Who's Sorry Now? Read online

  He handed the sheet of paper to Robert to read the rest. "It reads as this," Robert said. " 'If either of my heirs are canny or ambitious enough to open this case before the duration of the specifIc terms of my will, regarding the ten years, they will be allowed to open one book at six-month intervals and share equally and with Mr. Prinney, Esquire, the proceeds. I threw the key in the river. Not all the books in this bank of shelves contain anything, and my heirs aren't allowed to open another one when that is the case. All the other bookcases are all real books. If they wish to read them, they may do so. At the end of the ten years, if they've followed the conditions of the will, the rest will be theirs at that time.'

  “ 'Signed this last day of September, 1929, by Horatio Brewster.'"

  “Does this mean we get the tens in the first book now?" Lily asked.

  “I suppose so," Mr. Prinney replied.

  Robert retrieved the first book, and he and Mr. Prinney counted out the ten-dollar bills. A nice round nine hundred dollars. Three hundred for Lily, me, and you, Mr. Prinney."

  “I don't think I can accept my share," Mr. Prinney said. After all, I live in a great big house that isn't mine for free."

  “But that's what Great-uncle Horatio wanted," Lily said. "What's more, you do your share by taking care of the estate for us. You should be paid for it."

  “Lily's right," Robert agreed. "You must take your share. Sometimes, according to this letter, it won't be anything."

  “I'm giving a quarter of mine to a charity," Lily said. "Maybe the Red Cross or something else that's providing help for the poor."

  “I'll do the same," Robert said, not quite as enthusiastically as Lily.

  “So shall I then," Mr. Prinney said.

  “Will you keep our shares in the safe here?" Lily asked. "I want to think who to give it to fIrst. And I don't want to hide it under my mattress."

  “I'd be glad to. I don't suppose we need to take account of all these books right now. We already know what's in the first ones we opened."

  “Couldn't we at least shake the rest of them and see if they're real books, or just empty boxes?" Robert asked. "I don't think we're supposed to do that," Mr. Prinney said. "The letter from your great-uncle doesn't specifically mention such a thing."

  “I thought you'd say that," Robert said with a hint of self-pity.

  “Let's divvy up the money and Mr. Prinney can put it in the safe," Lily said. "I want to see what else Dr. Toller has found under the other bush."

  “You're letting yourself in for a lot more work helping him," Robert warned.

  “I know. But I find this skeleton business interesting. I might spend some of my money taking some classes about anthropology."

  “God forgive. You can't mean that you're going to be dragging bones in here for your homework, can you?"

  “I just might," Lily said, handing her share of the tens to Mr. Prinney.

  To prove it, Lily went outside to see what Dr. Toller was doing today. The second bush had been turned over and apparently inspected for anything interesting.

  Anything in the roots of the bush, sir?" she asked.

  “Not a thing," Dr. Toller said. "I'm up to the pelvis of the body but can't go on until I've dug down to the legs and feet. Would you like to help?"

  “I'm a little afraid of digging into something I shouldn't. But I'll sift and dispose of dirt you take out if you'd like."

  “That would indeed be a help. I was hoping those two nice young Harbinger boys would be back today to help out again."

  “Harry probably will be here eventually but Jim isn't especially interested, I'm sorry to say. Harry found this as fascinating as I do," Lily said, not at all sure this was the complete truth. Harry was the smarter of the two and if decisions about a roof were required, he was the one who needed to be there to decide how it was to be done properly.

  Dr. Toller had accumulated a lot of buckets to wash off the bones and others to put the dirt in. Then the dirt would be returned to the holes in the ground after the sifting. Each time he excavated a bucket full of soil, he'd pass it up to her to put on the pile that was rapidly building up.

  Pretty soon she could see the skeleton's upper legs start to appear, then the knees. "Does this tell you anything?"

  “Just that she did a lot of things squatting. Probably grinding corn on a stone, or making the balls of clay that the beads were made of. Young as she is, there seem to be slight signs of rickets as well."

  “What are rickets?" Lily asked.

  “It's a little complicated. You need calcium to grow good bones, but it's impossible to do so without vitamin D."

  “How do you get vitamin D?"

