The Bone Key (21 page)

For Mrs. Terpenning collected people. I witnessed her casting her barbed nets toward Madame Vlaranskaya and Mr. Ormont, but the most blatant example was her niece, Miss Hunter. I heard about Miss Hunter’s history at interminable length one evening, while Miss Hunter sat and pushed infinitesimal amounts of chicken around on her plate, her soft pale face becoming redder and redder. Once started, Mrs. Terpenning’s monologues were like juggernauts; trying to stop them would only get you flattened.

Miss Hunter was Mrs. Terpenning’s niece merely by marriage, the only child of Mr. Terpenning’s only sister. Lydia Terpenning Hunter had apparently been one of those fragile, exquisite beauties like an overblown rose. She had been a poet—Mrs. Terpenning seemed to imagine that this put her herself on a footing of equality and intimacy with Mr. Ormont, whose manners were too good to permit him to repudiate that suggestion with the loathing it deserved. Lydia Terpenning had taken intellectual society by storm at the age of nineteen; she had enjoyed a meteoric courtship with the brave and dashing Captain Cornelius Hunter. They had married; Lydia had borne her child and died of it; Captain Hunter had, in the most romantic way possible, renounced all civilized pleasures and gone off to Africa to hunt big game, where he had been killed by a lioness when his daughter was five.

The combined Terpenning-Hunter fortune was considerable, but Captain Hunter had, with execrable judgment, placed his finances in the hands of his dearest friend, one Captain Warren Starling, in trust for Miss Hunter, and Captain Starling had contrived to lose it all. I could not tell from Mrs. Terpenning’s dark and delphic conversation exactly what the wretched Starling had done, and I did not like to ask for clarification. Regardless, Miss Hunter was left a pauper at the age of twelve; her kind and generous uncle had taken her into his household. He had died scarcely a year later, and Mrs. Terpenning, knowing that “it was what Mr. Terpenning would want,” had continued to allow the child to make her home with her, asking in return for the money lavished on her education, her clothes, and all her other expenses, only that she keep a poor, lonely old lady company until such time as she should find a husband. For which last phrase, read “forever.” I felt desperately sorry for Miss Hunter.

It was a day or two after that ghastly dinner that Mr. Marten came to me with a proposal. He caught me on my way out of the dining room after lunch and said, “Mr. Booth, I understand that you are a curator of some kind.”

“Yes,” I said, wondering, a little uneasily, where this was going. “I work for the Parrington.”

“Yes, yes, of course, but I thought I understood from Major Berinford that your specialty is documents.”

“Yes,” I said, amazed and flattered that Major Berinford had noticed.

“Then I was wondering . . . you see, the Hotel Chrysalis has a long and most distinguished history, and I have always wanted to put together a book—or at least a pamphlet—but all the documents are simply shelved, higgledy-piggledy, if you’ll pardon the expression, in the Greater Library. I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of them. But if, perhaps . . . I don’t like to bother you when you’ve been so ill . . . ”

“No, no bother,” I said, scarcely able to believe my good fortune. “That is, I’d like to see them.”

He beamed at me. “Splendid! I shall give you the key, and you must feel free to come and go as you wish. There is no . . . I don’t want you to feel that there is any
obligation
involved.”

“No, I understand,” I said. “But really, I’d like to.”

“You are most kind,” said Mr. Marten and led me back into the staff’s part of the hotel. The Greater Library turned out to be a room I had often wondered about during my peregrinations through the gardens; it was a long, two-story peninsula, jutting out from the hotel into the rose garden. It had looked to me like a chapel, and I had wondered a little nervously about what religion might be practiced in it and whether I might be proselytized to attend services as I was proselytized to play bridge. But it turned out to be the religion I loved and understood, the religion of books. The shelves stretched up to the ceiling on all sides, with a one story pier down the middle of the room. There was a balcony at that height running all the way around, and there were two bridges, one a quarter of the way down the room’s length, and another three-quarters, so you could walk from one side of the upper shelves to the other without having to descend and ascend the torturous stairs. The second story was punctuated periodically with windows, like a clerestory, and some skilled artist had installed stained glass in every other window, depicting the life of King Arthur. A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.

