“Now I wonder,” said Chloe Majendie musingly at last, “how he got hold of that.” She looked at Todd. “Well, no matter. That is the whole case, Mr. McKinnon?”
“That’s the whole case. But there’s one more thing I’d like to tell you, though it may be irrelevant. I’ve been wondering, since my first sight of you this afternoon, when we might have met before—or where I’d seen somebody like you.”
“Yes?”
“In Hartlein’s room there was a photograph of his mother. You and she look somewhat alike.”
“God help the poor woman,” said Mrs. Majendie, with a little twist of her lips. She nodded, her gaze going past him. “Yes, I understand a good deal now. I’m much indebted to you, Mrs. McKinnon, for letting me meet your husband. Would your daughter like to come in now?”
“Chloe,” said Joan Godfrey, coming nearer, “if you’re really through—there’s someone who wants to see you at three o’clock.”
“Oh? I’m disappointed; I’d hoped for a purely social visit with all the McKinnons, but in that case—”
She went to the door of the library and glanced in at the tow head, bent above some unidentified tome. “I have to say good-bye to you now, my dear,” she told Barby gently, and turned again to Georgine. “Will you come into my room, and we’ll see if we can repair some of the damage that wretched cat did to you?”
“I’d be glad to.” Georgine followed the erect old figure across a hall and into another beautiful room. “And—you know, I’ve been wondering about your cat. I can’t remember ever seeing a lone Siamese before, most people have a pair.”
“Joan did too, once,” said Mrs. Majendie, indicating the chaste dressing-table.
Georgine hesitated. She remembered, with an odd creeping sensation, the little scene she had observed on her first visit: the hand pouring milk into a saucer, and the cat lapping it. She was almost afraid to ask her question. It was like setting a light to the end of an innocent-looking string, and not knowing… “Did the cat die?” she said as casually as she could.
“Disappeared,” said Mrs. Majendie inattentively, finding a whisk broom in her closet.
“Oh? How long ago?”
“Two or three years. If you’ll turn a little, my dear, I’ll get those hairs… Now and then I wish Dian would disappear, too. Where’s the beast now?” She glanced across the hall. “Ah, yes. Your child is making friends with her. That’s a very engaging young girl you have, Mrs. McKinnon.”
“Thank you,” said Georgine, breaking against her will into a fatuous maternal smile.
“She has Mr. McKinnon’s coloring, but nothing else.”
Georgine laughed. “That’s little wonder; she is my child by my first husband. He died before she was born.”
The alert eyes met hers in the mirror. “Hard,” said the old lady simply.
This was not exactly a powder-room, but it seemed to be almost as productive of confidences; Georgine had her mouth open to make some, and caught herself just in time. Mrs. Majendie couldn’t be interested in those brief months of marriage with Jim Wyeth, in the unformed and undisciplined love that had never had time to take enduring shape, nor in the terror of the three weeks she had lived through alone until his body had been found far down a Colorado river-bed, in the wake of a flash flood. She had actually been on the verge of confiding that after Barby’s birth she could have no more children…
Although she knew that no words had been spoken, she had a queer feeling that a great deal had passed between her and Mrs. Majendie; the eyes that met hers in the mirror were full of comprehension. She said, “Todd is just like her real father, she’s never known any other.”
The old lady nodded. “You have a good husband, too. I like him; and I think he sees a long way into things.” She waited a moment; when she spoke again her voice was lowered to the softest of murmurs. “He may even see beyond the world’s truth, and if he does—I sympathize with him. It is often unpleasant. Sometimes it is even—unsafe.”
Georgine’s lipstick slipped from her fingers and clattered on the table-top. She said, “I know, I never have been able to forget that since I’ve known him.” She was breathing fast. “But he thinks of it all in terms of fiction, not of truth!”
“You’ve heard of jesting Pilate, my dear?” said old Chloe.
They went out. Barby and Todd were still in the little room, gazing together at a small portrait hung between windows; the picture of a bearded man, deep-eyed, memorably handsome. Mrs. Majendie answered their unexpressed question. “That is my husband,” she said.
