The Innocent Flower

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Let me give you a sample. For instance”—Haggerty sank his voice—“did you know that Miss Emily Brown, the dead woman, held the mortgage on this property?”

  The statement, spoken as in a melodrama, seemed to bounce and echo off the walls. Behind him, Duff could feel the kids being as quiet as mice. He laughed. “Well! Was she about to foreclose, do you think? Have we here the motive?”

  Haggerty’s melancholy eyes remained fixed. “So it was murder,” he said morosely. “I thought so.” He actually took out of his pocket a notebook and a pencil. Furthermore, it was a stub pencil, and he licked it.

  Duff said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Haggerty.” He had a formal manner of his own, and it was not comical. It was ice.

  Haggerty started backward, shuffling his feet. “By the way,” he said with the air of pulling out a desperate plum, “there’s an escaped convict around somewhere. Did you know …?”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Duff sweetly. “I’m glad to know that. Thank you very much.”

  “O.K.,” said Haggerty, “Just as you like, sir. But I don’t give up. I warn you.” His feet scrambled for the doorstep.

  “Just don’t fall,” Duff said kindly. He began to swing the door shut. Haggerty let the screen door back behind him. Duff saw the man look up and rub his face as if he’d struck a cobweb, a queer frightened gesture.

  Dinny was hanging on the newel post, and Davey, like a little barnacle, clung to her behind. She giggled faintly, perhaps nervously. Mitch stood a step higher, very quiet, not giggling.

  “Was he really a reporter?” demanded Alfie. “Gee, is this going to be in the papers?”

  Duff surveyed his fat innocence glumly. “That,” he said, “was such an incredibly bad imitation of a reporter that I am almost compelled to believe that the creature is a reporter.” He watched their faces. “Is that true, about the mortgage?”

  “What mortgage?” Paul was coming down the stairs.

  “Did Brownie …?”

  “Oh. Oh sure.” Paul caught the question before it was all asked, as if the point had been close to the surface in his mind. “Who was that at the door?” He didn’t wait for an answer but went to the front door with a marching step, opened it, pushed open the screen, and looked out.

  Being the man of the house, Duff thought.

  “Davey says his ear aches,” said Dinny in an anxious voice. “Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t.” She sighed. “I don’t think he’s got a temperature.”

  “Naw, he hasn’t,” said Mitch, touching Davey’s brow with the air of a wise little old woman.

  Paul said gruffly, over his shoulder, “He’s probably faking.”

  “He’s an awful faker,” agreed Alfie.

  Duff looked down at Davey, whose small tanned face was now contorted to indicate pain, although he made no sound or moan except to suck in his breath in a kind of audible wince.

  Alfie sauntered into the room where the piano was and began to drum out, “Up we go—into the wild blue yonder—,” with one bold finger.

  “Tell Alfie not to play the piano,” said Davey in dying tones. “I don’t feel well.”

  “Ask him which ear, and I’ll get the mince candy,” said Mitch briskly.

  MacDougal Duff felt perfectly helpless.

  At that moment, loud and clear, from upstairs came the embarrassing sound of a flushing toilet.

  Duff checked in a flash. Paul, standing in the door. Alfie in the arch. Mitch and Davey and Dinny here at the foot of the stairs. Five Moriaritys.

  He saw Dinny’s plump body become very still and stiff. Her dark eyes turned warily, but she kept talking without a break, telling him smoothly, her voice a little light, but steady, that one asked Davey which ear in order to check, later, and that if he wouldn’t eat chocolate thin mints, he was probably sick.

  Paul came down the hall toward them. His face was red. Alfie took his hands out of his pockets and thrust them in again. “Well, get them, why don’t you?” he exploded.

  Mitch perched like a frozen butterfly on the edge of a step. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

  Duff said quietly, “Who’s upstairs?”

  Dinny said, “What?” with a little start and looked at him wide-eyed.

  So Duff brushed by and went up quickly, with Alfie on his heels. “What’s the matter? What do you mean?”

  “You heard what I heard,” said Duff skeptically.

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t hear anything.” Alfie faltered and hung back.

  There was no one on the second floor, although the toilet in the front bathroom was just subsiding.

