Murray took it, handing it to Juliet, his flush subsiding.
“Thank you. I'm sure I'll have questions later,” Juliet said. She was trying to keep her voice friendly, but she would have enjoyed giving Cindy Giddy a smack. Part of her annoyance had to do with the woman's simple rudeness. But a second element, she had to admit, was the sense of how far wrong she herself had gone in crafting her Giddys on the pattern of “country neighbors.” Stupid, stupid not to realize Espyville was as much a part of the young millennium as Manhattan. Probably Lord Spafford's village, Bywold-on-Tyne, was equally alive to the styles of its day (or would have been, had it existed). Regency romances might not be a high art form, but Juliet did pride herself on resisting the use of stock characters. And here she had fallen right into the trap.
In a private funk, she got back in the car, letting Murray resume the wheel. It was only fifty yards or so down the road to the next mailbox, beyond which Mrs. Caffrey's tall, rambling farmhouse showed through the leafless trees. The driveway was long, plowed but not sanded, and Murray negotiated its slippery length with care. When they got out, they both automatically locked their doors. Then, surveying the landscape around them, they laughed at themselves.
Aside from the house they had come to visit, and the Giddys' place some three hundred yards away through the leafless trees, in every direction there was nothing but empty land: silent road, trees, snow, rolling fields, a series of gnarled orchards on a procession of
round, rising hills, groves of pines behind them, and, not so far away now, the dull blue mountains. It was, as Ada had said, quite, quite beautiful.
They walked up the driveway, their booted feet squeaking on the scraped snow. The house before them looked to have been built early in the last century and left to fall apart for at least half the years since. It was white, or had been when it was painted, and was surrounded by a deep wraparound porch whose balusters were coming off in handfuls. Around this, what had doubtless been an orderly planting of hedges and flowering bushes in Ada's father's time had now grown much too high, to become a thick tangle of bramble, laden at this season with clumps of snow. Two tall brick chimneys had crumbled into ruins. The windows were dark and dirty, a few panes cracked, some boarded over. A greenhouse on the side farthest from the Giddys', most of its glass smashed in some distant epoch, was now the home of winter birds, squirrels, raccoons, and, no doubt, more exotic woodland creatures.
Juliet paused at the bottom of the steps to the porch and sighed, sad to think of Ada living alone in this faded wreck. Long ago Ada had mentioned in a letter the size of the apple farm her family had left her; Juliet could not recall the number exactly, but it was over a hundred acres. From what Ada had said of the economy in the Gloversville area, land prices must be extremely depressed. Still, Juliet would have thought she could have sold her placeâor some of it, at leastâfor enough to move into a snug house or condominium and be set for life. The fact that she hadn't Juliet took as an indication of the strength of her attachment to the place, to her long-dead parents, and, perhaps, to the vanished social world in which her family once held a meaningful place.
Sighing again, she walked up the steps and put the key into the lock in the battered door. It stuck, then turned. Mewing and the sensation of warm life surged around her ankles.
“No, kitties, no!” she exclaimed, pulling the door almost shut again for fear the cats would escape. She crept in; Murray slipped in behind her and closed the door.
But it was soon clear that Zsa-Zsa and Marilyn did not have escape in mind. They were merely curious about the visitors. One leapt onto the newel post at the bottom of a set of stairs while the other retreated toward a set of pocket doors on the left of the dank, gloomy front hall. These doors were slightly open; on the opposite side of the hall was another set pulled together and padlocked shut. The stairs, across from the front door, were covered with books, boxes and papers. The flight rose to a large door laid flat over the top of the stairwell, closing off the second floor, no doubt to save on the heating bills. Nevertheless, the hall was very cold.
