by Leslie Ford
“I’m not, not really.—What I’m worried about, Miss Randolph, is…my cousin’s will. Luton tells me he drew one up leaving his money in some screwball scheme for Faith Yardley and the restoration of Yardley Hall. It was signed and in order, and in the safe in Mason’s study.”
Mr. Seymour glanced around again.
“Well, it’s not there now. The old will’s there, but the new one isn’t. So that my position is-”
“Is equivocal in the extreme,” I suggested, quoting the rather more literate Mr. Luton.
He gave me a sharp glance. “That’s right,” he said briefly.
“You’re sure it was…signed and in the safe?” I asked. “Did Mr. Luton tell you that?”
“No. My cousin’s local attorney. A young fellow in his office witnessed it, with one of the local ladies. The only thing in the safe now is a rough draft my cousin typed himself. That’s how I first knew about it.—And I want to find it, Miss Randolph.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Luton know where it is?”
He smiled. “I think not,” he said coolly.
“In fact,” I wanted to say—and almost did say—”you think if he did he would have destroyed it himself before now.”
Instead I caught myself and said, “Do you think I know where it is?”
He lighted the cigarette he’d been holding in his hand for some time, and looked oddly at me. Then he said—and not as pleasantly as he’d sounded up to now—”I thought possibly you might suggest to your friends at Yardley Hall that if that will should happen not to turn up, it would make things…well, shall we say simpler—for everybody.”
CHAPTER 17
“You’re suggesting, I take it,” I said, with as much self-possession as I could muster, “that some one of the Yardleys has the will in his or her possession?”
He looked at me coolly as I got to my feet. Then he flicked the ash off his cigarette and got up too. There was something lithe in the way he moved his body, as if he were part jungle-cat. He stood looking down at me, all the glamorous pretence forgotten.
“I just suggest it might be pleasanter—for everybody—if we got together some way, Miss Randolph.”
Then he smiled again, and followed me out onto the porch and up the garden path to the gate. He held it open.
“You see, Miss Randolph, I’m not going to sit back quietly and lose a comfortable income for life. I might even be forced to marry Faith Yardley myself—and that doesn’t fit in with my present plans.”
At just that moment I saw a slim white figure at the end of the street turn and stop, seeing me, and my heart sank.
Mr. Talbot Seymour saw her too. His eyes lighted with what I took to be quite genuine feeling. “Boy, oh boy!” he said. “I’ll just walk along with you, Miss Randolph.”
I tried to protest, but I couldn’t, some way; and then we came up to Faith. She stood there, hesitating, no sign of recognition on her face. They hadn’t met, then, I thought. She had on a chalk-white sports frock and a white open-crowned turban that made her honey-rich skin darker and warmer, and her deep fringed grey eyes almost black under her straight perfect brows and her crown of burnished gold. She looked too lovely—and too exciting, standing there. I didn’t need Talbot Seymour’s delighted brilliant smile to tell me that.
“This is Mason’s cousin, Mr. Talbot Seymour, Faith,” I said. “Miss Yardley, Mr. Seymour.”
Faith held out her hand. “How do you do,” she said, and her voice… I never seemed to have noticed until the night before how warm and rich it was. Mr. Talbot Seymour noticed it instantly. And watching him, it seemed to me that he and Ruth Napier must have been raised in the same school. I couldn’t tell exactly how he did it, either. I don’t even know now what he said, besides the usual pattern of condolence—nothing, I’m sure, that any one wouldn’t have said under the circumstances, even barring murder. But in some way he managed to convey to her that she was the loveliest thing he’d ever laid eyes on, and how on earth had she happened to be in Williamsburg, just as Ruth had done to Bill, in practically nothing flat.
Only Faith was more reserved than Bill had been. The only sign that she understood was a deepening of the warm color in her brown face and her eyes darkening under their long gold-flecked lashes.
“I hope you’ll let me call,” Talbot Seymour said, implying richly that the pleasure would be infinitely greater than the duty he’d be performing for his dead cousin. He started back to the house, stopped and turned to me.
