Christietown

by Susan Kandel

  All eyes—that would be ten sets of two—turned his way.

  “Welcome friends and mystery lovers! I am your host, Ian Christie.”

  “Is he actually related?” whispered Dot.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Please find seats in the circle while you can,” Ian said with a fluttering motion of his hands.

  Everyone looked back. The circle was vast in diameter. Unless a busload of seniors arrived in the next few minutes, seats were not going to be a problem. While Ian nattered on from the podium, I quietly removed a dozen chairs from the circle and pushed the remaining ones closer together. The burly man in the green warm-up suit helped me move half a dozen more. We put the extras in the kitchen.

  Dot sat herself nearest the fire. The others, several of whom were using walkers, moved slowly. Once everyone was seated, Dot raised her hand. Still wounded by her rejection, Ian tried not to notice her, which worked until she started waving her

  knitting needles in a menacing fashion.

  “Yes?” Ian said, ever wary of a lawsuit.

  “I’d like to go first, if that’s all right,” said Dot.

  “Works for me!” shouted the burly man.

  The idea, Ian explained for the benefit of the uninitiated, was that somebody in the group would spin a mystery yarn, ripped from the headlines or invented whole cloth, and the others would attempt to unravel it. And yes, Dot could go first.

  She cleared her throat and the others leaned forward in anticipation. Turned out she was like Scheherazade. Her audience listened intently as she spun a labyrinthine tale involving the heist of an armored car, a shootout between rival gangs, and the kidnapping of the no-good son of a deposed mob boss. When she got to the part about the Baccarat crystal chandelier in the $2,000-per-night Las Vegas hotel suite crashing to the floor, it was time.

  I doubled over coughing, and slipped into the night.

  CHAPTER 17

  irst things first. I consulted my glow-in-the-dark Swatch watch, which I’d won at a West Hollywood Bastille Day Fair for guessing how many condoms were in the jar. The watch was ugly, with a green-and-brown Eiffel Tower on the face, but it kept perfect time.

  Five minutes past eight.

  I had half an hour max before Dot sent a squad car to find me, or, worse yet, came looking for me herself. I needed to get to the Vicarage as fast as possible and didn’t want to be spotted. I decided to bypass the brightly lit streets of Sittaford 2 in favor of the empty field just past Lansham Road, where the last of the Phase 2 houses were still being built. Nobody was going to see me out there, with the possible exception of a bobcat. And bobcats weren’t interested in large mammals in vintage orange-patent-leather Courrèges coats. They were interested in rodents.

  The moon was no more than a sliver in the sky, the stars as tiny as pinpricks. They say it takes five minutes for your eyes to adjust to darkness once you get away from the white lights, but I wasn’t sure about that. It was 8:11 now and I couldn’t see a thing, unless you counted the half-framed houses, which looked like something left over from a fire. Some vaguely hulking forms in the middle of the street turned out to be cement mixers, abandoned for the night. I thought about climbing aboard one, but the good citizen in me prevailed.

  The newly paved sidewalks were littered with construction debris. I did my best to steer clear of broken glass and stray ball valves. As I crossed from one side of the street to the other, a shaft of moonlight illuminated what looked like a key, just in front of an overflowing Dumpster. A key! Agatha Christie loved keys. They always turned out to be important clues. When I bent down to pick it up, however, it turned out to be nothing but a rusted piece of metal. I tossed it into the Dumpster, disappointed at having found nothing instead of something.

  By the time I left Lansham Road, my eyes had begun to adjust. I could see the clumps of lupine and prince’s feather growing wild in the foothills. The Kitanemuk Indians had once roamed those hills, hunting for berries, feasting on brown snakes. But that was hundreds of years ago—before the missions, before the stagecoach, before the railroad, before Christietown, before Dusk Ridge Ranch.

  Now the vacant field lay before me, a barren stretch of weeds and gnarled roots. I kept moving, ignoring the pebbles that had lodged themselves in my shoes and were cutting into my feet with every step. I checked my watch again: 8:14. I started running. Almost there. I briefly stumbled over something—a blown-out tire? a rusted steel sprocket? a dead rat? But I caught my balance, sighing in relief when I saw the lights of the Vicarage parking lot just ahead.

