Garden of Thorns

by Lillian Stewart Carl

“I’ll go out and speak to Mr. Baker and Miss Underwood now,” Yeager concluded, his inflection indicating a question. Zapata nodded, and he headed out the door.

  “Leslie?” said Kenneth. “What a little chocolate drop….” His mother shot him a squelching look. He squelched, staring down at his shiny Italian loafers. Hilary toyed with the image of Leslie practicing martial arts on Kenneth’s tongue.

  “Really, Detective Zapata,” Dolores said, “I firmly believe that all good citizens should cooperate with the police, but I don’t see why we should have to account for our movements last night.”

  “Just a formality,” stated Zapata. “Would you please take your family home with you, Mrs. Coburg, so we can come by and ask you some questions later? And you, too, Mrs. Hernandez, you may go home now.”

  Except for his quick embarrassment, Travis’s wooden expression hadn’t changed since he’d come in. Sharon seemed to be contracting to smaller than life size. Vasarian looked speculatively from face to face. Lucia turned to Hilary. “I’ll give y’all a rain check on that dinner, okay?”

  “Thank you.” Hilary wondered if she’d ever be able to eat again.

  “Good luck,” Lucia told the two detectives and left.

  Dolores said to her offspring, “I’ll have Pilar fix Eggs Benedict and espresso. Nicholas?”

  “Thank you,” said Vasarian, “but I believe I’ll stay on. Perhaps I can help the detectives identify some of those photographs. I’ll ring for a taxi.”

  Something sharp in his gaze caught Zapata’s eye. The European manners, Hilary guessed. She wonders if he’s putting her on.

  Dolores looked at Vasarian with what could’ve been called bewilderment, if she’d ever publicly admit bewilderment. “I’m sure Arthur’s family will best be able to help with the photos, Detective Zapata, if you’ll bring them with you to the house. Nicholas, I’ll tell Pilar to keep a plate warm for you.” She shot one last look at Jenny that Hilary couldn’t decode; it was almost the look of a headmistress who’d caught one of her charges misbehaving.

  Dolores swept out the door, Hilary thinking for a moment she was going to tip the waiting policeman the way she would a doorman. Sharon followed, then Travis. Kenneth lingered, also eyeing Jenny with an expression that suggested he was both amused and vaguely offended. His gaze moved to Hilary. She felt as if they were all in on some practical joke and that she was going to be its victim.

  Kenneth made an almost mocking about-face and left. Jenny sat in the attitude of Rodin’s “The Thinker”. Zapata walked toward the front of the house, Vasarian in tow, calling to one of her investigators. Odd how quiet the house was even when full of people. Hilary slipped into the bedroom.

  Mark sat on the edge of the bed, stroking Graymalkin. The cat faced away from him, pretending indifference, even as she tilted her head back and forth to make sure he scratched her ears, too.

  “How are things at home?” he asked, glancing up at Hilary and then down again.

  “It’s not home any more. I decided that much.” She sat down beside him. He inched away from her. Puzzled, she continued with a few superficial statements about her trip. Now wasn’t the time to show him her wounds. He was probably sick and tired of her wounds.

  Mark abandoned the cat and took Hilary’s hand. Instead of warming it, his fingers seemed to be drawing heat from hers. Graymalkin looked jealously back over her shoulder.

  “And your parents’ divorce?” he asked.

  “That seems to be on hold at the moment. My feelings about them are on hold, too, I think. And with Nathan being murdered, it all seems so petty.”

  “It’s not petty,” Mark told her. “Hang in there, sweetness. You can do it.”

  Do what? Hilary wanted to ask. Make peace with her family? That she could at last believe. Forgive Ben? She grimaced.

  But that wasn’t important now. Mark looked like the character from Greek mythology who walked around beneath a sword suspended from a hair. “You and Jenny found Nathan? Pretty bad, huh?”

  “Terrible.”

  “I wish I’d been here last night—that must’ve been a heck of a Scrabble game to keep you and Jenny up until 12:30. I guess Zapata asked if you heard or saw anything in the front of the house.”

  “There was a bad storm last night—wind, rain, sleet. We didn’t hear anything.” Mark released her hand and stood up so abruptly the bed heaved.

