A Slaying in Savannah (8 page)

Was the general’s proposal to Tillie one of those secrets?
I asked myself.

The conversation turned to the reason for my having come to Savannah, and I expressed my surprise about Mr. Richardson’s having called to inform me that I was mentioned in Tillie’s will. I opted to leave out the specifics of what she expected me to do. The doctor, along with others, would learn them soon enough.

“Well, she was certainly a generous woman,” he said. “There should be quite a crowd there tomorrow: charity officials, no doubt, Richardson, of course, myself, and the judge, those idiots in the guesthouse—although I can’t believe she would leave them anything.” He speared his fingers through his hair. “Then there’s her niece and nephew,” he continued. “Have you met them?”

“I haven’t.”

“I think they’re her only living relatives.”

“I didn’t know she had any brothers or sisters.”

“She didn’t.” He watched my face, waiting for me to ask the next question.

“Courtesy titles?”

“Nope.” He smiled, waiting.

“I never realized she’d been married,” I said. “Was she not a Mortelaine by birth?”

“You’re a sharp one,” he said, thumping his hand on the table, making my cup rattle in its saucer. “Oh, yes, Miss Tillie was a Mortelaine through and through. She married young, lost him in the war. Battle of Midway. No children. Not sure if that was good or bad for her. She took back the family name when some of her husband’s relations tried to make a claim against her property, arguing what was hers was his and, by extension, theirs. The niece and nephew are children of her husband’s brother.”

“And were they party to that claim?”

“No. No. Not even born at the time.”

“The claim was unsuccessful, I take it.”

He nodded slowly. “Frank O’Neill was her attorney. I thought he was a little young and inexperienced. ’Course, I was pretty young and inexperienced myself at the time. But Tillie liked him, and he proved me wrong. He’s gone on to prominence here in Savannah, now the Honorable Frank O’Neill, a retired judge. He’s grand marshal of this year’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Frank set those interlopers straight. But it gave Miss Tillie a bad feeling, sharing the name of those would-be thieves, so she went back to Mortelaine and stayed that way.”

“And she never married again?”

“Not to my knowledge, although there’s been many a man would’ve had her. Always had her beaus, even up to the day she died.” He chuckled.

Tillie obviously had her admirers. I’d heard Mr. Richardson speak fondly of her, and given his expression when discussing Tillie, perhaps Dr. Payne had had a crush on her, too.

“Was Mr. Pettigrew one of her beaus?” I asked.

“You don’t miss much.”

“The general told me that he’d asked Tillie to marry him and that she had consented.”

He sighed. “Rich ladies are always tempting prey for scalawags. I warned her about him, and about the Grogans, too, but she pooh-poohed me.”

“Perhaps she liked the attention,” I offered, “or found them entertaining.”

“That’s just what she said. Told me to mind my own business and to not spoil her fun.”

“But you don’t trust them.”

“How could I? Nothing there for her. Everything for them. She’s always needed protecting. Too trusting by half. Told her to make sure she locked up tight at night.” A wave of distress crossed his face. “I’m not sure she listened. Her death still doesn’t make sense to me.”

“What about it doesn’t make sense, Doctor?”

“Her falling down those darn stairs.”

“You don’t believe it was an accident?”

He shrugged and sighed. “Couldn’t say it wasn’t. No proof otherwise. But, Mrs. Fletcher, I tell you that Tillie Mortelaine was as steady on her feet as you and I. Yes, she was ninety-one. And yes, she’d had a spell or two when she overdid, but still . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Mrs. Goodall found her slipper at the top of the stairs,” I said. “She could have caught her foot in the frayed rug. Or maybe she just tripped. That can happen to the steadiest of us. Accidents happen in the home all the time. That’s common knowledge.”

“I know the statistics,” he said, staring down into his empty cup. “But I was her doctor for fifty years, and it just bothers me. I can’t envision her tripping.”

“What’s the alternative?”

He glanced up at me but said nothing.

“You don’t think someone killed her?” I asked, the chill I’d felt earlier coming back. Tillie was a small sparrow of a woman, barely a hundred pounds, if that much. It would not have been difficult for someone larger to pick her up and throw her down the stairs.

