Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery (12 page)

To Judith’s surprise, Lance turned evasive. “In a way.” He paused, flexing his leg. “That heat helps. The knee feels better.

After more than ten years, you’d think it would
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stop hurting.” He stared at the towel as if he expected it to apologize.

“Did Calvin Tweeks sell out his share of Club Stud when he and Gwen broke up?’ inquired Judith, her eyes on the pancake batter.

“Yes,” replied Lance, carefully putting the towel by the sink. “He felt it wouldn’t be right for us to go on being in business together. Not family anymore. Calvin’s a very deep man.”

“Of course,” said Judith. “That’s understandable. But it’s a shame they couldn’t make a go of the marriage. Still,” she continued, remembering that Calvin Tweeks had been the son of a black Alabama sharecropper, “even in this day and age, interracial marriages can be difficult.”

“That’s true,” said a somber Lance. “They had their problems. Bound to, I guess. That’s what happens when a Pres-byterian marries a Southern Baptist.”

NINE

JUDITH WASN’T SURPRISED that Gwen arrived almost immediately after Lance went back upstairs to shower and shave.

Wearing a gaudy kimono that could have been entered in the color sweepstakes with Madame Gushenka’s veils and Gertrude’s housecoats, Gwen sailed into the kitchen like a giant beachball caught in a wind.

“Coffee, thank heavens!” exclaimed Gwen, clasping her hands together as if in prayer. “I hardly slept a wink! This is all too awful! That policeman upstairs watches me so suspiciously, I know he thinks I did it.”

“You had a motive,” Judith said offhandedly, though her eyes studied Gwen’s reaction closely enough.

The china-blue gaze grew very wide, but Gwen was more thrilled than offended. “You’ve heard? Isn’t it too unbelievable? And Ellie, besides!” She put a hand to her mouth and giggled. “Dash does get around. Don’t you just love a man with a past?”

A past, maybe, thought Judith, but not a whole damned family. Putting her personal reservations aside, she noted that Dash had confessed to Gwen as well as 86

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Ellie and the police. Judith poured coffee for both of them as they sat down at the dinette table. Cozying up to Gwen in an attempt to create an intimate kaffeeklatsch atmosphere, Judith put on her most sympathetic smile. “It must have been a shock. You didn’t know about Wanda—or Ellie—before last night, I take it?”

“Not about Ellie! Who would have guessed?” Gwen was quite agog, a willing victim of Judith’s confiding manner.

“But Wanda—well, I knew Dash had had an unhappy marriage and that she was a nurse. I don’t remember that he ever called her by name. They were together only a year or so.” She inclined her head, her face wreathed in doleful commiseration.

Through the kitchen window, Judith could see the fog nestled between the houses. It was lighter now, the sun coming up over the mountains to the east of the city. An ordinary winter morning, she reflected, but marred by extra-ordinary events at Hillside Manor.

“Dash is certainly an attractive man,” remarked Judith with what she hoped was an appreciative tone of voice. “Where did you meet him?”

Gwen took a sip of coffee and donned a coy expression.

“It was really quite touching. I was by the pool at my hotel in Mazatlán last fall. All of a sudden, this gorgeous hunk sort of sidled up to me. I could feel the animal magnetism,” she breathed, speaking more softly, with her eyes focused somewhere in the direction of Judith’s sink plunger, “and my pulses throbbed with excitement. I turned”—the china-blue eyes grew enormous—“and there he was, all bronzed skin and taut muscles! He asked if I were Guinevere Arthur.” She paused to give Judith a demure glance. “Of course, I generally prefer to remain anonymous, especially on vacation, but this, my dear, was no ordinary fan!” Gwen leaned back against the chair, her face aglow at the recollection. “He had a copy of my latest book—they’d had them for sale at the hotel gift shop—and he wanted it autographed!” She beamed at Judith, as elated as if she’d won the Nobel prize for literature.

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“How…interesting that a man would read that particular genre,” Judith remarked, choosing her words carefully.

Gwen gave Judith a knowing look. “You’d be surprised, my dear,” she drawled. “However,” Gwen continued more briskly, “in Dash’s case, he had a special reason. My last book was about a circus juggler who had been stranded in the wilderness—I called it
Without His Balls
—and Dash had known someone dear to him who’d been with the circus. So my novel had real meaning for him.” She gave a shrug of her wide shoulders. “That’s how we met. It was very romantic.”

