Murder by an Aristocrat

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  About nine o’clock that night Adela came up, looking very weary but still faintly bland, and panting a little from the climb up two flights of stairs.

  “How is your patient, Miss Keate?” she asked. “Better, I hope. You are better, aren’t you, Florrie? You gave us quite a fright.”

  “I’m all right,” said Florrie rather weakly. “Miss Evelyn told me all about what happened. I don’t suppose anybody meant to give me the wrong stuff.” She glanced at me rather doubtfully but continued: “Miss Evelyn said I owed my life to the nurse. I suppose I do. But I ought to have known not to take the pills. A red-haired woman and the moon at its full and something out of a —”

  Adela thought she was still only half-conscious. She bent over the bed.

  “There now, Florrie. Try to get some rest and natural sleep. Dr. Bouligny says you are going to be all right. Isn’t it fine that Miss Keate was here and knew just what to do for you?”

  Florrie looked at me again; it was a curious look in which suspicion and gratitude were oddly blended.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But I ought to have known better than to take them. But I guess she didn’t mean to do it.”

  “Why, of course she didn’t mean to do it. It was a very terrible accident, but you are going to be all right now. Miss Keate will stay here and take care of you and —”

  “I think I’d be better off alone, ma’am, if you don’t mind.”

  “Alone! Oh, no, Florrie, Dr. Bouligny says it’s best for Miss Keate to stay with you, and I think she’s very kind to do it.”

  “Yes,” muttered Florrie. “But there’s a full moon tonight.”

  Adela looked perplexed.

  “Florrie, you aren’t yourself yet. But don’t worry: you’ll be all right if you do just as the doctor says. Will you be comfortable, Miss Keate? Is there anything you need? I can’t tell you how grateful we are to you. If you hadn’t been here last night —” Her face was hard all at once, touched with granite. She went on: “Don’t hesitate to ask Emmeline to help you or get anything you want. Goodnight.”

  Her silk skirts swished delicately on the stairs. Florrie sighed.

  “I don’t think you really meant to give me those tablets, Miss Keate,” she said forgivingly. “You’ve been awful good to me today. I guess you didn’t mean to. Miss Evelyn said I’d have died sure if you hadn’t known what to do for me.”

  I could see no good purpose in telling Florrie anything of the mystery of the veronal tablets. I said:

  “That’s good. Now I’ll just fluff up your pillows, and you try to sleep.”

  “Say, Miss Keate, did they have the funeral today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it a big one?”

  “I don’t know; there were lots of flowers.”

  “There would be. Likely the whole town was here. Say, Miss Keate, have they caught the burglar yet?”

  “No.”

  She brooded on that for some time. Then she said with a slow sort of smile:

  “They won’t catch him, either. Those diamonds —” she laughed outright — “those diamonds. Say, Miss Keate, nobody stole those diamonds. I know exactly where they are.”

  CHAPTER XII

  After a moment I realized that I had known it all along; had known there was something faulty, something too pat, about the missing diamonds; had known there was something conspiratorial about that supposed theft of which so much had been made. But with my own eyes I had seen Adela open that safe and discover the loss of the jewels. Who, then, had arranged their disappearance at so apt a moment?

  “Where? How do you know? Why didn’t you tell?”

  It was difficult to persuade Florrie to talk.

  “The only way to be safe in this house is to mind your own business,” she said.

  It was only when I combined a delicate threat to tell Miss Thatcher with a sort of provisional promise to keep what she had told me a secret unless I found it absolutely necessary to tell it that she resumed her communicative mood.

  The diamonds, she said, were in the tall jar of green bath salts in the bathroom adjoining Janice’s bedroom. She had seen them there the morning following Bayard’s murder. She had been cleaning the room rather hurriedly, and had picked up the jar to wipe the shelf under it and had caught the glimmer of one of the jewels which had somehow slipped through the concealing layers of crystals and next the glass. She had explored then and there, and while she didn’t remember exactly the entire collection of diamonds, she thought they were all there. Or most of them.

