Feta Attraction (26 page)

Brenda's chair in front of the door was empty, Russ's rifle nowhere to be seen. Damn! The door swung open and we all three ran up the last flight. I could hear the struggle going on in the cupola room. Russ must be trying to escape. Oh, God, this was my fault. If Brenda was hurt, I'd never forgive myself.

I surveyed the room as I reached the top of the stairs. Basil's old armchair was overturned, its torn and dusty cambric tipped up and facing us. Russ and Brenda were struggling on the floor. I could hear her grunts and moans of pain. “I'm here, Brenda!” I yelled. “I won't let him hurt you!” I reached out blindly and grabbed the first thing my hand touched. I pulled the heavy brass kaleidoscope from the basket next to the chair and raised it over my head, preparing to bring it down on Russ.

Brenda sat up, breathing heavily. Russ sat up too, wiping his mouth. Oh. My. God. The image would be burned into my mind for eternity. They'd been making out. At least, I hoped they'd just been making out. “Brenda!” I yelled and shut my eyes.

Brenda stood up and adjusted her clothes. She looked sheepish. “You don't have to pay me.”

Russ grinned his toothless smile at me. I'd been holding my breath and I released it with an audible whoosh. The stones inside the kaleidoscope clunked as I lowered my arms. Stones? I gave it another shake. I'd always assumed it was just bits of glass inside there, but now that I thought about it, the sounds they made were thicker and heavier than little chips of glass should be. I held the device up to my eye and pointed it toward the fading sunlight coming from the window. I moved closer and spun the wheel at the end. The pattern inside changed to a bloodred and crystal design. I spun the wheel again and the design was a sparkling blue and green. I stared at the colored fragments for a long moment, then turned around.

“Sophie, what do you know about this kaleidoscope?”

“That old thing? Basil used to come up here every day and mess with it. Spin, spin, spin. It drive me crazy!”

“Do you know where it came from?” I fiddled with the various brass pieces but couldn't figure out how to open the thing up.

“That musta been here when we bought this place. Basil found it somewhere. He used to say, ‘Sophie, we're gonna be rich. Sophie, we're gonna be rich,' then do the spin. Over and over. Then he have a heart attack and—pop!—he's gone. And I'm not rich.” Her eyes were sad, whether because of the lost husband or the lost fortune, I couldn't say.

I ran my fingers over the device. This time, I found a small catch. I manipulated it and the end chamber hinged open. I located the corresponding catch on the other side and opened that too. The brass cylinder with the eyepiece detached and I laid it on the seat of the chair. Russ and Brenda were standing off to one side, his arm around her possessively. I guess they made . . . Well, nobody could say a cute couple, but a couple who made sense together.

I held the end piece like a cup and looked inside. I couldn't help letting out a little gasp. Sophie shoved over and leaned over the cup. “What is it?” she demanded, reaching into her apron pocket for her reading glasses. “Looks like marbles.” Dolly came over and looked in too. I gave the cup a gentle shake. It was filled with large, translucent, polished stones in various colors of the rainbow. Except these weren't just stones. Unless I was very much mistaken, I was holding what remained of the Spanish crown jewels.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Steps sounded on the stairs behind us. I whipped around, putting the cup behind my back. Inky stood in the doorway, with his arm around Spiro, holding him upright.

“He insisted I help him get up here,” Inky explained. Spiro looked like death warmed over and was barely moving under his own power, but he was at long last conscious.

“Where is he?!” he rasped. “I'm going to kill him!”

“Who?” I looked around and then realized, of course, that he meant Russ, who was staring at him malevolently from across the room.

Spiro tried to make a move for Russ, but didn't have the strength to break Inky's hold on him. “Easy, Spiro. He's not worth it.”

“He is worth it, damn it!”

Russ's expression darkened in garish contrast to the yellowish gray bruise covering one side of his face. He pointed to his cheek with a stubby middle finger. “This better not leave a mark.” Brenda looked up at the bruise nervously. So there'd been no bar fight keeping him out of work the other day. Spiro hadn't gone willingly. I should have guessed.

I glanced from Spiro to Russ, and back again. There was something I was missing here. Some association that wasn't clear yet.

“My treasure!” Spiro cried in horror as he saw the dismantled kaleidoscope. I still had the cup in my hand. “Where is it?”

“Don't worry, I've got it,” I reassured him.

