by Dianne Day
“Yes.” Michael said, as if he did indeed know all that had just passed through my mind. His eyes were dark, deep, and full of feeling.
Then he cleared his throat, not so much of necessity but as a signal that he was in a way changing the subject, our discussion was moving on.
He said, “I’m concerned about your being in this house alone.”
“Mary is here,” I responded.
“Two women alone in a large house, from which another has recently been lured or driven outside to her death? I am still concerned. I think I should move in.”
“I’d love to have you here,” I said earnestly, “but in truth that would be frowned upon before we are married. I think I have a solution to this problem.” I told him about Ralph and Myra Porter, how I needed to talk to them anyway, how I planned to offer them their old jobs back.
Meanwhile Mary came in with a fresh pot of coffee and took away the remains of the breakfast we’d finished some time ago.
When she had gone back into the kitchen, Michael gazed toward the hall doorway and said, “I keep thinking the police will come at any minute. In fact, I’m rather surprised they haven’t been here already.”
“So am I,” I agreed.
He leaned close to me, and for a moment I thought we might kiss. But then I looked into his eyes and saw there not a hint of amorousness. He whispered, “I think you should give me back the gun I gave you yesterday.”
I blinked in surprise and said somewhat more loudly, “I’ll do no such thing! I need it now as much as I ever did. Maybe more.”
“The police will only take it from you if they find it, Fremont.”
“They will have to find it first, and for that they’d need a search warrant, for which they have no cause!”
Michael shook his head, not satisfied. “That little revolver was one of mine, and if I take it back no one need know you ever had it. You’ll be much safer, believe me, without it at this point.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean for you to give me your own gun—I thought you’d buy one for me.”
He shook his head. “Buying one in a town where one does not live cannot be done so quickly, but that is not the point. I have another gun with me anyway—the small one I gave you is an extra. The point, my dear, is this: The police are going to consider you a suspect in Augusta’s murder.”
“Me?” I was astounded.
Michael nodded; his face was more than grave, it was positively morbid.
After I had swallowed hard and forced myself to it, I conceded: “I hadn’t thought of it, but I do see it might come to that. Not necessarily right away, though. Maybe it will take a while, and who knows, if Searles Cosgrove and William Barrett—”
“And the Forrest sisters and that lawyer, what was his name, Carraway, and your maid all keep quiet—”
“Then,” I finished up for both of us, “the police may not realize I had a motive. Mary doesn’t count, by the way. She would never come down on any side other than mine in any situation. But anyway, the police aren’t going to know all that right away. Meanwhile I have work to do, and for that I will feel much more confident if I have your gun. So you still can’t have it back!”
Michael grinned. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Yes, and irrepressible too.”
That was when he did kiss me, and for a little while we both forgot everything.
TWO DETECTIVES of the Boston police came to the house before noon. They spoke to each of us separately, even Mrs. Boynton, although she had not been present during the night. When the three of us—Mary, Mrs. Boynton, and I—compared our experiences with the detectives later, we’d each noticed the same thing: They were preoccupied with keys. Of course, we each had keys to front and back doors, but that meant nothing. Half of Boston could have had keys to the house for all I knew.
I had the locks changed that very afternoon.
TWENTY
BECAUSE TODAY WAS a Saturday, I thought Ralph and Myra Porter might be at home. They were not on the telephone, so I could not call ahead, and must take my chances as I’d done with some success when visiting the nurse, Sarah Kirk.
The address Mr. Sefton had given me for my family’s old employees was in Cambridge near Central Square; I went there in a carriage hired from the same company that had been providing carriages to us at Pembroke Jones House for various purposes over the past several days, including our entries in the funeral cortege. This continuous patronage had an advantage in that they were willing to accommodate me at short notice, but it had the disadvantage of costing money that was being, in my opinion, unnecessarily spent.
As the carriage rolled across the Harvard Bridge, I thought again about getting my own automobile. Somewhat to my dismay I realized I would require the assistance of the bank in order to make such a large purchase—I could not just walk into some auto showroom and walk out with the auto of my choice. If I were a man, I might have been able to do it by writing a check, but a single woman, alone, buying an auto? The salesman would laugh me out the door—up his sleeve if not in my face.
I did not like this state of affairs, but there was nothing I could do about it. Worst of all, I knew I’d be well advised to confront William Barrett and have it out with him, for if he and I could not come to an understanding, then I should feel it necessary to take the money that was now mine to another bank. That, after Father’s long association with Great Centennial, would be a shame.
The Porters lived in one of several medium-sized clapboard-sided apartment buildings on their block. Each of these was four stories tall, neat and simple, and the street was clean if crowded. The arrangement for mail and doorbells was quite up-to-date with an electric buzzer for a bell. I pushed the buzzer by the name Porter, one of eight apartments, and soon a woman came to the door.
I recognized her by her shape even through the sheer curtain, which she twitched aside to check who’d rung the bell before she opened the door. It was Myra, grown a little more stooped through the shoulders, her hair perhaps a little grayer, but her wide smile and friendly broad face still the same.
