1 Death Pays the Rose Rent (23 page)

I was positive the answers I needed were to be found at the castle.

CHAPTER 23 

So far I hadn’t done a lot of good in proving Alice-Ann’s innocence. She was depending on me, and I was letting her down. I had to find the real murderer—and I had to do it soon!

It seemed that every time I came up with a likely suspect for Richard’s murder, there was no reason for that person to have killed the judge, and vice versa. LaVonna, I figured, was an innocent bystander who was killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the other two …there had to be a connection that I wasn’t aware of. Garnet had suggested the murders might not be connected. But then why the roses near both corpses?

I parked by the castle’s kitchen entrance and walked in without knocking. George was supervising several people busily chopping vegetables and didn’t look at all pleased to see me.

“Oh, no! Don’t tell me Fred’s on the loose again?”

“I won’t get in your way. I had promised LaVonna I’d help do some housecleaning. Now that she’s …gone, I figure I’m needed even more.”

He gestured somewhere over his left shoulder. “Cleaning supplies are in that closet. Keep out of the kitchen.”

“No problem,” I said cheerfully.

I grabbed a lamb’s-wool duster and the first few cans and bottles I saw, without paying attention to what they were, and headed up the stairs to the first floor. Good. No one in the front hall! I climbed the great staircase to the second floor for the first time.

I turned left, into the north wing, and opened the door closest to me. The room obviously had not been used in years. Same with the next. Puffs of dust rose from the hall carpet with every step I took.

The third room, I guessed, had been Michael’s since childhood. Built-in shelves contained such boyish treasures as a rock collection, trophies for swimming and football, and a photo of Michael and Garnet, about age fifteen, dressed in identical plaid shirts, holding a trout between them. Odd that the years had led those two boys in such different directions.

A silky white nightgown folded on the pillow was the only sign that the teenager had grown up and married a beautiful TV star.

Another door, and I found a room full of costumes and props. Several more doors and this was where the actors were staying. I backtracked and tiptoed across the gallery to the south wing. This was a little cleaner, as though people really lived here. I put my ear to the first door and, hearing nothing, took a chance and opened it. It was a nightmare of pink froufrou, from the silk-covered walls to the fluffy pink

canopy over the bed. Even the windows were covered with layers of pink chiffon, so the very air looked pink. It was every little girl’s dream bedroom, right down to the white French Provincial furniture, although I was pretty sure this was the real stuff and not the Sears catalog variety.

There was no doubt in my mind that this was Rose’s bedroom. I pulled open the drawers in the bedside table and dresser and did a perfunctory search through them. I didn’t expect to find any papers about the Edison project; no one ever claimed she was involved with it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see any papers at all, then I remembered she kept her desk in the library. I’d check it out when I went downstairs.

I continued opening doors until I found the room that had to be Sylvia’s.

Unlike Rose’s pink passion pit, Sylvia’s bedroom was furnished tastefully with walnut and mahogany antiques. A worn but still-beautiful Oriental rug lay on the floor, the original colors faded to soft, muted shades of rose, blue, and green. Because the room stood at the end of the hall, there were windows on three sides, gold draperies drawn back to allow light to stream through the leaded glass. A person could feel like a queen in such a room.

I hastily rummaged through the drawers of Sylvia’s bedside table and dresser, spent more time searching her desk. I had no idea what I was looking for, but it seemed to me if she and Richard had been doing research about Edison’s spirit communicator, there should be something about it in her desk.

There wasn’t.

The bottom drawer was full of old, used manila envelopes. The kind we save thinking we’ll use them someday, then never do. But underneath them, probably long forgotten, was an eight-by-ten folder full of yellowed typed pages. On the front someone had written in elegant script, The History of Rose Rent Day.

I opened it to the first page. And stared with bewilderment at what was typed there. It slowly dawned on me that the discovery of Edison’s invention had only been the catalyst that had led to the three murders. The real reason lay buried deep in the past.

