“You think Pamela and Arthur stole the artifacts from the Collecting Point?” Zapata asked.
“I certainly do. That makes much more sense than Arthur somehow stumbling over them and liberating them, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve always wondered why he didn’t turn the artifacts over to the Commission,” murmured Hilary.
Jenny sat with her hands folded in her lap; Mark, from his vantage point, could see her knuckles white with strain. But her face was very still, like a drowning victim pulled more dead than alive from deep, cold water. “He didn’t turn the artifacts over to the Commission,” she said, “because he wanted them for himself. He’d been collecting and dealing in objets d’art all his life. He valued the Regensfeld items for their workmanship and history rather than their intrinsic worth.”
“Are you sure about that?” Vasarian asked.
“No, I’m not.” A tremor moved through Jenny’s jaw, the drowning victim sensing life and pain. “I’m repeating what my mother told me two years ago on her deathbed. I know she valued the artifacts for their history and meaning. Perhaps she was projecting her sentiments onto Arthur’s more crass ones. Everyone is guilty of self-delusion from time to time.”
Amen, Mark said to himself.
Two investigators stepped into the kitchen from the front of the house.
“We’re heading back downtown,” one of them said to Zapata. “The reporters want a statement of some kind. Like the name of the victim.”
“Has the victim’s father been contacted?” she replied.
“Not our department, Rosalind.”
“Take all these people’s fingerprints before you go.”
“Okay. Present hands, everyone.”
The men moved briskly through the group. Mark was last. He ducked into the bathroom as soon as the investigator returned his hand, but the ink would simply have to wear off. He came back to find Vasarian offering his handkerchief to Hilary. When Hilary passed it on to Jenny, she scrubbed so diligently that Mark wondered if she’d have any fingerprints left.
The investigators hoisted their attaché cases and evidence bags and trudged away, their progress across the lawn punctuated by the rise and fall of shouted questions and then the sound of an engine starting and tires squealing. So Nathan didn’t even have a name any more. He was just “the victim”. Mark’s stomach gurgled with pain, rage, and bitter bile.
“Pamela was trying to justify her and Arthur’s theft of the artifacts from the Collecting Point,” said Vasarian, picking up the narrative where Jenny had left it.
“No telling what would’ve happened to the artifacts in Communist East Germany,” Hilary interceded. “If the Commission had sent them back there, even to a museum…. Well, ‘theft’ might be too strong a word for something much more ambiguous.”
Vasarian’s hands mimed a shrug. Jenny glanced in baffled gratitude at Hilary. Even if Hilary had known about his and Jenny’s—well, call it an indiscretion—Mark believed she would still have given Pamela the benefit of the doubt.
“We’re not here to debate morality.” Zapata tapped her pen on the table, gaveling her courtroom to order. Yeager looked more and more out of his depth, but he kept doggedly transcribing the interview into his notebook.
“The figure was affixed to the Cross in the inventory of 1923,” prompted Vasarian, with a nod at the crate and an inquiring look at Jenny.
“It was affixed to the Cross in 1946,” she replied. “Arthur—you’ll excuse me if I don’t call him ‘Father’, as he was never one to me—Arthur left my mother with the figure when he sent the artifacts back here to Fort Worth. Her share of the loot, you might say. Although I’d like to think it was a promise of affection, rather like a groom presenting his bride half a claddagh brooch and keeping the other half for himself.”
“You weren’t a promise?” Hilary asked, and then flushed.
“I didn’t come along for six more years. That’s a different story.”
“I’m listening,” said Zapata.
Jenny sighed. This had to be agonizing for her, thought Mark. By all accounts, the Duke of Wellington had also had a quintessential English stiff upper lip. “Arthur never married my mother. Because he was already married, to Felicia. What a scandal it would’ve been if he’d divorced her for a foreigner. What a scandal it was, in any event, when he divorced her for a local girl.”
“But you told us you didn’t know who your father was,” said Yeager.
“I didn’t know any of this was going on at the time, did I?” Jenny retorted. “My mother told me when she was dying.”
