Death, Diamonds, and Deception

by Rosemary Simpson

  “It was an unfortunate accident,” Prudence said.

  “He should never have gone out on that boat.” Letisha’s brows furrowed and her fingers clenched themselves into fists. “He began every morning with cognac or whiskey in his coffee, and he more or less drank throughout the day. Whiskey and wine at lunch; whiskey and beer in the afternoon; whiskey, wine, and brandy at dinner. He was steady enough on dry land, but the deck of a sailboat is no place for a man with that much alcohol in his blood.”

  “I understand the boom knocked him overboard.”

  “If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. Sooner or later he was bound to end up in the water. His bad luck that it happened in December. Between the pneumonia and the filth he’d swallowed, he didn’t stand a chance. I don’t blame anyone but Aubrey himself for his death. Morgan nearly lost his own life going in after him, and Everett is a skilled sailor, not one to overload a boat or go out when there are gale warnings posted. Aubrey and I grew up sailing together in Newport,” Letisha explained. “It drove my mother crazy because girls aren’t supposed to know how to handle small boats.”

  “I learned to sail off Staten Island,” Prudence confided. “With a fisherman’s daughter and her brothers.” She still missed Nora Kenney, obscenely killed two years before by a madman.

  “Aubrey didn’t have many friends,” Letisha continued. “They began to drop away as the drinking got worse. Morgan hung on, probably because they were two of a kind. And Everett looked out for both of them whenever he could. The others on the boat that morning may have been the only companions he had left. I think my brother had become very lonely.”

  “The De Vries housekeeper said that Aubrey was a frequent guest.” Prudence began to turn the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go.

  “My father grew very hard on him,” Letisha said. “He sent him twice to the Keeley Institute. Each time Aubrey came back, he declared himself cured. And perhaps for a few weeks or a couple of months, he’d stay sober. Then something would set him off, he’d take that first drink, and it was as though he’d never had the tonics and the injections of bichloride of gold. Aubrey preferred staying with Morgan to being called a disgrace to the Canfield name and things much worse than that.”

  “He was well seen to there,” Prudence said. “He even shared the footman turned valet who took care of Morgan and Everett.”

  Letisha’s shoulders froze. The smile on her face hardened into a rigid mask.

  “His name was Leonard Abbott,” Prudence continued, as if she hadn’t noticed Letisha’s reaction. “He hanged himself in the attic. Perhaps Aubrey mentioned the incident.”

  “Why are you asking these questions, Prudence? What are you after?”

  “Information. Answers to the same questions you must have asked yourself. Must still be asking. Your brother, his best friend, and a favored servant who waited on them are all dead. An accident, a tragic mishap, and a suicide. There has to be something linking them together, Letisha. Even coincidence doesn’t explain the timing of their deaths.”

  “Aubrey was crushed by the footman’s suicide,” Letisha said. “He told me over and over again that he could not fathom what had driven him to do it. Morgan was bitter. He blamed himself because Leonard Abbott was part of his stepfather’s household and he’d used him to cover up some of the activities he knew William wouldn’t have approved of.”

  “Abbott placed bets for him? For Morgan’s friends as well?”

  “I suppose you’ll find out anyway,” Letisha said. “It can’t matter very much now, can it? They all gambled, all of that set Morgan and Aubrey hung out with. Except Everett. He was probably the only voice of reason and restraint in the group. But he was rarely with them. Except for the sailing. Most of the time Everett was working or squiring Lorinda Bouwmeester around town. Everyone is expecting an engagement to be announced.”

  “Tell me about the betting.”

  “All I know is what Aubrey owned up to whenever he was desperate for money. I couldn’t give him much, but I always had some pocket change that was better than nothing. The way he talked they mostly used Leonard Abbott to place bets on horses when they couldn’t be at the track themselves. Aubrey rarely won, but when he did, he forgot about all the bad times. It was as if they’d never happened. Fortune had finally smiled in his direction. The Fates were on his side. Every bromide you can think of, Prudence. Then he’d lose. He drank to celebrate when he was victorious and he drank to console himself when he got trounced. It broke my heart.”

