Let's Play Dead

CHAPTER 30

“Who told you?” Hadley snarled. “That little twit Chloe?”

I wasn’t about to rat out Chloe. “You know, if you were nicer to the people who worked for you, they might be a bit more loyal to you.”

“They’re all out to suck my blood. All of them. They think working for a successful author will jump-start their tiny careers in publishing. Ha! It takes years of trying, and swallowing a whole lot of rejection, to get where I am today.”

“And where is that, Hadley?” I asked.

She glared at me. “I’m a New York Times bestseller! My Harriet books are in stores everywhere! A generation of children has grown up with her tales as bedtime stories. Harriet’s been optioned for animated films, and there’s some interest in a television series. Everybody knows me!”

Hadley’s tone was becoming increasingly shrill, and I was beginning to wonder how much longer she could delude herself about her success. Sure, the world knew of Harriet the Hedgehog, and had for a generation. But that was part of the problem: the world had moved on, and Hadley couldn’t or didn’t want to accept that. She was yesterday’s news now. As Chloe had pointed out, she needed this exhibit as much if not more than the museum did.

But if that was true, why would she try to destroy it? That didn’t make any sense. “All right, what do you think happened at the exhibit, Hadley? Why did Jason get shocked, and why did Joe die?”

“Why do you think I know? She”-Hadley pointed at Caitlin-“she was the one in charge. Ask her!”

“Caitlin’s already given us her side of the story, Hadley. What’s yours?” Arabella said with surprising patience.

“I didn’t want to do it,” Hadley muttered, her shoulders slumping. “The exhibit, I mean. Sure, I’ve known about your tacky little museum for years. I didn’t want Harriet to be cheapened by showing up there.”

“We have tens of thousands of visitors each year, Hadley,” Arabella replied tartly. “How many books have you sold in the past year?”

Hadley brushed aside Arabella’s comment. “I don’t pay attention to that kind of thing. But my publisher thought it was a good idea, and they hinted that they might be reluctant to publish the next book unless I agreed to promote a bit more aggressively, so I went along with it. And once I’d said yes, of course I spent a lot of time there, making sure your people got the details right. Obviously there were problems with that.” She sniffed.

“Was Caitlin correct about the Willy heads?” I asked.

Hadley shrugged. “More or less. The first version was completely unacceptable-Willy looked positively evil, and I couldn’t have that. So we tried again. And again.”

“And did you in fact keep the heads here, in your house?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still have the others, the two that didn’t go into the exhibit?”

Hadley cocked her head. “Yes, they’re in the basement. Do you want to see them?”

She stood up, and I held up a hand to stop her before she could go any farther. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight until we had the whole story. She sat again. “Why don’t you tell Nolan where to find them?”

“The basement. The door is off the kitchen, at the other end of the house.” Hadley pointed vaguely back the way we had come in. “I’m sure you can find it. Don’t touch anything else.”

I wondered briefly if Hadley’s remark had rankled; did she expect him to steal the silverware? I looked at Nolan, and he gave me an odd half smile before turning and heading toward the other end of the house. “Can I have a torch, darlin’?” he said. “Oh, that’d be a flashlight to you.”

When Hadley didn’t answer, I said, “Take a candle and check the kitchen.” He complied and disappeared down the dark hallway.

I turned back to Hadley. “Go on, Hadley. You decided which head you wanted to use. Did you deliver it to the museum yourself?”

She nodded. “That Chloe person was still around then. I’m going to have to replace her, especially with this exhibit opening. It will go forward, won’t it?” she asked, glancing at Arabella.

Arabella didn’t reply immediately. “It all depends on whether we can determine how this death occurred.” I noticed she didn’t use the word murder. “If we can’t convince the public that the exhibit and the museum are safe, then no one will come.”

“I’ll sue!” Hadley shrieked. “Look at the contract-I made sure I had a good lawyer, and I’m sure there’s some sort of default clause in there.”

“Hadley,” Arabella said with something like pity, “do you really want to be associated with an exhibit where somebody died? What kind of a message does that send to your young readers-or their parents, who actually buy the books?”

As I watched them talk, I wondered if that had been Hadley’s plan all along: scotch the exhibit, then collect whatever compensation she had wangled into the contract-and maybe enjoy a resurgence in sales as a result of the publicity. That would beat holding an exhibit that no one visited. I wondered just what else was in that contract, and how Arabella and the museum would fare, if this sad event weren’t cleared up quickly. Would a failed exhibit and a cloud hovering over the museum be enough to force Let’s Play to close its doors permanently? Arabella didn’t deserve that. Nor did she deserve to have her daughter-and employee-accused of murder.

Did it all come down to money? And if so, who benefitted? Hadley would receive widespread local and possibly national exposure, which I had no doubt she would milk as far as possible, maybe resulting in increased book sales. Assuming, of course, she wasn’t arrested for murder. The museum? If Hadley turned out to be the villain, then Arabella and her crew would benefit from the same publicity, if it was spun right, and a combination of curiosity and sympathy could attract droves of museum-goers, and therefore boost revenues. And what about Caitlin? No matter how things went, she had certainly gotten her parents’ attention. Would she have gone as far as killing someone to achieve that? The only person I was willing to rule out at the moment as a suspect was Nolan. Maybe. After all, he had been in town at the right time. But for the life of me, I couldn’t see any reason why he would bear a grudge toward Arabella.

