Who Killed Mona Lisa? Read online

  Who Killed Mona Lisa?

  Carole Buggé

  Contents

  That Mona Lisa smile . . .

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Copyright

  That Mona Lisa smile . . .

  Meredith shook her head. “But what if this killer is a case of life imitating art?”

  Wally nodded thoughtfully. “I had an instructor once at the academy who said that if you smell a rat, it means there’s a rat.”

  “Hmm,” said Meredith. “And how exactly does that apply here?”

  Wally leaned back and crossed his arms. “Let me put it this way: the scent of rodent is strong in the air.”

  “But we’ll know more when the DNA tests come in,” Claire pointed out.

  Wally shrugged. “Maybe. But they may not be able to draw any useful conclusions from them either—who knows?”

  “The Mona Lisa smile,” Meredith muttered as she picked up her cards. “Very mysterious and alluring. Someone fell for that smile big time—and then killed her for it.”

  Dedication

  For Tony,

  in memory of our great and glorious adventures

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my editor, Christine Zika, for her invaluable help in shaping this book, and my agent, Susan Ginsburg, as well as her assistant, Annie Leunberger, for all their hard work. Thanks also to Jeff Gogan of the Sudbury police for giving abundantly of his time in answering my many questions, Marina Stajic of the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office for her generous help on the subject of toxicology, and Louise and Nikola Kronja for their research assistance. Special thanks to Amanda George for her wisdom and guidance in my journey. And finally, to the owners and staff of Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, for creating a wonderful place where I spent a truly magical weekend.

  Author’s Disclaimer: Though there is a real Wayside Inn, the persons in this story are not meant in any way to represent actual persons connected with that establishment.

  Chapter 1

  “Nam yo ho reynge kyo.”

  Meredith was chanting. She sat in the front seat next to Claire, her thin white fingers pressed together, her pale eyes closed, the blond eyelashes flickering as her lips moved.

  Meredith had taken up Buddhism. Or, to put it more accurately, she was trying it on, as one might try on a hat, to see if it fit.

  “Nam yo ho reynge kyo.” Her voice was a steady monotone, droning out each syllable at the same low pitch.

  Claire Rawlings tightened her grip on the steering wheel and focused on the road curling and twisting before her, the pale sun flat on its surface.

  “Nam yo ho reynge kyo.”

  Meredith Lawrence and an Eastern religion based on patience and stillness were not a natural fit. Still, ever since Meredith read The Tao of Physics, the girl had become a devout Buddhist—or so she claimed. Claire wondered if Meredith was doing this partly to annoy her father, Ted Lawrence. Claire wasn’t crazy about the chanting, with its monotonous repetition, but she hoped it would make Meredith calmer. Anything that made the girl calmer was a blessing, whether it was Buddhism or voodoo.

  Claire pressed on the accelerator, and her old rust-colored Mercedes sedan shuddered and protested in response. They were entering the foothills of the Berkshires now, and the ancient diesel had to be coaxed up the steeper grades. The car was like a cranky old woman, rusty in the joints and resentful of any demands Claire made upon it.

  “Come on, Bessie,” she muttered as the engine labored and moaned against the pull of gravity. Claire thought that Bessie was a silly name for a car, and she had never actually named any of her cars before. But the old brown Mercedes—plodding, implacable, and stolid as a cow—was, from the first time she drove it up West End Avenue, unquestionably Bessie.

  Claire looked out at the darkening sky wrapped around the fading Massachusetts countryside. A weak November sun was struggling to pierce through the cloud cover; the sky looked backlit, like a movie set. A few of the trees still sported bright red and yellow leaves, but others were losing their foliage in clumps. The hillside resembled a thinning head of hair, a patchy autumn baldness.

  A weekend in the country, the bees in their hives,

  The shallow worldly figures, the frivolous lives . . .

  The words to Sondheim’s song from A Little Night Music popped into Claire’s head. She had been listening to the CD all week, and the songs floated in and out of her head as she drove. She and Meredith were on their way to eastern Massachusetts to meet Wally Jackson for Thanksgiving weekend at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, in the town of South Sudbury. Peter Schwartz, Claire’s chief editor at Ardor House, had come back from a weekend there raving about the place. Claire respected Peter’s opinion on most things except theatre (he had a taste for hideous, obtuse avant-garde productions), so when Wally suggested they get away for a few days, she suggested the Wayside Inn.

  “There’s even a guy in eighteenth-century clothes who greets you at the front door,” Peter had said in his enthusiastic way. “There are no phones in the rooms, and no television—but there are three or four real fireplaces!” Peter was full of enthusiasms, like a child. It was one of his most endearing traits. Claire counted herself lucky to be working with such a man; some of the chief editors at the big houses had all the charm of attack dogs. She knew the horror stories; she had heard them all from her colleagues—the tantrums, mood swings, the childish jealousies, and power games. Peter was eccentric, but he was kind, and did his best not to dump the pressures of his job on the editors working under him. And because of his courtly weakness for attractive women, he was especially fond of Claire Rawlings.

