The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  This time I did laugh. I couldn’t help it.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve arranged to have a car for me in fifteen minutes, Mr. Bassett,” I said; and he looked very blank and said, “Oh, dear!”

  “I’ve got three offers of transportation already,” Ï went on. “Unless you’re prepared with something pretty good I don’t think you can meet them.”

  “I . . . I really don’t know what you mean,” he said nervously. “I just . . . just came to tell you my sister has asked me to say she’s very sorry about . . . everything, and she hopes very much you can stay on with us. On account of my niece, Miss Cather. She’s very lonesome, and I’m afraid she’s going to be very unhappy.”

  “Oh,” I said. I looked at him intently, wondering if he was telling the truth about Mrs. Trent. If he was it made a lot of difference. That would mean that Dr. Sartoris had deliberately lied to get me away. But I didn’t believe it. Not that I put it past Dr. Sartoris. But he wouldn’t have done it that way if it had been his idea. He’d have done it the way Major Ellicott did, arranged to have me taken to Baltimore to the train, not dumped out at a trolley station by the road. However, there was something very honest and appealing in the rabbity little man in front of me.

  “Did you know that your sister ordered a car for me this morning, to take me away at quarter of ten?” I asked gently.

  He looked nervously down at his hands and put them behind him, and said “Oh, dear!” again. Then he looked at me and smiled like a child caught in a perfectly well-meant lie.

  “You see, Miss Cather,” he said timidly, “my sister sometimes forgets what she ought to do, but she doesn’t really mean any harm by it. I’ll just speak to her. I think she really wants you to stay. You will, won’t you? “

  “Yes, Mr. Bassett,” I said. “I think I will.”

  I had a strong suspicion, from my few minutes’ talk with Lieutenant Kelly, that in spite of Mr. Doyle I didn’t have much chance of getting away. It seemed to me that other people around were rather underestimating Lieutenant Kelly—and that turned out to be very much truer than I thought at the time.

  When Perry Bassett went out into the hall I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Kelly and Mr. Doyle going into Michael Spur’s room. As they closed the door Perry Bassett said “Tch tch,” and shook his head. He went on downstairs. I was still standing there, thinking about all of it, when Dr. Sartoris came from the other end of the hall. I thought he looked rather surprised to see me still about, but he merely nodded and went into Michael’s room,

  A few minutes later Aspasia came and told me Mrs. Trent would like to see me.

  “Her room’s this way, miss,” she said, and I followed her toward the end of the hall from which Dr. Sartoris had come, and into a wide transverse hall corresponding to the one in the other wing except that there was no balcony here. There was, however, a knight in armor on the landing of the wide staircase. He looked very cocky and had on a plumed helmet. The plume was quite new.

  A number of doors opened off the hall. I gathered that this wing contained the family apartments. Aspasia opened the last door at the end of the corridor nearest the bay, and I found myself looking into a large sunny room with pale coral walls and apple green woodwork and a deep mauve velvet carpet.

  Mrs. Trent, excited and obviously upset, was pacing the floor in the empty space in front of the door. Cheryl was sitting, her chin on her hand, gazing unhappily out the window.

  “Come in, Miss Mather.”

  Cheryl looked slowly up at her mother, then shrugged her shoulders as if she knew it was hopeless, and turned away.

  “I want you to tell me what they’re going to do,” Mrs. Trent demanded abruptly, and went on without waiting for me to answer. “I don’t understand Mr. Doyle. What is the matter with him? I’ve explained to him, and I’ve had Victor—Dr. Sartoris—explain to him. It seems to me he’s just making this as hard for me as he can. Why is he acting like this?”

  “I’m afraid he can’t help it, Mrs. Trent,” I said, sitting down in an elaborate yellow satin Empire chair with swans’ necks for arms. I glanced around the room. If you’d known it was going to be French you could have guessed all of it before you went in, the profusion of trivial knick-knacks and the piles of lace and satin cushions and spindly-legged dolls in the yellow satin chaise longue in front of the fireplace. On the low table by it was an enormous pink satin box of chocolates, open, with empty little brown paper cups scattered untidily about. A movie magazine was turned face down beside it. It struck me as being utterly heartless, in some way, but very like Mrs. Trent. She acted as if her husband’s death was some sort of a tiresome interlude, the only purpose of which was to annoy her.

