“Terry?” said Felicia, startling all of us. “Nattie did something to Terry?”
“To Terry, and to Winston,” I continued. “He was a threat to the family business—or should I say the family plot? You all were afraid that he’d realize what was going on and call the feds on you. His family ties were shredded when he was growing up here.”
“Balderdash!” Charles thundered. His face turned red, and bubbles accumulated at the corners of his mouth. “Winston Martinson was a sinner in the eyes of an angry God! He had no business coming back here to taunt us with his—his so-called friend. Terry was nothing more than a prostitute!”
Felicia dumped her tea on his head. “Why don’t you just shut up for once in your life? Everybody’s sick of listening to your bigoted tirades.”
“Quiet!” he said, trembling so violently that I had hopes he might levitate.
Her response was terse yet colorful and does not bear repeating. It was adequate to reduce him to rumbling, thus ruining my pipe dream.
Margaret Louise poured a dollop from a flask into her teacup. “Can you back up those accusations, dear?”
“I have all the proof I need,” I said levelly. “I thought all of you needed to hear the truth.”
Nattie laughed. “My herbs have gone to your head, Claire. I would never harm Winston or Terry. Exactly what proof do you have?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said, “tell us.”
The spacious kitchen was getting smaller. The air was laden with unspoken threats. It occurred to me that I might be making my third egregious error of the day. I studied their faces for any hint that I had an ally. Felicia, possibly, I thought, although I couldn’t count on her to grab a skillet and defend me. I was getting increasingly uncomfortable, but I willed myself not to blink as they watched me. Whatever might happen, I vowed, I would not sweat.
17
I crossed my arms. “How long have you been smuggling cigarettes from Missouri? Years, I suppose. The state taxes there are much lower than the ones in Arkansas. The markup is more than eighteen dollars a carton. I don’t know how many cartons are in a case, but there would be a nice profit for you as well as for the vendors. If you happen to come across a truck with a load of untaxed cigarettes, somewhere in the vicinity of Cuba, the profit’s higher. I don’t believe that loud thumping noise comes from a washing machine or dryer. You have some sort of machine in the basement that puts on counterfeit tax stamps.”
Felicia was the only one who looked shocked. “Is this true?”
“No way,” Ethan said. “You’re off your meds.”
I waggled my finger at him. “I was going to get around to you later, but now’s as good a time as any. You were having an affair with Angela Delmond.” I paused to make sure I had everyone’s attention. “You two met at Winston’s house whenever you could. She had to be cautious because of the divorce. I’d like to think that Pandora was home while you were carrying on with Angela. You do have a responsibility to your children.” Who might burn the house down, left unattended. “It was convenient, wasn’t it, Ethan?”
Charles leaped to his feet, his fist raised. “Blasphemy, Mrs. Malloy! Husbands and wives do not violate the sanctity of their vows! Furthermore, Ethan is a direct descendant of Colonel Moses Ambrose Hollow. He would never sully the family’s name!”
This time Felicia bonked him on the head with a saucer. “If you don’t shut your mouth and sit down, the conversation’s going to get a lot more interesting. I’m not the one who has an account at Victoria’s Secret.”
Her unspoken threat was effective. Charles plopped down like a sack of turnips and gazed at the floor.
Ethan was not so easily cowed. “You have no evidence. You need to be restrained in a padded room until you’re coherent. As Uncle Charles said, I’m a married man with a family.”
“You’re right about the evidence,” I said, “but the police are thorough. Are you going to be able to explain why your fingerprints are on the bedside table? There might be DNA in the silk sheets.” I politely disregarded his expletive. “It took me a while to realize that you had to be Angela’s lover. You saw her SUV turn on the driveway to Winston’s house, and you were worried. You made a call to Angela on her cell, probably demanding an explanation or threatening to expose the affair, and told her to meet you at your house immediately. She must have thought she could deal with you and be back at the house in less than five minutes. Otherwise, she would have fetched me and coughed up a plausible reason for us to leave.”
“Ethan?” Margaret Louise said. “Is this true?”
He tried to stare me down, but he was woefully inept. “So we were sleeping together. No big deal. Pandora insists that we adhere to the Kama Sutra. It’s fine if you’re twenty years old, but I work all day at the nursery, lifting heavy plants and weeding on my hands and knees. It was nice not to have to contort myself like a three-legged pretzel.”
