Death by Hitchcock (10 page)

When Milo got back to his dorm room that night he was euphoric from the success of their first date. How she had looked at him! How interested she seemed to be in everything he said! Now he felt sure Mary was his future, felt certain she would marry him one day.

Milo removed a postcard stuck in the mirror over his dresser. It was a black and white still photograph of Peter Lorre from the production of
M
. He addressed it to Mary and wrote on the back:

I really enjoyed our chat. I hope we can do it again soon. I feel sure we will. 

Your friend, Hans Becker
t
hehe

Chapter 27

There was a copy of Wallace Duncan’s documentary sitting on Will’s desk. A note from the Chief read,
Let me know if there’s anything interesting.  VB

There was also a brown envelope with ‘Detective William Tenney’ written on the outside in neat script. Inside was the postcard Milo Marcus had sent to Mary Buttery. The accompanying note said
:

‘Dear Detective Tenney, I thought you should see this. It’s from Milo Marcus. He sent it to me after we had tea together at Sanborn House. FYI, Hans Beckert is a fictional movie character who gets convicted as a serial child killer. Sincerely yours, Mary Buttery’.

Will read over Milo’s postcard and Mary’s note several times, and returned them to the envelope. He slid the documentary into his computer, and spent the next few hours reviewing Wallace Duncan’s film.  

Will found the film surprisingly entertaining, and frequently amusing. He was intrigued by the fact that Louis Edwards, only a few years older than Milo, indulged Milo’s occasional tantrums and churlishness with the patience of a father toward an adolescent son. Will laughed out loud during a scene where Milo tags along with Louis on a shopping trip for baby items. In Crackenthorpe’s Department Store, Louis selects diapers and baby wipes for his infant daughter. A discussion between Louis and Milo about
Singin’ in the Rain
builds into a heated debate in the baby department, as the two argue about the nature of the collaboration between
co-directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. Other shoppers, alarmed, variously stare or scurry away.

In addition to the scenes involving the two of them, Milo and Louis were filmed individually. Will paid particular attention to the scenes shot in and around Hexley Hall, featuring Milo. A handful of students in the Film Studies Department appear
ed here and there walking in and out of frame, including Bunny Baldwin, who popped up in the background of one scene.  Casual banter is exchanged between Milo and various students, but nothing in particular stood out as being significant to the investigation. Halfway through his second viewing of the film, Will looked at his watch. 

He hurriedly tidied up his desk, and grabbed his jacket. He didn’t want to arrive late for dinner. Before shutting out the lights, he ejected Wallace’s movie from his computer and shoved it in his pocket, along with the envelope from Mary Buttery. 

Will drove to Dan’s Bridge Market, and parked in the fifteen-minute zone out front. He grabbed a thirty-pack of #2 Phillips Screwdriver bit tips, and picked out two bottles of wine.

He jumped back into the truck, and set out for Canaan Farm Road.

Chapter 28

Edwina drizzled peony-scented bubble bath into the rushing water. The bathroom in her little house had the same footprint as the bedrooms across the hall, and she looked upon the oversized bathroom as a great luxury. She tossed her clothes onto a chair covered in worn chintz by the window. 

Edwina eased her body into the fragrant, foamy water, and submerged herself completely. Resurfacing seconds later, she lay back against the tub and closed her eyes.

The ghastly image of that poor, dead girl stuffed in a toilet with that big, grotesque celluloid bow in her hair, once again came into Edwina’s mind. She imagined the profound agonies Bunny’s parents must be suffering, and would suffer the rest of their lives. She pondered the nature of such evil, but could not get her mind around it, could not imagine the quality of contempt necessary for one human animal to do such a thing to another.

Edwina surveyed the sea of opalescent bubbles in front of her. Perhaps she could not understand cruelty, but she understood bubbles. She contemplated the inner and outer surfaces of these wondrous, spherical membranes, with their thin, elastic surfaces made of liquid. How marvelous it was that the forces of tension between the molecules of their soapy skin worked harmoniously to keep a constant volume. How odd that these playful, pink bubbles were distant cousins of the gigantic gamma ray bubbles in space that spanned a distance of 50,000 light years. Edwina blew a herd of bubbles across the tub.

She languished in the bath for as long as possible, until the temperature of the water started to cool, and the bathroom suddenly felt chilly. Reaching for a towel, Edwina regarded her lubricious, dripping body in the mirror, slender and taut from bike riding and kayaking. She dried off vigorously, banishing the goose bumps on her arms and legs.

Better get a move on,
she thought.   

Edwina dressed quickly in a fresh pair of jeans and a black turtleneck, combed out her hair, and scampered downstairs.

Her cooking repertoire, the result of Nedda Cake’s tutelage, was as follows:  roast chicken with lemon and rosemary, and spaghetti
carbonara
. Short of these two ‘fancy,’dishes, sandwiches and omelettes. But Will was coming over for dinner, and she wanted to make something special.   

