The Bone Key

  “I’m treating it as if it were a real archaeological site,” she said to me at lunch, when I brought her sandwiches and a bottle of water. “Just in case Dr. Starkweather is wrong, and we ought to have notified the police yesterday, at least they’ll know where everything was.”

  “Do you think . . . that is, will there be trouble?”

  “I doubt it,” she said, taking a generous swallow of water. “The Police Commissioner’s sister is a docent. Come to think of it, Commissioner Harmon probably already knows. And he’s probably just as glad to let the museum handle it. I shouldn’t be surprised if we were asked to lose the body.”

  “What?”

  “Scandal, darling,” she said, amused. “If this gets made public, half the city is going to find itself embroiled in a very sticky and embarrassing mess. Vernon Stanhope paid once to have it all hushed up, and I imagine his heirs will do the same. And the police aren’t going to want to trumpet it to the reverberate hills, either. Too many questions about how come they didn’t find her fifty-five years ago. Old incompetence is incompetence still.”

  “But Mrs. Stanhope . . . ”

  “Yes, Mr. Booth?”

  “I don’t know. But she was murdered.”

  “You are an idealist, I see,” Miss Coburn said and raised a sardonic eyebrow.

  “I . . . ” My nerve broke. I mumbled some disjointed excuse and fled back to the dumb-waiter to find out if Mr. Lucent was ready for the next load of boxes

  At two-thirty, Miss Coburn announced her readiness, at last, to retrieve the mysterious bundle; neither she nor I was willing to mention our speculations as to its contents. Mr. Lucent insisted that he had to be a witness, and when he arrived, it was in the company of several of his bosom friends, who also apparently had to be witnesses. Although Miss Coburn was deeply annoyed, to judge by the look she gave Mr. Lucent, in the end I think it was probably for the best.

  We all watched, clumped around the storeroom like a particularly odd set of statuary, as she crawled halfway into Madeline Stanhope’s de facto tomb. I could see now why she had refused to go after the bundle until the skeleton was properly accounted for—she put her hand in a spot initially occupied by a random assortment of ribs and vertebrae. She stretched, with a noise midway between a grunt and a gasp, and then came back out, holding a moldering linen bag, its drawstring tied shut with a knot of Gordian complexity. She produced a man’s penknife from her skirt pocket and cut the bag open with the ruthlessness of a pirate.

  “Oh!” said Miss Coburn, and, a moment later, “Oh!” said all of the watchers.

  It was the Venebretti Necklace.

  II

  I went with Miss Coburn when she took the necklace to Dr. Starkweather and explained to him everything we knew about its finding place, including the hypothetical identity of its grisly keeper. I said nothing, but I saw and heard, a witness and a bulwark against Dr. Starkweather’s anger. Miss Coburn had, after all, done no more than what he asked of her.

  I emerged from Dr. Starkweather’s office feeling rather as if I had just rounded Cape Horn in a typhoon; judging from her face, Miss Coburn felt the same.

  “Well,” she said. “What now?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Are you just going to leave it there? Woman, necklace, wall—how nice and pass the cucumber sandwiches?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was going to the stacks.”

  “The stacks?” Miss Coburn echoed, then she smiled wryly. “Of course. Trust an archivist. May I come with you?”

  “ . . . If you like.”

  “ ’Satiable curiosity, like the Elephant Child. Come on, then.”

  And somehow it ended up that I followed her into the stacks, although it had been my idea.

  The stacks—officially the Mathilda Rushton Parrington Memorial Library Annex, dedicated by Samuel Mather Parrington’s daughters to the memory of their grandmother—were truthfully a part of the museum in which I was just as glad to have company. The Annex was a square tower, extending three stories above the ground and three below, with two levels of stacks per story, each floored with an echoing iron grill: twelve levels of dark, cramped, overpoweringly musty, and labyrinthine shelving. The electric lights were even more unpredictable here than in the basements, although the bulbs rarely burned out. It was simply that sometimes the switches worked and sometimes they did not. And sometimes, if one happened to be alone in the stacks, the lights would go on, one level above or one level below, and then after a minute, as one stood there, clammy-handed, debating whether one ought to investigate or flee, the lights would go off again—leaving one with nothing to do but return to one’s researches, no matter how much one’s hand-writing wobbled. Although perhaps that only happened to me, just as no one else had ever confessed to hearing footsteps not their own echoing in the empty stairwell. But the other archivists hated the stacks, even though they tried to pretend they did not.

