5 Murder by Syllabub (17 page)

W
e hurried down the road, only, where was the yard light? The moon was bright enough to show a bundle of some kind crumpled by the barn door. Not Mildred. Please, God, not Mildred. The only sounds were Aunt Mary’s footsteps ahead of me and a car engine. A car engine? I came to an abrupt halt and listened. No mistake. That was a car. Where was it? Lights. There should be lights, but I couldn’t see any. An engine engaged and tires crunched, faint but definite. Could it be Noah? There were no lights down by his house, either, and the moon was bright enough to reflect on a car, if one was there. Nothing. No movement. No reflection off metal. No sound.

“Ellen, hurry.”

The bundle was Mildred. Elizabeth kneeled by her crumpled figure in front of the barn. Max was poised over her, whining softly. Cora Lee stood beside him.

“Do you have your phone?” Elizabeth’s face was white in the moonlight. Or maybe it was shock that gave it that pale, ghostly look. “Good. Give it to me. We need an ambulance. It looks like someone hit her good with something. There’s blood all over the side of her head.”

“How bad is it?”

“I don’t know. Nine-one-one?
” Elizabeth moved toward the barn while she made her call.

“We should try to stop the bleeding.” Aunt Mary knelt beside Mildred’s body and picked up her hand, feeling for her pulse. “She’s got one. That’s about all I can tell.”

“That’s more than I could do.” Cora Lee was literally wringing her hands. “I think Noah keeps a first aid kit in the barn.” She was gone.

Lights went on. Cora Lee might not know where Noah kept the first aid kit, but she found the light switch. Blood still seeped from the side of Mildred’s head and from her ear. I saw a gash, but barely. Too much blood and bloody hair. “Should you try to push her hair back?”

“I don’t know.” Aunt Mary looked back toward the door of the barn. “Where’s Cora Lee? The blood’s more oozing than rushing. I think that’s a good sign.” She laid her hand on Mildred’s chest. “A breath. Shallow, but still, her chest’s moving.” Max edged as close to her as he could, watching Aunt Mary’s every move. He nudged her hand with his nose, as if to say,
Do something
. She reached over and touched him on the ears. “I’m trying, Max. I just don’t know what else to do.”

“How is she?” Elizabeth knelt down beside Aunt Mary. “The ambulance
is on its way, but it’ll take a few minutes. They said if the bleeding is real bad to try to put a compress on to stop it. I don’t know what to use.”

“Cora Lee went into the barn to find a first aid kit.” I started toward the barn. At least it was something to do. I met her coming out, holding a white box with a red cross on top.

“Give it to Aunt Mary.” I continued on into the barn. Something was lying on the dirt not too far from the grain sacks. I walked closer. A spade. The kind with the sharp sides and the pointed end. Noah would never leave a spade in the dirt. He wouldn’t leave one with blood on the blade either. I stared at it then back at Mildred, lying also on the dirt. I’d found the weapon.

I walked back out to where Mildred lay but said nothing. Aunt Mary took out a big gauze square. She tore a package open and held the pad against Mildred’s wound. It immediately filled with blood. She pushed down a little. More blood filled the pad. The flow slowed under her fingers. “Press firmly. I read that somewhere. It seems to be working.”

“Is she going to be all right?” Cora Lee’s knuckles were white as she clutched her cane. So was her face.

“I don’t know.” Mary’s fingers pushed down a little more firmly. The gauze wasn’t going to absorb much more blood.

“Should you try and put on another one?” I was already holding a new pad.

“The blood flow seems to have stopped. At least it’s down to a trickle. I’d better keep doing what I’m doing until someone who can really help gets here.”

I wasn’t so sure the blood stopping was a good thing. How did we find out if her heart was still beating? The only way I could think of was to put my ear on her chest. Somehow that didn’t seem like a good idea.

“Who could have done such a thing?” Elizabeth clutched the phone while she watched Aunt Mary hold the gauze in place. “If I ever get my hands on whoever it is that’s terrorizing us, I’ll
… I think I’d better call Noah. Hope he doesn’t have his cell turned off.”

“Right now I’m not so interested in
who
it is as
where
he is.” Cora Lee kept looking around as if she expected someone to jump out of the barn and attack at any minute.

“Whoever it was left.”

Cora Lee snapped around to stare at me. Elizabeth, who’d started to enter Noah’s number on my phone, stopped. “How do you know that?”

“I heard a car drive away.”

“A car?” Elizabeth looked around as if she expected one to drive up any minute. “What car?”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if it was behind the barn, but it couldn’t have been. We’d have seen it.”