She shoved a few logs into the wood stove in the kitchen, poured a glass of wine, and straightened up the mass of books, periodicals, and papers on the kitchen table. She lined up half a pound of bacon slices in a low roasting pan and got them cooking on top of the wood stove. After she put a pot of water on to boil, she washed a bag of arugula, and grated a piece of
parmigiano reggiano
. 

The sweet smell of ash wood drifted through the house, and while Crosby, Stills & Nash rode the Marrakesh Express in the background, Edwina went about the rest of the preparations
––beating eggs, making salad dressing, and rinsing tomatoes for the salad. The dry warmth of the woodstove dried her hair quickly, and static electricity caused a few strands to stand at attention.

She greeted Will at the door with a glass of wine. He reached out and smoothed down the errant strands on top of her head. 

Edwina chattered away while she worked on the dinner preparations, but Will, vaguely uneasy if he wasn’t being useful, looked around the kitchen for something to do.

“Mind if I split those for you?” he said, pointing to a pile of logs outside the back door.

“What?” Edwina said, looking around. “Oh, sure.” 

Walls that had originally closed off a small dining room, had been removed in order to incorporate the space into the kitchen. The resulting kitchen was airy and spacious. A row of windows looked out onto a backyard dotted with mature trees, where a battered picnic table patiently awaited warmer weather under a sugar maple. Will came back into the house twenty minutes later with an armload of split logs, filling the round basket next to the wood stove.

“Hey, Will,” Edwina said. “Come here for a second.”

Edwina handed him an uncooked piece of spaghetti.

“Break this in two,” she said. “Hold it at either end like this, and bend it ‘til it breaks in two.”

Will looked curiously at Edwina. He held the strand of spaghetti at each end and slowly bent it until the pasta snapped, producing four pieces.

“Here,” Edwina said. “Try it again.”

Will repeated his action. This time the spaghetti broke into three pieces. Edwina handed him another piece, and he tried it again. The spaghetti broke into four pieces.

“Can’t you break it in two?” she said, re-filling their wine glasses.

Will peered at her suspiciously.   

“Let me try it again,” he said.

The strands of spaghetti continued to break
––into three, four, five pieces––but never two. Will attempted the experiment twenty times.

“What’s going on here, professor?” he asked.

“Well, besides the mess on the floor, what’s going on is physics,” Edwina grinned. “It will never break in two!”

“Look,” she explained, picking up another piece of dry spaghetti. “Initially, the curvature of the pasta increases near this end, see? Then a wave travels down, and you get the first break, where the curvature exceeds a critical limit. Then more bending waves travel along the newly formed pieces and the local curvature causes more breaks. Neat, huh?”

“Very enlightening,” Will said. “Now, where’s your dustpan, and I’ll get this experiment cleaned up.”

Edwina put the salad on the table. When the pasta was ready
, they sat down to eat.

“This is fantastic,” Will said, tasting the spaghetti carbonara. 

“It’s just bacon and egg spaghetti,” Edwina said. 

“The trick is stirring the eggs into the pasta as soon as you drain it, so the heat from the spaghetti cooks the eggs, and makes them all nice and scrambley. Nedda Cake taught me how to make it.”

“How is she?” Will said with a mouthful.

“She’s great. Still teaching, still brilliant,” Edwina said. “And I’m glad she’s got her niece living with her now. Nedda shouldn’t be living alone at her age.”

“What’s your impression of the niece?” Will asked.

“I haven’t spent much time with her,” she said, twirling pasta in her spoon. 

“Nedda had a few people over when Honeysuckle first moved in with her,” she continued. “She seemed pleasant enough. Kind of spinsterish and tweedy, but very friendly. She’s into a bunch of interesting things––homeopathy, for one––apparently she’s an expert.  Nedda was telling me––”

“What?” Will interrupted. “Honeysuckle knows about homeopathy?”

“Yes. Nedda says Honeysuckle gave a talk recently at the Garden Club about making homeopathic remedies. Why?”

“Because Bunny Baldwin was interested in homeopathy, too,” Will replied. “Her toxicology report showed she had colchicine and esculin in her system
––two substances often found in homeopathic remedies.”

“But Bunny was strangled,” Edwina said.

“She was, yeah,” Will replied, “but the fact that she was also poisoned is odd. It suggests a few possibilities. Colchicine and esculin have toxic properties, and there’s no innocent explanation for why they would be in her system in the amounts that were found. Colchicine comes from meadow saffron, a highly toxic flowering plant. And esculin comes from horse chestnut, very common in homeopathic remedies.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Edwina said. “Are you thinking there were two different parties out to murder Bunny?”

“Possibly. Or possibly just one party. And when the poison didn’t work, they resorted to strangulation.”

“I’ve just remembered something,” Edwina said, setting down her fork. 

