The Silver Ghost

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I don’t suppose I should have, either,” Sarah admitted, “if Uncle Jem hadn’t been telling me on the way down about the tricycle Wouter Tolbathy rigged up for Abigail when she first started keeping bees. It was shaped like a giant beehive, one of those old-fashioned conical straw ones. Abigail was supposed to sit inside with her head and arms and legs sticking out, wearing a black and yellow striped leotard and a fuzzy black hat with little antennae sticking up and a yellow bee veil with big goggly plastic eyes set into it.”

  “Simple, tasteful, and practical in the true Tolbathy tradition. Is the thing still around?”

  “No, it got wrecked ages ago when the Convivial Codfish crowd were having one of their quiet little get-togethers at the Billingsgates’. They were taking turns riding around in the beehive wearing the bee headdress and somebody got the bright idea of doing wheelies. Uncle Jem wouldn’t say who it was, so I suspect the worst. Anyway, that finished the beehive, but it’s worth considering, don’t you think?”

  “I certainly do. I’d better call the Billingsgates right away and see if that jackass Grimpen ever came back. Unless you’d rather give them a ring yourself?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’m at a pay phone in Milton. I was on my way home from delivering Uncle Jem back to his yachting party when I happened to catch you on the radio. I assume there’s been another blowup, but don’t tell me now because I’m running out of change and Lionel’s champing at the bit to use the phone. Don’t ask me what he’s doing here, unless he’s been over in the Blue Hills communing with the rattlesnakes. About dinner, darling—”

  “Forget it, kid. You’ve still got a long drive ahead of you and I’d better get back to the Billingsgates. Why don’t you find yourself a decent restaurant and wait out the traffic? Davy’s okay, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, I called Mrs. Blufert from the yacht club to tell her I was running late and she said not to worry. She’ll stay as long as we need her and there’s plenty to eat in the fridge. Oh, Max! Would you believe Young Dork just drove in? I’ve got to find out what this is all about. Take care, dear. See you soon, I hope.”

  She’d have turned the phone over to Lionel but he was with Young Dork now, trying to put aside his frenzy and act genial. Young Dork, though he barely knew Sarah, was far the more affable of the two.

  “Nice to see you again so soon, Sarah. On your way to the great celebration, too, are you?”

  “Actually I’m on my way home,” Sarah told him. “I just stopped to phone my husband. What are you celebrating?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Bunny hit the lottery.”

  “Bunny Whet? Do you mean that state lottery that’s always getting written up in the papers? How much did he win?”

  “A bundle,” said Young Dork reverently. “Something like three million dollars, didn’t they say, Lionel?”

  Now Sarah knew why her cousin was in so foul a mood. Bunny Whet had won a bundle and Lionel Kelling hadn’t. She rubbed it in for all it was worth.

  “What an utterly fantastic stroke of luck for Bunny. Some people just seem to have all the luck, don’t they, Lionel? You must be thrilled to pieces for him. So you and Young Dork are giving Bunny a surprise party?”

  “We are like hell.” Lionel had run out of geniality. “With a windfall that size falling into his lap, Bunny can damned well afford to give us one.”

  “Actually it’s Elizabeth who’s giving the party,” Young Dork explained. “Come on, Sarah, I know she and Bunny would love to have you. Follow me if you don’t know the way.”

  “But I can’t go barging in without an invitation.”

  “Of course you can, the more the merrier. Elizabeth said we should drag along any of the crowd she hadn’t been able to reach.”

  Sarah shrugged. She wasn’t one of the crowd and she didn’t want to be, but it would be a chance to do some more nosing around. When Lionel added his own invitation, for Lionel could be hospitable when somebody else was footing the bills, she capitulated.

  “Just tell me where to go and I’ll find the house. I want to run into the store for a minute first.” A Kelling might arrive both uninvited and empty-handed, but a Bittersohn surely wouldn’t. She had a new set of standards to maintain along with the old.

  Her cheese and crackers were well received, and so was she. “This is a nice surprise, Sarah,” said Bunny Whet.

  “It’s a surprise for me, too,” she told him. “I was on my way home from ferrying Uncle Jem to meet some of his friends at Scituate Harbor. I stopped to phone Max, bumped into Lionel and Young Dork, and here I am. I mustn’t stay long, but I simply had to offer my congratulations. This must be one of the most exciting days you’ve ever spent, isn’t it?”

