A Conventional Corpse: A Claire Malloy Mystery Page 16

  Prevarication (justified, I might add) had taken time. The second panel was apt to be winding down, and all the egomaniacal authors might be roaming the Azalea Inn before I arrived. I looked up at the rows of windows, wondering behind which one Sally Fromberg might be sprawled in bed, watching CNN, sucking up spoonfuls of chocolate pudding, and fantasizing about the exotically mysterious experience she was missing.

  Yeah, right.

  I drove out of the lot before Peter could emerge. Whatever it was that he thought deserved further discussion escaped me. The idea of him impregnating Leslie, either via a petri dish or the old-fashioned method, had chilled me, perhaps beyond the possibility of a gentle thawing after the fact. Luanne and I had debated it half the night. No matter what understanding he and Leslie had agreed upon, he would be the father, for better or worse, and he would never turn his back on his child. I could not see myself as the stepmother of a fertilized ovum.

  After indulging myself with some grumbled expletives, I forced myself to consider the present situation. I was missing three items of significance: the manuscript, the cat, and the key to Room 103.1 had no clues where to find the first two, but it occurred to me that there might be an outside chance of finding the third. Arnie had fallen into the cistern, and the paramedics had been less than enthusiastic about spending time at the bottom of the damp, odiferous hole. Arnie’s redolence would scarcely have enhanced the ambiance; I myself would have demanded a gas mask, if not full scuba gear.

  I drove back to the Azalea Inn. If Dilys and Sherry Lynne were already there, they were upstairs, presumably in their respective rooms. Laureen, Allegra, and Walter would appear within a matter of minutes, and the one hundred attendees in an hour. I thought about stopping by the kitchen to check on Lily, then realized I would be placing myself in danger should she be panicking over rolls that had failed to rise to the occasion.

  I tiptoed across the sunroom and went out into the garden. Although the rain had held back all day, dark clouds were moving in as if to spite Sally Fromberger. Lightning flickered beyond Old Main, and after a beat of three, thunder resonated.

  The shed at the back of the garden contained rakes, hoes, trowels, flowerpots, bags of fertilizer—and an aluminum ladder. I dragged it out, balanced it on my shoulder, and stepped over the yellow crime scene tape circling the cistern. Selling books was hardly a crime, I told myself virtuously as I pushed aside the wooden cover and eased the ladder into the cistern.

  A flashlight would have been convenient, but I had a feeling Lily was of the flickering candle school of detection. Rain began to spatter as I carefully descended the ladder into what might well qualify as the third or fourth ring of the Inferno. Nothing squeaked or hissed or flew into my hair. I was beginning to feel confident despite the increasing rain when the ladder began to shake violently. My foot slipped and I completed my descent in a fraction of a second, landing on my derriere on an uncompromisingly hostile stone surface.

  I’m not sure how long it took for me to assess the damage. My breath had been catapulted from my lungs, leaving me wheezing. My tailbone throbbed, but the remainder of my spine seemed functional. One elbow was oozing a warm, sticky substance that was, all things considered, apt to be blood.

  I do not bleed gracefully.

  Groaning, I sat up and wiggled until I could lean against the wall of the cistern. The braises on my buttocks might be worthy of depiction in an avant garde gallery in New York; undoubtedly one side or the other would resemble a religious icon. I could become renowned as “Our Lady of the Butt.” Pilgrims would flock from all over the world to marvel as I dropped my drawers, and their heartfelt donations would fund Caron’s college tuition.

  I realized that my head must have hit when I fell. I explored my comely curls and found a bump, not necessarily indicative of a concussion but likely to have realigned a few neurons. Rain was now pelting me, but it did little to sober me up as I gazed blearily at the ladder, which was rasping upward like a metallic caterpillar. I raised my hand as if to wave goodbye, then sighed and drifted into a senseless scenario of fluttering manuscript pages coated with pesto.