“Arthur was married to Felicia,” prodded Zapata.
“They were having problems. He was narked that she sold the property around Osborne in the late forties, whilst he was in China, I believe. He was unhappy that they had no children, although, unlike many men, he was willing to admit the problem might be his.”
Mark remembered that Napoleon had divorced Josephine because she had borne him no children, even though she had children by her first husband.
“I am the product,” Jenny continued, “of a blatant effort on my mother’s part to get herself a wedding ring.”
“That’s been known to work,” said Yeager.
Jenny’s short laugh had little humor in it. “This time it backfired. Once Arthur realized the fertility problem wasn’t his, he started looking for someone young, pliant, and socially acceptable. It took him a few years, but he found her. Or perhaps she found him.”
Mark couldn’t picture Dolores ever being pliant. And yet, as a twenty-year-old setting her cap for the local celebrity, maybe she had been. He could see why Jenny disliked the second Mrs. Coburg, although he had to admit that her blaming Dolores was a prime example of her own wishful thinking. Dolores had never known about Pamela and Jenny. Or at least, Vasarian didn’t think she did, and he had been right on the money so far.
“I never met Arthur,” Jenny said under her breath. “My mother wouldn’t let him see me, since he took no responsibility for me.”
The telephone rang, and Yeager leaped up to answer it. “Osborne. Yeager.” He listened attentively. Zapata slipped the two photographs of Pamela into plastic bags, Exhibits Y and Z. Vasarian considered the angle of his hands on the table. The block of sun subtracted itself across the floor.
“Yes, yes, I see,” said Yeager. “Yes, sir. Will do. Goodbye.” He hung up and said to Zapata, “Chief Mound. He says to go ahead and give a statement to the reporters, but to bear in mind we’re talking about Coburg property.”
“I get the message.” Zapata replied. “Dr. Galliard, there is one question that may or may not be relevant to Mr. Sikora’s death. Namely, where is the Eleanor Cross?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said. “Arthur told my mother he’d hidden it here at Osborne. That’s why I brought the Christ. That’s why I applied for this job to begin with.”
“To restore the Cross to the rest of the artifacts,” Hilary said rather than asked.
To pay your parents’ debts, Mark almost said, remembering Jenny’s words of last night. He and Hilary felt alienated from their families, but they were next-door neighbors of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson compared to Jenny. No wonder she had decided not to have children of her own.
Jenny said, “I felt that I owed it to—oh, let’s be idealistic and say justice—to put the Cross back together and return it to Regensfeld. Without demanding ransom.”
Vasarian coughed gently. Zapata’s mouth moved quickly in and out of a lopsided smile. “You haven’t found the Cross?” she asked.
“No.”
“Would you have told anyone if you’d found it?”
“No. I intended to do what had to be done and then go back home. I never had any intention of knocking on Dolores’s door and claiming an inheritance, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did you or your mother inherit anything when Arthur died?”
“My mother died first, by a month,” Jenny answered. “If he left me anything, no
one sussed me out to tell me so.”
“You weren’t working with Mr. Vasarian, Dr. Galliard?”
Both Jenny and Vasarian looked indignant. She said, “Of course not” just as he said, “Not a bit of it.”
Zapata frowned, lips tucked in, pen tapping on her notebook. Mark could almost hear the circuits humming in her mind, trying to put together a case, trying to work out a campaign. She’d told the Coburgs to wait for her at their mansion, and it was almost noon. Would it be her job to tell them who Jenny was, or could she discreetly ignore that aspect?
This wasn’t even beginning to make sense. Mark wondered if Vasarian really had been intending to blackmail Jenny, perhaps threatening to expose her to Dolores unless she turned the Cross over to him. He’d have no compunctions about asking ransom for it. And what if the word got out that Jenny had had a secret agenda in taking this job; would it damage her reputation? Mark thought not, but that could well be his own wishful thinking. His reputation was similarly at risk.
He rubbed his gray fingertips together, remembering Jenny’s lips touching them. No wonder she had been so desperately passionate last night, like an unexploded bomb. That passion couldn’t have extended to violence, he told himself, even as something slimy crawled from his stomach up his windpipe and back down.
