Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (20 page)

Kayla stood up from the table, and Max thought she was just going to leave and say no more. She would certainly have been within her rights. But she came back with a pot of coffee, and a cup for herself. Then the story came out.

“I met him the night of the restaurant opening. I was here, helping the caterer. One thing led to another. We didn’t have—there was nothing between us, but I knew what he wanted. And I let him believe he stood a chance. That was wrong of me, Father, and I know that now. I should have told him to go to hell or I’d tell his wife. I’ve wished a hundred times I’d done exactly that.

“He promised to help me get a job in London, to get my name before the important agents and directors. Right. What he had in mind would get my name before them all right. He organized an introduction to some guy in London—he said. I actually went to London, and the address he gave me was a phony. The guy’s name was phony. There was no such place in the West End. I guess he was hoping I’d be really grateful—beforehand—and wouldn’t think to check up on what he said—beforehand. He was half right anyway.

“I confronted him, and he had the nerve to laugh. He thought it was funny. ‘You’re only average,’ he said, ‘if that.’ He told me I had no potential in the theater ‘or anywhere else.’”

Ouch,
thought Max.

“He added that I was too old, that I’d be a laughingstock. I was just reeling. I don’t know why I just stood there and took it, but I did. Part of me believed him, you see. You always believe the bad things about yourself, don’t you? Anyway, what I couldn’t believe was that he would have the nerve to show up here, after pulling that on me, but somehow I think he’d gotten wind there would be a reporter from
Glossamer Living
at the restaurant that night and he was hoping someone would take his photo. Didn’t I nearly split a gut laughing when I saw they had taken his photo all right—from the back?”

That was it? Max wondered. A tawdry little ploy from Thaddeus—a ridiculous and cheap attempt at seduction that had failed. And when it failed, he was happy to send her off, wasting her time on a wild-goose chase. It seemed like a petty revenge, and, on reflection, probably just the sort of thing Thaddeus would do. If the woman had come across with what Thaddeus wanted, then, maybe, he’d have arranged the introduction he’d used as bait, but even that was doubtful.

They talked awhile longer, but Kayla had shut down now, and he got no more from her.

What is she not telling me? Max wondered. Was she lying about how far had she allowed intimacy with Thaddeus, decades older than she, to progress? For who would be able to find out the truth, now that the man who had tricked her was dead?

Somehow, Max didn’t particularly want to know the details. But her revulsion for Thaddeus now was real enough. Real enough to kill over? From the look on Kayla’s hardened face, the answer was yes.

The members of the Writers’ Square had convened an extraordinary meeting. It was merely an excuse to discuss developments, thinly cloaked by Frank’s claim that he’d been having problems with a plot point—
plot point
being a professional term he’d picked up from a rejection letter he’d received, in which it was claimed his work needed one.

Gabby had been invited to join the group, but not without opposition from Frank. Suzanna had broken the news to him just before the meeting started.

“But she’s—” Frank began.

“She’s what?”

“Well, she’s a hairdresser, and…”

“And you’re what—a brain surgeon? What difference does it make? We need to mix things up in this group, and she said she’d be willing to give it a try. Shush now. Here she comes.”

Suzanna and Elka had already explained the rules of the group to Gabby. She would have to read her work aloud—there were no exceptions to this rule. Suzanna thought she would balk at this, and she did. Only by bringing Elka onto the case was Gabby finally persuaded she would be in good company, with a patient and receptive audience. Elka wasn’t sure how true that was, but she sensed an aloneness that clung to Gabby and wanted very much to include her in village life. It was an aloneness with which Elka was too familiar.

So at Tuesday’s extraordinary meeting, they made the usual rounds of the group, each member reading aloud from a work in progress, or discussing what they were planning to try their hand at next. Frank began reading the same passage they had heard at the previous meeting. There was some objection to this, and he said, dropping all pretense, “Does it really matter? We’re here to discuss the murder, aren’t we?”

When it was her turn, Gabby cleared her throat and in a quiet voice that had them all leaning in to hear, she began to read.

I look for you in every flower.

