Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  Mara’s answer was a strangled terrified sob. “She’s gone, out there!”

  For a moment I stood there, not knowing what to do. Then I saw, quite suddenly, a figure standing in the shadow of the landing just below me, watching this as I was watching it, and my blood froze with horror. It was Irene Winthrop . . . just standing there, not raising a hand or saying a word to save her youngest child in that moment of abject mortal terror. My hands on the dark wood rail were cold and shaking like a leaf. Below me then I saw Mara sink down on the sofa and sit perfectly rigid, staring white-faced at the door that had slammed on her brother’s back.

  Irene hadn’t moved. I stood there for a moment, frightened and angry—angrier, I think, than I ever remembered being in all my life. Yet I knew that if I made a scene it wouldn’t help—anybody: Mara, or Cheryl, or Dan. I could, however, keep something pretty terrible from happening to Cheryl. I thought of that riding crop and of Rick Winthrop’s face, convulsed with rage.

  I turned as silently as I could and crept along to the other wing, the dining room wing where Dan’s room had always been, and opened his door. In the dim light I could make out the great fourposter bed and its blue resist print curtains. I could see Dan’s bags still unpacked on the rack. I ran across to the bed and put my hand out to wake him, and touched the soft cool linen sheet still folded neatly back.

  My heart stopped dead at a sudden wild shriek outside, and beat again as I realized that it was only one of Irene’s fancy buzzards. My knees were shaking and my hands were icy, and I don’t know how long I stayed there, just standing by the bed, afraid to go back for fear of meeting Irene. I had a profound conviction in my heart that she would make Mara, and Cheryl, suffer for that night . . . so charmingly and delicately that no one but they would know what was happening.

  Just as I was gradually realizing that I had to go back, I couldn’t stay here, I heard slow cautious footsteps coming down the hall, something in them so secret and stealthy that without fully realizing what I was doing I slipped behind the tall painted screen in the corner. I heard the door close and the latch uncatch, and a match strike. Looking out between the sections of the screen I saw Dan Winthrop go very quietly to the window and pull down the blinds. Then he took off his shoes and went into the bathroom and turned on the light. I saw him look in the mirror. A long streak of blood trickled down from a cut above his right cheek bone. He mopped it off with a cleansing tissue and painted it with iodine, and examined another cut on the side of his mouth. Then he came back into the room, took the pajamas off his bed, went back into the bathroom and closed the door.

  I got back to my own room . . . with a feeling of considerable satisfaction at the idea that if Dan had been marked up a bit, Rick Winthrop was probably unrecognizable.

  It was half-past eight when I went downstairs the next morning. Breakfast at Romney is served English fashion, in the summer, on the terrace of the dining room hyphen, overlooking the lawns stretching down to the Potomac. As I came down the wide staircase it seemed incredible that it was less than eight hours since I had seen Mara cowering there in the corner, her brother’s upraised crop, her mother watching, detached and impassive, from the landing by the grandfather clock. The hall was quiet, a fresh breeze from the river came through the front door and out the garden door where Dan and I had come in. It was the cool airy silence of a summer morning in the country, before the day’s life begins and the sun becomes hot and drowsy. A humming bird hung motionless like a jewel in the white wisteria on the garden porch, a wasp nosed at the copper screening on the door.

  The old rubbed pine made the hall dim and shadowy inside. I pushed the screen open and stepped out onto the pillared portico, and stood looking down at the green lawns sloping to the glistening waters of the river, almost blue under the clear cobalt sky, and the white urns full of brilliant flowers, and the Italian marble balustrade and benches, drenched with sunshine, that marked off the formal gardens on each side of the long dark alleys of box; and I caught my breath at the loveliness of it. The night, and the storm, and that passionate scene at dinner, were a nightmare—the wind whipping the cedars and the box, the buzzards in the oak, were as unreal as remembered pain. My heart rose inside of me with a sensation of almost physical release . . . and dropped again as suddenly, out of all this loveliness and light and sunshine came that horrible scream again.

