The Barker Street Regulars Read online

  After crossing the river, I pulled over to consult the directions that Hugh had dictated. Ceci lived in a section of Newton called Norwood Hill. Following Hugh’s instructions, I cut through Brighton and, just after entering Newton, veered sharply uphill in more senses than one. Brighton was apartment buildings, triple deckers, and shops that sold lottery tickets, potato chips, and not much else. As a tangle of streets ascended Norwood Hill, the size of the houses increased with the gain in altitude, and dim gaslights replaced the bright electricity of the lower regions. At a four-way intersection of narrow streets, I came to a stop to figure out where I was, but couldn’t read the street signs in the darkness and realized that the gaslights carried a message: If you didn’t already know your way around, you didn’t belong in this neighborhood at all. After crossing the intersection, I pulled up, dug a flashlight out of the glove compartment, got out of the car, and found a small street sign that told me I was almost at Ceci’s. Another gaslit block and a couple of turns put me on Norwood Road, which, as Hugh had said, soon split into Lower and Upper Norwood. Bearing right on Upper Norwood, I passed a baronial stucco minipalace, a rambling brick Victorian, a Cape that looked little and cosy by comparison with its imposing neighbors, and, on my left, a colonial that obviously dated not to New World imperialism but to the twentieth-century colonization of the suburbs. Beyond that colonial was a second, this one big, white, and square, with three gables and two massive chimneys. To the right of Ceci’s house was a detached garage, and in the driveway that led to it was a car I recognized from the Gateway lot, the old Volvo with the bumper sticker that read THE GAME IS AFOOT.

  I hadn’t even turned off the ignition when the front door opened. Robert, tall and dignified, came down the walk bearing a big battery-powered lantern. I noticed that he, like my father, had an exceptionally large head. Looped around his neck was the wide strap of a camera that clunked against his chest. To my relief, he wore neither an Inverness cape nor a deerstalker hat.

  At his request, I left Kimi crated in the car and followed him into the house, which was all high ceilings, brocade chairs, shiny mahogany tables, oriental rugs, and dark wood floors. Ceci, dressed in layers of pinkish-beige jersey, was fluttering around offering tea and sherry.

  Hugh looked up from an assortment of paraphernalia that he was removing from a cardboard box and arranging on the floor of the spacious front hall. Robert, as usual, wore a suit. Hugh had on a plaid flannel shirt with pens and pencils stuck in the breast pocket. Exchanging glances with Robert, he looked like a carpenter consulting an employer about which door he wanted rehung. Hugh rose to his feet, assured himself that I’d brought a dog, and immediately put on a padded canvas jacket. Robert donned a heavy black wool coat that made him look like an undertaker. Then the three of us followed Ceci into a living room the size of a banquet hall. At its far end, the room became a sort of miniconservatory: a series of French doors overlooking the backyard formed a large bay or alcove. A forerunner to today’s sun spaces, the area had a floor of burgundy tiles, tubs of potted palms, and the kind of natural-colored rattan furniture that obviously hadn’t been bought at some discount department store’s spring sale on wicker. The two chairs and an ottoman had cushions covered in a deep green and rose floral prints: fat peonies about to turn blowsy. The low table was topped with glass. Robert and Hugh trailed after Ceci as she made her way to the alcove and began to question her about Jonathan’s movements. Where had he been when she had gone to bed? Had she no premonition of evil? What had she observed the next morning?

  Turning a rheostat that lowered the lights in the bay, Ceci said, “I feel that Jonathan left this way.”

  “You feel?” Robert inquired. “And what grounds do you have for—”

  “Ceci, dear,” Hugh interrupted, “which of these doors did you, in fact, find unlocked?”

