Miss Lizzie (37 page)

When I came downstairs next morning at nine, Miss Lizzie was in the parlor, speaking on the telephone. As I came into the room, I heard her say, “I understand. And you'll ask Mr. Foley to do the other thing? Thank you. Have a pleasant trip. Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone and turned to me. “My,” she said, and smiled. “Don't you look lovely this morning.”

I was wearing my favorite dress, the white organdy trimmed with lace. Beneath it, stiff petticoats made a comforting rustle. My shoes were white patent leather, fastened with straps rather than laces, and the shoes, too, I liked very much.

“Thank you,” I said. “Do you really like the dress?”

“I do. You look altogether pre-Raphaelite. Now, what would you like for breakfast? I picked up some nice smoked bacon yesterday.”

We started moving toward the kitchen. “Pre-Raphaelite,” I said. “Is that good?”

“It is indeed.”

“That wasn't Father on the telephone, was it?”

“No. It was Mr. Boyle. He's going to Boston for the day.”

As we passed by the hallway closet, I was suddenly aware of the hatchet inside: as though my skin, magically hypersensitive, was able to perceive the subtle radiation emitted by that thing of wood and iron.

“What for?” I asked Miss Lizzie.

“Two reasons, I gather. Something about his reports, for one. He wasn't very forthcoming, but I think that when he writes them, he tends to be a bit less revealing than his superiors would like.”

I smiled. “He's a funny man, isn't he?”

“Yes,” she said, opening the icebox door. “And competent as well.”

“What's the other reason?”

“The other reason,” she said, and she smiled, “is that they've located the salesman, the Norton person who gave William a ride to Boston.”

“Really?” I said, excited. “That's great.”

“Mr. Boyle thinks it would be helpful if he went up there to speak with him. I agreed. Reluctantly.”

“How come reluctantly?”

She set the eggs on the counter beside the white butcher-wrapped package of bacon. “Because I have a feeling that the situation here is going to come to a head fairly soon, and I'd feel more comfortable with him about.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I'm not entirely sure. Instinct, I suppose.”

She was busy in the cupboard, taking out bowls and plates.

“What about Mr. Chatsworth?” I asked her. “Did Mr. Boyle get a chance to talk to him last night?”

Without looking at me, she said, “He did, yes.”

“What did he say?”

She pulled open the silverware drawer.

“Miss Lizzie?”

She turned to me and clasped her hands below her stomach and she sighed. “He admitted it. Your stepmother was blackmailing him.”

On the moral map with which I navigated at the time, blackmail did not possess much personal significance. I was even, as I have said, in a way rather pleased that Audrey had found something to do with her life besides complaining about it and making mine miserable. Certainly the fact of her being a blackmailer, after my experience of her character, came as no real surprise. I was not nearly so distressed to learn about it as Miss Lizzie seemed to think I ought to be.

Still, everyone around me—Miss Lizzie, Mr. Slocum, Boyle—appeared to agree that it was an Extremely Bad Thing, and I supposed they were right, and I kept my own council.

As we prepared our breakfast, and then as we ate it, Miss Lizzie told me what Boyle had learned. Mr. Chatsworth, while admitting to being blackmailed, had resolutely denied any involvement in Audrey's death. He had been, so he said to Boyle, in Boston that Tuesday, all day; and he had given to the detective the names of several people there who would corroborate this. Boyle planned to speak with them today.

What about Mrs. Archer? I wanted to know.

Boyle would be talking to her today, before he left town. And he had obtained from Mr. Chatsworth her former address in New York City, and had telephoned the Pinkerton office there to see what they could discover about her earlier life.

We finished eating at around ten o'clock, and, fifteen minutes later, Father telephoned. He was back at the Fairview, he told me, and he would be coming over to Miss Lizzie's in another half an hour or so.

Miss Lizzie, who had asked to speak with him, took the telephone when I was done with it and asked him if the two of us might come to the hotel instead. If possible, she said, she should like to speak with him. He agreed.

Overlooking the sea from a broad flat spit of land, the Hotel Fairview was a huge white wedding cake of a building with an air of fading but still finicky respectability. (Father had once taken us all to dinner here, and the only sound in the entire dining room had been the subdued click of silver against porcelain.) Running round its octagonal circumference was a wide colonnaded wooden porch. On sunny days the older guests sat out there in the white wicker furniture, their faces empty, and stared silently across the green lawns, beyond the younger couples lobbing tennis balls, toward the small boats sliding slowly in and out the harbor.

The sky today was overcast, the sun hidden, yet some of them were out there still; a few, despite the heat, bundled in blankets against the breeze that scudded in off the ocean and scattered small flickering whitecaps along the gray water.

We were coming up the wide porch stairway when someone called out, “Hey! Miss Borden!”

It was a short man in a brown suit that was, unlikely as this seemed, even baggier than Boyle's. Below the brown fedora, his face was narrow and pointed, like a fox's. As he scurried toward us across the porch, he whipped a notebook from his coat pocket with his left hand and plucked a pencil from behind his ear with his right.

“Phillips,” he announced when he reached us. “The
Tribune
.” His sharp chin bobbed as he chewed at a wad of gum. “How well did you know Mrs. Burton?”

