Murder Walks the Plank (11 page)

Annie was startled. Kay had changed her mind, gotten in touch with Dr. Burford. Was Kay trying to fore
stall an autopsy?

“—it's better to be safe than sorry. She wasn't pleased. But when I pressed her, she admitted Meg's death was unexpected, though it was quite possible she died of heart failure. I got a list of Meg's medications. I'll see what I can find out. There are some quick tests. If that doesn't turn up anything, we'll send the body to Charleston for a full-scale autopsy. That would take time to get results.”

The connection ended.

Annie didn't care. The first hurdle was past. But now she had to face the family of the dead woman. Certainly Kay Morris would make no secret of the fact that it was Annie who had demanded an autopsy.

At the front door, Claudette reached out to take the hands of slender, dark-haired Jenna Carmody, Meg's daughter. Jenna and Claudette drew back as the EMTs reached the foyer. Jenna clung to Claudette, watched the passage of the gurney with a shudder, her face pale, her eyes huge and dark. Jenna looked as if she'd thrown on whatever clothes were at hand, a fuchsia sweater stained with paint, black slacks with a snagged knee.

Claudette was somber. “Jenna, I'm dreadfully sorry. Come inside.” She gently tugged, pulling Jenna inside, and shut the door but not before Annie saw the techs start the awkward descent down the twisting staircase.

Jenna stood with one hand pressed against the marble top of a hall table. She waited, face sharp and still, until the rumble of a motor signaled the departure of the ambulance. She shivered, looked at Claudette. “Mother…” She shook her head. “She was all right last night. What happened to her?”

Claudette was slow in answering. “She didn't wake
up. It must have been her heart. We knew it was coming.”

“I guess so.” Jenna's voice was faint. “But”—she lifted her hands—“what do we do now?”

Claudette was abruptly the efficient secretary. “I'll call the funeral home, but I expect you and Jason will want to choose the casket and make the arrangements.”

“Arrangements…” Jenna's voice was dull. “Yes. We'll have to do that. And talk to Father Patton.”

“I left Jason a message.” Claudette looked troubled.

“I didn't tell him Meg was gone. I told him we had an emergency and he should come at once.”

“Jason.” His sister's voice was disapproving. “He never gets up this early. He probably has the ringer turned off. I'll go over there, get him up. He damn well can help.” There was no hint of sisterly love. Or support. Or, for that matter, any hint of grief. Jenna's eyes were dry. She was pale. There was shock, but not the bone-deep grief that grapples with loss of love. She lifted a thin hand, massaged one temple. “Casket. What a hideous word. I can't imagine Meg…” She shuddered.

Annie scolded herself. People show grief differently. Jenna was coping in her own way. Annie came quietly down the steps.

“It's her own fault.” Jenna hunched her shoulders and her face twisted in a scowl. “She got too excited. She was such a romantic fool.”

Annie stopped midway down the stairs.

“That doesn't matter now.” Claudette's tone was sharp. “Don't think about it.” The secretary looked up. Her expression was abruptly guarded. “Annie, please join us. Do you know Jenna?”

“Yes, we've met.” Annie hurried down the steps. “I'm sorry about your mother.” Annie reached the foyer. She would have given a kingdom to be elsewhere. She'd set in motion actions that would affect the lives of everyone connected to Meg Heath. She looked at Meg's secretary and her daughter. They'd borne a great shock and now they must bear another. It was time and past to tell what she'd done. “I spoke to the island's medical examiner….”

 

Max Darling looked across his mahogany desk at Annie's photograph. He loved the picture, Annie with her flyaway blond hair and steady gray eyes and laughing face. “I don't know, babe,” he murmured. This time Annie might have kicked a stone that would generate a landslide. If the autopsy showed death by natural causes, Annie was in big trouble.

Max knew his Annie. She would never agree that Pamela's death was anything other than murder, no matter what the result of the autopsy on Meg Heath. Even if Meg's death resulted from heart failure, Annie believed that Pamela had been murdered and that her murder was linked to her visits with Meg. He lounged in the sensuous comfort of the leather chair, but his eyes never left the photograph. Annie was always impetuous, sometimes reckless, often bullheaded. But, his eyes narrowed, she was intuitive.

