A Scandal in Scarlet Read online

  “You’re so right.” I said. “You do good work here. It’s important to remind people of our history. Those children will always remember being able to feed the tiny lamb.”

  “I baked cookies first thing this morning, following a traditional recipe, made in the traditional way. Would you like to try one?” She gestured to the table, on which lay a cracked wooden platter containing six flat, round, lumpy beige items that had all the culinary appeal of a rock.

  “No thank you,” I said. “We had a late breakfast.”

  “Terrible what happened yesterday,” Jayne said.

  Sharon shook her head. “Just awful. I can’t believe it. All that work and nothing came of it.”

  “Work?” I asked.

  “The auction. We hoped to raise as much as a hundred thousand dollars. We had some marvelous things donated. The people of West London are so kind, aren’t they?”

  Jayne and I exchanged a glance. I gave her a slight nod.

  “I meant the death of Kathy Lamb,” Jayne said.

  Sharon tittered in embarrassment. “Oh, that too. Most unfortunate.” She lifted the lid of her pot and stirred the contents with a giant wooden spoon. I wandered away to study the authentic farming tools hanging from hooks on the walls.

  “Kathy was the chair of the board of your museum,” Jayne said. “Are you going to be able to carry on without her?”

  Sharon snorted. “Carry on? Heavens, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead …”

  Sure you do, I thought as I examined a wicked piece of curled metal that looked like something the Grim Reaper might carry. As the Grim Reaper wasn’t real, the purpose of it I couldn’t even guess.

  “… but Kathy wasn’t the right person to run the museum. She had some ideas she thought were new and original, but we’d discussed them in the past and rejected them for practical reasons. She wouldn’t see sense and refused to listen. No one on the board liked her. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”

  “I suppose,” Jayne said, “you’ll need a new chair.”

  “I for one am hoping Robyn will agree to come back. Now, she was an excellent chair. She truly had the interests of the museum at heart. She wasn’t trying to find something to make her seem important because her husband dumped her for an older woman.” Sharon laughed.

  “Uh …” Jayne said.

  Sometimes a witness doesn’t want to tell you what they know, so you have to trick them into revealing it. Sometimes you have to gently prod information out of them; thus I had asked Jayne to open the questioning.

  And sometimes, best of all, all you have to do is stand back and let them at it.

  “A nasty divorce?” I asked.

  “The worst.” Sharon settled happily into gossip mode. “It dragged on and on, must have been dreadfully expensive, and Kathy got more and more bitter. The whole thing was only settled a couple of months ago. Everyone took sides, his or hers, and lifelong friendships ended. Things got so bad, Dan had to quit the West London Yacht Club, where he’d been a member forever, because the people there took Kathy’s side.”

  “Several people from that club were at the auction,” I said.

  “Because she begged and wheedled them into coming. Still, Dan did okay, didn’t he? What did he care that the divorce lawyers were draining him dry? Elizabeth paid for it. Easy enough to make new friends too. The day he was kicked out of the WLYC, he joined hers.”

  “Which one’s that?”

  “The Cape Cod Yacht Club. The place just up the street.” She waved her hand in what she thought was the direction of Harbor Road. “It’s not nearly as swanky, or so I’ve been told, as West London is.” She sniffed. “I wouldn’t know. They’d be unlikely to let the likes of me through their doors. Not that I’d ever want to.”

  “Kathy used her work at the museum to help her get over the pain of her divorce,” Jayne said. “I’m sure you all provided a marvelous support system for her.”

  Sharon snorted. “We would have if she wasn’t so darned bossy about it. She needed something to salvage the shards of her self-respect. She lost her house and ended up living in a cheap apartment.” Sharon couldn’t hide the slight smile that touched the edges of her mouth. “That put her in her place fast enough. At first, people felt sorry for her, and she used that to her advantage, to wiggle her way onto the board and then get herself voted chair. It was all sneaky and underhanded. Robyn, who always played fair, didn’t know what was happening before it was too late and she was out.”

