Alysse Aallyn

Category: Crime

  • Devoured Heart – romantic suspense by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 3. Ian

    It was their first morning in the house and the moving van was expected by noon. Scarlet was excitedly making measurements and notes about where everything should go.


    Lacking a butler, the butler’s pantry became a “buttery” in Ian’s terminology, a “bar” in Scarlet’s. It had such wonderful oak-shuttered pass-throughs on either side. Did she dare set up barstools? She knew she would have to handle Ian tactfully. Their English friends would be appalled. Bringing the pub home would be so “American” – which was their automatic euphemism for “lower class” as Scarlet had sadly discovered.


    “Pomeroy Bronfen invited us to dinner,” said Ian. “The unlucky heir. I can call him from town. Is it a yes?”


    “It’s a yes,” said Scarlet. “I just hope it won’t go late. You know I pass out at ten.”


    “He said six.”


    “Better and better.”


    “I may have mentioned that you were a prisoner of early nights.”


    A prisoner. Scarlet didn’t like that at all. Hadn’t her sister India warned her: “Beware the house in the country. That’s where Englishmen stick the wives and kids so they can lead a bachelor life in town.”


    But Ian wouldn’t be like that! Would he?


    “Are you going out? Here’s a list of things you ought to get,” said Scarlet, tearing a sheet from her pad.


    He took it like a man.

    Another man showed at eleven to install the phone.


    “That was fast”, said Scarlet. “I’m impressed.” Rumor was, it took simply forever, my dear – to get a telephone installation in the country.


    “I heard it’s both a business and a residence,” said the man in a thick country accent. “New businesses get precedence – there’s not much investment hereabouts.”


    So that was Ian’s game! Well, Scarlet could play. ““We’ll be needing one phone in the buttery, one in the upstairs hall and a ringer in the garden,” she directed.


    He studied his work order. “The mister requested an office phone.”


    Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Well, I suppose he must have one then.” She showed him to the library.

    Chapter 4. The Battery

    What a strange name Pomeroy Bronfen had selected for his new residence, a low mews house located behind the business square – but Pomeroy – “Call me Pom, everyone does” – offered a ready explanation: “This place was first a chicken coop, and then a garage. Part of it is still garage. Battery’s the shared motif.”


    The place didn’t resemble either a chicken coop or a garage any longer. A series of low-ceilinged, agreeably furnished rooms rambling around to a picture-window view of rolling hills. The whole town revealed itself as a Potemkin village one-house-deep.


    Pom himself was very thin and tall, with prematurely silvered hair. His deep-set eyes and close-cropped hair gave him the look of an overgrown Dickensian orphan. He seemed eerily fine-tuned to Scarlet in a way that unsettled her. He would be a difficult man to think private thoughts around.

    Ian’s other friends never guessed what she as thinking; her mind, assured of complete freedom, could range anywhere in their company. By contrast, Pom noticed her eying his trouser stains immediately.


    “Battery acid,” he said. “So you see.”


    “You seem to have got some there, too,” she gestured at his leather vest. Pom didn’t cock so much as an eyebrow, but regarded the stain thoughtfully. “I’m sorry. I think that might be roofing tar.”


    “I can’t figure out why you stay here now that you’re rich and can travel the world,” said Ian, with no apparent realization of the rudeness or even illogic of his statement.


    Pom swept the faux pas effortlessly away. “The bank got most of the money,” he said. “This residence at least is still family property.” Ian should understand; the Bronfens once owned everything. Pom smiled at Scarlet as if effortlessly reading her thoughts.


    “And one doesn’t need proper clothes but can muck about with cars all day. Drink?”


    “Pregnant ladies can’t drink,” said Ian at the same moment that Scarlet answered, “It’s my last trimester, I can have a glass.”


    She gave Ian a “married look” which, if he bothered to interpret it, said, “Weren’t you the one begging me to loosen up last night?”


    “As long as you’re sure,” said Pom, pouring. “I only have white.”


    Scarlet was sorry about that – till she tasted it. Then she was sorry she could only have one glass.


    “What flavor!” She gasped. “What do they make it from?”


    “Grapes,” said her husband flatly, but Pom replied politely enough.


    “Tastes like artichokes, don’t you think? It’s Gruner Veltliner.”


    “And peppers,” said Scarlet. “And apricots.” It was simply delicious.


    Pom guided them to the terrace where a platter of cheesestraws and apple slices lay underneath a bell jar, like a museum presentation piece.


    “Still think I should move?” Pom asked, gesturing toward the seemingly endless swath of green hills. “Selling – if I could even find a buyer – wouldn’t compensate me for losing a view like this.”
    “I agree that nature is very healing,” said Scarlet. “That’s why we came.”


    Ian agreed, “I take it all back. I just thought for an artist, London –“


    “I get as much London as I want,” said Pom. “I only want it about once a month.”


    Scarlet was thinking that her husband had buried the lead. “You’re an artist?” There wasn’t a single painting in any of his rooms. “Why don’t you display your work?”


    “I’m shy,” said Pom, and instantly Scarlet began constructing a mind’s eye version of Pom’s history where this was true, seeing the fair-haired boy with the wide forehead and the olive-green eyes always standing at a cautious distance from his peers.


