“He’s an odd one,” Prudence commented after Amos had left. “There are times I can’t be sure I’ve actually talked to him when my notes tell me that I have.”
“He’s one of the best in the business,” Geoffrey told her. “But don’t try to figure him out. It won’t work.”
He bent over the table, shuffling the lists like a card shark practicing the layout of a hand. “I see parallels, but there are also instances when Lena wore the necklace and it seems not to have been tampered with. If we’re looking at Carpenter’s notations and Canfield’s debt payoffs to provide the clues we want.”
“Why don’t I put it all on a single calendar?” Josiah suggested. He firmly believed that compiling information in the correct format was the real secret to good detection. He’d lately begun constructing elaborate calendars with entries made in various colors of ink. The firm’s appointment book had become a multihued wonder.
“If you think that will help,” Prudence agreed. “Lena has finally consented to let me visit with Morgan. I’m on my way there now. She won’t object if you come, too, Geoffrey.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to get in your way.”
“If I sense that Morgan doesn’t want to talk about his bad habits in front of me, I’ll excuse myself so you can continue the conversation alone with him. He may feel more comfortable if a man asks that type of question. I can use the time to encourage Lena to tell me about how her son and his stepfather have gotten along all these years. It’s another piece of that puzzle you’re always talking about putting together.”
They heard Josiah humming contently behind them as they left the office.
* * *
Morgan looked better than he had at Aubrey’s bedside, but no one could mistake him for anything but an invalid. His skin had the thin, flaccid look of a very old man, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands and lips trembled spasmodically. Lena had seen to it that her son was propped up in a pillowed armchair because it wouldn’t do for him to receive a female visitor while he lay in his bed. A fire blazed in the hearth and heavy drapes had been drawn across the windows. The room was as hot and stifling as a New York summer.
Prudence had written a note after Aubrey’s funeral, doing her best to remember details of the service that might have comforted Morgan. He hadn’t answered, and now she knew why. No way in the world those quivering fingers could clasp a pen firmly enough to form the letters of a comprehensible sentence.
The tricky part about this visit would be conveying William’s offer of treatment at the Swiss clinic. And its terms. Morgan would have to confess guilt and the humiliation of admitting that he could no longer control his own actions. Drunkenness. Cards and roulette. A spectacular failure at the much lauded Keeley Institute. And perhaps persuading his vulnerable friend into criminal activity. Prudence wondered whether any small, valuable, easily pawned items had gone missing from the Canfield household.
“I didn’t do it,” Morgan said, without preamble. “I know William thinks I did, and he’s tried to convince Mother that I might be guilty, but I’m not and I didn’t.” Exhausted by the vehemence of his denial, he sank back against the pillows, panting like a dog after a run.
“No one is accusing you,” Prudence said, though she and Geoffrey had discussed the possibility. Echoes of the arguments against Morgan’s innocence still rang in her head.
“We have the records of your wins and losses at the Mint,” Geoffrey said.
“I thought those were confidential,” Morgan protested.
“Anything can be bought. You should know that. It’s how investors get the tips that make them overnight millionaires.”
“My stepfather will tell you I’m as bad at managing money as I am at gambling.” Morgan bit his lower lip until a drop of blood appeared.
“You didn’t always lose,” Prudence reminded him. “You paid off substantial sums from time to time. The funds had to come from somewhere.” She was hoping he would recount a tale of triumph on the Stock Exchange or a winning bet he hadn’t then immediately wagered away, but he said nothing. “We do need to know if you and Aubrey gambled anywhere but at the Mint.”
“Not recently. Neither one of us could play without being able to run a tab. I can’t speak for Aubrey, but the only reason I was welcome at the Mint was because I had a history of paying off my losses there. I can’t say the same for the other casinos.”
“Morgan, do you still owe money around town?” Prudence asked.
“I told you I didn’t take those diamonds. There’s no still about it. I haven’t been completely out of debt since my second year at Harvard.”
“What happened after you came back from the Keeley Institute?” Geoffrey asked.
Prudence looked at him gratefully. She could feel tears tickling at the back of her throat. Morgan’s hopelessness was the saddest thing she had ever encountered.
“I was cured,” Morgan said. “That’s what I was told, and I believed it.”
“Until . . . ?”
“Until I took that first drink to celebrate my new sobriety.”
“Surely you knew what would happen?” Prudence asked. She was fast progressing from compassionate sorrow to frustrated anger.
“We were told never to drink again. But I thought that if I was cured, it meant I was like everybody else. I could partake or not, as I chose. It turned out I was wrong. There is no choice for people like me. And there is no cure, either. I already told you that, Prudence.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “There has to be something you can do, some regimen you can follow.” Was now the moment to bring up the clinic in Switzerland?
“Abstinence,” Geoffrey said, cutting her off before she could mention William’s plan for his stepson. “That’s the only way. Have you thought about going back to the Keeley Institute for a second course of treatment?”
“Aubrey did that. Took the bichloride of gold shots again. Drank the tonics. Gained twenty pounds and started feeling like the athlete he used to be. It didn’t last once he was back in New York. He was a lush with an unquenchable thirst. So am I. The most I can hope for is that it kills me quickly.”
