A Pinchbeck Bride (16 page)

“The Mingo girls died of complications from diphtheria. And fever.” Then, I swear the sad, contained expressions painted onto the little girls’ faces seemed to grow even sadder, but that had to be the punch taking effect. The rocker where Genevieve had sat had been carted off for the evening, as had the mannequin, “Maude,” too morbid to be present, and clashing with the placard commemorating the young docent, the dedicated student historian.

Sam Ahearn, overdressed in black tie, arrived, accompanied by a much younger Asian woman in a tangerine gown with a glittering rhinestone collar. “Well, I look like a goddamn fool, and I feel like one too. Rudy sent me an e-mail insisting trustees wear black tie.”

“He rescinded that,” I said. “In another e-mail.”

Sam’s wife, his second, I gathered, was a professor at Wellesley. She told us she taught French, which seemed strange until she explained that her family was from Saigon and she’d been raised in the Vietnamese colony in Paris. Madame Nhu was her godmother. “Such a lovely lady.”

“Have you seen the help?” Sam asked. “Rudy’s got some people in costume. College kids from the conservatories, if you please. Serving canapés down in the VIP section. Come, look.”

So we all surveyed the scene from the dining room windows, and, sure enough, saw young women costumed as Victorian maids circulating among the high rollers, carrying caviar and lobster on silver trays from the Mingo family collection. It was very Merchant-Ivory.

“Isn’t it…uncouth to have students in costume?” Sam said. “Given what happened to Genevieve Courson? In this very room?”

Chloe almost toppled a bisque dairymaid from her bamboo fretwork shelf. “Darling,” Miriam said, “watch yourself. You almost smashed that.”

“Rudy had them evacuate the Millet. It’s being examined at the Museum of Fine Arts. Hey, look who’s here. Wow, great to see you!” Sam said.

Nadia Gulbenkian’s filmy red dress was cut low enough to display her weary décolletage and a necklace of knuckle-sized emeralds. Nadia was pursued by Henri.

“What magnificent stones,” Miriam said.

Nadia ignored her. “There’s a woman out front holding a cluster of balloons, if you can believe it. It looks like a Presidents’ Day sale at a used car dealership. And she’s wearing a Victorian dress. It doesn’t have a bustle and it isn’t green, but some tourists from Scotland took photographs. If the tabloids ever get wind of this, we’re cooked. Cooked. Does Rudy have a brain? Mine might be addled, but it functions.”

“Get a load of this, Nadia,” Sam Ahearn said. “He’s got college students out back. In costume, serving canapés.”

“We never discussed this! Oh, horrors. It looks like a garden party during the Reagan administration. So much money and so little taste.” Nadia broached the subject no one else dared touch. “I never cared for Jon Kim, but I’m glad he’s okay. Given the circumstances.”

“
What
?” several of us asked.

“I spoke with him. He’s down in Hyannis. He’s in trouble about his Ativan prescriptions, but the rest of the reports in the media were pure fiction. Hearsay from some blog or Weasel News. He’s not a suspect in…” Her eyes darted around the room. “They moved the chair, the one you found her in, Mark.”

Chloe stepped back, as if to see how this revelation had changed my appearance.

“Chloe, you almost got that milkmaid. Again. Let’s get you someplace safer, for all concerned.” Miriam steered her away toward the front hall and its platters of brie, sushi, and mini crab-cakes.

“You’re saying Jon Kim is absolved?” Sam tried to loosen his tie.

“It’s a clip-on, honey. Remember? What you wanted,” his wife said.

“It’s strangling me,” Sam complained.

“Mark,” Nadia said. “Dorothea Jakes said Rudy is letting the MFA investigate the Millet.” She appropriated my elbow. “Henri, you stay here and make sure no one busts up the china. And move that dairymaid. She keeps wobbling.”

The front hall was ten degrees cooler, but its humidity was still bayou-thick. Outside, Chloe and Miriam were chatting with the balloon girl.

When she was certain no one else could hear her, Nadia whispered, “
Nosferatu
. Genevieve nicknamed a boy from Shawmut College Nosferatu. Because he drank something odd that turned his mouth red, like a vampire’s. Your tongue is red from the punch, so it reminded me. That’s what I’d wanted to tell you at the Soong Dynasty.”

“Was the boyfriend Fletcher Coombs? Who drinks pomegranate juice?”

“Yes, exactly. That big kid with red hair. Quiet, kind of sullen. He came to the volunteer appreciation party Rudy threw at his house. Rudy found him quite fetching, as I recall.”

