The Bilbao Looking Glass (2 page)

Green peas and early lettuce were already helping to feed Sarah’s boarders back on Beacon Hill, though, and she took comfort from the circumstance that the most viable campsite for Lionel and his pestilential brood was downwind of the fish heads. She was sharing this happy thought with Max when Sergeant Jofferty drove up in his cruiser.

“Well, Mrs. Kelling. Nice to see you looking so chipper.

The sergeant didn’t exactly cock an eyebrow in Max’s direction, but Sarah blushed anyway. “You’re looking well, too, Sergeant Jofferty. Do you know Max Bittersohn?”

“Ira Rivkin’s brother-in-law, right?” He got out of the car and shook Max’s hand. “Glad to meet you. Ira talks about you a lot. Claims you’re his rich relative, but with the price of gas these days, I guess Ira’s raking in a few bucks himself, eh?”

“Unfortunately, he has to hand it all back to the oil companies,” snarled Max.

“Let’s not get started on the oil companies,” Sarah interposed. “We seem to have another little mystery here, Sergeant Jofferty. When we came in about fifteen minutes ago, we found something that doesn’t belong. Max is going to be renting my carriage house for the summer,” she found it necessary to explain.

“My aunt, who’s just been widowed too, will be staying with me. However, that’s neither here nor there. The point is, we opened the door and discovered this looking glass hanging on the wall here in the entryway. Max says it’s valuable and I have no idea how it got into my house. Mr. Lomax is the only person other than myself who’s supposed to have a key, and you know Jed Lomax.”

Naturally, Jofferty knew Jed Lomax. Like Sarah, he refused to entertain any notion that the caretaker could have got up to something even the slightest bit shady. While he was getting Max to tell him the probable market value of a genuine Bilbao looking glass in first-rate condition, the old man himself drove up in his fishy-smelling truck. As they’d expected, Lomax didn’t know a thing.

“I can’t rightly recall ever seein’ that glass before, Miz Kelling. Kind o’ pretty, if you like them sort o’ things. Say, how come you got the front door open, anyways? You folks always go in the side.”

“I know, but my handbag’s crammed with stuff and this was the first key I could find. Otherwise, the glass might have hung there all summer and I wouldn’t have noticed. This is such a poky little entry that it’s never used except when somebody comes to the front door who doesn’t know any better. But you do check the doors, Mr. Lomax.”

“I do, an’ I done it yesterday same as always. Never seen no sign o’ breakin’ an’ enterin’, or I’d o’ reported it. You been around to look, Max?”

“You two know each other?” Jofferty asked in some surprise.

“Hell, yes, that’s Isaac Bittersohn’s boy from Saugus. Known ’im since he was knee-high to a flounder. Yep, that’s the one that busted his mother’s heart.”

The caretaker shook his grizzled head, the long peak of the filthy swordfisherman’s cap he wore summer and winter wagging sadly from side to side.

“Miz Bittersohn, she swore up, down, an’ sideways Max was goin’ to come one mighty cropper when he started that crazy business of his ‘stead o’ studyin’ to be a rich doctor like she wanted ’im to. Then he went an’ made a liar out of ’er. Been a sad disappointment, first an’ last.”

Lomax would hardly have gone so far as to smile, but he did give Mrs. Bittersohn’s sad disappointment a look that might almost have been called amiable. “Joff, if Max here tells you this lookin’ glass is worth stealin’, then I’ll bet you my bottom dollar it’s been stole. An’ you may lay to that.”

EMBARRASSED AT HAVING GONE
so far as to commit himself to a definite opinion, Lomax shuffled his feet, hitched at his galluses, and adjusted his cap.

“You need me to help settle, Miz Kelling? If not, I better go stake them tomato plants.”

“One thing before you go, Jed,” said Max. “Forget you ever saw this looking glass, eh?”

“But why?” Sarah protested. “If it belongs in one of the other houses Mr. Lomax takes care of—”

“The owners may begin wondering how it happened to wind up in your house instead of theirs,” Max finished for her.

“Oh. But surely they’d never—”

Sarah faltered. She’d forgotten for the moment that Mr. Lomax had a helper this year. From what little she’d seen of that nephew, she wondered if perhaps the Lomax reputation for probity might be in danger of getting tarnished around the edges. Pete would hardly hide stolen property here, though, because he knew Sarah was planning to open her house early. Or would he?

