Read Dead in the Water (Olivia Grant Mysteries Book 1) Online
Authors: Phyllis A. Humphrey
Dead in the Water (Olivia Grant Mysteries Book 1)
* * * * *
Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our new releases!
Sign up for the Gemma Halliday newsletter!
* * * * *
* * * * *
DEAD IN THE WATER
by
PHYLLIS A. HUMPHREY
* * * * *
Copyright © 2015 by Phyllis A. Humphrey
Cover design by Viola Estrella
Gemma Halliday Publishing
http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
* * * * *
No one murdered Edward Mason. At least I don't think so. Since he was ninety-two years old, he apparently died of the usual "natural causes." My father, Peter, Edward's younger brother, often boasted he came from a long line of sturdy, long-living ancestors. His three aunts died at ages one hundred, one hundred and one, and ninety-nine and a half years old, so Edward avoiding death until his ninth decade surprised no one. However, the case of his forty-something years younger wife, Noreen, was a different matter.
Although my father had invited me to accompany him and my mother, I didn't attend the funeral. Uncle Edward shed his body in London, and I stayed in San Francisco shedding a husband. When my parents returned, Mother said everyone asked about me.
"You should go to England yourself, Olivia." She leaned against the counter in my screaming-for-remodeling kitchen and delivered her advice with her usual encouraging smile. "You haven't been there since you were nine. Pay your respects to Edward's widow, and get reacquainted with your British cousins. A two-week vacation would help you recover from the divorce too."
Like she would know. She'd been married to the same man for forty-five years (she joked showing up was the sole requirement), whereas I—Olivia Grant, a dedicated chocaholic with unruly hair and a faulty sense of direction—had already been widowed before the brief marriage that just expired. I was in no mood for her idea of therapy.
"You're almost forty years old and have no children. Sitting around eating Dove bars all day is hardly a suitable occupation."
"I'm thirty-nine. And I teach bridge," I whined. I also deliver teddy bears to children's hospitals, but she'd forgotten about my charitable streak.
"You haven't even done that for weeks, and you put on at least ten pounds while we were gone."
"Five." I lied, although even my scale knew better. On the other hand, I was no fashion model forbidden to weigh more than her stiletto heels.
Mother could always guess my needs, and although I loved her, I sometimes wished she'd pay more attention to her other children, my sister Samantha and brother Brad, who were twenty-nine-year-old fraternal twins. I'd have definitely preferred sharing the occasional pressure to be perfect with them.
"I can tell you're depressed." Mother propped her hands on her slender hips. "You need a holiday. Visit cousins you once played with, go sightseeing."
"All right already. I'll go." Actually, I wanted to get over feeling that losing two husbands revealed some horrible secret about my character. The first, Stephen, was the victim of a freeway pileup, and the last one's sole contribution to the marriage consisted of wearing Jockey shorts and creating garbage.
So that was how a few days later, at the uncivilized early hour when my transatlantic flight came in, I got off the plane in London complete with jet lag, morning breath, and tangled hair. Heathrow was a madhouse, but a taxi eventually took me to Mason Hall, somewhere north of London. As we drove, I tried to keep my eyes open, to look at the mix of modern and ancient buildings in the city, the narrow brick houses dotting the suburbs, and the still-green countryside with its quaint low cottages. Instead, I must have dozed, because I remembered nothing about the trip.
Moments later, it seemed, we crunched up the gravel driveway curving in front of a three-story, gray, stone building topped with a forest of old-fashioned chimneys. After I paid the driver, whose accent revealed as much Calcutta as cockney, he deposited my two pieces of luggage on the doorstep, and I banged the brass knocker shaped like a lion's head.
As I waited, I stepped back to look up at the house and refresh my memory. Through my nine-year-old eyes, it had seemed a castle, but although not so large as Blenheim or even the Manderley I'd read about in one of my favorite old books, it still qualified as a mansion. A couple of towers rose above a roofline with crenellations. The deep-set mullioned windows, ornamented above and below, peered from ancient stones, the whole swathed in a mini-grove of ivy. I felt as if my suburban split-level had suddenly become a slum.
