Diva 03 _ Diva Paints the Town, The (32 page)

Read Diva 03 _ Diva Paints the Town, The Online

Authors: Krista Davis

Tags: #Murder, #Winston; Sophie (Fictitious Character), #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #General, #Dwellings

BOOK: Diva 03 _ Diva Paints the Town, The
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The lights suddenly came on. We could hear cheers and applause coming from upstairs.
Ted and Mike high-fived.
I followed them up the stairs, thinking about what Mike had said. Mordecai meant for them to find the grave, and he wanted to trigger a memory. If the students hadn’t killed anyone, why would he do that? Why burden them with the knowledge that he had committed a heinous crime?
Unless my speculations the day before had been correct and—it wasn’t Mordecai’s crime.
THIRTY-SIX
From
Natasha Online
:
Mirrors are my very favorite decorating devices. Hang a collection of similar mirrors on a wall across from a window and they’ll brighten the entire room. Place a huge vase of flowers on a pedestal, and flank it with two six-foot-tall mirrors to enlarge a room. And don’t forget to hang at least one mirror in every room, including the kitchen, so you can check your appearance in a fl ash.
“Mike!” We were in the kitchen when I asked, “Is there a possibility that Mordecai wasn’t the murderer? That he brought his best students together so you could figure out who had committed the crime?” He’d taught them to solve problems, to figure out his tricks. “Was he relying on you to solve a crime that happened over twenty years ago?”
“Don’t be silly, Sophie. What an imagination.” Natasha hung a mirror on the wall opposite the door to the family room. “I think if we place the wreath of silk roses behind the cake pedestal, it will make a darling counterscape.”
Natasha appeared to be talking to Beth, but Beth’s eyes met mine and gave away her thoughts. She excused herself and hurried into the foyer, with Ted, Mike, and me on her heels. “Those bones have to belong to Mr. Ledbetter.”
“Or Jean,” I interjected.
Beth’s face screwed up as though she was fighting tears. “They’re not my Aunt Jean. She lived with me until she died four months ago. With my kids in college on the East Coast, there wasn’t anything keeping me in Nevada anymore. That’s why I moved back here to help my parents.”
“I’m so sorry, Beth,” I said. “The bones could actually belong to anyone—a delivery guy, for instance.”
Mike shook his head. “This has something to do with us, the five students. I’m sure of it. Beth and I have been wracking our brains going over the events of that afternoon. Ledbetter was also a professor, but I don’t think any of us had it in for him. Besides, he was alive when we left.”
I shuddered. The circumstances reminded me vaguely of Kurt’s death. “Okay, let’s think this through. The five students left to go see the burning cottage at the community center. Right?”
Beth nodded. “Mordecai went with them, but he didn’t stay long. I was here a little longer, packing the car. Other guests were still here, too, oblivious to the entire drama.” She placed a hand on Mike’s arm. “Do you remember someone giving Ledbetter a pill? Like Valium or something? We shut the doors to the family room so he could rest.”
“What about the gang of five? What happened when you saw your cottage on fire?” I asked.
Ted winced. “Lots of accusations, of course. Everyone blamed it on someone else. But there was a theory that Ledbetter was responsible for the sabotage. Mordecai had received some kind of prestigious award, and we all thought Ledbetter was jealous. Think about it—Mordecai’s wife left, the cottage burned, and the man responsible, his archrival, was in the family room on the sofa. Mordecai went in there and killed him.”
“Or one of the students might have come back here and killed him. One of the students who thought Ledbetter set the cottage on fire,” I said.
Mike nodded. “I’ll call Posey and Nolan and get them over here. I’ll tell Nolan someone wants to buy one of his overpriced antiques, that’ll roust him. Two o’clock okay with you?”
Ted looked at his watch. “I may be a little late. I have to check on another job, and I have a crew reassembling the glass house for the woman who bought it. But it shouldn’t take too long.”
“Two o’clock is fine for me.” I’d no sooner said it than Natasha waltzed out of the kitchen.
“Am I the only one who ever does any work around here? Beth, take a lunch break, I’ll be back in two hours. Sophie, you’d better get cracking on cushions for that window seat. Do you even know how to sew?”
