The Case of the Seven Sneezes

by Anthony Boucher

  “I was once.”

  “That’s what I would have said. I was once. I’d cut all my home ties. I was a free woman, I was. I walked by myself and the world was spread out before me like my own private if singularly pearlless oyster. I was me, the bright young editor. I could stand up and say, ‘I yam what I yam,’ just like Popeye.”

  “Saint Paul said it first,” Fergus remarked.

  “It’s a good thought whoever said it. But it’s not true. You aren’t just what you are. You’re what you have been too, even when you think it’s done with. I come back here. I look at Father and Mother. I’m rational and dispassionate and I think, Here are a couple of people who’ve always been silly only now they’re getting old and all the sillier. I feel closer to Stella or Dr. Hugh or even to Uncle Jim. But just the same, if I don’t stop and think, if I just let myself feel, then it’s ‘I’m home again with my family and it’s good.’”

  Fergus gave the fire a needless poke. “I never knew my mother,” he said. “My father was swell when he was sober and even sweller half the time he was tight. The other half …”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t last if I stayed. I’d think more, and I’d feel less, and pretty soon it’d be the whole mess over again. I’ll have to go back east. The Live Alone and Like It girl. And the damnedest thing is, O’Breen, I do like it.”

  “You were lucky. Striking out on your own like that and landing a decent editorial job.”

  “Was I? I don’t know. I’ve got my suspicions. Uncle Lucas has a finger in so many pies of so many assorted flavors. I wouldn’t put even crossword puzzles past him.”

  Fergus watched the flames for a while. Beyond their upflaring brightness the little shorelights of Santa Eulalia vanished, and you faced an empty expanse to the east as though you were looking out west. “Why, Janet?” he asked at last.

  She jumped a trifle at the sudden breaking of silence. “Why what?”

  “Why did you strike out on your own like that?”

  “Why not? A girl wants to lead her own life, doesn’t she?”

  “Does she always?”

  “This one did.”

  “You mean that you are,” he lightly burlesqued the banal phrase, “a Career Woman at Heart?”

  “Who knows what he is at heart?” she burst out, with a sudden flaring glimpse of a passion he had hardly suspected in her. But her voice was calm again as she resumed. “If you really want to know, O’Breen, if you think you can pin everything down to one all-significant little episode and say, ‘This is it,’ I’ll tell you why I walked out on the family. Because I couldn’t wear my new dress.”

  “I’m not sure the male mind follows.”

  “Not even the trained mind of the detective?”

  “Educate me,” Fergus suggested humbly.

  Janet leaned back and clasped her hands around her knees. “I was nineteen then. I was in college and I was meeting people and I was beginning to have fun. Only I never bought my own clothes. Mother always bought them for me. And I was pretty slow realizing what was the matter. Only one night after a party I got to thinking about all the other girls there, girls I knew were my own age, and I looked at them in my mind and I looked at me in the mirror. And I saw. They were all women now, and I was still a little girl.” Her voice was bitter but it was also curiously young. As she spoke, she seemed almost to be nineteen again.

  “I don’t think I out-and-out admitted to myself why Mother did that. It was too cruel a thing to admit, but I must have known it even without admitting. Because I never complained to Mother or asked her to get me anything different. I just saved as much as I could out of my allowance, and I bought myself an evening gown. It was wonderful. It was so simple that it cost twice what I’d figured on, but I couldn’t resist it. It wasn’t a dress; it was just a black slinkiness that covered part of you. I tried it on in my room alone and I’d stolen one of Mother’s cigarettes and I looked as though my name ought to be Sonya or Dagmar until I started coughing. Which by the way—I don’t cough any more—have you … ?”

  Fergus tossed her a package of cigarettes and held out a brand from the fire for a light. “And did you knock ’em dead?”

