Honeymoon With Murder (6 page)

“Mr. Posey, I can assure you that Ingrid was not in a murderous frame of mind at all concerning Mr. Penrick. Actually, we talked about her little disagreement with him, and she dismissed it as one of those annoyances that crop up in the life of a property manager.” Annie knew she was being rather creative over a very small exchange with Ingrid, but Posey didn’t deserve any better.

Henny joined in. “As usual, Posey, you’re going to miss the forest for the trees. Clearly, Ingrid Jones has been abducted. Any fool should be able to study the crime scene and deduce that.”

Annie appreciated Henny’s support, but devoutly wished for a smidgeon more tact.

“Ingrid’s quite incapable of violence,” Webb snorted. “Damn fool idea.”

“Portents of death,” Ophelia said huskily to the stars overhead. “I
told
them.”

Max moved restively. “Posey, let it go for now. What matters is that Ingrid called for help—and we haven’t found her!”

It was too little, too late.

Posey’s face had the shine of the true believer. “As an accomplished and experienced investigator, I’ve learned to
trust my instincts and to explore fully the contributions that can be made by witnesses, and, further, I avoid the temptation that besets
inexperienced
investigators to look beyond the obvious in a self-gratifying attempt to produce rabbits out of hats.”

“Not
attractive,” Ophelia murmured. “Poor dear little rabbits squashed in boxes …”

An ugly red flush suffused Webb’s face and neck. “Goddammit, she’s missing!”

“Of course she is,” Posey said complacently. “She has motive, opportunity—and she’s missing.” He flicked off each on three fat fingers. “What does that add up to?” He overrode the growing babble of dissent. “Guilt,” he intoned happily. “Well, she won’t get away from me. I’m going to issue an all-points bulletin for her arrest. That woman will never get off this island.”

Webb lunged toward the circuit solicitor. “Do you mean you aren’t going to put out search parties?”

“You’ve already searched,” Posey pointed out silkily. “You didn’t find a trace, did you?”

“That’s right, for God’s sake,” Webb agreed. “We’ve looked everywhere within a radius of a couple of miles, and there’s no trace of her, none at all—”

“So you would have found her body—if it was out there!” Posey thundered triumphantly. “No, you didn’t find her because she’s run away. She’s hiding.”

No, Annie thought. Ingrid can’t be dead. She clung to one hope—Henny said there hadn’t been another murder, and Henny, exasperating as she was, had a wonderful instinct for crime.

Webb lunged forward. “You goddam fool. She didn’t run away. Somebody took her. As for a body …” He paused, swallowed, and said jerkily, “It’s dark. We could have missed—” He faltered.

But Posey was oblivious to his distress. “Nobody dragged her out here and killed her. Why should they? And there was no struggle in her cabin. If she’d escaped from a killer and run out to hide, why, she’d have called for help when searchers came by.” His heavy jaw jutted portentously. “No. This is all very clear to an
experienced
investigator. Jones is mad at this guy. She’s threatened him. She takes
down a sword—a sword that belonged to her—and shoves it into Penrick’s heart—and then she hightails it out of here.”

“Absurd!” Henny trumpeted. “No blood. No evidence of a struggle. And why is he barefoot? I’ll tell you this, Posey, you’re an amusing beggar, but incompetent. Now do you have the gall to tell me you don’t intend to mount a full-scale search for Ingrid Jones?”

Posey ignored her and swiveled back to Ophelia. “Now, ma’am, we’ll be taking your statement and—”

“Posey, old chap,” Henny interrupted.

The circuit solicitor’s bulky shoulders wriggled with irritation. “Mrs. Brawley, go peddle your papers somewhere else. This is a Murder Investigation, and I have my duties.”

“One final query, my good man: Will you order a massive ground search for Ingrid Jones?”

“Of course not. But don’t worry, we’ll catch her. My men will be watching the coast. She won’t escape the law.”

Henny gave a judicious, all-for-the-Empire nod, swung about, and crossed to the latticed arch. She scanned it with a measuring eye, then began to climb, hand over hand. When she stood atop the quivering structure, she loudly announced:

“Calling all concerned citizens. I am hereby creating the Citizens Search for Ingrid Jones. We shall search in the woods, on the beaches, along the creek banks, and in the salt marshes. We shall not flag or fail. Citizens, unite!” And she lifted a clenched fist to the thin shouts of the astonished onlookers.

