No Way to Kill a Lady (3 page)

“You look lovely. In fact, don't we look good together? I'm sorry I couldn't get back when your husband was killed. What a tragedy. But at the time I was literally caught in a typhoon off the coast of Hong Kong. Will you ever forgive me? My travels always seem to take me far afield when the family needs me most.”

I could have pointed out that the extended family usually muddled through without him, but Libby closed in just then and distracted Sutherland with a voluptuous sort of snuggle that made him laugh. Emma shook his hand hard. Sutherland smiled with charm through all the pleasantries.

Then he turned to the phalanx of lawyers. “Gentlemen! Welcome to Quintain. Groatley, you old rascal. Are you still smoking cigars in all the Blackbird back rooms?”

“Not all,” Groatley said. “But a few.”

They clasped hands like two bulls locking horns. Sutherland barked, “Good man. Shall we have a look around? I don't like seeing my fair cousins standing out in the cold.”

“We were just about to go inside,” the old lawyer said peevishly, “when you made your grand entrance.”

“Let's not delay another moment. Nora?”

He took my hand and pulled me across Quintain's drawbridge and under the grand archway. The rest of the group followed. Our footsteps were muffled by piles of leaves decomposing on the stones. Overhead, the blank windows of the abandoned mansion reflected nothing.

The deputy had preceded us across the walkway and approached the imposing front entrance, fashioned, if I remembered correctly, out of a pair of wooden doors from a fourteenth-­century Sussex abbey. He fumbled through a ring of keys and tried several before the lock gave a bang and the double doors swung wide with a creak of old wood and a screech of hinges that needed oil.

Then he stood back and raised his voice. “Step carefully, everyone.”

“It's cold as a dungeon in here.” Libby hesitated in the gloomy doorway. “Are the lights burned out?”

Beside me, Sutherland said, “The electricity's probably turned off. Shall I have a look at the generator? It's just behind this wall. The utilities were never terribly trustworthy. Let's see . . .”

Using a hidden spring, Sutherland opened a door in the paneling, and then he disappeared like a magician. We heard him thumping behind the wall as the musty smell of abandonment rose up around us.

Libby wound her hand around the deputy's arm and leaned in close. “Do you ever get nervous in old houses like this?”

“It's not the houses that make me nervous, ma'am.”

A yank of a rip cord preceded the spluttering roar of a generator, and Sutherland gave a shout of victory. A moment later, he re­appeared, rubbing his hands with triumph.

“Let's give the lights a try, shall we?”

He hit a switch, and the chandelier overhead sprang to life, illuminating the cavernous entry hall with a golden light that flickered unsteadily through a thousand dusty prisms.

“Wow.” The deputy gazed upward with awe. “This is like a real haunted mansion.”

Twenty feet over our heads, tattered flags hung from the rafters—­each bearing a family crest or ancient order of something bloodthirsty. A collection of battered medieval weaponry was displayed on the walls and a dreary oil painting of a glowering Blackbird relative in a ruffled lace collar gave the impression that the Inquisition might get under way soon. A sudden flutter of wings made us all duck instinctively.

“A hard hat wouldn't be a bad idea in here,” Emma said. “That ceiling could fall down any minute.”

Despite the mess, I felt my heart lift with anticipation. Aladdin's cave might have held treasures, but none so marvelous as the beautiful things I remembered gracing Aunt Madeleine's salon.

With barely suppressed excitement, we crunched our way across the parquet floor—­it was scattered with a fine rubble of fallen plaster and other debris I didn't want to think about—­past a twin set of tarnished suits of armor that functioned as sentries. Beneath the carved oak staircase stood the elevator, doors closed.

I put my hand on the massive double doors to the salon and took a deep breath, prepared to be dazzled.

CHAPTER TWO

D
isappointment stopped me cold.

For starters, the pair of magnificent tapestries that used to hang on opposite walls of the salon were gone. Both had depicted bucolic hunting scenes—­gentlemen on horseback chasing stags through forests shot with gold threads of sunlight. But today, empty walls stared where the tapestries had once hung.

