A Pinchbeck Bride (17 page)

Rudy Schmitz had asked me to stay “until the last gun,” and three students lingered, sweeping up, counting to be sure none of the Mingo family silver had emigrated, and picking up swizzle sticks, stray paper doilies, and, in the library, a fifty-dollar bill left orphaned on a hassock. “Well, the bill can’t be Clara Mingo’s since she was a contemporary of Ulysses S. Grant,” Rudy laughed. “But she and Julia Dent Grant didn’t see eye-to-eye. Julia thought Clara was a bit of a charlatan.”

We were in the dining room—with the table laden with Clara Mingo’s raspberry-pink and gilt china, isolated behind its red velvet rope, and the portrait of the forlorn triplets, seemingly mourning their own imminent demise. One of the college students spoke up: “Mr. Schmitz? This figurine got chipped.” He indicated the bisque dairymaid that Miriam had worried Chloe might jeopardize. Henri had ignored Nadia’s order to move her from her shaky fretwork shelf.

“Where?” Rudy sounded furious.

“See? On her bonnet. She’s missing a bow.”

“Well, did you see this happen?
Who
was responsible?”

“None of us saw it exactly. But we, um, caught Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth picking up the broken piece from the floor. They were feeling no pain, sir. They put away a whole bottle of Grey Goose between them. So the bartender said.”

Rudy had told me Cal Wentworth had agreed to be a trustee. Suddenly subdued, he told the students, “You may go. Are all your colleagues done?”

“Everyone but valet parking.”

“Fine. Thanks to all.”

As the students herded down the front steps of Mingo House, one of them called back. “Here he is now.”

My stomach went into freefall. “He” was Fletcher Coombs…decked out in high-Victorian fashion—in a black jacket trimmed with astrakhan wool along the lapels, and a vest embroidered with thistles in gold metallic thread.

“I didn’t know you were signed on tonight,” Rudy said.

“It was a last-minute change. I’m filling in for a friend,” Fletcher said.

“Come in, come in, don’t be bashful.” Rudy, like the Wentworths, was feeling no pain. “Did you make much in tips?” Rudy slipped off his Hermès tie. “I had fun, but I’m still glad it’s over.”

Fletcher hesitated on the threshold, balking at entering Mingo House, entering the place where he had committed murder, one of his murders.

He seemed wary too of the placard on the easel, with the photograph of Genevieve Courson,
his
Genevieve. He unbuttoned his vest, sweltering on this night. “Things went well. We didn’t get many complaints.”

“Many? You shouldn’t have had
any
.” Rudy drew a long cigar from his jacket, and, defying museum regulations, ignited it with his Art Deco lighter. “So who gave you trouble? In the parking lot.”

“That Timmons guy, the decorator. In the Escalade with the chrome lion hood ornament.”

“Well, what happened? Speak up!”

Any move I made to call the police might trigger some sort of violence from Fletcher. I hoped we could keep things calm until he was paid, until he left.

Fletcher was blushing like a shy adolescent taking his first post-gym shower. “That Timmons tried to kiss me, but I fought him off.”

Rudy exhaled cigar smoke and exasperation. “You
fought
Gene Timmons? Gene Timmons is a potential trustee. He’s not some lout.”

“He was hammered. He groped me. I gave him a good shove.”

“You’re kidding, I hope.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Oh, good heavens. Let me guess, you had an episode of homosexual panic.” Rudy rested his cigar in one of Clara Mingo’s sugar bowls. “Don’t tell me you’re shy. You certainly weren’t shy in
Fresh Men Initiation
.”

He’s a murderer
, I felt like telling Rudy.
Be careful
,
he’s killed here before.
He killed Genevieve and then wrapped her in silk the way a spider stores its prey for later consumption.

“You weren’t shy in that scene in the frat house. You went to town like there was no tomorrow.”

“I’m not exactly proud of that.” Now Fletcher stepped into the front hall, closing the heavy door behind him in a gesture I found ominous—not shutting the night out so much as shutting us in.

I had my hand on my cell phone but it was shaking.

“You can’t assault one of my guests and expect to be paid.” Rudy spoke the phrase in its now traditional manner, as all one word: “
Idon’tthinkso
.”

“You owe me. I worked, so you owe me.” Fletcher shrugged off his period jacket.

As always, Rudy was oblivious as to how he was affecting another person. “Your sort just doesn’t belong here. You just don’t belong. I’m all for people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but some people will never belong.” Now Rudy played the consummate martinet—the judge, the decider, the excluder. “If you shoved one of my guests, you weren’t doing your job. I owe you nothing whatsover. You owe me an apology. Get out.”

