The Gladstone Bag (26 page)

“Just lie still for a moment, my dear. You’ve had a nasty knock. What happened, do you remember?”

“Certainly I remember. My slipper came off. When I bent over to pick it up, somebody hit me on the head.”

“No, dear. You lost your balance and struck your forehead on the flour bin.”

“That was afterward.”

“You know best, my dear.”

Theonia was humoring her. Emma was not about to be humored. She pushed away the ammonia bottle and the ice cubes. She sat up and put a hand to the back of her head. There was one spot that made her wince as she touched it. It was swollen; not hugely swollen like the bump from that blow that missed fracturing Sandy’s skull, not gorily swollen like the injury Lisbet Quainley sustained, but definitely swollen.

“Then where,” she demanded angrily, “did I get this?”

First Theonia, then Bubbles obliged by feeling her lump. It was not, they agreed, much of a lump. Nothing to worry about, Bubbles reassured her.

Emma did not want reassurances. What she wanted, she realized with some astonishment, was revenge. How ignoble of her! She took hold of the edge of the flour bin to help herself up, but Bubbles put some kind of nursely grip on her arm and drew her effortlessly to her feet without jolting her sore head.

“Now, Mithith Kelling, I’m going to help you upthtairth and give you a thedative. Mithith Brookth, you’d better thleep in the thame room with her tonight. We don’t want any more inthidentth, do we?”

“We certainly don’t,” Theonia agreed. “I shouldn’t dream of leaving Mrs. Kelling by herself. Do you feel up to climbing the stairs, Emma, or shall we camp out in the living room?”

“I feel perfectly capable of climbing the stairs,” Emma replied with such dignity as she could muster under the circumstances, “and I don’t need a thedative.”

Oh dear, that hadn’t come out quite the way she’d intended. She hoped Bubbles would assume she must have bitten her tongue when she fell. “I’ll just take a couple of aspirin,” she amplified, being extra careful of her sibilants. “You see, I’m quite steady on my feet. Thank you, Bubbles. Now do get back to bed yourself. Unless you think we should all be out chasing after whoever keeps sneaking up behind people and bashing their heads.”

“I think that would be an incredibly stupid thing to do,” said Theonia, “and I’m sure Bubbles agrees. Ready, Emma? Perhaps I’d better take your arm.”

Emma thought she should explain to the cook what the pro-tem mistress of the house had been doing in the kitchen, then she thought she shouldn’t. That was surely not the way things had always been done. Emma started to give Bubbles a gracious nod but thought better of it. Her head was in no shape for nodding. She took the arm Theonia offered and walked slowly and carefully through the house and up the stairs.

She ought to have roused Vincent, she supposed, and made him count noses in the ell. She ought to have sent him or somebody out to make sure none of the cottagers had been attacked. She’d been on the point at dinnertime of suggesting they all double up for safety, but how could she know who was safe with whom? Anyway, the men should be capable of taking care of themselves. Only the women were getting picked on so far, unless one counted the late Jimmy Sorpende. Alding Fath was here in the ell, where Bubbles could look in on her. Lisbet Quainley had already received her blow. Anyway, she had Everard Wont to take care of her. Though it was more likely Miss Quainley was taking care of him, Emma thought cynically.

“Which room do you want to sleep in?” Theonia asked her. “Mine has two beds.”

“But only one of them’s made up,” Emma objected. “Let’s use mine. I’ll take the chaise, it’s quite comfortable and my head may not hurt so much if I don’t lie flat. Besides, my room’s one of the few places where nobody’s been slugged yet.”

“I don’t know whether that’s a plus or a minus, but it shall be as you say, my dear. Just let me pick up my toothbrush and my Queen Bee Replenishing Cream. After tonight I’m going to need all the help I can get. Oh, Emma!”

The room, which had been freshly turned out for Theonia before Sandy was struck down, had now been thoroughly and recklessly searched. Bedclothes were dragged to the floor, mattresses hanging half off their springs. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and dumped wherever they’d happened to hit. Even that moth-eaten old bathrobe of the late Mr. Sabine’s had been ripped out of the closet and thrown down in a heap, together with Theonia’s traveling dress and sailor hat.

Emma could not recall ever having been more furious in her whole life. She slammed the door of the ravaged bedroom, wheeled around so fast that her blue bathrobe flew out like a chorus girl’s skirt, and marched down the stairs.

