Buried Bones Page 23

  “Willem, where is it?” I meant business.

  “It’s safe. Very safe,” he said, stepping closer. “I was worried about you. Look, you’re cold.” His fingers brushed my arm with electric friction. “Let me light a fire.”

  He’d just done that, a near case of spontaneous combustion, but I had to focus on the case. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Your partner, Tinkie.” He struck a match, and in the light his smile was both sexual and highly amused. He bent to light the space heater. “Tinkie was very eager to tell me all about your new business relationship and the case.”

  I was going to have to have a talk with my partner. She wasn’t supposed to tell every Tom, Dick, or Harry where I was snooping.

  “She was worried about you, too,” Willem added, in a more serious tone. “This case isn’t exactly what it seems.” He reached out and his hand circled my wrist. Very gently he pulled me back into the pathway of light that fell from the moon. His gaze slid from my eyes, slowly moving downward, then back up to hold me for a long moment. “You’re truly beautiful.”

  His palm tenderly caressed my cheek. “Under different circumstances …” He took a breath and walked over to the window where he watched the play of moonlight tipping the lake with silver.

  The next move was up to me. I could go to him, touch him, and initiate the thing we both wanted. It occurred to me that having the power of a sex goddess was useless unless the goddess knew what she wanted to do with it. Suddenly I was unsure.

  “What are you really doing here, Willem?”

  He turned back to face me, hesitating for an instant while his gaze swept over me, before he came forward. “I was concerned for you. Tinkie told me you were at Senator Archer’s, and from there I followed you here.” He hesitated. “There was another car following you, too.”

  My passions had cooled to a mild simmer, allowing for a trickle of blood flow to my brain. I’d been so deep in my own funk that I hadn’t even thought to look behind me. Willem had followed me. Hell, half of Zinnia could have been in a parade behind me and I wouldn’t have noticed. The reality of my carelessness was unnerving. “Did you recognize the car?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Mississippi plates. A boxy car, the kind matrons drive.”

  Probably a Mississippi matron headed for groceries. No one had a reason to follow me. “Why weren’t you at Lawrence’s funeral?” I asked. The room was warming, but I shifted closer to the space heater. The warmth on the back of my legs was delicious.

  “I was searching Harold’s house. It was the only time I was certain he wouldn’t come home.”

  While I’d been snapping pictures of the rich and infamous, Willem had been solving my case. “You found the manuscript!” My heart was racing. If I could read that book I’d be a lot closer to finding Lawrence’s killer.

  “I know where it is.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “You didn’t get it?”

  He shook his head. “But it does exist. I know where it is.”

  “Where?” I demanded.

  “We can go for it together,” he said. “I’ll protect you, Sarah Booth. We’ll retrieve it together.”

  I began grabbing my clothes, preparing to dress. “Did you know that Lawrence and Madame were communists? There are some fabulous scrapbooks here.”

  “I don’t think you could honestly consider them to be communists,” Willem said. “They were activists. How well do you know your history, Sarah Booth?”

  “I made it out of college.”

  “Vague at best, he concluded. “In the summer of 1940, Europe was at war. Terrible things were happening, which Americans chose to ignore. It was inevitable that America would join the Allies, but the country was greatly divided. There was much to be gained—or lost.”

  It was nearly midnight, and I wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson. “Yeah, yeah, I know it took the bombing of Pearl Harbor to push us into war. Let’s go get the manuscript.”

  “You said there were scrapbooks?”

  His question caught me off guard. “Yes, on the second floor.” I had my clothes in my hand.

  “Let’s go look at them.” He took my hand, removed my clothes, and led me out of the warm room and into the freezing hall. He slipped out of his jacket, a nice leather one, and draped it over my shoulders but kept walking, heading straight for the stairs as if he’d been in the lodge a hundred times.

  When he’d settled me into one of the large, overstuffed chairs, he lit the nearby heaters and sat down on the arm of my chair, his hip brushing my shoulder. “Let me get a blanket from the room,” he said.

