Family Vault

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I said I’d row ashore, but Mother was already in her bathing suit insisting she could swim in faster than I could row, and get the harbor master to bring out the medicine in his motorboat. She’d happened to bash in the bow of our dinghy that same morning on a rock, which struck me at the time as a strange thing for Mother to do. She was never careless as a rule. We’d left the dinghy to be mended and were making do with a war surplus flotation raft that was designed for survival rather than easy handling.

  “We argued a bit, but it was obvious she could do the swim in much less time than I could paddle that cranky raft to shore. It was also true that I could handle the Caroline better than she if the wind came up. A squall was unlikely under those conditions, and I fully expected Mother’d be able to swim the distance easily in a dead calm. She really was a marvelous distance swimmer—I’d raced her in the dinghy and lost more than once. You see, it made beautiful sense at the time, and there was no use arguing with Mother anyway.

  “But she hadn’t been gone long when a squall did come up. I had all I could do to keep the Caroline afloat. Father tried to help, but collapsed almost at once. By the time I’d got the boat under control, there wasn’t much I could do but heave to and watch him die. I don’t know whether he realized what she’d done. He never said anything, just—suffered.

  “Once I knew he was dead, I thought I’d better try to find Mother. I circled for a while, but we’d been blown off course and I couldn’t pick up a landfall. I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was, much less where she might be. As it turned out, she’d got to shore some time before I did. They had her in the hospital. She’d taken such a beating from the squall that I—I couldn’t say anything.”

  “And you’ve never told her that you know?”

  “No, never. What was the use? She’s been punished enough.”

  “And you’ve been punished a great deal more than enough.”

  There was another long silence, that Sarah finally broke.

  “Alexander, are you absolutely certain it was your mother who killed Ruby Redd?”

  “Who else could have done it?”

  “Mightn’t she have been followed here by a jealous boyfriend? Ruby seems to have been a type who’d attract violence. But Aunt Caroline is not a violent woman, she’s a conniver. I can see her doing what she did to your father after she’d checked out the tides and weather, cracked up the dinghy on purpose, and goaded your father into an argument so that he’d need his medication even more urgently than usual. That’s how she operates. All right, she miscalculated, got caught in a squall and suffered terrible consequences, but she did achieve what she’d set out to do. She got rid of Uncle Gilbert, and she came out of it a heroine. If by any chance your father had survived, she’d still be a heroine, and she’d be in a perfect position to try again because nobody would believe she’d want to kill the man she fought so hard to save. You yourself might have wound up thinking you didn’t really see her dump out the medicine, mightn’t you?”

  “Perhaps. Who knows?”

  “Well, one thing I know is that whacking somebody over the head on a sudden impulse in her own front hall is just not something Aunt Caroline would be apt to do. Can’t you see my point?”

  “Yes, my dear. You want to convince me that some outsider came here with Ruby, fractured her skull in a quarrel and ran off leaving her dead, perhaps in the hope I’d be blamed for her death because I’d been seeing her.”

  “Why is that so impossible?”

  “For one thing, if he was jealous of my going around with Ruby, why didn’t he attack me instead of her? He could have found me easily enough at Danny’s or the theater. For another, if he was in this house, how did he get out? The night latch was on when I came. I distinctly recall having to use both my keys. As you know, that extra lock has to be worked with a key both inside and out. When he had it put on, Father got three keys cut, one for himself, one for Mother, and one for me. His is the one you’re using now.”

  “What about Edith?”

  “Servants didn’t use the front door in Father’s day. They came and went by the basement, not without permission. That was another point, you see. We still had a cook then. She and Edith were off on some overnight excursion, for which Mother had given them the tickets as a surprise. She’d never done such a thing before or since.”

  “Oh.”

  “Lastly, Mother had a plan to dispose of the body all figured out before I got there. I can see her now. I was kneeling on the floor beside Ruby’s body, trying to find a pulse although I knew she must be dead, when Mother came in from the back hall. She had on her black coat and hat. She said to me, “Alex, I know what’s happened and I don’t care to discuss it. Do exactly as I say. Don’t stop to argue because I can’t hear you anyway.”

  “Was she implying that you’d killed Ruby? How could she have the nerve?”

  “She accused Father of forgetting his own medicine, didn’t she? In any event, I was too shocked to do anything but obey. I’m not trying to excuse myself, Sarah. I acted like a fool and a coward. I had just enough wits about me to realize what a spot I was in. All my friends knew about my affair with Ruby. So did the crowd at Danny’s and the girls Ruby worked with and God knows who else. Don’t ask me how Mother found out.”

  “Maybe Uncle Jem told her,” Sarah suggested, “not to be malicious but because he’d think it amusing that you were turning into a stagedoor Johnny.”

  “No doubt a lot of people thought it was funny, and there’s always someone ready to spread gossip. Mother could lip read after a fashion then, and people used to write her notes on a pad she always carried. Anyway, there it was. I suppose Ruby might have dropped in for a friendly chat about being bought off, and Mother lost her temper, but considering Mother’s general modus operandi, as you so wisely pointed out, and the fact that she’d got the servants out of the house, I’m inclined to believe she’d planned everything in advance.