  It was much dimmer when I shook myself awake. After a moment to recall what had happened and why I was where I was, I realized that the lid atop the cistern had been scooted back, leaving only a few inches of visible sky The ladder was gone. The walls were twenty feet high and slimier than the four-month-old bacon in my refrigerator. What had now become steady rain suggested that no one would be chatting on a bench in the garden.

  I moved out of the rain, and then despite the obvious futility of it, bellowed “Help!” a few times before subsiding into petulance. Someone would eventually come into the garden and hear my pitiful bleats. The rain might relent at any minute and hordes of attendees would flood into the garden to pollute the stratosphere with second-hand smoke and admire the crime scene tape.

  It took me a bit longer to accept that someone had done this to me. The ladder had been pulled up, the heavy lid of the cistern dragged back, deliberately, and with malice aforethought. Was someone hoping I would not be rescued until after dehydration and starvation had resulted in a charmingly grotesque skeleton in the cistern?

  It was annoying, and I had no intention of cooperating. There was little I could do at the moment, however, except remind myself of why I’d climbed down the blasted ladder to begin with. I forced myself to my hands and knees and explored every inch of the floor of the cistern. Arnie’s key ring was not there, unless it had been so deeply lodged that it had slipped into the bowels of hell.

  I leaned against the wall. Moisture was beading on the stones. Our Lady of the Butt’s butt was chilling in a quarter of an inch of water. Cisterns had been built to collect not only rainwater, but also ground seepage. I was in no danger of drowning unless Farberville received an epic deluge, but I had no desire to succumb to a terminal diaper rash.

  I had reverted to doze mode when I heard a scritching sound above me. “Hello?” I called. “Is someone there?”

  There was no response. I sank back and tried to ignore the dribbles of water that had taken to zigzagging down my back. Parts of my anatomy felt as if moss was forming. If the noise I’d heard was coming from an invasion of rats, I vowed to hold my nose until I fell over dead and could aspire to a more blissful life next time.

  A cockroach in a bookstore, perhaps; the ones in mine seemed to be having a fine time and the only thing they did with invoices was to leave droppings on them.

  “Wimple!” shrieked a voice.

  Even Miss Palmer could have pegged this one. “Help!” I yelled. “Get the ladder.”

  “You poor creature,” said Sherry Lynne. For a moment, I thought she was addressing me, but then she added, “You naughty thing to disappear like that. I’ve been searching all day for you.”

  “Has no one been searching for me?” I called.

  “Is someone in there, Wimple?”

  “Do you believe in trolls, Sherry Lynne? Move the lid and find the ladder!”

  The cistern lid slid back, and Sherry Lynne’s round face peered over the stone wall. “Claire? What are you doing in there?”

  “I’m not waiting for a fourth for bridge. There’s a shed at the back of the garden. See if someone thoughtfully replaced the ladder.”

  “Yes, of course.” She vanished, and shortly thereafter lowered the ladder. “I don’t understand why you’re in there, Claire. It must be terribly uncomfortable.”

  “No kidding,” I said as I crawled carefully up the ladder and stepped into the glorious freshness of the garden. The sky was losing its color, but was a great deal lighter than the bottom of the cistem.

  “Whatever were you doing?” demanded Sherry Lynne.

  “Would you believe me if I said I was going for a merit badge in spelunking?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Nor would I,” I said, unable to come up with anything else. “At least you’ve found Wimple. He seems healthy enough.”

 
; She nuzzled her face in the cat’s raff. “My boy had a hard day, didn’t he? Thank goodness he came back and rescued Claire from that nasty old hole in the ground.”

  At least the cat hadn’t sent up a flare.

  Chapter

  12

  “Leave the ladder in there,” I said to Sherry Lynne. “I doubt the police can find any fingerprints, but they might as well try. And thank you very much. I hadn’t gotten around to thinking about what might happen if the person who did this to me returned to more carefully realign the lid—or determine just how easy it is to shoot fish in a barrel, so to speak. I wasn’t too far from developing gills.”

  “Someone was responsible for this?”

