Clearly, this evening was not going to rank among my Top Ten Easily Catered Affairs. I stopped arguing with Team Mom Number Two and strode over to the cooler.
My heart sank. The sorbet was gone. No carton. No telltale drips. I counted the bowls. None missing. No missing spoons, either. So, someone had come along, swiped the sorbet, taken the box into a bathroom, then eaten the contents with their fingers?
I sighed. I missed having Julian to help. Among other things, we managed to keep a close eye on the food, because people do steal at catered events, and not just because they want to take something home to Fido.
Thank heaven I’d bought two containers of sorbet! I asked the team moms to signal Eliot to start his discourse on How English Nobility Loved Hidden Treasure in Dessert. The women enthusiastically agreed to serve up tart slices with scoops of vanilla ice cream. If anyone asked, I told them, I was going back for sorbet for a demanding guest, and would return soon. They smiled in sympathy.
I sailed out of the Great Hall door, intent on my dessert-retrieval mission. But in the hallway between the Great Hall and Arch and Julian’s bedroom door, I came face-to-face with one of those ubiquitous Wet Paint signs. We’d been here four days. The mistress of the castle, Sukie Hyde, was the neatest neatnik I’d ever met. So how come these signs were still up?
Was any real painting going on? If you were trying to conceal something with a Wet Paint sign, wouldn’t you put up lots of Wet Paint signs, to confuse the issue?
My curiosity got the better of me. Eliot wouldn’t have left all the alarms on, would he? Especially since he had promised to take the guests on a tour later? I raced down the stairs to the ground floor and crossed the courtyard. The door to the hall leading to the “Moat Pump Room” opened easily. I wanted another look at the entry to that room, which had actually been filled with toys, and which had formerly served as the castle’s chapel.
-26-
The hallway glowed from the same overhead crystal fixtures and flickering wall sconces that were everywhere in the castle. Eliot had left on all the lights, probably because of the promised post-dessert tour. After his lengthy discourses and Arch’s accident, however, I thought it unlikely anyone would stick around to explore.
Unlikely for anyone except me, that is. By the entrance to the old chapel, I removed the Wet Paint sign and scraped the wall with my fingernail. Underneath the new splotch of paint was a dark spot. What was I looking for? Blood? If I found it, what would I do? And would the police accuse me of destroying evidence?
All right, think, I ordered myself as I studied the empty hallway. What exactly was I looking for? When Andy Balachek had been getting antsy, I was willing to bet, his partner-in-crime had strung him along with the information that the precious stamps were in the Hydes’ chapel.
Andy’s father Peter had worked on the west range after the flood of ‘82. According to Michaela, Andy had explored this side of the castle extensively as a child. So maybe Andy had figured in the Hydes’ chapel meant in the castle chapel. Say he had broken into the castle looking for those stamps. What was the one thing that had most haunted Tom and me since the discovery of Andy Balachek?
How he’d been electrocuted.
Using my fingernails to scrape was going to be too slow. I unscrewed the thin brass base from the bottom of one of the wall sconces. With this brass disk, I began to scrape random spots on the splash-painted wall. At last I uncovered another dark spot. Following it from the base of the wall to the door of the chapel/playroom, I quickly scratched out a dark, smoked arch.
This was it. It had to be. This was the arc left by a high-voltage bolt of electricity. Had Andy Balachek’s body been a part of the arc? Had the electrocution been delivered on purpose, or had Andy made a deadly mistake in trying to penetrate security? Why would this door have its own electric lock, anyway?
I was getting the creeps in that deserted hallway. I still had to replace the sorbet and finish the banquet. I sprinted across the courtyard toward the kitchen. Andy Balachek had sneaked into the castle because he’d thought the stamps were hidden in the castle chapel. I doubted very much that the stamps had ever been there; I’d found where they’d been stashed, in the chapel by the creek.
How had Andy gotten in here, anyway?
