Her eyes fixed on him. “To what?”
“To giving her permission for his marriage to you.”
“He needed that?” she said sharply.
“Technically, I understand, and according to the terms of his father’s will. Old Major Burrell had such strong ideas about fortune-hunting girls—”
The freckles were engulfed in a crimson flush. “Really, I hadn’t any idea.”
“No, please don’t take offense. He was a very unreasonable old man, a great deal like Mrs. Andler, who was his sister. Tick was a wild youngster, and Major Burrell—I knew him, you see—he picked out this way to keep a rein on him even from the grave.”
The impersonal look had come back into her face. “Then … Oh, but if she was that sort, it must look very bad for Tick!”
She’d seen through to the heart of the matter, then; there was no use smoothing the situation with banalities. “I’m afraid that it does. Tick’s a bit reckless. He’s not apt to make things easy for himself.”
The curious impersonality remained; she turned it on Mr. Pennyfeather. “He wouldn’t have killed her. Would he?”
Mr. Pennyfeather remembered, and unwillingly, the galling restraints Mrs. Andler had imposed and Tick’s wild resentment of them. He recalled days at the college when Tick had gone around in a fog of rebellion and rage, full of black schemes for frightening his aunt into giving up his guardianship. If Major Burrell had lived, Tick might conceivably have turned out to be another Tichenor Burrell, oil-and-beef baron; or if his mother were alive, he might be a bishop. Surely Tick would have made the strangest bishop in the world…. “But no,” he found himself saying, “Tick wouldn’t have killed anyone as Mrs. Andler was killed. Not coldly, not with such methodical butchery as—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s all right. I wanted to know. By the way, sir, have you had breakfast?”
Mr. Pennyfeather, surprised, shook his head.
“Then, if you’d care to—My aunt’s house is just down the street. She lives here in Superstition. Did Tick tell you that I’m a local product? Anyway, Aunt Lou would be pleased to have you.”
“For breakfast? Now?”
The girl nodded. “And we can talk there, too.”
He hated to turn his back on the cigarette with its mark in electric red; but the chance to have a home-cooked breakfast plus the opportunity to talk further to Miss Caroline Pond were irresistible. He went away with her, promising himself mentally to retrieve that cigarette on his return.
“It’s very early,” Mr. Pennyfeather pointed out as they walked. “Perhaps I’ll be imposing.”
“Not at all. Aunt Lou has boarders. She gets up for them.” She waved ahead to a shingled house whose porch wore a tangle of rather sickly vines.
Mr. Pennyfeather looked. Then he drew a deep breath. He felt slightly giddy.
A sign swung on the porch. It read: Mrs. Jessop’s. Good meals, 50ȼ.
Chapter Seven
Mrs. Jessop’s front room was set with two long tables; there was a bustling sound from the kitchen and a sharp aroma of coffee brewing. Mrs. Jessop came in answer to Caroline’s call. She was a plump, blond woman who reminded Mr. Pennyfeather somehow of a well-fed hen. She smelled in a heavenly way of cooking. She shook Mr. Pennyfeather’s hand, murmured that she was glad to meet him and wouldn’t he have breakfast with them, asked about Tick’s trouble, and then went back to work.
Caroline guided him to a place in the corner. “I’m just dying to know everything. I’m not gruesome-minded—please don’t think that.”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. Unless his nose betrayed him, there was corn bread coming up.
“It’s just that Tick’s so blundering, so inept. I gathered at the bus that he’d said some hot words to old Stacey. You can’t do that. Stacey’s an old plug, but you mustn’t build fires under him.”
“I went to bed,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “That’s when Tick had it out with Stacey. You see, neither Tick nor I have an alibi for the time his aunt was murdered. We weren’t together.”
“What about the others?” she asked quickly.
Mr. Pennyfeather sat very quietly and looked at her.
She covered the slip—if it were a slip—very quickly and neatly: “Tick said that there were some other people in the hotel who had more or less known his aunt. He didn’t explain how they happened to be there just at that time. But I was wondering whether they’d all been accounted for during the night.”
