A Study in Revenge (19 page)

His lamplight revealed another dirt basement, but this one showed evidence of regular use. Lean peered into one of many open-topped crates and saw empty liquor bottles. Above him, through the floorboards, he heard several people talking and a strange cracking sound that it took him a few seconds to identify as pool balls being struck. Lean tried to reckon his location, but he’d lost track of his bearings in the tailor’s cellar and then the winding tunnel.

The mystery was solved when a door to the ground floor opened, casting a shaft of light into the basement from above.

“That better not be you down there, Murphy. If you’re busting into any of my casks, I’ll split your damn fool skull open.”

Lean recognized the gruff voice as belonging to John Foden, the proprietor of a billiard hall and saloon on Fore Street, near the corner of Market. The man’s bulging midsection made its appearance on the staircase, followed shortly by the thick white mustache and goatee that dominated his otherwise hairless head. Foden marched down with a
purpose, a sturdy wooden truncheon in hand. Lean held his lamp up and waited for Foden. The sight of the deputy caused the air to go out of the stout proprietor, who stuck his weapon into his back pocket.

“Deputy Lean, how’d you? I mean …” Foden paused and glanced about at the stacked boxes of liquor and casks of beer.

While it was generally given little more than lip service, the state of Maine did have a liquor law on the books prohibiting the sale of alcohol except by authorized agents, and that generally for medicinal or commercial and manufacturing purposes. Foden managed only a shrug as he decided to meet the potentially awkward situation head-on.

“Is this going to be much of a problem?” he asked, nodding toward the copious evidence of his violations of the liquor law.

Lean weighed the situation. The augers had been left on the tunnel side of Foden’s beer closet. Whoever had brought them in through this side in the first place didn’t want them to be seen on the way out. If Foden was involved, or even knew what was going on, he wouldn’t bother to hide the tools from himself. Still, it was the only lead, and Lean needed it to pay off.

“No, not much. So long as you tell me who’s been coming through your cellar to reach this tunnel back here.”

A look flickered in Foden’s eyes. In the dim light, Lean couldn’t tell whether it was confusion or fear.

“Sorry, Lean, but I guess this is going to be a problem.”

“You’d be looking at a very big fine.”

Foden shook his head and spit on the ground. “There’s things far worse in this world than that,” he muttered, then crossed himself.

Y
OUR GRANDFATHER WILL BE WITH YOU IN JUST A MOMENT
, sir.” Cyrus Grey’s butler, Herrick, took Perceval Grey’s hat and walking stick. “Where would you care to wait for him? The attic? The gardening shed? The rest of the staff and I always like to place a small wager.” He couldn’t resist a dry smile.

“The study will do.”

“Excellent, sir. Yet disappointing.”

Though the majority of his time had actually been spent away at various schools, Grey had been raised in his grandfather’s house from the age of seven through his teenage years. When Grey was at home, Herrick had often been cast in the role of his avuncular caretaker. Now, however, he was formally a guest, and so Herrick felt obliged to show him to the study. An immaculately organized cherry writing desk stood before windows that looked out over the back garden. Stocked bookshelves lined the walls.

“Can I bring you anything, sir?”

Grey shook his head and asked in return, “How’s the old man faring these days?”

“Well and good, sir.”

“You’re normally a very convincing liar, Herrick. So I can only assume that despite your perceived duty to him, you actually desire to tell me some less optimistic news.”

“I take exception to that, sir.” The stout, middle-aged butler’s round face retracted a bit, forcing his jowls into sharp relief.

“Which bit?”

“That I occasionally engage in deception—even when needed as part of my household duties.”

“But not the other part? That you are well skilled in the art?”

“No, not so very much, in truth,” Herrick said.

“Out with it, then.”

“Nothing particular, sir. He’s just becoming a bit more … shall we say, deliberate in his movements. And this heat hasn’t done much for his spirits.”

“Has his physician been around recently?” Grey asked.

“Saw him for that cough he had in April.”

