Family Vault (23 page)

Could a thief have tied a rope to the chimney and swung down over the side of the house, jimmying open Alexander’s windows to get in? But why both? Why choose the side that faced the street, instead of coming down the alley way where he’d be less apt to be spotted?

Aunt Caroline’s boudoir was directly under her son’s bedroom. Sarah went in there and stuck her head out the window to see if she could spot a dangling rope. Something moved up there. She ducked back in a hurry, then realized it was only those thin white curtains billowing out in the wind. Nevertheless, she didn’t want to look any more. She clutched the heavy draperies and pulled them over the glass, feeling those myriad French knots under her hands, like Braille.

God in heaven, it was Braille! All those hours when she’d shut herself in here alone with needle and thread, Aunt Caroline had not been aimlessly killing time. She’d been writing her diary.

S
ARAH DROPPED THE TAPESTRY
as though it had been the shirt of Nessus. To pry into somebody else’s private writings was one of the most revolting breaches of courteous behavior any decently bred person could commit.

And what if it was? Caroline Kelling had killed her own husband, had got rid of a murdered woman’s body as coolly as if she’d been setting out the garbage, had somehow contrived the timely death of Walter Kelling, had almost certainly been sent to her own death along with her only son as a result of what had happened in the past. If there was any explanation of this ghastly chain of events anywhere, it had to be here. She picked up the cloth again, held it flat against the window frame, and began to sort out the letters with her fingertips.

“My little love,” those were the first three words she read and the ones that kept recurring. Caroline Kelling had a lover! It was for his sake she’d got rid of Gilbert Kelling. She had intended to go away with this man, to share her life and her fortune with him as she had already begun sharing her body while her husband was alive. The French knots went into voluptuous detail. Sarah would never have believed Aunt Caroline capable of such erotic passion.

It was appalling to think of that aging woman sitting here in black solitude, pouring out her soul in this almost eerie manner, reliving every moment of a love affair that must still consume her even though it had inevitably been blighted by the years and her growing incapacity. Probably, to Caroline Kelling, the passage of time had not been very real. Her little love was always young, always as handsome as adoring memory pictured him, although God alone knew what the man might look like by now.

The entries, if such they could be called, followed no logical order. When the brooding fit came over her, Aunt Caroline must simply have caught up a fold of the material, felt for a smooth place, and filled it in at random. Words were abbreviated, jumbled together without connectives, without punctuation, sometimes with no apparent sense. Reading was a puzzlement as well as an agony. Yet Sarah became wholly engrossed in piecing together the incredible revelations that emerged from those thousands upon thousands of meticulously worked French knots, forgetting that whoever murdered Caroline and Alexander might even now be in the house with her.

Caroline and her little love, whoever he might be, had been carrying on their tempestuous romance for some months before they came to the decision that Gilbert Kelling must be got rid of. It was the lover, she gathered, who first hinted at murder, but Caroline herself who worked out the plan that had succeeded so neatly in its objective, but ruined the hopes they’d had of enjoying Gilbert’s fortune together.

Caroline had been vehement in taking all blame to herself. The man had been swept into tragedy by his wild adoration of her. He must be shielded at any cost. Even in her most incoherent rhapsodies, Caroline had been careful to avoid putting in any tangible clue to her lover’s identity. The one fact that came out was that he’d been forced by circumstances to go through a form of marriage with somebody else, although his heart and his thoughts would always be with his beloved. Poor Aunt Caroline!

It was Ruby Redd who’d wrecked their lives, not Gilbert’s murder or Caroline’s affliction. Until the stripper entered the picture, the affair had been waxing hotter and heavier than ever. The rich widow and her little love still had every intention of getting married after a discreet interval had passed, no matter what the world might think of the match.

Was that a clue? Why should the world, or that minuscule portion of it whose opinion Caroline Kelling gave two pins for, have any objection to her marrying again unless the man was for some reason blatantly unsuitable? Some of the clan might indulge in a bit of cat about Gilbert’s money going to an outsider, but most of them were of the opinion that their relative had given his beautiful wife a pretty raw deal. Sarah couldn’t think offhand of anyone, except possibly Cousin Mabel, who’d have been spiteful enough to begrudge the family heroine a second husband who could give her the loving care she needed. Perhaps Caroline was being morbid about her afflictions here, picturing herself accused of trapping the man into being her nurse and depriving him of a normal wife’s attentions.

