Peril in Paperback (13 page)

If any of those scenarios were true, then everyone who worked in the company could be suspect. Peter, Sybil, Marko, even Grace herself. Along with anyone
whose money was invested in the company, for that matter. That list might possibly include everyone attending the party, except for me, of course.

“Why did they meet with you?” I asked. “Haven’t you retired from the company?”

“I’m still the major shareholder,” she explained.

“Do Peter and his wife stand to lose a lot of money from this theft?” Gabriel asked.

“No, no. None of us will lose money. Dear God, we all have more money than any of us will ever need. The company is extremely profitable. That account has already been closed and all of the passwords and routing numbers have been changed. And it’s all covered by insurance, anyway, so it’s not really an issue.” She rubbed her forehead wearily. “I don’t even know why I brought it up. I’m just flustered, I guess.”

Gabriel leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Just a few more questions, love.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, her tone resolute as she straightened her shoulders and sat back on the couch. “I’m fine. Let’s keep going. I want some answers.”

“All right, then,” I said. “What about Marko?” Feeling restless from sitting so long, I stood up to pace a little.

“Poor Marko.” Grace dabbed the corners of her eyes with a tissue. “He’s been with the company since we first started. Bella joined the team about ten years ago. I suspected that he was in love with her from the first day she arrived. He’s so immature. I knew it would never work out. For someone as easygoing as he is, he can fly off the handle at the oddest moments.”

“Could he be violent?” Gabriel asked.

“Oh no.” She shook her head as she reminisced. “No, they were more like tantrums, really. Artistic temperament, I suppose, although none of the other designers ever behaved that way. Oh, and he used to be so cheap. It was almost laughable. He’s gotten better, but Bella would never have tolerated that. Of course, we can’t always choose who we’ll fall in love with.”

“No, we can’t,” Gabriel muttered.

Grace continued. “After seeing Marko’s devastated reaction tonight, I’m sure he was in love with her. He couldn’t possibly have killed her.”

I let that comment go for now. “How about Merrilee?”

“Merrilee?” She was genuinely taken aback. Then suddenly she laughed. “Oh no, no, no. Merrilee isn’t smart enough or mean enough to concoct such an evil scheme. She wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone another human being.”

I sat down and took hold of her hand to soften the pain of the next question. “Grace, is Ruth in your will?”

“Well, of course,” she said easily. “I’m her patron as well as her friend. I’ve set up a trust fund that will take care of her as she works toward her artistic goals.”

“Does she know how much she would inherit?”

“We’ve talked about— Wait.” She held up her hand like a traffic cop. “You can’t possibly think Ruth had anything to do with this. We’re very close friends. More like sisters, really.”

Gabriel leaned farther forward to catch her gaze. “So you’ve told her how much she stands to inherit?”

She frowned at him. “Not exactly, but I suppose she might have an inkling. She’s not a stupid woman.”

“She handed you the poisoned drink,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean she was the one who added poison to the glass.” Grace shook her head vigorously and refused to look at either of us. “No. It had to have been done by someone else.”

“So someone else poisoned the drink and handed it to Ruth to give to you?”

“Yes. That must be what happened.” She stared intently at her fingers as she fiddled with her rings. “Something like that, anyway.”

“Grace, who do you think would do that?”

She looked up and her eyes were damp with tears. “I haven’t got a clue.”

*     *     *

Merrilee updated us with the latest information from the police dispatcher. There had been a major traffic accident on Highway 89, so the police wouldn’t be able to make it to Grace’s place before morning.

I stared at Gabriel, knowing what he was thinking. There was no way we could leave Bella’s body unattended in that warm upstairs room all night.

I had taken at least a hundred pictures, so the police couldn’t complain that we were mucking with the crime scene. Well, they could complain, but it was their own fault for not going to the trouble to get here faster.

I enlisted Suzie and Vinnie for help, and the three of us wrapped Bella’s body securely in a clean white sheet. This time Gabriel snapped photographs, memorializing every step we took. Then Gabriel and Nathan carried Bella downstairs and outside. We all walked with them around the house to the root cellar located beneath the conservatory. It was below freezing and snow was still falling, so if my rudimentary knowledge of forensics was correct, Bella’s body would decompose more slowly down here.

