Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow (20 page)

As I got farther from the dining room I lost the sounds of talk and laughter. It was very quiet at the far end of the hall. And then when I came out of the third room, a small one with no furniture except a piano and some bookshelves, I heard a voice. The last door stood open, and I headed for it.

Before I got there I stopped in my tracks, and a chill went down my backbone. It wasn’t Archie talking in that room. It was Edgar Stone.

“A man named Peter Tyler is outside the door threatening me with a knife—He’ll kill me if he gets—”

The harsh, almost whispering voice broke off, then repeated, a little lower, “He’ll kill me if he gets through—if he gets through the door.” It went slightly higher. “He’ll kill me if he gets through the door.”

I stepped slowly toward the room. Then Cyril Aubrey spoke from within it. “No, damn it,” he said, as if to himself. “Needs more force.” And then Edgar again, with increased intensity: “He’ll
kill
me if he gets through the door!”

I stepped into the room. It was an oak-paneled study, with an elaborately carved desk, an empty leather swivel chair and side chair, and a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A wheeled wooden ladder was fixed to a track on the ceiling, slanted toward the books. On the topmost rung I saw my grandson standing precariously, gazing at a small black radio-tape player a lot like the one Quin had given him, right in front of his nose on the highest bookshelf. He was waiting for it to do its magic trick again, but the tape must have run out.

My legs began to shake. I knew in that instant what had happened. Our affable host, my son-in-law’s greatest booster, had practiced the murder victim’s voice until he got it perfect. Then he had killed him, called Peter from the murder scene to lure him there, and made the 999 call that had laid the blame on Peter. Which meant he must have killed Perdita as well—God alone knew why! I had been right about that letter after all.

“Archie,” I said as quietly as possible, “stay there till I bring you and the tape player down.”

He jumped, startled, and tried to turn around. I could see him starting to lose his balance.

“Wait, wait,” I cried, running toward the ladder, “don’t move till I get you!”

Before I could reach the ladder he fell, with a little yip of surprise. I tried instinctively to catch him, so of course he landed right on top of me. I was thrown to the floor on my back, all the breath knocked out of my body. Archie, his fall conveniently cushioned, was immediately up and jumping around me, saying something I couldn’t hear through the ringing in my ears. I lay there like a beached whale, gasping for air, wondering what I had broken and how long it would be before Cyril Aubrey walked in.

After a while my hearing started to come back. Archie was yelling, “No, no, bad Nana!” and pulling on my arm with a worried face. All right, that arm wasn’t broken, because he wasn’t hurting me. Gingerly, I felt the other one, then my neck and my shoulders. Everything I could reach without sitting up felt okay, but I was still pulling in air as loudly as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and every breath hurt my chest horribly.

I gathered all my courage and started to push myself up, when I heard footsteps in the hall. Oh, God, I thought, he would know what had happened. I could see the tape player sitting askew on the shelf, not straight as it had been. I was scrabbling madly at the carpet to get to a sitting position when a man’s voice said, “Hello-ello! Having a problem?”

I looked around and saw the Aubreys’ two tall blond sons standing in the doorway, wearing bemused smiles. Relief flooded through me.

“Taypay,” Archie explained to them. “Fa-down.”

“What’s that, young fellow-me-lad?” said the younger of them. “Fall down? I should say she did.”

He came over and offered me his hand. I rose slowly, still gasping and speechless, but free of major pain. He got me into a nearby chair and offered to fetch a glass of water. I could only shake my head. All I wanted was to get myself and the baby out of that room before Cyril Aubrey found us. I pointed toward the door and looked up at his son pleadingly.

He had such a nice face, concerned and sensitive. What suffering was I going to lay on him when I told the police what I now knew about his father? I wondered sadly.

I stood up, rather wobbly, and leaning on the young man’s arm—Eric, I suddenly remembered—I limped toward the door.

The one who remained nameless to me herded Archie along, laughing, while we made our slow way toward the dining room. By the time I could hear the talk and laughter, I had started to breathe more normally and was able to whisper, “Thank you.”

“Not at all,” he answered cheerfully. I wanted to ask him not to tell anyone where he’d found us but knew I couldn’t get out that many words.

The party looked up in amazement as we came in, and Emily cried, “Mother, what have you done to yourself this time?” as Archie climbed into her lap.

“Taypay!” he kept trying to explain.

“Playing with the baby,” I wheezed.

“We found them on the floor in Dad’s study,” Eric added helpfully. “It looked as if she’d taken a fall, not surprising when you watch this young tearaway in operation.”

