“That’s absolutely impossible. I don’t have a driver, and I didn’t write you a letter. I’ve written no one at your office and have no idea what on earth you’re talking about. Who is this? Who really, and what do you want?”
“I have the letter in front of me, Mrs. Donahue.”
I look at it on top of my desk and smooth it open again, being careful and deliberate as it nags at me to ask her about Fielding and why she called him and what he said to her. It nags at me that I don’t want her to hate me or think I’m unfeeling and anything other than honest. It’s possible Fielding disparaged me to her the same way I suspect he did with Julia Gabriel. I’m close to asking, but I stop myself. What has been said, and what has Erica Donahue been led to believe? But not now. Self-control, I tell myself.
Mrs. Donahue asks indignantly, “What does it say that’s supposedly from me?”
“A creamy rag paper with a watermark.” I hold the top sheet of paper up to my desk lamp, adjusting the shade so the bulb shines directly through the paper, showing the watermark clearly, like the inner workings of a soft-shell crab showing through pearly skin. “An open book with three crowns,” I say, and I’m shocked.
I don’t let her hear it in my voice. I make sure she can’t begin to sense what is racing through my mind as I describe to her what I’m seeing, like a hologram, in the sheet of paper I hold up to the light: an open book between two crowns, with a third crown below, and above that three cinquefoil flowers. And it is the flowers Marino neglected to mention that so glaringly aren’t Oxford’s coat of arms, that so glaringly aren’t the coat of arms for the online City University of San Francisco. What I’m looking at isn’t what Benton found on the Internet early this morning while all of us were in the x-ray room, but it’s what I saw on the gold signet ring I took out of the evidence locker before I came upstairs after looking at the dead man’s clothes.
I open the small manila envelope and shake the ring out into the palm of my gloved hand. The gold catches the lamplight and is bright against white cotton as I turn it different ways to look at it, noting it is badly scratched and the bottom of the band is worn thin. The ring looks old, like an antique, to me.
“Well, that sounds like my crest and my paper. I admit it does,” Mrs. Donahue is saying over the phone, and then I read to her the Beacon Hill address engraved on the envelope and letterhead, and she confirms it also is hers. “My personal stationery? How is that possible?” She sounds angry, the way people get when they’re scared.
“What can you tell me about your crest? Would you mind explaining it to me?” I ask.
I look at the identical crest engraved in the yellow-gold signet ring that I now hold under a hand lens. The three crowns and the open book are large in the magnifying glass, and the engraving is almost gone in spots, the five-petal flowers, the cinquefoils especially, just a ghost of what was once deeply etched because of the age of the ring, which has been subjected to wear and tear by someone, or perhaps by a number of people, including the man from Norton’s Woods, who was wearing it on the little finger of his left hand when he was murdered. There can be no mistake he had it on, that the ring came in with his body. There was no mixup by police, a hospital, a funeral home. The ring was there when Marino removed the man’s personal effects yesterday morning and locked them up and kept the key until he turned it over to me.
“My family name is Fraser,” Mrs. Donahue explains. “It’s my family coat of arms, that particular emblazon for Jackson Fraser, a great-grandfather who apparently changed the design to incorporate elements such as Azure in base, a border Or, and a third crown Gules, which you can’t see unless you’re looking at a replica of the coat of arms that displays the tinctures, such as what is framed in my music room. Are you saying someone wrote a letter on my stationery and had a driver hand-deliver it to you? I don’t understand or see how it’s possible, and I don’t know what it means or why someone would do something like that. What kind of car was it? We certainly don’t have a driver. I have an old Mercedes, and my husband drives a Saab and isn’t in the country right now, anyway, and we’ve never had a driver. We only use drivers when we travel.”
“I’m wondering if your family coat of arms is on anything else. Embroidered, engraved, besides being framed on the wall in your music room, anywhere else it might appear. If it’s known or published, if someone could have gotten hold of it.” No matter how I phrase it, it sounds like a peculiar thing to quiz her about.
“Get hold of it to do what ultimately? What goal?”
“Your stationery, for example. Let’s think about that and what the ultimate goal might be.”
“Is what you have engraved or printed?” she then asks. “Can you tell the difference between engraved and printed by looking at what you have?”
You don’t know who he is, I’m thinking. You don’t know that the man who died wearing that ring isn’t a member of her family, a relative, and I remember Benton saying Johnny Donahue has an older brother who works at Langley. What if he happened to be in Cambridge yesterday, staying at an apartment near Harvard, maybe a friend’s apartment that has an obsolete packbot in it, a friend with a greyhound, a friend who perhaps works in a robotics lab? What if the older brother or some other man significant to Mrs. Donahue had just been overseas, in the UK, and had flown back here unexpected and is dead and she doesn’t know, the Donahue family doesn’t know? What does Johnny’s brother look like?
Don’t ask her.
“The stationery is engraved,” I answer Mrs. Donahue’s question.
What if her family is somehow connected with Liam Saltz or with someone who might have attended his daughter’s wedding on Sunday? Might the Donahues have a connection to a member of Parliament named Brown?
Stay away from it.
“Well, you can’t pull engraved stationery out of a hat, have it made in a minute,” Mrs. Donahue is saying.
Now I’m looking at the envelope, at the duct tape on the back that I didn’t cut through, that I thought to preserve.
“Especially if you don’t have the copperplates,” she adds.
We use sticky-sided tape all the time in forensics, to collect trace evidence from carpet, from upholstery, to lift fibers, paint chips, glass fragments, gunshot residue, minerals, even DNA and fingerprints, from all types of surfaces, including human bodies. Anybody could know that. Just watch television. Just Google “crime scene investigative techniques and equipment.”
“If someone got hold of my copperplates? But who? Who could have them?” she protests. “Without those, it would take weeks. And if you do press proofs, which of course I do, add several more weeks. This makes no sense.”
She wouldn’t put duct tape on the back of her elegant envelope that took many weeks to engrave. Not this precise, proud woman who listens to Chopin etudes. If someone else did, then I might have an idea why. Especially if it was someone who knows me or knows the way I think.
“And yes, the crest is on a number of things. It’s been in my family for centuries,” she adds, because she wants to talk. There is much pent up inside her, and she wants to let it out.
Allow it.
“Scottish, but you probably guessed that based on the name,” she then says. “Framed on the wall in the music room, as I mentioned, and engraved on some of my family silverware, and we did have some silver stolen years ago by a housekeeper who was fired but never charged with anything because we really couldn’t prove it to the satisfaction of the Boston police. I suppose my family silver could have ended up in a pawnshop around here. But I don’t see what that could have to do with my stationery. It sounds as if you’re implying someone might have made engraved stationery identical to mine with the goal of impersonating me. Or someone stole it. Are you suggesting identity theft?”