The Bilbao Looking Glass (14 page)

How utterly stinking of the Larringtons to be spreading that garbage about Max. They no doubt had their heads together now, deciding he must have gone off somewhere to dispose of his loot. They’d know he was out of town. Bradley Rovedock would have told them so, if Pussy Beaxitt hadn’t beaten him to it. She’d have got that from Appie, and God alone knew what else since Appie had never once in her life managed to get her facts quite straight. Poor Aunt Appie must be having a dreadful time of it, not wanting to believe anything bad about Sarah’s tenant and not willing to admit her friends could say he’d done something terrible if they didn’t know it was true.

It was getting awfully dark here under the trees. Sarah had a flashlight with her, but it wouldn’t do her much good if she got too far off the path and had to spend the night wandering among the poison ivy. The best thing to do would be to keep the wind on her right cheek and keep going downhill until she found the burned-out clearing where the boathouse used to be. Then she could follow the rutted track out to the drive.

She slogged on, picking blackberry vines away from her legs and wondering how she managed to keep getting herself into things. Gradually she became aware that she was hearing not only the soughing of the wind in the trees, but also human voices. Could Mr. Lomax and Pete have come back to finish taking down the boathouse? It wouldn’t be the first time the caretaker had turned up at some unexpected time to complete a job, and this was a busy time of year for him.

But why were there so many different voices, and why did they sound so young? Had Pete brought his kids with him? Or was it—she froze in horror, then went grimly forward. One might as well face the worst. Cousin Lionel was back.

“Oh there you are, Sarah,” was her cousin’s joyful greeting. “Where were you earlier? I wanted Alex’s hatchet and that man of yours wasn’t around to get it for me. Why didn’t you leave the tool shed unlocked?”

“Because I didn’t want people like you wandering in and swiping the tools,” she responded with equal cordiality. “Whatever are you up to?”

“Building a lean-to, as I should have thought you could observe for yourself. That’s right, Woody. Shove the pointed end of the upright well into the ground before you lash it to the crosspole.”

“The end isn’t pointed, dummy.”

“Then we’ll point it, shall we?”

Lionel had managed to get a hatchet from somewhere. Deftly as though he were sharpening a pencil with a jackknife, he struck neat scallops from the end of the two-inch sapling his son was holding, whittling it into a perfect point. “There you go. Woody.”

“Hey, not bad.”

For once, Lionel appeared to be commanding some respect from his band of ruffians. He’d got them to dig a businesslike firepit, well-ringed with stones to keep their campfire from getting out of control in this wind. The lean-to they were building was a professional-looking affair with a framework of lashed-together poles against which they were erecting a latticework of un-peeled saplings.

“Tomorrow we’re going to thatch the poles with overlapping branches of evergreen,” Lionel explained. “For tonight we’ll simply stretch a segment of our tent across the framework. The part that didn’t get burned,” he added accusingly.

“Don’t snarl at me,” Sarah told him. “I didn’t set that fire. Where do you think you’re going to get water?”

“From the well, of course. We’ve uncovered it and constructed a well-sweep with a rope and bucket to draw up the water. Show her, Jesse.”

“It’s my turn,” yelled little Frank.

“Aw, you couldn’t even lift the bucket,” said his loving brother. “You can show her the latrine.”

For a child of his years, Frank had a remarkable vocabulary. He spent some time explaining in detail to Jesse precisely what he could do with the latrine before he did in fact take Sarah to view their new sanitary facility. Situated well away from the camp and, she was glad to see, downhill from the water supply, it was a sort of tepee made from more saplings, another fragment of tent, and a sawhorselike seat straddling a deep trench. There was even a can of chloride of lime.

“That’s to keep down the stink,” James told her.

“How nice,” said Sarah. “Let’s go over to the well.”

She was dreadfully concerned about that, but she needn’t have been. Lionel hadn’t merely taken off the cover and left a gaping hole for some playful son to shove a sibling into. He’d erected a fence of stout poles deeply planted, reinforced with piles of rock, and laced together with willow withes. The fence was too high for the boys to climb over without stupendous effort, and the poles were sharpened at the tops to discourage temptation.