  “She knew her eyesight was going. Once she was blind as well as deaf, she’d need me to take care of her. I don’t suppose you or I could possibly begin to comprehend the anger and frustration she must have been suffering then. Finding out that I was being lured away from her by the kind of woman she’d consider hardly fit to live in any case might have been just one blow too many.”

  “I can understand that,” said Sarah. “It would be hard to judge her actions by rational standards.”

  “Oh, she was rational enough, though she might not have been altogether sane. She’d got hold of the key to that old family vault and informed me that was where we’d hide the body. I tried to tell her we could never do it without being seen, but she wouldn’t pay any attention, and I realized she meant exactly what she said about not arguing. I had my choice of calling the police and perhaps landing us both on Death Row, or taking the desperate chance that her scheme might work.”

  “But how could it? How did you ever manage without being caught?”

  “The reason I went home in the first place was that I’d been to a party here on the Hill and it was too late to go back to the dorm. It was about two o’clock Sunday morning. The weather was nasty, pitch-dark with a cold drizzle. Nobody was on the street downtown. We were both wearing black clothes. We pulled our collars up around our faces and carried Ruby wrapped in an old black tarpaulin that used to be kept in the cellar for hauling coal. When we got to the cemetery, we hung the tarpaulin over a low branch that used to grow right over the vault, making a sort of tent that we could work inside of. From even a few feet away the black canvas simply melted into the shadows.”

  “That’s incredible!”

  “I know, but it worked. We had one of those little pencil flashlights with us. Mother shielded the lock with her coat and I got the vault open. Then we shoved Ruby in as best we could—she’d begun to stiffen, by then—and walled up the vault. Mother had that all reasoned out. It was just after the family had been through that historical site business, and she was afraid some city official wo
uld take a notion to inspect the vault. She claimed that if a wall was there, they wouldn’t have the right to tear it down without permission, which we’d refuse to give. I don’t know if we’d have got away with it.”

  “But you did, for thirty years.”

  “Yes. Sarah. Sometimes I even managed not to think about it for weeks on end. Then something would bring it to mind and it would be every bit as ghastly as before.”

  “Poor darling! You must have been terrified while you were in that tent.”

  “I was, but Mother was perfectly cool. She stayed there most of the time by herself, laying the wall by touch while I ran back and forth through the alleyways fetching armloads of bricks under my coat. We’d brought the leftovers up from Ireson’s, thinking we’d do something or other with them here, I forget what. As to why she laid such a fancy pattern, we’d been working on the Secret Garden wall for so long that I suppose she instinctively followed the method she knew best. The opening isn’t very large, as you know, and the whole job took only an hour or so, but I think I must have aged ten years before we got that tarpaulin back in the cellar.”

  “Did you ever talk about it at all?”

  “Not one word. The closest we ever came was some years later when Mother said something about building another wall at the summer place, and I said I’d rather not. Naturally I had to endure a good deal of needling from the crowd about being ditched by my flashy girl friend. When Ruby disappeared so abruptly, the general assumption was that she’d run off with some more interesting man. I think the worst of all was having to show my face at Danny Rate’s the following night and act surprised that Ruby wasn’t around.”

  “Oh, Alexander!” Sarah rubbed her cheek against his hand. “It’s a wonder you didn’t go clean out of your mind.”

  “Perhaps I did. I don’t know, Sarah. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite real since then. I realized at the time we were married how bitterly unfair it was to saddle you with half a husband, but what else could I do?”

  “What do you mean?” she cried. “Alexander, why did you marry me?”

  He sighed, like an embarrassed parent faced with having to explain the facts of life. “I’ve always known you’d ask me that some day. If you want the unvarnished truth, I married you because Mother forced me to.”

  “No! You couldn’t!”

  “My darling, please don’t look at me like that. Let me at least tell you how it happened.”

  Sarah wet her stiff lips. “Go ahead.”

  “It was the money,” he began. “Father had left Mother as executor of the estate, which was a very large one. She should have more than plenty to last her lifetime, but she has nothing. Don’t ask me what she did with it. I haven’t the faintest idea. All I know is that within ten years’ time after she took over the handling of the estate, we began to be hard up. I tried to get her to explain why, but she wouldn’t. I begged her to unload this white elephant of a house and some of the land at Ireson’s Landing. She refused. I offered to sell some of the family jewels. She said they were hers for her lifetime and wouldn’t let me so much as look at them. The box was and still is in her name, and I’d have to get a court order to open it, which I’ve never been able to bring myself to do. Instead, I’ve been trying for twenty years to make her see reason, and you know how far I’ve got.”

  He wiped his forehead. “Then Walter made that appalling will appointing me your trustee and, like a fool, I told her. You know the terms. I’m to give you whatever allowance I see fit out of the interest until your twenty seventh birthday, when the principal reverts to you. If you should die before assuming control of your estate, everything comes to me. It was a hideous position to be put in. I begged Walter to choose somebody else, but he said I cared more about you than any of the others, and God knows that’s true enough. At least having to look after you gave me an incentive to stay alive a while longer. I’d been about ready to call it quits.”

