Murder by an Aristocrat

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  So it was Dave.

  Dave.

  It had been in Dave’s study that Bayard was killed. I felt certain of that. The blood on the rug in the study and no sound of the revolver shot — yes, I was sure Bayard had been killed in Dave’s study. Dave’s revolver with its two shots gone. Dave himself, silent, languid, morose — entirely perplexing.

  And Dave had made that first attempt to murder Bayard. He would have shot again, they said, if Adela had not stopped him. I had been convinced all along that when I knew who had shot Bayard that first time, when only his shoulder was wounded, I would know who had finally murdered him.

  But Dave had been with Allen all that long afternoon. Allen had quarreled bitterly with Bayard. Dave had taken a revolver and shot Bayard. But both the men had alibis for that interval of time during which Bayard was actually murdered.

  Who, then, could have killed him? It was curious that, as I thought of the Thatcher family, the only member of it who seemed psychologically capable of cold-blooded murder was Evelyn. Evelyn with her firm brown hands and her bluntness and her matter-of-fact way of looking at things. If, for some good reason, she had made up her mind that Bayard should be got out of the way she would kill him with as little compunction as she would step on a spider. After it was over she would not harass herself with fears or doubts or regrets; she would act exactly as she had acted — write her notes, send her telegrams, meet and calmly dispose of callers, help with household matters. The only signs of weakness she had displayed about the whole ugly business were when she had said, there over Bayard’s dead body in the library, “What will people say?” And that was not exactly a sign of weakness. The other was more significant: that was her reluctance to let her sons come home — come home to that grim and sordid tragedy of murder. Even an unimaginative woman would not want her sons entangled in the murder she had done.

  And so far as material evidence went — which after all is rather conclusive, for there’s no getting around it, if a man’s killed with a bullet that bullet’s got to come out of a gun, and guns don’t fire themselves — so far as material evidence went she — or Janice — was the last one known to have seen Bayard alive.

  Well, it had been a strange conversation I had heard; it seemed to me that the omissions were quite as significant as the hints and warnings and open admissions. There were many things they had quite definitely failed to talk of. Dave’s reason for trying to kill Bayard, for instance. Or why Hilary so hated the dead man.

  Evelyn or Janice had certainly been the last person to see Bayard alive. I could not believe that Janice with her loveliness and her youth and her charm had killed Bayard. And Evelyn would have had to have a very urgent motive for murdering him; it would have had to be a motive that even her gift for expediency and her extremely practical intelligence could discover no other possible way to satisfy. And while it’s true that a woman like Janice, passionately and hopelessly in love, may be impelled to do extraordinary things — still I don’t know that she need take to manslaughter as a relief for her feelings.

  But there was the time and opportunity Janice had had — there was the egg basket and the revolver and that compromising episode in the kitchen the very next morning following the murder. There was no escaping the deduction that she’d known the revolver was in that basket and that she’d gone to the refrigerator either to be sure it was still undetected or to remove it to a safer place.

  A dozen pictures of Janice returned to me: the frightened, beautiful girl in soft yellow chiffon, bravely holding her fright in leash and showing me into Bayard Thatcher’s room; the slim child in green dimity working among the flowers, herself lovelier than any of them; the tortured woman with the spent white face leaving her love and her lover without surrender there at the foot of the stairs, with the still summer night and the moonlight and shadows and the scent of the roses outside. And there was her letter with its pride and pain and honesty. And there was the girl of the afternoon, happy and warm in spite of herself because Allen was there beside her, and holding that dark red rose to her cheek as if that were the one thing she might caress.

  No, it couldn’t be Janice.

  Yet Bayard Thatcher had certainly been murdered. I always came back to that.

  Twilight was coming on when I went downstairs. That night dinner was a silent and a rather dreadful meal. Those desperate efforts to keep up appearances had flagged from very weariness with the long and trying day, and I daresay everyone dreaded tomorrow’s ordeal. Tomorrow, when they would lay Bayard’s body away with those other Thatchers, and would know, every one of them, that in their small circle was that one who had murdered him. No, it was no pleasant thing to anticipate, and there was no escaping it. There were, even, no more telegrams to be opened and read and discussed with a determined pretense of the ordinary and the commonplace. Flowers, however, had begun to come with the arrival of the evening train; they had been stored in tubs of cold water in the summer kitchen, but among them were lilies whose cloying fragrance had filled the house before the sheaf was removed, and which now clung to everything, a ghostly notice of the ordeal to come.

