The Silver Ghost (12 page)

Another thing most of Sarah’s relatives and in-laws couldn’t do, though, was to refrain from airing their woes to other members of the family. She’d heard through the grapevine that Lionel’s tightfistedness with his mother’s money had been annoying Vare a good deal. He’d been perfectly willing to wheedle Aunt Appie into paying for the ski lodge and the thirty-eight foot auxiliary ketch. Aside from the fact that Lionel himself liked to ski and sail, these expenditures could be justified as investments. He might, should he choose, rent the lodge for income and put the yacht out to charter. Both could be sold, hypothetically at a profit, if the family tired of them.

When it came to Vare’s yen for an expedition in the Andes Mountains, though, Lionel had been adamant. They might have got their money back on the llamas afterward, but overall they’d have had to operate at a substantial loss, and that was not the Kelling way. Lionel had also shot down Vare’s project for sailing the ketch up the Amazon, having no faith in his boys’ scheme to shoot boa constrictors along the way and smuggle the skins back into the United States for sale to handbag manufacturers. All in all, Lionel had been a sad disappointment to his wife and children of late. Would he have had the face to refuse his cooperation in what might have appeared to be an all-profit venture?

Vare and Lorista had never got along remarkably well but they were, after all, sisters. If the Dorks happened to have found out about Wouter Tolbathy’s big joke in the car shed, then it was entirely possible Vare had been let in on the secret even if Lionel hadn’t.

There was no real reason why Vare should have picked this particular weekend to go rock climbing with her sons. The spring semester at that glorified detention center they attended was not yet over and according to family scuttlebutt the boys themselves had been none too keen on being taken out. Jesse was in the midst of a complicated chemical experiment: preparing to blow up the lab, probably. Woody had been honing up his arithmetical skills by making book on the upcoming interscholastic soccer match. James and dear little Frank had spent most of the past week excavating a tiger pit into which they hoped to lure the headmaster as an experiment in psychology. Why hadn’t Vare left her hellhounds to pursue their instructive courses and accompanied Lionel to the Renaissance Revel?

There she could have danced the
volta
and the gigue with Vercingetorix Ufford, eaten authentic fourteenth-century frumenty, and hobnobbed with her long-unseen Aunt Drusilla. Had she not liked the idea of being just another guest while her sister queened it on the bandstand? But Vare could have brought along her sackbut and climbed on the bandstand, too. Or she could have stood around looking sympathetic and understanding whenever Lorista hit a wrong note. It was most unlike Vare to pass up the chance.

“Right, dear,” said Sarah. “I’ll check out Vare as well as Lionel, or would you rather do it yourself? Lorista might have some information on where they’re supposed to have gone. Will you be talking to her?”

“Not if I can help it.” Lorista was high on Max’s list of people he could do nicely without. “Fare thee well, mine own, I’d better get cracking. Call me at the Billingsgates’ if anything develops. I may not be there, but they’ll know where I am.”

“Is there any chance you may be in to dinner?”

“I hope so, I’ll call you later on. See you later, Dave. Have a good day.”

Max hunted out a relatively cereal-free spot to kiss his son goodbye, took a more comprehensive leave of his wife, and went off, leaving behind him the customary impression that he was battling his way into the teeth of a booming gale.

In fact it was overcast and blustery out. At least the Billingsgates had got the best of the fickle May weather yesterday. Sarah put the breakfast dishes in the sink for Mrs. Blufert to deal with, and flipped up the high-chair tray.

“Come on, Davy, we’d better quit lollygagging and get to work.”

By the time the housekeeper arrived, Davy was cleaned up, dressed in a striped jersey and red corduroy overalls, and happy to entertain Mrs. Blufert from his playpen while she worked. Sarah said, “Let me know if he starts to fuss,” and went into the office she and Max had planned for themselves. Here were three telephones: the green one they called the family phone, the white one used for business calls, and the red one that was their private hotline with a number known only to themselves and Cousin Brooks.

Cousin Brooks was in charge of the Boston office. For years, Max had rented a dingy cubbyhole in the by now somewhat venerable Little Building on Boston’s Windy Corner of Boylston and Tremont streets. He’d used it only occasionally as a mailing address or a neutral ground on which to hold interviews he preferred for one reason or another not to hold elsewhere. With typical Kelling penny-wisdom, Sarah had suggested a while back that since he was paying rent for the place anyway, he might as well get some good out of it. They’d spruced up the office with a few second-hand oddments so it wouldn’t look vulgarly nouveau and installed Cousin Brooks as manager.

