“Frederick must be sick as a dog that Charlie didn’t leave him anything,” she observed as she tucked her flutters under her napkin. “Not that Fred needs it, surely. He’s got the first dividend he ever collected, salted away in a Swiss bank to duck the income tax as Dolph must have told you.”
“No, he never did. Dolph’s fairly sound on the laws of slander.”
“Slander? What’s slander got to do with Charlie Daventer’s money? You’re getting more like your father every day of your life. I hope you can eat sardines.”
Sarah thought she could, as there was only one of them on her plate along with a paper-thin slice of tomato, half a gherkin, a wisp of lettuce, and a dab of mayonnaise. She said it looked delicious and changed the subject, not that she expected it to do much good. “Are you coming to the show tonight?”
“I haven’t seen anybody offering me a ticket.” Mabel snapped the tail off her sardinne, large white dentures clicking sharply.
“You know Aunt Emma never gives anybody a complimentary ticket. If she did, she’d wind up papering the whole house and there’d be no money raised for charity.”
“I thought charity began at home. What’s it supposed to be in aid of this time? Dolph starting a home for retired barflies, now that he’s collected all those empty beer bottles?”
“Oh, he doesn’t have any. Ever since the bottle bill was passed, they’ve been making a fortune on the refunds.” Sarah did enjoy watching Mabel wince. “The recycling center’s wholly self-supporting now. They’ve added a lounge where they serve things to eat and have lots of comfortable chairs. Mary says one of the problems of being a street person is that you never get to sit down where it’s really comfortable. Getting back to Aunt Emma, she’s doing this one for the Visiting Nurses’ Crutch and Wheelchair Fund. I just hope Ridpath Wale won’t be needing their services tonight. He had a little fall at the dress rehearsal and twisted his ankle. You know Ridpath, don’t you?”
Cousin Mabel gave her head the sort of toss Queen Elizabeth I might have used on Lord Burleigh. “I believe I may say so. He pestered me for years to marry him, as you apparently hadn’t heard.”
Sarah had not heard. She had been treated to similar confidences about other unlikely men. To do Mabel justice, some of them might have been almost halfway true. Mabel had, after all, been the only child of rich parents. As Dolph had once remarked, any girl could look beautiful sitting on top of a million dollars.
Mabel’s fortune must be considerably bigger now than when she’d inherited it. It was beyond the realm of imagination that she’d ever touched a penny of her capital, or even dipped deeply into the accrued interest. Speculation on whom Mabel was going to leave her money to was a favorite rainy-day sport among the several branches of the Kelling clan.
“I’ve been wondering why Ridpath isn’t married,” she replied with calculated hypocrisy. “How romantic, Cousin Mabel. But why didn’t you like him? Ridpath has such lovely manners, and he’s quite good-looking, don’t you think?”
“Looks aren’t everything.” Mabel was holding her gherkin by its stem and eating it in tiny nibbles, like an oversized chipmunk with an undersized nut. “I could never marry a man who gambles.”
“Oh? No, I’m sure you couldn’t. Does Ridpath gamble heavily?”
“The day I heard he was buying stock in some fly-by-night company that claimed to be making a camera that could develop its own film, I knew it could never be. I remember my sainted father telling me on my fourth birthday when he gave me my first very own safe-deposit key, ‘You hang on to your municipal bonds, Mabel, and keep out of the stock market. It’s no fit place for a respectable woman.’ So Ridpath married somebody else, just to spite me.”
“But he’s not married now, is he?”
“No, she left him ages ago. They swept it all under the rug, of course, one of those nonsensical no-contest divorces citing irreconcilable differences. Huh! She couldn’t reconcile herself to his throwing money down the drain, nor he to her carrying on with every man she could get her hooks into. Anyway, he drinks. Like a fish,” Mabel added, waving the remains of her sardine around on her fork for emphasis.
“Does he?” said Sarah. “I hadn’t noticed, particularly.”
Mabel snorted. “You’re hardly the most observant person in the world, are you? Otherwise, you might have observed who it is that new husband of yours takes with him on those so-called business trips he’s always trotting off on.”
