The Gladstone Bag (24 page)

“Have you seen Dr. Wont and Miss Quainley?” she asked him.

“No, but I’ve heard them.” He grinned. “They’re probably on their way.”

Emma suppressed a sigh. “And Mr. Groot should be back any minute. He went to change a while ago.”

She thought Black John looked a trifle surprised at that, but he didn’t say anything. He mixed himself a rum and Coca-Cola—shades of Emma’s youth—and settled as close as he could get to the appetizers. The young novelist was an enthusiastic trencherman at all times, but a day of raft building and searching the blackberry jungles appeared to have given him the appetite of an anaconda. He was worse than Tweeters, Emma thought; she hoped she wouldn’t have to send back for a third round of cheese and crackers before Bubbles announced dinner. She glanced at her watch. Twelve minutes to go. It seemed a long time.

Two and a half minutes later, Miss Quainley and Dr. Wont blew in. Emma didn’t need a seeress to tell her the two had been having a royal set-to. Ignoring his companion’s sulky glowers, Wont marched straight to the bar and poured himself a tumblerful of gin. He plunked in one ice cube, waved the vermouth bottle over the glass in a token gesture, and went to sit beside Theonia, who immediately got up and went to fix a drink for Miss Quainley. The younger woman looked as if she could use one and didn’t hesitate to say why.

“I’ve just had the most ghastly experience! I stopped in to see if Alding was awake and somebody hit me on the head.”

“She’s having pipe dreams,” snorted Wont. “She bumped into the wall.”

“I am not! I was nowhere near the wall and I’ve got a lump the size of an egg. Feel it, Mrs. Kelling.”

Emma didn’t particularly want to, but she thought she’d better. Lisbet Quainley had pulled her long hair through some sort of gold-colored metal spool affair that perched on the crown of her head, creating a horsetail effect that went a bit too well with her long, thin face. Emma couldn’t feel any great swelling as she explored the skull with the tips of her fingers, but she did get a trace of blood on one fingertip. She parted the hair where it felt damp and uncovered a small cut on the scalp.

“It looks to me as if the blow may have fallen on that metal affair you’re wearing on your head and driven the edge into your scalp. The cut’s nothing to worry about, but you might as well come upstairs and let me dab some antiseptic on it.”

“Please don’t bother, Mrs. Kelling,” the younger woman demurred. “I don’t want to make a fuss.”

“Huh! Considering the fuss you’ve already made, I consider that statement wholly untenable,” Wont snarled over his gin.

“I hope you know when you’re being ignored, Ev.”

Emma wasn’t about to let the pair of them get away with any childish wrangling in her presence. “And where were you while Miss Quainley was being assaulted, Dr. Wont?” she asked him.

“I was still in my cottage. Miss Quainley had gone on ahead, having expressed the intention of checking, as she put it, on Mrs. Fath. I’d told her I’d catch up with her, which I subsequently did, only to find her on the path in a state of semihysteria.”

“You didn’t look around for any sign of the person who hit her?”

“I was then and still am disinclined to believe anybody hit her.”

Wont finished his gin and went back for more. Emma could have kicked him.

“We’d better go upstairs,” she said. Lisbet Quainley noticed the set of her jaw and went.

Like a perfect hostess, Adelaide Sabine had caused a few standard first-aid supplies to be left in the guest bathroom’s medicine chest. Emma recalled seeing hydrogen peroxide, Merthiolate, and sterile gauze pads. “Come this way,” she told her reluctant patient, and opened the door to her bedroom.

As she did so, she heard a loud thud from outside and felt a strong draft of cold air. Where was it coming from? She distinctly remembered closing her windows before she’d left her room. The sea breeze had become too brisk for comfort. Now the window at the far end of the room, the one Emma herself had never yet opened, was pushed up as far as it could go. She ran over to it, noticed the screen had also been raised, and poked out her head.

The sun porch roof was directly below, a fact Emma hadn’t quite realized until this minute. The drop wouldn’t have been much for an able-bodied person. From the roof to the ground would have been nothing at all; the wrought-iron trellis could have served as a ladder. She hoped that beautiful clematis wasn’t ruined, as if something so inconsequential could matter at a time like this.

“What’s wrong?” Lisbet Quainley was fussing again. “My God, not another!”

“I’m afraid so.”