And he agreed that it was double damn strange for the parishioner most recently visited by Pamela to die before anyone could ask what transpired the last time she and Pamela were together. Sure, it could be coincidence. Everything that had happened was capable of an innocent explanation. But taken all together, the circumstances suggested sinister
possibilities.

Max sat up straight, yanked the legal pad close, began to write:

Sequence of Events

1. Pamela Potts visited Meg Heath every weekday and very likely read the previous day's newspaper to her.
   
2. Pamela's calendar indicated she was at the Heath residence Friday morning.
   
3. Pamela found a free ticket to the mystery cruise in her mailbox on Sunday afternoon. Pamela believed the ticket to be a gift from Annie.
   
4. Pamela fell (was pushed?) from the boat at approximately 10:40
   P.M
   . Sunday. Emma Clyde reported that Pamela died early Monday morning at the hospital as a result of her injuries.
   
5. Meg Heath's body was discovered by her secretary shortly after 9
   A.M
   . Monday.
   

Max softly hummed Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land,” which Annie would have recognized as a sign of rapid calculation. He started a new page:

Facts to Discover

1. What happened between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon to make Pamela's death necessary?
   
2. Was Meg Heath likely to confide in someone as prim and proper as Pamela Potts?
   
3. Meg Heath was a very rich woman. Who inherits?
   

The phone rang. Max glanced at Caller ID. He yanked up the phone. “Hi, Ma.”

“Maxwell, dear”—his mother's throaty voice always made him smile—“I understand dear Annie is once again violently tilting at windmills. I do urge—”

He raised an eyebrow. Surely Laurel wasn't already aware of Meg Heath's death and Annie's intervention.

“—an emphasis upon creative synthesis. I am shocked by Meg's death and so grateful Annie was there to prevent a miscarriage of justice—”

Max mentally tipped a top hat to his mother. He had no idea how she knew, but obviously her sources were impeccable.

“—although Emma—”

Aha! as Jan Karon's Father Tim often exclaimed. All was now clear. Max doodled on his pad the blunt head of a shark with many teeth. A cell phone was pressed against the shark's head. A dotted line snaked through space to a cell phone draped with a stethoscope.

“—is quite regretful that there can now be no possibility of working in the background without the murderer's knowledge. Dear Annie, so forthright.”

There was a silence while she—and presumably he—acknowledged dear Annie's unfortunate proclivity for forthrightness.

Max felt compelled to offer a defense. “Ma, she had to speak up. They were going to”—he paused, decided
cart
was not a graceful verb—“uh, take the body to the funeral home.”

“It would have been possible”—a gentle chiding laugh—“for the dear girl to privately contact Dr. Burford. However, be that as it may, we all must deal with the present situation”—her husky voice fell an octave—“a murderer en garde. Possibly poised to strike out at a pursuer.”

Max had a quick vision of a masked figure flailing
a sword, a long, sharp, dangerous sword, at Annie. Not a pretty picture. He frowned.

“Maxwell”—the reassuring voice flowed over the line quick as balm applied to a burn—“we shall defend our Dear Child. Now, she will, of course, in her direct way seek facts.” Laurel's tone dismissed facts as superfluous, unimportant, the small change of the petit bourgeois. “I urge creativity. If, as appears possible, dear Pamela and dear Meg were both victims, it seems clear the reason for the crime must have sprung from Meg's life. Pamela's placid existence was an open book. Meg's unfettered exuberance, however, affords scope for inquiry. Therefore it is of the essence to understand Meg Heath. That, my dear Maxwell, is our charge. As Demosthenes observed: Though a man escape every other danger, he can never wholly escape those who do not want such a person as he to exist.” A reflective pause. Then the honey-smooth voice observed lightly, “And sometimes, ah well, a man can speak better to a man. I've heard that Meg once was very close to a charming fellow named Rodney St. Clair. A writer of sorts.” Another pause suggested myriad possible pursuits enjoyed by Mr. St. Clair. “Quite attractive to women. I understand he lives in Majorca. I suggest you have a chat with him. Apparently he and Meg were boon companions at one time. Meantime I shall seek visions of Meg, with the verve of a naturalist observing butterflies. Oh, the glory of monarchs and zebras, sulphurs and queens…. Ta ta.”

