But when it came to means, there were plenty of people with knowledge of herbal poisons. Fran was the obvious one, but what about John, Grace, or even Daria? None of the other three suspects on the State police’s list exhibited a strong motive, although that could change: you never knew what you might uncover when you started turning over rocks in a murder investigation, Charlotte pointed out. John harbored a grudge against Thornhill, but that didn’t seem motive enough for murder, on the surface at any rate. And Grace and Felix had no obvious motives at all.
The moon was high over the tips of the spruces on Sheep Island when they finally decided to call it a night. Charlotte eagerly climbed the stairs to her room in the former hayloft and collapsed onto the antique spool bed with its colorful antique patchwork quilt. But sleep eluded her. Her thoughts kept returning to the books. The fact that they were missing blinked irritatingly at the back of her mind like the idiot light on a dashboard. How in the name of Sam Hill, to use one of Tracey’s favorite expressions, did they fit in with the suspicion that Thornhill had been poisoned?
The next day was a Friday. Only a week ago, Charlotte had been back at her town house on the East Side, packing her suitcase in anticipation of a restful vacation in Maine. How much had happened since then, she thought as she awoke to another beautiful day. She couldn’t complain about the weather. Every day had been perfect: clear and cool, with an electricity in the air that charged her with energy. She hoped it would remain as good for Tom’s stay. She had heard on the evening news that it was in the nineties in New York. At Stan and Kitty’s urging, she had invited Tom Plummer to Maine. There was nothing he liked better than poking his nose into a murder, and it looked as if a murder was what they had. Since writing Murder at the Morosco, he’d been making his living writing about real-life crime. His latest book, about a family that had been terrorized by a gang of thugs, had been another best seller and a critical success as well. It was about time that journalists started paying attention to the victims of crime for a change, the reviewers had said. She was glad the pendulum of public opinion was finally swinging the other way. In many respects she was a liberal, but when it came to crime she was a sobersided old Yankee conservative. She’d always felt ill at ease among people who excused antisocial behavior on the grounds of environmental deprivation. How did they explain the fine people who came from deprived backgrounds? To her mind, it was a view that denied will, energy, and spirit.
She was looking forward to Tom’s arrival. Since her divorce, he had been meeting the one major need in her life: compatible male companionship. If she wasn’t cut out for wifedom, she was at least entitled to a male companion. In the European tradition, every elegant older woman had her cavaliere servente, her gallant, and Tom was hers. It was a symbiotic relationship: like shark and pilot fish, though which was which she wasn’t sure. As her companion, Tom was exposed to the glamorous society that was hers as a star. Being a star, her second husband used to say, was like having a first-class ticket to life. Carrying the bag once in a while (or was it the old bag, she thought wryly) was the price Tom paid for going in style. For a couple of years now it had been working out very well.
Friday was the day that Kitty and Fran usually went into town to take care of their herb business. They had decided to keep to their schedule, at Tracey’s urging. “Carry on as usual,” he had said. Not only would it help take their minds off the situation, it would also help quell gossip. The State police had not officially acknowledged that they were conducting a murder investigation, but their presence, under the direction of a handsome detective named Gaudette, couldn’t help but set tongues wagging. Including Stan’s. He couldn’t understand why Kitty was choosing to associate with a suspected murderess. But Kitty was putting any suspicion of Fran completely out of her mind, for the moment at any rate. “Innocent until proven guilty,” she told him.
Fran arrived mid-morning looking chipper—unsuitably so, thought Charlotte, in light of the fact that her uncle had probably just been murdered. But maybe that was her overactive imagination at work again.
Her green eyes shone behind the thick lenses of her glasses, and pink lipstick brightened her papery-white complexion.
Carrying a brown paper bag over to the long pine table, she carefully lifted out a large object wrapped in newspaper. “This is for you, Kit,” she said as she unwrapped it. “A witch’s wreath.” She lifted out the wreath, which filled the kitchen with a spicy aroma.