She said mums were your favorite

But I knew that wasn’t so.

Nothing showy would do.

Something sturdy, plain, and white would be

Your plant du jour.…

As Gabby had read on, they had a sense they were hearing a unique voice, untrained, plain, and raw but transparent in its desire to communicate heartfelt emotion. Whether poets could be trained was a large question, but the members of the Writers’ Square registered that their low expectations of Gabby’s abilities as a poet had been colored by her sex, age, and occupation. Not all were as embarrassed as they might have been by this realization, but all felt somewhat chastened.

… A tall stem,

Against the blue sky

A blossom

White as a nun’s cowl,

Devon cream and white cliffs.

White as a shroud.

When we talked

Each morning

There would be

A vase of tulips between us.

It was, they knew without being told, a poem of loss. Frank’s face masked an expression of surprise as Gabby continued to read. He’d been expecting something more along the lines of a limerick.

Adam, possibly the most cerebral of the group, felt the impact of the poem as a quickening of his breathing, and a pounding of blood he imagined he could feel as it left and entered his heart. Having never had such an experience, and having no words to describe it, he shifted uncomfortably in his chair as he waited for the reading to end. Gabby at last looked up, blushing at her own boldness and fearing the others’ judgment.

Finally, she became aware of Elka staring at her.

“That was beautiful,” whispered Elka at last.

“That’s nice,” said Suzanna, less easily impressed. “What’s it called?”

Gabby hesitated, realizing: “I hadn’t put a title to it.”

“Who’s it for?”

Again the hesitation. Clearly, Gabby was not used to the spotlight and was wriggling under the novelty of being the center of attention. She tugged nervously at the cuff of her sleeve. “I suppose I was writing it to my husband, to Harold. So, ‘For My Husband,’ I suppose. That would do as a title. He would have liked that.”

“That’s nice,” Elka said again. She seemed to be fixed on this simple thought. Gabby was known to have been widowed. “It’s nice you remember him that way.” Elka’s own husband was gone and best forgotten, having left her to raise their son, a monumentally tough job, about which she held remarkably little rancor. Her son was the center around which planet Elka wobbled.

“It’s every bit as good as anything Thaddeus Bottle ever wrote,” said Adam. Frank nodded.

The mention of the great playwright formerly in their midst sparked an immediate detour in the conversation. They quickly moved from theories of who might have wanted to kill Thaddeus (everyone) to a critique of the man’s work.

“Of course it’s not the same thing,” said Frank. “It’s two different sets of skills entirely, acting and writing.”

“I wouldn’t agree,” said Adam. “Look at Shakespeare. Actor and dramatist.”

“Well, Shakespeare was
Shake
speare, wasn’t he? Everyone else is just everyone else.”

“Ah, gentle Shakespeare,” breathed Adam. “How I’d love to interview him over a pint of ale.”

“What would you ask him?”

“I’d ask him for his autograph, for a start,” said Adam with a laugh. “He left only five or six signatures. None of his plays or poetry survives in manuscript. Noah says the dream of his life is to find such a manuscript inside one of his antiques over there at Noah’s Ark—the pages perhaps used as lining for a drawer or trunk.”

The faraway look on all their faces at the thought of such a find was dispelled by Frank.

“Perhaps we should set our sights a bit lower. Suzanna, what else do you have to read for us tonight? A little light romance?”

If Suzanna was perturbed by the “less than Shakespearean” implication behind Frank’s word, she shrugged it off. Suzanna was aiming unapologetically for the Jackie Collins crowd.

“I’ll just get some more coffee before I begin, shall I?” she said. “Be right back. Elka, you brought biscuits again, did you?”

Elka nodded. “Lemon.”

“Ah, good! I skipped dinner to be here on time.”

“I can’t think of anyone more qualified to write a memoir than Suzanna,” said Elka when Suzanna was out of earshot.

“Me, either. But,” Adam added hesitantly, “I thought she was writing a romance?”

