The Hen of the Baskervilles (25 page)

Where did that come from, I wondered? I tried to imagine anyone sneaking live chickens past the inn's overzealous staff. The first—and last—time I'd taken Spike there we were followed around the whole time by a staff member carrying a whisk broom, a dustpan, and a little spray can of something called Pee-Off! I took the hint and the Small Evil One never returned. The inn's entire staff would probably have a collective conniption fit at the very idea of someone bringing in a live chicken.

But the Bonnevilles seemed to like the idea of my proposed search. When I left them, they were both wearing little conspiratorial smiles, and Mrs. Bonneville was attacking her salad with a zest that permitted Mr. Bonneville to finish off his chili dog.

As I drove to the inn, I shoved them out of my mind. I was making happier plans. We could move one of the sheds from our backyard out to the pasture where Rose Noire grew her herbs. The yard was already fenced in to keep Spike from roaming—did we need to subdivide it to protect the chickens from Spike? Or maybe to protect Spike from the chickens—the Sumatran rooster looked pretty fierce. And how soon would we be getting our chickens?

Our chickens. I found I liked the sound of that.

I got almost the whole way to the inn without thinking about why I was going there, which made for a much more pleasant ride than if I'd fretted the whole way about having to deal with Genette.

 

Chapter 27

As I trudged from my car to the front door of the inn, my good mood vanished and I began to feel put upon. Dealing with Genette was bad enough, but there was also the always difficult staff of the Caerphilly Inn. The doorman wasn't bad—it was his job to open the door and bow deeply to anyone who showed up, even unprepossessing people in blue jeans and a Caerphilly College t-shirt with chocolate ice cream stains on it. And he'd been there a while and knew me, so his welcome was almost cordial.

“May we help you, madam?” the desk clerk said. Unlike the doorman, he was new. And not local. Desk clerks never were, here at the inn. Apparently management had decided that they had to import staff to achieve the right blend of elegance and chilly hauteur. I had to fight the urge to look myself over to see if I had suddenly sprouted a crop of facial warts, or if maybe I was trailing a long piece of toilet paper from one shoe.

“I'm here to see Genette Sedgewick,” I said.

The change in the desk clerk's expression was almost imperceptible, but I could tell her name had not improved his opinion of me.

“On official Un-fair business,” I added. “Ms. Sedgewick is leaving the fair early, and I'm here representing fair management, to arrange for the removal and transportation of her booth and its contents.”

“So Mrs. Sedgewick will be leaving us?” He sounded eager. “Of course, we're always sorry to see our guests leave,” he added, though I suspected Genette came as close to an exception as anyone ever could. His tone was considerably warmer. Was it because he realized I was a representative of the fair, which was currently paying for half a dozen out-of-town dignitaries to stay here at the inn? Or was it Genette's departure that made him so cheerful?

“You'd have to ask Chief Burke that,” I said. “No one connected with the murder is being allowed to leave just yet.”

“Ah.” He hid his disappointment reasonably well. “So unfortunate about poor Mr. Riordan.”

“Was he staying here, too?” Not that I had been planning to pry, but he had opened the subject.

“He wasn't a registered guest,” the desk clerk said. He stopped just short of saying, “Thank goodness!”

“But as a friend of Ms. Sedgewick, he might have come to visit her.”

“Yes,” the desk clerk said. “Although we would have no real way of knowing,” he added, as if afraid I'd start questioning him on Brett's movements. “Ms. Sedgewick is staying in one of the cottages. Very secluded. Guests in the cottages often find it more convenient to go straight from the parking lot to the cottage, without coming through the lobby. Particularly those who are … less accustomed to the amenities of valet parking.”

So much for finding useful evidence from the desk clerk. Although he'd probably gone farther than he should in saying Genette was in one of the cottages. There were only three, each named after a Virginia-born president—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Presumably if the inn ever expanded, Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, and Wilson could expect their own cottages, too, but for now finding Genette would only require knocking on three doors.

