Murder at Teatime

by Stefanie Matteson

  “Next is the Herbarius Latinus, printed in Mainz in 1484 by Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg’s son-in-law,” he continued. “This is a very rare book. There haven’t been any copies on the market since the fifties. I’d have to say seventy thousand dollars as well.”

  “Were any of these books insured?” asked Tracey.

  “I doubt it. The cost of the premiums would have been prohibitive.”

  Tracey nodded and made another notation in his notebook.

  “Der Gart der Gesundheit,” continued Felix. Turning to Charlotte, he said: “This is the book we were talking about the other day. The first book printed in any language other than Latin. Very rare and very valuable. A minimum of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

  He really did have a prodigious memory for books, thought Charlotte as he again tilted his head toward the ceiling.

  “Next: Hortas Sanitatis, printed in Mainz in 1491,” he went on, spelling the title for Tracey. “Not as beautiful as Der Gart, but unusual because of the large number of illustrations—more than one thousand. I’d have to say eighty thousand dollars.”

  He paused to allow Tracey time to catch up.

  “The last book, Gerard’s Herbal, isn’t an incunabulum—it was printed in 1597,” Felix continued. “But it was the first great herbal printed in the English language.”

  “What’s an incunabulum?” asked Tracey.

  Charlotte explained, amusing Felix and Daria with her newfound expertise.

  “That’s Gerard,” continued Felix, nodding at the portrait that had concealed the vault. “He was a friend of Drake and Raleigh. They brought him plant specimens from the New World, including the potato. That’s a potato plant he’s holding in his hand—he was the first to describe it.”

  “How much is Gerard’s Herbal worth?” asked Tracey.

  “Six thousand or so, ordinarily. But Franklin’s copy was what we call an association copy, which means that it came from the library of a distinguished owner. In this case the owner was the herbalist John Parkinson, who published his own herbal in 1640. That’s Parkinson there,” he said, nodding at a portrait of a man wearing an Elizabethan skullcap and holding a flower. “Franklin’s copy was annotated with Parkinson’s notes, which makes it valuable indeed. Say, ten times it’s usual value, or sixty thousand dollars.”

  Tracey added up the figures in his notebook. “According to my calculations, the books are worth about four hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That sounds about right,” replied Felix.

  Charlotte was astounded at the total. “Then this must be one of the largest book thefts in history,” she said.

  “Certainly among the top ten,” replied Felix matter-of-factly. “Now,” he continued, turning to Daria, “the authorities will require detailed descriptions of the missing books to help potential buyers identify the stolen material. Will you be able to see to that, Miss Henderson?”

  “I think so,” she replied.

  “Gut. Title, author, date, publisher, number of pages, condition, binding description, illustrations, and so on.”

  Daria nodded. “I’ll look through the files,” she said. “I’m sure I can find that information somewhere.”

  Charlotte glanced over at the bank of half a dozen filing cabinets in the corner, each of them heaped with stacks of papers, and concluded it wouldn’t be an easy job. Apparently Thornhill’s acquisitive streak extended to papers as well as to books: it looked as if he never threw anything out.

  “They will also want copies of any documents pertaining to the books,” Felix continued. “Bills of sale, binder’s reports—that sort of thing.”

  Daria nodded.

  “I think that’s all we can do for the time being,” Felix said. He turned to Tracey. “I turn the case over to you, my good sir.”

  Tracey put his notebook away. Then he rose and crossed the room to shake Felix’s hand. “I’m much obliged for your help, Mr. Mayer.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “What we have then,” said Charlotte as she also rose to leave, “is a situation in which the books could have been stolen at any time over the past couple of weeks by anyone, from a professional thief to a bibliomaniac to a casual visitor to someone with a grudge against Thornhill.”

  “Ja, this is true, my dear Miss Graham,” said Felix. “Book thieves cannot be narrowed down to a specific type. They come in all forms—male and female, young and old, rich and poor.”

  Charlotte and Tracey thanked Felix and Daria for their help, and headed back to the Saunders’.

