For Dead Men Only: An Alexandra Gladstone Mystery Page 3

  She rode Lucy to Olive Fontaine’s house, only a short distance from the apothecary. Mrs. Fontaine was an elderly widow who lived alone with her many cats. Because she was given to mild bronchitis and frequent bouts of rheumatism, Alexandra made it a practice to visit her often.

  As they approached, Zack made a low muttering growl.

  “It’s all right, Zack,” Alexandra said. “The cats won’t bother you if you leave them alone.”

  Zack responded with another growl.

  After she’d tied Lucy to a post, Alexandra, followed by a still-edgy Zack, made her way up the walk through a lush, flowering garden to the front door. The sweet scent of the blossoms, birds chirping in trees, and a bright yellow bee on one of the red blooms all added to the tranquility of the scene.

  When Alexandra knocked at the door, Mrs. Fontaine, tall and thin and a bit stooped, welcomed her with enthusiasm and insisted she sit while she hurried off to bring her tea. Zack, as was his custom, stayed at the front door. Instead of lying down as he did when she called at other homes, he stood alert, preparing himself for any feline that might venture outdoors.

  “You’re looking rather spry today, Mrs. Fontaine,” Alexandra said as the elderly woman handed her a steaming cup.

  “No rheumatism aches for me as long as the weather cooperates. Lovely, isn’t it? Except for a nip of cold breeze in the early morning.” Mrs. Fontaine moved a striped Cyprus kitten from her chair and held it in her lap as she sat across from Alexandra with her own tea.

  “Lovely weather, indeed,” Alexandra said. Mrs. Fontaine was always eager to talk, even if it was only about the weather. She no doubt missed the company of her late husband, an oysterman, as well as the fuss and bustle of her three strapping sons, who had long since married and moved away.

  “Already have a good stand of flowers in my garden, I have,” Mrs. Fontaine said, her gnarled hands stroking the kitten. “I’ve acquired a few bees to help with the pollination, and they’ve made a remarkable difference.”

  Alexandra smiled. “Your garden is lovely, as usual, and you’re always busy with something.”

  “Oh, yes.” Mrs. Fontaine’s smile accented lines around her eyes. An elegant face, Alexandra thought. “I’m happy if I have something to care for—my garden, my cats. God gave us life, and I believe we should nourish it in all species.” A large, white Persian cat jumped onto Mrs. Fontaine’s chair and crawled up to rest on her shoulder while a gray tomcat of mixed breed curled at her feet.

  “Well said, Mrs. Fontaine.”

  “Sad, isn’t it, that not all agree? I’m speaking of the murders, of course.”

  “You’ve heard about that?”

  “Oh, I’ve heard, recluse though I am. Hard to keep that sort of thing secret, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Alexandra agreed. “Even though there’s no actual proof the men were murdered.”

  “But my dear Alexandra,” Mrs. Fontaine said, reverting to her first name, “how can you doubt it? You’ve lived here all of your life, and you must have heard all of the stories.”

  “I’m not certain I know what—”

  “Of course! Of course!” Mrs. Fontaine said, interrupting her. “I forgot for a moment that Huntington was never a member of the brotherhood. Perhaps you wouldn’t have heard.” Huntington was Alexandra’s father, the late Dr. Huntington Gladstone. Mrs. Fontaine was one of the few left in Newton-upon-Sea who still referred to him by his first name—indeed, one of the few who had been his contemporary.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Fontaine, what is it that I wouldn’t have heard?”

  “About the horseman and the old-line families, the treasure.”

  “Old-line families,” Alexandra mused. “I’m not certain, but it seems to me I’ve heard something about a group of families in connection with the local temple and something about a buried treasure, but I thought the treasure stories were just the stuff of legends we talked about as children. Rather like believing in ghosts in that old abandoned house near the sea. But a horseman…?”

  “It’s a long and complicated story. Has to do with geography before there was such a thing as geography, you know, and longitude and latitude lines used by the ancients. Had some mystical context. Then those lines were later used for the salt trade. Families who lived along those lines, so they say, were the families of the Templars.”

