The Gladstone Bag (30 page)

“Telephone call?” Everard Wont was vocal again. “What’s all this about telephones? I thought you said there wasn’t one.”

“Far as you’re concerned, there isn’t,” snapped Vincent. “Speakin’ of which, Professor, since you’re so hell-bent on gettin’ off Pocapuk, you better go get your stuff together right now. My brother won’t mind settin’ you ashore, but he’s got to get goin’ pretty quick. The deputies have to file their report.”

Emma could have kissed him. “Theonia,” she said, “that must be Sarah. Would you talk to her? Tell her I’m tied up right now with a departing guest.”

“Of course,” Theonia replied. “Don’t bother getting the other phone out, Vincent, I’ll take it in the kitchen.”

She walked out with the cook. Emma leaped to the attack. “Neil, would you please drive the luggage cart around to Dr. Wont’s cottage and help him with his bags? We mustn’t keep your uncle waiting. Dr. Wont, it’s too bad your project hasn’t worked out, but I have to say I had small hopes of it from the start. Now, does anybody else want to leave with Dr. Wont? If you do, please say so right this minute. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of you are quite welcome to finish out the summer here with me on the one condition that you never so much as breathe another word about Pocapuk’s treasure in my presence.”

Wont had most likely not intended to quit Mrs. Sabine’s free fleshpots now that the danger was past, but what could he do? Seething, he jerked his chin at Lisbet Quainley. Sighing, she got up and followed him out of the house.

“I had a feeling she’d go,” said Alding Fath. “I wonder if that means I’m getting my powers back.”

“I expect we all had the same feeling,” said Emma, “so I’m afraid this one’s not a fair test, Mrs. Fath. Or may I call you Alding?”

“Sure, go right ahead. Glad to have you.”

“And you must call me Emma. Now that we’ve been through so much together, I think we’re entitled to use first names. Don’t you agree, Alexei?”

Count Radunov was, as she’d expected, both gratified and amused. “My dear Emma, I could not agree more. Speaking of psychic powers, I observe that yours must be developed to a high degree. How else could you have hit on the lumpish Groot as the villain in our melodrama?”

“Don’t laugh at me, Alexei. I’m no detective, but I do know a little about people. Things kept piling up. To begin with, I always tend to distrust blank-faced people on general principles. Then Vincent told me Jimmy Sorpende’s clothing showed signs that he might have been picked up bodily and heaved over the cliff, which suggested an assailant who was big and strong. I have to admit Black John here was the first who came to my mind.”

“I bet I was the second,” Vincent grunted.

“Well, there was that possibility,” Emma admitted, “but we’ve already talked about that. Another thing that made me wonder was watching him and Black John building that raft. Groot was yelling at Dr. Wont and waving a big hammer around in quite a bloodcurdling way. Not that one could blame him because Dr. Wont is surely the most infuriating bird ever hatched, but it did show that Groot wasn’t always the placid fellow he seemed to be. What really struck me, I think, was our poker game. He was trying to cheat and got furious when it didn’t work.”

“Because you cheated back.” Alexei Radunov was having a lovely time. “I thought I was the one you suspected of marking the deck.”

“You were naturally my first choice,” Emma replied sweetly.

“Thank you, dear lady, but you overestimate my guile. You used the old fingernail trick, did you not?”

“Only because he used it first.”

“What’s the fingernail trick?” asked Black John.

“One makes tiny nicks in the edges of the cards or else little dents in the backs. Somebody was making nicks, I could feel them as I shuffled. So I merely added a few extra nicks here and there as the cards came around and waited to see which of you got thrown off his game. We used to pull that sort of trick on each other during our weekly poker games when my husband was alive. Everybody’s winnings went to the Firemen’s Relief Fund anyway, so cheating was just part of the fun.”

Radunov burst out laughing. “Emma, you continue to amaze me! So it was a case
of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.”

“Exactly,” Emma replied. “Groot also lied to me about Footsy-Wootsy.”

“The cad! Had I but known, I’d have challenged him at once.”

“Alexei, I am in no mood for frivolity. Footsy-Wootsy was the name of a shoe company he claimed to have done work for recently. My niece checked them out and found they’d gone out of business three years ago. And then Groot told that absurd yarn about getting locked inside Alding’s cottage when in fact he must already have been there and hit Lisbet Quainley on the head, then rushed up here and searched my bedroom, getting himself filthy when he jumped out my window and climbed down the trellis.”

