The Gilded Hour (71 page)

While Oscar tried to make himself comfortable with a chair far too small for his bulk, Anna watched Mr. Stone, who sat in a rocker by the window with a small dog in his lap. He was talking to the dog in a way he might have talked to an old friend or a brother who simply didn’t talk very much. She heard him mentioning a carriage going down the street with a single piebald horse, a neighbor who seemed to have forgotten his hat, children chasing fireflies in the new dark.

The dog seemed to understand it all, looking obediently where his attention was directed. His tail gave a thump whenever a name was mentioned, as if to comment.

Oscar was saying, “Now, I believe you said that you left to visit your sister on the day before Mrs. Campbell’s death. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. In Albany.”

“That’s a long way to go for a one-day visit. You’d almost have to turn around and come back within a few hours. You were home on Thursday morning?”

A little color had begun to creep into her face, but she nodded.

“Did you go to the train station with Mrs. Campbell and her sons that Wednesday?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was hoarse now, and she cleared her throat. “To help with the boys. Why do you ask?”

“Mrs. Stone,” Oscar said. “Where are the boys you helped Mrs. Campbell hide away?”

The room was completely silent but for the ticking of the mantel clock.
Anna, as surprised as Mrs. Stone seemed to be, watched the older woman’s face flush and then drain of all color. Her fingers were working in her skirts, gathering the fabric and then smoothing it, again and again. Jack and Oscar waited patiently, nothing to read from their faces, no judgment or disapproval.

Mrs. Stone cleared her throat again. “What do you mean?”

“I would like to know where the Campbell boys are. Archer, Steven—”

Mr. Stone turned toward them.

“Kommen die Buben heut’ abend?”
There was real excitement and pleasure in his expression.
“Kommen die Buben endlich?”

“
Nein,
” said his wife.
“Noch nicht.”

Below shaggy eyebrows the blue eyes lowered in disappointment. “
Schade,
” he said.
“Montgomery, die Buben kommen immer noch nicht.”

“My husband loves those boys,” Mrs. Stone said, a little stiffly. “He asks for them every day, many times. I can’t explain to him.”

“What can’t you explain?” Oscar asked.

“That they are gone away. That they won’t be back. I tell him but he doesn’t believe me.”

“Because he expects to see them again,” Anna suggested.

Oscar asked again, quite gently. “Mrs. Stone. What happened to the boys?”

She gave a sharp shake of the head and lowered her chin to her chest. When she looked up again she said, “Which one? Which one do you want to know about? Let’s start with Steven. Nobody at the inquest asked where the older boys were when the baby was coming into the world. If they had asked me I would have said. I would have told God and man about those poor boys.

“Because they were right here with us, with me and Henry. Junior and Gregory were playing with a puzzle in the kitchen and I was tending to Steven. He had bloody stripes on his legs and bottom and his back too, and it wasn’t the first time, wasn’t going to be the last, either. Their father used the buckle end of his belt to beat them with. The scars will last those boys a lifetime. And poor Junior—”

She sat back, breathless, her mouth pressed hard.

“What about Junior?” Oscar asked.

“He didn’t beat that boy near as bad as the other two. But he’d say,
Junior, which one of your brothers should wear your stripes today? And made him choose. If he hesitated, both boys got the belt. To remind them who was master of the house, and that disobedience has consequences. Oh, he loved teaching that lesson. So let me ask you, Detective Sergeant, what would you have done in my place?” She looked at Oscar with something like defiance in her gaze.

“I can answer that,” Anna said. “I would have helped Mrs. Campbell get away with her boys. Far away, where he’d never find her. Is that what you did?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Stone said, her voice breaking. “But it was all for naught, now. All for naught. And I promised her I’d get them away safe.”

“Away to where?” Anna asked.

From a notebook that sat on the table beside her, Mrs. Stone took a newspaper advertisement. She read it to them in a wavering voice but Anna had the sense that she could have recited it by heart:

Rhode Island. Comfortable cottage for sale. Nicely furnished, 8 rooms besides pantry &c. with chicken house, stable & small barn all in good order. One acre land. Fruit trees, vegetable garden, strawberry bed, pasture. Good pure water & excellent well. Sakonnet Harbor. $2,000. Inquiries J. Barnes, Main St. Little Compton.