Russ saw his chance and lunged for me. I stepped up on top of the overturned chair and went over the other side, still on my feet and miraculously holding the cup upright. I felt a painful spasm in my calf and knew I'd pulled another muscle.

Inky propped Spiro up against the wall. “Now, stay put! Do as I say!” He crossed the room at warp speed, and put Russ into a headlock. Dolly picked up the gun, which Brenda had stowed over in one of the eight corners of the room, and trained it on her son, not for the first time.

“Now, settle yourself down and shut up,” she ordered. “I ain't shot a deer yet this season but I'll settle for you.”

“He's always had everything! The best of everything!” Russ spit out, still trapped in the iron circle of Inky's left arm. “Now he's got a bunch of jewels too! It's not fair!”

“Life ain't fair, remember? If you'd gone to community college for restaurant management or up to Wanakena to the forest ranger school like I wanted you to, you'd be making good money by now.” She turned to Sophie. “No offense. We've got good jobs here and you treat us real well,” she said sincerely. Sophie nodded at her.

“Them jewels should be mine!” Inky tightened his grip. “They're half mine, anyway,” Russ choked out.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dolly asked him, waving the barrel of the gun up and down.

“Them rocks, this house, they're half mine. Basil was my father too.”

We all stared at him. Sophie's face was white and stony, her lips compressing into a line so hard it was possible her face might crumble from the pressure. Dolly's face turned scarlet. There was a long moment of silence; then she burst out laughing.

“You idiot!” she managed between guffaws. “Basil wasn't your father!”

Sophie did not relax. It was pretty clear that she had suspected something like this might be true. Now I understood why she had kept Dolly and Russ around all these years, even after we knew he'd been sneaking steaks and bottles of beer and liquor out in the boxes of vegetable trimmings. Maybe having them around was her way of keeping her husband's memory alive. Or more likely, she wanted Russ and Dolly where she could keep an eye on them in case they tried to capitalize on the relationship. She was not taking Dolly's word for it, but she remained silent.

“Oh, come off it, Ma! He must be my father. Look at me and Spiro!”

I looked from Spiro, who appeared to be preparing to throw up, back to Russ to see whether there was any resemblance. They were about the same height, and both had dark hair and similar hazel eyes. Russ was thirty pounds heavier and ten years Spiro's junior, but hard living had aged him prematurely. All in all, their similarities could easily have been coincidental. I couldn't tell, and I didn't think anybody else could either.

“Russ, your father's dead. You know that.” Dolly's first husband, Cliff, who refused to wear anything more rigid than a greasy Yankees ball cap on his head, had died when he hit a tree root hidden by the snow and flipped his four-wheeler thirteen years ago. We'd provided the funeral lunch at no cost.

Russ didn't look convinced. Dolly sighed, then continued. “Russ, how long have I been working here?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Watch your mouth, mister. Didn't I teach you better than to cuss in front of ladies?” Brenda stood up a little straighter. I doubt she'd been called a lady too many times in her life.

“Well, I've been working here for thirty years. This summer is my anniversary,” she added, tipping her head in my direction to make sure I'd heard. We'd have to plan some kind of celebration after Labor Day, or at least a gift. “Now, how old are you?”

“Thirty-three,” he answered, and I could see him mentally doing the math, none too quickly, all things considered. He looked up at his mother. “You mean Cliff really was my father, and you weren't banging Basil?”

“I said watch your language! Now, you apologize to Sophie.”

“Sorry, Sophie,” he said. Inky let go of him but blocked his way to the stairs.

I looked from Sophie to Dolly and back. Dolly hadn't answered the question at all, but I wasn't going to say anything about it. It was very, very quiet. Sophie finally broke the silence.

“Come downstairs,” she ordered. “I made moussaka today. Russ won't get any kind of good food in jail.”

EPILOGUE

“So, when's the auction?” Liza asked me over a glass of wine and some shrimp skewers. I bit off a chunk of the delicately spiced crustacean, chewed, and swallowed appreciatively. It was a Wednesday evening, quite warm for September, and Bonaparte Bay was pretty much shut down until the weekend. It would close up for the winter after Columbus Day. Liza's spa business, though, stayed open till Thanksgiving. I reached for my glass and leaned back into the chair.

“After the first of the year. Christie's gave us an estimate of two hundred and fifty thousand. They think half a million wouldn't be out of the ballpark.”

