by Blair Howard
“Well damn me,” I growled. “Fly off the handle, you say? Well, if that don’t beat all. I can explain it all right. Some son of a bitch is fu—is screwing with us, and when I find out who I’ll bust his nuts for him, and his teeth along with ‘em.”
“Harry! You said there must be a speaker, that someone is turning the music on and off. If that’s the case, how come you never hear it? How come only I do?”
Well damn. You got me there. “There has to be a logical explanation. Art. Give me your key to this room. I want it locked up until morning. Then I’m going to go through it. I’ll turn every speck of dust upside down. I want that speaker.”
Strong looked at us, first Amanda, then me, then Amanda again. Then he sighed and shook his head.
“I don’t think you’ll find anything, but if we can find an answer….” He put the small pistol in the pocket of his robe, took out a bunch of keys, removed one from the ring, and handed it to me.
“No, Art. Not we. Me. I’m going to do this alone. Well, with Amanda.”
Strong shook his head. He was obviously very upset. “Okay. Do what you have to. I’m going to bed. I have a busy day tomorrow.”
We went back to bed too, but neither of us so much as closed our eyes. I spent the rest of the night watching the space under the door, waiting for the light to come on again. It didn’t.
Chapter 12
Neither one of us slept much the rest of that night. I was up by six, and Amanda right after—too early to go down to breakfast and too chilly to go outside, so I relit the fire and we sat together in front of it.
“Harry….”
I had my eyes closed, half dozing. “Hm?”
“What’s happening to us? What is it with the sitting room? I know how you feel, but do you think… no, of course you don’t, but what could have happened to her, to Elizabeth? You said you’d help me figure it out.”
I did. I said that, but how the hell am I…. I opened my eyes and looked at her. Again I was struck by how beautiful she was. I nodded.
“Okay, so let’s look at it logically.” Logically? How the hell…? “Let’s make some notes, okay?”
She nodded and picked up her iPad, meeting my eyes again when she was ready.
“Okay, here we go. If I were investigating this case today, the first thing I’d want to know would be who, what, when, where, why, and how. The eternal questions. I’d also look for motive, opportunity, and means. We already have the who, the victim, if that’s what she was—Elizabeth, right?”
She nodded. I looked over her shoulder and grinned. She had one word on the screen: Elizabeth.
“And if she was indeed a victim,” I continued, “we need to know who the suspects are. We only have one: Jonathan Miles.”
She typed the name into the iPad.
“So next we need to know the what,” I said. “What happened to her? Did she run away? Did she commit suicide? Was she murdered?”
More typing.
“If she ran away, we can forget it, because we’ll never know why, who with, or to where. But if she didn’t run away—and for the purpose of this exercise we’ll assume she didn’t—the next question is if she committed suicide. The answer to that has to be no, because if she did, there would have been a record of it. Even if she tossed herself off the cliffs they would have found her body, either on the rocks right below here, or washed up on the shore.”
“How do you know that?” Amanda asked.
“Well, I… I don’t, not for sure. But we do know that his second wife threw herself off the cliffs. Georgina, right? And we know that her body was found. Most bodies do get washed up somewhere: the tides, currents, winds, and so forth. I’ll call the local coastguard office later. They’ll know how the tides around this section of the coast work. For now, though, I’m pretty certain that the body would have come ashore somewhere. So we can rule out suicide, okay?”
She nodded, and typed, “not suicide.”
“Now,” I said. “That leaves us with our third option: was she murdered? The answer: we don’t know, and probably never will. There’s just no way to know, thus we cannot determine the who, where, why or how, and that applies both to the cause of death and the disposal of the body. Oh we can guess who. If she was murdered, it was probably Jonathan Miles, but as to the rest, it can’t be done, Amanda.”
“But say it was him,” she said, “that he did kill her. What do you think he’d do with her body?”
“I just told you we can’t answer that. There are dozens of ways to dispose of a body, especially out here in the wilds of Northern Maine. He could have buried her somewhere; he could have dismembered her and fed her to the pigs, if they kept pigs; hell, he could have burned her. We’ll never know. Look, the chances are she met a really nice guy, ran away with him, had six kids, and lived happily ever after.”
“No. I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he murdered her, and I think the answer is in that sitting room.”
I sighed, shook my head, looked at my watch. It was after seven. Time for breakfast.
-----
To say that the atmosphere at breakfast was strained would be… well, I’m sure you get the idea. Strong was barely speaking to either of us, and Amanda was insisting that I apologize to him. Me? I wasn’t giving an inch, and she was angry with me for being stubborn. But someone was screwing with us and, as far as I could figure it, that someone had to be either Art Strong or his wife, Mary, or, perish the thought, old Perkins.
“So,” I said. “Are you talking to me or not?”
“Not!”
She had that look on her face. You know the one. They all do it when they’re mad at you.
I couldn’t help it; I laughed at her, and that only made things worse. Even so, she was as lovely as ever: she was wearing a soft jade sundress that matched her eyes. The woman would look great dressed in a garbage bag.
“You can be such an ass sometimes, Harry Starke. You were a pig to him last night.”
