Death of an English Muffin (12 page)

“Merry, I’m sorry, but I have some bad news.”

My heart dropped. “What’s going on?” I asked, and my voice quavered, echoing in the great hall.

He glanced at his deputies, who stolidly looked anywhere but at us, then pulled me outside, away from his men’s earshot. It was a sparkling May morning, fresh and lovely, the sun shining and the sky a brilliant blue, but all I could see was the darkness in his eyes.

He tugged me farther away and took a deep breath. “I hate
to tell you, Merry, but it looks like Miss Sanson’s death may not have been as natural as we thought.”

“What do you mean?” I squawked.

He looked over at his men uneasily, and put his big hand on my shoulder. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this much, but dammit, it happened in your place. She had a heart attack, yes, but it’s what
caused
it that we’re not sure of. There was cyanosing around her nose and some bruising around her mouth, too faint to make out in the light in the bathroom. And there are bits of fabric in her lungs.”

“Bits of fabric.” For a moment I didn’t comprehend what he was saying, and then it dawned on me. I gasped and covered my mouth, then realized what I was doing and snatched my hand away. “Are you saying . . . Did someone hold something over her mouth and smother her?”

“A towel. It was likely held over her mouth
and
nose. There were some of the same terry strands in her nostrils, the doctor says. There was some faint bruising on her shoulders, too, as if someone held on to her. But she didn’t die from being smothered. Or, well, kind of yes and kind of no,” he corrected himself. “She did die of a heart attack.”

I stood blinking for a minute, and shivered as I understood him. “Brought on by the smothering?” I said, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying.

“We think so.”

“So that’s murder.”

He nodded. Someone among those at my tea had followed the woman to the bathroom and smothered her, bringing on a fatal heart attack. Who would do that to Cleta Sanson, no matter how annoying she was?

He moved impatiently. “Merry, I need to get in and cordon off the bathroom and her room. It’s a crime scene.”

I sighed and tilted my head to one side, eyeing him. “Virgil, the towels went into the laundry and the bathroom has
been thoroughly scrubbed by my own resident Miss Clean, Juniper. And Cleta’s
room . . .”
I gasped and clapped one hand over my mouth again. “Oh Lord!” I mumbled. I let my hand fall, fluttering to my side. “Cleta’s niece, Lauda, came to the castle last night and demanded to use up the rest of her aunt’s rent on the room. I let her stay! I’m so sorry!”

“You didn’t know. We’ll just do the best we can. Is the woman in Miss Sanson’s room right now?”

“No, she’s at breakfast.”

“Then we’re going in to secure the scene.”

I stood in the great hall stunned as the three men marched past me and swarmed though my castle, a modern-day storming of the fortress. Virgil led the way to the bathroom, left one of his men there, then led the other upstairs. He made a few calls on his cell phone while doing this, recruiting others, I suspected.

Another day, another murder at Wynter Castle, another police presence.

I wanted to give Virgil time to have officers secure both spots before anyone noticed the police were even there, so I stayed in the great hall to head off any ladies retreating to their rooms. I have a large mahogany table in the center of the great hall, though I move it out when we are having events. Centered on it was a large crystal vase containing tulips just then. I rearranged them, taking out one that was wilted and used the hem of my shirt to dust the perimeter of the table.

As I fussed and fidgeted, I thought back to finding poor Cleta; I knew for a fact that the towels were perfectly neat and lined up on the towel bar when I got into the bathroom. It couldn’t have been one of those towels that was used to smother her, unless the murderer put them back straight. But if they did and the woman was already dead, how did they lock the bathroom? I had the only key and other than that, it could only be locked from the inside. Someone could
have had a towel with them, I supposed, but wouldn’t we have noticed someone carrying a terry towel at the tea?

I was chilled when I thought back to just a half hour ago, how cheerful I was that Cleta was gone. How could I have thought such a thing? She was a human being and deserved life until fate or mischance took it from her. Not murder.
Never
murder!

Virgil came back down to the great hall and we stood awkwardly by the table.

“So shall I tell Lauda that her room is off-limits for now?”

“I’ll tell her. Can you show me where the hamper is, so I can get the dirty towels from yesterday? I want them all so forensics can test them.”

I stared up at him. “I did tell you that Juniper is Miss Clean, right? I’m sure we’ll find that there are no towels left undone. Juniper’s pretty fanatical about that. Anything hits the hamper and it’s whisked away to the washer. She did a couple of loads after the tea.”

He sighed and his shoulders slumped. “Okay. I’ll talk to the ladies, and then I’m going to have you keep them where they are until we get finished.”

“How long will that be?”

