Authors: Elizabeth Peters
“I wish you’d stop cracking jokes.”
Jacqueline’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t joking. Everybody in Pine Grove loves me. I’ve made lots of nice friends already. An ex-boyfriend of Kathleen’s who mows lawns for a living, the manager of the Bon Ton, the model for Hawkscliffe in the flesh, and beautiful muscular flesh it is, too, and the woman who owns the local bookstore.”
Booton seized thankfully on the one item in the list that made sense to him. “A bookstore in Pine Grove? She must be starving. None of ’em can read.”
Jacqueline had had similar thoughts, but she resented hearing them from Booton. “They are nice people,” she said stiffly. “And Jan, the bookseller, is a very bright, capable young woman. She’s got a crush on Kathleen—knows everything there is to know about her—and I’m hoping to get some useful information from her. What a snob you are, Boots.”
“Sorry. I didn’t realize you had been elected an honorary citizen.”
“Go to hell, Boots. If you leave me alone, I should have that outline for you in a couple of weeks.”
“So soon? That’s great, Jackie, just great.”
“Don’t call me Jackie,” Jacqueline snarled, and hung up.
The nearest city of any size was the county seat, thirty miles east of Pine Grove. It possessed, among other amenities denied the citizens of the smaller town, two motels. Jacqueline made one stop, in a shopping center, before proceeding to the Holiday Inn’s restaurant.
What she had bought in the shopping center, with considerable reluctance, were four books. It half-killed her to contribute even minutely to the incomes of Jack Carter and Brunnhilde Karlsdottir, but it was the only way she could get her hands on photographs of the precious pair. She had also bought copies of the latest books of Martinez and Ellrington, but only because a good investigator overlooks no possibility. She had essentially dismissed them as viable suspects.
Once seated, she took the books out of the bag and spread them across the table. The waitress did not comment on the faces that leered, smiled pleasantly, glowered, and (in Augusta Ellrington’s case) hid behind the rump of an extremely large, extremely bushy cat. She simply moved the volumes out of the way and served Jacqueline’s salad.
No luck there, Jacqueline thought. She hadn’t really expected to be so fortunate. Chewing healthily, she considered her next move.
Direct inquiry produced nothing more. The waitress had never seen none of them. She’d never heard of them neither. She didn’t have time to read much. Being an agreeable woman, she conferred with several of her colleagues and finally flushed one who not only could read, but who had read both Carter and Karlsdottir. She loved Brunnhilde’s books. “I never knew that was what she looked like,” she mourned, studying Brunnhilde’s Viking leer. “I only buy paperbacks. No, she was never here, at least not when I was working.”
Jacqueline presented her with both books, stripped of their jackets, and she promised to call the number Jacqueline scribbled inside the Carter book if either of them showed up. She probably wouldn’t, but it didn’t hurt to try. While she waited for her coffee, Jacqueline entertained herself by cutting the photographs off the jackets.
The young woman at the front desk was equally unhelpful. So was the staff of the Ramada Inn, across town. Jacqueline got back in her car and brooded. There was no sense in going farther afield. The trip had been an excuse, really, to get away from the reproachful face of her computer. But there was one more thing she could do while she was here.
The courthouse was a turn-of-the-century red brick building on the square in the center of town. A modest fee got her access to Kathleen’s will, and she pored over it for some time.
Yet there was not much there she didn’t already know. The will was dated two weeks before Kathleen’s disappearance. The assets she possessed, and those accruing from royalties on her first and all subsequent books, were to go directly into a trust fund. It was the income from the trust that went to St. John and the other heirs, divided equally among them—but not the entire income. Fifty percent of the total was to be paid to an organization called Friends of Pets Incorporated.
Kathleen had had an earlier will, which this one supplanted. Jacqueline would have given a great deal to know how the two differed. An increase in the amount to be left to charity might suggest that Kathleen had learned something about one or all of her heirs that displeased her.
Such as the fact that one of them was trying to kill her?