Dr. Payne ignored my question. “Mrs. Goodall called me right after she called 911, but I got held up at the hospital.” He shook his head. “You can’t walk out in the middle of rounds. By the time I got here, the police were finishing up. Another doctor had pronounced her, and her body had been taken away.”

“Was there an autopsy?” I asked.

He gave a sharp nod. “At my insistence. The coroner and I are old friends. He did it more as a favor to me. The police were willing to let the body go straight to the funeral home. They had already decided it was an accidental death.”

“What did the results of the autopsy indicate?”

“Inconclusive. Nothing you could hang your hat on.”

“Have you mentioned your suspicions to anyone else?”

“I spent an hour questioning the people in the guesthouse. They’d be deaf and blind not to know that I suspected them of something nefarious. Pettigrew swore that Miss Tillie had locked up after them. I know for a fact that Mrs. Goodall checks all the doors before she leaves. Very reliable. You can set a clock by that woman.”

“Did the Grogans add anything?”

Dr. Payne poked his fingers through his hair, causing it to stand on end again. “That fool told me that angry spirits have been known to push people. He said if Miss Tillie offended someone in life, they could have come back to seek revenge.”

“And how did you answer him?”

Dr. Payne looked embarrassed. “I didn’t beat him up, but it was a near thing. Could have taken him, too. He’s soft around the middle.”

“It’s probably just as well you didn’t.”

“I’m hoping Rollie will boot those leeches out tomorrow.”

We chatted for a little longer, then cleaned up our tea service. Dr. Payne walked me around the house, showing me the doors to the outside and checking that they were all locked—I doubted that the windows had been opened in years—and took his leave. I locked the front door behind him and turned around. My eye fell on the little lamp. I leaned down to see where the switch was and twisted it. It clicked, but no light came on. I unscrewed the tiny bulb and shook it to hear if the filament was loose, replaced it, and tried the switch again. Still nothing.

Giving the lamp one backward glance, I started upstairs to my room, passing a series of small mirrors framed in gilt as I climbed. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something move in the reflection. I turned sharply and studied the front hall below. I’d left an overhead light on. The floor was marble, and the painted walls held no fabric that could respond to a breeze, not that there was one.

Stop spooking yourself, Jessica,
I told myself.
All this talk of ghosts and spirits has simply fired your imagination.
But I gave a little sigh of relief when I reached my room and could shut the door behind me.

Chapter Seven

The radium hands of the bedside clock read two a.m., and I sat up wondering why I wasn’t asleep. The room was very dark. Earlier in the evening, all my attempts to open the painted-closed shutters had ended in vain and I’d eventually given up. Before bed, I’d placed the little flashlight that I always carry with me when I travel on the nightstand.

By my reckoning, the room’s arch-topped windows overlooked the courtyard, but with no way to look out, I couldn’t be certain. Any illumination from a streetlamp hadn’t reached the slats. I listened, my ears straining to detect even the faintest sound, and my eyes focused on the shadowy outlines of furniture around me.

I was in a nineteenth-century carved mahogany four-poster bed, the silk tester above me tightly pleated around a center rosette. In the corner was an upholstered chair with matching ottoman. Between the pair of tall windows through which no light could seep was a Bombay chest with three drawers, topped by an oval mirror. Across from the bed was an armoire that must have been built in the room. Reaching almost to the ceiling molding, it would never have fit through the door.

Thinking of the Grogans and their electromagnetic theory, I tried to sense if I was being watched. There were a number of outlets and a small chandelier in the room. In addition, when I was unpacking that afternoon, I’d straightened a painting that hung askew and found that it hid the electrical panel for the second floor. Thankfully, none of these potential sources of electromagnetic fields were disturbing me, and I perceived no otherworldly gaze aimed in my direction.

I pushed back the covers, slipped off the side of the bed, and felt for my slippers on the needlepoint rug. Mrs. Goodall had left a cotton robe for my use draped across a corner of the bed, and I put it on. Standing on the rug, tying the belt of the robe, I cocked my head toward the door. What was that?

A gentle stream of air was coming into the room from beneath the doorjamb. In a house seemingly as hermetically sealed as an apothecary jar, that wasn’t logical. All my senses went on alert. The sound of a door slamming somewhere made me jump, and the breeze at my feet petered out.

