No Mortal Reason (16 page)

“I never had much to do with the business of running the hotel. After our father died, Myron took over. I stayed around, helped out in the season, but my paintings and my nature studies take up most of my time.”

“You’d been married. Had Mercy. Lost your wife.”

He nodded. “She died two days after Mercy was born.”

“Did you live here?”

“Yes, although I was gone a lot. Mercy stayed put. She needed people to look after her. Tressa Ellington’s been a marvel. She’s no blood kin, but she loves Mercy like she was her own and Mercy calls her Aunt Tressa.”

“How long has Mrs. Ellington been here?”

“Ever since our youngest sister, Elmira, got married. Myron hired Tressa as housekeeper right after. Our oldest sister, Sally Ann, is married to Tressa’s brother.”

Diana wanted to ask about Elmira, but she didn’t dare. She had no reason to be interested in the sibling who’d left thirty-three years earlier. After exchanging a look with Ben, she changed the subject.

“What did you know about the plans your brother had with Norman Saugus?”

“Ten years ago? They meant to enlarge the place.” Howd frowned. “It wasn’t nearly so grand a scheme as the one they’ve come up with this time. They talked about making the Hotel Grant into one of those resorts that has everything guests could want, all in one place, so they don’t mind traveling out of the way to get here. They’ve got that sort of thing up to Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks, near where Sally Ann’s place is.”

Diana knew such resorts existed, although she’d never stayed at one. Visitors came great distances to live in luxury. It took a considerable investment to build a hotel with all the amenities and an enormous amount of publicity to spread the word of its existence to patrons wealthy enough to afford the rates.

“So Norman Saugus had money to invest?”

“That’s what he claimed. But he was greedy for profits. Why Myron let him pressure him into trying to enlarge the fountain, I’ll never know.”

“The spring was lost. Then there was a fire. After all that, I’m surprised Saugus is willing to risk capital a second time.”

Howd gave a derisive snort. “Still greedy, I guess.”

“What if he didn’t lose by it?” Ben asked, causing Diana’s eyebrows to shoot up. “What if he had insurance?”

“I didn’t hear about it if he did.” Howd sat up straighter in his chair, his hands gripping the arms. “He sure carried on something awful at the time.”

“Did Myron have insurance?”

“Not enough.”

“That could be why Saugus didn’t mention any recompense he received.”

“What are you thinking, Ben?” Diana turned toward him fully, tucking her limbs beneath her on the sofa as she did so.

“That you’re right to think Saugus wouldn’t come back again if he’d lost money the last time. I wonder—would he have done even better for himself if the entire hotel had burned to the ground ten years ago?”

“Arson?” It was Howd who gave voice to the word on all of their minds.

“It’s worth investigating.” Ben rose and went to check the fire in the fireplace, which was crackling merrily in the background. “I have a hard time believing in the grand plans he’s been talking about. What if it was just talk the last time, too? What if he only appeared to invest in the hotel and meant all along to destroy it for the insurance?”

“But he has investors this time,” Howd protested.

“Does he?”

“Surely he’d not take such a risk, Ben,” Diana protested. “Once perhaps, but a second time? When there are people living here?” The idea that Saugus might try to burn the hotel down over their heads had the breath backing up in her throat. Bad enough that he cared so little for property, but to disregard human life was intolerable.

Plainly agitated, Howd also rose. “Saugus doesn’t know about all the renovations. Maybe I should tell him.” He gestured toward the fireplace. “Last year, before Saugus reappeared, Myron wanted to put in a new steam heating apparatus to heat the rooms, but it was too expensive. It was a choice between that and doing something about the water supply. We ended up digging an artesian well and putting in pipes to bring hot and cold running water to the rooms . . . and to two hydrants on either side of the hotel. They’re mostly used to sprinkle the lawn, but they’re there in case of fire, too.”

Diana found she could breathe again, but the possibility Ben had raised was still a terrifying one. Someone who had no regard for casualties of arson was not likely to balk at outright murder.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Howd muttered. “Saugus must have gotten money somewhere. He financed most of the renovations we completed this year.”

