Broken Strings Read online

  Puss harrumphed. “You’re the one who’d have to keep it going, Ced, not Marion. She’s beyond all that now. I mean, what’s a funeral for, except to placate the living?”

  “Marion asked me to keep on with the shows as well,” Fay said. “If you can’t do it, Cedric, then I’ll do it myself. At least to the best of my ability. I’m still in rehearsal mode.” Which was true, in spite of a dozen shows she’d helped with, and hours of practice at home between goats, cheese, foster kids and Glenna, whose eyesight was failing more and more. But if Cedric wanted her to buy him out, she’d be hard pressed without putting up her bed, bureau and body for sale. And who’d want her body? In a full-length mirror she was an old ship, complete with barnacles.

  “I don’t know,” Cedric said. “I’m not sure what to do. I’d like to drop it. But I’ve got money tied up in the marionettes, for one.”

  “Sell them,” Puss said. “There are other people with shows. Schools, clubs – someone will want them. Collectors. Marion kept some of Dad’s puppets, too. The Great Valentini!” There was bitterness in her voice. She stabbed a finger into Cedric’s cotton chest – he’d earlier removed his jacket in the crush of mourners. Even so he was sweating – with the decision he had to make? Or was it guilt, Fay wondered.

  He was a good looking fellow, Fay had to admit. Though on principle she distrusted handsome men; she’d been done in by too many of them.

  “You, Cedric,” Puss went on, “do not like these shows, you told me so at Christmastime. It may be too late already to attract an audience. I heard about the people who walked out up in Burlington! You need to get back to your true field. Your aerospace engineering. Did you know he was an aerospace engineer, Fay?”

  Fay nodded, and smiled. Did Puss know that her brother-in-law had been fired as an aerospace engineer? Maybe not. It was a confidence from Marion. Fay imagined Cedric getting Puss in a corner at a family gathering, complaining into her blond ear about the marionette shows. The woman was attractive but flawed, her nose too big for her face, her skin a victim of psoriasis. She made the most of a good figure with her low-cut blouses and skin-tight jeans that turned her legs into sticks, but she couldn’t match her stepsister’s beauty. Marion had been adopted five years after Puss’s birth, Fay knew, when the mother gave up trying to conceive. Had Puss resented Marion’s taking away her status as “only child?”

  Cedric was smiling and nodding. He lapped up sympathy. He was a martyr who’d sacrificed his true calling for his wife’s passion. “I’m not a puppeteer,” he said. “it’s not my thing. I told Marion that. I only helped out because, well, because…”

  “You fell out of that spaceship,” Fay said, smiling of course. “Your parachute broke.” He laughed. He was wearing his armor. Puss laid an arm on his shoulder; she’d stand by him in the loss of his wife – and his pride.

  “If you’re going to break that promise, then I’ll carry on alone,” Fay said. She felt like a cornered boxer; she’d fought fiercely but the opponent was coming in for the kill. Now Willard had spotted her anxiety. He was drifting over with a cup of grape punch. “We’ll carry on the shows, won’t we, Will? You said you’d help?”

  “Help? Oh. Well, yes, I guess – yes,” Willard looked at Fay, an eyebrow raised. Most likely he’d said nothing of the sort, but he had made signs, helped with props. He could play the prince; he had a nice homey kind of face, cheeks that matched the pale pink shirt he wore under his old brown tweed jacket. If Beauty was a hundred years old, what did it matter that the prince was in his fifties? Anyway, he’d wear a mask.

  “Look, Fay, this isn’t the time.” Cedric was on the attack. “I can’t think about all this now. Under the circumstances.”

  “Of course you can’t,” said Puss, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Has anyone seen my daughter? My Marion?” It was the old mother again, the mind gone but the body hanging on. They’d caught her wandering away from Green Pastures, where she lived, any number of times. One day, Fay prophesied, she wouldn’t come back.

  “No, Mummy,” Puss said, patting her arm. “She’s probably up in the attic again, playing with her puppets. Naughty girl.”

  “I keep telling her to come down out of that attic,” the mother said. “She spends too much time up there. She’s not like my other daughter.”

  “That’s me, Mummy.” Puss blinked into the mother’s face. “I’m your other daughter. Puss.”

