by Zenith Brown
“Of course it isn’t, but he thinks it is. He’s just eaten alive with an inferiority complex. That’s the reason for his beard and all his malice. You tell him he’s got gifts and talents that make him a giant of another sort and you ought to see his ego bloom. He’s witty and amusing then . . . really sweet, when he wants to be.”
“Okay, he’s a wonderful guy, and I’m an s.o.b. because I don’t see it. But that show Tip put on in the garden wasn’t any business of being possessive and having everything his own way. It was about a picture Dunning painted.”
She looked around at him quickly. “That’s silly. I was out there when he was doing it.”
“Mean . . . dirty mean, was what Tip called it. And you know Tip. He’s the only rational peaceable person in this house. If he gets to the point of wanting to kill somebody, and comes in here at midnight with his rifle loaded, ready to shoot, because he thinks Dunning——”
“Tippy?”
“Tippy, last night. Right in this room. That’s when he told me about the picture. That’s the reason he’s so hell-bent on keeping Dunning away from you . . . so he can’t paint you. And now it’s Miss Fairlie he’s upset about.”
The incredulous disbelief was still on her face, but at least she was listening.
“Dunning was over there, at Eden, last night. Not at any movie with Lucy, or sketching Colby’s Carnival, the way Anita says he was. He was outside Miss Fairlie’s picket gate between one and three . . . painting Eden by moonlight. And you’re not going to like this, but Yerby’s made me one of his deputies. My instructions are to shoot to kill if I see anybody at night on Eden that doesn’t belong there.”
She shook her head slowly. “I . . . don’t understand. It’s very strange.”
She went back to the desk and turned on the lamp, looking at her watch. “I wish Tip would come home. He’s never been over there as late as this.”
“Tip’s all right.”
“I know. It’s just . . .” She glanced uneasily out of the window. The river was still shining with the afterglow of sunset, but the trees were casting longer denser shadows with the creeping in of night. “I wish she had a dog over there. I asked David why she didn’t . . . he said it was because of her father’s dog. An old Gordon setter. He howled so pitifully during the . . . the time of sorrow, David called it. When George Sudley killed himself.”
“He didn’t.” It came out abruptly, before he thought.
“Oh . . .” She looked over at the bowl of nasturtiums, and back at him.
“He was murdered,” Spig said shortly. “It doesn’t matter. It was forty years ago”
“But if Art Dunning . . .”
“That’s right. If he goes digging around, just for the fun of it . . .”
“It wasn’t Harlan Sudley . . . was it?” Molly asked abruptly. “Because Art’s been over there a lot lately. You know the way he sees all the things people try to hide . . . like that horrible thing of Stan Ashton. To-night, all the time we were over there, I kept feeling he was right in the room—gloating because we . . .”
She caught her lip in her teeth and turned quickly away, her shoulders quivering.
“Don’t, Molly.” He took her in his arms and held her tightly. “Don’t. We’ll manage. We can start again”
She pressed her forehead hard against his breast.
“It’s Tip. It’s Tip I’ve . . . betrayed, giving away what was his. It wasn’t ours to give. It’s just so awful. It breaks my heart. But . . . it’s the only way we can get the money. This place is the only thing we’ve got. We couldn’t keep it, and go on living here, with everybody hating us, knowing Anita’s given us a chance to save them, and Eden’s Neck. And . . . Miss Fairlie. We’ve got to sell this place, Spig. It’s like selling a piece of your own heart, but it’s the only way we can do it. It’s the only way we can possibly raise the money.”
“I know.” He kissed the top of her head gently, holding her until she was quiet again. “It’s just something I never thought about . . . until now when I came in. It just seemed cockeyed, over there, when he reeled off the list of how much they’d put in the place. I never thought about this place being ours to sell. It’s been more like a . . . a trusteeship. I don’t know what I thought, barging in Nat Twohey’s office and demanding the stipulation. But I guess that’s why Ashton took it. He’d probably figured just how much this place would bring—we might be able to do him out of his extra profit.”
