Deadly Valentine Read online

  A trill of cheery laughter. “Connecticut? Annie, I’m not in Connecticut. I’m here.” Her tone was so open, so pleased, so certain of imparting pleasure.

  “Here? On Broward’s Rock?”

  “Yes. Oh, I know it’s unexpected. But yesterday I had the most compelling feeling. At first I didn’t know what it might be.”

  “Indigestion?” Annie muttered.

  But Laurel was too swept up in her account to hear. “And before I knew it, I was in the trunk room—and then I understood. A journey. I was to take a journey.”

  “I thought you always visited Deirdre in February.” Max’s youngest sister lived in San Diego. Everyone liked to visit her in February.

  “Annie, how clever of you. That’s what I first thought, too. But when I reached the airport, Chicago was snowed in. So, it became obvious. I was not meant to go to San Diego.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow—” Annie began feebly.

  “Oh no, the portents were so clear. I opened my purse and do you know what fell out?”

  Nothing would have surprised Annie. Burglar tools. The Watergate tapes. A wallaby.

  And, of course, Annie did want to know. Laurel always had that effect upon her listeners. She made the Pied Piper look like a piker.

  “What did you have in your purse?” Annie asked good-humoredly.

  “A paperback of Home Sweet Homicide. I picked it up and then I knew. It was meant that I should come to you.”

  Annie wasn’t sure just how to take this.

  “Because it’s a mystery?”

  “Oh, my dear.” The silvery voice betrayed just the slightest hint of disappointment. “No, no, no. Because you and dear Max have just moved into your new home—and I always think of you and homicide. Such an automatic association.” The tiniest of sighs. “Of course, I wouldn’t dream of staying with you. Newlyweds in their first true home, the construction just completed, for the very first week. That would be an imposition.” A pause. “Of course, it’s turned out to be a little difficult. Several of the hotels are renovating. The smell of paint. And, I can scarcely believe it, but the Palmetto Inn—always my favorite—those dear ceiling fans—a whirr so familiar to Sadie Thompson, I’m sure—but no air conditioning then—the dear Palmetto Inn is full, booked for a computer conference, all those bytes and microchips, so I did drive out to your new home and, of course, that’s when it happened. Definitely foreordained, the fog, the winding road”—the husky voice dipped lower—“almost a haunting landscape, really, diaphanous gray mist clinging to the low-spreading limbs of the live oaks …”

  Annie, mesmerized, was nodding in cadence.

  “… fog swirling, curling, obscuring, revealing. The gate came as a complete surprise. So,” she said brightly, “I ran off the road!”

  Confused by the abrupt switch from travelogue to action, Annie latched on to the most concrete statement. “Laurel, are you all right?”

  “Annie, the most exhilarating experience! I have been rescued! So like the stories of old, a gallant arriving in the nick of time. Though there were no dragons, merely inconvenience. But to have such a handsome man sweep to my rescue—a Bentley, not a horse—and open the gate and bring me here and even arrange for the rental car to be retrieved from the ditch and brought here. I can only report that I am swept to the heights. I am giddy with anticipation. I, my dear, AM IN LOVE.”

  If there was an appropriate reply, Annie didn’t know it.

  But Laurel swept on, saving Annie from an awkward pause. “So, you see, it was meant to be—Saint Valentine’s Day, the fog, the unfamiliar lane, the gate. Annie, you and Max hadn’t told me about the gate. Electronic. Just like a car wash, punching in the right sequence of numbers. So advanced for a remote island. Perhaps more privacy than one should need! However, I’m here—at your house—so clever to put the key beneath the ceramic cat, but I know I must find lodging, and I thought perhaps you—”

  Annie knew her duty. She didn’t even hesitate. At least, not for more than a single, wrenching second. “Oh, Laurel, of course, you’ll stay with us. We even have a suite just for you—”

  “The lovely pink and gold one?”

  A little longer pause on Annie’s part. “Uh, yes. Yes. That’s the one.”

  “Oh, if you’re sure …”

  Their duet continued a moment longer, ending in Laurel’s rapturous acceptance, Annie’s determinedly pleasant protestations of pleasure.

