The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  He shook his head. “Not the way Joe put that powder down,” he drawled. “Not less’n he was an aerial trapeze artist. I told you that wouldn’t wash, Miss Lucy.”

  He shook his head at me and went on.

  “We happen to know, now, that three people were in the back garden—two of ’em after the powder was put down, one before. A lady with flat heels was there. There’s powder in the print of her heel by the pool. A lady with high heels left her mark by the pool too, only afterwards. She went up to about fifteen feet of the house, and turned and ran. Now, maybe she fired that shotgun.”

  I stared at him in horrified amazement.

  “We don’t really think she did, because her neighbor across the street says she didn’t leave her house till past eleven. Of course, maybe Mason Seymour didn’t get shot till after eleven.”

  Everybody in the room was looking at me, and I was appalled and speechless. And then suddenly I saw through the whole thing, but it was too late to do anything about it. Faith had turned to John Crabtree, and she was saying, very quietly, to save me, “Mr. Seymour was dead before that, Cousin John.”

  She’d fallen into his miserable transparent trap as innocently as a week-old fawn.

  Her father’s shoulders stiffened; Marshall Yardley let his head drop on his open palms.

  “It was I who started to telephone there—a doctor first, then you—and…didn’t… because I was afraid, all of a sudden…”

  The kind of innocuous triumph a child’s face shows when he’s succeeded in snaffling the largest piece of birthday cake beamed in John Crabtree’s face, and I could have shaken the life out of him.

  “I went to Mason’s after my father and my cousin came back and were out in the garden.”

  Her calm grey eyes touched mine as they passed.

  (And I remembered: But nobody was there, Cousin Lucy…just a curl of smoke that hadn’t all disappeared yet. The window was open. I ran to it and called, but no one answered.)

  Yet Doctor Yardley, not raising his quiet voice, calling, “Faith! Daughter!” a moment before had brought her and Marshall in from the garden… I didn’t bat an eyelash. Perhaps all the Yardleys were standing together. Heaven only knew.

  “I decided I’d go explain to Mason myself,” Faith went on, just as calmly. “After all, it was my problem. I went to his house. The door was open.”

  (You’re forgetting the young man standing there in Scotland Street, I said to myself; and the gate that wouldn’t open, and the young man saying, “Even a gate post knows it’s no good, Faith—don’t go down there”)

  “I called, but he didn’t answer. The study door was closed. It seems to me now that the room was dark—I mean I didn’t see a light through the keyhole or under the door—but I didn’t notice it then. I just somehow didn’t make any attempt to open the door.”

  (As I stood by that door, something touched me on the shoulder and said “Don’t go in there, Faith”…just as plain as I’m speaking to you, Cousin Lucy… I looked around.—Nobody was there, and I…I knew nobody had been there.)

  “I started back, up the garden path. Then I must have got scared. I suppose I did—it was awfully dark under the mimosas, and everything was so terribly silent, even the frogs, and I hadn’t noticed it before. I suppose it was the contrast after the train roared by. Anyway, I went back. The door had swung shut, but it wasn’t locked. I opened it and went in. The library door was open…”

  She stopped for a moment, and went on.

  “I saw Mason sitting there, dead. It was long before eleven o’clock.”

  “It was ten-forty-one when you picked up the phone, Faith,” John Crabtree said gently. “—Why didn’t you call Sergeant Priddy? That was the thing to do.”

  “Because I was afraid,” Faith said.

  (And then, all of a sudden, Cousin Lucy,… I put down the phone. You see, Cousin Lucy, all… all the people who hated Mason the most live at Yardley Hall…that’s why I didn’t call Sergeant Priddy…)

  “I thought I heard some one on the terrace. That frightened me more…it was so light, and horrible, in there!”

  She hadn’t once looked at her father or her cousin or Melusina. After that one level glance at me her eyes had rested on the Commonwealth Attorney’s and stayed there.

  “I should have called. I was too…too horrified.”