“Maybe I was, but maybe I had a good reason; maybe, just maybe, I was testing him, trying to gauge his reactions.” I hadn’t been, but what the hell. “I have to admit, though, I don’t think he was lying. But, Amanda… I can’t do it. I can’t accept this ‘ghosts’ thing. I can’t go there.”
I looked at her, shook my head. Her face softened. She reached across the table and took my hand.
“I know,” she whispered. “I understand.” For a moment, I felt a whole lot better. But it was only for a moment, because in the next breath she said, quietly, “But I’m sorry, Harry—I do. I also believe in the hereafter. I believe in God, and I believe in Jesus, and so I have to believe in… well, spirits. Look. What if she’s a lost soul looking for release?” I opened my mouth to speak. “No no no, wait.” She squeezed my hand. “Listen to me. I mean it. Suppose she was murdered, by him,” she said, and glanced up at the portrait of Jonathan Miles. “In this house. Maybe she is here, trying to reach out to us, the only way she can.”
I slowly shook my head.
“Harry, I know what you’re thinking, but I want you to listen to something.” She reached for her clutch, rummaged around inside, and took out a small jewelry box, the sort they give you when you buy a ring. Speaking of rings….
But when she opened the box it was the ornate gold watch she took out, the one that had once belonged to Elizabeth Miles.
“Listen.” She opened the case, pressed a small button on the side of the frame… and I have to tell you, my hair stood on end. The watch began to play a tune, soft, tinkling, like a music box. The tune? You guessed it: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Wow. That’s a game changer.
I stared at her. She was smiling. “Now do you believe?”
“Not only no, but hell no. It’s a coincidence, is all.”
“Is it, Harry? Is it?”
“When did you…?”
“First hear the tune? This morning. When you were in the shower. I was playing with it. I just pressed the button
and that’s what happened. Weird, huh? I’m telling you. It’s her. She’s crying out for help. My grandmother knew it, and so do I.”
“How about this,” I said. “I told Strong last night—well, this morning—that I was going to search the room. I want to do that, and I also want to take a look at the rooms on either side. Are you up for it?”
“Of course, but I could use some more coffee first. You?”
I nodded thoughtfully. I don’t mind telling you, the watch—the tune—had had an impact on me, but I wasn’t about to let her know it.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s no sign of Strong. He’s probably avoiding us. Well, not me, you. I’ll go get it for us.” She got up from the table and went over to the sideboard, beneath the painting of Jonathan Miles, and poured two cups.
We drank them in silence. Strong didn’t make another appearance, so we left, and as we exited the room Amanda took a last backward glance at her great-great-grandfather.
-----
I unlocked the door to the sitting room and pushed it open. For several moments I stood on the threshold, Amanda at my left shoulder, and looked around. It was something I’d learned to do back in the day when I was a rookie cop. You know what they say about first impressions: you only get one chance at them. I took in every inch of that damned room. The only thing out of place was the piano stool, which was as we’d left it in the wee hours. It was set back a little from the keyboard, as if someone had just risen from it.
After several minutes, I shook my head and turned to look down at Amanda. She was wearing flat shoes, which I hated.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well what?”
“You see anything? Anything out of place? Do you have any thoughts?”
“Oh, I have thoughts, but you won’t like them. I’ll keep them to myself.”
I nodded. “Then let’s take a look.”
We stepped into the room. “Harry, we’ve done this before and didn’t find anything. What makes you think we will now?”
“Because there has to be something here, Amanda. We have to try. Speakers, right? There has to be at least one. I wasn’t looking for them last time—damn, I wish I had a CSI team here.”
There were of course no speakers, or anything else. I know Amanda was relieved, but she didn’t say so. Okay, so I’ll admit it: I was baffled, but I wasn’t ready to give up.
“Let’s go take a look at the adjoining rooms,” I said.
“Okay.” She sounded a little exasperated, but I couldn’t say I blamed her.
We not only searched the rooms on either side, we searched, though somewhat cursorily, the rest of the rooms on the entire top floor, all seven of them, and found… what? You got it. Not a goddamn thing.
We returned to the sitting room and I flung myself down in one of the easy chairs in front of the fireplace; Amanda seated herself, with a little more decorum, in the other. For several minutes she allowed me to sit there, hunched up, elbows on the arms of the chair, fingers intertwined, biting my knuckles. Oh I was pissed. Nah, I wasn’t. What I was was frustrated, unlike I’d ever been before. I was a highly trained detective, for Christ’s sake. I had a Masters in forensic psychology! I believed only in hard facts, physical evidence. Everything about the situation screamed for me to say to hell with it and get out of there. But that wasn’t me either. I don’t give up, not ever, and I wasn’t about to make this a first. So we sat there, me staring up at the long-dead woman who had somehow become my nemesis, Amanda staring at me, waiting.
“Are you going to open up your mind, if only a little?” she asked.
I turned and looked her, my knuckles still at my lips, and shrugged.
“I’ll take that as yes.”
I shrugged again, then turned back to the painting. There was definitely something to it, something I just wasn’t getting.
“Why would she have her portrait painted in that fashion?” I asked, more of myself than Amanda, more of the painting than myself.
