by Ella Barrick
I found myself speeding up as I neared the stairs; I was jogging by the time I reached them and started down. I took them two at a time, holding on to the banister, eager to reach the foyer, the front door, and freedom.
That might be why I didn’t notice the woman just to the left of the bottom stair, holding a fireplace poker in a stance that would have done Mark McGwire proud, looking like she planned to slam me over the fence, until I practically bumped into her.
Chapter 7
I let out a stifled scream.
The woman took two steps back and raised the poker higher. “You stay here while I call the police,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice that belied her looks. She was short, plump, and eighty years old if she was a day. Thinning white hair crinkled around her seamed face, and a pair of modern, red-framed bifocals perched on her Roman nose.
“I don’t think so.”
I sprinted toward the front door but didn’t get two steps before the poker cracked against my ankle. She hadn’t been able to put much force into the blow, but it stung like the dickens and made me stumble. I righted myself and had a hand on the door handle when a wheezing sound made me turn. The old woman had sunk onto the lowermost stair and had one hand pressed to her chest as she drew labored breaths.
Oh, damn. I hovered on the threshold, pulled in two directions. On the one hand, my Beetle, escape, and freedom beckoned me. On the other, if the old woman was having a heart attack or a stroke, I couldn’t leave her to die. I could call 911 once I was on the road, my practical side said. She could be dead by then, my more compassionate side pointed out. Aaagh. I took one step onto the veranda, then turned back with a muffled curse and ran to the woman.
Her eyes widened as I approached, but I knelt beside her and said, “I’ll call for an ambulance.” I fumbled for my cell phone.
The woman, a line of pale blue ringing her lips, said, “Pills. Purse. Kitchen.” Her voice got weaker with every word.
I raced to the kitchen and saw a purse that hadn’t been there earlier sitting in the middle of the granite-topped island. It was about the size of a book, with a rigid bottom so it sat upright, dual handles curving upward. Snapping it open, I dug through it, locating the pill bottle without trouble, since the purse held only a thin wallet, keys, a glasses case, and a tin of breath mints. I dashed back to the woman, unscrewing the bottle as I went and tipping some pills into my hand.
Giving me a grateful look, she plucked a tablet from my palm and tucked it under her tongue, closing her eyes.
“Should I call nine-one-one?”
A slight head shake answered me. I hovered near her, shifting from foot to foot, my fingers bouncing on the phone’s keys, until the blue tinge disappeared and her breathing came more easily. “I’m so sorry I scared you,” I said.
“You’re a peculiar kind of thief,” she said, eyes snapping open, voice more robust.
“I’m not a thief!”
The old woman peered over the tops of her glasses. “Of course you’re a thief. You broke into this house.”
“As far as that goes,” I said, rearing back, “you broke in, too.”
“I did not.” She glared at me. “I live here.”
“Do not. Corinne Blakely lived here, and she died.” We eyed each other with mutual suspicion.
“I worked for her for nigh on fifty years. Half a century.” Sorrow weighted her words.
“You must be Mrs. Laughlin!”
“How did you know that? We haven’t met, have we?” She scanned my face in the way people do when they’re afraid they ought to recognize you but can’t quite dredge up a name. An extra anxiety wrinkled her brow: the anxiety of an aging woman afraid she was losing it.
“No. I was here earlier today with Maurice Goldberg and he mentioned you.”
Mrs. Laughlin relaxed a tad and let me help her to her feet. “Maurice is a good man. He was good for Corinne, the only one of her husbands she shouldn’t have divorced.”
“Did you know them all?”
“All except the first one. He passed before I came here to work.”
“You came from England?” The faintest trace of an accent had been nagging at me, but now I placed it.
“Canterbury.”
“I go to Blackpool every year. I love England.”
She allowed herself a tiny smile. “You must be a ballroom dancer.”
I offered her my hand. “Stacy Graysin. Maurice teaches at my studio.”
