A Conventional Corpse Read online

  “Lemon or milk?” I asked.

  “Milk, please. Dilys has converted me. One of these days I may find the courage to eat a fishpaste sandwich.”

  “Were you sitting here late this morning when Roxanne came, into the inn with an armload of papers?”

  “I knew what they were, naturally, but I pretended otherwise and insisted she accompany me to the garden. I took the papers from her and set them on a bench, then suggested we sit on the wall of the cistern so no one could see us from the back door. I assumed the role of a snoopy old biddy, asked Roxanne what she thought might be in the cistem, and even convinced her to help me slide back the lid. She was smirking as she indulged my whim. What a shame that was the last expression on her face, except for a brief flash of terror. I really don’t like to dwell on things of that nature, however. Do you think I might have another lump of sugar?”

  “Certainly,” I said, empathizing with Alice as she faced the Mad Hatter across a tea table. “But you had to decide what to do with Ammie’s manuscript and notebooks. Why not dispose of them?”

  “Her life’s work? Unthinkable. I simply found a place to hide them until the police—and you, my dear—were finished searching the inn. I suspected the presence of a tunnel as soon as I read the brochure with the history of the house. I’ve had more experience with old houses and tunnels than most. I knew where to look.”

  “Weren’t you worried Dilys might insist on an expedition to explore the basement?”

  “Dilys, like her Miss Palmer, prefers to spin her fanciful ideas from the relative comfort of a cozy parlor such as this one. If she’d persevered, I would merely have warned her of the potential for mice and scorpions.”

  I hoped Dilys was not eavesdropping from the staircase, but the sound of footsteps suggested as much. Dilys came to the door of the parlor, dressed in a flannel nightgown that sagged unevenly below her knees, her face slathered with a pink cream that may well have contributed to her husband’s heart attack.

  “I am not afraid of crawly things,” she said indignantly. “It’s not to say that I should clutch them to my bosom, but I do not fling my hands in the air and shriek.”

  Laureen smiled. “Go to bed, Dilys.”

  Dilys stared at me for a moment, and then at Laureen. “Are you quite sure about this?” she demanded with more intensity than I’d heard previously from her.

  “Quite sure.”

  “You’ve been my best friend in the business,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I know you do,” Laureen said. “Now trot upstairs like a good girl.”

  I waited until she left, then said, “I went down to the basement, but I didn’t see an entrance to any tunnel.”

  “It’s in the shadows behind the furnace, and barely wide enough to slip through. A weathered piece of plywood was propped against it Only someone with expertise would have spotted it.”

  “How did you slip by Lily?”

  Laureen gave me a modest look. “It was not difficult. I waited outside until I saw her go down the hallway to the parlor, then dashed through the kitchen and into the basement. I will say I had to wait at the top of the stairs for a tiresome time until I heard the telephone ringing in her office and knew, to utilize a cliché, that the coast was clear. I really did think everything was under control until I looked out my bedroom window and saw Wimple. I must have misread his intentions.”

  “And this afternoon,” I said with a cold stare, “did you see me from your window?”

  “I feel bad about that, Claire, but I wanted to discourage you. I did wait until you were almost at the bottom. I did not wish you to break any bones.”

  “So very thoughtful of you. It must have been difficult for you to pull up the ladder.”

  “It wasn’t nearly as heavy as I’d anticipated.”

  I was not amused. “And would you have replaced the lid if it weren’t so heavy?”

  Laureen held out her tea cup. “Just half a cup, please. I don’t want to be up and down all night.”

  That was a question I chose not to pursue, especially since we had yet another visitor in the doorway. “Sherry Lynne,” I said.

  She stared at Laureen. “I cannot allow you to take the blame for this. You are a revered luminary in the genre.”

  “Come now,” Laureen said, “I’ve already confessed. Besides, we all know you would never have done anything that might endanger one of your cats. Let him feast tonight on a can of particularly succulent salmon or whatever you feed him.”

  “Don’t you think—”

  “I think you should tend to your cat.”

  “But, Laureen—”

  “Wimple needs you,” said Laureen. She glared until Sherry Lynne scurried back upstairs. “Please continue with your conjectures, Claire.”

  I wasn’t sure how crowded it might be on the landing, but I swallowed and said, “So you assumed you had everything under control until Caron came in through the front door. You knew the only way to leave the Azalea Inn without being seen was through the tunnel. Wimple was looking for an escape route, and Caron was chasing him.”

  “I did not actually enter the tunnel, and I had no idea it wasn’t blocked after a hundred and fifty years of neglect. It wasn’t so much the mud on her clothes as the cobwebs in her hair. I had a very good idea where she’d been.”

  “She didn’t spot the manuscript and notebooks, probably because you carried away the flashlight.” I paused to think. “In the morning she “would have told me about the tunnel, however, and I would have insisted on seeing it, as would Lily and the police. With the aid of adequate illumination . . .”

  “That’s what occurred to me. I felt as though the papers were less likely to be discovered in my room, since it had already been searched. Do tell Caron and Inez how sorry I am that I scared them, although if they were more familiar with my novels, they would have realized that creaking doors are de rigueur in houses of this period.”

  I placed my teacup on the tray. “I hope Ammie, or at least her parents, will appreciate what you did.”

