The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  “What am I going to do Lucy?” she whispered, almost like a mad woman. “—What if Hugh finds out that I…I saw so much of…Mason?”

  “You should have thought of that a week ago—or a year ago,” I answered. I really didn’t mean to sound as unpleasant as I did, but I haven’t much sympathy with the eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too school of wives who think husbands’ chief function is to pay the bills. Anyway, if Hugh Taswell didn’t know by now what everybody else in town had known all winter, he probably never would. I said as much, but Hallie shook her head, still frantic.

  “Oh, you don’t understand, Lucy! It’s this man Luton! He doesn’t like me, he never did, not when Mason first got…interested in me. I’m afraid he’ll make trouble. He was over to the house this morning—I didn’t open the door.”

  A crafty little smile—except that putting it that way makes it sound more theatrical and less real than it was—flicked the corner of her mouth.

  “He came over to the Raleigh Tavern then when I was on duty, and went through with a party I had. Honestly, Lucy, I could hardly go through my speech. Every time I’d point to a piece of furniture I’d find him looking at me. I’m almost out of my mind, Lucy! I made Hugh go to a movie tonight so he wouldn’t be home if he came, and I waited. I thought I’d just have it out with him. But he didn’t come, and I just couldn’t stand it any longer, so I came over here.”

  I looked at her. She was scared green, and I’m not sure I blamed her, remembering Luton sitting in the chair by the door looking steadily at me. And yet—she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. She was holding back as much as she dared. I knew that from the way she’d hesitate a little and glance at me to see how I was taking it.

  “What does he want, Hallie?” I asked quietly.

  She went pale.

  “I don’t know, Lucy, honestly I don’t!” she said quickly. “You mustn’t think I’m not telling you the truth!”

  “But you aren’t, are you? I mean, not all of it.”

  She gave a little gasp.

  “What do you know, Lucy? You must tell me—you’ve got to, or I’ll go crazy!”

  She almost screamed the words at me, if any one can scream and still remain practically inaudible.

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, “except that you’re acting like a complete fool, and that if you don’t stop it, and quit dramatizing yourself and your affair with Mason, you’re going to land in—”

  I stopped, utterly amazed at myself. I had almost said, “—land in the cooler.” I thought wretchedly, “Oh dear—how have I picked up such awful language just in the three days Bill Haines has been in this house.”

  “—You’re going to have to explain yourself to the Commonwealth Attorney,” I ended more primly.

  Hallie closed her eyes. I don’t think she’d heard a word I’d said.

  “If Hugh should divorce me, Lucy, what would I do?” she said.

  “Don’t be absurd,” I retorted sharply. “Just because you haven’t any sense is no sign Hugh has lost his. He hasn’t any grounds, actually, for divorce, has he? Or has he?”

  “Oh no, Lucy… but if Luton should go to him! I tell you he hates me!”

  “If Luton goes to Hugh, he’ll get a thrashing within an inch of his life,” I said. “I think you’ve been associating with Mason Seymour so long you’ve forgotten the sort of man your husband is, Hallie. If I were you, I’d go home and find out.”

  She dragged out of the chair and moved miserably toward the door. Then she hesitated, her hand on the knob.

  “Lucy…have you…heard any more about the jewelry that was stolen?”

  I looked at her, too disturbed by the way she asked that question to answer it immediately. But I didn’t have to, she went quickly on.

  “Lucy…if you hear anything about… about me, will you come and tell me—please? I mean I’d rather go jump in the river, or turn on the gas, than…”

  “Nonsense,” I said. Then I added, not looking at her, “By the way, did you take Summers Baldwin’s card off my table the other afternoon?”

  She didn’t answer. I glanced up at her. She was standing there clinging to the door knob, her face as white and congealed as death, her mouth open, her eyes perfectly awful.

  “Hallie—what is the matter?” I demanded.

  “Then he did tell you!” she gasped.

