Murder at Kingscote Read online

  “Are you feeling well?”

  “Oh, I had the typical malaise in the beginning, but I’ve no complaints these days except for my poor ankles.” She raised a satin-clad foot a few inches off the floor and flexed it this way and that.

  “And little Corneil? How is he?”

  Grace’s laugh pealed with the clarity of a porcelain bell. “Growing like a weed and demanding daily when his brother or sister will be arriving.”

  “He’s got his grandfather’s persistent temperament,” Neily said with a wry grin as he perched on the arm of the sofa. “It’s wonderful to see you, Emmaline.”

  “And you, Neily.” Of all my Vanderbilt cousins, I had been closest to Neily growing up. We had been playmates and confidants and, sometimes, partners in mischief. But our friendship had, of course, tempered once he married Grace, and we no longer shared our intimacy of old. That didn’t mean I didn’t worry about him, and sympathize with his being ostracized by the rest of the family because of his choice of wife.

  The others present were Mrs. Wetmore, of course, and her younger daughter, Maude, about my own age. The Wetmores’ elder daughter, named Edith after their mother, was apparently still away in Europe with an aunt. Gwendolen King was also present, looking dramatic in pale silk overlaid with black lace and appearing none the worse for this afternoon’s mishap.

  I resisted a slight urge to frown as I perceived the imbalance of the party, for there were two more women there than men. The Four Hundred were always precise in their social pairings—a man for every woman so that guests might proceed two by two into the dining room. Whose arms would Gwendolen and Maude take? I realized Philip was missing, and perhaps one of his friends as well?

  Mrs. King did indeed seem to be waiting for something. My stomach had begun to growl and the butler had checked on us several times before our hostess finally let out a disappointed sigh and led us to the dining room.

  I had been inside Kingscote before and found this room enchanting. Its most beautiful and fanciful element, undoubtedly, were the expansive windows made of opalescent glass tiles flanking the fireplace, each one a work of multicolored art by Louis Tiffany. Transoms above the windows carried similar designs. During the day, sunlight bathed the room in a fanciful array of jewel-tone colors.

  Meanwhile, the wall opposite the windows and fireplace wasn’t a wall at all, but an elaborate screen composed of delicate spindle work in black walnut with two leaves in the center that opened onto a wide hallway, lending an open and airy feeling to the room. The eye was further beguiled by a blend of designs from diverse times and places, from the built-in American Colonial sideboard, to the Japanese-inspired cork ceiling, to the Elizabethan coffered paneling, all enhanced by touches of Moorish and aesthetic design. Stepping into the dining room was like stepping into a world free of constraints, where art joyfully flourished in whatever manner it wished.

  The question of who would escort Gwendolen and Maude to the table was solved by Neily offering an arm to both Grace and me, while Derrick accompanied the other two ladies. From the consommé through the last course of terrapin and lobster à la Newberg, the conversation never ceased as we discussed the latest developments in Newport, the newest homes being erected, and an upcoming excursion, on horseback, across Aquidneck Island.

  At this, Gwendolen turned an eager gaze upon Derrick, and then glanced across the table to me. “There will be a prearranged location for a picnic, and the servants will meet us there with lunch. Won’t you join us, Mr. Andrews? And you, too, Miss Cross?”

  While Derrick replied that he would enjoy it very much, I shook my head. “Thank you, Miss King, but I’m afraid I’m not a proficient enough rider. I’d only hold everyone back.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Surely you’ve been on horseback before?”

  “Yes, but not like the rest of you. I don’t leap over rock walls or across streams. I very much doubt it would end well if I tried.” I chuckled. “Neily can vouch for the truth of it.”

  “You could always ride out with the servants in one of the carriages,” my cousin suggested. A grin tugged at his lips. “Or Philip could drive you in his automobile.”

  This earned a round of titters and a reminder from Mrs. King that the automobile didn’t belong to Philip, and if she had her way, it never would. Two footmen entered the room with trays of dessert and proceeded to set plates of poached pears in pecan cream before each guest. The aromas of brown sugar, pecans, and bourbon drifted to my nose and informed my quite satisfied stomach that it could yet squeeze in a bit of this delectable trifle.

