Emily's Ghost

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  Chapter 23

  Emily found the mayor's letter the next morning right after breakfast, long after Lee had left for the mainland. She'd focused her search on anything written in an old-school style, and she wasn't disappointed. The letter was written on heavy official paper in a man's hand and undated. What caught Emily's eye was the salutation: "Dearest H."

  Dearest H,

  Let me say at once that I am discouraged by the position you have taken regarding your cousin. He has brought forth his suit in a most seemly way, and my only regret is that John Talbot is not alive to give him the support and encouragement you so perversely withhold. What can be your possible objection to the man? He is well provided and of impeccable character and manners. Most important, his family are your own. I do not accept your frivolous lament to your brother that Thomas Dayton lacks color. You are not in search of a rainbow; you are in desperate need of a husband.

  Stewart has led me to understand that Thomas is in the process of angrily packing his portmanteau, not so much because you will not take him as because you will not take him seriously. Your brother seems to find your irresponsible manner amusing -- I believe he encourages you -- but I confess I find it incomprehensible and infuriating. While I am on the subject, I also have had reason to believe that yet another officer has caught your fancy. This I find truly insupportable. Must I remind you that the only reason any man joins the military is that he possesses neither a decent fortune nor a steadfast heart? It is all very well for a debutante to be dazzled by the shine of gold braid. But has it occurred to you that at the age of twenty-six you are no longer an ingénue? I have no choice

  And there the letter ended. Emily searched long and hard for page two but came up empty. There was nothing else in the same hand or on the same stationery. There was nothing, really, to prove that it was Mayor Abbott who was venting his fury at Hessiah, except for the fact that the single sheet of paper was embossed with the seal of the mayor's office.

  "Still, that's good enough for me," Emily murmured, satisfied. As always, she wanted to share the news. "Fergus?"

  He appeared at once, seated in the wicker chair with his legs stretched out in front of him, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, his hands tipped against his mouth in a prayerful pose. He looked both wary and hopeful. "This had better be good, girl."

  "I think it is, Fergus," Emily answered with an awkward, contrite smile. She still hadn't come up with a decent method for smoothing over their fallings-out. Lee was right. It'd be a lot easier if you could just stand there and duke it out. The trouble was, one minute Fergus was there, and then, just as you were working up a smart answer, he was gone.

  "Look what I've found." She waved the letter in front of him and then read it aloud, relieved that Hildie and the children were in town and Inez had the day off.

  Fergus leaped up and reread the mayor's angry diatribe over her shoulder. "God in heaven!" he said when he was done. "It sounds like any one of them could've done it! But the letter's undated. Are we certain the military man is Lieutenant Culver? And why should the mayor take Hessiah's flirting so personal?

  "That's the real question here. I don't think the mayor could ever have been her lover. He might've been more like a kindly Dutch uncle who agreed to watch over Hessiah after her father died."

  "Ha! He never seemed all that kindly to me."

  "No, you're probably right," she admitted. "If Hattie Dunbart's stories are accurate, the mayor was blindly ambitious. But then why make such a fuss over Hessiah? She was nothing to him." Emily puzzled over that for a moment. "Unless -—"

  "He was her real father, say. Bejesus, now ye have me thinking the way ye do."

  Their eyes met; they were again in perfect harmony.

  "Why not?" she said excitedly. "You once told me there was talk of a secret affair. Maybe it had nothing to do with Hessiah but with her mother. When Celeste Talbot died after being thrown from her horse, Hessiah was still a baby. Celeste was young, passionate, beautiful. Now I ask you, whom would she be more attracted to: a charismatic up-and-coming politician, or a dour, workaholic millowner?"

  "Well, but folks claimed she was religious," Fergus said reluctantly. Clearly he wanted to believe the scenario. "Ye're a female; could she have been tempted into a romance?"

  "Sometimes there's a thin line between religion and romance," Emily answered cryptically. "And remember," she added, "Mayor Abbott had one of the Talbot family photos in his possession. To me it's interesting that the face of John Talbot is obscured in it, which -- hold it. All we're doing is eliminating the mayor as a suspect. He wouldn't have murdered his own daughter."