  “Willem!” I was ready to get going.

  He disappeared for several minutes, returning with a heavy blanket he wrapped around my legs. “Which book?” he asked.

  I picked up the one I’d been looking at earlier and flipped the pages.

  “I have to tell you something. A confession. The complete truth this time,” he said.

  My finger was on the butchered picture of Lawrence standing at the lake. As impatient as I was to get moving, something in Willem’s face made me hold still.

  “As I told you, my father was in Germany during the war. He was a doctor.”

  My stomach knotted, hoping he wasn’t headed where I thought he might be going. “A doctor?”

  “In one of the concentration camps.”

  I closed my eyes. “So this is what you didn’t want Lawrence to put in his book.”

  “It’s what my mother wished to conceal. My father did nothing wrong. Nothing. He treated the victims of the pogroms. He was a kind man, and when the war was over, he was allowed to emigrate to Nicaragua without any difficulty.”

  “I see.” I wondered if this was a family fabrication, something that Willem had heard and wanted so desperately to believe that he’d deceived himself, or simply the truth. “Why is your mother afraid of this story?”

  “There were experiments conducted on prisoners. Though my father never participated, his name was put on research papers. He never knew this. It wasn’t until he was dead and unable to dispute the journals that my mother learned about this. It almost killed her.”

  “And how did she find out?” I was afraid I knew that answer, too.

  “Lawrence told her.”

  I didn’t say anything. My finger moved across the face in the photograph. Lawrence was a handsome man with kind eyes. Surely kindness was the motivating factor in what he’d done. “Is there anything in his biography about the experiments?”

  Willem’s hand brushed down my shoulder. “I don’t know. There’s something else. Did you ever wonder why Lawrence was so encouraging of my art?”

  I didn’t follow him. “What do you mean?”

  “I was in medical school when I took up painting to relieve the stress of school. I enjoyed painting, but my dream was to be a doctor, like my father, to go into the small villages and heal. Lawrence urged me to drop medicine and become an artist. He wrote me letters every week, encouraging me, giving me introductions to influential people in the art world. In a manner, he seduced me away from medicine and into art.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was blaming Lawrence or not. “Do you regret becoming an artist?”

  “No,” he said. “He was right. In my dream, I was a hero. Self-aggrandizement isn’t a good reason to become a doctor.” His smile was self-deprecating, and worth at least two million bucks. “But I can’t help but wonder if he understood what would happen to my medical career if my father’s past became public. I would have been ruined. The taint of such things is never forgotten.”

  I wondered, too. “How far along were you in school before you quit?”

  “I finished, I just never practiced. The week after I got my diploma, Lawrence arranged a huge showing for me in Paris. Friends of his friends. I sold every painting I had, and received several commissions—the kind of money that a young artist fantasizes about. I was a celebrity in a world of beauty and glamour. No disease or sickness.
No maimed or hungry children. I embraced that life, and I had no time to think about medicine. But that life is costly. There were times I was overextended. Times I used Lawrence’s name as a ticket. Times I acted … unethically. Even illegally.”

  His confession and the implications didn’t shock me. He’d bent opportunity to his needs. Hadn’t I done the same when I’d kidnapped Chablis?

  He shifted so that he faced me.

  “Willem, I—”

  Before I could offer my own confession, he interrupted me. “Don’t say anything,” he said softly. He went over to the old record player, selected an album, and put it on the turntable. “As Times Goes By” was a song my parents often danced to, a song that called for dim lights and a crackling fire, for the sound of their soft whispers and the lilt of my mother’s laughter in response to something my father said.

  Willem came to stand in front of me, in the edge of the light cast by an old lamp. Beyond him, out the window, Moon Lake glimmered.

  “The song suits your gown,” he said, his finger pushing aside the lapel of his jacket and tracing the narrow strap of coral satin. His hand closed over my wrist and lifted me to my feet. His jacket fell to the floor.

