by M. E. Kerr
She blew out a few smoke rings, as though she was clearly satisfied with herself that Sunday morning in July.
I decided to jump in.
I said, “Celeste was wearing a Seven of Diamonds around her neck.”
“Of course, you’d know that. Yes. It’s a copy. The original is in my safe. I’m very surprised Celeste wore the copy. Star would, of course, but Celeste?”
I didn’t bat an eye.
I said, “I’ve never seen one quite like that. Who gave it to you?”
“Nelly, of course,” she said. “It was his last gift to me. He told the Captain he’d ordered it especially for me.”
She shook her head. “Here he was in pain from being beaten up. You know my brother’s case, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know it.”
“I guess everybody does, no matter what age. Nelly’s become like Judge Crater or James Hoffa. Legendary.”
“Yes, you could say that.”
“The person who took Celeste beat him up. May have gone back and killed him later, but the Captain saw him in the meanwhile. Nelly wanted to be sure that I got the Seven of Diamonds immediately. He told the Captain it might cheer me up, so he wasn’t going to wait until journey’s end to give it to me. He knew how I loved John Kennedy. I was the only Democrat in the family.”
I remembered the journal: the description of Nels with the jeweler’s box inside his sports coat, just before the fight with Lenny.
“It’s the first one I’ve ever seen with a ruby,” I said.
“Nelly didn’t get a chance to tell me about that, but I guessed,” said Annette Plummer. “A piece of bright-red color in a row of diamonds. It could only stand for Celeste in my life, with her red wig. It was terribly original, which surprised me because Nelly wasn’t all that original. He always copied from other people. Daddy said I’d done that to him by making him play dummy all the time. It wasn’t like him to think symbolically: He was so direct. But what else could the ruby stand for?”
For Laura Delacourt’s birthstone, I thought.
Annette Plummer said, “Of course Nelly loved drama! He loved doing dramatic things, and he could afford to. What Nelly wanted, Nelly got. I’m afraid Daddy led him to believe there were no limits for him.”
She stopped smiling and looked off toward a vase of long-stemmed white roses, shaking her head.
“Maybe that’s why I went off to sea,” she said in a sudden, merry voice, as though she was mocking herself. “I ran off to sea like some young boy. I skipped college, said toodle-oo, and took off. For years I wrote Nelly every day. Much as I adored him, I had to get away.”
“Was he controlling, was that it?”
“Not controlling, really. No. He was beginning to turn into me. It’s hard to explain, but if Nelly truly admired you, he became you. It was as though you’d absorbed him. He was there but he was you. It was rather frightening. Whatever it was, he had no way of his own…. It’s hard to explain, Fell.”
Thanks to the journal, it wasn’t hard to understand, though. Leonard Tralastski had made the same complaint about Nels.
Or Plum had … if you wanted to believe they weren’t one and the same.
“Celeste never trusted him, you know,” she said.
I had no response to that remark, and she went on.
“Nelly knew it, of course. A part of me used to think Nelly’d destroyed Celeste himself, then changed his identity. But how could Nelly just walk out on his inheritance? He could never have afforded himself. He bought several new suits a month … and shirts, shoes. He was a world-class shopper.”
“My mother’s one of those.”
“The Captain isn’t chopped liver when it comes to shopping, either — only what he likes you can’t bring home on the bus in bags. You steer home the things he likes.”
She lighted yet another cigarette, in a mood to talk.
“A few years ago the Captain learned there was this broken-down ventriloquist who played the casinos and sang ‘Seeing Nelly Home’ in his act. The Captain began to suspect Celeste had not been thrown overboard after all. When he found out that Lenny Last was Nelly’s old school pal, he was sure. But he didn’t want to say anything to me. I had almost put the whole tragic affair behind me. And how could he ever prove it?”
I had an idea I knew why the Captain didn’t want to say anything.
He didn’t want her coming face-to-face with Lenny Last and finding out what the ruby really stood for, and whose necklace it was to be before the Captain took it.
Took it and then did what to Nels Plummer?
Had the Captain sent Plummer to a watery grave, just as Nels had wanted to do to Celeste?
Had the Captain found Nels injured from the fight with Lenny, and then finished the job himself?
But why?
Annette Plummer had more coffee.
Then she began to answer the questions I would have liked to ask her … the very ones I was sitting across from her asking myself.
She said, “The Captain always felt threatened by Nelly. My brother and I were like some kind of nightclub act when we were together: playing straight man for each other, doing one-liners that cracked each other up — oh, you know how it is when you’re very, very simpatico with someone…. The Captain was jealous of Nelly. Celeste spotted it almost immediately, and as the Captain would come toward us, she’d say, ‘Here comes jelly belly, jelly of Nelly belly, jelly of Nelly.’ I’d have to hush her.”
Maybe all vents were space cadets when it came to their dummies. So far I hadn’t met one who wasn’t.
I said, “When did you find out that Celeste wasn’t destroyed — that she was really Plumsie?”
She looked insulted suddenly, and her eyes narrowed. “Celeste was never Plumsie! Plumsie tried to take her over, yes, but Celeste was too strong for him!”
