Murder on Black Friday (6 page)

A moment passed, and then she came out of the shed, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’d gotten into the habit of checking up on him, trying to wake him if he was napping, seeing if there was anything he needed...”

“I understand his bedroom door was locked,” Will said.

“Yes.”

“That was unusual?”

“It was. It worried me, especially after I knocked and called to him, and got no answer.”

“What did you do?”

“I called down to Eileen to fetch the key from the butler’s pantry.”

“Eileen is a maid?” he asked.

“The
maid. We’ve had to let the others go.”

“What did you find when you opened the door?”

Miriam looked off toward the house, the morning sunlight shimmering in her eyes.

“Will,” Nell said quietly, “perhaps we can continue this some other—“

“He was lying on his stomach with his hands in the bathtub,” she said in a damp, strained voice. “It’s one of those shallow tin tubs with a wide lip to keep the water from splashing onto the floor—you know the kind. He had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up. His face was resting on the lip—the flat, seat part of it—as if it were a pillow, and his arms...” She illustrated his position by turning her head to the side and raising her bent arms over her head.

“The knife he used,” Will said. “Was it there?”

Miriam nodded. “It was the pen knife from his desk. It was on the rug next to him. There was b-blood everywhere—the floor, the w-wall—“ She hitched in a breath and closed her eyes.

Will reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, but he’d given it to his mother earlier. Nell pulled hers out of the chatelaine on her belt and offered it to Miriam, but she waved it away. Drawing in a tremulous breath, she said, “I’m—I’m all right. I just...I can’t afford to fall apart today. There’s too much to do.”

“I’d like to see your father’s bedroom, if I may,” Will said.

“Why? I...I’ve told you everything. I’ve described it all for you.”

“Yes, but if I could see it for myself, it would help me to—“

“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “I’ve answered your questions, I’ve told you everything you wanted to know. That room, it’s...” She shook her head. “I can’t even bear to think about it. It...it was the last place my father was alive, the place where he took his life.
I
haven’t even been in there. The thought of strangers trooping through it...”

“You
haven’t been in there?” Nell asked. “But you were the one who...found him.”

“I went no farther than the doorway,” she said. “I was...horrified. Grief-stricken. My throat was sore afterward. But I never stepped into that room. Eileen did, to make sure he was really dead, but I...I couldn’t. I still can’t.” 

“I’ll be with Dr. Hewitt when he’s in there,” Nell said. “We’ll respect the room. We shan’t touch anything.”

“I’m sorry,” Miriam repeated. “I just can’t have it. And it should hardly be necessary. I’ve told you what happened.”

Will looked as if he wanted to press the point, but after considering it a moment, here merely said, “Just one more question if I may, Miss Bassett, and then we’ll leave you in peace.”

“There was no note,” Miriam said as she lifted the empty basket.

Will looked at her.

“Isn’t that what you wanted to know?” Miriam asked.

“As a matter of fact, it is. Did you
look
for a note?”

“Yes.”

“But if you didn’t even enter the room—“ Nell began.

“Eileen looked. I asked her to. There was no note.” Miriam tucked the basket snugly up against her hip. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things I need to do. I’ll have Becky show you out.”

*   *   *

Becky prattled on about her father’s final arrangements as she held the front door open for Nell and Will.

“Miriam wants to have the funeral Tuesday afternoon. She wants Dr. Tanner to give the eulogy, and of course he’s the perfect gentleman to do it, being a man of the cloth and such a splendid speaker, not to mention having known Papa so well. I wish he could perform the funeral service itself, but Miriam says that would be wrong, because of course he’s a Unitarian, and Papa was a Congregationalist, never mind that he hadn’t been to church in years.” She winced. “Which I’m not supposed to mention, so please forget I said it. Anyway, the service will be at Central Congregational on Newbury, even though Reverend Bingham there has never even met Papa, which seems rather sad to me, but Miriam says that’s the way Papa would have wanted it, and she should know, because she was really much closer to him than I was, so it seems only right that she should have the final say in the arrangements. Not that Papa and I were on bad terms, or anything like that, it’s just that he never sat and talked to me the way he talked to Miriam, so—“

“So I don’t suppose you’d know anything about your father’s business dealings,” Nell interjected. “Whether he’d invested in gold?”

