The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  “He doesn’t bother about denying it,” I said. “—Or explaining it.”

  “I’m coming over, Cousin Lucy,” she said abruptly. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not, darling.”

  I hung up the phone. I could hear Bill Haines banging around in the little office. I glanced out to see if the walls were still standing. Then I went to the door, waiting for Faith. Maybe if the two of them could talk to each other, I thought… and then my heart collapsed like a punctured toy balloon. Ruth Napier’s car had just drawn up behind Bill’s, and she was getting out. She looked perfectly ravishing with her long dark hair in thick loose curls around her slim throat framing her vivid face. She had on some odd kind of yellow dress that made her look like a dark flame-wrapped star, and she gave me a quick smile.

  “Hello, Miss Randolph! Is Bill here? I see he is.”

  She came through the gate and started for the office. “Do you mind?”

  I smiled—or I tried to. I found myself hoping she’d think it was prudery she’d so obviously seen on my face that made her ask if I minded. As I stepped back into the hall and pushed the door to, I heard her tap on the office door, and heard the hinge groan. “Hello, Bill!” she called. “You home?”

  And after a little while, standing by the window, I saw Faith Yardley come up Francis Street, look at Ruth’s car, glance ever so slightly at the office and at my closed door, and go on by as if she’d never intended stopping in at all.

  When Community rang the supper bell, Ruth’s car was still in front of the house. I went in the dining room and sat down, wondering what I’d do if Bill came in and asked if she could stay for supper. Then I looked up. He was in the door, alone, and evidently planning to stay, because he sat down and unfolded his napkin, and grinned at Community and the golden mountain of fried chicken she brought in on his heels.

  When she’d gone he looked at me.

  “Miss Lucy, would you like me to get a room somewhere else?” he asked soberly.

  I was probably nearer tears than I’ve been for a thousand years. I shook my head. “Not unless you want to,” I answered.

  “I don’t,” he said. Then, when he’d eaten more strawberry shortcake than it seemed he could possibly envelop, he said, “Will you do something for me?”

  I nodded.

  “Take me around to Yardley Hall. I’ve got to see Faith—I’ll go crazy if I don’t…”

  If only the ceiling had dropped just then, or there’d been a flood, or anything, so we’d never gone to Yardley Hall that night! But it didn’t, and we went. Abraham showed us into the library.

  “Doctor Yardley, he’s upstairs, Miss Melusiny’s took bad again,” he said. That alone should have warned me. “Ah’ll tell him you all’s come, Mis’ Lucy. It’s mighty close in here, Ah’ll jus’ open th’ window.”

  He put up the window and pushed open the Dutch doors into the garden.

  “Is Miss Faith here, Abraham?” I asked as he went out into the hall.

  “Ah’ll see d’rec’ly, Mis’ Lucy.”

  I sat down, and Bill moved restlessly up and down the floor, absorbed, I’ve no doubt, in what he was going to say to her when she came, constantly turning toward the door to see her there. And all of a sudden I saw him jerk to attention. He was near the open garden door.

  Out of the soft night, alive with fitful firefly lanterns, lemon-pale, I heard a man’s voice, more charged with passionate longing than I knew one could be, saying, “I’ve loved you all my life, Faith…you’ll never be sorry, darling…”

  I sat there, my mouth open, my body turned to water and ice.

  “There’s never been any one in all the world but you. Oh, Faith, Faith, I love you so…”

  And I realized that it was Marshall Yardley saying that. It was his own cousin that he loved—it wasn’t Ruth Napier. Melusina had been wrong. All the rest of us had been wrong. Only Doctor Yardley had seen it. That was what he had meant—I saw it now—when he’d said to me, “Has Marshall declared himself?”… and that was what Faith had seen in Marshall Yardley’s face last night in my parlor. It wasn’t Ruth Napier he’d come for, it was Faith herself, and she’d known it, seeing the pain in his eyes.

  I looked at Bill. For an instant that seemed a thousand years he stood there, rooted to the floor, turned utterly to stone. Then suddenly he wrenched himself loose and barged out of the room, and into the hall, and out into the night.

