“About half an hour ago it was, I guess, Doctor. The telephone rings. I go to answer it, and it’s this man’s voice and he says: ‘You the cook at the Westlake house?’ An’ I says: ‘Yes, an’ what’s it to you?’ An’ he says: ‘I’m one of the inspector’s men, an’ the inspector tole me to call and say you’re to come right up to the Bray house on account of something important and the doctor says you’re to come.’”
She shrugged large shoulders. “I must of been out of my mind, Doctor, paying attention to some phony story like that. But he goes on and on and he sounds like he a real policeman and something’s happened and you needs me. So finally I say: ‘Sure, then, I’ll be right up.’ And Dawn’s upstairs in her room, fooling with that owl my cousin brought her. And I calls up the stairs that I’m stepping out a minute and she’s not to leave her room whatever happens. And she calls down: ‘Okay, Rebecca.’ And I makes sure all the doors is locked. Then I steps out of the kitchen door and locks it behind me an’ keeps the key in my hand an’ starts up the road some toward the drive up to the Brays’.”
I knew Rebecca well enough to realize that the story was going to be told her way. There was no possibility of cutting her short. I did my best to curb my impatience.
“An’ there I am, Doctor, walkin’ up the drive to the house the Brays got there. An’ I’m halfway up when sudden it comes to me—like a premonition or something. Like it was a voice sayin’: ‘Rebecca, you’re doing the wrong thing. That wasn’t no policeman calling. That was some party trying to get you out of the way.’ And, straightaway, before I hardly knows what’s happening, I’m turned around and running back here fast as my legs would take me.”
Carried away by the drama of her own story, Rebecca leaned forward, fixing Cobb with a bright, narrator’s stare.
“Don’t look nothing different about the house, Mr. Cobb, but there’s still this voice tellin’ me. An’ I sneaks around to the kitchen door, real quiet, and I lets myself in. And the moment I come in the kitchen, I know on account of I can hear voices plain, Dawn’s voice and some man’s voice, and they’re talkin’ in the office. And I says to myself: I might of known with that child. She say so sweet and good: ‘No, Rebecca, I promise I don’t leave my room.’ But she’s a deep one and she’s gotten this crazy notion she’s a detecative or something. An’ I might of known the minute my back was turned she’d be up to something crazy like letting any strange man as asks into the house and me away.”
She paused for breath, crossing her arms over the sinister apron.
“I kep the carving knife right there in the drawer where I can put my hand to it. Real quiet, I tiptoe over and picks up the knife and creeps through the hall to the office door. The door’s closed an’ I waits there a minute, listening. An’ I don’t hear no more voices from inside. And I thinks maybe I was dreamin’ ’em up, and that Dawn’s upstairs in her room after all. And, just as I figures maybe I’ll run upstairs, I hear this cry kind of from the office. A little kind of holler and then a thud like someone’s falling on the floor.”
Rebecca’s mobile face was reliving the drama of that moment. I was reliving it too, and it made me jittery with anxiety even though I knew the story had a happy ending.
“When I hears that holler, Doctor, I like about die. I grips the knife and I throws open the door, hollering myself like to bust my lungs. An’ there’s Dawn lying on the floor like she was a dead child. And there’s this feller stooping over her. An’ in his hand there’s this big rolling pin I used when I’m rollin’ out pastry for pies. An’ I holler again. An’ he swings around and he stares at me. Then he starts toward me with this rolling pin.”
She nodded her head at me. “I sees red then, Doctor. I actually, positively sees red. Red all around me like it was swimming in the air somehow. An’ I goes for him. I can’t think of nothing but Dawn lying there and maybe dead an’ it all being on account of my foolishness. An’ I hardly know what I’m doing. Guess for a while in there I was clear out of my head. Then, after a time, I comes to myself an’ I picks Dawn up an’ carries her into the living room an’ lays her down on the couch. Then I run to the phone an’ I telephone for you to come.”
I said: “But this man, Rebecca, he’s the man who’s killed all the others. Who is he? Tell us—who is he?”
