Past Malice (25 page)

B
Y THE END OF THE NEXT WORKDAY,
I
WAS BEGINNING
to believe that we were hitting everything we would from this field season. There was always hope, of course, but there was so much to finally map out that it would take us a good deal of our remaining time to do it. Brian stopped by again, to help close up, and I was glad of that, because my head was spinning with all the details I had to keep straight to help the graduate students figure out what they were looking at.

The Chandler House was also in a whirl, with the threat of two hundred visiting Chandlers and Chandler-descendants looming on the horizon, just a few days away. Trouble struck when Perry discovered that the last of the bunting that was meant to be draped on the house was torn and dirty, just after she’d brought it out for the scaffolding team to hang.

“Someone must have just shoved it into the bag last time, and never bothered about fixing it. I’ll take it home tonight.”

“Hey, I’ve got to go out to the farmstand anyway,” I said. “Let me give you a lift.” I was curious to see what she would say in the course of our drive, now that I knew a different version of how she’d hurt her arm.

Perry shook her head. “That’s okay. I’m getting a ride with Fee.”

“Fee’s at the caterer’s now, working out the tent issues. I don’t mind.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll see you back here about four then? I’m going to have to leave early if I’m going to get it all done by tomorrow.” She giggled. “Ted’s going to hate me.”

“He’ll get over it.” Any kind of attention seemed to be okay with Perry, I thought. It seemed as though Charles was correct in his assessment of her.

“Great. I’ll just help get things packed up, and I’ll see you back here.” She paused. “Damn it, this means that the scaffolding can’t come down until tomorrow morning. We hoped to have it down by now.”

I shrugged. “As long as you can remove it in time for the reunion.”

I sent Bucky home with Brian again, explaining why I would be late. “I’m just going to give Perry a hand. I’ll pick up some corn to roast too, on the way back.” I promised.

I helped Perry with the heavy box of fabric and got her settled into my car. We drove past the common, struggling to make our way against the tourist traffic on foot, buses, and cars. We were held up while someone tried to back a camper the wrong way down a one-way street, which kept us practically parked in front of Janice Booth’s house. There were as many tourists taking pictures of the striped house as there were people snapping shots of the common, with its green grass, colonial homes, white church, and the waterfront.

“Look at that, would you?” The bitterness in Perry’s
voice was like acid eating through metal. “It’s just a travesty, the way some people treat what should be respected.”

“I think Janice keeps the place up well enough. She’s just got a wicked sense of humor, that’s all.” I was able to maneuver past someone parked halfway across the intersection before the light turned, and breathed a sigh of relief as we got onto the wider road up the coast and out to the edge of town. It’s funny how you seem to hold your breath in traffic and let it out when you get through the snarl; the word “congestion” is most appropriate.

“There’s not a damn thing funny about it.” Each word sounded as though it was a dry twig snapping in half. I shot a glance across to the passenger’s seat. Perry had one hand overlapping the other in her lap, the knuckles white as the cast on her left arm, and fingertips red with the pressure. Her lips were pinched with disapproval. “This town, its past, is something to be cherished. Not mocked.”

“I don’t think Janice was mocking the town so much as she was trying to stick it to Aden.”

“Aden might have had his faults; I’m the last person to say he didn’t. But he did care deeply about historic Stone Harbor.”

“I don’t know,” I said. We had turned inland from the coast and were almost at the edge of Stone Harbor, near its shared border with Lawton and Boxham-by-Sea. Here the houses were interspersed with fields. “I’m beginning to think that Aden treated the past as something to use against people.”

“What do you mean by that?” she said sharply. “Aden worked as hard as anyone to preserve the past. He had an obligation, we all have, to look after what was built up for us. You look after the past, and it looks after you. You should know that, of all people.”

I’d never heard anything quite so silly in my life. The past
might not be dead, as Faulkner pointed out, but it sure as hell wasn’t up to looking after the present. It was something to learn from, something to inform you, but there’s no way I’d call it a living force, as Perry seemed to be doing. That kind of idealization was just sickly sentiment, as far as I was concerned. “Maybe he did care about preservation, but he had a nasty habit of using people’s histories against them.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said slowly. “Not very nice, some of the stories that have been going around.”