“Maybe you could telephone, see if the man’s willing to stop by for an unscheduled social call of some sort.”

“I think that would be wise, sir.”

“That is, if you don’t object to a bit of deception.”

“I think I can make a small allowance, just this once,” Herrick said.

“Right. Thank you, Herrick.”

Once alone among the books, Grey moved along the right-hand wall, then knelt down at the far end to see the spines on the second-bottommost shelf. There, tucked deep among thicker volumes, was his late mother’s family Bible, right where he’d placed it years earlier. He slipped the volume from its spot, cradling it in his hands. The book was old and hadn’t always been treated with the greatest of care during his mother’s travels. It carried the musty scent of stale, yellowed pages. He opened the cracked, stained cover and saw the name of Eliza Grey penned in the studied yet graceful hand of a girl. Below this, in a more forced and rigid hand, he saw the final message she’d left for him. Although it had been two decades since he’d last seen the words, he didn’t need to read them. He’d done that countless times in his youth, and the few delicate lines were ingrained in his memory. Still, he let his eyes run over the page.

Grey folded the book once more and felt the stiff cover beneath his fingers, as if he could draw something further out of it. His grandfather’s muffled voice and the slow procession of feet down the staircase reached his ears. He carefully replaced the Bible and walked out the door and a short way down the hall.

“Yes, Perceval, come out of the library. I can’t believe there’s anything left in there that you haven’t already conquered.” A thin smile crept onto Cyrus Grey’s pale, arid face as he spoke, revealing long, yellowish teeth.

Perceval guessed that the welcome was intended as a feint, an effort by his grandfather to make his descent down the stairs seem effortless. Even though thick carpet runners lined the steps and made a slip unlikely, Herrick followed at his master’s elbow ready to lend assistance. Grey studied his grandfather’s appearance. The stark white light beaming down from the electric chandelier made Cyrus’s fair skin seem almost translucent. There was barely a difference in hue between the eighty-year-old man’s bald pate, stretched taut across his cranium, and the strip of ghostly white hair that circled from temple to temple, dropping down at each end point to form long, scraggly sideburns. The dark sheen of the railing beneath Cyrus’s hand only highlighted the pallor of the man’s meager flesh.

Grey’s eyes darted aside, finding another image of Cyrus, this one decades younger, staring down from its place among the formal portraits that lined the wall above the staircase. Men and women, most of them past the prime of their lives, stood shoulder to elbow, in a rising cavalcade of close-set gilded frames. Perceval knew most of that pantheon of somber-looking Greys by name only. Apart from his own mother’s portrait, Cyrus’s was the only one that he recognized by sight, though the artist’s brush had been kind and there was little resemblance left to the man now before him.

Cyrus’s hand grazed across Grey’s arm as he motioned toward the living room.

“We have a few minutes until dinner.” Cyrus made his way into the large room and across to a side table set before a series of tall windows. Grey meandered over to the room’s grand piano and sat on its bench.

“Had it tuned again, at long last,” said the old man.

Grey watched, though he tried not to blatantly stare, as his grandfather poured himself a glass of brandy. The cut-crystal decanter shook in the old man’s hand and sent diamond-shaped reflections shimmering across the ceiling.

“Doctor’s orders?” Grey asked.

Cyrus made a short scoffing sound. “Has Herrick been in your ear? That man gets at me worse than your grandmother ever did.”

Before he replaced the crystal stopper, Cyrus glanced at his grandson. “Care for a bit, Perceval?”

“No, thank you.”

“As my own father used to say, you don’t always have to be quite so proper to be a proper gentleman. Though I’m not sure that animal still exists: the proper gentleman.”

Cyrus dropped the stopper into place with a clatter and then, tumbler in hand, took his customary seat in a tall chair near the brick-faced fireplace that dominated the end of the spacious living room.

“Whatever it is that passes for proper these days, some of us have to work harder to be seen as measuring up,” Grey said.

