by Leslie Ford
To try to say what horrible thousand imaginings were racing through my mind before sleep came would be like trying to describe a mental cross section of a madhouse. And when it did come it was worse. I kept dreaming and waking up and dreaming again that Faith and Bill were caught in the quicksands near College Creek, and that Ruth Napier and Luton were looking on, in some frightful subtle way hindering Doctor Yardley and Marshall and myself from saving them… and over it all was Talbot Seymour’s brilliant white smile and checked coat, weaving in and out a pattern so sinister and so hopeless that I couldn’t bear it.
When I woke up I felt as if I’d been riding all night at a witches’ Sabbath, and from the way Community’s coconut eyes searched my face as she poured my coffee next morning I knew I looked it too. When she said, “Mr. Haines, he look lak he slep’ all night in a thrashin’ machine,” I saw she was putting two and two together again…with what possibly extraordinary results this time I was too distressed to think.
And all the time I kept knowing I would tell Luton I wouldn’t speak to John Crabtree, and would speak to Faith, and I hated myself, because there’s something mean and degrading about fear. But the more I thought of it the more intolerable the idea of my calling him on the phone became. Finally, to escape being conscious of the phone, I put on my hat and left the house.
The office door was open. Community was in there, running the carpet sweeper over the threadbare rug, her deep religious voice singing over and over—
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,
Nobody knows but Jesus.”
Bill was gone. I knew that because his car was gone from the parking cobblestones under the elm tree. I wondered anxiously where he was and what he was doing.
I got as far as the Powder Horn across the Market Square, and stopped. In front of the old court house in the Duke of Gloucester Street I saw Talbot Seymour sitting bareheaded in his dead cousin’s car. John Crabtree the Commonwealth Attorney was standing with one foot on the running board, his arms leaning on the door, talking to him. There was a clatter and clop of horses’ hoofs and John looked up. The blue coach and four with its coachman in blue and footman in brown up behind him drove by. Inside was Hallie Taswell in her sprigged muslin gown and frilled white cap. She nodded to John Crabtree, and then, as they passed, I saw her put her handkerchief up to her mouth. The coach went on toward the Capitol at the end of the street, John Crabtree watching it go.
I went back behind the Powder Horn and down to the Travis House gardens, and through that way across the Duke of Gloucester Street to the Palace Green. Even if I didn’t want to meet John Crabtree face to face just then, I still think the sight of him had brought me back a little sanity. I was suddenly quite calm again, and aware that the only sensible and reasonable thing in the world to do was to talk to Faith, tell her what Luton had told me, so she’d know what was coming if he tried to speak to her.
But I didn’t get as far as Yardley Hall. A little crowd of colored boys and dogs and a few colored women in neat house dresses had gathered across the Green where the lane runs down by the Palace wall at the end of the Canal. Sergeant Priddy’s car was there, at the side of the big door leading to the Palace kitchen courtyard. I hesitated. Obviously something had happened… but equally obviously I was not in a position to join the group of goggle-eyed colored boys to find out what it was. Then a boy on a bicycle who delivers for the butcher reluctantly separated himself from the crowd and pedalled across the circle. The meat on his basket had soaked through the paper, so I knew he’d been there some little time.
“What’s going on over there, Fred?” I asked.
“I dunno, Mis’ Lucy,” he said. “They’s down there in the Canal huntin’ somethin’. Dunno what it is.”
I doubt if the hounds of hell could have kept me from doing what I did then. I crossed the Green. The little group broke apart and I went through, down the rain-guttered path that runs along the Palace garden wall, until I got to the level aqueduct where a little brook drains into the Canal. Then, seeing the gate was open just a little way along and nobody was there to stop me, I went in and through the shrubs to the Canal.
There I stopped. On the rustic bridge, under the long pale streamers of the weeping willow, and to the intense annoyance of a mother duck whose nest, I suppose, was near by, was Sergeant Priddy, with a couple of other men I didn’t know. Standing in the water, in hip boots, was still another man. He was fishing in the green spirogyra, among the lily roots and swamp iris, with a long rake. And just as I peered through the bay and laurel bushes I heard them all exclaim, and I saw the man under the bridge pull something up.
It was a shotgun. And I heard one of the men on the bridge say, “I figured that’s how it was—I was at the other end just before eleven and heard something splash. They musta thrown it over the fence from outside.”
I didn’t wait for any more of that. I don’t think any woman of fifty-five, used as I am to the mildest and least active kind of existence, ever traversed the length of the Palace Green and crossed the green of the Market Square as rapidly as I did. One of the ladies of the Auxiliary says she said good-morning to me and I told her I’d bake a cake for the sale Saturday, but I have no memory of that. I only know that I got back up Francis Street and through the white picket gate and to the office door very quickly indeed.
I didn’t knock. I hurried straight in and to the old press in the corner, and opened its door.
My father’s shotgun, that had stood there since he put it reluctantly away thirty years before, was gone.
I turned around. Community was standing in the door. She’d known it, of course, since the morning she cleaned Bill Haines’ shoes. I leaned against the foot of the sleigh-back bed and closed my eyes. Then I opened them. A car had stopped at the gate.
