The Plain Old Man (17 page)

Emma waved her gloves in horror. “Sheer madness. If you do, Mabel will nag you into chauffeuring her all over Pleasaunce and you’ll be stuck for the afternoon. Heatherstone will return punctually at half-past one with a message that you’re urgently needed here. That will give you a safe out and Mabel can revile me instead of you for breaking up her party.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, not that I don’t expect to be reviled for something or other anyway. Where’s Cousin Frederick?”

“He asked us to drop him at Charlie’s place. I do hope he’s not going morbid. All this detecting, you know. I’m not sure it’s healthy.”

“I’ll ask Max when he comes home. Here’s your list. The checks mean yes, the x’s mean no, and the question marks mean they’re to call back. No mark, no luck.”

Sarah kissed her aunt and got into the car. She didn’t mind being driven, actually. She could use a few minutes of doing nothing at all. Except, unfortunately, worry.

What did Frederick think he was looking for now? Maybe just papers to do with Charlie’s estate? She kept forgetting he was an executor. Still, Sarah wished he hadn’t gone there by himself. That had been a funny remark of Aunt Emma’s, “I’m not sure it’s healthy.” She wasn’t usually tactless, unless one was trying to interfere with her current project. The worst of it was, she was right. Detecting could be the unhealthiest activity possible for a feisty old amateur who didn’t know where the hazards might lie.

“Heatherstone,” she said, “it mightn’t be a bad idea for you to stop by on your way back and see if Cousin Frederick’s changed his mind about lunching with my aunt.”

“I was thinking of that myself, Sarah. To tell you the truth, I don’t much like him being over there alone.”

She might have known he’d see through her feeble wile. “It’s just that all these nasty things have been happening. I wish my husband would come home.”

“Better not say that in front of Miss Mabel. She’ll have you divorced before you’ve finished your soup.”

“What makes you think I’ll get any soup? Ever stop to think what a privileged position you’re in, Heatherstone?”

“Sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn,” he replied somewhat huffily.

“I didn’t mean that, silly. I meant about never having to eat lunch at Cousin Mabel’s. She’s always on a strict diet, you know, when she’s the one who’s paying for the groceries.”

“Has to be, I suppose, on account of the way she eats when it’s somebody else’s grub. Mrs. Heatherstone’ always cooks extra when we’re having Miss Mabel over, and I must say she never has to worry about what to do with the leftovers. Not that she minds doing it, you understand, and not that Mrs. Kelling would ever begrudge anybody a square meal regardless. Well, here we are, Sarah my girl. I better get out and hold the car door for you or she’ll be down here reminding me I’m paid to wait on my betters.”

“Not in front of me, she won’t. Thanks, Heatherstone. I’ll see you in a while, then. Just sit outside and honk the horn.”

On that outrageous note, Sarah allowed herself to be helped from the car in grand style. She refrained from waving good-bye to the chauffeur and swept up the walk, her nose in the air and her heart in her boots.

B
ACK BEFORE RESTORING VICTORIAN
houses got to be fashionable, one of Emma Kelling’s Boston friends had described Pleasaunce as a town where the architectural sins of the fathers were visited upon the children. There did seem to be a disproportionate number of leftover offspring rattling around inside their beporched and beturreted ancestral piles. Mabel Kelling was one of the rattlers.

Whereas Emma and Beddoes had, by judicious remodeling and decorating, made their house a thing of beauty, and Frederick, by self-denial, had turned his into a philanthropy, Mabel had elected to keep the agglomeration of stained glass and chocolate-colored clapboard she’d inherited just the way it was. The way it was was awful.

Mabel’s long-departed grandparents had chosen wallpapers that wouldn’t show the dirt. As the papers still hadn’t been showing the dirt to any noticeable degree when her parents took over the house, the said parents had let them alone. Whether or not they were finally showing the dirt would have been difficult to ascertain. Whatever the pattern might once have been, it looked now like a great deal of undercooked pigs’ liver.

By inheritance or pillage, Mabel had acquired a great deal of furniture. Unlike Emma, Mabel did not keep the overflow in her cellar. She preferred, as she often said, to enjoy her treasures. What enjoyment Mabel derived from three hatstands with hangers made of real deer hooves, three worsted-worked love seats, and a large bronze statue of Atlas carrying an illuminated globe on his shoulders and having his private parts discreetly dealt with by means of a barometer set into his lower abdomen was a mystery not even Max Bittersohn would have cared to tackle. And that was just the foyer.

