by Mary Daheim
“Bill doesn’t dote on yours,” Judith said accusingly.
“Yes, he does,” Renie replied. “Bill’s not mechanical, but Cammy—and all the cars we’ve ever owned—must be spotless, inside and out. They get more checkups than I do. Come on, coz, it’s another guy thing.”
“I suppose,” Judith muttered. “But Joe’s taking the day off. Wouldn’t you think he’d be committed to the murder investigation?”
“It’s a holiday weekend,” Renie said. “Isn’t he semi-retired? Cut him some slack.”
“All I could see were his feet,” Judith said. “If he hadn’t grumped at me, it could have been Cecil the mailman under there.”
“So what?” Renie remained unmoved.
“So—” Judith stopped herself. “Hey—I just had a brainstorm. What if Aimee Carrabas isn’t Aimee Carrabas?”
“What?” At last, Renie’s calm cracked.
“How do we know that was Aimee who was shot at the Alhambra?” Judith demanded in an excited tone.
“Because…” Now Renie paused. “You mean, her personal effects were planted?”
“That’s right,” Judith replied. “What if she’s really Anne-Marie? What if there is no other daughter of Harry’s? What if Aimee is actually some sort of nickname for Anne-Marie? Think about it. It could be a combination of the two, a nickname.”
“But the birth records show she was Aimee,” Renie pointed out.
“They might have been legally changed. Does a name like Anne-Marie resonate with exorcism talent to you?”
“Not particularly,” Renie admitted. “But I don’t hang out with a lot of exorcists. For all I know, there’s one named Jane someplace. Besides, didn’t the birth certificate state that Aimee was fifty-two years old?”
“It might be wrong,” Judith said.
“Why don’t you take the day off?” Renie said after a brief pause. “Aren’t you kind of busy with your guests?”
“Not right now,” Judith said, sounding defensive. “They’ve all gone off to football games and shopping expeditions and harbor tours and…Which reminds me, want to go with me to meet Liz Ogilvy at Toujours La Tour?”
“No. No. And no,” Renie said. “Bill and I are going door shopping. We want to replace this ugly sucker that we’ve put up with for almost thirty years. It’d be nice if the previous owner hadn’t kicked in the original. I’ll bet it was quite handsome, if flimsy. Even when they redid the kitchen, they used the cheapest stuff they could find and we’ve had to put in all new appliances over the years. By the way,” Renie added, “what is Liz Ogilvy doing at Toujours La Tour anyway? In fact, what are you doing with Liz Ogilvy?”
“Never mind,” Judith said in a huffy voice. “You won’t go, you don’t care.”
“I guess I don’t,” Renie said agreeably. “At least not now. Bill and I are off to Hank’s Lumber. See you in church.”
Still pouting a bit, Judith accomplished some light housekeeping in the next hour, made lunch, took three new reservations, and chased Sweetums around the house in an attempt to rescue a rather vast pair of underpants that the little wretch had stolen from the Wyoming woman’s room. Instinctively, cats knew who hated them most, and always set out to even the score.
At a quarter of two, Judith was almost out the back door when the phone rang.
“This is Nurse Royce,” said the intimidating voice from Norway General. “Dr. Bentley insisted I call to tell you that Dr. Ashe’s wife has had him removed from this hospital strictly against orders. He felt you and your husband should know.”
“Good grief!” Judith exclaimed. “Why did she do that?”
“I gather she wanted him flown back to San Francisco,” Nurse Royce said in an indignant tone. “She’s some kind of high-powered attorney, who was waving a bunch of legal papers around. I wasn’t here at the time. If I had been…Well, what’s done is done.”
Judith envisioned Hiroko Hasegawa pinned against a wall and looking about as flat as a pizza. “Yes, well, I hope the move doesn’t cause a setback for Dr. Ashe.”
“That’s their problem now,” Nurse Royce declared. “They were warned.”
Judith thanked Nurse Royce and hung up. At precisely two o’clock, she arrived at Toujours La Tour. Even there, election signs were stuck into the landscaping along the sidewalk on sturdy two-by-fours: “Rappaport for Port Commissioner,” “Long Duc for City Council,” “Save the Salmon,” “Stop the Violence,” and “Spare a Tree for You and Me.” Judith wondered if she could keep all the candidates and issues straight by the time she went to the polls.