The well-sweep was so ingeniously contrived that Sarah had a hard time believing Lionel had thought of it. Moreover, it worked. Jesse proved that by drawing a pailful of water and dumping it over Frank’s head. Frank lisped out several more words Sarah had never heard before.

“That will do, lads,” said their father genially. “Frank why don’t you skin out of those wet clothes and caper around the campfire Indian-style until you’re warmed up? Then on with the pajamas and into the old sleeping bag, eh?”

Frank made a suggestion about the old sleeping bag but, oddly enough, did as he was bidden.

“You’re not going to let that fire burn all night, I trust?” Sarah said to her cousin.

“I see no need. The lean-to will be quite snug and I have succeeded in getting our sleeping bags completely dry. It cost me two dollars and seventy-five cents in quarters,” Lionel added in an aggrieved tone.

“Hard cheese. Heaven only knows what this boathouse fire is going to cost me when the bank gets wind of it.”

“Sarah, I am in no mood to concern myself with other people’s money problems.”

By now all four of his sons were capering around the campfire Indian-style, getting covered with soot from the fire-blackened grass, making the night hideous with their yells, and having a thoroughly educational time. Lionel hunkered down on a log, picked up a stick of pine about a foot long, swiped the bark from it with four neat sweeps of his hatchet, and began turning it into a fuzz stick, cutting thin shavings perhaps an inch deep diagonally into the wood and leaving their ends attached so that they curled back and gradually gave the stick the look of a toy Christmas tree.

“Do you know what this latest insanity of Vare’s is costing me?” he demanded. “I’ve had to hire a full-time housekeeper, for one thing. You wouldn’t believe what those people have the audacity to charge.”

Considering what this one would have to put up with, Sarah thought, no salary whatever could possibly be large enough. She didn’t say so, though. She was rather horribly fascinated by the way that heavy hatchet was peeling back those delicate shavings with never a slip.

“And Vare’s making ridiculous claims about her allowance. That ghastly Tigger’s fastened on to her like a leech. I’m supporting the pair of them in luxury while they sit around drinking gin fizzes and laughing about what a fool they’ve made of me. But that’s going to be all over at the end of this week. I told Vare last night I was through shelling out for her and that anthropoid she’s taken up with.”

He threw down the fuzz stick and slammed the hatchet into the log so violently that Sarah jumped up in alarm. Lionel, always so controlled, was in a boiling rage. She hadn’t thought it could happen but there was the hatchet, its blade half buried in the log altogether too close to where she’d been sitting.

“And there’ll be all the school fees coming up in a couple of months.” His sons, even little Frank, went to highly progressive and correspondingly expensive private schools, of course. “Tuition will be raised again, no doubt, like everything else. And God knows what the taxes will be on Father’s estate if it ever gets settled. I’ll be lucky if I don’t wind up having to support Mother on top of everything else. And you know what shape the stock market’s in these days.”

Sarah didn’t know, but she judged the shape couldn’t be good. So Lionel was feeling the pinch, too, and apparently with reason. It occurred to her all of a sudden why Lionel was so unexpectedly handy with the hatchet. He and Vare had spent their honeymoon doing one of those survival programs where each got dropped into a separate patch of trackless wilderness equipped only with two matches, a compass, and an axe. Some of the family, notably Uncle Jem, had expressed regret when they’d both come out more or less unscathed.

Both Lionel and Vare had gone in heavily for self-improvement, even after they’d discovered procreation. Sarah recalled having bumped into Vare one day over at the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, while Jesse was a drooling lump in a canvas sack on his mother’s back and Woody still only a lump under her poncho.

“I’m exposing them to the aesthetic experience,” Vare had explained.

Nor was she trying to be funny. Vare wouldn’t know a joke if it walked up and bit her on the ankle.

“But the one in the bag is asleep and the other hasn’t even been born yet,” Sarah had protested.

“I did not say I was teaching them,” Vare had corrected. “I said I was exposing them. Subliminally, you know. When the time comes to begin conscious enrichment of their understanding, Lionel and I will introduce them to a variety of artistic stimuli by means of slides, books, lectures, and direct encounter. We are already taking refresher courses in art history on the nights when we don’t do yoga or canoe building.”

