“Hundreds and hundreds?” Juliet asked with dismay.

  “Oh my, yes. Roses grow all over the world, you know, except maybe in the arctic, and US growers have started importing everything they can get ahold of.”

  Juliet reviewed the heritage of every artist on the project.

  “Any from Ecuador or Hungary?”

  “I should think so,” Rose answered from inside. “I think they’re called Hungaricums. There is one named Saint Elisabeth of Hungary. It was supposed to have grown up out of the saint’s body or something dreadful like that. They call it the miracle of the roses. And Ecuador exports roses, tinted ones, but I think that’s a fairly new thing. They have one that’s popular called a BellaRosa. It’s red.”

  “So, the rose has a name? I mean, it’s not just like Ecuadorian red climbing rose or Hungarian yellow bush rose?”

  “Good heavens. Of course they have individual names. Like I said, roses grow on every continent except Antarctica. How else would we keep track? You can’t walk into a nursery and say I want a red bush rose with a hint of white, mossy leaves, and moderate citrus scent and expect them to find it for you. Trying to describe what you want that way would be almost impossible. Anyway, it wouldn’t be romantic.” Rose reappeared and handed Juliet a thick catalogue filled with colored pictures and, yes, hundreds and hundreds of names in print so tiny she had to squint.

  “Do any of them have female names?”

  “Almost all,” Rose said unhelpfully.

  “Well…. Thank you. I certainly have my job cut out for me. Um, have you ever heard of a rose called Stephanie Gillard or Sandra Kane?”

  “No, but I am hardly familiar with all of them. There could be ones called that. Stephanie is a very pretty name.”

  Thankfully, Rose didn’t watch the news or read newspapers.

  It seemed doubtful that Dolph, who had never expressed the slightest interest in any plant, would have known about lady roses, but a woman might very well be aware of the connection, especially if she had been named after a particular flower by a fond granny or aunt.

  Juliet sighed. Hunting up appellations could take forever. She’d have to get the name of every woman—

  “Rose, you said they were mostly called after women, but are there plants named after men too?”

  “Yes. It was often male explorers who discovered roses in their travels. Oh, there’s the kettle!” She hurried back inside and missed Juliet’s frown.

  So, she would need to get the name of every woman and man on the project site and try to match them to the names in the catalogue. The men were a long shot and she would save them for last, but it would have to be done if she didn’t get a match with the feminine names. Juliet pulled the glossy magazine open, hoping that the roses were listed alphabetically. Of course, they were not. This catalogue seemed to group roses by growing habits and scent. And first names, not last.

  “Here you go. Some nice ginger peach tea. So, are you off to the castle today?”

  “Yes. Esteban is going to help me hang my tapestries. It’s a two-person job.”

  “Carrie says they are lovely.” Rose sounded just slightly hurt that Juliet had shown her work to another neighbor and not Rose herself.

  “You’re coming to the open house, aren’t you?” Juliet asked. “You’ll see them then and can make up your mind. And they’ll be hanging properly. It was kind of Carrie to say they are lovely, but I don’t see how she could tell with the fabric stuck to the screens and velvet fluff everywhere. Frankly, until I vacuumed them, they looked like molting birds.”

  Rose was appeased. She knew Juliet preferred that people not look at her work in progress. Actually, Juliet didn’t care who saw her work at any stage, but she hated being distracted by visitors while she was busy with fast-drying fabric paints, and allowed people to believe that she was a temperamental artist who required solitude for her art.

  Wanting to get the day over with, Juliet gulped her tea as quickly as she could without scalding herself and then went back to her bungalow to pack up the tapestries. The older ones were dry and could be transported with only minimal protection of the velvet flocking. The latest set were still not entirely dry. They would have to go in last and be sandwiched between layers of acid-free tissue paper.

  She and Esteban worked efficiently, but it took a long while to carry up the tapestries and get them mounted and to put batteries in all the various candles and lamps and get them positioned. They were on timers, set to spring to life at eleven a.m., the time that the castle opened to the public for the home tour.

  Juliet knew that she was blessed in her friends. It wasn’t just everyone who would come to work in a hot, dark tower where a body had been bricked into the fireplace, no matter how attractive the room had turned out when all the work was done. The tower had probably seen many deaths and births and other calamities of war. The woman’s murder was just one more dark event. Still she was glad to hang a tapestry shroud over the shadow that had not cleaned away as well as the soot. Hiding the outline made her feel less like there should be funeral flowers in the room.

  Juliet shook her head at her thoughts. She could be as unreasonable as anyone when she put her mind to it.

  The sun was westering when Juliet had the last tapestry draped on its wrought-iron bar. Looking through the mirrored slit in the southwest window she could see a patch of ground that she hadn’t noticed before. Though overgrown it wasn’t as heavily forested as the rest of the estate grounds and it was rectangular in shape. In the slanting light she could also see that it was filled with smaller rectangles, about a hundred and fifty of them if she was correct in her multiplication of rows and columns. The shapes were not distinct and she doubted that they had been touched since the original interment. So much for the story about the bodies being moved.