If only she had more time! Jacqueline’s green eyes narrowed resentfully. Sherlock Holmes, damn him, earned his living detecting. Miss Marple didn’t have to do anything except totter around St. Mary Mead asking leading questions. She even had a little maid to do the housework. Lord Peter Wimsey was independently wealthy; furthermore, he had a useful manservant and a cooperative policeman for a brother-in-law, instead of a New York cop ex-boyfriend whose idea of cooperation was strictly physical.
Jacqueline’s earlier excursions into crime had occurred while she was on vacation. No doubt, she thought gloomily, corpses were falling all around her the rest of the time, but she hadn’t noticed because she was so busy earning a living. That was what she ought to be doing now, earning her living. Writers didn’t get vacations. Nobody paid them a salary while they basked in the Roman sunlight or took bus tours through England. Nobody did the work for them while they were away from their desks. When they returned from a holiday that had provided very little relaxation, because they were haunted the whole time by the letters they had not answered and the characters they had abandoned in mid-chapter, they found the characters still in desperate straits and a whole pile of new letters to be answered, not to mention galleys and manuscripts studded with nasty little pink slips containing questions and demands for revision from conscienceless editors.
What I ought to do, Jacqueline thought, is finish the damned outline. Get it out of the way. Assuming, of course, that nobody bashes my head in or electrocutes me before I can finish it. Damn Ara anyway, I can’t stand the woman. Who would have thought she’d turn out to be such a wimp? I wish I could talk to the other candidates about their proposals. But with the way things are…
She stopped, not because a reader at the next table was glaring at her for talking aloud, but because of the inspiration that had hit her like a dazzling flash. What if… And then supposing…
She crammed her pencil and notebook back into her purse, heaved it onto her shoulder, and bolted out of the room.
As she drove back to Pine Grove she worked out the plot twist that had occurred to her. It would mean scrapping most of Kathleen’s outline and introducing a new female character to act as a foil and a rival for Ara. Jacqueline chortled happily and passed an antique Chevy driven painstakingly by an elderly man. It could work. It had to work. Talk about the earth moving.… There was nothing, but nothing, to compare with the climactic rapture of the Great Idea that broke a long writer’s block. She felt like bursting into song. In fact, she had burst into song. “Oh, what a beautiful morning, Oh, what a beautiful day…”
It was afternoon, not morning, but she couldn’t think of a song celebrating that time of day. There would be no harm, surely, in letting her newborn idea lie fallow for a night. She couldn’t possibly forget it, it was too brilliant. (Jacqueline smirked.) It might even sprout a few subsidiary ideas. She still needed a finish, a conclusion as shattering as the ending of
Naked in the Ice
—something that would lead on into Volume 3 but leave the reader sated, if not wholly satisfied.
First thing in the morning, Jacqueline promised her conscience. I’ll sit at that desk till I take root or finish the outline. In the meantime…
Only one untoward incident occurred on her drive back. On the outskirts of Pine Grove she was pulled over by an unmarked car with a flashing red light. Resignedly, Jacqueline stopped. Maybe she had been going a smidge too fast. There were so many things to do that day.
The officer was a member of the local sheriff’s department, not a state policeman, and when he saw Jacqueline, his innocent young face opened into a broad grin. He didn’t even ask to see her license. After delivering a stern lecture on the perils of speeding to children and other livestock, he let her go, but not before he asked where she had learned judo. Evidently the story of her encounter with Carter had not only been spread by her admirers, but had taken on some degree of exaggeration. No doubt the current version had her leaping four feet off the floor and kicking Carter unconscious.
Jacqueline proceeded on her way, pleased but wondering how the young officer had known who she was. She couldn’t be the only handsome middle-aged lady with green eyes and auburn hair driving a car with New York plates and a Mondale-Ferraro sticker on the bumper.
On her way through town she stopped at the supermarket to pick up a few supplies. School would be out shortly and she wanted to be prepared.
As she approached Gondal, the mutter of an engine greeted her and she saw a riding mower lumbering across the lawn. The man who guided it was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing denim work clothes, but he was not Paul Spencer. Standing or sitting, running or reclining, he was unmistakable. “Her heart knew him with the knowledge of the ages.”
“Damn,” said Jacqueline.
