Being The Steel Drummer Part 35

"Uh huh. Piper Staplehurst came to Fenchester Museum looking for things she could cleverly steal and turn into cash. That's her M.O. She even lucked out by having a door to the underground tunnels just a few feet from her own desk. I'm sure she figured they would give her access to all sorts of lucrative places. But then a sinkhole cut off her easy access to the underground infrastructure just a day or two after she arrived in town. That must have frustrated her. All that was left was a small hole at the top of the pile of fill the city had dumped into the sinkhole. It was just big enough for her to squeeze through, but not a s.p.a.ce she could have moved anything of any size back out.

"She was hoping for a big score, but not having much luck when suddenly Suzanne Carbondale shows up right in Piper's office, happily telling her exactly where Victoria's studio and money were and that there were pa.s.sages to it under Fen House and under the crypt."

"Suzanne showed Piper the studio on Christmas Eve. And Piper killed her so she wouldn't tell anyone else and just left her there," Jessie said softly.

"You knew Piper was the killer all along, didn't you Maggie? How?" asked Kathryn.

"At the neighborhood meeting she was the one yelling out about gangs from the back of the room. I thought that was strange. When Farrel told us about the steel drummer and the drunk I knew they were a scam team, and everyone was saying that Piper was like the steel drummer. I began to think of her as someone with an ulterior motive," I explained. "Her silver sucket fork was the murder weapon. When I saw that the wound in Suzanne's neck looked like a square-toothed vampire bite, I thought of Piper's two-p.r.o.nged fork. She'd told us she carried it with her everywhere. Even in my dream, the steel drummer was eating fruit with a long fork. That's exactly what you use a sucket fork for. But there just wasn't enough motive and I certainly didn't have proof.

"So Piper wanted the gate over the crypt entrance to keep people from finding Suzanne's body?" asked Farrell.

"That's one reason."

"But what about Gabe? How did he get mixed up in all this?" asked Sara.

"Gabe was the one person who would know Suzanne hadn't just gone away. She'd have never left her dearest things behind. Piper didn't want Gabe searching for Suzanne and she also knew there was an entrance to the tunnels in Gabe's bas.e.m.e.nt, which she needed. So she decided to use Gabe. The minute he got back from England, Piper took him to the studio and showed him the sculpture and boxes of antiques that could be turned into money. They opened the first box and looked at what was inside. That's what Frankie found when he followed Piper's trail to the studio.

Piper made sure Gabe left his fingerprints on anything that could implicate him in Suzanne's death. Then she told him Suzanne was dead and that her body was in the studio, and he'd be blamed. She made Gabe help her arrange to gate up the crypt and I think she promised him some money too. So Gabe went along with Piper in sending emails and Facebook messages to make it seem as though Suzanne was still alive. Piper had already used Suzanne's phone to send texts to Jessie and Samson right after she'd killed Suzanne," I said.

"I'm pretty sure Gabe was afraid of Piper too. I don't think he realized that Piper had ruthlessly murdered Suzanne herself until Piper shot Frankie in the cemetery. Gabe wasn't acting when he threw up there. It took all of his Shakespearian skills to convince me and the police about what he'd seen. He was especially frightened after Piper phoned and threatened him later that day, when I was in his house. What Gabe didn't realize was that by being in England when Suzanne was killed he had a solid alibi for her murder."

"That daftie Piper was maniacal whilst dragging me through the rabbit hole," said Nora. "Maggie, I don't think I've really thanked you for saving my life." Nora bowed to me like an actor taking a curtain call. I smiled.

"So the motive was Victoria's money?" asked Sara. "Are we talking about actual hidden cash or simply the value of the art and antiques?"

"Oh, there was cash. Remember the twenty silver dollars a day that Merganser had to pay Victoria? Well, that's what Piper was looking for, and she found it. Victoria had been stashing those coins away for sixty years."

"Where?" asked Farrell incredulously.

