All's Well That Ends

by Gillian Roberts

  “Gee, you’d think one of the requirements for that job would be living in Spain.”

  “The former king of Spain, then. Joseph Bonaparte. Napoleon’s big brother.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s too—you’re serious?”

  He nodded. “Nappy got Elba, Joe got Bordentown. I didn’t want to say it right out at dinner because I had to think about it for a while, because—”

  “It changes everything.”

  He nodded again. “It’s speculation, nothing more. Joseph was going to be exiled, just like Napoleon, only he was going to be sent to Russia. He escaped to the States under a false name, carrying a suitcase full of jewels. But he also had around five million dollars worth of gold buried in Switzerland. Eventually, his manservant went back and retrieved it.”

  “Huh,” Sasha said. “Five million dollars back then? That’d be—incredible now.”

  “So would five million,” I said.

  “Interesting how easily we can mention his stealing—it was stealing, right?—a fortune because it was long ago. And because he was a king in New Jersey.”

  “He often wintered in Philadelphia.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous—and when I buy you a bigger car, the most important thing will be a decent heating system. It’s freezing in here.” Sasha smacked the dashboard.

  “My point being that it doesn’t matter that much where Phoebe’s family lived. Joseph’s wife didn’t accompany him, so there were also many liaisons.”

  I looked at him. “Then Phoebe could, indeed, be—”

  “Dear God,” Sasha said softly. “Remember how she’d be drawing those charts when we were in junior high? Always looking for the illustrious ancestor? Poor Phoebe. She’d have been so thrilled to know.”

  “Nothing to know,” our chauffeur reminded us. “Family legend could have created that story. You tell it enough generations, it becomes history. No way to prove anything. But there’s something else. The legislature passed a bill that allowed him—a non-citizen—to buy land. He had about a thousand acres, and a mansion, Point Breeze, filled with the treasures of Europe—”

  “Point Breeze!” I said. “Phoebe’s maiden name was Breeze. DeBreeze. From Breeze?”

  “Maybe. Doesn’t have to be. Somebody in her family could have decided to adopt the name. In any case, there was a huge fire—supposedly set by an angry Russian woman.”

  “All those treasures lost,” I said. “Pity.” We were by now sitting, idling in what would have been a great parking spot, down the street from Sasha’s place. Mackenzie finished his tale.

  “That’s the interesting part. The story is that the good people of Bordentown came to the rescue. They carried the paintings and statues and whatnots to safety. And then, according to the story, they returned everything.”

  “Really?” Sasha and I asked in unison.

  “You’re cynics,” Mackenzie said with a shrug. “But I agree. I find the official story a little hard to believe. I mean we’ve got a man living like the king he was, with money he stole and smuggled out, money basically taken from the common people of Italy and Spain. He’s a nice guy, but still, he represents the opposite of the democracy these people are building. His mansion is surrounded by ordinary, hard-working people. Small farmers, laborers. And suddenly, the treasure house—treasures gotten by nothing this man did, but through his brother’s conquests that more or less stand for everything we weren’t supposed to stand for—is up for grabs.”

  “So you’re saying—people grabbed.”

  “Most people obviously didn’t. Their inventory seemed pretty complete when it was over. I’d think that nearly everybody returned whatever they took. But everybody? I don’t think human nature changes, no matter how prettily the history books word it.”

  “So even if Phoebe wasn’t his descendant, she still might have had something that failed to be returned after the fire. Is that a polite way of putting it? One—or more—of her treasures might truly be just that. Ill-gotten or given to the pretty woman with whom he slept,” Sasha said.

  “But who would know this story?” I asked. “Who on our list is a student of history and would know this?”

  “There’s the rub,” Mackenzie said. “Go figure that out, you two. Once you do, we’re home free.”

  Twenty

  * * *

  * * *

  What do you think it could be, that treasure?” I asked as we opened the outer door to Sasha’s building. “And shouldn’t that door be locked?”

  “Could be treasures,” she said, then she looked at me quizzically. “It never is, till after nine P.M.”

