The Silver Ghost (11 page)

“That’s gratitude for you,” Max groaned. “Shall I go?”

“No, lie still. I had that long nap in the car. He must be wet; I can’t imagine he’s hungry after a day with Miriam.”

Sarah fumbled for her slippers and went into her formerly angelic son’s nursery, sorting out the sleeves of her robe en route. “Come on, squally. Let’s find you some dry pants.”

Fresh diapers didn’t appear to be the entire solution. Sarah carried the baby, still bawling, down to the kitchen. She warmed a bottle and settled the pair of them in the rocking chair for a feeding session. Davy took two hungry sucks, gurgled a bit, and fell asleep again with the nipple in his mouth.

“Little monster.” Sarah kissed the top of his head in helpless adoration. His hair was blond and curly. Like Max’s when he was a baby, Miriam said. There wasn’t a peep out of him when she laid him back in his crib. Nor did she get so much as a grunt out of Max when at last she slid back in bed beside him. Like father, like son.

Sarah herself was wide awake by now. And what about Aunt Bodie, she wondered. Where was she, and what was happening to her?

It was hard to envision anything’s happening to Boadicea Kelling. In her well-regulated life, events didn’t simply occur. They eventuated as the result of forethought and planning. Hardly a typical Kelling trait. But then Boadicea wasn’t a Kelling.

This realization came to Sarah as something of a surprise. She was so used to Kellings marrying their own distant relatives to keep the money in the family that she and most of her kin tended to lump the in-laws with the genuine Kellings regardless of what their origins had been. Max was having rather a hard time adjusting to Kellingization but Bodie had integrated easily enough, as far as Sarah knew.

Then where had Boadicea come from and why couldn’t Sarah remember? Her own father had been almost obsessively involved with the family history. She’d had it served up to her three meals a day and often at afternoon tea as well, for the first eighteen years of her life. She cast her mind back among the gnarled and intertwined branches of her family tree.

Boadicea had been married to Uncle Morgan Kelling who wasn’t Sarah’s uncle at all but Cousin Percy’s; and Percy was only her second cousin once removed. Uncle Morgan had been in wool and noils, an entirely suitable career for a Bostonian of his background; his father had been in wool and noils before him. Sarah couldn’t recall much about Uncle Morgan except that she’d been taken to his funeral when she was ten as a special grown-up treat. He’d commuted from Wenham on the train every day, she remembered that.

That must be why she really knew so little about the Morgan Kellings, not because Aunt Bodie made any great secret of her doings but because they mostly took place outside the particular orbit within which Sarah had grown up. Aunt Bodie didn’t like a good many of her in-laws, but that didn’t make her any less a member of the family. Kellings often didn’t get along with other Kellings, usually for good and sufficient reason.

Bodie had thought Great-uncle Frederick was insane, which he probably had been, and Great-aunt Matilda a menace. She’d been right on that count, too. She still considered Cousin Dolph a bore, Aunt Appie a scatterbrain, and Uncle Jem a wastrel. She’d liked Sarah’s parents well enough while they were alive because they’d been sensible people. She hadn’t visited them because they were too close to Aunt Caroline, whom she absolutely loathed.

Why had she been so utterly down on Aunt Caroline? Sarah was getting sleepy again. She felt like Alice falling down the hole into Wonderland, wondering whether cats ate bats or if bats ate cats. Had Boadicea rubbed Caroline the wrong way? Had Caroline antagonized Bodie? Or was it just a case of two iron wills clashing? What could it matter now that Aunt Caroline was dead and gone?

B
UT IT DID MATTER.
Sarah dropped off, still wondering why. She woke with the sun blazing in through the opened curtains and Max entertaining his son with an imitation of Boris Chaliapin and John McCormack singing “The Three Little Pigs” in concert.

“I know,” she exclaimed for what must have seemed like no good reason. “They both came from New York.”

Max finished on a high C and a low D. “Who did?”

“Aunt Bodie and Aunt Caroline, of course. Did you change him?”

“Look, that’s man-to-man stuff. We don’t ask you intimate personal questions, do we? Were you planning to get up today, or shall Dave and I just open a can of beans and flip a steak on the grill?”

“Why don’t you both clear out of here and let me get dressed in peace? What time is it, anyway?”

“Almost eight o’clock. I’ve got to call Birmingham before the rates change.”

