Ann started out of a reverie and shook her head. "No, Tm sorry, I've only been in here a few times to look at Zeb's Indian collection." The policeman prowled around for a bit, pulling open drawers and examining dusty surfaces while Penny and Ann looked on in silence. "Well," he said, after a while, "it's possible that some sneak thief came in here to lift a few things, that Grange spotted him and chased him on to the bog, they had a fight and that was that. It's a bit early in the year for that kind of thing, but we get it all the time in summer; people on the Cape never have got the hang of keeping their doors locked."
"Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I'm afraid there is a definite link between this attack and the murder you are investigating," Penny said stubbornly.
"What murder?" His face was blank.
"Why, the body in the bog, of course!"
"Oh, that." His face clouded over. "I don't know anything about it. Anyway, what has it got to do with this?"
"I think I can explain. Dr. Spring," Ann Langley put in hastily, seeing the look of outraged disbelief on Penny's face. "You see, when that body was found a state patrol car just happened to be at Mr. Chase's store as the young man came in with the news. The state police have been investigating the case. This officer is from the local police."
Penny turned on him . "You mean you don't do it together?"
"Not unless asked," he said, thin-lipped with disapproval "Anyway what has that got to do with this?"
She hesitated. Her first obligation she felt was to Zeb; what his involvement in all this was she had no idea, but until she could talk to him she felt she had no right to violate the secrecy he had wished. What was more, so far she only had suppositions and no facts to go on. "It was a very private matter for Mr. Grange. We are old friends from college days and he wanted my help on it," she said, "and until we know how he is and I can talk to him I don't think I can say anything further."
"Withholding evidence is a serious offense," the officer snapped.
"I am withholding nothing about this case," Penny said firmly, "in fact I've told you all I know."
"Well, tell it again," he said, busy with his notebook, and Penny and then Ann went over the events as he took their statements down. He had them sign the statements, then stood up. "Well, if you think of anything to add, call me at the station. Officer Birnie, Emie Birnie." He grimaced at the name, which Penny surmised had given him a lot of trouble through life. "You'll be staying on here of course until this is settled?"
Penny glanced at Ann. "Er, yes. I understood from Zeb that he had made arrangements with Miss Langley here."
Ann flushed a little and did not look at her. "Yes, officer, Zeb called on me last night and asked me if I'd be willing to take a lady friend of his as a paying guest for a while. That's why I came over to see him this morning, to ask about the arrangements. He did not tell me it was to be you," she said to Penny, an appeal in her voice. Officer Birnie looked from one to another of them curiously before shutting his notebook with a snap. "So that's where you can be reached if needed?" he asked.
"Yes, at least for the moment." Penny felt confused and awkward.
"O.K. Then you'll be hearing from me." He made his way out, leaving the two women staring at one another in silence.
"Look, Ann, if this isn't convenient for you, I can easily go to a motel," Penny at last said a little desperately. "I had no idea Zeb had been so vague about all this. I feel I must clear this up for his sake, but I don't want to put you out."
The girl looked drained, the gray eyes, which Penny had remembered as sparkling and full of life, sad and haunted. "No, it's not that, I'd like to have you. But ... well ... there's a lot I should tell you ..."
"Good idea," Penny said briskly, "and before you do I think we both could use a good stiff drink and a hearty lunch. Treat's on me. Where's a good place?"
The good place turned out to be a wayside restaurant in Barnstable. When they were finally settled before their drinks Penny, at least, was looking forward to a king-size seafood platter and took a satisfied gulp of her old fashioned. She said encouragingly, "So, Ann, catch me up to date on what you have been up to."
The fair girl toyed with her vodka martini, her eyes downcast. "I scarcely know where to begin—so much has happened..."
"The last I heard you'd decided to come over here with your young man—what was his name?—John something or other?"
"John Roberts." Ann's tone was bitter. "And you were right about that setup. It wasn't right, it didn't work out." She gave a deep sigh and Penny kept quiet, she too not being the "I-told-you-so" kind. "I got pregnant and when the baby was born he just walked out on me. Did not want the responsibility." She looked at Penny with miserable eyes. "I have a three-year-old daughter."
