Death On Demand Part 21

"All we need is a crow on a fence post," Max muttered.

The Porsche curved around the crumbling remains of old Fort Hendrix, an earthwork fortification built in 1862 by the occupying Union forces to overlook Abelard Creek. They rattled over a narrow wooden bridge, and Annie said in a hushed voice, "There's the house."

Magpie Plantation was old, a lovingly restored antebellum survivor of sea cotton days. The railings of the broad double verandahs and the slender Doric columns glistened with fresh white paint.

With the motor off, a funereal silence enfolded them.

Max raised an eyebrow. "I'll bet they laugh a lot here. My G.o.d, the place looks like a cross between a southern Wuthering Heights and the summer home of the Addams family."

The silvery Spanish moss hung motionless. The onsh.o.r.e breeze didn't penetrate the thick stand of live oaks. The sound of their footsteps on the oyster-sh.e.l.l path was distinct in the brooding stillness.

Annie remembered Magpie Plantation from summer hikes with Uncle Ambrose. It had been a derelict then, untenanted, dank weeds choking the drive, the second-story verandah sagging. She'd known, of course, that Kelly had bought and restored the old house. But why wasn't it included in the spring tour of plantation homes? Most owners of the antebellum mansions gloried in showing off their prizes.

They were starting up the rose-bordered front walk when a scream, high and rising higher, pealed through the heavy air.

"My G.o.d, what's that?"

Max was squinting at the house's beautiful facade. "There,"

he shouted, and pointed to the second-floor verandah, where two figures struggled near the railing, one trying desperately to squirm free, the other, smaller one holding on tenaciously.

Max leapt up the steps and yanked on the heavy front door. It didn't budge. He sprinted down the verandah to the end and an ivy-laden lattice. He started up, Annie close behind.

"It won't hold both of us," he shouted in warning as the framework quivered.

Annie dropped back down and craned to see.

The larger woman broke free to clamber awkwardly up onto the railing.

The smaller figure, Kelly, grabbed and clung. The two teetered precariously. Then Max was up and over the railing, and the three figures disappeared in a melee of arms and legs.

The scream sounded again, piercing and shrill, then abruptly broke off, followed by brokenhearted sobs.

"Max," Annie yelled, then she climbed up on the railing to start up the lattice.

He peered down from the second story. "Hold on, Annie. We'll be down in a minute."

By the time the front door swung open, Annie was standing beside it and breathing almost normally.

Kelly stepped back and motioned her inside. Her dark red hair was disheveled, her face pale. Max had an angry scratch on his right arm, and his shirt pocket was torn.

"We'll go in the living room." Kelly's voice was as soft and unhurried as usual. They might have been joining her for afternoon tea.

The living room was lovely. Delicate, white molded cornices decorated fourteen-foot-tall ceilings. A magnificent three-tiered crystal chandelier hung from a center medallion. Pale gray walls set off the draped turquoise hangings over the huge arched windows. The room was shadowy, but Kelly didn't turn on a light. Annie thought of the approach to the house. It was all of a piece, quiet, spooky, sinister.

Their hostess waved them to an American Chippendale sofa, then sat in a small but very fine Queen Anne wing chair, upholstered in rose and white.

Annie felt a curl of uneasiness. This was Knight's Gambit territory.

Antebellum perfection below and a madwoman above.

Kelly turned politely toward Max. "I do owe you a very great thanks."

"No problem." Max took up two-thirds of the sofa, overwhelmingly masculine in a feminine room. "I became quite skilled in ascending and descending lattices in my younger days."

Annie filed that one away for further reference and possible inquiry.

Kelly didn't smile. She nodded soberly and continued to gaze at Max with haunted green eyes. "It's great luck you happened by. We are rather isolated here. What can I do for you?"

It was a courteous way of asking what the h.e.l.l they wanted, and a clear indication the verandah episode was closed.

Kelly wasn't Carmen or any of the others they'd talked to. If anyone were capable of out-thinking the world, it was Kelly Rizzoli.

"It's Elliot," Annie began, beating Max to the punch.

"El)"t?" Kelly echoed coolly.

"He sent me a copy of what he was going to say Sunday night."

"Oh, he did? Would you suppose he had a presentiment?"

Annie shrugged. "I doubt it. Maybe more on the order of insurance."

"It lapsed, didn't it?"

Annie could swear there was a sick glimmer of amus.e.m.e.nt in Kelly's gorgeous eyes, but she plunged resolutely on. "I don't really want to tell Saulter what he was going to say about you."

"So you came to see me instead?" Kelly wore a shamrock-green turtleneck and boxy white slacks. She looked very slight in the delicate wingback chair. Slight but somehow imposing.

Annie nodded.

"If I can persuade you that what he had on me wasn't sufficient motive for murder, you will protect my good name. Is that right?"

"Right." Certainly Kelly didn't seem discomfited by her threat to go to Saulter.

Kelly looked away, her gaze seeming to fasten somewhere near the delicate Adam mantel. She spoke dreamily. "It's funny what can serve as motivation. That was part of Elliot's thesis, you know, that a writer's reality serves as the basis for invention. I find motivation quite fascinating." She shifted a little in her chair, looked at Annie. "In my latest collection of short stories, there's one I like particularly, 'Gideon's Morning.'" Her voice had a singsong, musical quality like the faraway fall of water. "It is his last morning, you see. His mother splits his skull with an axe as he sits at the breakfast table."

Max and Annie sat quietly, scarcely breathing.

She tilted her head like a bird observing a worm. "It's really quite understandable. She'd told him and told him and told him not to track mud across her clean kitchen floor when she'd just mopped it."

The vision of a blood-drenched country kitchen hung in the shadows of the room.

