The Withdrawing Room (5 page)

The brief statement she’d reluctantly made last night had been twisted beyond recognition. “Penniless Socialite Forced to Turn Ancestral Mansion into Boardinghouse” was among the less offensive headlines and “Kelling Murder Curse Strikes Again” undoubtedly the worst.

Sarah had made a formal apology to the survivors at the breakfast table, and assured them that their privacy would be guarded in every way possible. However, they’d all known her recent history before they’d agreed to take up residence with her and she got the distinct impression they were not particularly bowed down by being in the midst of another sensation, especially Professor Ormsby, who’d only grunted and helped himself to yet another fried egg.

Miss LaValliere and Mr. Porter-Smith were no doubt basking in the interest they could stir up among their respective classmates and fellow employees by now. Mrs. Sorpende, on the other hand, had looked genuinely distressed and expressed a fervent hope that the late Mr. Quiffen’s fellow boarders would be able to avoid any personal contact with the press. Mariposa and Charles applauded the feelings of this true gentlewoman and Sarah again felt a private surge of gratitude at having Mrs. Sorpende to set an example for the others.

Having wadded up the papers and thrown them away and dealt with the importunate Mr. Quiffen, Jr., she turned her attention to more pressing matters. She was cleaning an upstairs bathroom when Charles ascended the stairs three at a time without losing a jot of his Hudsonian aplomb to announce that Mr. Protheroe was on his way, that a cousin of the late Mr. Quiffen had already joined the nephew in the library, and that the new arrival had his attorney with him.

“Oh, gosh,” said Sarah, that having been the strongest oath she’d been allowed to utter during her carefully guarded childhood. “Maybe I’d better call up the troops, myself.”

She ran over her short list of possibles. Uncle Jem would come like a shot, but he’d be of no use in a situation like this. He and old George would get off in a corner with her only bottle of whiskey and swap reminiscences of bears and bares while the battle raged about them as it was shaping up to do.

She might get somebody from her own lawyer’s office, although she’d have a problem persuading any of the Messrs. Redfern to drop his writs and rush over here at a moment’s notice. She’d also get stuck for a fee and her financial position was sticky enough already. It would have to be Dolph. Her cousin might be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but when it came to a case of bellow and bluster, she’d back him against any Quiffen alive. Sarah leaped to the phone and sounded the alarm.

After delivering himself of the anticipated remarks about having told her from the first that this scheme of hers was totally insane and did she have to keep dragging the family name into the papers, Dolph said he’d be right over and was. He even took a taxi. Altogether it was quite an assemblage that greeted George Protheroe when he arrived, blinking like the dormouse that had been dragged out of the teapot, and being bullied along by his wife. Sarah took Anora off to meet her household staff, leaving the men to fight it out among them with Dolph yelling louder than all the rest as she’d been proudly confident he could.

Anora and Mariposa were buddies from the moment they met. The three women were drinking tea and holding a strategy session on household matters at the kitchen table when Charles came in to inform them that the gentlemen, which his tone implied was rather a loose term for some of them though it wasn’t his place to say so flat out, had taken an inventory of the possessions in the late Mr. Quiffen’s room. Charles had taken it upon himself to point out that several of the inventoried articles belonged in fact to Mrs. Kelling and Mr. Adolphus Kelling had personally deleted those items from the inventory list.

It had been ascertained from Mr. Quiffen’s files that his will was in the hands of either Mr. Snodgrass, Mr. Winkle, Mr. Tupper, or Ms. Pickwick of the firm bearing that name in Devonshire Street and the gentlemen were about to hie themselves thither. Mr. Protheroe was desirous of ascertaining the whereabouts of Mrs. Protheroe since he assumed she would wish to accompany the party, and what message should be conveyed to him? “My God,” said Anora, “is he always like this?”

“You better believe he isn’t,” giggled Mariposa. Anora said she was too old not to believe anything, gave them all her blessing, and waddled after her husband. Sarah went back upstairs and cleaned another bathroom. Now, please God, they’d have a little peace around here.

S
ARAH WAS SCRUBBING POTATOES
for dinner and wondering how soon she could decently let Mr. Hartler know she had the vacancy he was waiting for when Charles came into the kitchen.

“A person wishes to see you, madam,” he announced.

