by Lesley Crewe
Chapter Sixteen
Everyone froze.
Harry said, “Is everyone okay?”
They all nodded.
Graham turned to him. “Jesus. Was it yours?”
“No.”
“It was mine.” The voice came from a sliding door in the panelling to the left of the fireplace.
A gun emerged from the wall. Mrs. Noseworthy followed.
“Nobody move. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?”
Frightened faces looked at the gun.
Elsie was the closest to her.
“Mrs. Noseworthy,” she said quietly. “It’s me. Elsie. You know who I am.”
The old woman looked at her. “I know who you are. You’re the girl who ruined the game.”
“What game, dear?”
“Musical chairs. You told us to stop. That wasn’t nice.”
She moved around the room and pointed her gun at one, then another.
“That was mean. I’m sorry. We can play now if you like?”
Mrs. Noseworthy shook her head. “I don’t feel like it. You people make me tired. You run around and scream all the time. You say you have treasure and then take mine.”
Elsie continued to speak in a soft low voice. “Did we take your treasure, dear?”
“Of course you did. The girls even said so. But they only gave me back one box. I know I had more. Lots more. But you people are too greedy. Even Hildy said that.”
Elsie turned her head to follow Mrs. Noseworthy around the room. “Did you like Aunt Hildy?”
“She was nice when she first got here, but then she got bossy. Always talking about treasure. But it wasn’t hers. It was mine. I just wanted her to tell me where the rest of it was. But she wouldn’t. She said, ‘Go ahead, shoot me, I dare you.’ Well, I don’t know about you, but when I was a girl, a dare was a dare.”
“Are you sure it was you?” Elsie asked. “That’s a brave thing to do, get into someone’s house and get back out with no one seeing you.”
“You’re stupid, Elsie. You’re all stupid. Hildy told me about the secret passageway. I just went through the hidden door in her closet. Her father built it in his rum-running days. You didn’t know that, did you?”
She approached the library doors, still waving the gun around. Elsie saw Harry nod at Robert. If Mrs. Noseworthy got close enough, Robert might be able to tackle her into the hallway. Elsie needed to keep her talking.
“No, I didn’t know that. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Mrs. Noseworthy smiled. “No. You think you know everything. You think I’m a crazy old woman. I see those girls give me looks and Juliet twirl her finger at her head. I know what that means and I’m not crazy.”
“Of course you’re not crazy. I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that, did you Juliet?”
“No. No. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”
“Sometimes I forget. But I’m smart. I’ve been in this house lots of times and you didn’t even know it, that’s how stupid you are.”
“Did you find the bag of treasure in the sewing room?”
“So what if I did? It’s mine.”
“Is the treasure over at your house?”
Mrs. Noseworthy suddenly looked very cross. She reached out her arms and pointed the gun right at Elsie. “That’s none of your business. I’m not talking anymore. I’m tired. You’re giving me a headache.”
She was almost to the library doors. Only a few more steps. Harry looked at Robert again and jerked his head. Robert nodded and got ready to seize his opportunity.
There was a quick bonk and Mrs. Noseworthy crumpled to the floor in a heap. The gun dropped beside her.
Mrs. Minelli held up her frying pan. “Now you’re really going to have a headache.”
Everyone jumped up at once. Elsie and Graham flew into each other arms and then to their girls, who were in the arms of the boys. Juliet and Faith grabbed Robert and Bunny made a beeline for Harry. A moment later, everyone ran to Mrs. Minelli.
The afternoon was spent in confusion. The police wandered about taking reports and the ambulance carted off Mrs. Noseworthy. Once more, the neighbours shook their heads at the goings-on in the Brooks household. Mrs. Mooney rushed over with two pans of squares, Queen’s Lunch and Death by Chocolate. Elsie thanked her very much.
Elsie tried to apologize to Bunny, but she’d have none of it.
“You’re an idiot,” Bunny fumed. “This entire family needs to be locked up. You and stupid Graham deserve each other.”
