by Jane Langton
“Promise?” said Jack evasively. “There wasn’t any promise, Annie.”
“Of course there was a promise.” Annie banged her cup down on the coffee table. “What’s the point of having an insurance policy if you pay premium after premium and then, when you need help, the company doesn’t deliver?”
“Well, of course, decisions about claims aren’t really my department. It’ll be up to an adjuster. Oh, the company will help, of course they’ll help. But you can’t expect—Listen, Annie, you left the door open. You knew the child was a half-wit. It was your fault.”
“It wasn’t, it wasn’t.” Annie stared at him, outraged. “And it doesn’t matter anyway if it was my fault. Personal-injury insurance is supposed to cover cases like that, isn’t it? Isn’t it? What’s it for, if it doesn’t pay when somebody breaks a leg by slipping on your front step?”
“For Christ’s sake, Annie, don’t get so upset.”
“Upset? Upset? They’re suing me for two million dollars, and I shouldn’t get upset?”
It was clear that Jack would be no help. The Paul Revere Mutual Insurance Company would try to wriggle out of it.
Annie called Uncle Homer, and he said he’d look into it. “But there’s no point in talking to Jack. It’s not in his interest for Paul Revere to lose a couple of million on a policy he sold you. And how do you think they got so rich in the first place? They’ve got a whole floor of crafty lawyers diddling people out of their rightful settlements. Every time one of them saves the company a million dollars he gets a bonus.” Homer said he was sorry. Annie thanked him and said goodbye.
She got back to work, trying not to think about her plummeting software stock, or about the suit against her. But she couldn’t forget about Eddy, the only member of the family who had appreciated her wall.
Come on, now. Concentrate. There was still so much to finish. The last two sections of her arcaded gallery were entirely blank, and the center section only half done. She had been saving a space for Tom Sawyer, lost in the cave with Becky Thatcher, but she didn’t feel like painting a terrifying labyrinth, not today. It was too much like the dark tangle of her own life. Instead she’d get to work on Sam Clemens himself, leaning against a pillar in his white suit.
Annie climbed the ladder. Her hands were shaking. It took nerve to climb out on the scaffolding again, even though she had put all the boards back in place and locked the wheels.
Flimnap was gone again. He had said nothing about leaving, but on the day after Eddy’s death he had taken off. The detective sergeant wanted to know where he was. Was it not Flimnap O’Dougherty who had put the rolling scaffolding together in the first place, who knew how to lock and unlock the wheels? Maybe the whole thing was his fault.
Mary Kelly was working overtime as Historian in Residence at Weston Country Day. She made a batch of slides, using a camera stand to photograph pictures in books—the temple of Poseidon at Paestum, the Parthenon, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was a lot of work, especially tricky because Homer had cluttered up the floor. He was putting together a documentary history of the town of Concord, and his papers were distributed in a hundred piles all over the rug, one for each year of the nineteenth century. Mary had to tiptoe around the edges, and watch her step as she handled the camera.
When the slides were ready, she arranged them in the right order and carried her projector into the classroom, dropping a book on the way in, stooping to pick it up, dropping another book.
“Sssh,” said Mrs. Rutledge, looking up from the story she was reading aloud to the class, The Flying Family. In her opinion it was a great classic. Mary had heard some of the chapters before. The family in the story had discovered a magical tree in their front yard. When they jumped off its branches they could fly.
“Joan stood on the highest branch of the enchanted tree,” read Mrs. Rutledge. “She wasn’t afraid, and when she jumped off, she turned a somersault in the air, just to show Jim her new trick. ‘Isn’t this fun?’ she called to Mom and Dad, who were smiling up at her from the lawn. Then Jim jumped too, and turned a double somersault. Mom and Dad laughed and clapped their hands.”
The class was mesmerized. They gazed at Mrs. Rutledge. Some had their mouths open.
Mary put down the projector and waited until Mrs. Rutledge closed the book and stood up to make an announcement. “Class, I have something very sad to tell you this morning. There has been a death in Charlene’s family. Last week there was an accident, and her little brother was killed.” There were real tears in Mrs. Rutledge’s eyes. “Eddy was eight years old. He was going to a special school. I’m sure you will all want to show your sympathy for Charlene.”