Joan Godfrey, fluttering on the edge of the group, reached to readjust a small flower arrangement that stood below the portrait. “Chloe,” she said urgently, “it’s almost three.”
Barby glanced out the window. “Look, Mamma,” she said with interest, “there’s Mr. Nelsing and Mr. Slater. How did they know we were here?”
“Those two? No, they must be after me again,” said Mrs. Majendie with an ineffable accent of scorn. Georgine thought, —Cass said they wouldn’t get much change out of the old lady, and I’ll bet she was right!— “Are they the visitors we’re expecting, Joan? Did they tell you what it’s about this time?”
Miss Godfrey looked at her, the black eyes rolling brightly sideways.
“They did, I can see. Well, out with it!”
“It’s so absurd—” Joan Godfrey muttered.
“Then we can all laugh. What is it?”
“It’s—about what they found in the compost heap.”
Chloe Majendie fixed her with a sudden look. “In our compost heap? Do you mean where they were raking, yesterday afternoon?” Joan nodded. “Did the Inspector tell you he’d found anything?”
“No, Chloe. I went down after they had gone and looked about myself, and for a time I found nothing at all, but there was a vibration of something—it was in direct denial of Truth, so that the waves were very sharp, and I didn’t dare to stop looking. And when I found it, I hoped that the police had overlooked it; but there must have been others.”
“Joan, what did you find? That young Inspector is ringing the doorbell, and I prefer to be aware of what he’s talking about.”
Hastily, mutely, before she scuttled to the door, Joan Godfrey brought a hand out of her pocket and exhibited a few scraps of metal. They were twisted and bent, but one of them showed the threads of a screw top, and another the fragments of a label.
The scraps had once been part of a metal inhaler, and it looked very much as if someone had been experimenting at taking it apart.
There was a door from the library into the garden, and the McKinnons made their exit unobserved. Todd and Georgine murmured together as they went hastily down the hairpin curves of the path.
“She’ll say they were planted.”
“Certainly, and they could have been; but that’s what one would say anyway.”
“That Godfrey woman’s scared to death that Chloe’s guilty.”
“Or maybe just that she’ll be accused; or maybe she wants her to be! Those vibrations of evil worked amazingly well—do you suppose she planted the inhalers herself?”
“Or is the old lady above justice, and would she throw them away, with magnificent carelessness, and not worry about their being found?”
Georgine slackened her pace, to let Barby get a little ahead. “Todd, if Mrs. Majendie had by any chance bumped off Hartlein, isn’t the only conceivable motive a ritual one?”
“The only one I could guess,” said Todd, “but that might not be the real one.”
“Don’t confuse the issue. I’ve been wondering just how much she believes in it herself. D’you notice she says that people die, not that they ‘pass into the cosmos’ or whatever the Beyond-Truthers say? What if she kept the thing going more as a memorial to the old boy than as a conviction of her own?”
“Seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” Todd objected mildly.
“Look, she wasn’t just one of his disciples, she loved him. She loved him as
a man.”
“Lots of women keep flowers in front of a portrait of the dear departed.”
“That’s Joan’s doing, I bet you,” said Georgine scornfully. “But Chloe has another picture of him. It’s on her bed-table, and it’s a little old snapshot—and he’s in a pair of overalls, and laughing, and not a bit Messiah-like. He must have been attractive as all-get-out, if you happen to care for beards. But you don’t have to believe in what a man teaches, if you love him enough.” They had reached the level now, and Barby was running ahead to the car. Georgine added, “I leave Jim’s picture in Barby’s room, I don’t have a snapshot in a cloisonné frame by my bed.”
“I should damn’ well hope not,” said Todd, feeling for his car keys. Georgine giggled. “That,” she amended, “was by way of a figure of speech.”
She stood still, and put a hand on his arm. “Remind me to tell you later about the cat clue; it fizzled out completely. And, Todd—are you going to point out that resemblance to Nelse— between the picture and Mrs. Majendie?”