  “I’ll call Max,” Annie concluded.

  “Is he at his office?” Laurel cried. “Don’t bother. I’ll do it. I know it will be such a surprise.”

  Truer words were never spoken, Annie decided as she replaced the receiver, torn between irritation and amusement. Life never seemed quite the rational, orderly process Annie believed it to be when Laurel was on the scene.

  But Laurel did mean well.

  The phone rang again.

  Annie eyed it warily. Surely it wasn’t Laurel again.

  “Death on Demand.”

  “You won’t believe what I bought in Hong Kong!”

  This voice, too, was immediately recognizable to Annie, the clear enunciation that proclaimed an accomplished actress, the crisp tone of authority, and the note of triumph that could only mean a book collector’s coup.

  “Hi, Henny. What did you buy?” Annie asked with more than passing interest. Henny Brawley was not only her best customer, she was as knowledgeable about mysteries as H. R. F. Keating, the author of the Inspector Ghote books, who is equally well known as a critic and historian of the mystery.

  “In a bookstall on the street, Annie. It was like finding a pot of gold at the grocery store!”

  “Possibly,” Annie said dryly, “you were led to the discovery.”

  “Led?”

  “Saint Valentine at work, no doubt.”

  A soft chuckle. “I saw Laurel in a rental car ahead of me on the ferry. Did Saint Valentine lead her to you?”

  “In a roundabout way.”

  “Well, maybe that’s what happened to me, if old Val is the patron saint of book lovers, too. But, Annie, hold on to your hat—I found Arthur Upfield’s The Barrakee Mystery, first edition, original wrapper.”

  “Oh, my God!” Upfield’s second novel and first book featuring Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony).

  “Mint!” Henny continued dramatically.

  Mint was a book dealer’s designation meaning the book looks brand new.

  Wow. A coup, indeed.

  Annie ventured tentatively, “I saw that title listed in a catalog recently. The asking price was fifteen hundred dollars.”

  Henny cleared her throat. A drumroll it wasn’t, but the effect was the same. Annie waited breathlessly.

  “A dollar and a half.”

  “Saint Somebody must have been riding on your shoulder,” Annie moaned. She’d never hear the end of this from Henny.

  “My turn for luck, sweetie. Well, I guess I’d better see about my mail and do a little housecleaning. I just walked in the door, but I had to call you first thing.” An infinitesimal pause, then, as if an afterthought, “Oh, Annie, who won the contest last month?”

  Henny’s voice was still triumphant over the Upfield book, but a tiny edge lurked beneath the good humor. Annie understood at once. Henny had departed from Broward’s Rock just after Christmas on a round-the-world trip. Annie’s refusal to let her enter the Death on Demand January mystery paintings contest by long distance obviously still rankled. Every month a local artist painted a scene from five famous mysteries. The first person to correctly identify author and title represented by each painting received a free book and coffee for a month. Henny, of course, was the all-time high winner, coming up with the right identifications in five of the last fifteen months. It was a three-way tie in November, but she had swept the field in December, coming up with the correct titles the day the five were hung! (Christmas titles, of course: The Twelve Deaths of Christmas by Marian Babson, Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh, The Corpse in the Snowm
an by Nicholas Blake, A Holiday for Murder by Agatha Christie, and The Convivial Codfish by Charlotte MacLeod. Next time Annie would pick some less familiar titles. She’d like to see Henny identify The Santa Klaus Murder by M. Doriel Hay, The Murders Near Mapleton by Brian Flynn, Crime at Christmas by C. H. B. Kitchin, The Gooseberry Tool by James McClure, and Catt Out of the Baa by Clifford Witting.)

  Henny, of course, saw nothing wrong with her stranglehold on the contest. Annie, however, wanted to share the spoils among her other customers.

  “Now, Henny, it really wouldn’t have been fair of me to photograph the paintings and send them to you. Contestants have to come to the store and look for themselves.”

  “I don’t recall seeing that rule.”

  “It never came up before.”

  An unimpressed sniff. “Well, who won? And what were the books?”

