Mrs. Prowder's door was open when he came in, and Mary's head popped forward much as her mother's often had—the red of Mary's hair almost garish.
"Hello ... hello. Mr. Sullivan. I was wondering what the police were here for?"
She stood then by the door, and he stopped at the foot of the stairway.
He said, “Just ‘Henry’ is fine,” trying to gather his thoughts for an answer. “They wanted to speak to me....” He told her as briefly as he could what had happened. Feeling the weight of the lack of sleep, he leaned in the doorway and was instantly aware that old Mrs. Prowder would have objected and advised him to stand up straight.
Mary did not seem surprised by his story. Perhaps she had already heard and only wanted reassurance on the matter.
She said, “I'm sorry. We've both lost someone, then .... I was about to leave, and I was hoping you'd be home. I wanted to give you something.” She turned and grabbed a small book from the fireplace mantle facing the door. “You know she mostly read the papers and chatted with her friends. But she did like to read a book now and then, even if she didn't read those ‘digest’ things. Mostly, she got what she wanted from the library. But this was in the china cabinet. I thought you'd like it. It has someone else's name inside. I figured some tenant left it behind."
Henry knew the book at once. It was a small green leather and India paper edition of the poems of Tennyson published by Nelson in England and popular in the United States as a Christmas gift at the time of World War One. Not worth a great deal, but with reasonably large type—good to handle and read.
He said, “It's very nice. Have you read Tennyson?"
Mary forced a polite smile. “No. I never read poetry. It's all so very precious and fancy or mean and nasty. Not my thing."
Her distaste for poetry was audible in the tone of her words alone.
He shook his head. “You'd like this, I think. Your mother liked it. She read it through more than once."
This widened her eyes. Henry thought she might be too weary from her own efforts to show more. She held the small book in the palm of her hand with her fingers bent back like it was an exhibit of some kind. “Really? I didn't know she ever read poetry."
Henry put his hands in his pockets, trying to avoid the desire to lean again as he offered more of an explanation.
"She told me once she hated her name. She wouldn't tell me what it was for a long time. Always said she was known as just Mrs. Prowder and happy with that. But then I noticed a letter once from her bank and saw her name on it."
Mary interrupted.
"Enid. She hated it. Enid and Elwin Prowder. She thought it sounded silly."
Henry smiled and took the book in his own hand.
"So I gave her this. The Idylls of the King. There is a wonderful part of it called ‘Enid.’ She even learned a portion of it and recited it back to me a few times. ‘Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; with that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great .... ‘"
Mary's eyes showed her confusion. “Not really. My mother? Out loud? She was always so practical."
Henry said, “Not always,” without being sure of exactly why poetry was not practical.
"Oh. I didn't know ... .” Her fingers closed on the book in his hand. “I'll keep it, then."
She clasped the small book against her breast and smiled back at him, now obviously pleased. Henry was afraid he might be seeing tears form in her eyes soon, and he quickly said good night.
Eliot opened his door on the landing; the music behind him thickened the mix of yellow light and the smell of cooked food. He was thin to the point of being bony, a wispy beard covering sunken cheeks. Mrs. Prowder had often worried over Eliot's sallow complexion. He was a vegetarian, it seemed, an unnatural religion in Mrs. Prowder's cosmos. His greatest offense, however, was his overweight and overactive girlfriend, Jessica, who often spent the night and seldom slept.
Jessica smiled at Henry from the couch. The light of the apartment gave Eliot's complexion the look of cheese.
Without greeting, Eliot said, “What were the cops about?"
Henry fleetingly considered being cute and saying they were looking for drugs. “Just me. Someone died. They're just checking people out."
Eliot's chin went up, and he studied Henry with half-closed eyes over the beard-stubbled expanse of his cheeks. “Something wrong?"
Henry said, “She was murdered."
This brought the chin back down with a gape. “Mrs. Prowder?"
Eliot's cheeks now rose in a swell below his eyes, and his mouth widened in a grimace.
Henry took a breath against smiling at the facial contortions. “No. Someone else. Don't worry about it."