  “Yes, that sounds vaguely familiar, at least some of it. Could I have heard it from my father? There was something about hal being the Greek word for salt and place names that begin with al having something to do with that. Places like Alsace in France. I can’t remember how it all fits together.”

  Mrs. Fontaine smiled slightly. “Most likely you heard that from your mother rather than your father. Your mother, I believe, was from one of the old lines.”

  “Perhaps,” Alexandra said, “but I’m not certain. I was rather young when she died.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Mrs. Fontaine said, giving Alexandra a sad smile.

  “Now tell me, what was it you were saying about a horseman?” Alexandra asked. Before Mrs. Fontaine could respond, an old clock on a chest behind her chimed the hour. “Oh! Forgive me, Mrs. Fontaine, I must ask you to tell me at another time. I have an appointment. I am sure to be late if I don’t leave. I’ve not yet asked you about your health or your needs.”

  Mrs. Fontaine stood as well. “My health is better than an old woman expects, and my needs are few and well met,” she said as she brushed a kiss on Alexandra’s cheek. “Do come back, my dear. I always look forward to your visits.”

  Alexandra bid her goodbye with a promise to return soon. Besides watching after her health, she now had several questions to ask that there’d not been time to get to today.

  Zack stood from his perch near the front door as she exited and growled, giving one of the cats a slant-eyed stare. The cat quickly retaliated with a hiss that put Zack in his place. He backed away, only too grateful to follow along beside Alexandra as she rode Lucy toward Judith Payne’s cottage on Dedham Row.

  —

  Alexandra saw a blue haze of forget-me-nots as she approached the cottage. The little garden in front, though pretty, paled in comparison to Mrs. Fontaine’s garden. She noticed a jasmine and crocuses in purple and blue, and even a few green shoots of iris, but there was not the elaborate variety of Mrs. Fontaine’s plantings. She tied Lucy to a post, and Zack positioned himself in a comfortable pose near the door, his chin flat to the ground, and his dark eyes still drooping a little, perhaps over embarrassment about his cowardly reaction to the cat.

  After she knocked, Alexandra stood at the door for several seconds before Judith appeared. She was shown into the parlor, a room as tidy and carefully arranged as the front garden had been, but with less color. A ray of early-spring sunshine splayed itself across the center of the dark-hued carpet, giving an otherwise somber chamber a welcoming look.

  “Dr. Gladstone, thank you for coming,” Judith said as she directed Alexandra toward a sofa. Judith’s face, usually as pretty and fresh-looking as spring, today was marred with a frown and a troubled expression.

  “Are you all right, Miss Payne?” Alexandra asked.

  Judith pressed her lips together in a nervous gesture before she answered. “To be frank, no, I’m not all right, and please call me Judith.”

  “Very well, Judith. Now, please, tell me what’s troubling you.”

  “It’s those men—those who were murdered,” she said, as if to remind Alexandra. Judith held her head down and twisted a white handkerchief with her long fingers and sat with the rigid posture of a schoolboy. It was several seconds more before she raised her eyes to look at Alexandra. “As I told you, I…believe I know the identity of the person who killed them.” She was obviously struggling to keep her voice steady, but she was not completely succeeding.

  “What…makes you think you know that?” Alexandra asked.

  “It’s because of Thomas Cavenaugh,” Judith blurted.

  Alexandra spoke
calmly, hoping to keep Judith from giving in to the tears she seemed to be on the verge of shedding. “I don’t believe I know anyone by that name,” she said.

  “He doesn’t live here in Newton, he lives in Foulness,” she said.

  “I see, and what makes you think he may have killed anyone?”

  “He…He’s my fiancé.” Judith was twisting her handkerchief again. “I don’t mean he’s a murderer. I can’t see him doing such a thing, although I don’t really love him.”

  Alexandra frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand at all what you’re trying to tell me, Judith.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that my father killed those two men.”

  It took Alexandra a moment to respond. “Your father?” she finally managed.

  Judith nodded as a tear crept down her cheek.

