Saturday evening after dinner Elizabeth, apparently feeling guilty for having neglected me, pulled out the Monopoly board and insisted Jason join us. In spite of the urgency I felt to get on with my search for clues, I didn't want to question more than one family member at a time, so I tried to relax and enjoy the game. At least once Jason got over his snit at my having touched the papers in his office, the three of us got along better than we had as children. No yelling, no claims someone had cheated, no throwing dice across the room.
After lunch on Sunday afternoon, I once again found myself alone on the main floor of the house, everyone else having retired to separate rooms. I suspected they took naps. So when the doorbell chimed, I went to answer it. Three women stood huddling under two large umbrellas to stay out of the rain.
The tallest, about five feet eight, wearing a Day-Glo pink raincoat, spoke first. "You're not Mrs. Klein," she accused.
"No, I'm not. Did you want to see her?" I moved aside to let the women enter, and they thoughtfully stepped onto the rug Alice had placed near the door to catch wet footprints. "I'm her niece, Olivia Grant."
"The American," the woman said, as if she'd categorized me like a variety of garden pest.
I nodded. I wondered how she came to know who I was, then came to the conclusion Noreen must have told her I'd be visiting.
"Charlene's the name." She looked fortyish, had a frizzy mop of dyed red hair that clashed with the pink raincoat, what appeared to be a waffle-deep layer of makeup on her face, and open-toed high-heeled shoes. She made quick head shakes to indicate her friends. "We didn't 'specially want to see her, except to offer our condolences. About Noreen, that is."
The other two women, seemingly about the same age, a bit shorter and wearing more conservative colors but equally as much eye shadow, smiled and nodded.
Pink Raincoat spoke for them. "We read about the accident in the newspapers. So terrible it was."
"Yes. Thank you for coming." As I didn't know what the women expected of me, I wondered if I should try to find Alice anyway, but they seemed to have decided protocol required them to spend a little time commiserating with the family of the deceased.
Next, as if they'd been there countless times before, they removed their coats and hung them on the coatrack near the door. Under hers, Charlene wore a dress of the same wild shade of pink.
I felt I had no choice but to usher them into the drawing room and play hostess. "Would you like some tea?"
"No, thank you." Charlene wasted no time moving into the room and taking a seat in the middle of one of the sofas.
The thin, wiry-looking woman behind her spoke next, her voice high and reedy. "Vicki," she said and offered her hand.
"I'm Wanda," said the third woman, her plump body stuffed into a black dress with a too-tight belt. I shook her hand as well, and in a few minutes they joined Charlene, all three of them settling into the sofa. Silence fell.
Pieces clicked into place in my head. These must be the bridge players Alice had told me about. They didn't look too much different from some of the women who came to the Kosy Kard Klub in San Ricardo to play a few hands on a weekday.
"So nice of you to come," I said again. "Did you know Noreen for a long time?"
"Since last August bank holiday," Charlene said. "We played bridge most Wednesday afternoons. Didn't Mrs. Klein tell you?"
"We'll miss Noreen," Vicki said.
"Oh my, yes," Wanda added. "She was the one held us all together. I don't know what we'll do without her. So much fun too."
Until then I hadn't heard anyone speak of Noreen as being a "fun" person, and it suddenly occurred to me I might learn something from these women. If she had a lover, my mysterious Mister X, I surmised Noreen might possibly have told her friends about him.
"Call me Olivia." I smiled and pulled a side chair closer to the trio. "I never met Noreen myself. I came over for a visit the very day she died. I'd be grateful if you'd tell me something about her. What was she like?"
"Very friendly and outgoing she was," Vicki said.
That, too, failed to gibe with the impression I'd had so far, but it gave me an opportunity to pose another question. "Since you were her friends, I wonder if you'd be good enough to help us."
"Help?" Charlene frowned. "Help how?"
"It's about notifying Noreen's relatives and her other friends about the funeral."
"She had no living relatives. Leastways that's what she always said. As for friends, she had a few I suppose." A hint of smugness crept into her voice. "We were the closest."
"So she made few friends but fast ones," I said.
"You could say that."
"Loyal she was," said Wanda. "Generous too. Noreen never minded losing."
Charlene frowned again, and Wanda, catching her look, shifted in her chair and tried to pull her skirt further down over her elephant thighs.
I decided to get right to what I suspected lay behind Wanda's comment. "Did you play for money?"
"A bit," Charlene said, and the others took a cue from her and nodded without saying more.
"I play a little bridge myself," I told them. "It's more fun when there's something at stake, isn't it?" Since many people think so, I figured this wasn't totally a lie. Okay, "a little bridge" didn't quite fit with my being a part-time teacher, but, although I hardly ever played for money myself, I knew other people thought it made the game more interesting. Even the Kosy Kard Klub had no restrictions on its members doing so, provided the sum never exceeded one cent a point.
Wanda squirmed some more, and Vicki fiddled with her hair as if waiting for Charlene to do all the talking. However, Charlene got up, apparently preparing to put an end to their duty call.
I didn't want them to leave before I'd learned something, so I said, "You just arrived a few minutes ago."
Charlene didn't answer, and Vicki and Wanda rose from their chairs.
