The Gladstone Bag (28 page)

“Don’t be morbid, my dear. Ah, here’s Neil. Just what we need, a strong back.”

The boy grinned and fell to work. Within ten minutes they had the mattresses on their springs, the beds made up, and the drawers back in the dressers.

“Now for the fun part,” Emma groaned as she surveyed the jumble of garments and bric-a-brac strewn all over the floor. “You may as well run along to your father, Neil. Mrs. Brooks and I can manage the rest by ourselves. Oh, but first I meant to ask you—were you here last year with Mrs. Sabine?”

He shook his head. “Off-season with Pop a few times but never while she was here. See, Dad’s Uncle Winfield always used to come and help Dad, he and his friend Jake Pierce, who lives with him since Aunt May died. Uncle Winfield had a leg shot off in the war when he was a young guy. It never bothered him till a few months ago, but then he started having trouble with his stump and had to go to the veterans’ hospital. They finally had to cut off the stump clear up to his hip almost; he’s still in a wheelchair. So Dad figured what with my mother being away and everything, Jake would have to stay home and take care of Uncle Winfield this summer instead of coming to Pocapuk. That’s how Ted and I got to come instead.”

“I see,” said Emma. “What I really wondered was whether Mrs. Sabine had brought a maid with her, someone to look after her room and all that, the way Sandy’s been doing for me.”

“Gee, Mrs. Kelling, I don’t know. Mum was on a dig up in Washington County last summer, so Sandy and I went up there with her and camped out most of the time.”

“Then you didn’t see your father all summer?”

“Oh yeah, we saw him. Uncle Winfield and Jake were here, so Pop didn’t mind taking a day off now and then when Mrs. Sabine didn’t have anything special going on. He just never talked about the island much; he was too glad to get back to us. This year, with Mum not able to get home on weekends, Sandy and me here with him, and Ches and Wal coming out every day like they do, Pop isn’t planning to take any time off. He says I’m too young to be left in charge and Ted’s kind of a goof-off and Mrs. Sabine’s not here and Pop hasn’t quite made up his mind about you. I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

Emma laughed. “Why shouldn’t you? Your father’s wise not to trust any stranger too far, especially considering what’s been happening here the past few days. Mrs. Sabine’s fortunate to have such a conscientious overseer. Now you’d better scoot along; I expect your father has something else lined up for you to do.”

“You better believe it. Pop’s got a natural gift for keeping noses glued to the grindstone. See you later, then.”

Emma and Theonia went on with the task of straightening up what the would-be burglar had dumped. Adelaide Sabine had obviously been in the habit of leaving a good many personal effects, such as lingerie, nightwear, and casual clothing, on Pocapuk from year to year in order to avoid having to tote stacks of luggage back and forth. That was sensible; Emma would have done the same. Nevertheless, she wished she didn’t have to handle these intimate garments. It was too much like an invasion of the old lady’s privacy; Adelaide was of a generation to whom such things still mattered.

Oh well, Emma supposed what Adelaide didn’t know wouldn’t upset her. Had Sarah had better luck than she on the question of the maid? It was getting on for noon; if Sarah didn’t call pretty soon, Emma might just give her a ring. What if someone did pick up the extension in the pantry? The sooner all secrets were out, the better for everyone. With one exception, as Lisbet Quainley had so appositely and annoyingly pointed out.

First things first; Emma was too well-organized to leave this job half done. She was hanging Mr. Sabine’s ratty bathrobe back in the closet when Bernice tapped nervously at the door and stuck her head inside.

“Mrs. Kelling, there’s a telephone call for you. It’s your niece.”

“Oh, good. Thank you Bernice. Do you want to get in on this, Theonia?”

“You go ahead. I’ll be down as soon as I finish here.”

Emma didn’t stay to coax. Vincent was already in the drawing room with the telephone out of the Chinese box. An Admirable Crichton if ever there was one. Emma gave him a nod and took the receiver he handed her.

“Yes, Sarah. What’s up?”

“Quite a lot. To begin with, Mrs. Sabine did have a maid with her last year, a girl about nineteen years old named Cecily Green, the daughter of somebody who worked for the Pences. She was an art student, you may be interested to know. Mrs. Sabine did teach the girl how to open the safe; she was in bed for several days with one of her attacks and didn’t want to leave her jewelry lying around loose.”

“I wonder why Adelaide didn’t ask Vincent,” said Emma. “I suppose she didn’t feel it was quite the thing to have him performing personal errands in her bedroom while she was actually lying there in her nightgown. So she let this young stranger do it instead. Oh dear!”