  “I know Walter will, as will Sherry Lynne and Dilys when they acknowledge that Roxanne would have squashed them as surely as if they were ants on the sidewalk. Allegra may grow as a writer once she’s forced to rely on her own imagination. They’re all good eggs.”

  “I’m feeling a bit hard-boiled, myself,” said Allegra from the doorway, clad in a negligee as gossamer as her scarfs. She might have been the cause of a heart attack or two, but for entirely different reasons. “Once I realized—”

  “Stop right there,” said Laureen. “Go to your condo, take lots of showers, then sit in your hot tub and concoct plots. You’re not a bad writer. You can come up with something fresh, even if it’s in a different subgenre. You didn’t have a chance with Roxanne’s fangs so firmly embedded in your neck, but now you do.”

  Allegra shook her head. “Once I realized—”

  “You’re repeating yourself, child. The denouement has concluded. Claire knows that I shoved Roxanne into the cistem. If you attend a memorial service, please shed a few tears on my behalf. There is nothing else to discuss.”

  “Laureen—” Allegra began.

  “There is nothing else to discuss,” she said emphatically.

  “What about Ammie’s manuscript?”

  “It will be returned to her parents, who will never so much as glance at it. Someday, perhaps a cousin will find it in a drawer and read it, but you have nothing to worry about. Fame is ephemeral; take the money and invest wisely. Keep a lawyer under the deck, just for luck.”

  Allegra came into the parlor and clutched Laureen’s hands. “Why are you doing this? You barely know me.”

  “Consider it a legacy from the senior class.”

  “A very observant member of the senior class, watching from her bedroom window?”

  Laureen shrugged. “I would never have left the manuscript on the bench. Focus on the details, my child. A tightly-plotted novel has no gaping holes, unless, of
course, they lead to tunnels. Tunnels are so helpful.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Allegra as she kissed Laureen’s cheek.

  Laureen and I remained silent until she had gone upstairs. “You’ll have to talk to Lieutenant Rosen,” I said as I picked up the tray. “Are you confident you can hide the truth?”

  “Claire, my dear, I have murdered people in my fiction over the last fifty years, and not once has even the most astute reader anticipated the truth until the final chapter. What I tell Lieutenant Rosen shall be the shining culmination of my life’s work. The only thing missing is the final love scene. What a pity.” She grimaced as she rose unsteadily to her feet. She leaned over me to pat my cheek. “It’s time for me to retire. Although I do not have another novel in me, I think I shall write one last literary masterpiece before I sleep.”

  She took a step, then nearly lost her balance. I caught her arm before she could fall.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes, thank you. I have a degenerative muscular disease, as you must have noticed. It can be neither reversed nor halted. What I did today was my parting gift to the genre. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall make my own way upstairs. I’ve grown rather fond of the Rose Room; it reminds me of my garden at home. So restful.”

  She went around me and took each step slowly, her hand clutching the bannister.

  I put the tray back down and let myself out of the Azalea Inn. I would have to return in the morning to supervise the other authors’ departures. Laureen’s departure might not require an airline ticket.

  Peter was sitting on the settee. “Finished for the night?”

  “Have you been here all the time? Didn’t you hear Caron scream?”

  “I decided to let you handle it.”

  I sat down on the top step. “That doesn’t sound like the Supercop of olden days. I would have expected you to come charging inside like a blinded bull, waving your gun and warning everybody not to interfere with the crime scene.”

  “I thought you might enjoy hearing Laureen’s confession so you could claim you solved the case.”

  I swung around and stared at him. “You heard?” His teeth glinted in the muted glow from the streetlight. “No, I watched you two through the window. I had a gut feeling—a cop thing, I guess—that she wasn’t advising you on how to get an agent.”

  I gave him a synopsis of what Laureen had claimed was her final plot, then added, “She went to bed, and she’s not the sort to pack her bag and flee to avoid taking responsibility. She’s . . . well, a good egg herself.”

  He joined me on the step. “I know you’re exhausted, but I want to say one thing about this situation with Leslie.”

  I put my finger on his mouth. “You don’t have to. Bringing a child into the world, especially one who’ll have all the advantages, is a noble cause. I know you won’t believe me, but I’d like to hold this child someday.”

  He rocked back. “That’s not what I expected to hear from you. What caused you to change your mind?”

  “I don’t know, Peter. I guess I’ve been mulling it over in the back of my mind since you told me. I can’t explain why I initially found it so threatening. It’s not about me.”

  “All this time I’ve been waiting for you to tell me not to do it. If you had just once said that, I would have told Leslie to find someone else.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” he said resting his hand on my shoulder. “Instead, I felt backed into a corner, with Leslie and my mother cutting off one avenue of escape and you the other.”

  “What did I do?” I protested.

  “Your pigheaded refusal to so much as talk to me made me all the more defensive.”

  I moistened my lips. “Okay, don’t do it, unless you’re willing to take full responsibility and become a constant part of this child’s life. Our society doesn’t need any more absentee fathers.”

  “It’s irrelevant, anyway,” he said. “Leslie spent a week with her sister’s children and has decided to buy another pair of wolfhounds.” He tugged me to my feet. “Walk you home?”

  “You gonna carry my books?”

  “You don’t have any books.”

  “Wow, Sherlock,” I said as I gave him a kiss, “I can’t fool you.”

  “If only that were true, Ms. Marple.”