The Marsh Madness

In the meantime, in case we weren’t planning to stay home and forget about everything, Castellano hadn’t taken any chances.

There was a fresh new officer in a parked cruiser outside the front of Van Alst House. They’d stopped trying to fool us with unmarked police vehicles. I didn’t know this guy, and as I’d spent altogether too much time with the police, I wasn’t crazy about getting to know him, but I was pressed into service. The signora—once she decided that he was only a victim of circumstance—had sent me on several forays with thermoses of very good coffee, buckets of almond cookies and, on my last errand, a large and very smelly sandwich of Genoa salami and Asiago cheese on ciabatta. I knew she’d be wringing her hands and dancing her little dance while she waited for me at the back door. She seemed to have a mandate to feed the world.

I didn’t need to distract the police, but it seemed like a good idea to keep on this guy’s good side. It took a while to wear down his initial truculence—we were under surveillance, after all—but he mellowed as the evening wore on. I kind of felt sorry for him. We’d invited him to wait inside a couple of times. I suggested he’d have a better chance of making sure we didn’t leg it. But apparently protocol meant he had to freeze in his vehicle, even though nothing really prevented me from skulking out the back door, then dashing through the trees and over the fields. In the resulting confusion, Vera and the signora could have vanished in the Cadillac.

I paced around, restless. My special place still bore the signs of the invasion of the snoopy police. It took quite a while to get it back to normal, as much as anything could be normal. I decided I’d have to wash my police-tossed unmentionables and made a trip down to the first-floor utility area with my laundry basket. On my return I plunked on the love seat and put my feet on the Lucite table. I picked up and put down three separate Ngaio Marsh books. I couldn’t concentrate on any of them, no matter how many rambling and remote estates the author dangled in front of me. At the moment, our own circumstances were every bit as mysterious.

Inspector Alleyn wasn’t one to make lengthy notes about cases or even write that much down. He had Sergeant Fox for that. But I was on my own and Foxless. Notes always work for me. I found a sheet of paper and a pen and started to work things out, beginning with the heading. Paper and pen can help me think. I scrawled thoughts, words and ideas randomly on the page, making a “mind map.” In the end, sorting it all out, pulling things together, I ended up with this.

THE CRIME: What do we know?

First I wrote: Setup—elaborate!

Under that: Targeted

Knew Chadwick

Knew Summerlea

There was so much that bothered me. The setup. The whole charade of the luncheon. The food, the place settings, the invitation itself. It had all been so very intricate, so perfectly staged. Elaborate also meant premeditated. The scam had been premeditated. Had the murder been premeditated as well? Was it intended all along that Chadwick be killed and that we would take the fall for it? Or had he turned up at the wrong time, in the middle of the scam, and been killed?

That led me to my next observation:

Targeted

Knew about Vera’s collection

Risky

We had definitely been identified and targeted. It would have taken time, planning and energy to reel Vera in to buy the Ngaio Marsh books. Whoever did it knew about Vera and her collection. And to what advantage? As Uncle Mick had pointed out, there were valuable paintings, silver and other goodies. Why go to the trouble to sell us the books, even if there had been a transfer of ten thousand dollars? That wasn’t such a huge amount of money. Why not just simply clean out Summerlea, fence what was taken and be gone, without anyone seeing your face? That would have had a higher rate of return, with far less risk of being identified. Unless the purpose was really to kill Chadwick and frame us.

Naturally, I wrote: