A Study in Revenge (11 page)

Grey shook his head. “I sincerely doubt that a man would need to write down the address of the woman with whom he’s having romantic dalliances, as well as noting the name of her employer. Not to mention some coded message. He had the name and address because he was unfamiliar with the location. Nothing in the house was disturbed except for the window to the professor’s locked study and the glass bookcase therein.”

Grey stopped pacing with his back to Leif Eriksson and bowed his head in thought. “We cannot ignore the connection merely because its true nature eludes us. Rather we must pursue it with renewed vigor.”

“ ‘Have faith and pursue the unknown end,’ ” Lean said glumly.

G
REY MANEUVERED AND PARDONED HIMSELF THROUGH THE
clusters of well-dressed proprietors, as the members of the private Boston Athenaeum were known. The doors on the left side of the vestibule, housing the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, were shut, and the milling crowd was slowly moving toward the right. Grey instinctively mirrored the progress through the hall of his host, Justice Holmes, pausing whenever that man stopped to engage in short bursts of animated discussion with one of his innumerable acquaintances. Although he recognized a few faces among the crowd, Grey avoided eye contact, refusing to convey any hint that he would welcome even the briefest bit of conversation. His mind was still snared by thoughts of Chester Sears and the man’s coded note, which bore today’s date.

Once more he felt a flash of doubt over his decision not to accompany Lean and McCutcheon. There was nothing overtly rational in his election to spend the evening at the Athenaeum. That the professor’s esoteric and unconvincing writings had ended up here after his death seemed a tenuous connection to the case at best. All he could manage by way of consoling himself was the knowledge that his two colleagues should be perfectly able to locate and handle Sears.

Despite the tangle of thoughts that twisted through Grey’s mind, he couldn’t resist a glance toward the end of the hall and the glaring absence there of the grandiose Sumner staircase. The magnificent structure, which had formerly dominated the interior of the building, had been regrettably sacrificed four years earlier to accommodate the library’s ever-expanding collections. Grey had spent many hours within these walls, one of the favored places of his youthful school days. Memories pressed against the outposts of his mind, but his defenses held, repelling
the sentimental notions, denying them every possible inch of ground within his thoughts.

The electric lights flickered, signaling the approach of the night’s main event. The crowd began moving in earnest now, and Grey heard several references to the long room, meaning the first-floor sculpture gallery, which had been converted to a lecture hall for the evening. Though the Athenaeum numbered women among its list of proprietors, it still had the feel of a gentlemen’s private social club. The crowd reflected this, being made up of primarily male members of Boston’s cultural elite, a few of whom cast questioning glances at the copper-toned face of Perceval Grey.

Inside the sculpture room, hundreds of wooden folding chairs had been arranged in neat rows among the central space as well as in the room’s alcoves, which were separated by various classical figures in marble and carved busts resting on pedestals. Grey and Justice Holmes found seats not far from the windows that faced south, looking onto the open expanse of the Granary Burying Ground. Two hundred or so attendees, still greeting one another with self-pleased aplomb, settled into place with all the order and muted grace of a human landslide. Grey’s eyes sought out the peaceful contrast on the far side of the south windows. There, pale shapes, squared off or round-topped, gently faded into the night’s gloom.

One of Boston’s earliest graveyards, the Granary housed the earthly remains of such Colonial and Revolutionary luminaries as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Crispus Attucks, and Samuel Sewall, whom Grey recalled as having presided at the Salem witch trials. Two hundred tombs and upwards of two thousand stones crowded into the two-acre graveyard, though it was home to more than three times that many souls. Most of the names had been lost to history through poor record keeping, alterations to the cemetery, the moving of stones, and the reusing of lots. Space was so tight in the Granary and its immediate environs that the Athenaeum ran right onto the burying ground. The library’s rear wall actually contained a short arch that maintained the building’s straight back line by carrying it over several old headstones.

The din in the room began to die away as the Athenaeum’s head librarian, Mr. Lane, who’d recently been given the task of living up to
his renowned predecessor, Charles Cutter, began to speak. After brief opening remarks, the librarian introduced a nervous-looking young man who’d earned the honorable position of reader this evening.

With little ado the man launched into the subject. His voice fluctuated over the first few sentences as he became acclimated to the acoustics of the full, and not-quite-silent, hall.

“ ‘The Frontier in American History,’ a paper by Frederick Jackson Turner.

“ ‘Chapter One: In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.’ ”

Grey could bring little of his attention to bear on the subject of the speech. His mind insisted on the criminal matter of Cosgrove’s death and Sears’s mysterious note. He desperately longed for his rooms in Portland, curtains drawn, blocking out the calls and clatters, all the distractions of a world both doomed and eager to pursue an endless slate of minute and ultimately trivial obligations. Intense concentration was denied him, so his mind prowled back and forth, caged in by the continuous assault of nearby noises. Whispered comments mingled with the scraping of chairs on the floor as occupants shifted their weight. The hacking coughs of elderly men, or those old enough to have smoked for far too many years, split the air. Struggling to overcome his annoyance at the sundry noises from the audience, Grey tried instead to focus solely on the monotonous voice of the speaker.

