“Young girls stitched them to practice their needlework. They displayed their finest as proof of their skill. To help them land husbands. Or work, if they were of those classes.”
Gethsemane bit back her twenty-first century feminist retort. “This particular sampler is rarer than weapons-grade plutonium. I know you don’t know what that is, but, trust me, it’s crazy expensive. You could buy a fleet of brigantines for what that sampler’s worth. It was stitched by a free black schoolgirl in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1764. You can see it for yourself right over—” She froze. The frame—and its contents—she’d admired a few hours ago was gone. Only a forlorn picture hanger remained to mark the space. She put her hand against the wall as if she might be able to feel what she couldn’t see. “It can’t be gone. It was right here. The Patience Freeman sampler was right here. I saw it with my own eyes. It was. Right. Here.” She smacked the wall.
Captain Lochlan paled until the striped pattern of the wallpaper behind him showed plainly visible through his chest. “What was that name you said?”
“Patience Freeman. Why does her name matter? The only thing that matters is that the damn thing’s missing.”
“Her name matters to me.”
“The daughter of a seamstress and a slave in colonial Virginia? Why? It’s not like you knew her.”
“I knew her. I knew her quite well. I ought to.” He dematerialized. “I’m the man who killed her.”
Gethsemane gasped. Her eyes darted about for something heavy to throw. Then she remembered objects tended to pass through ghosts without harming them. Damn.
Why hadn’t she listened to Father Tim and left the ghost conjuring alone? Bad enough she failed to summon Eamon. Worse, she called up the ghost of a child murderer. Probably from hell where he deserved to spend eternity. “You murdered an eleven-year-old?”
Captain Lochlan rematerialized full force. The blast of Bay Rum knocked Gethsemane back. The captain blazed bright cerulean blue. Sparks popped and sizzled around his head. Gethsemane ducked and waited for orbs.
“Murdered?” the captain yelled. Gethsemane glanced at the door, hopeful no one else could hear him. “You think so little of me? You think me so low I’d murder a child, an innocent girl? Am I a highwayman, a fiend, an agent of Satan himself?”
“I’m sorry. I retract the question. Stop with the pyrotechnics before you set the house on fire.” She made a mental note: don’t accuse ghosts of murder. They don’t take it well. “You said you killed her.”
“I didn’t murder her.” The captain leaned against the file cabinet, dejected. A drawer protruded through his stomach as he dissolved partway into it. Gethsemane flinched and reminded herself Eamon said it didn’t hurt. “But I’m no less responsible for her death than if I’d squeezed the life from her with my own two hands.” He held them out in front of him and stared, lost in some distant painful memory.
“I’m confused. You didn’t murder her, but you’re responsible for her death? What happened?” The faint cacophony of violins being tuned floated up from downstairs before the captain could answer. She looked at her watch. Seven minutes until show time. She’d be missed. The story and the search would have to wait. She closed the file cabinet.
Captain Lochlan started as the drawer passed through him. He vanished, then reappeared next to the French windows and stepped onto the balcony. He leaned into the railing. Gethsemane thought he might speak, but he only peered down toward the patio below. He swore, then leaned so far over the railing it passed through his midsection. “Get help, lass,” he said without taking his eyes off whatever he saw.
“Help? Why?” Gethsemane moved toward the balcony.
“Stay back.”
She leaned over the rail next to him. “Damn. Not again.”
Olivia lay prone on the patio’s slate tiles, arms and legs akimbo, head and neck twisted at an awkward angle. Even if her mother hadn’t been a physician, and even if she hadn’t seen more dead bodies in the past three months than any musician should ever have to see, she would know that Olivia was now the late Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle.