Rebecca looked rather pained. “You know I don’t know none of the folks around these parts, Dr. Westlake. And it weren’t no time to go around askin’ him his name.”
“But what did he look like?” cut in Cobb quickly.
“Oh, he was just a feller. Kind of taller’n he was short an’ …”
Cobb, his eyes bright with impatience, turned to me. “We’d better wake Dawn, Westlake. We’ve got to know who it is.”
“Wake Dawn! What you want to wake that poor sleepin’ child for? You can see for yourself who he is.” A gleam of grim amusement showed in her eyes. “He ain’t run away.”
I stared at her. Then: “You mean…?”
“I tole you I sees red when I goes at him with that knife. I wasn’t playin’ with that knife neither, no sir.” Rebecca straightened a crease out of her lurid apron. “I just leaves him laying there on the floor in the office and turns the key on him.”
Both Cobb and I jumped to our feet. Rebecca rose too. In spite of her regal bearing, faint anxiety showed in her eyes.
“Before you goes poking your noses in the office, Mr. Cobb, I ain’t getting into no trouble for what I done?”
“Trouble,” exploded Cobb. “You’ll have a statue put up for you—six statues if you want them.”
Rebecca seemed somewhat relieved and handed him a key.
“I wasn’t intendin’ nothing,” she murmured. “I was just thinking of Dawn laying there and it bein’ my foolishness an’ …”
We didn’t wait for any more. We both ran out into the hall. Cobb’s hand was shaky with anticipation as he inserted the key in the lock. He threw the door open. He stepped inside. I followed him.
Rebecca had certainly seen red all right. There must have been a terrific struggle. Chairs were overturned. The whole room was in chaos.
But I wasn’t interested in the room. I was interested in the man lying motionless in a pool of his own blood in front of the desk.
Cobb and I moved tentatively toward him.
The inspector breathed: “In the name of glory, Westlake, it was—him.”
I dropped to the man’s side. Almost immediately I saw there was nothing that could be done for him.
Renton Forbes was mortally wounded.
CHAPTER XXIV
Dawn was still asleep when Cobb and I returned from Grovestown. Rebecca, who had been released without bail on a purely formal charge of assault, was in the kitchen being toasted as a heroine by a swarm of cousins. I had done what little I could for Renton Forbes and had rushed him to the hospital. But there had never been a chance of saving his life. Before he died, however, he had regained consciousness long enough to answer questions. Skipton’s reign of terror held no more mysteries.
I made drinks for the inspector and myself. Cobb still looked worn out, but the hard lines of anxiety had been smoothed from his face. He produced the inevitable brier pipe and watched me over it from blue, sober eyes.
“Well, Westlake, guess that about winds up that. We had the facts from the beginning. We just didn’t fit them together right.”
“I ought to have been able to,” I said. “I knew Ernesta. I knew how Victorian she was about morals. I also knew how jealous she’d be of a man once he was her own property. It was natural for Lorie to think her mother came back to spy on her. But I should have had the sense to realize Ernesta was more interested in her own love life than her daughter’s.”
Cobb nodded. “How did Mrs. Bray first get suspicious about her husband carrying on with Avril Lane?”
“Love Drummond made some crack that started her wondering. Then she overheard Avril making the date with Renton for Friday at the sawmill. The Raynors and the Brays are on t
he same party line.”
“Forbes tell you that?”
“Yes.” I sipped my drink. “Everything Ernesta did fitted with her character. She’d married Renton because he fascinated her, the way he fascinated most women, but she wasn’t the type to stand any nonsense from a man. She was appalled at the idea that her husband might be having an affair with a cheap little number like Avril before the marriage had even been announced. Some women would have come right out there and then and challenged her husband. But Ernesta never acted unless she was absolutely sure of her ground. That’s why she thought up that elaborate idea of a trip to New York.”
I paused. “She had to go, of course, to see Dr. Delacroix. She really was having a baby, and the fact of the baby made the idea of Renton’s outside amour even more shocking to her. So she gave him a chance to meet Avril, sneaked back and hid upstairs in the mill to overhear what went on. If the meeting was innocent, she’d have spared herself from making false accusations. If it wasn’t, she’d be able to confront Renton with the evidence of her own eyes.”