“Let’s skip everything that’s been said, shall we, Miss Randolph? Good-by.”
“What has been said?” Faith asked, when he’d gone.
“A lot of things that can easily be skipped,” I answered. I was tired, and I was trying to remember whether, when I was a girl and a young man did the things young men used to do, like pressing a rose from one’s hair to their lips, it hadn’t been all just a dreadful waste of time. They seemed to do it so much better now, without doing a thing that one could point to and say, “That’s how he did it.”
Faith walked slowly along with me. It occurred to me that Talbot Seymour might be a rather dangerous stimulant, but I didn’t undertake to tell her so, nor did I offer any comment on her next remark.
“Mason always spoke of Talbot as a sort of glamor boy just out of college,” she said. “Why, he must be thirty-five anyway. Mason sort of regarded himself as Talbot’s guardian. I guess that’s why I always thought he was younger. I mean, it seems silly to rail about anybody being irresponsible after he’s got old enough to look out for himself, doesn’t it?”
I looked at her. Talbot Seymour was old enough, and shrewd enough, to look after himself very well indeed, I thought. Then I said something I really hadn’t planned to say to Faith at all.
“Faith—what about Mason Seymour’s will?”
She looked at me, puzzled.
“His—will?”
I nodded.
“How should I know anything about his will, Cousin Lucy?”
“I just wondered,” I said.
She looked at me again with her grave tranquil eyes, still puzzled. Then she said, suddenly, “—Cousin Lucy…who do you think did it?”
I shook my head.
“They’re saying in town that they’ve found some of the pink powder in your office. Is that true?”
“It seems to be,” I said.
She was silent a moment. Then she said, “They say he’s gone, Cousin Lucy…skipped town, without paying you his rent. And they’ve searched his things, because three rings—one of them a very valuable star ruby that Cartier’s sent down for Mason to…to choose from—are missing. And they say Mr. Baldwin never sent him to you at all; he’s been in Europe over a month.”
I don’t know whether I’d got to the saturation point, so that nothing else anybody told me about anything that had happened at Mason Seymour’s house the night he was murdered could surprise me, or what. All I know is that I just walked along perfectly calmly. When Faith was through I said,
“Do you believe any of it, my dear?”
She didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, looking directly ahead of her, “Aunt Melusina says it’s clear now that he’s a… a gentleman thief. Raffles, or something, she called him. He gets somebody like Summers Baldwin’s card, and presents it to somebody who doesn’t know his handwriting, and worms his way in. She says that’s why he didn’t come directly to our house, because she’d have recognized the phoney handwriting at once. She says look at the flimsy excuse he made to get around father, and then he walks off with Heaven knows what. She can’t find a 1692 wine cup we’ve always had. And… and then he gets into Mason’s and takes the jewels——”
“Murdering Mason first, or afterwards?” I asked.
She looked at me with her grave serious face.
“I wish he hadn’t gone away,” she said, in a dull aching voice.
I wished so myself, but I wouldn’t have thought of saying so. We’d come to my house. Bill’s car was not there by the picket fence where I knew I’d hoped to see it. I didn’t say anything at all till we were inside and she’d dropped down on the ottoman. Then I said, “Faith—has Luton been to see you?”
She shook her head, surprised. “No. Why?”
“Did you see a check on the table in front of Mason…that night? Try and remember, Faith—it’s terribly important.”
Her face had gone quite pale. I knew she was seeing again that bloodstained figure of the man she’d been going to marry, sitting lifeless at the desk. She closed her eyes. After a long time she opened them again. They were pale too, from that awful journey.
“I think there was, Cousin Lucy,” she whispered. “I’m quite sure there was. Though I wouldn’t have thought of it if you hadn’t spoken of it. It’s so horrible—I can see it all so clearly whenever I shut my eyes, and think I’ve got to remember it’s wrong of me just to have it all gone from my mind as if it had never happened.”
“I’d let it go,” I said. “I wouldn’t try to remember.”
