Murder at Morningside (16 page)

I inhaled deeply. It was important to get every detail in the right order, even if it sounded insane. “I'm telling you, first Wyatt Burkett—he's the general manager—trapped me in the registration cottage. You know I knocked him out last night, right?”

Lance looked confused, but I didn't have time to explain the minor details. He'd have to take my word for it at this point and play along. There'd be time later to sort out the particulars.

“Anyway, he didn't want to let me go. I think he's the killer.” The minute I said that, I realized how absurd I sounded. Hadn't I mentioned Beatrice in the same breath as Wyatt, even though I didn't have any evidence to back it up? At least Wyatt had lunged at me. At least I knew he was strong enough and angry enough to hurt someone.

“There's also Beatrice.” My tone had softened. “She has a wonderful motive. Do you know she's in love with Trinity's fiancé? She could have poisoned Trinity as easily as anyone.”

Lance was listening, but he shook his head as if he didn't like what he'd heard. “There's only one problem, Missy.”

“Problem? What do you mean,
problem
? We need to get arrest warrants right now so you can bring them in for questioning. I'm almost certain one of them is the killer.”

“Now I'm sure you believe that,” he said.

Why was he shaking his head? And why wasn't he moving? He should have been on the phone by now, calling the station for backup. Instead, he looked ready to pat me on the head and send me inside for a nice glass of sweet tea and a batch of pralines.

“They both have rock-solid alibis,” he said. “She was studying for finals at LSU that night. It's on the surveillance tape from the school library. And Wyatt was home with his crippled mother. Had to bring her to the urgent-care center Friday night when she fell and hurt her hip. Didn't get out of there until almost four in the morning, according to the nurse on duty. I'm sorry, but you're wrong.” He patted my knee. “Don't take it so hard. I'm wrong a lot of times too. It only means there are two less people to worry about. I'm sure the general manager gave you a terrible fright, but he couldn't have killed Trinity Solomon.”

“Who, then?” While neither of my theories had panned out, someone else must be under Lance's microscope. Here I'd spent all day rushing around and I wasn't one step closer to helping Ivy.

“I got the medical examiner's final report back.” Lance must have felt really bad for me, because he opened his notebook. He didn't even attempt to put up a fight, which said a lot.

“Look here,” he said. “It confirms the victim was poisoned with cyanide. Only takes two teaspoons to put someone under.”

“I know . . . you already told me it was cyanide. By the way, whatever happened with the squashed pill capsule we found in the bathroom? Did that have anything to do with it?”

“Definitely.” He eyed the grounds around us, although we were the only two people in sight. “Traces of cyanide, all right.”

“That's what I thought.”

“There's more.” Lance glanced over his shoulder again, probably out of habit more than anything else. “It wasn't the type of pill you usually see around here. It was labeled as aspirin, but it was the kind you can pull apart. Those things pretty much disappeared after a cyanide scare hit the country back in 1982.”

Who could forget that? Grandma told me all about it when I was old enough to understand. Said something about shop owners having to throw away entire shelves full of Tylenol because someone went around tampering with the capsules and filling them with potassium cyanide. Seven people wound up dead. After that, the capsules pretty much vanished from pharmacy shelves, replaced by tamper-proof gel caplets.

I saw for myself when I snooped in her medicine cabinet. She had three bottles of aspirin and all of them were labeled either
gel capsules
or
tablets
. None of them had been divided in two.

“They also found something interesting in the victim's bathroom.” Lance's voice brought me back to the present. “Fingerprints in there that didn't belong to the victim.”

“Her name was Trinity.” It bothered me that he kept referring to the girl without using her given name.

“Of course. Trinity left prints in the bathroom, but they found someone else's there too. Not Laney Babin's—the housekeeper's—because she was the first person they tested and she came up clean. No, these prints were different.”

I leaned toward him, although I knew it would make me look eager.

“Who, then? They could've belonged to anyone, right? Trinity's bridesmaids, her fiancé, her stepmother, even her father. You'd have to haul in a dozen people to get the right match.”

“That's the strange thing,” he said. “They had a hard time lifting prints, even with a fuming wand, because they were incomplete. Whole sections were missing, or faded away. They couldn't get a clean print even with the fuming glue.”

