The Secret Ingredient Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery (8 page)

Suddenly she was too weary to search for it any longer.

“It’s fallen under a cushion,” she said to herself. “I’ll see it better in daylight.”

Her futile search for the brooch left her feeling bereft and discouraged, however. A brooch, even one of diamond and pearls, was a small thing to lose compared to the life of a human being. But it had been her grandmother’s and had great sentimental value.

What would Grandmother Andrews have said tonight?

Genia put imaginary words in her grandmother’s mouth:
“A person must always be prepared to say good-bye.”
To things, or to people. And the older you got, the more ready you’d better be.

As she slowly climbed the stairs to her bedroom again, a terrible thought crept in: Had Stanley died instantly? Or had he lain helplessly on the beach, hoping vainly that somebody might come along to help him? And when they didn’t, did he realize he was going to die? She felt very sad to think of him dying alone and aware of what was happening to him, as the rain pelted down on his face.

      6
R
EGRETS
O
NLY

Genia slept uneasily that night, waking up several times. Each awakening was, at first, a relief and an escape from bad dreams—until she remembered what had happened to Stanley. Finally she opened her eyes and saw a little light seeping in between the edge of the curtains and the windowsill. It was the quiet that had awakened her this time, she realized: the rain had finally stopped. Looking at the bedclothes, she saw that she had twisted her sheets into braids of damp cotton percale.

“I give up.”

Genia slipped out of bed and into her robe and took her worries to the kitchen table until there was enough daylight to allow her to act on them.

She made a cup of tea and waited for the sun to rise.

At six o’clock, as pale streaks of sunlight fell across the kitchen floor, she rose and dressed in waterproof boots, slacks, and a sweater, and carried the weight of her sadness into the day. She didn’t know what she would find or see, but gut instinct propelled her out of the house and into movement, toward the scene of Stanley’s death. She told herself that she needed to see where it had happened, to convince herself that he was really gone.

The morning air was cool and moist against Genia’s skin. In her boots, she didn’t have to avoid the puddles.

The adjoining properties meandered in oddly shaped ways, creating a longer walking route than one would have expected from looking at a map. There were two ways to go, one along the dirt path that bordered the ocean, and the other along a paved road that curved through the cul-de-sac, and by which her guests had come and gone last night. The only way to get from one route to the other was to break through the woods or to climb the steep hill from the beach.

She took the ocean path, which would have been Stanley’s way.

Genia entered the coolness of the woods, where droplets fell like crystals from the leaves of the trees, and the path was muddy.
Difficult to navigate on a motorbike
, she thought.

Did he die before the rain began, or after?

It was a bumpy route, rutted with pine tree branches and tangled roots of ancient oaks that lifted the earth in spots as if underground gnomes had hunched their backs. Stanley had driven his motorbike so often along here that it should have been second nature to him to avoid the worst spots with neat little twists of his handlebars, controlling his speed and direction. To hear him tell it, he was agile as a motor-cross rider. It had made her smile to hear his boasts. Genia walked the trail frequently herself, and only today did the tapestry at her feet take on a sinister feel. She could easily imagine a motorbike thrown off balance, tumbling down the rocky incline toward the ocean. They were lucky the tide hadn’t swept his body out to sea.

Stanley was always so careful on that bike, or claimed to be
.

In all the time he’d owned that bike,
not once
, he’d boasted, had he had an accident. It had a battered appearance, but that was only because he had tended to forget to prop its kickstand up well enough, so that it was constantly falling over and banging into things.

What was different last night?
she wondered.

Was it just the weather? Had that made all the difference? Or was he preoccupied, not paying attention to where he was going, taking his skill ill-advisedly for granted? Or was he ill? Was he in a hurry, because he was late?

She hoped it wasn’t that.

From what Kevin said, it happened along here.…

She had walked several hundred yards along the path by now. At her feet she saw a maze of footprints and trampled signs of last night’s fatal accident and the recovery of the body. The police had marked the spot with plastic strips left tied to trees, and the ends of the strips now flapped lightly in the breeze. She was glad she’d put a sweater on. The air still felt unseasonably cold, and the humidity made it feel even cooler. Branches from small trees and bushes looked snapped off, smashed into the mud by large feet. The interweave of urgent footprints crisscrossed the path and led down the rocky incline to the little beach where she was accustomed to go swimming, and where it was so pebbly she always wore rubber swimming shoes to protect her feet.

