The Best of Sisters in Crime (19 page)

Sam Clearey’s
skin darkened. Whether it was rage or embarrassment, it was difficult to tell,
for he was careful to let neither color his remark. “How can you possibly know
that?”

Noreen favored
him with a tender look. “She’s right across the hall from me. And I told you,
Sammy. The walls have ears.”

Sam disengaged
her hand from his arm. “Yes. Well. If you’ll excuse me, I’d better see to
Frances.”

Once he had
gone, Noreen Tucker seemed to feel little need to remain with Howard and Adele.
She left them to themselves and went to join her husband.

“Still think she
doesn’t mean any harm?” Howard asked. When Adele didn’t reply, he looked her
way.

She tried to
smile, tried to shrug, failed at both, and hated herself for losing her composure
in front of him. As she knew he would, Howard saw past the surface.

“She got to you,”
he said.

Adele looked
from Dolly Ragusa to Cleve Houghton to Sam Clearey. She had received Noreen’s
message without any difficulty. Nasty though it was, it was loud. It was clear.
As had been her message to Howard at breakfast. As, no doubt, had been her
message to Sam Clearey. Whatever it was.

“She’s a viper,”
Adele agreed.

The worst part
of those brief moments with Noreen was the fact that her cruelty brought
everything back in a rush. No matter that there was no direct correlation
between Noreen’s comment and the past; her veiled declaration of knowledge did
more than merely make perilous inroads into Adele’s need for privacy. It forced
her to remember.

The minibus trundled
along the narrow road. Signposts flashed by intermittently: Little Abington,
Linton, Horseheath, Haverhill. Around Adele, the noise of conversation broke
into Victoria Wilder-Scott’s amplified monologue, which was droning endlessly
from the front of the bus. Adele stared out the window.

She had been
thirty-one and three years divorced when she’d met Bob. He’d been thirty-eight
and eleven years married. He had three children and a wife who sewed and swept
and ironed and packed lunches. She was loyal, devoted, and supportive. But she
didn’t have passion, Bob declared. She didn’t speak to his soul. Only Adele
spoke to his soul.

Adele believed
it. She had to. Belief gave dignity to what otherwise would have been just a
squalid affair. Elevated to a spiritual plane, their relationship was
justified. More, it was sanctified. Having found her soul mate, she grew adept
at rationalizing why she couldn’t live without him. And how quickly five years
had passed in this manner. How easily they decimated her meager self-esteem.

It was two
months now since Bob had been gone from her life. She felt like an open wound. “You’ll
be back,” he’d said. “You’ll never have with another man what you have with me.”
It was true. Circumstances had proven him correct.

“You can’t get
anything inside the bus. There’s not enough light.”

Adele roused
herself to see that Cleve Houghton was laughing at Dolly Ragusa. She was
kneeling backward on the seat in front of him. focusing her camera on his
swarthy face.

“Sure I can.”
Click.
And to make her point.
Click.

“Okay. Then let
me take one of you.”

“No way.”

“Come on.” He
reached out.

She dodged him
by scampering into the aisle. She moved among the seats, snapping away at one
student after another: Ralph Tucker dozing with his head against the window,
Howard Breen reading the brochure on Abinger Manor, Sam Clearey turning from
the scenery outside as she called his name.

From the front
of the minibus, Victoria Wilder-Scott continued her monologue about the manor, “.
. .family remained staunchly Royalist to the end. In the north tower, you’ll
see a priest’s hole where Charles I was hidden prior to escaping to the
Continent. And in the long gallery, you’ll be challenged to find a Gibb door
that’s completely concealed. It was through this door that King Charles—”

“Doesn’t she
think we can read the brochure? We know all about the paintings and the
furniture and the silver gee-gaws, for God’s sake.” Noreen Tucker examined her
teeth in the mirror of a compact. She rubbed at a spot of lipstick and got to
her feet—intent, it seemed, upon Sam Clearey, who sat apart from his wife.

