“It was my mother’s maiden name. I sometimes use it because, well, we have a ‘tradition’ in our family—of marrying bad men.”
I trailed her into the kitchen, which was as high-tech as Rudy’s. “Why did you come here, Mr. Winslow? Out of curiosity? Out of altruism? Or are you up to something more sinister?” She poured two black coffees into matching clay mugs, and didn’t offer me sugar or cream. “I suppose those are unfair questions. I can tell you something, something I always knew, that that house on Beacon Street, that mausoleum, is cursed, unclean, defiled. It was built with blood money, built on death. Corinth Mingo was a war profiteer. He was no different from the house of Krupp. Do you know the Krupps, Mr. Winslow? The German dynasty which armed Hitler and the Kaiser? That developed the famous gun, Big Bertha. They used slave labor in their factories, under the Nazis.”
The coffee seared my tongue, but she drank it without flinching. “You can’t equate arming our Union troops with arming the Wehrmacht.”
For an instant, she glowed, seemed younger, almost pert. “I can do anything I want. I always have.”
That, I believed. “But houses don’t kill people. Neither do surnames. And you’re using the Mingo surname by choice.”
“It’s the lesser of two evils. My husband Bill, was abusive. He did wonderful things with his hands. Made all of this furniture, for example. And he did terrible things with his hands. Breaking my collarbone and two ribs. And Carol married a man just like her father. Worse, actually. Bill didn’t touch little girls. Genevieve—she picked the worst of all, didn’t she?” She had her grand-daughter’s ability to intimidate. She had a presence. “Bryce Rossi made my skin crawl.”
“You knew Bryce Rossi?”
“Well, of course. Genevieve brought him here all the time. They spent the weekend once. So Bryce could pick through our family papers, our Bible and some letters my great-great grandfather wrote to his crazy cousin, Corinth Mingo, Corinth One, as they called him. Like a monarch, nauseating. Corinth returned them, when the two of them stopped speaking.”
A long, pallid scar traversed her shoulder. Perhaps the result of abuse.
“You see, my branch of the family became Quakers. Cleanth warned Corinth his blood money would do him in, that it was venomous, drinking from a poisoned well. First, Zephyrus, Cornith’s nephew, was killed at Antietam, shot through the heart by a bullet from the family factory. Oh, yes, they saw it was a Mingo bullet when the surgeon extracted it.
“Then, later, the triplets died. In that horrible house. And do you know why? They had recovered from their diphtheria. They just had heavy colds. They died because the maid forgot to give them their medicine. Because the maid was busy helping Clara conduct one of her séances, to atone for the deaths the Mingo armaments had caused. See? It’s all connected. Karma, as the Hindus would say. Of the most atrocious kind.
“But Carol, Carol was enamored of it all. Then she got Genevieve enamored too. And look what happened. This history attracted Bryce Rossi and he ended up killing her. Strangling her, brutally. Because she refused to marry him. A silly, epicene man. So Larry, for once, did something right—and slaughtered him.”
“But do you think Bryce was the father of Genevieve’s child? If he was, why would he kill his own child in the womb?”
“Bryce was after that monstrance. The monstrance of King Charles the First.” She raked her fingers through her long gray hair, seemingly enjoying its strength and texture.
“Isn’t that a legend?”
“Does it matter? If Bryce thought it was real? He was a collector. Collectors are compulsives. He was also a con man. A hopelessly inept one, of course. So obvious. Do you know he once tried to kiss my hand in the ‘continental’ manner? He’d taken a bus tour through Tuscany and thought he’d become Bernard Berenson.”
“Are you afraid of Larry Courson? Now that he’s escaped?”
“I was afraid of him when Carol and Genevieve were alive. Afraid he’d hurt them.” She came to the verge of tears. “But now…” She crossed the kitchen, and, from a hutch displaying a set of white stoneware, produced a handgun. “I’ve been an NRA member for, oh, twenty or more years.”
I nodded.
“Mr. Winslow, I’m old. I’ve lived my life. And I’ve seen too much. Not just the deaths of my daughter and grand-daughter, but the death of civility, idealism, the sense that there could be progress, that humankind could become better and learn from error.” She put the gun back in the hutch, behind a casserole dish in the shape of a roosting hen.