That thought gave me shivers. You’d think I would have become used to the realities of dealing with dead bodies by now, but no.

More pictures were taken inside the root cellar; then Gabriel locked the door with Grace’s key and our small, intrepid group trundled back inside the house.

After Merrilee had arranged for a bedroom for Gabriel, she and Grace and the rest of the guests retired for the evening. I was wide awake, so I asked Gabriel if he would like to stay up and talk for a while.

He grabbed a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses while I snagged a plate of leftover appetizers and led the way to the cozy TV room I’d found earlier that day. It was a comfort to see that the short knight in shining armor still stood guard in the corner. He was a lot less scary now that I had company with me.

I sat on the couch and watched as Gabriel poured two
glasses of wine. He first took a sip of the wine, then handed me the other glass and sat in the nearby chair.

“So what are you doing here, really?” I’d been wanting to ask him that question all evening and finally had the chance.

He stretched out his legs. “Grace invited me.”

“But how? I can’t believe you know her. Is this a small world or what?” I tucked my legs underneath me and nestled into the corner of the couch.

“She and I share a passion for books,” he said, his smile enigmatic.

I narrowed in on him. “Did you steal one for her?”

“Brooklyn, Brooklyn.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Let’s just say we’re old friends and leave it at that.”

It was a reasonable question, given that shortly after the first time I ever met Gabriel he somehow managed to steal an extremely valuable book from my home. The book didn’t belong to me, so the fact that I later discovered it in the home of the very person I had meant to give it to was somewhat mollifying. But still, I had little doubt that Gabriel was a thief for hire, among other occupations.

I sipped my wine for a moment, then decided to take his advice and change the subject. “So how did you figure out that Bella was poisoned? Can you smell cyanide? I don’t think Marko smelled it. And how in the world did someone get cyanide into the house?”

He shrugged. “It’s not that uncommon an ingredient. And I happen to have a good sense of smell. Only about forty percent of the population can detect the scent of cyanide.”

“Really? I guess we’re lucky you’re one of them.”

He said nothing, just took a sip of his wine.

“But seriously, Gabriel. Cyanide poisoning? Sounds like something out of the Cold War, don’t you think?”

“It does. But it’s still used all the time in herbicides and drain cleaners, usually under different chemical
names. And it’s found naturally in the nuts and seeds of some edible plants and some roots, too.”

“Plants? Like garden plants?”

“That’s right. Lima beans, bitter almonds, apricot seeds. But we’re not supposed to worry because the government carefully regulates all that stuff.”

“I wasn’t worried until you said that.”

And not everything was regulated, I realized, recalling the poisonous plants and trees that were clearly marked in Grace’s conservatory.

I mentioned the plants to Gabriel and we discussed the remote possibility that someone had taken a cutting and somehow drawn the poison from it. I’d seen stranger things happen, so I wouldn’t put it past a truly desperate person.

It was likely that the killer had simply used some kind of weed killer or cleaning agent. But before going off to bed, Gabriel and I made a date to search the conservatory tomorrow to see if any of the poisonous plants had been disturbed.

No, not
if
. Something had definitely been disturbed; that much was clear. Now Gabriel and I were resolved to find out just how far someone in this house had gone in their attempt to kill our friend Grace.

Bright and
way
too early the next morning, two police detectives and two EMTs finally showed up from the local police department. The detectives, whose names were Pentley and Graves, were a no-nonsense team. They told Merrilee to round up all the guests in the Gold Salon for interviewing, then asked to be taken to see the victim.

Gabriel and I led the way to the root cellar, where Pentley told the paramedics to unwrap the sheet to check that Bella was, in fact, there. She was, thank goodness. Then they wrapped her back up and Pentley gave the two EMTs permission to take charge of Bella’s body.

I watched as the two burly men slipped her body, sheet and all, into a black zippered body bag. Then one of the EMTs ran back to their vehicle for a gurney to more easily transport Bella to the ambulance.

