Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  After Caroline and I had discovered the bony corpse the night before we pondered what to do with it. We discussed it in tense whispers while we stood over the skeleton hand that pointed skyward from the grave and we both agreed to cover up the pit as best as we could, shoveling back the dirt, stamping it down, replacing as many plants as might survive, leaving the body right there in the ground. It was not like the corpse was going anywhere, and any hot clues as to the perpetrator were already as cold as death. We convinced each other it was to our advantage to not let on to what we had found as we probed further into the Reddman past. So we left it there under the dirt, the bones of that poor dead soul, left it all there except for the gold ring which clung to the bone until, with force and spit, I ripped it free. We took the ring to help us identify the body and once we examined the ring there wasn’t too much doubt about who was there beneath the dirt. The ring had been engraved, in a gloriously florid script, with the initials CCR.

  “What’s the word?” I said.

  “I checked an old photograph with a magnifying glass,” said Caroline. “It’s her ring, all right.”

  “So there’s no doubt,” I said.

  “No doubt at all,” she said. “The body we found is of my grandmother’s sister, Charity Chase Reddman.”

  32

  WITH CAROLINE SITTING on my couch, smoking, her legs crossed, her arms crossed, sitting there like a shore house boarded up for a hurricane, I brought Morris up to speed on the mystery of the Reddmans. I told him about Elisha Poole, about the three fabulous Reddman sisters, about how Charity, the youngest, had apparently found herself pregnant and then disappeared, seeming to wrest the shackles of her oppressive family off her shoulders and be free, only to turn up eighty years later in a hole in the ground behind the Reddman mansion. Morris listened with rapt attention; it was the kind of puzzle he liked most, not of wood or of stone but of flesh and bone and blood.

  I showed him the ring. “What’s this on the inside?” he asked. “My eyes such as they are, I can’t read printing so small as this.”

  “ ‘You walk in beauty,’ ” I read from the inside of the band, “and then the initials C.S.”

  “Any idea who this C.S. fellow is?” asked Beth.

  “Could be anyone,” I tried to say, but Caroline, who had remained remarkably silent during my background report to Morris, interrupted me.

  “They were my grandfather’s initials,” she said flatly. “Christian Shaw.”

  “What about the inscription?” I asked. “Anyone recognize it?”

  “ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night,’ ” recited Morris.

  “ ‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ ”

  I was taken aback a bit by such melodious words coming from Morris’s mouth, where only a jumbled brand of immigrant English normally escaped.

  “Byron,” said Morris with a shrug. “You know Pushkin, he was very much influenced by this Byron, especially in his early work.”

  “Pushkin again?” I said.

  “Yes Pushkin. Victor, you have problem maybe with Pushkin?”

  “No, Morris. None at all.”

  “This girl,” asked Morris, “this Charity, how old was she again when first she disappeared?”

  “Eighteen,” said Caroline.”

  “Then that fits then. It is a poem, this, for a young girl. It ends talking of a heart whose love is innocent.”

  No one said anything right off, as if there was a moment of silence for the dead girl whose heart was suffused with innocent love.

  “Open the box,” said Caroline.

  “I’m ready if you’re ready,” said Morris.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked her.

  “I told you I want to find out everything I can about my family, all the bitter truths. I won’t stop at a corpse. Open it.”

  From his seat Morris bent down and lifted onto the table a leather gym bag. He opened the bag, peered mysteriously inside, reached in, and took out a small leather packet from which he extracted two thin metal picks. I looked at Caroline on the couch, arms still crossed, her front teeth biting her lip. I smiled encouragingly at her but she ignored me, focusing entirely on Morris. Morris turned the box until the front was facing him and then began working on the padlock.

  “Are you sure you can’t get hold of Sheldon?” I said, after Morris had tried for ten minutes to work the lock with the picks and failed.

  “It’s a tricky, tricky lock. Very clever these old lock makers. I must to try something else.”

  He put the picks back in their leather packet and the packet back into the gym bag, reached in, and pulled out a large leather envelope from which he took a jangling ring of skeleton keys. “One of these will work, I think,” he said. He began to try one after the other, one after the other after the other.

  “Do you have a number for Sheldon?” I asked after all the keys had failed to fit the lock.

  “Enough with the nudging already,” said Morris, anger creeping into his voice. “These locks, they are not such a problem for me, not at all. For this I don’t need Sheldon.”

  “I’ve seen Sheldon work,” I said. “He is in and out in seconds.”

  “On second-rate locks, yes,” said Morris as he put the skeleton keys back into the bag and rummaged around. “But this is no second-rate lock. I have one special tool in such situations that never fails, a very special tool.”

  With a flourish he pulled from the bag a hacksaw.

  “This lock it is very clever but the metal is not as strong as they can make now. Is this all right, miss, if I hurt the lock?”

  “My grandmother’s dead,” said Caroline. “I don’t think she’ll miss it.”

  It took only a few minutes until we heard the ping that signaled he had cut through the metal hoop. He opened the lock and took it off the metal guards soldered into the box. That left only the internal lock, which Morris looked at carefully. “For this again I need the picks.”

