The Plain Old Man Read online

  “You can use Bed’s.”

  “Rather have my own,” he grumbled. “What about pajamas?”

  “I have some of Young Bed’s old ones that will fit you. I keep them for the grandchildren when they sleep over. Don’t fuss, Fred. You’ll be perfectly comfortable.”

  She strong-armed him into Sarah’s car, Heatherstone having been sent home ages ago to rest up for tomorrow. “There, now we can talk. Sarah’s told me the dreadful news about poor Charlie. You do believe it, Fred?”

  “Would I go around shooting off my mouth to the police if I didn’t? What kind of fool do you take me for?”

  “Oh Fred, don’t be a prune. You know I trust your judgment as I would my own. It’s just that I can’t quite take it in. What are we going to do?”

  “Wait and see what the police turn up, I suppose. That Sergeant Formsby didn’t strike me as any dumbbell.”

  “All right, we’ll do that. But what about the funeral? You and I are Charlie’s executors, aren’t we?”

  “We are. I’ve already been to see Muffenson. The will’s perfectly straightforward, thank God. He’s left you his furniture, which you don’t need, and me his books, which I’ll be glad to have. His money goes to the school, which was damned decent of him, except for a few small bequests. A thousand to the BSO, another thousand to the Horticultural Society in memory of his mother, that sort of thing. We can go over it in detail when the time comes to cough up. As for the funeral, he didn’t want one.”

  “Did he actually put that in the will? I must say it doesn’t surprise me. Charlie used to say that for all he cared, we could simply wrap him in brown paper and mail him out of town. Oh Fred, I’m going to miss him!”

  “Now Emma, don’t go turning on the waterworks. It’s late and I’m tired, dammit. Charlie stipulated that he’s to be cremated with no fuss nor feathers and his ashes scattered over your rose garden in the pious hope they’ll be of some small benefit to the local ecology.”

  “Oh dear. I honestly don’t think I could bear having little bits of Charlie turning up among the mulch.”

  “Humbug. What’s the sense of being squeamish? If Charlie didn’t mind, why the hell should you? Funny how people get these sentimental notions about their outworn carcasses, isn’t it? Do you recall when Joe Pomfret died? He wanted his ashes scattered over Boston Harbor. This was back before they’d started trying to clean it up, and apparently Joe hadn’t gone to check it out before he made his will.

  “Well, anyway, Bed and I went down to T Wharf and hired some old gaffer to take us out in a damned stinking tub of a charter boat. We spent the whole day cruising around trying to find a spot that didn’t have any oil slicks or raw sewage floating around. Finally we gave up and put into the wharf again, half frozen and still lugging that blasted box of ashes.

  “So Bed said the hell with it, let’s go have a drink. He and I went back to South Station, bellied up to the oyster bar, and ordered a few martinis and an oyster stew. Then we walked back to the Fort Point Bridge and dumped Joe over the railing on the outgoing tide. By then it was too dark to see what he landed on, and we were too drunk to care.”

  Frederick snickered at this vignette from the past, then sobered. “None of that folderol when I go, Emma. I want a cheap pine box and I want to be planted in the family plot next to Mother and Father and Lucy. Why cheat the worms out of a supper just because it’s not stylish to park your bones next to the old folks any more?”

  “Yes, Frederick. I’ll see to it, assuming you don’t get to bury me first. And naturally we’ll do as Charlie wanted. Have you fixed things with the undertaker?”

  “I have. We’re due at the crematorium tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock sharp.”

  “So soon?” Emma sighed. “All right, then. You and me, and Sarah if she wants to come, though I can’t imagine why she would. Who else?”

  “What about the Tippletons? Charlie always thought Jack was an awful fool, but he liked Martha.”

  “Just Martha, then. Actually I don’t suppose we need ask anybody at all, merely to go over there and stand around the furnace, if that’s what one does. It would be much nicer to have a little memorial gathering at the house, perhaps on Sunday afternoon when we’re all rested up from the show. Drinks and little sandwiches, you know, and the orchestra playing some of the songs we used to dance to. We’ll ask people to bring their old snapshots of Charlie, and show them around and chat about the happy times. Oh, Fred!”

