Tulle Death Do Us Part (12 page)

“I haven’t even talked to you about the case, Dante,” I said. “And you were dead when he showed up to hide it here, right?”

Dante nodded.

“So, how can you make that judgment?”

“We were kids together. He always got the short end; I can’t even describe how. If I tell you who it is, it’ll send you his way.”

“But if he’s not guilty, why would it matter?”

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He cried as a kid over roadkill. He was used, I tell you.”

“Who would have used him? They might be the guilty parties.”

“The world was less enlightened then. People were not seen as being created equal. He was marked, and everybody had good aim. That’s all I’m going to say on the
matter. He might have been five when I passed, but I know that the publicity of being interviewed, singled out, would destroy him. I saw how scared he was when he left that box. He’d been threatened, and he believed the threats.”

“You’re sure, Dante, that he could be of no use to me?”

“None. I’ve heard you on the phone with Werner. Heard you with Eve. The piece of petticoat around the box and the peach gown are connected. I lived in this town. I belonged to the country club. I refused to take part in the scavenger hunts.”

“They had them from the beginning, then?”

“They did.”

“Anybody at the country club you don’t feel any allegiance to?”

“Who aren’t dead? Let me think about who was most likely to commit larceny. But, Mad, this is a lot of hullabaloo about a scavenger hunt and some missing baubles.”

“Someone died the night that box was taken.”

Dante’s head came up. “Now that’s a yardstick of a different shape. But you’re smart. You don’t need my help.”

“I’ll tell you what I do need.”

“What’s that?”

“Your friendship. I need you reading my paper when I come to work in the morning, your snarky comments when a woman squeezes into a dress two sizes too small. I miss our banter.”

“I’m back, as long as we understand each other on this issue. And I won’t hang you out to dry, Mad. If, in the end, knowing who left the box will solve the case, I’ll tell you.”

“Thanks, my friend.”

“So what are you doing here so late?”

“I came to get another reading.”

“Why didn’t you bring Eve?”

“I’m afraid to give her a stroke.”

“Let me sit with you while you read whatever you have, then.”

I’m sure my doubt showed in my expression. “If I get into trouble, what could you do?”

“I could set off the alarm. That’d bring the police and an ambulance.”

“Yes, it would. Thanks. I like knowing you’re here.” I took off my suit jacket, and, still wearing my gloves so as not to smudge any fingerprints on Werner’s petticoat piece, I lay on my side on the fainting couch.

Dante sat beside me while I unzipped the evidence bag, turned it upside down and let the fabric, smaller than the piece wrapped around the box, waft down against my arm. “I got a reading only after the wind blew the first piece against my chin and cheeks outside,” I said. “I can’t get my prints on it, so I hope my bare arm will be enough for a psychometric connection.”

“How do you feel?” Dante asked.

“Normal, and hoping I don’t have to put it against my face. It’s dirtier than the other.” And there were brown spots on it. Blood? I shivered at the thought. I suspected that it had touched the floor of the whale belly as Vainglory took it off beneath her gown, which meant it hadn’t been washed in at least forty years. Yuck.

Then I flew, without a broom, straight on until morning. I hadn’t needed to put it against my face after all.

I found myself back in the belly of the whale, alone with a man, with the sun beginning to rise. I saw his back, the
span of his shoulders, gauged his height. I watched him search as I hovered near the ceiling. My visions often happen this way. Sometimes I become a watcher without a body. Who knows why?

The lone searcher kept peeking into small places. He tucked something above a ceiling beam, walked around to look up there from every angle, swore, and took it down. He felt above the windows, the doors. Looked beneath the open stairs.

As the sun began to rise, what I had assumed was the belly of a boat—or maybe I wasn’t even in the same place—turned into an empty brick mill or warehouse. The faded word “steam” was painted on the brick inside wall in capital letters about two feet high in Britannic Bold, or as near as, if I didn’t miss my guess. Pieces of other words had been obliterated by replacement bricks. The rise and fall of the tide remained a constant if more distant sound. I surmised it to be low tide now, given the cleaner scent and the gentle wash of tides in the background. Certainly the storm had passed. Maybe by hours. Likely, this
was
the place they’d gathered after the scavenger hunt to determine who won the “game.” I distinctly remembered not needing my sea legs, and this place did indeed smell of the briny sea.

I could see better now—a dilapidated warehouse, rubble on the floor, like a couple of broken old chairs, one overturned, an old rubber tire with a cat curled inside, an ancient filthy sink in the corner. Likely the same gathering place, the loner’s tux suggested it could be the same night, or perhaps he’d been to a wedding. One indisputable fact: time was definitely toward morning.

For certain, the others were gone; they’d left the jubilee that had taken place the night before.

Tuxman paced and swore. “Just one small hiding place?” he begged loudly toward the rafters in a voice I did not recognize from my previous visions. His cry echoed and bounced as if pummeling him with the mayhem of the night.

He punched a column, bent over and swore at himself, and examined his bloody knuckles. Proof of self-recrimination, to my mind.

He touched the same column, felt along the joint he’d smacked, turned toward the center of the rancid depot, and shouted as if his favorite team had scored.

He fetched a wooden toolbox, or carrier, from a closet with a door split vertically down the middle. He moved like he knew this place. He then made for the center stairs.