  Then I heard the dead leaves rustling behind me.

  CHAPTER 18

  gatha gazed outside her window. The Hydropathic’s elderly gardener was raking the dead leaves. There were three boys playing nearby, biding their time until the poor man turned his back and they could dive headfirst into the pile, spoiling his hard work.

  The thing about people was that they were always testing you. They wanted to know how far they could push you. But the gardener was too smart. He was watching the boys out of the corner of his eye. And he was the one holding the rake.

  Agatha opened the window. The air was cold, but sweet. She closed her eyes for a moment, then turned over the sheet of paper in front of her and began writing.

  The words came easily. But then they always had, even that first time, ten years ago now, when she’d holed up for two weeks at the Moorland Hotel at Hay Tor, on Dartmoor. That time, it had been her sister, Madge, who had tested her.

  “I bet you can’t write one in which I can’t guess the ending,” Madge had taunted. Oh, but Agatha knew she could. She would write all morning, until her hand ached from the strain. Then she’d have lunch, read a book, go out for a walk on the moor. She’d learned to love the moor in those days—the tors, the heather, the wild part of it away from the roads. As she walked she’d talk to herself, enacting the chapter she was next going to write.

  The moor was haunted. There was the place where the Coffin Stone lay, cleft in two by a thunderbolt, forming the sign of a cross. Dartmoor was often struck by lightning. Unusual terrestrial magnetism, so science explained it. But legend explained better than science why clocks and watches ran backward on arriving there.

  Her favorite spot was in the highlands, at the foot of Mount Tor, where a ridge of stones, the granite hounds, could be heard baying at twilight, warning that the shadow of death was hanging over some moorland dweller. Conan Doyle had surely had that spot in mind when he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles: “The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm.”

  Conan Doyle was such a brilliant man. But she’d come up with something all her own.

  The broken coffee cup.

  The stain on the carpet.

  The candle grease on the floor.

  The burned pieces of paper in the fireplace.

  A lost key.

  The homely details.

  The family squabbles.

  And a Belgian detective whose head was shaped like an egg.

  Madge had dared Agatha to write a detective story and she’d done it. The book had been accepted and would appear in print. There, as far as she’d been concerned, the matter had ended. At that moment, she hadn’t envisaged writing anything ever again.

  But life steers its own course.

  The boys outside were whooping and shouting now.

  Agatha watched with satisfaction as the gardener escorted them back inside, his pile of leaves untouched.

  Archie had tested her, too.

  Poor man hadn’t understood she could be pushed only so far.

  CHAPTER 19

  stopped in my tracks—not moving, not breathing.

  The wind howled. An owl hooted.

  “Who’s there?” I called, the words catching in my throat.

  Silence hung on the trees like a lead weight.

  I turned around slowly. “Is anyone out there?”

  The
re was no answer. It was so dark, so cold. My legs were shaking, my heart pounding, my palms sweating. This is crazy, I thought. Just my overactive imagination.

  But then I heard it again.

  Someone was out here. Someone was following me.

  I whipped my head around in time to see him emerge from the shadows. The moonlight illuminated his eyes, which were hard. I saw something glint in his hand, and as I opened my mouth to scream he raised it and pointed it at me, and then everything dissolved into a hot white circle of light.

  And she lives to tell the tale.

  Oh, man. I put my hand up to shield my eyes. “Would you mind turning that flashlight off?” I asked, embarrassed.

  “You fucking bet I’d mind,” the man replied. “This is private property and you’re trespassing.”

  I recognized the accent: Dov Pick. The devil you know.

  “I’m an employee,” I said.

  Dov lowered the flashlight and looked me in the eye. “You sure about that?”

  “Well, I actually work for Ian. You saw me the other day, in the Vicarage. Don’t you remember?”

  He squinted at me. “No.”

  Flatterer. “You and Ian were having a sort of misunderstanding. Does that ring any bells?”

