The Caroline Quest: An addictive mystery novel Read online

  The Caroline Quest

  Barbara Whitnell

  © Barbara Whitnell 2001

  Barbara Whitnell has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  About the Author

  One

  Until the age of fifteen, I hated the British. Why? Because my mother told me to, that’s why. If that makes me sound a dope, then I’m sorry — it really is necessary to have known my mother to understand. I’ve seen sixty-a-day men quit smoking, confirmed alcoholics turn from the demon drink, overweight actresses cut down to three lettuce leaves and a raw carrot per meal, all because she said so.

  Why she harboured such negative emotions about our cousins across the pond I never knew. Not then. But there was no doubt whatsoever about what happened to make me change my mind. When I was just fifteen I met a cute sixteen-year-old English boy called Jeremy who was spending the summer in a house next to ours on Cape Cod. It’s all of eight years since those hot, magical days in Corey Cove when we swam and sailed and laughed and kissed in the moonlight, but I’ve never forgotten him and still go a little weak at the knees when I think of him.

  Naturally, I hardly expected Mom to feel the same way as I did about Jeremy, but I couldn’t understand her resolute refusal to socialise with his folks or to see any good in him at all. She turned deaf ears to my assurances that the British were just people some good, some bad, some boring, some fascinating.

  ‘Their voices grate on me,’ she grated. An actor once said her vocal chords sounded as if they were made of heavy-duty barbed wire wreathed in smoke, and I knew exactly what he meant. ‘They’re forged by centuries of arrogance and imperialism. And besides,’ she added, ‘what kind of a name is “Jeremy”?’

  I ignored this irrelevance, forbearing to say that when it came to arrogance, Mom surely was the champion. If there’d been an international award, she would have beaten all corners. But as I grew older and understood her a little better, I recognised that this was simply a disguise it had been necessary for her to adopt, something she’d needed to make possible her hard climb to the top.

  The white, clapboard house on Cape Cod was our vacation place, and although Jeremy was only there for the one summer that his dad was working in the States and I never saw him again after we returned to our New York apartment, it was sufficient to open my eyes and to prove to me that my mother could be both wrong and infuriating, although undoubtedly she was an admirable woman in many ways.

  She had been left a widow when my brother Jim was eleven and I was just a baby. My father had died, leaving her with no assets but a sharp brain, an iron will, a kind of instinct about other people’s talent and an endless capacity for work. I don’t much remember the days when we were broke, but I know they happened. By the time I was aware of my surroundings, however, she had clawed her way up in the world of the theatre and was a highly respected theatrical agent with her own business: the Martha Crozier Theatrical Agency, Inc. We moved from a walk-up apartment via several intermediary addresses to a very swank place indeed overlooking Central Park, furnished with no expense spared. As well as going to Cape Cod pretty regularly, we vacationed in Acapulco, Bermuda, the Bahamas and even the continent of Europe; but we never, ever went to Britain.

  As Jim got older, he became less and less at home in her world, and he was only with us in the new apartment for a short time. He was a rebel and argued endlessly with Mom about such things as the ethics of capitalism, the need for conservation, the validity of modern art and the sheer absurdity of our country’s gun laws, to name but a few of the issues about which they held diametrically opposing views. He was convinced that America, the great consumer society, was hell-bent on self-destruction. I guess he was a little pompous and opinionated in those days, but though he changed a lot as the years went by, taking life and himself a lot less seriously, he never changed his basic belief that somehow things were managed much better in Britain.

  Mom blamed everything on a school trip to London that he took when he was fifteen.

  ‘You gathered all this in two short weeks?’ she asked derisively. He had been telling us, at great length, about his impressions.

  ‘No, of course not!’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘It’s hard to explain. There’s just so much history there. The place is soaked with it. You can feel the wisdom of the ages — ‘

  ‘Oh, phooey!’ Mom had heard enough and, flipping a dismissive hand in his direction, she swept from the room.

  Though he was interested in all manner of current issues, art was Jim’s first and most important love. He majored in History of Art in college, haunted galleries, collected paintings and had still more rows with Mom, who wanted him to forget what she described as ‘all this nonsense’ and join her in the Agency, demonstrating that for all their arguments, she had a healthy respect for his intelligence and acumen. And of course, she loved him; I knew that — knew, always, that he was the favourite. There was a time when I was resentful, jealous of the fact that she always gave him the best cut of meat, the biggest slice of pie. Jealous, even that he had a middle name. Can you beat that? He was called James Fenton Crozier and I was just Holly, which seemed to me in those days a nasty, prickly kind of name.

  I got over it, of course. He never asked for any preferential treatment. He was just a nice, good-looking, upstanding sort of guy, and it was only natural that she should be proud of him.

  But he wouldn’t join the Agency, he told me. No way. She’d own him body and soul if he did, and for his own salvation he had to get away.

  I, aged eleven and his devoted admirer, was the first one to learn that via some useful contacts in the art world he had secured a job in London in the fine art department of Lovells, the international auctioneers.

