The 2nd Golden Age of Mystery and Crime MEGAPACK ™: Ruth Chessman

by Ruth Chessman

  “Oh, to be sure,” Richard echoed her last words. Was it mockery, that echo? She looked at him from under demure lashes, but he did not seem to see the weight of what he had pointed out, and she breathed a little easier. But less easy did she feel when he turned to something new.

  “The house must be searched,” he said. “Something may be amiss that will point a finger. You three, from knowing the house and its habits, must do the seeking. Take all the candles you need. Look carefully about you and tell me when you see anything, anything at all, that wants explanation.”

  Elizabeth, glancing about her as the others did, but moving closer to the door with each step, was halted by Richard saying, “This room first, as being the scene of the murder.”

  She had no choice then but to do as the others did, and conclude with them that except for the body and the blood, there was nothing wrong.

  “Then we will start with the halls,” Richard said, and Charles, who had been mute for so long Elizabeth had quite forgotten him, echoed, “Yes, the halls! This is the very idea I would have had next!”

  At his words Elizabeth moved swiftly through the door—to be a moment beforehand was all she hoped for. Without wasting time to look back she lifted the goblet from the hall table and drained it. Then, setting it down carefully on the table, she turned triumphantly, ready for anything—except Anne, kind, well-meaning Anne, staring at her from the doorway.

  “The wine and water, Elizabeth—you have just drunk Mrs. Parsons’ wine and water!” Elizabeth knew she was undone.

  “Elizabeth brought the drink to her last night,” Anne went on unbelievingly, “and the mistress would not drink?”

  “The mistress was set on her night drink of wine,” Jane asserted. “I’d sooner believe she could not drink it, than she would not.”

  “Exactly so,” Richard said. “She did not drink it because she could not—because she was dead—because, Elizabeth, you murdered her.”

  Elizabeth did not speak, for what more was there to say? She sank into the nearest chair and let her head droop.

  “I knew it must be you,” Richard said. “I knew even before I knew. There was something wrong from the beginning.” He turned to his friend. “It was not in the character of your poor aunt, Charles.”

  “Was it not?” Charles asked blandly.

  “Elizabeth’s gown,” Richard explained. “I knew your aunt would not permit a bondswoman to dress so fine—it was not in her noble heritage to countenance. You will recall, Charles, how greatly I wondered that Elizabeth should be willing to lead us to your aunt. And I was right to wonder, was I not, Elizabeth? You came into her presence gowned thus only because you knew her to be dead—because you murdered her, Elizabeth.”

  “But why?” Charles demanded. “My poor aunt had her taught to read, you know. And Elizabeth was fed at the grand table like any lady. So why should she kill her mistress?”

  “To do you a good turn, man,” Richard jested, little knowing he spoke the truth. “Possibly to help you into your inheritance and to remove a warder both. Without your aunt to oversee and interfere, you might have done Elizabeth a good turn in exchange by marrying her. She was after you, my friend.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” Charles asked, sounding pleased. “Do you really believe it? Because you know,” he went on, “she would have got me. She’s a pretty little woman, and she would have got me sure.”

  Elizabeth saw his regretful look at her. Yes, she would have got him—and that must be her consolation, alas! That—and one other thing. Her gown! The gown would console her to the end. She sat sadly, resignedly, but careful not to move lest her ugly boots show from beneath the hem of her skirt. Even now that she sat in the shadow of the gallows she could feel the great grandeur of wearing so fine a gown. She could not learn to hate it even now when she knew it was the silken gown itself, that would in the end form for her a deadly noose of hemp.

  POOR SHERM

  Originally published in Manhunt, Aug. 1958

  Two murders were done by two different murderers. The killers never met, and although one was never to receive man’s punishment for his crime—a higher power took care of it with swifter justice—the one who lived carried both men’s burden.

  The first murder happened in Custer, Massachusetts, when Sherman Wyatt was twenty-two. Sherman. Nobody ever called him Sherm, and that about says it. He wasn’t a man you could get close to, although there was nothing repulsive about him. On the contrary! He was a handsome young man, American style from his six feet of height to the rest of him, fine blue eyes and brown hair with a slight wave. Men liked him, yet he had no close friends. Naturally many a girl had done her best but no girl ever had a prayer, not with his sister Sarah for a rival.

