Whatever the explanation, it was certain she would not get answers from Gentle, which meant she had to seek out brother Oscar. She tried by the most direct route first: the telephone directory. He wasn’t listed. She then tried via Lewis Leader, but he claimed to have no knowledge of the man’s whereabouts or fortunes, telling her that the affairs of the two brothers were quite separate, and he had never been called to deal with any matter involving Oscar Godolphin.
“For all I know,” he said, “the man could be dead.” Having drawn a blank with the direct routes, she was thrown back upon the indirect. She returned to Esta-brook’s house and scoured it thoroughly, looking for Oscar’s address or telephone number. She found neither, but she did turn up a photograph album Charlie had never shown to her, in which pictures of what she took to be the two brothers appeared. It wasn’t difficult to distinguish one from the other. Even in those early pictures Charlie had the troubled look the camera always found in him, whereas Oscar, younger by a few years, was nevertheless the more confident of the pair: a little overweight, but carrying it easily, smiling an easy smile as he hooked his arm around his brother’s shoulders. She removed the most recent of the photographs from the album which pictured Charles at puberty or thereabouts, and kept it. Repetition, she found, made theft easier. But it was the only information about Oscar she took away with her. If she was to get to the traveler and find out in what world he’d bought his souvenirs, she’d have to work on Estabrook to do so. It would take time, and her impatience grew with every short and rainy day. Even though she had the freedom to buy a ticket anywhere on the planet, a kind of claustrophobia was upon her. There was another world to which she wanted access. Until she got it, Earth itself would be a prison.
Leader called Oscar on the morning of January seventeenth with the news that his brother’s estranged wife was asking for information on his whereabouts.
“Did she say why?”
“No, not precisely. But she’s very clearly sniffing after something. She’s apparently seen Estabrook three times in the last week.”
“Thank you, Lewis. I appreciate this.”
“Appreciate it in hard cash, Oscar,” Leader replied. “I’ve had a very expensive Christmas.”
“When have you ever gone empty-handed?” Oscar said. “Keep me posted.”
The lawyer promised to do so, but Oscar doubted he’d provide much more by way of useful information. Only truly despairing souls confided in lawyers, and he doubted Judith was the despairing type. He’d never met her— Charlie had seen to that—but if she’d survived his company for any time at all she had to have a will of iron. Which begged the question: Why would a woman who knew (presuming she did) that her husband had conspired to kill her, seek out his company, unless she had an ulterior motive? And was it conceivable that said motive was finding brother Oscar? If so, such curiosity had to be nipped in the bud. There were already enough variables at play, what with the Society’s purge now under way, and the inevitable police investigation on its heels, not to mention his new majordomo Augustine (ne Dowd), who was behaving in altogether too snotty a fashion. And of course, most volatile of these variables, sitting in his asylum beside the heath, Charlie himself, probably crazy, certainly unpredictable, with all manner of tidbits in his head which could do Oscar a lot of harm. It could be only a matter of time before he started to become talkative, and when he did, what better ear to drop his discretions into than that of his inquiring wife?
That evening he sent Dowd (he couldn’t get used to that saintly Augustine) up to the clinic, with a basket of fruit for his brother.
“Find a friend there, if you can,” he told Dowd. “I need to know what Charlie babbles about when he’s being bathed.”
“Why don’t you ask him directly?”
“He hates me, that’s why. He thinks I stole his mess of pottage when Papa introduced me into the Tabula Rasa instead of Charlie.”