Shadow of Reality (19 page)

Elizabeth’s nervous tension mounted as she waited through the other team’s presentations. The Circle did a rhythm play based on the children’s game, “Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?” Clapping and saying, “Who put the poison in Gloria’s soup?” “Susie put the poison in Gloria’s soup.” “Who me?” “Yes, you.” “Not me.” “Then who?” “Nigel put the poison…” until they came down to the conclusion that “Millie put the poison in Gloria’s soup,” and a team member portraying Millie made a tearful confession.

Private Lives used all their borrowed sheets not for a ghost story, but to drape the stage to depict Mount Olympus and did a sketch with a Zeus throwing lightning bolts and wreaking judgment on Brian Rielly for betraying the trust his country placed in him, for killing his partner in double-dealing espionage, and for allowing his—surprise!—
wife
, Susie, to take the rap.

Another team produced a television set and presented a videotaped drama; another did a parody of a Broadway musical; another a TV show, “This is Your Death, Gloria Glitz.” Two of the plays were all in rhyme.

Elizabeth’s tension mounted as the minutes dragged on, until she felt that she was trapped in some kind of timeless purgatory where her punishment was to watch an interminable amount of lighthearted cavorting on the stage, never knowing when her number would be called, never being free of the burden of what she must do.

“Our next solution will be presented by Blithe Spirit.” Stark’s announcement finally ended her agony.

Clutching her script with clammy hands, her heart thudding so she thought she couldn’t breathe, let alone speak, Elizabeth walked to the microphone as Irene set a small table and two chairs on the stage. Richard and Benton sat down with a large bottle labeled
Brandy
between them. It was Elizabeth's cue to take center stage.

But her feet wouldn't move. her mouth wouldn't open.
She wanted to clap her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t have to hear the words she herself must speak. Instead she drowned out the words she knew she must say by issuing desperate pleas to the universe.
Get me through this. The winds are so high. The storm so great. My boat is sinking fast
—
get me to the other side, please
. And as she implored the words came to her louder than those on the stage she was so desperate to shut out, louder than her own internal shouting.
Peace. Be still
.

And she was.

Elizabeth stepped forward. “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction.” She announced the title of their skit, then cleared her throat.
Deep breath,
she told herself.
You can do this.

“Two years ago at White’s in London,” her voice sounded shaky in her own ears, but quickly took on strength. “American thriller writer Weldon Stark entertained his acquaintance Sir Gavin Kendall with eighty-proof brandy and cleverly plotted mystery stories.” The actors pantomimed animated drinking and conversing.

“Not to be outdone, Sir Gavin countered with a story even more diabolically intricate. There were only two problems with the situation: Sir Gavin was too drunk to remember what he had told, but his friend wasn’t; and the plot was not fiction, but an incredibly involved true-life drama in which Sir Gavin Kendall himself was the prime actor.” Puzzle pieces danced onto the stage, highlighting Elizabeth’s words with their movement. “We shall tell the story calling the characters by the names Gavin Kendall would have known them as. You may find what parallels you will to the present puzzle.

“With the aid of her Detective Inspector uncle, an Open University composition instructor, and tidbits she had learned working for her mystery-writer boss, Victoria Parkerson wrote the first draft of a blockbuster mystery novel, but died of cancer before she could do anything more with it.

“Only one copy of the manuscript existed, and Victoria had given it to her half sister Mildred to read. Mildred, maid to actress Margo Lovell—better known to the present company as Gloria Glitz—left the bundle of papers in Margo’s dressing room where the actress found it and devised an insidious scheme for attaining her most cherished goal: becoming the mistress of a fortune.

“Margo gave a photocopy of the story to her mystery writer friend, assuring him the author was dead and encouraging him to rewrite it and publish it under his own name. The success of
Who Doth Murder Sleep?
is literary history.

“The death of Margo’s uncle, James Lovell, provided the perfect hiding place for the key ingredient in her plan: the manuscript. She secreted it inside the casket before it was sealed in the family vault. There it would lie forever hidden unless she, as the next of kin, should seek an order for exhumation, which she was confident the newly knighted Sir Gavin would not be so uncooperative as to require of her.