  “Wait. The story’s just started. It was for a big party of Uncle Lucas’. All sorts of important people. And of course Tom would be there. I used to put on quite a performance then of pretending I couldn’t see him—girls are silly things—but still I knew I wanted him there when I wore this. I took a long time dressing that night because I put things in the bath and then I had to wait till Mother was out of her dressingroom so I could sneak in and rifle her table. Oh, I did myself up proud, I did. Father and Mother were waiting downstairs and getting pretty impatient when I Swept Down the Staircase—that’s the proper phrase for Sonya, isn’t it?”

  “Sounds more like Dagmar.”

  “Hm. I think you’re right, O’Breen. Anyway, I Swept. And then I paused at the foot of the stairs and rested one hand on the rail and tossed back my head and tried a Lynn Fontanne sort of laugh—oh, that was an entrance! That was an entrance!”

  “And … ?”

  Janet’s face was turned away from the fire into shadow. “Then it was awful. I tell you, O’Breen, it was terrible. Mother began to scream and make a scene and this was treachery and going behind her back and had she nurtured a viper in her bosom … Oh, I don’t mean she actually said such absurd things as that, but I got the general idea all right. And Father backed her up and what did I think I was and a daughter of his making a Common Exhibition of herself damn it all and … Well, it was just plain hell. I suppose maybe it’s funny from outside, I don’t know. But it was hell then. It still is.”

  “And so you were … filial?”

  “Of course. What else could I be? You can’t let your mother cry. Not even when you’re nineteen and in your first evening gown. No, I was an angel child. We went back upstairs together and we had a Good Cry and we made up and I changed my clothes. We were late for the party and I looked about fifteen. And I was nasty to all the important people and especially to Tom and I went to New York.”

  “Fast curtain.”

  “Second act,” Janet picked up the metaphor, “five years later, Blackman’s Island …”

  “Cast, same as Act I. And our heroine, who so intensely wanted to look nineteen, now at last does so.”

  Janet smiled in the firelight. “Compliment?”

  “Intended as such. Rough draft.”

  “I’m not used to them. Not that kind anyway. The compliments I hear are more apt to be, ‘Smart work on that last issue, Miss Brainard.’”

  “What’s the matter with men in New York?”

  “The East is too near the South. The Cindy Lous are the standard of femininity; and God keep me from entering that competition … What do you think of Tom, O’Breen?”

  “I resent him. No one with his mind has a right to be that good-looking. Divine gifts should be split up.”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s so good-looking as all that.” Her tone was not convincing. “But do you like him?”

  “Aside from that resentment, a hell of a lot. He’s a good joe, Tom is.”

  “It’s funny with Tom. Here I thought I was …” Janet let her voice trail off and stared at the fire. Abruptly she rose and shook sand from her gown. “I’m going back to the house before I let all my hair down. You should have followed the family vocation, O’Breen. I can just see you in your little box, listening to them pour it all out.”

  “Uh uh.” Fergus shook his head. “I’d be lousy at it. You can’t smoke in a confessional. And imagine other peoples’ troubles without tobacco.”

  “Does everybody talk to you like this?”

  “Plenty. Especially murderers. They think it makes a good smoke screen.”

  Janet shivered. “Thanks. I needed a cold shower. Any orders, chief?”

  Fergus mused. “There’s one thing you can do. Maybe you’re just the person for it. While you keep Tom company in his vigil, you can ponde
r on a riddle.”

  “If it’s good, I warn you, I’ll steal it for the mag.”

  “Not this one. Different style. It’s only five words long, and it goes: The solution lies in Eliot.”

  “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Put your puzzle mind to work on it. Tell Tom too. There’s just the goddamnedest bare chance that it may mean everything.”

  ii

  The house was all lights. Presumably everyone had gone upstairs by now, but no one had turned off the lights on the first floor. Janet could understand that. To turn off a light would be a concession to the darkness. It would be opening the door to fear and the unknown.

  The second floor was quiet. Tom sat sprawled in a chair with his back to the wall. On another chair beside him were a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray, and Uncle Jim’s bone-handled revolver.

  Janet moved with deliberately cautious softness, but the guard was alert. He had sprung to his feet, seized the revolver, and covered her accurately before he recognized her.