  “Actually it’s been a week since I won the lottery,” he confessed. “But Father and I were at an organic pest control convention in Philadelphia and didn’t get home till late Monday night because we’d stopped to have dinner with Aunt Lucy. You wouldn’t know her, I don’t suppose. But anyway, that put me behind with my work and Elizabeth and I were both up to our ears in rehearsals for the revel, so I bunged my winning ticket into a safe-deposit box and didn’t get around to turning it in until today. I knew the money was safe, you know. I expect I should have let it sit for another few days, since Monday’s hardly the best day for a party, but I have to admit I was just too itchy. As it was, the lottery people seemed to find my lack of haste a trifle odd.”

  Sarah could see why they might have.

  “But how was I to know the customary procedure?” said Bunny. “I’ve never bought one of the things before, I don’t know what possessed me to buy this one. I’m not usually given to reckless impulses.”

  “It was only a dollar,” Elizabeth argued in extenuation. “And we did so want a nice, big chunk of money for the Bat Fund. Are you familiar with Bunny’s pet project, Sarah?”

  Sarah was about to be, that was clear. Bunny was off and running.

  “Bats are grossly underappreciated natural insect controllers. And what’s happening to their natural urban habitat? I ask you, Sarah.” But he gave her no time to answer. “Look at all those wonderful old stone churches we used to have. Getting their steeples lopped off, being turned into condominiums. What’s a bat without a belfry, answer me that?”

  She didn’t get a chance on that one, either. Bunny’s normally unimpassioned face was alight with enthusiasm. “So what we’re doing is constructing a series of artificial belfries in suitably insect-rife environments where bats will find congenial living quarters, ample food supplies, and, we hope, fruitful association with other bats.”

  At last Sarah got a word in. “Do you have bells in your belfries, too?”

  “Bells are a frill we’ve had to dispense with for reasons of economy,” Bunny confessed, “but the bats are adjusting nicely. We do install streetlights at strategic places, to draw the night-flying lepidoptera.”

  “Yes, I can see where you’d need to do that.”

  “Honestly, Sarah, you ought to go out to one of our bat sanctuaries and see the little beggars flitting around those lights on a balmy summer evening, snapping up moths and mosquitoes. Ifs sheer poetry in motion. Isn’t it, Elizabeth?”

  “There is an aesthetic quality one learns to appreciate,” Elizabeth agreed, a trifle wearily.

  “I’d appreciate the three million dollars a damn sight more,” Lionel told her crassly. “You must be pretty sick about losing out to a bunch of flying bug-snappers.”

  “Not at all.” Bunny’s wife was loyal to the core. “The income tax would have been horrendous. This way we’ll get a magnificent write-off for the next twenty years because they dole it out to you on the installment plan. Besides, it lets Mother Whet and me out of having to run a fund drive.”

  It would let them out of having to fight Bunny over that trust fund, too, Sarah thought. It also wiped out Bunny’s motive for having stolen the New Phantom even if he’d had the opportunity, which it now appeared he hadn’t.

  Salmon Tolbathy was
another washout. Tom and Hester had brought their younger son with them to Milton because he still couldn’t drive his own car and his brother Buck was tied up with a shipment of anchovies. Sal’s problem had turned out to be no mere sprain but a torn ligament. He was on crutches and could hardly move without wincing. His incapacity was beyond question.

  The male Abbotts hadn’t been able to come. Monk was back at school and Joe had a meeting of some sort. Joe’s wife, the lovely Lilias, had shown up with her parents, though, and was getting a good deal of ribbing about her kirtle from some people who hadn’t been at the Renaissance Revel but had attended the wedding. They were loudly expressing their disappointment that Joe and Monk had insisted on doing their respective stints in conventional clothing instead of their dags and slitters.

  That let the Abbotts out of stealing the Silver Ghost, at any rate. So far, though, Sarah hadn’t been able to give anybody a solid alibi for both the revel and the day the New Phantom had been taken. Was it possible the Morris dancers had worked in shifts? Sarah shook her head, both at the glass of champagne somebody was offering her and at the idea of so much organized malfeasance to so little purpose, and went back to Young Dork.

