The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  I got up too. “Please don’t, Bill—wait till morning anyway!” I cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Yes, I do, Miss Lucy,” he said, his voice suddenly very gentle. “You know the base Indian that threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe? Well—that’s not me, Miss Lucy. We Haineses always get our girl.”

  “The last of the Haineses will be getting a bullet in his head if he doesn’t start using it,” I said sharply.

  He grinned, and put his head back in the door just before he closed it. “Cheerioh!” he said.

  I leaned my head back against the carved rosewood frame of my Victorian rocking chair. It was definitely the place I belonged in, and I didn’t care just then whether I ever moved out of it or not. Tomorrow I’d have somebody get me some more knitting to do, and I’d hereafter sit there and do it—the Haineses and the Yardleys and the Taswells and the Lutons and the Talbot Seymours, and the entire universe of men and angels, could go their several ways without help or hindrance from me. I’ll get a cat and a parrot, I thought, and a little darky to wind my wool… and Bill Haines’s long legs are crossing the Court House Green into England Street, I thought, and now he’s passing the old mulberry tree by the cutting garden.… In a moment he’ll be in Scotland Street by the white wicket with the cannon ball on the chain to keep it closed. He’ll see the long dark alleys of box and the peaked roof of the little well house with the long fingers of wisteria and the brown spot of blood on the whitewashed board.

  I closed my eyes. The carved pear on the back of my chair pressing against my head made it ache suddenly as it had never ached before… but it wasn’t my head that was aching, or the carved rosewood pear on the Victorian chair back that made it ache…it was my heart, and the last of the Haineses, and the last of the Yardleys.

  And just then the phone rang. I don’t know why it sounded so urgent and peremptory, except that the house was so still and dead. It rang again, sharp and long, and I ran out into the hall and took down the receiver.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Oh, Cousin Lucy!”

  It was Faith; her voice was all agony.

  “Oh Cousin Lucy, come quickly…it’s Marshall…he’s dead!”

  * The author’s apologies to Miss Booth.

  CHAPTER 23

  Faith’s voice, all agony, crying through the night “Oh Cousin Lucy, come quickly…it’s Marshall, he’s dead!” was still throbbing in my numb brain as I hurried, too tired to even try to think, into Scotland Street. When I got there I stopped abruptly. Across the middle of the road was Sergeant Priddy’s car. It was turned so that the long white fingers of its headlights reached in through the white picket fence and groped among the dark branches of heavy box up the path, past the well house to Yardley Hall. I ran forward to the wicket. It had been propped open with a rock, the black cannon ball on its chain hanging ominously across the beam of solid light. Then I saw ahead of me in the path, grouped silently and terribly about the little well house, four motionless figures, their white-linen backs all toward me, looking down at something on the ground.

  I turned quickly and ran up to Palace Long Wall Street, and down the elm-shaded drive to the high pillared porch of Yardley Hall. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and went in. Death was there already. I felt his cold soulless silence touch my face and creep into my heart as I had felt it another time in those same dim walls. I closed the door softly and stole into the library. Faith was sitting there in her father’s chair, her face as pale as old alabaster, her eyes wide and tearless, her hands folded in front of her on the green-gold leather table cover. She didn’t move as I went to her and pressed my lips to her cold forehead. Then she closed her eyes.

  “They say he killed himself, Cousin Lucy,” she whispered. “I’ll never forgive myself, Cousin Lucy.”

  She clung to me quickly, desperately, her voice choked in a dry awful sob, her whole body shaking like a leaf.

  “Please, honey, please!” I implored, holding her tight against me.

  “Oh, how could he, Cousin Lucy, how could he? I did love him, really—in a way I did. I was going to marry him, I truly was.”

  I looked up. Melusina Yardley was standing in the door. Faith must have sensed it; she clutched me more tightly, and I her. Melusina’s face was terrible. It was calm and set as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d expected she’d be a fury with all hell loose in her eyes and in her serpent’s tongue. I shrank away from her hard level gaze, holding my child tightly in my arms—for she was mine, more mine than any one else’s, except her father’s, and she’d been mine for years and his only four short days.