Max slowly replaced the receiver. He had that old familiar feeling often engendered by contact with his mother, as if he'd stepped into a spiderweb and was enmeshed in silken strands. But, with almost the inevitability of automatic writing, he added to his list:

• 4. Who was Meg Heath?
  

He swung about to face his computer, reached for the mouse, chose a search engine.

 

Annie heard her own voice, but the words sounded hollow even to her. “…so we're sure”—Annie was sure—“Pamela was murdered. For Meg to die before anyone could ask her what she and Pamela did on Friday makes her death highly suspicious.”

Two hostile and angry women stared at her. Red stained Jenna's pale cheeks. Claudette's hand clung tightly to her pearl necklace.

Annie wasn't surprised that her accusations of murder—Pamela pushed overboard, Meg a victim of some kind of drug or poison—produced shock and resentment.

Jenna twirled a silver bracelet on one wrist. “Nobody said anything last night about Pamela being pushed overboard. And even if somebody did push Pamela, what would it have to do with Mother?”

Annie turned to Claudette. “Pamela came here every morning. Did she read the
Gazette
to Meg?”

Claudette slowly nodded. “Yes. What difference does that make?”

“Perhaps there was something in the Sunday paper that someone was determined to keep from Meg.” Annie wished she had Emma Clyde here to explain her theory. It sounded so unlikely that she rushed ahead.

“Or perhaps Meg had told Pamela something….” She trailed off.

Jenna and Claudette looked at Annie with similar expressions. Their faces didn't hold contempt or dismissal, they held sudden knowledge.

Annie felt the same thrill a treasure hunter experiences when a lump beneath the sand is unearthed to reveal the dark gold of a Spanish doubloon. That instant of comprehension was hidden abruptly behind carefully bland expressions. But Annie knew what she'd seen.

“Something happened to Meg this weekend.” Annie's voice was confident now. She knew she'd stumbled on the truth, a truth these women knew.

Silence held for an instant too long, then Jenna tossed her dark hair. “I'll tell you what happened. She went on that stupid mystery cruise and overdid. She got too excited.”

Once again there was a ring of truth. Something had excited Meg, but Annie knew it wasn't the mystery cruise. Jenna looked at Claudette, a wordless glance that held a meaning Annie couldn't fathom.

“Yes, she got too excited.” Jenna spoke loudly.

“That's what happened. That's all that happened.” She glared at Annie. “She died because she had a weak heart, and you're here trying to make it a mystery. That's your business, isn't it? But you aren't going to capitalize on Mother's death. I won't let it happen.” For an instant, her face was warped by sheer misery.

“Mother would hate it.”

Annie didn't back down. She doubted she'd be able to convince Billy that these women knew something important about Meg's last weekend, but she was certain she was on the right track. “Pamela and your mother. Their deaths have to be linked.”

“Meg had congestive heart failure.” Claudette was peremptory.

“I know. But don't you both want to be certain that's why she died?” Annie looked from Claudette to Jenna.

Jenna's face was stony. “Of course that's why.”

Claudette half turned to look up the stairs toward the room where Meg had lived and died. There was an odd, considering expression on her face.

Jenna's breath came in quick-drawn gasps. “I'll call the hospital. I'll stop this.” She swung away, her shoes clattering against the metal, taking fast steps, heading up the stairs.

Claudette's voice was shaky but strong. “Jenna, wait.”

Jenna stumbled to a stop, whirled to stare down at Claudette. “You don't believe her?” It was a plea for reassurance. She didn't glance toward Annie.

Claudette stretched out her hands. “Jenna, we have to find out. We have to be certain. If someone killed Meg and we didn't do anything about it, she'd be furious! You know how she hated to be cheated.”

“But why would anyone—” Jenna broke off, and once again she and Claudette exchanged wordless glances. Jenna's voice was harsh. “She got too excited and her heart gave out.” Jenna darted up the stairs, her shoes clacking on the metal steps.

Annie started after Jenna. If Jenna called Dr. Burford, Annie wanted to hear what was said. She heard Claudette coming up the stairs behind her.