  CHAPTER 22

  I didn’t know whether I should run after her, when she’d darted down my path, and stop her and make her tell me what all this insane nonsense was about, or just let her go and jump in the river, if she wanted to—she was a very capable swimmer and a cold douse would probably do her a lot of good. Anyway, I was too tired. I closed the door and picked my knitting up from under the rocker and took the broken needle out… and then—which I suppose shows I’m as unstable actually as Hallie—I threw the whole business, sock, wool, needles and all smack into the fireplace and set a match to it, and sat down and kicked off my shoes, and put my feet up on a chair and took a long deep breath—the first one I’d had, it seemed to me, for hours.

  But I only took one. The gate clicked. I heard leaden unhappy feet dragging slowly up the path, and by the time I’d got my own pretty leaden feet down and my shoes on, my lodger was in the doorway, looking as if he’d spent nine days and dewy nights in the lowest circle of hell.

  He sat down on the ottoman, his elbows on his knees, holding his head in tense widespread fingers. All the comical tragedy that had characterized his other dejection was gone. This was nothing but misery—stark, utter misery.

  “Oh dear, Bill,” I begged, “please don’t take it like this! Let me phone to her, or wait and go see her tomorrow.”

  He straightened up, shaking his head.

  “I’ve just seen her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’s going to marry Marshall.”

  “But she…she can’t I cried. “She doesn’t really care anything for him. Her father knows that—he won’t give his consent, and she won’t ever marry without that!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Bill Haines said heavily. “Maybe there’s…more to it than we know. I think she’s got it into her head she’s destined to make some kind of sacrifice for her family, or…or something. Marshall’s been in love with her for years. She says she never knew it till the other night. Says she can’t bear to make him unhappier than he is.”

  He got up and stood in front of the fireplace, staring down unseeing at the smoldering wool.

  “She admits she doesn’t love him. She’s sorry for him, and fond of him, and he’s always been swell to her—standing between her and that old warhorse Melusina. But it doesn’t make sense, Miss Lucy!”

  He gave my andirons a violent kick.

  “Yes, it does, if you know Faith Yardley,” I said. “It makes too horribly much sense.”

  He stood there, then sat down on the ottoman, his broad rumpled white linen back to me. After a minute he turned around, straddling the ottoman seat.

  “She can’t marry him, Miss Lucy,” he said doggedly. “She can’t do it. You’ve got to stop her before it’s too late.”

  I shook my head slowly. I’d much rather it had been some other way, but Faith knew now what she was doing. I was sure of that. There’d been a new gentleness in her face, pale as it was, when she came in from the garden. The two men in the library, her cousin and her father, were hers… a part of a deeper life that one had to have known the grave tranquil-eyed little girl with tightly drawn plaits and stodgy button shoes in another Williamsburg to understand. I shook my head again.

  “Look, Miss Lucy—you won’t think I’m just a damned cad, sore because I’m licked, punch-drunk and hitting below the belt, will you, if I tell you something?”

  “No, Bill,” I said. “No one would ever think that.”

  And I tried not to
remember Marshall Yardley standing in the path near the well, saying with such ominous calm, “What are you doing, Cousin Lucy?” I didn’t want ever to think that again, not if Faith was going to marry him.

  Bill hunched forward urgently.

  “Well, look. This is the way I’ve had this business doped out from the beginning…only I figured it was the Napier woman sent Marshall off his base. I thought, when she told me it was Faith he was nuts about, she was just making time, and explaining why she felt perfectly free to go all out for Seymour—pretending to lend Marshall a helping hand on the home team.”

  I folded my hands in my lap, wishing I hadn’t been so reckless with my knitting. It would have been convenient to have something to study so I wouldn’t have to look into Bill’s drawn unhappy face.

  “You see, I figured Ruth was a sort of tramp, but the kind that could get a guy like Marshall so he didn’t know whether he was going or coming. So that night when Faith’s engagement had been announced the day before, and he went over there and found Ruth there, he simply went off his nut. Because she was there, all right. She was still there when Faith went down—”

  He stopped abruptly, a shocked unguarded look in his eyes.