  “I know, but shouldn’t it be, all the time?”

  A car pulled away from the curb, and startled me.

  “You’re getting twitchy and weird.” She closed the door behind her.

  She was right, but that didn’t mean I could un-twitch. My mind felt clogged with potential dangers, as if Mackenzie’s information about Bonaparte had loosened items otherwise safely bolted down. Who now was a threat? Who knew enough to kill Phoebe and Toy?

  “Why do you look like a deer in the headlights?” Sasha asked. “Come on. I’ll make you decaf or tea. Or are you afraid Dennis is going to come back and rant again?”

  “It’s not that.” Maybe it was. Too many questions about Dennis. But too many questions now about too many people.

  Jesse Farmer. Not an “M,” but who knew what Phoebe might have meant by that letter? He’d been doing research for her. He’d know about the kind of valuables a Bonaparte might have owned. Maybe he was planning to rip Phoebe off.

  “Not to worry,” Sasha said. “Dennis would be too scared to, now that his little scam has been foiled. But if he does show up, I am going to personally kill him for what he was trying to do to me. Come on. A flight of stairs never hurt anybody, and it’ll burn off one half a bite of sausage.” We started up.

  Sasha’s condo was once part of a grand house, now sliced into three units, one on each floor. It makes for the kind of high-ceilinged spaciousness that is rare in newer buildings, but if you’re in a twitchy kind of mood, it’s also obvious that it was never designed to be a fortress, the way so many city apartment buildings are. There wasn’t any real lobby, only a narrow entry sliced off the original house’s more gracious one, with a staircase straight ahead, mail cubbies that were once open, but after some pilfering, were now covered with locked doors, and an elevator that hadn’t worked within recent memory.

  “Phoebe always said her ‘treasures,’ plural,” Sasha said.

  “Maybe there are lots of them. Then again, she would do things like pick up one of her pink crystal pyramids, or the plate with Charles and Diana painted on it when she said that, and I’m pretty sure those things never belonged to the Bonapartes.”

  We went into Sasha’s condo, which, unlike the building itself, had a spacious entryway leading down a short hall to the living room.

  I closed the door but stopped mid-motion.

  “What?” Sasha asked.

  “Listen.”

  She appeared to, then she shook her head. “What?”

  “That horn. Did you hear it? Two honks, then a stop, then two honks.”

  She pulled back in an exaggerated and stagy reaction. “Dear friend,” she said, “you are in deep trouble. Is it living with a crime-obsessed man that’s doing it? Was it seeing Toy dead? Or are you paranoid?”

  “Didn’t you hear it?”

  Before she spoke, she looked at me with an expression you never want to see on anybody’s face whose opinion you value. “If I heard a horn, so what?” she finally said quietly. “People honk night and day. It’s a rude city.”

  “Didn’t it sound like a signal?”

  “People who hear or see patterns in random events are in big trouble, pal. But even if it was a signal—why think it’s a bad one? Maybe it’s Romeo saying, ‘Juliet, I’ve got wheels, so come on down.’”

  Her worried expression made me realize I was tuned up
tightly in a way that wasn’t helpful and didn’t make particular sense. “Thanks,” I said. “I guess I needed that. It’s just that this week—”

  Now she spoke much more warmly. “I know. Me, too. And I don’t know how anybody’s supposed to pull away and regain balance, but you have to, don’t you? You especially. You have to keep telling yourself that Toy—con artist that we now know her to be—was nonetheless just in the wrong place—or the right one, where the supposed treasures lay. Or, what it sounds like, the place somebody had been robbing with great regularity since Phoebe died.” She walked ahead of me into the living room, then turned and, head tilted slightly, watched me as if waiting for something she’d expected.

  I remembered. “Tell me about him,” I said. “What’s wonderful and unique about him?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” She unbuttoned her coat and tossed it and her long black scarf onto an ottoman. “Coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”

  “I’m going to need to work when I get home, but tea would be great.” I needed warming up, and I left my coat on for a moment longer. Sasha might be economizing, given the current cost of gas, so I said nothing about how chilly it was in here.

