Who Killed Mona Lisa?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  The ringing of the phone on the other end was tinny and faint.

  “Hello?” The voice sounded far away, as if Sarah were underwater.

  “Sarah?”

  “Yes. Claire?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Are you still in Massachusetts? You sound so far away.” There was the familiar edge to Sarah’s voice, austerity in every syllable.

  “I know. We’ve only just got the phone lines back up and some of the connections aren’t so good.”

  “How many inches did you get up there? We got about twenty-two inches here in New York.”

  “Over thirty. Listen, Sarah—”

  “Good Lord—you were buried up there!”

  “Yes. Uh, Sarah, can I ask you a favor?”

  “Certainly. What is it?”

  “Well, there’s been a murder in South Sudbury . . .”

  There was a short pause on the other end, then a crackling sound on the line, and Claire thought for a moment she had lost Sarah. Then her voice came through, louder and stronger than before.

  “Sudbury! Good Lord, Claire; do you mean the poor girl in the inn? Is that where you are?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “It’s been in the news down here. Not a front-page story, but I read about it. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I need to ask you to do something for me.”

  “Of course—anything. Is the child with you?” Sarah always referred to Meredith as “the child.”

  “Yes, she’s fine, too. Wally’s here.”

  “Oh, thank God for that. Is he—”

  “Listen, Sarah, I hate to rush you, but there’s only one phone here, and—”

  “I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”

  “Do you still have Amelia’s books on mushrooms?”

  “Well, yes, actually. I think they’re in one of the bookshelves downstairs.”

  “Would you look up Amanita virosa for me?”

  “Yes. You’ll have to give me a few minutes to find the book. Hold on; I’ll be right back.”

  Sarah put the phone down and Claire could hear her footsteps on the creaky floorboards of her nineteenth-century town house. After a few minutes she returned.

  “I’ve got it!” she said, a little breathless, perhaps from excitement. The eagerness in her voice surprised Claire, who thought of Sarah as the epitome of restraint.

  “Here it is—Amanita virosa. The common name for it is Destroying Angel.”

  Destroying Angel. How bizarrely appropriate, Claire thought.

  “Can you read to me the symptoms of poisoning?”

  “Why? Was someone poisoned?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Claire, what’s going on up there?”

  “I’m really sorry, Sarah, but I don’t have time to explain everything right now.”

  “All right, all right.” Sarah sounded irritated. “Just a minute, I have to look in the back for the symptoms. All right, here it is: ‘Symptoms of poisoning…include dizziness, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, cramps, auditory and visual hallucinations. Kidney and/or liver dysfunction follow and can result in death.’”

  “Thanks. One more thing: does it say anything about how soon the symptoms occur?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah. “In the back here it says that symptoms can occur six to twelve hours after eating, typically ten to fourteen hours later.”

  “Wow.” Claire shivered, and thought of poor Sally, and how she had suffered, everyone all the while thinking it was a drug overdose. “Thank you so much for your help,” she said into the phone.

  “Can I do anything else?”

  “No…wait, yes. Would you call Peter Schwartz at Ardor House and tell him I’m all right and that I’ll call him as soon as I have a chance?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not at all. Claire?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful, will you?”

  “I will. Thanks again, Sarah.”

  Claire hung up the phone. Destroying Angel. She looked down the long dark corridor of the front hall and shuddered. Visual and auditory hallucinations…the thought occurred to her that a Destroying Angel would look very much like a ghostly Woman in White…and might very well prove to be even more deadly.

  Chapter 16

  “Well?” said Wally when Claire returned to the room. “Any luck?” He and Meredith were lying on the bed playing another game of Hangman. Wally was great at keeping Meredith occupied and out of trouble.

  “Amanita virosa,” Claire said softly.

  “What?” said Meredith. “What’s that?”

  “Destroying Angel.”

  “Destroying Angel,” Meredith repeated reverently. “Awesome.”

  “That’s a mushroom?” said Wally.

  Claire explained her conversations with Willard and Sarah, and described the poison’s delayed effects.

  “Well, it sounds a little farfetched to me,” Wally remarked. “But I guess it’s worth a try. I’ve never come across a case of mushroom poisoning in New York, but . . . I guess you never know. I’ll call Detective Hornblower about it and see if he wants to run another tox screen.”

  He paused and cocked his head to one side. “What made you think of mushrooms as the murder weapon?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Claire answered. “Call it a hunch, I guess. I’ll tell you something else, by the way. Some people think Henry Wilson set that fire two years ago. What do you think about that?”

  “What?” said Meredith. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Oh, I have my sources,” Claire answered, glad to have the drop on Meredith for a change.

  “What fire?” said Wally.

  “Oh, that’s right; you weren’t here when they talked about it,” Claire said. “Well, there was a terrible fire two years ago that nearly burned the place down.”

  “Really. And who thinks young Henry is behind it?”

  “Well, his mother, for one . . . and Otis Knox,” Claire answered, feeling a little smug.

  “Oh, man!” Meredith moaned. “Where was I when all this went down?”

