War and Peas

“I'm not sure you'd have to be an expert,' Jumper said. 'It's not an area of the law I've had reason to study, but my guess is that if you had possession of the peas, you could hire an expert. Or turn the matter over to an interested scientific facility under a royalty arrangement. But you said it was during the Depression that the family grew the peas. Even if there were still seeds around, would they grow?'

“How long do peas remain viable?' Babs asked, probably knowing nobody had the answer.

Shelley spoke up. 'I don't know about peas, but some grains will grow after hundreds of years.'

“And even if you couldn't grow them, you might be able to clone cells to determine the genetic makeup,' Jumper said. 'Could that be why somebody tore up the basement the other day — looking for that ledger?'

“I'd wondered that, too,' Jane said.

“And if he or she went back to search again—' Jumper went on.

“Derek might have found the searcher—' Shelley said.

“Or been the searcher,' Jumper amended. 'What if he'd overheard the conversation about the special pea and gone down to look a couple days ago? Then, when I told him that he wasn't going to be appointed director, he went back to make a more thorough search so he could steal the peas before he left?”

Jane shook her head. 'No, I don't think so. There would be no reason for someone to kill him just because he was looking for the pea ledger. Unless he was in it with someone else.'

“Like Georgia,' Shelley said.

“We have turned into ghouls,' Babs said. 'This is all wild, irresponsible speculation. And it's not our job. It's up to the police.'

“True,' Jumper said, chastened by her tone. 'But it's up to us to tell them all we know. And part of what we know is the relationships of the people here at the Snellen.'

“Yes, of course. I'm sorry. Old-lady nerves,' Babs said. 'All right. Let's don't wander off into a science none of us knows anything about. Justlook at the overall picture. If Derek's death actually did have something to do with the peas, and if we assume that his death and Regina's are connected in some way—'

“I think that's a logical assumption,' Jumper said. 'I can't believe we have two murderers operating independently.'

“—then what has Regina got to do with the pea — what was it called? Little Beauty? That's impossible. Nobody had ever heard about it until after Regina was dead.”

Nineteen

Jane excused herself, theoretically to visit the rest room, actually to get away from the others in the hope that her own mind would clear. It seemed that no matter how they looked at the situation, eventually they splatted up against a brick wall of common logic. She sensed that they were wallowing in a swamp of speculations where there was an answer hovering over their heads that they hadn't bothered to look at.

Or maybe she was going a tad batty herself. She wished she had a better idea of what the police knew, but she suspected that, for all their technical expertise, they were as baffled as she.

The officer lounging at the door of the boardroom let her go without any difficulty. Apparently the confinement in the boardroom was merely a suggestion, not a requirement. Jane decided to make a preventive visit to the bathroom, and when she was washing her hands, Sharlene came in, pushing the door with her derriere and holding her hands in front of her as if they were contaminated. 'Laser copier dust,' she explained.

Jane turned on the faucet for her and leaned back against an old steam-heat radiator under the window. 'So you're being allowed to do your work?'

“Somebody has to if we're going to run the museum and get moved. Thank heaven we didn't have any tours scheduled today, since the police have closed us up.'

“You're taking this surprisingly well,' Jane remarked.

“No use pretending,' Sharlene said, sounding a little like Babs. 'I really think it's terrible that somebody killed Derek, but I can't act like I liked him just because it happened. What I think is most awful about it is that it happened here. This is bad for the museum. Bad publicity. Lisa's going to have a big repair job when this is all over. I'm starting to think somebody's doing it simply to ruin us. But that's silly, I know. Nobody would take horrible risks like that just to hurt the museum's reputation.'

“I'm confused, too,' Jane admitted. 'There are too many trivial motives, real or imaginary.'

“That's exactly it,' Sharlene agreed. 'I can't imagine killing anyone for any reason, and because we're all stuck in the middle of this, we're all thinking of really stupid reasons. It's easier with Derek than it was with Ms. Palmer.'

“How do you mean?”

Sharlene was drying her hands, looking with irritation at the black dust that had stayed under her short, unpolished fingernails. 'Just that forall his brains and degrees and everything, he was a couple sandwiches short of a picnic where people were concerned. Lots of book learning, but no tact, no thought for others. Nothing like Mr. Abbot or Tom, for example. They're both educated and smart, but they don't run over people. And when they make mistakes, they admit it, instead of trying to blame others.'

“Mistakes like what?'

“I was thinking about Mr. Abbot and the bathrooms. I guess no one mentioned that to you.'

“I don't think so,' Jane said, imagining Whitney Abbot walking into a ladies' room.

“He had all the plans for the new museum done — the architectural drawings, I mean. And I had a set I was supposed to set up as a display in the main lobby. So I sort of studied them and realized there were no bathrooms on the first floor. I mentioned it to Ms. Palmer, and the next day Mr. Abbot asked me to take down the display and thanked me. He was really nice about it and explained that he'd done it on a computer and had taken out the bathrooms to change some hallway patterns and had forgotten to put them back in. He laughed about all those drains and pipes and things under the hallway.”

Blaming it on the computer instead of on someone else, Jane thought to herself, but didn't say anything. A computer couldn't argue or get its feelings hurt or knock you on the head with a blunt object. At least not yet. Though she suspected that Bill Gates had some if not all of those options in the works.

“He made it sound like I'd really done him a big favor,' Sharlene was saying. 'He even mentioned it again yesterday.'

“Yesterday?'

“He came by to get copies of some forms he needed and to remeasure the height of a couple of the taller exhibits. It's his job to make sure they can fit through doorways and halls.'

“When was this?'

“Oh, in the afternoon sometime. Two? Three?”

Jane wondered if anybody had mentioned to Sharlene that Derek might have been killed the day before.

“But when Derek did something wrong,' Sharlene continued, 'or made someone mad, he didn't seem to notice, and if someone else said something, he started looking for someone to blame. Still, that's no reason to kill him. Lots of people are annoying and that's just life. I guess I should feel sorrier than I do. He must have had family that cared about him.'

“And Georgia,' Jane said.

Sharlene nodded. 'In her own way. I guess she was lonely and liked having a young man take an interest in her.'

“That's a kind, generous interpretation,' Jane said.

“No, not really. I feel sorry for her and I think it's just as bad to feel sorry for people as it is to dislike them. But it's sad, really, when somebody tries so hard to pretend they're young when they're not. I mean, look at Georgia, then look at Babs.'

“That's very perceptive. It's impossible to imagine Babs acting like Georgia at the same age.”

For some reason, this gave Sharlene the giggles. 'I'm sorry. It's just — well, I suddenly thought of Babs being forty or fifty and wearing poodle skirts and saddle oxfords. Oh, dear. I better not get silly or the police will think I'm nuts.”

With that, she forced herself to assume a serious, businesslike expression and left.

Jane trailed along slowly, thinking about Whitney Abbot. How could an architect forget about bathrooms?