Yesterday's Murder

by Craig Rice

  He nodded his head, uncertain of the words to use, found himself blushing furiously, and became violently angry with himself for having blushed. It had now become entirely impossible for him to speak, and he knew, in some manner, that old Philip Telefair was aware of it.

  Suddenly Philip Telefair put his glass down with a curious, snapping sound, and turned to face his great-nephew, his face as smiling and shining with affection as though David’s words had pleased him very much. For only a bare moment of time David felt a joyous leaping of the heart, a throbbing of the pulse in his temples, as it seemed that the old man was about to agree to his request. But it was only for that instant. In the next, though no new expression crossed Philip Telefair’s face, David knew that he was not going to be given the use of a boat to cross to the mainland on the coming Sunday. He had not the faintest idea of how or of why he knew; he only was sure that it was so.

  “Naturally,” Philip Telefair said, “the religious devotions of a young man do not bear interruption. I am sorry that it did not occur to me before.” He smiled at David, his finely shaped head a little on one side. “You need not worry. I will make an arrangement, immediately.”

  At that moment Edris came into the room, and no more was said on the subject. David had no idea what the old man meant, nor could he hazard any kind of guess. He noticed that Philip Telefair went to his desk and busied himself for a few minutes with pen and paper; observed him engaged in a private word with old Jonas, but he could not imagine the meaning of what was being done. He only knew that during dinner his great-uncle nodded and smiled as though he were secretly and inordinately pleased with himself.

  It was not until after dinner, a silent meal through which David sat in what was almost a daze, barely conscious of Edmund’s occasional attempts to make conversation, that he learned what old Philip Telefair had in mind. Dinner was over, everyone was in the small parlor, when old Jonas came in bearing an envelope, which he gave to Philip Telefair.

  The room was so still that the crackling of paper seemed monstrously loud as the old man tore open the envelope and tossed it in the fire, after taking out a folded paper which he glanced through hurriedly, nodding a little with pleased approval, before he crumpled it too in his graceful hand and sent it to follow the envelope. Doctor von Berger had been in the act of lighting a thick brown cigarette when old Jonas entered; he stopped suddenly in the midst of it, the lighted match in his fingers, and stood holding it until the tiny flame scorched his skin, when he put it out hastily and dropped it on the hearth as though he were unconscious of what he did. Edmund had been in the middle of a phrase, something to do with the conditions of currents in the inlet, and ended the word he had been saying as though it were already thought, formed and made, and so came from his mouth of its own accord; he paused then as though the next word had been driven completely out of his mind, as though he would never complete the phrase in his lifetime. No one noticed that Edmund had stopped speaking; indeed, it appeared that no one remembered that Edmund had been speaking. Edris had been at the door leading to the great hall, preparing to go to her room; as old Jonas came in with the envelope she paused there, half turned to go, one colorless, fragile hand resting on the Dresden china doorknob, as though she had been enchanted and could not move again of her own volition.

  It all took place in such a little space of time, hardly more than the space between two words or two breaths, only the time required to tear open an envelope and glance hastily at a brief message, yet in that time it occurred to David that in all the weeks he had spent now at Telefair he had never seen Philip Telefair receive a message, nor, indeed, anyone else on the Island. It might have been, for all he knew, that a message had not been received at Telefair in all the years of Philip Telefair’s residence there.

  The old man spoke at last as though he knew they were all watching him, as though he was aware of the sensation his words would make, and was secretly delighted in anticipation of it.

  “I have just arranged,” he said in the most ordinary tone of voice, nodding and smiling, “for the Reverend Mr. Stone to come over to the Island next Sunday morning and conduct services in the Telefair chapel.”

  He paused there. No one said anything at all, yet it was as though a whisper of shocked surprise had run around the room. Doctor von Berger stared at Edmund, and Edmund stared in turn at the little German doctor, then both turned to stare at David. Edris stood there in the doorway, her eyes fixed on her father’s face as though she could not turn them away.

  David felt a sudden sense of triumph, a new and important nearness to old Philip Telefair, a kind of scornful superiority over the others in the room. It had been his request, made to Philip Telefair, that had brought about this extraordinary event; while he had not known the exact plan that had been forming in his great-uncle’s mind, at least he had the foreknowledge that a plan of some sort existed. His eyes met Philip Telefair’s across the room in a long look of intimate understanding, a look that said, “We knew of this all along, we knew that it was going to be,” a look that excluded all the others in the room from their close affection as though the two of them stood surrounded by a wall in which there were no windows.

  “The experience will be a novel one for you, Edris,” Philip Telefair said gently, “since you have never been inside a church in all of your life.”

  At his words, and without answering them, the girl turned and was instantly gone; through the open door David could see her flying up the long staircase so swiftly that it was almost as though a sudden flicker of light had flown up on the shadows and vanished.

  Old Philip Telefair laughed.

  Edris’ sudden motion, and the old man’s gentle laughter, had broken the tension in the room, yet it appeared that both Doctor von Berger and Edmund wished to speak, and could not, being unable to find the words they wished to use. Philip Telefair nodded across the room to his great-nephew.

