“Not to be outdone, Sir Gavin countered with a story even more diabolically intricate. There were only two problems with the situation: Sir Gavin was too drunk to remember what he had told, but his friend wasn’t; and the plot was not fiction, but an incredibly involved true-life drama in which Sir Gavin Kendall himself was the prime actor.” Puzzle pieces danced onto the stage, highlighting Elizabeth’s words with their movement. “We shall tell the story calling the characters by the names Gavin Kendall would have known them as. You may find what parallels you will to the present puzzle.
“With the aid of her Detective Inspector uncle, an Open University composition instructor, and tidbits she had learned working for her mystery-writer boss, Victoria Parkerson wrote the first draft of a blockbuster mystery novel, but died of cancer before she could do anything more with it.
“Only one copy of the manuscript existed, and Victoria had given it to her half sister Mildred to read. Mildred, maid to actress Margo Lovell—better known to the present company as Gloria Glitz—left the bundle of papers in Margo’s dressing room where the actress found it and devised an insidious scheme for attaining her most cherished goal: becoming the mistress of a fortune.
“Margo gave a photocopy of the story to her mystery writer friend, assuring him the author was dead and encouraging him to rewrite it and publish it under his own name. The success of Who Doth Murder Sleep? is literary history.
“The death of Margo’s uncle, James Lovell, provided the perfect hiding place for the key ingredient in her plan: the manuscript. She secreted it inside the casket before it was sealed in the family vault. There it would lie forever hidden unless she, as the next of kin, should seek an order for exhumation, which she was confident the newly knighted Sir Gavin would not be so uncooperative as to require of her.
“A rational man, Sir Gavin readily saw that reason was the better part of valor and so bowed to Margo’s demands, being too well bred to call them by the ugly name of blackmail. He broke his long-standing but unofficial engagement to Lady Leila Landsbury and prepared to acquiesce to his blackmailer’s monetary and matrimonial demands. But as her noose tightened around his life, he began to puzzle over possible routes of escape.”
The puzzle pieces bumped together in unsuccessful attempts to achieve a perfect fit as the narration continued: “Still Margo held the key piece. And with no possibility of recovering it, his only chance of escape lay in removing Margo. Nigel Cass’s storm-battered dinner party provided the perfect opportunity for Sir Gavin—our Linden Leigh—to introduce his own solution to the puzzle. A solution of 50 milligrams of cyanide, supplied by his chemist brother-in-law.
“The fact that Margo’s agent had peopled his guest list with those bearing grudges against the glamorous actress—whatever similarity they may or may not have borne to our present cast—added a certain poetically ironic touch to the occasion. But the ultimate irony was performed by Sir Gavin as he secretly emptied the contents of a cyanide capsule onto the rim of the glass he was to hold to his fiancée’s lips with his own hand, after pretending to drink from it himself in honor of their engagement.
“The care given to every detail of the plot showed in several things: his anonymous request that almond soup be served, to cover the bitter almond smell of the cyanide; his quick response to administer aid to his victim’s choking symptoms; and in the rapidly performed cremation following the village doctor’s certificate of natural death.
“And that would have been the end of the matter—” The puzzle pieces started to come together, then paused—“had it not been for Victoria’s uncle, Detective-Inspector Parkerson of Scotland Yard.” The puzzle pieces reeled apart in confusion.
“As soon as Parkerson read Who Doth Murder Sleep?—” The eyes pantomimed reading, looked at each other questioningly, then nodded—“he recognized his niece’s work. To the mind of a trained detective, it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened to the manuscript that had disappeared from Victoria’s personal effects. But without the original, he had no proof.
“Parkerson was more intrigued than surprised when he read of Margo Lovell’s death. After all, the pieces fit so well—especially after he had a nice long chat with his stepniece, Mildred, and then read the death certificate mentioning cherry-red lividity, which he recognized as a symptom of cyanide poisoning.
“But again, he had no proof. He lacked the essential key we have given you—knowledge of where the original manuscript was hidden. For that original would have been his proof of motive. Parkerson’s retirement from Scotland Yard occurred that year, but he didn’t retire from the puzzle of proving Margo’s murder and, more important to him, gaining posthumous recognition of his niece’s genius.
“The puzzle became a passionate obsession to him as he dogged Sir Gavin, even openly accusing the writer of his twin crimes of plagiarism and murder. But Sir Gavin knew both his victims were safely buried in the family vault.
“Not until late this past Saturday did the maze of defenses begin to crumble when Sir Gavin Kendall arrived to rehearse ‘Murder by Candlelight’ and learned the plot Weldon Stark was using for his mystery. Shaken, but confident of carrying everything off as the fiction Stark believed it to be, Sir Gavin met his nemesis, when, upon exiting from the parlor, he glimpsed Charles Parkerson leaving the balcony of the rehearsal room, flushed with the information he had sought so doggedly for four years.
“In a show of losing with good sportsmanship in the best stiff-upper-lip style, Kendall invited Parkerson to his room for a drink, or possibly a confession. Then, easily overpowering the older man, smothered him with a pillow, removed all identification, and dumped the body in a bathroom in an unused wing of the hotel—”
The dancing shapes did their final pirouette.
