by Zenith Brown
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Didn’t you see him when you came out?”
He shook his head.
“I was talking to Yarborough in the kitchen.”
“How is he, by the way?”
“He’ll be all right if he didn’t burst out all the stitches in his scalp when he came to. I don’t know whether he thought Mrs. Jellyby was a ghost or what, but he about had a fit.”
“Did he fall over something?” I asked.
Dr. Birdsong shook his head. “He was hit with a book end. If he didn’t have the skull of a rhinoceros, he’d have been done for.”
“And he doesn’t know who hit him, I suppose.”
“Neither who nor what. All he knows is he was in the hall locking the screen door when he heard Irene scream. He ran in as fast as he could, he says, and as he got to the middle of the hyphen he heard her scream again, and the shot. The door opened and something hit him. Purcell asked if he wasn’t wearing his glasses, and he said he was. Purcell thinks, of course, that he’s trying to shield Alan. It seems he’s been not seeing an awful lot around here lately.”
He drew a deep breath and shook his head slowly.
“And there’s an odd point about that. What Purcell won’t see until he gets the blood out of his eyes is that nobody could see through those glasses Yarborough wears unless he had a refraction of six point two. But they’re gold-rimmed, and they once belonged to a baron. The baron also left a bottle of sleeping medicine here that almost put Yarborough and the cook to sleep permanently. Yarborough’s the only one can wear the spectacles, fortunately.”
I tried to think what that odd vanity of the old darky could mean.
“You really think he couldn’t see who it was?” Major Tillyard asked.
“I’m sure he couldn’t,” Dr. Birdsong said. He smiled. “Except that he or she looked vaguely like Mrs. Jellyby. I think you can assume that from his reaction when he woke up and saw her standing by him.”
He got up.
“It’s those letters I want. I want to know who that fourth one was written to.—You’d better come inside Mrs. Latham. It’s not too healthy out here. You know about the miasma rising from marshes? Romney has a pretty lethal brand.”
Mr. Purcell came to the door as we started up to the house. “Oh, Tillyard!” he shouted.
Major Tillyard took a deep breath.
“I guess the wheels are turning,” he said. He quickened his pace across the grass.
25
Dr. Birdsong and I went in.
“I don’t see how it can be like this,” I said hopelessly.
“Who knew about those letters, Mrs. Latham?” he asked.
“Just Dan and me and Alan. I mean, we’re the only ones who knew what they were, or knew he’d tried to kill himself.”
“You haven’t told anybody about that?”
“Of course not.”
“And who saw you take them from him?—I suppose you pretended you’d given them to him to mail.”
I nodded, and tried to think.
“The Chews, Mr. Purcell, Dan, Mara, Cheryl—not Major Tillyard, he didn’t come in till later—and Mr. Dorsey.”
He thought a moment. “Then the only people who didn’t know are Natalie, Dunthorne, the major, and Keane.”
I nodded again.
“I wish you’d told me about that point-of-aim business,” he said abruptly.
“I thought you knew. Anyway, would it have made any difference if I had?”
He shrugged. “Considerable.”
“The only difference I can see is that the implication would have been stronger in your mind that Irene and Mara and Cheryl were involved.”
He nodded, rather grimly.
“Just what we were meant to think from the beginning.”
I don’t know what there was about the way he said that, but I stopped for an instant and stared up at him, a kind of hope beginning to swell in my heart.
“And . . . the three in the library?” I asked.
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, slowly, “This whole point-of-aim business is a pretty tricky one. There are several possible explanations for those discs in the library. One: somebody was getting ready to kill Irene just the way Rick was killed, and changed horses in mid-stream when the gun turned up. Or two: somebody else turned up with the gun and did the job instead.”
He hesitated a moment, and then looked down at me rather strangely.
“Or what would you think, Mrs. Latham, of Number Three: they were put there solely to point out that we hadn’t paid enough attention to them in the first murder?”
