by KB Inglee
Emily’s brother-in-law William Thaw handed her out of the carriage and lifted down her portmanteau.
Rachel and her daughter, Lottie, were waiting for them on the steps of the porch that curled around two sides of the graceful old house. Nephews Charles and William, now ages fourteen and sixteen, were instructed to carry her luggage up to her room. They obeyed with only the merest protest.
Emily chuckled. “Chaz and Willie have grown so in the last year, Rachel. What are you feeding them?”
“They are insisting on being called by their proper names, no matter how much confusion it causes. What is it about New England families that makes us think it is a good idea to use the same names generation after generation? And it’s a good thing Papa is a grocer or they would eat us out of house and home.”
Rachel held the front door open for her sister-in-law.
“I’m so glad you came.” Rachel kissed Emily and took both her hands. “You look grand! Papa is waiting for you in his study.”
Emily knocked at the closed door and entered her father-in-law’s inner sanctum without invitation.
Mr. Lawrence was more stooped than he had been at her last visit, as though he were carrying a heavy weight. He motioned her into the chair by his desk. “Sit down, Emily. I want to hire you.”
“Not even a ‘how are you? Did you have a nice trip?’” Emily settled into the overstuffed arm chair by the door. “Hire me? Why? You know I will do anything you ask.”
Charles Lawrence, senior, had taken to Emily from the start. Perhaps he had chosen her to fill the rift between her husband and himself that began with Charles’s failure to obtain a degree from Harvard and his choice to be a detective instead of coming home to help run the family business.
He took her two hands in his own with a warm squeeze before he sat down behind the desk. “It seems William has been passing on business secrets to the competitors. I want to know why.”
“You can’t believe that,” she replied. If he truly did, that would explain William’s reluctance to discuss Mr. Lawrence with her on the carriage ride from the train station.
“I don’t want to, but something is going on, and I must know what it is. Old Baker knows things only William and I are privy to, so what else could it be?”
“I thought I left the detective work in Cambridge.” Emily smiled. “But never mind. Tell me the story. Who is finding out what?” Could William become estranged from the old man, as Charles had been?
Relief washed over his face, erasing lines of concern that Emily was sure had not been there last summer. He was in his early seventies, ramrod straight and every bit as handsome, with his white hair, as Charles had been with his dark brown. The reflection of her dead husband in his father was bittersweet.
“You were a good wife to my son. I was glad of that. You have always been kind to me. I had hoped that Charles and I could find some common ground between us, and I think perhaps you were it. Someday you may know how much that has meant to me.”
Mr. Lawrence paused for a moment as though collecting his thoughts. “It’s not the money. It is the principle of the thing. William and I worked hard to put together a very complicated business deal. We would wholesale cheese directly to restaurants in Albany and New York City. We buy from the farmer, arrange for the transportation down the Barge Canal and the river, and sell to the facilities without any other middlemen. It keeps the costs down for the restaurants but doesn’t make a lot of money for us. There are endless contract details. William had worked it out with the farmers and the businesses in the cities. I put together the transportation from the farm to the outlet. I don’t get out much anymore, but the transportation people come to my office regularly on other matters. We were all ready to take the deals to our lawyers to draw up the contracts, and only William and I knew about it. Old Baker copied the whole deal and had the contracts drawn up and out to the farmers before we even got to our lawyers. Three months of work down the drain. William seemed as astonished as I was. Looked genuine enough, but how else could they have found out?”
Old Baker had been a lifelong friend and rival of Charles Lawrence, Senior. They both dealt as agents for produce and marble and anything else they could get their hands on. They stole contracts from each other regularly, and were the first to be invited to each other’s family celebrations. The loss of the contract would not be what bothered Mr. Lawrence, but the loss of trust between himself and William.
“Do you mean that all the farmers, all the transportation people, all the businesses in the city signed contracts with Mr. Baker, even thought they had promised them to you? Is it possible that someone watched the house to see who came and went?”
“Everyone knows who comes and goes. Rutland is a small town in many ways. They could get a lot from watching who came and went, but not the details of the transactions. Each was offered a very slightly better deal. How could they refuse? Baker must have known the amounts, as well as the names of all the people concerned. William went personally to Albany and New York, but Baker has agents there, so he could have acted petty fast once he had the information. He couldn’t get that by watching the house.”
The old man stood and moved to the window. Young Chaz and Willie were in the back yard, calling to each other. “He looks just like my son, you know,” said the old man wistfully, speaking of Chaz.
“Yes, he does,” agreed Emily. “It takes my breath away. Though he is several years younger, he looks almost the same as my Charles the first day I saw him.”
Mr. Lawrence turned away from the window to look into Emily’s face. “He died too young.”
“Yes. He always knew he would. The day he asked for my hand he told my father that if anything happened to him, you would take care of me.”
“Did he? He was sure of that? He was right; I would have. I could have if you had asked. If he were here now, would he work for me?”