Restlessly,
Adele turned in her seat. Her eyes met Cleve Houghton’s. His gaze was frank and
direct, the sort of appraisal that peeled off clothing and judged the flesh
beneath.

He smiled,
eyelids drooping. “Things on your mind?”

Dolly’s shout of
laughter provided Adele with an excuse not to answer. She was perched on the
arm of Ralph Tucker’s seat, talking to Frances Clearey. Her face was animated.
Her hands made shapes in the air as she spoke.

“I think it’s
great that you and Sam do things like this together,” Dolly said. “This
Cambridge course. I tried to get my boyfriend to come with me, but he wouldn’t
even consider it.”

Frances Clearey
made an effort to smile, but it was evident that her concentration was on
Noreen Tucker, who had dropped into the vacant seat next to Frances’s husband.

“D’you two do
this sort of thing every summer?” Dolly asked.

“This is our
first time.” Frances’s eyes flicked to the side as Noreen Tucker laughed and
inclined her head in Sam Clearey’s direction.

Dolly spoke
cheerfully. Adele saw her move so that her body blocked Frances’s view of Sam
and Noreen. “I’m going to tell David—that’s my boyfriend—all about you two. If
a marriage is going to work, it seems to me that the husband and wife need to
share mutual interests. And still give each other space at the same time. Like
you and Sam. David and
I. . .
he can really be possessive.”

“I’m surprised
he didn’t come with you, then.”

“Oh, this is
educational. David doesn’t worry if I’m involved in art history. It’s like him
and his monkeys. He’s a physical anthropologist. Howlers.”

“Howlers?”

Dolly lifted her
camera and snapped Frances’s picture. “Howler monkeys. That’s what he studies.”
She grinned. “Their poop, if you can believe it. I ask him what he’s going to
learn from putting monkey poop under a microscope. He says looking at it’s not
so bad. Collecting it is hell.”

Frances Clearey
laughed. Dolly did likewise. She took another picture and danced up the aisle.

Adele marveled
at how easily the girl had managed to bring Frances out of herself, even for a
moment. How wise she was to point out subtly to Frances the strengths of her
marriage instead of allowing her to sit in solitude, brooding upon its most
evident weakness. Noreen Tucker was nothing, Dolly was saying. Other women are
nothing. Sam belongs to you.

Dolly’s was a
decidedly insouciant attitude toward life. But why should she offer any other
perspective? Her future stretched before her, uncomplicated and carefree. She
bore no scars. She had no past to haunt her. She was, at the heart of it, so
wonderfully young.

“Why so solemn
this morning?” Cleve Houghton asked Adele from across the aisle. “Don’t take
yourself so seriously. Start enjoying yourself. Life’s to be lived.”

Adele’s throat
tightened. She’d had quite enough of living.

Click.

“Adele!” Dolly
was back with her camera.

When they
arrived at their destination, the sight of Abinger Manor roused Adele from her
blackness of mood. Across a moat that was studded with lily pads, two
crenellated towers stood at the sides of the building’s front entry. They rose
five stories, and on either side of them, crow-stepped gables were surmounted
by impossibly tall, impossibly decorated chimneys. Bay windows, a later addition
to the house, extended over the moat and gave visual access to an extensive
garden. This was edged on one side with a tall yew hedge and on the other with
a brick wall against which grew an herbaceous border of lavender, aster, and
dianthus. The Great Houses of Britain class wandered toward this garden with a
quarter hour to explore it prior to the manor’s first tour.

Adele saw that
they were not to be the only visitors to the manor that morning. A large group
of Germans debouched from a tour coach and joined Dolly Ragusa in extensively
photographing the garden and the exterior of the house. Two family groups
entered the maze and began shouting at one another as they immediately lost
their way. A handsome couple pulled into the car park in a silver Bentley and
stood in conversation next to the moat. For a moment, Adele thought that these
last visitors were actually the owners of the manor—they were extremely well
dressed and the Bentley suggested a wealth unassociated with taking tours of
great houses. But they joined the others in the garden, and as they strolled
past Adele, she overheard a snatch of conversation pass between them.