“If I only knew. Then there will be interviews.”

As I followed him to the breakfast room it really hit me that someone at my party murdered Cleta. We were going to be interviewed, asked what we remembered, who was where, who
went
where.

He paused outside the breakfast room, his hand on the doorknob. “I don’t suppose I could have you send the whole lot of them back to New York City after this?”

“I’d love nothing better, but no, Virgil, that’s not feasible. They’re in their eighties, all of them, and it takes them a while to do stuff. Patsy Schwartz doesn’t even have an apartment to go home
to
. She sublet it!”

“I had to ask.”

We entered the breakfast room. Emerald was just refilling Patsy Schwartz’s coffee cup from the thermal carafe on the Eastlake sideboard that held much of my collection of teapots, the rose and other floral patterns repeated in the mirrored back of the shelves. All the ladies looked up.

“We’ve been hearing a commotion,” Lauda said, her tone boisterous. “What’s going on?” She looked completely at home sitting at my lovely old rosewood breakfast table, using my Juliet china and the Wynter family silver.

Virgil was about to speak, but I put one hand on his arm. This was my home, and I would be the one to tell them. I heard the door behind me open and Pish entered, going directly to his aunt and standing behind her chair, one hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry to tell you all, but the police have come to investigate what happened yesterday. From evidence gathered in the autopsy the medical examiner has concluded that Miss Sanson was assaulted, which brought on the heart attack that killed her.”

Virgil nodded, approving of my wording. I knew enough not to give away anything about the method as he had described it to me, nor extraneous details. He was watching them all, his gaze traveling over the faces, but I was concerned about Lauda. She had paled and was silent. I wasn’t sure whether I should comfort her or leave that to the other ladies.

“You can’t be serious,” Vanessa said, one trembling hand touching her forehead. “You
can’t
mean it. But she did die of a heart attack!”

“Merry is correct,” Virgil said. “I’m going to need all of you to stay right where you are. My men are searching upstairs in Miss Sanson’s room, as well as the actual scene and the dining room.”

Tears streamed down Lauda’s face and she sobbed. Barbara ponderously heaved out of her chair and circled the table
to her. “There, there, I know it’s a shock, but . . .” She trailed off and looked up, shaking her head, at a loss for words.

“In addition, we’ll need to interview each of you today,” Virgil went on, talking louder over the weeping. “I’m posting an officer here in the room. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t speak of this to one another.”

Talk about closing the barn door. We were almost at the twenty-four-hour mark after Cleta’s death and had spoken of it at length, as I’m sure the ladies had done among themselves.

“Merry, you first.”

As a reinforcement arrived to watch over my flock of geriatric hens, I crossed the great hall, leading Virgil to the turret room library off the dining room, which now doubled as my office. I cleared space at the oak Eastlake desk, making room for him. As he sat I pulled a chair up in front of it and sat down, too. He hid a smile at my arrangements, but I knew the drill by now. Without prompting, I started relating my afternoon. When I got to the time in question, I paused and thought hard. “I first noticed Cleta was missing at about . . . two-ish? Everyone was so relaxed and enjoying the afternoon. There was never peace when Cleta was around, or not for long, anyway. I got so used to her agitating presence that the peace felt odd.”

“Who else was not in the room at the time?”

I scanned the room in my mind. “People kind of came and went,” I said. “I can’t be sure who was where when. I was mostly trying to make sure everyone had something to do, something to eat, something to drink.” I sighed. “People kept wandering off. I felt like a border collie half the time, herding them back to the dining room. I went to the kitchen for something at one point and had to shoo out three people who just wanted a peek. It was like a tour group, for heaven’s sake.”

“What three people?”

“Elwood Fitzhugh, Helen Johnson, and . . . gosh . . . I
think
there was a third, but I’m not sure.”

“So not one of your folks?”

I shook my head. “Oh! It
may
have been Elwood’s sister Eleanor.”

“Who else disappeared at any point?” He kept jotting notes while he watched me, a skill I envied.

“Let’s see . . . Barbara didn’t look like she was feeling well and was gone for a while. That was before Cleta was missing, I think. Or there may have been some overlap. Juniper disappeared and I don’t think she ever came back. I figured she went out for a smoke.”

“She never came back?” he asking, scrawling another note while he watched my eyes.

“Not that I saw,” I said uneasily. “She doesn’t do so well with hordes of people.”

“Go on.”

That had reminded me of someone else who didn’t do so well with groups of people. “I hate to say it, but Isadore Openshaw disappeared. I never did figure out where she went, but she came back at some point.”

“And?”