Behind Eliot, Jessica's smile had vanished in a wide expression of surprise.
She said, “Where?"
Henry needed another breath for that. His own body weight seemed to be doubling as he stood in place.
"A few blocks away. Don't worry about it. I've got to get some sleep. I'm pretty beat. Good night."
Henry made the last flight of stairs one step at a time. There was less to clean up this time from the police visit, and he gathered Helen Mawson's letters to one side and lay down on his bed, intending to close his eyes for only a moment before straightening up. Instead he fell into a pool of sleep, the sinking weight of his own body more than he could hold up. He resurfaced only fitfully to occasional street noise or the odd figment of a fading dream.
"Helen."
In the dark of early morning he awoke thinking of a young woman he did not know. Her hair was long, tied to one side with a turn of blue knitting yarn so that it fell over one shoulder. What was the color of her hair? Brown? Not plain brown. Something more. Her eyes were blue, almost purple, and too big for her face, which made her look very young. Cornflower blue came to mind, though Henry was certain he had never seen a blue cornflower in his life. She was small-boned but large-breasted, and this could not be hidden by the dress she wore, which was ankle-length and began at her throat with a white frill of lace. The dress was a deep blue brilliantine, embroidered with the same white lace. She had been looking directly at him, and he was sure he had spoken her name when he awoke.
The room was not completely dark, and the gaslight from the streetlamps below cast a film through the flaws in the glass of the window onto his ceiling. The blank plaster directly above, with its small cracks, was now the background to the image of the girl he had seen in his dream.
He knew the dress had been mentioned and complimented in one of the letters. The size of her eyes, and their color, too, had been mentioned in another. He was not certain how his mind had formed the whole of the image, but it fascinated him and brought him wide awake as the image faded beneath the onslaught of his thoughts.
He remembered again the Jack Finney book, and the idea of time travel. Surely, his small room in this house was part of another time. The letters had transported him so easily, so clearly.
When he turned on the light by his bed, the piles of her books stacked in front of the already-full bookcase along the wall presented themselves as an eccentric cityscape in miniature. The matching maroon cloth volumes of Richard Harding Davis and the green of F. Hopkinson Smith towered at one end over shorter stacks of Anthony Hope and Rudyard Kipling. Another tall stack of Winston Churchill rested beside the shorter one of Edward Noyes Westcott. Thick Mary Johnson novels butted against thin ones by Alice Hegan Rice.
His father had brought the books over as some kind of gesture, and Henry was thankful for that much. Henry would have to thank the old man again for it, even if he'd done it just to get them out of his own way.
Henry wanted to catalogue as much as he could before packing them up, and he had not yet found a space that would be best for that.
Still in his underwear, he sat at his desk and pressed the button on his computer before he had actually made the decision to start working.
Closest to him were the five stacks of leather-bound Roycrofter books, and he pulled off the top volume of these and set it by the keyboard. It was part of a pamphlet series of “Little Journeys” which had been gathered later into a single volume. This one began with Wordsworth. The leather of the cover was brushed to a soft texture and not stiffened with cardboard but left limp, as was the style of many of the other volumes. The paper was the color of dark cream.
All of it was intended to evoke an ancient time, an idealized moment of harmonious human endeavor which had never actually existed outside the minds of those first children of the industrial age who were already despairing of steel and smoke. Henry had read a little of melancholy Ruskin and mad Morris—or was it the other way around?—the Arts and Crafts movement, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his lovelorn and religiously unhappy sister, Christina. The artifice of it all had always struck Henry as false. A made-up past imposed on a rejected present, and like Christina and her unrequited lovers, barren.
Well, he thought, to be fair, there was the chair. Albert had taken it from the little house in Dedham and was keeping it for Henry in his basement. William Morris had in fact made a good and comfortable reading chair.
Turning the title page of the Wordsworth to read the copyright, he noticed a penciled comment in a neat script. “Not the way it looks at all. Probably did not go inside as I did. Sounds like one of the Stoddard descriptions.” The handwriting was Helen Mawson's.
