Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) (3 page)

“One of my men will go with you to your room for the number,” Donaldson said, ignoring the edge in Mathew's voice. “I think,” he added, turning to us, “that about does it for now. Except for one last thing.”

Mathew stopped in the doorway. Miranda straightened in her chair. Ben paused momentarily in helping Roz from hers. Darcy placed the disposable lighter down silently on the cigarette table. Beth breathed noisily.

“I'm asking that you all remain here while this investigation proceeds.”

“Are we to understand we're under some sort of house arrest?” Ben asked incredulously.

“No,” Donaldson said. “Of course not. It wouldn't be legal—even if that's what I wanted to do. I mean, remain in the area. Available.”

“Will may be dead, Lieutenant. But our work goes on. We'll remain for the rest of our lease here—another two weeks.”

The officer said nothing. Once again, he swept those searchlight eyes of his across our faces. He focused on me a few seconds longer than the situation warranted, I thought, but I didn't look away.

I wondered if this man was carrying a knapsack of pain on his back. And telling himself it didn't hurt at all. That he'd just have to walk straighter. What was it—a recent divorce? A promotion that had never materialized? A case he'd never solved? Illness? Impotence? Alcohol?

My theater training was beginning to get the better of me. Interpret the role. Study the character. Look for the hidden biographical strands. Feel the character's past traumas. Construct the role from the bottom up. Don't look at the face—look at the lines in it.

By the time I'd pursued all those strands, Ford Donaldson was saying good night to us. I caught the tail end of something about his being “sorry for everyone's loss.” He also informed us that one of his men would be remaining on the premises.

“You don't mean you think he . . . they . . . might come back?” Beth asked in alarm.

“
Is
that what you're saying, Lieutenant Donaldson?” Ben demanded to know.

“What I'm saying is, we're not taking any chance of that happening,” Donaldson replied.

Then, just as he was turning to go, Lulu, with her divine ears, appeared out of nowhere.

And Donaldson, after first stepping on her tail, which sent her yowling under the sofa, exited hopping and stumbling into the night.

As the door slammed shut, Darcy said tartly, “He's a piece of work, isn't he?”

***

We didn't go to bed right away, as late as it was. Except for Roz. I'm not certain that she was quite as exhausted as Ben thought, but she seemed to grow weary all over again at his solicitude. In the end she allowed him to see her upstairs, leaving the rest of the group gathered around the dying fire.

I knew I was now, more than ever, the interloper in the crowd. I couldn't join in the reminiscences of Will. But my native curiosity overrode any hurt I might have felt at being excluded from the talk. I sat quietly and listened.

“God, what a horror,” Miranda said. “I keep thinking it's time for someone to pinch me and wake me up . . . Willy, Willy, how did this happen?”

“I bet he's mad as hell he won't get to do that Berlin gig,” Darcy said, smiling and crying at the same time.

“Yes,” Mathew agreed. “That was Willy—always narrowly missing it. So talented, and stretched so thin, and yet . . . oh, I don't know . . . it's as if he spent his life missing trains.”

“Willy was very careless, wasn't he?” Beth said quietly.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Miranda spoke.

“I mean, sure he was talented. But he had a habit of overestimating his strengths sometimes. He wanted too much, maybe.”

“And we don't?” Darcy said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I . . . I don't know what I mean about Willy. It's just . . . all . . . sad. All of it. It just would be
him
to get—”

“To get killed,” Miranda said bitterly.

“I feel so responsible,” Mat said. “When he called to say he was on the way up here, I could've said no. I could've told him we had a full house up here. But I let him have his way.”

“Like most of us,” Beth said.

Mat nodded. “Yes. I guess nobody ever put the brakes on under him. Maybe he'd be alive if—”

“And maybe another one of us would have been in that barn last night—or somewhere else on the grounds,” Ben protested. “Would it make you feel any better if one of the girls were lying dead now?”

For a few moments, no one spoke.

“I think this little wake has had it,” Darcy said at last. “I'd just as soon not dwell on any of us lying dead anywhere.” She got to her feet and the others began to follow suit.

