Sticks & Scones gbcm-10 Read online

  What? What did I just say to myself?

  I pushed into the Great Hall and was thinking so hard I almost upended the Jerk, plate and all. He cursed under his breath. I sincerely hoped he’d served himself lots of molded salad. He was allergic to strawberries.

  I sandwiched the ice cream cartons between the ice cubes in the cooler, then began to cut the plum tarts. The castles were self-sufficient. All of the needs of the courtiers and servants were met within the walls: food, water, entertainment, and, oh Lord, forgive me for not thinking of it before now: worship.

  Every castle had a chapel, of course it did. But where was the chapel in this castle? I’d been so focused on the Gothic structure down the road, Hyde Chapel, I’d forgotten to ask the question. Andy had written to Tom, The stamps are in the Hydes’ chapel. Could there be more than one? And which one had he been talking about?

  Folks were already clustered back at the buffet line for seconds. One of the team moms zipped to my side and gushed that she had to have my recipes for potato casserole and shrimp curry. I told her no problem. The buffet line did not need my attention. So, acting as if I had business there I strode over to the rack of pamphlets Eliot had set up by the east door.

  The only two pamphlets on display both looked newly printed: Hide Away at Hyde Castle! and A History of Hyde Castle. I glanced quickly through both of them. The second had a current floor plan, but no indication of how the spaces of the castle had been used in the Middle Ages, when the building had been constructed. The living room, for example, was designated by Eliot as “The Grand Parlor,” when Sukie herself had told me it once stabled the horses. The playroom I’d discovered was labeled “Moat Pump Room.” Why would Eliot, with all his concern for casting out historical tidbits, not tell how the spaces were originally used?

  And then I remembered the pamphlets in Eliot’s study. I’d grabbed one entitled Medieval Castles and Their Secrets, as well as Have Your Wedding at Hyde Chapel! But hadn’t I taken another old one, one on taking a tour of the historic castle? Where was that thing?

  Out of habit, I patted my pockets. Nothing in my apron. I prayed and felt inside my sweater pockets. Ah: paper. I pulled out all three pamphlets that I’d picked up in Eliot’s office. As the guests had no immediate food needs, I quickly opened A Tour of Hyde Castle and pored over it.

  It contained a historic floor plan. I ran my finger across the space allotted to the stables, the old kitchen next to the Great Hall - now the bedroom suite where Julian and Arch were quartered - the duke’s bedroom, now the new kitchen, and, in the area marked Moat Pump Room in the new floor plan, next to what was now Eliot’s study on the west range: Chapel. But I hadn’t seen a pump, broken or no. I’d seen games and toys and kiddie-style furniture. I’d also seen a new lock, a lot of spilled paint, and a Wet Paint sign.

  Plus, I’d asked both Michaela and Eliot about the current uses of that room. They’d both either lied or been evasive.

  So what did all this tell me? I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t have time to think about it, because at that moment the second mom who’d helped me came trundling up.

  “Goldy? What are you doing? Several of the guests have asked what you were reading so intently. Mr. Hyde said it was an old map of the castle.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Well, the Lauderdales want the nondairy dessert for Howie now. They said they asked you to buy lime sorbet.”

  I stuffed the pamphlet back into my pocket. “I haven’t started to serve dessert yet.” My voice was stiff with anger. After what the Lauderdales had put Arch through, they had some nerve demanding early dessert service.

  “I told Buddy that,” the mom explained, “but he said he wants to get Howie home, in case he was hurt in the collision. I‘11 serve him his special dessert, if you want. Just tell me where it is. The Lauderdales are very anxious. Chardé says she wants to get her money’s worth from the banquet, and neither she nor Buddy are having any of the plum tart.”

  Oh, man, would these people never stop? “All right. Howie’s sorbet is resting on ice in the cooler. If they must have it now, you can serve it to them. Eliot wants to say a few words about the jewels in the plum tart, so I’m not going to start with the whole dessert service yet.”

  “Okay. Except here’s the thing. I thought the sorbet was in the cooler, too,” she explained. “At least, I thought I saw it there. But now it’s gone.”