As he climbed, he cackled—no other way to describe the self-satisfied sound—as he caressed slapdash handrails made of fat, jointed pipes, maybe three inches in diameter. The construction of the railings reminded me of anything made with Tinkertoys. Or metal plumber’s pipe.

In some cases, two pieces made one upright or two formed one span from upright to upright. Likely built during the Depression, they were a good indication of the way people made do with whatever they could get their hands on. In our neck of the woods, you never discounted anything built in this piece-by-piece way as having arrived in parts, over time, from the subbase.

Tuxman looked nefarious, working in tails on a T joint halfway up a dirty, worn, raw-wood stairway. He’d chosen a spot where two pieces of handrail met an upright. He cursed plenty until the T finally gave and fell,
clunk, clunk, clunk
down the
stairs then with a pipe-meets-cement clang onto a dust-caked, greasy floor.

Another string of curses ensued as he failed to access the inside of the pipe. The two handrail pieces met atop the upright, blocking his access.

I saw his dilemma.

“The idiots who built this should be shot!” he snapped.

I really did not recognize Tuxman’s voice.

A distant whistle scared the fiberfill out of us both. Tuxman jumped like he’d nearly had a heart attack, which caused him to fall halfway down the stairs. One leg caught around a rail and his head hit the floor. Then a
whoosh
shook the rafters and grime rained down on him, as he lay there in openmouthed shock.

I’ll confess to a spark of amusement as he spit and coughed and swore, and then pulled himself up and together and got back to work.

What shook the building had been a train that had rushed by, of course. First of the morning would be my guess. The mill must sit alongside the tracks, as most of Mystic’s old mills did. Once upon a time, the railroad would have been their prime shippers.

Tuxman wiped his face, pulled on his tails, got all dignified again, and hung on the upright like a monkey. With his whole body, he pulled the top toward him while pushing against the bottom, and when it moved the slightest bit forward, he took something from his pocket, a small item that looked to be wrapped in a petticoat piece, and slipped it into the pipe. Then he added two more objects, both wrapped, to the hollow pipe, one longer and narrower than the others.

With a relieved sigh, he pushed it back into place, and resecured the T joint with the tools. Good as new, except he’d tarnished the natural grungy patina on the old silver pipes. So he went from upright to handrail, tarnishing pipes all the way up to the third floor. Neatness did not count. I assume he wanted to make them all look equally distressed.

A single round of applause echoed in the empty place, another mocking sound.

Tuxman and I whipped our gazes toward the intruder.

“You scared me,” Tuxman said. “I thought you went home with your brother.”

“Nah. I’m not scared,” a new voice said. He stood on the verge of adulthood but looked to be stuck there. His voice hadn’t yet changed, and he gave the impression of insecurity, like a tagalong unsure of his welcome, acting younger than his size and voice implied. Too young to be part of a murder.

“Nothing scares you,” Tuxman said, patronizing the lanky boy. “Did you hide yours yet?”

“Nah. Saw you hide yours, though. I might hide mine with Day’s toy cars.”

Tuxman slapped the kid on the back. “I’m not sure that a hiding place as close as Bradenton Cove is a good idea. You’d be better off to hide it on the Yachtsee.”

“I scavenged more junk than you. But I don’t got stair pipes to hide it in. I could stuff ’em down a drainpipe?”

“A heavy rain’ll wash ’em to the ground.”

“Oh.” The intruder’s shoulders went up, then fell in a dejected manner. “I would have won the scavenger hunt, if not for—” Quick switch of emotion, like a younger child, off to the next subject.

Tuxman clamped a bony hand on the young shoulder and squeezed visibly.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry. Listen, kid, you did win. But you can never, ever tell.”

“Ohh-kay! Kin we play again tomorrow?”

Play? Like an innocent. Dante’s words came back to me. Someone who had been used.

What a misinterpretation of that night’s events.

“Am I not brilliant?” I asked.

Eve made a show of huffing and turning to face me from the passenger seat of her black Mini Cooper, since sleuthing made her too nervous to drive. And my Element was too big, boxy—and purple—to be inconspicuous.

“Madeira, you heard, in a psychometric stupor, a childlike scavenger say he’d hide something at Bradenton Cove. So forty years later you find the place and we, like idiots, head out to an estate that may, or may not, be the same Bradenton Cove?”

I knew for certain that it was one and the same. When I woke from my psychometric vision, I told Dante about it. He said the famous Bradenton Cove in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, known for their vintage car collection, was situated just the other side of Stonington and Mystic.

A founding country club family had owned the estate for
generations. Dante gave no names. I asked for none. He’d played there as a boy and suggested removing the fifth chimney brick from the bottom left at the back of the garage for a key that should be used on the cellar door at the bottom of a dug-out stairway as a quiet means of entering the area where they kept the classic cars. But I couldn’t tell Eve that. She didn’t know that Dante existed. And she didn’t want to.

I dressed to sleuth in a Kamali jumpsuit, python bomber jacket, and a funky pair of Converse sneakers, the easier to climb around and run in, if necessary.

Of course the family, the cars, the garage—they might all be gone by now. But I had to try. For Robin. “You said you wanted to live dangerously,” I pointed out.