The rest of Madeleine's home once featured a decorative style my father called “early bordello.” Time was, sumptuous furniture crowded art from every imaginable era and culture. On her travels, Madeleine had frenetically picked up enough treasures to fill her own museum. I remembered two Greek statues that stared loftily across the room at each other—­one a man in a helmet and a fig leaf, the other a woman in a draped toga that bared one breast. But Madeleine often dressed them in funny costumes for holidays. Grand paintings hung on the walls, half-­naked figurines stood on tabletops, shapely candlesticks and vases of every design littered level surfaces—­along with piles of invitations to society parties. A great mirror used to reflect a grand piano big enough for a hefty chanteuse to spread out on. But today, none of it remained.

In a glass case in the center of the room, Madeleine had always displayed a jeweled Fabergé egg—­not a large one, but an intricately designed confection of enamel and gold that opened to reveal a tiny baby chick inside. Today, the case was empty, its door half open, the glass shelf coated in dust.

All the treasures were gone.

My sisters and I looked around us in astonishment.

“Where is everything?” Libby cried.

“I'll be damned,” Emma said. “Madcap Maddy was robbed.”

All the paintings had disappeared. All the
objets d'art.
Aunt Madeleine's meticulously gathered collection of wonders had evaporated.

“What do you mean?” Groatley demanded hotly. “What's missing?”

“Everything!” Heartbroken, I spun in a circle to stare at the empty walls. “Where are the paintings? The Fabergé egg? The statuary?”

“This is the way we found the place,” Groatley blustered. “You mean things have been removed?”

“Stolen,” Emma corrected.

Yes, everything had disappeared. Everything except one very memorable painting.

Over the immense fireplace hung the same tall portrait I could remember from my childhood. Its colors were a little faded, and the canvas sagged damply in its frame. But Deputy Foley shone his flashlight on the picture, and Aunt Madeleine herself sprang to life. She leaned fetchingly against a marble pillar, dressed in a blue velvet gown that slipped off one shoulder. Her hand rested on her Fabergé egg. Tendrils of her Blackbird auburn hair teased her white skin. But her half smile and knowing gaze elevated the painting to something more than simply a picture of a very pretty young woman.

Everyone stopped, arrested by the vitality that smoldered on the canvas.

“She was so beautiful,” Libby said on a sigh. “And how lucky was she to have her portrait done by Charles Maguirre?”

“Who?” Sutherland asked.

“Charles Maguirre, a French portraitist. His works are extremely valuable now. He squandered his youth with romantic carousing, but in his later years, he made a living traveling around painting portraits of society women, most of them in velvet dresses, just like this one. He must have been especially infatuated with Madeleine, don't you think? He really captured her personality.”

“Infatuated is one word for it,” Groatley harrumphed.

I admired the portrait. To me, Madeleine vibrated with intelligence—­surely a trait very difficult to capture with mere paint and canvas.

Sutherland murmured, “I had no idea this painting could be worth anything. It was just another family picture.”

“Painted by a very important artist,” Libby added.

Emma was the first to turn away from Madeleine's likeness to cast her glance around the otherwise empty salon. “So where's all her other stuff?”

“This is very irregular,” Groatley snapped. “How was I to know she abandoned things of value here? My operatives said this is exactly how they found the place when they set foot in it.”

His underlings looked uneasy. Heads were going to roll.

Deputy Foley said, “Sir, we'll start an investigation right away. Even after all this time, there will be evidence.”

Emma eyed him. “You get a new fingerprint kit for your birthday, kid?”

“Don't pick on him,” Libby warned. “You'll stifle his youthful enthusiasm.”

“Sutherland,” I said, “perhaps you'll be the one to remember everything that used to be here?”

Sutherland frowned around the salon. “I'll do my best. But actually, I spent more time with my mother than here at Quintain.”

