Stranded (6 page)

A round tower room opened off this larger room, a charming, airy space, lace-curtained but quite devoid of furniture. Actually, both living and dining rooms were rather skimpily furnished, though a few impressive and no doubt valuable antiques remained. A lovely grand piano and a grandfather clock dominated the living room, and a heavy, claw-footed oak table and matching hutch stood in the adjoining dining room. A number of oversized portraits and photographs of various stiff-backed, bearded gentlemen hung on the walls, a couple of the men accompanied by wasp-waisted women in enormous, elegant hats.

Abilene, hands stuffed in the back pockets of her jeans, studied one of the photos. Although I suspected she was less interested in the people than the woman’s hat, probably looking to see if the feathers were from some endangered species. Abilene notices things like that.

“Are any of these pictures of Hiram?” I asked.

“No. That was his father.” She pointed to one elaborately framed oval photo of a wiry man with an unexpectedly rakish look in spite of an unsmiling countenance. The cane in his hand looked more like a stylish accessory than a necessity. “But I’m not certain who the others are. Various grandparents and uncles and cousins, according to Hiram. But he could be mischievous. I wouldn’t put it past him to just pick up some old photo in an antique store and blithely claim it was a distinguished or rascally old McLeod.”

An odd but probably harmless peculiarity of character.

Jarring next to the classic lines of the piano was a modern sofa with a purple and green pattern that looked as if it had been overrun by some virulent species of jungle fungus. Folding metal TV trays doubled as end tables, and most of the fringe on an old-fashioned floor lamp was missing. Blotchy gray paint covered the wallpaper on one wall, as if in preparation for some remodeling project that had never materialized.

In total, not the elegant rooms or furnishings you’d expect in a big old Victorian house with a wealthy owner. That thought must have zipped across to Kelli.

“There are more antiques stored upstairs, but what usually happened was that one wife would move in and change things to suit herself. Then another would come along and redo everything. Except for the first two, who he married when he was quite young, the wives were always much younger than Hiram. Maybe Ben Simpson mentioned there had been eight of them?”

I nodded.

She didn’t comment on Ben Simpson’s eager dispersal of gossipy information. “Apparently the wives always wanted things different than how they were, and Uncle Hiram was happy to humor them. The most recent wife threw out most of the previous wife’s furniture, but she didn’t last long enough to replace anything, so that’s why it’s so bare in here. I’m not sure where that came from,” she added with a nose-wrinkle of distaste at the sofa.

There was nothing good to be said about the sofa, so I didn’t say anything. “Did Hiram play the piano?”

“Oh yes, and he was quite good at it. I was always surprised when I’d come over and hear this wonderful Mozart floating out to the street. I think it relaxed him.”

No doubt he needed relaxation after eight temperamental, furniture-tossing wives.

Kelli led us on through a swinging door into the large kitchen. “He did most of his living in here in his last couple of years.”

This did not look like the world of a quite good, grand piano player, even a mischievous one. Actually, it looked . . . sad. And lonely. An enormous big-screen TV blocked most of one window, and a single cot covered with layers of khaki blankets stood against the opposite wall. A tiny microwave sat on the kitchen counter beside a huge combination refrigerator/freezer. A folding card table apparently served as Hiram’s eating area. It was set up near an electric fireplace. A lone yellow silk rose stood in a cheap vase on the windowsill over the sink, beside it a mayonnaise jar filled with feathers.

“Uncle Hiram hated to shop, so when he did do it he bought enough to last for a while. Like the thirty-four TV dinners, all Mexican enchiladas and tamales, that I found in the freezer. Plus seventeen cans of chili in the cupboard and rotten tomatoes in the refrigerator. Because he’d bought something like twenty pounds of them, way more than he could use.”

“He was a bit . . . ummm . . . eccentric?” I asked, curious but not jumping to conclusions on the basis of thirty-four TV dinners. Before living in the motor home full-time, where space is limited, I’d been known to stock up on good buys too. I’ve also discovered that a bit of eccentricity, like the invisibility that comes to many of us with the advance of years, can occasionally come in useful.