Except for Roger Drummond, we had so far been untroubled by reporters and photographers. Those who had gathered outside Miss Lizzie's house during the days of the siege seemed to have dispersed with the rest of the mob. But our luck, evidently, had changed.

“I'm sorry,” Miss Lizzie said politely. “But I have nothing to say.”

She moved forward, but he sidestepped to block our path.

“Hey, c'mon, gimme a break.” It was more a demand than a request.

Miss Lizzie said, “Would you please get out of my way?”

“Whaddy ya think about the cops arresting the Burton kid? You got an opinion on that to share with our readers?”

“I have nothing whatever to share with your readers.”

He nodded exactly as though she had answered the question, and continued, “So what about the possibility it could of been a burglar?”

“If you don't stop pestering us,” Miss Lizzie said, “I shall find a policeman and report you.”

The man's face puckered with irritation. “Look, lady, I'm only doin' my job.”

“Please do it somewhere else.”

“Listen,” he said, suddenly sincere, “we'll make a deal. You talk to me, exclusive, and I'll keep all the other guys off your back. I guarantee it.”

Her voice low, precisely enunciating each word, Miss Lizzie said, “Get … out … of … my … way.”

The man threw up his hands and stood aside. “'Kay okay okay,” he said, managing to convey by his tone, remarkably, both aggrievement and threat. He nodded at me as we passed him. “That the other Burton kid? I heard the two a you are buddies now.” And then from behind us, his voice raised: “
She know about Nance O'Neil
?”

Miss Lizzie marched on, ignoring him; but I craned my neck to look back. The man was standing there, hands on his hips, head back, leering at us while his jaw worked methodically on the chewing gum.

I did not know what he had meant, but I did know that if this was what Roger Drummond wanted to become, he was welcome to it.

Far across the empty lobby, Father sat with Mr. Foley, the other Pinkerton agent, on a long, purple velvet divan bracketed by two small, dispirited palm trees. Wearing a two-piece gray suit, his legs crossed, Father was tapping his hat lightly against his knee. When he saw us, he stood up, smiled and waved, and then walked across the white marble floor. “Hi.” He bent down, hugged me, kissed my cheek. As always, his mustache tickled. “How are you, Amanda?” He smiled.

“Fine.” After last night's telephone call, I felt tentative, awkward, and still a bit sulky. “How are you?”

“I'm all right.” But as he straightened up away from me, his eyes shifted, very slightly. Then his glance found mine and he smiled again. “You look very pretty in that dress.”

As pretty as Susan St. Clair
? I wanted to say. “Thank you,” I said.

He turned to Miss Lizzie. “Miss Borden, how are you?”

“Quite well, thank you.” She turned to Mr. Foley, whom she had not met, and who had just come up behind Father.

“I'm Foley, Miss Borden,” he said. He was a tall, thin man whose closely cropped hair and neatly trimmed mustache were prematurely white, and he looked very dapper in a pinstriped dark-gray suit and a pair of white spats. “I talked to Harry Boyle. How about I give you a phone call later on?”

“That would be fine,” said Miss Lizzie. “Thank you.”

Mr. Foley nodded, turned to Father and said, “I'll check in with you too, Mr. Burton.”

Father nodded. “Thank you, Foley.”

“Bye now,” said Foley, and nodded to Miss Lizzie. “Miss Borden.”

As soon as he was out of earshot, Miss Lizzie said to Father, “If you've a minute, I'd like to speak with you. In private.”

Father pursed his lips—a bit surprised, I imagine, by the need for privacy—and then he nodded. “We can use the library. There's never anyone in there.”

Miss Lizzie turned to me. “Amanda, excuse us for just a moment, will you?”

My turn to be surprised; I frowned. Why would she want to talk to Father alone?

She said, “You can wait here, dear. We'll be only a few minutes. I promise.”

Father smiled at me. I think he meant it to be reassuring, but it seemed to me forced and uncertain.

“All right,” I said.

They walked away and disappeared around the corner at the north end of the lobby. I sat down on the divan, leaned forward, and lifted a
Collier's
from the stack of magazines on the coffee table.

Less than a minute passed before someone sat down beside me and tossed a brown fedora to the coffee table. “Hey, kid.” Phillips, the reporter, was perched on the edge of the divan, a few feet to my right. “Too bad about your mom.”

“I haven't got anything to say,” I told him.

“Here's the deal,” he said quickly, his eyes wide and honest. “Just a couple questions and I am-scray, right?” His eyes narrowed and the honesty vanished. “Look, I heard you and your mom didn't get along, and I heard the two a you had a big blowout on Tuesday, before she got chopped. All I wanna know is this—did your friend Lizzie know about the fight? I mean, did she see it happen? Maybe hear it happen?”

“Of course not. And what difference would it make, anyway?”

His glance swept swiftly around the room, came back to me. “What I figure is, maybe she
did
see it, and she's your friend, right? so she decides to fix things up for ya.” He winked slyly. “Catch my drift?”

“Well she didn't,” I said. “And even if she did, it wouldn't have made any difference.”

“Listen, kid, this here is a lady got a history with hatchets.” He glanced around the lobby again. “I mean, this wouldn't be a first or anything. You follow me?”

“No I don't, and I think you'd better leave me alone.”

“Listen,” he said, and looked off, and then grimaced, grabbed his hat, and stood. “Later, kid.” He scooted around the coffee table and darted off across the lobby.