“Is that it? Don’t want to show any weakness, eh?” There was a note of approval in the old man’s voice.

“At least not that one. You’re doubly damned if you show any sign of the flaw they expect to see in you. Even a simple toast to good health: One man’s social grace is evidence of another man’s, an Indian man’s, weak nature.”

“Ah, a teetotaler out of spite for all those who doubt your character at first glance.”

“Not spite.” Grey shifted about on the bench, bringing his legs under the keyboard and flipping open the fallboard. As he studied the keys, he explained, “I just never cared to give them the pleasure of thinking their ignorant opinions were justified.”

“That’s you, Perceval. Always having to prove yourself right by proving everyone else wrong.”

“I’d be more than happy to quit my end of that equation, if only everyone else would give up the annoying habit of being wrong so much of the time.”

Grey’s fingers deliberated over the keys before touching down and working into the low, solitary notes of the opening of Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor.

“Horace Webster passed away the other day,” Grey said.

“Yes. The service was well attended, though mostly in connection with the younger generations. Not many left now who knew him in his greener years.”

“You did. What can you tell me about him and his family?” Grey asked.

“Why the sudden interest?”

“He asked me to perform a service before he died.”

Cyrus paused a second. Then, seeing that his grandson was not volunteering any further details, he said, “I suppose it’s not the sort of thing I’d wish to hear about anyway.”

With slow, stiff movements, the man rose from his chair and strolled closer to the piano, forcing the blood to move and stir what recollections his mind could muster.

“A longtime widower, same as me. The oldest son works in munitions; he’s done well with it. Started that up when he came back north after the war. The other has never given much account of himself, from what I understand.”

Close to a minute into his playing, Grey’s fingers suddenly sprang into action as the piece exploded to life. He played another thirty seconds, then stopped.

“There was a third son, wasn’t there?”

“Oh, yes.” A glint of remembrance came into Cyrus’s dull eyes. “Of course, young Alexander. Horace’s favorite. He loved that boy—his loss was such a blow. After Alexander’s funeral was one of the last times I really talked with Horace.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, no falling-out or any such. We were each just busy. And he was always an eccentric sort. Only got worse as he got older.”

“I meant with the third son,” Grey said.

“Tragic. The sorry fool blew his brains out with his service revolver. Was wearing his old Union officer’s uniform when he did it. Horace had been so proud of him, enlisting just like his oldest brother. The middle
son avoided it with health complaints or something. Bought his way out of it. But Alexander did his duty. Horace said he was never quite right in the head after: moody, forlorn. Left two daughters behind that Horace then raised up, as I recall.”

The two men exchanged a wary look, each cautious to avoid prompting the other into expanding that topic beyond its current range. They silently agreed to leave the matter where it was, pinned safely to some other family.

Cyrus coughed and lurched back into the conversation, “But, as I said, the whole lot of them are a bit on the eccentric side. Runs in the family.”

“How so?” Grey asked.

“The older ones were a bookish lot. I don’t recall how they made their money. Horace’s father was an inventor of some kind. Always dabbling about in science treatises and chemicals. A violent temper on him, though. He almost killed Horace once, when we were young men, just coming into our own.” Cyrus took a sip, then added, “Over a girl.”

Grey leaned forward. “Horace Webster and his father quarreled over the same woman?”

“No, not like that.” Cyrus shook his head. “You always get the queerest ideas flying through your brain. His father disapproved of her. She was a pretty servant girl, a young Negro. What was her name? Something odd or fanciful, and French-sounding: Destiny, perhaps.”

“Could it have been Dastine?”

Cyrus’s head tilted as a faint memory rattled down from one side of his brain. “It might have been.” He looked at his grandson with surprise.

Grey quickly asked, “What were you saying about her and Horace?”

Cyrus wavered between a demand for how his grandson knew that detail and his own memories, finally opting for the latter. “Horace’s grandfather had come to Maine from England, by way of the West Indies. Brought a family of servants from there. Obviously, none of us, his friends, approved when we found out.”