Cirak's Daughter

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Oh, hush up, Aunt Harriet. Why should you be denied your share of feminine frailties just because you know how to do arithmetic?” Jenny slid a fat cushion behind Miss Compton’s head, put a match to the ready-laid kindling, then went to get the sherry.

  “Drink that and you’ll feel better.”

  “Aren’t you going to join me?”

  “In a minute. I’ll get the soup on.”

  Harriet Compton sat sipping her wine and gazing at the flames. Jenny came back and did the same, until the soup boiled over and made a mess of the stove.

  “I hope it isn’t ruined,” she remarked as she came back with two steaming mugs on a tray.

  “The soup or the stove?” Harriet was beginning to sound like her usual self again.

  “Either or both. Want some of these crackers?”

  “Thanks. You’re comfortable to be with, Jenny.”

  “You’re the first person who’s ever thought so.”

  “What do you want to bet I won’t be the last?”

  That didn’t seem to call for any answer. Neither of them said any more until the soup was gone. After a while, Harriet Compton set her empty mug back on the tray.

  “That hit the spot. Well, back to work. Let’s balance the books. What have we got on the credit side so far?”

  “Well, I suppose we can say we’ve established the fact that James Cox really was—my father. Jason Cirak. Do you think anybody could have recognized him as himself?”

  “We’re not thinking, we’re adding up the facts. Okay, so there’s one fact. What else?”

  “I don’t know whether it belongs on the credit or the debit side, but I’d say we’ve also learned my father was as big a wolf as my mother always claimed he was.”

  “Oh, you noticed, did you? Cousin Elspeth may have been indulging in a spot of wishful thinking, you know.”

  “She doesn’t look like the imaginative type to me. Anyway, you just said yourself opinions don’t count.”

  “Had to remember that, didn’t you? So where does that put us? We’ve got Beth Firbelle hinting that James was after her aunt, Sue Giles virtually waltzing them down the aisle, and Elspeth Gillespie saying it’s all hogwash because she herself was the fair-haired lady. However, not even Sue Giles seems to have gotten wind of the switch, and that I must say I find awfully hard to buy in as close-knit a neighborhood as this.”

  “I’m glad I’m not writing this story. Sounds like a pretty messy plot to me.”

  Jenny was being flippant to cover the hurt that was creeping back. Noble sport for an eagle, playing puss-in-the-corner with two elderly widows!

  “So it does,” Harriet Compton agreed, “and the sooner we straighten it out, the better. I’d like to know what Marguerite Firbelle herself thinks.”

  “You’ve got a fat chance of finding out.”

  “That’s what you think, kid. I’ll have the information by this time tomorrow night.”

  “What are you going to do, walk up and ask her?”

  “I might just do that, if I can’t think of anything more subtle.” Harriet Compton wiggled her long, aristocratic feet out of her custom-made shoes and stretched out her toes toward the warmth.

  After a pause, Jenny ventured. “Any more facts?”

  “Sure. There’s the fact that Jack Firbelle was heaving sofas around over there at the church.

  “From which we deduce he’s not such an invalid as his doting mama tries to tell people he is. I could have told you that.”

  “Ah,” said the accountant, “but would I have believed you? It’s one thing to call a man a phony because he goes around with a supercilious sneer on his face, but quite another job to prove he’s cooking the books. If Jack really did have a heart condition, he’d have known better than to lift that heavy stuff, unless he’s an abject masochist, which I seriously doubt. We also know Beth is quite aware of the fact that Jack’s a healthy man or she wouldn’t have asked him in the first place. Unless she absolutely hates his guts.”

  “For which I wouldn’t blame her,” said Jenny. “Honestly, the way he and his mother treat that poor woman makes me boil! Having to ask permission to leave the house for a little while, even. You can tell how desperately unhappy she is from the way she walks, the way she talks, and especially the way she dresses, in those droopy skirts and tops she tries to make for herself and doesn’t know how. It’s not that she doesn’t care. She must care terribly, to put so much work into them even if they do look so awful when they’re done. Honestly, if you’d seen her as I did, fingering the hand-me-downs at the rummage sale and wishing she dared buy herself something fit to wear, you’d have wanted to sit right down on the floor and bawl.”

