The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  It was Agnes Hutton. Her body was hanging from an old-fashioned lamp post behind a rustic bench that stood by a little stream running through the open space in the woods. Her head was tilted at an unbelievable angle above the knotted rope, and her body looked as if it were resting against a solid bed of the white dogwood. Her right hand, clutching desperately in the very moment of violent death, had caught a branch of magenta Judas Tree. The feathery blossoms bruised and blackened in her clenched stiffening hand. Her face was purple and distorted; she looked as though she had been frozen with horror.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Cheryl and I dashed out of that ghastly rendezvous at full gallop, our heads ducked to protect our faces from the sharp stinging slaps of the dogwood blossoms along the narrow path. My mind groped desperately to remember something in our talk the night before that might explain the terrible distorted figure back there. And nothing would come except the image of those few shocked seconds, the dogwood, the leaden swaying body, the rigid white hand clutching the red branch of death. I’d taken it all in, even the grass beneath, blue with late violets, her dark blue straw turban, her gloves lying in the middle of the rustic bridge across the brook, as if she had been snatched back to her death while she was fleeing. From something she had feared? I hadn’t thought that the night before. I hadn’t thought of fear as having anything to do with it—it seemed just a sort of nostalgia, the modern form of remorse. Getting out because it was the thing to do. Then I wondered how early she’d gone—and I thought of something else, and dug my heels in the mare’s side and literally flew, wanting, desperately, to keep my faith with Agnes Hutton. If I could get there before someone else got there and got the things she wanted me to take to New York for her!

  My horse and Cheryl’s behind me pounded down the drive, and Magothy, with a blue apron round his stomach, sweeping the paved entry to the big hall, stopped broom in hand and stared at us as if we were the hosts of the damned descending on him.

  “Get Mr. Perry, Magothy!” Cheryl gasped, but before the old Negro could move we were both off our horses and in the house. “You phone the police, Louise, and I’ll get Perry and Victor. Oh, why isn’t Lieutenant Kelly here!”

  I ran into the library and picked up the phone, and waited interminably for the languid “Number, please,” and then interminably until I heard Mr. Doyle’s voice. I told him, and told him also that Lieutenant Kelly wasn’t out yet, and hung up. In the hall people were coming downstairs, talking excitedly, rushing about, collecting in circles. I could hear Mrs. Trent say it was just like Agnes Hutton to do something of the sort when we already had trouble and to spare.

  I slipped to the other end of the library and up the stairs in the family wing. No one was in sight. I ran quickly to Agnes’ room and opened the door. Her bed was rumpled up but it hadn’t been seriously slept in, and her yellow silk nightdress was crumpled just enough to deceive a colored maid who didn’t care anyway. Otherwise the room looked the same as it had the night before.

  I went quickly to the dresser drawer, thinking it was lucky I had my riding gloves still on, and opened it. There was a little bundle of papers there, and several pads that looked like shorthand notebooks, all fastened together with a wide rubber band. I took them out and started back across the room to get the book. The window was open, and I heard Mr. Archer’s voice from outside: “Lock up her room until the police get here.”

  I made a dash for the door, and got into my room just as Mrs. Trent, coming upstairs, said, “Give me the key, Magothy, I’ll lock the door. You go see about breakfast. We can’t all go round on empty stomachs all day.”

  I stuffed Agnes’s bundle of papers between the mattress and the rope springs of Queen Elizabeth’s and my bed, and rushed downstairs again. Somehow I felt a lot safer. Everybody was gone, and I started out too, and stopped, thinking someone ought to be there at the house when Mr. Doyle came. I was standing there in the drive when Magothy came out and said my breakfast was on the table out on the dining room terrace if I’d like to have it. That’s where I was, eating popovers and honey and thinking as hard as I could, but without much point, when a Ford coupé rattled up and Lieutenant Kelly got out, resplendent in a very light gray suit, a crushed raspberry shirt and stiff collar, a green tie, and with a green silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. It seemed almost a shame to tell him there was another murder. It was obvious he didn’t know it—he looked too pleased with himself and his get-up and life generally.

  It’s curious now to remember that I ran out and told him what had happened. I could almost swear he was as stunned by the news as we had been by the fact. But his recovery was instantaneous. Sergeant Lynch was with him in the car, and he rapped out orders to him to stay at the house, lock Miss Hutton’s door, watch everything and move nothing.

  “Now, then, lady!” he said, and together we ran—at least he ran, as easily as if he’d been in training for a marathon, and I fell out at the poplar alley, not being used to that sort of thing. That’s why everything was over when I got there. Anyway, it’s not easy to run in riding boots.

  Major Ellicott had cut the rope and laid the body of Agnes Hutton on the grass. “Couldn’t stand seeing her hanging there like that,” he said later to Dr. O’Brien. Dr. Sartoris had pronounced her dead when he’d got there, and when Dr. O’Brien got there the two of them agreed that she had been dead not much longer than three hours. It was then a little after seven. What she had been doing there, a mile from the house, at four o’clock in the morning was a natural question. Her hat and gloves, and her bag with $55.00 in cash and a check book on a New York bank seemed conclusive evidence that she was leaving Ivy Hill on short notice.

