Pursued by Shadows

by Medora Sale

  “The forms can wait, Mrs. Smithson. There are still a few questions that need to be cleared up first,” the sheriff said. “If you feel up to it. We can use this office,” he added, opening the door to a small, sparely furnished room.

  Nina stalked into the room and settled with graceful formality into one of the uncomfortable chairs. “Yes?” she said. The morning sun slanted through the venetian blinds, lighting up her features and adding ten years to her apparent age.

  “Can you tell us what your son was doing in Skaneateles?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said. Hostility and condescension battled for control of her face. “Chasing some woman, I expect. He spent a lot of his time doing that.”

  “He wasn’t engaged in recovering some property of yours?”

  “Of mine? Dean? Whatever are you talking about?” She shook her head and her hair swung back and forth in bewilderment. “I haven’t lost anything lately.”

  “Really?” asked Sanders. “You haven’t lost a map, worth a great deal of money?”

  “What in hell are you talking about? What is this map people keep talking about?” she said, wavering between exasperation and bewilderment. “I don’t deal in maps. I don’t know anything about them. I deal in contemporary art. I do it very well and it keeps me busy enough without worrying about maps.”

  “Really?” he asked again. “You didn’t accompany your son down to New York to help him recover a stolen map? By any means possible, even violent or illegal ones?”

  Nina shook her head very slowly, as if she couldn’t absorb what she was hearing.

  “But unfortunately for him, he wasn’t very adept at the violent or illegal parts, was he? He got injured in that scuffle in the city. And some kind person bandaged him up. Was that kind person you?”

  Nina stretched out her hand, trying to shove all this unwelcome information as far from her as she could. “No,” she cried. “I don’t know any of this. I left Dean in New York to negotiate a deal. For a piece of sculpture. You can check that. I expected him back on Thursday, but he phoned—”

  “Where from?” snapped Sanders.

  She shook her head. “I assumed he was in New York, but I suppose he could have been anywhere. He said that he was going to take a couple of days off and he’d be back on Sunday. I know nothing about stolen maps or anything like that. As far as I knew, he wanted a little holiday, that’s all.” Tears slowly filled her eyes and spilled, first left, then right, down her cheeks. “I still don’t understand what he was doing here.”

  “Don’t you, Mrs. Smithson?”

  Nina Smithson dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. The two men looked at her, interested but unmoved. Finally, she hiccupped, took a package of tissues out of her handbag, and mopped up the damage. “I always tried to keep him from doing anything too wrong,” she said in a whisper. “It wasn’t always easy, but I tried. He was so greedy.” Her voice broke again and she swallowed, pausing to mop up more tears. “You had to watch him with the customers on the floor. That’s why I kept him in the office, mostly, doing paperwork. Things the auditors would be checking up on. He’d do anything for money. It was a sickness with him. I don’t know why—he never spent any of it. He just wanted to watch it pile up. That’s why he still lived at home. It was free.” She looked up at them with an expression of earnest sorrow. “I don’t know this map you’re talking about, but he could have been mixed up in some shady deal. And if someone tried to cheat him out of his share, he’d go berserk. He really would.”

  “Come on, Mrs. Smithson,” said Sanders in a weary voice. “Just what do you know about what he was doing?”

  “Oh, God, I can’t stand it. He was just like his father.” Overcome once more, she huddled in the hard-backed chair, hiding her crumpled face. “Violent and cruel. Marco was like that too. He came to Toronto with his hands smelling of blood—he had killed I don’t know how many people in the fighting in his country. He didn’t care. If they were on the other side—even women and babies—they weren’t human as far as he was concerned. It’s a disease, you know,” she added, looking up. “Once it gets into your blood you never get rid of it. And he infected Dean with it. Christopher was too young when Marco died, thank God. He’s not like that.”

  “Would Dean have killed?”

  “It’s a terrible thing to say about your own child,” she breathed in horror. “But I think he might.”

  The door to the ground-floor workroom was open when they pulled up. Harriet knocked once and stepped tentatively in. The interior was bathed in the smell of fresh wood and sunshine on warm rock and water. Sun poured in from a broad opening at the other end, catching and intensifying a head of richly red hair, bent over a pale wood table, formed in a curious, rounded, irregular shape, which the owner of the red hair appeared to be rubbing down. He looked up and smiled. “You’re Harriet, aren’t you?” And Harriet recognized instantly the beguiling smile and the friendly voice that had chattered away at her all the time that she had been inspecting the house on Lake Street. “We’ve met, but not introduced ourselves. I’m Amos Cavanaugh.” He moved at once over to the stairs.

  “And my friend, John Sanders,” said Harriet quickly. Sanders nodded at the carpenter, and then picked his way cautiously after them, like a cat through tall grass.

  Whatever John thought he would find at the head of the stairs, it was not what he saw. Instead of some combination of Delilah and Jezebel, immersed in lies and fatal plots designed to destroy Harriet, she introduced him to a casually dressed woman with neatly cut, shoulder-length light brown hair and a pale face who flung her arms around that same Harriet as soon as she stepped in the door. “I can’t believe that you’re actually here,” she said.

