A Pinchbeck Bride (12 page)

“Do you have any albums? Photographs?” I asked Mrs. Torrance.

“Genevieve had those.”

“Where are they now?”

“Fletcher was going to get them.”

“Fletcher Coombs?”

She straightened the pile of documents. “You know Fletcher?”

“He was at the funeral.”

She bowed her head. “I can’t help it. I have standards. I see right and wrong. But I couldn’t stand to see Larry Courson. Why he beat my daughter when she was having chemotherapy. It was hard enough seeing him at Carol’s…To have to see him…I would have torn him limb from limb. Or…” She smiled in the direction of the hutch.

“I wasn’t sure whether Fletcher met Genevieve at St. Monica’s, in school, or if the families were close, way before that.”

“Oh, they’d known each other their whole lives. I never cared for Fletcher. He came from a very reactionary family. His uncle was active in the John Birch Society. His mother was very liberal, the flower power sort, believe it or not, but she changed when she married Fletcher’s father. So I’ve heard.

“And of course I’d run a Marxist bookstore in Cambridge, so they treated me like Alger Hiss. I remember Francis, Frank, Fletcher’s father, swearing Martin Luther King was a Soviet agent, and that Castro had killed Kennedy—both Kennedys—how’s that for a wacko? And he had very old-fashioned ideas about women, which I’m sure influenced his son.”

Before I could ask my question, she said, “But I always felt sorry for Fletcher.”

“How so?”

“Well, his sisters, he has three sisters, they’re older and all so smart. They went to Brown and Smith and Wellesley. And Fletcher just wasn’t a student. He had ADHD or some learning disability, but he was the lone son, so Frank put all this pressure onto him. That’s why Fletcher went to parochial school, even though Frank loathes Catholics. Frank hoped the discipline would help Fletcher perform.”

“Did Fletcher ever date Genevieve?”

Mrs. Torrance laughed. “No, no, of course not. My grand-daughter was an intelligent young woman. Ambitious, witty, unique. Why she’d dated a Harvard professor, Zack Meecham. She brought him here too. He loved this house. I told him, ‘This isn’t the family manse. Stop drooling. I bought this place.’

“He was fascinated by my family because we’re supposedly descended from regicides. I always took that with a grain of salt. Zack wanted Genevieve to marry him, but he was already saddled with a wife, a frigid control freak. He’d told Genevieve he’d get a divorce and then he’d teach at a university in the Midwest, where Genevieve could earn her doctorate. But Genevieve got tired of him. He was too academic, too stuffy. She wanted to be an independent researcher, unaffiliated with a university.”

“Did Genevieve spend much time here?”

“Of course. She lived here after she moved out of her dorm. Her roommate was kind of a party girl who’d skip classes the whole semester and then pull all-nighters before an exam and ace it. Her roommate spent all her time at fraternities.”

“Fletcher was a big fraternity guy.”

“Well, he always wanted to play football, but I think he was too small, so he ended up playing hockey. Until he got hit with a puck and lost some teeth.”

I had finished my coffee and was easing my mug toward her, hinting for a refill, but she didn’t respond. She was one of those talkers who need an audience, and anyone who’d known her grand-daughter would have sufficed. “You say Fletcher’s dad had odd ideas about women. Even though he had three successful daughters?”

“I’ll bet Frank opposes the Nineteenth Amendment.”

“Was he ever violent? Abusive?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. He’d just pontificate, and be the consummate boor.”

“Was Fletcher ever violent, physically?”

She began putting some of the family documents back into their shoeboxes. “Fletcher was never violent.” One of the ancient elastics snapped. “He kept it all bottled up. I’ve never seen Fletcher so much as raise his voice.”

“He’s had no reason to. With you.” I’d seen Fletcher all extroverted, seen his frat boy side, bounding from that Mercedes, hailing Peggy O’Connell—the unlikely party girl.

“Bryce Rossi—he’s a different story. He collected things besides Renaissance art, did you know that? He collected what he called ‘Death Row ephemera.’ He bought it online—belts from an old electric chair, a pistol used to kill some Belgian prime minister, knives,
death masks
…He showed me the death mask of some cattle rustler hanged a hundred years ago in Wyoming. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary? You can see the pores in his skin.’ He said that, and made my skin crawl.”

She was warming up to the subject. How odd these Mingoes all were!

“And he had an explosive temper. He was here and he got into an argument on the telephone, about access to some papers in a library in Washington. He became maniacal, screaming. ‘I have secured permission on four previous occasions. I know two members of your board. I am esteemed in the art world. Do you hear me?’ Well, you could have heard him in New Hampshire! He was a vile, pretentious creature. But he was older than Genevieve, well-connected, and a mentor of sorts. Genevieve liked older men. Having never had a decent father, ever.” She brought our coffee mugs to the sink. “Would you like to see Genevieve’s room? She lived here when she left her dorm at Shawmut.”

