Death on Beacon Hill (26 page)

“When did he get the gun back?” Nell said, curious as to Emily’s take on it.

“The day of the funeral. But he already knew it was a fake, and that I was the one who’d taken it. The day before, he told me the gunsmith I’d spoken to had been at the inquest and told him everything. He said I’d cost him five thousand dollars, over and above the original twelve he’d spent on the gun. I pretended not to know what he was talking about—I told him I’d just taken it to vex him. Do you know what he plans to do? He’s going to make back that five thousand, plus a little more for ‘mental anguish,’ by skimming it from Mrs. Kimball’s estate after he sells her house. He called me a liar when I said I hadn’t seen the gun for five days, but he didn’t care about getting it back at that point. He said it was worthless—almost as worthless as I—” Emily’s voice broke; her shoulders shook.

Foster wrapped an arm around her, whispered something in her ear. She nodded, blotting her eyes with the damp handkerchief. Will handed her a fresh one. She mumbled her thanks.

Still embracing Emily, Foster said, “This is where the tale takes a bit of a strange turn. The next day, after the funeral, Mr. Pratt showed Emily the gun and said he’d found it in her room.”

“I t-told him he couldn’t possibly have,” Emily said, “because it had disappeared from there almost a week before, but that only infuriated him. H-he said he’d found it under my mattress, but how could he have?”

“He didn’t,” Will said. “He got it from your aunt Vera. She told him she’d taken it from your room.”

Emily gaped at him. “That’s impossible. Why would she have said a thing like that?”

Nell said, “We’re just telling you what she told us she said. She asked him not to let you know she was the one who’d returned it to him.”

Emily shook her head with an expression of dazed confusion. “But
it wasn’t in my room.
It
wasn’t.
It hadn’t been in my room for almost a week. Where would she have gotten it?”

“Perhaps,” Will said, “she’d had it the entire time.”

*   *   *

“Aunt Vera?” Emily knocked a third time on the door of her aunt’s bedroom; still no answer.

“She’s probably still out back,” Will said, “summoning the dead.”

Foster grabbed Emily’s hand as she reached for the doorknob. “Let the men go first.”

“He’s right,” Will said. “Why don’t you and Nell stay back till we’ve had a look?”

Foster cracked the door open, paused, opened it further. He and Will stepped into the room; a few seconds later, they gestured for the ladies to enter.

It was a small room, humbly furnished in relation to the rest of the house. The bed was narrow, the rug small, the walls bare. In front of the single window stood a writing desk, on which an oil lamp illuminated a scattering of books and papers. Everything had a uniform, colorless look to it, almost as if it they’d entered a pencil sketch of a modest little bedroom rather than the real thing.

Nell’s gaze was drawn to the only spot of color in the entire room: a thick red book lying open and facedown on the desk.

“I see it,” Will said as Nell extended her hand to point.

He got to the desk first and lifted the book, using his thumb to mark Vera’s place. It was bound in crimson snakeskin, its pages densely inked on both sides with minuscule handwriting. Some of the ink had seeped through the tissue-thin, finely ruled pages, but not badly enough to obscure what was written there. Virginia Kimball’s penmanship was neat and unhurried.

Emily said, “I remember my father saying something to Mrs. Kimball about ‘the Red Book.’”

“This would appear to be it,” Foster said. “It’s a recounting of her...relations with men.” After a moment, he added, “She’ll have written about me in there.”

Emily looked at him. He held her gaze, looking not so much embarrassed as worried as to how she would take this revelation.

Presently she nodded, her expression relaxing into a near-smile. “Thank you for telling me.”

Will opened the book to the place Vera had saved; Nell read along with him:

Nov. 21st, 1868

It took me half an hour to get Orville laced up into my pink satin corset this afternoon, the new one with the black lace trim. There was a ten inch gap in back, and the front view was even more ludicrous, of course, but he didn’t care. He thought he was beautiful. He always does. His self-delusion would seem pathetic if it weren’t born of such arrogance. Hell, it seems pathetic anyway. It’s all I can do, once he’s got on the stockings and the jewelry and the face paint, not to howl with laughter.

