She Shoots to Conquer Page 20

  “Won’t happen, dearie.” The gummy smile was back full force and Mrs. Foot went so far as to rub her hands. “His lordship wouldn’t stand for us being booted out. He’s give us his word we’re to stay as long as we wants-which is forever-and with him that’s as sacred an oath as you’d get out of a bishop.”

  “I’m sure.” And naively or not, I was. What puzzled me was why Mrs. Foot had confessed to the hot-water bottle and the open window. My mind primed to suspicion by my imaginings, I remembered Mrs. Malloy’s throwing in my face our previous forays into sleuthing. I couldn’t recall if she had closed the door after bringing in the tray. But if she had left it ajar, might not Mrs. Foot-having followed her up for the express purpose of having a listen to our conversation-be probing the reasons why Suzanne’s death might be murder most foul?

  “I do hope you’re not ever so cross with me, dearie.” Vast shake of the hoary locks. “Oh, Mrs. Foot,” said both Mr. Plunket and Boris. “What if the lady he thinks ofas a rare rose goes telling his lordship about her bad night and he gets his dear self in a state worrying about her catching pneumonia? We can’t have him upset-not anytime, but specially now when he needs to be thinking clear to make his choice of a bride.”

  So much for my silly ideas. Why doubt this explanation for her coming clean? “Of course I won’t say anything,” I reassured her.

  “That’s a weight off my mind. I’ll go tell Mr. Plunket and Boris. I should have thought about them along with his lordship when pulling my stunt.” Giant sigh. No further mention of my feelings. “And now with all this drink your husband has brought into the house,” her voice became edged with the anger she had displayed that morning at the raising of a foreign flag over the kitchen, “I’m scared out of my wits Mr. Plunket will succumb to a glass of oh-be-joyful.”

  “Ben acted upon Monsieur LeBois’s instructions and surely” (perhaps wishful thinking) “he wouldn’t have issued them without Lord Belfrey’s approval.”

  “Pressured into it.” Mrs. Foot’s scowl deepened. “Not a drop of alcohol in the place from the day poor Mr. Plunket told his lordship about his battle fought and won with the bottle. An employer in a million, we’ve got. He’ll have insisted that what’s been brought into the house in the past twenty-four hours be kept under lock and key. But where there’s a will, there’s always a way to get to the booze. No stopping Mr. Plunket if the urge comes on too strong.”

  “I can understand your worrying.”

  Mrs. Foot knuckled a teary eye. “Just like there wasn’t any stopping Boris from letting that lion loose from his trailer in the middle of some high street after there was talk of him being sent to a zoo if he kept balking at jumping through the ring of fire, the poor old puss! Such a lot of running and screaming when all he wanted to do was play. But of course no one thought to toss him a toy mouse! And Boris given the boot after being with the same circus since he was a boy. Talk about feeling betrayed!”

  “Yes,” I managed.

  “What is this sad old world coming to?” Mrs. Foot wiped the other eye with her sleeve. “It’s a good thing those two men have me to mother them. Like Mr. Plunket said to Boris just this morning, their world would fall apart if I was took.” She appeared to size up my reaction. “I’m not as strong as I look-hacking coughs every winter and a nasty boil on my neck just a few months back.”

  “Oh, dear!” I was really thinking of the time. If I rushed, I’d be five minutes late for afternoon tea. I explained the situation, to which she responded by picking up the tray with a wincing heave.

  “Like I say to Mr. Plunket and Boris when they hover round, Ma-that’s what the dears call me in private-isn’t made of spun glass, but there’s never any getting them to see I’m not about to break like a precious ornament…”

  “But lovely they feel that way about you.” I opened the door more fully. “Can I take the tray down for you? Going to the kitchen would give me the chance to remind Ben about the need to keep the alcohol under lock and key.”

  “And make it look that I’ve been telling tales out of school about Mr. Plunket?” The eyes flashed green-yellow fire. If a woman of her looming presence could have been said to flounce, she did so out into the hallway. The thudding footsteps continued to echo like doom on the march as I raced along to the twilit bathroom, splashed water on my face, raked a comb through my hair, decided against lipstick, let alone a change of clothes, and sped down the main staircase into the hall without bothering to wonder if Georges had set up a trip wire in the guise of adding thrills and spills to Here Comes the Bride. Fortunately, this must not have occurred to him-yet. However, as I paused in my headlong rush to ponder the location of the library, a ghastly apparition emerged out of the crepuscular gloom.