* * *
“William has always been kind to Morgan,” Lena told Prudence over the inevitable cups of tea that were all ladies were permitted to drink in the afternoon.
Prudence hadn’t been able to remain any longer in Morgan’s room. She’d left it to Geoffrey to continue questioning him, patted away the dampness in her eyes as she descended the curved staircase to the ground floor, and joined Lena in the parlor.
“Has your husband talked to you about a Swiss clinic?” she asked.
“Morgan won’t go,” Lena replied. “Not if he has to confess to something he didn’t do. He doesn’t lie. He never has. Not even as a child. He’s as candid and forthright as they come.”
She was blind, Prudence thought. Deliberately blind. Her son drank himself into stupors and gambled away money he didn’t have. That didn’t happen without a belly full of lies and half-truths.
“I can attest to that,” Everett Rinehart said as he bent over Lena to kiss her lightly on the cheek. He’d come in so quietly that neither of the women had heard him open the parlor door. “I was hoping I wouldn’t be too late to catch you, Miss MacKenzie. Morgan told me this morning you would be coming by.”
“Is William with you?” Lena asked. She touched the spot on her cheek where Everett’s lips had brushed her skin.
To Prudence it looked as though she were wiping away an annoying stain.
“He’s still at the office. I’ve finished the real work for the day. Just a few things left that can easily be done tomorrow morning.”
“It’s not like you to leave this early.”
He smiled briefly at his uncle’s wife, then turned his attention to Prudence.
“I wanted you to know that I intend to try to persuade Morgan to accept my uncle’s offer,” Everett said, checking the time on his gold pocket watch before sittin
g down. “It might be just the thing to set his feet on the road to recovery. Far enough away so he won’t have the kind of visitors who would undermine his healing. It also makes sense for his sojourn there to be long enough to do some real good.”
“What harmful visitors did you have in mind, Mr. Rinehart?” Prudence asked.
“Not to speak ill of the dead, but Aubrey Canfield was the type of person Morgan should have been avoiding.”
“I had the impression the late Mr. Canfield was a mutual friend.”
“He was, although closer to Morgan than to me. Our connection was a shared love of sailing. Aubrey and Morgan had much more than that in common.” Everett stopped just shy of naming them both degenerate wastrels and partners in crime.
“Are you aware that your uncle’s Swiss clinic comes with conditions?” Prudence asked, glancing at Lena to judge her reaction.
“I am. I don’t find them unreasonable.”
“He says he didn’t take the diamonds, Everett,” Lena blurted, those two red spots Prudence had seen before blossoming on her cheeks. “I believe him.”
“Drunkards have blackouts, Aunt Lena,” Everett said soothingly. “He may not remember some or even much of what he’s done in the past few months.”
“I’ll never believe he would steal from his own mother,” Lena said firmly. “Never. No matter what proof you think you’ve dug up, Prudence. I know my son. He doesn’t lie and he’s not a thief.”
“Perhaps it would be enough if he were to admit that he might have taken the diamonds during one of his blackouts. He doesn’t have to remember the details of how and when. Maybe Uncle William would be satisfied with that. I can talk to him, if you like,” Everett offered.
Prudence watched as Lena weighed what must have seemed to her like a contradiction of the innocence she was so staunchly declaring. If Morgan admitted that he might have tampered with his mother’s necklace, but couldn’t actually remember doing so, wasn’t that a de facto acceptance of guilt? And if she urged him to make that statement, wasn’t she acknowledging lack of belief in the basic honesty she’d sworn had been a part of his character since childhood?
Possibility has a way of turning into probability when logic takes a crooked turn. Prudence’s father had often said that on the nights they’d discussed case law together after dinner. When, against all evidence to the contrary, they’d both allowed themselves to believe that Prudence might one day find herself arguing at the bar. Perhaps even in the courtroom over which he presided. She had the feeling that Lena had been arguing Morgan’s case before the jury of a mother’s heart and soul.
“You can speak to your uncle William if you think it will do any good,” Lena finally said. “But I won’t advise Morgan to use the notion of blackouts as a pretext to concede guilt for something I know he is incapable of doing.”
She looked exhausted, Prudence thought, as though she’d wrestled with the devil himself.
“I’ll go back to the office,” Everett said, bowing to both ladies. “Sometimes Uncle William is more amenable to persuasion there than he is at home.”
“What did he mean by that?” Prudence asked, when the parlor door had closed behind her client’s nephew. “I thought you told me that William has always been kind to Morgan. In fact, I think those were your very words.”
“There have been some problems,” Lena admitted reluctantly.
“Will you tell me about them?”
“Before Morgan went to Chicago, to the Keeley Institute, he made some mistakes at work. Neglected to follow some clients’ instructions regarding the sale of stocks when they reached a particular high. As a result, when the stocks went down again, the clients had lost the chance to make a sizable profit. William covered the losses with his own money and the clients were none the wiser. But he was furious at Morgan. That’s when he gave him the ultimatum. He had to turn his life around or William would expel him from the firm.”
“And out of this house?”