Was someone here? Or had someone just left? The room suddenly felt stuffy. I groped around the nightstand for my flashlight, tucked it into the pocket of the robe, opened the door quietly, and stepped into the broad upstairs hall, my ears straining to hear any movement. Dim light from the fixture I’d left on in the downstairs foyer allowed me to peer into the gloom. All the second-floor doors were closed, except mine. The only sound was the ticking of a grandfather clock somewhere downstairs. I thought I remembered spotting one in Tillie’s study when Dr. Payne and I were making the rounds of the house locking up, but we hadn’t gone into that room since it had no door to the outside.

Where could that slammed door have been? It sounded too far away to be on the second floor. I went to the top of the stairs. The woven rug under my feet was worn through, the bare section a patch of loose strands of heavy warp thread where it had lost its weft. I remembered Mrs. Goodall’s warning and stepped to the side, off the worn part. Gripping the banister, I descended the staircase, planting each foot carefully and slowly so as not to make the wood creak beneath my slipper. The small mirrors over my shoulder on the right-hand wall twinkled and I checked the reflection in them, remembering my earlier sensation of something moving. All was still.

As I reached the marble floor of the foyer, I began to feel foolish. Had I really heard a door slam in the house? Loud noises carry in the night. Could it have been a door in the guesthouse, or perhaps another home in the square? After all, many people kept late hours. Just because I preferred to get a good night’s sleep didn’t mean everyone else in Savannah went to bed before midnight. After all, this was a big city. There were restaurants and bars and nightclubs. Perhaps a neighbor had been out celebrating and the wind caught his front door before he could keep it from slamming. Or maybe a teenager broke her curfew and came home to an angry parent who flung the door closed behind her.

A loud crack sounded from the staircase behind me and I swung around with a gasp. Nothing was there. Now annoyed, I chided myself for being skittish.
Stop it, Jessica! This is no time to get jumpy. Mrs. Goodall told you it’s an old house with a lot of noises. You’ll have a difficult month if you let every sound rattle you. What you need is a good night’s rest.

Unfortunately, I was fully awake. If Tillie’s resident spirits intended to disrupt my sleep, they had done a fine job of it. I decided a cup of herbal tea would be soothing and hoped the pantry held such a prize. I switched on the chandelier in the dining room, crossed to the butler’s pantry, and descended the back stairs into the kitchen, turning on lights as I went. In the old houses in Savannah’s landmark district, the kitchen was typically on the ground floor, the wealthy owners of centuries ago accustomed to having cooks and other servants ferry the food to the formal dining room above.

The back stairs fed into a hallway with wood paneling in a nested-squares design. To the left, the hall led to the room Mrs. Goodall used when she was in residence. To the right, it went to the kitchen. Before the kitchen, however, there were two doors, one on either side. I checked them both. The first had a simple lock. I slid the bolt to the side and opened the door to rough wooden stairs leading down into blackness. A chill raised goose bumps on my arms.
That’s for another day
, I thought, quickly closing the door and relocking it. The door opposite had no lock, and when I turned the knob, it revealed shelves of cans and dry goods—the kinds of staples I had in my own kitchen in Cabot Cove—and row upon row of hand-labeled jars of pickles, fruits, and vegetables. But no tea.

I flipped the switch for the kitchen light, an old ceiling fixture that did not give off much light, and crossed the black-and-white-checkerboard floor to the cupboard where Dr. Payne had found the tin of loose tea, hoping there might be a noncaffeinated version. A box of Sleepytime was tucked next to the tin. I silently blessed Mrs. Goodall, took out a tea bag, filled the kettle at the sink, and turned on one of the stove’s gas burners. Mindful of the watched pot never boiling, I sat on a chair at a small wooden table and surveyed my surroundings.

The kitchen was a large rectangular room with windows on two sides. In the center of one windowed wall was a door to the outside, its glass top half covered by a pull-down shade. From other visits to the kitchen, I knew the door led to the courtyard and garden. The stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator were of recent vintage, but everything else in the room retained a century-old flavor, with cupboards thick with paint, a heavy butcher’s chopping block on four legs, and two wooden tables: one, next to the stove against the wall, on which Mrs. Goodall kept her cooking utensils, a flashlight, and an electric coffeepot; the other, the small square at which I was seated.