by Zenith Brown
Caxson Reeves was watching her intently. “What inference do you draw, Jennifer?” he asked quietly.
She flushed a little. “I don’t mean to sound brash. But I think Mrs. Emlyn’s just the one they do belong to, or did. If there’s something wrong about them and you couldn’t sell them openly, you’d sell them privately—to one woman who wants heirlooms and to another who doesn’t but loves a bargain. If you just sell them to Nikki’s wives, they’d still be in the family. And if mother smuggled them in and you reported her and got the moiety of thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars, you’d be sure she’d pay up and get them back . . . and that isn’t bad business, is it?”
“It isn’t,” Caxson Reeves agreed dryly. His eyes met Finlay’s. Jenny had left the verandah before Fish had told them about the telephone call to Boston.
“Polly may have known something about them,” Fish said. He took the letter B. Meggs had brought out of his pocket and handed it to Reeves, who took out his half-spectacles and read it. He handed it to Jennifer.
“She shouldn’t have told him,” Jenny said again, when she’d read it. “It was just a . . . an invitation to murder.”
Fish started a little, and Reeves’s saurian lids twitched just once, as if a grain of desert dust had blown too close.
“Have you told Jennifer about your visit to Dr. McNair?” he asked. “If not, you’d better.”
She listened gravely. “I thought there must be something wrong with her. Last night. . . . I’ve seen people drunk. They go to sleep. My mother was wide-awake all night, and the maid told me it’s the same every night. Anyway, she hasn’t had anything today. I tipped over her martini and I traded my iced tea for her coffee at lunch.” She got up. “I didn’t drink it. But tonight. . . . One dose wouldn’t hurt me, and we’ll see.”
“No.” Fish and Caxson Reeves said it together. “You can’t tell,” Reeves added. “It might be more than Benzedrine.”
“But you saw how she looked last night. It scares me. So maybe I’d better get back home. I just wanted to tell you. . . .”
Reeves got up. “I’ll go down with you.”
“Shall I run you home, sir?”
Fish went over to the door with them.
“I’ll walk,” Reeves said. “I’ll take the short cut through the gardeners’ lane. I’ll see you at the dance.”
“Is he going with you people?” Jenny asked as they went out the tower door into the drive.
Caxson Reeves looked at her with a dry smile.
“He’s going with you people,” he said. He saw the quickening glow he kindled. “Did you know he was engaged to a girl once? His sister told me. She threw him over when he lost his leg. If you want to marry him, Jennifer, you’ll have to ask him. He’ll never ask you.”
He tipped his old yellow panama. “Goodbye, I’ll see you this evening. Be careful, Jennifer. If you were married, I’d feel a great deal easier about both you and your mother.”
He left her standing there and went through the cedar fence to take the short cut home. He had reached the gate and closed it behind him before Jenny Linton could untangle the curious skein of multicolored astonishment that held her there, and then sent her suddenly dancing feet across the emerald medallion and up the steps. She was hurrying around to her own back entrance when she heard her mother’s voice in the hall.
“Darling . . . you’re being positively hysterical!” Dodo was saying. Her own voice was pitched not far from it. “I don’t see what you’re making such a ghastly row about it for. Nobody—”
Jenny swallowed quickly and went through into the hall. They were all on the second floor balcony, her mother and Alla Emlyn in dressing gowns, Peter with a bath towel wrapped around him, de Gradoff in his shorts, and the servants Moulton, Elsa, the other maid and the cook, all properly dressed, all of them shaken, de Gradoff standing alone outside his open bedroom door, his face transformed with impotent rage, turned on the servants, drawn together protectively behind Moulton at the corner of the spindled rail.
Jenny stopped cold, staring up at them. Alla Emlyn was holding on to the rail across the stair well, her face a different kind of white, her dark eyes grown so they were the only part of it Jenny really saw.
“I think you’re crazy, Nikki.” Peter de Gradoff was openly rude, almost contemptuous. “You’re making a damned ass of yourself. You lay off the gin awhile, your brain’s soft.”