  Then he laughed quietly. She applauded in pantomime. “Nice work,” she whispered. “Good watchdog.”

  “I thought it might be Alys. She’s not in her room—must have slipped off into the night. And she’s not too sober.”

  “Worried about her?”

  “To be frank,” said Tom, “I’m worried about Fergus. I know my Aunt Alys.”

  “Do you?” She put the most malicious meaning into the question.

  “How’s the fire?” he asked.

  “Blazing nobly.”

  “Feel all purged now?”

  “I’m my own sane self again.”

  “Does your own self have to be sane?”

  “I like it that way. And I think I’m sanely ready for bed.”

  “No, please. Not yet. Stay and talk with me.”

  “I shouldn’t distract the watchdog.”

  Tom shrugged. “Women weren’t intended to be sensible. Why try to break the rules?”

  “Victorian male.”

  “And unvictorious … But tell me, my fine modern woman, any orders from our commander in chief?”

  “Not a thing. Oh, except this. We’re supposed to do some fancy brain-cudgeling.”

  “God,” said Tom. “What else is anybody on this island doing?”

  “But this is a special assignment. Find the meaning of the five-word phrase: The solution lies in Eliot.”

  Tom frowned. “You mean that Fergus seriously asked us to—” He broke off and turned to one of the bedroom doors, his hand tense on the archaic revolver.

  The door opened slowly and James Herndon’s balding head appeared. “Janet,” he called softly.

  “Yes, Uncle Jim?”

  “Could I speak to you a moment? In here?”

  Tom layed a restraining hand on her arm, but she shook it off lightly. “Don’t be foolish, Tom,” she whispered, and added aloud, “Of course, Uncle Jim.”

  This was beyond any doubt Jim Herndon’s room, she thought as she entered it. Even in the short space of a weekend it had become unmistakably his. There were a half-dozen of his favorite books, chiefly poetry—and the only books, she reflected with some surprise, that she had seen in the entire house. And there were pipes.

  Five pipes and a cork-knocker ashtray sat on the bedside table, and six or eight more were visible in the open suitcase, chiefly briars but with a corncob or two, a cherry, and of course his treasured meerschaum that matched the revolver. A highly polished bronze humidor shone on the dressing table, and a black hole in the scarf beside it demonstrated that pipes jiggle sparks when you comb your hair.

  Janet breathed deep of the smoke-thick air. “It smells good, Uncle Jim,” she smiled.

  “If I could ever have found another woman who thought so,” James Herndon observed, “I might not be a bachelor now.”

  “It makes me feel like a little girl again. I haven’t smelled this smell for … Oh, I don’t mean I haven’t been around pipes. Half the crossword contributors are frustrated authors, so of course they have to wear pipes with their tweeds. But they all smoke very ladida mixtures specially blended that are so glamorous and fancy that they don’t even smell like tobacco.”

  “Nor taste like it, probably.”

  “And that’s why I like this honesttogod stench. It takes me back to when I was terribly little and I used to think it really came out of you, like from a dragon. Remember when I asked you to make it come out of your ears?”

  “And I never did, did I? You see, Janet my dear, I was failing you even then.”

  “Uncle Jim! You never failed anybody.”

  “Except my life,” Herndon quoted, “except my life, except my life …”

  “But so many pipes!” Janet exclaimed. “Do you need all these just for a weekend?”

  He picked up the meerschaum and began filling it. “Oh, it’s comforting to have them, you know. But let me show you my gem.”

  He reached into the suitcase and brought out a deep red morocco leather case. He unsnapped it tenderly. There, encushioned in satin, lay a briar pipe, a light reddish-brown in color, of a simple straight billiard shape and utterly devoid of ornament.

  “Nice,” said Janet, not knowing what on earth she should say. It was uncomfortably like being expected to comment on your friend’s infant.

  “Nice? But my dear, look at that graining. Notice those perfectly straight lines of grain, clear and even all around the bowl. One piece of briar in ten thousand!”