  “I know you don’t think it’s fair to let her compete—” Annie began defensively.

  “Emma Clyde!” It was a bleat.

  Emma Clyde was Broward’s Rock’s claim to literary fame, creator of Marigold Rembrandt, a fictional little old lady sleuth second only in readers’ affections to Miss Marple. Sixtyish and plump, three-time Edgar and double Anthony Award winner, Emma was partial to brilliant-hued caftans and improbable hair colors. Last month, her hair had verged on magenta.

  “They were tough paintings,” Annie countered vigorously.

  “Why not let Ingrid compete? Or see if the latest Agatha and Anthony winners would like to take a shot.”

  “Now Henny,” Annie soothed. “Just because people write mysteries doesn’t mean they know everything about them—”

  “Oh no. Just like surgeons hardly know any more than Joe Blow off the street about sutures and clamps.”

  Annie had a feeling she was losing this battle. Time for a diversion. “Now Henny, even you will have to admit that Emma’s never written a mystery with an art background.”

  “That’s right,” came the grudging reply.

  “The titles represented in last month’s paintings were The Rembrandt Panel—”

  “Oliver Banks.”

  “The Down East Murders—” She paused.

  “Don’t know it.” An unhappy mumble.

  “J. S. Borthwick.” Annie tried to be a good sport and not crow. “The Other David—”

  No hesitation this time. “Carolyn Coker.”

  “The Gold frame—”

  “Herbert Resnicow, of course. I do enjoy Norma and Alexander Gold even if he does take all the credit. But Alexander would be nowhere without Norma.”

  “—and The Fourth Stage of Gainsborough Brown—”

  “Clarissa Watson. There’s an author who knows what she’s writing about. Did you know she has her own art gallery on Long Island? And I like Persis Willum. I get so tired of pretty young things as sleuths. I know Persis is attractive but she’s in her thirties and a widow. And the way she uses her sketch pad!”

  By the time Henny rang off, she was in fine form again, though she still felt Emma Clyde had an unfair advantage.

  “But it’s another month, isn’t it. Has anyone cracked the February paintings yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “See you soon.” The challenge was clear.

  Annie sighed and turned away from the phone. At the coffee bar, she poured another mug of Kahlúa Fudge and looked up at the watercolors on the east wall.

  She smiled.

  Well, heck, they were terrific, if she did think so herself. Of course, Henny was so knowledgeable she would probably win at first sight.

  Still, she wasn’t unhappy at her choices. February might be dull, but it was the Valentine month and these sleuths were romantic duos who celebrated love as well as mystery.

  The room pictured in the first painting was unprepossessing to an extreme—a sagging bed, dirt, dust, disrepair. Its well-dressed occupants, reflecting the taste of the twenties, surely looked out of place—an older man who radiated power, but whose countenance twisted with anger as two young men gripped him by either arm. Watching in shocked surprise were two young women, one truly beautiful with masses of auburn hair, the other striking with her bobbed black hair, piquant face, and elfin charm. The latter shot a look of triumph at one of the older man’s captors, a young man with a pleasantly ugly face, exquisitely slicked-back red hair, and an aura of dogged, unconquerable Britishness.

  She was especially fond of the book represented in the second painting. It was this excellent author’s work at her best. This scene had no overtones of death. White clouds billowed across a blue sky above a strip of beach that curved to form a bay. The water surged against a spectacular rock, triangular in shape. Two bathers clambered about the rock, investigating the top and sides with much more intensity than casual beachgoers. The slightly tanned, dark-haired woman in her late twenties was not at all pretty but her intelligent, sensitive face was memorable. Her companion was fair and slim, but athletic. His confident bearing, perhaps just this side of arrogant, marked him as a man comfortable in any situation.

  Annie had some misgivings about her choice for the third painting. It was most assuredly not that famous author’s best work. Or even near it. But the pair depicted was among the most famous couples in mystery fiction even though only the one book was devoted to them. Hollywood made them famous. The hotel room was luxurious in the manner of the thirties, but its decorators assuredly never envisioned the derby-hatted thug in the doorway firing a black .38 automatic at the couple in bed. The ruggedly handsome man slammed his wife to one side as he rolled up and out of the bed toward their attacker.