  “If I had fallen from the top, I’d be destined for the drawer next to Roxanne at the morgue. I was climbing down the ladder when someone shook it. I fell the last few feet. linless the ladder was possessed, someone was indeed responsible.”

  Sherry Lynne tightened her clutch on Wimple. “But why were you going into the cistern to begin with, Claire? Didn’t the police search it earlier?”

  The rain, out of deference to my shivering, had abated. In that the lower half of my body was already soaked, I sat on a wet bench and rolled up my sleeve to examine my elbow. “Yes, but they were more concerned with the bodies. I can’t see this cut very well. Is it deep enough to require stitches?”

  She averted her eyes. “The sight of blood makes Wimple nauseous. He may bite rather savagely on occasion, but it always makes him uneasy afterwards and he spends hours behind the sofa. Cats are as complex as people, don’t you think? Dimple has intimidated every dog in the neighborhood, but never fails to get carsick, and Doolittle sprawls across my keyboard every morning and refuses to budge until I lure him off with his terrycloth mousekin.”

  “Fascinating,” I murmured. “Freud may have missed his calling as a vet.”

  Wimple’s tongue emerged as Sherry Lynne squeezed him even more tightly. “You used the word ‘bodies.’ Roxanne was not the only victim in the cistern?”

  “A local man, employed by the college, seems to have fallen, too. He’s in no shape to have a portrait made any time soon, but he’ll recover.”

  “How did he . . . ?“

  “The police have been asking him that same question. Thus far he hasn’t furnished any answers.”

  “Did he cause Roxanne’s death?”

  “I don’t know, Sherry Lynne,” I said. “Why don’t we go inside so I can ask Lily for an icepack?”

  Her face assumed the paranoid expression I’d seen the previous day at the airport. “What about Wimple? I am not about to allow you to take him away again. I can tell from the way he’s trembling that he went through a terrible ordeal today.”

  “I think his trembling is due to your armlock around his throat. Take him upstairs as discreetly as you can, and shut him in the bathroom. Caron will go back to the apartment and get his carrier, litter box, and some cat food. Lily won’t find out until tomorrow, after the deed is done and the two of you are on the way to the airport. Her reaction is at the bottom of my list of things to worry about.”

  “And the identity of the murderer is at the top? If it’s not this man you mentioned, is it one of us? A detective in a rumpled suit told us after the luncheon panel to be available for questioning before the supper.”

  I looked at my watch, which had kept on ticking. Although it had seemed as though I’d been in the cistern for the better part of a week, it was only a quarter past five. “Are the others here?”

  She nodded. “Dilys and I have been back quite a while. She said she thought she might return to the shop and buy the crystal figurine for her granddaughter. I was so distraught about my poor kitty that I took an aspirin and lay down. I was awakened by a conversation between Laureen and Allegra in the hallway outside my door; from what I could make out, the session was halted after a fire alarm went off. I took a bath, changed clothes, and was going to the kitchen to ask for a cup of tea when I saw Wimple scratching on the lid of the cistern. I could tell from the crinkle in his brow that it was something more important than a wounded bird.”

  “Let me make sure Lily’s occupied before you take him upstairs,” I said, heading for the back door.

  She waited outside while I crept to the kitchen door and pressed my ear against it. Lily’s culinary mantra was not for the faint of heart. I gestured for Sherry Lynne to come in, then held my breath until she scurried by me and up the stairs. Wimple’s brow was still crinkled, but he appeared to be breathing.

  I suppose I should have called Peter, but he and Jorgeson were likely to arrive within the next hour to question the authors. After I told them what had happened, I could expect long-suffering sighs and even a snide suggestion that I had allowed myself to be caught up in a fantasy induced by an overdose of mystery fiction. I was not about to expose my bruises to anyone below the rank of archbishop. And if they did believe me, the authors would be hauled to the station and the supper canceled. Sally would hunt me down in the darkest corner of the Book Depot; Lily would be right behind her, cleaver in hand.