Everyone looked inquisitively at Charlene Gast. Charlene stared straight ahead and said nothing.
“It was so brave of you, dear, not to miss a day of school,” continued Mrs. Rutledge. “But we all know what a courageous young woman you are.” With relief she changed the subject to something jollier. “Charlene, is it true that a big swimming meet is coming up soon?”
Charlene’s impassive expression disappeared. She beamed. “Next week it’s the New England championships in Providence. After that I go to Orlando, Florida, for the Eastern Division Finals. The three top swimmers get to compete in the Junior Olympics.”
Breaths were sucked in. How exciting! Charlene would soon be an Olympic swimmer! Mrs. Rutledge clasped her hands. “Is this the one I read about, with Cindy—?”
“Foxweiler.” Charlene grinned. “Oh, right. But it’s okay. I can swim faster than Cindy Foxweiler.”
There were squeals of delight. Applause. Becca Smith waggled her hand in the air. “I saw her on TV! Cindy Foxweiler!”
“All right, class,” said Mrs. Rutledge. “Now, just calm down. Thank you, Charlene. You know we’ll all be cheering for you. Now, girls, quiet down, please, for Mrs. Kelly’s thrilling slide talk about—what is it about, Mrs. Kelly?”
“Greek architecture,” said Mary grimly.
“How exciting! Cissie, would you close the curtains? Now, girls, you heard what I said, quiet down!”
The news of the death of Charlene’s little brother hardly made a dent in the consciousness of the fifth-grade class at Weston Country Day. Later that morning Mary watched them run around the playground. Her amateur psychological study of fifth-grade sociopathology was still in progress. It was obvious that an alarming virus was spreading among these eighteen ten-year-old girls. Mrs. Rutledge was nominally in charge, but in truth she was only a figurehead. Charlene Gast was commander-in-chief. She towered over the rest. They clustered around her, circling and giggling, vying for her attention.
Today Eddy’s bereaved sister seemed especially gleeful.
Chapter 35
“Go to the right, into the dark forest of fir-trees; for I saw Death take that road with your little child.”
Hans Christian Andersen, “The Story of a Mother”
Homer looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning. He was bored with his documentary history of the town of Concord, tired of waiting for news from Bill Kennebunk, sick of being nagged by his wife to do something about her niece’s troubles.
But Annie’s troubles were terrible enough to nag him on their own. Homer gazed out the window at the bend of the river. No wind ruffled the surface of the water. The red haze of the trees on the other shore had given way to a delicate veil of green leaves. Homer drummed his fingers on the table. What if he were to pay those lovable Gasts a friendly visit? Once again it amused him, the idea of barging in uninvited, lifting up a rock to watch the loathsome bugs scamper away from the light.
Now he stood up cautiously and minced around the papers on the floor, only once losing his balance and sending the notes for an entire decade sailing across the room.
Roberta Gast opened the door, and said, “Oh.”
“Hi there,” said Homer cheerfully. “I just thought I’d pay you a call.” He looked past Roberta at the front hall. “I’ve always liked this h
ouse. My nephew John used to live here.” When Roberta still stood immobile, staring at him, he said, as if it explained everything, “Annie’s brother.”
“Oh,” said Roberta again. “Well, come in.” She stood back, and Homer walked past her into the hall. In spite of his familiarity with the house, he hardly recognized it. In John and Helen’s time it had been dignified and bare, with only a few pieces of furniture making stark patterns against the walls. Now it was fussy with carpets, curtains, and bric-a-brac. Over a mantel hung a huge mirror with a fantastic gilt frame. The rest of the furniture was handsome too, but somehow phony—expensive replicas of antiques.
Furtively he inspected the seat of his pants, then sat down on a spotless sofa, George III Chippendale, serpentine cresting, claw-and-ball feet, circa 1760. Roberta sat opposite on a splendid side chair, Williamsburg, Queen Anne, cabriole legs, vase-shaped splat.
