by Zenith Brown
“Dan,” he said, very quietly. “What kind of an arrow was it you shot from that bow?”
He pointed to the broken wood lying on the table where Mr. Purcell had put it.
Dan raised his head. His voice was rough with pain as he spoke.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what kind of an arrow was it? Was it a target arrow, or—”
“It was a target arrow, of course,” Dan said.
“You’re quite sure?”
“Of course.—So what?”
Dr. Birdsong crossed the room to the fireplace. He lifted a feathered shaft from behind the Lowestoft garniture on the mantel, and held it carefully between his thumb and forefinger.
“Only that this is probably it,” he said. “Mrs. Jellyby found this in her nasturtium bed, behind the box hedge, this morning. She says it was not there when she looked at the bed last night.”
I think every eye in the room was fixed on that slender wooden shaft with the green and white casting and white cock feather swinging delicately in that huge hand. I heard no motion, no breath even. Irene’s cheeks flushed, and Dan looked suddenly like a man hoping against hope for a last moment’s reprieve from the gallows.
“And in any case,” Dr. Birdsong said steadily, “if you shot a target arrow, you didn’t kill Rick.” His eyes rested for a moment quite impersonally, on Irene, and turned to Dan, by his side. “It wasn’t a target arrow that killed Rick. It was a broadhead—the kind that’s used for hunting game.”
He turned round then to the rest of us, his gaze directed very steadily at the State’s Attorney.
“A target arrow has a short steel pile. A broadhead has a sharp steel shaped like an Indian arrowhead. A target arrow could conceivably kill a man . . . but if a man wanted to kill with an arrow, he would use a broadhead. It was a broadhead arrow that was found in Rick’s throat.”
I saw the color seep slowly back into Cheryl’s waxen face, and ebb slowly from Mara’s until she was paler than death. I glanced at Irene. She was looking at Cheryl. The room was alive with embattled hatred.
10
If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget the rest of that day. I kept thinking Rick Winthrop’s epitaph should be “No One Wanted to Know Who Put Me Here” . . . and found myself wondering grotesquely what some passerby fifty years from now would think, coming upon it carved on a lichen-covered stone in the little Romney cemetery under the weeping willow beyond the pear orchard. Whether it actually was what, in part at least, it seemed to be—a conspiracy of silence—I wouldn’t know. I do know that if the villain had to be picked out by virtue of being the most stubborn objector, then Irene and Major Tillyard and Mr. Purcell the State’s Attorney would have been quietly taken out and hanged forthwith on the highest branch of Romney Oak.
And it wasn’t what they said, so much, because after all, all Major Tillyard said was that he thought Dr. Birdsong ought to be very sure indeed before he implied that whoever shot Rick had done it purposely. Irene said that Dr. Birdsong didn’t seem to understand that what he was saying meant murder, and that no one she could think of could possibly want to murder poor Rick. And Mr. Purcell said nothing at all, but only looked as if he was ready to burst with choler.
Or if, conversely, as is always done in fiction, the person who had so calmly upset the applecart turned out to be Rick’s murderer, then that, beyond a doubt, would have been the stocky tweed figure of Mrs. Jellyby, planted four-square and solid on the sofa beside Mara. As that preposterous idea came to me, I thought instantly that even Mrs. Jellyby wasn’t so anxious to hang the person who killed Rick as she was to take the brand of Cain off Dan’s forehead. But I couldn’t know about that, really. I only know that a little later, after she’d gone and taken with her, in some way, her kind of dependable open air sanity, a sort of hysterical fear seemed to settle on the room.
Dan had already gone—almost immediately, in fact, after Dr. Birdsong had stepped in—and when old Yarborough came in to tell Mr. Purcell and the sheriff that some men were waiting for them outside, I escaped with an almost unbearable sense of liberation, and went to find him. I saw him, eventually, from the top of the shallow brick steps that go down from the lawn to the river. He was sitting on a bench at the end of the narrow float, just looking out ahead of him. He reached over, as I sat down beside him, and gave my hand a hard squeeze without turning his head.