  “It was a good place to hide them,” she said ruminatively. “The bath salts are sort of shiny; it was just the light catching one of the diamonds that made me look. But I didn’t say anything to anybody. I wanted to keep out of it. And I knew they were safe there because Miss Janice hates bath salts and never uses them. She says she just keeps the jar there for the color scheme. Did you ever see her bathroom, Miss Keate? She’s got water lilies painted all around the walls. And little green frogs. Heathenish, I say.”

  “Are they still there?”

  “Oh, sure. They’re painted.”

  “The diamonds, I mean.”

  She looked evasive.

  “The last time I looked they were,” she said. “Say, Nurse, do you suppose Miss Janice managed so I got those tablets — veronal? Is that what you call them?”

  “I don’t know how it happened, Florrie. Why did you think she might have — managed it?”

  “She don’t like me,” said Florrie, still evasive. “She threatened me just yesterday.”

  “Threatened you!”

  “Well, she said I’d regret something I did. And I got those tablets right afterward and nearly died.”

  I suppressed a smile at the thought of the salutary effect of Janice’s rebuke. Whatever Florrie’s conclusion regarding the veronal tablets came to be, I thought it highly unlikely she would ever do any more prowling among Janice’s things. Then another thought struck me:

  “Florrie, think now and answer carefully. Did you leave that box of tablets anywhere in the house before you took them? Did you put it down on a table? Or anywhere? Was the box out of your possession even for a moment?”

  “No,” said Florrie at once. “I’m sure of that, Miss Keate. I took the box from you and came straight up here to my room and took the first two tablets before I even undressed. Then my head was no better, so I kept on taking them.”

  “How many did you take altogether?” I asked, and when she told me I shuddered.

  “But didn’t you see they were not aspirin? They are much larger, for one thing.”

  “Why, no,” she said. “Coming from a hospital, I expected them to be a little different from regular aspirin. Hospitals are such queer places. Do you know what people are saying about who killed Bayard?”

  “No. You’d better go to sleep, Florrie.”

  “I don’t know either. But they’ll say Hilary killed him. You see if I’m not right. Hilary and Bayard never liked each other.”

  “Florrie, do you know anything about a Nita Thatcher? Have you ever heard any of the family mention Nita’s grave?”

  “No,” she said after a thoughtful moment. “There’s a grave up at the Thatcher cemetery marked Nita Thatcher, but I never heard anything about it. The Thatchers are funny about that cemetery,” she went on, pondering. “Dave is always going up there. And Miss Adela. And even Bayard used to go up there once in awhile.”

  “Was she — Nita — any connection to Bayard?”

  Florrie wrinkled her colorless eyebrows.

  “I don’t know, Miss Keate, but I don’t think so. I never heard anything at all about her. And if there’d been anything,” added Florrie not at all enigmatically, “I’d have known it.”

  I very nearly said, “You and everybody in C —.”

  For three whole days I nursed Florrie. They were to all outward aspects quiet days, chiefly characterized by a determined and outwardly successful effort on the part of the Thatchers to
ignore the matter of Bayard’s dreadful death and to present an unruffled countenance to the world. The only visible evidences that things were not as they appeared lay in the fact that Hilary and Evelyn stayed on, instead of returning to their own household, and that instead of getting a new housemaid during Florrie’s illness, Janice and Evelyn between them took over her duties. This was, I had no doubt, to prevent letting a girl from town into the house and its intimate workings, a girl who would talk, would relate every scrap of gossip she could garner to all too willing ears. I knew that, so far, they had managed to keep Florrie’s illness a secret, although once Adela went to see Florrie’s mother, and I suppose she told her of it. I never knew what measures she took to insure the woman’s silence.

  Almost frantically they resumed that orderly daily routine and clung to it as a man may cling to a straw to save himself from drowning. During those days I saw them together mostly at meals when they were bland, gracious, preoccupied with the housekeeping and gardens and affairs of the town. At the same time I could hardly help knowing in a general way what went on in the house. Once I ventured into Bayard’s room and found it prim and orderly with drawn shades and Bayard’s possessions — for I looked to make sure — removed and I suppose packed away. I wondered fleetingly what had become of the gin.

