As soon as Sarah had checked once more with Boadicea Kelling’s now distraught housekeeper, her next order of business was to get Brooks on the hotline and clue him in as to what had taken place yesterday at the Billingsgates’.
“And I’ve been trying to recall some bit of gossip I once heard about Aunt Bodie and Aunt Caroline,” she wound up. “I can’t think why it would matter at a time like this, but it keeps nagging at me.”
“I wish I could help you,” was Brooks’s unsatisfactory reply. “My mother would no doubt have known, but she’s long gone, as you know. I never did see Mother again after she took off for Switzerland with what was left of Father’s money. We’d come to our personal parting of the ways some time before that, as you know. I visited Caroline a few times, but she never once mentioned Bodie that I recall. Have you spoken to Emma?”
“No, I’ll try her next. It’s no use asking Aunt Appie, I don’t suppose.”
“Not unless you care to spend the whole morning weeding out the irrelevances. Will Max be calling in?”
“He said he would. I don’t know when.”
“It doesn’t matter. You might mention that I have a lead on the Wilton-Rugge robbery. I’m going out and poke around a bit. In case Max tries to reach me, I’ll leave a private message on the answering machine.”
Max and Brooks had worked out a verbal code of amazing complexity in the Alfred Campion manner. Often they themselves couldn’t decipher what they’d been trying to convey, but they forged on undaunted, inventing yet crazier convolutions. Sarah thought the whole business pretty juvenile, notwithstanding the fact that Max was ten and Brooks thirty years older than she, and refused to get involved with the code on the grounds that she heard enough gobbledygook from Davy as it was. She bade her consanguineous colleague an affectionate goodbye and looked up Aunt Emma’s telephone number.
Sarah had forgotten, if she’d ever known, that this was Fire Prevention Week in Pleasaunce. Emma Kelling had been an honorary member of the Pleasaunce Fire Department ever since she’d bullied her fellow citizens into raising the money for a new ladder truck. This morning, Emma’s butler told Sarah, Mrs. Kelling was off at a Women’s Club breakfast demonstrating the proper way to jump into a safety net.
“Heatherstone, you’re joking,” Sarah gasped. “No, I suppose you aren’t. What was she wearing?”
“Plus fours, a Norfolk jacket, and her Tyrolean hat. The same outfit she wore when she made that balloon ascension on behalf of the church steeple fund,” Heatherstone replied.
Aunt Emma did have a knack for the appropriate costumed Sarah thanked the butler and hung up, amused but not enlightened. She thought of making the supreme sacrifice and calling Cousin Mabel, but she flinched away and rang Jeremy Kelling’s Beacon Hill apartment instead, though she wasn’t quite sure why.
“Hello, Egbert.” Jem’s valet de chambre and general factotum was, like Heatherstone, an old friend of Sarah’s. “Any news from the briny deep?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Egbert replied. “It got too cold in Maine, so they’re coming back down the coast. Mr. Jem phoned from Halibut Point last night. Seems to me he ought to be rounding Marblehead Light just about now.”
“As near as that? The old sculpin, why didn’t he call me? Are they putting in at Marblehead Harbor?”
“No, they’re going straight on to Scituate, lay over at the yacht club tonight, and then going around Provincetown and down to Newport tomorrow.”
“Rats! What’s the name of that yacht he’s on, Egbert?”
“Maphwacha III, Mrs. Sarah. She’s a forty-five foot yawl. Mr. Jem tells me that means she has her mizzen, whatever that is, stepped aft of the wheel instead of forward as on a ketch.”
“It’s a mast.” Sarah had learned all about yawls and ketches from Cousin Lionel. “Thank you, Egbert.”
Sarah had looked forward to a morning at home with her son, but this was a chance not to be missed. “Mrs. Blufert,” she called out, “where’s your uncle this morning?”
11
MR LOMAX WAS EXACTLY where Sarah wanted him to be, down on the town dock mending one of the lobster pots he didn’t set nowadays so often as he used to. She ran her little car as close as she could and called over to him. “How’s the Mary L. fixed for gas, Mr. Lomax?”
“Huh? What’s up, Miz Max?”
