Slain in Schiaparelli (Vintage Clothing Mysteries Book 3) (25 page)

“Oh, Mom, leave her alone.” Penny’s voice rose from behind the couch where she was doing yoga stretches. “I know what she means. I haven’t spent time with you and Portia for years.” Joanna remembered them deep in conversation that afternoon—but fighting later on. Sisters.

“Well,
I’m
not happy we’re here,” Portia said.

“Why not?” Bette suddenly changed tacks. “I hadn’t thought about it, but Penny’s right. Besides, you’re home. Once you’re back from New York, that is.”

“I don’t think I’m going to go,” she said. “I changed my mind.”

“What?” Bette raised her eyebrows. “I thought you had an assignment there.”

“Just a business meeting. I’m canceling it. I’m going straight to L.A.” Portia tossed the background report on the coffee table. It had been making the rounds of the lodge’s guests. “Did any of you know Tony grew up in Italy?”

“Sure,” Penny said. “He learned English from watching
The Godfather
.”

“I’m happy to be here,” Marianne said solemnly. “I get to be with my grandma.” She slid off the sofa and pushed onto Bette’s lap. Bette kissed the top of her head while Sylvia watched with a wary eye.

“The press will be at us the second we’re out of here,” Portia said.

Yoga over, Penny moved to the hearth and sat down. “But they don’t know about Wilson.”

“They don’t know he’s not alive. Yet. They’ll want to see him either way. Timberline’s rooms are probably full of tabloid reporters,” Portia said.

“They’re not so bad. You get used to it after a while,” Sylvia said. “Of course, this time—”

Silence fell for another few minutes as the group mulled over the insanity that would erupt once it got out that Wilson Jack had been murdered.

“Anyway, it’s our last night here,” Sylvia whispered. “Must be.”

“Has to be,” Daniel echoed.

“Thank God,” Bette said.

***

Everyone rose from their places near the hearth’s dying embers and said goodnight. Joanna took a two-stick candelabra from the butler’s pantry with her. At least tonight they’d be able to sleep in their own beds. Daniel had switched places again with Clarke and was outside Tony’s door, but everyone else went to their rooms. The faraway sounds of doors slamming and Bette’s voice talking to someone—was it Portia?—drifted from the hall.
 

Joanna’s room was bone-chilling cold. She set the candelabra on the desk and looked around. Nothing had been disturbed since the last time she was there, but she felt uneasy. The ruins of the Schiaparelli gown still lay over the foot of the bed, her suitcase was open on the ledge under the window, and her book sat on the nightstand. All as she had left it. She peered into the bathroom. Everything looked as it did before in here, too. Occasional snowflakes pelted the window. She pulled the curtains shut. It must be all the talk about ghosts that put her on edge.

 
Quickly, she changed into her nightgown before pulling her wool sweater over its top and two pairs of socks on her feet. Too bad she didn’t have a stocking cap, or she’d wear that, too.
 

She gazed at the carnage of the Schiaparelli dress. The curator was going to flip out. The paper she’d signed had a lot of fine print on it, and she had only glanced at it before picking up her pen. Bad move, especially for an ex-law student. She might be liable for the dress’s value. Right now the contract was in her desk at home.
 

She folded the tattered gown and bundled it with its veil. It didn’t matter now if it wrinkled. God, what she’d give for a hot bath. She sat on the edge of the bed, and her hand rested on a shallow lump under the covers. A sock? She was wearing both pairs of the socks she’d brought. Maybe the sheets were lumped up.

She pulled back the wool blankets. Whatever it was, it was near the foot of the bed and squishy. Holding the candelabra in one hand, she peeled the blankets back further.
 

Gasping, she leapt back against the wall, splashing candle wax on her nightgown, but she hardly felt the burn. The bed swarmed with small black dots. Black widow spiders. Her heart raced. Someone had put a nest of black widow spiders in her bed.

She ran to the bathroom and slammed the door shut. Her stomach roiled. She lifted the lid to the toilet and heaved up the odd assortment of garnishes and canapés that had made dinner. Deadly spiders. In her bed. Someone wanted to kill her. First Wilson, then Chef Jules. Then an attempt on Bette. Now her. They knew she was getting closer to finding the murderer, and they wanted to stop her. There was nowhere for her to go, either. She couldn’t even lock herself in her room—black widows saturated her bed.