  "If he was in a rage? He might have," Fergus said, driving the argument home. "Here he was, trying his best to arrange a decent marriage for this love child of his, and here the little brat was, doing something stupid like taking up with a ne'er-do-well. It's also a fact that the mayor eventually shot himself to death. Something must've been bothering him," Fergus summed up in a dry voice.

  Emily frowned. "A father strangle his own daughter? It's too inconceivable," she said, dismissing the notion. "And in the meantime, we now have Cousin Thomas. I never thought about him, although he was mentioned in the accounts of the trial. So the whispers you once heard about a scorned suitor must have been true. Which means Thomas Dayton has motive. Which means Thomas Dayton has opportunity. Perfect," she said wearily. "Add Thomas Dayton to the list."

  "Sure. I'll pencil him in right after Lieutenant Culver, who still is nowhere to be found." Fergus was back in the chair, looking disgusted. He stared at the letter Emily was holding in her hand. "What if the mayor didn't even write that? What if someone else was really in love with Hessiah all along, and he wrote it on official paper? Maybe a deputy mayor or a clerk ..."

  Emily waved the suggestions away. "Enough! With any luck I'll be able to compare the handwriting to Mayor Abbott's signature on some city document. Unfortunately that means more boring searches through more moldy records."

  She began loading some of the stacks of memorabilia back into the trunk. "The next time I solve a murder," she mused, "I'd like it to be in the twentieth century. I'd like a real body, and real eyewitnesses, and a real police report. I'd like hair, blood, and DNA samples, and it would be nice if it all took place on a resort island."

  She sat back on the heels of her feet. "I'd like to be Jessica Fletcher," she said, sighing. "Jessica Fletcher never has to go to City Hall."

  Nevertheless, that's where Emily ended up two days later. It was no real challenge to locate a sample of Mayor Henry Abbott's handwriting; during his term of office he was constantly signing proclamations of something or other. If the document was not an official welcome of an important guest, it was likely to be an official observation of an important day. The mayor had seemed quite determined to put Newarth on the map; he would've been crushed to see how thoroughly he'd failed.

  In any case, the handwriting matched. It was small comfort. Although she now had suspects to spare, Emily was no closer to solving the murder of Hessiah Talbot. Worst of all -- and she took this very personally -- Emily had not yet figured out who had given Hessiah Talbot the necklace. It seemed to her that if she knew that, she might know who had murdered Hessiah. The question was who would have given Hessiah such a cheap and tasteless piece of jewelry. Surely the most likely one was Lieutenant Culver. Yet they still knew nothing about him, not even if he'd had a wife.

  Frustrated, Emily drove from City Hall to the Newarth Library. She thought she'd just say hello to Mrs. Gibbs, then poke around a little more through old Sentinels. She was hoping to find something connecting the mayor and Celeste Talbot, and so far she hadn't bothered to pay much attention to the early years of Hessiah's life.

  She found Mrs. Gibbs presiding over a plate of frosted brownies. "I'm so glad you've come," Mrs. Gibbs said almost wistfully. "No one else has all day. Even Mr. Bireth isn't around to snore over his morning paper; he's visiting his children on the Jersey shore. And it's
too hot to garden. I have nothing to do.

  She cut Emily a brownie the size of a small backyard and added, "So you've been busy finding out things. What are they? Is there anything I can do to help?"

  Emily brought her up-to-date -- omitting, as always, all mention of Fergus -- and announced her plan to find something, anything, in the time period of the early 1860s. They went down to the basement together, Emily following slowly behind Mrs. Gibbs's halting, arthritic descent. They dragged out two big volumes of Sentinels and sat at each end of the battered library table, carefully turning crumbling pages, searching for evidence of a liaison between the mayor and Celeste Talbot. Or anything else scandalous and indecent.

  The afternoon passed with very few interruptions upstairs and not much in the way of discoveries downstairs. But just before closing time Mrs. Gibbs murmured across the table, "This is very strange. Did you know that the Talbots had a son who died?"

  Emily's head shot up. "Is his name James?"