    “Well, I for one would love to see anything you’d like to show,” said Scarlet. “We’re both writers – we need to get out of our heads. We live in the world of ideas.”


    “Not perhaps so much while you’re gravid,” offered Ian. What an irritating thing that was for him to say! She refused to breach the uncomfortable silence while Pom regarded Ian with unflattering solicitude.


    “I think the life of the mind is even more powerful now,” Scarlet rebutted finally. “I’m living entirely in the future.” Her eyes dared her husband to reveal how little writing time she’d actually managed while packing and moving house.


    “It’s the thinking that’s so important I find,” said Pom. “That’s where the work is. It’s really why I became an abstract painter.”


    His work wasn’t mentioned for the rest of the evening because Scarlet didn’t want to see it in front of Ian, and Pom, she recognized, didn’t want to show it to him. Instead they discussed London over a delicious platter of rare roast beef and salad, and gushed appreciatively over the individual trifles offered for dessert.


    “Mrs. Ryquist’s work from over at the pub,” said Pom, referring to the Cat and Corncrake, centerpiece of town. “She’ll cook anything for you so long as you don’t expect delivery. You take your glasses and she fills them for you.”


    The trifles were particularly wonderful and Scarlet most appreciated the enjoyment of penetrating the perfect layers. She thought she tasted limoncello in the ladyfingers and crème de menthe liqueur at the heart, but she chose not to mention it and the others didn’t either. Was that what contributed to her blissful sense of well-being at the conclusion of the meal? Would she suffer for that, later? Or was it the realization, entirely unexpected at the very end of an exhausting nine-month pregnancy – that another man – a nice man – found her attractive and her husband felt it and was jealous? And would she suffer for that, too?

  • Devoured Heart – romantic suspense by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 2 – The Undercroft – 1959

    She felt a gush of relief at the first sight of what was to be her new home. Perhaps she could participate in Ian’s fantasy after all. This gate, massive and rusty, had fallen back against its stone surround and was an open invitation to a fairy tale. She saw something she knew Ian could never have resisted: this twisted iron was surmounted by a pair of stone wyverns. Ian had always claimed the wyvern as his “power creature”. Anything for sale in the town of Wyvern-on-Wye would be of interest to Ian. Was the town named after the house or the other way around?

    Whichever was true, she knew he’d claim the whole town as his by right. When she gasped out loud at the sight of their new castle Ian rippled with the same lordly pleasure he demonstrated on skillfully dispensing an orgasm. There it was, at the end of a curving drive, Wyvern House, miniature alcazar toppling on its hill, as if the earth itself would sink beneath its weight.


    “My goodness,” she muttered, thinking, as she knew he did, how impressed future guests would be, especially if they could clear away the brambles, re-paint the gates and set the slipping wyverns more solidly, less threateningly aloft.


    Up close, the “castle” proved considerably less commanding, revealing unpointed brick, mucky stucco, bleeding windows and muddy drive. Over the double front doors was carved a date which threw it completely out of the running for any claim to aristocracy: “1892: Magnus Bronfen”.


    “Soap manufacturer,” said Ian. “All soap manufacturers dream of castles, apparently. How else could you get a castle and six acres for nine thousand pounds?”


    She shuddered at the sum. Neither his family nor hers had ever seen so much money. In their five years together they had barely cleared a thousand pounds, and owed more than that. If she succumbed to this place what time would be left for working out her complex themes of literature? She had seen nothing encouraging, so far, about the financial viability of her productions in general.


    Ian himself was not doing much better with his proposal for a “modern mythology” TV series. They would be thrown back on Ian’s first idea: using his supernatural “imp” to win a football pool. Or her secret, most private fancy; writing an explosive novel that told the truth about women’s experience. The one time she had mentioned it Ian had been very clear that he considered “women’s fiction” a literary disgrace.


    “Plus, the novel’s dead. Plays are the thing, Angry Young Men and all that. Look! There is a garden. You could start a market garden. I’ve heard these roses were famed far and wide.”


    What had she ever done to make him think she longed to garden? But “rosarian” certainly was a better title than “hausfrau.” Much better. At this time of year, the overgrown garden offered nothing to see, but it was walled; the walls covered with the same brambly vines that were eating up the gate. They should be replaced with, say, espaliered fruit trees. By somebody. Someday.


    To her relief, inside she saw an ordinary house without the unlivable discomforts of an actual castle. The front hall was rather splendid with a huge creaky oak staircase that shed sawdust (deathwatch beetle!) when walked upon but the large rooms were blessed with electric light and there were four generous bathrooms: three second floor and one down.


    “I don’t think they spent a penny on the place after building it,” said Scarlet.


    “I’m sure they didn’t,” Ian agreed. “This Magnus guy died almost immediately. The current heir lives in town – I don’t think he has a sou but what I gave him. He says the place has been for sale – slowly dropping in price — his entire life.”


    It always impressed Ian to consult a “magic moment”. He was beginning to think he was a magic moment, himself. A fatalistic man, with a strong sense of “destiny”, he’d carefully consulted his horoscope before marrying Scarlet. The stars, and a general English misapprehension that all Americans were rich, had pushed him over the edge.