She looked wary. Her lip was firmly buttoned. By a trick of optics her face appeared before him twice, once across the room and once in the shining mirror. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is wickedest of all?
Roberta offered nothing in the way of comfortable small talk to the fumbling guest. Homer rattled on about the old days. Foolishly he mentioned John’s spider collection, and asked if she ever came across descendants of John’s dear old barn spiders. “Sort of fuzzy creatures, with big round webs?”
Roberta shuddered. “God, no. My cleaning lady comes twice a week.”
Homer leaned forward and turned sober. “My wife and I are so sorry about your boy.”
Roberta grimaced, and said, “Thank you.”
Homer blundered on, as though entirely unaware that the Gasts were suing Mary’s niece. “So strange, the way he got into Annie’s house. You people didn’t have a key, did you? Children are so curious. Eddy might have found a key somewhere, and used it? You know, the way a child might do?”
Roberta bridled, and said, “Of course not.” The button on her lip had become a closed zipper.
Homer floundered around in his head and produced another question. “I gather there were other incidents. Could you tell me any other things that happened, unavoidable accidents?”
Roberta no longer had a mouth at all. The lower part of her face was a block of cement. She stared at him venomously.
Homer stood up, and chuckled. “Well, I’d better be going. I’ll drop in on Annie, and see what she’s up to.”
Roberta did not accompany him to the door. He shambled out, shouting cheerful farewells, and walked around the house to Annie’s front door. Annie answered his knock at once and let him in. She looked drawn and pale.
“I should have remembered,” said Homer. “That woman is some kind of lawyer, right?”
“What woman?”
“Mrs. Gast.”
“Yes, unfortunately. She’s with the firm that’s suing me. Come on in, Uncle Homer.”
“I just stopped in over there. She didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet. I asked her if they have a key to your place, and she said no.”
“My God, Uncle Homer, what nerve! Did you expect her to answer a question like that?”
“Well, probably not. But you said you loaned them your key, right? So before they gave it back they could have had it copied. Have you still got it?”
Annie went to the kitchen counter and opened a drawer. “Here it is. It’s got a tag.”
Homer looked at the tag, which said “Annie’s house,” and stroked his chin. “When was this?”
“Last month sometime. Before—” She reached for her calendar. “Yes, here it is.” She showed it to Homer, the scrawl across the spaces for March 27 and 28. “I went to New York with my little sister. Miranda and I saw a couple of plays.”
“Ah,” said Homer, “just three weeks before Eddy’s death. How very interesting. May I keep this key for a white? You don’t happen to have a picture of those people, do you?”
“The Gasts? Why, yes, I think so.” Annie took a shoebox from a bookshelf. “I ought to paste these in a scrapbook, but I never get around to it.” She groped in the box and pulled out a picture. “I took it just after they moved in.” Her voice hardened. “When we were all such jolly friends.”
It was a family picture. There they were, the Gasts, lined up before their new front door. Roberta’s mouth, now so firmly cemented shut, was wide open in a toothy grin. Bob was smiling too, and so were Eddy and Charlene. “What a sweet young family,” murmured Homer.
“Adorable.”
Homer pocketed the picture, patted Annie’s back awkwardly, and said goodbye. In his car on the way home he thought about all the places where a key could be copied. Oh, Christ, there were so many.
Impulsively he ignored the turnoff for Fair Haven Road, turned left on Route 62, and parked in front of Biggy’s Hardware Store in West Concord.
It was an upmarket hardware store. Besides the usual tools, grass rakes, lawn mowers, trash cans, weed killers, and other murderous substances, it had an interior-decorating department with custom-mixed paint in colonial colors and samples of upholstery fabric. Homer thought of Roberta Gast’s flossy furniture. This was surely her kind of hardware store.
“Do you people make keys?” he asked the guy at the counter.
“We sure do. Hand it over.”
“No, I don’t need a key.” Homer pulled out the picture of the Gast family. “I’m looking into a case of B and E, breaking and entering—you know, burglary—and I wondered—”
“You a cop?”
