by Leslie Ford
CHAPTER 11
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I went back out on the porch and along the walk, and stopped. I could see shadows moving all through the garden, it seemed to me, under the mimosas, in between the box. And then, Cousin Lucy…”
She paused.
“I saw a woman. I know it was a woman. I don’t know where she came from, or where she went—only that the gate was dark a moment, and then I saw the white pickets and she was gone. Then I realized that was what Bill had meant by ladies’ day at the races and telling me not to go down. And then I got scared. I hadn’t been before, not very, anyway, but I was then, and I ran as fast as I could back to the house.”
She stopped again.
“Somebody had closed the door.”
I sat there motionless, my brain numb, seeing all this more plainly than she could know.
“I didn’t wait to knock, I burst in and through the parlor there. The door of the library was open a little. I called Mason and ran in.… And there he was. There was blood all over everything.”
She closed her eyes, blotting out that awful memory. There was no use in closing mine. The same dark image was there whether they were open or shut.
“I ran to the telephone. I knew I must call Doctor Harriman, and then I knew there was no use. It was too awful—it seemed to me as if I knew without any one telling me that he hadn’t killed himself—not like that. It must have been some one who hated him horribly, who wanted to disfigure him so dreadfully.—And then, all of a sudden, Cousin Lucy, with Central saying ‘Number, please; number, please,’ I put down the phone…”
She looked up at me. I think she wanted me to deny what she was going to say, and was afraid, somehow, that I wouldn’t.
“You see, Cousin Lucy, all… all the people who hated Mason the most live at Yardley Hall.”
She waited. There was nothing I could say. I couldn’t say, even though it was true, that Bill Haines had virtually shouted from the Palace lanthorn how much he objected to Mason Seymour—because that, of course, wasn’t very serious. Or was it? I thought suddenly. I hurried on in my own mind to Hallie Taswell’s husband Hugh, and Hallie herself, and Ruth Napier. I’m sure I shouldn’t care to trust any of them with a frantic cause and a loaded shotgun. But that wasn’t the sort of thing I could say to Faith. What she had said was true enough; and to make it truer still, there was blood on the well at Yardley Hall.
“Anyway, that’s why I didn’t call Mr. Priddy,” Faith said evenly. “And I should have, because—”
Her voice sank to a whisper again. “—because somebody was out on the terrace.”
I stared at her.
“Faith!”
“Somebody was watching me.”
Her lips were pale under the bright lipstick.
“I was in the light. It was dark out there, but I could…I could feel some one looking at me.—And oh, Cousin Lucy!”
She got up abruptly and stood, her hands clenched at her side. “What if it’s somebody I know—who saw me, and doesn’t know really whether I saw him or not, and keeps looking at me, wondering whether I know? I…I’m terrified! It isn’t that I’m afraid he’ll…kill me too; it’s something else. It’s just the knowing—because I heard something outside before I put down the phone, and looked out, and I know somebody knew I was looking at him…”
“Faith,” I said, very quietly, “do you think you know who it was?”
She put her hands to her head. “Oh, I don’t know, Cousin Lucy, I don’t know!”
“Sit down, Faith,” I said. She sat down on the ottoman, her head bent forward, her hands clasped tightly around her knees to keep herself from trembling from head to foot.
“Listen, Faith,” I began—but that’s as far as I got. The iron gate latch clicked and two feet—and not two, I realized instantly, but four—came up the path; two heavy, two so twinkling light that if I hadn’t been fearing desperately they’d come I should never have heard them. Faith looked up.
“Is that…?”
I nodded. I needn’t have, because that “Hi, Miss Lucy!” in the hall meant that the next moment the door would open and there they’d be, not just one as she thought, but two… and it did open and there they were—both of them.
