“Pardon?” said Harvey. It was an unsolicited editorial on everything that had happened in the last fifteen seconds, but it was directed at Albert.
“She’s not Heather Proverb,” Albert replied.
Harvey gaped at him blankly.
“What do you mean?” said Sarah. “Of course she’s Heather Proverb, Professor.” It was a lifesaver, thrown out upon the waters of lunacy to keep yet another soul from sinking. “You know perfectly well she is.”
“I’m afraid he’s right.” Standish had been listening from the bathroom door. He stepped into the hall, with his face half-shaved, and stood behind Albert, looking down the stairs. “I happened to check into her in the course of my investigation.”
“Investigation?” said Harvey, who had again taken Heather’s elbow and was squeezing it as if it was the hem of her reason, and he was determined not to let it get away. “What investigation?”
“You investigated Heather?” said Sarah in disbelief.
“I investigated everyone,” Standish replied calmly. He sat down on the top step at Albert’s feet. “It’s like the Professor says, as soon as you prove one person innocent, everyone else becomes a suspect. You have to poke around for motive, opportunity. You have to know about the people you’re dealing with.”
“Me, too?” Sarah asked hesitantly.
Standish shrugged professionally. “I’m only concerned with things that directly affect this investigation, Miz Grandy.”
Matt Harvey was losing patience. “What investigation? Who’s guilty?”
“I’m a private investigator, officer,” Standish explained. “I’d give you my card,” he tapped his t-shirt, “but . . . ” He shrugged. “The Professor hired me to . . . well, he hired me to do some work.”
“That’s true,” said Sarah, once again misunderstanding with perfect clarity.
“I found out that this woman is not Heather Proverb.”
The woman in question continued to mumble distractedly, but only Albert was listening. “I was driving. Not her.”
“Then, who is she?” said Matt Harvey and Sarah in concert.
Standish rose and glanced in the ornate mirror on the wall to see which side of his face he’d shaved. “I haven’t gotten that far yet, I’m afraid,” he said. He returned to the bathroom.
“And you knew this, Professor?” said Harvey.
“Yes.”
Sarah didn’t know how to respond, so she looked from face to face and said, ‘Well, I declare,” several times. “Well, I declare,” she said in summation.
“Who saw her?” Albert asked.
Matt Harvey wasn’t sure what to say, or if he should say anything at all. He’d come for Heather Proverb, and was leaving with a perfect stranger. He’d discovered an investigation taking place in his midst and nothing, to put it bluntly, was working out the way he’d imagined it would, and every time he opened his mouth he found out something he didn’t want to know. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was a phone call. About that time; two o’clock. A man. He said he saw someone over there. I was on duty, so I went over. Sure enough, I saw her come out.”
“What if I hadn’t jumped?” Heather was saying. “We’d both be dead!” She began crying.
Of all those present, only Albert didn’t automatically attribute Heather’s words to delirium.
“I’ll take her out on the porch,” he offered, retrieving Heather’s elbow from Harvey’s grasp. Harvey yielded unwillingly.
“Careful, Professor,” he said, surrendering her as if she was a Ming vase and Albert the horned protagonist in the china shop parable. “Don’t let her wander off.”
“Why didn’t you arrest her then?” Sarah demanded.
“Well, it was Miss Heather!” Harvey replied. “I mean, I know she’d been kicked out but, well, she was carrying something. I figured it was just some of her stuff, you know?” He paused. “She didn’t look guilty of anything.”
The more he spoke, the less confident he became.
Sarah gave the thumbscrews a half-turn. “Then why are you arresting her this morning?”
Harvey hung his hand from his pocket by a thumb. The palm of the other hand tapped out its disquiet on the butt of his pistol. “Not arresting, Sarah,” he said. He’d been intimidated by Sarah Grandy ever since he was eleven and she caught him draping toilet paper over her trees one Halloween. Nor had the tide of years softened the jagged embarrassment of the memory. He was unable to look at her for long without feeling eleven years old, and guilty.
