I pushed back my chair. “Dorothy, why don’t we take our cups into the lounge while Eileen gets on with her preparations for tea?”
When we were comfortably settled before the fire, I asked, softly, “When you sat on Alex’s deck painting this afternoon, you didn’t happen to see anybody go into the Catholic church, did you?” I wasn’t sure how many back-yards and bushes might block the view between Alex’s deck and the chapel door, but they weren’t far apart, so it was worth a shot.
She started to shake her head, then hesitated. “I saw Roddy leave, while I was setting up my easel. But once I get to painting, I don’t think at all. I just paint what I see and don’t think about anything else. I painted today until my hands got numb, but I wouldn’t have known I was cold if Alex hadn’t come to ask if I was warm enough.” In spite of what she’d told Roddy, her voice was soft and her dimples flashed when she said Alex’s name.
“Are you sure you aren’t in danger of confusing devotion to art and devotion to the art-gallery owner?” I teased softly.
She tossed her braid and it swung around to hang down her back. “Of course not. Alex is
old,
eh? Thirty-three his last birthday. But he’s asked me to stay here and work for him a year, and he says I can paint when we aren’t busy. He says he can’t pay much, but I have some savings. Do you think I should?”
“How badly do you want to?”
“If I could have just one year to see if I’m any good, eh? And if people like my work—Oh, Mac, if I just could!” Dorothy got as pink when she was earnest as when embarrassed.
“Take it, if you want it and can afford it,” I advised. “You’ll never be younger or freer than you are now.” It’s so easy to give advice like that to other people’s children.
I took a bath and washed my hair before tea, while the bathroom was free. Laura came up to the room while I was drying my hair. “How was your mountain climbing?” I asked.
“Hill walking,” she corrected me, flushed and happy. “It was fine.” She was still subdued, though, and she got more so when I filled her in on the two deaths.
“Poor Joyce,” she exclaimed. “What do you do when a member of your tour dies?”
“It’s doubly hard because they’re sure to cancel her play.” I chose my new heather gray slacks, but added a bright green sweater. Catching Laura’s expression, I said, “Brandi’s not going to expect us to wear mourning, and I’m certainly not mourning Norwood Hardin.”
Nevertheless, Laura chose black slacks and a gray sweater. As she went to brush her hair, she commented, “I wouldn’t have Joyce’s job no matter how much you paid me. I wouldn’t put it past Brandi to demand that the travel agency pay to return Jim’s body to the States. Did you know that Sherry wanted them to refund part of her ticket price because you’re on the tour?”
Putting on my shoes, I stopped with one leg in midair. “Why on earth should they?”
“Joyce said that the deal was, if somebody on the trip persuaded somebody else to come, they were to get a discount on their ticket. Since Kenny sent me information about the trip, they got a discount when I signed up. Once Sherry saw you were here, too, she wanted Joyce to refund more money for you. I tell you Mac, that woman—” She broke off and dragged a brush through her own hair instead of finishing the sentence.
“Did Joyce give her the refund?” I considered tying a colorful scarf around my neck, then decided to forego it. Not only did it look too jaunty for the way I felt, but there was still a killer loose in the village. I didn’t want a handy scarf around my neck if he or she got ideas about adding me to the tally.
“No. Joyce told Sherry she’d check on it, but later she told her that if anybody got a refund because you came along, it would be me. That made Sherry furious, as you can imagine. She doesn’t like me.”
“She doesn’t like you because you spend a lot of time with her husband.” There, I’d brought up the forbidden subject.
Laura huffed. “Sherry’s got him between such a rock and a hard place, he doesn’t know which way to turn.” I waited to see if she would name the rock or the hard place, but she merely asked, “Ready for tea?”