She nodded at me. With Jack's help I'd retrieved my table from Devil's Oven Island and managed to get it back to the Bonaparte House unscathed. I had an antique appraiser from DeKalb Junction take a look at it. He offered me a hundred dollars. I declined. Then, just for ha-has, I sent an e-mail and some photos to that PBS television show. An appraiser came barreling up from New York City the next day, and informed us that we had a very fine, early-American table made in Philadelphia in the mid-1700s. We were still trying to document whether Joseph Bonaparte had owned it at his estate in New Jersey. It would have been an antique even then. If we could prove that, the table was practically priceless. The Christie's people were working on that for us now.

“Sophie must be beside herself.”

“She's already counting the money, no question about that. But we're likely to be tied up in litigation with the Spanish government and the remaining descendants of the Bonapartes and the Spanish royal family for years. Whether we ever see any money from the jewels is up in the air. And now that Spiro and Inky have decided to buy the Sailor's Rest from Big Dom's long-lost wife, whom he apparently never bothered to divorce, she's afraid she's going to have to support the two of them.”

“That doesn't seem likely. Inky has a great head for business.”

“I know. Sophie should be happy. They've decided to turn it into a retro nineteen-fifties-style diner, which will attract a totally different clientele than we have at the Bonaparte House. I think they're going to do well.” I ate another shrimp. “That's why Spiro got involved with Keith, you know. He wanted to buy a business and a house on the river and start a new life with Inky. He thought he'd be able to pay Keith back once he sold the jewels. But he got in over his head.”

“Keith's trial is coming up,” she offered, somewhat tentatively. It was kind of her to try to spare me, thinking that I might have still had some feelings for him.

“He wrote me a letter from the county lockup, if you can believe that. Asking me to bail him out.”

“I take it you didn't.”

“Hell, no. He can rot there for all I care.” And I meant it. “The police recovered the bottle of Ouzo he used to knock out Big Dom. It came from the Sailor's Rest. From what Spiro tells me, the day of the murder Spiro, Keith, and Dom were out drinking on a boat, discussing business. They argued, and Keith hit Dom, shot him, and pushed him overboard. Spiro tried to intervene but Keith had already drugged Spiro's Ouzo and he passed out.”

“I hear Russ got off with probation,” Liza said.

“Well, Inky and Sophie convinced Spiro that he should let it go. Pressing charges for kidnapping would have brought out some pretty unpleasant things about Spiro and the missing money, among other things, and the publicity would be bad for business and for their future together. Of course we fired him, and Dolly told him she'd drive him to jail herself if he ever showed up here again.”

“The Sons of Demeter weren't real?”

“The investigation isn't finished, but it looks like Keith just made up the group to draw suspicion away from himself and try to pin it on the Sunshine Acres people. They never found any evidence of illegal drugs being grown there, so it looks like the hippies got off scot-free.”

I paused and took a sip of the delicious crisp Pinot Grigio. The stack of papers I'd recovered on my nighttime raid of the commune's barn had been useless. It was simply documentation related to restaurant orders—and Dom's name was crossed off because he wouldn't be needing any more produce.

“Did I tell you I offered to buy out Sophie and Spiro from the restaurant?”

“No!” Liza leaned closer, intrigued. “What did they say?”

“Spiro agreed, of course. He and Inky have the new restaurant, and they've got their eyes on a riverfront cottage they want to rehab, so he wants the money.”

“And Sophie?”

“Turned me down.”

“I thought she was desperate to get back to Greece full-time? The sale of that table ought to bring enough money for her to retire very comfortably.”

“You'd think so. But it seems she's got an iron in the fire here, and she wants to see how it heats up.”

Liza had clearly not heard anything about this through the Bay gossip lines. “What do you mean?”

“Remember Hank at Sunshine Acres?”

“Yes, I think so. We get our organic produce from there.”

“So do we. I've started buying from them again. There just isn't anyplace else locally to buy that quality of vegetables and dairy. Anyway, he's started coming in to Marina's diner and hanging out, waiting for Sophie to come in. She pretends she's not interested, but I think she likes him. Or she likes the attention. At her age, what does it matter?”

“So what about you? Do you have any irons in the fire?”

I cut my eyes to her. “Jack and I have seen a little bit of each other. I mean, I had to thank him for trying to protect me by following me out to the Devil's Oven that night. And to apologize for Sophie whacking him.”

“Come on, Georgie, spill it.”

I smiled. “Next time I go to Watertown, I'm seriously considering buying a lace thong. A real one.”