He turned and strode back into his room, slamming the door. But de Gradoff hadn’t heard him. His eyes, blue and swift as dragonflies, had darted over to Jenny, fastening themselves, frigidly malignant, on her, as naked for an instant as his own rigid torso above the polished rail. He started to speak, but Dodo had seen her too and moved abruptly forward.
“Nikki.” She put her hand on his arm, her voice taut but controlled. “You’re being fantastic, Nikki! Moulton’s told you what happened.” She turned to him. “I’m sorry, Moulton. Mr. de Gradoff isn’t himself. Go get them, and throw them out. Pitch them over the cliff, get thoroughly rid of them and see that it doesn’t happen again. The rest of you go on with your work. I’ll be down to talk to you. Alla, you’d better go dress. Jenny, go on to your room, darling.”
De Gradoff jerked his arm from her hand, his anger still rigidly focused on his stepdaughter. Dodo turned and spoke quietly down to her.
“Jenny, did you bring Nikki a basket of flowers?”
Jenny stared blankly up at her. Still dazed by the suppressed violence of the scene above her, she took the question as literally as it was asked.
“What would I be doing, bringing Nikki flowers?” she asked incredulously, and with such complete conviction that there was instant silence on the balcony.
Moulton went to the bedroom door.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said stiffly. “Elsa went to hang up your evening clothes when the cleaner brought them at one o’clock. She saw the basket sitting on the floor beside your bed. She thought you’d brought them in. She put them in a vase and put them on the table. None of us were aware you had a . . . an allergy, sir. However, I’m sure the staff understands, madame.” He bowed to Dodo. “I’m sure no one will feel obliged to give immediate notice.” He turned back to Elsa and the other two. “Carry on, please. Cocktails at a quarter to eight is correct, is it not, madame?”
“Thank you, Moulton.”
He went into de Gradoff’s room. Jenny was at the top of the stairway going to her room when he came out and passed her with a crystal bowl of pink and white carnations, their spicy fragrance filling the hall. She hurried on into her room, closed the door and stood there, startled at the chill running up and down her spine. After a moment she opened the door quietly. Nikki and her mother were gone, so was Mrs. Emlyn. Elsa was coming down the hall from her mother’s room. Jenny beckoned her into her room and closed the door again.
“What happened?”
“They were just there on the floor, miss, like somebody had set them down and forgotten to pick them up, in a willow-plaited basket, by his bed. But he acted so strange, miss. He came rushing out. He wasn’t angry at first, he was shaking all over. Then he got angry and called everybody out and started accusing us. I didn’t think he was right in his mind for a few moments, miss. And I hope Mrs. Huggins stays to finish dinner. She thinks this house is . . . is very strange, anyway. Her sister’s a medium in Boston and she feels vibrations. I don’t know what she’ll make of this. But your mother’s gone down to speak to her. Shall I run your tub, miss?”
“I’ll do it. But you can come back later and zip me up if you will.”
She locked the door when the maid had closed it and stood there, the chill still along her spine as she glanced over at the spray of butterfly orchids on her desk. That would seem to be the immediate explanation . . . but the gardeners wouldn’t know about the portrait, and there were no carnations in the greenhouses across the cedar fence. She knew, because she’d looked when she went to explain to Mr. Vranek about the rut in the turf edge. And Polly Ran
dolph was dead, so Fish was the only other person who’d know.
The threshold between the natural and the supernatural was very ill-defined in her mind then, as she stood there, rejecting and not rejecting.
I wonder if the woman from the Argentine could have come . . . if the rubies and everything could someway have brought her back, to try to help my mother?
Two things were sure. Her mother had no idea why Nikki was so beside himself, and Alla Emlyn did know. . . . The way she was holding to the balcony rail with one hand, clutching her robe with the other, the look in her eyes, as if she’d seen the ghost walk right there in front of them. But there are no such things as ghosts . . . and the carnations were real.
She went quickly across the room to the alcove, pulled the telephone across the bed where she could watch the porch through the grille and asked the operator for the stable number.
