“Look for Rosette Taylor’s fascinating account of the life of the sweat bee in next month’s issue, and learn about the hard work and solitary life of one of our native insects.”
Austin Rocks! the e-newsletter of the Austin Rock Garden Society
Pru was allowed to finish her wine alone—along with both packets of crisps—but not in peace. French had not expected an answer to his last question, saying that it was only an idea. An idea that he wanted her to pass along to Christopher, she decided, so that both men could mull it over before comparing conclusions.
The police knew no more—probably less—than she and Christopher did. And yet she had no inclination to discuss her ideas with French—those ideas she would save for Christopher. In the meantime, she would have to double her efforts, talk to each of the Austin women about Twyla, even speak to Iris. Something, somewhere, was terribly wrong.
Sunshine flooded the mews when she walked out of the pub. Still a bit of pale daylight until almost nine-thirty in the evening, midspring. Good thing, too—she had another appointment before this day was finished. She walked to the Lamont Road house, lifted the knocker, and let it drop. Rosette answered as if she’d been hovering behind the door.
“Good afternoon,” Pru said.
“Hi,” Rosette said, opening the door wide and looking resigned to her fate. “Come on in.”
Pru followed her through the sitting room, where an unopened bottle of wine and a line of glasses straight as soldiers sat on the coffee table. Rosette didn’t stop until she reached the far side of the kitchen, where she squeezed herself into the corner between the cookstove and the sink and crossed her arms. “Do you want tea?”
“Rosette, I hope you don’t feel as if I’m prying into your private life. It’s only, why didn’t you want me to know you and Twyla were sisters?” Rosette’s eyebrows jumped, and so Pru corrected herself. “Half. But still, her sister.”
“Her crazy sister,” Rosette said. “That’s what she told you, isn’t it?”
“I don’t understand why this had to be a big secret—or at least a secret from me. Everyone else knows, don’t they?” Pru had had no siblings until she discovered Simon only two years before and she treasured him, although they could drive each other crazy at times. Still, she wouldn’t hide him—they’d had enough of that.
“The moment I met you I knew you two would bond—you should’ve been her sister, not me.” Before Pru could protest, Rosette waved her hand. “No, that isn’t right. We loved each other”—she took a deep, ragged breath—“it just took a long time to get there.” She reached over and switched on the electric kettle. Good, Pru thought—tea. That means I’ll hear it all. Surely Rosette knows the rules.
“My father left my mother and me when I was eleven,” Rosette said. “Turns out he had another family with another daughter waiting for him in Blanco, not much more than an hour away from where we lived in Austin. The first time I saw Twyla she was four—it was when my father was moving his things out of our house. He came back for another carload and had this little girl with him. ‘Here’s your sister, Rosette. Say hello, Twyla.’ As if it was the most normal thing in the world. I didn’t see her again for fifteen years.”
The kettle boiled and switched itself off, but Rosette didn’t move and so Pru poured up the tea and put the pot on the table along with mugs and milk. She expected Rosette to rearrange the items to suit her, but Rosette, it seemed, was lost in thought, traveling back into her past.
“Did you ever see your dad again?” Pru asked gently.
“Oh yes. I took classes from him at UT—hard to avoid it as he was head of the botany department. My mother died before I finished my master’s degree and he offered to help me clear out the house, but what did I need of his help then? I was teaching at the junior college by the time Twyla was in college. We would run into each other every once in a while after her mother died, and she would always say those things you expect someone to say—she wanted to get together, let’s talk, we’re family. But we weren’t—my father had chosen his family and it didn’t include me. Until there was no one else left, of course.”
Pru poured the tea, put milk in the mugs, and pushed one toward Rosette, who wrapped her hands round it as if drawing up its warmth.