“Miss Caroline Jones, is that really you? Oh my goodness me—”
She went on like that, and I got tears in my eyes while acknowledging that yes I was indeed myself although I’d been answering to my middle name for so long now I might not respond if called anything other than Fremont. In a burst of spontaneous affection, Myra forgot herself and hugged me, and I forgot myself and hugged her back … and then I really did break down and cry.
Fortunately, by this time she had shown me into the tiny living room of their apartment and had presented me to Ralph, who seemed almost as overcome as Myra. When I went on my crying jag Ralph excused himself and went to make tea.
“You know that Father died?” I said when I was able to compose myself once more. By then Ralph had ventured back into the room.
“Ralph saw it in the newspaper, didn’t you, dear?” Myra said.
He silently nodded his agreement, put down a plate of cookies on a little end table, and went back to the kitchen.
“He was right upset.” Myra shook her head as soon as her husband had gone. “Not that I can blame him, I was upset too. Wanted to come to the services for Mr. Leonard, but didn’t think she’d consider us welcome. If I’da known you was back, Miss Fremont, I’da insisted we go whether Ralph liked it or not.”
“I would have been happy to see you,” I said honestly, “but the truth is that whole thing was such a hard time, I’m just as glad to be with you now instead.”
“So what brings you here today, Miss Fremont?”
“If you think you can call me Fremont, without the ‘Miss,’ I might tell you,” I teased.
“All right, so it’s Fremont, you always was a independent little thing. Well, maybe not so little, either. A tall, fine girl you turned out to be.”
We chattered on in that vein without either of us saying anything of substance. I was waiting for Ralph to return, which in a few minutes he did,
bringing with him all the tea things on a tray and one of those little tray tables with the folding legs tucked under his arm.
Before Myra could do anything I jumped up to help Ralph; they would have allowed it without a thought if I’d been younger, but now they both fussed and clucked until I told them to hush.
“Thank you for the tea, Ralph,” I said when we were all settled again.
He beamed at me—something he very seldom does.
Ralph is very much the quiet, sober New Englander. He’s a big-boned man in his fifties, broad-shouldered and, I would guess, still strong for his age. His hair is brown, cut short, and he has a mustache that looks like a brush—with a good deal of gray in it. Growing up, I had always felt I could rely on him, and I was finding to my great relief that I felt the same way still.
At last I embarked upon the major purpose for my visit:
“Two things I must tell you so that you can fully understand why I’m here. First, Father left the house on Beacon Street and most of his estate to me. There is also a small bequest for the two of you—if you haven’t yet had a letter from Mr. Elwood Sefton, a lawyer at the bank where Father used to work, you will have such a letter soon.
“The second thing I must tell you, you may most likely also read in tomorrow morning’s newspaper: Augusta Simmons Jones was shot to death early this morning. Her body was discovered in the Public Garden by someone walking a dog, that person called the police, and they came for me to identify the body.”
Ralph and Myra exchanged long, meaningful glances—and I, who was not in on the meaning, hoped I could soon persuade them to let me in.
“What you’re sayin’ is,” Ralph said slowly, “Mrs. Simmons Jones was murdered.”
“Yes.”
“Oh my stars!” Myra exclaimed.
Ralph unselfconsciously put his big hand on his wife’s knee.
“I am here in Boston with my business partner, Michael Archer Kossoff. I of course am staying at the house on Beacon Street, while Michael has taken a suite at the Vendome. He and I were planning to be married here in Boston so that Father could be present, but his sudden death, and now Augusta’s murder, have—well, the thing is I don’t know for sure when we’ll be able to have the wedding.
“What it all comes down to right now is a situation in which I need help. I’m living in Pembroke Jones House alone, except for a maid named Mary Fowey. I doubt you ever met Mary—she’s good at her job but quite young.”
Suddenly I was embarrassed, horribly aware of what enormous presumption I’d had to come here like this, with no notice whatever, just assuming these two people who had always been so wonderful to me would jump at the chance to come back to work and live on Beacon Street. I felt the heat and color climb into my cheeks, and I couldn’t go on.
Myra shook her head and clucked. “Poor lamb.”
That was what she used to say to me when I would fall down and rip the knees out of my cotton stockings, something I did with great regularity until I was about twelve.
I smiled at Myra and decided to go on and say my piece; after all, the worst that could happen was they could say no. And one does not die of embarrassment—though there have been times in such situations when I have certainly wished I might disappear by some means short of death.
“Ralph and Myra, I want you both to know how shocked I was to ring the doorbell at my old house upon my arrival a few weeks ago, and have someone else—someone who was neither of you—come to let me in. I don’t know what the circumstances of your leaving were, whether you left because Augusta asked you to, or whether you simply didn’t want to work at Pembroke Jones House anymore, but what it comes down to is this: I want so very, very much for the two of you to come back. To live at the house again, with complete security, for the rest of your lives. To run the house for me when I’m not there, which could be as much as six months out of any year. And perhaps most important of all, to help me now get everything back to what it once was.”
I did not say “before Augusta,” but that was what I meant and I was sure they both knew it.
I made light, made a joke of something that was not quite true—laughing, I said, “Why, Ralph, I don’t even know how to wind the grandfather clock and make it chime again, so you see how much I need you!”