  ‘Holly,’ he said to me, coming into my room one day, his eyes bright with excitement, ‘you’re going to have to fasten your safety bell.’

  ‘I sure am,’ I breathed, after he had told me why. ‘Mom’s going to go ape.’

  ‘I know.’ I could tell, young as I was, that there was a touch of fear mixed in with the excitement. He crossed the room and sat down on the window seat, staring out at the park. It was fall, I remember, and all the trees were turning gold.

  ‘She’ll stop you,’ I said. But when he turned to face me I could see by his expression that she wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  ‘I don’t like to hurt her, but I’ve got to go,’ he said, it’s an incredible opportunity. I just hope she understands.’

  ‘She won’t.’ I was only a kid, but I knew that much. ‘Oh, Jim, I’ll miss you terribly.’

  He turned and held out his hand towards me, inviting me to curl up next to him on the window seat, and I thought, obeying his summons, what a great big brother he was. I’d long got over my childish resentment and now thought him far nicer and far better looking than any of the actors that frequented the house. And funny, too, in spite of his strong opinions. I felt hollow inside at the thought of losing him.

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ he said, putting his arm round me and pulling me closer. ‘When I’m settled you must come and stay and we’ll do the grand tour.’

  But we never did. When I finally saw the Tower of London
and Buckingham Palace and Stratford-on-Avon, it was on a school trip. The day I waved goodbye to him at Kennedy (Mom wouldn’t come: it was the housekeeper who took me) was the last time I saw him, for almost three years later, before I was able to get to see him, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

  It didn’t make Mom like the British any better. You’d think, to hear her talk at the time, that no one had ever exceeded the speed limit in the good old US of A. The fact that the monster who had knocked Jim down and left him to die by the roadside was never caught hardly helped. Slow, inefficient, bumbling she couldn’t think of anything bad enough to say about the British police. It was only by degrees that I came to see that the anger was directed at herself as much as anyone else. Knowing she had let Jim go off without a kind word just about finished her.

  She worked with an even greater frenzy and made a lot more money, particularly when, breaking the rule of a lifetime, she personally backed the proposed musical Cherokee, which, as the whole world now knows, broke all records on Broadway and then proceeded to do the same in London’s West End. Even now, a day never passes without it being staged somewhere in the world.

  For eight more years she was up at the crack of dawn, having probably been out at the theatre or dining at a nightclub until the small hours. No one ever saw her with a hair out of place or her nail varnish chipped; but then, suddenly, the heart seemed to go out of her and she decided to sell out to her partner. She felt like taking it easy for a change, she said, and wanted to spend her time checking the Dow Jones index and reading all the books she’d never had time for.

  I was working in LA by this time, having landed a part in a soap opera that went out three times a week and kept me pretty busy, so I could only talk to her on the telephone. She was tired of it all, she assured me — all the hassles and the business lunches and the bruised egos and the megalomania. I never dreamt that the tiredness had another cause — never for one moment guessed, that night she called me to give me longdistance hell for my performance in that day’s episode of Bower Street, that she was giving me hell for the last time.

  I had just finished shooting for the day and was leaving the set when I was called to the phone. It was Frank Wheeler, Mom’s long-time friend and attorney. Mom was dead, he told me. She had suffered a massive heart attack some time during the small hours and had been found that morning by the maid when she had taken in her morning coffee. It was a few days before Easter, when we were all due to take a short break, so flying back to New York immediately presented no problems for me.

  ‘You mustn’t take it so hard, Holly,’ Frank said. He and Lilian, his wife, had come back to the apartment with me after the funeral. ‘It was over so quickly. Martha would have hated to linger on, getting more and more dependent on others.

  ‘Damn it, she was only sixty, Frank, and seemed even younger,’ I said. ‘Hardly at the dependent stage! She could have expected a lot more life yet.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Poor guy, his little face was all furrowed, like a distressed hamster. Lilian looked much the same and suddenly, shockingly, I wanted to giggle hysterically, they looked so much alike in their misery.

  ‘You shouldn’t be on your own over the Easter holiday,’ Lilian said to me. ‘Isn’t there anyone — ?’

  ‘No one,’ I said, and it was true. I had friends, men and women, but there was no one I wanted near to me at that moment.

  ‘What about the guy you’re dating?’

  Rick Mansfield, she meant; the man who played the part of the doctor in Bower Street. On screen he was warm, understanding, idealistic, witty, and very, very handsome. Half the teenagers of America were head over heels in love with him and he attracted twice as much fan mail as any other member of the cast.

  Off screen, however though still very, very handsome, which had fooled me for a while he was hopelessly egocentric, with as much understanding and idealism as a rattlesnake, as well as being totally devoid of wit.

  ‘I’m not dating him any more,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what about your friend — you know the one I mean! The one you went on vacation with. Kelly, isn’t it? You and she were always close.’

  ‘She married an engineer and went to live in New Mexico.’

  Lilian bit her lip and gazed at me in an anguished kind of way.

  ‘Such a tragedy there’s no family.’

