French Polished Murder (24 page)

“In her private life, she was quite different. Though she couldn’t, of course, get involved with organizations in an ostentatious way that would be seen as her endorsing them, particularly organizations that she thought would offend my father. So she started, I think, small, the way people do. She would find a place for a pregnant housemaid to deliver and someone to adopt her child, then receive the housemaid back into the household when it was done. She would give money to servants in distress. She had means of her own, a legacy from a great aunt. Some money, some grants and securities, and whatever they called stocks at the time. So she could do all of it without consulting my father, who didn’t need nor take any interest in her money.”

“But then she met someone she could use as a cat’s paw in her causes. He was a mulatto—to use the old term—man, just arrived from the East. A good-looking man, with charisma—I remember his entering a room, and all eyes turning to him as though it were his natural right. Mr. Jacinth Jones.” She sighed. “Not quite of our class, of course, but moving fast. And only Mother . . . and I suppose my brother and I, as we came along and grew old enough to understand . . . realized that he was mulatto. He spoke to her unreservedly in their private moments, to which they, you know, often admitted us.”

I wasn’t sure that she understood the implications of what she was saying, so I looked at the picture in my hands and made a noncommittal sign of paying attention.

“I’m sure it started quite innocently. He funded charities privately with her money and served as her face out in the world. There was a poor children’s nutrition fund, which provided meat and fruit to children of miners and . . . well . . . women of ill repute. Then there were the education initiatives that mostly consisted of paying parents a certain amount to prevent their removing their children from school after elementary school. She subsidized the children’s progress—in books and such—through junior and senior high schools, and, in the ten or so years that she and Mr. Jones devoted to the cause, I suspect—though I was too young to understand properly and don’t recall exactly—they must have financed more than a few college educations and professional instructions for poor children.”

She reached for a stick that leaned against her chair. It was a carved mahogany cane, looking too balanced and beautiful to have grown naturally in such a twisting shape. It was capped with silver at top and bottom, though I guessed at the bottom it was more ringed, with a rubber ending. I thought she was going to rise, but she didn’t. Instead, she banged the stick on the floor as though for emphasis. “It would have taken more than human strength to work that way with another young, attractive member of the opposite sex and not to have fallen in love.”

The declaration hung, bold in the room, and I fancied that the woman in the frame would have flinched from it, if she could. Or perhaps the bland smile she showed for the photo would have expanded.

“I don’t know why Mama married Papa. Surely there must have been reasons, but their society was very different from what it is now, different, even from my own time, so that it’s hard for me to bridge the gap between what I knew of her and what she might have been as a young woman.

“It is entirely possible that she loved my father, I think, when she was a young girl. She was very young when she got married, sixteen, and he would have been a thirty-year-old man, established and wealthy. He must have spoken to her of his ranches in Colorado and of the silver mine that had made his family fortune—though by that time he had branched into other forms of investment. He would seem . . . adult.” A small smile. “We all know how attractive that is to the very young.”

I nodded, not that I knew a heck of a lot about it. After all, most of my life, I’d found myself in the strange position of being the adult around my parents and their friends, and I didn’t find it particularly enthralling. The adults I knew growing up were more likely to be lost in their own heads or their own hobbies and have little to no contact with the world. Wonderful people, some of them and creative types many of them, but not the stuff that authority is made of.

“So she married him, and she found herself in a marriage in which she had very little in common with her husband. He pursued his financial goals and his politics, and his only interest in her was that she keep a nice house, be a good hostess and, of course, give him children.

“Meanwhile, there was this young man, somewhat dangerous by virtue of his origins, who was cultured and intelligent—I remember his declaiming poems for my mother—and more, he was interested in the same causes that fascinated her, and always ready to support her, help her, and boost her reasoning. You must see that this would be irresistible.” She spoke almost pleadingly.

I set the picture in its frame facedown on the love seat and tried to put a stop to the justifications, “Miss Martin, in this day and age few women would think badly of another woman who strayed during her marriage, when that marriage was almost by default an arranged one.”