  Claire shrugged. “Snooping around somewhere else, sleeping, whatever. But don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. I practically had to wring it out of Otis, and if anyone finds out I got it from him, he’s in big trouble.”

  She went on to tell them about the candle-lighting scene with Paula Wilson, followed as it was by her odd conversation at the bar.

  When she was finished, Wally shook his head. “This is not a happy family.”

  “And they’re unhappy in their own individual ways,” Claire agreed.

  “Oh, man!” Meredith muttered. She was evidently upset at having missed some of the “action,” as she liked to call it. Actually, Claire was planning to send her back to Connecticut, but she was not looking forward to breaking the news to her. Even with Wally and herself taking turns keeping an eye on Meredith, she was worried about the girl’s safety. After all, there was a murderer most likely close by—maybe very close by—and Meredith had a propensity to stick her nose in places where she wasn’t welcome.

  She looked at Meredith, sprawled out on the bed, her bony feet dangling over the edge of the blanket, toes twitching. Claire sighed. Tomorrow . . . tomorrow she would talk to her about returning to safe, boring Hartford.

  “I feel sorry for the kid,” Meredith said suddenly.

  “What kid?” asked Wally.

  “You know, the boy—what’s his name?”

  “Henry,” said Claire.

  “Yeah, Henry. Poor kid.” She sighed. “Living with screwed-up grown-ups is the pits, let me tell you.”

  “Yeah,” said Claire, “I know.”

  Wally left a message for Detective Hornblower at the precinct, then the three of them went downstairs for a mug of cider. The only other person in the bar was the inn historian, James Pewter.

  “Ah, just the man I wanted to see
,” Wally began in a friendly voice, but Claire knew him well enough to hear the edge behind his tone.

  Pewter looked up at them. “Oh?” he said. “What about?”

  “I understand you collect mushrooms,” Wally remarked, sitting down across from him in a chair nearer to the fire. At that moment Philippe came into the room and took his place behind the bar. Not wanting to miss the conversation, Claire sent Meredith over to get their drinks.

  “I’m an amateur mycologist, yes,” Pewter replied calmly.

  “Does anyone have access to your collection other than you?” Wally said.

  The historian looked from him to Claire and back, his handsome face showing concern. His thick eyebrows were drawn upward in an expression of bewilderment.

  “The Wilsons have a copy of the key to my house—and I have a copy of theirs. But sometimes I don’t bother to lock my door,” he added, shrugging.

  “Really?” said Wally. “You leave your house unlocked?”

  “Sometimes. This isn’t New York City, you know,” he remarked dryly.

  “Yes, I’m aware of that,” Wally answered. “Maybe if someone had told the killer that, we wouldn’t have this mess on our hands.”

  Claire looked at Pewter to see his reaction to this. It occurred to her that the testiness between the two men was only partly about the murders, and that the challenging tone they took with each other might have something to do with her. She looked at Wally; his grey eyes were calm, but narrowed in a way she recognized. There was certain stiffness to his shoulders, a tightness in his voice . . . yes, she concluded: he was jealous! She bit her lower lip to keep from smiling, out of amusement and—she had to admit it to herself—triumph. There was a certain satisfaction in seeing two handsome men square off over her. She shocked herself a little, but there was no denying the thrill: it was some ancient mechanism—the same one, perhaps, that made the two men bristle at each other. Claire suddenly had the image of two charging rhinos, and that made her want to smile even more, so she turned her head away.

  “Unfortunately, Detective, murder doesn’t confine itself to urban areas. If it did, we’d all be better off,” Pewter remarked, sitting back in his chair and crossing his legs. Had Pewter noticed her admiring his legs, she wondered, and was this a deliberately provocative gesture? Claire tried to not look at the muscles of his thighs, so thick and firm under his corduroys. Wally looked good in corduroy, too; he had a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches that made him look like the teacher he had once been.

  “Do you know that the crime rate in New York City is lower than in eighteen other major cities—among them Gary, Indiana?” Wally pointed out.

  James Pewter snorted. “Gary! It’s just a suburb of Chicago.”

  Wally chose not to reply to this observation and got straight to the point. “So you’re saying that just about anyone could have broken into your house and taken mushrooms from your collection?”

  Pewter shrugged. “Why would anybody want to do that, Detective?”

  “To kill someone, of course!” Meredith’s voice came from across the room, piercing the air. The historian looked at her and smiled. He liked Meredith, Claire thought; she also suspected he saw her as a welcome diversion from Wally’s questioning.

  “Well?” Meredith put three glasses of cider on the table and slid into the nearest chair. “Well?” she repeated. “Do you think Claire is right? Was it the mushrooms?”

  “We can’t know until we speak to the toxicologist,” Wally replied. He turned back to James Pewter. “Did you notice anything missing from your mushroom collection, anything that had been tampered with?”

  The historian shook his head. “No, not that I noticed. It wouldn’t take much, though, to do the job—to kill someone—if you used Amanita phalloides or virosa.”

  “The Destroying Angel,” Meredith whispered.

  “Oh?” Wally replied casually. “How much, do you think?”

  The historian shrugged. “Oh, a couple of grams would do it. They’re both very deadly, you know,” he added, looking Wally straight in the eye, as though he were issuing a challenge of some kind.

