Past Malice (17 page)

Every time she said Perry’s full name, it was accompanied with a sarcastic side-to-side rocking of her head, in time to the syllables. Perry’s name had become a byword for something ugly to Mary Ann Spencer.

“—suddenly developed an interest in business studies, and left American history entirely alone.” Dr. Spencer’s face was quite red now, and I could see a few reddish blotches appearing near the base of her throat. “This was the girl who always said the past owed her something. Business studies.”

“Wow.”

My limited encouragement was hardly necessary at this point, however: She was on a roll. “You might say so. And then, gall upon gall, after a respite of a year or two after graduation and a suitably restrained M.A. in art history, she shows up here, applying for a job with our American Fine Arts section. I was here, by that time. Oh, I was working on
my dissertation at night, but I was here and happily settled in—even though Perry is a year or two older than me, I beat her into the market; no distractions of a changed major, you understand—and I felt that I simply had to speak up and let the hiring committee know what I knew—”

All through her descriptions, I recognized the unassuaged bitterness of graduate school competition. Who finished soon, whose degree came from the better school, who got the job first.

“—It wouldn’t have been right for me to keep my mouth shut.”

“I suppose,” I said, “but people do make mistakes, when they’re young. Even—”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted with concentrated steel in her voice. “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how much of town your family owned, or how much you think the world revolves around you. You don’t get to cheat and get away with it. You just don’t.”

Well, all right then.

“God, is it getting warm in here?” Mary Ann asked.

“Maybe a little.” But I was thinking of the heat of emotion and not the temperature of the room.

She rubbed at her throat and swallowed. “You know, I think they put some kind of nut oil in the salad dressing in the museum restaurant. They always swear that they don’t—too risky to serve something like that—but they must have. Every time I have the salad for lunch, I come out in hives.” She thought about that for a minute. “But I didn’t have the salad today. I had the salami.”

I shrugged. “I hope it’s not serious.”

She shook her head. “No, it never is. I mean, not more than a nuisance. But I’m boring you, going into my health issues. I hate indiscretion in new acquaintances, don’t you?”

I looked at the curator, recalling our conversation, but de
cided that she hadn’t actually been ironic. “It’s hard to deal with that.”

She nodded again. “Those are the keys to museum work: discretion and order.”

I gazed around the upheaval that was her office, but still didn’t detect any irony in her remark. Carefully packing up my chatelaine and its fragment of chain, I thanked Dr. Spencer again and set off to complete my other errands.

I
DROVE BACK DOWN TO
S
TONE
H
ARBOR, INTENDING
to spend the rest of the morning at the courthouse. Even in this more modern section of town, there were traces of the past. There were a couple of churches that were early nineteenth century in date, and sat prim in their white clapboards, steeples straining to the skies in the attempt to find a little space vertically, as the old common area had been filled in with shops, houses, and businesses. I had a vague recollection that this had been the original center of town, but that there had been a fire in the first part of the eighteenth century and the common and churches had been moved closer to the point and the Chandler House. In the center of town, a couple of blocks from the waterfront, there were a few brick structures that looked as though they had survived from the eighteenth century, warehouses perhaps, or storefronts, but were now legal offices and restaurants and antique shops. Things got a little seedier in the area close to the courthouse, and the people loitering around the buildings
there usually looked unhappy or preoccupied for whatever reason, and were generally less garishly dressed than those on Water Street. With any luck, by the time I finished with my research, I would be one of the few smiling faces. But I had to find my sister first.

The library was a tall red-brick building, daunting Victorian Italianate with big granite steps, the very picture of what I imagine libraries should look like: imposing repositories of human knowledge. Maybe that was a little overly dramatic, but I always felt as though nothing bad could happen in a library. A lot of very good things had happened in them, as far as I was concerned, and so I was happy to make the stop.

I saw Bucky sitting at one of the empty tables, poring over one book, a stack of others sitting on either side. A librarian walked by and addressed her by name and I realized that this was where she’d been coming, all those times she’d left for downtown. The books on one side of the table were all on beading and jewelrymaking. The books on the other side, presumably ones she’d finished with, were all about archaeology. This explained her disagreement with Meg, a quick read of old sources and not the later ones that refuted them. I was instantly struck by a jealously competitive feeling: Archaeology was mine. But Bucky had the time, she had the lack of responsibility, and more importantly, she’d had the impetus to follow up on things about which she was curious. I sighed and walked up to her.

“Hey, Bucks.”

She looked up after a moment; my words had taken their time penetrating the closed world of her consciousness. She blinked as she recognized me.

“Hey, Em. What are you doing here?”

“Working. Want to get some lunch?”