  “Damn.”

  “What is it?” Esteban asked as he packed up his drill. He was tired and sweaty.

  “I’ve found the old cemetery.”

  “Oh.” He came to join her at the window. “But they moved all the graves, yes?”

  “They moved the headstones. They were supposed to move the bodies too, but that usually didn’t happen. It’s expensive, you know, and a lot of the patients from the hospital would have been paupers. Besides, who wants to deal with diseased and rotting corpses?”

  Esteban looked out the narrow window.

  “Do you need to do anything about this?” His voice indicated nothing about how he felt.

  Juliet reviewed an old rule from her days at the NSA. Did anything need to be said? Did it need to be said right then? Did it need to be said by her?

  “Not at the moment,” she answered. “Maybe not ever. I really hate to give the press anything else to write about, and what can it matter after all this time? It isn’t like that property is going to be developed.”

  “They are still with us, the gentlemen of the fourth estate?” Esteban asked.

  Juliet looked out the other window.

  “Yes.” She didn’t quibble at the term gentlemen though she rejected it in her own mind. The buzzards of the fourth estate had encircled the castle, hoping for more bodies or even a chance to see a murder happen. Unless someone got assassinated in San Francisco or they uncovered the lost city of Atlantis off the coast of Santa Cruz, they were probably stuck with the bored news crews for a few more days.

  Juliet turned from the window.

  “Esteban, I can’t thank you enough for all the help. It would have taken me forever to finish this room and I have to admit to being unnerved by this place.”

  “Bella, there is a killer at large. You should be unnerved.”

  “I know, but it isn’t the killer that is bothering me. At least, not only the killer. It’s this horrid place. It felt wrong to me from the moment I saw it baking on the hill. I thought maybe finding that poor woman’s body—”

  “Cornelia Barton,” Esteban supplied. “That was the name of the nurse who disappeared. I also talked with a friend in the coroner’s office. They have done some preliminary work.”

  He hesitated.

  “She was pregnant when she was killed?” Juliet guessed.

  “Yes, about five months along.”

  “And her lover, probably married and in danger of losing his position if there was a scandal, decided to take a sure way out of his difficulties.”

  “We don’t know that for certain, but … yes. I believe so. If it had been a patient who attacked her, there would have been some police investigation and the body would not have been hidden in a place used only by staff.”

  Patients. Juliet recalled the dead man in the bricked-up tunnel. Had he seen something or heard something he shouldn’t? Was that why he had died?

  “How many men were working at the hospital back then?” she asked.

  “There were three who were here full-time. The head doctor was Maurice Blair. He was married. There was also one male nurse, unmarried. His name was Karl Potter. And there was a gardener, a widower called Clarence Swift.”

  “So, chances are it was this Maurice Blair who killed her. He had the most to lose.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Esteban, sometimes I hate people. I truly do.”

  “I know, bella. Some days we all do.”

  That night, Juliet sat down at her makeshift desk, pushing away sketches and notebooks to make room for her to work. Her other work.

  People had patterns. Killers too. And Juliet was usually able to see them, whether she wanted to or not. For a while she had been confused, but not any longer. Since this wasn’t a common talent and Manoogin had asked for her help, there would probably be karmic repercussions if she turned her back on these murders.

  But she wanted to. She wished passionately that she could. She wanted to forget the day that the door in her mind opened, showing her a new way to see the world, and eventually attracting the men in blue suits who had been waiting for someone like her to come along. They never went away, those suits, and were always nearby, urging her to step through the looking glass and tell them what she saw. She wanted to forget the day that she had stepped into the gray world of “intelligence” and lost what innocence she had. Solving another murder would just draw their attention again.

  Unless she could get Manoogin to leave her out of things?

  Juliet looked again at the catalogue Rose had leant her and then sensibly opted for the Internet and its searchable databases, even though she knew that she was probably being surveilled anytime she went online. There were websites for everything. There had to be one that would have the name of every rose on the planet. And if her old friends at the NSA knew that she was looking up flowers, who cared? Surely that couldn’t raise any red flags.

  It took a while but she methodically entered the name of every artist, decorator, and contractor she knew on the project and followed it with the word rose. Finally there was a match. Juliet stared at the name, not entirely surprised to see it. The rose pictured next to the label was lovely, a light pink with a golden center. It was one of the hybrid rubiginosas.

  A rose by another name.

  Juliet reached for the phone. She hung up a moment later, her intuition confirmed. Manoogin had managed to track down the watch’s purchaser. Combined with the unique sawdust found on Dolph’s body from wood used in only one project, it was enough to bring the killer in for questioning.

  Something else was explained. Dolph and Stephanie showed evidence of hemorrhagic effusion into the cranium. That meant that they had been hit on the head before having their necks broken. The killer had taken no chances. She didn’t want them hurt. She wanted them dead.

  Marley came and sat in her lap. He began trying to knead her into a more comfortable bed.

  “What about it, cat? Is there anything we can do about poor Cornelia Barton and the unknown man in the basement?”

  The cat stopped pawing her legs. Marley mewed and walked over to Juliet’s small trunk where she kept her rarer inks.

