Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

was one of those women who, when they enter a room, the room lights up, as though the sun had emerged from behind clouds over a field of daffodils. She was radiant and had a personality to match. Always laughing, always smiling, never an angry word. Kind, compassionate… Need I go on?”

“No.”

I was about to continue, but Dehan was frowning and asked, “Forgive me for asking, Mr. Duffy, but you celebrate the anniversary of her death?”

He laughed. “It may seem a little macabre, but it’s not, I assure you. It is what she would have wanted. It is a celebration of her life, her vitality. She did not believe in death, you see. She said death was an illusion, an impossibility. So I keep her memory alive by celebrating her life on the day that she… passed on.” He smiled. “A small act of defiance.”

I nodded that I understood. “I wonder if you remember this particular party.”

“What was the year again?”

“2015.”

He thought for a moment, and then his face seemed to light up. “Of course! How could I forget?”

There was a tap at the door, and Parks came in with a trolley. On it was a bottle of beer, which he carefully decanted into a glass, with just the right amount of froth, and placed on the table beside Dehan’s chair, muttering, “Mod’m.” There was also a shaker with two martini glasses. He shook the shaker and poured out two martinis, in each of which he placed an olive. He handed us our drinks and left, leaving the trolley behind.

Dehan sipped her beer and raised an eyebrow. The eyebrow said the beer was good.

“What made that particular party especially memorable, Mr. Duffy?”

He smiled. “That was where I met the only woman who was ever able to make me love again. The only woman who has ever made me believe I might be able to be happy.”

I raised my glass to him. “Here’s to that. Who was this remarkable woman?”

“Tamara Gunthersen. The only woman, after Sally, who was able to touch my heart. My goodness! What a remarkable woman. She had that quality that Sally had, only perhaps more so, of being able to walk into a room and illuminate it simply with her presence. When I first saw her, on that night, it was as though the sun had taken human form and walked into my home.” He gave a small laugh. “Yet it was so innocent. In spite of her enormous, magnetic presence, she was shy and uncertain. When we met, she looked like a lost child, yet with the beauty of a goddess.”

I sipped my drink and frowned. “How did she come to be alone at your party, Mr. Duffy? A woman as remarkable as that…”

“Ah!” He raised an index finger with the air of a master chef about to reveal his pièce de résistance. “Serendipity! I had invited a rather extraordinary man who had visited me a few times because we shared an interest in antique books. Anyway, the man was a crashing bore, but one has to be polite. So I invited him to my annual party and suggested he might like to bring a guest.

“Well, as destiny would have it, the car picked her up, but he was detained. He sent her on with his excuses, saying he would be a little late, but he never showed up!”

I smiled the smile of a man of the world and observed, “Life will do that sometimes.”

He was thrilled by my insight and leaned forward eagerly. “Won’t it just, Detective! Well, naturally, as her host, I could hardly leave her stranded. I myself, naturally, in view of the very nature of the party, had no companion. It struck me that she and I were alone at the ball—her words, not mine—and we sort of sought refuge in each other. It was kismet.”

“This is extremely good beer,” Dehan observed in an apparently irrelevant departure, then added, “What happened?”

He heaved a huge sigh.

“It sounds corny, but it was truly love at first sight. We hit it off instantly. We laughed at the same things, we loved and hated the same things. She was intelligent and, believe it or not, at her age, she was erudite. She knew her Shakespeare, her Shaw… She was remarkable. And, for some bizarre reason known only to herself and the gods, she fell for me. We saw each other every single day for a week, and by the end of that week, we were engaged to be married. We both agreed it was the obvious, simple, natural thing to do. We were in love!”

I watched him a moment, frowning, putting the pieces together in my mind. “But…?”

For some reason he looked at Dehan. “I am both immensely fortunate and deeply unlucky in love, Detective. I am fortunate because I have loved truly, with my whole self, not once, but twice in this life. But on both occasions, the gods have seen fit to take my loved one away.”

He looked down at his drink with an expression of reluctance that masked a deeper pain.

“She disappeared. I had suggested to her that she move in with me. She stayed most nights anyway. And she agreed. The last day I saw her, it must have been the fifth of June, she left the house intending to collect her most basic belongings and bring them home. She never came back. She never phoned, never wrote. She just vanished into thin air.”

I looked at Dehan. She was frowning. She seemed entranced by his story. She said, “Did you try to find her?”

He gave a small laugh. “Of course! I contacted all the hospitals, the police precincts. I even hired a private investigator, but to no avail. She had vanished without a trace.”

We were quiet for a moment, each of us momentarily absorbed