The Bluest Blood

by Gillian Roberts

  Eh. Because of which sound, Harvey later said he knew Neddy, knew the man Neddy lived with. But how could he have? They wouldn’t travel in the same circles, ever. Loren said that Harvey had been an insurance clerk before he found God, while Neddy…

  Jake found the Web site. A low male voice, audibly serious, talked about the crime- and solve-rate in various developed countries.

  I was more interested in the voice inside my head. Canada. Insurance, it repeated. Something, Harvey said, that would put Neddy Roederer in jail. I’d thought it was Harvey’s religious hysteria, thought it was about homosexuality. But that wasn’t it. It was the Canada connection. It had to be.

  I felt short of breath, so near to something I was dizzy. “Aren’t you supposed to be looking for a clue?” I asked, while my mind spun.

  “See?” Jake was oblivious to me. His dad was paying attention. He had expertise that interested his dad. “You choose a kind of crime, or a region or country, or a time period—you can go a whole lot of different ways. They aren’t all violent, either. Like the one you sent me the clipping for. That was embezzlement.”

  Embezzlement. Canada. Insurance.

  Embezzlement must have struck a familiar chord with Loren, too. “Speaking of which, Mrs. Roederer says that you and she, ah, cleared up the matter of the bric-a-brac, is that right?”

  “She said I could keep it,” Jake said.

  “It or them?” I asked.

  Jake swiveled around. “What’s that?”

  “It or them? You took two pieces. The St. Bernard and the cat.”

  Jake shrugged. “She meant both of them. I’ll double-check.”

  But “it” was not “them.” That’s what she’d said upstairs, too. It was the cat. Only the cat. And how had she noticed one missing trinket in a vast household that had been trashed? Why had she? She hadn’t noticed the dog.

  The screen blinked and so did my brain. Canada. Enormous embezzlement. Insurance company embezzlement. Disappeared. No such person ever as Chester Katt. Insurance. Harvey Spiers. Chester. Cheshire Cat. A small and grinning china cat. The only missing piece noticed. Spiders. And, oh, God—Edward Fairfax Rochester’s secret about his wife.

  “Jake,” I said, still more breathlessly. “Should you be doing that? Aren’t you here to find out if Griffin left a clue as to his whereabouts?”

  “Huh?” He swiveled and looked at me. “Why would he? I know where he’s headed, but you can’t tell.”

  I promised not to, hoping I could keep that promise.

  “He found his aunt in New York State. On the Internet. When he was a kid, she was too young to take care of him, then she didn’t know where he was, but she’s cool now as a guardian.”

  “Does his—does Mrs. Roederer know that?”

  Jake shook his head. “Of course not. Griffin’ll get in touch when he’s ready.”

  “But she said…then why are you down here?” his father asked.

  “Mrs. R. said I could have the computer. I was figuring out how to transport it, what software to take. Some of it’s already at school and I have copies of other stuff…why?”

  “You know what a griffin was in mythology?” Loren asked.

  “Not now.” My pulse steadily gained speed.

  “A monster,” Jake said. “That’s what Griffin said.”

  “Only because it combines the head of an eagle and the body of a lion. In heraldry, griffins symbolize vigilance. In mythology, griffins guarded gold mines and hidden treasures.”

  I looked over Jake’s shoulder at the multicolored screen. I saw headlines, a colorized photo of the headless, green-footed corpse, private body parts blocked off.

  “Well,” Jake said, “this computer is the treasure he guarded.”

  I was not at all sure he was right about that.

  Also on the screen was the man called the Cheshire Cat, with his pudgy, nondescript features, his pale mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and sparse hair.

  Not possibly strong-featured Neddy Roederer by any stretch. Besides, if it had been, Harvey and he would have instantly recognized each other.

  I looked at his thin hair. “My God,” I whispered.

  “What?” Loren asked.

  “Let me ask you this—why would a woman wear wigs all the time?”

  “Don’t pick on Mrs. Roederer,” Jake said.

  “She wears wigs?” Loren asked.