Annie was overwhelmed. Bulldog Drummond with overtones of the Former Naval Person.

Early Sunday morning

Annie moved restlessly, clinging to the remnants of sleep. Hot. She was damned hot. She crinkled her nose and sniffed. Hmm. Coffee. Bacon. Her nose twitched. Marsh mud in the sun.

Her eyes popped open. She looked up blankly at a dingy swatch of canvas rippling in a breeze. A piece of wood was gouging her in the small of the back, she seemed to be lying in a trough, and this was too narrow to be her bed. A cot, an old-fashioned cot.

Max. The wedding. Their wedding night—Oh, Lordy. It was Sunday morning, the first day of her honeymoon, but Ingrid was missing and their honeymoon would have to wait.

She flung back an Army-issue blanket—no wonder she was hot—struggled to get up, and promptly got hopelessly tangled in a drape of mosquito netting.

Memory returned in a flood. As the night waned, Henny had taken time out from her Bulldog Drummond routine to contact her chief lieutenant on the Broward’s Rock search and Rescue Squad, Madeleine Kurtz. Madeleine arrived with a cheery whoop of encouragement. She had glinty grey eyes, a foghorn voice, and stood a majestic six feet two. Henny and Madeleine set in motion the creation of a tent city. At their direction, Max and Duane unloaded a commandeered truck and laboriously erected on the dusty courtyard of Nightingale Courts what Henny proudly christened “Search Control Center.” Annie phoned until
her fingers ached, rousting out the members of the Cha Cha Bowling League, the Professional Women of Broward’s Rock Island, the United Methodist Women, the Audubon Society, the Cultural League, the Triathlon Boosters, the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Association of Broward’s Rock, the Library Society the Broward’s Rock Municipal Hospital Volunteers, St. Francis of Assisi Altar Society, and half a dozen other organizations.

By the time the first mauve of sunrise streaked the eastern horizon, volunteers were arriving. In cars. On bicycles. Afoot. Many carried backpacks with survival gear, field binoculars, and compasses, wore no-nonsense swamp boots and could have passed for members of a Latin militia in their khakis and fatigue caps. Annie had blinked wearily in the daylight and stumbled past the arrivees toward a cot (Women’s Side) in the tent city. As she fell into a deep sleep, she heard searchers receive their instructions as the search got under way.

Now, as she struggled to disengage from the mosquito netting (yes, Virginia, mosquitoes still thrive and multiply and attack in the Lowlands of the Carolinas, and no, they do not carry malaria, according to the Health Department), she realized she was ravenously hungry—and where was her husband of one night?

She looked down at her crumpled cream silk blouse and blue linen skirt and thought ruefully of the elegant grey dress she’d intended to wear today when they traveled. But despite the fact she looked about as attractive as the mangled hairpiece Edmund had carried to his mistress in Charlotte MacLeod’s
Something the Cat Dragged In
, it was time to locate her new husband (on the Men’s Side, of course) and see how he’d survived what little had remained of their wedding night.

The mosquito netting proved wilier than she. Finally, she dropped to the ground and rolled beneath it, thereby putting the finishing dusty touches to her costume.

She shaded her eyes against the brilliant morning sun. Ingrid would never have recognized Nightingale Courts. Yellow tape marked Cabin 3 as a Crime Scene (
DO NOT ENTER
). A television crew with minicams clustered around Madeleine, who stood statuesquely on an upended wheel-barrow
and gestured vigorously toward the tent city. A long line of search volunteers inched by a field kitchen. So that was the source of those appetizing aromas.

Only the sternest sense of marital duty sent Annie in search of Max rather than directly to the end of the food line.

Wondering what sort of alarm might be raised if she strode boldly into the Men’s Side, she temporized and sidled along the outside, squinting to see through the mosquito netting.

He was in the third cot from the end, sleeping on his back with his arms and legs outflung. Estimating his size, Annie wondered if a queen would be large enough and perhaps she should change the order to a king for their new house. She’d never before thought in terms of
permanently
sharing a bed.

Max’s cot was the only one still occupied. With a wary look about, she dropped again to the ground, lifted the netting, and rolled under.

Using her hipbone to nudge him over, she perched on the edge of the cot and whispered, “Max. Hey, Max, wake up!”

