Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #Mysteries

  • Devoured Heart – romantic suspense by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 6 – Ian VS Poetry

    It wasn’t till the day the spiral stair was installed that Scarlet finally began to feel better. Maybe this was all she’d required: a positive personal accomplishment. Now the Tower was finally accessible! And then there was more. Ian came home whistling, saying, “Wait till you see what I’ve got for you.”


    What a wonderful gift, a glorious nineteenth century lady’s desk – a mass of pigeonholes and drawers like a huge jewelry box. “There’s probably a secret drawer but nobody knows where,” said Ian.


    The wood was in poor shape – covered with ink stains – but Scarlet was dazzled. “Oh, Ian!” she gasped. “It’s the best present ever!” When she commented on other people’s desks it was always the storage that she envied – give every idea its own resting place. It was a deeply flattering gift. He really had paid attention to her all these years! She hugged him breathlessly.


    “Is it possible -?” she wondered, gazing upwards, but Rocco the Enabler was way ahead of her.


    “We could winch it up,” he promised and a pulley was installed at the top of the house. The fine new desk, two Windsor chairs, a bookcase and a table were winched up to the tower room. Scarlet made one awkward trip upwards to supervise their installation. The small Tower room had windows on all four sides looking out over every bit of their property.


    “Oh, this is beautiful,” agreed Ian and even Rocco seemed impressed. “You could fit a slipper chair right here,” he offered, “A real lady’s chair – they’re selling one down at the church. Do you like purple?”


    Scarlet did – especially the chintz pansy print in which that chair was covered. There were other items at the church sale that she coveted – gorgeous copper pieces to cheer the many fireplaces. When the tower room was finished with the addition of a purple rug carried up by Ian himself it seemed a magnificent eyrie and retreat. Not just deep poetry but magnificent plays – possibly even novels – could be written here.


    “It’ll be cold,” warned Ian, and that was probably true. But “heat rises” said Scarlet and surely it must. And then she wrote a poem about it – one she could actually share.

    Heat rises
    From our marriage bed
    Powers up this house
    Summons up a cradle, fills the
    Varicolored jars of
    Seasoned fruit
    Museums of ripeness
    Captured – just
    As we –
    Fresh from the city were
    Caught and
    Prisoned.
    Belonging –
    Attempting to foreclose
    A Future.

    Of course there marriage bed was a decidedly less sexy place so long as Scarlet was a pregnant whale. And, It didn’t end right. She knew that, before Ian pointed it out. “You can’t say “prisoned”; he quibbled. “Surely “reveling’s” the word? Isn’t “future” just “the unforeseen”? Scarlet was annoyed – he usually right more than he was wrong, but he was still wrong about many central things. He always accused her of easy sentimentality and so she’d tried for a more evocative, ambiguous even threatening ending –the way Ian ended his own work, yet he still he wasn’t satisfied.


    She looked up “sentimental” in the dictionary and saw it described as “an appeal to tender feelings.” It couldn’t be that all “tender feelings” were inherently degrading, could it? But in England, they seemed to be! Scarlet and Ian had a child to raise.


    Scarlet wondered if it was even possible to satisfy these fussy men, determinedly hardening in their defenses. Ian was always talking about “toughening up” males – usually while wearing the latest fashion in gents’ bespoke suits – so that said males could “slay the dragon” as if modern educated people were still cave-dwellers. She took another look at her poem and decided “attempting to foreclose a future” was her favorite line.

    “Submit it to The Renegade,” suggested Ian, “I’ll write Nigel if you like.”


    She prayed she wouldn’t need his help. She wrote to Nigel herself.

  • Devoured Heart – romantic suspense by Alysse Aallyn

    Chapter 5. Pregnant Brain

    Grimly Scarlet launched an enormous push to have everything ready for the baby. The nearest big town – Oakhampton’s – merchants – though pricier than those in London – were willing – thrilled, in fact – to open charge accounts and to deliver. The deliverymen seemed very interested in the ongoing Wyvern House rehabilitation and expected a generous cuppa and a gossip in the kitchen. With Ian sealed off importantly in his “office”, there was no one to gossip with but Scarlet.


    “All the latest labor saving conveniences,” said one as he delivered a Bendix washer and drier to a corner of the capacious scullery. “Anybody can tell you’re American.” Scarlet was afraid this meant he thought she was rich but knew it would be insane to actually inform him just how poor they were.
    “New baby crib – how my missus would envy you. Ours has been passed down for a hundred years at least.”