  “Really?” Wally replied tersely. Again Claire had a wild impulse to laugh, not because she found anything funny, but because the tension in the air was so palpable. It hung over them, heavy as the thick white blanket of snow that lay over the Massachusetts landscape.

  She looked at Meredith, who was watching the two men expectantly, as if she were at a boxing match. “Claire said the toxins in it destroy your liver and kidneys and can lead to massive organ failure,” she said, plucking the cinnamon stick from Claire’s cider and sucking on it.

  “Why do you keep samples of such a deadly mushroom?” Wally asked, fixing the historian with a steady gaze.

  But Pewter just shrugged, and ran his finger around the lip of his mug. His hands were thick and strong, Claire noticed, though not as beautiful as Wally’s. “The jar is clearly labeled ‘poison,’ Detective. I would be willing to bet you that half the household items under your kitchen sink are chemical poisons.”

  “That may be, but as you know, there are uses for those chemicals, such as cleaning. What use do you have for a deadly mushroom?”

  “I am a mycologist, Detective—an amateur, it is true, but dedicated nonetheless. In fact, there are probably only a dozen or so professional mycologists in the country.”

  “What’s a—mycologist?” Meredith asked, swinging her legs back and forth under her chair.

  “Someone who studies mushrooms,” Claire replied.

  “Cool.”

  “And I do study them,” James Pewter said, “even if I don’t make a living from it.”

  “So you keep those samples around to study them?” Wally asked, not even attempting to disguise the distrust in his voice.

  “Yes, I do. Have you ever seen a mushroom spore under a microscope, Detective? It’s a beautiful sight, really. It looks sort of like a snowflake.”

  “And no two are alike?” Meredith asked.

  “No two are alike,” Pewter replied, “just like people.”

  “Duh,” said Meredith.

  “It may interest you to know that certain toxins are being used now for medicinal purposes. For instance, curare, which is a poison that paralyzes nerves and muscles, is being injected into people’s skin for cosmetic reasons—and a form of botulism is being used to treat a rare disorder that affects the vocal cords.”

  “I see. So you keep these poisons around in order to serve science?”

  Pewter smiled. Claire couldn’t help notice how his face was even more attractive when he smiled. The right side of his mouth lifted just slightly higher than the other, and the effect was striking. She looked away, afraid Wally would somehow read her thoughts.

  “So if the jars were labeled poison, then presumably anyone could have come in, seen it, and taken some out of the jar?” Wally continued.

  Pewter took a sip of cider. “Presumably.”

  “Why do they call it Destroying Angel?” said Meredith, taking a gulp of cider. A plate of scones sat on the table in front of them, and she reached for one.

  “Well, it’s a beautiful mushroom, tall and snowy white, with a veil on the cap,” the historian replied. “I can see where they got the name.”

  “Beautiful but deadly, eh?” Meredith mumbled through a mouthful of scone, crumbs flying from her lips as she spoke.

  Pewter rose and stretched himself, displaying his long, muscular back. “Well, Detective, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do.” He emphasized the word “detective” just enough to communicate his disdain. He smiled at Claire and laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll see you later, I hope.” The gesture was deliberate, she thought—and his hand lingered for a moment longer than necessary.

  “See ya,” said Meredith.

  “So long,” he answered, and left the bar.

  Claire glanced at Wally, who was frowning, his lips tightly pursed.

  “I don’t
like him,” he muttered.

  “I do!” said Meredith. “And Claire thinks he’s cute.”

  “Meredith!” Claire said, but she felt her face burning.

  “Well, we all know how trustworthy her taste in men is,” he snapped.

  Even Meredith gasped at this remark. It was so uncalled for, and so hurtful, that it stunned all three of them for a moment.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” Wally said before Claire could catch her breath and reply. “That was a horrible thing to say.”

  Claire just looked at him; she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Man,” Meredith muttered, “are you in the doghouse!”

  “I’m sorry, really,” Wally repeated. “I don’t know what came over me. I just—I just don’t know how you could . . . well, I’ve never understood why—”

  “Why I fell for Robert?” Claire said frostily. She could feel the icy chill in her voice, feel it spread all the way down to her heart. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right; maybe my taste in men isn’t so good.” She put her mug down and stood up. “Excuse me; I’ve got some work to do.”

  “Oh, come on, Claire,” Wally protested, but she left the room without looking back.

  She could hear Meredith’s voice as she closed the door behind her.

  “Oh, man, are you in trouble!”

  Claire was hurt and angry, but most of all she was confused. What Wally didn’t know was that his words echoed a question she had asked herself, one she had wrestled with ever since Robert tried to kill her: What if Wally was right? What if she couldn’t trust her feelings? If she could fall for a killer, then maybe—just maybe—she could be fooled again.

  She went upstairs to the little sitting room at the top of the stairs, with its eighteenth-century reproductions. She sat down in one of the straight-backed chairs and looked out the window. It was a clear night, and the moon hung high in the sky, hard and round and unreachable, a shiny yellow eye looking down impassively at the earth, bright and cold, removed from the struggles of humanity.