  I turned my head, hardly knowing what I must see. There parading majestically out of a tiny domed and pillared temple of love set in a crimson sea of roses, came a long troupe of peacocks, strutting the living beauty of their coverts, spread like great jeweled fans above their soft iridescent breasts. I watched them move sedately across the garden, their trains spread, glittering magnificently, a shimmering glory in the sun, to where an odd-looking woman in a wide straw sombrero was sprinkling corn on a marble rose-colored balustrade and calling them in a strange high-pitched voice.

  I turned quickly toward the terrace, a quite sheepish flush rising to my cheeks. The glamorous entourage parading through the sunlit flower-decked lawns of Romney made the fantasy of the night an even madder child of my disordered brain. I wondered with some amusement even if the rest of the night was also a horrible imagining: Cheryl’s flight, Mara cowering under the upraised crop, those tell-tale cuts on Dan’s face.

  I stepped out on the terrace, and stopped dead. Cheryl Winthrop was sitting at the table, in a blue backless tennis frock, her warm gold skin unbelievably lovely under her thick wheat-gold sleekly waving hair, her eyes as blue as hyacinths, her brown legs bare except for short white socks, her feet in stubby woven grass slippers. And beside her in a Lincoln green archery costume with a peacock feather in her hat, and looking very gay and lovely, was Irene.

  “Darling—good morning!” she cried. “I’m so glad somebody can get up in the morning! Do hurry and have a bite of food, and then come along to the range. Cheryl’s not going to shoot, so you really must.”

  I steadied myself against the walnut hunting table and poured myself a large cup of coffee from the fluted Sheffield urn. I must, I told myself, be quietly losing my mind. I was convinced of it a minute later when Irene said, “There comes Mara!” and in Mara came, dressed in tan mud-spattered jodhpurs, her jodhpur boots wet and muddy too, her yellow shirt open at the neck, her dark eyes shining, her pale cheeks flushed. She tossed her hat and crop and a yellow glove on one end of the table and sank down in her chair. Then she sprang up again.

  “Let me get something for you, Grace. Kidney stew—ham and eggs? Did the peacocks keep you awake all night? I think they’re ghastly, but you get used to it. They’re only vocal once a year—mating season.”

  I shall never know how I got through that breakfast, though it didn’t take long, Irene was waiting with such marked impatience for me to finish. She chattered gaily along like a bird among the apple blossoms while Mara and Cheryl ate in silence. When I got up she took my arm, and we went through to the hall and out on the back porch. I glanced up at the spot where she had stood silently looking on at that scene between Rick and Mara. It seemed utterly incredible.

  We went out onto the porch.

  “Dear, dear, look at that!” Irene cried suddenly. “One of my best bows!”

  Lying at the edge of the porch was the bow Dan had fallen over. It’s shaft was broken, the string tangled and snapped at the servicing.

  Irene picked it up. “You wouldn’t think these things cost money, the way they’re treated,” she said irritably. “Young people simply haven’t any sense about things.”

  She tossed it back on the stone flagging and held up her arms suddenly to the morning, her annoyance over the broken bow completely vanished. “My dear—isn’t it divine! Do come along!”

  We crossed the oyster-shell drive, toward the big target that my lights had picked out in the driving rain the night before. It was glistening in the sun now, and a peacock was perched on it, exhibiting the glory of his outspread train to a crowd of gray little peahens.

  Irene
waved her arms. “Isn’t he lovely!” she cried.

  The cock sailed slowly down, alarmed but dignified, as Irene hastened down the green stretch. The sun glistened on the raindrops caught in the tiny cups of the box leaves. I saw it glistening also on some little glass pebbles lying in the close cropped grass not far from the target. I bent down to look at them, they looked so like diamonds fallen there; and as I did so I saw Irene stop suddenly, ahead of me, and heard her give a strange strangled cry, so frightening that I stopped myself, bent halfway to the round. She ran quickly past the target then, toward the box hedge that formed a back drop for the range, stopped again and stood perfectly rigid, staring down at something on the ground.

