Mayhem at the Orient Express Read online

  “Okay. Sure.” In a perfect mirror image of her husband, Marianne clutched her hands together at her waist. “It’s the library. Our funding. We’re . . .” A single tear slipped down her cheek. “Oh, Alvin. What are we going to do? We’re going to lose Lucy Atwater’s grant!”

  It goes without saying that this meant something (and apparently something important, from the looks on the faces around me) to everyone but me. Newcomer, remember, and I leaned forward, to remind Marianne that I was there. And I was lost.

  “Lucy Atwater,” she said, her voice clogged with tears. “She died . . . oh, it must be twenty years ago now. Don’t you think, Chandra? Wasn’t it the winter Bill Smith over at the hatchery fell into the fish tank and drowned? It must have been right after that, because I remember Lucy telling me how much she missed Bill. They used to date, you know. Well, I’m not exactly sure it could be called dating. But they’d step out together and—”

  Alvin cleared his throat.

  Marianne gulped and collected herself and the quickly untangling threads of her story. “When Lucy died, she left the library a chunk of money. It funds most of our programs, but there’s a catch. We can only get our yearly payment if we have an ongoing book discussion group. And . . .” Marianne’s shoulders rose and fell in a slow-motion shrug. “These days no one’s signing up.”

  “People are too busy,” Kate said.

  “Yes, of course, that’s part of the problem.” Marianne dug a tissue out of her purse and touched it to her nose. “There are so many other distractions these days, books aren’t high on enough peoples’ lists. The other part of our problem is that there are so many summer visitors here to the island. They don’t sign up for programs because they know they’re not going to be around long enough to participate more than once or twice. I don’t know what to do. I’d hate for kids to come to the island in the summer and stop at the library and . . .” A fresh cascade of tears started and Alvin handed Marianne his handkerchief. She blew her nose. “Wouldn’t it just be awful for some poor, sweet child to show up at the library and find it closed?” she wailed.

  “It’s really too bad,” Kate agreed. “Now can we leave?”

  In the hope that she was actually right about something, I grabbed my purse.

  Chandra didn’t move a muscle. That is, until she slipped an arm around Marianne’s shoulders. “Of course you’re upset. Who wouldn’t be?” With her other hand, she grabbed for the denim hobo bag she’d plunked on a nearby chair when she entered the courtroom. She opened it, dug around inside, and came up holding a small glass bottle.

  “It’s neroli oil,” Chandra said, pressing the bottle into Marianne’s hand. “Rub it on your solar plexus. You know, right here.” She pressed a hand to a spot just under her own stomach. “That’s your Manipura chakra, and remember what we talked about when you came for your last crystal healing? That’s the chakra that corresponds to feelings of fear and anxiety, and that’s what we need to contend with first before we look for an answer to your problem. No worries,” she added, when Marianne gave the bottle a questioning look. “Neroli smells really nice, zesty and spicy with a little flowery note. Go on, Marianne, just pull up your sweater and—”

  “Not in my courtroom!” Alvin was on his feet again, and one look from him and Marianne blanched and handed the bottle back to Chandra.

  With a sigh of epic proportions, Kate dropped into the nearest chair and checked her text messages. “This is a perfect example of everything I’ve been telling you, Alvin,” she said, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “I told you, the woman plays sitar music. Loud. Day in and day out. Chandra’s nuts. Do you get what I’m talking about now that you see her in action? Someone needs to do something about the music and the bonfires and the chanting.”

  “Actually . . .” I stepped back, my weight against one foot, lest Alvin get lost in the moment and forget the real reason we were there. “What someone needs to do something about is Jerry Garcia. That stupid cat—”

  “Is nicer than a lot of people I know,” Chandra grumbled.

  Since she really didn’t know me, I didn’t take this personally.

  Kate dropped her phone back in her purse. “Can we leave now? It’s obvious nothing’s going to get done. And I don’t have time for this nonsense. Just tell Bea here”—she cast an icy green glance in my direction—“to cool it with Grand Central Station, and the Good Witch of the North over there . . .” She looked toward Chandra. “To put a sock in it, and—”

  “And the cat!” I butted in before Kate could get even more carried away. “Don’t forget the freakin’ cat!”

  Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed that there was a thick legal book on Alvin’s desk until he picked it up and slammed it back down.

  That got our attention. So did his voice. He spoke in what was nearly a whisper, each word so clipped and so precise, there was no doubt that he meant what he said.

  “I’ve had enough. We’re going to solve this problem once and for all. And we’re going to do it right now.”

  “Make Bea close her B and B?” Kate asked.

  “Make Chandra keep her cat inside?” I countered.

  “Make Kate turn off that horrible music?” Chandra retorted.

  Alvin banged a fist down on top of the book. “No. None of those things. What you women need to do . . .” His gaze moved from one to the other of us. “What all of you need to do is learn to get along. You’re neighbors. Start acting like it. You have to stop talking at each other and start talking to each other. And I’ll tell you what, I’m going to go down in South Bass history, because I’m the one who’s going to make sure you do it.”

  Yeah, I sounded as skeptical as I was feeling when I asked, “You’re going to sentence us to talk to each other?”