  “I didn’t see Robyn at the tea,” I said. I’d never met Robyn, and I didn’t know what she looked like, but I’d overheard someone say she wasn’t there. The best way to get information out of people, I have found, is to let them assume you know more than you do.

  Sharon put the lid back on the pot and wiped her hands on her apron. “As if. She wouldn’t go anywhere near any event Kathy was in charge of. It absolutely broke poor Robyn’s heart when Kathy formed that cabal against her and drove her out.”

  A family came into the barn. The “farmer” wasn’t with them. The kids turned immediately for the animal pens, and their mother said sharply, “Stay away from them. Those animals might be dangerous.”

  “Will you look at that scythe,” the father said. “It’s a real original. My granddad had one like that when he still had the farm. It wasn’t used any more, but it had been his grandfather’s. Before the days of automation, they cut the wheat and hay by hand.”

  “I wanna see the pigs,” the little boy declared, not the least bit interested in how great-great-granddad had worked the farm.

  “Jayne,” I said. “Why don’t you tell the visitors all about animal husbandry in the old days.”

  “What?”

  “The animals are quite safe,” I said, “as long as you don’t try to get into the pens or pick them up. Introduce the children to the baby pigs, Jayne.” I gave her a jerk of my head.

  “Oh, right. The pigs.” She headed across the barn. “The baby pigs are called piglets and they’re about … uh … four weeks old. Their names are Miss Piggy and Kermit and—”

  “Cookie Monster,” one of the kids shouted as he ran after Jayne.

  “I guess it will be okay,” the mother said, as though she had any choice but to follow. The father continued to examine the farm implements. So that was what that thing was. A scythe. Used for felling hay and other crops. Not for the first time, I was glad I lived in the twenty-first century and owned a bookshop.

  “Poor Robyn,” I said, nudging Sharon back onto the topic at hand.

  “She won’t be sorry to hear that Kathy died,” Sharon said, cheerfully tying a noose around Robyn’s neck. “I suppose the museum should do the decent thing and send flowers. I’ll call Robyn when I go on my break, and suggest she take care of that.”

  “Why don’t you do it before you forget?”

  “My phone’s in my purse, which is locked in my car. I can’t have the dratted thing ringing in here, can I? It would ruin the mood totally.”

  “Guess what we’ve found,” the father bellowed into his phone. “An old barn like the one Granddad had. Really takes me back to those summers on the farm.”

  “Baby pigs remain with their mother until they’re … uh, one year old,” said Jayne, who knew as much about farming as I did. For all I knew baby pigs stayed with their mothers until they graduated from high school.

  “I’ll watch the stew for you while you run and get it,” I said.

  Sharon hesitated. “I shouldn’t leave the barn unattended.”

  I dug in my pocket. “Why don’t you use mine?” I unlocked the phone. “If you don’t know her number, we can look it up on four-one-one. What’s Robyn’s last name?”

  “Kirkpatrick.”

  “Kirkpatrick. Does she live in West London?”

  “No, she’s in Chatham, but she loves Scarlet House. Her husband’s name is Eric. The phone’s probably under his name.”

  “Here it is. Eric Kirkpatrick. Chatham.” I pressed
the appropriate key and handed the phone to Sharon.

  She accepted it. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to use a cell phone in the middle of her seventeenth-century fantasy, but she was too polite to say no. I thanked the god of amateur detectives for well-mannered people.

  She waited a few seconds and then her voice took on the robotic tone that meant she was talking to a machine. “Hi, Robyn. It’s Sharon here at the museum. I was thinking we should send flowers or something to Kathy at the funeral home. Or wherever they … uh … took her. You’ve probably thought of it yourself—I know you’re always on the ball about that sort of thing, but just in case, I wanted to make the suggestion. Thanks. Call me. Let’s do lunch soon. We have so much to talk about now that we—I mean you—can get control of the museum back. Don’t call on this phone. I borrowed it. Bye.” She hung up and handed the phone back to me.

  “Now baby goats, on the other hand, don’t need their mothers as much as piglets do.” Jayne struggled to make up tidbits of animal husbandry. I didn’t have much more time.