The real clincher had been the hole in Ted Sharpless’s sneaker that matched the New Year’s Eve drawing in Joris Groot’s sketchbook, but Emma decided not to mention that. A lady didn’t have to tell all her little secrets. Anyway, Deputy MacDuff had taken both the sketchbook and the model into custody by now. And here came Theonia with a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“Ah, there you are, Theonia. Bernice, would you take this tray and pass it around? What did Sarah have to say?”

“Just that she’d unearthed a few more facts. Lisbet Quainley lives on a small inherited income and occasional jobs of an artsy-craftsy nature. She does paint, but nobody seems to feel she has much in the way of talent. Her outstanding characteristic appears to be a penchant for getting mixed up with totally impossible men.”

Emma exchanged smiles with Alding Fath. “Tell us something we don’t know, my dear.”

“The big thing is that Sarah’s and Max’s friend Bill Jones has managed to find out what Joris Groot had been doing since he lost the Footsy-Wootsy account. He’d picked up some free-lance work drawing jewelry for newspaper ads. He was good at finicky detail, as you know. He’d also been working as a part-time waiter for caterers handling lavish affairs like the one at which the Cantilever necklace was stolen. There’d already been a couple of similar robberies; the caterers were getting worried.”

“As well they might,” said Radunov. “That sort of thing could put them out of business in a hurry. But they hadn’t begun to suspect Groot?”

“Bill didn’t say so. Groot was such a quiet, dull-looking fellow that they probably wouldn’t have noticed him particularly.”

“Unless they found out he had connections among the jewelers,” Radunov suggested. “That’s probably how he got on to a fence willing to handle what he stole.”

“Or else to somebody who egged him on to steal,” Black John added. “How did Jimmy Sorpende fit into the picture?”

“I don’t know how they got together,” said Theonia. “I have a feeling Groot made the mistake of thinking he could use Jimmy for odd jobs whenever he wanted him and shut him out of the big ones. It looks to me as though Groot may have been acting on his own when he decided to bring the necklace to Pocapuk. This would have seemed an ideal place to lie low for the summer at no expense to himself. He may have meant to stash the necklace in Mrs. Sabine’s safe until after the party dispersed for the winter and collect it when he thought it was safe to approach his fence. As to how he wangled an invitation to join Dr. Wont’s group, I suppose Lisbet Quainley fixed it up.”

“That’s right,” said Alding Fath. “Lisbet hangs out in some back-street restaurant that caters to writers and artists, she told me on the ferry. I guess you do, too, Black John.”

“Sure, Tintoretto’s Taverna. I go mostly for the spaghetti; a guy can’t drink and stay in shape. Anyway, Tintoretto’s is the sort of place where everybody gets to know everybody. I’m not really one of the regulars, but Groot used to be there practically every night and so did Liz. They’d have these high-flown discussions about art, Liz doing all the talking and Groot giving a grunt or a nod about once every five minutes. Then Liz started bringing Ev around. I don’t know how she latched on to him, but she does seem to have some kind of magnetic attraction for losers. A couple of months ago Ev lined up this Pocapuk deal and started looking for recruits.”

“Who shouldn’t have been hard to find,” said Emma rather caustically.

“You’d have thought so,” Black John replied, “but it meant tying yourself up for a whole summer on a project that sounded pretty hopeless in a place nobody knew anything about with a jerk nobody could stand. But then Joris said he’d come because he’d been wanting to try his hand at illustrating a book and this seemed a good chance. Liz wanted to be with Ev, God knows why. I wanted to get out of town for the summer, and it was either Pocapuk or listening to my folks nagging me about why didn’t I quit making believe I could write and find myself a job that paid something. Alding, what about you?”

“Ev sent for me. He’d heard about me through a woman who’d got me to locate some jewelry she’d lost and figured I was just the one to locate Pocapuk’s—sorry, Emma. At first I didn’t want to come because I didn’t like the vibrations from Ev’s letter, but this other feeling came through that I ought to do it regardless. So I wrote back that I’d come if he’d send me a round-trip ticket, and he did, so here I am. What’s to become of me I don’t know, but I’m not going to worry about that till I have to. Go on about Joris and this Jimmy boy, Theonia.”

