The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  He nodded impatiently.

  “I should think any doctor would agree that it’s perfectly possible, Mr. Trent,” I said. “But I don’t know much about it.”

  He grunted.

  “You think I did wrong in telling that fellow to get out of here and mind his own business? You think maybe the boy is still dangerous? I’m running into trouble by not letting Sartoris take him in hand?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Trent, really,” I protested feebly. “I don’t think Dr. Sartoris would hurt him.”

  His manner changed instantly.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said quickly. “That’s just where you’re wrong. You don’t know anything about it. There’s something wrong about that fellow. And that’s another thing I want to ask you about. If it was just my wife I wouldn’t care what he did—but it’s my daughter.”

  He got up and began to pace back and forth along the table. He had just begun to speak again when there was a tap at the door and Michael Spur came in.

  It was the first time that I’d got a very clear sight of him. As he stood just inside the door, looking at Mr. Trent for a moment and shaking his head a little, with a queer and despondent look on his face, I saw a tall and almost rugged young man, his face a healthy bronze, his crisp curly hair a chestnut brown that looked as if it had been burned under a tropical sun. His mouth was full and generous, and while he wasn’t handsome in the smooth, suave manner of Dr. Sartoris or Cheryl’s fiancé Major Ellicott, he was decent and clean-looking and dependable. But the most striking thing about him was his eyes. They were dark, and somewhere in the depths of them there were brooding unhappy shadows that came to the surface whenever his face was in repose. They were apparent now as he came up to the table and sat down.

  “Well,” he said with a short laugh, “I can’t stay in there. I guess it’s no use.”

  He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture of unhappi-ness and almost of despair.

  Mr. Trent cast me a sharp glance.

  “I thought I was over all that. I thought I could come back here and take things up, without any trouble. But my God, the place hasn’t changed at all. Perry’s still bidding a slam on two aces, Aunt Emily’s passing, Mr. Archer’s doubling. It seems just as though, if I looked up, Dad would be standing there in the door telling Perry to learn how to count.”

  He sank his head in his hands suddenly, a dry painful sob racking his strong lean body.

  ‘Oh God,” he said, “I can’t forget it. I killed him! It’s just as if it was yesterday.”

  The glance Mr. Trent gave me was very grave, but his voice was confident.

  “Now, my boy,” he said gently. “You’ve got to snap out of it. We can’t go on like this. That’s all over-”

  “I know. It can’t go on. That’s the worst of it. I figured that out years ago. I forced myself to quit thinking about it. It got to be like a bad dream that really never happened. That’s why I came back—I thought I was all over it, and I’d prove it and carry on. But it’s no go. I guess I’d better get back to the sticks.”

  It was at that point that Mr. Trent made what I suppose was one of the greatest concessions he had ever made in his life.

  “Look here, Michaei,” he said. “Why don’t you talk things over with this doctor of Emily’s? They say he’s very successful with cases like yours. No harm in giving him a try. What’s he called himself?—a psychoanalyst.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “No use,” he said wearily. “I’ve been to a couple of ’em. One in San Francisco told me to come back here and one in Chicago told me to stay away. They talk a lot and that’s all there is to it. I guess the Chicago one was right. Anyway, I’ll clear out in the morning.”

  Mr. Trent hesitated.

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll talk about it in the morning, anyway. You’d better get to bed.”

  Talking things over in the morning seemed to be Mr. Trent’s approach to all his problems. Fie put an arm around Michael’s shoulders and walked out into the hall with him.

  He came slowly back into the library, his head sunk forward on his chest, his hands clasped behind his back, and stood in front of the fireplace, making odd noises in his throat. Then he looked up suddenly with a very odd expression on his face.

  “Did it ever occur to you tonight, young lady, that you’ve sort of stumbled into a pretty funny situation?”

  I must have looked puzzled in the extreme, for he laughed shortly.

  “Did you ever happen to think, this last hour or so, what a weapon anybody round here has got, if he happens to know how to stir Michael Spur up just right?”