  The empty apartment in the fourth painting evoked a memory of the Greenwich Village of fifty years ago. Then as now bright young couples lived in apartments converted from family houses built in the 1890s. This apartment was empty and a little dusty. Nothing remarkable about it except for the look of horror on the faces of the couple peering into a bathroom by the flickering flame from a cigarette lighter. Normally, his pleasant face would have worn a mildly puzzled look when dealing with his vivacious, talkative wife. Their horror was easy to understand. A man’s dead body lay in the bathtub, the head so battered that it flattened against the sloping end of the tub.

  The last picture was cheerful. Annie grinned at these lovers. The darkly handsome man examined a marble-framed looking glass with a pocket magnifier as a petite young woman with long, fine brown hair watched curiously. They stood in the entryway of an old house, a summer place in New England. This author knew how to entertain her readers.

  Annie gave the paintings a little salute. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said aloud.

  Others than Annie, of course, were engaged that morning in the cheery contemplation of Saint Valentine and all that he represented. Max Darling, Annie’s husband, tried again to make a huge bow with the red satin ribbon which persisted in slipping from the shiny, slick-surfaced, red-paper-wrapped box on his desk. The ribbon scooted from his fingers as if possessed. It was not only in Stephen King’s world that inanimate material could actively thwart human design. He tried again and almost had it when the door to his office opened and his secretary, Barb, bounded inside, flashing a huge grin. She was tugging a wobbling mass of violently red heart-shaped balloons variously inscribed KISS ME SWEET, LOVE YOU, TOO, and BE MINE TONIGHT.

  “Look what Annie’s sent!”

  The phone rang. Barb thrust the balloons at him and bolted back to the reception area to answer. Max lost control entirely of the ribbon as he made a futile grab for the string to the balloons. The ribbon slithered to the floor and the balloons wafted to the ceiling. “Oh, hell,” he muttered.

  When the phone light flashed on his desk, Max welcomed the interruption. Would it perhaps be an exciting challenge? (Something other than balloon retrieval or ribbon tying.) He felt an instant of surprise at his thought, because he was not enamored of work. In fact, Max secretly rather admired the ability of Joyce Porter’s detective, Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover, to avoid undue e
xertions, but found Dover quite unattractive otherwise. Max also admired civility. He was more at home personally with Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers’s elegant sleuth, or The Saint, Leslie Charteris’s debonair lighter of wrongs, who managed even the most violent encounters with studied charm and courtesy. But matters at Max’s office, Confidential Commissions, had recently been slow, as in proceeding at a glacial pace, and even Max felt an uncommon sense of boredom. Confidential Commissions wasn’t, of course, a private detective agency, because the sovereign state of South Carolina required either two years of work in an existing licensed agency or two years as a law enforcement officer before a private investigator’s license could be obtained. Therefore Confidential Commissions was a concern devoted to problem solving—and it didn’t require admission to the bar or a private detective’s license to solve problems.

  The only problem lately, however, had been an apparent dearth of problems among the inhabitants of Broward’s Rock, the loveliest resort island to grace the Atlantic off the coast of mainland South Carolina.

  So Max’s voice rose hopefully. “Confidential Commissions. Max Darling.”

  “Dearest, dearest Max, what a delight it is to have a tiny window into your exciting world. The resonance of your voice, the very savoir faire of your agency’s name—oh, it all combines to create an almost mystical sense of high drama.”

  Max poked a switch and his high-backed, well-padded red leather office chair eased almost horizontal, one of his favorite postures.

  “Hi, Ma,” he said cheerfully, an indulgent smile lighting his dark blue eyes. The balloons Annie had sent looked rather nice, clustered up there near the ceiling. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, the glory of it, seeking to aid those in need. Almost saintly, my dear. Do you know, I think perhaps Saint Gerasimus might be perfect!”

  Max’s blond brows knitted in apprehension. He was accustomed to his mother’s profoundly original thought patterns, but this time he was stumped. “Saint Gerasimus?”