I remembered it was his father who'd remained at Quintain with Aunt Madeleine while Sutherland went with his mother to live in Boston among her own family.

Loftily, he added, “This place was not my idea of fun.”

“Heaven forbid you not have any fun,” Groatley muttered.

We split up. The lawyers remained in the salon together—­perhaps planning a defense for their shameful neglect of the estate. Libby announced she wanted to look for the paintings she remembered in the dining room. Emma headed for the stairs, saying she needed a bathroom and since she'd never been on the upper floors, she intended to have a look around. Aunt Madeleine always had guests staying up there—­special guests that we children weren't to disturb.

I shared Emma's curiosity, but I had another exploration in mind.

It was the past that called to me. I slipped away from the others and headed for the study, where I remembered Madeleine spending most of her time. She liked a small, ladylike library off the breakfast room. Paneled with handsome shelves and featuring pink wallpaper, it also had an elaborate plaster ceiling depicting long-­tailed griffons that menaced cherubs who peeped out from behind the protection of delicately rendered seashells.

I opened the door and paused.

Although the sun glowed rather meagerly through the streaked glass of the windows and motes of dust floated in the air like moths, I could almost see Madeleine sitting tall and elegant at the delicate curved desk. She might be writing letters in her perfectly slanted hand or studying glossy catalogs from the New York auction houses, holding a magnifying glass to examine details of the photographs. On one corner of her desk she kept the bust of some poet or other—­a man with curly hair and his shirt open to his chest, although often he wore a paper hat she folded out of stationery. I remembered how she used to play her fingers idly on the statue as she spoke on her white telephone to arrange social engagements.

For all her reputation as Madcap Maddy, though, I remembered her more as a fearsome aunt who fixed me with a stern eye if I dared interrupt her. In my mind, she wore a dramatic black robe tied at the waist and loosened at the bust. She was vain about her figure—­and rightly so. She had been slim, but shapely. And of course her hands always seemed weighted down by the gigantic jeweled rings she liked to wear. Surely at least one had come from a husband, but the others I assumed she had bought for herself. She hadn't been the kind of woman to wait for anyone to give her the things she wanted.

“To what do I owe this interruption?” she asked me one morning when I lurked timidly outside her study doorway while she finished speaking on the phone. She set the receiver down sharply.

I was about ten at the time, and I had been afraid to answer her. But finally I edged into the room and held out the broken pieces of a Meissen sugar bowl. “Miss Pippi said to bring this to you.”

“Tea and crumpets?” Madeleine did not look up from the ledger book in which she was writing a notation.

“No. We were setting the table for lunch,” I whispered. “I bumped the sugar bowl onto the floor. It—­it broke. I'm very sorry.”

“Sorry?” Madeleine glanced up from her work at last and fixed me with a midnight blue gaze. “Did you break it on purpose?”

“N-­no, Aunt Madeleine.”

“Then you should apologize for your clumsiness, but not be sorry. Sorry is a foolish sort of feeling, don't you think?”

At ten, I didn't know what to think.

“It's Pippi who should be sorry,” Madeleine went on, “for conscripting children to do her work. She's supposed to be a socialist, after all. Here, drop those pieces into the trash.” She tapped the toe of her mule against the leather bucket at her feet.

“Oh, we offered to help Pippi,” I said in a rush, anxious to spare the housekeeper who shared cookies with us at her pantry table.

“We?” Madeleine repeated, sounding amused. “Who's we? You and your sisters?”

“Just Libby.” I obeyed my aunt by letting the shell-­like fragments of china fall through my fingers and into the bucket. Then I hid my hands behind my back lest they give away some other transgression she could criticize. “Libby was helping. Emma's too little.”

“I imagine your sister Libby helps by lounging on my cushions, pretending she's the Sultana of Arabia. She's like her papa. He's already drinking my liquor this morning. At least he knows how to perk up a room with conversation, I'll give him that.” She peeked into the bucket and raised her eyebrows. “What did you bring me those pieces for? Did you expect me to paste my sugar bowl back together?”