    “He only has what the bank gave him,” Scarlet longed to correct, but didn’t. Their marriage was the envy of their friends because neither of them – ever gave in to cracks like that. Ian had repeatedly stated his opinion that “money” was an imaginary concept anyway, created in the modern world by mere promises to buy and sell. Failing to leap aboard the mad carousel, you made certain of being left behind.


    Sixty-six years without improvements or upkeep should certainly give any buyer pause, thought Scarlet. What Horrible Secret – probably more than one – was this house hiding? Drains? Vermin? As if reading her thoughts – which he probably was, because marriage made a person good at that — Ian continued,


    “Apparently the problem is the railways – having to change trains from London only to arrive in the middle of nowhere with eight miles to go. But now that everyone has a car that will change. By road, the distance from London is two hours, tops.”


    No one in their London group really “owned” a car, but everyone aspired to, so why point out that the drive had taken them three hours? Ian would only say it as because his pregnant wife needed to pee every five minutes and maybe it had been. Ian had acquired the station wagon (third-hand) because he’d acquired the house, launching them to the summit of their particular clique. As they walked from room to room Scarlet felt herself warming to this unlikely residence – it certainly had potential – and feeling a lot more forgiving towards her improvident spouse.


    The rooms were big, well laid out, and the mullioned windows vast and wonderful. There was even a room of empty bookcases clearly meant to be a library – what more could writers ever require?
    The dining room was a bit dark but the scullery was enormous. “If we updated the appliances we could eat in here,” said Scarlet. “It would be cozy.”


    Ian made a moue of disagreement. “Why neglect such a magnificent dining room? I mean, we’ve got one, why waste it?”


    “Keep it for special occasions,” Scarlet murmured. Most of the time it would be just the two of them and a baby, because they’d never be able to afford live-in help. Anyway, what couple ever benefited from intrusion on their togetherness? “Pas devant les domestiques” was the English byword.


    Three large rooms beside a dining room, scullery and butler’s pantry Scarlet counted, then upstairs were six bedrooms laid out rather unimaginatively around a poorly lit central hall with bathrooms connecting between them. Scarlet suggested they each take for a study the smaller bedrooms. But Ian claimed the library.


    “Those are kids’ rooms, don’t you think?” he disparaged.


    Scarlet felt a thrill that he even contemplated extra children. He hadn’t seemed the least excited about her pregnancy until his flicker of interest when the doula suggested it might be a boy.
    She was too well-trained to argue. “If you prefer,” she agreed. “Why don’t you take the library for your office and I’ll take the odd bedroom. For now.” She was determined to have the baby with them in their bedroom for starters, requiring her do up just one guest room. Seemed a good way to keep out an overage of guests.


    There was no attic whatsoever and the stairs to the tower were barred with a handwritten “Danger” sign.


    “I haven’t been up there,” Ian told her. “Pomeroy the Heir pronounced the stairs unsafe. I think we must assume the whole Tower is a disaster area. He suggested just cutting them out altogether, getting rid of that weak flooring and making it sort of a skylight where you can look up.”
    Trust a man to come up with such an idiotic idea.


    “I’ll investigate spiral metal stairs,” said Scarlet. “They come in modular one piece units and I know where we can get one cheap.”


    Ian snorted, “The more fools they, then, lowering the price just because their Tower was a fake.”


    Since they couldn’t go up, they went down, down to the “undercroft”, as Ian called it, not a “basement” but a magnificently warm, low-ceilinged room with winking-eye lights to the outdoors, shelves of bottled fruit, an empty wine rack and a huge furnace. Purring away. The furnace clearly was newer than 1892 – and if that was the case, the situation might not be as desperate as Ian had painted it.


    “I wonder if any of that fruit is still good,” said Ian.


    Scarlet’s spirits lightened. She felt a poem coming on.

  • Devoured Heart: romantic suspense by Alysse Aallyn

    Scarlet – 1959

    Ian told Scarlet he bought the house as a gift. It was an apology for their cramped city quarters, compensation for Scarlet falling so heavily pregnant with their son. He, universally considered the ultimate bachelor, gave majestic permission for his wife to begin the nest-building and home-making he knew she had thirsted for ever since their hasty marriage.
    But as she sat beside him while he drove through the desolate winter countryside, she felt nothing but dread: how could he buy a house – reputedly for “her” – without her actual assistance? “Auction” was the answer.


    “Truth” presented by Ian seemed always subtly different from Scarlet’s apprehension of actuality, but in Scarlet’s youthfully cynical experience men never told the truth to women. It would be just like Ian to have purchased a ruin for the name alone. He was impulsive – act first, rationalize after – but he never thanked Scarlet for pointing it out. Women were supposed to be the impulsive, hysterical, emotional creatures, men were calm, rational, learned. Period. Scarlet had discovered there was even less room in England than in America for the sexes to locate the androgyny Virginia Woolf had so recently recommended.


    What was her fear, exactly? She felt for it nervously as if exploring a bad tooth. Would they be in hock to the moneylenders till kingdom come? The “big money” Ian assured her was right around the corner had yet to arrive, but he confidently continued to expect it. She wished Ian could see that auctions engineered participants into foolish decisions, but Ian considered himself above foolish decisions. In the early months of marriage, Scarlet had earned to pick her battles. Husbands didn’t welcome any overt attempts to “change” them.


