by James Brady
Then Miz Phoebe dropped her little bombshell over a Manhattan she’d invited me to have with her in my father’s absence.
“That girl who died on the beach down by the Maidstone, Hannah Cutting? You know she lived on Further Lane years ago.”
I protested that she hadn’t. “No, Miz Phoebe, she grew up poor, an immigrant Czech family scratching out a hardscrabble livelihood in Polish Town in Riverhead. I’ve gone up there to look into it and it’s true.” Quite so, said Miz Phoebe; little Hannah wasn’t actually living on Further Lane but working here as a teenaged au pair girl, what they called back then “a mother’s helper,” to one of the great families, the Warrenders. Working the summer in one of the several great Warrender “cottages,” for one branch or another of the wealthy Warrender Clan.
In fact, Miz Phoebe said, if memory serves, the young Hannah worked a summer in the very house she now owns! Or had, she added decorously, until her unfortunate death.
* * *
Speaking of house keys, I’d given Alix Dunraven a set. Not necessary, really, since no one I knew ever locked the doors on Further Lane unless you were going away. I don’t know; maybe I was attempting to distance myself from her, provide her an easy independence.
I’d never enjoyed being a houseguest, didn’t especially like having houseguests. Better for strangers to stay in hotels. But this guest had the potential for being different, or I was starting to think so. Our brief contact so far had been a bit awkward, edgy. Then why were we so relaxed next morning?
Credit Alix for that.
I was up early, hoping she’d sleep in late and we wouldn’t have to be artificially polite. I’ m not great before coffee. And I was inordinately self-conscious about being alone with her, sure I’d do or say something stupid and she’d go off. Harry had dumped her on me and yet I didn’t want to lose her. Not yet, certainly. Instead, whether she heard me at the coffee or the morning birds had called her, she came into the nice country kitchen the gatehouse boasted, maybe the best room in the small house.
“I’ve been admirably behaved thus far,” she told me, “even walked the dog.” She paused. “Hope you don’t mind her doing the necessary on your nice lawn.”
“No,” I said, thinking my old man would kill me for it, not being a dog fancier himself. But he was in Norway, stalking the noble salmon. The poodle, however, must have read my mind and growled.
“She’s remarkably well trained,” Alix assured me in comforting tones, aware I’d been bitten once already. “For a dog, I mean.”
Well, I said, hope you slept well, being hearty, though not feeling it truly. But she did look fine.
I should have been up earlier, made the coffee myself, she said. Are you good at it? I inquired, not knowing precisely where the conversation was going nor what to say, but only admiring, furtively, her body under the tie silk robe she was wearing, though only just. “No, I’m awful at it. Perhaps it’s best you press on and I’ll watch.” So I made the coffee and we sat together there at the kitchen table and drank it and before it was over, we were laughing at how badly I did coffee, almost as badly as she confessed doing. And I was telling her what good doughnuts Dreesen’s made, the grocery store, and how one of these mornings I’d …
But still, we fenced. She had appointments and chores; so did I, and I kept them to myself. Didn’t, for one, tell her about the cleanly scrubbed computer from which quite possibly the precious manuscript she was looking for had recently been removed. As for her chores?
“You know, before getting into publishing, I thought about trying your line. Worked on a newspaper for a time myself, one of the Fleet Street dailies, during the Long Vac at Oxford. Making tea and running errands and shepherding the Page Three Girls…”
“Oh?” Was she now going to tell me how to do my job on the basis of a summer as a copygirl?
“It was on The Sun, one of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids. Everyone reads it and denies they do so.”
“I know. Anyone who’s lived in London knows about the Page Three Girls.”
The Page Three Girls were in there and featured every day. Winsomely topless every day as well.
“Pa was apoplectic when I announced I was working there for the summer. Cursed out Rupert and me both.” She paused, “Though I suspect he thought the Page Three Girls rather jolly. I used to catch him giving them a careful look.”
I thought about my own father watching Toby Montana through binoculars.
But Her Ladyship was off on another tack.