  “No,” I snapped, “her hair just slides off her head the way it did today. I’m asking a real question, and trust me, it’s important.”

  “It’s a fashion statement,” Jake said. “Isn’t that what it’s called? A kind of look? And freedom—I’ve seen her with short hair Monday and long hair Tuesday.”

  “Are wigs relevant to anything on God’s green earth?” Loren asked. “You’re on my case when I said what Griffin’s name meant, but now you—besides, let’s talk about it in the car. Jake, can you turn off that thing so we can get it packed up?”

  “No!” I said. “Don’t turn it off yet—look at it, and my question, my question—think about it.”

  “About wigs?” Loren sounded testy.

  “Yes! Look!” I pointed at the screen. Surely somebody else would make the connection.

  “At what?” Loren said. “The bald guy? Is that what you’re getting at? Can women get bald that way? Young?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  The silence in our little room was many decibels loud.

  “Impossible,” Jake said. “Ridiculous. He’s a…”

  “He’s Chester Katt, that silly, made-up name. Don’t you think he meant the name as a joke, an apt one, too, because that cat knew all along he was going to disappear.”

  “I’m sorry,” Loren said. “I’m not following.”

  “What if he didn’t exist at all?”

  “No, really, he was there. He had a job. People knew him. He was real.”

  “But he wasn’t really Chester Katt.”

  “We already know that. Listen, I’m pressed for time. I’ve got to get back to Toronto.”

  “What if he were a she in disguise? Wouldn’t that be brilliant? Nobody anywhere would be looking for a woman, especially a patrician, long-married woman with a son. They wouldn’t occupy the same universe.”

  Jake stared at me.

  “You’re the one who always said they bought a son like something they needed,” I reminded him. “And named him Griffin. Guardian of the treasure, your father says. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  I could feel Jake’s effort to walk this through, figure out each step. “And then, it was because Harvey knew?” he asked.

  “Knew something and was therefore dangerous. I suspect he knew less than he thought, and way less than she feared.”

  “He thought Neddy was gay and connected with the real Chester Katt. He thought Chester was real,” Jake said. “And he knew Chester had embezzled millions.”

  I nodded.

  Jake digested this and nodded again. “But then, her own husband. She wouldn’t—”

  “I think it all became too much for him. He seems to have always been the passive one. I think when she escalated into murder—maybe even got him to help—it made him snap. He was going to tell.” The message for Mackenzie. The need for private consultation, for her not to know. “The secret was getting too hideous to hold. He knew who’d killed Harvey and why. He, like his almost namesake, had a mad wife in his attic. So she killed him that night. And tried to frame Griffin by using his car.”

  Loren was blinking hard, computing at a slow speed. “Jake,” I said, “you once told me Griffin could scan and change pictures. “Can you? Can you see what Chester Katt would look like thinner, without the glasses, the pasted-on mustache, and with a wig?”

  “What a complete waste of—just leave the computer and let’s get out of here,” Loren said.

  Jake tapped at the keyboard. The back of his neck was still too thin for the large man he’d someday be. It—he—looked vulnerable.

  And I sud
denly saw something I should have realized more quickly. Jake was the connection. He’d never, out of shame, mentioned his stepfather in this house, so when the secret was revealed at the party, Tea would have seen him as Harvey Spiers’ secret emissary, or spy. Jake, surely seen as knowing too much, torturing the Roederers with that Web site, his fixation on the Cheshire Cat story. Asking for a tape of the TV show—a visual check—to send to his newsman father in Toronto. Even the china trinket—the one she noticed—that he took.

  “Keep at it,” I said. “I have to check…” She was leaving. Her remarkable coolness had let her say so. I’d thought it was aristocratic, when it was just the calm of the con. I walked back down the hallway double-time.

  No servants, she’d said. Leaving. Permanently, I was sure. Just as she had done in Toronto and who knew where else? Tea Roederer, that renegade strand in the social fabric that nobody had been able to trace would disappear the same way Chester Katt had.

  I had to give them credit for the style and bravado with which they’d invented the Roederers. Ben Franklin’s descendant, indeed! Brilliant. Who could suspect people with such exquisite taste, such correct social values, such elegance, of being thieves?