  “I think you see the tragedy you have brought on this house, Lucy,” Melusina said, with horrible evenness. “Seeing it, I should think you’d have the decency to stay in your home, not come here to triumph over us.”

  Faith held to me tighter, her young arms giving back the strength that drained from my body like blood from a horrible wound.

  “Oh Melusina, how can you?” I whispered.

  “You’ve been against me all my life, Lucy,” she said, still with that same dreadful calm. “I see it now more clearly every day. And now you’ve taken Marshall—the only person I’ve loved, or who ever loved me.”

  “I’ve taken him…?” I gasped.

  “Yes, you.” Her voice was so deadly cold that even Faith shrank from it. “If you hadn’t brought Haines here to turn Faith’s head, Marshall would never have had to raise a hand against… against himself.”

  In one swift intuitive flash I realized she’d been going to say “against Mason Seymour” and had stopped just on the verge of it.—Then Bill had been right, and Melusina knew it: Marshall had killed Mason Seymour, for Faith…

  I leaned weakly against the table, my limbs shaking almost unbearably. So it was Marshall, in the end, I thought, who’d made the sacrifice for the Yardley’s, not Faith who’d seemed so destined to be the one who made it. And in a sense it seemed right that he’d done it, right that it should have been he who killed Mason, right that having done it he should pay for it with his own life. And yet it wasn’t right! Everything inside me cried out against it! Marshall was too good a person to go like that—and what right had this thin bitter woman with her overweening pride, clinging with such fierce tenacity on the shell of a dead past, to force any of them to the point where they had to sacrifice themselves—Faith and Marshall—to keep her from sacrificing her pride! It wasn’t right, there was nothing right about it; it was cruel and selfish and wrong!

  I looked at Melusina. In all the years I’d known her, seeing her almost daily, putting up with her riding roughshod over me and every one else, and over her brother’s child, I’d never opened my mouth to her or against her. My dingy parlor, the little stool at my feet, the canton ginger jar full of sugar cookies with a bit of candied watermelon rind in the center, a safe haven for a little girl with tight carrot-gold plaits and grave grey eyes and a warm sensitive mouth—these were all I’d ever set up against her. But now, standing there, the child grown up clinging so desperately to me—shocked, too profoundly hurt to cry out,—I turned on Melusina.—But not quickly enough, her tongue was so much more limber from years of indulgence than mine was from years of abstinence.

  “You’ll see you’ve not been as clever as you think, Lucy Randolph. We’ll see who wins in the end, you or me.”

  Then all the anger that had boiled up in me dissolved. It seemed to me too horrible for us, two old women, to be in that silent house, fighting like a pair of hungry buzzards over our own dead lives.

  Faith, sensing the struggle, and the end of it in me, relaxed her hold against my body.

  “You were always a spineless coward, Lucy,” Melusina said.

  Just then her brother stood behind her in the door. God knows how much of this scene he’d heard. His face was almost unearthly, and terrifying, it was
so pale and so stern; and when he spoke—“That will be enough of that, Melusina”—his voice was blue steel sheathed in velvet.

  Melusina shrank, her face crumpling like an old paper bag. Peyton Yardley looked at me.

  “Thank you, Lucy, for coming to us. The others will be here in a moment. I’d like you to stay, if you’ll take Faith upstairs and come back.”

  Faith raised her head. “I’d rather stay, father,” she said quietly.

  A sharp spasm of pain crossed his face.

  “You must do as you think best, daughter.”

  He turned to his sister and gave her a searching glance. “I advise you to go to bed at once, Melusina.”

  He passed his frail transparent hand across his eyes, and turned back, drawing the door to. We heard the slow muted steps of the men bringing Marshall Yardley back to the Hall. Faith closed her eyes and hid her face against my side. After a little the muffled steps were silent, and then I heard the men coming down, quietly still but individually, their terrible burden no longer unifying them.

