Cyanide with Christie Read online

  And now that new guy, Lansing, looked like he might be trying to muscle in. Well, not muscle in, exactly; muscle was obviously not his strong point. Worm his way in, more like. And the pen was supposed to be mightier than the sword, so Luke couldn’t count on his own brawn carrying the day over Oscar Lansing’s brains and education. Not for the first time since reconnecting with Emily, Luke wished he’d made time for college after he got back from his stint in the army. He’d never be as intellectual as she was – though he was confident of being smart enough in his own down-to-earth way – but at least with more education he’d have known the difference between a famous novelist and a TV chef. His cheeks burned remembering that blunder.

  At eleven minutes past ten he heard her PT Cruiser pull up outside. He had his hat and coat on and was out the door before she could get halfway up the walk. Then it occurred to him, maybe he shouldn’t seem so eager – under the circumstances, playing a little hard to get might not be a bad strategy. But he doubted he could pull it off, and it was late for that, anyway. She had to know by now how crazy he was about her.

  She stopped for a kiss before turning back to the car. He’d given up on being discreet in front of his subordinates; the whole town knew how matters stood between him and Emily. Probably thought they knew more than there really was to know. But that didn’t bother Luke one bit.

  ‘Friendly Fluke?’ Emily said, unnecessarily. Only one coffee shop and one regular restaurant in Stony Beach stayed open through the winter. He went around and got in the passenger door – Emily never let anyone else drive her Cruiser – and noted the car’s nose was pointing north, toward Windy Corner.

  ‘Where’d you come from?’ he asked.

  ‘I had to meet a new tenant down on Cedar. That’s why I’m a little late – had to show her around and all that.’

  Luke felt a tiny surge of relief at the pronoun ‘her’. ‘So what’s she like?’

  ‘To be perfectly frank, she seems like sixty-year-old mutton dressed as lamb, as the Brits say. But I’m trying to withhold judgment until I know her better. If I get to know her better – the prospect isn’t that tempting. She’s hostile and condescending at the same time, and I have no idea why.’ Emily frowned as if blaming herself for the woman’s bad behavior.

  ‘Well, it obviously isn’t your fault. You’ve never met the woman before, and anyway, nobody could have a reason to be hostile to you. You’re too sweet.’

  Emily rewarded him with a smile but still looked troubled. Luke diverted the conversation slightly. ‘Wonder why she wants to stay in Stony Beach in the winter. ’Specially with the weather we’re having.’

  ‘She said she wanted to be near her mother. She’s in Seaside Rest, like your granny.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Come to think of it, I haven’t been to see Granny in a donkey’s age. I need to get up there, take her something for Christmas. Want to come with me?’

  ‘Sure. I love visiting your granny.’ Luke knew, though Emily wouldn’t admit it, what she really loved was hearing all the embarrassing stories Granny told her about Luke’s childhood. But what the hey, at least she was interested.

  At the Fluke, Luke ordered a plain coffee while Emily asked for a triple mocha with whipped cream. He’d never understand what people saw in these fancy coffee drinks, but Emily did look cute with an accidental dot of whipped cream on her nose. He waited a minute, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then leaned across the table and licked it off.

  ‘Whipped cream,’ he said in response to her baffled look.

  She giggled. ‘I’m always doing that. My brother Geoff used to call me Spot because I could never drink hot chocolate without getting whipped cream on my nose.’

  She teared up all of a sudden.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She shook her head. ‘Just had a flash of missing Geoff. He’s been dead for five years, and to be honest we weren’t all that close for some time before. But I have no family at all now. It’s kind of a lonely feeling.’

  Luke knew lonely – the lonely of coming home to an empty house night after night – but he’d never been without family, never been without the knowledge that if push came to shove, somebody would have his back. His parents were gone, but he still had his granny, his sister with her whole brood, his brother with a few more kids, and a passel of uncles, aunts, and who-knows-how-many degrees of cousins, none further away than Tillamook. He’d brought Emily to his aunt’s to meet them all at Thanksgiving. They’d taken her to their collective heart, but he knew that wasn’t the same as having family of her own.

