Garden of Thorns

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Go right ahead,” Zapata returned.

  Jenny went over to the cabinet, pulled out a box of cat food and a dish, and went into the bedroom. The door shut.

  “Mark Owen,” said Zapata, turning to a fresh page in her book.

  “Yes.” He wriggled uncomfortably. Here we go again, the official equivalent of drop your pants and bend over.

  “You gave your address as Moss Street. Why were you here last night?”

  Her expression was unblemished by editorial comment. Just the facts, sir. He sighed. “I’ve spent several evenings here since the dig started.”

  “Alone with Dr. Galliard?”

  “Last night was the first time we’d been alone.”

  “And you were with her in the bedroom at the time of the murder?”

  Yeager managed to turn his snicker into a cough.

  Mark would’ve expected a little more sympathy from a man. “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know the time of the murder.”

  “Mr. Sikora was last seen alive a little before nine, when he left Temple Ahavoth Shalom. The preliminary report from the medical examiner says that he’d probably been dead no longer than three hours and no less than one when you found him at twelve-thirty. Of course, it was very cold in the front part of the house. He might have died even later.”

  Mark thought of Nathan lying there, death slowly freezing his limbs. He thought of the killer standing in the upstairs hallway as he and Jenny blundered through the darkness. “How did he die?”

  “Very quickly,” Zapata said, with the first hint of emotion Mark had seen in her. “His throat was cut. From behind, maybe, but the M.E. isn’t sure yet. He might never have known what was happening. The mutilation—partial disembowelment—came afterward.”

  “Not during a struggle?”

  “No. The blood was pooled beneath his body.”

  That was little consolation. Someone had not only killed but deliberately mutilated one of the most inoffensive people Mark had ever met. Someone was not only warped, his or her logic skewed from reality, but also sickeningly malicious. And while it would be comforting to assume that that someone was in Texarkana by now, Mark wasn’t about to assume anything simply to make himself feel better.

  He tried to focus. “So Nathan was killed between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty. But he must’ve stopped off at home to change clothes before he came here—he wouldn’t go to services in a rugby shirt and running shoes.”

  “He lives—lived—with his father in Ridglea,” said Yeager, flipping pages in his notebook. “He could’ve gone by there, changed, and arrived here about nine-thirty.”

  “Only to be killed as he walked into the house?” Mark asked. “He had to have time to pick up those photos. From the study, I guess.”

  “Dr. Galliard told us he’d been collecting the papers in the study the last two nights,” Zapata said. “Mrs. Coburg gave him the go-ahead on a biography of her husband. He told Dr. Galliard she’d lined up a publisher, Excelsior Press.”

  “Hilary—my friend who works in the Lloyd…” There, he’d managed to say her name without looking like a rabbit caught in the sights of a shotgun. “…told us Wednesday about the biography, but I didn’t know the name of the publisher. Excelsior, huh? Odd—that’s a vanity press, where the author pays to have his book published instead of the other way around.”

  “Why is that odd?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought a—well, penny-wise—lady like Mrs. Coburg would do a deal like that. Surely a biography of a prominent figure like Arthur could get a good deal from a real publisher.”

  “We’ll ask her,” said Yeager and wrote in his notebook. He added, apparently reading something from Jenny’s interview, “Hilary Chase. Assistant curator under Sikora. Out of town, due to return today.”

  “She’ll probably leave Indianapolis as early as possible,” Mark told them, “but I don’t know what specific time to expect her here.”

  Yeager nodded and made another note.

  Hilary’s name evaporated into the chill air without either detective using it to beat him about the head and shoulders. Not that Mark regretted the hour with Jenny—he couldn’t possibly regret anything that sublime. What he rued was the insult it would add to Hilary’s injuries. He didn’t even want to consider what the news of Nathan’s death would do to her.

  “Did Mr. Sikora have a key to the house?” Zapata asked.

  “He must have—he got in.”

  “Then the murderer took the key away. The only ones in Sikora’s pockets were his own. His car is still in the driveway.”

  “We didn’t let him in,” Mark said. “We didn’t know he was here.”

  “Would you have heard him come in the front door?”