  So much was evident and not much more. Our horses’ hoofs and Dick Ellicott’s and Dr. Sartoris’s footprints had trodden the violet-carpeted turf into an effective mess. Lieutenant Kelly ordered everybody back to the house. I glanced at them while they were leaving. Mr. Archer was still in his pajamas and dressing gown. Perry had flakes of dried lather around his ears and under his nose. One side of his face was shaved and the other was not, so that he looked ridiculously like one of those before and after using ads for razor blades.

  Michael Spur was partly dressed, and there was something new about him—he looked as if something had snapped and liberated him again, at least partly. I glanced at Cheryl, slim and straight in her white linen riding breeches and black boots and thin white turtle-neck sweater, her hair a living gold in the morning sun, her wide eyes the color of the purple iris just beginning to bloom along the sheltered sunny banks of the little brook. She was watching Michael, and when Major Ellicott put his arm around her shoulders to lead her away I thought she looked a little startled, as if she hadn’t expected it. I was rather startled myself when Dr. Sartoris said, “Let’s call a truce, Miss Cather. I want to talk to you.”

  I looked up at him. His face was a little pale under the blond stubble of his morning’s beard, and his eyes were so deadly serious that I felt a little shiver go down my spine.

  I turned to follow the rest. Just then Lieutenant Kelly barked at me, “I’ll want you a minute!” I said, “Later, Dr. Sartoris, ” and he bowed. Manners, I thought, are rather ridiculous when you’re not shaved and your pajamas have been slept in. And that struck me as rather odd.

  “Dr. Sartoris’s pajamas were perfectly fresh at two o’clock the other night,” Í said to Lieutenant Kelly.

  “The Hutton woman already told me that,” he snapped. After that I kept quiet.

  It seems that all he wanted me there for was to order me, very brusquely, not to talk to anybody until I’d talked to him. I have an unfortunate impulse to sudden anger, and I felt myself flaring up, and he felt it too. He shot out his hand and seized my wrist in a grip of steel.

  “Don’t be a fool, lady,” he said. “Look here.”

  He let go my wrist and took a telegram out of his pocket. He thrust it at me. I saw in a flash that it was the same as the one that had fallen from Dr. Sartoris’
s pocket on the train.

  MICHAEL SPUR RETURNING URGENT

  COME AT ONCE LOVE EMILY TRENT

  I looked blankly at him. All my wrath had vanished—as it always does—into thin air.

  “You knew about that?” he demanded.

  I nodded.

  He handed me another one. It was signed “Agnes Hutton” and it made a reservation on the Europa sailing at midnight Friday.

  “Know the point about them two telegrams?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s this—they were both sent by the same woman. Mrs. Trent never sent that. Agnes Hutton sent ’em both. She’s well known in town, they remembered her.”

  I stared at him. When he spoke next his voice was not so rough.

  “You get the idea? That’s why I’m telling you to be careful, lady. There’s a killer around here—there’s one of these good friends of yours wouldn’t stop a minute to treat you like that.”

  He waved his hand casually up at the lamp post.

  “So don’t you talk—see? You watch yourself. All right, now. You run along and finish your breakfast.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I won’t go into the details of the morning. Some of them were rather painful, especially the one dealing with the large raw spot on my heel where my riding boots, not used to two-mile hikes, had rubbed. While I was upstairs swabbing it with mercurochrome, Aspasia came in and told me that Lieutenant Kelly and Mr. Doyle and the other man—I supposed it was Sergeant Lynch—had got the key to Agnes Hutton’s room from Mrs. Trent and were in there. Also that they’d phoned for a lot of men from Baltimore and Heaven knows what more.

  It wasn’t until almost eleven that they called on me to help them take everybody’s statement. Before that I’d seen Michael and Mrs. Trent.

  Mrs. Trent, in fact, had sent Aspasia for me, and I hobbled down to her room in one shoe and one black satin mule. She opened the door for me and said, “Come in, Miss Mather, and sit down. I want you to do something for me. That’s a mighty cute dress you’ve got on. What an odd design!”

  The design, which I noticed for the first time, was a large splotch of mercurochrome on the right knee of a simple white crêpe dress.

  “I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Trent,” I said, “if I can.”

  She looked blank. “Oh, it isn’t at all hard,” she said.

  I sat down and waited.

  “They’re going to have the funeral today,” she went on. The complacent tone of her voice was almost horrible. I don’t really believe that she had actually realized what she was saying or how it sounded to other people.

  “You can go in town with us, and then step up to Mr. Murchison’s office and tell him I’ll pay anything that’s necessary to get the Foster place. Do you hear? Anything at all.”

  “Don’t you think it would be better if Major Ellicott or Mr. Archer looked after that for you, Mrs. Trent?”

  “Why, of all the impudence!” said Mrs. Trent. “I never in my life!”

  Then, realizing, I suppose, that I was neither her servant nor her daughter, she immediately made an about-face.

  “No, no,” she said, in a cajoling tone. “I’ll tell you. It’s this way. They don’t understand. You see, it’s to be a sanatorium for Dr. Sartoris, a gift from me and my late husband for the advancement of psychology. Victor doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

  I was a little surprised at that; I should have thought he would think it a fine idea.