  Duff went up to the third floor, and there was no one there either. As far as he could tell, alone.

  He came slowly down, and on the second level the Moriaritys flocked around him. A chocolate-coated Davey was pronounced a cure and dumped into bed. Dinny kept saying, “That’s awfully funny. I don’t understand it. Are you sure you heard anything?” Mitch said she was scared, but she looked excited. The boys watched Duff’s face.

  He considered the layout of the Moriarity house. On the second floor there was Mary’s room at the front, over the little music room downstairs, then the bath, then, squeezed into a corner, a tiny room that belonged to Davey. The big bedroom over the living room, they told him, was normally inhabited by Mitch and Taffy.

  The hall led back, then, and turned to end in another bath. Dinny’s room was on the southeast corner, over the dining room. The guest room, where Brownie had stayed, was next, over the kitchen. There were back stairs leading down at the very back of the house and, oddly, they went down from Brownie’s room and went up, too. Dinny told him that this arrangement had often distressed their mother. “Mother wants to tear them out and have a breakfast room downstairs, but she can’t afford to, and anyhow, not now, with the war …”

  “It must be handy for the boys,” Duff remarked.

  “Oh, it is,” they said heartily and then caught each other’s eye a little sheepishly.

  Paul and Alfie had the whole back wing of the house, up on the third floor. A paradise for boys, it was, with the eaves coming down to built-in cupboards and seats and shelves. Dormer windows. A whole laboratory in a corner. Three model airplanes zooming off the ceiling on wires. Stolen signs. One bed advised visitors to keep off the grass. On the door of their bath it said, “Please do not talk to the motorman.”

  There was a small uninhabited maid’s room up there, in the front. And three small storerooms along the side of the house opposite the stairs. Not much in them—garment bags, an old rocker, boxes and books and trunks.

  All this Duff had seen, and nothing seemed significant except that it was a maze. The whole house, at least the two top floors, was peppered with doors. On the third floor there was a way from each room into the next room and from each room into the hall. Therefore, one might run circles or figure-eights or any other funny figures around about and in and out. The second floor was much like it. No dead ends. There was simply no way to be sure that somebody was not always one lap ahead of you in this house unless you had a whole corps of trusted helpers, or dead silence and the ears of a lynx.

  Furthermore, the circles went in three dimensions. There were the back stairs and the front stairs. There was even a laundry chute all the way up, although it was too narrow for a man’s shoulders. There might, Duff thought, for all he knew, be two or three ways down outside, by way of roof and gutter, or rope and vine, and if so the boys were the ones to know it.

  Oh, no doubt. No doubt at all. If these kids wanted to hide someone here, in their big old house, it was quite possible for them to do so.

  Postulate a person hidden in the house. Consider the strategic position of the back stairs, coming down into the kitchen, as they did, at the back. Look at these clever Moriarity kids and remember their solidarity. Ask himself whom they would hide?

  Duff asked himself and told himself the answer.

  He led his troop down to the first floor. The big house echoed and creake
d. Was it empty, above them, except for Davey in his bed? Or was there a hidden person? Someone to whom these kids were bound to be loyal?

  And, if not, who had flushed the toilet while everyone known to be in the house had been on the first floor, under Duff’s eye?

  With the kids following after, as if he had been the Pied Piper, Duff stalked the downstairs hall and peered about. The music room, the big living room, the dining-room door, glass-paned and locked, at the end of the main hall, facing the front door. The cross hall, back here, ended at his left in a garden door that led to the terrace, and it was locked. At his right the same hall led to a “backdoor,” opening to the driveway on the west, and that was locked, too. The cellar door was under the stairs, and locked. The kitchen, on the southwest, with the back stairs coming down, was in a state of quiet confusion. The pantry stole a little space from both dining room and kitchen and lay between them at the back of the house. It was locked up from the kitchen side.

  They couldn’t see into the dining room through the glass hall door, now that it was dark.

  “Tell me, please,” Duff said, “what happened after Brownie screamed?”

  “They took her in the living room,” said Alfie. “The doctor did.”