“I think Stacey intends to go into that this morning,” Mr. Pennyfeather told her. Decidedly, it was corn bread. And baked beans. Ham frying, too. Something about this desert air had sharpened his appetite. He felt like rushing into the kitchen and asking for a few samples.
“I don’t suppose Stacey would let me listen,” she murmured as if to herself.
“You might tell him you are sort of representing Tick.”
She gave him a curious look. “No. That mightn’t sound so well.” There was a hint here, to Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind, that Caroline didn’t want to be in the same boat with Tick—if Tick’s boat were sinking.
“Then just eavesdrop,” Mr. Pennyfeather suggested.
She brightened as though he had given her an entirely new idea—though Mr. Pennyfeather thought that he’d been guided to the point of giving it. “It would be breaking the law. Or would it?”
“I don’t recall any laws about eavesdropping.”
She stood up briskly. “And you’ll help?”
“In any way that I can.” His attention was taken up with the arrival of a dozen or so men in work clothes, and the simultaneous entrance of Mrs. Jessop from the kitchen. She was carrying twin platters of ham and eggs. The cook, coming after, bore a giant crock of beans.
“Good morning, boys.” Mrs. Jessop beamed upon her boarders, who beamed back. Mr. Pennyfeather beamed, too, but at the ham.
“We’ll eat, then, and see about some way of sneaking me into that firetrap,” said Caroline.
Mr. Pennyfeather woke up to the fact that he was a full-fledged accomplice. He was somewhat consoled, however, by being led to a place of honor at the head of the first table and being given the first piece of hot corn bread. Probing the crock of beans, he found them succulent with pork and molasses. After that, he became very busy.
Caroline ate neatly, with an eye for the door. Just at the moment when Mr. Pennyfeather was wondering if he could possibly eat another slice of ham, she jumped out of her chair and pulled him with her into the kitchen. “Stacey,” she hissed. “He’s going to beg Aunt Lou out of a breakfast. Now’s our chance to get back to the hotel.”
“But I can’t run,” moaned Mr. Pennyfeather. “I’m too full.” What he wanted, actually, was to lie down quietly for a long while and just digest everything.
“We don’t have to run. We’ll go down alleys and come out by the cactus garden. It’s an old short cut of mine.”
Her profile was between Mr. Pennyfeather and the kitchen window, and he marked its clean and businesslike line and the little turn of the chin that gave it determination and purpose. For a moment he nearly blurted out what he knew: that Caroline Pond had been the girl in uniform with the lonesome beau, the girl he and Tick had overheard in the cactus garden. His mind raced. No wonder Tick had been huffy on the point of Caroline having met his aunt Martha; he must have been quite fearful of that possibility himself. And the conversation with the downhearted boy she had called Freddy—what had Tick thought of that?
She was pulling his arm, getting him out through the back door. Stacey’s voice boomed behind them in the kitchen.
“D’you know your old man’s stuck head first in a murder mystery?” were the words Mr. Pennyfeather heard.
Mrs. Jessop said: “Oh, heavens! That awful thing at the hotel?”
“Right across the hall,” boomed Stacey.
“The old goat!” muttered Caroline. “He’s priming her to give him a meal.”
“Did you know,” Mr. Pennyfeather w
ondered, “that your uncle was at the hotel last night?”
“Of course.” She threw him a look that was quite casual. “When Uncle Joe is out on a bout, Aunt Lou won’t let him in the house. He always goes to the hotel. He’s been there for three days this time. He’s one of the reasons I’d like to be inside. I wondered just how much of a mess he’d got himself into.”
Not Tick then, Mr. Pennyfeather thought. Caroline’s roping in of himself as an accomplice was strictly for family welfare.
“And Tick, mostly,” she added.
Mr. Pennyfeather wondered if Caroline could read minds.
“When we get to the hotel,” she said, “you’ll have to slip in first and let me know how the land lies. Mr. Johns usually keeps his lower floor for the soldiers, and so most of the rooms down there should be empty. Perhaps I could hide in one of them until you find out where the inquiry is to be held.”
They were in a weed-choked alley now, hemmed in by the back walls of Superstition’s business street, sun-scorched wood already growing warm with another day. Mr. Pennyfeather felt the tug of burrs and the scratch of foxtails through his socks.
