Necessary Evil (8 page)

I
thought
I was prepared.

 “If I were you, I’d get your money back.”

His voice was soft, even gentle, but the
words struck me as forcibly as arrows from a crossbow. My mouth went dry, my
heart slowed to almost a stop. The dreadful calm I felt as I faced him,
wide-eyed and an easy target, was almost as frightening as the look of
certainty in his eyes.

I stammered. “What are you talking about?”

He sighed and lowered himself back down
onto the couch, draping his clasped hands over the armrest. Then he fixed me
with that dark-eyed stare again.

“I’m talking about the letter you forged,”
he said.

After what seemed like an eternity, I
found my voice.

“You are
insane
,” I gasped.
“Absolutely
insane
.”

My breath was shallow. A thousand moths beat
their wings against my stomach lining and I instinctively wrapped my arms
around myself before realizing what I looked like. I let go and drew myself up
to glare at him.

“Insane,” I repeated, but he only shook
his head.

“Now, now, Miss Warwick, let’s stop
wasting each other’s time. The letter’s a fake. You know it. I know it. Let’s
move on.”

“Professor Maddox, Professor
Anthony
Maddox,
authenticated it. He was the finest in his field. Are you trying to say,” I
demanded, gaining confidence slowly, “that he made a mistake? He was too good
to be mistaken. The letter is real, Randall. Maddox said so.”

Professor Randall regarded me with
amusement.

“My dear Miss Warwick,” he said. It was a
mild and mocking reproof.

Damn him. He was so implacable!

“Professor Maddox had the respect of the
community,” I said. “He was known as an ethical man who wouldn’t put his name
behind anything that wasn’t absolutely true. You may not have known him,
Professor Randall, but everyone said…”

“Actually, I knew him quite well,” he
interrupted. He turned to his papers and searched through them as he spoke. “I
said before, I worked and studied under him for two years. He was, as you say,
a man of principle. If he gave his word, it meant something. Which leads me to
believe that he must have thought an awful lot of you and your family to do
what he did.”

I flinched. “I don’t know what you mean. I
barely knew the man.”

“Then you must have had some impressive
hold over him to make him commit perjury.” He plucked out a folded piece of paper
and sat back in the couch.

My face was hot. “You think I
blackmailed
Professor Maddox to authenticate the letter?”

“It wasn’t my first theory, but it does
fit.”

“Where on earth would I get anything on a
man like that? And why would I? I didn’t gain anything. We couldn’t even sell
the letter. Except for local interest, it’s worth nothing.”

“No, that isn’t strictly true,” Randall
said calmly. “A friend at Harvard University told me that he contacted you,
hoping to add it to his collection. He offered you the usual, generous amount,
but you turned him down flat. Surprised him greatly and made him curious.
Neither he nor I could figure it out.”

“So, you’re basing this whole crazy
forgery theory on the fact that I disappointed a collector friend of yours?”

“No. As I said, I can prove the forgery to
you right here and now. Want me to show you?”

“No!” I said sharply. “You’re crazy and I
want you to leave. What’s that?”

Professor Randall had opened the folded
paper while I was ordering him out, insufferable amusement plain on his face.

“This?” he asked, innocently. “It’s a copy
of the letter. Surely you recognize the writing.”

I did and felt the blood drain from my
face. He had a copy – but what could he tell from that?

We’d been so careful, so very, very careful.
Finding the proper nib and the right ink had been easy compared to finding
paper that was the right age and from the right location. The search went on
for weeks, and in the end, I had to settle for English stationary - reasoning
that in a port town like Baltimore, Beaumont might have had access to English
print supplies.

The letter was perfect enough that it
accomplished the seemingly impossible: convinced Maddox that it was the real
deal. It was a risk that cost me many nights sleep while he studied the letter;
but in the end, it paid off, and with Maddox declaring the authenticity, no one
questioned it. To be sure that no one ever did, I’d convinced Aunt Susanna to
store the letter in the safety deposit box – for future generations, I’d said.

