The Silver Ghost

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Did you see whether the man turned toward the car shed?”

  “No. There’s no way I could possibly have seen that far. My view is completely blocked by some big trees. I believe you said, Bill, that the landscaping had been planned with that factor in mind.”

  “That’s right,” Billingsgate confirmed. “Security was much less an issue than privacy in my great-grandfather’s day. By now, some of the trees he planted are so big that they do pose certain problems for us, but they’re such magnificent specimens we can’t bear to have them taken down. Sorry, Max, I didn’t mean to maunder. Could you give us any inkling of who the morris dancer may have been, Drusilla? Was he tall or short, heavy or lean?”

  “He was nimble on his feet, but then they all are. As to his build, that’s less easy than you might think. I was looking down on him from a fair height, you know, and one gets a sort of telescope effect. He definitely wasn’t fat or conspicuously broad in the shoulders, but neither was he skinny. ‘Well-muscled’ would be my best description.”

  And would fit any one of them, Sarah thought, though she refrained from saying so. The same thing must have occurred to Mrs. Gaheris, however, because she added a couple of qualifications.

  “It wasn’t Young Dork, I’m sure. He’s too short and burly. And I think we can eliminate you, Tick, because you’re so much taller than the rest.”

  Sarah caught her breath but again she didn’t speak. Mrs. Gaheris still had the floor.

  “Telling people from the back when they’re all dressed alike would be a tricky business even if I knew them well, which, needless to say, I don’t.”

  “How about you, Tick?” asked Bill. “Can you cast any light on who it might have been?”

  “Short of agreeing with Drusilla that it wasn’t myself, I’m afraid I can’t. After we stopped dancing, I made a beeline for the bathroom, if you want to know. Then I went straight to the pavilion.”

  “How long were you in the bathroom, just for the record?” Max asked him.

  “Only as long as was necessary. I was hungry and thirsty and I didn’t want to miss any of the fun.”

  “And which of the bathrooms did you go to?”

  “Oh. Good question. Both the downstairs ones were in use, so I ran upstairs to Melly’s old room, which is the one she and I still use when we stay here. That’s on the opposite side of the house from the one Drusilla’s staying in, since you were no doubt intending to ask. I couldn’t have seen what she saw even if I’d stopped to look, which I didn’t. It’s my impression that most of the other dancers were in the pavilion when I got down, but they weren’t all together so I can’t swear to it.”

  “Can you give me a list of the dancers?”

  “Sure. Myself, of course, and Young Dork and Lionel Kelling. And Bunny Whet and his son Erp who did the Betty, and Buck Tolbathy and his cousin Chad.”

  “How come Chad was dancing instead of Sallie?” Melisande broke in. “I’ve been meaning to ask.”

  “Sal sprained his ankle this morning. He hopped out of bed and tripped over that old beagle of his, of all the rotten breaks. So he got hold of Chad and sent him along instead.”

  “All the way from Schenectady? How could he?”

  “Sal chartered a plane by phone and alerted Buck to pick Chad up in Worcester so they wouldn’t have to bother us. Darned decent of them, I thought.”

  “Darned convenient this guy Chad knew the dances,” Max grunted.

  “Chad was one of our regular performers,” Tick explained, “until he got transferred to New York State. He’d have liked to keep on, but it’s just too awkward trying to synchronize the rehearsals. That’s why we’re breaking in Erp. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, and Joe Abbott and his son Monk. You can rule out the Abbotts, Max. They were due for a family wedding at three o’clock and had to leave before we finished our sets. That’s why we did the eight men’s morrises early and finished with the six men’s morrises, which are the older and more authentically Renaissance, anyway. Versey got a bit teed off by our switching the order at the last minute, but we couldn’t help that.”

  “Why should he object?” Sarah asked.

  “Oh, Versey always goes into a tizzy if we change anything without consulting him. He likes to think he runs the revels.”

  “Which is not to say he’s ever around when there’s any real work to be done,” sniffed Abigail. “Let me heat up your coffee, Max.”

  “No thanks, I’m fine. What happened to the Abbotts’ costumes, Tick? Would they have been wearing them when they left?”