“May I see the papers? The Bible and the letters to Corinth Mingo?”
Not replying, she climbed upstairs. Following was intrusive, so I just waited. When she returned, her arms brimmed with a Bible with disintegrating binding and packets of correspondence bound in brittle string and dried-out elastics, some loose, some in shoe boxes. I scanned through it all at the kitchen table, with her sitting opposite, watching me. Mindful of her presence and of her gun, I found it difficult to concentrate. The Bible contained pages recording births, deaths, and marriages in almost invisible ink. The archive included no photographs, but a plethora of pressed flowers, mostly roses and daisies, and some vellum cards from several funerals, including that of Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta.
Her ancestors’ handwriting was at once elegant and illegible, elongated, made of sweeping letters so broad that three or four words often filled an entire line. These were passionate people: like Queen Victoria they underlined constantly and were frequent users of exclamation points. Eventually, Mrs. Torrance began reading a biography of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and I came to an interesting letter, dated 1875, from Corinth One to his cousin Cleanth, the Quaker ancestor of Mrs. Torrance. Someone other than the author had scrawled, “This was the LAST,” across the top of the first page in pencil.
My Dear Cleanth,
You have no idea how hard this letter is to write, particularly the second adjective in my greeting. I have often been forced to endure your sanctimonious, short-sighted, and, I daresay, impractical and unpatriotic commentary on the business I have founded, nurtured, and made prosper. Your bitter viewpoint on the death in battle of our late and keenly lamented nephew, Zephyrus—as pure-hearted and sweet-souled a boy who ever breathed—that he was killed in part because of God’s “displeasure” with my trade—was offensive in the extreme. (Clara agrees with me wholeheartedly in this matter.)
Now, you write a still more callous account of why our three young daughters were taken from us—that they are the innocent sacrifice of a vengeful Creator—that they died for the same sorry reason as Zephyrus. And you imply that I know this because the portrait I had commissioned depicted one of their favorite dolls, bought during a happy month at Saratoga, a doll in the form of a cloth lamb. This, you propose, somehow references Our Savior, God’s Risen Son, the LAMB of the Holy Scripture.
UTTER RUBBISH AND BLASPHEMY!!!!!
My daughters were given the most excellent care possible when they sickened last autumn, treated by the most eminent, kind, learned, and practical men of medicine this city has. Polly Hanlon, our maid, had an unfortunate past, having been abandoned by her family at a tender age and forced to live in a squalid cellar in the North End, in a room that flooded with each tide. She was, however, morally unimpeachable in her character and conduct, with no problems of drink or impropriety whatsoever, and had made a living painting china and greeting cards, and then, eventually, moved to a modest room near Beacon Hill. She then came to the attention of the ladies’ aid at our church and we subsequently offered her a post.
Her activities the day of our daughters’ deaths were timely and responsible, serving tea and barley water to the Hoskins family. Polly served Clara and the Hoskins on only three occasions, for intervals no greater than ten minutes per encounter. The Lord took our daughters because their frail lungs gave way after a siege of diphtheria and a fever they picked up that weekend in Nahant.
While we bear this burden and the loss of Zephyrus,
we remain aware of the losses of hundreds of thousands of others in the war CAUSED BY THE PARTISANS OF SLAVERY AND BY THE COWARDICE OF THOSE, YOURSELF INCLUDED, WHO REFUSED TO FIGHT!!!
We rejoice, however, in knowing that their souls sing God’s praises this very hour in a deathless Heaven where we will see them once more, as God wills it.
I request no response from you now or EVER.
Once Your Cousin,
Corinth Hollis Mingo
“Do you have any albums? Photographs?” I asked Mrs. Torrance.
“Genevieve had those.”
“Where are they now?”
“Fletcher was going to get them.”
“Fletcher Coombs?”
She straightened the pile of documents. “You know Fletcher?”
“He was at the funeral.”
She bowed her head. “I can’t help it. I have standards. I see right and wrong. But I couldn’t stand to see Larry Courson. Why he beat my daughter when she was having chemotherapy. It was hard enough seeing him at Carol’s…To have to see him…I would have torn him limb from limb. Or…” She smiled in the direction of the hutch.