  “We are very close,” she’d say fondly. “Particularly since David died.”

  David Kenyon had taken a pretty desperate way out of being Sarah’s husband by dying of pneumonia when his orphaned little brother-in-law was eight. He wouldn’t have made much difference to Sherman dead or alive, though, since Sarah kept telling her husband, “You are too busy with your work to give time to Sherman.” And she had often added, “After all, he is not your responsibility.”

  Thus David Kenyon did not act the father to little Sherman, much as he might have wanted to. Sarah, on the other hand, spent most of her time being a mother to the little brother who had been born so unexpectedly when she was twenty-five. After David died, leaving friendly memories and insurance, not to mention the income she already had from her parents, Sarah often remarked on how providential it was that she and David had had no children. Now she could devote herself single-mindedly to Sherman.

  When Sherman graduated from Custer High he was pretty set on going ahead with the art that had begun to give him real pleasure, but Sarah jollied him out of it so skillfully that he didn’t feel the pain at all. In fact, he thought it was all his idea when he turned what Sarah called sensible. Quite contentedly he registered at a university of Sarah’s choice—within commuting distance, naturally, so he could continue to live at home. The September after he graduated he entered the law school at the same university.

  “Naturally,” as Sarah put it. Not only had David been a lawyer, but their own father too.

  They were really a comfortable family, just the two of them. They had a pleasant little ranch-type house in a setting that had remained half-country simply because the development had not caught on. Every year or so a few lots sold, a few houses went up, but the progress was so slow that each street still ended abruptly in fields, streams or woods. Even this environment fitted into the unchanging pattern they lived by. Sherman knew exactly what to expect next, because Sarah always told him, and Sarah was always right.

  And yet for a little space out of eternity one Indian summer afternoon in October it seemed as if an exciting new kind of life were just about to begin. This was on such a day as makes poets sing and artists dream. And Sherman was still an artist, because that part of a man never dies no matter how deliberately it is starved by indifference, nor made invisible by a pretense that it does not exist.

  This special afternoon Sarah was absent when he came home, although ordinarily she was there to give him her motherly welcome when he returned from classes. He began to idle through the house, nudged gently by a drive so long hidden he’d forgotten it was there. Without conscious plan he reached up to his closet shelf, in back of the hat box, and took out his sketch pad and charcoals. There was no secret about them—Sarah left them there each time she cleaned the closet. She seemed to know—who better?—that they were no threat to her plans for her brother. And yet today something in him stirred and reached out.

  He left the house by the back door, and as if he had an assignation with destiny he walked beyond the limits of the faultless lawn to the pine woods which backed along the whole area.

  There was a little clearing fifty feet from the edge. As a boy he’d come here a lot, but it was a long time since his last visit. He had a mom
ent of panic at the idea that it might be overgrown, but then without warning he was on his own private carpet of pine needles. I should come here more often, he thought as a kind of rapture took hold of him. But Sarah hadn’t even liked his visits here when he was a kid, how would she feel now? He made a quick deal with his conscience. Not too often, just once in a while, he promised himself.

  He opened his box of charcoals and began to work. The straight tall trees rimmed about with scrubby bushes, the rare shaft of sunlight, the brightness here where he sat, the shadow there—and in the shadow, with only a scant motion of the leaves, a girl stood framed in the green. They froze for a moment, staring at each other, and then the girl said gaily, “Hi!”

  He didn’t know how to handle the unexpected, and fell back on a chilly, “Good afternoon.”

  After a quick look around she stepped full into the clearing. “My folks are back there, looking to buy land,” she said. She spotted the sketchpad he had dropped behind him, and picked it up before he could stop her.

  He wanted to snatch it back, but his wants had been kept under such exquisite control for so long that he hardly knew he had them. He did nothing except watch her with pretended boredom. She was a flashy girl, eighteen or so, her black hair worn in a ponytail, and with black eyes sparkling under black brows. She wore a low-cut peasant blouse and a wild-colored cotton skirt. Her jewelry was wild too—bright green loops dangled from her ears, and a necklace and bracelet of the same heavy-looking plastic ornamented the young throat and slim wrist. She shone against the dark trees like a tropical bird.