I tried to think something about that, and couldn’t. “I . . . I wouldn’t know at all,” I said. “—You think there were two people who would have killed Irene.”
He nodded, very sardonically.
“I could name half a dozen without the least trouble—and so could you. And with motives not many people would resist forever. Alan, Mara, Dan, Mr. Keane, Natalie—”
“Natalie?”
“She’s been living on bread and rat cheese a long time, Mrs. Latham. She comes into quite a bit of money now Irene’s dead. If Irene had lived, she’d have spent Natalie’s share under the guise of gifts, and probably billed her for a few hundred over, if she’d ever got around to dividing the estate. Natalie could do with some hard cash. Furthermore, Yarborough tells me they staged a fight shortly after Irene came back from town this afternoon in which even Irene lost her temper.”
I wondered about that, knowing a good deal more about it, possibly, than he did.
“Do you know where Cheryl is?” I asked suddenly.
“She went out to the county road with the milk truck this evening. They left her there. She probably got a lift to Port Tobacco, and took a bus to Washington. She wouldn’t let Jim take her in. Purcell will get around to that soon enough. I’m surprised he hasn’t already.”
We were almost to the porch.
“Dr. Birdsong,” I said, “—Rick wrote a letter to Mr. Dunthorne the night before he came, telling him not to come.”
“No, he didn’t,” he answered quietly. “That’s the letter Tillyard posted. I got in touch with the District Attorney in New York, and his office collected the letter. There wasn’t a message of any kind in it—just a check for five hundred, made out to Rick by Irene and endorsed to Dunthorne.”
“But he came out as far as the tree, that night, and Dan found a letter half-written . . .”
“I know,” he said. “He admits he came out to the tree. Which was helpful, because I had some idea that another person might have borrowed his car. And I saw that letter in Rick’s room. I wondered if you and Dan had picked it up. Also the charred remains of another in the fireplace. Where was the half-written one when you saw it?”
“Under the desk pad.”
He smiled. “It was in the waste basket, early this morning.”
I stopped on the stone steps.
“Look, Dr. Birdsong,” I said. “Are you being mysterious, by any chance? Alan Keane couldn’t possibly have done that, if that’s what you mean—he hardly dared set foot in the house.”
He stopped too, looking down at me.
“My dear Mrs. Latham, your trouble is the trouble with all women. Your emotions are like Yarborough’s glasses—they blind you, and it isn’t until evidence hits you a blow on the skull that you’re willing to see it. Just because Alan Keane stole some bonds from the Port Tobacco bank three years ago doesn’t prove that he killed Rick and Irene.”
He smiled that very grim smile of his.
“I’ve given you one very definite clue. There’s another one—a kind of clue—that’s been steadily under your nose . . . right down there in the dining room . . . all this time; and you won’t as much as look at it.”
I couldn’t, of course, try as I might, get the shadowiest idea of what he meant. I did think of something else.
“You know,” I said, “there’s one other piece of information. I got
it by eavesdropping. It will have to come out sooner or later. If I tell it to you, will you promise, on your honor as a doctor, not to use it unless you can use it for the persons it chiefly affects?”
He looked at me a moment.
“I promise you that.”
“Mara and Alan are married.—Or did you know it?”
He didn’t answer for a little.
“You’re quite sure of that? I mean, legally?”
I nodded.
“Mara told Alan that Rick’s threatening to tell Irene about it was what made Cheryl come back that night. I don’t know whether it was after Rick’s quarrel with Mr. Keane and Alan, or before. I suppose you know about that, at any rate.”
“I do, but Purcell doesn’t,” Dr. Birdsong said. He stood there filling his pipe.
“If you would look back, Mrs. Latham, and see what happened before each of these people was murdered, I think you’d see something. I think also that if I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut. And furthermore, I think if I were you I’d go to bed. And take a couple of these.”
He smiled. “Afraid?”
I’m not sure that my knees weren’t a little weak, actually.