  What was increasingly obvious would have gone screaming off the pages of a cozy mystery novel: No one except the five authors, Lily, and the perpetually ill-fated Arnie had been at the inn when Roxanne had taken the fatal dive. The cast of characters had been reduced by one at the time I’d been sabotaged in the cistern. We had no sherry-swilling vicars in the vestibule or sociopathic housekeepers in the west wing. The butler had lost his position a hundred years ago, along with the houseboys and parlormaids. Laureen and Dilys might be convinced a ghost was prowling, but diaphanous entities were more apt to flit across windows than hoist ladders from cisterns.

  I considered the layout. Laureen and Allegra had the two rooms overlooking the garden. The window at the far end of the hallway could have provided Walter, Sherry Lynne, or Dilys with an opportunity to watch me begin my foolhardy descent. The window above the sink in the kitchen offered Lily the same opportunity, should her eyes have strayed from the chopping block.

  The cat had been recovered. The keys were likely to be lost to posterity, unless some college student had found them in the alley and was at the chemistry lab, brewing up a quantity of illegal drugs, or hunched in front of a computer in the physics building, surfing the Internet for instructions to build a nuclear bomb.

  This left only one more item on my list: Ammie’s manuscript. If someone had hidden it upstairs, he or she had done so with more cunning than I possessed. The very thought was humbling, and had I not been sitting on an increasingly damp cushion, I would have pondered it at length. My best chance of drying out, however, required & free flow of air.

  I rose and looked around the sunroom. The majority of chairs had cushions, but all were too thin to conceal the presence of a thick stack of papers. I checked the drawers of a small writing desk, finding nothing more incriminating than stationery with a logo of the Azalea Inn at the top of the pages. Lily must have taken some degree of pleasure in imagining genteel guests writing letters that extolled the virtues of her hypoallergenic haven. No doubt the pages were made from recycled pulp and the ballpoint pens filled with ink that did not utilize fossil fuel.

  There were no promising hiding places in the furniture in the hallway. My heart began to pound as I opened the cabinet doors of the credenza in the parlor, but subsided as I found nothing but a dusty decanter, chipped sherry glasses, and mummified moths. I was on my hands and knees, feeling for a secret drawer beneath it when I heard a noise behind me.

  “Goodness,” Laureen said from the doorway, “I’m sure none of my heroines was quite so soggy when she searched for clues.”

  I got to my feet. “The rain, you know.”

  “Why don’t you take a break and come up to my room? I know this convention has been nothing but a series of disasters for you. I’ll blow-dry your pants while you have a drink. It’s the least I can do, in that I share some responsibility for what’s happened.”

 
I realized my thighs were beginning to chafe. “Thanks, I’d appreciate that.” I trailed her up the stairs and along the hallway to the Rose Room. “I understand the fire alarm went off during the panel,” I said as I sat down on the edge of the bed and removed my shoes, socks, and pants in that order.

  “And the sprinklers in the ceiling as well,” she said as she went into the bathroom. “I suspect Walter’s temper was responsible. All I have is gin.”

  “Sounds great,” I said as I massaged my feet. My toes were as red as the roses coyly winking at me from every avaliable surface. Even the potpourri in a little wicker basket on the bedside table was composed of rose petals. The aroma might have been overpowering had the room not reeked of cigarette smoke. I felt a small prick of sympathy for Lily.

  Laureen came out with two glasses of gin and a hair dryer of the caliber Dirty Harry might have packed. She handed me a glass, then took aim at the backside of my pants, which I’d draped over a chair. “Even though I cannot excuse Walter’s boorish behavior, I do feel sorry for him. Roxanne seemed to have dedicated herself to destroying his career as a mystery writer.”

  “As if he had one,” said Dilys as she came into the room, then stopped. Her jaw waggled as she took in the situation. She finally regained her composure, as I’m sure her mummy had taught her to do, and said, “Do pardon if I’m interrupting something.”

  Laureen turned the hair dryer on her. “I’ve taken Claire hostage and threatened to set her pants on fire if she refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the Star of Farberville. Take one more step and I’ll have no choice but to attack your pores.”