After rinsing her mouth with the tap’s ice cold water, she splashed some on her face. The candelabra had tumbled, and now only one taper was lit, pooling wax on the tile floor. She sank to the floor next to it and pressed her hands over her eyes.

 
For a long time, she sat on the cold tile floor. She thought about the family that raised her—her grandparents. They’d raised her to be independent, but they hadn’t stinted on love. Sure, she’d grown up in a mobile home on the outskirts of a long-abandoned lumber camp, but it was her grandmother’s attention to detail that nurtured Joanna’s sense of beauty. Even when cutting cucumbers for her homemade bread and butter pickles, her grandmother had sliced them in perfect ovals to fan around the inside of the jar so they looked like art deco wallpaper studded with dill seed. She sewed her own wardrobe. Mostly it was pants with elastic waist bands and loose tunics, but her grandmother had chosen vivid turquoise and mauve and tangerine fabric with swirling vines and stylized flowers. Joanna played with her spools of thread for hours, arranging and rearranging them in rainbows.

Her grandparents had been dead for years now. Her best friend, Apple, was family, she supposed. Of course Apple had her own family—and husband. Then there was Paul. Paul, who might have second thoughts about her thanks to her disaster of a mother and her loser performance as a daughter.
 

Snap out of it, Jo
. That voice. It was definitely in her head, but it could have been her grandmother.
 

Yes, she had to snap out of it. Exhausted, Joanna struggled to regain her breath. She couldn’t stay in the bathroom all night, she’d freeze to death. Plus, at some point the spiders might begin to wander, and the bathroom door would not keep them out. She had one comfort: her bathroom shared a wall with the staircase to the tower room, so it was unlikely anyone had heard her breakdown.
 

She put a hand on the doorknob, intending to tell the others the killer was still active, then withdrew it. No. The murderer had targeted her for a reason. She’d been asking a lot of questions about Reverend Tony. Tony clearly was not the murderer—he’d been under watch all evening and couldn’t have put the spider nest in her bed. Maybe the real killer thought she’d uncovered something that would clear Tony. Or even unmask him. Or her. It was Joanna he wanted. The others were safe.

She patted her face with a towel and relit the other taper on the candelabra. She had to open the door, had to get out of her bedroom. What should she do? Joanna thought of the room: Her luggage. The folded remnants of the Schiaparelli gown. The bed. She could sleep by the fire in the great room, saying it was too cold to sleep in her own room, but she’d be a sitting duck out there. The murderer would know he failed and might try again.
 

Joanna set down the candelabra and grabbed towels off the rack. She took a fortifying breath, then opened the bathroom door and strode into the room. Standing as far from the bed as she could, she rolled the towels and dropped them on the bed in the rough form of a woman sleeping on her side. The black widows quickly covered the towels, first one, then several. Careful not to touch the inside of the bed, she grasped the top of the blankets to drape them over the towels.
 

As she lowered the blankets, her fingers tickled. A black form skittered across the back of her hand. Stifling a scream, Joanna shook the black widow loose and crushed it with her slipper. Fear rolled over her in a delayed reaction, and sobs again came to her throat. No, she told herself. Keep calm. Calm and steady.
 

When she felt she could move without shaking, she blew out the candelabra. She gathered the Schiaparelli dress, her sewing kit, and the candelabra, and she slipped the box of matches into her robe pocket. She opened the door to the hall as silently as she could.
 

The hall was pitch black, but a bare pinprick of yellow light flickered from the direction of the great room. Clarke. He must have swapped places with Daniel again and was up looking at papers in the dining room. Didn’t that man ever stop working?
 

Barely breathing, she padded up the hall, grasping the candelabra like a weapon. Just before she reached the great room, she turned left to take the staircase to the tower room. It was the only place she knew no one would find her.

She would spend tonight with a dead man.
 

If the rest of the lodge was cold, the tower room was downright glacial. A blast of icy air hit her face as she eased open the door. Joanna stood just inside, listening. Except for the whistle of the wind, it was silent. She set down her bundle and struck a match. Beyond the sulfuric haze lay Wilson’s body still surrounded by flowers. The cold preserved them—and Wilson—like a walk-in refrigerator. She quickly averted her gaze. No time to be sentimental, she had work to do.
 

