A Catered Tea Party (18 page)

Magda's eyes widened. “I thought you are finding out who killed Ludvoc for your friend.”

Bernie gave a casual shrug. “I am. We are. But hey, this is America. Who's to say you can't make a couple of bucks in the process. Right?”

“Right,” Magda said, lowering the gun for the third time. “You leave,” she told Bernie. “You leave now.”

Bernie and Libby both nodded.

“With pleasure,” Libby said—and, boy, did she mean it.

This time the sisters left through the front door. As they were going out, they passed Magda's office. Bernie's eyes widened when she saw what was sitting on Magda's desk. Judging by it, she figured that the money left in Zalinsky's account wasn't so “little” after all.

Chapter
33

“W
ow,” Bernie said once they'd gotten outside. “That's certainly interesting.”

“The gloves?” Libby asked, glancing at her sister after she'd scanned the sky. It had gotten cloudy and looked as if it was going to storm soon. Again. First, they'd had no rain, and now it was raining every day. It felt as if they were in the middle of monsoon season. Okay. Slight exaggeration.

“Those too, but I was referring to the Birkin,” Bernie replied.

She took a deep breath, taking in the odors of grass and the tang of the Hudson River and thinking about how nice it was to be out of the suffocating heat of The Blue House. She didn't know how Magda stood it. The building had been constructed with air-conditioning in mind. Without it, there was no air movement at all.

Libby brushed a mosquito off her polo shirt. “The Birkin? What the hell is a Birkin?” she asked. “It sounds like a disease. You know, she came down with a bad case of Birkinitis.”

Bernie rolled her eyes. Libby's lack of sartorial knowledge never failed to amaze her. “The handbag on Magda's desk.”

“What about it?” Libby tried to remember it, but she couldn't.

Bernie redid her ponytail. “Only that they're impossible to get. Magda probably paid at least ten for it.”

“Dollars?”

Bernie snorted. “Thousand.”

Libby's eyes widened. She couldn't conceive of someone spending that kind of money on something like that. “You're kidding.”

Bernie shook her head. “Not at all. And that's if she got it used. New they go for between fifteen and twenty-five. They're the holy grail of bags. Of course, she could have rented it.”

“Rented?”

“Yeah, rented. As we know, you can rent pretty much anything these days,” Bernie said, thinking of Zalinsky's car and the artwork in his house and office. “There are sites in Japan where you can rent a pet for a day.”

Libby sniffed. “That's terrible.”

“Agreed,” Bernie answered.

Libby turned to her. “Do you think Magda was telling us the truth about where her newfound wealth came from?”

“I don't know,” Bernie answered. “She could have pilfered from Zalinsky's account. Or she could have found and sold the teapot. She would know who to sell it to. After all, she had access to Zalinsky's correspondence.”

Libby bit her lip.

“What are you thinking about?” Bernie asked as she cut across the lawn to get to the van. The long grass brushed against her calves as she walked. She gave a wide berth to a stinging nettle, one of several, that was in her path. A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. A zigzag of lightning cleaved the sky to the east. A dark cloud hovered overhead. The storm was moving faster than Bernie thought it would.

“I'm thinking we should go get some more coffee,” Libby said. “We have about a two-day supply left.”

“Yeah, we should,” Bernie agreed. “We can do that on the way back.” She could feel the temperature starting to drop and the wind pick up. A moment later she poked Libby in the ribs.

“Hey,” Libby cried. “That hurt.”

Bernie pointed to the front of The Blue House. Magda was coming out and trotting to her car. Her head was down, and she was talking on her cell, looking neither to her left or her right.

“Now, there's someone in a hurry,” Bernie observed. “I wonder who she's talking to.”

“Maybe she just got a call from one of her kids,” Libby hypothesized.

“Or maybe we spooked her,” Bernie said.

“Maybe,” Libby said.

“Maybe she's going to get the teapot or talk to the person who has it,” Bernie posited.

