“How did you come to know Chuck and Claire in particular?” Carmine asked, fascinated at what could lie behind public façades.
“We all went to the Dormer Day School together. Chuck and Bob were four classes ahead of Claire and me.”
“Claire? But she’s blind!”
“That happened when she was fourteen. Nineteen thirty-nine, just after the war broke out in Europe. Her sight had always been poor, but then she suffered retinal detachments in both eyes simultaneously from retinitis pigmentosa. She literally went totally blind overnight. Oh, it was a terrible business! As if that poor woman and her three children hadn’t gone through enough already!”
“Three children?”
“Yes, the two boys and Claire. Chuck’s the eldest, then came Morton, and finally Claire. Morton was demented, never spoke or seemed to realize that other people lived in the world. His light didn’t go out, Lieutenant. It was never switched on. And he had fits of violence. Bob says that these days they’d diagnose him as autistic. So Morton never went to school.”
“Did you ever see him?”
“Occasionally, though Ida Ponsonby was afraid he’d fly into one of his rages and used to shut him up if we came over to play. Mostly we didn’t. Chuck and Claire came to Bob’s or my house.”
Mind reeling, Carmine sat battling to maintain his calm, to keep the strands of this incredible story separated as they must be — a demented brother! Why hadn’t he picked up that there was something wrong in the Ponsonby ménage? Because on the surface there was nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all! Yet the moment that Eliza Smith said three children, he knew. It began to fall into place. Chuck at the Hug, and mad brother somewhere else…Aware that Eliza Smith was staring at him, Carmine forced himself to ask a reasonable question.
“What does Morton look like? Where is Morton now?”
“Looked like, was, Lieutenant. Past tense. It all happened at once, though I guess there was a little time in between. Days, a week. Claire went blind, and Ida Ponsonby sent her to a blind school in Cleveland, where Ida still had family. Somehow there was a link to the blind school there — an endowment, I think. It was difficult to get into a blind school back then. Anyway, no sooner had Claire gone to Cleveland than Morton died, I think of a brain hemorrhage. We went to the funeral, of course. The things they inflicted on children in those days! We had to tiptoe up to the open casket and lean in to kiss Morton’s cheek. It felt clammy and greasy” — she shuddered — “and it was the first time in my life that I smelled death. Poor little guy, at rest at last. What did he look like? Chuck and Claire. He’s buried in the family plots at the old Valley cemetery.”
Carmine sat with his hypothesis demolished to ruins. No way in a fit Eliza Smith was making any of this up. The Ponsonby tale was true, and all it amounted to was a well-attested fact: that some families, for no reason that made sense, suffered whole strings of disasters. Not accident prone: tragedy prone.
“Sounds as if there’s a weakness in the family,” he said.
“Oh, yes. Bob saw that in medical school, as soon as he’d done genetics. Madness and blindness ran in Ida’s family, but not in the Ponsonbys. Ida went crazy too, a little later on. I think the last time I ever saw her was at Morton’s funeral. With Claire in Cleveland, I didn’t visit the Ponsonby house anymore.”
“When did Claire come home?”
“When Ida went completely mad — not long after Pearl Harbor. Chuck and Bob were never drafted, they spent the war years in pre-med and medical school. Claire had been in Ohio for two years — long enough to learn Braille and find her way around with a white stick the way blind people do. She was one of the first ever to have a guide dog. Biddy’s her fourth.”
Carmine got to his feet, devastated by the magnitude of his disappointment. For one moment he had genuinely thought it was all over; that he had done the impossible and found the Ghosts. Only to discover that he was as far from the answer as ever.
“Thanks for filling me in so well, Mrs. Smith. Is there any other Hugger you think I should know about? Tamara?” He took a breath. “Desdemona?”
“They aren’t murderers, Lieutenant, any more than Chuck and Walt are. Tamara is one of those unfortunate women who can’t pick a good man, and Desdemona” — she laughed — “is British.”
“British says it all about her, huh?”
“To me it does. When she was a kid, they starched her.”
He left Eliza at her front door and plodded back to the Ford.