“Really, Tommy,
darling, I can’t recall agreeing to come here at all. When did I do so? Is this
one of your tricks?”

“Salmon
sandwiches” was the man’s unaccountable reply.

“Salmon
sandwiches?”

“I bribed you,
Helen. Early last week. A picnic. Salmon sandwiches. Stilton cheese. Strawberry
tarts. White wine.”

“Ah.
Those
salmon sandwiches.”

They laughed
together quietly. The man dropped his arm around the woman’s shoulders. He was
tall, very blond, clear-featured, and handsome. She was slender, dark-haired,
with an oval face. They walked in perfect rhythm with each other. Lovers, Adele
thought bleakly, and forced herself to turn away.

When a bell rang
to call them for the tour, Adele went gratefully, hoping for distraction, never
realizing how thorough that distraction would be.

Their guide was
a determined-looking girl in her mid-twenties with spots on her chin and too
much eye makeup. She spoke in staccato. They were in the original screens
passage, she told them. The wall to their left was the original screen. They
would be able to admire its carving when they got to the other side of it. If
they would please stay together and not stray behind the corded-off areas . . .
Photographs were permissible without a flash.

As the group
moved forward, Adele found herself wedged between two German matrons who needed
to bathe. She breathed shallowly and was thankful when the size of the Great
Hall allowed the crowd to spread out.

It was a
magnificent room, everything that Victoria Wilder-Scott, their textbook, and
the Abinger Manor brochure had promised it would be. While the guide cataloged
its features for them, Adele dutifully took note of the towering coved ceiling,
of the minstrel gallery and its intricate fretwork, of the tapestries, the
portraits, the fireplace, the marble floor. Near her, cameras focused and
shutters clicked. And then at her ear: “Just what I was looking for.
Just.”

Adele’s heart
sank. She had successfully avoided Noreen Tucker in the garden, after having
almost stumbled upon her and Ralph in the middle of a Noreenian rhapsody over a
stone bench upon which she had determined the lovers in her new romance novel
would have their climactic assignation.

“The ball. Right
in here!” Noreen went on. “Oh, I
knew
we were clever to take this class, Ralph!”

Adele looked
Noreen’s way. She was dipping her hand into the plastic bag that protruded from
her husband’s safari jacket. Ten o’clock, Adele thought, trail-mix time. Noreen
munched away, murmuring, “Charles and Delfinia clasped each other as the music
from the gallery floated to caress them. ‘This is madness, darling. We must
not. We cannot.’ He refused to listen. ‘We
must.
Tonight.’ So they—”

Adele walked
away, grateful for the moment when the guide began ushering them out of the
Great Hall. They went up a flight of stairs and into a narrow, lengthy gallery.

“This long
gallery is one of the most famous in England,” their guide informed them as
they assembled behind a cord that ran the length of the room. “It contains not
only one of the finest collections of rococo silver, which you see arranged to
the left of the fireplace on a demi lune table—that’s a Sheraton piece, by the
way—but also a Le Brun, two Gainsboroughs, a Reynolds, a Holbein, a charming
Whistler, and several lesser-known artists. In the case at the end of the room
you’ll find a hat, gloves, and stockings that belonged to Queen Elizabeth I.
And here’s one of the most remarkable features of the room.”

She walked to
the left of the Sheraton table and pushed lightly on a section of the paneling.
A door swung open, previously hidden by the structure of the wall.

“It’s a Gibb
door. Clever, isn’t it? Servants could come and go through it and never be seen
in the public rooms of the house.”

Cameras clicked.
Necks craned. Voices murmured.

“And if you’ll
especially take note of—”

“Ralph!” Noreen
Tucker gasped.
“Ralph!”