by Maia Chance
Unease swilled in my stomach. Had Eustace used Berta and me as pawns in a diamond heist? No, surely not. If he had known there were diamonds hidden in the rhino trophy, he wouldn’t have hired detectives to pinch it. Too risky.
Berta and I donned shoes and coats, returned to Eustace’s room, and then the three of us carried the rhino out to Eustace’s motorcar in the front drive. The trophy wouldn’t fit in the boot, so we wedged it into the backseat and covered it up with a traveling blanket. No one saw us. Not that I knew of, at any rate. Then we went back inside and upstairs.
“I’m absolutely pooped,” I said to Berta with a yawn once we’d parted ways with Eustace. “It’s nearly four o’clock.”
“Are you not at all concerned that Lord Sudley will make off with those diamonds?” Berta asked.
“No. Why would he? He presumably owns a palace or something in England.”
“It is the usual sort of sprawling Georgian affair. Probably a nightmare to keep squeaky clean. He owns a town house in London, too—”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. A sprawling Georgian affair. I could just picture Cedric romping free on acres and acres of parkland, and I’d wear heaps of Burberry gabardine and hard-wearing woolens.
“One reads things. I see the dreamy look on your face, Mrs. Woodby, but it is your heart Lord Sudley is trifling with, and as such, this is none of my affair. And are you aware that in England it is customary to consume whole stewed tomatoes at breakfast?” Berta shuddered. “I am pooped as well. Let us wait until the morning to discuss our strategy.”
“Drat.” I stopped. “I meant to ask Eustace—I mean Lord Sudley—for Isobel Bradford’s address. He said he had it in his address book.”
“Surely that can wait until the morning.”
“Oh, all right.” I stopped at my door. “By the way, Berta, don’t ever make those spooky ghost noises again.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You know, that sort of moany ‘Lolaaaaaaaa’ business. You scared me half out of my skin.”
“Mrs. Woodby, I have never called you by your given name, and I would never stoop so low as to impersonate a specter. Do you take me for a starstruck ingenue?”
I swallowed. “But then who—?”
“I expect it was the highballs talking, Mrs. Woodby. Good night.”
But I couldn’t get back to sleep. My exhausted brain buzzed, so I switched on the lamp and continued to read “The Lost Lass of Cairn Gorm,” in which occult detective Hugo Quinn stalks opium-smuggling pagan cultists in the Scottish Highlands. You know, light reading. All the while I listened for footsteps and moans in the corridor. By the time I reached the story’s climactic gunfight, I could’ve done with another slice of that orange spice cake, but there wasn’t a snowman’s chance in hell that I was going down to the kitchen in the dark.
I finished the story, switched off the light, and snuggled against Cedric. I listened to raindrops tap against the windowpanes. I pondered what a sterling, gorgeous, and caring gentleman Eustace, Lord Sudley, was … and tried with all my might not to long for Ralph’s warm, strong arms around me.
7
Berta and I slept until ten o’clock the next morning, but still we were the first guests up. Someone—Miss Murden, presumably—had set out silver chafing dishes of breakfast in the dining room, so after I took Cedric for an airing in the soggy garden, I sat down at the table across from Berta and put on the nose bag.
“Hear any ghosty moans last night?” I asked Berta.
“No. You?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, Berta.”
“You sound as though you were trying to convince yourself of that.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“It is not that I believe or do not believe, but that I have not assembled enough facts to come to a final conclusion.”
“You’ve been hitting Lurid Tales too hard.”
Berta sniffed, smearing jam on a toasted muffin. She gazed out the window as she took a crunchy bite. “If I am not mistaken, that is young Theo, the history student, out there.”
“Where?”
“Look out the window.”
I turned. “So it is. Where’s he going, I wonder?”
Theo was bicycling across the lawn in the direction of the forest, a bulging knapsack on his back.
“Funny,” I said. “Miss Murden said he had permission to use the Montgomery family’s books in the library, but she said nothing of him having free rein on the estate.”
“We must interrogate him while we have the chance,” Berta said. “He is on our suspect list.”