  He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. Then the words tumbled out before he could stop them. ‘You could marry me. Then at least I’d be family.’

  She gave him a sad smile, obviously not taking that as one of his serious proposals. ‘Thanks, but it wouldn’t be the same. Blood family comes with a shared history, a whole set of attitudes and presumptions and inside jokes. You and I could build some of that together, but it wouldn’t come ready-made. And we’d never have anyone to pass it down to.’

  He drew his hand back. She’d gone to a place where he had no comfort to offer – to her or to himself. He had a grown son from a previous marriage, but he and Emily had lost the only chance they ever had for a child together – after they separated as teens, she’d miscarried the baby he hadn’t even known she’d conceived. That was a loss he could never make up to her. They both looked on Katie as a sort of adopted daughter, but it wasn’t the same, and they all three knew it.

  He couldn’t take much more of this – not on such a gray, gloomy day. Time to change the subject. ‘So tell me about the other guests you’re expecting. When do they all get here?’

  She blinked and shook her head briefly as if shaking off unwelcome thoughts. ‘Most of them are coming Friday night. Let’s see – there’s Ian MacDonald. He’s the star turn.’

  ‘Yeah, even I’ve heard of him.’ MacDonald had been a well-known writer of highbrow mysteries for years – Luke had tried to wade through one of his books but found it too depressing. ‘Haven’t seen anything from him lately, though.’

  ‘No. I understand his career’s in a bit of a slump. He’s coming to Windy Corner to recharge.’ She squinted at the ceiling. ‘Oh, and there’s a young memoirist, Dustin Weaver, sort of the golden boy right now. And a cozy writer, Olivia Mountjoy.’

  Luke scratched the back of his neck. ‘Hold on a sec. I’ve heard of cozy rooms, cozy fires, but how can a writer be cozy?’

  Emily laughed. ‘That’s mystery jargon. She writes what are called cozy mysteries – the kind with an amateur sleuth, where the blood and gore are neatly tidied away out of sight. You know, like Agatha Christie. Or Murder, She Wrote.’

  ‘I get it. So have you read her stuff?’

  ‘I read one after Marguerite proposed her. It was pretty good, definitely above average. Oh, Marguerite’s coming too. And she’s bringing a student of hers who’s trying to write a novel.’

  ‘Is Marguerite responsible for your whole guest list?’

  ‘Pretty much. She doesn’t know them all personally, but she has a lot of connections. She put the word out, and this crop is what turned up.’

  Luke frowned. ‘So essentially, you’re going to have a houseful of complete strangers you know nothing about, except they happen to be writers.’

  ‘Well …’ She bit her lip, then shrugged. ‘I guess so. But honestly, writers tend to be pretty decent people. At least the ones I’ve met. And Marguerite will be there – she’s rather brilliant at smoothing over any social awkwardness.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of awkwardness.’ He was thinking of his beloved Emily being murdered in her bed, but he wouldn’t say that out loud.

  She reached over and took his hand. ‘I know you weren’t. But you can come Friday night and meet them all and vet them for yourself. You can even do background checks if you want.’

  He was already planning to do background checks. He’d filed all those na
mes in his mental notebook. But that wasn’t good enough. ‘I’d feel better if you’d let me stay over.’ He looked at her sideways to see if she’d take his meaning.

  ‘Full house, I’m afraid.’ As he expected, she was being deliberately obtuse. He swallowed a sigh. ‘If anything really bad happens, I guess you could sleep on the sitting room couch.’

  ‘What, that little loveseat? My knees’d hang over the armrest.’

  ‘It folds out into a bed. I tested it – it’s actually fairly comfortable.’

  ‘Hmph.’ It could be the best mattress in the world and he wouldn’t be comfortable – not ten feet from Emily’s bedroom door. He was beginning to wonder if that door would ever open for him, with or without a wedding ring.

