Corpus Christmas (3 page)

The huge attic was warm and smelled almost like a hayloft—a clean, dry mustiness compounded of old cardboard, lavender, and
mothballs. Odds and ends crowded the space in an orderly fashion: wooden wardrobe boxes, storage cartons of all sizes, trunks,
spare furniture, and, to Rick’s surprise, a makeshift office of sorts.

At the far end of the attic, extension cords had been strung for lights and a typewriter, and three old tables formed a U-shaped
desk for a man who sat reading intently, half hidden from their view by tall metal file cabinets in which were stored a hundred
years of Breul papers.

He did not look their way. “Who’s that?” Rick murmured. “Dr. Shambley.” Pascal put his finger to his lips. “Shh.” He pointed
to the remaining boxes of Christmas decorations, gave half of them to Rick and started back down. Not until they were at the
bottom of the attic steps did he speak again. “Dr. Shambley’s new. Mrs. Beardsley doesn’t like him.”

Rick remembered that his grandfather had mentioned a new trustee who was an art historian or something. “Why doesn’t she like
him?”

“I don’t know,” answered the young handyman, but his manner was uneasy and Rick wondered if it were only Mrs. Beardsley who
didn’t like the new trustee.

On the third floor, they had to edge around the tourists who blocked the hall’s frosted glass doors as flash cameras and video
minicams recorded the turn-of-the-century house-maid from the toe of her lace-up boots to the tip of her starched cap.

There was no sign of the day-care group until the two men descended past the final turn on the stairs and saw the children
being herded across the wide entry hall like a flock of pigeons. The teacher’s voice echoed off the marble walls as she called,
“Now who has to use the bathroom before we put our coats back on?”

“I do! I do!” they all cried and streamed for the cloakrooms on either side of the main entrance.

Mrs. Beardsley wore a determined smile on her face, a smile that became genuine as Pascal Grant set down his load of boxes
and said, “We got them all, Mrs. Beardsley.”

“Wonderful, Pascal. Now if you’ll set up the ladder and if Mr. Evans will help you with the lights—though why we can’t have
real candles just once, I’ll never understand,” she fretted, half to herself. It was Mrs. Beardsley’s annual regret that the
insurance company and the New York City Fire Marshall were both so stuffy about using real candles on the tree.

Helen Aldershott rolled her eyes at the others and continued to untangle the tiny electric candles that would light the tree
safely, if anachronistically.

It was a little past one and the docents were beginning to murmur of missed lunches before the last glass angel was fastened
to the last bare twig. After one final inspection, Mrs. Beardsley nodded imperiously to Miss Ruffton, who tapped on the director’s
door and summoned him to preside at the lighting ceremony.

Every hair was sleekly in place and a festive red tie was knotted beneath his pointed chin as Benjamin Peake emerged from
his office, more urbanely than the butler who had once occupied that corner of the mansion. He acknowledged the hours the
women had worked to transform the mansion’s formality to a Dickensian festiveness, and he assured them that he spoke on behalf
of the trustees when he expressed their appreciation—his, too, of course—for their artistry and dedication.

Benjamin Peake possessed a rolling baritone that filled the marbled hall and floated up the stairwell. Alerted by his formal
tones, a small crowd soon gathered around the tree and even spread themselves along the staircase for a better view.

When he was sure of everyone’s attention, the director drew his remarks to a close and smiled graciously at his audience.
“A very merry Christmas to you all,” he said and clicked the switch Pascal Grant had rigged.

“Ah!” everyone exclaimed, as the tree blazed forth in all its Victorian glory.

Fourteen senior suburbanites, in from Connecticut for the day and fresh from touring the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace a short
walk away, had gathered in the entry hall for a guided tour. Several began taking pictures of each other in front of the Christmas
tree.

“Your tree is much prettier than Teddy’s,” one of the women told Mrs. Beardsley.

Pascal Grant paused in the act of carting away the ladder and storage boxes. “Hey, Rick,” he said. “Want to see my window
now?”