She looked at me for a moment then nodded and said, slowly, “Yes. Yes. So you understand . . . I mean, it was inevitable that they’d get involved. And just as inevitable that it would lead to problems, eventually, perhaps to tragedy, depending on how it was discovered.” She sighed.

“Tragedy is what ended up taking place, because my father, you see, learned that Mama was . . . uh . . . expecting.” She blushed delicately. Unless the news missed something enormous, she’d been single her whole life. “And something about it made him suspicious. Perhaps it was the timing, or perhaps the rumors about Mother’s private meetings with Mr. Jones had come to his attention.” She shook her head. “I don’t know which. But after all that time, he was alive with suspicion.

“He was a successful man. In many ways, I think a very big man, and in his own way as forward-looking as my mother, even if with slightly different . . . priorities. He wanted to advance the city of Goldport and make it a world jewel.” She shrugged, as though conceding that he might not have fully succeeded in that. “He was proud. And at any rate, I understand that . . . well . . . I’ve never been married, but it’s not hard to understand how upset a man can get over infidelity. And so I think he went a little out of his mind. He threatened to kill them both with an ax.”

“Yes, your nephew told me,” I said. “If the new baby didn’t look like the other children.”

Miss Martin shrugged. “But you know, he would never have actually done it. He was an educated man and too refined to engage in . . . that sort of thing.”

I couldn’t tell if the sort of thing she spoke of so disapprovingly was axing people or merely the physical exertion involved in the activity. I didn’t weigh in either way. Instead I looked at her and she sighed.

“Mama had to do something, of course . . .”

“So she ran away with Mr. Jones.”

“She tried to.” The blue eyes looked at me a long time, unflinchingly. “To understand this, first I must tell you that I did indeed tell my nephew a different story. I think it is very bad to have a boy think the worst of his father. And besides, he was very young, and I don’t think anything would be served by telling him the truth.

“Secondly, you must understand that I was very much my mother’s . . .” She smiled a little. “Favorite child and confidant would be a way to put it, though at this time it makes one feel quite out of countenance to admit one was the favorite anything, as though it were an unearned privilege.

“It was very simple, you know. I was born premature, very small, and it was unknown, for a long time, whether I’d survive. My mother . . . She became attached to me when she thought she might lose me. She took me everywhere with her. She called me Baby, even after I was no longer a baby. I was, in a way I think, her consolation and her support, even though I was only eight when she died.”

“Died?” I said.

“Of course. Surely you have realized this. Mama and Mr. Jacinth made plans to get away, but their hand was forced, a day or two earlier. All I remember was Mother dressing me in an extraordinary amount of clothes. Right now we’d call it layering, I believe. Petticoat upon petticoat and skirt upon skirt and blouse upon blouse, all my best. She dressed the same way herself, in addition to packing a small valise.

“I think this was sensible, because, as you must realize, clothes were worth a lot more then, and I suppose she intended to sell some of the more expensive clothing, which would bring less attention than selling jewels, to finance their escape. Meanwhile, Mr. Jones, I now understand, though I didn’t at the time listening to their conversation, had been liquidating some of his assets and converting them to money orders payable to bearer.

“I don’t know where they meant for us to go. All I know is that I was wakened not too long after going to bed, and that my mother dressed me in an absurd manner, before sneaking out through the deserted kitchens and through the servant’s entrance. At the time I was surprised that she didn’t wake my brother Edward, also. Edward was ten and we slept in the same room, separated by a screen. But she kept very quiet so he wouldn’t accidentally wake.

“She didn’t call for the car or have another arrangement. We walked the distance to Mr. Jones’s house. And I know you might think a distance of a few blocks was inconsequential, but in fact because the neighborhood he lived in was less than stellar, Mama was in the habit of having the chauffeur drive us there, then wait at the street for us to emerge again.” She smiled slightly. “That’s probably how Papa found out about these meetings, of course, though it wouldn’t occur to Mama to do otherwise.”