“From what I’ve heard, there were a lot of people who Aden was blackmailing. A lot of people who would have been happy to see him dead.”

“Hmmm. I guess I’m just trying to think of some good in the man. Now that he’s dead.”

Trust Perry to ennoble something that was past. Her whitewashing of Aden was as obnoxious to me as Janice’s house was to her.

We passed the farmstand, and I pulled down the road that led to the old Taylor place. A rambling old house, it was carefully maintained but clearly had seen better days. The lawn was overgrown and the gardens were getting weedy.

“You’ll have to pardon the decay.” Perry laughed. “I’ve not been too handy with the lawnmower since the accident.”

Her use of the word “accident” rather than “mishap” or “rundown” caught my attention, and I couldn’t help poking at her story a little. “Have the police found anyone yet?”

“No. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help in terms of giving them a description. It all happened so fast.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t like to think of it.”

I nodded, unsmiling. “Of course not. Let me give you some help with the bunting.”

“Thanks, Emma.”

I pulled the heavy box out of the back, and Perry opened
her front door. The smell of old house—aging wood, polish, and the habit of centuries—washed over us.

“Just tell me where the washing machine is. I’ll bring them straight there, so you don’t have to lug them any more than necessary.”

“That’s okay, really. You can just put them anywhere.”

“No, really. Which way to the washing machine?”

“Just down here.” Perry led the way down to the basement, crowded with boxes. “Forgive the mess. I’m afraid my father was an inveterate collector. I’ve only had the chance to go through about a third of his stuff since he died last year. It’s amazing what gets left behind to be sorted out.”

I deposited the swags right into the washing machine. “I know. It’s always a surprise when I see the tangle of legal documents that get left behind after someone’s death.”

She put her finger to her chin. “That’s right, you study those, don’t you?”

“All the time.”

“Well, come up. You can at least let me give you an iced tea.”

“Thanks, that would be great. I can’t stay long, though.” But just to be on the safe side, I called Brian to let him know I would be running a little later than expected.

She filled the glass from the pitcher in the fridge and handed it to me. Her kitchen seemed to be a time capsule from the 1940s, crowded with pieces of furniture and implements that were even older, probably handed down through many generations of the Taylor family. It had a comfortable, well-worn, much-loved quality that more than made up for the dated equipment. The windows let in lots of light, and Perry pulled down a yellowing shade to keep it from heating the room up too much.

“I can’t believe what we’ve all been through in the past
week or so. It’s hard to believe that the family reunion is still ahead of us. Other years, we’re never allowed to forget.”

I nodded. “Your hands will certainly be full. Ted says that you’re expecting about two hundred people all together?”

“I think that’s right. He’s in charge of the invitation list.” There was more than a trace of contempt in her voice.

“And Bray Chandler is taking over where Aden would have been in charge?”

“Yes, so far as I know.” She looked at me sharply. “You’ve been talking with Ted a lot lately?”

I shrugged.

“Well, anything that comes out of his mouth ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Everyone knows what a talent he has for spying and creating gossip. I suppose that you knew he worked for the Voellers before he retired. He made very little secret that he was ‘keeping an eye’ on Aden for them while he worked at the Chandler House.” She shook her head. “He has absolutely no sense of loyalty. Not a shred.”

“Do you think the Voellers—?”

“I have no idea whether they actually put him up to it, but I suspect not. Daniel is nice enough, though I don’t put anything past that stepmother of his. But I do know that Ted is in bed with that hateful Booth woman.”

I gaped.

“Oh, I don’t mean literally, though that’s possible too. They’ve always got their heads together, plotting and scheming.” She shuddered. “They’re just so nasty, the two of them. Look, what else can we talk about? What have you found out about the site lately?”

“Well, I did a little research on the broken bit of chain that we found. It was silver and…” I realized what I was going to tell Perry next, thought better of it, and then immediately changed my mind back again. “I took it to the
Boxham-by-Sea Museum. Showed it to one of the curators there.”

