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  A MOMENT IN CRIME

  A SANTA FE REVIVAL MYSTERY

  Amanda Allen

  PROLOGUE

  New York City, 1910

  “What are you going to be, Maddie? When you’re a grown-up lady, I mean,” Gwendolyn asked, suddenly breaking the dusty silence of their attic sanctuary.

  Maddie glanced up from her sketchbook, startled. She’d become so absorbed in her drawing, the scene of a summer meadow with a castle in the background, that she had completely forgotten where she really was. That she wasn’t alone.

  Not that she minded being with Gwen at all. In fact, her cousin was very nearly her favorite person in the world, certainly in her family. Gwen’s father was one of Maddie’s mother’s Astor cousins, and when they visited the Vaughns’ Fifth Avenue house there were games, bicycle rides, trips to Central Park, and long, lavish teas where the grown-ups droned on with their boring gossip for hours, but Maddie, Gwen, and their brothers were left to make their own fun.

  Best of all were the times when Maddie and Gwen could slip off by themselves and sneak up to the attic storage room tucked behind the maids’ chambers at the very top of the tall house made to look like a château. There, among the trunks and piles of old furniture, they would read and chatter and draw, and fritter away the time in dusty sunlight from the high windows. No mothers or nannies hovered to tell them to stand up straight or comb their hair or quit running, to act like proper ladies.

  Being a proper lady was hideously boring.

  “I don’t know,” Maddie answered honestly, trying to consider Gwen’s question. “We’re only thirteen.”

  In truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. Grown-up ladyhood seemed to be a world full of rules that were no fun at all. The hats seemed nice; she would give ladyhood that much. The enormous confections of feathers and flowers her mother perched on her upswept pile of dark hair were pretty. But everything else looked dreary in the extreme. Walking slowly, smiling calmly, never talking too much, never showing too much interest in anything but babies and gossip. She couldn’t look forward to it.

  Maddie glanced down at her drawing. That was what she liked more than anything. Art, making new worlds with just a pencil or paintbrush. When she was painting, nothing else mattered at all. Everything disappeared, and she saw only what was on her paper. Her mother’s disappointed frowns, her father’s vague smiles on the rare times he was home, her brother’s annoying pranks—none of it was there.

  She thought of the artists she saw with their easels in the park or along the marble halls of the Metropolitan Museum. The colors and lines that brought so many things to vivid life where she stood and watched, awestruck. The artists were usually men, of course, but her mother’s best friend, Millicent Schuyler, owned a portrait by Berthe Morisot, and Maddie’s art teacher at Miss Spence’s School was always putting her work on display at galleries. Maybe, just maybe, Maddie could be a real artist herself someday. Even teaching art could be interesting.

  “I suppose you’ll marry Peter,” Gwen said, all casual and dismissive.

  Startled, because her own thoughts on the future were so different, Maddie turned to her cousin. Gwen sat in the window seat, her legs swinging, the pale sunlight turning her silvery blonde hair to a sweep of fairy-spun gold. Sometimes people were surprised the two girls were related, as Maddie was so small and dark, Gwen so blonde.

  They were different in temperament, too. Gwen was vivacious, full of high jinks, and bursting with confidence, while Maddie was careful and quiet until she was sure of things. But they usually understood each other very well.

  Or so Maddie had thought.

  “I don’t know,” she answered slowly. She considered Pete Alwin, who had lived across the street forever and had always been in her life. Their mothers were in the Opera Society and the Garden League together; Pete had been her first dance partner at cotillion, and he always played with her on the summer beach at Newport. He let her sketch him often. He had such an interesting face, always smiling. His quick laugh and merry brown eyes always made any day lighter.

  But she hadn’t seen him in a while, not since he’d gone away to Phillip’s Academy. She’d missed him, yet she’d also been wrapped up in the new extra art classes her parents permitted, the promise of a trip to Paris and possibly some classes at the École des Beaux-Arts.

  “I do like Pete a lot,” she said. “But I think there are some things I’d like to do before I get married.”

  “Like what?” Gwen popped a bonbon into her mouth, her green eyes bright with curiosity.

