“It gets him access, you see,” the policeman added. “It’s amazing what latitude you career women will allow your nannies. You take up the references about the nannies, and never ask about the boyfriends.”
The moment to disabuse the detective inspector as to Claudia’s parentage—and Maureen’s real employer—was fast approaching. Nevertheless Jemima took the point. She had simply taken the egregious Johnnie for granted, only too happy that the sullen Maureen had company. Jemima hardly looked forward to breaking this news to Alexa Farrow: it was going to be difficult not to speak in tones of reproach, just as Harwood was speaking to her now. How feckless Alexa had been! Or had she simply succumbed to modern customs? Being too busy, fraught, and unhappy herself to pay close attention to the most vital aspect of her private life. Jemima, being childless, simply didn’t know.
She decided to concentrate on the immediate present.
“Murder!” cried Jemima. “He’s a killer. What’s he doing free? You say he’s done this before.…” With all her liberal principles, Jemima found herself seized with total indignation at the idea of such a situation.
“No, no, wait a minute. Don’t misunderstand me. Johnnie Johnson is not a killer, he’s a thief, if you like, a minor thief. But no killings involved, no muggings. Not even a very bright burglar. The kitchen was covered in his prints. But nothing even near the body. He’s a chancer, sees the opportunity, can’t resist taking it. But then he goes and telephones us! Thinking that makes him innocent. Johnnie Johnson!” The detective inspector shook his well-brushed head with something approaching tenderness.
So part of Johnnie’s story was true. Jemima had a mental image of Johnnie, lithe and athletic, scaling the wall as the cats had done so often.
“The cats!” she exclaimed. “What’s to happen to them?” Detective Inspector Harwood—it became clear that he was not a cat lover—did not seem to think that the cats were all that important. He murmured something about the RSPCA.
“We’ll take them.” Jemima took the decision without thinking. That is, she did not think about the reaction of Alexa: she did think of Claudia. At this, Detective Inspector Harwood began to look quite definitely irritated at having to concentrate on the issue of cats.
“What have cats got to do with a death?” he asked plaintively. “They’re not important.”
It was only when the cause of Miss Pollard’s death was established that he was obliged to change his mind. The cats were important, very important.
Miss Pollard had not been murdered by anyone, let alone done to death by Johnnie Johnson. (His stash of stolen goods was discovered without difficulty, neatly stowed under the bed of Claudia.) Miss Pollard had taken a large cocktail of pills and brandy. She had done so deliberately. She had stated that in a note found in her escritoire—forced by Johnnie in search of plunder.
Coolly, Miss Pollard gave her reasons for taking her own life. It was not worth living, she wrote, without the company of her beloved cats, Rosy and Rusty. Yet her cats wanted to desert her for the company of younger people, like the little girl at No. 16. She had tried to make a home for them but they spent the day trying to escape.… Miss Pollard could see no way out but to take her own life. She put her cats’ happiness above her own.
Whoever cares for my cats after my death, Miss Pollard ended, gets my blessing not my curse.
Jemima did not tell any of this to Claudia. She merely put her arms round her.
“You see now that Miss Pollard wasn’t a witch,” Jemima said gently. “She wanted you to care for her cats. She specially said so.” Jemima edited the will to her own satisfaction.
“She was a witch, Jemima.” Claudia spoke firmly, with new assurance. “I know she was. But there are good witches as well as bad, aren’t there? And in the end she was a good witch.”
To Jemima, it seemed as good a verdict as any on the sad, lonely death of Miss Pollard. She watched Claudia playing with the two golden cats, all her childish tension apparently gone. It was, in a way—wasn’t it?—a happy ending.
BARBARA WILSON is the author of five mysteries, most recently Trouble in Transylvania, which features translator sleuth Cassandra Reilly. A previous mystery, Gaudi Afternoon, won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery, and a British Crime Writers’ Award for best mystery set in Europe. A collection of Cassandra Reilly mysteries, The Widow’s Curse, is forthcoming.