  Suddenly aware that the chanting had stopped, Claire looked over at Meredith. The girl had fallen asleep, her head resting on the topaz-green scarf Claire had given her last Christmas. Claire sighed. As of two days ago, her “romantic weekend” in Massachusetts with Wally now included Meredith. When the girl called Claire in tears, claiming she couldn’t stand another Thanksgiving in Connecticut with her “evil stepmother,” as she called her father’s second wife, Claire agreed to take Meredith along. Ted Lawrence offered to pay for Meredith’s room at the inn, so at least when Wally arrived the following day he and Claire would have some privacy. For the first night, though, Claire and Meredith would share a room. Claire had brought along earplugs to drown out the girl’s snoring.

  The pale sun fell on Meredith’s burnished copper curls, kinky and as unruly as Meredith herself. She had her hair cut short just last week, and the first thing she said when Claire picked her up at her father’s house was, “See my hair? Yuck—I hate it!”

  Meredith was not given to neutral statements. In spite of her extraordinary intellect, her emotional life was still that of an adolescent girl—melodramatic, extreme, and mercurial. She hated this and she loved that; she hated Connecticut Republicans, and she loved Pepperidge Farm cookies.

  Claire looked out the window at the brown earth, the grass short and stubbled like a man’s beard. She thought about Wally, of his face in the morning, his whiskers scratchy on her skin when he
kissed her. She loved the feel of those rough hairs on her cheeks, just as she loved the smoothness of his skin after he shaved and the faint bitter lime taste of aftershave. She marveled at the way a man’s face could change so suddenly with the swipe of a razor; the transition from sharp masculine bristle to the soft vulnerability just after shaving always struck her as something of a wonder.

  Equally amazing to Claire, something she never tired of wondering at, was the bizarre way Wally Jackson had entered her life. She never would have imagined she would be dating a policeman—much less a detective—and yet here they were, less than a year after Wally and Meredith saved her from Robert’s attempt to strangle her.

  Robert. So handsome, so smooth, so British. With that accent and upper-class manners and the public-school-boy charm, was it any wonder Claire had fallen for him? He had worn his mask so tightly that she hadn’t seen the real face behind it until it was almost too late. If it hadn’t been for the sudden arrival of Wally and Meredith . . . Claire shivered. Well, Robert was dead now, and she was doing her best to put that chapter of her life behind her. Still, it was hard to forget the feeling of his fingers upon her throat, pressing down, cutting off her air . . . she still awoke in the middle of the night, shaken by nightmares that clung to her subconscious like leeches, sucking her down into a pit of memory and desire.

  Claire slipped a tape of Nixon in China into the cassette player and turned up the volume. Surrounded by John Adams’s swelling harmonies and pulsating syncopations, she leaned back and let her shoulders relax. She looked out at the landscape, suddenly transformed by the music; all at once it seemed mysterious and unknowable.

  Now, as she looked out over the frost-streaked fields, she wondered what secrets were hidden behind that copse of oak trees, what mysteries lurked underneath that bright pile of fallen leaves? Another Sondheim quote popped into her head, this time from Sunday in the Park with George: “Order out of chaos. Order to the whole.”

  Yes, order indeed; the need to create form out of chaos, the eternal search for patterns, for meaning. And no one craved order, Claire thought, more than the girl sleeping on the seat next to her. Her life thrown into internal chaos after the death of her mother, Meredith had seized upon reason and logic with a fierce tenacity. It was, for her, a kind of salvation, a way of both denying and coming to grips with her mother’s death.

  “Are we there yet?”

  Meredith’s voice startled Claire out of her reverie. “No, not yet,” she answered, ejecting the tape from the cassette player.

  Meredith sat up in her seat, stretched, and wiped the drool from her chin. “Ee-yew,” she said. “That’s disgusting. How come people drool only when they nap but not at night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you noticed that?” Meredith said, rubbing her eyes. “That you only drool during the day?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I don’t know why that is.”

  “It’s weird.” That was Meredith’s new word—everything that was different or unusual or strange was “weird.”

  “Oh, look—cool!” she said, pointing out the window at a farmhouse with a gigantic grinning pumpkin perched atop a straw-stuffed scarecrow, a lumpy figure in flannels and overalls leaning against a pitchfork.

  “Is it me, or are pumpkins getting bigger?” asked Claire.

  “I think they’re getting bigger,” said Meredith. “You should see this one by my dad’s house; it’s gigantic!”

  Meredith still spoke of her home in Connecticut as “my dad’s house” instead of “my house.” Ever since the death of her mother—Claire’s college friend Katherine Lawrence—two years ago, Meredith described herself to anyone who would listen as “an orphan.” She knew this hurt her father, but Claire thought she did it to punish him for marrying Jean, or, as Meredith called her, the Wicked Witch of Greenwich.

  Meredith shifted restlessly in her seat and switched on the radio. The smooth mid-Atlantic accent of a newscaster filled the car.

