by Frances
“Hello, Alden,” Pam said. “You’re looking—”
Major Alden Buddie, Jr., was not impolite but he was not interested. He broke in.
“Oh, Sand,” he said. “Rye and plain water, will you?” Sand bowed. Major Buddie turned back to Pam, raising his eyebrows in step. “Martini,” Pam told him. She went on, a little hurriedly. “Aunt Flora and I are drinking martinis today.”
“Out of a small shaker,” Aunt Flora reminded her. Sand said, “Certainly, madam.”
“No olives,” Aunt Flora said, on second thought. “You can’t tell. Recesses.”
Benjamin Craig and Major Buddie looked at her with vague interest and then at each other. Ben smiled and Major Buddie accepted the smile. That was the way mother was, the half-brothers agreed. Pam shook her head very slightly at Aunt Flora. Ben ordered sherry, and the major, suddenly very businesslike, demanded that somebody tell him where the girls were.
“Gadding about,” he said, with disfavor.
“Not Judy, anyway,” Pam told him. “She came in a few minutes ago. With Nemo. He barked at the cats. At one cat, rather.”
“Cats?” said Major Buddie. “What cats? Who’s got cats?” He looked suspiciously at his mother.
“I have,” Pam told him. “Very nice cats.”
She said it defensively. But Major Buddie surprised her.
“Of course,” he said. “All cats are nice.” It sounded very obvious as he phrased it. “Where are they?”
Pam told him where they were. She said that she would take him to see them, or bring them to see him, after dinner. If he liked.
“Naturally,” said the major. “Always like to see cats. Some sense to cats. The others—always yapping. Bite, too.”
That must be dogs, Pam decided. Then she remembered. It was a family joke; Major Buddie, who was afraid of nothing else that anyone knew about, was afraid of dogs. Or was, at any rate, unhappy in the presence of dogs. He had a chance to prove it almost at once, because Nemo entered. The cocker observed the family group, and the major observed him, haughtily. Nemo rounded the major, flattened himself at Pam’s feet and smelled her shoes. He looked up at her with doubt and went to Aunt Flora. He put his forepaws on Aunt Flora’s precipitous knees and looked at her longingly. She pulled his drooping ears and he extended his right paw. She took it and his soft brown eyes filled overwhelmingly with devotion.
“Hello, everybody,” Judy said from the doorway. “Oh—Dad! Sorry about Nemo. Come here, Nemo.”
Nemo went. Judy snapped the green leash to his collar and pulled him into the hall. She returned, alone.
“Hooked him to the banisters,” she explained. “Dad doesn’t like him much, do you, Dad?”
“No,” the major said. “Where’s your sister?”
Judy answered almost too quickly.
“She wanted me to tell you,” she said. “She ran into a girl she used to go to school with and—and—. You know how it is, Dad. She said not to wait dinner, because she might be late. It was Mary Conover, I think, and you know—.”
She’s talking too much, Pam thought. Too much and too—too anxiously. But then Sand came in with a tray and bottles and glasses and Judy stopped, as if she were glad to stop. Sand put the tray down on a side table, poured drinks and passed them. Pam watched him pour martinis from a small shaker into clean glasses; watched Aunt Flora’s glass until she lifted it from the serving tray. All right so far. Pam took her own drink. Sand made good martinis, but they needed lemon peel. Judy, her father’s eyes on her, took sherry with her Uncle Ben. Pam remembered she was standing and that the men were standing with her and stepped backward to a chair. For a moment they sipped.
“Hello, everybody,” a new voice said. “Oh, Pam! Darling! Hello!”
You would have guessed that Clem and Judy Buddie were sisters or you would, at the least, have wondered whether they might not be sisters. But still they were very different. Clem, standing in the door, was not so tall as Judy. She was quicker, brighter, more compact—and infinitely more assured. Her eyes were blue, like Judy’s, but her cascading hair, uncovered, was auburn. The brightness came from her hair. It came from her reddened lips and from a kind of excitement which entered the room with her.
“Clem!” Judy said, half starting up. “I thought—.”
