Crying Child (24 page)

“I don’t say anything,” I said respectfully. “You know a lot about ships, don’t you?”

“Should. My family’s from Bath. Most of the fortunes in this part of the world were made from shipbuilding and/or the East India trade. The way Bostonians talk, you’d think none but Mas
sachusetts ships ever crossed the Pacific. That’s Massachusetts bull. The Maine captains knew Canton as well as they knew Portland a century and a half ago. Hey—that reminds me.”

She ducked down out of sight under the counter. There was an interval of muttering and scrabbling, and then she reappeared, with dust in her bright hair and a grin on her face.

“Look at this.”

It was a box, about eight inches square and six inches high. Made of some light-reddish wood, it was completely covered with carvings in bas-relief. Dragons and flowers and twining vines, butterflies, snakes, beetles—every form except the human had furnished an inspiration. It sat on four small feet carved with claws, and it had handles and a clasp of tarnished silvery metal.

“Chinese?” I asked. “It’s charming. Is this one of the things your Maine captains brought back from Canton?”

“Not just any old Maine captain. This is one of Hezekiah Fraser’s treasures. Remember I told you and Mary about the things the old ladies sold me?”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten. But how do you know this belonged to Hezekiah?”

“He was the only sea captain in the family,” Sue said. “Didn’t Ran tell you about him? His son didn’t follow in his footsteps; he took over
the family business, and the Frasers have been businessmen ever since. So I assume this is one of Hezekiah’s imports. His carryings-on in the Orient have made local legend, you know.”

“I did hear about that. He must have had a regular harem out there.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I know this box has been worrying me. There are a few chairs and an inlaid table in the back, and if Ran wants to drop by and look at them, I’d be pleased. But this—it seemed to me Ran might want it if it really was one of the old Captain’s souvenirs. It’s a nice piece of work, too. Can you take it along now, or is it too heavy?”

“No.” I lifted the box experimentally. “It isn’t heavy, and the car should be right down the street. No problem. Ran will drop in one of these days and reimburse you.”

“He can have it for what I paid for it.” Sue smiled. “Plus 4 percent. I’m a businesswoman.”

“And a very nice gal.” I picked up the box. “I’d better get going.”

Sue peered out the shop window.

“Is that Ran, looking for you? It’s so hard to see in this fog…. No, it’s not Ran. It’s Will Graham.”

“I imagine he’s on his way to meet Ran. Nobody knows I’m here, so I’d better run.”

She put her hand on my arm.

“Hey, Jo. One more thing.”

I glanced at her. She was smiling broadly.

“What is it?”

“You’ve heard about me and Will? No, don’t be polite, I know you have.”

“I understand that you were engaged once.”

“And that I broke his heart?”

“Well…”

“Honestly, the people in this town.” She sighed. “And Will is the worst of the bunch.He jiltedme, Jo, that’s the honest-to-God truth. You know Will—or maybe you don’t. He was very fond of me; I think he still is. But he knew marriage wouldn’t work for us, and he’s not the type to go nobly into some dumb fool thing when he knows it’s a mistake. In order to save my face here in town, he told people I had broken the engagement; it’s better to look like a hardhearted flirt than an unwanted woman, you see.”

“But…the way he acts…”

“Act is the word. It’s partly conscience, too; the darned fool still feels guilty.”

“He doesn’t need to.” I was suddenly quite sure of that.

“No.” Her eyes—clear and blue and smiling—met mine. “Oh, I wasn’t very happy for a while. But I realized he was right. I’m too bullheaded and independent to get along with a man as domineering as Will is. Now I’m not sure I ever want
to marry. I’m enjoying my freedom. But it would be nice if Will and I could be friends again; I’d enjoy talking to him now and then.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “But sometimes I think men come from a different species altogether. They have the weirdest ideas…. Except Jed, of course.”

“Jed Willard? I’d propose to him tomorrow if I weren’t scared of Bertha.”

“Me, too. He’s a fantastic guy.”

“Will is going to be just like him in another thirty years,” Sue said.

I really believed, then, that she was telling the truth about her feelings for Will. Women are instinctive matchmakers—I wonder why?—but no woman tries to fix things up for an old boyfriend unless she is thoroughly through with him herself.

“Will doesn’t have Jed’s Olympian calm,” I said, peering out the window. “Look at him, pacing like an expectant father. Ran told him we’d meet him at the drugstore, and he’s probably furious because we aren’t there. I really must go.”

Ran was waiting when I reached the store; it was my absence that had sent Will into fits. I let him rave on for a few minutes and then I said,

“Oh, cut it out. You haven’t been here five minutes. I saw you arrive.”

“Where were you?” His eyes fell on the box,
which I had placed on the counter. It certainly wasn’t inconspicuous. “You wereshopping? ”

“You make it sound as if I’d been headhunting.” I turned to Ran. “Sue gave me this, for you. She bought it from your aunts.”

I told him the whole story. He looked amused.

“That sounds like Sue. She always did have an overactive conscience. I’ll have a look at the other stuff and pay her back for all of it. I imagine she only took this as a tactful way of giving the aunts a loan. Who would want such a monstrosity?”

He was chatting on, carefully not looking at Will. I was thoroughly out of patience with the pair of them; such a fuss about a casual boy-girl romance that had died a natural death years before. But I couldn’t ignore the slur on the Chinese box, to which I had taken rather a fancy.

