by Zenith Brown
“Anyway,” he said smoothly, “it’s no lower than the way you’re walking off with Miss Trent’s feeancy.”
I stared at him open-mouthed. “What do you mean?” I demanded hotly.
“Plain as the nose on your face,” he said, “except that you ain’t got much of a nose to speak of. But it’s plain, anyway, that the major ain’t looked at Miss Trent half a dozen times since you been around.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“No, I ain’t crazy. It’s you’re crazy not seeing he’s crazy about you. What do you suppose he comes to town with you for?”
“Don’t be absurd,” I replied hopelessly.
“I ain’t absurd,” he said soberly.
When Dick came out he remarked, as blandly as you please, “We was just saying you must be buying out the store.”
Dick Ellicott smiled at me.
“Dr. Sartoris asked me to get some sleeping powders for his patient,” he said.
To get to Ivy Hill from town we had to cross three drawbridges—one over College Creek, one over the Severn, one over a little inlet about a mile this side of the road that ran down to the gates. For some curious reason Lieutenant Kelly suddenly began to take a great interest in their operation. He stopped the car while he got out and passed the time of day with the keepers of the first two. Dick Ellicott and I stayed in the car and talked, and I found it a little uncomfortable, at first. If Lieutenant Kelly thought I was trying to make off with poor little Cheryl’s dashing major, what might the major himself think—and Cheryl too?
But we did get on very well together, and once he said, “I wish we didn’t have to go back, don’t you?” I said, very primly, that I thought Cheryl would miss him if we stayed away too long. Then he asked me how it had happened that I hadn’t married anybody. That’s always been something to explain. A lover lost in the war is a pretty good explanation, but the war was awfully long ago and I was only thirteen when it ended, So I said I didn’t know. He said he thought we’d hit it off awfully well, and I was about to say something acidly about his scheduled elopement with Cheryl, when Lieutenant Kelly came back. Fortunately the little bridge over the inlet hadn’t a keeper.
When we got back to Ivy Hill there was a man from Baltimore waiting. He had a brief case with him, and he and Lieutenant Kelly went into the library together. About two minutes later Lieutenant Kelly came out and asked me to get hold of Mrs. Trent and bring her to the library at once.
She was out in the lilac sheltered summer house, I eventually discovered, with Dr. Sartoris. I approached as noisily as I could, and when I got up to them she was standing looking down towards the water. Dr. Sartoris was doing what in a less poised and confident person would be called desperately pacing the floor.
“Lieutenant Kelly wants to see you right away, Mrs. Trent,” I said. She turned around. She had been crying, and the mascara on her eyelashes had run so that she looked exactly as if she’d got a couple of black eyes in a tavern brawl.
“You must come with me, Victor.”
“You’ll manage better alone, Emily.”
He spoke kindly but very firmly.
“But I’m doing it all for you!”
I don’t like to say she sniffled, but that’s just what she did
“I think you’d better take Kelly into your confidence, Emily,” he replied quietly. “You have very little to gain, and you have a great deal to lose.”
“But it’s only you-”
I interrupted just then, quickly.
“I’ll go with you, Mrs. Trent, when you see Lieutenant Kelly, if you want. But you must come along and wash your face, and see what he wants.”
I took her by the arm, and by dint of talking continuously I got her to her room and got the mascara mopped up, and took her downstairs, protesting but subdued.
I must say I wasn’t prepared for what we found on the library table, or the look on Lieutenant Kelly’s face as he stood behind the table. One hand jingled the change in his trousers pocket, the other pointed sternly to the photographs in front of him. They were a dozen or so greatly enlarged fingerprints. They were all the same, and even an amateur could tell they were identical with the smaller set on another sheet, labeled “Mrs. Emily Bassett Trent.”
She looked at them. I felt her stagger, saw her clutch at her throat and go the color of painted chalk. I steadied her with one arm round her waist, or half-way round anyway.
“What about it, now, Mrs. Trent,” Lieutenant Kelly said furiously. “These are your fingerprints.”
If a King Cobra could talk I imagine he’d have just that sort of flat cold deadly voice. I was genuinely frightened.