I kept my eyes away from Cyril but I could feel his on me, as the others exclaimed and offered me advice. Emily insisted on my sitting down, and Quin took Janet’s untouched glass of water and, leaning across the table, set it in front of me while she watched in dumb misery.

What was I to do? I couldn’t very well stand up, point down the table at Cyril, and shout,
“J’accuse!”
There he sat, quoting yet another obscure playwright, his wife smiling fondly at him, his sons teasing him affectionately, Dorothy nodding approvingly at a point he’d made, none of them imagining he was a murderer.

Bookish, rumpled, kindly Cyril Aubrey—how could he be capable of such things? And
why
would he kill two people who had been his friends for decades?

I was starting to feel a persistent ache in my back now, and I was slightly sick besides, more from the knowledge I was holding inside than from the fall. I pulled myself up with the help of the chair back and said, “I’m sorry, I think I really must go home and rest.”

There was a general murmur of concern, while Peter and Emily insisted I come to their place until I felt better. I refused, but evidently I had started a trend, because everyone started getting up and gathering belongings together. Cyril and Ann of course protested politely, but we all moved gradually toward the front door, Emily and Peter still trying to convince me I wasn’t fit to drive.

I kissed them good-bye at the gate. Archie was still worried about me. He kept repeating, “Fa-down!” and “Ow!” as we went out into the street. I looked back to see the Aubreys standing in the doorway, waving to their departing guests, holding hands. I wished I could go back and unlearn what I had learned.

I was just opening my car door when I heard Quin’s voice at my shoulder. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he murmured huskily.

I turned and looked up at him.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got to talk to you too. I’ve got something really important to tell you.”

“Have you?” His eyes lighted. “That’s good. Not right now, though. Meet me in an hour or so, after I explain—Should I come to your house?”

I balked at the idea of letting him into my little sanctuary. Somehow I knew Rowan Cottage would never be the same once he’d stepped over the threshold.

“No,” I said. “Someplace else. There’s a pub, the Eagle and Child, on St. Giles, just a little north of your hotel. I’ll meet you there.”

“Right. I’ll see you in an hour.”

He turned and went to his car. I saw Janet sitting huddled in the front seat, hugging herself. I certainly felt no pity for her, but I did feel a frisson of fear, realizing what I had just agreed to. I had to tell him about my discovery in the study, I had to get his help, but I knew this meeting was going to decide things between us as well. I was going to have to choose between Far Wychwood and New York, between solitude and companionship, and I was going to have to do it in only one hour.

…what’s past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.

Shakespeare,
The Tempest

P
arking in Oxford is a royal pain. The closest space I could find to the Bird and Baby was on Keble Road, several hundred yards away. I had to feed the meter, a big black box on a post that took the money for four or five parked cars. I put in enough coins for an hour—surely we’d be on our way to Aubrey’s house by then—pressed a button, and put the resulting ticket on the dashboard so it showed through my windshield.

Sore all over by now, and tense as a strummed string, I walked toward the pub through the grounds of Keble College, a redbrick intruder in the golden stone of Oxford. I’d always liked the scallops and stripes and checkerboards of white and yellow brick that enliven its facades, and the happy superfluity of Victorian Gothic turrets and gables.

It was still more than half an hour until I had to meet Quin. I didn’t want to sit conspicuously alone in the pub that long, but my body insisted on sitting somewhere, so I crossed the sunken quad to the college chapel. I’d always got a kick out of its overdecorated interior, especially the mosaics of biblical events going around the walls like a pre-Raphaelite comic strip. There was nobody else in the vast stone interior. I sank wearily into a pew, my stomach churning with apprehension. Maybe I could just sit here for a while until Quin gave up on me and went away. If I did, and if I took the phone off the hook tonight, the whole crisis would be over because he would be gone tomorrow, back to America with Janet. She’d be cheerful again in her own environment, and he’d sink back into his world of affluence and adoration and forget this temporary madness.

How had I let it happen? Was I really so weak that a few caring words, a shared adventure, a single kiss could win me back? I hadn’t been lonely before he came, I hadn’t been afraid of the future or hungry for affection. I’d shed the skin that had loved his touch and grown a new, harder one. At least, I’d thought I had.

A mosaic God the Father glared down at me from above the altar, a bearded old man with a stern, impassive face, a sword sort of floating on his shoulder and one hand held up, with a star in the palm. I half wished I were one of those people who believed you could get your problems solved by talking to someone you couldn’t see. When I was a child in Cincinnati, my mother took me and my brothers to church every Sunday, and I obediently repeated the magic formulas she’d taught me, picturing the man with the beard listening sympathetically, even though I never got the pony. But when she died despite my frantic repetition of every Episcopal mantra I knew, my faith began to slip away. My father wasn’t a churchgoer, so the boys and I gradually dropped it, and I’d been a skeptic ever since.