  Turning onto the Gilley Road a few minutes later, they ran into Wes Gilley, who was coming from the opposite direction. He was driving a battered old pickup filled with new lobster traps.

  “Fine day for the race,” he said as he pulled up alongside them. Leaning out the window, he spit a brown stream of tobacco juice over the side.

  “What race is that, Wes?” asked Tracey. He looked perplexed, as if there was a race in town he should know about but didn’t.

  “The human race,” replied Wes. He smiled broadly at his joke, revealing handsome teeth that were stained brown from chewing tobacco.

  “Couldn’t argue with you there,” said Tracey, grinning.

  Seeing Wes at close range, Charlotte was struck by the fact that he was a good-looking man, if you could get beyond his red-ringed eyes, three days’ growth of beard, and the wad of chewing tobacco that bulged beneath his lower lip. The broad, unlined face under his navy watch cap was tanned to a deep bronze by the wind and sun, and his large eyes were a pale, delicate shade of blue, as if they’d been bleached by ocean salt and foam.

  “They crawling good?” asked Tracey, inquiring about the catch.

  Wes uttered an emphatic growl that sounded something like “daow,” and which, Charlotte presumed, answered the question in the negative.

  “Got six hundred jeezly traps out,” he said disgustedly. “First time in my life I’ve had that many out. And I still ain’t haulin’ much.”

  “Ayuh,” nodded Tracey sympathetically. “And when everybody’s got so many traps out, you can’t really put them where you want to.”

  “Jeezum, ain’t it the truth,” said Wes. “Alls you can do is put ’em where somebody else ain’t and hope your guess is better than theirs.” He spat another stream of tobacco juice over the side. “Ayuh,” he continued, staring pensively out over the steering wheel. “Years ago I used to think that anyone who expected to make a livin’ by settin’ a trap in the water and expectin’ a lobster to crawl into it was a damn fool.” He turned to face them with a big smile. “I expect as I was right.”

  He spoke in a thick nasal accent. If you didn’t listen closely to the words, you could be carried away by the antique cadence, with its broad a’s, dropped g’s, and lost r’s. Until the fifties, Kitty had told Charlotte, the inhabitants of many of Maine’s outer islands still spoke a little-corrupted form of Elizabethan English, but television had brought the beginnings of cultural homogeneity to even the most remote backwaters. In another generation or two, Gilley’s accent would probably be indistinguishable from that of the evening news anchorman.

  Wes put his truck into gear and said goodbye. Tracey had not introduced her, but Charlotte knew that Wes knew who she was. She had sensed him subtly sizing her up. She wondered if he was responsible for the vandalism. Kitty had pooh-poohed her suggestion that he might be the culprit, but Stan had quite another story. On one of his late-night walks—the night the air had been let out of the tires of the Ledge House jeep—he had seen Wes sitting up against the side of the barn where the jeep was garaged, drunk.

  Wes drove a few feet down the road, and stopped. “Hey Howard,” he shouted, looking back out the window. “When’s that meetin’?”

  “Sunday night, eight o’clock,” replied Tracey. “Town Hall.”

  Gilley waved goodbye and drove off.

  Tracey explained that the Board of Selectmen would be holding a public hearing on the proposal to grant the
Chartwell Corporation a tax abatement for the Gilley Island development. The town would vote on the issue at a special town meeting the following week.

  Tracey was saying goodbye to Charlotte outside of the Saunders’ house when he was hailed by Kitty. “The police station called,” she said. “They want you to call back right away.”

  A minute later he was calling the station from the Saunders’ telephone. After listening for a few minutes, he hung up the phone with a worried frown.

  “Dr. Thornhill’s passed away,” he said.

  7

  Thornhill’s death was a shock, but not a sudden one. Both Fran and Marion had been at his bedside. In the end, death had come as a relief. He had not gone gently into that good night. His final hours had been accompanied by convulsions, hallucinations, and finally coma.

