It must be this clan loyalty thing, Jenny decided. The Plummers were like that. They were always ripping each other up the back among themselves, but let a stranger attack one of them and the rest would leap at his throat. People’s foibles could be endured as long as they belonged. Her father hadn’t belonged to the Plummers, so they’d cast him to outer darkness. He hadn’t belonged to Meldrum, so he’d been murdered. She didn’t belong, either, and she’d better keep that fact in mind.
“The Firbelles must be a good-sized family,” she remarked as she passed Sue a plate of pastries from the bake shop they’d stopped at with Beth. “I met one of the cousins, Daisy Green, I believe her name was. She was telling me who was related to whom at your party. Too bad you missed it, Aunt Harriet,” she threw in as cream for the cat. “Sue is the most marvelous hostess. You never saw such food, and I’m sure I met everybody worth knowing in Meldrum.”
Plus a number who weren’t, judging from the earful Sue had just been giving them. “There were so many I got confused after a while. Who was that man with the red mustache, Sue? Is he another Firbelle?”
Mrs. Giles put down the silver teaspoon she’d been furtively examining to see whether it was sterling or only plated and gave Jenny the speculative glance she’d anticipated. “Larry MacRae? Perish the thought! His grandmother would have a Scotch conniption if she ever heard you say a thing like that. She and Marguerite Firbelle have carried on a running feud for the past thirty years.”
“What about?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s been going on so long, I doubt if they remember themselves. Too bad old Elspeth couldn’t make it last night. You’d have got a kick out of watching her and Marguerite high-hat each other.”
Harriet Compton raised her eyebrows. “Do you mean people actually invite them both to the same affairs?”
Sue laughed. “You have to. If I’d slighted either one, they’d both be down on me. Social life in Meldrum is more complicated than you might think.”
“You’ll have to teach me the ropes,” said Jenny, wondering how she could get back to Lawrence MacRae without causing further complications. “So the grandmother is Elspeth MacRae?”
“No, Elspeth Gillespie.”
“Gillespie? Is that a Scotch name?”
“Is it ever! She’s even got a Gillespie tartan collar for her cat.”
“She sounds as if she’d be fun to meet,” said Harriet Compton. “Can’t you invite her over tomorrow, Jenny?”
“I don’t see how. I haven’t met her myself, just the grandson, and I don’t think he even likes me.”
Sue Giles pricked up her ears. “What makes you say that?”
Good question. How was one supposed to answer that? “Well, he didn’t act any too friendly. He wouldn’t let me read his palm, for one thing.”
“Probably afraid you’d see what it is he does on those business trips he’s always taking. Larry’s kind of a dark horse, if you ask me. Disappears for weeks on end and claims he’s been off on assignment. He makes good money, they say, and Elspeth’s always bragging about what a great photographer he is, but I sure wouldn’t want any grandson of mine chasing after those sexy models.”
“Is that what he does, fashion photography?”
“I couldn’t say. All I can tell you is Larry MacRae doesn’t waste much time cooling his heels in Meldrum.”
Evidently that really was all Sue Giles could say, or at least all she had time for. It was almost five o’clock, and Bill was a man who expected his dinner to be ready when he got home from work. Sue wiggled her way back through the hedge, leaving Jenny and Harriet free to assess what she’d said.
“Did that get us anywhere?” Jenny asked.
Harriet shrugged and began gathering up the tea things. “We’d already learned from Beth Firbelle that there’s an unexplained death connected with this house. Now Sue tells us the dead man was supposed to have been going to marry Mrs. Firbelle, who’s not only rich but also related to half the village. She says Larry MacRae’s always taking mysterious trips and that his grandmother, Mrs. Gillespie, doesn’t like Mrs. Firbelle. It hardly seems likely MacRae and his grandmother would bump off that poor Mr. Cox just to spite his fiancée, but you never know. Sue also says Jack Firbelle’s real illness is an allergy to work, and that his brother-in-law, Greg Bauer, is beginning to think he made a bad bargain when he married Pamela.”
