Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  “It’s not . . .”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s her husband,” I said. And then, because the look of relief on his face was so complete, I added, pretty callously, I’m afraid, “He’s dead, Dan.”

  He looked at me, his eyes blank and perfectly uncomprehending, his big mouth opened stupidly.

  “Rick’s dead, Dan,” I repeated, more gently. “With an arrow in his throat. Your mother and I found him—she’s out there now, with Dr. Birdsong. You’d better get some clothes on and go out to her.”

  I glanced at the cut on his cheek. He’d plastered it with some adhesive tape. The skin around his eye was swollen a little and rather discolored, and his mouth was swollen a little too. It didn’t look serious—not in itself. I could easily see the cold look that Dr. Birdsong was going to give it.

  He stood there dumbly, staring at me. “Does . . . she know?” he got out at last.

  It never entered my mind to think who “she” was, knowing that so far as Dan was concerned the feminine creation existed solely in one exemplar. I shook my head, aware curiously that while I was saying I didn’t know, he was of course understanding that she didn’t. He stood there silently a moment, then turned and hurried back to his room.

  I looked down at the dog, trusting he’d remember in his report to say that Dan’s face was certainly bewildered to the point of stupefaction when the news was broken to him, and started out to the porch. The quicker the two girls out there were prepared for the descent on Romney of what sounded over the phone like a Keystone comedy sheriff, and for all I knew a khaki-colored car bearing brown-jacketed State Police, the better. That they might conceivably have a deeper concern with Rick’s death seemed irrelevant at the moment. And while normally I’m really not a completely callous person, Rick’s performance of the night before had raised the threshold of my mind gainst him so definitely that I couldn’t actually think of his death as anything but a fact. Not even a tragic fact . . . only an ugly one. And ugly, I thought, in its effect on Dan and Mara and Cheryl and Romney, more than its effect on himself.

  I went down the wide pine staircase, the dog at my side. I’d begun to think of him as definitely detailed to keep an eye on me, and I was surprised, therefore, when we got to the landing and I started to go through to the porticoed verandah overlooking the Potomac, to see him go to the screen door and push it with his immense wooly paw. I was more surprised to see that it didn’t open; someone had hooked it. I glanced out on the porch. The two girls were still sitting there, their heads close together. I wondered, idly at first and then with more interest, who had come that way, why had they moved so silently, why had they locked that door? If one of the servants had heard what I said, either to the police or to Dan, he would have showed more interest. They’d all been born on Romney or close by—in fact had practically raised the three young Winthrops.

  I started over to unfasten the door, but as I did the dog raised up on his hind legs, balancing with one paw against the frame, and calmly nosed the hook loose. He then pushed the door open and padded down the stone steps toward the range . . . the death range, as the papers were to be calling it in so terribly short a time.

  As the door slammed back, Yarborough, the gaunt white-wooled old colored man who had come with the house when Mr. Winthrop bought Romney, came out of the dining room, muttering darkly. He had on a fresh white linen coat and the thickest-lensed pair of gold rimmed spectacles I’ve ever seen. He padded to the door, saw me and said, “This yere do’ got to be kept shet. They’s flies, and they’s waspes, and Missy she make out it’s case we don’ keep the pantry do’ shet. It’s this yere hard-name ol’ do’ that makes th’ trouble. It’s got to be kept shet.”

  With that he locked it firmly and turned back to me. He hesitated. Then he took off his spectacles, and beamed suddenly, like an ancient ebony cherub.

  “ ’Deed, Mis’ Grace, Ah didn’t reco’nize you in that costume. La, chil’, you’s pretty as a picture, ’deed you is.”

  I thought it was odd he hadn’t recognized me. I looked at his glasses.

  “You must be having trouble with your eyes, Yarborough?”

  He gave his old head a mournful shake. “Mus’ is, Ah reckon Ah gettin’ ol’ Mis’ Grace. An’ eye strain is health strain, as the sayin’ is.”

