Death’s Old Sweet Song

by Jonathan Stagge

  I was thinking of the elaborate plans Ernesta had made to keep her own marriage secret so that just this very thing should be avoided. Personally I was delighted at the prospect of a marriage between Lorie and Caleb, but I was uncomfortably conscious that I had tampered most effectively with a situation that was no concern of mine.

  “Yes,” Caleb was saying, “I can still hardly believe it. From the way Lorie talked, you’d have thought that her mother suddenly didn’t mean anything to her. I guess what they say in the movies is right. I guess love is a wonderful thing.”

  It was natural enough for Caleb to ascribe Lorie’s precipitous change of viewpoint to love.

  But suddenly I started to wonder.

  And as we caught up with Avril and Phoebe, I was wondering—and wondering.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The state troopers had taken Skipton over all right. When the four of us emerged from the Bray drive into the main street, a motorcycle was parked outside the rectory and at least two troopers were in sight pacing ominously up and down. A third was visible down at the village store conversing with Violet and Irma, whose echoing giggles suggested that, for the time being at least, the talk had shifted from murder to more everyday topics. The Konapic River flashed like a mirror in the blinding sunlight. It was the only feature of the Skipton landscape that remained impervious to our change of status.

  Renton Forbes was hurrying down the elm-fringed road. As our little group paused outside my garden gate, he joined us. Renton seemed more resilient than the rest of us. He looked, at least, as spruce and debonair as usual. With a distinctly ironical: “Morning, Mabel” to Avril, he turned to Phoebe and asked whether Ernesta had returned yet.

  As he did so, Dawn burst exuberantly from the front door and ran down the path toward us.

  “Oh, Daddy, I’m so glad you’re back at last. Isn’t it excit—I mean, isn’t it awful about so many people dying that way? There was a state trooper in the house just now. At least he wasn’t in the house because Rebecca wouldn’t let him in. But he was looking for clues and things and, Daddy, I wish Rebecca’d let him in because I’m sure the marble Bobby gave me is a clue and probably I could have found some more. But Rebecca said no one wasn’t to cross the threshold and …”

  She curbed her enthusiasm sufficiently then to greet our various neighbors. But they could not suppress her for long. Soon she was off again, rattling:

  “And Love’s cat likes Hamish, Daddy, only Hamish doesn’t like her much yet and chased her under my bed and I suppose it takes time. But I gave her milk and …”

  Phoebe and Caleb had to pick up something at the store. Avril walked on with them. Shepherding Dawn ahead of me, I invited Renton in for a drink. It seemed as good an opportunity as any to learn his version of the Friday meeting with Avril.

  Rebecca was not visible. I brought the drinks into Dr. Stokes’s office. Renton was candid as ever about his relationship with Avril. He remembered the rat too. He had gone to investigate and had seen it scuttle away. Nothing else unusual had happened. The only thing that had differentiated this rendezvous from the others was that he had finally persuaded Avril it should be the last. With his tongue, no doubt, very much in his cheek, he had convinced her that his usefulness to her as a literary inspiration was over and that, painful as it was to him, she should, for her genius’s sake, break new male ground. He had suggested Caleb, and apparently the prospect of a younger swain had been pleasurable enough for her to have parted from him graciously.

  “I’m delighted I cut the pink ribbons once and for all, Westlake. I hated having to drag on with her after my marriage, anyway. And now that Skipton’s wallowing in a blood purge, all our little secrets are bound to come to light. That’s why I’m hanging around for Ernesta now. I’m going to confess the whole thing to her—not for any laudable reasons, but because I know that if she doesn’t hear it from me she’ll hear it from someone else. I’ll be able to present it in a slightly rosier light, I hope.”

  He grinned. “Ernesta’s going to be very stern, I’m sure. But if I’m boyish and rueful enough I think I’ll get away with it.”

  It was typical of Renton to be wholly concerned with his own amorous entanglements when his neighbors were dropping like flies around him. I suppose I should have disapproved, but I didn’t. People like Renton were anchors. They reminded you that one day life would be normal again.

