Death of an English Muffin

by Victoria Hamilton

  “I’ll get her to leave her camera with me so you can see them this evening.” This was the closest to a date we’d ever had. How weird were we?

  “Gotta go,” he said, whirling abruptly and heading to his car. He clapped his hat on as he climbed into the cruiser. “See you later.”

  Becket, who had emerged from the woods as we talked, joined me, sitting at my feet on the gravel drive. I watched Virgil drive away. There was something wrong between Virgil and me that had stopped him from following his inclinations. I thought it had to do with his divorce, but the marriage was over a couple of years ago, from what Gogi told me. Why couldn’t he move on? Of course, I was one to say that—the queen of not moving on, still holding on to my husband’s memory eight years after his death. Sometimes it felt like every moment of those eight years had passed, and at other times it felt like it had all happened yesterday.

  “Come on, Becket, let’s go in.” I grabbed my empty muffin containers and headed into the kitchen to wash them, ready for the next batch.

  I spent the afternoon working on one of the vacant rooms, systematically stripping off the hideous seventies wallpaper my great-uncle had inflicted on the room. Since the fall I had acquired a number of tools of the trade and I now knew much more about fixing up a run-down castle than I’d ever thought possible. Weary of pretty much everything, I then showered, dressed, and came down for dinner.

  The Legion ladies gathered in the breakfast room, where we dined when it was just us. It is one of my favorite rooms, and from the first I had a clear vision for it, as housing my lovely china set and teapots. I had far too many for the room, so I had selected the best: chintz, figural, and antique, with a few cutesy ones thrown in for good measure. They lined the sideboard and a couple of staggered shelves mounted on the papered walls. I served the beef burgundy, to call it by its anglicized name, and we dined with Pish, who always joined us to sit with Lush. I looked around the table. This crime was a tough one. In the past outsiders were easy to pin the blame on, but this time it was likely someone at my table.

  Lush was out of the question. Pish’s darling aunt was dotty and sweet, but noticed little and knew less. She wanted to be everyone’s friend and was wounded when shunned. Beyond that I just couldn’t picture her smothering Cleta or anyone, no matter the provocation.

  So, the rest of the Legion.

  Barbara Beakman: heavy and slow, depressed and depressing. Barbara appeared strong enough to do it. I had not witnessed a lot of animosity toward Cleta from her, but what was hidden behind those lifeless, heavy-lidded eyes?

  Patsy Schwartz: beer and toilet heiress, a joke waiting to happen. She was surprisingly active for someone of her advanced years, making it up and down the stairs with the spring of someone half her age. She seemed to feel herself inferior to the others, but why, I wasn’t sure. Was it really just the source of her family’s money that made her feel less than worthy? That seemed silly. In America, rich is rich; money confers status. Of all the ladies she appeared to be in the best health, though she complained constantly, usually one-upping someone else’s tale of woe with one of her own, exaggerated. If you had a cold, she had bubonic plague. But as with Barbara, I couldn’t imagine any reason why she would kill Cleta. She hadn’t appeared to have any affection for the woman, but then, who had?

  Vanessa LaDuchesse: flamboyant, with a long career in Hollywood that included mostly noir films. But where had she come from originally? I didn’t know.

  But then, I didn’t know much of anything about these ladies. Vanessa seemed reasonably healthy, though I knew she took heart medication and some other mysterious pills. They appeared to share a lot, including similar tastes in costume jewelry and a fondness for bright lipstick.

  And then there was Lauda. The more I thought about it the more suspicious I was of her pushiness to get into Cleta’s room with no interference. Going by what Gordy had overheard between Lauda and Cleta, I would bet she wanted to search her aunt’s things to make sure no new will excluding her existed. Perhaps she had dispatched her aunt to prevent that new will from being drafted.