  “Take some art classes in Paris, maybe,” Maddie ventured. It was the first time she had admitted such a thing aloud as she waited for her parents to arrange the trip. If she wanted it too much, it was sure to be snatched away. “If I get to be good enough, maybe I could show a painting in a gallery.”

  “I think you’re good enough now,” Gwen said.

  “Really?” Maddie gasped. No one had ever told her that before.

  “Of course. Heaps better than those gloomy old flowers Mama hangs in her sitting room. Even if you did marry Peter, I doubt he’d stop you painting.”

  “Probably not.” Maddie thought of Pete, so happy-go-lucky, so accepting of everyone around him. But then, husbands always did expect their wives to put them, their houses, and their families first. Even nice ones like Pete. It was just the way it was. “I still don’t want to get married for years and years, though.”

  “Quite right. Even handsome boys like that Roger Godolphin, who I danced with at cotillion last month, get to be bores so quickly. All that cricket talk.”

  Maddie laughed as Gwen gave a shudder. “What do you want to be then, Gwennie?” she said, expecting her cousin would want to marry the Prince of Wales or something like that.

  “I’m going to be an actress,” Gwen proclaimed solemnly. “A great one. Lady Macbeth and Rosalind, all the great roles. They’ll cover the stage with flowers and pull my carriage through the streets. Every girl will copy my hairstyle and wear the same hats I do.”

  “Really?” Maddie said, amazed at such a grand dream. But truly, if anyone could do such a thing, become an idol of the stage, it was Gwen.

  Gwen frowned. “You don’t think I could do it?”

  “Of course you could. If anyone was ever meant to be a great, famous actress, it’s you. But surely your parents would never let you!” If Maddie was lucky, her mother might let her increase her drawing classes. Art was a ladylike hobby, admired and refined, as long as it didn’t go too far. But no Astor would ever be allowed to go on the public stage. Their cousin Monty had been cast out when he married an actress.

  “They’ll have to, won’t they?” Gwen said, scowling defiantly. “They’ll just have to realize this is the twentieth century. The world isn’t like when they were young anymore. There are typewriters and motorcars, and—and airplanes! There are even bits of film in those Edison stereoscopes where we can watch people dancing. Who knows what will happen next! The world deserves to see me, don’t you think?”

  Maddie laughed. “They certainly do.”

  “And you will paint my portrait, which will make you famous, too.” Gwen sat back on the window-seat cushions with a satisfied smile. “You see. Our lives are going to work out absolutely splendidly.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Santa Fe, 1922

  “When I grow up, I’m going to look just like that,” eight-year-old Ruby Anaya sighed as she stared at a glamorous photo of Constance Talmadge in Maddie’s new Movie News mag.

  Ruby’s twin, Pearl, studied the image with a gimlet eye. A blob of cookie dough from the bowl she was stirring fell right on the gleaming image of Constance’s silver lamè skirt. “You’ll never be blonde,” she said, and tu
gged at her sister’s glossy black plait.

  Ruby pulled Pearl’s hair right back. “There’s peroxide, isn’t there? Uncle Gunther tried some last month.”

  “Yes, and look what happened to poor Mr. Ryder. He has barely a curl left after he burned them off,” their mother, Maddie’s housekeeper, Juanita Anaya, said sternly. She barely glanced up from sewing the labels in the girls’ new black-and-white school uniforms. They were starting at the Sisters of Loretto’s school the next day, and there was no time to lose. “No daughter of mine will ever peroxide her hair. It’s not proper.”

  Maddie stifled a giggle at the memory of Gunther’s little hair mishap. In a misguided attempt to look more “Viking” for his new author publicity photos, he had dyed his curly red hair platinum—only to see much of it tumble out of his scalp in burned curlicues.

  “Oh well, darling,” he had sniffed. “Turbans are very chic right now.”

  Maddie plied her own needle on the hem of her pink chiffon dancing dress for that night’s party at the Art Museum. Her own work was going to be among those on display, and she had to admit she was more than a little nervous. Not just about people seeing her paintings, but about being escorted to the soiree by the handsome Dr. David Cole. Her first real date in—well, ever, since she had married her childhood sweetheart and then lost him in the war.

