The Withdrawing Room (17 page)

Sarah watched Charles collect the empty liqueur glasses, then decided she’d better check in on Miss Hartler. She found the sister in her nightgown, which was not to say scantily clad, since Miss Hartler wore the sort of garment R. H. Stearns used to carry for Boston ladies who went in for modesty. Nevertheless, Miss Hartler made a point of covering her yards of cotton with several more yards of flannel wrapper as she came to open the door.

“I know you’re exhausted,” Sarah told her, “so I shan’t stay. I just wanted to make sure you have everything you need for the night.”

“Dear little Sarah! You grow more like your Aunt Marguerite every day.”

Sarah winced. One Marguerite in the world was already one too many for her. However, since there was no blood relationship there was little likelihood of resemblance. Miss Hartler must either be hallucinating or trying to pay a compliment One might as well take the more charitable view.

“Do sit down and talk to me a moment,” the woman went on. “I feel so—so terribly alone.”

“Of course you do,” said Sarah. “That’s only natural. One gets over it sooner or later, or so they tell me.”

“Ah, yes. We must comfort and support one another in our bereavement. I can see how valiantly you’re trying to cope, and I admire your strength. But, Sarah dear, I can’t help wondering—of course it’s not my place to say anything, but—well, quite frankly, dear, I really don’t think that if I’d been in your place I’d have been quite so quick to fill my home with a somewhat peculiar assortment of strangers. I only say this because I’m so much older. We old folks can’t resist spreading our wisdom around where I’m sure it’s not wanted. Personally, I’d be the last to interfere—”

“And there’s no earthly reason why you should feel any need to do so,” Sarah interrupted, a good deal more briskly than she’d meant to. “I get all the advice I can handle from Cousin Dolph and my uncle, who lives a few streets over, and the rest of my relatives. As to my boarders, I’m chiefly concerned that they pay their rent on time and obey the house rules, of which I’ll give you a copy first thing in the morning. So far the only one who’s given me any serious trouble was your brother. If I’d known what a dreadful nuisance that Iolani Palace project of his would turn out to be, I doubt if I’d have taken him on. However, he was always pleasant in other respects and got along with the rest of the group even though he did manage to keep us in an uproar a good deal of the time.”

“Oh, Sarah!” Miss Hartler shook her white head sweetly and sadly. “I know Wumps was just a prankish schoolboy at heart and sometimes got a bit overexuberant, but at least he was our own sort. What do you know about those others? Little Jennifer LaValliere is all right, I suppose. Flighty and silly, but I’ve met her grandmother. This Porter-Smith, as he calls himself—”

“Came highly recommended by my Cousin Percy.”

“Oh. And that man Ormsby—”

“Professor Ormsby is a distinguished member of the faculty at MIT.”

“Ah, these mad scientists! Inventing those dreadful clones and goodness knows what else. Still, I suppose MIT is respectable enough as colleges go these days. However, that rather dangerous-looking young man who runs an art gallery or whatever it is. Bittersohn, he calls himself.”

Miss Hartler inched closer and lowered her voice to a shocked murmur. “I was trying to make conversation with him before dinner, as one does, and since little Jennifer and I had been talking about her grandmother’s work on the altar guild, I happened to ask if his own mother was involved in any such thing. He made the most incredible reply. He said, ‘No, she doesn’t even get to sit downstairs.’ Now, Sarah dear, of course you’re a young thing and you wouldn’t know, but I’m very much afraid that man is a
Jew.”

For a moment, Sarah was so furious and disgusted she couldn’t even speak. Then she managed to say through stiff lips, “I am perfectly well aware that Mr. Bittersohn is a Jew. His people are neighbors of ours at Ireson’s Landing.”

“Good heavens! Did your dear Aunt Caroline know his mother?”

“Mrs. Bittersohn is very selective in the people she chooses to know.” Sarah could be bitchy, too, given the kind of provocation she was getting now. “However, as you learned this evening, the son is not the least bit snobbish provided one doesn’t try to overstep the line. And he doesn’t run an art gallery, he’s an internationally known art expert. His work requires a great deal of travel, so he finds it convenient to have a pied-à-terre here, and I must say I consider myself unusually fortunate to have him as a tenant.”

“Dear me, I had no—I must—” Miss Hartler floundered a bit, then chose another victim. “Then this Mrs. Sorpende—this
femme fatale,
who is making such an obvious play for your cousin’s fortune—what’s she an international expert in, or would it be indelicate to ask? May one know where on earth you managed to become associated with a woman like that?”