  Bayard was never mentioned. Every so often Strove would come to the house and talk apologetically of the diamonds and the burglar, and I would wonder anew just where my duty lay concerning those diamonds — and more urgently concerning my accumulating evidence that Bayard Thatcher had been murdered not by a marauding burglar but by one of his own family. If the county authorities chose to ignore it, as they did, to whom ought I to appeal? Or ought I to appeal at all? I think I had some faint notion that if any stranger actually was made a victim of, and the thing came to his arrest, I should step forward with what I knew. But in my heart I felt, I am sure, that it would not come to that. That things would somehow work out. For a feeling of something impending was everywhere: in the air we breathed and the food we ate and in our eyes meeting and glancing quickly away.

  A climax was coming. We all knew it. It was in Janice’s set white face as she went about the cool, polished spaces of the house doing Florrie’s dusting, or working in her garden and later appearing fresh and beautiful at the dinner table, ready to take her role in that tragi-comedy of manners that went on every night — avoiding me and avoiding Allen, her dark eyes somber above quiet lips.

  It was in Adela’s bleak eyes and her blunt white fingers as they worked ceaselessly with her long turquoise beads or with the flat silver beside her plate, and in her bland observations which saved us so frequently from a conversational trap and which yet were apt to break off in the middle as if she’d completely forgotten what she had been saying.

  Even Emmeline grew nervous; she twisted her fingers constantly and took to having neuralgia and wafting a smell of vehement winter-green salve which did not add to our combined peace of mind.

  Allen Carick looked taut and spent, as if he’d been sleeping badly. And Evelyn decided to have the boys kept on at camp for a while after the summer session was over.

  “It’s as well not to let them come home just now,” she said, and later I heard her sending a carefully worded telegram over the telephone to the head of the school.

  I grew restless under that prevailing sense of strain and expectation, under the goading pressure of my many unanswered questions and unproved theories, and — more definitely — that unrelenting chaperonage. Every one of those three days I left the house for a time, and never, after Sunday, alone. Evelyn volunteered once to go for a walk with me, and I could scarcely refuse. Another time Hilary turned up about four with the sedan and took Adela and me for a long and silent country ride — reluctantly, I think, and with a very red neck, which was all I could see of him from the tonneau. And another time, by leaving from the back door, I got away from the house unobserved, only to meet Allen a quarter of a mile away, rather breathless, as if he’d run across country. He stuck to me like a burr, but was lost in his own not too pleasant thoughts, for he tramped along steadily with his hands in his pockets and his blue eyes frowning at the path, and only spoke twice during the whole walk, which I somewhat unkindly prolonged, taking him through some thickets where there were opening milkweed pods whose soft silks clung stubbornly to his trousers and resisted his savage efforts to brush them off. He swore a little under his breath and brushed with his hands and looked up at me and surprisingly laughed. He was very nice when he laughed: his sullen frown gave place to a sort of bright blue twinkle, and he had a direct and very charming way of smiling exactly into your eyes.

  “You win, Nurse,” he said, admitting his espionage almost in words. But he stayed with me until he saw me safe and incommunicado, so to speak, inside the door of the Thatcher house.

  The whole thing was an admission, I suppose, that something was to come. That there must be some change, some development, some climax of those hidden forces. But I think none of us guessed the dreadful turn that development was to take.

  My nerves were on edge, and I slept poorly at night. There were times when I suspected every member of that family of having murdered Bayard.

  My only desire during those days was to get away. And Dr. Bouligny insisted on prolonging my stay. Florrie needed my care, he said. And the semblance of the ordinary, everyday state of affairs which they had built up was so real in its outward aspects that I could not refuse. I could not say openly that I wanted to leave, because — well, because Adela looked worried, harassed, and old — or Evelyn dark and ill — or Hilary frightened. That I wanted to leave because a man had been killed in that house. That I was afraid.

