The Plain Old Man (16 page)

“Here, put on this apron so you won’t spot your pretty blouse,” Mrs. Heatherstone scolded. “And stay in the kitchen to eat that. I won’t have you tracking melted butter all over the house.”

“Yes, Mrs. Heatherstone,” Sarah replied meekly, and sat down like a good child with a plate and napkin. She’d be going home tomorrow evening, most likely, then she could eat where she chose. Max was a great one for having picnic meals wherever he took the notion, and she’d picked up the habit from him. What was he eating now, she wondered, and where, and how soon would he get back to Boston?

Sarah realized she was having mixed feelings about Max’s homecoming. She ached to have him back, but she dreaded having to plunge him into yet another family crisis. Things had been the same when Alexander was alive, everybody expecting Sarah’s husband to pull them out of the soup, leaving him no time for Sarah. She sighed and rolled herself another pancake.

“You keep that up, young woman, and you won’t have any appetite for breakfast.” Mrs. Heatherstone couldn’t seem to remember Sarah was grown up and twice married. “Now go along and set the table for me, like a good girl.”

Sarah obeyed as she always had. She couldn’t quite recall the first time her parents had parked her at Aunt Emma’s. The last had been when she was ten, the time her parents had gone on an extended tour of Europe. That must have been right after her mother had learned she was terminally ill and made up her mind to do all the things she’d been putting off while she was still able. Nobody had bothered to tell Sarah that. She hadn’t minded being left behind; to go would have meant having to memorize too many guidebooks in order to get the maximum benefit from her cultural experience. Here in Pleasaunce, she’d been allowed to read Uncle Bed’s mystery novels instead.

They’d been innocent enough, she realized now; no sex, less violence than she’d found in her fairy stories, lots of earnest cogitation often based on remarkably silly premises. If it weren’t for the unrefined nature of Cousin Frederick’s clue, the current Kelling predicament might have fitted comfortably into one of Uncle Bed’s genteel thrillers: a valuable family portrait gone, a murder made to look like the commonest sort of accident; a perfect setup for Miss Maud Silver to take off her second-best hat, pin on her bog-oak brooch, sit down with her knitting, and unravel the mystery.

But how many mysteries were there? Was it sensible to lump Charlie’s death in with Ernestina’s disappearance just because they’d happened on the same night? And because Charlie’d been in on the discussion about how much Ernestina might be worth on today’s stolen art market? And because that last and nastiest note had said, “Two down, one to go”?

What about those notes, anyway? What was the point of all those vague menaces and no instructions about forking over the money? What sort of game did these crooks think they were playing?

Maybe they weren’t real crooks. Maybe Four-Square Jane was back on the job. Sarah couldn’t help smiling at that notion as she arranged silver and napkins on the pale green linen place mats. She’d discovered Pour-Square Jane here in Uncle Bed’s library that summer when she was ten. Jane had been one of those emancipated ladies of early crime fiction, not a detective but a female Robin Hood who stole from the stingy rich to give to the worthy poor.

In one adventure Jane had abstracted a huge masterpiece from a rich man’s gallery under seemingly impossible conditions and forced its flinthearted owner, by way of ransom, to send a large donation to a philanthropy he’d been holding out on. Once the check was cashed, she dropped him a note telling him to pull down his window blind. There was the treasured painting, cut out of its frame, pinned to the cloth, and simply rolled up out of sight.

She’d told Max the story not long ago. He’d hit the ceiling. In the first place, he’d pointed out, Jane would have marred the painting by cutting away the edge, and ruined the goddamn finish by cracking it all to hell when she rolled up the goddamn blind. In the third, the extra thickness of canvas would have caused the blind to bulk up so much that the owner would have had to be blind himself not to notice. In the fourth place, Jane wouldn’t have been able to reach the painting in the first place. If the owner was such a tasteless clod as he was made out to be, he’d have skied the painting in the tasteless fashion of the day, hanging it up close to the ceiling. That would have been at least fourteen feet high and unreachable except by a long wooden ladder which Jane would have had one hell of a time tucking into her bloomers.

Max would never make a mystery fan. He was too unwilling to suspend logic in the interest of a good yarn. He did believe in playing one’s hunches, though, and here was a point to consider. Would Sarah have thought of Four-Square Jane just now if Jane hadn’t been trying to tell her something? Suppose the reason she couldn’t figure out how the painting had been taken from the house was that in fact it hadn’t. All right then, if it was still here, where was it?

