The Bilbao Looking Glass (19 page)

“Where was Mr. Bittersohn when you got there, do you know?”

“Oh yes, we found him sitting by the fire in the living room with Sarah. We all had a drink together, then he said he had to be going, and went.”

“Where to?”

“Chief Wilson, this was the first time in my life I’d ever met the man,” Bradley expostulated. “I hardly felt well enough acquainted to question him about his engagements.”

“Speaking of engagements, were you aware that he and Mrs. Sarah Kelling were seriously considering marriage?”

“Not then, no. As a matter of fact, he was introduced to me as her tenant.”

“That so?” Wilson fished out his notebook and opened it again.

“According to the testimony of both Mrs. Larrington and Mrs. Beaxitt, the conversation which took place at the party held here prior to Miss Alice Beaxitt’s death between her and Mr. Bittersohn had to do with his love affair with a young woman named Barbara. Would you know anything about that?”

“There was some discussion, I believe, after Sarah and Mr. Bittersohn had left the party.” Bradley didn’t exactly curl his lip in disdain, but he gave the impression of having done so. “I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“Oh, but Sarah hadn’t known anything about this Barbara,” cried Appie. “Not until Alice B. blurted it right out in front of everybody. Poor Alice B. was always so forthright. It never occurred to her—”

“Alice B. was a vicious gossip, and she told the story deliberately to make trouble between Max and me.”

Sarah knew better than to tell lies to the police, after the experiences she’d had with them. “She succeeded, if you want to know. Max and I had a big fight about it on the way home. We’d gotten ourselves straightened out and everything would have been fine if you and Bradley hadn’t come—” she’d almost said barging in.

“In view of what had gone on, Max didn’t feel like hanging around making polite conversation, so he went over to his sister’s house and played cribbage with his uncle,” she finished.

“But you didn’t know where he was going, dear. You’d expected him to stay for dinner, and you asked if you should leave him something. Bradley, you remember.”

“Aunt Appie, if you’re trying to give me an alibi, forget it. I don’t need one. As for Max, his own family can vouch for where he was.”

“Neither of you happened to hear him come back?” said Wilson.

“No, but we wouldn’t, you see,” Appie took it upon herself to answer. “As I told you, he was staying down at the carriage house. It’s a fair distance from the main house because of the old days when the horses would—well, I’m sure I don’t have to—and the driveway has a turnoff down that way so if he didn’t choose to drive up to the main house, which of course he wouldn’t if he got back late—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kelling. Come on, Bittersohn. You can tell us the rest of it in the cruiser.”

“What about you, Sarah?” asked Bradley. “Shall I take you home?”

“No, stay here with Aunt Appie. I’ve got to drive Max’s car back. We can’t leave it standing here.”

“Are you sure you can manage by yourself?”

“Why not? After the Studebaker, I should be able to manage anything.”

She gave Rovedock a confident smile and went out flipping the car keys between her fingers. Once behind the wheel, though, she didn’t feel quite so sure of herself. Max loved his car the way a cowboy is alleged to love his horse. Cracking it up on him after what he’d already been put through would be the ultimate blow.

Sarah managed well enough by driving more cautiously than she normally would have. The upshot was that by the time she got there, the police were already hard at work inside the carriage house. When she went in to see what was happening, she saw one of the men had found a loose riser she’d never suspected in the stairway, and was holding it up like the flap of an envelope. His partner had a flashlight and was peering into the cavity.

“Hey, Chief, come here quick!”

Sarah went, too. What they’d found were a small watercolor whose characteristic purple shadows told her at once it was a Millard Sheets, and a long-handled axe that had been almost but not quite wiped clean.

“Sorry, Bittersohn,” said Chief Wilson. “I guess we’ll have to take you on down to the station.”

“Y
OU CAN’T BLAME MAX
for that,” Sarah cried. “He wasn’t the one who hid it.”

“Then who was?” Wilson asked her.

“I don’t know, but I heard it happening.”

“Oh yeah? When was this?”

“Last night. Around midnight, I should think. It wasn’t too long before Max got back from New York anyway, because I was still in a flap when he came in. I was hunting around the stalls to see if I could find anything wrong. Wasn’t I, Max?”

“You were, not that they’re going to believe either one of us.”

“Let her tell her story,” said Wilson. “Go on, Mrs. Kelling. How long did you spend hunting?”

“Perhaps fifteen minutes. After Max came in, we—got sidetracked.”