Tail switching, the cat nearest the open doors glided between them. Juliet nudged one of the heavy doors open wider and followed, Murray behind her. She patted the wall by the door, found an old-fashioned, cylindrical switch, and pressed it. Dim bulbs in a wrought-iron chandelier brought the room to life. It was a sort of parlor, with four tall, narrow windows covered in thick, cheap lace and a stone fireplace, which now contained a couple of cardboard cartons. A well-worn couch upholstered in faded purple occupied one wall; across from it sat a pair of discolored pink-and-white-striped armchairs. Between these lay a dingy Persian rug. On the couch was an untidy stack of magazines, a plate containing a petrified half-sandwich, and an open box of cookies. Juliet saw what Suzy had meant about Ada's housekeeping.
But this pedestrian kind of disorder was nothing beside the parlor's other contents: a weird, dingy jumble of the most unlikely odds and ends. There was a hammock woven of rough grass and filled with antique dolls and moldering teddy bears; there was a huge, weathered ship's anchor, and a fireplace bellows painted with the cheeks of the North Wind. There was a basket the size of a small child filled with Christmas-tree ornaments and colored Easter eggs,
a carved lion from a merry-go-round with most of its metal pole intact. Presumably, most of it was loot from the auctions Ada Caffrey's second husband had loved so much.
The other notable feature of the parlor was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with hardcover books. Some had old-fashioned leather bindings stamped with gold; many were slender, suggesting poetry; but not a few were novels whose familiar, sometimes notorious, titles jumped from their dust jackets:
Tropic of Cancer, Justine, As I Lay Dying
⦠If any of these were first editions, as perhaps one or two of them might be, Juliet's inheritance would have more than sentimental value. Instinctively, she touched them, trailing her fingers along their backs as she read down the shelves: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nazim Hikmet, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, e. e. cummings.
She lingered a moment longer, then, with Murray following, entered the next room. Once a dining room, no doubt, it now contained Ada's famous, gigantic bed, its sheets and covers every which way, of course. The bed was almost the size of a crypt and, with its dark, intricately carved wood, almost as creepy. Juliet did not think she could have slept there, or made love. Against an adjacent wall, a battered art nouveau era vanity table held dozens of pots and tubes of makeup in sensational disarray. A tall dresser and two capacious mirrored wardrobes, both with doors swinging ajar, held Ada's beaded, spangled, draped, and gathered clothes. Spilling out from a set of built-in shelves between the windows was a lifetime of theatrical memorabilia: programs, signed photographs, scripts, prop daggers, swords, costumes, wigs. An unplugged space heater sat on the cold hearth of a second stone fireplace.
One of the cats rubbed herself against Juliet's blue-jeaned leg, and she leaned down to stroke it. Warmer than the parlor, and considerably warmer than the clammy front hall, the room reeked of dust, cosmetics, mildew, and, overwhelmingly, cat. A swinging door into the kitchen stood open, propped with a heavy black raven cast in iron.
The kitchen was unexpectedly small, its walls and linoleum floor both a muddy yellow. Two windows looked onto a tumbled back porch and a broad expanse of snow fringed by spindly rows of leafless fruit trees. There was a freestanding sink and a very old gas range, bare but for a battered kettle; over it, a black Kit Kat clock shifted its eyes and tail in ticking syncopation. Two old crockery bowls sat on the floor beside the sink, one filled with water, the other with dry cat food. Three more doors led off the kitchen: one to a pantry and, thence, a set of stairs into the cellar, another to the out-of-doors, the last to a bathroom. In the old-fashioned tub in this room sat a much-used litter box.
Juliet glanced into the bathroom, then turned back to the kitchen, fumbling in a pocket of her coat. Her heightened sense of smell often delivered insistent volleys of unwanted and useless information. She coped by smoking four or five nose-dulling cigarettes a day.
“Do you mind?” she asked, pausing with cigarette and lighter in her hands.
Murray made a be-my-guest gesture. On his face, Juliet saw a sympathetic reflection of the dismay her own features must be showing. The house was so like her first impressions of Ada herself: eccentric, game, derelict, rich in some ways, poor in others. She tried to imagine the place seventy-five or eighty years ago, when it had been the Case family home, with three girls in calico and pigtails shouting up and down the staircase while Mother adjured them to modulate their voices. Then the big house must have buzzed and clattered with life; now, all but the few rooms they had just passed through were closed off.