“Twyla started teaching high school, but after about ten years said she needed a break. She wanted to travel the world, but she came to England first, and once she got here, she never wanted to leave, said she planned on staying. After a couple of years, our father became very ill and he could no longer live alone. All he had was me, so I moved him into my house and took care of him.” Rosette swallowed. “It wasn’t the ideal match. He was so messy—he’d set glasses of water down everywhere, leave doors ajar, and drop tissues on the floor—he couldn’t even be bothered to throw them in the wastebasket. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t…” She shuddered. “Twyla and Damien had to come back. To help. Our father died about six months later.
“It was a while before I could go back to work. It was a while before I understood that it wasn’t my fault my father had left my mother and me. And it wasn’t Twyla’s fault, either. Since then, we’ve been close. You know, more like sisters.” Rosette gulped down half her tea and set the mug on the table. “And there you have it—portrait of a perfect family.”
“No family is perfect. Someday I’ll tell you about mine.”
“Do you think I killed her? Is that why you won’t leave me alone? Am I a suspect?”
“Everyone’s a suspect,” Pru said, not happy about it. “That’s what the police think. I never thought you did it, it’s just that I couldn’t figure out why you could be so protective of Twyla and annoyed with her at the same time. And then the other night I rang my brother and as usual we disagreed and made up and disagreed again—and that’s when it dawned on me.”
“If I didn’t do it, then who?”
Pru shrugged. They sat in silence as Pru’s eyes wandered over the kitchen with its modern fittings and out into the sitting room filled with comfy chairs and with lovely art prints on the wall.
“It was good of Damien to do this for you,” she said, almost to herself. “The house for the month, paying for the garden. All for Twyla—and you, too.” She recalled the brief conversation she’d had with Damien that afternoon. “He doesn’t sound sold on Forde, though.”
“I’m not sold on Forde, I can tell you. All this talk of his proprietary process and how much money he’s going to make.” The bitter Rosette, who had disappeared by the end of the story of her family history, returned. “The Texas DOT buys thirty thousand pounds of wildflower seed a year—and the society helps sow them. When I mentioned that to Forde, all he said was, ‘Well, wouldn’t that add a copper or two to the coffers.’ ” She wrinkled her nose. “He was talking about money, wasn’t he?”
Pru nodded. “A copper is an old name for a two-pence—tuppence—but can mean money in general.”
“Made it sound as if he wanted to corner the market,” Rosette complained.
“I know how annoying it is when you can’t get someone to see the value in what you love—and what’s important. Twyla did this garden for you, didn’t she?”
Rosette blinked, but not fast enough to keep back a tear that ran down her cheek. She drew a folded hanky out of her pocket, dabbed at her face, shook out the handkerchief, and refolded it.
“I won’t let that designer screw this up,” Rosette said. “It’s Twyla’s legacy now.”
Although Pru could not see Rosette strangling her own sister, she could quite envision her throttling Roddy. Had Rosette enough time to hurry back to the grounds and attack Roddy before Pru arrived? That is, if he had been attacked.
“I wonder what was bothering her,” Pru said to herself.
Rosette shook her head. “Before we left Austin, I knew something was wrong. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I see you,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you—I’ll bring proof.’ ”
“Proof?” Pru echoed.
“I looked for it in her suitcase,” Rosette said, nodding to the ceiling. “I thought she might have papers or her computer or a flash drive. Nothing.”
Pru recalled seeing the police carry out the suitcase. It had been the only indication that Twyla had been to the house. “You looked through her suitcase before the police took it away with them? How did you manage that?”
“They brought us back here that day to get our passports, and when we went upstairs they stayed down here. I didn’t think they’d found a suitcase at the garden, but she had to have left it somewhere. If the person who murdered her took it, the police would need to know.” Rosette shrugged. “I peeked in the little room that was supposed to be hers, and there it was. I didn’t even think, I just started going through it—I hoped maybe there would be something that would jump out at me. ‘Here!’ I could say. ‘This is why she was killed.’ But there wasn’t anything. So I put everything back the way it was.” Rosette smiled, her eyes shining. “No, better. I straightened it up—she never folded her clothes properly. And then I told the police it was there.”