  FOUR

  Emily did some shopping in town before heading back to Windy Corner and got there just in time for lunch. Oscar didn’t appear for several minutes after Katie rang the gong. When he finally came into the dining room, he looked a little bewildered.

  ‘I was exploring the house – I hope you don’t mind – and believe it or not, I actually got a little lost. I’m starting to feel like I’m staying in Downton Abbey or something.’

  Emily laughed. ‘Hardly. I’ve heard that place has a hundred bedrooms. But I’m surprised an adjunct prof working on a PhD has time to watch TV.’

  ‘That show is my guilty pleasure. But I wasn’t sure you’d be familiar – I haven’t seen a television here. Unless you have it hidden behind the paneling.’

  ‘No. I go to Luke’s house when I want to watch TV. My aunt didn’t have one, and when I moved in it seemed like a television would violate the spirit of the house. I do keep up with Downton Abbey, though. Who’s your favorite character?’

  ‘The Dowager Countess, hands down. No one can compete with Maggie Smith.’

  Emily reached across the table for a high-five. ‘I knew your head was screwed on straight.’

  They spent a pleasant lunch trading Downton trivia, then ranging into other favorite shows – most of which, for both of them, were British mysteries or productions based on classic literature. Their tastes were so nearly identical that Emily began to wonder if Oscar could be real. If she’d created a congenial companion out of her own imagination, he would have been exactly like Oscar.

  And the more she looked at him, the more she had the feeling he reminded her of someone, though she could never put her finger on who it was. Yet more evidence she had made him up. Oh well, if she was going crazy, it was a pleasant way to go.

  They eventually got around to the Forster films, of course, and when they’d exhausted that topic, Emily asked him how his writing was going.

  Oscar flushed. ‘To be perfectly honest, I haven’t done much of anything yet. I got all my things arranged on that lovely desk upstairs, but then Katie came up to tell me there were coffee and pastries in here, and of course I had to sample them, and then I had to look over the books in your wonderful library, and then I accidentally discovered your hidden staircase …’

  He paused, no doubt noticing the suddenly frozen expression on Emily’s face. She hadn’t visited that staircase in almost two months – not since it had been polluted by bloodshed.

  ‘I’m sorry, is that staircase out of bounds? I didn’t mean to snoop, I just happened to try to pull out Arabian Nights and the door opened.’ The volume of Arabian Nights was fake; it disguised the lever that made a section of bookcase swing out to reveal the hidden passage.

  Emily shook herself. ‘No, it’s all right. I don’t use it myself because of … bad associations. I would prefer you keep it closed from now on.’

  ‘No problem.’ Oscar’s flood of words dried up after that, and they finished their meal in silence.

  He laid his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. ‘I came here to write. Guess I’d better get to work.’

  Emily gave him her best smile by way of apology. ‘Tea at four in the library.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  After lunch, Emily returned to a task she’d begun before the big push to get the house ready for Christmas and guests: going through some boxes of papers she’d found in the attic when rearranging the storage up there. She didn’t expect to find anything of real interest, as the top layers had consisted of outdated business documents, but the slight possibility of encountering some meaningful family history kept her digging. In the absence of living relatives, family history was the only thing she felt could ground her and give context to her life.

  The boxes now stood stacked in a corner of her sitting room, where she could peruse them in comfort. She made it all the way through the first box without finding anything of interest. But the second box looked more promising. It contained a stack of photo albums, cracked and yellowing with age.

  Her heart racing, Emily lifted out the first album and gingerly eased it open. This must be the oldest of the set: men and women in nineteen-twenties garb romped on the beach or posed in groups at garden parties and balls. The photos were neatly captioned, but none of the names meant anything to Emily until she came to a studio shot of a youngish couple, dressed as if for church, holding a baby whose tiny face was nearly lost in a sea of ruffles and lace that stretched halfway to her mother’s feet. A boy who looked about twelve stood by his mother’s side. The caption read, Beatrice Jane Worthing on the day of her christening. June 30, 1929. With her parents, Edward and Maude Worthing, and her brother Eugene.

