by Dianne Day
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you must be at least as unhappy about losing your father as my mother is about losing her husband. It’s not like she’s the only one has a right to be upset, I know.”
He’d spoken so quietly I doubted if Michael had heard. But Augusta did, and her head snapped up as she shot me a keen glance.
I had no idea what she and Michael had been talking about; I’d been distracted by my own thoughts. Whatever it might have been, she abandoned it and directed all her attention to me.
“Fremont,” she said in a disapproving tone, “I heard you went out today.”
Why should I not go out, and what concern should she have over my comings and goings? The tip of my tongue itched to snap back at her, but I did not wish to be unnecessarily provocative, and so I said nothing.
Augusta regarded me with what could only be called a withering glare. “I hope you have done something to obtain the proper wardrobe. Was that where you went, if I may inquire?”
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, blinking in disbelief. Proper wardrobe? She wants to talk, to make a fuss, about clothes?
Ah, said my inner voice, but you are supposed to be in mourning. And Augusta’s next words confirmed that my inner voice was right.
“I would offer you something more appropriate myself, but you are so much taller than I am—”
Not to mention too thin for fashion, my feet are too long, my hair is straight as a stick, blah-blah-blah. Oh really, the triviality of this whole subject made me want to tear out what hair I had, straight or not!
Once again I sensed I was on the edge of my control, and so I reined myself in and tried to pay attention to the topic. There had been a death. Mourning was appropriate.
For dining alone with family, even in the circumstances, I’d thought I was properly enough dressed. Since Mary had informed me we would all be eating together in the dining room tonight, I had changed my day dress for a gown of midnight-blue silk, with a high neck and long sleeves and a full, floor-length skirt. I showed not even the hint of an ankle. What could be more proper than that?
Actually I knew the answer to that question, and loath though I might be to talk of clothes, I gave it: “I know I am not wearing black, Augusta. I’m not fond of black and so I own nothing of that color. This means I must provide myself with an entire new wardrobe, which takes time. I am taking all the necessary steps to see to it; you need not be concerned.”
There. That should satisfy her. And I thought too that I had rather neatly sidestepped the matter of my going out, not mentioning where I’d been. I couldn’t tell them about my visit to Nurse Kirk, not even Michael; nor did I want to have to make up a tale to account for half my afternoon’s whereabouts.
“These steps,” Augusta said, “had better not take too much time. Leonard will be buried day after tomorrow. The death announcement will appear in tomorrow’s newspaper with all the details.”
I nodded. Surely at R. H. Stearns I would be able to find something ready-made that I could wear with only a quick alteration to the bodice. I always needed a quick alteration to the bodice; and I always had to deal with both the saleswoman and the fitting woman fussing at me for not wearing a corset. No wonder I hated buying clothes.
But Augusta was not done with me yet, not by a long shot. She said, “You really should not have gone out today in that coat of yours—some shade of red, isn’t it? Highly inappropriate!”
“The coat is burgundy,” I said, “and it is the only one I have. At the moment. I will have another tomorrow, I assure you.”
“But you went to the bank this afternoon, your father’s bank, wearing a red coat. Didn’t you, Fremont? Red, burgundy, they are much the same. Of course, everyone knows you have a reputation for being unconventional, but that is too much.”
Larry Bingham had tucked his head down so far, if he lowered it any farther he’d be beneath the table. Michael, however, gazed intently at me through a thicket of candles in the tall candelabra. Even in this light—perhaps especially in this light—I could see that his eyes had gone dark and cold as sapphires. This is something that happens only when Michael is gripped with some intensity of feeling. His eyes look like that in orgasm; but they also look like that in rage.
“My trip to the bank was necessary.” My chin came up; it was time for me to defend myself, even if I intended to do so with half-truths and a few outright lies. I continued:
“If you had consulted me before making Father’s funeral arrangements, my trip to the bank today could have been avoided, Augusta. But you went ahead with those arrangements on your own, without doing me that courtesy. This was unfortunate, because I knew there were certain aspects of the burial that he was likely to have wanted a certain way. Father felt so strongly that I expected he would have included these wishes in his last will and testament. That document is, as I knew, being kept at the bank by Mr. Sefton, and so of course I had to go there to see him. Would you expect me, Augusta, to allow you to bypass me entirely in such a crucial matter? Especially when to do so might have meant that Father would be buried in some way other than he most wanted? His wishes were spelled out in the will, by the way. I was correct.”
“I know,” Augusta said, with a most peculiar intonation to her voice. “I saw Sefton myself. Now I know everything. Don’t worry,” she threw her napkin down on the table suddenly, “he’ll get his wooden box, and everything else he wanted, just exactly as he wanted it. Now if you will all excuse me, I have a headache and am going up to my room.”
Michael stood politely, and mutely.
Larry jumped up, forgetting to push his chair back first, banging his legs against the underside of the table and jostling the plates and crystal. “Want me to come up with you, Ma?”
“Certainly not,” Augusta said, turning in the doorway with an expression on her face that was almost a sneer. “You stay here with your new friend.”
By “new friend” I did not think she meant Michael.