  I would have liked to tell him that Caleb and Lorie were going to marry and that, in her consternation over the news, Ernesta would have no time or energy to worry about his peccadilloes. But the announcement had been made to me in confidence, and I had no right to pass it on. Besides, Renton could take care of himself without any assistance from me.

  “Do you suppose you’ll announce the marriage now?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “That’ll be up to Ernesta. Now I’ve got Mabel subdued, I can’t wait for our wedded bliss to be proclaimed to the world. But with Lorie and everything … we’ll see. Maybe with a new little stranger on the way, Ernesta will give up being so motherly about Lorie.”

  He left soon to resume his watch for Ernesta, and I was alone in Dr. Stokes’s office.

  I poured myself another drink, took off my jacket and tie, and dropped down on the couch. Although I had had practically no sleep the night before, my mind was very alert, and the question which Caleb’s remarks about Lorie had started continued to nag me. Ernesta had told Lorie categorically that if she married her cousin it would mean a permanent break between them. It had been a brutal move on Ernesta’s part, but obviously a well-intentioned one, since the specter of her mother’s madness loomed large in Ernesta’s mind and she was genuinely frightened of the results of a marriage between Lorie and Caleb. I could understand Ernesta’s attitude. What I found hard to understand was Lorie’s sudden decision to disobey her mother.

  I was sure she loved Caleb, and with most girls love itself would have been a sufficient motive for a break with her mother. But Lorie wasn’t like most girls. She had always worshiped Ernesta and taken her every whim as gospel. Why had she suddenly changed? Was it because Caleb’s confession of his night fears had brought on a rush of pity stronger than her love for her mother? That was possible, of course.

  But I had a hunch that the truth lay deeper. Something was wrong for Lorie. Of that I was sure. I remembered the unexplained shudder that had racked her body earlier that day when I had mentioned Ernesta’s name. I remembered too, of course, her extraordinary behavior when Cobb had confronted her with the cigarette butt.

  At first she had denied having been to the sawmill in months. Then, when she had actually seen the butt, she suddenly changed her tune and admitted to that most unconvincingly narrated episode of her visit to the sawmill on Saturday morning. Why had she switched her story? And why had that look of uncontrolled terror come into her eyes?

  The cigarette butt led my thoughts back to Cobb’s theory of the sane motive lurking behind the bloody phantom of the maniac. Once again I had that exasperating sensation that he had almost stumbled upon the truth. The White twins, George Raynor, Dr. Jessup, and Love Drummond had all gone to the sawmill on Saturday evening, and they were all dead. That was an inescapable fact. But what could have been in the sawmill, a glimpse of which had been sufficient to doom those five people to die? Whatever it was, it could not have been there at eight-thirty on Friday evening. Renton or Avril would surely have seen it. Then the thing or the person must have arrived later. Friday night or Saturday morning. This was possible because I didn’t believe Lorie had been to the sawmill Saturday morning.

  Thing or person? Could Cobb be right that there had been a person lurking there in the sawmill? Someone completely unconnected with the case so far who had managed to focus suspicion on the picnickers? For a moment I toyed with the idea, although I could think of no type of criminal who would fit the pattern. Then, with a sudden jolt, I remembered the paper knife which had killed Dr. Jessup.

  The paper knife surely destroyed Cobb�
��s theory once and for all. Because the paper knife had been in the Bray house on Sunday night. No outsider could have known it was there, let alone have broken in and stolen it. The paper knife could have been taken only by Lorie, Caleb, Phoebe, Renton, Avril, or the farmers of the patrol. I could not seriously suspect the farmers. That brought me right back again to the point from which Cobb’s theory had originally taken us.

  I took a glum sip of my drink. Lorie had lied about going to the sawmill. The cigarette had made her lie. She was prepared to break forever with a mother she had worshiped since infancy. Those were the few facts I had. I let them wander aimlessly in my mind. And, suddenly, like a view emerging from an early morning mist, I saw the only way in which those facts could fit together.

