More Tales of the Black Widowers (29 page)

Trumbull said, “Mr. Leominster, I wonder if you could get back to the lost object.”

“Ah, I'm sorry. I had forgotten. Aunt Hester, considering her views, was not happy over my uncle's cavalier treatment of his collection. Aunt Hester had a totally exaggerated idea of its value. 'These items and sundries,' she would say to me, 'are of peerless worth.'“

“Is that what she called them? Items and sundries?” asked Avalon, smiling.

“That was a pet phrase of hers. I assure you I remember it correctly. She had an archaic way of speaking—a deliberately cultivated one, I'm sure. She felt that language was a great mark of social status—”

“Shaw thought so too,” interrupted Rubin. “Pygmalion.”

“Never mind, Manny,” said Trumbull. “Won't you please proceed, Mr. Leominster?”

“I was just going to say that Aunt Hester's fetish of verbal complication was something which she felt, I think, set her off from the lower classes. If I were to tell her that she ought to ask someone about something, she was quite certain to say something like, 'But of whom, exactly, dear, ought I to inquire?' She would never say 'ask' if she could say 'inquire'; she never ended a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive. In fact, she was the only person I ever met who consistently used the subjunctive mood. She once said to me, 'Would you be so gracious, my dear Jason, as to ascertain whether it be raining or no,' and I almost failed to understand her.

“But I am wandering from the point again. As I said, she had an exaggerated idea of the value of my uncle's collection and she was always after him to do something about it. At her insistence, he put in an elaborate burglar alarm system and had a special signal installed that would sound in the local police station.”

“Was it ever used?” asked Halsted.

“Not as far as I know,” said Leominster. “There was never any burglary. My uncle didn't exactly live in a high-crime area—though you could never convince my aunt of that— and I wouldn't be surprised if prospective burglars had a more accurately disappointing notion of the worth of my uncle's collection than my aunt had. After my uncle's death, Aunt Hester had some of his belongings appraised. When they told her that his stamp collection was worth, perhaps, ten thousand dollars, she was horrified. 'They are thieves,’ she told me. 'Having remitted ten thousand dollars, they would then certainly proceed to retail the collection for a million at the very least.' She would allow no further appraisals, and held onto everything with an unbreakable* clutch. Fortunately, she had plenty to live on and didn't have to sell anything. To her dying day, though, I am sure she was convinced that she was leaving me possessions equivalent to an enormous fortune. —No such thing, unfortunately.

“My Uncle Bryce was hardheaded enough in this respect. He knew that the collections were of only moderate value. He said so to me on several occasions, though he also said he had a few items that were worthwhile. He did not specify. According to Aunt Hester, he went into more detail with her. When she urged him to put his stamp collection in a vault he said, 'What, and never be able to look at it? It would have no value to me at all, then. Besides, it isn't worth much, except for one item, and I've taken care of that.'“

Avalon said, 'That one item in the stamp collection that your uncle said he had taken care of—is that what is now lost? Was it some stamp or other?”

“Yes, so Aunt Hester said at the time of my uncle's death. He had left her the house and its contents, which meant that stamp too. She called me soon after the funeral to say that she could not find the stamp and was convinced it had been stolen. I had attended the funeral, of course, and was still in Connecticut, having taken the occasion to track down some old gravestones, and I came over for dinner the day after she called me.

“It was a hectic meal, for Aunt Hester was furious over not having found the stamp. She was convinced it was worth millions and that the servants had taken it—or perhaps the funeral people had. She even had a little suspicion left over for me. She said to me over dessert, ‘Your Uncle, I presume, never discoursed on the matter of its location with you, did he?'

“I said he did not—which was true. He had never done so.”

Trumbull said, “Did she have any idea at all where he hid it?”

“Yes, indeed. That was one of her grounds for annoyance. He had told her, but had not been specific enough, and she had not thought to pin him down exactly. I suppose she was satisfied that he had taken care of it and didn't think further. He told her he had placed it in one of his unabridged volumes, where he could get it easily enough to look at it whenever he wished, but where no casual thief would think to find it.”

