Shadow of a Spout (15 page)

“Doesn’t matter,” the combative woman shot back. “I wanted fresh towels the first night, and there was no one to get them! I even rang the desk.”

“I’m so sorry, but that must have been during the storm, and you know it’s dangerous to answer the phone with a lightning storm going on. I was . . . I was indisposed.”

“Do you mean you were not even at the desk?”

His gaze flitted to Sophie, and he just shrugged. “I’m so sorry for your inconvenience. I’ll give you a ten percent discount on the entire bill as compensation. Now let’s get you set up for one more night.”

Sophie, who was pretending to leaf through the postcards on a rack at the far end of the check-in desk, felt for him. As a restaurateur, she occasionally had diners requesting items be taken off their bill when they had eaten the whole thing or most of it, claiming it wasn’t what they were expecting or wasn’t up to snuff. She had learned to keep her cool and in most cases obliged; it wasn’t worth the bad rap they would give the restaurant otherwise, especially with social media being as prevalent a way of communicating as it was today. It hadn’t been easy at first, but she had become philosophical about it.
Most
people were good patrons and didn’t rip her off.

Melissa, the housekeeper, breezed through the door from the basement, chattering to a young fellow who was following her. “I’ll show you the routine and Bertie can sign you up as relief.”

The woman toddled away from the desk, happy with her discount. Melissa waved to Sophie then said to her boss, “Bertie, this is Domenico Dominguez,” she said, hitching her thumb over her shoulder at the small, nervous-looking dark-haired fellow, who was dressed in jeans and a clean T-shirt. “He comes highly recommended, so I said he could try out for the evening housekeeper job. He’s going to shadow me today.”

“What happened to Brittany?” he asked, looking the fellow over with skepticism. “Wasn’t she supposed to be working today? Isn’t today your day off? What’s going on?” His tone teetered on the verge of hysteria.

“She never shows up when I ask her to. Do you see her here today? No. Did you see her yesterday? Last evening? No again. Night before last? Same thing,” she snapped. “Left me doing
everything
, including vacuuming the halls and dusting, and I’m tired of it. I finally phoned her house this morning and her mom told me she’s taken off, gone to California, or something. That’s why I’m here. Didn’t you wonder who was coming in?”

“Oh, Lord, why am I being tested?” Bertie wailed.

“It’s okay, Bertie,” Melissa said, her voice confident and the snappish tone gone. “Dom, here, is a great guy. He has two jobs and he’s never late to either of them. You know Pete at the Pizza Stop . . . Dom does night cleaning for him, and he can fit this in before it. You can call Pete for a reference, if you want, but I’ve already spoken to him.”

“Okay, but I need to get his particulars and we have to fill out an employee information form and a W-four,” Bertie fussed.

They all went into the office and Sophie’s stomach tightened. Would Bertie notice that the key was gone? Well, of
course
he would, because Melissa would go to get the key and ask where it was. She’d have to confess what she’d done or this was going to get ugly. She heard them talking and a file drawer slam.

She retreated to the alcove, where some chairs and a big palm hid her from view, but there was no roar of anger, no exclamation of puzzlement. The threesome came back out chatting, though she couldn’t make out their voices. Melissa had a clipboard with some paperwork on it, and Bertie followed the two toward the coffee shop. Sophie seized the moment. She looked around, but there was no one else in sight, so she skipped across the lobby, slipped into the office, hung the key back up and hopped back out toward the stairs.

“Okay, when you’re done we’ll go through it all,” Bertie was saying. “Can you bring me a coffee when you and Dom are finished with your lunch and you’ve explained the routine to him? I hope he works out better than Brittany.”

Sophie raced up a few steps to the turn in the staircase and rested back against the wall, catching her breath. She had a weird feeling that this was exactly what the murderer did and how he or she felt. That little exercise had proved one thing: Bertie was not the most vigilant person in the world and there was ample opportunity for someone with good nerves to filch the key, run up to Nana’s room, steal the teapot and replace the key with no one the wiser. Whether that was possible that evening was the question.