Not rolled up in a window blind, surely. Not pinned behind a drapery, either, because Heatherstone would have noticed. Not cut out of its stretcher, thank goodness, or surely the remains would have been left in the frame.

Somewhere down cellar would be the obvious place, or rather the sort of un-obvious hideaway the thieves would have been looking for. There was stuff down there from generations back, even pieces Uncle Bed’s great-grandparents hadn’t been able to part with because who knew when they might come in handy? As children and grandchildren moved or married or set up apartments or redecorated their houses, things got shifted around, taken away, brought in, parked wherever a spot could be found. Even something the size of Ernestina could easily escape notice, especially nowadays when there were only the Heatherstones and part-time outside help to run Emma’s complicated household. Nobody had time to keep tabs on nonessentials. Sarah folded the napkins into swimming swans the way Mrs. Heatherstone had taught her ages ago, set a pot of Aunt Emma’s fairy primroses on the table to add a springtime note, and slipped down the back hall to the cellar.

Her first thought when she got down there was, “This could take forever.” Her second was that things were neater than she’d expected and that none of them resembled a missing Romney. That didn’t mean Ernestina wasn’t there, naturally she’d be well camouflaged. Sarah poked around until she heard her aunt’s voice demanding, “Isn’t Sarah down yet?” and decided she’d better go up. She wouldn’t say anything yet about her hunch. If she was right, Ernestina was safe enough. If she wasn’t, this was hardly the time to start a hunt for an imaginary hare.

Cousin Frederick looked chipper enough after his night in Young Bed’s outgrown pajamas. Looking at him and Emma together, both pretty much of an age, Sarah wondered why she called him cousin when Emma’s sons, both a good deal older than she, called him uncle. In fact none of them could have said precisely how and in what degree Frederick was related to anybody. That was the way things tended to be among the Kellings. Relationships got so wildly intertwined that it didn’t pay to be picky about accurate titles. Nobody cared anyway, except Cousin Mabel, who took her own spectacular brand of umbrage if any of the young folks dared to address her as aunt.

Mabel’s invitation had been for lunch. Having a pretty good idea what that would amount to, Sarah decided she might as well fill up on pancakes and sausages. She didn’t have to talk much; Emma and Frederick were absorbed in deciding whom they should ask to the memorial gathering tomorrow. Aunt Emma had come to the table equipped with her big address book, the slim gold pencil that hung from a chain around her neck and was as much a part of her as the diamond solitaires in her ears, and à fresh blue notebook.

At last Emma let the pencil swing back against her hand-embroidered gray silk blouse. “That’s the lot, I think. Thank you, Fred. Sarah, if you’re not keen on going to the crematorium, I wish you’d stay here and make some calls. Not that Saturday morning’s the best time to catch people in, but I don’t know what other time we’ll have. We’ll take the Buick, Heatherstone. Mrs. Heatherstone tells me she’d like to go, too. We can all stop on the way back and shop for groceries. I can’t imagine what we’re going to feed them all on such short notice, but we’ll think of something. Too bad about Cousin Mabel, Sarah, but at least her having you to lunch gives us a golden excuse not to take her to the cremation with us. We’ll have to ask her here tomorrow, I suppose, or I’ll never hear the last of it. You give her the message, dear, will you? If I don’t call her myself, perhaps she’ll choose to be offended and stay away.”

“No such luck,” grunted Frederick. “You know what else to ask her, Sarah?” He was clearly weaseling out, as who wouldn’t?

“If I can get a word in edgewise.”

“What’s Mabel supposed to know that I don’t?” Emma demanded.

“Don’t ask me,” said Sarah. “It’s just that her name came up night before last while Cousin Frederick and I were having our little chat with Sergeant Formsby. Somehow or other, he got the idea he ought to go over and give her the third degree.”

“What a lovely idea.”