“What if I had killed him, Grace?” he said, after a long time. “God knows I could have, last night. In fact, I damn near did.”
He spread his two great brown hands out in front of him, looking at them as if he’d never properly seen them. The knuckles of his left hand were cracked, and had broken and bled again as he’d clenched his fist tight during that ordeal in the house. My heart sank a little as I saw that, and glanced at his forehead.
“Or what if it hadn’t been for Birdsong, and I’d gone on thinking I’d killed him.”
I lighted a cigarette.
“I trust you’re not planning to brood much about either possibility,” I said, more casually than I felt.
“No, but what if I had?” he said doggedly. “I’d always have thought I did it so he couldn’t have . . . her.”
A flush darkened his face.
“The old unconscious, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’d thought of that too.”
We sat there, watching the slender white sail of a catboat bobbing up and down in the yellow river.
“You know, it’s funny,” he said at last. “I never knew till last night that finding her was the only thing that’s really mattered to me for a long time. I mean, that’s why I’ve stuck in Paris grubbing away—so when I did find her I could take care of her. I guess I figured I couldn’t count on Mother.”
He ground his cigarette slowly to brown powder under his heel.
“It sounds crazy, but I’ve waked up at night in a cold sweat, thinking what if something happened to her, like an auto accident, or a plane crash. But the idea that when I did find her she’d be married to somebody else just never entered my head.”
He laughed, very mirthlessly. “I got to thinking of her like a kind of destiny. Not that I took the veil or anything, but other girls just didn’t mean anything.—And now, it’s all shot.”
“Well,” I said, “—now that you have found her . . . and Rick’s . . .”
I suppose it just goes to show that women are more callous—about some things—than men. Or maybe only more egocentric and practical. Dan frowned and got up.
“It isn’t the same,” he said briefly.
“Just more adult—and realistic,” I said.
“I didn’t mean that. Its just—”
At that moment that ridiculous dog with the pale uncanny eyes behind their fringe of dirty gray hair materialized on the top step between the urns of dubonnet petunias, stood there for a moment wagging his tail, and glanced back to tell his chief he’d found us.
Dr. Birdsong’s large figure came into sight. He looked rather grim, it seemed to me. In fact I saw now that I hadn’t realized before just how grimly hard-boiled, in a perfectly impersonal way, that face of his was, or how cold those light blue eyes of his were.
He came down the stairs to the float.
“Purcell and Dorsey have rounded up a coroner’s jury. The verdict’s death by shooting with a bow and arrow, accidentally or on purpose, by a person unknown.”
“I ought to have thanked you—” Dan started. Dr. Birdsong shook his head.
“For what?” he said curtly. There was a sort of arctic gleam in his eyes. “You’d better wait and see. At the moment Purcell’s hunting for you. I’d stick around up there if I were you.”
Dan nodded and strode up the steps. Dr. Birdsong watched his long rangy figure disappear in the box alley, and turned back to me. He looked down at me for a moment. I could almost see him tabulating me on a Bertillon chart, or something: hair light, eyes dark brown, height five feet seven, weigh
t one-thirty-five, age thirty-eight (I hope). Then he said, his voice as impersonal as his gaze, “Can you shoot a bow and arrow?”
“Not without taking all the skin off my arm, fingers and nose,” I replied. “And if I made a hit, it would be entirely by accident. I suppose, however, that’s just what qualifies me for the present round.”
He smiled—I was surprised to see that he could—and just sat there for a moment, his curiously sensitive fingers scratching absently at the shaggy head of the huge dog sitting between his knees.
“You know, I can’t make this damned business out,” he said, after a time. “Nobody could possibly have shot Rick, in the position he must have been in, and been sure of a hit. It isn’t possible. But nobody would shoot a hunting arrow at a target, at night, just for fun.”
I got the impression, somehow, that his remarks were not really addressed more to his dog than to me—as they’d have appeared to be—though I dare say the dog looked the more intelligent of us. He was certainly the happier, for Dr. Birdsong’s cornering me down there was not, I was fairly certain, as unpremeditated as it seemed on the surface.