"Then that's his loss and your gain," Penny said definitely. "Unless you think otherwise. And you have plenty of company these days."
"No, Penny's all the world to me." Ann's fingers tightened on her martini glass and the color flooded up under the fair, translucent skin. "I called her after you; I hope you don't mind."
"Pm very flattered," Penny said, and waited for more.
"I know all they say about the disadvantages to a child brought up by a single parent," Ann said fiercely, "but I'll never give her up, never!"
"My dear, there are a lot more advantages to a child brought up by a single loving parent than two un-loving ones," Penny said with firmness. "I ought to know. I did it myself. Alex was only two when his father died."
"But that was different—you were married."
"Oh, what does that matter any more! Thank God for Ms.! No one will ever even know unless you tell them."
"And you've always had Toby Glendower," Ann blurted out, and then flushed a brilliant scarlet. "Oh! I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry!"
"Not to worry," Penny said placidly. "It's true Toby has always been around, but actually he's hopeless with children. Alex and he never did see eye to eye, Alex being very much of the twentieth century and Toby never having really got beyond B.C"
Having made one gaffe, Ann plunged on. "We students never could figure out why you two weren't married."
"Us! Married?" Penny said with horror. "Oh, no, that would never do!"
"But you are always together!"
"Yes, but only when we want to be—that's different. And not always, like now," Penny said with a faint resentment against the absent Toby. "Anyway, enough about me. Back to you and your daughter. How did you end up here?"
Their food arrived, and while Penny tucked into her platter and listened, Ann toyed with hers and talked.
"It was just luck, really. I was flat broke after John left me, and the market for archaeologists with no experience and a newborn baby in tow isn't exactly flourishing. I saw this ad for a live-in research assistant—and it was Steven." Again a hectic flush mantled her fair cheeks, which Penny made a mental note of. "Steven Dimola is a scholar. He's a keen amateur Assyriologist, among other things, and he's done a lot of work. He's really quite good," Ann blurted on. "Anyway, I got the job, and since then I've been a sort of general girl Friday to the Dimolas when they are here. It has worked out very well. They have a Portuguese butler whose wife doesn't work because she has three small children, so she baby-sits Penny while I'm working. It's fine for her because she has lots of playmates, and of course we all live very close together on the estate . .."
"Talking of living close together," Penny said, glancing at her watch and abandoning her platter with some reluctance, "I think I'd better check the hospital to see how Zeb is. When I tried before they couldn't tell me anything. They said to call back in about an hour."
She returned after a considerable interval to find Arm moodily smoking, her own lunch hardly touched. Penny reapplied herself to hers. "What a runaround," she grimaced, "I had to claim kinship before they'd tell me a thing—not that there's much good to tell. He's in the intensive care unit in a coma—multiple skull fractures. It could go either way. I only hope he's as tough as
he looks." She polished off her plate in grim silence, then addressed herself to a luscious chocolate gateau while Ann drank coffee and chain-smoked. Why, thought Penny, if your job is working out that well are you so confoundly nervous, my girl? She had reached the coffee stage herself and was about to open this intimate subject when a burly figure in blue caught her eye. Officer Birnie was advancing purposefully toward them. "Why," he said accusingly as he came up to the table, "didn't you tell me right off you were related to Zeb Grange? We've been trying to locate his next of kin."
"I? To Zeb!" Penny started to protest, when light dawned. "Oh, my! Word certainly does travel fast on the Cape, doesn't it?" She smiled at him weakly. "I suppose you got that from the hospital. Well, er, I'm afraid that was a little white lie. I'm no relation."
He turned a dull purple and seemed to swell. "You mean you aren't! After all the trouble I've been to to track you down!"
"Well, you know how difficult hospitals are about giving information," Penny said feebly. "I had to say something to find out about him."
"Then who is his next of kin, tell me that!" Birnie demanded in a muffled bellow. "He's such a hermit that no one seems to know the first thing about him or his family."