“I'm sure the chief understood why you can't give him any information about Mr. Riordan,” I continued. Actually, from the look on his face, I suspected the chief hadn't been all that understanding. “I'll go see Ms. Sedgewick. You said the Jefferson Cottage, right? I know the way.”

“The Madison,” the desk clerk said quickly. “But Ms. Sedgewick is not in her cottage at the moment. Madam will find her in the restaurant.”

His voice dripped disapproval. I'd heard rumors that occasionally, when guests did not meet their standards, the inn banned them from the restaurant and ordered them to confine themselves to room service. Was Genette about to suffer this humiliation?

I thanked him and crossed the lobby to the entrance of the restaurant. On those few occasions when Michael and I had splurged to eat at the inn's restaurant, the maître d' invariably kept us waiting well past our reservation time. And eyed our best clothes as if they only just barely met his standards. Luckily he wasn't there at the moment, so I could invade his domain uninvited.

I threaded my way through the tables in the cavernous and dimly lit room. My feet sank into the thick, soft carpet and seemed to make little swishing noises as they emerged. Thanks to the heavy drapes, lush upholstery, and fabric-covered walls, those little swishes were the only noise I heard until I drew near the table where an elegant gray-haired waiter was murmuring the specials into the waiting ears of the three wine judges.

I paused by the table to exchange muted greetings with the judges, and then continued on. Three tables farther down, at the very back of the restaurant, in a corner almost completely lost in the shadows, I found Genette.

She was dressed in black, or at least dark colors. It was hard to tell in the near blackness. And she was wearing oversized dark glasses.

“Ms. Sedgewick?”

She lifted her head, peered up at me, then removed the sunglasses and peered some more. Her face looked tear streaked, and she was squinting as if she ought to be wearing corrective lenses.

“Meg Langslow,” I explained. “From the fair.”

“Yeah. Siddown.” Her voice was overloud and startling in the dim hush. As I took a seat opposite her I could see the waiter and the wine judges casting curious glances our way.

Genette fumbled blindly among the various items on the table until she found a highball glass. She picked it up with a shaky hand, gulped down the remaining inch or so of whatever liquid it contained, and set it down carelessly on the table, clinking against the silverware.

Genette was soused.

“Waiter,” she called in the overloud voice of the very, very inebriated. The waiter arrived at our table with surprising speed, as if eager not to have her call again.

“'Nother Scotch,” she said. “Nosso many rocks.”

The waiter frowned and glanced at me.

“Nothing, thanks,” I said.

He blinked disapprovingly, as if he'd really been expecting me to say, “No, I think she's had enough.” I smiled back, declining to do his dirty work for him. He murmured something and slid noiselessly away.

“Ms. Sedgewick, it's about your booth,” I said.

“I tol' you,” she said. “Pack it all up.”

“We did.”

“Break much?”

“I arranged to have it packed by a reputable professional moving company,” I said. “In the unlikely event that they break anything, their fee includes insurance. I came to ask what to do with it all.”

She stared back, uncomprehending.

“Do you have a truck into which they should load your stuff?” I spoke as slowly and distinctly as I could. “Or would you like for me to arrange to have it all delivered to your farm?”

“Who cares?” she said. “Not the truck. No one to drive it. Send it all. Whatever.”

It took forever, but I got her signature on the paperwork from the Shiffley Moving Company, and then on a very large check. The waiter was nowhere to be found, which was probably just as well. I suspected another whiskey would send Genette into oblivion, and I was grateful to the waiter for postponing his arrival until I'd finished with the signatures. Of course, since she was drunk as the proverbial skunk, I wasn't sure any of the paperwork would hold up to legal challenge. I'd let Randall figure out how to deal with that.

I tucked the check and the contract into my purse and pondered what to do next. Common sense suggested that I should hurry back to the fair. But it might be a lot easier to get information out of her in her current inebriated condition. I was trying to figure out how to ask a few leading questions—something slightly more subtle than “Did you have an argument with Paul Morot? Or maybe with Brett himself?”—when a figure loomed up beside us.

