The Gladstone Bag (8 page)

Each in his own way, the guests had clearly made an effort to do her proud this first night on the island. Lisbet Quainley had done something really horrible to her hair and adorned her thin body in a long, baggy, olive-green skirt and a long, baggy, yellow-green sleeveless top. She must be depending on her jewelry to keep her warm; there was a great deal of it. The sort of chunks and blobs Little Em would go wild over; Emma rather wished she’d worn some of her own.

Joris Groot and Black John Sendick were presentable enough in slacks and sports jackets. No ties, but Emma hadn’t expected a miracle. At least their shirts looked clean.

Count Radunov was naturally a hostess’s dream come true in a white dinner jacket, navy blue trousers, and red bow tie. She must seat him opposite Mrs. Fath and the roosters, Emma decided. They’d balance her table if anyone could.

Everard Wont hadn’t shown up yet, and that was fine with Emma. She was about to ask Radunov to help with the drinks—he might well have done a stretch as a waiter somewhere along the line—when she realized Vincent was back and coping.

“What can I get you, Mrs. Kelling?” he asked her.

“A very feeble gin and tonic, please, with lime.”

She’d almost made the faux pas of adding, “If you have it,” but caught herself in time. Of course Vincent would have fresh lime. He’d also have caught her hint about not mixing the drinks too strong, though it was most unlikely he’d have needed to be told. Emma was dying to know what he’d done about their mysterious stranger, but this was hardly the moment to ask. At least Vincent knew now she hadn’t been dreaming about that man on the pier. How fortunate that she’d realized in time about the scuba suit! And how curious that the man bore so striking a resemblance to Everard Wont, though she supposed it was mostly the beard and the build.

Vincent handed her a glass complete with lime. “That about right, Mrs. Kelling?”

Emma took a sip and nodded. “Perfect. Thank you, Vincent.”

Drink in hand, she circulated among the cottagers, making the sort of polite conversation one always made with a group of new acquaintances. She hoped they’d found their cottages comfortable. They had. She commented on the superb view. They approved of it, too. She wondered whether they were to enjoy a fine day tomorrow. They were, according to Alding Fath, who hadn’t divined the forecast by mystic means but had heard it on a small transistor radio she’d brought with her. Mrs. Fath was having her tonic without the gin, she explained. Alcohol did things to her vibrations and she didn’t want to disappoint Everard, since he’d been nice enough to pay her way.

Not knowing quite how to answer that, Emma asked her, “How soon do you think you’ll be able to get in touch with the ghosts?”

“Oh, I don’t expect to reach them at all. Most of this ghost stuff is poppycock, you know. It’s not the entity who hangs around, as far as I’ve been able to make out, it’s just some remnant of the earthly personality. Sort of like an old sock that’s been left in the back corner of the closet, if you get what I mean.”

“I must say I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Emma couldn’t recall whether she’d ever thought of ghosts much at all. “Then can’t they just be tidied out, so to speak?”

“Oh, they can. Ghosts are a cinch to get rid of, but you’d be surprised how many people won’t let you. They hang on to their ghosts the way some folks collect old cigar boxes. There was an awful lot of that foolishness going around back during Queen Victoria’s time, you know, her mooning around about poor Albert and the mass mind catching her vibes. Cluttering themselves up with their hair wreaths and mourning rings and all the rest of it. Regular breeding ground for ghosts. Stirred up a lot of old ones that had been kicking around unnoticed, too.”

Mrs. Fath took a sip of her tonic water. “I’m not trying to claim there’s anything wrong with remembering our loved ones who’ve passed over, mind you. And it’s only natural to want a few keepsakes. But that garbage about parking Aunt Minnie’s ashes on the mantelpiece and Granny’s teeth in the tumbler on the nightstand beside her deathbed so’s a person would have something to go and weep over whenever they couldn’t find anything better to do, that was carrying it too far, in my opinion.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

Emma thought of Cousin Mabel in that great ark of a house stuffed with dead relatives’ portable assets. Mabel kept her parents’ bedroom just the way they’d left it, though whether she ever went there to weep was something Emma didn’t know and wouldn’t have believed if anyone had told her, particularly Mabel. She wished she could get Mabel together with Alding Fath. Perhaps later on, after they were all back from the island—it dawned on her that she was actually thinking about inviting this fortune-teller out to Pleasaunce for a weekend. And that Mrs. Fath knew what she was thinking.

