Family Vault (13 page)

“But why now? It’s something to do with—what we found in the vault, isn’t it?”

His hands came up to close over her arms in a spasmodic grip but he made no answer. She had to keep on talking.

“Alexander, I know about the wall. I made a sketch of it while they were off getting tools to tear it down. I thought you’d be interested to see what it looked like.”

He began to shudder and so did she, but she couldn’t stop now.

“When they carted away the bricks, one got left behind. Dolph started waving it around and fussing, so I said I’d get rid of it. I stuck it into that big shoulder bag of mine, meaning to dump it somewhere on the way, but forgot. I was in a rush because I was so late getting home. Do you remember that?”

“Yes. I was annoyed. It seems so foolish now.”

“You may also recall that after we got home from the Lackridges’, I went to make you some milk toast because you hadn’t eaten and looked so ill. I know now that I gave you a dreadful shock by not telling you about the vault before we went. I truly didn’t mean—”

“I know, Sarah. How did you—find out?”

“Well, as I started to say, I went out to the kitchen and that photograph you took of the Secret Garden happened to catch my eye. Your mother’s often told how she and you worked out the pattern yourselves, and the bricks are an unusual size and color. It seemed too much of a coincidence. Last night, after you went to bed, I drove out to Ireson’s Landing with my sketch and the brick, and compared them. I know it was a dreadful thing to do, but I had to know. You can understand that, surely?”

“Yes, my dear, I understand. Is there any more tea?”

She filled his cup, and he drank.

“In a way, I’m relieved that you found out for yourself. I’ve been wondering how I could ever tell you. I thought it would be the end of everything, but you’re still here. Why, Sarah?”

“Because I love you, silly! I won’t say I’m exactly happy about—”

“Sarah, you can’t think I had anything to do with Ruby’s being killed? I was crazy about her!”

The corners of Alexander Kelling’s exquisite mouth curved in a sweet, tragic half smile. “Does it disgust you to learn that your stuffy old crock of a husband once made a fool of himself over a striptease dancer?”

“No, I think it’s rather—touching. You must have been awfully young.”

“Young and brainless. If I’d had sense enough to keep away from things I didn’t know how to handle, Ruby might still be alive. Do you suppose I could have a little whiskey?”

“Of course, darling.”

Sarah took her time getting the drink, aware of his need to be alone for a few minutes with whatever he was seeing in the firelight. She went out to the kitchen to fetch ice and made sure Edith wasn’t within listening distance. The maid had evidently fixed herself a strange supper of leftovers, baked beans, and poached eggs, leaving the tin, the shells, and several dirty pans in the sink as a gesture of defiance. They needn’t worry about her coming up again before Aunt Caroline was due home. It was an oddly peaceful moment.

Alexander would tell her when he was ready. She was in no special hurry to hear the story, she thought she could almost tell it herself. Another lover, jealous of Alexander’s incredible beauty as all men must be, threatening the dancer. “If you don’t stay away from that college boy, I’ll kill you.” The kind of woman who’d get her teeth set with rubies wouldn’t care much for being bossed around.

Tim O’Ghee had called Ruby Redd the meanest woman he ever knew. Mean enough to play off one lover against another, no doubt, not believing the jealous one had nerve enough to carry out his threat until it happened. Alexander would have helped to hide the body not out of fear but because he’d feel responsible for having been the cause of the fatal quarrel.

Poor Alexander! No wonder he’d shied away from women for so many years before marrying his eighteen-year-old cousin. No wonder he was still not able to function as a normal husband. Coming, as this must have done, so soon after his father’s death and his mother’s tragedy, it was a wonder Ruby’s murder hadn’t sent him straight over the edge. Then to keep it bottled up inside him all these years—she added an extra dollop to the drink and carried it back to the library.

“I made sure Edith hasn’t got her ear glued to the keyhole,” she explained. “She’s downstairs listening to some idiotic program, so we’re safe for a while. Now would you like to tell me? You’ll feel better once it’s out of your system.”

“Are you sure you want to know, my dear?”

“Yes, I’m perfectly sure. You have to remember, Alexander, that this is a lot easier for me than it is for you because it happened years before I was born. I’m not personally involved, you see.”

“I wish that were true.”

“What do you mean?”

