Family Vault

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Good God, Mrs. Kelling, are you trying to tell me I negotiated those mortgages with a pair of impostors?”

  “No. With Caroline Kelling and one impostor.”

  “Then who was the man?”

  Sarah was wondering how to answer, when she heard footsteps somewhere in the house. Was it the arsonist, back to try again? What should she do? Rush out to the sidewalk and wait for Bittersohn? Call the police? Make a noise herself in the hope of scaring him off? That would be pretty crazy. Best lie low.

  Hastily she said, “Mr. Verplanck, I’ll have to call you back,” and tried to replace the receiver without a sound. In her nervousness, she knocked the phone off the stand. It fell with a mighty crash.

  At once, to her mingled relief and fury, an all-too-familiar voice called out, “Edith, is that you?”

  27

  “HARRY, YOU SCARED THE life out of me! No, it’s Sarah. Edith isn’t here. However did you get in?”

  “Through the door, naturally.”

  “How could you? It was locked.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Lackridge. “When I rang the front doorbell and nobody answered, I thought Edith might be down in her lair with that damned television blaring away as usual, so I went around through the alley and found both doors ajar. You ought to be more careful about keeping the place locked up, Sarah. Anybody could barge right in.”

  “But, Harry, that’s not possible. Mr. Bittersohn nailed them shut.”

  “What the hell for? What’s Bittersohn doing around here, anyway?”

  Sarah was almost demoralized enough to tell him, but not quite. She had no right to let the publisher know that his supposed author was really a detective using him for cover. Luckily, Harry answered his own question.

  “Figures if he can’t get at the family jewels one way, he’ll try another, eh? You watch out for that chap, Sarah. You know what those people are like, give them a toe in the door and the next thing you know, they’re trying to crawl in bed with you.”

  “Yes, I had a little lesson in that regard from your lad Bob Dee,” Sarah couldn’t resist telling him. “By the way, Harry, how did he know Alexander and Aunt Caroline and I were going out to Ireson’s Landing for the weekend? He mentioned it at that meeting we had, and I don’t recall having told anybody.”

  Lackridge looked blank for a moment. Then he said, “Where else would you have been going? Speaking of beds, what the hell’s going on around here, anyway? I came to look for a little notebook I’ve misplaced. It has all my appointments for the next two months, and I’m lost without the thing. It occurred to me that I might have left it in Alex’s room that night Leila and I slept here. That’s why I came this morning. Since nobody was around, I decided I might as well go straight upstairs and look for it. The place is a mess. I know you’re in no fit state to function yourself, but couldn’t you get Edith to straighten things up?”

  Sarah shook her head, trying to clear her mind. “I told you Edith’s not here. The rooms were in order when I left the house a couple of hours ago. The problem is, somebody’s been breaking in and trying to burn the house down.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  Lackridge caught himself. “Sorry, Sarah, I didn’t mean that. But Leila and I were talking. We realize you’ve been under an intolerable strain, and we think it might be a good idea if you were to go away for a while.”

  “I thought I’d made it clear to Leila that I prefer to make my own plans,” Sarah snapped back. “If you’re hinting that I ought to be committed for observation, I suggest you leave that decision to Uncle Jem or Cousin Dolph. It’s kind of you to be concerned, but I do have a family.”

  “Sarah, be reasonable. All this talk about people breaking in and setting fire to the place—”

  “You’ve seen the evidence, haven’t you? You say the bedrooms are torn apart. You say the basement door was open when Mr. Bittersohn himself can tell you he nailed it shut.”

  She wasn’t convincing Harry Lackridge, she could see that. He wasn’t bothering to hide his sneer. Alexander would never have sneered. It was odd how unlike the two friends had been, yet so very like in superficial ways. Harry’s voice was harsher than Alexander’s, but his diction was as impeccably Phillips and Harvard. The height, the thinness, the well-worn Brooks Brothers tweed suit, all were Alexander’s without the elegance. In this ill-lit hallway, even the aquiline features were not all that dissimilar at first glance. Years ago, when Harry’s skin was still fresh and his eyes clear, when his teeth were unyellowed and his grin hadn’t yet become a twisted sneer, he’d sometimes been taken for one of the Kelling clan. If anybody in the world could have impersonated Alexander Kelling and got away with it—perhaps she really was going crazy. Sarah thought of a way to find out.