I stuck the folder down the front of my slacks and tried to hide the bulge by letting my shirt hang out over my hips. It was time to take another look at Edison’s infernal machine.

To my great surprise, Rose was sitting at her desk in the library, writing in a small, red, leather-bound notebook.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as she closed the book and slipped it into the top drawer of the desk.

“What are you doing here?” I echoed idiotically. “I thought you’d be at the Rose Rent celebration.”

“I have far too much to do to get ready for the Mystery Dinner. And my health …”

I picked up on that. “That’s why I’m here. I came to help with the cleaning. I told LaVonna I would. And I knew you weren’t feeling well.”

“Funny,” she said wryly. “You don’t strike me as

the domestic type. But, thank you. Why don’t you start with the bathroom down the hall.”

Bathroomf Yufef

“Be happy to,” I said, forcing a smile. “Where is it?”

“To your left. Second door. And Tori, you’ll need more than furniture wax and silver polish to do it.”

“Right … I know that.” I headed down the hall to the bathroom, which had fixtures old enough to have been brought over from jolly old England when the castle was first built. It didn’t appear to have been cleaned since then, either. I stayed there, rubbing the faucets with a washcloth, until I heard Rose leave the library, waited a good five minutes to make sure she wasn’t coming back, then headed directly for her desk. I wanted to see what she’d written in that book.

The drawer was locked, but it had one of those old-fashioned keyholes, like the kind kids draw. When I was about eight, I’d discovered my parents kept a raunchy (at least I thought it was) sex manual locked in a nightstand. The key to my father’s desk had opened the nightstand as if it were made for it, and also just about everything else in the embassy that had an old-fashioned lock. I looked around, and sure enough, there was a glass-enclosed bookcase next to the fireplace, with a small brass key protruding from the lock, and sure enough, it opened the desk as if it were made for it.

I removed the book from the drawer, but before I had a chance to open it, the doorbell rang. I heard the tippy-tap of Rose’s feet heading down the stone corridor and the creak of the great door as she pulled it open. In a panic, I stuffed the little book down the front of my slacks, next to the folder I had stolen from Sylvia’s room. I managed to close the drawer, lock it, and put the key back in the bookcase before Rose appeared in the doorway accompanied by Briana.

“Finished with that bathroom already?” she asked me suspiciously. She walked over to the desk and tried the drawer. Apparently she was satisfied that I hadn’t opened it because she smiled graciously at me. “Would you be able to dust the front parlor?”

“Of course, but I just remembered I didn’t feed my cats this morning. I’ll be back in just a few minutes.”

I couldn’t wait to get out of there and look over my purloined material. I was almost certain that what I had taken from Rose’s desk was a diary, and I had the feeling it would explain a lot of what had been going on.

At Alice-Ann’s, in my room, I pulled the loot out of my pants and dropped it on the bed. I picked up Rose’s book first, and as I did, it fell open to a page near the center. What a disappointment. Instead of a diary full of secrets, it was only an appointment calendar. Under today’s date, it simply said Rose Rent Day and Mystery Dinner.

I flipped ahead. She had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for next week—probably what she’d been writing down when I barged into the library. I flipped backward. Under Thursday’s date, she had penciled in 5:00—Visit Ben Parker. The poor judge’s appointment with death!

The first time I’d been in the library, I’d seen the appointment book lying on Rose’s desk. She had probably kept it there for years—where anyone could have picked it up and looked through it. It slowly dawned on me that the murderer had probably seen that entry, preceded Rose to the judge’s house through the tunnels, waited there to hear what she told him, and then, after Rose left, killed him to keep him from telling anyone else what they had discussed. The fact that the murderer had taken the power nailer along meant the murder was most definitely premeditated.

I knew I should call Garnet and tell him of my suspicions.

I rang his office, but got “Hoop’s Garage.” The bored female voice on the other end had to be the teenage manicurist. He’d been in for a few minutes, she told me, but got a call and went out.