  “I agree. We must certainly see that she is buried. But not in the hospital cemetery. She and her baby need to go home—wherever home was. Hopefully Esteban can figure it out.”

  Marley mewed again. The cat also had great faith in Esteban.

  Chapter 11

  The wine was mediocre, as were the canapés, and only the most voracious guests were going in for seconds. The string quartet in the courtyard was a nice touch, but Juliet had some doubts about the piper in the turret, though most people probably felt that if there had to be bagpipe music welcoming them to the castle, sticking the piper on top of the tower and as far from the conversing crowds as possible was a wise decision since one had to be heard in order to coax money from the guests.

  Though the majority of the partygoers didn’t look like the kind of people who had bulging Italian leather handbags and sharkskin wallets with money that wanted to invest itself in strange real estate. Most of them were lookie-loos, gawkers who wanted to see the place where there had been a triple homicide. There would be media coverage, but a lot of it would be about the killings and very little about the castle itself.

  Juliet made an effort to appear genial but it was difficult when she felt like people were walking over her grave. She didn’t know most of them, but even among the artists there were some bad hats and only the Shadow knew what evil lurked in the hearts of her fellow men. And women.

  She also wanted out of her heels. Another hour with her hips and back in lordosis and she would need a chiropractor. The clothing was necessary though. It was a transference of power and professionalism from her old life to her new one. The leopard needed her spots. It was her body armor.

  She had squandered some energy on a fast tour because it had seemed important to walk over the castle and see the other artists before the public arrived and began inflicting themselves on the old stones. She had even been to the top of the tower to see the new garden they had planted the day before. The few annuals in barrels wouldn’t last without some kind of shade and water, since the Santa Ana winds were blowing and sucking the life out of everything. But no one was thinking much beyond the open house. Juliet dumped what was left of her bottle of water on them but it had beaded on the dry potting soil and then disappeared under the lash of the wind without ever reaching the roots. Juliet did not linger.

  A screeching child ran by and started up the tower stairs. She supposed she should follow to make sure that neither the child nor her hangings came to harm, but she was reluctant to leave her post where she had a clear view of the entrance to the great hall.

  Children…. Juliet was philosophically opposed to the modern idea that children should be welcomed everywhere. Events with champagne—however cheap—and caviar—even cheaper—should not include small people who flung crackers and cereal at one another and who shrieked for no reason except to enjoy the loud echoes of their voices. It seemed like their cries made the giant chandelier cobbled together of brass oil lamps shiver in its tethers. The giant chains that held it up were massive, but they didn’t seem strong enough once the lamps began swaying.

  Weston was there, sober but sneering, a little black raincloud that everyone instinctively avoided. His presence effectively damped what little enthusiasm there had been for this opening night party among the artists and contractors.

  Manoogin was little better, strolling about with an aura of anticipatory gloom as he overlooked the cast of extras that were littering up this drama, taking inventory of their characters and then dismissing them from consideration. In her own way Juliet did this too; she just hoped that she wasn’t so obvious about it.

  Juliet wasn’t eating any of the strange hors d’oeuvres the caterers urged upon her. She was not so destitute that she had to grab a free meal when one was available and the heat-wilted cheese looked suspect to her. She liked her food to have a bit of life left in it. Besides, Raphael had promised her and Esteban a spectacular meal when the open house was over; she owed it a good appetite. She did carry a small plate and napkin for protective coloring as she moved among the crowds, looking and listening for signs of her quarry.

  The conversation wasn’t even interesting to eavesdrop on. None of the guests knew anything and the artists weren’t talking much. Death hadn’t conferred sainthood on Dolph but no one was going to say much about what they had really thought about him as long as the cameras were around. There was a lot of such a tragedy and what a loss.

  Sandra Kane sidled up to Juliet. She had swathed herself in layers upon layers of cream and yellow chiffon whose various V and scoop necklines made for a strange décolleté. She was even wearing what looked like green bloomers but was probably the bottom half of a belly dancer’s costume. Her hair was moussed to its full height giving it the appearance of roots and she looked like an inverted green onion. She also began to sweat as she moved closer to the unnecessary fire that had been kindled in the massive hearth. It burned as cheerily as any in hell and Juliet hoped Sandra didn’t stray too close. A stray spark could send her highly flammable outfit up like a Roman candle.

  “I—I’m having some doubts about the dining room. I’m not sure that people get it,” Sandra confessed. She started to run a hand through her hair but stopped. That was probably best because her hedgehog was already looking agitated.

  “But why?” Juliet asked, hoping to forestall an artistic crisis before a full meltdown ensued. “I think the table looks like burnished armor and nothing could be more appropriate in a castle. And, frankly, I don’t think this is a crowd that is going to get anything.”

  “Really?” She seemed to brighten. “They do seem to be … regular.”

  “Oh yes, very regular. The dining room is wonderful.”

  A lie of that magnitude required the crossing of more fingers and toes than Juliet possessed, so she didn’t even try. She just hoped she wouldn’t be struck dead by the gods of art and armor.

 

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