Mrs. Laughlin shook my hand, her grip firm, although her skin felt as thin as tissue paper. “I could use a cuppa. Why don’t we sit in the kitchen and you can tell me what you’re doing here, if it’s not thieving.”
I trailed her back to the kitchen, where she filled a stainless-steel teapot and put it on the range. I perched on a bar stool drawn up to a breakfast bar. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought Turner said… you didn’t work here anymore.” I opted not to say the F-word-fired.
“That twit fired me this morning,” she said with an affronted sniff. “About ten minutes after he found out dear Corinne had passed. I worked here for more than twice as long as he is old, and he turns me off with no notice.” She didn’t sound too upset. “I was going to quit; he stole that pleasure from me. I did tell him I wouldn’t work for a spoiled, cowardly adolescent like him for twice what Corinne was paying me.”
“I’ll bet he liked that.” I accepted the china cup she handed me and breathed in the fragrance of Earl Grey.
“Not by half,” she said with a reminiscent smile, seating herself beside me. “He hollered and carried on and ordered me out of the house on the spot. That’s why I came back now: I knew he’d be out, and I wanted to collect my things and a few mementos Mrs. Blakely intended me to have.” She nodded toward a couple of suitcases and boxes near a door that I guessed might lead to the housekeeper’s quarters.
“Do you have someplace to live?” I felt a tug of concern for the old woman whose knuckles were swollen with arthritis in the kitchen’s clear light.
“Bless you, I’m going back to England to live with my sister Abigail,” she said. “She’s got a snug little cottage in Cornwall and has been after me for years to retire and set up house with her. Now”-she leveled a stern look at me from pale blue eyes-“perhaps you’ll tell me what you’re doing here.”
I liked Mrs. Laughlin and couldn’t believe she’d had anything to do with Corinne Blakely’s death, so I told her about Maurice being arrested and about the manuscript Corinne was working on. “I don’t suppose you know where it is?”
She was shaking her head before I finished the question. “No. I know about the book, of course. She talked about it constantly these past few months, and used to ask me if I thought she should include this happening or that anecdote, but as far as I know, she hadn’t actually written the thing yet. She was waiting for a contract. ‘There’s no point doing it on spec, Mrs. Laughlin,’ she said to me more than once. She did have an outline, though, which she revised every day. ‘Should I put in the bit about Greta Monk?’ she’d ask, or ‘I don’t think I’ll use the story about Frederick Winston… poor old Freddy.’”
Mrs. Laughlin sipped her tea. “Sometimes I thought it would be best if she didn’t get a contract, because then she’d have to write the book, and I didn’t know what she’d focus on once it was finished. I had one of my feelings-that when she typed ‘The End’ on the last page, she’d be at her end, too. A foolish worry, as it turns out.” She stared into the amber liquid in her cup.
I tried to imagine what it must be like for her at eighty-whatever to have lost the woman I suspected was her best, if not only, friend, her employer, and her home all at once.
“You wouldn’t believe how worried some people were about what she was putting in the book,” Mrs. Laughlin went on. “My, my. I can’t tell you how many times one person or another cornered me in the kitchen if they were over for dinner, or asked me on the phone, if I answered it, exactly what she was including. I gave them all
the same answer: ‘You’ll have to ask Mrs. Blakely.’”
Interesting, I thought. If Danielle or one of my former dance partners or boyfriends told me they were writing a memoir, would I be worried? Okay, maybe a little bit. Danielle certainly knew a few things about my love life that I’d just as soon my parents never knew, and Andrew might reveal the story of how we raised the money to enter our first serious ballroom dance competition, but I couldn’t see myself taking any drastic steps to protect those secrets. Just how big did a secret need to be to inspire someone to want it kept under wraps “at all costs”? A question to ponder later.
“I can help you carry your stuff to your car,” I said, beginning to worry about Turner Blakely returning. If he wasn’t spending the night in Virginia Beach, he could come driving up anytime. Even though he was probably whooping it up with his about-to-be-married buddy, I couldn’t help worrying. A flat tire or a headache or a falling-out with a drunken friend might bring him home early.