I stared back at the mosaic face scowling down in disapproval, as if I’d somehow let God the Father down. But
he
was the one who’d decreed my mother should have a fatal stroke at thirty-three.

Still, I liked churches, the quiet, the smell of candle wax and flowers, the way nobody bothers you. A church is a great place to get your thoughts together. I decided to rest there for a while, and then just go home. I didn’t
have
to talk to Quin, after all. I didn’t have to put myself through all this misery. It would serve him right to be stood up.

As soon as I’d made the decision, I relaxed. No longer obsessed by the prospect of meeting him, my thoughts shot back to my other problem, Cyril Aubrey. When I gave John Bennett that tape player he would have no doubt who the killer was. But I had to get hold of it first. Could I risk breaking into that house alone? I thought I’d seen Aubrey throw me a startled look when his son said I’d been in his study. Had he remembered the tape was still there, even though he had put it on such a high shelf, where no one would be expected to climb? Or had he just left it there and forgotten it? It was kind of amazing that he’d held on to something so incriminating. Anyway, I had to get back there and grab it while he was out boating. I had to do it now, as soon as possible, and, I admitted reluctantly, I was going to need help. Quin hadn’t been willing to let me go into danger alone before. He was the only person I was sure would go with me. Suddenly I was irritated with myself, hiding there like a coward, when I needed to take control of this situation.

All right, I’d go to the Eagle and Child, not to discuss this thing that had happened between us, but to tell him what I’d found and demand his help. I would be very firm in squelching any talk about our future.

I stood up, not without a groan, and hurried out of the chapel before I could change my mind yet again.

“Kit—over here.”

I heard his voice as I passed the two rooms just inside the front door of the Eagle and Child, and when I looked to the right, behind me, I saw him sitting on the bench that ran along the front wall of that room. He was leaning on a low, round table, holding his pipe. When I went in, he half-rose, then sat down again as I took the other bench, at one side of the table. He hit the pipe bowl a few times against an ash tray to empty it. The sound flashed me back to New York, to nights reading in bed, knowing the next sound after that would be the click of the living room light going off, then his footsteps coming down the hall to join me.

The room was small and intimate, and we had it to ourselves. There was one casement window, behind Quin on the front wall, the only other light two old-fashioned wall lamps, high up, casting yellow circles on the embossed ceiling. The walls were dark green above almost black wainscoting, interrupted on the opposite side by a little fireplace.

“Quin, something really important has happened,” I began quickly.

“I know,” he answered. “Something neither of us expected.”

“You see, this morning I was—”

“No,” he said. “Let me tell you first. Then you can tell me.”

I really had meant to be very firm, but sitting there, looking at his face and hearing his voice, was totally different from sitting in Keble Chapel making theoretical plans. Now I didn’t want to stop him.

“I came to England to offer you any help you needed, to try to get us acting like adults again. That’s the real reason I came, Kit, not just for a visit with Emily. It was a hell of a job to get Janet to let me come, and it turns out she was right about everything. Emily didn’t want her around, she knew that would happen, and when I saw you again—”

“Take your order, then?” a chipper young man in an apron demanded, leaning in the door.

Quin scowled at him and said shortly, “Lager.”

“Pint, sir?” the waiter asked, and Quin nodded, blowing out an angry sigh. “And the lady?”

“What do you have that’s not alcoholic?” I asked him. “I need my wits about me.”

“What about a nice squash?”

“Squash?” I pictured a glass of liquefied zucchini, and it must have shown in my expression, because the waiter laughed.

“Quite tasty, actually, lot like a lemonade.”

“For God’s sake, bring her a squash!” Quin exploded. Obviously he was at least as tightly wound as I was.

When the waiter had gone I said tartly, “I didn’t come to hear about
her
!”

“You’re wrong about her, you know. It’s not an act, she really loves me.”

I swallowed the question I wanted to ask, the one about his feelings for her, and took refuge in sarcasm.

“ ‘Whatever love means,’ ” I quoted. “Prince Charles, announcement of engagement.”

“I don’t want to get into one of these go-arounds with you about what things ‘mean’! We’ve already agreed I’m no good at that stuff.” He leaned toward me, his blue eyes full of intensity. “Listen, I lied just now. It’s not true I only wanted to get on a more adult footing with you. I told myself that was it, but—I missed you, Kit. I worried about you.”