“Sounds like a plot for a soap opera,” said Jenny. “Was Greg afraid he’d lose his chance of an inheritance from his mother-in-law if she remarried? Assuming Sue Giles is right and M-Mr. Cox really intended to marry Mrs. Firbelle, which I don’t believe for one minute.”
“Why not?” Harriet wanted to know.
Jenny could have told her because it would have been too much like getting stuck with the Plummer tribe again, but she wasn’t ready to do that. “Because he had such a wild taste in slipcovers, I suppose,” she hedged. “It just doesn’t feel right to me. Of course, even if he didn’t, but the Firbelles thought he did, they’d still be scared, wouldn’t they? Pamela might have been worried that her own marriage might go down the tube if Greg got too uptight about the money. And Beth could have figured she’d be out of a home because her aunt’s new husband wouldn’t want poor relations camped on the premises.”
“And there may be any number of things we don’t know about yet, so let’s not start jumping to conclusions,” said Harriet Compton.
“I wish there were some way of finding out what Mr. Cox’s blood type was,” Jenny mused. “Then we could find out if it matched the stains on that suede jacket.”
Harriet didn’t make any reply for a little while, then she nodded. “I knew you’d turn out to be intelligent. What else do your hunches tell you?”
“That I’m in big trouble,” Jason Cirak’s daughter answered frankly. “I wish I’d never come here!”
Tea tray in hand, the older woman stood looking down at the white-faced young woman hunched on the edge of the garish sofa with her fists clenched and her too-fancy wig askew.
“Jenny, there’s something you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me now?”
“No.”
If Harriet Compton was offended by the curt monosyllables, she showed no sign. “That’s right, my dear. Never trust anybody until you’re sure.”
“I trust you. I just don’t know what to say.”
Jenny pulled off the hot wig and sat looking down at the tangle of black acrylic curls as though trying to remember how the thing had got into her hand. “I’m beginning to realize that I’ve made a big mistake, and I’m scared. I’m even more scared than Sue Giles.”
“Sue Giles?” Harriet Compton was startled. “How do you know that? She didn’t act scared.”
“Well, she is. Don’t ask me how I know. I feel it, that’s all. It’s like last night with Mrs. Firbelle. I felt it, and I said it!”
She was almost screaming, her voice beginning to shake.
“Jenny, stop that!” Harriet’s matter-of-fact voice cut into the mounting hysteria. “Listen to me, Jenny. How old are you?”
“I’ll be nineteen next week.” She was too exhausted to lie any more.
“And this is your first time away from home, right?”
“I never had a home. My mother and I always lived with Uncle Fred and Aunt Martha Plummer.”
“Why? What happened to your father?”
“You tell me.” Jenny had no defenses left now. “That’s what I came here to find out.”
“Your father was James Cox.”
“My father was—yes, my father was James Cox. And he left me all his money even though I hadn’t seen him since I was a baby. And I got sick of listening to the Plummers nagging and nattering and grinding their teeth over the money and where it came from, so I came charging down here like the heroine of some idiotic paperback novel to s-solve—”
Harriet Compton sat down on the sofa and slipped an inexpressibly
comforting arm around the dead man’s trembling daughter.
“You poor, poor kid! Listen to me, Jenny. There’s nothing abnormal about extrasensory perception. Everybody has it, to a greater or lesser degree. You happen to be more sensitive than the average, that’s all. Look at it positively. Being able to tune in on other people’s feelings may be uncomfortable sometimes, but it’s also a protection for you. Can’t you see that?”
“I suppose so. Thanks, Aunt Harriet.”
Jenny still didn’t move, not wanting to draw away from the reassuring pressure of the older woman’s arm, not feeling secure enough to lean closer. “You know, you said this morning that suede jacket might have been a cry for help. This is another crazy idea, but—do you think it’s possible I’m the person you were brought here to help?”
The elderly accountant cleared her throat, as though some word she didn’t want to say had got caught there. “That’s not such a crazy idea, Jenny. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but you need somebody, and I’m here. That’s what matters, isn’t it?”