“Oh, Fran, it’s lovely,” said Kitty, taking it from her. She gave her a peck on the cheek. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s made of mugwort, vervain, St. Johnswort, southernwood, elder, rue, willow, and valerian—the traditional herbs of the summer solstice,” explained Fran. “I’m putting it in the catalogue. I think it will sell very well. People like to hang wreaths on their doors in summer too.”
“That’s a marvelous idea,” gushed Kitty. She held the wreath out in front of her by its wire hanger. “Charlotte, isn’t it just divine?” she said. “I’m going to hang it on the front door.”
“Why is it called a witch’s wreath?” asked Charlotte as she leaned over to smell the fragrance.
“The wreaths used to be singed in the Midsummer-Night bonfires and then hung on the door as a protection against lightning and the power of witches,” she explained. “Witches are exorcised by fire: if you make a wreath of certain herbs and throw it in the fire, it will keep them away.”
“Like the incense at the Midsummer-Night festival?” asked Charlotte.
“Exactly,” replied Fran. “Oh, and look at this. This is the first of these I’ve made, but if it sells, we can make more for Halloween. A witch’s broom. The handle is made of ash, which keeps the witch from getting her feet wet; and the sweeping part is made of birch, which holds the evil spirits.” She held it up. “If you lay it across the threshold, it will prevent the witches from entering,” she continued. “Of course, you can accomplish the same thing by hanging a dead black chicken from the doorjamb,” she added cheerily, “but I think a wreath or a broom is so much nicer, don’t you?”
Charlotte and Kitty readily agreed.
She briskly wrapped up the broom and returned it to the paper bag. “We’ve got to get going, Kit,” she urged, heading toward the door. Turning to Charlotte, she said: “It was a pleasure seeing you again.”
After gathering up her belongings, Kitty scurried out after her.
Charlotte sat for a moment after they had gone, looking out at the cove. She marveled at Fran’s energy, and wondered briefly if there was an herb she prescribed for it. She decided she wouldn’t want to take it even if there was. Outside, the gulls swarmed around the garbage cans. The gull, like man, had learned to adapt to its environment, she reflected as she watched a charred English muffin and a leftover chunk of lamb from their barbecue disappear into a down-turned beak. An eating machine with wings, it dined on everything from periwinkles to shish kebab with equal relish.
The phone rang as she was washing up the breakfast dishes. It was Tracey, with a report on the progress of the investigation. The results of the tests on the tea and the cookies had already come back. They were negative, meaning that the poison had probably been added to the teapot. The results on the tissue samples weren’t in yet. He sounded harassed, and no wonder: taking statements from murder suspects was hardly his everyday fare. She had just finished reading the “Police Beat” column in the Bridge Harbor Light: sick moose on the beach, set of screwdrivers stolen, littering at the town pier, and a couple of driving-while-intoxicated arrests was about it—for last week. Next week’s column would be a different story.
As she hung up the phone she decided to spend the rest of the morning following in Tracey’s footsteps. He had urged her to talk with whomever she wanted, on his authority. She would start with the simplest task: Grace and Felix, the suspects with no apparent motives. But she suspected her task wouldn’t be as simple as it seemed. For one thing, it bothered her that Grace had been so relu
ctant to call an ambulance. Perhaps she had wanted time for the poison to take effect. She even wondered if Grace had actually given Thornhill his nitroglycerin pill, as she had claimed. For another, there were the books. And no one knew more about books than Felix Mayer. She was anxious to hear what Tom had found out about him. She wondered if he’d really reported the book theft. If he had stolen the books, he could have feigned making the report, manufactured a phony provenance, and passed the books along to an innocent—or not so innocent—customer. If he was desperate for money, he might even have poisoned Thornhill. Hadn’t Thornhill promised to let him handle the sale of his collection after his death? Maybe there was a reason why he had the reputation of being able to hear the death rattle before the doctor was called in. Collectors thrive among the dead—quote, unquote the great Felix Mayer.