It was only then that anyone seemed to acknowledge that I was in the room. Beth called out to me, “Alice, you can sleep in the room next to me. Do you know the way?”

They were all moving so slowly, shuffling, half-asleep. I don't think anyone even heard me when I answered, “I'll find it. Thanks.”

Chapter 3

I thought I was dreaming. I heard choking sounds. Mournful sounds. Terrible, heartbroken sighs.

They were all real. I wasn't dreaming.

My room was cold, and almost punitively small in relation to the other bedrooms. Perhaps long ago a child's nurse had used the room, or an au pair.

I knew from the purplish quality of the dark that the sun would be up soon. I got out of bed and walked soundlessly over to the door that connected my room to Beth's. Yes, it was she who was crying. When the weeping went on with no sign of stopping, I decided to go in.

I knocked a few times, not knowing whether she could hear me, and then opened the door. Beth sat up in the four-poster bed. She was red-eyed, and the white comforter was littered with mint-green Kleenex.

“Beth? Beth, is there anything I can do for you?” I approached the bed gingerly, knowing I was meddling. But as soon as I sat next to her, she fell into my arms and wept until the tears were all gone.

“Thanks, Alice. Please forgive me for carrying on like this.”

“No need to apologize. You've lost someone close.”

“Yes. But it isn't just Will I'm upset about. Just about everything in my life seems to be falling apart at the moment.”

I waited, asking nothing, while she blew her nose one final time.

“I told you about the debacle with the Europe thing. Well, I think it did much more damage than we even knew. Mat thought that coming up here was a way to heal us, but I think it's ripping us apart. Maybe for the first time ever, we're taking a look at each other—and not liking what we see.”

“Does this have anything to do with Miranda's sniping earlier?” I asked.

“Sure. Even on a good day she's got a pretty sharp tongue. But she's been lashing out, just mad at the world these last few days. I think it's like Roz said: she's scared, too.” Beth balled up one of the tissues and sent it flying across the room. “Score another one for Roz,” she said, her mouth a little awry.

“Why is everybody so scared? Bad reviews are inevitable. As inevitable as falling out and bickering among friends. You've been together for years. Surely this isn't your first disappointment?”

“No. Well, no
and
yes. We've worked like dogs to make it in the music world. I don't know whether it's true or not that we had to be twice as good as a group of men. But we decided we'd better be. Of course, not everything turned out just the way we wanted it, but we've had great luck—with audiences, with critics, money, the whole thing.

“And we have Mat to thank for everything. He may be a bit of a stick sometimes, but we owe everything to him. In fact, I wonder if it would be harder on him than anyone else if . . . if . . . something happened to us.”

“Something like what, Beth?”

She shook her head, as if to clear it of awful thoughts. “I don't know. I guess I'm making things even worse than they are, Alice. It's like I said: things are just coming unwrapped. And I miss Will. He's not even gone a day, and I miss him already. I never felt lonely when he was around.”

New shadows fell across her face. “It's like some kind of morbid preview of what's to come. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt you were really down in a hole—maybe the worst place you'd ever been—but you knew the bad stuff wasn't over yet? There was something even worse right around the corner?”

I gave her bleak question, with all its mixed metaphors, some thought. But not much.

“Look, Beth, you should try to get some sleep.”

“Can't,” she said simply.

“Why don't I look around the kitchen for some tea, something herbal to help you”—I almost said “relax”—“to help you sleep.”

She shrugged. I headed back to my room to get a robe.

“Sorry, Alice,” I heard come floating toward me. I turned back to her. “Sorry we're ruining your vacation,” she said.

I groped around for a minute before locating the kitchen light switch. The lights popped on and I gasped, startled by the sudden movement all around me. I guess I must have been expecting Mrs. Wallace to be standing there with a meat cleaver.

What I saw was considerably more benign. All around me were plump, tufted, adorable little brown field mice—on top of the cabinets, on the counters, playing games in the toaster.