Their old caretaker had run through a gamut of names with her: plain Sarah when she’d come to Ireson’s as a visiting child; Mrs. Alex when she’d married his then employer, Alexander Kelling; Mrs. Kelling when she’d become a young widow running the place with only Mr. Lomax’s help. He couldn’t quite bring himself to go back to plain Sarah, but he was dammed if he’d address his friend Isaac’s son’s wife as Mrs. Bittersohn. Miz Max was his solution, and it suited them both fine.
“I need you and the Mary L. right now,” she told him.
“She’s full.”
Mr. Lomax laid aside his lobster pot and tack hammer, straightened up and swayed back and forth a few times to get the kinks out, then climbed aboard the old but spruce twenty-six footer and held out his hand to help Sarah over the gunwale. It wasn’t until he’d started the engine and pulled outside the breakwater that he bothered to ask, “Where we headin’?”
“Toward Marblehead. I want to intercept a forty-five foot yawl named Maphwacha III. She left Halibut Point this morning sometime on her way to Scituate. She hasn’t been past here yet, has she?”
“Ain’t seen ’er. Here, take the wheel a minute. Keep between the channel buoys till we round the ledges.”
Sarah had done a little sailing and plenty of rowing, but she’d never handled a power boat before. She might have been nervous if she’d stopped to think about what she was doing, but there was no time for that. She kept her eyes on her course and her hands on the wheel while Mr. Lomax fiddled to get his elderly radio going:
At first all he got were squawks and sizzles that suggested a hen being fried alive, then he reached somebody with whom he had a brief chat in what sounded to Sarah like Max and Brooks’s secret code. Either the coast guard or the harbor master, she assumed. Then he took back the wheel from her and jerked his head toward a couple of ratty cushions on top of a locker in the tiny open-ended wheelhouse.
“I’m goin’ to let ’er out. Stay under cover so’s you won’t get soaked with spray.”
Sarah knew better than to pester him with questions. She flopped on the cushions, pulled her knees up against her chest, and sat as tight as the pitching and rolling allowed. It was amazing what a turn of speed the Mary L. could put on. She remembered Mr. Lomax telling Alexander six or seven years ago about the 360 cubic inch Chrysler truck motor he’d picked up second hand at a Chelsea junkyard. Alexander had liked talking about engines. She hadn’t cried about Alexander for a long time.
Mr. Lomax threw her an anxious look. “Ain’t gettin’ seasick?”
Sarah shook her head. “How about you?”
That got a chuckle out of him. He checked his compass, tugged his filthy old sword fisherman’s cap farther down over his bald spot, and chugged on.
The big waves weren’t running today, but the breeze was stiff enough to raise an uncomfortable chop. The sun kept poking in and out from behind a skyful of quick-traveling clouds. Sarah wished she’d brought her sunglasses and windbreaker but she hadn’t, so there was nothing she could do but stick it out.
Forever, it felt like. She still wasn’t seasick but she was getting awfully sick of the eternal up and down, to and fro, of the noise of the engine and the mingled smells of exhaust and bygone fish. Were they lost? Had they missed the yawl? They’d spotted a couple of fishing boats and one yacht, but she was a schooner. Surely they must have failed to catch Maphwacha III.
No, they hadn’t. There she was. Sarah almost panicked.
“Mr. Lomax, what shall we do? Wave our arms and holler?”
“Good a scheme as any, I guess. Stand astern an’ let ’em see you.”
He handed her a batte
red megaphone. She picked her way aft and braced herself against the gunwale. Lomax knew better than to kill his engine, but he slowed down and steered straight for Maphwacha’s bow, shooting off his flare gun while Sarah waved and shouted through the megaphone.
“Heave to! Heave to! Stop, you idiots!”
“What the hell?” roared someone from the bridge. “Get out of the way.”
“No! Stop!”
It was either heave to or run them down. Mercifully, the yawl came up into the wind and dropped her mainsail. By now half a dozen curious faces could be seen along the rail. To Sarah’s unbounded relief, Jeremy Kelling’s was among them.
“Uncle Jem,” she shrieked.
“Sarah! Good God, is that you?”
“Of course. We came to get you.”
“What’s the matter? Not Egbert?”
By this time, the old tires that served the Mary L. for fenders were smack up against Maphwacha III’s sleek white hull and a man in captain’s uniform was having thirteen kitten fits. Sarah was not to be put off by a tantrum.