Because of the yellow plastic police tape, she had to push her way into the woods and work her way around the perimeter of the scene they had marked off. “You’d think it was a crime scene,” she remarked to herself, “instead of the scene of an accident.” On the far side of the police barrier, she came back around again to the path, and stood at the edge of it, staring down.

The beach was postcard-scenic, with large boulders.

His fall must have ended at the boulders
.

She half expected to see his old red motorbike, but it wasn’t there.

The police must have carted it off, too
, she thought.

Genia stared at the footprints inside the plastic barrier, footprints that were pressed firmly into the muddy terrain. Some stood out clearly, because nobody else had stepped over them. There was one distinctive grooved tread which went in both directions along the path, although the ones heading back to her house were pressed in at the toes, as if that person had been running.
Kevin’s
, she thought those might be, made when he hurried to announce the news.

She looked down at the beach again, where the tide was coming in, and suddenly she was awash in her own high tide of memories.
Thank you for being such an important person in my husband’s life, Stanley. Thank you for becoming a good friend to me. There hadn’t been enough time. Not nearly enough
.

This moment was what had pulled her here, she realized, this deep need to see for herself where it happened and to try to determine how and why. She still didn’t know how, except to guess that his wheel hit a root or a rut, and she would probably never know why.

God, grant me the serenity
, she began to pray,
to accept what I cannot change.…

After a few moments there, she walked on toward Stanley’s house. When the muddy mix of footprints petered out, she found she was following one set alone and they went back and forth at least once.

Jason’s
, she surmised, made when she had sent him—twice—to search.

The second time she had told him to drive over, but it looked as if he had come down this way again, probably just double-checking.
And he had come upon his father, down by Stanley’s body on the beach. What a terrible shock for the boy!

Around a final bend the woods fell back, and she spotted Stanley’s familiar property in the distance. She quickened her pace and slipped into the clearing. The property looked especially imposing this morning, she thought, and then realized that she had never before seen it this early in the day. It was the light rising over it that seemed to magnify and illuminate it. What a sight it must have looked to sailors coming over the horizon in the previous century!

She felt lonely, being here without Stanley.

If there was a heaven, she hoped he was already in it, reunited with Lillian, telling St. Peter how to run things and riding his celestial motorbike from cloud to cloud. He had probably already started a committee or two. No. Genia had to smile. Not a committee. Toward the end of his life, they became Stanley’s idea of hell. A crow cut into her fantasy with a raucous, scolding cry, seeming to say this was his property now and would be until Stanley’s daughter, Nikki, arrived to take over with her husband, Randy. Oh, how Stanley hated the notion of his son-in-law living in this house!

A large stone garage was close to the pathway, its two stories housing vehicles below and a caretaker’s apartment above. That apartment should be empty, Genia knew; Stanley had planned to terminate Edward Hennessey’s employment yesterday. “And not a day too soon,” she had retorted when he told her that. Stanley had been generous to give Hennessey a chance; unfortunately the groundskeeper had proved himself unlikable and unreliable in record time. A little guiltily Genia recalled her own concern last night that Ed Hennessey might have retaliated against Stanley when the old man fired him.

The garage sat at the edge of a circular drive that swung around past Stanley’s gardens and his home. Behind the house on the ocean side there were more gardens and terraces. A little farther to the south, and separated from the house by a fish pond, was his beloved greenhouse, where her own nephew had been hired to work for the summer.

Genia wandered down the brick path that wound around the house and back toward the ocean view. She walked over to a knee-high stone wall that stood between her and a steep drop to the private pier below. At the moment there was one small motorboat tied to the pier, and she wondered whose it was. Stanley hadn’t believed in spending money on boats, which of course had made it all the more painfully ironic when Lillian died on one—

“This is private property.”

She jumped at the sound of a harsh voice behind her.

