A Rage to Live (9 page)

‘Well, we can’t use it any more, that’s for sure. We’ll have to find a new place for the spare key. And I think we should change the locks anyway. Who knows? The burglar may have made copies.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘You may doubt that, Mr Chandler, but you don’t know that.’

‘Forget the key and changing the locks. It’s a mystery, I’ll grant you that, but one
we
are going to solve. The lady burglar, let’s start with her.’

‘Mr Chandler, please, this is a job for the police.’

‘Maybe, but for the moment, humour me. We will try and find her ourselves.’

‘How? And why do we want to?’

‘It amuses me to find her again. Let’s just leave it at that.’

‘Someone breaks into the house and steals nothing?’ Mrs Tweedie
shook her head from side to side. ‘I don’t like it, it’s not normal for a burglar to break in and not rob you. Do you know anything about her? Her name, where she came from, why she did it? No. And you let her get away. She must have been very pretty. You play a dangerous game with all these women of yours, and now a burglar woman, Mr Chandler!’ Karen actually stamped her foot. ‘I think you’re crazy sometimes, I really do.’

She rose from her chair and Kane asked her very nicely, ‘Please sit down. She left me this note.’

The housekeeper took her chair again and read the lipstick words aloud. The message seemed to calm her down. ‘I don’t understand. What burglar leaves a message, a child’s message?’

‘Precisely.’

‘She was no burglar.’

‘Right again, Karen.’

‘And not a vandal. Just a crazy woman out after you.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Call the police.’

‘No.’

‘She could be dangerous.’

‘She had every chance to be dangerous, but instead she was sublime.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘Never mind God, and listen. She was a really handsome blonde woman, it’s a guess but I think in her late-twenties, early-thirties, and dressed in a very expensive and elegant evening dress. I’ve never seen her around New Cobham before. She’s either a new resident, one of the summer people, or someone’s house guest. All we have to do is work out which and then how to find her.’

‘Mr Chandler, I’m a housekeeper not a detective.’

‘Don’t be negative, Karen.’

‘I’m not a negative woman, Mr Chandler.’

‘Good, I’m glad to hear that. Now, who gave a black tie dinner party last night?’

‘Now how should I know that, Mr Chandler?’

‘Downstairs talk, tradesmen’s gossip. You know that I know that you know any and all the news around town, so who entertained on a rather lavish scale in New Cobham last night?’

‘She could have come from Orleans or Harwich or Truro or anywhere.’

Kane ignored that and said, ‘She knew the Vines had a boathouse at the other end of the beach.’

‘Oh.’

‘She had a man’s dinner jacket with her, presumably to keep her warm when she was walking here.’

‘The Vines? No, no dinner party there last night. There were moving vans there most of the afternoon and through the night.’

‘Carol, leaving Hollihocks?’

‘Evicted more like.’

‘That can’t be.’

‘Well, it is. No one knew a thing ’til she announced it, made a scandal at the country club dinner dance last night. There! Your lady might have been there last night. Everyone who was anyone was there. The first dance of the season and all that.’

‘Very good, Karen.’ He looked so delighted the housekeeper had to smile. Now
she
was really getting into the idea of finding the mystery lady for Kane.

‘I’ll be right back.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Make a couple of phone calls. You want your lady, don’t you?’

Kane Chandler leaned back in his chair and rocked slowly back and forth. ‘Indeed, I do, Karen. Indeed, I do.’

Chapter 8

Ed Cornwell and Harvey Brown, as sheriff and deputy of New Cobham, did not keep the peace of New Cobham County by not knowing its people and most of their secrets. Ed’s officers and he practised a supportive sort of policing, not at all like the work he had been trained for as a young rookie in South Boston. Later, as chief of detectives before he gave up his job to become New Cobham’s sheriff, there had been little time to practise intimate law enforcement there either. He did not miss policing or investigating murder and the drug-related problems of a big city, but he hadn’t left it behind either.