“I found myself brooding about Hannah last night in bed. A woman with all that she had going for her and then, at the pinnacle, to be summarily butchered like that on her own doorstep. Can that ever again be a happy house?” She paused for an instant, and then asked, “Do you believe in ghosts, Beecher? I mean, here we are, the two of us, picking over poor Hannah’s bones. If I were so dreadfully slaughtered as she was, I’d strive vigorously to come back and haunt everyone. Weep in the night, rap on tables, set pet dogs to howling, cast funereal chills over things, give all of East Hampton nightmares.”
I chewed the question over for a bit. Ghosts? Wasn’t the sort of thing I thought much about.
“I dunno. Do you?”
That was clever, I told myself, turning the question back on the questioner.
“Oh, yes, of course. And I’m surprised you haven’t taken a philosophical position on it. All these big old houses out here on the sea. Places like this in Cornwall and Devon simply pullulate with ghosts. There was a lovely little film years ago called The Uninvited, with Ray Milland, I believe, an old house on the Cornish cliffs. Super, I promise you, sheer but quite elegant horror. Surely along Further Lane someone’s encountered a shade or two.…”
“Well, I…”
“Take my Pa’s place at Kingston Mere. We have a white nun who appears on the stair and sobs, wringing her hands and all that. Terrified me as a child. The stair was just outside my nursery and I spent the first decade of my life half stifled, sleeping with my head under the pillow so she couldn’t get at me. A wonder I didn’t perish of emphysema.”
“But surely your parents took steps to…”
“Oh, they nattered about it. Said a proper house ought to have a ghost or two. Insisted a good haunting did wonders for the rental or resale value of an old house, that everyone knew that. Beastly of them, come to think of it, permitting me to grow up perpetually terrified. Finally, I turned the whole business into an asset, inviting girls from my school to come stay overnight, especially girls I envied or didn’t particularly like. The weeping nun paralyzed them with fear. Sent them back to school thoroughly chastened with their pants wet. It was smashing! By the time we graduated, everyone at my school wanted a ghost.”
I promised to check with my father when he got back to determine whether we’d ever had a ghost. I felt I owed Alix that.
Now she shifted focus yet again.
“Good,” she said. “Now in my brief forays through the village, it appeared to me there were any number of super-looking boutiques. If I’m to be here for a few days I’m running somewhat short of clothes. Don’t want to let the side down by looking frumpy, y’know.”
No, of course not, I quickly agreed. As if she could ever look “frumpy.” But it would keep her occupied for the day if I knew anything about the East Hampton shops, and give me time on my own. I’d barely begun digging into the story of who Hannah Cutting was and how she got from Polish Town to Further Lane, the story Walter Anderson wanted. I wasn’t getting very far with the assignment but instead found myself inevitably being drawn into another story entirely, the one not of her life but of her death.
I kept trying to steer clear of that story, leaving it to cops like Knowles, and to stay with the assignment. Trouble was, maybe, just maybe, they were the same story.
I was talking to all these people, asking all these questions, when all the answers might be in a book Hannah Cutting was writing when she died and which nobody, not Random House who’d advanced
a million for it, or this beautiful troubleshooter of theirs, or even the police seemed to be able to find. But who downloaded the text and why? Where had those 180,000 characters gone? Did they no longer exist or did the thief have plans for them? Did someone erase them out of sheer mischief or ignorance and not recognize the value of what he had? The way the bandidos who killed Humphrey Bogart in the last reel of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre threw away the gold dust from his saddlebags thinking it was useless dirt, when they were scavenging for coins and pelts? Fred C. Dobbs, that was Bogie’s name. The stuff I remembered.
No point pursuing that. There were still leads unexplored. But I wasn’t sharing my information with Alix Dunraven. Not yet. Not quite yet.
