~ Bed And Breakfast Murders ~

by

Billie A Williams

Trudy grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself as she stared in disbelief. She hadn’t imagined it. The Amazon--the words stung her as they struck home. She also realized then she never even knew her name. A guest had died at the Slipper and she never even knew who the woman was.

Forms, shadows gathered around the body in the periphery of her view, she couldn’t pull herself away from the sight of the gold handled knife standing there so regal in the woman’s back.

“Call emergency rescue,” a baritone room encompassing voice collided with her thoughts. Nothing seemed real. Not the voice, not the woman lying on the floor, not the gold handled dagger plunged deep between her shoulder blades--perhaps it was her scream she’d heard. Did she scream, or was it someone else, her own scream that still echoed in her head?

“Trudy, my God, Trudy,” she heard Alexandra’s voice outside the fog. Alexandra took her shoulders and forced her to turn away from the view of the body.

Unglued from the scene Trudy regained her composure. “Call nine-one-one. I must,” her own voice sounded disjointed, hollow in her ears, “Yes, call.”

“Here you sit, I’ll call. Marquis, grab that afghan from the couch and put it over the woman, will you please?”

One of the shadow men leaned down to pull the knife from her back.

“No! Don’t touch,” Alexandra said as she dashed to the phone. Alexandra’s face drained of color as though some one had pulled a drain plug. She shook the phone and pushed frantically at the disconnect button. Trudy knew in an instant the phone was as dead as the woman in the kitchen doorway.

“Now what?” she said.

Trudy sat staring at the men who stared back at her. None of them showed any emotion about the death. The thought struck her, someone in this house is a murderer and I’m stranded here with them. “We’ll have to get Max and Jamison to... no, that won’t work, we can’t jeopardize their lives. This woman is already dead, there is no help for her,” Trudy said.

The noise from the living room reminded her the television was still on. Life went on as usually in the rest of the world. Once again things had stopped turning in her life, in Orenda, at Zero Cemetery Lane. She was beginning to wonder if Faith Yachne hadn’t been right and The Slipper needed to be burned, not renovated.

Since none of the men seemed emotionally involved with this woman she reasoned one of them must have been the killer. “Will you all go back to what you were doing? Where you were before I screamed. There is nothing we can do for her. We will have Jamison and Max move her.”

“I’ll go get them,” Alexandra said slipping back into her winter clothes.

Trudy wasn’t sure she wanted to be left alone in the house with a murderer. “Okay,” she said thinking her choices were extremely limited in this instance.

The shadow men retreated to the living room. “Maybe I can assist,” Marquis said.

“Who is... was she?” Trudy asked.

“I’m afraid I do not know, dear lady.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Exactly that,” his voice, baritone and booming, never moderated from a pleasant loudness and yet it filled the room much as a stage actor learns to project his voice. He offered nothing further.

The shadows merely stood a short distance off, soundless, emotionless. Time seemed frozen in that moment of discovery until Jamison and Max burst through the door.

“What in biddy hell, who offed the old bag?” Max said in his brutish manner. He never seemed to temper his words. He just blurted them out without apparent thought of their impact.

“I’m afraid we have no clue who off--stabbed Mrs., Ms, the lady.”

Alexandra finished her snow dance and stood next to Trudy staring down at the big woman; blood had begun to ooze around the knife as Jamison turned her to check for pulse or breathing. “She’s dead all right. How’d it happen? Who stabbed her?” he said looking around at the male guests.

“No one seems to know,” she turned to Alexandra “And get this, no one knows who she is... was.”

“Now wait a New York minute, I’m gullible, maybe even a little naïve, but...” she waved her hand toward the men. “They were traveling with her, weren’t they?”

“Yes and no,” said Marquis finally.

Jamison and Max lifted the body onto the tarp they brought in from the shed. “Where shall we put her?”

Trudy couldn’t bear the thought of sharing the house with another corpse, but until they could get the coroner and the police here she had little choice. “Let’s put her out in the summer porch bedroom. That way she will remain cool and won’t start to decompose as quickly. I’m sure Chief Hahn will have a million questions once we get through to him, and the knife will need to be fingerprinted.” Dread began to wash over her again as she realized yellow crime scene tape may once again decorate the rooms of the Slipper.

“Well, if no one knows who she is we need to go through her belongings to see if we need to notify someone, next of kin, whomever,” Alexandra said.

Trudy watched the two men carrying the Amazon woman like yesterday’s garbage. “Could you move her with at least a shred of dignity? She was, after all, a guest here.” It would seem all the Slipper’s guests go out feet first, she thought. Mother, Linda, Cilla and Pastor Black, John Wanita, though they weren’t all really guests, they were tied to the Slipper. What of all the skeletons in the dungeon, the bodies in the garden... “I should have known better,” she said aloud.

“Known what, that someone was going to be murdered here? Are you clairvoyant, too, now?

“I think I should go back to being a rodeo clown. At least there I knew who my enemies were and where the danger was.”