  I straightened up and stood for an instant staring at this odd pantomime. Then, still rigidly poised there, one hand out in front of her as if to ward off some terrible sight, she moved her other hand in an almost mechanical but so imperative a summons that I ran toward her.

  Lying huddled at the base of the box hedge was Rick Winthrop, and a slender, feather-tipped shaft was buried in his throat. A stream of blood had trickled down, dyeing his white coat an ugly brown, and dried along the white folds of his collar.

  I stood there for an instant, as petrified with horror as Irene Winthrop. Then I felt my eyes moving back, almost automatically, to the golden ball of the target. The arrow that had been there last night, that Dan and I had seen in the beam from my headlights as we rounded the white oyster-shell drive, was gone.

  It seemed to me a thousand years that my eyes had to journey from the empty gold back to the inert figure huddled under the box, and at the feathered shaft stained with blood, to realize that it was an arrow, to understand that Rick Winthrop was dead. It seemed a long time too that we stood, his mother, all the jauntiness gone from her archer’s suit of Lincoln green, and I, staring down at him. I didn’t see as much as simply know that her hand was moving out to touch that arrow. As it closed on the green and yellow crest I felt something cold and wet and alive touch my own trembling fingers.

  I couldn’t move my hand, or could hardly look down, without forcing myself to do it. When I did, I was looking into a pair of pale, almost white eyes, very alive and strange, behind a fringe of long curly gray hair.

  “It’s Dr. Birdsong, Irene . . .” I managed to say.

  “Oh, my God, no! No!” she whispered frantically. Her sharp red nails were buried in my arm.

  6

  It sounds absurd, I suppose, to call Irene’s hand clutching at my arm, and her frantic broken whisper, a jarring note, because obviously the whole business was jarring in the extreme . . . our coming so abruptly on Rick Winthrop’s rigid ghastly body in its sodden white dinner coat, lying there in the sun-drenched grass, the arrow buried in his throat, the oozing dried blood on his jacket and collar . . . and then the cold wet muzzle of that extraordinary dog thrust so silently—and significantly, it seemed to me—into my hand.

  Probably if I’d known more about Dr. Birdsong then, and less—or perhaps more—about Irene Winthrop, I shouldn’t have been so disturbed as I was. Disturbed isn’t, of course, quite the word. And shocked is too strong, although it was literally a kind of shock; not the sort that would floor one, but the kind one gets touching a door knob after crossing a heavily carpeted room. It sank like a tiny sliver of ice into a remote unhappy corner of my mind, and crept out to plague me again and again.

  If I’d known more about Dr. Birdsong—if, for example, besides telling me he was the local man of mystery, Irene had told me that if you mentioned his name at a dinner in Washington somebody would always look up and say, “Oh, do you mean Tom Birdsong? Do you know him—really?” and then lapse into abrupt and quite inexplicable silence . . . just that might have made my part in it all quite different. Sometimes so many people were apt to lapse into silence that the hostess was grateful to some western senator’s wife who’d look up brightly and say, “Oh, it must be twenty minutes past the hour!” And I suppose sometimes it must have been. It could happen in London too, and in remote spots on the globe where many other names would pass quite unnoticed.

  But I didn’t know that then, nor did I know that Irene Winthrop carried beneath the sunny gay surface of her life, with its vanities and affectations, anything that fear could touch, and touching, wither like hoar frost a garden of autumn roses. I didn’t, for example, know that she disliked Dr. Birdsong, nor why. I only guessed, from what he’d said the night before, and the glance he gave her as he stopped beside us now, and looked down before he stooped quickly and touched the rigid heap that had been Rick Winthrop, that he hadn’t any too great admiration, or even tolerance, for her.

  She stood now, her face ashen, her lips quite blue where they showed under the bright outline of geranium-red, her thin nostrils pinched and quivering. I think if she hadn’t been steadied by her convulsive grip on my arm she would have swayed like a drunken person.