  “He could certainly help it if he wanted to,” she snapped pettishly. “I’ll give him some money. He’ll do something about it.”

  “Oh, mother!” said Cheryl in a low voice. Even knowing Mrs. Trent I was aghast.

  “Well, I will. He’s a politician, isn’t he?”

  She stopped her pacing and held out her hands in a gesture of impotence.

  “But I can’t get any money!” she said. “That’s the whole trouble. Archer won’t give me any. I’ve asked him.”

  “You don’t need any money, mother,” Cheryl said patiently.

  Her mother picked up a paper from her desk and held it up. It was an announcement of the public auction of a property by court order to recover a mortgage, scheduled for Saturday at eleven o’clock at the courthouse steps in Annapolis.

  “I’m going to buy this,” Mrs. Trent said. “That’s what I need money for. And I’m going to have it.”

  Cheryl looked at the printed bill.

  “It’s the Foster property up the river,” Mrs. Trent went on. “It’s just what Victor needs for his sanatorium. Fifty acres, a dairy, water front, twenty rooms. They’re selling it day after tomorrow, and I’m going to buy it for him.”

  “Mother!” Cheryl said gently. “Didn’t Dad say you shouldn’t buy it—that we couldn’t afford it now?”

  Mrs. Trent’s mouth closed tightly. She said nothing, but her manner said plainly, “Your father is dead. It’s none of his business.”

  Cheryl bit her lip and turned toward the window. Mrs. Trent turned suddenly to me.

  “You’ll bid it in for me, Miss Mather. That’s an idea. Go as high as you have to. It’s what Victor needs. And it’s so close—only a few miles away.”

  The thought came to me suddenly that I was staring in astonishment at an insane woman.

  “I’ll get the money, you needn’t worry about that,” she said firmly.

  She pressed a bell in the wall and began moving about restlessly, absorbed in her new idea, until a colored maid came.

  “Tell Mr. Archer I want to see him at once, Lucy,” she ordered, and began her pacing again, utterly oblivious of me sitting there or of her daughter, wan and unhappy, staring out the window.

  Mr. Archer came. I was surprised at that; I thought he wouldn’t. And he looked at me in surprise; apparently he also thought I’d gone. He stood just inside the door, without saying a word, until his eyes fell on the bill of sale of the Foster property up the river. Then he gave a disgusted snort and glared at Mrs. Trent.

  “As long as I’m in charge of Duncan’s estate, Emily,” he said, “you’re not going to throw his money away on this sort of thing.”

  He tapped the bill sharply with a pudgy forefinger.

  “It’s my money!” Mrs. Trent retorted defiantly. “You can’t keep it away from me!”

  Mr. Archer glared at her a moment, then, like Cheryl, gave up.

  “I haven’t looked at Duncan’s will recently, Emily,” he said quietly.

  “He couldn’t cut me out of his will! I have a dower right, and that’s one-third of the estate at the very least!” Mr. Archer laughed a little.

  “That’s true, Emily. But I don’t know how much one-third of the estate is going to be. Duncan lost a great deal of money in nineteen-twenty-nine.”


  Mrs. Trent’s jaw dropped. She stared at him, breathing heavily.

  “What do you mean?” she said at last.

  “I mean that the estate has shrunk,” he said sharply. “Duncan’s death will make it shrink more. I don’t know that you can afford to keep Sartoris any longer. That’s what I mean.”

  He got up and went to the door, and turned with his hand on the knob. He looked steadily at Mrs. Trent with barely concealed contempt, his face purple with suppressed anger.

  “Doyle’s coming back after lunch,” he said curtly. “He’ll want to talk to you.”

  She gaped stupidly.

  “To me?”

  “To you. Someone murdered your husband, Emily.”

