Family Vault by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

Studebaker continued to run like a charm and was no doubt a fairly valuable antique by now. Some day, perhaps, they’d relegate it to the shed at Ireson’s Landing with the Milburn, and get themselves something to ride in that wasn’t a collector’s item.
    Some day, maybe, Sarah would pry Alexander loose from this ruinously expensive, hard-to-maintain town house and move into a place of her own. She was sick of Beacon Hill, sick of never being able to get her hands on a little spending money, sick to death of being married to Aunt Caroline. That day, the sofa cushions got the beating of their lives.
    Work, as always, was therapy. It wasn’t until Mariposa was gone, the mops and brooms put away for another week, and Sarah soaking off the dust in a hot tub, that she had time to start worrying again. Alexander and his mother ought to be back any minute now, provided he hadn’t fallen into another of those frozen trances and cracked up the Studebaker. She ought to have left Mariposa to cope and gone with him. He wasn’t fond of driving long distances at any time, and in his present state the trip must have been sheer murder.
    She wished she hadn’t thought of that word. Ruby Redd had almost certainly been murdered, according to a story in the morning paper which Sarah had been able to wrest away before Mariposa used it to protect the newly scrubbed kitchen linoleum. The skull had been caved in at the back by a blow that was unlikely to have been accidental, especially in view of the macabre entombment. An investigation would be made, but little hope was held out for a solution.
    That meant a few perfunctory inquiries, no doubt, then one more file left to collect dust. Boston had too many fresh corpses turning up in vacant lots and alleyways for the police to spend much time on a crime that might or might not have occurred some thirty years ago.
    Sarah was absolutely convinced that Tim O’Ghee had been murdered, too, but there wasn’t even an outside chance the police would ever get to investigate that death, unless the undertaker found a bullet lodged in his heart. That wouldn’t happen. Probably no undertaker would be called in. Thanks to modern technology, bodies were a lot easier to get rid of than they used to be. Anyway, why shoot him when it would be so easy to inject poison? Even if the body were examined, one more hypodermic puncture in the flesh of someone who took insulin regularly would never be noticed.
    Again she felt a compulsion to ask herself if Alexander could have done such a thing? Physically, yes. There was an old hypodermic needle of Uncle Gilbert’s still in the house and plenty of poisons available: things like bleach and lye in the kitchen, atropine in Aunt Caroline’s eye drops, a croton growing in the drawing room bay window and heaven knew what else, plus that bag of candy he himself had bought, ready to take along and set the scene.
    Alexander had driven his mother out to Dolph’s early yesterday morning, some time before Sarah left the house. Aunt Caroline wouldn’t know if he swung around through South Boston and left her sitting in the car while he pretended to be doing some trivial errand. Finding Mrs. Wandelowski out shopping might have been a lucky accident, or else he could have phoned first pretending to be the serviceman from the gas company or something, and learned that she was about to leave the house. The lock on that ramshackle door would present no difficulty to his talented fingers. He could have been in and out before anybody in that virtually deserted neighborhood knew he was there.
    Of course the whole notion was absurd. Alexander would have to know where the old barman lived, that Tim was diabetic, that he had a landlady who shopped over on the Avenue in the mornings.
    Perhaps he did know. Tim might have been boarding in that same house for years and years, ever since Alexander’s student days. He might have talked about his flashy landlady, might have refused to let