7
Aunt Harriet—Jenny was beginning to forget she wasn’t actually related to this visitor of a day—turned on James Cox’s record player while they ate dinner. Jenny was half amused, half appalled to learn that the father she’d always pictured as a suave cosmopolite had been a country and western addict. Nevertheless, steak, salad, and “I’ve Got Tears in My Ears Lying Flat on My Back in Bed Cryin’ over You” were effective therapy.
“Here’s one for you, Jenny.” Miss Compton was having a marvelous time reading titles: “‘You Stepped on the Corns of My Heart.’ Or how about ‘Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?’ That was one of the great joys of my childhood. I think your father must have acquired these records along with the house.”
She talked of James Cox as a real human being who’d lived in this house, eaten at this table; not as a legendary character who’d come to a bad end as Uncle Fred had always said he would. Jenny found it an intense relief, being able to picture Jason Cirak doing small, unimportant things. Not flouting convention, not dodging responsibility, not breaking anybody’s heart or borrowing anybody’s money, just sitting in one of these lumpy, gaudy armchairs listening to some bugle-nosed rhinestone cowboy wailing about the lone prairie and the perfidy of woman.
He hadn’t been a young man when he married Marion Plummer. So he must have been quite old by the time he died. He’d probably had backaches and sore feet and false teeth that got seeds under them when he tried to eat raspberry jam. It must be tough to be a gone-to-seed Lothario, finding yourself alone when you couldn’t go a-wooing any longer and needed somebody to bring you a cup of tea in bed when your rheumatics were acting up. Maybe he was sorry his marriage had gone sour, sorrier than Marion Plummer for all her weeping and wailing. Maybe that was why he’d been playing around with the idea of marrying Mrs. Firbelle, if it was true that he had.
Yet surely he hadn’t meant to commit bigamy. Would he have asked her mother again for a divorce, after all these years? Or was he merely having one last fling with a good-looking woman and had he carried the game a step too far?
Did his death have anything to do with Marguerite Firbelle at all? As the family kept reminding her, there was all that money, and he hadn’t gotten it making movies nobody wanted to see. It must have come from somewhere.
Why hadn’t she told Harriet Compton the whole story? Why hadn’t she explained that James Cox was Jason Cirak, who’d lived poor and died rich? If this strange woman was willing to help, didn’t she deserve all the facts, or at least all Jenny knew?
It wasn’t the right time to tell.
No, that wasn’t true. Now was as good a time as any. Jenny simply wasn’t ready to share Jason Cirak with anybody. She’d been without a father almost all her life. Only since she’d come here had she begun to experience him as somebody who’d lived, not in a few old photographs but in the flesh, someone to whom she owed her being, someone who’d pretended not to care about her but had spent years amassing a fortune to leave her. She wanted to keep him with her for a little while before she let anybody take him away from her again.
Harriet Compton wouldn’t hurt her deliberately. Jenny was sure of that. There was a good deal about the woman that puzzled her, something strong that she could feel but not understand, but mostly there was goodness. It wasn’t the Fred Plummer kind of goodness, the kind that warned you not to get caught doing anything someone could sue you for. It wasn’t Aunt Martha’s brand of sweetness and light, giving you a headache so she could flutter around you with aspirin and cologne when all you wanted was a chance to call your soul your own. Harriet Compton’s version of the Golden Rule probably read “Do your enemies before they do you.” Nevertheless she was good.
Jenny could feel it, a wiry, workaday kind of decency that wouldn’t turn squashy and start dishing out platitudes in a pinch. She’d waste no time wringing her hands, but would get in there shoulder-to-shoulder with you and do whatever had to be done. It was silly to think some unknown friend had sent the retired accountant to fish Jenny Cirak out of the mess she’d so blindly hurled herself into, but it was an indescribable relief to have Harriet Compton with her now.