  He drew me into his arms. “For just a few moments, forget who we both are and live what this place used to be. We share many things, Sarah Booth. A love of family, a love of the land. We are much alike. Forget everything else for the time of one dance.”

  There was no hesitation as he swept me into the rhythm of the song, leading with a strength and sureness that left only the music, the movement. My body pressed tightly against his, the nightgown offered little protection from the sensation of flesh against flesh.

  I had been freezing earlier, but I was flushed with sudden warmth. I closed my eyes and yielded to the subtle pressure of his body against mine, the timeless pleasure of dance.

  The needle moved into the final groove with a repetitive scratch, scratch, scratch that broke the spell. Willem put his hands on my shoulders as he stepped back from me. “Ah, Sarah Booth,” he said. His lips brushed my forehead, then grazed my ear. “We’ll go to Memphis and examine the art vault. That’s where the manuscript is hidden.”

  I was surprised that Willem knew about the storage facility in Memphis, but since he was an artist, Lawrence had probably told him about it. “Okay. We’ll get it together.” I frowned up at him. “What did you tell Harold to make him give you the key?”

  For a moment he said nothing. “I thought you had it. Brianna said you were going to Memphis to open the vault.” Willem looked puzzled. “Why would she—”

  “You talked to Brianna about Memphis?” An alarm was ringing.

  Willem stepped back from me. The cold seemed to move in closer, as if it had been waiting. “I have to leave.” He put words to action and started down the long room toward the stairs.

  I jumped up and followed after him, my bare feet lightly slapping the freezing floor. “Willem!” I caught him on the stairs. “You can’t leave me here. My car isn’t working.”

  “I have to get in that vault. Right away.”

  “How do you know the manuscript is there?”

  On the darkened stairwell he had to look up at me. A hint of moonlight slipped through a landing window and seemed to linger in his eyes. “It’s the only place Harold could have hidden it so successfully.”

  He hurried down the stairs, leaving me standing in the cold in a movie star’s borrowed nightgown.

  21

  For the rest of the night I replayed the hour I’d spent with Willem. He’d hornswaggled me with his charm and Latin movement—and then left me high and dry. I suspected him of crippling my car. I gratified myself with visions of revenge, and then moved on to Harold.

  The idea that Harold knew where the manuscript was—had deliberately concealed it—my mind balked at such deception. Yet Harold was romantically linked with Brianna. It was possible that somehow she’d sucked his brain slam out of his head. Whatever technique she used to send normally intelligent men off the deep end, it was an awesome talent.

  I took a shower, carefully folded the nightgown, left it on the bed with a shivery tad of regret, and went downstairs where Edy and Johnny were having breakfast. The dining room was open and there were half a dozen big, burly men eating. All conversation halted at my entrance. Something exciting was going on.

  “Lucas,” Edy pointed to a man in a flannel shirt and overalls eating a plateful of bacon and eggs, “fixed your car. Someone had unhooked the spark plug wires.”

  I walked over and thanked him, shaking his hand and offering to pay him, which he refused. When I returned, Edy had breakfast in front of me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her. Conversation was still hushed.

  “A body washed up at Harbo’s Landing. Some fancy-pants.”

  “Fancy-pants?”

  “Tourist, more than likely. It happens two, three times a year. Local folks don’t normally drown in Moon Lake.” She finished her eggs and poured us both coffee. “Whatever it is you’re up to, be careful. Those spark plug wires didn’t jump off your car. That was deliberately aimed at keeping you here.”

  My effort to pay was again flatly refused. It was with some reluctance that I said goodbye to Edy and the lodge. There was something very special about the place. The car started perfectly, and I headed for home through a bleak winter day. In the summer, the Delta days are long and monotonous, the heat broken only by an occasional afternoon thunderstorm. The winter is another story. A fairyland of ice crystals can melt and give way to a day as balmy as spring. Or the sky can lower in a gun-metal gray so that it touches the horizon like a prison wall. It was this latter kind of day I drove into.