  He put his spectacles back on. I didn’t know then they were an extra pair left behind by an exceedingly myopic member of the German Legation after a weekend at Romney and that Yarborough had just adopted them . . . or that when he had them on he was practically as blind as a bat. He only made his way around the house safely because he knew the shape of every room and stair and the position of each piece of furniture by heart. Nor did I know that that was why the Romney murderer was able to pass so close to the old man—blinded quite literally by his pride and his vanity—as almost to touch him. But no state policeman would ever believe that, and I suppose it is incredible unless one has lived with colored people, or children, or known—for instance—an otherwise quite intelligent man of fifty who thought the small patch of brown on the top of his head remotely resembled hair, as did the rector of the church we went to as children. And I’m not sure, now, that the strangest thing about the whole affair of Rick Winthrop—and what followed—wasn’t that when life and death hung so delicately in the balance at Romney, the two-fold vanity of an old darky should have weighed death’s side down: the personal pride that made him wear the gold-rimmed spectacles that almost blinded him, the pride in his career that made him labor stubbornly to keep that screen door locked to keep out flies and waspes. But that night when life and death swung in the balance, and death was the throw because a screen door was locked, was still mercifully in the future.

  I looked at his brown old eyes, lost fathoms deep in the concentric rings of those spectacles. He took them off again, and said gently, “Mis’ Grace, you lookin’ mighty worried. Is they sumthin’ wrong?”

  “It’s Mr. Rick, Yarborough.”

  “He did’n had no accident?” he asked quickly. His eyes bulged a little—almost hopefully, I realized with a definite shock.

  I nodded. “He’s dead.”

  His face faded slowly into the color of old putty. He put on his spectacles again, turned and went blindly off without a word; and I really had no doubt that the reason he staggered against the door was that he was overcome with emotion. I heard the pantry door swing shut, with the sort of suction sound it has, and I heard a door slam shut upstairs, and Dan Winthrop’s quick heavy tread on the narrow back stairway.

  I crossed through the hall, opened one side of the front screen, and stepped out on the wide sun-bathed verandah. The two girls sitting there stopped their low-voiced talk abruptly, and sat motionless for a moment. Then Cheryl glanced around, said “Oh!” and got up quickly. Mara looked back and got up too. It didn’t take much to see that it hadn’t been I they had expected, or to see that they were both living in a state of mute anxiety that was straining their nerves to the breaking point. Mara’s eyes were like two blurred dark wells, the yellow handkerchief in her hand was a tiny tight wad of linen that fell when she got up quickly and rolled like a ball down the stone steps and lay unnoticed in the grass. Cheryl Winthrop’s blue eyes had the look that I’ve seen in women’s faces standing in hospital corridors, waiting.

  I looked from one to the other of them, and for the first time, I think, the necessary corollary of murder struck me full in the face: if there is murder, there must be a murderer. I don’t mean that that’s something I hadn’t known before, but only that it came with startling newness as I looked at the two girls there, one the dead man’s sister, the other his wife . . . the sister who hated him, the wife whom his brother loved.

  All that went through my mind quite instantaneously, for Cheryl said almost as soon as she rose, “Is Irene waiting for us?”

  I shook my head. “There’s some pretty awful news for you, Cheryl,” I said, as gently as I could.

  Pale gold as she was, she grew paler,
until her blue eyes were dark lakes in the waxen pallor of her face. She stood quite motionless, and Mara’s slim little figure, still in tan jodhpurs and yellow shirt open at the throat, grew as still also as a candle flame when a window beside it is suddenly closed.

  “Is it . . . Rick?”

  Cheryl’s voice was almost soundless.

  I nodded.

  “He’s dead.”

  For a moment neither she nor Mara moved a muscle or quivered an eyelid. And yet something about them had changed so completely that it was hardly believable. It was almost like seeing them turn almost imperceptibly to marble. They didn’t look at each other; they simply stood, silent and immobile. For a moment I thought Cheryl was too dazed to speak . . . and then I knew, in some way, that she was not, that she had known, and Mara had known, and that this had been what they had sat there together on the porch waiting for.