  “Now, Emma. I’m going to miss the old buzzard as much as you are, but you don’t catch me giving way. Come on, chin up. Stiff upper lip.”

  “Stiff upper horsefeathers!” Emma sniffed a few times, made vigorous use of her handkerchief, and straightened her spine. “Frederick, what makes you so sure Charlie was murdered?”

  Kellings never did have much patience with namby-pamby notions about finer feelings. Frederick told. Emma nodded.

  “Yes, of course. I’d have found that out for myself if you hadn’t beaten me to it. Charlie told me about his little arrangement one day when I’d asked him how he was managing you know, as one naturally would. We had a good chuckle over the family heirloom. He wants it to go to the Massachusetts Historical Society, by the way. Polished first, I suppose.”

  “I know. That’s in the will too. There aren’t any Daventers left except that third cousin of his, and I don’t have to tell you what Charlie thought of Lemuel. He’s left him two dollars to buy a girlie magazine.”

  “Frederick, he didn’t.” Emma was laughing and choking at the same time.

  “It’s right down there in black and white. Blast it, Emma, you might as well go ahead and bawl if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  “Later,” said Emma Kelling. “Right now I’m trying to remember where I put those pajamas.”

  Chapter 13

  IF ANYTHING ELSE HAPPENED that night, Sarah didn’t know about it. By the time they’d shared a jug of Slepe-o-tite and got Frederick bedded down in Young Bed’s old room, she was quite ready to resume the slumber she’d begun at the rehearsal.

  She woke early, though, noted it was going to be a fine day for the show, and felt an urge to be up and doing. Then Sarah remembered this was also her day to visit Cousin Mabel and wished she hadn’t waked up at all. Even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wouldn’t have much heart for that particular fate, she brooded as she brushed her teeth.

  However, as Ridpath Wale had so aptly put it last night, needs must when the devil drives. She hoped that ankle of his wasn’t going to give him too much trouble. It might be possible for the Sorcerer to play his part on crutches, but Sarah couldn’t see where they’d add much to the dramatic effect.

  That unscrewed step down from the trapdoor bothered her very much. It hadn’t caused Ridpath a very long fall. Even if he’d taken a headlong spill, he might have got out of it with nothing worse than a mild concussion or a broken collarbone. On the other hand, he might have broken his neck. From the tenor of the note stabbed into Aunt Emma’s bustle, he’d been meant to.

  The note must have been written well before Ridpath was hurt. There was no typewriter backstage, or anywhere else in the auditorium that Sarah could recall, and she’d covered most of it during the past couple of days, on one or another of her aunt’s commissions. She wondered if by any chance it might turn out to have been typed on the machine downstairs in the library, at the same time the paper knife was taken. It was strange about that knife. Surely whoever took it must have known Emma would recognize her own property. It must have been taken sometime yesterday. Sarah was pretty sure she’d noticed the paper knife on Uncle Bed’s desk Wednesday when she’d been checking for signs of a break-in, just before she saw the note on the screen.

  And why couldn’t the knife have been taken soon afterward, maybe while she was trapped in the potting shed? She hadn’t gone back to the library. The entire ensemble—cast, chorus, and orchestra—was in the house then. Aunt Emma had been busy with the rehearsal and the Heatherstones with the buffe
t. To accomplish all that without being missed from the rehearsal would have taken some pretty fancy footwork, though. It seemed more and more that at least two people must be involved in this wicked business. Now it looked as if they must all be connected in one way or another with the show, and that seemed hard to swallow.

  Unless it was the Tippletons. Jenicot’s notion of togetherness, perhaps; the family that robbed together hobnobbed together. That meant Jack’s infatuation with Gillian Bruges, his indifference to his wife and daughter were feigned. Sarah didn’t believe that for one second. Jack was a randy old rooster, Martha a well-trodden doormat, and Jenicot a daughter in distress, looking for a happy ending she wasn’t likely to find unless she managed to create a separate one for herself.

