Death’s Old Sweet Song

by Jonathan Stagge

  “That would only explain part of it, wouldn’t it? The hit-them-on-the-head-and-throw-them-in-the-pond part. A stray nut lurking in the fields—how could he know the twins were called White and that they were dressed in green?” Some of my original horror shivered inside me. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  Cobb looked up, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. “These pals of yours on the picnic—could any of them be”—he gestured—“crazy?”

  Put that way, it sounded so perfectly absurd. A homicidal maniac in the bosom of Ernesta’s little group of “our type of people,” Skipton’s elite who spent most of their uneventful summers pottering in their gardens or gossiping around a teapot!

  “No,” I said. “Never in a million years.”

  I did think of Caleb and put the thought out of my head.

  “Then could any one of them have any sort of motive for wanting the kids out of the way?”

  Love Drummond murdering her nephews because they’ve broken her Staffordshire china? That was just as fanciful.

  “No,” I said. “So far as I know—no.”

  “There’s a square dance in the village tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And most of the people around these parts go, I guess?”

  “Practically all of them—unless they’re sick or have babies to mind.”

  “Then it’s going to be easy checking on the village people. If the murderer heard Dawn singing before the picnic and hung around till later to kill the boys, he couldn’t have been at the square dance without someone noticing he’d slipped away. Of course, there may be a lunatic loose from the state institution in Leabright. I’ll check on that too, but there’s been no report of it turned in so far.”

  Cobb called over two of the detectives and sent them down to the Community House with instructions to inaugurate an exhaustive check on movements. As they hurried off, he gave a weary shrug.

  “We’re going to start a panic, Westlake, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Even if we tried to hush it up, the news’d be blazing like wildfire through the village by tomorrow morning. Sometimes I wish I’d followed my old man’s advice and gone into the hardware business when I was a kid.”

  “So’s you could sell blunt instruments to murderers?”

  “Cris’sakes, don’t be funny.” The inspector stared down gauntly at the two little bodies. “Come on. You’d better introduce me to these friends of yours.”

  He left Leaf in charge, and the two of us plodded in silence back to the Bray house.

  Love had gone home with the Reverend Jessup, but she had left word with Phoebe that she was perfectly well enough to see Inspector Cobb at his convenience. The inspector handled the rest of the party admirably. His solid, almost paternal presence seemed to reassure them, and his questions, although always discreet, covered the whole ground thoroughly. He learned just exactly as much as I had learned from them, no more, no less. But in spite of his ominous warning that a maniac might be at large and that all precautions should be taken, he left them steadier than he had found them.

  In a way, I thought with faint amusement, he had taken Ernesta’s place.

  We drove together to Love’s cottage. All the downstairs windows were brightly lit, and the iron-framed door lantern in the porch was burning too. The rather excessively Pilgrim Fathers lantern was typical of the dainty antiquity of Love’s whole establishment, and her obsessive distaste for dirt and disorder was so familiar to me that I found myself instinctively warning Cobb to wipe the mud off his shoes before we rang the doorbell.

  The Reverend Jessup led us into the small, undilutedly New England parlor where Love was sitting on a horsehair sofa with her fat gray cat, which the twins had tried to hang that afternoon, curled at her feet. She was pale as ice but enough herself to glance at our shoes as we entered.

  “Hilary’s been trying to pamper me,” she said, laying a large knuckled hand on Dr. Jessup’s. “But I don’t have to be pampered. I have made him tell me the whole truth. So sit down, Inspector, and ask me any questions you want to.”

  With caution, Cobb seated himself in a rocking chair which was perilously close to a cabinet filled with bric-a-brac. The Reverend Jessup and I settled ourselves side by side and incongruously on a green love seat.

  “It’s a lunatic, of course. Some poor, horrible mad person lurking in the woods.” Love stared directly at the inspector. “I didn’t like them, you know. They fussed me. They broke my china. They were cruel to my cat. They were like a plague of locusts in my house. I’m too old and unmarried to change my ways. I wished a hundred times a day I’d never offered to take them for the summer. That’s what makes it so hard. I can’t help telling myself that if I’d been fonder of them, more careful—”

  “Now, Love,” broke in the Reverend Jessup solicitously.