Whatever her qualms, Caroline’s little love had evidently kept insisting he wanted her under any conditions, until Ruby Redd showed up demanding blackmail. How a stripper from the Old Howard ever learned the pair had murdered Gilbert Kelling, or what the damning proof she held against them was, Caroline didn’t say. Possibly she never knew. More likely, the proof would have pointed too clearly toward the man whom she was so determined to protect.

Ruby made her approach to the lover, but it was Caroline who paid. The man must not have had any real money of his own. That, Sarah thought cynically, could explain his unswerving devotion to a rich widow. Aunt Caroline herself might have had some inkling that once her fortune gave out his attachment would lessen. She didn’t admit any such thing, but it was clear that she’d been thrown into panic by the speed at which Ruby was bleeding her of her funds. At last she’d put her foot down.

“I said no more…face her down…deny…forgery…slander…”

That hadn’t worked. Ruby demanded a confrontation, forced the lover to bring her face-to-face with Caroline late one night, when Alexander was off at a stag party and the maids could be got rid of.

Caroline had planned the meeting herself, expected an unpleasant scene, but the reality was beyond anything she’d imagined. “Here in this house…railing…threatening…grinning sidewise at him with that vampire’s mouth as if they shared some obscene joke. Said promised rubies…must have them or dreadful things…kept yelling you promised…how could I…said ridiculous…how did she know about rubies…”

Then it came out. Piecing the incoherencies together, Sarah managed to understand that the lover had finally been put in the position of having to explain that Alexander had let himself be seduced by the creature who was blackmailing them. Ruby had been stringing the infatuated boy along so that she could pump him about the true extent of his father’s fortune. Alex had been a willing dupe. Knowing her obsession with rubies, he’d bragged about the family jewels, promised to let her wear the parure in return for her disgusting favors.

Caroline went on and on about the appalling scene.

“Outrage…laughed at me…called me fool…stupid …said I didn’t know what…flaunted herself before his eyes…twined her body…tried to make me think he and she…”

The lover had repulsed the dancer’s blatant sexual advances, pushed her away in anger. Caroline seemed not to have comprehended precisely what happened after that. Ruby must have become enraged and tried to fly at her. To save her life, the lover struck out. Suddenly Ruby was dead on the hall floor and the man was protesting, “I did it for you. She was going to kill you!”

It was not a killing, it was sheer heroism; noble, justified, no wrong at all. Yet they couldn’t risk putting their case before a judge. Again Caroline thought of a plan. They must hide the body in the old family vault, soon to be part of a historical site, never to be opened again.

Alexander wasn’t meant to be involved, he simply happened to come home at the wrong moment. However, they immediately realized they could use him. Even while he was kneeling beside Ruby Redd’s body, feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there, the others were out in the kitchen, plotting.

The lover must get away by the back door. Caroline would go back and pretend she thought Alex had killed his paramour in a drunken quarrel. It served him right for having betrayed his mother. Obviously, Aunt Caroline had never felt the slightest compunction about laying such a dreadful punishment on her child, only exultation at having so valiantly shielded her little love.

For her, the tragedy was that the blackmailing didn’t stop. Ruby, too, had betrayed them. She’d shared their secret with an accomplice who stood guard outside the house and saw what happened. Now they were more vulnerable than before. Again the lover got the threats. Again it was Caroline who paid.

That was where Gilbert Kelling’s estate had gone, every cent of it, to save another man from disgrace and prosecution for murder. Caroline reveled in the sacrifice she had made, never caring that she’d robbed Alexander of his birthright. She actually seemed to think she’d done a mother’s duty when she laced Walter Kelling’s mushrooms with her eyedrops so that Alex could marry Sarah for her inheritance.