“The inquiry,” he told Caroline, “is going to be held in the lobby at eight o’clock.”
She glanced at her wrist watch. “Thirty minutes. We’ve got lots of time to do it right.”
She smiled at him suddenly, and he saw how the new sunlight accented her clear skin, touched the freckles with gold, brought out the uncompromising directness of her eyes. After the sticky artificiality of Taffy, she must have seemed quite wonderful to Tick. A girl raised in the desert, doing her part as a soldier…. Mr. Pennyfeather brushed away the little doubts that had plagued him. What if she hadn’t admitted being around the hotel the night before? And what if, as he judged from Tick’s muddled behavior, she hadn’t told Tick about Freddy? She was a very nice girl, and nice girls always have reasons for what they do.
Only, of course, it was quite odd that her uncle Joe should have had the room right across from the one in which Mrs. Andler was murdered. But that would be Uncle Joe’s problem. Not Caroline’s.
They had reached the rear door of the hotel, and the lower hall was empty and quiet. Someone was playing the piano in the lobby, a brittle, rapid, tinkering sort of playing. Mr. Pennyfeather wondered who had braved all that dust to raise the lid on the keyboard. He motioned to Caroline to duck into an open doorway while he went ahead.
The girl at the keyboard turned to look at him as he entered the lobby. For an instant he wondered who she was. She had hair the color of the night sky: a depthless black with glitterings in its curly fringe. Her face was amazingly familiar. Then he knew that she was Glee Hazzard. He looked in vain for bandages, for the steel brace, for the cast and the sling upon her arm.
She laughed, ran a long trill across the keyboard, and fished in the pocket of her jacket for a pack of cigarettes. “You’re surprised, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Very much so. Do you hurt anywhere?”
“Hurt?” She stared at him across a puff of smoke.
“I mean, being unwrapped so suddenly.”
“Oh.” Merriment flowed up into her face and quieted some of its nervous tension. “You thought I’d actually been injured. I hadn’t been. It was just a trick to make Tick feel sorry for me. He did. So now I don’t have to pretend any more.”
Mr. Pennyfeather studied the amazingly red lips and saw their bitter line. “Was the feeling sorry all that you wanted?”
She turned her face quickly so that he should not see what had come into it. She tapped the cigarette into an ash tray; the coal was bare and glowing. “That sort of question is apt to make one very unpopular, Mr. Pennyfeather.”
“I suppose it should. I withdraw it. Will you forgive me?”
“Certainly. Have you had breakfast?”
“I had considered having some,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted cautiously, wondering if this were quite a lie.
“I begged a cup of coffee from our host. If you’d join me, I believe I’d try the restaurant you and Tick went into last night.”
Mr. Pennyfeather just stared.
“I was watching you,” she went on. “I have the front room upstairs. The first look I took out of the window I saw you and Tick coming from the bus depot. Every time the nurse went out of the room I ran to see what you were doing.”
She stood up from the piano stool. She no longer wore the wool coat. The red slack suit made her look young and very thin.
Mr. Pennyfeather let her take his arm. It occurred to him that the thing he did mostly these last few hours was to squire Tick’s girls around.
“Did you—Were you awake when all that fracas started about Miss Whittemore falling downstairs?” he asked, as they walked.
“I heard it. I knew what Taffy was up to. Falling is a favorite trick of hers. She’s done acrobatic dancing and diving. She’s unbreakable. She’s also a very low wench.”
They had come out into the sunlight, which was beginning to grow hot.
“You’re acquainted with Miss Whittemore?”
“Miss Whittemore and I have had encounters,” said Glee Hazzard nonchalantly. “I mean public exhibitions. Hair pulling and things. When Tick and I broke up-or rather, when his aunt broke us up-and I saw Taffy Whittemore get her claws into him, I went a little insane.” She threw the cigarette away; they were crossing the street.
The memory of Taffy standing in the bus aisle and saying, “I don’t feel like getting on. She’s in there,” flitted across Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind. Also Tick’s mournful recitation of the incident about the beer. Mr. Pennyfeather’s Aunt Elizabeth would have said that Miss Hazzard’s exploits were not those of a lady. Nevertheless her touch on his arm was electric and exciting. Even the prospect of a second breakfast did not daunt him.