  Lorie loved Caleb. She wanted to marry him, but she would not have married him unless something had happened to diminish her respect for her mother. All right. Ernesta had done something that Lorie knew about and that Lorie thought discreditable. Had Lorie found out about her mother’s secret marriage? It was possible, but that solution offered no explanation for Lorie’s pretending she had dropped the cigarette butt when she hadn’t. It was another, much more dramatic but more logical reason for Lorie’s having turned against her mother. Lorie had pretended she had dropped the cigarette in the sawmill presumably because she was protecting the person who had. And the only woman Lorie would protect was Ernesta.

  Ernesta who wore lipstick, smoked Russian cigarettes, and was the only person in the world who had not been on the picnic and yet could have both known about the paper knife and been able to steal it.

  It was wildly impossible, of course. On Friday night, when the butt had been dropped, Ernesta had been in New York, busily writing letters about the results of her visit to the obstetrician and her discovery of a “perfectly divine” material for the living-room drapes.

  I sat a moment, dazzled by my own deductions.

  Then I went to the phone. I put in a long-distance call to the New York hotel at which Ernesta had been stopping.

  I was told by the room clerk that Mrs. Ernesta Bray had checked out. I knew that, of course. Any minute now she was expected to drive past my house.

  “But when did she check out?” I asked. “Today?”

  There was a pause. Then the clerk’s voice announced: “No, sir. Mrs. Ernesta Bray checked out Friday afternoon.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I put the receiver back, rather shakily, on its stand.

  Incredible as it still seemed, my theory was taking on flesh and blood. At least one thing was certain.

  Wherever she had been since the wave of murder hit Skipton, Ernesta Bray had certainly not been in New York.

  CHAPTER XIX

  I was still giving uneasy thought to this new development when Rebecca came into the office and darkly announced that a girl, who claimed to be a friend of mine, was at the door. Rebecca’s tone implied that the visitor was almost certainly a homicidal maniac and was not going to cross the threshold if she could help it. I went out into the hall to find Lorie—the person in Skipton I was most eager to see.

  For the first time since I had known her, Lorie was not expensively dressed. She wore an old gray sweater and a pair of blue jeans. It was an outfit that would have horrified her mother, but it became her. There was a flush in her cheeks too which gave her a new vividness.

  “Hello, Lorie. Come in.”

  Rebecca, seeing that I accepted Lorie as a guest, relaxed her vigilance with obvious reluctance and stumped upstairs, presumably to protect Dawn from any sinister results of my rashness.

  Lorie said: “I’m going to be an awful nuisance. I need your help.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s Mother. She’s arrived. A call just came in. She got a flat over on Breakneck. She’s left the car and’s walking back over the mountain.”

  Any movement Ernesta made was of great interest to me now.

  “Walking back?” I said. “It’s about five miles, isn’t it?”

  “That’s nothing to Mother. She’s crazy about walking. You know that. But she wants me to go fix the flat and pick up the car. That’s where you come in. Caleb doesn’t have a car, and Mother suggested I could ask you to drive me out.”

  That was so typical of Ernesta, not only to abandon her car for her daughter to fix, but also to decide by remote control exactly which of her subjects should be elected as chauffeur.

  “I know it’s an awful bother for you right now of all times, but—”

  “It’s no bother at all.”

  It wasn’t, of course. It gave me an ideal opportunity to test my new and extraordinary suspicions. If I was right, Lorie might hold the key.

  As we started down the garden path, Dawn’s voice sounded from above us. I looked up to see my daughter leaning precariously out of her bedroom window with the dark shadow of Rebecca hovering behind her.

  “Oh, Daddy, Rebecca says I’m never to go out and I do want Mr. Cobb to have my clue so I’ve wrapped it up in cleaning tissue so the fingerprints won’t be spoiled and I’ve tied it with a ribbon so no one will know what it is and think it’s a present, I mean. And will you please give it to him and explain…?”

  Leaning still further into space, my daughter dropped a small round package, clumsily tied with a pink ribbon. I caught it and put it in my pocket.

  “Thank you, Daddy. Hello, Lorie. Miss Drummond’s cat used to like Hamish and Hamish used to hate the cat, but now Hamish loves the cat and the cat hates Hamish. And it scratched Hamish and Hamish howled and Rebecca says …”

  Her voice trailed after us down the path.