“These are your fingerprints, Mrs. Trent—and they were all over Agnes Hutton’s room.”
“I know it,” she gasped helplessly. “I was there.”
“Sit down,” he said in the same tone. “What were you looking for? “
“Oh my God!” said Mrs. Trent. “Where’s Mr. Doyle?”
“For God’s sake!” said Lieutenant Kelly. “He ain’t here—forget about him, and tell me what you were up to!”
His voice rose to a harsh shout, and I thought Mrs. Trent was going to faint.
“Mr. Doyle ain’t going to get you off,” he shouted; “what were you after?”
She clung to my arm and sobbed convulsively.
“Oh, God forgive me,” she cried, “I was hunting letters.”
Lieutenant Kelly’s eyes flashed.
“What kind of letters?” he barked.
“I thought Victor—Dr. Sartoris—was writing her letters, and I wanted to find them. I hated her, and I wanted to know, to be sure. I saw him coming out of her room. Oh, I can’t stand it!”
“When was that?”
“The night before—late. Oh, I was so unhappy.”
She choked miserably.
“Then in the morning they told me she was dead, and I said I’d lock the room. That’s when I went in.”
“What’d you find?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Lieutenant Kelly moved around the table with incredible speed and thrust a stubby finger accusingly in her face.
“Mrs. Trent!” he said slowly, “we know you took a book off her table. Where is it? And what else did you take?”
She gave a couple of convulsive sobs. And then a strange thing happened. Just as one can see air coming into an inflating balloon, I felt something—strength, or desperate courage, decision, perhaps just craft—coming into Mrs.Trent. Her next sob rang very false, and when she looked up at Lieutenant Kelly her face was blank and vapid.
“I didn’t take anything,” she said. “I wanted to find Victor’s letters because I knew she knew him. She told me about him first two years ago. I thought he was in love with her. But I was wrong. He didn’t write her any letters, and he assures me he never was in love with her at all. She just pestered him the way women all do.”
I understood exactly why Lieutenant Kelly was so pleased that Mr. Doyle was out of the way—he never would have allowed the ordeal that Mrs. Trent was put through during the next fifteen minutes. And Mrs. Trent was as adamant, so to speak, as an indestructible jellyfish; and when she was finally allowed to go and the door had closed behind her, the man with the funny little toupee who had brought the brief case down, and was sitting with it across his knees, expressed it very adequately, I suppose: “You didn’t get to first base, did you, Joe?”
Lieutenant Kelly mopped his brow with a large purple silk handkerchief.
“Let’s see what else you got,” he said placidly.
I didn’t know until later that Lieutenant Kelly was slowly getting the tangled skein of the Ivy Hill murders untangled and laid neatly across the back of a chair. For instance, though I might have guessed it, I didn’t know that he’d sent Agnes’s shorthand notebooks, that I’d stowed away under my mattress, to Baltimore to be completely transcribed. I didn’t know that in four days he’d traced the lives of Michael Spur, Agnes Hutton, Vi
ctor Paul Sartoris and Louise Cather so that he knew as much about each of them as they knew themselves. And I was as much surprised as Cheryl was when she and I were sitting in my room after lunch, talking, and he stuck his head in the door.
“Lady,” he said with a scowl, “what do you call that red stuff the Hutton woman had in her hand?”
For a moment I couldn’t think what he meant, and then the picture of Agnes Hutton clutching the bruised magenta branch came with nauseating clearness into my mind. I said, “Some places they call it redbud. Here they call it Judas Tree.”
“Yeh,” he said. “Thanks.”
He closed the door, and Cheryl shook her head.
“I wish they’d get somebody else down here,” she said.
We’d been talking, Cheryl and I, about Major Ellicott.
“Sometimes I don’t think I’m the person for him to marry, Louise,” she said. “He’s so much cleverer than I am. I used to think, sometimes, that even Agnes was a better match for him than I was, as far as brains went, because I’m an awful dud, you know. But a person like you could do a lot for him. And he ought to live in town, not in the country like this. That’s what Perry thinks too. You know, Perry’s funny—the other day he said, ‘Now your father’s dead, you don’t have to marry Ellicott.’ “
“Your father wanted you to?”