  I dug out my Townes Van Zandt tape and pushed it into the stereo, a sad songman for a day that begged for bed, bonbons, and bourbon. Unfortunately, I had no window of opportunity to indulge in my three preferred pastimes. I pressed down on the accelerator and sped toward Dahlia House.

  Sweetie Pie greeted me with a yodeling bark that brought a baker’s dozen suitors out from under the porch. “Slut,” I whispered to her as I caught her collar and dragged her into the house with me. No matter that she was just following her natural instincts. I, too, am instinct-driven—as much an animal as my hound, yet I must subjugate my urges. All except for nosiness. Which, so far, was the one instinctual drive that was saving my home.

  Once inside the house, with a resisting Sweetie Pie in tow, I heard the television. The sound of laughter stopped me in my tracks and I listened for a moment. The television in my bedroom was going full blast.

  “Rick-y!” came a woman’s wail.

  “Lu-cy!” was the shocked response, in an accent that made a shiver touch my spine as I remembered dancing in Willem’s arms.

  I crept up the stairs to my bedroom where I found Jitty sitting on a chaise lounge by the window intently watching an episode of I Love Lucy.

  In the soft gray tones of television, Lucille Ball looked both elegant and comic, a neat trick. Desi Arnaz glowered handsomely at some caper she’d pulled.

  “Welcome home, traveler,” Jitty said over her shoulder.

  “Busy morning?” I replied, going to the closet to find some clean clothes.

  “Tinkie left the television on to keep the hound company last night. These I Love Lucy episodes are pretty good. Did you know Desi Arnaz developed the split screen technique of showing two sequences simultaneously?”

  That comment stopped me dead in my tracks. “What are you up to, Jitty?”

  “Watching the tube.”

  “You are not that innocent, and I am not that stupid.” There was something different about Jitty, but I couldn’t discern exactly what. It was only when she moved her legs, curling them up beneath her that I saw the red toenail polish. June Cleaver would never wear Red Passion toenail polish. And false eyelashes! My God, they were as thick as a broom.

  “Updating your image?” I asked.

  “Close your mouth or y
ou might catch a fly,” Jitty responded.

  She rose slowly to her feet, and I was given the full effect of the tight black pants overlaid with a fitted gold jacket that flared from her waist into a calf-length skirt. With the stand-up collar she looked like a cross between the wicked witch in Snow White and Mrs. Jetson.

  I heard the rush of my breath through my open lips, and I snapped my jaw shut before she pointed out that I was little more than a mouth-breather. I almost choked when I saw the shoes—stiletto heels, backless, and with a clear strap across the ball of her foot. She looked like some designer’s dark vision of vixen hell.

  “Wow,” I managed.

  “Deadly, huh?” she asked, pleased by my reaction.

  “I thought you were into a family values mode.”

  “I am.” She did a little turn, giving me the view from all angles. “Desi and Lucy were married and worked together.”

  Somewhere along the track my train derailed. “What are you talking about?”

  If all of this reverted to her obsession with wholesome families of the fifties, I didn’t have time for it. I was trying to unravel a murder and build the foundation for a life in the new millennium—a life with some form of companionship other than the company of a ghost.

  “Lucy and Desi are evidence that family and glamour aren’t mutually exclusive,” she said, preening in front of my mirror.

  I snatched a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt from the closet. Harold Erkwell was the man I needed to see, and pronto. “Real life isn’t television, Jitty.”

  “That’s where we got it wrong, Sarah Booth. We thought that solid family values came along with rigid conduct and rigid underwear. Watching I Love Lucy I realized that wasn’t true. She was beautiful and glamorous and Ricky loved her. They created a dynasty together.”

  It was all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes. “They fought like cats and dogs. They divorced, Jitty.”

  She followed me into the bathroom, where I began running water. “They had years of happiness, Sarah Booth. And children. Years and years together. Your track record is what, six dates?”