I had hoped to motor straight to Boston once we got our hands on Isobel Bradford’s address, so I sighed. “All right.”
We quickly finished eating, put on coats and hats, and trudged through the chilly, misty parkland in the direction Theo had gone. Spiraling seagulls screeched overhead and salty wind whapped and sucked our umbrellas. Cedric stopped and stared up at me accusingly.
“Poor little peanut,” I murmured, enfolding him in my arms. “You don’t like walking through the wet grass, do you? Would you like Mommy to buy you four little boots?”
“There he is,” Berta called to me.
“Where?” I peered into the dripping forest. I saw a bicycle leaning against a tree. I saw a hat bobbing around right at ground level. What in Sam Hill…?
Berta and I elbowed through underbrush and found ourselves looking down into a rectangular pit the size of a motorcar, cut into the sod at a depth of about four feet. The damp mineral odor of dirt rose up. Excavated earth heaped beside it. Theo Wainwright was scraping the side of the pit with a trowel. He was utterly absorbed, his cheeks and eyeglasses rain-spattered, but suddenly he looked up and took a startled step back.
“Lord!” he cried, holding on to his battered hat. “I didn’t hear you coming. Mind the edge of my pit, please. It would be a disaster if it caved in—that’s it, back up another step. You two aren’t exactly pixies. There. Did Miss Murden send you? I don’t want another cup of tea.”
“Mr. Wainwright,” Berta said, “we are private detectives investigating the death of Mr. Montgomery, and we’d like to have a word with you.”
“Is this some sort of joke?”
“No, it is not a joke,” Berta said. “Is it really so difficult to come to grips with lady detectives? Most men cannot find anything in an icebox, let alone murderers. Shall we join you down there, or are you coming up?”
“I’m coming up.” Theo stuck the trowel in the pocket of his grubby waxed-canvas coat and climbed up a crude wooden ladder to ground level.
“Female detectives,” he said. “And I thought all those frumpy coeds mucking around at the college were bad enough. Oh, it’s quite obvious why no one has married them, but can’t they stick to stenography courses if they must go to school?”
Ugh. I couldn’t help it; I mentally nudged Theo up to second place on the murder suspect list, right beneath Isobel Bradford.
Behind his eyeglasses he was blandly handsome, like a man in a sock garter advertisement: brown hair and eyes, slight shadow on his shaved upper lip, medium sized, well-proportioned physique. He was probably only twenty-three or so, but he had all the smug ease of a seasoned professor.
“What’s this about murder?” he asked. “I understand it was a suicide. There was a note and everything.”
“Our client, Lord Sudley, merely wishes to be absolutely certain of things,” I said. “You were in the house when Mr. Montgomery died?”
“Yes. In the library. I heard the gunshot and left the map I was studying to go upstairs, where I found everyone already congregated outside Rudy’s door.”
“Why are you studying in the Montgomery library?” Berta asked. “What is the matter with the library at your college?”
“It’s about my thesis.” Theo gestured to the dirt pit behind him. “So is this.” His voice sank into a droning professorial key. “Most scholars believe that on the eve of the famou
s massacre of the Pequot War of 1637—I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it—”
“Of course we have,” Berta and I lied in unison.
Theo’s brows lifted. “Oh. Well, most scholars believe that the English camped at the mouth of the Mystic River, approximately four miles west of here. It is my contention, however, that they camped right here in this forest, at the mouth of the Sewant River.”
Sounded anaesthetizing.
“My thesis will turn Pequot War scholarship on its ear. If I am able to convincingly prove my case—and I have no doubt that I shall—my academic career will be made. I’ll be able to win a professor’s position at the university of my choice once I complete my doctoral degree.”
“There is proof of your thesis in the Montgomerys’ library?” I asked. “And out here in your mudhole?”
“It’s an excavation pit,” Theo said coldly. “Not a mudhole. And, yes. I’ve already found two musket balls and seventeenth-century iron nails in the correct stratigraphic layer. I’m about to break ground on another pit closer to the salt marsh, actually.”
