Crime is Murder

by Nielsen, Helen

  “Bancroft,” he murmured, half to himself. “You do remind me of someone, but I just can’t place the name. I guess my memory isn’t all it used to be.”

  Lisa didn’t answer. If she said nothing, he would just go away. She waited and he went, a tired old man still fingering his watch chain. She watched him pass through the hall and out of the front door. Only then did she follow.

  Outside, the collection of cars that had gathered since her arrival was dispersing. The doctor was climbing into an old sedan, Miss Oberon into a small coupe, and she caught a glimpse of an old but expensive limousine pulling off down the drive that could only be transportation for the reigning monarch of the board room. There was no sign of the professor or his nephew, and no sign of Johnny.

  But Lisa wasn’t alone. The little girl with the pony tail hadn’t forgotten. Little girls with pony tails never forgot.

  “May we talk now, Miss Bancroft?”

  There didn’t seem to be any way to avoid talking. The gravel drive was deserted now. Lisa had no choice but to wait.

  “I suppose everybody’s been asking you the same questions,” the girl began, “about why you’ve come to live in Bellville and all that?”

  “I’ve come for rest and relaxation,” Lisa answered absently.

  Why did the professor have to run off so quickly? Why couldn’t the man ever finish what he started to say?

  “And research, I suppose.”

  Research? Lisa looked at the girl, really looked at her for the first time. She was awfully young, but she looked bright.

  “For your book on Martin Cornish,” the girl added.

  “Oh,” Lisa said. “You’ve heard about that.”

  Agree with thine adversary quickly. Lisa was beginning to get the hang of this thing now. The story came in pieces—a piece from the professor, a piece from Tod’s wife. Why not a piece from the girl with the pony tail?

  “As a matter of fact—” she smiled at the girl. She beamed at the girl—”perhaps you can help me.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? I’ll bet you’re a native of Bellville. I’ll bet you’ve lived here all of your life.”

  “Well, just about.” The girl was smiling back now, briefly. “But I really don’t see how I could help you, Miss Bancroft. I only graduated from high school last year. I just don’t remember things. I’m not old enough.”

  “But that’s just what I mean,” Lisa persisted. “Don’t you see, dear? The real story of Martin Cornish is what he left to the world: his music, the heritage of this festival, and now even his own child carrying on with his work. I understand that Marta Cornish is entering a piano concerto in the competition this year. To me that’s very exciting.”

  The girl had followed Lisa’s words carefully, but now that wan smile she’d mustered up acquired a cynical twist.

  “I wouldn’t get too excited if I were you,” she said. “Nothing will come of it. Nothing ever does.”

  Nothing. “She just never finishes anything.” There must be twenty years between this girl and Ruth Graham, but for a moment they’d spoken with the same voice. But it was difficult to accept the verdict that nothing would come of Marta Cornish. Lisa couldn’t forget that girl in the tearoom. She was too vital to be written off so abruptly.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked. “Don’t you think she has talent?”

  The girl with the pony tail shrugged.

  “I suppose so. I’m no musician. I only know that every year we hear the same story. Marta Cornish has a big deal simmering that’s going to win the award, only when award time comes she hasn’t even submitted an entry. My father calls her ‘Nydia’s dark horse.’ But then, he says, she never even gets to the wire. But don’t ask me why, Miss Bancroft. I don’t know Marta Cornish. Hardly anybody does. In school we always thought she was a snob.”

  Or very lonely, Lisa thought. Or am I already prejudiced? It doesn’t necessarily follow that a gifted father has a gifted child. Bellville may be right. She may be only a spoiled brat.

  But conjecture didn’t answer questions. Irritating questions tossed out at random by an irritating man.

  “Even so,” she said quickly, before the girl with the pony tail caught on to who was interviewing whom, “the festival must be a thrilling affair. You’re very fortunate to live in Bellville and see it happen every year.”

  “I suppose so,” the girl admitted grudgingly.

  “I should think you’d have a fount of material to write about.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  Now she’d struck a responsive chord. The young face told her that.

