The Withdrawing Room (4 page)

“Quite sure. I really shouldn’t try it if I were you, Mr. Hartler.”

If old Barnwell Augustus thought anybody else wanted the room that badly, he’d dig himself in like a badger for sheer cussedness, and she’d be stuck with him forever. One could only wait and pray.

S
ARAH HAD ESTABLISHED THE
pleasant routine of gathering her boarders in the library half an hour before dinnertime for sherry and chat. This helped her get them to the table on time in a mellow mood, and gave Charles breathing space to change from working clothes into his butler’s rigout. It also provided an opportunity to dull people’s appetites with some inexpensive but hearty hors d’oeuvres if the meal was going to be a trifle on the lean side, as it was on this particular occasion.

Mariposa was circling the room with a tray of Sarah’s hot, delicious, filling, and surprisingly economical cheese puffs. Sarah was pouring wine for Mrs. Sorpende out of a cut-glass decanter she’d been tempted to sell but was now glad she’d held on to. Though they were filled from gallon jugs of the cheapest drinkable sherry she could find, the decanters did seem to have a favorable psychological effect on the flavor.

All of a sudden it occurred to her that the gathering was several degrees more amicable than usual. Nobody was fighting with anybody. No whiny voice was pontificating about some niggling point in which nobody else except possibly the encyclopedic Mr. Porter-Smith had the vaguest interest. Momentarily puzzled, Sarah stopped short with the decanter in mid-air and looked about. Mrs. Sorpende continued to hold out her glass with an air of sweet patience. Sarah recollected herself.

“I’m sorry. It just this moment dawned on me that Mr. Quiffen isn’t here. He’s usually so punctual.”

“Been hoping he’d get stuck in the subway again, myself,” grunted Professor Ormsby, taking several more cheese puffs and settling himself where he could ogle Mrs. Sorpende’s décolletage in comfort.

Tonight, that elegant lady had enlivened her favorite black gown with a huge red silk poppy, and set a high-backed Spanish comb in her hair. Sarah thought not for the first time that Mrs. Sorpende would make a far more impressive landlady than she, and asked her to do the honors with the decanter.

“Could I ask you to take my place for a moment? I want to run out to the kitchen and see how things are getting on.”

Actually she was wondering if Mr. Quiffen might have sent a message that nobody had remembered to give her. As a rule, both members of her multi-talented staff were punctilious about such things. In fact, Charles liked nothing better than to make a stately entrance with a slip of paper on a silver tray as if he were carrying the good news from Ghent to Aix. Tonight, though, he might have got held up at the factory while Mariposa was preoccupied with the cheese puffs.

No, she found Charles bustling up the cellar stairs, white-gloved and ready to roll. There had been no message.

“Then we shan’t hold dinner for him,” said Sarah crossly. “Mr. Quiffen knows the house rules. He’d be the first to squawk if anybody else kept him waiting.”

Mr. Quiffen did not call and he did not come. They ate without him and found the experience a most agreeable change. Only Sarah could not escape the little worry that was nagging at her. It was so very unlike Mr. Quiffen not to make any kind of fuss whatever.

Perhaps she ought to call Anora Protheroe after dinner and see if Barnwell Augustus was out there. He might have got waylaid into hearing George’s bear story, which went on for hours and from which once a victim was trapped there could be no escape. Sarah’s nerves were still too raw from her own recent tragedies to tolerate any unexplained absence, even Mr. Quiffen’s, without some degree of apprehension.

After dinner they went back to the library for coffee. Sarah used the Export China that had been brought back by one of her seafaring ancestors after a successful deal in nutmeg graters, chamber pots, and other products of an advanced Western technology. The cups had the double advantage of being so small that they saved a good deal on coffee and of giving Sarah an excuse to drop an occasional nugget of family history, thus contributing to the atmosphere her lodgers were paying for.

Jeremy Kelling had already joined them twice for dinner. On those occasions the anecdotes had been a good deal more picturesque. Sarah wished Uncle Jem could be here tonight to help
her
out of her preoccupation. However, he’d gone to some kind of old Barflies’ Reunion at a suitably disreputable saloon for which the group had been forced to search far and wide, urban renewal having hygienized all their old haunts out of existence or into respectability.