“What’s in the Montgomery library?” I asked.
“Family histories and records. I’m looking for mention of the camp, or mention of artifacts having been found on the land.”
“And the map you mentioned?”
Theo’s lips tightened. “If you must know, it was an antique map of the estate, dating from the construction of the lighthouse on the point in 1802.”
“What was your relationship with Rudy Montgomery, Mr. Wainwright?”
Theo’s eyes flew wide, but he swiftly rearranged his expression to one of amusement. “You wish to determine whether or not I blipped the old coot off, is that it?”
Berta said, “You do not have an alibi, Mr. Wainwright.”
“I didn’t kill him. How absurd. I only met him for the first time at the beginning of the school term, after my professor told me I might find something of interest in the Montgomery library. So I went to his front door and asked for permission to look through his documents and, amazingly, he said yes.”
“Why was it amazing?” I asked.
“Because he was either drunk or in a jealous rage on every subsequent occasion that I encountered him. An awful man, really. Always bellowing and posturing and trying to make certain that everyone for miles around knew that he was the alpha of the pack. Other than that, I did not know him. So sorry.”
“Have you found anything of interest in the library?” I asked.
A slight pause. “Not yet. But such is the way of archival research.”
“Did Mr. Montgomery give you permission to dig on his land?” Berta asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he cared about history, quite obviously.”
I said, “Miss Murden mentioned something about having known your mother—who was she?”
Theo jutted his chin and shoved his glasses up his nose. “What did she say about my mother?”
“Nothing, really, but—”
“My mother was a saint, and Miss Murden is an evil biddy.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
Another pause. “I grew up here in Carvington.”
Funny. I would’ve never guessed he was a local. He spoke not with the coastal Yankee accent, but with the sniffier intonations of a boarding school boy.
“One last thing,” I said. “If Rudy Montgomery was indeed murdered, who do you think might have done it?”
“God, I don’t know. One of his hunting cronies?”
“They were all outside when he died.”
“Then I suppose that skulking African valet fellow couldn’t have done it either. Pity. That man looks like a criminal.”
I looked at Theo closely. Was this run-of-the-mill bigotry? Perhaps. Although, something like anger snapped in his eyes. “Do you have a personal grudge against Mwinyi, Mr. Wainwright?”
“God, no. I’ve never even spoken to the fellow. Actually, I don’t think he even speaks English.” Theo stepped onto the ladder leading down into the pit. “Now, I’d like to get some work done.”
Berta extracted a business card from her handbag and passed it down to Theo. “Do contact us if you think of anything useful.”
Before Berta and I went back inside, we stopped to inspect Rudy’s bedroom windows from the outside.
“The window on the right was the one left open when his body was discovered,” I said. “It’s exactly above the drawing room window that Isobel Bradford opened.”
“Which is precisely why we were able to smell gunpowder,” Berta said.
“Right. But as I suspected, the position of the windows means that no one could have fled through the window by way of, say, a ladder, without our having seen them from the drawing room. And—” I studied the red stone façade. “—no balconies, ledges, or vines to enable an escape to the next room over.”
“Could the killer have fled through the open window by using a rope to scale up to the roof?”
I laughed, picturing Miss Murden winching herself, mountaineer-style, up the steep, rain-slicked slates. “No. Even if it could’ve been done, they would have been in clear view of the hunting party.”
“True. I did not think of that.”
* * *
When Berta and I arrived in the entry hall, Eustace was waiting for us.
“There you are,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve got some rotten news.” He came over to me and flipped the pages of a kidskin address book. “I’d just remembered you requested Isobel Bradford’s address. But look here: the page with the B tab, where her Boston address was written, has been ripped out. See?” One of the pages had a jagged tear near the binding.
“Goodness,” Berta murmured. “It would seem that Isobel Bradford does not wish to be pursued.”
“I knew she was bad news,” I said. “What about Coral? She might have Isobel’s address somewhere, since she’s been playing Montgomery Hall’s hostess.”
