by S. T. Joshi
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2011 by S. T. Joshi
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
Chapter One
I was racing down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland at breakneck speed to help my friend, Charles Jameson.
We were college buddies—Johns Hopkins, Class of ’23—but I hadn’t seen much of him in the fourteen intervening years. I knew he had become a professor of classics at the University of Maryland at College Park—the author of any number of immensely learned notes on textual problems in Juvenal and the like—but there was something about him that always disturbed me.
In short, Jameson was what one would call a “sad sack.” He cultivated pessimism and a kind of brooding misanthropy as if it were a badge of honor. Being around him actually made you more cheerful—the “there but for the grace of God go I” idea. Many of his college friends felt he was just putting on an act, or that he had read too much of Swift and Byron and found it amusing to dwell on the futility of all effort, the kind of thing that Schopenhauer had summed up in the plangent utterance, “Human life must be some kind of mistake.”
But I sensed that there was something more in Charles’s low spirits than a callow reflection of fashionable philosophers. He had hinted of things in his past, or his family’s past, that had permanently colored his perception of himself and of the world around him. No one could keep up a mere pretense of depression so faithfully or unremittingly.
And now he was in trouble. In short, he was in jail on a suspicion of murder.
It was not surprising to me that the case involved his family. The wild story he blurted out on the ’phone while locked up in the Chestertown police station was little short of fantastic—something to do with a bizarre contest or riddle that had to be solved at his ancestral home, Sarsfield Manor, well outside that centuried town. His incoherence was enough to persuade me that something serious was afoot, for Charles was ordinarily as cynically phlegmatic as the Sphinx.
The short version of the story was that he had gathered at Sarsfield Manor with a number of his other relatives; that his aunt Judith had been killed; and that he was found with his hand gripping an antique dagger that had been buried in her back.
It did not look good for him. His vehement denial of guilt seemed heartfelt, but I was not about to let an old friendship impel me to pervert justice, if he were indeed the culprit. But the case, from what little I knew so far, presented so many oddities that I felt obliged to pursue it. Where it would lead, I had no idea.
As I entered Maryland from the north, crossing from New Jersey to Pennsylvania north of Philadelphia, I had to resist the unconscious tendency to continue down to Baltimore, where I had spent several of the most rewarding and stimulating years of my life. I myself was not a little callow in those years as a wide-eyed student of philosophy, and couldn’t then have imagined that my future career lay as a hardened private investigator. I wanted to look up Henry Mencken, holding forth as he had done for decades from his house on Hollins Street, but suspected that our political differences would dynamite any attempt at cordiality. I was a supporter of FDR, he an increasingly cantankerous opponent, writing screed after screed in an American Mercury that was already in the process of declining from an iconoclastic nose-thumber of the booboisie to a haven of cranky right-wingers.
We would, however, have seen eye-to-eye on one matter. Mencken had bravely spoken out against a lynching that had occurred on the Eastern Shore six years before, something that shocked him and other Marylanders who felt that, in spite of their residence below the Mason-Dixon line, the vicious paranoia of Southern white trash was inconceivable in their blandly wholesome state. It had happened in Salisbury, and some of the details were chillingly gruesome—such as the fact that someone had cut off several toes of the wretched Negro and taken them away as souvenirs.
It was hard to imagine incidents of that sort occurring as I skirted the northern shore of the Chesapeake and headed down to Chestertown, an exquisite colonial village on the north bank of the Chester River and home to the venerable Washington College. It was as if a little corner of England had been uprooted and planted in the New World, where it blended with smiling farms and pleasant country roads to create a flawless picture of civilized placidity. As I entered the town I saw in the distance the imposing brick façade of Sarsfield Manor, which similarly boasted a history stretching to pre-Revolutionary days and was a testament to the wealth and taste of its builders, the four brothers Sarsfield.
During our college days Charles Jameson had once taken me to the village of Chestertown, but had perversely refused to show me the manor or lead me anywhere near it. I had taken offense, suggesting gruffly that there was no need for his pseudo-aristocratic family to look down their noses on a commoner; he had apologized profusely, stating that a certain adolescent trauma had made him regard the place as a kind of nexus of spiritual evil. How that baleful characterization could have harmonized with the stolid Georgian brick of Sarsfield Manor puzzled me at the time; in the years since then, I have learned not to judge books, houses, or people by their covers.
The Chestertown jail was not difficult to find, and the rotund police chief, Frank Powers, was not inclined to make a fuss about my seeing Jameson, even though I had no legal standing to do so. Of course, Charles had hired a lawyer, but, as he presently told me, it was painfully evident that that veteran jurist was inclined to think the worst of his client and to do little but hope to save Charles’s hide in the manner of Clarence Darrow’s prestidigitation in the Leopold and Loeb case thirteen years before. It was for this reason, indeed, that Charles had frantically called me: the case presented such a number of anomalies that only a seasoned private investigator could, in his perhaps excessively optimistic judgment, plunge to the bottom of it.