  “It’s getting late, Morris,” I said.

  He took out the picks and began to work the little lock. “This second is not so tricky,” he said as he twisted the picks once and twice and the lock gave way with a satisfying click. Morris beamed. “Sheldon maybe would be a bissel faster, but only a bissel.”

  Caroline rose from the couch and sat beside Beth at the table. Morris turned the box to her. She looked around at us. I nodded. She reached down and, slowly, she lifted the metal lid.

  Beth let out a “Wow,” as the lid first cracked open and Caroline shut it again.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I just thought I saw something.”

  “One of your flames?” asked Morris.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What color was it?” asked Morris.

  “Yellow-red,” said Beth.

  Morris nodded. “The color of the death force.”

  “Enough already,” I said. “Just open it.”

  Caroline swallowed and then flipped up the top of the metal strongbox. Inside were dust and dirt and a series of old manila envelopes, weathered and faded and torn. Not very encouraging.

  “Let’s see what they’re holding,” I said.

  One by one Caroline lifted the envelopes out of the box.

  The first envelope contained a multitude of documents on long onionskin legal paper of the type no longer used in law offices, each dated in the early fifties. The documents were all signed by Mrs. Christian Shaw, Caroline’s grandmother, and witnessed by a number of illegible signatures, all probably of lawyers now surely either dead or retired. As best as I could tell, as I plowed my way through the legal jargon of the era, replete with Latin and all types of convoluted sentences, the documents created a separate trust to which a portion of the Reddman estate was to be diverted. The trust was named Wergeld and so a person or a family named Wergeld was apparently the intended beneficiary, though nothing
more specific was provided in the documents. It wasn’t clear exactly how much was to be transferred, but it appeared to be considerable, and over the past forty or so years the amount in the trust must have grown tremendously.

  “This must be the trust Harrington was talking about the other night,” I said to Caroline while I examined the documents. “Ever hear of a family named Wergeld?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Anyone at all?”

  “No, no one,” she said. “Never.”

  “That’s strange,” I said. “Why would she set up a trust for someone you never heard of? All right, let’s go on.”

  The next envelope contained a series of bank documents, evidencing the opening of accounts all in the name of the Wergeld Trust. The signatory on each account was Mrs. Christian Shaw. The banks to which the money was to flow were in foreign countries, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands. “All tax havens,” I said. “All places where money could arrive and disappear without anyone knowing, and where the banks are all governed by secrecy laws.”

  “Why would my grandmother care about secrecy?” asked Caroline. “While she was alive she had control of all the money in the trust, she could have done anything she wanted and no one could have stopped her.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but it appeared she wanted the trust hidden and this Wergeld person to remain anonymous.”

  Along with the bank documents was a three-by-five card with a list of long combinations of letters and numbers. The first was X257YRZ26–098. I handed it to Morris and he examined it carefully.

  “To my untrained eye these are code numbers for certain bank accounts,” he said. “Some of the banks in these places you need mention only the code numbers and a matching signature or even just a matching phrase to release the funds. This was obviously the way your Mrs. Shaw, she could access the money from that trust you were reading us about, Victor.”

  “But why would she bury it?” asked Caroline.

  “She knew where it was if she needed it, I suppose,” said Morris with a shrug. “But I would guess the beneficiary person of this trust, or whatever, would have these very same numbers.”

  The third envelope contained a packet of old photographs. Caroline looked at them each carefully, one by one, and then went through them again, for our sakes, telling Beth and Morris and me what she could about the people in the pictures. “These are of my family,” she said, “at least most of them. I’ve seen many of them before in albums. Here’s a picture of Grandmother when she was young, with her two sisters.”

  The picture was of three young women, arms linked, marching in step toward the camera, dressed as if they were young ladies on the make out of an Edith Wharton novel. The woman in the middle wore a billowing white dress and stared at the photographer with her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face full of a fresh certainty about her future. That woman, full of life and determination, Caroline said, was her grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw. To Faith Reddman’s right was a smaller, frailer woman, her stance less sure, her smile uneasy. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and her dress was a severe and prim black. This was Hope Reddman, the sister who was to die of consumption only a few years later. And to the left, broad-shouldered and big-boned, but with her head tilted shyly down, was Charity Reddman, poor dead Charity Reddman. Her dress was almost sheer enough to see her long legs beneath, she wore a hat, and even with her face cast downward you could see her beauty. She was the pretty one, Caroline had been told, the adventurous one, though that thirst for adventure was not evident in her adolescent shyness. Beautiful Charity Reddman, the belle of the ball, who was destined to disappear beneath the black earth of Veritas.

  “That’s your great-grandfather,” I said, pointing to the next photograph, a picture of a fierce, bewhiskered man, his bulging eyes still burning with a strange intensity even as he leaned precariously on a cane, his knees stiff, his back bent. He was leaner than I had remembered from other pictures, his stance more decrepit, but the fierce whiskers, the burning eyes, the wide, nearly lipless mouth were still the stuff of legend. Claudius Reddman, as familiar a figure as all the other icons of great American industrial wealth, as familiar as Rockefeller in his starched collar, as Ford with his lean angularity, as Morgan staring his stare that could maim, as Gould and Carnegie and Frick.

