by Zenith Brown
“Why not?”
He repeated my words with infinite disgust.
“She’s only known the fellow two days.”
“That’s a long time when you’re twenty, Bill,” I replied philosophically. “Mr. Baca is very handsome and perfectly charming and polite and all that sort of thing. I imagine Susan found it a change from being called an idiot and an ass and a half-wit. I know I would.”
He looked at me with the strangest, most pathetic look in his eyes.
“But Martha,” he said plaintively. It sounded very odd in an All-American quarter. “She knows we don’t mean it. She’s just a kid.”
“Yes. I know all about that. I’ve got six older brothers myself.”
CHAPTER XXI
Ben came in for lunch shortly after Bill left. I gathered he hadn’t been doing anything very taxing at the library. He had a midiron in his hand and Dr. Parr had an old golf ball in his mouth. Ben put his club in the bag in the closet and came in to the living room.
“I was just talking to Mr. Rand,” he said casually.
I prepared for the worst.
“What did he say?”
“He says they’ve got a gift of fifty thousand for the library, from a woman in New York, a friend of his wife’s. It’ll take a load off the library committee’s mind.”
“Oh,” I said weakly.
“We need a lot of books for new courses.”
“I suppose so. What else did Mr. Rand say?”
“Nothing. He was just coming out of Aunt Charlotte’s. Oh yes. He said Sullivan had discovered you had a motive for shooting Sutton. I told him to tell Sullivan he was demented, you actually were fond of the old boy.”
“What did he say to that?”
“Nothing. Seemed to think it was queer. When’s lunch?”
There’s never any use of my being annoyed with Ben, or trying to find out anything that’s happened. So I gave up after I’d made one more attempt.
“Did you see Dr. Knox this morning?”
“Yes. He’s afraid Saunders isn’t going to pull through in Math. 21. If he doesn’t he won’t be able to play football next fall. I guess the old guard’s after him again.”
“Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler if they get after Saunders and make him pass Math. 21 now? It’d save a month of meetings and moilings next fall. Can’t somebody give a lecture on preventative medicine or something?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. Knox has to have something of this sort to worry about. He thinks the endowment business is pretty well settled.”
“That’s good. If we get the endowment settled, and the business of who can play on what teams settled, and money for the library, I should say life in the Niles family would be fairly smooth. But I suppose something else would come up.”
“That’s life,” Ben replied with simple irony. “I suppose there’s baked apples for dessert.”
I ignored that, and we went back to the subject of the library budget, and ended lunch with an account of Dugan’s sprained shoulder that unfortunately would keep him out of the lacrosse game with the Hopkins in the Baltimore Stadium on Saturday. I wish I were as single minded as Ben. I left the table feeling that he wouldn’t care in the least if I were put in jail. After brooding over that a few minutes, I pulled myself together with the knowledge that he would care, because he wouldn’t be able to find anything if I weren’t around. I suppose that’s a fairly solid foundation for domestic tranquillity. Anyway, I had other things more important to do at the moment.
I was still doing them at four o’clock when Susan Atwood appeared. She was troubled about something, I gathered from the clouded blue eyes that are normally as clear as cornflowers.
I was in my room at my desk making out checks for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker, and tearing up some old letters that I didn’t care to have discussed by the whole town in the event that Mr. Sullivan decided to do any more searching among my effects. I put down my pen and turned around in my chair. Susan flopped down on the chaise longue and adjusted the pillows under her head.
“How’s your patient?” I inquired by way of conversation.
“All right, I guess. Mr. Rand is talking to him now. Or he was when I left.”
She answered my question listlessly and lapsed into a gloomy silence. I picked up my pen and went on making out a check for $15.32 to the butter and egg and chicken woman.
“Martha,” she said tentatively.
“Yes.”
“Martha, do you think Sebastien—I mean Mr. Baca—had anything to do with Uncle Dan’s . . . death?”
I put down my pen, tore out the check, put it in an envelope, and turned around again.