  “Hardly. They were going straight from here to the church. I assume they changed in one of the bedrooms and either took their costumes with them or left them in the car here to be picked up later. Mum, you haven’t happened to run across them?”

  “I’ve had surprisingly little time to go poking around the guest rooms, Tick,” his mother-in-law replied with commendable forbearance, all things considered. “If you think those costumes will help us to find Bodie, Max, I’ll look for them now. If not, I’d rather wait till morning. I’m beginning to run out of steam.”

  That was surely a gross understatement. For the first time since the Bittersohns had met her, Abigail looked as old as she probably was. All the color had drained out of her cheeks, her eyes were halfway into her head. Sarah was surprised she could still lift the coffeepot.

  “I don’t suppose they matter a rap. If they don’t turn up, Max or I can call up the Abbotts in the morning and ask what became of them,” she assured Abigail.

  If one of the costumes had been worn to the car shed, it had most likely gone off with the Silver Ghost. If either Joe Abbott or his son had kept the doublet and hose on and hidden around the house until everyone else was supposedly in the pavilion and the coast was clear to commit the crime, then the first place to check was among the guests at that wedding they’d been supposed to attend. Sarah didn’t think much of the Abbotts as possible suspects, and she couldn’t imagine Max did, either. They’d be far too vulnerable to having their alibis blown.

  Max was thinking, too. The likeliest and nastiest explanation for Boadicea Kelling’s disappearance was that she’d gone walking in the fields and spied Rufus’s killer driving off in the Silver Ghost. Mrs. Gaheris was probably right in saying that if Bodie had seen the actual murder, she’d have been killed on the spot.

  The Silver Ghost was an open tourer. The thief might have risked driving it away, knowing the locals were used to seeing the Billingsgates’ old cars out on the roads. One of those dust coats with a driving veil or cap and goggles would have disguised the driver adequately, but how could anybody dare take a corpse along for the ride? Boadicea’s body would have been hidden in the car shed, which it hadn’t, or dumped in the copse or the woods down by the drawbridge, which had also been searched without result.

  A meeting out in the open was a far different matter. Trying to breeze past Boadicea with a honk and a wave would have been an act of folly that didn’t appear to fit very well with a crime so carefully prearranged. Inviting her to come aboard and silencing her later on, probably inside whatever hiding place had been prepared for the car, would be the safest thing to do. A big closed van somewhere handy, with an accomplice to drive it away and dispose of the excess baggage, was the most likely explanation. The original thief wouldn’t have risked being away from the revel too long. The state police could cope with vans a great deal more efficiently than the Bittersohns could.

  “Just let me ask you all one more question. Then I’ll take my wife home and let you get some sleep,” Max said. “Since you’ve been holding these revels as a yearly event, I expect you’ve found they more or less fall into a pattern. I realize this one went haywire at the end, but most of your guests probably went away thinking everything was pretty much as usual. Is that right? Aside from what happened at the car shed, were there any major surprises?”

  “Well, I was pretty surprised when Chad turned up instead of Sal,” said Tick.

  “
And I’m surprised Sarah managed to pin Versey’s ears back,” Melisande giggled. “I wish I’d been a bee on a bush when that happened.”

  “Now, Melly,” chided her father, though not without a slight twitching of his own lip, “Vercingetorix Ufford is an old and valued colleague.”

  “Colleague?” Sarah was surprised. “I thought he was a professor.”

  “That’s true. He still lectures occasionally, but he also does some of the programming for our radio stations, such as choosing the music and writing the scripts for our ‘Renaissance Ruminations’ series. He even had a program of his own for a while, doing readings from the early poets, notably Chaucer and Spenser.”

  “The listeners adored it,” drawled Tick, “all three of them. How did you tangle with Versey, Sarah? Was he lurking in the bushes, waiting to pounce on the first toothsome wench who came along?”

  “Nothing surprising about that,” said Melisande. “He always lurks.”

  Sarah gave her a wry smile. “Oh dear, another illusion shattered. He said he’d followed me all the way from the pavilion because none of the other women came up to his specifications.”

