by Rufus King
“No. I’ll get one from the sheriff.”
“Take mine. I had planned to be with the posse, but a case is keeping me in town.”
Durban pocketed the revolver.
“Thanks, Doctor.”
(Three paths, thought Starr, and one led to a youngster bleeding like a shot animal in some fastness of the hills, and one led to dead ashes of a fire, while the last led toward that bourne from which—)
* * * *
The shot cracked crisply in the chill night air, and the scene arranged in the lighted window of the living room of Dixlow’s house changed slowly according to plan. Martha’s hands clasped spasmodically on her breast and she sank forward in the chair and toppled onto the floor.
Starr moved with Heffernan from behind a masking spruce and they blocked young Durban as he rose from a crouch. Durban looked at them stupidly, while the revolver swung loosely from a finger of his right hand. He started to cry. He said, in a welter of self-pity, “There was so little time. It was hard to figure what ought to be done first.”
Starr said equably, “Panic does that to people, Joel. Like drowning, they grasp what’s near at hand. Like drivers who hit and run, panic arouses their instinct for self-preservation to the deadening of everything else. You thought it better to come here first and shoot Martha before she could remember the things you imagined she had seen. Then would be time enough to destroy whatever mechanism you had arranged at the signal fire, and lastly you could take care of Jeff. Were you going to fix things so that it would seem to have been he who shot Martha and then that he had killed himself?”
Durban’s voice stayed stupid, thick.
“Yes, Doctor—there seemed a way—such quantities of time left through the night.”
“Tell me, why did you kill Elsa? Naturally we realize you intended to marry Mrs. Culver and her wealth and that her interest in you would have deadened if she’d known you had a wife, but after all, there is the mechanism of divorce. Tell me really why, Joel?”
Durban’s handsome eyes were wide with candor. He said with the utmost conviction, “But I never could have just left Elsa, Doctor. It would have killed her. Don’t you see?”
It was easier then. He told them just what he had done: how he’d come back from Columbus the night before last and killed Elsa with the charcoal fumes while she lay in the deep first hours of sleep and then dressed her and thrown her body over the cliff; told them of the time bomb for the fire which he’d made at the forge, of the weather forecast which had assured him there would be no snowfall to smother the fire. Then he said bitterly, “Why did you let me shoot Martha? It was such a useless thing when you already knew.”
“There’s no hole in the glass of that window, Joel. I took the lead from the bullets before I gave you the gun.”
There was something that Durban still sought in the deep confusion of his mind. He said to Starr, “But at the first, when you found Elsa—I looked it up in a medical book in the library—if anyone freezes to death their skin gets a cherry red, just as it does if they die from the fumes of charcoal—it was so foolproof—how did you know?”
Starr felt, against reason, a sense of pity.
“It’s a case of the little knowledge being a dangerous thing, Joel. The flesh in both instances docs turn a cherry red, but with freezing, the only parts that do so are those which have been exposed to the air. Your mistake, when you dressed Elsa, lay in buttoning the collar of her coat.”
* * * *
They brought young Luffberry in around midnight. Starr was waiting in the cabin, with Miss Wadsworth, dressings, probes and Martha Dean. They’d found Jeff unconscious in a cave further back in the hills. It was a flesh wound of, as Starr had thought, the shoulder. It did not worry Starr or Martha or Jeff himself when he came to. Because, as all three of them knew, young Luffberry was tough.
THE CASE OF THE LONELY LADIES
Chapter 1
She held the letter in her hands for a long time, thinking, while her dark eyes stared from under fine lashes through a window that was sullen beneath murky overtones of a threatening storm. She felt wretchedly chilled and nervous, in a way that she hadn’t known for years. It was of small moment in itself, the letter, but it served to bring her problems to a sharp focus and to set a period mark on any further procrastination.
Extrasensory phenomena had never been considered by her in one way or another, for plainer terms such as moods, hunches were more to her liking. She was experiencing one then: a sense of disaster (she went further in a rush of self-honesty and labeled it danger), and she was too clever a woman to dismiss the feeling without making an effort to trace it to its source. There was, that she could discover, absolutely none.
Her name was Lily Elser.
That was it: it was sixteen years ago when she had felt like this, during the first few weeks when she had come to Ohio and settled down in Laurel Falls with her daughter Nan, who had then been a child of three. Lily herself was at the time only twenty-two, but a certain maturity of manner had made her seem older. It had stamped her with a quality of agelessness which had never changed and without detracting in any fashion from the warm charm of her character and pleasant looks.
As there had not been the least reason for anyone to be curious about them her antecedents prior to Laurel Falls had been initially obscure. It was generally understood that they involved several cities which were as far-flung as Seattle and New Orleans, with brief sojourns at St Paul and Pittsburgh in between. Lily had been accepted without the slightest curiosity as a delightful young widow whose name had then been Mrs. Robert Warden.
There had been enough money for Lily to engage an agreeable suite in the Mansion House, and she had ascribed her decision to remain there simply to the natural beauties of Laurel Falls, which lay in the ruggedly hilly southeastern portion of Ohio, on the banks of the Onega River. Unobtrusively and always with a correct sense of reticence she had found her way into the social life of the community. Her regular Sunday attendance with Nan at All-Saints-in-the-Valley had with time brought her many agreeable contacts which later developed into sincere friendships.