“‘Oh dear’ is hardly the word,” said Sarah. “I’ve done a follow-up on Cecily Green. She was a nice-enough girl from a respectable family but none too swift in the intellect. After she came back to Boston, she started seeing a fellow named Ted Sharpless who came from somewhere up near where you are now. They met in a singles bar, from what I was able to gather. She fell for him in a big way, but her father found out somehow that Sharpless was a convict on parole and made her quit seeing him. That was around the end of April. Shortly after they broke up, Cecily was killed in a hit-and-run accident, or a reasonable facsimile of one. That could have been the real reason why Sharpless skipped back to Maine.”

“Sarah!”

“Yes, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? We don’t know, of course, whether she told him about the safe just to make conversation or whether he picked her up on purpose to pump her about the Sabine place. As to who killed her, that could have been Sharpless but I doubt it. He was too obvious a suspect. I’d guess he was safely off in some bar with his pal Jimmy, working up an alibi, while the third member of the team went after Cecily Green. If somebody twists the screws a bit, it’s a fairly safe bet Sharpless will talk.”

“Vincent tells me the county sheriff’s people will be here by noontime, so perhaps I’d better go and do some preliminary twisting right now.”

“Wait a minute, Aunt Emma, I haven’t finished. You also asked me to work on Joris Groot and Black John Sendick. It may interest you to know Footsy-Wootsy was bought out by a conglomerate three years ago. The company had been losing money; the conglomerate quickly ran it into the ground and took a big tax loss; which, of course, had been their objective from the beginning. The Footsy-Wootsy trademark hasn’t been used since.”

“Then what was Mr. Groot lying for? You don’t suppose he’s had a nervous breakdown or something and that’s the last job he remembers having done? After a lifetime of drawing children’s sneakers, suddenly finding out there were no sneakers left to draw might conceivably have a shattering effect on one, don’t you think? But what’s he been living on in the meantime?”

“Good question, Aunt Emma. I asked our friend Bill Jones about him. Bill’s a commercial artist himself.” Among other things, but Sarah didn’t go into that. “He says Groot did in fact used to be a shoe artist but hasn’t had much to do in that line since Footsy-Wootsy folded. Groot’s a bachelor, by the way. He still has a studio downtown and doesn’t appear to be strapped for cash, but Bill doesn’t know what sort of work he’s doing. Bill will find out; he’s good at that.”

“Thank you, Sarah. That does indeed give one food for thought.”

“As to Sendick, he’s a son of some fairly well-to-do people who live in Beneficence.”

“Beneficence? That’s not far from Pleasaunce. I wonder if they might happen to be clients of Parker Pence?”

“Good question. Anyway, Black John’s been something of a handful, it seems. He went to Boston College and majored in lacrosse, wrestling, track, and soccer, which left him little or no time for academics. After he flunked out, he hitchhiked to Alaska and worked on a salmon-fishing boat for a while, then gravitated to San Francisco, where he became a black belt in karate practically overnight. He’s a crack athlete, holds a couple of intercollegiate track records, came in fifth in the BAA Marathon two years ago, and won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in the welterweight classification while he was still in high school. As for his writing career, he did a series of articles for the
Pacific Salmon-Gutters’ Gazette
that were fairly well received, but that seems to have been his chief literary triumph to date. He’s generally considered a likable fellow but short in the fuse and a rather wicked practical joker. Does that help any?”

“I can’t see how.”

Emma sent her love to Max and young Davy. Then, deliberately and carefully, she put away the telephone and locked the Chinese box. So Sendick was a runner, a scrapper, and a wicked practical joker. And Groot was a liar, but why? And why had Everard Wont gone silent all of a sudden? And what would happen if Emma were to go to Wont’s cottage and rouse him out of his alleged drunken stupor and tell him the county police were on their way to Pocapuk?

N
OW THERE WAS NOTHING
to do but wait. Emma had got the cottagers herded together in the sun porch like pigs in a pen. This was too beautiful a day to be indoors, but she didn’t want them roaming around loose when the people from the county sheriff’s office arrived. She wanted this horrible business to be over and done with, and she wanted it now.

And then what? Would the cottagers all want to leave Pocapuk? Would she find herself alone here with the servants for the rest of the summer? Surely Adelaide Sabine wouldn’t care to keep this entire establishment running just for her; perhaps Adelaide would put it up for sale to avoid the inheritance taxes, leaving Emma there to handle the prospective buyers. That would be the sensible thing to do.

