A Star-Spangled Murder Page 9

  “Maybe you could tie her up out here?” Susan suggested, scowling at the animal.

  “We can try,” was Tierney’s response.

  “I saw some rope down by the water. The tide must have washed it in. Do you want me to go get it?” her sister asked.

  “Good idea,” Susan said, following the muddy prints the dog and children had made into her house. She stood in the middle of her living room and looked around. Except for the chair Humphrey Taylor had been found in, all the soft furniture was still covered with blankets, and now all the blankets were covered with mud and fur. “How did this happen so quickly?” she asked Kathleen, who was leaning against the wall, smiling.

  “Apparently the dog leapt from chair to chair. She’s just a puppy, you know. She has a lot of energy.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me. I’ll sweep up later.” She started for the kitchen. “The girls are staying for dinner.…”

  “Don’t you want to find out what Titania’s message is?”

  Susan pulled her hair back into a ponytail and groaned. “I really will forget my head next. Yes. Definitely. Where is it?”

  “On the mantel. Are we feeding them lobster?”

  “Hamburgers. I think one of us is going to have to go to the store.…”

  “Why don’t I? And I’ll take the girls with me.”

  Susan had opened the envelope and was reading the note and didn’t answer immediately. When she had done nothing but frown for a few minutes, Kathleen grew impatient. “What does she say?”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “Well, that’s not quite accurate. Here. Read it yourself,” Susan offered, passing her the sheet of paper.

  Kathleen read quickly and handed it back. “I—”

  “Is that Titania’s letter?” Her youngest sister stood in the doorway.

  “Yes, it is,” Susan answered quietly. “Do you know what it says?”

  “Not exactly,” the girl answered slowly. “I know that she asked you to take care of Karma and that she’s hiding. That’s all.”

  “Hiding,” Kathleen repeated.

  “Do you know where?” Susan asked, leaning down to the child. “I know she probably told you not to tell us, but it could be important.”

  Tierney returned Susan’s serious look. “I don’t keep secrets very well. I try, but …” She stared down at the floor. “Titania said that she wasn’t going to let me know where she was so I wouldn’t have to lie. I really hate lying.”

  “But you know what the note says,” Kathleen added.

  “Yes. Titania read it to me. It says that she would like you to look after me, and my sister, and Karma—and that she is going to find out who killed Uncle Humphrey.”

  “And that she is going to be staying in some sort of secret place on the island,” Kathleen added.

  “Yes.” Tierney nodded.

  “And she really didn’t tell you where?” Susan asked.

  “No. And she didn’t tell Theresa either. So you don’t have to bother to ask her.”

  “Did—” Kathleen began.

  “Do you know what?” Susan interrupted. “I think these girls are going to be hungry soon. And they’re not going to get any dinner until you do the shopping.…”

  “So why don’t we all head to the store,” Kathleen said, picking up on Susan’s suggestion. “You can help me pick out things like soda.…”

  “We’re not allowed to drink soda at home.”

  “This is a vacation. Maybe your parents wouldn’t mind,” Susan said.

  The thought seemed to perk up the girl. “Maybe not,” she agreed. “Do you think we should take Theresa with us?”

  “I …” Kathleen was uncertain about what, if anything, Susan had in mind.

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” Susan said quickly. “She’s down by the water getting that rope. Why don’t you help her, and then both of you should wash off before you leave, okay?”

  “Okay.” Tierney started to leave the room, but she turned back at the door. “You will look after Karma, won’t you? Titania’s depending on it.”

  Susan, who had just been thinking about shipping the dog back home, didn’t answer immediately.

  “Of course she will,” Kathleen jumped in. “And we’ll help her, won’t we?”

  “Sure,” the girl called cheerfully, skipping out the door.

  “And will we help clean up this mess?” Susan asked rather sarcastically.

  “Worry about that later. We have to talk, and those girls will be back in a moment,” Kathleen insisted. “The first thing to do is to call Janet Shapiro. There’s going to have to be a search party organized. Can that be done on the island?”

  “Probably better here than a lot of places. The islanders are always willing to help out someone in trouble. And tourists have gotten lost before. The volunteer firemen will organize a search, but it will be difficult to find Titania if she doesn’t want to be found. This isn’t going to be like looking for a child who wandered into the woods while his parents were stopped to look at seals lying on the shore.”

  “Where do you think she is?” Kathleen asked.

  “Titania? How would I know?”

  “You keep saying that it’s a small island. You must have some idea where she is.”

  “None at all—but I suppose we should look around here. She couldn’t be too far away.”

  “But you explored all over this area when you were a little girl.…”

  “When I was a little girl, there were six homes on the cove and even fewer lining the ocean. There’s been so much building.…” She paused. “Why, just in the eighties alone—”

  “You thought of something, didn’t you?” Kathleen interrupted impatiently. “Or someplace?”

  “There was a cave at one time. Down at the end of the cove and around the corner …”

  “Down by the Taylors’ house?”

  “Exactly. I don’t know if it’s still there.… Storms and time can change things a lot on the coast, you know. But if it’s there, there is no way in the world those girls could have avoided stumbling across it.”