“Don’t quite know what to make of me, do you, Mrs. Kelling? At least you’re not scared of me, like some people. What gets ’em is that they think so-called psychic powers are something out of the ordinary. Actually, it’s more like your appendix or the little tailbone at the end of your spine. Everybody’s born with one but we don’t use it for anything, and most of us can’t even remember what we grew it for in the first place.”

“If you say so.” Emma still wasn’t quite clear as to the relationship between the occult and the vermiform appendix.

Mrs. Fath was quite willing to enlighten her. “Back when a tribe had just one big mind among ’em, as you might say, and hadn’t developed the concept of time as a kind of dressmaker’s tape measure, all the ideas and experiences would be kind of mixed in together like a pot of stew: your thoughts, my thoughts, past, present, and future. When you needed a point of information, you just dipped into the common pot and hauled it out for yourself. As life began to get complicated, more and more stuff got thrown into the pot and it got harder to fish out the piece you wanted, so you got somebody who hadn’t lost the knack to do it for you.”

“Those would have been the oracles?”

“Or shamans or medicine men or whatever you want to call ’em. We’ve all got a bit of the shaman in us still, but most of us don’t like to admit it to ourselves, so we squash it down and sit on it. You’d have been pretty good yourself, if you hadn’t been so well educated.”

“Do you think so?” Emma felt oddly pleased by this rather backhanded compliment, if such it was meant to be. “One does get hunches now and then.”

“And I’ll bet one’s learned to trust one’s hunches over one’s so-called logical thinking. Right, Mrs. Kelling?”

“Well …” Emma couldn’t imagine what Cousin Mabel would think of this conversation. “I have to say I generally regret it if I don’t. Is that how you got started, trusting your hunches?”

“Trouble with me was, I had ’em too often, and they were never wrong. My folks were real strict churchgoers and didn’t hold with what they called Devil’s work, so I had to either keep my mouth shut or darn well wish I had. They weren’t mean people, but they thought it was their bounden duty not to spare the rod. I never did care much for getting walloped, even when I knew it was well intended.”

I
SHOULDN’T THINK YOU WOULD
.” Emma didn’t know why Alding Fath was telling her all this, but how did one manage to turn the woman off? And did one honestly want to? “But when you got out on your own …” she prompted.

“I didn’t get out on my own. When I was fifteen, my parents were afraid I was getting worldly notions from too much schooling, so they took me out and married me off to the minister’s nephew. We hadn’t been hitched a week when I knew for a positive fact my new husband was having it off with his uncle’s wife and only took me for a cover-up because he thought I was too young and stupid to know any better. I stuck it out for a while. Having my own place to keep was better than being home, and she kept him so busy he didn’t bother me any about the married stuff. Finally, though, the hypocrisy began to get under my skin, so next time he told me he was going to choir practice, I told him a thing or two. He beat me up and threatened to kill me if I ever told on him.”

“How dreadful! What did you do?”

“I waited till he’d gone off, then I took a little money he didn’t know about that I’d made picking berries and went down to the bus station. There was just enough to buy me a ticket to Atlanta. My father had a sister there who didn’t like him much, so I figured Aunt Flossie’d be the one to go to, and she was. She put me up and got me a job clerking in a store. That meant I could pay my board and have a little over for myself, which was fine for a while. But then I got a feeling that my father had figured out I was with Aunt Flossie and was fixing to come after me. I lit out for Wilmington and slung hash in a diner till I could buy myself a few decent clothes and get a job in a bank. They had a training program and I was all set to go to night school and work my way up.”

“That was ambitious of you.”

“Sure, till I got one of my hunches that somebody was helping himself to the cash. Like a good little girl, I went to tell the manager. Just about half a second too late it hit me like a ton of bricks that he was the one with his hand in the till. So naturally he fired me.”

“Oh dear.”

“And that was how it went. I’d get a job and something would happen and I’d be out on my ear again. You’d have thought I’d learn, but I never could seem to keep my mouth shut. Finally, one day I happened to be eating at one of those sidewalk cafés and this woman came up and asked if she could share my table. I said sure, you know how you do, and the next thing I knew, she was telling me this big sob story.