My grandparents, Chauncey and Olivia—now you know where I got my name—had four children. They were Alice, the recently deceased Edward, my father, Peter, who had emigrated to the US to marry my mother, and William.
Aunt Alice opened the door. I hadn't seen her since my long-ago childhood visit, but Mother had described her when she returned to the States, and there couldn't be two Mason women as wide as they were tall, with gray hair pinned into a knot on top of their heads. I smiled, remembering how we children ran to her for biscuits, a bandage for a skinned knee, or a hug against her warm comfy bulk.
"Olivia!" she squealed. "My darling girl, you look smashing. Elizabeth will be quite jealous." Elizabeth was the eldest of Alice's three children and a year older than I am, and I wondered if she'd put on as much weight as her mother.
"Come in." Alice smoothed imaginary creases from the white apron she wore over a dark blue dress. "We didn't expect you so early. If you'd rung, someone would've collected you."
I entered, dragging my wheeled suitcase and the tote bag I'd slung over its handle.
"Leave your bags here for now. We have no live-in servants anymore. Noreen dismissed them all weeks ago, said she couldn't afford them." She added a loud, "Hah!"
I remembered my mother saying something unflattering about Edward's widow, and my father adding he suspected the other relatives worried she'd soon run off with the family silver.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"Now you mention it, I haven't seen hide nor hair of her all morning. Most everyone came down to breakfast some time ago."
"Is she sleeping in?"
"No, I'm certain of that. When I left my room, I saw her door standing open and looked in, but she wasn't in bed." She rubbed one hand over her head as if searching for stray hairs she could poke back into the topknot.
"Are you hungry? I believe everyone has finished breakfast, but there's still food laid out on the sideboard in the dining room. Being a Yank, you'll want some coffee as well."
I managed to get my words in edgewise. "Coffee, but no breakfast." Diet or not, I usually eat whatever can't escape from me, but I remembered formal breakfasts there. Scrambled eggs that had seen better hours, black toast not only far beyond even the English definition of crisp but stone-cold as well.
As I poured myself a cup of coffee, Alice waved a hand. "Make yourself at home, and I'll fetch the others. They've looked forward to seeing you." She hustled away.
The heels of my travel shoes echoing, I crossed the hall and went into the library. With thousands of books in colorful bindings lining the walls, the room seemed cozier. I settled into the corner of a faded blue sofa and punched a throw pillow into submission at my side. I drank most of the coffee, put the cup and my purse on the mahogany table, and waited.
Somewhere a grandfather clock chimed ten times, and when it finished, silence settled all around. I felt, or heard, someone come into the room, and I opened my eyes to find the world had turned sideways. Alice stood close to me, and I lay on the sofa, drooling into the throw pillow. I straightened up and looked at my watch. I'd been asleep for half an hour. "Sorry. Jet lag, I suppose."
"I didn't mean to disturb you. However, as you're awake, you haven't seen Noreen, have you?" Despite her earlier comments about the woman, Alice seemed genuinely concerned.
"I haven't seen anyone."
"Noreen's gone missing, and we've been searching for her the past quarter hour. We've scoured all the rooms, but there's no sign of her."
"Don't bother on my account. I don't want to upset her usual routine."
"She knew you were coming this morning. Not being here to greet you is rather rude." She raised her shoulders in a what-can-you-expect motion. "Not that it would be the first time she's been rude to people."
"I don't mind, really. After all, we've never met. I'm more looking forward to seeing Elizabeth."
"Nevertheless, she ought to be here."
"Perhaps she's still grieving over Uncle Edward."
"Grieving? Happy as a lark, I have no doubt. I'm sure it was what she wanted. Mark my words, when a forty-seven-year-old woman marries a man who's eighty-nine and has never been quite right in the head since he fought in the Korean War, it's not love she's after, but money."
"Could she have driven off somewhere?"
"The cars are sitting in the garage." She accented the first syllable of the word, making me smile.
"Out for a stroll, perhaps?" I don't usually say "stroll," but I had already begun to imitate the language I heard. An unconscious habit of mine, I pick up accents everywhere I go. Once, on a visit to Alabama, I inadvertently convinced several people I'd been born in Mobile.
