Trouble at High Tide (7 page)

“Norlene is putting away the groceries and she’s angry as a bear. I wanted to get out of her way.”

“What’s her problem?” Tom said. “She didn’t know Alicia all that well.”

“It’s still upsetting,” I said in Norlene’s defense.

“That’s not it,” Stephen said. “She says she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to make dinner without any knives.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Stephen took another canapé before replying. “Between the cops and Claudia, the kitchen doesn’t have any knives. Completely wiped out.” He held up his bandaged hand. “That’s why I got this. No knife to open the box.”

“What does Claudia have to do with it?” Tom asked.

“Oh, you missed that little contretemps last night, did you?” Stephen said. “Claudia came in the kitchen and claimed the box of Wusthof knives were a gift from some member of her family, and she walked out with them. Adam tried to stop her, but she was too fast for him.”

“Where was I when this happened?” Tom asked, clearly irritated.

Stephen shrugged.

“Do the police know about that?” I asked.

“I didn’t tell them,” Stephen said. “Frankly, I didn’t think of it until now. Every time Claudia comes to the house, something else goes missing. Makes Claudia a prime suspect, doesn’t it? She wasn’t any too fond of Alicia.”

“Neither were you,” Tom said. “And I’ll thank you not to speak ill of the dead.”

“I’m not speaking ill of her,” Stephen replied hotly. “I didn’t hate her. I… well… I just thought she was a spoiled brat. She was. And I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“I’m not suggesting any such thing. I know you didn’t kill her,” the judge said wearily. “We’ll have to let the police
know about the knives. What a stupid, selfish thing Claudia did. I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Yeah,” Stephen said. “You were married to her.”

“She wasn’t so bad at first.”

“She was always awful,” Stephen said. “You just didn’t recognize it.”

“Maybe.”

“No one was ever as good as my mother.”

Tom heaved a sigh. “Your mother was one of a kind,” Betterton said. He shook his head. “But she died and left me with her children to raise.”

“C’mon. What do you mean, “RAISE”? I was practically in college. Just about.”

“Well, your sister, Madeline, wasn’t, and Alicia was just a kid.”

“Are you telling me that you married all those women just to get us another mother? You would have been better off hiring nannies. At least you wouldn’t lose half of what you have every time they walk out the door.”

“We’ve been over all this before. I’m sorry they didn’t work out. But you don’t appear to be scarred by the experience.”

“You have no idea what scars I have.”

Tom looked up at Stephen from beneath his frowning brows. “Go wake up your sister,” he growled. “I don’t want her to sleep all day.”

“Let her sleep. She’s only going to fight with me.”

“No. She needs to get up.”

Tom started to heave himself out of his chair, then fell back into it, his eyes wet.

“Why don’t I go wake Madeline,” I said. “I’ll try to coax her downstairs. Maybe she’ll be more willing to listen to someone she doesn’t know well.”

“Thank you, Jessica,” Tom said, shaking out a white handkerchief, wiping his eyes and blowing his nose. “She’s in the second bedroom on the right at the top of the stairs.”

The staircase was on the other side of the house, and I took a quick look out the windows of the glass front door as I crossed the breezeway’s tile floor. Reporters were still camped out in front of the house, and there were policemen on the road directing traffic. I moved away from the door, wary of attracting attention, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. A long carpeted corridor linked both sides of the house. I followed Tom’s instructions and found the second bedroom on the right. The door was open and I walked in.

It was a bright, airy room, obviously decorated by a professional in a yellow cotton print with large tropical leaves, but the room held few personal touches, apart from the clothing that had been draped over a chair at the dressing table or carelessly tossed across a turquoise chaise. On the left wall were two doors, side by side, and an unmade canopy bed. I opened the first door to find a large walk-in closet filled with clothing. The second door turned out to be the entrance to a Jack-and-Jill bathroom tiled in white with a narrow stripe in aqua running its length. On the other side was an open door, which led to the next bedroom. I walked through the bathroom and stood at the threshold.