  “Puss?” Gloria looked confused. And then rallied. “Can you take me home, Puss? They’re having pot roast for dinner. It’s going to burn if I don’t get there.”

  “Sure, Mummy. Mom,” she repeated, but got the same vapid smile. “We’re going right now.” Puss glanced at Cedric for support and squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry about – everything,” she said. “But don’t worry. We’ll work it out. I’ll help.”

  “Thank you,” Cedric said solemnly, returning the squeeze. “I can use your help. All those boxes of stuff to go through. Marion was a pack rat.”

  “You can count on me,” Puss said.

  Surely he could, Fay thought, determined herself to go through any boxes that related to marionettes. She waved at Apple and Glenna, who would need a ride home; Willard had come on his own in his veggie mobile. He didn’t want to pollute the air with gasoline fumes.

  Cedric could count on her, too, Fay decided as they drove the two miles home in her pickup. One way or another she’d carry on for Marion – at least she’d give it a try.

  Home, the red light was blinking on the kitchen answering machine. A message from Lieutenant Higgins grunted: “You were right, Fay. Gotta hand it to you. It was poison did the lady in all right – medical examiner just called. But not nightshade, though there was a trace of that. No. It was taxine. Taxine is found in...”

  The tape ran out on the machine so Fay ran right to the dictionary. Why, taxine came from yew, like that sweet yew bush Glenna had planted outside the front window! Yew was a pagan tree, Glenna said, it could live forever. There was one in Scotland almost five thousand years old. Though almost everything about yew was poisonous, according to the dictionary: leaves, seeds, roots – everything except the fleshy red berries.

  “Whoa!” Fay told Glenna, looking up from the dictionary. “You planted a poisonous tree out there. You trying to kill us all? I think we better pull it up, don’t you?”

  “No,” her cousin said, putting her size-eleven foot down. Stamping it, actually. “I won’t have it. I love that tree. You can put a fence around it, but I won’t pull it up. You can ask Willard to make a warning sign.”

  “So the animals can read it?” But Glenna wasn’t listening, she was back in the living room, turning up the volume on the old black and white TV. She couldn’t see the screen with her glaucoma eyes, but she could hear it. Ingest it as it were.

  Which made Fay wonder how Marion had gotten the poison. By ingesting it? Could taxine be absorbed through the skin? That new controller she’d used for the Beauty puppet – why, it was made of yew!

  “Yew,” she told Willard when he walked in to shower in the downstairs bathroom, showering was one of his perks for mowing and weeding. It was unusually warm for late September, and his forehead was oozing beads of sweat. “Marion’s new controller is made of yew. It was a gift from somebody. She had lots of secret admirers, people sending her stuff. And detractors. Uh oh – I practiced with it, too.”

  “You’re still alive,” Willard reminded her. “I don’t think you can absorb the poison through the skin. I’ll find out for you, though.”

  “Then it had to be in her tea, I’d expect, crushed up yew leaves and seeds? What do you think?” She read aloud the symptoms, most of which Marion had had. She was thankful that the medical examiner, smart fellow, had pushed for an autopsy in spite of Lieutenant Higgins. The trembling, the convulsions, nausea, the irregular heartbeat. “She died of cardiac and respiratory failure,” she reminded Willard. “Meaning too much taxine in the system. Though at that point the doctor didn’t
know it was yew. Or how it got in there. We still don’t know how.”

  “On the other hand,” Willard said, “there could’ve been fresh sap in the yew wood. Do you think she might have kissed the controller – for luck or something?”

  “Oh! Maybe. Though I never saw her do it.”

  Poisoned by her controller, Fay thought. That would be an irony.

  Chapter Four

  A Friendly Suspect and a Secret Circle

  Monday, September 24

  “You could’ve knocked me over with a yew twig,” Ronald Higgins told Fay. “I got a cabinet made of yew at home. Nice hard wood, you know. ’Course I heard the guy who made it for me died a month later.” He chuckled. They were sitting at the rear table in The Hungry Mind eating wedges of spinach quiche along with green chai tea; she’d gone to meet him after all, thinking he might have fresh information. They’d both ordered quiche: Higgins thought that was meaningful. “We have the same taste buds,” he’d said at the counter and she winced, wondered what he’d say if she said she loved Brussels sprouts, sushi and snails.