“Living like this, it looks that way, doesn’t it? But I think it was more that he considered his present living conditions temporary and irrelevant. He really wasn’t concerned about the details of everyday living.” She smiled. “But maybe that’s one definition of eccentricity?”

“I wonder why he didn’t hire a housekeeper?”

“I wondered too. I even suggested it, but he got all huffy, as if I were implying he was getting incompetent and couldn’t take care of himself. So I just dropped it. I don’t think many people knew he lived like this. He always dressed very well and cut quite a distinguished figure when he went out.”

“Did you know any of the wives?”

“They were all past-tense by the time I moved here. One is still around, though she’s elderly now and I think would rather no one knew she was once married to Hiram. But he was planning to marry again this spring. I suppose Ben told you that too?”

I nodded. I glanced around, wondering how a new wife would react to all this. “Hiram was an optimistic sort of man, then.”

Kelli surprised me by laughing with delight. “I hadn’t thought of it in exactly that way, but yes, that’s true. Uncle Hiram was an optimistic man. He always had big, sometimes grandiose ideas, and he never gave up on marriage. And I think he had a right to be optimistic in this case. The next wife was to be Lucinda O’Mallory. She’s the widow of a man whose early family established the first bank in Hello.”

“Not as young as the others?”

“She’s about Uncle Hiram’s age, late sixties. By far his best choice in wives, I think. Actually, it’s quite a romantic story.”

“Oh?”

“Lucinda was his old flame way back in their high school days here in Hello. I don’t know what happened, but something did, and she married the banker and Hiram married someone else. She stayed married to the banker all these years, but he died a few years ago, and she and Hiram got together again not long ago. I sometimes wonder if the reason none of Hiram’s marriages worked was because, deep down . . .” Kelli smiled self-consciously as if embarrassed to be caught romanticizing about the endurance of lost love. “Maybe I should be trying to write syrupy romances instead of a legal thriller.”

“You’re a writer?”

“I’ve had a considerable amount of free time since coming to Hello. I figured I might as well try to use it constructively.” Her tone was wry, but her smile unexpectedly mischievous, perhaps a trait that ran in the family. “Also a perfect opportunity to fictionally skewer a few local personalities.”

Hastily she jumped back to the story of the upcoming marriage that was not to be. “Lucinda has a beautiful home on the other side of town, a Victorian like this, only much better kept up. They were planning to live there.”

Wise Lucinda
, I thought. “What did Hiram intend to do with this place?”

“He talked about selling it after they were married, though I’m not sure he’d ever actually have done it. He had a sentimental streak.”

“You approved of the marriage?”

“Oh yes. Lucinda’s a wonderful woman. Very upbeat and cheerful. Active in local charitable and civic affairs, and very health minded too. I’ve seen her working out at the local health club. She’s in incredible shape for someone her age. She’d have taken good care of Hiram.”

“Too bad, then, the way things worked out.”

Kelli nodded. “I know he must have had enemies from business dealings or personal differences over the years. He was a shrewd businessman. But it’s hard to believe someone could have hated him enough to kill him. He was so generous to the town. To me too. He bought my little cabin for me. And then to have people think I murdered him . . .” She swallowed hard.

“Does Lucinda think that?”

“No. She says anyone who claims I killed him should be forced to write ‘Kelli Keifer is not a killer’ 349 times. She’s always been wonderfully kind and nice to me, both before and after Uncle Hiram’s death. We worked together on his funeral arrangements.” She gave an unladylike snort. “Their upcoming marriage was another reason people think I murdered him, of course. I had to kill him before he and Lucinda married, otherwise I might lose out on some or all of the inheritance.”

“There’s a lot to inherit?”

She hesitated slightly. “I’ll be working on that for some time yet.”

“Hiram was still mentally okay?”

“Oh yes. He had an excellent memory. He could tell wonderful stories from when he was a small boy and spent time with his father out at the mine. Like when his father shot an attacking bear out there. And another time when he was playing in a creek and found a gold nugget as big as his thumb.”

Abilene, always quiet, hadn’t said anything all this time, but I knew she was anxious to get out of here and go talk to Dr. Sugarman about the job in his vet clinic.

“So, what do you think?” I said to Abilene, thinking we’d hurry this along so she could be on her way. She still needed to see a dentist too, but I knew that for her that came second in importance to the job with Dr. Sugarman. “Look okay to you?”

Although it was an unnecessary question, of course. We didn’t have a smorgasbord of free living quarters from which to choose while we were stranded here in Hello. Abilene nodded approval. I knew Koop would love the place too, with its various nooks and crannies and, undoubtedly, plentiful supply of mice.

I turned to Kelli. “The house looks wonderful, and we really appreciate your generosity, so—”

“Let me show you the bedrooms first. I don’t want there to be any unpleasant surprises.”

Actually I was more curious about the murder than the bedrooms. I hadn’t noticed any blood stains or other signs of violence so far. How had Hiram been murdered? And where? Who’d found the body?

Yet I thought tact and sensitivity required waiting until Kelli offered the information rather than my demanding it, so I merely followed when she opened a door from the kitchen to a hallway.

“This part from here on back is an addition that was put on in the ’50s, I think it was. Hiram’s mother, or maybe it was his grandmother, was bedridden, and they needed rooms for more nursing and household help.”

The long hallway led to a windowless back door. The first two rooms Kelli opened in the addition were empty, but the next one held an impressive array of workout equipment, a treadmill, a stepper, barbells in graduated sizes, and various weight machines.

“Hiram worked out?” I asked, surprised.

“No, some wife had all this stuff moved in. I’ve heard she had a trampoline out in the yard too, and she liked to work out on it in her bikini. I heard there was a big jump in the sale of binoculars locally about that time.”

Yes, I decided, Hiram definitely needed an older woman such as Lucinda O’Mallory.

The next room looked as if it had been Hiram’s discard room. Or maybe it was his save-it, I-may-need-this-someday room. Piles of newspapers and magazines, a mountain of wadded-up plastic bags, plastic jugs, bits of old, broken furniture, cardboard boxes of all sizes, various-sized chunks of Styrofoam, sacks of old rags, even a couple of old bicycle tires.

“I’ve been putting it off, but one of these days I’ll have to rent a truck and haul all this stuff to the dump.”

“Some of it could be recycled.”

“Just don’t drop a match in here, or the whole town might go up in flames.”

“We’ll be careful.”

“There are two furnished bedrooms on this floor,” Kelli went on as she turned and led us in the opposite direction down the wide but dim hallway. “There are also various rooms on the second floor that I suppose were bedrooms. The second floor hasn’t actually been closed off like the third floor has been for years, but I haven’t had the house checked for structural reliability yet, so it would probably be best to use these.”

She opened a door off the hallway and stood back to let us see inside. “This is the smaller bedroom on this floor. I’ve wondered if it may have been a nursery at one time. There isn’t a private bath, just the bath down the hall.”

The bedroom may have been a nursery at some time, but the furniture now was old and heavy, probably antique but mismatched and rather worse for wear. Two single-wide beds, a tall chest of drawers, and two nightstands. Two generic, English hunting scenes hung on walls papered with cabbage roses. The carpet, of entwined dark flowers on a blue background, had a faded elegance, and there was also an impressive armoire of more dark, carved wood, probably rather valuable.

The room was clean, but the beds looked carelessly made up. A crooked sheet hung below the bedspread on one. A book,
I Married an Alien
, with a picture on the cover of a big-eyed, hairless being, lay on the nightstand. The open door of the armoire revealed a couple of plaid shirts, one with a hole in the elbow, and a pair of scruffy, sheepskin-lined slippers. A faint scent of old smoke clung to everything.

“Did Hiram spend some of his nights here rather than in the kitchen?” I asked.

“No. Norman, the caretaker out at the mine, came to town once in a while, and Hiram always let him stay here. Hiram and he liked to smoke and drink tequila and argue about everything from politics to UFOs. It was a rather unlikely friendship, but they were good buddies.”

“Was this buddy around when Hiram was murdered?”

“You’re seeing Norman as a murderer?” Kelli smiled and shook her head. “No, I’m sure he wasn’t, though the police did go out and question him. Not that anyone would suspect ol’ Norman anyway. He’s a bit odd, but harmless. He was terribly upset by the murder. He even showed up at the funeral in a blue suit. Although the tie with a palm tree on it detracted a bit from the effect.”