  “No. The wind was howling, the sleet was falling, and we wouldn’t have heard the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band come in the front door.”

  “Would you have heard him if he’d come in the kitchen door?”

  “If we were in the bedroom when Nathan arrived, he could’ve let himself in this way, and we wouldn’t have heard him.” He might have heard us, Mark added to himself. But with the windows dark, Nathan probably thought Jenny had either turned in early or left for the evening, so he went to the front…. His thought veered. “My van was in the garage with Jenny’s car. Nathan wouldn’t have known for sure that anyone was here at all.”

  “So you planned on spending the night?” asked Yeager.

  “No. It was fixing to rain and maybe sleet. I didn’t want to have to clean off my windshield when I left.”

  Zapata shot a part warning, part amused glance at her partner. He looked blandly back.

  Her eyes moved to Mark’s chest. Yesterday when he’d put on his sweatshirt inscribed, “Warning: Contents under Pressure”, he hadn’t realized how accurate a label it was. Zapata presumably decided he wasn’t going to detonate on the spot. “When did you and Dr. Galliard go into the bedroom?”

  Again Mark sighed. Relativity. “Maybe about nine-thirty. I didn’t look at the clock until after—until ten-thirty.”

  “Was Dr. Galliard out of your sight at any time between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty?”

  Mark’s jaw twinged. “No.”

  “Not even to visit the bathroom?” Again the blade of sarcasm glinted briefly beneath Zapata’s voice.

  “Oh. Yeah. She went into the bathroom about ten-thirty.”

  “For how long?”

  He’d looked at the clock and at the photograph of Jenny and her mother, and he’d thought about the weather. He’d been dozing when she’d returned to the bed, her skin cold as marble.

  Zapata’s dark eyes and Yeager’s pale ones were fixed on him from either side. Mark felt like a medieval prisoner confronted with the spiked jaws of an Iron Maiden. “I don’t know. A very short time, maybe five minutes.”

  “Which is it?” asked Yeager. “I don’t know, or five minutes?”

  “As short a time as possible,” Mark replied testily. “It was cold, and she wasn’t wearing anything.”

  “I saw a TV movie about Lizzie Borden,” Yeager mused aloud. “Said Lizzie was nude when she axed her parents. That’s why they never found any bloodstains on her clothing.”

  “They never found any bloodstains because they didn’t have modern testing methods,” Zapata told him.

  Mark scowled. “You think Jenny ran to the front of the house, killed Nathan, and ran back again? You think she set me up as an alibi? Give me a break—she wouldn’t have any more reason to kill Nathan than I would.”

  “All this is just formality,” murmured Zapata. She looked at her printout. Yeager gazed into the middle distance. Mark forced himself not to jump out of the chair and pace up and down the floor.

  The detectives had no doubt asked Jenny if she’d been with him the entire time. He and Jenny alibied each other. Unless the police thought it possible they had both killed Nathan, or that one of them was lying for some other reason, or…. Or nothing. This was absurd, a nightmare of dis
torted images and events wrenched out of order. He glanced at his watch. It was ten to nine. He would’ve testified under oath it was half past Armageddon.

  “Who besides Dr. Galliard has keys to the house?” Zapata asked.

  “Any or all of the Coburgs,” answered Mark. “The workmen, maybe. It’s an old house. There could be keys all over town.”

  “The door connecting the kitchen to the front of the house was locked the entire evening?”

  “Jenny unlocked it at 12:30, after the cat woke us up.”

  “Do you know anyone who might want to kill Mr. Sikora?”

  Jealous possessiveness was no longer considered the excuse it had once been, but it was still a motive. Mark crouched defensively—tattling was not his favorite activity—and said, “Hilary told me she’d seen Nathan and Sharon Ward kissing each other. Travis Ward has a six-inch-long clasp knife. I borrowed it for a few minutes last week. The first time I met Sharon she was wearing a pink sweater.” Now that he’d articulated the suspicion it sounded ridiculous. Travis was a lout, but…. No, Mark could see Travis killing someone before he could see Jenny doing it.

