A Veiled Antiquity (Torie O'Shea Mysteries) (6 page)

His face changed expressions completely. He sat to attention then. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. Why would she get out two glasses? I think that somebody knocked at her door, so she brushed her hair, put on the robe, and so forth.
She let in her killer.
Whether or not the person came there with the intent to kill her, or if it was a result of an argument, I don’t know. But she was not alone,” I said. “I don’t think that she would have got out the milk before she went to bed and forgot to put it away. And why the two glasses? There should have been only one,” I said with great satisfaction.

Sheriff Brooke sat with one leg crossed over the other, picking at the heel of his boot. His eyebrows were knitted together. He was off in police land trying to piece together everything I’d just said.

“So,” I said. “I ask you one more time. Why is this not being handled as a homicide?”

“Well, I left the crime scene. It was my day off and I thought Duran had it under control. I’ll check into it, but that still doesn’t take away from the fact that you were where you weren’t supposed to be. With your children, no less!”

Sheriff Brooke stood up then and headed out to my back porch, stopping at the door. “I don’t want to hear of you being on that property again. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir!” I said as I saluted him.

I was so thrilled with myself for convincing the sheriff that some pretty sloppy investigative work had been done that I forgot that my mother was still in the room. I was smiling to myself, like a schoolgirl who beat the smartest boy in the class in the math races. My smile soon faded as I looked into my mother’s eyes.

“It was an accident,” I pleaded. “I would not intentionally endanger my children.”

She said nothing. I glanced out my back door and thought about Sheriff Brooke sitting out on my porch swing. I supposed that this would not be a good time to bring up the subject of his informal bid on Marie Dijon’s estate.

Six

Camille Lombarde lived in an area of St. Louis known as the Central West End. It was an artsy neighborhood where one could find organic grocery stores, outdoor cafés, beautiful globed streetlights, cobblestoned streets and sidewalks, and every type of esoteric bookstore and music store imaginable. My favorite Chinese restaurant is located at the corner of Maryland and Euclid. The Magic Wok can’t be beat for their lunchtime buffet.

The residences were old, pretty, and rich in architectural extravagance. Camille’s residence was no different. Her house was, at one time, a building with several residences in it.

She bought the building, gutted it except for the original wood molding and wood floors, and made it one very large, enviable piece of property. It even had a courtyard with fountains and statues, all surrounded by a brick wall that was about eight feet tall, over which vines of every sort climbed.

I was seated in the courtyard somewhere in between a statue of the Venus de Milo and a fountain of a cherub with water squirting out of some fairly ingenious places. Camille, seated next to me, was a native of France, although she hadn’t lived there in at least forty years. She had taught French at one of the universities in Atlanta for nearly thirty years and then retired to St. Louis.

I had gotten her name and address from Marie Dijon a while back. I had French documents from my family tree that I needed translated, and Marie said Camille would translate for twenty dollars an hour. Eventually Camille and I became friends, and we get together every now and then for lunch for the sheer enjoyment of each other’s company.

“Torie,” she began. “I would think by now that you had found the majority of your French ancestors.”

She barely had an accent anymore, but it was still lingering in her
r
’s, especially when she got angry or excited. She was very wrinkled for her age, about sixty. She was also very charming, as I tend to think most Europeans are. Gray hair framed Camille’s dark eyes and she was blessed with a small pert nose.

“This isn’t for my family tree. These documents were … found in an old bureau that a friend of mine bought at an auction. They’re very old. I made out the date on one of them to be April 1756.”

Her eyebrows shot up on that one. I handed her the envelope.

“I don’t know if they are written by anybody famous or worth any money, but we are very interested to hear what somebody from 1756 had to say.”

“Well, I should say so. I am interested myself,” she said. She carefully took the papers out of the envelope.

“I managed to make out a few things. One of them is written to a countess, but no name is given, only her title.”

“Let’s take these into my office. It looks like rain, no?”

