Murder at Teatime (28 page)

“He thought he was doing the world a favor,” said Tom.

“Exactly. But, John, you must have had a harder time justifying the next murder attempt,” she continued. “The attempt to kill Daria. When you thought Daria had found you out, you went after her too. By tampering with the boat engine.”

The audience’s attention shifted to Daria, who looked very shocked, and in the glow of the firelight, very beautiful.

And then it happened.

In an instant, John was gone. Taking advantage of the lapse in their attention, he had bolted for the landing. Before anyone realized what was happening, he had jumped into the Saunders’ runabout, started the engine, and taken off. Avoiding the boats that had gathered in the harbor to view the fireworks, he headed straight down the channel toward the open bay.

The curtain had dropped much sooner than they expected.

16

They sat for a second in stunned silence. Then, as a green rocket exploded, Tracey, Gaudette, and Rodgers sprinted toward the police launch. Tracey was the first to reach it. He jumped in and turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t kick over. As the little group listened to the futile grinding, John raced toward the darkness of the open bay. On the fourth try, the engine finally started, and they were off under a blaze of rockets.

As the police launch took off Wes raced to the
Virgie G.
, gesturing for Charlotte and Tom to follow. He was probably trying to redeem himself in the eyes of the law, Charlotte thought. The boat must not have been as ramshackle as it looked, for it had won the lobster-boat race again that afternoon. Though slow in getting underway—they had to turn around first—they quickly closed the gap. The old boat shuddered with the effort of its speed.

“Don’t worry. We’ll catch up,” Wes said reassuringly, leaning over to spit a stream of tobacco juice over the side. “This baby’s fast.” The engine, he explained proudly, had been custom-built from an old Oldsmobile engine.

The light of a bright rocket revealed that the police launch was closing in on John. “Looks as if Tracey will catch up with him all right,” said Tom, leaning to the side to look out over the prow.

“He don’t stand a chance,” replied Wes, who stood at the helm with his teeth bared in a gleeful smile. “With that little thirty-five horsepower engine? Howard’ll catch up to him in nothin’ flat.”

Tom sat back down next to Charlotte, atop the wash rail that did double duty as a worktable for lobster pots. “There’s still something I don’t understand,” he said, raising his voice above the noise of the engine.

“What?” asked Charlotte. She pulled up the collar of her jacket against the rush of the cold night air.

“Why did John want to kill Daria?”

“It had to do with the manuscript for the private catalogue of the MacMillan collection. Felix had said that MacMillan was about to send the manuscript to the printer’s when he died. But when we looked through Thornhill’s papers, we found the notes, but no manuscript.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I more or less forgot about the manuscript, but it turned out that it did exist and that John had it all along.”

“He used it to blackmail Thornhill?”

“Yes. I don’t know how John found out Thornhill had stolen the books. Maybe he heard the gossip, or maybe he noticed the discrepancy in dates, just as we did. In any case, once he started poking around among the papers in Thornhill’s library, he found the manuscript.”

Tom nodded.

“He realized he could use it to force Thornhill to pull strings on his behalf,” she continued, “and he confronted him with it. He also presented Thornhill with a list of the names of the seven people on his tenure review committee, three of whom were subject to his influence.”

The sky erupted into a giant pink chrysanthemum that seconds later spawned a bouquet of little chrysanthemums. The display prompted a chorus of
oohs
and
aahs
from the spectators lining the waterfront. By its bright light, they could see that the police launch was still gaining on John.

“The attempt failed, and John returned to his room with the manuscript and the list of names, which he stuck in an envelope. The envelope must have sat there for weeks, until he absent-mindedly picked it up while he was working on
Der Gart
Monday morning and stuck it between the pages as a bookmark.”

Tom nodded. “I do that sort of thing all the time—use an old bill or a letter to mark my place.”

“That’s where I found it. I must have still been thinking along the lines of blackmail, because when I came across the list of names on university stationery, I was reminded that John, too, wanted something from Thornhill. Then it was just a matter of calling to confirm that the names were those of the tenure review committee members. The rest fell into place: it became obvious that the blackmail attempt had backfired, and that the reason John’s career had taken a nose dive was that Thornhill was out to ruin him.”