  “Are you quite certain?”

  “I am,” Judith said.

  “I confess, I’ve never met your father, but how on earth did you come to such an extraordinary conclusion?”

  Judith didn’t answer. “You’ve never met Papa because he lives in Foulness, as does Thomas Cavenaugh,” she said. “I lived there as well. Before I came to Newton-upon-Sea.”

  Alexandra remembered Judith coming to the parish with her mother when Judith was still a young maid in her teens. Now that she was in her midtwenties, there was much speculation as to why she never married. Alexandra could understand that Judith’s life had kept her too busy for marriage. When her mother had fallen ill with consumption, Judith was no more than fifteen. She’d cared for her mother for the next several years and had taken over her mother’s profession as a dressmaker to provide for both of them.

  Alexandra said, “As I remember, your mother professed to be a widow.”

  “Yes.” Judith looked at Alexandra with a forlorn expression. “It was easier for her to claim widowhood than to admit she’d left Papa.”

  “I see,” Alexandra said.

  “Women have such little control over their own lives.” Judith’s voice took on a note of anger. “No one could imagine how it was for her, trying to live with a man like my father. Oh, no,” she added quickly, “don’t get the wrong impression. She loved him. We both did. I was allowed to see him from time to time, but my mother always insisted that she be present to protect me. He could be violent when he was angry.”

  “He hurt you?”

  “Never me, but he hit my mother simply for disagreeing with him. As if she had no right to express herself. Besides that, he is an impossible man—a dreamer, unwise, incompetent. He was always full of schemes to make us rich. Even after Mama and I left, he’d show up with some irresponsible plan of some sort—a way to crossbreed cattle for more milk, a scheme to grow tea leaves in cold climates. He had all sorts of ideas about using electricity for things like growing larger plants. The money he lost on those ideas! We were barely surviving until Mother and I came here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alexandra said.

  “You can only imagine how sorry my mother was. Especially since it was her inheritance that he squandered. Her bitterness made her ill, then finally killed her.”

  “Judith,” Alexandra said, “I can understand her bitterness, and perhaps yours as well, but being an irresponsible dreamer and schemer hardly makes a man a murderer.”

  Judith looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. They were well-shaped hands, but a bit too brown to be the hands of a lady. They were the hands of someone who spent time outdoors. More tears fell on her slender fingers. “I wish that were true,” she said and sniffed. She pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve, where she had tucked it, and dabbed her eyes and nose. “But there was another scheme. This one a desperate one because he no longer had access to money. All of his financiers had finally given up on his crackpot ideas.”

  “An idea that involved murder?” Alexandra asked.

  “Not at first. It involved me, though, and Thomas Cavenaugh.”

  “Your fiancé? Whom you don’t love?”

  “Of course I didn’t love him. I told you, it was my father’s last desperate scheme. You see, Mr. Cavenaugh is a wealthy man who once loaned my father money. Of course, Papa couldn’t pay him, so he offered me to him. I am to be Mrs. Thomas Cavenaugh, and Papa will have a source of financing for the rest of his life.”

  “And you agreed to this,” Alexandra said.

  “Yes, I agreed, reluctantly,” Judith said, dabbing at her eyes and nose again. “And before you can ask why, it was because, as I said, I love my father. When I was young, he would weave fantastic stories to entertain me, stories in which I was a beautiful princess or a great queen, or even a fairy with magical powers. He was the one who once took me to a circus, although God only knows where he got the money. I suppose you could say he bribed me into loving him. I agreed to marry Thomas when my father asked me to. I wanted to help him. I wanted him to love me as much as I love him. Surely you can understand that.”

  “Of course I can.” Alexandra was remembering how desperately she’d wanted to please her own father. “But that still doesn’t explain why you think he is a murderer.”

  “Both Jeremy Fitzsimmons and Saul Mayhew were courting me, you see, and I have to confess that I was pleased by their attention. But Papa couldn’t afford for this attraction to go any further. He said as much. He said he’d kill anyone who ruined his chance of financial redemption. It was an opportunity for both of us, he said.” Judith’s voice quaked as she spoke. “You can’t imagine how difficult this is for me,” she added, breaking into sobs.