So now she knew how the killer had possibly gotten the key, but that didn’t eliminate a single person from the list. It was time to call—or text—Jason to ask about Dahlia Pettigrew.

*   *   *

T
he lecture had been enlightening, Rose thought, but it was hard to concentrate when you knew that the police detective still felt there was a possibility you had killed someone. O’Hoolihan hadn’t come right out and said it, but it was in the air every time he tracked her down to confirm or clarify some detail of her day or night. The last time, Rose had made sure he had an earful about what she thought of Orlando and Zunia Pettigrew’s relationship. She told him about the conversation Thelma had overheard as Pettigrew talked on the phone to someone, and every other detail she could think of. There was no room for worries about being a snitch anymore when the murder was weighing this heavily on her mind.

Walter Sommer took the podium as the second guest speaker of the day sat down. A hush came over the group. He gathered them with his expert glance and cleared his throat. “As you all know, Friday night or early Saturday morning we lost one of our own to a horrible crime. Zunia Pettigrew will be missed by us all—”

There were a few mutterings in the crowd at that.

“—and her dedication to the ITCS and her own home chapter, the Niagara Teapot Collectors Society, still ably represented by Orlando Pettigrew, Pastor Frank Barlow and the others, is unquestioned. Pastor Frank, I believe you wanted to say a few words?”

“This oughta be interesting,” Laverne murmured.

Rose glanced over at Orlando Pettigrew, who sat alone, his face frozen in distaste as the pastor shambled to the podium. The other members of the Niagara group, two sisters and Penelope Daley, glanced between the pastor and the widower uneasily.

“I’d like to lead you all in a prayer.” He opened a leather-bound volume and haltingly led the group, they said amen in chorus, then he closed the book with a slap and looked around the group. “And now I’d like to speak about Zunia Pettigrew.”

Some started chatting quietly among their own groups as he talked on and on, lauding the woman’s greatness and purity of heart.

“How can he say all of this with a straight face?” Rose said to Laverne.

Penelope Daley had begun weeping like a hired mourner at a funeral, her soft sobs becoming louder the longer Frank spoke.

“You know, there are some men who time after time pick the naggingest, most difficult women to fall in love with,” Laverne whispered. “There was a man in our church . . . Everyone felt sorry for him for years because his wife made his life a living hell. Nothing he did was
ever
good enough. When she died every sweet widow and lonely heart wanted to console him. Thought he’d respond to good cooking, nice treatment, compliments . . . every kind of TLC. Well, didn’t he up and marry Azalea Crowther, the meanest woman on the planet! Some men just don’t know how to go along unless a woman is telling them which shoe to put on first and how they’re not even good at that.”

Rose glanced over at Orlando Pettigrew. Was that the case with him, careening from one mean-tempered woman to the next? Rose remembered Dahlia Pettigrew from past conventions, and she was a mousy, sweet-natured enough woman, so now, in his case he had jumped from one extreme to the other. He and Zunia had been married a year or so. Had he just had enough and decided to get out of the marriage in a permanent and quick way?

She looked over at Walter and Nora, who sat together in matrimonial solidarity. Nora had claimed Walter was never going to leave her to marry Zunia, but was Orlando sure about that? Did he kill his wife to keep her from leaving, as weird as that sounded? Wouldn’t be the first time in a sorry world of hurt that a man killed a woman in a fit of
If I can’t have her, no one can
.

When the pastor was finally done eulogizing Saint Zunia, as Laverne tartly named her in a whispered aside, Walter Sommer took the podium and said, “We’ll break for lunch, and then meet back here at one thirty to discuss our plans for the division presidency for the New York State ITCS.”

There was the usual bustle of chairs moving, people murmuring, shoes shuffling. Josh, with a worried frown on his young face, joined them. “Mrs. Freemont, that Detective O’Hoolihan talked to me again. He asked me if I thought you were strong enough to hit someone with a teapot!”

“That’s just ridiculous,” Laverne said sharply. “As if she would. Who do they think she is, Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Xena, Warrior Princess?”