  To my surprise Janice was white and tired and failed to catch the occasional effort Evelyn made to introduce some safe topic of conversation. The meal was half over before I discovered why; somehow, I had expected her to be greatly relieved from alarm and anxiety by the return of her letter and to show it in her face and bearing. But, possibly from not having had an overwhelming amount of experience in such matters, I am rather clumsy. I had not perceived that her distress and anxiety as to who had read her letter would be greater than her relief at getting it into her own hands once again. After all, it might have been kinder to tell her.

  After dinner we sat out on the porch in the quiet, deepening summer night. There was very little said. The greens of the lawn lost themselves in shadow; the cigarettes became small red spots of light; the street lights away down at the corner made the trees loom huge and black and far away, with leaves edged in light silver where the light touched them. The moon came up finally; the dusk was lost, and the shrubs and trees stood out black against the white lawn, and white strip of road. The moon, I thought idly, was at its full.

  After a long time Evelyn murmured something about going home, and Adela stirred to say, out of the darkness beside me, that she’d like them to stay there again for the night. There was no appeal in her deliberate voice, but I felt she wanted Hilary and Evelyn near her. Evelyn agreed at once.

  “Allen won’t mind staying over at the house alone,” she said. “But I’ll want a few things from home. Allen, will you take the car over and ask Julia to pack my overnight bag. Tell her to put in that new white silk. The crêpe with the long sleeves; she’ll know the gown I mean. And the white hat that goes with it. And gloves. Tell her to fold the silk carefully, I don’t want to have to press it. We’d better wear white tomorrow, Janice. Adela will wear black with her long crêpe veil, but I think plain white summer dresses with white hats would be better for us to wear. People will like it. Do you mind, Allen?”

  “I hope I get the right things,” said Allen, rising from the step. Against the moonlit lawn his tall figure looked strong and full of life and vitality. His cigarette was a small red comet across the lawn, and he said:

  “Better come along, Janice. The drive will do you good.”

  “Oh, no. No,” said Janice. There was a hint of panic in her voice. Of what had she been thinking, I wondered, as she sat there so quiet in the shadow of the clematis vine and watched Allen in the moonlight, and felt the soft summer night and wanted, perhaps, the touch of his hands and his arms and his mouth. Poor Janice, who knew so well what love could be. But perhaps Allen suffered more when he thought of Dave. Dave! With some chagrin I reminded myself that my morals were tottering — morals which had served me well for longer than it’s necessary to mention. There was Dave, too, to be pitied; Dave whose wife no longer loved him; Dave whose friend was treacherous. Dave, who, by all rights, oug
ht to be pitied more than any of them. But for the life of me I could not feel particularly sorry for Dave; perhaps it was owing to his curious detachment, his enigmatic lack of interest in his lovely wife, his morose silences, his somber, withdrawn look.

  Wearily I found myself again in that hopeless circle of speculation and resolved to leave it at least for the night. But I was not permitted to do so; one of the strangest things about the Thatcher case was the inexorable destiny which dragged me into every phase of it.

  Evelyn, too, may have caught some meaning note in Janice’s voice, for she rose.

  “Perhaps I’d better go along after all,” she said firmly. “We’ll be awfully hurried tomorrow morning, and I’d better be sure I have everything. I’ll bring your things, too, Hilary. I think I know what you’ll want.”

  The sound of the car shook the still night. Janice had shrunk back into the shadow of the vine. “Such a few moments,” she had said, “out of all the years. All the rest such a dreadful waste.”

  Adela stood.