There was no KINE-TV vehicle parked in the lot, so Judith assumed that Liz hadn’t shown up yet. The tour trolley was gone, no doubt off on a sightseeing run with Labor Day visitors.
The door to the building was open, but as Judith stepped inside she noticed that there were no lights on. Maybe Dennis was practicing for his Halloween spook show. Enough light came through the open entrance so that Judith could see the door to the inner offices. She turned the knob and went inside. Although the draperies had been closed and the reception area was also dark, she eventually found the light-switch. Blinking against the sudden brightness, she sat down at Nan Leech’s desk.
A half-dozen messages dated from late Friday afternoon were laid out in an orderly fashion. They were all for Jeremy Lamar, and each one was marked urgent. A Miami travel agency. Squeals on Wheels Bus Tours in Chicago. A teachers group from Denver. Another travel agency, this one with a Dallas number.
Judith smiled grimly. Apparently the discovery of two dead bodies during the Toujours La Tour visit had made the national media. The macabre was good business. She hoped that Jeremy wasn’t wishing for an encore.
A sudden noise from somewhere in the distance made Judith jump. She thought it had come from Jeremy’s inner office, but she couldn’t be sure. Sitting perfectly still, she listened to see if she could hear anything else. But only silence filled the reception area.
After fifteen minutes of reading tour brochures, studying the routes on maps spread out on the walls, and eating a half-dozen jellybeans from a candy dish on Nan’s desk, Judith went outside to see if Liz Ogilvy had arrived. Maybe she wouldn’t be driving a KINE-TV vehicle on a weekend. But there were no newcomers in the parking lot. Judith went back inside and dialed the TV station’s number.
Liz wasn’t in. In fact, the bored voice at the other end said she hadn’t been in all day. Would Judith like to leave a message?
“Yes,” Judith said in a firm voice. “I would. She was supposed to meet me at Toujours La Tour twenty minutes ago. Please get hold of her and tell her I know who killed Aimee Carrabas. If she doesn’t show in half an hour, our deal is off.”
Judith hung up. The ruse should work, though she wasn’t exactly sure how she was going to get around the big whopper she’d relayed to Liz. Judith was about to check the parking lot again when the lights went out.
“Drat!” she murmured, heading for the door with a sense of trepidation.
She’d taken only a few steps when she heard the door close.
“Who’s there?” she called, her voice wavering slightly.
There was no response. Maybe the wind had blown the door shut. But there hadn’t been any wind the past few days. Summer was waning on a humid, airless note.
Judith realized then that she had begun to perspire. Was it the heat? Or fear?
A noise, very close by, made her jump. “Who is it?” she demanded, hoping to keep the panic out of her voice.
Again, no one answered. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized that the closed drapes permitted just enough light to make out shapes in the reception area. She could see Nan’s desk, the filing cabinets—and that eerie, ghostly figure hovering near the door. She’d seen it before, on her earlier visit to Toujours la Tour. Even so, the apparition was frightening.
“Dennis?” She gulped. “Dennis?”
The figure swayed closer. Judith could see the awful mask just a few feet away.
<
br /> “This isn’t funny, Dennis,” she said, trying to sound severe. “Jeremy wouldn’t approve of you trying to scare someone.”
The filmy right sleeve of the billowing garment pointed at Judith. “You fool,” said a muffled voice from behind the mask. “You reckless, silly fool.”
“Dennis?” Judith gulped. Not Dennis. This was no joke. “Who are you?” Judith demanded, the words sounding ragged in her ears as she instinctively backed away.
It was then that she saw the gun under the folds of the ghostly fabric. It was the killer, Judith was certain of it, and she had no idea who lurked behind the mask.
I can’t die without knowing, she thought frantically.
“How did you find out?” the voice demanded.
“I…didn’t,” Judith confessed. “I don’t know anything. If you go away, I still won’t know who you are.”
