Murder in Pastel (25 page)

I knew now that the truth would bring me no happiness, but I also knew, until I had the truth I would know no peace.

The cops had come and gone by the time I reached Miss Irene’s. She ushered me in, offering lemonade and fresh-baked brownies.

I sat in the Cobbs’ parlor, staring at a painting Cosmo had done of an old moss-covered bridge. The bridge had been torn down, but it lived forever in my father’s work. I thought of
Virgin in Pastel
’s sad fate.

As I sipped a glass of lemonade Miss Irene explained that the mayor and her nephew were seeing a lawyer, and then she flushed painfully and launched into some awkward apologies for Jack’s “rude” behavior.

“I—I don’t know what the silly boy could have been thinking,” she said twice. The second time she said it I took her up on it.

“I do.”

“You do?” she quavered.

“I think so. And I think I know why he destroyed
Virgin in Pastel
.”

Miss Irene’s color faded, leaving her bone white. I tried to be gentle. I said, “You were the model, weren’t you, Miss Irene?”

She stared at me mutely.

“You were the model for
Virgin in Pastel
.”

Her lips parted but no words came forth. Her green eyes looked stricken. Finally she nodded.

“Were you lovers? You and my father?”

She gasped as though I had struck her.

“What happened to my father, Miss Irene? What happened that night?”

“W-what night? Nothing happened. He left. Cosmo left. He left me.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“But it’s
true
,” she said quite desperately. “You have to believe it. It’s the truth.”

“You were lovers. At least for a time.”

“N-no—I was just a girl. Unmarried. I—I wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been right. It would have been
wrong
.”

“Miss Irene, what can it matter now? I know you were the model for
Virgin in Pastel
. I saw your photo at the museum. At Cobb House.”

“Photo? What photo?” She sounded scandalized. “What photos can you mean, Kyle?”

“Photographs of some picnic. Once I saw the resemblance, I knew.” My grandfather had suspected as well.

Miss Irene stared at me like a rabbit gazing up a gunsight.

“That’s why Jack stole the painting, isn’t it? Somehow he recognized it. He took it and he destroyed it because he was afraid of what it meant.”

“Jack wouldn’t steal anything,” Miss Irene disagreed feebly.

“Yes, he would. To protect you. Because he loves you. Because you’re the only mother he’s known. He thought the painting proved you really were his mother, and that’s why he took it.”

Miss Irene began to cry, a weak plaintive sound.

“But you’re not his mother, are you? The rumors in high school were wrong. There was a baby, but not Jack. The baby was Brett.”

At Brett’s name she threw her head back and wailed. It was a shocking sound.

“My baby,” she howled.

“Miss Irene,” I exclaimed. I jumped to my feet and awkwardly patted her shoulder. “Don’t cry. Please.”

“My baby,” she wept.

I poured her some lemonade.

“Here, drink this.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. You want to blame it all on Jack but it’s not Jack’s fault. None of it’s Jack’s fault. It was my fault. Mine and Cosmo’s.”

“Why is it anyone’s fault?”

“Because it was
wrong
,” Miss Irene cried. “It was immoral and wrong. I knew it, if he didn’t. I tried to end it but—” She shook her head sadly. “I loved him so,” she whispered.

“What happened that night, Miss Irene?”

“Nothing happened. Why do you keep saying that? I went to him and begged him not to show that painting. He had promised me.” Her eyes fell from mine. Her hand went up nervously to her throat. “He promised never to show that—that thing. I reminded him of his promise, and he—he agreed.”

“That doesn’t sound like Cosmo,” I had to say.

Miss Irene blinked her wet lashes at me. “He agreed,” she repeated stubbornly. “And he went away.”

“Where did he go?”

She shook her head.

“Why did he go?”

Another shake of her untidy gray head.

“Miss Irene, you’re not telling me everything.”

She said with unexpected dignity, “Why should I tell you everything? I have a right to my own secrets.”

I guess if anyone should have understood that, it was me.

Anyway, I didn’t really need her confirmation. Between my grandfather’s informed suspicions and my own wild speculation, I was pretty sure of my facts.