His last words floated around my mind, like wet laundry tumbling in a clothes dryer. So many memories flooded back. Talks I'd had with Darryl, Cat, Charles . . . with all of them, really. But when the tumbling stopped, a single memory clicked into place.

“Oh, shine!” My hand flew to my lips in an automatic effort to keep something worse from spilling out.

“What is it?” Lance looked troubled, either by my words or the way I'd yelled them loud enough to wake the dead in the Andrews family graveyard.

It couldn't be, could it? I finally dropped my hand. There was only one way to find out, and I was pretty sure the answer wasn't going to show up in a shiny gift box while I lounged around at the mansion with Lance.

“I need to check out a hunch. Can you come with me?”

“I'm sorry, but they're expecting me back at the station. Can it wait?”

If the hunch was right, it couldn't. “Not really. But it's okay, I know you need to get back to work.”

He eyed me skeptically. “Tell me you're not about to do something foolish.”

“Why, Lance. Do you really think I'd run off and do something foolish?”

“Hell, yes.” At least he smiled when he said it. “So you need to promise me that you won't go chasing down any suspects while I'm gone. Promise.”

I scrunched up my nose before answering him. “I know you have this whole situation under control. I promise not to undermine you in any way, shape or form.” Hopefully, my response was vague enough to appease both him and my conscience.

“That doesn't sound right, but I don't have time to argue. Just wait for me to get back before you do anything. That's all I'm saying.”

“I'll wait for you to get back before I do anything foolish.” There, I said it. And to my way of thinking, what I was about to do next wasn't close to being foolish.

“That's better,” he said. “See you soon.”

The minute he disappeared around the corner of the house, I took a deep breath for courage and plowed ahead. There was no way I was going to twiddle my thumbs on the back lawn and let the latest clue disappear like a cloud on the horizon.

O
nce I said good-bye to Lance, I moved down the curved steps as quickly as the river water that flowed beside me. The fashion show was fast approaching, and there was no telling when my driver would reemerge from the mansion's museum. Once I hit the last step, I sprinted around the eastern corner of the house and headed for the pool out back.

The waning sun hovered on the horizon, threatening to set but not quite there. It still amazed me that someone would murder a girl in such a tranquil place. But after a century of visitors, like me, there was no telling what the walls here had heard or the windows had seen. And now this.

I replayed possible scenarios as I ran. While I had a pretty good idea of who murdered Trinity, the tricky part was to confront the person without getting myself killed. Ambrose always said my feet moved faster than my brain, so I put on the brakes and slowed to a jog.

I rounded the brick wall circling the pool and came upon what I was looking for: a two-story building resembling the main house, only smaller. Same brilliant white paint, same lovingly tended flower beds, same dark storm shutters perfectly kept. The staff's quarters. As I approached them, a painted snake appeared on one of the first doors in the lineup.
Bingo.

Above the snake trailed a vine of magenta bougainvillea, like something out of a Grimm Brothers' storybook. I knocked on the door and waited. When no one answered, I tried the doorknob, but the door was locked.

Could the unit have a back door, since it was on the ground floor? Best of all would be a sliding glass door. I could sneak right in if the saints and prophets were on my side today. Apparently they weren't, though, because when I jogged around to the back, I found a window and not a door.

No matter. The owner had cracked the window open a foot or so, probably to catch a stray breeze, which was enough for me. I slipped off my sandals and approached the windowsill. It was only three feet up from the ground. Hallelujah. I placed my palms on the sill, pushed the window open more, and hoisted my body through the open space.

Thank goodness my only witness was a marble statue of a mermaid, tucked among the impatiens, and she didn't look like a gossiper. Once I made it through the window in one piece, I was home free.

The room I landed in was small but colorful. Cat's bedroom. An iron headboard sat against the far wall—painted neon orange—and she'd tossed on a fuchsia comforter and some lime green pillows. It was a wonder she could sleep, since the colors fought with each other for attention.

I walked past the psychedelic display to the bathroom, where a light shone. Much like the room outside, the space was tiny and bright and crammed full of shiny things. The sink looked dirty, and she'd littered it with eye-shadow compacts, bottles of Clairol Nice'n Easy, music CDs, and a pill bottle or two. Exactly what I was looking for.