“A person?” Sarah put down the potato she was washing and dried her hands on a dish towel. “What kind of person? Male or female?”

“I am unable to state, madam. The person is wearing a great many concealing garments and also carrying two decrepit paper shopping bags stuffed with trash.”

“What for?”

“I have no idea, madam. I have instructed the person to wait in the vestibule while I ascertain whether you are at home.”

“Why not in the front hall or the library?”

“This does not appear to be the sort of person one would wish to admit inside the house, madam.”

“Oh, come off it, Charles! Neither was that last lot of Quiffens. Are you trying to tell me this is one of those poor old souls who go around fishing through the trash bins on the Common?”

“The person would appear to fall into that category, madam.”

“Did this person say what the person wants with me?”

“The person claims to have information of interest to you.”

“I can’t imagine what it might be, but I suppose I’d better come. Leave the paper bags in the vestibule and bring the person into the front hall. As soon as I get the potatoes cooking I’ll find out what the person wants. Most likely a handout.”

Sarah hustled the potatoes into the oven, took off her apron, and went to meet this enigmatic person. When she caught sight of the visitor perched on the tip-edge of a hall chair, she understood Charles’s unwonted confusion about sex. Her uninvited caller was bundled into such an assortment of outerwear, including khaki army pants, rubber boots, a sailor’s peacoat, and a knitted balaclava helmet that not enough of the presumed human being inside was visible to afford a clue. However, if this was one of those pathetic derelicts who wander the streets and sleep in doorways, its standard of dereliction must be remarkably high. The coat was threadbare but not unclean and had all its buttons firmly sewn on. The pants showed signs of having been pressed in the not too distant past. The navy blue balaclava was expertly darned in wool that almost matched, and the boots were wiped free of slush.

“Good afternoon,” she said to the helmet. “I am Mrs. Kelling. I understand you have something to tell me?”

A hand in a much-mended cotton glove pulled the knitted mask away from the mouth, revealing a somewhat wrinkled but well-washed and by no means, unattractive woman’s face. “How do you do, Mrs. Kelling. I’m Mary Smith. Miss Mary Smith, I suppose I should say. I didn’t give my name to your man there because he’d have thought it was an alias, which it isn’t. My dad was a Smith and my mother a Mary and I can show you my birth certificate with more years’ on it than I care to count. You must think I’m a real crackpot butting in on you like this, but I’ve got to find somebody who’ll listen to me and you’re the only one I haven’t tried. You see, I was there. I saw it happen.”

“Saw what happen, Miss Smith?”

“The murder.”

“Oh, dear!” Sarah repressed a moan. Ever since the remains of a long-vanished ecdysiast had turned up in the family vault on the eve of Great-uncle Frederick’s burial, she’d been pestered by a wide assortment of cranks. She’d hoped she’d seen the last of them, but evidently she hadn’t. Yet Miss Mary Smith, in spite of her ragpicker’s getup, didn’t look like a crank.

“Yes, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” the woman agreed, evidently thinking Sarah was offering sympathy. “I still get the shivers every time I think of it. I was on my way home with my day’s gleanings. Since my retirement I’ve developed sort of a hobby, as you might say, collecting papers and cans to recycle. I can’t take glass because it’s too heavy to carry. Helps the ecology a little, or so I like to think, and gives me something to do. But I’m not here to talk about that.”

“Please, won’t you take off your things and come into the library?” Sarah still wasn’t sure whether Miss Mary Smith was a nut, a reporter in disguise, or the perfectly sane elderly woman she appeared to be, but she thought she’d better find out.

“I don’t want to impose on your good nature.” Nevertheless, Miss Smith rolled up her helmet into a neat cap and began struggling with the toggles of her peacoat. “I will just slip off this jacket, though, if you don’t mind. Otherwise I won’t feel the good of it when I go out. I never used to mind the cold, but now it seems to go right through me. That’s why I bundle up in any old thing I can lay my hands on. Anyway, if I’m going to be a ragpicker I might as well look the part, eh?”

“Here, let me help you.” Sarah managed to extricate Miss Smith from the top layers and led her into the library, where Charles had already lit the fire and laid out biscuits and sherry for the evening gathering.