Luckily, she could escape before long. Sarah had let it be known that exactly half an hour after she’d served the coffee, she would either adjourn to her upstairs lair or go out to whatever social engagement she might have, though since she’d opened her boardinghouse she hadn’t been invited anywhere. She did so tonight, leaving the others to continue socializing in the library or get on with their own plans for the evening.

As it happened, nobody was going anywhere. The lodgers were all still in the library enjoying their unaccustomed congeniality when the telephone rang at about a quarter past nine. After several rings, when it became clear that Charles and Mariposa must be in their basement quarters reading good books, listening to Bach
partitas,
or more probably doing something else, Sarah came back downstairs to answer it.

According to old-fashioned custom, the original instrument had been installed in the front hall. This was the one she answered. As the library door was open, her boarders could hear, and the babble of conversation died suddenly as she gasped, “The police station? Yes, this is Mrs. Kelling. Yes, he does. Mr. Quiffen is one of my boarders. No, I’m not acquainted with his family, but I can find out who they are. Why? What’s happened to him?”

They told her. She put down the receiver and entered the library with a face as white as the linen damask tablecloth she’d have to iron tomorrow. “I’m afraid we have some bad news. Mr. Quiffen has been in an accident.”

“What kind of accident?” demanded Mr. Porter-Smith.

Sarah swallowed hard. “He appears to have fallen under a subway train at Haymarket Station.”

“What the hell was he doing at Haymarket Station?” That was a stupid question. Oddly enough, it was Professor Ormsby who asked.

“I have no idea,” she replied.

“Is he badly hurt?” was Mrs. Sorpende’s more reasonable inquiry.

“He—” Sarah found she could not go on.

“You mean he’s dead?” squealed Miss LaValliere.

“I—I believe it happened very quickly.”

“Naturally it would have to,” said Mr. Porter-Smith. “When you consider the weight and velocity of a subway train—”

Sarah had no desire to consider any such thing. “Excuse me,” she interrupted. “I must call some friends and see if they can tell me who are his next of kin. Mr. Porter-Smith, you might pour us each a little brandy, if you will. I’ll get the decanter.”

“Please allow me.” The young pontificator switched without effort to his role as mountain climber. He was out of his chair and across the room in a bound. Sarah showed him where to find the brandy and the liqueur glasses. Then she escaped to the kitchen, where there was an extension telephone, and dialed the Protheroes’.

George was, as she’d expected, three sheets to the wind and fast asleep by this time. Anora was awake and every bit as shocked as Sarah had thought she would be.

“Barney wasn’t such a bad old wart when you got to know him,” she snuffled, “and we’d known him forever. George is going to take it hard.” As to relatives, Anora had to stop and think. “Barney never married. Or anything else,” she added forthrightly. “He could never find a woman to suit him, and if he had, she’d have known better than to get stuck with such a pest. I expect you’ve had your hands full. But Barney wasn’t any worse than a lot of others, no matter what they say.”

The parents were long gone, of course. There had been a brother, but he was dead, too. However, Anora was pretty sure she could produce a nephew and a cousin or two.

“I hope you can,” sighed Sarah. “Otherwise this may wind up as my responsibility. Frankly, Anora, I don’t think I could cope.”

“Of course you couldn’t and why should you? George is one of the executors. Poor old Barney was going to be one of his. They used to go on about which would get to plant the other. George can stir his stumps for a change. Maybe it will buck him up a bit to learn he’s the survivor instead of the survivee. I hope Barney’s rent was paid up.”

“Until the end of the week. If his heirs are anything like him, I daresay they’ll demand a refund, since today is only Wednesday. I’m sorry, Anora. I know you cared for him.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t cut any ice. I know what Barney was like. You should have heard the way he carried on after your Uncle Fred died and he found Dolph had been given the chairmanship of one of those ridiculous foundations instead of him. Anyway, whatever the nephew says, don’t give him a nickel. You’ve got to be tough if you’re to succeed at that landlady wrinkle of yours, Sarah. As soon as we’ve got poor Barney safely underground, I’ll see whom else I can dig up for you.”

“That’s sweet, Anora, but I already have one. Do you recall that nice Mr. Hartler we met at Aunt Marguerite’s? His sister is in Rome and he’s alone here in Boston, desperate to get the room. I’m sure he’d move in tomorrow, unless this thing about Mr. Quiffen turns him off.”