“In one of his unabridged volumes?” said Avalon in astonishment. “Did he mean in his collection?”

“Aunt Hester quoted him as saying 'one of my unabridged volumes.' We assumed he meant in his collection.”

Rubin said, “It's a foolish place to put it. A book can be stolen as easily as a stamp. It can be stolen for itself and the stamp would go along as a side reward.”

Leominster said, “I don't suppose my uncle seriously thought of it as a place of safety; merely as a way of satisfying my aunt. In fact, if she had not nagged him, I'm sure that Uncle Bryce would have left it right in the collection, which is, was, and has always been safe and sound. Of course, I never said this to my aunt.”

Rubin said, “When people speak of 'the Unabridged,' they usually mean Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Did your uncle have one?”

“Of course. On a small stand of its own. My aunt had thought of that and had looked there and hadn't found it. That was when she called me. We went into the library after dinner and I went over the Unabridged again. My uncle kept his better stamps in small, transparent envelopes and one of them might have been placed among the pages. Still, it would have been quite noticeable. It was an onionskin edition, and there would certainly have been a tendency for the dictionary to open to that page. Aunt Hester said it would be just like Uncle Bryce to hide it in such a foolish manner as to make it easily stolen.

'That was quite impossible, however. I had used the Unabridged myself now and then in my uncle's last years and I'm sure there was nothing in it. I inspected the binding to make sure he hadn't hid it behind the back strip. I was even tempted to pull the entire volume apart, but it didn't seem likely that Uncle Bryce had gone to elaborate lengths. He had slipped it between the pages of a book—but not the Unabridged.

“I said as much to Aunt Hester. I told her that it might be among the pages of another book. I pointed out that the fact that he had referred to 'one of the unabridged volumes' was a sure sign that it was not in the Unabridged.”

“I agree,” said Rubin, “but how many unabridged volumes did he have?”

Leominster shook his head. “I don't know. I know nothing about books—at least from a collector's point of view. I asked Aunt Hester if she knew whether he had any items that were unabridged—an unabridged Boswell, for instance, or an unabridged Boccaccio—but she knew less about such matters than I did.”

Gonzalo said, “Maybe ‘unabridged’ means something special to a book collector. Maybe it means having a book jacket—just as an example—and it's between the book and its jacket.”

Avalon said, “No, Mario. I know something about books, and unabridged has no meaning but the usual one of a complete version.”

“In any case,” said Leominster, “it doesn't matter, for I suggested that we ought to go through all the books.”

“A thousand of them?” asked Halsted doubtfully.

“As it turned out there were well over a thousand and it was a task indeed. I must say that Aunt Hester went about it properly. She hired half a dozen children from town—all girls, because she said girls were quieter and more reliable than boys. They were each between ten and twelve, old enough to work carefully and young enough to be honest. They came in each day for weeks and worked for four or five hours.

“Aunt Hester remained in the library at all times, handing out the books in systematic order, receiving them back, handing out another, and so on. She allowed no short cuts; no shaking the books to see if anything fell out, or flipping the pages, either. She made them turn each page individually.”

“Did they find anything?” asked Avalon.

“Numerous things. Aunt Hester was too shrewd to tell them exactly what she was looking for. She just asked them to turn every single page and bring her any little thing they found, any scrap of paper, she said, or anything. She promised them a quarter for anything they found, in addition to a dollar for every hour they worked, and fed them all the milk and cake they could hold. Before it was over, each girl had gained five pounds, I'm sure. They located dozens of miscellaneous items. There were bookmarks, for instance, though I'm sure they were not my uncle's, for he was no reader; postcards, pressed leaves, even an occasional naughty photograph that I suspect my uncle had hidden for occasional study. They shocked my aunt but seemed to delight the little girls. In any case they did not find any stamp.”

“Which must have been a great disappointment to your aunt,” said Trumbull.