I really ought to go see the Warrenders. Follow up on what Miz Phoebe Allenby said, that Hannah worked for them long ago, maybe in the house she later bought and where she died. Finding a Warrender was no great task, not in East Hampton. There were a dozen of them in the phone book. But I didn’t make any calls. I knew where at least one Warrender was likely to be. And I began with him, began with a drunk at the bar of the Maidstone Club. A club sufficiently exclusive to have quietly warned Donald Trump, while he enjoyed a temporary summer membership, not to apply for full credentials lest he be turned down. And had treated Hannah Cutting every bit as chillingly.
But a club which tolerated eccentric, even dubious behavior, on the part of old members, the Old Money set who founded the Club, men like Jasper Warrender.
Jasper was one of the Warrender cousins and a midday regular at the bar. His golf game had developed an incurable hook and not even the new oversized putter seemed to help his shakiness on the greens, and out of desperation he had turned, in all seriousness, to consulting the bottom of a glass. A Jack Daniel’s man. I felt slightly guilty about pumping a middle-aged souse in my father’s club but still …
“Sure,” Jasper said, he remembered Hannah Shuba. A quarter century later and over the Jack Daniel’s, Jasper recalled, “She was only a kid, a teenager, fourteen or fifteen, but a hot little number. She was like honey and we were all buzzing. All of us, me included. Even Cousin Royal home from Yale after his junior year. And you know how goddamned particular and stuffy Royal is, how hard to please, even then.” I stood Jasper a couple of drinks and got a little more. Miz Phoebe was right; young Hannah worked that long ago summer in the very house on the grounds of which, a week ago, she was murdered.
When I phoned the Kroepkes that afternoon they were still upset about the break-in. Nothing seemed to be missing. But you didn’t sleep easy if you knew strangers had been on the property, had broken in, even if it was just the pool house. I pumped them tactfully, I hoped, double-checking about the computer. Did they know if Hannah left any disks behind? I asked. No, said the Missus, Hannah was hardly a computer literate. Used the PC pretty much like a fancy typewriter, writing right onto the hard drive. Disks would have been beyond her, Mrs. Kroepke said. She had a secretary for that.
“How about her secretary…?”
No, said the housekeeper firmly, Ms. Cutting gave precise instructions to the secretary that she’d be writing the book herself and didn’t want anyone messing with it. The secretary handled her correspondence, typed her magazine articles, but didn’t touch the book. “At this stage, it was much too personal. I heard Ms. Cutting say that. She even took to typing on it out there in the pool house where she wouldn’t be disturbed and no one could look over her shoulder while she worked. Very close she was about it. There was a steno helped her on the other books, going back to the very first one, The Taste Machine. No steno this time, no private secretary, just Ms. Cutting and her laptop. Top secret and all that. Which wasn’t usual for Ms. Cutting. Hannah, I mean Ms. Cutting, she loved the publicity. Only when it was good, of course.”
“But how can you be sure there were no disks left behind?”
“Mr. Stowe, I never saw a disk. I don’t think she’d have known how to insert one. Just about the only thing Hannah, I mean Ms. Cutting, couldn’t do. And do well.”
“But she was so damned competent. Sure a floppy disk wouldn’t be beyond her.”
“I don’t think she trusted anything with such a silly name. ‘Floppy disks’? They couldn’t possibly be good enough for her own life story.”
“Could I take a look at the laptop?”
Mrs. Kroepke shook her head. “Nossir, she wouldn’t want it. And the cops told us to keep it locked away in case they needed it for evidence.”
I nodded, ready to hang up.
“Oh, one other thing,” she said. “They finally released Ms. Cutting’s body. The executor claimed it, a lawyer from Sullivan and Cromwell at One twenty-five Broad Street in Manhattan, Claire didn’t want to, didn’t think she should.”
And the funeral? I asked.
There would be none. Cremation. Later on, somewhat vaguely, a memorial service might be held and …
Even in death, Hannah was not to be accepted or paid tribute to. A rich and successful and important woman was dead and nobody hung crepe or lighted candles or tossed a trowel full of earth on the pine box. Ozymandias had it better than Hannah. At least he’d once had a statue.