His experience as a law enforcer in a metropolitan area where crime had got too far out of hand, as it was doing in most of the large urban centres of the United States, gave him a kind of second sight. He was sharp. He could see trouble coming almost before it arrived. And dealt with it, when it did arrive, long before it had a chance to take hold. More times than not New Cobham’s sheriff was there to nip trouble in the bud before it could blossom, and it was not with big city police enforcement.

It was obvious in the way he ran his county that behind Ed Cornwell’s light but firm hand was a ruthlessly hard punch that knew how to find its mark. The gun he carried at his hip, the shotgun in the boot of his car, they were not ego dressing or mere killing machines. Everyone knew that if the Sheriff of New Cobham County was forced to use them, the criminal had no chance. He was not a man to mess with. Criminal or law abiding citizen, neither wanted to see the hard, ruthless, side of their soft spoken, friendly sheriff. Rumours and his Boston reputation had preceded him.

Though New Cobham was admired for being a near trouble-free county, that was not to say that it didn’t have its occasional breaches of the law. Crime, very petty. Suicide, one. Murder, one, nasty, some ten years ago, and solved by Ed. Its tragedies too: unnecessary accidents, acts of cruelty, domestic violence. Some social, business and sexual intrigues, conducted with the utmost discretion. The sheriff didn’t miss much. He and his men were discreet observers who did their job with a light hand. Most of the time policing in New Cobham
was laidback to the point of boredom, but the place did throw up the occasional mystery. One of them the Vines.

Even after so many years, people still talked about the tragic death of Rosemary Vine and her children. How and why had it happened? The boat had been abandoned. The bodies had not been found on board but in the ocean. Even in the storm, with a boat like the Sea Hawk and a sailor like Rosemary Vine, almost the best of the New Cobham sailors, one of the best in New England, she could have outrun the weather. First the man next-door scandal and her brazen return, then the tragedy that should never have been? Questions that had never found answers and which added up to an unsolved New Cobham mystery. And why had Cressida, Byron’s only surviving child, never returned home until last night and her dramatic reappearance?

Cressida Vine had been gone years before Ed Cornwell became Sheriff of New Cobham County and so he had only known her through gossip, an occasional mention from Byron, and a court order. Until now. And now that he had met her, and especially under the circumstance in which he had met her, Ed Cornwell, though he could not see Cressida Vine as a criminal threat to his patch, did see her as a disruptive influence in the community.

She had looks, wealth, power, intelligence and a certain hardness about her, and she did not tread carefully. She had caused a great deal of embarrassment to the club members by her appearance there and her public confrontation with her step-mother. She was a woman who didn’t care. Cressida Vine had no remorse in her and, the sheriff guessed, little compassion. That told him she was a danger, yes. Hadn’t she already shaken up the community with the eviction order?

The sheriff had never liked Carol Vine. She had always been one of those women who are obsessively protective of their husbands, and most especially their husband’s fame. She lauded who and what he was over everyone, used her name and him as a power tool to further herself in New Cobham society, totally unnecessarily since she had always been accepted and liked. A woman who was a pillar of the community, always on the right side of the law. Even her obsessive love for her husband, her possessive caring for him, the way she ran every aspect of Byron’s life and Hollihocks, was considered something to be admired, by some. Others in the community had their doubts, but remained silent.

Powerful women in small communities can do that, silence the doubters for the sake of peace and acceptance by the group. That she did her job, loved her husband, there was no doubt. Yet … Ed had always sensed that she was a real bitch who had them all fooled with her good looks, her manners, a Mona Lisa smile that always looked to
him as if it had been pasted on. He had not been one of Boston’s best chief of detectives for nothing. It had not taken long for him to figure out Carol Vine’s great hang up in life was that she would always be the second Mrs Vine. No matter how much Byron had loved her, and he had, that’s what she was and that was what she would always be. It drove her a little mad, but she covered up well. She never let that façade of contentment with life show the least little crack. It had been Byron himself who had told Ed,
en passant
, during one of their games of chess, ‘Carol loves almost as well as she hates.’ That said it all. And that was why he was here at Hollihocks now.