  How stupid I was! How slow! How blinded by surfaces, fictional credentials, and aesthetic values of which I approved.

  The basement door had been difficult to open not because she’d accidentally locked it then. It had been locked when only Jake was down here. He’d become part of her plan, maybe saved her time by simply appearing and not needing to be hunted down. He knew things, the significance of which he didn’t yet understand, like Griffin’s alibi for Neddy’s death. But she knew.

  By now I was at the top of the stairs, my hand on the knob, my lips forming a yoctosecond’s worth of prayer—let me be wrong, incredibly wrong—my hand, turning.

  Nothing. I wasn’t wrong. Another attempt, another definite nothing. A serious, total nothing.

  We were locked in the basement. Margaret was on vacation, as was everybody else who worked here. And Tea Roederer, whatever her real name was, was about to disappear.

  I walked down the stairs. No need for major consternation yet. There were windows.

  And previously unnoticed grillwork over them.

  And no sign of another door, of any other exit. No sign of anything that could break a locked and solid door down. Where were the usual basement tools? In a lean-to outside? Damn the rich with their overabundance of space.

  Don’t alarm Jake or Loren yet, I decided. They were male. They’d rush into action, any action, however stupid and futile. Think. What’s the worst that could happen? The basement was spacious. We wouldn’t run out of air. We wouldn’t die of starvation. Margaret would probably be back before the two weeks, anyway, to cover furniture and do those things rich people mean when they speak of “closing the house.”

  A washer and dryer sat side by side in the corner along with a rack for air drying and an enormous open hamper with a dish towel hanging out of it.

  We could get drinking water from the washing machine supply line. I was proud of my basement-wilderness survival techniques.

  There was no reason to panic.

  Maybe there was food storage down here. Perhaps even mansions stocked the canned and preserved haul of summer, the way a farmhouse would. And if not, that was okay. It would be hardest on Jake’s rangy, ever-growing frame, but for me, it’d be the affordable equivalent of a spa. I’d finally lose those five pounds.

  Or Mackenzie would figure it out, and as soon as we heard a sound above, we’d pound on that door and shout. Nothing to worry about except inconvenience and boredom. A bad plan on her part. Not worthy of the Cheshire Cat, not wily or complete enough. She was losing it.

  I headed toward the computer room, ready to reassure them, but was stopped by the sound of shattering glass. I turned back. Maybe we were locked in by accident. Maybe she was sending help through the window. At least a warning through the bars of the window.

  But help didn’t look like the enormous something now blocking all the light from one of the windows. Nor did I understand how it could look like a board being hammered over the other window. The one she hadn’t broken. And help didn’t look or smell like the smoky fumes—like car exhaust, like a poorly maintained car’s exhaust—pouring through the broken window.

  All right, I told myself. Now. Now was as good a time as ever. Now was the perfect time.

  I panicked.

  Nineteen

  I was a natural at panic, a potential virtuoso, but given our specific situation, I tried to stifle it as I made my way down the hallway toward Jake and his father. I had heard that if you opt for the gasping-for-air or screaming thing, you gobble available oxygen at warp speed. So I worked hard to stay calm. Either because I was concentrating on that, or because I was nonetheless panicky, my progress felt exactly like the nightmare where I need to run for my life, but my legs are underinflated balloons and each laborious step takes an hour.

  “Guys,” I said, when I entered their lair, breathing rapidly, “we have a—”

  “—perfect fit!” Jake said. “It’s primitive, but look.”

  There she was on the screen in her dark wig, the glasses gone, the shape of the face slimmed down, the pale mustache removed, and color on the lips and eyes.

  Loren Ulrich patted his son’s shoulder. “Quite a detective we’ve got here. Quite a computer genius.”

  Jake squirmed and swiveled around on his chair. “This makes sense of what Harvey said before he…oh, man…if...”

  I waited before sounding the alarm, trying meantime to think of a plan, of at least a suggestion of how we’d get through this alive.

