The Bluest Blood (27 page)

“Yes,” Tea said, “to several of your questions. He didn’t leave at all. He’s still here.”

I couldn’t decide if she’d been oblivious to our sense of urgency, if we hadn’t made our concern clear, or whether for lack of any other pastime, she’d simply been toying with us.

“He came to tell me why Griffin couldn’t have run over Edward. To set my mind at rest on that point.”

Just as I’d thought. So Griffin was still in trouble, but not the very biggest kind.

“The discussion of Griffin led to many topics,” Tea said. “Including—I hope this doesn’t upset you—my accusations against him, to which he admitted his guilt and attempted to explain about the Limoges box. The cat, you know.”

I reached into my pocket. I could return her stolen goods right now. But Jake should be the one. I took my hand out, empty.

“I told him to keep it,” she said.

Them, shouldn’t it be? Keep them?

“As a symbol, a souvenir.”

Of what?

“He thought Griffin might have left a clue as to his destination in their hideaway. With all our bedrooms—Griffin has his own recreation room upstairs—the boys treated a hole of a closet in the basement like a clubhouse, the kind kids had in old movies. A place to take things apart, build them, go online, Lord knows what. They spent a lot of time down there.”

Less time than she thought, I bet, remembering Jake’s reference to sneaking out by the back stairs.

“And he’s there now?”

She nodded. “Seems to feel Griffin’s running away might be half a test, a serious prank, but that in his heart, he wants to come back. That may be wishful thinking. I know the boys are close and Jake must be experiencing a sense of loss. But Griffin does not have Jake’s common sense, more’s the pity. The school we found him is excellent. And it would give him stability, particularly now, when we—when I—will be moving, and he’d have to readjust to another school in any case.”

“You’re moving?”

“I can’t stay here. This has become…bitter. I’ve told the entire staff to take two weeks off, close up the house while I’m gone. I suspect that will become a permanent condition.”

“It’s supposedly not a good idea to make decisions right after you’ve suffered a great loss and are…” Her raised-eyebrow expression of incredulity stopped me. Who was I to give Tea Roederer advice?

“Where will you go?” Loren asked, as if he hadn’t noticed the deep freeze that had greeted my intrusions into her private life.

“Anywhere but here.”

I wanted to say how much it grieved me that this city that was so profoundly indebted to the Roederers now felt inhospitable. But her expression froze me out. It wasn’t my place to offer such sentiments—I didn’t have the credentials to equate my feelings with hers, to
presume
with my betters. Some horrid ancestral worldview that last served a purpose in the Middle Ages had been reactivated by the manor house and its mistress.

“Forgive me,” Tea said. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. This has been the most dreadful—and talking about it makes it worse. I appreciate your concern.”

We nodded. Loren cleared his throat. “Jake,” he prompted, bringing us back to our purpose. “His mother is worried sick.”

Tea Roederer nodded. Her mood had softened, her attitude toward us warmed. “Yes, of course, but please excuse the mustiness and clutter. It is a basement, after all.”

It was humorous, seeing the aggrieved aristocrat lapse into a flustered and apologetic housewife-mode. Her basement could be any damned way it wanted to be. It was a Roederer basement and I was sure that its discards and excess—even its trash—would be exceptionally fine.

“Follow me,” she said.

We were led to a cramped landing at the back of the house. The fabled Back Stairs, route of surreptitious expeditions. The landing ended at a heavy door with a troublesome knob. Tea juggled the key in its latch, mistakenly locked the door, and muttered, “Sorry.” Finally she unlocked and opened it. “Be careful on the steps,” she said, as she worked the lock. “They’re sturdy, but the whole place gives me the willies. I have a phobia about spiders, and despite all good efforts, we do get them down there.” She shuddered. “I never go down those stairs except in dire emergency, and we’ve never had a sufficiently dire one.”

Has never done laundry, is how I translated that. Has someone else pull the circuit breaker if a fuse blows. Is rich enough to have parts of her house she never visits and household functions she refuses to know about.

