Plaster and Poison (24 page)

I walked into Kate’s kitchen just as she and Mom were sitting down to breakfast.
“Oh, no.” I looked around. “No Noel?”
“He’s feeling a little better,” Mom said, buttering a piece of toast, “but he’s spending the day in bed, even so.”
“So it’s just you and me again?” I sat down on the other side of the table. “D’you want to help me paint and distress the shutters we bought yesterday?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Mom said between bites of buttered toast, while Kate wanted to know what the shutters were for.
“I know I helped you carry them, but I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. They’re too big for the windows, and there aren’t enough doors.”
I shook my head. “They’re for the bedroom, to go on either side of the skylights in the ceiling. I figure it’ll make them look less like black holes and more like windows. I’ll be putting some flower boxes underneath, as well. It’ll look good, I promise.”
“Sounds great,” Kate said with real enthusiasm. “I can’t wait.”
“You’re sure you don’t just feel obligated because of the work we’ve done so far? I mean . . .” I hesitated, wondering if maybe it would be better not to bring up painful subjects. Too late now, however.
She looked surprised. “Of course.”
“I thought maybe, after Gerard . . .”
“He didn’t die there,” Kate said steadily. “Someone put him there after he was dead, to throw suspicion on us. You and Derek or me and Shannon. Or Wayne. If I refuse to move into the carriage house, that person will have won.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Even if Wayne and I decide to stay in the main house, we can always rent out the carriage house. I won’t allow families with small children in the house—too many antiques and breakables—so the carriage house would be somewhere a family could stay. Or a honeymooning couple, for some privacy. Or even Shannon, if she didn’t want to share with me and Wayne.”
“Has she decided what she wants to do when you guys get married? Is she still talking about moving in with Josh?”
“I’m not sure what she’ll decide to do,” Kate said. “If Wayne and I move out to the carriage house, I guess she could just stay right here, in her room. It’ll be convenient, having someone actually in the house. Once in a while, one of the guests requires something in the middle of the night.”
I nodded. Made sense.
“So tell me what happened last night,” Kate added. “Did you get to talk to Helen Ritter? What did she say?”
“You’ll never guess.” I told her what Mrs. Ritter had told us, about Emily’s death in childbirth following her conviction for the murder of William Ellis, and had the satisfaction of seeing both Kate’s and Mom’s jaws drop.
“That’s incredible!” Kate gasped.
I nodded. “That’s not all, though. After I got home, I got to looking at the pictures. The one of William and Emily from 1917, and the one of Helen and Larry, from 1942. And Larry looked just like William.”
Mom nodded; obviously she’d already seen that one coming. “When was the baby born again?”
“January second, 1919,” I said.
“He would have been conceived nine months earlier, give or take a week or so. That would make it the end of March or beginning of April.”
“While they were building the carriage house,” Kate nodded. “During the time when William carved his and Emily’s initials in the post.”
“William was killed during the first few days of June,” Mom said. “Two months later.”
“So . . . right around the time Emily would have realized she was pregnant?”
Mom nodded. “She was married to Lawrence. She would want her child to be born in wedlock, to her husband; she’d want there to be no question about that. Illegitimacy was a big deal back then.”
“So she had to get rid of William, so he couldn’t make a fuss about the kid’s parentage.”
“That makes sense,” Kate said. “It doesn’t make Emily sound like a very nice person, though.”
“Like most of us,” Mom said, “she was probably human. Her marriage may have been bad, she tried to snatch some happiness where she could, but when the rubber met the road, she did what she did for her child. She was protecting his future.”
We sat in silence for a moment and digested this.
“I guess that’s true,” Kate said eventually. “Mothers will do almost anything for their children.”
Mom nodded. “Up to and including murder. Not that I’ve ever had occasion to kill anyone, but I would have, had they been threatening Avery. I was tempted to push Philippe under a bus just because I knew he’d end up breaking her heart.”
“Awww!” I said, touched. Mom grinned.
I sat for a few minutes and listened to them talk about motherly things, and then my cell phone rang. The number was unfamiliar but local. My heart jumped; maybe there was news about Beatrice?
“Hello?” The person on the other end of the line was breathless. “Avery?”
“Paige?” I said.
“Avery! Hi! You’ll never guess what I found!”
