By the time I’d finished shopping with Gogo and dragged myself up the sour-smelling stairs to my apartment, I was sober enough to study the Metropolitan files at length. What I didn’t have was time. I had to dress and head back uptown to the Lightfoot mansion on Seventieth and Park.
I tried calling Aunt Julie, but there was no answer. I called Cousin Lily instead.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” I said.
“I have not. Is this about Violet?”
Tap tap tap went my suspicious finger. Sniff sniff sniff went my . . . well, you know about my nose. “Ha! You are holding out. Otherwise those two sentences would have gone in reverse order.”
“Vivian, why would I hold out on you? I’m on your side.” So guileless.
“Because it has to do with your own mother.”
“Trust me, Vivian. In the annals of my mother’s crimes, this is nothing.”
“Alrighty, then. Why did one Christina Schuyler Dane write to one S. Barnard Lightfoot, Junior, in the fall of 1914 and ask him to purge any mention of Violet Grant in the magazine’s records?”
An extensive pause. “That, I don’t know. Did he?”
“Not exactly. It all just went under lock and key. But what were you thinking about?” In the background behind her, I heard a faint drawn-out Maa-maa from Baby Number Five. (No longer a baby, I need hardly add, but a somewhat imperious young lady on the verge of adolescence.) In the foreground, there was hemming and hawing.
“Lily,” I said darkly.
“I might have another letter for you.”
“Might? Or have?”
Maa-maa! Like a singsong goat. Closer now. Would Doctor Paul want five children? I hoped not. On the other hand, he’d look as adorable as Nick Greenwald did, holding the little cherubs against his shoulder.
“In a moment, honey. Have a letter. You see, you finally got me looking through Mother’s old letters, which, being Mother, she kept strictly organized by sender. I thought you had all of them, and then . . . well, I don’t know if she misfiled it on purpose or by accident. Probably on purpose, knowing her.”
“And?”
“Weellll.” The word stretched doubtfully. “I think you’d better see for yourself.”
“You read it?”
“Of course I read it, Vivian. I do have some curiosity left. Can I bring it by your office tomorrow?”
“Better yet. I’m heading uptown in half an hour. I’ll stop by your apartment on the way.”
“That’s perfect. Vivian?”
I was already standing, telephone cord stretched to the limit. The cells of my skin were fairly popping with eagerness. “What, Cousin Lily?”
“You might want to read those lock-and-key files, if you haven’t already.”
WELL, of course I read them. You don’t think I’d let a little thing like lipstick get in the way of my curiosity, do you? I read in front of the mirror, I read as I was fastening my stockings, I read as I was pulling the fat curlers from my hair and fluffing everything in place. I read mostly about the breathless diplomatic maneuvering into war, about the hourly frissons of schadenfreude as the American correspondent watched Europe teeter above the chasm. And then, on July 30, sandwiched between Russian mobilization and frantic British attempts to intercede:
In response to your cable about the Grant affair, I haven’t the foggiest, that is to say, it’s pretty clear what happened but they’ll never be able to catch the perpetrators or prove anything at all. They say all the scientists are mute about it. Einstein himself was with them in Wittenberg a week ago, and won’t say a thing. Clearly the wife has run off with the lover, but they’re being protected somehow, no one will let slip an unofficial word about it, let alone an official one, there’s hardly anything in the papers with all the war talk. It’s the quietest scandal I ever heard, which means it must be something very delicious indeed, especially since our old friend the Comtesse de S.H. is an interested party, by which I mean she was intimate with Dr. Grant and making no attempt to disguise the affair. I would ask her about it, but she’s left town as well. Soon I shall be utterly on my own, with only Germans to speak to, and they’re all war and no play at the moment.
I glanced at the clock. Half an hour until I was expected uptown, and I still had to retrieve Violet’s letter from Lily.
I put the letter back in its folder, and it occurred to me, as I retrieved my coat and hat and pocketbook from the careless dump by the entry, that it might be a good thing I had a strong stomach.
THE STOMACH in question wasn’t holding up well as I traveled from the Greenwalds’ elegant ten-room apartment in Gramercy Park to the Lightfoot mansion on East Seventieth Street, but it wasn’t the fault of Aunt Violet’s letter to her sister. Fate had given me the lurchiest of lurchy cab drivers, a hunched-over monosyllabic stick of a man who evidently thought I was auditioning him for the Daytona 500.
I, of all people, should have know better. Never, ever climb into a New York City taxi and tell the cabbie to step on it.