  Pointing to a French door in the center of the alcove, Ceci said, “Ajar. Ever so slightly open. It was really very naughty of Jonathan to have done that.” She talked on. I didn’t follow what she said. Indeed, so transfixed was I that I didn’t even follow her to the alcove. I stared at an immense oil painting that hung over the baronial fireplace in the living room. The painting was a beautifully executed life-size portrait. Its subject posed right in front of this same fireplace. During his lifetime, when he’d actually sat on the hearth directly beneath his portrait, he must have given people the uncanny impression that they’d been struck by double vision on a giant scale. Maybe the artist had intended precisely that effect. In any case, as rendered in oil, the subject was a handsome, noble fellow. The portrait was illuminated from above by a small light mounted on an elaborate gilded frame. The bottom of the frame bore a brass plate that read LORD SAINT SIMON.

  An end table near the fireplace held a collection of crystal knickknacks and china shepherdesses arrayed around a small photograph in a correspondingly small silver frame. The frame wasn’t cheap-looking—nothing in Ceci’s house was—and it was tasteful, but it was only about two inches wide and four inches high. Like the massive gold frame over the fireplace, it displayed a portrait. This one showed a bald-headed man with wire-rimmed glasses. The man wore a morose expression. I assumed that he was Ceci’s late husband, Ellis Love. If so, he had a right to look slighted.

  Chapter Twelve

  HUGH AND ROBERT HAD brought what I suppose should be called a scene-of-crime kit: Robert’s camera, two powerful lanterns, tweezers, small paper envelopes, paper and plastic bags, labels, indelible markers, little glass jars and test tubes, measuring tape, a yardstick, plaster of Paris or perhaps of somewhere else, a fingerprint kit evidently purchased at a toy store, a laptop computer that sat like a mechanical bird in a homemade-looking nest of insulation, and exactly the kind of oversize magnifying glass depicted in caricatures of Sherlock Holmes. With misogyny worthy of Holmes, they forbade Ceci to go anywhere near the equipment arrayed on the floor of the immense central hallway of her house. I, they decided, might make myself useful by lugging gear, but would probably drop it.

  I felt a senseless urge to prove myself worthy of a key role in the charade. “Toby,” I announced, “was spaniel and lurcher. Lurcher, as you probably know, refers to a sighthound cross, usually greyhound. The term connotes—”

  “Poachers,” Robert said.

  “Gypsies,” I finished.

  Hugh was tinkering with the laptop computer. Robert pointed menacingly at it and apologized for Hugh’s insistence on wasting time.

  “The neatest and most orderly brain,” quoted Hugh, peering up, “with the greatest capacity for storing information—”

  Robert interrupted. “Not neatest! Not information! Tidiest! Facts! The tidiest and most orderly brain with the greatest capacity for storing facts of any man.” He added emphatically, “Man! Not machine.”

  Pressing the power button on the laptop, Hugh cryptically replied, “Jupiter nonetheless arises.”

  Robert was livid. “Ascends! Jupiter nonetheless ascends!”

  “Pay no attention to them,” Ceci advised me. “I never do. Ellis was just the same. I put up with it from him for a great many years, and—”

  “Fifty-nine,” Hugh said. “You and Ellis were married for fifty-nine years, Ceci. We attended your Golden Wedding anniversary.”

  In an odd voice, Ceci said, “Jonathan was there.” She sounded puzzled, as if some unreliable person were trying to convince her of her grandnephew’s presence on the occasion. “I had entirely forgotten, well, almost entirely, until the subject came up in our”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“recent communications.” Brushing a hand lightly across my sleeve, she murmured, “And you? Have you sought Irene’s assistance?”

  Before I could answer, Robert broke in to warn me not to get Kimi, or Toby, as he called her, until the first stage of the investigation was complete. Ascending like Jupiter, I suppose, Hugh announced that it was about to begin. It started where Jonathan had evidently left the house: at the large plant-filled alcove at the far end of the liv
ing room. As Robert quickly sketched the area on a sheet of paper fastened to a clipboard, Hugh drew it on his laptop. I just looked at it. The alcove, I observed, was formed by sets of French doors. Those on each end were windows, really, and angled to create the bay. The doors gave onto a brick terrace. Ceci flipped a switch that turned on large lights that must have been mounted high on the back of the house. Peering out, I saw a vast yard that sloped downward and disappeared into darkness.