“I—I’m finding this extremely hard, Sarah.”

“I know you are, darling. Why don’t you simply begin talking? Start with something easy. How did you happen to meet Ruby Redd?”

“Oh, a bunch of us from Lowell House got into the habit of catching the show at the Old Howard on Saturday nights, then doing the Scollay Square bars. We thought we were seeing life. God!”

“Go on,” Sarah prodded.

“Well, needless to say, those teeth of Ruby’s captured our puerile fancies, and we started a sort of fan club. Rubies—crimson for Harvard—that sort of nonsense. There was a certain—carnivorous fascination about them. And, of course, Ruby was a striking creature altogether; vibrant, flamboyant, totally different from anyone I’d ever known. I grew up in a somewhat bloodless atmosphere, as I daresay you realize. Father was an austere sort of man. I suppose he’d learned to keep his emotions under control because of his heart trouble. Mother was never demonstrative, either.”

“That’s true enough.”

In all the years she’d known Aunt Caroline, Sarah could not recall her making one spontaneous gesture of affection toward the son who’d sacrificed his life to her needs. It wasn’t hard to see why a naturally loving youngster like Alexander would be drawn toward any woman who promised even a spurious warmth.

“We were all climbing the walls one night with excitement when Ruby came into Danny Rate’s Pub after the show. We found that was her regular hangout, so it became ours, too. As I recall, it was Harry who first got up nerve enough to approach her, but she soon took a fancy to me, for some reason. Needless to say, I was pretty cocky at that. I haunted Danny Rate’s until Ruby invited me to her dressing room. After that, one thing led to another. I shan’t bore you with the details. It didn’t last long, in any event.”

He shook his head and gulped down about a third of his drink. “I came home one night and found her dead in the front hall.”

“Home? You don’t mean here?”

“Yes, my dear. On the floor in front of that marble-topped console, with her red satin skirt spread out around her like a great pool of blood, and the back of her head—”

He got his voice under control after a while, and struggled on. “I don’t know how long she’d been there. She was cold when I touched her. I don’t know why I touched her. I suppose I thought there might be something I could do.”

“But how did she get here?”

“I have no idea. I wouldn’t have thought she’d even know where I lived. I stayed in the dorms, you know, my freshman and sophomore years. Mother still had her vision then, and we were trying to live normal lives. I did come home a good deal more than I might have if Father was still alive, but I wasn’t quite besotted enough to think Ruby was the sort of girl one brings home to Mother. All I can tell you is that she was lying there, and it was clear that she’d been murdered.”

“Are you sure? Couldn’t she have slipped and cracked her head against the edge of the console?”

“I don’t see how. She was lying on her face, and it was obvious she’d been struck from behind.”

“By whom?”

He shrugged. “Mother, of course.”

“Alexander, you can’t be serious! Aunt Caroline wouldn’t kill anybody.”

“She killed Father.”

“But that’s crazy! Uncle Gilbert died of heart failure because he forgot his medicine. Your mother almost lost her own life trying to save him.”

“Father didn’t forget his medicine. Mother emptied the bottle overboard.”

“How can you know?”

“I saw her. She thought she was alone on deck. We were becalmed in a fog, as you’ve heard. That part of the story is true enough. Father was resting in the saloon, and I was supposed to be in the galley fixing lunch. I couldn’t find something or other, so I poked my head up through the hatch to ask Mother where she’d stowed it. When I saw what she was doing, I pulled back fast.”

“You actually saw her do that?”

“Oh, yes. She was only a couple of feet away from me. I couldn’t believe it at first. I tried to tell myself it was some trick of the fog. But then she came below and a bit later she started fussing at Father for having been so careless as to bring an almost empty bottle instead of a full one. He said it was full, so then she said he mustn’t have got the cap on tight. They had quite a row over it, which of course wasn’t supposed to happen. Father started getting short of breath and having chest pains. It was obvious we’d have to put in to shore, which we couldn’t do because there was no wind.

“I said I’d row ashore, but Mother was already in her bathing suit insisting she could swim in faster than I could row, and get the harbor master to bring out the medicine in his motorboat. She’d happened to bash in the bow of our dinghy that same morning on a rock, which struck me at the time as a strange thing for Mother to do. She was never careless as a rule. We’d left the dinghy to be mended and were making do with a war surplus flotation raft that was designed for survival rather than easy handling.

