A Premonition of Murder (27 page)

I heard a creaking noise nearby and froze. It could have been a floorboard or it could have been a door closing. Was someone prowling around upstairs or was my imagination getting the better of me? I pulled Ali into the living room and put a finger to my lips. “Did you hear that?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide. “But it could just be the house settling. Aren't there always strange noises in old houses?”

My mind was racing, and I suddenly remembered what Sam had said about the smudged handprint on the banister. It had contained a residue of saddle soap mixed in with other ingredients. Saddle soap had made me think of horses, and Dorien had said Jeb Arnold was good with horses. Why hadn't I connected this before? Jeb was supposed to be on the grounds at Beaux Reves today, but we hadn't seen him. I thought about calling Sam but decided it might be a false lead and it was better to get on with the work at hand.

We stood stock-still, and I mentally counted to twenty. I started to relax and then a sharp thump split the air. I felt an icy tingle go down my back and grabbed Ali's arm. That was no creaking floorboard. I locked gazes with Ali for a long moment, and then I looked past her at the living room window and my whole body slumped with relief. I let out a
big whoosh of air; I hadn't even realized I'd been holding my breath.

“A shutter!” she said, her voice giddy with relief. “That's all it was.” It was a windy day, and sure enough, one of the shutters had banged against the front of the house.

“Let's get started in the library,” I said, suddenly eager to find Abigail's diary and get out of the mansion as quickly as we could.

29

“The library,” Ali gasped. “It's exactly as Dorien described it in her dream. Even the two ceramic dogs by the fireplace. And the maidenhair fern.” I'd forgotten Ali hadn't been in the Beaux Reves library before. The amount of detail that Dorien had included was startling. “Do you think she really had some sort of premonition?”

“She could have seen a picture in a guide book,” I said flatly. “Anyway, whether she did or not, we have a lot of work to do.” It was oddly chilly in the library. The windows were closed against the bright Savannah sunlight, and the dark green drapes were pulled tightly shut. It wasn't the warm, inviting place that Dorien had described. There were ashes in the fireplace and the room seemed dank and unwelcoming.

“How shall we start?” Ali asked. “It looks overwhelming.” Books lined all four sides of the room, except for the areas taken up by the fireplace and the windows. The
books were stacked from the floor to the ceiling, and there was a sliding wooden ladder for easy access to the top shelves.

“Let's divide the room up into sections,” I suggested. “I don't know how big the diary is, so it could be tucked away behind one of the books. The bottom shelves will be easy to do. It looks like she kept oversized art books there. We should be able to reach behind them and see if she hid the diary.”

“The top shelves will be more difficult,” Ali said. “We'll have to go through them shelf by shelf. If only we knew what it looked like.” She walked over to a round side table with claw feet. “It's got to be an antique,” she said admiringly. “Expensive,” she added, running her hand over the smooth surface. “There's a drawer,” she said hopefully. She pulled it open and frowned. “Nothing.”

“Let's concentrate on the bookshelves,” I told her. “You start with the far wall, and I'll do this one. We can share the ladder.”

“Do you feel a draft in here? Or is it my imagination?” Ali shivered and rubbed her hands over her arms.

“I think it's coming from this window.” I peeked under the heavy dark green drapery. “They left this window wide-open, maybe to air the place out. Do you want me to try to close it?”

“No,” she said. “It's musty in here. Just leave it. With the drapes closed, I won't feel the draft.”

We worked steadily for over an hour. The search went more quickly than I'd anticipated. The books were neatly arranged by category. Abigail had been a voracious reader, it seemed, and the shelves were filled with books on art, history, and travel. She loved the classics, and I saw several French novels by Zola, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Her taste
in modern novels tended toward bestsellers in contemporary mysteries and thrillers.

“What next?” Ali asked, taking a break and sinking into an armchair.

“We have to rethink our strategy,” I told her. “The diary doesn't appear to be hidden anywhere in the room.”

“The book,” Ali said slowly. “Remember how Abigail referred to her diary as ‘the book'?”