Sarah had to sit on one of the love seats for several minutes while Zeriah, the maid, a hard-bitten specimen from the wilds of upper New Hampshire who claimed she could lick her weight in wildcats and worked for Mabel, it was assumed, to keep in trim, went to find out if the mistress was in. This was routine procedure. If Sarah hadn’t been on time to the dot, Mabel would have been out on the doorstep with blood in her eye.

In due course the lady of the house made her entrance. Mabel was a big woman like Aunt Appie, but a good deal dressier. Over the years she’d collected the wardrobes of several departed relatives, and naturally wanted to enjoy these treasures along with the rest. Today she had on a Voices of Spring number in green and yellow chiffon with trailing sleeves, trailing shoulder panels, and various other trailing bits here and there, all of them wildly aflutter as she tramped down the hall in her sensible brown oxfords. With her high color and masses of badly waved white hair, she looked something like a giant peony in a windstorm, Sarah thought. The peony, of course, would have been prettier.

“Well, Sarah, you finally made it,” was her affectionate greeting. “I’m surprised you managed to spare the time.”

Her bulbous blue eyes were fastened on Sarah’s waistline as she spoke. “Nothing doing in the family line yet, eh? You don’t have much luck with husbands, do you?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say that,” Sarah replied with a wicked little smile she’d been practicing for just such a contingency. “You’re looking well, Cousin Mabel. What an interesting dress you have on.”

Mabel Kelling was not to be beguiled by flattery. She hated being told she looked well almost more than she hated being told she looked ill. She treated Sarah to an account of her latest brush with the Grim Reaper, a spectacular gastric upset designed, no doubt, to account for the meager fare of which they were about to partake and, with luck, to destroy her guest’s appetite altogether.

Sarah didn’t care, she hadn’t come here to eat. She threaded her way among the hassocks and taborets to the morning room, accepted one of the many chairs there present, and waited patiently for Zeriah to come and serve her a grudging puddle of abominable sherry in one of Great-aunt Berengaria’s ruby-glass goblets.

Mabel took the best of the chairs for herself, spent some time getting comfortable, then buckled down to business. “I suppose there are great doings over at Emma’s this week. Everybody working for her full tilt so she can reap the glory as usual.”

“It hasn’t been all fun and games,” Sarah was willing to concede in the interests of diplomacy. “I suppose you’ve heard about poor Charlie Daventer.”

“Fell in the bathtub blind drunk and cracked his head open,” Mabel replied with unconcealed relish. “I understand they found him stark naked except for a black-lace garter belt and a pair of rhinestone ear-rings.

“Cousin Mabel, whoever told you that? Isn’t it amazing how vicious gossip gets around? Don’t you often wonder who thinks up these wild yarns?”

“Oh, Sarah, don’t try to pull that guileless act with me. Considering the scandals you’ve managed to get yourself mixed into, a person might think you’d know the facts of life by now. Everybody knows what Charlie Daventer was. Why do you think he never married? All that nonsense about being devoted to Emma. Huh!”

Mabel touched her sherry glass to her lips and brought it away with the puddle undiminished. “Is it true he’s left his money to some young fellow he’s been running around with?”

“Heavens, no. He’s left it to the school for the handicapped. And I know that for a positive fact because Cousin Frederick’s an executor and he told me so himself.”

“Ah, I see. Then it was one of the male teachers from the school.” Mabel treated herself to a genuine gulp of her sherry. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I always did think there was something fishy about that place. All those do-gooders cooped up together with a pack of cripples. I must attend the next open house and see what’s going on.”

“Mabel, you wouldn’t.”

“Sarah, a woman in my position has a civic duty to keep an eye on the morals of the community. You wouldn’t understand that, obviously. More sherry? Then let’s go in to lunch,” Mabel added without giving Sarah a chance to say yes or no.

“Frederick must be sick as a dog that Charlie didn’t leave him anything,” she observed as she tucked her flutters under her napkin. “Not that Fred needs it, surely. He’s got the first dividend he ever collected, salted away in a Swiss bank to duck the income tax as Dolph must have told you.”

“No, he never did. Dolph’s fairly sound on the laws of slander.”

