Tense because Day Thirty was almost upon him.
“Lieutenant Delmonico?” asked the desk sergeant.
“That was me when I last looked,” Carmine said with a grin.
“I found an antique evidence box stuck behind those packages when I came in this morning. No name on it, which I guess is why you never got it. Then I found a tag with your name on it yards away.” He bent down, fumbled under his counter and came up with a big, square box that looked not unlike those in current use.
The belongings of the woman and child beaten to death in 1930! He’d forgotten all about them, so absorbed in surveillance planning had he become. Though he had remembered to ask Silvestri to light a fire under the archives bitch and her peon.
“Thanks, Larry, I owe you one,” he said, picked up the box and took it to his office.
Something to do with a Sunday morning if your beloved is on a route march through wet leaves.
No fetid relics of a crime thirty-six years old puffed out of it when he pulled the lid off; they hadn’t bothered keeping the clothes the pair were wearing, which meant there must have been blood all over them, including footwear. Since no one had thought to record the exact distance of “near” Leonard Ponsonby, for all that Carmine knew some of the blood might have been his. No one had even drawn a sketch to show how the bodies had lain in relation to each other. “Near” was as much as he had to go on.
The pocketbook was there, however. By habit he had donned gloves to remove it gingerly so he could examine it with his more sophisticated eyes. Homemade. Knitted, as women did in those days of no money, with two cane handles and a lining of coarse cotton fabric. No clasp. This woman couldn’t afford even the cheapest cowhide, let alone leather. The pocketbook contained a tiny purse in which sat a silver dollar, three quarters, one dime and one nickel. Carmine put the money purse on his desk. A man’s handkerchief, clean but not ironed; calico, not linen. And, in the bottom, fragments and crumbs of what he presumed were the two cookies. The mother had probably stolen them from the station café so the child would have something to eat on the train, and that might be why they were hiding out in the snow. The autopsies had said both stomachs were empty. Yes, she’d stolen the cookies.
The carpetbag wasn’t a large one, though it was old enough to have been one of those the northern predators had carried south with them after the Civil War. Faded, balding in places, never elegant even when new. He opened it with gentle reverence; in here resided almost everything that poor woman had owned, and no thing was more touching than the mute evidence of lives long over.
On top were two long woollen scarves, hand knitted in varicolored stripes, as if the knitter had scrounged for scraps. But why were the scarves in the bag when the weather was so awful? Spares? Under them were two pairs of clean women’s panties made of unbleached muslin, and two much smaller pairs that obviously belonged to the child. A pair of knitted kneesocks and a pair of knitted stockings. On the bottom, carefully folded between torn tissue paper, a little girl’s dress.
Carmine stopped breathing. A little girl’s dress. Made of pale blue French lace exquisitely embroidered with seed pearls. Puffed sleeves on dainty cuffs, pearl-studded buttons up the back, silk lining, and beneath that, stiffened net gathered to hold the skirt out like a ballerina’s tutu. A 1930 precursor of a Tinker Bell, except that this one had been completely handmade, every pearl sewn on separately and firmly, none of the stitching done by machine. Oh, the things the 1930 cops had missed! On the left breast the word EMMA had been picked out in dark, purplish pearls.
Head whirling, Carmine laid the dress on his desk and then stood just staring at it for what might have been five minutes or an hour; he didn’t know, hadn’t looked at his watch or the clock.
Finally he sat down and put the carpetbag on his lap, opening it as widely as its rusting jaws would allow. The lining was worn, had come apart on one side seam; he put both hands inside the bag and felt around, eyes closed. There! Something!
A photograph, and not taken on a box Brownie. This was a studio portrait still mounted in a cream cardboard folder stamped with the name of the photographer. Mayhew Studios, Windsor Locks. Someone had written what looked like “1928” on the frame below, but in pencil now so faint it was a best guess.
The woman was seated on a chair, the child – about four years old – seated on her knees. In this, the woman was much better clad, wore a string of real pearls around her neck and real pearls in her earlobes. The little girl wore a dress similar to the one in the carpeting, EMMA showing up clearly. And both of them had the face. Even in black-and-white their skins had a suggestion of café au lait; their hair was densely black and curly, their eyes very dark, their lips full. To Carmine, gazing at them through a wall of tears, they were exquisite. Destroyed in all their youth and beauty, every vestige of it bloodied to pulp.
A crime of passion. Why had no one seen that? No killer would waste his essence on a torrent of blows were hate not the motive. Especially when the skull under the bludgeon belonged to a little girl. There’s no way these two female creatures weren’t connected to Leonard Ponsonby. They were there because he was there, he was there because they were there.
So it’s Charles Ponsonby after all. Though he wasn’t old enough to do this. Nor Morton, nor Claire. This was mad Ida a decade and more before she went mad. Which means that Leonard and Emma’s mother were – lovers? Relatives? One was as likely as the other; Ida was ultra-conservative, no touch of the tar brush for her. So many questions to ask! Why were Emma and her mother so destitute in January of 1930 when Leonard was with them carrying $2,000 and flaunting diamond jewelry? What had happened to Emma and her mother between the prosperity of the 1928 Windsor Locks photo and their impoverishment of January 1930?
Enough, Carmine, enough! Nineteen thirty can wait, 1966 cannot. Chuck Ponsonby is a Ghost – or is he the Ghost, doing all of it alone? How much help does Claire give him? How much help is she capable of giving him? Can one Ponsonby be a Ghost and the other not? Yes, because of Claire’s blindness. I know she’s blind! Chuck could move around in some secret, soundproof basement and she’d never know. I’m positive it’s soundproof. The screams have to be kept in, and the screams are very loud.
Charles Ponsonby…A bachelor stay-at-home who couldn’t produce original research to save his life. Always in someone else’s shadow – mad mother’s, mad brother’s, blind sister’s, far more successful best friend’s. Doesn’t bother matching his socks, keeping his hair combed, buying a new tweed jacket. An archetypal absentminded professor, too timid to pick up a rat without wearing a furnace glove, nondescript in that way which suggests a radical failure in ego, despite the veneer of intellectual snobbishness.
But can this Charles Ponsonby be the portrait of a multiple rapist/murderer so brilliant that he’s run rings around us ever since we discovered that he existed? Seems impossible to believe. The trouble is that no one has a portrait of the multiple murderer except that sex always seems involved. Therefore every time we unearth a specimen, we have to dissect him minutely. His age, his race, his creed, his appearance, the victim type he chooses, the personality he presents to the world, his childhood, background, likes and dislikes – a thousand thousand factors. About Charles Ponsonby we can certainly say that on his mother’s side there is a family history of madness as well as blindness.