Deadly Valentine (22 page)

“No way.”

So the Burgers had an alibi—if Marshall could be believed.

And somebody—Dorcas Atwater?—rowed a boat on Scarlet King Lagoon—if Marshall was telling the truth.

Annie looked up at the stolid-faced butler. “You know that Mrs. Cahill—Sydney Cahill—was beaten to death in the Cahills’ gazebo Tuesday night.”

“I read about it. In the paper. That’s when I told Mr. Burger about the boat.”

He stood with his back to the setting sun, his face in shadow.

“Did you know Mrs. Cahill?”

Her words hung on the soft night air.

“No.”

Annie wished she could see his face. Could any man have lived so near Sydney and never thought about her, never made an effort to meet her?

“I’m part of the workin’ stock. I don’t fool with the gentry.”

Was her face that readable?

“Of course,” she said quickly to hide her confusion. She thanked him then for his cooperation.

Cool golden eyes looked at her emptily from an immobile face.

Annie turned away, glad to be leaving. She headed for the path to the Atwater house. She could feel Marshall’s eyes—his impersonal, alert eyes—on her back as she stepped into the clammy dimness of the shrub-choked pinewoods. She shivered.

But not from the cold.

T
HE PALE PINK
stucco house, aglow in the final wash of crimson from the setting sun, should have been enchanting. The white columns seemed touched by fire. Pink silk panels in the Palladian windows matched the rich hue of the stucco. Deeper pink tiles crowned the roof.

At first glance, the house delighted the eye, a confectionary design celebrating sun and marsh and pines. But, as Annie drew closer, signs of neglect spoiled the lush holiday impression.

Stubborn sprigs of grass poked up from the shell walk.

Paint peeled from the Ionic columns.

An ugly rust stain scarred the chimney.

A shutter hung askew on the second floor.

Rainwater simmered with a rich island brew of insects in a long-neglected child’s plastic wading pool.

Mud streaked the front steps.

The windows were dark. Not a single light shone, upstairs or down. Dusk was falling. The rooms would be dim. Obviously, Dorcas Atwater wasn’t home. Annie almost turned on her heel, then shrugged and pushed the doorbell.

Faintly, she heard a muffled peal. Another. And another.

No one came.

Frustrated, she retraced her steps. Oyster shells crunching beneath her shoes, Annie continued her puzzled survey. This place was going to seed. Was Dorcas Atwater broke? Why didn’t she sell? The house was well worth half a million.

An owl hooted mournfully from the stand of pines. Annie’s neck prickled. It sounded wild and forlorn, like the laughter Jane Eyre heard in the corridors of Rochester’s home, like Dorcas’s eerie laughter the night Sydney died. Damp earth smells wafted on the cooling evening breeze. She hesitated at the entrance to the undergrowth-choked woods. It wasn’t, of course, that she was frightened.

But it was dusk and last night a woman had been bludgeoned to death not far away. And Annie was all the way across the lagoon from home.

The tiny seed of unease flowered into fear. She plunged into the woods, walking fast, then faster, finally breaking into a run. The occasional lights in the pines only made the growing dark more ominous.

She burst, breathless, into the corridor of light circling the Burger mansion and was halfway across the lawn before she noticed the Burgers’ soft-voiced and soft-footed butler-watchman. He was watching her, his stance alert, his right hand slipped within his blazer.

She was well into the stretch of ill-lit path leading to the Grahams before it dawned on her that Marshall was prepared to draw the pistol that nestled in a shoulder holster.

My God.

It was a relief to reach the Grahams’ property. Lights glistened in the swimming pool and cheerful oblongs of brightness marked the windows of several rooms, upstairs and down. There was neither the sense of a brilliantly delineated no-man’s-land as at the Burgers nor the feeling of forlorn abandonment at the layers of darkness that swathed the Atwater grounds.

Annie slowed to a walk. Max would probably be home and she didn’t want to appear disheveled and out of breath. Max. Her steps quickened once again.

Then she paused.

There was a light in the Grahams’ garage apartment. Joel
was home! As she started across the hummocky ground, a gunmetal-gray Mercedes roared up the drive and jolted to a stop in front of the garages.