    Unsaid between them, probably unremembered by him, was an episode early in their marriage where she’d suggested, “That will never work” to one of his passing fancies and he’d grabbed her by the throat. Made her shudder to think about it now. Clearly she should not think about it. Fetuses might be negatively affected by thoughts like those.


    After he’d cooled down – and apologized – she’d tried to get him to acknowledge that such behavior should never happen; his response was, “You shouldn’t taunt me.” So the blame was subtly – or unsubtly – placed on her. She was left with the unpleasant sensation that he’d somehow reserved the “right” to lose control – a right denied to her – but at least it had never happened again.


    Hadn’t he married her a brief three months after their first meeting, just to stop her returning to America? She’d been dazzled by his beauty, his gorgeous male power, glittering intelligence, tall wide-shouldered body, and those long-lashed blue eyes fixed so deliciously upon her. All Oxford considered him the matrimonial catch of the year – you could certainly claim she personally had benefited enormously from his hasty decision making. Everyone she met envied her; there was no one to whom could she confide marital difficulties.


    Not even to the very close sister, her “best friend”, who considered marriage “surrender” and who had refused to attend the wedding. All acquaintances so far collected in England were Ian’s eager slaves. There were certainly trade-offs, in the business parlance of the day. Men might be demanding, self-involved, autocratic, but didn’t that make them better in bed? Wasn’t that the real reason Scarlet had married him, the secret she dared not confess but everyone suspected, that he had overwhelmed her with a display of sexual seduction just the memory of which raised every hair on her body to antennae? Now that she was nine and a half months pregnant it regrettably seemed as if she would never be svelte, or young, or even whole – again.


    That was not all that had changed. She didn’t like it when she overheard him describing her as a “born hausfrau” – was there an uglier word in ANY language? She felt misrepresented, as if he deliberately missed the evidence of her true nature and the meaning of her entire existence. Wasn’t such blindness a crime against love? Yet what had he “done”, besides purchase a castle for her? At the apex of pregnancy – you could also call it the nadir – she was willing to admit that possibly she misrepresented HIM.


    They needed a fresh start. But with a baby expected, wasn’t that the pattern of couples everywhere?
    She couldn’t silence her inner critic. She felt emotionally repelled by all the bluster he deemed necessary to “get ahead”. Maybe she didn’t like the concept of “getting ahead,” especially considering he was so disparaging of America’s “crass commercialism.”

    And what was that about, his peculiar reliance on the occult? It was almost a religion with him. He made a game of consulting his “imp” through Tarot cards – a funny party trick morphing into a disturbingly dissociative responsibility dodge. When she suggested as tactfully as she could that perhaps they should not expose a growing child to superstition he “doubled down” with outlandish “universal mythologies” of magic, nemesis, false birth and disguise. Jung, even Freud, was on his side. She had no one.


    He had convinced himself his parents were no relation; he translated his envy of the aristocracy into an unshakeable conviction that he belonged rightfully among them. The democratic American in Scarlet tried to show him the pride in becoming truly “free” and his own person, but the lure of imposture seemed too strong.


    Thank goodness for her diary – there was nowhere else to confide her unsettling thoughts. She disguised her journal as a “baby book” – a document she could feel certain he would never read. Her totally inadequate London doctor – whom she would be happy never to see again – had assured her that pregnant women were all prey to “nonsense fears” and she would feel completely different following delivery. Scarlet was hopeful that deep in the country – perhaps with a midwife – she could secure more enlightened care.


    So she sat beside him on the way to view this new acquisition. And smiled.

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 36. Blessings & Mysteries

    The nuns gave Jacquetta a party. They gave her the “special dispensation” to “step over the rail” and mill about the parlor with them. Sister Elgarde baked a cake, and if it was a little too dense and packed with raisins the frosting was a gustatorial delight as well as a thing of beauty.


    They oohed and aahed over her business card for “A Sister in Need.” And it turned out each of them knew of a mystery; a dropped stitch from the skein of Time. Attics were stuffed and barns choked with the detritus and confusion left behind by the lost and missing.


    “My aunt Cinderella was taken to the State Mental Home when I was just a child,” Mother Xavier reminisced. “But when we went to visit her, she wasn’t there, and they claimed they never knew her.”


    Jacquetta produced a notebook and began to scrawl in the distinctive sketchy hand no one else could read.


    “They do say she was raped by her own father,” Mother Xavier hissed.


    “And Mrs. Molino, who helps out in the store, when she came to clear out her father’s house, it turned out the funeral director owned everything,” said Sister Hyacinth. “The funeral director!”


    “That can’t be right,” said Jacquetta.


    “And Reverend Cross’s nephew Bob went to Newark to take up a job and he was never seen again! His car gone and everything! Not a word and it’s been seven years,” complained Sister Philomena.
    “What did the police say?”


    Philomena shrugged. “That a twenty-three-year-old man is welcome to go anywhere in life that he wants. But Bob Cross wasn’t the boy to ignore his parents and sisters! Never!”


    The nuns were full of such stories. They took a card to put up on their bulletin board – a special sign of support and recommendation – and another to place by their phone. They toasted her in daffodil wine, and at the end of the party she knelt to receive their blessing.


    “May the road rise up to meet you and the wind always be at your back”, said Mother Xavier.


    “May it be a long road, a walkable road and not throw you off it,” quavered old Sister James-and-John.


