A Crossworder's Holiday (12 page)

“And if we hang on to our ‘
X marks
THE SPOT' theory, the only X in the puzzle is right here.” Rosco pointed to the X in XRAYS at 48-Down. “And that's nowhere near the Parade route. It would be closer to Seventh and Sansom Streets … Does the book indicate what's at that location?”

Belle flipped pages until she found a stylized city map displaying the various sections of the city, and what each was noted for. “Okay … Antiques Row … The Italian Market … Chinatown … Penn's Landing … Independence Mall … Here! Here it is! Seventh and Sansom—Jewelers' Row.”

Rosco pointed to 1-Down. “BANDITO … ESCAPEE … Tony Starch, the second-story man … The guy's going to knock off a jewelry store while the entire city—and police force—are focused on the Mummers Parade.”

“But which store? I'll bet there are thirty or forty.”

Rosco reached under the nightstand and pulled out the yellow pages. “Okay, we're looking for an address in the seven hundred block of Sansom Street, right?”

Belle nodded.

“Jewelers, jewelers, jewelers,” Rosco murmured as he flipped through the phone book. “This isn't too bad; there are only a couple of pages of listings … Nope, nothing rings a bell.” He flipped the page. “There's a ton of them on Sansom Street … A lot on Eighth Street too—”

Belle was peering over his shoulder. “37-Down; the answer to the clue is TAPERS.” She pointed. “Taper's Diamond Exchange—”

“That's got to be the place.”

“It's at 741 Sansom Street, Suite 308. Obviously it's not a storefront. It must be on the third floor; probably a wholesaler. A wholesaler with a lot of valuable stones.”

Rosco jumped off the bed and grabbed his jacket. “Call Keegan on his cell phone. Tell him I'm on my way to Sansom Street.”

“Maybe you should wait for the police? This sounds a little dangerous.”

He bent down and gave her a kiss. “Don't worry. If this is like any other jewelry section, of any other city, a beat cop is stationed there twenty-four/seven. I'll find him before I do anything stupid.”

“It's the ‘do anything stupid' part that worries me.”

He smiled, said, “I love you. Call Keegan,” and charged out the door.

R
OSCO
covered the four blocks to Jewelers' Row in three minutes. Being a jogger, he wasn't close to being winded. Sansom Street was deserted, every shop closed up tighter than a drum. There were no window shoppers, no casual strollers, no one scurrying about: everyone was at the parade. Even the beat cop Rosco had anticipated encountering was nowhere in sight.

“Okay,” he muttered, “741 … Has to be on the north side …” Rosco seldom carried a gun and he was beginning to question the wisdom of this decision. He started going west, but suddenly saw a glass-paneled door swing open halfway down the block. The number 741, etched in gold leaf, reflected the sunlight. A short man, dressed in a three-piece suit and overcoat, and carrying an attache case, stepped from the doorway.

“Yo!” Rosco called out. “Tony Scorps!”

The man froze in his tracks and turned slowly, making eye contact with Rosco, before dodging off in the opposite direction. Rosco sprinted after him.

As the two approached Eighth Street, the much-sought-after beat cop rounded the corner, well bundled against the cold and bearing a take-out container of coffee, which splattered on the sidewalk as Tony barreled into him. Rosco shouted out the thief's identity—as well as his own; the cop drew his pistol while Tony Starch snarled out an oath and leaped backward, clutching the case against his chest.

“Put the case down,” ordered the cop. His grip tightened on the pistol. “Now!”

Outnumbered, the thief complied—all the time swearing mightily.

The cop simply looked on in silence, then picked up the case and trained his weapon on Rosco and Tony. “Couldn't have done it without ya, Ton',” he said as he began edging his way up the street, leaving Rosco and Tony Starch standing with their hands held high. The officer was halfway around the corner when Keegan and several other FBI agents appeared behind him.

“Bobby Bananas,” Keegan said with a smile. “Or is it just plain Bobby B. now? When did you blow back into Philly? Impersonating an officer, too … nice touch. It'll look even nicer beside your charge of murder one—”

“Hold on, Keegan. I didn't whack Freddie Five—”

“Oh yeah? Then how did you know Tony was pulling this job?”