“It’s Sergeant Priddy and Mistah John Crabtree, Mis’ Lucy,” Community said.
CHAPTER 15
I didn’t realize, not until I saw the swift change in the expression on John Crabtree’s face flash into Michael Priddy’s, how revealing my own must have been as I came into the parlor. For an instant all three of us stood perfectly motionless, their eyes on me, mine on them, until mine moved and fell on the shotgun lying on a damp newspaper across the ottoman. Brief as that instant was, it was long enough for a whole new pattern to shape simultaneously in both their minds…for until that instant, the possibility that I—their own Sunday school teacher, one of the town’s most respectable spinsters—could have had any connection with the murder of Mason Seymour had never even faintly occurred to them.
I felt rather than saw their eyes follow mine to the gun on the ottoman, and to my father’s name, “J. P. Randolph,” burned in the polished wood of the butt.
John Crabtree wrinkled his face up and wiped his moist forehead. It was hard to know where to start—even I recognized that. So I said:
“If it’s that shotgun you’re worrying about, John, it belongs to me. And I knew it was gone, because I was passing the Palace when you all were pulling it out of the Canal. I thought it looked familiar—that’s why I rushed home to see if mine was missing. It is—or was. But how long it’s been gone, or who took it, I haven’t an idea.”
I saw a heavy weight rise miraculously from the Commonwealth Attorney’s almost comically furrowed brow. As his old Sunday school teacher I was glad it didn’t so much as occur to him to doubt my word—and relieved too, I may say. As a voter it seemed to me he ought to be a little more cautious about accepting people’s statements. That was before he went on, he and Sergeant Priddy together, asking me a thousand more questions—when I’d seen the gun last, where did I keep it, how many people knew I kept it there…
I tried to think when I’d seen it last. The nearest I could come to it was in March when we were spring cleaning and I had Community’s brother clean it and oil it. I always did that, two or three times a year.
“Was it loaded, M
iss Lucy?”
I shook my head.
“Who knew you kept it in the office?”
“I’ve been trying to think,” I said, which wasn’t true… I’d been trying desperately to think that Bill Haines of course knew, that Faith Yardley knew, that Marshall Yardley knew.
“It’s always stood in the corner press,” I said. “I suppose everybody I’ve ever showed the office to must know that, because I always open the cupboard—it’s considered very interesting by antiquers. I mean, practically anybody might know, if they were interested in knowing.”
John Crabtree nodded slowly.
“For instance, if any of us stopped to think, I expect we could remember a dozen houses in Williamsburg where they have old arms of some kind…not counting either the Powder Horn or the Palace. Mason Seymour himself had a lot of bowie knives and tomahawks and blunderbusses in the room over the coach house. You remember he collected old weapons.”
I didn’t go on to say the Yardleys had a whole armory in and around the iron chest in the old wine cellar of the Hall. They knew that, both of them, as well as I did, because they used to play pirates down there with Marshall when they were boys.
They both nodded. My heart began to rise, and sank abruptly as Sergeant Priddy said, “I’ll go ask Community—she might remember.”
I heard his heavy steps along the hall, and Community’s hymn stop. Then I saw that John Crabtree was watching me listen, so I sat down, trying not to look concerned at all. He sat down too, and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
“Miss Lucy,” he said, very kindly, really, “what all’s goin’ on around here?”
“—John,” I said abruptly, without really knowing until I got it out that I was going to say it at all, “Luton told me that Mason Seymour had written him a check, fairly large he said, and that when he found Mason in the morning, his check book was there, but the check was gone.—Is that true?”
He looked at me. “Did he tell you that?”
I nodded, a cold feeling that I’d made a ghastly mistake creeping about my heart.
“It’s funny he didn’t tell me about it,” he said slowly. “There was a check, all right. We got a picture of the one underneath it. You can trace the name, and the amount.”
“Was it signed?” I asked. If it hadn’t been signed, and Luton had taken it himself to cast suspicion on… I didn’t need to go any farther, for John Crabtree’s slow voice wiped all that—wishful thinking, I suppose you might call it—right out.
“Oh, it was signed, all right, Miss Lucy. You can see the signature plain. In fact the tail of the ‘r’ runs onto the piece somebody tore off, gettin’ it out from under his hand.”
I said, “Oh,” noticing the quiet glance he gave me through a cloud of blue-grey fragrant smoke and wishing I hadn’t said anything at all. Wishing that, it seems almost perverse that I should have then gone on the way I did.
“How much was the check for, John?” I asked. “Luton said it was right good size.”
“It was for $2,500.00,” John Crabtree said. He looked at me. “—You wouldn’t reckon the reason he came to you about that check, instead of comin’ to me or Priddy, was he thought maybe you could help him get it back quicker’n we could, would you, now, Miss Lucy?”
He drawled that out with a kind of cheerful guile, like an amiable and definitely homey sort of serpent.
It must have been in my imagination—that sudden faint odor of burnt cloth in the room. “Just how would I be able to do that, John?” I asked tartly.
