“So, talk to me, bella. Tell me about your day.”

  So Juliet told him about Weston and the tunnel and how Dolph had lied about sealing it. She then expressed something that had been troubling her from the beginning of the project.

  “There are three types of people in the world. The creators, the destroyers, and the consumers.” Esteban grunted agreement and began bolting the next section of shelf into the wall. “The creators are the most rare. I know that we are basically loners, but gathering us together is unusual and should have created some kind of synergy. But it hasn’t. And I think the lack has something to do with Dolph and his philandering. It’s poisoned the waters and made people territorial and secretive.”

  “He pissed in the creative soup?” Esteban asked.

  “I might not have expressed it that way—but yes. Something about him changed the dynamics of the project. It’s messed up the patterns and I can’t quite see the whole picture of what has happened. Yet.”

  “But you will.”

  “Yes. Eventually I will. I just hope it isn’t too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Esteban asked, turning to meet her gaze. His tanned face was filmed with perspiration. It was good that there was only one more section of shelving to go up. Juliet decided that she would finish the mirrors the next morning when it was cooler. “You are feeling fey about this place?”

  “I guess I am. There’s no proof that anything else is going on, but I have the feeling the bad things are not over yet.”

  “Then it would behoove you to be cautious, bella. It might be best if you did not work here alone. I am free tomorrow.” Esteban looked sober. “I shall come.”

  “But—”

  “I have great respect for your hunches. If there is more trouble coming then I will be here to face it with you. I know that you are very capable, but one cannot look everywhere at once. A second set of eyes and hands is best, yes?”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that except a sincere thank you.

  They finished their work about twenty minutes later and Esteban asked to see her tunnel.

  “Let’s go out the back way and avoid the workmen. I don’t want to go through the kitchen though since Manoogin and Weston are probably still there, dusting for fingerprints or something.”

  “Some fresh air would be nice. Your tower is an unpleasant place in the summer.” His eyes flicked to the sooted wall. There really was an outline of a body. It was plain once more light had bounced its way into the chamber.

  “I suspect it’s unpleasant all the time,” Juliet muttered, starting down the stairs.

  They went out through the back way, in case the news crews were still filming. Esteban had not seen the whole castle and was curious about what the artists had done. He did not seem impressed with the library, though his eyes lingered on the limestone fireplace which was carved with the faces of crusaders and quite large enough to roast a large mammal.

  He was more approving of the music room done in a quasi-French Emperor style with its oversized bust of Napoleon and the ninety thousand dollar pipe organ donated by an anonymous philanthropist. The organ wasn’t working yet, but it looked impressive enough to grace a cathedral. The giant rug on the floor was wrong though.

  Palm trees and exotic fruits like the banana tree had no place in that room, though they masked the giant gong which had somehow gotten classified as a musical instrument and tucked away in a corner.

  At last Esteban spoke.

  “It is odd that one could spend so much money and effort and still fail at creating something beautiful, or at least inviting. It is not art, it’s.…”

  “Andy Warhol,” Juliet finished. “After he had sniffed a lot of glue. Dolph kept talking about wanting something whimsical and quintessentially Californian.”

  “And the artists indulged him?”

  “Yes. For some reason they did. Only, it doesn’t come off as whimsical.”

  It was a relief to reach the outdoors. The air was still but it was fresh. They began walking toward the fence at the back of the property. The air did not remain fresh for long.

  “Ugh? What is that?”

  “The pond, but where have all the ducks gone?” Juliet asked out loud, diverting her steps toward the pond which looked a flat black with advancing sun glancing off of the thick, algae-rich water. “And the geese? They’ve been hanging out here lately.”

  “Perhaps they have migrated.” Esteban was not interested in wildlife unless it was trying to kill him.

  “Not at this time of year.”

  “Maybe the noise from the machines has discouraged them. It discourages me.” The cacophony from the courtyard was somewhat muted by the castle’s walls, but still quite audible.