“May I have our keys back? The set you stole?”
“With pleasure.” Bunny took them out of her pocket and threw them at her. Then she turned to Harry. “Officer Adams, I’m feeling so faint. Is it possible to get a drive home? May I lean on you? I think I twisted my ankle.” As she bent over to caress her stockinged leg, cleavage poured out of her blouse. Elsie saw Harry’s eyes bulge.
“Ah, sure,” he stammered.
Elsie smirked. “Can I talk to you for a moment, Harry?”
He followed her into a corner of the living room. Bunny gave her a smug look.
“I want to thank you for everything, Harry. You were awfully nice to me when I needed someone. But you know this is over, don’t you?”
“I know,” he sighed. “I knew the minute you and Graham locked lips earlier…after the frying pan…”
She smiled. “But you’ll stay my friend?”
He smiled back. “Try and stop me.”
She whispered in his ear, “I think you’ve found a new friend. And I don’t believe you’ll ever need champagne to get her in the mood.”
They looked at Bunny and laughed together.
It wasn’t until later that night, as the family sat around the dining room table and ate Mrs. Minelli’s homemade pizza, that everything fell into place.
“I saw you talking to the officers outside,” Juliet said to Graham. “Did they say what they found when they went into Mrs. Noseworthy’s?”
“It was a rat’s nest, apparently. Everything everywhere. Some of the stolen items were in planters and in the dryer. Others were in the oven. The poor old soul’s been losing her faculties for a while, judging by the state of the house.”
“No wonder she’d never let us in,” Faith said. “I just thought she was a private person.”
“I should have known better,” Elsie fretted. “I deal with people like her all the time and I let her suffer in that house all by herself.”
Graham pointed his finger at her. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You were good to her. She loved to come over here and you couldn’t have known what went on inside that house.”
“Well, I should’ve guessed. I should have checked and made sure,” Elsie frowned. “Most elderly people in the first stages of dementia don’t take care of their personal hygiene, but Mrs. Noseworthy always looked pretty good. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tweak.”
“What will happen to her?” Dahlia asked.
“It depends on what the physiologists determine,” Graham said. “She’s in the hospital tonight, exhausted and dehydrated apparently. She’ll be placed in a facility.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt her too badly,” Mrs. Minelli said. “I didn’t want to kill her, just knock her out.”
“You knock all of us out with that frying pan of yours, Mrs. Minelli,” Robert smiled.
Everyone laughed.
Lily shook her head. “What I can’t believe is the secret passage in my closet.”
“Yeah,” Eli winked. “If I’d known….” He glanced at Graham and didn’t even try to recover. Graham downed his glass of red wine.
Dahlia looked at Slater. “Remember we said Aunt Hildy always seemed to be in the library? Maybe she used that secret passageway sometimes.”
“She’d have loved that,” Lily laughed. “Thinking she pulled one over on us. Although, I wonder why she told Mrs. Noseworthy about it, if she didn’t tell us?”
Elsie smiled. “We tend to think of Aunt Hild
y as someone who never put a foot wrong. But she was ninety-one. I’m sure she just got carried away one day out in the garden and spilled the beans inadvertently, while telling Mrs. Noseworthy a story. She took it all in, of course.”
Robert fingered his glass. “So we’ve solved the mystery of where the treasure went, but we still have no idea what it was doing here in the first place.”
“I know why.”
Everyone turned to look at Faith.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, fill us in!” Juliet shouted. “If you know, I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.”
Faith leaned back in her chair. “I didn’t know everything until yesterday, as it happens. And I didn’t know about the secret passageway until today, obviously. Our dear aunt often used code words and there are still things I don’t understand. She didn’t write every day, in those early years, so there are great gaps. I’ve just pieced it together. Aunt Hildy’s story spans decades, and it wasn’t until the last bit of the puzzle was revealed that I was able to solve the mystery.”
“So put us out of our misery,” Graham urged. “What’s the secret?”