There was a look between the sisters. And did Clem’s jaunty head shake just perceptibly? Nobody else seemed to notice, and Pam wondered. I’m seeing things, she thought. It’s this arsenic business.
“Stood up, darling,” Clem said gaily. “Helen didn’t show. Kept me—.”
“Oh,” Judy said, and spoke quickly. “It was Helen, wasn’t it? I couldn’t remember—I told Dad Mary Conover.”
There was no pause this time.
“No,” Clem said. “You were mixed up, darling. Helen. But it was only half a date, really—just one of those I’ll-come-if-I-can-but-don’t-wait sort of things. And apparently she couldn’t. And anyway, if I’d known that Pam—.”
She crossed to perch on the arm of Pam’s chair, to say, “Ah, martinis!” with evidences of delight and to call to Sand across the room. Sand brought a martini for Clem Buddie.
It was family talk then for a quarter of an hour, with Ben refilling his glass and Judy’s, waving his half-brother toward the whiskey decanter, solicitously carrying the martini shaker to his mother and to Pam. Then Sand announced dinner. They went back to the dining room, which occupied the rear half of the same floor. The table was long and candles lighted it. Aunt Flora went firmly to the far end and sat in the large chair; for Pam she patted the one at her right. Pamela sat down, feeling surrounded by family. She looked around the circle—Cousin Alden Buddie at her right, Cousin Benjamin at the end, opposite his mother as became the resident son, the girls opposite.
“Looking for Chris, dearie?” Aunt Flora enquired, while Sand passed soup. “Thought he’d be here myself. Telephoned Sand he couldn’t come at the last minute. Something about dinner with somebody who might put on his play. Nonsense, of course.”
“Well,” Pam said. “You can’t tell about the theater.”
It seemed a safe remark.
“And Harry eats in his room when there’s a crowd,” Aunt Flora added. “Doesn’t like crowds, Harry doesn’t. Particularly of relatives.” She looked around the table. “Can’t say I do myself,” she added. “Except you of course, dearie.”
She looked around the table. Everybody was eating soup.
“I tried to get him down tonight though, dearie,” Aunt Flora went on. “And I wanted Chris, too.”
She spoke loudly enough for all to hear. There was something in her voice which commanded attention.
“Wanted you to see them all, dearie,” Aunt Flora continued, only ostensibly to Pam. “See them all in a bunch. Because it was one of them, Pamela.”
Everybody was looking at Aunt Flora, now. Her yellow wig bobbed.
“That’s right,” she said. “One of you. Tried to poison me, one of you did. Arsenic, it was.”
She looked around at them, her eyes bright with interest.
“Nasty stuff, arsenic,” she said. “People put it in soup.”
There was a clatter. Benjamin Craig dropped the filled soup spoon he had raised to his lips. It clattered against the soup plate and fell in. It splashed.
3
TUESDAY
8:15 P.M. TO ABOUT MIDNIGHT
Dinner had not, accountably enough, ranked as a successful occasion. Sand, to be sure, moved silently and in order between the tiny serving pantry, supplied by an electric dumb waiter from the kitchen on the ground floor, and the table. Aunt Flora had, to be sure, eaten with apparent satisfaction and Pam had found time, between observations, to nibble contentedly. But it could not be argued that anybody else had really enjoyed the meal.
There had been exclamations, and expressions of shocked and incredulous amazement, and demands for further information. These Aunt Flora had squelched. She did not, she said, see any reason for discussing unple
asant things at meal-time. Even she noticed a slight inconsistency in this attitude, but met it by explaining that she had thought they would want to know before they ate. This logic escaped Pam and seemed to escape the rest; it was evident, indeed, that few of the others had left much interest in food. But all of them, under Aunt Flora’s watchful eye, took token bites. They took their bites with a kind of bravado, feeling, it was evident, like kings’ tasters.
Dinner ended and Aunt Flora, acting the role of hostess with uncharacteristic zeal and what Pam suspected to be sardonic amusement, suggested coffee in the library. The suggestion was not received. Benjamin Craig discovered he had some things to go over and went off, looking a little pale, to go over them. Pam caught the movement of Clem’s head which summoned Judy to join her and watched the two girls, Judy so evidently uneasy and Clem so contradictorily secure, go out together. This left Aunt Flora and Pam and Cousin Alden, who drank coffee grimly and stared at Aunt Flora.