I greeted Charles warily. He was sitting disconsolately in his cell, hardly aware that the police chief had allowed me entrance into the cell block. When I called out to him, he jumped up in alarm—almost in horror—before relaxing in relief. Through the bars he extended a hand, looking at me with a kind of harried desperation, as if I were some kind of personal savior.
“Joe . . . God, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you!”
As I shook his hand, I couldn’t help thinking that this was presumably the same hand that had gripped a dagger that had killed his aunt.
He noticed my hesitation and dubiety, and after a brief shake withdrew the hand as if it were polluted. For a time we stared at each other without uttering. Then:
“Joe, I’m in a bit of a jam . . . .”
“I can see that,” I said, trying to drain my voice of any suspicion of sarcasm.
“You have to believe I didn’t do it,” he said breathlessly, peering into my eyes as beads of sweat appeared on his brow. “I know what they say . . . I know my cousin saw me holding that weapon in Judith’s back . . . but that was afterwards!” I didn’t understand what that meant. “She was lying there dead, and I was only trying to help. . . . What possible reason could I have for killing her?—I hardly even knew her! They’ll tell you it was because I wanted the money—the money from John Kenneth Sarsfield’s will—that Judith had solved the riddle and that I was trying to shut her up . . . but it’s all—”
I interrupted him sharply: “Charles, slow down. I can’t follow you. You need to tell me the story from the beginning. What brought you and others of your family to Sarsfield Manor? I know you hated the place. Who is John Kenneth Sarsfield, and what’s the business about his will? What’s the riddle you were trying to solve?”
Charles looked at me with an unutterable weariness that almost sent him to the floor of his cheerless cell. Passing
a hand over his face, both to rub away the sweat and, it seemed, to brace himself for the long account he knew he would have to tell, he sat down heavily on his narrow bed and urged me to seat myself in a chair nearby.
For a time he did nothing but stare into his hands. At last he began his tale. And this is what he said:
Chapter Two
The letter was dated July 16, 1937—God, it’s hard to believe that was less than three months ago!—and bore the letterhead of a law firm, Parke, Gordon, and Parke, of which I had a dim but unplaceable recollection. It read something like this:
Professor Charles Jameson
Department of Classics
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
Dear Professor Jameson:
It is not likely that you will recall my identity. I am the administrator of the Estate of the late John Kenneth Sarsfield, who died in the Sheppard–Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson on June 28. The matter which I must put before you is a bit strange—and a little tragic—and I trust that you will bear with me.
Your uncle John Kenneth Sarsfield left a somewhat curious will which may cause you and others some inconvenience for the next month or so. It would be too complicated for me to explain here what is involved; suffice it to say that you will be asked to dwell for a longer or shorter time in Sarsfield Manor outside of Chestertown. The will states that all the adult members of your line inhabit the manor until one of you finds the solution to a riddle in the will. (I am aware of how silly this sounds, but since the will was made before your uncle was deemed mentally unbalanced in 1924, it would be highly cumbersome, and probably illegal, to evade its provisions.) The one who solves the riddle will gain the great majority of your uncle’s assets, valued after death duties at approximately $3,000,000.
The other members of your family who are to be summoned are your aunt Judith Sarsfield Kellar (with her husband, Professor Edward Kellar); their son and your cousin, Jacob Kellar; your uncle George Sarsfield; and your cousin Winthrop Sarsfield (son of George), and his wife, Alice.
If you can meet me at my office in Baltimore at 2:00 on the 25th of this month, I shall explain to all of you the peculiar details of this whole affair.
Again begging your forgiveness for this inconvenience, I am
Cordially yours,
Wilbert Parke
Attorney-at-Law
I read this letter—particularly the second paragraph—twice before I began to understand it. The superficial eventlessness of my life—my routine as a college professor was rarely disrupted by anything more dramatic than an unruly student or a tiresome faculty meeting—made it hard for me to accept that anything like this could be happening to me. I had come to feel that I was not of the world—not, at any rate, of the world of business and law and external affairs. On the third reading of the letter I closed my eyes in weariness and felt a warm lump in my stomach, thinking not only of how much time that ought to be devoted to scholarship would be wasted, but how unpleasant it would be to deal with relatives whom I had, for the most part, not seen since I was a boy but who, as relatives, would expect an intimacy and cordiality I always found it hard to display.
But mingled with my irritation at the disturbance of my schedule was a tension—almost an apprehension—I could not quite diagnose. There was undoubtedly a taint in the Sarsfield line that no amount of wealth or prestige could disguise. I was a Jameson, but I was also a Sarsfield: my mother, Henrietta Sarsfield, had married Franklin Jameson at an early age—was it purely for love, or was it to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Sarsfield Manor? Henrietta, Judith, John Kenneth, and George—four siblings who, in their way, paralleled the earlier quartette of siblings (all brothers) who had built Sarsfield Manor in 1765. And the parallels extended not only to the financial acumen of each group of siblings but to a nameless tragedy whose details and ramifications remained maddeningly unclear.