“Stop yelling and throw us a rope. We need Jem Kelling on urgent business.”
“What business?” demanded the captain.
She looked across at the gaping faces, half of them slightly glassy-eyed although the sun was nowhere near the yard-arm and wouldn’t be for hours yet. Jem looked to be cold sober, thank God.
“Top secret,” she snapped.
“What’s this? What’s this?” The passengers were all agog. “God, Jem, you’re not a CIA agent?”
“No comment.” This was a glorious moment for Jeremy Kelling. His face grew as hard and inscrutable as its surrounding chins would permit. “Get me aboard. Pronto.”
Transferring an elderly, overweight, and none too nimble gentleman wearing a natty blue blazer and white flannel slacks from a forty-five foot yacht to a twenty-six foot fishing boat in open sea is not accomplished without some discomfort to the man and dire peril to the white flannels. However, Jem was eager to bear himself manfully in the face of this unexpected notoriety and Mr. Lomax was a capable seaman even if one or two of those aboard Maphwacha III were something he muttered under his breath and Sarah didn’t quite catch. Egbert might go into convulsions when he saw the flannels, but Jeremy Kelling was relatively unscathed and insufferably proud of himself by the time they’d got him into the cockpit of the Mary L.
“Will you be rejoining us, Jem?” the yacht’s owner called down in a more respectful tone than he’d used hitherto.
Jem looked at his niece. Sarah shrugged.
“If you want to. I could probably run you down to Scituate later on. Can you reach them by telephone if necessary?”
After a fair amount of backing and forming, it was determined that Jem could. The phone number, written on paper adorned with signal flags and headed “Memo from Maphwacha,” was sent across in a pink plastic bucket. Jem saluted smartly, Mr. Lomax gunned his engine, and they were off.
“What’s this all about?” Jem roared as soon as they were under way, but the noise level was so high that Sarah only screamed back, “Tell you when we get ashore,” so Jem leaned back on the cushions and practiced his inscrutability.
The trip back was only half as long as the trip out, as is ever the case. Sarah was agreeably surprised to see by her car’s clock that it was only a quarter to twelve when they’d tied up at the Ireson’s Landing dock, thanked Mr. Lomax and persuaded him to accept reimbursement for his gas, and headed back to the house. On the way, she gave her uncle a quick fill-in on what had taken place at the Renaissance Revel.
“So that’s why we need you, Uncle Jem. You know the Billingsgates’ crowd, you’ve got the memory of an elephant. What I want you to do is start remembering. For all we know, Aunt Bodie’s life may depend on you.”
Jem chuckled. “Let’s hope it doesn’t. Bodie would never get over the chagrin of having to be grateful to a dissolute rogue like me.”
They reached the house just in time to embarrass Mrs. Blufert for not having quite finished the dusting. Sarah parked Jem in the living room with a martini and the morning paper. She seized the opportunity to give Davy a few quick hugs and settle him in his high chair with a pilot biscuit to work on. Mrs. Blufert would have to feed him his lunch; Uncle Jem was not spiritually attuned to teething babies. She put a pot of chowder on to heat and fixed Jem another martini.
“Take this to my uncle and talk to him for a minute, would you please, Mrs. Blufert? I want to call my husband.”
Max wasn’t in the house, Abigail told her, but he and Bill were around the place somewhere. She’d give him the message. Sarah hung up and went to open a bottle of chablis she’d been giving a quick chill in the freezer. Jem wouldn’t be crass enough to drink martinis at the table, but he’d expect to be given something other than water. As she was giving the chowder a final stir, one of the phones rang, a shrill bleep that could only be the private hotline. She clapped the lid on the pot, shoved the chowder off the heat, and ran to pick up the red handset.
“Hi, what’s new?” was Max’s greeting.
“Jem’s here,” she told him. “We’re about to have lunch.”
“Jem? I thought he was in Newport. How the hell did you get him off that yacht?”
“Mr. Lomax picked him up in the Mary L.” Sarah thought perhaps she wouldn’t go into details just now. “What’s new at the Billingsgates’?”
“Bill got the results of the autopsy.”
“So?”