“Fish . . . this is Jenny. Did you put a basket of carnations in Nikki’s room?”
“Did I do what?”
The surprise in his voice gave his answer the same convincing quality her own had had. She repeated the question.
“No,” he said.
“Somebody did.”
“Maybe it was the lady herself. Maybe Enniskerry’s really haunted.”
CHAPTER : 18
Fish Finlay meant it to sound mildly amusing, but he knew it had no such content, for he had just seen the semblance of a ghost of sorts himself. He had stopped at the sink for a drink of water and looked down into the vegetable garden. A dusty blue gnome in a faded brown hat was in one of the cordoned squares, spraying the mauve-green plums, one of the two old gardeners. He sprayed and moved back, raising his head to avoid the wind drift, and Fish saw the face under the faded brown hat. It was a face he’d seen before, and as he stared down at it, puzzled, it came suddenly into his mind. He’d seen it that morning, passing him in the doorway of room No. 7 of the Azores in Thames Street . . . the sad-faced man in the blue work denims and blue denim hat.
It was just at that moment that the phone rang. When he’d answered Jenny, he put it down and went back to the kitchen window, puzzled by the carnations, but still more puzzled by what one of the Enniskerry gardeners had been doing in room No. 7 of the Azores. Until he looked over at the greenhouses. Caxson Reeves was in the doorway, just leaving, his short cut a matter of distance, not time. The other gardener was trotting along behind him. Old Right Hand Reeves checking with another of the hired left hands. . . . Because, of course, it had to be the gardeners who superintended the locks on Jenny’s door and windows, and Caxson Reeves would be too conspicuous going to the Azores himself to check on M. Blum’s personal belongings before the police arrived.
“Well, well,” Fish Finlay said, with a sardonic salute to his own retarded development in the field of intrigue. With his known interest in tree planting (Finlay of the banished dreams), Reeves had no doubt counted on his visiting the gardeners himself. If anyone could guess what went on in Reeves’s mind, that is. Finlay abandoned it, when he heard the clock strike seven and remembered abruptly that his only white dinner coat had been a mess when he took it off at six A.M. He went in to take a look at it before he called Dodo to regret, and found that Moulton was as far ahead of him in his department as Reeves was in his. It was there in the closet, clean and pressed. He had no excuse to avoid the dance, and no particular wish to, he realized, his only regret, in fact, that Moulton hadn’t provided a red carnation for his buttonhole.
His heart was strangely quiet. It had been, since he opened his eyes to see Jenny Linton’s face bending over him and knew the decision was his to make. He’d make it, and could face himself in the mirror knowing the loneliness would come again, but come with a difference. For the moment a curious muted peace seemed to hang over him there in the loft. No premonitory shadow wavered, or light flickered, to suggest how frayed the rope or deep the abyss, or how near its edge they were.
At half-past seven he went down the clock tower steps and looked across the courtyard. No one was on the verandah except Moulton bringing ice and glasses and stopping to straighten the chairs. Fish paused inside the hexagonal hall. There was a door at the side of the staircase. He opened it. It led into a passage. On the right was a door opening into the part of the stable under his bedroom end, where the cars were kept. At the end of the passage an open door led into the gardeners’ domain. He went through it and strolled out into the vegetable garden. A path along the cordoned fruit trees led toward a terraced garden under the spindled balustrade between the stable and the house. He looked back toward the greenhouses, and seeing neither of the little blue gnomes, went on along the path to the terraces, looking into the stable windows, at the elegant box stalls made of polished walnut, waxed and gleaming, the rails between them decorated with sheaves of ripe wheat and faded cornflowers. At the end of the cordoned path, he glanced back up at the porch again. Its only occupant was Nikki de Gradoff at the bar, a circumstance that he viewed with no interest. He turned down the center corridor of turf between the shallow-terraced rose gardens and went along until the roses ended and he came to the rocks, heather flowing like spilled wine over them, creeping out into the narrow trail along the cliff to the right, where the sound was coming from.