“Birmingham, England, or Birmingham, Alabama?”

“Both, come to think of it. Come on, Dave. You might as well start learning the business.”

Left to herself, Sarah showered and put on a fleecy blue jogging suit. She had no intention of committing athletic excesses, but the outfit was comfortable to work in and could be tossed into the washer when Davy made a mess of it as he was bound to do one way or another. She didn’t bother to make the bed. Mrs. Blufert would be arriving at half-past nine on the dot.

Neither Sarah nor Max had wanted live-in help, but their strange business had made it imperative that they have a reliable person to cope with the housekeeping and, when necessary, with Davy. Mr. Lomax, who’d been caretaker at Ireson’s Landing ever since Sarah could remember, had solved their problem as he did most others. His widowed niece lived just up the road a piece, liked housework and babies, and wouldn’t mind earning a little something extra.

That meant she was hard up and needed a job. The Bittersohns had checked out Mrs. Blufert through Miriam’s grapevine, interviewed her and liked her, and offered a generous wage to compensate for sometimes irregular hours. So far, the arrangement was working beautifully. Sarah would have liked more time for cossetting her new house, but cleaning had never been her favorite pastime and at least she got to spend plenty of time with Davy.

She’d had to curtail her long-distance traveling with Max but she was able to manage a good deal of the contact work by phone from the house, along with much of the research she loved and the paperwork Max loathed. Sarah herself rather enjoyed writing letters and keeping accounts. She’d had plenty of experience handling club reports and committee budgets during her first marriage. The late Caroline Kelling had been a tireless joiner of worthy organizations and a still more zealous delegator of the dog work.

Why did she keep thinking about the mother-in-law whom she’d always called Aunt Caroline, Sarah wondered? What was that niggling bit of family gossip she couldn’t pin down about Caroline and Aunt Bodie? Instead of sitting here with one shoe on and one off, puzzling over something that probably didn’t matter a rap anyway, why didn’t she go down and see whether Max and Davy had managed to demolish the kitchen?

She’d misjudged her menfolk. Davy was in his high chair, gloriously happy with a spoon and a bowl of cereal. He’d got a little inside him, more on his chin, a good deal on the tray, and a few blobs on the dark red clay floor tiles. Max was talking into the wall phone, reaching over from time to time to steer his son’s spoon mouth ward. Sarah wiped up some of the overspill with a paper towel and measured coffee into the elegant brewing machine that had been a housewarming present from Miriam and Ira.

This house was set closer to the ocean than the old Kelling summer place had been. The North Shore offered granite ledges to build on, so they hadn’t needed to worry much about erosion. From the upstairs windows, they could see all the way to Little Nibble Island and beyond to infinity. Even here in the kitchen, Sarah caught glimpses of the Atlantic as she toasted muffins and sectioned grapefruit.

The old place had been all dark corners, drafts, and mildew; this was all light and air. They’d saved none of the furnishings; Sarah had looted the old place of everything worth taking when she’d refurbished the Beacon Hill brownstone that, with the Ireson’s Landing property, had been all her inheritance from her first husband. The leftovers had gone to the Goodwill before the wreckers came in. Now she had pale wood, bright colors, natural textures, the wondrous Burchfield landscape that had been Max’s wedding present, and immense views of cliff and moor and forest and sea through snug-fitting, draft-free, triple-glazed windows.

The Bittersohn’s usual morning’s entertainment at this time of year, aside from Davy, was watching for migrating birds through the two pairs of binoculars they kept right next to the toaster. Today, they didn’t have a thought for birds.

“What’s on your mind?” Max asked when Sarah started to butter her muffin with her coffee spoon.

“H’m? Oh yes, I see what you mean.” She put the spoon down. “It’s just some probably irrelevant little thing I ought to know about Aunt Bodie and can’t for the life of me remember. If Aunt Emma can’t help, I may have to make the supreme sacrifice and call Cousin Mabel. And I thought I could do some discreet nosing among the Whets and Tolbathys. If only Uncle Jem hadn’t gone off on that stupid yachting party! He knows all that stuff.”

“Send the coast guard after him.”

“I’d love to, if I thought they’d go. You’re going back to the Billingsgates’, I suppose?”

“I want to check on whether Wouter installed a secret underground garage while he was about it.” Max reached down to retrieve the spoon Davy had dropped and was working up to be cross about. “Here you are, tiger.”