“Didn’t stop that bull from busting you up though, did it?”

“The barrel was defective,” Trudy said.

“Yeah right! After someone defected it, it sure was.”

“Okay, so maybe bad luck follows me. We better see if the television weather channel can tell us anything about this storm, when it will clear out--what the next couple days look like.”

“Then if anyone still has an appetite we may as well get lunch out of the way.”

Trudy wasn’t encouraged by the two day outlook. Living in a blizzard for two days wasn’t her idea of fun, especially not since a murderer was sharing their lodgings. If it hadn’t started as a rain and snow mix--all the ifs in the world won’t change, won’t solve this dilemma.

Alexandra and Trudy prepared the chicken soup and sandwiches they had planned for lunch without conversation.

Jamison and Max joined the guests at the table as did Trudy and Alexandra. Trudy had questions she wanted answered. She waited until the pleasantries and the-pass-this-pass-that lunch conversation turned to serious soup slurping. Marquis wasn’t slurping his; that definitely was not his style.

“As owner and hostess of The Pink Lady Slipper, I would like to apologize for this bizarre turn of events. Though I can’t control the weather, and that has caused us some major problems, it has made a mess of your visit with us. The death of your companion has shocked and saddened me. I have some questions I really and truly need answered if you wouldn’t mind.” She looked around the table--all eyes were on her, heads nodding, shoulders shrugging--it reminded her of a Sunday School class she had taught.

“Okay, who was the lady you were all traveling with?” More shrugs. “Are all you gentleman companions of Marquis?” More shrugs.

“Perhaps I should explain if I may,” Marquis began.

“Please do,” Trudy said feeling frustrated and apprehensive with the responses she had gotten so far.

“You see, I was traveling from my country and I arrived in the airport at--I believe you call it O’Hare--in your Chicago. This is so strange to have my luggage searched and I was in quite a state about it. This, woman who is now dead, came beside me and told them--the police security... whatever you name them, that I was indeed not carrying contraband or terrorist devices. They looked at her identification and let me pass quickly.”

Trudy listened with rapt attention, but it still did not explain how they managed to wind up at The Slipper. “You never saw her before in your life?”

“Never. She was the very kindest person. She helped me. So when she asked if I could do a favor for her--call here make the reservations--and accompany her here, how could I refuse?”

“I can’t believe you wouldn’t have at least gotten her name,” Alexandra said.

Trudy agreed but so many farfetched things had happened to her already that she was prepared to believe just about anything now a days. “Okay, so where did you pick up the silent shadows?” she said motioning to the other men who had not yet ventured to utter a word to her or anyone else.

“These, I gather, are some brotherhood. The woman also got them safe passage at a place in Chicago that we stopped. They cannot speak--she said their tongues have been removed.”

Alexandra and Trudy looked at each other and then at the shadow men. That would explain their silence. But why, who, would cut their tongues out and why?

“I know you have questions about this. I am afraid I have never seen the tradition except in Sicily where it is a practice for those who would be in the service of the Master.”

“And by the master I assume you mean, the Don, or the head of the Family?” Trudy couldn’t believe that this barbaric tradition was still carried out. If it were true, it was also possible that one of those men were the one who killed her only female guest. She studied them closely--little men with beady black eyes. Could they understand and write in English? she wondered. She walked to her desk in the corner of the room and withdrew a slip of paper from one of the drawers. She wrote on it ‘Do you understand English,’ and returned and handed it to one of the men. He looked at the paper and handed it back to her. No sound came from his lips. She handed him the pen. He studied the pen, took the paper and wrote some words in a language she didn’t understand. She took the paper and handed it to Alexandra.

“Greek to me,” she said.

“Don’t look at me,” Jamison said. “I ain’t never studied no foreign language. I have enough trouble with English.”

Max just shook his head and put his hands up in a defensive motion--obviously he wouldn’t know either.

Marquis took the paper and studied it briefly. “I believe it’s Polish. I have seen that language a time or two. I cannot understand it, but I can recognize the form.”

Wonderful, Trudy thought. They may or may not be mafia, they may or may not be Polish, they may be murderers who can’t communicate with the rest of us--just knock us off one at a time.

Max and Jamison left to go tend to the chores in the barn and left Trudy to her own devices to figure out how they were going to get police help. Someone was a murderer, but who? She couldn’t begin to imagine. The idea of Marquis being a murderer was totally ridiculous. The other men were not actually connected to the woman and she did rescue them--they wouldn’t kill her, would they? Her questions only gave her more questions, not answers. She hoped Xavier would try to reach her and, finding the phone not working, perhaps he would decide to come out and investigate. All she could do was hope and pray.

She got up from the table and began clearing away the lunch dishes, no further ahead than she was when the Amazon woman collapsed in the doorway. What did she see or hear before the woman was stabbed? She wracked her brain trying to hear, see, smell and feel the atmosphere before she saw the murdered woman collapse.