  “. . . and in spite of public opinion, he will begin experiments aimed toward cloning human beings.”

  “Oh, I heard about that guy last night.” Claire shifted into low gear as they approached another hill. “He’s a scientist out west somewhere.”

  “Well, I’m surprised it took this long,” said Meredith. “After all, it was only a matter of time.”

  The newscaster then read various denunciations of the man, including those from some religious groups who compared him to the devil. The president himself was in on the action, criticizing the scientist for his decision.

  “Good Lord, get real!” said Meredith. “Of course someone was going to try it, for Chrissake! I mean, like they discovered nuclear energy and no one built a bomb? Come on!” She rolled her eyes and rubbed her finger on the inside of the car window so that it made a squeaking sound. “You can’t stop science, for Chrissakes,” she muttered, drawing a circle in the mist that had gathered on the glass. “It’s a goddamn Pandora’s box.”

  “Watch your language,” said Claire.

  In response, Meredith heaved a noisy sigh of displeasure and turned to stare out the window.

  Pandora’s box. Despite warnings, Pandora’s box would always be opened; people were far more motivated by curiosity than by caution, Claire thought. And no one was more driven by curiosity than Meredith Lawrence; with her, caution hardly entered into the equation.

  “It’s weird, though, this whole cloning thing, don’t you think?” she said, pulling her feet up onto the seat. Her pout this time was short-lived, Claire noted with relief. Meredith curled her feet under her, and Claire was amazed that she could fit those long legs there. Watching the girl was like watching a camel move, awkward yet with a strange kind of grace.

  “I mean, how would you like to have a younger version of yourself walking around? It’s creepy, if you ask me.”

  “Yeah,” said Claire. It was creepy. If cloning was possible, all kinds of assumptions about individuality and free will would be called into question.

  “I mean, I’m even a little creeped out by twins, you know?” said Meredith, rummaging through the glove compartment.

  “Right,” said Claire. “What are you looking for?”

  Meredith shrugged. “I dunno. Gum, candy—something.” She pulled a tattered map out of the glove compartment. “How would you introduce someone like that at parties? This is my clone?” She opened up the map on her lap and bent over it, her neck long and pale in the dying sun.

  “What are you looking for?” said Claire.

  “Oh, just trying to see where we are.”

  “Just outside Worcester.”

  “Ah, then we’re not far.”

  Meredith peered at the map, her face close to the paper. She was nearsighted but refused to wear glasses. “No matter what frame I wear, I look like Atom Ant,” she once told Claire. She held up the map, her hair brushing the section of eastern Massachusetts.

  Massachusetts. Birthplace of Samuel Adams, site of the Boston Tea Party, cradle of the Revolution. Home to crusty, bloody-minded New England types. Claire liked the people she had met in Massachusetts. It was a much friendlier state than Connecticut, with its frosty, status-obsessed Republicans.

  Meredith fished around in the glove compartment and extracted a guidebook. “Listen to this. Right across from the hotel is an eighteenth-century gristmill—and they still make flour there! And there’s a chapel, too, but they say it’s a reproduction.”

  “That’s nice,” said Claire.

  “Cool!” said Meredith suddenly. “Look at that!”

  Claire turned and looked out the passenger side of the car. There, on the lawn of a respectable-looking suburban home, was a unique Halloween display. In fact, it was so amazing that she pulled the car over to get a better look.

  Seated at a picnic table were three full-sized dummies made from straw stuffed into clothing, each with a hideous, ghoulish papier-mâché face. On plates in front of them were piles of what looked
like entrails, strips of rubber tubing painted bright red, as well as other gruesome tidbits. The ghouls sat there grinning wildly, forks poised in their gloved hands.

  Even more extraordinary, though, was the rest of the display: next to the picnic table was a wooden cage filled with children, their little bodies plump with stuffed straw, their papier-mâché hands clutching the bars of the cage. Outside the cage a gleefully evil witch stood turning a homemade spit, upon which was impaled one of the children.

  They sat looking at this for several minutes. “Wow,” Claire said finally, “talk about venting your hostility toward your kids!”

  “Oh, the kids probably helped build it,” Meredith said. “I bet the kids love it! They’re probably the coolest kids in the neighborhood.”

  “You think?” asked Claire.

  “Sure! It’s way cool! And if you want to get Freudian on me, it’s also an expression of children’s fear of grown-ups.”

  Claire looked at the grinning witch, her yellow eyes bright with malice. “I guess you’re right.” She laughed. “I wonder what that family is like,” she said, easing the old car back onto the road.

  “I’ll bet they’re totally fun parents,” said Meredith. Then, in a softer voice, she added, “My mom would have done something like that.”

  Meredith rarely spoke of her mother. Claire was both relieved and a little intimidated whenever Katherine’s name came up; she knew Meredith carried around a lot of grief that she had never expressed, and she was glad the girl felt comfortable enough with her to talk about her mother.