  He’d spent last Monday at Station XBIG in Gibbon, New Hampshire, doing Tick a favor. They’d had problems with a broken cable. That meant they couldn’t play their tapes or records, so he’d taken Lorista and her dulcimer along to do a live program of folk songs. As if one disaster hadn’t been enough, Sarah thought unkindly.

  “Done much bike riding lately?” she asked in desperation.

  “Who, me?” Young Dork thought the question over and decided Sarah must be joking, so he laughed. “I’ll take one of the Billingsgates’ Rolls Royces over a bicycle any day of the week, myself. Your cousin Lionel’s the boy for the bikes.”

  “Yes, I know Lionel rides a lot.” He’d biked all the way from Cambridge to Ireson’s Landing only last week as part of his, or rather Vare’s, relentless keep-fit program. Even fully clothed, Lionel was no great beauty; the sight of him in shorts and a fluorescent green bicycle helmet had been enough to set Davy wailing in mortal terror. Sarah had had all she could do to refrain from climbing into the playpen and adding her wails to Davy’s. “But don’t the rest of you ride, too?” she said doggedly.

  “We all used to when we were kids,” Young Dork conceded, “but I don’t recall our ever making a big thing of it. Except Lionel, of course, and Tick Purbody. Too bad Tick and Melly couldn’t come tonight but they’re both tied up. Anyway, Tick was really hot there for a while. He even entered a couple of six-day bicycle races, but Melly put her foot down on that once they were married. Sure I can’t get you some champagne?”

  “Not just now, thanks,” said Sarah. “I want to talk to Hester and Tom.”

  The elder Tolbathys were sitting together on a straight-backed settee, neither of them looking particularly festive. Sarah could understand why, knowing what Max must have told them during his morning visit. At least she had one piece of cheerful news to impart.

  “You’ll be glad to know Aunt Bodie’s turned up.”

  That brightened their mood a bit. “I’m so relieved!” said Hester. “We’ve been awfully worried about her. Where was she, do you know?”

  “She’d managed somehow to get locked in the honey shed.”

  “But that’s incredible! Bodie, of all people. However did she get into a fix like that?”

  “Apparently she’d gone exploring.” Sarah didn’t feel this was the time or place to go into specifics. “The room had been sterilized and sealed off ever since last honey-gathering time, whenever that was, so naturally it was the one place nobody thought to look. But anyway, she’s all right. Somewhat frayed around the edges, of course. The last I heard, Abigail and Drusilla had her tucked up in one of the guest rooms, taking turns playing Florence Nightingale.”

  Hester even managed to smile. “It’s funny hearing you say that. I never think of Drusilla as playing anything that didn’t involve a stick and a ball. She used to have the most spectacular tennis serve, though I have to admit it never landed quite where she meant it to.”

  “I suppose you found her a great deal changed.”

  “No, not really. Goodness knows what she thought of me.

  “She thought you were absolutely ravishing, naturally. How could she possibly not?”

  “How dear of you, Sarah. Anyway, I’m glad she’s there to lend a hand. I called Abigail early this morning to see how things were going, and she sounded absolutely exhausted.”

  “Not surprisingly all things considered,” Tom grunted.

  Sarah might have said more, but Lionel was at her shoulder.

  “If you people want another drink, you’d better get it now. Elizabeth’s making noises about shutting the bar and serving some food.”

  “That’s fine with me. I don’t want any more,” said Sarah.

  Her cousin glared at her. “Well, can’t you take one anyway and pass it along to me?”

  “Honestly, Lionel, you are the living end!”

  Sarah wished she herself could end this weary visit, but she still didn’t have a line on who that Morris dancer in the copse could have been. Max couldn’t have had any better luck than she, or he’d have said: He hadn’t said anything about Rufus’s Totschläger, either, and that worried her.

  There were too many things they hadn’t been able to pin down yet. But at least they’d found Aunt Bodie alive and kicking, and the Silver Ghost and the New Phantom. She couldn’t let herself think about Vercingetorix Ufford now, not while she still must grill Cousin Lionel about that half-hour gap at the banquet and still must face Elizabeth Whet’s high-minded version of a buffet supper.