It was a horrible document. Yet Sarah read on until her fingertips were raw from fumbling over the hard knots, until her body was chilled through despite the down comforter. She stayed at the window until dawn cast its dirty coral glow over the rooftops. Then, as though she dared not let the sun see what she was up to, she crawled into Caroline Kelling’s bed and went to sleep.

T
HIS TIME IT WAS
the telephone that woke her. Sarah started downstairs still half asleep, felt the blast from those open windows on the third floor and decided she’d better shut them before she went down. By the time she got to the phone, there was nobody on the line. Fuming, she climbed back to her own room and put on some clothes.

Nothing up here seemed to have been disturbed. Even Aunt Caroline’s pearls as well as her own modest strand and what remained of the money she’d got from Mr. Redfern were lying on the dresser. Sarah went to take a closer look at Alexander’s room. Here, too, except for the mess of bedclothes on the floor, there really wasn’t much wrong. His studs and cufflinks were safe in the collar box along with Grandfather Kelling’s massive solid gold watch and chain with the star sapphire set into the fob.

That scared her more than anything else. Sarah backed out of the room and was running down to check the dining room silver when she heard an almighty thumping on the front door. Whoever that might be, it was surely no ghost. Uncle Jem, perhaps, though he wasn’t usually so energetic at this hour of the morning. She peeked through one of the narrow glass panels that flanked the doorway and saw Max Bittersohn, in what appeared to be a state of utter panic.

“Mr. Bittersohn, what’s the matter?”

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” he yelled back.

“I did, but you hung up too fast.” She opened the door. “Come in and help me hunt for burglars. I think there’s been a break-in, though I haven’t found anything missing so far.”

All at once Sarah was exhausted. “Would you mind terribly if I went out to the kitchen and made some coffee first? I haven’t had breakfast, and I feel a bit wobbly.”

“So do I. Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

Sarah hunched her shoulders. “Because I didn’t have guts enough to come downstairs, if you want the truth. I’d moved into my mother-in-law’s room on the second floor, thinking that would be close enough to the telephone, but it wasn’t.”

“Want to tell me what happened?”

“I wish I could. All I really know is that sometime during the night, both windows in my husband’s room on the third floor were opened from the top and the covers pulled off the bed.”

“That’s odd. And you say nothing was taken?”

“Not that I could see. A valuable antique watch and some other things are still there, and my own room next to his wasn’t disturbed at all, though I’d left my money and Aunt Caroline’s pearls in plain sight. I haven’t searched downstairs yet because I just got up. I locked myself in Aunt Caroline’s room after I found the windows open and didn’t get to sleep till daybreak. I hadn’t realized what a coward I am.”

All he said was, “Where do you keep the coffee?”

“Oh, please don’t bother. I can manage the stove, if nothing else. Do you eat eggs? Those seem to be about the only thing I have in the house.”

“You don’t have to get anything for me.”

“But I’d like to. I hate cooking for just myself.”

Sarah poked bread into the toaster. She felt weepy again; was that because she’d found a shoulder she could bawl on? Why was this strange man showing such concern, when her own family didn’t mind leaving her to fend for herself? Egg box in hand, she turned and faced him.

“Mr. Bittersohn, I’m going to ask an extremely rude question, and I hope you’ll understand why I have to know. Does your benevolent interest in me have anything to do with the Kelling jewelry?”

To her surprise, he laughed. “I was wondering when we’d get around to that. I can’t afford to buy the collection, and I’m not planning to steal it, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“But what about your book?”

“Forget it. Okay, I guess it’s time I came clean. Remember my uncle, the pawnbroker?”

“You mentioned that you had one.”

“Well, back when I was in college, he got caught in a flimflam involving some stolen diamonds, and wound up in jail on manufactured evidence. That didn’t worry him much, he said the hours were shorter and you met a nicer class of people. My mother, on the other hand, was very upset because it was a schamde for the neighbors. When my mother’s upset, everybody’s upset. This to me was a real problem. I was still living at home and working my way through school, which gave me little enough time to do my homework under the best of conditions. I had exams coming up, and I knew Ma would never shut up and let me study unless I managed somehow to get Uncle Herman sprung. So I started nosing around and happened by some miraculous accident to catch the crooks who set him up.”