I got desperate. "I have an idea. Why don't we play a few hands now? Nothing else to do on a rainy afternoon, is there? And we can get better acquainted."
Charlene hesitated. "Well—"
"With a little brandy to warm us up," I added.
"Oh, do let's," Wanda urged.
They hustled right over to the bridge table in the corner, and Vicki pulled the cards out of a small drawer in the end table nearest the window. While she turned on the tall lamp in the corner dispersing some of the gloom from the cloudy day, and the others shuffled the two decks, I went to the bar and poured a small amount of brandy into four glasses.
Charlene got right down to business. "We can't stay long, so how about changing partners every four hands?" This being fairly standard practice at party bridge, I agreed.
"Three hundred points for only two games, fifty for an unfinished game." That was standard as well, and we also mentioned the conventions we played and the similarity of the British and American versions.
"Since you said you like to play for money," Charlene said, "how about making it tuppence a point?"
The Klub limited its members to less than half that amount, but, since we'd be changing partners every four hands, I doubted anyone could run up a huge score and hurt the others too much.
"Noreen liked to play for lots more," she added, "but that wouldn't be fair seeing's you're a newcomer, would it?"
"It's all right." I sat down in the vacant chair they'd left for me.
The first two rounds were dull, with no particularly interesting hands and no big swings in the scores. The women played competently I decided, although occasionally, especially when I might become the declarer, made excessively high bids as if hoping I would go down and hand the other team some penalty points. To say nothing of my money.
By the third round my suspicions had hardened into reality. Not only did they try to land me in unmakeable contracts but, when playing declarer to my dummy, frequently messed up perfect opportunities to take the necessary tricks and score points.
In addition, their comments and occasional smil
es and winks soon alerted me to their scheme, one I decided had been used successfully with Noreen. To put it bluntly, I suspected they considered Noreen a cash cow. She not only liked to play for high stakes but did most of the losing. So, in the long run, the other three could make out like bandits. For all I knew, they had an agreement between them to bundle all their winnings and split the take three ways.
That was discouraging enough. Not that I cared that Noreen's playing caused her to lose money, but it was my Uncle Edward's money she lost every week. In addition, my probing for information had yielded little.
As we changed seats after the first round, I brought up the subject again. "So you were Noreen's best friends. When her husband died, she must have been grateful for your support."
"Right," Vicki said. "We were that close."
"Nevertheless she must have been lonely at times. A young, attractive woman like that, all alone."
"Oh, not for long," Wanda said. "Noreen had many admirers."
Vicki laughed. "Admirers? I should say they were more than that. Lovers more likely."
Aha, just as I suspected. I looked from one to the other, waiting to see which one would elaborate.
But Charlene, as if realizing the others had said too much, cleared her throat loudly. "We don't know that for sure, Vicki. She never mentioned anyone in particular."
"Well, there was that one bloke," Vicki said.
"A special boyfriend?" I asked. "What about him?"
"I don't know about special," Wanda said. "He was like the others, I expect. She always liked big men and, you know, sort of macho."
"And he liked to dance," Vicki added.
"They went dancing?"
"At that club where she used to go often with the nephew."
Chaz's club. A dozen more questions flooded my mind, but Charlene reminded her friends they must play bridge not engage in gossip and insisted we get back to the game. I returned to looking at my cards, planning to wait for a further opportunity to ask more questions. None came.
On the last round, Wanda and I were partners, and the bidding was weird. I won't go into detail, because if you don't play bridge, you won't understand it anyway.
Suffice it to say, on the last hand, no matter how conservative my bidding, Wanda managed to steer us into a too-high bid. My suspicions seemed justified. At first she showed a weak hand, but eventually she pushed me into what she probably perceived as an unmakeable contract.
Then, to make matters worse, Charlene, sitting west on my left, said, "Double." That meant if I couldn't make the contract and went down, she'd get double the penalty points, and I felt sure I would go down. I could only grin and bear it.
Then Wanda said, "Redouble." She had compounded our loss by quadrupling the penalties! If I hadn't already been sure of it, she'd now confirmed I guessed right about the situation.
Vicki, on my right, spoke in a petulant voice. "Charlene, are you sure you should have doubled? Now she knows who's holding most of the high cards."
Talking about the hands is strictly forbidden in a normal game, but this one was far from normal anyway.
"Won't do her any good," Charlene said, a smirk pulling up the corners of her mouth. "Anyways, Wanda redoubled. Maybe I don't have all the high cards after all." Nevertheless she laid down the ace of diamonds.
Before Wanda, as dummy, began to place her cards face up on the table, Charlene raised her hand to stop her and looked at me. "What say we have a little side bet, you and me?"
"What kind of side bet?"
"I haven't seen the dummy cards yet, but I don't think you can make this hand, and I'm willing to wager twenty pounds on it."
A twenty-pound side bet? Did they do this sort of thing to Noreen, or did her steady losing at two or five pence a point satisfy them? Or did they wish to cheat me today? Had my normal, conservative playing hampered them and made them desperate to put up one last-ditch effort to score big?