Madeline sat in a chair by the bed, legs crossed on an ottoman, her arms wrapped around a pillow, her eyes focused on the view outside the window.

“It’s her room,” she said, without averting her gaze.

“Alicia’s?”

She nodded, sighed, and slowly turned her head toward me. “Did they send you up to find me?”

“Tom did, yes. He doesn’t want—”

“Me to sleep the day away. I know. It’s a familiar refrain.”

“May I sit down?”

“Sure,” she said. She took her legs off the ottoman and kicked it in my direction. It rolled across the room.

I stopped it, moved it closer to Madeline, and sat on it. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

She gave me a wry look. “You didn’t know her at all.”

“I know,” I said, “but you did, and you’re hurting. I’m sorry for that.”

“She was the biggest pain in my a—in my neck,” she said. “She was self-centered, spoiled, forever in trouble, which we had to bail her out of. I couldn’t stand her. But she was my little sister, sort of, and I loved her in spite of it.”

“Of course you did.”

“Don’t say ‘of course.’ Stephen hates her. Or hated her. They were always arguing. Not that I didn’t fight with her, too. He wanted her to grow up and be responsible instead of living off Tom and whoever else she could wheedle something out of. She was a taker and Stephen’s a giver.” She gave a soft snort. “They weren’t talking to each other recently. He had finally lost all patience with her. But I really think he loved her more than any of us.”

“Did she have any friends here in Bermuda, anyone she might have been meeting last night?” I asked.

“You mean other than us?”

I nodded.

“Not that I know of. She was only down for the week. Oh wait. There’s Agnes’s nephew, Charles. They were pretty close. At least he wanted to be. Alicia was very good at attracting men and then dropping them. Even the older ones, Tom’s friends. She would bat her eyes at them, and then tell them they were too old when they made a play for her.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked.

“I think she enjoyed the game. For so long she was the baby, kind of the also-ran to Stephen and me. When she found herself grown up and suddenly the center of attention, she wanted to test her powers. Stupid! If that’s what she was up to last night, it got her a terrible result.” Madeline shivered. “I almost hope it was the Jack the Ripper killer.”

“Why do you say that?”

“At least if it was him, killing her was always part of his plan, not something she brought on herself.” She started to cry, but rubbed the tears from under her eyes and blotted her nose with a tissue.

“Did the police examine this room?” I asked.

“Top to bottom, I understand. I wasn’t here at the time. I was being questioned.”

“Do you know if they took anything?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t look like it. But Alicia didn’t have much here other than her warm-weather clothes and a couple of books. Don’t know why they would want any of those.”

“Did she carry a handbag? Have a cell phone?”

Madeline straightened up and glanced around the room. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen her bag. And of
course she had a cell phone. The police must have confiscated them.” She slumped down again.

“What about the book she was reading?”

“You mean this?” She reached behind her back and pulled out the paperback Alicia had shown me at lunch. “She had it hidden in this pillowcase. The police must not have found it, or if they did, they left it where it was.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure.” She handed it to me. “Ironic, isn’t it? Her fascination with this monster, and then—” She broke off, unable to complete the sentence.

“Was she always interested in Jack the Ripper, or in true crime in general?”

“Yeah. She loved reading about crime. Never missed the police bulletin in our local paper. Used to pepper Tom with questions until he was ready to kill her. Oh God, I shouldn’t say that.”

“It’s just an expression. I know you didn’t mean it the way it sounds.”

I paged through the book. Alicia had underlined or highlighted certain passages halfway through; it appeared as if she’d never finished reading it.

“May I keep this for a few days?” I asked.

“You can keep it forever,” Madeline replied. “I was going to throw it out.”

“Tom said Alicia lived with you on and off after her folks died. How old was she when they were killed?”

“I think she was ten. It’s hard to remember because she was our cousin and she was pretty much always around. My mother was the one who insisted we take her in when Uncle
Mickey and Aunt Joanna died. Uncle Mickey was Tom’s youngest brother.”

“There were other brothers?”