  Leaving Ceci indoors, I zipped my parka, pulled on gloves, and followed Hugh and Robert onto the terrace, which was elevated about two feet above ground level. It was about ten feet wide. A flight of brick steps led from the terrace to the rear of the property. On the sides, the terrace stopped abruptly where the alcove ended. Systematically casting back and forth on the empty terrace, Robert reminded me of an advanced obedience dog working his scent articles. The examination of the terrace seemed like a waste of time. Not so much as a stray leaf was visible, and any outdoor furniture Ceci kept there, a wrought-iron table and chairs, perhaps, had been stowed elsewhere for the winter.

  Undiscouraged, the Sherlockians next turned their attention to the garden beds that ran along the foundation of the house. I should explain that if you faced the back of the house, to the left ran a brick walkway that eventually passed between the house and the garage, and led to a white wood fence with a sturdy gate. The flower bed to the right of the terrace ran parallel to the back of the house, turned the corner, and ended at another length of the same high white fence. Robert and Hugh hovered over the path to the garage and the flower bed next to it. I observed nothing except a thick layer of fir bark, the leafless branches of small azaleas, the emerging shoots of daffodils, and the foliage and blooms of dozens of crocuses and snowdrops, their blossoms tightly closed, as if the February night had forced the harbingers of spring to fashion makeshift parkas out of pastel petals. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. That mulch is ubiquitous in the suburbs, where expensive lawn services convince homeowners that bare earth, dirty as it is, should never be seen unclothed.

  On the other side of the house, however, the corresponding bed of fir bark, dormant azaleas, daffodil shoots, and early bulbs drew enthusiastic exclamations from Hugh and Robert: “Features of interest!” In my skeptical eagerness to see whether the men had found a genuine clue, I had to be shooed away so I wouldn’t trample the flowers, if not the evidence. As it turned out, mashed blossoms and squished daffodil shoots were the evidence. Along most of its length, this mulched bed looked identical to the one on the garage side of the house. Near the angled French door that formed this end of the alcove, however, broken foliage lay flat on the fir bark. I found myself in agreement with Robert and Hugh: The appearance of the ground honestly did suggest that someone had stood there to peer through the glass.

  As Robert was taking close-ups and distance shots, one of the French doors opened. Ceci, apparently alerted by the flashes of the camera, appeared on the terrace. Her fluttery manner hinted at the sort of dissociated woman who cloaks herself in full-length dead animals, but has hysterics at the sight of the furry corpses the cat drags home; I had the sense that practically from the moment she’d been born, everyone around her had engaged in a conspiratorial, if unconscious, program of operant conditioning that systematically reinforced that kind of internal split. If so, maybe Ceci’s dogs had made her whole again. She wasn’t wearing fur. Rather she had all but vanished inside a long, thick quilted coat, heavily padded boots, Polartec mittens, and a matching tam-o’-shanter. She was dressed to walk a dog on a cold night.

  “Has my Simon been back?” She was childishly eager.

  Robert, who seemed to specialize in dealing with Ceci, replied, “Someone or something has stood or been placed near this angle between the window and the wall of the house. The damage to the vegetation appears recent.”

  “My Simon,” said Ceci indignantly, “would be most unlikely to tromp down my flowers.” With hurt feelings, she added, “And he’s never been this close to the house before.” As if mouthing someone else’s words, she said hopefully, “He is not yet ready. The time will come.”

  “The hypothesis,” Robert said severely, “concerns the presence of a human being.”

  Flinging a mittened hand toward the lower part of the yard, she said, “The police spent all their time below, where Jonathan had his accident.”

  “Ceci,” Robert said firmly, “Holly is beginning to feel the cold. Take her in and give her a cup of hot tea.”