  CHAPTER 19

  I just sat there, utterly limp. Over and over again, as if they were on a phonograph record that had got stuck and kept repeating the same line, Marshall’s voice—”You’ll never be sorry, dear; Faith, Faith, I love you so!”—and Bill’s tortured retreat marked step by step through the dark lanes of box until the gate banged, ground round and round in my ears. Then Doctor Yardley’s gentle voice from the stair landing:

  “I don’t know where Miss Faith is, Abraham. I presume she’s in the garden with Mr. Marshall.”

  He came in the door.

  “Good evening, Lucy.”

  He looked around. “Abraham said young Haines was with you.”

  “He was, but he left,” I said.

  A disturbed shadow crossed Peyton Yardley’s transparent finely chiselled face. He touched the bell on the old mahogany table. “Bring some sherry for Miss Lucy, Abraham.—You look ill, my dear. Has something distressed you?”

  For the second time in years, and all in less than three hours, I could have wept, long and bitterly. I just shook my head. I did take the sherry Abraham poured me from the delicate blown-glass decanter, and drank it slowly while Doctor Yardley sat in his old faded leather armchair behind the table watching me, his grave, faraway eyes clouded with anxiety.

  I put the glass down and managed a smile.

  “I’m just a romantic fool, Peyton,” I said ruefully. “As the young say, skip it.”

  The shadow dimmed his face again.

  “Have Faith and Haines had another—”

  I shook my head.

  “It didn’t get that far,” I said. “Marshall seems to have led the field.”

  He was silent a moment. He’d seen it coming, of course, with clearer, more understanding eyes than the rest of us had had… but it was a kind of stopping for him, even at that.

  “Melusina’s very upset about it,” he said at last. A faint almost sardonic smile moved his face. “Melusina is undoubtedly the world’s least successful fixer.”

  He sat there tapping his fingertips absently on the green tooled leather table cover.

  “Marshall may be, and undoubtedly is, in love with Faith, Peyton,” I said. (It’s extraordinary how nothing will ever teach me to mind my own business.) “But she isn’t in love with him. I’m a pretty bad fixer myself, but that doesn’t keep me from knowing that Bill Haines is head over heels in love with Faith, and Faith is madly in love with him. Normal people don’t go about acting like lunatics unless there’s something wrong with them.”

  Doctor Yardley got up, his eyes troubled—almost as troubled as they’d been the afternoon I’d blurted out my pent-up rebellion against his daughter’s marriage to Mason Seymour.

  “Have they been going about acting like lunatics, Lucy?” he asked at last.

  “Worse,” I said flatly. “Bill Haines is practically certain to be locked up for the murder of Melusina’s precious Mason. God knows he may even have done it—but if he did it was because Faith goaded him to it.”

  He was standing there, his finger tips balanced on the table top, and not lightly but very hard, to keep his tall body from swaying. I could see how white and bloodless they were.

  “I don’t understand you, Lucy,” he said, almost sharply—very sharply for him.

  “I don’t understand all of it myself,” I replied. “But it seems plain enough to me that Bill tried to stop Faith from going to see Mason Seymour, and
she went anyway, and found him dead, and…”

  I didn’t get any farther. Doctor Yardley held up his hand, his face paler even than it was from years of seclusion within these four panelled book-lined walls.

  “I think I’d better speak to Faith at once, Lucy,” he said quietly. He went over to the open Dutch door, slowly as if his feet were weighted with lead, looked out and called, “Faith! Daughter!”

  As he called there was a sound of some one stumbling up the front steps and a man’s voice swearing softly. Doctor Yardley turned back, and frowned. Then his face cleared as Abraham opened the door and the dim hall light fell on the perspiring face of the majesty of the law in the person of Sergeant Michael Priddy, and behind him, looking even less majestic because he was grinning like a schoolboy, the Commonwealth Attorney, Mr. John Carter Crabtree.