  Mrs. King turned her attention to each of her guests in turn. “Does anyone desire anything else?”

  “No one could desire another thing after such a meal, Ella.” Senator Wetmore patted his slightly bulging stomach beneath his evening coat.

  “Good heavens, you’ll have to roll me home, George,” his wife said with a happy groan. “Miss Cross, I wanted to thank you for your help with the St. Nicholas Orphanage fundraiser last month, and with today’s donation from the parade.”

  “I’m always happy to help St. Nicholas, ma’am,” I said. “In fact—”

  I broke off at a loud voice coming from the front of the house, but advancing nearer with each second. The words of a ribald song echoed in the sitting room next to the dining room, prompting each of us at the table to exchange startled glances. I recognized the voice before its owner made his way into the dining room—or stumbled, I should say.

  “Philip!” Mrs. King exclaimed. She started to rise, but quickly lowered herself back into her chair. “Where have you been?”

  “Hello, Mother. Hello, everyone.” Philip King looked surprised to see our faces staring up at him. He aimed a smirk at the carved angels on either side of the fireplace. “Sorry I’m late. It’s thick as corn chowder out there. Rolled in off the harbor about half an hour ago.”

  With a giggle at nothing in particular, he took a wobbly step closer. The seats he and his friend might have occupied had been cleared away at Mrs. King’s direction, and now the blond footman hurried back into the room to make a place at the table for Philip. This necessitated that Gwendolen and Derrick scoot a few inches over. Poor Mrs. King looked ready to melt into the carpet, despite Derrick and the other guests assuring her the sudden addition of her son presented no inconvenience whatsoever.

  Gwendolen obviously thought differently, and gave her brother a good jab in the ribs as he hovered unsteadily over the chair the footman held out for him, then plopped down into it without the slightest decorum. His mother’s eyes burned with embarrassment while the rest of us looked politely away, as if we hadn’t noticed Philip’s inebriation.

  “How’s everyone tonight, eh?” he asked without apparent interest, his attention instead focused on the plate of pears Adelia the footman had placed in front of him. Philip leaned down and sniffed the aroma. “What’s for supper?”

  “You missed dinner,” his mother said with a tight smile. “We’re on dessert. What happened to Francis? He was supposed to be here with you.”

  “Crane? Oh, he had me drop him next door at Stone Villa. Bennett’s having a gentlemen’s cards night. Asked me too, but I said, no, no, my mother is expecting me and I cannot disappoint the old girl. And so here I am.”

  “You’re being such a rotter,” Gwendolen murmured, and stirred her pears around her plate. Apparently realizing she’d spoken aloud, albeit in a whisper, she blushed a furious shade of crimson.

  “You’re just put out that your sweetheart didn’t show up.”

  “Shhh! He is not my sweetheart and you know it,” she shot back in an angry hiss and blushed hotter still.

  One of the footmen offered a tray of liqueurs, which made Mrs. King frown yet again. “Where is Baldwin? Why isn’t he serving with you? Has something happened?”

  The footmen exchanged puzzled glances, and the blond one spoke. “We’re not quite sure, ma’am. He was in the kitchen after we served the fish course and said he’d be right b
ack. But last we were in there, he hadn’t. Come back, that is.”

  “How odd.” Mrs. King didn’t seem overly concerned, but, like her footmen, puzzled.

  “Oh, you know how it is, Mother.” Gwendolen gathered a small pile of pecans on her plate and transferred them to the hollow of one of her pears. “Something is always coming up that needs the butler’s attention. Meanwhile, Martin and Clarence are taking good care of us.” She indicated the footmen, who acknowledged her praise with bobs of their heads.

  “Would you like us to send him in as soon as he’s finished doing whatever it is that’s detained him, ma’am?” the darker-haired one offered.