Cobb chewed on his pipe. “She arrived at the mill before Renton and Avril. We got that figured wrong because Lorie wasn’t definite about the time she’d seen her mother’s car. She must have been upstairs when they came. Maybe she couldn’t hear so well up there, so she tiptoed down the outside staircase. Avril and Renton heard her. Renton Forbes went out to investigate. He told Avril it was only a rat, but he’d seen Mrs. Bray and realized he’d been caught red-handed. I guess he managed to get rid of Avril, and then he and Mrs. Bray met. Right?”
“Sure. Ernesta didn’t break in on the two of them. She had too much pride to make a scene in front of Avril. But once Arvil was gone, she confronted Renton. She was seething with righteous indignation. She told him exactly how she’d set the trap for him. She told him she realized he’d only married her for her money and announced that she was going to sue for divorce immediately. Renton said he tried to argue with her, tried to explain that Avril meant nothing to him and that he was merely trying to disentangle himself from a relationship which had only been for laughs anyway. But he cut no ice with Ernesta. She was through and he knew it. He’d married a meal ticket and lost it in less than three months.”
Cobb grunted. “Seems like his financial affairs were a lot worse than anyone suspected. There were a terrific amount of debts, and he stood to lose the house and everything he possessed if he didn’t get money and get it quick. He’d thought he was sitting pretty with Mrs. Bray and, just because he hadn’t been smart enough to break with Avril in time, he’d bungled the whole setup.” He shrugged. “Must have been a big temptation to a guy like Forbes. Once Mrs. Bray left that mill, he’d be penniless and discredited. But he was still her husband and she’d made no will. The only way he could benefit financially out of her any more was to kill her.”
“He told me it was an accident, that there was a struggle and she fell and hit her head. But I doubt it. Renton was unscrupulous, and he was a gambler. I think you’re right. I think he realized his only chance was to murder her. He probably thought out his whole plan for hiding the body and starting the fake forest fire while they were still arguing. He slipped up on the necklace, of course. He didn’t notice it break in the struggle, and he didn’t realize how terribly important it was until the White twins had found the beads and it was too late.”
Cobb had taken the unlit pipe from his mouth and was rubbing his hand around the bowl. “He was a gambler all right. Most murderers in his shoes would have given up once the White kids found the beads. But not Renton Forbes. Five more people had to be killed. Okay. So he killed five more people and managed to make his position even safer by building up an imaginary maniac who was hipped on ‘Green Grow the Rushes-O.’”
He was staring ahead of him reflectively. “Know something, Westlake? I think there was a lot more back of his use of the song that we never got. I mean, I don’t think he was just trying to build up a maniac in a void. He could have done that without fitting the deaths with the song. I’ve been thinking. Lorie was crazy about that song, wasn’t she?”
I nodded.
“And probably Forbes had found out from Ernesta about the streak of insanity in the family. I’ve got a hunch Forbes was working around to throwing the blame on Lorie. Maybe a hint here, a hint there that Lorie was acting kind of queer. Then, maybe, one morning we’d have woken up to find Lorie’d ‘committed suicide’ during the night. That way he could have made her the scapegoat and also picked up her share of the Bray money.” He grinned rather sheepishly. “Of course, Westlake, that’s only theory. Guess we won’t ever know now what might have happened. But that’s kind of how I figure it.”
“You could be right.”
His face grew grave again. “And you realize how he almost got away with it, Westlake? If Dawn hadn’t been given that marble, maybe he would have. Maybe he’d have gone on to kill Lorie and we’d never have caught him.”
I let the happenings of the last few days pass in review through my mind. “Renton was smart enough and daring enough to have planned something like that. He was smart, the way he handled me. He knew he’d have to announce the secret marriage sooner or later if he was to claim Ernesta’s money, so he told me about it just at the moment when he could use it to show he had no motive for wanting to kill George Raynor. The way he killed Raynor was certainly daring too. Realize how he managed it?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. He got himself a perfect alibi for that afternoon with some folks in Beldon Falls. I checked it.”