“Now, mother,” the major began sternly. But Aunt Flora shook her head and said “no” with decision.
“Not right after dinner,” she said. “When you’re as old as I am, son, you’ll learn to think of digestion.”
And then, when the major had shown signs of beginning again, Aunt Flora had got up, announced that she was going to her room to rest and gone. The major looked at Pam and, after a moment, nodded.
“Now, Pamela,” the major said. “What’s all this? Eh?”
Pam felt that she should come to attention, but resisted the impulse. She wondered what to tell him. The major’s eyes commanded.
“Well,” Pam said, “your mother thinks somebody tried to poison her. With arsenic.”
“Obviously,” said the major. “I heard her.”
“I don’t,” Pam said, “know all about it, of course. Only what she told me. She wants me—.”
That, Pam decided, was one of the things she might better not have said. But Major Buddie only nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. Intelligence work. Nonsense, of course. Eh?”
It was of course nonsense, Pam agreed. She had merely happened, because she knew a detective, to have been a little involved in the investigation of one or two small matters. Small murders, to be exact. Nothing that a soldier would really regard as killing. And in them she had been hardly more than an onlooker.
“But,” she added, “you know your mother. When she gets an idea—”
“Yes,” the major said with conviction. “Well—go on. What did she tell you?”
The question was sharp, demanding. But then, Pam thought, the major’s questions would normally be sharp and demanding, admitting of no shilly-shallying by the answerer. And what, in fact, had Aunt Flora told her—told her that afternoon, skirting the topic and rebounding from it; now direct and concise, now tricked by her own impetuosity into rather remarkable divagations? There had been in it, somehow—and at the time almost relevantly—the life story of a horse Aunt Flora had owned as a girl, and there had been a good deal, at one time or another, about the first Major Buddie. It appeared that, had he lived, he would not have permitted anybody to poison Aunt Flora.
Pam edited her account as she gave it to the first Major Buddie’s son. He probably remembered that, a little over two weeks ago, Aunt Flora had been suddenly and unaccountably taken ill an hour or so after breakfast, and that for several hours she had grown progressively more ill and that, at her instruction, Sand had finally called a doctor? The major remembered.
“Something she ate,” he said. “As I told her at the time.”
“Yes,” Pam said. “It was something she ate. Arsenic.”
The major snorted, but Pam shook her head.
“Really,” she said. “She had—it—analyzed. She got the report yesterday. That was why she called me up and insisted that I come to stay for a few days, with Jerry gone and everything. But she didn’t tell me then. Only this afternoon.”
“Well,” the major said, “show you the report, did she? From the chemist or whatever it was? Showing arsenic?”
Pam shook her head. Aunt Flora had merely stated, not proved.
The major snorted again.
“Imagined it,” he said. “Nobody tried to poison her. She just ate something. Getting old, mother is, and won’t learn. Bad diet.”
“I don’t see,” Pam said, “how she could have imagined arsenic into—into what she threw up. Do you?”
The major looked triumphant.
“Didn’t show you the report, did she? Probably made it up. Or perhaps she did get a little arsenic, by accident, and—”
“I should think,” Pam said, shaking her head, “that it would be hard to get arsenic by accident. Unless you were a plant.”
“What?” said the major. “Eh?”
He looked at her darkly.
“Spraying,” Pam explained. “It’s accident to the plants, I suppose. I—oh, it just came into my head.”
The major regarded her head with suspicion, but apparently decided to waive the point for one more important.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” he said. “All in the family, Pamela. Mother’s getting a little queer.” He paused. “Queerer,” he said. “God knows—”
“Yes,” Pam said. “I know. But I’ve never thought she was, really. Not that way. Not to making up arsenic.”
The major’s face delivered itself of an expression of concern; his voice grew lower and more solemn.
“Afraid you’re wrong, Pamela,” he said. “We’ve been worried recently. All of us—even Ben.” His tone removed Ben to the outer fringes. “Been acting very odd, mother has. And that last husband of hers!” The major’s tone removed the last husband to the ultimate limbo. “That in itself,” the major added, sadly.