Theonia hurried after her. “Emma, where are you going?”

“To do what I should have done as soon as this nonsense started. It’s quite clear we’re dealing with a criminal who’s utterly ruthless, damnably persistent, totally lacking in either manners or imagination, and disgustingly inefficient. I can think of no more dangerous combination of traits. Theonia, this is no time to pussyfoot!”

“Then do turn on some lights so we shan’t break our necks. You can be as intrepid as you like, Emma, but I’d feel much braver if I didn’t keep tripping over the hem of your bathrobe.”

Theonia thought she knew what Emma was aiming for, and she was right. She simply hadn’t realized how much noise that big ship’s bell by the kitchen door could make when rung with might and main by a thoroughly irate former garden-club president.

The bell even roused Alding Fath. Within a minute and a half, Emma had the entire population of Pocapuk Island gathered around the door: some inside, some out, all of them in states of undress ranging from prudish to downright indecorous, all of them demanding to know with ejaculations mostly profane what was going on.

A woman who’d been able to give the keynote speech without benefit of microphone at the open-air benefit of the Pleasaunce Firemen’s Relief Fund had no trouble whatever making herself heard above a dozen overexcited islanders. “During the past half hour,” Emma informed them, “I have been struck on the head and Mrs. Brooks’s bedroom has been recklessly ransacked. This is the fourth time in twenty-four hours that one of us here on Pocapuk has been subjected to violent assault and the third time a room has been searched. The first assault led to the death of the victim; the second time, a skull fracture was only averted by a lucky circumstance. Next time, if there were to be a next time, one of you could wind up dead.”

This started a babble that Emma promptly quelled. “This is why I’ve got you out of bed. The island has been thoroughly searched; there’s no mysterious stranger lurking in the bushes. Whoever’s been committing these outrages has to be one of us here now. I don’t expect the perpetrator to confess. Whoever you are, you’re obviously a thoroughgoing scoundrel and totally lacking in the rudiments of common courtesy. I just want to make it clearly understood that you might as well quit thumping people around and tearing the place apart, because you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”

“You mean the treasure?” That was Black John Sendick, with his Tycho Brahe sweatshirt on inside out and backward.

“No, I’m referring to an exceedingly vulgar but no doubt fabulously expensive diamond necklace that I inadvertently brought here myself. During the trip on the ferry, somebody had temporarily relieved me of my Gladstone bag and hidden the necklace in the lining with the apparent intention of stealing it back again on the island. The man who was found drowned yesterday morning—”

“His name was Jimmy Sorpende,” Theonia put in. “He was a rather inept criminal with a prison record.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so before?” bellowed Vincent. He was wearing an ancient bathrobe patterned in one of the Indian designs popular in the late twenties and early thirties. It must have been a family heirloom, Emma thought inconsequentially.

“I have said so,” Theonia was telling him sweetly. “Sorry to break in, Emma. Do go on.”

“Thank you, Theonia. I don’t know what function the late Mr. Sorpende was supposed to perform. Since he was an experienced burglar, he was most likely the one who managed to steal the Gladstone bag out of my bedroom night before last while I was asleep. He supposed, of course, that the necklace was still in the bag. In fact I’d happened to discover it during the evening and put it in the safe, stuffing a piece of costume jewelry under the lining in place of the diamonds. I don’t know why I did that, it just seemed a good idea at the time.”

“My God!” said somebody in the crowd.

Emma waited for a more enlightened response. It didn’t come, however, so she continued. “The fact that Mr. Sorpende was later struck on the head and thrown over the cliff suggests that his accomplice had discovered the substitution and assumed Mr. Sorpende was trying to appropriate the necklace for himself. The accomplice thereupon lost his temper—I use ‘his’ in this context as an indefinite pronoun, you understand—and murdered Mr. Sorpende, throwing the worthless bag and costume jewelry over the cliff after him in a further fit of pique. Don’t you think so, Theonia?”

“Either that or the accomplice killed Jimmy Sorpende first in order to gain sole possession of the necklace and threw the bag after him simply to get rid of it. We’ll probably never know which, but I don’t suppose it matters. I might point out that Mrs. Kelling is quite right about the impersonal pronoun. It wouldn’t take any prodigious amount of strength to fell somebody with a hard blow to the head, then roll him to the edge of the cliff and shove him off. An able-bodied woman could do it. I daresay I could myself if I put my mind to it.”

