“I know he was married,” Ralston said coldly. “And so do you.”
I became aware that Will Burke had edged up beside me, even though I had told him to stay back. That came as no surprise, since I didn’t really have the right to boss him around.
He gave me a look of surprise as we both digested Ralston’s comment.
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re well rid of him,” Ralston went on. “Whoever killed that bastard did you a favor, my dear.”
Janice’s hand flashed up and cracked across her father’s face in an angry slap. Ralston didn’t hesitate. He slapped her. Janice gasped in pain and shock and put a hand to her face as she took a step backward.
Ralston reached out to her. “Janice, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. It was just a reaction—”
She closed the door in his face, hard enough so that it was just short of a slam. Ralston stood there staring at the door for a long moment, then shook his head heavily and turned away toward his own rooms across the hallway.
Will and I both sunk down quickly, sitting on the steps, as Ralston started to turn. It would have been pretty embarrass-ing if he had caught us spying on him—which was exactly what we’d been doing, of course. We sat there listening to his footsteps, and I don’t know about Will but I was sure hoping that Ralston wouldn’t come this way and start down the stairs.
If he did, there was no place for us to hide.
He went into his suite instead, closing the door behind him.
I breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed slightly. As I did, I became aware of how closely Will and I were huddled together on the step. My leg was pressed against his. I didn’t figure I could move it without being too obvious about what I was doing, so I left it where it was for the time being.
“Kelley was carryin’ on with Janice Ralston, too,” I whispered. “Were there any women on this plantation he wasn’t foolin’ around with?”
“I don’t know, but from the sound of it, Mr. Ralston wasn’t happy about the situation.”
“Did you know about Kelley and Janice?”
Will shook his head. “No. They must have been pretty dis-creet. And you saw Janice earlier, after the murder. She didn’t act like somebody who was all broken up about Kelley’s death.”
He grunted. “She’s an even better actress than I thought she was, but she could only keep up the façade for so long. Once she was alone, it was too much for her.”
“Her daddy knew about it, though, and he didn’t like it.”
Will looked intently at me. “What are you thinking, Delilah?”
I said, “I’m just wonderin’ how far Edmond Ralston would go to break up a romance between his teenage daughter and a married man with the habit of sleepin’ with everything in a hoop skirt.”
CHAPTER 20
Will continued looking at me with an intensity just short of a stare. After a moment he said, “Do you really think Ralston could have killed Steven Kelley?”
“He had the same opportunity as anybody else,” I said.
“The big crowd in the ballroom meant that anybody could have slipped in and out of the place with a good chance of not being noticed. And he would have known where to get that knife, too, since he lives here.”
“Anybody could have gotten hold of that knife. I just work here, and I know where the kitchen is and where the knives are kept.”
“Then maybe you killed Kelley.”
I don’t know why I said it. Sheer contrariness, maybe. I know I didn’t mean it.
And yet when the words came out of my mouth, I felt a chill go through me. Despite the comfortable feeling between us that had been there right from the start, I didn’t really know Will Burke. I didn’t know what he was capable of doing.
Maybe he was involved with some woman at the college, and Kelley had taken her away from him, just as Kelley had stolen Luke’s girlfriend back in high school. Maybe Will wanted vengeance on Kelley for some other reason. As Will had just pointed out, he would have been able to get his hands on the murder weapon. I didn’t know about motive, but that gave him means and opportunity.
Just like dozens of other folks, I reminded myself. Still, it was a little creepy to think that I was sitting on a dimly lit staircase with a man who was, at least within the realm of possibility, a murder suspect.
He might have been thinking the same thing about me, I reminded myself. And because of Kelley’s improper advances toward my nieces, I had a motive, even if it wasn’t a very strong one. So I was three-for-three on the whole means, motive, and opportunity business.
“I didn’t kill him,” Will said. “I’ll admit, I didn’t really like the guy, but I didn’t kill him.”
“I believe you,” I said, and I did. “I didn’t kill him, either.”
“And I believe you. Now that we’ve got that established, what do we do?”
“We were going to talk to Lieutenant Farraday. I suppose we still can.”
“Do we tell him about Ralston and Janice?”
I thought about that. I didn’t want to cast any suspicion on innocent people … but I was beginning to doubt that anybody in this plantation house was really innocent. Put any group of people together, and chances are that quite a few of them will have secrets they don’t want anybody else to know about. I knew that from working with tour groups in the past.
Dig under the surface of anybody’s life and you’re liable to ex-pose things that aren’t meant for the light of day. Most of them don’t have anything to do with murder, of course, but folks will go to surprising lengths sometimes to protect their privacy and that of their loved ones.
“I reckon we ought to,” I said to Will. “The more information Farraday has, the better the chance that he’ll be able to solve this murder.”
“I was under the impression that you wanted to solve it.”
“What gives you that idea?”
He smiled. “Oh, just the fact that we’re sneaking around in the middle of the night and eavesdropping on other people’s conversations to see if we can uncover some more motives and suspects. We’ve just found two more.”
