Читать книгу Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead - Livia J Washburn - Страница 10

Don’t ask me how I knew Rhett Butler was dead. I’m not a medical person, and outside of a funeral home or an actual funeral, I’d never even seen a dead body.

But as I looked down at him, there was no doubt in my mind. His eyes were open wide, staring but not seeing anything. His mouth was open and his jaw was slack. His face seemed to be getting paler by the second. I knew from watching crime shows on TV that that meant the blood was pooling in the back half of his body, since that was lower. Lividity, I think they call it. The bloodstain on his shirt was ugly, but it wasn’t spreading anymore because the heart had stopped pumping.

All that’s logical enough now, looking back on it, but at the moment all I heard was a frantic voice in my brain yammering, Oh, no, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!

I took a step back and bumped into Luke. He jumped a little and I did, too, but both of us managed to keep from yelping. I guess Luke felt like letting out a holler. I know I sure did.

“Holy cow, Miz D! Is that…is that…”

“Rhett Butler,” I said. The strain made Luke’s voice sound strange to my ears, but my own voice sounded even more strange.

“Is he—”

I knew what Luke was going to ask, but he didn’t get a chance to finish the question. Instead another voice boomed out, “What’s going on here?”

We turned to see a bulky, tuxedo-clad figure hurrying along the garden path toward us. The lights out here were bright enough for me to recognize the actor who played Scarlett’s father, the man with the faint, underlying British accent who slightly resembled Thomas Mitchell.

He saw the man on the ground and said, “Oh, my dear Lord.” His hand went to his pocket and pulled out a bandanna he used to mop away some of the beads of sweat that suddenly popped up on his forehead. The night was warm and humid, but not enough to make a fella look like he was in a steam bath in a matter of seconds. “What happened here?”

“He’s dead.” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew it was a dumb, obvious thing to say.

“He can’t be.” The man brushed past Luke and me and dropped to one knee on the path beside the corpse. The path was made of flagstones arranged on a bed of gravel, and the gravel crunched a little as the man leaned over and his weight shifted. “Steve! Steve, wake up!”

So the dead man’s name was really Steve, not Rhett, I thought. The Thomas Mitchell look-alike reached for him, as if he were going to grab hold of him and try to shake him back to life, and I said, “You better not do that.”

He stopped and looked back over his shoulder at me. “Why not?”

“The police won’t like it if you disturb the body.”

“Police?” His stunned eyes opened even wider. “Oh, my God. You’re right. We have to call the police.”

“Got my cell phone right here,” Luke said as he pulled it from his shirt pocket. Before anybody could say anything else, he had thumbed in 911 and hit SEND.

The man kneeling next to the body leaped to his feet. “Wait! We don’t know…” He stopped, his voice trailing off for a second before he went on, “We don’t know anything, do we? Only that he’s dead.”

The police would have to be involved. This was a murder, after all. Unless, of course, Steve/“Rhett” had shoved that knife into his own chest, which didn’t seem likely to me. I was starting to get over my own shock to a certain extent, although I was still as horrified and, I admit it, creeped out as any person would be who doesn’t deal with violent death all the time.

After he finished telling the 911 operator where we were and that we needed the police and an ambulance right away, Luke said, “You know, I guess we really should check his pulse and make sure he’s dead…”

By now, other people from inside the plantation house had gotten curious enough—and courageous enough—to start edging down the path toward us. I was vaguely aware of lots of whispering going on. A thought occurred to me, and I turned and called to the crowd, “Is anybody here a doctor or a nurse?”

“Or a paramedic?” Luke added.

The only responses we got were shaking heads and muttered denials.

I turned to look at the man who played the plantation owner. “I guess you can do it, just try not to move him.”

The man looked a little queasy. “I don’t think I can.”

That left it up to me or Luke, since we were the ones standing there, and when I hesitated, he said, “Don’t worry, Miz D. I’ll do it.” He didn’t sound real enthusiastic, though, and he swallowed hard as he approached the body and then knelt beside it, the other fellow moving back to give him plenty of room.