Susan was sitting up, her chin in her hands, elbows on her knees, almost exactly as Franklin Knox had sat a few hours before. She was staring disconsolately out of the window.
“What makes you ask that, Sue?”
“Everybody’s being so funny about him. I’m about the only person that’s been near him today, except you. And I did see him last night, of course. And that’s one of the things that bothers me. You see, I said I’d seen him, and Dan and you and Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe all heard me, but Mr. Sullivan hasn’t spoken to him or to me either.”
“Maybe he’s on another trail.”
“Yes, I know. I just heard him telling a reporter from the Sun that he was leaving no stone unturned,” she said dryly, and lapsed into another preoccupied silence.
“In that case he’ll get around to both of you sooner or later,” I assured her.
“Sooner, I guess. Mr. Rand asked me after lunch when I’d seen him. I told him about two o’clock. He wanted to know what I was doing up at that time.”
“Well, what were you?” I asked after a bit.
“I was thinking.”
It was said very soberly. I remembered what I’d just said to Bill about being polite to Susan, repressed the obvious reply and waited for her to elaborate.
“I was sitting by the window looking down the terrace at the water,” she went on dreamily. “It was beautiful. You know, Martha. The fringe of trees along each side of the lawn was deep black, and the water was sort of shimmery. It wasn’t as bright as it was earlier, but it was sort of luminous. You know?”
I looked at Susan with certain misgivings. It was, I gathered, the first time she’d ever seen the beauties of nature. I didn’t know how long this rhapsody would take. She was still gazing sadly into space.
“I don’t think Sebas—Mr. Baca had anything to do with it, Martha.”
“Call him Sebastien, Susan,” I said. “It’s easier.”
“It’s a nice name, isn’t it?” she said with a sudden smile.
“Mm,” I said. My misgivings increased a hundred-fold. “Where was he, by the way, when you saw him?”
“He was down by the path to the King Charles Street gate, just in the shrubs. He sort of cut around and up by the kitchen. I guess he went across the porch and through the drawing room to the wing—or he could have gone across and in the outside door. But then he wouldn’t have known the way, I shouldn’t think, would you?”
I shook my head. There was something wrong here, that was obvious. Nevertheless I didn’t want to tell Susan too much.
“Are you sure it was Mr. Baca, Sue?” I asked.
She raised her troubled young eyes to mine. They were charmingly blank.
“I thought so.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not, of course. It was a funny light, but it was a man and he was tall, slim, dark, and . . . there’s nobody else like that.”
I didn’t say anything. Gradually the expression in her eyes changed from bewilderment through a whole series of emotions to triumphant comprehension.
“Martha, it wasn’t Sebastien at all!”
Her voice quickened.
“That was Franklin! That’s what’s the matter with Thorn. She thinks Franklin shot Uncle Dan! My dear!!”
“And Franklin thinks Thorn did
it,” I added.
“What rot,” said Susan with finality. She lapsed slowly back into her former state.
My afternoon was then punctuated by another silence. Her next question took me back to my rapidly growing suspicions.
“Martha,” she said without looking up, “have you ever been in love?”
“Many times,” I replied without hesitation.
“No, I mean really.”
“So did I.”
She puckered her smooth forehead and said, with tears not very far off, “I wish you’d be serious, Martha. Nobody’ll ever talk to me seriously.”
“I’m perfectly serious, Susan,” I said. “You start falling in love about your age, or younger, and you keep it up until you marry somebody. Some people continue after that, but that’s to be avoided unless you fall in love again with the person you’ve married. That sometimes happens.”
She thought over the first part of what I’d said. The last part clearly did not interest her. No doubt some day it would seem infinitely more important; but that was ten years off.
“Martha,” she said wistfully, after a minute or so, “isn’t it funny that suddenly you see things you never saw before, even though things have been right in front of your nose all your life?”
I nodded. “Yes, it’s funny.”
“It’s like the garden last night. I never noticed before how many sounds there are at night, and how gorgeous it smells with the lilacs and roses and what a pleasant little sound the box trees make. Last night the air was like velvet. Do you know what I mean?”