  “I got the kids, and we went up to Taffy’s room, and Mother came down,” said Dinny breathlessly.

  Paul said, “They chased Alfie and me outside, after a while, so I thought I might as well clean the sprayer.” He eyed Duff as if he challenged him to find this unreasonable. It didn’t sound unreasonable. It sounded like one of Paul’s facts.

  Duff pursued his line of inquiry, reaching his point.

  “No one stayed in the dining room?”

  “No. The doctor said not to touch any food. He said that right away. We stayed out of there.”

  “Nobody was in the dining room,” Alfie said, “because I hung around on the back porch, and I’d have heard them. Why? What’s the idea? I don’t see …?”

  “Is your toaster automatic?”

  They shook their heads.

  “I wonder who turned it off? Did any of you?”

  “Oh, Lord, maybe it’s still on!”

  “If it was, we could see it,” Paul said, peering close to the glass. “It gets red. No, it’s off, all right.”

  “The detectives must have done it,” said Alfie, “for gosh sakes.”

  “We must ask,” Duff purred.

  He went back to the living room and sat down. He thought: According to witnesses, she died about six-forty to six-forty-five. Therefore, a matter of minutes before the rain began to come down so hard. He said aloud, “Where were all of you in that heavy rain?”

  “I was upstairs,” Dinny said, “with Taffy and Mitch and Davey.”

  “I was in the stable,” Paul said, “putting the sprayer away. I got caught out there.”

  “I was on the back porch,” said Alfie. “Holy cats, did it rain!”

  “You still think you’d have heard someone in the dining room?”

  Alfie considered. “Yes, I would. It was kind of hollow.”

  Duff recognized the truth of that observation.

  “But she was dead,” Paul said patiently.

  “Yes. Yes, she was. And we don’t seem to be able to tell very much about it, do we?” Duff smiled at them. “Perhaps we’ll know more tomorrow. Let’s talk about something else.” He appeared to relax. “What do you want to be when you grow up, Dinny?”

  “An actress!” She reacted promptly, with no hesitation whatsoever. There she stood, fat and certain, and Duff felt dismay, and, in a moment, wonder.

  “I’m going to be a dancer!” cried Mitch, swinging out a thin limber leg. Duff suddenly saw Mitch in tarleton with a spotlight on her.

  “You go right straight to bed!” Dinny turned on Mitch in a fury. “Go on, now. Hop it. Mother’d have a fit. You go to bed and go to sleep. Hurry up.”

  Was it fury or flurry? Duff wondered. Because he’d caught her off guard, this young Dinny who wanted to be an actress. She ought not to have confessed that, because she had, he knew now with intuitive certainty, been acting for hours.

  He knew he was going to have to ask that other question, sometime, whatever his reluctance. The impulse—and later he wondered if it had been telepathic—came to him to ask it now.

  “Tell me,” he drawled, “was your father a professor?”

  “Huh! Gosh, no!” cried Alfie and was obviously struck silent by a thought.

  Dinny was in the arch with Mitch, but they waited and listened.

  “My father was an actor,” Paul said quietly.

  They were all very still for a moment. Duff, too. Dinny moved, as if to drag herself from a dream.

  But Alfie bubbled over. “Say, listen, we oughta be on the other side!” he crowed. “You know? Our name is Moriarity! Isn’t it? Gee, whiz, don’t you know who Professor Moriarity was!”

  “Shaddup!” said Paul.

  CHAPTER 5

  Enter Constance Avery. Duff went to the door and there she was at last, a tall young woman in a butter-colored linen suit, the color of her hair. She had a long oval face and a well-kept complexion that was like a mask. She wore no hat, and her fair hair was pulled flat from a center part, which gave her a look of being out of fashion. However, she did not seem behind the mode, but ahead of it, as if by tomorrow everyone would look just like her. She stood tall. Her suit was exquisitely tailored, her feet and ankles slim, her stocking seams precise, her white gloves pure white.

  She pronounced her name so as to make Duff feel that he was expected to know who this was. He bowed, ever so slightly. “Please come in, Miss Avery. My name is Duff. Dr. Christenson asked me to say that he would be back. He had hoped to return before you came. Mrs. Moriarity isn’t here, I’m sorry. She is at the hospital with her little girl.”