“Nedda told me she thought Honeysuckle had a thing for Chaz Winner,” she said. “A crush, or whatever. Do you think it’s possible––?”

“That’s interesting,” Will said. “Could be a motive.”

“It seems like kind of a reach, though––that Honeysuckle would murder Bunny Baldwin so she could have a shot at Chaz Winner?” Edwina said doubtfully.

“Homeopathy keeps popping up,” Will said. “There’s got to be a connection with it somehow”.

Edwina refilled Will’s glass.

“Would you mind if I helped myself to more pasta?” Will said.

“Please do.”

Will carried his empty bowl over to the stove and heaped more spaghetti, bacon and egg into it. On his way back to the table he opened the woodstove and stoked the fire.

“What was Bunny Baldwin’s roommate like?” Edwina said.

“Interesting girl,” Will replied. “Very bright and well-spoken, but openly resentful of Bunny. She was very straightforward about it. It was almost as if she wanted to protest her innocence by being totally upfront about hating Bunny’s guts. Does that make sense to you?”

“Trying to psych you out, you mean? Reverse psychology? Yeah, maybe,” Edwina said. “Doesn’t prove anything, though.”

“I can’t say I like Chaz Winner much,” Will said, grating cheese onto the spaghetti. “Not that I’m letting it influence me. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t, but I don’t think the Winners are the happiest couple in New Guilford,” Edwina said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that they were both having affairs,” Edwina said. 

“By the way, who told you about Mrs. Winner having an affair
––your source in the Film Department?” Will said. “I’d like to speak to them.”

“He’s a grad student
––kind of a loner––hangs around Sanborn House in the afternoons sometimes for tea. Smart kid. I felt kind of sorry for him, and one day I struck up a conversation. We play chess sometimes.”

“Name?” Will asked.

“Milo Marcus.”

“Milo Marcus? I’ve been trying to interview him,” Will said. “Haven’t been able to track him down, yet.”

“Interesting thing about Milo Marcus,” Will continued. “When I interviewed Aaron Farb, the student who was running the projector the night of
Spellbound
, he said Milo burst in on him and told him to shut down the film.”

“So?” Edwina asked.

“According to Aaron Farb, Milo appeared very quickly, before anybody in the auditorium even knew what was happening. So how did Milo know?”

“About the murder?” Edwina said. “Maybe he didn’t. Milo is nothing if not a film fanatic. He probably heard the scream, and was reacting to the fact that there was some kind of commotion going on in the theater, and that people were no longer
paying attention to the film. So he told Aaron Farb to shut it down.”

After dinner Will remembered the copy of Wallace Duncan’s documentary in his coat pocket.

“Got any interest in seeing a film made by one of Chaz Winner’s students?” Will asked.

“Definitely,” Edwina replied.

Mary Buttery’s envelope fell out of Will’s pocket.

“What’s that?” Edwina said.

Will showed her the postcard Milo had sent to Mary Buttery, and Mary’s accompanying note. Edwina read them over carefully.

“Milo sure could use some pointers,” she said.

“Such as?”

“Such as, it’s probably not a good idea to compare yourself to a serial killer if you’re trying to get a girl to like you.”

They cleared away the dinner dishes. Edwina made a pot of tea and set the tea things on the kitchen table. Will loaded the movie on Edwina’s laptop, and they scooted their chairs in closer to the table to watch it. Sitting at such close quarters, Will noticed the amber-colored coronas around the pupils of Edwina’s hazel green eyes. They looked like tiny solar eruptions.

“That’s Bunny, isn’t it?” she said, jabbing her finger at the screen when the girl appeared briefly in the background.

“Yup,” Will said. “I was hoping there’d be more of her, but this is the only time she shows up.”

“Whoa!” Edwina exclaimed. “Back it up a second. Okay, pause.”

Edwina pointed at a female figure in a classroom scene.

“That’s the girl I saw with Honeysuckle at the Tea Room the other morning, and then again with Milo at Sanborn House,” she said.

“This one?” Will said, pointing at Mary Buttery. “You positive?”

“Yes,” Edwina replied.

“She and Honeysuckle were having a pretty intense conversation the day I saw them together,” she continued. “So, she’s the one who gave you that creepy postcard from Milo?”

“Yeah, Bunny’s roommate,” Will said. “Mary Buttery.”

The two studied the frozen image on the screen.

“The day I interviewed Mary Buttery in her apartment,” Will said, “she served some kind of home-made herbal tea. When I asked her about it, she said she bought it from a friend. I’ll bet the friend was Honeysuckle.”

“That makes Mary and Honeysuckle both suspects,” Edwina said. “It looks like maybe you were right about the connection between Honeysuckle and the sketchy herbs, and Bunny’s death. Think Honeysuckle and Mary could’ve been involved together?”

“The day you saw Mary Buttery and Milo in the library,” Will said, “did you happen to overhear anything?”