I thought back. “When I noticed Cleta was gone, I went to look for her upstairs. I caught one of the ladies there, coming out of Patsy Schwartz’s room. She said she was looking for a bathroom and evidently used the one in Patsy’s room. That was definitely Eleanor, Elwood’s sister. She was kind of weird about it, and . . . Oh! She said one of the New York ladies had been upstairs. I don’t know which one, but she could probably describe her.” I shook my head. “Then I went on to Cleta’s room and checked it. She wasn’t there. I smelled cigarette smoke, but I’m not sure it was new or left from Juniper having a smoke while she cleaned the room.”

“Juniper’s the only one in the household who smokes?”

“That I know of,” I said.

“Do any of the other guests smoke?”

“I don’t know about the ones from Golden Acres. I suppose it’s possible.”

“I’ll check with my mother. What about your ladies?”

I shook my head.

Morning light streamed in the diamond-paned library window and fell on Virgil’s broad hand, holding the pen that he was making notes with. Dark hairs dusted the back and up his wrist, disappearing under his shirt cuff. “What happened then?”

“That’s about when all hell broke loose after Janice Grover dumped a pitcher of cream on Patsy Schwartz.” I related the event. “It wasn’t until Hannah asked about the bathroom that I went looking. She said she’d been trying for half an hour or more, but it was locked. That may have been three-ish?”

He jotted that down. “Okay, that gives us an end time, anyway. Maybe Hannah will remember exactly what time it was.”

“She probably will,” I said, envisioning Hannah’s jeweled pendant watch, which she always wore on a long chain. She checked it often, punctual about opening and closing the library. “Oh! While I was trying the bathroom door, Zeke said he had last seen Barbara Beakman using it, but he didn’t say what time that was.”

“But he wasn’t in the hall the whole time?”

“No, Zeke was responsible for helping the folks in when they arrived. He also helped Hannah’s parents with the wheelchair, and kept an eye on things.”

“So he would have seen if anyone pulled up outside?”

“You never know. He’s been doing some gardening, so he may have been behind the castle.” My eyes widened. “Do you mean someone could have come from outside?”

“Anything is possible.”

Better than the alternative, I thought. Better than a senior slayer sitting in my breakfast
room.

“D
O YOU HAVE
any idea why Miss Sanson went to the bathroom in the first place?” Virgil then asked.

“What do you mean?”

“She was . . . uh . . . fully clothed.” His cheeks turned ruddy. I hadn’t thought someone as matter-of-fact as Virgil Grace could blush, but he did. “Presumably she wasn’t in the bathroom to use the toilet,” he continued. “But why else would she be there?”

I shook my head, mystified. “I haven’t a clue.”

“Maybe some of the others will know. Just go on with your day. We’ll be here awhile.”

I stood and stared down at him, wanting to say so much . . . wanting to
ask
so much. Did he have a theory? Did he have a suspect in mind? But there was a distance between us that had been breached only on occasion, some few moments when I thought we were becoming friends, or maybe even something more. “Who would you like to see first?” I said, in lieu of anything more profound.

“Can you find one of my officers and send him here?” He continued jotting notes. “I’d like to have someone with me while I interview the ladies. Thank you.”

I had been dismissed. I didn’t know whether to be angry or bemused. As to his request for backup, Virgil is a careful and wise sheriff; he takes no chances on lawsuits against his office. Close to joining the FBI as a field agent when his mom became ill with breast cancer, he gave up the chance at his dream to stay in town and look after her. That was many years ago, and he had risen in his local force until he became sheriff, a popular one, as far as I knew, winning handily in the last election and looking good for the next one, in the fall.

But he’d had his challenges, locally. His marriage to the daughter of Ridley Ridge’s sheriff had gone badly, and Ben Baxter had nothing but scorn for him. I suppose that had soured Virgil on women, but there was
something
between us. “Any preference, or are you happy with that sarcastic Urquhart jerk you hired?” I was still stung by him hiring an Urquhart and not telling me, after all I’d been through with that clan. My eyes widened as I acknowledged the truth that had popped into my brain. So
that
was what I was really upset about; I wished Virgil had just given me a heads-up when he hired him.

“The sarcastic jerk will do, if you can find him,” Virgil said, eyeing me with a calm expression. “He has his faults, but he’s a good deputy, Merry. Give him a chance. I’ll have a talk with him about his attitude toward you, if you like.”

I was silent. Virgil was being more than fair and I didn’t like it. I couldn’t be wounded and miffed when he did that. “No, I don’t want him to think I’m complaining to you. I have enough problems with Minnie without that getting back to her. I’ll send in whoever I find first.”