  “Harry,” she said, keeping her voice from shaking as best she could, “when you came through the basement, did you notice anything different about Edith’s sitting room?”

  He blinked. “How do you mean, different? How should I know? I hadn’t been down there in years. Anyway, it was rather dark and I couldn’t find the light switch.”

  “But you had to walk right through the room to get to the kitchen stairs. Weren’t you afraid you’d break your neck on the furniture? You know what a packrat Edith’s always been.”

  Lackridge hunched his shoulders. “I’d forgotten about that. I damn near did kill myself, if you want to know. I slipped on a rug, and barked my shin on something or other. A rocking chair, I believe it was.”

  “That was remarkably clumsy of you, Harry,” Sarah told him quietly, “considering that Edith moved out of here night before last, and took the rags and every stick of furniture with her. The basement rooms are bare to the walls, and you couldn’t have helped noticing. You didn’t come through there at all, you came in the front door with the keys Aunt Caroline gave you back when you were having your red-hot love affair. And you weren’t looking for any appointment book, you were trying to find her diary.”

  “Then she—don’t be ridiculous, Sarah! How could Caro keep a diary?”

  “You’d be surprised. I certainly was.”

  “You found it?” He wasn’t bothering to keep up his act any more.

  She hadn’t really taken it in until that moment that Harry Lackridge intended to kill her. Incredibly, the realization did not frighten her at all.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied quite calmly. “You must have realized Aunt Caroline wouldn’t be able to resist dramatizing her great romance. I must say it was pretty raw of you to murder the woman you were supposed to be madly in love with, after you’d milked her of everything she owned and a lot more that she didn’t.”

  “I was very fond of Caroline. If you hadn’t started throwing your weight around and making trouble—”

  “Stop it, Harry. You killed her and Alexander because you knew Mr. Verplanck was about to start foreclosure proceedings on those two mortgages you were supposed to have been paying the interest on. Not even a blind fanatic could have gone on covering up for you once the bank came to put us out in the street. Don’t try to make me believe you gave a rap about Aunt Caroline. You don’t have one scrap of human feeling for anybody but yourself. I can’t imagine what she ever saw in you.”

  “She saw what she was looking for, and she got it.”

  “The beautiful Mrs. Kelling and a nasty little boy straight out of prep school? It does sound incredible, especially when I look at you now. Her little love!”

  “She wrote that?” He grabbed Sarah’s shoulders and began shaking her violently. “You’re lying! Caro swore she’d never tell.”

  “No, Harry, she didn’t call you by any name but that. She kept faith with you, even though you betrayed her in every way you possibly could. But it wasn’t hard to figure out who her little love must be. Who but you could have staged that scene with Ruby Redd when Aunt Caroline got tired of forking out money to that imaginary blackmailer you’d invented so you could get your grubby hands on Uncle Gilbert’s fortune? You knew Al
exander was seeing Ruby, you were the one who got them together in the first place. You knew the girl would help you put on your little act if you promised her the ruby parure as a reward. Promising wouldn’t cost you anything. I’m sure you’d planned from the beginning to start that fake quarrel as an excuse to murder her. Aunt Caroline would never be able to refuse another of your blackmail demands after you’d supposedly saved her life by killing somebody else. Having your so-called best friend walk in just at the right moment to be struck with the blame and have his whole life ruined was a stroke of luck you hadn’t counted on, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s a pretty story, Sarah. Where did you say you heard it?”

