by Alice Duncan
“I see. When did this young man die? And what did he die of? That is—”
“I know what you mean. The police and everyone thought he committed suicide.” The last word wobbled on my tongue, because it had such a terrible significance for me. “But then he—or something—spoke through me and told the world he’d been murdered. I don’t know the official cause of death. Something that could look like suicide, I suppose.”
“Mercy sakes.”
“And not only that, but he said he needs someone to find the culprit or he’ll never rest in peace!”
“You mean he doesn’t know who killed him?”
“Evidently not. Oh, Pa! I don’t know what to do!” Burying my head in my arms once more, I commenced whimpering.
Pa patted my shoulder in a consoling manner. “That must have been a terrible experience, sweetheart.”
“It was,” I sobbed.
“Yes.” His voice took on a musing quality. “You say you’d never met this Hastings boy before?”
“No. Never. Didn’t know he existed. Well, I guess he doesn’t anymore, but . . . oh, never mind.”
“I see.”
Silence prevailed for what seemed like an hour or three, but was probably only maybe a minute. Then Pa said, “Please don’t think I doubt what you told me, Daisy, because I don’t. But I know this last year has been especially rough on you. You don’t think that perhaps . . .” His words trailed off, as if he didn’t quite know how to phrase the last part of his sentence.
I knew, though. He thought I’d imagined the whole thing and had somehow managed to project Edward Hastings’ voice at the stupid séance out of my own personal misery. My heart sank like a lead weight. My own father, the man who had been the bedrock and strength of my life since its beginning, thought I’d succumbed to the stress of my husband’s illness and death and had somehow or other created, not by choice, the scene at the séance. Oh, he believed I didn’t know I’d done it or even know how I’d done it, but he didn’t believe for a minute that a murdered Edward Hastings had crashed the party and begged someone to avenge his death.
Feeling increasingly desperate, I sat up straight and said, “Harold believes me! So does his mother! Not Mrs. Pinkerton. I mean Mrs. Hastings, Edward’s mother. She said she’d always known her son didn’t kill himself.”
“I see.”
Oh, boy. Another “I see.” Almost as hysterical as Mrs. Pinkerton by this time, I said, “Mrs. Hastings said the voice was that of her son! So did Harold! I didn’t do it, Pa! Something—or someone, and I suspect the honest-to goodness ghost of Edward Hastings—spoke through me!”
“Oh, dear.” My father appeared almost as distressed as I felt.
“And Sam will never, ever believe me if I tell him a real ghost spoke through me. You know he won’t. He’ll only get mad.”
“Well, I don’t know if he’ll get mad, Daisy.”
“I do,” I averred with some heat. “Believe me, I know Sam well enough to know that.”
“Hmm. We’ll have to think of some way to approach him, then. You can’t tell him the ghost story—not that I don’t believe you,” he hastened to assure me.
I sighed. “Right. I wouldn’t believe me either.”
“Now Daisy, it’s entirely possible that . . . something did speak through you at the séance. I know none of us believes in spirits and suchlike, but you never know about these things. Even Shakespeare wrote something about ghosts, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Hamlet. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”
“You have a good memory.” Pa said it proudly.
“Well, we had to memorize entire passages of Hamlet when I was in eighth grade. Too bad we didn’t read Othello before I chose my spiritualist name.” I shook my head to rid it of trivialities. “But that doesn’t make any difference. Can you think of a way to approach Sam?” I stared beseechingly at my father.
Who gazed back at me. Blankly. Drat.
Then I got mad at myself, pulled my cold casserole back in front of me, and dug in. Darned if I’d let Eddie Hastings’ murder go unrecognized or allow myself to go into another decline. Between bites, I said, “One thing I can do is visit the library and look up his obituary and read anything else I can find out about him. And I can talk to Harold and Mrs. Hastings some more. Heck, I can even question Sam about how and where Eddie Hastings was found and who decided he’d killed himself.”
“Oh?” Pa seemed nearly stunned by my tone, which was rather forceful.