  A startled sidestep into the sharp edge of a piece of furniture, a suppressed scream, and I recognized the white face and lanky figure of Boris. My request for directions met with a hollow-eyed stare, as if I were a zombie or the ghost of Eleanor Belfrey. Luckily, before I was forced to go it alone-opening up door after door until hitting the jackpot-another shadow cast itself alongside him and Mr. Plunket’s voice asked if he could be of assistance. He sounded so much like a normal butler that I forgot my rush and took the opportunity to ask him if someone had been able to find a torch for Ben to use in trying to figure out what was wrong with the cooker.

  Those blank looks of Boris had to be contagious because now Mr. Plunket had one.

  “Monsieur LeBois said he’d seen one in his lordship’s desk. A red one,” the thickening silence had me babbling, “but there must be others, although in a house this size it must be hard to keep track of every little thing.”

  “Green,” said Mr. Plunket.

  “There’s one that’s-”

  “Green the one in his nibs’s study.”

  “Red, Mr. Plunket, dearie,” said the voice of Mrs. Foot. “That one is red. There was a yellow torch once in the pantry, but that got broke when Whitey knocked it off the shelf.”

  “Color-blind,” gloomed Boris. “That’s what Mr. Plunket is, Mrs. Foot. Isn’t that right, Mr. Plunket? Remember,” his vocal cords sounded rasped to the limit, “you told us it came on you sudden, late in life, so it’s not surprising you forget sometimes.”

  “That’s right.” Mr. Plunket nodded with such vigor I was afraid his head would fly off. “The result of the drink, that would be it, wouldn’t it, Mrs. Foot?”

  “Now don’t you go blaming yourself, Mr. Plunket,” came the tender response; “we’ve all had our vices.”

  “Not you, Mrs. Foot!” Staunch conviction.

  “Not you, Mrs. Foot!” Sepulcher echo from Boris.

  This was pointless. By now Ben had probably sent out for a torch or gone to purchase one himself. Mumbling something to this effect, I skirted the obstacle course of furniture and entered Mucklesfeld’s library.

  As in the drawing room, the lackluster lighting made it impossible to immediately grasp the size of the space other than that it wasn’t poky. Bookcases lined with leather volumes that appeared to have been purchased in matching height and width rose on all sides to a railed portrait gallery beneath the vaulted ceiling that had the drift of an overcast sky. I was able to make out a short stairway immediately across from the doorway, providing access to closer perusal of presumably dead (and hopefully gone) Belfreys.

  The living were scattered into two groups. Georges LeBois in his wheelchair watched with pouting lips as his crew carted tripods, telescopic-looking cameras, and goodness knows what other necessary equipment first one way, then another, as if searching for the perfect campsite on which to pitch a tent. All six of the contestants were assembled on sofas and chairs arranged roughly in a circle beneath an unlighted chandelier that would have flattened an entire city if it fell. Here there was not the excess of furniture that encumbered the hall and drawing room-a billiard table blanketed in shadow at the other end of the room from the seating area, an oversized desk that enhanced the professorial atmosphere, and of cou
rse the library ladder suggesting either an urge to dust or search behind the highest tomes for a hidden safe.

  Georges did not acknowledge my arrival, none of the crew gave me a glance, but before I could turn tail, Mrs. Malloy beckoned me toward the leather sofa she was seated upon with Livonia Mayberry and Judy Nunn, both of whom beamed at me. Three other women took up another even longer sofa: a buxom blonde giving vent to hearty laughter and one with an attractively untidy mass of red hair drawn up on top of her head, talking animatedly over the blonde to the mousy woman of indeterminate age. Something about flying cutlery. Hoping Mrs. Malloy had not been the source, I joined them in the hesitant manner of a schoolgirl walking into class ten minutes late, sat on a faded tapestry chair, and braced myself to embark on an explanation of why I was intruding.

  “And about time, too, Mrs. H,” Mrs. Malloy shot across at me, cutting into the blonde’s continuing saga. “I’d about given up on you. And tea, like Christmas, is still a long time coming.” She was looking fiercely overdressed in her forest green taffeta, especially compared to Judy Nunn, who had shed the hiking jacket but had not otherwise changed her attire, which, with mud stains added to the knees of her slacks, had acquired the look of gardening clothes kept on a rusty hook in the potting shed.