  Ceci agreed, but as I climbed the steps to the terrace and followed her through the open French door, she made the justifiable complaint that Hugh and Robert treated her like an imbecile. “I am perfectly competent. I went to Wellesley, you know, just like Madame Chiang Kai-shek, not that I stayed long, girls didn’t in those days, you know, I left to marry Ellis, girls did that back then, but Ellis made sure that I understood practical matters, he was a stockbroker, you know”—I hadn’t—“and I have always had my own checking account and reconciled my bank statements and taken care of my charge cards. You see, in his business,” she continued as I trailed after her into the kitchen, “he saw a great many women who suddenly lost their husbands and didn’t know how to make out a deposit slip or cash a check, never mind understanding investments, and he was determined not to leave me in that position. We’d no sooner returned from our honeymoon, Niagara Falls, less trite then than now, when Ellis sat me down and said, ‘Ceci, buy and hold!’” Filling a teakettle, she concluded, “I am no imbecile!”

  “Of course not,” I said. As I was reflecting that if I were in Ceci’s financial position, I’d forget Ellis’s dictum and sell enough to update the old-fashioned kitchen, Ceci hunted through a cupboard, extracted a box of graham crackers, and with an exasperated click of her tongue complained that Jonathan had polished off all the nice lemon wafers. Worse, Ceci said, instead of replenishing the supply, Mary had gone and bought graham crackers. Ceci went on to lament Mary’s insistence on leaving at three in the afternoon. “And,” Ceci said, “she positively will not work weekends. But I must admit that she’s the first one I’ve had for longer than I care to remember who doesn’t smash the china, and when she is here, she’s a hard worker.”

  Watching Ceci resentfully arrange a teapot, cups, saucers, spoons, a sugar bowl, a creamer, and a plate of the unsatisfactory graham crackers on a wooden tray, I sensed a gap between us that was as generational as it was financial: From Ceci’s viewpoint, why remodel a kitchen? Why spend money on the domain of the hired help?

  If we were going to drink something, shouldn’t it be decaffeinated coffee? Brandy? Ovaltine? But tea was what Robert had suggested. I took Ceci’s compliance as a sign of suggestibility. We did not, of course, have our tea in the kitchen. Ceci politely rejected my offer to help with the tray. With no apparent effort, she lifted it herself and carried it across the kitchen and hall, and through the living room to a side table in the alcove. The potted palms, the bone china, the whole scene gave me the bizarre sense that I should be wearing white gloves and a perky little hat with a decorative veil. After sitting, I crossed my legs at the ankles.

  “It’s rather drafty here,” Ceci apologized, “but it’s where Irene receives best.” Ceci could have been talking about a radio.

  “Yes?” I prompted, thinking, Oh, so Irene makes home visits.

  “Naturally, Simon comes back to his own yard. How many sugars?”

  When she’d served me and poured for herself, I asked when Simon had begun to reappear.

  Ceci glowed. “Exactly one week ago today. Monday. Of course, I’ve been communicating with him for the past year, and it has been a great consolation, not that I ever for a second believed that Simon had ceased to exist, if you understand me, but I was blocked by the wall that isn’t there.”

  “Does Simon …?” I fished for a serious-sounding alternative to bark or woof. “Does Simon speak to you, uh, directly?”

  With touching sweetness, Ceci explained that Simon spoke throu
gh Irene. “I ask him a question, and he responds through her.” She sounded as I would if I had to explain the simplicity of E-mail to a Rip Van Winkle whose idea of high-tech communication was the carrier pigeon.

  Consequently, it seemed better to focus on the content than on the technology. “Questions like …?” I asked.

  “Well, naturally, one of the first things I wanted to know was why on earth he died! And why then, when Ellis had passed on only a year before and I’d just had to put Althea in the nursing home. It was no time to leave! And as soon as he answered, I felt like such a selfish fool!”