  “You have never seen the Telefair chapel, have you, David?”

  David shook his head. “I had no idea that there was one.”

  Philip Telefair lifted his eyebrows ever so little. “Most of these great old houses had their private chapels, at least those such as Telefair. I am a little afraid that the Telefairs were more formal than devout in their religious observances, when they made any at all, but at least there is a chapel, and a very notable one.” He lifted his voice and called to Jonas to bring him a candle. “It might amuse you to see it.”

  He took the candle when it came, told Jonas he need not accompany them, and led David into the great hall, Edmund and Doctor von Berger remaining behind. Beyond the hall, double doors led into the library, the only room ever used in the old wing, and at the far end of the library was another door. David had never seen it opened, had wished many times that he might open it, and had never ceased wondering what manner of rooms might lie beyond.

  “The chapel,” Philip Telefair said, pausing with one hand on the knob, “is underground.” As though he sensed David’s unspoken surprise, he answered the young man’s question without its being asked. “It was built by the Eugene Telefair who built the old wing, considering it to be all the house he needed. By the time it was pointed out to him that he had not included a chapel in his building plans, it was too late to make room for it without radically altering the construction. Not wanting the chapel to be a separate building, he solved his problem neatly by putting it underground.” He added after a moment, “Where, incidentally, he put most of his religious scruples as well.”

  Philip Telefair opened the door—it led into another wide hall that seemed to separate what lay beyond from the rest of the house—and paused at another pair of double doors.

  “The ballroom,” he said, indicating the doors. “A curious location for it in the house, but it had its practical reasons. It has not been used now for many years.”

  He opened the doors as he spoke, and motioned to David to enter, following with the candle. In its dim and uncertain light the room which
they had entered appeared to be one vast, cavernous shadow, circular in shape, giving the impression of being larger than any room David had ever seen. As his eyes slowly became accustomed to the gloom, he could make out a gallery surrounding the room, and, above it, a high, slightly domed ceiling on which he could dimly see shadowy, immense, and faded figures only half emerging from the dark, so that in the candlelight they appeared to move endlessly in a strange yet graceful design. Around the walls, and below the gallery, he could see old paneled mirrors; even in so faint a light he could see that they were deeply tarnished, their silvering so worn that they gave back hardly any reflection at all, and were almost entirely black, retaining only enough of their former polish to send back the gleam of Philip Telefair’s candle in little flickers of yellow light that moved and wavered a dozen times around the room.

  “It has not been used for many years,” Philip Telefair said again. David turned to look at him, and saw that his face was unusually pale in the candlelight. His dark, deep-set eyes looked over David’s shoulder and into the old ballroom, and peopled it with dancers and musicians, polished the mirrors, repainted the figures on the ceiling, dusted the great chandelier and lighted it with a hundred candles. Then, with only a faint change in the old man’s eyes, the room became empty again, shadowy, dim, and mysterious.

  Old Philip Telefair laughed sharply into the gloom. “I came to show you the chapel, and instead I show you a forsaken ballroom,” he said a little harshly. He turned abruptly and led the way into the hall, closing the doors behind them with a sudden, startling clatter that re-echoed through the unused rooms above them.

  Not far from the double doors the hall turned, and to David, a few steps in advance of Philip Telefair, it seemed as though the floor suddenly fell away, and nothing lay ahead save the bottomless pit itself. He halted, trying to see through the gloom, and then as his great-uncle came nearer, bearing the candle, he could see that what had appeared to be an endless well of darkness was, in truth, a flight of stone steps that led down into the earth.

  “Let me go ahead,” old Philip Telefair said softly.

  He went on down the steps a little way, and David could see that the stone of which they were made was fine, and beautifully cut, and that the stairs themselves curved and curved again on their way underground, so that, as he felt his way down carefully, he could not see his destination.

  All at once he paused, part-way down the stair, and leaned against the cool wall behind him. From somewhere in his childhood he remembered a dream he had once had—no, not once only, but over and over, recurrently—a dream in which he had followed some curious, winding passage down into the depths of the earth, in search of some destination of which he knew nothing, and that he never attained. It had been so long ago that he could remember nothing more of it, only that there had been such a dream. There on the stone steps, with old Philip Telefair’s candle flickering dimly ahead of him, it seemed to him suddenly that he was not at Telefair at all, but back again in the dream of which he could remember so little.

  Philip Telefair’s voice came to him from a little distance, with a singular, echoing response, asking if he had lost his way. It was as though he woke suddenly when he heard it, and again he picked his way carefully down the stairs in the direction of the wavering light, wondering what Philip Telefair would say if he had explained that he had paused there on the staircase to try to remember a dream he had had as a child.