"In the plaster and clay bags. It hit me in my dream when Victoria found the coin under her foot in the studio. The money was in the only place it could have been, under her studio in the storage room. The bags in front had real plaster and clay in them, but farther back were over 600 seventy-five-pound sacks of dimes, quarters, fifty-cent pieces, and silver dollars. Buster nabbed one of those dollars out of Piper's hand at gunpoint. And all along I was finding Piper's dusty footprints."

"Explain about Frankie and Red," said Kathryn.

"OK, Piper was trying to turn some of Victoria's silver into working cash while she arranged for trucks to bring in the wrought iron gates and then take out the bags of coins. By the way, that was her main reason for gating the crypts, so that trucks under her control could legitimately be in the historic cemetery. All those bags of coins were very heavy. Anyway, she saw Frankie at a flea market peddling Victoria's possessions. She went back to Victoria's studio and found that one of the boxes of antiques was gone. She figured correctly that Frankie had followed her into the tunnel through the crypt, and she knew he'd be back to get more for the next market. There's one in Gloversville on Monday morning, isn't there?"

Farrell nodded.

"So she hid in the crypt on Sunday, ready to kill Frankie the minute he showed up. She really is ruthless. She was also the one in the van chasing us. The police found it near her apartment. She was trying to get rid of anyone who might have known about what was in the studio."

"How many silver dollars?" asked Cora.

"Over 500,000," calculated Farrel.

"Crikey!" said Nora.

"500,000 dollars, Maggie? I know it sounds like a great deal of money, but in today's economy it isn't such a huge amount," said Judith.

"I agree, Judith," said Kathryn, leaning back in her chair. "All that planning, arranging that grant, getting the van, three murders, staying in Fenchester when she was on the verge of being discovered. The risks were so high. I just can't see why Piper Staplehurst would go to this much trouble for five hundred thousand dollars. She could have converted some of Victoria's sculptures into cash. She couldn't flood the market with a blizzard of Snows, but she could have sold a few and made half a million from them. So much work for such a small amount of money."

Everyone was nodding, except Farrel and me.

"No, Kathryn, you're forgetting something important," I said.

"What?" asked Kathryn.

"That Victoria saved over 500,000 dollars in silver, based on the face value of the dollars, quarters and dimes," I said pointedly. "But each silver dollar is close to an ounce of silver. And in the current market silver has been fluctuating between 30 and 40 dollars an ounce. So... it's not 500,000 dollars we're talking about; it's over 500,000 ounces of silver. That's well over sixteen million dollars!"

Awe settled over the room.

"For a professional thief, sixteen million dollars of stolen merchandise, or even hot paper money, probably has a cash value of less than ten percent, and even that's hard and dangerous to get. But these silver coins could be cashed in at any one of those We Buy Gold shops. There are a dozen of them just in Fenchester. Some of the good shops even pay ninety-five percent of the current market value. This silver wasn't hot either. She probably would have taken most of the sculpture as well. She had the trucks for it. It would have been the perfect crime, if she hadn't had to kill three people."

"Piper also nearly murdered Samson," said Sara.

"Right, but that wasn't quite as pre-meditated. Piper used Suzanne's cell phone to fake texts from Suzanne to her friends. But then Gabe broke his cell when it dropped into Buster's water dish. So Piper gave him Suzanne's phone to call her in case anything was up. Later she took it back to send more fake Suzanne texts. Samson thought he saw Suzanne leave Fen House. When Samson dialed Suzanne's phone he heard his own ringtone coming from Piper's pocket and followed her," I said.

"He followed Piper into the crypt and along to the studio," said Kathryn. "Samson told us he'd seen someone get a hand truck from a van and take it into the crypt. Piper must have wanted to use it to move the heavy bags of coins and couldn't fit it through the narrow pa.s.sage under Fen house. In the studio, Piper heard Samson coming. She set up a candle on the steps to decoy him and then hit him with a plaster mold."

"Kathryn, you're catching on to this private eye stuff," said Sara.

Kathryn shook her head. Then she said, laughing, "Not exactly, Sara. I got the motive wrong, and up until Maggie pulled down Piper's scarf, I thought the killer was Lois Henshaw!"