“No. He would find out all he could for you, but he would do it because you were his father, not because you were his employer. I will do it for that reason, as well. I cannot bear for a rift to develop between you and William.”
“Don’t mention this to Rachel. She knows nothing of the business. I would not like to burden her with details when she has no need to know. It can have no effect on her one way or the other.”
Emily kept silent. Rachel may know nothing of the business, but she surely knew that her husband and her father, living under the same roof with her, were at odds.
“I will not call this to her attention. I may have to tell her something, since I am a guest in her house, and I may have to give an explanation of my activities. I am certainly not going to do anything until tomorrow. It has been a tiring day, and dinner will be ready in less than an hour. I want to visit with you all first.”
They spent the next half hour in easy conversation, discussing the year that had passed since last they had seen each other.
* * * *
Dinner conversation was strained between William and Papa Lawrence. Rachel kept glancing at Emily, perhaps to see if she noticed any change. Everyone wanted to talk about Emily and life in Cambridge. Her presence gave the family safe topics of conversation for the first time in a while. Willie asked question after question about Harvard until Emily invited him to come for a visit in the fall.
“I will personally show you around and introduce you to the professors who taught your father and your uncle. At least the ones who haven’t died yet.”
“I would like very much to do that,” answered Willie, practically bouncing in his seat. “You live in a boarding house, don’t you? Could I stay there?” he asked.
“Yes, but I might be able to get you a room in The Yard.”
Young Chaz, jealous of the attention his elder brother was getting from the visiting aunt, piped up. “Aunt Emily, have you done any interesting detective work lately?”
“No
thing I can tell you about. It has all been really boring or too confidential to talk about. Would you like to know how I found an address in Michigan? Or the married name of the childhood friend of a local matron? No? I had to find a piece of furniture that had been passed down in a family for three generations. The original owner had neglected to mention to anyone that an important document was attached to the underside of a drawer, and the person who inherited the diary with that information didn’t know where the desk had gone.
“I found the wedding date for a colleague of a friend, so that someone could throw a party for the couple on their fiftieth anniversary. They were off by two years, but gave the party anyway. It all keeps me in the little luxuries and lets me bring presents to my nieces and nephews.”
Lottie looked up at her with a shy smile. “Aunt Emily, you said you would come look at the doll.”
“Yes, Lottie, first thing Monday morning. What else do you have planned for me to do?”
They usually managed a trip somewhere and a picnic during her stay, as well as a time for Emily to bring flowers to Charles’s grave.
After dinner Rachel served lemonade on the porch for the grownups, and in the back yard for the children. William and Emily were seated on rattan chairs waiting for the others to join them when he leaned toward her and spoke quietly.
“I have something I need to ask you. The others will be here soon, but I need help, and don’t have much time to explain. You know I’ve worked with Mr. Lawrence since I graduated from Harvard. Up ’til now it has been a wonderful partnership, but suddenly he seems to have lost trust in me.”
“Do you know why?” asked Emily.
“I’d like you to find out, if you could. You have a way with him, and you are good at finding things out. I’d pay you your regular fee.”
“William, I will look into it, but there will be no fee. You are my family, and this is what I do. You will have to give me more details, however.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “We had a business deal that went wrong and our competitors picked up the contact at a few cents off our price. It was complex and we both had done a lot of work on it. He thinks I let it slip to Baker or his people. I didn’t. I think he may have passed on information without realizing it. He’s an old man, and he forgets things.”
“I’ll bet he hasn’t forgotten a single thing in his whole life,” joked Emily. “We don’t have time to go into it now, but I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow after Rachel and I come back from the cemetery.”
“Here they come now. Don’t let on to Rachel. She doesn’t know, and I wouldn’t want her to think there was anything wrong between me and her father.”
Emily smiled and patted his hand, just as Rachel and her father joined them. Polly, the new maid, was at their heels carrying the tray and glasses.
“You made Willie happy with your invitation,” said Rachel, pouring lemonade for everyone. “Will you actually have him come?”
“Of course. We will have a fine time. Is Chaz interested in Harvard as well?”
“He hasn’t mentioned it yet,” said the proud father, “but he is only fourteen. It is very odd how Rachel knew which of her sons would take after which of us, and named them appropriately. Willie is as like me as Chaz is like his uncle.”
“Then how do you explain Lottie? She isn’t a bit like any of the women in my family. She is most like Emily, who is not even a blood relation.” Mr. Lawrence sounded perfectly serious in his statement, but Emily knew from decades of experience with the man that he was joking.
“That must be why she is my favorite niece,” said Emily. “You know, I believe I am fonder of your children than my own sisters’.”
“They have always been fond of you, as well,” said Papa Lawrence.
“How can it be that our children mean more to you than your own flesh and blood?” asked William, astonished at the revelation.
