Better Homes and Corpses by Kathleen Bridge Page B

I’m a surfer bum, as my mother calls me. She’s afraid I’ll turn into a carbon copy of my father and live out some kind of Andy Warhol–like existence. In fact, Dad did hang out with Warhol at his compound in Montauk,
back in the day
. The real reason my mother’s pissed is ’cause I dropped out of med school. Enough about me. How about you? Jillian told me you two used to be roommates.”
    The front door opened and Adam walked in, his arms loaded with goodies.
    “Here. Let me help you with that,” Van said. “I was giving Meg a capsulation of my dull life story. The conservatory, old buddy?”
    “Hey, watch the ‘old’ reference. You’re only a few years younger than me.”
    “Meg, come back and join us.” Van smiled.
    “I’ll ask Elle.”
    “Do you want to take this with you?” Van took a foamy concoction from Adam’s outstretched hand and waved it under my nose.
    “She can’t bring that in there. She might spill it on the seventeenth-century rug. Caroline would never have allowed it,” Adam said.
    Adam and Van walked to the right of the staircase, taking my coffee with them. They passed the same spot where I’d found Jillian and Caroline Spenser the morning of the murder. If I had to find the conservatory, I’d make damn sure not to go in that direction.
    Elle was standing at a cabinet holding a vase with glistening silvery-blue leaves and vines. “Louis Comfort Tiffany. Caroline Spenser paid forty thousand dollars for it.”
    “Wow. Exquisite.”
    She replaced it in the cabinet and reached for another, swaddling it in her hands like a preemie from an incubator. This vase resembled a delicate wineglass—the round base sprouted a thin green stem that reached up to display sparkling blooms of amber and teal. Elle tipped the vase over to show me the paper label with Louis Comfort Tiffany’s initials. “Do you know that for all his accolades, there was a short period of time when Tiffany glass fell out of favor? It wasn’t unusual to see Tiffany glass thrown in trash bins along Park Avenue.”
    “I’ll remember that the next time I go garbage pickin’. Can I hold it?” I cupped the base in my hands. I could swear my fingers warmed from the fire caught in the glass. When I placed it back on the bottom shelf, there was a rectangular impression etched in dust from where an object once stood. All the vases in the cabinet had circular bases. “Hey, do you think something’s missing?” I pointed.
    “Let me check the list.” Elle flipped through the insurance files and cross-referenced the items in the photos to the items in the case. “There’s one thing that doesn’t match up—a marquetry fruitwood box supposedly filled with an assortment of nineteenth-century coins. The total value at the time of their appraisal was two thousand dollars. Not a lot compared to the other items in the room.”
    “Hmm. We’ve been invited to the
conservatory
for coffee. Maybe we should go so we can get closer to the pulse of the house.”
    “Professor Plum with the wrench in the conservatory.”
    “Adam seems more like a
Colonel Mustard with a revolver in the billiard room
kind of guy.”
    The back porch, or conservatory, as Adam called it, was a small rainforest with floor-to-ceiling windows filled with tropical plants, moist air, and exotic birds in cages. Mr. Arnold was outside cleaning up from the storm. Giant fern fronds tickled my neck as I sipped something delicious, not what I’d ordered, topped with crème fraîche. Elle had bowed out, opting to take the video camera to the attic to capture the bookcase I’d found behind the screen.
    I was wrong about Adam. Now he was Mrs. Peacock in a wide fan-backed wicker chair.
    “It’s time for Jillian to leave Seacliff,” Adam said to Van.
    Van’s sneakered feet were propped on top of a rattan ottoman. “This is the only home she’s ever known. She’d be lost anywhere else. Hell, she’s such a homebody, she doesn’t even own a cell