“Tranquilizer gun. They found the dart in Rufus’s jerkin.”
“What? Max, do you mean one of those things they shoot into animals on the National Geographic programs? Isn’t that awfully,” Sarah floundered for a word and came up with “inappropriate?”
“Awfully,” Max agreed. “The pathologist figures Rufus got a dose big enough to stop a rhinoceros.”
“You don’t suppose Gerry Whet brought one back from Nairobi?”
“I assume you mean the gun, not the rhinoceros.” Max didn’t sound particularly struck by his wife’s suggestion. “It’s a thought. On the other hand, you might ask Jem which member of the party has a cousin who works in a zoo. Tranquilizer guns are more common in this country than you might think. Lots of people use them: game wardens, animal control officers, researchers, vets.”
“What do they look like?”
“Pretty much like an air rifle, and they’re used the same way. They have a spring mechanism that shoots a hollow dart. The principle’s the same as an overgrown hypodermic syringe.”
“How close would you have to be to hit anything with one?”
“Maybe fifty yards, if you were a first-rate marksman.”
“Then Rufus could have been shot from the edge of the copse.”
“Quite likely. The gun could have been stashed there in advance, then hidden again while the killer ran forward to hoist Rufe’s body out of the way. Again minimizing the risk of getting caught, you see. If the killer was unlucky enough to be seen crossing that strip of lawn, he could have claimed he’d seen Rufus fall and was hurrying over to see what was wrong with him.”
“Has the gun been found?”
“Not yet. Grimpen’s got his men messing around in the pond now. My guess is they’ll find it and it won’t tell us a damned thing.”
“I must say there appears to have been some efficient planning.” It flashed into Sarah’s mind that Boadicea Kelling herself couldn’t have organized the matter more efficiently. All she said was, “Anything new on Aunt Bodie?”
“Not a yip so far. What’s with Jem?”
“I haven’t had a chance to talk with him yet. He’s still catching his breath.”
“Acquiring one, you mean. How’s Davy?”
“Eating his lunch. Have you had any?”
“Plenty.” Max’s carelessness about regular meals worried Sarah sometimes, but she might have known there’d be no problem about that today. A person would have an awfully hard time starving around. Abigail Billingsgat
e. She explained about promising to take Jem to meet the yacht, broke off reluctantly, and went to give her uncle his lunch.
Being a Formerly Exalted Chowderhead of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish, Jeremy Kelling took his chowder seriously. Sarah waited until her uncle had a pint or so aboard before she broached the business of the meeting.
“Max just told me they’ve found out Rufus was killed by a dart from a tranquilizer gun, Uncle Jem. Do you know who might have been able to get hold of such a thing?”
“Wouter Tolbathy made one once.”
Sarah groaned. “I might have known. Whatever happened to it?”
“Don’t ask me. The only time I ever saw the gun was at a farewell party Tom gave for Gerry Whet. Gerry’s always tootling off to Kenya, you know. Generally it’s to buy bug powder, but this time he was taking his son, Bunny, and his two sons-in-law on safari.”
“Who are the sons-in-law?”
“Joe Abbott and Buck Tolbathy. Joe married Gerry’s daughter Lilias and Buck married Primula.”
“And all three are in the Morris dance group,” said Sarah.
“Well, naturally. Joe and Buck are cousins, the whole tribe have always been close. Ski together, sail together, all that. Anyway, Wouter had made this great big hippo out of some revolting plastic stuff and painted it in a tasteful mélange of fuchsia, chartreuse, and turquoise, as Wouter would naturally have done. We were all supposed to plug away at the hippo with the tranquilizer gun. If you happened to hit it in a certain spot, the beast would begin to snore.”
“Clever,” said Sarah. “But you don’t remember who got to keep the gun, Uncle Jem?”
“I haven’t the dimmest recollection. Most likely Wouter kept it himself, or else Tom took it and locked it up somewhere. It wasn’t the type of thing they’d want the grandchildren to get hold of.”
“Did the gun shoot real tranquilizer darts?”
“What would have been the point if it hadn’t? Wouter didn’t put real tranquilizing juice in them, I don’t suppose. Probably lemonade or some such abomination. He was loading the darts in and the rest of us were shooting them out, that’s all I can tell you.”
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