“Yes. Darn it, I’m at least going to find out how the poor guy died. If there were any marks on his body. Stuff like that. Heck, maybe somebody injected him with . . . something.” I liked to read detective stories, and I shuffled through memories of various books, trying to come up with injectable poisons. Then I bethought me that if someone had injected him with something, he or she must have been mighty close to the victim. Close enough to be seen by same. “Or maybe somebody fed him cyanide. I understand that works almost instantly. Heck, maybe you can even sniff some and croak.”
“Daisy. Do you really think you should—”
I dropped my fork, raised my hands to my shingled red hair, and tugged. Hard. “Yes! Yes, blast it, Pa! I have to! I promised Mrs. Hastings I’d look into her son’s death, and I won’t go back on my word. Especially since . . . well, especially since I’m the one who propounded the murder scenario in the first place, even though I didn’t do it on purpose. Or by my own will, for that matter. Criminy, do you think I wanted this to happen?”
“I know you didn’t, sweetheart, but don’t go nutty on us. All right? Calm down, and take your investigation step by step if you honestly intend to investigate.”
Trying to take my father’s advice, I released my poor hair, rubbed the sore spot I’d created on my scalp, and took several deep breaths. “Yes. Yes, you’re right. I’ll have to be methodical. First, I’ll go to the library. Then . . . well, I guess I should make an appointment with Mrs. Hastings. She’ll have information about her poor son’s friends and enemies and so forth.” A brilliant thought occurred to me. Or maybe it wasn’t brilliant; sometimes it takes a while to discover an idea’s worthiness. But it seemed like a good one. “Doc Benjamin! Maybe he treated the Hastings family.”
“Lordy, Daisy, you’re not going to tell him about—”
“Good heavens, no! He’d think I was crazy. But I could go to his office for a checkup or something and ask him. Heck, I could even tell him I’d met Mrs. Hastings at a séance and ask about her son.”
Pa gave a judicious nod. “Yes. Yes, I suppose you could do that. Actually, Vi’s been talking about asking the Benjamins to dinner one of these days. Maybe you could convey an invitation and wrangle some information out of him at the same time.”
“What a good idea!” I gave my Pa a smile at least as brilliant as my idea had been.
I finished up my breakfast casserole and carried the dirty dishes to the sink. As I began the washing-up, Pa said in a thoughtful voice from the table, “You know, Daisy, maybe this is a good thing that happened. It’s at least got you taking action about something. We’ve all been worried about you, you know. Well, of course, you know.”
I heaved another sigh and picked up a dish towel. As I carefully wiped a plate, I said, “Yes. I know. The past year has been rough on all of us, and I . . . well, it’s kind of funny. I mean, I knew Billy was destined to die young. After he was shot and gassed in the war, we all knew it. But when it happened, I . . . well, I wasn’t prepared.”
“You can’t prepare for something like that,” said Pa.
“No. I guess not. But then Harold hauled me to Egypt, and I got so sick, and I lost so much weight, and . . . I don’t know. It’s almost as if I’ve spent the rest of the year recuperating.”
The first three months after Billy died, I was basically stunned. Grieving and lost and miserable. I’d felt marginally better after Harold and I got home from Egypt, but I’d
gone into a vast melancholy at Thanksgiving that hadn’t eased until well past the new year started. My family had even gone up to watch the New Year’s Day Rose Parade on Colorado Boulevard on the first of January, 1923, and the jollity hadn’t helped my mood one little bit.
It was now the middle of June, and I’d gradually begun crawling out of the hole of unhappiness into which I’d sunk. Yet until Eddie Hastings showed up at last Saturday’s séance, I hadn’t seen much point to existence.
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe Billy had been the driving force behind Eddie’s appearance, but I scoffed at the idea almost as soon as it popped into my head. Heck, Billy had been dead set—so to speak—against my line of work. If he knew now, after his own demise, that people’s spirits survived beyond the grave, he’d never tell me. He was stubborn like that.