I found an officer—not Urquhart—gave him the message, content to let them do their job. For once, it wasn’t up to me
how the ladies were taken care of. I trusted that Virgil would see that everything was done correctly. I retreated to the kitchen, my comfort zone, and made more muffins. Once Emerald and then Pish were done, they joined me. Pish was carrying a clipboard under his arm.

“The police found Juniper and she’s in with Virgil right now. I can’t believe someone killed Cleta,” he said.

I held my tongue. My true opinion would be ill-timed. I had been thinking that it was a wonder she hadn’t been murdered years ago, given her nature, but if unpleasant people were inevitably murdered, the crime rate would double. There had to be some deeper reason behind it. “What do you remember about the afternoon? In particular, everyone’s whereabouts?” I asked, taking them both in with my glance.

“I’ve been trying to reconstruct it in my mind,” Pish said, perching on one of the bar stools I had bought from Janice to sit along the high countertop. “We started at about twelve thirty, right?”

I nodded, measuring flour, using a knife to level it in the cup, then glancing over at him. “I timed it to be a good hour or so after the last church service. We had everyone seated and eating luncheon by one. I know for sure that everyone was in the dining room at that point.”

Pish placed his clipboard on the stainless steel worktop. “I’ve made a list of everyone who was at the luncheon, including those of us here at the castle,” he said.

I grated cheese for the cheddar muffins that I was making for Golden Acres to serve with their noon meal of soup. I had to get a move on, if I was going to make it there in time, I thought, glancing up at the clock. The police arriving had thrown a wrench in my scheduled timeline. Emerald started to run water in the big sink for dishes. She did the breakfast dishes, while Juniper handled them the rest of the day.

“Read them out,” I said to my friend.

Pish read them all off, and I listened intently. “You got them all,” I said, when he was done, “but did you notice that Juniper disappeared at some point? She went somewhere and never came back.”

“Where did she go?” Emerald asked.

“I have no idea.”

Pish jotted down a note. “Who else disappeared at any point?”

“Isadore, for sure. Eleanor. Patsy. Barbara.” I paused and looked over at him, as I got the gist of his questions. “Pish, I already feel like I’m skating on thin ice with Virgil. The last thing I need to do is get in his way, so . . . we’re not really investigating this.”

“Who said we’d get in his way? Why else are we talking about it if not to figure things out? Virgil will thank us.”

I sighed and shook my head. My friend is a good-looking older man, lean of face and body, longish brown hair, fastidious and tidy in habits and mind. But he has a wicked sense of humor and a gleam in his eyes that always makes me smile. Right now the mischief had been replaced by determination and it made me nervous. “Pish—”

“
You
didn’t have to reassure your aunt that there is not some goon out there murdering elderly women,” he said, his voice filled with emotion. He adores his aunt. “Poor Lushie is quivering in her orthopedic shoes.”

“We
can
talk about it, can’t we?” Emerald said to me, wiping her soapy hands on a tea towel and putting her arm over Pish’s shoulders. “We won’t do anything; we’ll just talk. It makes me nervous, too, especially with Lizzie here.”

I got where they were coming from. “Let me think about it.”

“In the meantime, we’re all adults here,” Pish said, giving me a stern look. “And we need to figure out what to say to the Legion about this.”

I had been tickled that Pish had taken to calling them by my name, the Legion of Horrible Ladies, but now it seemed
kind of mean. “Okay, so offhand, who do you think is the murderer? Who snuck out after Cleta, followed her to the bathroom, taking a towel with them, and smothered her until she had a heart attack?” I said ruthlessly.

“Awful!” Pish took in a shaky breath. “How could someone do that to an old woman?”

“Or anyone,” Emerald added.

“Please forget what I just said.” I had an uneasy sense I had already broken my promise to Virgil. “I told you way more than I should have, and Virgil will have my head if he finds out. But it feels really personal to me. Like an intimate murder; someone really hated her.”

“You don’t think one of those harmless ladies had anything to do with it, do you?” Emerald asked.

I was having trouble with it, too, but I had to wonder how much strength it would take to kill Cleta the way it had been described to me. “We don’t have many options,” I said.

“But there were lots of people here,” she stubbornly said. “Could have been anyone.”

She was right about that, except it had to be someone who really wanted Cleta out of the way. Pish was jotting something down.

“What are you writing?”

“I’m dividing possible suspects into two groups with different motives, castle folk and townsfolk.”

I grudgingly admitted that they both had a point. As much as I had hoped to confine the victim and suspect to one group—the Legion of Horrible Ladies—I had to figure that there were townsfolk with whom Cleta had run-ins. “If you look at it that way, anyone who was at the castle that day could be guilty: Shilo, Jack, Juniper, Zeke . . . you two, me,” I said to Pish. “We were all wandering in and out of the dining room, and no one was watching the clock.”