“—where the body was discovered by the sleuths you see before you. They studied the clues, thought out the riddle, and found that the pieces fit.” The forms came together making a giant likeness of Gavin Kendall. “The Puzzle is solved.”
The room filled with confused applause from the spectators, who weren’t sure whether the elaborate solution was an attempt to win the originality prize or the answer to an actual murder. But Elizabeth was only dimly aware of the perplexed disorder around her. For the first time she allowed her gaze to seek out Gavin.
He was a figure of quiet in a roomful of uproar. Gavin didn’t move. Neither did the policeman stationed at the back of the parlor. And the full horror of what she had done hit Elizabeth. She had publicly accused an innocent man of horrible crimes. She had embarrassed him unforgivably, and she had forever sealed her fate, cutting herself off irrevocably from the love he had offered her.
If only she could call back her words, turn back time, rearrange the puzzle pieces. The least she could do—a useless, futile gesture, but the only possible thing—was to go to him and apologize.
As she made her way slowly through the room abuzz with discussions of what she had just said, people saw her coming and moved aside, clearing a path to Gavin like the waters of the Red Sea.
She crossed to him on dry sand.
“Gavin, I’m so sorry…” She could think of nothing else to say.
“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by let us call thee devil!…O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! . . Every inordinate cup is unblessed, the ingredient is a devil.”
She gasped at his quotation, not sure she heard him right. “Gavin?”
“It was the wine that spoke and not the man, but en vino veritas.”
“It is true.” She wasn’t sure if she spoke the words aloud, but they were accompanied by a noise as loud to her ears as the crack of a gun—the bursting of her bubble of dreams. She didn’t realize until that moment, until she heard the confession from his own lips, that she had still clung to the tiniest hope that she’d been wrong.
“Not very sporting of me, was it?” He dug in his vest pocket for his eyepiece. “Broke the old pu
blic school code and all that, what? Pity you couldn’t see your way clear to accept my offer, old girl. I really meant it, you know. Wouldn’t want you to think I was a cad about that, too. I could have made a better show of it with your help.”
Elizabeth glanced uncomfortably around her and saw, thankfully, that Stark was calling everyone’s attention to the front of the room—giving them a semblance of privacy. She turned back to Gavin, all of her might-have-been feelings swelling to the bursting point. “No you wouldn’t, Gavin. No person can make that change in another. People can’t change themselves by deciding to turn over a new leaf—”
She choked on her last words. She, of all people, was in no position to preach to him. But what she wanted to do was to rail at the evil that had insidiously induced him to choose the first step of plagiarism, then murder in an attempt to extricate himself from the tangle of the web he had spun by his own bad choices.
Suddenly she knew what to say. “Another person can’t do it for you, Gavin, but you can change—with God’s help. It’s up to you. And she knew the person she was really preaching to was herself.”
The monocle slipped from his fingers as he looked at her intently for just a moment. Then he picked it up again and turned to a figure just behind Elizabeth. “Well, cheerio.”
Elizabeth turned to look beside her. “Anita?”
“Special agent, Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office.” Anita held out an ID card. “Parkerson checked in with our office early Saturday morning, and I was assigned to meet him here that night. Unfortunately, I was too late.” She signaled to the officer in the doorway who moved forward to read the suspect his rights. “Thank you for all your help, Richard.” They shook hands in a businesslike manner.
Elizabeth felt the strength in Richard’s hands as he took her arm and guided her from the room. All the way to their private sitting room, Up each stairway that had become so familiar, down each hallway that held so many memories, she drew on the resource of that strength.
One inside their parlor, Richard touched a match to the newly laid fire and pulled Elizabeth to its warmth. Suddenly she was talking, not sure what she was saying, not caring whether or not it made sense, just telling Richard everything she had seen and heard and thought and worried about in the past days. He held her and listened without interruption until all her words were spent and she leaned against him for support.
“I wonder why he didn’t run when he read your script last night?” Richard said. “He could be in Mexico by now.”
“Oh, I didn’t leave the real one out. The script on the table was the alternate I’d worked out in case he didn’t prove me right by taking my bait. I kept hoping one of the other suspects would come.” She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “But Gavin did come. He actually did those terrible things. Oh, Richard—”
Richard held her, gently stroking her hair. When she seemed calmer he said, “How did you know his excuse for moving the body was false?”
“His whole story was built around the fact that no one could do anything until the police came anyway. But when they did get here, he didn’t tell them. I was there when they took his statement.”
Richard nodded. “Would cyanide really work the way it did in the skit?”
“I don’t know. I suppose Stark simplified it for dramatic effect, same as he changed the time period for fun and took other bits of dramatic license for the sake of the story. But the essentials were right.” She choked as a new wave of the horror of it all hit her.
“If only I hadn’t been right. I prayed to be wrong. Richard—”
He held her tightly, pushing the horror back with his own fierce caring. At last he said with his lips against her ear, “‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.’”
She nodded, the top of her head brushing his cheek. “Yes, all those things I learned years and years ago—literally at my grandmother's knee—and even things I myself have taught my own poetry students…suddenly I really heard them. and they made sense to me, to my very real everyday life. Not to the fantasy world I wanted to live it.