Eight
Had Olivia fallen? Gethsemane gripped the balcony’s stone railing. Couldn’t be any sturdier. The handrail came up past her waist. But Olivia stood several inches taller than her. The handrail would’ve stopped at her hips. Gethsemane craned forward and scanned the courtyard. She forced herself not to stare at the crumpled figure of her hostess. Except for the dead woman, the yard was deserted. No lights in any of the windows opposite. She swallowed nausea and looked down again. Moonlight sparkled off something near Olivia’s hand. Shattered glass. Had she gone out onto the balcony to sip champagne in the night air? She’d had at least one drink downstairs. Maybe she got dizzy and stumbled. Or maybe—did she imagine it—maybe something below caught Olivia’s eye. Gethsemane leaned out farther over the rail. There was something, something caught in the bushes. Something light-colored. She could see it better if she just leaned out a little bit more…
Gethsemane felt the back of her dress jerk upward. She gagged as the front neckline caught her in the throat. A yank and she fell back into the room, where she landed hard on the floor. “Ow.” She scrambled to her feet and glared at Captain Lochlan. “That hurt.” She rubbed her dignity. “Throw me across the room next time. What’s wrong with you?”
“Are you touched in the head?” The captain nodded toward the balcony. “Do you want to end up down there like the poor woman?”
The office door flew open before she could answer. Ray huffed in. A vein pulsed in his temple and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “Where the hell’ve you been? You’re due to start again in five—” He checked his watch. “Make that two minutes. Damned unreliable temperamental musicians.” He gave no sign he noticed Captain Lochlan.
“I hate to interrupt your tirade, Mr. Delaney, but I think you better call the gardaí.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
Gethsemane pointed to the French windows. Ray rushed onto the balcony and looked over the rail. “What have you done? You’ve killed her.”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Gethsemane said to the sour-faced female sergeant who interrogated her in the courtyard. She tried not to think of Olivia’s crumpled body covered with a sheet a few yards away. She shivered in the cold and longed for her coat, out of reach in her tower room. The sergeant, who’d introduced herself as Heaney, bundled in a parka and gloves, didn’t seem to notice the temperature or Gethsemane’s shivering as she asked the same questions again and again.
“No,” Gethsemane said. “Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle wasn’t in her office when I went in. No, I didn’t see anyone else in the room.” She assumed the sergeant meant anyone corporeal and omitted mention of Captain Lochlan. “I went to the office to look at the Freeman sampler. Everyone knew Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle displayed it in her office.” She didn’t know who in the garda knew about Yseult’s investigation. If she told the sergeant what she was doing and Yseult denied it…
“This interest in antique textiles.” The sergeant scribbled in her notebook. “It’s a new hobby? Music not fulfilling enough anymore?”
Captain Lochlan’s disembodied voice whispered in her ear, “Is sarcasm a standard part of modern law enforcement?”
Gethsemane flicked her fingers to shoo him away. Sergeant Heaney noticed.
“Something wrong, Dr. Brown?”
“A bug. And my music is plenty fulfilling, thanks.”
“Textiles are a family thing then?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning your brother-in-law is suspected of trying to steal an antique sampler from an auction just a couple of days ago.” She consulted her notes. “A quite valuable piece of embroidery.”
“That sampler was planted in my brother-in-law’s coat. He traveled all the way from Virginia to Ballytuam to bid on the piece with the full knowledge of the entire museum staff and
approval of the museum board. He could hardly return home with the miniature and no proof of purchase. Jackson had no reason to steal it.”
“And you had no reason to help the victim over the balcony?”
“Of course I didn’t!” A stream of curse words streamed through her head. She closed her eyes and counted to five before speaking. “I hardly knew the woman. Why would I kill her?”
“To derail the investigation into your brother-in-law’s crime.”
“My brother-in-law hasn’t committed any crime. Your accusations are false. All of them.” Gethsemane balled her fist. She’d never wanted to hit anyone as badly as she wanted to hit the sergeant right in her thin-lipped mouth. “What is it with you people? You pin a crime on the first person you see and cook up some cockamamie explanation to avoid actually investigating. Investigations seem too much like real work?”
A tingle shot from her elbow to her shoulder as a ghostly hand materialized on her arm. The scent of Bay Rum tickled her nose as the captain’s voice filled her ear. “Easy, lass.”