“Of course.”

The room, upstairs, had low sloping ceilings and a slightly slanting floor, all odd angles like the sets in German expressionist cinema, in, say
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. Or
Nosferatu
. “Did Genevieve ever call Bryce Rossi Nosferatu?”

“Like the vampire film? By Murnau?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head No.

The room was like a museum dedicated to Genevieve Courson, her own private Mingo House. Here were posters of paintings by George Grosz and Wassily Kandinsky; a closet of vintage clothing, including rayon Hawaiian shirts, a charcoal-gray sheath dress, and an Eighties prom gown, a mass of ruffles and flourishes. Here were beach stones, iron pyrite, and rose quartz the pink of bland watermelon; photographs of Mingo House blown up to poster-size; and one portrait of a woman I assumed was her mother, “a dead ringer” for her daughter in every sense of the world.

“Genevieve loved that photograph of Carol because it wasn’t taken by Larry. I took it, on what became Carol’s last birthday.”

Now she offered me her hand, as a way of getting me to leave. I shook it and thanked her.

“You’ve told your thoughts—your suspicions—to the police,” I said.

“More times than I care to recall…You won’t need to contact me again, Mr. Winslow.”

The Mingo send-off, twenty-first century style.

Chapter Nineteen

Grace Torrance was a strange woman, open and hostile, talkative and guarded, charming and scary. And she had convinced herself that Bryce Rossi had strangled her grand-daughter when Genevieve had sought to sever ties. Granted, I had witnessed his temper, as had she, and certainly Bryce had a fondness, even an obsession with the past, that made killing Genevieve
and
dressing her in Gilded Age finery possible, perhaps. But Bryce had ongoing business at Mingo House, his pursuit of the monstrance and his association with Rudy—why he had even gone there on business with Cat Hodges, after Genevieve’s death. So why would he “contaminate” that setting by staging a homicide? If he killed, he would do it elsewhere.

But Fletcher Coombs was another story. He had a family history of misogyny and had chosen to live in the no-doubt sexist world of a fraternity. And he liked “old-fashioned” girls, as evidenced by the Renoir poster tacked to his door. But the poster could have belonged to roommates, and clearly Larry Courson valued Fletcher as a friend. A friend fit to comfort him the very day of his daughter’s funeral—as his only friend, in fact, a man he physically embraced.

I wondered, was Fletcher aware that Genevieve was a Mingo through her mother’s bloodline? Could he have been jealous of her position, of her “history,” both personal and professional, that kept widening the gap between them?

Had he “followed” Genevieve to Shawmut, she, settling for a modest college because of financial constraints, but he matriculating because it was the best he could hope to achieve?

Trudie, the clerk at the Shawmut registrar’s office, had told me Genevieve was anticipating some “money” coming way her in the future. Was Genevieve referring to her and Bryce Rossi locating the royal monstrance at Mingo House? But surely that was a long shot, and, in the unlikely event they unearthed such an artifact, it would belong to the Mingo House foundation. Unless they kept their little treasure hunt secret, and Bryce used criminal means to fence the relic into the vast art underworld of drug lords and the Russian Mafia.

—Or was Genevieve’s change of fortune matrimonial: wedding a well-off man like Bryce Rossi?

The next morning, I stopped by Mingo House. “How was Martha’s Vineyard?” I asked Dorothea Jakes. She was sporting a garish dress, lime-green with blue spouting whales. She must have bought it at one of the outré boutiques that push the preppie thing too far. With Dorothea was her fifteen-year-old grandson, Chris, a somewhat dim bulb whose forehead was inflamed with a persistent case of acne. I had met Chris before because his class from the Lenox School visited Mingo House on a semi-regular basis, when studying art and the Civil War.

“Well, Edgartown was great, but things have certainly gone to pot here. Rudy and Jon—I guess they’re a couple—are conducting some sort of séance in the library.”

In the library, Rudy and Jon Kim had moved most of the furniture abutting the wall nearest to Arlington Street: Corinth One’s grandiose desk, his globe with the world a quarter pink with the British Empire, and a table supporting the model of a Spanish galleon. They had emptied the shelves on this wall of books and stacked dozens of glass plates, Clara’s record of Civil War carnage, onto the damask sofa and several chairs. They were rapping their knuckles against the walnut shelves as if starting a perverse “knock, knock” joke.

“Nothing, nothing,” Jon Kim kept saying. “Keep trying, it’s got to be someplace,” Rudy said. They were so intent that they hadn’t noticed me, until Jon Kim turned to swig the can of Dr. Pepper he’d left by the copper eagle inkwell on Corinth One’s desk.