  I glanced at Doctor Yardley. If I’d expected—and I’m not sure that I had—that he’d be annoyed or disturbed at their coming to Yardley Hall without a formal by-your-leave-sir, I was wrong. He seemed not the least surprised—almost relieved, in fact, as if he could now get a little first-hand information.

  He held out his hand. “Good evening, John; good evening, Michael.”

  I saw the whimsical flicker lighting his eyes for an instant. If you’ve brought two children into the world, given them the first whack on the back to make them howl and exist, it must be rather amusing to have them confront you thirty-five years later as guardians of the law under which you live.

  “Good evening, sir,” the Commonwealth Attorney said.

  “Good evening, sir,” the City Sergeant said.

  Then they both said, “Good evening, Miss Lucy,” and at just that moment Faith and Marshall came in from the garden—Faith pale and lovely, Marshall as if with star dust still drunkenly in his eyes. Faith looked quickly at her father, and at me. I shook my head. She looked relieved, though I’m sure I don’t know either what she thought I meant, or what I did mean, actually, except that it was all right, whatever it was.

  “Won’t you all sit down,” Doctor Yardley said, with that grave courtesy that invested each chair with a canopy of royal purple like the governor’s pew in Bruton Church. “I’m sorry my sister can’t come down, John. She’s not well.”

  For an instant John—as Commonwealth Attorney—looked as if he thought possibly justice was being obstructed, and then immediately as John Crabtree his face brightened, as at one less ordeal. But they were both wrong, however, or rather all three—Doctor Yardley, John Crabtree attorney, and John Crabtree gentleman…for nothing short of death or two broken legs would have kept Melusina Yardley upstairs when Abraham, replying to her querulous command, told her who all were downstairs. I saw the faint ironic gleam in Peyton Yardley’s eyes, and caught the tightened glance his daughter gave me. Sergeant Priddy mopped his forehead, and so did John Crabtree, and Marshall did nothing but just gaze at Faith, as if he’d never seen her before and wouldn’t again for a long, long time.

  Then Melusina arrived, her astringent quality heightened by an obvious suspicion that we’d all rather she’d not come, and also by her very hasty toilet. She looked frightened, too, in an odd sort of way, as if something more fundamental than she’d known existed had suddenly tottered and collapsed in the foundations of her life.

  John Crabtree cleared his throat. “Of course, you all understand that we don’t want to make any more trouble for you all than we can help…”

  Doctor Yardley leaned back in his worn leather chair.

  “I think we all understand, John,” he said quietly. “We realize that the unfortunate publication of the announcement of my daughter’s engagement to Mason Seymour involves us in the investigation you’re bound to make. I’m very glad you’ve come like this. We know we can trust your and Michael’s discretion as gentlemen, as well as your honor as officers of the law. You understand, of course, that we’re not asking any favor not entirely consistent with your duty as such.”

  John Crabtree mumbled something. Doctor Yardley shook his head. “All you have to do, John, is find out the truth,” he said. “We shall be entirely content with that.”

  He passed his hand across his high forehead.

  “The first thing for you to know—and this is where I ask your discretion as a gentleman—is that my daughter was not engaged to Mason Seymour.”

  The room was like a forest pool with a stone dropped abruptly into it. Faith’s pale calm rippled and was still again, Melusina’s breath came sharply. Her brother turned to her.

  “I think it’s only fair to Faith, Melusina, to have the onus for this sickening tragedy taken off her shoulders.”

  Faith’s eyes were fixed like two rapt stars on her father’s face; her red lips were parted a little, waiting. It was the first time the onus for anything had ever been taken from her, except for Marshall’s clumsy childhood attempts that had never deceived their aunt, only convinced her more firmly that Faith was a spoiled wilful child.

  “The announcement was made impulsively by my sister, who, I don’t doubt for an instant, thought she was doing the best thing. When I learned that my daughter was not in love with Mason Seymour, I went to him and told him frankly that there had been a misunderstanding, because of my sister’s overzealousness, and that I would only consent to my daughter’s marrying when I was convinced that her heart, and not any other consideration whatsoever, counselled it.”