“And that’s what scared Anita over there,” Molly said. “She and her father hadn’t figured we could possibly raise that much money, so they were going to give us a week. I could just see her all of a sudden thinking we might, and cutting the time down so we wouldn’t possibly have a chance.”
She went across to the telephone and stood there a moment, then raised it and picked up the receiver. The dial rasped under her fingers.
“Mrs. Cameron, please. Oh, Martha—tell her Mrs. O’Leary called.”
She put the phone down. “They’ve taken the kids out on the boat. They’re going to sleep out to-night.”
She came back and sat down beside Spig. “Those friends of theirs. This place is just what they’ve been looking for. Miss Fairlie’ll approve of them. They’ve got five children. If they paid us fifteen hundred an acre, that’s seventy-five thousand, and something for the house . . . we could borrow the rest. We’d have the Ashton place. We wouldn’t dare sell it . . . but we could give both sides of the road to the State for our park . . . for Kathy. You . . . you’ll have to go and see Miss Fairlie, first thing in the morning. And just wait till Anita and her father find out they haven’t beaten us! She’ll be furious. And I guess . . . I will send Molly A. to Daddy. Her and John Eden.”
Spig nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Because Anita doesn’t really want her. She’s just doing it to hurt us. I’ll call Daddy in the morning. She won’t have a maid and a nurse that quick and she wouldn’t want her if she had to look after her herself. By the time we get the thing to court she’ll decide she doesn’t want her anyway.”
She raised her head, listening to the dog’s quick happy bark down at the little bridge. “There he comes. Oh, Spig . . . let’s not tell him, not to-night!”
Spig got slowly to his feet. “It’s his place, Molly. We have to . . .”
“But not to-night!”
They heard him coming, running with the dog, throwing her ball for her.
“I can’t bear it! I can’t even bear it to see him!”
She ran, suddenly blind, to the door, and Spig heard her stumble on the stairs, running again, and the bedroom door slam shut behind her. He stood there a long moment, and went out through the hyphen to meet his son.
“Hi, Dad. Where’s Mother?”
“She’s gone to bed. She doesn’t feel very well. We’ve had some pretty rugged news to-night. Do you think you can take it? It’s really rugged.”
Tip motioned the dog to sit. His face was a pale blur in the shadow of the night. But there are things you don’t have to see to know.
“Is it . . . about the place?”
“That’s right. Anita will sell us hers. The only way we’ve got to raise the money is to sell our own . . . if Miss Fairlie will let us. To those people the Camerons had over here a few weeks ago.”
Tip was silent a moment. “Miss Fairlie liked their children,” he said then, gravely. “We took them over to see her. She said it would be nice if they could live down here.”
“We’ll get in touch with them in the morning.”
There was an aching hollow where Spig’s throat was. Tip put his hand out, touching his father’s.
“It’s all right, Daddy. Don’t feel so bad. We don’t need this big a place. We promised Miss Fairlie. She doesn’t like people who go back on their word. Is there anything we could get to eat? I’m hungry.”
CHAPTER XVII
IT WAS twelve-thirty when Spig left Molly asleep and went quietly downstairs and out into the night. He would
have taken the dog, in spite of Miss Fairlie, but she was in Tip’s bed where she was not allowed, wagging her tail, alert with a special knowledge that to-night was different. Tip asleep with his arm around her shaggy ruff. He didn’t take a gun.
Once he had been at Eden in the dark of a winter’s dawn, but he’d never been there at night before. The late moon through the ragged cumulus cast a filtered glow, bright as hoar frost on the open lawns, intensifying the darkness crouching under the trees, as he left the white bridge at the head of the Cove and came up the turf into the gardens.
Death is a flower that blooms at night. It came into his mind, as if he were in some way himself on death’s business, as his rubber soles trod the springy turf as silent as death in the sudden cessation of sound—all the tiny voices, the cicadas and tree frogs and the myriad things singing in the night, pausing as he came, singing again when he had passed. But the borders themselves were intensely alive, the nicotiana, dreary during the day, waxen fresh, star bright as a milky way though the sleeping beds, its delicate fragrance mingled with the tube rose and night-scented stock. The trimmed yews, black silent sentinels at the four corners of the graveyard, hid the river. Next to them were the taller, blacker forms of the cryptomeria. The small Greek temple between them and the arbour emerged touched with moonlight, its slender white columns as tenuously intangible as smoke rising from the altar of the oracle in some far-off Aegean land.