“Say you nothin’. Saw wood.”

With that sibylline utterance, Lomax bowlegged himself off to the tomato plants. Jofferty wrote out a receipt for the Bilbao looking glass on a page from his notebook, and asked Max to wrap the thing up for him real good so’s it wouldn’t get busted. Breaking a mirror that valuable would mean a dam sight more than seven years’ bad luck and he’d been getting enough flak about the robberies as it was.

“I’ll go over the lists of stolen property as soon as I get back to the station,” he promised, “and let you know if I turn up anything. Bilbao looking glass, eh?”

“Sometimes they spell it Bilboa,” Max told him. “Means the same thing. Except in Bilbao, of course. Got any cardboard and wrapping paper, Sarah?”

“Bring it into the kitchen. I’ll see what I can find.”

Wrapping bundles is always more of a nuisance than it starts out to be, and the looking glass presented special problems. Eventually, though, they found enough padding and stiffener to assure a safe ride in the cruiser.

“There you are, Sergeant.” Max personally carried the package out and stowed it in the cruiser’s trunk. “I’ve marked it fragile, but you’d better make sure they understand down at the station that it really is. And for God’s sake, don’t let anybody take off the wrappings.”

“They won’t get a chance,” Jofferty assured him. “We’ve got a special box down at the bank where we store valuables, and it just so happens I’m the man in charge. I’m going to take this thing directly there and forget to file a report. That satisfy you? Hey, and give my regards to your folks.”

As he turned the ignition key in his mud-spattered cruiser, he glanced over at the magnificent car beside him, and grinned. “Guess your mother must have said more or less the same things mine did when I quit the fish cake factory to join the force. I told her getting shot at now and then’s a better deal than spending the rest of my life gutting pollock. See you around, Max. So long, Mrs. Kelling.”

“Fine thing,” Sarah pouted after he’d driven off. “If Sergeant Jofferty starts calling you Max after he’s known you for about thirty seconds, why can’t he call me Sarah?”

No doubt he would have, if she were Mrs. Bittersohn instead of Mrs. Kelling. No matter how far he’d stretched his roots, Max would always be accepted around the North Shore in a way none of her own crowd would ever be, even though they’d been trooping here summer after summer, some of them for three and four generations. Lines between summer people and year-rounders might be less sharply drawn these days than they were in her grandparents’ time, but they still existed and it wasn’t fair.

“You’re a bunch of snobs, that’s what. Look at you. You don’t even come from Ireson Town and everybody treats you like his long-lost cousin. Even with Alexander, they never—”

She stopped short. Max must be getting awfully fed up with Alexander by now. “Come upstairs and help me wrestle with the new mattresses. Mr. Lomax has got them in the wrong rooms.”

They were busy putting the guest room to rights when the telephone rang. Sarah had a pillow jammed under her chin and was struggling to cram it into a case that must have shrunk in the wash. “Answer that, will you, Max?” she mumbled. “It’s probably your pal Jofferty about the looking glass. Maybe he’s found out where it belongs.”

Max ran to the phone, but was back upstairs before Sarah had got the second pillowcase unfolded. “It’s for you. Some woman named Tergoyne. She thought she’d got the wrong number.”

“Couldn’t you have convinced her she had?”

Sarah was not panting to chat with, or rather listen to, Miffy Tergoyne. Miffy was one of the old yacht club set to which Alexander’s parents had once belonged. Their official membership had been dropped after Alexander’s father died and his yacht had to be sold, but the Kellings automatically continued to count as part of the crowd because they always had.

Having become a much gossiped-about widow and, worse, a near-bankrupt one in the past months, Sarah had been counting on social ostracism from the yacht club set as a fringe benefit. Either Miffy was too old to change her ways, though, or else the fact that Sarah was now in possession of her father’s relatively modest bequest must have reinstated her among the elect. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

Somebody had once observed that the true Boston Brahmin has customs but no manners. Like most generalizations, that remark was probably based on a few unfortunate particulars. One particular could have been Miffy Tergoyne.

“Sarah.” Her nasal shriek was enough to cut the phone wires. “Who was that man?”

“Max Bittersohn, my tenant,” Sarah told her.

“My God, you’re not starting that stuff out at Ireson’s? Alice told me but I couldn’t believe it, not after Alex. Are you really having an affair with him?”