  “For the second time in recent memory,” said Harriet, pointedly. “I’ll admit it is a nice place to visit, but—”

  “And this is—”

  “I met Mr. Cavanaugh,” Harriet interrupted. “When he was explaining to me oh-so-charmingly that no one could possibly be staying at that address on Lake Street. Not without him knowing about it.”

  “You have to admit that I gave you the absolute truth,” said Amos modestly. “I did know about it. Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.” He retreated to the kitchen area and began to arrange mugs, cream, and sugar on a tray.

  “Now,” said Harriet, dropping down on the couch and turning toward Jane. “What in hell happened yesterday? And what in hell is going on?”

  “Going on?” said Jane, sitting down in the other corner of the couch and drawing her legs up to rest her chin on her knees. “Uh—”

  “Come on, Jane. Explanation time. What’s been happening? And are you all right?”

  Jane stared ahead of her out the window in the direction of the lake for a moment and then shifted her body in Harriet’s direction. She glanced first at Amos and then at John before taking a deep breath and beginning to speak. “What’s been happening? Well—I guess it all started in London . . .” she began slowly.

  John broke in impatiently. “The man who attacked you,” he said, grabbing a chair from beside the dining room table, turning it around, and sitting down with his arms resting on the back.

  “Yes?” Jane watched his antics with a controlled and steady gaze.

  “You didn’t know who he was?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never seen him in my life before.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She did not bother to reply.

  “He’s been identified now as Dean Smithson, Nina Smithson’s son. You still say you’ve never met him?”

  “Smithson?” she said, startled and discomposed for a moment. “I had no idea. He doesn’t look at all like his brother. But absolutely. I met Nina in London several times and she brought Christopher with her once or twice, but not Dean. I assumed that he was always needed to take care of the gallery.”

 
“And you never met him before you left for London? While you were working for Miss Jeffries?”

  She shook her head. “I was never invited to Nina’s parties. As far as she was concerned, I was just one of the hired help. You know, like the cleaning woman or the gardener. Not worth cultivating.”

  Harriet nodded. “That’s true. You had to be rich or trendy to get invited to her house. I’m afraid Jane never qualified as either, as far as Nina was concerned. Not while she was working for me.”

  “Miss Sinclair—why should Dean Smithson try to kill you? I know that the local police have accepted your story that he was trying to kill you—and I can guess why they believe you,” he added, glancing over his shoulder at Amos, who was leaning impassively on the kitchen counter. “But what possible reason could he have?”

  “He wanted the map,” said Jane simply. “Do you know about the map?” She stood up, walked over to the closet beside the bathroom, and pulled out an attaché case. She took a key chain from her pocket and unlocked it. “Here it is,” she said. “In the envelope. It doesn’t look like much.”

  Sanders opened up the attaché case and looked oddly at Jane. “In fact, it doesn’t look like anything,” he said. “There’s nothing in here.”

  “Were you looking for the manila envelope?” Amos’s voice emerged from the kitchen, shyly quiet. Everyone turned in his direction and he smiled. “So many people seemed to be looking for it that I tucked it away in a safe-deposit box. I’ll be glad to give it up in return for a court order. From the state of New York, that is. Since at the moment no one seems to know who owns it, do they?”

  Jane looked at Amos and shrugged her shoulders. “It was Guy’s, I thought, but maybe Nina put up the money to buy it—or maybe Dean did. I don’t know. I assumed it was Guy’s, let’s say. I took it because he owed us at least that,” she said stubbornly. “Agnes and me. And I figured that taking something that belongs to your husband isn’t the same as breaking into someone else’s house and stealing it.”

  “Your husband?” said Harriet. “Well I’ll be damned. He actually married you? Age must have mellowed him beyond recognition.”

  Jane shook her head somberly. “We got married in London. I don’t know why. He suddenly decided it would be a good thing. So I figured that the map was my share of community property.”

  “Do they have community property in the UK?” asked Harriet.

  “I don’t know,” said Jane. “But they must have something. Child support or something. I heard him tell Peter that they were going to have to give Malcolm Whiteside an extra five thousand to get it—extra on top of what, I don’t know, or whether it was dollars or pounds—and so he must have known he could sell it for at least ten or fifteen. I figured that all I had to do was take it to the dealers who had said they were interested in it.”

  “What were you going to do about provenance?” asked Harriet.

  “Provenance?” She raised an indecisive hand. “I was playing that by ear. I did think about it and it seemed to me that Guy hadn’t acquired it in any very legit way either. The dealers on his list can’t have been the most honest and upright characters in the world, and so I thought if I sort of intimated to them that it had been lifted from a museum somewhere . . .” She shook her head and grimaced slightly. “Now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I was counting on that map to get me established somewhere with Agnes . . .”

  “What’s going to happen,” said John, “is that you’re going to get it all. Beaumont left his entire estate to you and the baby. Split fifty-fifty. And that includes the map—unless it turns out to be stolen property, of course.”

