I wasn’t going to reveal my anxiety by asking questions about the stupid bag, so I took my whiskey and emptied it with one gulp. It was nice and smooth. The Irish knew how to make the good stuff.
“Well,” Jared finally broke the silence, “there’s something I want to give you back.”
“Give me back? I can’t remember giving you anything, to be honest.”
Jared pushed the bag closer to me.
“Open it. It belongs to your family.”
I slowly took the bag and looked inside. There was a little size white shirt, neatly folded and wrapped with a long blue string inside. I looked at Jared.
“Take it out,” he said.
So I did. Before seeing it, somehow, I already knew what I was going to see on that shirt. Slowly, I untied the string and revealed the embroidered anagram CJM on it.
“Charles John Montague,” Jared said. “I noticed you have a similar one on your cuff. You still customize all your shirts, don’t you?”
I did have a similar style anagram on my cuff, except it was my name, AJM II for Alexander James Montague II, and I’d been wearing dress shirts, polo shirts, and even underwear with my name on them all my life.
I was trying to gather my thoughts. “How … Why do you have this?”
“Well, Charlie gave me this shirt the day before I left the estate. I didn’t own anything that nice, as you might imagine. He gave it to me as a goodbye present.”
I shook my head, trying to digest the information. I didn’t remember Charlie giving away any of his stuff.
“He gave it to you the day before you left? When was it again?”
“It was on the day when he disappeared.”
“Could you please step on it?” I asked the taxi driver. “I need to get on the last train.”
The man didn’t dignify me with an answer, but he did make the cab go faster. Shamefacedly, I took another dosage of Ching at the next traffic light in order not to spill the stuff.
This is insane. I’ll make a big fool out of myself.
My phone rang. It was our former butler turned de facto estate manager.
“Mr. Montague, this is Harry Schulenburg,” he said.
“Yes, Harry. I need you to open the house first thing tomorrow morning,” I said wiping my nose.
“It can be arranged, Mr. Montague. May I ask if you’ll be traveling alone?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be requiring any assistance?”
Good old Schulenburg. He’d started to work for my father when they were both young men in their twenties. He’d come from South Africa to see the land of his predecessors and decided to stay. He’d married a local lady, but she’d gotten sick and passed away after only ten years. He never remarried. He volunteered to stay behind and look after the house. He said that he was “tied to this land until the day he was no longer needed,” and we couldn’t imagine the house without him. Nothing could rattle his professional calm, which had helped him run the house without its owners and deal with the tenants for the past twenty-three years.