Murder at Morningside

by Sandra Bretting

  Someone had screamed near the main house. I was sure of it. Near the back, if I had to guess. We hurried there. A flurry of activity met us. A man wearing a tool belt blocked the mansion’s back door, waving people away with a pair of garden clippers and shouting at everyone to stay back.

  One of the waiters was there too, judging by a black apron he wore around his waist. He tried to comfort a shrieking woman in a maid’s uniform, but her cries only amplified the chaos. By this time, several guests had joined the melee.

  Ambrose was nowhere to be seen. That made my heart race, and I made a beeline over to the waiter and the distraught housekeeper.

  “What is it?” Although I suspected a kitchen fire, there was no smoke or flames.

  The waiter had his hands full with the crying woman and didn’t answer. I moved on to the gardener, who was doing his best to keep everyone at bay.

  “You, there!” I hoped he could hear me above the hubbub. “What’s going on?”

  The man stopped waving long enough to fix his pale aqua eyes on me. “Find da manager, quick.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Da maid found a body in dere. Women’s batroom.”

  Ivy gasped behind me. It couldn’t be, could it? I turned to gauge her reaction. She silently swooned, like an old-fashioned paper doll cut free of its pattern, and fell to the ground.

  Chapter 3

  Paramedics maneuvered the stretcher slowly—too slowly—out a side door and down the path. Ambrose had emerged from the main house safe and sound, and I was so happy I threw my arms around his neck to hug him for all I was worth.

  We had to wait on the lawn until a Louisiana state trooper arrived to cordon off the area. A second officer accompanied him, and he gestured for Ivy to follow him into the house.

  My heart hurt for her. Who could have guessed the morning would turn out so? Once she disappeared into the house, a man with a name tag identifying him as the general manager stepped out.

  “Could I have your attention, please?” The general manager spoke loudly, as if to override the chaos. His bald head was smooth and as shiny as a new penny. “We don’t have much information at this point, but I can tell y’all one of our housekeepers discovered a body in the restroom. She’s been positively identified as Miss Trinity Solomon.”

  No one stirred, out of respect for the deceased or perhaps just plain old curiosity.

  “We’re willing to give anyone their deposit back if they want to leave, but the police need to talk to you before you go. That is, if you go.”

  The moment he hushed, whispers rose on the air like dandelions blown about by a headwind as people traded information back and forth. The overwhelming majority standing with me on the lawn seemed to be in town specifically for the wedding.

  A lady to my left announced she’d write up a little something for the Baton Rouge Women’s Club newsletter. A soft-spoken older gentleman wondered whether the flowers could be donated to a local hospital. And a young businesswoman questioned the fate of Mr. Solomon’s oil company now his only child was gone. It was all very civilized, but also chilly, for such a sudden turn of events.

  I glanced at my shoes. Ivy’s beautiful hat lay in the grass. Such a pity. She never had a chance to wear it for the competition, and now it was ruined, or nearly so. If I brought it back to my room, there was a chance I could reshape its crown using my travel steam iron.

  Since I didn’t have any other way to help her, I scooped up the hat. We awkwardly stood there for a moment longer until Ambrose touched my arm and began to lead me away from the crowd.

  “C’mon, Missy, let’s get out of here.”

  I studied the faces as we walked. Like it or not, a dead girl had been found in the hotel’s bathroom, even though she appeared to be as right as rain during our tour yesterday. True, she was in a family way, but she’d been downright feisty with her daddy when he challenged her about the wedding.

  Someone had wanted Trinity gone and, for all we knew, that someone could still be among us. A few weeks back I ran into our local police chief at the Food Faire. He told me about a thief he’d arrested who videotaped his victims when they returned home. Apparently the guy wanted to record their expressions when they noticed the smashed windows, broken locks, and scuff marks on the front door. Especially if they began to yell, shriek or argue with each other because they didn’t know what else to do.