There was a long moment’s silence while Mrs. Stone tried to gather her composure. She said, “Janine wrote to Mr. Barnes and I mailed the letter. He wrote back to this address and after a few letters back and forth they came to an agreement. She bought the place sight unseen and sent the money express. I said to her, Janine, you’re taking an awful chance, but she was desperate to get the boys away to a safe place.

“The plan was that we would all live in that house together. She gave her name as Jane Steinmauer, a widow woman coming with the boys and us, her parents-in-law. Henry has never got used to the name Stone anyway, and the boys are young enough to learn to answer to new ones. We’d be like any other family, keeping chickens and a garden. But poor Janine, she never got as far as Rhode Island.”

She stopped to get her handkerchief from her sleeve and wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“I went ahead with the boys. Janine came with us to the train station by omnibus and then I took the boys by cab to the steamer office. The plan was, she was supposed to come later in the day. It made me terrible nervous. I was so worried about that cottage, maybe it would turn out to be a hovel or maybe it didn’t exist at all, but in the end she was right. It was just the way it’s described here.”

She touched the newspaper cutting. “You should have seen the boys, they could hardly have been happier if you set them down in heaven itself. The harbor and the boats and the garden and the house with a nice big kitchen.” She pressed her mouth hard, as if she were telling herself to be quiet, she had spoken enough. But the question came out just the same: “Can I ask, did Campbell go to the police saying he’d been robbed?”

When Oscar said that no complaint had been filed, she nodded.

“Janine said he wouldn’t. That he couldn’t tell the police about the money because he didn’t come by it honest.”

Jack said, “Mrs. Stone, I’m confused. Campbell told us that he was missing just over twelve hundred dollars cash. Where was the money coming from to buy the house? From you?”

That almost got him a smile. “All we have is Henry’s pension, the bit I make mending and sewing, and this little house I was born in, termites and leaky roof and all.”

“Do you know how she paid for the Rhode Island house?” Oscar asked.

In fits and starts the story came together. Mrs. Campbell had indeed had something over a thousand dollars in cash, most of which she had passed to Mrs. Stone when she left with the boys for the cost of travel and provisions, and getting settled in the new house.

It was true that was the only cash, but it wasn’t the only money.

“That’s why she stayed behind when I left with the boys. Or at least, that’s what she said. Here, it’s easier to show you.”

Mrs. Stone took up a large sewing basket, set the lid aside, and began to unpack it. There was a tray of threads and a pincushion, shears, a roll of muslin, patches, a darning egg, knitting needles, a man’s shirt neatly folded, a chemise. When it seemed to be empty she turned it over and thumped the bottom with the heel of one hand. Two solid blows and a false bottom went clattering to the floor, followed by a black pocketbook.

With trembling hands she took out a thick roll of oversized bills. This
she handed to Oscar, and he slid a binding string down and off so he could spread the roll flat on his lap.

“Bearer bonds,” he said. “Issued by the State of Massachusetts.”

The bills were elaborately engraved and printed in three colors. Anna had to look twice before she could convince herself that she was seeing correctly.

“Five hundred dollars,” she said. “For each?”

“Forty-six of them,” Mrs. Stone said. “Of the original fifty. That Thursday morning I found her near dead, she gave me the purse with the bonds before the ambulance came. But I’m not keeping it for myself,” she added, new color flooding her face. “The money is to raise the boys, for food and clothes and school fees and the like, and—”

“No one suspects you of plotting to steal the bonds,” Jack said.

Anna wondered if that was strictly true. She could see the Campbell house through the front windows, still dark. If Archer Campbell suspected that Mrs. Stone had the bearer bonds, she didn’t doubt he was looking for a way to get them back.

“Bearer bonds.” Oscar rubbed both hands over his face.

Mrs. Stone said, “All I know is, Janine said he hadn’t come by them honest.”

“It’s not important right now,” Jack said. “But it’s still unclear to me why she didn’t just leave with you and the boys that Wednesday morning.”

Anna said, “She had a doctor’s appointment, didn’t she?”