“Are you sure?” Cora Lee asked.

“Quite sure.”

Aunt Mary adjusted the bandage a little. That ambulance had better hurry up. Mildred’s breathing sounded raspy and I didn’t think that was a good sign.

“There aren’t any other roads.” Cora Lee leaned heavily on her cane, glanc
ing back and forth from the barn to Mildred. “The road through the main gate goes by our houses and down to this barn and the other outbuildings. There’s a driveway off the highway that leads to Noah and Mildred’s house, but it ends there.” Barn forgotten, her eyes were fixed on Mildred and Aunt Mary’s hand. A shudder ran through her, strong enough so that her cane shook. “This has got to stop. Mildred. Why would anyone want to hurt her? I can’t believe all this. First Elizabeth and that crate, then Monty dead in our dining room. Now this.”

I thought Cora Lee was going to burst into tears. She better not. I couldn’t handle a case of hysterics right now. Where was Elizabeth? She seemed to have taken root as she, too, stared at Mildred, hopelessness and despair
written on her face. Mary reached into the first aid kit and took out another gauze square. “One of you needs to open this for me. Hurry. This one’s not going to absorb much more blood.”

I tried to hand her the one I held but she shook her head. I got it. Maybe doing something would shake some life back into Elizabeth and keep Cora Lee from dissolving into mush. It was Elizabeth who tore the paper off the square and handed it to Aunt Mary.

“Are you going to take the other one off?”

“No. I’m afraid to. I’ll just slip this one on top. The bleeding’s slowed down a lot, but I don’t like the way she’s breathing. I hope that ambulance hurries.”

A shrill ambulance siren split the silence. Help had arrived, and it was coming in through the main gate.

A
unt Mary and I sat in the hospital waiting room staring uncomprehendingly at the television screen mounted in the corner. Elizabeth had gone in search of coffee and I had no idea where Cora Lee was.

Mildred had already been admitted when we finally got there. Noah had turned off his cell but Elizabeth found him and his fiancée, Felicity, eating dinner at the second place she tried. Felicity was on staff but had the night off. She, evidently, put herself back on. Noah paused only long enough to ask about the dogs. When we assured him they were locked in Elizabeth’s house, he nodded and disappeared down the hall.

Aunt Mary sighed deeply. “I feel out of my depth and I don’t like it. If we were in Santa Louisa, I’d know exactly what was going on because I’d be acquainted with almost everyone in the hospital. Here, we only know Elizabeth. And Cora Lee, of course.”

I wasn’t at all sure we knew Cora Lee. I couldn’t quite figure her out. One minute she seemed devoted to Elizabeth, the next resentful and angry. She acted as if Smithwood was hers and seemed to have no plans to return to her life in Atlanta. Only, Noah had said she couldn’t inherit and neither could her children. Why? I thought again about Monty. He wanted Smithwood
, but only in order to turn it over to a developer. Was the thought of condos replacing her childhood home so upsetting to Cora Lee that she’d resorted to murder? She might not own it, but there was no doubt she loved Smithwood and everything in it. Did she, too, think Monty would get his talons into the estate and destroy it? Sell off all the old family treasures? The time fit. Maybe it was Cora Lee who’d entertained Monty in the dining room, gone back over to Elizabeth’s house—leaving Monty dead on the rug—calmly washed out the glass and put it in the dishwasher, then turned on the TV and waited. Only, Cora Lee hadn’t been the one holding the candle we’d seen, and Cora Lee hadn’t attacked Mildred or driven the mysterious car I’d heard. I sighed and glanced at the TV. Fox news. I never watched that channel. The sound was so low you couldn’t hear a thing, but I watched for a minute. There was no sign Fox had picked up another attempted murder at the Smithwood place. I hoped it stayed that way.

Elizabeth sank into the chair beside Aunt Mary and handed each of us a white paper cup with what looked and smelled like hot mud.

“Sorry. It was all I could find.” She peered into her cup, took a tentative sip and shuddered.

Aunt Mary looked into hers and set it on the floor beside her. I held mine. It was warm and for some reason my hands were cold.

“Has anyone come out?”

“No. No one. I think she’ll be all right.” I thought about the wound and the spade I’d seen and hoped I was right.

“Unless it cracked her skull.” Elizabeth’s mouth was set in a straight line and her eyes seemed suspiciously wet. “Oh, shit.” A man turned the corner at the end of the hall, striding purposefully toward us. “Just what we need.”

Aunt Mary peered down the corridor. She didn’t have her glasses on and didn’t seem too sure until he got closer. She stiffened. “McMann. We could have done without him.”

