“Don’t worry. I will.”
Jeremy and Hilary, Job and Carlos all moved away toward the front drive. Bill and Tash followed more slowly.
“Why do I have to be taken care of?” mused Tash. “I’m not five years old.”
“But you do look nearer fifteen than twenty-five,” returned Bill. “Don’t worry. Youth is a disease that time cures fast enough.”
The telephone wakened her next morning at seven. “Is that Miss Tatiana Perkins? I have a person-to-person call from Rome. . . .”
“Oh, Daddy, you shouldn’t have bothered!”
“What do you expect me to do when my only daughter is all over the front pages of every newspaper? Are you all right?”
“Of course, I am.”
She was awake and expecting the second call when it came at eight.
“Miss Tatiana Perkins? Person-to-person call from Boston. . . .”
“Tash, darling, I’ve just seen the papers!”
“I’m all right, Mother, honestly!”
“But a fire! Would you like me to come down there?”
“No, Mother dear, thanks, but really, the fire is over and I was not hurt . . . Yes, of course, I’m going to rest today.”
This time when Tash put down the telephone, she went back to sleep.
The third call woke her at noon.
“May I come to breakfast?” It was Hilary’s voice. “I’d love to see you, but there isn’t a scrap of food in the place. The refrigerator is even turned off.”
“I’ll bring food. You turn on the refrigerator.” Hilary brought oranges and eggs, croissants and fresh butter, coffee, sugar, and cream.
She also brought newspapers.
All the locals, the Washington papers, and even the New York Times carried a photograph on the front page of Tash coming down the fire ladder in that photogenic, white negligee with Jeremy standing just above her on the balcony.
The news stories were all pretty much alike.
When firemen reached the scene of the fire they had some difficulty finding the Governor himself, who was with a member of his staff, Miss Tatiana Perkins. She was evacuated from her rooms by means of a ladder to one of her windows. The Governor went back into the burning building to bring out his wife, Vivian, with the help of one of his aides, Carlos de Miranda. Mrs. Playfair was taken to the hospital in a serious condition, and she is still on the critical list.
The only other casualty was her maid, Juana Fernandez, whose body was found by firemen early this morning on a flagstone terrace. Apparently, she had fallen from an upstairs window while trying to escape the fire.
“Poor Juana!”
“I know,” said Hilary. “Come and have your breakfast.”
When Hilary got to her first cigarette, Tash took her second cup of coffee over to the window seat.
“Thanks, Hilary. I needed that breakfast. When I went to stay at Leafy Way I didn’t leave anything in the kitchen, not even a can of soup.”
“I’ll have to go in a little while,” said Hilary. “By the way, Bill Brewer thinks you should take this day off.”
“Oh, dear!”
“What’s the matter?”
“There’s something I forgot to tell Bill last night. I’m going to keep my job with Jeremy after all.”
Hilary put out her cigarette slowly and carefully. “There may not be a job with Jeremy any more.”
“What do you mean?”
“The fire didn’t do him any good. The medical verdict is that he must take at least a month’s vacation right away. Job, as Lieutenant Governor, will take care of routine state business. Lucky the strike’s settled, isn’t it? Job could never have handled that on his own.”
“And the campaign?”
“Jeremy may not run. It’s not just his burns. It’s shock. He’s been through an ordeal. He can’t bounce back in twenty-four hours.”
“I understand that, but why should it affect his candidacy? The election isn’t until Fall.”
“His mood has changed. He may not care about being governor anymore. He may not come back here for years.”
“Where is he going?”
“He’s gone already. Carlos took him off to Sotavento in the Caribbean. Carlos’ mother has a place there. I saw them off at the airport this morning. Jeremy asked me to say good-bye to you for him. He wasn’t able to call you after all. He was sorry about that.”
“Is Vivian going?”
“No. I’ve been trying to think of the best way to tell you about that.”
“About what?”
“Vivian. She died in the hospital three hours ago. Don’t cry! Tash, please . . .”
It was early evening when the doorbell rang again.
Tash pressed the button that turned on the voice box connected with the vestibule downstairs.
“Who’s there?”
“Me, Miss Perkins. Boy from Grantley’s.”
Grantley was the best florist in town.
The boy laid a long, white box on the kitchen table.
“You’ll be wanting to put these in water.”
She shut the door after him, untied the ribbon, and lifted the lid off the box.
A sheaf of long-stemmed red roses lay in a nest of maidenhair fern and green tissue paper. They were just beginning to open their petals, and their fruity scent filled the air around her.
She looked for a card, but there wasn’t any. So she knew who had sent them. Only one person had any reason to send her roses without a card.
She put the box down when the telephone rang again. She thought it might be Hilary or Bill or even Gordon, but it was a voice she had never heard before. A woman’s voice speaking in the slurred speech of the western counties, and trembling with righteous indignation.
“You dirty whore! You murdering devil! Everyone knows that fire was arson. You set it to kill the Governor’s wife so you could marry the Governor. For that you will burn in Hell forever. How do you think she felt when the smoke got into her lungs, and—”
Tash put the telephone back in its cradle, breaking the connection.