“I’m at Alice-Ann’s,” I told her. “Please have him call me as soon as possible.”

I sat in the kitchen, ate the Snickers bar, and waited. And waited. No call. I tried Hoop’s again. She would give him the message when and if he called in, and would I please stop phoning because she was very busy.

Alice-Ann and Mark came home, bursting with excitement and full of stories about their wonderful day. Garnet still didn’t call.

It didn’t occur to me until later that I never did get to examine Edison’s machine when I was in the library. In fact, I couldn’t even remember seeing it.

CHAPTER 24 

I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and had to admit the white Victorian gown was flattering.

While I waited for Alice-Ann and Mark to finish dressing for the Mystery Dinner, I wondered offhandedly if it was a smart thing to go to the castle tonight. I decided it would be wise to go, because Garnet was expecting me to be there, and if he didn’t get a chance to call me at Alice-Ann’s before it was time for us to leave, he would assume I was at the castle and go directly there. If he was late, at least I could keep an eye on the people I suspected of murder.

Almost time to go, and still no call. Alice-Ann and Mark came downstairs. The Rose Rent honoree’s face was twisted into a petulant sulk. “I hate it,” he cried, stamping on the floor with his little feet. “I look like a dweeb.”

He was dressed in short wool pants with suspenders, a once-white—now aged-yellow—shirt with a round collar, and a big red bow tied at his neck. On his feet were brown, high leather boots with buttons. He did indeed look like a dweeb.

“It’s traditional. Every MacKinstrie boy wears it on Rose Rent Day,” Alice-Ann told him, ending the argument right there.

I called Hoop’s one last time. A different woman answered. She was the night shift, and she hadn’t been told of my calls. Garnet had checked in once and was now over at the Civil War battlefield where some “soldiers” had drunk a little too much homemade moonshine and were attempting to reenact Pickett’s Charge against the medieval encampment in the next field. I explained I was going to be at the castle, and it was urgent that Garnet contact me.

“I’ll do my best,” she promised. “He’s got a beeper, but if things are really rowdy out there, it may be a while before he can get to a phone.”

We walked down the footpath to the castle. There must have been a hundred cars there. Most of them looked abandoned rather than parked. First in would definitely have to be last out.

The woman who admitted us into the castle looked vaguely familiar. “Hi. Remember me? I was at the station when you’uns came in on the bus.”

“Of course. Janet. It’s nice to see you’uns … I mean, you again.”

“I’m helping out tonight, since LaVonna …well, you know. I’m kinda scared. With all these murders, I don’t know if it’s safe to be here.”

“Don’t worry. There’s plenty of people around. Nothing’s going to happen.”

I certainly hoped I wasn’t lying!

Almost everyone had shown up at the castle in costume. Most wore Victorian garb, but some wore

the earlier clothes of the pioneers, and a few were in Civil War uniforms, both armies represented.

Michael approached me as soon as I walked in. He was dressed in white tie and tails and looked stunning. He lifted my hand to his lips as he bowed to me.

“My heroine! I’ve great news. The Smithsonian already has found a person who is willing to buy Sylvia’s Star from us and donate it to the museum. The jewel will be on display for everyone in the world to enjoy, and Silverthorne is saved.”

“I’m thrilled for you, Michael. I hope you put that necklace in a safe place. You don’t want it to get lost for another hundred years.”

“Don’t worry. It’s in a box at the Old LCNB.”

“Old LCNB?”

“Old Lickin Creek National Bank. Sorry, I keep forgetting you’re not a native. It seems as though you’ve always been here.”

Several guests had been listening to us and were saying things to me like ooh and aah and weren’t you brave. I was thoroughly enjoying every bit of it when the spell was broken by the arrival of a man in a trench coat and a brown fedora.

His hands were trembling, and perspiration beaded his upper lip. “Michael,” he said. “Problem. The countess can’t find her gun.”

