Pete played a handful of videos before letting his phone drop into his lap. We sat in silence, staring at each other, stunned.
“She was in a band with him. A country music band.” He jumped up to pace around the room. “We’re not supposed to know this. She’ll kill us.”
“Why? Because she killed him with torch fuel in his whiskey?”
Pete fell back into his chair. “Daria! That was a figure of speech.” He locked eyes with me. “Do you seriously think Aileen killed Ladd Foster?”
“Did you seriously think you’d ever see Aileen in dyed blond braids shimmying to ‘Flowers of the Forest’?” I flung out my hands. “I don’t know what to think. She could have done it. She was in the VIP tent at the right time. She’d just had a fight with him and threatened him with her guitar.” I waved a hand at the CD. “She has a history with him. It’s pretty obvious she hates him.” I stared at the CD cover with unseeing eyes. “I wonder what color her hair really is.”
Pete groaned at this random comment. But I persisted. “Pete. What do we really know about Aileen? Is her real name Aileen or Penny? Which one is a stage name? Ten some years ago, she was in a country music band with Ladd Foster. She’s since remade herself into the lead singer in a metal band. How much farther could you go, musically? What happened between her and Ladd? It must have been momentous, to make her go to jail rather than talk about it. It must have been more than just embarrassment about an early musical venture.” I gulped. “It must have been bad enough to give her an ironclad motive for murder.”
Pete sat chewing on his fingernails, an old nervous habit he had largely conquered of late. I sat back on my heels, looking at him for guidance. “What are we going to do?”
“Nothing.” His reply was instantaneous. “We’re not going to do anything. We know something we’re not supposed to know. We have to forget it. If Aileen wants us to know about her history with Ladd, she’ll tell us. Otherwise, we don’t know anything.”
I snorted, sounding just like Aileen. “That’s ridiculous. We can’t forget something like this. Shouldn’t we tell the police?”
“If you tell the police, they’ll come back and detain Aileen again. Even if they wave the CD in her face, she still might not talk to them. And she’ll never talk to us again if we throw her under the bus like that.” He twisted his hands together. “I don’t want to make an enemy for life out of Aileen.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of her. You just said she couldn’t have killed Ladd.”
“I’m not afraid of her.” He looked away, suddenly clamming up.
I studied his face, reddening under my gaze. What was going on? He was hiding something from me, so of course I wanted to know what it was. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
He ignored this question, countering with one of his own. “Where did you get this CD anyway?”
I decided to let him get away with it, for now. I told him about Herman Tisdale and the fictional obituary McCarthy and I were putting together. A pang shot through me at the realization that we had lied to Tisdale, just like we’d lied to both Ryan and Gillian. Is that what my nosy nature was transforming me into, a systematic liar? And now Pete was insisting we cover up knowledge that could have a bearing on the case. Aileen called Pete “Moron.” She could just as easily call me “Liar.” It was a sobering thought.
Finally, Pete got up to leave, after telling me to hide the Royal Pains CD and hand it off as soon as possible. Sensible advice.
I shoved the CD deep into my shoulder bag to give to McCarthy tomorrow. I contemplated the kilt that was slowly taking shape on the floor and abandoned it for the night. Time to curl up in bed with Over the Sea to Skye. I wanted to finish the book before meeting Morris Hart for lunch tomorrow.
I checked my email before heading off to bed. There was a quick message from Julie Lombard at the Tremington, asking if I could stop by at ten the next morning to take a look at Margaret Oliphant’s wedding dress. I said yes in a heartbeat.
Chapter 12
I made a cup of relaxing herbal tea to drink while I finished Over the Sea to Skye. It did little to alleviate the tension.
Stu and Catherine got a tip from one of the old Alsatian monks and traveled across the sea to America, following the tracks of Count Roehenstart, illegitimate grandson of Bonnie Prince Charlie. They landed in Philadelphia, where they struggled against mysterious would-be assassins in their quest for Charlie’s ring. These foes captured Catherine, leaving Stu to choose between freeing her and beating his opponents to the ring. I did find myself identifying with Catherine by this time, so it was hard for me to read the part where she was tortured with Stu as a helpless witness via phone. “Don’t take it personally,” Hart had said. I could hardly help it. But Stu figured out how to do the impossible. He rescued Catherine, and together they recovered the ring and headed back to England, where Stu deposed the aging Queen Elizabeth and claimed the throne as the descendant of Charles Edward Stuart and his grandson, Count Roehenstart. The novel ended with Stu accepting congratulations from the president of the United States, even as the mysterious adversaries massed in the shadows in the hopes of overthrowing this new claimant to the British throne.
I laid the book down at three-fifteen in the morning. The ending was satisfying, while leaving enough unanswered questions to make readers anticipate a sequel. Truly, Morris Hart was a master at his craft.
I turned out the light, but I was so keyed up by the excitement of the novel that I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep anytime soon. I toyed with the idea of getting up and working on Corgi’s kilt but decided against it. Maybe I wasn’t sleepy, but I definitely was tired, and in no fit state to struggle with pinning up pleats.