He leaned back, releasing his tension in another of his noisy sighs as the waiter set our drinks down. I took a sip of my lemony soda, he took a long swallow of his beer, and we sat in silence for a few moments. Outside, a sidewalk grate clanked periodically as passersby stepped on it. Emily had told me a few days before he’d said he missed me. It had made me angry then, but it didn’t now.

Finally he said, with a touch of impatience, “So didn’t you miss me at all?”

“Back in New York I thought I’d go crazy from missing you. And after I got here—yes, I thought about you, and our past, a whole lot more than I’d expected to. I’d thought once I was far away it would be easy to forget, but it wasn’t. It took me weeks to cure myself of thinking about you, and now—Oh, it’s not fair! What do you
want
, Quin? Are you planning to move all your women into a big house together, like BrighamYoung?”

“No,” he said, smiling for the first time. “One at a time’s enough to deal with.”

He reached across the table and took my hand, and I felt the same shock in the pit of my stomach as when he’d held and kissed me.

“Now,” he said softly, “you tell me.”

I took a deep breath.

“I want you to help me break into Cyril Aubrey’s house.”

He drew back and dropped my hand, looking stunned. “To do
what
?”

“Okay, I’ll explain,” I hurried on. “This morning, when I went to look for Archie, I found this tape recorder in the study, and the tape was of Aubrey practicing Edgar’s voice saying what he said on the 999 tape. You know, that Peter was about to kill him? So Cyril Aubrey made that call! Which means he killed Edgar, and he must have killed Perdita too, because I know she didn’t commit suicide from the way the
I
in her note was written, so we’ve got to get that tape and take it to the police.” I stopped to get my breath.

He just stared at me for another minute.

Then his face flushed and he burst out, “What is this? I came here to talk about
us,
you and me, whether we can start over—not about another cockamamie murder theory you’ve cooked up!”

I started to respond angrily too, then forced myself to quiet down, to be conciliatory.

“Just help me, Quin, the way you did before, and
then
we’ll talk about us. I know we need to, but this has to be done right away, before he—”

“You’re going off half-cocked again, the way you’ve done as long as I’ve known you! Look.” He leaned across the table again, gazing at me earnestly. “Peter’s free, Emily’s got him back, so she’s happy again, and that’s all I ever cared about. It’s over. Perdita Stone killed her husband and herself, nice neat package, all wrapped up and bought by everybody. Forget about it.”

“No, you don’t understand—it’s unjust to Perdita to leave it like this. If Cyril Aubrey really killed them he has to bear the responsibility!”

“I don’t give a damn about that. It’s better for everybody if a dead woman gets the blame.
If
Aubrey did it he had a rational motive, he’s not some serial killer. It’d be painful for a lot of people if he went down, and a big black eye for the police, which I can tell you they wouldn’t appreciate.
You
don’t understand, baby—nobody cares who really killed the Stones.”

I drew back, as if to avoid touching a live wire laid across the table between us.

“
I
care,” I almost whispered.

He leaned back with an exasperated sigh. “God, I’d forgotten that absolutism, that right-and-wrong garbage you were always full of. Like you never got over what they told you in Sunday school. Used to drive me crazy.”

I let silence fall between us for a few minutes. Clank.

“Yes, I remember,” I said slowly.

“There’s no absolute right and wrong, Kit. Never was, never will be, and people who believe there is don’t make it to the top—not in the real world.”

“What about justice?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “Justice is an effect of the wallet. If you can afford Quin Freeman, you’ll probably walk, even if you’re the guiltiest guy alive. If you have to settle for the public defender you’ll probably go down, though you’re innocent as a newborn baby.”

“That used to bother you.”

“I used to be a kid. I grew up.”

I saw in my mind’s eye the shaggy young fellow I’d first met in front of the Capitol Building, his eyes shining with conviction. I remembered him shouting “Sellouts!” at some of the most powerful figures in the government, and I heard him telling me in a Greenwich Village coffeeshop about the poor and ignorant people trapped in the legal system who someday would not need to be afraid, because of him.

“You know,” I said, “that day on the train, you said when Emily left there wasn’t much between us anymore. I didn’t see it then, but now I do. It was because over the years you’d ‘grown up,’ if that’s what you want to call it, and I hadn’t.” A strange new feeling was taking over inside me, a sort of lightness, as if, minute by minute, something heavy was being lifted off my shoulders. “I’m sixty years old, and I haven’t grown up yet.”

A puzzled anger kindled in his eyes. “Yeah, don’t I know it! And if I hadn’t been there to take care of you, to rein you in when you’d go haring off on one of your impulses, how much trouble would you have gotten yourself into?”

“Probably about as much as I’ve been getting into since you left.” Now there was a bubble of laughter bouncing around in my chest, just waiting to burst.