“She had it at rehearsal. Where did she leave it?”

“She said she put it back in the prop room.”

Michael sighed and grinned at me. “Something always goes wrong on opening night.” To Trench Coat he said, “She’ll just have to improvise. Get her a knife.”

“But I’m supposed to accuse her of murder because she’s holding a smoking gun. Whoever heard of a smoking knife?”

“Shit!” Michael muttered, and hurried off.

Alice-Ann and I helped ourselves to champagne, and Mark ran off to join a small group of children.

Father Burkholder walked in, spotted us, and came over. “Sorry I’m late. The traffic is unbelievable. I think everyone in southern Pennsylvania is heading into Lickin Creek tonight.” He grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

“What on earth for? Certainly they can’t all be interested in a medieval jousting match,” I said.

“Don’t forget the Monster Tractor Pull. That always draws a big crowd,” Alice-Ann put in.

“Just what is a tractor pull?” I asked.

“Farmers hook their tractors up to sleds weighted down with heavy objects and pull them,” Father Burkholder told me. “The tractor that pulls the heaviest load the farthest is the winner. Obviously.”

I shook my head. What a strange place this was!

Another waiter, dressed in an impeccable black tuxedo, came by bearing a tray of fluted champagne glasses. I put my empty glass down and took another, and as I did, he leaned close to the three of us and whispered, “Did you hear the countess was seen kissing the ambassador in the library?”

“Huh?” was my intelligent response.

He was already serving someone else, and I noticed he whispered a message to them also.

A hand touched my shoulder, ever so lightly. I jumped a mile and turned to find myself nose to nose with Praxythea.

“You startled me,” I gasped, heart pounding.

“Where’s Garnet? I need to—” she began. But she didn’t have a chance to finish because Sylvia descended upon us, a Valkyrie without her spear.

“Praxythea, I need your help.” She took Praxythea’s arm and they sailed away in a cloud of Bellodgia.

What was that all about? I wondered. I took a sip of my wine, and a maid in a Victorian servant’s uniform—long black dress and white apron—appeared before me with a platter of hors d’oeuvres. I helped myself to some caviar on toast and heard her say, sotto voce, “The detective is not what he appears to be.”

I thought for a second she meant Garnet, then I got it. “It’s part of the play.”

“Brilliant deduction,” Alice-Ann said.

A woman in a Jean Harlow-style skintight white dress slinked up to us, tapped Father Burkholder with her white-feather fan, and told him that the Orient Express was late in arriving.

I caught her arm before she had a chance to ooze toward the next couple. “What’s the point of all this?” I asked her.

She looked shocked but stepped out of character for a minute. “We talk about the different characters to each group of people, dropping clues that will help you solve the murder later on.”

“What murder?”

“The murder that’s going to take place during din-

ner. Then each table will discuss the clues they saw and heard and will write the name of the murderer and his motive on a piece of paper. The winning table gets a prize.”

“I remember now. A season’s ticket to the Whispering Pines Summer Theatre.”

“Toodle-oo,” she said, tickling the priest’s nose with her feathers. She was back in character.

It was an absolutely bizarre situation. Here we were up to our necks in real murders, and a bunch of fruit loops were running around pretending murder was fun. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, but what I really planned to do was look in the library to see if the Edison machine was still there.

I barged into the room and surprised Sylvia and Rose, who were engaged in a quiet but intense conversation. The sisters stared at me like panicked rabbits. As usual, Rose was wearing something pink, and Sylvia was in her black mourning gown.

⁴
’Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize there was anyone in here.”

“We’re quite finished. Aren’t we, Rose?”

Rose nodded. Her eyes and nose were red, as if she had been crying.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” I said to Sylvia. “I thought the doctor might keep you in the clinic overnight.”

“He ordered me put on an IV, but I had too much to do here, so I called Uriah’s Heap and came home. It was really just exhaustion, my dear. Rose Rent Day always takes so much out of me. I feel fine now.”