Lt. McMann stopped abruptly. He loomed over us, scowling down like an irate principal about to berate naughty third graders.

He’d picked the wrong ones. Elizabeth had faced down lumberjacks with chainsaws, and Aunt Mary had spent years with
seventh graders whose only mission in life was to make adults miserable. Lt. McMann didn’t stand a chance. We stared back at him.

He took one step back and his face softened. “How is Mrs. Longo?”

The ice in Elizabeth’s voice practically clinked. “We don’t know yet, but Mary thinks she’s going to be all right.”

Lt. McMann didn’t need words to let us know he didn’t think Aunt Mary could diagnose a common cold, but he seemed bent on being polite. At least, for now. “Mind if I sit?”

Nobody objected so he pulled up a chair and sat facing us.

“Want to tell me what happened?”

Aunt Mary and Elizabeth looked at each other, then at me. That seemed like a reasonable thing for a policeman to ask. I nodded. Elizabeth started.

“We finished dinner and Mildred headed home. She had school early tomorrow.” She glanced over at Aunt Mary. “It is still Sunday, isn’t it?”

“Barely.” She nodded for her to go on.

“Max went with her.”

“Who’s Max?” The lieutenant lifted his head and his eyes narrowed. Now we’re getting somewhere, he seemed to say.

“Noah’s Golden Retriever.”

“Oh.” Interest died. “Go on.”

“We were talking when we heard Petal barking, a frantic kind of bark, and then Max barked and we heard a scream.” She stopped, as if there wasn’t any more to say.

Lt. McMann didn’t agree. “Then what did you do?”

“We ran out, of course. Ellen brought her cellphone.”

“Cora Lee brought her cane.”

“The same things you brought when you found Monty.”

Aunt Mary nodded.

Lt. McMann sighed. “Where’s Cora Lee now?”

“I don’t know.” Elizabeth looked around. “Do you know, Mary?”

“She went down that corridor after we got here. She didn’t say where she was going. I didn’t ask.”

“Of course not.” The corner of Lt. McMann’s left eye twitched. “So you ran down to the barn. Then what?”

“Mildred was lying in front of the barn door. Max stood over her.”

“Go on.”

“I took Ellen’s phone and called nine-one-one.”

“Anything else?” The lieutenant seemed to be gritting his teeth. We were making him work for every detail. Pleasant as it might be to make his life difficult, I wanted this investigation to move right along. One man dead, one woman attacked. Where was it going to end? I didn’t have much confidence in McMann’s ability, or his desire, to get to the bottom of this. However, he was all we had. “The barn lights were off when we got there.”

Lt. McMann blinked. “Don’t you usually turn them off at night?”

I studied him. He had actually asked a polite question and was waiting for an answer. “I went down to the barn earlier, to talk to Noah. He turned them on for me when I went back up to the house and said he’d leave them on for his mother.”

“So you think
they were turned off by someone else down there, the same someone who hit Mrs. Longo alongside the head. Is that what you’re telling me?”

It was Aunt Mary who finally answered. “It would seem that way, wouldn’t it?”

Lt. McMann’s neck started to redden and blotches crept up his cheeks. Embarrassment? More likely temper. He was proving to be a most disagreeable man. “Ladies, it’d help if I didn’t have to drag every syllable out of you. Mrs. Longo is your friend. Don’t you want to help find who did this?”

He was right. He might be a disagreeable person and I might not like him or even trust him very much, but he was the police.

I sighed. “Cora Lee went into the barn and turned on the lights. She found the first aid kit Noah keeps down there and Aunt Mary put a compress on Mildred’s wound to stop the bleeding until the emergency people got there.” I paused. “There was a spade lying in the dirt beside the grain sacks. It had blood on it.”

McMann didn’t say anything, just stared at me. Finally, he gave one nod. “We found it. Did you see anything? Hear anything? See any signs of where whoever did this went?”

Once more Aunt Mary and Elizabeth exchanged looks. Aunt Mary turned toward me. “Tell him.”

“Tell me what?”

He wasn’t going to believe this. “I heard a car.”

“A car.”

“It sounded as if it was behind the barn, only there’s no road there.”

“Did you see it?” There was an odd expression on Lt. McMann’s face. Surprise seemed to change to thoughtfulness. Not disbelief.

“No. I heard the engine start and then it drove off.”

Lt. McMann turned toward Elizabeth. “Did you hear it, too?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I was in front of the barn, so the sound wouldn’t have been as loud. Besides, I was so upset about Mildred, I’m not sure it would have registered.”