“Her husband was a gambler. He’d joined some self-help group and was trying to quit, but a couple of days ago, a lovely antique clock that had been her grandmother’s had disappeared out of the house. She knew her husband must have sold it for money to gamble with. He was swearing up and down that he hadn’t, but he’d done the same thing before and lied to her about it. She didn’t know what to do.

“So I told her. ‘What you’d better do,’ I said, ‘is beg your husband’s pardon and get rid of that sanctimonious young twerp who’s living in your spare room. Tell him he’d better bring back your clock and get out of your house or you’ll set the cops on him. The clock’s in a pawnshop, and he’s spent the money on a floozy.’

“I described the fellow right down to a hair. He was the son of somebody they’d met on a trip, passing himself off as a theological student, which he either wasn’t or shouldn’t have been. I could sense he was another one just like my husband.”

“My goodness!” said Emma. “That must have given the woman a jolt.”

“Oh, she wasn’t having a bit of it. She started telling me what a lovely boy Ernest was. I said to her, ‘You come with me right now to that pawnshop and I’ll get your clock back.’ So she finished her sandwich and paid her bill and we walked over to the shop. I’d never been there before, but my feet knew where to take me. Well, we looked all over the place, but the clock was nowhere to be seen. So I said to the pawnbroker, ‘You’ve got a fine antique clock in your back room.’ I told him just what it looked like and the name on the dial and all. ‘You’d better trot it out here right quick,’ I said, ‘because it’s stolen property and you’ll be in big trouble if you don’t.’

“I don’t know what got into me that day, I guess I’d been stomped on once too often. I was bound and determined I was going to win this one, no matter what. I scared that man into believing I was an undercover cop, and by gum, he went and got the clock. Then I made him describe the person who’d brought it in and it was the young boarder, no doubt about that. He’d given the husband’s name, the little sneak.

“So then the woman wanted to know how much the pawnbroker had lent on the clock. She meant to give it back to him so’s he wouldn’t lose out on the deal. He told her two hundred dollars, which was a lie. I said, ‘Then how come you wrote down only fifty in your book? You knew perfectly well what that clock’s worth, and you knew it wasn’t that boy’s to pawn or he wouldn’t have settled for so little. You figured he’d never come back for it and you’d make a bundle on the deal. Don’t waste any sympathy on this bird, lady. He’s as big a crook as the other one.’

“So the upshot was, she gave me the fifty instead and told me I ought to go into the business. I decided that was the only way I’d ever be able to open my mouth and not get fired for it, so I did. And if I were you, Mrs. Kelling, I’d be darned wary of that man in the kitchen. I can’t seem to get a handle on him yet, but he sure doesn’t feel kosher to me.”

T
HIS MUST BE WHAT
her grandmother used to call the gypsy’s warning, Emma thought. She didn’t need it, she had qualms enough already. Emma wished she could have a little heart-to-heart with Vincent about what he intended to do with that unfortunate find of Ted’s, but he’d disappeared. Into the kitchen, she supposed; it was getting on toward seven o’clock and she found herself eager for that lobster bisque.

Everard Wont still hadn’t put in an appearance. Emma mentioned the fact to Joris Groot, who happened to be standing near her. He only shrugged.

“Don’t worry about Ev. He’ll show up when he feels like it.”

“Then we must hope he won’t show up feeling hungry after we’ve finished serving,” Emma retorted. “Mrs. Sabine was quite clear that I mustn’t let her employees work overtime to suit the whims of the guests. I believe there’s a notice to that effect in each of the cottages.”

Groot shuffled his feet uneasily. “Maybe Ev fell asleep or something. Want me to go see?”

“Certainly not. Why should you?”

Wont was more apt than not to be sulking in his cottage waiting for somebody to come and make a fuss over him. If Groot was fool enough to go now, he’d find himself stuck with the job for the rest of the summer. Alternatively, Wont had been at the wine jug again and drunk himself into a stupor, in which case Emma certainly did not want him at her dinner table.

“If he misses dinner, I expect the cook would let you take something to him afterward,” she added so as not to seem too unfeeling. “I believe we’re about to sit down.”