Murder Comes to Eden

by Zenith Brown

  Now that Anita was in charge, all the sweet reasonableness he’d rehearsed before he talked to Stan and never uttered a word of was clearly as useless as it no doubt would have been with Stan himself. The gambling outfit Stan had had in his mind would have been less of a menace, or a menace to fewer people, than the honky-tonk shambles Anita had in hers. For that O’Leary could blame nobody but O’Leary, and the bitter part was the necessity he could no longer avoid of going to Eden and telling Miss Fairlie. Telling her he’d failed her, failed the old judge, failed everybody. It was probably what the Greeks had called hybris. The O’Leary’s pride in their unbounded good fortune that had made them toss their gift of the ten velvet acres to the Ashtons had probably offended one of the lesser gods; this was the result. And O’Leary’s pride and general arrogance in sounding off to all and sundry, making Devon County fit for human habitation. It was all part of the bitter taste of the dead ashes that went with him across the circle down the path to the bridge to the Gardens of Eden.

  The borders, fragrant masses of phlox, white and brilliant pink, backed with regal lilies and foxglove, edged with spice pinks, were alive with bees, gay with butterflies. The brick wall was a shower of roses, pink Van Fleets, the silver moons, pale gold between the pleached apricots and peaches. The turf was blue-green, soft as foam rubber under his feet. This was the Eden he’d promised would never be threatened in Miss Fairlie’s lifetime.

  He came out of the borders into the old carriage drive. The fireman’s red jeep with the vases of rosebuds attached was on the other side of the picket gate where Mrs. Twohey had once hung suspended by her corset, pelted with rotten pears. It stood in front of the little Greek Revival office with its porch and white pillars, where Miss Fairlie had lived her five dark years, David and the old judge her fortress against the world.

  We may have been monstrously culpable in many ways, but my faith in the ultimate Court of Appeals is such that I’m sure we will be judged with mercy as with wisdom.

  Spig stopped, looking down at the house. A few late, long, graceful pinnacles, still hung from the century-old wistaria that made a heavy canopy over the porch. The double wings of the front door were open, but the louvred doors behind it closed. He’d imagined the central hall, but he’d never seen inside, or into the rooms on each side of it where the windows were open but the carved inside shutters folded forward to let in the summer air but still close the rooms to view. The rest of the house, the dormered windows upstairs, the two single-story wings connected with the main house by the bricked-in passageways known as hyphens, was as tightly shuttered as the day the old judge waded through the floating ice on the river to find the house locked, barred and deserted. Only now the forty-year added growth of ivy and Virginia creeper had sealed the windows, obliterating them with a sable pall. The six great chimneys, one at the end of each hyphen, two at each end of the house itself, were clothed with ivy, too, no sign of the brick beneath it.

  The only sign of life itself, except for the partially open windows downstairs, was old David’s wife washing clothes in a pair of wooden tubs on a bench beside the pump at the end of the kitchen wing, facing the O’Learys’, where Spig had been admitted the morning the old judge died. But he waited. Miss Fairlie had an eerie way of suddenly appearing, from the house or from behind the boxwood or a border, sometimes seeming to materialise out of the air itself.

  He couldn’t see the children, but he could hear enough noise to wake the dead—or the sleeping child—down behind the bamboo screen bordering the duck pond. He went over through the borders across the boxwood circle to tell them to stop their racket. As he got to the giant weeping willow at the lower end of the pond there was a sudden silence, and out of it a peal of laughter as gay and crystal-clear as a dancing fountain, before the children joined in it and somebody retrieved Miss Fairlie’s sailor hat from a maurauding gander. Spig knew she laughed with David and the children, but he’d never heard her. It was rippling, infectious and silver-light. He went through the willow branches and watched them for a moment. The boys. Tip and John Eden and David’s grandsons, were cutting bamboo for fishing poles, Kitsy and David’s granddaughter were laying out their lunch. Miss Fairlie, bareheaded, was with Molly A., feeding a welter of baby ducks. If anybody was worried about a sleeping child it was not apparent and unless it was an eccentricity to like other people’s young of assorted colours, there was no evidence of that, either.