“It’s usually me. Anyway, I can hardly send a private detective to spy on him when he’s one himself, can I?”
Sarah finished her sardine and ate the wilted lettuce, knowing she’d get a lecture on the starving people of Africa if she left anything but the pattern on her plate. “You mustn’t fret about Max, Cousin Mabel. He’d never take another woman with him unless he could figure out a way to put her on his expense account, and he wouldn’t do that anyway because it all comes out of his own pocket in the end. What about Jack Tippleton? He’s something of a philanderer, I gather from the way he’s been acting with one of the women in the cast, but Aunt Emma claims he’s all talk and no action.”
Mabel wasn’t ready for Jack Tippleton, she hadn’t finished with Ridpath Wale. “How did he sprain his ankle?”
“I don’t think it’s a sprain, just a wrench. He tripped over a piece of the scenery.” That was stretching it a bit, but she certainly wasn’t about to tell Mabel about those booby-trapped steps. “And no, he had not been drinking. There wasn’t a drop of liquor anywhere.”
“Don’t be silly. Bottles hidden all over the set, no doubt, if only you’d had wits enough to see them. It does surprise me, I must say. Ridpath fancies himself such a great tennis player, one might have thought he’d be nimble enough not to go falling over his own feet. He plays all winter long at one of those indoor clubs to keep in trim, though don’t ask me what for. Those places cost a fortune in dues, but what does he care? Easy come, easy go.”
Mabel pushed out her chair and stood up. “I knew you wouldn’t want dessert so I told Zeriah not to bother fixing any. You young women are all alike, fussing over your figures when you already look like walking skeletons. Next thing you know, you’ll wind up with that anorexia nervosa which seems to be all the rage at the moment. Wasting away to a shadow. We’ll have our tea in the morning room, Zeriah.”
As Mabel led the way through her minefield of treasures, Sarah managed a glimpse at her own watch. She knew better than to trust any of Mabel’s clocks, they were even less reliable than their owner’s sources of information. One o’clock. Half an hour to go before succor arrived. She must try to think of this as an exercise in building character.
Mabel made a great deal of fuss over the tea tray. The tea wasn’t worth the effort, but it did help to wash away the fishy taste of that lone sardine.
“Now,” said Mabel when she’d got her own cup dosed with a drop of milk and five grains of sugar, “you asked me about Jack Tippleton. There’s one man I’ve always felt really sorry for.”
“You have?” Sarah almost dropped her teacup. “Why is that, Cousin Mabel?”
“Jack Tippleton was made the victim of one of the most cruel deceits I’ve ever heard of, and that’s saying something, I can tell you. It happened back in the forties. Jack had gone into the Navy straight out of college. He’d been in the ROTC, so he got made some kind of junior lieutenant right away. I don’t believe he ever saw combat duty or got a promotion, but that’s beside the point. He was still in uniform when he came home and naturally he was the debs’ delight. He had everything, you know—looks, money, and he danced the meanest tango in Pleasaunce.”
Mabel gave herself more tea, absentmindedly ignoring Sarah’s cup. “Well, this went on for quite a while. Jack went with this one and that one, but none of the girls managed to snare him. Then this little Martha Sorter blew into town, all fluffy ruffles and big brown eyes, visiting the Pences. That’s Parker Pence’s grandparents. Old Mrs. Pence and Martha’s mother had been room
mates at boarding school, or something. Anyway, the mother had died and the father was having a depression. Having a woman on the side, more likely, and didn’t want his daughter underfoot. So to make a long story short, Ellen Pence sent for the girl and here she was.”
Mabel drank some of her cooling tea. “Jack Tippleton fell for Martha in a big way. So did a few others, don’t ask me why. Frederick made an awful ass of himself, as I recall, but of course no girl in her right mind was going to look at Fred if she could get Jack. Naturally the Tippletons checked out her background but they couldn’t find a thing against her. Old Philadelphia family, father’s business sound as a bell, daughter the only heiress, so they went ahead and gave their blessing.
