“Why would my grandmother care about secrecy?” asked Caroline. “While she was alive she had control of all the money in the trust, she could have done anything she wanted and no one could have stopped her.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but it appeared she wanted the trust hidden and this Wergeld person to remain anonymous.”
Along with the bank documents was a three-by-five card with a list of long combinations of letters and numbers. The first was X257YRZ26-098. I handed it to Morris and he examined it carefully.
“To my untrained eye these are code numbers for certain bank accounts,” he said. “Some of the banks in these places you need mention only the code numbers and a matching signature or even just a matching phrase to release the funds. This was obviously the way your Mrs. Shaw, she could access the money from that trust you were reading us about, Victor.”
“But why would she bury it?” asked Caroline.
“She knew where it was if she needed it, I suppose,” said Morris with a shrug. “But I would guess the beneficiary person of this trust, or whatever, would have these very same numbers.”
The third envelope contained a packet of old photographs. Caroline looked at them each carefully, one by one, and then went through them again, for our sakes, telling Beth and Morris and me what she could about the people in the pictures. “These are of my family,” she said, “at least most of them. I’ve seen many of them before in albums. Here’s a picture of Grandmother when she was young, with her two sisters.”
The picture was of three young women, arms linked, marching in step toward the camera, dressed as if they were young ladies on the make out of an Edith Wharton novel. The woman in the middle wore a billowing white dress and stared at the photographer with her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face full of a fresh certainty about her future. That woman, full of life and determination, Caroline said, was her grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw. To Faith Reddman’s right was a smaller, frailer woman, her stance less sure, her smile uneasy. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and her dress was a severe and prim black. This was Hope Reddman, the sister who was to die of consumption only a few years later. And to the left, broad-shouldered and big-boned, but with her head tilted shyly down, was Charity Reddman, poor dead Charity Reddman. Her dress was almost sheer enough to see her long legs beneath, she wore a hat, and even with her face cast downward you could see her beauty. She was the pretty one, Caroline had been told, the adventurous one, though that thirst for adventure was not evident in her adolescent shyness. Beautiful Charity Reddman, the belle of the ball, who was destined to disappear beneath the black earth of Veritas.
“That’s your great-grandfather,” I said, pointing to the next photograph, a picture of a fierce, bewhiskered man, his bulging eyes still burning with a strange intensity even as he leaned precariously on a cane, his knees stiff, his back bent. He was leaner than I had remembered from other pictures, his stance more decrepit, but the fierce whiskers, the burning eyes, the wide, nearly lipless mouth were still the stuff of legend. Claudius Reddman, as familiar a figure as all the other icons of great American industrial wealth, as familiar as Rockefeller in his starched collar, as Ford with his lean angularity, as Morgan staring his stare that could maim, as Gould and Carnegie and Frick.
“That was just before he died, I think,” said Caroline. “He lived to be ninety, though in his last years he suffered from palsy and emphysema.”
She flipped to the next photograph and said, “This is my grandfather.” It was a photograph of a handsome young man, tall and blond and mustached, with his nose snootily raised. His suit was dark, his hat nattily creased and cocked over his eye. He had the same arrogant expression I saw in Harrington the first time we met at the bank. There was something about the way he stood, the way his features held their pose, that made me pause and then I realized he held himself in the same careful way I often saw in drunks.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at a photograph of a thin, bald man with a long thin nose and small eyes. He wore a stiff, high collar and spectacles and through the spectacles his tiny eyes were squinted in wariness. Beside him was a handsome woman with a worried mouth. There was something fragile about this couple. There was a sense in the picture that they were under siege.
“I don’t know,” said Caroline.
I turned it over, but there was no description.
The next was another picture she couldn’t identify, a photograph of an unattractive young woman with a dowdy print dress, unruly hair, and a long face with beady eyes. She looked like a young Eleanor Roosevelt with a long thin nose, which was rather sad for her since Eleanor Roosevelt was the ugliest inhabitant ever of the White House, uglier even than Richard Nixon, uglier even than Checkers. The woman in the photograph was just that ugly, and she seemed to know it, looking at the camera with a peculiar passion and intensity that was almost frightening.
“I don’t know who she is,” said Caroline. “I have no idea why my grandmother would save these pictures.”
“Who might know something about them?” I asked.
“These all seem very old, from the time before my father was born, but he might recognize them. Or Nat. They are the only ones who have been around long enough to possibly know.”
There were other photographs, more of the unattractive young woman, more of Christian Shaw, one of which showed him haggard and miserable in a mussed suit. It was taken, Caroline said, shortly before he died. She could tell, she said, because the sleeve of his jacket was loosely pinned to the side. “He lost his arm in the war,” she said. “In France, during the battle in which he won his medal.” There was also a postcard with a picture of Yankee Stadium on its grand opening, a sellout crowd, the Yankees, in pinstripes, at bat. From the distance it was impossible to tell, but maybe it was Ruth at the plate, or Jumping Joe Dugan, or Wally Pipp. There was no message written on the back.
The final picture was more modern, in faded color, a young couple with their arms around each other. The boy was tall and handsome, his hair long, his shirt tie-dyed, his jeans cut into shorts and his shoes sandals. He was laughing at the camera, giddy with life. The girl was wildly young, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, her brown hair as straight and as long as a folk singer’s. She was staring up at the boy with the glow of sated passion on her face. Caroline didn’t say anything and I blinked a bit before I realized who it was: Caroline and Harrington, just a couple of kids crazy in love.
“Who took it?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” she said softly, “but not Grammy. I don’t remember her ever taking a picture.”
When we had finished with the photographs, Caroline reached again into the box and took out a white business envelope with the words “The Letters” written in script on the outside. The handwriting was narrow and tight, the same as the writing on the trust documents. Inside the envelope was a key, an old key, tarnished, with an ornate head and a long shank and a bit that looked like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle.
“Any idea where the lock is?” I asked Caroline.
“None,” she said.
Morris took hold of the key and examined it. “This key is a key to a Barron tumbler lock of some sort. Such a lock I could open in a minute. Maybe three.”
A thin envelope taken from the box contained only one piece of paper, a medical bill from a Dr. Wesley Karpas, dated June 9, 1966, charging, for services rendered, $638.90. The services rendered were not specified, nor was the patient. It was addressed, though, to Mrs. Christian Shaw. I asked Caroline whether she had any idea about the medical services referred to in the bill and she had none.