  “Dorothy Gish has dark hair,” she said, pointing out a photo of the raven-haired comedienne in an elaborate eighteenth-century costume. “And she is very beautiful.”

  “More than her sister Lillian, do you think?” Juanita asked. She always tried to pretend indifference to such newfangled amusements as the movies, but Maddie knew different. It wasn’t always the twins who took the piles of magazines Maddie had sent from New York out of the sitting room.

  “I think they’re equally lovely. Just like Ruby and Pearl,” Maddie said. “I almost went to California once, you know, to see the movie sets not long after most of them went out there from New York.”

  The twins looked at her with wide, chocolate-brown eyes. Even Buttercup, their little terrier dog, sat up with an interested perk to her ears. “You were going to be in the movies, Señora Maddie?” Ruby gasped.

  Maddie laughed. “No, not in the movies. Just watch some of them filming, take in the ocean and the sunshine, eat some fresh oranges right off the trees. My mother thought it would do me good.”

  “Do you good?” Pearl asked, her little forehead creased in concern. “Were you ill, Señora Maddie?”

  Maddie carefully snipped a thread that tightened a silver bead onto pink silk, remembering that time. Wondering how much to tell the girls. Those weren’t days she enjoyed thinking about at all. The weeks and months after hearing of her husband Pete’s death in the trenches of France. The blackness that seemed to enclose her like a suffocating blanket, shutting out all the light, the warmth and feeling.

  The girls had only just lost their father, in a terrible way. They didn’t seem to be falling into the abyss as she had, since they had their mother’s careful love and attention, and the excitement of a new school. Maddie kept a close watch on them, and never wanted them to worry.

  But she could tell them about the journey, and how it had all ended for her. In a new home here in Santa Fe, in new life and hope.

  “I was very tired,” she said. “And I had a cousin named Gwendolyn, who always said she wanted to be an actress. She had a chance to make a screen test in California with a famous director, and she wanted me to go with her on the cross-country train trip so she wouldn’t be lonely.” She had also gone so Gwen wouldn’t get into too much trouble, as her parents feared. They’d thought a chaperone would be good for Gwen. Aunt Astor had been right to worry, of course; Gwen had already caused numerous scandals in New York, the latest involving the fountain outside the Plaza Hotel. “My mother thought I would like the journey.”

  “Did you?” Ruby asked.

  “Very much. I saw so many things I had only ever heard of in books. The Mississippi River, mountains and plains. But my very favorite spot was right here in Santa Fe.”

  “Why?” asked Pearl, who had never been further away from Santa Fe than her parents’ ancestral home at San Ildefonso Pueblo, where her brother was currently visiting.

  “Because I had never imagined anything so beautiful.” Maddie smiled as she remembered her first glimpse of the New Mexico sky, that vast, liberating sweep of endless brilliant blue, the lavender mountains in the distance, the open spaces of the desert. It was only there that she could finally breathe again. Where she had the space to be free. “And because I met you girls, and your mother and your brother and Uncle Gunther, and you were all the kindest people. I knew I could be at home here.”

  “What about your cousin? Is she a movie star?” Ruby asked.

  Maddie glanced at Juanita. Gwen wasn’t really a woman Juanita would approve of. Juanita always tsked about “flappers,” and Gwen was certainly a flapperish sort of girl, with her love of parties and clothes and a good cocktail.

  But Juanita also knew how Maddie and Gwen had once been like sisters when they were girls together in New York, and how Maddie worried because there hadn’t been a letter from Gwen in some time.

  And, aside from two small appearances in “dancing jazz babies” flicks, Gwen hadn’t shown up on Santa Fe’s small movie screen, either.

  “No, not yet,” Maddie answered. “It does sometimes take time to find the right part.”

  “Lilli Lamont was discovered drinking a root beer float at the Woolworth’s counter,” Pearl said. “Maybe your cousin should do that.”

