Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  And Irene was dead, and Cheryl was gone.

  Natalie came over to the bed, glanced down at Mara with a very perfunctory “Poor kid,” moved over to one of the dormer windows and stood looking down at the gardens. After a moment she said, without turning, one hand holding to the glazed chintz curtain, the other resting on her elegantly minute waist: “Would you mind telling me what you told Fellowes Dunthorne about my father’s debts, and his insurance?”

  “Oh, dear!” I thought. “Does one have to go into that.”

  Aloud I said, “Not at all. I told him what Irene told me—that you used your father’s insurance to pay back unsecured loans he’d had from friends, when you weren’t legally obliged to.”

  She turned then, the most extraordinary smile in her really lovely hazel-green eyes.

  “Did Irene tell you that?”

  She laughed, a curious laugh compounded of more sardonic disillusionment than it had occurred to me could be got into one short sound.

  I nodded. I was also a little annoyed.

  “She didn’t, I suppose, tell you it was Mr. Winthrop loaned Dad the money—and that neither of them ever thought of it as a loan, but just an additional part of my mother’s share of their parents’ estate . . . which she hadn’t taken originally because my father was so much better off than Mr. Winthrop and didn’t need it?”

  I shook my head. She certainly had not.

  “Or that it was Irene herself who demanded the money as soon as she came into the estate? And that I was only eighteen, and pretty broken up by Dad’s . . . suicide, and didn’t realize he’d only done it so I could have his insurance—and didn’t know I wasn’t required to pay it, legally? And didn’t know it for several years?”

  “Oh dear!” I said.

  She came over from the window.

  “Not that it mattters now. In fact it taught me more about . . . things than I’d probably ever have had sense enough to learn by myself.”

  She moved gracefully across the room to the door, and turned back to me. She laughed again, this time as if she was genuinely amused.

  “But thanks just the same!”

  “You’re very welcome,” I said. “Delighted to oblige at any time.”

  She put her hand on the old black iron latch and pressed it down. She didn’t pull the door open, but just stood there for a moment. And I was surprised to hear myself remarking in the most astonishingly casual fashion, “I take it you’re planning to marry Mr. Dunthorne?”

  She nodded. Then she nodded again, not emphatically exactly, but certainly not dubiously at all.

  “Why?” I asked. “Because he’s filthy with money?”

  “Not entirely.”

  She smiled ironically.

  “I suppose that surprises you?”

  “It does, rather.”

  “I wonder,” she said, looking at me appraisingly. “You see, Mrs. Latham, the only trouble with Fellowes Dunthorne is friends like Rick, for one thing, and for another, he actually believes men wear what he sees in magazines about what the well-dressed man will wear. Some day he’ll learn they don’t, not unless they want to be funny.”

  She went over to the mantel, picked up a cigarette and lighted it.

  “The point about his money is first, he made it himself, and second, he’s hung on to it. Furthermore, he knows how much he can drink, and he doesn’t drink any more—and he’s arrived at the age of forty-one without falling into one of the many matrimonial venus fly traps set for him—including my own.”

  “Is it just another of Irene’s stories,” I asked, “or could you have married Rick?”

  “I didn’t know she knew it,” Natalie said calmly. “As a matter of fact, Rick was too like his mother to fool me. I don’t want to be on the toboggan to the divorce court the minute I marry a man. Furthermore Rick drank like a fish, he’d bet on a dry leaf blowing across the street, and—if you’ll let me be contemporary—he was a sucker for every blue-eyed glamour gal on Broadway.”

  She shook her head.

  “Call me a materialist—or worse if you like—but Fellowes Dunthorne can learn everything Rick knew . . . and I can help him. Rick couldn’t learn the things he knows, because he wasn’t born with them. Fellowes thinks all this is what counts.”

  She waved her hand over all Romney.

  “Rick thought it was eyewash. I don’t think it’s all that counts, but it’s important, because it’s decent, and . . . well, laugh if you want to, but it’s—American. And I want my children to think so too. It doesn’t have to make people like Irene and Rick. They can be like Dan and Cheryl.”

