A Dark and Stormy Murder (A Writer's Apprentice Mystery) (15 page)

“My goodness. Well, now that we’re the writing team of Graham and London, and now that you already know significant secrets of my life, why not share the so-called secret of my husband’s manor house? Come here, my friend.”

She walked to the back of her study and pointed to the window. “Go over there and take a look at the scenery.”

“All right.” I walked to the window and glanced out at the bluff and the blue line of lake. “What now?”

“There’s a heating vent in the floor there at your feet. Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“On the right there’s a little dial for opening and closing the vent.”

“Yes.”

“There’s another dial on the left—about an inch away from the vent itself. Slightly larger. Yet you don’t really notice it, do you? It blends in.”

“Yes—it doesn’t open the vent?”

“No.”

I turned to look at Camilla, who smiled at me with twinkling eyes. “Go ahead and turn the dial,” she said.

I squatted in front of the vent and rolled the dial mechanism toward me until I heard a loud click. The sound had come not from the floor, but from an area to my left, where a corner hutch bookcase tucked against two walls. Now one of those walls seemed unproportional. I stood up and walked to it; I pushed it slightly, and it moved farther. It
was a doorway, and the darkness behind it emitted a lavender scent.

“There you are,” she said. “The only secret this house has, that I know of. Go on through. There’s a light just there, near your right hand.”

I flicked on the light and walked into a narrow little room lined with shelves. On one side were jars of canned fruits and extra dry goods like sugar and flour and spices. On the other wall were, predictably, more books. The walls stretched for perhaps fifteen feet, and at the back of the space were a couple of folding chairs. “I don’t know why we put those there. It’s a fun little hiding place, but the heat and air-conditioning don’t reach here as well, so it’s often a bit too warm or cold. But it’s handy for extra storage. I keep my little air fresheners in here so that my books won’t grow musty.”

“There were times,” I said, gazing around, “that I couldn’t find you—or that I thought I’d seen you in your office, and then you weren’t there.”

“I dart back here now and then to claim a book I need. Or a jar of something to give to Rhonda for dessert. That jelly in the cupcake? Homemade raspberry preserves.”

“This is an impressive secret! Sort of a cliché, but still impressive. I never would have imagined it. Why did your husband’s family have this room?”

“Oh, who knows?” she said, brushing some dust off the spines of books. “The house is very old. It may well go back to the late eighteenth century, the local Realtor has told me. In any case, some claim it might have been a sheltering place for runaway slaves. Indiana has many registered sites on the Underground Railroad.”

“Wow.”

“But James—that’s my husband—felt that it was more likely connected to bootlegging in the twenties. No one will admit to anything, but he thought his grandparents made their share of bathtub gin. He figures maybe they stored it in there. Anyway, in the modern era it is nothing but a storage space, devoid of excitement or intrigue.”

“It’s still amazing. And that dial hidden in plain sight—a sophisticated touch.”

Camilla grinned. “Have we seen enough? Because it’s rather drafty out here.”

“Of course. And thank you for sharing.”

We left the room, and I slapped my head. “Camilla! Last night, when we thought there were intruders—could they have been—?”

“No. I checked there while you were turning on lights. The dogs did seem interested in that corner, but there was not a soul inside, and nothing had been disturbed. Besides, you saw that the room is self-contained, and one can enter only from the inside.”

“Hmm. It’s weird, anyway.”

“Yes. But I believe I’ve had enough real-life mystery for one day. I only want to spend time on my fictional one.”

“Fair enough. Is Rhonda coming back tonight?”

“I gave her the night off. I figured we could be fun and order a pizza. Would you do that for me, Lena? You can decide what to put on it.”

“Of course. I’ll have them deliver it in—two hours?”

“Perfect. See you then.”

I waved and went upstairs. I could do some yacht research and share it with Camilla while we ate.

I grabbed my phone and put it on my desk so that I would remember to order the pizza in time. I held it in my hand for a moment, then clicked on text messages. I had one.

