The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  All night long I’d gone over that in my mind, and at the end as at the beginning, I knew it was at least in part my fault. If I’d told John Crabtree everything from the beginning, if I’d told him about the shadowy hand on the black chain, and the blood on the well at Yardley Hall, Marshall might not have died… and Faith would have married him, I had to add… ashamed because I did.

  Nevertheless, it was all too serious now for me to do anything to shield anybody—no matter who it might be—but Bill. I dressed and went downstairs before Community had brought my coffee, and phoned John Crabtree’s house. He was gone. He’d left early, his wife said; I could probably catch him at his office. But he wasn’t there either, he wouldn’t be there until nine. At a quarter to nine I went upstairs and put on my hat. As I came down some one lifted my knocker and rapped. I opened the door.

  Ruth Napier was standing on the stoop. She’d been crying. Her face was a mess. Her long loosely curled hair was raven black against the thick sprays of silver moon roses over the door.

  “May I come in, Miss Randolph?” she said. I glanced at the office. Had she been there first, I wondered? I held the door open. She went straight across the parlor and dropped down on the ottoman.

  “Tell me about Marshall, Miss Randolph!” she demanded. “Is it true he…killed himself?”

  “That’s what Mr. Crabtree said last night,” I answered.

  “Oh, that little fool!” she cried suddenly. “She doesn’t deserve all this!”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked sharply, astonished and bewildered by her violence, and by the great hot tears that drowned her dark eyes.

  “Oh, you know as well as I do—he adored her, and it’s her fault…”

  “Look, Miss Napier,” I said. “I think Faith wouldn’t care if I told you that she had—just last night after supper—told Marshall she’d marry him.”

  She stared at me, her great eyes blank, her red lips opened.

  “Then why…why did he…”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not true, then!” she cried passionately. “It doesn’t make sense, Miss Randolph!”

  She got up and stood confronting me, challenging everything.

  “You don’t understand…none of you did. Marshall was absolutely mad about her. It was killing him, having to let Mason Seymour have her because he didn’t have anything to offer her—no money, I mean. He was almost desperate, living there in the same house with her, with that horrible old woman always talking about keeping the Hall, not caring what she did to people’s lives just so that awful house could live!”

  She threw back her dark loose curls, her eyes blazing.

  “I suppose I was in love with Marshall. I don’t know—he certainly never knew it if I was. I would have done anything to help him get away from here and make a name for himself! But he couldn’t bear not seeing her.—I didn’t want Mason Seymour, but I couldn’t bear seeing him marry that kid and get tired of her in six months and make a wreck of her, because I knew if he did Marshall would kill him!”

  I sat down weakly. If the whole place had gone up in a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke, I shouldn’t have been the least surprised. This girl was a flaming torch.

  Then suddenly, as violently and passionately as she’d flared up, she collapsed in a broken heap on the ottoman, sobbing bitterly. I got up, went out and closed the door. Community was in the hall.

  “Take that girl some coffee,” I said. “And get her quieted down before she goes out of her mind.”

  Community looked at my hat and gloves, and glanced up at the hall clock.

  “You sho’ you ain’ done gone out a’ yours, Mis’ Lucy?” she inquired darkly.

  “On the contrary, Community,” I replied sharply. “I’m convinced that’s exactly what I have done.”

  “Yes, ma’am” Community said.

  She watched me as far as the gate.

  I went down Francis Street and up the walk to the new red brick courthouse and upstairs to the Commonwealth Attorney’s office. Mr. Crabtree wasn’t in, the girl in the bare outer office told me, but he was expected any moment.

  “If you’d like to go in and wait, I’m sure it will be all right, Miss Randolph,” she said.