Skinning his rabbit when he gets himself tricked out that way takes all my self-control. I close my eyes and imagine I’m someplace else with some other man, someone who can inspire some semblance of passion from me—that simpleminded young Adonis who drives the ice cart, or Tommy Kimball in that barn loft where he took my maidenhead while begging me to marry him, or my old standby, Doc, who makes love with feverish passion and exquisite tenderness every time...for such is the advantage of a lover one has only ever enjoyed in one’s imagination....

Will closed the book, his eyes shadowed.

“I saw my father’s name on that page,” Emily said. “May I read it?”

Will glanced at Nell, who gave him an almost imperceptible shake of the head. “There’s really no point to it, Miss Pratt,” he said. “Suffice it to say she had ample ammunition for blackmail.”

“And not just against your father,” Nell said. There was a list of men’s names on the desk, with dates and scribbled comments next to them. She turned it around so she could read it. “Your name is on here, Dr. Foster, and Mr. Pratt’s, and...oh, my. These must be the men Mrs. Kimball wrote about in the Red Book, but this isn’t her handwriting.”

Emily, reading over Nell’s shoulder, said, “It’s Aunt Vera’s. She must have read the whole book and taken notes.”

“Listen to this.” Foster, who’d been sorting through the papers on Vera’s desk, showed them a letter bearing that day’s date. “It’s to Helena Blavatsky. ‘My dearest guru, priestess, and friend of the heart,’” he read. “‘Soon, very soon, I shall be able, at last, to rejoin you in your journeys—by which I mean, of course, not just your travels around the globe, but your explorations of the mind and the spirit. The pecuniary limitations which have thwarted me thus far shall soon be vanquished. And you will be pleased to know that I am progressing in my quest to coax a departed spirit into this earthly plane. Recent events seem to have focused my abilities in this area, to the point that I feel as if I am on the verge of a glorious assimilation not unlike that which you yourself have experienced.’” Foster scanned the rest of the letter. “There’s more. It’s all pretty much in the same vein.”

“Vera’s been busy.” Nell picked up a letter with
Mrs. Virginia Kimball
embossed across the top in crimson. It had been folded at one time to make an envelope, and sealed with crimson wax. “This is a blackmail letter from Mrs. Kimball to Mr. Pratt, dated March twenty-fifth. My guess is that Vera got this from her brother’s study. It looks as if she was using it as an exemplar to teach herself to copy Mrs. Kimball’s handwriting.” Nell pointed to several sheets of paper on which Vera had practiced, over and over, Mrs. Kimball’s signature and various snippets from the blackmail letter.

Finally, there was a half-finished letter Vera was composing to “Orville” on Mrs. Kimball’s writing paper, and in the late actress’s hand, demanding three thousand dollars within two days “or I will share your most entertaining performances from the Red Book, complete with costume changes, with your wife, your clients, every member of the Somerset Club, your friends, your business associates, in other words, everyone in your world who matters. Do not call my bluff, as you did the first time. I swear to God, if I don’t have that money in my hands the day after tomorrow, you will be a ruined man.”

“This makes no sense,” Foster said. “How could Vera think Mr. Pratt would take a letter like this seriously? Virginia Kimball is dead.”

“Relatively speaking.” It was a female voice, throaty and seasoned with a hint of a genteel southern accent.

They turned to find Vera Pratt standing in the doorway wearing an open silk wrapper over a matching nightgown, her hair cascading over her shoulders, a stemmed cordial glass in her hand. The glass held a ruby-colored drink with a cherry in it; even from ten feet away, Nell could smell the sweet red vermouth and gin. It was a Martinez cocktail.

“Doc.” Vera crossed the room in a leisurely way, hips swaying, her gaze fixed on Will. “It’s been so long.” She reached up to stroke his cheek, her eyes glimmering. “There are so many things I’ve wanted to say to you, explain to you...”

Emily stepped forward. “Aunt Ver—”

Nell grabbed her arm and shook her head.