“'Bout time,” Genette said. But it wasn't the waiter returning with her refill. It was a young woman—not much more than a girl, really—in jeans and a t-shirt. Clearly the maître d' wasn't guarding the entrance to his cave very well today—normally denim was a sure way to get turned away at the door.

“Hussy!” the young woman shouted. “Murderer!”

Genette just stared back at her.

“You couldn't stand that he was leaving you for me,” the young woman said. “You had to get rid of him.”

Genette put down her drink, took off her sunglasses, and blinked, clearly startled.

“Wha'?” she asked.

“He wanted to be with me and the baby!” the young woman shrieked. “He was going to marry me as soon as he was free! And you couldn't stand it, could you?”

The young woman pulled something out of her purse and was shaking it in Genette's face. Genette was visibly having trouble focusing on it, so I leaned around to see what it was. A photograph of a baby, probably a newborn, wearing one of the little yellow knit hats they put on them in the delivery room. “Cranky bishop hats,” Michael and I had called them. I had pictures of Josh and Jamie at that age in identical hats.

“You're a killer!” the young woman wailed. “Brett said he was going to tell you yesterday, and look what happened!”

I glanced around to see two sleek, gray-haired waiters frozen in shock, while the wine judges had all turned around to stare with unabashed fascination.

“Who the hell are you?” Genette sounded puzzled.

The young woman burst into tears, turned, and began running away.

“Madam!” One of the waiters took a few futile steps in pursuit of the young woman, who increased her speed and escaped into the lobby. The other waiter came over to our table.

“Who was she?” Genette asked. She still sounded more puzzled than upset or angy.

The waiter frowned at us as if he really wanted to ask the same question.

“Does madam require any assistance in returning to her room?” he said aloud.

“I think they're cutting you off,” I told Genette. “Let me help you.”

“Bastards.” Genette didn't sound surprised though. More resigned. “Who was that woman?”

She asked the same question at least a dozen times in the time it took me to help her out of the restaurant, through the lobby, out the back door, and down a short walkway to her cottage. By the time I dumped her on her bed, the young woman's words appeared to have finally sunk in. When I reached to pull her shoe off, she kicked me.

“Why didn't you tell me he was cheating on me?” she wailed. “After all I did for him!”

She began spitting out a stream of bitter and increasingly obscene invective against Brett and the unknown young woman, all the while kicking viciously in my general direction. After a few sentences, I realized she was starting to confuse me with the young woman, so I decided to get out while the getting was good.

“Sleep in your shoes, then,” I said.

Before leaving, I checked the bathroom, the closet, and the armoire. No chickens, and no telltale signs of recent chicken occupancy. Not that I expected any, but you never knew, and at least I could honestly tell the Bonnevilles I'd tried. I turned the bedside light out, then went to the door. I paused and listened for a few minutes, in case she said anything of interest, like, “Now I'm really glad I killed you, you jerk!” or “And after I stole those bantam chickens you wanted!” But her rant was repetitive and uninteresting, except for the couple of times that she shrieked “I'll kill him when I get my hands on him!” As if she'd forgotten Brett was already dead.

I stepped out into the hallway, pulled the door closed, took a deep breath, and called the chief.

“I have another suspect for you,” I said.

 

Chapter 28

The chief sent out an APB on the unwed mother, and suggested that he would appreciate talking to me when I got back to the fair. Within half an hour I was in the fair office, seated in one of our uncomfortable folding chairs.

“We'd have a lot better chance of locating this young woman if we had a more specific description,” the chief was saying. “Young and wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt doesn't help much.”

I winced.

“I can't really tell you much more,” I said.

“Try,” the chief said.

“I am trying. But I didn't really get a good look at her.”

“You were able to recall a fairly lengthy conversation,” he said. “Are you telling me you weren't looking at her all that time?”

“I was looking at her,” I said. “But we were in the very back of the restaurant at the Caerphilly Inn. The part where they put guests when they approve of your wallet but not your wardrobe. The part where the menus ought to be printed in braille. The part—”