Even through her worry Rose smiled at her friend, who liked her female TV characters strong and feisty. “Rose, Warrior Teapot Collector,” she said.

Laverne chuckled. “What did you say, Josh?”

“I said no way. I may have . . . uh . . . made you sound kinda weak and helpless. I hope you’re not offended.”

“Don’t let it worry you, honey,” she said, patting Josh’s back. “Everything is going to be fine. The police are just exploring every possibility.” She spied Thelma edging closer. “If certain people hadn’t thought it would be funny to make me out to be the wicked witch of Gracious Grove, this wouldn’t have happened.” She was sorry the moment she said it, especially when she saw the stricken expression on Thelma’s wrinkled face. Darn it, that was too harsh.

Thelma turned and shuffled away, out of the convention room.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she fretted.

“Rose, don’t concern yourself,” Laverne said. “It wouldn’t do her any harm to know she made a mistake and own up to it for once in her life.”

“I suppose. I just hope this doesn’t send her off to do anything even more foolish. I know Thelma, and she has no off switch for her brain.”

Chapter 16

T
his was when she needed one of those cellular thingamabobs, Thelma thought, as she chugged into the lobby like a slow-moving train. Cissy had gone off with Dana Saunders to shop just when she needed her granddaughter’s help! That Dana was a bad influence, getting Cissy to do stuff like shop and have fun.

She
needed
someone nimble and young to help her clear up this mess. And by “mess,” she meant the awful bashing of Zunia Pettigrew, even if that woman was just a murder waiting to happen. She frowned as she pondered that thought.

A murder waiting to happen.

Seemed to her you could look at this like a sale. There were two different kind of sales; there was the planned sale, advertised and thought out ahead, but then there was the sudden pop-up kinda sale, one of those rare opportunities when you got to the store and found out they had a surplus of squash so they had slashed the price.

Pain shot through her left foot. She sure hoped her gout wasn’t flaring up, because nothing in the world hurt like gout. One time her big toe knuckle had swollen up and gotten so red and hot, felt like it was on fire. All she could wear on her foot was an old carpet slipper of her late husband’s with the toe cut out. She shuffled over to the alcove and sat down behind the palm tree, slipping off her orthopedic Rockport shoes. She’d worn them too long and they’d broken down until they were falling apart, but they were darned expensive and money didn’t grow on shrubberies!

Anyhoo . . . was this murder like the advertised-in-advance kind of sale, or the pop-up sale of opportunity? Had someone close to Zunia, like that weaseling husband or nasty stepchild, planned this out, deciding ahead of time the how and the where and the when? Or had someone seen an opportunity, someone like that Galway girl, who always looked like she was sucking a sour lemon when she looked at Zunia, or that bossy Sommer woman, who couldn’t keep her husband corralled in his own pen?

Either way the teapot was likely just a chance addition to a planned crime. It wasn’t like someone had heard her say Rose was nasty and decided then and there to kill Zunia. Woulda happened anyway.

She nodded sharply. That was the truth! Invigorated, she got up and headed to the coffee shop. A cup of tea and a scone, and then she was going to investigate! She’d practically solved the last murder all on her own and she’d do the same this time. She would be Miss Marple, only the Margaret Rutherford portrayal of Miss Marple, not the namby-pamby one Dame Agatha had written down.

*   *   *

W
hile waiting for her friends to return, Sophie decided to familiarize herself with the whole hotel in her effort to figure out how the perpetrator had met up with Zunia, so she retrieved her notebook to sketch a plan. She had taken a course in restaurant layout and design, and quickly realized that a buffet event needed a much different flow from a formal restaurant with designated seating, which in turn required a different layout from a casual-dining outlet. She had worked hard, honing her sketching skills during hours spent drawing up mock seating and floor arrangements for events, weddings, conventions and parties of all sorts, all in an effort to improve the flow of bus and waitstaff.

The ground floor of the inn was easy and took her only a few moments. She then ascended the stairs and turned toward the elevator. It had been cleared, nothing left but a big patch of gluey cement where the police had cut the carpet away. The sight left her feeling a little queasy, since she understood immediately why the carpet had been cut away.