In his mind’s eye he saw Nathan idly opening the wooden crate, then staring in appalled recognition at its contents. He saw him slipping the figure into his pocket…. Wait a minute. Why would he do that? The wooden crate sat innocuously on the counter. “Where was that crate with the figure before it was in the study?” Mark asked, his voice shattering the silence.
Everyone started. Zapata looked up and around. “Another county heard from, Mr. Owen? But that’s a good point. Dr. Galliard, I assume you weren’t keeping that crate in the study, or Mr. Sikora would’ve found it long since.”
“It was in my bedroom cupboard,” said Jenny. “I last saw it there yesterday—no, today is Saturday—I last saw it there Thursday morning. But it wasn’t in the study Thursday evening. I was there with Nathan packing some old receipts and diaries.”
“I can’t see Nathan—Mr. Sikora—searching your closet. It’s almost as if someone put it in the study, hoping it would be found….” Zapata’s voice trailed away into the realm of thought.
First Jenny glanced sharply at Vasarian. He met her eye with such a defiant expression, almost a challenge, that Mark expected him to ask her to choose her weapon. Then Jenny looked more slowly from the connecting door to the door of her bedroom, giving Mark a full, if brief, view of her face. Her expression was the same it had been when she’d told him about seeing the Victorian ghost, and about sensing a presence in the house. Did she think Osborne had poltergeists that moved objects around? Great. Mark pressed his shoulders against the wall.
“Do you know where Sikora found all the photographs he had with him that evening, including the one of your mother?” Zapata asked.
“I daresay they were the last items in the desk,” Jenny replied.
“How thoroughly have you searched the house yourself?”
“As thoroughly as I could without bashing open the wainscoting and peeling off the wallpaper. The Ripper material in the attic, some old books in the drawing room—I gave Nathan a go at whatever I found.”
“Do you think the Cross is still here?” Hilary asked. “Arthur had plenty of opportunity in the last forty years to take it someplace else.”
“What about Felicia?” queried Yeager, his blue eyes flaring with a mental light bulb. “Do you suppose she knew it was here and took it? Maybe she knew about Pamela and Jenny.”
“Could be,” Zapata told him, “but it’d be a little hard to call her as a witness.”
“That might be just the point,” said Mark. “Maybe someone silenced Felicia before she could expose the theft of the Cross.”
“Could be,” Zapata replied, rather more tartly than necessary. “But if someone had silenced Nathan for the same reason, why leave the figure in his pocket?”
“Yeah.” Mark subsided. He visualized the walls of the house shifting, expanding like balloons into the rooms to smother the inhabitants. Hilary glanced back at him. He offered her a wan smile. He suddenly remembered that Dolores hired Vasarian to look for the Cross. Did she know that it might have been under her nose all these years? But, he rationalized, if Vasarian didn’t tell her about Jenny, then he didn’t tell her about the Cross.
Zapata slapped her notebook shut and focused on Jenny. “Why didn’t you tell Dolores who you are?”
Jenny laughed a laugh so dry it almost left dust eddying in the cold air. “Would she have hired me, her husband’s by-blow? I think not.”
“Why hide the ivory figure?”
“Because it’s my own unfinished business, not Dolores’s, not Vasarian’s.” She didn’t add, “not yours”, but the words were implicit.
“Did Nathan know who you are?”
“Not unless Vasarian told him.”
The art expert shook his head, indicating an offended negative.
“Did you kill Nathan Sikora?” Zapata asked.
“Why? To conceal the figure? To conceal my birth? Would I have left the figure in his pocket and my mother’s photograph on the floor? Would Nathan wait obligingly in the parlor until I had a chance to run out and kill him? And where’s the murder weapon? If I hardly had time to kill him, I wouldn’t have had time to hide the knife so thoroughly you lot couldn’t find it.”