“You might sit down on the ground and push with your feet,” Sendick suggested. “Most people have a lot more power in their leg muscles than they do in their arms.”

“Very true,” said Theonia. “I must say that hadn’t occurred to me, but do go on, Emma.”

“Thank you, Theonia. I should perhaps mention that Dr. Franklin says Mr. Sorpende was still alive when he landed. So he wouldn’t have drowned as his assailant perhaps expected. However, it was Mr. Sorpende’s misfortune to land facedown and be smothered by the mud. Had he landed faceup, he might have survived the fall.”

“Then it’s manslaughter, not murder,” said Black John.

“Why yes, I suppose it would be, now that you mention it,” Emma conceded. “You do know a great deal about these things, don’t you, Mr. Sendick? Neil, since you’re the one who found him, is there anything you’d care to add?”

Neil’s teeth were chattering. He was clad only in pajama bottoms and his feet were bare, but he manfully stepped forward and spoke his piece. “J-just that Uncle Frank said they found some pine needles glued to the guy’s hair with pitch, like as if he might have been hit with a pine branch or rolled over the ground where the pine needles were. Didn’t he, Pop?”

“Ayuh. For God’s sake, couldn’t you have had sense enough to put something on? Come over here.”

Vincent wrapped his son in a fold of his Indian-blanket bathrobe and hugged him close to his side. “Sandy, you scoot back to bed. You shouldn’t be up in your condition.”

“Oh, Pop!” his daughter protested. “I feel swell, honest. Bernice and I don’t want to miss anything. Are you okay, Mrs. Kelling? Gosh, I hope that guy didn’t ruin your pretty wig when he hit you.”

Sandy did indeed have an embarrassing penchant for the truth. Emma dealt with the faux pas as best she could. “I’m not at all sure my attacker was a male, Sandy. Fortunately for me, the blow was a relatively light one. This bruise on my forehead came from striking the edge of the flour bin as I fell. And I was not wearing my pretty wig, that’s only for dress-up. I do have hair of my own, as you can see, though I expect it’s a dreadful mess by now.”

Emma caught Count Radunov’s appraising eye and blushed; she was annoyed with herself for doing so. “And your father’s quite right,” she went on briskly. “You ought to be in bed. Bernice, so should you. I suppose you all expect me to apologize for dragging you out at this hour. Since it’s obvious that whichever of you stole that necklace originally is on a rampage to get it back, however, I thought it more sensible to tell you now than risk finding somebody else either injured or dead in the morning.”

“How right you were,” Count Radunov assured her. “We are deeply grateful for your solicitude on our behalf and only regret the deplorable incident that prompted it.”

He was winding up for further effusion, but Lisbet Quainley cut him off.

“Where’s the necklace now, Mrs. Kelling?”

“On its way back to its original owner,” Emma told her. “Don’t ask me who that is because I don’t know. All I know is that it was stolen from the wearer at a charity ball. I sent it to Boston by Mr. Arbuthnot, the man who brought Mrs. Brooks here in his seaplane this morning. By now, it’s been turned over to the proper authorities.”

Emma knew she was stretching a point there, but she didn’t care. Max Bittersohn was certainly more proper than Jimmy Sorpende and his head-bashing confederate. Max would in fact return the jewels to their rightful owners as soon as he’d extracted a reasonable fee for Theonia’s services and full payment of the reward to the Firemen’s Relief Fund.

Tweeters wouldn’t care about financial reimbursement. According to Theonia, he already had more money than he knew what to do with, despite turning it over by the fistful to the Audubon Society and being the sole support of several puffin rookeries. Speaking of Tweeters—Emma cocked an eyebrow at Theonia and then at Mrs. Fath, who was clutching her lurid Japanese kimono around her and looking confused, as well she might.

Theonia nodded and took up the tale. “We should also tell you that we gave Mr. Arbuthnot a sample of orange juice obtained from Mrs. Fath’s room. We’ve received a report of the analysis and discovered someone has been dosing Mrs. Fath with tranquilizers, presumably to keep her from using her psychic powers to reveal his or her other malefactions. Whichever of you is doing this must stop immediately. You’re in violation of the federal narcotics law. Furthermore, it’s a devastating thing to do to anybody, let alone a genuine sensitive.”