“About this noise you say you heard, where were you at the time?”

“Upstairs in the apartment.”

“That so? Your aunt gave me the impression you’d been staying at the main house.”

Sarah knew she was the color of a Paul’s Scarlet, but this was no time to play coy. “What my aunt told you is perfectly true. It just happened that I’d been down at the campground talking to my Cousin Lionel.”

“That’s the guy who burned down your boathouse a couple of days ago?” said one of Wilson’s men.

“I don’t think Lionel himself had anything to do with that. His sons claim they didn’t, either, for what that’s worth. Anyway, I thought they’d gone but it turned out they hadn’t. I’m telling this backward. What happened was that yesterday I went out to Little Nibble with Bradley Rovedock and the Larringtons, as you know. That was when Fren Larrington killed the goat. When we got back about six, the rest went on to dinner somewhere, but I asked them to let me off at my house. I was tired and lay down to rest. I fell asleep. I woke about eight o’clock and wasn’t sleepy any more, so I went for a walk. I came across Lionel and his gang down in the clearing where the boathouse used to be, so I stopped to visit with them for a while.”

“Visit with them?” said Wilson. “Jed Lomax told me you’d thrown them off your property.”

“I had, but they weren’t listening. Anyway, they’d come back and built a well-sweep and a lean-to and a firepit. They’d really been working awfully hard. It was getting dark by then, so I didn’t have the heart to throw them out again. Lionel and I sat down on a log and he started telling me his troubles. Vare—that’s his wife, whom you met back at Miffy’s—”

“The one who’s cast off the shackles of motherhood?”

“Yes. She’s stuck him with the children, who are absolute fiends, I grant you, but that’s as much Vare’s doing as Lionel’s. She’s demanding a huge allowance which she shares with her friend Tigger, and being utterly beastly in general. Vare was a Beaxitt, by the way. I’m throwing that in for what should be very obvious reasons. Lionel and I have never been what you’d call close, but he needed somebody to talk to and I had nothing better to do, so I stayed and listened.”

“Until when?”

“Oh, tennish, I should think. It had been dark for quite a while by the time I started back.”

“How could you see?”

“I’d brought a flashlight with me. I still wasn’t sleepy, so I went down to the beach and walked there for a while, then I came back up to the carriage house to see whether Max was back yet. He wasn’t, so I decided to wait for him in the apartment.”

“Any special reason?”

“Yes. It was while I was walking on the beach that I’d made up my mind to go ahead and marry him. So I wanted to tell him.”

“Nice timing,” muttered one of the officers.

“I can’t help it, that’s what happened. Not that it’s really anyone’s business but Max’s and mine.”

“All right, Mrs. Kelling,” said Wilson. “So you went upstairs to the apartment. How did you get in? Was the door unlocked?”

“No. That is, the carriage house—where we are now—was, but the upstairs wasn’t. I had a duplicate key on the ring with my own door keys, so I was able to let myself in.”

“You go prepared, don’t you?”

“I’ve been trained to. My late husband had a thing about it. We’re so isolated out here, you see. Anyway, I left the outer door unlocked because I knew Max would be coming in, but I’m sure I locked the door to the upstairs apartment when I went in. I remember being glad I had when I heard the noise downstairs.”

“Can you describe that noise, Mrs. Kelling?”

“Scrabbly, I suppose one might say. I thought at first it might be an animal of some sort, then I realized it was a person trying to be quiet.”

“You didn’t open the door and yell down to see who it was?”

“Chief Wilson, we’d just had a particularly gruesome murder which appears to have been the result of Alice Beaxitt’s surprising an intruder. No, I did not open the door and yell down. I kept as still as I could and hoped to goodness whoever was down there wouldn’t take a notion to come up.”

“For how long?”

“Five or ten minutes, I suppose. It seemed like an eternity.”

“How come they didn’t see the light in the upstairs apartment?”

“Because I hadn’t put one on. I’d had my flashlight when I went in, you see. I don’t know why I didn’t switch on a lamp, I just didn’t. As things turned out, I must say I was awfully glad I hadn’t.”

“You’d been sitting up there alone in the dark for some time, then, before you heard this scrabbling noise, as you describe it.”

“No, as a matter of fact, I’d stretched out on Max’s bed and fallen asleep again.” That was as close as she needed to get to the truth. “I expect it was the noise that waked me.”