  I said nothing to this. What was there to say? There’d been no one but Mom ever since Jim died. She’d had no siblings and neither had the long-dead father I’d never known, so there were no aunts or uncles or cousins.

  In Bower Street I played the part of Mary Lou McAllister, youngest daughter of an Episcopalian minister, a ditzy blonde with a heart of gold, the one that did stupid things and said, ‘Oh gee, I’ve done it again’ I never meant that to happen!’ when everything fell about her ears, as it invariably did. In the show I had three sisters and two brothers, devoted parents and a dear white-haired old grandma, who sat rocking on the stoop shaking her head over my doings and uttering such things as ‘born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards’. Strange that in real life my situation was so diametrically different.

  Frank, it seemed, was thinking along the same lines. He reached out and patted my shoulder in an avuncular way.

  ‘Well, you have your screen family,’ he said.

  I smiled as if in agreement, but the truth was that Bower Street was going down, down, down in the ratings and we all knew it would be axed very shortly. Its particular down-home charm was of the kind that had been out of date for years. It hurt me to admit it, but it was undoubtedly Rick Mansfield’s association with the show that had kept it on screen for this long; now he wanted to be written out and it meant the end for all of us. Somehow the family spirit, if ever it existed, was disintegrating rapidly as everyone cast round for the next opportunity.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said, hoping to comfort Frank. ‘I have to go back to LA when Easter’s over, but I’m going up to Cape Cod first.’

  The old, clapboard house at Corey Cove had always been a bolt hole for me; a haven in good times and bad. Somehow I felt I would come to terms with my mother’s death and my aloneness up there. Convince myself that it didn’t matter that I hadn’t been able to tell either Jim or Mom goodbye before they were taken from me.

  Both Frank and Lilian urged me to change my mind.

  ‘Come and stay with us,’ they said. ‘You shouldn’t be alone.’

  They were so kind, and I knew they were sincere in their concern, for I had known them all my life. Lilian and my mother were particularly close, having been friends since the days when they were both young girls about town, and I knew too that Lilian’s grief was probably as great as my own. Perhaps it was for that reason I felt I had to get away. I needed Corey Cove, needed the peace and the space and the pounding of the waves and the lack of pressure to do other than to mourn. So long as I saw those poor little hamster faces in front of me, I felt compelled to be cheerful and it was tearing me to bits.

  I drove to the Cape in Mom’s car, picked up groceries at the local store and continued to smile as I received condolences from all the kind people who had known us over the years. It was a relief to reach the house and to close the front door behind me. I leaned against it for a while, letting the atmosphere wash over me, conscious of my mother’s presence not far away.

  ‘I know you’re there, Martha Crozier,’ I called out; but there was no response, only the shush-shushing of the sea and the sound of the whirring of the old refrigerator in the kitchen.

  I had expected to weep, and was not proved wrong. For two days I mooched about, not doing much but crying and sleeping and feeling sorry for myself and for her, because she had driven herself so hard and hadn’t been able to enjoy the fruits of her labour. I kept thinking of different aspects of her life; the times when she’d forced herself to dress up and go out to some function when I knew she’d rather be at home with her feet up. The times when she was supposed to be on vacation but was
always at the end of a phone, at everyone’s beck and call. Then, suddenly, it was as if I heard her voice.

  ‘That’s enough! For Pete’s sake, girl, pull yourself together.’ she seemed to be saying, her voice as harsh and vigorous as ever. ‘You’ve got as much backbone as a plate of Jell-O! You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  I knew she was right. I made myself cook a proper meal, tidied the house, tidied myself, and felt a great deal better. The sadness was there, of course, and the sense of loss it always would be but somehow I knew that the paralysing helplessness had passed and that from now on I would be able to cope with the knowledge that I was on my own. Life went on a platitude, but an inescapable fact.

  I sat down and thought about my future. Bower Street was clearly on its last legs. I had wanted desperately to act, but overtime I’d realised that I didn’t really have what it takes to make the big time, and the thought of scraping around for second-rate bimbo parts like Mary Lou for the rest of a short acting career filled me with depression. A pretty face and good figure were useless without the talent to back them up. It was time, I felt, for my life to take a new turn — but in what direction?

  I was, so Frank had assured me, a wealthy young woman. Maybe now was the time to do all the travelling I’d missed out on. That one trip to Europe had taken us to Paris and to Switzerland, which left hundreds of places to see, and the solitary school trip to Britain, though we had whizzed around some of the main tourist attractions, had merely whetted my appetite for more. Then there was Africa the Far East Australia —

  Hey, hold on there, I told myself. First I had to decide what I would do about the apartment in New York, as well as this much-loved house. The first I would sell, I decided without any difficulty. It was far too big and too ostentatious for me. Not my sort of place at all. Frank had also advised me, as he had advised my mother, to sell the Corey Cove house. It was too big and rambling, needed too much attention, he’d said. It shouldn’t be left empty. Something smaller and more modern would suit me better, be far less of a responsibility.