Sound was all he could call it, hearing it first halfway down the turf stairs. It was a roar, but quite distinct from the roar of the surf he could hear beating at the bottom of the cliff. As he went along the trail toward it, it changed abruptly. It sounded exactly as if some gargantuan unseen beast was suddenly and violently sucking air into his mouth just after he’d spewed out some scalding mess . . . unless the gargantuan beast was the Satan himself, as this must be the Devil’s Chasm, he thought, that Caxson Reeves had said ought to have a rail around it and that Dodo had called the Rock and said not to go near when he’d had a drink, one of their friends had tried it. He had not had a drink for a couple of hours, but he approached it cautiously nevertheless, by ear alone, and found himself abruptly much closer to the edge than he’d imagined, even warned by the purple heather cringing back from the spume-poisoned rim. There it was, the deep jagged cleft in the rock, full of the tumultuous rage of the white sea horse, captive in his box stall of living rock, before the long withdrawing roar of the crested waves released him and the unseen monster sucked in the air to breathe, until the rearing sea charged in again.
He watched it, its violence fascinating. The cleft was perhaps not five feet in width, the rocks on the far side as flat and as barren, except for the poison ivy growing out of the shallow fissures. He could understand the impulse of the young man in the bathtub-gin days who’d tried to leap it. He felt it himself . . . and then, for a fraction of an instant, he thought the cold chill crawling up his spine was fear, a sharp reminder that it took two good legs to make a broad jump. But for a fraction of an instant only, and then he knew it was not that, and that someone was there close behind him . . . and knew also, with a sudden flash of knowledge, that what was happening to him was what had happened to Polly Randolph and to Ferenc Blum. The place and the time were different, the menace was the same, and his bad leg made him as unequal in the event as each of them had in different ways been unequal.
He braced himself and swung around. The instant held rigid . . . the sea roaring and the rising terraces hiding the verandah where help could have been, as the sea had roared and the rose-covered rock had hidden the garden full of people from the Randolphs’ fishing platform. There there had been a rail. Here was nothing. He was caught in the apex of a triangle, one side the sucking chasm, one side the cliff down into the sea, and from the base of the triangle de Gradoff was moving deliberately toward him, his whole body alert as a tiger’s is alert, except that a tiger wears no smiling mask to charm and deceive.
How narrow is the escape from death? Or is there a wide band of unseen shadow across which an unseen hand may reach and save? Was it chance alone that an angry order had been literally carried out, a crystal bowl of fresh-cut flowers pitch
ed over the cliff into the sea, and by chance alone that one of them was caught, clear and lovely pink, on the mane of the white sea horse and carried back to toss on the vortex of swirling foam in the Devil’s Chasm sucking the wave into its jagged mouth? And that de Gradoff saw it as he took his last forward step?
Fish Finlay knew only that something had happened as the smiling mask was ripped apart and the taut body went flaccid. He stepped around de Gradoff into the path between the heather-covered rocks to the turf stairs, and turned back then.
“Coming up?” he asked.
“Yes,” de Gradoff said.
It took him a moment to say it, a curious pallor behind the vivid blue of his eyes.
“I . . . came down to speak to you about Dodo’s necklace. She has the mad idea she isn’t going to try to recover it. You must—”
“Sorry. You’ll have to talk to Mr. Reeves.”
There was a chill at the base of Fish Finlay’s spine as he looked past de Gradoff at the Devil’s Chasm. It would have been a natural . . . Nikki his own eyewitness. Poor Finlay with his bad leg got too near the edge. Treacherous spot, should have been railed off. Another murder no one could ever prove.
He reached in his pocket for a cigarette, aware that de Gradoff was watching him intently without seeming to watch him at all.
He’s not sure if I know.
It was a curious sensation, walking casually up through a rose garden with his own murderer. More curious that Alla Emlyn should be coming swiftly to meet them. Her geranium-red evening dress was like a raw flame blowing in the wind. She stopped short when she saw them, between the urns on the balustrade, and stood stock-still an instant before the taut swift lines of her body were fluid again and she waited, half-turned to go back to the porch.