“Yes. Two. Uncle Lee and Uncle Frank. I don’t think they or their wives wanted to take in Alicia, but my mother wasn’t about to let anyone reject her. She said that as the eldest Tom was the right person to raise her. I don’t remember any hands going up in protest.”

“That must have been a traumatic time for a little girl.”

“I guess. But my mother felt so sorry for her that she spoiled her terribly. You can imagine how that sat with Stephen and me. We were not fans.”

“Did she go somewhere else when your mother died?” I asked.

Madeline shook her head and sighed. “No. She stayed through two more wives, and got worse and worse. I think those women left Tom because of Alicia. Claudia changed all that.”

“How did she do that?”

The beginnings of a smile played around Madeline’s lips. “She sent her off to a boarding school.” Madeline’s eyes met mine. “We were all glad to be rid of her. Tom, too, I’m willing to bet. Not that he would ever admit it.” She closed her eyes and covered a yawn with her hand.

“Tom wanted me to ask you to come downstairs,” I said. “What shall I tell him?”

She sighed. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

As I left, she still sat with her arms embracing the pillow, a vacant, distant look in her eyes. She’d given me a snapshot into the Betterton family, and not a very pretty one. You
never know about families. You view them from afar and all appears to be well. But within many there are jealousies, frustration, turmoil, ambitions, and egos at work that outsiders seldom see. I wasn’t sure that I was pleased to be allowed into the Betterton family’s inner sanctum, and under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t have wanted to know anything.

But this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance.

This was murder.

A
part from the family and those who worked for them—and, of course, the police commissioner—I hadn’t seen anyone else during the day who’d been present at the party the night before. I knew that Tom’s British publisher, Godfrey Reynolds, and his wife, Daisy, who were guests in the other cottage, were among those asked to remain in Bermuda. But they had opted to go out to a restaurant rather than join the family for dinner. I didn’t blame them. The meal had been a somber affair, and I had made my exit as soon as possible.

I hadn’t had a chance to examine the scene of the crime in the daylight; policemen posted on the beach kept the curious away. When I returned to my cottage after dinner, the security guard Adam had hired cautioned me not to go down to the beach for a few days. It was a difficult instruction to follow with the sound of the waves rolling up the sand like a siren song.

I sat on the swing on my porch and replayed my discovery
of Alicia’s body over and over in my mind, trying to remember every detail. There had been a flight of stairs from the Jamisons’ property leading down to the beach not far from where I’d stumbled on Alicia’s body. The shoes that the police thought might be hers had been found at the top of those stairs. Daniel and Lillian Jamison were sparring with Tom over a building he wanted to construct that, according to them, would mar their view. If the shoes were indeed Alicia’s, why would she have been at the Jamisons’ house? She had direct access to the beach from her uncle’s home.

Had Tom sent her over to their house to convince them to drop their suit? It seemed unlikely, particularly at that hour, and given that the last time I’d seen Daniel Jamison, he was drunk and trying to pick a fight with Tom.

Could Alicia have been planning to meet someone in secret? If she didn’t want anyone at the Betterton house to see her go out so late at night, she might have walked over to the Jamisons’ and used their access to the beach. That sounded like a more plausible scenario to me.

Of course, she could have walked down to the beach from Tom’s house with one of the other guests and I might not have heard them. I was fast asleep on the swing. That was also possible.

The killer was either an acquaintance or a stranger, someone she planned to meet or someone who surprised her. Not much help there. But the killer had attacked her from behind. That much was certain. He or she would have had to move swiftly to catch Alicia off guard. There had been no indication that I could see that she’d fought off her assailant, although it had been dark when I discovered her.

I eventually climbed into bed with Alicia’s book and paged through it, paying particular attention to the parts she had underlined.

The original “Jack the Ripper” was a product of late-nineteenth-century England. He’d operated in the Whitechapel district of London where poverty, crime, and violence were commonplace. Five grotesque murders sharing similar characteristics are attributed to this otherwise unnamed killer, although another six with variations on the distinctive features are thought to have possibly been his as well, but may have been the work of imitators spurred on by sensational news coverage.