The little cottage looked even sadder and more dispirited. When Jacqueline unlocked the door, a breath of dank, dead air greeted her. Leaving the front door open to dispel the stale miasma, she went into the other room. Kathleen’s library.
Someone had removed the fragments of the broken railing and swept the floor. There goes that piece of evidence, Jacqueline thought. If it was a piece of evidence… The sawed-off step, which was, to her mind, at least, more conclusive, had not been touched. Did that prove St. John, who had obviously been responsible for the clean-up, was innocent of the tampering? Possibly; probably. It didn’t mean he was innocent of other things.
A rapid overall survey of the bookshelves told her that the books had been arranged by subject: history, anthropology, folklore, literature, poetry. It was an impressive collection, indicating the breadth of Kathleen Darcy’s research. She had used a variety of sources for
Naked in the Ice
—biblical exegesis, studies of ancient religion, the latest archaeological finds.
Jacqueline could feel herself succumbing to the lure of the books. It was all she could do to refrain from taking one of the volumes from the shelf, squatting on the floor, and starting to read. That wasn’t why she was here, however. She had begged an empty carton from the supermarket manager and she intended to take a selection away with her. She needed more background, especially in the area of folklore. The religious aspect figured strongly in Kathleen’s book; she had made extensive use of such authorities as Lévy-Bruhl, Frazer and G. R. Levy.
Their books were on the shelves. Jacqueline put them in the carton and wandered on, marveling at the breadth of Kathleen’s reading. There was an entire shelf on the Brontës, including the standard works devoted to their juvenilia. Poetry, ancient and classical history.… That was an old and very handsomely bound edition of Suetonius. Horribly spotted with mildew.… Damn St. John. Jacqueline took the book from the shelf and wiped the cover with her handkerchief.
Why the connection occurred to her at that particular instant in time she could not have said. It might have been the title—
Lives of the Twelve Caesars
—and the way her mind clicked into gear, reciting the names she had memorized back in college. It might have been her insatiable curiosity and elephantine memory, which stored away for future consideration all the unexplained trifles she encountered along the way. Whatever the mechanism, the connection occurred, forceful as a swift kick in the pants. Heedless of splinters and dust, Jacqueline dropped to the floor and opened the book.
“He got his surname Caligula, derived from
caliga,
a kind of boot, by reason of a merry word passed around the camp, because he was brought up there in the dress of a common soldier.”
Gaius Caesar, son of Germanicus, nephew of the emperor Tiberius; “a monster rather than a man”; one of the most infamous of all Rome’s rulers.
Little Boots.
That was the word Booton Stokes had cut short when he slammed his fist onto the recorded telephone message. Caligula. An appropriate nickname for a man whose acquaintances called him Boots. Particularly, Jacqueline mused, if the people who called him that thoroughly disliked him. Not a complimentary name in any sense—rather like dubbing an associate Adolf, or Jack the Ripper. No wonder Booton had reacted with such fury. He must be familiar with the reputation of the original Caligula. It wasn’t a particularly esoteric piece of information. Every student of Roman history, every reader of novels such as
The Robe,
surely must be familiar with it. All the popular histories of Rome dwelt lovingly on the nasty habits of Little Boots. Modern explicit sex and violence fiction couldn’t hold a candle to the Romans at their best, or worst. You name it, some of them did it.
The sound was not loud but she had been hoping to hear it, and half-listening for it. She turned her head in time to see the hasty withdrawal of a small sneakered foot that had tentatively pressed one of the floorboards of the adjoining room.
When she reached the door the child was standing outside. She must have come directly to the cottage after getting off the school bus; she was still wearing her school clothes. The jeans were new and the sneakers were still fairly clean, and she was carrying a lunch box. From its brightly enameled cover the epicene countenance of Michael Jackson grinned at Jacqueline, who did not grin back.
“I do hope I’m not interrupting,” said Marybee, with a smirk that aroused Jacqueline’s worst instincts. She hated smart-ass kids, with good reason. She had raised two of them.
However, she wanted to pump Marybee, so she kept her opinions to herself. “Not at all. Come in.”
“Not me.” The child shook her head vigorously. “I wouldn’t go in that place for anything.”