“Perhaps you resented your sisters for having families when you and Charles had none,” said Rachel sympathetically.
“Yes,” said Emily, surprised at Rachel’s forthright statement, “but I think your children are genuinely nicer.”
* * * *
Sunday morning was bright and clear, warm but not hot. The service at St. Paul’s Universalist Church was conducted by a summer replacement with a droning voice and an odd manner of dropping the end of each sentence.
“I must find out where his home church is and avoid it at all cost,” laughed Emily as the family walked home together.
After dinner, Emily and Rachel gathered armloads of summer flowers for the Lawrence family gravesites, and set off in the carriage to deliver them.
Emily hated the ornate headstone that the family had chosen for Charles’s grave, but it fit well with the rest of the headstones in the plot, so she kept her silence. She wanted to tell Charles everything that had happened in her life over the year since she had last visited his grave, but she could not speak her thoughts with another present. Perhaps she should come back alone later. Why did she have the urge to speak at all? While Charles’s earthly remains may lie here, his soul was elsewhere, watching over her as carefully in death as he had in life.
The stone next to Charles’s was his mother’s. Emily noted the date on it: June 27, 1868. That September Charles left for Harvard and never came back.
When Emily turned away from the grave, Rachel caught her arm.
“Emily, please help me. I don’t know what to do, and I am so frightened.”
“Of course, I will do anything I can. What is it?” Emily took her sister-in-law’s hand.
“It is Papa and William. Something has gone wrong between them. They have been almost silent at meals, and are seldom together any other time. William used to take a walk with Papa every afternoon; they called it a business meeting. They don’t do it anymore.
“They were setting up a complex deal, and they had both worked very hard on it. I think they did it for the fun of doing a deal, since it wasn’t supposed to be very lucrative. It fell through. Maybe that is what has set them against each other.”
Emily squeezed Rachel’s hand. This from a woman who supposedly, knew nothing of the business. How little men really knew of their women.
“Yes, that would explain the coldness I noticed. I will find out what I can for you.”
* * * *
Emily spent the rest of the afternoon collecting all the business details, first prying them out of William and then Mr. Lawrence.
“We always told each other everything,” said William. “He knew who I had seen and how much I had offered each man. We were having a grand time. So many details, and everything had to mesh perfectly. We did it and we were proud of it. Sat on this very porch with the best wine and congratulated ourselves the day we finalized the last contact.”
“But each of the other participants knew what was going on. Couldn’t the Bakers have found out from them?” asked Emily.
“Not without doing all the same work we did. They would have had to visit every farmer, as well as every establishment in New York and Albany.”
* * * *
Emily found Mr. Lawrence going over some papers in his study.
“Was there any time that the two of you ever went over the whole plan at once? Named names, gave amounts out loud, where you might have been overheard?” Emily asked him.
“No. We did it piece by piece. We discussed some of it on our afternoon walks. Some in the study, here. Some at my office or his, in town. I can’t think of anytime we laid it out all at once. Someone would have had to follow us around with paper and pencil. I would have noticed that.”
“Where were the papers kept?”
“Right here, in the safe. Locked up each night. Put them all away after William and I had our little celebration on the porch.” He stopped and frowned. “Wait a minute. That was on a Thursday night. We
toasted all the people involved, locked the papers away in the safe to be taken to the office on Monday. Our lawyer was out of town for the weekend. We thought Monday was plenty of time.”
“Can things you say on the porch be overheard on the street?”
“No. When we started using the porch to discuss work, we made sure it was secure. You can hear from the parlor if the window is open, but it wasn’t. You can’t hide in the bushes in front of the porch because the growth is too thick, and the street is too far away. Someone would have had to be on the porch with us.”
“Under it, perhaps?”
“No way in except for a locked door by the kitchen steps. You could dig your way in, but no one had. Someone would have noticed.”
“How long has Polly worked for you? She wasn’t here last summer.”
“Since just before Christmas. Ask Rachel the details.”
“Does she have access to your study?”
“She dusts and lays the fire every day. I don’t let her near the desk and she doesn’t know the combination to the safe.”
“Do you still go for walks every afternoon?”
“Yes, alone since this happened. William won’t come.”
“Could I join you? I would like to very much.”
“Yes, it would do me a world of good to be seen with a beautiful young woman on my arm.”
“I am neither young nor beautiful, but I would be honored to be on your arm.”
“Good. Three o’clock at my office tomorrow afternoon. Don’t be late.”
She kissed his cheek and went to look for Rachel.
“How long have you had Polly?” asked Emily without preamble.
“Just before Christmas. December seventeenth to be exact. Is it important?”
“I don’t know. I am just asking questions. I haven’t begun to put everything together yet. Tell me about her. Where was she before?”
“Prudence Baker had to cut back on her staff and let her go. I took her on as sort of a favor. She is adequate, but not the best servant I have ever had. I will be glad when she finally marries.”