  Hilary followed. She wanted to hug him. But he was protecting his own wounds now, and she had to respect that.

  The kitchen door opened and shut. Heels tapped across the hardwood floor. Yeager’s voice said, “Miss Underwood wasn’t at the museum last night. She says we need to talk to the security chief.”

  “We need to check out Sikora’s office,” said Zapata. “I want the letter and the portfolio. We’ll need to talk to his father, too. And get me the sports and society editors at the Star-Telegram. Surely someone was taking photos of that cutting-horse contest and the charity ball, both.”

  Checking alibis, Hilary told herself. Good thing Mark and Jenny were able to give each other alibis—not that either of them would dream of harming Nathan.

  Two more sets of footsteps drummed across the kitchen floor. “Here they are, Rosalind,” said a male voice. A police investigator, Hilary supposed.

  Zapata said, “Dr. Galliard, this is the picture from your bedroom, of you as a child with your mother.”

  Mark turned toward the bedside table. Hilary saw nothing there but a lamp and a clock, but he muttered cryptically, “I saw it lying on the floor in the parlor, but I didn’t place her. What the hell?”

  “And this one,” Zapata continued, “was lying with all the others beside Sikora’s body. Mr. Vasarian recognized it earlier but didn’t want to speak in front of Mrs. Coburg.”

  Mystified, Hilary stepped forward so she could see into the kitchen. Jenny sat beside the fireplace, her face set, her eyes closed, as though willing herself back in England’s green and pleasant land. In the doorway Vasarian stood at parade rest, his hands behind his back, his lips not quite concealing a smile. Zapata was turned three-quarters away from the table, to give Hilary a clear view of the two photographs she held.

  One was in a metal frame, a little girl—Jenny, obviously—and a blond woman with disciplined hair and plucked brows. The other was a studio portrait of the same woman, the gothic arch of her eyebrows unmistakable. But in this picture she was younger, her face higher and firmer, her expression less sober. Her hair was rolled back from her face in the style of the forties and she wore a military uniform.

  “Is this your mother?” Zapata asked, turning the picture toward Jenny.

  Jenny stood up and backed against the fireplace as if preparing herself for a firing squad. “Yes.”

  Zapata read from the back of the picture. “Pamela Galliard. Munich. 1946.”

  Mark joined Hilary in the doorway. The tension radiating from his body was like an electric field, making her own nerves shiver. Okay, she thought, Arthur was studying the Regensfeld artifacts by reading Pamela Galliard’s work on the Cross. But that didn’t explain why he had a picture of her taken forty years before she started writing the book she never finished. Or why Nathan was carrying that picture when he died.

  Vasarian purred, “It’s time to stop playing games, Dr. Galliard.”

  “I’m not playing games,” retorted Jenny. “Are you?”

  Vasarian stood his ground. “I’d hoped for a private discussion, Jenny. But I’m afraid—poor Nathan—forced my hand.” He turned to Zapata, who was up on her tiptoes, lips parted impatiently. “Pamela Galliard met Arthur Coburg at the Allied Art Collecting Point in 1946. In 1952 their liaison produced a daughter.”

  Zapata spun around to Jenny. “You’re Arthur Coburg’s illegitimate daughter?”

  “Yes, I am,” Jenny replied. And to Vasarian, “Judas.”

  “Judas had his role to play,” Vasarian told her.

  Hilary’s mind tripped, fell, and smacked hard against the ground zer
o of perception. Why, she asked herself, should she have noticed the resemblance between Jenny and the portrait of Arthur in the Lloyd, the crisp dark hair and the intelligent brow, the ambitious chin and the sardonic mouth? During the reception, Jenny had shied away from Vasarian as though shaking his hand would be like touching a red-hot iron. That was before Nathan had told her Vasarian was asking about Pamela; Jenny must have suspected then what he knew. Did Nathan figure it all out last night? If he had, so what?

  Hilary glanced around at Mark. His stunned expression made his face look like that of the mouse Graymalkin had presented to Jenny last week.

  “I can see why you wanted to wait until Mrs. Coburg was gone,” Zapata said to Vasarian. “Now, what’s this about an artifact?”