However, there was one thing he could do, should do: see Claire Ponsonby and find out why she’d lied to him about the date of her blindness. And maybe too he just wanted to see her — look at the face of a living, breathing tragedy. Father and the family fortune lost when she was five, sight when she was fourteen, all her freedom when, at sixteen, she had to come home to care for a demented mother. A job that lasted about twenty-one years. Yet he had never felt the slightest vibration of self-pity emanate from her. Some woman, Claire Ponsonby. Only why had she lied?
Biddy started barking the moment the Ford turned into the driveway of 6 Ponsonby Lane; Claire was at home then.
“Lieutenant Delmonico,” she said in the open doorway, holding Biddy’s collar.
“How did you know it was me?” he demanded, entering.
“The sound of your car. It must have a very powerful engine because it rumbles while it’s idling. Come into the kitchen.”
Through the house she went without as much as brushing a single item of furniture, into the over-warm room with the Aga stove.
Biddy lay down in the corner, eyes fixed on Carmine.
“She doesn’t like me,” he said.
“There are few people she does like. What can I do for you?”
“Tell me the truth. I’ve just been to see Mrs. Eliza Smith, who informed me that you weren’t blind from birth. Why lie to me?”
Claire sighed, slapped her hands on her thighs. “Well, they say your sins will find you out. I lied because I so much loathe the questions that inevitably follow when I tell the truth. Such as, how did it feel after you couldn’t see? Was it a heartbreak? Was it the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to you? Is it harder to be blind after you’ve seen? And on, and on. Well, I can tell you that it felt like a death sentence, that my heart did break, that it is indeed the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me. You’ve just opened my wounds, Lieutenant, and I am bleeding. I hope you’re satisfied.” She turned her back.
“I’m sorry, but I had to ask.”
“Yes, I can see that!” Suddenly she swung around, smiled at him. “My turn to apologize. Let’s start again.”
“Mrs. Smith also told me that you and Charles had a brother, Morton, who died suddenly, very close to the time you went blind.”
“My, Eliza’s tongue did wag this morning! You must be quite something to look at — she always had an eye for a handsome fella. Pardon my being catty, but Eliza got what she wanted. I didn’t.”
“I can pardon the cattiness, Miss Ponsonby.”
“No more Claires?”
“I think I’ve hurt you too much to call you Claire.”
“You were asking me about Morton. He died just after I was sent to Cleveland. They didn’t bother to bring me home for the funeral, though I would have liked to say my goodbyes. He died so suddenly that it was a coroner’s case, so there was time to bring me home before they released his body for burial. Despite his dementia, he was a sweet little guy. Sad, sad, sad…”
Get out of here, Carmine! You’ve outworn your welcome. “My thanks, Miss Ponsonby. Thanks a lot, and sorry to have upset you.”
A coroner’s case…That meant Morton Ponsonby’s death would be on file at Caterby Street; he’d send a uniform to dig it out.
On the way back to Holloman he called in at the ancient burial ground in the Valley, a cemetery that had run out of plots for newcomers ninety years ago. It contained Ponsonby graves by the score, some of them older by far than the earlies
t picture on the Ponsonby kitchen wall. The newest memorial stone belonged to Ida Ponsonby, died in November of 1963. Before her, Morton Ponsonby, died in October of 1939. And before him, Leonard Ponsonby, died in January of 1930. A trio of tragedies that a grave archaeologist would never have known about from the bald, uninformative epitaphs. The Ponsonbys did not wear their sorrows on their sleeves. Any more than did the Smiths, he thought when he found Nancy’s grave. Bald and spare, no reason for her death given.
What, he wondered, back in the car, would Chuck Ponsonby do without the Hug? And the Prof’s research tips? Go into general practice? No, Charles Ponsonby didn’t have the manner. Too aloof, too austere, too elitist. It might even be, thought Carmine, that no other medical job would be forthcoming for Chuck, and if that were so, then he could have no reason to destroy the Hug.
He walked into Patrick’s office with a growl and flung himself sideways into the armchair that sat in one corner.
“How goes it?” asked Patrick.
“Don’t ask. You know what I could do with right now, Patsy?”
