Figurines of crystal lined mirrored shelves and tasteful paintings graced the walls. French impressionism, if Jack was guessing right, muted, pastel views of reality.
“Mr. Shepard?”
Jack rose, and a tall woman swept toward him.
Dorothy Kerns was a blonde, but not the kind who have more fun. She was the fragile type, like a fairy queen, delicate and untouchable, friable as a frozen bird.
From the “spinster” picture her brother had painted, Jack practically expected a matronly dame with graying hair and grandma shawl, a pair of knitting needles in her arthritic hands. Dorothy wasn’t even close. Yes, her lips were too thin, her skin too pale, and her blue eyes set farther apart than Great Neck and Newark; but she had high cheekbones, intelligence in her gaze, and only the faintest hint of wrinkles at the edges of her mouth.
No man could deny she was a striking woman—not a raving beauty by any stretch, but nothing close to her brother’s narrow view of her. But then, Jack had noticed how often family members viewed each other through out-of-date glasses.
“Please excuse me for not greeting you when you arrived.” Dorothy held out her hand. “To be perfectly honest, I was in my robe and needed to change.”
Jack had expected a dame like her to show up in a prim dress or skirt. But her long legs were clad in flowing brown slacks, a thin leather belt circling her trim waist. She wore a white silk blouse, and a string of pearls around her slender neck, showed to advantage by upswept hair.
“Miss Kerns.” He lightly took her hand, felt as if he were trying to grasp a sparrow without crushing its delicate bones. “I appreciate your making time for me tonight.”
Jack tried to release the bird, but Miss Kerns held on tight—and with surprising strength. “You must find Vincent for me, Mr. Shepard. Promise me you’ll find him.”
Jack could see the sincerity in her wide-set eyes. They were shining and he realized why—they were wet with unshed tears.
“I’ll try to help,” Jack replied and used his left hand to diplomatically pry loose his right.
Dorothy turned away, recovering herself. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief she’d pulled from her pants pocket. “Won’t you sit down?”
Jack took a load off again—in the same armchair by the cold fireplace. Miss Kerns sat in the chair opposite, crossed her long limbs. Her young maid brought in a tray with a tea service.
“Tell me honestly, Miss Kerns. What do you think happened to your fiancé?” Jack asked after the maid departed. “Another woman? Or maybe he was the victim of a fast money scam gone wrong? Do you think maybe he lost your investment and was ashamed to face you?”
“I would like to believe it is none of those things, but the alternative is no better. Vincent had a drinking problem, you see.”
“You think he crawled into a bottle?”
“He told me he would never drink again. That was my condition for our engagement. My brother…he doesn’t like Vincent, you know?”
“I got that impression. How did you two meet, anyway?”
“At a big New Year’s Eve party last year. Vincent hadn’t been Stateside long. He’d been stationed in Europe—”
“Army?”
“Yes, he’d been badly wounded after D-Day, during combat in the hedgerow country—”
Jack winced.
“You were there, Mr. Shepard?”
“Not in that action. But I knew about the losses. It was a real meat grinder. I pushed through Carentan to Cherbourg, that’s where the U.S. set up her regional HQ—uh, headquarters.”
Dorothy presented a weak smile. “I know what HQ means, Mr. Shepard. My late fiancé, my first one, had written me for years from the front. He’d lost his life in the same battle where Vincent lost half his left arm.”
She paused and glanced at the dark window, as if looking for a memory.
“When I first met Vincent, at that New Year’s Eve party, and discovered he’d been in the same action that had killed Gabriel, he and I began to talk. But not like people usually talk at social gatherings. We began early in the evening and didn’t stop until after breakfast the next morning. I don’t suppose you know how that can go, Mr. Shepard? Talking all night when you first fall in love?”
Jack shifted uncomfortably, thought of Sally. For a moment, in a dream, he’d seen a future with her, a home and family. But he’d slept too long. And when he finally awoke, Sally Archer was long gone.