Will glanced at Nell, then met Vera’s eyes. “There’s no need to explain, Mrs. Kimball.”

“But I was so cruel to you.”

“You had your reasons. I understand. I do, really.”

Vera closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet with tears. “If you knew how much it means to me, hearing you say that.”

Will nodded, looking slightly stunned.

Vera’s gaze lit on the Red Book in Will’s hand, and the letters Nell and Foster were holding. “Y’all are probably wondering what I’ve been up to,” she said with a wicked little smile.

Nell said, “It looks to be the same thing you were up to before your...tragic demise.”

Vera chuckled as she lifted the glass to her mouth. “It’d take more than one puny little bullet in the chest to keep Virginia Kimball from her fun.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Nell said. “I can’t help wondering how you pulled it off, though.”

“My miraculous resurrection, you mean?” With an airy wave of her hand, she said, “Nothing to it. Vera was looking for a departed spirit to ‘inhabit her earthly shell,’ which was actually a pretty good idea, seeing as how she has no personality of her own to speak of. I, meanwhile, took one look at the Other Side and just knew I had to get back into a nice, warm body as soon as I could. Not that I’m too keen on this one,” she said with a contemptuous glance down at herself, “and I’m
definitely
not looking forward to sleeping all alone in that sad little bed of hers, but I reckon beggars can’t be choosers. And there
is
a certain comic irony in possessing the body of the person who did you in. Max should write a play about that. It’d be a hoot.”

Emily sucked in a breath; Foster wrapped an arm around her. “So you really...I mean Vera...she really m-murdered...?”

“Your aunt is what you call a ‘killer mouse.’” Vera propped the bed pillow against the wall and reclined there with her drink in her hand, looking like Cleopatra on her barge. “She just scuttles along the walls trying not to be noticed, squeaking and creeping, creeping and squeaking, then one day she all of a sudden goes on the attack.”

Will leaned against the desk. “What was it, do you suppose, that incited this particular mouse to attack? What happened that afternoon to set her off?”

“We know you’d been out shopping,” Nell said.

“Oh, I’d bought the prettiest little hat you ever saw, and now I’m never going to get to wear it, thanks to Vera Pratt, damn her. She was already there when I got home, raising hell with poor Fee up in my room. I heard them as soon as I walked in the front door. When I got upstairs, I found my jewelry case open and my necklaces spilling out. Vera had a big ol’ gun in her hand, but her back was to me, so she didn’t notice me right away. She was screaming at Fee to give her the Red Book.”

“So you fetched your Remington pocket pistol from under your pillow,” Nell said.

“Yes, but Vera turned and saw me, so she grabbed Fee by her apron sash and held the gun to her head. That’s when I realized it was Orville’s precious Stonewall Jackson gun. I said, ‘So you’re the one who stole it.’ She told me it was actually you, Emily. She said she swiped it out from under your mattress to punish you after you made plans to take ship without her. She’d been hoping to use my necklaces to pay for her own travels—until she got a good look at them and realized they were paste. She came up with a backup plan, though.”

“This.” Will held up the Red Book.

“So she could blackmail her brother?” Nell asked.

Vera shrugged. “And maybe some of the others. Who knows how a mind like that works? Fee, bless her heart, refused to tell her where the book was. She told me not to tell, either. She kept saying Vera could never kill her, that she didn’t have it in her, but I wasn’t so sure, especially when Vera cocked the hammer back.”

“So it was a standoff,” Will said, “you with your gun aimed at Vera, and Vera with her gun on Fiona.”

“Vera swore she’d shoot Fee if I didn’t give up the book. It wasn’t worth gambling with Fee’s life, so I told her it was in the safe behind the painting, and I tossed her the keys—along with a warning that I’d kill her if she hurt Fee. Vera told Fee to take the painting down. Fee refused. Vera screamed at her, threatened her... Fee tried to grab the gun. That’s when...” Vera squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. There was this...explosion, and Fee’s head just...” She gulped her drink with a palsied hand, tears trickling from her eyes.