Zapata didn’t even begin to wither in Jenny’s dry desert blast. She glanced around at Mark, regarding him with something between calculation and annoyance. It was his fault, that her prime suspect had an alibi. And even an imaginative woman like Zapata couldn’t come up with any reason for Mark to have killed Nathan. Although, her look warned, that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to search for one.
Jenny’s lack of motive was no longer so complete, and her character wasn’t quite as good as it had been. Mark went over and over last night’s sequence of events, but still the wheels of doubt creaked slowly down ruts of memory. A sublime moment and then a nightmare he couldn’t shake—Nathan dead, Hilary hurt, images of peace and pleasure as smudged as his fingertips.
“Check the FBI murderer profiles,” Zapata told Yeager. “This killer might be the same one as in 1975, or he or she could be an imitator. I want a transcript of Arthur’s trial that year. See if you can find any records—coroner’s report, anything—on the 1912 deaths. Find me something on the Jack the Ripper murders. When were they?”
“In 1888,” said Jenny.
Yeager stared at his partner, his expression saying, Give me a break.
Zapata didn’t look at him. She pulled out the photograph of the sweater and passed it around. Mark stared at the pattern, unable to discern the variations he’d overheard Hilary pointing out.
“Nothing? Anyone have anything else to add?” No one did. Zapata tucked the sweater photograph and the two of Pamela into her notebook. She pushed her chair back from the table. “We have to be getting out to Casa Coburg. I’ll bring the ivory figure to the museum on Monday, Miss Chase. If you’d like to be there, Mr. Vasarian, fine. None of you even think of leaving town.”
“You’re not going to arrest me?” Jenny asked.
“We only arrest for probable cause, when we have enough evidence to get an indictment and then a conviction.”
Jenny’s brows quirked. “Very sporting of you.”
Yeager gathered up his notebook and stood, looking faintly worried. Who wouldn’t, having to beard the Coburgs in their den, armed with only the limp whip and broken chair of official caution? But Zapata assumed what Mark recognized as her habitual stance, head up, shoulders back, straining upward to look taller. If she wore higher heels, she would be taller but would sacrifice efficiency. She licked her lips, seeming to savor the contest to come. She probably was the type who would consider working in a hospital emergency room exciting, not stressful, and would be darned good at it. Ma
rk was surprised she didn’t conclude the interview by slashing a “Z” in the tabletop.
Zapata walked out the door with nothing more dramatic than a boldly inquisitive backward look. Yeager picked up the crate and followed. Voices rang out as they ran the gantlet of the reporters, only to be quelled by Zapata’s businesslike tones.
Vasarian went to the telephone and called himself a taxi. “Miss Chase, Dr. Galliard, Mr. Owen—until we meet again,” he said, walking away as though he were out for a stroll through Hyde Park.
“I almost have to admire the man,” Mark said. “He seems to be working both ends against the middle.”
“Letting Dolores hire him to find the Cross?” Hilary replied. “I’m not ready to trust him.” She shot Jenny a troubled glance. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s just as well all the balloons went up at once. Don’t apologize.”
There was one balloon left to pop, Mark thought. Actions speak louder than words. He’d acted last night. Now he’d have to talk. Hilary, too, was passion compressed into a bomb.
Hilary, unaware her fuse was burning, got to her feet. “Mark, my car’s parked on the street. I’ll drive you home.”
“Thanks. See you later,” he said to Jenny, in the calmest, most casual tone he could muster.
She nodded, eyes not quite focused, all passion spent.
Mark escorted Hilary out the door, and they were quickly intercepted by Preston and Leslie. “Are you all right?”
“We’ll live,” Hilary replied bravely.
God, I hope so, Mark said to himself with no bravado at all.
“I assume the police are trying to tie Nathan’s murder in with Felicia’s?” Leslie asked. “That’s standard procedure.”
“Watch out,” warned Preston. “She’s studying for the police exam—won’t even wash the breakfast dishes without lifting fingerprints off them.”
Leslie elbowed him indignantly. “Was anything stolen from the house?”
“Not that we could tell,” Mark replied.
“Do you think, then, that the murderer intended to kill Nathan?”
Garden of Thorns Page 20