  From behind his back Vasarian produced a small wooden crate about the size of a shoebox. He strolled across the room and with the bow of a duelist to his second, presented the crate to Zapata. “I took the liberty of replacing the artifact in its packing material. A jacket pocket is hardly an appropriate place for such a valuable item.”

  “Sikora’s jacket pocket,” explained the investigator. “We found the crate standing open and empty in the study.”

  Jenny’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Her teeth gleamed between her pale lips.

  Zapata opened the box, Yeager breathing over one shoulder, Hilary oozing forward to look over the other. In a polyurethane form reposed a six inch long figurine of Christ.

  The words spilled involuntarily from Hilary’s lips. “Ivory. Style of the twelfth century. English. Judging from the extended arms, the crossed feet, the sagging head, it’s the figure from a crucifix. And not just any crucifix. The Eleanor Cross.”

  “I thought as much,” Vasarian said.

  Hilary heard the screeching of tires in a traffic circle in Waltham Cross. She stepped back against the brick wall of Mark’s chest. Jenny’s expression wavered between relief and rueful amusement. Go on, she seemed to say.

  “It’s the one missing artifact from the Regensfeld collection,” Hilary finished. “Pamela was writing a book about it when she died.”

  Yeager’s mouth fell open. Zapata pursed her lips in a silent whistle and inspected the label on the box. “It’s addressed to you, Dr. Galliard. Postmarked London, United Kingdom, three weeks ago.”

  “Arthur sent himself the other artifacts from Regensfeld.” Hilary tried not to look at Jenny. She liked Jenny. She also liked honesty.

  “A convenient way of circumventing the questions of customs agents,” Vasarian added.

  Behind Hilary’s back Mark was swearing under his breath like a teakettle letting off steam. Hilary herself could think of no more words. Even articulating a simple “Why?” took more energy than she could summon.

  “All right, Dr. Galliard,” said Zapata. “It’s time to tell us about it. Mr. Vasarian, Miss Chase, if you could serve as expert witnesses, please.”

  Lifting each foot as though it were mired in asphalt, Hilary walked over to the table and collapsed into a chair.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mark drained his entire profane vocabulary and stood sputtering. He’d had so little sleep, he told himself, and his nerves had been scraped so thin, that he must be hallucinating. People changed their roles, masks fell away, the kitchen itself pulsed as gently around him as Jenny had pulsed in his arms. She hadn’t used him. She couldn’t possibly have used him. Give her a chance to explain. Eventually this would make sense. It had to.

  With a pained, apologetic look at Mark, Jenny walked across to the table and sat down. She folded her hands in her lap and fixed her eyes on the empty wine bottle by the sink, as though clinging to the one element of the last twenty-four hours that was pleasurable. A block of sun stretched from the east window behind her but left her in darkness.

  “Why didn’t you tell us who you are?” Yeager demanded. “Why didn’t you tell us you had the figurine?”

  “I didn’t know it was relevant, did I? I didn’t know poor Nathan knew anything. Now I do. And I won’t let Vasarian here blackmail me for it.”

  “Blackmail?” Vasarian murmured. “My dear woman, if I had wanted to blackmail you, I’d hardly have confided in the constabulary, would I?”

  Jenny didn’t respond. Zapata’s acerbic eye moved from Yeager to Jenny to Vasarian and back again, but she made no comment. She covered the wooden crate and set it on the counter, out of range of any random shots.

  Hilary sat gingerly on the edge of her chair, her back turned to Mark. It was poetic justice, he supposed, that it was her hand helping to pull the rug out from beneath Jenny. Not that Hilary realized the justice of it, not yet. He had to tell her before someone else did. The situation was already far enough out of his control.

  Mark backpedaled to the wall beside the bedroom door, sure that if he tried to sit at the table Zapata would order him away. The detective sat down across from Jenny—Hilary and Vasarian at her right, Yeager at her left—like a judge taking her seat on a tribunal. “I’ve read about the Regensfeld artifacts, of course, but you’d better fill me in on the details.”

  She spoke not to Vasarian but to Hilary. Hilary’s brows rose, her sense of propriety violated, but she managed to give a relatively coherent recital about the artifacts and their significance. “If the Eleanor Cross were included, the overall value of the set would be astronomical. The whole would be worth more than the sum of its parts, as Nathan said.”

  “Nathan,” repeated Zapata.