  And I scarcely dared say that I wanted to leave because I was convinced that one of them had murdered a man.

  Nothing, however, happened during those three days; it seems incredible as I write it, but it’s true. Florrie had got over her communicativeness; Dave stayed out of sight, and when Dr. Bouligny asked what I had done with the remaining veronal tablets and I told him Evelyn had them he seemed quite satisfied and said no more about it.

  It was when Florrie was sitting up in a chair and an amazing dressing gown which only Florrie could have thought anything but poisonous, and was obviously about to get up and stay up, that Adela undertook her campaign. I wonder how often she had rehearsed it, gone over every step of it, testing its weak points, before she sent for me the afternoon of the fourth day of Florrie’s illness.

  She was in the library. The high-backed chair she had chosen added to her little air of stateliness. Her bleak blue eyes looked colder, back of her polished eyeglasses. Her lavender silk gown fell in delicate folds, and there were her favorite snowy ruffles about her throat and wrists.

  She asked me a few questions about Florrie, said she hoped I would be with them a few days longer, gave me no opportunity to voice my own somewhat urgent views of the matter, and began:

  “Miss Keate,” she said, “I have liked you very much. I feel you to be a woman of common sense and sanity. I want your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Yes. You see —” her bleak blue eyes went to the open window for a moment to linger on the green stretches of sunlit lawn and the cool shadows of the shrubbery at its edge — “Bayard’s death has been a great shock. You know that. So far, we have not succeeded in discovering the man who did it. The man who stole the diamonds. Mr. Strove doesn’t seem to think we shall ever find him. Now then, first I want you to understand that I myself am convinced — entirely convinced — that Bayard met his death at the hands of a wicked thief. At the same time it happened here — in my house — the Thatcher home for generations. There will be people who will say things. Anything. People are always ready to talk of a family which —” she hesitated here and then continued with quiet simplicity — “which has been more or less prominent and which has never lacked — worldly goods. I could never be more completely convinced than I am now that the membe
rs of my family are innocent of this thing. Even the thought is absurd. But for their own protection I intend to prove it.”

  There was silence in the long old room: a silence so complete it was as if the books and the portraits and the old walls themselves were repeating her words: “I intend to prove it.”

  Even with the memory of that conversation which I had overheard when she had told Hilary and Evelyn that she would convince me I could not quite credit my ears.

  All those damaging things I knew swarmed into my thoughts. How could she prove their innocence when I knew there was no burglar? When I knew that the diamonds had never been stolen? When I knew about the revolver and about poor little Janice’s bloodstained hat? When I knew so many things — and yet not enough.

  Janice said Bayard had been “bleeding the family for years.”

  Silence in that long room with the bare space almost at my feet where there had been the rug on which we found Bayard, dead. And the door to the little study where I knew he’d actually been killed securely closed. I don’t know why I felt so sure that Dave was at that very moment in his soundproof study unless it was because I so seldom saw him and I knew that was his retreat.

  “I intend,” said Adela, slowly and deliberately in her elegant voice, “to prove it. And you can help me, Miss Keate, if you will be so good. I want you to hear every thing I ask, every inquiry I make and its answer. And if you feel that, in any case, I have not fully and thoroughly covered the ground, I want you to say so. To ask, in fact, anything that occurs to you.”

  Gradually I grasped the thing she proposed to do, which was apparently to conduct her own inquiry. To question in my hearing those who might be thought to have had some connection with the death of Bayard Thatcher. I wondered that she dared. It would take the wisdom of a serpent, the wiliness of a diplomat, the guarded care with which one walks on the edge of a precipice. She continued:

  “I have asked Emmeline to come first. I intend to question her, Miss Keate. And I want you to listen carefully. And if you are not entirely satis —” she checked herself on the very verge of giving herself and her motives away —” I mean if you think I have overlooked any — anything, don’t hesitate to speak.”