  Even Mrs. Trent winced at the devastating contempt in his voice.

  “It was Michael Spur!” she cried. “It wasn’t . . . murder!”

  “Do you know it was Michael Spur?” he said coldly.

  She stared speechless at him. Then she faltered, “Why, yes, Tom! Everybody does! Dr. Sartoris . . . yew know it!”

  “I don’t know it, Emily,” Mr, Archer said dryly. “What’s more, the police don’t seem to.”

  He opened the door and slammed it behind him. The long crystals on the candlesticks on the mantel tinkled nervously under the impact.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The three of us stared blankly at the white solid surface of the door. Mrs. Trent, oddly enough, recovered first. “Well!” she said. “Whatever do you suppose he means by that?”

  Cheryl had leaned forward tensely.

  “Louise!” she gasped, light dawning in her wide-open hyacinth eyes. “Does he mean that maybe Michael didn’t . . . do it? Didn’t kill my father?”

  “Nonsense!” Mrs. Trent snapped. “Of course he did it. If he didn’t do it, it means somebody else did; and that means . . . murder.”

  She hesitated, and then repeated the word sharply, very much as if she were shocked but determined not to be afraid.

  “Murder.”

  She looked at me.

  “Nobody would murder my husband,” she said, her voice high and edged with a kind of fear and suspense, rather as if she wanted me to deny it if I dared. “Would they—you.”

  It was obvious that she was speaking to me, and I don’t know but that I’d quite as soon be called “you” as Miss Mather. So I said, “No one that I know of, Mrs. Trent.”

  “You see, Cheryl. She says Michael did it.”

  “No, she didn’t, mother!” Cheryl said quickly.

  I was astonished at the change in her. When I came in she was like a drooping water lily lying on a bank in the sun. Now her golden head was high, her lips parted breathlessly, her eyes bright. I don’t mean that she was happy. She wasn’t; but she was alive again and eager.

  “Yes, she did!”

  Mrs. Trent turned back to me pettishly.

  “My brother says you’ve been talking to that policeman from Baltimore.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say, Louise?” Cheryl demanded quickly.

  There was no use in trying to evade the point, and anyway Lieutenant Kelly had told me to break the news. This seemed as good a time as any, with Mr. Archer having prepared the way.

  “I may as well tell you, Mrs. Trent,” I sad, “that Lieutenant Kelly feels there is a possibility that Mr. Trent’s death wasn’t accidental. That he actually was murdered.”

  “You mean that Michael . . . that he wasn’t just walking around in his unconscious libido when he did it?”

  “That’s evidently it,” I said.

  I glanced at Cheryl. She was standing up, slim and straight; her face was pale, but the brave light was still in her eyes. She was moving her head slowly back and forth. I could almost hear her murmuring “Í don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, in that case,” said Mrs. Trent, shrugging her shoulders and reaching for the box of chocolates, “they’d better take him out of here at once. The sooner he gets away the sooner we’ll have a little peace.”

  Cheryl moved quickly across the room.

  “Mother!” she cried passionately, stamping her foot on the floor. “How can you bear to talk like that? I won’t listen to it! You’ve no right to say such things!”

  A deep strangled sob choked her last words as she burst out of the room.

  Mrs. Trent looked at me with genuine dumfounded amazement on her flabby carefully made-up face.

  “Well, I declare,” she said. “What’s got into her?”

  She sat down and picked up her magazine.

  “You’d better go see,” she went on helplessly. “I’ve given up trying to understand that child,”

  I started toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “My brother says he thinks you ought to stay here a while. So it’ll be all right.”

  “Thanks very much,” I said, with what I regarded as devastating sarcasm.

  “That’s all right,” she said vapidly, turning a page. I heard her hand fishing absently among the crisp brown paper cups in her box of chocolates as I closed the door.

  “What a woman!” I thought.