“It’s not a monstrosity,” I said. “I don’t know anything about oriental art, so I can’t tell you whether it’s worth anything, but it’s certainly attractive. The metal is silver or I’ll eat my diploma, and the carving is exquisite. Look at the lock. I’ve never seen one like it. How does it work?”

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a lock; at least there was no visible keyhole. On the center edge of the lid there was a grotesque animal head; from its open mouth a tongue of tarnished silver came down over the front of the box. Clearly there was a catch of some kind connected with this ap
pendage, but my fingers moved back and forth over it without producing any results. Ran got interested.

“Let me try. It must be this metal what-not. Press on it…. No, that doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to move at all.”

“I should have asked Sue,” I said. “It would be a pity to force it.”

“There may not be anything inside. Wait a minute.” His thumbnail found a minute crevice under the tip of the tongue. “So much for that famed oriental subtlety,” he said triumphantly. “Look, it just pulls up.”

He suited the action to the words. The silver tongue lifted, and Ran raised the top of the box.

For a full thirty seconds we stood there, stupefied and staring.

The box was lined with crimson velvet, now worn and dusty. There was only one object inside. It was a miniature set in an oval gold frame—a portrait of the head and shoulders of a woman. The shoulders were draped with some light fabric, in the manner of an old-fashioned evening dress, and the white throat was bare except for a locket on a chain. But the face was the face I had seen take shape out of the shadows of the tower room.

9

RAN WAS THE FIRST TO MOVE. HE SLAMMED THE LIDof the box down as if the contents had been alive and liable to escape.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and headed for the door with the box under his arm.

We crowded into his car, which was parked at the curb. Ran turned the interior lights on and the fog shrouded the windows like curtains; we were much more private here than we would have been in the store. I understood Ran’s need for privacy. This might be the first breakthrough we had had. It was also unnerving, in a very specific way. Will was the one who put this feeling into words.

“Let me go on record,” he said, staring as if mesmerized at the painted face. “I’m resigning as group
skeptic. Do you realize that this almost constitutes legal evidence? Sue will testify that this box and its contents have been in her possession since the old ladies sold it to her. Jo couldn’t possibly have seen it before today. Mary hasn’t seen it. So how did Jo produce a portrait of this woman?”

“Somehow I find the differences between the two portraits even more convincing than the similarities,” Ran said. “The dress isn’t the same and neither is the hair style; the face is younger, happier. Yet it is unquestionably the same woman.”

He had caught the two essential differences in two words: younger and happier. This girl couldn’t have been more than twenty. The smiling face had the rounded softness of youth, and the dark hair was set in loose ringlets. The contrast between this unmarred face and the haggard visage I had drawn was extreme; and yet there was no mistaking the identity of the two. My drawing showed this girl as she would have looked after years of living—unhappy living. As Will had said, it was virtually conclusive evidence, at least to us who knew that the people involved were not in collusion.

“She was beautiful,” I murmured. “Ran, look on the back. Maybe there’s a name…”

But there was no writing on the back. There was something even more startling—another portrait. The face of a young child.

The face itself had no remarkable qualities. It’s very difficult to do good portraits of small children; they all look alike, in a way, with their round faces and buttony noses and fair, smooth skins. They haven’t lived long enough for experience to mold their faces. This was a typical vapid baby’s face, with the golden sausage curls and rosebud mouth that painters of the nineteenth century liked to put on their cherubs. But it was a baby’s face; that in itself was enough to make me catch my breath.

Ran turned the miniature over and over in his hands as if he wanted to dissect it.

“This is almost worse than nothing,” he said, between tight lips. “Who the hell are these people? There’s no name, not even a date.”

“Yes, but it is evidence,” I said eagerly. “The two go together, don’t they, the woman and the child? Ran, it’s the kind of thing a woman would have done for her husband—the father of the child.”

“Or a father might have it painted of his two children,” Will said repressively. “Jo, you’re jumping to conclusions again. The girl could be as young as sixteen; the baby, a year or two. They could be the children of the same father.”

“Oh, you’re hopeless,” I said. “Don’t look so discouraged, Ran. If you took this to a city museum—there ought to be one in Portland—an expert could tell you a lot about it. The date, maybe even
the name of the painter, if the style is distinctive enough.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow.” Looking more hopeful, Ran closed the box. “We’d better get back. It’s lunch time, and I don’t want Mary thinking we’ve run out on her.”

“I’ll see you later.” Will reached for his bag. “I have to take a patient across to the hospital this afternoon. I just stopped by to tell you that, and to ask whether you made any discoveries at the museum.”

“Nothing as spectacular as this. In fact, you’ll probably say nothing at all. There was only one odd little fact; I got it from Hezekiah’s obituary. He died as the result of a fall; tumbled down a flight of stairs and broke his head open.”

“What’s so odd about that?” I demanded. “He was probably drunk.”

Will looked thoughtful.

“No, that is slightly peculiar, Jo. I wouldn’t think a man of his age and presumed toughness would fracture a skull so easily. It must have been quite a tumble. After all, the stairs at the house are fairly wide, shallow, and carpeted; and the banisters, though they’re heavy, are just wood, with no sharp protruding carvings. Unless he—”

“Wow,” I said suddenly. “Hey. I wonder…It didn’t say which stairs he fell down, did it, Ran?”

“I got the impression that he wasn’t at home
when he fell. There was something about an iron staircase. There’s nothing like that at the house.”

“Oh, yes, there is,” I said. “Yes, there is, too. Up in the tower, in the nursery—the room where I saw her last night.”