Berta and I left Eustace and went upstairs to the bedroom where I’d tucked in Coral the night before. Coral sprawled facedown, still in her fox party dress, makeup smeared across the pillowcase. We couldn’t wake her.
“Rudy’s study?” I whispered.
Berta nodded.
We hurried back downstairs. After opening and shutting a lot of doors—library, billiards room, conservatory, powder room—we found a study with a big cluttered desk and a wall of wooden file cabinets. Berta snapped on the overhead light.
I hesitated. “What about our fingerprints?”
“We are private detectives, Mrs. Woodby. It is the done thing to rifle.”
“Okay.”
Berta began pawing through the desk drawers, so I went to the file cabinets and opened one. Bank statements, and healthy ones at that, including the most recent ones. That would seem to negate Eustace’s theory that Rudy was hiding diamonds to keep a reservoir of liquid assets.
I was just opening a dossier marked OYSTER PRESERVES (Ugh. Did one smear those on Melba toast?) when Berta said, “Here it is.”
I shut the file cabinet and hurried over.
Berta flipped to the Bs.
“Wowie,” I murmured.
Just as with Eustace’s address book, the B page that would have contained Isobel and Winslow Bradford’s address had been torn out.
“What a cunning woman,” Berta said. “How will we locate her now?”
“We may be able to dig up her address and telephone number in the Social Register of Boston, if we can locate a copy, or—” I snapped my fingers. “Remember Eustace said that Winslow Bradford belonged to the Scion Club?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the club must have the Bradfords’ home address on file somewhere.”
“Those clubs admit only gentlemen, Mrs. Woodby, and they are guarded like King Tut’s tomb.”
“Sure, but the Scion Club is one of Dove White Launderette’s clients, and I don’t need to remind you that Dove White Launderett
e is still our client.”
Confusion, then shock, then understanding washed over Berta’s face. “So it is. What splendid luck.”
* * *
We found Eustace in his bedroom.
“We’re leaving for Manhattan,” I told him. “We have a lead on Isobel Bradford’s address.”
“Manhattan?” he said. “That gives me an idea.” He looked up and down the corridor. “Come in.”
Berta, Cedric, and I stepped into Eustace’s room.
He shut the door and went to his desk. He pulled something from the drawer and turned. “Here.” He held up an argyle sock with something bulgy weighing down the toe.
“I hope you don’t think laundry services are included in our agency’s fee,” I said.
Eustace burst out laughing. “Oh, my dear Lola, you are a pip. No, I’ve stashed the diamonds in this sock, but I really don’t think they’re safe here in my bedroom. Anyone could come in and jimmy the desk drawer open.” He handed the sock to me—it was surprisingly heavy—and produced a key. “This is the key to my safe-deposit box at the East Twenty-third Street branch of Sterling National Bank in the city. The box number is engraved on the key. I keep a box there for when I’m in America—handy for storing valuable bits and bobs when I’m traveling from place to place. As long as you’re going into the city, why don’t you take the diamonds and lock them up there? It’ll be a great weight off my mind. I didn’t sleep more than an hour last night, worrying that some scoundrel was going to murder me for those diamonds. I mean to hand them over to the lawyer as soon as he shows up, of course, but that won’t be till tomorrow.”
Berta and I exchanged doubtful glances.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll telephone you here at the house as soon as we have any news about Isobel Bradford.” We turned to go, but Eustace stopped the door with a large, suntanned hand.
“Wait,” he said. “There is something else.”
“Yes?” I widened my eyes and gave my Maybellined lashes a flick.
Berta sighed heavily.
“Do be safe, Lola,” Eustace said. His brown eyes pleaded like a Saint Bernard dog’s. “Not only with the diamonds, but with yourself. I simply couldn’t forgive myself if anything were to happen to you. It kills me a bit that I can’t come along to look after you, but I must stay here at Montgomery Hall and stave off any more dreadful occurrences.” He smiled and opened the door. “Off you go. I’ll be waiting for you to telephone—oh, and don’t mind the jewels that are already in my safe-deposit box. Those belong to my aunt Iphigenia.”