“Yes,” I said encouragingly. “I figured she misspoke; I thought she meant to say,
This is one for the books
. And instead she said,
This is one for the
book.” I didn't want to let Ali know how disappointed I was. If the library really had been Abigail's favorite room in the house, I could imagine her sitting by the fire every evening, writing in her diary. Where else should we try? The mansion was enormous.

Ali stood up suddenly and walked to the far wall. “What if ‘the book' was a real book? And she used that expression for a reason?”

“I'm not following,” I said, biting back a yawn. I thought I heard a faint creaking noise again, but I ignored it. Ali was right; old houses had lots of peculiar noises, and I wasn't going to jump like a rabbit every time I heard one.

“Look at this row of books on the bottom shelf,” she said. “It makes sense that Abigail would choose the bottom shelf if she wanted to hide her diary. She was an old lady. I can't imagine her scrambling up on a ladder to retrieve it each time she wanted to make an entry.”

“A good point.”

“And this bottom shelf is devoted entirely to books about Savannah.”

“Yes, and I ran my hand behind them a few minutes ago. There's no diary hiding back there,” I said firmly. “I think you're on the wrong track.”

“No, I'm on the
right
track,” she insisted, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Taylor, we were looking at this all wrong. When anyone in Savannah talks about ‘the book,' what do they mean? Anyone besides Abigail, I mean.”

“The book? I don't know—” I said, and then stopped abruptly. It was like a lightbulb had gone off over my head. “When they say ‘the book,' they mean
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, the novel by John Berendt.”

“Exactly. It put Savannah on the map. It was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for over two hundred weeks. Everyone loves that book. It's all about eccentric people in Savannah and what happens when an antique dealer is charged with murder. It's so well-known everyone here calls it ‘the book.'”

“So if Abigail had a copy . . .” I began, but Ali was already ahead of me. She was down on her hands and knees, scanning the contemporary novels I'd already checked on the bottom shelf.

“Not ‘if,'” Ali said triumphantly, holding up a hardcover book. “She
did
have a copy, and here it is!” The dust jacket said
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, and it featured the famous Bird Girl sculpture on the cover. “And if my theory is right,” she said, pulling off the dust cover, “
this
is Abigail's diary.”

I gasped as she showed me a red leather diary inside the dust cover. The truth had been staring me in the face, and I had totally missed it.

She flipped open the cover to reveal pages and pages of notes written in a spidery hand. A flyleaf had Abigail's name, and Ali began to riffle through the diary. “It's part diary and part date book. All we need to do is find out what Abigail wrote about the visitor the night of her death. Who she was expecting at Beaux Reves, what they were going to discuss—”

“You don't need the diary, my dear. I could have told you that myself.”

I recognized the voice, and it chilled me to the bone. Ali and I looked up in horror as Norman Osteroff emerged from the hidden passage near the fireplace.
Norman Osteroff?
He'd entered the library so quietly we hadn't heard him. His eyes glinted with an evil light and he reached out one gnarled hand for the book.

The other hand was holding a gun, and it was pointed straight at us. It's true what Noah once told me: when someone points a gun at you, you can't concentrate on anything else. It's like your brain goes into red alert, and all you can do is look at the gun. All the other details in a scene just fall away.

“Now, if you'll just pass that over,” Osteroff said with a death's-head smile, “I'll be on my way.”

Ali clutched the book to her chest and backed up so fast she nearly crashed into me. “You don't think I'll let you walk out of here with this?” She gave a high-pitched laugh, and I knew she was terrified. Brave but terrified.

“You won't care either way,” he said with a sly chuckle. “You and your sister will both be dead. Dead girls don't talk.”

“You won't get away with this,” I said, forcing my voice to remain steady. “A lot of people know we came to the mansion today.”

The lawyer's face twisted into a mock frown. “Yes, and they'll be so sad they didn't get here in time. Such sweet young girls. Another tragedy at Beaux Reves. Maybe there really
is
a curse hanging over this place.” He chortled.

“They'll know you did it,” Ali insisted.