Adelaide would never do it, though. Marcia wouldn’t let her. Selling Pocapuk would mean acknowledging that Adelaide’s life was over. As an only daughter, Marcia had been particularly close to her mother; she wasn’t about to let go of Adelaide until she absolutely had to. That was why Marcia hadn’t put her foot down about this slightly insane affair of letting a bunch of totally unknown who-are-theys park here for the summer.

The cottagers were taking their confinement calmly enough at the moment. Black John Sendick was reading a paperback thriller, Joris Groot was sketching his own feet, or rather his own enormous white-and-baby-blue-striped running shoes. Alding Fath was knitting some indeterminate garment out of shaggy brown yarn, sneezing every so often when the fluff got up her nose. Lisbet Quainley and Everard Wont were sitting together on the glider hammock at the far end of the porch. She had her yellow pad on her knees, he was presumably dictating, although Emma couldn’t see that anything much was being taken down.

Count Radunov, on the other hand, was scribbling away like a house afire, glancing up at Theonia every so often as though for inspiration. Perhaps he’d cast her as Queen Victoria, though Emma couldn’t think why. The czarina, more likely, though Alexandra hadn’t been Theonia’s type either. She was wearing the same blue skirt and blouse she’d borrowed yesterday, which was considerate of her. Emma was not yet ready to face the question of who coped with the laundry. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to; she might soon be leaving Pocapuk with the rest of them.

Right now the prospect was alluring, and yet this was a lovely place. One could be so happy on Pocapuk, Emma thought wistfully, if one could pick one’s own guests. Which of this lot would she have chosen? None, of course, she wouldn’t have known they existed. Maybe it was better to get away from one’s familiar circle, to open oneself to new associations, new experiences, new ideas. Adelaide’s way might have been the right way despite the inherent risks. Maybe Emma had never risked enough, had always been too careful to make sure the net was under her before she jumped.

Well, there was always hang gliding. Radunov seemed to have caught her thought, though of course he hadn’t; he looked up and smiled at her. Emma smiled back, then she noticed how badly crushed the clematis outside the porch window was and went back to feeling depressed.

It was precisely one minute to twelve when Brother Lowell pulled up to the dock with two passengers aboard. Both wore trim khaki-and-brown uniforms, Emma observed with ineffable relief. Vincent, Neil, Sandy, and Bernice were all hurrying down to meet them. Ted Sharpless was hanging back. He’d run away, Emma thought, if there were any place to go. Bubbles was not in sight; presumably he was still in the kitchen putting together the picnic lunch they were going to have after a while, provided the sheriff’s men didn’t haul the lot of them away.

“Charlotte, having seen his body borne before her on a shutter, like a well-conducted person, went on cutting bread and butter,” Emma murmured, mostly to herself. Was she the only person left alive who still quoted Thackeray? No, Radunov was smiling at her again.

Again she smiled back, albeit nervously. She’d begun to feel like a kettle coming up to the boil.
Please God,
she prayed silently,
make it happen now.
She couldn’t endure much more of this.

Shame on her. That was theatrical nonsense. She would endure as much as she had to, when had she not? When Vincent brought the two deputies out to the porch, Emma greeted them as collectedly as though they were expected guests at one of her lawn parties.

Deputy MacDuff had many stripes on his uniform sleeve; he did the talking. Deputy MacIvor had fewer stripes; he, for the most part, kept his mouth shut.

“I expect you want to be told precisely what’s been happening here,” Emma began.

“They got a pretty good idea already,” said Vincent.

“Ayuh,” said Deputy MacDuff. “Let’s just get sorted out here. You’re Mrs. Kelling and you’re an old friend of Mrs. Sabine’s. That right?”

“Essentially, yes. Mrs. Beddoes Kelling of Pleasaunce, Massachusetts. My first name is Emma and I’m a widow. To be precise, I’ve been a close friend of Mrs. Sabine’s daughter and her husband, Marcia and Peter Pence, for many years. I never knew Adelaide Sabine very well until she came to live with her daughter about four years ago. Since then we’ve become quite close, however. That’s why I volunteered to take over here at Pocapuk for her when Mrs. Sabine’s doctor decided at the last minute that she really wasn’t up to coming here herself. She had her staff engaged and all six of her cottages filled, you see. She didn’t want to leave her guests in the lurch even though she’d never met any of them. And still hasn’t, needless to say.”