  “That’s what he always says, the old beast. He said it to me the year I was eighteen. I couldn’t think of a snappy comeback and got stuck for two courantes and the galliard.”

  “Don’t be too hard on Versey, girls,” said Abigail. “He does the best he can with what little he has to work with. Let’ see, Max. Drusilla’s being here is unusual, but that’s only because she’s been away so long. And it’s no surprise, we’d been expecting her for the past two months. Do you know, the most surprising thing I can think of is that all the frumenty got eaten.”

  “Mother, you don’t mean it,” cried Melisande.

  “I do so. They even scraped the bowl. Cook couldn’t believe it when I showed her. She’s terribly embarrassed at not making enough, poor dear, but how was she to know? Usually we wind up throwing most of the batch on the compost heap. Even the Sunday School children hardly touch it.”

  “Did your cook change the recipe this year?” Sarah asked.

  “Oh no, she couldn’t do that. The one we’ve been using ever since we started the revels is taken straight from a fourteenth-century manuscript written by the prioress of an abbey in Kent. You don’t suppose this nouvelle cuisine fad has finally got around to frumenty?”

  Nobody had anything to say on that question. Nehemiah Billingsgate looked around at the weary cluster of still costumed ex-revelers.

  “Well, my dears, if frumenty’s the most exciting thing we can come up with, I think we may as well call it a day. You and Sarah will be back in the morning then, Max?”

  “Let’s see what happens between now and then,” Max answered. “The police may come up with something.”

  Saying goodbye was a bit awkward. Sarah could hardly thank her hostess for a lovely time under the circumstances. She compromised on, “Please don’t worry too much, especially about Aunt Bodie. I simply can’t imagine she’d stand for having anything awful happen to her. We’ll be in touch.”

  9

  “WHAT A RELIEF TO get out of there!” Sarah released the underpinnings of her hennin, pulled the tall cone away from her head, and tossed it into the back seat of the car. “Turn up the heater, will you, dear?”

  “It’ll warm up once we get going. In the meantime, you could move a little closer.”

  “I don’t want to get my draperies in the way of the gas pedal.” Nevertheless, Sarah took Max up on his attractive offer, kicking her by now bedraggled train over to the far side of the passenger seat.

  “I feel as if we ought to be out combing the byways for Aunt Bodie, but I know she’d be the first to say that’s nonsense. What could we accomplish in the dark that the police and Tick with the helicopter haven’t already done better? I’m just relieved that Abigail and Bill managed to get their company away without having police and media all over the place.”

  “I’m surprised Grimpen didn’t go for the publicity,” said Max. “I’ve seen cops willing to cover up a crime before, especially when somebody rich and prominent is involved, though it sometimes works the other way around. But I’ve never seen anybody so ready to shove the whole case under the rug after he’d arrived at a brilliant solution without even bothering to examine the evidence.”

  Sarah yawned. “Melly said her friend Reggie told her Grimpen had a bridge game on at the country club. Maybe he was afraid his wife would be cross if he dallied around doing his job. Or else he stole the Ghost himself and was getting edgy.”

  “I’d buy that with pleasure if I thought Grimpen had brains enough to carry it off. We’ll have to check him out, Kätzele.”

  “You’ll have to, darling. I ought to get after Cousin Lionel about the Morris dancers.”

  “That brings up a slightly embarrassing point,” said Max.

  “Yes, dear. Don’t worry, I’ll know in a flash if he was in on the doings. Lionel thinks he’s a master of guile, but his eyes cross whenever he tries to tell a lie. Besides, he has all that money of Aunt Appie’s to play with nowadays, so I hardly think he’d begin rustling Rolls Royces for kicks. Do you think Miriam will be furious with us for having stayed out so long?”

  “You phoned the house and told her what was happening, didn’t you?”

  “Of course. She said Davy went right to sleep after his story and he’s welcome to stay the night, but she knows how we feel and she’ll be waiting up for us.”

  “Don’t start feeling guilty about that. Miriam and Ira are both night owls. They’d be prowling till all hours anyway. See what’s on the radio, why don’t you?”

  After that they didn’t say much. By the time they got to Ireson Town, Sarah was actually asleep, curled up on the seat with her head in Max’s lap. He had to give her a gentle nudge.