“I remembered another when Anita was leading Gavin off and he looked so—so beaten.” She closed her eyes, whether to shut out the image or to focus on it, even she wasn’t sure. ‘The villain’s ways are villainous and he devises infamous plans to ruin the poor with his lies and deny justice to the needy. But the man of noble mind forms noble designs and stands firm in his nobility.’” She was silent, letting the words echo to the far corners of the room.
In the comfort of Richard’s arms it all became clear to her who the man of noble mind was. Elizabeth realized that it was Richard’s presence that held her steady during the landslide. She knew now that the night on the balcony while Richard and Gavin chased the fictional jewel thief, it was Richard whose safety she was crying out for. And that one, brief moment when she thought Richard might be involved had been much more shattering to her world than learning the whole truth about Gavin. It was Richard. It had always been Richard.
Now she saw it. Richard was of the true nobility, the real gentleman who put the rights and feelings of others before his own.
Now she knew. She knew the difference between love and infatuation. Between dreams and reality. She realized her feelings for Gavin had been based on fantasy and superficial qualities, and that she had made a vital error in deciding to trust Gavin because she thought she loved him—basing her decision on advice from fairy tales rather than on eternal truths.
She looked up at the outline of Richard’s profile—how unspeakably dear to her he was!—and realized that what she had considered his dullness was one of his most endearing qualities. Richard was real, dependable, solid…
Besides, he’s not nearly as dull as I used to think. For the first time that day, she smiled.
She knew what she would answer the next time he asked her to marry him.
But would he ask?
How long had it been since the last time? It seemed like a lifetime—just before she met Gavin…and Richard met Anita.
Would he ask again? She had had so many chances and blown them all. Nobody got that many second chances. Now that she knew Richard was the real hero for her, would he want the part?
His voice broke her reverie. “Are you feeling better now?”
“Yes, my lord.”
He held her at arms’ length and looked at her. “What did you say?”
“You heard me,” she laughed.
“I say, are you casting me as your fictional hero now?” He adjusted an imaginary monocle.
“Oh, no!” She leaned up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “I’ve got a much better role in mind for you.”
“Do you really mean it?”
“More than I’ve ever meant anything.” She moved back so she could watch his face as she spoke. “It was you all along, Richard, only I didn’t realize it.”
He held his arms open to her. “Let’s go home.”
Home—it spoke of comfort, of protection, of freedom…of Richard. She walked into his arms. “I’m already there.”
Epilogue
Monday, April 16, 1990
Elizabeth walked into Richard’s office carrying a bowl of April daffodils and tulips on Easter Monday. He looked up from the letter he was reading. “It’s from Bill. He wants to make sure we put next year’s mystery week on our calendars now. It looks as if the whole group plans to return. This year will be a hard act to follow, though. We can’t hope to win that big every time.”
Elizabeth put the flowers on his desk and walked around to plant herself on his lap. “Shall we invite them all to our wedding? Irene and Cathy would make darling bridesmaids…I don’t know about Anita—”
“You aren’t still worried about her, are you? You said you believed me when I explained it was all to provide a cover for her investigations.”
“Even the kiss in the gazebo? That was all in the line of duty?”
“The fact that you believed it was rea
l proves it was effective camouflage, doesn’t it? Anita had her suspicions about Gavin pretty well worked out by then, and we were worried about your safety.”
“Poor Gavin.” She stood up and moved around the room. “It’s still so hard to believe…”
Richard nodded, but characteristically didn’t interrupt her stream of thought.
“Was I wrong to dream?”
“Of course not. Dreaming the impossible dream is part of the human spirit. After all, if you don’t have a dream, you can’t have a dream come true.”
She laughed. “You sound like a show tune writer.”
“Yes, I guess I do. Sorry. But the point is to dream your dreams—then redeem them in the light of reality.” He stood and walked to her. “Elizabeth, in the hard, cold light of day are you disappointed in your bargain?”
She flung her arms around his neck. “Richard! Don’t you ever think such a thing! All my heart is yours, and all my dreams are of you.”
When he kissed her she knew the fulfillment of the promise that the redeemed would come home, entering the Promised Land with shouts of triumph, crowned with everlasting gladness. “And gladness and joy will be their escort.”
She rested her head against his chest. “You see, I was right all along. Dreams can come true. But the pearl of great price may be in your own backyard.”
“Well…” Richard leaned down and nibbled at her ear. “If you find things getting dull, we can always go to another mystery week.”
“Mmmm, maybe.” She lifted her face and traced the line of his cheek with her finger. “But I have a feeling the real world will be quite exciting enough.”
The End
About the Author
Donna Fletcher Crow is an author of historical novels including the epic Glastonbury, A Novel of Christian England, which was awarded First Place in Historical Fiction by the National Federation of Press Women. Donna lives and writes in Boise, Idaho. She has four adult children and 10 grandchildren. Her newest book, A Very Private Grave, will be released in 2010.
Shadow of Reality (Book One in the Elizabeth and Richard Mystery Series) Page 16