  “That’s all right, Bill,” I said wearily. “Faith told me all about it—about you and the gate post. She told the Commonwealth Attorney all about it tonight, leaving you and the gate post out, and Ruth Napier too. So that’s when you went back to the terrace and ploughed around in the cockroach powder?”

  He was staring at me.

  “You mean she told Crabtree she was at Seymour’s?” he blurted out.

  I nodded. He got to his feet instantly. “I guess I’d better go see Crabtree myself.”

  “Sit down,” I said. “He’ll come to you soon enough. Did you tell him—”

  “I told him I saw Seymour and left the place without seeing anybody else, or…hearing anything.”

  “Did you hear something?”

  He sat down on the ottoman again and began fishing about in his pockets, and eventually pulled out a mangled pack of cigarettes.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  As with Hallie Taswell, I knew he wasn’t telling me the whole story. And yet it was different. It wasn’t himself he was trying to shield.

  “Was Marshall down there, Bill?” I asked.

  He hesitated. He seemed torn between a kind of conviction and a kind of dubious sense of honor that made it hard to say what he wanted to say.

  “Look, Miss Lucy—somebody got into the back garden and shot Mason Seymour, and got out and tossed that shotgun into the Canal. It wasn’t you, because he was dead before you got there. It wasn’t me, because he was dead before I went barging back—having…well, maybe I still had some cockeyed notion that Faith would see the light, and was just telling myself something else.”

  He gave me a rueful grin.

  “Maybe I was just still fooling myself that it was because Seymour was such a bounder that I didn’t want her to marry him, not because I was crazy about her myself and saw red every time I thought of him having her. I don’t know. I know I’d have been glad to strangle him myself. I almost did, when he was telling me in the dining room, with that most superior smile, that he thought Miss Faith would make up her own mind by morning without advice or assistance from me, in that who-the-hell-did-I-think-I-was sort of tone that burned me up so it was all I could do to keep from sorting one out on his chin.—He said Doctor Yardley had agreed to leave the decision up to his daughter, and he thought I could quite safely do the same.”

  His lips twisted in a mirthless sort of grin.

  “That bucked me up,” he said, and after a moment he added, without looking at me, “that’s why meeting her five minutes later, on her way down there, handed me such a wallop. That and knowing Ruth Napier was still there, and they’d be sure to meet. I guess that’s why I followed her, I don’t know. But as soon as she disappeared and the train went by screaming like a banshee, I had a hunch something was wrong.* I wasn’t just sticking my nose in. When I got back there and looked in, and saw him sitting there like a goldfish in a bowl, looking like he’d faced a firing squad…well, I’ve been telling myself I had a hunch all along that something like that was on the cards.”

  “Was Faith there then, Bill?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “She told John Crabtree she heard some one outside.”

  He looked up and grinned.

  “I guess that makes William the guy with the maroon eyes,” he said.

  “She thought you’d gone. She looked back up at the gate and you weren’t there. She didn’t know you’d followed her down.”

  He nodded.

  “But you see what that does—unless somebody else was in the back garden: me and the shotgun and the cockroach powder and all the rest of it. I don’t have any yen to take the rap for Cousin Marshall, Miss Lucy—not and let him get Faith too. I mean, that’s too much.”

  He grinned at me, not too pleasantly I may say.

  “You see, I’ve been looking over that back garden, where it runs down to the railroad. If you’d been brought up around here, and played Indians up that ravine, there’s a mighty good way you could get up there from the back of Yardley Hall without going through the jungle next door, the way you and the colonial dame did.”

  I looked at him. The shadowy hand on the chain, the blood on the whitewashed boards, Marshall Yardley saying “What do you want, Cousin Lucy?” …I couldn’t keep them out of my mind now…nor Faith saying, “I went into the library—there was only a curl of smoke…”

  “What if she’s marrying him to…to pay for something, Miss Lucy?” Bill Haines said. “Because of what she knows…or because of what—he knows?”

  The clock in Bruton Church struck ten.

