An Old-Fashioned Murder (10 page)

Sarah's behavior was more intriguing. Daisy couldn't decide what to make of it. It was odd how paralyzed she became by the breadbasket. Beulah really had said it best.
They were dinner rolls, for criminy sake.
She didn't have the fate of nations resting in her petite palms. There was also something in the way she was gazing at it, like the bread wasn't simply bread. Like it had greater meaning somehow, although Daisy had no clue what that meaning could possibly be. It did seem as though Sarah was waiting, however. If she was waiting for her husband to tell her what to do, then she wasn't held in suspense for too long. After a pause, Kenneth reminded her—firmly but not crossly—to keep the basket moving, which she did, leaving the rolls untouched.

The remainder of dinner passed smoothly and enjoyably. Even Lillian managed to keep her complaints and criticisms to a minimum. The evening ended soon thereafter. The group was tired from all of the earlier excitement, with everyone's arrival and the hullabaloo regarding the secretary. Once the first person announced their intention to retire for the night, the rest soon followed. Daisy was glad for it. She had been up early and worked hard at the bakery that day. She was more than ready to put up her feet and lay down her head.

Ironically enough, the oldest in the party had the most energy. With his stomach pleasantly full, Henry Brent proceeded to settle himself in the parlor and start in on a convivial bottle of Aunt Emily's gooseberry brandy. As the others toddled off to their rooms, he kept looking around for somebody to share a nip and a good story. Daisy would have obliged him, but she couldn't stop yawning like a grizzly in need of a lengthy hibernation. So Drew pulled up an armchair instead. After a quick kiss good night—one that they did their best to conceal from Lillian—Daisy headed upstairs.

Her body hit the bed with all the force of an anvil dropping on concrete. She slept hard, at least in the beginning. Then noises started to creep in. There was a rumble. It sounded like thunder. Maybe it was the storm outside, except she didn't think that snow usually had thunder. The hinge of a door squeaked. There were footsteps in the hall. It was probably Drew. He and Henry Brent had finished their brandy and were finally calling it a day. Drew's room was the Stonewall Jackson, which was only one away from hers.

Another rumble, followed by footsteps on the stairs. Still more asleep than awake, Daisy couldn't tell if they were coming up or going down. It could be Drew again. But it couldn't be Henry Brent. He was in the Jubal Early. That was on the ground floor, on the other side of the dining room from the parlor. A car—or truck—door slammed. Beulah had made it back to the inn at last. The date hadn't ended early, after all, so that meant Wade Watson Howard III must have passed muster, even if only temporarily. Although Daisy thought for a fleeting second about checking the time, the clock on the nightstand was too far away. She didn't want to bother rolling over.

Voices. Were those voices? If they were, they weren't close by. She couldn't hear more than a garble. Or maybe she was dreaming it. Daisy was pretty sure that she had dozed off again. Maybe all the noises were part of her dream, too. A deeper rumble, then the crash of lightning. That seemed strangely out of order to her. There was a thump. It was a dull, heavy sound, like somebody had dropped a big mud-caked boot. A second thump. Then a third. They kept coming, a whole string of them.
Thump, thump, thump.
Pause.
Thump, thump, thump.
Daisy cracked an eye. She was in her room. It was still dark out. And she definitely wasn't dreaming.

As she lay there slowly regaining her senses and listening to the continued thumping, it started to sound more like pounding. Then it occurred to her that somebody wasn't dropping muddy boots, they were pounding on the front door of the inn. Beulah? She must have forgotten or lost her key. Daisy knew with the thin walls of the inn that she couldn't be the only one who heard the pounding. But she very likely would be the only one who was going to respond to it. She certainly couldn't expect the guests to rise and open the front door for who-knows-who in the middle of the night. Her mama was too ill to get out of bed. And Aunt Emily was either sleeping like the dead or dashing down to the kitchen for her shotgun.

Rising and pulling a robe around herself, Daisy opened her own door and shuffled out. The hall was dimly lit by a small stained glass lamp at the opposite end. As far as she could see, the other room doors were closed. The pounding went on, growing progressively louder and harder. It had probably begun as a normal polite knock, and when nobody had answered it, Beulah had gotten impatient. Daisy couldn't blame her for that. Nobody wanted to be stuck outside on a February night in the cold and wet.