But even as I moved into the kitchen, I knew the answer to that question: Michaela and Sukie had given it to me. Michaela had mentioned that while Peter Balachek ran his excavation equipment to rebuild the moat dam, his little son Andy had been fascinated, and had followed the reconstruction each day. What would the boy have learned during all those hours of watching? What Sukie had told us that very first night: the same knowledge that attackers of Richard the Lionheart’s castle on the Seine had cleverly employed to invade - that the way in and out of the castle was into the water… and up through the garderobes.
Instinctively, I glanced up at the taped kitchen window. Could someone have been coming up a garderobe and through the window into the kitchen? I couldn’t imagine it, as there was no ledge on the outside wall. This had been a bedroom - that of the child-duke - and some of the garderobes were corbeled out from the living quarters, as in our suite. But Sukie had shown me the closest garderobe to the kitchen. It was down past the dining room, in the drum tower with the well.
Andy, on the other hand, had known exactly where the garderobe was that led to Eliot’s study. Believing the stolen stamps were in the castle chapel, Andy had planned to cheat his partner by sneaking in through the moat - wearing a wetsuit, perhaps? The moat was aerated for the ducks, so it wouldn’t freeze. Sukie herself had told me she’d had mesh grilles installed on the bottom of the garderobes to keep rodents from making their way into the castle. But grilles could be popped off, I knew, and loosely bolted tops could be crashed through with a hammer. In this way, a garderobe could open a way into the castle, a way unprotected by security.
I stared at the kitchen windows. Once in the castle, Andy had encountered some kind of electric force he hadn’t expected - a lock? A light? A security guard box! What had I found when I’d burst into the former chapel a space that clearly had been ruined by the flood and never remodeled? I’d discovered a cheaply furnished playroom, with a new bolt that was missing one screw. The arc of electricity leading to the door seemed to point to an armed security device that had blown out when someone had unwisely tried to disarm it. Sukie had told me the room with the moat’s pump was the only dangerous place in the castle. But I’d discovered the moat pump room, with no pump. Had the pump been in a closet I just hadn’t seen? I doubted it.
No, I was willing to bet several rare stamps that that arc of electricity I’d just discovered was at the very spot where poor Andy had received his fatal or near-fatal shock. He’d been trying to break into the playroom, and had failed, miserably. And then he’d been discovered by someone. And shot by someone. And moved to the creek.
I stared down at the trestle table, almost forgetting what I’d come for. Oh, yes, the sorbet! But I couldn’t concentrate; my mind raced. In Hyde Chapel, down by the creek, where had the stamps been hidden? I’d found a solitary stamp, in the one place that represented the mystical treasure - the very heart of the rose window. Who would have hidden an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar stamp there?
My first thought was Eliot. Eliot was the one who was big on labyrinth symbolism. But he was also loaded with money, and didn’t need proceeds from a theft. Still, he dearly wanted his precious conference center to be a success, and anyone, no matter how rich, could be greedy for more cash. On the other hand, even before he’d profited from Henry VIII’s letter, he’d turned down Viv’s gambling idea, which could have garnered oodles of cash. But that didn’t account for the utmost importance of Eliot’s name to him. Illegal gambling would have been very bad for his beloved reputation, if he’d been caught.
I tapped the freezer door. You had to conclude that whoever hid the stamps in the center of the rose window knew Eliot’s passions. You have to think the way the thief does. If the stamps had been found by the authorities, who would have been blamed?
Why, Eliot, of course. He’d been my first suspect, and he’d surely be the cops, too.
I snatched the second carton of sorbet from the freezer, but felt no compulsion to go rushing back to the Great Hall. I was in a mental zone, the kind where you know the ideas will keep coming if you persist in asking the questions. I didn’t intend to leave that zone until I’d explored every inch of it.
Okay: Say the person who hid the stolen stamps wanted Eliot to be blamed and arrested, and to take the fall, if anything went wrong. Something did go terribly wrong when Andy double-crossed his hijacking partners and tried to swipe the stamps himself. Then the killer shot Andy, and left him … near where the stamps had been. Somehow the killer must have figured out that Andy - had broken into the wrong chapel in the process of trying to steal back the stamps. Since the killer couldn’t be too sure that Andy hadn’t told somebody “the stamps are in the chapel,” he