  “Shut up. Hilary. I have a conscience, and no power inside or outside the Episcopal Church is going to keep it from telling me what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve been terribly wrong and I’ve been terribly punished. Now, Inspector, what do you want to know?”

  There was very little, of course, that Cobb would want to know. He had her explain her misunderstanding with Dr. Jessup which had caused the twins to be lost sight of at the picnic grounds. He questioned her about her descent of the mountain and asked if there was any conceivable motive for anyone’s wishing the boys dead, to which he received the expected reply. The boys had been naughty, but no one kills children because they’re naughty. Their parents were not well off, and their deaths were of no possible monetary interest to anyone.

  In spite of her spinster tartnesses and her tiny village feuds, Love was of as tough a fiber as a Massachusetts maple. She and Cobb were enough alike to understand each other and approve.

  Finally Cobb asked if we might search the boys’ room. It was pitifully unlikely that there could be anything significant among the belongings of two eight-year-old children, but Cobb and I climbed the winding stairs to the small attic bedroom. Its disorder was touching. I found three broken birds’ eggs and a clumsily set Luna moth in a shoe box. But there was, as I had expected, nothing to suggest that those two obstreperous little flame-headed boys had been destined for so brutal and shocking a departure from life.

  Love saw us out herself, standing lumpy but strangely dignified under her Pilgrim Fathers lantern.

  “I shall not telephone the children’s parents until tomorrow. They might as well have one more peaceful night. Inspector, the necessary complications … I mean, nothing will interfere with the funeral, will it?”

  “The autopsy should be completed tonight, Miss Drummond. After that, the police have no further need.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much for everything, Inspector.” Love Drummond smiled a small, wry smile at me. “Poor Dr. Westlake, what a terrible evening for you too.”

  At that moment the fat gray cat appeared, winding in and out of her legs and staring up at her, its mouth open in a pink, silent miaow. Suddenly, without warning, Love Drummond lost control. Her lips quivering, she picked up the cat and pressed it against her cheek. In a little, choking voice she said:

  “And I forgot your supper. For the first time in your life I forgot your supper.”

  Cobb and I drove as near as possible to the duckpond, left the car and walked the rest of the way. The bodies had been removed by ambulance to Grovestown. Dan Leaf and his assistant had completed a preliminary and quite unproductive search of the area. The other two detectives were still at work in the village. Cobb called it quits for the night. We stopped off at my house for my car, and all drove to Grovestown.

  The city pathologist had been called, and the autopsy was already under way. I was too tired and too disgusted with life to wait for the results. They could be only of technical interest anyway. Whether Bobby and Billy had died from the blow on the head or from drowning, nothing was going to change the fact that they had been murdered.

  Before I left, however, Cobb and I examined the little
bundle of wet green play suits. In the pockets we found a stick of gum, two pieces of string, an illicit, water-yellowed cigarette, and a soaked package of matches.

  Cobb, his mouth grim, said: “Nothing there.”

  A memory came. “Funny,” I said.

  “What?”

  “They’d been playing marbles up at the sawmill. There aren’t any marbles here.”

  “When did they play?”

  “Just before we started for home.”

  Cobb shrugged. “If I know kids, they kept them tight in their hands. I always did. I liked the shiny feel of them.”

  “And they got scattered when they were attacked?”

  “I guess so. Dan’ll probably find them tomorrow, or—” He threw out his hands hopelessly. “But what’s the difference? We aren’t going to solve this thing with a couple of marbles.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You headed home?”

  “Yeah. I’m having them phone me the autopsy results in the morning. I guess you’ll be calling too?”

  “I guess so.” Cobb suddenly looked up, his blue eyes unhappy and worried. “I’m scared, Westlake.”

  “Scared?”

  “A murder with a motive. That don’t bother me. But two little kids … that song. Westlake, does that song have any more verses?”