Sighing, Homer produced the well-worn card that identified him as a lieutenant detective, the one dating from many years back. Displaying it as legitimate accreditation was increasingly ticklish. This time the guy behind the counter looked at it carefully and glanced up at Homer suspiciously. “Hey, fella, this isn’t you.”
“Oh, that was before I grew whiskers,” said Homer, grinning foolishly.
“And the date, this card’s no good. What are you trying to pull?”
Homer put the card away and tried a fallback approach, telling the truth. “Look, the people in this picture are suing my niece, claiming she’s responsible for the death of their son. They say she left the door open while she was out, and the little kid got in and had a fatal accident.”
“Oh, yeah, I read about it in the Concord paper. Kid was retarded, right?”
“Down’s syndrome. Tell me, did you copy a key for these people?”
Doubtfully the hardware-store clerk looked at the key. “I didn’t copy anything with a tag. Maybe Ron did. I just work weekends. And I don’t recognize anybody in this picture. Come back Monday. Ask Ron.”
At Vanderhoof’s Hardware, on the Milldam, it was the same. “Sure, sometimes the keys have tags, but I don’t remember this one.” The proprietor bent over the picture. “I think that guy comes in here sometimes.” He called to his clerk. “Do you recognize this guy? Didn’t he buy some antifreeze in here one time?”
“Right. He’s been in here a couple of times. Bought a bunch of twenty-five-watt candle-flame bulbs. Couple dozen, for a chandelier.”
Homer dangled the key in front of him. “Can you remember if he had a key copied?”
“Not as far as I know,” said the proprietor, glancing at the clerk.
“Nope,” agreed the clerk. “I didn’t cut a key for him. I’d remember it if I had.”
Homer went out to the sidewalk, telling himself Gast would have been a fool to have his key copied smack in the middle of town. He went home and showed the key and the picture to Mary, and growled about his suspicions.
“There’s a hardware store in Lexington,” said Mary. “You could try that one. And there must be others in Bedford and Sudbury. Probably every town around here has a hardware store. And don’t forget Boston. Roberta works in Boston.”
“Oh, good. That’s just great. My God.” Then Homer noticed an appalling orderliness in the living room. “Good Lord, what happened? You didn’t pick up my papers” He looked around in a panic. “Where are they?
Where the hell are they?”
“Now, now, Homer, don’t worry, they’re fine. Look, I bought you a file box and a lot of file folders. A hundred folders. I spent all morning putting labels on them. I mean, really, Homer, we had to get the room back. I was tired of tiptoeing around the edges.”
Grumpily Homer ran his finger over the orderly row of folders, inspecting the labels and the neat disposition of his papers. “Well, I don’t know. If only we had a library like Annie’s, I could spread out in all directions.”
“You’re jealous, are you, Homer?”
“Nothing to be jealous of, I’m afraid. The poor kid’s going to lose it all.”
Chapter 36
“Open everything, go everywhere, but I forbid you to enter this little room.”
Charles Perrault, “Bluebeard”
Sergeant Kennebunk’s voice on the phone seemed to come from the distant past, all the way back to last week, when Homer had been interested in the disappearance of the battered wife of Frederick Small.
“Oh, Bill, hi there,” said Homer, trying to sound cheerful, failing.
“Say, Homer, that was great, the way your wife interviewed the maid in that hotel.”
“Oh, right. But we still don’t know if the blond woman in that room was really Pearl Small.”
“No, that’s right, we don’t. So I thought you might like to join me in a little research project.”
“Research project?”
“Examining Small’s house. He seems to be elsewhere. I can’t find him. His phone’s been disconnected. I think McNutt knows where he is, but he just blusters and says it’s none of my business, it’s a free country, Small’s a law-abiding citizen. Anyway, I thought I’d just take a look at the premises.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got McNutt’s signature on a search warrant?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Oh, I see.” Homer was delighted. “You’re ready to sacrifice your entire career as a law-abiding police officer and future candidate for the job of Rollo McNutt, in order to make a case against that monster Small? Well, good. I’m your man.”