  Lorie said: “What on earth did she drop to you?”

  “It’s just a marble one of the White kids gave her. She’s being The Great Detective. She thinks her marble’s going to give Cobb a blinding inspiration.”

  Soon we were driving through the valley toward the treacherous dirt road up the mountain where Ernesta had come to grief. It was obvious that Lorie had to be handled with care. Even if she had the information I thought she had, she would guard it jealously. I knew that from the way she had lied about the cigarette butt.

  I started with a safe subject. “Caleb’s told me the good news, Lorie. I’m all for it.”

  “Thank you.” Her face lit up with a smile. “I’m terribly sorry I was so rude this morning when you talked about Caleb. Things seemed so black and hopeless then. I couldn’t believe there could ever be a happy ending.”

  “You had a right to be rude. I was butting in where I didn’t belong.”

  “You weren’t. Oh, you weren’t. And I can never be grateful enough, because it was you who really did it. Caleb was obsessed by his fear of the dark, thought it made him a sort of pariah, not good enough for anyone. If you hadn’t made him see things properly, he’d never have asked me to marry him.”

  Edging around, I said: “I hope your mother won’t be too tempestuous. She’s not going to like this, is she?”

  “Oh, Mother.” Lorie’s smile went. “No, she’s not going to like it at all. But I’d never let that stand in the way.” She paused and then added: “I’m an awfully shameless piece, you know. When Caleb came home, I thought he’d ask me to marry him right away. I’ve always loved him and I thought he loved me. But the weeks dragged by and he didn’t ask me and he acted stranger and stranger. Last Friday I couldn’t wait any longer. I asked him to marry me.” She laughed shortly. “He turned me down flat.”

  “Friday?” That was the day before the picnic.

  “Mother was away. I was alone in the house. I had dismal visions of things being stalemated between Caleb and me forever, so I plucked up my courage and called him. In the old days we used to go for walks in the woods at night. We know every track, every clearing. I asked him to meet me in the place where we always used to meet. I was terrified he wouldn’t come, but he did.”

  I kept my eyes on the road ahead. I didn’t want to break into her flow of words.

  “Mot
her’d told me about Grandmother being insane. You knew that, didn’t you? She’d said it would be utterly impossible for Caleb and me to marry. But I didn’t believe it. I won’t believe it, because I’m not afraid. I know Caleb. I know me. I know we’re all right. I swear I do, Doctor.”

  “I know it, too.”

  “But I knew Aunt Phoebe hadn’t told Caleb. About Grandmother, I mean. And I thought that was wrong. I thought it was only fair to let him know. So when he came, I told him. I told him Mother was dead against our marrying. I told him everything. But I said I didn’t care. I said that being married to him was the only thing in the world I wanted. I said: ‘Please, please, marry me. Let’s forget Mother and everyone and go away.’” She gave a little shiver. “It was ghastly. He just stood there. I could see his face in the moonlight. It seemed cold, hating me. And he didn’t say anything. He just turned on his heel and hurried away through the trees as if he couldn’t see the last of me fast enough.”

  Her voice faltered. “I wanted to die. I thought he didn’t love me any more and that I’d embarrassed him frightfully by throwing myself at his head. And then next day at the picnic it was even worse, because he was flirting with that frightful Avril in front of me, deliberately, I thought, to let me see what he thought of me.”

  She put her hand up to her face. “That’s why I’ve been in such a terrible state lately. It was that, even more than the murders. You see, I didn’t know the truth. I didn’t know that Caleb had this crazy feeling about not being worthy, that he was flirting with Avril and everything to try to make me hate him so he wouldn’t be a burden to me.” The hand dropped back to her lap. “But it’s all over now. Incredibly, everything’s all right. And you did it, Dr. Westlake.”

  I took a hand from the wheel and put it over hers. “If it hadn’t been me, it would have been something else.”

  The whole saga of Lorie’s relations with Caleb was clear to me now. It was touching, as all stories of thwarted young love are touching. But it wasn’t my chief concern at the moment. Disliking the role I had to play, I eased the conversation back to Ernesta.