  “The seven sacraments,” Yeager said, busily writing in his notebook. “I’m a Southern Baptist boy, Miss Chase, if you’d explain….”

  “I’ll fill you in later,” Zapata told him.

  Hilary added with scholarly caution, “We’re assuming, of course, that that ivory figure is genuine. An age test would be nondestructive.”

  “The figure belongs to Regensfeld,” Zapata told her. “Mr. Vasarian, if we need to check with Germany before any tests….”

  Vasarian murmured something courteous and cooperative. Yeager pointed out, “It’s police evidence now.” Jenny eyed the wooden crate like a medieval worshipper eyeing a holy relic.

  “Now, Mr. Vasarian,” said Zapata, “please continue with your story of Pamela and Arthur and the Allied Art Collecting Point in Munich.”

  “Dolores has asked me very few questions about just how I traced the Regensfeld artifacts to Arthur,” said Vasarian. “I think she suspects that her husband’s adventures in post-War Germany were considerably edited. And his story would’ve remained edited if the Iron Curtain had not come down. I do not believe that Dolores knows about Pamela Galliard, and therefore about Jenny.”

  Jenny winced, perhaps at the prospect of claiming Ken and Sharon as relatives. There was an interesting argument in nature vs. nurture, Mark thought.

  Vasarian steepled his long, elegant hands on the table before him. “I started by tracing the last living custodian of the treasure room at the Regensfeld Kirche. I found him in a hospital ward in Leipzig, dying of tuberculosis. He told me that the artifacts—all seven of them—had been looted by one of Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering’s minions in 1943. In other words, they were not even in Regensfeld in 1946, when Arthur was supposedly rescuing them.”

  Mark watched, fascinated. Vasarian’s hands resembled those of a priest making ritual gestures.

  “So then I traced Goering’s collections. Many of the artifacts ended up at the Collecting Point—including the Van Meegeren forgery which is now hanging in the Lloyd. It’s ironic that Van Meegeren could only defend himself against charges of collaborating with the Nazis by proving that the Vermeers he had been selling were fakes he had painted himself.”

  No one so much as blinked.

  “People from many different nations worked at the Collecting Point. I interviewed as many of them as I could, asking questions in particular about Arthur Coburg. I discovered that he had had a special friend among the young ladies who catalogued the recovered artwork—an English historian named Pamela Gall
iard. They were very discreet, and only two of the people I interviewed knew for certain what their relationship was. But that was enough to set me searching for Pamela. I discovered that she died in 1988—the same year Arthur died, coincidentally. But I also discovered that whilst she had never married, she had a daughter. Half the people in the Wiltshire town where the Galliards lived recognized a photograph of Arthur and agreed that he had visited there frequently during the 1950’s.”

  “Until 1960,” said Jenny. “Always when I was away, with friends or relatives and later at school. When I said I’d never met Arthur I was telling the truth. I didn’t know he was my father until the year my parents both died.”

  Jenny had told Mark when they first met that her name was short for Guinevere, and how she wished her parents had been more imaginative. He eyed her glacial profile, gauging the depth of the ice beneath which she concealed the nature he now knew to be highly passionate. The palms of his hands were sweaty against the paint and plaster of the wall. A door slammed in the front of the house. Electronically amplified voices echoed from outside.

  “And Pamela catalogued the Regensfeld artifacts?” Zapata rearranged the two photographs on the table before her. Pamela’s even features peered into infinity, beyond any earthly summons.

  “Not according to the surviving records,” Vasarian replied. “In fact, there are no records of the artifacts ever having been in Munich at all. That, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark in the night, is what interested me. Because at least two veterans of the Collecting Point told me—independently of each other, mind you—that they had seen Pamela inspecting a Giotto ‘Last Supper’, and a carved boxwood misericord. The bracket beneath a hinged chair seat in a church choir,” he explained in response to Zapata’s and Yeager’s raised brows, “upon which the priest or other celebrant can lean during a long service. Hence the root in the Latin word for ‘mercy’.”

  “There could be more than one misericord,” said Hilary, “but I’m not so sure about the Giotto.”

  “Exactly.” Vasarian agreed. Mark decided that the man resembled Cardinal Richelieu sitting behind the throne of France, solemn and smug.