"Couldn't have been Lois. She has coffee with Sh.e.l.ly at Brews on the Mews every morning, rather than chasing around flea markets," I explained.

"I missed that point," sighed Kathryn.

"But when the going got rough, you saved my life at the library archives. Kathryn, how did you know where Piper was going?"

"Well, Nora uses one of the office phones. I tracked the GPS on it. It showed Nora's phone was going west. In the 1800s when the tunnels were built, there was nothing out there but the college. Everyone at the college knows that the library archives have underground floors. I headed there. On my way, I saw Samson Henshaw. He insisted I tell him what was happening. And I felt I needed some back-up. It was his idea to use a ketchup pack for the blood. He was brave."

"It was risky," I said.

"Maggie, I don't see how Suzanne found Victoria's studio so quickly. There's no studio information in Victoria's archive box. Nothing about where the money was hidden or a pa.s.sage under Fen House either," said Kathryn ignoring my concern.

"Now... There's nothing in there now. I think there were some papers there about the studio and money that Suzanne found and told Piper about. They were probably fairly cryptic, so that the average researcher wouldn't have understood their implication, but to Suzanne they were clear. There could have been a bill for the cost of having the secret pa.s.sage built and receipts for having supplies delivered to the Majestic. Suzanne could have known that Victoria owned the Majestic if she'd seen the public posting of Victoria's will. I'm guessing Victoria paid for the pa.s.sage herself, but I think Merganser was the one who set up the crypt pa.s.sage, to run all sorts of black market items through.

"After Piper killed Suzanne she had plenty of time to remove those papers from the library archives, smuggle them out in a pocket or something and delete all the references to Victoria Snow from the computer files when a librarian was away from the terminal. In that way no one else could ever find Victoria's information again."

"Except Isabella Santiago!" said Amanda brightly, then shook her head at my questioning glance.

We were eating apple pie. Jessie was pa.s.sing around the coffee pot. The meal had taken most of the day. It was getting dark out. I heard Wagner and Griswold merfing and owing on the stairs, hesitating because that giant dog was in their house again.

"Kathryn has uncovered something else in the journals," I said.

"Victoria gave money to various charities and traveled quite a bit, especially to South America. Though she was reclusive in Fenchester, she was selling in a number of galleries, so the income from her work easily paid for all her expenses. Everyone knew she was getting the twenty dollars a day commission fee from Merganser Hunterdon, but there was only about thirty thousand dollars in her bank account when she died. Even at the time, people speculated where the rest of the money was," said Kathryn.

"She wanted it to all go to Irwin. That's what her will says. But if you ask me, I think she wanted to have Merganser's silver in one place before she finally gave it away," I said.

Kathryn nodded. "The interesting thing, though, is no one has really wondered why she was paid so much. Victoria made Merganser pay her for the rest of their lives and they both lived into their nineties. It was as though each of them was trying to outlive the other. It turns out the key is the line Victoria carved into the wall of the crypt: Man Must Chase The Demon Messenger Of Grief With Unbound Charity.

"What do you think it means, dear?" Judith asked Kathryn.

"I think Victoria was talking about Merganser chasing the demon, but the demon of grief was Victoria herself," said Kathryn simply.

"I just don't understand. Why would that misogynist, crooked, thieving, weasel Merganser consent to give Victoria so much money?" said Farrel. "He must have hated her!"

"He gave her the money because General Merganser Hunterdon murdered Evangeline Fen, and Victoria could prove it."

Everyone gasped.

"He cheated all those people out of their money, and he was a murderer, too?" asked Sara.

"I'm afraid so," said Kathryn. "Victoria had evidence that proves Merganser Hunterdon hired a trio of... well, ruffians is too gentle... they were thugs, to head off Evangeline's horse and make sure she had a fatal accident that broke her neck."

"Oh no," said Jessie. "It's so sad. I'm not sure I want to hear this part."

I thought about my dream. The frightening riderless horse chasing Evangeline. It hadn't needed Merganser to ride it, because he'd hired someone else as the hit man.