And what was taking Nolan so long? The basement couldn’t be all that big. I thought I could hear some banging around below my feet.

It was time to get to the point. “Hadley, let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. “You brought the head you chose back to the museum two weeks ago, and the installers attached it. Jason says they tried it out and everything was working fine.”

“I don’t remember what day it was. That’s why I have an assistant, to keep track of things like that.”

Caitlin, who I thought had shown remarkable restraint through Hadley’s story, spoke for the first time in a while. “Tuesday, definitely. The installers attached the head in the morning, and we tested it. Then you came by at about one to check it out.”

“If you say so,” Hadley said. “I don’t remember.”

“Arabella, you invited me over on Tuesday afternoon,” I said, picking up the thread. “That’s when Jason was hurt. So if someone did something to the installation, it had to have happened between Tuesday morning and Tuesday afternoon.

“My memory’s still kind of shaky,” Jason said, “but I remember it worked fine the first time we tried it.”

Jason’s accident had looked convincing enough, and I’d seen it up close. Maybe it was possible he could have rigged it to limit the damage, and then used himself as a test dummy, but why on earth would he do such a thing? But who had the expertise to do it? Arabella had been married to an electrician; had she paid attention to the details of wiring? As for confirming Hadley’s whereabouts, I had an idea.

“Hadley, do you keep a calendar?”

She sniffed. “My assistant does. I have no idea where.”

“Would Chloe know what your schedule was that week?”

“Probably. But she’s gone.”

“I know where to find her.” Hadley and I locked eyes, and I thought I saw fear in hers. “Did you provide her with a computer or some other device to keep track of things for you?”

“No. She had her own. She never asked for one.”

Probably because she knew that Hadley wouldn’t spring for one. “So you personally don’t recall where you might have been Tuesday afternoon?”

“I told you, she was at the museum Tuesday after lunch,” Caitlin said. “She wanted to make sure we hadn’t screwed up attaching the new head.”

“All right!” Hadley all but shouted. “I was at the museum. But so were Arabella and Caitlin and Jason and God knows how many other people. Any one of them could have tampered with the exhibit.”

That was true enough, although I wasn’t sure who else would have a motive. But there was one more piece: Joe had died on Wednesday. “Arabella, you had the wiring for the new head checked on Wednesday, the day after Jason was hurt. I assume you tested it again?”

“Of course we did. One accident was more than enough, and I wasn’t going to take any chances. Caitlin and I were both there. It was working fine. I even called in an outside electrician to check things out-I paid for that out of my own pocket.”

“Hadley, where were you on Wednesday?”

Hadley looked victorious. “I had a signing out in Chester County. I worked from home in the morning, then Chloe drove me to the bookstore there. We were there for a couple of hours-with plenty of witnesses.”

“And after that?” I pressed.

“Chloe brought me home. I fixed supper and went to bed.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, alone! Then some reporter called around eleven that evening to say that someone had been killed at my exhibit, and what did I have to say? That must be on record somewhere-I was quoted in the paper, you know.”

Score one point for Hadley. If she had sneaked into the museum after hours to mess with the exhibit, she’d have had a rather narrow window of opportunity between the closing time for the museum and nine o’clock when Joe died. Which made things look worse for Caitlin. When had Jason come home from the hospital? Had they been together Wednesday night?

It wasn’t easy to try to sort out any kind of time line while keeping up with the conversation going on in front of me. Joe had died on Wednesday, but Hadley hadn’t fired Chloe immediately. Of course, it had taken the police some time to put together the pieces and arrive at Hadley’s door, and from there to Chloe. After Chloe had talked to them and spilled some of Hadley’s dirty little secrets, Hadley had dumped her fast, and Chloe had come running to Eric for sympathy. Last week. Why had Hadley bothered to fire her? Surely she should have known that Chloe had no choice but to talk to the police. Was it just Hadley acting out of pique, which was apparently her normal operating procedure, or did she think that Chloe had pointed the police toward Hadley, deliberately or unintentionally? Did Hadley’s sliding book sales give her a real motive?

Apparently Hadley sensed my hesitation, because she launched into attack mode. “Excuse me, Nell, but who the hell appointed you investigator here? I’ve talked to the police about the events at Let’s Play, told them everything I’ve told you, and they seem satisfied. My reputation is on the line as much as anyone’s. And nobody has shown that I had a clue about what happened, or if I had even wanted to do something like that, how I could have. I have trouble programming my cell phone. Do you seriously think I could rig the wiring in the exhibit? And how was I supposed to set a death trap when I was miles away? Why aren’t you looking at Caitlin-she’s been part of this from the beginning. Maybe she thought she’d failed at her job and was trying to destroy the exhibit before it even opened. Maybe she has a lifelong beef with her mother. I don’t know-but I do know that I’ve had enough of this discussion. I’d like you to leave now.”

Nolan appeared in the doorway from the hall, holding a flashlight. He looked a bit absurd with a Willy head tucked under each arm, but his expression was far from amusing-or amused. “You’ve had some electrical work done recently, haven’t you?”

Startled, Hadley turned to confront him. “Yes, I have. So what?”

“Because, lady, you have a serious problem.”