“The man was a thief! He was getting kickbacks from our maltsters. He was stealing, Mr. Hope. Which is why I fired him.”
“Did you have proof of this theft?”
“Of course I had proof!”
“Then why’d you settle out of court’ If Holden was in fact a thief, then you hadn’t libeled him when you called him a thief.”
“Well, of course, don’t you think I knew that? But what would a prolonged legal battle have done to the Brechtmann name? We’re in the business of brewing beer, Mr. Hope, not manufacturing sensational headlines. I paid him off. And felt it was well worth it.”
“You settled for five hundred thousand dollars,isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Exactly what you paid Charles Abbott,” Matthew said.
“Oh, my,” Sophie said, “here’s that scurvy dog again.”
“I’m afraid so,” Matthew said.
“Young man, you already know that I refused to give Mr. Abbott a penny!”
“Yes, you had him thrown out.”
“Yes. So now you come here again, and you tell me…”
“I’m talking about 1969,” Matthew said. “The money you gave him in 1969. Haifa million dollars.”
“Is that what he told you?” Elise said. “That we gave him…?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a liar. Why would we have…?”
“To get rid of him,” Matthew said.
“Don’t be absurd!”
“And to take the baby off your hands.”
“What baby?”
“Your daughter,” Matthew said. “Helen Abbott.”
“I have no daughter,” Elise said.
“Miss Brechtmann,” Bloom said, “I have here…”
“Get out of here,” Sophie said, “both of you. You have no right intruding on our privacy. You have no right coming here and…”
“Miss Brechtmann,” Bloom said again, “I have here a warrant that authorizes me to…”
“A what?” Sophie said.
“A search warrant, ma’am. I’d appreciate it if your daughter read it. It authorizes…”
“She’ll do no such thing,” Sophie said. “What you’ll do is leave this house at once.”
“No, ma’am, I’m not about to do that,” Bloom said, and shook the warrant at her. “This was signed by a magistrate of the Circuit Court, and it authorizes me to…”
“Then I know you won’t mind if I call my lawyer,” Sophie said, and reached for the phone.
“You can call the Attorney General if you like,” Bloom said, “but that’s not going to stop me from searching these premises.”
“For what? What in hell do you want here, Mr. Bloom?”
“Two things,” he said, and again offered the warrant to Elise. “If you’ll just read this…”
“Don’t touch that piece of paper!” Sophie shouted. “Get out of this house, Mr. Bloom! And take this shyster with you!”
“It’s all right,” Elise said suddenly.
Her voice sounded hollow. Her eyes looked vacant.
“Elise…” her mother said.
“Let me have the warrant.”
“Elise!”
“Give it to me, please.”
She held out her hand.
Bloom put the warrant into it.
She unfolded it, and began reading it silently.
She looked up.
“A thirty-eight-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver,” she said.
“Yes, Miss. Which is the caliber and make of the pistol that killed a police officer named Charles Macklin on Wednesday night.”
“And you think that pistol is in this house?”
“We think it may be here, yes.”
“And these photographs?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“You think they may be here as well?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Photographs of a baby and her mother, the warrant says.”
Her voice caught on the word mother.
“Yes, Miss.”
“Photographs of me and my baby, the warrant says.”
“A little girl named Helen Abbott,” Bloom said. “With baby beads on her wrist. Spelling out her name.”
Elise looked at her mother.
“They know,” she said.
There were tears in her eyes.
From the shelf in Frank’s study, Leona removed the copy of Corbin on Contracts.
Behind it, just where she’d hidden it, was the .22-caliber Colt Cobra.
She took it in her hand, turned, and placed the gun on Frank’s desk. She put the book back on the shelf. She knelt to where Frank kept his volumes of Black’s Law Dictionary. She took down two volumes, and then removed the box of cartridges from the shelf, and placed this on the desk, too. She slid the volumes back into place on the shelf. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Aristotle. Or somebody.
She smiled.
And then she sat at the desk in Frank’s swivel chair, and she loaded the gun the way the chubby little man in the gun shop had showed her. Bobby Newkes. Cute little man who knew all about things lethal. One cartridge at a time. Nice and easy. Squeeze off your shots, he’d told her. Don’t pull the trigger, just squeeeeeeeze it gently.
She snapped the cylinder back into the gun.
And put the gun into her shoulder bag.
And looked at the clock on the wall.
Twenty minutes to twelve.
She took a deep breath and went out to her automobile.
The women were explaining it all to Matthew and Bloom.
Trying to explain it all.
“After the call from Hurley,” Sophie said, “I realized we were in trouble again. Abbott’s visit to the house hadn’t posed a serious threat. In fact, after his… accident, I didn’t expect to hear further from him.”
“But then Helen showed up,” Elise said.
“Yes. Helen.”
The two women looked at each other.
“I must admit…” Sophie said, and shook her head, and sighed.
“Yes,” Elise said, and sighed, too.
“The resemblance,” Sophie said.
“Yes.”
“Your hair, your eyes.”
“But blue.”
“But your eyes exactly.”
Both women sighed.
“We almost…”
“But you see, gentlemen…”
“If what we’d done back then was to have any meaning…”
“Protecting the name…”
“Making certain the name wouldn’t be tainted…”
Sophie sighed again. “Giving away a… a granddaughter was… was not very easy,” she said.
“A daughter,” Elise said.
The word seemed to echo in the vaulting room.
“But, you see,” Sophie said, “I knew that if my husband had learned of this… if we had not kept it from Franz, why… he would have killed them both. First that sniveling dog, Charles, and then Elise. Yes. I believe he would have killed his own daughter. For dishonoring the house.”
“For bringing shame to the Brechtmann name.”
“A name that stood for quality and wholesomeness.”
Both women fell silent.
In that room, with the mist from the ocean crowding the French doors like a multitude of silent ghosts from the past, they seemed now to be wondering about the wisdom of what they’d done almost two decades ago — and what they’d been forced to do now, in order to protect that long-ago decision.
“We had to get them out of our lives,” Sophie said. “Abbott and the baby both. To protect Elise… to protect the house…”
“The house?” Matthew said.
“Brechtmann Brewing,” Sophie said.
Matthew nodded.
Sophie sighed again.
“And yet,” she said, “when she returned, a grown woman, pregnant… oh, dear God, pregnant the way my daughter was pregnant so long ago…”