She played with her napkin. “It’s a heartbreaking story. But it explains why Aunt Hildy was so eccentric. Her sadness coloured her whole life.”
Juliet slammed her wine glass down. “Out with it!”
Taking a deep breath, Faith started. “When Aunt Hildy was about seventeen, she met a young Norwegian sailor who worked on one of her father’s ships. Nikolai came to the house one night with her father. He must have been helping bring rum barrels in through the secret passageway, because I could never figure out why her father would take home a lowly sailor. Anyway, Hildy and the sailor fell in love almost instantly.” Faith stopped. “And of course! That’s how she slipped out of the house to meet him. Through that passageway. It all fits.” She took a sip of her wine. “Aunt Hildy knew her father would never approve of Nikolai as a suitor. He was a poor immigrant, but she didn’t care. She made plans to marry him. They were going to run away together and start a new life. He was the one who gave her the music box. It was his grandmother’s.
“Anyway, the night they were to be secretly married, Aunt Hildy’s father found out about it and waylaid Nikolai on the dock. She waited at the church almost all night for him but he never showed up. Her father was in her room when she finally returned home. He told her he’d bought Nikolai off, had given him a large sum of money to leave town and that’s just what he did. He told her she’d never see him again.”
“That’s so mean!” cried Dahlia. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Daddy?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
“Aunt Hildy didn’t believe her father and looked everywhere for Nikolai. For weeks she wandered around, asking everyone, but no one knew what happened. She slowly accepted the fact that maybe what her father had said was true. Her bitterness over these two men changed the rest of her life.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elsie.
“She ran away and vowed no man would hurt her again. She took money from her father’s cash box and went to Europe on her own, to start her new career.”
“As an archaeologist,” Lily prompted.
“No. As a courtesan.”
Everyone gasped at the same time.
“Are you serious?” Elsie whispered.
“A courtesan?!” Slater shouted. “Aunt Hildy was a lawyer?”
“No, you idiot,” Juliet said. “A prostitute. For wealthy men.”
“You take that back,” Slater yelled. “Aunt Hildy wasn’t a hooker. No freakin’ way!”
No one said anything, so Slater looked around. Finally he said, “For real?”
Faith continued. “She travelled in well-heeled circles. She was beautiful, intelligent and completely without conventional sensibilities. She did very well. Very well, indeed.”
Juliet went pale. “My tiara…you don’t think…”
Her sister nodded. “Very high circles.”
Graham whistled.
“She was paid with ‘treasure.’ Our treasure.”
“But why is it here?” Elsie wondered.
Lily’s eyes got as round as saucers. She looked at Eli. “She wanted to rub her father’s nose in it. It’s classic passive-aggressive behaviour. He wouldn’t let her have the man she wanted, so she had lots of men and surrounded her father with the fruits of her labour.” Lily looked back at Faith for confirmation.
“You’re right. That’s just what she did. She’d visit her mother every few years but apparently never spoke to her father again.”
No one said anything. Graham cracked open another bottle of wine and poured everyone a drink.
“It gets worse,” Faith said.
“Worse? It can’t get much worse than that,” Elsie frowned.
“Her father was on his death bed and her mother begged her to come home. He wanted to see her before he died. The only reason she did come was because of her mother and sister.”
Faith took a deep breath. “At her mother’s urging, she went to her father’s bedside. It was there that he begged to be forgiven for what he’d done. He didn’t want to go to hell for killing Nikolai.”
There was complete silence at the table.
“It’s true,” Faith said quietly. “Our grandfather went to meet him that night with the intention of buying him off, and the young man threw the money back in his face. He punched Nikolai so hard in the jaw that he went down, hit his head on the iron anchor mooring and fell off the wharf into the inky black water of the harbour. Grandfather dove and dove but couldn’t find him.”
“Oh my God,” Elsie cried. “Poor Aunt Hildy.”