The collection itself was excellent, though I did no more than browse occasionally through its shelves. Someone in the hotel’s history had been a collector of skill, means, and perseverance; the temptation to abscond quietly with a volume or two was extreme, and I recommended Mr. Marten strongly that he have a catalogue made and appraised. He seemed a little surprised; his energies and passions were devoted to the running of the hotel, not contemplation of its books.

The documents pertaining to the history of the Hotel Chrysalis, as Mr. Marten had warned me, existed in a state devoid of order or pattern on the two sets of shelves immediately flanking the door. I spent that first day, from lunch until dinner, simply exploring, trying to make sense of what had been saved, and when, and why. I would have gone back after dinner, but Molly caught me and insisted that I join the company in the conservatory. “It’s them nasty old books made you sick in the first place,” she said, and since I did not know what had made me ill, I could not argue with her effectively.

The conservatory, unlike the other rooms at the guests’ disposal, did have some advantages, namely the philodendrons that grew to enormous height and amplitude. It was possible to disappear almost entirely into their foliage; I could sit and be safely unnoticed for hours. I made my way to my favorite coign of obscurity and sat. I
was
tired, a headache beginning to push at my temples, and I thought, though reluctantly, that Molly was right. I was not yet well, and I would have to pace myself carefully, lest I throw myself into a relapse. I did not believe that my books had made me ill, but I was not fool enough to ignore the signs of fatigue in my mind and body. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.

Nearby, Madame Vlaranskaya, Mrs. Terpenning, Mrs. Langtry, and a newcomer, a Mrs. Whittaker, were discussing illnesses with the passion that only dedicated invalids can bring to the job. I had heard installments of that conversation, with a variety of celebrants, twenty times since coming to the hotel and had even come to find it queerly soothing. No longer deathly ill, I could not fall asleep in the public forum of the conservatory, even screened by philodendrons as I was, but I sank into a kind of reverie, imagining that the women talking were participating in the one great conversation of the Hotel Chrysalis, a dialogue echoing from decade to decade down the hotel’s long history, in which individual speakers might come and go, appear and vanish, be heard and fall silent, but the conversation itself never paused in its ceaseless murmuring and muttering, the catalogue of symptoms like Homer’s Catalogue of Ships, the tales of doctors’ kindnesses, nurses’ cruelties, miraculous recoveries and sadly unexpected deaths—a vast and powerful river which neither time nor death, nothing but the destruction of the hotel itself could dry up. And even then I imagined pale, sickly specters drifting through the ruins, so enrapt in their descriptions of pain that they would never notice that they had died or that the hotel itself lay open to the stars and rain, that the great edifice of their illness was constructed now of words alone and had no—

There was a crash like the war trumpets of Armageddon.

I came upright out of the chair so fast I nearly fell over and bolted out of the conservatory. I think that to my half-dreaming mind a noise that dire could only signal the destruction of the library. But when I came into the hall, I saw it was no such thing.

The hotel’s main staircase was flanked by two massive stone urns, each large enough to conceal a child of five. There were Greek characters inscribed on each; on the right was ΤΙΜΟΣ, Honor, and on the left ΚΛΕΟΣ, Glory. Now ΚΛΕΟΣ lay on the floor, a huge chip out of its mouth, surrounded by a dismal knot of people, including Mr. Marten, Mrs. Stepney, and Miss Hunter, who, I gathered, had actually been coming down the stairs when the urn fell.

“It’s a mercy you weren’t killed,” Mr. Marten was saying as I approached from one side and Major Berinford hobbled up from the other. “But what I don’t understand is how it came to fall.”

“I don’t know,” Miss Hunter said; between her shaking voice and paper-white face, she was clearly near fainting. “I was coming down the stairs, and it just
went
.”

“I’m not blaming you for anything, dear girl,” Mr. Marten said. “You couldn’t have moved that thing even if you’d wished to. But I can’t
imagine
 . . . ”

“Perhaps there was an earthquake,” Mrs. Stepney suggested.

“
Rosemary
,” came Mrs. Terpenning’s voice from the conservatory door. “What have you done?”

“Nothing!” cried Miss Hunter, and, bursting into tears, she turned and ran back up the steps.