  “I do try sometimes.”

  “Of course you do, and that’s why you can help me. You understand my problem. Now suppose I were planning a novel based on Martin Cornish’s life, but instead of starting with his birth I wanted to start with the festival itself. Some great, dramatic highlight. Something—” She hesitated. She couldn’t afford to be too subtle with this child. “Something to get the book off with a bang!”

  The professor couldn’t have done better. She watched the seed of thought take root and grow. With it grew a brightness in the eyes.

  “Oh, you mean like last year.”

  And then the brightness faded and became a scowl.

  “But you wouldn’t get very far with that. Nydia Cornish wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you kidding?” Lisa’s stupidity netted her one long, incredulous stare. “Nydia Cornish just about runs this town, Miss Bancroft. She wouldn’t let anybody tell you anything about her darling daughter. After all, Marta was engaged to be married to Howard Gleason.”

  When in doubt, full speed ahead. “She was?” Lisa asked.

  “Of course she was. Didn’t you know? That’s why he stayed on in Bellville and took a teaching job at the high school. He was in love with Marta from the very beginning. Naturally, Mrs. Cornish denied it afterwards. She said Marta and Howard Gleason had just been good friends, but the whole town knew better. But you don’t fight Nydia Cornish in this town, Miss Bancroft. Not in this town!”

  After the session in the board room, Lisa could almost believe that. But fight her over what? She’d done everything short of asking point-blank what had happened at the festival last year. It sounded drastic. She took a chance.

  “It must have been terrible,” she said.

  “I’ll say it was. And to think, I had to miss it!” The girl shook her head sadly, and Lisa held her breath. “The one year I’m off to summer school and miss the festival, Howard Gleason gets up just as they’re about to announce the award winner and puts a bullet through his head!”

  Once upon a rainy day, Lisa had sought shelter in a little tearoom. Shelter was a good word. It could mean a covering for the head, or a place to put the heart. It could be a fortress, or it could be a purpose. She wasn’t sure why these thoughts came to her as she stood there on the wide porch of an elegant old house that belonged to yesterday and exchanged words with a bright young girl who belonged to tomorrow. The blossoms were dead on the lilac tree. All of the blossoms were dead. She could see that now.

  And now the words were dead, too. Foolish questions, foolish answers, until the foolish child was finished with her foolish interview and was racing off down the gravel drive with a notebook full of copy. Lisa was relieved. Johnny might return for her at any moment, and there was something she must do first. Something she must verify.

  It was noonday now. The interior of the white tile hall was refreshingly cool, and empty. Miss Pratt was nowhere in sight. She must have gone to lunch. Lisa moved slowly past the stairway on her way back to the museum, but then she stopped to listen. Voices came to her from the stairwell, loud, angry voices that couldn’t be ignored.

  “Tod, what are you trying to do with Nydia? What have you already done?”

  Demanding voices. The first she didn’t recognize immediately, but there was no disguising Tod’s.

/>   “What am I trying to do? I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do! I’m trying to do a damned thankless job for a damned thankless town! And I’m trying to get along with a tyrannical woman as well!”

  “Tyrannical! You’ve got her eating out of your hand. You’ve flattered her until—”

  “And you haven’t, I suppose?”

  Now the silence answered. The guilty silence. And then, “But Nydia’s my friend, Tod. I’ve known her all my life. I knew her father—”

  “—and her grandfather, who founded your father’s bank. Oh, I know all the historical facts of this town, Stanley. I know a few of the skeletons in the closet, too. I may be just a newcomer in your eyes. I may be just an interloper—”

  “I never said that, Tod!”

  “But you’ve thought it, haven’t you? Don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been gunning for me ever since I took over management of the Cornish estate! It’s a wonder you haven’t told Nydia that I wanted old Hubbard to die. It’s a wonder you haven’t suggested that I made off with his damned medicine.”