The gun moved up a notch, pointing straight at Judith’s heart. “I heard you on the phone. You said you knew the killer’s identity. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I was lying,” Judith admitted, and cursed herself for telling such tales out of hand. “I do that. I lie sometimes. I…” Her voice was swallowed up as she gulped for breath.
“I don’t believe you,” the voice said. “You’re lying now, not on the phone.”
Judith was too frightened, too rattled to consider the irony, except in a hazy, disjointed way. She’d told her share of fibs and even the occasional outright lie, but now her life depended on the truth, and it wasn’t believed.
“Really,” Judith began, shaking all over. “How could I know? You’ve been so…clever.”
She heard the click of the safety being removed. The hand that held the gun was gloved and very steady. “You can’t fool me,” said the voice. “You should never have gotten involved. You went after me because I insulted your stupid bed-and-breakfast. Why couldn’t you have left it alone?”
Despite her terror, Judith was confused. Or maybe she couldn’t think straight because she was so terrified. She opened her mouth to speak just as the door flew open behind the spectral apparition.
Judith’s would-be killer started to swerve around but was impeded by the folds of heavy fabric. The figure in the doorway swung an election sign with lethal accuracy. The ghost went down in a cloud of gauzy white cloth.
“Renie!” Judith screamed. “Thank God!”
But Renie had also gone down, carried by her own momentum. The gun and the election sign both fell to the floor.
“My shoulder!” she cried, writhing in pain. “I’ve dislocated it!”
“Coz!” Judith tried to get down on her knees, but the pain was too great. “Oh, coz! I’ll call 911.”
“You do that,” Renie said between clenched teeth.
Judith hit the light switch and grabbed the phone. When she had delivered her frantic message, she turned to see Renie getting up.
“Don’t move!” Judith exclaimed. “Wait for the medics!”
But Renie was shaking her head, a sheepish grin on her face. “I saw Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon put his shoulder back in. In fact, I’ve seen it five times, it’s one of Bill’s favorites. I hurt, but it’s bearable.”
Judith regarded Renie with awe, then stared down at the unconscious figure on the floor. “Who is this?” she asked in a shaky whisper.
“Have a look,” Renie murmured, rubbing her right shoulder.
Judith leaned down just far enough to remove the mask, which covered the entire head. Renie edged closer.
The cousins stared down into the unconscious face of Nan Leech.
EIGHTEEN
“YOU HOLD THE gun,” Renie said. “I’ll get the sign.”
Judith stared at the sign’s red-on-white lettering, which read, “Stop the Violence.” She couldn’t help but grin. “Should we tie her up?” she inquired of her cousin after making sure that Nan was unconscious.
“We’ve got the gun.” Renie shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’d be afraid to use it.”
“I don’t know how, and I wouldn’t want to if I did,” Judith said. “I’d rather you used that sign again.”
“I can’t,” Renie said. “My shoulder hurts too much. We could sit on her.”
Judith nodded. “We could, except I might not be able to get up again. I don’t think she’ll be coming around for a while.”
Renie’s eyes widened. “Did I kill her?”
“No, that mask thing protected her head.” Judith suddenly stared at Renie. “How on earth did you happen to show up with that election sign?”
“Oh.” Renie’s laugh was a trifle lame. “After you and I spoke on the phone, Bill and I headed out to Hank’s Lumber. We were talking about all the improvements we’d made in our house during the last thirty years. Then I got to thinking about the renovations you’d done to start up the B&B, and I remembered Grandma and Grandpa Grover’s old wood-burning gas range, and how Grandpa almost set the house on fire one Christmas Eve because he put too much used wrapping paper in it, and Uncle Corky poured a bottle of vodka on the fire which only made it worse and—”
“Coz,” Judith broke in as Renie began to grow dreamy-eyed, “get to the point.”
“Sorry.” She glanced at the motionless form of Nan Leech. “It’s weird, isn’t it? We’ve been in this kind of situation so often that we’ve gotten callous. Or are we just numb?”
Judith considered the question. “I’m not sure. I was certainly terrified. I thought I was about to get shot.”
“But you’ve been there before, too,” Renie noted. “So have I. Has urban life hardened us this much?”