  “That was just before he died, I think,” said Caroline. “He lived to be ninety, though in his last years he suffered from palsy and emphysema.”

  She flipped to the next photograph and said, “This is my grandfather.” It was a photograph of a handsome young man, tall and blond and mustached, with his nose snootily raised. His suit was dark, his hat nattily creased and cocked over his eye. He had the same arrogant expression I saw in Harrington the first time we met at the bank. There was something about the way he stood, the way his features held their pose, that made me pause and then I realized he held himself in the same careful way I often saw in drunks.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at a photograph of a thin, bald man with a long thin nose and small eyes. He wore a stiff, high collar and spectacles and through the spectacles his tiny eyes were squinted in wariness. Beside him was a handsome woman with a worried mouth. There was something fragile about this couple. There was a sense in the picture that they were under siege.

  “I don’t know,” said Caroline.

  I turned it over, but there was no description.

  The next was another picture she couldn’t identify, a photograph of an unattractive young woman with a dowdy print dress, unruly hair, and a long face with beady eyes. She looked like a young Eleanor Roosevelt with a long thin nose, which was rather sad for her since Eleanor Roosevelt was the ugliest inhabitant ever of the White House, uglier even than Richard Nixon, uglier even than Checkers. The woman in the photograph was just that ugly, and she seemed to know it, looking at the camera with a peculiar passion and intensity that was almost frightening.

  “I don’t know who she is,” said Caroline. “I have no idea why my grandmother would save these pictures.”

  “Who might know something about them?” I asked.

  “These all seem very old, from the time before my father was born, but he might recognize them. Or Nat. They are the only ones who have been around long enough to possibly know.”

  There were other photographs, more of the unattractive young woman, more of Christian Shaw, one of which showed him haggard and miserable in a mussed suit. It was taken, Caroline said, shortly before he died. She could tell, she said, because the sleeve of his jacket was loosely pinned to the side. “He lost his arm in the war,” she said. “In France, during the battle in which he won his medal.” There was also a postcard with a picture of Yankee Stadium on its grand opening, a sellout crowd, the Yankees, in pinstripes, at bat. From the distance it was impossible to tell, but maybe it was Ruth at the plate, or Jumping Joe Dugan, or Wally Pipp. There was no message written on the back.

  The final picture was more modern, in faded color, a young couple with their arms around each other. The boy was tall and handsome, his hair long, his shirt tie-dyed, his jeans cut into shorts and his shoes sandals. He was laughing at the camera, giddy with life. The girl was wildly young, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, her brown hair as straight and as long as a folk singer’s. She was staring up at the boy with the glow of sated passion on her face. Caroline didn’t say anything and I blinked a bit before I realized who it was: Caroline and Harrington, just a couple of kids crazy in love.

  “Who took it?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember,” she said softly, “but not Grammy. I don’t remember her ever taking a picture.”

  When we had finished with the photographs, Caroline reached again into the box and took out a white business envelope with the words “The Letters” written in script on the outside. The handwriting was narrow and tight, the same as the writing on the trust documents. Inside the envelope was a key, an old key, tarnished, with an ornate head an
d a long shank and a bit that looked like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle.

  “Any idea where the lock is?” I asked Caroline.

  “None,” she said.

  Morris took hold of the key and examined it. “This key is a key to a Barron tumbler lock of some sort. Such a lock I could open in a minute. Maybe three.”

  A thin envelope taken from the box contained only one piece of paper, a medical bill from a Dr. Wesley Karpas, dated June 9, 1966, charging, for services rendered, $638.90. The services rendered were not specified, nor was the patient. It was addressed, though, to Mrs. Christian Shaw. I asked Caroline whether she had any idea about the medical services referred to in the bill and she had none.

  The final envelope was a thick bundle that felt, from the outside, not unlike a bundle of hundred-dollar bills. Caroline opened the envelope and reached in and pulled out a sheaf of papers separated by clips into four separate sections, the whole bundle bound with twine. The papers were old, each about the size of a small envelope, yellowed, covered with the tight narrow handwriting that was already familiar, the handwriting of Faith Reddman Shaw. One edge of each of the papers was slightly ragged, as if it had been cut from a book of some sort.

  Caroline looked at the top page, and then the next, and then the next. “These look to be from my grandmother’s diary, but that can’t be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “She burned them all shortly before she died. She kept volumes and volumes of a diary from when she was a little girl, she would scribble constantly, but she never let anyone see them and a few years back she burned them all. We begged her not to, they were such a precious piece of our history, but she said her past was better forgotten.”

  “I guess there were some pages,” I said, “she couldn’t bear to incinerate.”

  Caroline, who was scanning through the excerpts, said, “This first one is about meeting my grandfather.”

  “Maybe there are clues in these diary pages of who these people in the photographs, they are,” said Morris, “and why your grandmother, she kept this box buried like she did. We should maybe be reading these pages, no?”