Sarah played her trump card. “Through Aunt Marguerite.”

“Marguerite? But she’s never once mentioned—we were always such great friends—how could I have missed—”

“I believe Mrs. Sorpende is not personally acquainted with Aunt Marguerite.” Few people would be, if they knew what they were getting into when they accepted the introduction, in Sarah’s opinion. “She heard about my venture from a mutual acquaintance of theirs.”

“Oh? Then I must know that person, at any rate. Who was it?”

The only way to end this distasteful conversation, Sarah supposed, was to satisfy this nasty old creature’s curiosity once and for all. She racked her brain for the name Mrs. Sorpende had given. “Something with a B, I think. Brown? Baxter? Burns? No, Bodkin, that was it Mrs. G. Thackford Bodkin.”

Miss Hartler emitted an odd little whinny. “But, my dear Sarah, how could she? Vangie Bodkin has been dead for two years. I’ve never been to a lovelier funeral.”

S
ARAH PASSED ANOTHER TERRIBLE
night. After she’d got Miss Hartler quieted down, she’d taken the almost unprecedented step of phoning Aunt Marguerite on her own initiative. Her ostensible reason was to pass the word about Mr. William Hartler’s impending funeral. In fact, she wanted to make sure Vangie Bodkin’s had already taken place.

Yes, Mrs. Bodkin was well and truly demised. Yes, Joanna Hartler had been her bosom friend and had wept copiously at the interment. No, Marguerite had never happened to run into a Theonia Sorpende. What was she like, and why didn’t Sarah bring her down sometime?

That was what had upset Sarah so dreadfully. Aunt Marguerite was not one to forget a name or deny an acquaintance, however slight. She liked to pass herself off as the most sought-after hostess in Newport. Since she was far from being that, she had to do a good deal of seeking on her own hook. If the late Vangie Bodkin had ever so much as mentioned Theonia Sorpende in her hearing, she’d have insisted on Vangie’s bringing the woman to one of her teas, cocktail parties, luncheons, dinners, charity balls, and certainly to what she called her Sunday afternoon salons.

Even if Mrs. Sorpende had turned out to be Mrs. Bodkin’s poor relation or favorite manicurist or the lady who took up her hems, she’d probably still have got invited. Aunt Marguerite would have managed somehow to check out her appearance and conversation, found her more than presentable, and at least put her on what Sarah and Alexander used privately to call the desperate list: reasonably well-mannered nobodies who could be called upon to fill in the gaps when too many somebodies fought shy of being salonized. If Mrs. Sorpende had been involved in a scandal, that would make her even more desirable because then she could be pointed out and whispered about behind her back. Aunt Marguerite had aped a famous Washington hostess by embroidering herself a sofa pillow with the message, “If you can’t think of anything nice to say about anybody, come and sit next to me,” and she practiced what she preached.

So unless Mrs. Sorpende was an adept with the oiuja board, she must have learned from somebody other than Vangie Bodkin that Sarah Kelling was renting rooms. Then why hadn’t she given that person’s name as a reference, instead of telling a lie that could so easily get found out? There was no second Mrs. O. Thackford Bodkin; the widower was still a widower and living, so far as Miss Hartler knew, in semi-seclusion.

But exactly how secluded was Mr. Bodkin? If he was acquainted with Aunt Marguerite, and now in the position of being an available extra man, she must be pestering him with invitations right and left. Surely he must have to respond sometimes, if only to decline, unless he’d gone senile or something. Miss Hartler had no information on that point. She’d merely described him as a quiet sort of man and gone on exclaiming over the perfidy of Mrs. Sorpende’s having taken Vangie Bodkin’s name in vain while Sarah tried to make believe she herself must have got the name wrong.

G. Thackford Bodkin was not the sort of name one got wrong. Mrs. Sorpende must have heard it somewhere, somehow, and who was to say that even if she didn’t know the wife, she hadn’t been acquainted with the husband? Her own marriage had not been happy, Sarah deduced that from her one little confidence over the lingerie. If Vangie Bodkin was an intimate of Joanna Hartler, she couldn’t have been any Cleopatra, either. Perhaps the two disappointed spouses had become clandestine lovers, and perhaps Mr. Bodkin had mentioned Sarah Kelling’s lodging house venture to Mrs. Sorpende after he’d got the news from Marguerite.