“Sorter chartered a private train to take the Tippletons and the Pences to Philadelphia for the wedding, as I recall. Or maybe he simply sent them his private railway car. Anyway, it was quite a set out.” Mabel sniffed to show what she thought of private railway cars. “So there they were, all moonlight and roses for the next few years with the newlyweds billing and cooing and the Tippletons going around patting themselves on the back about Jack’s having made such a wonderful match. Then one fine day there’s a piece in The Wall Street Journal hinting that Sorter’s firm was heading for the rocks. Next thing we knew, Sorter himself was splashed all over the sidewalk in front of a New York hotel.”
“Oh, no!” Sarah gasped.
Mabel Kelling nodded in agreeable recollection. “They had to scrape him up with a shovel and bury him in a bucket. In a pauper’s grave, or he would have been if his creditors could have found a way to dig up the family plot and take that along with everything else. So there’s poor Jack, stuck with a wife who hasn’t a penny to her name. Can you imagine anything worse?”
“Yes, lots of things,” Sarah told her. Being married to Cousin Mabel, for instance, though she wasn’t reckless enough to say so. “I’ve been in a similar fix, you know, and I came out of it all right.”
“That remains to be seen. Besides, you had Walter’s money, such as it was. Martha got nothing at all except the undertaker’s bill, which Cousin Beddoes insisted on paying when the Tippletons wouldn’t touch it. Don’t ask me why he did, though it always seemed to me that second son of Martha’s favors Bed a little around the eyes. You needn’t repeat that to Emma.”
“I shouldn’t dream of it,” Sarah assured her. “Then Jenicot has older brothers. I hadn’t realized.”
“Oh yes, three of them. If it weren’t for those boys, I daresay Jack would have found some way to get out of the marriage once he realized what a terrible mistake he’d made, but he could hardly take the chance with no other grandsons in the family and his father so keen on keeping up the name. There’s nothing shaky about the Tippleton money, you know. I’m not saying Jack’s any great intellect, but you’ve got to give him credit for knowing which side his bread’s buttered on. His parents hadn’t any comeback about the marriage because it was Jack’s mother who checked out Martha’s connections and her father who ran the Dun & Bradstreet on Sorter’s finances. They were decent enough to Martha afterward, all things considered, but naturally they could never feel the same toward her again.”
Mabel waved the teapot vaguely in Sarah’s direction and set it down again. “Of course Jack didn’t, either. He’d been stepping around a little ever since her first pregnancy, but he’d been discreet about it up till then. Once the bloom was off the rose, he went ahead and did as he pleased, though he’s managed to stay out of any real scrape as far as I know.”
“And you would know,” Sarah murmured.
Mabel accepted the compliment, with a smirk. “I’m a pretty hard person to fool. But anyway, that’s how it’s gone ever since. Martha tried every trick in the book to hang on to Jack, but she didn’t get far. She’d been one of those early bloomers who lose their looks once they start having children.”
“I think she’s perfectly beautiful still.”
“Humph. What good’s your opinion going to do her? For heaven’s sake, Sarah, don’t go turning yourself into another sunshine girl like Appie. One in the family’s already more than the rest of us can stomach.”
Mabel emitted an all-purpose snort of derision for the world’s follies. “Sweetness and light didn’t help Martha any. She even went ahead and had that last child when she was old enough to know better. I suppose she thought a cute little daughter would keep Jack home nights. It might have worked, if Jenicot had been somebody else’s cute little daughter. I told Martha time and time again that she might as well quit trying because it wasn’t going to pan out no matter what she did, but I should have saved my breath. Try to be nice to a person, and what thanks do you get?”
“These things are sent to test us, Cousin Mabel.” Sarah looked at her watch again, making no bones about it this time. “Tell me about Sebastian Frostedd. Is he as black as he’s painted?”
No, it appeared he was a great deal worse. Mabel wasn’t half done mincing Sebastian to shreds when Heatherstone was at the door with a totally superfluous rug over his arm to usher Sarah to the car. On a final volley of acrimony, she ended her visit.
Chapter 15
“ENJOY YOUR LUNCH, SARAH?”
“About as much as I expected to.”
