The Bone Key (6 page)

I thought of the skirmishing between departments to get guards assigned to their particular treasures, and had to agree.

“Maybe we had it backwards,” Miss Coburn said. “Maybe DeWitt is the hero in this little drama.”

“Then how did Mrs. Stanhope end up . . . ”

“I’ll keep looking,” Miss Coburn said.

The memoranda for the last months of Mr. DeWitt’s life were almost oppressively normal, and relentless in their tedium. He was planning a buying trip to Europe, arguing with the trustees about the museum’s budget, waging a campaign to educate the docents in the niceties of French and Italian pronunciation. The first two times I saw a reference to his “plans,” I assumed it meant one of these concerns, but the third time, it was at the end of an entry full of self-congratulation over his progress on all three fronts. The “plans” had to be something else.

While I was puzzling over that, Miss Coburn said, “Oh dear.”

“What?”

“He’s been reading about Maria Vittoria Venebretti.”

“Oh.” I thought it through, and asked, “
What
was he reading?”

“My Italian isn’t very good, but off-hand I’d say the word
diavolo
is a bad sign.” She handed me the memorandum book, open to the relevant page.

I scanned down the list, my stomach becoming a harder, colder knot with each entry. Then I turned the page.

“He . . . he wasn’t just reading
about
Maria Vittoria Venebretti. He was reading the books she would have read.”

“Which positively begs the question:
why
?”

“I can’t . . . ”

“I fancy we can put Mr. Havilland DeWitt firmly back on the villain side of the equation.”

We sat in grim, cold silence for a moment; I did not know about Miss Coburn, but my mind was full of images of Madeline Stanhope’s bones, her vertebrae like gruesome counters in a children’s game, that sad clump of phalanges I wished I had never seen, her skull. Hamlet had been disgusted by the solid heft of mortality; I was filled with a vast, hopeless desire to protect a woman who had died before my own birth. But I could not reach her, just as Hamlet had not been able to reach the man he had once loved.

“He must have been trying to
do
something,” Miss Coburn said, jerking me back from my morbid reverie.

“Beg pardon?”

“The evidence we’ve got so far doesn’t so much as mention Madeline Stanhope, but it has quite a lot to say about the Venebretti Necklace. If there was a plot here, it wasn’t aimed against
her
. If DeWitt’s our man, then this wasn’t about her at all. She was just . . . inconvenient.”

“Or too convenient to waste,” I muttered, still transfixed by that neat, methodical, and entirely insane list of books.

“What?”

I handed the memorandum book back to her. “While you were . . . talking to your aunt last night, I was . . . that is, I have read many of the same books as Mr. DeWitt, and, er, there are . . . there could be
reasons
. If he bricked her up alive . . . ”

“Which certainly appears to be the case. What sort of reasons?”

“Nothing I want to talk about here or . . . ” I looked at my watch. “Oh God.”

“What?” she said, scrambling to her feet as I did.

“It’s six o’clock. The museum’s closed.”

She did not ask me why that mattered, either because my fright was infectious, or because she had heard the stories for herself. Even those employees, such as myself, who habitually worked late hours did not go into the stacks after the museum closed. We all knew that the next time it might be us lying at the bottom of the stairs for two days before we were found.

When I opened the door to the stairwell, I heard the faint, echoing tap-tap-tap of footsteps even before I reached for the stairwell’s light switch. One glance at Miss Coburn’s white face told me she heard them, too.

There was no way we could climb the stairs stealthily enough to avoid being heard—even if we could have done so in the stairwell’s stygian blackness—and a gibbering voice in the back of my head pointed out that the slower and more cautiously we went, the more likely we were to encounter . . . it, whatever it was.

I found the light switch with fingers that felt as cold and brittle as icicles. “Run!” I said, flipping the switch, and we threw ourselves up the stairs like a pair of demented mountain goats. It was only much later that night, lying in bed staring at the patterns the moonlight made against the venetian blinds, that it occurred to me to wonder what we would have done if the light had failed to go on.

