Marcia Muller - The Tree of Death

I turned, smacking her across the face. She screamed and let go. I grabbed the sword.

As I spun around, its tip nearly caught her in the eye. She stared at it, frozen, then backed off and scurried down the aisle between the boxes, out of the flashlight’s beam. Her sandals slapped toward the stairway. I followed, dragging the heavy sword.

Isabel ran up the steps and threw open the door. Welcome light poured into the cellar. For a second she stood silhouetted there.

“Help!” she screamed. “She’s trying to kill me!” Then • she started to run down the hall.

There was a pounding of feet on the floorboards above. They were heavily shod, not sandaled like Isabel’s. I bounded up the stairs.

Dave Kirk stood in the middle of the hall. Isabel was midway between him and the cellar door.

“Stop her!” I shouted. “She’s the murderer!”

Isabel looked back at me, then flung herself at Kirk. “Please help me! She killed Frank and now she wants to kill me!” She sagged against him, panting.

I stopped. “She’s lying. She’s the one…”

Kirk put his arms around Isabel. His bland brown eyes met mine, shifted to the sword in my hands.

Whom was he going to believe? Isabel, because of her social status and respectability? Or me, because I was telling the truth?

Isabel clung to Kirk, not looking at me. “She wants me dead. Just like she wanted Frank dead…” The words trailed off into a low cry.

Kirk put his hand over Isabel’s mouth and, with his other hand, pinned her arms behind her back. She struggled, but he held her firmly.

Relief coursed through me. Kirk had seen through Isabel’s dramatics; he’d recognized the truth. Then, looking up at the ceiling light, I realized he’d known even before Isabel had burst into the hall. He must have been here, listening to what was going on in the cellar, because the light had been off when I’d gone down there but had been on when Isabel reached the top of the stairs.

I looked back at him. His eyes, still incredibly bland, again moved from my face to the Hispanic sword.

“So,” he said, “who are you supposed to be-Zorro?”

When I got home from the doctor’s the next afternoon, my mother was holding court under the pepper tree in my back yard. She had dragged out the blue-flowered tea set I’d bought at a flea market several years before and was serving what I knew had to be Upton’s along with tiny circles of lemon and some very stale vanilla wafers.

I stopped in the back door, smiling. To Mama’s right sat Carlos Bautista, looking dignified as he balanced the delicate cup and saucer. To her left was Dave Kirk, looking as though he could use a beer. The two men got to their feet as I went out into the yard.

“What’s all this about?” I pulled up the remaining lawn chair and motioned for them to sit.

“Mr. Bautista came by to see if you were all right,”‘ Mama said, nodding at the board chairman. “As did Lieutenant Kirk. You are all right?”

“Yes, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health.”

She sighed with relief and poured me some tea. She’d shown up here early this morning, as soon as she’d heard the news and, after taking one look at the disorder in my house, had started cleaning. She’d been working on the kitchen when I left for the doctor’s.

I turned to Dave Kirk. I was no longer angry at him. He had apologized for his earlier treatment of me and, surprisingly, admitted he had not suspected Isabel until he saw her use a key to slip into the museum after the party the night before. Foolishly, she had not thought to reset the alarm once inside, so Kirk had followed, searching through the galleries and offices until he heard the commotion in the cellar.

Now I asked Kirk, “Did Isabel confess yet?”

He shook his head. “It’s not likely she will. Her first call was to Al Faxstein, that criminal lawyer., He came right down and has been ‘defending her civil rights’ ever since.” Kirk’s mouth twisted in annoyance.

“He won’t get her off, will he?”

“No. Don’t worry.”

“What about the others?”

“Robert De Palma and Vic Leary have been arrested. So has the Sanchez woman, although she’s claiming she didn’t know anything about the embezzlements. We don’t really have anything on her, but she doesn’t know that, and we’re hoping she’ll talk. Some of the funds they appropriated were from federal grants. The guys from Washington are interested in them, too.”

“How’s Vic doing?”

“He seems relieved, strangely enough.”

It probably eased some of his guilt, past and present, to have been caught. “Wait a minute. What about Tony?”

Kirk grinned. Carlos looked amused. My mother scowled. “Tony,” Kirk said, “got on a plane to Colombia before we could issue the warrant.”

“What’s so funny about that?”

“His wife refused to go with him.”

“What?”

“She said she would rather make her way alone in the United States than return to what she calls ‘that backward place.” “

“To go off and leave poor Susana like that,” Mama muttered.

Carlos added, “Don’t be surprised if she comes to you for a job. Elena.”

“Oh, no!”

“When I spoke with her, that seemed to be her intention.”

“She can’t do anything.”

Carlos merely smiled and gave me a very Latin shrug.

We all sipped tea in silence for a time. Then Mama said, “Elena, do you know why Isabel killed Frank?”

“I think so. I’m pretty sure she’d found out about the embezzlements. Isabel was very active in museum affairs. She was everywhere, doing everything from making bank deposits to helping me arrange the exhibits. If anyone could catch on to what they were doing, it was Isabel. And, remember, she was always afraid Frank would do something to ruin the museum. She watched him every minute.”

“But to kill him…”

“She didn’t plan to, I’m sure. That afternoon, before I left, she said she was going to have a few words with him. I think she was going to tell him what she’d found out and warn him to quit. Or maybe she didn’t even know that much and was just going to question him. Anyway, when I left, she was still in the museum, maybe in the ladies’ room or checking on supplies in the kitchen, as she often did. Then she went looking for him and when she finally found him, it was in the folk art gallery.”

“And she killed him,” Mama said flatly.

“No, I doubt it was that way. She confronted him. They argued. She realized he would destroy the museum, and the museum was all she had, now that her marriage had fallen apart. Remember the conversation we had with Nick? About how a man like Frank would have driven Isabel mad?”

Mama nodded.

“Well, that’s what he did. Isabel had always deferred to Don Francisco, as she did to her husband. But, like Douglas Cunningham, Frank finally did something that caused all her repressed rage to boil over. With her husband, she could express it by divorcing him. With Frank…” I stopped. The picture was too vivid in my mind.

“Well, she may not have planned to kill Frank, but what about you?” My mother’s eyes were flashing. “She was the one who hit you and left you out in that field to die, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t think she knew what she was doing then. She hit me in a panic. Probably she thought she’d killed me. I have a slow heartbeat, and she might not have been able to find my pulse. The whole thing was pretty clumsy.”

“You’re too charitable.”

“Well, actually if she hadn’t done it, I might never have realized she was the murderer.”

Carlos leaned forward, looking interested. “Now we’re getting to the part I want to hear. How did you catch on to her?”