“Downstairs, there’s a sort of hallway off to the right of the laundry and heating area. Down it a few steps you’ll probably find Jake glued to a computer monitor. Forgive me for not leading you to him, but as I said, I simply don’t.”

“No problem. Thanks,” we both said.

“I’m going to close the door behind you,” she said, “if that’s all right. Those spiders, you know.”

As if arachnids, seeing the open door, would make a run for it. Nevertheless, we said everything was fine and walked downstairs. The treads weren’t rickety or dangerously unprotected, as in so many old basements. They were solid wood with a decent-enough handrail, and I didn’t know what the fluttery-housewife fuss had been about.

The open space into which we descended was unfinished, with pipes crisscrossing the ceiling, and large mechanisms—heaters of home and water, the guts of the house above it—bulking in corners. From what I could see, it was less overstuffed than most basements, but then, the Roederers had spent most of their lives in transit, and would have disposed of the redundant. So while there were a few trunks visible and at least one upholstered dining chair with a sprung seat propped against a wall, mostly it was concrete flooring and naked lightbulbs. Despite the wealth above us and its relative cleanliness, the basement managed to have a dingy subterranean ambience, with the lightbulbs losing the struggle against architectural gloom. I spotted only two windows in the large open area, and those were high up and small.

We walked into the hallway, which was lined with closed storage, and eventually reached a side room that looked like it, too, had once been a closet. Tea had been right. Inside the small room, Jake intently studied a computer screen. I could see the photograph of a man, plus the image of a newspaper that flipped pages as Jake clicked the mouse.

The room was makeshift, and in contrast to the open area we’d just left, knee-deep in clutter. Griffin and Jake had apparently used this place not only as hideout/clubhouse, but also as Dumpster. Sweaters, baseball hats, books, a boom box, CDs, a chair in need of reupholstery, newspapers, fast-food wrappers and containers, a printer.

Loren stepped over the discarded pages of a joke-a-day calendar, avoiding treading directly on them, as if following a magic incantation. “Jake,” he said softly, “you gave me quite a scare.”

Jake whirled around, eyes as startled as if we’d set off a siren under his chair.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Didn’t expect to see you here!” He looked shaken and pale, although it could have been the dim light cast by the computer screen.

“I thought you’d be glad to see me,” Loren said.

“I
am,
Dad.”

“I wish you’d have waited for me, then.”

I needed to dilute the father-son tension or we’d all get stuck in it. “Are there all that many spiders down here?” I asked. “I mean, I’m not over-fond of them myself.” That was an exaggeration. I am not afraid of spiders. Not much, anyway.

“Spiders?” Jake shook his head. “Why?”

“Mrs. Roederer. Isn’t that why she never comes down here?”

“Where’d you get that idea? She comes down. She stores some of her clothes down here, and Griffin and me”—I didn’t think it a good time to stop and correct his grammar—“spent an hour with her here last week trying to explain what the Web was. Maybe she meant afraid of the Web, not spiders.”

I let it go, but not far. It hovered like a spider on a thread in front of my eyes. Why would she lie about something so inconsequential?

Loren seemed too far out of it to even notice the inconsistency. He leaned over his son’s shoulder, studying the multicolored screen.

“Can you show me that conference?” he asked Jake. “The one you got your column from?”

“I didn’t get the column from it, Dad. I wrote the column about it. There’s a difference.” Despite his grumbles, he clicked his way around the screen toward his father’s requested destination. “Incredible, isn’t it?” he said.

“Boggles the mind, eh?”

Eh.
That Canadian trademark. The first time I was in this house, it was a topic of conversation. Harvey Spiers used it and Neddy Roederer commented on it. And now they were both dead. But surely not for the sin of regional speech patterns. Nobody had clearly related the two deaths, but both were dead, and they’d known each other, or at least, Harvey said they had. I was sure there was a link.