Bobby's shoulders sagged. “I ain't sayin' nothin' 'til I talk to my lawyer—”

“Uh-huh …‘All things come to he who waits,' Bobby boy.”

A Ghost of Christmas Past

T
HEN
she disappeared … without a trace. The authorities had bloodhounds searching the grounds and village—both Upper and Lower Slaughter. In fact, the surrounding Cotswolds countryside remained under scrutiny for years. Many of the old-timers said they half expected to find her body while digging for turnips in their gardens—”

“Angus!”

“I'm merely citing sources, Judy.”

“That's ‘professor-speak' for quoting unabashed raconteurs and gossips, Belle.” Judith, round and homespun as a sparrow, gazed fondly at her tall and angular husband, then returned to the all-important preparation of dinner for their newly arrived American guests: the task at hand being to dust a layer of grated Parmesan over a terrine of leeks and potatoes covered with an herb-flecked béchamel sauce.

“And that,
madame et monsieur
,” Angus announced as he pointed to the casserole, “is what happens when a Brit like me gets hitched to a Yank. The lowly leek and spud pie goes Continental.”

“‘Continental'?” Judith teased. “Aren't you confusing your geography a wee bit? Or are you referring to the continent of North America?”

“Well, you know what I mean. Cooking becomes ‘cuisine'… à la Brillat-Savarin and all those fancy culinary blokes—”

“Brillat-Savarin's long gone,” his wife laughed. “Nowadays, you need to know the difference between Asian-fusion and—”

“Feta focaccia,” her husband added.

“Not
precisely
the analogy I would have drawn.”

Angus ignored his wife's gibe, instead raising a garnet-colored glass of port. “Cheers! Here's to Belle Graham, crossword editor, ‘egghead,' and valued chum, and here's to our
newest
crony, Rosco, i.e. the doting mister—”

“I don't know about ‘doting,'” Belle rejoined.

“All right then: austere, reticent, cantankerous, contentious—”

“How about just plain old, nice guy?” Rosco chuckled as he returned to the previous topic: the peculiar history of their hosts' home. “What happened to Katlin's husband, Richard—after she vanished?”

Judith answered as she placed the terrine in the oven. “There were rumors that she'd been unfaithful … A gardener named Tom was mentioned … Nothing proven, of course.”

Angus joined his wife's recitation. “He was reputed to be a bit of a rum fellow—”

“That's an ‘odd duck' to us Yanks.” Judith walked to an antique trestle table as she spoke, and began setting places for dinner. Belle joined her, folding napkins and aligning forks and spoons and knives. The two women worked in such silent harmony they might as well have been back in the dorm during their college days—roommates focused on a single task. “What an odd story,” Belle finally said. “Unsettling, too …”

“All these Cotswolds houses have strange tales attached to them,” Judith offered. “It comes with the territory. If a place is four or five hundred years old, it's bound to have witnessed its share of troubling events.”

“Take Minster Lovell Hall,” added Angus. “A ghost of a place now … and probably for good reason—”

“Don't tell that awful ‘Mistletoe Bough' story, Angus. You'll be scaring Belle and Rosco half to death.”

But Angus, a born tale-teller, was not to be stopped. “Picture this … Christmas Eve … Let us say three hundred years ago, or four, or even five … Around here, the dates are haphazard at best when most folks—and I don't mean solely peers of the realm—are the twelfth or thirteenth in a family line …

“So, Christmas Eve with all the attendant hoopla: wassail and song, a home bursting at the seams with visitors, a pig roasting slowly on a spit, minions scurrying about mulling wine and cider … and a little girl vanishes while playing hide-and-seek: ‘sardines' or ‘squashed sardines' being the names of the variants I played as a kid … At any rate, the wee person in question creeps on tiptoe through the ancient manse, her velvet gown rustling across the floor, her stiff lace collar clasping a small throat that scarcely dares draw breath so pleased is she to be allowed to play a game with her elder siblings and cousins—”

“Angus! This is circumstantial.”

He raised a hand requesting silence. “Children are children the world and intervening ages over … I daresay you and Belle would have behaved exactly as the girl in my story.”

Judith sighed but it was the indulgent sound of a woman in love with her husband.