  "That's right. Listen to this: 'In a tragic mishap at Talbot Manor, James Talbot, the younger son of John and Celeste Talbot, fell down a well adjacent to the formal gardens. Rescuers were unable to reach the boy in time to prevent his drowning. The boy, who with his sister and brother was in the care of a young governess at the time of his death, was said to have been fetching a drink of water for his baby sister. Further details are unknown at this time. Funeral arrangements have yet to be announced.'

  "And that's it," Mrs. Gibbs said, stunned. "Page three, at the bottom. The younger son of the town scion dies, and it's tucked on page three. At the bottom."

  Emily was standing next to her now, turning the paper back to page one. "The paper's dated July 1863. James couldn't have been more than four years old. Hessiah was two years old in 1863; her brother Stewart must've been five or six."

  "What a terrible thing for them to live with," Mrs. Gibbs said, holding her hand to her cheek in an old- fashioned way.

  "Hessiah wouldn't remember that, would she? At two?"

  "She easily could have," Mrs. Gibbs said, shaking her head and tsking like the grandmother she was. "But why wasn't this mentioned at the time of the trial? I'm sure I would have remembered reading about it. Of course, my research was never so thorough as yours, dear. Do you remember anything about this?"

  "There wasn't anything about this," Emily said, every instinct on the alert for a cover-up. "We'll have to go through the next issues with a fine-tooth comb."

  They searched through 1865, but all poor James ever rated in the Sentinel was the one mention at the bottom of page three.

  "For whatever reason, the Sentinel shied away from this story," Emily said to Mrs. Gibbs. "I remember your saying that John Talbot was close friends with the publisher; there must have been an understanding. This is interesting. Was Celeste racked by shame? What happened to their governess? Was she some romantic, silly young thing? Who hired her anyway?"

  "We're supposed to be answering questions, dear, not asking them," Mrs. Gibbs said pragmatically. "Now that we know James existed, we can at least verify his birth and death dates. Would it be a help if I did that?"

  The librarian wanted very much to be a part of things, and Emily was glad to have her help; it would save her the drive back to Newarth. Besides, the Toyota had been making eerie gurgling noises lately, and Emily was petrified at the thought of having to roll it in for repairs.

  That night as Emily lay in bed, hot and uncomfortable, she began to suspect that information had begun flowing almost too quickly. It was as if some hand were guiding her through a tortuous maze of characters and events to some fated conclusion. She didn't like it. If she didn't know better, she'd say it was a trap. The question was who had set it.

  Surely not Fergus. The suspicion came and went, like a shooting star in the night sky, and there was nothing Emily could do to unthink it. After all, Fergus was the logical, obvious suspect in the murder. It was fair to say that Emily knew nothing about how astral spirits were assigned their destinies. What if Fergus could successfully pin the rap on someone else? It happened in court all the time. If Emily were really a detective, then no one would be above suspicion.

  Not even Fergus, she thought, restlessly throwing off the sheets from her body.

  ****

  The next day Emily got two phone calls. The first was in the morning, and it was from Mrs. Gibbs, verifying the obvious: that Hessiah was two years old, James was four, and Stewart six at the time of the drowning. "Thank you, Dr. Watson," Emily had said, and the librarian laughed and hung up, pleased.

  The second call was in the afternoon, from someone who very definitely did not wish to be identified, and it had nothing at all to do with the ongoing investigation. That was the bad news. The good news was that it had everything to do with destroying Lee Alden's primary opponent, Boyd Strom. Emily was being given a hot, hot tip, so hot that the phone she held felt like a charcoal ember.

  "Boyd Strom is up to his neck in toxic waste. I want him to be up to his eyeballs," the caller said in a growl. "He's a partner in Rondale Associates; they own some land on Rondale Road in Scanset, in the northwest part of the state. It ain't a town, more like an intersection. Ever heard of it?"

  "No --"

  "It's there. Trust me. Check it out; he's been dumping PCBs illegally there for years. There's a guy named Sid willing to talk from Wally's Hauling out of Winslow. But you got to ask him first."

  Click.