  But she wanted to hear more about that yew cabinet.

  “It’s been oiled and lacquered. The wood’s poisonous too, they say, but not after it’s been oiled.” Though he looked worried.

  She told him about the controller. “Willard called up a poison expert. The woman was pretty sure the poison has to be imbibed.”

  “According to the coroner,” Higgins began, pontificating a little – she didn’t care for that trait in him. But it was nice to be sitting here with a man. She smiled up at her neighbor Jenny, who was passing by with her nonagenarian mother and for a moment Fay felt quite cosmopolitan. In the dating loop again, while poor Jenny was wiping up her mama’s drool. Higgins did have nice eyes, a deep chocolate color. And thick white fingers he’d lay on the table like some kind of definitive evidence. He was a policeman, after all –a good one by all accounts.

  “…it was probably in the thermos. Like you say, no cases they know of from skin absorption. We’re still waiting for the full report. Apparently the stuff works fast, like within an hour. Where would she have been when she absorbed the stuff?”

  “Elementary school,” Fay said. “About ten-past-one Wednesday afternoon.” Fay rather liked this precision of time, it made her feel like a sleuth – though she was just an ordinary woman wanting to discover who harmed her good friend. Just thinking about it brought the bile up into her throat. Who would harm this beautiful, creative woman?

  “So our perp…”

  “Our what?” she asked. Higgins was talking with his mouth full of spinach and egg.

  “Our perp.” He swallowed and sipped his chai. “Short for perpetrator. You know, it means – ”

  “I know what it means, yes. It was the monosyllable that confused me.” The man was grinning; he loved to show off. He’d had two years of college and then some kind of police school, rose through the ranks to become lieutenant. His mouth had hung open a whole minute a few months back when she told him she had a double major in English lit and theater from Vassar. “But where did it get me?” she’d said when she saw his flushed face. She was no Meryl Streep who’d graduated from there and made her millions in movies. Practically every taxi driver in New York City was an out-of-work actor like herself. “Too skinny,” she quoted from the directors. “Too tall for the part. Too dark, too light.” She blew her nose, remembering the humiliations.

  He’d smiled. She was evidently more accessible with those flaws.

  “So our perp must have had access to her thermos.”

  “Does it have to be the thermos? Why not an unlacquered controller? Somebody could have rubbed it with ground yew and she kissed it – Willard’s idea. She got some of the sap in her throat.”

  He stared at her through his spinach teeth. Who was the detective here, anyway? the stare said. But then he shrugged. “Well, that’s a possibility. I’ll talk to Chas again. The medical examiner,” he said when her eyebrow shot up.

  They finished their quiches and he went back to the counter for a second cup of chai tea. He was always wanting to prolong the lunches on his day off. It was warm inside the coffeehouse. There was no air conditioning. John, the owner, was still struggling to make a go of the place. He’d started it with his girlfriend, Carol, but a week before they were to open, Carol died of pancreatic cancer. The suddenness took everyone’s breath away.

  Which made her think. Marion had pledged $20,000 to the new church sanctuary they’d recently built. But only part of the pledge had been met at her death. Cedric would have different ideas for that money. Like buying a bigger home, one of those new hybrid cars he could tootle about in – he was already sick of the BMW, he’d said. Travel to Europe, travel to Australia, New Zealand, outer space. Cedric had tapping feet. He wouldn’t honor that pledge.

  Higgins smiled at her silence. “Something big on your mind?” He was leaning toward her with his tea, elbows on the round table. His head was slightly cocked, his chocolate eyes melting seductively. “Anything to do with, um, me?” he asked. He licked his thin but reddish lips. Lips that matched the off-duty, red-striped shirt he was wearing. His pink tongue licked the palm of his hand. What in hell did that mean?

  Though she knew. Fay had made the rounds in her long life.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” she said, leaning back to defend herself. “I’ve a hunch Cedric will withdraw from the Valentini troupe. If he does, we’ll need another man to operate one of the marionettes. It takes a little training, but once you’ve got it…”

  The elbows lifted, he looked stunned. “Me? What do I know about marionettes?