  She nodded down at the bed. “And that brat—when she finds herself.”

  I looked at her grinding her cigarette out on the fireplace with the tip of her gold evening sandal.

  “Sermons in stones,” she said with a quick smile—to my surprise. “And good in everything—a little anyway.”

  She opened the door, stopped abruptly and shot an alarmed backward glance at me. I’d risen, my heart standing perfectly still before it gave a cold nauseating lurch. I ran across the room, pushed her out into the hall and pulled the door firmly shut behind me. Then I rushed to the stair rail. Below me, at the bottom of the long well, focused in a square of bright light like a theater stage, was a crowd of people . . . Dr. Birdsong and Mrs. Jellyby, Mr. Keane, Major Tillyard and Dan. And suddenly, excited, strident and noisy, Mr. Purcell bolted in among them, almost dragging Alan Keane after him. The boy’s white shirt was ripped half off his back, his face was ashen, his hair damp and disheveled.

  Up the dark stair well came the State’s Attorney’s voice, harsh and contemptuous and triumphant:

  “Here’s your murderer. And what’s more, Tillyard—and you, Birdsong—I’ve got the hot bonds you all insisted he never stole . . . right in the map pocket of that heap of junk he drives around in. All stowed away ready to scuttle!”

  My fingers gripping the pine satin-smooth stair rail were like icicles. I turned quickly. Behind me, so quietly that I felt rather than heard it, the door had opened. Mara Keane stood in it, as silent and rigid as a pillar of stone.

  24

  I’m not sure, looking back on it, how we got through the rest of that night without at least five additional unpremeditated homicides—or at least homicide committed wilfully and without premeditation on one man by at least five others. It was extraordinary how Mr. Purcell managed to antagonize practically everybody at Romney to a point of frenzy. It amounted almost to a genius, some way, or so I thought until I realized—and I don’t think there’s any doubt of it now, though none of us so much as thought of it at the moment—that what he said and did, and his whole manner and conduct, was simply because he was more genuinely upset by Irene’s death than anyone else on the place, not even excepting Major Tillyard. It wasn’t only because Irene—as several people suggested—had loaned him considerable amounts of money from time to time. The local gossip that had had him in love with her for years undoubtedly had the sharp kernel of truth in it that gossip, no matter how little one likes to admit it, usually has. It could hardly have been anything but the fact that he had an almost idolatrous devotion to Romney’s lovely mistress that made him lose all his politician’s suavity and lash out bitterly at the people he thought were trying to protect her murderer.

  And the first to be lashed at was poor Mr. Sam Dorsey the sheriff. Mr. Dorsey, it appeared, having been born and brought up in Port Tobacco, had a deep-seated sectional conviction that crime, whether chicken-stealing or homicide, unless the latter was plainly mandatory—as for instance when a boundary or a woman’s virtue was involved—was naturally and inevitably committed by a negro. That was why he had let Alan Keane out of jail, it was why he had watched with slow good-natured tolerance all the crackpot business of fingerprints and arcs and inductions that his deputy Dr. Birdsong had prosecuted with amiable idiocy—and small success.

  It was, of course, extremely unfortunate that in the first place, Irene was murdered wh
ile he thought Mr. Purcell was in Baltimore and while Alan was out of the jail, and in the second place, he had been impelled to arrest Jim, the stable boy with white buck teeth and bulging thyroid eyes, at the very moment that Mr. Purcell was stopping Alan in his mad flight from Romney. For Mr. Dorsey, pursuing his long-established line of reasoning, had found a lot of peacock feathers under the corn-husk mattress in Jim’s room over the stable, and the plump exotic carcass of the bird itself stewing in the iron pot in the fireplace. Two and two make four, and a negro and a fifty-dollar peacock made murder, especially when the terrified boy confessed that Rick Winthrop had caught him wringing the cock’s neck.