  “From sunshine mostly," Dr. Toller said. "She may have grown up in a cave."

  “Wouldn't there have been a fire in the cave?" Lily asked.

  “Probably. But a wood fire doesn't provide enough natural light, or none at all, I suppose.”

  As he was still uncovering the legs of the skeleton Lily made up an excuse to go help Mrs. Prinney with something she was preparing for dinner.

  An hour later, Dr. Toller came in and asked Mimi where Miss Brewster was. "I have something important to show her.”

  Mimi delivered the message to Lily, who was in her bedroom, reading a book with Agatha lying at the bottom of her bed.

  She ran downstairs, Agatha so excited that something interesting might be happening that she was right on Lily's heels.

  Dr. Toller was deep in the hole. "Look at her feet.”

  Lily squatted down to look. The skeleton was wearing pretty moccasins, entirely intact. Dr. Toller had carefully removed them and washed them off. They had tiny, pretty beads all over the front.

  “How on earth did those survive?" she asked. "Beeswax, most likely. I can't think of anything else that would have so thoroughly impregnated the leather well enough to preserve them so perfectly. I also have unearthed the pelvis."

  “What are you going to do with the skeleton now that you have the whole thing?"

  “I owe it to the pathologist to send it to him. We've agreed that once he's gone over it, it will go into a museum. Someday, someone will figure out how to date old bones. I hope it's within my lifetime. Do you think the Harbinger boys would make me a crate in which to ship her?"

  “Why are you calling the skeleton ‘her'?" Lily asked.

  Only slightly embarrassed to explain in detail, he merely said, "A woman's pelvis is designed to separate to let a baby's head through the birth canal. A man's isn't.”

  Her, Lily thought. She'd still been thinking of the skeleton as "it." From now on, the skeleton would be a girl.

  Dr. Toller was still staying at Grace and Favor but was late for dinner, so Mr. Prinney made a further announcement about the library. "It appears that we've already resolved the problem that Miss and Mr. Brewster and I were dealing with. So feel free to use the room anytime you wish.”

  Everybody was obviously curious. But they were too polite to ask questions.

  Lily changed the subject. "Dr. Toller should be here soon. He has interesting things to tell you about the skeleton. Especially about her moccasins."

  “What about them?" Robert asked.

  “I should let Dr. Toller tell you. But I can hardly keep it to myself. She was wearing small moccasins. They're completely intact and very pretty. He says they were probably soaked thoroughly in beeswax. Aside from a scrap of leather, and the other beads that were loose in the soil, that's the only article of clothing that survived. The beads are smaller than the other ones that were found.”

  A moment later, Dr. Toller arrived, apologizing for being late but proudly showing around the small shoes.

  “Poor little girl," Phoebe said. "Can you tell how she died?"

  “No, I'm afraid I can't," Dr. Toller admitted. "There was no sign of an injury. No broken bones, at least. It could have been a disease. Smallpox or measles. The bones don't tell me."

  “She might have been one of my family," Chief Walker said.<
br />
  “You're an Indian?" Toller asked.

  “Only an eighth part. But the old genes were passed down."

  “Do you think she was buried there before or after this house was built?" Robert asked.

  “I know bones. I don't know houses. Do you know when it was built?”

  Everyone looked at Mr. Prinney for an answer.

  He thought for a minute or two, and said, "Mr. Horatio Brewster inherited it from his Aunt Flora. She was born around 1850, as I recall. She was known to have been born and grown up here. So the house must have been here since at least that date. I can check the records at the city hall. They might still exist."

  “But she was a couple feet outside the foundation," Robert pursued. "No matter when the house was built, she wasn't dug up then, or she wouldn't have been found this week."

  “I was telling Miss Brewster a little while ago that the skeleton should be preserved at a museum. Right now it's impossible to guess when she died. But someday science will figure out a way to determine this. I hope some of us survive until that happens and one of you finds out."

  “I'm going to stay one more day, Mr. and Mrs. Prinney, if Miss and Mr. Brewster agree. I want to see her bones well packed into a crate. Then you can present me with your bill for feeding and housing me.”

