She found her in the ruins crouched in a corner with her head pressed against her knees.
“Marta. Marta, get up.”
The dark head rose slowly. Sullen eyes found Lisa’s face.
“What was that all about? That ridiculous display at the piano?”
“It’s no good,” Marta said. “Nothing I do is any good.”
“Who told you that? Your mother?”
“Everybody. Everybody knows.”
“Everybody knows what, Marta?”
If Marta wouldn’t rise, at least Lisa could kneel beside her. There had been enough running away. This time she was going to get an answer.
“You know! You heard Carrie last night! You saw what I did!”
“I saw a foolish child give way to an outburst of temper. I saw the same thing again today. But that’s all I saw.”
Now Marta looked at her, sudden wonder in her eyes. And something else, too. Not just anger. Fear. Haunting fear.
“Talk about it,” Lisa ordered.
“Talk—?”
“Start at the beginning. Or shall I start for you? There was a gardener, wasn’t there? A peculiar gardener when you were just a child.”
“No! I don’t remember him. I don’t even remember!”
“But you remember what the gossips said when he was sent away, don’t you? You remember that. And then old Mr. Hubbard who lost his heart medicine at your birthday party.”
There had to be a limit to Marta’s stubbornness. Somewhere there had to be a limit to the strength of that wall of defiance.
“I don’t remember!” she insisted. “I remember the party. I remember that he died. That’s all I remember!”
“But you do remember when Pierre Duval fell down the stairs. You remember that, Marta.”
“Yes, I remember. But I didn’t push him. That’s what Carrie told all over town. We quarreled. We quarreled a lot, but it wasn’t anything serious. And I wasn’t in love with him. I don’t care what anybody says, I wasn’t!”
“Were you in love with Howard Gleason?”
For just a moment Lisa thought the moment had come for the wall to collapse. Marta drew in her breath. She was very pale now.
“Not really,” she said, in a half-whisper. “Not enough. He knew that. He knew that from the beginning.”
“But he shot himself.”
Talk about it. Talk in cold, hard words until Marta’s shoulders began to tremble and a lifetime of fear began to seep through that wall of silence. And then it was gone—swept away in one terrible cry,
“I killed him! I killed them all! I never meant to, but I did. Everybody knows that.”
And then the tears. A dark head buried against her knees, and the long, deep sobs of a child’s fear. How many times? How long had Martin Cornish’s child come to this spot to cry away her fear? Lisa’s arms were about her shoulders, drawing her near. Martin Cornish’s child, alone these many years.
After a while the sobbing stopped.
“Talk about it,” Lisa said again. Softly now.
One last, muffled sob like the echo of spent grief.
“I liked him,” Marta said. “He was young and I was glad when Mother asked him to stay at the mansion on week ends. It gets lonely there. Maybe I thought I loved him, but I didn’t tell him so. And I didn’t ask him to stay. I didn’t ask him to give up the scholarship and stay. And I don’t know anything about that money. I don’t know anything about any money!”
“And yet you said that you killed him.”
The words sounded foolish now. They must sound foolish even to Marta, but still she hesitated.
“But he shot himself—”
“Exactly. He shot himself. There was a weakness in him. You didn’t put it there. You couldn’t have put it there. Howard Gleason was afraid of life. Sooner or later he would have destroyed himself by one means or another. Suicide, liquor, self-pity. That’s the world’s greatest killer—self-pity.”
Marta’s head came up. She began to grope for a handkerchief.
“Now, why don’t you forget all this nonsense and get back to work? I know a fine young man who believes in you. He’s already planning a honeymoon in Paris.”
There was so much confidence in Lisa’s voice—never mind if it were justified—that she fully expected Marta’s face to brighten with a smile. The storm was over, wasn’t it? The sun always came after the storm. But Marta didn’t smile. Suddenly the fear was in her eyes again.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you love Joel?”
In a small voice, Marta answered.
“Very much. Too much.”
“Then why are you afraid?”
Marta began to corkscrew the handkerchief about her fingers. There was something more to be said. The storm wasn’t quite over. Then she faced Lisa with large, frank eyes.
“Because I might hurt him, too. Because something terrible may happen.”
“Marta!”
“No, I will say it! I will! I do terrible things. I don’t know why. Like throwing that weight at Carrie, and letting that—that load of lumber fall—”
For a moment, Lisa couldn’t believe her ears. “Letting the lumber fall?” she queried.
There was silence after the question, as if Marta herself wasn’t sure what she meant.
“I saw it getting ready to fall,” she said at last. “I stood there and watched it.”
“But you couldn’t have stopped it.”
“No, but I could have warned Joel and he might have stopped it. I didn’t because I was angry with him. He’d been riding me about finishing my composition. I just watched it fall and then ran away the same as I did last night. Can’t you see, Miss Bancroft? I really am—”
But she couldn’t actually speak the word. It caught on a barrier of her mind.
“I mean, I really do bring bad luck to people. I am a jinx, just as they say.”
She actually believed it. It was a sickening thought. Lisa felt a wall of anger rising up inside her. A child, nothing but a child, but she was being crucified by backstairs gossip and old tragedy. The ruins seemed uglier now. Black and dismal. How many lives had to be sacrificed on this charred altar?