The largest of the two pill bottles wore a baby-blue cap and French words filled the label. She'd told me she studied in France. I twisted open the top and let the contents tumble into my palm, where the capsules twinkled, shiny in the fluorescent lights.

They looked like spores on a honeycomb. Golden, soft to the touch and pliable. Like they'd been spun from amber plastic. Just like the casing I'd found on the floor of the hotel's bathroom.

The minute Lance told me about the unusual cyanide capsules as we met behind the house, plus the disfigured fingerprints, I had my answer. Just yesterday, back there in the kitchen of the main house, I'd cooked up one of my special omelets for Cat after she'd thrown up next to her car. I couldn't exactly let her unborn baby go hungry. When Cat took my steaming offering and scooped it up like it had come straight from the refrigerator, my eyes widened to the size of saucers. But she didn't feel a thing, she told me, even though I worried that besides being pregnant, the girl would have burned fingertips too. Apparently her fingers had been burned so many times—not to mention her tongue and the roof of her mouth—that she'd lost the feeling in them. And apparently the prints on her fingers too.

“You found 'em, huh?”

Someone had walked up behind me, as unexpected as a rear-end collision. I didn't turn, although I desperately wanted to. I was frozen in place, the capsules still winking in my palm. Surprisingly, and to my credit, I didn't gasp, but when I glanced in the mirror, Cat's reflection appeared behind mine.

“What are they?” As if I didn't know.

“Why, Missy. Those are the vitamins I take for my baby.”

The bathroom counter slowly spun away. It wasn't that Cat had caught me red-handed in her bathroom. I was more surprised by the look on her face. Her eyes were so dull and black they reminded me of the skillet I'd used to cook up her omelet.

“I saw you take your vitamins in the kitchen, Cat.” I closed my fingers around the contraband. “You took some regular vitamins. From a bottle in the pantry.”

My calm recitation snapped her back to reality. She grabbed my arm hard, which jarred the medicine free and sent it tumbling into the sink. When she twisted me around, I came face to face with the tattooed snake on her neck. It grew larger and thicker as her body tensed.

“You shouldn't have come here.” The snake writhed when she jerked her head like that. “What made you think you could break into my room?”

“I didn't break in.” Which wasn't a total lie. Nothing had been broken, although I knew exactly what she meant.

“Come with me.” She tightened her grasp and pushed me out of the bathroom.

Pain radiated up my arm. “Ouch.” I tried to shake her off. “You're hurting me.”

She shoved me to the bed when we were back in the room, and I tumbled face-first onto the fuchsia comforter. No one knew where I was, did they? I tried to remember what I'd told Lance, but I had trouble focusing on anything but the sharp ache at my side.

“You're not going to get away with this.” I twisted around to face her. Pink and green pillows fell away like blooms from the bougainvillea outside. “They're going to know it was you.”

“Funny you should say that, considering you're the one who doesn't belong here. Me, I just came back to my apartment to change clothes, and there you were.” Cat inched closer as she spoke, her tattooed snake zeroing in on its prey. “That's it. That's what I'll tell the police. How could I know it was you?”

She glanced at a bedside table, probably looking for a weapon. Odds were good she'd turn me facedown and strike me with a heavy lamp or something even worse.

“You didn't know Trinity Solomon,” I said. “What did she do to you?”

“Do? To me?” Cat's breath brushed my cheek and her tattooed snakeskin glistened with sweat. “Everything. Everything.”

She was so strong, my only hope was to stall. The more Cat talked, the less time she had to find a weapon.

“Think about your baby,” I said. “What will happen to your baby if you hurt me? Sooner or later they're going to figure out it was you.”

She screwed up her face, as if she'd swallowed a mouthful of bleach. “You don't get it, do you? Wyatt said we'd get this place closed down by scaring everyone away. But that could take months. When I found out the Solomons were here, I knew what I had to do.” She snorted. “Told the stupid daughter the pills were a cure for morning sickness. Brilliant, right?”

I slowly understood. And if Cat could murder Trinity in cold blood, she could do it again . . . with me.

She closed her eyes. “The baby's kicking,” she whispered. “He knows this is right.”

