The Gladstone Bag (10 page)

“Don’t let me disturb you,” Emma said quite redundantly. “I just wanted to let the girls know they can clear away in the drawing room and to ask what you’ve done with our mystery man. Has he shown any sign of recovering his memory?”

“I expect it’ll come back when he takes a notion,” Vincent grunted. “We got ’im bedded down for the night in the storeroom. Neil and Ted set up a cot an’ done what was reas’nable. They’ve gone to check the cottages now. We always take a look around last thing before we go to bed. We all sleep in the ell, by the way, so you’re not alone in the big house.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“We won’t bother you none. Neither will he.” Vincent jerked his head back toward where the storeroom was presumably located. “I locked the door.”

“Very sensible,” Emma approved. “I take it there are no windows in the storeroom.”

“Ventilatin’ slits high up in the walls. He’ll do till my boys pick ’im up. I called and gave ’em the word. They’re goin’ to stop by an’ take ’im ashore after they’ve finished haulin’. Can’t ask ’em to give up a mornin’s work.”

“No, of course we can’t.” Emma felt a twinge of guilt at the mere notion of it, even though she wasn’t altogether sure what Vincent was talking about. “And I must say I shouldn’t mind having another try at getting some information out of him before we let him go.”

“Me neither.”

Vincent cast a glance down at his cooling coffee. Emma took the hint.

“Then we’ll leave it till morning. Good night, everyone.”

Emma dragged herself upstairs wondering whether she was going to fall asleep before she got to the top. Once inside her room, though, she found herself oddly reluctant to settle down. She made a lengthy business of getting undressed and parking her wig on its block. Emma had reasonably abundant hair of her own but wasn’t one to fritter away time at the hairdresser’s when it was so much more sensible to send the hair along without her. She wouldn’t have access to a beauty shop for the rest of the summer, she supposed, unless she rode ashore with the lobsters. She’d have to manage the best she could.

Not that it mattered. She quit fiddling with the wig and started patting cream into her face with a tiny pink plastic paddle she’d never used before and couldn’t imagine why she was bothering with now. She tossed the paddle in the wastebasket, retied the bow of her nightgown, kicked off her mules—pale green satin ones with pert little heels and marabou trimming; widowed or not, Emma was not yet ready to haul down the flag—and began wandering around the room in her bare feet.

Sandy had dutifully parked Emma’s other luggage all arow in the big closet, but the old black Gladstone bag was still squatting on the bench at the foot of the bed. Emma sat down beside it and began sorting through the meretricious glitter that had raised such a fuss on the way here. She didn’t know why she bothered; she certainly didn’t intend to start gluing in rhinestones tonight.

It was immediately clear to her that the fairies’ baubles had not been treated kindly during their brief pillage. Before starting on her journey, Emma had taken everything out and repacked the bag as neatly as the varied shapes and conditions allowed. Now the pieces were all one great jumble. The ferryboat snatcher must have taken them into the loo, she decided, and dumped them out to see what he’d got. When he’d found out he’d wasted his time, he’d stuffed them back any old way and ditched the bag where Radunov had found it. Or not, as the case might have been.

There was no earthly reason to take them out again now, but Emma did. They were, after all, old acquaintances. This was going to be the Pirates’ fifth
Iolanthe.
No, their sixth, with all those others in between. Dear heaven, where had the years gone? She picked up the Fairy Queen’s crown, the one with the big diamond butterfly on top, and perched it on her head for auld lang syne while she untangled the rest of the gauds. So it was five times, not four, that she’d tyrannized over her fairy court and nursed her secret passion for Private Willis before she’d faced the truth and called a halt.

“Leave ’em while you’re lookin’ good.” Mae West had said that. Emma and Bed had sneaked off to Boston by train on their very first all-alone date to catch Mae’s then-latest movie. They’d dined at the Copley Plaza on Bed’s father’s charge account, then gone on to the Tremont. Or was it the Majestic? She’d been too dazed with love and excitement to remember afterward, and she’d never thought in later years to ask.

One dressed in those days. She’d worn her coming-out gown with pink roses instead of white and that bottle green velvet wrap Bed had always loved her in, Emma remembered that well enough. Bed had been in tux, looking handsome enough to turn heads and pretending not to notice, the darling ham. And the movie palace had been a gorgeous welter of rococo swirls and painted ceilings and crimson plush draperies and sky-high gold-framed mirrors and chandeliers totally beyond the scope of reason or logic.