  “He consoled himself with Leonard Abbott.” It was as loaded an assertion as Prudence could make, worthy of her aunt Gillian’s frankness.

  Letisha stared at her.

  “It was never a secret below stairs at the De Vries house,” Prudence said, stretching the truth as far as she dared.

  “I don’t know the words for it,” Letisha whispered. “I don’t even know how to talk about it. Aubrey was my brother, and whatever he did or didn’t do had no bearing on the love we shared. We were the only two in this house who truly cared for one another. If being with another man made him happy, then so be it. The only thing I worried about was that Father would find out.”

  Letisha’s erect carriage had melted like candle wax. She sat slumped in her chair as though years of inflexible training in ladylike posture had never taken place. “I don’t need smelling salts,” she said when she saw Prudence open her reticule. “I despise women who loll about with the vapors. I’m stronger than I look.” Her voice was reed thin, but she didn’t try to keep the rancor out of her tone. “Do you have what you came for?”

  “I had to confirm what we suspected,” Prudence said. “I hope you can understand that.”

  “When you say we, you mean you and Mr. Hunter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you enjoy playing at being an inquiry agent, Prudence? Do you like prying into other people’s lives?”

  “That’s not what it’s about, Letisha.”

  “Then what is it? You made it possible for Morgan to remain at my brother’s bedside when anyone could tell he hadn’t the strength to do it alone. Then you presume on that moment to prey on my grief and dig around in Aubrey’s private life for a secret he never meant anyone to discover. What next, Prudence?”

  “No one will ever know, Letisha. Neither Geoffrey nor I will reveal what you’ve told me. I promise you. It won’t appear in any report we write.” She would have liked to leave it there, but she couldn’t. Not if she intended to be honest with the young woman whose trust she had just abused. “But the relationship between Aubrey and Leonard Abbott speaks to motive. That’s why I had to uncover it. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Motive for what? A suicide and a drunken fall off the deck of a sailboat?”

  “No, Letisha. Motive for murder.”

  CHAPTER 24

  What Amos Lang discovered on his visit to the Abbott farm on Long Island confirmed what Prudence had learned from Letisha Canfield.

  “Take your time, Amos,” Geoffrey told the exhausted ex-Pinkerton who had come directly to the Hunter and MacKenzie offices from the train station.

  Prudence summed up the profiles they were building of the three young men whose lives intertwined in the months before their deaths. Two scions of prominent families and the footman who might have been the lover of one of them.

  Amos nodded in agreement as he wolfed down the German pastries and coffee Josiah set in front of him and warmed his feet against the pot of hot coals that normally glowed under the secretary’s desk in the winter. The train had been freezing and he’d leaped aboard without time to buy sandwiches for the return journey.

  “Sisters are more forgiving than other women,” he said, wiping traces of cream and buttery crumbs from his lips. “And fathers can be the cruelest of men.” He flipped open the narrow notebook that slid easily into a breast pocket. Like Geoffrey, he had been well trained in accuracy of recall by Allan Pinkerton. “Leonard’s fat
her disowned him over an incident his sister was reluctant to do more than mention.”

  “This is the sister whose letter we read?” Prudence asked.

  “Sophie,” Amos said. “Older than Leonard by a number of years. She seems to be the daughter chosen by her parents to remain unmarried and on the farm to care for them as they age.”

  “How sad for her.” Prudence imagined a small woman, thin and cowed by a gaunt, domineering father and a heavyset, narrow-lipped mother.

  “In this case, I believe it suits her,” Amos said. “Once Sophie Abbott inherits, she’ll be well situated and independent. She’s careful not to rile either of her parents, but I think that’s only because she has an eye to her future. There isn’t any love on that farm. It’s all duty and obedience to the father. Who, by the way, is not a man I’d want to claim as my progenitor.”