He came to the boxwood circle, black and billowing, its sheen as elusive as its fragrance, and moved on up to the picket gate, stopping to whistle softly. “I told her you would, Dad. So she’d know it’s you.” He whistled again and looked down at the big house, dark, sealed and shuttered, its six ivy-clad chimneys broad, black planes magnified against the slate roof shining with its silver frost. It was the way it must have looked the day Judge Twohey came and found it locked, barred and deserted. Except that Spig felt a sense of life about it. It seemed poised and waiting, watching, as somewhere in the silent rooms he’d never seen she was watching, as she’d watched the night before. He waited, half expecting to see her materialise out from under the canopy of the wistaria over the porch, through the door hidden in its depths. But there was no sign of her, outwardly or visibly, only the whispering fragrance of her gardens and the lonely quack of a duck disturbed down in the pond behind the pallid silver screen of the bamboo and the weeping grace of the old willow.
He turned to unlatch the picket gate, listening. Dunning must have come on foot the night before. To-night, with Lucy presumably housebound by the presence of her grandfather, or Yerby, or her own discretion, he’d have the midget car. He opened the gate and went through, and stood, listening again. There was nothing he could hear except the tree frogs and cicadas, the leaves whispering, and the lonely disembodied call of the chuck-will’s-widow off in the woods. He closed the gate, startled at the metallic click of the latch, loud in the sea of foam-rubber silence around him. He was at the end of the lane where they’d parked, leaving the children in the car, the day they came to Eden. Ahead of him on the left, shadowy in the light filtering through the leafy arabesques of the dogwoods, was the little Greek Revival office, where Mrs. Twohey, Cerberus with a cigar box guarding the portals, had been that day, and where Miss Fairlie had lived the five dark years. It was easy to imagine that it as well as the big house was haunted, the white columns strangely insubstantial, like slender ghosts, pale against the sable shadow of the porch under the pediment.
The soft scrunch of the gravel under his feet was the only sound he heard. He moved off on to the grass. Almost to the office porch he stopped. It was something he could feel, not hear, that stopped him, the cold sweat coming out, prickling sharp along his spine. He could hear it then, a soft slurring sound, as the door in the dense shadow of the porch seemed to open, a vague white blur that grew there, the musty odour of old books, in a closed-in room, strange incense, seeping like a formless ghost around it.
“He may not come to-night.”
The faraway, childish voice didn’t shatter the illusion, but for an instant heightened it.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
O’Leary reacted sharply then, aware that it was no way to speak to Miss Fairlie of Eden. He reached down to pick up the flashlight he’d dropped, and started to apologise. But she hadn’t seemed to notice.
“I was looking for the man with the broom.”
“Broom?”
Maybe he was crazy himself, but “broom” was what he thought he heard.
“Like a witch,” Miss Fairlie said.
She came on, her slippered feet whispering on the boards of the porch until she emerged into the filtering light, still not solidly real in her long white wrapper, until Spig saw the white straw sailor hat on her head, a fantastic touch that set her firmly back into reality . . . as firmly as she was ever in it.
“Or like a chimney sweep,” she said. “All black.”
She came down the two steps to the ground.
“It’s very peculiar. No one sweeps chimneys any more. Not with a broom. Vacuum bags are much cleaner.”
O’Leary drew a deep breath. “I’m sure they are, Miss Fairlie,” he said gently. “But don’t you think you’d better go on in? Let me talk to him when he comes.”
“He seldom comes two nights in succession. Sometimes not for a week or more.”
He came closer to her, looking intently at her in the moonlight.
“You mean he’s been here before, Miss Fairlie? Before last night?”