Rick Evans made a show of looking at his watch. “Sorry, Pascal, but I’d better finish taking pictures of the tree.”

Yet when he saw the open disappointment on the other’s face, he relented. “Tell you what, though. Why don’t I come a little
early tomorrow, around four? You can show me then, okay?”

“Okay!” Grant nodded happily.

* * *

At the top of the house, Roger Shambley lifted his massive head from a letter that had been misfiled in a cabinet with some
of Erich Breul’s business papers.

“
Sorgues?
” he muttered to himself, remembering that name from a biography he’d once read. “August of 1912? Hmm… now wouldn’t that be
something?”

He looked past the circle of bright light in which he sat, out to the dim stretches of attic crammed with boxes and trunks,
and wild surmises filled his head.

“
Silent, upon a peak in Darien,
” he jeered at himself.

And yet—!

In another attic several blocks southeast of the Breul House, a different discovery had just been made.

While renovating their old, but newly purchased, red brick row house in the East Village, Daniel and Gigi DeLucca had found
a rusty tin footlocker pushed up under the eaves of the fourth-floor attic behind stacks of
National Geographic
s
.

“Old books?” he’d wondered.

“Old clothes,” she’d guessed.

The hasp was rusted tight. “Blackbeard’s treasure,” they decided and, lustily chanting, “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho! Yo-ho!” they had hauled it downstairs and pried it open with a crow-bar.

Inside they found an unpleasant musty odor and four little bundles wrapped in stained newspapers.

“Pigeon bones?” she asked as she finished unwrapping the first bundle.

“I don’t think so,” he said and carefully laid the second bundle back in the chest as if afraid it would explode.

It was a tiny mummified figure, entwined in what looked to the man like a shriveled grapevine but that the woman instantly
recognized as an umbilical cord.

They left the last two bundles for the police.

Lieutenant Sigrid Harald arrived shortly after an assistant from the medical examiner’s office. “I’m no Dr. Oliver when it
comes to bones,” said Cohen, referring to one of the country’s leading experts on human skeletal remains, “but off the top
of my bead, I’d say all four are human and all died within hours of their births.”

“When?” asked the tall, gray-eyed lieutenant. “How the hell do I know?” Cohen answered testily. They looked at the dates on
the yellowed newspapers in which the four pathetic remains had been wrapped. The earliest was March 4, 1935; the latest was
April 1, 1947.

“Look there, Lieutenant,” said Detective Jim Lowry.

He showed her a flaking page of newsprint that headlined the allied invasion of North Africa. Overlaying a map with arrows
pointing to Algiers were four faded brown ovals that looked very much like old fingerprints made by bloody adult fingers.

Friday, December 11

T
HANKS TO THE SUSSEX SQUARE PRESERVATION
Society, which had successfully fought to retain them, six of the city’s last original gas streetlights survived in working
order, and here in the early December twilight their soft flickers gleamed upon polished brass door handles and kick plates.

A through street for cars and taxis passed along the bottom of the square, but when vehicular traffic was banned from the
northern three sides around the small park, the original cobblestone carriageway was repaved in smooth brick, a substitution
Mrs. Beardsley regretted anew as she stood in the doorway of number 7 and watched the last visitors descend the broad marble
steps.

Mrs. Beardsley lived diagonally across the park at number 35. As senior docent, however, she spent almost as much time at
the Breul House as she did in her own. She had hoped for the seat on the board of trustees that had recently gone-to Dr. Shambley,
but until that prize dropped into her lap, she would continue to conduct tours of the house, arrange seasonal decorations,
and intimidate the reduced staff.

Mrs. Beardsley’s officiousness might weary Benjamin Peake—especially when he was called upon to calm the ruffled waters she
left in her wake—but the director revenged himself with the secret knowledge that the woman would never become a trustee as
long as he had a say in the matter. Otherwise, he had no intention of discouraging her interest in the place. After all, she
deferred to his position, she was capable of surprisingly shrewd promotional ideas, and she worked tirelessly without a salary,
of itself no small consideration, given the Erich Breul House’s current financial difficulties.