“Damn,” Annie swore softly, coming to a stop. She could scarcely ask Joel whether he had lusted after Sydney with his father present.

Graham slammed out of the car.

The front door of the garage apartment burst open, and Joel Graham ran lightly down the outside steps.

“Dad, hey Dad! I’ve got to talk to you about last night.” His voice was husky with strain.

In the light that spilled downstairs from the open door to Joel’s apartment, George Graham’s face mirrored the shock that Annie felt.

Moving as quietly and quickly as she could, Annie ran lightly toward the garages to a huge pine only a few feet away from the father and son. The smell of pine resin mixed with the fading fumes from the diesel car.

There was no trace of the island’s most affable dentist in the tightly drawn features of the man beside the Mercedes. Graham looked every year of his age and more.

Joel stopped at the foot of the garage apartment stairs, hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, his eyes averted. “Jesus, Dad. I don’t know what the hell to do. Listen, last night, I …”

“Stow it.” The words shot out like a steel door clanging down to meet concrete.

Joel’s head jerked up. “Oh God, Dad—”

“Keep your mouth shut, Joel.” There was no disguising the fear beneath Graham’s anger. “Listen to me, that goddamned Cahill’s got all the money in the world. You can bet they won’t get him. But I don’t intend to be the goat. So you tell the cops—if they ever ask—that you went to bed about midnight and you don’t know a damned thing.”

“Dad, please, we’ve got to talk. I—”

“Nobody left our house Tuesday night. Nobody.”

“Dad—”

“Goddammit, Joel. Keep your mouth shut.” Graham turned on his heel and strode away through the darkness
toward the light cascading down the steps of the Victorian back porch.

Joel took a couple of steps as if to follow, then whirled to his left and broke into a stumbling run. At the jeep, he yanked open the driver’s door.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, shit, shit.”

The jeep roared to life, jolted backward, then U-turned and accelerated up the drive.

Annie ignored the flash of the message light on the phone’s answering machine, and dialed Frank Saulter’s number as fast as she could. No answer. Damn, he needed to know that
something
happened late Tuesday night at the Graham house. And it wouldn’t do a bit of good to call Posey. He wouldn’t listen. She glanced up at the clock. Almost six. Where was Max? He would surely be home soon. And no trace of Laurel.

Laurel!

She punched the Play button on her answering machine.

“Annie—if I may—rather than Mrs. Darling. I do feel that tragedy removes formal barriers. We of the Scarlet King compound must face what has happened together. This is Eileen Houghton, General Houghton’s wife.” The voice was smooth and controlled. She sounded extremely competent and capable. So why identify herself as the general’s wife? Wasn’t her own identity enough? Did she perhaps feel that Eileen Houghton had no clout, no reality, except as a wife? “I know that you and your husband have had some experience in matters of this sort. I’m hoping that you will feel, as the general and I do, that the mere idea of suspecting Howard Cahill of murder is totally and patently absurd. Surely the police can’t continue to hold him! If you would be so kind as to return my call at your convenience, the general and I would appreciate it. The number is 555-1314. Thank you.”

Annie scratched the number on a pad.

A bleep. The second message: “One bloody nose—Dorothy L.’s; one bloody hand—mine; one renegade cat—Agatha; two broken mugs (courtesy of Agatha)—
The Footprints on the Ceiling
by Clayton Rawson and
Murder Against the
Grain
by Emma Lathen; one terrified customer—identity unknown—who fled when a streak of black fur—Agatha—tore down the center aisle, flew up on top of the Thriller section, and knocked down four books.”

Irritation sharpened Ingrid’s voice. “Some of our best books:
The Great Impersonation
by E. Phillips Oppenheim,
Brass Target
by Frederick Nolan,
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth and
The Tamarind Seed
by Evelyn Anthony. Dented the Oppenheim. Anyway, I’m closing early. Henny assures me that Agatha won’t really kill Dorothy L., but I’m not convinced. I’m taking Dorothy L. home to spend the night. Only thing to do.”

Hope flickered in Annie’s heart. Was there a solution to the Great Impasse (or the advent of a new cat on an old cat’s turf)? Beneath Eileen Houghton’s number, Annie wrote:
DOROTHY L., INGRID, NEW HOME???