It was predestined, of course, that she would marry again. Completely apart from any mental or physical qualities Lily belonged to that fairly rare stamp of women who are, inescapably, wives. Without in the least being helpless she did suggest an impression of being so. There was nothing conscious or deliberate about this on her part: it just was there as a fact, and every man felt it and instantly started in figuring out ways for helping and protecting her.
Lily had come with the years to know that look. To recognize it the instant it sparked in a man’s eye and then spread out into a warm, protective glow.
Faintly she resented it for she knew herself to be sane, sound and capable, with strengths that could (and had) cope efficiently with varied emergencies. But she could not, in the kindness of her heart, ever bring herself to the point of quenching it. Never, certainly, before the glow was fixed, and then it was always too late.
Milton Elser had had it seven years ago, so Lily had married him and had moved with Nan from the Mansion House and into Elser’s spacious home on Onega Drive. It was a small estate, really, for the property extended in the rear to the bank of the river and was masked from the main highway in front by broad landscaped lawns dotted with metal fauna elegancies of the day. The buildings, which included stables and a gate lodge, were in the handsomest tradition of Stanford White, and the three of them lived there in an even state of unexciting contentment with Elser daily protecting and cosseting Lily and she letting herself be both and Nan getting finished at the Misses Tunkets’ in Maryland.
There was this to be said for the firmness with which Lily’s roots had struck into the town’s society. Nobody for a minute considered that she might have married Milton Elser for his money, and this in spite of the fact that Elser was a good twenty years her senior. There had seemed a r
ightness about the match: a satisfactory exchange of security for Lily and Nan and of an agreeable companionship and shepherding rights for Elser.
Then Elser had died.
This was several months ago after a full year’s distressing illness which had terminated in a stroke, leaving Elser helplessly bedridden until his death. So there was Lily a widow again, alone with Nan, and the sole mistress of an estate which the town felt certain must be very large.
It wasn’t.
Elser’s malady had been seated in the brain, and long before his stroke his judgment had begun to falter, a condition that was aggravated by a dread on his part that he would die and Lily would be left unsheltered, a tragic, tender sheep alone among the financial wolves and morasses of the world’s unsettled state. He had viewed the collapse of great houses, of guaranteed mortgage bonds (and similar once-invincible solaces for widows, idiots and orphans), and his tired, kindly head got completely muddled.
As a result Elser had converted a fortune in reasonably sound holdings into a myriad of desperate eggs for whose goodness and hatching he would develop some transiently intensive hope. He had specifically barred any sale of the estate during Lily’s lifetime (always she must have shelter, a roof and warmth and light and things to eat), then had lumped the whole sorry mess into a trust and had wished it on the First National Bank of Laurel Falls as both executors and trustees. For Lily.
Lily turned from the window with dread. It was a dread at the immediate steps which she would have to set into motion. All of her life she had disliked an air of tolerance, and Sheffield would, she knew, continue to be tolerant. Sheffield and Delilah both. They were part of the estate, having started in service with Elser’s parents, whom they had respectfully wept into their graves, and continued through Elser, weeping him into his grave, and would undoubtedly (Lily felt) weep her into hers. They were, of course, the type of Negroes who never, never die. Lily had found it difficult to be firm with them and impossible to be hard, and now she might have to be both.
She left the living room with its fine old things and went through a broad hallway to the quarters in the rear. Sheffield and Delilah both stood up with gracious politeness when she came into the roomy kitchen. A rabbit casserole was fragrant on the range, and the air was pungent with the tang of baking bread. Lily’s nervousness increased and her fingers were chilled. She thought for a wretched moment that they might begin to tremble, like impossibly flexible icicles in a wind. She came straight to the point.
“I’m considering taking in tourists, Sheffield. If the plan is agreeable to the trustees I’ll arrange with Bellamy’s after lunch to place a signboard at the gates.”
He said, “We was afraid.”
“There’s nothing else I can do.”
“No’m, we was aware of that.”
Probably, Lily thought, before she had been aware of it herself. Well, there wasn’t anything else either. But this immediate capitulation surprised her until she reflected that it was based on an acceptance of overnight tourists as the lesser evil of possible others.
There were the things. Heirlooms of Sheraton, of Phyfe, some good glass, some silver. There were also the paintings: a fine Benjamin West, a Vanderlin, a Rembrandt Peale, some lesser fry, but all of a certain value to a collector of Americana. Yes, therein lay their greater evil: she might have sold something or persuaded the trustees, rather, to permit her to do so. Sold some of the heirlooms out of the family, which was dead but which didn’t matter because in the opinion of Sheffield and Delilah the Elsers continued to own them in some supernal fashion, whereas Lily only lived among them on a slender tenure of (still supernal) sufferance.
Oddly she thought: And they’re quite right.
She said to Delilah, “Some of the bedrooms might be made ready. There isn’t much traffic in winter, so I doubt whether we’ll need more than a few.”