  The funeral arrangements were still uncertain, although a memorial service had been tentatively scheduled for Saturday. Fran and Marion were awaiting the arrival of Thornhill’s brother, a Boston banker, to make the final plans. The body would be cremated as Thornhill had requested, and a modest memorial, which was Marion’s idea, constructed on his beloved Ledges. Kitty had spent the previous evening helping Fran and Marion notify friends, relatives, and colleagues of the death, and was now helping Grace prepare food for the gathering that would be held at Ledge House following the service.

  Charlotte sat on a stool in Stan’s studio, looking out at the cove, which shone a pale green in the morning sun, the waves lapping against the shingled beach. Her thoughts dwelled vaguely on Thornhill’s death: it was hard to believe he was gone, she mused as she watched the gulls wheel and turn and dive for crabs and periwinkles with raucous, excited cries. He had seemed so full of vitality despite his heart condition. How many of her friends and acquaintances had slipped away just as quickly? The older she got, the more tenuous the thread of life seemed to become.

  By contrast with the peacefulness of the cove outside, the sea in the large canvas to which Stan was applying the finishing touches was roiled and angry. The painting depicted a big gray-green wave about to break on a cluster of jagged rocks surrounded by a swirl of white foam.

  “I’ve never understood how you paint a wave,” Charlotte said. “It’s not as if a wave will stand still for you like a landscape.”

  “Exactly,” replied Stan, adding a dab of brown to the tip of a gull’s wing. “Trying to copy a small detail of a wave is the biggest failing of beginners. Before they can get it down, it’s moved. The trick is to think of the detail as part of a bigger body of water.”

  “Yes, but how do you teach that?” she asked, referring to the classes Stan taught in seascape painting.

  “Actually, I have a new technique. John Lewis, Daria’s boyfriend, is taking photographs for me of waves breaking at different stages. The students sketch from the photographs until they they have a sense of the action. Then I try them out on the real thing.”

  He handed her a stack of student sketches, which showed the stages of a breaking wave outlined in blue pigment. Charlotte leafed through them, stopping at an unusual sketch of a bizarrely shaped rock.

  “Crap,” growled Stan, who was hanging over her shoulder.

  “Why?”

  “The whole point of a marine painting is to show the drama of the conflict between land and sea, not to show an unusual rock formation or a scenic shoreline. The viewer should have the idea that the painting could be anywhere, anytime. Universal, not specific.”

  “But Stan,” she protested, “isn’t that a matter of opinion? Perhaps some people like paintings of scenic shorelines.”

  “Now you sound just like Daria,” he complained.

  “What does she say?”

  “It’s not what she says, it’s what she does,” he replied, sorting through a stack of canvases leaning against a wall. “Here I am, trying to teach her how to capture the elemental battle between land and sea, and she insists on painting the sea barse-ackwards, to use the local expression.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” he said. “Instead of painting the land in the foreground and the sea in the background, she wants to go out in a boat and paint the sea in the foreground and the land in the background. There,” he announced, lifting a large canvas onto the easel.

  It was an oil painting of the channel with the path of the Ledges, crowned by the gazebo, rising in the distance. Unlike Stan’s dark, somber paintings, Daria’s was light and airy, with subtle, abstract shapes that captured the magical enchantment Charlotte had felt upon first seeing the Ledges.

  “Oh, Stan, I love it,” she said quietly.

  “You women are all alike,” he groused. He stepped away from the easel. “Actually, it’s not bad,” he said, which coming from him was a compliment. “But as far as I’m concerned, it’s not marine painting, that’s all.”

  Removing the painting from the easel, he carried it back to its place. “Now she wants to paint the same scene by moonlight. The next thing you know, she’ll be putting a goddam gondola in the foreground.” Returning to the easel, he paused to rotate his shoulder.

  “I doubt that,” said Charlotte. “What’s wrong with your shoulder? Is your rheumatism bothering you again?”

  “It’s lifting these canvases—it’s a hard angle for me. I’ll have to get Kitty to give me another dose of that monkshood.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘I’ll have to get Kitty to give me another dose of that monkshood,’” replied Stan with a puzzled look. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” she said, sliding off her stool. “I’ve got to go up to Ledge House. You just gave me an idea.”