Much questioning and soul-searching among the staff and guests of the Hotel Chrysalis resulted in a tolerably exact timetable for the evening, but no clearer understanding of what had happened. At 8:03 p.m., immediately after dinner, Mrs. Terpenning had sent Miss Hunter upstairs to fetch her pills. This was attested by Madame Vlaranskaya, who had dined at their table and had much admired the generosity of aunt toward niece and the dutifulness of niece toward aunt. The two women—Mrs. Terpenning and Madame Vlaranskaya—had then accreted Mrs. Langtry and Mrs. Whittaker and gone into the conservatory. At the same time, Carrie, Doris, Mr. Ormont, and Mr. Grierson (another sufferer from “nerves,” in this case meaning alcoholism) had gone into the game room, the room farthest from the front hall, to play bridge.

From 8:05 to 8:08, Molly Sefton and I had stood arguing beneath the ΚΛΕΟΣ urn. Then I had gone into the conservatory, and Molly had gone upstairs to check on one of her other patients. At 8:15, Major Berinford had crossed the front hall to the Small Library, where he joined Mrs. Stepney and two other women discussing the most recent developments in Russia. Most of the other guests had gone immediately upstairs to their rooms. No one reported noting anything odd about the ΚΛΕΟΣ urn. The staff were all accounted for, either in the kitchen cleaning up or in Mr. Marten’s office discussing next month’s budget.

At 8:25, Miss Hunter descended the stairs, and the urn toppled. When questioned by her aunt as to why it had taken her so unconscionably long to fetch three simple pills, Miss Hunter had explained that she had had a headache and had stopped to take some aspirin, for which (Mr. Marten interjected hastily) she could hardly be faulted.

The upshot of it all was that there were only ten minutes in which the urn had been unobserved between its not falling on Major Berinford or Mr. Ormont or me, and its swan dive before the horrified eyes of Miss Hunter. Even if that were time enough to shift the urn’s balance sufficiently for it to fall—and even if one could somehow then keep it from falling until one was out of sight—even an able-bodied man could not have done it alone. Indeed, as the next day proved, it took three able-bodied men—Parris and two of the gardeners—the better part of an hour to hoist it back into place. No one could have done it; moreover, there seemed no reason why anyone would have wanted to do it. Reluctantly, in bafflement, Mr. Marten accepted Mrs. Stepney’s earthquake theory, even though no one had felt a tremor and nothing else in the hotel had been disturbed. It remained a mystery.

Over the next week, the hotel continued to be plagued by falling objects. None was as spectacular as the urn, but we would come downstairs in the mornings to find pictures off the walls, books off the shelves. On Wednesday, eight packs of cards were scattered across the floor of the Small Library, and on Thursday, in the dining room, of the four settings at each table—laid out the night before in preparation for breakfast—one plate per table lay in shivered pieces on the floor. They looked as if they had been smashed by something heavy. People made nervous and unhappy jokes about poltergeists. As the week wore on, the nervousness increased and the joking decreased. By Saturday, people were starting to leave; Mr. Marten was close to a nervous breakdown.

By the next Tuesday, the residents of the hotel were reduced to eight in number, not counting Mr. Marten and his unwaveringly loyal staff: Mrs. Terpenning and Miss Hunter, Major Berinford, Madame Vlaranskaya, Mr. Ormont, Mrs. Whittaker, Carrie and Doris, and me. The neurasthenics and hysterics and pampered, discontented women had all taken themselves off. Those who remained gave various reasons for their stubbornness—I do not believe Carrie and Doris minded a bit—most of us, I think, had nowhere else to go. Mrs. Whittaker pointed out, with great good sense, that no one had actually been harmed, and Major Berinford reiterated tirelessly that there would turn out to be a good scientific explanation for it all, and then the hotel’s fair-weather friends would look a pack of fools.

I had been continuing my activities in the Greater Library, which seemed to be immune to the poltergeist’s malice, and what I found there drove me, that Tuesday evening, to seek out Doris and Carrie. I could think of several things I would have preferred to do, including standing under the ΚΛΕΟΣ urn the next time it fell over, but I had been trained by my nature, by my professors, by my work, to pursue historical truth even into the mouth of a dragon, and I knew—I had known for days—that of all the people at the Hotel Chrysalis, Doris and Carrie were the two most likely to be able to answer the questions that nagged at me when I tried to sleep.

I found them in the Brocade Room, sitting by the fire and tatting lace, their thin twittering voices exploring the dreadful tragedies that had struck the family of Doris’s second cousin Irene. They broke off when they saw me.