“A number of times,” she said. He couldn’t see her face clearly under the stiff white brim of her hat, but he sensed the blinking faraway look in her faded blue eyes, the way she stood, erect, hands primly folded in front of her. “I expect it was that woman sent him. Very irritating. It disturbs the child. Privacy is repugnant to Mrs. Twohey. It’s surprising to me that Nathan retained what sanity he did. I must go now.”
She started past him towards the gate.
“Here. Let me give you a light.”
“There’s a light,” she said. “If you know the dark, you find it has a light of its own to let you see.”
She went a few steps farther and stopped without turning.
“You’re disturbed,” she said. “Don’t be. Everyone dies. Mr. Ashton was his own dark angel. Baal, I expect, was made of gold. The people who worshipped it were the ones devoured.”
“Then you knew he planned——”
“But surely.” She seemed even surprised, in a vague way, that he should have thought to ask her. “A niece of David’s worked there. Mrs. Ashton was against it, at first. But she hasn’t been happy here. I expect she’ll be glad to get away. But don’t let it disturb you.”
She came back to him and stood, scarcely coming above his elbow, her hands fluttering in a brief gesture.
“It doesn’t matter. Eden has had strange tenants before these. And gamblers. There never was an Eden who wasn’t a gambler.”
“You gambled on us, Miss Fairlie.” He wasn’t sure she was listening to him, there seemed something so elusive about her, as if she were already moving away again. “We promised Judge Twohey you’d never regret it . . . we’d see that Eden was safe, never threatened because you gambled. And that’s what’s happening. Not only to Eden but to everybody else out here. I was coming to talk to you to-morrow morning. Anita’s agreed to stand by the promise that Ashton made us. We can buy the place for the cash they’ve got in it. We can raise the money—if we can sell the Plumtree Cove . . .”
“In which case you’ll stand by your own promise. Or so I assume.”
There was nothing vague, nothing elusive about Miss Fairlie of Eden then. He couldn’t see the blue eyes, but he could feel them, as direct and unblinking as her voice was tart, far more effective than any physical blow she could have delivered him.
“Of course, Miss Fairlie. There’s no question——”
“Then tell Nat Twohey to prepare a deed,” she said curtly. “I’ll take yo
ur property back. It’s clearly evident you’ve lost your mind. I’m going now.”
O’Leary stood stupidly where he was, staring after her. Half-way to the gate she stopped and came back again.
“My dear child.” She put her hand out. It rested, light as a moth but definitely firm, on his. “You don’t have to save Eden. Eden will manage. And don’t be impatient. I’m as responsible for the Ashtons as you are. I knew the bridge was coming. I was curious to see how you would act when your wedding present to Kathy became so valuable. You acted very well. It was Mr. Ashton who acted badly. Very grasping. But that place isn’t worth what they put in it. It was a sinful waste of money. Don’t worry. It’s not important.”
“But . . . it is important, when Mr. Sudley——”
“Blackmail.” She cut him off astringently, her hands dropping as her shoulders stiffened. “Nothing but blackmail. As I told him this morning. He was dead set against any form of property restriction. Now his own’s involved, he doesn’t like it. He was mistaken, he says. Very well. But you’re not going to impoverish yourselves to pay for his mistakes. Or assume his responsibilities for the people on Eden’s Neck. He sold them their homes, you didn’t. He’ll support a zoning law. What kind? And what will his support be worth? People may easily resent his changing his mind . . . knowing his reasons. And the Eden’s Neck people. What assurance have you that one of them won’t sell before a law is passed, if it passes? The Edens are gamblers, Tipton, not suicidal maniacs, I’m glad to say. If you wish to sell, you may sell to me. But you’re not going to pauperise yourself and your family with any quixotic nonsense about saving Eden or anybody else. I’m astonished at you. I thought you had a little sense.”
O’Leary stood there, on what little ground there was left for him to stand on, all the turmoil and heartache of the last few hours reduced to specious absurdity by the practical realism of a presumed eccentric. But without changing any of the basic problems . . .
“Still, Miss Fairlie——”
“Do you want to sell the place or don’t you?”