I heard Aileen rustling around in her bedroom, across the hall from mine. She had come home well after two-thirty, presumably from a gig. I imagined she found it hard to settle down for bed after a late-night session of metal music in a crowded bar. I pictured her in the midst of the Twisted Armpits, dressed in full leather and chains with her hair in dyed black spikes all over her head, howling to the thrashing music. Such a different image from the fresh young thing who’d harmonized with Ladd Foster in the Royal Pains video clips.
Aileen or Penny? Who was the woman sharing a house with my brother and me? Was she a murderer?
On my list of suspects in Ladd’s death, Aileen was the only woman. They say poison is a woman’s weapon, presumably because of a lack of physical strength for stabbing or strangling. It seemed like an outdated notion to me. It was hard to imagine a woman lacking the strength to pull the trigger of a gun. When it came to Aileen, it was a completely ridiculous idea. I couldn’t think of a single thing she couldn’t do. If she wanted to kill someone, I had no doubt she could accomplish it with one swing of her guitar. She had refrained from whacking Ladd with her guitar at the Highland Games, but that could have been because of the crowd of onlookers. A bit of torch fuel slipped into his whiskey had achieved the same result. Was it Aileen who did the poisoning?
I snuggled down in bed, too tired to think about murder any longer. I guess the very fact that I could sleep was an indication that I didn’t see Aileen as a threat, at least not to me.
* * * *
It was hard to get up the next morning, but there was no way I was going to miss the chance to see Margaret Oliphant’s wedding gown from the 1700s. To a historical seamstress with a healthy business in wedding gowns, this was practically the Holy Grail. I hurried through my breakfast, keeping quiet so as not to wake Aileen, and caught the bus to the Tremington Museum.
The museum doors were just opening when I arrived. Julie had told me to find her in the basement, so I headed downstairs. I hoped it would be easier to find a staff member than it was to find any given item in the chaos of the basement. But I didn’t need to worry. Julie met me at the elevator. She wore the same bib overalls as she had the other day, along with a long-sle
eved, tie-dyed shirt that gave her a decided hippie aura. “Hey, Daria, nice to see you. Ready to go where no tourist has gone before?” She led me to the door marked “No Admittance.”
“Seriously, nobody gets to come back here?” I felt a little thrill when she unlocked the door and pushed it open.
I took in the wide, stainless-steel table in the middle of the room, surrounded by deep shelves covered with any number of random artifacts. There were broken pots that looked like they came from some ancient gravesite, piles of faded textiles, a collection of bones spilling out of a cardboard box, various household items in differing states of disrepair, and a pile of framed pictures that could have contained the Mona Lisa or a crayon drawing from a local third grader, for all I knew. Several chests of drawers were crowded along the wall, from the wide, shallow drawers that held maps to the tiny drawers that must have contained jewelry. I looked around in delight. Honestly, the staff workroom wasn’t all that different from the public areas of the basement, except that the items here in the back were in much poorer shape than the ones displayed out on the floor. Julie and I were alone in the midst of this historical treasure trove.
“This place is awesome,” I said. “What a fun place to work. Where does all this stuff come from?”
Julie pulled on a pair of thin cotton gloves. She handed a second pair to me. “People bring stuff from their attics and barns. People leave things to the museum in their wills. There’s a staff member who actively searches for things to put in the exhibits. Some of these things have been here for decades, waiting for someone to catalog them, or clean and preserve them, or even just to open a box and see that they’re here.” She grinned. “It’s a fantastic place to work.”
She lifted a soft package wrapped in tissue paper from a shelf and laid it on the table. She unwrapped the paper to reveal the heavy folds of a wedding gown. She put out a hand to stop me from touching it. “We can’t pick it up in its present state. The fabric is almost to the point of shredding.” She gently shifted the bodice so I could get a better look at the gown. I had expected to see ivory-colored silk or satin, but Margaret Oliphant’s wedding dress was made of gold brocade with intricate embroidery covering the bodice and overskirt. The underskirt layer was a pale blue silk that was heavily spotted with water damage. Lace ruffles that had once been white adorned the ends of the sleeves and the low neckline.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Will you be able to get out those water spots?”
Julie shook her head. “Not unless you know something I don’t know.” She carefully spread out the skirt until the dress lay unfolded the length of the table. “According to the historical record, Margaret Oliphant was a petite woman, probably no more than five feet tall. She was seventeen years old when she wore this dress. Judge Tremington was a good twenty years older than her.”
I longed to finger the intricate embroidery but restrained myself. “Are there any pictures of their wedding, or even any portraits of Margaret as a young woman?”
Julie rooted through the drawer of a filing cabinet until she found a small pamphlet. “This is a program from an exhibit on the Tremingtons’ family life that was on display in the 1960s.” She leafed through the program and showed me a color photograph of a portrait painted in the eighteenth century. It depicted a couple sitting together on a stone bench in a garden. The man was dressed in a waistcoat and fine white breeches, with long graying hair tied up in a queue and a tricorn hat held under one arm. With his other hand he held hands with a short young woman wearing the very dress that lay on the table before us. Margaret’s auburn hair was tightly pulled away from her face, and her gold damask skirt was carefully arranged to cover her feet and ankles. The pale blue satin shone under the artist’s skill.