  Of course if one got to thinking of families, some of the people Sarah had assumed were out of it might as well be counted in. Maybe Parker Pence’s father had been masterminding from behind the kettledrums while his son did the dirty work and Mrs. Pence carried the stolen paper knife away in her flute case. Stranger things had happened, but surely not in Emma Kelling’s drawing room. Would respectable parents embroil their children in such nefarious doings? Would sensible parents trust their children to do as they were told and keep their mouths shut about it? Not that Parker could be called a child, Sarah supposed, but he seemed awfully callow to her.

  And what if he was? Guy Mannering didn’t strike Sarah as any master of guile either, but he did have those two friends taking stiff college majors. A philosopher to work out a plan, an electrical engineer to handle the technicalities, Guy himself the scene painter with a glorious excuse to invade Emma’s house and learn the lie of the land; they’d make an effective team. They’d said they weren’t coming back to the rehearsal, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t done so. Or that one of them hadn’t.

  Skip, she thought, the skinny one who could curl himself up in impossible places. He could have secreted the paper knife while they were putting up the scenery, watched his chance to drive it into the bustle while Aunt Emma was passing by with that single mind of hers fixed on the performance, and made his escape perhaps during the finale while everybody was onstage. Such a stunt would appeal to that crude schoolboy sense of humor she’d been treated to a dose of when they went out to supper.

  Well, it was one more thing to think about. Sarah climbed out of the shower and toweled herself dry. No old pants and jersey today. Cousin Mabel would take it as a personal affront if she didn’t show up dressed to the teeth. Mabel would also take it as a personal affront if she did, but that couldn’t be helped. Her natural linen skirt and blazer, with a blue silk blouse, would be a reasonable compromise. If Aunt Emma had some chore for her, she could borrow a smock.

  It was almost a shock, after the all-out involvement of the past week, to realize that after tonight everything would be over. After so much preparation, one might have thought they’d do three or four performances, but perhaps that was part of Emma Kelling’s mystique. By making her operettas once-and-never-again events, she made everybody and his grandfather feel they absolutely had to be there. The auditorium would be packed to the eaves tonight. It always was. She buttoned her blouse and went downstairs.

  Heatherstone was just starting upstairs with the tea tray. Sarah took the cup he’d meant for her and carried it out to the sun parlor. The room was still chilly, but the sun was up. It would be warm soon. Sarah hoped the sun would shine again Sunday for Charlie’s memorial gathering.

  Not that the occasion would be a dreary one in any event; there’d be too many Kellings around. Kellings, by and large, adored a funeral. This one wouldn’t be up to standard without the guest of honor present, but they’d make the most of what they could get. Dolph would pontificate, Uncle Theodore would quaver, “So young to be taken,” and Aunt Priscilla insist, “A blessed release.” Aunt Appie would be crushed with grief over not getting to pay her personal last respects to the dear departed, which to her would have meant standing over the open coffin, shedding tears and hairpins all over the undertaker’s painstaking handiwork. Cousin Theonia, though only an in-law, would enter into the spirit of the occasion, cooing like the mourning dove Zenaidura macroura, “Such a loss to his dear ones.”

  His dear ones in Charlie’s case would be primarily Emma and Frederick, as far as Sarah knew; unless the detested Lemuel showed up, in which case Aunt Appie would doubtless be good-natured enough to cry over him. Cousin Frederick must have sent him a telegram from a sense of executorial duty, but Sarah could imagine what he’d put in it. CHARLES DEAD. DON’T COME. NOTHING IN IT FOR YOU.

  The hot tea tasted good, but it was making her hungry. Sarah went out to see whether Mrs. Heatherstone had started breakfast yet, found her frying pancakes, and helped herself to one hot from the pan. Pancakes with the real maple syrup they’d surely get at Emma’s were lovely, but Sarah liked them even better rolled up with butter and jam inside.

  “Here, put on this apron so you won’t spot your pretty blouse,” Mrs. Heatherstone scolded. “And stay in the kitchen to eat that. I won’t have you tracking melted butter all over the house.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Heatherstone,” Sarah replied meekly, and sat down like a good child with a plate and napkin. She’d be going home tomorrow evening, most likely, then she could eat where she chose. Max was a great one for having picnic meals wherever he took the notion, and she’d picked up the habit from him. What was he eating now, she wondered, and where, and how soon would he get back to Boston?