  The door at Ledge House was answered by Marion. Charlotte remembered that Thornhill’s wife had been French, and concluded that Marion must take after her. Tall and slim, she had the long-necked elegance of a Nefertiti, with a high forehead, graceful brow, and large, Gallic nose. The prominent nose, which might have marred a face whose features were less well-proportioned, endowed Marion with an air of intelligence and authority. Her thick, wavy dark hair was cut very short and brushed stylishly away from her face. She might have been beautiful, but even allowing for the circumstances, her pale, drawn face lacked the animation that her generous features seemed to call for.

  Introducing herself, Charlotte offered her condolences and her help, to which Marion responded graciously that Fran, Grace, and Kitty were providing all the help she needed. She spoke in a deep voice, made husky, Charlotte suspected, by too many cigarettes.

  But Charlotte’s wasn’t purely a condolence call, as she tactfully explained. She wanted to use the library, she said, for a purpose that she would rather not take the time to explain at the moment.

  Her mind too preoccupied with other matters to be curious, Marion showed her to the library and retired to the kitchen.

  As Charlotte entered the library her mind was whirling. What can kill, can cure, Kitty had said. Stan’s comment had reminded her of the engraving of the violet-blue flower in the herbal she had looked at in the bindery. Monkshood: the plant Kitty was using to treat Stan’s rheumatism was the same plant she had seen growing in the black witches’ section of the witches’ garden. The same plant whose roots had been dug up. The same plant that had made her fingers numb.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for. It was only a hunch. And an image: the body of a yellow dog floating above the glowing coals at the bottom of an iron cauldron.

  She scanned the brass markers—agriculture, horticulture, landscape architecture, plant exploration, history of gardening, systematic botany, trees and fruits—until she found what she was looking for: herbs and herbals. There it was—the linen-covered box Daria had made with the title, A Complete Herbal by Thomas Grenville, stamped in gold on the spine. Removing it from the shelf, she leafed through the pages. The book fell open to the page with the hand-colored engraving of the tall plant with the violet-blue flowers.

  She started reading: “Monksh
ood—also known as friar’s cap, helmet flower, grannie’s nightcap, and wolfsbane—is a native of the mountains and woods of Germany, France, and Switzerland, but since the time of Gerard, it has been cultivated for ornament.” She skipped ahead. “Many cases have been cited in which rheumatism that could not be helped by any other medication was cured with monkshood.” Which would explain Kitty’s success in treating Stan’s shoulder. She read on. And there it was—the words seeming to leap off the page: Monkshood is the most virulent of all plant poisons.

  She sank into a chair, stunned. Laying the book down on the table, she lit a cigarette with shaking hands. After a minute, she picked it up again, her eyes skipping over the text: The variety that is the most poisonous is the common garden variety, Aconitum napellus.… The chief active ingredient is the alkaloid, aconitine.… The root is the most poisonous part. She remembered some lines from Henry IV: “Venom … as pure as aconitum,” the king says to the Duke of Clarence. As if there was none purer. Leaning her head back, she stared out at Jesse’s grave in the rose garden.

  So her hunch had a basis in fact. Jesse might have been poisoned. Maybe by accident, maybe not. The same went for Thornhill. But by whom? Kitty immediately popped to mind, but suspecting her was absurd. She sighed. In life, one never knew what to expect: treasured friends become suspect, if only for a second, as murderers; cultured, well-mannered gentlemen (except for the cigar ashes) become suspect as thieves. It was different in the theatre: there everything was ordered, logical, continuous. Which was why she was an actress. Then again, maybe she was imagining it all. What to do now? she wondered. Talk to Kitty. Kitty could tell her more about monkshood. So could Fran, but the fewer people who knew about her suspicions, the better. Putting out her cigarette, she headed out to the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, Kitty was sitting with her in the library, her eager face overflowing with curiosity.

  “Kitty, do you remember telling me about treating Stan’s rheumatism with an herbal preparation? The herb was monkshood, right?”