For the first time that morning, the sheriff and his deputy stepped through the front door of Hollihocks. His first instinct was to look up. The eighteenth-century crystal chandelier had gone, not even a bare wire hung from the ceiling. The large and once beautifully furnished entrance hall with its bowls of tulips, vases of iris, Chinese blue and white porcelain pots of peonies – Byron’s favourite flowers all gone; there was no picture on the wall, no period oriental carpets on the floor. He looked up the handsome free standing wooden staircase, three times wider than normal, that rose to the first landing, as wide and as deep as a decent-sized room. The Persian carpet too had been removed from the stairs. The brass stair rods with their pineapple finials had also been removed. On the landing, where once rested a beautiful Queen Anne settee covered in white silk damask, a pair of Han pottery horses on priceless Chippendale tables on either side, and an eighteenth-century English mahogany games table placed in front of the settee, there was nothing.

The sheriff walked into one room, another and another. Not a thing. Not even a scrap of packing paper, a length of string. Room after room empty. Carol had left not a rod on the windows, not a light bulb on a flex. The sound of his and Harvey’s shoes echoed through the rooms. ‘Talk about an empty victory. Never thought I’d see Hollihocks like this. It’s almost criminal.’

‘Good word, Harv. It just may
be
criminal.’

The kitchen was as bare as the rest of the house save for several people standing round looking exhausted and dazed. The sheriff and Harvey knew them all. They were townspeople, born and bred, and were the Hollihocks staff: cook and housekeeper, gardeners, maids, cleaners, the stable men, the boatman. No one said a word. No one gave a greeting.

The sheriff re-lit his cigar. He rolled it slowly between thumb and forefinger, looking over it at the staff as he puffed and got the cigar burning evenly. ‘Mrs Cosgrove,’ that was the cook, ‘why don’t you make a nice big pot of coffee for us all?’

‘Oh, that’s clever, Sheriff. Do you see a cooker? She had it dismantled and carted away, my French eight-burner, four-oven cooker. And she took the coffee pot.’ The cook walked to a cupboard. It was bare. Her eyes were brimming with tears of outrage when she told him, ‘Coffee? Not a bean did she leave.’

‘Never a word as to what’s been going on. Most of us has been here since she came to Hollihocks, and she left with not so much as a goodbye. No notice, nothing. Four o’clock yesterday afternoon she calls us all here for a staff meeting and announces we have to work with the movers all afternoon and through the night until the place is empty. We’re dead on our feet.’ That was the housekeeper, Mrs Timms.

‘I thought she was decorating or some such thing. That was odd, but then it got crazy. “Don’t leave that light bulb, John. Not a thing. I want this house stripped”,’ the gardener told the sheriff.

‘Finally, about eight o’clock, when I was packing all her dresses,’ continued the maid, Rosie, ‘I said, “Mrs Vine, are you leaving Hollihocks?”

‘“No, I’m being evicted from Hollihocks. There is a definite distinction between leaving and eviction. And so are you, all of you who live on the estate. I should have thought it was obvious that I am leaving here.”’

‘That was it. Except when she assembled us all down here just to tell us, short and sharp, “We’ve worked these past years as a good team, and I thank you for that. Regretfully you are dismissed, and with no compensation for your years of service to my husband and me. You can thank the new owner for that. My only consolation at leaving you all so abruptly, and with no gratuities, is that we, my husband and I, were good and generous employers to you.” Something like that anyway,’ the housekeeper told the sheriff.

‘It was worse, but that was just about the gist of it,’ added the cook.

‘We had to ask, otherwise she would never had told us, that the new owner of Hollihocks wanted us out and off the premises today. No notice, nothing. No jobs, no homes for some of us, just like that.’ And the gardener snapped his fingers and added, ‘I’ve been here forty-two years. What’s going to happen to my gardens? Mr Vine, he would never have done this. Died and never left us nothing? I never believed it then when she told us that. Don’t believe it now. Skulduggery, I can smell it. And now this. Is it true the eviction notice is for us all, Sheriff? That’s what she finally told us.’