  “I’ll say good-night,” she said. “As Evelyn says, we’ll be hurried in the morning.” She sighed. “I only hope no one says anything about our hurrying the funeral so. It doesn’t seem fitting not to wait — but tomorrow’s Sunday — perhaps they’ll think —” She checked herself and said in a more collected way, “Will you come with me, please, Miss Keate? I am very tired.”

  I went with her, of course. She did look dreadfully weary. I was giving her a back massage when someone knocked at the door. At Adela’s word Florrie entered.

  “Well, Florrie, what is it?” asked Adela.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, Miss Adela,” said Florrie. “But I thought you might have some aspirin. I’ve got one of my bad headaches. And I don’t want to be sick for tomorrow, ma’am. There’ll be a lot to do.”

  “Why, certainly, Florrie. There ought to be some in the medicine chest, there in my bathroom. Go and look.”

  But there wasn’t, it developed, and Adela sent Florrie to Janice’s room.

  “I’m sure she has some. Just look in the medicine chest in her dressing room. She always keeps it on hand for Mr. Dave’s headaches.”

  Florrie went away. It was perhaps five minutes later that she returned. At first sight of her eyes, shining a little, and that odd look of malice in her usually stolid face, I straightened up and looked at the thing she held in her hands. It was a small white felt hat. Adela looked, too, and became an old, old woman before my very eyes.

  “I thought I ought to bring this to you, ma’am,” said Florrie, her voice shrill with a kind of ugly triumph. “I saw it accidentally. It was stuffed back of the radiator in Miss Janice’s dressing room, ma’am. Right there below the medicine cabinet.”

  I have never before or since admired Adela as I did at that moment. She said:

  “Give it to me, Florrie. Miss Keate, haven’t you some aspirin for her?”

  I did have: a large boxful of tablets. A pasteboard box into which I had tumbled the tablets for convenience and which I had labeled. It was in my small instrument bag, and I got it at once and thrust box and all into Florrie’s hand and told her not to take too many of them.

  “You may go now, Florrie,” said Adela. Her bluish lips looked stiff, and her eyes like ice. The girl went; she looked frightened.

  Adela did not try to dissemble before me. I suppose she knew it was no use. I looked at the small hat.

  It was the hat Janice had worn the previous afternoon; I knew it at once. And I remembered with frightful clarity that she had worn it when she entered the house alone, not more than ten minutes before Bayard was found murdered. And that when, at the alarm, she had appeared in the library beside us all she had worn no hat.

  But on the white brim of that small felt hat were four red-brown smudges. I have seen dried blood too often not to recognize it immediately.

  Adela said stiffly:

  “Take it. Nurse —”

  And at that very instant there was a knock on the door, and without waiting for a reply it was pushed open.

  Janice stood on the threshold.

  Her dark eyes went to me and then to Adela and then fastened upon the hat. It was not nice to see the loveliness leave her face; to see it become a stiff, strained white mask, hiding terror.

  CHAPTER X

  Many times during my stay in the Thatcher home I was astonished at the Thatcher capacity for utter silence. Utter and complete silence at times when an ordinary person would have burst into frenzied explanations. But I was never more taken aback by that baffling trait than when Janice merely looked at that bloodstained little hat, that dreadful witness against her, for a long moment, and then said:

  “What are you doing with my hat?” Her voice was quite steady, but then I had seen something of her powers of self-control. And her face was still white and drained of life.

  “Your — hat,” said Adela with difficulty. It was not exactly a question or a statement; it was just the utterance of words in a curiously tentative way. She offered, I thought, a chance for Janice to deny the hat.

  But Janice said, “Why, certainly. You know it’s my hat. What are you doing with it?”

  “It was — found,” said Adela. She looked shrunken and terribly old. “It was found and brought to me.”

  “Who found it?”

  “Florrie.”

  “Oh,” said Janice. “Oh. Florrie. Florrie seems to be taking quite an interest in my affairs lately. Well, if you are quite through with it, I’ll take it.”

  She walked swiftly to the bed and picked up the hat. I noted that her slender fingers seemed to avoid touching the brim; that brim that showed where four fingers had touched it and had left so ugly a mark of their pressure. To complete my bewilderment she bent over Adela, kissed her cheek lightly, said, “Have a good night, darling. Don’t worry about tomorrow,” and turned away. At the door she remembered my presence and said over her shoulder, “Good-night, Miss Keate.”