“Oh goodness, no, he never discussed such things. Mr. Munro was the only person Papa ever talked to about—“ Becky cut herself off with a groan. “There I go again. Miriam’s right, I’m such a rattle-pate. Please, please,
please
don’t tell her I said anything.”

Will and Nell exchanged a look. “About Philip Munro?” Nell asked. “Why aren’t you supposed to talk about him?”

Becky glanced toward the back of the house and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Miriam doesn’t want anyone to know that he had anything to do with us, even now that he’s dead. You won’t tell her I said anything, will you?”

“Of course not.” Nell smiled conspiratorially. “If you don’t tell her that Dr. Hewitt and I slipped upstairs for a couple of minutes before we left.”

Becky stared at her. Will turned and smiled at Nell in a way that she found very gratifying.

“You want to go upstairs?” Becky asked.

Will said, “I just want to take a look at your father’s room, since it’s where he...well, to help substantiate the diagnosis of suicide. Your sister was reluctant to let me up there, but you seem a bit less...wrought up about things.”

A classic Will Hewitt understatement,
Nell thought.

From the rear of the house came the creak of the back door opening, and Miriam’s footsteps retreating down the flagstone path toward the drying shed.

Becky cocked her head to listen. “She’s hanging up that dress, and then she’ll have to clean up in the kitchen. It’ll take her a little while—twenty minutes, maybe.” Shooing them toward the stairs, she said, “If she catches you up there, I had nothing to do with it.”

“Mother of God,” Nell murmured as they stood in the doorway of Noah Bassett’s bedroom.

The maid Eileen was on her hands and knees with her back to them, scrubbing a sudsy bristle brush over the carpet. Being of petite stature, she really had to put her back into it; a little grunt of effort escaped her with every stroke of the brush. Nell closed her eyes, but a ghastly tableau was emblazoned on her mind’s eye.

The carpet, an elegant if worn Savonnerie patterned in shades of gold and cream, was smeared with blood, some of which had spurted from Mr. Bassett’s slashed arteries onto the counterpane on the half-tester bed. Part of the carpet had already been scrubbed; it was damp and strewn with pink-stained washrags, on one of which lay an ivory-handled pen knife. Two buckets of reddish water, one soapy and one less so, stood next to a bathing pan of tinned sheet iron that resembled an upended garden hat with a wide, curved brim. Blood, or bloody water, filled the tub’s shallow well.

Nell took a deep breath, but the stench of old blood mingled with ox-gall soap made the gorge rise in her throat.

Will closed a strong hand around her arm, said her name softly.

She opened her eyes and crossed herself.

Eileen, who’d paused in her scrubbing to survey them over her shoulder, noticed the gesture and cast a curious glance at Nell’s blue silk dress and chic little velvet tam. Unlike the young maid, with her sweetly Gaelic visage, one wouldn’t necessarily peg Nell as Irish Catholic just by looking at her. More often than not, given her attire and comportment, she was taken for a Brahmin miss of the prim and starchy variety.

Eileen looked from Nell to Will, who was sweeping his gaze around the room, those dark, trenchant eyes seeming to catalogue every detail of the scene. To Nell, it looked as if Mr. Bassett had died exactly as he was purported to have, from cutting his wrists and submerging them in a tubful of warm water; she doubted Will would have a different take on it.

Pausing in her work, the girl blew away some strands of staw-colored hair that had escaped her head rag to hang in her eyes. There was something familiar about her; Nell was sure she’d seen her somewhere before, but where?

In a soft, bone-weary brogue, the maid said, “Can I help ya?”

“We understand Dr. Tanner is up here,” Will said.

