Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  “I know,” I said. “And without being asked, either.”

  Mrs. Jellyby came down the path, more slowly than I’d ever seen her walk before. She hung her hat on the door. I felt her eyes move from the wooden measure to her spoon to Fellowes Dunthorne to me.

  “They’re asking for you at the house, Mr. Dunthorne,” she said. And when he’d left she sat down on her stool and went back to her task.

  “What did you think of Irene, Mrs. Jellyby?” I asked suddenly. I hadn’t meant to, and I was sorry the instant the words were out of my mouth. Her face was drawn in a little spasm of pain.

  “I’m sorry!” I said.

  A pair of yellow butterflies flew in the door and out again. Great black and gold bumblebees lighted on the larkspur, bending their blue spears almost to the ground.

  “She was wilful and capricious even when she was a baby,” Mrs. Jellyby said slowly.

  Then her eyes, so patient and so full of old pain, met mine.

  “I was her mother, Grace.—And no better at the job than she’s been. Except that I was very young then . . . and very ignorant.”

  I sat there staring at her, quite speechless, I should have thought, if I hadn’t heard my own voice, barely audible, saying, “Mr. Winthrop . . . did he . . . ?”

  “Irene never knew he knew,” she said quietly. “None of the children must ever know.”

  Her hands gave up their mechanical dipping and tying, and lay still on the table. She sat there, her face as impassive as a square of rawhide. Only her eyes lived, gazing down the years. After a long time she said, “Go tell Tom Birdsong I want to see him.”

  I went out, but I didn’t, as a matter of fact, have a chance to tell him just then. I realized even before I opened the big door of Romney that something was happening. Mr. Purcell’s car was in the drive, the motor still running, and inside I could hear his voice. He wasn’t shouting now, and the effect was rather more disturbing. I hurried through the hall to the sitting room, almost as frightened, I think, as I’d been the night before, waiting for Dr. Birdsong to crash through that hooked screen door.

  Mara was standing in the middle of the room, steadying herself against a mahogany Pembroke table. Dan beside her had his arm around her shoulders, his face almost as bloodless as hers. The State’s Attorney, his hands in his white linen pockets, rocking back and forth on his brown and white brogues on the hearth, had a look on his face that I couldn’t even attempt to describe. It wasn’t only anger, and triumph, but more impersonal, in some way, than either. It made me think of the way a man would look who’d thrown every possession he had in the world into the pot, and won.

  Major Tillyard was beside him, his face still gray from his sleepless vigil beside Irene’s body. Dr. Birdsong looked on, casual and inscrutable and detached. And at the end of the room Natalie and Mr. Dunthorne were standing, not, I thought, unlike a couple of people who in all likelihood had got something for nothing, and were just waiting to take over as soon as the messy procedure of eviction was over.

  “I understand your feelings, all right, Dan,” Mr. Purcell was saying, not unkindly. “But I’ve got my job to do. Friendship doesn’t change the picture.”

  “But you’re crazy, Purcell!” Dan said angrily.

  “That’s for the grand jury to say. You just don’t know what’s been going on around here for the last three years. There’s not a shadow of doubt Mara’s known all along that Alan had those bonds. She was getting ready to run away with him last night. Her bag was in the back of his car and the bonds were in the map pocket.”

  The table scraped along the wide boards of the old floor as Mara swayed. Dan’s arm tightened around her shoulders.

  “And this gun. It’s got her name on it too, like that bag—only she tried to wipe these off. Her fingerprints—all over it, smudged on the grip. Oh, I don’t say she planned to kill your mother.—Mara, the smart thing for you to do is come clean, and admit that when your mother put it to you that it was either giving up Alan Keane or giving up your share of the estate, you saw red.”

  “That’s a lie!” Dan said hotly. “I was there when Mother told her that. She didn’t do a damn thing but walk out.”

  “All right, Dan—she walked out. But both she and Alan walked in again. His prints are on the library mantel and on the table.—You don’t deny he was in the library, do you, Mara?”

  Her “No” was hardly audible, her lips scarcely moving.