Feeling a bit shaky, Juliet took a Melmac saucer from a cupboard to use as an ashtray, then sat abruptly on the vinyl seat of a chair at the kitchen table. Shoved into one corner, this was a small table topped with ancient red Formica and banded in dented aluminum.
On it sat a ballpoint pen and a box of the yellowing stationery on which Ada had used to write to her.
Juliet took a deep drag of smoke and closed her eyes. The kitty-cat ticked and tocked. A moment later, she heard the scrape of the other chair as Murray joined her.
“It's horrible to come into the home of a murder victim,” he said. “I've always especially hated it.”
Juliet nodded, then opened her eyes. Murray was looking at her with more warmth, less amusement than usual. He put his hand on her arm.
“Does it matter that she was very old?” he said. “One thing that wasn't in the newspapers, they found on autopsy that Mrs. Caffrey had a tumor in her brain, quite a big one. Raj Krishnasami, the ME, said it apparently hadn't affected her yet, but it certainly would have set off all kinds of neurological havoc in a month or two. So whoever killed her spared her that.”
Juliet took this in. Then she said, “No, I don't think it matters.”
“Nah, not for me either.”
They sat for a while in the ticking quiet.
“It's funny,” Murray said finally. “My line of business, you'd think you'd start to feel sometimes killing is okay. Like when someone takes out a big-time drug dealer, real scum, you'd think, well, glory hallelujah. But somehow, it's not that way. A person should not kill another person. I still believe that. Not even the death penalty.” He moved his hand from her arm, put it over her free hand. His hand was warm; his skin tough and dry. “Give me a toke?”
Juliet handed him the cigarette. He took a puff and immediately exploded into coughs.
“God, tobacco is awful.”
Juliet laughed, took the cigarette back, and stubbed it out. Murray was still holding her other hand. She looked at him curiously. At the same moment, a muffled roar caught both their ears. It grew
rapidly louder, swelling to a frantic scream of pounding metal as they jumped up and rushed to the window. A gleaming streak of red was crossing the snowfield behind the house. It veered, plunged in among the bare trees, and winked over the horizon.
“Jesus.” Juliet found she had put her hand to her bosom, the picture of a Regency heroine. “What was that?”
“Snowmobile?”
“Oh, yes, Ada mentioned them. What an awful invention.”
The noise of the vehicle gradually vanished. It seemed to have taken with it whatever impulse had warmed them toward each other for those few minutes.
“I take it your friends Skelton and Crowder have already been here?” Juliet asked.
“I'm sure they have.”
“Then I'm going to look around a bit myself.”
Murray made that be-my-guest gesture again. “I'll see if I can turn up the heat,” he offered, and ambled out into the parlor.
In the bedroom, Juliet plugged in the space heater (given the state of the chimneys, it was likely the fireplaces had been unusable for years) and finally took off her coat. Her first wish was to investigate Lord Quiddenham's secret compartment. But, out of an obscure sense of decency, she took a moment beforehand to straighten out the covers on the enormous bedstead. Mrs. Caffrey had slept beneath a couple of peach-colored satin quilts worn down over three or four decades to a fineness suggesting silk. With the sensation of tidying an altar, so grand was the ornate bed, Juliet fluffed the pillows and squared the quilts, then knelt by the crowded night table.
The hiding place in the swollen, polished leg was easy to find. It had been left openâby Jeff Skelton and LaTonya Crowder, probably. It was too dim to see well, but Juliet thrust her fingers inside and groped around. The cavity was small, and perfectly empty. She was tempted to close it up but feared she would be unable to open it again.
“Found the thermostat,” Murray announced, coming back in. “By the staircase in the front hall, if you need it later. I turned it up.”
Juliet glanced up from the other side of the bed where, in the middle of a worn hooked rug, she had noticed earlier a wooden crate full of photographs. No doubt this was where Cindy Giddy had searched for a recent picture of Ada.