“A rational man, Sir Gavin readily saw that reason was the better part of valor and so bowed to Margo’s demands, being too well bred to call them by the ugly name of blackmail. He broke his long-standing but unofficial engagement to Lady Leila Landsbury and prepared to acquiesce to his blackmailer’s monetary and matrimonial demands. But as her noose tightened around his life, he began to puzzle over possible routes of escape.”

The puzzle pieces bumped together in unsuccessful attempts to achieve a perfect fit as the narration continued: “Still Margo held the key piece. And with no possibility of recovering it, his only chance of escape lay in removing Margo. Nigel Cass’s storm-battered dinner party provided the perfect opportunity for Sir Gavin—our Linden Leigh—to introduce his own solution to the puzzle. A solution of 50 milligrams of cyanide, supplied by his chemist brother-in-law.

“The fact that Margo’s agent had peopled his guest list with those bearing grudges against the glamorous actress—whatever similarity they may or may not have borne to our present cast—added a certain poetically ironic touch to the occasion. But the ultimate irony was performed by Sir Gavin as he secretly emptied the contents of a cyanide capsule onto the rim of the glass he was to hold to his fiancée’s lips with his own hand, after pretending to drink from it himself in honor of their engagement.

“The care given to every detail of the plot showed in several things: his anonymous request that almond soup be served, to cover the bitter almond smell of the cyanide; his quick response to administer aid to his victim’s choking symptoms; and in the rapidly performed cremation following the village doctor’s certificate of natural death.

“And that would have been the end of the matter—” The puzzle pieces started to come together, then paused—“had it not been for Victoria’s uncle, Detective-Inspector Parkerson of Scotland Yard.” The puzzle pieces reeled apart in confusion.

“As soon as Parkerson read
Who Doth Murder Sleep?
—” The eyes pantomimed reading, looked at each other questioningly, then nodded—“he recognized his niece’s work. To the mind of a trained detective, it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened to the manuscript that had disappeared from Victoria’s personal effects. But without the original, he had no proof.

“Parkerson was more intrigued than surprised when he read of Margo Lovell’s death. After all, the pieces fit so well—especially after he had a nice long chat with his stepniece, Mildred, and then read the death certificate mentioning cherry-red lividity, which he recognized as a symptom of cyanide poisoning.

“But again, he had no proof. He lacked the essential key we have given you—knowledge of where the original manuscript was hidden. For that original would have been his proof of motive. Parkerson’s retirement from Scotland Yard occurred that year, but he didn’t retire from the puzzle of proving Margo’s murder and, more important to him, gaining posthumous recognition of his niece’s genius.

“The puzzle became a passionate obsession to him as he dogged Sir Gavin, even openly accusing the writer of his twin crimes of plagiarism and murder. But Sir Gavin knew both his victims were safely buried in the family vault.

“Not until late this past Saturday did the maze of defenses begin to crumble when Sir Gavin Kendall arrived to rehearse ‘Murder by Candlelight’ and learned the plot Weldon Stark was using for his mystery. Shaken, but confident of carrying everything off as the fiction Stark believed it to be, Sir Gavin met his nemesis, when, upon exiting from the parlor, he glimpsed Charles Parkerson leaving the balcony of the rehearsal room, flushed with the information he had sought so doggedly for four years.

“In a show of losing with good sportsmanship in the best stiff-upper-lip style, Kendall invited Parkerson to his room for a drink, or possibly a confession. Then, easily overpowering the older man, smothered him with a pillow, removed all identification, and dumped the body in a bathroom in an unused wing of the hotel—”

The dancing shapes did their final pirouette.

“—where the body was discovered by the sleuths you see before you. They studied the clues, thought out the riddle, and found that the pieces fit.” The forms came together making a giant likeness of Gavin Kendall. “The Puzzle is solved.”

The room filled with confused applause from the spectators, who weren’t sure whether the elaborate solution was an attempt to win the originality prize or the answer to an actual murder. But Elizabeth was only dimly aware of the perplexed disorder around her. For the first time she allowed her gaze to seek out Gavin.