  Jesse Farmer, I thought again. But Toy? Why, then, go after Toy?

  “Make yourself at home.” She went into the kitchen, talking nonstop as she did. “He is really different,” she said.

  As was every other man, every other time, I didn’t have to listen that attentively because I’d heard all this before. Why didn’t the two murders, the two deaths, fit into one piece?

  “Honestly,” Sasha said. “I think I’ve found him.”

  “Where?”

  Dennis was the one who needed money, who had motives for both murders, sordid as those motives might be.

  “Met him on a blind date my aunt arranged!” Sasha burst out laughing. “Surprised you, didn’t I? No bar, no online service—my aunt Cassie!” It sounded as if she clanged the spoon against the cup on purpose, as if we’d hit some prize on a quiz show. I was shocked into attention by her answer. Religious great-aunts’ matchmaking was not high on Sasha’s list of favorites.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Based on the little I’ve heard about great-aunt Cassie, he’s a man of the cloth, right?”

  “Not quite,” she said. “Unless cloth means he’s well dressed. He’s actually a scientist, an oceanographer, who…”

  She continued to talk, but I no longer really heard her because the din of everything else—people, need for money, knowing about Bonaparte—was now fighting for space against a third factor, and this one was here, nearby. Something was wrong, but what?

  I listened. No more horn. No noise outside at all. Was that all it was? The shock of silence?

  No. The horn had stopped its two at a time message a while back. This had just happened.

  I looked around, but the room was, as always, a mélange of styles that combined to suggest another era, one you should recall and be able to identify, but couldn’t. I saw the same unknowable time and place. Nothing moved, nothing had a new, unnatural protrusion, silhouette, or dent.

  From the kitchen, Sasha described the scientist’s hair and smile, muffling whatever other sounds I might have otherwise heard. But even so, something had shifted. Was there now a shadow where there hadn’t been one? Sasha had turned on only one floor lamp in her passage through the room, and its circle of light did not reach into the corners.

  I barely breathed, I was straining so hard to hear and see. It—whatever it was—wasn’t here in the living area, but beyond; in the shadows of the dining area, under the long satiny cloth covering the table, behind the brocade drapery. I stood up slowly, trying to avoid any floor squeaks, any shift in furniture.

  And then I saw it, the slightest bulge in the brocade drapes, the shift of darker shadow on dark cloth. I grabbed the first solid and moveable object near me and slowly advanced toward the drapes, my hand gripping what I suddenly realized was the ugly statue—the scrawny centurian in his sculpted tunic. Skinny Caesar. He was made of metal, so I didn’t care that his muscles were weak-looking. I gripped it tightly, as if it were enchanted and had the power of that metallic legionnaire. As if his short knife would protect me.

  I advanced, my eyes on the drapery. I thought I saw it move again, the slightest sucking inward, pulling back in on itself.

  The teapot screamed, and I nearly did, too. But that high, ungodly warning meant only that the water had boiled. The scream died off as Sasha removed the pot from the burner.

  I reached the drapery, stood there, trying to breathe, then with my right arm brandishing Caesar, I put my left hand on the edge of the drape.

  The scream was Sasha’s this time. “For God’s sake, what are you—”

  I half turned, and moved my head to make her come closer. She was carrying a pot of boiling water, an even better weapon than the Roman statue.

  “Amanda, really—you’ll kill somebody!”

  My eyes wide—how many ways could I silently signal somebody to be quiet? In any case, I’d failed to get the message across, but seeing is believing, so while she shouted at me, I whipped the drapery back.

  And revealed nothing. No one.

  “What in God’s name were you—”

  “I saw movement—”

  “The window’s open! Air currents do that.” She was giving me that look again, and I could understand how, from her point of view, I deserved it. But she was wrong.