Belladonna
Barbara Wilson
I
It is over a year since I spent the day with you on your lovely island—I remember it all very vividly.…
—Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to her hosts on Maui
For a long time I turned up my nose at Hawaii. We who call ourselves travelers are snobs of the worst kind. We would much prefer to be wildly uncomfortable on the cushionless seats of a bus in Bangladesh or a train traversing the Gobi Desert, moving slowly through some strange desolate landscape and feeling either boiling hot or freezing cold, with nothing to eat, no toilet paper and nothing to read, surrounded by hostile people who don’t speak our language and perhaps want to convert us to their religion or to steal all our money, than to do anything so gauche as to enjoy ourselves in any sort of tropical paradise, particularly if it means that another Westerner, a mere tourist, might be anywhere in sight.
Luisa Montiflores, the gloomy and recondite Uruguayan novelist, was not of the same opinion. She had just spent three “cold like hell” winter months as a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, and wanted to recuperate on the Hawaiian Islands. And she wanted me, as her translator, “my friend,” to join her.
Luisa had once been my protégé, but over the years the situation reversed itself. I had been a lone voice championing her difficult, deconstructionist novels, sending sample translations of her work to publishers and writing articles that proclaimed her originality. Now I had lost interest in her work, just as academics and the literary elite were discovering her peculiar blend of poetry and self-pity. Although I suspected that hardly a thousand people in the English-speaking world could have read her work, Luisa attracted honors, grants, stipends, symposia, and residencies all over the world.
“All, all I owe to you,” she often said. “I am loyal, you see,” and to prove it she frequently stipulated that a translator’s salary be part of her agreements. From Stockholm to Adelaide we had traveled the globe together, and if it had truly been my goal in life to be Luisa’s literary factotum, I’d have been ecstatic.
We had just been to the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where Luisa gave a seminar talk on the new Latin American fiction, which was, strangely enough, only about her fiction. Now we were in Maui, where Luisa planned to stay a month and to put the final touches on her latest novel, and talk to me about translating it. We were staying with Claudie, a friend of Luisa’s who was an art dealer in Lahaina.
“When Gloria de los Angeles goes to give a talk, they do not ask her about my work. Why do they ask me about her?” Luisa glared at me. “I still do not understand, Cassandra, how you can also translate her. That idiot and her magic realism. I spit on her magic realism.”
“You’re writing for different audiences,” I soothed her. “Believe me, your work and hers cannot even be discussed in the same breath. Scholars laugh at her. But when they say Luisa Montiflores, they bow their heads in respect.”
We were sitting on a terrace overlooking Claudie’s magnificent garden of ginger, hibiscus and trailing orchids in the warm, sweet-scented evening. I had managed to keep up my anti-tropical-paradise attitude through this morning’s arrival at the Honolulu airport, with its refrigerated leis and prêt-à-porter pineapples. But by the time the day was over, I was half converted, and by the time our plane had taken us through an indigo and passion fruit sunset to Maui an hour ago, I was babbling like an idiot. “Just look at that surf! And look, palm trees swaying in the wind!”
“Everyone is reading her,” Luisa said. “Every airport I am in, I see her books. Pah! She is a fool. She is
overaccessible, a tramp.”
Claudie laughed. “Oh, Luisa, always the same worries!” Claudie was wearing a silk print shirt in tangerine and lemon over a pair of crisp white shorts and sandals. Her skin was a warm desert-sand tone—Filipina, I guessed—and her straight black hair swung all in one piece like a curtain. I had just been in St. Petersburg, and coming from a bitter winter, my black jeans, cowboy boots, and worn bomber jacket felt completely inappropriate for the lush warm breeze. Underneath my beret my crazed graying hair frizzed out humidly; like Claudie’s, it was all of a piece, but more a piece of untended topiary than a swaying curtain of black light.
Luisa took a long drink of iced tea and shrugged off poor, pathetic, overread Gloria. “Claudie,” she said abruptly, remembering something. “Where is your Nell? The last time I was here, you had your Nell.”
Claudie’s smile was almost easy. “Oh, Nell and I have broken up. She goes her way, I go mine.”