After eating a light lunch by herself (Stan was playing golf), she headed up to Ledge House under a porcelain blue sky. It was a day to lighten even the heaviest of hearts, as if a benignant power were trying to make amends for what had gone before. Ten minutes later, she was ringing the bell at Ledge House. A witch’s wreath was already hanging on the door. Good—if any dwelling needed protection from evil spirits, it was Ledge House. Grace answered the door and ushered her into a large, bright, old-fashioned kitchen, which looked much as it must have in the thirties. Taking a seat at an enamel-topped table, Charlotte explained that she was there at Chief Tracey’s request, and asked Grace to review the statement she had given the police.
At the mention of Thornhill’s name, Grace pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at the swollen eyes under her rhinestone-studded glasses. Charlotte waited patiently. The smell of chocolate cake baking in the oven, the fern fronds bobbing in the open window, and the familiar theme music from Guiding Light reminded her of her childhood and of the afternoons she’d spent listening to the soap operas while she waited for her mother to get home from work.
Finally Grace lit a cigarette with shaking hands gnarled by arthritis and shiny-red from years of being immersed in hot water. “Honey, I can’t tell you how heartbroken I am,” she said, lifting the cigarette to a mouth outlined unevenly in red lipstick. “He was a fine, fine gentleman.”
“I know,” said Charlotte sympathetically. Grace had not looked away from the little television set on the table since Charlotte sat down. “I’d like you to tell me everything that happened on Tuesday afternoon,” Charlotte prompted, “starting with when you began to fix the tea.”
“I don’t mind, honey,” Grace answered, exhaling twin streams of cigarette smoke from her nostrils. “Anything to bring a villain to justice. Poor Frank—I mean Dr. Thornhill.” She sighed, looked briefly at Charlotte, and returned her gaze to the television set.
“The tea?” said Charlotte.
“Oh, yes. I told that handsome State policeman, Detective Gaudette, all about it. I think he looks like a movie star, don’t you?” Without waiting for a reply, she continued: “But land-a-goshen, what a mess they made with that fingerprint dust. It’ll take me days to get it all cleaned up.”
“I’m sure your work will have served a good purpose,” Charlotte assured her. In fact, however, the fingerprinting had been no help at all, according to Tracey. What few good prints the police had found belonged to members of the household.
“We were talking about the tea,” prompted Charlotte again.
“Oh, yes. I put the kettle on at about three thirty,” Grace continued. “To have it ready at four. Frank—I mean Dr. Thornhill, God rest his soul—was very particular. He was every inch a gentleman, and we ladies know how a gentleman wants everything just so.” She winked conspiratorially.
Charlotte smiled in acknowledgment. Poor Grace—a woman of fifty or more trying to be a Southern belle of eighteen. She couldn’t understand this frantic effort to hold back the clock. The most horrible fate she could imagine would be to look the way that some stars did in their old age: lifted, powdered, and mascaraed into hideous caricatures of their former selves. She didn’t mind getting old. True, she was a bit heavier than she used to be; true, she no longer wore the slinky sheaths she used to; true, the catty columnists sometimes referred to her “fading beauty” or called her an “aging goddess” as if she had betrayed her public by growing old. But as far as she was concerned, a lot of living had gone into the lines on her face, and she was proud of them.
She brought her attention back to Grace, who was still absorbed by the television. “What do you mean ‘just so’?”
“I mean, he insisted on having his beer and sandwich on the dot of noon, and his tea—he called it his tisane—French, you know—on the dot of four. If I didn’t have it ready … land-a-goshen, what a fuss he’d raise.”
Then the fact that he took his tea at four was probably common knowledge, thought Charlotte, which meant that anyone could have recognized teatime as the perfect opportunity for a poisoning.
Grace glanced over at the counter, and then got up and fetched the tea tray. “Everything had to be in a certain place,” she said, showing Charlotte the tray, which was all set up. “The teapot had to be here, the vase here, the sugar and milk pitcher here, the cookie plate here. I swear, he could drive a woman crazy sometimes. He was particular about his cookies too,” she continued as she returned the tray to its place. “He always had two: coriander sugar cookies on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and ginger biscuits on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”
“It sounds as if he was a man of habit,” said Charlotte drily.