“They say!” she exclaimed. “What do you care what they say! Don’t you know why they talk about you? You’re the daughter of Martin Cornish, and you have a gift they envy. You can’t please the world, Marta. None of us can. Even to try is to risk your sanity. Life isn’t easy. All we can do is make the best of whatever we have to work with, and let the idle minds find fault. They have the time for it!”
A speech with that much feeling behind it had to have some effect. Lisa waited for a sign of confidence. It was beginning to come.
“Your friends will see the good in you,” she added. “The others just aren’t worth thinking about.”
It was beginning to come. Marta’s head rose higher, and then her ear caught a sound on the path. Lisa heard it, too. Not Nydia, she prayed. Not now. But some happy fate was with them, and the voice that came with the footsteps was the one voice Lisa longed to hear.
“Marta? Marta, are you in there?”
Joel’s ruddy face appeared at the window fragment. He saw them immediately.
“Now, what are you two doing in this godforsaken place?” he asked. “I just stopped by the house and Mrs. Cornish said that Marta had run off—”
“We’re having a discussion,” Lisa said quickly, “on the trials and tribulations of a great artist in the making.” She winked at Marta. No time for tears now. The storm was over. “Now, if someone will just give me a hand. I seem to have dropped my cane out of reach.”
Marta was on her feet instantly, and her hand was strong for one so small. Joel stepped through the window and retrieved her stick from a crack in the boards. He smiled at her, as if thanking her for keeping a promise. Marta was calmer now. Shaken still, but calm.
“Take her home, Joel,” Lisa said. “She hasn’t much time to get that concerto in complete form. There’s no time
like the present to get started.”
Marta drew back.
“It isn’t good,” she said.
“Then make it better.”
“But I can’t—I mean, I’m not really that good!”
Her wide gaze swept the studio ruins in a kind of last stand of timidity. Lisa knew exactly what she meant.
“Shades of Hamlet! The child’s haunted by her father’s ghost! Take her home, Joel, and make her work. You’re not competing with Brahms and Beethoven, you know.”
Now the smile came—a weak one, to be sure, but a big improvement over any expression Lisa had seen on Marta’s face to date. Joel had his arm about her waist. They started to move away, and then Lisa remembered something still unfinished. It was risky to bring it up inasmuch as she’d touched off a small revolution with the subject before, but there might be no other opportunity to ask.
“There’s one thing, Marta.”
Marta and Joel paused in what once was a doorway.
“That theme I’ve heard you playing. Where did you get it?”
She was right. It was a touchy subject. Marta paled for an instant—but no, they were friends now. There was nothing to be feared or hidden between them.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t—really. It’s just something that’s been running through my mind for—oh, ever so many years. I work on it, but I can’t ever seem to find the finish. Then I get angry. Mother’s right. I shouldn’t try. It only makes me unhappy.”
She hesitated as if there might be more she could tell, but there must not have been. The troubled look that had come into her eyes vanished. She was smiling again as she and Joel started back toward the big house on the hill. Back to work. Back to the pursuit of a dream.
Lisa watched them go, a vague smile softening her mouth. Something had been done. Something had been accomplished. But then, as she stood alone among the ruins of Martin Cornish’s studio with all its ghosts of tragedy past, she knew at last the purpose of this pilgrimage to Bellville.
Like Marta’s composition, there was a story that needed an ending.
CHAPTER 14
Marta worked. From her listening post at the ruins, Lisa followed the progress day by day. She was working, too, in a way. There was that air about the study of something being done. The incubating stage, Johnny called it.
“What’s it going to be, the epic of ‘the house of death’? If so, even I’ll get enthused about this opus. I want to know how you explain away three dead bodies and nearly twenty years of mystery.”
Lisa looked up from the note pad she was working at.
“Say that again,” she ordered.
A puzzled Johnny tried to comply. “I said, I want to know how you explain away—”
“Just the last part,” Lisa murmured.
“—three dead bodies and nearly twenty years of mystery.”
“That’s very good. I can use that thought.”
And Johnny shook her head sadly. There were times when she suspected Carrie wasn’t the only queer one in the house.
Marta worked, Lisa worked, Joel and the Cushing Construction Company worked on the bleachers and stands on the athletic field. Commencement day came and passed, with Miss Oberon’s choral group acquitting itself nobly in spite of her tireless efforts to reduce everyone to a state of nervous exhaustion. Curran Dawes closed the door on his classroom and left all the textbooks behind him. The Cornish Memorial Award Committee met again.
“And so everybody lived happily ever after,” the professor said, that faint, enigmatic smile on his face.
He stood next to Lisa in the hall outside the board room. The meeting had gone smoothly under Tod’s masterful direction. Only a bit of grumbling from Stanley Watts at the cost of new bunting for the streets and podium at the field. If better care were taken of the old bunting it wouldn’t have to be renewed so often.
“But it rained last year,” Miss Oberon reminded timidly.
“And it will probably rain again this year. That’s why I objected to all that foolishness at the field!”