“Point out to Nelse?” her husband repeated with fine scorn. “That guy doesn’t need things pointed out to him, I’ll bet he was onto that while I was still getting my eyes into focus in Hartlein’s room. —Yes, cricket, we’re coming as fast as our age will allow.”
***
The McKinnons never asked Inspector Nelsing to dinner while he was working on a case in which Todd might be interested, a delicate shade of feeling which he had always seemed to appreciate; yet on this Sunday evening he had flabbergasted them by calling up and asking himself. “We’d love to have you,” Georgine had replied, and then inquired candidly, “Why tonight, Nelse? Strictly from hunger?”
“Well, no, not strictly,” Nelsing had said. Before and during the meal, however, he talked with great vigor about anything except the death of Hugh Hartlein. Georgine was puzzled. He acted oddly as if he were shying away from the subject and yet wished to mention it.
She went round the living-room windows after dinner, carefully closing the blinds. She was conscious of Nelsing’s look, half-scornful and half-amused, and was not astonished to hear him remark, “Scared of your own shadow, even in a case like this?”
“Now look,” she replied tartly, “don’t you sit there, full to the collar-bone with our meatballs and spaghetti and two pieces of lemon pie, and poke fun at me.”
“Man’s got no manners,” said Todd.
“Man’s speaking the truth,” Nelsing rejoined.
“All right, you ought to know by now that I behave with, uh, normal caution. We did neglect the blinds for a while, and Hartlein spied on us, that night he came. What’s more, we have that empty house next door, the Manfreds won’t be home for two weeks more. I go in now and then—they left me the key so I could use their ironer and air the place for them—and I fairly hold my breath every time I open the door.”
“You’ve got Berkeley’s best and finest patrolling the houses whose owners are away.”
“Well, sure, they drive by every night and look up to see if there are any suspicious lights or movements; you couldn’t expect ’em to do more. But what if somebody’s just waiting there in the dark? And there’s that hedge across from our house to the Manfreds’, in front of the drying yard. There could be a regular witches’ sabbath going on there, and your officer wouldn’t be able to see from the street.”
“Now, hold on, Georgine,” Todd said. “I really think that would attract his attention—one way or another.”
“Maybe you’re right. The girls fly in, I understand.”
“Dressed in a li’le ointment and nothing more.”
Georgine laughed. She certainly was not going to express to Nelsing her queer feeling of the presence that waited outside, and that seemed to retreat a little when the house was enclosed from the night. It should not be troubling her now, in the presence of her husband and a police inspector; nevertheless she tilted the slats of the blind in a front window, and glanced down toward the street.
There was someone down there now, going past Nelsing’s car. She had caught a brief flash of light from a torch. That, however, could easily be one of the neighbors walking his dog.
“All right,” Nelsing was saying, “make your cracks now and get them over with; but I need to talk with you two.”
“Ha ha, so the police are baffled,” said Todd rapidly, “and have been forced to ask for help from the brilliant amateur at whose theories they had always sneered. There you are, Nelse—it didn’t hurt much, did it?”
“I’m assuming you’ll tell the truth,” Nelsing went on imperturbably, “because you haven’t a stake in the business.”
“You do pay nice compliments,” Georgine murmured.
“It’s natural for the rest of them to lie. There’s that question, was it suicide or murder? Either way it goes there’s trouble for somebody, or loss of money. You should have heard Hartlein’s mother on the subject.” Nelsing shook his head with reminiscent pain. “She thought he’d killed himself, you could see it sticking out all over her, but she can’t bear to lose out on that insurance; so she has to thunder out that Sonny wasn’t the suicidal type. What does she suggest instead? Oh, it must have been murder, but she hasn’t a shred of evidence to back that up. Battle-axe,” he added thoughtfully.
Todd grinned. “What do the others think?”
“They’re wavering back and forth—all except the insurance company.”
“I take it they hold out for suicide.”
“Naturally. I must say that Mrs. Majendie and the coroner’s court agree,” said Nelsing with irony. “They prefer not to judge by whose hand deceased came to his sad end.”