  “It’s funny about Seymour,” Bill said. “He was an odd sort of guy. Maybe he was going to settle down and cut out the middle-aged Casanova stuff. He always paid for his fun. More than that, he was as generous as they come. I was talking to his cousin today. He says Seymour gave him five hundred a month, and was always good for a touch if the wrong horse came in. He’s pretty down in the mouth about that second will. He says it leaves everything as a sort of endowment to Yardley Hall, with enough for him to buy a pack of cigarettes twice a week if the tax doesn’t go up.”

  “How does he know that?” I demanded.

  Bill shook his head.

  “Has anybody seen that will? John Crabtree didn’t mention it tonight at Yardley Hall. Maybe Mason wasn’t signing it until after the wedding.”

  “No, it was signed all right,” Bill said. “Ruth Napier was one of the witnesses, some lawyer here in town was the other.”

  He tossed his cigarette toward the fireplace.

  “Well, it works out swell for Marshall. Mason bites the dust, I take the rap, he gets the girl and Yardley Hall plenteously endowed. Neat, I call it.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not like Marshall,” I said.

  (There’s blood on the well at Yardley Hall.)

  “And anyway, how would he have ever got the gun?”

  Bill looked at me. “He was here the day before. He was coming out of the house when I came. He said you weren’t here. I didn’t know who he was then, of course. He had a newspaper in his hand.”

  “That would be the announcement of Faith’s engagement,” I said. “But anyway, the gun was here after that. Community says you were aiming it at my squirrel who lives in the pavlovnia tree.”

  He grinned.

  “I recognize that shotgun as my problem, Miss Randolph,” he said. “Gosh, maybe I did shoulder it and march down the Green—but I sure don’t remember doing it. You’re sure it wasn’t you? Or what about your lady in the fancy dress? There’s room enough under that paniered skirt to carry an arsenal.”

  “Don’t be prepos
terous,” I said sharply.

  “That’s not as preposterous as it sounds,” he replied calmly. “You know about hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. She’s certainly got the wind up about something.”

  “She’s scared out of her skin that Luton will tell her husband what an idiot she’s been, that’s all,” I said.

  Bill nodded. “I think it’s time somebody gave that fellow a break, by the way,” he said seriously.

  “Who—Luton?”

  “Yeah. Talbot Seymour says Mason picked him up when he was down and out, in Paris. He’d been a customer’s man in a private bank there, doing a little bucket shopping on his own, and he got caught out. He took hold of Mason’s affairs and cut off all the servants’ pipe lines, and saved about ten grand a year just in petty cash. He knew all the tax dodges, and never tried to chisel for himself.”

  I thought back, a little ashamed of myself after a minute. If I’d ever had a check for two thousand five hundred dol lars snatched from my fingers I wondered what I would have done… I glanced at the fireplace where Faith’s flaming handkerchief had fallen to ashes. Luton could have taken it to John Carter Crabtree just as well. The check had been his—it had his name on it and Mason Seymour’s signature at the bottom…like the signatures people used to write for the devil, only it was Mason’s blood had wet the paper, not the pen. “That money means a great deal to me, Miss Randolph,” he’d said.

  Then suddenly it occurred to me that maybe he hadn’t been so sure Faith had taken it, had just guessed that because he’d found her handkerchief there, spotted brown with blood. Maybe that was why he was dogging Hallie Taswell’s steps too, and if…

  “I mean, you’ve got to give the devil his due,” Bill Haines was saying earnestly. “He had his job to do, and I don’t suppose it was his fault that the guy that gave him a break when he needed it was a louse.”

  He got up. A sudden alarm gripped my heart. “Bill,” I said, “—what are you planning to do?”

  He gave me another mirthless grin.

  “Me, Miss Lucy? I’ll tell you. I’m going over to Yardley Hall, and I’m going to tell Marshall Yardley that it’s his cousin or his life. If he don’t give up the gal, I’m going to show his old friend Johnny Crabtree the hole in the back fence. Boy, oh boy—am I going to tell him plenty!”