Brooks Kelling had been working with Max and Sarah in an unofficial capacity ever since before they were married. The keenness, daring, and almost wizardry resourcefulness which the sixtyish little man had developed during his lifetime as an ornithologist had proved equally valuable in detection. Nowadays he and Sarah handled a good deal of the local work by themselves while Max tackled the more far-flung assignments.

As soon as Sarah had checked once more with Boadicea Kelling’s now distraught housekeeper, her next order of business was to get Brooks on the hotline and clue him in as to what had taken place yesterday at the Billingsgates’.

“And I’ve been trying to recall some bit of gossip I once heard about Aunt Bodie and Aunt Caroline,” she wound up. “I can’t think why it would matter at a time like this, but it keeps nagging at me.”

“I wish I could help you,” was Brooks’s unsatisfactory reply. “My mother would no doubt have known, but she’s long gone, as you know. I never did see Mother again after she took off for Switzerland with what was left of Father’s money. We’d come to our personal parting of the ways some time before that, as you know. I visited Caroline a few times, but she never once mentioned Bodie that I recall. Have you spoken to Emma?”

“No, I’ll try her next. It’s no use asking Aunt Appie, I don’t suppose.”

“Not unless you care to spend the whole morning weeding out the irrelevances. Will Max be calling in?”

“He said he would. I don’t know when.”

“It doesn’t matter. You might mention that I have a lead on the Wilton-Rugge robbery. I’m going out and poke around a bit. In case Max tries to reach me, I’ll leave a private message on the answering machine.”

Max and Brooks had worked out a verbal code of amazing complexity in the Alfred Campion manner. Often they themselves couldn’t decipher what they’d been trying to convey, but they forged on undaunted, inventing yet crazier convolutions. Sarah thought the whole business pretty juvenile, notwithstanding the fact that Max was ten and Brooks thirty years older than she, and refused to get involved with the code on the grounds that she heard enough gobbledygook from Davy as it was. She bade her consanguineous colleague an affectionate goodbye and looked up Aunt Emma’s telephone number.

Sarah had forgotten, if she’d ever known, that this was Fire Prevention Week in Pleasaunce. Emma Kelling had been an honorary member of the Pleasaunce Fire Department ever since she’d bullied her fellow citizens into raising the money for a new ladder truck. This morning, Emma’s butler told Sarah, Mrs. Kelling was off at a Women’s Club breakfast demonstrating the proper way to jump into a safety net.

“Heatherstone, you’re joking,” Sarah gasped. “No, I suppose you aren’t. What was she wearing?”

“Plus fours, a Norfolk jacket, and her Tyrolean hat. The same outfit she wore when she made that balloon ascension on behalf of the church steeple fund,” Heatherstone replied.

Aunt Emma did have a knack for the appropriate costumed Sarah thanked the butler and hung up, amused but not enlightened. She thought of making the supreme sacrifice and calling Cousin Mabel, but she flinched away and rang Jeremy Kelling’s Beacon Hill apartment instead, though she wasn’t quite sure why.

“Hello, Egbert.” Jem’s
valet de chambre
and general factotum was, like Heatherstone, an old friend of Sarah’s. “Any news from the briny deep?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Egbert replied. “It got too cold in Maine, so they’re coming back down the coast. Mr. Jem phoned from Halibut Point last night. Seems to me he ought to be rounding Marblehead Light just about now.”

“As near as that? The old sculpin, why didn’t he call me? Are they putting in at Marblehead Harbor?”

“No, they’re going straight on to Scituate, lay over at the yacht club tonight, and then going around Provincetown and down to Newport tomorrow.”

“Rats! What’s the name of that yacht he’s on, Egbert?”

“
Maphwacha III,
Mrs. Sarah. She’s a forty-five foot yawl. Mr. Jem tells me that means she has her mizzen, whatever that is, stepped aft of the wheel instead of forward as on a ketch.”

“It’s a mast.” Sarah had learned all about yawls and ketches from Cousin Lionel. “Thank you, Egbert.”

Sarah had looked forward to a morning at home with her son, but this was a chance not to be missed. “Mrs. Blufert,” she called out, “where’s your uncle this morning?”