  The stacks were emphatically off-limits to the public and always kept locked. Miss Coburn had a key, as did I; there was no way to do any kind of research in the Parrington without visiting the stacks. Individual departments were strongly discouraged from keeping separate collections, although a certain amount of hoarding had always been politely overlooked by Dr. Evans. We were all dreading what would happen when Dr. Starkweather noticed.

  Miss Coburn locked the door behind us, again following the museum’s strict policy, and then raised her eyebrows at me. “Where to?”

  “Bottom level.”

  “It would be. What’s down there?”

  “The, er, meta-archives.”

  “The what?”

  I opened the door to the stairs and waved her ahead of me. “Inventories, directors’ memorandum books, notes of departmental meetings . . . et cetera.”

  “I had no idea we kept things like that.”

  “The museum may lose things,” I said, “but it never throws them away.”

  Our voices echoed eerily up and down the shaft. I followed Miss Coburn down the stairs, both of us gripping the handrail; the stairs twisted in a tight, steep corkscrew, and it was lethally easy to lose your footing. When I had been hired, and Mr. Spaulding had been showing me around, he had told me that ten years previously, a junior archivist had slipped and fallen down the stairs, breaking his neck along with a generous assortment of his other bones. The corpse had lain at the bottom of the stairs for two days before anyone found him. It was the sort of story that was impossible to disbelieve, whether it was true or not. Another reason I hated the Annex.

  The levels were labeled with Greek letters, the lowest being the appropriate ω, rather than the correct μ. It was not a comfort. I opened the door, and Miss Coburn and I stepped into ω; I flipped the light switch. The lights went on, and I was able to breathe again.

  My memory always insists that ω is dank, even though my intellect knows that the first observed drop of water would have every curator in the museum baying for blood. It is not dank, merely musty, the air stale and thick with dust.

  “All the charm of the family crypt,” Miss Coburn muttered, but she did not suggest retreat.

  I knew what I wanted, and I knew roughly where to find it. It was Miss Coburn’s turn to follow me; the aisles were too narrow for two people to walk abreast. They were almost too narrow for two people to pass each other, even if they both turned sideways. The obese and jovial Mr. Paulson from Armor and Weapons could not come into the stacks at all.

  “Spend much time down here?” Miss Coburn said.

  I stopped and glanced back at her. “ . . . No. Why?”

  “You seem to know your way around.”

  “Would you rather be lost?” I said waspishly, and then was appalled. “I beg your pardon, Miss Coburn. I didn’t mean . . . that is, I shouldn’t have . . . ”

  “Why not? I was asking for it.” She laughed at my expression. “Clearly, Mr. Booth, you have no siblings.”

  “No.”

  “It’s all right. I’m not off
ended. Let’s get this done, though, shall we? I’m not enjoying the ambiance.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, of course.”

  I found what I sought two aisles further in. Samuel Mather Parrington had had a mania for documentation; he had insisted that each director of the museum should keep what he called a log—vaguely akin to a ship’s log—a notation of the museum’s day to day business. I had no idea what purpose Mr. Parrington had intended for his logs, but they served in practice as a kind of rough index to aid the hapless researcher in determining which of the boxes of archived material he needed. The system was far from infallible, but it was better than no system at all.

  I knelt down to scan the row of ledgers, each with the director’s name and the dates, inclusive, of the ledger’s contents. “Fifty-five years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  The director then had been one Havilland DeWitt, a relative nonentity in the history of the Parrington. I found the appropriate ledger, noting that the one after it was labeled “H. Catesby-Stanton.” I was not exactly surprised to learn that the end of Mr. DeWitt’s tenure had coincided with the loss of the Venebretti Necklace, but it sent an unpleasant frisson through me all the same.