Yes, it did look like rain. Dark clouds were moving in from the west at a fairly fast pace. A slight wind kicked up some leaves around the patio.

I didn’t have to tell her that she held photocopies. She could tell that the paper was not old. It had taken me hours to copy them because the papers were so fragile and I was afraid that they would get torn.

“Maybe you have found the correspondence of a dangerous
liaison,
” she said with a smile.

We entered her den, which looked like something right out of a French château; vanilla-colored walls with dark cherry trim, large settees everywhere, and a marble fireplace were the highlights of the room. The den included bookshelves that went from floor to ceiling on two walls. I found this quite impressive because she had twelve-foot ceilings. She had a table set up in the middle of the room, complete with fluorescent lamps and magnifiers.

She sat down, grabbed her glasses from the end of the table, and began scanning the papers. “Get me a piece of paper from my desk,” she said without looking up. “And a pencil.”

I obliged. After a few minutes she looked up at me, with a disturbed look on her face. “Torie, I may need a few days to work on these.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just think they are going to be a little difficult to translate. They are in two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old French. The handwriting is not that great.”

I suppose I didn’t look completely convinced.

“At the least it’s going to take me twelve hours. Do you have twelve hours to sit in my den and watch me?”

“Well, no. But … well, not to insult you, Camille, but I’m not real thrilled about—”

“Leaving them with me.”

“No. It’s not you. I’m just really impatient. Not to mention generally paranoid. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Well, some of them may never be translated.”

“Why?”

“Look at this one,” she said. “It’s nothing but numbers.”

“Like an accounting report or something?”

“No. It’s in a code.”

The implications of that rocked me to my feet. In code? What in the heck had I found? What the heck did Marie Dijon have? I swallowed nervously.

“It would have to be decoded first, and then translated. But here’s the tricky part. The numbers are written in French, as in
quatre onze vingt.
But who’s to say that the words that they spell out will be in French? They could spell out words in English, Dutch, Russian. Any number of languages and even then the words could be purely allegorical. It just depends on how far the author tried to go to keep this information safe.”

I felt the blood run from my face. Surely if it was something from the 1700s it wouldn’t be pertinent to this century’s events.

“Of course, who’s to say they are even authentic? Whatever they say will have to be authenticated. You know, the originals will have to be dated?” she said. That was the only indication she gave that she was aware I had the originals elsewhere. They were in my safety deposit box, to which only Rudy and I had keys.

“Yes, I know.”

“Even if they are dated at the eighteenth century, the author could have been writing a novel, or could have written false truths. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Why was she trying so hard to convince me? She had barely glanced at the documents and yet she was acting as if she already knew that they contained earthshaking news. I didn’t feel as though I could leave these documents with her. And yet, if I didn’t? Who could I get to translate them without putting me in debt? I didn’t know anybody else.

“I’m not all that concerned about their value or authenticity,” I said. “I was just curious as to what they said.”

“I will keep them in my safe. Yes? Will that make you feel better?”

No, not really. But it’s not like they were the originals. Right? I suppose in my paranoid head I just had this awful feeling that the copies would be destroyed by a spilled cup of coffee or something equally bizarre, and then my originals would burn in a fire and then I’d never know what they said. Is that not the working of a truly paranoid mind?

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll pick them up, say tomorrow around three?”

“That should give me plenty of time. I don’t really have much else to do. I will give them my full attention. And I’ll take good care of them.”

“I know you will. Call me if you need anything.”

*   *   *

I kicked the soda machine that was located in the hall outside of my office, an hour after I had left Camille. A Dr Pepper costs fifty cents. So, for some reason, this machine will not give me a Dr Pepper unless I put in sixty cents or more. It’s like it forgets that I already gave it a dime. Sylvia got the proceeds from the machine, though. That should tell me something.

I went back into my little claustrophobic office and found Eleanore Murdoch seated in the chair across from mine. She didn’t hide the fact that she was reading the documents on my desk. I suppose I shouldn’t get too angry with her for being as nosy as I am.