  “Oh dear!” said Miss Avery with exactly the proper accent of alarm.

  She smiled at the boys. Alfie grinned back, with his tusks out, and Paul shifted his feet. She walked gracefully into the living room and, not knowing what had lain there so recently, sat down on the red couch. She crossed her ankles, not her knees, and began to pull off one white glove with delicate care.

  Her eyes were gray, and there was not quite enough color in her brows and lashes to set them off. They seemed a little cold, and there was something faintly haughty in the way the fine skin drew up above them.

  “Dr. Christenson,” purred Duff, “has been trying to reach you, I know.”

  “Has he really?” she said. “But of course … I was repairing the henhouse.”

  Intrigued by this extraordinary statement, Duff nevertheless hid his surprise and offered a cigarette. They went through the graceful little ceremony of lighting it. Duff noticed her hands. They were smooth enough, yet he could tell that the skin on their backs was not elastic any more. Her long nails wore immaculate pink polish. Duff went to a chair opposite, concluding from this evidence that she was older than she looked and that whatever she meant by repairing a henhouse, those hands had not done it.

  “I haven’t met you before,” she said. Her eyes had been summing Duff up, his lanky elegance, his quiet manner, the authority of his personality. She was inclined to approve. “Are you a friend of Mary’s?”

  “It is rather difficult to explain who I am and why I am here,” Duff said. “Did you know Miss Brown?”

  “Miss Brown? Oh, Mary’s guest, of course. I was to meet her this evening. Has she gone? She is a very old friend of Norry’s, you know. I mean to say, Dr. Christenson’s. He and I— Perhaps you don’t know that he is my fiancé?”

  “I have been told, and I congratulate him,” said Duff gallantly. “You never have met Miss Brown, then?”

  “No.” She frowned politely.

  “Miss Brown became ill very suddenly,” Duff said, “and has died.”

  Her cigarette paused in midair at exactly the proper angle of surprise.

  Alfie said, “She was poisoned.”

  An express
ion of pain crossed Miss Avery’s face. Pain or aversion? Distaste was closer.

  Duff said, “The doctor was very anxious to spare you the shock of this news. I’m sorry.”

  She said, “How dreadful!”

  “He’s a detective,” announced Alfie, wagging his thumb. “He’s MacDougal Duff. Mac Duff, you know. He’s famous.”

  Now she looked, in some subtle way, outraged. She crushed out her cigarette. “Really?” she said.

  Duff knew he had lost caste, and it amused him.

  “Did Dr. Christenson say I was to wait here for him?” she asked.

  “He didn’t say. I’m sure he plans to be here as soon as he can. I should think you ought to do whatever you like.”

  She glanced at her watch.

  Duff said, “It’s too bad this henhouse you speak of has no telephone.”

  “I have a farm,” she said coldly. “I breed dogs, normally. I have been raising chickens since the war.”

  Duff made no comment, and Alfie leaped into the breach. “Oh, gosh, you oughta see it. It’s right here in New Rochelle, out on the Neck. She’s got real barns and cows and everything. She’s rich,” he added.

  Paul knocked an elbow into his ribs. Dinny came downstairs.

  Miss Avery seemed mildly pleased with Dinny’s admiring hospitality. She thawed out a little and even spoke graciously to Duff from time to time, while Dinny led a bright chat about Miss Avery’s dogs and how adorable the puppies were. The boys drifted toward the hall. Soon they had oozed themselves out and away, upstairs.

  Duff gleaned what he could. Miss Avery was disposed to be friendly toward Mary, in her condescending way. In her eyes, for some reason, Mary had caste. She was not fond of children but would allow them to admire her if they wished to do so. She was quite absorbed in her own interests and gave an effect of being well pleased with Miss Constance Avery and her ways. To Duff, she seemed essentially chilly and chilling.

  At about ten-thirty the doctor came. He brought with him Eve Meredith, the red-headed woman Duff had already seen at the hospital.

  The doctor made a bee-line for his fianceé. “My dear, I’ve called you and called you. I did try to head you off—”