She got up wearily, turned toward the door, and then turned half-way back to me.
“Is it true the shotgun they found is the one you keep in the office, Cousin Lucy?”
She didn’t look at me.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“Couldn’t anybody have taken it—I mean anybody except…him?”
“I don’t know, Faith. I wish I did.”
“You were over at our house that afternoon. Community wasn’t here. Couldn’t somebody have gone in and taken it? Have they tried to find out if anybody was seen coming in?”
I got up and went to her, put my hands on her drooping shoulders and looked into her face.
“Faith,” I said gently, “tell me—are you trying to prove he didn’t do it because you think he didn’t, or because you think he did?”
She raised her head, and then she buried it against my shoulder, her body shaken with sobs. “Oh, I don’t know, Cousin Lucy, I don’t know!” she cried wretchedly.
And then she’d gone, leaving me still standing there, my shoulder wet with her tears, my heart torn with doubt, yet clinging to a hopeless hope that it couldn’t be true. And then I sat down suddenly as two things popped out of my mind like a couple of grotesque and totally unrelated jack-in-the-boxes…one grinning like a zany and the other not grinning at all. The first was Melusina’s 1692 wine cup that her gentleman Raffles had stolen. I’d seen it less than a month before, being sold, by what the English call private treaty, to a collector for a Philadelphia museum for some perfectly unbelievable sum. And the second, which wasn’t nearly so amusing, was Summers Baldwin’s card that Hallie Taswell had seen on my parlor table.
I reached out and pulled the bell cord. Community, just leaving for the afternoon, heard the silvery jingle and came into the parlor, in a starched lavender percale dress and a white straw hat with a red rose on the crown, a paper of scraps for her chickens under her arm.
“Community,” I said, “—when did you see the card Mr. Haines brought last?”
“Yes’dy evenin’, ’fo’ Ah wen’ home, Mis’ Lucy. It warn’t there when Ah come back. Ah look fo’ it to show Joe nex’ do’, they’s always braggin’ ’bout havin’ sech grand comp’ny ovah theah.”
“But you didn’t see anybody here? I mean when you came back?”
“No, ma’am.”
—And Hallie Taswell, I thought, had told Melusina she couldn’t read all the card because Community interrupted her.
“Has Miss Hallie been here lately, Community?”
“Ah ain’ seen her ’ceptin’ in that there coach once or twice lately,” Community said.
When she’d gone I sat there, thinking. Hallie Taswell had been to my house. We’d seen her, Bill Haines and I, coming out of Mason Seymour’s place through the Lane garden, almost beside herself; and that couldn’t have been much later. But why had she told Melusina a story about not reading the card because Community had interrupted her? Why had she been so distraught at my wicked and unchristian thrust about people slipping through the hedge, when she couldn’t help knowing that Bill and I had seen her come out? Why had she sat so stoically until the blue coach passed John Crabtree talking to Mason Seymour’s cousin in front of the old Court House and then pressed her handkerchief to her mouth after she’d got past them?
CHAPTER 18
While I was thinking all that I was only vaguely aware that a car had stopped in front of the house and that the gate latch had clicked… and then I heard the door bang and a voice shout “Hi, Miss Lucy!” and my heart almost burst with joy as I turned and saw Bill Haines in the doorway, looking more like a drowned rat than either a gentleman thief or a murderer trailing clouds of pink powder. He had a bath towel around his neck and a damp pair of bathing trunks in one hand.
“Where have you been?” I demanded.
“Out to Yorktown for a swim. Why?”
“Why?” I said, tartly. “Only that you’ve practically been convicted of murder in the first degree while you were out there—to say nothing of larceny, theft, burglary, jumping your board bill and parading under false pretenses.”
He stared at me for an instant. Then he said, “Oh, gee!” and sank down on the ottoman.
