A Pinchbeck Bride (11 page)

So he confirmed what Zack’s widow had claimed, that Genevieve had
pursued him
. Not the other way around.

“Whose baby was she carrying?”

“God only knows. It could have been anyone’s. The way she acted. When her mother got sick, she just lost it. She was, like, ‘Chances are, I’ve got the gene for breast cancer. I could be dead at forty just like her.’” He took my empty glass and set it by his on the counter. “I was, like, ‘You’re half your father’s gene pool, your grandmother, Mrs. Torrance, she’s still going strong and she’s seventy-something.’”

“Her grandmother?”

“Mrs. Torrance. Her mother’s mother. She lives on Cape Ann.”

His eyes met mine. Was there sexual yearning there? No, but there was more intelligence than I’d given him credit for. “Are you a private investigator?” he asked softly.

“No, Fletcher, I swear I’m not. I just happened to become involved with Mingo House. Rudy Schmitz asked me to become a trustee. Because I’m a history buff.”

“Rudy, that horndog.” Fletcher sniggered. “You know Larry Courson…wasn’t the greatest husband in the world. He used to rough up his wife, Genevieve’s mom. He’s a very perfectionistic guy. Exacting. It’s what makes him such an awesome photographer. Getting the perfect shot at the exact right moment. But he can be difficult.”

“You’re saying he has a dark side.”

“He and Mrs. Torrance fought like cats and dogs.”

Fletcher hadn’t taken down all of his decorations. On the door, partially ajar, leading to the stairs to what I assumed was the floor below, he had taped a poster from the Museum of Fine Arts, that famous Renoir of the man in the straw hat dancing with the sensuous woman in the red bonnet. Like the women of that day, she was plump by our standards.

“Mrs. Torrance lives in Rockport.”

“Really? I’m from Gloucester. Where does she live?”

“Near Halibut Point.”

“She’s kind of crazy. She’s a Communist. She used to run this leftist bookstore in Cambridge.”

“Was she at Genevieve’s funeral? You never mentioned her.”

“Mrs. Torrance won’t be in the same room with Larry Courson. If she could blame him for Mrs. Courson’s breast cancer, she would.” He opened the kitchen cabinet and removed a Fiesta ware mixing bowl and two Super Bowl coffee mugs.

I decided to be bold, risk alienating him: “Why do you shave your chest?”

“It’s not my choice.”

That was an odd answer. “Whose was it?”

“Long story.” He removed more things from the kitchen cabinets: boxes of herb tea, a bottle of Omega 3 capsules, Pop Tarts, curry powder. Then, surprisingly, from a higher shelf, he retrieved six or seven copper gelatin molds.

“You’ve got as many molds as Bryce Rossi.”

“They were just for decoration.…What were you doing in his kitchen?”

“Escorting him home from dinner. He’s gotten hammered—” I realized the awkwardness of my adjective too late. “He wanted to talk about Genevieve. He’d told me she was carrying his child. When she was murdered.”

Fletcher lugged a browning spider plant and two small phallic cactuses from the windowsill to the trash. “Genevieve had bad taste in men.”

“So how come you two never…?”

“We grew up together. We were like siblings.”

“Always?”

“I could never have thought of her that way, it would have creeped me out. It would have felt incestuous.”

“Where are you moving?”

“I’d…rather not say…This place is expensive. These guys have expensive tastes. Did you see that Mercedes Trent was driving? You’ve seen the heap I have.” He twisted old newspapers around the mixing bowl and tucked it into a cardboard box.

“Do you think I’m dangerous?” I laughed. It was a joke, but no humor registered in his expression.

“If I can do anything to help, feel free to call me.” He scribbled his cell phone number on a junk mail return envelope and gave it to me. “Please excuse me. I have tons to do.”

Fletcher Coombs was odd all right, a man of few words and fewer social skills. Being with him required “having personality for two.” He had lied before, telling Mr. Courson the police had suspects in mind. He now claimed his friendship with Genevieve predated their years at St. Monica’s. But he had given me a new source, accidentally, apparently—Genevieve’s grandmother, whose telephone number and address were available online.