We made enough noise for an army, maybe two—the clatter of our shoes, Miss Coburn cursing breathlessly in French, the air sawing in my lungs, and the echoes clamoring and wailing and clawing at our ears. But always, underneath it, I could hear that tap-tap-tap, unhurried, unemphatic. I could not tell if it was ascending or descending; after we had scrambled around two full turns of the stairs, I could not tell if it was above or below us. With the echoes, it was equally impossible to know if it was drawing nearer or moving away. There was just that sense of menace, filling the air like choking dust.

Whatever it was, we did not encounter it. We burst through the stairwell door at ζ, both of us already fumbling for our keys. I found mine first, wrenched the lock mechanism over, every second expecting to hear the stairwell door open behind me, and shoved the door open. We both got through it somehow, and I locked the door again with feverish panic. And then we both simply sank to the floor where we were, panting for breath. I was intensely, absurdly grateful for the cold marble pressing against my knees and ankles, for the dusty, slightly sour air of the Parrington’s back hallways.

When we were both breathing more normally again, Miss Coburn caught my eye and said, “Dripping water.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “But . . . I’m not going back to turn the lights off.”

She laughed and got to her feet with a leggy athleticism I could only envy. “Come on,” she said and held a hand out to help me up. “Let’s get out of here.”

I do not like to be touched. I got to my feet without taking her hand; I felt her puzzled look, but did not meet her eyes.

After a moment, she let it go, and we walked together toward my office. As with Mr. Lucent the night before, we found ourselves unwilling to separate. Neither one of us spoke; anything we said would only have made more crushing the reality of the dark, deserted museum around us.

Then we turned a corner and nearly collided with Dr. Starkweather.

“Mr Booth. And Miss Coburn.” His heavy eyebrows drew together into a scowl. “Were you in the Annex?”

“Er,” I said. “I . . . ”

“Yes,” Miss Coburn said, unfazed. “Mr. Booth was helping me with some research.”

Dr. Starkweather seemed to contemplate her disheveled hair, then gave me a look I could not decipher. “I would suggest you conduct your . . . research somewhere else after hours,” he said finally. “Good night.”

He continued on his way; Miss Coburn grabbed my arm and dragged me in the opposite direction, disregarding my reflexive attempt to shake her off. She let me go as soon as we were out of earshot and, unbelievably, started to giggle.

“What is it?” I said.

“N-noth—” But she could not get the word out. I stood and watched as her giggles deepened to whoops of laughter; she ended up leaning against the wall, snorting and panting for breath.

“Miss Coburn, please, is it something I did?”

She shook her head. “Starkweather . . . Starkweather thinks . . . oh God!” But she suppressed her giggles sternly and said, “He thinks we were necking in the stacks.”

She met my eyes for a moment and then dissolved into howls. I could feel my face burning and wondered if anyone had ever gone off in an apoplexy from sheer embarrassment. Perhaps I could be the first.

“I’m sorry,” Miss Coburn said, finally composing herself. “Really. I understand that it’s not funny, and I’m not . . . ” She fought her giggles down again. “I’m not laughing at you. I swear.”

“Good night, Miss Coburn,” I said stiffly.

“Good night, Mr. Booth,” she said, and I felt her amusement behind me all the way down the hall.

Again, Miss Coburn was waiting at my office door in the morning. I was rather later than usual in the hopes that this craven ploy might allow me to evade Dr. Starkweather.

“I finished with the memorandum books,” she said abruptly.

“You . . . went
back
?”

“Dripping water,” she said impatiently. “Nothing more. We spooked ourselves.”

“Yes,” I said, because I did not want to argue with her. “Did you find anything?”

“No. Nothing useful. If he was up to something, he must have realized he was incriminating himself. The most specific he gets after that entry with the books is all that talk of ‘plans’ just before he died.”

“The books must have shown him what to do.”

“You still think he killed her?”

I had not meant to say that out loud. “I . . . I need to do some reading,” I said, hastily unlocking the door and entering my office. “Good morning, Miss Coburn.” I closed the door, locked it again, and made my way unsteadily across to my desk to sit down. I saw the outlines of what Havilland DeWitt had done, like a silhouette cast against a screen; I did not want to know more. I could not help Madeline Stanhope now, and there was no point in unearthing the details of this sordid, lunatic crime. Havilland DeWitt had gotten his comeuppance; the Venebretti Necklace had been found; and I was sure that word of Madeline Stanhope’s innocence would trickle out in the same way the original scandal had.