  Alexandra went to her and took her hand. “You must try not to let it overcome you. After all, there’s no proof, not even any suspects at this point. Calm yourself and let the investigation take its course.”

  “I…I can’t in good conscience stay silent about this,” Judith said. “I had to speak to someone, and I thought you’d understand. I admire you so much—the way you’ve stood up against criticism about your right to practice medicine, the fact that you refuse to admit that women are unfit for any career they might choose.”

  “Judith,” Alexandra said with some reluctance, “I appreciate your confidence in me, but if you are convinced that what you told me about your father is true, you should tell Constable Snow.”

  “You’re right, of course, but I can’t risk anyone knowing about it if I do.”

  “And why is this?”

  “Word could get back to my father. It could be dangerous for me.”

  “Surely your father wouldn’t harm you. And how would it benefit him if something happened to you?”

  “I used to think he wouldn’t harm me, but he did strike my mother, as I told you, and now that he has resorted to murder…Please,” Judith said. “This is why I asked you here today. You must help me find a way to speak with the constable without anyone knowing it.”

  Alexandra was about to attempt to explain to her that her reasoning was flawed, but she was once again swayed by Judith’s agitation. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll go for the constable now and send him to your house.”

  Judith accompanied her to the door, where Zack and Lucy were waiting near the front. It was obvious Zack hadn’t rested there the entire time, however. Alexandra saw chewed blossoms along the walkway.

  “I’m afraid Zack has been destroying your garden,” she said, embarrassed.

  “Please don’t concern yourself,” Judith said. “Just help me.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Alexandra said. She left, riding Lucy and with Zack following along. She scolded Zack as they continued toward the constable’s office in the center of the village. Zack ducked his head briefly, but he apparently thought that was sufficient apology and galumphed ahead of Alexandra and Lucy, enjoying the spring air.

  She could see, as she approached the building in the oldest section of the village, that the door was closed. A sign on the door outside explained the reason.

  I will be away from the office for an indefinite period, attending to a matter of
personal interest. A deputy has been appointed and will assume duties when possible.

  The note was signed by Constable Snow.

  Alexandra could hardly believe what she had read. It made no sense at all that the constable would leave town when there were two suspicious deaths to investigate.

  Chapter 4

  “Always was an odd bird, that Snow,” said Nancy, when Alexandra told her the extraordinary news. “I should think now you’d have to agree.” She was busy replacing items on shelves and in drawers in the surgery, preparing for the next walk-in patient.

  Alexandra looped a stethoscope around her neck. “It hardly makes sense, does it?”

  “To leave the parish when there’s a crazed murderer running loose? Makes sense only to him, I suppose.”

  Alexandra shook her head and frowned. “I can’t think why he would do such a thing.”

  “I can think of just two possibilities.” Nancy spoke with her back to Alexandra, still busy with her task at hand. “Either he’s afraid he’ll be next, since ’tis Freemasons the killer appears to be after, or else he’s the killer himself and has nothing to fear.”

  Alexandra almost dropped a stack of bandages. “Nancy! How absurd. You know as well as I that for all his oddities and foibles, Constable Snow is not a killer.”

  Nancy’s response was a shrug.

  “And as for his fearing he might be the next victim,” Alexandra continued, “there are plenty of other Freemasons in Newton who could be next, if that’s even the motive. However, I’ve just explained to you that Judith Payne offers another reason for the killings, and I’m beginning to think she could be right.”

  Nancy turned around, wearing a look on her face that could have been interpreted as surprise at Alexandra’s dense thinking. “They were both killed in the Freemasons’ lodge—the temple, as they call it. Both died in a similar manner, with no marks upon their bodies. I’d say that’s more than coincidence. I’d say there’s a connection.”

  Alexandra sighed audibly. “Perhaps you’re right. Or perhaps you’re not right. As I told you, Judith said they were killed because they were her suitors.”