“Sure, just give me….” She held up a finger and then it
seemed as though she were diving off the high board, back into the book, and she might as well have been diving into deep water for all she noticed me. She finished the page she’d been working on, and then the final paragraph of the chapter, and closed the book. “Just wanted to finish that. Okay, I’m set.”

Again, I felt a stab of jealousy because I knew that once my sister had read something, she never would forget it. She had a kind of eidetic memory that I would have killed for. I’d always been good at school, and worked my butt off to do it. Bucky had been tested when she was a kid because she seemed so much slower than the others, never doing very well at her work. To everyone’s surprise she tested off the charts for her age. She was skipped a couple of grades to try and coax her into achieving her full potential with harder, more challenging work, but the simple fact remained: When Bucky wanted to do well she did, and when she wasn’t interested in it, no power on earth could convince her otherwise. I’d been envious of her skipped grades, too.

“What are you in the mood for?” I asked once we got out into the fresh air. The warmth after the air conditioning was like walking into a sauna, but it felt good. “I’m buying.” That was to make up for my unsisterly feelings in the library.

“How about lobster rolls?”

“You are a bad date, aren’t you?” I groused. I wasn’t feeling that guilty. “Okay, I know a place.”

It was actually closer to the courthouse than to Water Street, but it didn’t make any difference. The place was packed, and we had to hover over a couple who were loitering over their coffee and paid bill until we could snag their booth. After a bit of a shuffle, where we both went to sit on the same side of the booth, I let Bucky take it.

“What’s wrong with the other seat?”

“I just don’t want to look at anything that spidery,” she said, jerking her head back toward the lobster tank that bubbled away in back of her.

“You don’t mind eating them,” I pointed out.

“Just as long as I don’t have to deal with the legs.” She shuddered and made a face. “Yuck. Have I told you lately how much I hate Ma for naming me Charlotte? In grades K through six I was constantly reminded of both my wretched name and spiders. It was always, oh, Charlotte,
Charlotte’s Web
—”

“It’s a great book, Bucks.”

“Yeah, unless you’re a screeching arachnophobe. And the thought of a talking spider, I don’t care how nice she was, just about sent me screaming, foaming, into the wild blue yonder. I considered becoming an astronaut, on the chance that there were no spiders in outer space.”

“Yeah, and then you read
Starship Troopers
.”

“Stupid book,” was all she said. It was tough for her, because Bucky loved science fiction and particularly Heinlein.

We got our food in record time and wolfed it down. I automatically pushed the chips I didn’t eat toward Bucky; she was already eyeing them anyway.

“You know it was Perry’s earrings making that clicking noise? It’s because she doesn’t make her headloops close enough to the bead. If she did that, they wouldn’t make so much noise. She should get better pliers.”

“Oh.” Why on earth did that grab her attention? I sighed; why did anything interest my capricious sister? “I thought they were antiques or something. They look old.”

“No, reproductions. She made them. There’s a place downtown, she said.” She looked up from the chips. “Maybe we could go sometime?”

“Sure.” It was unlike Bucky to suggest an actual activity
that we could do together. “Just name the date. You want to come with me now? I’m just going to be a half hour at the courthouse, checking something out, then I’m heading home.”

“Sure, whatever.” She licked the tip of her finger and caught up the last few crumbs of my chips, seeming more interested in cleaning her plate than my offer.

I was getting to know the courthouse pretty well and knew right where to head for the records I wanted. Shelves of tall volumes in red and brown leather were at the far end of the room with the probates and wills. I looked for the volumes that covered the years I was interested in, 1738—when Nicholas Chandler had died—and 1772, when Matthew Chandler had died. I pulled down the first volume and found what I was looking for.

“See here.” I pointed to a page that was covered with cramped lettering. “This is Nicholas’s will. He wrote it just before he died, it seems, and he was about twenty. He was born about 1716, then. That was several years before Matthew and Margaret Chandler were married.”

“So they had a kid out of wedlock,” Bucky said, growing interested.

“I doubt it. I mean, if he had been born six months
after
they were married, say, I could believe that. But people of that class didn’t go around having a kid, waiting a couple of years, and then getting married. It just didn’t work like that in those days. No, this is something else.”

I could feel my excitement growing, the way it always did when I was chasing down a clue. “Look at his will. It says that he left things to his children and wife, but also to his brothers and sisters: tokens, money for gloves, mourning rings, that sort of thing.”

“So?”

“Look at the names of his siblings.”

“Thomas, Rupert, Carlisle, Lydia, Seaborn—hey, that’s a name?”

“Yep. The first couple of names are from Margaret’s family and the third is from Matthew’s side; I’ve seen them in genealogies. Seaborn, though, that’s different. He might actually have been born at sea, but whatever the circumstances of his birth, it is a Chandler name we know was associated with Matthew and Margaret. So it looks like Nicholas is definitely one of our Chandlers. This is the document that Bray is probably working from.” I chewed the inside of my lip for a second. “I wonder if there is a connection between Nicholas’s death, the wing of the house burning down, and the fire downtown. I’ll have to think more about that.”