  A forgotten picture came suddenly to Spig’s mind . . . the rabbit warren in Washington, the grass patch with the Keep Off sign, Tippy’s paper box of leaves in the garbage can, the crowded little room with Molly knocking over the laundry rack. All this around him was what the mad woman of Eden had given O’Learys to take its place, and given it on faith.

  He went silently back and headed home, not the way he’d come but down through the rose arbour, where primroses and sweet herbs bordered the shady path, to the summer house, a small open Greek temple like the office, overlooking the river. No one ever came there now, not even the children, because along the other side of it, in front of the cryptomeria that hid it from the house, was the old Eden graveyard. At each corner of the rusted iron paling that enclosed it was a yew tree, neatly clipped, four dark guardian sentinels. He stopped, looking at it an instant. The stones were old, chipped and weather-scaled, all but one that was still legible. On it was chiselled: “Celia Eden Fairlie, aged twenty-four. Beloved wife of Ammon Fairlie.” Below that was “Ammon Eden Fairlie, aged one day.” It was Miss Fairlie’s mother and the child she’d died in bearing. Beside this was another grave, the one they’d had to boil the snow to thaw the ground for, that had been covered with fresh pine boughs the day the old judge came. There was ivy on it now, but no headstone.

  “The judge say some day we put one,” David had told Spig when he’d passed there once, when the judge was still alive and David was clipping the ivy and yews. “But it jus’ seem like that day don’ never come. Firs’ when her mind was sick it didn’ seem right to call attention. Now, looks like she jus’ forgot. Bes’ she forget. Ain’ nobody need his name writ down for the good Lord to fin’ him. Nor the Devil neither. Tha’s what I tell the judge and he agree.”

  O’Leary went on. The dog lying on the bridge waiting for the children wagged her tail, the crow cawed and stumped along the railing to follow him to the house that was still empty. He was crossing the circle when he heard the car in the lane and stopped, his pulse quickening. But it wasn’t Molly. It was Joe Malotti, one of the neighbours, with two acres on the corner next to Sudley’s place across from Miss Fairlie’s gate on the old road. Spig went over to meet him.

  “Hi, Spig. I thought I’d better come and tell you. I’m the first rat off the sinking ship.”

  It was what O’Leary had been waiting for, not knowing he was waiting.

  “I hate like hell to do it, Spig,” Joe said. “But . . . if Sudley’s going to put up a factory, it’s no place for my kids. I’ve got a chance to sell. A service station-motel arrangement. I feel like a skunk, but we can get out whole if we get out first.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s different with you people. You’re lucky. You’ve got fifty acres. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  Spig glanced across the field at the Ashton house, seeing in his mind’s eye the neon glow of Anita’s honky-tonk, hearing the sonic attack of the jukes a lot more clearly than Kitsy had heard Lucy’s “Good-bye, Uncle Art” downwind that morning.

  “If we coulda got a zoning law . . .” Malotti went on. “But that’s the way it goes. Everybody that can’s going to run for cover. It’s the ones off the road out in back I feel sorry for. They’re stuck. But you can’t blame the rest of us, can you?”

  Spig shook his head. Then he said, “Ashton’s dead. Or have you heard?”

  “Just now, on the radio. But my tears have dried. Pete Greenway told me there was a rumour about Ashton’s selling out and I asked him. He said nothing was settled but we didn’t have to worry about the
highway. He’d fixed that when he bought a right-of-way for his entrance through your woods.”

  “He didn’t buy it. We gave it to him.”

  “That’s what I suggested. He said he regarded the protection of the highway as in effect a purchase price. Smug as hell. I damn’ near socked him. But there’s not likely to be a change . . . with Anita in the driver’s seat?”

  Spig shook his head. “We’ll try to do anything we can.”

  “So if we all held off . . . ?”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

  “Well,” Malotti got back in his car. “I just wanted you to know where we stand. I’m sorry. But we just don’t have the dough to take a chance.”