  A burst of laughter announced that another group had come into the barn. Sharon blinked and slipped back to her seventeenth-century world. “Welcome,” she said. “I’m Goody Musgrave. You look as though you have had a long, hard journey. Come sit by the fire, and I’ll tell you my tale.”

  I called to Jayne, and we left Sharon to her fantasies.

  “Learn anything?” Jayne asked as we walked to the car.

  “Quite a lot,” I said. “Give Ryan a call. Ask him if the police will be releasing Kathy’s body soon, and if so, ask if he knows the funeral arrangements. Don’t tell him you’re with me. Just say that, as she died in your place, you’d like to pay your respects.”

  Chapter Eight

  Ryan didn’t answer, so Jayne left the message. As we drove toward Chatham, I told her what I’d learned.

  “You think someone would kill over a place on the volunteer board of a small-town history museum? That seems like a heck of a stretch to me, Gemma.”

  “I’ve discovered there’s no accounting for what some people will consider serious enough to kill over,” I said. “The smaller the stakes, often the bigger the desperation. This Robyn Kirkpatrick was spotted outside the tearoom while the fund-raising tea was getting underway. That implies a degree of obsession to me. But I’m not—not yet anyway—as interested in Robyn as I am in Sharon.”

  “Sharon? Why? She seemed harmless to me.”

  “Seemed, isn’t good enough to prove innocence, Jayne.” We came to a red light, and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pressed my thumb into the button to unlock it. “Take this. Look up the last number dialed on four-one-one-dot-com, and find me the address.”

  She did so and read it out.

  “Thank heavens,” I said, “some people still have land lines. When Sharon called Robyn, she got voicemail. Either Robyn isn’t at home, or she didn’t want to pick up for a number she didn’t recognize, which is common enough these days. If she’s not home, this might be a wasted trip. But it is Sunday morning, and chances are good Robyn and her husband are either at church or brunch. We’ll check their house, and then I’ll decide. I want to pay a call on Mr. Lamb as well. That might be more difficult to arrange, as I don’t want to talk to him in the presence of his wife.”

  “As long as you don’t send me to talk about pigs endlessly,” Jayne said. “There’s only so much a woman can pretend to know about pigs, Gemma.”

  “I fear you’ve ruined those children for life with all that incorrect knowledge,” I said. “By the time pigs are a year old, they’re on the dinner plate, not living happy piglet lives in Farmer’s Brown’s family compound.”

  “You could have done better?”

  “I didn’t even know a baby pig’s called a piglet until today.”

  The Kirkpatricks lived on a well-maintained street of well-maintained houses not far from the ocean in the beautiful town of Chatham. We drove slowly down the street. A few people worked in their immaculate gardens, making them even more immaculate. An elderly couple sat on the swing on their front porch, watching the world go by. A woman walked a Pomeranian. She passed a man with a Great Dane, and they exchanged words of greeting while the dogs sniffed at each other. The Pomeranian couldn’t reach his twitching nose past the Great Dane’s ankles.

  This was not the sort of neighborhood in which I could park on the side of the road and observe the inhabitants without being noticed. At the Kirkpatrick’s house, no cars were in the driveway, and the double garage doors were closed. I parked on the street, and Jayne and I walked up the pathway between rows of perfectly trimmed bushes overflowing with fragrant pink roses.

  I rang the bell, and the sound echoed throughout the house.

  “Please tell me we’re not going to break in like we did at the Kent place when no one answered,” Jayne said.

  “As I have no reason to suspect the maid is not telling her we’re here, the answer is no.” The house was nice, built on a quarter acre of tree-lined property in the seventies or eighties. The windows had recently been upgraded, and the house given a new roof. Nice, but not the sort of home in which the residents had a maid.

  I pressed the bell again.

  No answer.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “We’ll try again later. If they’re still not home, I’ll have to call ahead, although I always hate giving people time to prepare for my visit.”

  We headed back to the car. “I dribbled salad dressing down the front of my favorite green dress the other day,” I said to Jayne as I pulled the Miata out of the driveway.