“The night of the party,” I said, “You were staring at Brett’s anklet. You recognized it, didn’t you?”

Some kind of internal struggle seemed to take place. “It was my necklace,” she said. “The necklace he gave me. I would have known it anywhere. And he was wearing it on his foot. Like a trashy piece of jewelry. I don’t believe he could have been my little boy.” Tears brimmed in her faded eyes; she blinked them away. “I don’t believe that.”

“Who gave you the necklace?” I knew. I don’t even know why I was asking.

“Cosmo.” Her chin raised. “He was like that, you know. So brusque and so…hard. But now and again he could be…different. Oh, he could charm the birds out of the trees when he put his mind to it.”

Out of the trees and out of their frilly little dresses and their frilly little moralities. And why the hell did I feel so bad about it? What did any of it have to do with me?

“Did you kill him? Did you kill my father?” The strained sound of my voice startled me.

But Miss Irene reacted like she’d received an electric shock. “Kyle Bari, what a heartless boy you are! You don’t know anything about people!”

Chapter Seventeen

I
took the largest key from my grandfather’s key ring and fitted it in the rusted padlock. After a couple of tries it turned, the chains holding the door slipped free and fell clinking to the stone steps of the graveyard chapel.

I shoved the heavy, weathered door which opened with a screech of arthritic hinges.

Despite the bright sunlight it was damp and dark, moldering as the grave inside the old church.

I switched on the flashlight and picked my way across the broken planks. As my eyes adjusted to the poor light I could make out cobwebs draped from the carved lintel posts. I stared up and felt my hair rise like porcupine quills. The vault ceiling seemed to ripple like the underbelly of a sleeping animal—hundreds of bats hung from the rafters.

“Jesus,” I said softly. Although I kind of figured Jesus didn’t live here anymore.

Drawn toward the chancel, magnetized as though by true north, I walked down the aisle. I set the flashlight down on the altar, propping its beam toward the apse. There, as I remembered from my childhood, was a long stone bench perhaps originally intended as a reliquary.

I set my strength to pushing aside the lid, several pounds of solid stone. As I gripped it I realized that it was actually a slab of marble, beautiful and cool beneath the layers of dirt, dust and mouse droppings.

The lid scraped over, inch by inch, until my final heave slid it clear across. It teetered, and then fell with a thump that sent the furry ceiling rippling and flapping.

A bat detached itself from the mass and swooped down, squeaking.

I grabbed the flashlight and yelled, swinging at it. Heroic stuff. The flashlight ray slid across the roof like search beams. The bat flapped away, and I lowered my arm. I was barely conscious of my victory, my attention riveted by what lay entombed in the marble case.

A skeleton lay grinning up at me in the spotlight of my torch. Time and nature had done their work. The empty sockets stared; the gaping mouth was stuffed with the remnants of a mouse nest. The print had long ago faded off the rotten tatters, but I recognized the shirt and the gold band on the bones of his left hand.

I whispered, “Father?” though he was long past hearing, long past answering. There was a split down the center of the skull, cleaving it nearly in two. My whisper echoed emptily round the church.

The band of light at the chapel entrance vanished as the door swung shut.

“This is just too bad,” a familiar voice said conversationally into the darkness. “Just too darned bad.”

I turned my flashlight toward the voice. There, like a convict caught in the glare of the jailbreak searchlights, stood Mayor Cobb in his khaki shorts and straw sun hat. Binoculars hung around his neck; he held a gun which was pointed at me.

Switching off the light before he could use it to target me, I knelt beside my father’s tomb.

“Why?” My husky echo repeated itself over and over down the empty aisles stripped of pews.

Mayor Cobb chuckled. Maybe it was a silly question.

“Why? You know why. The bastard would have bled us dry—that’s assuming he could have kept his mouth shut.”

“Not Brett. Cosmo. My father.”

Silence.

There was a sliver of light shining through one of the wooden slates boarding the windows. I could see the blue of stain glass, a glimpse of a wimple like the cowl of the Virgin Mary.

Like that, memory came flooding back: the knock at the window which only half woke me, sending me barefoot and still dreaming across the meadow and into the woods to see the blue woman. A stained glass face? Yes, but something else: a woman’s face turning blue. A woman being choked. And voices…yelling. Arguing.