Maybe that was why she’d come up here to Boston. After a decent interval, Mr. Bodkin would follow, pretend to strike up an acquaintance with an attractive stranger, and marry her.

But if the two years that had already passed since Vangie’s death wasn’t a decent enough interval, then what was? Mrs. Sorpende was no chicken and Mr. Bodkin probably well into his seventies. More likely, she’d decided she’d better get on a streetcar that was moving.

Everybody knew Sarah Kelling was broke, but everyone also knew Sarah had rich relatives, that some of them were bachelors, and that one of those bachelors was about to become a great deal richer than he was already. And Mrs. Sorpende had already met him and been a smash from the start, but Dolph was a fusty old prig and if he found out she’d been carrying on with one of Marguerite’s neighbors on the sly, he’d back off in a hurry. And if Mrs. Sorpende did have a scandal in her past, either Mr. Bodkin or any other person or circumstance, who’d have been likeliest to know and most eager to use it against her if he got the chance?

She must have sized up Mr. Quiffen right away as a troublemaker of the first water. She might also have known he was having Dolph shadowed. Who knew what her sources of information might be? If Mrs. Sorpende did want to find out anything about anyone, the odds were there’d be some man ready and willing to tell her. And if she saw her way clear to snaring the heir to Great-uncle Frederick’s fame and fortune, and if nasty old Barnwell Quiffen posed a present threat to either Dolph’s or her own prospects, might not a big, hefty woman without a decent shred of underwear to her name take drastic steps to remove that threat?

Suppose Mrs. Sorpende had got rid of Mr. Quiffen with a minimum of fuss and bother? Suppose that by a hellish coincidence she’d found his room taken over almost at once by a man from Newport; a man whose sister had been the bosom buddy of the woman she’d falsely named as a reference; a garrulous indiscreet old man who of course knew Vangie Bodkin was dead and might know a good many other things she wouldn’t care to have him blurt out at some inconvenient time. Mightn’t she be tempted to try her luck again?

Mrs. Sorpende had gone straight up to her room after he’d left the house on the night he died, but Sarah knew how easy it would have been for her to sneak down the back stairs again. By then, the rest would have gone their various ways, Sarah would be on the second floor, Mariposa and Charles in the kitchen or the basement. Mrs. Sorpende’s coat was in the front hall closet, she’d simply have to put it on and go out. If anybody did happen to see her, she could have pretended she needed something at the drugstore or wanted a breath of air or had decided to drop in on a sick friend. Sarah had known better than to give her boarders door keys, but Mrs. Sorpende had only to snap the latch back so that she could return without having to ring the bell, provided she made it before Charles put on the night lock sometime around midnight.

Mr. Hartler might very well have told her where he was going about those chairs. Mrs. Sorpende had that pleasant, gracious way of chatting at least a few minutes with everyone in the company. It would have been natural enough for her to observe, “I hope you’re not going far on such a cold night,” or something of the sort. He’d almost certainly have replied, “Oh no, just over to Fairfield Street,” or wherever it happened to be.

She’d then have known just how and where to arrange a supposedly accidental meeting, and suggest a cozy stroll through the Garden on their way back. It really was lovely with the lights in the trees and the golden dome of the State House in the background. He’d have accepted, either to oblige a lady or because he was happy the chairs were authentic or down in the dumps because they weren’t. Bashing him over the head would have been an extremely unladylike thing for her to do, but it was the most plausible way for him to die there and she could have managed easily enough, being so much larger, younger, and stronger. With his bad heart, he might have died from the shock of the blow alone.

And she could have rushed back to the house, up the rear staircase, and been ready to put on Aunt Caroline’s elegant negligee and do her act of kindness when Sarah collapsed after hearing the news. How did she happen to be awake when everyone else on the upper floors slept through the disturbance?

Mr. Bittersohn had been awake, too. He’d also been out for the evening, and he’d never said where. Maybe he himself wouldn’t mind getting his whack at those seven chairs, if they were worth as much as Mr. Hartler had seemed to think. But Mr. Bittersohn would never do a thing like that!

Anyway, what about the rest of them? How did Sarah know Professor Ormsby was really giving a paper at MIT? Or that Mr. Porter-Smith and Miss LaValliere had been together at that coffee house the whole evening? Or that some totally unknown person hadn’t come along and committed a haphazard murder for no reason other than to get at the money that was missing from Mr. Hartler’s wallet? Why should she get so wrought up just because Mrs. Sorpende had happened to drop a little white lie about her social connections?