by Carrie Doyle
“I did. And I didn’t see anything that resembled a will at all. Lucy was right; it was just some notes.”
Barbie smiled and cut her sticky bun into quarters. “I knew you would say that. Of course.”
“Why of course?” asked Antonia before selecting a soft egg salad sandwich that folded completely into her mouth in one bite.
“Because why would you tell me if you found it? It would only cause complications for you, legal issues, et cetera.”
“Barbie, if I had found something, I would have told you. Trust me, I’m not out to break the law.”
Barbie laughed and shook her head with condescending disbelief. She stabbed a piece of the sticky bun with her fork. “Oh, Antonia. I know you have this whole wide-eyed, good girl from out-of-town thing going. That little, ‘Aw, shucks, who me?’ But you’re a businesswoman. You’re shrewd. Hell, you fired most of the staff that had been here for years. Why would I assume that you would be on my side?”
Antonia felt herself becoming mad, but even worse, defensive. It was not how she liked to play things.
“First of all, Barbie, in regard to the staff. Yes, there were several whom I chose not to invite back. And that was because I was not impressed with their work ethic, or frankly the condition of the inn when I purchased it. I invited many of the busboys and wait-staff to return, but as the inn was closed for six months while I refurbished it, understandably, many had to seek other employment and couldn’t wait for us to finish.
“I am not sure why you accuse me of playing some sort of ‘aw shucks’ role, because I am certainly not trying to pretend to be anything that I am not. And as for being on your side, I am not on anyone’s side. I have no vested interest in what happens to Gordon’s estate. But you, on the other hand, seem determined to benefit from his death.”
Barbie put down her fork. “I resent that. I’m not trying to benefit from Gordon’s death. But I was his common-law wife for five years. I helped him with every aspect of the inn. And for that, I deserve something!” She waved her arms up in the air. “This was my home. Without me, this place would have been a dump. I deserve something. I put up with Gordon and all of his craziness. I shouldn’t be thrown out on the street like yesterday’s trash.”
Antonia watched her as she wallowed in self-pity. Her eyes filled with tears as she looked dramatically around the room. She took deep breaths, as if she was trying to stop herself from crying. It was all very moving…and yet, Antonia felt there was something totally inauthentic about it. Especially since she knew that Barbie had been having a relationship on the side with another man.
“I’m sorry that you lost both your boyfriend and your home,” replied Antonia, trying another tack. “You are always welcome here.”
“Thank you for saying that,” said Barbie with satisfaction. She resumed ripping apart the sticky bun, balling up little pieces between her fingers and leaving shreds on the plate. “It’s all Naomi’s fault. She is evil.”
“I’m glad you brought her up,” said Antonia. “I was wondering why she said that you had murdered Gordon.”
Barbie snorted before taking a sip of her tea. More lipstick found itself onto the rim of the teacup. “She’s delusional. Quite honestly, Antonia, you know what I think?”
She leaned in conspiratorially. Antonia did as well. “What?”
“I think she killed Gordon.”
With that, Barbie raised her eyebrows and sat back in her chair with the smugness of a cat.
“Why do you think that?”
“Money.”
“Huh,” said Antonia. “I admit money is a powerful motive. But he was her brother. The inn wasn’t doing well. There’s been nothing to prove she was homicidal.”
“I found a secret account in her name. She had been stealing from the inn. Gordon was so mad he was going to tell the police!”
Before Antonia could respond Barbie continued.
“And,” said Barbie, leaning in again. “I know for a fact that Naomi has had problems with her temper. She could get just as angry and crazed as Gordon, I’m sure you saw that the other day. She once got a summons for threatening her neighbor with a baseball bat. She smashed the neighbor’s car windows while she was sitting in the car!”
“Really?” asked Antonia with surprise. Naomi was tough but she was so thin and wiry she couldn’t imagine her doing that. But you never know.
Barbie nodded. “Maybe she just snapped one day with Gordon.”
“But how did she kill him?” asked Antonia. “He died of a heart attack.”
“So they say,” said Barbie. She smoothed the tablecloth with her fingers. “If it were me, for instance, maybe I’d give him some poison somehow. Like, slip rat poison into his coffee.”
Antonia eyed her. Barbie glanced out the window, possibly daydreaming about murder.
“Don’t you think the police would have found that?”
“Remember, Naomi didn’t want the autopsy. She was the one who said no way.”
“True,” agreed Antonia. “Then why would she have even brought it up yesterday? If she had committed murder and gotten away with it clean, why would she even suggest it?”
“To deflect attention from herself.”
“Aha. But still. No one was on to her. No one had been talking about murder.”
“You see?”
“No, not really. See what?”
“It’s part of her plan,” said Barbie, raising her eyebrows. She cut into her sticky bun.
“What is the plan?”
“To trip people up. Make them think I murdered him.”
Antonia became conscious that they were talking in circles. She took the opportunity to inhale another sandwich, this time cucumber. Ah, when butter meets vegetables, it is so lovely, she thought, a marriage made in culinary heaven! She swallowed gently as if reluctant to release the sandwich from her tastebuds to her stomach.