  Nobody had, of course, except the Camerons and the Potters, and they were out at the end of Eden’s Neck with three hundred acres apiece, safer than anybody else.

  O’Leary went out into the kitchen and got a glass of milk and the devilled eggs and sandwiches Molly had set aside from the children’s picnic, at least remembering him to that extent before she skylarked off to Baltimore. It didn’t make the house any less empty or fill the emptier hollow somewhere inside him. He was thinking that when he heard another car and went out. It was Yerby this time.

  He got out of his car and took off his uniform hat to wipe the sweat from it.

  “Boy, has she sure got it in for you. And for Devon County. Her father’s flying down. She’s gone to meet him now.”

  “I take it she still wants me in jail.”

  Yerby shook his head. “Not in jail, in the pen. But she didn’t call the State’s Attorney. She’s waiting for her father. She tells me he’s a smart operator. Maybe she’ll cool down, I don’t know. I came to tell you to sit tight for a while. I don’t want her to tell the papers I’m playing any favourites and she can’t get a square deal here in Devon County. It’s lucky Doc and I were both just leaving Sudley’s when my office got me. If you’d got a couple of deputies there, you’d have been in the can for sure.”

  He opened the car door. “If she gets us out on a limb and we have to hold an inquest, and she charges you with scaring Stan to death . . . But maybe her father’s got some sense if she hasn’t.”

  He started to get in the car and stopped. “One other thing. You have something on your mind when you called me at Nick’s?”

  As Spig hesitated his dark eyes smouldered with sudden anger.

  “What’s the trouble, O’Leary? You turning yellow, too?”

  He slammed the car door shut and came back. “If you know any more about what happened at the Three D last night, I want it.”

  “I might want to know what you were doing at Sudley’s, first?” Spig said.

  Yerby stared at him. “What I was doing at Sudley’s is no business of yours. But I’ll be glad to tell you. I was checking if they heard any noise last night. They didn’t.” His face darkened with anger. “And I don’t like what you’re saying or the way you’re saying it, O’Leary. I’ve heard it too many times. You took an oath this morning. ‘Diligently and faithfully, without partiality or prejudice . . .’ I took the same oath. Now if you know anything about that job at Nick’s I want it. I don’t care if it was the Governor. I’m waiting, O’Leary.”

  “All right,” Spig said. “When I called you, I’d just seen a car with a splinter of blue glass shot into the side of a white wall tyre.”

  He saw Yerby’s face relax into a wary stillness. “Go ahead.”

  “There was a fifty-cent piece rolled up against the base of the gear shift. I called you——”

  “Then what happened?” Yerby asked quietly.

  “Nothing. The glass and the half-dollar were gone when I saw the car a little later.”

  Yerby’s eyes were still steadily on his. “The people that own this car . . . they friends of yours?”

  “I know them.”

  “I followed you out from town this morning, as far as Nick’s,” Yerby said slowly. “You hadn’t seen this car then. You were headed for Ashton’s. Was this car a yellow midget?”

  Sprig nodded.

  Yerby was silent for a moment. “You’re dead sure?”

  “Dead sure.”

  “Okay. That’s enough.” His face looked like old shoe leather. “One of my boys saw that car parked out past the Old Mill round half-past one. He’s got kids of his own. He told those two to move on, it wasn’t safe if some sex psycho was on the prowl. He told me about it, just in case it backfired.”

  He turned his hat slowly around in his lean, brown hands. “This sort of knocks me. I knew it was amateur. But . . . this boy’s father’s done a lot for me. One of the best friends I’ve ever had.”

  He got in his car. “I don’t know what to do, Spig. You try to figure it as if they were your own kids. I can’t get it. They’ve got everything, those two . . . everything they want. Did you tell Anita? Is that why she——”

  Spig shook his head. “I didn’t tell her. Lucy did—or started to. She knows I saw the tyre. She thought that’s why you were coming this morning, before she knew Stan was dead.”