"I'm afraid I don't know either," she confessed. "You see, apart from that brief visit last fall I told you about, I've been out of touch with Zeb since we were in college. I know very little about him."
Birnie looked as if he might burst at any moment, so Ann put in hurriedly, "I think I've heard Zeb mention a nephew who lives on the Cape somewhere—his brother's son, so the name will be the same. Would that help?"
"It might," he growled and after another venomous glance at Penny stalked out.
"Oh, dear, I'm afraid that's rather cooked my goose as far as he is concerned," she exclaimed in some dismay. "I don't know how I manage it, but I always seem to get on the wrong side of the law, and this time there isn't even a Bilger in sight." Ann gazed at her blankly. "Oh, that was a young policeman who helped me in the Pergama affair," Penny explained hurriedly. "I certainly could use him around now. "But let's get back to the Dimolas and the people on the estate."
"You mean normally or now?"
"Is there a difference? Well, start with now and go on to normally."
"Now the whole family is here," Ann said. "There's Rinaldo and his wife Annette, his second wife, that is. And Steven and his wife Inga—she's Swedish..." The color rose and ebbed in her cheeks again and Penny felt she had a possible answer to her unasked question. "Then there's Alexander, that's the younger son, and his wife Wanda—she used to be an actress—and Maria Bearse, Rinaldo's only daughter, who is living at home now after her divorce. That's the family. Then there's the servants, six of them, two Portuguese and four Cape Verde Islanders, plus the Italian chef. Some of them live in the house, the others in Masuit."
"And who else lives on the estate?"
"Just Zeb and I."
"And normally?"
"Well, it's a year-round house for Steven and Inga— he can work better here. The six servants are theirs. For the others it's a weekend and summer place. Dimola Enterprises has its HQ in Boston. Rinaldo has his town house on Beacon Hill and brings his Italian chef with him when he visits here. Alexander and his wife also have a house in Wellesley Hills, and Maria normally lives in New York but since the divorce has been living with her father."
"I'm convinced, the more I think of it, that Rinaldo Dimola is the key to this whole thing," Penny said slowly. "The first thing I must do is to talk with him, then perhaps I can begin to make sense of this business."
"I'm afraid that's out of the question." Ann was looking at her oddly.
"How so? He's not another Howard Hughes, is he?"
"Then you don't know?"
"Know what?"
"Last September Rinaldo Dimola was stricken with a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was paralyzed, and he has not spoken a word since."
CHAPTER 5
"Why would anyone want to steal a photo?" Penny wondered. Her inner dismay at the news of Rinaldo Dimola was mixed with the growing certitude that Zeb's weird behavior was an outgrowth of his fanatical devotion to the stricken multimillionaire and linked to the latter's illness in some way. She had ascertained from Ann that the stroke had occurred only a few days before Zeb's first summons, and that when she had been on the Cape previously the millionaire was still hovering between life and death. Since then his condition had stabilized, and lately he had shown some slight signs of improvement.
"I've no idea—it appears to be so senseless," Ann answered Penny's question. They had retreated to Ann's little cottage in the pines and were now drinking coffee, which Penny noted seemed to be Ann's principal item of diet. The cottage, Ann explained, had been an overflow guest house for the main house. It was a low, shingled Cape Cod rambler with three bedrooms, each with its own bath, a large living-dining room with a huge stone fireplace and a tiny kitchen. The trees clustered closely around the house, making it rather dark, but inside it was coz^' and Ann had added a lot of pleasing feminine touches: hanging plants of all kinds, bright cushions on the basic, solid maple furniture, and jazzy modem prints on the pine-paneled walls. After the dreary starkness of Zeb's house Penny found it a comforting relief.
"Dimola isn't one of these tycoons who hates to be photographed, is he?" Penny was groping for answers.
"No, far from it. Up until just after I came to work for them he was very gregarious in a rather heavy-handed sort of way—not so much the past two years though."
"Any reason for that?"
"Not that I know of. But he seemed to undergo a sort of personality change; become much more somber and withdrawn, and even more of a 'padrone' if that were possible. Maybe his stroke was boiling up for a long time."
