The Other Side - J. D. Robb [73]
She hadn’t planned this third trick as carefully as the other two. I’ll play it by ear, she’d thought. And now it was time to do just that, with a piece by a Belgian violinist she’d learned, sort of, from a gramophone record. But should she start playing it now, here, just down the hall (but behind a floor-to-ceiling mirror in a gilt frame) from Mr. Cleland and his dog? Or should she wait for—
Never mind. Margaret took the decision out of her hands by bounding up onto a bottom octave just then—a tremendous leap, it sounded like, reverberating with a nice atonal bang. Angie waited, holding her breath. More piano notes, higher—Margaret was making her way up the scale—and then the sound of feet and paws nearby. Muttering. A rustle of movement, of rushing. Well, wait, not so fast, Angie worried; give her a chance to finish eating. Pounding feet on the stairs now. Oh dear. And now—why hadn’t she foreseen this?—a din of horrendous barking and hissing, screeching, howling, the crashing of objects and the yelling of oaths.
A distraction, that was the ticket. But suddenly she couldn’t remember how the Gypsy piece started! Play anything, she thought, and struck up a mazurka she knew well—she taught it to her music students. Sort of Gypsyish. She slowed it down, gave it a mournful edge. The cursing downstairs stopped, but not the animal ruckus. She kept playing, straining to hear what was happening between long, sad violin strokes.
Bow poised, she felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. A muted scrabbling was coming through the false wall—the mirror’s back. He was out there. She was found.
Run!
No, don’t! Stay still, don’t make a sound. He’d never figure it out, that pineapple finial at the bottom corner blended into the mirror’s gilt edge too well, he wouldn’t turn it, he’d never . . .
The mirror tilted. Pale light streamed in. Angie set her violin down and ran.
Down instead of up—a mistake. She might have lost him in the attic, but the mayhem waiting for her in the music room doomed her escape. Anyway, how could she leave Margaret halfway up the wall, clinging wildly to the window drapes, spitting and terrified? “Astra!” she yelled, grabbing for his stubby, ecstatic tail, missing.
And then the worst. A horrible, horrible thumping in the wall above the mantel, all the more horrible for how long it went on. Mr. Cleland crashed into the fireplace and lay dead.
Six
“I’ll pay you more. Not much more, but then, you don’t have to do much. Just say nothing.”
Henry made a show of being unable to raise his head to the glass of water Miss Darlington was holding to his lips. It worked; she moved even closer to him on the sofa and slid her cool fingers to the back of his neck. “You don’t have any money,” he pointed out, taking a small, pitiful sip. His head throbbed, but Miss Darlington’s ministrations were making up for it.
“No, but I will have as soon as my grandfather’s lawsuit is settled. Any day now, I expect a windfall.”
“The gramophone disk?”
“No, his new bicycle pedal. Someone else took credit for it, so now it’s in court. If we win, the A. A. Pope Company will market his recessed-cleat, dual-sided, spring-actuated, clipless pedal, and I’ll be rich. Well.” She made a deprecatory moue. “Not rich. But, by God, I’ll have enough money to buy this house back from the bank!” She set his head back on the sofa cushion with a bit too much force; he winced. He sensed a sore subject.
They were in the small parlor off the dining room, where she’d moved him, with some difficulty, so that they, or rather she, couldn’t be seen from the street when she switched the electricity back on. Now she rose from the sofa and started pacing. A habit, he’d noticed.
“The lawyer says a decision is coming down soon, so all I have to