  “You’re certain he’s the reason his son left?” Josiah asked. He rarely did more than take notes during a debriefing, but this dead man’s story seemed to touch him more than the dozens of others he’d heard.

  “The father threw him out with the clothes on his back. Not much more than that. Told him never to darken his door again. Or words to that effect. Sophie didn’t hear from Leonard for several years, not until he’d gone to work for the De Vries family. Then he wrote to tell her he was happy for once, settled.”

  “The letter couldn’t have been sent to the Abbott farm,” Geoffrey commented.

  “It went to General Delivery at the nearest village. The postmistress knew the family,” Amos confirmed. “Sophie sells eggs and garden produce at the street market there every week. She was able to send and pick up communications without her parents being any the wiser. She and Leonard were cautious. They wrote each other no more frequently than once every couple of months. It was enough to exchange basic news and ensure they didn’t lose touch. She never brought the letters back to the farm. She burned them before leaving her market stall.” He touched the spot on his chest where his heart beat. “She told me she memorized each one of them before destroying it.”

  “How long did you have with her?” Prudence asked.

  “Less than an hour. Leonard’s father shut the farmhouse door in my face as soon as I’d told him his son was dead. He didn’t want any details, not even where the body was buried. Sophie was waiting for me where the road leading to the Abbott farm joined the highway. We stood in the shade of a tree and talked. It was obvious from the first that she and Leonard had once been very close and remained so even after he’d been forced to leave.”

  “Everyone needs someone to love,” Prudence remarked, thinking of Letisha and Aubrey Canfield.

  “In the final letter Sophie received from him, Leonard told her that he’d found the one he was meant to spend his life with. There are problems, but we mean to overcome them. She quoted that to me, and asked if I knew what her brother could have meant when he wrote it. I didn’t tell her anything but that we would probably never know. She seemed to accept it. My reading of Sophie Abbott is that she has no illusions about life.”

  “Could Aubrey and Leonard have stolen the diamonds together?” Prudence wondered. “Was that how they were planning to overcome the obstacles standing in their way?”

  “They had opportunity,” Geoffrey speculated. “Abbott as valet on the floor where the family bedrooms are located, Aubrey also there as a frequent overnight guest. If we’re able to check the dates, we may find that some of them overlap with when Lena’s necklace had been removed from the Tiffany vault.”

  “Letisha said that Morgan’s friends often gathered in his suite of rooms before going to a ball or debutante soirée,” Prudence reminded them.

  “Yes, but I question whether Aubrey or Abbott had the expertise to extract a diamond from its setting and replace it with a fake,” Geoffrey said. “It had to be done so carefully that there were no scratch marks and the prongs holding in the diamond didn’t look as if they’d been reset.”

  “Amelia Taylor,” Prudence said. “Lena’s lady’s maid, with the jeweler father who taught her how to care for precious stones.”

  “Means and opportunity,” Josiah chimed in, scribbling away in his incomprehensible Gregg shorthand.

  “Motive?” questioned Geoffrey.

  “It had to be money,” Prudence declared. “She would be aware of the special closeness between Aubrey and Leonard. It’s possible she was ready to blackmail both of them if they didn’t cut her in to what they were planning. Where else would they get the funds to surmount the problems Abbott wrote his sister about? I think they may have been intending to run away together. Stealing and selling Lena’s diamonds was their way of amassing the funds to do it.”

  “Did Morgan know about it?” There were few things Geoffrey enjoyed as much as watching Prudence work through a case with the quick, incisive vitality of a well-trained legal mind.

  “I’m not ready to pronounce on that yet,” she answered. “I’d like to think he wasn’t part of the scheme in any way, not even to ignoring what he might have suspected was going on. But the jury is still out on that point.” She grinned as Geoffrey quietly applauded her conclusion.

  “There’s no one left to testify to his innocence,” Geoffrey mused. “Except Lena. And I think she was too preoccupied with hiding the affair she was having with Jasper Owens to be very aware of what her son might or might not have been up to.”