She turned her mind away from the bloody carpet and began to draw up a plan with room numbers and spaces left to write in who was in what room. Really, though, the exercise was meant to give her a better understanding of the scene and force her to think about the sequence of events.

The whole thing seemed to have happened in a tight time frame. Nana said Penelope Daley, the first person on scene, told the other conventioneers she had tried to roll Zunia over, thinking she was just drunk. The body was still warm to the touch. Someone had to have killed her and then gotten away, or run back to their room.

If that’s where she was killed, as it appeared to be, why would Zunia be at the elevator at that time of night, still in her day clothes? And where was her husband all this time? She had to be meeting someone, but who? Her lover, Walter Sommer? According to him, he was asleep in his room alongside his wife, Nora. They alibied each other, but they could both be lying, or Walter could have snuck out.

The other possibility was she was coming back with someone, perhaps even her murderer, however, why would she do that? Most of them were doubled up two by two in their rooms, and her husband was presumably in their room, so where would she be going? Maybe she was on her way out and was accosted and killed before getting on the elevator. Did that rule out whomever she was going out to meet? Sophie shook her head, not sure of the answer. The police would have Zunia’s cell phone—unless it was missing—and would know if she was corresponding with someone, but Sophie had to work from a place of ignorance.

She stood in the dim hallway and imagined it as Nana had described it, the ring of anxious and horrified faces, the body on the floor, the alarm clanging . . . the teapot lying beside her bloodied head.

The teapot. Sophie had handled it and done some research on it for Nana, enough to suspect that it was Tibetan, not Chinese, and perhaps not even a teapot, but rather a holy water vessel, though she hadn’t been able to confirm it. Zunia had apparently written it off as not old and not valuable, which showed how ignorant she was of antiquities. It was weighty, but certainly not heavy enough to be a logical weapon, not one you’d go out of your way to obtain, anyway. There were a thousand readily available murder weapons, and a Tibetan artifact was not what most would think to use. Not having seen the wound, Sophie couldn’t evaluate if it was so, but she suspected that the teapot could not produce enough damage to actually kill someone. And if that was true, then another weapon had been used and the teapot was planted to point to Nana.

Anger burned in her gut that someone would listen to Thelma Mae Earnshaw and concoct a heinous plot to ensnare an innocent octogenarian. Nana was suffering, but so was poor Thelma; without the quirky lady’s lies the murder would have happened anyway, but at least it would have been with some other instrument.

The elevator mechanism started humming and she could hear a mechanical groan, then the doors whooshed open, and Detective Eli Hodge stepped out.

“Miss Taylor,” he said, his tone calm and measured. “I’m glad I caught you. I want to speak to your grandmother but she’s with the convention folks right now. Maybe you can give me a sense of what happened that night. I’d just like to confirm my colleague’s notes.”

“I wasn’t here for the convention. I didn’t come until last night after I found out what had happened.”

“I guess I misunderstood.” He glanced down at her sketchbook. “What do you have there?” he asked, reaching out for it.

Too late, she wondered if the police would take her to task for involving herself. She handed it over. “Just a sketch of the layout of the hotel.”

He fixed his gaze on her with a speculative gleam, then looked down at the notebook. “Yours is better than the one O’Hoolihan did, I’ll tell you that. May I borrow it?”

“You’re going to trust mine?”

He gave a half smile. “Oh, I’ll confirm that it’s correct.” He held on to the notebook as he looked around. “This is right where the body was found, and that is the staircase there,” he said, indicating the door.

Sophie examined him as he paced over, opened the door and peered down the stairs. She followed his thoughts: How did the murderer get away, by elevator or stairs? Or did the culprit—or culprits, because who was to say there was not more than one murderer?—just nip into their own room, change into pajamas and go to bed?

It would take a particularly cold-blooded person to do that. But then, what normal person would commit the murder anyway?

“I was thinking,” she said, but then paused.

“Yes? You were thinking?” He met her gaze and raised his brows.