She was reaching for the phone to return the call from the general’s wife when the front door opened.

“Where’s the prettiest girl in the world?”

Annie began to smile.

Max was home.

“It’s nighttime,” Max said serenely. “Time for all good workers to rest from their labors.”

Annie popped to her feet. “Max, listen, maybe I ought to try and catch the chief at home—”

Max reached up and gently drew her back to her seat. “Dear love, Frank is probably making clam chowder right now.” He glanced at the green ceramic wall clock (could they possibly have too
much
green in the garden room?). “No, to be more accurate, Frank has finished his clam chowder and is now in front of his VCR watching the fourth game in last fall’s World Series.”

Annie glared. That was right down on a level with subliminal advertising. Max
knew
how much she enjoyed watching last summer’s Cubs games on their VCR. Well, he might think he was subtle, but she wasn’t to be deflected from her duty.

Even if the next tape in her collection was that wonderful
June 5 game when they trounced the Mets 15 to 2. If that wasn’t a giddy moment for Cub fans!

“Max, we can’t just do
nothing
tonight!”

He smiled. “Of course we can. In the morning, we can report what you overheard to Frank. And, if you think about it, Annie, it isn’t much to go on. Certainly it isn’t proof that George Graham had anything to do with the murder, though it does indicate he knows something. As for Laurel, she’s quite safe—and won’t be here tonight.”

Honestly, he’d go to any lengths to suborn her from duty.

However, she
had
worked hard at it all day. And she’d come up with a lot. But she hadn’t even looked at Max’s bios of the suspects. She should get right into those. And she needed to keep an eye out for Joel’s return. Talking to the teenager and to his rather topped her list.

Max delicately massaged her tight shoulders. “Tired minds do not work well, sweetie.” A pause. Then, as if an afterthought, he added, “The special at the club tonight is beef Wellington.”

A sentry crow cawed an urgent alert—raccoon, danger, raccoon!—and the air was abruptly filled with shrieking, tar-black birds rising in a whir of gleaming wings. The grayish, ring-tailed predator stood upright in the early morning shadows at the edge of the pinewoods and lifted his Lone Ranger-masked face to watch the receding flock. Then he turned and eyed Annie and Max at their breakfast table.

“Go home, fella,” Max advised. “Time to tuck in for a nap.”

Annie had heard many of the wonderful South Carolina raccoon stories: the agile animals’ ability to manipulate even the most sophisticated garbage can cover, their enjoyment of television (could it really be true coons changed channels if bored?), the ease with which their clever black fingers unlatched doors and opened refrigerators. Jar tops posed no problem for them either. In her book
Nature Watch
, Charleston reporter Lynne Langley tells of one raccoon who showed up when a certain piece of classical music was played and departed for the woods when it ended. The
Hilton Head Island Packet carried a story about a coon who learned how to enter a house and always headed straight for the bedroom where Godiva chocolate was kept on the nightstand (Annie’s kind of house, Annie’s kind of raccoon).

Their dark-eyed, shaggy visitor completed a bold, measuring, thoughtful survey, dropped to all fours, and stepped toward them. It looked like she and Max were going to have an unwelcome guest for breakfast. But after a last, lingering appraisal, he turned and trotted back into the pines.

And that reminded Annie of Valentine’s Day morning when another unwelcome guest, Sydney Cahill, had shattered their early morning idyll by the pool. And that, of course, revived the Calvinist imps in Annie’s mind that tried hard to keep her from having
too
much fun. Last night, she had succumbed to Max’s importunings that enough was enough and it was time to relax, that they would work even more effectively if they took the evening off. He’d stressed that it was just the two of them (not, of course, that he was happy with Laurel’s detention on the mainland, but after all, she’d brought it on herself), and he’d finally resorted to an out-and-out bribe, beef Wellington at the country club. Annie was too mellow when they came home to even think about investigations. (She was always mellow after imbibing the club’s triple chocolate delight, which included three kinds of rum, crème de cacao, whipped cream, Hershey syrup, butterscotch ice cream, and semisweet chocolate bits.) Max was quite correct in pointing out that although it was much too late to pursue their investigation, it was quite the right time for other, more sensual pursuits.