Charles’s ears quivered, but he kept his head lowered. Felicia covered her mouth to keep from laughing. Margaret Louise felt no such restraints. Only Nattie watched somberly from her position near the sink.
“If I may continue,” I said, “Ethan lured Angela away from the house and bashed her with a shovel. Her SUV was put on a truck and abandoned in Maxwell County. Her body was stashed in the outbuilding with the cooling unit. When I started asking questions, Ethan buried her in the pot patch. Did you hope that you could implicate Pandora?”
Ethan was too stunned to offer a rebuttal. I allowed him to squirm while I listened for cars pulling up outside. I heard a whip-poor-will and a tree frog. I furtively glanced at my watch. Jorgeson should have arrived ten minutes earlier. Nattie’s unblinking stare unnerved me. I had no choice but to continue.
Meeting her stare, I said, “Winston must have confided his suspicions to you. You lured him to the stream. Everything was fine until you and Ethan found out about the deed that gave Terry the right of survivorship. Maybe Winston had told you about his concerns, or maybe not. Terry was a threat, because he was going to sell the house to the wife of the deputy chief.” I was loath to delegate myself to a subsidiary menace, but I had to admit it made for a better story. A story that I needed to keep unraveling until the police arrived.
Nattie raised her eyebrows. “I do think that I should call an ambulance. You’re making no sense, Claire.”
“Moses rarely made sense, did he? You told me several times to ignore his garrulous ramblings, and most of the time I did. He did, however, have lucid moments. When Terry was on the kitchen floor, writhing from the onset of the poison, I saw Moses on the terrace. I asked him later why he’d been there, and he told me that he wanted to have a word with Terry. He must have known that Terry had arrived the previous night. I could offer a hypothesis of what he wanted to tell Terry, but it doesn’t really matter. It was about nine o’clock at night when Terry got to the house, and I showed up soon after that. Moses wandered home to the Old Tavern to have his milk and cookies before bedtime. The only person with whom he might have shared his news was his devoted caretaker.”
Felicia, Charles, and Margaret Louise were watching with perplexed expressions. Rather than confront Nattie, I looked at them. “Nattie had access to the house, as all of you did. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but she’s the only one with the knowledge to poison the vodka with an elusive substance. Earlier in the week, Lieutenant Jorgeson told me that the lab had ruled out the garden-variety poisons. He meant arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide, things like that. When more testing is done, I believe it will actually be something from the garden. You were digging up daffodil bulbs this afternoon, Nattie. Were some slivers destined for my next cup of tea?”
Margaret Louise stood up. “I can’t listen to this any longer. If what Claire said is true, you should be ashamed of yourself, Nattie!” She left through the kitchen door.
Nattie shrugged. “I would never poison your tea, Claire. If you’d ask for a vodka and tonic, well, I can’t make any promises. It’s not as easy as you think. One has to grate the bulbs, let the pulp diffuse in vodka for weeks, and then meticulously strain it. I keep a variety of my herbal concoctions in a cabinet in the garden shed. One never knows when one might need to … modify the situation. Terry would have lived a long and happy life if he’d stayed away. It wasn’t my fault that he popped up like a ragweed stalk. That was
your
fault, Claire.”
I had a confession, but I had no idea what to do with it. Felicia was gaping at Nattie, and Charles was too stunned to speak. Ethan appeared to be numb. I began to feel rather idiotic, having gone through the steps for a grand denouement that should have resulted in something more dramatic. I was out of accusations. It seemed prudent to stall.
“What did you put in my tea, Nattie?”
“Calendula and a few sprigs of catnip. The proper dosage is soporific. A little too much is fatal. I wanted to find out what you knew and if you’d said anything before”—she shrugged—“I adjusted the dosage.”
“When I met you, I hoped we could be friends,” I said with a trace of umbrage. “You’re not like these people.”
She took a step toward me. “Nevertheless, I am a Hollow. That’s why I cannot allow you to repeat these accusations to anyone.”
“It’s too late. The police are on the way.”
“Are they? I haven’t heard anything outside.” Her hand was behind her back as she continued to move toward me.