I said, “Sorry.”
Her fece softened. “I am, too, Fell. I shouldn’t be cross when you only came here to do us a favor … And here I’ve been blabbing away selfishly about myself and Nelly and Celeste. Forgive me!”
“I’m having a good time.”
“I think I miss having a young man to talk to. Fen’s such a good listener.”
“Please go right on with the story,” I said.
Another smoke ring. She admired it for a moment, and then got back on the subject. “As soon as Lenny Last was dead, the Captain told me his suspicion. They were more than suspicions by then. He’d actually had Fen sneak off to a performance of Plumsie’s out in Las Vegas. Both of them vowed to get her back for me. And for Fen, as well…. Fen knows Celeste’s entire act, but he can’t make it work with Star. She’s clearly inferior.”
“Not a McElroy,” I said, straight-faced.
“Far from it!” said Annette Plummer, looking pleased that I understood.
She said, “You see, the Captain would like to have Celeste back on the Seastar. Fen would like living on shipboard, too, I think. And I am happiest at sea. We could all four be together. It’ll be enormous fun!” Her face was radiant then. “Celeste will love hearing what we’ve planned for her!”
She rose finally and said it was so very nice to meet someone from her brother’s school … and club.
“Although,” she said, “there are some very ominous things about Sevens, aren’t there? Some kind of Sevens Revenge?”
“I never heard of that,” I said loyally.
Celeste, Plumsie, Lenny, whichever one it was, was right, of course: We’re taught to say that.
But it was the very first time I’d ever said it and known better. For when Deem was convicted of drug dealing, and then killed mysteriously during our Easter vacation, I’d believed the rumors that the drug lords had copied descriptions of The Sevens Revenge to take suspicion off themselves.
Thanks to the journal, I finally knew better.
Thanks to the journal, I knew better, I knew more, I knew then that in a world so full of cunning and concealment, I needed all the help I could get … wheth
er I owned a restaurant, had a chain of them, or worked as a chef in one.
No matter what I did, or where I did it. I’d best get my butt back to the books, to The Hill, to the Sevens.
chapter 17
Before I left, Annette Plummer showed me Celeste’s room, exactly as it had always been, still waiting for her … across the hall from a smaller room where Star lived.
I asked her if she wanted me to put the suitcase in Fen’s room, and she answered that she’d like that.
That was when I slipped the journal into my pocket. I must have always known I would not leave it for Fen to read, for I had never mentioned it.
Lark took me back down in the elevator.
“Did you talk a lot about Mr. Nels?” he asked me.
“Enough to make me suspicious,” I said.
He laughed as though I’d said something funny. He said “That Mr. Tobias? He’s full of suspicions. At one time he even suspected Miss Annette. And he’s always snooping around in the Captain’s life. He could be right about the Captain.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The Captain’s a man who likes what money can buy. A man who drives an Avanti around likes what money can buy. Her money bought it, of course. And the boat. Imagine wanting a boat when you work on one? But it’s quite a boat, and she bought it.”
“What were Nels and she like together?”
“When he was small she called him Little King Tut, and he was, too. The master spoiled him rotten. Remember, it wasn’t her brother. Not a blood relative at all…. She was always jealous of Mr. Nels. He came along so unexpectedly, and he was a real Plummer — and a male in the bargain. The master focused all his attention on the boy, see, because the Mrs. passed away. But Mr. Nels adored Miss Annette. He tried his best to please her, always. Poor Mr. Nels.”
“And how did he feel about Celeste?”
“She’s an itch with a b in front of it, Mr. Fell.”
I laughed and so did he.
Then I said, “What do you really think happened to him, Lark?”
“Someone murdered him, Mr. Fell…. That school friend of his, maybe … or someone closer.” He looked around him in the small elevator, as though the culprit could be riding down with us. “Someone very close, maybe.”
When we hit the first floor, he hung on to me. Someone should have been taking him up and down in the elevator, not the other way around.
He said, “That day Jack Kennedy was shot is like a bad dream. It wasn’t real and yet it was. And I don’t think we’ll ever know the whole truth about that or this.”
• • •
The next day before I checked in at Le Rêve, I tore a few pages out of the journal: the ones that described how Lenny and Nels named their trees Celeste, winning admission to Sevens … and at the very end, the pages about Lenny Last going to Cottersville to perform The Sevens Revenge on Deem.
Both Lenny Last and Deem were dead. The score was even.
I made some phone calls next and found out the address of George Tobias. Then I wrapped the journal up and mailed it to him.
It was his case, after all; he should be the one to solve it.
As for any immediate punishment due the Captain, I was betting on Celeste.
I was betting that with Celeste back aboard the Seastar, The Ancient Mariner would read like the story of Little Bo Peep.
chapter 18
That September I returned to Gardner and to Sevens House. Not everyone on The Hill had resigned himself to the fact we were now a coed institution. There were pickets out with signs reading BETTER DEAD THAN COED, and WOE, MEN! WOMEN!
There was only one new member of Sevens, a junior named Parson Stalker.
He told the Sevens he was assigned to that he had named his tree Dazzler, after his horse.