  “No.” He pulled a cell phone out of the pocket of his jeans. Shoot. He was calling Ian. I started babbling incoherently, which at the time seemed like a plan.

  “Who’d have guessed you liked to hang out at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Sunset? I go there all the time! I’m addicted to the iced blendeds with extra whipped cream.” Apparently, I couldn’t stop myself. “Did anyone ever tell you you look like Omar Sharif?”

  Dov hung up the phone.

  “Real estate is absolutely fascinating,” I continued without taking a breath. “My cousin is a broker. He failed the test six times. His first sale was to my aunt. A condo in Leisure World. Agatha Christie was obsessed with buying and selling houses, did you know that?”

  He put up his hands. “Okay, okay. I surrender. You can stop now. I remember you.”

  “Thank goodness. I’m exhausted.”

  He did something with his mouth, which may or may not have been a smile. “But you still haven’t explained what you’re doing out here in the middle of the night. It’s dangerous.”

  You’re telling me. “I had an errand to run.”

  “What?”

  He was relentless. “Ian needed me . . . to find a lost key.” That piece of metal I’d just seen by the Dumpster. It was the first thing that came to mind. Too bad.

  “God damn it,” he yelled, shaking his fist. “This is the shit I can’t believe. After I told him, and told him! Jesus, that stupid piece of—”

  “I didn’t find it,” I blurted out. “I looked for that key everywhere.” Whatever you say. Just don’t shoot me with your flashlight.

  “Where’d that dickbrain tell you to look?” There was no mistaking Dov’s frown. His entire forehead crumpled, making a beeline straight for his nose.

  “Nowhere. I don’t know.”

  Dov grabbed my arm and started walking me in the direction of the Vicarage. That could’ve been a good thing. It was where I wanted to go anyway. Only I was supposed to be alone, not alone with a man known as the Icepick.

  Inside, the air-conditioning was up full blast.

  “Assholes think I’m made of money,” muttered Dov, flicking the switch to Off. Still holding on to my arm, he marched us past the scale model of Phase 2, past the wall-to-wall plasma screens showing imaginary Christietownspeople enjoying riotous good times in the as-yet-unbuilt Victorian-themed music hall, past the desk where Ian’s assistant sat, into Ian’s office. It smelled awful, thanks to a dying hydrangea swathed in green foil with a card sticking out of the dirt reading, “Good Luck!” I needed it. Dov kicked the door shut, then sat me in the upholstered swivel chair and spun me around so I was facing him. He could’ve used a shave.

  “About that key,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Tell me your name again.”

  “Cece Caruso.”

  “Cece, you are going to forget you ever heard about it. Do I make myself clear?”

  I bit my lower lip involuntarily. “Crystal clear.”

  “Thatta girl,” he said, patting my thigh. Then his cell phone rang. This had to be Ian. And Dov was going to tell Ian that he had me sitting here and how angry he was that Ian had sent me to look for the key, which of course Ian had not because there was no key. No key that I knew about, at least. As Dov stood to take the call, I sprang up from the chair with every intention of getting out of there, but then I remembered that I was in Ian’s office because I was hoping to find something incriminating about these people’s business operations, and how was I going to do that if I left? So I sat back down while my captor, ear glued to the phone, became increasingly agitated. After a few minutes of mute scowling, he flung open the office door, stormed into the hallway, slammed the door shut behind him, and started yelling at the top of his lungs in what sounded like Hebrew.

  As far as I knew, Ian Christie didn’t speak Hebrew.

  That was a positive.

  Still, I had to hurry. Dov wasn’t going to leave me alone with the family jewels forever. Hands trembling, I eased open the top drawer of Ian’s desk. It contained several file folders. The top one was marked “Browning McDuff.” Inside were miscellaneous invoices. Screens. Fire extinguishers. Lumber. Not very interesting. Another envelope marked “Petty Cash.” A bottle of pills. Viagra, speaking of the family jewels. Another folder containing bills of sale for the Sittaford residences. I stopped to listen. Dov was still screaming, so I started flipping through them, but the tiny numbers and letters were impossible to decipher under this kind of pressure. Also, my contacts were dirty. Also, I had no idea what I was looking for. Shit. Dov had hung up. He was coming back. I shoved the folders back in the drawer and, desperate for something—anything—to take away from this whole sordid experience, grabbed the small stack of pink “While You Were Out” slips sitting on the top of Ian’s very full trash can and shoved them in my purse—this, at the very moment Dov was opening the door.