“ ‘In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, tools, modes of travel, and thought. But he must accept the conditions which the frontier furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian
clearings and follows the Indian trails. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe but a new product that is American.’ ”

As the room settled into the methodical rhythms of the speech, Grey’s thoughts fell into place, like the needle of a compass settling on magnetic north after having been spun about. He returned to the first element of the inquiry: the death of Frank Cosgrove. The motive was unknowable at present, meaning that the dead man’s old partner, Chester Sears, could not be eliminated as a suspect. Grey doubted that possibility. Sears’s hasty flight from Portland could indicate guilt, but the man hadn’t fled immediately after the murder—only after Cosgrove’s corpse had been disinterred and burned. There was another party involved in the goings-on in Portland.

What to make of the Boston connection? The note with Horsford’s name and Cambridge address, along with the apparent code, was found in Sears’s room. He hadn’t written the note for his own benefit; notes meant to be seen by only the writer’s own eyes didn’t require the use of a code. Cosgrove wouldn’t have written it, since it was on Tremont House stationery and referenced people living near Boston. Cosgrove worked exclusively in the Portland area. Besides all that, there was no discernible reason for the criminal partnership of Cosgrove and Sears to be interested in scholarly information or items such as would be present in the late Professor Horsford’s study. The only obvious motive for trying to steal something from the professor’s study would belong to a commercial competitor of his. The idea seemed logical given the fortune that Horsford had made from his various chemical inventions. But then his daughter had indicated that his recent studies were not at all commercial in nature. They amounted to little more than hypothetical musings, receiving scant notice in academic circles.

Something was missing, some connection, and Grey couldn’t shake the feeling that it had to do with the coded reference on Sears’s note:
“boy 22 horse 78 dog ink sun.”
He ran the numbers and words through his head again and again. There was something oddly familiar about them. The frustration at his inability to recognize the code gnawed at
him. He was barely able to subdue the urge to rise and begin pacing. He noticed that Justice Holmes was glancing at him, a keen worry in the older man’s eyes.

“Feeling well, Grey?”

Grey nodded. He could only imagine the look of concentration on his own face that had prompted the judge’s concern. Needing to calm his thoughts once more, he stared ahead at the man reading Frederick Turner’s paper on the role of the frontier in American history.

“ ‘The story of the border warfare between Canada and the colonial frontier towns furnishes ample material for studying frontier life and institutions. The palisaded meeting-house square, the fortified isolated garrison houses, the massacres and captivities are familiar features of New England’s history. The Indian was a very real influence upon the mind and morals as well as upon the institutions of frontier New England. The occasional instances of Puritans returning from captivity to visit the frontier towns, Catholic in religion, painted and garbed as Indians and speaking the Indian tongue, and the half-breed children of captive Puritan mothers, tell a sensational part of the story; but even in the normal relations of the frontier townsmen to the Indians, there are clear evidences of the transforming influence of the Indian frontier upon the Puritan type of English colonist.’

“ ‘For example, Connecticut in 1704 ordered her frontier towns that for the encouragement of our forces going against the enemy, the public treasury will allow the sum of five pounds for every man’s scalp of the enemy killed. Massachusetts offered varying bounties for scalps, according to whether the scalp was of men, or women and youths. One of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard in 1703, urging the use of dogs “to hunt Indians as they do Bears.” The argument was that it would not be thought inhuman; for the Indians “act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.” Thus we come to familiar ground: the Massachusetts frontiersman like his western successor hated the Indians; the “tawney serpents,” of the Reverend Cotton Mather’s phrase, were to be hunted down and scalped in accordance with law.’ ”

A grotesquely absurd image stuck in Grey’s mind: various-size scalps hanging in a line befuddling some powder-haired Colonial treasury
clerk whose job it was to measure and classify the scalps according to gender or age and pay the proper bounty. The Cotton Mather Human Scalp Gradation scale. He would have chuckled to himself in spite of the historical horror of the idea if another, even more painful, thought hadn’t struck him at that same moment: a system of classification. Frustration and disappointment bordering on self-loathing began to well up from the lowest point of Grey’s stomach. He felt a pain in his knee and looked down to see his own fingers digging into his pant leg. He forced his hand to release. The brutal obviousness of the answer threatened to overwhelm Grey’s mind, and for several seconds he couldn’t harness his thoughts.

The speaker droned on. “ ‘This is one of the most significant things about New England’s frontier in these years. That long blood-stained line of the eastern frontier which skirted the Maine coast was of great importance, for it imparted a western tone to the life and characteristics of the Maine people which endures to this day. Within the area bounded by the frontier line, were the broken fragments of Indians defeated in the era of King Philip’s War, restrained within reservations, drunken and degenerate survivors, among whom the missionaries worked with small results, a vexation to the border towns.’ ”

The words and numbers on Sears’s note were not a code at all, not technically, but rather an entry in a classification system. A system Grey was familiar with, one that had been invented in this very building.

“Damnable fool!”

Grey uttered the condemnation louder than he’d intended as he bolted up from his seat. Edging past his neighbors to the central aisle, he incurred disapproving glares and murmurs the whole way. The ire of the crowd was only partly mollified by the reader plodding on valiantly and by the presence of Justice Holmes, who followed close behind Grey.

The door to the hall was ajar, and a plump, middle-aged lady standing just outside, listening to the lecture, had to quickly step aside as Grey exited. Grey paused, and Justice Holmes laid a hand on his shoulder.

“You ought not to get so vexed over the language, Grey. It’s an historical assessment of the character of the Indians after a brutally contested war, not a current indictment of the people. And certainly no need to curse the poor man reading.”

“What?” Grey faced Holmes with a look of utter confusion that took several long seconds to fade away. “No, I was cursing myself. I’ve been utterly blind when the answer was right before me.”

Now it was Justice Holmes’s turn to be perplexed.