  Alvin’s smile was sleek. “I’m going to do you one better than that,” he said. “I’m going to make each of you report to the library at seven o’clock, this Monday, and every Monday for the next year. I’m sentencing you three to be a book discussion group.”

  Marianne’s miserable expression morphed into a smile.

  Chandra’s mouth dropped open.

  Kate (do I even need to say it?) rolled her eyes.

  Good thing one of us didn’t lose her head. “You can’t do that,” I said. “It’s not legal.”

  “Well, it’s not illegal,” he told me. “And believe me, it beats all the other things I could do to you. You don’t want to find out what those things are.”

  I had to agree with Alvin there.

  But just for the record, that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  From the looks on their faces, I’m pretty sure Kate and Chandra didn’t either, and I left the town hall with a cynical smile on my face, thinking it was the first thing we’d ever agreed on.

  No, at that point, we didn’t think of ourselves as the League of Literary Ladies. Not yet, anyway. I’m pretty sure we didn’t think of ourselves as anything but royally pissed, not to mention inconvenienced.

  But then, that was before the murder. And the murder?

  Well, that changed everything.

  2

  A library was the last place I wanted to be.

  Not that I hate books or anything, it’s just that . . . Well, it’s a pretty long story, and it doesn’t matter at this point, anyway. Let’s just say that I spent the weekend stewing about Alvin Littlejohn’s creative sentencing, and by the time Monday evening came around, that stew was at a rolling boil.

  At the risk of sounding too much like my across-the-street neighbor, Ms. Kate “Oh-I’m-So-Uppity” Wilder, I didn’t have time for reading books, much less talking about them. Add to that the fact that I didn’t have the patience to sit around when there was so much to do back at the place I called Bea & Bees (no, there were no hives in the garden yet, but someday I hoped there would be), and that I didn’t have the inclination to spend another minute in the company of my two unneighborly neighbors, and I confess, I almost opted for the Rambo approach. I
pictured myself barricaded in at the B and B, eating tinned meat, chopping up the furniture for fuel, and fighting to the death if anybody actually noticed I hadn’t shown up at the library and came to collect me.

  Not to worry, after a few moments of dramatic daydreaming, my cooler-headed self prevailed. She usually does.

  After all, I reminded myself, I didn’t want to not comply with Alvin’s ruling and end up on the radar screen of the Put-in-Bay Police Department.

  With that in mind, I arrived at the room in the library basement next to the boiler room, the one someone with more of an imagination than a decorating budget had dubbed the Executive Boardroom.

  I slipped off my lightweight spring jacket and flopped into a metal chair with a gray plastic seat, paying little attention to the shelves that lined three of the room’s institutional green walls. They were stacked with books, mass-market paperbacks mostly, and rather than worry which of them would be our first official homework assignment, I took off my glasses long enough to clean them on one of those lint-free cloths and ran my fingers through my unruly hair. As ready as I’d ever be, I propped my elbows on the table, braced my chin in my hands, and waited.

  Kate was the next to arrive.

  “Oh.” Obviously, she’d expected to be the first one there, and she pulled to a stop just inside the door and glanced around the room as if deciding which of the chairs at the round table would afford her the power position within the group. Since there were only five chairs, it wasn’t like she had a lot of choice.

  She slapped a leather portfolio on the table and took off her tan Burberry raincoat. “You got here early.”

  “I just finished hanging some pictures in one of the bedroom suites at home. It seemed like a good place to stop for the day.”

  “I hope the room doesn’t face Chandra’s house.” Kate took a compact out of her purse, checked her makeup and freshened her lipstick. “She might have heard the pounding on the walls and figured the spirits were trying to communicate from the Other Side.”

  Hey, the woman was a royal pain, but I had to give credit where credit was due. I laughed.

  Kate had chosen the chair directly opposite mine, and she studied me for a moment, apparently trying to decide if my amusement was genuine. I guess I passed the test, because after she glanced over her shoulder toward the door, she leaned a little nearer. “You know it’s not her real name, don’t you?”

  My questioning look said huh? way better than words could have.

  It was Kate’s turn to laugh. She had straight, even teeth, and they were blindingly white. “Chandra. Our woo-woo friend. Her real name is Sandra. A couple years ago, she insisted we all start calling her Chandra because she thought it sounded more mystical, but a lot of the old-timers still call her Sandy.”

  I felt my smile get bigger. “Sandy. Yeah. I can see that. She looks like a Sandy.”

  “And smells like a Chandra.” Kate wrinkled her nose. “All those herbs and potions and oils. I swear, if the woman put half as much effort into fixing up her house as she does into concocting all that weird stuff she’s always giving people to use, all our home values would skyrocket.”

  I had seen Chandra’s house, of course; I knew exactly what Kate meant. Though it wasn’t a dump by any means, Chandra’s place was . . . eclectic, a spare, single-story house, each outside wall painted in a different color: turquoise, orange, pink, purple. She saved the sunshiny yellow for the garage door. The house was surrounded by a veritable forest of wind chimes and fountains, gnomes and sparkly twirling suncatchers. I shuddered to think what might pop up in her overgrown garden once the weather was warm and Chandra really got into the spirit of outdoor living.