“N-­no. I just—­I needed to tell you it was my fault.”

Did her face soften? “Be careful, young lady, or you'll turn into a dreary sort of child. Do you tattle on your friends? Whine for attention?”

A little flame of pride burned brighter inside me. The worst crime of all, it seemed to me, was whining. I said, “I believe in doing the right thing.”

Aunt Madeleine laughed at that. “Well, you didn't learn that kind of behavior from your parents. Not a reliable synapse between them. I don't suppose they even keep their own checkbook, do they?”

I had seen my father frequently dashing off checks, so I said, “They do so.”

Aunt Madeleine capped her pen and firmly closed the ledger on her desk. “They have no more sense than hummingbirds, either of them.”

“They're very happy,” I said in defense of my parents. And although I already sensed our place in the world was slipping, I loved that we laughed every day in our household.

Aunt Madeleine said, “As long as they're happy, you're happy, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“You take everybody's happiness as your responsibility?”

“I—­I don't know what that means.”

Aunt Madeleine gave me a piercing look that made me want to step back from her desk and slip away. But she said, “It means you don't have to be a good little girl every minute of the day. You have choices, you know. You can break the rules once in a while without the world coming to an end.” She eyed me. Perhaps with a shade less distaste than before. “Find yourself a talent, little miss. Make it your focus. Draw power from it. In the long run, that will make the tough decisions a little easier. Take it from me.”

I couldn't quite muddle through all that, but it didn't matter. Suddenly she said, “If you want to make me happy, young lady—­you can do the right thing after I'm gone.”

“Okay.”

“You'll destroy this book for me.” She tapped her beautiful fingernails on the black ledger on her desk. “Burn it.”

I thought she was testing me. I said, “It's wrong to burn books.”

“Not this one.” She reached and seized my wrist, hard. “A woman like me should keep her business to herself so nobody goes around blowing things out of proportion later. Will you do it? Burn this when I'm gone? Promise?”

“Where are you going?”

“When I die,” she corrected sharply. “You're the one I can trust, aren't you?”

Her talk of dying frightened me. But I understood that she wanted me to stiffen my spine, to be strong. Draw power, she had said.

“Okay,” I said, squaring my shoulders.

Now, years later, the encounter swept over me like an ocean wave and left me feeling beached. Like a bottle with a message inside. Except I couldn't read the message clearly.

I caught my balance on the doorjamb. Maybe I still needed to hear her words. My own life had gone haywire lately. Lexie's legal troubles had ended with her turning away from me—­from her whole life, perhaps. When she pleaded guilty and the bailiff escorted her out of the courtroom, I hadn't expected her to be whisked away so suddenly. Her stiff neck tore my heart. There were places I couldn't go with her. I'd written daily letters to her, but had received no reply.

Remembering Madeleine's words sharpened something inside me, though. It seemed there was still something I could do—­if not for Lexie, then for Madeleine. I looked for her leather-­bound book. Today the black ledger was not on top of the desk. Nor was it inside the top drawer, which I slid open for a peek.

Quietly, I looked around for other possible hiding places. Two filing cabinets disguised as Chinese chests stood against one wall. I tried the handles. Locked. That's when I noticed yet another treasure was missing. On top of the chests, Madeleine had once chosen to keep a set of Russian nesting dolls. The largest had been a woman in a kerchief that popped open to reveal another figure and another—­each succeeding female a younger version of the last. The final, smallest doll—­a smiling infant swaddled in yellow—­had always fascinated me. Madeleine had allowed me to play with those dolls. But today they were gone.

I was tempted to try jimmying open the file cabinets in search of the black book, but I heard someone in the hallway behind me. Instinctively, I slipped out the door and down the corridor.

I poked my head into the kitchen and found it in deplorable condition—­the floor tiles were heaved up from water damage, and someone had left the remains of a dinner tray on the white marble counter. The teacup was stained yellow at the bottom, and mouse droppings were unmistakable on the plate.