  “Did she really do that?” Harriet Compton asked. “What puzzles me is why she sticks around Jack and his mother at all. Beth is a capable woman, even Elspeth Gillespie hands her that. She could get a job somewhere and support herself instead of having to do the poor relation bit.”

  “And deprive dear Aunt Marguerite of a free housemaid?” Jenny snorted. “The old biddy probably keeps stringing Beth along with the promise of a nice little inheritance if she toes the line. One of my mother’s aunts has a widowed niece she’s been pulling that line on for about thirty years. By the time the niece finally caught on, she was too old to make a change. That’s what’s happening to Beth, if you ask me. I’d like to take her aside and tell her a few things while there’s still time for her to get out.”

  “If you’ll take some advice from me, you’ll keep your thoughts to yourself till you’re sure Beth isn’t doing just about what she wants to do,” the older woman warned. “Families are strange, as you ought to have learned from your own experience. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere with this discussion, do you? What about a spot of innocent recreation till bedtime? I don’t suppose you happen to play cribbage, by any chance? James must surely have left a board and a deck of cards around here somewhere.”

  “There’s one in that desk we decided to keep. How did you know?”

  “Good question. I haven’t been rummaging through your private papers, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Aunt Harriet, I never dreamed you were! It’s just that I don’t recall having opened the desk during the grand chuck-out. I went through it when I first came here. There wasn’t much except some writing paper and a few receipted bills for fuel and whatnot. The cribbage board was in a separate little drawer with the cards, and I left it there. It gave me a—you know me and my feelings. And your mentioning it like that.…” Jenny’s voice dwindled off.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Harriet Compton rather impatiently. “Maybe I only thought there must be one because I’m a cribbage nut myself. Maybe I read somewhere that Jason Cirak liked to play cribbage, too, and it stuck in my mind. There used to be a lot of stuff written about him back when he was a big name in films, you know. James—I mean Cirak—was a colorful personality.”

  “That’s not what the Plummers call him. I do know there was publicity even after he and my mother were married, because Uncle Fred and Aunt Martha still haven’t got over his dragging the Plummer name through the newspapers. I never got to read any of the articles, naturally.”

  “No, I don’t suppose they kept scrapbooks. It’s a shame, Jenny. You have a right to know both sides of the story. If you like, we might drive into Providence and see if they keep old periodical files at the main library there. Maybe we can find some stories about your father. And see if they say anything about cribbage,” she added with a wry smile. “Not that it matters now.”

  “How do you know it doesn’t? Maybe that cribbage board is the clue to the whole mystery.” Jenny opened her father’s desk and pulled the cribbage board out of its drawer. “Here it is. Does it suggest anything to you?”

  Harriet Compton ran her fingers over the long strip of wood. “It’s so worn.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “I hadn’t realized James was so old.”

  “He must have played on it for years and years.
” Jenny looked down at the age-stained board, its holes worn out of their serried regularity by countless movings of the metal pegs that marked the scoring. She’d wanted something like this. She’d hoped that somewhere in her father’s house there’d be some keepsake he’d carried around with him through the years, in and out of whatever adventures had landed him at last in this made-over carriage house in a tiny Rhode Island village. And here it was, this piece of wood bored full of holes, rubbed to an antique sheen by the hands of Jason Cirak.

  Or was it? Maybe the cribbage board wasn’t even his, just one more bit of clutter that had been left behind when that old woman who’d been here before him died and was taken away to be buried. Maybe the thing meant nothing at all. So why was Harriet Compton poring over it so avidly, touching the holes, turning the board over and over in her competent hands, running her fingertips along the edges, which had been rounded by years of handling? Did she think that bit of hand-polished walnut could tell her who had been Jason Cirak’s cribbage partner on that fatal night last March?

  If the board held a secret, it had no way to tell. Harriet handed the thin, worn slab back to Cirak’s daughter.