    “It will certainly be interesting, whatever else it is,” prophesied Mother Xavier.


    “May the sun shine upon your face and all the little flowers,” said Sister Elgarde.


    “May you see your children and your children’s children and may all God’s children be your children,” said Sister Philomena.


    “And may God hold you in the Palm of His Hand,” blessed Mother Xavier.


    “Or Her Hand,” said Sister Hyacinth. “Whatever the case may be.”

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 35. Ricey

    A green Corvette parked a few slots down pulled out behind her but Jacquetta couldn’t see who was driving. Roxelle Shields – or her manager – drove a green Corvette. Coincidence? There were a lot of green Corvettes in the world. Speaking of coincidence, Rose-Alice Ramey could not POSSIBLY have the same name as the St. Barnabas churchyard baby. When a monster was close and about to surface, otherwise innocent ripples had one meaning and one meaning only.


    The apartment smelled horrible. Some kind of chemical smell suppressed the stench of spoiled food and an even nastier odor that could only be Death. Maybe I don’t want the clothes, thought Jacquetta. I’ve cleared out most of my stuff anyway. Make my phone call and get out.


    But as she entered the living room she was brought up short by the sight of Rose-Alice Ramey, aka Ricey Kleinemann, sitting in the rocking chair waiting for her.


    Caught by surprise Jacquetta knew she showed fear. She could tell that by the flicker of satisfaction on the other’s face. Damn! Now Ricey had the upper hand. How to win it back?


    ‘Who let you in?” She forced herself to advance far enough into the room so that she could sit on the sofa. Above all, she didn’t want Ricey standing up.


    “Your roommate gave me her key.” Ricey played with a lock of her own hair.


    “As well as her life,” said Jacquetta.


    “I needed to know what you knew,” said Ricey. “She was the weak link. If I wrapped a dishtowel around her neck and twisted it with a stick –“ She made a snapping motion with her hands. “But she wouldn’t tell me. She died too soon.” The murderer sound almost regretful. “I couldn’t bring her back.”


    Jacquetta was grateful for the apartment’s semi-gloom. Easier to conceal the blood boiling up her throat and into her face.


    “Why send those letters? You were safe until then.”


    “No one’s safe,” spat Ricey. “That’s why I sent them! People thinking they’re so safe!”


    “Who shared the Brooklyn apartment?” asked Jacquetta.


    “Oh, everyone.” Ricey shrugged. “No one. A girl’s got to live. You know what they pay nanny-girls? Next to nothing!”


    “So you preferred blackmail,” suggested Jacquetta. “But that didn’t work out either, did it?”


    “I preferred murder,” said Ricey, leaning forward. “I like finding the edge. I would have snapped that old woman’s neck if I could have gotten away with it. Pills in the milk. It’s so unsatisfying.” She laughed in a low, reminiscent chuckle, “Turns out I like shooting people and setting them on fire.”


    “You were smart to use so many different murder methods,” said Jacquetta, frantically thinking out her next move. The other girl’s cynical smile told her flattery wouldn’t work, so she desperately threw out her next idea. “What a pity you sabotaged your own work by wanting to be caught!”


    Wow! That got her! A little too much so – Ricey jumped to her feet while the rocking chair trembled.


    “I’m not going to be caught!” she snapped. “I’m never going back to prison. I can be anyone! I can go anywhere!”


    “Why tell me about the “commune” in upstate New York?” challenged Jacquetta. “You meant prison, didn’t you? You should have been worried, giving me so many clues!”


    The apartment door opened behind them and Ricey’s face changed. She seemed to back up, scared. Jacquetta twisted her head but was astonished by her rescuer – Roxelle. Carrying a gun.
    “I should have killed you when I had the chance,” said Roxelle. “For what you did to Granny. I brought you into this world and I can take you out.”


    The first shot went wild. Ricey ducked but her mother advanced on her, shooting, emptying the gun. The noise was deafening and the smell pungent. Jacquetta backed toward the kitchen and called 911.


    She dropped the phone when Roxelle appeared in the kitchen doorway.
    “She’s dead now,” she said. “Thank you.” And she was gone.


    Ricey was not dead. Jacquetta tried futilely to block the gushing blood with the spilled contents of Honey’s ironing basket, but there was too much. To the music of sirens the monster’s eyes refocused, unfocused, falling back in time to childhood, infancy, and ultimately to non-existence, to the time before all will and all suffering and the senseless destruction they perpetuate.

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 34. A Stone Angel

    The door of Jacquetta’s own church, St Barnabas, was locked. This had never happened before. The sign said “mold treatment.” Jacquetta walked around the path to the churchyard and sat on a stone bench in the sunshine, watching the sexton clear graves. Some of the grass had been getting pretty tall!


    It was soothing having nothing to do, refusing to think. She tried praying but her mind kept drifting away. Shaming to have to tell Mother Xavier she was right; “I don’t want to be a nun. Turns out what I wanted all along was to be a snoop.”


    Being a snoop was endlessly absorbing, like trying to make sense of a forgotten language. Working as an actual detective would not be so much fun, she could tell. For one thing, you could end up shot or burnt. She didn’t envy Benson his gun, his license, or his death.