I thought I’d covered it all. It was such
a small event in the academic world that I convinced myself that no one would
pursue it. The Chases were locally interesting, but not enough to draw national
attention - except, of course, for the treasure angle. With that out of the
picture, I thought I’d ended it.

It appeared, in the form of Professor
Randall, that I’d failed to kill all interest.

Where this was going seemed obvious, but
how much money could he really expect to get out of us, knowing the pitiful state
of the farm?

I decided to keep playing the game for as
long as he was willing. I pointed to the letter he held and demanded, “Where
did you get that? Did Maddox give it to you?”

“Copies are available to all interested
parties,” Randall said. “I thought you might be reluctant to show me the real
thing, so I brought this to prove my claim to you.”

“To prove that Professor Maddox was a
liar.”

“Or that his affection for you and your
family was strong enough to override his natural honesty,” he said calmly. “I
have to confess, I haven’t been able to discover the connection yet.”

“If you think this will make me give you
permission to run around my property, then you’ve got a big disappointment
coming. I’ll run you out of town, Professor. Don’t think I won’t file a
harassment suit against you and your precious Hadley University for ruining my
family name. ”

Again, the grin, accompanied by a glitter
in his eyes. “Oh, that won’t be necessary. I’m sure that you and I can work
things out so that no one’s reputation is damaged.”

There it was. The first demand. I felt
deflated.

I folded my arms. “So it’s blackmail,” I
stated, and noted that he flinched at the word. “I don’t deal with
blackmailers, but even if I did, if you’ve been as thorough as you claim, you’d
know that we don’t make enough to keep a mouse, let alone a greedy,
self-serving…”

He cut in with a dismissive wave. “We’ll
get into the particulars later. First things first – while your aunt is out,
suppose I show you what is wrong with your letter?”

Without waiting for my response, Professor
Randall placed the letter on the coffee table, then reached into his suitcase
to pull out a magnifying glass and a file folder. Reluctantly, I left the wall
and went to look over his shoulder. I kept telling myself there was nothing he
could prove from a mere copy – that his entire case had to be based on a hunch
and that it would, if made public, turn into a case of my word against his. If
that happened, I’d be in the better position of having the deceased, respected Professor
Maddox on my side. Joe Tremonti would back me, too - but I preferred to leave
him out of it, until absolutely necessary.

Logic notwithstanding, I was nervous as I
peered over Randall’s shoulder.

Randall smoothed the letter out and my
eyes ran over the artistic strokes. It was a good letter, artfully done, with
just the right blend of training in the pen-strokes and gruffness in the tone
to be convincing as a letter from a carelessly educated man. It fooled Maddox.
It should have fooled Randall, too.

“Show me,” I demanded.

“Just a minute.”

He pulled out a slim, paperback book,
garishly yellow and red. I thought,
Typical – technology adverse
.

Randall placed the book face down and
rubbed his hands together, satisfied that everything was in place.

“Now,” he said, “I did say that I was
working on a biography, but I didn’t say who it was about. To save you the
trouble of asking, it’s about Ernst Raine, a Baltimore prison guard during the
Civil War, and an interesting subject.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“Very few have. He played no significant
part in the war and I’m the first historian to take any real interest in him.
Raine’s contribution was made in a lengthy, detailed diary he kept, in which he
described his daily life and wrote brief sketches of his inmates. Raine was an
amateur psychologist, although he wouldn’t have known of the science at the
time. He had a great deal of sympathy for those in his care, especially those
who were injured, sickly, or crippled. Life in the 1860s was a rough sport,
Miss Warwick, and it left scars. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“No, and I wish you’d get to the point.”

“I’m practically on top of it. You knew,
of course, that Beaumont was arrested and tried for causing unrest in Baltimore
shortly after Alexander Chase’s death?”

“Of course,” I said.