I could barely hide my frustration. I was tired of the sound of rain against the windows, tired of their almost transparent strategy, and tired of getting so little information out of them. More than that, I was angry. I said, "All right," and immediately wished I could take it back. Idiot! Fool!
Wanda laid her cards on the table for all of us to see, and she had a good hand, after all. My spirits lifted.
Charlene's forehead creased into a frown. She, too, looked surprised by Wanda's hand, but she quickly put her smile back in place. Yet there was more bad news to come.
Looking at my own hand I saw I could take nine tricks, but I needed ten, and I could see no way to get the tenth one. I dredged my mind for ideas, but none of them seemed likely to work that time.
Without going into detail, trust me that I found a line of play and won after all. As I claimed the last trick, Charlene stared daggers at me, Vicki looked as if she'd like to slip poison into her partner's brandy, and Wanda looked completely dumbfounded.
"I believe we've played our twelve hands," I said, and Vicki and Wanda wasted no time in getting up from their chairs. Charlene, who had commandeered the score pad from the first, remained sitting, grim-faced and tight-lipped, while she added up the points for each player. The double and redouble had quadrupled mine. Then she fished into her handbag and threw a wad of bills on the table.
I couldn't tell if she gave me the right amount. I didn't much care. As I said, I rarely played for money. It was the challenge of the game that intrigued me: trying to determine by intuition and experience what cards the opponents held and using skill to play my own cards correctly.
Hmmm. Suddenly it seemed to me that playing bridge resembled detective work. No wonder I kept trying to solve the mystery of Noreen's death: asking questions, trying to read answers in people's looks and gestures. Maybe, since I could win at bridge, I'd be pretty good at playing sleuth as well.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After Noreen's chums departed—with hardly a good-bye among the three of them at the front door—I returned to the drawing room to put the cards and used glasses away. To my surprise, Chaz sat in one of the chairs at the table making a house of cards. He created a third level to his structure with remarkably steady hands.
He looked up when I came in. "I say, this looks like fun. Plus, when I came down to the library, I heard laughing."
I explained that three of Noreen's lady friends had been there. "We were playing bridge, not normally a funny game."
"But you enjoyed it." A statement, not a question. "How'd you like to teach me to play?"
"You knew Noreen played bridge with them, didn't you? If you wanted to learn, you could have asked her to teach you."
"I'm asking you." He picked up the money Charlene had thrown on the table, got up, and came to stand in front of me. "You seem to have come out the winner. Might as well learn from the best, eh?" One by one, he thrust the bills into the neckline of my dress. Gently, erotically.
I backed away, removing the bills. "I don't think so."
"You're attracted to me. I can tell. Why don't we stop this cat-and-mouse game, go upstairs, and spend a cold, rainy afternoon cuddling under my quilt?"
I tried to think of the right words to turn him off. "Chaz, be serious. I'm much older than you are."
"Don't give me that 'old enough to be your mother' routine. We both know that's not true. And what has age got to do with it anyway, so long as we're both adults?"
"This particular adult isn't interested in pursuing a…" I left the sentence unfinished and started a new one.
"My brother Brad is almost your age." Okay, I exaggerated. "You wouldn't want to make love to a woman who was thinking you were her younger brother, would you?"
He moved toward me again, his voice soft and seductive. "You think what you want, and I'll think what I want."
I couldn't help smiling. "If you promise to behave in future," I said over my shoulder, "I won't tell your mother."
His laughter followed me down the hall.
* * *
Chaz didn't appear the rest of the weekend, which didn't surprise me, and on Monday Jason went back to work, Beryl to another women's club meeting, and William, Alice, and Elizabeth finished making funeral arrangements.
In the evening, no doubt feeling guilty that my visit had turned out so strangely, they took me to a posh restaurant for dinner, and I joined in the conversation about other subjects than the one which preoccupied me.
Despite the still-pouring rain, Noreen's funeral took place on Tuesday. The service was held in the local church, less than a mile from Mason Hall. The doors of the small, moss-covered stone building looked too large for its size, and inside I saw worn wooden pews and a small stained glass window. As we family members sat in the front pews, I didn't have an opportunity to determine if a mysterious stranger made an appearance.
The local vicar read a eulogy both blessedly short and totally unrelated to Noreen's character. Apparently to fill time, we sang several hymns until the vicar determined we'd observed the necessary formality.
No, I did not know the woman, and, yes, I thought she probably deserved her fate, so when I found my eyes filling with tears, I recognized my feelings came from the funeral of my husband Stephen. To keep from making a public spectacle of myself, I tried to think of something less stressful, and I remembered the time Stephen and I went into a funeral home to choose a casket for my maternal grandfather. We descended stairs to the lower level of the building, and the very sight of the caskets made us solemn, especially the small ones made for babies. After touring the entire room, we came upon one regular-sized casket with a sign on top reading, "This is not a casket."
Stephen had looked at me and said, "Do you suppose it's a sailboat?" The tension broke, and we both cracked up.
I tried to stifle my giggles and said, "We mustn't laugh. What if they have microphones down here like used car dealers have in their offices?" Then we exploded into more loud guffaws.
Dead in the Water (Olivia Grant Mysteries Book 1) Page 10