Eileen hesitated, then cocked her head toward a closed door in the far wall. “He’s in there.” She hunkered down and resumed her scrubbing.

As they crossed the room, side-stepping Eileen and the grisly mess she was cleaning, Nell noticed some items of clothing laid out on a setee: a black, double-breasted frock coat, gray trousers, braces, socks, shirt, drawers, collar... The last suit of clothes Noah Bassett would ever wear.

Nell knocked softly on the door to Mr. Bassett’s study.

“Miss Bassett?” Dr. Tanner said from inside.

So,
Nell thought,
He even calls her that when they’re alone—just as all those dour old etiquette books advised.
She opened the door.

The minister, sitting at a cylinder desk in the Spartan but sunwashed room, turned to look at them, a hint of disappointment shadowing his face when he saw that it wasn’t Miriam. He rose and bowed to Nell, a ribbon-tied bundle of envelopes in his hand. “Miss Sweeney...Dr. Hewitt.”

The desk had its top rolled up. All but one of its little nooks had been emptied out onto the desktop, taking up its entire surface except for an inkstand. It was a pewter stand with two ivory-capped inkwells, an ivory-lidded stamp box, a pen rest bearing a well-used quill, and a smaller, empty, rest meant for a pen knife. The lower desk drawers all stood open, the files and papers that had filled them spread out in neat stacks on the rug.

Looking from Nell and Will to the rummaged-through desk, and back again, Tanner said, “I am, of course, going through these things at Miss Bassett’s behest.”

“I know. I overheard.” Nell was careful not to specify how very little she’d overheard, in the hope that Dr. Tanner could be finessed into disclosing what he was looking for. “Whispers,” Nell said, “tend to have the unintended effect of drawing one’s attention to what’s being said.”

“You must understand,” Tanner said as he shoved his eyeglasses up, “Miss Bassett’s tendency toward...I don’t want to say secretiveness...”

“Circumspection?” Will supplied.

Tanner accepted the euphemism with a mordant smile. “It’s the product of circumstance, not nature. She’s a lady who’s grown accustomed to, well, taking care of things—of
everything
—on her own hook entirely, with no aid or input from anyone else. Running a house this size with a staff that’s dwindled down to one, caring for an ailing father, serving as a substitute mother to Becky after Mrs. Bassett’s passing... It’s a great deal to be laid upon one person’s shoulders.”

“I can understand Mr. Basset’s having done little to ease her burden,” Will said. “He’s evidently been suffering from mental depression for years. But surely the younger Miss Bassett, as she’s come of age, has been able to help out.”

“Becky...” Tanner flipped through the letters in his hand as he composed his reply. “She’s a charming girl, but she’s simply never been expected to shoulder any real responsibilities.”

“Are you saying she’s been spoiled?” Nell asked. If so, whose fault would it be but that of the person who’d reared her—her sister Miriam?

“I wouldn’t say that.” Lowering his voice, his eyes sparking with amusement over the rim of his glasses, Tanner said, “It might get back to Miss Bassett, and there’d be the Devil to pay. I say, do you mind if I, er...” He gestured toward the desk.

“Oh, do please carry on,” Nell said. “We didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Acknowledging the small courtesy with a nod, the minister sat back down and placed the letters on the desk, lining them up tidily with the other piles. “Miss Bassett has found that it tends to just complicate things when she tries to share the load with Becky, what with all the explanations and instructions. And Becky, as you’ve no doubt observed, relishes discourse to an extent that Miss Bassett finds, well...”

“Time-consuming?” Nell said.

Tanner smiled. “Quite. Being a very busy lady who values her time, she’s learned to keep her counsel—almost to a fault, as you’ve seen.” Pulling a sheaf of papers from one of the cubbies, Tanner said, “In that respect, the Bassett sisters could not be more different.”

Too true,
Nell mused. Every thought Becky had seemed to make its way out of her mouth in short order, without benefit of any kind of filtering process.