  To sit back and enjoy human suffering was horrible, but that didn’t mean those types of people didn’t exist. While most sane folks would catch the first Jefferson Transit out of town, most wouldn’t murder a young bride right before her wedding. I eyed all the spectators equally as we made our way to the front of the house and up the stairs. I collapsed into one of the rocking chairs on the porch, still clutching the crushed hat to my chest.

  Ambrose followed suit and sat beside me. “Well, I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Ambrose! Don’t be so flippant.”

  “Of course, I feel awful for the girl’s family.”

  “That’s better.” I started to fluff up the pheasant quills on Ivy’s hat, but my heart wasn’t in it. She and I had walked right by the restroom where the maid found Trinity. Heavy panel door, brass doorknob, leaded glass window. Nothing unusual about any of it. “Who do you think would do such a thing?”

  “Now that’s hard to say. No telling who had motive. Could’ve been anyone. Even someone they didn’t know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It had to be someone they knew. Why would you even say that? It’s not like a stranger would wander onto this plantation out of the clear blue.”

  “You’re only saying that because it makes you feel safer.”

  No doubt he was right. The thought of a stranger killing someone two floors below my bedroom was enough to send me packing. But, if it was someone who was upset at the bride, or her family, that would be a whole ’nother story.

  The waiter I’d seen earlier ambled up the stairs and joined us on the porch. “Maybe the ghost did it.” He was handsome, even with the prematurely gray hair, bless his heart.

  “Now that’d be the day,” I said.

  “People were talking about it this morning.” He leaned against the rail that separated us from the river beyond. “One guy told me he almost called the cops last night because he heard so much noise. People moving furniture around, banging walls, having a regular party.”

  “Do tell,” Ambrose said. “I’d be mad too if someone kept me awake all night.”

  The waiter crossed his arms. “Or something. By the way, I’m Charles. I’ll probably be your server while you’re here.”

  “Nice to meet you, Charles. I’m Missy and this is my friend Ambrose.”

  He looked doubtful when I said friend, but that was neither here nor there at this point.

  “By any chance, did you hear anything last night?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “There’s too much stuff going on in the kitchen. The chef has to practically scream whenever my orders are up.”

  “You mean Cat? I met her this morning by the Jacuzzi. So you didn’t hear anything?”

  Ambrose shot me a look because he knew full well my questions usually led someplace else.

  “Not a thing,” Charles said. “If anything weird happened last night, I wouldn’t know. Guess it’s time to drive back to school.”

  “Let me guess. LSU? I went to Vanderbilt and Ambrose here went to Auburn—”

  Charles’s eyes flitted away from my face and landed somewhere behind me. At that point, I could have been speaking Swahili, for all he knew, because he only had eyes for the front door, which had squeaked open.

  I turned. Beatrice stepped onto the porch with her cell phone once again at her ear. There was definitely some history between those two.

  “Charles?” I asked.

  His head snapped ’round again. “Uh-huh. Auburn.”

  “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  Ambrose chuckled at our exchange. “Girlfri
end?”

  “What, her? Oh, no. No.”

  “Do tell.” Ambrose was toying with him now.

  I was about to intervene when Beatrice finally lowered the cell. “Mr. Jackson, can you come with me?”

  “Me? Is something wrong?”

  With everything that had happened, it was anyone’s guess what new crisis lurked around the corner. Maybe the police wanted to question Ambrose about what he’d seen while he was at the front desk. Or maybe they wanted to know if he’d heard anything the night before.

  “You had a call,” Beatrice said. “She said you weren’t answering your cell. Something about a problem at the store.”

  “Criminy. My guess it’s the Fitzgerald dress.” Ambrose grimaced. “I didn’t do a very good job of training my assistant to handle things when I’m gone, now, did I?”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Ambrose. She should be able to figure it out, don’t you think?” I said.

  “I should tell her that.” Reluctantly, he rose from the rocker and motioned to Charles. “Want to hold my seat for me? Best view in the house.”