  John Crabtree came in first, behind him one of the Palace watchmen; and then—and my heart rose, and sank numb again—Bill Haines. His face was as white as his linen coat, his blue eyes sick as they met mine and moved, with a quickening dumb ache in them, to the girl beside me. I was so concerned with him that I didn’t see it was George Luton coming in behind him, between him and Michael Priddy, looming in the doorway as tall as Bill himself, both of them a full head and shoulders taller than Luton and twice as broad.

  They sorted themselves out in the room, Bill farthest away, his eyes drawn, in spite of his efforts to keep them away, constantly back to Faith. Luton edged to the side of the door and stood there, his back to the old Chippendale mirror. The room was as silent as the tomb as we all waited for John Crabtree to speak. And he was finding it very hard to do. Marshall was younger than he by several years, but they’d been friends, close friends, since Marshall had been admitted to the bar and John had been Commonwealth Attorney.

  It seemed such pitiful irony, some way, that we should all be so much more shattered by this than Melusina, whose heart he had been. I saw the quick glance she darted at me. She was going to take the offensive, I thought—knowing just how desperately offensive she could be.… But her brother cleared his throat, and she subsided as John Crabtree said,

  “There’ll be an autopsy in the morning, sir. We’ve got the revolver he killed himself with. Maybe he left a message.—Mr. Haines here was almost up to him when it happened.”

  He took a rumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead.

  “There’s just one thing I want to ask about, Doctor Yardley. This will that Mason Seymour made out… It was witnessed by Miss Napier and Jerry Matthews in town.—Have you any idea what’s… become of it?”

  I glanced at Luton. There’s the man you should ask about that, I thought, uncharitably—or possibly, and I don’t know why the idea hadn’t struck me before, the man you should ask about that would be Mr. Talbot Seymour. After all, it was Talbot Seymour who inherited his cousin’s property by the first will. And having thought of that, I looked eagerly at John Crabtree, just as Doctor Yardley, standing very erect, and really beautiful, in front of the carved mantel, the portrait of Sir Robert Yardley above him, three centuries of dignity and honor linking them together, inclined his head gravely.

  “I don’t know how the law will regard what I did, John,” he said quietly. “I explained to Mr. Seymour, when I saw him at his house that night, before his death—and I think he understood me perfectly—that such a will as his, drawn before he had either a moral or legal claim or obligation to my daughter, was an intolerable impertinence—ill-advised and misguided in the extreme. I tore the document up, in front of him, and put it in the fireplace, and set a match to it with my own hand.—I don’t know how the law regards that act… but so far as my daughter and I are concerned, Mr. Seymour’s second will never existed.”

  I think the silence in that room then was as profound and breathless as any silence could have been. Faith’s hand tightened in mine. I didn’t want to look at Melusina, but I couldn’t help it. The most extraordinary change had come over her. She was as rigid as granite, her eyes were terrible. She got up—I don’t see how she did it—and stood, one hand out in front of her as if to ward off some dreadful injury, looking first at her brother, who met her gaze calm and unflinching, and then at me, anything but either… and then she turned without a word and went from the room. At the door she tottered, her whole body sagging, her knees buckling, and pitched forward in a miserable heap on the floor.

  Her brother’s calm voice cut the shocked silence. “My sister has fainted—will you carry her upstairs, please, Michael?”

  The rest of us sat perfectly still, unable to move for a moment. It was all too dreadful. Then Faith released my hand and followed her father and John Crabtree up the stairs. The Palace guard said, “Jeez, what come over her so sudden?” but nobody answered him, and he went out. I saw him stop on the porch and light a cigarette. The flame shook and the cigarette shook, but at last I saw smoke and heard him go down the steps. I looked around at Bill. He’d stepped out into the garden through the dutch door. Mr. Luton and I were left alone. I should have apologized to him, I suppose, for what I’d been thinking. I certainly wasn’t prepared for his apologizing to me instead.

  He took a step into the room toward me.

  “I hope you didn’t misunderstand my seizing your wrist this evening, Miss Randolph,” he said earnestly. “You were so agitated, and you looked so shaken, I thought you were going to lose your balance. I’m sorry if I alarmed you.”