“Law, yes,” she bubbled. “He was a gentleman, as I said. With very particular habits, refined habits. He was also a man of honor, the kind of man a lady of breeding could trust with her reputation. He never would have taken advantage, if you know what I mean. Not that I would have let him.” She raised her chin in an expression of virtuous hauteur. “I’m not the type to let my emotions run away from me.”
Her words had the fulsome ring of a script for Search for Tomorrow, thought Charlotte. She also sounded a little like Blanche DuBois.
“I worshiped the ground that man walked on,” she continued in a maudlin tone, sniffling into a hankie. “He was so like Mr. Harris—he passed away in 1962—so smart and clever at explaining things. I was so lucky to have been able to come to Ledge House. Before I came here I was just at sixes and sevens all the time without a man to take care of me. And now this. It’s just too much.” She leaned forward to touch Charlotte’s arm. “Honey, this conversation’s mighty hard on me. Since Frank’s death, I’ve just gone to pieces. You wouldn’t mind if I had just a wee tad of bourbon to calm my nerves, would you? Mind you,” she added, rising from her seat, “I don’t ordinarily touch spirits, but my nerves are just worn to a frazzle.”
“Please, go right ahead,” said Charlotte, declining a drink herself. She noticed that Grace’s nose was rubricated with the telltale broken blood vessels of the heavy drinker. Judging by the level of alcohol in the bottle of Old Grand-dad she fetched from a bottom cupboard, it had been resorted to on more than one occasion as a tonic for frazzled nerves.
Pouring herself a tumblerful, Grace quickly emptied more than half of it in a series of demure sips. “Oh, yes,” she said, with a little shiver of pleasure. “Makes me feel like a schoolgirl on a Saturday night.” She giggled and looked around her as if the world had suddenly come into focus.
“What kind of tea did Dr. Thornhill drink?” asked Charlotte.
“He always had one of Fran’s herb teas. He didn’t believe in caffeine, you see. He said it poisoned the system.” A shadow passed over her face at the mention of the word poison. She continued: “He had a different tea each day. Rose hip, peppermint, chamomile, lemon verbena. His favorite was lovage; it tastes kind of like celery.”
Lovage was the herb that Kitty had mentioned in connection with the poisoning case in Belgium, the herb that monkshood had been mistaken for.
“Do you remember what kind of tea Dr. Thornhill had on Tuesday?”
“I can’t
recall the name,” she said, reaching out a shaky hand to tap her cigarette ash in the ashtray, and missing. “It was a new one that Fran had just brought over that afternoon. I’d show you the package, but the police took it. She likes to test her new blends on the family. Come to think of it, I don’t think she told me what was in it.”
“Did you prepare it, or did Fran?”
“Usually, I do, but Fran did on Tuesday, because it was the new blend.”
Why a new tea on that particular day? Charlotte wondered. And why had Fran prepared it? But if Fran was guilty, why call attention to herself by preparing the tea? She could have just let Grace do it as usual, and slipped the poison in later. Her attention drifted off to the subject of poison, while Grace’s drifted off to the soap opera. Poisoning was reputedly a woman’s crime, but she wondered if that was accurate. True, poisoning required cunning and subterfuge, the traditional weapons of the powerless. She was reminded of another case of monkshood poisoning that she had read about in one of Thornhill’s books. It involved a group of wives in a Hungarian village whose husbands were called away to military service. When the husbands returned and started demanding their wives’ submission, they began mysteriously dying off. More than sixty husbands were poisoned by their wives, one of the largest mass poisonings in history. Now that was a woman’s crime. But even more important than cunning and subterfuge, she thought, would be the murderer’s feeling that he or she could get away with it, the feeling of infallibility. And that feeling, she reflected, was distributed in equal measure in both sexes.
Murder at Teatime Page 11