When his mother had left the dining room, Larry collapsed back into his chair like a deflated balloon. This time he caught the edge of the tablecloth on his way down, and I reached over to rescue his water glass just before it fell.
It was on the tip of my tongue to say I was sorry, but I’d be damned if I’d do that. What did I have to be sorry for? That woman had killed my father, I was certain even if I couldn’t prove it, and for all I knew her son had helped.
But as I looked closely at him, I could not believe he’d had any part in it. He seemed altogether too young, too … well, incompetent to be a murderer, or even an accomplice to murder.
“Errh-um,” Michael said.
My thoughts were still on Larry: He did get excited about criminal acts, that was true …
“Fremont?”
… but no, I didn’t think his was the kind of excitement that would carry him into the doing of criminal things himself. He liked to read about them, and he would have liked to write about them if he had the chance. That was all.
I felt sorry for Larry; I remembered how hard he had tried to please Augusta that first night, had worked himself up practically into a fever. Now he seemed somewhat desperate since his mother had gone from the room. Remembering his recent sensitivity to me, I reached out and patted his shoulder in what I hoped was an encouraging manner.
“Fremont?”
“What?” I asked Michael sharply.
“Would you mind telling me what just went on here, since you and Larry Bingham both seem to know? I would like to be let in on the secret.”
I hesitated, and into my hesitation, Larry blurted:
“She’s upset because she didn’t get the money!”
I placed my hand on his arm again, and this time I left it there. To calm him was my intention.
Addressing Michael, I said, “As I told Augusta just now, I expected Father would want to be buried in a certain way—”
Larry interrupted: “She should’ve waited till you could go with her to talk t
o them about the funeral and all. I mean, he was your dad same as she’s my ma—I never had a dad, and I guess you were a long time without a ma either, and I reckon I know how that feels. I wanted to make her wait but I couldn’t, she never listens to me, she never lets me tell her anything!”
“That’s hardly an unusual state of affairs between mothers and sons,” Michael said dryly.
I hastened with my explanation, sensing something here I didn’t like any more than I understood it: an atmosphere of tension in the room that had not dissipated, as I thought it should have, with Augusta’s departure. I explained how I had recalled my mother’s burial in a wooden coffin, how this had prompted my own trip to the bank, and so on.
With a nervous glance at Larry, who seemed now thoroughly miserable and therefore at least five years younger than his real age, I touched on the major points of Father’s will. For Larry’s sake I emphasized the security of the fund Father had set up to provide for Augusta the rest of her life. I concluded:
“It is only unfortunate, I think, that this could not have waited until after the funeral.”
Michael nodded. His eyes had stopped glittering, which was a relief to me.
“I don’t know,” Larry said, throwing his own napkin on the table in an exact if unconscious copy of his mother’s gesture not long before, “maybe it’s better for me this way.”
He got up from the table, but this time he remembered to push his chair back first. With one hand he slicked back his hair at the sides of his head, first one and then the other, as if in this way he might also restore order to his troubled mind.
“What do you mean,” I asked, after having darted a glance toward Michael and seeing that he wasn’t going to, “better for you?”
“I had a pretty good job down there in New York. They didn’t want me to leave, and if I go right back maybe I can get there before they hire somebody else to take my place. I’m not staying for the funeral. He wasn’t my daddy—” Larry stared at me for a minute with a challenging look in his eyes. “In fact, the old guy didn’t even like me very much. I bet he’d rather I wasn’t here.”
I had the feeling he wanted me to ask him to stay. But my voice stuck in my throat, and I didn’t ask, and the moment passed.
“Your mother wants you here,” Michael pointed out.
Larry made a face, as if he’d swallowed something that had left a nasty taste in his mouth. “She nags me. And she embarrasses me all the time. Like tonight. I’ve had enough,” he said.
And then he left the dining room.
Just as Larry went out the door to the hall, Mary Fowey came in from the kitchen with a platter of roast chicken, the main course. I believe we had all forgotten there was to be anything more to this meal.
“What’s this, then? Only two of you left?” she asked.
SIXTEEN
I CAN SEE you’re on the edge of exhaustion,” Michael said, “but you and I have to talk as soon as you feel you can.”
He had his hat in hand already; I’d walked him to the front door to say good night. Our dinner unexpectedly à deux had been almost silent by mutual agreement, I’d thought. I had appreciated the respite.
I nodded. “I feel better since eating, although I thought I wasn’t hungry,” I said. “And I agree, we do have to talk. But not here, where, as they say, the walls have ears. Tomorrow morning?”
Michael bent his head, bringing his face close to mine, close but not touching, respectful and perhaps wary of the distance that had grown between us of late. Across that distance, which was somehow so much farther than mere inches, I felt him draw me like a magnet. I felt irresistibly attracted, yearning to touch the rough silk of his beard, to taste the sweet salt of his skin.
I lifted my face, wanting him, wanting us to be as we had been together in the best of times, and he kissed me. There in the hall, in the hush of my ancestral house, Michael kissed me. It was like kissing a stranger; but it was also like coming home.
