Christietown Read online

  * * *

  Title Page

  Dedication Page

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Kandel

  Credits

  Copyright Notice

  About the Publisher

  Christietown

  SUSA N KANDEL

  To Deborah Michel, lifelong friend

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1 The lights sparkled overhead as the man I loved spun… 1

  CHAPTER 2 My dad, a twenty-year veteran of the force, used… 10

  CHAPTER 3 Agatha was wearing a fur coat, brown fur-lined gloves,… 21

  CHAPTER 4 I am a superstitious person. 24

  CHAPTER 5 Ian came running over the minute he saw me, right… 30

  CHAPTER 6 Bridget’s disappeared, too,” Lael said calmly. “But if we keep… 39

  CHAPTER 7 When Agatha took her hand away from her forehead, she… 48

  CHAPTER 8 People talk about falling apart, but after making an official… 50

  CHAPTER 9 Richard,” I said to my ex-husband, trying—failing—to stay… 55

  CHAPTER 10 It was evening by the time Agatha’s taxicab pulled up… 62

  CHAPTER 11 Poisoned?” I sank down on the couch, bewildered. “How Can… 65

  CHAPTER 12 It was close to seven by the time I was… 70

  CHAPTER 13 The water was boiling. 77

  CHAPTER 14 Would you please stop yelling?” I begged my mother. “The… 79

  CHAPTER 15 When I got home, I made a pot of coffee… 88

  CHAPTER 16 The next evening Dot was waiting for me outside her… 92

  CHAPTER 17 First things first. 99

  CHAPTER 18 Agatha gazed outside her window. The Hydropathic’s elderly gardener was… 101

  CHAPTER 19 I stopped in my tracks—not moving, not breathing. 104

  CHAPTER 20 I slipped back into the Blue Boar and took my… 110

  CHAPTER 21 A little after eight the next morning, Gambino and I… 117

  CHAPTER 22 Ladies first. 122

  CHAPTER 23 Every day, after breakfasting in bed with the London newspapers… 129

  CHAPTER 24 That night I had three surprises for Gambino. 131

  CHAPTER 25 Seven A.M. came in the blink of an eye. 134

  CHAPTER 26 The Vicarage was an unholy mess. Business types in rumpled… 139

  CHAPTER 27 Unfortunately, I was not able to reflect upon the day’s… 145

  CHAPTER 28 Unfortunately, dinner at Dr. Hogly Wogly’s never happened. At Roscoe… 153

  CHAPTER 29 Two A.M. 159

  CHAPTER 30 It is a terrible mistake to marry a stranger. 162

  CHAPTER 31 The bell rang while I was doing the breakfast dishes. 164

  CHAPTER 32 Unfortunately for Wren, she got arrested on a Friday. According… 172

  CHAPTER 33 There were four art deco timepieces at the top of the… 179

  CHAPTER 34 Avi Semel strode into the office like he owned the… 184

  CHAPTER 35 The ride home was frustrating. Call after call led nowhere. 190

  CHAPTER 36 Several hours later I heard the key turn in the… 196

  CHAPTER 37 Everyone thought he was sleeping. 203

  CHAPTER 38 It wasn’t fair. 205

  CHAPTER 39 A uniformed guard escorted Wren into the dingy conference room… 208

  CHAPTER 40 I got back from the detention center before ten, which… 213

  CHAPTER 41 One hour with Richard. That was all I needed. Jackie kindly.. 221

  CHAPTER 42 Agatha wrapped her fur-trimmed coat more tightly around her. 229

  CHAPTER 43 Amnesia saved Agatha Christie’s life. 231

  CHAPTER 44 Sunday morning, the sky was dark and angry. Rain had… 235

  CHAPTER 45 The thing about Los Angeles is, nobody knows how to… 240

  CHAPTER 46 I’d have to go down to the dance studio, though. 248

  CHAPTER 47 We exited the freeway at Temple, entering the evil maze… 255

  CHAPTER 48 The onlookers huddled around the rosy-cheeked man in the… 263

  CHAPTER 49 Betrayal by Chambermaid. 270

  CHAPTER 50 Cece! Where are you?” Gambino shouted into my ear. 273

  Acknowledgments About the Author

  Other Books by Susan Kandel Credits

  Cover

  Copyright About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  he lights sparkled overhead as the man I loved spun me around the dance floor. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. His was pounding, too.

  “‘You’d be so nice to come home to,’” he murmured into my ear.

  “‘It had to be you,’” I whispered.

  “‘I’ve got you under my skin,’” he whispered back.

  “No way,” I said with a shudder. “They played that one at my first wedding.”

  “Must I remind you that we are dancing the tango, Ms. Caruso?” came a voice from across the room. “Sexy! Earthy! Drama!”

  Lou Berman, aka Le Duc de Danse. I tuned him out. We’d found him in the Yellow Pages.

  “We’ve only got one lesson left in the Romance Package, Cece.” My fiancé, Peter Gambino, pressed hard on the small of my back. “We have to make a decision about the first dance soon.”

  “Arms high, Detective! You are a matador!” Lou stomped his feet, then whipped a McDonald’s bag out of the trash and whirled it triumphantly overhead.