“That’s very kind of you.”
I helped her down from the stool and hefted two boxes. She led the way through a back door to a detached four-car garage that held only an aging Volvo station wagon. I slid the boxes into the back and returned to the kitchen for the suitcases. When I’d loaded those, the cargo area of the Volvo was less than half-full. “Is that all?” I asked doubtfully, thinking it sad that the accumulation of fifty years would take up so little room.
“Other than the few things I mean to gather,” she said, walking briskly back toward the house.
I caught up with her. “I’m afraid Turner will come back.”
She made a derisive noise. “That sot? He’s been taken up for drunk driving three times already; he can’t afford to be pulled over again. No, he’ll stay over with his chum in Virginia Beach. That one’s another with more money than sense.” She stalked into the house, if a woman who bore more than a passing resemblance to Tweety Bird’s Granny could be said to stalk.
I followed her through the mansion, fascinated by the items she chose and the stories associated with each one. I carried the things she indicated. “That pillow,” she said, pointing to an ornately embroidered throw pillow on one of the couches. “I made that for Mrs. Blakely when she turned forty. What a party we had that weekend.” In the dining room she pointed at a framed photo. “That’s me and Mrs. Blakely and Fred Astaire. They were very close at one time; he said she was the best dancer he ever led onto a dance floor. Ginger Rogers supposedly took a pet when she heard that.”
I eyed the black-and-white photo as I picked it up. It was a casual snap of the three of them, taken in front of this house. Corinne Blakely was young and lovely, holding windswept blond hair back with one hand. Mrs. Laughlin was laughing up at a middle-aged Fred Astaire, who had an arm draped around her plump shoulders. “She lived a lot of ballroom dance history,” I observed.
“She is ballroom dance history,” Mrs. Laughlin said, taking the photo from me and passing a sleeved forearm over the glass. She held it as we continued through the house, acquiring a small landscape painting, an old-fashioned pincushion shaped like a strawberry, a pair of earrings-“she was wearing those the night the baron proposed”-and a competition gown of turquoise satin and chiffon, heavy with rhinestones and trimmed with feathers. I recognized it.
“She wore that when she and Donald-that’s Donald Stevenson, one of her early partners-performed on The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mrs. Laughlin said.
“I’ve seen the footage,” I said, carrying the plastic-wrapped gown high in one hand so it wouldn’t drag on the ground. “It belongs in a museum.”
Mrs. Laughlin glared at me. “She said she wanted me to have it. She and Lavinia and I worked on it together, oh, decades ago, before Lavinia had her accident and turned to designing full-time.”
“Lavinia Fremont?” She was a famous and successful competition gown designer, the same vintage as Corinne Blakely. I bought gowns from her; in fact, she was working on my and Vitaly’s costumes for the upcoming Virginia DanceSport competition.
Mrs. Laughlin nodded and headed back toward the kitchen. “They were best friends,” she said. “Mrs. Blakely was very good to Lavinia after the accident, invested in her design business.”
I vaguely remembered hearing about a tragedy or scandal involving Lavinia Fremont some decades ago, but I couldn’t summon up the details. I’d ask Maurice. “Aren’t you worried Turner will miss some of these things?”
She shook her head so her fluffy white hair danced. “A pillow? A pincushion? The boy is oblivious to anything whose value can’t be totted up by a bank.”
“The painting?” It had left a bare rectangle of lighter paint where we unhooked it from the wall. Something about the luminous colors and quiet serenity of the scene made me suspect it was valuable.
“Maybe,” she admitted with a tight smile. “But I don’t care. It’ll be on its way to Cornwall tomorrow, and I’ll be following it immediately after the funeral. He may suspect I took it, but I don’t see that he can do anything about it.”