  In spite of what Mr. Prinney, Lily, and Robert had discovered in the library, nobody demurred about being paid.

  “I for one have enjoyed having you here," Lily said. "You discovered such interesting things. We seldom have guests as knowledgeable as you are.”

  On that note, Dr. Toller put the moccasins aside and began his dinner as the others finished theirs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Thursday, April 27

  DR. TOLLER had asked the Harbinger boys to make him a sturdy crate to ship the girl's bones, beads, and moccasins to the pathologist and then to a museum. He called a freighting company he was familiar with in these cases. "Do you mind if I leave her in your garage next to your car, Mr. Brewster?"

  “Not at all. But let me know when they're coming so I can move the Duesie out of their way." What he really meant, of course, was that he didn't want anybody bashing his precious automobile with a rough wooden crate.

  While Dr. Toller and Robert were working this out, Howard Walker sat at his desk at the jail, his feet up on the desk, eating a jelly doughnut he'd bought at Mabel's Cafe. He was thinking about the skeleton of the young Indian girl. He wondered if she, like him, was all or partly of the Munsee subtribe of the Delaware tribe, from which he, too, was descended—in a sense. His great-grandfather, a full-blood Munsee Indian, had married into a Dutch family, needless to say, to the Dutch family's disgrace. Walker was a name many of the tribe shared.

  The old tribes had all had their fill of the Dutch settlers infringing on their land and way of life. They'd packed up and gone West, taking everything they owned in a wagon or on their backs. Only a few families remained. Those families who emigrated wrote letters home saying they'd changed their names to Walker because they'd walked hundreds of miles to find other tribes to join up with.

  When Howard was about eight years old, his grandmother, as Dutch-looking as anyone could be, told him that when she was born, the third of six children, all of them fair-haired and with pale complexions, her own mother, when eventually widowed, decided they'd change their name from whatever their Indian name had been to Walker. Howard's grandmother told him he was her favorite grandchild because he looked so much like her own father—dark-haired with a proud handsome face, though his coloring was paler than her father's.

  He'd hated his looks in grade school. The other kids called him names, making fun of him for having Indian features. The boys made jokes about where he hid his tomahawk. And was he a good shot with a bow and an arrow? As he grew older, however, he realized that girls liked him better than the other boys. He was taller, darker-haired than most of the Dutch boys, and more handsome.

  That was when he came to terms with himself. He was only one-eighth Indian but had overridden those powerful Dutch genes the whole rest of his family had acquired from his tough, practical great-grandmother.

  Still, he felt oddly sad about the poor little Indian girl, buried under what would eventually become huge dead bushes. What kind of life had she had? Lily had told him about Dr. Toller's theory that she'd possibly lived in a cave. At least her family had buried her properly laid out in her best clothing with all the beading on her clothes and shoes. They made sure her feet didn't get cold and wet in the winter.

  As he took a bite of the doughnut, his phone rang. It was the fingerprint expert.

  “Have you identified it?" Howard asked.

  “No record of anything like it in the records. It's distinct, though I didn't notice it until I used the magnifying glass. It's a thumbprint, of course. But it also has a long-healed cut right up through the middle of it. Quite distinct if you look closely."

  “If I happen to figure out who painted the swastika on the tailor's shop, we'll know he's the perp from his thumbprint then? Which thumb?"

  “The left. He was probably right-handed and handled the can with his left hand and rested it at some point on the window."

  “It was stupid of him not to notice and clean it up," Howard commented.

  “Not necessarily. Maybe he didn't have cleaning rags handy and didn't want to wipe it off on his clothes—if he even realized he'd left a fingerprint."

  “Thanks for letting me know," Howard said.

  The moment he'd hung up the phone, it rang again. It was Harry Harbinger. "Chief, Edwin McBride has been murdered in that shed we set up for him. Come quickly. We haven't touched him. We knew better.”

  Edwin was indeed dead. Dr. Polhemus was already there before Chief Walker arrived. Howard would have been happier with almost any other doctor to sign the death certificate. Howard wouldn't have even recognized Edwin except for his brown hair and plaid shirt and brown trousers, both much patched. His face was reddish-blue, his blue eyes were wide open, and his mouth was open with his purple tongue protruding as if he were still gasping for breath.