She resumed her interrogation. “What about the bee sting?”
“What bee sting?” asked Barbie.
“I heard that some people think Gordon was stung by a bee and that’s how he died.”
Antonia slid a piece of sticky bun onto her plate. Now that she had gotten through her vegetables and protein, it was time for sweets.
“I never heard that,” said Barbie. She bent down over her plate so that Antonia couldn’t read her expression, and speared another piece of sticky bun with her fork. “Why would that matter, anyway?”
“He was allergic to bees, wasn’t he?” asked Antonia with confusion. Shouldn’t Barbie know this? “A sting could have sent him into anaphylactic shock and killed him.”
“Oh.”
Something in her tone alerted Antonia. She furrowed her brows. “You did know he was allergic to bees, didn’t you?”
Barbie shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? But you lived with him for five years.”
She waved her hands. “Gordon had a lot of ailments. A lot of allergies, too, so sure, maybe I knew. Or maybe not.”
Antonia decided to let it pass. She moved forward with another question. “Who do you think, besides Naomi, would have wanted Gordon dead?”
Barbie chortled. “The list is kind of endless.”
“Throw me some names. Anyone who pops into your head.”
“Well, Naomi.”
“We covered her.”
“And Ronald Meter. That beast.”
“Uh huh.”
“He’s really a terrible person.”
“I know you didn’t get along.”
“Oh, you don’t believe me? I could tell you stories about how bad that guy was…he robbed us blind. He set up a secret account.”
Antonia listened as Barbie delineated all of the offenses that Ronald enacted against her and Gordon, but with an air of skepticism. She didn
’t really want to waste time on Ronald Meter right now. Although she hadn’t ruled him out as a possible suspect, Antonia was aware that Barbie’s information would be biased based on personal slights. And for sure she thought that Barbie was an unreliable narrator when it came to Ronald.
When she had finished rehashing everything about Ronald—which was just as Antonia thought it would be, petty offenses along with the supposed theft of the money—Barbie paused.
“Anyone else who hated Gordon?” Antonia asked.
Barbie cocked her head to the side. “There were all sorts of former employees whom he fired…”
“Right.” Antonia thought about Hector, the gardener whose wife had been fired. She had to remember to talk to him.
“I mean, the list is long. Gordon was mad at a lot of people and they in turn hated him. Some of the vendors that he fought with probably hated his guts. The guy at the bank who managed the mortgage. Gordon screamed at him one time, made a huge scene. There was the building inspector who cited the inn for all these infractions. Gordon thought they were imaginary and the guy was just trying to get him to comp him dinners here.”
“Wow, popular guy,” said Antonia.
“He was tough. Lots of people loved him. Lots hated him. Oh, and Biddy Robertson.”
Antonia replaced her teacup on its saucer with surprise.
“Biddy Robertson?”
“Yeah, the woman who owned the inn before Gordon. He bought it in foreclosure for a really cheap price and pushed her out. She was furious, said she was literally on her way to the bank with the money when he pulled a fast one on her. She was always writing him terrible letters, badmouthing him around town. Very vindictive.”
Antonia put down her sticky bun. “Biddy Robertson died last night.”
Barbie stared into Antonia’s eyes. A small smile crept across her face. “Pity.”
Antonia waited for her to say more but she didn’t. The waitress came to ask if everything was all right and that moved the conversation to a different topic, which prevented Antonia from continuing to review Biddy’s death. She wasn’t sure she would draw more out of Barbie anyway, as Barbie’s cell phone started buzzing and then Barbie was tapping away at a response with a silly smile on her face. Shortly, Barbie begged off saying that she had to meet a friend. Antonia was pretty sure her “friend” was her boyfriend. On her way out, Barbie made one last plea for the cardboard box but Antonia resisted and she didn’t press. Perhaps she believed Antonia that nothing in it would be of help to her.
After Barbie left, Antonia sat at the table for a few more minutes to process everything. Her head was spinning and she felt as if her quest was leading her in so many different directions. Was it even worth pursuing? Maybe it all just was a coincidence. She wanted to think that, but that was the easy way to look at it. “There are no coincidences,” her mother would say.
She sat back in her chair and took one last gulp of her now lukewarm tea. She glanced over at Barbie’s plate, and noticed for the first time that after all that cutting, picking and forking, Barbie had not eaten one bite of the sticky bun. Oh well, thought Antonia. Her loss.
9
Antonia’s shoes crunched along the leafy path as she wended her way through the back yard: a wide expanse of sprawling grass enclosed by a privet hedge and a deer fence. Thickets of trees lined the back edge of the property as well as dozens of bushes that flowered various times of the year. On the right side of the lawn there was a long fenced patch of vegetable garden, which was currently dominated by cauliflower, spinach and squash. The other side held wildflowers and a large magnolia tree. The garden shed that had once been used as the tannery was backed against the most recessed part of the yard, in the shadows of some pine trees.