“Let's assume that what you're saying is true—which I have my doubts about. Why wouldn't she just pick up the phone?” Libby asked her sister.

“Because some things are better to talk about in person.”

“Who do you think she's going to talk to?” Libby asked.

“My money is on Jason. After all, we didn't see his hat there.”

“Not that that means anything,” Libby pointed out.

“No, it doesn't,” Bernie told her. “Still, it would be interesting to see where Magda goes.”

“Well, it wouldn't hurt,” Libby agreed as she scratched her upper arm. It itched. Probably a bug bite, she decided, looking at the welt.

The sisters looked at each other and by common consent turned and hurried toward the van. By now Magda was at her vehicle and had the door of her car open. A moment later, Bernie and Libby reached their van. Magda still hadn't looked up as Bernie and Libby opened Mathilda's doors. They paused for a moment as the heat flowed out of the van.

“We should get one of those silvery things that you put on the windshield to stop the van from getting hot,” Libby observed.

“Yes, we should,” Bernie agreed. For some reason, they kept on talking about getting a sun visor, but they never did. By the time they got around to it, it would be fall.

T
he van was still too hot when Libby and Bernie got in. Libby winced as the hot leather seat cover touched the back of her leg. “Damn,” she said.

Bernie didn't say anything. She was focused on watching Magda. Magda closed her car door, started up her engine, and drove out of the parking lot. Bernie watched her take a left onto Clarke before following.

“She'll probably see us,” Libby noted as they reached the main road. “It's not as if we're inconspicuous.”

“If she does, she does,” Bernie said, turning onto Clarke as well.

She followed, careful to keep a three–car-length distance between the van and Magda's car. As Bernie drove, she noticed that their van was pulling to the right. “I think we need to get the alignment checked,” she told Libby.

“We did last month,” Libby reminded her.

“Then they didn't do a very good job, because it's off again.”

“Lovely,” Libby said as she fanned herself with the edge of her hand. It might be cooling off outside, but it was still hot as hell in the van.

Magda made a sharp left onto Cliff Street, and Bernie followed a moment later. “Well, she's not going home because this isn't the way to her house,” Bernie remarked.

“Maybe she's got an appointment,” Libby suggested.

“We'll see,” Bernie said. “Doesn't Jason rent a place around here?”

Libby scratched at her bite again. “Yeah. I think he does.”

Bernie grunted and concentrated on her driving. ”You know,” she said a moment later. “I think I can make a strong case for Magda killing Zalinsky.”

“You can do that for everyone else as well,” Libby replied.

“A stronger case then. Magda had access to his accounts. She was his personal assistant. She knew what he was doing. Maybe,” Bernie hypothesized, “she was syphoning money off from his accounts and he caught her and threatened her.”

“With what? Jail?”

“No,” Bernie said. “You don't threaten someone with jail if you're running a scam. You threaten them with bodily harm . . . or you threaten their kids . . . if the money isn't put back.”

“That would be a good motivator,” Libby said. “Especially if he threatened her children. It would make me want to send him off to a better place.”

Bernie slowed down slightly. She didn't want Magda to spot the van. “The teapot would be an added bonus for her.”

“But when she goes to get it, it's not there,” Libby said. “So she had to have seen Casper taking it.”

“And maybe Jason did too.” Bernie turned the wheel to keep the van from drifting to the right. “So they joined up. They probably looked through The Blue House, but it wasn't there, so they assumed it was in Casper's house.”

“But it wasn't there either,” Libby said.

“Because someone else had taken it,” Bernie surmised. “But they didn't know that. They thought that if they came back and left a note, that would spook Casper into retrieving the teapot.”

“Casper's house sounds like Grand Central Station,” Libby reflected.

“Jason knows Adam Benson,” Bernie said.

“And Adam strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn't mind buying something like that under the radar,” Libby observed.

“In fact,” Bernie added, “it wouldn't surprise me if Jason knew a fair number of people in that category. After all, he used to move in those circles.”