“That’s just what I was goin’ to ask you to tell me, Miss Lucy,” he answered placidly, blowing a wreath of blue smoke above his head.
“He can never smell anything through that,” I thought— sharply denying an impulse to look toward the fireplace. I didn’t of course need to look there to know that the scattered black ash of Faith’s handkerchief was still there. I’d noticed the minute I came downstairs in the morning that Community hadn’t touched the fireplace. In fact, I’d even thought, for an instant, of setting fire to the accumulation in it myself.
And now, sitting there with the unmistakable odor of burnt cloth in my mind at least, I realized I’d been very stupid indeed. Not for not setting fire to the melange in the fireplace, though that was stupid too, but for mentioning Luton and the check. If the fact of the check was true, what other conclusion could the Commonwealth Attorney draw than the one he had drawn? I kept asking myself that, knowing all the time that I’d done it because I hadn’t believed the fact of the check—I hadn’t actually believed Luton’s story at all. I’d just been frightened by it, and by Faith’s blood-stained handkerchief…
John Crabtree said placidly: “Findin’ out who murdered somebody isn’t just takin’ the first fellow you don’t happen to like and sayin’ he did it.”
“No, I suppose not,” I said. I reached down and picked up my knitting, knowing that this last was just a friendly interpolation to help me save face, and that he was still waiting for me to answer his question about why Luton should have come to me about the check instead of going to him.
Just then Sergeant Priddy came back, the change in his kindly familiar face so sharp and alarming to me that the sudden tension in my throat was almost strangling. It was incredible, and terrifying, seeing him so, his jaw set like granite, his mouth a hard grim line.
“Tell me what you know about this young fellow Haines, will you please, Miss Lucy?” he asked curtly.
He sat down on the ottoman, grim-faced, watching me. He’d forgotten he’d ever sat there eating ginger cookies, trying to learn the Ten Commandments—especially the one that says “Thou shaft not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Surely, I thought, wondering desperately what he had found out, what Community had told him, that was what was happening now, only with inanimate objects doing it… Bill Haines never liked Mason Seymour!
I said, trying to give my voice the conviction that had melted to nothing in my heart, “I don’t know anything about him except that he’s a splendid person, that he was sent to me by an old friend.”
I didn’t say that he’d known Mason Seymour and his man Luton somewhere and didn’t like them, that he fell in love at first sight with the girl Mason was to marry, that he was now involved with another girl of Mason’s, that he was at Mason’s the night he was murdered, that he tried to keep Faith from going there…
“Who sent him to you, Miss Lucy?” Sergeant Priddy asked.
“Summers Baldwin,” I said.
The two looked at each other.
“Did you get a letter from him?”
I shook my head. “He brought a card.”
“May I see it, please?”
I went to the tea caddy where Community puts all cards two days after they’re left. There weren’t but a few in it. They dated back to Easter—mostly left by people who come from a distance and like to see a restored house that’s being lived in, so they can go back home and say, “And that lead blue really isn’t too dark, my dear…not when you get used to it.” I looked through them. Summers Baldwin’s card was not there.
In the Adam mirror I saw John Crabtree and Sergeant Priddy exchange glances behind my back.
“Never mind,” John said. “Did you recognize Mr. Baldwin’s handwritin’, Miss Lucy?”
“Yes,” I said. And then I stopped short. I hadn’t seen it for years, of course; and I thought suddenly just as I answered that question, “Did I recognize it—or was it just his name on the card?”
I saw Michael Priddy’s lips tighten still more at the look that must have been on my face.
“Anyway,” I said, “it’s quite simple to prove, if you doubt he sent Mr. Haines. I’ll telephone him, if you’d like.”
“Except he’s in Europe,” John Crabtree said. “He’s been there over a month.”
I just said “Oh,” rather miserably.
I shook my head. “I haven’t seen him this morning,” I said, and realized, from the quick glance they gave each other, that I was foolish to have said that.
I suppose that’s why I don’t have as clear a picture of how what happened next exactly did happen as I should have. I mean, I was so worried about Bill…or not Bill personally so much as the whole pattern surrounding him…that I didn’t pay any attention to Sergeant Priddy actually—until he’d suddenly just catapulted from the ottoman across the room and was down on his knees in front of the fireplace, and in a flash had reached his arm into it and held up, covered with the furry coagulated dust of Community’s carpet sweeper, the black cord with the frayed ends that had broken from my reticule.
I stared at it, my eyes rivetted, remembering it as one would remember a nightmare if it suddenly materialized in front of his face. I could feel their eyes—John Crabtree’s as they moved incredulously from the frayed silk to me, and Michael Priddy’s searching my face, not incredulously like John’s but as if appalled at the death of an illusion…one of the few, I imagine, that he still had left about people, now that he was a policeman.
It was the Commonwealth Attorney who recovered first. “It looks like you’d have to do a little explainin’, Miss Lucy,” he drawled.
“It looks like Miss Lucy and this Haines are goin’ to have more than explainin’ to do,” Sergeant Priddy interrupted brusquely. “Community says that shotgun was there last week. And you never use pink cockroach powder—but the sweepings in the office fireplace are full of it.”