“Well done,” Pru said, marveling at Rosette’s sneaky ways. “But if the proof wasn’t there, where is it? And what is it?”
“I’m—”
Their conversation broke off when they heard the front door close. Ivory called out, and Rosette said, “In the kitchen.”
Ivory entered, panting slightly and her hands full of shopping bags, which she deposited in a chair. “I have found the most beautiful and expensive scarves in the world.” She held up a bag emblazoned with LIBERTY LONDON. “My husband will be thrilled, I’m sure. But I also found this place called Lillywhites and got all the men their soccer jerseys—or, excuse me, ‘football.’ ” She wiggled her fingers in air quotes. Ivory took in the kitchen scene and asked, “So, how are you two doing?”
“We’re good,” Pru replied, smiling. “Where are the girls?”
“They’ve latched on to one of the old guys working on Prince Harry’s garden, and they’ve taken him out for a drink.” Ivory frowned. “It was all right, wasn’t it, that we left? Chiv said to go on, that he and Iris were leaving soon.”
Had Chiv sent everyone away so that he could attack Roddy? Pru could quite see that happening, too. “Sure, nothing going on back there now.”
“Pru, why don’t you stay to dinner?” Ivory asked. “Damien’s coming over—has your husband made it up here yet? We sure would love to meet him.”
Pru looked away from Ivory’s big, deep brown eyes as she felt her face go hot. “Oh, he’s started working on a special case”—true, this one, with me—“it’s fraud”—yeah, I’m being a fraud right now—“but I’m keeping him up on everything that’s happening here”—true, except for today’s information, which I’ve yet to off-load. Pru’s head began to spin. How could she track what she’d said to Ivory, and what she’d kept quiet? “Thanks, but I think I’ll be on my way. I’ve been helping out a neighbor, walking her dog.” True—whew.
Ivory accompanied her to the door.
“Did Sweetie clear all that other business up with the police?”
“They didn’t even ask her about that other business,” Pru said. “Twyla didn’t press charges, maybe it didn’t stay on the books.”
“So she told you about it?”
Pru nodded. “They just wanted to go over her statement again, where she was and when. That she was with Skippy all night—of course, you knew she hadn’t gone to the theater.”
It was the way Ivory didn’t move and didn’t look at Pru, only shifted her gaze slightly and said, “Yeah,” that put Pru on high alert.
“Right? You knew she wasn’t there because all the rest of you were.”
“I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ivory pulled the door to behind her before she answered. “Our seats weren’t together, so we all got there at the same time, but we didn’t really see each other the rest of the night.”
“What?”
“It’s a really popular play, even though it’s been running forever. Damien said he could only get single seats, so we were scattered around—there are two balconies and then the ground floor. We decided we’d meet back at the Tube station afterward, but the girls said they might stop at a pub, and I could see Sweetie wasn’t going to hang around—not the way she was dressed. Rosette and I decided that if we didn’t catch up—those stations are so crowded—we’d see each other back here. I just figured Sweetie came in later—I didn’t know she’d stayed the whole night with Skippy.”
“You didn’t tell the police this?” Pru saw the women scattering to the four winds that evening. Any one of them could’ve left early and the others wouldn’t have known. “Didn’t you talk about this among yourselves?”
“We didn’t need to.” Ivory folded her arms over her ample chest. “We didn’t think one of us was guilty. And so it didn’t seem important.”
“No—that isn’t true,” Pru said, wagging a finger at Ivory. “People only say that when they know very well it’s important but they believe there’s something to hide. If none of you told the police that you didn’t see each other until late that evening, it means that all of you think that any one of you is capable of…doing that. You’re covering for each other.”
“Are you saying you think one of us killed Twyla?” Ivory’s face flushed.
“No, I’m not saying that I think that. I am saying that you all think one of you is capable. Why else would you hide this?” Ivory didn’t speak, but she did shrug one shoulder. Pru hoped it meant she had made her point, but it couldn’t hurt to give another nudge. She put her hand on Ivory’s arm. “Come clean to the police.”