Emma started opening drawers. They weren’t badly messed up, but they’d definitely been searched. She went back and locked the window, for whatever good that might do, then took her patient by the arm, led her into the bathroom, and sat her on the stool.

“Take that thing out of your hair, I need to get at the cut.”

“But aren’t you going to see if the burglar took anything?”

“There was nothing to take. I’m wearing my pearls and my wallet’s in my skirt pocket. Hold still, can’t you? This is messier than I’d realized. Cuts on the scalp always bleed a lot.” She swabbed out the cut with peroxide while Miss Quainley squirmed. “There you are, it’s only a flesh wound. Keep pressing this pad over the cut till the bleeding stops. Let’s go, I need to find Vincent right away.”

“What do you bet you’d already have found him if we’d got here a second or two sooner?”

“Miss Quainley! Surely you don’t believe Vincent’s the one who did this?”

“Why not? Do you know where he was?”

“He’d been in the drawing room with us until just a few minutes ago.”

“A few minutes is all it would take,” Lisbet Quainley argued. “That’s how professional burglars work, get in and out as fast as they can.”

“If Vincent had wanted to break into my room,” Emma insisted, “he’d have had every opportunity earlier in the day.”

“Would he really?”

Not while he was caring for his injured daughter. Not while he was helping his brothers cope with Jimmy Sorpende’s lifeless body. Not while he was leading his little band of searchers through the blackberry vines. This would have been as good a time as any, Emma supposed, when he knew she and Theonia were occupied with their guests. And where had Vincent been when Lisbet Quainley was being hit over the head in Alding Fath’s cottage? It wasn’t impossible that he could have gone straight there after he’d shown that startling outburst of anger and frustration, then rushed back here and gone up the back stairs to the bedroom. Emma assumed there must be a back service stairway, although she hadn’t used it or even gone looking for it. The Sabines had been of the old school. They might have been the world’s most considerate employers in other respects, but they’d never have permitted their servants to use the front stairs. And the cottages weren’t far from the house. How could they be, on an island as small as Pocapuk?

She led Miss Quainley back down to the drawing room, left her dabbing at her skull with the gauze pad, and walked quickly out to the kitchen. Bernice was in the dining room as she passed through, setting the table backward. She said, “Knives on the right, please, forks on the left,” and kept going. Neil was at the kitchen table eating chowder. Bubbles was dishing up more chowder into a majolica tureen shaped like a fish. Another house gift, Emma surmised automatically. Nobody else was in sight.

“Where’s your father?”

“In with Sandy.” Neil put down his spoon and stared up at her. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Kelling?”

“Someone was searching my room just now. When he heard me coming, he jumped out the window and escaped over the porch roof.”

“Wow!” Neil hopped up and ran into the ell. “Dad! Hey, Dad! Mrs. Kelling got burgled.”

Emma heard a chair crashing over and Vincent saying something extremely profane. He’d be along in a second. She said to Bubbles, “Where’s Ted?”

The cook kept on bailing chowder. She said again, “Where’s Ted?”

By now, Vincent was there to hear. “What happened to you, Mrs. Kelling? What do you want Ted for?”

“I want to know where he’s been for the past fifteen minutes. Miss Quainley came in a few minutes ago with a cut on her scalp that she claims she got when she stopped in to see Mrs. Fath and was hit from behind, like Sandy. I took her upstairs to fix her up. When I opened my bedroom door, I heard a loud thump. The window over the porch roof was wide open and the screen was up, so I assumed what I heard was somebody jumping out. My bureau drawers had been searched. I expect we’ll find signs on the trellis that somebody used it for a ladder. The intruder might conceivably have been you, but I prefer not to think so. It probably wasn’t Neil because when I got to the kitchen he’d been eating chowder and his bowl was almost empty. So that leaves Ted. Where is he?”

“Jesus H. Christ, how the hell do I know? I can’t be baby-sittin’—” Vincent caught himself. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kelling. Ted was s’posed to finish cleanin’ off the tools we was usin’ this morning, then come in an’ have his supper. I’ll go see if he’s still in the pony shed.”

Which wouldn’t prove a thing. Of course Ted would have run back to the pony shed and pretended he’d been there all the time. How could Vincent prove he hadn’t? How could she, for that matter? Nevertheless, she told the caretaker, “Find him, then, and hang on to him. As soon as we finish dinner, I want to talk with that young man. And furthermore, Vincent, I don’t think Mrs. Fath should be left in that cottage alone any longer. You’d better bring her up to the house right away. Neil can help you put her on the electric cart, can’t he? She’s not a big woman. There’s an extra bed in Mrs. Sabine’s room; we can put her there.”