“I know something about it, miss. Go on.”
“Well, we did fall in love that first night, and it deepened as the weeks and months went by. He asked me to marry him on my birthday in June. We set a date to be married next year—June 1947—although my brother raised objections.”
“So why didn’t you just take off with Vincent if you loved him and your brother was so disapproving? You’ve got your own money, right?”
“I…only have a little bit left now. I gave Vincent the bulk of my inheritance to invest.”
“Yeah, about that…I understand Vincent could earn a dollar?”
“Yes, that’s right. Before the war, he made a great deal of money by investing in steel. He saw what was coming, you see? And it paid off for him. And I was sure it would again.”
“So, you gave a drunk all your money…to invest?” Jack asked.
“He’s not a drunk. Not anymore. You see, about a month ago, Vincent came upon some information about a lucrative investment in a company that manufactures air conditioners.”
“Air conditioners?” Jack jotted that down. “Do you know the name?”
“Ogden Heating and Cooling Company. They’re located in the South. Vincent says air-conditioning’s going to transform that entire region. He got a tip that Ogden was going to be bought by a much bigger corporation. He believed he could double my money in less than a year.”
“But he disappeared? With no word on your money or what he did with it?”
“I love him, Mr. Shepard. And I trust him. You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I guess not.”
Miss Kerns leaned forward, her eyes shining, the unshed tears threatening once again to fall. “Find him, please, Mr. Shepard. I miss him so, you see.”
She was suffering so visibly that Jack wished she were right—though he believed in his heart that the woman had been taken, or her fiancé had fallen down a bottle again and something ugly had happened to him.
Jack got more information from Dorothy, standard stuff like where Tattershawe worked, where he lived, any known friends or relatives—all of whom, no surprise, she’d already contacted and gotten bupkus as to the man’s whereabouts.
“One last thing,” Jack said, glancing around the large salon. “Do you have a recent photo?”
Dorothy rose and walked out of the room. When she returned, she handed Jack a photo of Vincent in an oval frame about the size of his palm.
“Take this,” she said. “It’s hard for me to look at now anyway.”
Jack nodded, encouraged by Dorothy’s admission. Baxter Kerns had asked that Vincent’s whereabouts be kept a secret from his sister. Jack wasn’t all that keen on lying to the lady; but if she were angry at her fiancé, then some part of her probably knew she’d been played.
“You mean you can’t stand to look at his face?” Jack pressed. “You’re that steamed?”
“Not at all. I have other photos of Vincent that provide me with much happier memories. This one’s the last gift he gave me. He sent it to me just before he disappeared.”
Jack frowned at that response then studied the picture he’d been given. Like all black-and-white portraits, the subject was a deceptive contrast of shadows and light, a collection of shaded traits. In this incarnation, Tattershawe appeared handsome: a rectangular kisser with a long forehead, solid jawline, dark hair, and dark eyes.
Jack tucked the oval frame in his pocket, wishing someone would invent the camera that could show you whether or not a man had a dark heart.
With no more questions for
Dorothy Kerns, Jack bid her goodnight, and stepped into the building’s hallway. As he waited for the elevator, he heard a door opening behind him. It was the service door to Miss Kerns’s luxury apartment. The young Irish maid emerged in a plain overcoat, a hand-knitted hat, and scarf. She nodded politely and waited with Jack for the elevator to arrive.
“Miss Kerns must be difficult to work for,” Jack fished. “I’ll bet she can be very demanding.”
“Oh, no, sir. She’s the sweetest woman in the world. This is the latest I’ve ever worked for her, and she felt so bad about asking me to stay, she gave me car fare to get home.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “You’re not a live-in?”
“Miss Kerns likes to do for herself. I help out a few hours a day and also receive guests when she has ’em.”
“Does she get a lot of guests, then?”
“Over the past year, they’ve mostly been the ladies from the veteran’s charity.”
“Veteran’s charity?”
