Walking Into Murder by Joan Dahr Lambert Read Free Book Online Page B

masks so realistic, and how he learned to make them in the first place,” she mused.
    “I believe the Baroness taught him,” Thomas answered. “She once had something to do with the theater, I think, and knew a lot about mask making.”
    Maybe that was why the portrait of a younger Baroness had seemed so familiar, Laura thought, because she had been in the theater. The elusive sense of recognition surfaced again, but vanished just as quickly. How frustrating!
    Spurred on by her show of interest, Thomas continued his explanation. “Nigel adapted one of her techniques to create a series of face portraits, as he calls them. First, he makes a bust of his subject; then he covers it with fabric – buckram, I think it’s called, that conforms perfectly to the contours of the face and head when it’s wet. When the fabric dries, he peels it off and has a mask. It’s quite flexible, Nigel tells me, and can be kept in place by an almost invisible piece of elastic under the hair. By the time he adds coloring, paints the eyes and mouth, adds hair and eyebrows and all the rest, the results can fool almost anyone, at least in dim lights. I’ll ask him to show you, if you want. Or maybe he’ll do one of you if you’re around.”
    Laura shuddered. In normal circumstances she would have been fascinated, but at the moment masks made her feel rather nauseous. “Later on, maybe,” she answered. “Right now I’d be afraid there would be yet another body underneath.”
    “So you realized there must be a body, too.” Thomas sighed. “Hard to come alive again when you don’t have a pulse or a heartbeat.”
    Laura shivered. “And so cold,” she said. “The Baroness and Angelina felt her arm, and so did Nigel. Maybe that’s why he was fooled. Or not fooled, depending on how you look at it. I wonder what he thinks now.”
    “That he was wrong and Lottie was alive all the time,” Thomas answered. “Or at least I hope that’s what he thinks. It’s safer.”
    “Safer?” Laura was startled, and then she saw what he meant. “You mean the murderer wants everyone to think no one is dead. That was the point of using the masks and then removing the body, so they would think Lottie had been lying here all the time and had recovered.”
    “As possibly they do, except for you,” Thomas observed and Laura thought she detected a note of suspicion in his voice. “You decided to return to the scene of the crime to ask more questions Are you a detective in disguise, like Miss Marple?”
    “Not at all,” she answered primly. “I came because I was…Well, I was just curious.” She grimaced. One might even say, as Donald had, insatiably curious. The tired maxim about cats had inevitably followed. Donald hadn’t liked her impulsiveness, either. She leaped before she looked, he said, and she had to admit he was right about that. The fact that she was in this room looking for clues and wrangling with a possible murderer was proof enough.
    “You are also not lacking in courage,” Thomas said, and this time Laura thought she really did see admiration in his face.
    Terrified that she would blush again, she leaned over the bed to hide her face. Her eye was caught by a small red spot on the pillow. Blood, she was sure. Had Thomas seen it? Should she point it out? Was that risky? After all, he could be the murderer.
    Thomas’s voice made her jump. “As I said before, people do not rise from the dead, not without a pulse or heartbeat, and there’s some blood on the sheets as well. The question is, why all the disguises?”
    “To give the murderer time,” Laura replied promptly. “He, or she, had to wait until everyone was asleep to move the body, but in the meantime he had to prevent anyone from seeing who the victim really was, or even from knowing that there was a victim in the first place.”
    Her stomach lurched suddenly. She was such an innocent! Maybe that was why Tom Smith was in the green room right now. Maybe he had already