“There’s one person who hasn’t a stake in the matter— young Shere.”
“We don’t know that he has a stake in the matter. He’s the worst of the lot; worked so hard telling me about Hartlein’s depression and nerves in the week before he died, that he might as well have yelled ‘murder’ in my ear. He did point out,” said Nelsing thoughtfully, “that no matter which way he expressed himself, it seemed to be wrong. He was right about that. If this case ever came to trial, either counsel could tear him to pieces in five minutes. I can’t crack down on him, of course—nor on any of ’em.”
“H’m,” Todd said. “So you’re still on the fence yourself.”
“Sure. Damn’ near everything we’ve got points either way. Take that business of the series of ritual murders— it’s the worst poppycock I ever heard—and yet, Hartlein landed it on you and then died. We can’t afford to ignore it completely.”
“I know,” Todd said. “I laughed like a fool when I first heard about it. Then we began mentioning some of the names that came into that list, and—we got a reaction. I don’t suppose, uh, there were any more that he didn’t include?”
Nelsing shrugged. “We checked with the Contra Costa people. This is all unofficial, of course, no reasons given. Sure, there have been deaths in that community, plenty of ’em since it was started. Bound to be, when most of the disciples were forty or more when they joined. There’d be an appendix here, and a case of food poisoning there, and a cancer another time. All open and above board, physicians’ certificates and no suspicion. The Beyond-Truthers don’t do faith healing. There was old Nikko Majendie himself, for that matter; he died of what sounds like virus pneumonia, though they didn’t have that diagnosis then. Carried him off in four or five days.”
“So?” said Todd, looking at him. “You can’t help wondering if he was a backslider, too; and if any of those other people might have been.”
Nelsing stirred rather uneasily. “No way to find out unless you went out to the Colony and put some of the disciples through the mill. Fat chance we’d have of getting anything there, what with the fact that we’ve got no authority in that county, and the fact that they wouldn’t tell us if there was anything screwy about those deaths, and if they did open up it’d likely be Cosmic Truth and not related to the common variety—and the most important fact, tha
t we’re not sure if this is a murder. I’m stymied,” he added in an unusual burst of irritation, “and yet I can’t leave the thing alone. What happened to that Bourbon I brought up with me?”
He was served; he took a drink and appeared to be calmed by it. Todd, sitting down with his own drink, remarked, “Just the same, for my own part I’d like to see that colony. It’s only fifteen or twenty miles from Barby’s school. When we took her back this afternoon, I was tempted to make a detour.”
Nelsing appeared to be turning over something in his mind. “Wonder how much they’d tell us about personalities, if nobody brought up the subject of mysterious deaths? There’s the Godfrey woman, for instance. I’d like to know if she’s been loony from the start or got that way after she’d started traveling into the cosmos. Maybe they’re all loony.”
“Now there,” said Georgine, laying down the dress she was lengthening for her daughter, “is somebody I can see committing a chain of ritual murders—Godfrey, I mean. Only if she did, she would never be able to resist pinning the sign of the Pointing Hand on each victim’s chest, and maybe staying around to gloat.”
“You have a point there,” Todd said. “Question is, would she have the ability to kill off those people in so many ways? Your Maniac-Sane-on-the-Surface generally sticks to one modus operandi; that in itself becomes part of his mania. Isn’t that so, Nelse?”
“Most criminals stick to the same m. o.,” said Nelsing unencouragingly.
“No, if this is a case of Vengeance to Backsliders,” Todd pursued, “it’s a li’le too subtly done for Miss Godfrey’s type. The old lady could manage it if anyone could.”
“Barby liked Mrs. Majendie,” said Georgine.
Nelsing gave her a withering look. “How about dogs, do they love her too?”
“Why, I don’t know!” said Georgine brightly. “Couldn’t we borrow a dog and take it up there—”
“Or better yet,” Todd interrupted, “test Barby on a series of known murderers, and if she lit up for any of ’em we’d know she’s not infallible, but if she didn’t we could hire her out as a human litmus paper. About time the cricket began to make you some money, Georgine.”
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