  Dr. Birdsong stood up as abruptly as he’d stooped, and turned to me. I had a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been where a person had been killed; but it was the first time anyone had looked at me with cold and inexorable eyes that had so definitely the effect of putting me instantly in my place. Before, I’d been, if not an official, at least a tacitly accepted member of the hounds. I was now painfully one of the hares, if persons suspected of such a thing as this could conceivably be called hares; and I was to learn before the week was out that nobody, no matter how innocent he is, can be normal under the cold and jaundiced eye of suspicion.

  And there was suspicion, definitely, in the remote gaze that Dr. Birdsong fixed on me.

  “Go and phone the sheriff,” he said curtly. “Tell him what’s happened, and tell him I said I’d wait here till he comes. His name’s Dorsey.”

  It may have been because I’m not used to being ordered about, or perhaps it was some of Irene’s emotion communicating itself to me. Anyway, I felt the color rise in my cheeks and the adrenalin content of my viscera increase perceptibly.

  His steely eyes sharpened, but he added instantly, though I’m afraid with a barely perceptible irony, “—if you don’t mind?”

  “I’ll be glad to,” I said shortly.

  “And also will you tell everybody in the house to stay there.—And Irene, will you move out of the way? It’s important to keep this place from being messed up.”

  I didn’t hear Irene Winthrop’s reply. I don’t imagine in fact that she made one. It didn’t occur to me, however, as I hurried down the hundred yard range to the house that this was probably part and parcel of what Dan had so aptly referred to as the hell’s broth for somebody to stew in, and whether it was Irene Winthrop who had stirred it up didn’t seem to matter very much. All of us, apparently, were going to stew, and stew properly, under the frosty objective eye of the gentle man in the rough baggy Harris tweeds and riding boots caked with dirt from the tobacco fields.

  And when I’d realized that, in a vague way, I hadn’t yet realized that it was also to be done under the personal supervision of that odd dog of his. It wasn’t until I’d stepped out of the glaring sun into the cool hall that I noticed he’d come along with me and that I’d rudely closed the screen door in his face. For a second I thought I’d do nothing about it. Then I saw those gray white-rimmed eyes looking at me through their chignon of dirty wool. It sounds silly, of course, but I opened the door with a sudden feeling that if I didn’t he might very well go back and tell his master, and probably put a very bad face on the entire incident. As it was, he grinned at me and gave his ridiculous tail a perfunctory wag, and waited for me to proceed.

  I hesitated. Through the great open door leading to the pillared verandah I could see two heads, one dark, one shining gold in the sun, close together, as Mara and Cheryl sat side by side on the top step, so deep in conversation that they must not have heard me come in. For a moment I thought I’d go immediately and tell them. Then I changed my mind, and to keep from having to use the living room
phone, where they’d hear me if the window was open, I went upstairs to the one on the landing.

  The house was perfectly silent with that drowsy summer silence that a bumble bee buzzing at the clusters of white wisteria outside the palladian window on the upper landing seemed only to intensify and make more profound. I found myself thinking, as I wound the little crank at the side of the phone and picked up the receiver, “But it’s a live silence, it’s got nothing to do with the silence that hangs over Rick out there.”

  A voice said, “Number, please,” and I said, “The sheriff’s office, please.” After a minute a tired voice at the other end said “Sam Dorsey speakin’,” and I said, “There’s been an accident at the Winthrops’, at Romney, Mr. Dorsey. Dr. Birdsong said to tell you he’d be here till you come.”

  I put down the phone. The dog was sitting there beside me, grinning. He looked at me, and then down the hall, and back at me . . . for all the world as if he were saying, “Don’t look now, but there’s somebody listening to us.” It may not have been what he meant at all, but I did look . . . and as I did I saw, in the old gilt mirror over a Pembroke table against the wall, a door closing softly, very quietly, and in its dark cloudy surface I saw the bright glint of auburn hair.

  I glanced back at the dog and nodded. He grinned, pricked up his ears and looked down the other wing, just as Dan Winthrop, barefooted, in his bathing suit, a towel around his neck, came whistling cheerfully from the opposite wing.

  “Did I hear you say there’d been an accident?” he asked.

  When I saw the alarmed look come into his eyes I knew I must be paler than I’d thought.