  “Could Titania live there for a while?”

  “Not comfortably. As I remember, it was mostly below water at high tide.… In fact, it could be dangerous. And the girls may not know that some tides are higher than others.… She might get trapped in it.”

  “The tide is coming in.…”

  “Let’s tell the girls to skip washing up. Why should the inside of the car be cleaner than the living room? Why don’t you just get the girls out of here, and I’ll run down to the shore and check everything out before the water gets any higher.”

  Susan hadn’t planned on taking the puppy with her. In fact, she didn’t. But halfway between the house and the sea, a very wet and very fuzzy ball sped past her, and she realized she had company. She grabbed the frayed rope hanging from the animal’s collar and was surprised when Karma slowed down to trot by her side. She was thinking how nice a dog could be when the retriever leapt after a large blue heron that rose into the air in front of them. Susan felt like her arm was being ripped off. “Karma! Heel!” she ordered. But either the dog was too young to obey or unwilling, so Susan wrapped the rope more firmly around her wrist and set off down the cove.

  “Come on, Karma,” she said, as the animal lunged into the water. “We’re going to go find Titania.”

  Whether the animal recognized her owner’s name or whether she just happened to want to go in the same direction Susan was going, Susan didn’t know, but they walked around the edge of the cove toward the spot where Susan remembered the cave was located. Unlike most things in her life, the hike to the cave turned out to be longer than she remembered it being in her youth. She climbed around boulders and tramped across tiny, sandy beaches before arriving at the tall, upended slabs of granite that guarded the entrance to the cave.

  One of the most persistent of Maine legends is that Captain Kidd buried his gol
d on one of the islands and took off, leaving the treasure to be found by the person who would spend enough time and effort digging for it. And, of course, each island’s residents believed that their island was the island. When Susan was small, she had been convinced that this was the cave where the pirate had landed, and she and two of her cousins had spent much of one summer digging up the cave’s sandy floor. About twenty years later, her children had done the same thing. No one had found anything more than a few sand dollars, some rusty tin cans, and numerous lobster buoys. Now she climbed into the cave and wondered if pirates concealed their treasure in Styrofoam ice chests—or if it contained Titania’s provisions.

  “No, Karma!”

  But the dog ignored her and, pulling free, grabbed the plastic and began to worry it into small pieces.

  Susan saw that she had been mistaken about the ice chest. Well-aged bait dripped from the holes that the dog was ripping in the plastic, and the resulting stench caused her to gag.

  “Karma! No!” Susan accompanied the order with such a hard jerk that the dog almost fell over. She pulled the animal out into the open air. Happily, the beast had a short attention span, and a flock of eider ducks sunning on a rock was so distracting that Susan was able to start back across the cove. She knew Kathleen would have called Janet Shapiro by now, and a search was probably being organized at this moment. But Susan couldn’t just wait and do nothing while people swarmed all over the island looking for the child. She had to help find Titania. And she knew that the girl’s house was the place to start her search.

  SEVEN

  Susan and Karma were seated on a large rock, still warm from the afternoon sun. Susan waited to hear a car drive away from the Taylor house. Karma waited for a sea gull stupid enough to stroll within striking range.

  Susan was the lucky one. “Come on, puppy!” she said, pulling the dog to her feet and heading up the steps to the house. “We might as well look around here while we have a chance—and maybe we can find you some dinner!” Apparently she had discovered a word the animal recognized. They ran toward the house together, crossing the patio while dust from the car’s trip down the road still dirtied the air.

  “Now, if only we can get in,” Susan muttered, struggling to turn the knob on the large double glass doors.

  Karma, less gentle and happy to be home, jumped up, thrusting muddy paws against the sparkling glass and shoving her way into the house.

  “Hey, thanks.” Susan would have patted the tawny head, but the beast was scampering toward the kitchen.

  Susan headed straight to the winding stairway that filled the rear of the large entryway. Deciding to explore from the top down, she mounted smooth oak risers to the third floor, unable to resist pausing along the way to admire the spectacular view as she climbed.

  Reaching the landing, she chose to explore the largest room first, assuming (correctly) that it was the master bedroom. She paused a moment to overcome her well-bred dislike of snooping, and then walked right in.

  The room surprised her. While the rest of the house was unfinished, this place had been decorated to death—or to life; plant life, to be specific. A misguided designer might have called it a bower. Flowers were embroidered on bedspreads, curtains, and upholstery. Vines were carved in headboards and chairbacks. Honeysuckle was stenciled on walls near the ceiling and around windows. Pansies and roses were woven into the carpet. Needlepoint pillows adorned every available surface, each bearing a different blowsy bloom. Watercolors of improbably fabulous botanical specimens hung on the walls, and every lampshade had been pierced to give the impression of ivy joyously circling each light bulb. Susan wondered if anyone could enter the room without feeling a desperate urge to start weeding. This was Ted Taylor’s dream bedroom? She thought not, guessing that the bedroom had probably been redecorated in honor of the new marriage.