“Where Sandy got hit on the head?” Vincent snorted. “Weil put ’er in Ted’s room. He can bunk in with Bubbles or sleep on that cot in the storeroom. I don’t care which.”

As Vincent went out, Emma turned to Bubbles with a half-smile of apology. “I’m sorry to have barged in while you were doing your last-minute touches, but I’m sure you understand why I had to.”

“Yeth, Mithith Kelling. Vinthent came thtraight out here after he talked to you. He got two bowlth of chowder and took them into Thandy’th room tho they could eat together. Vinthent’th a good man. You can quit worrying about him.”

“Thank you, Bubbles. Believe me, I don’t want to. Then you might as well get on with serving dinner. I’ll tell the others to come to the table, shall I?”

“Pleathe.”

Tonight’s meal would be a dismal farce, but what else could she do? Emma straightened her back and walked into the drawing room. Joris Groot was there; he must have just come in. Most uncharacteristically, he was holding the floor, talking loud and fast in that incongruously high voice.

“Damnest thing that’s ever happened to me. Just stopped in to see if Alding wanted anything and when I went to leave, the door was locked. From the outside! I didn’t know what the hell to do. Alding was asleep; I didn’t want to go banging and yelling and waking her up. I thought at first the door was just stuck, so I put my shoulder to it and gave it a kick, but nothing doing. So finally I opened a window and lowered myself down by the hands, which is how I got so dirty. Sorry, Mrs. Kelling, but I knew I was running late because I’d got to fiddling around with my sketch, so I didn’t want to go back and change a second time. Anyway, I went back up on the porch and would you believe, the key was in the lock.”

“It hadn’t been there when you went in?” Radunov asked him.

“No, the door was already ajar; I just walked in. If one of you clowns was trying to be funny—”

“There’s nothing funny about it,” Lisbet Quainley told him sharply. She took the gauze pad away from her head and held it out so Groot could see the blood. “This happened to me in Alding’s cottage about fifteen minutes ago. Whoever hit me must still have been there when I ran out.”

“Where, for instance?” Everard Wont still wasn’t buying.

“How do I know? I didn’t hang around long enough to search the place. In the bathroom, I suppose, or behind that curtain where Alding hangs her clothes.”

“So when I came in, the guy slipped out behind me and locked the door after him in case I might try to follow,” said Groot. “That makes sense.”

“To you, perhaps.” The gin wasn’t sweetening Wont’s mood any.

Why couldn’t whoever it was have slugged the one who most needed hitting? Emma gritted her teeth and said, “I’m told dinner is ready to be served. Will you all please come to the table?”

“Y
OU CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT
a relief it is to talk to somebody who hasn’t been hit over the head today!”

Emma was on the telephone in the pantry, Theonia in the drawing room using the one that came out of the Chinese box. The two Mrs. Kellings had been catching Sarah and Max up on the events of the day. Considering the sort of day they’d had, that had taken a fair amount of time. Now they were ready to let the Bittersohns get in a word or two.

“Have you got back the report on the orange juice?” Theonia was asking Max.

“Yes. It’s laced with what the chemist refers to as a tranquilizing agent. He’s going to see if he can pin down which one, but I don’t suppose that matters much. The point is that there’s just enough of the drug to keep a person who’s already been given a dose buzzing along nicely. How did you happen to hit on the orange juice?”

“Through your friend, Count Radunov. I thought it was awfully philanthropic of a man like him to be running a servant’s errand. I could see why the others keep popping in on Mrs. Fath; she’s one of their group and it’s natural for them to be concerned about her. From what he told Emma, though, Radunov was a stranger to them all. So when he came tripping along full of sweetness and light on his errand of mercy, I wondered. When we got to the cottage and found the place practically awash in orange juice already, I wondered a little more.”

“Theonia and I were going to take the juice ourselves, but Bubbles the cook practically threw a fit when I went to get it,” Emma added. “Did I mention last night that he’s a trained nurse? I have a hunch Bubbles suspects somebody’s been tampering with Mrs. Fath’s food; I can’t think why else he’s being so ferociously protective of her.”