  “You mustn’t say that!”

  “Sarah, please grant me the luxury of being totally honest for once in my life.”

  “I’m sorry, Alexander. Go on.”

  “Well, as soon as she heard what Walter had done, Mother decided you and I should marry so that we could all three live off your income. I wouldn’t hear of it, not because I didn’t want you, but because I felt you deserved a better fate than a man twice your age, saddled with a hideous burden of guilt and responsibility, who couldn’t even support you. Furthermore, Walter was still hale and hearty and not all that much older than I. I told Mother her plan was out of the question, there wasn’t going to be any income in the first place because Walter would no doubt outlive me. With that, she said I’d better marry you anyway and make your father give us an allowance, or something would happen to Walter.”

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Mother was completely blind by that time, quite helpless to plan any more murders, or so I thought. One month to the day after that conversation, you asked me to be one of your father’s pallbearers.”

  “But his death was an accident! He ate a bad mushroom that he’d gathered himself by mistake.”

  “Sarah, darling, Walter Kelling was a past president of the Mycological Society. He’d been gathering and eating wild mushrooms since he was a boy. His eyesight and his judgment were as sound as they’d ever been. I don’t know where the amanita came from, but I’ll never believe he picked it himself.”

  “That was the weekend you drove Beth and me up to Maine,” Sarah said slowly. “Aunt Marguerite was supposed to come and stay with Aunt Caroline, but she came down with hives and Father said he’d go in her place.”

  “That’s the story Mother told, at any rate. I shouldn’t be surprised if Aunt Marguerite was never invited. She also told the doctor Walter had picked the mushrooms and cooked them himself. Of course she was believed because everyone knew Walter did that sort of thing, and it was so obvious that a woman in Mother’s condition couldn’t have had anything to do with them. Don’t ask me how she managed to get a bad one and slip it past him. I began to wonder if she might be possessed of some uncanny power. I knew she ought to be locked up, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence against her. I couldn’t tell the police she’d already done two other murders because they’d arrest me as an accessory, and you’d be left with nobody to look after you.”

  “It never occurred to you that I might be able to look after myself?”

  “No, never. I had to believe that you needed me. Oh, my darling, I had to have something!”

  12

  ALEXANDER WIPED HIS EYES and blew his nose. “Sorry I made a fool of myself, breaking down like that.”

  “It’s a pity you didn’t do it sooner,” Sarah mumbled into his hair. She had his head in her arms, cradled against her breast. “So you only married me to keep me from getting killed.”

  “I married you because I adore you, Sadiebelle, and always did and always will. It’s only that I wouldn’t have forced myself on you—”

  “Forced yourself on me? You idiotic man! I suppose you tied me hand and foot, and dragged me screaming to the altar?”

  That got a smile out of him. “No, I will say you came willingly enough, but you were so young and you’d lost your father so recently. I thought it was because you felt you were—”

  “Getting another one? I did welcome the prospect of having somebody to rely on, but I’d never have married you for that. Has it never occurred to you that I might be even goofier about you than you are about me?”

  “How could you be? My darling girl, you are my whole life.”

  “Then it’s high time you started living with me instead of your nightmares,” she told him. “From now on, you’re to stop treating me as if I were nine years old and young for my age. I’m your wife. Whatever happens, we’ll share it equally. I don’t believe your mother has any secret powers. I don’t think she’s that much smarter than we are, and I think it’s high time we stopped letting her rule the roost. What we ought to
do is go to court and have you appointed her legal guardian or whatever it was that Dolph did when Great-uncle Frederick got so batty. Between her double handicap and the fact that she’s thrown away a fortune without being able to say where it went, you wouldn’t have a speck of trouble convincing a judge that she’s not fit to handle large responsibilities.”

  “Sarah, can you imagine how she’d react?”

  “Who says we have to tell her, and how’s she going to find out if we don’t? If she ever did find out, what could she do about it?”

  “She’d think of something. It’s a terrible risk, Sarah.”

  “From what you’ve been telling me, it’s a risk being anywhere near her. She hasn’t tried anything on either one of us yet, and she’s had every opportunity.”

  “That’s only because we’ve let her have her own way in everything. Why do you think I let her lead me around by the nose as I do? It’s so that she’ll leave you alone.”

  “She’ll leave me alone,” said Sarah grimly. “Alexander, I am simply not afraid of Aunt Caroline.”

  “I’d feel safer if you were.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’d sink right back into the same old rut. I’m not going to stand for that, my love. We have plenty of good years ahead of us, and it’s high time we quit dragging on from one day to the next as we’ve been doing. Promise me you’ll at least give some thought to that guardianship.”

  “Yes, darling. I’ll talk to the lawyers about it next week.”

  “Good. Now, my next bright idea is, how would you feel about getting out of this house for a few days and having a chance to pull yourself together?”

  “Where should we go?”

  “I suppose the sensible place would be Ireson’s Landing. We could walk the land and make up our minds about what part we want to sell off so that you’d have some capital of your own and wouldn’t have a fit of the guilties every time you spent a nickel of mine.”