  19

  “THAT’S WHAT I SAID, Bill, a bicycle. Sarah thinks there ought to be one. Why won’t you allow them on the place? Oh, so the kids don’t get to racing through the fields and stirring up the bees. Yes, I understand, but have Grimpen keep an eye out for one anyway, will you? He’s been trying to convince you Ufford’s death was an accident, eh? That figures. No, you’re under no obligation to talk to reporters. If they get too pushy just lower the portcullis, raise the drawbridge, and unleash the bees.”

  It would have been too much to hope the news media could be kept at bay forever. Poor Bill, as if he and Abigail didn’t have troubles enough already. Half of him must be longing to scoop the others and get the story on his own stations first, and the other half praying nobody would run it at all. Fat chance. Max checked the address he’d obtained, shook hands with his new friends at XBIX, sent his kindest personal regards to the station manager’s daughter, and went on to the next stop.

  Vercingetorix Ufford’s aerie didn’t take much finding. It was up among the gables and cupolas of an immense Victorian house on a sedate side road in West Newton. The house was three high-ceilinged stories tall, painted lemon yellow with a layer of chocolate in the middle and vanilla trimmings under the eaves. Ufford’s was a private entrance on the side. A flossy brass plaque screwed to the door proclaimed that this was indeed the place. Max turned the key Bill had lent him and it worked.

  “Quite a pad,” he murmured as he reached the top of the stairs and switched on a light.

  Ufford must have dreamt that he dwelt in marble halls. The plastered walls of what he’d probably dubbed his salotto had been painted over in a white travertine faux marbre, broken here and there by trompe l’oeil pilasters and pedestals in green serpentine, the latter surmounted by what looked to Max like funerary urns in rosso antico. Deep green velvet draperies dripping with gold fringe were caught back by heavy gold ropes to reveal glass curtains in shimmering cloth of gold.

  To Max’s trained eye, the furniture and accessories were all reproduction, but what they reproduced were the wildest excesses of the Italian Renaissance. There was enough gold here to have stripped the hypothetical mines of Golconda if Versey’s gildings hadn’t been equally hypothetical. True or false, the decorating must have cost him a bundle. Taste
this bad didn’t come cheap.

  The bedroom would make a grandiose setting for a really spectacular nightmare. An immense tester bed, also gilded, had purple velvet hanging everywhere velvet could be hung, plus a fake polar bear rug thrown over the foot. And that was only the beginning. Max wasted little time straining his aesthetic sensibilities but went on into the recording studio.

  Here, he was grateful to see not a fleck of spurious gold anywhere. Bill hadn’t exaggerated about the equipment, there was a lot of it. Max hadn’t the technical expertise to judge how good it all was, but he recognized some internationally famous brand names. Everything appeared to have been well cared for and efficiently arranged. Wall racks held thousands of recordings, all filed and labeled according to some elaborate system. There were drawers for cassettes and for what Max decided must be professional broadcasting tapes on large reels. He was beginning to feel depressed by the magnitude of Ufford’s collection when he discovered one rack marked “Experimental Tapes.”

  Once he’d figured out how to play them, Ufford’s experiments proved well worth the trip. It was Ufford himself who’d made them; Max all too easily identified that pompous, overprecise articulation he’d heard so much of at the revel. One of the professor’s recorded messages was quite a little Renaissance drama in itself:

  “Amaline Pettigrass, you are a slave to those turntables. For years you have stood here watching the turntables go around and around. They have hypnotized you. They hold you in their power. They are your enemies. You must destroy the turntables. You must break their evil spell. Take their cruel arms, Amaline Pettigrass. Bend them back and twist. Do it now, Amaline. Then forget what you did. You will remember nothing. You will only know the turntables don’t work. You won’t know why. Do it, Amaline. Break the arms and forget. Now, Amaline. Now.”

  This must have been one of Ufford’s earlier attempts at recording a subliminal message. He’d kept the tapes, one in which he’d tried to meld the words with a bouncy jingle for a restaurant called Francine’s Fritter Factory, one with what must be the theme song for some of Bill’s little homilies. The first efforts were jumbled, but there was another tape where words and music must have been blended into an undistinguishable whole. Max couldn’t hear the hidden message at all, but Amaline Pettigrass’s subconscious mind would have sorted it out. Both the advertisement and the theme song would have been played again and again, probably several times a day over a period of weeks or even months. It would have taken plenty of urging to make a loyal employee sabotage expensive equipment for no apparent reason.