All right, so she had been crazy to come to Meldrum. Would she have been any saner to stay with the Plummers? Mother was never going to forgive Jenny for having been the one to inherit Jason Cirak’s money. Uncle Fred, Aunt Martha, and the rest of the tribe would never quit harping about ingratitude, even if Jenny were to turn every penny over to them. How long would she have been able to endure their snide guesses about how that wastrel Jason had managed to pick so much cabbage? How many more times would she have had to catch sidelong looks and portentous remarks about “Blood will tell,” every time she got within twenty feet of an eligible man?
It must have been downright ghastly for a man with such uninhibited tastes in music and chintzes to find out he’d married the whole Plummer clan instead of just pretty, clingy Marion. Maybe Jason Cirak had been trying to provide himself with respectable connections, as Aunt Martha so loudly maintained, but he couldn’t have realized how devastating all that concentrated respectability was going to be until he was stuck with it. Poor Father! Jenny was beginning to feel a kinship with him, reprobate though he no doubt was.
“Company’s coming.” Harriet Compton must have sharp ears. Even over the blare of the phonograph, she’d heard footsteps coming up the walk moments before the front doorbell rang. “Watch it, Jenny. Don’t open the door till you find out who it is.”
She hovered like a bodyguard while Jenny called out, “Who’s there?”
The answer came low and urgent. “Greg Bauer. Can I see you for a minute? It’s important.”
“That’s Mrs. Firbelle’s son-in-law,” Jenny whispered. “What shall I do?”
“Let him in. I’ll be in the kitchen. Find out what he’s after.”
“I know darn well what he’s after,” Jenny muttered cynically, but she was wrong. Greg Bauer wasn’t grabbing tonight.
“Look, Jenny, can you do me a big favor?”
“That depends on what it is,” she replied.
“Can you—” He took a deep breath and thrust out his hand. “Can you see anything there about Peruvians Unlimited?”
“About what?” Jenny gaped open-mouthed at the sweating palm. “Of course, I can’t. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, do you see a big killing?”
“He means on the stock market, Jenny.” Harriet Compton’s voice came, deep and amused, out of the dark. “I’d stay far, far away from Peruvians, young man. In my opinion, Consolidated Federal is a much better risk.”
“What risk? Con Fed hasn’t moved a point in six months.”
“There’s a rumor around that in about three weeks it’s going to announce a jump in profits and a split in shares. If you keep your mouth shut and pick up what you can now, you won’t need a fortune-teller to make you a killing.�
�
“On the level?” Greg Bauer was still holding out his hand but he’d forgotten Jenny was even there. “Can I count on that?”
“As much as you can count on anything in the stock market. Just don’t go repeating what I said and jacking up the price. If your broker asks you why you want a dog like Con Fed, tell him you’re interested in a safe long-term investment and he’ll tell you you’re nuts, but never mind. Once it splits, watch till it starts to level off, then take your profit, shove most of it in a high-interest savings account, and if you still feel like sticking your neck out, buy a few shares of Peruvian just for kicks. Never speculate with money you can’t afford to lose, young man, and never, never gamble with anybody’s money but your own. There aren’t all that many successful embezzlers around, and you don’t look to me as if you have the brains to be one of them.”
“Say, who are you, anyway?”
“This is my aunt, Harriet Compton.” Jenny was enjoying herself now. “And you’d better believe she knows what she’s talking about. Greg Bauer is the husband of Beth Firbelle’s cousin Pamela, Aunt Harriet.”
“How do you do, Mr. Bauer,” said Miss Compton. “So that’s why you’re anxious to get rich quick.”
“Are you a witch or something?” he gasped.
“I’ve been called that, among other things. Here, Mr. Bauer, let me take your jacket. Jenny, is there any coffee left?”
“I’ll get some.”
Jenny fled to the kitchen where she could have her laugh unseen. Harriet Compton in action was really something. A rabbit being hypnotized by a rattlesnake, if such things actually did happen, would probably wear much the same expression as the one on Greg Bauer’s handsome, puffy face right now.
Cirak's Daughter Page 6