I honorably added Havilland DeWitt’s unpleasant library to the list of my obligations and made a mental note to avoid Miss Coburn as well as Dr. Starkweather for the next several weeks.

And there matters rested for quite some time.

III

Miss Coburn leaned around my office door one afternoon in early September. “Are you going to the Museum Ball, Mr. Booth?”

“Er,” I said, looking up from an odd little Hellenistic statuette that no one quite knew what to make of, and felt the immediate weight of guilt across my shoulders. I had avoided Miss Coburn so successfully for two months that I had almost entirely forgotten my half-promise to follow up on Havilland DeWitt’s reading. “Yes, I suppose.” Dr. Starkweather had made it clear that attendance at Museum Balls was mandatory for all curators.

“Excellent.” She came in and shut the door behind her. “I need an escort.”

I stared at her. Her mouth quirked up, and she said in the simpering accents of a society debutante, “But, Miss Coburn, this is so sudden! Why, we hardly know each other at all!” Then, reverting to her normal voice, “You needn’t look so unnerved. Think of it as a favor.”

“Oh,” I said. “That is . . . what sort of favor?”

She laughed. “I have just lied shamelessly to Cameron Larkin and told him that I cannot attend with him because I already have an escort. You perceive the immediate necessity of making that lie a retroactive truth.”

“ . . . Yes.”

“And I am confident that you will neither become vulgarly drunk nor make a pass at me at two o’clock in the morning.”

“Not at all,” I said, probably too hastily and too vehemently.

She smiled again, but ruefully. “If you really dislike me that much—”

Oh God, worse and worse. And I could not escape the feeling that I owed her a favor. “No, I don’t dislike you, Miss Coburn. Truly. I just . . . I . . . I will be happy to, er, escort you to the Museum Ball.”

“You are too kind, sir,” she said with a mocking curtsey.

“Miss Coburn, I meant no offense. I just . . . ”

“I know. I took you by surprise. You remind me powerfully of my Aunt Ferdy’s cat Fortunato. He greets any change in his routine with that exact horrified stare.” She opened the door. “I will come to your apartment at eight on Friday. I believe we can walk from there?”

And somehow she knew that I did not own a car. “ . . . Yes. Yes, if that’s—”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Booth.” She shut the door briskly behind her and was gone.

I had never had a sweetheart, never so much as escorted a young lady to a dance. My prep school was boys-only, and contact with girls, either from the nearby girls’ school or from the town, was strictly forbidden. Many boys defied that prohibition, but I was not among them. In college, my friend and roommate Augustus Blaine had held sole sway over the department of romance; even if I had been brave enough to wish to attract the attentions of a young lady, I could never have done so with Blaine in the room.

This was not, of course, a date in any proper sense of the word. Miss Coburn was merely using me as a shield. But I still felt horridly like the gawky, shabby boy I had once been, too shy to say anything to my guardians’ goddaughter when she was kind enough to ask me how I did.

Gawky I still was, but shabby I was not, freed from the Siddonses’ parsimony; I bought Miss Coburn a corsage. It took all my courage to go into the florist’s, and I nearly fled when the young woman behind the counter asked if she could help me. But I held fast and managed to explain the situation—that I needed flowers for a lady with whom I stood on amiable (I hoped) but not romantic terms, and that, no, I did not know the color of her dress—and she provided me with some delicate white flowers and attendant greenery which, she said dimpling, would do charmingly. I suspect that she found me more than slightly comical, but my determination carried me through. I did not want to be any more of an embarrassment to Miss Coburn than I had to be.

Miss Coburn arrived promptly on the stroke of eight. I had been ready and waiting since six. I opened the door to her knock. “ . . . Good evening, Miss Coburn.” She was wearing a black dress, long and unadorned and austere, under a plain and slightly threadbare black coat. Instead of its usual bun at the base of her skull, her hair was arranged in a coronet of braids, as stark and becoming to her as the dress. Her only jewels were a pair of diamond earrings and an antique signet ring on her right hand.

“Oh, God, is it going to be ‘Miss Coburn’ and ‘Mr. Booth’ all evening long? My Christian name is Claudia, and I beg you will use it. And yours is . . . Karl? No.”