Fletcher draped his jacket over the red velvet rope. “You sound just like her,” he said. He searched the dining room with his eyes, searched the space where the rosewood rocker had been. “You’ve moved things around. The rocker is gone. Where she was sitting—Genevieve.”

The haughtiness in Rudy’s expression dissolved.

“My God, it was you!” Rudy said.
“Good God, you killed her! It was you!
”

“She thought she belonged here. To the manor born. She thought she was Little Miss Mingo. ‘I could stay here forever’—she said that.”

Rudy pulled his cell phone from its holder on his hip. “You belong in prison.”

Then Fletcher lunged toward Rudy, punching his face and knocking the cell phone from his hands.

“You little whore,” Rudy gasped.

Fletcher kicked him in the groin and Rudy crashed against the dining room table, breaking bone china and sending silverware ringing to the floor. Fletcher wrestled Rudy past the velvet rope, into the newly restored harp—whose strings chimed, then snapped.

Fletcher seized Rudy by the shoulders and flung him—across the velvet rope and onto the dining room table, in a maelstrom of cutlery and china.

He would kill Rudy unless I could stop him, but what could be my weapon in this room where everything was fragile? No canes or walking sticks offered themselves, but, from the brass stand to the right of the fireplace, I pulled an iron poker—and swung it toward Fletcher until it hit his skull with a hideous crack.

He screamed, shuddered, and then fell to the floor, balling up like a dying cutworm as blood soaked through his hair onto the Mingoes’ precious carpet…

Chapter Twenty-seven

But Fletcher Coombs was only wounded.

He was later convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of Genevieve Courson and Bryce Rossi, and of manslaughter in the death of Rudy Schmitz, who’d suffered a stroke during the brawl at Mingo House. Fletcher was sentenced to spend the remainder of his “natural life” behind bars—and behind walls of cinderblock and coils of barbed wire, watched, regulated, and never alone, but perhaps, I thought, somewhat acculturated, having achieved the order he so craved at last.

His capture revived the media obsession with the Victorian Girl, as did the trial and imprisonment of Genevieve’s father. Was it possible for a man as seasoned in deception, in seduction, as Larry Courson to arrange for the murder of his daughter’s killer in prison? Time would tell.

By the evening of the party, the police were closing in on Fletcher Coombs. The media had gotten it wrong; Jon Kim was never a serious suspect. The police had lifted a fingerprint from one of the “Vengeance is mine” notes Fletcher had been depositing on the steps of Mingo House, matching it with a print Peggy O’Connell had provided on a term paper she had lent Fletcher for a class at Shawmut.

Fletcher’s post-trial confession was broadcast live on CNN and all of the Boston channels. His jumpsuit was the orange of Halloween candy corn. Stubble darkened his neglected chin. He spoke with no more emotion that the narrator of choices on the average voice-mail menu.

“A promise is a promise. Genevieve promised herself to me. The month after we graduated from high school. We went to Nahant Beach, a bunch of us from St. Monica’s. It was after hours, evening, when the police and the lifeguards had gone. We had a keg hidden, buried in the sand. Somebody had boiled lobsters and brought chicken and corn on the cob.

“There was this beautiful moon over Egg Rock. We drank and swam and played Frisbee. The water was so warm. There’d been a storm and it was full of kelp, full of seaweed. With big waves you could really ride. Some of the biggest I’ve ever seen.”

Stress and despair had sculpted his physique. Was it possible, had his hairline receded?

“Eventually, most everyone drifted away so that it was just us—Genevieve and me, laughing and swimming and body-surfing. Then this big wave knocked me over and sort of tugged down my swim trunks, so I just took them off. She did the same thing. She looked so beautiful, more beautiful than I’d ever imagined. Without that makeup, without mascara. Just her.

“The east wind came up and she was shivering, so I kissed her, and she tasted of salt. I wanted to do more, right then and there in the water, but she said, ‘No, I want to wait, I want it to be special. Because we’re special, you’re special. Just saying your name makes me smile.’

“‘I’ll wait for you,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait for you. I’ll be with you always.’”

Then he described that mild spring evening—that brought Genevieve Courson death and him ruin.

Fletcher had wanted to visit Mingo House, so he told Genevieve, to examine, close up, the joints of a mahogany sideboard, and replicate them in a cabinet to enclose his television. He, in turn, would take Genevieve’s photograph in a Victorian setting and in the Victorian-style gown she had sewn with the paid help of Cat Hodges and a pattern bought on the Internet. Genevieve would use the gown and photograph in her living history project, the monologue about the life of a young Brahmin woman.