Eh.
Because of which sound, Harvey later said he knew Neddy, knew the man Neddy lived with. But how could he have? They wouldn’t travel in the same circles, ever. Loren said that Harvey had been an insurance clerk before he found God, while Neddy…

Jake found the Web site. A low male voice, audibly serious, talked about the crime- and solve-rate in various developed countries.

I was more interested in the voice inside my head. Canada. Insurance, it repeated. Something, Harvey said, that would put Neddy Roederer in jail. I’d thought it was Harvey’s religious hysteria, thought it was about homosexuality. But that wasn’t it. It was the Canada connection. It had to be.

I felt short of breath, so near to something I was dizzy. “Aren’t you supposed to be looking for a clue?” I asked, while my mind spun.

“See?” Jake was oblivious to me. His dad was paying attention. He had expertise that interested his dad. “You choose a kind of crime, or a region or country, or a time period—you can go a whole lot of different ways. They aren’t all violent, either. Like the one you sent me the clipping for. That was embezzlement.”

Embezzlement. Canada. Insurance.

Embezzlement must have struck a familiar chord with Loren, too. “Speaking of which, Mrs. Roederer says that you and she, ah, cleared up the matter of the bric-a-brac, is that right?”

“She said I could keep it,” Jake said.

“It or them?” I asked.

Jake swiveled around. “What’s that?”

“It or them? You took two pieces. The St. Bernard and the cat.”

Jake shrugged. “She meant both of them. I’ll double-check.”

But “it” was not “them.” That’s what she’d said upstairs, too.
It
was the cat. Only the cat. And how had she noticed one missing trinket in a vast household that had been trashed?
Why
had she? She hadn’t noticed the dog.

The screen blinked and so did my brain. Canada. Enormous embezzlement. Insurance company embezzlement. Disappeared. No such person ever as Chester Katt. Insurance. Harvey Spiers. Chester. Cheshire Cat. A small and grinning china cat. The only missing piece noticed. Spiders. And, oh, God—Edward Fairfax Rochester’s secret about his wife.

“Jake,” I said, still more breathlessly. “Should you be doing that? Aren’t you here to find out if Griffin left a clue as to his whereabouts?”

“Huh?” He swiveled and looked at me. “Why would he? I know where he’s headed, but you can’t tell.”

I promised not to, hoping I could keep that promise.

“He found his aunt in New York State. On the Internet. When he was a kid, she was too young to take care of him, then she didn’t know where he was, but she’s cool now as a guardian.”

“Does his—does Mrs. Roederer know that?”

Jake shook his head. “Of course not. Griffin’ll get in touch when he’s ready.”

“But she said…then why are you down here?” his father asked.

“Mrs. R. said I could have the computer. I was figuring out how to transport it, what software to take. Some of it’s already at school and I have copies of other stuff…why?”

“You know what a griffin was in mythology?” Loren asked.

“Not now.” My pulse steadily gained speed.

“A monster,” Jake said. “That’s what Griffin said.”

“Only because it combines the head of an eagle and the body of a lion. In heraldry, griffins symbolize vigilance. In mythology, griffins guarded gold mines and hidden treasures.”

I looked over Jake’s shoulder at the multicolored screen. I saw headlines, a colorized photo of the headless, green-footed corpse, private body parts blocked off.

“Well,” Jake said, “this computer is the treasure he guarded.”

I was not at all sure he was right about that.

Also on the screen was the man called the Cheshire Cat, with his pudgy, nondescript features, his pale mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and sparse hair.

Not possibly strong-featured Neddy Roederer by any stretch. Besides, if it had been, Harvey and he would have instantly recognized each other.

I looked at his thin hair. “My God,” I whispered.

“What?” Loren asked.

“Let me ask you this—why would a woman wear wigs all the time?”

“Don’t pick on Mrs. Roederer,” Jake said.

“She wears wigs?” Loren asked.

“No,” I snapped, “her hair just slides off her head the way it did today. I’m asking a real question, and trust me, it’s important.”

“It’s a fashion statement,” Jake said. “Isn’t that what it’s called? A kind of look? And freedom—I’ve seen her with short hair Monday and long hair Tuesday.”