"Jessie, Victoria didn't write much about the accident. She didn't even write about the funeral. I think she was devastated. But she finally got a grip on herself and found a renewed purpose. Shall I read some? "

Everyone nodded. So Kathryn opened her bag, put on her white cotton gloves, and carefully drew out Victoria Snow's second journal.

"This was written about a year after Evangeline died," Kathryn began.

Date, July 4th, 1879 Three years after the nation's centennial, and I find myself alone and independent. Demons have haunted my dreams and crushed my spirit. I have felt little since the pa.s.sing of my beloved Angel.

I had seriously considered taking my own meaningless life, but now my beloved brother Franklin, who has been my only rock, has brought me the evidence of the horrible deed committed by the devil incarnate, Merganser Hunterdon. Perhaps anyone else would have kept the truth about my beloved's death from me, yet Franklin has understood that my sense of justice could overcome my grief.

Yet I drew out a volume of Anne's poems and found: I dreamed an angel, Angel twice, through death, Wrought us another "Night." A stately dream, Where reconciling Infinites did seem To fold round life's perplexities, and wreath Its ancient glooms with stars: - a marble breath From Art's serene, fresh, everlasting morn, Where the dull worm of earthly pain is born To winged life thenceforth, and busieth With golden messages its mortal hours.

O the Divine, earth would have wronged and slain!

Its pangs are rays above her falling towers Of lovelier truth - breaths of a sweet disdain Shedding strange nothingness on meaner pain, Drops of the bleeding G.o.d that turn to flowers.

And so this very afternoon I visited our rock pool and there I experienced an epiphany accompanied by a ray of blinding light that struck the deepest regions of my soul. I fully believe it was sent to me by my Angel.

My two glorious years with my beautiful Evangeline were filled with pa.s.sion and the brilliant light of the most generous and giving woman in the universe. She had humor and intelligence unparalleled. She was kindness personified. Though I fancy myself a competent artist, my contribution to society pales to a puny flicker in comparison to what Evangeline was able to do in just a mere twenty-four months.

My dear brother has brought me the sworn statements and indeed the witnesses who would bring swift justice upon this evil man. Yet, I will not seek the arm of the law. It is too lenient, too gentle.

Today I commit my life to honoring Evangeline and punishing the minion of Satan who took her away from this world.

My dear brother has compelled this evil murderer to sign a complete confession and consent to act as an instrument for good and generosity. Some would say I was committing acts of blackmail, and perhaps it is so. But those leaders of the State still seek to compel me, and indeed the memory of Evangeline, to allow Hunterdon to act as a financial figurehead to ensure the stability of the economy. And they too do so with the action of threat and coercion based on the evidence of his evil deeds.

I will see to it that every cent of this evil man's money goes toward the civic projects Evangeline envisioned. I will allow him liberty as long as he suffers everyday. Especially as I shall act as the demon messenger of grief, p.r.i.c.king his horrible soul with a pikestaff dipped in brimstone as punishment for his most evil deed. Every plan he makes for his own wealth and fame I shall foil, every misstep he takes, I will cause him to stumble and fall. I myself cannot emulate the sweetness and light, and indeed forgiveness of my beautiful Evangeline. Yes, I am the ant.i.thesis. I shall act as an earthly devil and shall dedicate myself to creating the h.e.l.lfire in which this man must burn.

Perhaps I shall create a statue of him with his back to me, to symbolize his inability to know how I contrive to torment him.

And I shall be sure that I take good care of my safety, for I will live a long life fueled by my mission. I shall celebrate everything about my Angel in my work, and I shall use the devil's wealth never for my personal benefit, but to do good in the world. The contract he signed yesterday shall require he pay me twenty dollars in silver a day. He will bring them to me each evening in supplicatory penance, a daily reminder of his sins, and of the one who holds his reins. Further, he must spend every discretionary cent beyond, to make this City a better place.

My hollow life now has new meaning. And though I take on the pitchfork of the devil, I am sure my Evangeline will understand, and will surely delight in the good works I shall bring to fruition. And while I shall not find joy ever again, the action of my pitchfork shall bring me satisfaction.