  I suppose I did see what he meant, but the expression on my face must still have been rather queer. He laughed again.

  “You probably don’t know anybody you’d like murdered, young woman,” he said. As a matter of fact I could think of several people, just offhand. But I said “No.”

  He nodded almost absent-mindedly, as if he were thinking very hard about something else.

  “Well, there’s a couple around here that I could be rid of without losing sleep,” he went on. “If that boy does shoot anybody, I hope he’s careful who he picks out.”

  He lapsed into a moody silence again.

  “It’s funny, now,” he said, “his deciding to come back here just now. It’s damned funny. Well, Boswell—I’ll look into that in the morning. See you about ten. O.K.?”

  I nodded and said “Good night, Mr. Trent,” and started for the door. He stopped me.

  “Look here, young lady,” he said earnestly. “Keep an eye on my little girl for me—will you? She means a lot to me.”

  I smiled. “I’ll be glad to, Mr. Trent,” I said. “Good night.”

  I went back into the living room to say good night to Mrs. Trent. She and Dr. Sartoris were playing bridge with Perry Bassett and Cheryl. Mr. Archer and Major Ellicott were engrossed in a game of chess, and Agnes Hutton was sitting in front of the fireplace reading.

  When I came in Cheryl looked up and smiled, and her mother said, “Oh, is that you, Miss Mather? We looked all over for you to make a fourth at bridge, but we couldn’t find you. So poor Miss Hutton had to read a book.”

  “I really don’t find that a hardship, Mrs. Trent,” Agnes Hutton said sweetly. Mrs. Trent flushed. As I had no idea that what she would say, if anything, would help, I broke in. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been talking to Mr. Trent. Anyway, I’m rather tired, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “You can play tomorrow night. That’s my trick. It was my jack.”

  “I know, mother,” Cheryl said patiently. “But Perry trumped it with the two of diamonds. Anyway, mother, Miss Cather’s waiting to say good night.”

  “Oh, good night, Miss Mather.”

  Mrs. Trent looked around and smiled brightly.

  “I hope you get some sleep. Queen Elizabeth slçpt in your bed. They say it’s well over a hundred years old.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I didn’t know as much about the geography of the Trents’ house then as I do now, after all that happened there. But I did know that after I got up the wide staircase, past the knights, I had to turn out of the big dimly lighted hall, with the balcony overlooking the foyer downstairs, into a corridor that was still longer and dimmer and even more spacious. My door was the third on the right. I hurried past the oak highboys and the carved chests, very glad to close the heavy door behind me and be alone.

  I’ve wondered a number of times since then whether the course of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign would have been a little smoother if she’d had a different bed. It was an enormous bed, heavily carved, with heavy tapestry curtains drawn closely round the head; and it was harder than I’d thought it possible for a bed to be. When I got into it I was very sleepy. After I’d turned off my light, and lay there looking up at the dark curtains all around, I was as wide awake as I’d ever been in my life. At first I thought the bed was entirely responsible.
Then I realized that it wasn’t. The chief thing I missed was the familiar sound of the L-trains and the honking taxis. I closed my eyes and listened. All I could hear was the loud croaking of the frogs, and when that stopped, in one of those concerted silences, I could hear the far-off lapping of the waves on the beach, and all the tiny unfamiliar country sounds that the frogs drowned out the minute they began to croak again.

  I lay there trying to get my city tempo down to the point of sleep, and I got to thinking about the people downstairs, and wondering whether Michael Spur was really dangerous. Or was it just special pleading on Dr. Sartoris’s part? After all, I thought, he’d never seen Michael before. He’d probably got everything he knew from Mrs. Trent, and she was cer tainly both a very prejudiced and a very foolish informant. Then I began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t Dr. Sartoris’s influence that had convinced Mrs. Trent. Then what Mr. Trent had said came into my thoughts with a rush: Michael’s illness could be a powerful weapon in the hands of somebody who could control him.