“You know, that’s not such a wild idea,” Sarah replied. “I wonder if the Billingsgates ever built themselves a fallout shelter. Wasn’t there a craze for them back in the late forties or fifties?”

“Before people realized there wouldn’t be anything left to crawl out for. Christ, Davy, I wonder what we’ve let you in for.”

“Darling, there’s always something,” Sarah reminded him. “Years ago he could have died from blood poisoning, Whooping cough, scarlet fever, pneumonia, or goodness knows what else, if he’d lived long enough to catch them. And he might have been motherless if he did. Do you realize it wasn’t until 1843 that Oliver Wendell Holmes published his paper on the contagiousness of puerperal fever? He spent years trying to convince the eminent physicians of his day that they were killing off new mothers by not washing their hands or changing those filthy old frock coats they wore to deliver the babies. The dirtier your coat, the more successful you were supposed to be. They’d go from one patient to the next in a cloud of germs, wipe out a hundred women in a row, and put it down to the will of God. And they tore Dr. Holmes to pieces for trying to make them clean themselves up. Old poops!”

Davy babbled something that sounded very much like what Sarah had just called the eminent doctors. Max chuckled. “There, see. Teaching the kid rude language.”

“Well, there are some things that can only be expressed in rude language. More coffee?”

“Just half, thanks. I’ve got to get rolling.”

“Do give Abigail my best when you see her. Poor woman, having to clean up after a party that ended in disaster.”

“It could have been worse,” said Max. “None of the guests got hurt and most of them never knew anything had happened. There’d have been no point in holding them all for questioning even if that jackass Grimpen had happened to think of it. We’ll know better when we get the result of the autopsy, but I’m fairly sure Rufus had been dead for at least an hour by the time I got to him. Whoever’s responsible had plenty of time to cover his tracks. You probably accomplished as much as anybody could have by collecting information from the group without getting anybody stirred up.”

“I can do better. We still don’t know anything about that Morris dancer Mrs. Gaheris described to us. Have you any ideas as to which it could have been?”

“She said he was too short to be Tick and too tall for Young Dork.”

“What would you expect her to say? Young Dork’s her first cousin once removed and Tick’s her old school chum’s son-in-law. She didn’t mention Lionel, and he’s at least an inch taller than Tick. I say we should check out the whole pack of them. No, Davy.”

Sarah took away the empty bowl her son was trying to use for a helmet and pacified him with a big wooden spoon from the rack on the counter behind her. “If you want to know, I can’t give Lionel clearance for the early part of the banquet. He didn’t show up in the pavilion for almost half an hour after we went in, as far as I can make out. Aunt Appie was burbling around looking for him, and he sidestepped when I tried to find out later on where he’d been.”

“I wish Mrs. Gaheris had been able to tell us exactly when she looked out the window,” Max fretted.

“I know, it was terribly inconsiderate of her not to check. But why should she have?”

“To see if it was time to take her pills?”

“No, they’re stomach pills. She said she takes them with meals. Oh dear, Aunt Appie will die if it turns out Lionel’s done something stupid.”

“Something stupid’s a pretty thin definition for killing a man and hanging his body in a tree, my love.”

“Lionel might have stolen the car, but he’d never have done the actual killing. He’s much too squeamish. Those brats of his must get their bloodthirsty streak from Vare’s side of the family.”

“So what about her?”

“She and the boys were all off rock climbing for the weekend.”

“Says who?”

“Says Lionel,” Sarah answered unhappily. “Darling, you don’t actually believe Vare organized this outrage to give her children a richer experience of
Hill Street Blues?
”

“You know them better than I do, kid.”

“That’s right, throw it up to me. Can I help whom I’m related to? All right, you dreadful man, I freely concede that Vare and her hyena pack might do something really outrageous if the boys happened to think of it and Vare managed to convince herself the project would be educational. And I don’t have to tell you that Vare can pressure Lionel into doing whatever she wants, except spend money recklessly.”

No Kelling could do that. Even Great-uncle Serapis had died with his capital intact, although he’d managed to establish an international reputation as a millionaire playboy mainly through bluff and good management. There was something in the family genes that kept their revels from turning into routs. No matter how great their urge to chuck the dollars around, Kellings always had to stop and count their pennies first.