In this kiss I felt something I had never felt before, not like this. I felt how strongly this man and I were bonded together, like two trees whose roots have intertwined belowground, although aboveground they seemingly stand separate and apart.
In this kiss I found the knowledge that he would not desert me. My inner voice had been right: the stresses of this day, the day before, and many days before that, all had led me temporarily astray, made me doubt and overreact.
“I love you,” Michael said solemnly as his lips left mine.
“I love you too,” I replied, equally solemn. Such simple words, yet are there any others?
“Tomorrow morning I will come for you early. We’ll go over to the Parker House and have a fine breakfast, with some of their famous rolls. Then if the day is fair we’ll walk and talk—in the park where we won’t be overheard.”
“That park is not a park, it’s the Common. I know: You can walk me up Tremont Street to the department store, since I must go there anyway.”
“Eventually,” he promised. His eyes were dark with concern and the tone of his voice was grave. “You were right, you know. There are far more important things going on here than the need for mourning clothes.”
“Thank you.”
Could I hope he was beginning to believe me, to see things my way? I cared so much, wanted so much for him to believe, that I didn’t dare ask.
Michael touched my cheek with his gloved fingertips, then turned to open the front door. We were still alone in the hall, with the house a huge, hovering presence at my back.
“Good night, sleep well,” I said.
I ached at seeing him go. I would have given much to sleep in Michael’s arms tonight … even if I had to wake and find on the morrow that he did not believe me after all. All of a sudden I understood how it is with those silly creatures in fairy tales who do things like trade a kingdom for one night with their beloved.
THE HOUSE was too quiet. Eerily quiet.
I lay in bed in the guest room, which I hoped would not be my room much longer, and listened to the silence. I tried to analyze what there was about the particular quality of the quiet in my old house that bothered me so much.
It was almost a hundred years old; generations had lived here. Maybe there were ghosts. Maybe the ghosts were real; certainly I knew enough people who thought such things were real. But I did not. Anyway, ghosts would have been too easy an answer for this problem.
I sighed.
Too, too quiet.
I wished I had Hiram, my black cat, here to amuse and comfort me. His soft paws would make a circle in my lap two or three times, then he’d curl himself into a ball with the tip of his tail over his nose, close his eyes, and purr until he’d purred himself to sleep. Hiram could purr me close to contentment too; he’d done that many a time.
I sighed again.
Earlier I had brought in the reading lamp from Father’s room because there was no good lamp in this room to read by; wasteful as it was of electricity, after Michael left I’d kept that lamp burning through the remainder of the evening and into the hours past midnight. I had dozed from time to time with a book open on my chest, just as Sarah Kirk had done on the night my father died.
Her denial had not fooled me for a minute. Well, to be truthful, not for much more than a minute. When things are dire, one may rather easily be persuaded to doubt oneself. And things were certainly dire.
I was waiting until I could be sure both Larry and Augusta were sleeping soundly; Mary Fowey was of no concern. If she were to walk in on me, I’d just enlist her help. I truly did not think Mary would give me away, especially since Augusta would not be mistress of this house much longer. Mary’s job here was secure, though Mary herself might not know it yet.
Once again, as on the night Father died, it was between 2 and 3 A.M. when I opened the door from my room into the hall and listened with all the intensity at my command. Still only the silence.
It was then that I realized what was so strange about the quality of this silence:
I missed the ticking of the big clock, and its chiming of the half hour and the hour. In this house that clock had always been a constant in the background, in much the same way my father had constantly been in the background of my entire life … until now.
I could, and would, restore the clock to its rightful place in the working order, but not yet. Father, alas, could not be restored, but he could be avenged—only not yet. For many other things, too, the bywords were “not yet.” Now there was much I must do to see to it that Augusta moved out of Beacon Street and into the place she rightfully belonged—wherever that place might be.
I hadn’t bothered to try to persuade her to ask for an autopsy on Father’s body. Trying persuasion on Augusta would have been a complete waste of time; Dr. Cosgrove, who apparently was far from always right about everything, had been right about that at least. She would never agree to an autopsy, though not for the reason he thought. Or professed to think. If she’d had an accomplice, Cosgrove would make a fair candidate for that position. The doctor would be a more appropriate partner in crime than her strange and strangely affecting son.
I comforted myself with the thought that all criminals make mistakes. If I were diligent, I might uncover Augusta’s. I lit the candle I needed for a light down the hall, closed my own bedroom door as if I were still reading, and stood outside Augusta’s door for a couple of minutes. As my eyes adjusted to the near-total darkness, I did not see around her door the thin line of light I could see even at a distance around mine. Nor did I hear any sound coming from within; but, as I had noted earlier, this house was so solidly built that sound did not pass easily through the walls.
Ah well, that would work to my advantage once I was in Father’s rooms.
Borrowing the lamp earlier had taken away some of the element of shock I felt at being in Father’s bedroom again. Still, I had an uneasiness in the pit of my stomach as I shut the door and closed myself in. I took a good, deep breath, turned on the electric light, blew out the candle, and began methodically, as I’d been taught in my training as a private investigator, to search.