  “Did you just think of an important detail, Gemma? You remembered something about salad dressing or green dresses, and now you know who killed Kathy Lamb?”

  “I remembered that I can’t get the stain out, and so I’d like to get a new dress. There are some nice shops in Chatham. It’s almost noon, and they’ll be open soon. We can come back here later and see if anyone’s home.”

  My shopping expedition was a success, and I bought a sleeveless blue and green cotton dress with a full, knee-length skirt, and a matching blue cardigan in case of evening chill.

  “Feel like lunch?” I said to Jayne as we left the store.

  “After that huge breakfast you made me?”

  “Let’s check out the Kirkpatricks again then,” I said.

  This time, an almost-new Lexus was parked in their driveway. I pulled in behind it, and the door was opened almost immediately in answer to the bell.

  “Can I help you?” The woman was in her mid-fifties, short at about five foot one, lean, and toned in a way that told me she worked out regularly. Blond hair with caramel highlights fell to her chin. Dark eyes and an olive complexion hinted at her southern European ancestry, but her accent was pure middle-class New England. I’d never seen her before.

  “Mrs. Kirkpatrick?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Gemma Doyle, and this is Jayne Wilson.”

  “From the Sherlock Holmes store and the tearoom.”

  “Oh. Yes, that’s right.” I wasn’t often caught off-guard. Usually I was far quicker to recognize people than they were to remember me. “I’m sorry, but have we met?”

  She shook her head. “No, but my husband loves your store. He has a terrible weakness for historical mysteries. He pointed you out to me once when you were walking down the street.”

  “You come into the tearoom quite often,” Jayne said.

  Robyn smiled. “Whenever I have out-of-town guests, I like to take them for afternoon tea. It’s always such a treat. What can I do for you two? Would you like to come in?”

  We did so, and Robyn showed us to the living room. We took seats on comfortable chintz chairs.

  “Can I offer you some tea?” Robyn asked.

  “No thank you,” I said. “We don’t want to take up much of your time. I’ll get straight to the point. Did you hear what happened yesterday at Mrs. Hudson’s?”

  “My phone hasn’t stopp
ed ringing since yesterday afternoon. Everyone pretends they’re breaking bad news, but I can tell they think I’ll be delighted, although I’m not. How can I be happy that a woman died?”

  “Delighted is a strong word,” I said.

  “Kathy Lamb and I had a strong relationship,” she said. “Strongly negative. To put it bluntly—and I’ll assume that’s why you’re here—we hated each other.”

  I was wrong-footed again. Most people danced around their feelings for the recently departed with phrases like “I won’t speak ill of the dead” or “We had our differences, but.”

  “She kicked you off the museum board.” If bluntness was the order of the day, I could also be blunt.

  “She did. She engineered a coup and managed to persuade enough members to vote against me. I was angry at the time, but I soon got over it. Unlike some people, I don’t allow my position on the board of a historical museum to define my self-worth.”

  “You didn’t come to the auction tea?”

  “No, I didn’t. As I said, I got over it. The museum is no longer any of my concern.”

  “But you stood outside, watching people arrive.”

  Her right eye twitched. Not as calm as she wanted me to think. “Why are you here, Ms. Doyle?”

  “Someone killed Kathy Lamb in my place of business. I don’t like that.”

  “I’m sure you don’t.” She picked a piece of invisible lint off her immaculate white trousers. “I find your question insulting, but I assume you’ll go running to the police if I throw you out of my house.”

  “I never run to the police,” I said, “unless I have something to tell them.”

  “I was in West London yesterday to do some shopping. I like the fishmonger on Harbor Road better than the one in Chatham. After I bought our night’s dinner, I thought I’d drop into your store and get a gift for Eric. His birthday’s coming up, and I read a review of Gaslight by Stephen Price in the New York Times. I know Eric hasn’t read it yet. It was only after I’d parked my car that I remembered someone telling me about this auction. I saw my former colleagues going into Mrs. Hudson’s Tearoom. I didn’t want a potentially unpleasant encounter with Kathy, so I went home without buying the book. I’ll return for it another time. Now, if there’s nothing else.”