“I wasn’t sure whether Fletcher met Genevieve at St. Monica’s, in school, or if the families were close, way before that.”
“Oh, they’d known each other their whole lives. I never cared for Fletcher. He came from a very reactionary family. His uncle was active in the John Birch Society. His mother was very liberal, the flower power sort, believe it or not, but she changed when she married Fletcher’s father. So I’ve heard.
“And of course I’d run a Marxist bookstore in Cambridge, so they treated me like Alger Hiss. I remember Francis, Frank, Fletcher’s father, swearing Martin Luther King was a Soviet agent, and that Castro had killed Kennedy—both Kennedys—how’s that for a wacko? And he had very old-fashioned ideas about women, which I’m sure influenced his son.”
Before I could ask my question, she said, “But I always felt sorry for Fletcher.”
“How so?”
“Well, his sisters, he has three sisters, they’re older and all so smart. They went to Brown and Smith and Wellesley. And Fletcher just wasn’t a student. He had ADHD or some learning disability, but he was the lone son, so Frank put all this pressure onto him. That’s why Fletcher went to parochial school, even though Frank loathes Catholics. Frank hoped the discipline would help Fletcher perform.”
“Did Fletcher ever date Genevieve?”
Mrs. Torrance laughed. “No, no, of course not. My grand-daughter was an intelligent young woman. Ambitious, witty, unique. Why she’d dated a Harvard professor, Zack Meecham. She brought him here too. He loved this house. I told him, ‘This isn’t the family manse. Stop drooling. I bought this place.’
“He was fascinated by my family because we’re supposedly descended from regicides. I always took that with a grain of salt. Zack wanted Genevieve to marry him, but he was already saddled with a wife, a frigid control freak. He’d told Genevieve he’d get a divorce and then he’d teach at a university in the Midwest, where Genevieve could earn her doctorate. But Genevieve got tired of him. He was too academic, too stuffy. She wanted to be an independent researcher, unaffiliated with a university.”
“Did Genevieve spend much time here?”
“Of course. She lived here after she moved out of her dorm. Her roommate was kind of a party girl who’d skip classes the whole semester and then pull all-nighters before an exam and ace it. Her roommate spent all her time at fraternities.”
“Fletcher was a big fraternity guy.”
“Well, he always wanted to play football, but I think he was too small, so he ended up playing hockey. Until he got hit with a puck and lost some teeth.”
I had finished my coffee and was easing my mug toward her, hinting for a refill, but she didn’t respond. She was one of those talkers who need an audience, and anyone who’d known her grand-daughter would have sufficed. “You say Fletcher’s dad had odd ideas about women. Even though he had three successful daughters?”
“I’ll bet Frank opposes the Nineteenth Amendment.”
“Was he ever violent? Abusive?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. He’d just pontificate, and be the consummate boor.”
“Was Fletcher ever violent, physically?”
She began putting some of the family documents back into their shoeboxes. “Fletcher was never violent.” One of the ancient elastics snapped. “He kept it all bottled up. I’ve never seen Fletcher so much as raise his voice.”
“He’s had no reason to. With you.” I’d seen Fletcher all extroverted, seen his frat boy side, bounding from that Mercedes, hailing Peggy O’Connell—the unlikely party girl.
“Bryce Rossi—he’s a different story. He collected things besides Renaissance art, did you know that? He collected what he called ‘Death Row ephemera.’ He bought it online—belts from an old electric chair, a pistol used to kill some Belgian prime minister, knives, death masks…He showed me the death mask of some cattle rustler hanged a hundred years ago in Wyoming. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary? You can see the pores in his skin.’ He said that, and made my skin crawl.”
She was warming up to the subject. How odd these Mingoes all were!
“And he had an explosive temper. He was here and he got into an argument on the telephone, about access to some papers in a library in Washington. He became maniacal, screaming. ‘I have secured permission on four previous occasions. I know two members of your board. I am esteemed in the art world. Do you hear me?’ Well, you could have heard him in New Hampshire! He was a vile, pretentious creature. But he was older than Genevieve, well-connected, and a mentor of sorts. Genevieve liked older men. Having never had a decent father, ever.” She brought our coffee mugs to the sink. “Would you like to see Genevieve’s room? She lived here when she left her dorm at Shawmut.”