She turned them back around once I came in the room and smiled at me.

“What can I do for you, Eleanore?” It was difficult for me to be civil. I hoped she had come to tell me that she was going to print a retraction about Sylvia.

“Oh, you know, I wanted to see if Rudy could help Oscar paint the porch on the inn next month.”

“In November,” I said, deciding to temporarily forget about the retraction.

“Yes.”

“Isn’t there some rule about not painting when it’s cold or something?”

She shrugged her shoulders. It was clear that was not why she was here. Then she pointed to the documents she had been peeking at. “I noticed the Dijon name on those papers.”

“Yes.”

I popped the lid on my can of Dr Pepper, taking solace in hearing the fizz of the carbonation. Eleanore evoked very unpleasant thoughts in me.

“Is that what you’re supposed to be working on? I mean, doesn’t Sylvia have some tax or land records she wanted done last August that you still don’t have finished?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” My blood pressure had just gone up a noticeable amount. My temples hurt.

Her eyes got really big and darted around the room. She pressed her very red lips together, fingered her necklace, and acted innocent.

“Eleanore … I’m not sure how you even know about the land records incident, but it’s none of your business what I’m working on and what I’m not. But, for the record, I will say that I was working on the history of New Kassel, right over there,” I said, and pointed to the computer in the corner. “These just happen to be on my desk because…”

“Because?”

“Because I was going over them earlier in the day. I’m not sure what it is that you want or what you’re driving at, Eleanore … but while you’re here there’s something I’d like to talk with you about—”

“There was nothing that I wanted, Torie. I truly wanted to know if you thought Rudy would help Oscar with the porch. Oscar wanted to get a group of guys and have a cookout and paint the porch. Really, Torie. You are so sensitive these days.”

With that she stood up and walked out of my office. I took a very long, much needed drink of my cold Dr Pepper. Then I took a deep breath and made myself go to the computer.

I stopped just as my fingers reached the keys. She managed to get out of my office without me saying a word to her about the article she had written. My head hurt worse.

Seven

Six hours later, my phone was ringing at the same time that my doorbell was buzzing. Mother answered the phone as I answered the door.

The mayor of New Kassel, Bill Castlereagh, stood on my front porch.

“Hello, Bill,” I said as cheerfully as I could. He looked as angry as my rooster does when he gets caught out in the rain. Bill is bald, short, and has a huge belly. He is one of those middle-aged men who are not overweight anywhere except in the midsection. His stomach could rival a midterm pregnancy.

“Torie, for God’s sake! What have you done?”

I stood there with a pair of scissors in my hands, and assumed that he was referring to them. “I’m making a banner for the Octoberfest,” I said.

“Torie!” my mother yelled. “It’s Colin. He wants to speak to you.”

Colin? I couldn’t get used to my mother calling Sheriff Brooke by his first name. I couldn’t treat him like an outsider if everybody was on a first-name basis with him. Rudy had capitulated about two weeks ago.

“Bill, would you come in? I have a phone call. Just for a minute,” I said. He stood just inside the door with his fingers linked just below his belly, waiting impatiently.

“Hello, Sheriff,” I said into the phone. I smiled at Bill.

“Torie, I don’t know what to say,” Colin said.

“About what?”

“You had better not be responsible for this … this atrocity or I swear, I will kill you with my own bare hands.”

“Jeez, all I’m doing is making one little ole banner.”

“Really, Torie, you’ve gone too far,” Bill said to me, unable to keep quiet any longer. “I’m going to have the sheriff arrest you.”

“Torie, you have gone too far,” the sheriff said.

“Okay, would somebody please shut the heck up and tell me what it is that they think I have done?” I yelled.

Bill shut up with a quick flap of his lower jaw, and surprisingly the sheriff did as well. Finally, after a few seconds of blissful silence, Sheriff Brooke began again in a calm voice.