“Aunt Emma, be serious. You know perfectly well what would happen if we’d ever let a policeman start asking Mabel about Charlie Daventer’s private life. She’d have stirred up such a scandal you’d have had to call off the show. So I hurled myself into the breach and managed to persuade him that I’d have better luck worming things out of her than he would. Frankly, I don’t think he needed much convincing.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would,” Emma agreed, helping Frederick to the last sausage. “Mabel calls them to report a Peeping Tom on an average of six nights a week. Wishful thinking, pure and simple. What a pity her parents were too close-fisted to keep a gardener she could have run off with when she was a girl. Now then, Frederick, don’t you think we ought to start girding our loins pretty soon?”

“My loins are as girded as they’re going to get, Emma. It won’t take us more than fifteen minutes at the outside to drive to the cemetery, so I’m going to sit here and digest my breakfast. Don’t get one like this very often, I must say. If I weren’t afraid of having my face slapped, I’d go out in the kitchen and kiss Mrs. Heatherstone.”

“Why, Fred, what’s come over you all of a sudden?”

“Keeping up my spirits, I suppose. No sense pulling a long face, is there? Charlie wouldn’t want that. Anyway, I’ll be joining him soon enough. I just hope I live long enough to get my hands on that swine who did him in. I’ve never thought of myself as a vindictive man but, by God, this is more than I can swallow.”

Emma gave him a little pat on the shoulder. “I know, Frederick. I think what horrifies me most is the fear that his death may somehow have been connected with this stupid business about Ernestina. If I ever found out Charlie Daventer had lost his life over a few square feet of canvas off my own wall, I honestly believe I’d drop dead for shame.”

“No you wouldn’t. You’d be mad as hell, like me.” Frederick pushed back his chair, stood up, and faced her squarely. “Emma, you don’t for one split second think Charlie had any part in stealing your painting?”

“Frederick! How can you even dream of suggesting such a thing? My only thought was that since Charlie was here that night, he might possibly have caught on that something was in the wind. He was awfully clever at puzzles, you know, all those Double-Crostics and the crossword puzzles from the London
Times
when he could get hold of a free copy. But I don’t see how that could have happened. Can you?”

“Emma, what’s the sense in brooding over it before we have anything to go on? Where’s your coat?”

Emma smoothed down her dark gray skirt and buttoned her jacket. She hadn’t put on black for Charlie, Sarah noticed, probably because she’d had none to wear. She’d often said black was unflattering to women over forty. But she’d come as close as she could.

“I shan’t want a coat, Fred. It should be warm enough in a crematorium, wouldn’t you think? Heatherstone, please tell Mrs. Heatherstone we’ll be ready by the time you bring the car around. Here’s the list of names to call, Sarah. Just tell them what it’s about, and four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Oh, and the snapshots, if they have any. I’ll just run upstairs and get my hat. Charlie always liked me in a hat.”

Aunt Emma probably wanted a quiet sniffle, Sarah thought, as who wouldn’t in her place? She carried the few remaining dishes out to the kitchen, told Mrs. Heatherstone not to bother with them now because Mrs. Kelling was putting her hat on, and went into the library. She might as well do her phoning where she could be most comfortable. It was going to be a long job.

Most of the people on Emma Kelling’s list were either completely unknown to Sarah or the most casual of acquaintances. A few remembered her as the child who’d stayed with Emma and Bed when Walter’s wife was in such a bad way and wasn’t it a pity she went so young? They supposed Sarah must miss her mother dreadfully but didn’t wait to be confirmed in their erroneous surmises. They were too eager to tell her how sad they felt about poor Charlie and how eagerly they were looking forward to
The Sorcerer.
Sarah cut them as short as she decently could, and went on dialing numbers.

She didn’t catch many men. These must all have gone fishing or golfing, or be locked in their studies writing their memoirs, or whatever the males of Pleasaunce did on Saturday mornings. Fortunately, most of them had wives or daughters or housekeepers or possibly lady friends at home to take Sarah’s message. She d managed to contact all but a few of the names on Emma’s list by the time she had to bite the bullet and get ready for Mabel’s luncheon. And she still hadn’t got back to searching the basement.

Sarah was dithering on the doorstep, wondering if it was safe to leave the house unattended and telling herself she was just stalling because she didn’t want to go, when Emma’s car pulled up.

“Sarah, haven’t you gone yet? I must say you look stunning in that outfit. Mabel will be livid. Hop in, dear. Heatherstone will drive you there.”

“I was going in my own car,” Sarah protested.