  He was probably just dismissed, I said to myself.

  It took me only a brief perusal of the ledger to find the disappearance of the necklace. Mr. DeWitt had boxed that entry off with a black border, as if it were a funeral card, and it began, “A very black day for the Museum indeed.” I read the entry through, frowning, then handed the ledger to Miss Coburn and said, “Does this seem . . . overdone to you?”

  She read it. “It’s certainly overwrought,” she said, “and there’s distinctly a note of suppressed hysteria. But what do you mean by ‘overdone’ ?”

  “Nothing,” I said, flipping to the last few entries, some three-quarters of the way through the ledger. There was no mention of tension, of conflict, or even of dissatisfaction. Havilland DeWitt had not, it was clear, left the museum with any kind of warning. I was liking this less and less, if such a thing were possible.

  I put the ledger back and stood up. “We want his memorandum book.”

  “We do?” Miss Coburn said doubtfully, following me. “I suppose . . . it had occurred to me that the person most suited to the particulars of this murder would be the person running the museum. No one he would have to account to for his movements; the run of the building—and the keys; the ability to, for instance, designate that particular room to hold the collected letters of Jephthah Strong . . . ”

  The directors’ personal memorandum books—another of Mr. Parrington’s ukases—were kept in rows and rows of boxes. Some directors, I knew, disliking the idea that all of their day-to-day concerns would be preserved for posterity, kept two memorandum books, one for the museum and one for themselves. Dr. Evans had been one, but from the florid bombast of Havilland DeWitt’s log, I was guessing he was not.

  “Here,” I said, pulling out the box labeled DeWitt. “Maybe I’m wrong, but let’s start with—I’m afraid . . . that is, this may take a while.”

  “I asked for it,” said Miss Coburn cheerfully, as she had said earlier, and settled herself on the floor.

  I found the memorandum book covering the period of the necklace’s disappearance and handed it to Miss Coburn. “If you’ll start here, I have one other . . . ” Two cases down and across the aisle were the scrapbooks of press cuttings, the first assignment of each junior curator the museum hired. I wanted to see what had made the papers when Havilland DeWitt left the Parrington.

  The week after his last entry in the log, I found his obituary. I skimmed it, but was jarred to a stop by the second to last paragraph: “Mr. DeWitt was known for his tireless devotion to the museum, and his dedication is exemplified by his death. His assistant, Mr. Roland Laughton, explained that Mr. DeWitt was contemplating a ‘massive reorganization and inventory,’ beginning with the museum’s basements. Mr. Laughton said that Mr. DeWitt must have descended to the basement after the staff had left for the day, and thus he died alone, surrounded by the artifacts to which he had devoted his life.”

  “Oh dear,” I said.

  “What?”

  I read her the paragraph.

  Miss Coburn ticked the salient points off on her fingers. “By himself, in the basement, after hours. I’d like to believe there’s an innocent explanation for that, but I’m finding it difficult.”

  “It does suggest guilty knowledge, at least, if not . . . ”

  “Actual guilt? When did he die?”

  “About a year after the necklace disappeared.”

  “And Madeline Stanhope.”

  “ . . . Yes. I’m sorry. I wasn’t . . . that is, I didn’t mean to be callous.”

  “And I didn’t mean to sound as if I was rebuking you. It’s so much easier not to think of her that I have to keep reminding myself. This isn’t really about the necklace.”

  “No,” I said. I returned the scrapbook to its proper place and came back to where Miss Coburn was sitting with the memorandum books. I sat down, feeling even gawkier and more awkward than usual, and said, “Have you found anything?”

  “This man could bore a stone to sleep?” she offered. “Other than that, nothing except some gloating remarks about the museum’s good fortune in acquiring the necklace.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Keep looking.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, just enough under her breath that I could pretend I had not heard her, although I am sure my blush betrayed me. I picked up Mr. DeWitt’s last memorandum book and started reading.