My heart was pounding when I clicked on the message that said “Sam West.”

His response was short:
Appreciate the support. You have persuaded me to stop smoking, but I have picked a very stressful time to do so. Keep sending good thoughts.

I sat for a moment, staring at his message, then turned it off and stared at nothing. What was happening to him right now? Were the police interrogating him? Was he being besieged by the media? Was anyone on his side? At least he had a lawyer waiting for him. Hopefully that person was vocalizing the “innocent until proven guilty” idea, as well as the “innocent until proven a crime” notion. And what about the investigator that West had hired? He must have turned up enough, after all this time, to cast doubt on their suspicions.

With a sigh, I turned on the computer and started Googling articles about yachts, especially yachts in the 1960s. Soon I was immersed in a world of beautiful people in pressed white clothing, with sun-kissed skin and smiling faces, as though the problems of humanity didn’t touch them in their special bubble of wealth and celebrity. Here were film stars and directors, pausing for a swim while filming some famous movie; here were multimillionaires, squinting into the glare of cameras as though the world’s admiration were their due; and here were people that no one knew, but who through a series of golden decisions had been lifted into the upper strata—that little-known tip
of society where yachting was just one way to spend a long, leisurely summer.

By the time I finished my evening’s notes, I knew one thing for sure: these were people who lived a long way from everyday life.

12

“We have to go,” Gerhard whispered in the darkness of her room.

“Go where?”

His face was grim. “I don’t know.”

“Why must we go?” she murmured, still half asleep.

“Because if we don’t, they’ll kill us.”

—from
The Salzburg Train

I
WOKE THAT
night at midnight, not certain why, my heart pounding. I grabbed for my phone and pressed it on to give a dull illumination to the area around my bed. I had heard something, but what was it? Lestrade, too, was awake, standing in the middle of the bed, his hackles raised, his eyes on my bedroom door.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to him. I slid reluctantly out of bed and grabbed the cow doorstop that I had just put back earlier in the day. A snuffling sound in the hallway had me asking, softly, “Who’s there?”

A slight moaning and scratching answered me, and I slowly opened the door to find Rochester and Heathcliff there, without Camilla, their paws busy against the bottom of my door. “What do you guys want?” I asked softly. “How did you get out?”

I glanced down the hall to see that Camilla’s door was slightly ajar. Somehow these two had escaped. Now they looked up at me and ran halfway down the hall, then looked back.

“I get it. You have to go, right? Give me a sec.” I went back inside to get my robe and slippers, then grabbed my cell phone and turned on the flashlight app. It created a great deal of light for the stairway.

The dogs and I moved downstairs in relative silence. I felt protected with them nearby, and they seemed eager to get to the entrance. I opened the kitchen door, as I had seen Camilla do many times, and let them into the yard. The wind must have been strong, because the trees on the bluff were bending their dark silhouettes against a slightly lighter sky, and a ghostly sighing sound could be heard behind the glass door. I waited for a while, peeking into the refrigerator, running a finger across Rhonda’s shiny stove, peering at some notes Camilla had put on the kitchen bulletin board. The dogs did not return.

“How long does it take to do your business?” I said aloud, feeling nervous.

After another five minutes I decided that I needed to take Lady Macbeth’s literary advice and screw my courage to the sticking-place. Making sure the door would not lock behind me, I crept outside into the cold, burrowing into my robe as I padded across the grass, calling softly for Rochester and Heathcliff. “Hey, guys! Come on back and we’ll warm up inside. I’ll even give you some food. Come on, doggies!” I had covered the length of the back of the house, and now I turned the corner, wishing I didn’t have to search in the dark.

“Heathcliff!” I called a bit louder. I sensed motion to
my left and turned with a sense of relief, only to see a dark form coming at me fast.

“Hey!” I yelled, but it was already ramming into me, hard, and I was suddenly flat on my back on the ground, the wind knocked out of me and the stars the only thing in my line of vision. While I tried to regain my breath, my muscles clenched with panic, I heard whispering voices and felt the pounding of footsteps vibrating on the ground and into my back. Someone was there, but they were going away. I had walked into something that I wasn’t supposed to see.