  Doctor Yardley leaned forward and rested his head on his hand. Faith got up suddenly and ran to him, and put her arms around his head, her lips pressing against his hair.

  “Oh, forgive me, Father! I should have told you, but I…I couldn’t!”

  Doctor Yardley put his arms around her, his head close against her young heart. “I’ve failed you so often, Faith,” he said softly, and she put her fingers on his lips, shaking her head. “Never,” she whispered. She sat down on the arm of his chair, her arm around his shoulders, his arm around her slim waist—closer together than they had ever been in their lives.

  Melusina pleated and unpleated the hem of her handkerchief. She was like a rag that had been wrung out in coffee, Faith had said before, and she was like that now. I glanced at Marshall. He was sitting hunched down in his chair, looking as if he’d been an hour-long eternity in hell. It seemed to me now I’d been blind as a mole not to have seen he’d been in love with Faith ever since they were children. I remembered now that when he was at the University he’d always got a job in the summer instead of accepting invitations from wealthy Northern boys to spend his vacation abroad or in New England. Melusina had glibly attributed it to the Yardley pride and scolded about lost opportunities to meet desirable girls with rich fathers.

  And what he must be thinking now I could only guess. “It won’t be so bad for the…woman,” he’d said the night before.

  In any case it seemed more important just then to wonder what John Crabtree and Sergeant Priddy were thinking. I saw them exchange a quick glance. They must have a signal code, I thought, remembering that that’s what I’d thought up years ago to account for their spontaneous devilment in Sunday school class. Maybe the old signals still worked, I thought, as John said,

  “If you don’t mind, Miss Melusina, I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say.”

  I think a desperate struggle must have been going on in Melusina’s soul. For the first time it occurred to me that the Yardley pride she talked so much about was a bitter cloak she’d wrapped herself in to cover up the disappointments of her own life, her own loneliness and the struggle with poverty and fear. The fierce tenacity with which she clung to Yardley Hall, willingly sacrificing Faith to Mason Seymour—even Marshall, whom she loved certainly more deeply than she loved anything—was the last desperate stand for self-preservation. The rest of us had taken the easier way, there was no doubt of that. Whether it wasn’t also the better way didn’t change the fact that we’d given up a kind of autonomy that Melusina had hung on to, and would, I thought, looking at her gradually drawing her wiry, almost gaunt, frame together, hang on to till the death.

  “I have nothing to say whatsoever, John,” she snapped at last. “Except”—it was against reason and Melusina’s nature to let it stop there—“that there was none of this nonsense about Faith’s marriage until certain people began to interfere”—she looked directly at me—“in something that was definitely no business of theirs—from whatever motive; whether it was plain ordinary malicious dislike of a charming and eligible gentleman”—that was me and Mason Seymour—“or whether, having no experience with the world, her head was turned by this young adventurer who calls himself Quincy Adams Haines”—it was my head she was talking about—“I don’t know, it may even be that knowing Mr. Seymour was no fonder of her than she was of him, she realized that Faith’s marriage would cut her—”

  “Aunt Melusina!” Faith said. Her eyes were black as coals. Melusina raised her brows.

  “You’ve never realized, Faith,”
she said coldly, “that Lucy Randolph has stood between you and me since you were a baby—so that we could never come to any real understanding, you and I.”

  Had I, I wondered, without being conscious of it—been paying her out for the trouble she’d made the other Faith?

  “You shan’t talk that way!” Faith cried passionately.

  Peyton Yardley tightened his arm around her waist. His face was stern and implacable, his lips hard. “That will do, Melusina. John didn’t come here to witness a family row.”

  He turned to me, his eyes burning coals like his daughter’s.

  “I know you’ll forgive this intolerable discourtesy, Lucy—for Faith.”

  Which Faith he meant I didn’t know—the girl who’d stood with him at the chancel in Bruton Church, or the one who’d stood by Mason Seymour’s murdered body, her hand on the telephone.

  John Crabtree and Sergeant Priddy were silently watching us tearing at each other’s throats this way, like mongrel dogs. It was too horrible. I got up.