  However two things counted against that. Surely if inheritance was the motive, she would not kill her aunt until she was sure there was no will disinheriting her. It was risky to do so after their confrontation in Autumn Vale. Also, I had no reason to suspect she was even at the castle that afternoon. Of all of them she was the youngest and strongest, though. I watched her covertly; she was a big woman, with strong, capable hands accustomed to working hard. She had lugged her heavy suitcase up the long castle staircase easily. She was physically capable of the crime, but was her personality such that she could kill her own aunt in such a brutal and personal fashion?

  As I made dinner conversation, I thought about how to figure out the truth. It was frightening to think that one of them was the murderer. It seemed impossible.

  I’d start with the woman who had the most to gain. I took a sip of wine and set my glass down, carefully. “Lauda, I have to admit, I know very little of Cleta’s past. As her niece, you must have been the one she was closest to. What was she like when you were a child?”

  The woman chewed and stared at me blankly, frizzy hair badly confined in a bun, wisps sticking out around her moon face. She wore another of her shapeless mud-colored dresses, and I wondered why any designer would use that fabric to make a tent, much less a dress for a woman.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, displaying too much of the contents of her mouth as she spoke.

  I turned away and set my fork down. It wasn’t a tough question, but I’d elaborate. “Did you spend time with her? Was she kind to you?” I looked at her again, examining the pouchy face and bags under her eyes. “Did she buy you things, take you places?”

  She shook her head. “She didn’t like kids much.”

  “Did she and your mother get along? Did you see her often?”

  She just shook her head and took another giant forkful of the beef and mushrooms.

  “When did she come to America from England?” I asked, glancing around at the others. “Why did she come to America?”

  “Actually, I think I was the first to meet her,” Vanessa said, pausing in the act of picking up her wineglass. She looked around at her tablemates. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  Lush nodded. “You came back from staying with that duke in England, and Cleta came with you to visit.”

  Vanessa smiled mistily. “We were all so young and gay,” she said wistfully. “Cleta, too. It was the sixties, very wild. I was divorcing Nigel and staying at the town house of a duke who threw outrageous parties for artists and musicians. Cleta was one of those upper-crust Englishwomen—you know, horses and hounds and cocktails and cigarettes—and I found her amusing. Very acidic, even then. My style protégé, I called her.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said. “My mother was a teenage hippie in the sixties, which meant earnest protests and war rallies.”

  “We did have fun. I ran with a very fast set.”

  “But you’re American, right? What did you do before the movies? Where did you come from?”

  “Darling, no actress has a past before her movies,” she said, with a faint, mysterious, practiced smile. “Actually, when I married Nigel I quit movies for a few years.”

  “You were separated from him by the time you met Cleta, though, weren’t you?” Patsy said, eyeing her friend. “He had left you for some little snippet in Cannes.”

  “That was the story,” she said, with another slight, enigmatic smile.

  I caught a hint of something in her voice, some underlying meaning, and I thought about her words. “You were separated from him?”

  She nodded.

  Digging for more, I said, “And he was supposed to be having an affair, but he wasn’t?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that, dear,” Vanessa said. She glanced over at Pish, then back to
me. “In those days a man had to be circumspect, you know, and having a wife was a very good thing for some men, especially if she left him because he played around with younger women. That way he could be free but his reputation as a man about town, a ladykiller, if you will, was assured.”

  Pish nodded, a smirk turning up one corner of his mouth. “Meanwhile, he probably had a lot of handsome young men hanging about his home.”

  My eyes widened. “Ah, I get it,” I said.

  Patsy had a sour look on her face that I had a hard time deciphering.

  “I thought you knew Cleta before that, my dear?” Lush said. “Didn’t she introduce you to Nigel?”

  Vanessa sighed and shook her head. “Lush, you know you have started mixing up dates and the order of things.”

  Lush frowned down at her fork with a befuddled expression. “I suppose that’s true.”

  Barbara snickered. “You asked me last week when my nephew Harrison was coming home from school. Harrison graduated college twenty-five years ago.”