As I put the last glass into the cupboard and wiped down the sink and counter, I said, “First I’m going to change clothes. Then I’m going to the library to look up what I can find out about the young Mr. Hastings’ death. Maybe I’ll pop around to see Flossie and the baby. Dr. Benjamin’s office hours don’t start until one, so I’ll probably have a sandwich at the Tea Cup Inn or something and then visit him.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” said Pa.
I’m sure he was only humoring me, but that was all right. I knew what had happened on Saturday night, even if Pa remained doubtful.
I resented it like fire, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
So I gathered up all the library books my family members had stacked on the little table beside the front door—every time anyone in the family finished a book, he or she would put it there in anticipation of my next library visit—told Spike to sit and stay, and went out to our wonderful self-starting Chevrolet motorcar. My mood was lighter than it had been in many months when I drove north on Marengo, headed for the Pasadena Public Library.
My favorite librarian, Miss Petrie, greeted me when I walked into the library shortly after nine that morning. She reached under the desk she sat behind, which instantly told me she’d been saving books for me. Goody. Miss Petrie was seldom wrong in her selections. She knew my father enjoyed Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books, both the outer-space ones and the Tarzan ones, and she knew my mother and aunt and I all liked detective fiction and action yarns.
“I’ve got several brand-new books for you today, Mrs. Majesty. This one just got catalogued.” She handed me a book with a yellow cover. Which, when I read the title, seemed appropriate: Crome Yellow, by someone named Aldous Huxley. I’d never heard of him. I guess I tilted my head in bewilderment or something, because Miss Petrie said in something of a hurry, “I’m not sure you’ll like it. It’s set in England. I thought it was most amusing. It’s about a poor lad named Denis who visits a grand house called Crome.”
“Thanks. I’ll give it a try. Um, do you have any new mystery books?”
She gave me a beaming smile. “Oh, my, yes. We have two Doctor Thorndyke books for you: Helen Vardon’s Confession and The Cat’s Eye. The latter is brand new, too. It sometimes takes a while for British fiction to cross the Atlantic, but this one was published in America at the same time it was published in Britain.”
“Hmm. I think I’ve read Helen Vardon, but unless you have a list of people waiting for it, I’ll take it, just to make sure. Anyhow, my mother and aunt might not have read it yet.” I didn’t mean to sound greedy, but this was turning out to be a most profitable visit, and I couldn’t help myself. “Anything else?”
She grinned. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in a new collection of stories by Mr. Fitzgerald?”
I very nearly shuddered. “No, thanks. His people are too depressed and wealthy for me. I prefer stories about people who don’t hate life.”
Never mind that my husband had killed himself because he couldn’t stand his life. The way I looked at it, then and now, is that if I wanted to be despondent, all I had to do was wake up in the morning. When I read for entertainment, I wanted to be taken away from the real world for a while. Nuts to F. Scott Fitzgerald and all his beautiful and damned young people who didn’t have anything better to do than fritter their lives away drinking and brooding.
“Very well. I know you enjoyed the Father Brown stories by Mr. G. K. Chesterton. I have a new collection of short stories by him. It’s The ManWho Knew Too Much, and Other Stories.”
“Oh, that sounds good!”
“It seems like all these wonderful writers are English, which makes them more difficult for us to get them here, as I said before.”
“Wish more Americans would start writing detective books,” I said, meaning it.
“There’s a young fellow named Dashiell Hammett who just came out with a pretty good mystery. It’s called The Gatewood Caper, and it’s not only written by an American—”
“With a really strange name,” I plumped in for no reason except than it was the truth.
“Yes, he does have a rather odd name, doesn’t he? But the book is quite good. It’s set in San Francisco and Los Angeles.”
“Oh, my! Los Angeles is right next door. Practically.” Los Angeles was actually about twenty-two miles away from Pasadena, but lots of people who worked there had weekend homes in Pasadena, where they got away from it all. These were the folks who worked in the moving pictures and who had the money to have lots of houses in lots of different places. Like Harold Kincaid, for instance. Every now and then it would come as a shock to me that I actually knew quite a few wealthy people. But Harold was nothing like the characters in Mr. Fitzgerald’s books. He was a nice guy who actually worked for a living.
