“Who has lived in it since your stepfather’s death besides Sylvester Mayhew and his wife?”
“Wives,” corrected the doctor, pouring himself another glassful of gin. “Sylvester married twice; I suppose you didn’t know that, my dear.” Alice shivered by the fire. “I dislike raking over old ashes, but since we’re at confessional... Sylvester treated Alice’s mother abominably.”
“I— guessed that,” whispered Alice.
“She was a woman of spirit and she rebelled; but when she’d got her final decree and returned to England, the reaction set in and she died very shortly afterward, I understand. Her death was recorded in the New York papers.”
“When I was a baby,” whispered Alice.
“Sylvester, already unbalanced, although not so anchoretic in those days as he became later, then wooed and won a wealthy widow and brought her out here to live. She had a son, a child by her first husband, with her. Father’d died by this time, and Sylvester and his second wife lived in the Black House. It was soon evident that Sylvester had married the widow for her money; he persuaded her to sign it over to him — a considerable fortune for those days — and promptly proceeded to devil the life out of her. Result: the woman vanished one day, taking her child with her.”
“Perhaps,” said Ellery, seeing Alice’s face, “we’d better abandon the subject, Doctor.”
“We never did find out what actually happened — whether Sylvester drove her out or whether, unable to stand his brutal treatment any longer, she left voluntarily. At any rate, I discovered by accident, a few years later, through an obituary notice, that she died in the worst sort of poverty.”
Alice was staring at him with a wrinkle-nosed nausea. “Father... did that?”
“Oh, stop it,” growled Thorne. “You’ll have the poor child gibbering in another moment. What has all this to do with the house?”