And when I went to the phone and called the Commonwealth Attorney and said, “John, Bill Haines is here, you’d better come and talk to him, alone if you can,” I didn’t really expect he’d leave Sergeant Priddy behind. I suppose it’s just as well he didn’t, the way it turned out, because while Michael Priddy never did much in school he was born with considerable more mother sense than a great many schools could give. It didn’t, apparently, strike either him or John Crabtree as odd in the least that Bill should have taken the morning off to go swimming. In fact, the impression I got was that they wished he’d let them know so they could have gone too. The business of Summers Baldwin’s card seemed reasonable enough too. He’d given it to Bill just as he was sailing, the first of March when Bill was coming to Williamsburg. Then a man in the office had done something to his sacroiliac so that Bill had to put off his trip till the man came back from Florida. He’d kept the card and used it when he came. They could cable Mr. Baldwin at Nice if they wanted to, unless he’d already left for home. As for the rest of it, sure he’d seen the shotgun. He was nuts about guns, and always had been. But he hadn’t shot Seymour with it, if that interested them any.
And from that point on he refused to be drawn.
“This here pink cockroach powder, Haines,” Sergeant Priddy said.
Bill’s jaw went hard. I looked at John Crabtree. He tipped his chair back, regarding Bill and the Sergeant with the kind of deliberately benign glance that an old setter would give a pair of haggling pups.
“It looks to me like you’ve got yourself out on a limb, Haines,” he said peaceably, in that slow ambling fashion of his. “You can see how it is yourself. You go around to Seymour’s, have a quarrel with him. He’s found dead. The shotgun was in your room, you admit knowin’ it’s there, and bein’ familiar with guns. Then it comes out that only one person went back on the terrace through cockroach powder, and there’s a lot of it in your room. And your shoes just fit the tracks comin’ and goin’ through it. Looks to me like you’d want to explain how come.”
Bill’s lips shut like a steel trap. He shook his head. I could have shaken him. Instead I turned to the Commonwealth Attorney. “John,” I said, “—if I went through the hedge from the Lanes’ garden, is there any reason some one else couldn’t have done the same thing?”
My lodger glowered at me savagely, yet with a kind of relief…thinking, poor lamb, that I’d made a clean breast of the whole thing. He didn’t know that instead I’d mired us both completely, especially him.
John Crabtree s
hook his head. He also smiled a little.
“Nobody but you went through there, Miss Lucy. You, and another woman a good bit earlier.”
He glanced at my shoes.
“Your heel marks aren’t as square as hers and are on top of them. Hers just fit these pumps the ladies wear with these colonial costumes.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. He knew about Hallie Taswell, then. And Hallie, I thought abruptly, had been an old flame of his eldest brother, and Hugh Taswell was some kin to the Crab-trees. That’s the worst of Williamsburg—you scratch the grocer’s boy and you find a cousin.
John’s face was an amiable mask turned back to Bill Haines, sitting there tight-lipped and rather pale in spite of his fresh sunburn.
“I’m goin’ to ask you not to leave town, Mr. Haines,” he said. “I’d like you to keep an eye on Miss Lucy here. Wouldn’t want her to get into any more mischief. Hear?”
When they’d gone I said to Bill, “Why don’t you tell them the whole thing from the beginning?”
He shook his head.
“Then will you tell me one thing: did you know Mason Seymour and this man Luton before you came here?”
He nodded. “I met them one summer crossing the Atlantic. Once after that in New York. And I don’t like Luton any more than I liked his boss.—And if you don’t mind I’m going to get dressed.”
He went out to the office, and I went to the phone and called Faith.
“He’s back, darling,” I said. I told her that the Commonwealth Attorney and the City Sergeant had seen and talked to him, and he wasn’t in jail, and that was that, and to give her Aunt Melusina my love.
Her voice over the phone seemed strange and rather choked to me as she said, “Thanks, Cousin Lucy.” There was a long silence after that, but I knew she hadn’t hung up.
“Are you all right, Faith?” I asked sharply.
“I’ll tell you when I see you, Cousin Lucy,” she said. Then she added, almost in a whisper, “Is it…true, about the powder and the…the footprints?”