“What a lovely room!” Miss Smith arranged her dilapidations in a thoroughly feminine manner and took the glass of sherry Sarah poured out for her. “Thank you, Mrs. Kelling. I certainly didn’t expect such royal treatment after the brushoff I’ve been getting from everybody else. Of course I ought to have known better than to rush up to that policeman the way I did, dressed like a tramp with two big bags of garbage in my hands, but that’s me all over. I never think how I look till it’s one step too late.”

“My whole family are the same way,” Sarah agreed, “and they never give a hoot, so why should you? But do please tell me—”

“Why I barged in on you like this?” The sherry was giving Miss Smith more self-assurance. “It’s going to sound foolish, but just a little while ago, I picked a paper out of a litter basket. There was your name and picture staring right out at me, and it said where you lived and everything. It struck me all of a heap, like an omen or whatever you want to call it. So being, as I said, the kind who leaps before she looks, I picked up my junk and waltzed myself on over here. I’m sure that man of yours didn’t want to let me in and I must say I can’t blame him. But I do think a citizen has to take some responsibility, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Sarah, still nonplused.

“Well, there you are, then. I wasn’t about to let anybody get away with a horrible thing like that, but the policeman just brushed me off and the reporters thought I was looking for an easy buck and told me to go home and sleep it off as if I were some old drunk, which I wouldn’t be even if I could afford to which I certainly can’t. Though this sherry is a real treat,” she added politely.

“Anyway, being a senior citizen, I get to ride the T on the cheap fare, so I was down there on the platform waiting for my train. It’s good pickings around Haymarket, you know, on account of the tourists and all. Some of them slip me a quarter now and then, and if you think I’m too proud to take it, you can think again. I can’t afford that sort of nonsense anymore.

“But as I started to say, I was standing beside the track and this stout elderly man in a dark blue overcoat was standing next to me. He gave me a nasty look and edged back as if he was afraid I had lice or something, which I don’t in case you’re wondering. Of course I couldn’t help noticing. I may have had to shed my pride since I started trying to live on Social Security but I’ve still got my feelings. Then the train came along and everybody started shuffling forward, you know how they do. The station was mobbed, as you’d naturally expect at that hour. So anyway I was still turned toward this fat man in the overcoat, giving him a look as much as to say I’m as good as you are, you old goat, because I don’t care to be treated like dirt under somebody’s feet. And I distinctly saw a pair of hands come out of the crowd and shove that man down on the track, right in front of the train.”

“Oh no!” cried Sarah. “You couldn’t.”

“There,” said Miss Smith. “I didn’t expect you’d believe me any more than the rest. But I’m telling you, Mrs. Kelling, I had my eye right on this Mr. Quiffen and I know he was the one because they had pictures of him in both the
Globe
and the
Herald
and I tore them out and I’ve got them right here in my coat pocket. I never carry a purse because it’s an invitation to be mugged, even an old derelict like me. And I have very good eyesight for my age and that’s not the sort of thing a person could forget. And I tried to tell the starter and I tried to tell the conductor and I—but I’ve been through all that, so now I’ve said my piece I’ll go away and not pester you again. And thank you for at least not laughing in my face.”

“But I’m not laughing at all,” said Sarah. “The awful part of it is, I can believe you because I know how obnoxious Mr. Quiffen could be. He had a natural gift for making enemies. I know of only two people in the world who had a good word for him and they’re such old sweeties they’d like anybody.”

Miss Smith nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. He was always writing the nastiest letters to the papers, mostly about dumb little mistakes anybody could make. I’d read them and think how somebody was going to get in trouble with the boss over that letter, and wonder if this Barnwell Augustus Quiffen had the faintest idea what he might be doing to some poor slob with six kids to support.”

“I’m sure he neither knew nor cared. If I’d realized what he was like, I’d never have let myself be talked into taking him on as a boarder. But please don’t broadcast that, Miss Smith. I haven’t said that to anyone else, and I shouldn’t have said it to you.”

“Don’t fret yourself,” the woman replied. “I have nobody left to tell. I don’t visit my old neighbors anymore because I wouldn’t want them seeing what I’ve come down to and thinking I was after a handout, and anybody who knows me well enough to say hello to now thinks I’m just another harmless nut. Then you do think Mr. Quiffen might have pestered somebody into doing something desperate to get rid of him?”