  “I think I’ll go home, Peyton,” I said.

  “You’d better ask her, John, before she goes,” Melusina snapped—she was beside herself with rage—“who this young upstart she’s harboring is, and what he’s done with the jewels he stole from Mason Seymour.”

  I’m really a very mild woman, but I think I could have strangled Melusina Yardley just then with my bare hands and rejoiced at the job. And perhaps I should have tried to, I’m sure I don’t know, I was so angry, if John Crabtree’s slow voice hadn’t ambled into the breach:

  “Bill Haines is Summers Baldwin’s ward in the Massachusetts courts—his father was Mr. Baldwin’s partner. Mr. Baldwin just telephoned the Governor from somewhere out in the Atlantic this evenin’, the first he’d heard anything had happened down here.—And as for the jewels you’re talkin’ about, Mason Seymour sent ’em back to New York two weeks ago. Luton sent ’em by registered mail. He’s got the post office receipt and the jeweller’s receipt filed in the safe.”

  He looked at Melusina.

  “It’s always a good plan to know the facts before you do so much talkin’, Miss Melusina,” he drawled evenly.

  Melusina’s face had gone the color of old putty. I saw the mildewed reflection of my own face in the old Chippendale mirror by the door. I was grinning like a spotty triumphant cat. In the silence—there was something almost triumphant about that too, it seemed to me—I heard John Crabtree’s deliberate voice going on.

  “It wouldn’t have been you, would it, Miss Melusina, that tore the check out of Mason Seymour’s check book on the desk in front of him, now—would it, Miss Melusina?”

  CHAPTER 21

  I didn’t wait to hear any more. I had to get out of Yardley Hall. As Bill had said about himself, I’d go crazy if I didn’t. But I might as well have stayed, as I was practically crazy anyway before I got home, and if I hadn’t been, as it turned out, my getting home in itself would have finished the job.

  I never would have dreamed that the familiar streets, silent except for the chorus of croaking frogs, dark except for the pale circles suffused from the old street lamps, and the fitful glow of a million fireflies, could be so full of menace. I ran down the stairs and out the drive to Palace Long Wall Street. Then, instead of hurrying down the Palace Green as I probably should have done if I’d stopped to think—even though it is the longer way—I turned left again into Scotland Street. I was thinking so many things, and trying to keep from thinking so many others, that I didn’t notice, not until I almost fell over it, that the white wicket gate into the garden was standing open.

  I came to an abrupt halt. In the pale glow from the cloudy moon I could see the little peaked roof of the well house again. My heart went cold. For the first time it struck me, with the force of a blow, that I’d never honestly tried to think who it was I’d seen there the night Mason Seymour was murdered…or what I thought he’d been doing there…or why there’d been blood on the well at Yardley Hall. I’d stopped it all on the threshold of my mind, even before Bill had said “If you want to keep quiet, Miss Lucy, now’s the time to begin.”

  Was it, I wondered, because so many things had been happening in a life where nothing except the Restoration had ever happened before? Or was it because I was just downright afraid to think about it? And now that I did think about it—if a whole series of things flashing into my mind at once can be called thinking—I realized that I’d assumed, in some dark way, that…some one—I hadn’t given him a name, I swear I hadn’t—had thrown a weapon down there. And that’s why my mind had been in such a turmoil when they’d fished that shotgun out of the Palace Canal. So it was clearer now, when I came to think about it. Some one had thrown the gun into the Canal, and had come back—it would be less than the distance from the Powder Horn to Travis House—slipped in the garden gate where I was now standing, drawn up the bucket from the well and washed his hands. That’s why there was blood on the whitewashed board, and then… I stopped. Had he crept on into Yardley Hall?

  All around me the great black clumps of box swelled and moved. The mulberry trees reached out their liquid arms. Who am I talking about? I thought desperately… and I said to myself, “Some one you’ve known all his life…people your people have known for three hundred years…maybe longer, back on the bowling greens of England, before Jamestown and Middle Plantation and the Palace and Yardley Hall and the United States of America.” And then—and I’ll never know why I did what I did, except that I couldn’t then have done any other thing—I crept through the gate, along the brick path between the eerily fragrant, softly murmuring mountains of box, toward the peaked well house with the long ghostly fingers of wisteria moving sinuously in the night air.