  “Put it back where you found it, Jenny. We can’t play on James’s board. It belongs to a time that’s over and done with forever.”

  After that, the gentle closing of a desk drawer and the snapping of applewood logs in the fireplace were the only sounds to be heard in the old carriage house. Two women, one older and one younger than either had realized herself to be until now, sat side by side, trapped by their thoughts inside an eagle’s nest.

  13

  It was Harriet Compton who broke the spell. “Well, that’s that for today, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to stick a few rollers in my hair and get ready for bed.”

  “All right. You get finished in the bathroom and I’ll be along. I’m just going to rinse out these mugs.”

  Miss Compton was in the little guest room and Jenny tidying the kitchen when Lawrence MacRae came to the door carrying the matte-finished enlargement he’d promised Jenny.

  “Sorry to come so late, but I didn’t want to hurry the drying for fear of spoiling the print.”

  “That’s all right,” she assured him. “I didn’t expect you to have it done this soon.”

  “I felt I owed you some kind of apology, Miss—is it still Plummer?”

  “You’d better call me Jenny. Come in for a minute, won’t you? It will give Sue Giles something to talk about. Aunt Harriet’s probably got her curlers in by now, but she won’t mind.”

  “Not a bit. Good evening, Larry.” The older woman entered the living room with a silk scarf draped coiflike over her head. “Personal vanity has never been one of my failings, mainly because I’ve had nothing to be vain about.”

  “What are you talking about?” the photographer contradicted. “You’d have made a great fashion model if you’d ever wanted to. You’ve got the height, and the bones. In fact you’d be a terrific study right now against the dying fire, with that thing over your head, though I don’t suppose you’d let me shoot it.”

  “On the contrary, I should be intensely flattered,” said Miss Compton. “And I don’t mind saying so because I notice you don’t have a camera with you.”

  “Ah, but I do!”

  MacRae whipped a tiny Minox out of his car coat pocket. “Mind sitting on the edge of that chair and leaning forward? I want to get your profile silhouetted in the light from the coals. Great! Oh, blast, I forgot I don’t have superfast film in this thing. It’ll have to be a time exposure. Is there anything around here I could use for a tripod?”

  “Mean to say you don’t have one of those in your coat pocket, too?” Jenny teased, fetching a step stool from the kitchen. “Will this do?”

  “Perfect.”

  He steadied the miniature camera on top of the stool and squinted through the viewfinder. “A little more forward. Good. Hold it for a second.”

  MacRae pressed the shutter release and eyed the second hand on his watch. “Okay, now face me just a little.”

  He took four or five more exposures, then lamented that he had no more film and put his camera away. “Where does this stool go, Jenny? I don’t know if those shots will amount to anything. I’d like to try again with better equipment, if you’ll pose for me, Miss Compton. I’m supposed to be doing a series on American faces for Pictorial Magazine, and you’re a natural for it. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “I’d be tickled silly. I was—somebody told me once I’d be good in pictures, but I thought it was only because he—liked me.”

  Why wouldn’t he, whoever he’d been? Jenny was glad to see that MacRae’s unexpected but obviously sincere admiration had been the perfect tonic for the somber mood Harriet Compton had been in a while ago. She didn’t know why the older woman’s happiness was so important to her, when they hardly knew each other. Surely there must be some tie of relationship, like the one Harriet had discovered with Elspeth Gillespie.

  Or was that merely wishful thinking? She wanted Harriet to be family because Harriet was so exactly the kind of relative she’d needed all her life. Jenny had never been really accepted anywhere. She was too much a Cirak for the Plummers, too much a reminder of the cataclysmic error Marion had made on the one fateful occasion when she’d insisted on having her own way in the face of the family’s objections. Furthermore, Marion herself had never, deep down, wanted Jenny. You couldn’t stay the little girl of the family if you had a daughter of your own.