  “Twelve of them,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything more. I drove home and dropped exhausted into bed.

  But, sly and insistent as a mosquito, a small tune plagued me:

  Two, two the lily-white boys,

  Clothed all in green-O.

  One is one

  And all alone

  And ever more shall be-O.

  One is one and all alone.

  What did that mean?

  Avril Lane’s prettified face seemed to rise in the darkness in front of me. It merged into macabre visions of white-robed Druids tying a naked, flame-haired boy to a stone altar.

  Then I slept.

  2: THREE, THREE THE RIVALS

  CHAPTER V

  “Three, three the rivals.

  Two, two the lily-white boys,

  Clothed all in green-O.

  One is one

  And all alone …”

  I awakened to those words sung in a high, childish treble. They were so apposite to my dreams that for a moment I thought I was still sleeping. But they soon were blurred with the hiss of falling water and I realized that Dawn was taking a shower in the bathroom next door and that Sunday morning, the first day of the new Skipton, had come. Sunshine splashed beguilingly through the window. But it didn’t beguile me. I got out of bed, went to my own bathroom and dressed.

  As I started downstairs the telephone rang. I heard the tough, uninhibited voice of Violet, the village girl who “did” for us, announcing: “Sure, sure. I’ll get him.” Then she came into view, hurrying breathily around a corner.

  The everyday Violet had the assured stolidity of a cow in a clover field, but today there was a marked change. Her lipstick was on crooked, her stout legs did not seem quite sure where they were going, and her eyes stared with a greedy excitement.

  “Telephone,” she said. “Sounded like that policeman from Grovestown.”

  It was that policeman from Grovestown. A distracted Cobb brought me up to date. The autopsy had revealed water in the lungs. The boys had been knocked unconscious and left to drown. No inmates were reported missing from the State Institution for the Insane at Leabright. Detectives were still on the job in Skipton, getting nowhere. Cobb seemed at his wit’s end and pathetically anxious for me to suggest something helpful. I had nothing to suggest, of course. I did, however, promise reluctantly to keep a neutral and speculative eye on my fellow picnickers.

  Violet had been hovering shamelessly in the dining-room doorway. The moment I hung up, she came to me, clutching my arm, smelling heavily of five-and-dime perfume.

  “Didju find them? Down to the village they’re saying as it was you as found them. Smashed on the head and thrown in the Brays’ duckpond.” Her eyes beetled. “It’s a maniac. That’s what they’re saying. Maybe a couple of maniacs. Broken out of Leabright.”

  Since I wasn’t in a conversational mood, she babbled on: “There was detectives to the square dance last night, a couple of them, asking questions and all. They’re still around, Irma says. Ain’t it something?”

  “It is,” I said.

  Violet found a forgotten piece of gum in some inner recess of her mouth and started to chew. “Breakfast is ready, and I take this opportunity to tell you when I’m done with the dishes I’m not comin’ back tonight. No sir, you don’t catch me walking home after dinner in the dark with no maniacs behind every tree. I’m sorry, Dr. Westlake, but that’s what I say and I stick to it. And Irma’s doing the same down to Miss Drummond’s.”

  She flounced away. We were losing our help. The panic prophesied by Cobb was under way all right.

  I was already seated at the breakfast table when Dawn scurried in, followed more sedately by Hamish. After her experience with Bobby White the night before, my daughter seemed to have matrimony on the brain and started to regale me with her conception of the ideal husband—a conception which, I reflected, was depressingly similar to the one Violet would nourish. Dawn had to be told about the White twins, of course. It would be hopeless to try to keep her from it. But, since the news of the twins’ death would hardly assist her appetite, I decided to postpone the breaking of the news and let her romantic soliloquy have full rein.

  “Of course,” she chattered, offering an edge of toast to the disgusted Hamish, “you can’t always get the sort of husband you really want. I mean, you have to compromise.” She paused for reflection. “I think maybe if I simply had to marry someone in Skipton I think maybe it would have to be Caleb.”