Theonia rearranged her red scarf. “Of course now that they’re both dead we can only conjecture. After discussing the matter with our cousin the detective, though, I should say Jimmy Sorpende either knew or suspected Joris Groot had the necklace in his possession and had no intention of cutting Jimmy in on the takings. Jimmy therefore followed Groot to Maine and onto the ferry. He couldn’t have known it was the discovery that he was traveling with a bona-fide clairvoyant that sent Groot into a panic. We don’t know ourselves, but odds are, it was. Anyway, Jimmy would certainly have seen Groot drugging Emma’s coffee and stealing her Gladstone bag. That would have been his cue to step back into the picture, and by then Groot would have been only too glad to leave Jimmy literally holding the bag. I expect he gave Jimmy orders to keep it hidden until the next-to-the-last stop, then leave it in the men’s room and go ashore.”

“The idea being that one of us would find the bag and either return it to its owner or carry it ashore here,” Radunov put in. “It would have occurred to neither of them, one assumes, that the finder might simply turn the bag over to the ferryboat captain. And in fact the plan worked.”

“Only Jimmy didn’t go ashore,” said Theonia. “What he must have done was sneak down into the hold and steal a diving suit and a snorkel out of somebody’s car. He’d then have stashed the bag as Groot told him to, hid somewhere until the ferry was almost to Pocapuk, slipped overboard, and swam under water to the island. Jimmy was probably hiding under the dock when you all came ashore and waited there till he was reasonably sure you were out of the way. When you happened to catch sight of him, Emma, I expect he was doing a quick reconnoiter to see where he might plausibly drag himself ashore suffering from amnesia and wait his chance to steal the bag back. He probably knew Ted Sharpless was already on Pocapuk and wouldn’t dare refuse to help him.”

Vincent snorted. “Catch me ever doin’ another favor for a jailbird!”

“Now, Vincent,” said Alding Fath, “they’re not all like Ted Sharpless.”

“Yeah, Dad,” said Sandy. “All you have to do is let Mrs. Fath check ’em out for you first.”

“Mind your tongue, young woman.” But Vincent’s lips were twitching. “What beats me is how Groot knew Sorpende was on the island. I never said.”

“I expect the meeting came as a shock to them both,” Theonia told him. “What must have happened is that they both came prowling after the necklace at more or less the same time. I think Jimmy got to it first, being the more experienced burglar. Groot either trailed him and let him take the risk of stealing the bag out of Emma’s bedroom or else happened on him after he’d got it. I don’t know how Jimmy planned to get off the island.”

“Figured we had a boat he could steal,” said Vincent.

“I suppose so. Anyway, Groot apparently slugged Jimmy with a pine branch and chucked him over the cliff, then searched the bag, found only Emma’s jewelry, and tossed the whole business after Jimmy in a fit of temper. He may possibly have gone down and searched Jimmy’s body after that; we can’t know because of course the footprints would have been washed away when the tide came in.”

“Could o’ shoved Jimmy’s face in the mud to make sure he smothered,” Vincent suggested. “I wouldn’t put it past Groot after the way he went for Sandy. He must o’ been half crazy to go searchin’ the house in broad daylight.”

“It’s a mercy he didn’t kill more of us,” said Emma. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a thoroughly disorganized scoundrel. Well, Theonia, is that the end of your report?”

“Just that I’m supposed to tell you Tweeters Arbuthnot was awfully sorry he couldn’t come today. His pet toucan is molting and he felt he had to be there in its hour of need. He’s engaged a toucan-sitter for tomorrow, however, and will be here to pick me up. But first he wants to take you for a little hop to see the puffins.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be quite in the mood for puffins.”

“He also mentioned hang gliding.”

“Oh?” Emma began to perk up. “I wonder what one ought to wear?”

“Emma, you wouldn’t!” cried Alexei Radunov.

Theonia laughed. “I assure you she would, but could you put off deciding for a few minutes, Emma? Bubbles wants us in the kitchen. You too, please, Vincent.”

This was a change; Vincent looked as puzzled as Emma felt. However, they both followed Theonia without demur. As they were going through the dining room, Vincent asked her, “What’s he want us for?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t want us at all,” Theonia surprised him by replying. “It’s just that there’s one more bit of unfinished business I’d like to clear up before I leave.”

B
UBBLES DEFINITELY HADN’T BEEN
expecting them; he was at the sink washing vegetables when they walked in. “Oh, hi. What’th up, Vinthent?” The boss cocked his head at Theonia. “Ask her.”