‘We don’t even know who it is. I can’t think about all this any more. I’m dead on my feet, up all night, carrying and fetching, nothing but coffee and biscuits, and that was only until the cooker went. It’s all crazy, I’m going home.’ That was Sam Pierce who had run the stables
for the Vines for as long as the sheriff had been in New Cobham.

‘OK, I’ve heard enough,’ stated the sheriff, barely hiding his annoyance.

‘And look at the house. Crazy. She didn’t even take half the things with her.’

‘What are you talking about, Betsy?’ the surprised sheriff asked one of the cleaners who had dusted the Vines’ fine furniture and mopped Hollihocks floors, and who had taken pride in her work and job enough to boast about it in the Candy Kitchen where she had coffee every morning on her way to work.

‘It’s all in the big barn. My stove and all,’ added the cook.

‘What went in the moving vans then?’

A shrug of the shoulders from all the dejected staff. ‘Mrs Vine stood at the front door as things were being removed from the house, directing, “in the barn” or “in the van”. And: “I only want what is legally – mind you, I did not say rightfully – mine. You take note of that, Mrs Timms.” She must have repeated that a hundred times.’

In the barn, and Carol Vine gone? It didn’t take a detective nor a smart sheriff who knew some of the facts of this unsavoury fight between step-mother and step-daughter to figure out Carol Vine was every bit the spiteful bitch he had always thought her. Byron’s widow hadn’t dared to break the law and steal anything that belonged to the Vine Trust. She could only take with her what was left by Byron to her, but she dismantled everything else and sent it to the barn, to leave the house stripped and ugly. A vindictive act of revenge on Cressida. A hollow victory for Cressida Vine, a way for the heir to Hollihocks to return to nothing. Not nice. Not healthy either. For either woman. This was just the sort of crime, the crime that’s not a crime according to law, that Ed Cornwell detested. It usually bred disturbing irrational behaviour that had bad repercussions. It was dangerous, hard to be rid of, and very destructive. ‘Shit!’ he said aloud.

All eyes were now on the sheriff. Everyone in the room seemed to perk up. Some even began to laugh at their sheriff standing in the middle of the empty kitchen chomping on a cigar. He removed it from his mouth and said, ‘You all wait right here. I’m going to bring you someone I want you to meet. Oh, and no one’s fired, not yet anyway, and no one has to leave their house, today anyway, you’ve got my word on that.’

‘I’m going home, fuck this,’ he heard someone say.

Ed Cornwell swung around and said, ‘I aim to settle this mess right now, and I don’t want to repeat myself here. Got it?’

No one moved, no one said a word. ‘Good. I’ll be right back.’

Ed Cornwell found Cressida walking across the lawn towards the
house, her shoes in her hands. He wished he knew why she had really returned to live in Hollihocks. That she’d inherited it, and it was a very special place, just didn’t seem to be enough reason to give up an ongoing life and return home. She seemed to him to be a woman with a purpose, more purpose than merely revenge on a step-mother. He was suddenly curious as to who she had spent the night with. He registered his questions, labelled them curiosity, and filed them in the back of his mind. Attractive, yes. Sexy, too, in a subtle way. Smart, intelligent handsomeness, that was her real attraction, and she had a lot of that. That was what worried him about her, and her coming back to New Cobham to live.

‘You still here, Sheriff?’ she asked as she approached him.

‘Seems that way. Not been in the house then, Miss Vine?’

‘No.’

He walked along with her. ‘The staff have assembled in the kitchen.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’ll probably remember some of them.’

‘Yes, I probably will.’

‘You do know, don’t you, that they have no idea that you’ve inherited Hollihocks?’

‘Carol never told them?’

‘No. Not been very forthcoming with them, either one of you,’ he said, feeling annoyed by the obvious selfishness of the two women. Their utter disregard for those who had worked for the Vines and Hollihocks so faithfully, some for generations. He couldn’t believe that Byron would have sanctioned what those two women had wrought.