Now was my chance. I remembered something when Cat leaned over me on the bed and her tattoo drew closer. Every scale on the snake telescoped larger and larger. Where had I seen a tattoo like that? It'd been a year or so, but the tattoo definitely looked familiar.

And then I remembered. I had just opened my shop and was having lunch with my next- door neighbor, a handsome guy named Ambrose. My new friend was worried about a string of burglaries in our building. He told me about a self-defense class at the local Y and even offered to pay for my tuition, since I was broke.

I decided to go—for his sake, more than mine—and gamely watched a young guy in a karate jacket and slacks enter the Y. After spending half an hour in the overheated studio, the instructor stripped down to a T-shirt and exposed an enormous tattoo on his arm. A snake slithering down to his elbow and then on to his fingertips. I remembered thinking the tattoo would make a good story for Ambrose, because I didn't expect much else from the class.

But darn if I didn't learn something. That night I learned a sure-fire way to escape a kidnapper. The teacher pointed to the heel of his hand and then pretended to smash it against his chin, which didn't seem too complicated. He made us practice the move over and over on a row of punching bags until sweat streamed down our cheeks.

I felt ridiculous, of course, but I practiced it anyway until my hand purpled like ripe eggplant.

The snake on Cat's neck eyed me now as I mumbled a quick prayer for forgiveness, since I was about to strike a pregnant woman. Then I shoved the heel of my hand into her chin for all I was worth. The crunch of bone hitting bone rang out and her head snapped back like it'd been ripped clean from her spine.

As she fell, her head crashed against the iron headboard with a sickening thud. Only then did I feel pain radiate through my hand.

I had no time to think. I rolled off the bed and scuttled crablike toward the kitchen. Halfway there, the sound of a doorknob being turned reached me and I froze. When the door didn't budge, something crashed against it—hard—and the panel flew open, raining wood splinters onto the carpet. It was Lance, his leg still poised in the air as if he might kick the panel again for good measure. Cat must have locked the door behind her when she entered, which sent a chill down my spine.

“Lance!” I shouted. Across the room, Cat lay as still as an iceberg marooned in the sea of pink. Hallelujah for that punching bag in the Y's basement and for Ambrose's worrisome nature.

“Missy?” Lance peered at me. “You okay?”

I lay on the ground and clutched my throbbing hand. “I think so. It's Cat, Lance. She's the one who poisoned Trinity. She's in the bedroom.”

Quickly, Lance strode through the doorway and headed for the back bedroom. When he returned, he held Cat in his arms, her head bobbing against his shoulder.

“You did this?” Lance squinted, as if there must be another explanation for the unconscious girl in his arms.

“Sure did. And I found a bottle of doctored pills in the bathroom. She gave them to Trinity and said they were a cure for morning sickness.”

“Why?” Lance looked wary, as if he couldn't quite trust his eyes.

“Her daddy died at Mr. Solomon's refinery, and she wanted to get back at him. Guess she didn't much care how she did it.” I shrugged, since nothing Cat had said would ever justify murder.

“You're okay, right?” Lance asked.

“Fine. A little shook up, but I'll be fine.” My hand still hurt like the dickens, but it was nothing compared to what could have happened. “Guess I should have waited for you, after all.”

He grinned as he walked around me, the lump in his arms as silent as the stone mermaid outside. “Let me put this one in the squad car and then I'll come back for you. We need to get your statement when you feel up to it.”

I nodded and watched him walk through the jagged doorframe. Someone else arrived a few seconds later, but this person wore the most wonderful pair of pressed khakis and Sperry Top-Siders.

I finally rose to my feet. “Hi, Bo.”

“Oh, Missy. I'm so glad you're okay.” Ambrose rushed to me and enveloped me in a hug so strong I couldn't help but squeak.

“How'd you know where to find me?”

“Lance called the church and they tracked me down. Said something about how he was going to look for you.”

“Y'all worry about me too much.” I looked into those beautiful blue eyes and smiled. “But I'm glad you do.”

I didn't ask—or care—how he knew where to find me. All that mattered was that we stayed in each other's arms for way too long. Neither of us could think of another thing to say—but, then again, conversation could be highly overrated.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Whatever for?” Gently, Ambrose brushed aside some hair that'd fallen in my eyes.

“For making me take that silly self-defense class back at the Y. Turns out it wasn't so silly, after all.”