  Juliet looked back at the castle. It stared at her with lidless, blind eyes that looked out of walls scoured by time and weather. It looked dead, deserted except for the lizards clinging to the rough stone, and she couldn’t imagine who would want to shut themselves away there. There had to be nicer castles for sale.

  “Maybe.” She sighed as another man hove into view. “Prepare yourself. You are about to have the pleasure of meeting Manoogin’s partner.”

  Weston, who had likely seen them from the kitchen, joined Juliet and Esteban out by the pond. His posture suggested that he wasn’t happy to be outside. If the policeman was trying to like her, he wasn’t having much success at it. And since he was not the kind to gracefully yield his prejudices, he was about as subtle as an anvil.

  “It’s a shame what a lack of humor and paranoia will do to a man.” Juliet considered the preemptive measure of shoving him into the dirty water before he could speak and say something offensive. She could pretend to trip….

  “Don’t do it, bella,” Esteban said quietly, but he sounded more amused than alarmed.

  “I won’t. Not if he behaves.”

  “Manoogin wants to see you before you leave,” Weston said abruptly, stopping about ten feet back. His squint looked a lot like a scowl and his nose was wrinkled. That could be because of the pond stench.

  Juliet decided to change tactics and see if she could kill him with kindness.

  “Detective Weston, this is Esteban Rodriquez. Esteban makes puppets. He has been kind enough to help me hang some shelves up in the tower room.”

  Weston fought an internal battle and basic manners won. It probably helped that Esteban wasn’t female.

  “How do you do?” He nodded but didn’t offer his hand.

  “If you see Lieutenant Manoogin before we do, would you tell him that we’ll be in directly?” Juliet asked.

  “Tell him yourself. I’m leaving.” Apparently nodding had used up his supply of good manners. Then Juliet saw that he was looking past her. She turned. The lieutenant was walking up from the fence along the service road at the back of the property. Though separated by the hurricane fence, the pond was only a short distance from the hidden tunnel. Judging by the state of his clothing, Manoogin had been out exploring the hillside outside the tunnel and along the fence.

  The lieutenant looked hot and exasperated but spoke pleasantly enough.

  “I’m glad that I caught you,” he said, staring at Weston as the man retreated. “What is eating him?”

  “I don’t think he cares for the pond,” Esteban said. “It does smell a little like a septic tank.”

  “Or he doesn’t like me. Though I don’t even smell bad.”

  Manoogin shook his head, clearly dismissing his partner’s moodiness.

  “So what’s up?” Juliet asked.

  “It seems Stephanie Gillard has disappeared. Her significant other has filed a missing person’s report. She has been gone since the day of the murder. The security guard said that she got to the castle around ten, but no one else admits to seeing her after that. We’ve searched the castle but there is no sign of her.”

  “You believe this is related to Dolph’s murder?” Juliet asked.

  “I think it is probably best to assume it. She is friends with Antonia Warren who remodeled the kitchen and might well have known about the entrance to the wine cellar. By the way, it turns out the Mrs. Ex-Kingman wasn’t quite a legal ex when Dolph got engaged to Brittany Saxon, who apparently also has a not quite ex of her own that her family was unaware of. He is a souvenir of a drunken weekend in Cabo.” Manoogin clearly did not approve of such goings on.

  “I bet if Dolph knew about that he was angry, however bigamous his own state.” Juliet was talking to herself, but both men were staring. “Manoogin, do you know what’s happened to the ducks?”

  Now they were both staring hard. Juliet tried not to sigh.

  “Is it relevant?” he asked.

  “Bella?” Esteban was more used to how her mind worked.

  Juliet walked to the edge of the pond and peered into the murky depths. It was slimy, foul.

  “I don’t know. I think that it might be.” She looked around the shoreline, first while trying to focus on some irregularity in the landscape and then again without any effort, letting her eyes explore where they willed. Some things, like movement, were better detected when the gaze was unfocused.