“Credit?” Ben suggested.

“I’m sure I’d have heard complaints by now it if the local builders hadn’t been paid.”

“Then perhaps he does have investors. Perhaps he means to defraud them, too.”

“You’re very cynical,” Diana said, but there was no heat behind the accusation.

“In this case I think it’s warranted. Who was it said that Saugus reminded them of a snake-oil salesman?”

“Mrs. Ellington,” Diana supplied.

“Yes. And you said you suspect that his wife has theatrical experience. I wonder if this is nothing more than an elaborate confidence game.”

“All for insurance?” She didn’t want to believe it, but the idea was beginning to sound plausible.

“If it is, then the real question is not whether Saugus was guilty of arson ten years ago, but whether he also committed a murder to cover his tracks.” Ben looked at Howd, who now stood beside him at the hearth. “Could Elly have found out what he was up to? Might he have killed her to keep her quiet?”

He looked appalled at the idea. “She’d have told me!”

Diana wasn’t so sure about that.

Ben clapped a hand on Howd’s shoulder. “We’ll pursue the matter. In the meantime, say nothing to anyone of what we’ve discussed here tonight. After all, it’s just a theory. We may be wrong.”

“We’ll find out the truth,” Diana promised as she showed her uncle to the door. “You can count on us.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he said in a choked voice. And then, looking as if he might burst into tears any moment, he made a hasty exit. 

Ben glanced up from the fire as she closed the door and leaned against it with a deep sigh. “You’ll have more perspective on the matter after a good night’s rest.”

“I am too agitated to sleep.”

He reached her in two long strides and pulled her into a comforting embrace. “I know how to relax you.”

“Still trying to get me to go to bed?” She managed to inject a note of teasing into her voice but the mood was not reflected in her eyes.

With another sigh, Diana eased far enough away from Ben to retrieve the list of suspects she’d tucked into his jacket pocket for safekeeping while they were dressing for supper. She carried it back to the sofa and, using her notebook as a lap desk, she added “unknown drummer” to the bottom. Earlier she’d written in Mrs. Ellington’s name. If she’d been jealous of Elly, she might have killed her, hoping to win Howd’s affections for herself once her rival was gone.

Turning the paper over, Diana continued to write.

“Another list?”

“A timetable. I need to organize what we’ve learned.”

She wrote quickly, with Ben standing behind her to point out anything she forgot. “We need specific dates,” she murmured. “We can’t just say 1878.”

“Put down what you have. What happened first?”

“Saugus came to Lenape Springs as Myron’s financial backer.”

“His wife came too.”

“Yes. The hotel was to be enlarged into a self-contained destination resort.”

“It could have succeeded. I know plenty that have. The Poland Spring House in Maine. The Catskill Mountain House overlooking the Hudson River.”

Diana glanced at him. “Both places are too expensive for a third-rate acting troupe on tour to afford. Have you stayed at either of them?”

“Both. And others, on the trip I took with friends from college.”

“The same journey that brought you to Denver and up Pike’s Peak?”

“That’s the one. That was back in 1877, so what I saw would have been similar to what inspired Myron to think he could succeed.”

She nodded and continued to list items under the year 1878:

Howd and Elly secretly courting

Myron tries to enlarge fountain and loses source of spring

handsome drummer visits Lenape Springs

Howd gives Elly a locket

the next day Elly is gone—said to have “run off with a peddler”

A few days later—fire destroys west wing of hotel

Saugus leaves—collects insurance?

Howd leaves

“It was in the autumn of the year,” Ben said. “Myron said the season was over when the fire broke out.”

“I forgot to ask Howd where it was that he last saw Elly,” Diana said.

“It may not matter what questions you ask. At this point we don’t know what’s important and what’s not. For that matter, we have no way to separate truth from deception. For all we know, they may all be lying through their teeth.”

Diana knew he was right, but made no response to the implied warning in his words. “I can’t think of anything else we know about 1878.”

“Then skip ahead to 1886.”

“What happened in 1886?”

Myron visited his oldest sister and brought Sebastian Ellington back with him to help out at the hotel.”