That settled it. I said, “Fletcher Coombs did it. He killed Genevieve. Because Genevieve was free and easy with her favors, with every guy she met except him. And he’d known her forever and sort of felt he owned her. He’s obsessed with the past. Not like Bryce or Rudy. He craves the ideas of the past, he craves its values. When women knew their place and couldn’t vote or run. When women were weighted down by big, huge dresses with bustles.”

“But for a college kid to kill his girlfriend…To have worked up all that hate during such a short life…”

“She had betrayed him by rebuffing his advances. And getting pregnant by an unsuitable man. By Bryce Rossi, Fletcher thought. The irony is, the real father of Genevieve’s baby was Chris Jakes. Dorothea’s fifteen-year-old grandson.”

“
Chris
?” Nadia boomed, loud enough to wake the dead. “With the lisp and all that acne?”

“Please keep it down.”

“Sorry. Oh, what a tragedy. What a sorry, sorry business.”

“Chris told me himself, that he was the father. He’s here. He’s an alcoholic in training, he drinks like a fish. He says he met Genevieve when she gave the kids from Lenox a tour. Then Shawmut sent her to Lenox as a guest speaker. Chris got the job to show her their campus, and, well, they found a tool shed…”

“How appropriate. Dorothea claimed she’d caught Genevieve kissing the janitor in the broom closet. I thought she was exaggerating until I saw Genevieve rubbing tonsils with Bryce Rossi outside that awful Italian place on Newbury Street.”

“May I take a bathroom break?” the balloon girl asked.

“Of course,” Nadia said.

The president of Colony Bank sidled by, so we smiled.

“He’s a rancid Republican,” Nadia said. “…Well, if Coombs killed Bryce in a jealous rage, isn’t Chris Jakes in danger?”

“Only if he blabs about Genevieve to Fletcher.”

“Shouldn’t you warn him? Or Dorothea?” Testing the brie, Nadia scowled. “I can warn him.”

“No, I can do it. It’s best if I go. Since he confided in me.”

“Oh, here comes Henri. It’s like being on a date with Interpol.”

“Both of you are wanted,” Henri said. “By Mr. Rudy Schmitz, in the courtyard. You and Mr. and Mrs. Sam Ahearn are supposed to mingle. By the way, the cheeses here are substandard. I hope the food is better out back. Under those hideous trees.” As we traipsed downstairs, Henri grumbled that the Mingo House courtyard was an eyesore compared to the one at the Gardner Museum, lacking orchids, Roman amphora, or any aesthetic distinction whatsoever.

“Hey, we’re lucky the potted palms are still alive,” Sam Ahearn said. “They sprayed more chemicals on the weeds that were here than we used in the entire Vietnam War.” Sam’s wife blanched.

One of the Victorian maids, with a tattoo like bar code across her neck, requested we produce our credentials to be admitted, but Rudy swung by and snapped, “They’re trustees for God’s sake. Let then through.” Then he assigned Nadia and Henri to butter up the Wentworths, and the Ahearns to charm an Indian-American biotech tycoon.

But, sometime, I had to slip away and tell my suspicions to the police. I could call, but showing up in person was more serious, more validating. First, I had to again find Dorothea Jakes.

The hors d’oeuvres here were delicious, briny, succulent lobster and the most tender scallops I’d ever encountered. Navigating the small space of the courtyard meant meeting the same shy fellow travelers again and again as their smiles faded, supplanted by intent stares at the fairy lights in the ailanthus trees or at an imaginary someone just beyond your right shoulder.

Then Rudy suggested I convince Gene Timmons, the owner of the South End’s largest interior design firm, to become a trustee of Mingo House. Gene was a haughty man with a shaved head, halitosis, and a soul patch. He droned on and on in a critical monologue. “I realize the Mingoes were never top drawer, but I had no idea their taste was so pedestrian. This house could have been decorated by the late Tsarina Alexandra. She filled the palace at Tsarskoe Selo with furniture from Maples, in London. ‘See Maples and die,’ as the wags said back then. And Rudy Schmitz picked out the canapés, I can tell. His taste is equally dubious. Those crab-cakes are not
lump
crab-cakes, you can’t fool me. Did you drive? I did, from Chestnut Hill. The valet in the parking lot is quite the stunner. I find you very attractive, in a certain light…”

He didn’t consent to become a trustee. Neither did my other prospects, Nita Standish or Harry Bernstein, the owner of New England’s most popular brand of canned clam chowder. I kept up my campaign to empty the punchbowl, just to make it through the evening; how I wished I had the company of my old friend Arthur Hilliard, Miriam’s cousin, now happily living on Maui.