He moved in right across the hall from me.
I’d walked over to introduce myself and tell him whatever he might want to know about life on campus as a Sevens.
He was sitting in a leather chair with his back to the door. He was smoking. The view in front of him was of The Tower, where the Sevens had sung him into the club … and where we ate evenings, separate from and better than the others at Gardner School.
“Hello there!” I called out to him. “If you have permission to smoke, do it down in the smoker, first floor.”
There was no response. He didn’t move a muscle.
He was reading a book by James Tiptree, Jr.
“I’m John Fell from across the hall!” I said.
He actually blew a few smoke rings, reminding me of Annette Plummer that Sunday morning I’d gone to see her.
The book he was holding up was called Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. His did, too; maybe he couldn’t see me through it. I went closer until I was right in front of him and then finally he looked up at me and said, “Who’re you?”
“Fell!” I said. “No smoking!” I was teed off.
Then I saw the cord coming down behind his ear and inside his shirt collar.
He put his fingers to his lips making a shhh gesture. He pointed to his cigarette.
I shook my head. “No way. Put it out!”
He laughed and gave me a beseeching look as though he was saying “Please?”
“Stalker, butt it!”
“Parson,” he said. “Parr. Who’re you?” I told him again.
He was a turn-head, kind of good-looking; male or female, you’d want to be sure you were seeing right. He belonged in movies, on the slick pages of magazines, and up on billboards. He had dark eyes and black hair and he was tanned. White, perfect teeth. A mole just to the left of a dimple. Forget Tom Cruise!
He put out his cigarette, shrugging. “Okay,” he said. Then he pointed to the hearing aid and said, “I’m deaf. This alerts you more than it helps me hear. I read lips.”
“You speak good.”
“I do everything good.” He laughed.
“Yeah, you even brag good.”
He laughed again and nodded. “I brag good.”
“Welcome to Sevens.” I grinned at him.
He said, “You’re all lucky to have me,” and he grinned back.
• • •
He said what?
I was late for Science. I was up to explain Lamarckism that morning, so my mind was on acquired characteristics … but he said what?
I told myself probably Stalker was just a wiseacre, but you know the feeling you have when something says what you see is what you’re getting?
There was that feeling.
There was that feeling, there was my forthcoming discussion of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, and there was a September rain that added whole new dimensions to the meaning of the word wet.
I was running through it when I saw her.
And she is somebody I am always seeing, even though it is never her. She is at bus stops as I go by in a car, in crowds I see from buses, at the backs of restaurants until I get closer, and again and again flying with me in dreams.
But that September day in the pouring rain I swore that I saw Delia on that campus.
By the time classes were finished, the rain was too.
The late-afternoon sun brought my sanity back, I believed, and the beginnings of autumn colored the campus.
In my mailbox was a letter from George Tobias and one from Keats.
Keats’s first.
Yes, I’m in love and that’s why you haven’t heard from me! My life would be perfect if it were not for her. She calls me Bleeps, because she says what she wants to call me would be bleeped out. And DON’T tell me it’s really Fen, because it really isn’t. Maybe she isn’t real, but she is a force, Fell! I was almost glad to get back to school to be away from her! Fen is coming this weekend, without her. Can’t wait. He’s my fella, Fell.
xxxxx Keats
P.S. He doesn’t know anything about the journal and I’d just as soon keep it that way now that I’ve met Celeste. I don’t want Fen swallowing that mystique of hers. It’s
bad enough without written confirmation of her power!… Do you really think Tobias will take it to the police?
Tobias’s letter answered her question. He had already called me in August, to thank me for sending the journal.
Dear Fell,
A detective who investigated the case years ago is having a look at the diary, comparing it with the Captain’s testimony.
It’ll take time, but I think we’re onto something. Keep quiet about it.
The detective knew your dad. He also wants to know about your mother. Seems he dated her before your dad did. His name is Tom Bernagozzi. Would your mother mind if he called her? I’ll keep in touch. Thanks!
G.T.
I was in a good mood, glad to be back.
I went up to my room in Sevens House to drop off my raincoat and give Mom a buzz.
At the end of our conversation I told her that the detective working on the Nels Plummer case had known Dad.
“What’s his name?” she said.
“Tom Bernagozzi,” I said.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” she said.
“I’m not,” I said.
“Tommy!” she said. “I didn’t know he was still around.”
I said, “Well, he is, and he’s asking for you. I’m supposed to find out if he can call you.”
“If he can call me?” She laughed. “He can do more than call me. Him with his eyes?”
“Yeah, but what about Mr. Lopez?” I said.
“What about him?” she said. “He’s just a neighbor.”
• • •
I changed into shorts and Keds. I felt like running. At least that kind of running had a purpose.
I was ready to go when I smelled cigarette smoke again. I heard the sound of female laughter.
Parson Stalker was breaking two rules at once this time: smoking above first floor, and entertaining a female in his room on a weekday.
I thought right: Woe Men, Women!
I went across to speak to them, to get her out of there … fast.
She was sitting on the windowsill facing Stalker, wearing something red, smoking a cigarette.