Gethsemane took a deep breath and tried to relax. “You don’t know me, Sergeant, but please believe me when I tell you I’m not stuck on stupid. Even if Jackson had stolen that sampler, which he didn’t, I wouldn’t kill someone to cover it up. Murder is a far more serious crime than theft.”
“The twenty-first century has a gift for understatement,” Captain Lochlan whispered.
Gethsemane hissed at him to shut up.
Sergeant Heaney shot her a strange look as she tried to hide her admonishment under a cough. “Did you say something, Dr. Brown?”
“No. The, uh, night air dries my throat.” She coughed again. “I was just clearing it. Isn’t it more likely that Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle just leaned too far out over the rail and lost her balance than someone pushed her?”
“Leaned out to do what? Catch some night air?”
The captain asked Gethsemane, “Do you think she was born a bitch or is it a technique she’s perfected through years of practice?”
Gethsemane stifled a laugh. “Maybe she leaned out to see something.”
“Such as?”
“When I was standing on the balcony I saw something caught in one of the bushes. Something light-colored.”
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. It was way down in the bushes. If I’d leaned any farther I would have ended up on the patio next to Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle.”
“This, perhaps?”
Gethsemane and Sergeant Heaney faced the newcomer as she walked across the courtyard. Yseult. One gloved hand grasped a light-colored object.
“Could be.” As Yseult came closer, Gethsemane saw she carried a rolled ivory-colored fabric. Embroidery threads showed around Yseult’s glove. Surely it wasn’t—“What is it?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” Heaney said. She stood at attention. Yseult didn’t try to suppress a grin. The sergeant didn’t seem to notice. Gethsemane wondered at the sergeant’s deference. Yseult’s assignment must be quite “special” for her to pull rank on the local guards. “What’s that, ma’am?”
“Something I found caught in a bush.” She took care not to let the cloth touch the ground as she unrolled it in front of her. The now familiar embroidered alphabet marched in neat rows across the upper half of the large linen rectangle and the embroidered grid filled the lower half of the fabric. The missing sampler. With the fabric out of its frame, Gethsemane saw just how perfect the letters were, how precise the numbers were. The exquisite stitching resembled printer’s ink.
“You found it,” Gethsemane said.
“Is that the missing textile, ma’am?” Heaney asked.
“No, Sergeant, it isn’t.” She reconsidered her words. “Strictly speaking, it may be the missing textile. But it’s not the genuine Patience Freeman sampler. This sampler is a modern fake.”
“A fake?” Gethsemane and the sergeant exclaimed simultaneously.
Captain Lochlan said something Gethsemane was glad only she could hear.
“How can you tell, ma’am?” Heaney asked. “I mean I know how you can tell, but how can you tell?”
“May I borrow your torch?” Heaney handed her a pocket flashlight. Yseult flipped the sampler to its reverse and shone the flashlight beam on the embroidery threads. Gethsemane noted the stitching was almost as neat as that on the front. “See how the stiches on the back of the sampler are faded?”
Gethsemane and the sergeant nodded.
Yseult flipped the sampler to its face. “See how the stitches on the front are also faded, exactly as much as they are on the back?”
“Shouldn’t they be?” Gethsemane asked. She remembered what Jackson told her about light exposure on color. “The embroidery thread’s almost two hundred fifty years old.”
“A sampler this fine would have represented the culmination of Patience’s training, her best work, meant for display. It would have been framed on a wall for a good part of that two hundred fifty years.”
Captain Lochlan confirmed Yseult’s statement.
“Light would have fallen on the front of the piece and faded the threads, but the frame,” she turned the sampler again, “would have protected the back.”
“So the back should have faded less than the front. The colors should be brighter,” Gethsemane said.
“A common forger’s mistake. But one they often get away with until someone takes the piece out of its frame and examines it closely. If they ever do. By then the sale is often made, the money’s stashed in an offshore account, and the forger’s laying low in a country with no extradition treaty.”