  Maddie laughed. “Maybe so,” she said, thinking the girls seemed to be reading too many movie gossip rags.

  Ruby wrinkled her nose. “Floats are fattening. Ladies’ Circle says so.”

  Yes. Definitely too many magazines. Maddie vowed to keep them more out of sight from then on.

  “What nonsense,” Juanita said briskly. “You two are always running and jumping so much, it would take a thousand floats to plump you up enough. And you know it’s what in your hearts that counts. What you see in a movie is only a dream. You’ll learn that with the Sisters and their school lessons.”

  Pearl and Ruby nodded, but they still looked doubtful.

  “It’s time to wash up for dinner,” Juanita said. “You need to let Señora Maddie finish her dress. Dr. Cole will be here soon.”

  Juanita very much approved of Dr. Cole, ever since he had been of so much assistance when her husband Tomas died. Maddie liked the doctor, too, more than she wanted to admit. He made her smile and laugh, and feel all fluttery and nervous, in a girlish way she barely remembered. His blue eyes, his golden beard, his rare smile, his quiet kindness—he was a find indeed.

  “Oh, yes, that reminds me,” Maddie said, tying off the end of her thread and trying to push away those ridiculously dreamy thoughts. “I need your help with something, Juanita.”

  “What is that, Señora Maddie?”

  Maddie lifted a strand of heavy, dark hair that had fallen from its pins. “I need you to bob my hair. It’s time I joined the 1920s.” She laughed at the appalled look on Juanita’s face, and the twins clapped their hands in delight. “But I promise. There will be no peroxide.”

  CHAPTER 2

  It was her painting. Maddie’s very own work, hanging on a museum wall for everyone to see. She didn’t quite know if she wanted to laugh—or be sick.

  She studied the small oil scene, her own pink-brown adobe house and bright garden, a swirl of brilliant colors in the amber light of a late autumn afternoon. How she had struggled to capture that magical, shimmering light! One moment she had grown so frustrated that she’d even tossed her brushes to the ground, making Buttercup bark like it was all a fun game of “fetch the brushes.” It still wasn’t quite right, but a small red dot proclaimed it sold, so it was too late.

  She glanced at her other work, an image of the distant mountains at sunset, the peaks all lavender and indigo-blue, touched with b
its of snowy white against the broad sweep of gold and rose light. The quiet intensity, the solitude, of the hours she had spent working on it seemed very far away amid the noise and chaos of the party.

  Ever since Maddie had arrived in Santa Fe, she had dreamed of having her work shown in the new Museum of Fine Arts. The building, one of the largest in town and on a prominent corner across from the Palace of the Governors, was only a few years old but looked as if it had always been there, with its rounded, pueblo-like walls, towers, and balconies. Inside, it was all dark wood floors and pale walls, covered with brilliant paintings, lined with glass cases filled with gorgeous pottery. And she was there, too, for everyone to see!

  “Darling, there you are! Oh, look at your hair; aren’t you just the bee’s knees? About time you bobbed it,” she heard a voice call, and she turned to see her friend Gunther Ryder pushing his way toward her through the crowd. Gunther was tall and slender, his pale features touched by his patrician New York Jewish background, his red hair grown back after the peroxide disaster and smoothed into a crest with Brylcreem. The green-and-white polka dot cravat she’d brought him back from her last journey to Manhattan gleamed as bright as his smile. He held two heavy pottery goblets, especially designed to go with the Pueblo Revival style of the new museum, and he pressed one into Maddie’s hand. “Here, have some of this delicious planter’s punch. Not much punch to it, I’m afraid, but I did add a touch of my own special brew.”

  “Oh, Gunther, you are an angel,” Maddie said, taking a sip of the deceptively sweet, fruity concoction. It was bracing, but she knew better than to imbibe too freely of Gunther’s special brews. “I was feeling rather queasy just looking at my paintings here for anyone to see.”

  Gunther cocked his head to one side to study the mountains. “Maddie, my pet, you have nothing to fear. They’re exquisite, so full of light and freedom! And you’ve sold one already, before the party even had time to really get started. I do understand, though.”