“But the gallery?”
“She kept it. I got the house. Some of the artists went with Nell, some with me. I’m hoping to get another storefront.”
“But Claudie, this is not good. What happened? No, I know what happened! Another woman, no? I’m killing her.”
Claudie laughed. “Oh, Luisa, you’re always the same. It’s too late. It’s happened six months ago. One of those things. Believe me, it wasn’t easy for any of the three of us. No one’s to blame. I could have been the one to leave too.”
“That’s different, if you leave,” said Luisa firmly. “That’s passion. Otherwise, it’s just betrayal.”
“I’m getting used to being single,” Claudie began, on a positive note, and then the telephone rang and she excused herself.
When she was gone, Luisa announced, “That Nell was no good anyway. You know the type: restless, a toughie, a big mouth, always feeling sorry for herself. You know I can’t stand that. Claudie is my friend from Paris, we went to cinematography school together. She deserves a good woman. Perhaps you’re interested, Cassandra?” Luisa eyed me speculatively. “When are you settling down?”
“When are you?”
“Me? Every day I don’t commit suicide is a miracle.” But Luisa was laughing now. “My writing is my only mistress. When you see what I have written, you will be amazed and astounded. It is the best work I have ever done, no kidding.”
“The most extraordinary thing,” Claudie said, returning with more iced tea and sitting down. “That was a woman on the phone named Donna Hazlitt, calling from the Hana coast, on the other side of the island. I don’t know what to make of it, whether she’s lucid or completely confused. She was talking about a small painting that she said she discovered among her dead husband’s things. He apparently inherited it from his parents. It’s unsigned and seems not to have been quite finished, but Mrs. Hazlitt seems to think it might be an O’Keeffe. Mrs. Hazlitt is interested in having it appraised and in selling it. She wants me to handle the sale for her.”
“O’Keeffe? You mean Georgia O’Keeffe?”
“The very same. She came here, you know, in the thirties, courtesy of Dole Pineapple. They hired her to do two paintings for advertising purposes. They set her up on the Big Island, but when she asked if she could live among the workers on the plantation, the Dole people said absolutely not. She never did end up painting any pineapples for them while she was here. Eventually, in desperation, they air-freighted her a pineapple in New York and she managed to paint it, very unenthusiastically.”
Claudie put down her iced tea without drinking it and stood up again. “The critics were never very excited about O’Keeffe’s Hawaiian paintings, but I think some of them are lovely. There was an exhibit two years ago at the Honolulu Academy of Arts—it caused quite a stir. Gorgeous flowers, of course—crab’s claw ginger, hibiscus, plumeria, lotus, and jimsonweed—which she called belladonna—those lovely angel’s trumpet weeds. There were also some landscapes from Maui. She stayed here for a few weeks, escaping the Dole people. Waterfalls and mountains in the Iao Valley, and black lava on the Hana coastline.” Claudie paced up and down the terrace. “I can’t tell if Mrs. Hazlitt is on the up and up. She just started talking in the middle, as if we’d been discussing this for years. She said it’s a flower, an angel’s trumpet. Oh, what a coup if this is for real. It would make all the difference to me. Mrs. Hazlitt wants me to drive out there tomorrow to look at it. Why don’t the two of you come?”
In a shop in Lahaina, where we stopped the next morning to buy a few provisions, I saw a T-shirt proclaiming I SURVIVED THE HANA HIGHWAY.
All too soon I knew what that meant. The Hana Highway was a two-lane road that twisted around the north coast of the island like dental floss around teeth. The landscape was spectacular all right: a dark cobalt sea and only slightly lighter sky, waterfalls at every other turn and black lava rock formations and black sand beaches. Claudie’s Toyota, however, was a compact, and although Claudie and Luisa, being small and fined-boned, fit quite well, I had some trouble with my long legs.
And with my stomach, which insisted on lurching in rhythm with the car.