Mrs. “G Torrance,” as the directory called her, had no driveway, only an unpaved path winding through woods conquered by green coils of cat briar. I felt like the prince, slicing through thorns to reach Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Mrs. Torrance’s house was burr-brown, seventeenth-century, with small, diamond-paned windows and a sagging roof verdant with moss. Time had warped its contours as it had settled unevenly into the ground.

No bell, no knocker greeted me at the door; the house itself seemed to shun visitors. Then, from behind me, a voice asked, “What do you want?”

It was a gray-haired woman, with the austere beauty of an elder Puritan, with the cheekbones of a model and the wardrobe of Priscilla Alden, a long dress of unbleached cotton the color of moths’ wings, without ornamentation of any kind. Her shoes, however, were the kind young people favor, orange work boots from an Army and Navy store. She cradled a bouquet of tiger lilies and a pair of yellow-handled garden shears. “You’re not from the media, I hope.”

“I’m a friend of Genevieve’s.”

“God, I thought they’d found me.” She looked me up and down like a tailor judging the fit of a suit. “This Victorian Girl nonsense. Summing up Genevieve as though she’s the Black Dahlia. It’s revolting.”

“I work at Mingo House. I was asked to be a trustee this spring. Before all of this happened. Genevieve of course was a docent. She was assigned to orient me. She was so enthusiastic about history. She remembered being taken to Mingo House on her tenth birthday. The same day her mother first took her on the swan boats.”

Mrs. Torrance pinched a shriveled blossom from a stem of otherwise flawless lilies. “Carol had so many bad ideas.” Mrs. Torrance resembled Genevieve in the intensity of her eyes and the square heft of her jaw, but her nose was less pointed, more restrained. Her skin bore few wrinkles; she must have evaded sun long before it was recommended. “You might as well come in.”

The interior of the house was scrubbed and stark. The wide-boarded floors, honey-gold, tilted slightly, throwing me off-balance here and there. The low ceilings were of hand-hewn timber and ancient plaster, and the few tables and chairs had been crafted with simplicity—which was why the walls provoked such a reaction: they were red with posters from the Russian Revolution, of Bolshevik sharpshooters in red caps and jackets, of a giant skeleton swinging a bloody scythe, running through the streets of St. Petersburg…

“From my bookstore. I had a bookstore in Cambridge. In Central Square. In the days before espresso bars.” She arranged the lilies in an earthenware vase with a glaze that looked wet like slip. The room lacked modern appliances—no television, radio, computer. Mrs. Torrance seemed to read my thoughts. “I don’t live in a museum. I’m not held hostage by the past. Don’t think I’m some sort of Luddite. I have all of my electronics in my office, upstairs…Why did you come here, Mr….?”

“Mark Winslow.”

She kept her hands clasped, wouldn’t shake mine. “I’m Grace.”

What she said next came as a shock.

“Grace Mingo.”

It wasn’t meant to shock me, I could tell; she was being matter-of-fact. But it shocked me just the same, to hear that “extinct” name applied to a living person. “Mingo, like the house?”

“It was my mother’s maiden name. I sometimes use it because, well, we have a ‘tradition’ in our family—of marrying bad men.”

I trailed her into the kitchen, which was as high-tech as Rudy’s. “Why did you come here, Mr. Winslow? Out of curiosity? Out of altruism? Or are you up to something more sinister?” She poured two black coffees into matching clay mugs, and didn’t offer me sugar or cream. “I suppose those are unfair questions. I can tell you something, something I always knew, that that house on Beacon Street, that mausoleum, is cursed, unclean, defiled. It was built with blood money, built on death. Corinth Mingo was a war profiteer. He was no different from the house of Krupp. Do you know the Krupps, Mr. Winslow? The German dynasty which armed Hitler and the Kaiser? That developed the famous gun, Big Bertha. They used slave labor in their factories, under the Nazis.”

The coffee seared my tongue, but she drank it without flinching. “You can’t equate arming our Union troops with arming the Wehrmacht.”

For an instant, she glowed, seemed younger, almost pert. “I can do anything I want. I always have.”

That, I believed. “But houses don’t kill people. Neither do surnames. And you’re using the Mingo surname by choice.”