  The eyes finally snagged on something. Juliet turned and began walking toward the fence and its plants which were slightly wilted to one side. She followed it to the left corner where it joined up with what was left of the masonry wall. The spiny privet was uniformly green under its layer of construction dust, but to the left the leathery shrubs were flaccid. It was only a small patch, about three feet worth. The other privet a few inches farther on looked healthy.

  “It’s been cut,” she said to Manoogin who reached out and lifted the dead branches away. The ends were cleanly chopped and not broken. “The fence has been cut too. The mend is careless, hurried.”

  No one asked why the fence had been cut, though Juliet could think of two good reasons.

  “I’ll have it dusted for prints, but there won’t be any, will there?” Manoogin asked, a bit wearily.

  “No. But I suppose it is best to go through the motions in case this ever comes to trial.”

  Chapter 8

  That night Juliet dreamed about the murder. Not Dolph’s, but about the poor woman in the chimney. Her death had been officially neglected, at least so far, in favor of the current homicide. Which made perfect sense, given that there was a killer on the loose who could possibly harm someone else. The woman’s killer had already passed beyond doing any more harm or legal justice.

  Facts were still few, but one of the things they did know about her was that she had departed the world under peculiar and violent circumstances.

  Dreams could be vehicles of the subconscious and her brain was obviously pondering the dead woman’s fate. Only the dead woman in the chimney had died from stabbing, not drowning in the duck pond.

  “Why would I…?” she asked the cat in a scratchy voice.

  After a few moments of thought she reached for her phone and called Esteban. It was still mostly dark, but he didn’t seem to sleep much.

  “You’re up early, bella. Why does this alarm me?”

  “Look, I could be all wrong but … I think I need to have a better look at that duck pond. And I would rather not do it alone.”

  He sighed.

  “I am willing, but must be paid for my labors.”

  “Okay. Pumpkin cupcakes?”

  “And coffee. There must be coffee.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Do you want Raphael to join us?”

  Juliet sighed in turn.

  “Yes. And that makes me the most selfish woman on the planet. Let me call him. I may as well find out how many cupcakes this will cost me and phone in an order to go.”

  Raphael cut into Juliet’s apologies and said he could be ready in fifteen minutes. Esteban was at her bungalow in five and had to wait while she brushed her teeth and fed an annoyed Marley who could tell that Juliet was planning on another day away.

  They made a quick stop in town and then ate their cupcakes in the car. Juliet forced herself to partake though her stomach was tied in knots.

  “Are you afraid that we will find something in the pond?” Raphael asked. “Or that we will not?”

  Juliet laughed a little ruefully.

  “I am going to look like an idiot if nothing is there. But that would be better than what I fear we shall find. There had to be a reason for cutting that fence and for the ducks and geese to disappear.”

  They parked at the back of the castle on the service road since it was closer and let themselves in through the opening cut in the wire enclosure.

  “Juliet,” Raphael began.

  “I know.” She got out her phone. “I’ve been putting it off. Manoogin is going to hate me for this.”

  The detective didn’t say anything to indicate annoyance, but she had the feeling that her request for him to meet them at the duck pond did not make him happy.

  “We are going to need something to drag along the bottom. A hook of some kind,” Juliet said when she tucked her phone away. The morning was glorious and peaceful since work hadn’t started yet. A glancing ray of early sun on the dark water seemed substantial enough to touch as it reflected back into the air.

  They finished off the coffee in Juliet’s thermos while they waited, staying upwind of the dark pond, and after a couple moments Esteban went to the castle to find some kind of dragging tool.

  Manoogin, also having parked at the back fence, arrived just as Esteban was returning from the castle with a twelve-foot piece of rebar. He had bent the end to a more or less ninety degree angle.

  “How cold is the water?” Raphael asked Esteban as he watched the detective picking his way over the ground. “It’s spring fed?”