Antonia loved the smell of the East Coast autumn air, which was a revelation for her after all those years in California. The fresh breeze contained a combination of earth, fireplace smoke, musty leaves and pumpkins. It was hard to explain but she wished one of her vintner friends back in California could bottle it all into a cabernet that she would enjoy with a thick slice of Vermont cheddar and some soppressetta. With such a lively and happy aroma, it was strange to think that autumn is the season of death—where all of nature is falling to the ground and dying. Including Biddy Robertson.
Antonia found Hector towards the edge of the yard, planting bulbs in the bare spots between the perennials. Gardening and flowers and plants were all things that Antonia appreciated but had known very little about until recently. In California, she had lived in a town house and paid dues to have others maintain the grounds. It was a relief to have someone else trim bushes into perfect cones and meticulously color-coordinate flower boxes so that everything was as neatly manicured as Disneyland. But now that she owned an inn with a giant yard, she felt it was crucial for her to learn more. For instance, Hector had just told her that spring and summer flowers need to be planted six weeks before the ground freezes in the fall. So they had spent an afternoon flipping through a catalogue, selecting hyacinths, Dutch Master daffodils and Spanish bluebells to be planted. And now here he was, bent down, pushing them into the earth. He was so focused on his digging, that he didn’t hear Antonia approach. Although it was chilly, he had taken off his jacket and laid it on the ground next to his tools. The back of his green shirt had sweat marks, which clung to his back while the rest of his shirt rippled in the wind. He wore Carhartt pants and brown work boots, the standard gardener uniform. When Antonia called out his name he stiffened, before turning around.
“Yes, Mrs. Antonia?”
“Hi Hector, sorry to interrupt. Do you have a second?”
“Sure.”
He wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and put down his shovel. He looked up at Antonia with an earnest, eager look, and she at once dismissed the idea that he killed Gordon. This was not that type of person. If there was one thing Antonia trusted, it was her gut. This guy didn’t read killer. Now there might be some people who questioned her gut when it came to bad decisions like marrying her ex-husband. But if she were truly honest with herself, she would recall that she knew from the beginning that the darkness in Philip’s eyes was not a brooding intensity but rather a menacing rage. She was too young to distill the depth of his anger, and optimistically thought she would be able to shake any darkness out of him, like in those romantic comedies where the nice well-intentioned girl changes the badass thug into a charming suitor (see Grease). How wrong she was.
She momentarily lost her nerve. Instead of asking Hector anything about Gordon, she immediately peppered him with questions about the bulbs and what his plans were for their ailing birch tree. He then showed her a hole in the back fence where the deer had broken through, and she gave him permission to buy more wire. Deer were a huge problem in East Hampton; the town was overrun with them. Beside the fact that they ate all of her plants and flowers like candy (she was particularly bitter about the row of yews that used to line the side of the driveway that would now basically be considered a pile of firewood) deer were dangerous. They carried diseases, not just Lyme, which was particularly debilitating, but many others. And they would run out in the road at top speed at dusk and a driver could slam right into them, totaling a car. Ask most people in East Hampton what they thought about deer and you would not receive a response that was warm and fuzzy like Bambi. Deer were vermin.
After exhausting all of the deer conversation, as well as reiterating all of Hector’s plans for the grounds, Antonia had run out of dialogue. She could tell Hector was waiting to return to work, but was politely humoring her. She finally had to make a move.
“How is your wife, Hector?”
He nodded and answered in his thick Guatemalan accent. “She’s good. She has a new job, only part time, she stays home with the kids a lot.”
Antonia nodded. “That’s great. Nice people?”
Hector shrugged. “Yeah, nice.”
Antonia nodded again. “Well, so, did she like working here at the inn?”
A brief flicker of anxiety flashed across Hector’s face. “Yes, she like. But then, you know, Mr. Gordon was not so…well, it didn’t work out.”
“I heard what happened, Hector. But I also heard that your wife said it wasn’t true. What was her side of the story?”
Hector’s eyes darted around and he hesitated. Antonia could see the wheels turning in his mind. She wanted him to trust her, because she could just instinctively tell that he was an honest and decent man, the way she could tell a ripe peach from a mealy one.
“Soyla, that’s my wife, she work hard for Mr. Gordon. That’s okay. She do the sheets, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, and the living rooms. She work from seven in the morning until eight at night for three years. Then one day a guest say that she missing gold hoop earrings. She say Soyla take them. Soyla didn’t take them, I promise you, Mrs. Antonia. We are Christians, we go to church every Sunday, we no drink, no smoke, no drugs. Soyla never took the earrings. But they missing…”
“Gordon accused her of stealing them and fired her?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Were you mad?” asked Antonia.
Hector blew air out of his mouth in a deep sigh. “Yes, but I no quit because I need this job, Mrs. Antonia. It’s a good job, I work all year here, not just summer.”
“Did you ask him to hire her back?”
“I tried talk to Mr. Gordon but he no listen.”
“Did you try to talk to anyone else?”
“Well, Mr. Ronald was already fired, so it was just Barbie who help Mr. Gordon, and she no care.”
“She didn’t try to help you?”
He shook his head. “She said she would talk to him, but I don’t think so. And I didn’t want to ask her again.”
“Was Barbie nice to you?”
“She fine,” he said in a tight voice. Antonia could tell he was holding something back.