“It’s the lesser of two evils. My husband Bill, was abusive. He did wonderful things with his hands. Made all of this furniture, for example. And he did terrible things with his hands. Breaking my collarbone and two ribs. And Carol married a man just like her father. Worse, actually. Bill didn’t touch little girls. Genevieve—she picked the worst of all, didn’t she?” She had her grand-daughter’s ability to intimidate. She had a presence. “Bryce Rossi made my skin crawl.”

“You knew Bryce Rossi?”

“Well, of course. Genevieve brought him here all the time. They spent the weekend once. So Bryce could pick through our family papers, our Bible and some letters my great-great grandfather wrote to his crazy cousin, Corinth Mingo, Corinth One, as they called him. Like a monarch, nauseating. Corinth returned them, when the two of them stopped speaking.”

A long, pallid scar traversed her shoulder. Perhaps the result of abuse.

“You see, my branch of the family became Quakers. Cleanth warned Corinth his blood money would do him in, that it was venomous, drinking from a poisoned well. First, Zephyrus, Cornith’s nephew, was killed at Antietam, shot through the heart by a bullet from the family factory. Oh, yes, they saw it was a Mingo bullet when the surgeon extracted it.

“Then, later, the triplets died. In that horrible house. And do you know why? They had recovered from their diphtheria. They just had heavy colds. They died because the maid forgot to give them their medicine. Because the maid was busy helping Clara conduct one of her séances, to atone for the deaths the Mingo armaments had caused. See? It’s all connected. Karma, as the Hindus would say. Of the most atrocious kind.

“But Carol, Carol was enamored of it all. Then she got Genevieve enamored too. And look what happened. This history attracted Bryce Rossi and he ended up killing her. Strangling her, brutally. Because she refused to marry him. A silly, epicene man. So Larry, for once, did something right—and slaughtered him.”

“But do you think Bryce was the father of Genevieve’s child? If he was, why would he kill his own child in the womb?”

“Bryce was after that monstrance. The monstrance of King Charles the First.” She raked her fingers through her long gray hair, seemingly enjoying its strength and texture.

“Isn’t that a legend?”

“Does it matter? If Bryce thought it was real? He was a collector. Collectors are compulsives. He was also a con man. A hopelessly inept one, of course. So obvious. Do you know he once tried to kiss my hand in the ‘continental’ manner? He’d taken a bus tour through Tuscany and thought he’d become Bernard Berenson.”

“Are you afraid of Larry Courson? Now that he’s escaped?”

“I was afraid of him when Carol and Genevieve were alive. Afraid he’d hurt them.” She came to the verge of tears. “But now…” She crossed the kitchen, and, from a hutch displaying a set of white stoneware, produced a handgun. “I’ve been an NRA member for, oh, twenty or more years.”

I nodded.

“Mr. Winslow, I’m old. I’ve lived my life. And I’ve seen too much. Not just the deaths of my daughter and grand-daughter, but the death of civility, idealism, the sense that there could be progress, that humankind could become better and learn from error.” She put the gun back in the hutch, behind a casserole dish in the shape of a roosting hen.

“May I see the papers? The Bible and the letters to Corinth Mingo?”

Not replying, she climbed upstairs. Following was intrusive, so I just waited. When she returned, her arms brimmed with a Bible with disintegrating binding and packets of correspondence bound in brittle string and dried-out elastics, some loose, some in shoe boxes. I scanned through it all at the kitchen table, with her sitting opposite, watching me. Mindful of her presence and of her gun, I found it difficult to concentrate. The Bible contained pages recording births, deaths, and marriages in almost invisible ink. The archive included no photographs, but a plethora of pressed flowers, mostly roses and daisies, and some vellum cards from several funerals, including that of Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta.

Her ancestors’ handwriting was at once elegant and illegible, elongated, made of sweeping letters so broad that three or four words often filled an entire line. These were passionate people: like Queen Victoria they underlined constantly and were frequent users of exclamation points. Eventually, Mrs. Torrance began reading a biography of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and I came to an interesting letter, dated 1875, from Corinth One to his cousin Cleanth, the Quaker ancestor of Mrs. Torrance. Someone other than the author had scrawled, “This was the LAST,” across the top of the first page in pencil.