“We argued a bit, but it was obvious she could do the swim in much less time than I could paddle that cranky raft to shore. It was also true that I could handle the Caroline better than she if the wind came up. A squall was unlikely under those conditions, and I fully expected Mother’d be able to swim the distance easily in a dead calm. She really was a marvelous distance swimmer—I’d raced her in the dinghy and lost more than once. You see, it made beautiful sense at the time, and there was no use arguing with Mother anyway.

“But she hadn’t been gone long when a squall did come up. I had all I could do to keep the Caroline afloat. Father tried to help, but collapsed almost at once. By the time I’d got the boat under control, there wasn’t much I could do but heave to and watch him die. I don’t know whether he realized what she’d done. He never said anything, just—suffered.

“Once I knew he was dead, I thought I’d better try to find Mother. I circled for a while, but we’d been blown off course and I couldn’t pick up a landfall. I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was, much less where she might be. As it turned out, she’d got to shore some time before I did. They had her in the hospital. She’d taken such a beating from the squall that I—I couldn’t say anything.”

“And you’ve never told her that you know?”

“No, never. What was the use? She’s been punished enough.”

“And you’ve been punished a great deal more than enough.”

There was another long silence, that Sarah finally broke.

“Alexander, are you absolutely certain it was your mother who killed Ruby Redd?”

“Who else could have done it?”

“Mightn’t she have been followed here by a jealous boyfriend? Ruby seems to have been a type who’d attract violence. But Aunt Caroline is not a violent woman, she’s a conniver. I can see her doing what she did to your father after she’d checked out the tides and weather, cracked up the dinghy on purpose, and goaded your father into an argument so that he’d need his medication even more urgently than usual. That’s how she operates. All right, she miscalculated, got caught in a squall and suffered terrible consequences, but she did achieve what she’d set out to do. She got rid of Uncle Gilbert, and she came out of it a heroine. If by any chance your father had survived, she’d still be a heroine, and she’d be in a perfect position to try again because nobody would believe she’d want to kill the man she fought so hard to save. You yourself might have wound up thinking you didn’t really see her dump out the medicine, mightn’t you?”

“Perhaps. Who knows?”

“Well, one thing I know is that whacking somebody over the head on a sudden impulse in her own front hall is just not something Aunt Caroline would be apt to do. Can’t you see my point?”

“Yes, my dear. You want to convince me that some outsider came here with Ruby, fractured her skull in a quarrel and ran off leaving her dead, perhaps in the hope I’d be blamed for her death because I’d been seeing her.”

“Why is that so impossible?”

“For one thing, if he was jealous of my going around with Ruby, why didn’t he attack me instead of her? He could have found me easily enough at Danny’s or the theater. For another, if he was in this house, how did he get out? The night latch was on when I came. I distinctly recall having to use both my keys. As you know, that extra lock has to be worked with a key both inside and out. When he had it put on, Father got three keys cut, one for himself, one for Mother, and one for me. His is the one you’re using now.”

“What about Edith?”

“Servants didn’t use the front door in Father’s day. They came and went by the basement, not without permission. That was another point, you see. We still had a cook then. She and Edith were off on some overnight excursion, for which Mother had given them the tickets as a surprise. She’d never done such a thing before or since.”

“Oh.”

“Lastly, Mother had a plan to dispose of the body all figured out before I got there. I can see her now. I was kneeling on the floor beside Ruby’s body, trying to find a pulse although I knew she must be dead, when Mother came in from the back hall. She had on her black coat and hat. She said to me, “Alex, I know what’s happened and I don’t care to discuss it. Do exactly as I say. Don’t stop to argue because I can’t hear you anyway.”

“Was she implying that you’d killed Ruby? How could she have the nerve?”

“She accused Father of forgetting his own medicine, didn’t she? In any event, I was too shocked to do anything but obey. I’m not trying to excuse myself, Sarah. I acted like a fool and a coward. I had just enough wits about me to realize what a spot I was in. All my friends knew about my affair with Ruby. So did the crowd at Danny’s and the girls Ruby worked with and God knows who else. Don’t ask me how Mother found out.”