Laura, Dorothy, and I sat alone that night at the table by the window. Marcia was eating in the kitchen with Eileen, the Boyds didn’t come at the gong, Brandi still hadn’t returned, and Joyce chose to sit alone at the empty table in the far corner, in the seat where Jim Gordon had eaten breakfast that morning. I wondered if she’d chosen his seat deliberately, or because it had its back to the rest of us. She was trembling in spite of having on the heaviest sweater I’d seen her wear on the trip. I remembered that she’d had to walk all the way back from the theater without a parka, and wished I’d thought to take her down something to put on. When Laura noticed that Joyce was alone, she left Dorothy and me and went over to join her, but Joyce waved her away. “I’d prefer to be alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Not really. You would not believe what a mess this all is, and I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to do now. But I don’t think you can help. Thanks.” She looked utterly drained. I wondered if she’d ever really gotten rid of her migraine, she was so pale.
Sherry came in late, looked around, and demanded, “Where’s Kenny? I want to show him some china I bought in an antique shop. It’s eighteenth century, I’m sure, and very fine.”
“I’m sure the dealer will be particularly sorry to
lose
it,” Laura said with a strange emphasis on the verb, “but Kenny hasn’t been around all day.”
Sherry glared at her and headed toward Joyce.
Joyce gave her the same quiet, “I need to be alone just now. Sorry.”
Sherry gave her a curious look, then stalked over to our table and sat down next to me with an irritated flounce.
“You must not have heard what happened in the village today,” I told her.
“I’ve been out of the village since ten, and just got back. Eileen’s neighbor gave me a ride. She was visiting her sister, but if I’d known she was going to stay so long, I’d have caught a bus back. What happened?”
“There have been two deaths,” Dorothy said in a hushed voice. I suspected this was the closest she’d ever come to tragedy.
“They weren’t simply deaths,” I pointed out. “They apparently were murders.”
Sherry stared around at each of us in turn like she was waiting for somebody to burst out laughing and admit it was a joke. “Who? Why? Where is Kenny?” Her voice rose in fear.
She tensed to spring from her chair, but I caught her arm. “Neither victim was Kenny, but somebody killed Jim. Sometime this morning, apparently.”
She looked around the table and her eyes narrowed in suspicion.“Well, Kenny didn’t do it, no matter what you think!” She jumped up and ran from the room.
That took the baking powder out of our biscuits. We sat there chewing Eileen’s delicious meal like it was sawdust and foam rubber. The phone rang in the back of the house, then Eileen came through. “It’s for you,” she told Joyce. “Mrs. MacGorrie’s secretary.” Joyce didn’t return to finish her tea.
Sergeant Murray arrived before seven to talk to me. We sat in the dining room while I told him I’d remembered hearing Jim quarreling with Norwood Hardin the previous evening, up the brae. “But that’s probably pointless now,” I concluded. “If Mr. Hardin himself has turned up in the other coffin, it’s unlikely he killed Jim.”
“Hphmm.” That’s the closest I can get to what he said, but it indicated that the bobby was first cousin to a clam. I figured we were done and I’d wasted his time.
He settled back and fixed me with a thoughtful stare. “Tell me aboot the quarrel.”
I described as best I could what they’d said and how Norwood Hardin knocked Jim down. “Butted him, I think. I didn’t see it happen, but that’s what Jim told the laird’s wife he did.”
The sound of a violin, low and mournful, filtered through the dining-room door. For a startled instant I thought Jim had returned to play his own lament, but then realized it must be Sherry, honoring him in the way she knew best.
“The laird’s wife was there?” The bobby’s voice had a peculiar inflection.
“Yes, she came about the time Norwood knocked Jim down.” I described how she had intervened and as much as I could remember about what everybody had said afterwards.
The bobby turned his cap around and around in his hand, much like our sheriff back home does when he’s thinking. “The laird mentioned that he and Mr. Gordon were discussing business, but his wife did not mention knowing Mr. Gordon before. Ye’re sure she did?”
“Oh, yes. She mentioned it last evening, Jim’s wife mentioned it at breakfast, and the laird himself told me later in the cemetery that his wife and Jim were friends back in Georgia.”