  When do I have time for that sort of thing? Training, all that.”

  But Higgins was thinking. His chin was down on his chest like a shaggy brown bird. He was thinking, she bet, he’d get to see Fay more often. He was thinking bed, that’s what he was thinking. Higgins was fifty-nine now; he was divorced, he was lonely, he was thinking retirement, sure he was, he had no kids to cook for him or pick up his socks.

  “You can let me know,” she said, getting up with her empty plate and cup. “I don’t need an answer now. Anyway, Cedric might want to continue. Unless –”

  “Unless what?” Higgins said.

  “Unless he’s the guy who had the ‘opportunity’ you always talk about. To put the poison in the tea, I mean. Or the drink, or whatever. Unless he goes to jail and can’t continue.”

  The lieutenant looked sternly at her. “We can’t assume that, Fay. This is a criminal investigation. We can’t assume anything until all the facts are in. I’m putting another man on the case, I’m too close to it. I mean, knowing you and all…I have to be careful.”

  What was he saying? She stared back at him. He had a bit of cheese on the side of his red lips. “You mean to say I’m a suspect?”

  “I didn’t mean that exactly. But you’re involved in the show. You were there when Marion Valentini collapsed. Everyone there that day is a suspect. I mean, we have to ask questions. We have to figure answers. That’s why I’m putting Sergeant Nova on the case. Because, like I said, you and I are – ”

  “Friends,” she said. “Just friends. And I’m a friendly suspect. I could easily have put yew seeds in her herb tea, sure. Hey!” She’d just seen Willard Boomer walk through the door. He was wearing his blue coveralls and a pale blue denim shirt. He looked cute with his wind-tousled hair, his mellow face, his nice lean sexy shape that came from hard labor on the Flint farm.

  He waved at her. His face broke out into a smile, then fell again when he saw the lieutenant. Was he jealous? She hoped so.

  “Just friends,” she repeated, and smiled. She needed both of them in order to carry out her promise to Marion. She didn’t have time for a passionate plea at this point; she just wanted to find out who put the yew in Marion’s body, however it got there.

  The perp could be some kind of kook, she thought. Someone who hated puppets. Whose abusive mother had been a puppeteer. So n
ow the kook wanted to do in all puppeteers? Even herself, she thought. Fay Hubbard, murder suspect about to be murder victim. What a combo!

  If only Marion were still alive to talk to. But Marion was dead and she could only try to crawl back a few years into Marion’s life to find out why. Why she was dead.

  “Nova will be calling on you,” Ron Higgins told her. “Strictly routine, you know.

  I’ll be behind him for help. I’ll tell him to go easy on you. He’s married, by the way.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, standing up with her empty plate and cup, “then I’m safe. Okay, Ron, I’m ready for whatever you guys throw at me. I’ll be honest, tell it like it was. Cedric didn’t like Marion’s new ending for the show, you know. Neither did I. I took Cedric’s side. Maybe we did it together,” she whispered, jabbing his arm with a spoon while Willard looked on with flushed cheeks. “Maybe we poisoned the tea. So what the heck. Bring Nova on. Just not at milking time though, thank you.”

  She brushed past him with a sweet smile, chin up. She’d already changed her mind about Higgins joining the show. “I was just kidding about your helping, Ron. I have Willard here to do the prince.”

  Oops – she’d dropped her metal fork into the can for paper trash. When a blue denim arm reached in to pull it out, what could she do but laugh out loud? And what ever made her think she could operate a marionette theater?

  “Lord almighty,” she said out loud.

  “Hello,” Willard said.

  * * *

  Chance didn’t know if the tall leader of the sacred circle was male or female. He/she was dressed in witchy-black with holes for the eyes. “Intentionally androgynous,” Billy whispered. A secret circle, yes. Chance was nervous, she had to admit. She’d never been to a Wiccan ritual, only the prosy Christian ones with her former foster mother. Now they were “casting the circle,” he explained. The act of “defining sacred space” – a space that divided the mundane world from the sacred world, where magic could “happen more easily.” She loved to hear Billy talk. He was smart, he was spiritual, he’d been a foster kid, like her. High school boys were bores compared to Billy.