  7

  Cheryl turned around suddenly and leaned her slim young body against the white fluted columns at her side, and bent her bright head with its gay little red ribbon bow. Mara’s dark eyes rested on her for an instant. Then she went to her, and touched her arm in some mute appeal I could not fathom. Cheryl’s brown hand closed on Mara’s browner one, as if she understood and assented. Mara turned back to me.

  “Where . . . where did they find him, Grace?”

  “Your mother and I found him on the archery range, behind the butt,” I said.

  Her eyes widened slowly. “Behind the . . . oh, how awful!”

  “I should think both of you might change into something else, and be ready when the police come,” I said, a little brusquely, I’m afraid, trying to cover up my own sharp bewilderment.

  Cheryl looked down at her smart short blue linen frock and brown bare legs as if she had suddenly seen them for the first time.

  “Yes . . . of course,” she whispered.

  Then I saw that Mara’s calm control had suddenly snapped. She was staring at me, her eyes wide with terror. “The police! Oh, Grace, they shan’t come, you mustn’t let them!”

  Cheryl caught her arm.

  “Oh, don’t, darling, don’t! You just make it so much harder! Come on, please, and change your things!”

  “But you don’t know what they’re like, Cheryl!”

  I heard her voice, almost hysterical, as Cheryl took her into the house. As I stood there, more bewildered than ever, not knowing now at all what to think, Irene’s voice came from the living room. She was obviously at the telephone, and trying, it was equally obvious, to sound as casual as she could.

  “Sid, this is Irene. Rick’s had an accident. Could you come over—just as quickly as you can?—But this is dreadfully important . . . can’t your meeting wait? I do want you here when the . . . the rest of them come.”

  Then there was a silence, and in a moment Irene came out through the open window and stood beside me. “Let’s go down here,” she said softly. We went down the three shallow bevelled stone steps and across the lawn. A peacock perched on the marble bench, his glorious tail spread to the morning sun, and a drab little peahen pecking aphids off the rose bushes, moved grudgingly out of our way. Irene drew me down beside her and glanced uneasily at the house.

  “My dear, you can’t ever tell, at a time like this, who’s listening,” she said, her grip on my arm tightening nervously. “I’m literally terrified. Do you know what that horrible man has done?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s had Mr. Keane put a barrier up around the range, and he won’t let anyone go up on the porch. He thinks . . . somebody shot Rick from there. Oh my dear Grace, it’s too, too horrible! Two policemen have come, and they’re ordering everybody about as if they owned the place.”

  She clasped and unclasped her hands convulsively.

  “If only Mr. Purcell would come, Grace! He’s the State’s Attorney, and an old friend . . . I know he’ll put a stop to this terrible mockery.”

  I looked at her, wondering in spite of myself about a lot of things. Her lips were pinched and her face drawn and gray. For the first time since I’d known her she looked her fifty-five years . . . and more, I thought, just then, in the bright glare of the morning sun. She looked away quickly as her eyes met mine. There was something in them that I couldn’t fathom.

  “Grace, you must help me,” she said suddenly. “We’ve got to stop this thing!”

  “I’m afraid it’s rather late, Irene,” I said gently. “And anyway, don’t you want them to . . . to find out what . . . happened?”

  Her eyes were wide with surprise and dismay, question and horror, and under them stark living fear.

  “And have it all in the papers? His quarrel with Sidney Tillyard, and . . .”

  “Did he and Major Tillyard quarrel?”

  I thought, just off-hand, that there were other more important quarrels that seemed infinitely more likely to make the public prints.

  “Oh, yes. Rick didn’t want me to marry Sidney—he threatened to kill him . . . and me too. Rick was insanely jealous. He always was, even when he was a baby. He was jealous of Dan—and even of his own father.”

  “Irene,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Do you mean you think Major Tillyard killed Rick?”

  She turned full on me. “Why, Grace—what a horrible thing to say!”

  “Then I’d be awfully careful about about saying anything that seems to imply it,” I said. “Especially if there are any policemen about.”

  She seemed shaken, and paler, all of a sudden.