    There ought to be some kind of in-between career, Jacquetta thought. Maybe I can invent something. A helper constrained not by a client’s demands but by some higher purpose. “Will Snoop For Bread.” She recalled how delighted Honey had been raking through Miss Rainbeaux’s possessions. The “cleaned up” version offered to the public at the Open House, Jacquetta hadn’t found nearly so satisfying. “Sister Jacquetta Sorts Your Departed’s Junk.” There it was: a possible business. “A Sister In Need. I do what Relatives Don’t Have Time or Are Too Emotional or Disgusted to Do.”


    She smiled as she thought of the business card. It would actually be fun. She could make antique store versus dumpster recommendations without a hidden agenda. “A Sister You Can Trust.” Maybe that was a bit snide!


    The sexton finished. He climbed into his cart and tootled away, so Jacquetta stood up to admire his handiwork. There was one place he had missed.


    An obelisk dedicated to a 1930’s patriarch and his two – no three wives. A gaggle of children surrounding a stone angel. The smallest stones looked like footstones but, moving the grass with her foot, Jacquetta saw they bore engraving. Babies. “Bequeathed Only for A Moment.” “An Angel Passed Among Us.”


    And then she saw it. “Rose-Alice Ramey. August 31, 1962.”


    There it was. This is what Beatrix Rainbeaux had seen, this is what started the whole disaster. Hadn’t she told Jacquetta in their only conversation, “I was just at your church recently?”


    And she must have wondered about Avalon’s au pair; how she could be from “out of town” and yet have the same name as an infant buried in the St. Barnabas churchyard? And now Beatrix Rainbeaux was dead. Rose-Alice Ramey was the exact right age to be Ricey Kleinemann.
    Why had Jacquetta been so stupidly slow about recognizing this fact? Because she was rubbish as a detective, that’s why. Was it also because she liked Rose-Alice? Rose-Alice and she were outsiders together, two of a kind. But the “con” in “con-artist” comes from a criminal gaining trust – gaining undeserved confidence.


    Sociopaths were said to be charming. Jacquetta had identified with this hard-working young woman obliged to keep her opinions of her ridiculous employers to herself. Like everyone else, she was yearning for beauty, longing to travel. Jacquetta wanted the murderer to be one of the morally compromised Rainbeaux clan or someone from their cadre of sycophants. But Rose-Alice – she would have to think of her as Ricey now – had snuffed out the life of Honey, a fresh young girl – a striver, a dreamer just like herself – without a second thought.


    This monster wore a pretty face. Jacquetta decided the letters were older, probably unconnected with the murders. Ricey flexing her claws. Unable to contain her rage, her hostility, her secret violence, and she tried to siphon it off as harmlessly as she could. But when she gave in to love with her employer’s husband, her secret had been exposed. And who was Jacquetta to judge her for that? She saw George Cleese every day, he had plenty of time to work on her, as Nelson had “worked” Jacquetta.


    It was humiliating and enraging and it all made perfect sense. It explained why Miss Rainbeaux hesitated, why the real estate agent was charmed, why the detective relaxed, why Honey let her in.
    Jacquetta rushed back to her car. She needed a phone. She need to tell Lt. Marie the whole thing, because Ricey was clearly spinning out of control. She had nothing left to lose.


    Jacquetta regretted letting Nelson go: he had a car phone! She couldn’t think of a payphone closer than her apartment – she’d been planning to return anyway. She could think of no reason why the phone wouldn’t work. She didn’t dare wait even returning to the motel before she shared the secret. Ricey was too dangerous. She steeled herself. Grab some clothes and make that call.

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 33. Wildwood

    “How about a foot-long chili dog?” Nelson facetiously suggested.


    “Absolutely not,” Jacquetta returned, “I need a drink.”


    “I know just the place.”


    At this hour, Me Ole Matey was empty, but it was so dark you couldn’t tell what time it was. “Seat Yourself” said the sign, so they fought their way through fishing impedimenta to a corner booth.
    “Is white wine and kir still your favorite drink?” Nelson asked, signaling for the lone waitress.
    Jacquetta had no desire to recall any of those nights.


    “No,” she said. ”Just a glass of house red.”


    Nelson surprised her by ordering the whole bottle and a slew of appetizers. “The potato skins here are famous,” he said.


    Suddenly it was a date.


    “So,” Jacquetta hazarded, “Roxelle Shields’ baby girl? Any ideas? We have to have found the right family or she wouldn’t be acting this way.”


    “Definitely. Ricey Kleinemann’s Roxelle Shield’s daughter,” he concurred. Jacquetta shuddered. “Means that horrible old woman was Roxelle’s mama. Something went pretty wrong somewhere. Twelve years old is scary young to have a baby. We didn’t even get to mention D.L. LeRoi.”


    “I believe her that she doesn’t know where her daughter is,” Nelson said. “Don’t you?”


    “I guess so. Seems like we caught her completely by surprise. What do you think is the next move?”


    “I have to pray about it.”


    That silenced him. When they returned to the car in an hour, feeling much better, there was a message on the car phone from Lt Marie.


    “He says you can go back to your apartment. Also, your car is being released. Which do you want first?”


    “Thank God,” said Jacquetta, thinking, I need to pick up some clothes. She also wanted to find out if the killer got the datebook. “Car first.”


    “Going back to the motel?” he gave her a sidelong look.


    “Probably.”