Mrs. Stone’s head dropped. “That was it. I didn’t figure it out until later, but she went to that doctor who charged so much to fix things.” She rocked a little in place. “She was so worried about another baby, sick, really, in her head and heart both. She went to that doctor right after she saw me off with the boys. She had a ticket for the noon steamer, that’s in the purse still. But it didn’t work out the way she planned.

“She told me when I found her Thursday morning, she knew as soon as she left the doctor’s office that something was wrong. She was in so much pain and bleeding so bad she couldn’t get on a steamer. She could hardly get back here.”

A fresh welling of tears cascaded down her cheeks. “I get so mad at her when I think about it. What’s another baby when there’s hands enough to do the work and money to put food on the table? But she couldn’t bear the
idea, and so she went and had the operation and she never lived to see the place she bought, or her boys so happy.”

“When did you decide to go back to the city to look for her?” Jack asked.

“Wednesday evening. She wasn’t on the steamer when she was supposed to be, or the one after that. The plan we made was to meet back here if something went wrong, and it did go wrong. If you can imagine it, Janine had to spend another night with that man, knowing she was sick unto death, thinking she’d be dead within a day and what was going to happen to the boys?

“So I did come back, and thank God. Just before the ambulance came she gave me the purse with the bearer bonds. She said, ‘Mabel, think how much worse it would be if Archer had realized what I took from him. I wouldn’t have anything to give you for the boys. Now you can raise them up right and they’ll be safe.’

“Then the doctor came in and examined her in the bedroom. Not ten minutes later they put her in the ambulance and I never saw her again. It’s a sin and a shame the way she died, but she went easier, knowing I would go back to the boys. That’s all I want, to go back to the boys, me and Henry, but we can’t get away. And I don’t know how much longer Mrs. Barnes can look after them.”

Jack got up and paced the length of the parlor. “You think Campbell suspects?”

“I know he suspects,” she said, almost sharply. “Didn’t he say as much, right to my face? He said, ‘Mabel Stone, remember one thing. I’ll have what’s mine.’ And now he sits there watching us, day and night. Like a spider in a web he watches us. I know he didn’t answer when you pounded on the door, but he’s there. You can see his cigar, it’s like an evil red eye in the dark. I think he’s waiting for us both to be out of the house so he can come in and search.”

She rocked forward and crossed her arms across her chest, weeping silently but for short indrawn breaths. Anna leaned close and put a hand on the bowed back. The kind of touch that might provide a grieving mother some small comfort. Because Mrs. Stone had lost a daughter in Janine Campbell.

They talked for a half hour more, asking questions that Mrs. Stone tried to answer. She didn’t know where or how Archer Campbell had gotten
some twenty-five thousand dollars in bearer bonds; she didn’t know where Janine Campbell had gone for the abortion or who had performed it. All she could say for sure was that she had paid the doctor three hundred dollars.

“She thought it was the only way to get it done quick and safe. And truth be told, I think she got some satisfaction out of the idea that it was Archer’s money that paid the doctor. Three hundred dollars, and for that he butchered our girl and now those boys have got nobody. Nobody who knows them and loves them. If we go to them, Campbell will follow. For the bonds, if not the boys.”

Jack said, “Mrs. Stone, does anybody else know about this, the whole story?”

She shook her head. “The only person who knows anything at all is a neighbor from down the street. Mrs. Oglethorp. She stayed with my Henry while I was gone. She thinks I went to my sister, too.”

Anna asked, “How can you be sure Henry didn’t tell Mrs. Oglethorp anything, given his state of mind?”

“I can be sure because Mary doesn’t speak German, and Henry lost every word he ever knew of English on the battlefield at Bull Run.”

Oscar stood up, his expression thoughtful as he walked toward the window where Mr. Stone sat rocking. He crouched down and smiled at both man and dog, held out a hand to be sniffed, and scratched behind Montgomery’s ear.

“Henry,” he said.

Mr. Stone looked at him expectantly, a smile on his face that could almost be called hopeful.

“A fine dog you’ve got here. His name is bigger than he is, though. Why’d you name him Montgomery?”

An uncertain look was all the response he got.

“Henry, where are the little boys from across the street?”