  Peyton Yardley looked at Faith. He was talking to her, not to John Crabtree. He was talking about Marshall, not about Mason Seymour. His grave understanding eyes were as steadfast as the day. The pallor under Faith’s honey-gold skin deepened. She closed her eyes. Marshall got up abruptly and moved over to the window, his dark face drawn, his hand trembling as he lighted a match and held it to his cigarette.

  Melusina seemed to me to have shrunk down into herself, completely wretched. I think she must have viewed her brother as a child building a castle in the sand, having it washed down and building it up again and again until it at last seemed eternal, must view the final wave that takes it utterly away. Certainly her brother had seemed permanent enough in all the years after the lapse of his marriage, and now he was entirely out of hand again, as he was saying to the Commonwealth Attorney,

  “You would, I expect, John, like each of us to give you an account of his movements night before last. We would like to do it, whether you require it or not.”

  Sergeant Priddy took out his notebook. I think he was glad to have a job of any kind to do…there was something pretty overwhelming in the shabby grandeur of Yardley Hall and the impressive dignity of the white-haired cavalier sitting there under the three-hundred-year-old portrait of the first of his line to come to Williamsburg.

  “I left the supper table and went to Mason Seymour’s a little before seven,” Doctor Yardley said evenly. “I was there, I should judge, twenty-five minutes or so. Our interview was entirely amicable. I was surprised, therefore, when I got home to find that my sister was greatly upset and that my nephew here had followed me over. I hadn’t met him on the way because I didn’t return directly; I walked around to Nicholson Street, to the Palace Green, and back to the Hall that way.

  “My nephew came in about half an hour after I returned. We went out into the garden here.” He pointed to the curving stone stairs that led down to the path from the Dutch doors. “We had a good deal to talk about. Neither of us noticed the passage of time until the night train went by. We came in shortly after that, about eleven, I should judge. I had a glass of port and we went upstairs.”

  It was just before eleven, I thought, when the watchman heard the gun being pitched over the fence into the Canal. It was after that—ten minutes or so—that I myself stood at the garden gate in Scotland Street, afraid to come on into Yard-ley Hall, seeing the shadowy hand and hearing the chain on the well house.

  The Commonwealth Attorney looked at Marshall Yardley.

 
“I went to see Seymour because my aunt felt she’d involved Faith more deeply than my uncle knew,” Marshall said shortly. “She felt Seymour wouldn’t be as reasonable as my uncle found him.”

  “Luton says the two of you quarrelled?” John Crabtree drawled.

  “We did. I took the opportunity of telling him a few truths. Not that I thought it would do much good, but I had the satisfaction of getting a lot of spleen out of my own system. I went over there about eight. I was back here at eight-thirty or quarter to nine at the latest.”

  “You didn’t go back after that?”

  “No. I stayed here in the garden, talking to my uncle.”

  “And you didn’t go in the back garden over there at Seymour’s, any time?”

  Marshall shook his head, and John Crabtree turned to Faith.

  CHAPTER 20

  She might have been carved out of old ivory, she sat there so motionless. Only her eyes were alive, deep black pools, liquid and unafraid.

  “You see, the trouble is,” John Crabtree said—and I don’t think he knew quite how important what he was saying was to her—“it happens this is simplified to a certain extent because we found the shotgun. The Sergeant and Captain Callowhill from Newport News—he’s a ballistics expert—they made some tests after dinner, and there’s no two ways about it. Seymour was shot at a distance of about twenty feet through the open window from the terrace. Now it happens we can check pretty well on everybody that was in the back garden. Because they’ve had a plague of cockroaches and waterbugs over there, and they had powder all around the house, along the sills, and the drains, and the gutters, so anybody goin’ from the front of the house to the back, or anybody goin’ out of the house onto the terrace, was bound to track the stuff. Joe, the gardener, put it down just before supper, and they locked the doors so’s nobody’d go trackin’ it in.”

  I heard myself saying: “What if somebody who was in the house knew it was there, John—couldn’t they have avoided it?”