He grinned again, and flipped over the
book so that I could see the title:
Handwriting Analysis – the science and
psychology
.

He said, “And I’m sure you knew that he
was right handed.”

I felt such a rush of relief that I had to
fight against showing it.

“I hate to disappoint you, professor, but
I think if you analyze this letter, you’ll find - as Maddox did - that the
letter was written by a right-handed man,” I said. “Maddox was, as I’m sure
you’ll remember, a thorough man.”

And so were we, but I didn’t say it.

Randall’s smirk threatened to undermine my
confidence.

“Oh, I remember,” he said, and pulled a
piece of paper out of the book. “You’re right – this is the letter of a
right-handed man. But that’s the problem. At the time this letter was written,
according to both Ernst Raine and the surviving Baltimore Prison Records,
Jeremiah Beaumont was in the hospital, recovering from a severe beating he
received in a prison riot. Among the injuries sustained were head injuries, the
usual bruising,
cuts
to the legs, the torso – and
breaking four out of the five fingers on his right hand. It took him two months
to recover.”

“Where?” I demanded and without a word, he
handed the paper to me. There, copied from the original records, was the
notation from the prison records. And lest I claim this was a forgery, the copy
bore the stamp of the school library it came from. A precaution that was
particularly sagacious on Professor Randall’s part – it left me without
recourse.

Not that I didn’t try. Desperately I
scrounged about for an explanation, any explanation. “Then, then someone else
must have written it for him,” I stammered. “Someone else – someone who – who…”

“Someone who took such care to imitate his
handwriting? I had an analysis done on this letter, comparing this letter to
the logs that Beaumont kept for McInnis back in Charleston. Even though this
was a copy, the expert I hired told me that it was a near-perfect imitation. ‘A
very impressive piece of work,’ was the phrase she used, actually.”

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking,
Stupid,
stupid! Why didn’t I check for hospital records?

But there had been no indication that
Beaumont had done anything other than complain about prison food and catch the
lingering disease that killed him six months after his release. Why would I
have looked further?

I felt my world crumbling about me. I
could fight Randall, claim innocence, throw him out and deny access to the
letter or make sure that it was lost or destroyed, leaving nothing for the
authorities when they came looking to verify his claim. What would Aunt Susanna
think? What would this do to her?

I can’t let this touch her. I can’t let
this happen,
I
thought over and over again; but try as I might, I could think of no way to
avoid this. Randall had me over a barrel, me and all those I held dear.

After a moment, Professor Randall said,
“If you still have doubts, let me reassure you that I do have documentation to
back my claims. The Baltimore Historical Society will verify the hospital
records. I told them they could expect a call from you.”

I glared at him.

He went on, folding the letter as he
spoke. “Initially, I thought that you’d been had, Miss Warwick. I thought, as
anyone would, that you lacked the motive, the means, and the cunning to carry
out such a deception. But when I learned that it was your aunt who’d found the
letter in your attic, I realized that there was no way a third party could have
put it there. You had to be in on the fraud. I wondered if you were trying to
keep others away. I thought,
She’s
found the
treasure and now she’s looking to dispose of it through underground channels
,
but that didn’t wash. None of it was turning up, and it’s obvious you don’t
have an independent source of income. You’re running yourself into the ground
trying to keep this place open. That gave you opportunity without means or
motive. I wrestled with this for a while. Then it came to me. The reason why
you did what you did, and why you kept it from your aunt.”

“How do you know I kept it from my aunt?”
My voice was hoarse, foreign.

“I talked with her. She knows nothing.”

I flared. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. She still thinks the letter is all
right. You wouldn’t tell her, and I didn’t see any reason why she should know.
After all, the deceit was to protect her, wasn’t it? Both she and the family
business were - are - being besieged by opportunists. You didn’t believe in the
treasure yourself, so you fabricated the letter to convince others that it
didn’t exist. You falsified history in order to protect your family’s privacy.
Isn’t that right, Miss Warwick?”