Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  “Just try, that’s all,” Fay said.

  The phone was ringing. It was Lieutenant Higgins, wanting to know about Monday lunch. “I can’t tomorrow,” she told him. “I have to rewrite the ending on the Beauty play, we’ve a new show coming up. Maybe next week. So what’s going on with the case? Anything new?”

  “Nope,” he replied, sounding sulky about the lunch. “Nothing.” She heard him sigh.

  “You didn’t let Cedric Fox go, right? I told you he’s wanting to leave town.”

  “Over my dead body,” Higgins said, and Fay smiled.

  “I really don’t care who Sammy is,” Chance said when Fay hung up. “I’ve other things on my mind.”

  “Homework?”

  “Of course not homework. But I have been doing that assignment you gave me.”

  “Remind me.” Fay had given out so many assignments she couldn’t remember who was doing what. But she had to remember, didn’t she? For Marian’s sake?

  “Cedric and Mademoiselle LaFleur.” Chance guzzled orange juice right out of the large container and put it back in the fridge. She’d broken a rule, but Fay held her tongue. “I saw them in Vergennes,” she said.

  “What? That was days ago. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Just a quick glance,” Chance said, unruffled. “They were carrying a framed picture of a skull. And then…”

  “But that’s important! What did the skull look like? It might be the same artist. Cedric might know him. Cedric might be in cahoots with him! Oh my God, this is big!”

  “And then,” said Chance, crunching Cheerios. “I saw them going into the Co-op.”

  “And?” This was all too much, this days-old information. Did the girl realize how important it was to find this criminal before he could – do what? Here her imagination faltered.

  “She said ‘Money,’ that’s all I heard. ‘Money.’ Oh, yeah – and one of them said ‘Paris’ – I forgot who said which. And that’s all I have to report. Except for Sammy who makes those smoothies. But you told me to forget about her.”

  “You told me to forget her, that you weren’t going to check on her relationship to Billy. That was you, not me.”

  “Okay, okay. Anyway, I got other things to do. Homework, yeah, goats to make for my art project. I got – ”

  “I heard you. Well, you can at least help with the Rutland performance. And whatever we get after that. We may not book any more shows till these murders are solved. People might be afraid someone will blow up the puppets – and themselves.”

  In truth, no more show requests had come in of late. Fay put down her pen. She’d been chewing on it, made a serious dent in the top. Maybe in her front teeth as well. When Chance sighed heavily, as though exploited, Fay said “Well I’ve got a few jobs myself. I mean, not counting the milking and now Hester’s hurt her foot and I have to get the vet. And the cheesemaking’s come to a complete halt – I’m putting it in the failed category, like the hooked rugs and the B and B I thought was going to support me and Glenna.” Even this didn’t include the bum job she’d made trying to raise children. She’d hoped taking on these foster kids would redeem her. But it didn’t seem to be working.

  Chance rinsed out her cereal bowl and started for the door. Fay felt abandoned. Overwhelmed. But she had to get back to work. She read aloud from her list. “Read papers from Puss’s house. Call Permanent Solution re: the brown spot woman – or was it blue? Locate art gallery where Beets saw the skull artist. See Cedric about the skull painting he bought.”

  Chance turned in the doorway. “Why would he buy a painting like that in the first place. A skull? With a nose ruby and earrings? That’s what you have to find out, Fay. So ask him that.” The door slammed.

  “I will,” Fay told the door. But why would he? Why would Mademoiselle? Was there heroin inside the frame? Whoa. A whole new dimension here! Drugs? She hoped not.

  The door opened again and Chance said, “I don’t know about any brown spot in a blue eye, but Sammy has a sort of bluish circle around her brown eye. I noticed it Saturday morning when the sun shone through the back window. I thought that was weird!”

  “Interesting,” Fay said. “Thanks!” The door slammed again and took Chance with it.

  Fay ate one of the power bars she’d been saving for emergencies. She ate the last chocolate chip cookie in the box Glenna had bought after Saturday’s show. Never mind it was only ten o’clock in the morning and she’d sworn off sweets. She needed the jolt.