“He had an alibi for the afternoon, sure. That’s where the daring came in. By afternoon Raynor was already as good as dead. Renton hit him on the head and turned on the gas while I was actually in the house upstairs in Avril’s study. When I came down, Renton was waiting for me outside the porch, and I naturally joined him. I never dreamed George was lying unconscious in the kitchen. Of course, killing Love and Dr. Jessup was a cinch for him. As one of the leaders of the patrol, he could go anywhere and do anything without arousing suspicion.”
My old friend sat in silence for a while, fingering his pipe. Then his steady blue gaze moved to my face, and there was a gleam of amusement in his eyes.
“Well, Westlake, you picked a good place for a vacation, didn’t you? A nice quiet time. That’s what you’ve had.”
“Yes,” I said. “A nice quiet time.”
One of Rebecca’s innumerable cousins had turned on the radio in the kitchen. Strains of “Love’s Old Sweet Song” floated in to us. Cobb hummed along with the orchestra for a few bars.
“Pretty tune, that. Mrs. Cobb used to sing it when I first started going with her. Real pretty.”
“At least it’s a change.”
“From ‘Green Grow the Rushes-O.’” Cobb nodded. “Guess that one should have been called ‘Death’s Old Sweet Song.’” He frowned. “Come to think of it, I never did hear the tune of that song. Was it pretty too?”
“You’ll never know,” I said firmly. “Not if I can help it. That’s one song that’s never going to be sung around my house.”
Turn the page to continue reading from the Doctor Westlake Mysteries
Chapter 1
I had been staying with the Lockwoods in Bittern’s Bay more than a week before I met The Divine Daphne. The First Lady of the American Stage was in deep retirement, following a triumphant Broadway season. But the Lockwoods were intimate friends of hers and it was understood that eventually we would be summoned to The Presence. The summons came abruptly one morning when Tansy, Don, and I were eating breakfast on the Lockwoods’ sunny terrace. Tansy was called to the phone and rejoined us with an enigmatic smile.
“The hour has struck,” she announced. “Daphne has heard that we have a charming Dr. Westlake staying with us.” She nodded to me. “She will be charmed to see us all for lunch today at one-thirty. Charmed!”
Dr. MacDonald Lockwood groaned.
Tansy ruffled his hair. “Don’t be difficult, dear.
You know it’ll be nice for Hugh. The Divine Daphne is something that everyone should see at least once.”
I was left with the impression that I was about to meet a national monument rather than a woman.
Later that morning, as the three of us strolled through Tansy’s formal gardens toward the white gate in the arborvitae hedge which divided their property from that of Daphne Winters, Tansy coached me on correct deportment in front of the “greatest interpreter of Ibsen this country has produced and possibly the purest creative talent the Stage has known since Duse.” (Sydney Cobblestone: Stage Monthly, June 1931.)
“Rosmersholm isn’t just a house, Hugh. It’s Parnassus, the Shrine of Lovely Womanhood. And Daphne isn’t just The First Lady of the American Stage; she’s all Nine Muses rolled into one. Since you’re a mere male, you must worship meekly in corners with big devoted eyes.”
“I wasn’t planning to attack her,” I said.
Tansy tossed her taffy-colored hair and laughed. “My dear, you’d be dead if you did. Daphne’s manager, Evelyn Evans, would leap on you like a mountain lion, and if she couldn’t finish you off singlehanded, she’d summon the Five Sweet Symphonies.”
“The Five Sweet Symphonies?”
“Every year Daphne selects five budding young actresses for summer tuition. It’s all very reverent. That’s why we call them the Sweet Symphonies. You know. The Blessed Damozel.”
She quoted:
“‘We two,’ she said, ‘will seek the groves
Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys.
“‘Circlewise sit they, with bound locks
And foreheads garlanded …’”
She laughed again. “I’m afraid they don’t sit circlewise with foreheads garlanded, poor dears. They spend most of their tuition running errands and pushing lawn mowers. I don’t know why they put up with it—except that they’re dazzled. Everyone’s dazzled by Daphne Winters. You will be too.”
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