He transferred his gaze to Aunt Mary.

“No, I was too busy trying to see if Mildred was still alive.”

McMann let that slide right off and turned back to me.

“So, you’re the only one who heard this car?”

I bit my tongue and nodded. He didn’t believe me. I barely believed myself.

“No one drove up the road by the Longos’ house or by the barn?”

“No. Really, Lieutenant, if someone drove by, we’d have mentioned it.” Elizabeth’s eyes snapped and she
held her empty coffee cup as if she’d like to strangle it. Even Lt. McMann might have realized she’d had enough, but evidently he didn’t.

“Only if it suited you.” The time for politeness had come and gone. “You’re sure?” He turned back to me.

“Yes, I’m sure. I have no idea where the car was, or where it went, but it’s hard to mistake a car engine. This one was close by.” Politeness had left the building.

He nodded and got to his feet. “Thanks, ladies. You’ve been a big help. Where’s Longo?”

“In with his mother, I guess.” Elizabeth got up. “I’ll walk down to the nurse’s station and see if I can find out anything. Are you two coming?”

It certainly beat staying with Lt. McMann. Besides, I wanted to know about Mildred. I also wanted to know what Cora Lee was up to. “Right behind you.”

I stood there waiting to see if Aunt Mary needed help. She’d been sitting for some time. I should have known better. Elizabeth was already at the door. Aunt Mary hesitated for only a second before she followed, nodding politely to Lt. McMann as she passed. He turned and, without another word, stomped off in the opposite direction.

Elizabeth glared at his retreating back. “I wonder what he thinks now. He has to know I wasn’t the one who attacked Mildred. Do you think he still suspects me of poisoning Monty?”

“I have no idea what he thinks.” Aunt Mary sounded as disgusted as Elizabeth. This time some of her disgust was reserved for me. “Why didn’t you tell us about the bloody spade?”

“Too busy worrying about Mildred. Then I forgot about it until just now.”

“Humph. I thought he’d be more surprised about the car.”

“This whole thing is bizarre
,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe he’s just confused. I know I am.” She looked around. “Where’s the nurse’s station?”

“I think it’s around this corner.” Aunt Mary led the way. “I doubt they’ll tell us much.”

“Let’s try,” Elizabeth said. “If I don’t find out something soon, I’ll explode.” We started down the corridor again. “I hope Mildred’s going to be all right.”

“So do I.” Aunt Mary stopped and put her hand on
her friend’s arm. “Elizabeth, none of us can go on this way. Mildred easily could have been killed, and even if she’s all right, that doesn’t mean this is over. I don’t trust that Lieutenant McMann one bit. We’re going to have to do something.”

Emotions rolled across Elizabeth’s face faster than I could read them. “Noah
…”

“Noah’s plate was full to overflowing before Mildred was attacked. We can’t count on him, at least not for a while.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t know what to think.” She took Aunt Mary by the arm. “When I called and asked you to come out here, I said I needed someone I could trust.”

Aunt Mary nodded.

“I needed you because I thought Noah was somehow making a deal with Monty.” That came out with a rush. Her face twisted in anguish and her eyes glistened with unshed tears. She dropped Aunt Mary’s arm and brushed them away.

“What made you think so?”
I asked. I already had a pretty good idea but needed to make sure.

“I saw Monty down at his house the morning after
I encountered the ghost in the upstairs hallway. I’d started down to tell Noah and ask him what I should do. There was Monty, standing outside with him, talking intently.” Elizabeth looked at her clasped hands. “I didn’t know what to do, or what to think. It was the next day the crate almost fell on me.”

“You thought Noah was somehow involved.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I couldn’t see how, or even why, but that crate scared me more than the time we got rammed by the barbarian who was trying to harpoon a baby gray whale. I felt betrayed and scared. Oh, what a mistake I made! How can I make it up to him?”

I let Aunt Mary comfort her. I was trying to figure out time frames. “That must have been the day Monty came to tell Noah he was getting Smithwood and
would be moving him and his mother out.”

“Monty told him that? And Noah believed him. That’s my fault. What a jewel that man was. If this wasn’t so serious, I’d be tempted to thank whoever slipped him that doctored
syllabub.”

Whoever it was had to be familiar with the house and grounds. Knew how to get in and out. The movement outside earlier. Someone had been down by the barn. I’d thought it might be Calvin. He had a truck and had worked at Smithwood for a long time. That he hated Monty was a given.
But why would Calvin attack Mildred? I thought about ponytails. Was it Calvin prowling the halls? Why? This was getting me nowhere.