When they returned to the hotel some half-hour later, it was to find the lobby full of people and Stacey roaring over them like a slightly overfed lion. Mrs. Jessop’s breakfast had left him with a somewhat lethargic look.
“Come on in, folks,” he said to Miss Hazzard and Mr. Pennyfeather. “Wondered where you’d gone. Have a seat. Mr. P., you might just set on the piano stool. The ladies’ve got the chairs.”
Miss Comfort, the nurse, got up and made a little show of getting Glee settled, but Mr. Pennyfeather could see that her heart was not in it. He gathered that Miss Comfort hadn’t been in on the hoax and that the lack of bandages displeased her. She also managed to convey the impression that what she was doing now was maid’s work and that she was above it.
Taffy and her companion, Mrs. Blight, were in the farthest chairs. They both wore black and had an air of wanting to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Mr. Jessop, seated on the lowest stair, was whittling a decoration into the banister with a pocketknife. Mr. Johns, the hotelkeeper, watched him with an angry attentiveness. When the knife bit especially deep, Mr. Johns made a startled sucking sound. He was behind the counter, more transparent and spidery than by daylight.
Two official-looking strange men sat at the top of the stairs and watched the group below, and Mr. Pennyfeather guessed that they were the experts Stacey had called from headquarters in San Diego. The little doctor beside them was yawning.
“Now,” boomed Stacey, opening his mouth very wide, “we’re ready to start this inquirey. We’re going to build up a picture of what happened here last night to the littlest detail. We’re going to—”
“Why isn’t Mr. Burrell here?” cried Mrs. Blight.
Stacey looked about. “Oh, you mean Mr. Tichenor Burrell? I let him go back to camp. I’ve got his story.”
She seemed to sit there debating whether to launch into an account of Taffy’s encounter on the stairs. Mr. Pennyfeather could fairly see the words trembling to get out. Her beaked nose was high, her eyes behind the terrifically clean glasses were wary. She was wondering, too, he thought, whether the audience was ripe for a scene such as she could put on. Tick’s absence must have
decided her against any action at this time. She relaxed with a little cough.
“Anything more, ma’am? No? Well, I’ll get things rolling. This bus that Mrs. Andler-she’s the murdered woman, in case you forgot-this bus came in here at 9:55 P.M., of course. Some of you came right over to the hotel. You registered before Mrs. Andler did. Now speak up.” He was looking at Taffy.
Taffy twitched in her chair. She glanced uncertainly at Stacey and shot a second look toward the men at the top of the stairs. “My—my friend and I—”
“Distant relative,” corrected Mrs. Blight grimly.
“My relative and I came over to the hotel as soon as we got off the bus. We read the notices beside the ledger and went upstairs and looked about to make sure there were rooms open. Then we came down again and registered. We went back upstairs after that, to bed.”
“Meet anybody up there?” asked Stacey.
She shook her head.
“Go to the bathroom?”
With a little blush and without looking at him, she nodded.
“Did you notice the door of this linen closet open? I mean the place where the ax was kept by Mr. Johns.”
She shuddered delicately. “I didn’t notice the door. I mean, I guess I must have seen that it was there. I—I saw it so plainly this morning. But I don’t recall paying the door any attention.”
“What about you?” he asked Mrs. Blight.
Mrs. Blight clutched her hands in her lap and blinked nervously. “I went into the bath as soon as Miss Whittemore came out. I—I saw the door in the other wall of the room, and I opened it and looked inside. I’ve always been afraid of—” She coughed. “Of peepers.”
“Peepers?” Stacey looked as though they were some new kind of insect.
“Peeping Toms,” she said frigidly.
“Oh, I see. Well, now, it’s a good thing maybe that you took that look. What did you see?”
“I saw a space with shelves. The shelves had linens on them. There was another section of the closet which had a lot of dirty mops and old buckets crowded into it.” She looked fiercely at Mr. Johns, who boiled visibly in return.
Bring the Bride a Shroud Page 6