  I went in. His desk with its swivel chair set in the dormer was like a vacant niche in an empty church. I sat down in the chair in front of the littered desk to wait. Whatever doubts I might have had about the wisdom of my course before Ruth Napier came had been entirely dissipated by her passionate avowal. I was a little chastened too. I’d been wrong about the blood on the well at Yardley Hall, apparently. I’d certainly been wrong about Luton, and about Ruth Napier herself. What if I’d been equally wrong about…well, say about Bill Haines, I thought dismally? What if the circumstantial evidence that surrounded him was true? What if it was true that the Haineses always got their girl—let the chips fall and the blood spout where they may? What if I’d been trying my level worst to marry the child I loved better than my own life to a cold-blooded murderer?

  “Oh dear,” I thought; “I wish John would come!”

  And then—and I suppose I ought to be ashamed indeed to admit it, and certainly shall never tell it any more after I have admitted it—I did a perfectly inexcusable thing, or rather a continued series of perfectly inexcusable things. John Crabtree’s desk was piled—even more piled than littered, when I got to looking at it—with stacks of typed reports. I had only to crane my neck the least bit—at first—to see that the top one was a statement in the Seymour case. Craning my neck a little more I could read it quite plainly—and I did.

  It was the report of a colored boy named Craddock who was a member of the C.C.C. camp working on the archeological diggings at Jamestown. He had heard a shotgun being fired in the woods near Jamestown the evening of Mason Seymour’s death, at about four-thirty o’clock. He was curious, and ran out to see what was going on. He didn’t see who fired the shot, but he heard a car leaving the place hurriedly. It was gone by the time he got to the road. He could however show the place where the gun had been fired.

  Attached to that statement was a photograph of a lot of shot marks against a group of loblolly pines. I couldn’t, of course, see that by just craning my neck. I had to reach out and pick it up, which is exactly what I did. After that the rest was quite simple. I went through the whole case without batting an eye, my conscience, heavily drugged with curiosity, slumbering profoundly.

  The next was a statement of five members of the staff of the Inn. Mr. Talbot Seymour had arrived by motor car at the Inn at eight-fifty. He had inquired the way to his cousin’s house, registered, gone to the phone booth by the desk, not in his own room, and phoned his cousin. He had then come out and gone to his room. At about nine-thirty he had left the hotel without taking his car. He had returned, talked to the desk clerk a few moments, and retired.

  The report of Talbot Seymour’s conversation with the desk clerk followed. He had been in Southern Pines, was returning to New York, had seen the announcement of his cousin’s engagement to a Williamsburg girl and decided he’d come down and look her over. He’d left Richmond about two o’clock, but he’d got mixed up on Route 60 and gone the wrong way, and then, to make everything worse, he’d had a flat that had taken him a long time to change. That’s why he’d arrived so late, and that’s why he didn’t go directly to his cousin’s house. He would however be checking out the first thing in the morning. Williamsburg was certainly a dead hole, and personally if he’d been Mr. Rockefeller he’d never have sunk fifty cents in it, much less fifty million dollars. He had looked at his watch, set it with the clock on the mantel, said he’d like some ice sent to his room so he could have a drink and turn in. He phoned from his room at nine-forty-five, asking for a boy to get his suit and have it pressed by morning, and get his shoes to clean—he didn’t want to unpack his bag. The boy had got his suit an
d shoes, which were in the valet’s room until Mr. Talbot Seymour phoned for them at eight-thirty the next morning.

  He had had a room on the first floor in the west wing.

  Attached to that report was a floor plan of the Inn. An exit into the garden was marked on it in red ink.

  Next came a complete dossier of the life of Mr. W. Q. A. Haines, from the service station on the Richmond Road where he’d stopped for a hot dog at four-forty-five, from the Information Booth by William and Mary College where he’d asked the direction to Miss Lucy Randolph’s house in Francis Street, to his arrival, and to my arrival—through the eyes of my neighbor across the road.—“I thought for a minute she wasn’t going to let him have her room,” she said. “You know, Miss Randolph’s right peculiar at times, and she don’t take in everybody.”

  Under that was a whole batch of cards with a lot of ill-assorted fingerprints on them. One of them, from the telephone in Mason Seymour’s study, was labelled, “Miss Faith Yardley; picked up the phone at 10.41, uncompleted call, by own admission.”