“Slander? What’s slander got to do with Charlie Daventer’s money? You’re getting more like your father every day of your life. I hope you can eat sardines.”

Sarah thought she could, as there was only one of them on her plate along with a paper-thin slice of tomato, half a gherkin, a wisp of lettuce, and a dab of mayonnaise. She said it looked delicious and changed the subject, not that she expected it to do much good. “Are you coming to the show tonight?”

“I haven’t seen anybody offering me a ticket.” Mabel snapped the tail off her sardinne, large white dentures clicking sharply.

“You know Aunt Emma never gives anybody a complimentary ticket. If she did, she’d wind up papering the whole house and there’d be no money raised for charity.”

“I thought charity began at home. What’s it supposed to be in aid of this time? Dolph starting a home for retired barflies, now that he’s collected all those empty beer bottles?”

“Oh, he doesn’t have any. Ever since the bottle bill was passed, they’ve been making a fortune on the refunds.” Sarah did enjoy watching Mabel wince. “The recycling center’s wholly self-supporting now. They’ve added a lounge where they serve things to eat and have lots of comfortable chairs. Mary says one of the problems of being a street person is that you never get to sit down where it’s really comfortable. Getting back to Aunt Emma, she’s doing this one for the Visiting Nurses’ Crutch and Wheelchair Fund. I just hope Ridpath Wale won’t be needing their services tonight. He had a little fall at the dress rehearsal and twisted his ankle. You know Ridpath, don’t you?”

Cousin Mabel gave her head the sort of toss Queen Elizabeth I might have used on Lord Burleigh. “I believe I may say so. He pestered me for years to marry him, as you apparently hadn’t heard.”

Sarah had not heard. She had been treated to similar confidences about other unlikely men. To do Mabel justice, some of them might have been almost halfway true. Mabel had, after all, been the only child of rich parents. As Dolph had once remarked, any girl could look beautiful sitting on top of a million dollars.

Mabel’s fortune must be considerably bigger now than when she’d inherited it. It was beyond the realm of imagination that she’d ever touched a penny of her capital, or even dipped deeply into the accrued interest. Speculation on whom Mabel was going to leave her money to was a favorite rainy-day sport among the several branches of the Kelling clan.

“I’ve been wondering why Ridpath isn’t married,” she replied with calculated hypocrisy. “How romantic, Cousin Mabel. But why didn’t you like him? Ridpath has such lovely manners, and he’s quite good-looking, don’t you think?”

“Looks aren’t everything.” Mabel was holding her gherkin by its stem and eating it in tiny nibbles, like an oversized chipmunk with an undersized nut. “I could never marry a man who gambles.”

“Oh? No, I’m sure you couldn’t. Does Ridpath gamble heavily?”

“The day I heard he was buying stock in some fly-by-night company that claimed to be making a camera that could develop its own film, I knew it could never be. I remember my sainted father telling me on my fourth birthday when he gave me my first very own safe-deposit key, ‘You hang on to your municipal bonds, Mabel, and keep out of the stock market. It’s no fit place for a respectable woman.’ So Ridpath married somebody else, just to spite me.”

“But he’s not married now, is he?”

“No, she left him ages ago. They swept it all under the rug, of course, one of those nonsensical no-contest divorces citing irreconcilable differences. Huh! She couldn’t reconcile herself to his throwing money down the drain, nor he to her carrying on with every man she could get her hooks into. Anyway, he drinks. Like a fish,” Mabel added, waving the remains of her sardine around on her fork for emphasis.

“Does he?” said Sarah. “I hadn’t noticed, particularly.”

Mabel snorted. “You’re hardly the most observant person in the world, are you? Otherwise, you might have observed who it is that new husband of yours takes with him on those so-called business trips he’s always trotting off on.”

“It’s usually me. Anyway, I can hardly send a private detective to spy on him when he’s one himself, can I?”

Sarah finished her sardine and ate the wilted lettuce, knowing she’d get a lecture on the starving people of Africa if she left anything but the pattern on her plate. “You mustn’t fret about Max, Cousin Mabel. He’d never take another woman with him unless he could figure out a way to put her on his expense account, and he wouldn’t do that anyway because it all comes out of his own pocket in the end. What about Jack Tippleton? He’s something of a philanderer, I gather from the way he’s been acting with one of the women in the cast, but Aunt Emma claims he’s all talk and no action.”