machine. Oh, the things the 1930 cops had missed! On the left breast the word EMMA had been picked out in dark, purplish pearls.
Head whirling, Carmine laid the dress on his desk and then stood just staring at it for what might have been five minutes or an hour; he didn’t know, hadn’t looked at his watch or the clock.
Finally he sat down and put the carpetbag on his lap, opening it as widely as its rusting jaws would allow. The lining was worn, had come apart on one side seam; he put both hands inside the bag and felt around, eyes closed. There! Something!
A photograph, and not taken on a box Brownie. This was a studio portrait still mounted in a cream cardboard folder stamped with the name of the photographer.
The woman was seated on a chair, the child – about four years old – seated on her knees. In this, the woman was much better clad, wore a string of real pearls around her neck and real pearls in her earlobes. The little girl wore a dress similar to the one in the carpeting, EMMA showing up clearly. And both of them had the face. Even in black-and-white their skins had a suggestion of cafe au lait; their hair was densely black and curly, their eyes very dark, their lips full. To Carmine, gazing at them through a wall of tears, they were exquisite. Destroyed in all their youth and beauty, every vestige of it bloodied to pulp.
A crime of passion. Why had no one seen that? No killer would waste his essence on a torrent of blows were hate not the motive. Especially when the skull under the bludgeon belonged to a little girl. There’s no way these two female creatures weren’t connected to Leonard Ponsonby. They were there because he was there, he was there because they were there.
So it’s Charles Ponsonby after all. Though he wasn’t old enough to do this. Nor Morton, nor Claire. This was mad Ida a decade and more before she went mad. Which means that Leonard and Emma’s mother were – lovers? Relatives? One was as likely as the other; Ida was ultra-conservative, no touch of the tar brush for
Enough, Carmine, enough! Nineteen thirty can wait, 1966 cannot. Chuck Ponsonby is a Ghost – or is he
Charles Ponsonby…A bachelor stay-at-home who couldn’t produce original research to save his life. Always in someone else’s shadow – mad mother’s, mad brother’s, blind sister’s, far more successful best friend’s. Doesn’t bother matching his socks, keeping his hair combed, buying a new tweed jacket. An archetypal absentminded professor, too timid to pick up a rat without wearing a furnace glove, nondescript in that way which suggests a radical failure in ego, despite the veneer of intellectual snobbishness.
But can this Charles Ponsonby be the portrait of a multiple rapist/murderer so brilliant that he’s run rings around us ever since we discovered that he existed? Seems impossible to believe. The trouble is that no one has a portrait of the multiple murderer except that sex always seems involved. Therefore every time we unearth a specimen, we have to dissect him minutely. His age, his race, his creed, his appearance, the victim type he chooses, the personality he presents to the world, his childhood, background, likes and dislikes – a thousand thousand factors. About Charles Ponsonby we can certainly say that on his mother’s side there is a family history of madness as well as blindness.
Carmine replaced the contents of the evidence box exactly as he had found them and took it down to the desk.
“Larry, put this in security storage right now,” he said as he handed it over.
Then before Larry could reply, Carmine was out the door. It was time to take another look at 6 Ponsonby Lane.
The questions milled in his head, swarming wasps in search of the nest called answers: how, for instance, had Charles Ponsonby managed to get from the Hug to Travis High and back again while convincing everyone that he had been in conference on the roof? Thirty precious minutes before Desdemona found him and the others there, yet all six on the roof swore that no one was absent long enough to go to the john. How reliable was the attention span of an absentminded researcher? And how had Ponsonby gotten out of his house on the night Faith Khouri was snatched when it had been so closely watched? Did the contents of the 1930 evidence box represent enough hard evidence to wring a search warrant out of Judge Douglas Thwaites? The questions swarmed.
He came down Route 133 from the northeast, which brought him to Deer Lane first. In the Council’s view, the four houses on its far side had not warranted tar seal; Deer Lane’s 500 yards were traprock gravel. At its end it flared into a circular patch that gave sufficient parking for six or seven cars. On all sides the forest came down to the road – secondary growth, of course. Two hundred years ago this would have been cleared and farmed, but as the more fertile soils of Ohio and westward beckoned, farming had ceased to be as profitable for Connecticut Yankees as the assembly line precision industries Eli Whitney had started. So the woods had grown back in profusion – oak, maple, beech, birch, sycamore, a few pines. Dog-woods and mountain laurel to bloom in the spring. Wild apple trees. And the deer had come back too.
His tires crunched audibly over the gravel, which reinforced his opinion that the cars watching Deer Lane at its junction with 133 on the night Faith Khouri vanished would have heard a vehicle as well as seen the white vapor from its tailpipe. And the only cars parked on Deer Lane that night had been police unmarkeds. So while it was possible that Chuck Ponsonby had walked up the slope behind his house minus a flashlight, where would he have gone from there? He hadn’t stored his vehicle any closer than some distance up 133, or if the vehicle belonged to a partner, it hadn’t picked him up any closer than that. A walk that long at zero Fahrenheit? Unlikely. Freezers were warm by comparison. So how did he do it?
Carmine had a precept: if you are forced to take a stroll on a nice day, then do it near a suspect; and if the stroll involves a forest, take along a pair of binoculars to watch the birdies. Binoculars slung around his neck, Carmine walked up the slope among the trees in the direction of the spine that looked down on number 6 Ponsonby Lane. The ground was a foot deep in wet leaves, the snow melted except in the lee of an occasional boulder and in crannies where the warmth hadn’t penetrated. Several deer moved out of his way as he walked, but not in alarm; animals always knew when they were on a reserve. It was, he reflected, a pretty place, peaceful at this time of year. In summer the whining buzz of lawn mowers and shrieks of laughter from cookouts would ruin it. He knew from previous police combing that no one ventured out of the car park, even for illicit sexual encounters; the twenty-acre reserve contained no beer cans, ring pulls, bottles, plastic detritus or used rubbers.
Once on top of the ridge it was surprisingly easy to see the Ponsonby house. The trees of their slope had been drastically thinned to make a woodsy statement: a clump of three-trunked American birches, one beautiful old elm tree looking healthy, ten maples clustered in such a way that their fall leaves would make a stunning display, and nursery specimens of dogwood that would turn the grounds into a pink-and-white dreamland in spring. The thinning must have been done a very long time ago, as the stumps of the removed trees had disappeared from sight.
Lifting his binoculars, he surveyed the house as if it were fifty feet from him. There was Chuck up a ladder with a chisel and a blow-torch, chipping at old paint the proper way. Claire was sprawled in a wooden outdoor chair near the laundry porch, Biddy at her feet; the scant breeze was kissing his face, so the dog hadn’t scented his presence. Then Chuck called out. Claire got to her feet to walk around to the side of the house so unerringly that Carmine was amazed. Yet he
How did he know that so certainly? Because Carmine left no stone unturned, and Claire’s blindness was a stone in his path. Sometimes he used the services of a women’s prison warder, Carrie Tallboys, who struggled to support a promising son, therefore was available for hire outside working hours. Carrie had a curious talent that involved acting out a role so convincingly that people told her a great deal they ought not have. So Carmine had sent Carrie to see Claire’s ophthalmologist, the eminent Carter Holt. Her story was that she was thinking of donating some money to retinitis pigmentosa, as her dear friend Claire Ponsonby suffered from it before she went completely blind. Ah, well he remembered the day Claire came in with bilateral retinal detachments – so rare, for both eyes to go at