  Purcell took a step toward her.

  “And you thought if you told your mother you were married, it might change things—didn’t you?”

  She nodded slowly, her eyes closed, tears crowding under her short thick black lashes. Dan stared at her, his face blank, his arm around her shoulders loosening. She didn’t look at him, or move a muscle to indicate she hadn’t known that Mr. Purcell or any of us had known. Major Tillyard drew his hand slowly across his forehead. I couldn’t tell whether he’d known too, or whether he hadn’t.

  “So that when it was a question of your husband or your mother—”

  Mara threw back her dark little head suddenly, desperately.

  “I don’t care what you do with me,” she cried, “only quit talking! Quit, I say! I didn’t do it, I tell you! I didn’t do it! But quit talking about it!”

  “All right,” Mr. Purcell said quietly. “If you didn’t, Alan did. And you know he did do it—you knew he had the money! I think you’d better come along with me.”

  “You haven’t got any place in that stinking jail for a woman,” Dr. Birdsong said abruptly. “You can leave the girl here.”

  “She can stay here till somebody takes her to Baltimore,” Mr. Purcell said. “And now I want you to tell me where Cheryl is.”

  “I’ve told you I don’t know!” Mara cried; and Dan, who’d gone to the table in the corner and picked up the telephone, put it down and strode back.

  “What do you want Cheryl for?” he said.

  “You seem awfully interested in the young lady, Dan,” Mr. Purcell snapped.

  “I am. So what?”

  “So how many of you are accessories—before and after the fact—to the murder of your brother Rick and your mother?—And perhaps you know where she is?”

  Dan was quite white, but I thanked heaven he’d got control of himself again.

  “It just happens that I don’t,” he said quietly.

  Mr. Purcell’s eyebrows raised. “The Department of Justice will find her quick enough.”

  Dan’s face turned a dark unpleasant red. I had the feeling that if Mr. Purcell were smart he’d use a little less of the mailed fist—his suit was so beautifully white and pressed, his gray hair so perfectly in place. I take it Dr. Birdsong may have had much the same idea. At any rate it was he who brought this scene to an end.

  “Don’t you think, Purcell,” he said, with a kind of unusual amiability, and even suavity, “you’re making a mistake in assuming that because Alan stole those bonds, he necessarily committed murder? It’s my guess you can settle it all quite simply . . .”

  “Yes?” Mr. Purcell said. His voice had a very heavy ironic politeness.

  “I think so.”

  Dr. Birdsong’s voice was imperturbable.

  “You can settle it by simply reading the confession Alan wrote yesterday—before Mrs. Latham and Dan stopped him from killing himself, at the Fountain.”

  I may be mistaken, but I certainly thought Mr. Purcell gave a violent start.

  “What’s that?” he said harshly.

  “He wrote several letters. It was the desperate necessity of getting them back—from Mrs. Latham’s bag—that brought him out here last night. Unfortunately . . . he didn’t get them. Someone else had got them.”

  Mr. Purcell the State’s Attorney gave me what I can only describe as a very dirty look, and turned back.

  “What’s in them?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Birdsong said calmly. “I haven’t read them. They aren’t addressed to me. One of them is addressed to you,
and it’s quite thick. My guess would be that it confirms the belief Tillyard and I have had for a long time, as you know—that he wasn’t alone in taking that money. There’s no doubt he was protecting somebody else. That ought to come out. . . .”

  He stopped for a moment, and went on slowly:

  “Unless, of course, Tillyard is right in thinking the motive behind Rick’s murder was to get the entire possession of the bonds.”

  The only sound in the room was the silvery tickety-tock of the French clock in the hanging corner cupboard.

  “Where are those letters?” Mr. Purcell demanded. His face was flushed, and he spoke with a restrained violence.

  “I . . . they’re coming along later,” Dr. Birdsong said. He looked at his watch with great deliberation.