Luke grimaced as he felt around on the stabbed man’s neck, searching for a pulse. After a minute or two he looked up at me and shook his head.

“He’s dead, all right.”

Luke made that grim announcement just as a young woman wearing a fancy ball gown with a hoop skirt and lots of petticoats pushed through the crowd and reached a point where she could see the corpse. She screamed, “Steven!” then clapped her hands to her face, and darned if she didn’t swoon, just like the character she was supposed to be might have. As she lay there in a faint, I recognized the pretty face and dark curls. She was the actress who played Scarlett O’Hara.

She wasn’t the belle of the ball anymore. She was just a crumpled heap on the flagstones. But at least she wasn’t dead, like the phony Rhett Butler.

I heard a siren somewhere in the distance. As it began to wail, a couple of men in uniform trotted up to us. They weren’t policemen. Logos on their gray shirts identified them as guards from a local security service.

The portly Gerald O’Hara—the Thomas Mitchell character—turned to them and demanded, “How could you let something like this happen?”

The two security guards shook their heads, and one of them said, “Sorry, Mr. Ralston. I checked out here in the garden just a little while ago, and everything was fine then.”

“Well, it’s not fine now. Mr. Kelley is dead.”

The guard nodded. “Yeah, I can kinda see that. The cops’re already on the way?”

“That’s right, no thanks to you.”

Ralston was getting his bluster back. The way he was acting made me wonder if he really did own this plantation, in addition to playing Thomas Mitchell for the tourists. The name Ralston was familiar to me, too, and I recalled that I had seen it on some of the paperwork when I was setting up the tour with the management company that handled business affairs for the plantation.

I took a chance and approached him while we were waiting for the police and the ambulance to arrive. “Mr. Ralston, I’m Delilah Dickinson….”

I saw by the look in his eyes that he recognized my name, too. “Mrs. Dickinson,” he said with a grave nod. “I’m sorry we had to meet under such tragic circumstances. I’m Edmond Ralston. This is my plantation.”

That confirmed my suspicion. It surprised me a little that a rich man like Ralston would take part in the play-acting, putting on a show for the tourists. From the way he had been acting earlier, though, he seemed to get a kick out of it.

“Oh! Oh!”

We looked around to see that the woman who had fainted earlier was coming around. Two more ladies in ball gowns hovered over her, helping her sit up. Both were young, a blonde in her early twenties and a brunette who was probably still a teenager. “Scarlett” began to sob as she once again saw the corpse lying a few yards away on the path.

“Maybe we ought to cover him up,” Edmond Ralston muttered under his breath.

“The cops wouldn’t like it,” Luke said, echoing what I had told Ralston a few minutes earlier about messing with the body.

“I just hate for her to have to see him like that.” Ralston lowered his voice even more as he added, “She’s his wife.” He spoke up. “Janice, why don’t you and Lindsey take Maura back into the house?”

The brunette teenager nodded. “All right, Dad.”

She and the other young woman helped the sobbing Maura to her feet. Maura didn’t want to go, though. She tried to pull away, saying, “Let go of me! I have to help Steven!”

Ralston said, “There’s nothing you can do for him now, my dear. It’s a matter for the authorities.”

He sounded a little more British now, although his voice still held a trace of the Southern drawl he affected as Thomas Mitchell.

I turned to Luke and said, “Keep an eye on things here. I want to make sure the girls are all right.” I had thought about them right away, after Luke and I came out here and saw the body, but I’d seen them dancing in the ballroom only a short time earlier so I wasn’t really worried about them. Still, since I’d promised my sister I would take care of them, I knew I’d feel better about it if I saw them with my own eyes.

Luke nodded. “Don’t worry, Miz D. I won’t let anything happen.”

I looked at the corpse and shook my head. “I’d say it’s already happened.”