  I started to explain to the newcomers who I was, but the buxom blonde cut me off with an impatient chuckle.

  “I’m Wanda Smiley and we all understand why you’re joining us, Mrs. Haskell. Monsieur LeBois gave us the explanation. Quite a long one, but then he is in the entertainment business.” A look round to see how much responsive amusement this had achieved. “Though why we need an interior decorator to tell us how to brighten up Mucklesfeld, I’m sure I don’t know, when all it needs is a good spring cleaning. But as he said, you do happen to be here, along with your husband and Roxie there.” No bothering to look at Mrs. Malloy, therefore missing the glower. “And now where was I? Ah, yes, such a laugh you’ll all get out of this one. I’d gone to buy a new bra and decided to get a good fitting, seeing I need all the support I can get, given my generous proportions.” She made the mistake of pausing to look smugly down.

  “I’m so glad you’re staying, Ellie,” Livonia leaned eagerly toward me, “and after being ready to bolt off like a rabbit, I’m glad I’m here, too.” If the room had any glow at all, it came from the shine in her blue eyes. My goodness! I thought. What or who could be responsible for the stunning change? Did I need three guesses, or just two? Lord Belfrey or Dr. Tommy Rowley? Either way, she had gone in the flash of a few hours from mildly pretty to extremely so. “And, will you believe it, this lady,” casting her radiance on the mousy-looking woman, “is Mrs. Knox’s daughter. I never knew she had one, but here she is-Molly Duggan. You remember I told you about Mrs. Knox?”

  “The next-door neighbor.”

  “And so horribly shocked to find out I’d entered Here Comes the Bride. And to think Molly is also a contestant!”

  There was absolutely nothing wrong with mousy Molly’s looks and nothing right with them, either, seeing she had left it all up to Mother Nature, who hadn’t been forthcoming with a mascara wand, a lipstick, or, given that sad frizz, a comb.

  “That’s nothing to what she’ll have to say when she finds out I did the same.” She peeked a nervous look around the circle. “I’ve always been a disappointment to her. It’s why she doesn’t talk about me and hardly ever comes to see me at my bed-sitter. She’s ashamed that I work the checkout at the supermarket she used to go to. Until now, my highest ambition was to be moved to the seafood department, but then this came along and I pictured the look on Mum’s face if I got to marry a lord. But after what happened at lunch when that giant fork came at me…” She sat gulping.

  “One in the eye for the old bat you marrying into the aristocracy, eh!” The woman with the red hair-who had by default to be Alice Jones-grabbed the chance to speak. “You should have heard how my parents both carried on when I joined a commune at age nineteen.”

  “Hurts to crane your neck back that far, I’m sure.” Mrs. Malloy tempered this comment with a chuckle that to me was clearly imitative of the blonde Wanda Smiley, and my heart sank. Unless reined in, my friend was going get herself soundly disliked by the rest of the group, as Georges had predicted. But how to save her from herself without putting her in the corner or telling her no sweets for a week?

  “Did you live off the earth at the commune, Alice?” Judy asked with her pleasant smile. “Grow all your own vegetables, peat fires, that sort of thing?”

  “Did you weave your own clothes?” Livonia emerged from a dreamy-eyed reverie. “I’ve always thought that would be so romantic.”

  “Looks like she still does.” I thought it, Mrs. Malloy said it.

  Alice eyed her questioningly, before judiciously deciding to assume a compliment. “To be completely up-front…”

  “Oh, do by all means set an example.”

  Really, I sighed, Nanny was going to have to get very cross indeed if this kept up.

  Undeterred, Alice proceeded. “I haven’t touched a loom in years, but as it happens I was thinking on the drive here that I could put my skills to use weaving blankets for all the bedrooms. I also hook rugs and make slipcovers-I put that down on my application and I have to assume it helped in my being chosen.”

  Wanda Smiley got her mouth open, but Mrs. Malloy was too quick off the mark. “You were another link in the chain, Alice, that was your selling feature…”

  “Previously knowing which of the contestants?” I asked brightly, having caught a look from Georges that said I wasn’t doing much of a job controlling my charges.