Her eyes shone like two blue stars in the creamy pallor of her face under the crown of smooth gold ahir. What a contrast they’d make, I thought. Sebastien Baca was so dark.
“What did you think of, Sue?”
“I thought of the last time I saw my mother, when I was very little,” she said, her lips quivering in wistful curves. “It was one night. She had on a dark blue velvet dress. She came to kiss me good night, and I reached out and touched her dress. I liked the feel of it, and it had a very lovely perfume. Well, last night was like that. I just closed my eyes and I could feel the velvet all around me.”
I didn’t say anything, but I suppose really that’s the way mothers would like to be remembered.
In a minute she was practical downright Susan again.
“Martha, can you be in love with anybody without them being in love with you?”
Susan’s syntax was something that nobody had ever bothered with very much.
“That’s a question, Sue,” I replied helpfully. “I was terribly in love with my Greek professor, and I don’t think he knew I was on earth.”
“But I mean really.”
Perhaps she was right. That seemed very real when I was seventeen.
“Ordinarily, I’d say not, in that case,” I told her “But you can’t generalize, my dear. It’s best to wait and see.”
She nodded, her eyes clouding again, the tiny frown puckering her brows. Her lips drooped at the corners.
“I suppose so. But it seems very stupid.”
“Better stupid than shocking,” I said sententiously.
Suddenly she smiled impishly.
“Or else very clever,” she said. “I’m going home. Will you come with me? Oh, by the way—Mr. Rand sent me to get you. Mr. Sullivan wanted him to bring you to Sullivan’s office at the court house at 4:15.”
I looked at my watch. It was then quarter to five.
CHAPTER XXII
I sent Susan back to Seaton Hall and telephoned Mr. Rand.
“Mistah Nathan he’d in conf’rence with Miss Mildred an’ Mistah Dan,” Lafayette’s high wheezy voice piped across the wire. “Ah’ll ask him call you direc’ly he come downstairs, Miss.”
“Very well, Lafayette,” I replied. I was about to put down the phone when I realized that the old man was still at his end and that he probably had something to say.
“How is everything?” I added. He would never say it, if he did have something to tell, without an opening.
“It’s all right, Miss,” he said significantly. “Only Mistah Sullivan he’s been raisin’ time here ’cause he cain’t see Miss Thorn.”
“Let him raise it then, Lafayette.”
“ ’Deed an’ Ah will, Miss. ’Deed Ah ain’ goin’ stop him.”
I put the phone down, wondering just what kind of time Mr. Sullivan had been raising, and thinking it was a useless waste of his own. He could hardly expect to be very impressive with anyone who knew as many legal circumventions as Mr. Rand about, or indeed with anyone who chose to be as stubborn as Thorn could be when she did choose. It was however perfectly clear that his business with me in his court house office was not as urgent as I’d assumed, or Mr. Rand wouldn’t be raisin’ time with Thorn.
I changed my dress, got my hat and gloves and came down stairs to wait for what should happen. I picked up the afternoon paper and tried to read about what the local reporter called the most dastardly crime committed in the annals of our peaceful hamlet. He enlarged on Mr. Sutton’s noble and useful life, mentioned the grief-stricken family, and added that Mr. Sutton’s death left a gap in the community that would be well nigh impossible to fill. He ended by saying that the police were leaving no stone unturned to bring the dastard to justice. I used to think when I first came to Landover that the Landover Inquirer was consciously funny. After reading it for six years and meeting the local reporter I changed my mind. No conscious intention could preserve so high an average.
I suppose all this was beginning to get on my nerves. Anyway, I was startled when I looked up and saw Lillie’s black face and shiny eye thrown in high relief above the lamp on the low table beside me.
“Law me, did Ah scair you?” she inquired solicitously. She pads around the house in felt, slippers anyway, so that one hardly ever hears her unless she’s annoyed. Then she sounds like Pharaoh’s army.
“Is they foun’ out who done it?” she asked, looking behind her as if she expected “them” to hear her.