    “Need me?”


    She faced him. “Not till you’re a free man. Consider your bereavement period over.”


    He sighed gustily. “And Sister Jacquetta is back.”


    She returned, “You’re welcome.”

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 32. A Brass Ass

    As scrub pine gave way to hot dog stands Jacquetta wondered if she should try to talk about last night. It didn’t change anything, and in the morning she had been grateful he didn’t mention it. But now she worried: wouldn’t he think it DID change things? Should she say something and if so, what?


    But everything was so up in the air. Part of me was killed with Honey, Jacquetta realized. Funny that she’d never realized they were Siamese twins; mentally and physically connected. Was that true of every relationship? The force of what Nelson had said about bereavement hit her with double power. He said he’d “lost everything.” If so: what was left for her? And how to find out? She wished she’d had the emotional strength to reject his proffered body, but she never had, and she knew perfectly well that was why she had left her job.


    Could Nelson be right that she’d contemplated the monastic life just to hide from men and their dangerous allure? She knew what Mother Xavier would say about it; only one way to find out. Ask God.


    “Desperado,” Nelson was counting the bars. “Cotton Candy. Brass Ass. There it is.”


    At this hour the neon sign depicting the backside of a naked woman aboard a kicking mule wasn’t lit, but the marquee said “Miss Roxelle Shields Appearing Nitely.” From the plethora of parking spaces Nelson chose the one nearest the door. The green vinyl padded door wasn’t locked but the bar was dark.


    A bartender was setting up beneath a single spot. He barely looked at them.
    “We’re closed.”


    “We’re here to interview Miss Shields?” Nelson sounded tentative even to Jacquetta’s ears.


    Barman couldn’t have cared less. “Around back.”


    Nelson unlocked the car and opened the door.


    “You’re using the car to go around back?” Jacquetta questioned.


    “Who knows how safe it is back there?” Nelson shrugged.


    Wow thought Jacquetta. I never would have thought of that. I need this guy.


    “Around back” was a dumpster and a green Corvette. It didn’t appear unsafe.


    There was a locked door labeled “Authorized Personnel Only” and “It is a State Crime to block or prop this exit.” Nelson hammered on the battered metal with his fist.


    A man wearing a three piece suit a size too small stuck out his balding head. Nelson, who’d had an opportunity to get his story together, flashed his press card.


    “We’re here to interview Miss Shields.”


    The man took the card and held the door open. The woman behind him was short but her high-heeled boots made up for it. Her white-lace minidress was red-lit by the lights.


    “TriCity News Service,” read the man.


    Nelson took back his card.


    Roxelle put her hands on her hips. “Woman’s Day looking for my recipe for sausage paprikash?” she asked. “Or are your readers wondering what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this?”


    “We’ve got a press release in the office,” said the man helpfully. “I’m her manager.” When he turned around Jacquetta saw he’d drawn his three strands of hair into an unkempt ponytail. He opened the door to a tiny room that seemed to double as a storage space for industrial-sized jars of marinara sauce and cleaning fluid.


    Roxelle sat behind the desk, her manager perched unsafely a single buttock on the desk’s edge and Nelson gestured for Jacquetta to take the only chair. It seemed like a good idea as at least some insurance against being thrown out.


    “Get me some more bute, Clint,” Roxelle asked, putting one leg up on the desk and unzipping her boot. “You can tell your readers stripping’s hell on the knees.”


    “It’s the high heels,” said the manager, producing a syringe kit. “Miss Shields doesn’t get on her knees for anybody.”


    “Not anymore,” said Roxelle, her teeth chattering as the needle went in. Under these lights her skin seemed strangely matte white, but her black eyes were old. Impossible mounds of blue-black hair poured down her back. It made Jacquetta’s head hurt to think of trying to hold up so much hair. The manager rummaged in a briefcase for paper.


    “So what do your readers want to know?” she asked, relaxing back in the brass-studded captain’s chair. In a sing-song voice she teased, “I was born a poor little gypsy girl in a tiny town in upstate New York.”


    Jacquetta had a brainwave. “Devil’s Elbow?”


    The shock was palpable. The manager dropped the briefcase in his haste to open the door and usher them out.


    “We’re researching the Kleinemann-Lundt case,” said Nelson. Roxelle’s eyes filled with tears.


    “Have you found my baby girl?”


    “Baby girl?” asked Jacquetta. “I thought you were sisters.”


    The manager dumped Jacquetta out of her chair but she resisted ejection. The two women looked at each other; Jacquetta’s flushed skin facing Roxelle’s hard Chinese mask.


    “I was only twelve years old,” said Roxelle. “What’s she done now?”


    “She’s been sending anonymous letters to people,” said Jacquetta. Now it all made sense. “She rented a love nest in your name.”


    “Out! Out!”


    There was an unbecoming moment of full-body wrestling with Clint the Manager before the stage door slammed behind them.

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 31. Devil’s Elbow

    At the library he gave her a stack of dimes and said, “Better make copies of those letters. Lady Susan might repossess them out of sheer revenge.”


    “I’ve got my own dimes thank you,” she said, pushing his hand away.
    The newspapers – now confined to microfilm operated by a sticky hand crank rotary machine – were bleached of both sense and sensibility.