  The room had the same spectacular views out to sea that the rest of the house did. A quick inspection revealed a very modern bathroom attached; Susan was particularly taken with the six round brass portholes over the tub and the nautical scenes painted on the walls. The two walk-in closets were full of casual clothes. There was nothing of real interest, and Susan went off to check out the other two rooms on the floor: the guest rooms. At first glance, they were pretty much identical: double beds, double dressers, night tables with regrettable lamps, and Wyeth reproductions on the walls. Susan felt a little like she had wandered into two hotel rooms. Both rooms were neat and contained a minimum of personal belongings. Susan poked around, noticing that the room with the most flamboyant clothing (she assumed it belonged to the Brianes) was also overflowing with books. Each nightstand was piled high with literature. Susan paused long enough to be amazed by the number of reference works devoted to deep-sea fishing and then turned to the other side of the bed. What was Judy Briane reading before she fell asleep?

  A couple of beautiful books by a European publisher with an international reputation for color plates sat at the base of the collection. One was a book of seaside homes in Finland; one a tribute to Bauhaus. There were also a few books by or about I. M. Pei’s work. Did this indicate a connection to Ted Taylor? Susan wondered. The rest of the collection was also interesting. Did people actually choose Alexander Pope for bedtime reading? she wondered, thumbing through the tall pile of Oxford paperbacks and deciding that either Judy Briane was doing graduate work or else she was the most unusual of intellectuals—one who wasn’t addicted to a particular type of “junk lit.”

  Susan took a moment to check out the windows in these rooms, too. They looked into the woods behind the house, and it was even possible to see a corner of the Henshaw boathouse through the trees. Time, she decided, to head downstairs.

  There were three rooms on the next landing also, but apparently the sisters had chosen to share the large room directly beneath their parents. Three pine beds stood against one wall. Five or six footlockers were scattered around the floor, and clothing peppered the place as well. Books and shells littered the windowsills, and posters of rock stars, sea life, and Einstein adorned the walls. Susan thought how pleasant it all looked and was glad she didn’t have to be the one to suggest that it was time to clean up. As in all the bedrooms, the connecting bath was expensive and artistic. This one was mahogany and brass, like the interior of an old sailing ship.

  Susan studied the bedroom. Despite the mess, each girl seemed to have her own territory staked out by posters on the walls and the small piles of possessions that encircled each of the beds. Susan assumed Titania’s bed stood beneath a poster on which a photo of Einstein declared imagination to be more important than knowledge—and at this point in her life, Susan certainly hoped that he was right. She started her search there.

  She was looking for something that might give her some idea of where the girl had been on the island, whom she might have met. The usual assortment of shells and pebbles stood on the trunk by the bed. Susan picked up a small bowl of sea urchin shells that smelled dreadful; apparently the shells weren’t quite as empty as the collector had thought. Sea heather was drying in a tiny porcelain vase, and a collection of dark blue beach glass was arranged on a pile of well-read paperback classics. It looked like Titania was learning to knit. A length of knitting displaying a rough idea of a stockinette stitch hung from one of two needles stuck in a ball of yarn. That was all there was, except for a whirligig of a child on a pogo stick. Susan spun the blades of the construction and thought. There were some clues here; she only wondered if there were enough. That the trunk itself was locked didn’t surprise her. Privacy was essential to most thirteen-year-old children. Susan didn’t know how to pick locks and so, deciding that she had made a start, she got up to leave the room. Something tucked under the bed caught her eye, and she stopped to pick it up.

  “Well, well, I wonder if this means something,” she muttered, put her find in her pocket, and headed back into the hall.

  The other two rooms on the floor were completely empty except for a few cartons tha
t, opened, revealed books. Susan trotted back to the first floor, unable to decide what, if anything, she had learned from her snooping.

  The dog, who had been waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, attacked her Keds the moment she touched the main floor. Susan assumed the animal was hungry.

  “Maybe you should spend more time with Kathleen. You seem to have a lot in common,” she said. “Let’s just hope that there’s dog food in the kitchen.” The animal skidded across the polyurethaned floors ahead of her, running smack into one of the tall cupboards. Susan decided it wasn’t an accident. She opened the door, and a fifty-pound bag of puppy chow with an unpronounceable name and a repulsive odor fell out, spilling across the tiles. The dog was delighted. Apparently no one had ever presented her with an entire room full of kibble before.

  Susan grabbed for the animal’s collar, but a lot of food had disappeared before she regained control of the animal. “You are going to get fat,” she said, yanking the dog back to her house.

  Kathleen had just arrived, and the girls were hopping from the Jeep as Susan and Karma got home. Tierney and Theresa were no sooner out of the car when Karma had leapt up and scrambled into the front seat, where she immediately began to drool.

  “She thinks you’re going to go for a drive,” Tierney announced unnecessarily.

  “I was actually thinking of doing just that,” Susan said. “If Kathleen doesn’t mind getting dinner for the two of you … there are some things I’d like to check out.” She gave Kathleen a lock over the heads of the two girls.

  “I’m sure we can manage dinner just fine without you. In fact, if you’re heading back downtown, you could pick up some ice cream. We just realized that we forgot to buy any.”

  “Fine. I’ll be back in less than an hour probably—certainly in time for dessert. What flavor does everyone want?”