  “No, that’s okay. I have to get back to school pretty soon. Finals are coming up.”

  Beatrice didn’t even glance Charles’s way, which seemed a trifle sad. “They have the number in the registration cottage,” she said to Ambrose, instead.

  “Gotcha.” He lingered by the rocker, and neither he nor Charles seemed anxious to leave.

  “Speaking of which,” I asked Beatrice, “did they ever tell you what happened to Trinity Solomon?”

  “No. All I know is a maid went into the handicapped stall this morning to refill the toilet paper and there she was. Must have been an awful sight.”

  “So there was lots of blood?” What a horrible fright to walk in on a crime scene—first thing in the morning, no less.

  “No, there wasn’t any blood.” Beatrice pursed her lips. “They didn’t ask for a mop or anything. Just said we couldn’t use the bathroom until a crime-scene investigator came by.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t use a mop, not until they’d had a chance to analyze the splatter pattern, if there was one.” Thank heavens I took a criminal-defense course at Vanderbilt when I thought about going to law school. Never imagined I’d use the information, though.

  “But they wheeled the stretcher right by me and they didn’t cover up the body very well. It looked like she was only sleeping.”

  “Did her skin look gray or purple?” I asked.

  “Now that you mention it, her skin did look purple. What does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing.” No need to provide a police procedural out here on the front porch. Although it meant Trinity had been lying in the restroom for some time, at least a few hours.

  “We should go see about that call,” she said to Ambrose.

  “Are you going to be okay out here by yourself, Missy? This shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.”

  I waved away his concerns. “Fine and dandy.” With Ambrose gone, I could question Charles to my heart’s content. “I need to catch my breath anyway.”

  Before they left, Beatrice blessed Charles with a throwaway smile. The boy looked ready to melt into a puddle of happiness.

  “Breathe,” I said, once they were gone. No need to have two bodies lying around the plantation.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You stopped breathing when she spoke. Sit.” I pointed to the chair Ambrose had recently vacated. Sometimes it was best to take the bull by the horns and lead him around the corral. “You were telling me about ghosts and such.”

  Charles reluctantly sank into the rocker. “You hear things when you’re waiting tables.”

  “I imagine. If you were to gamble, who would do something like that to the Solomon family?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “There was a big accident at her father’s oil refinery last year.”

  “Really? I kinda remember reading about it in the newspaper. Baton Rouge, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep. A fuel stack exploded in the middle of the night.”

  “Did a lot of people get injured?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, but it was more than that. There was the money too. Half of Baton Rouge had invested in the refinery and when it shut down, they got aced.”

  “What do you mean, ‘aced’? Did Mr. Solomon lose everything?”

  Now he looked disgusted, with his face all pinched up. “He didn’t lose anything. But everyone else did. Even my dad had money in it.”

  “Sometimes they’ll sell off the assets if there’s been an accident and give the money to the survivors. Why didn’t they do that?”

  “There wasn’t anything left to sell. How much would someone pay for a burned-out fuel stack? ’Course, Mr. Solomon got off scot-free. Turns out he’d invested his money somewhere else. Didn’t have a dime in his own property.”

  Gracious light. That would give a lot of people motive to get back at Mr. Solomon. But why go after his poor daughter? Why not the man himself?

  Charles rose from the rocker and stretched. “I’d better head back. Time to hit the books.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll probably see you tonight.”

  By the time he left, my thoughts were a million miles away. Not only did Mr. Solomon cause a lot of physical harm to people in this area, but it seemed he’d caused a lot of financial damage too. Hard to say which of the two would be a better reason for revenge.

  No sooner had Charles started back down the stairs when the top of Ambrose’s head appeared over the landing. He seemed a little winded from all the coming and going, so I motioned to the rocking chair, which had been getting more than its fair share of use that morning.

  He shook his head. “Missy, I hate to do this, but I have to get back to the shop.”

