On, Off

“There are few people she does like. What can I do for you?”

“Tell me the truth. I’ve just been to see Mrs. Eliza Smith, who informed me that you weren’t blind from birth. Why lie to me?”

Claire sighed, slapped her hands on her thighs. “Well, they say your sins will find you out. I lied because I so much loathe the questions that inevitably follow when I tell the truth. Such as, how did it feel after you couldn’t see? Was it a heartbreak? Was it the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to you? Is it harder to be blind after you’ve seen? And on, and on. Well, I can tell you that it felt like a death sentence, that my heart did break, that it is indeed the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me. You’ve just opened my wounds, Lieutenant, and I am bleeding. I hope you’re satisfied.” She turned her back.

“I’m sorry, but I had to ask.”

“Yes, I can see that!” Suddenly she swung around, smiled at him. “My turn to apologize. Let’s start again.”

“Mrs. Smith also told me that you and Charles had a brother, Morton, who died suddenly, very close to the time you went blind.”

“My, Eliza’s tongue did wag this morning! You must be quite something to look at – she always had an eye for a handsome fella. Pardon my being catty, but Eliza got what she wanted. I didn’t.”

“I can pardon the cattiness, Miss Ponsonby.”

“No more Claires?”

“I think I’ve hurt you too much to call you Claire.”

“You were asking me about Morton. He died just after I was sent to Cleveland. They didn’t bother to bring me home for the funeral, though I would have liked to say my goodbyes. He died so suddenly that it was a coroner’s case, so there was time to bring me home before they released his body for burial. Despite his dementia, he was a sweet little guy. Sad, sad, sad…”

Get out of here, Carmine! You’ve outworn your welcome. “My thanks, Miss Ponsonby. Thanks a lot, and sorry to have upset you.”

A coroner’s case…That meant Morton Ponsonby’s death would be on file at Caterby Street; he’d send a uniform to dig it out.

On the way back to Holloman he called in at the ancient burial ground in the Valley, a cemetery that had run out of plots for newcomers ninety years ago. It contained Ponsonby graves by the score, some of them older by far than the earliest picture on the Ponsonby kitchen wall. The newest memorial stone belonged to Ida Ponsonby, died in November of 1963. Before her, Morton Ponsonby, died in October of 1939. And before him, Leonard Ponsonby, died in January of 1930. A trio of tragedies that a grave archaeologist would never have known about from the bald, uninformative epitaphs. The Ponsonbys did not wear their sorrows on their sleeves. Any more than did the Smiths, he thought when he found Nancy’s grave. Bald and spare, no reason for her death given.

What, he wondered, back in the car, would Chuck Ponsonby do without the Hug? And the Prof’s research tips? Go into general practice? No, Charles Ponsonby didn’t have the manner. Too aloof, too austere, too elitist. It might even be, thought Carmine, that no other medical job would be forthcoming for Chuck, and if that were so, then he could have no reason to destroy the Hug.

He walked into Patrick’s office with a growl and flung himself sideways into the armchair that sat in one corner.

“How goes it?” asked Patrick.

“Don’t ask. You know what I could do with right now, Patsy?”

“No, what?”

“A nice shoot-out in the Chubb Bowl parking lot, preferably with machine guns. Or a nice stroll into the middle of ten hoods holding up the Holloman First National. Something refreshing.”

“That’s the remark of an inactive cop with a sore butt.”

“You’re darned right it is! This is a talking case, endless talking, talking, talking. No shoot-outs, no robberies.”

“I take it nothing came out of the sketch Jill Menzies made from the Tinker Bell woman’s description?”

“Not a thing.” Carmine straightened, looked alert. “Patsy, at ten years longer on this troubled earth than me, do you recall a murder at the railroad station in 1930? Three people were beaten to death by a gang of hoboes or something like that. I ask because one of them was the father of Charles and Claire Ponsonby. As if that wasn’t enough, he turned out to have lost all the family’s money in the stock market crash.”

