Free Spider Dance by Carole Nelson Douglas Page A

element of ritual to the method, if not the means.”
    “This is a brutal and senseless puzzle.”
    “The first, yes, but I beg to differ on the second. It is a commonplace to call what is brutal senseless, but I have found the opposite to be the case. It is simply that the motive is not evident and makes no sense to us yet”

8
F AMILY M YSTERY

    In any appreciation of the American Renaissance, as the period
from the 1870s to the first world war is sometimes called, the era
that saw the United States emerge from its earlier republican
simplicity and isolation to ingest the glories of European art
and culture, some account has to be taken of the Vanderbdts
.
— LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
    F ROM THE C ASE N OTES OF S HERLOCK H OLMES
    I’d gotten my old briarwood going and rose to stretch my legs while I marshaled my thoughts into a form that would penetrate a millionaire’s brain, addled as it must be with buying and selling men and machines.
    I was, in a sense, taking the stage in order to keep the attention of this surprisingly dense man. He made Watson glitter like the veriest Aristotle by comparison.
    “Mr. Vanderbilt, I have had cases laid before me by everyone from humble clerks to the crowned heads of Europe. In each instance, they reported a puzzle or a dilemma that often had them fearing for their fortunes, their lives, their very sanity. At all times the circumstances that brought them to me were strange, frightening, and contradictory. In all cases, every one, I was the mere epilogue to a string of events that were rooted firmly in my clients’ pasts.
    “I am not much a reader of fiction or drama, but I can say that if there is a motto that guides my detection work, it wasuttered by England’s Will Shakespeare four hundred years ago. ‘The past is prologue.’ I know not the play or the speaker, and I don’t care. To help you, I must know your past and that of your forebears.”
    “My father has been dead these five years, and my grandfather, the Commodore, has been gone for twelve.”
    “Again to quote the Bard, and I assure you I don’t have a large store of such: ‘Age cannot wither nor custom stale’ the interest to be found in a saga of worldly success built from a pittance. I presume that was the Commodore’s story, or was he truly a well-born and placed soul?”
    And so I invited upon myself the usual rags-to-riches fairy story, save that it was set against the rude American background of a frontier becoming a world force.
    Invited to tell the family tale, the affable William Kissam Vanderbilt, a handsome man only a few years my senior, selected another Havana cigar and gestured me back into the comfortable armchair.
    “The Commodore was not an official title, as you divined,” be began. “It came as a result of his extensive shipping interests, and, I suppose, a certain commanding manner.”
    He nodded at a black-and-white sketch on the wall framed by a broad border of gilt that would have overpowered the subject had he not been a lean old man of martial bearing. His hat and cane occupied each hand, and he wore a high-buttoned frock coat with the soft collar and tie favored at midcentury, or earlier.
    “A large man, I see, muscular and athletic. Something of a frontiersman in his youth, like your president, Andrew Jackson.”
    My dapper host blinked in amazement. Ah, it is good to encounter a portable Watson now and then. “How on earth did you know that, Mr. Holmes? There can’t be much knowledge of our family’s roots in England.”
    I nodded at the sketch. “All the knowledge I need is there. His size I determined from the length of his arms and size of the hat in relation to the figure we see from head to knees.His firm grasp upon the walking stick implies a man who has had more concrete rudders in his hands than metaphorical ones. The knuckles are also enlarged, either the sign of a pugilist or a laborer”
    “My grandfather was born in a Staten Island farmhouse.”
    “Modest, I