I supposed I ought to object to aiding and abetting a thief, but I found I didn’t care. If the painting meant something to Mrs. Laughlin, I was glad she could have it. We exited through the back again and finished loading the Volvo. I told the housekeeper that I’d see her at the funeral, and watched as she backed out carefully. Then I made sure the back door was locked-I didn’t want real thieves ransacking Corinne Blakely’s house-and trotted around to the front. Clouds had drifted in, obscuring what little light the stars and new moon provided, and the wind blew in fitful gusts. I locked the front door, too, fumbling the key a bit in the dark, and was just descending the steps when headlights swept into the driveway.
Chapter 8
I froze. Turner Blakely! I was so screwed. My choices were try to brazen it out or dive into the bushes adjacent to the stoop. If I tried to run for it, he’d see me. I dived.
Stiff holly leaves pricked me and scratched my face, and crushed juniper let out a fresh piney scent. The drop was only four feet or so, and I landed on my feet but pitched forward onto my knees. Damp soil caked my hands. Concentrating on being still, I tried not to think about the spiders or other creepy crawlies that might lurk in the greenery. I couldn’t see Turner or his car from my vantage point, but I heard the motor cut off, the door slam, and footsteps. A man’s figure came into view, pausing beside my Beetle. He stopped to look into the passenger-side window, then straightened and looked around. After a moment or two, he started toward the house.
Watching him walk, I knew it wasn’t Turner. As a dancer, I’m very aware of how people move, and this man didn’t move like Turner. His stride was longer, his balance better. Besides, I noted as he mounted the stairs, this man was taller than Corinne’s grandson. Looking over his shoulder when he reached the door, he reached for the knob and jiggled it in vain. I was glad I’d locked it.
The man rattled it harder, cursed, then pulled something from his wallet and had at the door again. Lock picks, maybe? I wondered whether he was one of those opportunistic thieves who read the obituaries and burgle dead people’s homes. The skritch of his tool against the door sounded loud in the stillness. A moment later, a faint snap elicited another curse and something fell to the ground almost noiselessly. As the man bent to pick it up, a gust of wind snatched it and tossed it into the bushes, right at my feet.
Ack! I tried to shrink back without rustling the bushes. Luckily, the wind was blowing hard enough to clack the branches together, so it covered, I hoped, any sounds I made. The burglar swore loud and long this time and crossed the wide stoop with a heavy tread, coming straight toward me. There was something familiar about his voice…
I didn’t have time to figure it out as I concentrated on looking small and bent my head forward so my white face wouldn’t glimmer. I held my breath, praying the man wouldn’t want whatever he’d dropped badly enough to brave the holly to look for it. Labored breaths sounded from only a couple feet away, and the man muttered
to himself, “Shit… flashlight… no one… find it.”
When the footsteps moved away again and no beam of light shone into my face, I took that to mean he wished he’d brought a flashlight and didn’t think anyone would find whatever he’d dropped, so it wasn’t worth searching in the bushes. The tink of metal against glass moments later, followed by a shaking sound, told me he was trying to raise the window. I found myself hoping he’d get in, so I could seize the opportunity to escape.
Instead, he descended the stairs two at a time and I stopped my breaths, afraid he’d decided to search for what he’d dropped after all. The footsteps moved away, however, and soon I couldn’t hear them. Was he leaving? I listened hard. No, I didn’t hear a car start up. Glass shattered somewhere around the back of the house and I realized he’d broken a window. Now was my chance. Still on all fours, I crawled forward a couple of feet, wincing as a holly leaf scored my cheek. A second later, that pain was forgotten as something jabbed into my palm. I closed my lips over the “Ow!” and it came out as a muffled, “Urmf.”
I picked up the thin, flat item, figuring it was the tool the burglar had dropped, and slipped it into my pocket. Rising to a half crouch, I shouldered my way through the remaining shrubs, saw no one on the expanse of lawn and driveway in front of me, and broke cover, doing my best gazelle impression until I thudded against my car. Scrambling around it, I flung open the driver’s door, sat and inserted the key in one motion, threw the car into reverse because the burglar’s dark sedan had me blocked in from the front, and backed down the drive faster than I’d ever backed up in my life.