“It’s how they did things back then,” Amanda said. “I think it’s very attractive. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I said, thoughtfully, staring up at Elizabeth. “Beautiful…. No, not beautiful—you’re beautiful. She was pretty. She does look a little like you, though. No. What I meant was, why would she have her portrait painted like that? It’s not natural, not something most folks would think to do: the table, the box, the watch. I wonder if it means anything.”
“Harry!” She almost shouted it. “You’ve got it. She’s trying to tell us something. Think about it. The box and the watch have both been passed down from her to me. It has to be more than just a coincidence that she’s showing them to us in the painting…. That’s it, Harry,” she cried, “She’s showing them to us!” Oh she was excited, and I had to admit, it was tough to discount what she saying.
“Come on, Harry. This is what you live for. Think, man, think!” I couldn’t help it. She was so funny, I started laugh.
“What is it?”
“You, you silly goose.” I almost choked, I was laughing so hard. And then she was laughing too, and from there it deteriorated. It became one of those silly moments you can never account for. Maybe it was the stress. Maybe it was relief. Whatever. She jumped out of her seat and onto my lap. She landed so hard the chair almost went over backward.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Tell me, damn it,” she was almost strangling me. “You know, don’t you? You know.”
“Know what?” I said, pushing her away, trying to get my breath.
“You know what the painting means. I know you do.”
“Well, I have an idea….”
“I knew it.” She pounded my chest with her fist. “Out with it, you ass.”
“Let me see the watch.”
She jumped up to grab her clutch, extracted the little box, opened it, and handed the watch to me.
First thing I did was turn it over. There were two fingernail slots at the edge of the frame. They were to be used to open the back and front of the case, I supposed. I did just that; I opened both. It was a truly ornate piece. Highly engraved, inside and out, looping swirls cut into the metal. At the front the case, when closed, protected the crystal; at the back it covered a second crystal that provided a view of works, which were, even as I looked, ticking away with perfect precision. Even the insides of the two covers were engraved, a mass of intricate swirls, works of art: someone with a great deal of skill had spent many hours creating such a beautiful piece. I snapped the covers shut and handed it back to her.
“Okay?” she asked. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s a watch. A very nice, and probably very expensive watch, but a watch.”
“It has to be more than that. Why is she showing it to us if it isn’t?”
“Maybe she was just checking the time,” I said.
“Bull. How many paintings have you seen where the subject is checking the damn time? None, I bet.”
“True enough,” I said, getting to my feet. “Speaking of the time—” I checked my own watch—“it’s almost one o’clock, and I’m getting hungry. Let’s go see if we can persuade Art to make lunch for us. Then, my girl,” I said, sweeping her into my arms. “I think we need to go screw our brains out. I think it could clear our heads.”
“I have a better idea,” she laughed. “Let’s forget about lunch and just go do the brain thing.”
And we did.
Chapter 13
It was after three o’clock when we finally made it outside and up to the cliff tops. It was another beautiful day, in more ways than one. I was slowly coming to terms with the idea that Amanda and I were getting married. Nothing yet had been said about setting a date, and I… well, it wasn’t something I was ready to push, and Amanda seemed to be of a similar mind. Maybe she was preoccupied with her newly acquired fortune, haunted house and all.
Yes, I’m being facetious.
She was however in high spirits and a curiously playful mood
that afternoon.
We walked hand-in-hand along the cliff tops like a couple of sixteen-year-old kids—my old man would not have believed it of me; hell, I didn’t believe it myself. The truth was, though, I was happier that day than I could ever remember. Amanda’s happy-go-lucky frame of mind was infectious, and it wasn’t just then; she always seemed to be that way. She’d drop my hand and run on ahead, swinging her arms, the skirts of her dress billowing in the ocean breeze, and then she’d run back again, grab my hand, and pull me along like a half-dead donkey. It was fun to watch her cavorting along the narrow path but, as they say, such moments never last, and this one was no different.
Finally, she ran out of steam and sat down on the edge of a vertical drop of at least a hundred feet, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them: beautiful. I took out my iPhone—no good up here if I wanted to make a call, but it was fine for taking photos—and snapped several dozen of her. Used to the camera as she was, she played along, posing, pouting, tossing her head. She’d never been lovelier.
“Selfies,” she said, holding out her arms for me. “We need selfies.” So we did that too. And then we just sat there, looking out over the ocean, listening to the sea birds call, enjoying the light breeze.
“Harry,” she said thoughtfully, after a few moments of silence, “do you think we’ll be able to figure it out?”
“You mean what happened to Elizabeth?”
“Uh-huh.”
I really didn’t want to spoil her mood, but there was no way I could be anything but honest with her, not now. “Nope,” I said. “I don’t think so. I will say this, though. I can’t tell you why, but I don’t think she ran off. Although, we don’t know anything about Jonathan, do we? He looks like a piece of work, a real son of a bitch, at least in that portrait. I wonder if there are any more pictures of him anywhere.”
“But you won’t give up, will you.”
I shook my head. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow will bring us something new.”
“Thank you.” She snuggled up close to me, slipped both of her arms through one of mine, and pulled me in tight.