“He did, didn't he?” Libby said. She glanced up at the sky. It was getting darker outside; the wind was whipping the branches of the oak trees around and pressing down the stems of the Queen Ann's lace and the loosestrife that grew in the ditch that ran parallel to the road. “Of course, Magda could have come into an inheritance. We don't know. This is all conjecture.”

“She pretty much told us where she got her money,” Bernie objected. “She told us she stole it from Zalinsky.”

“She could have done both,” Libby said.

“Indeed, she could have,” Bernie agreed.

“I'd be tempted if I were her,” Libby noted. “Very tempted.” Then she pointed toward the sky. “It looks like it's going to rain,” she observed, changing the subject.

“Storm,” Bernie corrected. “It looks as if it's going to storm.” She heard a buzz coming from her phone.

Libby reached over, got it, and read the text message. “It's a flood warning,” she informed her sister.

“Terrific,” Bernie said.

“Maybe we should go back,” Libby suggested.

“We'll be fine,” Bernie said automatically, her mind on the road in front of her. She was straining to see Magda's Hyundai, which had just gone around a curve. Cliff Road was a series of curves, but there were no cutoffs until Ashcroft Corners, so Bernie was fairly confident she didn't have to worry about losing Magda for another mile or so.

“What about the ditches?” Libby asked.

“What about them?” Bernie said.

“They're going to fill with water.”

“We're almost at Ashcroft,” Bernie told her sister, and then the heavens opened up. The rain came down in horizontal sheets. It thrummed on the roof and the windshield. The windshield wipers fought a losing battle with the rain, and the world vanished into a watery haze.

Bernie turned the wipers on as high they could go. It didn't help. She cursed under her breath as she leaned forward, trying to see the road ahead of her. But she couldn't. As she came around the curve, she spotted the taillights on Magda's car, two blurry red circles, but then they got farther and farther away until they were gone altogether. Now nothing was in front of them. There was nothing to navigate by. Bernie slowed down, and then she slowed down even more. The van was pulling more and more to the right, and she had to fight to keep it on the road.

“We should pull off to the side,” Libby suggested.

“There is no side,” Bernie answered without taking her eyes off the road.

“Can't we stop somewhere?” Libby asked.

“Like where?” Bernie demanded. The only place to pull off would be someone's driveway, and the stretch of road they were on now was all woods. “We can't stop in the middle of the road. Someone could smash into us. No. We have to keep going.”

Libby didn't answer because she knew Bernie was correct.

“At least we're not on Forest,” Bernie said, her voice lost in the roar of the storm. Forest was a dirt road, really little more than a country lane that became sludge when it rained. The county had been promising to pave it for the last ten years, and each year they'd pushed it down on their to-do list.

“If we weren't following Magda, we'd be home by now,” Libby commented.

“But we are,” Bernie replied. Then she didn't say anything else. She was too busy concentrating on keeping Mathilda on the road. It was getting harder and harder. Aside from not being able to see and the fact that the road was slippery, the car kept pulling to the right. Two minutes later, she said, “I think there's something wrong with Mathilda's right side.”

“What?” Libby asked.

Bernie just grunted. She leaned forward, trying to see the curve in the road. She knew it was close by, but she didn't know how close. God, what she wouldn't give to have another vehicle in front of her. A moment later, the van lurched and leaned toward the right. Bernie wrestled with the steering wheel, but it was too late. The van began to slide.
This is like steering an elephant,
Bernie thought.

“Bernie,” Libby screamed as the van began tipping, “do something!”

“I'm trying,” Bernie yelled back as she turned into the slide.
We're going into the ditch,
Bernie realized, as the van tipped some more.

After what seemed like hours but was actually just a minute, Mathilda came to a shuddering stop. She was lying on her right side, half in and half out of the ditch. Bernie looked over. Libby was fumbling with her seat belt as water came bubbling up through the crack in the door.