“How kind of you to take an interest in my affairs,” Sarah replied sweetly.

“Is that supposed to be an answer?”

“What makes you think you’re entitled to one?”

That actually stopped Miffy, though only for a moment. At last she sniffed and growled, “I must say you’ve changed.”

“No I haven’t. This is the first time you’ve ever bothered to listen to anything I had to say, that’s all. To what do I owe the honor, Miffy?”

“I want you and Appie here for drinks at half-past five.”

“Sorry, but Aunt Appie’s not coming until Monday.”

Miffy cackled. “That’s what you think, little girl! I phoned Appie this morning and bullied her into starting right away. She ought to be rolling up that godawful driveway of yours any minute now.”

“Miffy, you didn’t! I haven’t even got the house ready. Did you ever once in your life give any thought to minding your own business?”

“Don’t be absurd. Why should I? At half-past five, sharp on the dot. Bring your boy friend. Alice and I want to look him over.”

Max came downstairs in time to see Sarah hurl the receiver back on its hook.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing,” she raged, “except that Aunt Appie’s about to breeze in here without a word of warning and Miffy expects us all for drinks at five-thirty on the dot. You included.”

“Damn it, Sarah, I thought you and I were going to have a few days to ourselves.”

“So did I, but that doesn’t cut any ice with Miffy.”

“Couldn’t you simply have told her to go to hell?”

“I did, but she wouldn’t listen. It’s not Miffy, Max. The real problem is Aunt Appie. I couldn’t bear to have her find out she’s not welcome. You’ll know why when you meet her. Aunt Appie’s the eternal Girl Scout, doing her good deed every day and getting kicked in the teeth for it more often than not.

“You never met my Uncle Samuel, a fact for which I hope you’re duly grateful. He was the world’s most dedicated hypochondriac. Aunt Appie nursed him through every disease in the medical book. At last he died of a misprint and I truly believe she’s sorry he’s gone.

“When Cousin Dolph told her I was coming out here for the summer and came up with the bright idea that she ought to come too, because the change would do her good, I wanted to slaughter them both but I hadn’t the heart to tell her she couldn’t come. Aunt Appie tried so hard to ease things for Alexander all those years when he was stuck with taking care of his mother.”

There she went again. Max was looking thunderous, and no wonder. Sarah flung her arms around his neck. “I’ll make it up to you somehow. I promise.”

“That’s what you say,” he grumbled.

However, he was still allowing himself to be placated when they heard the taxi from the railroad station clattering over the potholes outside. With her fingers, Sarah hastily rubbed lipstick off Max’s chin.

“Don’t you dare go sneaking off. You’ll have to meet her sometime.”

“How long’s she going to be around, for God’s sake?”

“I have no idea. Not long, most likely. She’s not going to be all that comfortable, you know, with half the furniture up in Boston and no heat but the fireplace. You know how raw it can get at night here so close to the water. Oh dear, I do hope Mr. Lomax remembered to have the chimney swept. I don’t know what the High Street Bank would do to me if I let the place burn down.”

Sarah’s property was under litigation because of a disputed mortgage. The big house itself wasn’t worth much, unless some enterprising architect wanted to spend a few hundred thousand dollars converting it into luxury condominiums. The thirty-five-acre tract on which it stood, though, would make a developer’s fortune. All she could do until the suit was settled would be to pay the taxes and hope.

Right now, Sarah was in no position to make long-range plans anyway. Everything hinged on what happened between her and Max. After having to spend the summer enduring Sarah’s relatives and old acquaintances, he might decide to call the whole thing off. She made a futile attempt to put her long, fine, light brown hair in decent order and went to meet her aunt.

“Isn’t this fun!”

Aunt Appie was climbing out of the station taxi, scattering bags and bundles in gleeful abandon. “As soon as Miffy phoned me, I threw my things together and buzzed right along. Caught the train by the skin of my teeth. I’ve made us a lovely tuna casserole so we shan’t have to fret about dinner.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Sarah protested, and meant it. She knew Appie’s casseroles of old. “Cousin Theonia packed food enough to last us forever. But you were sweet to bother,” she added, because after all the dish must have been an awful nuisance to juggle all the way from Porter Square to North Station to Ireson’s End to here. She could always sneak the pallid, tasteless mess out to the skunks and raccoons after dark. They didn’t care what they ate.