“But what about the attempt to kill Daria?”

“Okay. That sequence of events began when the botanical society called to tell Daria that they’d be sending someone up on Tuesday to pick up the books. Daria goes to John’s room to fetch
Der Gart
in order to have it ready. Tracey told us that he was using it for his work, remember?”

Tom nodded.

“It was
Der Gart
she was carrying when you spoke with her Monday afternoon. She probably meant to tell John she’d taken it, but forgot.”

“I think I’m beginning to see.”

“John comes into the library while Daria’s drinking her tea out on the veranda. He sees the book and wonders why she’s taken it, not knowing that she’s getting the books ready for the botanical society. Then he notices the envelope containing the manuscript and the list of names stuck in the book, forgetting that he was the one who put it there.”

“He thinks she’s assembling a case against him?”

“Yes. He wonders why she’s taken this stuff from his room. And then he sees the other papers—the catalogue notes, the bill of sale, the binder’s report—a whole sheaf of papers that, when examined closely, prove incontrovertibly that Thornhill stole the books.”

“He must have freaked out. He thought he was the only one who knew Thornhill stole the books.”

Charlotte nodded. “To him, it looked as if Daria had figured the whole thing out: how Thornhill had stolen the books, how he had tried to blackmail Thornhill, and how, when that failed, he had murdered him. And to top it off, he thought she was about to go to the police.”

“Why’d he think that?”

“One of those odd coincidences. Daria was due to go over the official report on the book theft on Tuesday with Tracey. He just wanted to make sure all the details were accurate. He called to change the time of their appointment, while she was out at lunch with John, and Grace took the message.”

“And John sees the message: ‘Chief Tracey called and wants to change meeting time.’”

“You’ve got it.”

“So he figures he’ll kill her before she has a chance to air her suspicions—or the suspicions he thought she had—to Tracey.”

“Yes. He knew she was planning to go out on the water to sketch that night. He also knew that the tidal current was treacherous, and that it would be at its most treacherous at about the time she was ready to head in. It was a risk, but he thought he had to act quickly.”

“Whew,” said Tom. “What a creep.”

“One other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Revenge. He was in love with Daria, and he thought she was in love with him. Until she met up with you, that is.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a shout from Wes. Suddenly they realized that the boom of the rocket explosions was interspersed with a lighter, pinging sound—the sound of gunfire. Moving up beside Wes, they looked out over the prow. By the light of a large orange rocket, they could see Gaudette crouched in the bow of the police launch with his revolver drawn. The launch was closing in on John, who was steering the boat in a zigzag path to avoid Gaudette’s fire. But when the rocket faded out, so did their ability to see. For a moment, they raced toward their quarry in darkness and in silence.

Charlotte thought of the crowd waiting in silence for the thrill of the next rocket when a much more exciting display was transpiring in the darkness right in front of them.

Suddenly Wes let out a whoop. “They’ve got him,” he said.

Charlotte marveled at the acuity of Wes’s vision, the product of years of peering into the pre-dawn darkness. Then a pinwheel display burst into a hot, white light that revealed Tracey struggling with John on the deck of the Saunders’ boat. Gaudette was covering Tracey from the police launch, which had pulled up alongside with Rodgers at the wheel. On the pier, a fountain display erupted into flame, raining colored fire. At the same time, they heard the boom-swish, boom-swish of rockets being launched one after another for the grand finale. Then the sky burst into a blaze of color.

“He’s got him,” said Wes, easing up on the throttle.

The noise of the finale was deafening, like the explosion of mortar fire. The explosions left spots dancing before their eyes and the acrid smell of gunpowder in their nostrils.

Tracey was holding John by the elbow—his hands were secured behind his back by handcuffs. He pushed him into the police launch toward Gaudette, who sat him down in the stern with a gun pointing at his chest. Then Rodgers moved over to the Saunders’ boat to drive it back.