  “Me.” The word came out in a squeak. Molly Duggan, daughter of the odious Mrs. Knox, looked and now sounded like a mouse peeking out of a hole. “Alice shops in the supermarket where I work.”

  “And,” said the thus named, “Wanda comes in quite regularly to the health food café where I waitress.”

  “Not that I’m keen on tofu burgers or seaweed omelets.” The oar was eagerly grabbed by the blonde, not relishing the sidelines. “But they do serve a decent cappuccino and a rather scrumptious blackberry and apple crumble-the sort Mother never used to make. As I said to the saleswoman when I went in to buy myself those new bras, I never worry about what I eat because I always put it on in the right places!”

  “Same here! Shame we can’t all be as lucky!” Mrs. Malloy slunk a look at Judy, who crossed her legs, clasped her knees, and remarked that she thought she heard the distant rattle of a tea cart. It was Livonia and Molly Duggan who looked uncomfortable.

  “Into the changing room we went-me and the fitter-and out came her tape measure-you could tell from looking at her she’d only half a brain. But even so, I almost dropped from shock when she told me I was a size twenty-four-round the bust mind you, not my thigh! Me of all people! The Jayne Mansfield of my school! Of course she was before my time, but anyway, it turned out the silly woman had the tape measure round the wrong way…”

  Laughter in varying degrees of amusement, save from Mrs. Malloy.

  A sudden flare of camera lights nearly blinded me. In looking away, my eyes veered upward to the portrait gallery to fasten on the painted images of a sternly bewhiskered gentleman in a frock coat, a stout matron in a crinoline, and a woman in a tall white wig and the satins and lace of Versailles’s glory days. Ruminating on her sour expression must have caused me to miss Georges’s call for Action. I blinked back to the assemblage upon sensing a stiffening of posture, a drawing in of elbows and a replanting of feet.

  “You were saying, Mrs. Haskell,” Judy kindly cued me in.

  “So exciting to be part of Here Comes the Bride in an observing capacity,” my voice played back to me with its embarrassingly contrived enthusiasm. What on earth was I to say next? Fortunately, Mrs. Malloy intervened before Georges yelled Cut! or something equally cutting.

  “Well, I’ve got to say, as lunch had its moments! And I’m not talking about the food, although it w
asn’t to be sneezed at-Mr. H being in top form. It was when the lid of the canteen opened all by itself and the cutlery flew up in the air that I said to meself this is a bit of all right. ’Course I see some of the others was petrified! But that’s people being different.” Smug-faced self-approbation. “Like I always say, after battling the world on me own, there’s not much as will give me the willies. And anyway I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced it was the Mucklesfeld poltergeist or what have you pulling a stunt.”

  “Special effects,” voiced Judy sensibly.

  “But how?” Molly stirred nervously.

  “Some mechanical device in the cabinet to get the show started, followed by a visual recording when the cutlery apparently began whizzing around the dining room.”

  “Not much romance in your soul, Miss Nunn.” Mrs. Malloy hunched a shoulder.

  “I will always remember it as the silver dance.” Livonia smiled dreamily.

  “The idea that there are restless spirits at Mucklesfeld doesn’t bother me,” Wanda asserted. “I know blondes aren’t supposed to have much in the way of brains, preferring to rely on our other charms,” another of her self-congratulatory laughs, “but I’m convinced that a womanly hand on the helm will put paid to nerves.”

  “I rather like the idea of ghosts.” Alice tucked in a tangle of reddish hair. “Places like Mucklesfeld should have them, along with a repaired roof and a thorough refurbishing.”

  “How do you all feel about an influx of capital used to restore the place to its former grandeur?” I dutifully inquired of the circle of faces after catching Georges’s eye.

  “First the gardens,” responded Judy.

  “I don’t see why.” Mrs. Malloy at her most petulant.

  “Does anyone have a particular design vision for the interior or exterior?” I persisted nobly. “Elizabethan or Jacobean furniture would seem the obvious choice, but perhaps not…”

  “I don’t think a home is about a particular type of furniture,” said Alice. “It should be about family, and I’ve been thinking,” she looked round the circle, “that the nicest thing we could do for Lord Belfrey would be to invite his two cousins over for a meal, which I would be happy to cook…”