“No,” Judith said slowly. “I mean, maybe, in a way. We were raised to always find the lighter and brighter side of everything. I suppose it was because of the hard times Grandma and Grandpa had trying to support six kids on almost no money. Then the Depression and the war…All those things get passed down to shape the way we think and feel. We add our own experiences—which, let’s face it, have been a little bizarre—and here we are. Now tell me what clued you in or I’ll have to shoot you.”
“Okay, okay,” Renie said with a glance at the gun that lay next to Judith’s feet. “It was that old stove. Do you remember when the tour trolley pulled up at Hillside Manor and Nan went into her spiel? She mentioned how the house looked, with chintz and oak and all that—which, of course, she could have seen in the photos from the brochure I designed for you. But she also said something about the old-fashioned gas range. It didn’t sink into my brain at the time, and maybe you were too angry to notice. Then suddenly, this afternoon, I realized she couldn’t have known about the old stove unless she’d been inside the house before it was converted into a B&B. In fact, the original stove had been replaced forty years ago when Auntie Vance worked for that appliance company. Thus, Nan Leech, who claimed to have moved here from California twenty-odd years ago, had been in the house a half-century earlier. I realized that she could be Anne-Marie Meacham.”
Judith had grown bug-eyed. “My God,” she breathed. “Anne-Marie. Nan. Of course! How could I have been so blind?”
“Because you were so mad,” Renie declared. “All you could do was zero in on the terrible things Nan was saying about the B&B.”
Judith was shaking her head. “And it almost got me killed. Not to mention preventing me from concentrating on important clues.” She glanced again at Nan, who still wasn’t moving. “Where are the cops and the medics? What’s taking them so long?”
“I was afraid you might be in trouble so I called them before I got here.” Renie cocked an ear toward the door. “I don’t hear anything out there.”
Judith made a face. “Maybe I should call again.” She picked up the phone and punched in the emergency number. “We’ve already called for help twice,” she said in an emphatic tone. “This is a medical and a criminal situation. We have a killer pinned down and people are injured. What’s going on?”
Judith listened, clapped a hand to her head, and put the phone down. “The visit
ing football team’s marching band got loose at halftime and started a riot. All units have been summoned, since over seventy thousand people are involved, including one really screwed-up tuba player. He chased the university’s mascot all the way to the upper deck.”
Renie held her head. “Great.”
“I should call Joe,” Judith said.
“Why? He’s not a doctor. On the other hand,” Renie went on, “I could call Bill. He could counsel the nutty tuba player.”
“Joe was under the MG when I left. He’s probably still there,” Judith said, then paused. “So what do you figure? Nan killed Aimee because…?”
“They’re half-sisters, right?” Renie offered. “Jealousy, maybe?”
Nan had started to stir. Judith and Renie exchanged quick, worried glances. Renie pointed to the gun. “Hold it. Point it. Menace her.”
Gingerly, Judith picked up the weapon. “I’m ruining fingerprints. No, I’m not. She’s wearing gloves.”
“Nice ones,” Renie said, observing Nan’s outstretched hands. “From Nordquist’s, I’ll bet.”
Nan was moving slightly on the floor, and her eyelids were beginning to flicker. She groaned and tried to lift her right arm.
“Where the hell is Liz Ogilvy?” Judith said in a low voice, placing the gun beside her on the desk. “She’s missing the news story of her life.”
“Probably at the stadium,” Renie replied, “trying to avoid flying pom-poms.”
Nan made a noise that sounded like “aargh.”
Judith leaned down. “Nan, can you speak?”
“You,” Nan said, her voice thick and her eyes half-open.
“We’ve sent for help,” Judith said.
“Fool,” Nan replied, slowly twisting her neck.
“Why did you kill your sister?” Judith asked, trying to sound sympathetic. “What did she do to you?”
“Fool,” Nan repeated, and finally opened her eyes.
“You must have hated her,” Judith said. “Why?”
Struggling to sit up, Nan didn’t respond for at least a full minute. “They got rid of me,” she finally said in a groggy voice. “They sent me away.”