“No, what?”
“A nice shoot-out in the Chubb Bowl parking lot, preferably with machine guns. Or a nice stroll into the middle of ten hoods holding up the Holloman First National. Something refreshing.”
“That’s the remark of an inactive cop with a sore butt.”
“You’re darned right it is! This is a talking case, endless talking, talking, talking. No shoot-outs, no robberies.”
“I take it nothing came out of the sketch Jill Menzies made from the Tinker Bell woman’s description?”
“Not a thing.” Carmine straightened, looked alert. “Patsy, at ten years longer on this troubled earth than me, do you recall a murder at the railroad station in 1930? Three people were beaten to death by a gang of hoboes or something like that. I ask because one of them was the father of Charles and Claire Ponsonby. As if that wasn’t enough, he turned out to have lost all the family’s money in the stock market crash.”
Patrick thought deeply, then shook his head. “No, I don’t remember it — my mother censored everything I heard when I was a kid. But there’ll be a case report on it buried in the archives. You know Silvestri — he wouldn’t throw out a used Kleenex, and his predecessors were just as bad.”
“I was going to send someone out to Caterby Street to pick up yet another case file, but, since I have nothing better to do, I might wander out that way and have a look myself. I’m curious about the Ponsonby tragedies. Could they be Ghost victims too?”
Only a little more than a week to go before the Ghosts struck again; February was a short month, so maybe the date set for their next abduction was early in March. Possessed by a creeping dread, Carmine would have driven to Maine at this time of year to look at some unpromising archival lead, but Caterby Street was much closer than Maine. Paper storage was every public servant’s nightmare, be it police records, medical records, pension records, land rates and taxes, water rates, any of a hundred different categories. When the Holloman Hospital was rebuilt in 1950, a whole subbasement was reserved for archives, so they weren’t hurting. Commissioner by 1960, John Silvestri had fought fiercely to keep every scrap of paper the police had, going back to when Holloman had owned one constable and the theft of a horse was a hanging offense. Then a local concrete firm went bankrupt, and Silvestri hounded all of officialdom for the money and authority to buy the premises, three acres on Caterby Street, an area of industries famous for dirt and racket, therefore not prime property. The three acres and their contents went for $12,000 at auction, the Holloman Police the successful bidders.
On the land sat a vast warehouse in which the concrete firm had kept its trucks and spares, equipment of all kinds. And once the dust had been scoured out and the rest of the lot tidied up, all the police archives had been placed in the warehouse on steel-framed shelves. The roof didn’t leak — a main consideration — and two big attic fans, one at either end, meant sufficient air circulation to keep mildew down in summer.
The two archivists lived a comfortable life in an insulated trailer parked alongside the warehouse entrance; the peon half ran a broom over the warehouse floor occasionally and took trips to a nearby deli for coffee and edibles, while the qualified half did a Ph.D. thesis on the development of criminal trends in Holloman since 1650. Neither half was in the least interested in this Lieutenant weird enough to come to Caterby Street in person. The qualified half simply told him whereabouts to look and went back to her thesis, and the peon vanished in a police pickup.
The records of 1930 occupied nineteen large boxes, whereas the coroner’s records of 1939 ran to almost that many: crime had increased greatly during the nine-year gap. Carmine dug out the case of Morton Ponsonby in October of 1939, then looked in the first of 1930’s boxes for Leonard Ponsonby. The format of a record hadn’t changed much between then and now. Just sheets of legal-sized paper enclosed by a manila file folder, some sheets stapled together, others floating free. In 1930 they hadn’t owned a system that kept the sheets bound to the folder — nor, probably, an office staff to deal with files once they were closed and moved out of the “current” drawers.
But there it was, where it was supposed to be: PONSONBY, Leonard Sinclaire, businessman, 6 Ponsonby Lane, Holloman, Conn. Aged 35. Married, three children.
Someone had placed a table and an office chair under a clear plastic skylight; Carmine carried the two Ponsonby files to it, and one thin, unnamed file that contained the details of the two other murders at the railroad station.