  “It’s not cold enough,” Juliet answered. “It’s fed by a spring but the level is falling and the algae would not be this thick if it were cold enough to preserve a body.”

  They all took a bracing breath.

  “So rigor will have worn off. That will make it more difficult to retrieve the body,” Esteban said calmly and bent the rebar into more of a hook. He began removing his shoes and socks, setting them on a clean rock. The ground was slimy with goose droppings. “The body will probably be weighted.”

  The odorous pond had been shrinking and at that point was no more than twenty feet across. The rebar was about eleven feet long. It wasn’t enough to drag the entire bottom of the pond since it sloped at about a twenty degree angle but it would get close. And it didn’t seem likely that the killer had waded out into the middle of the muck to dispose of the corpse.

  “Start over there,” Juliet said, pointing. The water seemed completely calm but the detritus and algae had gathered on one side, suggesting there was some underwater current. It was also the side closest to the fence.

  “It isn’t the best place to hide a body. Not permanently,” Raphael said.

  Manoogin stayed quiet.

  Esteban removed his shirt, folded it tidily, and then cast the hook into the water. The pole brought up nothing but rotting sludge.

  “I don’t think the killing was planned,” Juliet said. “And the murderer wanted a place to hide the corpses away from the castle at least for a while. Someplace that the vultures wouldn’t find. At a guess, I would say they were ultimately headed for the old cemetery. The ground would be easier to dig and one wouldn’t have to run the risk of being found with a body in the trunk of a car.”

  “Corpses?” Manoogin finally spoke. “More than one?”

  “I think Dolph would have ended up here too if there had been more time. Sandra spoiled things by showing up early from lunch. She’s lucky the killer didn’t have it in for her as well.”

  Esteban cast the hook again. Under other circumstances Juliet would have enjoyed watching him work. The scars on his torso did nothing to detract from his beauty and he moved with an efficiency that bordered on grace. She wondered if Raphael was also wishing he had a sketch book on hand.

  Manoogin had noticed the scars, but he said nothing about them. He would have had Esteban’s biography by then and known what each bullet hole meant.

  “I’ve noticed that you are a little focused when you work,” Manoogin said at last. The tone was conversational and Juliet was grateful that he wasn’t the type to show a lot of unrest and emotion.

  Juliet had been told that she went so dead in the face when she communed with her inner oracle that she looked like something attacked by the Medusa.

  “You take the good with the bad,” she said, shrugging. She didn’t want to talk about her methodologies. Her new life was supposed to be a refuge, a garden she cultivated for her crushed spirit. It pissed her off that murders kept cluttering it up. How was she ever going to regrow her soul?

  Except she was regrowing it. Slowly, unevenly, but her spirit was healing in the quiet, with her art and with her friends.

  “Build thee more stately mansions, o my soul,” she said to herself.

  Manoogin would not understand, but Raphael would. Did. He had had to rebuild his life too.

  “Revenge, or money?” Raphael asked.

  “Revenge. Mostly. But I think money played a part too.”

  “It’s a shame that really complete revenge almost always involves a body count. Most people simply aren’t that inventive.”

  Juliet nodded agreement.

  “As we all know, Dolph was into casual sex. The trouble was that he forgot to mention this to his partners. Some women and men, even in this day and age, don’t do casual anything. Not relationships, not investments. And especially not the two together. Artists, though I hate to say this, are especially emotional and this time he picked the wrong woman to scorn. Dolph probably never realized that he had entered into a non-survivable relationship. He was unobservant that way. If he had guessed, he would have gone down fighting instead of to an ambush.”

  Juliet didn’t say anything more about Dolph or the women he had been involved with. It would have been redundant.

  “So, we are looking at a female killer?” Manoogin asked.

  “Probably. Though there is still room for argument that it could be a man. Some women come with protectors.” She refrained from looking at Raphael.

 

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