Emily's Ghost (40 page)

"Look what I've found."
She waved the letter in front of him and then read it aloud,
relieved that Hildie and the children were in town and Inez had the
day off.

Fergus leaped up and
reread the mayor's angry diatribe over her shoulder. "God in
heaven!" he said when he was done. "It sounds like any one of them
could've done it! But the letter's undated. Are we certain the
military man
is
Lieutenant Culver? And why should the mayor take Hessiah's
flirting so personal?

"That's the real question
here. I don't think the mayor could ever have been her lover. He
might've been more like a kindly Dutch uncle who agreed to watch
over Hessiah after her father died."

"Ha! He never seemed all
that kindly to me."

"No, you're probably
right," she admitted. "If Hattie Dunbart's stories are accurate,
the mayor was blindly ambitious. But then why make such a fuss over
Hessiah? She was nothing to him." Emily puzzled over that for a
moment. "Unless -—"

"He was her real father,
say. Bejesus, now ye have
me
thinking the way ye do."

Their eyes met; they were
again in perfect harmony.

"Why not?" she said
excitedly. "You once told me there was talk of a secret affair.
Maybe it had nothing to do with Hessiah but with her mother. When
Celeste Talbot died after being thrown from her horse, Hessiah was
still a baby. Celeste was young, passionate, beautiful. Now I ask
you, whom would she be more attracted to: a charismatic
up-and-coming politician, or a dour, workaholic
millowner?"

"Well, but folks claimed
she was religious," Fergus said reluctantly. Clearly he wanted to
believe the scenario. "Ye're a female; could she have been tempted
into a romance?"

"Sometimes there's a thin
line between religion and romance," Emily answered cryptically.
"And remember," she added, "Mayor Abbott had one of the Talbot
family photos in his possession. To me it's interesting that the
face of John Talbot is obscured in it, which -- hold it. All we're
doing is eliminating the mayor as a suspect. He wouldn't have
murdered his own daughter."

"If he was in a rage? He
might have," Fergus said, driving the argument home. "Here he was,
trying his best to arrange a decent marriage for this love child of
his, and here the little brat was, doing something stupid like
taking up with a ne'er-do-well. It's also a fact that the mayor
eventually shot himself to death. Something must've been bothering
him," Fergus summed up in a dry voice.

Emily frowned. "A father
strangle his own daughter? It's too inconceivable," she said,
dismissing the notion.
"And
in the meantime, we now have Cousin Thomas. I
never thought about him, although he was mentioned in the accounts
of the trial. So the whispers you once heard about a scorned suitor
must have been true. Which means Thomas Dayton has motive. Which
means Thomas Dayton has opportunity. Perfect," she said wearily.
"Add Thomas Dayton to the list."

"Sure. I'll pencil him in
right after Lieutenant Culver, who
still
is nowhere to be found."
Fergus was back in the chair, looking disgusted. He stared at the
letter Emily was holding in her hand. "What if the mayor didn't
even write that? What if someone else was really in love with
Hessiah all along, and
he
wrote it on official paper? Maybe a deputy mayor
or a clerk ..."

Emily waved the
suggestions away. "Enough! With any luck I'll be able to compare
the handwriting to Mayor Abbott's signature on some city document.
Unfortunately that means more boring searches through more moldy
records."

She began loading some of
the stacks of memorabilia back into the trunk. "The next time I
solve a murder," she mused, "I'd like it to be in the twentieth
century. I'd like a real body, and real eyewitnesses, and a real
police report. I'd like hair, blood, and DNA samples, and it would
be nice if it all took place on a resort island."

She sat back on the heels
of her feet. "I'd like to be Jessica Fletcher," she said, sighing.
"Jessica Fletcher never has to go to City Hall."

Nevertheless, that's where
Emily ended up two days later. It was no real challenge to locate a
sample of Mayor Henry Abbott's handwriting; during his term of
office he was constantly signing proclamations of something or
other. If the document was not an official welcome of an important
guest, it was likely to be an official observation of an important
day. The mayor had seemed quite determined to put Newarth on the
map; he would've been crushed to see how thoroughly he'd
failed.

In any case, the
handwriting matched. It was small comfort. Although she now had
suspects to spare, Emily was no closer to solving the murder of
Hessiah Talbot. Worst of all -- and she took this very personally
-- Emily had not yet figured out who had given Hessiah Talbot the
necklace. It seemed to her that if she knew that, she might know
who had murdered Hessiah. The question was who would have given
Hessiah such a cheap and tasteless piece of jewelry. Surely the
most likely one was Lieutenant Culver. Yet they still knew nothing
about him, not even if he'd had a wife.

Frustrated, Emily drove
from City Hall to the Newarth Library. She thought she'd just say
hello to Mrs. Gibbs, then poke around a little more through
old
Sentinels.
She was hoping to find something connecting the mayor and
Celeste Talbot, and so far she hadn't bothered to pay much
attention to the early years of Hessiah's life.

She found Mrs. Gibbs
presiding over a plate of frosted brownies. "I'm so glad you've
come," Mrs. Gibbs said almost wistfully. "No one else has all day.
Even Mr. Bireth isn't around to snore over his morning paper; he's
visiting his children on the Jersey shore. And it's too hot to
garden. I have nothing to do.

She cut Emily a brownie
the size of a small backyard and added, "So you've been busy
finding out things. What are they? Is there anything I can do to
help?"

Emily brought her
up-to-date -- omitting, as always, all mention of Fergus -- and
announced her plan to find something, anything, in the time period
of the early 1860s. They went down to the basement together, Emily
following slowly behind Mrs. Gibbs's halting, arthritic descent.
They dragged out two big volumes of
Sentinels
and sat at each end of the
battered library table, carefully turning crumbling pages,
searching for evidence of a liaison between the mayor and Celeste
Talbot. Or anything else scandalous and indecent.