“Yes. I don’t know just why.”
The most ridiculous thing flashed through my mind then. If Cheryl’s father had insisted on her marrying Dick Ellicott, and Perry Bassett didn’t want her to, perhaps Perry had killed him so she wouldn’t have to. It seemed pretty farfetched, and also, I reflected, it certainly didn’t explain Agnes Hutton’s death, even if she was hanged with Perry’s rope. So I dismissed that idea and went on listening to Cheryl.
“Mother’s never liked Dick very well,” she was saying, “and I don’t think she was very keen about me marrying him before Dad died. But now she’s all for it. The sooner the quicker. I don’t know why. I suppose she’d like one of Dad’s wishes carried out.”
“You know, Cheryl,” I said, “I inadvertently heard your talk with Major Ellicott yesterday. I was in the summer house.”
“Oh—really?”
I nodded.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided to wait.”
I smiled at that.
“Maybe I’m just stubborn, but I thought I’d tell Mother about it. After all-”
She shrugged her shoulders indifferently and unhappily.
“There’s no use being silly about such things. Well, she was all for it. It’s the first decent word I ever heard her say to Dick. Wished him all sorts of nice things.”
She laughed mirthlessly.
“I just had the feeling that she was saying the ‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry’ sort of thing, and I balked. I told Perry this morning. He didn’t like it a bit. He’s funny. You know, Louise, I think he’d do anything for me. He said he’d even go to town to live if we could have some window boxes.”
“He’s sweet,” I said. “And speaking of sweet people, how’s Michael Spur? “
She turned two wide serious young eyes towards me.
“Oh, Louise,” she said, “I’m so afraid! Michael told me while you were in town that he knew my father and Mr. Archer had absolutely ruined him, but he didn’t care, because he sort of thought of it as part payment for his killing his father. It was his father’s money. And I talked to Victor then, and he said Michael couldn’t really forgive them, he must have some deep resentment. He might not be conscious of it, you see, but it could come out in one of his spells and he’d kill my father.”
“That’s just the same old idea, Cheryl, isn’t it?” I said. “And what’s more, it doesn’t explain Agnes Hutton.”
She held out both her hands in a helpless gesture of despair.
“I know, but it might. Agnes told Michael about the money business last year, and she’s known about it for years, you see, that they were . . . just selling him out. It was a sort of revenge she was getting, and it wasn’t any revenge unless he knew about it. She knew so much, you see.”
“Doesn’t sound sensible to me,” I said promptly.
“Oh, I hope not—I do so hope not. I couldn’t bear it, Louise, for him to have hurt her . . . that way. It’s so beastly cruel. She looked so awful. I’ll never forget it.”
She closed her eyes, and one large tear squeezed under her long lashes and slipped down her pale cheek.
“Michael was really awfully in love with her once,” she said. “I remember every time I wanted to see her she was off with him somewhere, and he always told her all our secrets. I hated him for it. I thought they were so important—about where the cardinals’ nest was and where I’d seen the first violets, and that sort of thing.”
She laughed unhappily.
“It doesn’t matter, though.”
“I suppose not,” I said very insincerely.
And actually it turned out to matter infinitely more before another day was over than it ever had when Cheryl was six and a cardinal’s nest and the first violets were all that was at stake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I went down to find Lieutenant Kelly and met Mrs. Trent standing in the hall. She seemed to have recovered entirely from her temporary lapse. She was looking at herself in a rather fine girondole that her independence of spirit had hung over a seventeenth century lowboy near the door. Her first remark was characteristic, I thought; she said, “Dear me, I’m a perfect sight, Miss Mather. Will you come upstairs while I write a note to Victor and take it to him for me?”
I started to suggest that she send a servant, but I thought better of it and went along with her.