Her voice was exuberant, something I’d never, ever heard from Paige before. She’s usually so subdued and quiet as to be practically colorless, and now she was stumbling over her words in her hurry to get them out.
“What did you find? Where?”
“At home. In Dad’s house. In the attic. A letter. From Emily to her baby.”
I blinked. “Wow. That’s . . . amazing.”
Kate and Mom both looked up and over at me.
“Isn’t it?” I could almost hear Paige beam. “She wrote it before he was born, so he’d know what had happened, and she left it with her sister, my great-great-great-grandmother, but I guess he never came to get it. So it’s just been sitting there ever since.”
“What does it say?”
“It says . . .” She hesitated, her voice slowing down. “It says a lot of things. I think you’d better have a look yourself. But it says that Larry wasn’t Lawrence Ritter’s son; he was William Ellis’s.”
“I thought he might be. There’s a distinct family resemblance.”
“OK, but did you know that she was in prison when her son was born? For murder?”
“Actually, I knew that, too. I spoke to Helen Ritter yesterday. She was married to Larry. She’d have been Emily’s daughter-in-law, if Emily had survived childbirth. She told us the whole story.”
“Well,” Paige said, sounding just a little bit peeved, “that must have been interesting, I’m sure. Here’s something that Helen Ritter may not have told you, though. Emily didn’t kill William Ellis. She was framed.”

21

That was all Paige was willing to say over the phone: She insisted that I had to read the letter for myself. I could come to Barnham to pick it up, she said, or wait until she could send it home with Shannon at the end of the day. She couldn’t bring it to me, since she had classes and projects all day.
“That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll get there. Thirty minutes.”
“You can take my car,” Kate offered when I’d hung up and was looking around frantically, remembering that the truck I’d counted on for the past few days was off at Clovercroft with Derek at the wheel.
“Or the Beetle,” Mom added. She looked and sounded perfectly innocent. “It’s just been sitting there for the past two days. It could probably use some exercise.”
“Do you want to come?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it. Let me go get my coat.” She headed up the stairs.
“What about you?” I asked Kate.
She shook her head. “Wish I could, but now that I’ve finished decorating the B&B for Christmas, I have to get ready for the wedding. We’re putting together the seating charts today.”
“I’ll help you when I get back,” I promised, getting to my feet. “The shutters can wait another day.”
“No, they can’t. I’ve got Shannon coming over later, with Josh. Between us, we’ll get it done.”
“You sure?”
“I’m positive. Just finish my romantic retreat. Wayne and Reece will take care of finding Beatrice and Gerard’s killer, and Shannon, Josh, and I will handle the wedding.”
“Nice to know you’re confident,” I said as Mom came back down the stairs, pulling on her coat. “Ready to ride? ”
“Ready when you are. Here you go.”
I smiled when she handed me the car keys.

The Beetle was wonderful. Little and zippy and so much easier to maneuver than Derek’s big truck. I was going to enjoy driving it when it was mine. Obviously I would prefer not to have to mess with a car at all, but if I had to have one—and in Maine, I did—I could do worse than the Beetle. Of course, I didn’t say a word about any of that. I didn’t want to jinx anything.
Paige was waiting for us in the cafeteria at Barnham, and when we walked in, she stood up. “I’m sorry, but I really have to run. I have class in, like, three minutes. Here’s the letter. I’d like to have it back when you’re finished with it, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” I said, accepting the envelope she handed me. The paper was thicker and rougher than what you see these days, more natural, somehow. The words “To my child” were written across the front in faded fountain pen, the script rounded, almost girlish.
“May as well sit here and read it,” Mom suggested as Paige hurried off. I nodded. We sank down on a couple of chairs and put our heads together. I opened the envelope and pulled out the pieces of paper inside.
To my beloved child,
the letter began, on letterhead supplied by the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women.
You will never know me, and perhaps that is for the best. But I cannot leave you without the knowledge that I have done everything I can to tell you that I love you, and that what I did, I did for you.
“Told you so,” Mom said.
“I never doubted you,” I answered, going back to the letter.
I am your mother, Emily. My husband was Lawrence Ritter, but he was not your father. Your father’s name was William Aaron Ellis, and he was the love of my life.
“Hah!” Mom crowed.
“What do you mean, hah?” I retorted. “I never doubted that, either.”