  He was verbose and, as Miss Coburn had remarked, monumen-

  tally dull. For some time, we both read in silence; I was straining my ears for footsteps, tapping, or the other strange noises that I sometimes heard when I was in the stacks by myself, but heard nothing.

  “That’s interesting,” Miss Coburn said.

  “ . . . What?”

  “He says he doesn’t think the necklace is safe.”

  We sat for a moment, considering the implications of that. Then I said, “Does he say . . . that is, is there a . . . a reason?”

  “No. It seems to come out of a clear blue sky. No recorded incidents, no comments from the trustees . . . just all at once he says he doesn’t think the necklace is safe. He’s worried that it’s ‘vulnerable to the general public,’ and he’s planning to assign another guard to that gallery—which can’t have made him very popular.”

  I thought of the skirmishing between departments to get guards assigned to their particular treasures, and had to agree.

  “Maybe we had it backwards,” Miss Coburn said. “Maybe DeWitt is the hero in this little drama.”

  “Then how did Mrs. Stanhope end up . . . ”

  “I’ll keep looking,” Miss Coburn said.

  The memoranda for the last months of Mr. DeWitt’s life were almost oppressively normal, and relentless in their tedium. He was planning a buying trip to Europe, arguing with the trustees about the museum’s budget, waging a campaign to educate the docents in the niceties of French and Italian pronunciation. The first two times I saw a reference to his “plans,” I assumed it meant one of these concerns, but the third time, it was at the end of an entry full of self-congratulation over his progress on all three fronts. The “plans” had to be something else.

  While I was puzzling over that, Miss Coburn said, “Oh dear.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been reading about Maria Vittoria Venebretti.”

  “Oh.” I thought it through, and asked, “What was he reading?”

  “My Italian isn’t very good, but off-hand I’d say the word diavolo is a bad sign.” She handed me the memorandum book, open to the relevant page.

  I scanned down the list, my stomach becoming a harder, colder knot with each entry. Then I turned the page.

  “He . . . he wasn’t just reading about Maria Vittoria Venebretti. He was reading the books she would have read.”

  “Which positively be
gs the question: why?”

  “I can’t . . . ”

  “I fancy we can put Mr. Havilland DeWitt firmly back on the villain side of the equation.”

  We sat in grim, cold silence for a moment; I did not know about Miss Coburn, but my mind was full of images of Madeline Stanhope’s bones, her vertebrae like gruesome counters in a children’s game, that sad clump of phalanges I wished I had never seen, her skull. Hamlet had been disgusted by the solid heft of mortality; I was filled with a vast, hopeless desire to protect a woman who had died before my own birth. But I could not reach her, just as Hamlet had not been able to reach the man he had once loved.

  “He must have been trying to do something,” Miss Coburn said, jerking me back from my morbid reverie.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The evidence we’ve got so far doesn’t so much as mention Madeline Stanhope, but it has quite a lot to say about the Venebretti Necklace. If there was a plot here, it wasn’t aimed against her. If DeWitt’s our man, then this wasn’t about her at all. She was just . . . inconvenient.”

  “Or too convenient to waste,” I muttered, still transfixed by that neat, methodical, and entirely insane list of books.

  “What?”

  I handed the memorandum book back to her. “While you were . . . talking to your aunt last night, I was . . . that is, I have read many of the same books as Mr. DeWitt, and, er, there are . . . there could be reasons. If he bricked her up alive . . . ”

  “Which certainly appears to be the case. What sort of reasons?”

  “Nothing I want to talk about here or . . . ” I looked at my watch. “Oh God.”

  “What?” she said, scrambling to her feet as I did.

  “It’s six o’clock. The museum’s closed.”

  She did not ask me why that mattered, either because my fright was infectious, or because she had heard the stories for herself. Even those employees, such as myself, who habitually worked late hours did not go into the stacks after the museum closed. We all knew that the next time it might be us lying at the bottom of the stairs for two days before we were found.

  When I opened the door to the stairwell, I heard the faint, echoing tap-tap-tap of footsteps even before I reached for the stairwell’s light switch. One glance at Miss Coburn’s white face told me she heard them, too.