Patrick thought deeply, then shook his head. “No, I don’t remember it – my mother censored everything I heard when I was a kid. But there’ll be a case report on it buried in the archives. You know Silvestri – he wouldn’t throw out a used Kleenex, and his predecessors were just as bad.”

“I was going to send someone out to Caterby Street to pick up yet another case file, but, since I have nothing better to do, I might wander out that way and have a look myself. I’m curious about the Ponsonby tragedies. Could they be Ghost victims too?”

Only a little more than a week to go before the Ghosts struck again; February was a short month, so maybe the date set for their next abduction was early in March. Possessed by a creeping dread, Carmine would have driven to Maine at this time of year to look at some unpromising archival lead, but Caterby Street was much closer than Maine. Paper storage was every public servant’s nightmare, be it police records, medical records, pension records, land rates and taxes, water rates, any of a hundred different categories. When the Holloman Hospital was rebuilt in 1950, a whole subbasement was reserved for archives, so they weren’t hurting. Commissioner by 1960, John Silvestri had fought fiercely to keep every scrap of paper the police had, going back to when Holloman had owned one constable and the theft of a horse was a hanging offense. Then a local concrete firm went bankrupt, and Silvestri hounded all of officialdom for the money and authority to buy the premises, three acres on Caterby Street, an area of industries famous for dirt and racket, therefore not prime property. The three acres and their contents went for $12,000 at auction, the Holloman Police the successful bidders.

On the land sat a vast warehouse in which the concrete firm had kept its trucks and spares, equipment of all kinds. And once the dust had been scoured out and the rest of the lot tidied up, all the police archives had been placed in the warehouse on steel-framed shelves. The roof didn’t leak – a main consideration – and two big attic fans, one at either end, meant sufficient air circulation to keep mildew down in summer.

The two archivists lived a comfortable life in an insulated trailer parked alongside the warehouse entrance; the peon half ran a broom over the warehouse floor occasionally and took trips to a nearby deli for coffee and edibles, while the qualified half did a Ph.D. thesis on the development of criminal trends in Holloman since 1650. Neither half was in the least interested in this Lieutenant weird enough to come to Caterby Street in person. The qualified half simply told him whereabouts to look and went back to her thesis, and the peon vanished in a police pickup.

The records of 1930 occupied nineteen large boxes, whereas the coroner’s records of 1939 ran to almost that many: crime had increased greatly during the nine-year gap. Carmine dug out the case of Morton Ponsonby in October of 1939, then looked in the first of 1930’s boxes for Leonard Ponsonby. The format of a record hadn’t changed much between then and now. Just sheets of legal-sized paper enclosed by a manila file folder, some sheets stapled together, others floating free. In 1930 they hadn’t owned a system that kept the sheets bound to the folder – nor, probably, an office staff to deal with files once they were closed and moved out of the “current” drawers.

But there it was, where it was supposed to be: PONSONBY, Leonard Sinclaire, businessman, 6 Ponsonby Lane, Holloman, Conn. Aged 35. Married, three children.

Someone had placed a table and an office chair under a clear plastic skylight; Carmine carried the two Ponsonby files to it, and one thin, unnamed file that contained the details of the two other murders at the railroad station.

He looked at Morton Ponsonby’s record first. Because the death had been so sudden and unexpected, the Ponsonby’s doctor had declined to sign a death certificate. There was nothing in this to suggest the man suspected foul play; simply, he wanted an autopsy done to see if he had missed anything during the years when Morton Ponsonby had been almost impossible to approach, let alone treat. A typical pathology report that started off with the hackneyed phrase of the time: “This is the body of a well-nourished and ostensibly healthy male adolescent.” But the cause of death had not been a brain hemorrhage, as Eliza Smith had said. The autopsy did not reveal the cause of death, which meant that the pathologist wrote it off as due to heart failure, possibly consequent on vagal inhibition. The guy wasn’t in Patsy’s league, but he did run the full gamut of tests for poisons without finding any,