  “You’re thinking about summer.” Chalk one up for Kate; she was an annoying little twit, but she was perceptive. “When your windows are open, that’s when you’ll start hearing the music.”

  “And the cat will visit more often, I imagine.” Just thinking about it, my head started to pound. “I’m considering tiny electric fences. One for each of my flower boxes.”

  For about half a second, she thought I might actually be serious. Then her smile bloomed. “I’m thinking about something a little more irritating than opera. Hip hop?”

  I joined in the good-natured fun. “Knowing Chandra, she’d be out in the street, dancing to the beat.”

  “Broadway show tunes?”

  “I have a confession. I like Broadway show tunes. I even know most of the words. If you start playing them, I’ll start to sing. And I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear me sing.”

  “Then zydeco.”

  “Klezmer.”

  “Polkas.”

  “Yanni.”

  “No.” Kate groaned. “Chandra actually likes Yanni! You’ll hear a lot of him this summer, too.”

  By this time, we were both laughing, and I decided that maybe I’d misjudged Kate. Maybe, like me, she was annoyed at being dragged into Alvin’s courtroom—again—when she had more important things to do. And irritated about being forced to read and discuss a book she’d likely have no interest in. Maybe that explained the way she’d acted when we were in court together a few days before. Maybe Kate was simply rushed. And overworked. Maybe she really was as busy and as important as she made herself out to be.

  “The workers are nearly done at my place,” I said, proving once again that I can act like an adult when the situation calls for it. “There will be less traffic soon.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” Kate sat back. She must have just come from the family winery, because she was wearing a tweedy brown suit with flecks of orange in it that matched her hair. I was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a navy blue sweatshirt, and I felt like we’d reversed roles and that I was the country bumpkin and she was the power broker from the big city.

  “I’ve got my first guest checking in on Sunday,” I said, and maybe I wasn’t just making conversation; maybe I was reminding myself that running Bea & Bees wasn’t just my new career. It was my chance at starting over, and I planned to be as darned good at it as I was at everything else I’d ever tried in my life. “Kind of a red-letter day for me.”

  “First guest. Let’s hope it’s not the last.”

  “No reason it should be. Once the summer tourist season starts—”

  “The island will be hopping. Yeah, that’s true. Around here, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the place explodes with visitors. Fishermen, boaters, families, partiers.”

  “Which only reinforces the fact that I won’t lack for guests. I’ve already taken a few reservations for the summer season. Once I start advertising, things are bound to pick up even more.”

  “Right.”

  It wasn’t what Kate said, it was the way she said it. And the fact that she tap, tap, tapped one finger against her leather portfolio when she did.

  I hadn’t realized I sat up a little straighter until it was a done deal. “What?” I asked her.

  Her smile, so leisurely just a short time before, was suddenly tight. “That place of yours, I can’t help but wonder if there might have been a better use for land that close to the lake. It may have made more sense to tear down that monstrosity of a house than renovate it. That way, the land could have been repurposed, let’s say for—”

  “Growing grapes?” No grape was ever as sour as the sudden tone of my voice. But then, I’d just realized why those words repurposed and better use for land that close to the lake and monstrosity of a house sounded so familiar.

  “You’re the one.” I pointed an accusatory finger directly at the cute little freckles on the cute little bridge of her cute little nose. “You’re the one who submitted the objection to the township board of trustees when I first tried to buy the property. I always wondered who the troublemaker was. You!” Another jab in her direction, just for good measure. “You’re the one who wanted to stop me from opening the B and B.”

  “Busted.” She didn’t sound at all guilty about it. Kate sat back, as nonchalant as if we’d been tal
king about the weather instead of the place I hoped was going to be my home and my refuge for who knew how long. “I’ve got nothing against you personally,” she said, and she didn’t give me time to throw in a sarcastic thank you very much before she went right on. “But let’s face it, you show up here out of nowhere and chances are you don’t know anything about running a B and B on an island in the middle of Lake Erie.”

  “And that’s your business, why?”

  Her phone vibrated, and she checked the message on the screen before she said, “It’s not. And honestly, I don’t care if you succeed or go belly up. I do care that when you fail and you go running back to the mainland with your tail tucked between your legs, that hulking Victorian house of yours is going to stay empty because these days, nobody’s going to be able to afford to buy it, especially after all you’ve sunk into the renovations. It’s going to fall into shambles and that’s going to hurt everyone’s property values.”

  I didn’t even realize I was clinging to the tabletop until I looked down and saw that my knuckles were white. “That’s only if I fail,” I said, snapping my gaze to Kate’s again. “And I have no intention of failing.”

  I prayed she was about to give me some smart-alec comeback, because I was ready for her. Yeah, I had pledged to be as polite and considerate as my island neighbors, but enough was enough.

  And I’d had enough of Kate Wilder.

  Before I could make that stunningly clear, the door popped open and Chandra walked in.

  “Oh my, isn’t the feng shui off in this room!” She shivered, reached into her purse, and took out a small spritz bottle.

  “I swear, Chandra.” I slapped a hand on the table. “If you spray that, I’m going to hurt you.”