“Before he died, her father returned the small gold band that he’d wrestled out of Nikolai’s hand before the fight.”
“What did she do?” Dahlia sobbed.
“She sat and watched her father die, without forgiving him. But she never told our mother and grandmother what he’d done. She spared them that heartache. She went back to Europe, got an education and started her career. She stopped giving herself away to men. Nikolai hadn’t left her all those years before. He loved her until the end. That’s all that mattered.”
“No one would believe this story if it wasn’t true,” Lily sniffed. “All this stuff. All these things, hidden away. No wonder she was confused as to whether she wanted us to have the treasure or not.”
“How so?” Robert asked.
“Well, think about it. A part of her was ashamed of it, and yet she was smart enough to know that it couldn’t just sit here forever. It might as well be used by us. But she didn’t want to explain to us what it was doing here. At least not while she was alive. It was too personal, and probably too hard to talk about. So she invented a foolish game to focus our attention elsewhere.”
“But the story was in her journals,” Graham said. “If she didn’t want us to know, why not burn them?”
“Because all her life she was alone,” Eli said. “She wanted someone to know her suffering. Wouldn’t you?”
Lily agreed. “But she couldn’t stand the thought of being pitied. It was there for us to find after she was gone. Back to him.”
Everyone around the table nodded.
Faith turned to Slater. “She said you reminded her of Nikolai, a big blonde gorgeous man. She wrote that it amused her to think that maybe their son would have looked like you.”
Slater folded his arms on the table and hid his face.
“Oh, this just stinks,” Dahlia cried. “Why isn’t she here? Stupid Mrs. Noseworthy.”
“I can’t get over Aunt Hildy,” Eli said quietly. “Can you imagine staring down the barrel of a gun…”
“Yes,” everyone interrupted.
Eli held up his hands. “Okay, okay, so we can imagine. But I don’t think anyone at this table would have the guts to say, ‘Go ahead, shoot me, I dare you.’”
“She was tired,” Faith told them. “She longed to just close her eyes and have it over wit
h. She wanted to join her lover. She said he’d waited long enough for her. And she looked forward to the day when she would see him again.” Faith cleared her throat. “I, for one, am glad Aunt Hildy didn’t die a slow and undignified death in a hospital somewhere. That was her greatest fear. And knowing her, the way I’ve come to know her through her words, I think she saw an opportunity and took it.”
Elsie looked around the table. “This house has seen so much sorrow and joy over the years. I’ve often thought that memories must live inside the walls of a house. I now understand why Aunt Hildy needed to come back here, and why she wanted to be in her old room. Just to be close to Nikolai again. To walk down that passageway, perhaps remembering a summer’s evening when she’d slipped away to meet him in secret. If she had to die anywhere, her bedroom was no doubt the one place on earth she’d want to be.”
There wasn’t much more to be said after that. Everyone drifted away from the table, lost in their own thoughts as they took the dishes into the kitchen and thanked Mrs. Minelli for her usual great meal.
Elsie was on her third trip to the dining room to collect the tablecloth, when Faith and Juliet stopped her.
“That was scary today,” Juliet said. “You made it better in there. You talked your way out of that mess. You used your people skills to make Mrs. Noseworthy calm down and I just wanted you to know that I’m proud of you.”
Faith nodded. “Me too.”
Juliet added, “You sounded and acted…”
Elsie smiled, “I know, just like Aunt Hildy.”
“No. Just like Mom.”
Elsie cried then. She hugged her sisters tight and blubbered, “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Juliet pulled herself away. “Well, don’t get used to it. I hate sentimentality. It’s a bore.”
“You can’t take it back, Juliet. You can get as bitchy as you want but I’ll always remember you just said that.”
Juliet did her famous eye-rolling thing. “Oh God. I’ve created a monster. Good night all. I’m off to soak in a hot tub.” With that, she waltzed out the door.
“I think I’ll go over and have a cup of cocoa with Nella,” Faith said. “You and Graham have some talking to do.”