“I only met him once,” Pam said. “He seemed rather—” She stopped for a word.
“Exactly.” The major took over. “Of all the nasty, slippery, unwholesome weaklings I ever saw your Stephen Anthony—sorry, my dear, I mean your aunt’s Stephen Anthony—is the prize.” He stared at Pam, waiting for the words to sink in. “And I’ve seen some,” he added, counter-sinking them.
“I always wondered,” Pam said, “how Aunt Flora who—who’d known so many men, and seen so many things, could bring herself—. I’ll admit I always wondered that. But I think she was lonely.”
“Nonsense,” the major told her. “Three sons, hasn’t she? Counting Ben, that is. And a lot of grandchildren. And that what’s-his-name—Harry—who hangs around all the time. Don’t think much of him, come to that. But at least he’s somewhere near her age. This young—weasel!”
“Relatives aren’t quite the same,” Pam said. “Even children, I should think. I mean, I’m very fond of the cats, but they aren’t the same as Jerry. Not really.”
The major looked a little baffled, but put himself again on the track. Years before he had tried to make a rule not to listen to Pamela North when she interrupted and said things nobody could understand. He had, even earlier and with little more success, made a similar rule as regarded his mother. They threw men off, but, after all, they were women.
“Well,” he said, “can you imagine anything queerer than marrying this Anthony worm? That’s when we began to wonder—even Ben. I never denied mother was odd—not in the family, anyway. But after that! Well!”
Pam felt some sympathy.
“But after all,” she pointed out, “she’s got rid of him, now. And gone back to Buddie.”
The major nodded.
“Odd,” he said, “how she always goes back to Buddie. In between. Makes it difficult for Ben, at the bank. Checks and things.” This last thought seemed to please him mildly. “A bit of a blow to him too, I’d think. Never goes back to Craig, I notice. Must make Ben think.” He paused. “Even Ben,” he added.
“Not,” he added after a moment, “that Fred Craig wasn’t quite a man. Ball player, you know. I thought he was great, as a kid. Had a real spitter. Don’t see those, nowadays. Held
the ball like this.”
The major doubled his hand in a complicated gesture, as if he were throwing a ball. He looked very interested.
“Taught me,” the major said. “Had quite a spitter myself, once. Not like Fred’s, of course.” He moved one finger a little to the side. “More like this, it was,” he said. He stared at his hand reflectively. Then he remembered that Pam was looking at him and, when he met her eyes, smiled.
“Never made anything of it, of course,” he said. “Where were we?”
“You thought your mother was getting queer and imagining things,” Pam said. “Because she married Anthony. And that she wasn’t poisoned at all, really. But she was, I think.”
The major stared at her.
“Yes,” Pam said. “I think she was. I don’t think she imagined it. It didn’t feel as if she imagined it. When she was talking, I mean. Were you here that day?”
The major looked at her suspiciously.
“Here?” he repeated. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I was here. Didn’t think anything of it; none of us did. She was all right the next day. Or pretty near.”
“And the rest?” Pam said. “The girls? Ben? Harry Upstairs?”
The major nodded after the girls and Ben. Then he repeated, “Upstairs?”
“I always think of him,” Pam explained, “as Harry Upstairs. I know it really isn’t that—Harry Something-else. Parsons?”
“Perkins,” the major said. “Yes, he was here. And Chris and young McClelland, I think. Even Anthony came in.”
“Really?” Pam said. “Anthony too?”
The major nodded.
“There’s the man, if it was anybody,” he said. “Kind of thing he would do, you know. Funny his showing up, too.”
It was funny, Pam agreed. Because he had not, before then, been around for weeks.
“A month, anyway,” the major said. “She threw him out. And that day he turned up bold as brass and wanted to see her. Did, too. Ben let him in. Ben would.”
“But,” Pam pointed out, “Aunt Flora must have agreed to see him.”
The major nodded slowly. She had agreed to see him, although she had already complained of feeling unwell. He had been in her room for almost an hour until her illness had really begun to worry her.