A Cast-Off Coven (17 page)

She shook her head.

“This doesn’t mention suicide, or even where the death occurred,” I said.

“The school must have hoped the death notice would fly under the radar. A suicide would be dramatic, bring unwanted attention to the school.”

Something bothered me: Ginny claimed to have read about the suicide and made her sketch from a photo of John Daniels. Where did she get the photo?

“But what does this have to do with the clothes in the closet?” I wondered aloud.

“I don’t know—maybe nothing,” Susan said. “But want to hear the kicker?”

“There’s a kicker?”

“The woman in question in that little romantic tragedy still lives nearby—right across the bay in Sausalito.”

“How in the world did you find her?” Bronwyn asked. Susan smiled. “I have my sources . . . and then I just looked her up in the phone book. Seems she kept her name—Eugenia Morisett. I gave her a call last night; she’s happy to talk to us. And here’s the best part: She has some old clothing she’s willing to part with.” Susan favored Bronwyn and me with a cat-and-canary smile. “Anyone feel like having lunch in Sausalito?”

 

Bronwyn and I left several dresses to drip-dry over the big tub, a few others blocked out on mesh boards, several hanging in the fresh breeze, and one very disgruntled potbellied pig who was told he had to stay home.

As we left the store, Conrad shuffled over and said in an urgent whisper, “Dudettes, run!”

“What is it?” My question was answered a second later when I spied Inspector Carlos Romero ambling across the street toward us.

“Don’t worry, Conrad,” I said. “He’s a . . . friend.”

“He’s a
cop
,” Conrad mumbled as he disappeared around the corner.

Romero reached the sidewalk and nodded. “Good afternoon, ladies.”

“Hello, Inspector,” I replied. “I’m afraid we were just leaving.”

“I have a couple of things I’d like to go over with you first.”

“Susan and I’ll pop into Coffee to the People for a few minutes,” Bronwyn said. “Get you anything?”

Carlos and I declined, and I let him inside the quiet shop.

Oscar was beside himself with joy, convinced I had come to my senses and decided to bring him along. He ran circles around us, bringing a reluctant smile to Carlos’s typically solemn face. Poor Oscar would be doubly upset to learn I was going again; I was sure my familiar would have a few choice words for me when I returned home later that day.

The inspector’s dark eyes alit on the frilly garments hanging from a nearby rack. He reached out and rubbed a piece of delicate hand-tatted lace between thumb and forefinger. I watched with interest—I would have thought Romero too serious of mind to be distracted by such things as corsets and lingerie. Then again, as Luc had pointed out yesterday, adolescent fantasies ran deep.

“Inspector?” I urged at his continued silence.

He dropped the lace, almost guiltily. “I hear you were hanging around campus yesterday, asking questions.”

“Not the whole day—I just passed by there in the afternoon. I wanted to retrieve the vintage clothing Marlene Mueller had promised me.”

“Who did you speak to while you were there?”

“I met Luc Carmichael, whose office is near the third-floor closet where the clothes were kept, and then I stopped by to speak to Walker Landau before I left.” I decided not to mention the supernatural light-and-sound show Luc and I had been treated to in the closet.

“Why did you want to talk to Landau?”

I shrugged. “He was in the café with Becker the night he died. And Marlene said he was nervous.”

“Provost Mueller? You spoke to her as well?”

“Oh, yes, to confirm it was all right to pick up the clothes. And her husband, Todd.”

“Anyone else?”

I thought for a moment and shook my head.

“Uh-huh.” Romero’s dark eyes swept around the shop. “Okay, what I’m still not getting here is why you’re involved in this investigation at all.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m involved. . . .”

The inspector fixed me with a cross between a stare and a glare.

“I asked a few questions yesterday when my curiosity got the better of me. I suppose I thought maybe people would open up to me more easily than to you. No offense.”

His lip curled up in the barest semblance of a smile. “Did you find out anything?”

“I think Walker Landau’s telling the truth, for what it’s worth. Becker was useful to him alive. He stood to gain nothing by murdering him.”