“Of course.”
The room, upstairs, had low sloping ceilings and a slightly slanting floor, all odd angles like the sets in German expressionist cinema, in, say The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Or Nosferatu. “Did Genevieve ever call Bryce Rossi Nosferatu?”
“Like the vampire film? By Murnau?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head No.
The room was like a museum dedicated to Genevieve Courson, her own private Mingo House. Here were posters of paintings by George Grosz and Wassily Kandinsky; a closet of vintage clothing, including rayon Hawaiian shirts, a charcoal-gray sheath dress, and an Eighties prom gown, a mass of ruffles and flourishes. Here were beach stones, iron pyrite, and rose quartz the pink of bland watermelon; photographs of Mingo House blown up to poster-size; and one portrait of a woman I assumed was her mother, “a dead ringer” for her daughter in every sense of the world.
“Genevieve loved that photograph of Carol because it wasn’t taken by Larry. I took it, on what became Carol’s last birthday.”
Now she offered me her hand, as a way of getting me to leave. I shook it and thanked her.
“You’ve told your thoughts—your suspicions—to the police,” I said.
“More times than I care to recall…You won’t need to contact me again, Mr. Winslow.”
The Mingo send-off, twenty-first century style.
Chapter Nineteen
Grace Torrance was a strange woman, open and hostile, talkative and guarded, charming and scary. And she had convinced herself that Bryce Rossi had strangled her grand-daughter when Genevieve had sought to sever ties. Granted, I had witnessed his temper, as had she, and certainly Bryce had a fondness, even an obsession with the past, that made killing Genevieve and dressing her in Gilded Age finery possible, perhaps. But Bryce had ongoing business at Mingo House, his pursuit of the monstrance and his association with Rudy—why he had even gone there on business with Cat Hodges, after Genevieve’s death. So why would he “contaminate” that setting by staging a homicide? If he killed, he would do it elsewhere.
But Fletcher Coombs was another story. He had a family history of misogyn
y and had chosen to live in the no-doubt sexist world of a fraternity. And he liked “old-fashioned” girls, as evidenced by the Renoir poster tacked to his door. But the poster could have belonged to roommates, and clearly Larry Courson valued Fletcher as a friend. A friend fit to comfort him the very day of his daughter’s funeral—as his only friend, in fact, a man he physically embraced.
I wondered, was Fletcher aware that Genevieve was a Mingo through her mother’s bloodline? Could he have been jealous of her position, of her “history,” both personal and professional, that kept widening the gap between them?
Had he “followed” Genevieve to Shawmut, she, settling for a modest college because of financial constraints, but he matriculating because it was the best he could hope to achieve?
Trudie, the clerk at the Shawmut registrar’s office, had told me Genevieve was anticipating some “money” coming way her in the future. Was Genevieve referring to her and Bryce Rossi locating the royal monstrance at Mingo House? But surely that was a long shot, and, in the unlikely event they unearthed such an artifact, it would belong to the Mingo House foundation. Unless they kept their little treasure hunt secret, and Bryce used criminal means to fence the relic into the vast art underworld of drug lords and the Russian Mafia.
—Or was Genevieve’s change of fortune matrimonial: wedding a well-off man like Bryce Rossi?
The next morning, I stopped by Mingo House. “How was Martha’s Vineyard?” I asked Dorothea Jakes. She was sporting a garish dress, lime-green with blue spouting whales. She must have bought it at one of the outré boutiques that push the preppie thing too far. With Dorothea was her fifteen-year-old grandson, Chris, a somewhat dim bulb whose forehead was inflamed with a persistent case of acne. I had met Chris before because his class from the Lenox School visited Mingo House on a semi-regular basis, when studying art and the Civil War.
“Well, Edgartown was great, but things have certainly gone to pot here. Rudy and Jon—I guess they’re a couple—are conducting some sort of séance in the library.”
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