    Photos of Kleinemann and Lundt might as well have been Kabuki masks; one Obvious Old Woman and a pair of gangly dark-haired teenagers, visibly he and she. Jacquetta had better luck with the magazines, showing two pictures; one of a terrifying earth floored basement where tree trunks complete with bark held up the ramshackle house and the other of the “back yard”; a chipped cement court whose single central pole dangled a depressing wire.


    The tale was soon told; the old woman tortured Ricey Kleinemann as long as she was able, beating her with a wire and confining her to the basement until the abused was old enough and big enough to become the abuser. She, as Clay Lundt asserted – or Clay, as Ricey always insisted – followed Granma’s script closely, throwing her down the basement stairs, tethering her in the yard and ultimately garroting her with a wire. Whether it was the same wire that had been used on Ricey the story did not say.

    Even a town named “Devil’s Elbow” could produce enough jury members with a sneaking suspicion Granny had it coming.

    The “perps” – no one bothered to ascribe superior or inferior culpability – were confined till their twenty-sixth birthdays – then Sayonara. There were no stories in any press format about their release three years ago.


    “Yuck,” said Jacquetta. “What kind of a name is Ricey? I don’t know if we should even bother to have any of this copied.”


    “It was Rise,” said Nelson. “German. All we need to now is whether this is any kind of a secret worth killing for.”


    “They did their time,” Jacquetta said.


    “But could either of them ever get a position of trust again?”


    “Nobody’s the right age.” Jacquetta tried to think how old Penny Dettler was. Hard to tell – she looked thirty in some light and forty in another. “The au pair said both Avalon and her husband are having affairs with younger partners. One of them could be one of our ex-killers.”


    “If we knew who they were.”


    “Benson might have known. And Chester is rumored to have affairs with people he hires. Benson would have investigated all that.”


    “And now he’s dead.”


    In fact there were nothing but dead ends in this case, thought Jacquetta. That was obviously the way the murderer liked it.

  • The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 30. The Detective’s Dilemma

    “Wow,” said Lt. Marie, sitting down uninvited, “Lawyered up already, huh?”


    “Mr. Kyro is my friend,” said Jacquetta stiffly. Luckily Nelson said nothing.


    Clearly unbelieving, Lt. Marie produced a paper. “I’d like you to sign this statement that you made this morning, and answer a few more questions about your roommate’s life. What did you know about her job, for example? Did she ever complain to you about it?”


    This guy just wasn’t getting it. While correcting typos with one hand, Jacquetta said, “I don’t think this murder had anything to do with my roommate’s job. My roommate was helping me try to find an anonymous letter writer and I think –“


    “Oh? Playing amateur detective, eh? You got any of these letters?”


    Jacquetta didn’t know whether he meant had she “received” any or was she carrying, but she had started confiding in him so she might as well continue. “The officer who searched my purse already saw these,” she said laying them out on the table, “But-“


    Lt. Marie took one look at the blue stationery and the daisies and said, “Nah. Nah.”


    “Nah?” Nelson echoed. It was the first word he had spoken.


    “That’s clearly a woman’s letter. This is a man’s crime.”


    “It is?”


    Jacquetta was grateful for Nelson’s intervention because the detective was defensive with him in a way he certainly wasn’t with her.


    “Yeah,” said Marie, “It was a sex crime. She was strangled with a dishtowel – you got any idea how much strength that would take?”


    “How much?” asked Nelson.


    “A lot. Plus there was a broomstick at the scene. Looks like impotent rage to me.”


    “Impotent rage?” Jacquetta echoed faintly. She didn’t dare even think what this could possibly mean.


    “Date gone wrong. Enough said,” smirked the detective.


    “Honey didn’t date anyone but Barney,” insisted Jacquetta.


    “Maybe that’s what she told her roommate, the nun. For all you know, she sent those letters.” He swept them up with her statement as he rose to go.


    “They weren’t sent to ME,” argued Jacquetta. But Nelson laid a restraining hand along Lt. Marie’s arm.


    “You can’t take those, he said.


    Lt. Marie regarded him disbelievingly. “You said it was evidence in the case.”


    “And you said it wasn’t.” Nelson took them back. “Get a warrant.”


    Lt. Marie seemed incensed.


    “When are you releasing my car?” asked Jacquetta.


    “At the moment we’re all jammed up with a bunch of uncooperative witnesses,” he said, “So I don’t know. Check back later in the day.”


    He flounced out.


    “I don’t think Lt. Susan is going to be our savior,” sighed Nelson.


    “Well, you didn’t treat him very diplomatically,” protested Jacquetta.


    “They had no right to search your car.”


    “I said they could! There’s nothing in there but trash. I wanted them to get on with the actual evidence.”


    Nelson shook the letters at her. “You see how well THAT worked out!”


    “I’m certain he’s completely wrong about the case,” said Jacquetta.


    “Well, if he’s right about the dishtowel, I guess it has to be a man. Lundt would be what… twenty-nine? Thirty?”


    “Maybe Lundt and Kleinemann are still working together.”


    “Maybe.” He stood up.


    “So where are you going?”


    “With you to the state library, looking up that old case, and then we have to hit the Brass Ass.”


    She couldn’t believe it. “Don’t you have work?”


    He grinned. “I’m bereaved, remember” The grin faded. “I lost everything.”