"Possible, I suppose," Penny murmured. "When I saw that photo I felt his face was so familiar, I wish I could remember where I'd seen it."
A faint smile appeared on Ann's face. "Maybe I can help on that." She got up and took a heavy Italian art book off a bookshelf. Opening it, she placed it before Penny. "Is that it, by any chance?" Penny gasped. "Why, of course!" She was looking at Castagno's fresco portrait of the condottiere Niccolo da Tolentino from Florence Cathedral— the resemblance between it and Rinaldo Dimola was striking.
"If ever there was a throwback, Rinaldo is it," Ann went on. "It's remarkable really, because he's a fourth-generation American—his great-grandfather immigrated in the late 1860s—but he is the most complete Italian I've ever seen. Not a modern Italian, a Renaissance Italian, perhaps even an ancient Roman. 'La famiglia' is his God, I think —the complete patriarch, the complete autocrat." She was becoming quite animated. "You should see his part of the main house, it's like stepping into the ducal palace in Florence. And I think he sees himself like that, the head of a hereditary empire; only in this case it is a twentieth-century empire he has carved out himself."
"Not the easiest person to live with I should imagine," Penny murmured.
A slight cloud passed over the fair face in front of her. "Well in some ways no, but he wasn't a bully, and he was fair according to his lights—very much the iron hand in the velvet glove. Not that that is always appreciated..." She trailed off.
"Tell me about the rest of the family," Penny encouraged. "Are they like him?"
"Alexander is very like his father, both to look at and in character. He's his father's right hand in running the business and has been doing it entirely and very ably since Rinaldo's stroke. Steven's very different, more like his mother, I suppose—she was a Cape Cod Chase. Not the banking Chases but a branch that hung on to most of its land and was pretty well-to-do in a quiet way. All this Masuit land was hers. Anyway, Steven has no liking for business. All his tastes are scholarly or artistic—collecting painting and sculpture, archeology, genealogy and so on. It was he who got his father all fired up about the Dimola family genealogy—and, by the way, it should be 'D, apostrophe, Imola'—it's a little place some thirty miles south
of Bologna in the hills, I believe."
"D'ImoIa, D'Imola," Penny muttered, "why does that make me think of the poet Dante?"
Ann beamed at her like a proud parent. "That's right," she encouraged, "one of Dante's supporters and early biographers, Benvenuto D'Imola. Rinaldo thinks he's descended from him, though I'm a bit dubious about it myself, and so is Steven, but he is such a gentle soul he doesn't like to disillusion his father."
"Did Rinaldo approve of Steven's activities?"
Ann looked surprised. "Why, yes! Steven's the elder son, and in Rinaldo's way of thinking this means he can do no wrong. Of course money is no object anymore to any of them, but Steven is Rinaldo's successor in every sense of the word. When he dies, the empire is Steven's."
Penny's eyebrows shot up. "And how does Alexander feel about that?"
Ann looked slightly uncomfortable. "Well, he and Steven get along all right, but naturally there's a bit of resentment. Not that Steven would dream of taking over from him. If Rinaldo goes, Alexander in fact will run the business."
"But not as its head," Penny murmured thoughtfully. "And what about the daughter?"
"Maria is the family maverick. She and her father don't get on at all well, though I think she's more like him than either of them care to admit. He is so patriarchal as far as women are concerned, it's almost unbelievable, so she's very much the low member on the family totem pole. She's overreacted to this and is one of the most fervent women's libbers I've come across, an absolute fanatic about it. Rinaldo's an ardent Catholic and I swear she has married and divorced twice just to get his goat. A classic love-hate relationship, because she always comes home between husbands—just to fight with her father, I'm certain. And she's a born mischief maker. But she must be fond of him because since his stroke she's been a tigress with the others over his medical care. It is she who insisted on bringing in this newest doctor, who really does seem to be doing some good at long last."
"And how does that sit with the second Mrs. Rinaldo Dimola and the rest of the distaff side?"
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