  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 or she had had to move the stamps again, before they could be discovered. But where would the killer hide them this time?

  I whacked the frozen sorbet carton onto the counter. Figure it out, I ordered myself. Think. If you’re trying to think along the same lines as the murderer, aren’t you going to once again put the booty somewhere relatively accessible … but still somewhere that Eliot would be blamed if the booty were found?

  Where would Eliot hide something?

  What had Eliot said to me? The Elizabethans hid surprises in their desserts. Wait. I struggled to recall his exact words. A typical Elizabethan treat … to bake treasure into something sweet … Giving me cooking directions in a rhymed couplet, no less. But what something sweet was Eliot’s special preserve? What place would he be likely to hide something extremely valuable, where it probably wouldn’t be found? But if the loot were discovered, what place would point directly to Eliot as the culprit - ?

  Wait a second. Eliot’s special preserve?

  My eyes traveled to the jam cabinet. It was in plain sight, but locked with a key that was available to anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the ways of the castle. Too obvious? Still, like the labyrinth, the stillroom products were Eliot’s pride and joy… was there any other place where he stored them?

  My mind cast up a memory. This is just half of his insomniac production, Sukie had told us, referring to the jams in the kitchen. Think.

  Last night when we’d had lamb, I’d requested mint jelly. Julian had searched in the kitchen jam cabinet, with no luck. Then he’d disappeared into the buttery/dining room … the same place he’d gone to get the equally recherché sherry jelly… .

  No, that’s stupid, I corrected myself. This castle is enormous. You could hide something in a million places.

  With trembling fingers, I shoved aside the rapidly softening sorbet and reached for the key ring where the team moms had left it, on the counter. Swiftly, I sorted through the keys, heart pounding, until I found the tiny skeleton key used for the kitchen preserves cupboard. Maybe… I thought. Tom was at the airport with his high-school sweetheart, thirty-some people were waiting for me to provide dessert upstairs, my son and Julian were racing to the doctor, and I intended to solve a major murder case by ransacking shelves of… jelly?

  Tomorrow might bring better ideas, but for now, I moved in rows, holding each jam jar up to the light. Currant. Blackberry. Cherry. Blueberry. Marionberry. All these preserves were just what the labels said they were. Orange, Fig, and Grapefruit Marmalade, ditto. Feeling increasingly foolish, I began lifting the last row of jars: Strawberry Jam. Nothing. />
  I hastened into the buttery/dining room. The antique wine cabinet, an elegant mahogany piece with diamond. shaped leaded glass, had a tiny keyhole. I thought back. Julian had come in here, probably with the keys in his pocket. He’d only taken a moment to locate the mint and sherry jellies. I tried the smallest key on the ring. After a minute of my jiggling it in the lock, the glass door popped open.

  The light in the dining room was dimmer than in the kitchen. I stared hard at each jam jar as I held it up to the light. Mint Jelly, Sherry Jelly, Pear Chutney. I was beginning to feel stupid. I started on the last row of jars, Lemon Curd.

  On the tenth jar, I inhaled sharply. Pay dirt? Instead of being filled with pale golden curd, this jar was lined with… paper. I unscrewed the top and peered inside.

  Clear plastic envelopes. I pulled out one and detected the unmistakable homely profile of Queen Victoria.

  Unfortunately, before I could shout “Eureka” or even “God save the Queen,” the floor in the hallway creaked ominously. The hairs shot up on the back of my neck. As I pivoted toward the sound, Michaela burst into the kitchen, then ran into the dining room. She was clutching a saber.

  “Where are they?” she demanded. She was enraged. Her white hair, lit from behind, made her look like a banshee.

  “Where are who?”

  Michaela’s wild eyes fastened on the jar in my hand. “What is that? What are you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out why you put the stamps in here.” I took a deep breath. “It’s because you want Eliot to get caught, isn’t it? I know you hate him. I saw you fighting - “

  She burst into a humorless laugh that was more like a cackle. “You don’t know anything! I don’t hate Eliot! Quite the opposite!”