“Two?” I repeated. “Janice is just a kid. I could see her father killing Kelley to protect her from him, but why would she want to stab him?”
“Your daughter was a teenager once, and your nieces are now. They’re not always capable of making rational decisions, especially where passion is concerned. Look at Romeo and Juliet. They didn’t think things through.”
He had a point there.
“Just because Janice plays Melanie doesn’t mean that she’s as sweet as Melanie was in the book,” Will went on. “She has a temper. I’ve seen it. And I think she would have loved to take Rhett away from Scarlett.”
“You’re talking about Kelley and Maura.”
Will nodded. “If Janice was having an affair with Kelley, she might have thought that sooner or later he’d leave his wife for her. Maybe they met in the garden tonight and Janice gave him an ultimatum. Kelley chose his wife and told Janice that he wasn’t going to leave Maura.” Will shrugged. “It holds together.”
It did. It held together as well as any of the other theories I’d come up with. I wanted to groan in frustration but held it back. One thing you can say about a sleazy character like Steven Kelley, there was no shortage of people who might want to see him dead—and would be willing to stick a knife in his chest to bring that about.
“All right,” I said, getting ready to rise to my feet. “Let’s go find Lieutenant Farraday.”
Will stood first and put a hand on my arm to help me up. A part of me wanted to pull away from him and tell him I didn’t need any help. But a part of me enjoyed it, too, so I didn’t say anything.
“We’re going to get in trouble for not staying in our rooms, you know,” Will said as we started down the staircase.
“What’s he gonna do? Lock us up? Consider us murder suspects? I’m not scared of the lieutenant.”
Farraday did make me a little
nervous, though, with his bulldog determination. If I really was a criminal, I sure wouldn’t want him on my trail. He might not be flashy about it, but he’d stick with it for however long it took, I sensed.
We were just about down to the second-floor landing again when I heard a door open and then close. Or one door open and another one close, it was impossible to make that distinc-tion. Will heard the sounds, too, and put out a hand to stop me.
He leaned toward me and whispered, “It didn’t take people long to discover that there aren’t any deputies up here after all, did it?”
Another door opened and closed. The noises were faint but audible—and unmistakable.
“This is startin’ to remind me of one of those Bugs Bunny cartoons,” I said, “where Bugs is being chased by Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam and they run in and out of all those different doors.”
Will grinned at me. “You must’ve watched a lot of cartoons on TV when you were growing up, too.”
“Everybody our age did.”
“There was a Bugs Bunny cartoon that was a parody of Gone With the Wind, you know, called Southern Fried Rabbit. I referenced it in a paper I wrote on Mitchell’s influence on popular culture. Bugs was Scarlett O’Hara.”
“I remember it. I can still see Bugs in that long, curly wig… .”
I started to laugh and had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep the sound in. I had been so long without sleep and had been under such a strain that I was getting giddy. Will was grinning, too, and that didn’t help. Here we were faced with a serious, even deadly situation, and we were about to start gig-gling like a couple of eight-year-olds. I swatted Will lightly on the shoulder and told him, “Settle down now. We’ve got work to do.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, but that grin was still lurking around the corners of his mouth. “Things seem to have quieted down again. Do we try to make it to the first floor and find the lieutenant?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
We went down the stairs to the second-floor landing, where we paused and peered both ways along the corridor. Nobody was tiptoeing in or out of any of the rooms. I wondered if what we had heard were the sounds of more romantic rendezvous being carried out. Probably not among the tourists—although such things weren’t unheard of in my business—but with all those college kids working here, it stood to reason that there would be plenty of “hooking up,” as they call it. I had already seen evidence of that in Lindsey Hoffman’s visit to Perry Newton’s room.
Will was about to move on down the stairs when I touched his arm and whispered, “Wait a minute.”
“What is it?”
I had noticed something that wasn’t quite right. One of the doors about halfway down the hall to the left was ajar. It was only open a couple of inches, but that was enough to make it stand out from all the other doors. I cast my mind back over the arrangements I had helped Edmond Ralston and Lieutenant Farraday make earlier.
That was Elliott Riley’s room, I realized. He was by himself in there, because I’d figured that nobody would want to share the room with him and had warned Ralston and Farraday about that.
The thought that Riley was out and about somewhere in the house, long after midnight like this when all the other folks were supposed to be asleep—but obviously weren’t—
made my pulse jump a little. What was he up to? I was willing to bet that it wasn’t anything good.
But if he wasn’t in his room, that also gave me the opportunity to look around some in there. No telling what I might find, I thought.
I pointed out the open door to Will. “That’s Elliott Riley’s room,” I told him.
“Who’s Elliott Riley?”
It was too long a story to tell him all the details, so I just hit the highlights running. “I want to take a look in there,” I finished.
A dubious frown creased Will’s forehead. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. If you’re really suspicious of this guy Riley, let’s go find Lieutenant Farraday and tell him that Riley’s not in his room. Then Farraday and his men can search it if they want to, and look for Riley, too.”