“Didn’t she tell you, sir?” The maid looked over her shoulder at the front door then lowered her voice to a whisper. “That’s why she gave all that money to Mr. Tattershawe. It was her idea to start up a special private foundation for disabled veterans in our area, help them in all sorts of ways. I was so proud. My brother lost his eyesight, you know, and she told me he would be one of the men she’d be helping.
“She and Mr. Tattershawe discussed it night after night. It was hard not to overhear them. Mr. Tattershawe believed he could turn her inheritance into a fortune and they’d have the funds they’d need to do anything they wanted.”
“What did you think of Mr. Tattershawe?”
“I liked him, sir. He seemed a fine man.”
“Seemed?”
The maid looked down. “Well, he run off with her money, didn’t he?”
CHAPTER 6
Open for Business
My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly…a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified…
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” 1843
OUTSIDE, A HORN blared. Spencer dumped his bowl and spoon into the sink. “That’s the school bus!”
I’d already run a brush through my hair and thrown on a pair of blue jeans and a powder-blue sweater before making oatmeal for Spencer. But I was still bleary-eyed from the terrible events of the night before…and, of course, that strange dream of Jack working a missing persons case in New York City.
“Wait a minute!” I called as Spencer raced for the door. “I’ll walk you downstairs.”
He wheeled, a look of horror on his face.
I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t worry, kiddo, I’m only going to unlock the front door for you. I’ll stay out of sight.”
Spencer nodded, his sense of relief visible. Together we walked down the stairs. “Do you have your Reader’s Notebook?”
“Duh! I worked on that all summer, Mom. Do you think I’d actually forget it now?”
“Apparently not,” I replied as we crossed the empty bookstore’s main aisle.
The school encouraged reading over the summer by running a contest every year. The student who read the most books would be awarded a grand prize. Spencer had completely filled one spiral-bound notebook with titles, authors, and short descriptions of every story he’d read.
He had nothing on poor Peter Chesley with his fifty volumes, but in my view Spencer’s work had been just as diligent and enthusiastic.
Of course, living above a bookstore might be seen as a blatant advantage, but I didn’t allow him to read a book in our store and put it back on the shelf. I wanted Spencer to get comfortable using the local library and took him there regularly to check out new stacks of books.
When we reached the front door, I unlocked it. “Your first day for the new school year.” I smiled. “Good luck.”
Spencer returned my smile, then darted across the sidewalk. I heard Danny Keenan and a few of my son’s other new friends excitedly shout his name when he entered the bus and I felt my own sense of relief.
My son had gone from a morose little boy who missed his father to a bright and alive young man. He no longer had nightmares about my leaving him like his daddy did. He hardly mentioned missing Calvin anymore.
The early days after his father’s suicide had been awful, and for a long time, I questioned the decisions I was making. But now I was convinced that moving away from New York City and back to Quindicott had benefited Spencer’s peace of mind. It had been the right thing to do—for both of us.
I now had about fifty minutes before our bookstore was scheduled to open, and I went back upstairs to check on my aunt. She was still sleeping. This was unusual for Sadie, who was always the early riser, but considering the previous night’s events, it made me happy to see her get some much-needed rest.
Since I had a little time, I decided to slip on a jacket and head down the block to Cooper Family Bakery for a nosh of something special. The oatmeal was warm but hardly satisfying—and although my size fourteen jeans certainly could have been looser, I sorely needed the fresh air as much as the sugar rush. On the way, I stopped at Koh’s Grocery and bought a Providence Journal.
It took me a few minutes before I found a small item about the accidental death of Peter Chesley. The sparse article simply stated he’d “fallen in his home” after “a long illness.” There were no surprises here. It was clear to me that Detective Kroll had made up his mind before he’d even arrived at the mansion. But I took a deep breath and told myself to stop thinking about it.
“This is Kroll’s case now,” I muttered, “not mine.”