She was trying the dress on, in Clara Mingo’s dining room. Fletcher was kneeling, bent at her feet, ostensibly to inspect the carpentry of the sideboard. He was in modern dress, but his manners were as antique as Disraeli’s. He presented Genevieve with a heart-shaped, velvet-lined box containing his hopes for the future as well as a
1
/
8
-carat diamond set in genuine white gold, not pinchbeck. The metal was as pure, so he believed, as the love for her he had kindled since their childhood. Now he asked the woman he wanted to be his bride: “Will you marry me?”

“‘You can’t be serious!’ Those were her exact words.” She was carrying another man’s child, she said. “‘See? This dress is too tight.’” She had lunched with Bryce Rossi that noon at Villa D’Este. She was wearing the Eternity he had given her. He was writing her a check for $10,000, his first child support for their “little darling.”

“It was the way she was smiling,” Fletcher said. “It was a leer, it wasn’t her. Her face, her voice—everything was wrong. She’d already killed the best parts of her.

“She said, ‘I’m all set. Don’t you see? This kid is my meal ticket. I’ve moved on. Don’t you get it?’

“I asked her to kiss me. For old time’s sake. So she came closer—so coy, so horrible. She pressed her finger against my lower lip. The way that con, Bryce Rossi, used to press my hand. Like it was all some joke. Me and everything else.

“I had a pair of white gloves, in my pocket, from my tool kit. The kind archivists and conservers use, to handle the furniture at Mingo House. I slipped them on. She didn’t notice.”

He coughed, blinked…

“I put my hands around her neck, gently at first…But she kept that awful leer on her face. So I squeezed and squeezed until the leer went away…Then I sat her in the rosewood rocker. She fit right in. That’s what she wanted. She fit right in…”

***

Jon Kim moved to San Jose, where he invented a successful video game, HistoryBlaster, based on combat with ghosts in a Victorian mansion. One of the ghosts, with gray hair bound in a ponytail, resembled a stylized Rudy Schmitz, except that it possessed the power to fly and breathe fire. Jon Kim had been cleared of any involvement in Genevieve Courson’s murder but fined for his illegal drug use and ordered to perform community service in a halfway house.

None of the people Rudy Schmitz had cultivated on the evening of that disastrous fundraiser actually joined the Mingo House board of trustees; so, between them, Sam Ahearn and Nadia Gulbenkian recruited five of their friends and colleagues from the corporate, academic, and governmental worlds to expand and reinvigorate the board. With my help, they wrote a number of grant applications that resulted in Mingo House being awarded funding to replace its porous roof and bolster its fragile foundation.

During work on the fireplace in Corinth One’s library, a mason discovered an ancient iron box secreted within the brickwork. The box contained a cache of English silver dating from the time of King Charles I—not a monstrance but an intricate salt cellar depicting St. George dispatching the dragon, as well as a chain, some coins, and a pick for removing earwax. So some guilty Mingo had concealed this treasure in the library, in the hearth—in the very spot Corinth Two alluded to in his “memoir.” Indeed the silver was deemed to be stolen, being royal property missing since the time of Oliver Cromwell. Claimed by the Crown, it was presented, with apologies, by Sam Ahearn to the Duchess of Kent, in London.

Genevieve’s script on the life of Meribel Bolyston Sears was published in the first issue of the new Mingo House newsletter, the memorial issue commemorating both Rudy Schmitz and Genevieve Courson, with their joint photograph from Genevieve’s placard. (Sam Ahearn gave a copy to the Duchess of Kent, so, for one brief, shining moment those two extinguished socialites glimmered through the consciousness of breathing British royalty, that is, if the Duchess ever bothered to thumb through it.)

To our surprise and consternation, the Museum of Fine Arts ruled the Mingo House “Millet” a clever fraud, done by a family of forgers. It was perpetrated by the Babineaux family of Rimouski, Quebec.

The house—“the curse” of Mingo House, as the media put it—reached out to harvest one more victim, a death utterly ignored because it happened years later. Christopher Jakes, an Amherst College junior, was killed climbing Mt. Leitzel in British Columbia when his grappling hook gave way and he plunged two-hundred terrifying feet to instantaneous death. “And he’d been sober for six months. There was no alcohol involved,” his grandmother, long done with being a docent, told me. “Don’t tell me that place, Mingo House, isn’t cursed. Every atom of that building is evil.”

I couldn’t agree more. I resigned as a trustee two years after the murders. I have never set foot in Mingo House again.