Men like Kerns used silence to great effect. Somewhere along the road, they’d learned what Jack already knew about the parturient pause: Weaker souls tended to feel terrorized by long silences in polite conversation. Pressured by the inferred censure in the paternal lift of the eyebrow, the slight downturn of the mouth, they almost always spilled their guts.
Jack wasn’t a weaker soul.
He picked up his long-stemmed crystal goblet and sipped. The wine was good, full-bodied and sweet-smelling. It reminded him of Sally, a woman he’d known before the war. After two long minutes of Jack’s breathing in perfumed memories, Kerns became the impatient party.
“You won’t share your business with Teddy?” he pressed.
“No, Mr. Kerns,” Jack replied, more than willing to give a straight answer to a straight question. “You won’t find out from me. My discretion comes as part of the service.”
Kerns shifted in his leather dinner chair. “Must I pay extra for your discretion, Mr. Shepard?”
“It’s free of charge.” Jack allowed a small smile. “Part of my per diem.”
“Yes, so you quoted. Twenty dollars a day, plus expenses.”
Kerns began to explain the specifics of the job. It seemed his sister, Dorothy, had gotten herself engaged to a savvy broker who’d claimed he’d made a real killing with prewar investments in steel manufacturing.
“His name is Vincent Tattershawe, or that’s what he calls himself, anyway.” Kerns frowned and shifted.
“Go on.”
“He has pretensions to society, but I’m worried for my sister.”
“I see.” Jack pulled out a small notebook and jotted down Tattershawe’s name.
“My sister has many virtues, but she’s naïve about the ways of the world, and far too trusting. Without consulting me, she gave Mr. Tattershawe a considerable portion of her inheritance for him to invest.”
“Why is that naïve? You said yourself that this Tattershawe is an up-and-comer with a nose for business.”
“I’m not so sure he really does have the connections and background he recited to Dorothy. Nor can I be sure he actually made a lucrative investment in prewar steel. That’s simply what he told her.”
“So you’d like me to investigate this Vincent Tattershawe? Answer some of your questions?”
“I want you to locate the man.”
“He’s missing?”
“Shortly after Dorothy turned over her money to him, he vanished. I asked around a bit, and I’m troubled by what I’ve learned. I believe this man presented himself to my sister as something he is not. I understand he drinks a lot as well.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “We all drink a lot, don’t we, Mr. Kerns?” During dinner, Baxter had consumed two Scotches, more than half their bottle of wine, and was now nursing a cognac. And Jack suspected the man had knocked back a few before Jack had even arrived.
“There’s a difference between drinking”—Kerns lifted his snifter of liquid gold—“and being a drunk, Mr. Shepard.”
“So you think Tattershawe either took off with the loot or fell back into a bottle?”
“Possibly both. My sister claims she convinced Vincent to give up drinking. But you and I both know that a man will tell a woman almost anything if he wants to…shall we say, grease the wheels?”
Jack sipped his wine. He didn’t share Kerns’s philosophy on dames. Lying to women was a boy’s game; and he always figured any broad that required him to be something he wasn’t, wasn’t worth his time. But in Jack’s experience, telling a disdainful Ivy Leaguer like Kerns that you knew something he didn’t was like trying to crack a manhole cover with a soda straw. Jack saved his breath.
“I’ll have to speak with your sister, Dorothy.”
Kerns leaned forward, his relaxed posture tensing for the first time that evening.
“Listen, Mr. Shepard, I’m going to be perfectly blunt with you. I contacted you because my sister insisted a private investigator be hired. I don’t like the idea myself. I stepped in because she had no idea how to proceed. I want you to find Mr. Tattershawe, but you are not to convey his location to my sister. Tell me and only me what you discover, so I can deal with him.”
“Deal with him?”
In Jack’s part of the civilized wilderness, “dealing” with someone usually meant helping them meet with an unfortunate accident.
“His theft of her money,” Kerns clarified. “Dorothy has had a lot of heartache in her life. Her only serious suitor died in the war. Now she’s forty, and far from a beauty. But she’d be better off staying a spinster than marrying a man like Tattershawe, who I believe would cause her harm. I wish to retrieve her money but not at the risk of reuniting her with the man who took it. Do you see what I’m trying to accomplish?”
Jack nodded.
“I’m trying to protect her. You understand wanting to protect someone you care about, don’t you, Mr. Shepard?”
Kerns was still leaning forward, his hazel-brown eyes shining, intense. Clearly, he wanted Jack to understand that although he preferred to avoid the appearance of doing business, when it came to this, he meant it.
“I understand, Mr. Kerns.”
Kerns downed an unfashionably large gulp of cognac, then finally leaned back, his tense limbs going slack again. “I’m not a man who expresses gratitude often. But I do thank you for respecting my wishes.”
Jack reassured his client that he understood the terms of the job. “For now, all I need to get started is your sister’s address.”
“Fifth Avenue, across from the park.” Kerns reached into the breast pocket of his pinstripes. “Here’s her calling card.”
CHAPTER 1
Descent into the Maelstrom
The continuing popular appeal of Poe’s works is owing to their power to confirm once-real beliefs from which most people have never entirely freed themselves…that the dead in some form survive and return.
—Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Rememberance, 1991
Quindicott, Rhode Island
Today
“HEY, MOM. DO you think they’ll have a Halloween party at school this year?”
Beneath his getting-too-long-again bangs, Spencer’s grass-green eyes looked up. I slapped a dollop of steaming oatmeal into his bowl and mine, then set a fresh quart of milk on the table. Yawning, I adjusted my black rectangular glasses and brushed aside a lock of my own copper hair.
Spence had my hair color, my late older brother’s handsome features, and my late husband’s eyes. But, although the light green hue and large, round shape were Calvin McClure’s, the emotional expression inside them held little resemble to the man I’d married—and for that I was eternally grateful.
“Spencer,” I said with all the sternness that I could muster after only four hours sleep. “You haven’t seen a class since last June. I think you should worry about your education before you worry about Halloween parties.”
“But Halloween’s only two weeks away. That’s a fact. The principal can’t just ignore it.”
My son, the budding trial lawyer.
Always precocious, Spencer’s rhetorical skills had been initially influenced by the exclusive private school the McClure family had insisted he attend when we lived in Manhattan. He was in Quindicott’s public school system now, of course. But his vocabulary and stubborn proclivities were lately a result of the crime shows and legal dramas he’d been watching on the Intrigue Channel.
This autumn he’d gotten a political education, too, thanks to City Councilwoman Marjorie Binder-Smith, locally known as the Municipal Zoning Witch for the charming taxes and regulations she continually attempted to slap onto Quindicott’s businesses.