When I got to the bakery, I saw that half the mothers in Quindicott had gotten the same idea I had—send the children off to school and head over to Cooper’s. There was actually a line out the door. I waved to a few mothers who were also good Buy the Book customers.
“Penelope, did you get the new Patricia Cornwell in yet?”
It was Susan Keenan, the thirtysomething mother of Danny, one of Spencer’s new friends. Danny had two siblings: seven-year-old Maura, who was in school at the moment; and two-year-old Tommy, who was sleeping in a stroller by his mother’s side.
“It’s in, Sue,” I called to her, “stop by anytime.”
“Come on, come on, move along ladies,” a man’s voice boomed from the center of the perfumed mob. “Let me out of the pretty store and one of you can get in!”
Holding high his cup of steaming-hot coffee, Seymour Tarnish struggled to escape the packed bakery. As the women moved aside, I could see into the store. Behind the counter, Linda Cooper-Logan looked harried.
She wore a rainbow bandana over her short, spiky, platinum blonde hair (she’d had a thing for Annie Lennox since we were kids back in the eighties), and her husband Milner Logan (fan of noir thrillers) was nowhere in sight. My guess—the talented quarter-blood Narragansett Native American was in the back, doing his best to whip up more of those famous fresh, hot doughnuts that people drove from miles around to snag.
“Hey, Pen.” Seymour looked down at me with a crooked smile on his round face. He jerked his head in the direction of the bakery. “If you’re looking to buck that crowd, beware. Hungry housewives cruising for pastry are a dangerous breed. I almost lost my arm putting cream in my coffee.”
(What Seymour actually said was “almust lahst mah aahm”—using the typical dropped R’s and drawn out vowels of our “Roe Dyelin” patois. We might be the smallest state in the Union but, by golly, we’ve got a sizable accent. Sadie speaks with the accent, too, along with most of the people here in Quindicott. I lost mine somewhere between college and living in New York although the occasional slip—e.g., “You can never find pahkin’ in this town!”—just can’t be helped.)
Not exactly resplendent in his natty blue postman’s uniform with matching coat, his hat askew, Seymour was obviously on his way to his day job.
Although thickwaisted, our big, ta
ctless, fortysomething mailman wasn’t always thickheaded. He’d won quite a bit of money on Jeopardy! a few years back and ever since, the town had its own local celebrity. It was the main reason the people on Seymour’s mail route put up with him. Still, their descriptions of the man spanned from “irascible” to “obnoxious,” depending on how diplomatic they were in choosing adjectives.
Seymour took a loud slurp from his steaming cup and smacked his lips. “Man, I needed that!”
“Late night?” I asked, enviously sniffing the aroma of his freshly brewed French roast.
“The haunted house is open right up until midnight through Halloween. I parked my ice cream truck on Green Apple Road at noon on Sunday and got home at one A.M. Cleaned up, though.”
One of the things Seymour did with his Jeopardy! winnings was purchase an ice cream truck. It had been his lifelong dream to become Quindicott’s one and only roving ice cream man (go figure), which he now was on evenings and weekends. The other thing he did with his prize money was purchase old pulps, usually collector’s items, which is why Buy the Book counted him as one of its most consistent (and, yes, at times, compulsive) customers.
After another gulp of coffee, Seymour gave me the fish eye. “Man you look wasted, Pen,” he observed, ever the charmer. “You got insomnia?”
“I had a late night, too. Sadie and I drove over to Newport and bought some items from a collector.”
Set wide apart, Seymour’s blue eyes gave his regular features an air of perpetual surprise. Now those eyes bulged like a hungry bug. “More swag! What’cha got? Anything hot and collectable?”
I mentioned the Phelps editions of Poe. Seymour shrugged.
“We also acquired an 1807 first edition of Thomas Paine’s An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament.”
Seymour’s bugging eyes quickly glazed over. “Not for me. But I’m sure your pal Brainert will wet his academic pants over them. I’m more interested in that 1931 issue of Oriental Stories your aunt has been tracking down for me. Any sign of it?”
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