“I will check on that, then.” He made a note. “When the men quarreled, you think it was because Mr. Hardin felt he deserved more—ah—”
“Money. Yes. Apparently his part of the business deal was to ‘persuade’ the laird—that’s what he told his sister, anyway. She claimed that he persuaded her and she persuaded her husband. Jim was going to pay Norwood for setting up the deal, but Norwood wanted to be a partner. That’s what the quarrel was about, as I understood it.”
He stood. “I’ll speak to the laird and his wife aboot this again, but it’s all very puzzling. From what you say, Mr. Gordon may have had a remote reason for killing Mr. Hardin, and Mr. Hardin may have had what he deemed a good reason for killing Mr. Gordon. The question is, who might have had reason to kill them both?”
“You think it was the same person?”
“We dinnae ken. It wasnae the same method, and the only prints on the coffins are Ian’s and, oddly, Mr. Hardin’s on the one he was found in. He seems to have opened the lid.”
“Do you know if he was killed there or moved?”
“Oh, he was killed there, right enough. Stabbed as he bent over the coffin, then bundled inside.” He settled his hat on his head and changed the subject. “Has Mrs. Gordon returned?”
“None of us have seen her since breakfast.”
“We havenae located her yet, either. It would help if we had a picture. Her description would fit so many people.”
“Not at all. Brandi is drop-dead gorgeous. But wait! I have a snapshot I developed in Inverness.” I ran upstairs and fetched the picture of Jim and Brandi standing beside the bus in Glasgow. “So Norwood Hardin was stabbed?” I asked as I handed him the picture.
“Aye, with a short sword, the kind we call a
sgian dubh.
It doesn’t belong to any of our local pipers, nor did it come from any of our local shops. We’re checking to see where it could have come from.”
I felt very cold. “Can you describe it?”
“Aye. It’s about this long”—he held his hands apart—“and has a particularly fine cairngorm worked into the hilt. A bonnie piece.”
My first impulse was to say nothing until I could speak to Kenny. But I had obeyed a similar hunch that morning, and look what happened. “One of our group is a piper and has a
sgian dubh
with a cairngorm in the hilt. But he hasn’t been here all day, either. That’s his wife playing the violin.”
“Would you ask her to step across here, please?”
I found Sherry playing with no light but the lounge fire. “The police would like to speak with you,” I told her.
She jumped and looked around like she was searching for another door than the one I was standing in. “Why?”
“He wants to ask you a couple of questions.”
“I haven’t done anything!”
“Then you’ve nothing to fear, have you?” I held the door for her. She set down her fiddle and stood with a swishing of her long skirt. The way she walked across the hall, head up and chin at a slight angle, reminded me of a film I’d seen of Mary, Queen of Scots going to be beheaded.
When I ushered her into the dining room, the sergeant handed me a piece of paper. “Just jot down your address in America, please. Then that will be all.”
I lingered in the hall, reading some business cards in a basket on the hall table. In a very short time Sherry was back, heading up the stairs. “He wants to see Kenny’s
sgian dubh.
” She sounded worried. No wonder. She came back down with a blank expression. “It’s not there. Nor is his kilt. He must be wearing them, wherever he is.”
The business cards had given me an idea. After the bobby left, I went to the kitchen, where Eileen was finishing the dishes. “Could I use your computer for a few minutes?”
I sounded like one of those people who can’t be away from e-mail for two weeks without going crazy, but she led me to her private room without a word and turned on the computer.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “You go on back to what you were doing.” As soon as the door closed behind her, I went online and searched for “Norwood Hardin.”
By now I have done so much Internet research on folks whom I’ve suspected of various crimes that I subscribe to a number of news sources. Normally I am astonished at how much the Internet knows about us all. This time I was astonished at how little it knew. I found only two mentions of Norwood in the past five years. One was an article in
Georgia Trends,
discussing the growth of Albany businesses during the past thirty years. It mentioned Jim’s former company, among others, and showed a handsome picture of Jim in golf gear about to tee off with a partner identified as “Norwood Hardin, former CFO of Hardin and Gray Investment Firm.”