Sarah gave him a stare that left no room for interpretation as to what she thought of what he was about to say, but he said it nevertheless. “I just wanted to take her in for questioning. I wanted to know what she was doing there, is all.” The crease in his trousers wilted slightly before the gaze which seemed to say ‘At least she wasn’t tossing bathroom tissue around the neighborhood.’ “I just got to thinking, that’s all. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to find out what she was up to. Clear the air, you know.” He swiped at his mustache with the back of his hand. “I didn’t know all this – that she’d – that she wasn’t who I thought she was; we all thought she was.
“I don’t know what to make of that.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Albert waited for Heather to sit, which she did, on the top porch step. He sat beside her. Then he waited for the crying to stop.
“Your name is Angela, isn’t it?” he said softly.
She searched his face with her tear-filled eyes for a moment, then nodded.
“I thought so,” said Albert. “You always looked up when anyone called Angela Marie. Sometimes you almost answered.”
She sniffed. “What do you suppose are the odds of two out of four women having the same name?”
It was the kind of statement to which Albert’s mother would have replied ‘the government’s probably funded multi-year study into the subject with results that require further investigation.’ She said things like that.
“Who died?”
“What do you mean?” said the former Heather Proverb.
Albert wasn’t sure what he meant, but he felt he was on the right track. Proceed with care. “When you jumped,” he said. “From the car,” he ventured. He’d been listening carefully.
Angela’s eyes flashed. “How did you know?” she said.
“You said so,” Albert replied. She may as well have.
“I did?” She put her head in her hands and the ensemble between her knees. “I was hot. Confused. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
Albert had a theory, which came as a surprise. “It was Heather Proverb.”
Angela rocked and nodded and wept afresh with undistilled tears. “I can’t believe I was so bloody stupid!”
Suddenly she began beating herself on the face and head with both fists. “Bloody, bloody stupid!” she cried with every blow.
It took several tries before Albert could grab the flailing hands. “Need help, Professor?” said Matt Harvey, who had been drawn to the door by the commotion. Albert shook his head. “Looks like we’re losing her,” Harvey continued, tapping his temple.
Albert hadn’t determined yet whether she was coming or going. “Sarah,” he said. Sarah and Alice came to the door in tandem. Two for the price of one. “Would you mind taking Mr. Harvey . . . ”
“Call me Matt,” said Matt. “Everyone does.”
“Matt,” said Albert. Now everyone did. “Would you take him into the kitchen for some coffee?”
“Coffee?” said Sarah, looking at Albert as if he’d asked her to build a cozy bungalow by a quiet lake and paint it a color of which she did not approve. She dangled on the moment’s indecision.
“I’ll heat the cup,” said Alice. She seemed to have a grasp of the situation. She hooked her arm through Harvey’s and tugged him down the hall. “I hate tea in a cold cup,” she said. “Don’t you? I assume it’s the same with coffee, though I seldom drink it myself. Tastes like the residue of hell, as far as I’m conce
rned.” Halfway down the hall she stopped and turned. “Are you coming, dear?” she said.
“But, what about Heather?” said Sarah who, though she’d be the last to think it, was unwilling to stray too far from the action. “I think I should stay here and . . . ”
“I’m sure the Professor’s got everything under control,” Alice retorted. She held her right hand out to Sarah while maintaining a monopoly on Harvey’s elbow with the other.
Sarah couldn’t help but be struck by the incongruity of the idea. “He does?” she said doubtfully. Reservations to the contrary, she slowly yielded to Alice whose judgment she respected, though she often dismissed her observations as ‘feather-headed.’ They creaked together down the hall in comfortable shoes, with Harvey suspended between them.
Steps. Stairs. Little ledges between one place and another. Neither here nor there. Neither up nor down, but both at once. A great place, Albert had found, for unburdening the heart. A stratified confessional. He said nothing. So long as she sat, it would come.
It did.