“It certainly was. She had immediate dark suspicions that one of the little girls had walked off with it, but even she couldn't maintain that for long. They were perfectly unsophisticated creatures and there was no reason to suppose that they would have thought a stamp was any more valuable than a bookmark. Besides, Aunt Hester had had her eye on them at every point.”

“Then she never found it?” asked Gonzalo.

“No, she never did. She kept on looking through books for a while—you know, those that weren't in the library. She even went up into the attic to find some old books and magazines, but it wasn't there. It occurred to me that Uncle Bryce may have changed the hiding place in his later years and had told her of the new one—and that she had forgotten the new place and remembered only the old one. That's why I said what I did during dinner about two hiding places. You see, if that were true, and I have a nagging suspicion that it is, then the stamp could be anywhere in the house— or out of it, for that matter—and frankly, a search is hopeless in my opinion.

“I think Aunt Hester gave up too. These last couple of years, when her arthritis had made it almost impossible for her to move around, she never mentioned it. I was afraid that when she left the house to me, as he had made it quite plain she would, it would be on condition that I find the stamp—but no such thing was mentioned in her will.”

Avalon twirled the brandy glass by its stem and said rather portentously, “See here, there's no real reason to think that there was such a stamp at all, is there? It may be that your uncle amused himself with the belief he had a valuable item, or may just have been teasing your aunt. Was he the kind of man capable of working up a rather malicious practical joke?”

“No, no,” said Leominster, with a definite shake of his head. “He did not have that turn of mind at all. Besides, Aunt Hester said she had seen the stamp. On one occasion, he had been looking at it and he called in Hester and showed it to her. He said, 'You are looking at thousands of dollars, dear.' But she did not know where he had gotten it, or to what hiding place he had returned it. All she had thought at the time was that it was unutterably foolish for grown men to pay so much money for a silly bit of paper— and I rather agreed with her when she told me. She said there wasn't anything attractive about it.”

“Does she remember what it looked like? Could you recognize it if you found it?” asked Avalon. “For instance, suppose that shortly before the time of your uncle's death he had placed the stamp with the rest of his collection for some reason—perhaps because your aunt was in Florida and could not nag him, if he wanted it available for frequent gloating. —Was she in Florida at the time of his death, by the way?”

Leominster looked thoughtful. “Yes, she was, as a matter of fact.”

“Well then,” said Avalon. “The stamp may have been in the collection all along. It may still be. Naturally, you wouldn't find it anywhere else.”

Trumbull said, 'That can't be, Jeff. Leominster has already told us that the stamp collection was appraised at ten thousand dollars, total, and I gather that this one stamp would have raised that mark considerably higher.”

Leominster said, “According to Aunt Hester, Uncle Bryce once told her that the stamp in question was worth his entire remaining collection twice, over.”

Avalon said, “Uncle Bryce may have been kidding himself or the appraisers may have made a mistake.”

“No,” said Leominster, “it was not in the collection. My aunt remembered its appearance and it was unusual enough to be identifiable. She said it was a triangular stamp, with the narrow edge downward—something like my face as drawn by Mr. Gonzalo.”

Gonzalo cleared his throat and looked at the ceiling, but Leominster, smiling genially, went on. “She said it had the face of a man on it, and a bright orange border and that my uncle referred to it as a New Guinea Orange. That is a
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distinctive stamp, you must admit, and while it never occurred to me that it might be in the collection itself, so that I did not search for it specifically, I did go through the collection out of curiosity, and I assure you I didn't see the New Guinea Orange. In fact, I saw no triangular stamps at all—merely versions of the usual rectangle.

“Of course, I did wonder whether my uncle was wrong about the stamp's value, and whether he might not have found out he was wrong toward the end and sold the stamp or otherwise disposed of it. I consulted a stamp dealer and he said there were indeed such things as New Guinea Orange. He said some of them were very valuable and that one of them, which might be in my uncle's collection because it was not recorded elsewhere, was worth twenty-five thousand dollars.”