“What made you so sure it wasn’t Bittersohn coming in that you heard?”

“Because Max always charges upstairs like my Great-uncle Nathan at San Juan Hill. He’s been one of my tenants in Boston since January, in case you hadn’t realized. I’m quite familiar with the kind of racket he makes around a house. Anyway, it’s absurd to think he’d have been sneaking in to hide those things so long after the robbery, and then gone out and made a separate entrance later on. He had no way of knowing I was upstairs.”

“We don’t know if this noise you say you heard had anything to do with the evidence you found, Mrs. Kelling,” said Wilson.

“As for the painting, he might have taken it to New York to sell and not been able to find a buyer, so he brought it back again and put it in the hiding place,” suggested one of the other men not unintelligently.

Wilson nodded. “Getting back to this noise, Mrs. Kelling. How long did it last?”

“Not long, unless of course it had been going on while I was asleep. Anyway, I only heard it for a short while, then I thought I heard the outer door creak and a little rattling of gravel on the drive, as if someone had gone. As I mentioned, I lay still for a while longer. Then it occurred to me that what I’d heard might have been one of my cousin’s children setting another fire, so I pulled myself together and came down. That’s what I was doing when Max came in, sniffing around for any sign of smoke or the ticking of a time bomb or whatever.”

“Time bomb? Are you kidding?”

“You don’t know those little innocents. There’s nothing I’d put past them.”

“What about murder?”

“Well, perhaps they’d draw the line at that. I don’t believe they knew anything about Alice B.’s at any rate, until they heard me telling their father about it the morning after it happened, because they started shrieking, ‘We want to see the body.’ ”

“They weren’t at the funeral, right?”

“No. Lionel asked me whether he should take them and I vetoed it as hard as I possibly could because I knew they’d have turned it into a three-ring circus. For a wonder, he took my advice.”

“You say his wife was related to this Alice B., as you call her?”

“Yes, Vare was a niece. From what I was told at Miffy’s today, she’s been hanging around a good deal of late, apparently trying to get Alice B. to leave her some money. Vare knows all about axes because she’s done one of those survival courses. She’s going to be in a financial mess if Lionel really cuts off her allowance as he claims he’s going to, because Tigger appears to be not only a professional freeloader but a pretty tough character. Vare has no money of her own that I know of, and her parents certainly won’t give her any to support Tigger with. I know them. I do think you ought to check out those wills before you do anything else, Chief Wilson.”

“Thanks for the suggestion, Mrs. Kelling. As it happens, we managed to think of that ourselves. Miss Beaxitt left her entire estate, which amounts to a little over three hundred thousand dollars, to Margaret Tergoyne. The residuary legatee would have been Alexander Kelling.

“Alexander Kelling?” Sarah stammered. “But—but which Alexander Kelling? That’s a common name in our family. I have a cousin Alexander Brooks Kelling, and another—”

“This was Alexander Archibald Douglas Kelling. Got many of those?”

Sarah shook her head. She honestly thought she was going to faint. “None now. That was my husband. Why in heaven’s name would Alice B. leave her money to him?”

“The will said ‘in memory of our beautiful relationship.’ That mean anything to you?”

“Yes.” Her voice was shaking. “It means she wanted everyone to believe she’d been Alexander’s mistress. If that isn’t typical! Alice B. couldn’t even get herself murdered without being nasty about it.”

“You didn’t know about this bequest?”

“Know about it? Of course I didn’t know about it. Of all the slimy, rotten—I’m sorry. What’s the use of ranting and raving? She’s had her fun and I’m left with the consequences. You might as well arrest me, Chief Wilson, because I probably would have murdered that scheming old bitch if I’d known what she was up to.”

“Then you don’t think there’s any chance she might in fact have had some kind of relationship with your husband—back when they were young, I mean.”

“You’re a brave man to ask me that, Chief Wilson. No, I do not. My husband had been so deeply traumatized, if that’s the word, by his one disastrous love affair when he was still practically a boy that he didn’t even care to think about sex, much less engage in it with a woman who went around telling everything she knew and a great deal she didn’t. It’s entirely possible Alice B. did have some kind of romantic crush on Alexander, because he was a remarkably handsome man, as you know. Since he was always courteous and considerate toward everyone, Alice B. may have read more into his behavior toward her than he’d meant to convey. It’s far more likely, however, that she was just being funny in her own vicious little way. There’s going to be a grand free-for-all among the Beaxitts now.”