“I have no family to speak of,” she said. Sniff. Sigh. Sniff. “Just a sister years older than me. She raised me.” She punctuated the statement with an ironic laugh. “Had me raised, I should say. Nannys and all, you know.” She looked up at Albert as if to reassure herself he was still there. The black depths of his pupiless eyes reflected only her. She placed her chin on her knee and told the remainder of her story to the ground.
“Heather had family out the ears,” she resumed. “She was always talking about them. She could go way back, hundreds of years, on both sides. And I loved to listen. I guess because I had none of that. Like a pauper listening to the princess tell about the ball, I suppose. I could listen all night. Often did, at school. We shared a room.
“I felt as if I knew them, in a way. I suppose that’s daft.” She didn’t raise her head. “Like Humpty Dumpty said, that’s me all over.” She laughed to herself.
Humpty Dumpty. Albert had heard the story. They had a common literary heritage.
He waited some more. He’d gotten good at waiting, though it was an art he seldom had time to practice where women were concerned.
“She was doing this paper, you see, on all her family and that. She’d been working on it for eons. We’d sit there sorting through piles of old photos, daguerreotypes, and letters. Putting names and dates to faces, filling in their lives. I guess I was adopting them. I knew them as well as she did, before long.
“The only thread she couldn’t seem to tie off was the Antrims. The second generation after Heather’s grandfather, the Royalist, moved his family back to England from the Colonies.
“The search for them lead us to the Town Hall in Bristol, and that’s where we found them. They’d gone back to America!
“Anyway. Heather was all excited, of course. We both were. She decided she’d go there – come here – to see if anyone was left.
“It took her about four transatlantic calls to track down the Judge. She wrote him a letter that very day, inviting herself over at some time in the future.”
Angela fell silent for a long time. She picked up a twig and traced letters on the granite step that only she could read. A crew of street sweepers turned onto the street.
“She was so excited,” she said at last. “We stopped at this little pub to celebrate. She always got sleepy after a few drinks, so she asked if I was up to driving the rest of the way.
“I said I was.” She released a groan of irony. “I could hardly stand!”
“So you had an accident,” Albert deduced.
Angela nodded.
“I saw it coming, and managed to roll out at the last second. Heather was sound asleep.” She raised her head and looked straight ahead, though her sight was on an image that had been burned into her heart. “She woke up just as the car broke through the hedgerows and . . . over the cliff.
“It seemed like she screamed forever, all in slow motion, you know? Then the scream sort of merged into a seagull’s cry and, that’s all there was. No crash. No explosion. It was so far down, you see. I waited; but there was nothing.
“I got up and went to . . . there was nothing at all. Nothing to see. Just huge breakers thundering on the rocks, so far down you could hardly hear them.
“There was just the tire tracks through the hedges. That’s all.”
A new, deeper silence settled on the shoulders of these revelations. By the time it was broken, the sweepers had finished the far side of the street, turned, and were coming back the near side.
“I told them she was driving,” she whispered. She burst into tears. Albert cupped his hand on her shoulder and waited for the storm to pass.
“After that, something happened in me. In my mind. I went back to school and collected her things – clothes and books – all the family things. Her passport. Her family wanted none of it. Painful memories, I guess. Told me to take what I wanted and give the rest to Oxfam or get rid of it. So, I packed it all up and threw all my own stuff away.
“Freud would have a field day with that, wouldn’t he?” she sniffed.
Albert didn’t know Freud or field days. If ignorance was bliss, why wasn’t he happy?
“I moved down to Exeter and got a job.”
“As Heather Proverb?”
Angela nodded. “The last thing I ever did as Angela – as myself – was attend her funeral. Then I just became her.
“It’s so strange. I don’t remember ever making a conscious decision to impersonate her. I don’t know what possessed me, but that day – after the funeral – I started wearing her clothes. From there, it was another step to poring over her papers, then calling myself by her name. I even practiced her handwriting. It’s as if she was still alive, somehow. As if I was the one who died. I should have been.