One dark blue eye reluctantly opened and slowly focused on her. A flash of enthusiasm. An indistinguishable noise deep in his throat and two eager hands.

“Max! This is in public,” she hissed, fending him off.

An expletive, beginning with a letter early in the alphabet, was
clearly
distinguishable.

“Max!”

They made a disreputable pair as they sat at the end of the pier, throwaway mess plates balanced on their laps. Her blue linen traveling suit was crumpled and dusty, and Max’s trousers were snagged and stained. But their appearance was no more bizarre than that of Nightingale Courts.

From their vantage point, they could see the whole expanse of the inlet, the two cottages on the arm of land opposite, the glittering tin roof of Jerry’s Gas ’N Go, the assorted boats docked at the long piers that thrust through the marshland toward deeper water, the semicircle of
cabins, and the huge, beige canvas tent. The tent dominated the courtyard. A milling throng eddied from the command post, a long table covered with maps and telephones, to the mess line.

Max poked unhappily at an extremely limp slice of bacon.

“Pretty good eggs,” she observed.

“Hmmph.” He gnawed disconsolately on toast coated with government-surplus peanut butter.

“The lady dishing up the grits said there would be a general meeting in about fifteen minutes.”

Max stopped gnawing long enough to glance toward the swarm of activity then he glanced toward the sun. Abruptly, he put the crust on his plate and placed the plate on the pier. “Annie—”

“No.” She shook her head decisively. “No, she isn’t dead. Max, she
isn’t.”
She felt a surge of confidence, a certainty. And she wasn’t just whistling Dixie. She was betting her chips on Henny and Henny’s long immersion in every facet of the mystery, from Dupin to Maigret. “No blood,” Annie said firmly. “No disarray. No
body
. Max, it wouldn’t make a bit of sense to kill Ingrid and take her body away. Why leave one body and take another?”

He played devil’s advocate. “The fact that she’s missing has convinced Posey she killed Jesse. Maybe that’s what was intended.”

“That won’t wash,” she said firmly. “If she’s never found, who’s going to believe she was guilty? This isn’t the day of Judge Crater. Why, the likelihood that she could escape to the mainland and not be spotted by anybody is just zilch. So, if she’s never found, it will prove she’s innocent, that she was murdered, too. They think the reason Judge Crater wasn’t found was because somebody murdered him. No, Ingrid has been kidnapped for a purpose, and it’s up to us—”

A tiny throat clearing, as delicate as the liquid call of a tree swallow, indicated an end to the honeymooners’ privacy. Laurel smiled winningly down on them.

Max pushed aside his plate and stood. “Mother?”

Annie scrambled to her feet, too, tugging at her wrinkled skirt with one hand and holding her plate with the
other. She wondered if his astonishment was at Laurel’s presence (which would never astonish Annie, not here, not in Timbuctoo) or at her costume.

As always, Laurel was radiantly lovely. Her chiseled patrician features were aglow with good health and good cheer; her vividly blue eyes glistened with love for her fellow human beings. (And if those same blue eyes had a slightly spacey air to Annie, she put it down to uncharitableness on her part and quickly thrust the thought away.)

But Laurel’s apparel
was
unusual, even for a woman who always matched her dress to her mood, with the infinite variety that implied.

A piece of dark brown cord cinched an absolutely plain, oatmeal-colored robe to Laurel’s nineteen-inch waist. Simple leather sandals completed her attire.

No adornments. No jewelry. No scarfs. No hose. Not even a single button.

Annie knew that in a similar get-up, she would be about as alluring as Bertha Cool.

Laurel was stunning.

However, a tiny frown marred that smooth, aristocratic brow. “Maxwell, dear boy,” his mother said hesitantly, “I wouldn’t, of course, interfere in your honeymoon plans in
any
way. May I say, however—and I’ve enjoyed five honeymoons, my sweet—that I do believe this”—and her spread hand (no rings today) indicated the rackety wooden pier and the exposed mudflats of the salt marsh, steaming beneath the sun—“is carrying rustic simplicity to an
extreme.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” her son said fervently.

“Oh, of course, of course. You and dear Annie have interrupted your plans to help search for Ingrid. I understand—and I applaud you both…. However, perhaps you dear children might take time this morning to—uh—freshen up.”

If Annie had felt like Edmund’s bedraggled trophy earlier, she now felt like a skunk-struck inhabitant of Joan Hess’s
Malice in Maggody
.