  “No, that’s all right, thank you, Clarence.” Mrs. King put down her dessert fork. “We’ll take our coffee in the library, thank you.” She came to her feet, the men doing likewise—all but Philip, who made swirls with his fork in the pecan cream on his plate. We ladies rose from our chairs, too, and we were all about to file out of the room, leaving Philip to his own devices, when urgent shouts made their way in through the open windows and sent us running to the front of the house.

  Chapter 3

  “Why, I think that’s Donavan.” Ella King pressed herself up against the window in the small reception room, which flanked the front entrance opposite the front drawing room. The shouting continued. I stood at Mrs. King’s right shoulder—Gwendolen stood at her left—and the three of us pressed our faces close to the glass. With difficulty we peered out into the murky darkness interrupted by amber swirls of illumination beneath the gas lanterns on the drive. Philip had declared the night as thick as corn chowder, and he hadn’t been far off. Fog stretched languidly across the property, blanketing everything in its path.

  “What do you see?” demanded Mrs. Wetmore from behind us. Mr. Wetmore had led Neily and Derrick outside with an order that we women remain in the house. Now they surrounded the man Mrs. King referred to as Donavan.

  “I can’t see a thing. What are they doing?” Grace stood directly behind me, her hand braced on my shoulder. She practically pressed against my back as she craned her neck to look out. Maude’s face hovered above Mrs. King’s and Gwendolen’s shoulders.

  “Over there.” I pointed to a gnarled shadow, hunched and twisted like a creature from the underworld. “By the beech tree.”

  “Goodness, Mother, open the window wider.” Without waiting for her mother to comply, Gwendolen shoved the window higher. We all three stuck our heads out, and that was when I saw the fog-blurred lines of the rear panel of an automobile, stripped now of its colorful flowers, jutting out from beneath the European beech tree.

  Mrs. King saw it, too, for she drew back with a strangled whisper. “Oh no. Philip . . .”

  “What is it, Mother?” Gwendolen clutched her mother’s hand, then appealed to her friend. “Maude, can you see anything? Miss Cross?”

  But I had already headed for the front door, was descending the steps and turning onto the drive when Donavan, nearly in tears now, choked out, “It’s him. It’s Baldwin. I think he’s dead.”

  * * *

  The mist ran clammy fingertips across my face and down my arms, raising shivers. I ran to the beech tree, nearly tripping over a root hidden in the grass, as Derrick, Mr. Wetmore, and Neily disappeared beneath its canopy of branches. The man called Donavan hovered off to the side, watching warily as the leaves swished back into place around the rear of the Hartley Steamer. I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Grace, indistinct and ghostly in the fog. Behind her, the other women approached at a much slower place, as if dreading what they were about to learn.

  I ducked beneath the tree. The fog hadn’t drifted through the dense sweep of the branches and although the lawn lanterns didn’t penetrate either, visibility was better. The men were grouped around the front of the motorcar and something wedged against the trunk of the tree. My eyes soon adjusted to the darkness and I realized the object was a man in a formal dark suit—a butler’s attire. His legs and lower torso were pinned against the trunk, his upper body draped face-down over the motorcar’s vertical front panel.

  Bile rose in my throat as the horror of death filled me. Yet in the same instant Derrick cried out, “He’s still alive. We need an ambulance here. Immediately.”

  Could it be? Derrick was leaning over the body—no, leaning over the butler, Mr. Baldwin—with his fingertips pressed to the side of the man’s neck. I went nearer, and perceived, barely, the slight rise and fall of his spine. I moved farther still, until I could see more of the man’s form. His head dangled over the footboard. In this position he looked as though he might merely have been drunk and keeled over, except that a rattle, hollow and bleak-sounding, issued from his throat, and a dark bubble grew at the corner of his slack mouth. Blood.

  Less than half an hour later, we were all back in the house—all but Mrs. King’s butler. The ambulance and the police had arrived, the former bringing medical staff who dislodged Mr. Baldwin from between the vehicle and the tree, and the latter securing the scene. It appeared to have been an accident, but one caused by the reckless misbehavior of a certain young man. Before I’d gone inside, I had asked a brief question of the doctor in charge. Would the man live? He had shaken his head in doubt.