In the silence she could still hear that voice going on and on and on. It would not be the only one.
PART II
Fox Run
13
GORDON’S INVITATION to dinner came early in August. He had been extremely busy ever since April, and of course, in his position he had to be careful about being seen in public with anyone who was involved in . . . er . . .
“Scandal?”
“Oh, no, no! Politics. Those of us who have important positions in the civil service are supposed to be completely apolitical.”
“I’m completely apolitical now.”
That was the truth. She had not heard from Jeremy. There had been newspaper photographs of him with Vivian’s parents at her funeral in New York, where she had lived with them before her marriage. He had flown back to Sotavento the next day, according to the news stories. A few postcards from Carlos had told her from time to time that Jeremy was “getting better,” but there was nothing about his return. Tash was beginning to wonder if he would ever want to come back.
She accepted Gordon’s invitation in the selfish hope that other evenings with other men might lay Jeremy’s ghost eventually. She had forgotten how powerfully contrast can evoke opposites.
Gordon fussed over a choice of restaurant, sent his fish back to the kitchen because he claimed it was frozen, not fresh, and found something wrong with the wine as well. By the time he had thus paraded his connoisseurship twice, their table was the most conspicuous in the room. “Dessert?”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, I want dessert. Gargon! Waiter!”
Two minutes later Gordon was haranguing the waiter for bringing him a soggy millefeuilles pastry.
Now he had taken out his temper three times on the hapless waiters, he became mellow over coffee and Benedictine.
“I’m glad you’re back on the newspaper.”
“Are you?”
Something in her voice made him look up. “Aren’t you glad?”
“Not particularly. I liked being at Leafy Way.”
“Oh, I suppose there were perquisites. Tennis courts and all that. You practically lived there, didn’t you?”
“That was part of the job.”
“A silly way to do things. I know that whenever I tried to get you on the telephone there I had an awful time. They kept saying you were out or busy or something.”
“I usually was.”
“Well, I quite missed our little evenings together. You’re so refreshing after the sophisticated, glamourous women I see in Washington all the time.”
“Thanks!”
“You know I never did like him.”
“Who?”
“Jeremy Playfair. Too young for his job. And too flashy. Nothing solid about him. He’d never get anywhere in the civil service.”
“You didn’t know him, did you?”
“Well, I never actually met him, but, of course, in my position I do hear a great deal of gossip in Washington, and the things I’ve heard about him—”
“Gordon!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Either you take me home now or I’m going alone. I am not going to sit here and listen to Washington tattle about the Governor. I got to know him well when I was on his staff, and I do like him.”
Gordon stared at her, mouth ajar. “I never thought you’d feel any loyalty to him.”
“Well, now you know. I do.”
Gordon signaled the waiter for the check. “This is rather awkward.”
“Why?”
“Because now I suppose I can’t say something I had planned to say to you.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Then isn’t it better left unsaid?”
“No, I think it is my duty, Tash, to warn you against Jeremy Playfair. He is not a suitable companion for a girl of your type and—”
Tash rose. “I doubt if you have the slightest idea what type of girl I am, Gordon. Indeed, there are times when I like to think I am not a type at all, but an individual. Please just stop talking about Jerry.”
“Jerry? Is that what you call him?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Gordon said no more on the subject. When he took her home he looked at her forgivingly when she did not ask him in for a nightcap, and said: “Tash, no matter what happens, no matter how deeply you may become involved in a rather unseemly situation, I do want you to know that, if you need me, you may always count on my friendship.”
As she was unlocking the door to her apartment, she heard her telephone ringing. Leaving the key in the lock, she ran into a long slide like a baseball player to grab the telephone before it stopped ringing.
For one wild moment she had hoped she might hear an operator’s voice saying: Person-to-person call from Sotavento, but it was only Bill Brewer.
“I’ve been ringing you all evening.”
“I was out at dinner.”
“So I deduced. The insurance company has completed its investigation of Leafy Way. I am going out there tomorrow to get a final story on the causes of the fire. Want to come? You were a witness. You might think of questions to ask them that would not occur to me.”
“Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away!”
“Then I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock.”
Tash was waiting for him downstairs when he arrived. As she slid into the passenger seat beside him, she said: “Why has this investigation taken so long? This is August. The fire was in April.”
“It was unusually thorough. They must be sure of their facts in this case. If the fire was the work of a torch—”
“A torch?”
“Police jargon for an arsonist. If this was arson, it may have been an attempt to assassinate the Governor.”
“His wife was the one who died.”
“But the fire could have been meant for him. Her death could have been incidental.”
For the first time Tash wondered if Jeremy had escaped death because he had been in her rooms when the fire started, something no arsonist could possibly have foreseen. In Vivian’s bedroom or in his own adjoining bedroom, he might have had as little chance as Vivian herself. It was in her room that the fire started and blazed most fiercely.