Ted, Natasha, and I pulled on jackets and walked out into crisp, cold air. A layer of snow dusted our street and the sky was ominously gray, as though more snow was on the way. Natasha hurried toward her house, muttering something about Beth and employees. Ted shivered and hopped into his truck, but I crossed the street slowly, still thinking about Mordecai and his students. If the body was Ledbetter’s, and Mordecai thought Jean had killed him, what changed his mind? What made Mordecai think one of his students killed Ledbetter?
The minute I opened my kitchen door, Francie and Duke bounded out. “Nina is going to have to hire a bodyguard. I can’t keep babysitting her.” Francie hooked a leash on Duke, who pranced delightedly in the snow.
I didn’t make it into the house because Nina thrust a coat at me. “Francie bolted without it.”
I rushed after her, caught up on the sidewalk, and helped her slip it on. Duke dug in the shallow snow, tossing it in the air. A little mound of snow stuck to his black nose. Francie and Duke continued their walk in the direction of Natasha’s house, and I turned back.
My hand was on my gate when the words of Mordecai’s lawyer came back to me. Mordecai had told him his little dog dug up something that made him realize he’d labored under a misconception. Could Emmaline have dug up the insulin? The killer would have wanted to be rid of it, but since it would implicate Jean, maybe the killer buried it in the crawl space. When Emmaline uncovered it, Mordecai realized Ledbetter hadn’t died from a blow to the head. Jean could have killed him with her insulin, but she needed it and wouldn’t have left it behind.
And crafty old Mordecai found he had a new puzzle to solve. He came to suspect one of his students, since they’d been present when he found Jean with Ledbetter. He set up the hunt for the bequest secure in the knowledge that the person who buried the body wouldn’t want the others to find it, and thought the killer would finally be revealed.
He just hadn’t realized how desperate that former student would become, and that other lives would be lost in the unveiling of the killer.
I shivered and gazed at Mordecai’s house, imagining the horror of that day, when I noticed that Ted’s truck hadn’t left. I studied it for a second. No one was inside, the engine was off, and snow still clung to the windshield. Had he changed his mind?
I walked closer. Maybe his truck wouldn’t start. And then I realized
his men couldn’t be pouring concrete in the snow
. They’d told me the weather had to improve before they could work on reassembling the glass cottage. I approached the truck cautiously and looked down at the footprints in the snow. Ted’s large footprints left little confusion about which direction he’d gone. I could see that he’d gotten into the truck. But another set of his footprints led down the sidewalk, as though he’d gotten out again. I followed them around the side of the house to the gate in back, where I’d met Tara the night I thought I saw a light in the house. The footprints continued in the direction of the house and the pond liner that Natasha was trying to install. I followed them up to the back door and looked through the window.
Nothing seemed amiss. To be on the safe side, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called Wolf. I knew I shouldn’t phone him because of Kenner, but this was surely an exception. When Wolf answered, I said in a low tone, “I’m at Mordecai’s and something’s not right.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I believe I’ve caught Ted in a lie.” I snapped the phone shut and tried the door. It swung open easily, though it did creak a bit.
I stood in the English Country kitchen and listened for voices. The door to the family room stood ajar, and unless I missed my guess, I could hear someone talking softly.
I hadn’t moved when Ted called out, “Sophie! Please join us.”
How had he known I was here? I swirled to hide or leave, and realized that he could see my reflection in the mirror Natasha had hung earlier.
“I have a gun, Sophie. Don’t make me use it.”
I gazed around the kitchen for a weapon. Beth and Natasha had cleaned out Mordecai’s knives, and the straw hat wouldn’t do me any good. My only chance was to drop to the floor and hustle outside—fast. I crouched and waddled to the door. Before I could open it, I heard a mechanical click behind me, and looked up to see a perfect round hole in the glass of the door. In the few seconds it took me to register what had happened, fissures spread in the tempered glass. It crackled as they grew and filled the door window, and a moment later, I covered my head as the entire window crashed to the floor in tiny square shards of thick glass.