  27

  The next shock I got came only a little while after that. Dr. Birdsong had gone down to Mrs. Jellyby’s. I saw his great figure disappear through the arborvitae, his dog padding along at his heels. Major Tillyard was standing with his foot on the running board of Mr. Purcell’s car, talking to him very vigorously. Mr. Purcell, one hand on the gear shift and his clutch just enough engaged so that his car kept inching forward, was obviously impatient to be gone, and I supposed annoyed at what he thought was an attempt to apply family pressure. Natalie had disappeared, and Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne had set out somewhere, with a sort of paddocky look about him—though I never did find out if he could keep his seat if he once actually got on a horse.

  As I started back into the house I saw Dan barge out of the sitting room and out the front door, giving the screen a bang that would have shaken an ordinary house to its roots, and stride down toward the river through the long alley of green box. A peacock strutting in the sun quickened his pace, and then folded his glittering fan and scuttled off in alarm. I looked in the sitting-room door. Mara was still standing in the middle of the room, her hands hanging at her sides. She turned her dark little face wretchedly as I came in.

  “Dan being the heavy brother?” I inquired casually.

  She nodded. Then she came over and sat down on the edge of the love seat, where I’d sat when I first saw Dr. Birdsong and that fantastic dog.

  “Grace,” she said. “Is it true they can’t make me . . . give evidence about Alan, because we’re . . . married?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “But they’ll let me—I mean, they won’t make me not, will they?”

  “Oh, dear!” I thought. I stared at her open-mouthed. “Why?” I asked. “Do you want to?”

  When she nodded I really thought I was definitely losing my mind.

  “You see—I did tell Mother I’d married him. I was angry, and I didn’t care what I said.”

  She caught her lower lip in her white teeth and looked away.

  “But . . . oh, Grace, I know Dan doesn’t believe it, and nobody else will, but it’s true . . . Mother just stopped saying all the things she’d been saying, and stood looking at me, and then all of a sudden she put her arms around me, and kept saying, ‘My poor lamb, why didn’t you tell me!’ She was marvelous, Grace—she really was! Just like she used to be. I went to find Alan, but . . . he wasn’t there, and when I got almost back I heard . . . I heard her scream, and just as I got to the door I heard that shot, and the lights went out. . . .”

  Her fingers gripping my hand were like cold ribbons of steel.

  “It couldn’t have been Alan, Grace, it couldn’t! Because Mother was going to help us—you’ve got to believe me, Grace!”

  “Then you weren’t going away with him?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, no! Those were Cheryl’s clothes in his car. Her bags were down in the storeroom. She borrowed one of mine. Alan was going to take her to Washington. We put it in the car before we went to the Fountain, just before they arrested him. And she had to come back here. But if I told Mr. Purcell that, he’d think she—”

  “And those fingerprints on the gun?”

  She nodded.

  “They’re mine. Oh, Grace, I did an awful thing! Don’t be cross, please—but I saw those letters when Alan gave them to you. It was his handwriting on them. I . . . I had to see them, so I took them. I’d been so afraid that was what he’d do. And I knew the gun was his too. I did pick it up, but I didn’t take it. I only took the letters.”

  “Have you got them now?”

  She shook her head.

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Oh, Grace—I’m so afraid.”

  She buried her dusky head in my lap and lay there, perfectly still, for a long time. Then she raised her head. “Grace—go talk to Dan. He didn’t mean to be so beastly. It’s just because he really cared a lot about Mother, and because he’s almost out of his mind about Cheryl.—What if they should take her to prison?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “She wasn’t even on the place last night.”

  “Yes, she was. Alan picked her up in the road and brought her back. He left her in the car just in the drive. He was going to take her back. I don’t know what happened, because she couldn’t have been in the car when Mr. Purcell stopped Alan, or he’d have said so.”

  I gave up trying to think about anything, with that, and went out. Dan was sitting on the float, in exactly the same spot and in exactly the same attitude that I’d found him in the morning Dr. Birdsong had quietly wiped the brand of Cain off his forehead.

  “If there was only something anybody could do, Grace,” he groaned.

  “In a year you can start hunting for Cheryl again,” I said, rather callously, probably.

  He shook his head.