Luisa wanted to know more about O’Keeffe, and Claudie had obliged by giving her a life history, ending with “She was essentially a solitary woman. Even though she was married to Stieglitz, she still managed to live her own life and spent half the year in New Mexico. I never really think of her as having been married at all.”
“Have you ever noticed,” I asked, “how much we admire heterosexual women who remained single or as if single? Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou. With lesbians, though, it’s a different story. We don’t want to discount their relationships, we want them to be coupled.”
“I am never coupled,” said Luisa. “I couldn’t ask anyone to share my suffering.” As always when she talked about her depressions, she began to laugh hugely.
“I think you’re right, Cassandra,” said Claudie. “Is it perhaps because lesbians are not supposed to have the problem of being misunderstood and held back by their mates?”
“Or because being a lesbian rests so much on proof. You need to actually have a lover by your side before you’re believed.”
“I know that part is true,” sighed Claudie. “Since Nell left me, a few people—relatives mostly—have asked if I’m seeing any nice men.”
“I am opposed to marriage for creative people,” said Luisa. “An artist’s life is always solitary. You two, on the other hand, are not artists, only the handmaidens to creativity. There is nothing to prevent you getting together with each other. Why don’t you?”
In the embarrassed silence that followed, Luisa murmured, “Claudie, pay attention to your curves, please.”
Around the small town of Hana was a luxurious resort and clusters of houses on the hillsides. We pulled up a driveway half hidden by ferns and hibiscus bushes to a simple but beautifully constructed wooden house, low and long.
Claudie knocked on the door, but there was no answer.
“That’s odd,” she said, looking again at her scrap of paper. “We’re right on time and this is the right address.”
We waited for half an hour on the steps, drove away to the resort for a cool drink, and then came back. There was still no sign of Donna Hazlitt.
“I hate to have come all the way out here for nothing,” Claudie said, and sounded close to tears. “I guess she changed her mind. Maybe she decided to take the painting to a gallery in Honolulu.”
I’d had the feeling there was something odd about this adventure from the beginning. As the afternoon shadows lengthened, the impression grew stronger. I began to walk around the house, looking for a window I could at least peer into. Most of them were tight with blinds. Finally, in the back, I was able to peer through an opening in the blinds into what appeared to be a bedroom.
The closet was open and clothes were strewn about; the drawers had been treated the same way. And on the floor near the bed lay the still body of an elderly woman in a dressing gown, a still body that
did not move when I called out, and would not move again.
The next day back in Lahaina, the news was all over the local paper. Donna Hazlitt, longtime resident of Hana, had apparently been the victim of a robbery-murder. But subsequent editions of the paper backed down: there were no signs of breaking and entering, and nothing of value had been taken, though Hazlitt, the widow of a coin and stamp collector, had many obvious things to steal.
It also appeared that what seemed to be murder may have really been a case of accidental poisoning. Apparently Mrs. Hazlitt had recently been treated at the local clinic for uveitis, an inflammation of the iris, for which she’d been prescribed atropine. The atropine came in a small dark brown bottle with a glass dropper, and was similar to a second brown bottle found next to it on the kitchen counter. This second bottle held Echinacea in a tincture of alcohol, and was a herbal remedy for strengthening the immune system. It was usually taken orally, in a glass of water. Authorities speculated—and then, and after tests, concluded—that Mrs. Hazlitt had mistaken the two bottles. Instead of putting in drops of Echinacea before she went to bed that night, she’d poured atropine in instead. Taken internally, atropine is a poison which attacks the nervous system and causes flushed skin and a terrible thirstiness. If untreated, the symptoms increase to a state of delirium, in which the victim makes spasmodic movements and then falls into unconsciousness and death. The amount of atropine in the glass shouldn’t have been enough to kill her, but Mrs. Hazilitt was almost eighty and had a heart condition. She’d certainly shown all the signs of poisoning, including evidence of the spasmodic movements in the disorder in her room.
Donna Hazlitt was known to be a solitary, rather mousy, and inoffensive woman who had inherited her house and money from her husband. They had no children and she had no enemies. The coroner gave a verdict of accidental death by alkaloid poisoning.
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