  “Harry, I’m telling you, it’s all in the diary. You’d explained to Ruby Redd that Aunt Caroline was deaf, but you forgot to mention that she could lip-read. Ruby was shooting her mouth off right and left, shouting about how you’d promised her the parure, and so forth. You tried to explain that away by saying it was Alexander who’d promised, but there were still parts of the dialogue Aunt Caroline didn’t understand because it never dawned on her in all those years that you were the one who’d rigged the performance. It’s perfectly obvious to me, now that I know what you are.”

  Lackridge was smiling, that same yellow-toothed grin he put on when he was playing the buffoon in his wife’s drawing room. “That must be quite a document. What else did she write?”

  “She told how you put her up to killing my father so that she could coerce Alexander into marrying me and getting them both an income after you’d swindled her out of Uncle Gilbert’s estate. And, of course, there was the part about how Uncle Gilbert was got rid of, which I already knew. I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You must have heard Alexander telling me on your bugging apparatus. That doesn’t work any more, by the way.

  “That doesn’t matter. I shan’t be needing it,” Lackridge said in a tone that was appalling because it was so matter-of-fact. “How did you find the bug? That couldn’t have been mentioned in the diary.”

  “No, and neither was the safe-deposit box full of bricks, or the fact that you strangled the bank attendant who knew you had access to the box, although I’m sure she never realized what you were up to. Aunt Caroline never found out about that particular murder, I don’t suppose, or the swindle you worked all over the world with the Kelling family heirlooms when you were supposed to be off peddling books. You might at least have left a set of copies in the box so that I could see what the jewelry would have looked like if I’d ever got to inherit it.”

  “Sorry, Sarah, I try not to mix sentiment with business unless I have to. It leads to complications, as you’ve so clearly pointed out. Where is Caro’s diary?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  Why, indeed? Sarah had thought she wanted to die and be with her husband. Now she knew she wanted to stay alive, and her one hope of survival lay in keeping up this mad conversation until, God willing, Mr. Bittersohn managed to find a parking space.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever find it, Harry,” she said. “It’s a shame your odd-job man failed in his attempt to burn down the house last night, isn’t it?”

  “And who is my odd-job man?”

  “His name is Abelard and he lives over near Andrew Square with a woman named Madelane, who may or may not be his wife. She calls herself Mrs. Wandelowski and claims to run a rooming house. That was where either you or they murdered Tim O’Ghee, who used to bartend at Danny Rate’s Pub, as you so well know. I suppose the old man thought he could put the screws on you a bit when Ruby Redd’s body turned up. That was a bad mistake. He should have remembered how you hate to pay anybody for anything. When I think of all the times Alexander broke his back doing photography for you, and you begrudged so much as buying him a roll of film, after you’d robbed—”

  She mustn’t let herself get maudlin. Sarah gulped down the tears and tried to keep her voice level.

  “Telling Abelard to fix the Milburn so it would go out of control and smash must have broken your heart. Think what you could have got for it from an antique-car collector. Of course, you’d have had a hard time stealing it back and selling it over again, as you did with our ruby parure until that woman in Amsterdam got the better of you.”

  “How did you know about the woman in Amsterdam?”

  Now she’d gone too far. Lackridge wasn’t going to stand for any more goading.

  “Sarah,” he insisted, “where did you get this information?”

  She was terrified now, but she wouldn’t back down. “I haven’t the slightest intention of telling you, Harry.”

  “You’re going to be an extremely sorry young woman if you don’t.”

  “Do you think you can hurt me any worse than you have already?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  He was too tall and too fast. Before she could back away, he grabbed her left arm and twisted until the big bone snapped just above the elbow. He let go and the limb flopped useless at her side.

  “Now do you understand that I want an answer, Sarah, or shall I make my position a Little more clear?”

  The pain was making her want to vomit. She spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Clever of you to break the left arm instead of the right, Harry. That must mean you have some more free artwork lined up for me to do.”

  He twisted the arm again, spinning her back against the console. “Frankly, Sarah, I never did care for you. This isn’t going to bother me one bit.”