“Another puzzling thing,” he went on, with a kind of grim abstraction, “is that when they moved Rick’s body, they found his cigarette lighter under him. It was open, and there’s a scorched spot on his shirt front. He apparently fell on it when it was still lighted.”
“So that the flame of the lighter might have made a target for . . . someone to aim at?”
He looked at me with an oddly interested flicker in his cold blue eyes.
“Did you . . . deduce that, or—”
“Or did I already know it?” I asked sweetly. “The answer to that, Dr. Birdsong, is no.”
He shrugged his heavy tweed shoulders. “You’ll have to forgive me, Mrs. Latham. I’m rather confused by the apparent lack of interest everybody has in Rick’s demise.”
“You wouldn’t be if—”
I stopped abruptly and bit my lips. I’d stepped full into his trap. And oddly enough, the only way I knew it—for his own expression hadn’t changed, or the tone of his voice—was that I was suddenly aware that the milk-blue eyes of his dog had opened and were fixed intelligently on me. I supposed he must have sensed a quickened interest through those fingers moving in his matted hair. I felt exactly as I imagine a laboratory rat must feel when he’s escaped the door in the maze that leads not to the carrot but to the charged plate.
Dr. Birdsong glanced at me then with the look of rather ironical amusement that I suppose the experimenter would give the rat.
“Look,” I said. “It’ll be a lot simpler if you’ll just ask me what you want to know. I don’t like devious people. And while it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me—frankly—that Rick’s dead, I do, I’m afraid, have a certain amount of just natural curiosity about who did it—if anybody. On the other hand, if it’s going to cause a lot of unhappiness to Dan, or Mara, I’m willing to let my curiosity go unsatisfied. I happen to like Dan, and I’m finding myself rather moved by Mara.”
He took a bright new corncob pipe out of his pocket and filled it slowly from an ancient rolled oil-skin pouch patched with adhesive tape.
“Mara could do with a friend,” he said.
When he didn’t go on for quite a while I said, “You’re sure Rick was killed—deliberately, I mean? It really couldn’t have been an accident?”
He shook his head.
“If it had been a target arrow, in the first place . . . or anybody else in the second. But Rick’s been asking for something like this, as far as I can make out, for just about twenty-eight years.”
I looked a little surprised, I suppose.
“No,” he said, as if I’d asked a question. “I’ve only known him five. But I’ve heard a lot since I’ve been around. He was a bully, in the first place. Take the case of the Keanes, for instance.”
“Isn’t it rather . . . dangerous, to be taking the Keanes?”
He looked at me.
“I mean, when your State’s Attorney starts gathering motive, and opportunity, and all the rest of it, aren’t the Keanes going to be right out in front?”
“I don’t think either of the Keanes goes in for the aristocratic sport of archery,” he said. “Now if it had been a pruning hook, or a tobacco knife . . .”
“I should think it’s not unlikely Alan knows how to shoot—with everybody else in the place going in for it.”
He nodded slowly. “He may. He’s an interesting boy, by the way. Sensitive and ambitious, and he’s worked like a dog.”
“You don’t think he’s as black as Irene paints him, then?—or what I’d rather know, really is . . . why do you dislike Irene?”
He gave me a quick glance, amused and a little surprised, I thought.
“I don’t dislike Irene.”
“You certainly don’t like her.”
“I don’t like bullies, male or female. Irene’s just as much of a bully as Rick was. More, actually—she’s smoother. She uses her charm and her money so they amount to actual brute force, in the end, to get her own way . . . and she glosses it over so well that it generally looks as if she’s doing it for somebody else’s good. Like Rick and Cheryl, for instance, or Mara and Alan Keane.”
“You don’t think it’s for their good?”
“Cheryl was the best thing that could have happened to Rick, or any other man,” Dr. Birdsong said shortly. “And if she really wanted to break up Mara and Alan Keane she could have sent Mara to New York, or Paris—anywhere to get her away from here, where she sees Alan every day and never sees anybody else. No, Mrs. Latham, the point about Irene is . . .”