  “Really? If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Or as my granddaddy used to say, It’s always somethin’, never nothin.”

  “The wedding next weekend is going to be a disaster if I don’t take care of this. I need to come up with a whole new design or the mother will want my head on a platter.”

  I sighed heavily. “Oh, Bo.” Ironically, one of the things I liked about Ambrose when I first met him was his passion for his work. But why did that passion have to interrupt the only weekend we’d had together in a month of Sundays?

  “We’re talking major disaster here. Now she wants her mermaid dress to be a ball gown. Trust me, there’s not enough fabric for that.”

  “I understand.”

  Once he made up his mind, it was like trying to tame the wind to change it.

  “I’ll only be gone a few hours. Then I’ll come right back. You probably won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  I worked up a respectable pout. “You know that’s not true. Maybe I’ll leave too and go back with you.”

  “Now don’t be silly. Didn’t you want to go swimming? I’ll tell you what: You go get some sun, and I’ll be back as quick as anything. This place costs a lot of money, so you might as well enjoy it. Even with everything that happened this morning.”

  Maybe that wouldn’t be too bad. There were a few things I’d wanted to do around the plantation that Ambrose might not enjoy. Reading in the library was one, along with getting my toes done at the day spa. “Well, if you insist.”

  He smiled, which brought out the blue in his deep-set eyes. “Try to stay out of trouble for once, okay?”

  So much for the day’s plans. I settled back in the rocker, but then changed my mind and snatched up Ivy’s hat. Even though Ambrose was determined to fix things at his store, I could always help him by finding him something to eat on the way. I walked across the porch, but before I got very far, a shrill noise sounded below me. It landed a half-note shy of being on pitch as someone whistled away. Sounded to me like an off-tune rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  Curious now, I peeked over the rail as the front door closed behind Ambrose. Someone stood over a clump of impatiens next to the house, tugging at a weed.
Thinning hair, blue coveralls, and a low-slung tool belt around the waist. It was the gardener from before. The one who’d ordered everyone to stay away from the house once the maid discovered Trinity Solomon.

  Despite the horrible morning, he seemed calm as he casually pulled at a stalk.

  “Good morning,” I said, as I began to descend the staircase. “Crazy times we’ve had this morning, right?”

  He didn’t bother to rise to meet me; though he did glance my way.

  “You can say dat again. Crazy ’nuf to scare da guests away.”

  Judging by the man’s pale face and watery blue eyes, he looked to be about eighty or so. His accent reminded me of the Cajun store owner in my building.

  “You were very brave this morning,” I said.

  “Tank ya. Didn’t know what else ta do, ta be honest.”

  “I’m Melissa DuBois.” I stopped and held out my hand. “You do a great job with the gardens here. They’re absolutely beautiful.”

  “Gotta cover da soil in acid. Git it from da coffee. Pour dat stuff on da plants and never tink twice ’bout dem again.” He slowly straightened and held out his left hand. He’d pinned the empty sleeve on his right side to the blue coveralls.

  “Nice to meet you.” I gently shook his hand. “I’ll have to remember that about the coffee, Mr. . . .”

  “It’s jus’ Darryl. Darryl Tibodeaux. Nice ta meet ya.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about plants. Been here long?”

  He ducked his head. “Not dat long. Use ta work at da oil refinery. Dat’s water under da bridge. Water under da bridge.”

  “I heard about the big accident there.”

  “Da refinery weren’ so good ta me.” He glanced at the empty sleeve of his coverall. “Happy ta have dis job. Happy ta have any job.”

  “I think they’re lucky to have you. I mean, look at those flowers!” A low rumble careened through my empty stomach. “Say, Darryl. What with all the craziness this morning, I completely forgot to eat breakfast. Do you know if the kitchen’s still open?”

  “Should be. Dat Cat works round da clock. If’n it’s not, she’ll open it right up for ya.”