I slept badly that night. I’d learned something but wasn’t sure quite what. Besides, Alix Dunraven came home late. After I was asleep. What the hell was she doing out so late? Where did she go? And with whom? I told myself I was being silly, feeling avuncular about a woman only six or seven years younger. I could hear her moving around, talking to the dog, imagined that by now she ought to be undressing. I was being protective, concerned, and could see her barefoot and sleepy-eyed in that silk robe in my own kitchen. Was starting to imagine how she looked without that silk robe in my own kitchen. Or my bedroom. And not feeling one bit like kindly old Uncle Beecher.…
FIFTEEN
The Hound of the Baskervilles in poodle’s clothing …
For year-round residents of the Hamptons, people like Admiral Stowe and his son, me, those days immediately after Labor Day were the finest of the year. The crowds gone, the water warm, the sun still high, the beaches near empty, the cranes and cormorants fishing, riders and their horses trotting along the beach, maybe a couple of college boys spiraling a football on the sand, a deer here and there shyly blinking in the sunlight and dashing nervously away. A red fox at dusk hunting pheasant. A hawk circling. An osprey fishing. Schools of big blues working along the beach, scattering the baitfish into panicked flight. Big stripers, too. The last college girls daringly topless within view of the pursed-lipped ladies of the Maidstone. Reduced prices on Ralph Lauren merchandise at the Polo shop on Main Street. Parking spaces on Main Street and even in the A & P lot. Seats for the first show at the movie house. Vehicular traffic along Montauk Highway had slowed to such an extent that those silly-looking guinea hens Billy Joel raises at his place, odd birds with big fat bodies, long necks and tiny heads, felt sufficiently confident to scurry across the road between cars, leaving motorists more startled than the birds.
Honest people had ended their vacations and were back in the counting house, the Hollywood studios, or behind their Manhattan desks. East Hampton was left to the natives, the Bonackers who make their lives and their work here, and to the rich, for whom all of life is a vacation.
I loved this place in September. Even if there was talk of a hurricane out there and possibly coming. And when I couldn’t work something out in my head, the lead to a story, the answer to a puzzle, I tossed my Old Maine canoe atop the Blazer and drove up to Three Mile Harbor to launch the boat and paddle about for an hour or two, thinking, pondering, wondering …
The storm, if it matured into one, would be called Hurricane Martha. Nice irony there, a big storm named for yet another famous local woman who’d surely had her differences with the late Hannah Cutting.
At this juncture when I couldn’t seem to break through to the next stage of Hannah’s story, someone with whom I was being awfully canny, not letting on much to her, came to my assistance. Alix
Dunraven. She didn’t intend to help me out; it was an inadvertent break. And it all came about because I’d given Alix the names of a couple of local places for lunch or a cool drink or the bathroom facilities when she was out shopping. And, despite its bathroom, I’d included The Blue Parrot on my short list of pit stops. Trouble was, Alix went there with her borrowed dog. I’d been halfway down Main Street, talking with Wendy Engel who used to own the pottery shop when I heard the ruckus.
“What the hell was she thinking about, Beecher?” demanded Roland the manager, whose small white dog. Little Bit, had just been rather roughly treated by Alix’s Mignonne.
“I’m quite astonished myself by her ferocity,” Alix was assuring Roland. “I am so terribly sorry. She’s not really my dog, just on loan, and I don’t even like dogs all that much. And certainly never suspected Mignonne to be the Hound of the Baskervilles in poodle’s clothing.”
Roland was barely listening, intent instead on murmuring solace and binding up Little Bit’s wounds, which, in all candor, seemed more damaged pride than actual hurt. Lee the owner, a tall, handsome Navy brat raised in Hawaii, came out to tend the bar while Roland, and his dog, recovered. Lee rarely mixed a drink himself and this was something of an event. On the basis of which, I bought a round of drinks for the bar, to ease trauma, and included Roland. Not that it mollified him completely, but it was a start.
“What the hell do you feed that dog? Or do you intentionally keep her mean and hungry?” he asked Alix, who instinctively bathed him in the diffident flirtatiousness she might several years before have utilized on an Oxford don about to ask her to defend her thesis on Saint Augustine or old Clive.