The transformation that Perry’s face underwent was impressive. At the mention of the museum, her jaw tightened. By the time I got to the word “curators,” her face had gone red. And then she recovered herself. “Oh, I suppose you spoke to Mary Ann Spencer?”

“Hey, good guess.” I was watching her closely now, to see what her version of the story would be.

Perry shook her head. “Not really. It was either her or the assistant curator, and since he’s only there half-time now, it wasn’t much of a guess.” She caught my eye. “Mary Ann’s an interesting person. Odd little ways about her.”

I nodded. “Her office was in a state.”

“She’s never been very tidy, not since I’ve known her. We were in school together for a while.” There was a pause and I watched her carefully, wondering what she would say. “She and I…don’t have a wonderful relationship. Let’s just say that there was a slight misunderstanding over whether she’d actually broken up with her boyfriend when I started dating him. Left some bad blood between us.”

“Oh, I see. That would do it.” I didn’t see, really. I now knew how unreliable Perry was, but I didn’t have any idea about Dr. Spencer or whether her story was the exact truth either. Graduate school and its competition does strange things to people, and who knows what the real story was?

“God, when you live in a small community—and I don’t care whether it’s a town or a college or whatever—there are just so many things going on just below the surface.” She smiled grimly at me. “But I guess you’ve learned that by now.”

“I’m afraid so.” I set my glass on the wooden counter.

“Thanks for your help.”

“Thanks for the tea. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“You can bet on it.”

It wasn’t until I got halfway home that I realized I’d left the camera behind at the Chandler House. Cleverly trying to keep it out of the sun and away from where the tourists watched, just in case it should grow legs, I’d put it under one of the shrubs. I was damned if I was going to leave it out all night, so I turned straight around and headed back.

I pulled up in the deserted parking lot and saw that the scaffolding to put the bunting up was already in place. No one seemed to be around though, and I figured that perhaps they would return tomorrow to hang the swags and flags and such. I knocked on the door, in case Fee or Ted were still around, but no one answered. I thought I saw a shadow cross the inside doorway, but when I cupped my hands around my eyes to look more closely through the window, I realized that it must have been the waving tree branches on the other side of the house. I rang the bell and no one answered. I heard nothing from inside, and a quick glance across the street suggested to me that the dreaded Bellamys were off someplace: their house was dark and the family minivan was nowhere to be seen. Presumably Matisse and Monet were idly surfing the shopping channels while the rest of the family did something educationally uplifting. But I wasn’t going to be bothering them anyway. I only wanted to take a nice picture of the site while I could get directly overhead. I hurriedly removed the tarps from the units as best I could, stashing them away so that they were well out of the frame of the shot I wanted, and then considered my upward route.

I really only thought about it for a moment; it was one of those situations where the repressed teenager in me starts to get impatient and point out that it’s easier to get forgiveness
than it is to get permission. I know that I was thinking a little about the other night around the fire, when I recalled all of Bucky’s stunts as a kid, and how I had always been a scosh envious behind my disapproval. I suppose I was also bridling a little bit about Brian having come out to the site that day, and the days after. As much as I appreciated what he was trying to do, the idea that he thought I needed looking after rankled. Most of the time, I’m able to be mature about these things.

This time was Oscar’s fault, I decided. The only time I’d hesitated, when he’d offered to get me a banana split for dinner, I said, “Ma doesn’t like me to.” Oscar mustered as much patience as he could. He nodded gravely, scratched under his beard, and said, “Em. Your mother’s not here.”

The scaffolding looked pretty sturdy. There was no one around; the Chandler House was set far enough off the common to keep my activities hidden from any suggestible young people, and the roof would shield me too. I didn’t want them to get the idea that what I was doing was all right for just anyone; I was, after all, a highly trained professional. I slung my camera strap over my head and tucked it around to my back so it wouldn’t get bumped, made sure I had an extra roll of film in my shirt pocket, and wiped my hands on my jeans preparatory to grasping the rung over my head.