  “Big deal,” said Jane. “You expect me to jump up and down? Everyone seemed to think it was stolen. And anyway, I don’t want his goddamn estate.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because for one thing, I already took most of the money there was. All he had to leave anyone would be his debts. If anyone was stupid enough to lend him anything. I have no idea what he did with the money he got from his painting—I suppose Nina screwed him out of most of it, and he blew the rest on God knows what. Booze, other women, gambling. I have no idea. He did keep a secret stash at home. Or he thought it was secret. Twelve thousand in dollars and one thousand in pounds hidden away. Otherwise he just carried small change. He never seemed to own a thing except for his clothes, and they always looked as if he stole them from a Salvation Army collection box. And his paints and empty canvases. He resented every penny we sent my mother for Agnes—I went back to working in hamburger joints to shut him up about it. Thank God, we didn’t have to pay rent or the bastard would have tried to shove me out on the streets to cover it. Anyway, when I left, I took ten thousand dollars from the stash. I left him the rest for plane fare and stuff like that. And I took the map. I figured I was going to need every penny—and I knew I could whistle for it once I left England.”

  “Why didn’t you take the baby to England with you?” asked Harriet. “I mean if Guy wanted to marry you and all that, surely—”

  “Why? Because two weeks after she was born he gave me a choice. I could stay in Canada with Agnes and starve, or I could leave her behind and follow him to London for a few months. I left when she was three months old and I figured we would be back in no time. As soon as we ran out of money. Only those few months kept stretching out longer and longer.”

  “So you took the money and the map,” said Sanders, trying to get her back on the track of her story.

  She nodded. “There had to be something a bit fishy about it, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I thought maybe they had found it somewhere and paid someone practically nothing for it—Guy was always dreaming about that kind of thing. You know, stumbling across an unknown Constable or Gainsborough hiding in a little out-of-the-way junk shop. The way people dream about winning the lottery. And they had to keep it quiet, because it’s not quite legal to do that, is it? Pay five pounds for something that you know is worth a lot more than that. Or if it’s legal, it’s not ethical. Anyway, I took it and when people began following me and threatening me and ripping my luggage up, I got scared. Really scared. You wouldn’t think it was worth enough to get people that excited. I wondered if it had been owned by someone in the mob.”

  “It was worth a bit more than five thousand pounds, that was all.”

  “How much?”

  “To the right buyer, maybe three or four million. Dollars.”

  “God almighty,” said Jane. “Three or four million? If I had known that, I wouldn’t have laid a finger on the damned thing. Or let my sister—” She paused a moment and shivered. “I’ve been thinking about this, and I figured they must have been using the same list of dealers, of course, and so no matter where I went to get rid of it, they could be there ahead of me. Before I realized about the list, I thought that with my sister helping, we could outfox them. That way, I could stay here, and while they were watching me, Lesley could go down to New York and sell the map. I figured I’d be safe here. Only it didn’t work. Instead of sticking with me, they must have figured I’d passed it on and went down to the next couple of dealers in New York to wait for one of us to show up. She got attacked in New York. And then he followed us up here. I’ll never forgive myself for that,” she said, very quietly.

  “Someone here could well have been keeping an eye on you,” said Sanders dryly. “I doubt if they were following you. More like waiting for you to walk into their arms.”

  Jane turned her attention back to the window and an uneasy silence fell over the room. “Does this mean that I get charged with theft? Of something worth three million bucks?” she said at last, looking at Sanders again. “I’ll give it back to whoever. But you can’t charge my sister. She never knew what she was doing. I told her that Guy had given me the map and then decided he wanted it back again.”

  “The problem is,” said John, “that no one knows who to give it back to. No on
e has laid claim to it officially. People have told various other people that the map is theirs, but that’s not evidence. And we don’t know if it’s real. There’s a possibility that it’s been forged.”

  “Great,” said Jane, clutching her knees tightly to her chest. “Forged. There goes my little fortune, up in smoke.” She grinned suddenly. “Still, I can always get a job.”

  “But Jane,” protested Harriet. “You get Guy’s money. He left a hundred thousand bucks or more. That’ll keep you for a while.”

  “A hundred thousand?” She looked over at Amos, whose slightly lopsided eyebrows rose a millimeter or two. “I’ll be damned,” she added softly.

  Chapter 14

  Jane stopped dead in the doorway of her sister’s empty hospital room. The bed was made with antiseptic precision, and not a chair was out of place. Lesley’s roommate had left the day before, remarking as she packed up that she had had livelier conversations with a rutabaga, but that her two days in the same room with Lesley had enabled her to appreciate her husband and kids. “I mean they don’t say much,” she had added, “but you can at least get them to fight, if you know what I mean.”

  And now there was nothing but silence. Jane whipped around and ran to the nurse’s station. “What’s happened to my sister?” she whispered, white-faced with fear, to the woman behind the counter.

  “Your sister? Is she the one in one-twelve?”

  “I saw her in the patients’ lounge about ten minutes ago,” said another nurse, looking up from the charts she was working on. “Maybe she’s still there.”

  “The lounge?” muttered Jane, only slightly reassured. At least Lesley hadn’t died of pure despair since yesterday, she thought, as she headed in the direction of the pointing finger. Had they dragged her out of bed and forced her to put one foot in front of the other until they got her down there? Because yesterday and Saturday she had still been in that blank stupor that had enveloped her on Friday.