Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

“You have all this, and you still find reasons to kill people.”

I smiled and turned my back to the French windows. As I spoke my voice came back at me with a hollow echo. “Enough of this weather might drive me to murder.” I started pacing slowly across the room, studying the wall. “Sidartha, Gotama Buddha, said that everything in this world is always unsatisfactory.”

Dehan crossed the floor to look out the windows. Her voice reverberated down at me out of the dome. “I bet he was invited to all the parties. Didn’t they cast him as Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh?”

I kept smiling to myself and nodded. “Yup!”

We both turned. She looked at me with one eyebrow raised. The silver, pre-storm light lay silvery blue across the planes of her face, making her look oddly like a Norse daemon. “They did?”

“No.” There was a small couch beside a potted palm up against the wall. I sat on it and considered her where she stood, half in shadow, half ghostly silver-blue. “He said that we are driven by craving and aversion. We perpetually either need something we haven’t got: a wife, a husband, a castle, a fortune, freedom… Or we want to be free of something we have but don’t want: a wife, a husband, a father, a mother, a prison, poverty… You know. All those things people kill for. He called it ‘dukkha’ and said it was the source of all pain and suffering in the world. It was one of his four basic truths.”

She made a face, then shoved her hands in her pockets, turned her back to the windows and fell into darkness.

“So if you want to be happy, all you have to do is stop wanting good stuff and stop caring about the bad shit that happens in life. Good luck with that.”

“There is something wrong here, Dehan.”

Her disembodied voice said, “What do you mean?”

I chewed my lip and shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Cool.”

“Walk through it with me.”

“Weren’t you the one saying we were on honeymoon?”

“Mm-hm…” I nodded absently, not really listening. “Who gained from his death?”

She paced away from the window, deeper into shadow, looking down at her feet. “The obvious prime suspect is Charles Gordon Sr. He had the most to gain. Freedom to marry the girl he loved and inheritance of a major fortune.”

“But?”

She stopped, still staring at her feet, and nodded slowly, then shrugged. “But he didn’t really love her, though he married her anyway, and by all accounts he had resolved his conflict with his father. He was still the heir.”

“Who else?”

She turned and paced back toward the silver-blue glow from the French windows. She said simply, “Pam.”

I nodded. “She stood to gain a lot from marrying Charles Sr.”

She glanced at me, then back at her feet. “But I think it’s a bit more complex than that.”

I smiled. “You picked up on that, huh?”

“She was playing them both. While Charles Sr. was away at college in Boston, she was playing Laird and Lady with the old man. I figure she was thinking that if the son was only along for the ride, if you’ll excuse the pun, daddy, with his love of all things Scottish, might just jump at the chance of a young, beautiful wife. But then Charles graduates, comes back to the castle and his daddy tells him she is the wrong class and not from one of the great clans. Bombshell. So she decides to eliminate the old man.”

“Hmm…”

“And there’s another thing.” She pointed at me. “If she was a frequent visitor to the master bedroom, she might well have known where he kept the revolver.”

“It’s a nice theory, but there is one flaw in it.”

“What?”

“Charles had just told her that the old man had given him the green light to marry her.”

She nodded. “That is not such a big flaw, Stone. In the first place, by now she knows what a temperamental son of a bitch the old man can be. There is no telling when he’ll change his mind again. Add to that the fact that she must have known, as everybody did, about the old man’s love affair with the Armstrong family, and you have two powerful motives for murder: one, that he might at any time disinherit Charles and her with him, and two, jealous anger. Two gets you twenty that the old man was involved with Mama Armstrong, and as you have said more than once, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“That is a very compelling theory, Dehan. Who else?”

“Bee has to be up there.”

“You think so?”

She frowned at me and nodded, then began pacing into the shadows again, toward the dais.

“I had a chat with Bee before I joined you in the study. She’s been in love with Charles Sr. since she was a kid. But, get this, she also had an affair with his dad. In fact, according to her, his dad warmed the sheets with just about every woman Charles Sr. was involved with.”

I sighed. “I can’t say I’m all that surprised. If Oedipus had lived in this house, he would have needed a shrink. But explain to me how that would give Bee motive to kill him?”

She sat next to me on the small divan and put her elbows on her knees. “Revenge. For giving the man she loved permission to marry…” She shrugged with one shoulder, “Not just marry, but marry a publican’s daughter. It was the ultimate rejection and humiliation, the ultimate insult to her and her sister. Her sister was the right woman for Charles. With her dead, Bee should have stepped into her shoes. But instead…”

I nodded. “But instead he allows him to marry