  Cedric was last on the list but he lived the closest. She’d go there first.

  * * *

  “What in hell took you so long?” Cedric yelled when she knocked at the door. “Oh, it’s you,” he said and shut it in her face, then opened it again, his face a round white cheese. “Well, I need someone to take me seriously. The police don’t listen. They don’t realize I’m in danger.”

  Fay pushed her way inside before he could close the door again.

  “First it was my rug and the portrait,” he said. “Now my bedroom drawers. Marion’s lady’s desk. All rifled through. Papers, bills, you name it, all over the damn floor. That fellow of yours again?” A puppy yipped in the background. Cedric had a watchdog?

  “It wasn’t Rudolph this time,” she said, surveying the mess. “Rudolph’s in prison. And he’s not my fellow. My Beets is home. The boy hasn’t left home since he got there.” She picked up a handful of papers and Cedric stabbed a finger at her.

  “Don’t touch! I want the cops to get fingerprints. Want ’em to take it seriously. And that’s not all. The kitchen drawers, the bedroom. My whole house is trashed.” He flung himself down on the couch. “Someone’s after me,” he wept, peering up through bleary red eyes, “someone wants me dead.”

  “Someone wants something they think you’ve got in your house,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they want you dead.”

  “Listen, Fay. Now listen.” He jumped up and stuck his face into hers. “First Marion, then Puss. Then the old lady, Gloria. It’s not hard to figure, okay? Someone wants the whole family dead. The whole goddam family! I’m next in line.”

  “But you’re not family, Cedric – blood related, I mean. You’re only the husband, the brother-in-law.”

  “Jesus.” He looked at her like she was a complete nerd. Then he pointed a finger again and held it to the tip of her nose, flattening it. “The Valentini money comes to me, got it? Turns out there is no other relative. Money. M-O-N-E-Y.”

  “I can spell. But trashing the house doesn’t kill you. I mean, if someone planted a bomb or something…”

  “Exactly. What I’ve been trying to tell you. You wait there.” He dashed into the rear of the house. She heard a back door slam, and slam again. Five minutes later he was back with a small package. “Left at my back door. Pandora’s Box it says on top, see? Anything could be in here, anything! A bomb, anthrax. I found it when I went out to the garden this morning. I want the police to see it. But they haven’t come. They don’t give a damn. So I’m taking it out to the woods behind the house. When they come they can look at it out there. Blow it up, hose it down – whatever they do.”

  She pulled out her cell and phoned Higgins. He wasn’t in so she called Nova, who was in Bristol, negotiating a threatened suicide. She admired him for that. “The guy locked himself in,” he’d said. “The wife’s running around screaming.”

  Fay explained the Cedric situation but Nova had no one to send. The Branbury police were understaffed. Lately they were all working overtime. Traffic accidents, wife abuse, theft. The Irish chief was away doing a gig – he and his daughter sang Irish folk songs. “This is a bomb,” Fay told Nova. “It could blow up the neighborhood. It could blow me up! Send someone. Now.”

  “Bomb? Oh, right” Nova said with a groan that came up out of his boots. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Okay,” she told Cedric. “While we’re waiting – I’ve a question. About a certain painting you and your lady friend purchased. It might have somethi
ng to do with the murders. I’d like to see it, please, before the cops come. I’d like to know why you bought it. And who from.”

  “I don’t have it,” he said, starting out back with Pandora’s Box.

  “Then who does?” She followed him through the kitchen.

  “She does. Felice. You’ll have to ask her. She bought it. Why would I want to hang a skull on the wall?” He was beyond the garden now, running fast, like the place might blow up any second.

  Fay hung back. She had three kids to care for, along with an elderly cousin and an errant grandson. Dogs, a cat, and a few chickens in the shed. Three goats. She wasn’t ready to be blown up. “Come on, Cedric. This Felice must’ve given you some reason why she wants it,” she said when he came puffing back.