“Why would someone hide a fake antique in a bush, ma’am?” Heaney asked. “And what’s it got to do with Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle’s death?”
“As to your first question, I have my suspicions, but I don’t know why for certain. Yet. As to your second question, maybe nothing. Or maybe everything. We don’t know whether Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle died from misadventure or homicide.”
The sergeant opened her mouth to speak when Ronan Leary burst into the courtyard.
He pointed at Gethsemane. “You! You were at the auction the night of the theft. You’re no musician. What’re you doing here? Casing the house?” He turned to the police officer who’d followed him out. “It’s her. She’s the thief. She’s the one you should be questioning.”
Kenneth sauntered up behind the officer. “Shut it, Leary. Of course she’s a musician. You heard her play. And so what if she was at the auction? So were you.”
Leary turned on Kenneth. “So were you, for that matter. Maybe you’re the one. Maybe you’re in it together. I saw the two of you talking inside. You didn’t know that, did you? I saw you plotting.”
“Are you delusional or just ossified? Sure, I was talking to her. I always talk to beautiful women. The only thing I was plotting was how to get her phone number. Which I failed to get, I’m sorry to say.” He shrugged and winked. “Best laid plans…”
“A friend of yours, Dr. Brown?” Yseult asked.
“A recent acquaintance.”
“A lifelong flirt,” Yseult said.
“Perhaps an alibi,” Kenneth said. “No one saw Mrs. McCarthy-Boyle after ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.’ Dr. Brown remained seated at the Steinway in front of three hundred people through the end of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.’”
“Do you know what he’s on about?” Yseult asked Gethsemane.
“The music. Those were two of the pieces we performed. Children-themed music, since the event benefitted a children’s hospital.”
“Sorry I missed it.”
“I’m not one to call a lady a liar,” Captain Lochlan whispered to Gethsemane, “but I don’t think she’s sorry at all.”
“All right, Leary,” the officer standing next to Ronan said. “C’mon. I’ve some more q
uestions for you. You, too, O’Connor. The guard waiting over there is all yours. Sorry he’s not a beautiful woman, but he’ll be sure to get your phone number.”
Yseult addressed the sergeant after the men left. “I’m going to bring Dr. Brown to the station with me. I need to ask her more about this.” She held up the sampler. “You can finish taking her statement about the deceased there after I’m done with her. In the meantime, one of the guests, Mr. Fitz-something-or-other, Fitzpatrick, Fitzwilliam, I don’t remember, corralled me to tell me he saw someone crawling into one of the windows from the courtyard. He’s adamant. Would you talk to him and see if you can make some sense out of his story?”
The sergeant snapped her notebook shut, shoved it into her pocket, glared at Gethsemane and Yseult, and stomped off in search of the adamant Mr. Fitz.
Someone called out to Yseult and motioned her over toward the bushes where she’d recovered the sampler.
“A moment please, Dr. Brown. I’ll be right back and then we can go.”
Gethsemane rubbed her arms to try and warm herself. Captain Lochlan offered her his coat. “Thanks, but I don’t think it’ll work.” She stamped her feet and paced around the patio. She stepped off the edge of the slate on her second pass. She expected to step down into soft grass, but the toe of her shoe landed on something hard. After making sure no one watched her, she picked it up.
“A button,” Captain Lochlan said over her shoulder.
“Not just any button.” She turned the silver shank button over in her hand. “This is custom, like a tailor would use on your bespoke suit.”
“Aren’t all suits bespoke?”
“Remind me to explain ready-to-wear.” She turned away as Yseult approached and slipped the button into her cleavage. She wished she’d bought a dress with pockets. Much easier to hide things from people you don’t trust.
“Dr. Brown?” Yseult asked.
“Just trying to warm up.” She held her hands close to her chest and blew on them.
“We can go now. I sent a uniform for your coat. It’ll be waiting in the car.”
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