The steps creaked under her as she descended. Daisy remembered Kenneth Lunt's comments about being able to hear her moving around the previous morning, and she shrugged. If he was indeed such a light sleeper, then he was already awake anyway. Somewhere above her a door opened. It sounded like it came from the third floor. Lillian and Parker were in the James Longstreet on the third floor. Maybe Lillian was coming to protest the pounding. Another door opened. There were also footsteps. Daisy couldn't tell the direction of either. The closer she got to the pounding, the more it obscured everything else.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was surprised to find the entrance hall dark. A trio of brass sconces lined the wall. Although they originally held candles, they had been wired for electricity long ago. Their soft light was more decorative than functional, but Aunt Emily always left them on so that no one would accidentally go careening down the steps in the pitch black, especially not guests, who weren't used to the narrow passages and tight corners of the inn like Daisy was.

Even more surprising to her was the parlor. It was dark, too. To the best of Daisy's recollection, there had been at least four lamps switched on when she had left Drew and Henry Brent earlier in the evening. It seemed peculiar that the two men would have been fastidious enough to turn them all off, particularly after enjoying what had no doubt been a considerable amount of gooseberry brandy. And then they both would have had to make it to their respective rooms in the dark. Granted, it wasn't completely dark. There was no light coming from the kitchen or the dining room, but there was a faint yellow illumination from the porch lights shining through the leaded-glass panel above the front door.

Suddenly, she felt movement behind her. Daisy spun around. No one was there, or at least no one appeared to be there. She squinted down the hall. Was that shadow at the edge of the kitchen a person?

“Hello?” she asked.

She received no answer. The shadow didn't budge an inch. Daisy shook her head at herself. How silly. Of course it wasn't a person. Her eyes and mind were just playing nighttime tricks on her.

By this point, the pounding on the front door had become almost frenzied. Turning back around, Daisy hurried to put a stop to it. She flipped the locks and threw open the door.

“Hey there,” she began with a smile. “How was the date? Did you lose your key…”

Both Daisy's voice and her smile faded in the same instant. She had been mistaken. It wasn't Beulah on the front porch of the inn. It was a man. A strange man.

“Mercy me, Ducky! What's all the racket?”

There was no mistaking Aunt Emily. She was plodding down the stairs in her scarlet slippers, fastening her matching chiffon dressing gown. Apparently she had been sleeping like the dead, because there was no shotgun in her hands.

“I—” Daisy stammered, still startled from not finding Beulah at the door.

Aunt Emily rubbed her eyes to wake herself up, after which she carefully ran her fingers over her hair to correct any wayward silver strands. When she had finished her toilette, she looked at Daisy, then at the man standing in the doorway, and finally back at Daisy again. “Who's this?” she said.

“I—” Daisy started once more.

The man cut her off.

“Bud.” He took a step forward and stuck out his hand. “Bud Foster.”

Bud Foster appeared to be about fifty, and he didn't have a nice hand. The nails were ragged, the skin was thick and callused, and the knuckles had that misshapen quality often noted in those with pugilistic tendencies. After a brief hesitation, Aunt Emily shook the hand, but she did so with obvious reluctance.

“This isn't an appropriate hour, Mr. Foster,” she remarked.

Although Aunt Emily's tone wasn't hostile, it also couldn't have been described as welcoming. Apparently good hostess standards were less rigid between the hours of midnight and dawn when strangers on the front porch were involved.

“Bud,” the man corrected her with an unnervingly large smile of chipped and yellowed teeth.

Neither Aunt Emily nor Daisy smiled back.

“It's my car,” Bud said, after a short pause. “I got lost. Then the storm hit, and I couldn't see a damn thing—”

Aunt Emily cleared her throat to express her displeasure.

He paused again and seemed momentarily confused. “Oh. Okay.” He gave a little nod. “I couldn't see
any
thing. The snow was coming down in these huge flakes. They were clumping together on the windshield like a blanket, and the wipers couldn't get 'em off fast enough. I didn't know if I was still on the road or had gone off it. I couldn't tell what was ahead of me or on either side. It all just blurred together in one giant cloud. I think it must have been what they call a whiteout. Take a look for yourself.” Bud turned and gestured behind him.