“It wasn’t hard to identify this dress as Margaret’s wedding gown,” Julie said with a chuckle. “When the dress is ready to go on exhibit, this picture will go with it.”
I studied the dress on the table. Something about it made me uneasy, something more than the sadness I felt at such beauty now faded and lost. I circled the table to view it from all angles. The proportions weren’t right. Margaret was a petite woman, barely five feet tall. That was easy to see in the portrait, and the length of the skirt bore it out. But the width of the waist was greater than I would have expected, given her petite stature. I spanned the waist with my hands hovering just above the dress, and then I brought my hands to my own waist. Since I was only five-foot-three, I figured I might have similar proportions as Margaret. But that waist was quite a bit bigger than mine. A second glance at the picture assured me that Margaret wasn’t a heavy girl, unless the artist had taken liberties when painting the portrait. She was seated at an angle, in such a way that her waist wasn’t readily visible to the viewer. I turned to Julie. “Was Margaret pregnant when she got married?”
Chapter 13
Julie’s eyes opened wide. “You can tell this from looking at her dress?”
“Was she?”
“Well…that’s a fair question. The Tremingtons’ only child was born two years after their wedding, kind of a long time for a dutiful wife. But there’s a record of Margaret taking an extended holiday roughly four months after the wedding. She was gone for several months, ostensibly visiting family. That’s curious, because her family was in Scotland and she didn’t go to her father in Philadelphia. Some scholars have speculated that she was gone long enough to carry a baby to term, but she didn’t come home with a child. She could have had a stillbirth, or she could have fostered the child, which raises all kinds of questions as to why she would abandon Judge Tremington’s baby. But it’s been nothing but speculation, until now.” Julie rubbed her hands together like a pirate contemplating his chest of gold. “Now we have her diary. I haven’t gotten that far, but I’m dying to know what she writes about this journey so soon after her wedding day. I’m almost positive there’s more to this story.”
I found myself consumed with curiosity as well. “Can I see the diary?”
Julie lifted a brittle leather volume off a shelf. Embossed on the front cover was an image of a unicorn encircled by some words that could be Latin. It looked familiar to me, although I couldn’t think why. Julie saw me looking. “That’s the Oliphant crest. It says ‘Tout Pouvoir,’ which is translated from the French as ‘provide for all.’ Those Oliphants sound like good socialists to me.” She carefully opened the book, revealing fragile pages closely written in a flowing cursive hand. “I’m working on scanning the diary page by page, and then I’ll type it up from those images to produce a transcribed version for scholarly use. It’s so tempting to stop and read, but it takes forever because of the old-fashioned handwriting and the spelling variations.” She turned to the middle of the book. “Here’s the part about her journey to America and meeting Judge Tremington.” She pointed to a paragraph and read aloud. “He is a good man, my father says. A good provider. Rich. My father does not say that he is bald around the ears and has teeth as brown as an old shoe. But that does not matter. He will be my husband, although he will not be my love. My love is lost to me forever.”
Julie paused. “That doesn’t sound like Margaret falling in love with Judge Tremington, does it?”
So much for romance. “No, it doesn’t. What comes next?”
“The next entry is a list of goods she bought in Philadelphia, where the ship docked, and then she writes about learning how to bake an apple pie.” She carefully turned a few pages. “Here’s a description of her wedding dress, and further on she writes about the ceremony and the guests. I can make copies for you if you want.”
“That would be awesome. So, what about her ‘love’? Does she write about him?”
Julie smiled. “Just hints and side comments. I haven’t seen any place where she wrote his name. He was someone she knew in Scotland. He probably died in the Forty-Five. She makes mention of a book of poetry he gave her, and a ring. Sadly, those two items
weren’t in the trunk where we found her diary and wedding gown.”
My eyes kept returning to the thick-waisted dress on the table. “So, is it possible her lover in Scotland fathered a baby who was born during Margaret’s extended absence?”
Julie chuckled. “You sound like a historical detective or something. Technically, it is possible. The passage to America could take anywhere from six to eight weeks, depending on the weather. If she were pregnant before she got on the ship, and she married shortly after arriving, she would have been anywhere from two to four months pregnant on her wedding day.”
Caught up in the excitement of someone else’s life story, I said, “She would have begun to show at three to four months. That would explain the wide waistline of her wedding gown.”
“Then four months later, when she left town, she would have been seven or eight months pregnant. Would wide skirts hide that fact? There wasn’t any mention in the primary sources of her being pregnant.”
I indicated the voluminous skirt lying on the table before us. “I’ll bet this could hide a pregnant belly. Is there anything in the parts about her lover in Scotland that indicate he got her pregnant?” I didn’t know why this interested me so much, but it did. McCarthy always said I was nosy.
Julie glanced at the wall clock. “I’ve already scanned the parts that mention this mysterious lover. I haven’t read them all, because, like I said, the handwriting is so hard to decipher. But I can email you the scanned images and you can see for yourself.” She took down my email address. “Let me know what you find out. I need to get to work now, but you’re welcome to hang around as long as you want.”
“Is it okay if I take pictures of the gown?”
Royally Dead Page 16