"Motivation. Yes, Elliot was right. We use everything we've ever known or seen or felt when we write. Sometimes, we pick up pieces of people's lives, like a crow attracted to the shine of a broken brooch. We take it all and put together something new and different, but it does spring from our past, our collective past."

"And your past," Annie said softly.

Kelly nodded. She looked childlike, sitting in that straight-backed old chair, her hands folded primly in her lap, her shoulders narrow beneath the green turtleneck.

"My past-and Elliot. That's what you came to talk about. My past and my present. You know, Elliot was right and wrong about me."

"Can you tell us?" Max urged, his voice low and careful.

Pensively, Kelly nodded. "It's interesting. Motivation again. Elliot didn't understand that it didn't matter to me if he told everyone-right or wrong. He got the story from one of my cla.s.smates, I suppose. It happened at the College of the Ozarks." She turned to Max. "Have you ever been to southern Arkansas? You might understand better if you've been there. Did you know you can go back in the Arkansas swamp country and go to a lake that's hooded by trees-and there will be snakes hanging from the branches?"

Again that slow, dreamy smile.

"Think about that, picture it. The darkness among the cypress and the still, emerald water and the thick-bodied water moccasins dangling from the branches.

"Arkansas-it can be very still and dark and ingrown. Very ingrown.

Many families have kept to themselves for a long time. My family, too.

But my sister, Pamela, and I went together to college. I knew Pamela wasn't quite right, but we thought she could go if I were there." Kelly's dreamy eyes looked beyond them, to a past and place they couldn't see.

"We rented a tiny room in a boardinghouse two blocks from the campus.

Pamela took art cla.s.ses." Her voice was suddenly animated. "She can really draw quite well. When she's happy, she paints smiling children.

When she s unhappy. . . They found the dog first, the dog next door. His throat was cut. Then a parakeet was strangled. Our landlady had a pet cat, a beautiful cat who had her own silk cushion and special foods."

Kelly moved her hand, as if stroking a cat.

Annie didn't ask what had happened to the cat. She didn't want to know.

"Pamela?"

Kelly's eyes slowly focused on Max. "I told them I did it. I said it was an experiment in the psychology of stress, and I promised to make rest.i.tution. Do you understand why?"

"To protect your sister?"

"They would have put her away, and she wouldn't be able to bear it. I never make her stay locked up. I let her go out when she wants, but I watch her very carefully. Upsets like today don't happen often, but I think she sensed I was disturbed about something. That affects her.

She'll be all right, now that she's had a sedative. She'll sleep until tomorrow, then get up and be cheerful, and we'll walk along the beach and search for a perfect sand dollar."

"Why not get her to a doctor? She's sick, Kelly. You should know that.

You majored in psychology."

Kelly's green eyes didn't look the least dreamy when she turned them toward Annie. "You do know a lot about me, don't you?"

"Why don't you get her into a hospital?"

Kelly's skin was almost translucent, the veins blue-black near the surface. "Never. You don't know what it would be like. Have you ever been in a mental hospital? Tan walls and cement floors, people with empty, staring eyes, figures in green coveralls, and doctors who ineptly try to treat illnesses that no one understands." She paused, then spoke so low Annie found herself leaning forward to hear. "She would be so frightened, so terribly alone."

"It must all be in your college records," Max said briskly. "About the animals. And that's what Elliot had. You said you didn't care if he told it?"

"Why should I?"

"Because someone might discover the truth about Pamela and insist she be put away."

"I won't let that happen." Kelly lifted her head regally.

She was cold and obdurate and a dangerous adversary. And very, very clever. She was also supremely confident of her cleverness.

Those shrewd, beautiful eyes watched Annie warily.

"Look, Kelly, I'll tell you the truth. Chief Saulter is going to arrest me tomorrow. He believes I murdered Elliot because he was threatening to raise my rent and drive me out of business. He even thinks I pushed my uncle into the harbor last summer, just to inherit- the bookstore."

For the first time, Kelly looked surprised. Annie wondered immediately if it were consummate acting or if it had never occurred to her that Ambrose Bailey's death had not been accidental.

"That's absurd. You wouldn't have done that."

"Well, thanks. I'm glad you don't agree."

Kelly wasn't listening. Instead, she studied the diamond pattern in the turquoise rug.

"Ambrose murdered." Her gaze swung back to Annie. "Why?"

Annie briefly described the true-crime book and the missing ma.n.u.script.

"Oh hey, Annie." Max was impatient, irritated at this diversion. "You and Saulter both are way off base. Your uncle fell. I'd bet on that."

"So what happened to the ma.n.u.script?"

"You probably lost a box when you moved the stuff from his house."

"Lost a box? Do you think I'm a nitwit?"

"Do you lose things sometimes?"

What a low blow. "Just because I mislaid that script."

At least he had the grace not to bring up the fact that it had almost cost him a producer.

"Where did we find it?"

"Okay, okay. I left it on a park bench. But a silly d.a.m.n script is not the size of a box with a ma.n.u.script." Annie was tired of this battle. She turned to Kelly. "Anyway, my neck's on the block, and Saulter won't even listen, so Max and I have decided to find out everything we can to solve the crime. Will you help us?"

"How can I help you?" Kelly was still cautious, but interested. And perhaps tempted?

"Sure you can help. You know these people; you are extraordinarily perceptive. Maybe you'll see something we've missed." Max was busy exercising his charm. Max was world cla.s.s when it came to wheedling.

He could wheedle a seat five minutes before takeoff on a sold-out People's Express. He could wheedle a box-seat at game-time at the Super Bowl. He was magic, and Annie watched with reluctant admiration as Kelly received a concentrated dose.

"I might at that. Tell me what you have." A feint flush stained those marble-pale cheeks. Max was a marvel, and Annie was controlling a sharp impulse to give him an elbow in the ribs.

They started with number one, Emma Clyde.