I breathed in the icy air. It was never a fun thing to view death up close like that, but standing around with the cops and paramedics as they started down those cold concrete steps into the dark, dank root cellar? It really disturbed me. Especially since I knew that poor dead Bella had been lying there all night, waiting inside that earthen cavern on that icy slab for the police and EMTs to show up and declare her dead.

Bella hadn’t deserved to die, but she also hadn’t deserved to be wrapped in a plain white cotton bedsheet and stuck on the shelf of a funky old root cellar like a bushel of potatoes while she waited for justice to be served.

Rubbing my arms to fend off the chill, I added up the insults that Bella had endured. I put them all on a mental list of reasons why I wouldn’t stop until I found her killer. I didn’t care if that person turned out to be Grace’s best friend, her worst enemy, or Grace herself. I was sick and tired and pissed off at people who killed other people, especially when I was around. It made me cranky and vindictive.

And yes, sometimes it was all about me, damn it.

Shoving my hands into the pockets of my thick fleece vest, I walked away from the activity. I didn’t go far, just a few dozen feet, but it was far enough to take advantage of the sight of the early-morning fog hovering over the lake beyond the house. Snow had fallen during the night, so the mountains and trees surrounding the lake had received a light dusting of white. Everything looked clean and sparkly.

Staring up at Grace’s home, I was overwhelmed by the grand eccentricity of the design. The outer walls were constructed from thick, heavy stone, but the style of the home itself was Queen Anne Victorian, complete with steep gables, a central tower, rounded turrets, and cone-shaped, or witch’s cap, rooflines. Fanciful finials perched on top of the witch’s caps completed the Victorian look. I was familiar enough with the design because Victorians of every style were ubiquitous in San Francisco.

Wrapped around the outside walls of the second and third floors was a labyrinthine maze of passages and walkways that led to balconies and porches and terraces outside the various bedrooms, parlors, and salons on the second and third floors. Some of the balconies were walled in by stone, while others were contained by pretty wooden spindle railings.

At the very top of the house was another railing that surrounded a central section of the roof. A widow’s walk, maybe? The view had to be incomparable from up there. I couldn’t wait to explore it.

The overall feeling of the outside of the mansion was whimsically contradictory: heavily fortified yet charming. Almost otherworldly. An airy-fairy castle in the woods.

At last, the EMTs wheeled Bella’s body over to the ambulance and loaded her inside. Then they took off, leaving the two detectives, Pentley and Graves, behind to conduct witness interviews and examine the crime scene.

“Sorry we couldn’t get out here last night,” Graves said.

“I guess the snow was falling pretty hard,” I said.

“Yeah, the snow was bad, but we also got called to another murder in town.”

I had to ask. “Do you normally get a lot of murders out here?”

“Not really,” the taller cop, Detective Pentley, said. “Must be the full moon or some kind of weird planetary alignment or something.”

“You think?” I asked, remembering there was a full moon the first night here. “Do the movements of the planets have an influence on the level of crime in this area?”

Graves snickered.

“Nope, it’s mostly about drugs and alcohol,” Pentley said with a straight face.

“Right.” So I was being mocked. I exchanged looks with Gabriel. Fine. I could take it. And these cops would need their wacky senses of humor once they were dealing with the crowd staying at Grace’s house.

By the time we got back inside, Merrilee had arranged for two sitting rooms to be used for the private interviews. She had stocked each room with a coffeepot, sodas, doughnuts, chips, and pretzels.

Merrilee was so competent and warm and intuitive
when it came to providing guests with a welcoming space, I wondered why she was wringing her hands and fussing so much. It was almost as though she were the one about to be dragged off to the pokey. I knew in my gut that she couldn’t be guilty of murder, so why was she acting like it?

I finally pulled her aside to try to calm her down. “Are you all right?”

Stressed out, she blew her bangs off her forehead. “I’m so worried we’ll run out of potato chips. We’re down to three bags.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I laughed, then scanned the sideboard with its abundant supply of snacks. “If we run out, it’s not your problem. We’ll just eat tortilla chips or pretzels. But it’s not going to happen. You’ve arranged everything perfectly.”