  “You’re back!” I said like a lunatic.

  Dov walked toward me, stroking his stubble, taking his time, as cool as a cucumber. I was sweating bullets. “Orange,” he finally said, “is a good color on you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, mentally calculating the distance from the chair to the door.

  He stepped closer. “Not everybody can wear orange.”

  “Correct,” I said. “Tough color.”

  He looked at me some more.

  “I can’t wear beige,” I stammered.

  He circled around me, stopping where he started. “I hope you don’t mind me telling you that you’re a good-looking woman.”

  My bad karma had finally caught up with me. The Icepick didn’t want to kill me. He wanted to have his way with me.

  “Thank you, but I’m engaged.” I showed him the emerald ring Gambino had given me as proof.

  He took my hand in his. “A woman like you should have a bigger ring.” He squeezed, too hard.

  “I did, the last time,” I said, pulling my hand back. “It didn’t make any difference.”

  He spoke slowly, like he was talking to a child. “That’s because it wasn’t big enough.”

  And then his phone was ringing again, and the screaming started again, and he was pacing the room like a caged tiger, and suddenly I didn’t matter anymore. Gingerly, I got up from the chair and, as I made my way toward the door, he stepped aside to let me pass.

  Our bodies touched slightly, but as if by mutual agreement, our eyes didn’t meet.

  CHAPTER 20

  slipped back into the Blue Boar and took my seat as

  unobtrusively as I could.

  “You okay?” whispered Dot.

  Not really. As if Dov wasn’t bad enough, the “While You Were Out” slips were a wash. Ian’s mother was as bad as mine, calling day and nigh
t. His shirts were ready at the dry cleaner’s. His gym membership was about to expire. The Agatha Christie memorabilia he was interested in would be available after two on Friday at a store on Sunset Boulevard.

  “Cece?” Dot’s voice was low. “Where were you all this time?”

  I pointed to my tummy.

  “You’re pregnant!” she exclaimed. “How wonderful!”

  All heads turned my way.

  “I’m not—“

  “Congratulations!” said an elderly woman, clapping her hands.

  The burly man wagged his finger and said, “You should be sitting down, young lady.”

  Dot said, “That is so adorable. You and your—”

  “I am not pregnant!” I broke in. Then, in a quieter voice, “I have indigestion.”

  Everyone looked disappointed, and vaguely disgusted.

  “I think that about wraps it up,” said Ian, scowling at me. “See everybody next week. And thank you for coming. We will be having many more such events. Concerts, performances, book groups. Life at Christietown will never be dull, I assure you!”

  Dot stood up and linked arms with a large, middle-aged woman standing next to her. She reminded me of a Slavic Jackie Collins. Naturally, she, too, was wearing a warm-up suit, only hers was fully loaded: fringe, studs, designer insignia, shoulder pads. Her frosted mane complemented her pale snakeskin boots.

  “No worries, dear,” said the woman, taking big steps toward me. “There’ll be other babies. Let me introduce myself. I’m Silvana Holtzman. Formerly of Farmer’s Insurance, currently self-employed. And you’re Cece.” She stuck out her hand. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to shake it or admire her nails, which were long and bejeweled. I shook—carefully. “You and Dot are coming to my place for a nightcap, and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  The theme of the evening.

  “Cece?” queried Dot. “Do we have time?”

  I owed her. We headed outside, where Ian, juggling a copy of Burke’s Peerage and a Lladro figurine of an English bulldog, cut us off at the pass. I knew that he was desperate to get Dot back to the office, so I took him aside and told him she wasn’t the type to go for the hard sell.