  “Why not? “I said.

  “Well, he thinks it’s a little out of the way.”

  She shifted her bulk against the multicolored cushions on the yellow satin chaise longue.

  “He really wants to be in New York. I promised him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build himself a hospital, but of course if I can get the Foster place for about thirty or forty thousand, it’ll be that much to the good.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “And it’s near Ivy Hill.”

  She was not cajoling now, or simpering; it was just a good practical scheme for keeping him near her.

  “Of course Victor says that’s a very great inducement.”

  Of course he did. I could hear him. I writhed a little, uneasily.

  “But anyway, it’s best not to say anything about it to anybody—not even Victor—until it’s all ready, and I can have the deed all made over and put it on his breakfast tray some morning. Is that an idea?”

  “It certainly is,” I said.

  “Well, that’s all, then. You take care of it for me, and I’ll see you again before you go. Do you think I ought to arrange to give you power of attorney? “

  “No,” I said flatly.

  “Maybe it won’t be necessary.”

  She started humming something gay.

  I thought I’d make one last conscientious attempt to dissuade her before I did anything else about it. I said, “Have you thought, Mrs. Trent, that maybe Dr. Sartoris feels he’s too close to the Baltimore medical centers, and hence that this isn’t a good place for a sanatorium?”

  “Nonsense!” she said quite tartly. “Victor will do as I say, and don’t you worry about that”

  The only thing that did make me worry about it, a little, was Cheryl’s chance remark that her father had said they couldn’t afford it. It seemed a strange sort of business altogether. However, I supposed it was Mrs. Trent’s affair.

  As I was going back to my room Mr. Doyle came out of Agnes’s room, and I stopped him.

  “Do you know anything about the Foster property?” I asked.

  He was obviously thinking about other things, but he managed a smile.

  “Thinking of buying it?” he said. “Well don’t—because it’ll probably run up to thirty thousand, and it’ll cost you that much again to put it in shape. They call it Foster’s Folly, and they’re right.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “By the way,” he went on, “can you help us out again, in about an hour? “

  “I’ll be glad to.”

  He locked Agnes’s door and I went into my own room. At first I thought I’d got in the wrong place. Michael Spur was sitting there in front of the window, staring out.

  “Hullo,” I said. “Anything wrong? “

  “Haven’t you heard, for God’s sake?” he said.

  “Plenty,” I replied. “I thought there might be something else.”

  It was odd that I always found myself thinking of Michael as quite young—about Cheryl’s age—rather than almost as old as Dick Ellicott.

  “Now look here, Louise Cather,” he said slowly. “Do I look crazy to you?”

  “Not to me, Michael,” I said.

  “Don’t be funny. I mean seriously.”

  “I answered you seriously. I said you didn’t look crazy. But you act it sometimes—now, for instance. Why don’t you say what’s on your mind? “

  He leaned forward and looked silently at me for a moment. Then he said, “What shall I do, Louise?”

  “The first thing I’d do is get a good lawyer.”

  “Archer’s a good lawyer.”

  “You asked me, and I told you.”

  “You don’t think he is?”

  “I’d get a good lawyer who’s not connected with all this.” He looked at me silently again.

  “What else?” he said.

  “Well, I’d quit sticking in my room brooding about something you don’t know whether you did do or didn’t do, That’s second. Third, I’d go to Lieutenant Kelly and I’d tell him everything I knew from the beginning. That’s if you didn’t do it. If you did do it, you’d better keep away from him. Fourth . . . well, fourth, Michael, I think something’s got you down. I don’t know what it is, but you don’t seem to have any fight in you. You know? “

  He pushed his hair back slowly and rubbed the back of his head. He looked, I imagine, as the Puritan fathers did when they were sore beset and sore perplexed.

  “Look here,” he said abruptly. “I’m going to tell you s
omething, and you can tell me what to do.”

  “Shoot,” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t. He looked a little hurt. “Sorry, Michael,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “Sunday night, after I sent that wire, I went to my hotel and went to bed,” he said, as abruptly as before. “And I . . .”

  He hesitated, and then went on doggedly.

  “I came to, running down the hall like a fool. Nobody was around, and I got back to my room all right. It’s the first time that’s happened to me for eleven years. Do you see now why I’m not sure?”

  He stopped and looked at me uncertainly; and there was fear in his deep-set eyes.

  “Why did you come here, Michael?” I said quietly.

  “Because I was a fool,” he groaned. He got up and began to pace back and forth.

  “Sit down,” I said. “You make me dizzy.”

  He sat down again, ran his fingers through his hair and pressed the back of his neck as if there was some deep-seated pain there.

  “I came because I got a letter from Agnes Hutton,” he said at last very slowly.

  “Oh,” I said. I hadn’t intended prying into his private affairs.

  “I used to be engaged to Agnes. I don’t know how it happened. I was going to France—I guess that was it. Well, I got back. I’d forgot all about it, and then when I was cracked up and got back here, well, it just died out. After my father’s death I went out West. I heard from Agnes once in a while. She managed to keep track of me, and one day she showed up in Arizona.”