M
R LOMAX WAS EXACTLY
where Sarah wanted him to be, down on the town dock mending one of the lobster pots he didn’t set nowadays so often as he used to. She ran her little car as close as she could and called over to him. “How’s the
Mary L.
fixed for gas, Mr. Lomax?”

“Huh? What’s up, Miz Max?”

Their old caretaker had run through a gamut of names with her: plain Sarah when she’d come to Ireson’s as a visiting child; Mrs. Alex when she’d married his then employer, Alexander Kelling; Mrs. Kelling when she’d become a young widow running the place with only Mr. Lomax’s help. He couldn’t quite bring himself to go back to plain Sarah, but he was dammed if he’d address his friend Isaac’s son’s wife as Mrs. Bittersohn. Miz Max was his solution, and it suited them both fine.

“I need you and the
Mary L.
right now,” she told him.

“She’s full.”

Mr. Lomax laid aside his lobster pot and tack hammer, straightened up and swayed back and forth a few times to get the kinks out, then climbed aboard the old but spruce twenty-six footer and held out his hand to help Sarah over the gunwale. It wasn’t until he’d started the engine and pulled outside the breakwater that he bothered to ask, “Where we headin’?”

“Toward Marblehead. I want to intercept a forty-five foot yawl named
Maphwacha III.
She left Halibut Point this morning sometime on her way to Scituate. She hasn’t been past here yet, has she?”

“Ain’t seen ’er. Here, take the wheel a minute. Keep between the channel buoys till we round the ledges.”

Sarah had done a little sailing and plenty of rowing, but she’d never handled a power boat before. She might have been nervous if she’d stopped to think about what she was doing, but there was no time for that. She kept her eyes on her course and her hands on the wheel while Mr. Lomax fiddled to get his elderly radio going:

At first all he got were squawks and sizzles that suggested a hen being fried alive, then he reached somebody with whom he had a brief chat in what sounded to Sarah like Max and Brooks’s secret code. Either the coast guard or the harbor master, she assumed. Then he took back the wheel from her and jerked his head toward a couple of ratty cushions on top of a locker in the tiny open-ended wheelhouse.

“I’m goin’ to let ’er out. Stay under cover so’s you won’t get soaked with spray.”

Sarah knew better than to pester him with questions. She flopped on the cushions, pulled her knees up against her chest, and sat as tight as the pitching and rolling allowed. It was amazing what a turn of speed the
Mary L.
could put on. She remembered Mr. Lomax telling Alexander six or seven years ago about the 360 cubic inch Chrysler truck motor he’d picked up second hand at a Chelsea junkyard. Alexander had liked talking about engines. She hadn’t cried about Alexander for a long time.

Mr. Lomax threw her an anxious look. “Ain’t gettin’ seasick?”

Sarah shook her head. “How about you?”

That got a chuckle out of him. He checked his compass, tugged his filthy old sword fisherman’s cap farther down over his bald spot, and chugged on.

The big waves weren’t running today, but the breeze was stiff enough to raise an uncomfortable chop. The sun kept poking in and out from behind a skyful of quick-traveling clouds. Sarah wished she’d brought her sunglasses and windbreaker but she hadn’t, so there was nothing she could do but stick it out.

Forever, it felt like. She still wasn’t seasick but she was getting awfully sick of the eternal up and down, to and fro, of the noise of the engine and the mingled smells of exhaust and bygone fish. Were they lost? Had they missed the yawl? They’d spotted a couple of fishing boats and one yacht, but she was a schooner. Surely they must have failed to catch
Maphwacha III.

No, they hadn’t. There she was. Sarah almost panicked.

“Mr. Lomax, what shall we do? Wave our arms and holler?”

“Good a scheme as any, I guess. Stand astern an’ let ’em see you.”

He handed her a battered megaphone. She picked her way aft and braced herself against the gunwale. Lomax knew better than to kill his engine, but he slowed down and steered straight for
Maphwacha’s
bow, shooting off his flare gun while Sarah waved and shouted through the megaphone.

“Heave to! Heave to! Stop, you idiots!”

“What the hell?” roared someone from the bridge. “Get out of the way.”

“No! Stop!”

It was either heave to or run them down. Mercifully, the yawl came up into the wind and dropped her mainsail. By now half a dozen curious faces could be seen along the rail. To Sarah’s unbounded relief, Jeremy Kelling’s was among them.

“Uncle Jem,” she shrieked.