“The last man who did that ended up dead,” I told them.

Rudy Schmitz wheeled around.

“Bryce Rossi was doing that.”

“Yes, and you were arguing with Bryce the day he was murdered. So Jonny informed me. And the docent you trained with also ended up dead.” Rudy had shorn off his ponytail and was editing the gray from his remaining hair with Grecian Formula or some other such chemical.

“Gentlemen,” Jon Kim said, “we must be civil.”

“Do you really think that monstrance is buried in this wall?” I asked.

“Bryce Rossi did.” Jon Kim set his soda directly onto the mahogany surface of the desk before catching himself and transferring it onto the green baize pad. “Bryce told Rudy—”

“Watch yourself, Jon.”

“Mark needs to know.” Rudy flushed red so that his complexion complemented the cartoon logo, the Leaning Tower of Pisa wearing earmuffs, on his Chill T-shirt. “Bryce told Rudy that he’d heard, through sources, that some people, art thieves, were planning a burglary here. A heist similar to the one at the Gardner Museum. To find the monstrance and sell it on the black market. Bryce had found some allusion to its whereabouts in some Mingo papers he’d chanced upon.”

Was Bryce referring to the papers in Grace Torrance’s house? I had found nothing relevant, but perhaps Bryce had already taken something, with or without Genevieve’s knowing.

“Bryce was a fence. The media reported that. He was probably the guy planning the break-in,” I said.

“Then why would he have alerted us to it, for God’s sake?” Rudy, clearly addled, fetched a cigarette from his pocket, recalled his whereabouts, and then tucked it away. “Mark, I wish you would get it through your…head, I care about Mingo House, its past, present, and future. Even Nadia admits that.”

“
Admits
?”

“She’s regained consciousness. She spent some time in rehab and is now back at her home in Brookline. She mentioned she’d like to see you, by the way.”

Jon Kim had re-mounted the small aluminum ladder they’d procured for their search and was again rapping his knuckles against the paneling.

“Why would Corinth Mingo seal this monstrance into a wall? He was a practical, no-nonsense kind of guy.”

“You’re forgetting Corinth had a wife,” Rudy told me. “Clara Whicher Mingo was a one-of-a-kind neurasthenic, as they called them back then. Forever getting the vapors, forever taking to bed. Seeing ghosts on the stairs, in the coal shed, on the Common. Perhaps she saw the ghost of King Charles the First, with his lace collar, holding his head. Who knows? Clara could have given Corinth an ultimatum: ‘Get rid of the accursed thing, or I’ll leave.’”

“Hey,” Jon Kim said.

“I think we’re done,” Rudy said.

“No, we’re not. Listen.” Jon Kim rapped his knuckles against the historic wood, which emitted a uniform sound of solidity until, on the uppermost shelf…

“That sounds hollow! It sounds like there’s a compartment behind there,” I said.

Jon Kim yanked at one particular board—“Hey, I’ve got something!”—then, jerkily, it slid aside as it was meant to, for the correct Mingo hand. Beyond was a cramped compartment where a square white something loomed in the murk.

“Good God!” Rudy said.

Jon Kim pulled it out—a cardboard box—was it from a department store? It was embossed with filigreed Victorian lettering and a design of bluebirds with flowers in their beaks.

When Jon Kim flipped aside the cover, we all saw, not silver, not a monstrance, but gold—a strange sort of wreath woven from—

“Hair,” Rudy said. “It’s a wreath made of hair.”

“That’s gross,” Jon Kim said.

“From the triplets. Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta. The sisters who died of complications from diphtheria. The Victorians wove wreathes from their loved ones’ hair. They used it in lockets and bracelets. They used it in pictures. As part of the mourning process.”

“Is there anything more?” I climbed the ladder to peer into the secret compartment and saw it was empty. “No monstrance. Not here. But why hide this?”

“The Mingoes were mad,” Rudy said. To put it mildly, I thought.

“But if there’s one compartment, there may be others,” Jon Kim said.

“See, here.” Rudy pulled a yellowed strip of newsprint from beneath the wreath and showed it to Jon Kim and me.

It read:

Daughters of Corinth Mingo Die, Great Tragedy Strikes Armaments Manufacturer

The triplet daughters of Corinth Hollis Mingo, Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta, died of fever despite the valiant efforts of doctors and family. Mrs. Clara Mingo was reported prostrate with grief, insisting that the girls’ bodies remain in their beds and preventing the undertakers from transporting them to the mortuary…

Then Rudy’s cell phone began playing its ringtone of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” “Yes? I thought this guy was supposed to be experienced. Are you asking
me
to come?” He clamped the phone shut. “Carnage at Flex. Our sushi chef lost the tip of his thumb while cutting up an octopus. Then he bled all over the dining area. Gotta run.”