  “If she was Chester Katt, that explains why Harvey thought Mr. Roederer was gay. Mr. Roederer told me that they’d been all around the world. They went to Bali after Canada, I remember, but to Canada after Nairobi. Hot to cold to hot places, he said. So if they were together when Harvey met her—disguised as a him—it would have looked like they were two men.”

  His head moved from side to side in tiny arcs, like a tremor that denied what his mind was telling him. “I thought Harvey was going to try blackmail.”

  “Maybe he did,” Loren said softly.

  “In which case, they’d think his ranting about Neddy’s sins meant the stealing, like he knew the truth about the disguise and that Mrs. Roederer embezzled seventeen million dollars. Even though I don’t think Harvey had a clue,” Jake said.

  “Seventeen mill.” Loren let out a low, appreciative whistle. “Buys a whole lot of living.” He looked up at a thick pipe with seams of duct tape, but I knew he was using X-ray vision into the palatial living quarters.

  “Look, guys,” I interrupted. “I hate breaking up the conversation, but maybe we’ve been too clever by half. We have a problem. A biggie.”

  “What kind?” Loren asked.

  “For starters, we’re locked in. She locked you in first, Jake, knowing you wouldn’t notice for hours. So when it was our turn, she jiggled the key and pretended to have turned it the wrong way first. In any case, she did it. And it’s a solid door.”

  “They knew how to build ’em in the old days,” Loren said. “Unfortunately.”

  They were reacting with remarkable and unexpected calm, so I moved my tale beyond the introduction. I informed them of the added attraction—the exhaust pipe aimed at us. “And remember, Margaret’s on vacation,” I added lamely. “Along with whatever other help might otherwise be here. There’s no way to phone 9-1-1 from the basement, is there?”

  Jake shook his head. “No phone.”

  I hadn’t expected anything else.

  “How could she have known we’d figure this out? Or even that I’d come here?” Jake asked.

  Such questions didn’t help our escape, but since my last opportunity to teach looked like this moment and in this basement, I shared whatever data I had with my student. “She didn’t know you’d show up. Your appearance was the frosting on the cake
. She’d not only get away, she’d get rid of the one person left who was likely to connect the dots and understand what had gone on. Or maybe your arrival just saved her time. Maybe she was going after you next.” I gave him a minute to silently digest that idea.

  “I can’t believe she’d leave all this,” said his father.

  I gave up on Loren. “We have to figure out what to do.”

  “If what you said is true, then there’s nothing we can do,” Loren said.

  I vowed that if I lived, I would no longer make sweeping generalizations about men springing into action too readily.

  “We don’t know that yet, Dad,” Jake said quietly. “Maybe there’s another door somewhere.”

  “Wouldn’t she have locked that, too?” Loren said.

  “Let’s check the entire basement,” I said.

  “Luckily for us, it isn’t small,” Jake said. “It’ll take a while to kill us.”

  “Slow death,” Loren said. “Lucky us, indeed.”

  Those closed storage areas made the square footage available to the carbon monoxide smaller and made its work more efficient. “Maybe we should try and stop the damn stuff from coming in,” I said. I headed for the large space and took inventory. Then I pushed the overstuffed, under-upholstered side chair beneath the high window. The weight of my foot sent the sprung seat almost down to the floor.

  I sat down on it, discouraged.

  “The washing machine!” Jake said. “That won’t mush up.” He was already starting to move our future water supply.

  “The dryer, instead,” I said. “It’s lighter, anyway.”

  As soon as it was pulled out, we saw the small hole into which the dryer exhaust had once fit. The tube was missing. I looked up at the barred window and suspected I’d find it up there, connected to the exhaust pipe of a car. Unfortunately, the hole was too small to let more than our fingers get through it, but it still would have let some of the fumes escape, if it, too, had not been covered by a piece of plywood. She was a lot handier than I’d assumed. Must be from her prearistocratic phase.

  Jake kicked aside the woven hamper blocking his way and he and Loren lifted the dryer and relocated it under the window, then Jake, the tallest of us, hoisted himself up top. The metal bucked and protested, but he put one foot on each side and found stability.