  Poor Lush colored faintly, her softly wrinkled cheeks rosy. “I was mistaken. I meant your great-nephew Henry, not his father. It was the merest slip of the tongue.”

  Pish put his hand over hers and squeezed.

  “So, Vanessa, you brought Cleta back from the continent and introduced her to the others?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” I glanced over at Lauda, then at the other ladies, realizing how bald my questions sounded. “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but she could be so cruel. Was she always like that? Mean-spirited? She was outright rude to my friends. Pish, you always treated it like a joke, but was it?”

  He shook his head. “My darling, I found over the years that treating it like a joke depleted some of the tension surrounding her behavior, and it became a reflex.” He looked back to Lush. “Auntie, did I do the right thing? Or did I just enable her?”

  The room was silent, forks suspended as the others waited. Lush considered, her head down as if she was in prayer. When she looked up she said, “Cleta Sanson was a friend, but she often made me uncomfortable with her cruelty to others. I wish now I had said something. Pishie, you did the best you could, always trying to soften the blow of her words. That’s not enabling.”

  I took a deep breath and faced the niece. “Lauda, did you put up with her meanness to you because of the will?”

  The woman froze in place, swallowed, and frowned. “None of you would understand. She may have been mean, but she was my aunt, my only blood relative since my mom died. Who else did I have?”

  That gave me pause, and I considered her words. “Actually, Lauda, I do understand. I don’t have any family, either, but . . .” I looked over to Pish. “I’ve created a family with my friends. I’m lucky, I guess; they’ve always been there for me.” When I looked over at Lauda, my heart constricted. There were tears welling in her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” she said, waving her hands. She looked like she was about to say something, but then shook her head.

  My heart constricted; for all the pain I’ve suffered in my life, I’ve never truly been alone except for a brief time after my grandmother and mom died. I got work, made friends, and soon the pain eased, though I carried a hole in my heart until Miguel filled it with his love. When he died I had Pish and Shilo to lean on, and though I was bereft, I was never alone. But Lauda didn’t seem the sort to easily make friends. Maybe Cleta was all she had to cling to.

  “Let’s just say it,” Patsy said, glancing around the table. “Cleta was a bully, and none of us said anything to her because when we did, she just made our lives miserable.”

  “How did she do that?” I asked.

  “She had her ways,” Barbara said darkly. She set herself to the task of eating, though, electing not to say anything more.

  And that was all I could pry out of anyone. Everyone agreed she was a bully, and no one knew why. Everyone agreed that confronting her just made her worse, but no one would say why they didn’t just unfriend her, to use social network parlance. They retired to the parlor after dinner, as always, and I cleared with Pish’s help.

  Emerald was off to Rusty Turner’s with Lizzie, though I had caught them before they left the castle to get Lizzie’s camera. Rusty was a gruff fellow, but he seemed to be softening some now that he had a granddaughter in his life. Juniper had gone into Autumn Vale to help Binny with her massive weekly cleanup of the bakery.

  I left the ladies to their own devices while Pish and I did dishes. There was a dishwasher, but I couldn’t use it for the china, silver, and crystal, so in other words I (or someone in the house) needed to hand-wash just about everything, especially after dinner for the ladies.

  “I don’t get it, Pish,” I said, carefully washing a Royal Doulton Juliet plate and handing it to him. “Why did they stay friends with Cleta?”

  He dried it and stacked it carefully in the cabinet with a paper towel between plates. “I’ve had friends like that. At first the joke is always about someone not immediately in your circle, someone you find annoying or tedious. Joking about them seems okay somehow. By the time the joke is on you, it’s hard to disentangle.”

  I got what he was saying.

  “I think that’s what happened with Cleta and the other ladies. Women of their generation have trouble cutting ties.”

  I handed him another plate. “It makes me grateful that the ones who I ended up being friends forever with are you and Shilo.”

  As we worked through the silverware I asked Pish who he thought could have done it, and who the police would be considering.

  “You, my dear, talked openly about kicking her out and, in a move that made me love you even more, forced her to apologize to dearest Hannah.”