Ruth Napier was no longer in jodhpurs but in a sort of dark reddish dress that fitted her slim figure as if she’d just risen from a sea of crushed raspberries, with a crushed raspberry turban on her dark head and a necklace made of the little brass bells that Indian dancing girls wear as anklets. She looked utterly enchanting, and the big young man behind her in the crumpled white linen suit knew it quite as well as she did…or did until he saw the other girl sitting on the ottoman in front of the fireplace. Then his face changed. I suspect he must have thought I always kept a female figure, stuffed if necessary, on that ottoman for him to barge in on.
“Oh, hello, Faith,” Ruth Napier said, with a sort of “Fancy-meeting-you-here” air and that little snapdragon smile flicking the corner of her red mouth.
“Hello, Ruth. Good evening, Mr. Haines.”
“Good evening, Miss Yardley.” Bill was like a sullen schoolboy.
“We’ve come to tell you we’re going over to Barrett’s to dance,” Ruth said. She looked up at him, laughing gaily. “Bill seems to think you ring curfew at nine-thirty. He wanted to be properly checked out so he could get back in again.”
“He has the key to the office,” I said tartly. “Furthermore, he’s quite free to come and go as he chooses.”
He gave me a savage scowl. And Ruth, whose command of the situation was nothing less than admirable, unless it was somewhat shocking for Williamsburg’s classic repose, said, “Faith, why don’t you come along with us? Mason would hate all this gloom!—You ask her, Bill!”
Well, I’m afraid I’m pretty old-fashioned, I must say. Bill Haines flushed, or maybe it was Ruth’s frock reflected in his face—they were very much the same shade.
“No, thanks—I couldn’t, really,” Faith said.
“Then do let us drop you at home—it isn’t a bit out of our way…is it, Bill?”
“Thanks,” Faith said. “My cousin’s coming after me.”
And when they’d gone, and the gate had clicked and the sound of the motor was lost, and the frogs and some students harmonizing somewhere in the distance were all the sound left to us, Faith looked at me with an unhappy little smile.
“So that’s that,” she said, trying to keep the husky edge off her voice.
I’d have given my head to be able to say, “Not at all, my dear,” but I wasn’t. So I didn’t say anything at all. If I should wake up some morning and look out and see that eternal midnight had come, and our Cinderella town had gone back to its old self, and where the Palace is, an ash heap was again, and where the Capitol is, an empty lot with a bronze tablet on a stone, and in place of the blue coach and four, with its liveried footmen, a gasoline truck backfiring down the Duke of Gloucester Street, I couldn’t, I suppose, be sicker than I was just then. I hadn’t been matchmaking… but I had seen the topless towers of Ilium rise glowing in a young man’s eyes, and in a girl’s now it wasn’t even a smoldering ruin, it was just a ruin.
It’s not without relief, however, that I can say I didn’t get up and make a bee line over to the office and get my father’s shotgun out of the old press and set out into the night to do something about it. If I’d even had the impulse, I think I should have hurried down the street and applied for admittance to the State Hospital. Instead I just sat there, hoping that Mr. William Quincy Adams Haines was having the most miserable evening of his life, and that the mosquitoes at Barrett’s were as ubiquitously carnivorous as they used to be when I was a girl and went there.
Faith just sat there too. Every line of her young body had changed, somehow, and drooped the way the petals of an iris droop under an unseasonable sun. I do
n’t mean she’d collapsed or anything of the sort, just that a kind of fresh resilient young glory that she had had suddenly dimmed, like a cloud crossing the sun, draining its golden radiance from the earth.
After a moment she got up, slowly, as if it was a hard thing to do to move her weary little feet in their blue-braided sandals, and moved to the fireplace and stood there, the way her father does, looking down, her back to me, her bright head bent forward a little. A firefly that Bill and Ruth had let in out of the night circled its lemon-pale lantern around her a moment and settled, dark again, on the bowl of scarlet roses in the corner. At last Faith raised her head, and when she turned to me again her chin was up, her eyes clear, her slim young body crisp and green again…so that I thought preposterously that this firefly must have brought her some subtle elixir—a pennyworth of starch for her heart.