  Sarah realized she was having mixed feelings about Max’s homecoming. She ached to have him back, but she dreaded having to plunge him into yet another family crisis. Things had been the same when Alexander was alive, everybody expecting Sarah’s husband to pull them out of the soup, leaving him no time for Sarah. She sighed and rolled herself another pancake.

  “You keep that up, young woman, and you won’t have any appetite for breakfast.” Mrs. Heatherstone couldn’t seem to remember Sarah was grown up and twice married. “Now go along and set the table for me, like a good girl.”

  Sarah obeyed as she always had. She couldn’t quite recall the first time her parents had parked her at Aunt Emma’s. The last had been when she was ten, the time her parents had gone on an extended tour of Europe. That must have been right after her mother had learned she was terminally ill and made up her mind to do all the things she’d been putting off while she was still able. Nobody had bothered to tell Sarah that. She hadn’t minded being left behind; to go would have meant having to memorize too many guidebooks in order to get the maximum benefit from her cultural experience. Here in Pleasaunce, she’d been allowed to read Uncle Bed’s mystery novels instead.

  They’d been innocent enough, she realized now; no sex, less violence than she’d found in her fairy stories, lots of earnest cogitation often based on remarkably silly premises. If it weren’t for the unrefined nature of Cousin Frederick’s clue, the current Kelling predicament might have fitted comfortably into one of Uncle Bed’s genteel thrillers: a valuable family portrait gone, a murder made to look like the commonest sort of accident; a perfect setup for Miss Maud Silver to take off her second-best hat, pin on her bog-oak brooch, sit down with her knitting, and unravel the mystery.

  But how many mysteries were there? Was it sensible to lump Charlie’s death in with Ernestina’s disappearance just because they’d happened on the same night? And because Charlie’d been in on the discussion about how much Ernestina might be worth on today’s stolen art market? And because that last and nastiest note had said, “Two down, one to go”?

  What about those notes, anyway? What was the point of all those vague menaces and no instructions about forking over the money? What sort of game did these crooks think they were playing?

  Maybe they weren’t real crooks. Maybe Four-Square Jane was back on the job. Sarah couldn’t help smiling at that notion as she arranged silver and napkins on the pale green linen place mats. She’d discovered Pour-Square Jane here in Uncle Bed’s library that s
ummer when she was ten. Jane had been one of those emancipated ladies of early crime fiction, not a detective but a female Robin Hood who stole from the stingy rich to give to the worthy poor.

  In one adventure Jane had abstracted a huge masterpiece from a rich man’s gallery under seemingly impossible conditions and forced its flinthearted owner, by way of ransom, to send a large donation to a philanthropy he’d been holding out on. Once the check was cashed, she dropped him a note telling him to pull down his window blind. There was the treasured painting, cut out of its frame, pinned to the cloth, and simply rolled up out of sight.

  She’d told Max the story not long ago. He’d hit the ceiling. In the first place, he’d pointed out, Jane would have marred the painting by cutting away the edge, and ruined the goddamn finish by cracking it all to hell when she rolled up the goddamn blind. In the third, the extra thickness of canvas would have caused the blind to bulk up so much that the owner would have had to be blind himself not to notice. In the fourth place, Jane wouldn’t have been able to reach the painting in the first place. If the owner was such a tasteless clod as he was made out to be, he’d have skied the painting in the tasteless fashion of the day, hanging it up close to the ceiling. That would have been at least fourteen feet high and unreachable except by a long wooden ladder which Jane would have had one hell of a time tucking into her bloomers.

  Max would never make a mystery fan. He was too unwilling to suspend logic in the interest of a good yarn. He did believe in playing one’s hunches, though, and here was a point to consider. Would Sarah have thought of Four-Square Jane just now if Jane hadn’t been trying to tell her something? Suppose the reason she couldn’t figure out how the painting had been taken from the house was that in fact it hadn’t. All right then, if it was still here, where was it?

  Not rolled up in a window blind, surely. Not pinned behind a drapery, either, because Heatherstone would have noticed. Not cut out of its stretcher, thank goodness, or surely the remains would have been left in the frame.