“Don’t make things worse,” I warned her as I inched backward, feeling for the doorknob.
“What’s wrong with you, Nattie?” Felicia asked suddenly. “Is what she said true? You killed Winston? How could you?”
Nattie’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I didn’t mean for him to die. I’ve loved him since I was fourteen. He loved me, too, although he was too awkward to show it. We read poetry together next to the stream. I could hear the emotion in his voice, the yearning to embrace me with all his heart. When he tried to explain why he couldn’t, I could see the confusion on his face. All I could do was wait for him to cast away his tangled fantasy and come home to me.”
“He was gay,” I said.
“No, he wasn’t! He was confused, that’s all. That’s why I waited twenty years for him. He loved me, and I knew he would come home.” Her voice grew raspy. “Then when he did, he brought Terry with him. Do you know why he did it? To get back at the family! He wanted”—she turned to face Charles—“to rub their faces in the dirt. Don’t you understand that it was a ruse? He wanted revenge.”
“He was a pervert,” Charles croaked.
Her eyes blazing, Nattie slapped his face. “How dare you! Winston was pretending, that’s all. You have no right to speak ill of him. He was a better man than you. That’s why you banished him from Hollow Valley. But he came back, didn’t he? He laughed at you, he mocked you. You were an object of his contempt. He saw through your pretenses. He knew that you beat Esther until you drove her away.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Winston never told lies, you hypocrite!”
I decided to intervene before things got out of hand. “Was he lying when he told you that he loved Terry?”
Nattie turned on me. “Winston loved me, but he couldn’t admit it. I tried so hard to explain it to him that dreadful day. I got on my knees and begged him to be honest. Instead, he sighed and stood up.”
“Then you pushed him,” I said softly.
“I tried to grab his arm to keep him from walking away. He jerked back and slipped in the mud. I never meant to hurt him, Claire.”
“Then who put the fishing gear and wine bottles on the bank?” asked Felicia.
She rubbed her temples. “I don’t remember. Maybe I did.”
“Moses probably contributed the wine bottles,” I said. “I suspect he saw the whole thing from his vantage point in the orchard and wandered down later to get a better look. That’s why he had to die.”
Nattie shook her head. “No, he was old and his time had come. He deserved the dignity of dying peacefully in his own bed. I took him cookies and a nice glass of milk. I was a little worried the milk might taste funny because of the poppy sap, but he drank it and fell asleep.”
Ethan came out of his stupor and banged a fist on the table. “You put Moses down like an old dog? How could you, Nattie?”
“He
was
an old dog—incontinent, slobbery, smelly. How many times did you offer to take him to the doctor or clean up his puke? I couldn’t let him go around blabbing about what he knew.”
“Then you should have confined him.”
“Where? In your guest bedroom? Margaret Louise didn’t offer, nor did Charles and Felicia. Should I have locked him in the attic?”
Ethan was nonplussed. “Well, it would have been better than poisoning him.”
“He was the patriarch,” harrumphed Charles.
Felicia’s smile was wicked. “Will you be wearing a red negligee to your coronation, Charles?”
“What is wrong with you?” he demanded. “Have you lost your mind?”
“No, I’ve found my spirit.”
I was all for them getting into an extended argument. Unfortunately, Nattie did not join in the fun. She took another step in my direction. I took a step backward, wondering where the hell the door was. I was convinced that whatever she was holding behind her back was not a benign tea bag. I shoved Ethan out of his chair. He was so startled that he sprawled on the floor. Nattie smiled at me as she stepped over his body.
“I don’t believe that the police are coming,” she said. “Perhaps you’re not as smart as you think you are, Claire.”
“There are witnesses. You aren’t going to get away with any more violence, Nattie.” Somehow I’d misgauged the location of the door. I bumped against the stone fireplace. “The police are coming. You need to give up, Nattie.”
“Do I?” she purred, advancing like a feral cat. She put out her arm to show me a very large knife.
My memory was beyond reproach, most of the time. I felt behind me until I found the poker, clenched it in my fist, and said, “Yes.” I then whacked her across the head with calculated force. She crumpled to the floor.
“Well done,” said a voice from the doorway. It was not Jorgeson, or one of his minions. I launched myself into Peter’s arms and buried my face against his shoulder.