“Why should it? Old people know other old people are going to die. We know we are, too, though we don’t believe it till it happens and maybe not then, if you can put any stock in that parapsychology twaddle. What do you want to bet Barney’s lodging a complaint with St. Peter right now? Or more likely trying to hunt up a nasty-minded medium to put a hex on the Secretary of Transportation. Whatever happened, I’m sure he brought it upon himself. No doubt he was bending over to inspect the rails or something that was none of his business in the first place, and wondering whom he should write to about it. Now, Sarah, you go lock his bedroom door right this minute. Don’t let a soul set foot over that threshold until George and Barney’s lawyer get there. Especially the relatives. Those Quiffens are all cut from the same bolt of cloth, and pretty shoddy material it is, if you ask me.”

“Darling Anora, I do love you so!”

Sarah had been properly brought up not to get sloppy with people, but she’d also learned the hard way that it was no good bottling up your feelings until suddenly you had nobody to tell them to. Maybe that fat old woman out there in her overheated, overfurnished cavern of a house with her fat old servants and her fat old drunk of a husband would forgive being told she was loved.

At any rate, Mrs. Protheroe replied in a gruff but not snappish tone, “Now don’t you fret yourself about this business for one minute, Sarah. Take a little brandy and a hot bath, and get some rest.”

Sarah obeyed and was glad later that she had. Almost at the crack of dawn, a sharp-nosed, thick-waisted, middle-aged man who could be nobody else but Barnwell Augustus Quiffen’s nephew was on the doorstep, set to go through his uncle’s possessions before the landlady pinched all the goodies. Or so his supercilious expression implied until Charles, who had taken the day off from the factory because he thought Mr. Hudson would have wanted him to, proffered a silver salver and straightened out the caller with a lofty, “I will tell the mistress you are here. Would you care to present your card?”

As Mr. Quiffen did not have a card and was much shorter, less attractive, and infinitely less impressive than Charles, he was thus put at a disadvantage and meekly allowed himself to be herded into the library.

Sarah, having anticipated an early-morning visit, was ready and waiting, but she let the man cool his heels for five minutes or so before she descended the stairs, correct in black-and-gray tweed and a discreet strand of pearls. Having picked up a few tricks from Charles, she entered the room with exactly the right degree of hauteur.

“Mr. Quiffen?” She held out a limp hand and permitted him to touch the first two fingers. “Allow me to express my sympathy on your sad loss. This has been a shock to us all.”

“I’m going to write a mighty stiff letter to the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority, I can tell you.” No question about it, here was a Quiffen. “Now would you show me his room?” the nephew added almost in the same breath.

“Your uncle had the suite directly across the hall.” Sarah was about to add that he wouldn’t be able to get into it, but the man was over there trying the knob before she had a chance, so she merely sat down and waited. In a moment he was back, his nose twitching as his late uncle’s would no doubt have done in a like circumstance.

“I can’t get in. What’s wrong with the door?”

“Naturally I instructed my manservant to lock it as soon as we got word of your uncle’s death,” Sarah replied calmly.

“Then would you kindly instruct him to unlock it again?”

“Certainly, as soon as Mr. Protheroe arrives with the other executor. I assume you have made the necessary arrangements to meet him here?”

“Protheroe? That old—why, I never—”

The nephew began gobbling like an infuriated turkey. Sarah touched the small silver bell at her elbow. Charles, who had been lurking in the wings enjoying the show, entered on cue.

“You rang, madam?”

“Charles, would you telephone the Protheroe residence? Present my compliments and inquire whether Mr. Protheroe plans to come here this morning. If so, find out what time we may expect him to arrive, and give Mr. Quiffen that information. Mr. Quiffen will then either wish to make a proper appointment and return later or wait here in the library, depending on Mr. Protheroe’s plans. If he chooses to wait, have Mariposa bring him some coffee. And now, Mr. Quiffen, I must ask you to excuse me. I have some things to do.”

Giving his comeuppance to this not very pleasant man who had so obviously expected to barge in and stamp all over her afforded Sarah no cause for rejoicing. She’d sent Charles out for the morning papers and found as she expected that they’d pulled out all the stops. The late Barnwell Quiffen had “fallen or jumped” in front of the train. Altogether too much was made of the fact that he’d been staying with Sarah Kelling, to whom they’d already given more publicity than anybody but a movie starlet could ever want.