“And I have a book here by a woman named Patricia Wentworth, another Englishwoman. It’s called The Astonishing Case of Jane Smith. We only have that one because Miss Hill, our reference librarian, took a trip to London earlier this year and brought back several books.”
“Bless her heart. I wish I’d thought to bring books back to the library when I was in England last year.” The sad truth was that I hadn’t been thinking about books on that voyage with Harold; I’d been too brokenhearted to read or even think about books.
Miss Petrie patted my hand. “Oh, my dear, you had so many other things on your mind back then.”
“Yes. I suppose I did.” Besides mourning my deceased husband, I’d been sick as the proverbial dog and beset by a gang of criminals.
“But I have two more wonderful books for you. One’s called Captain Blood, and the other’s called Scaramouch, and they’re both by Rafael Sabatini.”
“Oh, my. He doesn’t sound American, either.”
“He isn’t. He’s Italian, but his books are being translated. These are both quite new, and we just got them in. They’re . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she put a hand over her heart, which, I presume, was palpitating.
“Adventure stories?” I hazarded.
“Yes, indeed. I loved them. In fact, I bought copies for myself, so I can reread them for years to come.”
Poor Miss Petrie. She wasn’t awfully attractive, being on the drab, skinny side and with a skin tone that resembled library paste, but she was a sweetheart. As with Lucy Spinks, however, the fact of life for young, unmarried women after the Great War was that there were very few young men left from which to choose—or who might be fit to choose a young, unmarried woman. In some ways, I’d been lucky. At least I’d had my Billy for a while. It made me sad to know a tender, romantic heart beat under Miss Petrie’s meager bosom, and that she might never find true love. Ah, well.
“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in another book by Mrs. Rinehart.”
“I love Mary Roberts Rinehart’s books. For the most part.” I sure didn’t want to read any more of her books dealing with the late war. Miss Petrie had lent me The Amazing Interlude last year, and all it did was make me cry. “Has she written any new mystery stories?”
“Alas, I fear the new one we have is another war story.”
I shook my hea
d so emphatically, my hat nearly fell off. “Then I don’t want to read it. I wish she’d get back to writing mysteries.”
With a sad sigh, Miss Petrie agreed with me. “Have you read all of her other books? She wrote several before the war that are funny and have good mysteries in them.”
“I’ll check the stacks. Thank you very much for these.” I indicated the pile of books in my arms.
“You’re more than welcome, Mrs. Majesty. I enjoy selecting books for you because we share the same tastes.”
“Thank you again. I have to look in the Periodical Room for back issues of the newspapers, and then I’ll look in the R section of the stacks.”
“Aha. Looking up a person who showed up at one of your séances?”
The question startled me, as did the gleam of avid curiosity in Miss Petrie’s pale brown eyes, which were magnified beneath the thick lenses of her eyeglasses. “Why . . . yes. How did you guess?”
“Oh, no reason, really. But I’ve often wondered what happens in your séances. You’re the best spiritualist medium in town, according to many of the ladies who visit the library.”
“How nice of them,” I said, feeling heat flush my cheeks. One of the problems of having red hair, even if it’s more auburn than red, as was mine, is that we redheads blush easily.
Miss Petrie leaned over her desk and asked intently, “So who is it you’re looking up?”
“A young man named Edward Hastings. I conducted a séance for his poor mother last Saturday. The dear woman is shattered about his death. I don’t blame her, of course. I never knew Mr. Hastings, so I thought I’d try to find out more about him.”
Lucky for me she didn’t ask why, but only shook her head sadly. “The poor woman.”
“Indeed.”
“As if that accursed war didn’t leave enough grieving parents behind. I hate to hear about a young person’s passing.”
“Yes,” I said. “Me, too.”