“At length, our festively bedecked young lass finds an ideal place of concealment: an aged and unused oaken chest, cobwebby and rusty-hinged. She struggles to raise the lid, choking back her apprehension at the utter darkness inside, then looks about. No one appears to question her actions or give her hiding place away. So without a sound, she sequesters herself within—never to stir again.”

Belle gasped. Judith said, “Angus. No more. Please.”

But he continued. “The little girl's body was found many, many years later—a small skeleton in the cask in which she'd hidden herself—”

“Wouldn't her parents have turned the place upside down searching for her?” Belle interrupted with some heat.

Angus shrugged. “The answer, I'm afraid, is lost in the centuries. Perhaps, all and sundry hunted in the wrong places: out of doors, or in the cellars, or servants' quarters … I would imagine—and this is purely conjecture, mind you—that the searchers would have assumed she would be able to hear them and cry out …” He shook his head, leaving the rest of the grim prognosis unspoken. “Then there was also the death of Francis Lovell—”

“Angus, stop!”

“No, I'm interested,” said Rosco.

“Ah, the lugubrious brain of an ex-copper,” Angus chortled. “Now, that particular Lovell was a supporter of Lambert Simnel … You Yanks probably haven't heard tell of him, but he was a rather well-known fifteenth-century impostor—and pretender to the throne. A bloke with a questionable past, as they say, who'd been born the son of a tradesman in Oxford, not too far from here as you know … Young Simnel came to the attention of a politically minded priest who decided the handsome youth would do well impersonating a dead prince—rumor being that said royal was
not
demised—”

“Angus!”

He beamed benignly. “My wife doesn't appreciate scholarly digressions … At any rate, following a bloody uprising in which the Royalist forces of King Henry VII won the field, Francis Lovell disappeared, then clandestinely returned to his ancestral home, ensconcing himself in a secret room in order to avoid being arrested as a traitor … However, he concealed himself so successfully that he couldn't escape his own prison and so died of starvation.”

“How awful,” Belle murmured.

“So you see why the history of our tidy home is decidedly staid.”

“What do you mean by saying Tom was a ‘rum fellow'?” Rosco asked after a moment's pause.

“Gypsy eyes,” was Angus's ready response, “and all that sort of hocus-pocus stuff … Rumors, every one of them, quite naturally. And probably aggrandized, i.e. romanticized over the decades. However, I do gather that Tom was a decided loner—which doesn't sit well with your Cotswolds native. One of our neighbors also referred to him as ‘handsome enough to be considered dangerous'—from which you may draw your own conclusions as to the speaker's motive—”

“Or the man's wife's,” Judith threw in.

Angus raised an eyebrow. “Whereas Richard, the spouse in question, was a proper Oxford ‘don' of the old school. My mind conjures up images of a stooped gent wreathed in perpetual pipe tobacco and clad in tweeds that have seen better days. Leather patches at the elbows, ink stains on his fingers, linen none too tidy. Not your ideal Lothario … Richard's specialty was fourteenth-century Venice; he was a well-respected scholar, but was also renowned for a barbed tongue and fearsome temper—”

“Supposedly a crossword fiend, too, Belle,” Judith added.

“That's right,” her husband said. “When he wasn't delving into the notorious Council of Ten and the infamous
Sbirri
—”

“Dinner's ready,” Judith announced, and the two couples took their places at the table, murmuring appreciatively over the fare Judith had provided. “We're planning the traditional goose on Christmas,” Angus announced. “And plum pudding, too.”

“Angus is the ‘bird' man,” added his wife.

“Well, I can certainly use assistance. I'm not what you'd call a culinary virtuoso.”

Wineglasses were raised and clinked. “Happy holidays, all.”

“Christmas in the land of Charles Dickens. What a treat,” Belle said. “And seeing your new home …”

“New to
us
, at any rate,” Angus interjected.

The four sat in momentary silence as they took in the tranquil scene: deeply recessed windows leaded with diamond-shaped panes of glass, an oak-beamed ceiling darkened by decades of candlelight, floorboards worn and polished by the centuries, a fire crackling in a hearth that had once served as cook stove and roasting pit, the chill night air that whispered blackly outside the walls, making the room that much more inviting and companionable.