He nodded without commenting on my inclusion of ourselves. “And Stoddart,” he added.

“Right. And from Golden Acres, Gogi, Hubert, Doc, and Elwood. Several of them were wandering around, snooping all over the castle. I caught Elwood’s sister upstairs coming out of Patsy’s room.”

“I remember her!” Emerald said. “She was one of the twittery ones and came on the Golden Acres bus. So she’s Elwood Fitzhugh’s sister?”

“She is. What about others from town?” I asked, moving on. I did not think Elwood’s twittery sister was a suspect, and what did it matter who was upstairs? The murder happened on the ground floor. “Who actually had a motive of sorts? Janice Grover, no comment needed after the incident at the opera, though Janice wasn’t as upset about it as I expected. Isadore? She and Cleta
hated
each other, but I can’t picture Isadore sneaking after her and smothering the woman. Bashing her over the head with an umbrella maybe, but not smothering.”

“I can’t picture
anyone
doing this!” Emerald said, plunging her hands back in the soapy water.

My memory was spotty because I was so busy, but we all agreed that there was a lot of movement as the tea tables were cleared and remade for cards. Cleta was there for the beginning of that and sat down to play, but people came and went, and some changed games, as Patsy did. Lush claimed that Cleta was one who changed tables, being banker for a game of faro.

“That’s true,” Pish said. “Vanessa wanted to try faro, so we got Cleta to our table to be banker, but it didn’t work out because neither Eleanor nor Helen knew how to play. Cleta just went back to her table then.”

Some sat out a hand as they waited to play a different game. More than one tried the bathroom on the main floor but found the door locked, Pish and Emerald both confirmed, and so went upstairs to one of the other bathrooms.

“I think Stoddart said the same thing,” Pish said. “That
the downstairs bathroom was in use, so he just went up and used mine.”

As we talked Emerald finished the dishes and I got a lot done, browning cubes of beef, sautéing garlic, cubing vegetables, and uncorking red wine. Soon I had a bourguignon stew in the huge slow cooker I’d bought from Janice when the ladies had moved in. I’d get some fresh rolls from Binny’s Bakery in town. I had a pot of soup on the stove and baked fresh corn and cheddar muffins to go with it. Add some fruit for dessert, and that was lunch. “Can you serve lunch, Em, while I go on a muffin delivery?” She knew the drill: coffee, tea, and water; milk for anyone who asked. Set the table, let them eat family style, then shoo them out and clear the table.

“Sure. But should you leave with the police here?”

“I’m not doing any good here, I’m just worrying. Pish, are you coming into town with me?”

“I am,” he said, making a few last notes. “I’m going to drop in on Isadore and talk to Simon, too.”

“Not about this,” I said as a statement, not a question.

“Of course not,” he said.

“We’ll discuss it later, though, so try to remember whatever you can, you two.” Something about the scene was in the back of my mind, something I saw, but I couldn’t think what it was. Maybe it would come to me if I left it alone.

I checked in with Virgil and he said I was free to go to Autumn Vale, but not to talk about the crime. I had one thing to do before going. I ducked out the front door and circled the castle to the butler’s pantry door, the door nearest the bathroom. There was crime scene tape across it, though it had already been searched, as much good as that would do after the scrubbing it had received from Juniper. I wondered if the outside door had been left unlocked after Hannah’s arrival? Only Zeke would know.

I paced around the end of the castle wall to the protected
nook where my fledgling garden was and stared; I could not see the lane or the direct approach to the back door from that spot. Zeke had indeed been gardening, his handiwork evident in the tidy patch of cleaned-up herbs and seedling basil plants he had brought from his mom’s garden and planted for me. If he’d left the back door unlocked, then someone could have come in, suffocated Cleta, and retreated, with no one the wiser unless they looked out the right window at exactly the right time.

Even Lauda could have done it. Money or material gain is at the center of many murder cases. I went back inside in a thoughtful mood and wrote it all down on a note that I handed to a deputy to give to Virgil. It made me uneasy to consider Lauda a suspect and yet have her in the castle, but I wasn’t sure what else to do.

Pish and I loaded the car with big tubs of muffins and squares, as well as two more boxes of books that I had gone through, from my grandmother and mother’s horde. I wanted to check in with Hannah anyway, make sure she was all right after the events of the day before, and the books made a good excuse. As I drove Pish and I talked but came to no conclusions and I dropped him off at the bank, where he was going to work with Simon Grover for a while.