  It was such an interesting conversation, and so careless of Lisa to become so engrossed in it that she failed to notice where she was putting her walking stick. At the worst possible instant—in the little silence after Tod’s outburst—the cat screamed. Cats had a way of doing that, when sticks were pressed on their tails, but not for no reason at all. Lisa restrained her own cry of surprise and leaned back into the shadows under the stair. Already footsteps had sounded in the upper hall.

  “Miss Pratt?”

  Tod called, but no one answered. No one but the offended cat nursing her wounds at the bottom of the stairs.

  “That damned cat! Let’s get done with this business, Stanley. I want those checks signed so I can get out of here.”

  Tod’s voice faded and then was gone. He must have closed the board room door after him. It was just as well. Lisa had heard more than she could assimilate anyway. But she didn’t turn back. This was a public museum, after all. Even if Tod found her she would have good reason to be here.

  Good reason. How many suitors had Marta Cornish lost? Two? One down and one to go. Puzzled and shaken, Lisa returned to the mantel in the museum room. Martin Cornish looked down on her with brooding eyes; Nydia watched with a marble face. But in between the portraits was a bronze plaque inscribed with names. Lisa counted … seven, eight. This year would be the ninth, then. The ninth festival and the ninth winner of the Cornish Award. But the unknown name of the ninth winner wasn’t what she’d come to ponder. It was the seventh: the year before last year’s drama.

  She was right. A half-remembered inscription had meaning now. The winner of the seventh annual Cornish Award was Howard Gleason.

  CHAPTER 7

  “So that’s the answer,” Johnny said. “Suicide. But was Howard Gleason suitor number one or number two?”

  “And what happened to the other one?” Lisa asked.

  Masterson House was a good place to brood over the puzzle. It was beginning to be more livable now; the last crate had been opened and cleared away, and enough furniture had been uncovered and shifted about to make the rooms in use comfortable if not luxurious.

  But Johnny still didn’t like it.

  “I can’t sleep nights,” she complained. “You aren’t sleeping well, either. I can hear you moving about.”

  “The nights have been warm,” Lisa said.

  “Then why don’t you move to another room? We certainly have plenty of them. I’ve never understood why you picked that little cubbyhole next to the playroom. It was probably meant for a nurse or a governess.”

  Lisa didn’t answer; her mind was busy with many things. Howard Gleason had shot himself. Why? A suicide always raised speculation, and whether or not that cute little girl reporter knew what she was talking about when she insisted that Gleason and Marta Cornish had been engaged, the fact remained that a young musician of enough merit to win the Cornish Award one year had ended his life in a most dramatic fashion the next. That left one very interesting year to be explained.

  “You might ask the professor,” Johnny suggested. “He must have known Gleason if they both taught at the high school.”

  “Ask the professor?” Lisa smiled at the thought. “Professor Dawes poses questions; he doesn’t answer them. What’s more, he used to teach at a university.”

  Johnny looked puzzled. “I suppose you mean something by that remark, but I don’t get it,” she said.

  “I don’t either. Why the demotion?”

  “Maybe he got fired.” And then Johnny’s puzzlement gave way to a mild form of shock. “You’re not suggesting that he’s unbalanced?”

  “ ‘All the world’s mad, sister, save thee and me,’” Lisa murmured. Then she laughed. “No, that’s not what I think, and I’m not going to pursue the matter further because you’ve given me an excellent suggestion. The high school, of course. That’s the place to start laying the ghost of Howard Gleason.”

  Bellville High School was at least twice the size Lisa would have expected to find in the deceiving little community, deceiving because it wasn’t nearly so little as it appeared to the eye. Seeing it for the first time, she remembered Tod’s explanation of the extent of the school township; then, too, Bellville was growing. Tod Graham was on hand to see to that.

  The campus was a scene of great activity. Lisa had restrained a natural impulse to put Johnny’s suggestion into action immediately. A few facts on Howard Gleason were needed first. They came as a result of some surreptitious telephoning to a friend on a New York newspaper. Surreptitious if anything could be surreptitious in Bellville. And so it was several days after that first board meeting when Lisa parked the station wagon in one of the few available spaces alongside the athletic field—parked it painfully after long dependence on Johnny. Too long, she had decided. It was time to act alone.