  “‘I Get a Kick Out of You?’” I suggested.

  On cue, Gambino kicked me in the shins.

  “Go with it, Ms. Caruso!” Lou cried. “You are the wounded bull!”

  Not exactly the wedding-day scenario I had in mind.

  “It’s ten o’clock on the nose, people.” Lou’s wife, Liz Berman, emerged from the back office and flicked the CD player to Off. “Time to hit the road.”

  Gambino and I disentangled ourselves as Lou folded himself into a ratty metal chair. Liz sat down at her desk near the water cooler and knocked back her regular evening cocktail of antihistamines and acetominophen. Then, shooting Lou the evil eye, she got up to put the McDonald’s bag back in the trash. She was the detail person.

  “S
o what do you think of these kids?” Lou mopped a suspiciously smooth brow.

  “They’re really coming along,” Liz said with no perceptible enthusiasm.

  Gambino turned to me. “I told you. We’re going to kick butt at next week’s lesson.”

  I patted his arm. “I think we should avoid the word kick.”

  Lou looked dubious, in any case. Next week’s lesson was the foxtrot, the most difficult of all ballroom dances, requiring constant shifts in rhythm from slow to fast to medium.

  “If anyone can teach you two to foxtrot, it’s Lou,” Liz conceded.

  “You kill me, doll.” He went over and wrapped an arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet. Then the two of them—tall, plump, congested Liz and tall, thin, bottle-bronzed Lou—began to whirl around the room. Gambino and I stared,

  openmouthed. They didn’t need music. They were music.

  “Married twenty-two years,” Lou said, dipping Liz.

  “Twenty-two years,” she repeated, upside down.

  That was about how long it had been since I’d last walked down the aisle—young, pregnant, and dumb.

  Dumb enough to think winning Miss Asbury Park, New Jersey, would be my ticket to eternal bliss.

  Dumb enough to blow off college to put my then-husband through grad school.

  Dumb enough—well, just dumb enough.

  I wanted to believe I’d learned something since then. I looked over at Gambino. He was kind, smart, funny. He had me, and still wanted me.

  Yes, I’d learned something since then.

  “While we’re on the subject of killing,” said Liz, pulling out of her husband’s embrace, “get a load of this.”

  I’d thought we were on the subject of love everlasting but I wasn’t about to interrupt Liz, who discouraged that sort of thing. She peeled off her worn leather jacket, took a puff of her inhaler, then wrapped a fuzzy white scarf tight around her neck.

  “My dears,” she said, “it’s truly a mystery to me.” Her voice was suddenly frail, her nose longer, her skin pinker. She pulled a pair of knitting needles out of her bag. “But I so often seem to get mixed up in things that are really no concern of mine. Crimes, I mean, and peculiar happenings.” She leaned her head a little to one side, like a cockatoo fluffing its feathers. “Nothing, of course, a nice linseed poultice couldn’t cure.”

  “Miss Jane Marple!” I exclaimed.

  “Damn straight,” she said, then sneezed. “Guess I’ve got to double up on the Claritin for Saturday.”

  Saturday.

  Saturday was a big deal.

  I was dreading Saturday.

  But at least Saturday was a distraction from the bigger deals in my life, which for the record would be:

  Waiting to hear from my editor, Sally, about Poison Book, my biography of the mystery writer Agatha Christie. I’d sent the four-hundred-and-two-page manuscript off to her exactly eleven days, ten hours, and thirty-five minutes ago, not that I was counting.

  Choosing the right ensemble for the upcoming baby shower I was hosting for my daughter, Annie. The champagne-colored, disco-era halter dress I had in mind didn’t exactly scream “grandma.” But I was barely forty years old. Did I really have to go for double-knit slacks? Or worse yet, a muu-muu?

  Getting married.

  Getting married (it merits two mentions).

  Like I was saying, thank God for Saturday.

  Saturday would mark the opening festivities of Phase 2 of Christietown, a Golden Age mystery-themed housing development on the sun-baked fringes of Antelope Valley, just east of Los Angeles.

  I was in charge of Saturday.

  In charge of the clotted cream, the scones, and the Cornish pasties; in charge of the yapping Yorkies and stubby Corgis; in charge of the larkspurs, hollyhocks, and snapdragons lining the neat brick path up to the Vicarage (which would be the sales office); and worse yet, in charge of the original, interactive Murder Mystery Tea, starring—yes—Liz Berman (aka La Duchesse de Danse) as Agatha Christie’s beloved amateur

  sleuth, Miss Marple.

  Everyone had a part.

  Lou Berman was the butler. He didn’t do it.

  Wren Abbott, the dance studio’s frizzy-haired receptionist, was an eleven-year-old with psychic abilities.

  My second-best friend, Bridget, was her governess, Estella Raven, who was rude and spirited and whose studied insolence covered a great fear.

  My best friend, Lael, master pastry chef and inadvertent sexpot, was the vicar’s wife.

  My fiancé, Peter Gambino, was the soldier of fortune.

  My gardener, Javier Gomez, was Sir Guy Pilkington of Gossington Hall. He was going to be in a wheelchair for the duration of the play.