  “Of course I didn’t mean that. It’s ridiculous and wrong of you to pretend I did. After all, he’s my own son.”

  I managed to follow that.

  “And you’re going to marry Major Tillyard . . . and Rick’s been going around, I suppose, shouting that he’s a fortune hunter.”

  “But he’s not, Grace.” She was very indignant. “I mean, he’s got much more money than I have. I’ve explained that to the children, thoroughly.”

  It seemed to me so strange, then, that Irene should be talking this way with her first-born son lying dead so close by . . . and not only dead, but—as eleven men in all probability now being gathered from the neighboring fields would be saying so soon—dead by the hand of a person or persons unknown. Looking at her, I wondered again . . . pretty sick, I’m afraid, at her shallow heartlessness. After all, whatever Rick Winthrop had done or not done, he was her child; it was she who had set his feet in the path they were to go.

  “All I mean is,” she said plaintively, “is that everybody will think of that the first thing as a motive, and no telling what might come of it, with a man in Sid’s position.”

  I looked at her with a new awareness.

  “You mean, Irene, that you’re really in love with Major Tillyard . . . you really very much want to marry him?”

  A little cloud settled on her smooth forehead.

  “It doesn’t seem quite right to be talking about my marriage—at this time, I mean. But I do want to marry him. I suppose I’m in love with him. I’m certainly very fond of him. He’s been asking me to marry him ever since his wife died, three years ago. It seems too bad that now . . .”

  She trailed vaguely off.

  “You don’t need money, do you, Irene?” I asked.

  “Oh, no.” She laughed lightly. “Although money’s the one thing nobody ever gets too much of. You know, I’ve almost doubled the estate Joe left me—I’ve been very lucky.”

  If I had known Irene better at that moment, I would have known a great deal more than I even faintly guessed about what had been going on at Romney . . . but know her as well as ever I might, I could never at that point have guessed why Rick Winthrop lay out there with an arrow in his throat.

  “But what I wanted to tell you, Grace, is this: you mustn’t let on if the police question you about any of the things I said last night.”

  “You mean what you said about almost hating Rick.”

  She looked at me in amazed horror.

  “Why Grace La
tham, are you mad? How can you sit there and say such a thing!” she cried. Her blue eyes were saucer-wide. “—Hate my own son?”

  Maybe she had forgotten words that no doubt she hadn’t seriously meant.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have been thinking about something else. Just what is it you don’t want me to let on about?”

  “I mean about dividing the estate, and all that. Because I really promised Rick I’d give him his share. I really did. So you see that couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it, could it, Grace?”

  I looked away. Her gentle insistence seemed rather odd. Had she promised him his money, I wondered, or was she only trying to make me think so . . . and if so, why, in heaven’s name?

  “There is one thing that disturbs me, though.” She’d changed again, suddenly, and was speaking almost as if she were thinking out loud. “I mean, if the police do come, and all that. It’s about Cheryl. I wouldn’t want it known . . . but she wasn’t in her room last night, Grace.—And we certainly ought not to let it get out that she’s an astonishingly good shot with a bow. She taught archery when she was a councillor at a summer camp in the Adirondacks.”

  She was bent forward, her weight on her two hands spread palm down on the marble bench, swinging her tiny handsomely shod green feet, crossed, back and forth over the daisies and buttercups in the grass. She looked as sweet and charming and lovely as the flowers themselves. And my blood froze in my veins.

  “Irene!” I gasped. “That’s the most horrible thing I ever heard anybody say!”

  She looked at me innocently. “My dear, I was just warning you. I wouldn’t think of mentioning it. Heaven knows I don’t want to cause the girl any trouble.”

  She shrugged airily. “It is unfortunate, of course, that there’s been all this talk of divorce.”

  I’d got past the point of doing anything except just wait, staring stupidly, for the next thing she’d say. I was well beyond surprise or shock any longer. I couldn’t, however, help noticing the ever so faintly calculating wrinkle that deepened at the corners of her eyes so guiltless of the crow’s feet that plague most women past thirty.