Around the time of the Revolution, those four brothers Sarsfield—having acquired much wealth in the West Indies trade and settling down in their middle age to an English-style manor house built to their specifications—had all committed suicide one evening after having killed their only servant. The servant, it was said, could have told nasty things if he had been given the chance; but he was not. The brothers Sarsfield had taken to a mild form of occultism by which they had unearthed medieval tracts on the “Black Arts” and followed them with an assiduity that seemed to bespeak no more than a harmless fanaticism; but the rumors of the country people were always there, the more disturbing because they were unsubstantiated. The brothers had become absurdly penurious in their old age, being extravagant only in books and other predilections; hence the sum of money that had sifted down and accumulated to our day. John Kenneth Sarsfield was an antiquarian, and perhaps he had learned things better left unlearned. . . . Madness does not come of its own accord.
On the 25th of July I made the short trip from College Park to Baltimore. I was almost late in reaching the lawyer’s office—largely because I dawdled in Monument Park and didn’t leave enough time for the inevitable searching for his office—but as I arrived there I saw my cousin Winthrop and his wife Alice alighting from their Silver Shadow. Their father, George, whom I only dimly remembered, had become the family patriarch and historian after John Kenneth’s confinement, and Winthrop’s own occupation as a banker ensured his living in the luxury to which he—and particularly his wife—had wished to become accustomed. He had, inevitably, grown a little stouter since I had seen him last.
He welcomed me without a smile; for although he grudgingly respected my achievements as a classical scholar, he could never repress the feeling that I was burrowing away at a dead end and was wasting the best years of my life. Philology, he felt, should be restricted to near-sighted pedants beyond the prime of life. His wife was a vivacious woman somewhat younger than he, whom he had married after a romance surprisingly brief considering his stolidity. I wondered how they got along, for they seemed to have little in common. She seemed to have little but charm, he little but money. Perhaps that was enough for them.
“What do you make of this business?” he asked me after mutual courtesies had been exchanged.
“I’m rather captivated by the idea,” Alice burst out suddenly. “I’ve read a lot of mystery stories, you know . . . .”
I glanced at her blandly and replied to Winthrop as if she had not uttered. “I’m not excited at the prospect of spending a month or more in Sarsfield Manor, especially since no one has lived there for years.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s certainly going to knock a hole in my schedule—I’ll probably have to miss a meeting of the Maryland Bankers Association on August 12, unless we solve this ‘riddle’ by then. And then there’s—”
“But Winthrop, dear,” said his wife as if talking to a child, “don’t forget the three million dollars.”
He looked at her in high disdain. “Do you think that all I care about is money?”
She said nothing, but looked at me and smiled. We entered the lawyer’s office.
We were apparently the last to arrive, for the other four were already seated in the spacious if reserved inner office of Wilbert Parke. I barely recognized old Uncle George, whom I had not seen since I was a teenager and who must have been approaching seventy. His face did not disguise his age, but his physique did; for he was as vigorous and lean as a man of forty, and made Winthrop look pudgy and unathletic indeed.
The other three occupants in the room I knew even less than George. Aunt Judith had not been a welcome guest at most of our family reunions (such, at any rate, as I attended), for rumor told that she was a positive virago. Her sharp-featured countenance suggested shrewdness and cleverness of a calculating sort—the hallmark of the successful businesswoman that she was. Her husband, Edward Kellar, looked like nothing but the typical absent-minded professor; he conformed almost parodically to the image in his snowy and disheveled hair, his pince-nez spectacles, his portly frame, and hi
s look of perpetual confusion. I knew of him as a professor of music who had done some sound if mechanical work on Handel and some of the forgotten English composers of the eighteenth century (he had developed a curious fondness for the work of John Stanley, derivative and academic though it was); but I gathered even then that his studies were conducted less out of scholarly interest than as a tonic for his wretched life. He was doing little scholarship now, and was suffered to teach at Goucher College only out of gratitude for his long and faithful servitude there. They were just waiting for his death.
The son of Judith and Edward was a minor blot upon the family’s escutcheon. Jacob Kellar was in his thirties yet still lived with his parents—it was thought he was somewhat soft in the head, but subsequent conversations with him convinced me that he was hardly lacking in intelligence. His troubles seemed more psychological than intellectual; and a certain wildness in his eyes led me to suspect that he had difficulty maintaining a grip on his emotions and actions. A nervous tic that caused him to tap the arm of his chair rapidly with his index finger was also not encouraging.
Parke entered only moments after Winthrop, Alice, and I had been ushered into the room by some nameless assistant. He was a thin, gaunt, twisted man with abnormally large eyes and a crooked grin that made him look at once sinister and grotesque. He nodded aimlessly at us as he bustled to find the right papers, mumbling to himself in a monotonous drone that was almost soporific. Finally, with a cry, he discovered whatever he was looking for and sat down abruptly—almost more abruptly, it appeared, than he had expected.
“I’m afraid,” he began, “that you are going to find this matter somewhat curious. This is really most irregular, but—as I must have explained to each of you in my letter—there is nothing we can do about it now. In any case, the business will certainly be harmless, if perhaps a bit bothersome. Let me read you the will.”