  “She knew the artist, that’s all I can tell you.” He flopped down on the couch and checked his watch. “Some guy she used to date. She wanted it for auld lang syne. You know, tell your friends. ‘Ooh, it’s a little something I picked up. I knew the artist. We shacked up a little.”

  “She said that?”

  “Only in French. I don’t speak French.”

  Someone banged on the door. He opened, and two young officers stood there. “Hear you got a bomb. Where’s it at?”

  Bang! The bomb answered for him. The cops yelped and raced out back. Black smoke rose out of the pumpkin patch.

  “Know anyone wants to kill you?” one of the cops asked Cedric.

  He didn’t answer. He was cradling the one remaining pumpkin. The rest of it was scattered throughout the yard, clinging to branches like hunks of rotting apples. Bits cleaved to the clothes line, the bird fountain, the statue of Medusa that Marion had sculpted out of wire.

  “What do I know?” Cedric said to the cops, staring down at the pulpy mess, his hair full of seeds. “That’s for you to find out. Now get me a bodyguard. Then go and arrest somebody, dammit!”

  * * *

  Sammy was lounging like a red queen on the couch when Billy got home. “I’ve got the tickets,” she said, holding them out in her hand like a pair of aces. She was grinning, ear to ear.

  “I’m not going,” he said.

  She shrank back, like he’d just hit her, and her shoulders trembled. “You said –

  “I’ve changed my mind. There’s too much else going on here in town. The band’s making a CD, they need me. Saturday I’ve got a puppet show.”

  “Piss on your puppet show. It was your idea to go, remember, Billy? You said you needed a break from all this. From that girl – you were sick of her little jealousies. You said the band was falling apart, you lost your singer. You promised. You said –”

  He didn’t answer. He was sweating and went into the bathroom to throw cold water on his face. Worried about getting a pot, he’d been out running. It was bad enough being twenty-five. Didn’t want middle age coming on so soon – he’d lost most of his youth as it was. Now just as he was getting it back with Chance, who made him feel twenty again and ready for a fresh start, Sammy wanted him to go to the UK. Back into the pagan scene there. The drug scene.

  “I said I’m not going. I can’t.”

  She was standing over him now. “The tickets are nonreturnable. I worked my butt off for them.”

  “Then find someone else to go with you.” He ducked past her and sat down at his desk. He was cleaning out his drawers, one by one. Getting rid of the old entanglements. Making a new beginning. Phoenix rising out of the ashes.

  “Better watch what you throw in that trash basket,” she said. She was on the couch now, her lips in a straight line like they’d been sewn together.

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody trashed it. When I came in yesterday afternoon, it was on the floor, papers all over. I stuffed them all back in.”

  He thought of Chance – nobody else knew how to get in except for her and Sammy. He rifled through the mess – he’d thrown old papers in here he wouldn’t want Chance to see. “It wasn’t you?” he asked. “Sure? Accidentally maybe?”

  She lifted an arched eyebrow. A tough lady. Though she had to be, with her past, she’d been in a dozen foster homes. Once in Juvie for trashing somebody’s house. Though he couldn’t blame her. The guy had been nasty to her.

  It was Chance then. She’d found something. Which explained her being so offish this weekend. Hardly giving him the time of day. She’d taken off right after the Saturday show, leaving him to do the clean-up.

  “Hey,” Sammy said, “forget that girl, huh? She’s just a kid. You’ll be doing her a favor. You were in up to your ears with the last one, right? Gave her everything you had and she dropped you cold? Look, Billy boy, time you got out of the puppet business before you turn into one. What’d they pay you for that stellar performance yesterday anyway?”

  He didn’t answer. Sammy knew the school shows were for free. He’d get something back next week though, Fay said, something like a quarter per ticket. Big deal.

  But he’d do it for Chance.

  He looked at Sammy, then stood up and crossed his arms. “Not going,” he said.

  “If you’re not coming to England with me, then do me one more favor before I leave. Something that’s got to get done. I mean, if either of us are going to get out of the rut we’re in.”