Henry turned a clump of rough-cut pages and read a paragraph of chatty background biography on Wordsworth. He had never been fond of Elbert Hubbard—his pedantic style or his overplayful use of difficult words—and it did not take long to make Henry quit and close the book now.
Setting it back, he noticed the edge of something protruding from another of the volumes lower in the stack. He opened this to a batch of thin pamphlets and folded sheets. They were all printed in the same style as the books and bore the Roycrofter heading here or there. On stiffer stock was a printed listing of room rates at the Roycroft Inn at East Aurora, New York. One listing was circled with the date October 12 penciled beside it. The cost was three dollars per night. Breakfast was fifty cents. Dinner was a dollar fifty and included a choice of beef or lamb. The rate card included the date 1912 at the bottom.
Elbert Hubbard had run an amazing operation for many years. In the best American business tradition, he had adopted the aesthetic socialism of the Rossettis’ Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Arts and Crafts medievalism of William Morris, from England, to the American business credo and the middle-class prosperity of upstate New York—and made it pay. Pamphlets and books were hand-produced by the thousands on letter presses in the shops he had built in the small hamlet of East Aurora, near Buffalo. His short-story pamphlet, A Message to Garcia, had sold in the millions after the Spanish-American War.
In a colony-like settlement, Hubbard had encouraged volunteers to come and learn handicraft trades ranging from printing and papermaking to the hand illumination of books, and including the carpentry necessary for building the shops where all the work was done. This for a middle-class market which was only just finding the time to spare for luxuries and home decoration. Hubbard's reinvented aesthetic was a match for his marketing genius.
So it appeared that Helen might have gone to East Aurora. This seemed like a loose end of information to Henry, and he had no idea what use it might be.
Fully awake now, he pulled a container of orange juice from the small refrigerator in the kitchenette and sat back at his desk to begin cataloguing. He set the more difficult Roycrofter books aside and picked from a stack of books by fabulist John Kendrick Bangs to begin. He had finished those, and four by Mary Austin, as the glass of his window had turned gray. Nearly thirty titles were entered by the time his stomach pulled him away to the Paramount Cafe to find some food and coffee.
Henry had long before learned the benefit of concentrating his efforts only on books in the best condition. Almost every entry began with the words “Fine, in dust jacket.” He knew it was easier to note a later printing than to fuss over the details of wear and damage. The reason his books sold easily whenever he posted a new catalogue was that his customers could be sure of what they were going to get, and, of course, because they got to determine the price. Not having to think beyond a certain point about accurately pricing each individual volume saved at least half his time. When his customers got the listing, they checked off the ones they wanted and inserted the price they could afford. The highest bidder got the book—in most cases. He had begun to limit the purchases of some of his customers to keep them from totally dominating his list. The more people who had some success in their bids, the more bids he got. Because most books sold at about a third of their potential retail price, he made less than the dealer who bought the book, but he risked less and turned his stock over quickly.
Nearly all of his customers were registered dealers, and most of those dealers ran used-book shops. He had even required the few private individuals who ordered from him to register as dealers in their home states because he did not want to play games with taxes. All his sales were made to resellers and thus were not liable to tax. And each sale was automatically registered by the computer when he printed out the shipping form. Henry's accountant, Ralph, had designed the program for a computer-software outfit in Cambridge before they went bankrupt in the shakeout of the late nineties, and now Henry used it for all his book sales so that at the end of the year he could file his income forms in a matter of minutes. This one innovation alone, Henry considered a coup, and it pleased him no end when he spoke with Albert, who seemed always to be fighting over some tax problem or other.
But Henry's great secret was in the shipping. He reused corrugated boxes from the liquor store which he cut apart and turned inside out so only the plain brown interior could be seen. Henry could cut a box and refold it in less than a minute. The cost of a brand-new shipping box would be more than a dollar. Thus, Henry calculated he was paying himself over sixty dollars an hour to cut up boxes. He usually packed the orders in the evenings, when he was tired and could listen to the ball game or an old phonograph record as he worked. Most days he received six or seven orders, usually for more than one book per order. Because he was selling the books wholesale, they averaged around twenty dollars apiece. More than twelve years into it, and he was making about seven hundred dollars a week, after expenses.
