“They’re clumsy to move in, Patsy.”
“Not these days, if you can afford the best.”
“And he can afford the best, because I think he has money.”
Corey and Abe’s investigations in Groton had yielded nothing; New Year’s was always rackety.
“Thanks, guys,” Carmine said to them.
No one stated the obvious: that they would know more when Margaretta’s body turned up.
The previous evening had seen Carmine ascend in the elevator of the Nutmeg Insurance building to its top floor, where he sought out Dr. Hideki Satsuma. Who was willing to admit him.
“Oh, this is nice,” said Carmine, gazing around. “I tried you last night, Doctor, but you weren’t at home.”
“No, I was up at my place on Cape Cod. The Chathams. When I heard the weather forecast, I decided to come home today.”
So Satsuma had a place in the Chathams, did he? A three-hour drive in that maroon Ferrari. But shorter if the drive had begun in Groton.
“Your courtyard is beautiful,” Carmine said, going over to the transparent wall to gaze through it.
“It used to be, but there are imbalances I am trying to correct. I have not yet succeeded, Lieutenant. Perhaps it is the Hollywood cypress – not a Japanese tree. I put it there because I thought a strand of America was necessary, but perhaps I am wrong.”
“To me, Doctor, it makes the garden – taller, twisted around itself like a double helix. Without it, there’s nothing high enough to reach the top of the walls, and nothing symmetrical.”
“I take your point.”
Like hell you do, thought Carmine. What does a gaijin know about gardening the universe?
“Sir, will you give me permission to have someone look at your house on Cape Cod?”
“No, Lieutenant Delmonico, I will not. If you so much as try, I will sue.”
Thus had Monday ended, with nothing to show.
At six on Tuesday evening he arrived at number 6, Ponsonby Lane, to beard the Ponsonbys in their den. The deep baying of a large dog greeted his car, and when Charles Ponsonby opened the front door he was hanging on to the collar of – his sister’s guide dog?
“A weird breed,” he said to Ponsonby as he divested himself of layers in the weather porch.
“Half golden labrador, half German shepherd,” said Charles, hanging up the clothing. “We call her a labrashep, and her name is Biddy. It’s okay, sweetheart, the Lieutenant is a friend.”
The dog wasn’t so sure. It decided to allow him in, but it kept a wary eye on him.
“We’re in the kitchen, starting to make a Beethoven dinner. Numbers three, five and seven – we always prefer his odd-numbered symphonies to his even-numbered. Come through. I hope you don’t mind if we sit in the kitchen?”
“I’m glad to sit anywhere, Dr. Ponsonby.”
“Call me Chuck, though for form’s sake, I’ll stick to your official title. Claire always calls me Charles.”
He led Carmine through one of those genuinely 250-year-old houses that sag at the beams and have floors full of undulations and jogs, into a more modern dining room that opened into what was definitely the original kitchen. Here, the wormholes, the fading paint and the splintering wood were authentic: eat your heart out, Mrs. Eliza Smith.
“This must have been separate from the house in the old days,” said Carmine as he shook hands with a woman in her late thirties who looked just like her brother, even to the watery eyes.
“Sit over there, Lieutenant,” she said in a Lauren Bacall voice, waving a hand at a Windsor chair. “Yes, it was separate. Kitchens back then had to be, in case of fire. Otherwise the whole house burned down. Charles and I joined it to the house with a dining room, but oh, what a headache the building process was!”
“Why’s that?” he asked, taking a glass of amontillado sherry from Charles.
“The ordinances insist that we have to build in timber of the same age as the house,” Charles said, seating himself opposite Carmine. “I finally located two ancient barns in upstate New York and bought them both. Too much timber, but we’ve stored it for any future repairs. Good, hard oak.”
Claire was standing in profile to Carmine, wielding a thin-bladed, supple knife that she was using to prepare two thick cuts of filet steak. Awestruck, Carmine watched her deft fingers get the knife under a tendon and strip it off without losing any of the meat; she performed the task better than he could have.
“Do you like Beethoven?” she asked him.
“Yes, very much.”
“Then why not eat with us? There’s plenty of food, I do assure you, Lieutenant,” she said, rinsing the knife under a brass tap over a stone sink. “A cheese and spinach soufflé first, a lemon sorbet to clear the palate, then beef fillet with Bearnaise sauce, new potatoes simmered in homemade beef stock, and petits pois.”
“Sounds delicious, but I can’t stay too long.” He sipped the sherry to find it a very good one.
“Charles tells me another girl is missing,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Ponsonby.”
“Call me Claire.” She sighed, put the knife away and joined them at the table, accepting a sherry as if she could see it.
The kitchen was much as it must always have been, save that where once the great chimney would have held the spits, hooks and bread oven of eighteenth-century cooking, it now held a massive slow combustion stove. The room was too warm for Carmine.
“An Aga stove? I don’t know it,” he said, draining his sherry.
“We bought it in England on our one adventure abroad years ago,” said Charles. “It has a very slow oven for all-day baking, and an oven fast enough to do justice to pastry or French bread. Lots of hot-plates. It supplies us with hot water in winter too.”
“Oil fired?”
“No, it’s wood fired.”
“Isn’t that expensive? I mean, heating oil is only nine cents a gallon. Wood must cost a lot more.”
“It would if I had to buy it, Lieutenant, but I don’t. We have twenty acres of loggable forest up beyond Sleeping Giant, the last land we own apart from these five acres. I cut what I need each spring, replant the trees I take down.”
Jesus, here we go again! thought Carmine. How many Huggers have these secret retreats tucked away? Abe and Corey will have to go up there tomorrow and comb his twenty acres of forest – how they’ll love that with all this snow on the ground! Benjamin Liebman the undertaker has a mortuary so clean that we’d have to catch him in the act and the Prof has a basement full of trains, but a whole goddamn forest -!
A second glass of the Ponsonby sherry made Carmine conscious that he hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch: time to go.
“I hope you won’t consider my question rude, Claire, but have you always been blind?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said cheerfully. “I’m one of those incubator babies got fed pure oxygen. Blame it on ignorance.”
His rush of pity made him look away, up to where on one wall hung a group of framed photographs, some of them old enough to be sepia daguerrotypes. A strong family resemblance ran through the faces: square adamantine features, fiercely marked brows and thick dark hair. The only different one was clearly the latest of them: an elderly woman whose face was far more reminiscent of Charles and Claire, from its wispy hair to watery pale eyes and long, lugubrious features. Their mother? If so, then they were not in the Ponsonby mold, they were in hers.
“My mother,” Claire said with that uncanny ability to pick out what was going on in the sighted world. “Don’t let my prescience bother you, Lieutenant. To some extent, it’s legerdemain.”
“I can tell she’s your mother, and that you both resemble her rather than the Ponsonby line.”
“She was a Sunnington from Cleveland, and we do take after the Sunningtons. Mama died three years ago, a merciful release. Very severe dementia. But one cannot put a Daughter of the American Revolution in a home for senile old ladies, so I cared for her myself until the bitter end. With some excellent help from the county authorities, I add.”