  Across the field, much activity was in progress. True to his word, Joel Warren had started the bleacher construction job immediately. Several construction trucks and a load of lumber were already on the scene; and as Lisa stepped from her car, she became aware of two familiar figures standing on the grass only a few yards away. Joel blocked the view somewhat with his back—twice as broad, it seemed, in shirt sleeves, but not so completely but that she could glimpse Marta, piquant in bright yellow cotton, poised before him in that too-defiant manner. She wore her anger like a battle flag.

  Lisa hesitated at the edge of the walk. She didn’t want to intrude, and she didn’t want to leave. The voices coming to her across the grass were too interesting.

  “I gave the committee my promise to have this job done, and I intend to keep it!” Joel said. “I always keep my promises!”

  “And I don’t, I suppose!”

  Silence. Sullen silence. Across the field, a line of dark clouds was beginning to rise up slowly along the horizon. It made quite an appropriate backdrop to the scene.

  “I only know what your mother said,” Joel answered.

  “My mother!”

  Marta turned away abruptly, leaving Joel to stare at her poker-straight back. A workman called out from the lumber truck. Joel didn’t answer. The call came again.

  “All right, I’m coming,” he shouted. “Keep your shirt on!’ But the last remark, the lower one, was meant only for Marta’s ears. “I guess I have to keep working even if nobody else does.”

  It was a good time to leave—quickly, before anyone saw her standing there. Lisa felt a bit guilty about her unintentioned eavesdropping. A lover’s quarrel was in a different category from what she’d overheard of that board room squabble from under the museum stairs.

  She crossed the street and made her way toward the front entrance of the school, her stick tapping out the way. This wing seemed newer than the others. A cornerstone bore the date 1953. Boost Bellville. Lisa smiled to herself, wondering if Tod Graham was on the school board, too. Inside, she found an exhilarated senior to direct her. It was after school hours, but with Comm
encement Week in the offing the building was far from deserted.

  And Miss Oberon was far from at leisure. Miss Oberon seemed incapable of leisure. For her life would be one crisis after another. Had she been Franz Schubert, the “Unfinished Symphony” would have remained unfinished due solely to an attack of last-movement hysteria.

  “It’s the choral group,” she confessed, almost at the verge of tears. “Actually, it’s one of the finest in the state, Miss Bancroft, but at rehearsal today I thought I would go mad!”

  Miss Oberon tried to shove a pencil behind her ear. Another pencil had already preceded it into a bird’s nest of bushy brown hair, and both of them clattered to the floor in a manner that annoyed poor Miss Oberon until the pitch pipe hanging about her neck swung crazily against her flat chest.

  And what did the choral group think? Lisa wondered. Aloud she said, “I’ve always heard that a bad rehearsal is a good omen. And I’m sorry to trouble you on such a hectic day, but I did feel the need of your advice.”

  “Advice?”

  Miss Oberon was at once both intrigued and bewildered. Perhaps she’d never been asked for advice before.

  “On procedure and such on the committee. I’m sure you’ve had a great deal of experience on the festival committee.”

  Miss Oberon beamed. It was a weak beam, to be sure, but the spark was still there.

  “As a matter of fact,” she admitted, “I’ve served on the committee since the first award was given.”

  “Nine years ago,” Lisa mused.

  “Why yes, that is, this will be the ninth. Of course, we planned it for several years prior to the actual event.”

  “We?”

  “Mr. Graham and Mrs. Cornish. But I was in on it almost from the beginning. We were delayed because of the war. Culture suffers so in wartime.”

  “Among other things,” Lisa observed.

  “But then we got started, finally, and it’s been such a satisfaction to assist those fine young talents. To watch them rise—”

  Miss Oberon’s expression was almost beatific. Her thin fingers played idly with the pitch pipe, and her eyes glowed happily—and then darkened. Lisa caught the cue.