Turning around, she found that Stanley’s fired caretaker was standing only a few feet away from her, with a shotgun held loosely under his left arm and a cigarette in his other hand. Although he had the gun pointed to the ground, she felt unnerved by the sight of it and of him.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded of her.

“I could ask you the same thing, Ed Hennessey.”

She spoke sharply, unwilling to allow him to intimidate her. “You know perfectly well that I’m a friend of Mr. Parker’s,” she added for good measure. “He would be glad for me to be here.”

He was a wiry, rumpled figure, a man she didn’t know well, or care to, but about whose work habits she had heard plenty of complaints. He’d been in and out of prison several times. Stanley had frequently hired ex-convicts, considering it to be a civic duty in his small state to try to turn its troublesome citizens into better ones. Some of his attempts had been more successful than others; this one had been doomed.

“What do you mean?” he challenged her.

“Mr. Parker told me he was going to fire you yesterday.”

“Was-going- to ain’t the same as did.” A sly look came over his face, and it was only the stone wall behind her that kept Genia from stepping back a pace. “Anyway, that’s what you say.”

“That’s what he told me, Eddie.”

“Yeah, well, let’s see it in writing.”

“Do you think you can just keep on living here?”

It would be no wonder if he tried; the garage apartment must be comfortable. And since he never worked hard anyway, this was a cushy place to try to hang on.

“It’s my job.” He smirked at her and took a drag on his cigarette. “Gotta do it.”

“Mr. Parker’s family will have something to say about that.”

“What family?” He said it in a scoffing tone, as if he knew the only person he had to deal with was Nikki, Stanley’s thirty-four-year-old daughter, who was hardly an intimidating force. Her exasperated father had often described Nikki as a pushover for any man with a sad story. “They got to have somebody staying on to look after this place now the old man’s gone. Who knows more about looking after it than me?”

After swallowing the lump in her throat, Genia said, “How do you know he’s gone, Eddie?”

“I got ways to find things out.”

It sounded like braggadocio, but Genia assumed a more pedestrian explanation: The police must have told him of his employer’s death.

“You’d better pack up your things and leave, Eddie.”

He shifted the shotgun under his arm, so that the nose of it pointed ever so slightly higher, toward her. “I think you’re the one who’d better leave.” He said it mockingly, aping her words and her tone.

Genia suddenly sensed Stanley whispering in her ear:
“Don’t mess with this man. Get out of here now.”
She realized that was excellent advice. Eddie was an ex-convict, he was a man with something valuable to lose, and—overriding everything else—he was the one with the gun.

Genia swallowed her pride, put her hands into the pockets of her sweater, and began to walk with as much dignity as she could muster back in the direction by which she had come.

Behind her she heard a chuckle, and although it sounded forced, she knew he was making fun of her. She didn’t care about that; she only cared about getting back onto the path and away from him, so that his shotgun was no longer turned toward her back. Should she take the more public road, instead? That was a good idea, she decided, and she altered her direction a bit. She didn’t really fear that Eddie was going to shoot her; she sensed that he merely wanted to flex his temporary power and force her off “his” property. But she didn’t want to take the chance of underestimating his bad intentions.

Soon enough, either Nikki or her attorneys would fix his wagon, as Genia’s father used to say about people with broken attitudes. She made up her mind to call Nikki Parker Dixon the minute she got back home. The Dixons needed to know that a man Nikki’s father had intended to fire was now alone on their property, probably with access to house keys.

Her alteration in course took her around the front of the garage. As soon as it stood between her and the man at her back, she felt her muscles relax a little. Suddenly, she felt a little silly for having let him scare her like that. Surely, there was nothing to be afraid of here.

Off to her right, and hidden a bit by trees, was the greenhouse where Stanley had put Jason to work all summer. She glanced through the leaves hoping for a glimpse of it, and when she did she heard a distinct rattling noise coming from that direction. After first making sure that Eddie wasn’t following her, Genia moved a branch aside to try to see what was making the noise. It didn’t sound as if it was coming from anything natural. She couldn’t see what it was, but it continued in an on-again, off-again way, so she stepped quietly among the trees to go see for herself. A few hidden yards later, she came up to the backdoor of the greenhouse, and there she discovered the source of the rattling.