She looked at me with her wide grey tranquil eyes, and then that sudden merry smile that had always punctured her prim gravity with a sharp plop just as people were about to say “What a serious child!” lighted her face, not with any cold firefly light but warm and radiant as the sun.
“Oh don’t, Cousin Lucy, don’t!” she cried. “You look just like Williamsburg before the Restoration!”
It was precisely the way I felt, of course.
“Oh, please, darling!”
The Bruton Church clock struck its silver bell. She paused to listen.
“Oh, dear, I’ve got to go home—it’s late.”
She picked up the blue straw cartwheel she’d tossed on the sofa and dropped an airy kiss on the top of my head.
“Isn’t Marshall coming after you?” I asked.
“Don’t be naïve, Cousin Lucy,” she said lightly. “Of course he isn’t. Poor dear, he’s probably sitting moping in the moonlight in Ruth Napier’s rose arbor.”
She shrugged her slim shoulders.
“We Yardleys are tragic figures, darling.—You know?”
The gate latch clicked again just then, and almost at once, with the casual bang of the brass knocker that old friends give before they walk in, knowing the servants are off, the door opened and Marshall Yardley literally materialized out of the chorus of frogs and ballet of fireflies that make up Williamsburg’s spring comic opera nights. And Faith’s flippancy to the contrary notwithstanding, Marshall Yardley, standing there filling the hall door, was a tragic figure.
CHAPTER 12
If ever in my entire life I saw aching hopeless hunger in human eyes, it was in Marshall’s just then. If it hadn’t been for the Yardley nose and the Yardley jaw and the Yardley pride keeping it all in an iron strait-jacket, I think I should have wept seeing him. Because I couldn’t help seeing at the same time the other man who’d stood in that very spot such a few minutes before…the gay dark girl in the raspberry frock and turban laughing up at him. Had Marshall known she’d been there, I wondered, and was that why he’d come?
“Hullo, Cousin Lucy,” he said shortly. He turned to Faith. “I’ve just been down at the Court House. Priddy said you were here.—I thought if you were ready…”
He hesitated.
“I was just starting to go,” Faith said. And I knew I hadn’t just imagined the pain in Marshall’s eyes. Faith had seen it too, and her voice was warm and gentle, the way honey tastes that’s been standing in the sun. I looked at her with surprise. Perhaps the fragment of love she’d glimpsed herself had done it. Perhaps, I thought, if Melusina had ever had such a glimpse she wouldn’t have botched Faith’s life the way she had. But Melusina had never loved anything, not even a dog, really. And Faith had always before been a little offhand and snippish and young about Marshall and Ruth Napier. Her voice just now was a kind of rich apology for all that.
I folded up my knitting and bent down to lay it in the basket beside my chair. I was thinking, “Why don’t I ask Marshall if they’ve found anything out since morning? He’s just been down to the Court House. It isn’t natural, with the whole town crying Murder and every parlor in Williamsburg buzzing with it, for us to act as if nothing at all had happened.”
So I said aloud, “Is there any news, Marshall?”
He didn’t answer, not as quickly as it seemed to me he should. So I glanced up—and looked away quickly, too startled to breathe without gasping. He and Faith were looking at each other. Faith’s lips were parted just a little, her face had gone quite pale. But it was the expression in her eyes that was the perfectly extraordinary thing… as if she’d suddenly and abruptly discovered in that very instant something she’d not been sure of before; something she hadn’t wanted to know, that she’d wanted, in fact, not to know but couldn’t help knowing now.
Marshall’s dark strong face was pale too, and focused and intense. They looked, I thought with dismay, no more like the two pleasant children who’d grown up together than the man in the moon. Then suddenly Faith turned away, and I saw that her lips were trembling and her eyes wide, and almost anguished, it seemed to me. And Marshall, quite as if my question had solidified, and was still there in the air, waiting for him to take hold of it, jerked himself quite literally to attention.
“They’ve found out that… a woman was at Seymour’s last night, in the study—either when he was killed, or immediately after,” he said.