  I felt the dry flaking whitewash on my hands, and heard it crack against my body as I leaned against it, putting out my hand to take hold of the chain to draw up the bucket. As I touched its cold black links I heard a sound near me, along the path toward the house.

  My knees dissolved in a cold sickening stream, my heart pounded, suffocating me in my throat. I steadied myself, clinging to the chain, and forced myself to turn.

  Standing in the path, dark against the darker box, was a man. His voice came quietly but with a controlled undertone that I’d never heard in it before.

  “What are you doing, Cousin Lucy?”

  It was Marshall Yardley asking that.

  “Nothing,” I gasped, my hand frozen to the well chain, my body pressed against the dry brown spot on the whitewashed board that had been red and moist two nights before.

  “If you want a drink of water, I’ll get it for you from the house.”

  “No, no!” I cried—frantically, I suppose. “I must hurry home, I really must!”

  I ran back to the white wicket gate without turning my head, my hand still aware of the cold black links of the chain, the sound of its thin song in my ears again. I was still running, and very breathless now, when I got to the corner of England Street under the old mulberry tree. Its great tumorous boles seemed to me to swell and move. I stopped, and the terror in my heart died abruptly, and a new terror grew in its place…more than terror, terror and that creeping unholy fear I’d known the night before. They say a horse senses a rattlesnake in the grass beside the road; and I, frozen there, knew even before the dark figure disengaged itself from the mulberry tree that George Luton was there, behind it, stepping into my path, blocking it… and that I was too much of a coward to simply turn aside and go on to my home without speaking or answering him when he spoke to me.

  He said: “Have you got the check for me, Miss Randolph?”

  For a moment I couldn’t make my voice work, nor my lips; and when they did finally, I didn’t recognize them, nor what they said, as mine:

  “No—she hasn’t got the check.”

  I could see his eyes glint in his narrow sallow face. I started to move. His hand shot out, pinio
ning my wrist with a grip of steel.

  “Miss Randolph…tell them to give me that check…or I’ll tell all I know…”

  He must have let my wrist go then, but I didn’t know it, I could still feel that grip—I can still feel it now—the way they say a person feels a hand or a limb that’s been amputated, as if it was still there, still aching. All I know is that suddenly I was fleeing across the Court House Green, the grass wet with dew around my ankles, more frightened than I’d ever been in all my life or ever hope to be again.

  I’m afraid, thinking back, that it must seem dreadfully as if all I did those days—and nights—was fly back from some dreadful place or another to sanctuary in my own white clapboard house with its bower of silver moon roses set in the fairy circle of white picket fence trailing with scarlet rambler and woodbine and honeysuckle. In fact, it rather was all I did…except that my house wasn’t always sanctuary. And it certainly wasn’t now, with Hallie Taswell sitting in my chair, her head back against the carved rosewood frame, looking like death on a pale horse.

  The effort of pulling myself together, I suppose, made me brusquer than I should ordinarily have been, although Hallie has always, it seems to me, brought out the worst in me. I sat stiffly down on the sofa and took a deep exasperated breath.

  “Oh, Lucy, you must help me,” she moaned, rocking back and forth, ignoring the fact that she was ruining the sock that that Eskimo is still waiting for in his igloo in Alaska. I could hear the bone needle crack.

  “I’ll be glad to do anything I can if you’ll quit yammering and act like a sensible white woman,” I said, waspishly.

  Hallie looked at me with her big brown eyes, dark circles all over her face. In her ordinary clothes she lost, I’m happy to be able to say, a great deal of the arch coquetry that velvet bows and sprigged dimity paniers—to cover the fact that she needed to diet—seemed to bring out in her like a strawberry rash.

  She glanced at the door and leaned forward, gripping the arms of her chair.