As the voices grew distant, I tried to make out what they were saying, but could only hear disjointed words. “Ray,” perhaps, and “Before the dogs come back.” Where had the dogs gone? Had they done something to the dogs?

My panic increased. What if they came back? What if they intended to do more than just knock me down? I closed my eyes and willed myself to be calm. My breath was returning in small, gasping bits, and I struggled to a sitting position, looking around for my phone light. It was still there beside me, lighted side down. I grabbed it and dialed 911. An operator asked what my emergency was, and I told her, in a panicked voice that did not sound like mine, who I was, where I was, and that intruders had just knocked me to the ground. “And I can’t find my dogs,” I said. “I don’t know what’s happened to them!”

Her voice was calm and soothing, and she assured me that someone would be out presently.

I clicked off the phone and stood up. Something touched my leg and I jumped approximately three feet into the air. “Darn it, Rochester! Where were you all this time?”

The dog did me the courtesy of looking guilty, as did
his brother, who sidled up next to him. “Where the heck were you guys, seriously? Did you happen to see the jerks who knocked me down? Did you think you might want to use your training to stop them?” I heard the crazy pitch of my own voice and paused to take some deep, calming breaths. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re both okay.”

I started limping toward the back door. The violent fall had done something to one of my knees, and my back felt as though a disc or two had jolted out of place.

I opened the door and gingerly moved through, followed by the dogs, who seemed ready to go back to bed after their nocturnal adventure. I went to the stove and started heating water for tea. By the time I found a tea bag, I saw red and blue lights in the driveway. I moved swiftly to the front door and peered out; Doug Heller stood on the steps.

“Lena?” he asked when I opened the door. His voice was a little stronger tonight. “Are you okay?”

“No. I let the dogs out and they didn’t come back, so I went outside and someone ran out of nowhere and knocked me down. Just slammed into me.”

“Don’t cry. Come on—let’s go in.”

“I’m not crying,” I said angrily. “I’m just mad.”

“Turn a light on; let me see if you’re hurt.”

I flipped on the living room lamp and blinked in the light. Doug Heller narrowed his eyes as he studied me. He fingered my cheekbone. “Looks like you’ll have a bruise there. He body-slammed you?”

“Yeah. I was so surprised I didn’t know what was happening. In retrospect, I think he hit me hard. I landed on my back,” I said, turning around.

“Ah. The dirt tells the story.”

“And this is my favorite robe. Because it’s my only
robe.” Heller had been right; I was sort of crying, but it was a release of tension more than anything.

“Hey—is that a teakettle I hear? You go make some tea. I’m going to have a look around. I’ll meet you at the back door.”

I nodded and locked the front door after him, then went to the kitchen and fumbled with the box of tea bags, finding one and plunging it into my mug of boiling water. I indulged myself with sugar and cream and sat down, taking a few bracing sips. Heller appeared about fifteen minutes later, and he joined me at the table, looking wide-awake and comfortable, as though this were a lunch date. “How’s your tea?”

“It’s good. I put a lot of sugar in it.”

“Good. You feel a little better?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think you need a doctor?”

“I don’t think so. I’m just going to be sore.”

“So let’s take this from the top. Why were you outside?”

“Because I let out gosh darn Rochester and Heathcliff, and they didn’t come back. I didn’t think Camilla would take too kindly to me losing her dogs in the middle of the night, so I went out after them.”

“Okay. And where did you get knocked down?”

“I was turning the corner. I got to the end of the house on the back side here, and I turned around the corner to the west wall, and suddenly there it was.”

“It?”

“Just this big black form, coming at me. And then I was looking at the sky.”

Doug Heller grinned at me. “Beautiful night for it.”

I sort of wanted to punch him, except that I did feel a little better after he joked about it.

“Yeah.”

“So there’s no way you could identify this guy?”