Delilah’s origin was Jamaica, and she had never lost the soft, slurred flavor of her English. She said, “Is it satisfactory to Madam to use the ones in the north wing?”
“Yes, those, please, Delilah.”
“Will there be meals served too, madam?”
Lily had wondered about that. She thought not. The first step alone was difficult enough of itself. And still it seemed stupid to hang suspended in the center of a plunge.
“Perhaps morning coffee and toast, Delilah, and fruit juice, in their rooms.”
“Yes, madam. That can be done. And the silver?”
“Silver?”
“Will you wish us to put it away?”
It came back to Lily swiftly and more strongly, that foreboding sense of danger, and this time she could label it quite simply: Taking strangers into the house.
“Thank you, Delilah, for thinking of it. It would be best.”
She left the kitchen and got ready to drive down to the bank. The thought stayed with her while she did so, expanding across a canvas that grew ever more somber: the potential dangers of the step she was planning, which so many hard-pressed women had been compelled to take before her.
A tourist house was different from hotels. Hotels had staffs, house detectives, any number of protective measures both for sizing up their guests and for coping with any eventuality whatever. But with a private house which was suddenly thrown open to the public—
Lily cut the thought off sharply, settling a smart hat, arranging furs, thinking of her mirrored face and expensive turnout in the uncertain terms of a whited sepulcher, uncertain because she had never been sure as to what the phrase definitely meant, but she felt it analogous to false western fronts.
* * * *
Mr. Lorrimer Keith was, for the president of a bank, a young man, scarcely five or six years older than Lily herself. But then, the First National of Laurel Falls was a family affair almost to the point of being entailed. Groton and Williams, also entailed, had done their customary job and had sent him back to Ohio, a finished product of their personal tradition.
He cordially detested everything about banking and would have given anything to have outfitted a caravan and toured the countryside, presenting plays of an intimate, intensive nature in an intimate and intensive way. A yearning, he knew, utterly vain, for his body belonged to Laurel Falls no matter where his soul might long to flit, just as the bodies of his ancestors had belonged to Laurel Falls before him. And whatever might churn inside of it his shell was a beautifully glazed example of courteous business acumen and sound Rotary Club restraint.
He had gone through one brief and disastrous marriage, a rebellious gambol in reality among his secret Elysian fields, with a girl from New York’s Greenwich Village. And Genevieve had certainly brought life to Laurel Falls. Then, after busting up two families and giving a local welterweight ideas (finer things in life—the brain—a touch of soul, of poetry above the belt) Genevieve had got a divorce and had returned, plus alimony, to Greenwich Village. Leaving Keith in a daze of unspeakable relief.
He caught Lily on her way to the paying teller and led her across polished marble into his office. He had always liked Lily enormously, because he thought her decorative and knew her to be both intelligent and nice. Well, and comfortable too. Flow, immeasurably so, he often thought, in comparison with his yardstick Genevieve. Recently, since he had found himself in the role of chief trustee to the Elser estate, he had worried about Lily terrifically, because he knew down to a penny the muddled financial abyss which Elser had left her in. He seated her with a Clyde Fitch flourish in an armchair and offered her a cigarette.
“We see too little of you, Lily.”
She smiled and said, “I’ve so little to come here for, Lorrimer.”
“I know, and I’ve been wondering.”
“What recipe I’ll use for cooking the wolf?”
“Yes. The best thing to do. We’ve got to tide you over, Lily.”
He stared at her earnestly, and Lily thoug
ht uncomfortably: It’s there. The look. She couldn’t mistake it after so much experience through the years with its inevitable kindling, the glint, which would so shortly spread into the warmly protective glow. Right now, she decided, was the instant to quench it (just as she had always decided) but she couldn’t bring herself to do so, any more than she had been able to in the past.
Keith was saying, “I can’t take the securities as collateral for a loan without having the bank examiners bring charges of lunacy and embezzlement. I don’t think they’re utterly worthless, but that’s just my private opinion. I think the coal stocks especially will be all right after this strike nonsense is settled. We can’t touch the house or grounds, of course, but that doesn’t matter. I doubt whether you could even give the place away for taxes as things are now. Lily”—Keith hesitated uncomfortably—“you need cash. You need it for food and fuel. You need it to carry you until, well, the mines start paying again. I want you to let me take that stock over. Just a transfer sale, and later I’ll sell it back to you.”
She felt the sting of tears at the genuine warmth of his friendliness, at this interest in her concern.
“Thank you, Lorrimer, but I’ve thought of a way.”
“What is it, Lily?”
“I came here really to see you about it. To find out whether legally I’ve the right to do it. I want to turn the place into a tourist house, if that’s permissible under the trust.”
He sensed a firmness in her, a firmness against his stock-transfer idea or any other idea which would simply be a euphemism for a personal loan. He thought of how rigidly the old conventions still retained their bonds.
“Lily, I don’t like it.”
“I don’t myself especially, but what is there else?”
“I don’t know. It’s the usual solution, heaven knows, cither tourists or boarders. There, Lily, why not boarders? People you know? At least they’re—well—safe.”
“But I would know them, Lorrimer. That’s just it.”