Sarah settled back against the gray velvet upholstery and smiled at Heatherstone’s gray broadcloth back as he steered the aging limousine homeward at a sedate thirty miles an hour. He seldom bothered to change into his livery; he’d worn his usual black box jacket to the crematorium. No doubt he’d put on the braided jacket and cap on purpose to give Cousin Mabel something else to steam about. The Heatherstones must manage to extract a good deal of fun from their job, one way and another. Maybe Zeriah did, too, though Sarah couldn’t see how.
“What’s my aunt up to now?” she asked.
“She went off by herself in the doodlebug. She wanted to check things out for tonight at the auditorium, and pick up some flowers for tomorrow at the florist’s. She doesn’t want to take any more out of the garden. It’s already looking kind of thin.”
“Why couldn’t she bring back the baskets after the show?”
“Oh, she’ll be sending those to the nursing home or somewhere. You know Mrs. Kelling. I suppose we might have brought ’em back tonight if we were having the cast party. Too bad we had to call it off, but it couldn’t be helped. Anyway, I expect most of them will be coming tomorrow. She said something about you arranging the flowers when she gets back, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Not at all, I’d love to. Is there anything else she’d like me to do in the meantime?”
“She didn’t mention anything to me. You might as well take a little rest for yourself. You won’t get much tonight or tomorrow. We’ve already got about a hundred people coming for the memorial gathering, and I expect she’ll invite a few dozen more before the day’s out.”
“How in the world do you all three keep it up?” Sarah marveled.
“Oh, we’re used to it, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Never a dull moment, that’s for sure. Our son’s been after us to retire and move in with him, but we tell him we’re perfectly happy with Mrs. Kelling and don’t want to quit till she kicks us out.”
“You know she’d never do that. I hope you’ll be together for a long time yet.”
This was getting sentimental. He’d be embarrassed. Sarah changed the subject.
“Heatherstone, have you been down cellar in the past couple of days?”
“Just to get wine for the table. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve been thinking about Ernestina. She’d have been so awkward to take away, I’m wondering if whoever stole her might simply have hidden her someplace right in the house. Then when they’d collected the ransom money, assuming they ever get around to telling us how to pay it, they’d only have to say, ‘Go look behind the furnace,’ or wherever.”
“She’s not behind the furnace, I can tell you that. But you know, Sarah, that’s not such a dumb idea. There’s certai
n things Mrs. Kelling doesn’t expect Mrs. Heatherstone and me to do, and keeping track of that cellar is one of them. We generally get some college kid in once or twice a year to clean it up and straighten things out. Unless one of the family came along and started rooting around, you know how they do, I suppose you could slide the painting in underneath something else and it wouldn’t be noticed for months. I tell you what I’d do, though. I’d put Ernestina in the attic. It’s nice and dry up there and she wouldn’t be so apt to mildew.”
“That’s a thought. I’ll go up and have a look when we get back. I’m sure you and Mrs. Heatherstone are far too busy getting ready for tomorrow.”
“Well, you know how it is. Mrs. Heatherstone’s going to be baking all afternoon, which leaves me to do the silver and the rest of it. Added to which, Mrs. Kelling’s invited Mr. Frederick and the Tippletons to supper before the show and we’re trying to get everything organized so we can scoot off right after dessert. Got to be early if you want a seat down front.”
“That’s right, there aren’t any reserved seats, are there?”
“Nope, not a one. Mrs. Kelling knows her own friends would buy them up first crack off the bat, and that wouldn’t be fair to the rest. First come, first served is the way it’s always been and always will be as long as she’s running the show. Which still leaves Mrs. Heatherstone and me as free as anybody else to get down there early and grab ourselves a good spot, is how we look at it.”
“And you couldn’t be more right,” Sarah agreed. “I’m just praying everything goes without a hitch tonight. I don’t mind telling you I’ll be relieved to see Aunt Emma taking her curtain calls safe and sound.”
Even though these would be her last ones. No matter, Emma Kelling would find a new cause to hurl herself into. Provided she got the chance.
Sarah stayed in the car until Heatherstone had driven it into the carriage shed. She couldn’t see any good place to hide Ernestina here. The space was too open, and the cars were always coming and going. There’d be too many chances for the painting to be noticed, however well it was disguised.
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