  It all seemed so unusual and complicated. Violent death, or the idea of it, seemed so familiar to all these people, like something they lived with daily, not something remote and horrible. I put the whole matter out of my head, and tried to think about Duncan Trent and how I’d begin a story about him. That wasn’t successful, since he’d already warned me that this was going to be a new kind of success story. At last I tried to count sheep jumping over a fence; but after a bit the sheep began to smile a Mona Lisa smile. When the larger ones turned into bundles of red velvet fretfully bleating something about psychology, I sat up and turned on the light.

  I reached for one of the two thin white books lying on my bedside table. I’d noticed them before I went down to dinner, observed that they didn’t look very exciting, and thought of getting something in the library. But I hadn’t done it. The one I now took up was bound in vellum, and was inscribed on the fly-leaf, in a fine flowing hand, “To the future and Emily Trent.” The title-page was printed in gold in Old English type. It read “A Way of Life. An Experiment. By Victor Paul Sartoris, M.D., Ph.D. Privately Printed.”

  I thought it would at least have something to tell me about Dr. Sartoris, and settled down to have a look at it. I was wrong. When I’d got halfway through, not having understood a single paragraph, I came to this line: “The erotic-narcissistic-compulsive is therefore, friends and, fellow-seekers, the ideal harmonology of the libido.” That finished me. I closed the book and put it respectfully down, thinking I could almost see Agnes Hutton’s smile.

  The second book was as bad. It was called A Way of Love, and apparently was not an experiment, for it was only inscribed “To Mrs. Trent,” and seemed to have nothing to say about the future or the past.

  After that I tried to go to sleep again, and when that failed I got up. I thought I’d write a letter to Mr. McCrae about Dr. Sartoris, and tell him also about Perry Bassett, since Mr. McCrae grows smilax in a box in his office window over the radiator. I poked up the fire and settled down with a piece of Mrs. Trent’s very expensive stationery. But it was no go. My fountain pen was dry, and I knew before I looked that the dish of shot with the quill in it on the prie-dieu had never had any ink in it.

  I looked at my watch. It was just twelve o’clock. I didn’t of course know what time the Trents went to bed, or whether I could risk going downstairs after some ink, or a book if I could find one. They probably had reading books somewhere; the ones in the library were obviously just decoration. Then I thought of the magazine on the sofa in the living room. I might get hold of it until I could manage something better in the morning.

  So I got up, and looked out of the long leaded window. My room was near the center of the long vista to the shimmering bay. The seat where Michael Spur had knelt, the spot where his father had fallen, was white and ghostly, almost phosphorescent in the moonlight. I leaned out. There were no paths of light across the lawn from the open windows downstairs, and I decided I could risk it. I put on my dressing gown and slipped out into the hall. It was absolutely dark. Apparently when the Trents went to bed they believed in turning out the lights.

  However, I knew that if I kept in the middle of the hall, and made my way carefully, I could probably get downstairs without knocking over a knight. If I hit a chest or a chair or a highboy it was just my hard luck, but the knights were concentrated on the landing. There were two windows in this end of the hall, and there would be a little light from the rose window. I decided to risk it.

  Ordinarily it would have been simple to turn on a light; but I had no notion where or how you did it. The switches were all carefully concealed behind old pieces of tapestry, or under chair rails, and it was pretty confusing until you got the hang of it.

  So I went on in the dark. I got to the balcony without bumping into anything. There was light enough from the rose window for me to make out the glint of polished steel, and then the figures of all three knights, standing like ghostly sentinels on the landing. I stood looking down into the hall below; and I became aware then that I had a curious feeling, a sort of uneasiness, vague and indefinable, that something was wrong. And because I haven’t any sympathy for vagueness of any sort I promptly put that sensation down to pure funk, brought on by the dark eeriness of a misplaced cathedral window and various skeletons in armor, and proceeded quietly but firmly down the stairs after my magazine.

  Just at that point, I’ll admit, I should have been glad to have fled back to my room; but it had got to be a point of honor not to let myself be scared out by anything as immaterial as gray shadows.

  On the bottom step I came to an abrupt halt.