  “What favor? Feed your cats?” he asked, smiling, trying to make light of it. Sammy lived in a two-room apartment with three cats and the occasional male live-in. She was always looking for a man with money, but those were scarce. Though lately there was some guy up north she was hanging out with.

  “You know what,” she said, looking up at him, narrowing her eyes.

  He shook his head. Though he had an idea. He didn’t want to be part of it. But she already had him tied up in her web. Knitted into her shawl. Madame DeFarge, the name came out of some French Revolution novel he’d read. Sammy was still looking at him. Hard.

  He owed her for a couple of things she had never let him forget.

  “If we’re ever going to get out of here, permanent,” she said, “if we’re ever going to get what we deserve, what I gave my youth for – ” Her voice was rising and he put a finger to his lips to quiet her. The landlord had big ears. So did old Miss Barnes in the next apartment. “What I want back is my rightful, hard-earned legacy that I’m willing to share with an ungrateful half-brother who wants his cake but wants to eat it too!” Her words ended on a shriek.

  Someone rapped on an adjoining wall – the old lady. “Cut that out!” Sammy shouted. “Then sit down, Billy dear, please,” she said softly, “and I’ll explain your role in my new show.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  New Revelations and an Old Liaison

  Monday, October 8

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give out the artist’s phone number,” the saleslady said. “It’s policy. We’re non-profit here, the Board makes the decisions.”

  “This is a matter of murder,” Fay said in her most authoritative Jane Tennyson voice, but the woman clammed up even more. She turned pigment red and wheeled about as though she’d walk through the wall of paintings.

  “They sell well, do they, these skulls?” Fay asked, glancing at the several skull paintings. She’d finally located the arts and crafts gallery Beets had stumbled into in the northern town of Fairfax and was determined to follow that lead.

  “Well now, I can’t say that they do.” The woman spoke slowly, as if the next word was eluding her – rather annoying when Fay wanted quick answers. The artist came in once a week, the woman said, and if a painting didn’t sell, she confided, “he’d switch it with another one.”

  “Another skull?” The woman shrugged.

  When Fay asked why they let him exhibit there if the paintings didn’t sell, the woman said, “Oh but he has a reputation, don’t you know. It’s only the past year he’s turned to painting skulls. Before that it was landscapes. He did the most interesting landscape of some place in England. I forget now where it was. And I, well, I bought it myself. It’s out back, waiting for a f
rame. Would you like to see it?”

  The woman took Fay into a back room filled with paintings. She pulled out a small, dark painting of an old stone ruin on a round green hillside. “Glastonbury,” the woman sang out, “that’s what it’s of. Isn’t it pretty? Makes you want to walk right into that old church.”

  “Not in a rainstorm,” Fay said. “There’s no roof.”

  “But it never rains in a painting, now, does it?” the woman said, smiling at her wit.

  Fay picked up the painting. “May I?” When the woman nodded, she examined it closely. A man was moving down from the church. Other people were all walking up to the ruin. The primary figure was a slim woman in a long blue skirt, her face caught in the pale light that shone in a diagonal from lower left to the upper right. Her blond hair was lifted by a wind that was blowing the leaves of an enormous tree to the right side of the painting. Was it a yew? Very possibly, Fay thought, remembering Glenna’s bush. Fay asked for a magnifying glass, and then held it close to the painted figure.

  The painted woman was wearing a necklace with a tiny skull, shiny as though decorated with diamonds.

  As she handed back the magnifying glass the picture tilted in her hand and she spotted a slip of paper taped to the back. SOLD, it said, to HELEN MACKEY: $650. And printed on the slip: a name and address. Harley Grimes, in Stowe. She fixed the street number in her head. “An interesting landscape,” she said, handing it back. “More than just landscape really. I do like to see people in landscapes – it adds a new dimension.”

  The woman hauled out a dozen more landscapes with figures in them. A flush was creeping up her neck, as though she thought she’d make a sale. Fay pretended to be interested in a watercolor of two women bathing in a mountain stream. Here was a different style, different artist, in truth, more Fay’s style, but in this instance, not what she was looking for. “I’ll be back,” she said, “but right now I have to run to an appointment.”