“They used to meet here,” Mayor Cobb explained, as though trying to persuade me to his viewpoint. “She thought I didn’t know. Hell, the whole county knew. Then it was over and she was in trouble. I told her to get rid of it. He told her to get rid of it. But no, she had to have it. Came back and bit us in the butt, didn’t it?”

“Brett? She gave Brett up for adoption. But he tracked her down. And then he tried to blackmail you.”

“Yup. He thought he’d hit a live one with Irene.”

In books people always keep the murderers talking to stall for time. I wasn’t stalling. I had to know the truth.

“Why did you kill my father?”

Even after all this time, the righteous indignation was still in his voice.

“After everything we’d been through, he was going to show that goddamn painting for all the world to see. After he promised her he wouldn’t. His word was shit. I tried to tell her that, but she wouldn’t listen. I followed her when she came to meet him that night. It was shameful. She was like a bitch in heat. Here I thought it was all over, and she’d learned her lesson, but at the chance of seeing him again…and here he was betraying her! I couldn’t stand it. I could have choked the life out of her.”

I tried to use this to glue together the broken pieces of my memory.

I said slowly, “But he stopped you? You fought?”

“The silly thing ran home crying, and I had to deal with it as usual. I offered him money. I told him what it meant to us—to her. He didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself. He tried to walk away from me. Arrogant ass. I threw a punch. We fought.”

“You killed him.” This memory would not come, and maybe that was a blessing. There was a reason my mind had nailed down the shutters ten years ago, but it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. “You picked something up and hit him.”

“The sickle left by your grandfather that day was leaning against the building. I picked it up and I—” he paused as though the memory of that was a little too real, too horrific.

“And you killed him.”

“It was an accident,” Mayor Cobb said automatically. “I kind of lost my temper.”

“And then you dragged his body inside the church and hid it.”

“He was no loss. I don’t expect you to understand. Irene understood. As much as she understands anything. Aaron understood.”

“My grandfather knew?”

There was nothing written in his journal, nothing at all for the month of July that year. I guess that should have tipped me off.

“He’s the one who padlocked the church. Next day I came back, and it was bolted up. Windows boarded. He knew. He had to know.”

“He covered for you. Why did you kill him?”

The mayor blustered, “Who says I—”

“Or did he think it was Irene?”

No comment from the mayor.

It made sense though. My grandfather had that old-fashioned chivalry reflex. He’d have sympathized with Irene as yet another woman wronged by Cosmo. He’d have covered for her.

I worked it out aloud. “But then you killed Brett, and he must have guessed. Cosmo was one thing, but your own nephew—”

“Kid, you are stupid,” my elected public servant informed me. “Aaron didn’t give a rat’s ass about that faggot. He was afraid you’d poke your damn nose into it. He heard you were asking questions, checking county records.”

If I poked my nose in, I’d be next on the mayor’s hit parade. This was a man not afraid to sneak into my house and swipe my medication (probably during my morning swim). The bird watching gave Cobb the perfect excuse for wandering around the colony, but he must have had nerves of steel to tamper with the dock on the beach below Adam’s cottage.

“That was a damn shame about Aaron, but I couldn’t trust him not to tell you,” the mayor said. He sounded like he was bent over. I could hear him moving around.

I moved as well, feeling my way through the darkness.

“This is a regular murder epidemic you’ve got going. You think the sheriff is going to buy it?”

“I think the sheriff is going to do his duty and arrest Adam MacKinnon any day now. He’s the only one with a motive. Pervert. You people are not right in the head. Unbalanced. Hysterical.”

Oh yeah, but he, the homicidal maniac, he was an up and up guy.

“So you’re going to shoot me?”

“With my own gun? Heavens no! This has to seem like an accident. Or at least like it could be an accident. Anyhow, I’m going to burn this place down, raze it to ashes like I should have done years ago.”

I opened my mouth to point out the obvious flaw in this plan.

There was a screech of hinges, a burst of sunlight. Mayor Cobb’s shadow filled the doorway for an instant, and then the door shut once more leaving me in darkness.