  The veins stood out on Mr. Purcell’s forehead like mountain ranges on a relief map.

  “And he was eating its tongue on Melba toast, I suppose?” he roared.

  “No, suh!” Jim’s face was the color of a sick oyster, his eyes stood out like skinned grapes.

  “Get him out of here!” Mr. Purcell bellowed. “Or I’ll—”

  “Or you’ll have apoplexy,” Mrs. Jellyby said calmly. “Go back to bed, Jim.”

  It was Mrs. Jellyby who had taken over Romney; and it was when that fact first struck me that I was also aware of the very curious fact that whereas Rick’s death had relieved the tension in the house for a few moments, it had become infinitely more menacing as the hours went on, Irene’s death on the other hand had snapped all tension completely. It was as if some extraordinary elastic that we’d all been pulling at in an unseen but desperate tug of war had suddenly been released at the other end. And it was strange that I didn’t for some time realize it wasn’t Irene’s death alone that had released it. It was just as much, or perhaps more, the finding of that fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stolen bonds in Alan’s car that had done it. That, and Mara’s death—for say what you please, she had died a kind of death as she stood there hearing Mr. Purcell shout that he’d found the bonds in that car.

  She’d just stood there a long time, so long and so motionless that Natalie Lane, with a tact I’d not thought of her as having, had crept away out of sight, not downstairs but into one of the rooms up there, and closed the door. Mara hadn’t made the least resistance as I led her back to her bed. She lay down on it, staring dry-eyed and silent up at the white muslin-covered tester. It seems to me that lately I seldom pick up a magazine without an article pointing out that doctors and clergymen say when death finally comes it’s painless, that only in the struggle against it, which is still life, is there agony. That seemed to me what had happened to Mara. Everything up to now had been agony, with love struggling to believe and to live. Now that she knew, there was no longer any pain, only anesthesia, and then sleep.

  I turned out all the lights except the one on the night table and closed the door. I knew if I were the one I should rather have been alone.

  I hadn’t, of course, heard what had gone on downstairs after Mr. Purcell’s bomb had dropped. When I got down they were all there, and all still terribly shattered. Alan Keane stood white-faced and defiant, his eyes searching the stairs and doorways for the one dark pointed little face that even if he had been Dillinger himself he must have dreaded to see. And I was the only person there, I think, who realized that. The rest of them put it down to fear, and Mr. Purcell to natural shiftiness. Then they showed him his gun, and he cracked, and buried his face in his hands. I didn’t stay. It wasn’t only he that made it all too harrowing to be endured. It was his father, his face ashen, his lips drawn to a tight gray line, his hands shaking like aspens. And the others, too, who had tried so long and desperately to believe in him—Major Tillyard and Dr. Birdsong. I don’t know about Mrs. Jellyby. She gave the impression that if the universe turned to spun sugar it wouldn’t have altered her monumental plastic calm. Her snow-white cropped hair and her sunburned weather-beaten face above her square body were still solid and practical and invulnerable.

  I went out on the porch and stood for a few moments, leaning against one of Romney’s white fluted columns, looking down over the gardens to the Potomac. Then I wandered down to the white marble balustrade and sat there, feeling as if I’d felt the last drop of emotion that I would ever be capable of again. I looked back at Romney. It was incredible that such things could happen there, yet not change one brick or one leaf of all its beauty and all its glamour. I looked back over the dark water. A boat was going downstream. People watching from its decks, seeing Romney lighted from wing to wing and cellar to garret, would not know till they saw the morning papers that it was a dance of death going on there.

  Quite abruptly Dan was standing beside me.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” he said, after a long time.

  He was silent again.

  After a few moments I said, “Dan, did you see your mother, before . . .”

  He nodded. “Mara, too.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’d decided to divide the estate, into four parts—keep one, give me one, put one in trust for Mara as long as she didn’t marry Alan. The other to go to Natalie and your kids.—She said she was tired of all this bickering.”

