Honeymoon With Murder (17 page)

The cheerful clink of glasses sealed their bargain.

Annie’s hip throbbed from her fall, but she ignored the nagging discomfort as she peered intently at the circular
loops in the braided rug. She ignored, also—or tried to—the husky humming that drifted from Ingrid’s bedroom. All she needed now was to have to deal with Laurel! It was like trying to do brain surgery with a leprechaun tap-dancing beside the surgical instrument tray.

“Annie, love, could you come?” Laurel’s throaty murmur rose confidently.

Taking a tight grip both on her flashlight and her temper, Annie bounced to her feet and hurried to the bedroom door. “Shh,” she implored her mother-in-law. “If anyone hears us and calls the cops, we’re in terrific trouble.”

Laurel’s hyacinth-blue eyes widened. “My dear, you sound so apprehensive! But there is a simple remedy—oxygen, that most life-giving of forces. Please, please, Annie, take a deep breath. One. Two. Three.” The pencil flash waved in concert with the words.

Annie was infuriated to realize she was indeed breathing deeply “Laurel, stop it! We don’t have time to fool around. I need to—”

“Time is not our master, Annie dear. We can conquer time. As I have learned from dear Ophelia, the world can be ours through meditation.” The ingenuous eyes brightened. “Just think about that, Annie, my sweet, and you will feel a sense of relaxation, even of exultation.”

Maddened almost beyond endurance, Annie opened her mouth to explode, but Laurel deftly headed her off.

“Now, I called you in here because you, dear, of all people, can help the most to rescue our dear Ingrid. You see, I might make the wrong choice,” and she pointed toward the clothing visible through the open door to Ingrid’s closet.

Annie’s mouth closed. She struggled for composure.

“Annie, I want you to think. Press your fingertips lightly to your temples, close your eyes, remember Ingrid in her favorite clothes.”

Annie’s mouth opened again, then closed. It might be quicker—and, God knew, simpler—if she did whatever damfool thing Laurel wanted. Then she could return to the living room.

Laurel stepped into the closet.

Annie squeezed her eyes shut. What was Ingrid’s favorite outfit? Almost as she formed the question, a picture flashed into her mind: Ingrid cheerfully working at the cake booth during the hospital bazaar, clad in a white cotton sweater decorated with an imposing black cat among red geraniums and a cotton-and-linen skirt in a textured check of black and grey.

Her eyes snapped open and she hurriedly described the outfit to Laurel. “She gets so many compliments on that sweater. It’s one of her favorites. She calls it her ‘Agatha’ sweater.”

“So she
is
fond of Agatha,” Laurel said brightly, nodding in satisfaction as she rummaged through the clothes. “That’s what we thought—though the results were
so
disappointing.”

Annie was aware of fleeting time—and the disaster that would occur should anyone notice will-o’-the-wisp lights moving about Ingrid’s cabin—but one thing she had to know.

“Laurel?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Laurel, I can understand fish. But why smoked herring?”

“Oh, here it is, the
very
sweater. Oh, how marvelous.” Laurel backed out of the closet and turned to face Annie, clutching the sweater tightly. “Oh, the herring. Yes, of course. I would like to make it clear, but reincarnation is so
complex
. I do fear that for once dear Ophelia was misguided. She had the most distinct impression that Agatha had once been a scullery maid in London in the 1890s—and that her young man had been seriously injured in an accident with a hansom cab.”

Annie wondered if walking on quicksand might result in the same sense of disorientation she was experiencing.

Laurel took a quick step toward Annie. “My dear, don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, I’m fine, fine. Of course, it all makes perfectly good sense. Smoked herring, of course. By all means.” She began to back out of the bedroom.

Laurel gave a tiny shrug. “But Agatha was just—I hate to say it—just piggy—and when she’d finished her herring,
she sank into the deepest sleep. Ophelia thought once it might be a trance, but her spirit was
inert
and no good at all to Ophelia.”

Annie translated this to mean that Agatha experienced a blood-sugar lag and, having gorged herself, refused to be aroused.

“So,” Laurel concluded, “our afternoon was wasted. But this”—and she held the sweater aloft—“should make
all
the difference. And it’s all because of you. Now, dear, you can go back to your search.” Her nod was magnanimous.