  As he raised his hand to slash across her face, the doorbell rang. Sarah sucked in every ounce of breath her lungs would hold, and let it out in one mighty scream.

  One second later, a body crashed through the library window and into the hall. Max Bittersohn was on top of Harry Lackridge, pounding him into the floor while Sarah stood and watched, perhaps from the identical spot where Caroline Kelling had watched her little love strike down Ruby Redd so many years before.

  28

  “YOU’LL NEED SOMEBODY TO look after you for a while.”

  Sarah had given her statement to the police from a bed in the emergency ward at Massachusetts General, but insisted on being taken home as soon as her broken arm was X-rayed and set. Uncle Jem and Egbert had stayed with her overnight as a pair of most unlikely nursemaids, but fled delightedly back to Pinckney Street when Max Bittersohn showed up the next morning and invited the patient to lunch.

  Since the distance was short and the day was fine, he and she had walked down to the Hampshire House. Sarah was still having a lot of pain, but after two bourbon manhattans and her fair share of a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, she wasn’t feeling it much.

  “I know I’m making a mess here,” she replied, struggling to get the last forkful of chicken divan off her plate. “Do forgive my horrible manners.”

  “You’re doing fine, Mrs. Kelling. Sure you feel all right?”

  “I’m alive, that’s the main thing. Harry did mean to kill me, you know.”

  “I never doubted it for one minute. Anyway, he’s safe in the jug now. I only wish I’d been able to ditch that damned car in time to save you from getting hurt.”

  Sarah dipped the corner of her napkin in her water glass and scrubbed cheese sauce off her chin. “In a way, it’s probably just as well you didn’t. If it hadn’t been for my arm, we might never have got the police to believe such an insane story about a solid citizen like Harry Lackridge. There’s something awfully convincing about a compound fracture of the humerus. Have they arrested Bob Dee, do you know?”

  “Booked him on suspicion. I don’t know what will come of that, though he has been identified as the eyewitness who just happened to be on the spot, by a very curious coincidence, when the Milburn was wrecked. He’d given a false name, which isn’t going to help him any.”

  “I hope it won’t. And what about Abelard and Madeleine?”

  “Abelard’s singing like a scalded nightingale. With their police records and your evidence about how they bumped off old Tim O’Ghee, they wou
ldn’t dare refuse to co-operate. I have to go and speak my piece to the grand jury tomorrow morning first thing.”

  “Am I expected to testify, too?”

  “No, your statement is going to be allowed as evidence for the purpose of indictment, although you’ll undoubtedly be key witness for the prosecution when Lackridge comes to trial. You and your mother-in-law’s draperies, that is.”

  “Oh, no! I meant to burn those ghastly things before anybody else could read them.”

  “Good thing you didn’t, otherwise you might be liable to a charge of obstructing justice. The draperies have already been impounded. You’ll be getting a receipt, no doubt. A Braille expert will be called in to prepare a transcript of Mrs. Kelling’s fancywork, but you’ll be asked to identify the actual embroidery and testify that you saw her doing it.”

  “That’s no problem. I’ve watched her making those zillions of French knots any number of times. So has Edith, and Leila, and Harry himself, for that matter. Won’t he be livid! After he’d gone through that performance of sneaking in and throwing things around, in the hope of scaring me away from the house so that he’d have a clear field to hunt for the diary, when it was hanging right there in plain sight all the time. I’ll bet the reason he didn’t kill me right away was that he had some scheme in mind to get himself appointed my trustee and scoop up Father’s money along with everything else.”

  “That’s entirely possible. People like Lackridge always think they can have anything they want for the taking. He still doesn’t believe we’re going to nail him, you know. Don’t be surprised if he puts on quite a show in court.”

  “The relatives are going to love the trial, all those passionate outpourings of Aunt Caroline’s getting into the papers.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “You’ll never convince my Cousin Mabel of that. She’ll be telling everybody I need a keeper instead of a trustee.”