Romero let out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know why Walker Landau’s so fixated on his being the number one suspect. At this point his guilty response is the only thing making me look at him.”

“He does seem a little high-strung,” I said.

“That’s the understatement of the year. Truth is, Landau’s no more a person of interest than anyone else. Jerry Becker had more enemies than Adolf Hitler. We’ve got suspects coming out our ears. This was not a well-liked man.”

“Well, you know what they say,” I said. “Some people are all right till they get two sets of britches.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wealth doesn’t suit some people.”

“Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your homespun wisdom?”

I laughed. “What about Luc Carmichael? Is he a suspect as well?”

“As far as I’m concerned, until this case is closed, my own mother’s a suspect.”

I smiled, but Romero looked serious.

“Tell me once again who was with you when you were ghost hunting?”

“The security guard, Kevin something, Ginny Mueller, and Maya Jackson.”

“Ginny’s an unexpected beneficiary of Becker’s death—lucky for her you gave her an alibi.”

“What do you mean she’s a beneficiary?”

He ignored the question, but clearly had something else to add. He cleared his throat, looked down at the medallions in my display case, over at Bronwyn’s jars of herbs, then finally back at me.

“Inspector Romero?” I asked.

“I think I might have heard that bumping you were so interested in.”

“Bumping?”

Romero shifted his weight uneasily. “Sounds. Strange sounds. At the school.”

“I see.”

“If you repeat any of this to anyone I’ll arrest you and lose the paperwork.”

I smiled. “It’s not a crime to admit you heard strange noises.”

“I’m a rational man, Lily. A police officer. An SFPD Homicide Inspector. I can’t exactly go around telling people the building’s haunted, much less that maybe a ghost killed Jerry Becker.”

“For what it’s worth, I do believe in this stuff, but I don’t think a ghost was responsible, either. It’s really not normal spectral behavior.”

“That would reassure me, except that I find myself discussing what is and what is not ‘normal’ ghost behavior.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“No, I don’t think I will.”

There was something of an awkward pause.

“Oh, by the way,” said Carlos, “I’ve been meaning to tell you that you can get your clothes back.”

My mind was blank. “What clothes?”

“The ones we confiscated when you were involved in the last death.”

“I wasn’t
involved
.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. You’ve been in town three months, and you’ve been associated with two suspicious deaths. Given what the police from your hometown tell me about your unusual . . . ‘upbringing’? . . . and what you were accused of back in Texas, it gives me the willies.”

“Is that a technical police term?”

The corner of his mouth kicked up in another slight smile. “What can I say? I listen to my intuition, for better or for worse.”

I nodded. He didn’t trust me. Maybe Conrad was right; we weren’t friends after all. . . . Carlos Romero was first, last, and always, a cop.

“Anyway,” he continued, “you can get the clothes back now that the case is closed. I’ll make sure they’re released.”

“Thanks. So, back to the School of Fine Arts—is it all right with you if I poke around a little more? I won’t interfere with your investigation. I’m just trying to figure out what we’re dealing with here. Until I do, the, uh, ‘bumping’ will continue.”

He nodded. “Tell you what: You do what you do, and I’m going to keep doing what I do, namely search for a real live person who was responsible for this. But if you run across anything, however crazy it sounds, I want to be your first call.” He reached into his jacket pocket and laid a business card on the table. “Your
very
first call.”

“I’m proud of you, Inspector Romero. It’s not easy to admit you’ve experienced something unexplainable.”

He snorted and turned to leave.

“Inspector, could I ask you a question about Max? Max Carmichael?”

His expression shifted, almost imperceptibly. “What about him?”

“I don’t . . . I mean this is probably going to sound rather forward, but he tells me his late wife was related to you.”

“My cousin,” he said with a curt nod. I noticed a small tic at the corner of his eye.

“And her death . . .”

“Was his fault.”

Romero’s dark eyes were deep and unfathomable. I wished I could read what he was thinking.

“His fault?”