His voice was hard, as if it was coming out of a mechanical, not a human, throat, except that it jolted unevenly as Faith reached out her hand to steady herself against the wing of the fireside chair.
“Priddy says it must have been after, because he’s convinced the shot was fired through the window from the terrace. They’re sure nobody went either in or out of the house from the terrace, either before or after the…murder. They’ve put pink roach powder all over the back entrances and the drains. Anybody going in or out would have had to track the powder. And no one did.”
He stopped and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a crumpled handkerchief.
“Somebody,” he said harshly—not because he wanted to be harsh, I thought, but because it was the only way he could control his voice, “a man—went back onto the terrace and out again to the front. He didn’t go in the house. They’ve got his footprints in moulage—that’s a kind of wax they use. So if Priddy’s right and the shot came from the terrace, it’s not so bad for the…woman. If he’s not, and John Crabtree doesn’t seem convinced, because they can’t find a gun anywhere—then it won’t be so…simple.”
He stopped abruptly. It was just as if I wasn’t there, or the room, or the ottoman, or the roses and lilies in the rug, or the unravelled sock for the Eskimo, or the Empire table with the veneer broken off the apron, or anything—just those two speaking to each other across a barren wind-swept plain. Marshall knowing Faith was the woman in the study; Faith knowing then that Marshall must have been outside… and the people who hated Mason Seymour the most all lived at Yardley Hall. It was almost as if I was hearing her say it again.
“How do they know it was a woman there?” I heard my voice say. I knew with a sudden sharp intuition that that was the question Faith dared not ask, and that I was asking it not through any free volition of my own, but because the words were there in the room and some one’s lips had to give them form.
Marshall looked at Faith, not me.
“The telephone operator says a signal flashed from the phone there shortly after half-past ten. She said ‘Number, please’ twice without any answer, and then she heard a woman give a… a sort of little gasp. She’s sure it was a woman. She can’t say why, she just knows it was.—And there are a woman’s fingerprints, with blood on them, on the phone.”
He stopped again. The atmosphere in the room moved like a dark turgid river slow with fear.
“Does John Crabtree know who it was?” I heard myself asking. My voice sounded strangled and unnatural, but I knew it was because it was falling into a choked and unnatural silence, and because my own ears were tortured with dread.
> Even in the candlelight I could see the hard muscles of Marshall’s jaw working under the heavy blue shadow of his clean-shaven beard. He didn’t answer, not for ever so long, but when he did his voice was more controlled than it had been.
“He hasn’t said. All he says is that one woman was known to have been in the house at about that time. He thinks it may be that she…killed Seymour—for the reason women always kill men—and picked up the phone to tell the police what she’d done… and then couldn’t go through with it.”
He stopped, and added quietly, “They’ve been hunting her this evening to take her fingerprints. She’s out…somewhere.”
So that was it, I thought. Marshall knew that Faith was the woman who’d been in the study—but suspicion was pointing to Ruth Napier. He stood torn between the Yardley loyalty to his cousin on the one hand, and on the other a more poignant loyalty to a woman dancing somewhere under the soft May moon in another man’s arms. And what, I thought, if between those two loyalties was something else, something grimmer and starker than any one knew—the gaunt terrible shadow of murder—sealing his lips?
If Faith didn’t speak, he never could. Only one man had gone into the back garden to the terrace, tracking the roach powder as he went, and come again, tracking more than roach powder…unless this murder was a kind of human roach powder. Which is a very dreadful thing to say, and no really nice woman would dream of saying it.
I knew Faith was thinking that too: that Marshall would not dare to speak. I knew she was thinking of the sound she had heard, standing there beside her dead fiance’s body… and that she mustn’t now move or speak a word to say she knew.
I heard Marshall say, “We’d better be going, Faith. Your father will be worried,” and my heart rose in sharp alarmed protest. I saw Faith’s body go taut for an instant.
“Why don’t you stay all night with me, Faith,” I said, and heard myself trying desperately to sound ordinary and casual. I saw her brighten, clutching an instant at a straw, and grow dim again, rejecting it.