“But who would want to kill Jeremy?”
“There were some pretty violent people involved in that strike. Remember? Two men were killed and several injured.”
“But Jeremy settled the strike!”
“And by so doing made the Barloventan political exiles his implacable enemies. They say he betrayed them by breaking all sorts of promises he made to them in the beginning.”
“I don’t believe that. Do you?”
“Probably just a misunderstanding. Verbal agreements are tricky things. But whether it’s true or not, they believe it and they are fanatics, so that gives them a motive for killing him.”
Tash fell silent as the car turned into the familiar Leafy Way drive.
The fagade in front was not so bad. Just some windows boarded up where glass had been broken. It was only when Bill and she walked around the house to where she could see her own windows and Vivian’s, that she caught her breath.
The mild August sunshine fell gently on a charred and lunatic chaos. Great holes gaped in once solid walls of brick and lathe and plaster. Insulation leaked from between inner and outer walls in the form of powdered ash.
A lilac silk quilt, grimy with cinders, dangled from an upstairs window. A portable television set lay on one side just inside an open door. Its plastic case had been melted by intense heat into a fantastic, free-form shape that had no rational relation to the shape of circuits and wiring inside the case.
They walked into a drawing room and saw a bucket of dirty water standing on top of a mahogany piano. Some paintings in oil stacked in a fireplace looked as if the paint had become soft and sticky. Underfoot, shards of broken glass and splintered wood and a dozen varieties of ash were all melded by rain and dew into a thick, gritty mush.
“They haven’t even begun to clean up!” cried Tash. “They can’t,” said Bill. “There’s an unusually large amount of insurance money at stake. There were absolute orders from the insurance company that nothing must be moved or even touched until their investigation was completed. They’ve been out here for weeks, photographing, sifting, and analyzing in the most minute detail. The Police Commissioner and the Fire Commissioner backed the insurance company, because they’re even more anxious to know whether this was arson or not.”
Tash looked up at exposed beams overhead that were badly charred. “Will they have to be replaced?”
“Probably, and that alone is about the most expensive thing you can do to a house.”
“Couldn’t those charred beams be encased in wood paneling?”
“They could, but if you did that you’d get a horrid smell of burnt wood on every rainy day.”
At last they came to the Florida Room. The wicker and rattan furniture had vanished in the flames. All that remained were the iron and glass tables, the stone floor, the marble chimney piece.
It was there that Captain Wilkes met them.
“We’ve seen enough of the downstairs,” said Bill. “Is it possible to go upstairs where the fire started?”
“You mean poor Mrs. Playfair’s room? Yes, it’s safe to go up there now. We’ve braced the stairway and shored up the floor in several places. We had to do that before we could go up ourselves.”
Wilkes led them to the door of Vivian’s room.
The taffeta curtains were gone. The paneling that had not been repainted since the eighteenth century was blistered and black. The whole room was black, brown, yellow, and gray now. Even the bed had burned after Jeremy and Carlos got Vivian out. The linen sheets were scorched rags. The screen of black lacquer and mother-of-pearl, that was supposed to have protected Vivian when the fire first began, was now itself a
mass of cinders and ashes turning to powdery dust beneath their feet.
Something glinted there. Tash kicked the dust aside with the toe of her shoe and discovered two dimes.
“Did one of you drop these?”
Both men shook their heads.
“Better keep them,” said Wilkes. “Found money is supposed to be lucky.”
Bill touched one of the curtains. It crumbled into flakes. He looked at Wilkes. “Well? What do you think? Was it arson? That’s what I came here today to find out. What do the insurance people say?
“They say not. In spite of all the money involved, they have to say that because they have not turned up any evidence of arson.”
“Do you agree?”
“I have doubts, but no evidence, so I can’t arrest anybody.”
“Do you suspect any person or group of persons?”
“Not even that. It’s just a feeling I have, an insight, a Gestalt thing.”
“How do the insurance people account for the fire?”
“Mrs. Playfair had the habit of sleeping in bed. That’s her ashtray still there on the bed now.” He pointed to a few shards of broken china, white with touches of gilt and pale blue and green that had once been a forget-me-not pattern. “Some of the ashes on the counterpane were analyzed. They proved to be cigarette paper and tobacco.”
“In other words, she took her sleeping pills and dozed off with a lighted cigarette in one hand?” said Bill.
“Or in her ashtray where it could have rolled off onto the bed when she turned over in her sleep,” answered Wilkes. “Sometimes the smoker wakes in time, but not if he’s drunk, or taking sedatives as Mrs. Playfair was.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Tash. “I saw Vivian Playfair in this room a few hours before the fire. She was smoking then and it worried me. I made her promise she wouldn’t smoke in bed anymore. I think she meant to keep that promise.”
“Perhaps she meant to,” said Wilkes. “But she was subject to loss of memory. She may have forgotten.”
“Wouldn’t an arsonist need something more than a cigarette?” asked Bill. “Lighter fluid or kerosene?”
Helen McCloy Page 12