“No. But it was more than one.”

He sat up straighter. “Why do you say that?”

“There was whispering. Talking in low voices—I couldn’t make them out. And then they took off. Boom boom on the ground, like they were running. I felt it through my back, which was pressed against the dirt. And there was a smell—yes, I think I smelled something weird.”

“Pot, maybe?”

“In all honesty, I don’t know what pot smells like. Maybe. It had a weird incense smell. But there was something else, too. Some kind of cologne on top of that smell. Something kind of cheap, like Brut or Old Spice.”

“And the other night, when our guys came out here—you didn’t see anyone then?”

“No—Camilla was just alerted by the dogs. They wanted to come downstairs, and they ended up standing— Oh boy.”

“What?”

“Nothing—well—I don’t know if I’m allowed to say.”

“Lena, I’m trying to help here.”

“Well, I was having lunch with Lane Waldrop. You know her?”

“Yeah. I know Clay, at least.”

“She said this place had a secret, and she had always been curious about it, and that she had told Martin Jonas, and he had been curious, too.”

Heller’s eyebrows went up so high they disappeared under his blond hair. “And what is this secret?”

“Well, I didn’t know when I talked to Lane. But later Camilla told me about it. Listen, I don’t know if I have permission to—”

Heller stood up and folded his arms. “A man assaulted you, Lena. Tell me all the information or I’ll arrest you for not cooperating with the police.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Lena!”

“Okay. But swear you won’t tell Camilla’s secret to anyone.”

“I swear.”

I led him into Camilla’s study and turned on the light. We walked to the window and I showed him the dial near the heat vent. He turned it, then looked to his left , as I had done, when he heard the click that unlatched the wall mechanism. He stared for a moment, his face a picture of surprise. “No way,” he said, and then he disappeared into the little room. I switched on the low-wattage light and he studied the shelves in the dimness, along with all the corners of the space. “And there’s no chance that any of these walls also magically opens?”

“No—this is self-contained. So I can’t imagine it would have anything to do with the people outside.”

Heller ran his hand over a few canning jars, his face thoughtful. “So let’s recap: a man is shot to death a few hundred yards from this room. Subsequently, on two different nights there are intruders who are found in your backyard, also adjacent to this room.”

We left the room, and I shut it. I started walking back toward the kitchen, and Heller followed me. I returned to my cup of tea.

Sitting down, I said, “We never found intruders the first time—just a fifty-dollar bill and a gray scarf.”

“Uh-huh. There are people in town who knew this house had ‘a secret.’ One of those people was Martin Jonas.”

“Yeah, but those could all just be unrelated ideas. You know—what’s that old term from the list of logical fallacies?—post hoc ergo propter hoc—‘after this, therefore because of this.’ It’s faulty thinking.”

“Is it, Lena? Here’s another little tidbit for you. Based on the inside of this house, it would seem that this little room would jut out like a porch, and therefore be visible from the outside. But look at that back wall—it’s smooth and even all the way across. No additions or porch-like protrusions. What does that tell you?”

“Um—what?”

“That something else must be right next to that room, keeping the wall level across the back of the house. The room is only about twenty feet, but the back of the house has to span about sixty or more. So what’s in the rest of the space?”

I shrugged and took a sip of my tea.

“We’re coming back here in the morning with a team.”

I sat up straight, alarmed. “You can’t! You just said you wouldn’t tell anyone the secret! How are you going to keep the town from knowing if you go barging around her house?”

Doug Heller’s face was a mixture of surprise and belligerence. “Lena! You could have been badly hurt out there. For some reason, people are returning to this house at night, and it is not unlikely that it has something to do with the death of Martin Jonas. I’m not going to avoid investigating just because it might seem impolite!”

I slumped in my chair, and a soft voice behind me said, “I thought I heard something down here. Hello, Doug. What am I missing? Is this a midnight rendezvous?”

I whirled to face Camilla, who smiled sleepily at me and said, “Is there enough water for another cup of tea?”