“The weirdest part is I knew all along what I was doing, but I sort of stuffed that voice into a closet somewhere. After a while I couldn’t hear it. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t hear it.”
“Like the family in the well,” said Albert softly.
“Mm,” she said. She nodded.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” she said after a deep sigh. “Speaking of wells, I feel as though I’ve just come up after a long time underwater. It’s hard to catch my breath.”
Albert understood.
“Within a year, I’d become more Heather than Angela. I’d saved enough money to come here and meet the Judge. I’d kept up the correspondence, just as if I was her.” She shook her head. “It must sound sick, all I did. The deceit. The lies. But, I half believed I was her; that living out this last great dream of hers would, I don’t know, atone for what I’d done, I suppose. Maybe I’d have just stayed her for the rest of my life, if it hadn’t been for what happened just now.
“Something happened when I realized you knew. The whole illusion just dissolved, like a shattered mirror. I felt dizzy.” She lifted her chin and sopped up the tears with her sleeve. “I’m okay now.”
“What happened last night?”
Angela added another note to the irony suite. “I went to get the Judge’s papers. Yesterday Marchant told me, came right up on the porch, he was going to burn them . . . everything the Judge and Heather – he and I – had been working on for so long. Everything that meant so much to us.
“I wanted to collect them the day he threw us out, Kitty and me. But I knew he wouldn’t hear of it, out of spite if nothing else.”
“Did you get them, last night?”
Angela nodded. “I also found this. It was under the bookcase beside the Judge’s desk, with just a corner sticking out.” She removed an envelope from the right rear pocket of her shorts and handed it to Albert. “I’m sure it wasn’t there earlier. Maudanne and I cleaned that room very thoroughly after the police were done.”
It was warm. “What is it?”
“I think it explains why the Judge was killed,” she said. “And who did it.”
Angela fixed her attention on the sweeper
s, as they worked their way down the street.
Chapter Twenty-Four
For a while Albert just stared at the envelope. He turned it over a couple of times. There was no stamp. No address. It was white. That was all. He opened it and pulled out the crisp, neatly folded paper within. Also white. It was a letter dated the day the Judge had been murdered.
“Asherton,” Albert read. “Asherton?”
“Asherton Pike,” said Angela, or Heather. “The Judge’s partner at the bank.”
“He’s missing.”
“Ran away with kettles full of money,” Angela corrected. “That’s what they say. Read on.” Her eyes were still on the sweepers.
Albert read on, slowly and deliberately:‘In consideration of our long association and acknowledging the friendship we have enjoyed over the years, I am compelled to disclose the following:
‘I am aware that you have misappropriated bank funds to cover personal debts to the extent of $437,698.17. How you came to do this, or what extraordinary circumstances prompted you to violate the sacred trust placed in the institution by patrons, I do not know. Nor do I care to know. Such an egregious act is beneath contempt and cannot be justified.
‘Should the missing funds be reinstated by closing of the business day Wednesday next (the 18th), I will not make your actions public, for the sake of your family and the bank’s reputation, providing you sell all your stock on the open market and submit your written resignation.
‘Should you fail to satisfy these stipulations in every particular, state and federal authorities will be promptly notified.
‘A copy of this letter . . . ’
Albert turned the page over in his hand. “That’s all,” he said.
“That’s all,” said Angela. “I think it’s enough.”
“You do?” said Albert. Apparently she was several steps ahead of him.
“Sure. Not only is it proof that Pike absconded with the funds, as everyone suspects . . . “
“Absconded?”
“Ran away with,” said Angela. “Pilfered.”
“Oh,” said Albert. English would be a much easier language if there was just one word for everything. Still, ‘absconded,’ it sounded like what it was. When he was a kid, he’d absconded with an apple from Morris Capel’s orchard once and discovered, after the first bite, he’d also absconded with a worm that came with it.
Dead in D Minor Page 24