  The kids Jenny had met and liked at school were never the kind Aunt Martha would have wanted coming to the house; so although she was naturally sociable, she’d wound up with the reputation of being a loner. Having one person in her life who’d at least have made an honest effort to understand her would have been a blessing beyond words. Harriet Compton was more than that. She knew without having to try. Was she that way with everyone?

  Harriet had Lawrence MacRae nicely wound around her little finger already. He was telling her a funny story about having to take close-up photographs of a sea lion with herring halitosis, so that he could watch her face when she laughed. Jenny began to feel a bit out of it.

  “Shall I put on the tea kettle?” she offered. “Here, Lawrence, let me do something about your coat.”

  “Most people call me Larry,” he answered. “Don’t bother. Just throw it down somewhere.”

  “I’m too house-proud for that.”

  The car coat was a good one, tailored of dark green corduroy. Its classic lines reminded Jenny of that bloodstained suede jacket. Not much liking the task, she went to the coat closet and hung MacRae’s beside the one Harriet Compton had brought in her gold-mounted attaché case. It didn’t take a tailor’s eye to see that the two garments were exactly the same size.

  14

  “Nonsense, Jenny! That can’t possibly be Larry’s jacket.”

  “Why not? Because he thinks you’re beautiful?” Cirak’s daughter dumped the eggy frying pan into the sink and ran cold water over it. “I thought we were going by the facts.”

  “And the fact is that I’m ugly?” Aunt Harriet spooned gooseberry jam over her toast, as if she didn’t care one way or the other.

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. The fact is that I compared his jacket with it, and they’re exactly the same size and style.”

  “But what motive could Larry have to kill James?”

  “How am I supposed to know? Maybe be found out my father was trifling with his grandmother’s affections.”

  “Maybe he thought James was planning to pinch old Colin’s bagpipes. Jenny, you can’t honestly believe an intelligent young man who’s been around as much as Sue Giles claims Larry has would kill such a magnificent model as your father just to protect his grandmother’s virtue? Did Elspeth Gillespie strike you as the helpless sort?”

  “No, but I’ve been wrong before.”

  Jenny sat down and started eating her breakfast. “I don’t want to sus
pect Larry any more than you do. He’s not so bad once you get past the mustache. But that doesn’t mean we can shut our eyes to the evidence, does it? I wish I’d given him the wrong jacket when he left, the way I did Greg Bauer night before last.”

  “You’d have been making a mistake if you did. Larry’s no dope.” Harriet buttered more toast and passed it over to Jenny. “Anyway, I can think of at least one other man not far from here who’s almost the same height and build, and dresses even better.”

  An image of Larry and another tall, thinnish, nattily-garbed man shoving a sofa across the church vestry flashed into Jenny’s mind. “So can I. Jack Firbelle.”

  “Too right, as an Australian client of mine used to say. Gooseberry jam?”

  “Please.”

  Jenny’s appetite was picking up. She wouldn’t mind so much if the jacket turned out to be Jack Firbelle’s. What business did he have dolling himself up like a male fashion model and letting his cousin go around like a walking ragbag? She said so.

  “Yours is a God of justice and of wrath, I see,” was Harriet Compton’s only reply.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t you think he deserves what’s coming to him for being so ratty to Beth?”

  “How do I know what he deserves? Whatever it is, he’ll get it sooner or later. People always do, so why fret about it? Furthermore, kindly remember that it’s never safe to judge by appearances.”

  “Yes, Auntie dear. I adore you when you go all sententious. More coffee?”

  “Thanks, Jenny. I’m glad you don’t mind my preaching. I used to do so much of it that I can’t get out of the habit, even now when I have nobody left to preach to.”

  “You have me.” Jenny stopped pouring. “Aunt Harriet, you’re not just—just going back to Baltimore, are you?”

  “Don’t you want me to? Wouldn’t you rather see me fade away, now that I’ve brought you a fresh lot of worries?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You haven’t brought me any trouble I didn’t have before.” Jenny decided she’d better set down the coffeepot before she poured its contents all over the table. “Aunt Harriet, I—I don’t think I could bear to have you walk out of my life the way my father did.”