  Yeager’s sandy brows shot up his forehead. Zapata’s dark brows puckered in a frown, and she scrawled a brisk note. Neither detective seemed horrified by the thought of a Coburg or a Coburg satellite being the murderer. In fact, Yeager said with relish, “Dr. Galliard was telling us about a folder of Jack the Ripper material she found in the attic.”

  Mark explained about the manila folder contained within the shiny blue and silver portfolio, concluding, “Nathan took it away last weekend. I don’t know whether he decided on his own not to tell the Coburgs about it, or whether one of them told him to cease and desist. Hilary’s the one he talked to. You’ll have to ask her.” He rubbed his jaw. There, he’d thrown her to the wolves. Protecting her would make everything worse.

  A police officer glanced inside. “There’s a guy from the excavation out here, wants to make sure we keep the reporters from trampling the trenches.”

  “Preston Baker?” Mark called.

  “Yeah, that’s him. And there’s a woman with him, Leslie something.”

  “She’s a security guard at the Lloyd,” Mark told Zapata. “Jenny and I would appreciate it if you’d let them keep an eye on things. The last thing we need is problems with the dig.” He remembered what he’d told Preston about guillotines the first day of the dig, and smothered a groan. This was going to look great on his resume.

  Zapata said over her shoulder, “Tell them to stick around, I’d like to talk to them, too.” The officer vanished. Zapata turned back to Mark. “Do you think this murder has anything to do with Felicia Coburg’s death in 1975? Not to mention the murder-suicide in 1912.”

  Yeah, Mark thought, the house is cursed. Aloud he said, “No one knows why Felicia died or who killed her. I suppose the same person could’ve killed Nathan, but the only connection I can see is the house.”

  “Like the way cattle trucks keep turning over on the mixmaster downtown, one particular combination of speed and gravity happening again and again?” She tapped her pen against her white, even teeth. “Something in the house—although fifteen years is a long time to wait for—ah, hell. Frank, I want to see all the files on the Felicia Coburg case.”

  “That’s a long shot,” he muttered.

  “I never said it wasn’t,” she retorted with a smile that looked like the one in the limerick, not on the lady’s face but on that of the tiger.

  One of the investigators pushed through the kitchen door and started bundling the set of kitchen knives—not that any of them was likely to be the murder weapon. Edward Coburg had used a razor to kill his wife and then himself. Felicia’s assailant had utilized an edged weapon of some kind, which had never been found. Some theorists thought that Jack the Ripper, appropriately enough, had employed a long autopsy knife. Whether Travis’s clasp knife was a likely candidate this time around was up to the forensics specialists, the psychologists, and God himself.

  Mark fished in his pocket and produced his Swiss Army knife. “Here. You might as well check this one out while you’re at it. You’ll probably find British fingerprint dust still on it.”

  Yeager picked up the knife. “What do you mean?”

  Mark filled in the two detectives and the investigator on the Rudesburn case, both to insure they couldn’t accuse him of hiding anything and to set them a good example to follow.

  They wrote it all down. At last Yeager said, “They sent an entire team to handle just one case? Must be nice to have such a big payroll.”

  “Must be nice to have so few murders,” Zapata corrected and turned to Mark. “This case will be the headliner of the month, I’m sure. But it’s not the only case we have. If there’s anything else you’d like to add, anything at all that can help us….”She paused expectantly. Yeager gnawed at a fingernail. The investigator carried away the knives.

  The Rudesburn murder had been sudden and shocking. Mark felt as if he’d been expecting this one. The house had fooled him with its initial passivity. Now it had betrayed him—and with perfectly sadistic timing.

  The pain in his jaw radiated outward like the shock waves of an earthquake. His entire head throbbed and the room fuzzed out at the edges. He tried to think—the means was all too dreadfully apparent, the motive unknown, opportunity wide open. Poor Nathan, just a statistic, another job for already overworked detectives. “The longer a case goes unsolved, the better the chance it’ll never be solved. And someone gets away with Nathan’s murder like someone got away with murdering Felicia. There’s no justice, is there?”

  “We’ll do our best,” Yeager said stiffly. Zapata’s look was almost amused, as if she agreed with Mark.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Are you going to give Jenny and me lie detector tests?”