  “It was all right . . . about Cheryl, then?”

  He shook his head.

  “She wanted me to promise not to try to see her, or get in touch with her, for a year. Then, if I . . .”

  He stopped.

  “Did you promise?”

  “A year, or ten years, won’t make any difference.”

  I caught my breath.

  “You mean you’re . . . going to let her—”

  “I didn’t promise,” he said. “That’s what makes it . . . binding, now.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” I said.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I certainly don’t. You probably wouldn’t marry her for a year anyway. But just letting her wander off . . . It’ll serve you jolly well right if she marries on another rebound, the way she did Rick. Your mother was a whole lot smarter than you are.—I’ll be glad to shut up if you’d like me to.”

  “No, go on,” he said. “Everybody needs one salt hair shirt.”

  “That’s exactly the trouble with you,” I remarked. “Personally, I’ve always approved the practice of keeping the martyrs on pillars and sending their food up in baskets twice a week.—Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d go and see Mara. She knows what’s happened.”

  “Oh, God!” he said. “Who told her?”

  “It’s just as well she heard it while she’s still doped. If she can talk about it, that’ll help too.”

  I stood there a little while after he’d gone, then wandered over to the terrace and sat down, leaned my head back against the green and white cushions of the long chair that Natalie had spent the hot afternoon in, and closed my eyes. I opened them again almost immediately, hearing voices.

  “It isn’t possible,” Major Tillyard was saying. “It simply isn’t possible. I think I can understand his killing Rick. After all, Rick was asking for it. He was putting the boy’s father out of his living, he was spying on him and Mara. He was in the bank when the bonds were stolen. He may even have known Alan had them. It’s a hard thing to say, Tom, but I don’t mind telling you it was always my idea that Rick had those bonds. I’ve always felt guilty about not having said so. But there was Irene, and I couldn’t make her suffer. That’s why I tried to do as much for Alan as I could. I thought it was pride that kept him from taking help. I didn’t know he was—”

  He interrupted himself. “But even so . . . that poor girl! She was more like a child than a woman!”

  They came onto the flagged terrace. I straightened up. They nodded to me and sat down, not seeming to mind my being there particularly.

  “What will they do to him?” I asked.

  “Hang him,” Dr. Birdsong said laconically.

  After that nobody said anything for a long time. Then Dr. Birdsong spoke.

  “I still can’t see Alan murdering Irene,” he said. “Even granting the business of the bonds. Not unless
she knew about them—and if she did, why didn’t she use her knowledge, a long time ago? I think you’re right about her being a child, and a child wouldn’t have kept a trump like that up its sleeve.”

  He turned to me.

  “What happened at the Fountain?” he asked quietly. “You know there’s nothing to be saved anyone now.”

  “Alan was on the point of putting a bullet in his head,” I answered. “Dan stopped him. He was going to bring him back here, but Mr. Purcell had him arrested before we got to the door.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Except for the letters.”

  “What letters?”

  I told him about them.

  “He’d written four, when he was going to kill himself. One was to the Chews, one to his father, one to Mara. I didn’t see the fourth.”

  He looked at me inquiringly. “Were those . . . ?”

  I nodded.

  “I had them. I got them from him before they took him to jail, and put them in my bag with the gun. Dan took it away from him, and I took it away from Dan—thinking it would be safer.”

  “You didn’t see who that fourth letter was to?”

  “No. I just stuffed them in my bag. When I went to get them they were gone. So was the gun. The next time I saw it was there on the library floor.”

  “And who were you getting them for?”

  “For Alan. He said Mr. Dorsey let him out of jail to come and see his father. I suppose it was Mara, really.”

  Major Tillyard smiled dryly.

  “I doubt if Sam Dorsey let him out. He’s too scared of Purcell. Nobody would have much trouble getting out of Port Tobacco jail. Most people they put in it are glad enough to sleep till morning.”

  “You don’t think he just came for those letters?” Dr. Birdsong went on.