And he liked his work.
He showered and dressed and put one small Roycrofter volume in his pocket to go. Then, as an afterthought he grabbed his notebook as well.
Passing Mrs. Prowder's closed door now with only a glance, he found himself wondering about what her Elwin would have done under these circumstances. What advice would Mrs. Prowder have passed on to him? There must be a method to such things. Henry was not about to play Sherlock Holmes or Perry Mason, but something in what he knew might be of importance.
Henry paused at the top of the granite steps and surveyed the empty street.
What could be sufficient motive for someone to kill Morgan? Dear Morgan. What could she have ever done to deserve such a thing? How would the killer benefit from such an act? There could be no possible gain for the loss of her.
At the Paramount Cafe he sat at the counter as he always did and drank his first coffee quickly then finished his eggs before opening his notebook, using the empty space beyond his entries for upcoming library sales and auctions.
Henry was fairly certain O'Connor had finished with him. It was in the tone of the detective's voice the evening before. Henry now followed Tim's lead and made a list of those people who might be suspects in Morgan's murder. Because he knew so little of the life she had been living recently, the list was short.
There was the obvious possibility that it was a thief—a “bungled burglary” as Erle Stanley Gardner might say. He got the sense now that O'Connor was looking in that direction. There was Fred, the building superintendent, even if Henry's suggestion to O'Connor had not been accepted gratefully. And then there was Morgan's son, Arthur, the former drug addict, who lived in California. Henry put Arthur down as the prime suspect. If he had any special dislike for his fellow man, any prejudice he was consciously aware of, it was for druggies who habitually avoided reality by choice. Then there was the voice Henry had heard behind Morgan as she spoke to him late that night from the Cape. It was a man who had spoken, and Henry noted it simply as “the voice.” Henry included the weasel from the auction house who had come in to look at the furniture. There had to be a Realtor, too—but then what would a Realtor benefit if his client was murdered? There was the cleaning service. That would be the motive of theft again. He had never asked if the Mexican woman was alone. He put that down, believing he had covered every possibility he could think of.
Then he added the name Ranulf Richter.
This was an odd thing. He certainly did not remember exactly how the books had been placed on the shelves in the inner-office library. But when he had first come in with O'Connor, he had noticed something, along with the rest of the displacement of chairs and the ashtray at the center of the table. He was fairly certain that those things had been at one end of the table before. And he had noticed a narrow space beside the three books of Ranulf Richter.
Morgan knew Richter better than most of her husband's other clients. There had been some passing mention, but Henry could not remember what. There had been an envelope—when?—the second day—only a few days ago, when she was still very much alive—after he had begun to look at the books. It was in the kitchen on the side with other opened mail when she had given him a glass of water. It was addressed to Morgan, at her Cape house. The return address had been a distinctive signature, simply “Richter” in the corner of the envelope. And then, when he had been appraising the books in the library, he had noticed that even though most of the books were inscribed to Heber Johnson, the inscription in at least one of Richter's books had been “To Morgan."
No. As he thought about it again, that book had not been with the others in the library. He had noticed that book in the small study by Morgan's bedroom.
Henry was fairly certain there was something more between Morgan and Richter, and he could say little else. He had not mentioned this yet to O'Connor, because he wondered if it was fair to cause that kind of trouble for someone he did not know, and because, at the moment, he felt some small jealousy. He worried that it was Ranulf's voice he had heard behind Morgan when she called from the Cape.
It only made sense that Morgan, in her loneliness, and having not seen Henry for over six years, might have found someone else to comfort her. And it was none of Henry's business, except that now Morgan was dead and someone was responsible.
He began another page in the notebook now. A page for motive. Only one thing occurred to him, however, through his third cup of coffee, and it sat on the page in a single word.
He wished he had a cigarette. He had quit at the wrong time. Too much was going on. He had always been able to think better when he smoked.
Still, only one motive came to mind, to fill an entire page of empty lines: money.