Free City of Brass by Edward D. Hoch Page A

also involves Foster Baine and me?”
    “You’re worried about the scandal? You’re apparently not worried about being seen driving around town with an old boy friend.”
    “That kind of talk never worried me,” she answered smugly, and turned the car onto a bumpy dirt road. “Hang on, we’re almost there.”
    “Almost where?”
    “To the Baine family secret. The skeleton in the closet.”
    “Does your husband know you’re taking me out here?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Some things have to be done. You want to know about Professor Wilber’s work and I’m going to tell you. Maybe then you’ll be convinced it doesn’t concern Cathy Clark’s killing.”
    I sat back in the seat, trying to relax, and presently we topped a ridge to look down on a rambling old house that might have been something out of Hawthorne or Dickens. Certainly it was a house from the past, a house that had seen a good century of life and death. Yet some small attempts had been made to modernize it—a bright brick chimney contrasted sharply with the drabness of the faded gray sideboards. We passed a single wooden name sign bearing the simple word Baine, and this too looked somehow old and faded.
    “The family homestead?” I asked her.
    She nodded. “Foster was born in this house.”
    “But his parents are dead, aren’t they?”
    She pulled up and parked behind a black Ford, the only other car in sight. “Most people think so. You lose track so easily of widows after their famous husbands pass on.”
    “You mean Foster Baine’s mother is still living in there?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. She was already out of the car, heading up the front steps with quick, sure strides. I followed, a bit uncertainly.
    The door was opened to her ring by a dumpy, middle-aged woman who could only have been a cook. “Hello, Gerta,” Betty Baine said. “How is she today?”
    The woman shrugged. “The same. She’s always the same.”
    “Has Father Fox been here today?”
    “Sure. He comes every morning, sometimes before I’m up.”
    I’d figured Mrs. Baine for some rare illness, but this mention of a priest threw me for a loss. What type of illness required the daily ministrations of a priest?
    “We want to see her,” Betty said. “Just for a moment.”
    The woman called Gerta eyed me suspiciously. “Does the mister know about him ?”
    “It’s all right. I’ll take full responsibility.” She turned to me. “Come on, this way.”
    I followed her toward the front of the house, until we reached a locked door. Betty motioned to the woman and she produced a key from somewhere, inserting it in the gleaming lock that was like a sleeping eye to the heavy wooden door. Inside, all was semi-darkness. Blinds were tight on the windows and there was only the dim glow of dying embers from the fireplace to cast a flickering fire over the room. But my eyes went first to the woman who sat upright on a straight-backed chair in the very center of the room. Her eyes had been closed, but now she opened them, gazing out at us from a wrinkled yet strangely peaceful face. She was not a young woman, and I would have guessed her age at near seventy-five. That was Foster Baine’s mother I had no doubt—the face bore the Baine look, as little of it as I’d seen.
    “Hello, mother,” Betty said. “I brought you a visitor.”
    The old woman focused her eyes on me. “Who?” she asked, nothing more.
    “Just a friend, Mrs. Baine,” I answered. “You don’t know me.”
    A shadow seemed to pass across the face and the old head nodded a bit. Then her eyes flickered shut. “She’s sleeping,” Betty Baine said.
    “What’s this all about, anyway?” I asked her.
    “Look.” Betty walked over and opened one of the blinds a bit, so that a ray of sunlight fell across the room and onto the woman’s sleeping figure. Then she came back and reached for the two wrinkled hands lightly clasped in Mrs. Baine’s lap. I bent over to see what she