  “Strangled with a fine wire," Polhemus proclaimed. "Must have died hours ago. The flesh has swollen, concealing it, all but at the back of his neck. A thin piano wire, probably.”

  Or some other kind of wire, Howard thought, but said nothing.

  Both Harry and Jim Harbinger were seriously upset. "He was a nice, hardworking man," Harry said. "Who would do such a horrible thing to him?"

  “He had no enemies?" Chief Walker asked.

  “Not a chance," Harry said firmly.

  “We'll have to get him to a pathologist. I know several of them," Chief Walker said. "It's clearly a murder, not an accident. First, I'm calling the funeral home in Beacon to pick him up until I can fInd someone to do a thorough examination."

  “Be careful stepping outside," Harry said. "Jim found him and upchucked near the shed door. I'll wash it away soon.”

  Howard asked for permission to call the Beacon funeral home from the Harbinger house and had an ambulance around in record time. By then Chief Walker had contacted the pathologist who'd been at Grace and Favor when the skeleton was discovered.

  Dr. Meredith gave Walker the address of the morgue in New York City.

  The ambulance was still present, so Walker gave them the address to deliver the corpse. The guy driving the ambulance said, "I can't go that far. We don't have the budget for using that much gasoline. But there's a good pathologist in Newburgh. Could we deliver the body there?"

  “What is the pathologist's name?”

  The driver told him.

  Walker called Dr. Meredith back to explain and ask if the other pathologist was known to him, and if he was reliable. Meredith said he knew the man and he'd do a good job.

  “You'll see that I'm right about the piano wire," Dr. Polhemus said in a cranky voice. "It's obvious.”

  Walker ignored him and gave Harry a handful of change to pay for the calls. "Be sur
e to let me know if I owe you more when the bill comes." Then he asked Harry again, Are you sure that Mr. McBride had no enemies?"

  “I can't imagine him having a single one. He was such a shy man, and worked so hard at the train station. Golly!" Harry said. "Edwin was about to make a little more money there with the post office boxes. Who's going to do the sorting now?"

  “Robert Brewster, I assume," Howard said. "It was, after all, his idea.”

  Howard was thinking furiously about where to go from here. A nice man. No enemies whatsoever. Howard's experience told him this was seldom true. Everybody had said or done something wrong to somebody else at one time or another. Mostly it was harmless and was forgotten or forgiven. But there were also people who were of a mind to take offense when none was meant. Even a well-meaning compliment could set them off.

  “Did Edwin tell you anything about his past?" Walker asked Harry.

  “Mostly he talked about how grateful he was to Jack Summer, who told him about Voorburg at the Bonus March. You know he came here because of Jack's description of the town?"

  “That's what I'd heard," Walker said. Anything else? Like where he grew up, or if he had family elsewhere?”

  Harry thought for a few minutes. "I think he mentioned growing up somewhere in south Yonkers."

  “Nothing about family?"

  “Only that his mother is a really good cook.”

  “Did he suggest that she was still living?”

  Harry shrugged. "I assumed she was because he said 'she is' not ‘she was.' "

  “Do you have any idea of his age?"

  “No. But he met Jack at the Bonus March, so he must have served in the Great War. That would make him at least in his mid-thirties or older. I think he might have been in his early forties.”

  Chief Walker went back to his office and put in calls to the county records people in Yonkers. He was told they probably had the information he needed, but he'd have to hunt for it himself. Someone would help him, but not do it for him, he was told.

  This would have been the perfect thing to tell a deputy to do. If he had a good deputy. What he had was only Ralph Summer, the cousin of Jack Summer, the local newspaper editor. How could cousins be so very different? Jack was sharp as a tack, and never printed anything in the Voorburg Times that couldn't be verified by at least two other sources. Ralph, on the other hand, was stupid and lazy. And what's more, he was currently engaged to the only daughter of a successful (so Ralph said) jeweler in Albany. Howard wondered how that had happened. Would a successful man turn over his only daughter to a lump like Ralph? Unless there was already a bun in the oven. Ralph was spending all his free time, and more, driving to Albany and was there now.