He hesitated.
“. . . is something else again.”
He gave me a cheerfully irresponsible grin. The dog grinned too, and glanced up the terrace steps. A peacock had perched himself on one of the urns and was posing his magnificent iridescent fan to the midday sun.
Dr. Birdsong turned back to me. “That’s what Irene’s like. Only her vanity’s not as harmless.”
There was something in it, I supposed. Romney and the wealth and old glamour that it represented were to Irene what his glittering plumage was to the peacock, and she displayed them with a charming apparent naiveté quite as effective. I glanced back at the bird. His head went up with sudden interest as he strutted there, and he scrambled down from the urn and scuttled across the lawn to where the short square figure of Mrs. Jellyby, with her peaked straw sombrero and seed bag—like the Pied Piper—led a procession of strutting cocks and scurrying hens toward their feeding ground.
An affectionate light kindled for a moment in Dr. Birdsong’s strange face.
“There’s a woman,” he remarked. There was a sudden warmth in his voice. “It’s she that’s been the Winthrops’ mother—not Irene. Mother and father-confessor.”
It seemed to me I detected a note of bitterness in his voice too, that didn’t match that apparent detachment of his.
“You don’t, by any chance,” I inquired with what pretended to sound like casual indifference, “happen to be in love with Mrs. Winthrop yourself?”
A wintery gleam flickered in his eyes.
“Not consciously, Mrs. Latham,” he answered. “But I see what you mean. I suppose I do sound like it. And the fact that she’s fifteen years older than I am doesn’t prove it isn’t so.”
He shook his head.
“No, it’s just that in a community of this sort you tend to get involved in other people’s lives, and when you see the wanton damage that a person like Irene can do to half a dozen people, it gets under your skin. At least it does mine.”
He shrugged, trying, I thought, to keep his tone completely casual.
“I just happen to be one of those people who’re more moved by individual injustice than by collective injustice. The sight of four hundred and eighty-nine starved coolies doesn’t make me as sore—for example—as seeing Irene let Purcell make a decent chap like Dan go through the rest of his life th
inking he’d killed his own brother.”
It seemed to me this was being pretty rough on Irene. I was a little sore myself.
“You don’t really think Irene knew, do you?” I asked. “I mean, give the devil his due.”
“You’re like all the rest,” he said evenly. “Irene’s never held accountable for what she does. Everybody assumes she couldn’t possibly know what she’s doing. Look here: Irene knows more about archery and bows and arrows than anybody else at Romney. She knows a green and white crested broadhead from a green and yellow crested target arrow. They don’t look alike at all, if you know anything about nocking and fletching and woods. And Irene does.”
He knocked his pipe out on the edge of the bench.
“I’ve been around here several years, and I’ve seen a broad-head hunting arrow in just two places. One’s over the taproom mantel at the Fountain in Port Tobacco. The other’s down in the game room in the cellar here at Romney.”
He didn’t go on for a long time. There was something so definitely odd about the way he’d said that, or it seemed to me there was, that a terrible idea leaped for the first time, clear and sharp, into my mind, and I felt my heart freezing inside me. I knew at the same moment, automatically, that it was an idea that had been persistently trying to get into my mind, and that I’d refused to let in because it was too horrible a thing to dream, much less to say.
“Dr. Birdsong,” I managed to get out, “—you can’t think that Irene . . .”
I didn’t finish it; and I was shocked again to hear how hushed and how deadly in earnest my voice had become.
11
He nodded, to show he knew what I meant without my finishing that sentence.
“If I could only figure it out,” he said slowly. “How could anybody have shot him in the dark, even with his lighter burning? It couldn’t be done, not surely. It just couldn’t be done—and perhaps it wasn’t.”
I steadied my voice.
“I thought, if you were a really good shot,” I said, “you could hit pretty consistently in the fifties.”
He looked at me very oddly.