“Well,” she said, “when we came in, I soon realized that it was two days earlier than Mr. Jones had expected Mama to appear, so he wasn’t quite prepared. They didn’t exactly argue, because he was trying his best to accommodate her, you know. So they sat at the table, and he made coffee, and they drank it, and I grew very sleepy, so Mama laid me down in the love seat in the living room. I woke up sometime later with a very loud thump.

“I ran to the kitchen, and Mama and Mr. Jones seemed to be sleeping across the table. I saw someone run out the back. He looked . . . from the back, like my brother, Edward. I went back to Mama and Mr. Jones, but they wouldn’t wake up. I don’t know when I realized they were dead, but I did, after a while.” Her voice and expression betrayed the confusion and despair the little girl she’d once been must have felt. “I was very little and I didn’t know what to do, so I went to Papa. There was a bicycle in the yard and I knew how to ride, so I rode the bicycle back home, and snuck in through the kitchen door, which was unaccountably left open, and into Papa’s room.

“It took me a while to make him understand what happened and I must say, to his credit, that he didn’t seem to doubt me enough to call Mother or give the alarm in any way. Instead, he went to her room and looked in her wardrobe, then he looked at what I was wearing. And then he told me to go back to my room and take off my clothes. Hang them in the usual way, which he said he trusted a big girl like me to do.” She nodded approvingly at her father’s manipulation of her feelings. “And to go back to bed, and he would take care of it all. I don’t know what he did, but I know that the next day when Mother was found missing, it was understood she had left town and deserted him. After a few years he got a divorce based on abandonment and he never remarried.”

She was silent, like a recording that had come to the end.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why did he do that? I expect to avoid a scandal. Oh, you young people don’t understand what a scandal meant in those days, but it could have made it impossible for both myself and my brother to ever hold our heads up in society. As it was—” she made a wry mouth “—I suspect I would have been considered a liability in the marriage market, because my mother had run away. As it turned out, I never got an opportunity to enter such a state. But still, Father made the scandal as small as he could. There was never any proof, and very little idea, that Mother had joined Mr. Jones when he disappeared. Rather, it was thought—and Father was quite good about giving enough hints of this to make it the accepted version—that while she was . . . enceinte and the balance of her mind was thus disturbed, as is normal for ladies in that condition, my father’s intemperate words on the subject of rumors of her friendship with Mr. Jones had so alarmed her that she had left their abode.

“My father must have paid someone because the investigation, which he had, of course, made, revealed traces of a lady boarding the train alone, and traveling alone all the way to Philadelphia. It was believed she had there joined her family who had helped her hide, perhaps by sending her abroad to England, where her mother came from, or some other place where she would be out of my father’s reach.”

She was quiet a long time again, as if she had said everything she intended to say. But I took a deep breath and plunged in. “No,” I said. “What I meant is why are you telling me this. Your . . . housekeeper told me over the phone that you thought someone should write your mother’s story. And surely you know that if I’m undertaking to write about this, I can’t promise to keep secret the parts you wouldn’t wish revealed. So why tell me, if you didn’t tell your own family?”

She shook her head. “Young woman, when you get to be my age, and your brother has been dead a year, and you can tell you don’t have much longer in this Earth, you start prizing the truth above all the convenient lies with which you’ve lived.” Her voice rang out loudly. “I had a stroke, about six months ago. And sometimes I have recurrences of certain convulsions, similar to what strikes epileptics. My doctor tells me there is no reason I shouldn’t live another ten years, but I think I know when I’m nearing the limits of my allotted time on this Earth.” Her face looked suddenly chiseled and terrible, in a way, as though she’d turned to stone. “I realized, as I recovered from the stroke—and of course I was very confused as I came out of it—and past times as present as . . . well, the present, in many ways . . . I realized that I knew a secret and that this secret might die with me.