  Mrs. King ordered coffee laced with cognac and insisted we all drink it. Each Wetmore—the senator, his wife, and their daughter—had taken the news with stoic calm. I believe Gwendolen might have become a good deal more distraught had it not been for the calming influence of Maude. Mrs. King flitted about, seeing to her guests’ needs, which were few, really. But it kept her busy, kept her, perhaps, from fearing the worst. And the worst, for Mrs. King, centered not on her poor butler, though his likely fate clearly upset her, but on her son and whether or not he was responsible for what happened.

  As for Neily and Grace . . . A few years ago, they had become involved in an investigation into the death of a member of the Four Hundred, one Virgil Monroe. As with tonight’s incident, questions had arisen then as to whether Virgil Monroe’s demise had been a mere accident, a result of some form of incompetence, or something more deliberate. As continually seemed to happen, I’d been drawn into those questions, and Neily and Grace with me. I believe at first Grace had found excitement in our search for the truth, but soon enough came to recognize the dangers.

  Was she thinking of that time now? Was that the reason for the deep etches across her brow? Or was she simply attempting, as were we all, to puzzle out whether Philip, arriving late and tipsy and in the fog, could have run his automobile into Baldwin, and then strolled into the dining room as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  Now, his coat unbuttoned and his vest rumpled, Philip sat slumped in a wing chair beside the fireplace, staring down at the flames reflected on the tips of his shoes and looking very much like a boy who’d been taken to task for his misdeeds. The police had questioned him briefly, and I could see by their expressions that his inebriated state raised their speculations as well as their disgust. His replies had been little more than two- or three-word sentences, surly and reluctant, but he had insisted he’d pulled the Hartley onto the drive without incident. Certainly without plowing into the butler. One of the officers had jotted down his claims. Then they left him to stew with the rest of us, and had gone back outside to rope off the area and make some preliminary observations. To that end, they’d ringed the area with Dietz canister lanterns, whose bull’s-eye lenses intensified the beams of light.

  From outside came the sound of a newly arrived voice, issuing commands. I set down my cup and saucer and quietly made my way back out to the lawn. Derrick followed me, as I knew he would. But the others remained in the library, sipping their coffee and cognac in tense silence.

  “Jesse.” I greeted the Newport Police Department’s head detective succinctly, and he returned my greeting with a mere nod, as if my being there came as no surprise. Jesse Whyte was about a decade my senior, with auburn hair and a fair, freckled complexion that hinted at his Irish herita
ge. He and Derrick also acknowledged each other with brief nods. “What have your men told you so far?” I asked him.

  “If you mean did they mention Philip King having driven this motorcar all day after crashing it at the parade, and arriving home drunk right before the butler was found—”

  I held up my hand. “So they’ve told you mostly everything, but perhaps not this. When Philip came into the dining room he acted as if nothing was wrong. He seemed completely at ease.”

  “And drunk,” Derrick put in.

  “Yes, and drunk,” I conceded. I couldn’t have said why I felt a need to defend Philip King. He had arrived in the motorcar and he had been—make that still was—drunk. Despite the sobering effects of the incident, he still lacked steadiness and a clear head. “Do you mind if I watch?”

  “Stay out of the way. Please.” Jesse’s tone softened at that last word, turning what had started as a command into a request. I had no desire to interfere with police business, but possessed an insatiable need to reach my own conclusions. It had been that way for several years now, and Jesse had learned to trust my observations.

  Was this the scene of an attempted murder?

  To prove to Jesse I’d keep my distance, instead of moving toward the Hartley, I walked in the opposite direction. The fog still hung thickly in the air, muffling sight and sound, but what I sought could just as easily be felt as seen. Mrs. King’s guests, including Derrick and me, had parked their carriages on the east side of the circular drive, to the right of the house. The tree Philip’s motorcar struck stood to the left of the house, on the stretch of drive that led out through the gates. I walked slowly along the gravel. Derrick joined me, and we went all the way to the road, guided by the gas lanterns.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked me when I’d turned around to once more face the house.