Although a discreet sign inside the vestibule suggested donations of three dollars per person to view the house and its contents,
at least a third of those who came either donated less or brazenly ignored the sign altogether. This wouldn’t have mattered
if hundreds daily thronged the house. Sadly, the two who had just departed were the forty-first and forty-second of the day.

An average day these days.

Mrs. Beardsley sighed and lingered for a moment in the chill twilight. She considered herself a closet romantic and the square
was at its wintertime loveliest tonight. The very sight of it restored her good spirits because she could, she thought, take
credit for its beauty—not only for the gaslights but even for the tiny colored lights that twinkled upon a tall evergreen
at the center of the square’s handkerchief-size park.

The tree represented compromise. Every year the question of decorative Christmas lights came before the Sussex Square Preservation
Society and every year Mrs. Beardsley had managed to block their use. This year a younger, more vulgar contingent from numbers
9, 14, and 31 had rammed the motion through. Mrs. Beardsley had then rallied her forces and carried a vote that limited the
lights to a single tree.

With predictable incompetence, the arrivistes had under-estimated how many strings it would take to bedizen every twig, so
the evergreen emerged more tasteful than Mrs. Beardsley had dared hope. In fact, it was even rather festive but Mrs. Beardsley
had no intention of admitting that to a soul. Give them an inch and they’d string every bush next year.

One electrified tree was anachronism enough.

An icy gust of wind made the tall spruce dip and sway and Mrs. Beardsley shivered with a sudden chill that had nothing to
do with the plummeting temperature.

“Somebody just walked over my grave,” she thought and hurried inside.

Footsteps sounded on the marble stoop behind her and she held the tall door open a crack.

“I’m sorry but we’re just closing and—oh! Mr. Munson. I didn’t realize it was you. Do come in.”

With a thin gray beard that hung down over his woolly muffler, Jacob Munson was small and spry enough to remind a more fanciful
imagination than Mrs. Beardsley’s of an elf escaped from Santa’s workshop. Adding to the illusion was the perennial cloud
of peppermint fumes in which he had moved ever since his doctors forbade cigarettes, and his eyes danced with merriment and
goodwill beneath his wide-brimmed black fedora.

“Mrs. Beardsley, is it not?” A slight German accent underlay his friendly tone. “The others are here?”

“I believe so.” She started to escort him toward the director’s office at the far end of the vaulted marble hall where the
others were gathered when she suddenly found her outstretched arm draped with Mr. Munson’s muffler and overcoat. His hat and
gloves followed in rapid order and he himself was speeding across the polished tiles before Mrs. Beardsley could make it clear
that she was not some sort of resident butler or hatcheck girl.

Miffed, she carried the art dealer’s outer garments over to a bench near Miss Ruffton’s desk and dumped them there, grateful
that the secretary had not been required to attend tonight’s informal meeting and had therefore missed this minor humiliation.
Miss Ruffton was an enigmatic young black woman who never talked back or argued, yet Mrs. Beardsley suspected that she secretly
enjoyed any affronts to the older woman’s dignity.

As she put on her own coat and gloves to leave, Mrs. Beardsley subconsciously tried to fault Miss Ruffton but found nothing
to seize upon. The secretary’s gleaming desktop was bare except for an appointment calendar, a pot of red poinsettias in gold
foil, and one of those stodgy brochures that outlined the history of the Erich Breul House.

And that reminded Mrs. Beardsley: Where was young Mr. Evans? Didn’t Mr. Munson expect him to join them? She pushed back the
cuff of her cashmere glove and glanced at her watch. Everyone else was there except him.

“Boys!” she murmured to herself. With her children hundreds of miles away and occupied by families of their own, she had unconsciously
transferred her maternal interest to Pascal Grant, who would never completely grow up. And she’d be quite surprised if Rick
Evans were a day past twenty. Now what sort of mischief, she wondered, could be keeping those two so long in the basement?