  “Not at all,” I said curtly. I didn’t mean it to sound that way, but I was really upset, because I had misunderstood him. I hadn’t thought of how I must have looked, barging off up the street.

  “Thank you, Miss Randolph,” he said. He hesitated and glanced around. My heart sank again as I thought, “What’s coming now?”—the old alarm springing up, constricting my throat.

  “I wonder if you’d do one thing for me, Miss Randolph,” he said, so quietly that it was almost under his breath. His hand went to his inside coat pocket. He glanced back into the hall again.

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear!” I thought desperately. “Why doesn’t that wretched William Quincy Adams Haines come back in here!”

  Luton drew out a thick packet of pale blue letters held together with a red rubber band.

  “Will you give these to Mrs. Taswell?” he said, in that same preternaturally quiet voice. “I’ve tried to get them to her myself, but I’ve been unable to do so. 1 hesitated just to leave them at her house, or send them through the post. From portions of them Mr. Seymour used to read aloud to me, madam, I expect she would prefer they didn’t fall into… any other hands. If you’d be so kind…”

  I almost snatched them out of his hand.

  “Thank you, madam,” he said. “Good night.”

  What a beast Mason Seymour must have been, I thought, and what a fool Hallie was! I thrust the packet down the neck of my dress and turned around. Bill Haines was bending down to clear the window above the dutch door. He came on into the room and took hold of my arm.

  “Let’s go home, Miss Lucy,” he said. Then he said, “What’s the matter? Are you going to faint?”

  “I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” I said. But I didn’t. Though I nearly did just as we were crossing the Market Square. Bill hadn’t said a word since we’d left Yardley Hall, just trudged along silently, holding my arm in his big hand, bearing most of my weight as we went along. As we cut across beside the Powder Horn he said, not abruptly but as if he’d thought it all out and decided finally to say it,

  “Miss Lucy—Marshall didn’t kill himself. Some one shot him, when he was standing by the well. Don’t ask me who it was, because I don’t know. And just keep this under your hat till we decide what
to do.”

  I couldn’t go to sleep that night. I got up half-a-dozen times and wandered wretchedly about the dark house. Outside it was pitch-black except for the fireflies bearing their pale lanterns up and down the streets. The grotesque idea that there was a plague in Williamsburg and they were showing their lights, calling “Bring out your dead!” came to me as I sat by the window in my room watching them.

  I found myself watching one of them especially, under the old mulberry tree across the street, glow redder than others and go down, and up and glow again. Then my heart suddenly sank cold and heavy to the pit of my stomach and lay there like a stone. Fireflies are lemon-pale, and glow upward, never more than once in the same place. That wasn’t a firefly. It was a cigarette. Somebody was standing under the tree across the road, watching my house…or my office, rather, where Bill Haines was sleeping…if he could sleep.

  Some one else knew, too, that Marshall Yardley had been murdered.

  CHAPTER 24

  If Sergeant Michael Priddy hadn’t come to the office before Bill was dressed the next morning and waited while he shaved, and left with him in the police car before Community had come to get breakfast, I shouldn’t probably have done what I did. But all night the chain of circumstantial evidence that bound Bill to Mason Seymour’s murder kept going around and around in my head. The gun from the office; his footprints in the cockroach powder; the definite knowledge that Mason was shot from the terrace and that Bill was the only person on the terrace; his ridiculous behavior in trying to keep Faith from marrying Mason in the first place, his trying to shield her from the consequences of her presence at Mason’s house, her folly to deny his presence there…it was all too frightening.

  Now, added to that, Marshall Yardley was dead… Marshall who Bill had thought murdered Mason Seymour. God knows whom he may have told that beside me, or who might have heard him tell me. Or what if some one else had possibly heard him say what he was going to tell Marshall? My doors and windows are always open—if the man with the cigarette under the mulberry tree had cared to listen outside… And the Commonwealth Attorney had said Mr. Haines was almost up to Marshall when he shot himself.