"I doubt it. We thought she might be walking Mr. Tarkington. That's her dog, but he's in the house."
"Anything I can do?"
"No, no. Sorry I disturbed you." She waved her hand again. "William and Beryl are in their sitting room and will be down directly, and Elizabeth has been helping me look for Noreen." Her forehead wrinkling in distaste, she turned and disappeared.
I stood and tried to smooth the pants and jacket I'd worn on the plane. They were not supposed to wrinkle, but "sleeping in them" failed to appear on the label as an acceptable thing to do. I decided to kill the time with a walk across the grounds, passing through the great hall and out the front door. I hoped the September air might revive me, since the coffee obviously hadn't.
Leaving the gravel driveway, I crossed an expanse of thick green lawn then continued toward a side garden surrounded by a privet hedge. Despite the passage of time, everything looked the same—massive house, sloping lawn, stately trees. I rounded the hedge and sauntered toward the rectangular lily pond lined with rocks and overlooked by a sculpture of twin cherubs. I remembered giggling with my girl cousins over whether the boy cherub was anatomically correct. Stone benches rested on the grass on either side of the pond, their seats still damp with morning dew.
However, the pond didn't look the same as it once did but showed obvious signs of neglect. The water appeared almost black, with no lily pads or flowers, just green scum at the sides. Plus a smell like rotten vegetation. I walked beside the edge, looking at the water, and saw something inches below the surface. An acid taste of coffee and bile rose to my throat, my heart pounded, and my knees buckled.
A body lay face down, dark clothing, thin white legs, yellow hair fanned out, floating like albino seaweed. I had no idea what she looked like, but I had a hunch I'd found Noreen.
* * *
I stumbled back into the house, found Alice in the hall, and choked out what I'd seen. "A body—" I squeaked, "in the lily pond—" I took a breath and tried to control my quaking thighs.
"A body in the lily pond?"
"A woman, a dead woman. She's floating face down."
Alice frowned and clutched my arm. "Not—" she paused, "medium height, thin as a chair rail, with long hair that's seen the best of a peroxide bottle?"
"I think so."
"Right."
I decided she confirmed it must be the missing widow. I hadn't expected to meet her so oddly.
Alice rushed out, and then Uncle William, Aunt Beryl, and my cousin Elizabeth all entered the hall at once, and I found myself greeted with sedate embraces. Their words echoed in my ears but made no sense to me. They must have been uttering polite questions about my trip, my parents, my siblings, yet all I could think of was the body in the lily pond. I couldn't speak.
Elizabeth seemed almost American in sweatshirt and jeans and had not put on as much weight as her mother. Instead, she was trim and had grown quite tall, at least two inches over my own five-feet-six. She hugged me, and I may have hugged back, but I don't remember.
Alice returned and gasped out the news. For a few minutes no one spoke, and then they uttered murmurs of surprise. Aunt Beryl, short and plump in a long-sleeved dress with a lace collar, put a hand to her throat but made no sound.
William, pushing ninety but still slim and rather handsome with his cloud of Albert Einstein hair, looked like an older version of my father. He cleared his throat. "I say, do you mean dead in the water?"
"I'm afraid so," Alice told him.
"You're certain it's Noreen?" Elizabeth asked.
Alice nodded, but Elizabeth, apparently wanting to see for herself, rushed out the door.
"I must call the authorities." With that, Alice hurried away, and the rest of us stood awkwardly in the great hall.
Elizabeth returned moments later, proclaiming Noreen did, indeed, lay facedown in the pond and ushered us into the drawing room. This looked as I remembered it, a cavernous place with high molded ceilings, tall windows, and more furniture than a Sheraton lobby. Soon Alice joined us and told the others I had originally found the body, but everyone looked strangely noncommittal about Noreen's fate. No exclamations of horror or surprise. No tears, fake or otherwise.
Having never met her, I had no sad feelings about Noreen's demise. Yet I was still in shock from finding her, and I regretted a relatively young person should have died. In my opinion, the right time to leave the earth is at the age of one hundred or more when you wake up every morning thinking, "Oh, darn, I'm still here."