  I found Cheryl’s room by the simple process of opening every door until I came to it. It was at the other end of the corridor. A narrow passage ran between it and the railing around the stair well. It was a charming room, finished inivory and blue, and a good decorator had managed to use Pompadour chintz at the mullioned windows without being ridiculous. Cheryl was standing at one of them, looking down into the gardens. She was quite calm, and when I came in she said, “I’m sorry I made a scene, Louise. But Mother can be so provoking,”

  It seemed to me to be putting it mildly.

  “You are going to stay, aren’t you?” she said, coming over and sitting down in one end of a deep chintz-covered sofa. She tossed me a pillow and a cigarette and I sat down at the other end.

  “Perry came and gave Mother the devil. He’s the only one on earth who can manage her, you know. And she said she’d ask you to stay. I don’t want you to go. I . . . I don’t feel quite so alone . . .”

  “Well,” I said briskly, “I’m staying. I have to, in the first place. Lieutenant Kelly said so. He’s not letting anybody leave right now. Afterwards we’ll see.”

  “Listen,” she said. “What Mr. Archer said. What do you think about it? “

  “I don’t know, Cheryl,” I returned. “I don’t think I’d count on anything, if I were you.”

  She laughed unhappily.

  “Don’t worry. I know that. But I don’t believe he did it. I just don’t, some way. I mean I don’t think he’d do it.” “Do you think anybody else would?”

  Something behind her eyes made them flatten curiously, and took all the velvety quality away, and left them cold and vindictive.

  “I’d better not say—had I?”

  Her voice was so hard and so mature that I had to think to make myself remember that she was only twenty. Then I remembered that Constance Kent had murdered her brother when she was sixteen, and that Lady Jane Grey had been named Queen of England, convicted of high treason and beheaded all during her seventeenth year. Age doesn’t make much difference in the way a woman acts. It’s the propelling force that counts.

  “I mean somebody did do it,” she said, still in that same hard little voice, “and I can think of several people who might have. Don’t you see, it’s got to be one of three things. Either it was Michael walking in his libido, as Mother calls it, just as Victor said he would. Or Michael did it in his right mind, for some reason he had that we don’t know. Or third, somebody else did it.”

  I agreed with that.

  “Well,” she said more calmly, “it might be the first. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it isn’t the second. I think it’s the third, Louise. It’s somebody that had a grudge against my father and knew Michael would get the blame for it.”

  She got up and walked across to her taffeta-skirted dressing table, leaned over and powdered her nose.


  “In fact,” she went on, “I’ll bet anything I’ve got on Agnes Hutton.”

  I was a little startled, because exactly the same idea was passing through my own mind when she said it.

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said. “Just because you don’t like the woman is no reason to think she’s a criminal.”

  She tossed her powder puff back into the enameled French make-up box and faced me, with admirable if slightly obstinate loyalty.

  “I’ll never believe iVIichael did it,” she repeated simply. Then suddenly her defiance faded out, and she was a wistful, rather pathetic little figure trying hard to keep her courage up.

  “Oh, Louise, please don’t think I’m dreadful . . . but I’m awfully fond of Michael. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve adored him. They used to have that silly picture of Sir Galahad at school—you know the one with the horse and the armor? I used to pretend it was Michael. One day the other girls went to Boston to the theater, and I stayed behind with one other ratty mutt from the third form who’d done something too. I was supposed to do French verbs, but I sat there pretending Michael galloped in a fine suit of armor with a new pink plume in his helmet. I had an idea the picture was winking at me, and that Michael thought it was pretty stuffy too.”

  She laughed.

  “I suppose that’s what Dr. Sartoris calls ‘escape,’” she said. “It sounds like frightful wash, but I guess it’s what comes of growing up always bumping into Mother’s iron men and never seeing any real ones. Anyway,” she continued decisively, “I don’t believe Michael murdered my father. He couldn’t have—do you see? “

  “I see perfectly,” I said, and I did. I saw that Cheryl had an image of Michael in her heart that probably Sir Galahad himself couldn’t have lived up to with all the new plumes in Christendom in his helmet.

  I said, “You’re going to marry Major Ellicott, aren’t you?”

  “Oh . . . yes. Of course. I’d almost forgotten that,” she said. “In June.”