The clear implication was that Annie’s endeavors, childish though they were, should be indulged. Annie stalked back to the living room. Oh, Lordy Already one-thirty. She had barely begun.

Dropping to her knees, she returned to her inch-by-inch scrutiny of the rug. Her search was rewarded as she neared the blood-crusted area where Jesse Penrick’s body had lain. She gave a whoop of triumph—pine needles embedded in the cotton.

Shiny brown, prickly, two-inch-long pine needles.

She was careful now, very careful, not to touch or disturb them.

But she could scarcely contain her excitement. This must be the same heady flush of cerebral delight enjoyed by Nero Wolfe when the answers clicked in place. She had taken that one tidbit of information from the feature writer, the revelation that Jesse Penrick had suffered a contusion on the back of his head, and built a theory.

The pine needles were the first tangible proof that she might be right.

Pine needles there, but no pine needles around the periphery. She jumped up and moved her flash slowly across the living room floor. No pine needles. She hurried to the kitchen, turned the beam down. No pine needles. Swinging around, she paced back to stare down at the braided rug. “They were stuck to his clothes!”

She said it aloud and looked up.

Unblinking blue eyes regarded her thoughtfully. Laurel was perched gracefully on the chintz sofa, Ingrid’s white cotton “Agatha” sweater in her lap. She clapped her hands excitedly. “My dear, your search has been successful!”

“It didn’t happen the way they think,” Annie said eagerly. “He wasn’t stabbed during an argument.”

“Of course not,” Laurel agreed approvingly. “He departed this life unknowingly.”

Annie stared at her for a long moment. “That’s right.” Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. “How did you know?”

“Ophelia says it is a matter of emanations. When a spirit has been violently extinguished—and there would certainly be a flood of emotion when facing death—anguished reverberations come down through time. It is this power which often accounts for poltergeist events.”

“So?”

A graceful hand indicated the living area. “No emanations.” She tapped a finger to her cheek. “It is a
subtle
distinction, because he was done to death in this room. The autopsy report would have indicated movement of the body after death, had it occurred. Yet, there are no emanations. So, the solution is clear.”

Annie wondered what kind of emanations would result if Laurel were violently removed from the premises. But, she reminded herself firmly, this was her mother-in-law. Until death did them part. Except, of course, Laurel would smilingly negate that last possibility. For a moment, the idea of an eternity spent with Laurel was almost more than Annie could envision without nervous collapse.

One day at a time, she reminded herself. Never had that sensible injunction seemed quite so imperative.

She even managed a smile. “Oh, of course, I understand. No emanations. Does Ophelia have any idea
where
Jesse was knocked unconscious?”

Laurel’s headshake was pitying—and infuriating. “Annie, my sweet, it doesn’t work like that.” Pressing Ingrid’s sweater to her oatmeal-colored robe, Laurel was earnest. “Ophelia is merely a receptacle. She receives emanations from her surroundings. Like this room. Or from objects.” She held up the sweater. “Ophelia opens her mind and heart to vibrations from both past and present, the residue of which are retained in material objects. Because of her own purity of spirit, she can brush through that curtain
which separates us from infinity and receive inspiration and guidance.”

Heartily tempted to shout “Bullshit,” as Texans are wont to do when provoked, Annie restrained the impulse and concentrated fiercely on what mattered.

Those pine needles didn’t walk into Ingrid’s living room and neatly dispose themselves where Jesse Penrick had been dumped.

And that was exactly what had happened.

He had been knocked unconscious elsewhere. Her eyes once again swept the room. There was nothing where he had fallen that could have caused a contusion on the back of his head.

This changed entirely the picture of Jesse facing his murderer at midnight in Ingrid’s cabin.

Jesse had met his murderer somewhere else. He’d been knocked unconscious. He had lain on a carpet of pine needles until he was carried to this cabin.

Posey saw this crime all wrong. This was no murder of passion.

This was a carefully thought out,
premeditated
murder, and the cold-blooded plan had included killing Jesse with a weapon from Ingrid’s home.

Posey’s likely ridicule rang in her ears:
Isn’t this a rather cumbersome theory, Ms. Laurance? Designed to fit circumstances you have merely imagined? Based on a scattering of pine needles?

Annie’s mouth firmed. But it fitted! It fitted with the contusion on the back of Jesse’s head. It fitted with the pine needles where the corpse had been found.