I glanced quickly around the room. No black box in sight. “Did either of you see where Garnet put the Edison machine?” Both shook their heads.

“Haven’t seen it since you dragged it out of the basement,” Sylvia snapped. Rose blinked. They left the room together but went in opposite directions when they reached the hallway.

I checked every corner, but the box I’d risked my life for was gone. Maybe Garnet had taken it with him, I hoped, but doubted it, since he didn’t really think it was anything other than a curiosity.

Chimes rang out, the signal that dinner was ready. I picked up the telephone in the hall and tried to call Garnet again. As far as the receptionist at Hoop’s knew, he was still out at the battlefield, and she was still trying to beep him. I told her it was a matter of life and death. She didn’t sound impressed, but promised to keep trying.

I walked into the ballroom, studied the seating chart, and located my table. I joined the mayor, the Seligmans, Alice-Ann and Mark, and three people I hadn’t met before. It turned out they were all winners of some of the day’s special events. The owner of a two-headed snake was proudly displaying her pet’s first-place medal. I prayed she didn’t have her pet with her, too. The two muscle-bound young men were the winners of the bed race, having represented the Old LCNB in that competition. They were both from the accounting department, and conversation with them was as fascinating as watching an industrial training film. I was just thankful that the teenage winners of the skateboard race were seated elsewhere.

I sipped champagne and looked around to see who else was there. Twanya Tweedy, looking virginal in a white dress similar to mine, was seated on the other side of the room. Tactful planning by someone! She was having a lively conversation with a good-looking Union officer—the king was dead, long live the king!

The Thorne sisters were at a table near the entrance to the front hall. Rose looked upset. Sylvia, pale and fidgety. Seated with them was Praxythea in a black dress she’d spray-painted on.

At another table, Maggie, the librarian, waved at me. The nice-looking man on her right must have been her fiance. Dr. Meredith Jones was there, of course, positioned where he could keep an eye on his favorite patient, Alice-Ann. His dinner companion was the editor, publisher, reporter, etc., of the lickin Creek Chronicle. She nodded graciously in my direction and coughed.

To give the waiters credit, they kept the wine flowing, and I was having trouble concentrating on the confusing, complicated mystery plot. The pretend one, not the real one. People in strange costumes kept appearing, making dramatic speeches or bursting into tears or threatening to kill themselves or someone else.

Michael was apparently the comic relief, showing up every few minutes in a different costume, starting with a Lawrence of Arabia outfit, and most strangely, during the shrimp-cocktail course, wearing a pink satin negligee and what must have been one of his mother’s Lucille Ball wigs. I don’t know if it was his intent, but he looked a lot like Rose.

In a loud “intimate” conversation with a bespectacled man, Michael explained he was a princess from a Balkan country who needed to marry for money before her country was sold to a Japanese businessman for a ski resort. Everyone laughed a lot as he swished around the room, so I suppose it was funny.

Suddenly a shot rang out, and you could hear silverware dropping all over the room. A moment later we heard a woman’s scream from the great front hall.

Everyone at our table jumped up with much excitement, Not me. I took another tiny sip of wine and told Alice-Ann, “Some guy gets shot by the countess and rolls down the steps. I watched the rehearsal.”

But it was happening differently this time. The woman who ran into the dining room, screaming, was not the French maid in her skimpy costume, but Janet in her sensible shoes and plain dress.

“Help, someone, please. There’s a dead body in the hall.” She sounded convincingly panic-stricken.

Everyone laughed and clapped, and about half the people in the room followed the trench-coated detective into the hall. The rest stayed behind to eat.

“Let’s go see,” Alice-Ann suggested. Mark didn’t want to, so she and I went together to watch the show in the hall. I couldn’t see a thing over the heads of the people in front of me, so I took Alice-Ann’s hand and we weaved our way to the front, where we saw a woman, dressed in pink, lying facedown in a pool of blood. Her bright red wig was slightly askew.