  Next was a complete photographic statement of the crime. I put that down quickly, sick at my stomach and my heart, and picked up the report of Joe Sanders, colored gardener at Mason Seymour’s. Joe had put down ten pounds of pink cockroach powder. Roaches and water bugs were what Mr. Seymour and Mr. Luton “mostes’ didn’ like.” They always kept a quantity of powder in the cellar, but it had got wet, so Mr. Luton had sent him for a fresh supply that day, and he’d put it around. Joe himself didn’t see that a few roaches and water bugs made any difference, and grumbled considerably. The other servants had grumbled too, because the time before it had got tracked into the house and Mason Seymour had raised Cain.

  Joe admitted too that he had oiled and cleaned Miss Lucy Randolph’s shotgun, and that he had borrowed it once or twice without her knowledge to go hunting, but he’d always put it back in the cupboard in the office. He admitted buying shells to use in it, but he hadn’t any at the present time.

  After that was a statement from Ray Byers at the hardware shop in the Duke of Gloucester Street. Joe had bought ten pounds of pink cockroach powder about three o’clock the same afternoon. He had bought shells from time to time, in duck season mostly. The roach powder was charged to Mr. Seymour’s bill. The shells he had always paid for himself.

  Next was an envelope labelled, “Sweepings from Miss Lucy Randolph’s office, occupied by W. Q. A. Haines.”

  On the card under that was part of the sweepings from Miss Lucy Randolph’s house occupied by herself, I suppose. It was Mason Seymour’s card with the invitation to supper written on it, torn in two, the two pieces pasted on a mount about half an inch apart. Under it, attached to the same card, was an envelope that said, “Contents of Miss Lucy Randolph’s fireplace.” I didn’t look into that. “I must make Community be more careful,” I thought, passing it by to look at a long and complicated report that meant nothing to me. It was signed “E. C. Callowhill, Ballistics Expert, Newport News, Va.”

  Under that was a long grey envelope entitled “Last Will and Testament.” I didn’t open that either, much as I’d have liked to do…knowing it was not the last will and testament of Mason Seymour, that his last will and testament had been torn up and burned by the man whose house and whose daughter profited most under it. Yet I couldn’t put it down at once; I stood there with it in my hand, unable to get it out of my head that perhaps Mason Seymour, in signing these instruments, had signed away his life. And not this one so much as the other one, the one that Peyton Yardley had burned.

  I put the grey envelope down at last and started on the next report, and passed it over without much interest, thinking it was just a silly waste of time. It was about Hallie Taswell’s husband Hugh, who apparently had been in Richmond attending an insurance salesmen’s get-together the night Mason was killed. And following that was a whole batch of drawings clipped together with a ticket labelled: “Diagrams illustrating wounds produced by shotgun fire at varying distances.—Gun belonging to Miss Lucy Randolph, Francis Street, taken from Palace Canal, 19th May, 10.15 A.M.”

  And just as I bent down to study the first diagram, feeling again a little sick at my stomach, I heard the jangle of the phone in the outer office, and I heard John’s secretary say, “Yes, sir. She’s here now, waiting for you. Yes, I’ll tell her, Mr. Crabtree.”

  I hastily stacked the Commonwealth’s accumulated evidence against a person or persons unknown—or were they unknown, I wondered; I had a curious feeling that all this mountain of detail wasn’t without some subtle and pertinent direction—back the way I’d found it, and got back to my chair. I was there, calm I believe, if a little flushed, when the girl put her head in the door.

  “Mr. Crabtree says he’s awfully sorry he’s kept you waiting, Miss Randolph,” she said apologetically. “He’s got to go over to Yardley Hall right away. He wonders if you’d mind meeting him there instead.”

  “Not in the least,” I said.

  “I’m awfully sorry you had to wait.”

  “That’s quite all right, my dear,” I said.

  She smiled. “I expect maybe the rest did you good, Miss Randolph.”

  “Yes, I expect maybe it did,” I replied.

