Liz was about to pull off her sweater when Marla Maxwell said, “I’ve got a problem. Can I talk to you?” The self-satisfaction was gone, and the girl now looked worried, a frown wrinkling her pristine forehead. Liz pulled her sweater back on.
“You can, but this is not the ideal place. Why don’t you come and see me at the office? I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t want to be seen at the police station, because someone will tell my mother. Why not now? No one’s around.”
Marla began to put on some clothes, which Liz found helpful. Although, God help her, she only fancied men, a naked Marla did nothing to establish a professional atmosphere in this already unbusinesslike setting.
“Okay. What’s bothering you?” Resigned to her fate, Liz sat down on the bench in front of the lockers. Marla Maxwell threw her towel into her gym bag and started to tie her damp hair into a ponytail.
“Not what. Who. I’m being harassed.”
“That’s serious and we can help you. Who is doing this?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. I’m getting these weird text messages, and they’re not from the people who they say they’re from. And someone’s following me, I’m sure of it.” Marla’s low dramatic tones began to sound like something from one of the daytime soaps.
“That’s all a bit garbled, Marla.” Liz took the padlock off her locker and started to take out her belongings. “If these things are happening, surely your parents should be the first to know.”
“No!” Marla Maxwell sounded as if she was about to burst into tears. “Because then they’d know about …and I’ll be sent to my horrid old aunt on the mainland, and if you say anything to them I’ll deny everything!” The soap opera tone had returned.
“Marla, you still live at home, don’t you? And your parents are friends of the chief officer’s. I’d have to tell them.”
“That’s why I wanted to tell you here, not at the police station.”
At this point, two women came in, chattering away, and Marla picked up her gym bag and ran past them, bumping into them in her hurry.
On her way back to Elodie and lamb shanks, Liz mulled over her change room encounter. Overly dramatic as the girl had sounded, there clearly was something bothering her, or why would she voluntarily open up a can of worms with a member of the police force? And a can of worms it was, since she was afraid of her parents finding out whatever it was she was doing — and it was easy enough to guess what that was. Sex, yes, and probably involving some youth the Gastineaus would consider undesirable. Or, rather, unacceptable.
It was a short drive to Elodie’s cottage, but by the time she got there she had decided there was nothing she could do unless the girl laid a formal complaint. She could only guess at Marla Maxwell’s age, but she suspected she was younger than she looked, still in her teens. Certainly she talked like a fifteen-year-old. She sighed, remembering herself at that age, hormones a-bubble, one minute melancholy and the next over the moon, secretive and sociable, a mass of contradictions. Come to think of it, had she really changed that much?
She was laughing as she drove up the gravel driveway alongside Elodie’s cottage, but her laughter died when she realized she had forgotten to pick up a bottle of red, as she had intended. Thinking about Marla Maxwell’s problems had driven it clean out of her mind. Ah well. Liz got out of her car, locked it, went up and knocked on the door before letting herself in. As she did so, she heard voices, Elodie’s voice, and that of a man. The scent of something delectable hung in the air. Not lamb shanks. It smelled like mushrooms cooking.
“Liz! Come on through! Into the kitchen!”
She walked into a scene of cosy domesticity. At the kitchen table, her aunt was slicing up a baguette and, at the stove stood a small, bearded man in a striped apron cooking — yes — mushrooms.
Gandalf.
As she came in, he turned around. He was not looking particularly pleased at the intrusion.
“Liz, let me introduce my neighbour, Hugo Shawcross, who will be joining us for dinner. Hugo, this is my niece, Liz.”
Gandalf nodded, managed a smile, said hello, then turned hastily back to his mushrooms. As he did so, Elodie mouthed something at Liz, shaking her head slightly. It looked as if she was saying, “Only Liz.”
Ah, no job description.
Before Liz could make any response, Elodie said, with cheerful animation, “Hugo and I have been having the most fascinating conversation.” She brandished the breadknife in the air like a cheerleader waving her pompoms. “Sit down, pour yourself a glass of wine.”
“About —?”
“About vampires,” she said. There was just a touch of hysteria in her voice, which seemed to Liz to be more about a wild desire to laugh, than fear. “Hugo can tell you all you might ever want to know about them.”
Gandalf turned away from his pan of mushrooms, and chuckled. “The undead,” he said, and held up his glass of wine, which stood close to the stove. From the colour of his cheeks, it was far from being his first, and he looked not in the least vampire-like. “Here’s to the undead,” he repeated.
Almost exactly an hour after their across-the-garden-fence conversation, Hugo Shawcross had arrived at Elodie’s front door carrying a very nice bottle of wine, a paper bag of mushrooms, and a buff-coloured folder. The trouble-making play, presumably, thought Elodie as she let him in, although it was not at all certain if he knew he was in Mrs. Maxwell’s bad books. They exchanged the usual pleasantries, thank-yous for the invitation and the wine, idle chatter about mushrooms, appreciative comments from Hugo about Elodie’s cottage, and an offer to do the mushroom-cooking.
“Lovely. I’ve already put out a suitable pan, and I’ll make garlic bread — if you like garlic bread?”
“Love it.”
“So,” said Elodie, vigorously mashing crushed garlic cloves into the softened butter, “tell me about your play. I hear the subject matter is somewhat controversial?”
Hugo helped himself to a blue-and-white striped apron from a peg by the stove and put it over his immaculate white shirt. “Some have found it so, and, unfortunately, the some in this case is a Mrs. Maxwell, who has clout in the group.”
So he knew that much. “Not just in the group, Hugo. She is island aristocracy.”
“I know, and that’s the other thing. I am, naturally, interested in the ancient Guernsey families — she’s a Gastineau, isn’t she? — but when I started asking questions about her family history she seemed quite put out, I can’t think why.”
“Not a good person to get on the wrong side of. You said ‘the other thing.’ What else is she upset about?”
Hugo stopped cleaning the mushrooms, and banged his fist on the wooden table. “It’s my own fault,” he said. “She got up my nose with her hoity-toityness and I made a stupid joke. The play, you see, involves vampires, and the Players are hopeful it will bring in a new, younger audience. She objected, and I — laughingly — claimed to have the inside track on vampires,