She didn’t see what connection that could have to the murder, but she wrote it down anyway. Then she added several more items without comment:

Spring 1887

camp meeting near Liberty Falls; Riker one of the preachers

Summer 1887

Jonas Riker marries Lida Rose Leeves

Lenape Springs Villa turned into a temperance house

Myron rediscovers source of spring

“Or salted it,” Ben said dryly.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him, but I also know it wouldn’t have worked.”

She wrote down:
rumors of salted spring
. “Whose idea was it to expand the Hotel Grant on an even grander scale?” she wondered aloud. “Myron’s? Or Saugus’s?”

“Another question we’ll have to ask.”

Diana went back to her notes.

Fall 1887

renovations start

Spring 1888

Saugus returns talking of telegraph line

“Can we find out more about that? Wouldn’t he have had to file papers?”

“Yes, and obtain the right-of-way from landowners. If the proposal was a scam from the beginning, there won’t be any. I can also find out more about this joint stock company he says he’s formed. He could be bilking the investors, even though there is building going on.”

“Something Mrs. Saugus said . . . .” Diana struggled to recall what it was, but the long day had caught up with her. She was too tired to think straight. Hastily, she scribbled the last few lines of her timetable.

Saugus keeps workers away from the burned out wing

Elly’s body found

Saugus spent the next day in his room drinking.

“How do you know that?” Ben asked.

“His wife bought whiskey at the general store. Then he wasn’t seen all day, including at supper.”

“She said he was indisposed.”

“Did she ask you to examine him? If he was ill, he’d have wanted a doctor.”

“Perhaps, but at the moment this is all speculation, and there’s no way to find out more about Mr. Norman T. Saugus tonight.” He gently pried Diana’s notes and pencil away from her and tossed them on the nearest table. Then he  tugged her into his arms and lowered his head until his lips were almost touching hers. “Perhaps you’d care to concentrate on Dr. Benjamin Northcote instead?”

“Perhaps,” she replied, and closed the distance.

Chapter Eight

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” Pastor Riker intoned.

“Amen!” chorused his congregation.

The interior of the church would have been stuffy with the windows closed, but opening them allowed insects to swarm in. Sticky curls of arsenic paper suspended above Diana’s head did little to reduce the annoyance. She noticed an audible hum as flies settled on a sticky spot on the back of a pew two rows in front of her.

A pity no one had installed screens, she thought. Castine’s store had them in stock. They also sold palm leaf fans, but she’d not had the foresight to buy one. Not only would it have helped keep the bugs away, it might have dispelled some of the unpleasant odors rising around her.

She recognized one smell as shoe blacking, far too liberally applied. Another, she suspected, was a mixture of ingredients designed to repel mosquitoes and other flying nuisances. Rubbed into the face and neck and hands, it did a good job of preventing bites and stings but the stink of oil and tar also forced the wearer’s friends to keep their distance.

“Set your affections on things above, not on things of the earth,” the preacher exhorted his listeners. “Eschew whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones. The love of money is the root of all evil. The wages of sin is death.” 

Riker, Diana realized, was not so much delivering a sermon as stringing Bible quotations together. She closed the little notebook in her lap. With its green leather cover it looked enough like a book of psalms to escape notice. Still, she doubted she’d be writing anything down. Funerals might make good copy, but this interminable worship service would not.

Pastor Riker continued elaborating on a fire and brimstone theme for fully half an hour while Diana, Ben, and the good people of Lenape Springs sat in uncomfortable silence on hard pews. The preacher did not mention Elly Lyseth’s murder or the Hotel Grant, but there was no doubt in Diana’s mind that he’d deliberately chosen texts likely to escalate the level of disharmony in the village.

Everyone in the community seemed to be in attendance, with three notable exceptions—Myron Grant, and Norman and Belle Saugus.

Having worked the crowd into a fine fervor, Riker called upon members of his flock for their testimony. Celia Lyseth was the first to stand up and tell the others how she’d found salvation. It was a story they must have heard dozens of times before, but they listened with rapt attention.