Where on earth was Lulu, the cat? This was her whole excuse for joining the party. The mice scurried off and I found the kettle and the tea bags.

I located a tray as well, and I was balancing it carefully as I started back up the stairs. I got another scare when I heard someone ask sharply from the gloom of the living room: “Who is that?”

I recognized Miranda Bly's low, whiskey voice.

“It's Alice Nestleton.”

“Oh. What's going on?” she asked wearily.

“Nothing really. Beth's having a bad night, and I'm just bringing her some tea.”

“Are you now?” Her mocking laughter sounded hollow in the empty room.

“Listen, um . . . Alice,” she said haltingly, “would you come in here for just a minute?”

I set the tray down in the hallway and joined her.

She didn't switch on the lamp, and didn't have to, because the first light of day had started rolling through the room.

“I really should apologize to you, you know,” Miranda said. “I've been filthy to you, and just want you to know I know I have.”

“Stressful times,” I answered. “It's all right.”

“Well, thank you for understanding,” She lit a cigarette and picked up a cut-glass tumbler, containing, I guessed, Scotch. Clearly, she was drunk.

“So, Alice, do tell, what has Beeswax been telling you to enlist your sympathy? Still playing the sensitive wallflower?”

“I'm not sure what she's playing, Miranda. Or even that she's playing at all. But then, I don't know Beth very well. We're just friendly acquaintances. As you said earlier, I'm her cat person.”

“Then let me assure you that she most certainly is playing—at something or other.” Miranda ran her left hand through her lushly waved hair. I hadn't paid much attention during all the unhappiness of the evening, but she, too, was a beauty, in her way. Her face was pale and moon-shaped and slightly pitted, and she was the only member of the group who was starting to look her age. Hers was the strange, graying beauty of a Lotte Lenya. And her stark black leotard made her appearance all the more arresting. “Well,” I answered carefully, “of course you'd know better than I, but her grief over Will's murder seems completely genuine to me. She's very, very upset.”

“When you get to know her better, you'll realize she'd lie about the temperature. She simply doesn't know what the truth is, that girl. And there's no more truth in her grief than there is in her playing.”

“But why wouldn't Beth be as sorry about the murder as the rest of you?”

“Because, Alice Armchair, she threatened to kill him herself.”

“Excuse me?”

“What's the matter—didn't you hear me? It's true, I tell you. Will had a great sense of play. He played with life. He played with people. And as of late he'd been playing with her.”

“Beth was having an affair with him, you mean.”

Miranda laughed again, heartlessly. “You might call it that. But from his end of it, they were having something a sight more vulgar than that. I suppose she thought it wasn't high-minded enough, and she wanted something more from him.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, for godsakes, how should I know what Beth wants from a man? I just know they'd been having it off ever since he arrived up here. And then the shit hit the fan. I was passing by one of their little trysting places—that shed near the creek—only two days ago. I supposed they'd just done it and were having a row. At any rate, I heard her call him a few names I never expected that little twit to know. They were actually physically fighting in there—throwing things at each other. And when she stormed out, I distinctly heard her say she wanted to kill him.”

“I see,” I replied after a moment. “Are you sure it wasn't the kind of thing anyone might say in the heat of a terrible argument? What makes you take it so literally in Beth's case?”

“Because . . . when little worms turn, they turn with a vengeance. Second-rate, jealous-hearted little worms in particular.”

I sat for just another minute before rising from my chair. “I think I'd better turn in now, Miranda,” I said. “You should sleep, too.”

As I suspected, Beth had fallen asleep. She was curled up tightly, as if defending herself from those other blows the world was about to deal her. I saw a ball of shredded tissue in her fist.

And I'd thought I was tired
before
.

Miranda Bly had an iron knot of resentment and contempt inside her. Would she make up a story like the one she'd told me? How was I to know? If there was any truth to it, the police had to be told—
if
there was any truth to it. And how was I to know that?

It would mean shedding my passive observer role, delving, snooping, opening up who knew how many cans of worms. But I
would
know.

And I wondered how Ford would feel about that.