Lena nodded. “He hasn’t said it in so many words, but the implication is clear. If Morgan isn’t welcome in William’s business, he shouldn’t expect to make his home with him.”
“What was Morgan’s reaction after the confrontation? I assume words were exchanged,” Prudence said.
“You could hear the shouting all the way upstairs in my bedroom.” Lena raised a hand to one ear as if the acrimonious voices still reverberated there. “He seemed to pull himself together for a while. Left as soon as he could for the Keeley Institute. The house was so quiet after he’d gone. He came home looking better than I’d seen him in years. None of that awful yellow pallor or the sounds of retching in the night. He renewed his subscription at the athletic club where Everett is also a member. They boxed together. But it wasn’t more than a month or so before it all fell apart. The drinking. Staying out late. Not showing up at the office until after lunchtime.”
“Morgan says he thinks he’s incurable.”
“I can’t allow myself to believe that,” Lena said. “It would be the loss of all hope.”
“Tell me about Morgan and his stepfather in the years after you first married,” Prudence urged.
Lena’s face brightened. “They were good times. The best, I suppose. We anticipated adding to our family. William thought of Morgan as the first of many children we would have together.”
“Yet he didn’t formally adopt him.”
“No, he didn’t. In the beginning he said it was because he wanted Morgan to retain his father’s name, as a way of not forgetting him. That made sense to me, and I was grateful for the honor William was paying my first husband.”
“And then?”
“As time passed and I did not conceive, it became more important to me that William accept Morgan as his true son. Not merely someone I had brought with me into his life and for whom he was obliged to show affection and consideration.”
“Were you afraid, Lena?” It was the question that lay at the heart of the De Vries marriage. “Did you think William would find some pretext for divorcing you if you failed to give him a child?”
The tiny cry that forced its way through Lena’s tightly clamped lips was like the jolt of an arrow shot through her heart. “I knew why he married me, you see. I’ve never blinded myself to that.”
“Because you had already proved your ability to carry a child?”
“There was mutual attraction, even love, but I was always aware that my greatest value lay in not being an unknown quantity.”
“I’m so sorry,” Prudence said. It was a side to marriage and womanhood that was rarely spoken of, this devaluation of the female of the species who could not bear young. Barren, she was called. A word that connoted cold, empty, windswept ground where nothing would grow.
“I didn’t mind so much for myself,” Lena said, “but for my son it was devastating. He adored William, you see. And he didn’t understand when his stepfather began to draw away from him, when the silences between them increased and lengthened. Every time William looked at Morgan, a frown creased his forehead and he seemed plainly disappointed that this creature was the only child he would ever be able to claim. Sometimes a new acquaintance would assume that Morgan’s last name was De Vries. Whenever that happened William made a point of correcting the mistake. By the time he left for Harvard, Morgan was in no doubt that he had been tried and found wanting.” Lena’s voice trembled and tears stood in her eyes. “That’s when the drinking really began.”
“What gave him away?”
“Bay rum cologne never quite manages to mask the lingering odor of alcohol,” Lena explained. “The moment Morgan leaned over to kiss me hello after those first few months in Cambridge, I knew what it was. My brother had struggled with drink; he died young, of a pneumonia he might have survived had his body been strong enough to combat the fever.”
“Does William know? About your brother’s affliction?” There was probably no scientific proof, but it was widely believed that tendencies to madness and drunken
ness ran in families, making their presence known generation after generation.
“It was something we didn’t talk about, a hidden shame I was foolish enough to believe had perished with my brother. I should have known better.”
“But the animosity between William and Morgan never broke out into real quarreling,” Prudence continued, pressing as hard as she dared.
“Only recently, after the incident I told you about. And then again when Morgan failed the Keeley Cure. My husband has come to the end of his rope. He will cut Morgan off, and this time I won’t be able to do anything about it.”
“There was mention of an inheritance he received from his father,” Prudence said.
“I don’t know how much is left,” Lena said. “It was a substantial amount to begin with, but I fear it’s been much depleted.”
“Enough to drive Morgan into penury if William disowns him?”
“I doubt things have gone to that extreme.” Lena’s certainty was the confidence born of never having had to question how a lavish lifestyle was maintained or whether it might someday be in jeopardy.
Money was a topic too vulgar to be discussed in a lady’s parlor.
Lena rose to her feet as Geoffrey was shown into the room.
No one commented on whether Morgan was doing better. On his prospects for the future.
Nobody wanted to admit that he might not have one.
CHAPTER 17
“If we accept Morgan’s claim that he and Aubrey rarely gambled anywhere but the Mint during the past year or so, we should be able to find out what we need to know from these four lists alone,” Prudence said. She had unobtrusively pushed aside Josiah’s colorful calendar. The miniscule handwriting in four different shades of ink made her eyes ache when she tried to decipher it.
“Start with last season’s Assembly Balls,” Geoffrey instructed.
“I’m sure you’ll think I’m a bluestocking for this, Geoffrey,” Prudence said, as she picked up Amelia Taylor’s list, “but I’m delighted not to attend all of these balls and cotillions and dinner parties. I’m very happy not to have to worry about ball gowns and jewels and whether my head will ever stop aching from all the pins holding my hair up.”
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