  “Hey, sleepyhead. We’re here.”

  “Here? Oh.” She bounced up and opened the car door. “Brr! It’s chilly. I wish I’d had sense enough to bring something warm.”

  But it was only a step to the Rivkins’ pleasant ranch house, and Miriam had hot tea waiting.

  “So you ran into big trouble?” was Ira’s greeting.

  “How did the houppelande work out?” was Miriam’s.

  Sarah answered the more important question first. “Fine. Everyone said mine was the prettiest costume there. Didn’t they, Max? Was Davy a good boy?”

  “Come and see.”

  All four of them tiptoed into the guest room, where Miriam had set up her own son’s old crib as a lure. Once assured that Davy was alive, well, and sleeping the sleep of the innocent, Sarah and Max allowed themselves to collapse around the kitchen table and unwind.

  “I didn’t realize I was hungry,” said Sarah, gladly accepting a slice of Miriam’s spicy dark prune bread. “Though except for a cup of coffee, I haven’t had a thing to eat since the banquet, and that’s been forever. It seems so, anyway.”

  “What did they serve?” Miriam wanted to know.

  “Who got killed?” Ira demanded. Max and Sarah tried to answer them both, with mixed results.

  “Peacock pie? How could anybody eat a peacock?”

  “It was just turkey with feathers stuck in the—”

  “So here’s this guy up in the tree with just his feet—”

  “Oddest thing was the frumenty. Nobody liked it but everybody—”

  “Sounds to me like the cop.” Ira had the floor to himself at last. “The hell of it is, how do you go about arresting a police chief?”

  “I’ll find out and let you know.” Max set down his empty cup. “What do you say, Sarah? Think we ought to get the kid home?”

  “He could stay with us,” Miriam told them for the fifth or sixth time. “You could all stay. There’s room.”

  “But then we’d have no clothes for the morning,” Sarah reminded her. “Could I borrow an extra blanket for Davy?”

  “Take one for yourself,” Max suggested. “She was bitching about the cold all the way
here.”

  “I was not,” Sarah insisted. “Mainly because I was asleep a good part of the time, I have to admit. Oh, thank you, Miriam. I’ll return them tomorrow.”

  After the usual amount of flapping around, they got themselves and the sleeping baby out to the car, made the short ride to their own house in perfect calm, and got Davy peacefully settled in his own crib. They were just laying their own heads on their respective pillows when he woke up and began to fuss.

  “That’s gratitude for you,” Max groaned. “Shall I go?”

  “No, lie still. I had that long nap in the car. He must be wet; I can’t imagine he’s hungry after a day with Miriam.”

  Sarah fumbled for her slippers and went into her formerly angelic son’s nursery, sorting out the sleeves of her robe en route. “Come on, squally. Let’s find you some dry pants.”

  Fresh diapers didn’t appear to be the entire solution. Sarah carried the baby, still bawling, down to the kitchen. She warmed a bottle and settled the pair of them in the rocking chair for a feeding session. Davy took two hungry sucks, gurgled a bit, and fell asleep again with the nipple in his mouth.

  “Little monster.” Sarah kissed the top of his head in helpless adoration. His hair was blond and curly. Like Max’s when he was a baby, Miriam said. There wasn’t a peep out of him when she laid him back in his crib. Nor did she get so much as a grunt out of Max when at last she slid back in bed beside him. Like father, like son.

  Sarah herself was wide awake by now. And what about Aunt Bodie, she wondered. Where was she, and what was happening to her?

  It was hard to envision anything’s happening to Boadicea Kelling. In her well-regulated life, events didn’t simply occur. They eventuated as the result of forethought and planning. Hardly a typical Kelling trait. But then Boadicea wasn’t a Kelling.

  This realization came to Sarah as something of a surprise. She was so used to Kellings marrying their own distant relatives to keep the money in the family that she and most of her kin tended to lump the in-laws with the genuine Kellings regardless of what their origins had been. Max was having rather a hard time adjusting to Kellingization but Bodie had integrated easily enough, as far as Sarah knew.