  “If we think it necessary,” said Zapata. “Don’t…”

  Her “leave town” hung in the air unsaid as the patrol officer opened the door again. “Woman named Lucia Hernandez wants to talk to you,” he said to Mark.

  “She’s the dinner date we all had tonight,” Mark explained. “Nathan was going to interview her for the biography. She used to work here; she found Felicia’s body.”

  He added to himself, Maybe Gilbert killed Nathan for his share of the food. Maybe Nathan’s rabbi killed him for planning to eat non-kosher tamales. Maybe little Colleen did him in for a science fair project. Maybe, maybe, maybe….

  Zapata’s dark eyes sparked. “Send her in.”

  Lucia was already brushing the policeman out of her way. “Ay, Mark, there you are! I heard the news on the radio and went out to tell you, and you weren’t there! I thought maybe you were the victim!”

  “It was Nathan Sikora,” Mark said.

  “Ay!” Lucia pulled out a chair and sat down. “Who did it? Why? What’s going on with this house?”

  Zapata cleared her throat. “Mrs. Hernandez, I’m Detective Rosalind Zapata, and this is Detective Sergeant Frank Yeager. May we ask you some questions?”

  “Let me tell you, this house has had something wrong with it ever since Arthur’s father killed his mother back in 1912. I know Arthur loved the place, but he hardly lived here until the sixties. That was when Dolores—you know her, all fur coat and no knickers—staged her coup.”

  Yeager started writing furiously. Zapata’s eyes glazed. The officer at the door admitted Preston. “Mark, Mrs. Coburg is here,” he said, then ducked back out.

  Speak of the devil. Mark didn’t wait for permission—he slipped away from the table and knocked on the bedroom door. “Jenny? I’m sorry, but Dolores is here.”

  The door opened immediately, as if Jenny had been listening at the keyhole. She couldn’t have been there the entire time, though—her hair was damp, and she was dressed in a clean blouse and pants. Her eyes were so bruised, her mouth so pinched, that Mark wondered if she’d been crying. He wasn’t far from tears himself. Beyond her shoulder Graymalkin was a fur stole sprawled across the
tidily made bed.

  “It’s a proper cock-up and no mistake,” Jenny said.

  Mark had always had a hard time keeping a straight face at that particular bit of British slang. Jenny’s use of it almost unnerved him. He suppressed a gurgle of hysterical laughter. “Yeah. It sure is.”

  From the table came Lucia’s musical voice. “My son came running in to say the old carriage house was on fire. It was a windy night, and we thought Osborne itself was gone. Since Dolores and the children were out of town, and Arthur was at a meeting, I let myself in with my own key to try and save some of the papers and pictures. And there in the front parlor was Felicia, lit up by the orange light of the fire, holding a rose in one hand and her intestines in the other. Madre de Dios, I’ll never forget that moment if I live to be a hundred and twenty.”

  Mark had heard that story before, but only now did he fully realize how Lucia must have felt. How she probably still felt, with Felicia’s murder not so much unavenged as unexplained. “You didn’t tell them about seeing the ghost, did you?” he asked Jenny in a low voice.

  “They doubt my morals already. I don’t want them doubting my sanity.” She shook her head. “Mark, I’ve always made it a policy not to get involved with dig personnel. Professional colleagues,” she amended quickly, as though he would object to her reminding of him of his inferior status. “I’m sorry I put you in a compromising position, with the police and with Hilary. And I know Nathan didn’t die because we had it off, but I can’t help but feel….” She turned away and made a show of smoothing the covers of the bed. Graymalkin opened a baleful eye and closed it again.

  Surely, Mark thought, the medieval concept of the evil eye was started by people who owned cats. “Just as long as you’re not sorry about everything.”

  “No, not everything.” She offered him a quick smile. He smiled back. Lucia was saying, “When Dolores came back and found out about the murder, she started spitting nails. How dare Felicia come into her house while she was gone? How could her children be safe in the house any longer?”

  Jenny strode across the floor and out the back door. Mark followed, inhaling deeply of air so crisp it tingled like club soda.