  Someone was still in the library. The door was closed, but there was a faint dim edge of light along the floor, and I could hear someone speaking. At least, I heard a sort of mumbling. I didn’t want to get caught prowling around at that hour, and I think I should have gone back then, except that I was wider awake than ever and the living room door wasn’t more than twenty feet away. Furthermore, it was open. I decided to make a dash for it, get my magazine and slip upstairs before anybody came out. But it wasn’t that easy. I don’t mean that anyone came out—at least no one came out into the hall.

  I got inside the living room. The heavy gold curtains had been drawn aside, and the moonlight lay in long barred panels across the room. In the instant that I stood there, looking down, a tall dark shadow moved into the white oblong, and fell across my feet, and the shadow of a man’s head was blocked against the hem of my nightdress. I looked up, frozen with terror.

  A man was standing motionless in the window. For a moment I thought he was inside the room. Then he moved, and I realized that he was outside, and that he did not know that I was behind him, inside the room. I crouched down instinctively, I suppose, behind a chair and waited.

  In a minute or two I peered out again. He was still standing there, his back to the window, looking down towards the water. He raised his left hand, and slowly, almost painfully, ran his fingers from his forehead through his hair to the nape of his neck.

  I drew a long breath of relief and got up. I didn’t mind Michael Spur—which, I suppose, was a tacit admission that I did mind somebody else. Although I don’t know just who I thought it was out there. I realized too that the reason I hadn’t recognized him was that the moonlight and shadows played tricks with his bulk, so that he seemed thicker than he was.

  He didn’t look around, and when I reached over the back of the sofa and found somebody had been ahead of me and the magazine was gone, he was still there. There were a couple of decks of cards on the table. I turned to get one of them, and as I did so the shadow on the floor disappeared; Michael Spur had gone as silently as he had come. I put the pack of cards in my pocket and got out of the room.

  On the bottom step I hesitated. I could still hear the rumbling sound of voices in the library, and for a moment I thought of looking in and telling Mr. Trent or whoever was there that Michael Spur was out in the garden. But I didn’t. I can’t help even
now, when it’s all over, wondering what difference it would have made to everybody—especially to Michael Spur—if I had.

  Back upstairs in my room I closed the door and locked it. Then I stood there, wondering if I really ought not to do something about Michael. I decided at last that it was absolutely none of my business, and I’d better go to bed. So I took the stiff red morocco desk pad off the prie-dieu, got into bed, with the help of a pillow on my lap made myself an adequate card table, and dealt out the set-up for a game of patience. Just how long I played I don’t know. I heard the muffled but distinct report of the gunshot just as I’d figured out that by Monte Carlo standards I’d lost about $105, had laid down the first seven cards for a new game, and was in the middle of the row of six.

  The report was followed by a moment’s dull reverberation, and then, instantly, all sounds stopped, even the frogs’ croaking, and there was a complete and profound silence.

  I sat there motionless, hardly breathing, expecting to hear people rushing around in the hall. There was no sound. I glanced at my watch. It was just two o’clock. I pushed my card table aside and slipped out of bed. It was incredible that no one else in the house should have heard what I had heard. I put on my slippers and dressing gown, unlocked my door and peered out into the hall. The corridor was dark; no one was in it. I listened. There was no sound except for the quick merry note of a clock somewhere striking two.

  Then abruptly, almost as if they were reassuring me, the frogs started their loud chorus again.

  My first impulse had been to wake someone and tell him I’d heard a shot; but standing there in the dark it flashed across my mind that I’d better be sure before I did anything.

  For some reason, I wasn’t frightened at all. The blind flash of terror I’d had when Michael’s shadow fell across my feet downstairs was gone. In fact, I distinctly remember having a sort of pious sense of being very firm and resolute; and that held up until I got to the balcony and looked down in the eerie grayish light from the rose window. The motionless figures on the landing seemed to have grown suddenly more shadowy and sinister. The long black shadows downstairs seemed to shield moving forms. I felt my heart shrinking, and I looked back to where the shaded light from my bedside threw a dim bar across the black channel of the hall.