    Scarlet couldn’t think how to warn him that crib slats had to be an exact distance to keep from catching baby’s head. Here in England, Science never had the last word. Next it turned out the spiral stair she’d ordered was four feet too short.


    “No problem,” said the washer deliveryman, who’d come upstairs to help, “My mate Rocco can build you a platform.”


    When that was undertaken, what with workmen marching in and out over the just-fitted carpet and filling the house with the sound of hammering – it was not at all the atmosphere Scarlet had hoped for in the days approaching the birth of her first child. She wrote a despairing poem “Future Blank” with the chorus “Nowhere to get to” and, ashamed of her own emotions, stored it at the very back of a pile of unsatisfactory work sheets.


    Fortunately, the midwife paid a cheering visit. She was revealed as a small, withered-looking Pakistani woman in a sari who promised a tank of “gas” in case the contractions became “too fierce”. Scarlet was grateful for any promise of pain relief; Ian appeared to think all “women’s problems” required was the application of masculine mind over feminine matter but Scarlet felt she couldn’t trust her gravid brain, and she certainly wasn’t going to listen to people telling her to “Buck up.”


    Ian himself had suddenly acquired a new passion for old furniture and began haunting estate sales. Soon he was dragging home settles, bureaus and tables.
    “How are we going to afford all this?” wailed Scarlet.


    “My folks have a lot of retirement cash just sitting idle in the bank,” said Ian confidently. “Proceeds from selling the shop. They’ll want to invest it here when they see what a fine place we’re creating.”
    But wouldn’t they expect income? That was the way things worked in America. “As long as they don’t expect to move in,” sighed Scarlet, but she was too exhausted to argue. Instead she sketched out yet another unsatisfactory poem: this one about how old houses were only walls of corpses holding up the ceilings. This too, must be hidden.


    What kind of home was she preparing for this baby? Was she herself putting a curse on the whole enterprise? Was this some grenade from the depths of her subconscious as Ian had always insisted, comparing her lack of a father to the United States’ “lack of history”? She usually fought back with the a fierce explication of the collective European unconscious whose “ancien regime” was obviously rotten with envy over the New World’s youthful potential?


    What awful obligations poetry placed on people! Every word, every idea had to be catalogued, organized and defended to the last ditch. Should she give it all up and become an interior designer instead? Why not concentrate on life’s beauties, opportunities and perfections, instead of digging about in universally discarded psychic muck?

    But employment required sucking up to people – something she’d never been good at. She felt far too old and tired to start now.


    If she died in childbirth Ian would read these abortive poems and draw entirely “the wrong conclusion” – that his wife had been miserable. But she was too committed a poet to destroy them. Poetry ideas – “seeds” – held a sacred, central importance in a poet’s life. You denied them at the peril of losing access to your deepest self. And that would be the worst fate of all.


    So she was conflicted. Contrasted with their life in London where they lived in such a small flat they had to take turns at the desk, wasn’t this existence wildly superior? She always felt less grounded when she “gave in” to Ian’s ideas – yet the wife’s job seemed to be all about “giving in”.

    Ian always seemed so confident, the opposite of the way she felt. It was what made him so attractive. But something in this new life went against her grain. Was it just the reckless expenditure? Key was her embarrassed silence with her sister India, usually her lifelong confidant. Was it simply embarrassment over confessing indebtedness? Was it disloyalty or pride that kept her from complaining about the man India warned her not to marry?

    How about the anguish of being suddenly the underdog when all her life she’d been on top, the prize-winner, the golden girl who could do anything and go anywhere. Both she and India had good brains – but she had looks as well. Here in Britain women were nothing, artists were nothing and Americans were less than nothing. Yet here she was, putting down roots as deep as they could go.


    For her letters, she’d have to construct an entirely false self, one she knew wasn’t fooling India at all. She couldn’t risk India despising her brother-in-law.


    Ultimately she felt she was producing the kind of nonsense you would send a stranger. She’d finally seized on the difficulties of moving as an excuse to let the whole mess go. How could she ever start the dialogue again? This was the first “secret” they’d ever had. It seemed far too big ever to surmount.

  • 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?

  • 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.”