To Judith’s logical mind, it was very calculated. Had Dash hit on Gwen because he thought she was rich, or had he a more devious motive—like Ellie? But could Dash have known that Guinevere Tweeks was related to Eleanor Carver? Judith found it unlikely, but not impossible.

Gwen was rattling on about nights under the stars, and mariachi bands, and tequila for two. Judith listened with half an ear, until Gwen said something that made her stop short:

“…friend wasn’t a juggler, actually, but a fortune-teller. Oh!”

Judith stared at Gwen, who had put a hand to her mouth again. “I never thought of it until now! He must have meant Wanda!”

“She must have moonlighted when she wasn’t being a nurse,” Judith said as she poured more coffee.

But Gwen was frowning. “No—whoever it was had traveled as part of a circus family. I gathered she was very young, a child in the beginning. In fact, now that it’s all coming back to me, it was a sad story, a little girl raised by foster parents. They went from town to town, except for the winter, and never had a real home. When she got older, she ran away. Dash joked about that, saying this was the only person he’d ever heard of who had run off to un-join the circus.” Gwen giggled. “Dash is very witty.”

And I’m Elvis, thought Judith. But to Gwen, she offered a smile that indicated she was deeply impressed. “If that
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was Wanda, I wonder what happened to her, uh, real parents.”

“Dash might know,” said Gwen, but she sounded dubious.

Judith knew what had become of Otto; she was trying to puzzle out the fate of Gloria St. Cloud when a noise at the front door caught her attention. She excused herself, got up, and hurried through the dining room and entry hall. The policeman who had been on duty in the living room was already there, opening the door to Joe Flynn and Officer Price. Behind them on the sidewalk, a contingent from the media stood in a swirl of fog, cameras and tape recorders at the ready.

“Don’t worry,” Joe said to Judith as he breezed across the threshold, “I told them that if they bothered you, I’d have them all arrested for dangling their modifiers in public.”

Judith wasn’t completely assuaged, but was so relieved to see Joe that she disregarded the media gathering under the maple tree. “I’ve got a lot to tell you,” she said under her breath, leading him out to the kitchen. “But I’m not saying a word until you tell me a few things.”

“Such as?” inquired Joe, nodding to Gwen, who was still ensconced at the dinette table.

“Later,” murmured Judith, her eyes darting in Gwen’s direction. “Coffee? Pancakes? Ham? Eggs?”

“Please. Orange juice, too. Powdered sugar instead of syrup, and the eggs aren’t over easy but—”

“—cooked in one-sixteenth of an inch of water with the lid on,” finished Judith. “The effect is the same, but the yolks don’t get broken because the eggs don’t have to be turned over.” She stood by the stove with her hand on the griddle, giving Joe a gimlet eye. “The fact is, you learned that trick from my mother.”

Leaning against the door between the kitchen and the dining room, Joe grinned sheepishly. “I’d forgotten that. For twenty-some years, I’ve claimed it as my own invention.”

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“Did you teach it to your wife?” Judith didn’t look up from basting the griddle with bacon fat.

“Get serious,” responded Joe. “The closest Herself ever came to cooking was when she set my Yves St. Laurent tie on fire.”

“Hmmm.” Judith let the subject drop. Gwen was wide-eyed, trying to make sense out of a conversation that was clearly not typical between detective and suspect.

Joe and Woodrow Price headed off to confer with the policemen who had stayed inside the house. Judith began cooking in earnest as she heard sounds overhead indicating that other guests besides Gwen and Lance were astir.

Wielding frying pans, coffee cups, juice glasses, and silverware, she wished that Renie was among them. Unfortunately, her cousin was the type of high-energy person who could go like a whirlwind and accomplish ten things in the time it would take somebody else to do two—but once she stopped and took a deep breath, she collapsed like an old umbrella.

Judith would be lucky if Renie woke up before ten.

In the next half hour, ham was fried, eggs were cooked, pancakes were flipped, and juice was poured. The coffee-pot made the rounds several times as Gwen, Lance, Harry, Dash, and Otto breakfasted around the Grover kitchen table. Dash seemed unperturbed by the night’s revelations, Harry looked as if he’d just finished up a ten-hour bilateral hip replacement, and Otto had gone from ornery to surly.

“Damnedest bunch of horse-pooky I ever heard,” he grumbled into his soft-boiled eggs. “Stuck in this old barn while these damned fool policemen screw up. None of ’em probably ever arrested anybody for anything more dangerous than jaywalking.”