"Well, this is quite a turn of events. Victoria Snow fueled by vengeance and Merganser Hunterdon compelled by nothing more than fear. No doubt it was the tip of Victoria's pikestaff that caused him to drop out of the Senate race after he had won the primary," said Amanda. "Is there anything that can confirm Victoria's condemnation of Merganser?"

"Victoria notated a legal doc.u.ment that should still be on file. The Philadelphia law firm founded by her brother is still in existence. All I have to do is request to see the doc.u.ment," said Kathryn.

Epilog

Piper Staplehurst was convicted. No one had to testify because she took a plea. For someone so calculating, Piper had made many foolish mistakes. She'd left a huge amount of incriminating evidence around her apartment. Everything from the big gun that had killed Frankie to the sucket fork were in plain sight in her kitchen. She even had a bag of silver dollars and one of Victoria's sculptures under her bed. And though the fingerprints on the gun that shot Gabe were too smudged to incriminate anyone, the powder blowback from the shot was on Piper's hands. She was sentenced to life plus 200 years.

Suzanne's sister claimed her body for a funeral in Illinois. Jessie and Farrel hosted a local memorial for her in their home that ran all day. Hundreds of people attended.

Gabe's memorial was more complicated. He'd been blackmailed into crime, he hadn't killed anyone, and he had no family to claim his body. Yet Gabe had covered up Suzanne's disappearance at least partly from greed. Perhaps if he'd spoken up, Frankie and Gabriel himself wouldn't have been murdered. Ultimately, it was Jessie who took charge of Gabe. She and Farrel paid for his cremation and spread his ashes in the Washington Mews Cemetery.

"It's what Suzanne would have wanted," Jessie explained.

Red Kibbey disappeared after getting probation for conversion of property. He left Frankie's remains to the city to deal with. Frankie's older and more dangerous partners in crime, Cue and Willie, went to prison for home invasion and robbery, for five years. They got out in eight months.

The millions of dollars of Victoria's money rightfully went to the Irwin College Fen Scholarship Fund as Victoria had directed. The more than one hundred Snow sculptures in her studio went to the college as well. The college created a spectacular traveling exhibition of her newly found work. Kathryn wrote the catalogue notes for it. The large work of Evangeline emerging from the stone traveled with the exhibition and then was installed as the focal point in the grand foyer of the fine arts building. It further established Victoria Willomere Snow as one of America's greatest 19th century sculptors.

Irwin College was so happy I'd found the sixteen million dollars and the Snow sculptures they wanted to give me the standard finder's fee. I suggested quite a bit less if they let Kathryn and Farrel keep the Snow sculptures they'd purchased from Frankie. The college agreed as long as those works could be part of the traveling exhibition for a year. The reduced finder's fee still paid off my entire home improvement loan.

Kathryn located Merganser Hunterdon's confession at the Snow, Platt, Raymond, and Fen law firm in Philadelphia. When she got back from visiting their offices she told me, "One of Evangeline's great-great-nieces heads the firm."

"Evangeline's great-great-niece? What's her first name?"

Katherine answered with her s.e.xy half-smile, "Lavender."

"Uh huh," I nodded, "and what does she look like?"

"Well, I'd say she looks like. Hmmm, how shall I put this, like... Victoria's heart's desire."

"I'm surprised you're back so soon," I said wryly.

"My dear," Kathryn returned, putting her arms around me, "Victoria's heart's desire is not my heart's desire."

When she got all her notes together, Kathryn applied for a grant to produce her book about Victoria Snow. She received confirmation of it in record time. With part of it she hired Nora to be her part-time research a.s.sistant, which extended Nora's educational fellowship.

Nora continued to work part-time for Sara and Emma and continued to hold Kathryn in awe despite her best efforts to lighten up. I suspected Kathryn was teasing her by using her academic voice in its lowest register whenever they spoke. And I suspected Nora kind of liked it.

Amanda and Buster seemed to understand each other. She took Buster to her office at Clymer House at Irwin each day. He became a favorite fixture at the college.