  Yerby nodded slowly. “I saw her run when we drove in, but I never thought a thing about it.” He was silent for a moment, and started his car. “I’ll talk to the kids first. Before they get a chance to get together. If Lucy was that scared. When I get through this, I’m going back to the automobile business. This makes me want to vomit.”

  He shot his car forward, the tyres digging into the gravel.

  CHAPTER XIV

  O’LEARY SMOOTHED the ruts over with the side of his shoe, and went back to the house. It had been a great day for the great O’Leary. A great day. The only fitting end to it would be to find himself in the local jailhouse accused of frightening a hungover former friend to death. Plus ratting on a couple of teen-aged kids. Plus having a wife he was supposed to treat like a plough horse. It would make a fine story by the time it got the rounds.

  John Eden’s moulting crow stumping along behind him, croaking and blinking its jaundiced rimmed eyelids, seemed equally fitting.

  “Cah,” it said.

  “Get out,” O’Leary said. “Beat it, will you?” He went on inside. If there was just something brilliant and dynamic he’d done, it wouldn’t have been so depressing. Or if there was something dynamic he could do. Instead, he got a washer and fixed the leaking faucet in the bathroom. That was the great O’Leary’s speed. Then there was the loose rubber tile in the kitchen, the cellar window that creaked, and finally the loose plank down on the pier.

  The crow followed him down. “Cah, cah!”

  Spig looked around. It was headed down the sea wall towards the blue heron soberly fishing the bank. They’d tangled before, the lost feathers black, not grey, the home champion game but over-matched. He picked up a nail to throw and stopped. The Ashtons’ back windows were in full view from the end of the pier. One of them was open, and running out of it was a black-haired boy as tall as a man. He dashed down the lawn and over the bank, ducking as he waded out of sight around the retaining wall under the great chestnut oak. It was just in time. Charlie Sudley had barely disappeared when Buck Yerby came around the side of the house. The window was closed then. Yerby stood a moment and went back along the house to the living-room windows on the terrace, also closed. If he was knocking, he was not admitted. When he left then, the bedroom window opened again and the fair-haired child slipped out. But only for a moment, and when Yerby came in sight again it was too late. Lucy was back inside, the windows tightly shut. Spig grinned, cheered a little to find Yerby’s efforts as non-dynamic as his own.

  Which was why there was something essentially comic, in spite of everything, about Joe Cameron’s barging around the house just as he came up from the pier.

  “For God’s sake, Spig! I got here as quick as I could.” He was in his city clothes, sweating, his brown ox eyes and ruddy face stricken with dismay. “I went to the jail. Thank God you’re out. I told you to watch it, Spig. I just happened to call up, to talk to Stan, and Lucy
told me what happened.”

  O’Leary took a long breath. “Look, Joe. I don’t know what little Lucy told you, but let’s get it straight. I didn’t kill Ashton, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”

  Cameron let himself down into a chair and wiped his forehead.

  “And I’d like to know what little Lucy did tell you.”

  Cameron’s face reddened. “It doesn’t matter,” he said defensively. “She was just upset, I guess. All alone there. You’d think her mother’d have more sense. Anita’s not fit to have a kid.”

  “Yeah,” Spig said. “Poor Anita.”

  Joe Cameron looked at him doubtfully. “Well, I better call Mag.” He got up and made a bumbling embarrassed move towards the door. “I called her from the office. She wanted to come right over. But . . . well, Lucy told me about Molly and Dunning, Spig.”

  “She did? She tell you they’re in Baltimore for lunch and a Swedish art exhibition of some kind?” Cameron’s distress suddenly gave a little perspective of O’Leary’s own. “I don’t know what Lucy made of it, Joe, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Nobody around here’s threatened to kill Dunning?”

  “It wasn’t me and it wasn’t about Molly,” Spig said. “It was about a painting. You remember last night over at the Ashtons’? You said if Dunning painted you the way he did Stan, you’d kill him? Let’s call it a manner of speaking, shall we?”

  He said it casually, trying not to think of the loaded rifle in Tip’s hand.

  “It wasn’t any manner of speaking.” Joe Cameron’s face reddened again. “I said it and I meant it, by God.”