Bucky’s face was screwed up in concentration. “So was Nicholas Matthew’s son from another marriage?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“From an illicit affair? But would you think that Margaret would let her husband’s bastard be raised in her own house, with her own children?”

“It’s possible; I believe she was that kind of Christian.”

Bucky thought about it for a minute, and I could almost see the gears turning as she mulled over the problem. “Did they adopt in those days?”

“Yes, but not necessarily the way we think of it. There wasn’t always a formal procedure, and families took cousins, orphans, all sorts of people into their houses. They didn’t necessarily make legal distinctions, either, between in-laws. Your sister-in-law was your sister, etcetera. If we could find a document that Matthew signed, officially announcing his intention to raise Nicholas as his son, that would be one thing, but there didn’t need to be. Now let’s check Matthew’s will.”

Sure enough, it was right there, although with the long
list of children’s names, it wasn’t surprising that I had missed it there the first time. “Check this out: Thomas gets the real estate and the first son’s portion—that’s primogeniture for you—and Margaret gets her widow’s third—”

“Her what?”

“In a lot of wills at the time, the eldest son got a third, including the land, if there was any, and the wife got a third, and the rest of the children divvied up the rest of the estate, unless some other provision was specifically made. In this case, we see that Thomas, the eldest son of both Margaret and Matthew, gets the lion’s share, and the rest of the kids, including Nicholas, share in the last third.” I furrowed my brow. “But wait. This will was written before Nicholas’s death. Why wouldn’t a lawyer like Matthew have drawn up another will? This is strange.”

I glanced at the date of the will and saw that it did in fact predate Nicholas’s death, but that it had been filed in the year of Matthew’s death, decades later. Any will that had been found at his death would be here; there was nowhere else I could look, without some other clue.

“Maybe they couldn’t find a later will at the time of Matthew’s death,” I finally decided. “Or maybe that one was misfiled; all sorts of things happen to keep official documents from ending up where they should. At least from this we know that Nicholas was not being given the eldest son’s portion, as he would if he were legitimate.”

“So if we know that Nicholas was older than Thomas—” Bucky began.

“It seems reasonable to believe that Nicholas was adopted,” I finished. “So Bray Chandler can’t be descended from Margaret and Matthew, and he might not even be related to Matthew at all either.”

“Isn’t Bray going to be pissed about this? He seems pretty wound up about the whole thing.”

“The name is his legally, of course; it’s just a matter of blood.” I bit my lip. “Though that seems to be the thing with folks around here.”

“Pedigree is that important? I mean, maybe in a competitive show animal….”

I thought of my conversation with Ted. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder if that isn’t a fairly good description of Bray, at least as far as his wife is concerned. I think it’s very important to him, and I wonder if Aden didn’t know it too.”

Bucky shifted her weight, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah, but that isn’t a reason to, you know, kill someone. Is it?”

“I think we’d both be surprised.”

We were both quiet for a moment. Then Bucky leaned over the book, straining to see something. “Where does it list what he had?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought you said that wills listed what people owned when they died.”

“Not wills. Probate inventories. Those are separate documents and they are usually more detailed. They were taken after someone died, sometimes years after, if the estate was complicated. Those are in another section and I think we’ll leave that for another day. I’m beat.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Bucky said suddenly. “It’s like you have to know about these whole other worlds. All the information from other times and places, whole other lives and philosophies.”

I put the books on the trolley to be returned. “A lot of years of work and practice, Bucks. That’s all.”

I was getting a goodish dose of the Chin now; Bucky was annoyed with me and I wasn’t sure why. “But it’s more than that. It’s like you belong here, you know what I mean?”

I did; I knew what she meant and I believed her too. I was just a little disconcerted to hear something that sounded so
much like admiration and envy coming openly from my little sister. I suspected her questions were related to her reasons for spending her vacation with me; perhaps she was unhappy with her personal life. “I belong here among the dusty old books?” I joked feebly, trying to lighten the moment. I dusted my hands off on the back of my jeans; the red from the record books had bled off in crumbly dust onto me, making me feel a bit like Lady Macbeth. Will all the perfumes of Arabia never sweeten this sibling rivalry?

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do,” I conceded. “I’m lucky, is all. I found a good fit and it worked out for me.”

“You get all the good fits, don’t you?” Bucky almost sounded angry. “Husband, job, even a town that suits you.”

“It takes a hell of a lot of work,” I said curtly. “And it takes being honest with yourself about what you want to get out of life. Now, let’s get going.”