  Emily grabbed a pencil and wrote first, thought later. She got out a map, verified the town's location, made herself a cup of tea. A toxic dump. If the caller was on the level, Boyd Strom wouldn't be running for anything except possibly his life in a federal prison. If the caller was on the level. The first thing tomorrow, she'd see what she could find out at the office.

  Or not. After all, she'd just declared herself on leave from this kind of investigation. She'd have to do it on her own time, then. Except that it was too big a story, too big an investigation, for her to pursue alone. She didn't have the resources, and she wasn't even sure she had the courage; a trail of PCBs could lead to some pretty rough characters.

  But it was an explosive story; she couldn't just sit on it. The next day she called Stanley Cooper. After a little backing and filling in the way of pleasantries, Emily gave him a verbatim account of the anonymous tipster. Predictably Stan listened quietly, then fired both barrels simultaneously. "The story's bullshit. There's nothing you can do anymore to put Lee Alden on top in the primary, Emily. Give it up."

  "I'm not trying to put anyone on top," she said, blushing irrationally at the image. "Someone called me with a tip. I think the paper should check it out. That's all there is to it, Stan. Dammit!"

  "I'm not allocating resources to this story," Stan said flatly. "I've heard it before. It's bullshit. Strom's a lot of things, but he's not connected. Nice try."

  "I told you, Stan -- oh, forget it." She slammed the receiver down, furious with him for suspecting her motives. Granted, it was a fantastic window of opportunity for Lee. But it was a genuinely newsworthy story as well. She tried not to think of the enormous conflict of interest the story represented for her as she punched in Lee's phone number. She'd made him promise not to call her, so he sounded surprised and -- she had to admit --extremely pleased to hear from her.

  She brought him up to date on her progress in the case, then said, "I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing here, Lee. I think this violates the Hippocratic oath or something. But I got an anonymous tip last night, and I don't know what to do with it. I can't follow it up myself, and Stan told me flat out that it's an old rumor and untrue. But I just have this feeling –-"

  "My Emily of the Hunches," Lee said in a bemused voice. "Okay. What now? Shoot. Who's your latest suspect?"

  "Oh, this isn't about Hessiah." She told him exactly what the caller had said about Boyd Strom's toxic dump. Lee listened in absolute silence. When she was done, he said, "I see."

  "I don't know what you can do with it. The g
uy called me at home, and I wasn't on the payroll at the time, and anyway, the Journal has turned it down, so -–"

  "So you wrapped it up in a big red ribbon and gave it to me. Thanks," he said dryly.

  "Well, for goodness' sake, the primary is less than a month away, everyone says the second debate ended in a draw, and you're running out of options, mister. If Boyd Strom doesn't make a real boner in the last debate, if he doesn't say that Poland is the capital of Iraq or something, then .... Do you want to lose?"

  "Doesn't what you're saying leave you with just a little bit of a bad taste in your mouth?" he asked her quietly.

  She felt the heat fire up in her cheeks, then burst into flame. It was the first time in her life that anyone had even hinted she might be doing something unethical. Especially when she wasn't quite sure that it wasn't.

  "It doesn't leave as bad a taste in my mouth as -- as what you're saying," she said petulantly. And then she placed the receiver very gently, very precisely in its cradle.

  When she turned around Fergus was there, shaking his head. "What a world," he said sympathetically. "What's a toxic dump anyway?"

  She told him, but he was puzzled. "Poison has to go somewhere. Here's a man willing to pile it up on his own land. Why would that stop him from getting elected in the primary?"

  "Because he's not going to tell anyone about it," Emily said impatiently. "He's going to sell the land for a school or a playground or to some unsuspecting home builders. And in the meantime the stuff is going to leach into the groundwater or nearby streams -- well, never mind. You couldn't possibly imagine what we've done to our environment, Fergus. I can't begin to explain it."

  "If it's so bad, why's the senator miffed with ye?"

  "I suppose," she said with a sigh, "because I've thrown all the dirt in his lap. He has to decide whether he wants to brush it off or make it into a mud pie and sling it at Boyd Strom."