“Now Daddy,” cooed Gwen, offering her father more ham,

“try to think of this as an adventure! Like one of those mystery books where everybody is trapped for the weekend in an English country mansion.”

Judith didn’t wait to hear Otto’s reply, but pushed the tea wagon out into the front parlor where Joe and Officer
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Price were waiting. Blowing an errant strand of hair from her eyes, Judith dished up pancakes for Joe, and toast for Price. She had just set out a small crock of boysenberry jam when Renie stumbled into the room, looking like she’d been run over by a Metro bus.

“Finally wake up?” Judith asked casually, well inured to her cousin’s early morning state of physical and mental wreckage. “Coffee?”

“Snrphm,” said Renie, bleary-eyed. Judith noted her sweatshirt was on backward.

“That means,” Judith translated for Joe and Price, “that she would certainly enjoy a steaming cup, with just a wee bit of sugar.” She gave her cousin a cloying smile. “Isn’t that right, little Renie?”

“Frgcu,” muttered Renie, moving toward the table.

“I won’t bother translating that one,” cooed Judith, pushing the tea wagon aside and sitting down. They were crowded around the little pedestal table: Joe, dapper in a navy blazer and gray flannel sacks; Officer Price, a stolidly reassuring presence in regulation blue; Renie, showing signs of emerging from her stupor; and Judith, seemingly composed except for the telltale shifting of her chair. “Now, gentlemen,” she said,

“tell us all or I’ll have the Rankers bring Mother home.”

Joe evinced mock horror. “If I made a threat like that, you’d charge me with police brutality. To be honest, I can’t tell you a lot because the M.E. isn’t finished yet.” He paused to swallow about half his coffee all at once. “It’s pretty screwed up. There was cyanide in Wanda’s tea and Otto’s inhaler was laced with Nembutal.”

“Jeez!” exclaimed Judith, wondering if Joe knew about the father-daughter connection. “You mean somebody wanted to get rid of both Otto and Wanda?”

“We don’t know,” Joe said, the green eyes apparently frank.

“Who else would use Otto’s inhaler but Otto? As for Wanda’s tea, it’s unlikely that she drank enough of it to kill her. In fact, the lab people figure that even if she’d
92 / Mary Daheim

downed the whole cup, it wouldn’t have been a lethal dose.”

“Any amount of cyanide sounds lethal to me,” Judith murmured. “But why two poisons?”

Joe polished off an egg and eyed Judith with a strange little smirk. “Three. Wanda died from some poison other than cyanide or Nembutal. For one thing, she didn’t use the inhaler, and again, it probably wasn’t a fatal amount. So either we’ve got a rank amateur loose, or a random poisoner.”

“Wait.” The croaking voice emanated from Renie, whose eyes had finally opened all the way. “After dinner, Otto said something about having the wrong cup. He’d ended up with the English bone china, the one that was meant for Wanda.”

Joe and Officer Price both stared at Renie. “How’d that happen?” asked Joe.

Renie and Judith exchanged fretful looks. “I took out the tea and coffee,” Renie began, then stopped short. “I had help, actually. Ellie and Mavis.”

“Ah.” Joe’s red eyebrows lifted slightly. “Now how—and when—did they both get so domestic?”

“Ellie needed some aspirin,” Judith said, striving to get the sequence of events in order. “That was after Wanda had started her routine. No, she’d joined them at that point, but was eating dessert. Ellie said she found it all very bizarre and had gotten a headache. Then she offered to take out the cups.”

“And Mavis had to remove her contacts,” Renie chimed in. “She helped serve, too.” Her brown eyes clouded over. “I can’t honestly remember whether I gave Otto and Wanda their cups or not.”

Joe was rummaging in his black leather attache case.

“Here,” he said, pulling out the diagram they’d made the night before of the table arrangement. “Otto was at the head, with Wanda on his right, then Mavis. Ellie was at his left. It would have been pretty hard for anybody else
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to get at the cups. Unless someone came into the kitchen earlier.”

“Otto and Oriana did,” said Judith, “but I’m not even sure I had the cups out then. And the extra one came from the breakfront in the dining room.”

“I’m pretty sure I gave Wanda the floral cup,” Renie muttered, more to herself than the others. “But maybe I gave it to Ellie to carry out. Or Mavis.” She mulled for almost a minute while Joe and Price studied the diagram with Judith looking over their shoulders. “Damn,” Renie admitted, “I honestly don’t remember.”