He opened the torn screen door, not hooked now that old Yarborough was lying on his cornhusk mattress like a white turbanned mummy. I remember wondering suddenly if the pantry had got full of flies and wasps.
“Thanks for telling me about Mara,” he said quietly. The last I saw of him that night he was going slowly up the third floor stairs.
I was glad to find I did wake up, the next morning, because I took the two pills, and it would have been mortifying to discover—or not to discover—that I’d been too trusting. As I went down to breakfast I glanced out of the Palladian window and saw the dog sitting on his haunches in the drive. I raised the window quietly and pressed my nose against the screen. There on the grassy range was Dr. Birdsong. He was down on his knees, acting very much as if he were Nebuchadnezzar.
I went downstairs and out onto the porch.
“What are you doing?” I called.
“Testing your observations,” he said with a grin. He got up and came back to the porch, and held out his cupped hand for me to look into. There were several minute white specks on his palm.
“Dried paint,” he said in an undertone. He glanced inside the cool quiet hall. “—Will you do one more thing for me?”
I nodded.
“Try and remember what everybody had on the night Rick was killed. Do you think you can?”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “It isn’t just to test my I. Q.? Because it’s lower than most people think.”
He shook his head.
“By no means. I’m going to do a little scientific vacuum cleaning. Somebody carried those glass pellets around in something before he deposited them. You’d be surprised at how many people have been hanged for a bit of fluff from a pocket or a trouser-cuff.”
“Do we have to hang somebody?” I asked. It sounds, I suppose, much more flippant than I felt.
He nodded coolly: his hard lean corrugated face was set like iron.
“We have to hang somebody,” he said quietly. “And not so much for the murder of those two people—which I gather you’ve noted doesn’t distress me very much—as for . . . something else. Including one simple little act that took place during your scene at the Fountain yesterday. It was about as devilish as anything I’ve ever heard of.”
His voice was icy spray against my face.
“I think I would like a cup of coffee,” I said.
He followed me into the hall and out to the terrace. Mara was sitting at the table, a cup of coffee and a golden juicy melon in front of her, both untouched. Her face under her dusky hair had shrunk so that there was almost nothing to it except two enormous dark eyes, staring, fixed and unseeing, in front of her.
Dr. Birdsong lifted her hand lying limp on the table and held his fingers to her pulse. Then he stood there, holding it in his own hands until some of his electric energy seemed to communicate itself to her. She looked up and smiled wanly.
“Where’s Cheryl?” she asked suddenly. “Can’t somebody bring her back?”
She picked up her spoon.
“Though I don’t suppose she’ll ever want to come back to this terrible place.”
“Where is her home?” Dr. Birdsong asked. He took the cup of fragrant coffee I handed him.
“She hasn’t got one,” Mara said. “She was brought up by a bank, in New York, in boarding school and summer camps. When she was twenty-one they sent her a check for $1742.38. She went abroad on it—she thought it would be fun to start from scratch. She got back to New York with some French clothes and the $2.38, I guess.”
She lifted her spoon to her lips and put it down again, the melon untasted.
“I don’t think she’s got that much, now,” she said bitterly. “I know she hasn’t any clothes, except the ones she brought here, and just enough to keep the authorities from arresting us for running a nudist camp. So I suppose she’s gone wherever it’s easiest to start from scratch again.—Oh, it’s beastly the way everybody treated her!”
And then she put her head suddenly down on the table and broke into a torrent of tears. I got up. Dr. Birdsong, I was sure, was much better at that sort of thing than I was. I took my coffee and a piece of toast out on the terrace steps. The peacocks out there in the sunlit gardens, training up and down with their scurrying entourage of hens and chickens, seemed to me a curiously enviable tribe. At the end of the garden I saw Mrs. Jellyby’s peaked sombrero, and heard her calling the flock to their feeding ground.
Suddenly Mara’s voice rose clear and passionate: “I don’t believe it, I’ll never believe it till he tells me with his own lips! How could he have gone to Grace’s room to get the gun?”