For the first time since she had opened the door, Daisy's eyes moved past the man. She was so astonished by what she saw that she took a step backward. It was as though the world had disappeared. There was nothing beyond the inn. The doorway, the front porch, and then a wall of gray. Common sense told her that it was a sheet of white snow against the black night sky, but it looked like a solid wall of gray.

“Well, I'll be,” Aunt Emily exhaled.

Bud nodded vigorously. “I was driving real slow, hoping that I wouldn't hit something, or that nothing would hit me. But then I went down into a ditch and got stuck. After a couple of tries, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to work myself out. Of course my phone couldn't get a signal, not that a tow truck could reach me now anyway.”

“Certainly not,” Aunt Emily concurred.

“So I sat there for a while,” Bud continued, “wondering what to do. After a lot of looking around, I thought that I saw some lights in the distance. I got out and headed toward them. Five minutes into it, I was wondering if I hadn't made a big mistake and should have just stayed put. With the snow piling on and the wind whipping it around like a tornado, half the time I couldn't see my hand in front of my face and kept losing track of the lights. Let me tell you, I was getting pretty worried. You hear those stories about people in blizzards wandering ten feet from their house or barn and not being able to find their way back. They just get covered and freeze. When I finally saw that the lights belonged to this place, I said a prayer of thanks.”

“I can well imagine,” Aunt Emily concurred again.

Daisy glanced at her. Her tone had warmed, but only slightly. It still couldn't have been considered friendly. Did Aunt Emily not believe the story? There was a somewhat artificial, almost rehearsed quality to it. But that could have been because the man was cold and stressed. Why would he want to fabricate such a tale? Of at least one truthful element there could be no doubt—the heavy snow.

Maybe there was something else about Bud Foster that Aunt Emily didn't trust. He definitely didn't have the most confidence-inspiring appearance. His stubble was a good three days old. His tan trench coat was fraying in spots and had several large inkblot stains from coffee or cola having been dribbled down the front. And he kept cracking his pugilist knuckles while he talked.

“Sorry for banging on the door like I did,” Bud apologized, “but I was worried that everybody might be asleep. I couldn't very well stay out here on the porch all night, not in this miserable weather.”

“Everybody?” Daisy echoed. The word struck her. It seemed as though he knew that there were a lot of people in the house.

“It is an inn, isn't it?” he replied immediately. “I saw the sign coming up the front walk, or what I assume is the front walk, and the part of the sign that isn't coated with ice. ‘The Tosh Inn. Rooms available.' I'm hoping that you'll have a room available for me.”

It was a smooth response. A bit too smooth, perhaps. Daisy glanced at Aunt Emily again, wondering if she thought so also. She must have had some reservation, because as with taking Bud Foster's hand, Aunt Emily hesitated with his request.

“Of course we'll find you something,” she answered after a moment. “None of God's creatures should be left outside on such a night.”

“Thank you, ma'am. I sure do appreciate your kindness.”

Stomping his feet and brushing the snow from his coat, Bud stepped into the inn. A hefty black duffle bag was slung over one shoulder. Daisy blinked at it in surprise.

“You trekked through the snow and wind carrying luggage, not knowing in advance that this place was an inn?” she said.

This time the response wasn't so smooth.

“I couldn't tell—” Bud began. “I thought maybe—”

He was interrupted by the onslaught of voices and footsteps on the stairs. His pounding on the door, along with their talking in the entrance hall, had evidently stirred the guests. There was a mixture of sniffling, shuffling, and general drowsy mumbling. Aunt Emily switched on the sconces. Drew was the leader of the pack, followed by Lillian, who was sputtering about the injurious disruption to her sleep regimen.

With the front door still partially open behind Bud Foster, there was a frigid breeze gusting through the hall, so none of the guests lingered. Like sheep pushing into a cozy pen, they all crowded into the parlor, where Drew and Parker started turning on lamps and arranging seats. Daisy was about to shut the door and show Bud where he could hang his wet coat when she heard Drew's voice rise abruptly. A second later, the light clicked on in the dining room. And Lillian screamed.