He looked at Morton Ponsonby’s record first. Because the death had been so sudden and unexpected, the Ponsonby’s doctor had declined to sign a death certificate. There was nothing in this to suggest the man suspected foul play; simply, he wanted an autopsy done to see if he had missed anything during the years when Morton Ponsonby had been almost impossible to approach, let alone treat. A typical pathology report that started off with the hackneyed phrase of the time: “This is the body of a well-nourished and ostensibly healthy male adolescent.” But the cause of death had not been a brain hemorrhage, as Eliza Smith had said. The autopsy did not reveal the cause of death, which meant that the pathologist wrote it off as due to heart failure, possibly consequent on vagal inhibition. The guy wasn’t in Patsy’s league, but he did run the full gamut of tests for poisons without finding any, and he noted the presence of psychosis in the medical history. No changes in the brain were present to indicate cause of the psychosis. The boy’s penis, he noted, was uncircumcised and very large, whereas the testes were only partially descended. For 1939, a thorough job. Carmine was left with no doubts that Morton Ponsonby was no more and no less than a hapless victim of the family’s tendency to tragedy. Or maybe what it really said was that Ida Ponsonby’s genetic contribution to her offspring was unsatisfactory.
Right, on to Leonard Ponsonby. The crime happened halfway through January of 1930, in the midst of two feet of snow — one of the colder winters, to produce January blizzards. The train, which had originated in Washington, D.C., had come in from Penn Station in New York City, running two hours late due to frozen points and a snow slide off a steep bank onto the line. Rather than sit inside and perish, the passengers had elected to dig the line free of snow. One car had held about twenty drunks in a group, jobless men hoping for work in Boston, the train’s ultimate destination; they had been the most reluctant shovelers, boozed up, angry, aggressive, working only to keep warm. When the train reached Holloman it stopped for a quarter-hour, enabling the through passengers to buy snacks from the station café, a cheaper alternative than the train’s under-patronized dining car.
Ah, here was the most interesting news! Leonard Ponsonby was not disembarking! He was boarding the train to travel to Boston, for so said his ticket. He’d chosen to wait outside in the cold, and, according to one observant passenger, he appeared furtive. Furtive? Ponsonby had shown no inclination to display himself in the warmth of the station waiting room, nor did he climb aboar
d as soon as the train pulled in. No, he stayed outside in the snow.
The time was 9 P.M., and this Boston train was the last one for the day. It steamed off on its journey while the station staff made the rounds to lock the waiting rooms, ladies’ room and toilets against the army of vagabonds tramping the nation in search of work or hand-outs, though the twenty-odd drunks had not left the train in Holloman. Somewhere between Hartford and the Massachusetts border they jumped off into the night, which was why they had come under suspicion and why, after fruitless inquiries, they had ended in bearing the blame.
Leonard Ponsonby was lying in the snow with his head beaten to a pulp; near him lay a woman and a female child, their heads also reduced to pulp. Ponsonby’s wallet contents identified him, but the woman and child carried nothing to say who they were. Her old, cheap pocketbook held one dollar and ninety cents in coins, an unironed handkerchief and two cookies. A carpetbag contained clean but very cheap underwear for a woman and a girl child, socks, stockings, two scarves and a little girl’s dress. The woman was quite young, the child about six. Ponsonby was described as well dressed and prosperous, with $2,000 in notes in his wallet, a diamond stick-pin in his tie, and four valuable diamonds in each of his platinum cuff links. Whereas the woman and child had been summed up in one powerfully suggestive word: “breadline.”
To Carmine’s sensitive nose, three weird murders. One man, prosperous, on his own, plus a breadline woman and child not connected to him. Robbery not a motive. All three skulking outside in the snow when they should have been inside warming their hands on a steam radiator. Of one thing he was sure: the gang from the train had had nothing to do with these murders.
The real question was, which one was the intended victim? The other two were mere witnesses, killed because they had seen the wielder of the blunt instrument that had done for all three with a degree of savagery commented upon in the otherwise tersely sloppy police report. Heads, the intended victim was Leonard Ponsonby. Tails, it was the woman. If the coin stood on its edge, then it was the little girl.
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