“I’m not sure in Suzanna’s case there’s a great deal of difference.” This from Frank. “As I understand it, apart from her vicar book, she’s been working on a tell-all about her more rackety days in London working for that now-defunct newspaper, a tale thinly disguised as fiction. At least I think it’s disguised.”

“Oh my. Could we be sued by someone?” wondered Elka.

“Just for being in her writing group? I doubt it.”

Adam had another thought. “She’s not writing about any of us, is she?

“I don’t think so,” said Elka. “She says, ‘Nothing interesting ever happens here in Brigadoon.’”

“That’s not true,” said Frank. “We have murders, don’t we? And there’s a definite chance Royalty may visit the village soon.”

A rumor had been spread by the
Globe and Bugle
that an HRH or two were staying with friends nearby. This rumor seemed to be the incentive for numerous shopping excursions by the villagers into nearby Monkslip-super-Mare, the colorful seaside town nearest the estate of the stately friends. Sadly, there had been no reports of a live sighting. It would appear the Duchess of Cambridge no longer had time to shop for her groceries at Waitrose.

The Royalty buzz had somehow become entangled with an earlier rumor involving an equally unlikely visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Given Nether Monkslip’s reputation as a place of healing and spirituality—this due partly to the menhirs on Hawk Crest and partly to the abbey ruins—the rumors combusted like heat and flammable gas, taking on new life with the theory that the mystically inclined Prince Charles would be drawn as if by magnet to the area, with HRH Camilla, however reluctantly, in tow.

The villagers were content in the case of the archbishop to let the man come to them, rather than that they should find cause to seek out His Grace. As Elka Garth had been heard to comment, the archbishop, unlike HRH Camilla and—God knew—Catherine, always wore the same old outfit.

Suzanna returned. Tonight she wore a tailored men’s-style shirt and a skirt fitted like cling film to her wide hips. Her blond hair gleamed and her brown eyes sparkled in the firelight. She was holding aloft a circular plastic item decorated with beads.

“What
is
this?” she asked. “An IUD?”

Elka looked up. “It’s a stitch marker, dear. One of the knitters must have left it behind. It looks like one of Miss Pitchford’s.”

A local knitting circle led by Lily Iverson, the resident expert in all things woolen, also used Adam’s shop as meeting space. Sometimes one member would take turns reading aloud while the others clicked softly away with their needles; generally, they just chatted, taking occasional sips of their wine. Miss Agnes Pitchford had been working for months on something white that might have been a ship’s sail.

“Oh,” said Suzanna. “
Not
an IUD, then. Anyway, I’ve just remembered what happened at the second-but-last Christmas office party before the ‘dark Satanic mills’ folded,” she said. “I can’t tell you the details—I’ve got to save
some
thing for the book—but it involved the photocopying machine and a reindeer antlers headband. Of course, this was just after my divorce, so allowances must be made.”

She looked around at her audience. Gabby looked particularly taken aback. The rest of them were used to it.

“What? We
were
on deadline.”

Frank, who despite his better judgment had read the paper until it folded, was thinking Suzanna’s story explained so much—the typos, the missing paragraphs, the page numbers out of order.

Suzanna said, “I’m just getting to the part where my boss finally left to ‘explore new opportunities,’ as it was announced in the trade press. That is trade-press speech for rat deserting a sinking ship, not to be confused with rat walking the plank. At least he didn’t say he wanted to devote more time to his family. I knew his wife. She would have been appalled to have him underfoot all the time.”

“This was just before you came to Nether Monkslip, wasn’t it?” asked Elka. “Your job at the paper?”

“More or less,” said Suzanna. “It seems like another world now. The memory of the days when I toiled among the other ink-stained wretches is fast receding.”

“Do you ever hear from your ex?” Elka asked.

“My ex-husband? God, no. The last I heard, he was starting some sort of adventure company. Perhaps he and the new girlfriend will be eaten alive by rhinos. Or maybe he’ll get his ass permanently wedged in a crevasse while he’s leading a potholing expedition down a cave. Either way, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

Yes, thought Elka. The arrival in the village of Umberto Grimaldi was doing Suzanna a world of good. She had seen them talking together in the village more than once.