I left the letter in the day pack and watched her intently, wondering what she wanted to show me. Her search produced a folded newspaper clipping. When she unfolded the clipping, I saw that it was the same size as the blank spot I’d noticed on the corkboard in her bedroom and that it had a telltale pinhole in each corner. A. J. had apparently written a lengthy account of his life because the typeface was miniscule.
I expected Bree to pass the clipping to me, but she kept hold of it.
“Tell me about my great-grandaunts,” she said, without preamble. “What did they do for a living before they retired?”
“I don’t think they did anything for a living,” I replied readily. It seemed only natural that Bree should be curious about her newly discovered relatives. “They’re magnificent gardeners and accomplished seamstresses and they’re on the flower-arranging rota at the local church, but as far as I know, neither one of them has ever held a paying job.”
“Have they ever had any trouble making ends meet?” Bree asked.
“No,” I said. “And believe me, if they had, I would have heard about it. News like that gets around faster than fleas in Finch.” I smiled. “You don’t have to be concerned about them, Bree. Ruth and Louise live quite comfortably.”
“My great-grandaunts have never worked a day in their lives, yet they live quite comfortably.” Bree raised her pierced eyebrow. “Haven’t you ever wondered how they pay for their comforts?”
I shrugged. “I assumed that their father—”
“Their father was a village parson,” Bree interrupted impatiently. “Even if he’d scrimped and saved, he couldn’t have left them enough money to enable them to live in comfort for the rest of their lives.”
“I suppose not,” I acknowledged equably. “I’m sorry, but I can’t answer your question, Bree. I don’t know anything about your great-grandaunts’ financial affairs.”
“Granddad did.” She glanced down at the newspaper clipping, then stowed it and Ruru in her bag. “Granddad wrote about the English aunts in his obituary.”
“What did he write?” I asked.
Once Bree started speaking the words came tumbling out, as if she’d longed to confide in someone but had known full well that no one would believe or understand her. The intensity of her loneliness came home to me as I realized that there were only two people in her entire country to whom her story would make sense. One was the American woman who sat in front of her, and the other was sitting on a park bench, waiting for me.
“My great-grandfather, Aubrey Jeremiah Pym, Senior, was for a short time one of the wealthiest men in New Zealand,” she began. “He got rich by marrying an heiress named Stella McConchie.”
In my mind’s eye I saw the silver-framed wedding portrait Cameron and I had discovered on the mantelshelf in A. J.’s filthy flat. Cameron had said at the time that it looked as though Aubrey had married money, and Bree had confirmed his guess. Aubrey, it seemed, had used his charm and his dashing good looks to jump to the top of the social ladder in his adopted country.
“When he took control of Stella’s money,” Bree was saying, “the first thing he did was to set up a trust fund for the sisters he’d left behind in England. He tied it up in miles of red tape because he didn’t want his father to touch a penny of it. He’d never gotten on well with his father.”
I leaned forward, intrigued. It had never occurred to me that the family’s black sheep, an unrepentant scoundrel who’d committed every sin short of cold-blooded murder, would behave so magnanimously.
“Aubrey didn’t get on well with the McConchie family, either,” Bree went on. “They didn’t approve of him, so when Stella died in childbirth and Aubrey reverted to his bad old habits, they turned their backs on him and his newborn son. Aubrey drank and gambled his way through the rest of his fortune in less than a year. His sisters’ money was safe, though. Aubrey had tied it up so tightly that not even he could touch it. When he died in the Great War, therefore, his penniless son was put into an orphanage.”
I thought of the mustachioed man holding the lace-bedecked baby in the arched entryway of ChristChurch Cathedral, and bowed my head. Aubrey had gone from rags to riches in five short years, but while he’d enjoyed the riches, his son had been left nothing but rags.
“Granddad beat the odds,” said Bree, with a wan smile. “He had a rough start at the orphanage, but he made a success of his life. Then he and Gran had Ed. I don’t know what they did to deserve a son like Ed, but it must have been terrible because Ed grew up to be a worthless piece of . . . tripe.”