“I know the teapot in question,” she said. “I handled it a lot as I was doing research on it. It was weighty for a teapot but not the easiest thing to use as a weapon, I wouldn’t think. I know you can’t confirm or deny this, but it seems to me that it can’t have been the actual weapon used to kill Zunia Pettigrew.”

His gaze was neutral. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“In that case, there was a real murder weapon and then she was whacked with the teapot to make it look like it was the weapon while the real thing was carried away, concealed or disposed of.”

He didn’t reply, but at least he didn’t dismiss her.

Talking to herself, she said, “So then the killer had to go somewhere to dispose of the weapon, maybe downstairs. That changes what I was just thinking, that they killed her, then ran back into their room. They had to get rid of the real murder weapon first, and they sure wouldn’t want it in their room.” She shrugged and added, “There’s not really anything more yet. I figure whoever did it must have been at the tea after the meeting. They heard Mrs. Earnshaw talk about how dangerous my grandmother is, and then decided to use that to point the finger of blame at her. It has to be someone who doesn’t know her well.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s
ridiculous
! Anyone who knows my grandmother would know she could never kill anyone. Which, by the way, I hope you make clear to the other detective.”

His expression turned from amusement to cool regard, his blue-gray eyes holding a chilly blankness. “We don’t work that way, Sophie. We don’t decide ahead of time who couldn’t have done it and then work from there. You’d be surprised at the people I’ve arrested for murder or assault after being told there was no possible way they could be responsible.”

Grudgingly, she nodded. “I see your point, but
I
know she didn’t do it. I’m going to keep pointing out every other person who could be guilty.”

“That is your right,” he said. “And does that include your friend Rhiannon Galway?”

Her stomach clenched. “Why her?”

“Interesting that you didn’t leap to
her
defense. I suppose I can tell you this, since we know you two are friends and you’ve visited her today. You may have even talked about it already. She doesn’t really have an alibi for that night and beyond that I’m saying no more, except that O’Hoolihan has a feeling she’s holding out on him and he doesn’t know why. It’s making her look bad.”

“Making her look bad,” Sophie echoed anxiously. They knew she had visited Rhiannon? Were they watching her or Rhi? Probably Rhi.

“It would really be in her best interest to tell us what she was up to that night rather than saying she was home when we know she was not.”

Sophie snatched her notebook back. “She would never kill anyone, no matter what you think. Someone could have a million reasons for not wanting to tell the police where they were that night.”

“Exactly my point. That’s why she needs to tell us, no matter how embarrassing it is.”

“Why would it be embarrassing?” Sophie said.

He sighed and looked off into the distance. His expression was detached, almost blank. When he met her eyes again, though, she could see that he had made some kind of decision.

“I’m going to tell you more than I should and only because it would be good for us if we could start eliminating people off the list of suspects. These folks are all going to want to go home, if not tonight, by tomorrow morning, and we have no cause to hold them here. That means we’ll need to travel to wherever they are next time we want to ask questions, and it would be simpler if we can eliminate some of them.”

“I get that. I watch
Cops
. And
The First 48
. And
City Confidential
.”

“You do know those are edited to be entertainment, right?” He sighed and shook his head. “Never mind. We know that Rhiannon Galway was not home because a nosy neighbor saw her car leave and not come back until morning. She won’t tell us where she was, so we’re expending a whole lot of energy on tracking down anyone who saw her. We have a tentative sighting, but she needs to tell us the truth, and fast.”

The elevator doors opened just then and Dana and Cissy started toward them, stopped in surprise, but then hastened to get off as the elevator doors started to close again.

“Hi there, Detective,” Dana said, her cheeks getting pink, and not just from the heat outside, Sophie surmised. “You two look cozy,” she said, eyeing Sophie. “What’s this little tête-à-tête about?”

Both she and Cissy had a multitude of bags over their arms. Cissy ducked around them and murmured that she was putting the stuff in her grandmother’s room.

Under normal circumstances when there was romantic tension between a couple Sophie would have felt like the third wheel, but the detective was polite and yet noncommittal, simply nodding in acknowledgment of Dana’s greeting. “We were speaking of the murder. Sophie had some interesting insights.”