Ralph and Myra smiled at each other, and then at me.
“She never could stand that clock,” Myra said.
“And he always loved it,” said Ralph, “which in a way you might say was the start of their problems.”
WE TALKED a long time and drank the entire pot of tea. Myra told their story with occasional verbal nudges from Ralph when she ventured too far into the extraneous. It was about what I’d expected: the first year of their marriage, Father and Augusta were in an almost embarrassing state of honeymoon-like bliss. They went on a lot of trips. Father was home a lot, he showered her with presents and so on.
But when he was not there, gradually Augusta’s snappish, selfish nature began to come out with Myra and Ralph. By the second year of the marriage, Augusta had insisted they move back up to the little rooms on the fourth floor, and that they stay out of sight as much as possible, use the back stairs, and so on.
“Seemed like,” Myra said, hitting the nail on the head I was sure, “she wanted your father all to herself. Anybody else around was too much, anybody at all.”
“When she convinced Mr. Leonard to close the stables, get rid of the horses and the carriage, well then that was half my job right there, wasn’t it?” said Ralph.
“What was the reason for that, do you know?” I asked, because it truly baffled me.
“Pure spite,” said Myra, “because neither of the two horses liked her.”
“Animals ’r like that,” Ralph said, “they sense things about a person, sometimes an animal can see things a person can’t. But anyway that wasn’t the whole there was to it.”
“Tell her the rest,” Myra urged her husband.
“I’m gettin’ to it,” he said in his patient way. “The other thing was, Augusta, she wanted a new carriage, somethin’ spiffier, and your dad—well you know how he was, Caroline.”
I didn’t correct him, because I was thinking back to my youth when I’d been just Caroline, and I knew exactly what Ralph meant. I said, “He liked the old better than the new, and he’d insist it be kept in good condition, no matter whether the old item was the grandfather clock or a pair of leather shoes. Father would buy the very best there was and then expect to be using it for the next hundred years. Especially something big, like a carriage.”
“You betcha.” Ralph nodded.
“But not Miss Augusta; she was the exact opposite, always a-wantin’ new things. She’d figured out,” Myra said, “she could have the very latest carriage and the handsomest horses to go around town in and show herself off, if she was to use hiring stables and always insist on their best.”
“So she made a fuss,” I guessed. I could see, and hear, her doing it. Just as I could see in my mind those magnificent black horses with the plumes on their heads, pulling her carriage for Father’s funeral. No wonder I, using that same hiring stable, got such prompt service.
“Well,” said Ralph, “it was the way she did it, made us quit. You tell her, Myra, I ain’t got the heart for it.”
Myra’s kind eyes filled up with tears. “Mrs. Augusta said one of the horses bit her. She had a big bruise on her arm, with teeth marks—the skin weren’t broken but the marks were there—and she said the gray horse, what was his name, Ralph?”
“Bill.”
The other one was named Bob, I remembered now; Bill was the gray and Bob was a chestnut.
“She said Bill bit her, but he never did such a thing. So help me God, I don’t know how she got them marks on her but that horse didn’t do it. Your father, he believed that evil woman just the same as he always believed her—begging your pardon, Caroline, I mean Fremont, but I swear she could be evil—and Mr. Leonard told Ralph he had to put the horse down.”
“Yep,” Ralph confirmed, nodding somberly. “Perfectly healthy horse he was too.”
“Oh, no!” I gasped, then covered my mouth with the back of my hand.
Somehow to hurt an innocent animal seems almost worse than to do something similar to a human being—I suppose because we humans can usually fight back.
I added inadequately, “I’m so sorry.”
“We said to each other, didn’t we, Ralph, we was glad you wasn’t there to see it. That was when we decided to leave. Much as we didn’t like to go off after all those years and leave Mr. Leonard … well, he had her didn’t he, and she was what he wanted.”
“Yep.” Ralph first nodded, but then he slowly, sadly, shook his head.
I wondered if my father had continued to want Augusta all the way to the very end. I wondered if infatuation—I refused to call it love—could be that blind; and in a way, I hoped it could, because otherwise Father must have died an unhappy man.
IT TOOK very little persuasion for the Porters to say yes to my offer. Of course, Ralph had another job now where he would have to give two weeks’ notice, but Myra wasn’t working. She could move in right away at Beacon Street, and so could Ralph sleep there at night. They understood both my not wanting to be alone and my concern that no gossip be started about me and Michael. In fact, they said they would come that very evening to spend the night, and would start to bring over their things the next day. Together we would restore their former quarters in the back of the third floor.
The sun was setting as my hired carriage crossed the Harvard Bridge going back the other way; its declining light made a golden wash across the mostly frozen surface of the Charles River. In mid-bridge, when for a few moments I could look straight down, I could see cracks in the ice and the river’s waters moving beneath. Spring was coming soon.
I myself felt hopeful for the first time in what seemed like a long while; I was returning to Beacon Street with a sense of accomplishment. One wrong had been set right, at least: the Porters were coming back where they belonged. It was only one thing, a small step, but in the right direction.