“Not necessarily. I took the precaution of hiding my car in the woods, and I came up the back way. I entered the house through the root cellar. It was so easy.”

“Jeb Arnold is working today,” I said desperately. “He's somewhere on the grounds.” I looked past the elderly lawyer and saw the bottom of the heavy green drapery move a few inches. It puffed out just a tad, like the jib on a sailing ship. Was it the Savannah wind coming in through the open window? Or were my nerves so jangled I imagined it?

Norman shook his head. “Oh, Taylor, how naïve you are.” He waved the gun at Ali. “I thought you were the smarter one of the two, but maybe an MBA doesn't mean what it used to. Haven't you figured out that Jeb has been helping himself to artwork from the mansion for years?”

“So it was Jeb who killed Lucy?” The longer I could keep him talking, the better; I figured if I asked enough questions it would feed his massive ego.

He laughed, a thin, brittle sound. “Of course not.
I
killed Lucy. She was trying to blackmail me. That's the trouble with accomplices. You can never really trust them. They bite the hand that feeds them. So you have to put them down, like rabid dogs.”

“Lucy was an accomplice to Abigail's murder?” I felt incredibly sad at the thought.

“Never. She didn't have the stomach for it. Stealing paintings was one thing, but she would never hurt Abigail. I had to do the dirty work.”

“So you killed Abigail, too?” Ali's tone was incredulous, and her eyes welled with tears.

Norman nodded. “And Desiree.” He raised the gun toward us. “And now you two.”

“Wait,” I said imploringly.”At least tell us why you killed Desiree. I thought you were in love with her.”

“In love? Never. I was in love with her money. Abigail was so shrewd, I couldn't put anything over on her, but
Desiree was like putty in my hands. All you have to do with a pretty girl is flatter her.” He raised the gun again.

“But why kill her?”

“I had to,” he said in a reasonable voice. “She'd turned over quite a bit of money to me, and I'd used it for my own investments. Bad investments. I'm sorry to say they tanked. There was no way I could repay her, and she'd threatened to go to Abigail. Abigail was my main client, my bread and butter for the last thirty years. I wasn't going to lose the golden goose, so I had to stop Desiree. A midnight stroll along the Riverwalk, one little push, and it was all over. Desiree was history. The water closed around her like she was a pebble. She didn't even scream.”

“You're a monster,” Ali said softly.

“And you killed Abigail because . . .” I hoped to keep him talking. I was sure I saw another movement behind the heavy drapery.

“I really hated to kill Abigail,” he said regretfully. “She was a tough old bird. I actually had trouble pushing her down the stairs. I never expected her to put up such a fight. But somehow she'd figured out that Desiree had given me all that money, and I guess she'd put two and two together. She invited me over to the house to talk about it.” He gave a harsh laugh. “‘Talk about it'? What was there to say? I had to kill her. Sometimes we do things in life that are hard to do.” He took a step closer and leveled the gun at Ali. “Like this.” He raised the gun to take aim at her forehead, and several things happened at once.

Suddenly, Sam Stiles dove out from behind the curtains with a move worthy of Lara Croft. With her gun drawn, she hurled herself through the air and connected with the lawyer in a full-body tackle.

Osteroff's arm was jerked straight up in the air and his gun went off, blasting a hole in the fancy tray ceiling. Sam took him down in a classic karate move, and he was lying on his stomach grimacing in pain as she yanked one arm behind his back and pushed it up toward his shoulder blades.

“Cuffs!” she yelled to two uniformed detectives who seemed to appear out of nowhere. One of them quickly cuffed Osteroff, and the other jerked him to his feet. “Get him in the squad car and call it in,” she ordered. She was panting a little and said to Ali in a gentler tone, “Are you okay?”

“I think I am,” Ali said wanly. She looked deathly white, and I put my arms around her. She was trembling all over, and I gathered her in a tight hug. “I'm okay,” she said after a minute. “How did you know to come here?” she asked Sam, who was dusting herself off and rubbing her wrist. I had the feeling she'd been bruised when she'd forced Osteroff to the floor.