  “Sit down,” she said, brandishing the teapot until I was afraid she’d use it on me. “And put that down. It isn’t a—”

  “Somebody’s here,” I whispered, nonetheless sitting on a dining-table chair. I kept hold of the soldier, needing all the help I could get. From where I sat, I could see into Sasha’s bedroom, which looked still and unoccupied. Her window curtains were pulled back with ties. Nobody could hide behind them, and nobody could hide under her bed, where, she’d once proudly shown me, she had drawers for extra clothing storage. It was a spacious flat, but it did not have an infinite number of rooms. There was the bathroom, off of Sasha’s bedroom, and—

  “Dennis? You think Dennis is in my house?”

  “Listen, Sasha—”

  “You’re out of your—”

  “Shhh!” I said.

  “I’m worried about you,” she whispered.

  I felt as if we were closed in a box charged with extra ions, electrical waves—something. As if everything had been drenched in colors so intense they hurt the eyeballs. And every sound, however tiny, buzzed and roared into my brain. I heard a squeak, an old floorboard’s complaint, and my back muscles tightened and my heart beat still faster.

  Somebody was in this apartment. I had heard something, I knew it. Something I couldn’t account for, even if I couldn’t remember what it had been. I refused to believe it was pure coincidence that tonight, for the first time ever, some random thief would break into Sasha’s condo in order to rob her. Coincidences happened, but not that many. Not now. Whoever was here had to do with Phoebe and Toy, and that house, and probably with Joseph Bonaparte.

  Phoebe must have known. She’d somehow finally put the family legends together, read Bordentown history, found a site online—I didn’t know how, but I was sure she knew.

  My mind kaleidoscoped. The spinning elements swirled: Phoebe, Toy, the king of Spain in New Jersey, the appraisals, the idling car outside tonight, the honks. The joyride in the BMW. “Sorry,” said once too often.

  I felt sick.

  The colors around me swirled and ran together, and I was afraid I might faint. “Call nine-one-one,” I said.

  “Are you crazy? Why?”

  I stood up again despite Sasha’s soft protest and the hand with which she grabbed me. I shrugged off her hand and pointed to the closed darkroom door across from us and moved closer to it. It was the only space we couldn’t see.

  She shook her head. “It’s always closed,” she whispered. “It doesn’t mean anybody’s hiding—” />
  I shook my head. It was the only thing that made sense. The person behind it had heard the signal, the warning beeps, had not had time to get out before we entered, had hidden behind the only closed door.

  Sasha frowned and shook her head again.

  I ignored her, then turned and whispered, “Bring the kettle, the teapot.”

  “No!” she whispered back. “That’s horrible! You could—”

  “Two people were murdered,” I snapped, my voice wobbling out of control. “It isn’t going to turn into four!”

  “Nobody’s here! You’re imagining all this and scaring me! Put that thing down and get yourself—”

  This time we both heard it, though I couldn’t have said what the wheezed, full-of-air noise was. A small scream? Someone inhaling mightily in order to have the strength for an attack? “You’re right,” I said. “Put the kettle back.”

  “But I heard it,” Sasha whispered. “OhmyGod. Dennis?” Her voice got louder. “I’ll kill him! How dare he—how dare he!”

  “No,” I whispered. “Not Dennis.” I felt my eyes well up. “Please—just call!

  “Why are you—”

  “Call!”

  “Okay, but don’t do anything until I—”

  Wrong. I wasn’t going to give the person behind the door the advantage of flinging it open and springing on me.

  Besides, I knew who was behind there.

  Armed with Little Caesar, I took a deep breath and whipped the door open, my arm held high as Sasha screamed, “NO! Don’t do that!”

  “Call!” I shouted, trying to see into the dark of the room. The dim, faraway living-room floor lamp gave the windowless space the merest outline and blurry glint of bottles, countertops, the stainless faucet.

  I blinked, then blinked again, and for a third time, heard the noise.

  A sob.

  And then, loudly, a voice screaming, “Don’t shoot me! Don’t kill me!”

  I knew that voice. I’d been right.

  I could not remember ever so acutely wanting to have been wrong.

  Twenty-one