William and I were sweethearts as children, but as we grew older, things changed between us. The war came, and William wanted nothing more than to enlist, to serve his country. I wanted marriage and children. We drifted apart. When Lawrence proposed, my mother urged me to accept. Lawrence was wealthy and my family was poor. And foolishly, I thought that the threat of my marrying someone else might make William propose marriage, as well. He didn’t. Instead, he told me to marry and be damned. So I did.
“I think I would have liked Emily,” Mom said. “She had a sense of humor.”
“If the choice of words was deliberate.”
“Oh, I think it was. Go on.”
Things went badly from the first. Lawrence had no fond feelings for me beyond possession and the knowledge that he had taken me away from William. There had always been competition between them. He wasn’t unkind, just indifferent. I found myself regretting my choice. The following spring, when the family decided to have a carriage house built on the property, William signed on as carpenter and we sinfully resumed a sort of courtship.
“Good grief,” I said, “what a way to describe it.”
“Guilty conscience,” Mom answered sagely.
When the carriage house was fi nished and William asked me to run away with him, I refused. I had made my bed, and felt I should lie in it. He left, and I returned to being a dutiful wife to my husband. Until I realized that the result of my behavior had been you.
“Here we go,” Mom said.
Due to the coldness of my marriage, I knew William was without question your father. At that time, William had given up any hope of persuading me to leave with him, and had joined the navy at Elliott. I went to see him there.
“Good for Emily,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” Mom answered.
I told him I had changed my mind, that I was carrying his child and I wanted you to know your father and him to know you. But the United States Navy is not forgiving of deserters, and William was unable to leave their service. We agreed that I would go to Lawrence and tell him the truth—and that I would then pack the few belongings that were mine alone and go to Dr. Ellis’s house—and that William would come to me when he was able to leave the service. He assured me that his family would welcome me as their own, and that his father would ensure that our child—you—would come into the world safely.
“William sounds nice,” I said. “I think I would have liked him.”
Mom nodded. “Caring
and
brave. Good for him.”
By the time I got back to Waterfi eld that night, it was late. I told Lawrence the truth and prepared to leave. However, his mother persuaded me to tarry, in an effort to convince me of the error of my ways. Meanwhile, Lawrence left the house in a rage.
“I’m not surprised,” Mom said.
The next day, I was informed that William had died. And although I cannot prove it, I know in my heart that Lawrence killed him. There was strychnine in the house; my mother-in-law had used it during the winter as an antidote for bronchorrhea. When the police came, my husband and his mother conspired to tell them that I had taken the medicine to do away with my lover, as he was planning to make things diffi cult for me and as I did not wish to leave my husband’s household and go back to abject poverty. The police chose to take their word over mine. I was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder of William Ellis.
“Wow.”
I never saw Lawrence again, as he died two months later, when the USS SC-209 was sunk off the coast of Long Island. Thus the devil got his due.
“Nicely put,” Mom remarked.
I nodded. “No love lost there, obviously.”
Shortly after the accident, his mother came to see me in the penitentiary. She offered to strike a bargain. There was nothing anyone could do to help me, nor did she want to, but she offered to accept you as her own and bring you up as Lawrence’s child, with every privilege and opportunity. My own family had turned their backs on me, with the exception of my cousin Annabelle, to whom I will entrust this letter. And William’s family believed me guilty of murdering their son. I had nowhere else to turn, so I agreed. Thus, your birth certifi cate says that you are the child of Lawrence Ritter Jr. and his wife Emily, when you are, in fact, the child of William Aaron Ellis and Emily Ritter, errant wife of Lawrence.
“Hmmm,” Mom said.
“Yep. Definitely guilty conscience.”
I am doing my best to provide for you, my darling child, since I cannot be there myself. Your new grandmother will take good care of you. You are all she has left, and you are her only chance to carry the Ritter name forward. Lawrence has passed on, as has my brother-in-law Frederick, a victim of the influenza. As, indeed, has my father-in-law. Anna Virginia and Agnes are the only two left. The family and the fortune need an heir. You are their last hope. I trust they will take care of you and that you will be happy. And when you are grown, if you ever decide to look into the fate of your mother, I pray you will fi nd this letter and know the truth.
Your loving mother,
Emily Thompson Ritter