  “It’s pretty,” she admitted. “Even if I don’t appreciate its subtleties. Pipes do look so much nicer before you smoke them.”

  “I had planned to break it in over this weekend. But in such times of trouble and confusion, one wants the consolation of old and tried friends” (he patted the meerschaum), “rather than the difficulties of making acquaintance with even such a splendid specimen as this.”

  There was a light rap on the door, and Tom’s voice called softly, “Are you all right, Janet?”

  “Of course. Don’t be foolish. Your job’s to watch that hall.”

  James Herndon cleared his throat. “But Tom reminds me: I did not call you in here to talk about pipes.”

  “But I … I’m surprised at myself, but I like it. It makes me feel so nearly at home.”

  Herndon laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You do want to be at home, don’t you? You’ve always wanted to, and they wouldn’t let you.”

  “I don’t know. I truly don’t know, Uncle Jim. I have a good life now. I know interesting people, I like my job, I make decent money, I’m comfortable living alone. I used to think about a home and being part of One Happy Family like some of my girlfriends, but now … I was perfectly contented.”

  “Was?”

  “Until I came here. And now … Damn it, Uncle Jim, I don’t know what I want or who I am.”

  “Listen to me, my dear. I … I have done very little good in my life. I think I can say that I have done equally little harm; but that would not have defended me in Jay’s eyes, nor does it in my own. I have been nothing.

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas …”

  “But Uncle Jim—”

  “Let me go on. I … You may know, Janet, that I have a little money. Not so much as I had once, not what Lucas or even your father would consider much, but a great deal probably in your eyes or in Tom’s.”

  “Tom’s?”

  “Purely illustrative,” said Herndon hastily. “A great deal to a young person in his position or say O’Breen’s. I only wished you to know that … I am not young, Janet. And at this moment, on this island, life does not seem a certain thing. We cannot tell where or when next … Oh dear, I wish I could speak clearly.”

  “Don’t try, Uncle Jim. And don’t talk about dying. This O’Breen lad’s clever. He’ll see us through.”

  “I know. I know … But I want you to know that—well, if it should affect your plans in any way, that I—tha
t is, I mean, that you …” James Herndon set down his meerschaum and drew himself up with an odd formal stiffness. His body was so strong and handsome, Janet thought. Usually the ineffectiveness of his manner made you blind to what he really looked like; but at moments like this you could see it clearly.

  “Janet,” he announced with quiet dignity, “you are my sole heir.”

  “Uncle Jim,” she murmured, “you are a darling.”

  She put her arms around him and buried her face in his coat lapel. The rich reek of honestly cheap tobacco filled her nostrils, and before her moist and blinking eyes she saw a small coal-burned hole in the black cloth.

  There was another tentative tap on the door.

  “Tom,” she whispered, “is an idiot. He suspects even you.”

  James Herndon freed himself reluctantly from her arms and took up his still glowing meerschaum. “Go to him, my dear,” he said, and puffed contentedly. “Go home.”

  Fergus had watched after Janet closely until he saw her enter the house. Then he let his eyes stare unseeing at the flames while his mind worked beaverishly at all the hints and fragments of hints which the past few hours had brought.

  It wasn’t impossible, even as soon as this, to say who the throat-slitter was. If he were reading this case as a narrative, he’d make his guess now, check at the end to see that he was right, and sit back feeling smug. But spotting the murderer, putting the finger on the one individual was only a part of it. He needed to understand them all; he needed to get under their little shells of egocentric self-sufficiency and find out what made this tightly knit group click, what had held them together for so many years. The Stanhopes, yes. Devotion to Jay and involvement in Martha’s death were undoubtedly factors in keeping the group intact. But what were their relations to each other, how did the pieces interlock?

  He went back to contemplating his working hypothesis on the identity of X. It wasn’t bad. It was ingenious and conceivably even true. But he hadn’t the trace of a physical fact to clinch his suspicions. He did, indeed, have one fact which apparently contradicted them. For that, of course, there was another possible interpretation; but that would be at once too fantastically unlikely and too horribly possible to entertain …