So Lionel ought to know a Fantin-Latour when he saw one, not to mention a Millard Sheets. Would it be so very unlike Lionel to commit an art robbery with the object of repairing his fractured finances, and ignore a diamond necklace because it didn’t happen to be on his list of things to steal?

It would be much more like Vare. Maybe she and Tigger had decided to acquire a richer experience of grand larceny.

That wasn’t funny, either. Sarah found she could easily believe something like that of Vare. Everything her cousin and his wife had ever done, from the survival-camp honeymoon to the rapid-fire production of Jesse, Woodson, James, and Frank, had been far more Vare’s doing than Lionel’s. She’d bet anything it had been Vare’s idea to park her husband and sons on Sarah for the summer. Vare would assume they’d have no trouble taking over and running things to suit themselves now that Alexander wasn’t around to put the brakes on.

Vare hadn’t been so far wrong, either. Sarah’d thought she was rid of them and here they were, settled in as if nothing had happened. The worst of it was, now they’d put in all this work making the supposedly ruined campsite not only livable but down-right homey, Sarah knew she wouldn’t have the heart to turn them out again. Not until catastrophe struck again, anyway, as it doubtless would. She went around to the end where the hatchet wasn’t and sat down again beside Lionel.

“Where are Vare and Tigger living now?”

“They’ve taken a place on Chauncy Street in Cambridge.”

“So close to you and the boys?”

“Where else would they go? Vare’s still taking courses at Harvard, you know.”

Sarah hadn’t known, but she might have guessed.

“She had her summer schedule all mapped out before she decided to do this absurd thing with Tigger. She could hardly change that.”

“I don’t see why not, when she was changing everything else. Whatever prompted her to—” Sarah faltered. This was too much like the sort of question Alice B. would have asked. “I’d had the impression you and Vare had worked out a thoroughly viable lifestyle,” she substituted, choosing the sort of phraseology Lionel would be most apt to understand.

“So had I,” he responded gloomily. “Dash it, Sarah, I cannot for the life of me understand why she’s treating me this way. I’ve always done everything she—that is to say, Vare and I had always explored the ramifications and arrived at a joint resolution on any course of action. But when this Tigger lunacy came up, she absolutely refused to enter into any sort of rational discussion. She wouldn’t even listen to me. I—”

He glanced over to make sure his sons were too engrossed in their own caterwauling to overhear. “I raised my voice. Sarah, I haven’t told this to anybody else, not even Mother, but I lost my temper. I honestly believe if I’d had this hatchet in my hand at that moment—but this is idle conjecture.”

Lionel took a few deep breaths, then managed to speak more calmly. “Sarah, what would be your thoughts with regard to the boys’ attending Alice B.’s funeral tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Oh dear, it is, isn’t it? I suppose I’ll have to show up, or your mother will have kittens again. But I don’t think you should take the boys, Lionel.”

She could think of nothing more dire than sitting through a service with Jesse, Woody, James, and Frank erupting all around her. Lionel, naturally, was thinking along different lines.

“Modern psychiatric emphasis is strongly on the necessity for learning to cope with the death experience. This would give them an opportunity to get in some practice.”

“At the funeral of a murder victim? Lionel, I do think that’s a bit much. Besides, they’ve already coped when your father died.”

After the obsequies, it had been the consensus that the prospect of never having to put up with his grandsons again must have made death a welcome release for Uncle Samuel. Sarah could picture Miffy going into raging hysterics all over the church if they got a chance to try on their antics at Alice B.’s funeral.

“But Vare said—”

“When did Vare say? Alice B. only got killed night before last.”

“I spoke with her last night. The boys and I had to go back to Cambridge, as you should have realized, since other hospitality was not forthcoming.”

“You could have gone to a public campground.”

“And fork out some outrageous fee to be crowded in with a pack of God-knows-whats? I’d already had to spend all that money at the laundromat. Anyway, I knew Vare would be planning to attend the funeral, so I decided I might as well call her up and discuss the matter with her.”

“Why should Vare come to the funeral?”

“Because Alice B. was her aunt, of course.” Sarah gasped. “Lionel, I’d completely forgotten. Vare was a Beaxitt, wasn’t she?”