He was a figure of quiet in a roomful of uproar. Gavin didn’t move. Neither did the policeman stationed at the back of the parlor. And the full horror of what she had done hit Elizabeth. She had publicly accused an innocent man of horrible crimes. She had embarrassed him unforgivably, and she had forever sealed her fate, cutting herself off irrevocably from the love he had offered her.

If only she could call back her words, turn back time, rearrange the puzzle pieces. The least she could do—a useless, futile gesture, but the only possible thing—was to go to him and apologize.

As she made her way slowly through the room abuzz with discussions of what she had just said, people saw her coming and moved aside, clearing a path to Gavin like the waters of the Red Sea.

She crossed to him on dry sand.

“Gavin, I’m so sorry…” She could think of nothing else to say.

“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by let us call thee devil!…O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! . . Every inordinate cup is unblessed, the ingredient is a devil.”

She gasped at his quotation, not sure she heard him right. “Gavin?”

“It was the wine that spoke and not the man, but
en vino veritas
.”

“It is true.” She wasn’t sure if she spoke the words aloud, but they were accompanied by a noise as loud to her ears as the crack of a gun—the bursting of her bubble of dreams. She didn’t realize until that moment, until she heard the confession from his own lips, that she had still clung to the tiniest hope that she’d been wrong.

“Not very sporting of me, was it?” He dug in his vest pocket for his eyepiece. “Broke the old public school code and all that, what? Pity you couldn’t see your way clear to accept my offer, old girl. I really meant it, you know. Wouldn’t want you to think I was a cad about that, too. I could have made a better show of it with your help.”

Elizabeth glanced uncomfortably around her and saw, thankfully, that Stark was calling everyone’s attention to the front of the room—giving them a semblance of privacy. She turned back to Gavin, all of her might-have-been feelings swelling to the bursting point. “No you wouldn’t, Gavin. No person can make that change in another. People can’t change themselves by deciding to turn over a new leaf—”

She choked on her last words. She, of all people, was in no position to preach to him. But what she wanted to do was to rail at the evil that had insidiously induced him to choose the first step of plagiarism, then murder in an attempt to extricate himself from the tangle of the web he had spun by his own bad choices.

Suddenly she knew what to say. “Another person can’t do it for you, Gavin, but you can change—with God’s help. It’s up to you. And she knew the person she was really preaching to was herself.”

The monocle slipped from his fingers as he looked at her intently for just a moment. Then he picked it up again and turned to a figure just behind Elizabeth. “Well, cheerio.”

Elizabeth turned to look beside her. “Anita?”

“Special agent, Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office.” Anita held out an ID card. “Parkerson checked in with our office early Saturday morning, and I was assigned to meet him here that night. Unfortunately, I was too late.” She signaled to the officer in the doorway who moved forward to read the suspect his rights. “Thank you for all your help, Richard.” They shook hands in a businesslike manner.

Elizabeth felt the strength in Richard’s hands as he took her arm and guided her from the room. All the way to their private sitting room, Up each stairway that had become so familiar, down each hallway that held so many memories, she drew on the resource of that strength.

One inside their parlor, Richard touched a match to the newly laid fire and pulled Elizabeth to its warmth. Suddenly she was talking, not sure what she was saying, not caring whether or not it made sense, just telling Richard everything she had seen and heard and thought and worried about in the past days. He held her and listened without interruption until all her words were spent and she leaned against him for support.

“I wonder why he didn’t run when he read your script last night?” Richard said. “He could be in Mexico by now.”

“Oh, I didn’t leave the real one out. The script on the table was the alternate I’d worked out in case he didn’t prove me right by taking my bait. I kept hoping one of the other suspects would come.” She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “But Gavin did come. He actually did those terrible things. Oh, Richard—”

Richard held her, gently stroking her hair. When she seemed calmer he said, “How did you know his excuse for moving the body was false?”

“His whole story was built around the fact that no one could do anything until the police came anyway. But when they did get here, he didn’t tell them. I was there when they took his statement.”