Well, I was late! I hadn’t counted on Five-O wanting to tell me all about the fifth-grade Thanksgiving feast at Nightingale-Bamford (for the record, she had been an Indian), or on Nick Junior turning up at a quarter to seven and scolding me for my performance at the Schuyler drinkies a month ago: They’re still wiping the lipstick off my cheek, Vivs. Six of them asked for your number! I’m never living it down.
So by the time Lily had shooed everyone off and called down for the doorman to find me a taxi, I had only five minutes to travel fifty city blocks on a Thursday evening. So: Step on it, I told the driver, and the next instant I found myself pinned to the seat by the gravitational force of the resulting acceleration, clutching my pocketbook to my stomach like a life belt on the Titanic. By the time we reached Thirty-fourth Street, we’d driven up on the sidewalk twice and possibly taken out a parking meter.
It wasn’t until a red light forced us to a growling stop near Grand Central Terminal that I could unclench my hand from the door handle and open up Violet’s letter. (What? Me, wait until I got home? You know better.) By now I was accustomed to her handwriting; I knew it like my own. I held the paper next to the window, where the glow of a streetlamp illuminated the words just enough, and read:
My dear Christina, I am leaving Walter . . .
Lurch went the taxi, and thump went Vivian against the seat. I righted myself and strained to hold the letter back up against the window, but the flashes of passing light weren’t quite enough to reveal the page.
. . . leaving Walter . . .
What was the date? What was the date? I hadn’t even checked. The date might make all the difference. If she’d left him first, and he’d come after her and threatened her—I knew Walter by now, I knew he had his pride, I knew he wasn’t just going to let his wife depart his control without a fight—and then the murder had taken place. Or if she’d murdered him and left him, all in the same bold stroke.
And where was Lionel Richardson in all this? Who was Lionel Richardson?
On we raced, up Park Avenue, into a ribbon of green lights. The engine was cranking now, grinding out speed in a triumphant roar. We hit a bump, and the wheels left the pavement for a weightless instant. My stomach remained suspended for considerably longer. I was going to die, and Violet’s letter with me.
I peeked over the top of the seat and saw the light turn red. The engine screamed, the taxi leapt ahead, and before I could ask God for mercy on my sin-scorched soul, we whipped around the corner of Seventieth Street and banged to a stop in front of the cool limestone face of the Lightfoot mansion.
I climbed out the door and onto the sidewalk. I maybe might have been a teensy bit shaky. Violet’s letter was clenched in my hand, my pocketbook tucked under my arm. I opened it and found a few crisp dollar bills somewhere inside. I looked at my watch, and saw it was seven-oh-three. If I’d climbed into a helicopter at Gramercy Park, we couldn’t have made it any faster.
I shoved the dollar bills through the window. “Thanks for the thrill, buddy. You might want to check those tires.”
I rang the Lightfoot doorbell. Just as the butler arrived—yes, the Lightfoots had goddamned Jeeves answering the door—I remembered Violet’s letter.
“Good evening, Miss Schuyler,” said Jeeves. (No, I didn’t know his real name.)
“Just a moment, please.” I straightened out the paper in my hands. There was no date at the top. I hunted back in my pocketbook and found the envelope.
Jeeves cleared his tactful throat. “They’re expecting you in the drawing room, Miss Schuyler.”
“One moment.” I found the postmark and stepped into the radiant entry hall. Berlin, it said. 25 JULI 1914. So had Violet written the letter on July 25, or had she written it earlier and only posted it on the twenty-fifth?
Jeeves was handing me skillfully out of my coat. “The drawing room, Miss Schuyler,” he said, with a little more vim. “Up the stairs and to the left.”
“Yes, I know. Thank you.” I folded the paper back into the envelope and stuffed it into my pocketbook. The hall smelled of orchids. As I raced up the curving stairs to the drawing room, a new and entirely different thought reared its curious head among my snapping synapses.
That hat on the hat stand. Where had I seen it before?
I reached the top of the stairs and turned left, and just as I passed through the open doorway into the monumental Lightfoot drawing room, my snapping synapses shot back an answer.
But by that time the owner of the hat was already standing white-faced before me, with his hand surrounding that of the gleaming Gogo. And lo! S. Barnard Lightfoot himself, fully recovered from the afternoon’s festivities in the Metropolitan conference room, was rising from his armchair and holding out his triumphant hand to me while his polished face smiled and smiled.
“Why, there you are, Miss Schuyler,” he said. “You’re just in time to raise a glass to the happy couple.”