The box by the fireplace still held a few logs and some kindling. Good. No one would be able to hear a fire up here, and no one would be outside to see the smoke. Doing her best to ignore the corpse behind her, she rubbed her hands together to warm them, then set the kindling into a teepee as her grandfather had taught her. The fire caught quickly. She set one log on the kindling and leaned another on the side of the firebox to warm.

She shook the Schiaparelli dress toward the fire, just in case one of the spiders had crawled in. A shiver raked her neck and arms. Someone had tried to kill her and would certainly try again if they knew she was alive. As she took out her scissors, she pondered who could have put the egg sac in her bed. It could have easily been Daniel or Clarke while they were on their shift guarding Tony. All they would have had to do is take the back staircase—the one across from the storage shed on the lower level—to the second floor where the bedrooms were and slip the sac under her covers. No one in the great room would have seen them.

She stood still and listened. The wind had slowed, and for once the old lodge was silent. Where was the murderer now?
 

During the day, each of the others—Sylvia, Bette, Penny, and Portia—had gone to their rooms for one reason or another. They could have dashed down the staircase and into the storage room for the egg sac and smuggled it up. All they needed was an excuse about fetching more wood, and whoever was standing guard outside Tony’s room wouldn’t have questioned it. With a stick and a pillowcase, someone not squeamish could have knocked the sac down, carried it safely upstairs to her room, then burned the pillowcase.

The fire had caught and was bright enough now that Joanna blew out the candles. She smoothed the remains of the Schiaparelli over the hearth and, taking a deep breath, dug her shears into its fabric. The old silk was fragile, but also thick, and the scissors crunched hard into it. The dress’s fabric fell away.

As far as motives for Wilson’s murder went, nearly everyone had one. Tony’s was obvious. If Wilson alerted the police about his being on parole and out of the state, he could go back to prison.
 

As for Sylvia, her daughter stood to inherit more as long as Wilson died before he married. Sylvia’s clinic desperately needed the money, and Wilson hadn’t agreed to lend it to her. Maybe a legal loophole allowed her to borrow from Marianne’s inheritance. Or maybe she simply killed Wilson out of anger—or jealousy.
 

Daniel might harbor a grudge against Wilson for losing his fingers and kicking him out of the band. Plus, he obviously had Sylvia’s interests at heart.
 

What about Penny and her family? Bette seemed to think Penny’s marriage to an ex-rocker would be a disaster. Would she kill to save her daughter’s future? Unlikely. She might kill to make it to her next Botox appointment, but it was hard to imagine anyone else’s life being more important to her than her own. Plus, she’d been attacked. Joanna couldn’t figure out what motive Portia would have, either, but she was definitely hiding something.
 

Now the dress was cut into thirteen squares, some off-white, and some streaked with Dali’s slashed-flesh design. Joanna stacked them and reached for her sewing kit. The scent of woodsmoke mingled with the lilies surrounding Wilson’s bed. Beyond the orange glow of the fire, the room retreated into darkness. She squinted toward the door and the closet door where the secret staircase led up before turning back toward the hearth.

She threaded a needle with red coat thread and pierced a silk square.

That left Clarke. As Wilson’s business manager, he’d lost a good client. Once the estate was settled, that is. What motive could he have for killing Wilson? He seemed fiercely protective of Wilson. He might have locked the chef outside as revenge for putting seafood in Wilson’s sandwich.

After twenty minutes’ work, she’d stitched “S O S Redd Lodge” over one Schiaparelli silk square. She stretched her fingers and picked up the next square.

The chef had died, too. Presumably, no one knew him before he came to cater the wedding. He had to have been killed for what he saw and threatened to tell. Incensed that he was blamed for a death, he might have waved the clam dip container in someone’s face and ended up dead for his trouble. Now the container was gone.
 

She clipped a thread. Sewing scissors still in hand, she looked over her shoulder once more toward the door. The fireplace’s light, casting a moving orange wash against the wall, barely illuminated that far. She was alone.