  Emily smiled at the picture, slightly teary-eyed. To think that boy, looking so serious and protective of his baby sister, was her grandfather, who had died before Emily was born. And that sweet, helpless baby girl had grown up into the ultra-competent, no-nonsense Aunt Beatrice of Emily’s childhood. Aunt Beatrice, the anchor that had kept Emily and Geoff from drifting far out to sea when their mother died and their father’s rootlessness and alcoholism escalated beyond endurance. Aunt Beatrice, whose common sense and business acumen had built her already substantial inheritance from her husband, Horace Runcible, into the fortune that made Emily’s life so comfortable today.

  A comfortable life – and no family to share it with. Aunt Beatrice was gone, Geoff was gone, Philip – Emily’s husband of almost thirty years – was gone. The tiny life that had once fluttered in her womb, the life that would have carried the best of herself and Luke into posterity – that was long, long gone. Emily had always imagined that baby as a sweet red-haired girl, like Lizzie. Her premature passing had carried with it all chance of any successor.

  Emily shut the photo album and had a good cry. Then she dried her tears and went down to tea, leaving the rest of the papers for another day.

  Luke wangled himself a dinner invitation to Windy Corner again mid-week. He didn’t trust that Lansing fellow alone with Emily for five whole days.

  But once the conversation got going, he was torn between feeling sorry he’d come and thinking it was a damn good thing he had. Oscar and Emily talked like they’d known each other for years, trading references and inside jokes that mostly passed straight over his head. Emily laughed more than he’d known her laugh since they were kids. When had he lost the ability to amuse her like that?

  And she sparkled as well. Exactly like a woman basking in the flattering attention of an attractive man. That sparkle was supposed to be for Luke himself – had been, not so very long ago.

  He narrowed his eyes at Lansing over dessert. Was he flirting with Emily – deliberately calling out that sparkle? Emily was an attractive woman, but she had to be a good ten to fifteen years older than this fellow. Could he really be interested in her?

  Not impossible; there were men who preferred older women, and this guy looked like he might not be super successful with women his own age. And then, of course, Emily had other attractions besides her looks and charm. She was a wealthy woman. A poor adjunct professor – old enough that he was unlikely ever to be more than that – could easily be tempted by Emily’s bank account.

  When they moved to the library for
coffee, Lansing excused himself and made for the restroom. Luke took the opportunity to drop a word in Emily’s ear.

  ‘Listen, Em,’ he said, closing the door and pitching his voice low. ‘I think you need to be careful with this guy. I know you like him, and he seems OK, but you might want to think about what his intentions could be.’

  Emily made a disbelieving face. ‘Intentions? What on earth do you mean? He’s not exactly courting me.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? I’m not.’

  She turned toward the coffee tray, hiding her face from him. ‘Honestly, Luke, I’m practically old enough to be his mother.’

  ‘That would be a stretch, and anyway it doesn’t make any difference. He could be after your money.’

  ‘Oh, so I’m too old and ugly for him to like me for myself? Is that what you’re saying?’ Her voice was light, playful, but with a little quiver that told Luke he was on dangerous ground.

  ‘You yourself just said—’

  ‘It’s one thing for me to say it. I certainly don’t want to hear it from you.’

  He’d dug himself in this time. ‘Emily, you ought to know by now that in my eyes you are the most beautiful woman on earth and you always will be. Of course it’s possible Lansing is attracted to you for yourself alone. But it’d be a rare fellow who could look at you and see only you, and not your money. ’Specially somebody as poor as Lansing appears to be.’

  She kept her eyes on his shoes. ‘I think I’m capable of judging a man’s intentions for myself. And I don’t see anything inappropriate in Oscar’s behavior toward me. We have a lot in common, and we’re becoming friends – that’s all.’