  “Amelia Taylor could easily have concealed what she and her confederates were doing with the necklace, if that’s what happened,” Prudence said. “A lady’s maid is usually the most trusted servant of any household. She’s at her employer’s side throughout the day, sharing her most intimate moments.”

  “Not all of them,” Geoffrey reminded her, black eyes shining mischievously.

  “You know what I mean,” Prudence chided. “A lady has no secrets from her maid because the maid is in the bedroom and boudoir when the lady isn’t there; she has ready access to her lady’s writing desk and the daily journal she keeps.”

  “Does every lady keep a journal?” Josiah asked curiously.

  “It’s the first lesson a governess drills into her charges,” Prudence answered. “Not until someone else comes along and reads what you’ve written do you realize how dangerous it can be to put your true feelings into words.” She smiled to take the edge off what she’d said. “I didn’t have any pesky brothers or sisters to invade my privacy, but I did have a stepmother.”

  “Then there’s a possibility that Amelia Taylor could have been blackmailing Lena,” Geoffrey said. “That Lena knew about the missing diamonds and was obliged to keep silent about the thefts or be exposed to her husband as an adulteress.”

  “Possible,” Prudence admitted, “but too far-fetched, I think.” She rarely contradicted Geoffrey, but in this instance she was relying on her woman’s intuition. “Lena’s crime has been to give away small pieces of jewelry that could be easily pawned or sold. It may not even be a crime if the jewelry could be proved to belong to her through gifting.”

  “So we take her off the list of suspects?” Josiah inquired, his pencil at the ready to strike through her name.

  “Not yet,” Geoffrey replied. “I’d rather have too many suspects than miss the one guilty party.”

  “Though in this case, we may have multiple crimes committed for different reasons by several guilty parties,” Prudence said.

  “All of them coming out of the woodwork because Lady Rotherton has an exceptionally good eye for an authentic stone,” Geoffrey said. “Which reminds me, has she said anything more about going back to England?”

  “She asked me the other day what I’d done with the Dakota apartment my father bought for my late stepmother,” Prudence said. “I told her it’s been standing empty for over a year now, like the Staten Island house. She said she might make an appointment with the building manager to see it.”

  “If you had no objection?”

  “Aunt Gillian doesn’t consider whether anyone coul
d object to whatever it is she intends to do,” Prudence said. “I imagine she’s looking out over Central Park right now, deciding whether Victoria’s apartment would make a comfortable New York City pied-à-terre.”

  Geoffrey shuddered.

  Josiah wondered if he should order more imported English teas.

  * * *

  “It’s so far-fetched an idea,” Lena said, fingers twitching at the folds of her black silk dress. “Taylor would never do something like that. She’s devoted to me, and she hardly ever leaves the house.”

  “We’re following every thread,” Prudence explained. “Which is what you said you wanted us to do.”

  “I never thought it would lead you to my lady’s maid.”

  “How close was she to Leonard Abbott?” Prudence asked before Lena could decide she didn’t want to have this conversation.

  “Not close at all, as far as I know. Taylor is senior staff and at least fifteen years older than Leonard was. Senior staff tend to keep to themselves. They have a preferred status in the servants’ hall and they guard it jealously. Most of them have worked very hard to rise from the ranks. I can’t imagine any of the five of them doing anything to jeopardize their positions.”

  “Who are the five?”

  “Cook, of course. The housekeeper. Our butler. William’s valet, who is now looking after Everett. And my lady’s maid, Amelia Taylor. Actually, we should probably raise that number to six. The coachman is also senior staff, but not quite of the same status as the indoor servants. I know you and Mr. Hunter have spoken to all of them.”

  “We have. But that was during the period when Mr. De Vries limited our time with members of the household.”

  “I hadn’t realized he’d done that until we were discussing the new investigation,” Lena said. “Why William would hire your firm and then try to limit what he’d allow you to do doesn’t make sense. It’s throwing away good money, and my husband has always been a man whose business deals had to be profitable.”