“Not yet.”
“Well Ah guess they will, ’cause Ah seen Mistah Rand goin’ in the telegram place when Ah was down gettin’ some sugar you forget to ordah this mo’nin’. Ah guess he sent a powe’ful lot of telegraphs. He’s in th’ a powe’ful long time.”
“Was he?” I turned the paper inside out to the society columns.
“Yass’m.”
She went over and straightened the curtain. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She moved a pillow on the sofa and put another in its place.
“They tells me Aunt Charlotte ain’ goin’ sell her house,” she said after a moment.
“Isn’t she?”
“No’m. They tell me that Reverdy Hawkins got money from somebody ’bout it an’ that he’s lef’ town this mo’nin’.”
“Really?” I asked with more interest than I usually show. “They tell me” is Lillie’s expression either for a confidential authentic source or for simply the consensus of colored opinion gathered at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Westport.
“That’s stupid of him,” I said. “Now Mr. Sullivan will think he shot Mr. Sutton.”
Lillie made some internal noise and shook her straight bear-greased thatch.
“ ’Deed an’ he won’,” she said. “Mistah Sullivan, he knows Rev’dy won’ do that.”
After a moment she added, screwing up her black forehead, “Ain’ the’ a Mexican at the Hall?”
I nodded. She shook her head ominously.
“That’s what they say,” she observed. “They tell me they’s treach’rous. Stick a knife in you fo’ a nickel.”
“I don’t think this one would,” I said, just as the door bell rang. “If that’s Mr. Rand I’m all ready.”
“Yass’m.”
She padded quietly out. I heard her say “Come right in, suh, Miss Niles all ready.”
It was Mr. Rand. I went out to meet him.
“Sullivan would like to see you at his office,” he sai
d. I thought he looked rather tired. I’d never noticed the deep furrows in his face before.
We went out, Lillie watching furtively through the curtain. I could imagine her storing this up for the Rosebud Circle (Daughters of the Nile) that night.
We got in my car. Mr. Rand somehow managed to get his legs folded up so as. to give me room to shift gears without too much trouble.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“That’s just what we’re going to see,” he said gravely. So gravely that I decided I’d better hold my peace. Which I did, remarkably enough, until we drew up in Court House Circle. I parked the car and we made our way through the crowd of men lolling on the benches and steps in front of the two-story brick building that houses Landover County’s majesty of the law. On the steps we met Judge Duval. He shook hands with Mr. Rand and nodded to me. Judge Duval never fails to announce to every panel that women are at the bottom of all crimes. I thought it was very fitting that I should meet him now. They tell me—just as they tell Lillie—that in the drawing room he’s the embodiment of chivalry; the point being that the minute women leave the house they’re up to mischief. It’s a simple creed, and Judge Duval follows it with a simplicity that would be admirable if one weren’t a woman.
We went up to Mr. Sullivan’s office and into the ante-room. Reverdy Hawkins was standing by the water cooler, ashy grey, smoothing the ruffled surface of his top hat.
“Good day, Mistah Rand; Good day ma’am.”
He bowed with a jerk and looked very much like an exceedingly unhappy ostrich.
Mr. Rand looked him over carefully.
“I thought you left town, Reverdy,” he said dryly.
“No suh, no suh!” Reverdy protested hastily. “Ah jus’ ran up to Baltimo’ for somethin’. Ah was comin’ right back.”
“I see. I’d been under the impression Mr. Sullivan had you brought back.”
“A very nach’ral impression, suh. Ah came with Mistah Basil. Ah met him, an’ we comes back togethuh. He thought Ah was goin’ away, but Ah wasn’ suh. No indeed.”
Against the cloudy glass in the door marked “Mr. Sullivan” a shadowy figure moved briskly back and forth. It was taller than Mr. Sullivan and slimmer. Mr. Sullivan is short and father stout. I watched it with a vague feeling of familiarity. Suddenly the door opened and Franklin Knox burst out, Mr. Sullivan following complacently, a startling contrast to the white-lipped younger man.