  She said it coolly, her dark eyes unfathomable, her slender figure erect, her chin up, and the tell-tale little hat crushed in her hand. Then she closed the door firmly behind her, and Adela sighed.

  “You see, Miss Keate, we were wrong. We both leaped to an unjust and horrible conclusion. Or not so much a conclusion as a very dreadful suspicion. It only goes to show how one’s nerves may trick one. We are both unstrung by the dreadful and shocking circumstances of Bayard’s death. He was killed by a burglar, and we know it. And yet merely the sight of — the sight of —” She could not say the word and substituted, “merely the stain on Janice’s hat made us both fear —” Deep waters here, Adela. And she realized it. For she checked her words to cough delicately, to hunt for a handkerchief, to ask me for a drink of water. And finally to resume:

  “Absurd of us. When there are so many ways that could happen. Of course. I know my own family. I know none of them are capable of — that Janice is not — that she could not —” She stuck again. Poor Adela, she could not bring herself to voice her thought.

  As for me, I should have been much happier if Janice had said something — anything — to explain that hat. Her silence was almost as damning as the bloody fingerprints; more so, in fact, for I felt if there’d been an innocent explanation she would have given it.

  And the grim little incident brought rather forcibly to my mind the danger in which I stood. I, the stranger; I, the outsider. I said quietly:

  “By the way, Miss Thatcher, you won’t need me past tomorrow. I can return to the hospital after the funeral.”

  Even if I did not know what I knew, I would have guessed something of it from the sudden bleakness of her blue eyes, the way her face set itself again.

  “Oh, certainly, Miss Keate,” she said. “Certainly. I didn’t realize that I was keeping you here when there was something else you were anxious to do. Is there a case waiting for you?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “But I must — go.”

  “Oh, then,” she said affably, “if ther
e’s no case waiting for you, you won’t mind staying with me a few days longer. Surely you don’t feel that we expect too much of you? I haven’t had a chance, really, to tell you how grateful we all are for the way you’ve helped us. I don’t know what we should have done without you. But I’m sorry we have worked you too hard.”

  “Oh, no,” I said helplessly. “Not too hard. But you don’t need my nursing care, you know, and —”

  “My dear, you are too conscientious,” said Adela pleasantly. “I see what’s wrong. You like to be busy, and you feel you aren’t doing enough. Well, then, I must tell you that we — we depend upon you. Of course, if you don’t like it with us, I will not try to keep you. But I — I’m not in very good health, as you surely have seen. And you can’t possibly realize what a help you’ve been to me. But don’t let me persuade you. I can probably get along. It’s only that it’s been such a shock. Such a dreadful shock —” Her voice broke. That much was true, and I knew it; I even wondered how long she could endure the dreadful strain put upon her.

  Afterward I reflected that she had very cleverly used the only weapon that would touch me; opposition I could have resisted, defencelessness weakened my resolution. And at the time I felt no definite, physical fear of any one member of the Thatcher family; it was only a kind of grim uneasiness, a feeling of uncertainty that clutched rather coldly at my heart now and then and was immediately dispelled at the sound of Adela’s calm, deliberately elegant voice.

  “Never mind, now,” I said. “You must get some sleep. I’ll not leave for a day or two, at any rate. Now then, I’ll just give you something Dr. Bouligny left to make you sleep. You must have a good night’s rest.”

  Wisely she left the matter of my departure rest. Adela was always wise. But she refused the sedative.

  “I don’t like drugs,” she said sharply. “I never feel well the morning after I take a sedative. And besides, I — well, I don’t like them. I hate drugs. Dr. Bouligny is too free with them. I’ll do better not to take any tonight, Miss Keate. Just hand me those turquoise beads, will you? I like to — Thank you. I’ve had these many years. It always calms me a little to feel them in my hands. But you might read aloud to me a little, if you will, Miss Keate. Reading aloud is very soothing, I think. There are some books on that shelf back of you. Choose what you like.”