Then, by the bar, I again spied Dorothea Jakes. “Chris is three sheets to the wind. He reminds me of my father, I’m ashamed to say. And do you know why he’s in his cups? Illegally, of course, he’s fifteen. Because he keeps thinking about Genevieve Courson, that’s why. He developed a schoolboy crush on her.” She slapped a mosquito shopping along her arm. “More than a crush, really. She raped him. That’s what they call it when a woman has sex with an underage male. She forced herself on him when she visited his school.”

“Why was Genevieve at Lenox?”

“Shawmut sent her. She was rehearsing this piece—a theater piece about Meribel Boylston Sears. Don’t bother looking her up, she’s fictional. She was a character Genevieve created, from combining—well, stealing—anecdotes from unpublished diaries and correspondence. Of various Brahmin ladies of the late-nineteenth century.”

Dorothea slurred the occasional word. Chris wasn’t the only inebriate in the family.

“Genevieve got some of her knowledge of Victorian domestic life from interning here at Mingo House. And from cribbing from the Mingo family papers. Bills for brandy and paraffin and washboards and molasses. Corinth Two saved the mundane things, the impersonal things. And from Zack Meecham’s work at Harvard. She knew you were a performer, she wanted to show you her script. She told me. She said, ‘Mark Winslow can be useful. He used to do improv. He’ll be sure to know good dialogue when he sees it.’”

“Did you see the script?”

“Oh, yes. A hundred times. I got more e-mails about that than from those Nigerians with millions of dollars they want to transfer—”

“Send it to me.”

“I think it’s a lot of bunk.”

So her script was the “little something” I was slated to examine. I was yet another means to an end.

“Genevieve had the gall to tell Chris she was a Mingo herself. After she’d violated him amid the lawn mowers in that shed.” Dorothea threw back her shoulders with indignation. “I’ve tired to feel compassion toward her, I’ve tried. I went to her funeral, as you know, and I even bought flowers to her shrine, you saw me. But I can’t help thinking Jon Kim…did the world a favor.”

Then a sheepish Chris came skulking up. “I feel better, Gramma.” He’d neglected to buckle his belt. “I blew my dinner all over the bathroom.”

Dorothea groaned.

“But I cleaned every bit of it up.”

“Please promise me,
both of you
,” I said. “Don’t talk about Genevieve Courson at this party.
I mean it! That’s crucial
!”

“That software guy killed her, right?” Chris said.

“Are you two driving home?”

“No, my son is picking us up right out front. Where the balloon girl was stationed. She’s gone. She told Nadia Gulbenkian she’d only been paid for two hours’ duty and she’d be damned if she’d stay one minute longer.” Dorothea centered her grandson’s tie. She frowned at his belt, which Chris finally buckled. “Chris, if you don’t get your act together, you’re liable to end up at someplace like Shawmut for college.”

Rudy came beaming toward us. “Well, it’s been a superb evening. If I say so myself. We have three new trustees. All with deep pockets. So the time is ripe for Nadia Gulbenkian to bid us adieu. And Sam Ahearn isn’t really working out. Too negative and rough around the edges.” He dropped his voice. “And the only person who mentioned our troubled software guru was Gene Timmons, the decorator, who said he was a dud in the sack.”

“There are young people present, Rudy!” Dorothea said.

At that, Rudy retreated inside. Dorothea concluded it was time to go, so she phoned her son and I escorted the pair to the curb where Chris’ father awaited, double-parked in a maroon Lexus.

So, at that point, I went sneaking away, straight toward the nearest police station. I ran through the warm, indigo night, the soles of my feet stinging as my wing-tips slapped the sidewalks and my boutonnière, hummingbird-quick, flew from my buttonhole.

I told the police everything—my own suspicions as confirmed by Nadia’s new information. They listened in taut silence until one of them interrupted—“Have you seen Coombs
today
? We’ve looked for him, but he’s not at Shawmut. And he’s not in Lynn or Southie.”

Of course I hadn’t seen him since visiting his new apartment, with that room of dismembered Victorian furniture. The police thanked me, and made me promise to call them immediately if I saw Fletcher Coombs: “He could be dangerous.” Fletcher’s being a cop’s son surely made this awkward, anguished for them.

Back at Mingo House, the hors d’oeuvres had withered and the guests were dwindling away. Rudy dismissed most of the faux-Victorian maids. He told Nadia she could leave, and the sushi chef from Flex, and the boy toy from Taipei who’d played the harp and seemingly usurped Jon Kim in his affections.