  Around the curve of the stair he could see a wide opening, dark, forbidding, cavelike, edged round with massive, wooden pillars. Old Philip Telefair held the candle up a little, and in its light David could see a vast curtain of cobwebs that had been woven over the entrance, and a thick carpet of some curious fungus growth upon the stone floor. He drew nearer, and peering intently through the veil of cobwebs, he could see the chapel itself, for all the moss and the thick dust that covered everything a little jewel of a room, paneled in a wood that still retained some of its luster, richly and elaborately carved. At the far end of the chapel a piece of some heavy material had been laid over the altar, hiding as well as protecting it, but David could see, even through the cobwebs, the deep and magnificent carvings of the pews, the delicate silverwork designed to hold the candles on the walls, and the heavy benches at the back of the chapel placed there for the Telefair slaves. It was small, built to hold only a few, and the space before its altar was narrow, yet every inch had been made beautiful with carving, with paneling, with inlay or with silverwork. Through the gray, feathery web, and in the faint light, the whole appeared dim, unreal, dreamlike; the cloth that had been laid over the altar to protect it took its shape, pale against the gloom and hazy-edged, the nebulous ghost of a cross.

  “It has not been entered for a long time,” old Philip Telefair said, his voice very gentle and very soft, yet seeming to echo and re-echo from the stone stair well. “Not since the burial of my own father, and that was many years ago.”

  David turned to look at him as he spoke. Holding the candle as he did, and standing in the deep shadows, only his head and a little of his shoulders were showing; the rest had been made invisible by the dark. His face appeared to be extremely pale, the skin drawn over it tightly; his white hair was like a half-luminous aura about his head. The light of the candle was reflected in his deep-set eyes, so that two tiny pin points of light showed where the pupils should have been. He did not seem to see David at all, nor to remember that David was there.

  It was not until much later, after he had said good night to Philip Telefair and retired to his room, that David thought of a singular thing. Philip Telefair had said that the ancient chapel had not been entered since the burial of his father, many years past. Where then, David wondered, had the funeral of his own father taken place, only twenty years before? For his own father had died on Telefair Island, and been buried there. He wondered for a moment if the body of his father had been placed in the earth, in the burying ground of the Telefairs, at dead of night, without ceremony, without prayer, with no more than the help of a Negro servant, Jonas, perhaps, to dig the grave and to shovel back the soil.

  Wondering, he walked to his window, drew the blind, and looked out into the night. He saw, then, that during the evening the sky had clouded over, obscuring the moon, and that now the rain was beginning to fall.

  8

  The Sunday when the first services were to be held in the old chapel, now cleaned and refurbished, was a gray day, dark with unfallen rain. Now and then one drop would fall, one and then another, and then no more, but from his window David could see that black and threatening clouds hung close over the Island, spreading a daytime darkness that was like the threat of some vast, unknown, oncoming doom.

  He had slept later than usual, oppressed in his sleep perhaps by the approaching rains, and now he bathed and dressed hastily, his head still heavy with sleep, his half-wakened fingers fumbling numbly with his tie.

  The upper hallway was empty when he left his room, and he went on slowly to the stairs, pausing for a moment at the top, listening for what voices might be heard from the rooms below. There were none, there was only silence. As near as he could tell, no one but himself was awake and stirring in the house.

  He went on down the stairs softly, took a few steps, and paused again, half on one step and half on the next, one hand still clinging to the balustrade.

  A girl was standing in the great hall, near the portrait of Claire Telefair, a girl with dark hair that gleamed almost blue in the curious rain-light, tall, slender, wonderfully graceful, dressed in some pale gray stuff that seemed like a delicate cloud of smoke.

  David had never seen a stranger at Telefair before, and for one instant he was stunned out of thought, staring at her, uncomprehending. In that instant it seemed to him that he was staring at the apparition of some long-dead Telefair, seeing her standing beside the portrait of the tall, graceful, dark-haired Claire who had been dead for more than a hundred years. He waited there on the stairs, poised between one step
and the next, till she should move or speak, holding his breath for the moment when she would vanish and be seen no more. Then as he stood there motionless she turned around, and he looked down into the great, sightless eyes of Laurel Stone.

  He understood at once, telling himself that he had been inexpressibly stupid. She must have rowed over to the Island with her father, who was going to conduct the services in the underground chapel.

  He recognized her, and he understood why she was there, yet still he waited on the stairway, not moving, hardly breathing.

  For a moment she was unaware of him, and he was still, lest she might be startled by his footfall on the stair. Suddenly he realized what he had never known before, that blindness is not of the eyes alone. Indeed, the blinded eyes of Laurel Stone seemed, in their unfathomed darkness, to be the only part of her that could see, and they saw not the earth but the waters under the earth, not the life of men on the earth but their dream life, not the stars of the night sky, but the star that had slipped below the horizon’s rim.

  Laurel Stone, he knew, was blind, yet it seemed not so much her eyes that were blind as her face, her hands, and the movements of her body. David had never realized it before, but he discovered now that the faces of those who cannot see are far more blind than their eyes.

  It was not, though, until she spoke to him that he heard and understood the subtle difference between the voices of the sightless and the voices of those who can see. The difference, he perceived, is that of one who listens not only for spoken words but for the small, the almost imperceptible sounds; who cannot see the lines on the face but listens for the faintest inflexion of the voice; who cannot see the lighting of the eyes, the dropping of the lip, the movements of the brow, but who catches the whisper of the indrawn breath, and the inward alteration of the tone.

  She said, “Good morning, David. I am glad to be able to repay your visit.”