  And yes, it’s true, my neighbors, seventy-year-old twin sisters and ex-showgirls Lois and Marlene—known in their former lives as Hibiscus and Jasmine—would be dancing onstage for the first time in thirty years.

  With the exception of Javier, who inexplicably had a Screen Actors Guild card, nobody was being paid. I’d blown my budget on expensive sherry and a large plasterboard facade of Gossington Hall, with real mullioned windows. So instead of hiring actors, I’d called in my chits. It didn’t take much convincing. These people were dying to ham it up in front of an audience.

  It being tax season, my accountant Mr. Keshigian did not have a part, though I’d been tempted to cast him as Sir Guy’s cousin Jasper, the black sheep of the family. Mr. Keshigian, I should explain, was the one who got me the gig in the first place. Mr. Keshigian is concerned about my finances. Writing biographies of dead mystery writers—as he reminds me every time we go over my deductions—is not a lucrative profession. So when he recently found himself attending a real estate seminar where the developer of Christietown was making a presentation, he didn’t waste any time. He cornered the guy during cocktail hour and by the time the baked Brie was gone, had me moonlighting as an event planner.

  Like I dared argue.

  My new boss was named Ian Christie.

  Ian Christie was a beet-faced Englishman who claimed (vociferously) to be related (distantly) to the Queen of Crime herself. Fat chance. Agatha Christie was the world’s best-known mystery writer and, not counting Shakespeare, the all-time best-selling author in any genre. Christietown, however, was Ian’s baby, a master-planned, amenity-packed, Cotswoldsesque cozyland tailor-made for its target demographic: mystery fans, retirees, British expatriates in search of the midday sun. The fact that Phase 1 had been only a middling success (less than half of the 125 existing houses had been sold) had proved no impediment whatsoever to the initiation of Phase 2, which was vastly more ambitious: 500 new houses plus a church and a High Street, with a butcher, a baker, a post office, an apothecary, a pub, and a locksmith.

  All this I learned several weeks ago over lemonade and sticky buns at the Vicarage. There were already themed mugs, night-lights, key chains, picture frames, illuminated water globes, and T-shirts, all bearing the logo Ian Christie had designed himself: a white-haired, hatchet-wielding spinster sitting inside a spinning teacup, the word Christietown spelled out in dripping blood. But that was just the beginning.

  Ian was thinking big: housing developments in similar communities across the U.S., maybe even Europe, and best of all, a Christietown credit card. He salivated at the mere mention of the credit card. His plump hands flew; his pale eyes popped. While waiting for him to settle down, I’d found myself wondering if the chief investors—two Israelis rumored to be ex-Mossad operatives—were equally optimistic. The real estate market wasn’t exactly booming these days. And I couldn’t imagine there were that many British expats roaming the southern California desert looking for storybook cottages with pseudothatched roofs. But that wasn’t my business. I sipped more lemonade. I shoveled another sticky bun in my mouth. “Not my business” was my new mantra. By the end of the afternoon, Ian was congratulating himself for having hired me. Now all I had to do was deliver. That part was my business.

  “You hungry?” Gamb
ino asked as we got in his car.

  “Starved.”

  “What do you think about a chili dog at Pink’s?”

  Pink’s, on Melrose and La Brea, was a sentimental favorite of ours. One of our first dates had taken place on its sixtieth anniversary, when we’d waited for four hours in the hot sun for sixty-cent chili dogs. Pink’s was famous for them. Orson Welles ate eighteen at a single sitting, which was a record. Orson Welles probably didn’t care if he got food all over his pants. But I had on a seventies white jersey dress with bell sleeves, which wouldn’t be the same covered in chili grease.

  “I’ll have fries,” I said. “Life’s a compromise.”

  The wrong choice of words, as it turned out.

  Gambino took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. Then he put them back on in slow motion. I knew what that meant.

  “If you have something to say, Cece,” he said, not looking at me, “just come out and say it.”

  We’d been arguing nonstop about the wedding. I was ready to march into city hall and be done with it, but Gambino wanted something more traditional. Thus, the dancing lessons. And the meetings with Father Joe. And the ongoing discussion with my neighbor Butch, who had volunteered his backyard for the reception. I’d thought compromising was a sign of character. Apparently not.

  “Orson Welles narrated the third film version of Ten Little Indians, did you know that?” It seemed simpler to avoid the issue.

  “No,” Gambino said sharply. He got onto the I–10 heading east.

  “It starred Elke Sommer, the kiss of death,” I added.

  “Uh-huh.” He was doing deep nose breathing now, a bad sign.

  “Orson Welles’s ghost haunts Sweet Lady Jane.” Sweet Lady Jane, our favorite bakery, was located next door to the old site of Ma Maison, where Orson Welles ate lunch every day until he died.

  “Cece,” said Gambino, “we need to talk.”

  “Oh, no. I forgot my shoes.” Lou had taken one look at my platforms and insisted I change into Liz’s dancing slippers before I twisted an ankle. Everyone except me had been excited that Liz and I wore the same size. “They’re collectibles. Kork-Ease. From high school. We have to go back.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Gambino said. But he was already heading for the exit.