After that, nobody said anything to Stanley and soon it was all over, including the arrangements for meeting and housing Sir Anthony when he arrived.
“My wife insists that he stay with us,” Tod explained. “After all, we do have the room.”
And the finest, most modern house in town. Not a relic from the past like that hideous mansion on the bluff. Tod was smiling when he made the offer, smiling particularly in the direction of Nydia, but Lisa knew what the smile really meant. Humor the old girl. Let her preside in an honorary post at the festival, but, in heaven’s name, don’t let her bore Sir Anthony. Nydia accepted the situation with a vague nod and the fingers of her mended gloves tightened on the clasp of her handbag.
Then it was all over and everybody could go home. Nydia paused in passing.
“You’re looking well, Miss Bancroft.”
“I’m feeling well,” Lisa said. “And Marta?”
“Oh, busy on her concerto. Busy as a bee. I’m so grateful for all you’ve done.”
She smiled and moved on magnificently. It was then that Professor Dawes leaned close.
“And so everybody lived happily ever after,” he said.
“I like happy endings,” Lisa answered.
“So I’ve noticed. I’ve been catching up on your novels, Miss Bancroft. They have an irritating optimism glowing from every last page.”
“And why irritating?”
“Because I’m a realist.”
It was Lisa’s turn to wear the enigmatic smile.
“So am I,” she said. “That’s why I insist on happy endings.”
That made two puzzled people. Lisa was beginning to enjoy herself.
The station wagon waited at the curb. Johnny was struggling valiantly with the folds of an enveloping road map. She greeted Lisa with an air of both expectation and resignation.
“Well, I got it,” she said, “but it wasn’t easy. Everybody in Bellville either stays home or knows where they’re going. I tried every service station in town before I found a map.”
“Good,” Lisa said. “Now let’s see if we can find a place named Granite.”
“Granite?”
Then Johnny’s face brightened with remembrance. It was she who had given the name to Lisa after getting it from Carrie. Granite meant only one thing.
“But why the map?” she protested. “Why didn’t we just ask Carrie the route?”
And Lisa smiled her indulgence.
“Carrie talks,” she said.
The village of Granite—or was it a town? Lisa was never quite sure about such classifications—was not much smaller than Bellville. Different, of course. The small dot they found on the road map took them on a journey about seventy miles inland. There was no lake breeze in Granite to cool the afternoon sun and no busy preparation for the one week’s transfusion into the anemic veins of commerce. There was the traditional circle of green called “the square,” the red stone Court House, and the civil war cannon and bronze image of a grim-faced Union soldier in full pack, bayonet fixed, marching due south. There was a National Trust and Savings Bank on one of the four intersections of the square, and, finally, a friendly faced police officer who pointed out the way to the sanitarium.
It was at the edge of town just beyond the civic limits. A long gravel drive led back from the highway for about a quarter of a mile, and then they were in the courtyard of a large, square, red brick building with a feeble attempt at colonnades at the entrance and a superintendent within who was cordial enough when Lisa told her story.
She introduced herself first of all. The receptionist, who called the superintendent, read novels. That was a help. Even more of a help was her latest fiction.
“I’ve been inquiring in Bellville after an old friend I knew many years ago. A gardener. I was shocked to learn that he’d been committed to this institution some fifteen years ago. I wonder if he’s still here.”
In this way L
isa introduced the subject of Claude Humphrey. She wasn’t questioned. Yes, Claude was an inmate. Harmless but now quite addled. He probably wouldn’t recognize a visitor—certainly not one from the forgotten past. But couldn’t she see him anyway? Couldn’t she reassure herself that he was the same man she remembered? A less persuasive visitor would have been turned aside, but it was only a matter of minutes until Lisa and Johnny were being escorted out to the garden. Once a gardener, always a gardener. Even the feeble-minded needed a place to put their hands.
“Confidentially,” Johnny whispered, as they followed the attendant along a gravel path, “these places give me the creeps. I’m always afraid they’ll shut the gates and lock me inside. It might be years before I could prove I didn’t belong.”
“If ever,” Lisa murmured.
“And what are we trying to prove, anyway?”
Lisa couldn’t answer. She knew only that to find the end of a story one should start at the beginning. Chronologically, the gossip about Marta Cornish began with Claude Humphrey. Item one, so to speak. A few yards farther, just beyond an open packing case in which two elderly men were enthusiastically cheering a ball game that wasn’t being played, the attendant came to a halt. They had reached a beautiful bed of rose bushes which were being painstakingly sprayed by an old man in coveralls whose face brightened like a candle at the sight of visitors.
“They’re doing fine this year, Claude,” the attendant said. “Even better than last year. I’ll bet you could win first prize at the state fair.”
The old man grinned vacantly. He didn’t speak. His eyes were all for the newcomers.
“These ladies have come to admire your roses, Claude. This one is an old friend of yours. She says you used to work in her garden.”
“In Bellville,” Lisa added. “Do you remember Bellville?”
The vacant grin remained unchanged.
“At least he seems happy,” Johnny murmured. “That’s more than can be said for most of the people on the outside.”
Crime is Murder Page 12