The afternoon passed with
very few interruptions upstairs and not much in the way of
discoveries downstairs. But just before closing time Mrs. Gibbs
murmured across the table, "This is very strange. Did you know that
the Talbots had a son who died?"

Emily's head shot up. "Is
his name James?"

"That's right. Listen to
this: 'In a tragic mishap at Talbot Manor, James Talbot, the
younger son of John and Celeste Talbot, fell down a well adjacent
to the formal gardens. Rescuers were unable to reach the boy in
time to prevent his drowning. The boy, who with his sister and
brother was in the care of a young governess at the time of his
death, was said to have been fetching a drink of water for his baby
sister. Further details are unknown at this time. Funeral
arrangements have yet to be announced.'

"And that's it," Mrs.
Gibbs said, stunned. "Page three, at the bottom. The younger son of
the town scion dies, and it's tucked on page three. At the
bottom."

Emily was standing next to
her now, turning the paper back to page one. "The paper's dated
July 1863. James couldn't have been more than four years old.
Hessiah was two years old in 1863; her brother Stewart must've been
five or six."

"What a terrible thing for
them to live with," Mrs. Gibbs said, holding her hand to her cheek
in an old- fashioned way.

"Hessiah wouldn't remember
that, would she? At two?"

"She easily could have,"
Mrs. Gibbs said, shaking her head and tsking like the grandmother
she was. "But why wasn't this mentioned at the time of the trial?
I'm sure I would have remembered reading about it. Of course, my
research was never so thorough as yours, dear. Do you remember
anything about this?"

"There
wasn't
anything about this," Emily
said, every instinct on the alert for a cover-up. "We'll have to go
through the next issues with a fine-tooth comb."

They searched through
1865, but all poor James ever rated in the
Sentinel
was the one mention at the
bottom of page three.

"For whatever reason,
the
Sentinel
shied away from this story," Emily said to Mrs. Gibbs. "I
remember your saying that John Talbot was close friends with the
publisher; there must have been an understanding. This is
interesting. Was Celeste racked by shame? What happened to their
governess? Was she some romantic, silly young thing? Who hired her
anyway?"

"We're supposed to be
answering questions, dear, not asking them," Mrs. Gibbs said
pragmatically. "Now that we know James existed, we can at least
verify his birth and death dates. Would it be a help if I did
that?"

The librarian wanted very
much to be a part of things, and Emily was glad to have her help;
it would save her the drive back to Newarth. Besides, the Toyota
had been making eerie gurgling noises lately, and Emily was
petrified at the thought of having to roll it in for
repairs.

That night as Emily lay in
bed, hot and uncomfortable, she began to suspect that information
had begun flowing almost too quickly. It was as if some hand were
guiding her through a tortuous maze of characters and events to
some fated conclusion. She didn't like it. If she didn't know
better, she'd say it was a trap. The question was who had set
it.

Surely not Fergus.
The suspicion came and went, like a shooting star
in the night sky, and there was nothing Emily could do to unthink
it. After all, Fergus
was
the logical, obvious suspect in the murder. It
was fair to say that Emily knew nothing about how astral spirits
were assigned their destinies. What if Fergus could successfully
pin the rap on someone else? It happened in court all the time. If
Emily were really a detective, then no one would be above
suspicion.

Not even Fergus,
she thought, restlessly throwing off the sheets
from her body.

****

The next day Emily got two
phone calls. The first was in the morning, and it was from Mrs.
Gibbs, verifying the obvious: that Hessiah was two years old, James
was four, and Stewart six at the time of the drowning. "Thank you,
Dr. Watson," Emily had said, and the librarian laughed and hung up,
pleased.

The second call was in the
afternoon, from someone who very definitely did not wish to be
identified, and it had nothing at all to do with the ongoing
investigation. That was the bad news. The good news was that it had
everything to do with destroying Lee Alden's primary opponent, Boyd
Strom. Emily was being given a hot, hot tip, so hot that the phone
she held felt like a charcoal ember.

"Boyd Strom is up to his
neck in toxic waste. I want him to be up to his eyeballs," the
caller said in a growl. "He's a partner in Rondale Associates; they
own some land on Rondale Road in Scanset, in the northwest part of
the state. It ain't a town, more like an intersection. Ever heard
of it?"

"No --"

"It's there. Trust me.
Check it out; he's been dumping PCBs illegally there for years.
There's a guy named Sid willing to talk from Wally's Hauling out of
Winslow. But you got to ask him first."

Click.

Emily grabbed a pencil and
wrote first, thought later. She got out a map, verified the town's
location, made herself a cup of tea.
A
toxic dump.
If the caller was on the
level, Boyd Strom wouldn't be running for anything except possibly
his life in a federal prison.
If
the caller was on the level. The first thing
tomorrow, she'd see what she could find out at the
office.

Or not. After all, she'd
just declared herself on leave from this kind of investigation.
She'd have to do it on her own time, then. Except that it was too
big a story, too big an investigation, for her to pursue alone. She
didn't have the resources, and she wasn't even sure she had the
courage; a trail of PCBs could lead to some pretty rough
characters.

But it was an explosive
story; she couldn't just sit on it. The next day she called Stanley
Cooper. After a little backing and filling in the way of
pleasantries, Emily gave him a verbatim account of the anonymous
tipster. Predictably Stan listened quietly, then fired both barrels
simultaneously. "The story's bullshit. There's nothing you can do
anymore to put Lee Alden on top in the primary, Emily. Give it
up."

"I'm
not
trying to put anyone on top,"
she said, blushing irrationally at the image. "Someone called me
with a tip. I think the paper should check it out. That's all there
is to it, Stan. Dammit!"