  CHAPTER 25

  I wasn’t so sure of it myself, however, as I crossed the Court House Green into England Street and turned there at the cutting gardens behind the Archibald-Blair house into Scotland Street. There’d been too many ballistics reports on my father’s shotgun, and too many references in one way and another to Miss Lucy Randolph’s house in Francis Street to reassure me very much. It did serve, however, to heighten the immediate necessity for me to tell John Crabtree I’d seen somebody at the well—when Bill Haines was safe at home.

  I turned in the garden path from Scotland Street. John Crabtree and Sergeant Priddy, and another man, were standing talking, half-way along between the gate and the well house. I could see its peaked roof with the long full fingers of wisteria moving delicately in the air. John and Michael lifted their hats.

  “This is Captain Callowhill from Newport News, Miss Lucy,” John Crabtree said. “—This is the lady whose shotgun you’ve been trying out, Ed.”

  Captain Callowhill’s face had all the best features, I thought, of a brace of working ferrets. He was lean and keen and wiry, and as he looked at me I had a sudden panicky picture of myself in a diagram, all neatly plotted and subdivided with dotted lines running from my eyeballs to infinity.—Or to the well house; because I said quickly,

  “John, I should have told you before that some one…some one was here at the well house a little after eleven o’clock the night Mason Seymour was killed—and that brown spot on the well is blood.”

  They looked at me as if they thought the sun had addled my brains. Then they glanced at each other as much as to say, “Gently, now—let’s not get Miss Lucy excited.”

  “It’s just Bill Haines I’m trying to—to get off,” I said quickly. “I mean, he was at my house by eleven o’clock or a minute after, so he couldn’t have been pitching a shotgun in the canal. And I was back there at the wicket, after I left Mason Seymour’s garden… and I heard some one washing his hands at that well… and I saw blood there the next morning.”

  They looked back silently at the little peaked roof and the black wheel and delicate chain. Then they looked at me, and at each other again, and at me again. Then John Crabtree went slowly back toward the well, and we all followed him.

  “I came out here last night,” I went on. “On my way home. Marshall caught me here. He seemed… annoyed, I guess, though that’s not quite the word… as if I was meddling. That was less than an hour before he…shot himself.”

  John didn’t look at me. He said quietly, “Marshall didn’t shoot himself, Miss Lucy. He was shot from right behind that clump of box there.”

  He pointed to where a broken branch, its leaves limp in the morning
sun, hung down to the ground. The periwinkle and scylla under it were tramped in the earth.

  Michael Priddy didn’t look at me either, only Captain Callowhill, so I knew they’d been saying that Bill Haines must have done this too. My heart sank dismally, but I didn’t let go. I said, “It still doesn’t explain the blood on the well, John,” as if they’d actually said what they were avoiding saying because I’d said I wanted to get Bill Haines off. John turned then.

  “What blood, Miss Lucy?”

  “The stain there on the board.”

  They moved aside for me to show them, and I stopped, my jaw dropping in spite of myself. The brown stain that had been red still when Bill and I had seen it was gone, the well house was fresh and clean, newly whitewashed.

  I just stood looking at it, John and Sergeant Priddy looking at me. I glanced up, hopelessly, through the leafy canopy toward the house. A curtain in the transverse hall moved ever so gently back into place. A sharp anguished protest sprang up inside me. Bill shouldn’t be sacrificed the way Marshall had been, to save Melusina’s pride—not if I could help him!

  I turned crazily to John. “But it was there, I tell you!”

  “There, there, Miss Lucy!” he said, maddeningly soothing.

  “Listen, John Crabtree,” I snapped.

  “Now, now, Miss Lucy,” Sergeant Priddy put in. “You just keep your shirt on a minute. If the well’s been whitewashed in the last day or so, we’ll find it out. You just leave it to us.”

  I was so angry I could have snatched them both bald-headed.

  He stepped up to the well. Captain Callowhill and John Crabtree moved around behind it. “Is this in use?” Captain Callowhill asked.