The last time her grandchildren had dragged her to a movie, they’d sat in a barren cube that might as well have been a lecture room in a teaching hospital, and the film had been about talking robots. Poor, glamour-starved children, little did they know how deprived they were. Emma took off the crown and looked in the satchel for the best place to stow it.

Over the years, the old Gladstone bag had taken a good many knocks. Even the thin calf lining was bubbled and ripped in places. One of the rips was longer than Emma remembered; something had got caught down inside. She fished out the bauble and thought she was going to faint.

Emma had enough diamonds of her own to know the true from the false. These were all too true. This was no mere necklace but what her mother would have called a dog collar: a band of diamonds fully an inch and a quarter wide, set in four solid rows, every single diamond as big as a baby pea. Dangling from it on diamond-studded platinum chains were three pear-shaped pendants, one with a blue diamond not more than half the size of the Hope, one with a yellow diamond of equal weight, and one great, dark blaze that could only be a rare black diamond, all of them framed in yet more diamonds—smaller ones these, of a paltry half-carat or so apiece.

Emma tried to think what such jewels might be worth on today’s market and boggled. The women she knew didn’t buy diamonds, they inherited them or got them from their lawfully wedded husbands. She herself had her grandmother’s lovely sunburst, naturally, and her mother’s modest parure, besides the ring Bed had put on her finger that fateful night going home from the Lambda Chi hop and the stud earrings he’d given her when Young Bed was born. All these were useful pieces a woman in Emma Kelling’s position might reasonably have occasion to wear. Who on earth would dare to appear in a great lump of ostentation like this? A royal personage or a movie star, perhaps, surely not anyone from Pleasaunce.

As to the owner of the necklace, that was for the police to find out. As to what it was doing in Bed’s uncle’s Gladstone bag, that was no great enigma. Whoever stole the diamonds had had to get rid of them in a hurry. Emma Kelling’s happening to show up on the ferry with a satchelful of fake jewels had offered a chance to work the old purloined-letter trick.

She’d read in the paper not long ago that there were more multimillionaires in Maine than anywhere else in the United States, notwithstanding the fact that Maine was by no means a wealthy state by and large. They would be chiefly part-time residents like the Sabines, Emma surmised, weekenders and vacationers who came and went as the mood took them. It would not be too farfetched to visualize one of those super-rich women taking the ferry on a whim in the old Blue Train manner with a jewel case and a light-fingered maid or else with a husband whose millions were less multi than he was anxious to make his business associates keep on believing. This amazing discovery might be evidence of outright theft or of an insurance fraud in the making. Emma didn’t care which; her sole concern just now was how to get rid of it.

Was this her only problem, as if it weren’t enough? She laid the dog collar on the bed, fetched the long hatpin she’d worn on the boat to anchor her long-cherished panama, and began probing the bag’s lining. To her relief, she failed to strike pay dirt again. To steady her nerves, she went back to sorting out the
Iolanthe
pieces. Some of the sets were incomplete, but that didn’t surprise her. They’d been lent around so many times that it was a marvel the Pirates hadn’t lost them all.

None of these blatant fakes could have functioned as a plausible substitute for that gold digger’s dream. Emma supposed a couple might possibly have been stuffed into the jewel case, supposing there was one, in order to bring it back to the correct weight after the collar was taken out. For no special reason, she picked up the Fairy Queen’s necklace she’d chosen for herself so many years ago, doubled it into a neat package, and stuffed it under the lining whence she’d drawn out the dog collar. Then, suddenly disgusted with the whole business, she jumbled the rest of the stuff in on top of it and closed the bag as best she could.

The plan, she assumed, had been for an accomplice to collect the bag from the men’s room. Somebody might be feeling pretty sick about now because Count Radunov had got to it first. Unless, of course, Radunov himself was the accomplice. He could have made the pickup any time while she was asleep and decided only after that next-to-last stop that it would be safer to let her carry the Gladstone bag off the ferry herself. He’d have gambled on the assumption that a silly woman who’d let herself be drugged and temporarily robbed in full daylight aboard a busy ferryboat wouldn’t have the brains to notice there’d been an addition to her imitation dragon’s hoard before he found the chance to steal the necklace back again.