If there were pine needles in his clothing—By God, that’s all she needed.

“I’m getting there,” she cried excitedly. She paced across the room, skirting the rug, of course. “Laurel, listen, it all makes sense. Somebody decided to kill Jesse and frame Ingrid for the murder. It was planned from the start. Don’t you see? Because there was no reason for Jesse to come to Ingrid’s house at midnight. That’s crazy. No, it’s a frame.” She pointed dramatically at the rug. “Those pine needles prove it!”

Laurel nodded. “That’s very well thought out.” She
carefully folded Ingrid’s sweater, then rose and glided across the room to brush her lips approvingly against Annie’s cheek. “I’m afraid, however, dear, that there is one major obstacle.”

“Obstacle?”

Poised in the kitchen doorway, Laurel sighed gently. “Mr. Posey is so
averse
to reason, isn’t he?” She glanced down at the sweater. “There is so
much
to do,” she murmured. “But surely I can find the time. I know, Annie, I’ll talk to Mr. Posey.” She nodded decisively, and her soft, golden hair rippled like sun-kissed water.

“Oh, my God, no.” Annie heard the horror in her voice. She took a deep breath. “No. No, Laurel. I appreciate the offer. I do indeed. It is marvelous of you, but I believe it will be best if I talk to him. As you say, you, uh, have so
much
to do.”

“That is true.” The fine brow crinkled pensively. “Yes, that’s true. Well, then, I will leave it to you, my dear.” She smiled warmly. “I know you will do your best. And
not
lose your temper.” She lifted a hand in farewell. “Until tomorrow, Annie dear.” And she was gone, leaving only the haunting scent of lilac behind her.

The whispers were fairly low, but a faint undercurrent of bonhomie and scotch lifted them on the night air.

“Good night, Henny. Good hunting.”

“Good night, Max. We’ll have to do this again sometime. Most fun I’ve had in years. Maybe we both missed our calling. We’d make a swell pair of second-story men.”

“Just like Raffles?” Annie inquired icily as she stepped out of the shadow of a palmetto to stand squarely in front of the two cat burglars on the dusty, moonlit road.

“Annie.” Henny didn’t sound the least chagrined. “You’ll never guess what we were doing—”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Annie mused. “Picnicking? Canvassing voters? Trading chili recipes? Or perhaps something socially relevant. Planning a day-care center for working mothers?”

“Now, Annie,” Max cajoled.

Henny patted Annie’s shoulder. “Something tells me you
two have a lot to say to each other. See you in the morning. Reveille at six. Tallyho,” and she trotted off into the night toward the Tent City.

She left behind a bottomless pool of silence.

“I thought I’d do a little more checking,” Max said vaguely, after a while.

“It was somewhat disconcerting to find you missing from your cot,” she replied crisply.

Max was quiet for a moment, then, his tone distinctly suspicious, he asked, “And what, my love, were
you
doing, roaming about at this ungodly hour?”

“A little checking,” she retorted, trying hard not to sound defensive.

He began to laugh. After a moment, she did, too.

Each took a step toward the other, then a businesslike throat clearing arrested their movement.

“Heard rustle in the bushes over this way,” Madeleine whispered hoarsely, obviously making a best effort to speak quietly. “Sorry to say, it’s after hours, you know. Camp rules, you understand.”

Which rather put a damper on further conversation.

The newlyweds gave each other a last fond farewell glance, then melted into the night. To the Men’s Side and the Women’s Side, of course.

Monday morning

Annie lifted her steaming mug of coffee in a cheerful breakfast salute to her mate. “At least the coffees good.” It smelled
wonderful
. But breakfast coffee always did, even if she hadn’t brewed it from one of her favorite grinds.

“I will admit to quite pleasant breakfast interludes,” Max said agreeably, “but I can’t be quit of that communal tent soon enough.”

Their paper plates, with the remnants of the Tent City breakfast (charred bacon this morning), rested on the pier beside them. Up at what Annie considered an obscenely early hour, they’d exchanged good morning nods from their
respective spots in the shower lines (Men’s and Women’s, of course), then met at the chow line and carried their plates to the end of the middle pier.

Annie gulped down the rest of her coffee and wriggled impatiently. “I wish the search teams would get started. I can’t wait to get into Jesse’s cabin,” and she rattled Ingrid’s keys in the pocket of her skirt.