“And he’s the first to admit it. Unfortunately, all the regret in the world won’t bring her back.” He started to turn away, but hesitated and looked back over his shoulder. “It’s none of my business, but if I were you, I’d be careful around the man. He doesn’t have the greatest track record with women.”

 

“Shall we take my car?” I offered. “We can put down the top and enjoy the sunny day.”

Bronwyn and Susan agreed with enthusiasm, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Last week, Bronwyn drove me across town to pick up some fresh goat’s milk from a new source in the Mission, and within three few blocks I vowed never again to enter a vehicle with her at the wheel. She was full of good intentions, but drove as she did everything else—with joyful abandon and sweeping gestures, which sent us careening all over the road.

My companions directed me to head north across the majestic Golden Gate Bridge. The day was perfect: A robin’s egg blue sky provided the ideal backdrop to cottony clouds that looked made to cradle angels. Hawks and seagulls swooped overhead while tourists crammed the bridge’s walkways, taking souvenir photographs and relishing the famous vistas. The rugged Marin headlands, just on the other side of the span, jutted out into the Pacific Ocean.

I was so busy enjoying the view myself that I managed to miss the first Sausalito exit. Instead I took the second, which dropped us off in an unmarked residential area.

“Just keep heading downhill,” said Bronwyn.

That was easier said than done.

Sausalito’s narrow streets wind about the hills like a meandering river that defies gravity. The road started out downhill, then snaked back up before heading down again. I found San Francisco twisty and hilly, but compared to Sausalito, it’s positively tame. The area is overgrown and wooded, with the houses built right on the streets so that meeting a car coming the other way requires one or both vehicles to pull into a nearby driveway or cling to the edge of the road. Old Victorians, simple beach bungalows, Italianate manors, and sleek modern structures pepper the hillsides in a fascinating mélange.

We looped and swooped around zigzagging hairpin turns, avoiding bicyclists, walkers, and children in strollers until we finally reached a main drag on the edge of the water, a natural inlet of the bay directly across from what locals refer to simply as “the City.” Looking past the jostling crowd of tourists thronging the sidewalks, one could see the architectural remnants of Sausalito’s history as a sleepy fishing village. The bay was jammed with sailboats, a passenger ferry, and two tugboatescorted freighters lumbering past on their way to the port of Oakland.

We turned right, went straight up a hill so steep I had to shift into first, made another turn down an impossibly tight street, and finally nosed into a driveway of an older Mediterranean home with white stucco walls decorated with brightly painted tiles. The entrance was on the top floor, while the rest of the house was on descending floors following the grade of the hill.

A lovely elderly woman answered the door. Her pure white hair was thick and artfully styled in a relaxed bob; her eyes were a deep, startling sapphire blue.

“Come in, come in. Do excuse the mess, but the place is in quite the uproar,” she said, gesturing to various cardboard boxes and items strewn about. “We’ve been working all morning.”

In the entryway hung a large, riveting oil portrait, obviously Eugenia Morisett as a young woman. There was no mistaking those eyes.

“Thank you so much for meeting with us,” I said as Eugenia led the way to a glass-enclosed garden room. We passed through a living room studded with original art work, sculptures, as well as paintings, both classical and modern.

Eugenia gestured for us to take seats on comfy overstuffed couches covered in floral chintz. Quaint leaded windows overlooked the town of Sausalito and out to the bay.

“Don’t mention it. I’m happy to unload these items; I’ve spent weeks just cleaning out the closets. I’m thinking I’ll probably sell the house as soon as the market improves. Now that my husband, Richard, has passed, it hardly seems worth the time and energy to keep it up. Only in the summertime when the kids come with the grandchildren—that’s when I truly enjoy it. But one can’t shape one’s entire life around three weeks in the summer, can one? I might just move into the Nob Hill apartment full-time.”

Must be nice, I thought.

“It’s such a fabulous place,” said Susan. “But I can see how it would be a lot of work to maintain. Still, it’s the perfect place to display all your artwork.”

“Isn’t it just?” Eugenia said, preening. “I like to think of myself as a patroness of the arts. I’m on the board at the MOMA. I think art is essential to any civilized town, don’t you?”