We went through the downstairs hall to the other stairs leading up to the family wing. Mrs. Trent pointed to a lovely tapestry hanging over a carved chest and said, “That’s a very fine Goblin, they tell me.” She seemed to be speaking of the things we passed as if she were seeing with a new eye. In fact, she said, “You know, I never really felt like I owned this house until now with my husband and that Hutton woman always around.”
I think I could almost have felt sorry for her—a little—if she hadn’t immediately added, “Oh, I tell you, Miss Mather, my life hasn’t always been a bed of roses.”
Perry was just coming into the back hall as we got there. He’d been working in the garden. Mrs. Trent stopped short, hands on hips in a gesture suggesting long generations of washerwomen, and looked at him.
“Now I ask you,” she said. “Doesn’t he look like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, all covered with dirt?”
In fact he did look decidedly sheepish, and very much ill at ease. She waived it all aside.
“Well, that’s what he’s like. He’s aesthenic. Victor says they’re all queer. You’d better change, Perry.”
“Yes, Emily,” he murmured, and stepped aside while she swept up the stairs with me in her trail.
At the landing she paused, and looked fixedly at the knight in armor.
“That piece,” she remarked, “is worth more than the whole place put together. The plume was in the hat I wore when I met Queen Marie in New York.”
Then she laughed, and I realized that it was the first time I’d heard her laugh, except when she was being arch and affected. It gave me a strange sensation up and down my spine for a second. But she wasn’t paying any attention to me. She went on pointing out the other objects of interest in the household fittings, almost as if she were trying to sell me the place. I glanced furtively back at Perry Bassett. He was trying to hide behind an armoire, and I looked further down and saw Dr. Sartoris coming in, just as Emily Trent turned up the stairs from the landing. I was glad we’d missed him; I’d rather deliver a note than witness another scene between them.
I waited for Mrs. Trent to write at least six notes and tear each one up before she got one that suited her. She put it in an envelope and very carefully sealed it. Then she wrote “Kindness of Miss L. Mather” on the outside.
>
“Will you give him that, like a dear child?” she said, and smiled at me with eyes that were a thousand miles away.
Again I experienced that queer feeling up and down my spine.
She sat down at her dressing table and began to dab at her mouth with a lipstick. I got out as quickly as I could.
Outside the room I stood with her letter in my hand. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Emily Trent was entirely mad; and suddenly as I stood there, wondering what to do, my heart began to beat violently with just sheer fright. I was all at once just horribly afraid of the woman.
Could there be any possible doubt, I thought, not only that Emily Trent was insane, but that she was also a murderess? Like a flash there came into my mind her words in the summer house this very morning: “I’ve done it all for you”; and I remembered Dr. Sartoris’s face. I thought back over the nightmare of the last four days. If any human being ever thought she had a motive for murder, Emily Trent thought so. She was afraid of both her husband and Agnes Hutton; she hated Agnes, probably her husband as well. There was no doubt also that she had some sort of mad obsession about Dr. Sartoris—call it love if you wanted to. I suppose it was that. Or passion flaming up in a thwarted and unhappy woman who was getting old. Those two people stood in her way—kept her from what I suppose she thought of as happiness.
Her mud pack the night of Duncan Trent’s murder could have been a fake. The story of Michael Spur’s psychosis was largely her story. She kept it alive. She could have used it as a mask for her own murderous designs. Supposing Agnes had got Sartoris down to Ivy Hill, and supposing Agnes had sent the wire for Emily Trent when they learned Michael was coming. Mrs. Trent. I knew well had her full share of a sort of low animal cunning—she could have arranged it. She could have shot Duncan Trent. She was the last person downstairs. Perhaps her brother knew it, and that was why he had hid the gun in the flower bed. If I only knew why she took the book!
Agnes’s death, coming after she’d seen Dr. Sartoris coming out of Agnes’s room, seemed too awfully clear. Suppose the woman had got rid of her husband, throwing the suspicion on Michael Spur, only to find that her doctor was deceiving her with her husband’s secretary, whom she hated. She couldn’t, I suppose, know, and I should perhaps have told her, that Dr. Sartoris had come from Michael Spur’s room, and met Agnes and me at Agnes’s door; that he hadn’t really been in her room at all.