Well, Emma knew how to deal with that. Adelaide Sabine had confided to her the whereabouts of a wall safe that even Vincent was supposed not to know about. Emma thought he probably did, but he probably wouldn’t know the combination; he wouldn’t suppose Mrs. Kelling had anything special to put in it, and he wasn’t likely to come snooping anyway. She put on her blue robe and found a pair of soft-soled slippers. It mightn’t be wise to go clacking about in her mules.

Nor did she feel like turning on a light in Adelaide’s bedroom, not even a flashlight. Ted and Neil might still be doing their rounds outside, or one of the cottagers could be taking a pre-bedtime stroll. The windows were large and the moon was close to full; she’d be able to see well enough. Emma turned off her own light, put the dog collar in the pocket of her robe, and went into the only other bedroom on the floor.

Hers was good-sized, but the one Adelaide and her late spouse had occupied was enormous. Mr. Sabine’s bed had never been taken away; it stood complete with its nightstand and one of those high-backed wooden chairs with a coat hanger on top. There was a huge armoire; Emma supposed that was to compensate for inadequate closet space. There was a writing desk, and no puny one, either. There were a vanity table with a triple mirror, a cheval glass, a chiffonier, a semainier, assorted dressers, a slipper chair, an armchair, a spring rocker covered in faded tapestry, a television set in a walnut cabinet dating from the late fifties, if Emma was any judge. This must have been the Sabines’ escape hatch when their never-ending duties as host and hostess got too overwhelming for them.

The safe was inside a small closet next to one of the beds. To Emma’s relief, there was a bare bulb in the closet ceiling, with a long cord hanging from it. They’d left the light on to keep down the mildew, she surmised; dampness and mold were the penalties of living so close to the water. She let herself inside, closed the door, took down a woolen bathrobe that felt as if the moths had been at it—one of the late George Sabine’s, probably, left hanging there partly for sentimental reasons—and found the knot in the cedar paneling exactly where Adelaide had said she would. She pushed.

A very neat job; her own carpenter couldn’t have done better. Where no crack in the paneling had been visible, a tiny door flipped open. A small wall safe was revealed. Emma dialed the combination Adelaide had given her, opened the inner door, laid the necklace inside on top of some yellowed papers, which she naturally did not read, and closed the safe. She hung the bathrobe back on the hook over the knot and shut up the closet with a feeling of great relief.

Tomorrow she’d get in touch with Sarah’s husband. One of Max Bittersohn’s specialties was the discreet tracking down of stolen jewels; he’d know how to cope. For tonight, she’d done what she could. The sensible thing now would be to push that outrageous necklace to the back of her mind and try to get some sleep.

T
HIS WAS A HEAVENLY
room to wake up in. Emma lay watching the sunbeams dance across the old-fashioned lilac plissé blanket cover, pleased that her bed was so comfortable, that she wasn’t feeling exhausted any longer, that the wood thrushes were in good voice, that from somewhere down below, a faint whiff of brewing coffee was being wafted up to her. She slid out of bed, put on her robe, for the sea breeze through the open windows had a morning nip to it, and went to the bathroom.

Now, back to bed or up and at it? Emma was debating the issue with one slipper on and one off when she heard a knock at her door. She put on the other slipper and called out, “Come in.”

It was Sandy, bless the child, with a tray. “I heard the john flush, so I knew you must be up. Bubbles made the tea, and I picked the rose. There was a bug in it, but I chased him out. Go ahead and sniff if you want.”

“How lovely. Thank you, Sandy.”

The rose was a fluffy little pink one, the sort one always saw blooming in great clusters around old houses near the seashore at this time of year. Sandy had sorted out the prettiest, Emma supposed, and found that tiny silver vase for it somewhere in Adelaide’s cupboards. So many charming things around here for the heirs to squabble over when the end came. Marcia wasn’t the squabbling kind, but Emma wasn’t so sure about those two sisters-in-law of hers. Perhaps Adelaide would have left lists of who was to get what, or perhaps she didn’t care by now. Emma poured from the graceful silver pot into the dainty china cup and sipped. Perfect tea, of course. How could it be otherwise?