What he said made sense, but I shook my head anyway. I was a little like a bloodhound with a scent, I guess, unwilling to give it up. “Riley’s been nothin’ but trouble for me since this tour started. I think he’s the strongest suspect in Kelley’s murder, and I want to have a look for myself.”
“It’s a mistake,” Will sighed. “But I’ve already learned that it’s also a mistake to argue with you. Let’s go.”
“You don’t have to,” I told him. “You can stay in the hall and keep an eye out for Riley coming back.”
“You don’t know that he’s actually gone,” Will pointed out, and I realized he was right. “I’m not letting you go in there by yourself.”
I liked the way he didn’t try to stop me but insisted on going with me, instead. For some reason I liked the idea that he’d started to think of us as a team.
We moved as quietly as we could along the hall toward the door of Riley’s room. As we got closer I could see some light coming through the narrow gap. It wasn’t very bright, and I figured the lamp on the bedside table was on. That was good, because it would give me enough light to take a look around without being bright enough to draw any unwanted attention.
My nerves started jumping around. Even though I wanted to do this, it wasn’t the sort of thing that I did every day, or ever. I had never searched a murder suspect’s room. But even more undesirable was the feeling of being suspected of murder myself. If I could turn up some proof that Riley had killed Steven Kelley, then my name would be cleared, along with those of Luke and Mr. Cobb and everybody else who’d been unlucky enough to be on this plantation tonight. Mr. Cobb could go back to Betsy Blue, and the rest of us could go home, too. I wouldn’t even wait for morning. I’d head back to Atlanta just as soon as Lieutenant Farraday said it was all right for us to go.
Despite those feelings, I still had the urge to turn and run, rather than going in there, and I was glad that I had Will with me so that I wouldn’t chicken out. I wasn’t sure why, but it was important to me that he didn’t think I was a coward.
We paused outside the door and looked back and forth along the hall, just to make sure that no one was coming.
Then I took a deep breath and reached out to push the door open.
Will’s hand on my arm stopped me before I could touch the panel or the knob. Grim lines had appeared on his face. He leaned forward, putting his nose close to the opening, and sniffed. When he turned to look at me, I knew something was really wrong.
Smell that, he mouthed at me. At least, I think that’s what he said. I put my nose closer to the gap and took a sniff anyway.
The smell was faint and reminded me of something. A second later I realized what it was: firecrackers, like the ones we had popped on the Fourth of July when I was a kid.
Nobody had been setting off firecrackers inside Elliott Riley’s room, though, and there was something else that smelled like that.
Gunpowder.
“Oh, Lord,” I whispered. My heart started its hammering in my chest again. I hadn’t heard a shot and it seemed impossible that somebody could have fired a gun here in the house without making a big racket, but that smell was unmistakable, even for somebody like me who normally didn’t have anything to do with guns. “We better find the lieutenant right now.”
A determined look had appeared on Will’s face. “I’m going to have a look,” he said.
“Dang it! Not without me, you’re not.”
If he could be stubborn, so could I. He looked like he wanted to chase me off, but he didn’t try. Instead he used his foot to push the door open enough so that we could see into the bedroom.
I felt a little sick as I saw a pair of pale, bare feet sticking out on the floor past the end of the bed. Whoever they belonged to lay beyond the bed. The hem of a pair of pajama pants came down around the ankles of those feet. I had a feeling I knew who they belonged to.
Elliott Riley hadn’t snuck out of his room after all, I thought.
He was still here.
Will shuffled forward. Even though every instinct in my body was telling me to turn and run, I was right beside him, clutching his arm. I knew that I was holding on to him tightly enough that I might be hurting him, but I couldn’t seem to let him go. My fingers dug in even more when I saw the ugly red splatters on the lampshade and the wall behind the lamp.
We reached the foot of the bed and both leaned forward, trying to see what was on the other side of it. The covers were pulled back, the sheets were rumpled, and there was a dent in one of the pillows caused by someone’s head. Riley had put on his pajamas, turned in for the night, and evidently gone to sleep, before something had woken him up and caused him to get out of bed.
He would never go back to bed, but he wouldn’t ever wake up again, either. He lay on his back, arms limp at his sides, the fingers of his right hand still partially curled around the butt of a small revolver. His eyes were wide, bugged out, staring without seeing anything. Blood hadn’t just splattered on the lampshade and the wall, it had pooled under Riley’s head, too.
I knew without seeing it—I didn’t want to see it—that the back of his head was probably a real mess, and he didn’t even have his toupee to help cover it because the rug was on a stand on the dresser across the room.
Elliott Riley had blown his brains out.
CHAPTER 21
Well, I pretty much had two choices right then. I could get the fantods at the sight of the dead man and run screaming from the room … or I could suck it up and stay where I was and try to figure this out.
I managed not to scream and run. It was a few moments, though, before I could move on to the figuring-it-out part. I had to stuff my heart back down my throat first and wait for the anvil chorus in my head to settle down.
Will brought me back to something resembling coherent thought by saying, “He killed himself. Put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That’s why we didn’t hear a shot. It was muffled by … by …”
Deliah Dickenson Mystery 01-Frankly My Dear, I''m Dead Page 14