  “Yes,” I said. “A war hero, the Purple Heart and everything.”

  “Oh no, I don’t care about war heroes. It’s just because he’s got such lovely golden hairs on his legs and he looks deep and desperate.” She sighed after this immodest revelation and added: “But I don’t imagine he’d marry me, because I know he’d marry Lorie if he could.”

  “If he could? Why can’t he?”

  “Mrs. Bray, of course. Didn’t you know?” Dawn looked patronizing. “Lorie would never do anything against her mother, and Mrs. Bray would never, never let them marry, never in a million years.”

  Faintly curious, I asked: “Why ever not?”

  “Cousins,” said my daughter mysteriously. “I was up at the Brays’ the other day and Mrs. Bray was going on and on about it. Cousins should never marry, she said, because it was very bad. Of course, I don’t understand, because I had two guinea pigs once who were brother and sister—remember?—and …” She abandoned the sentence, the end of which, presumably, would be too genetic for the breakfast table. She sighed again. “No, I guess I couldn’t get Caleb. I’d have to settle for Mr. Forbes. Of course, he’s a bit of a wolf, but the wolf type is attractive to girls.”

  My daughter’s worldly phase was still recent enough to appal me. “Where on earth did you pick up that revolting word, brat?”

  “Wolf? Why, everyone at school uses it all the time. It’s fashionable and not half as revolting as calling your daughter a brat.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said meekly. “But isn’t Mr. Forbes rather old for you? He’s even older than I am.”

  “Oh, I’d much rather marry an old man like you or Mr. Forbes if he’s interesting rather than a sissy like George Raynor who’s years younger than his wife and lets her boss him, making him cook and do the housework and everything like Violet. He is much younger than her, you know, Daddy, and she dyes her hair. I noticed last night there would be lots of gray in it if she left it alone and”—she paused, reached for the orange marmalade, and smiled enigmatically—“she likes Mr. Forbes better than her husband anyway. She only flirted with Caleb last night because she’s mad that Mr. Forbes won’t flirt with her any more.”

 
I hadn’t intended to let the conversation sink so deep into the quagmire of local gossip, but, since we’d gone this far, I thought we might as well go further.

  “What on earth are you talking about, Dawn?”

  “Oh, she did use’ to flirt with Mr. Forbes. I know she did because I saw them kissing one night on the Raynors’ back porch and I heard her giggle and she said: ‘If George and Ernesta saw us now, we’d be in hot water.’ She really did, Daddy, and I hate grownup people who giggle, don’t you?”

  Violet had departed, slamming the kitchen door for the last time when I finally broke the news to Dawn. I didn’t say anything about murder. I decided that, even if she did hear rumors around the village, it was better for me to soften the tragedy into an accident. I did, however, take the opportunity for a stern warning to be careful and not to go wandering out alone.

  She cried a little, but only a very little, and murmured: “Bobby really did love me very devotedly. I shall treasure that marble.”

  In spite of my warning, worry for Dawn mounted steadily in me. My duties as coroner and Cobb’s unofficial assistant were bound to keep me out of the house most of the day, and although Love Drummond and the Reverend Jessup were close neighbors, I did not like the idea of Dawn being left alone. The menace that had crept into the community was still too incalculable for comfort. But what could I do? Wild horses, I knew, would not drag Dawn to the Cape Cod cottage of my ferocious spinster aunt Mabel, our only living relative. And, if I sent her to camp, she would only come back (as she had done once before), claiming with theatrical and outraged piety that the girls swore, drank, and suffered from hideous, infectious diseases.

  When Dawn was upstairs getting ready for church, a happy thought came to me. On our departure from Kenmore, Rebecca, our faithful colored factotum, had been packed off for her first vacation since my wife died ten years ago. She had been reluctant to leave us and had made me promise I would call her if things went wrong. Well, things had gone wrong enough. I went to the telephone and called her in Grovestown, where she was unwillingly staying with unwilling relatives. Rebecca seemed overjoyed to hear of our local tragedy and undertook to be with us that very afternoon.