  “Where Hannah is concerned, I will tolerate no insult.” I realized that far from only having Pish and Shilo in my life, a few folks in Autumn Vale had been added to my family, among them Hannah Moore and Gogi Grace. “Do you think I’m considered a suspect?”

  “Unlikely,” he said with a shoulder bump, as he was drying a handful of butter knives at that moment. He then ruined the familial moment by adding, “You were in plain sight the whole time; no one can dispute that.”

  I laughed. “Actually, you are completely incorrect, darling Pish. I was gone from the room during much of the salient time, looking for Cleta.”

  “We’ll put you on the list, then. Along with . . . who among the Legion?”

  “It comes down to who was missing at the right time, doesn’t it? I wish I knew more about their background. Someone said something about old friends staying together because they know each other’s secrets.”

  He frowned and turned away to put the silver in the felt-lined silver chest. “To be completely frank, darling Lushie has an old beef against Cleta, one she never talks about. But I remember something about it from when I was a child.”

  He sounded troubled. Alerted by his tone, I dried my hands and helped him with the silverware, then shut the mahogany chest. “What was it about?”

  “I was thirteen or so. She was crying a lot then and would come over for tea with my father.” He leaned against the counter, arms folded over his chest. He wore an old jean shirt, open at the throat, and the soft folds of tanned neck skin were one of the few signs of his age, somewhere in his mid-sixties. “My dad was her older brother. I remember auntie saying Cleta’s name—it was unusual and stuck in my mind—and how she had ruined her life . . . Cleta had ruined Lush’s life, I mean.”

  “Sounds serious, but that was, what, fifty years ago? Doesn’t have anything to do with today.”

  “You’re right, of course, but I remember the devastation in her voice as she said, If it takes me forever, I’ll get her for this! Then she wept.”

  I was silent for a moment but then tentatively said, “Maybe yo
u should ask Lush about it. It can’t have anything to do with this, but you’ll feel better for getting it off your chest.”

  He nodded. I remained tactfully quiet after that. We finished the dishes in silence, washing the crystal wineglasses and water goblets in fresh water, rinsing them carefully in hot clear water, and drying with a clean soft tea towel. When we were done I hugged him hard. “Pish, you know darned well Lush didn’t have anything to do with this, and I just can’t imagine Patsy, Vanessa, or Barbara doing such a deed, either. There must be another explanation.”

  I held him away from me, examining his lightly lined, tanned face. Pish maintains a youthful figure and appearance by eating light and caring for his skin and body like an athlete, though he calls himself indolent. Pish styles himself as a vain, effete poseur, but in truth he is good and honest and caring, more so than anyone I’ve ever met. I love him with all of my heart. I cupped his cheek and stared into his eyes. “Talk to her if it will make you feel better, but talk to her, too, about the others. See if you can find out anything else hidden in their past. I can’t imagine we’ll unearth anything, but we need to figure this out.”

  “You’re right. And you, my beauty, have a date with the delicious Virgil Grace.”

  “Hardly a date,” I said, smiling at him and patting his cheek. “Don’t make this more than it is. He’s coming over to talk about the investigation.”

  He kissed my cheek and danced away from me toward the door. “He’s mad about you, you know. He’s not admitting it to himself yet, but he is. Absolutely gaga.”

  “He manages to control himself admirably.”

  Pish promised to talk to Lush later and went upstairs to work on his book while listening to music, trying to decide on his next operatic choice for the Autumn Vale Community Players. Yes, after the fiasco that was The Magic Flute, he still intended there to be a next performance.

  I went up to get ready. When I was done with my shower and had dried my hair, I robed myself in a longish Kiyonna dress they called Wrapped in Romance, in Teal We Meet Again color. It goes well with my dark hair and medium complexion, as well as complementing my full figure. It was certainly too dressy for just the sheriff, but comfortable. I did some careful makeup but left my hair long and unbound.