  “I’d never have the crust to look her in the face again,” he said despondently. “Look—do you think Mara knew the kid had those bonds?”

  “I think the less we speculate about what Mara knows, the happier we’ll all be, Dan,” I said. “I also think if you got it into your head that she’s grown up a lot further and a lot faster than anybody else around here, you’ll make a lot more sense than you’re doing now. Just think of a few of the things you’ve heard about a woman in love, and remember that there’s nothing Mara won’t do to save Alan, or try to—even if he’d left the place a complete shambles.”

  That was the first time I’d realized how little I myself believed of the story Mara had just been telling me.

  It seemed to me that many years got mixed up in the time span of Romney that afternoon. It was like watching a never-ending slow-motion moving picture of a day in the country, where nothing ever happens but you don’t dare take your eyes off it, because you know something is going to happen, suddenly and inexorably, that will immeasurably change all the rest of your life.

  People kept coming and going. Mr. Dunthorne kept coming and going in different sets of extraordinary clothes, as if he thought that if he’d just the right combination of plaids and checks, everything would be all right again. Dr. Birdsong and Major Tillyard kept coming and going, or staying closeted with Dan and a man who’d come down from New York who had been in charge of Irene’s affairs. Natalie sat in the long chair under the mimosa tree with her white-rimmed sun glasses. Mr. Keane chugged monotonously up and down between the rows of corn with the yellow cultivator, and Mrs. Jellyby went around untying all the little red strings she’d tied on the sweet peas she’d intended saving for seed. Mara sat all afternoon beside Yarborough’s bed in the stuffy room over the kitchen, putting witch hazel fomentations on his splitting old head.

  Once just before supper Dr. Birdsong and I were alone on the front porch. He was filling his pipe from the old mended oilskin pouch.

  “Mrs. Jellyby told me she’d told you,” he said quietly, without looking up.

  I didn’t say anything. He glanced around at me and smiled a little. “And now it’s in the limbo of forgotten things?”

  I nodded as the supper gong rang.

  Then the sun went down behind the blue Virginia hills beyond the Potomac, and the fireflies rose out of the dark box and along the smooth lawn
s. The peacocks quit training up and down and took to the branches of Romney Oak, and roosted there like great black birds of prey. And it seemed to me that an ominous muted sense of culmination settled over Romney Marsh.

  I don’t know just how it had occurred to any of us that those letters were going to come into Dr. Birdsong’s possession . . . whether they were going to drop from the sky, or whether there’d be a sudden materializing of trumpets from the spirit world and when the lights went on there they’d be on the dining room table. He and Major Tillyard sat out in the hall all evening, just waiting. At ten o’clock, when Jim came for the mail pouch and brought Major Tillyard’s car for him to go and get Mr. Purcell, I for one was on the point of nervous prostration. Dr. Birdsong came out onto the portico where Dan and I were sitting, and glanced at his watch.

  “Would you like to go down to Mr. Keane’s with me?” he asked.

  We got up. I could see from the look on Dan’s face that he was as taken aback as I was. Neither of us said anything. We followed Dr. Birdsong around the house and down the lane to the tenant house.

  It was dark except for a single unshaded bulb in the kitchen, and that had just been turned on, because it was still swinging back and forth across the window when we came into the fenced yard and Mr. Keane’s little rabbit hound bitch wriggled forward on her belly to greet us. Dr. Birdsong went quietly into the hall, with Dan and me on his heels. His dog had stopped outside the gate, as if his personal ethic precluded late calls on rabbit dogs. Farther along the lane the white barn loomed like a great pale ghost. Beyond it, in the paddock, a horse whinnied and stamped. Except for all farm odors and sounds the place was like a deserted ranch on a painted desert. I’d never realized how far away the big house was, or how secluded in its vines and trees and boxwood gardens. Its two broad flat chimneys were lost in the leaves.

  I saw Dr. Birdsong feel along the side of the door for the light switch, and waited for him to turn on the light. But he didn’t. He just motioned us in, and stood there, in the dark doorway. We stood there too, until Dan, outlined in the window, turned suddenly.