“I guess the show is over,” said Charlotte as a red, white, and blue portrait of Uncle Sam transformed itself into an American flag and then burned itself out, casting the water into darkness.

Wes turned the boat around and headed back to the Ledge House landing.

“Acta est fabula,”
said Tom with a grin.

“He confessed everything,” said Tracey as he sat at the Saunders’ kitchen table two days later. “I guess he figured his career was over no matter what.”

So much for Fran’s prognostication that his tenure would come through, thought Charlotte.

“He says he wants to continue his research in jail. That’s where he is now—he was released yesterday from the hospital.”

“Was he badly injured?” asked Kitty.

“Nope. Gaudette just winged him. Enough to make sure he couldn’t fight back when I boarded the boat. Didn’t stop him though—he managed to whale into me nonetheless—sent me tail over bandbox. If he hadn’t lost his balance, I would have been in a heck of a pickle.”

Tracey had come to fetch Charlotte. The tide was up, and he had promised to take her across the channel in the police launch. But he was being kind enough to do it her way. She wanted to leave the island the same way she had arrived: via the Ledges. Stan had loaded her bag into the police launch at the Saunders’ wharf nearly an hour ago. Then Tracey had driven around to the Ledge House landing, climbed the Ledges, and met her at the Saunders’. They would go back down the Ledges together.

Charlotte excused herself to answer the telephone. She was expecting a call from her agent. A few minutes later, she hung up the phone and entered the kitchen. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, and waved it at the group sitting at the table. “My wish came true.”

Tracey looked baffled.

“Fran Thornhill gave us handkerchiefs on Midsummer Night with a drop of sap from a dogwood tree on them,” explained Kitty. “She said that if you carried the handkerchief around with you, your wish would come true.”

“What was your wish?” asked Tracey.

“A wonderful script,” said Charlotte. “A movie—one I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. That was my agent telling me I had the part.”

Kitty and Tracey congratulated her.

Fitzgerald had been wrong when he said American careers have no second acts, she thought. Her career had had a second act, and a third … Probably she would go on until she dropped.

She would be flying back to New York with Felix, whom she would be meeting later at the airport. He had left earlier in the day to see a client about handling the sale of his collection—maybe a big commission would be coming his way after all. He hadn’t seemed terribly worried about his financial predicament. “God watches over the bibliophile,” he had said. Tom would be staying on with Daria until she was finished with the transfer of the Thornhill collection to the botanical society. He was busy collecting material for a new book, on the Thornhill murder. She doubted anything would come of their relationship: they were both too independent to settle down. But it was bound to be a pleasant affair. Maybe that’s the way she should have done it, she thought. But she doubted the studio would have approved. Better to keep on getting married than to have—God forbid—a scandal. The studio encouraged romances between the stars—it made for sizzle in the love scenes and simoleons at the box office—but it wanted the romances kept legal.

“Ready?” asked Tracey, interrupting her thoughts.

“Chief Tracey was just telling me about the chase,” said Kitty. She turned to him. “I bet you’ll go down in Bridge Harbor history for that.”

Tracey looked down at the floor, embarrassed. In fact, however handsome Detective Gaudette might have looked in his State police uniform, it was Tracey, in his Red Sox baseball cap and navy blue windbreaker, who was the hero of the hour. His capture of the fugitive murderer was the talk of the town.

“I’ll tell you, I was some anxious when that engine wouldn’t start. It always gets notional when you need it the most.”

He rose to leave. They said goodbye to the Saunders, who insisted that Charlotte come back soon. Tracey too invited her back, and she reciprocated by inviting him to the Big Apple. He was grateful, he said, but he’d only been outside of Maine twice, and had regretted it both times.

“I’ll look out for your old movies on television, or maybe I’ll see you in the movie theatre in this big new role,” he said.

As they walked down the Gilley Road their conversation turned back to the case. “Did, you know the town voted last night on the tax abatement proposal for the Chartwell Corporation?” he asked.

She’d forgotten. “How did it turn out?”