“Natalie says she saw him upstairs, Mara,” Dr. Birdsong’s calm voice said. “He wanted those letters—he had to get them. He had to take the risk, to keep—”
The door banged shut again. I got up, wondering if that was the evidence that was under my nose and that I couldn’t see because I was blinded by emotion.
At the end of the garden I saw Mrs. Jellyby setting back toward her cabin under the weeping willow, and almost unconsciously I set out toward it myself. I opened the little gate into her garden and walked down the herringbone path to the door. It was open, and I stopped abruptly as I came up to it, staring in. Mrs. Jellyby was seated on her stool at the end of the table. Mr. Keane was there too, and—of all people under the sun—the elegant Mr. Dunthorne, done up in white linen plus fours and the loudest checked jacket I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing off Epsom Downs. They each had a little tin of seeds, and a little stack of white cotton sacks, and a pile of labels. And I stood there speechless for a minute, watching them put a spoonful of seeds in a little bag, pull the string tight, tag it, put it in the osier basket, and pick up the spoon and another little sack.
Mrs. Jellyby looked up at me.
“Has Mara come down?” she asked brusquely.
I nodded.
She pushed her stool back, got down from it and picked up her sombrero.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
Mr. Keane’s eyes moved up from his tray of seeds and followed her, like an injured dog’s. He got up too, put on his hat and went out after her.
26
Mr. Dunthorne scratched his head. I sat down on Mrs. Jellyby’s stool, picked up her spoon, filled a sack, labeled it with a tag on which was written, in her extraordinary copper-plate script, “Cypress Vine from Romney,” and put it with the others.
“This old lady’s the only person I ever heard of that Rick had any real respect for,” Mr. Dunthorne said abruptly. He put a spoonful of larkspur seeds into a bag and labeled it. “Rick said they liked her best when their mother used to go down to Aiken or up to Bar Harbor, and she used to eat up at the house. They’d sit around and play rummy, or talk—”
He stopped suddenly. “Hey, what’s that?”
> He got up and leaned across the table.
“What?” I said.
“In the bottom of your basket.”
He thrust his spoon down in the millions of tiny black seeds in my wooden grain measure and stirred it around.
“There,” he said. “Looks like a diamond, but it’s just glass. I guess she puts prizes in some bags.”
He sat down again. I couldn’t say a single word, for some time. All I could do was sit staring helplessly at the two glass nodules that Mr. Dunthorne’s inquisitive spoon had turned up—knowing that in the bottom there was another one, knowing too that Mrs. Jellyby had thought they were very safe at the bottom of the measure she herself was working on.
Mr. Dunthorne fortunately wasn’t looking at me. He was plainly fascinated by the job of putting a teaspoonful of larkspur seeds into a little cotton bag.
I covered the discs over again.
“Probably came up from the barn in the measure,” I said, when I’d found my voice. In my mind I could see that young cop sitting on the running board of the car Mr. Purcell had come in, and at the end of the range Rick’s body cold and stiff, covered with a tarpaulin, and Mrs. Jellyby down there, by the box alleys. I wondered what had she known? Which of the children she had raised was she now struggling to protect? What—above all—did she think now, when three more glass pebbles had appeared with yet another murder?
Out the door I could see her heavy tweed figure with that straw sombrero coming slowly back to the cabin through the lanes of bright flowers—scarlet poppies, zinnias, marigolds. I got off her stool and sat down at the shallow pan Mr. Keane had been working on, trying to still the ache in his heart. And suddenly it occurred to me—was all of this for that purpose I’d been thinking of? Or had Mrs. Jellyby herself for many years been stilling an ache in her own heart, with her bags of seeds and her mothering of the little brood in the great house, whose own mother had no gift for the whole business of mothering?
I glanced at Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne. There was certainly no ache in his heart—just puzzlement. “If she sold these damn seeds, I could figure it out,” he said. “But she just gives them away.”