“Now get in here and don’t make me shoot you.” Ted’s tone had taken on an unfamiliar hard edge.
The pile of tempered glass glittered in front of me. It was all I had as a potential weapon. Thankful that they didn’t have the razor-sharp edges of regular broken glass, I scooped up handfuls of the prickly shards and dropped them into my pockets. Gulping hard, I rose and walked very slowly toward the family room.
Beth and Mike sat on the beautiful couch, holding hands and looking very frightened. Each of them held a small glass filled with liquid. An unpleasant, pungent odor wafted over to me—turpentine?
“Pity that you showed up. I thought I might be able to spare you once the lovebirds killed themselves over their dirty deeds.”
I hoped Wolf was on the way. I needed to keep Ted talking, so I feigned stupidity. “Beth and Mike killed Mr. Ledbetter? Mike, was it you and Beth who were in Mordecai’s house a couple of days after he died?”
Ted laughed. “That was me. Making sure old Mordecai hadn’t left some kind of message about the body in the basement.”
Mike seemed confused. “We didn’t kill anyone, Sophie. It was Ted.”
Ted tilted his head. “And that’s why they’re drinking turpentine. They’ll be dead by the time their two o’clock appointments arrive. I hadn’t counted on you, though, Sophie. You don’t fit in this plan at all. I guess I’ll have to take you with me and dispose of you somewhere.”
I needed to stall him. “You buried Mr. Ledbetter in the basement? Mordecai must have known.”
“He was so distressed about Jean’s infidelity that he was hardly functioning. Jean had been planning to leave with Ledbetter, and when Mordecai learned that, he threw her out of the house. I think it broke him. I remember him sitting in the garden like a statute surrounded by guests who hadn’t a clue about what had transpired.” He sounded angry when he added, “Mordecai didn’t deserve that kind of treatment from either of them. He was a decent and giving man.”
“So you came back to the party.” I took a chance. “With Kurt?”
“He helped me carry Ledbetter’s body to the basement. I thought I could trust him. But when I showed up that night, after Nina pushed him into the andirons, he’d opened the wall unit. We hid in the stairway while you and Nina searched the house.” A smile turned up one side of his mouth. “Kurt thought that was hilarious. When you left, he found a bottle of booze in the kitchen. I never knew he was such a talkative drunk. He was a danger to us, a loose link who had to be silenced. The best place for him was with Ledbetter, under the house. But Kurt had closed the wall unit, and I couldn’t figure out how to open it.”
In horror, Mike said, “You kept him alive until he showed you?”
“It took the whole night. Drunk men don’t focus well. We finally figured it out, and I’d just slammed him in the head with a hammer when Sophie came in to clean. Who cleans that early in the morning?”
“So he might have still been alive when you stuffed him into the window seat?”
“If he wasn’t dead, he was unconscious. I waited in the closet and had to hustle when you left. I threw him down the steps and applied the hammer again, then hid there with him while you brought the cop inside.”
“Then you’re the one who moved his car and returned his cell phone to his booth at Rooms and Blooms.”
Ted frowned. “Perhaps it’s a good thing you happened along. You know too much already.”
“I don’t know who shot nails into your pond.”
He sighed. “It seemed prudent at the time. In case anyone tried to blame Kurt’s death on me, I wanted it to appear that I was a victim. But then when I followed Tara back to the convention hall, I didn’t have a weapon and had to improvise. Posey’s nail gun happened to be handy. I wish I hadn’t killed Tara in my own exhibit, but it was the only place with a degree of privacy.”
“You didn’t have to kill Tara. She didn’t know anything,” I protested.
“Mordecai would have loved her. She kept dropping a feather on the floor in front of the wall unit. She figured out there was a draft and that it opened. It would only have been a matter of time until the cops swarmed the place. I had to prevent that at all costs. As long as the cops didn’t find out about the stairwell behind the wall unit everything would be fine.”

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