  “Hey, this is good!” she said, holding the sketch away from her as if to appreciate it more properly. “Very good.”

  He hardly breathed. Nobody except his high-school art teacher had ever praised his drawings. This girl’s spontaneous opinion, however valueless her taste might be, was intoxicating.

  “I’d like to do you, in colors,” he said gratefully. “I’d call it Bird.”

  “Nobody ever said anything like that to me!” she said. Their eyes met. The moment, the vibrant girl, the repressed young man, all met and matched. They were locked in a first close embrace when Sarah’s voice, calling his name, reached them. They moved apart quickly, but all the magic wasn’t over. Even an almost instinctive obedience could not make him go the whole way and answer Sarah.

  Did Sarah remember the clearing? Apparently not—she had stopped calling. After a full minute they turned to one another slowly—and at that moment his sister stepped into the clearing, dominating it from the second she set foot in it just as she had to dominate everything. She was tall, and wore her brown hair in a braid coronet. At this moment she seemed majestic to him, frighteningly so. He stole an apprehensive look at the girl who, to his amazement, seemed ready to laugh.

  “So this is where I find you!” Sarah said. “A cheap rendezvous with a cheap girl.”

  “Sarah—please!” Sherman said, but his throat was so constricted the words sounded shrill. He glanced apologetically at the girl, whose expression had changed abruptly. Now she looked puzzled.

  “I worried about you not being in the house,” his sister proceeded accusingly. “But you—you couldn’t even wait until I got home from marketing. All you cared about was hiding off here with some—some—!”

  Sherman knew the girl was waiting for him to defend her. But that would mean defiance of Sarah. Although he was incapable of any lucidity on the subject, so that he could not even guess how he arrived at his conclusion, he knew irrevocably that defiance was impossible. Neither he nor his brother-in-law—nor anybody else, to his knowledge—had ever defied Sarah. Like many another before him who has said, “I have no choice,” the real fact was simply that the existence of choice was something he had never dreamed of. The stillness began to thunder in his cars, and worse even than that was the motionless girl at his side, waiting, waiting.

  Then she was waiting no longer. She walked to the edge of the clearing, the spot where she’d first materialized like a brilliant apparition, over her shoulder she called, “Goodbye, Sherman,” and mockingly, “Poor Sherman!”

  “Well, that’s the last of her!” Sarah said—prophetically, because he never saw the girl again, nor learned her name. On those rare, rare occasions when she came to mind he thought of her as Bird. A dream of Indian summer—and finis. “Come on, Sherman,” Sarah added.

  Sherman said mildly, “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  Having won the war Sarah quite generously conceded this battle, and departed. Until she left he had no feelings beyond a vague discomfort, but the instant he was alone he was seized by a rage, a fury so passionate he couldn’t be still. This was happening to him, who had never even known anger before! He caught sight of the sketch pad and snatched it up, only to rip it to shreds. He broke off a thick branch over his head, as easily as if it were a matchstick, and began to flail the trees with it until it too lay in shreds. For at least fifteen minutes he was a man possessed.

  He had never in his memory resented Sarah, not even when he was a small child, yet even at his wildest he knew this must be an accumulation, that this pointless, objectless fury was the eruption of a volcano that had been boiling underneath for a lifetime. When the frenzy passed, quite as suddenly as it came, he dropped exhausted to the bed of pine needles and fell fast asleep at once.

  It was full moonless night when he opened his eyes and started up, waiting to hear again whatever it was that had awakened him. It came to him again, a man’s voice calling, “Sherman Wyatt?”

  Another masculine voice said, “I told you he wouldn’t be here. What would he be doing here?”

  He called to them, and went to meet them guided by the beams from their flashlights.

  “Police,” one of them explained.

  “Bad news, fella,” the other said, as if he were trying to be kind—but there’s no way to break the news gently, to tell a man kindly that his sister has been strangled.

  “Lucky she was frying something at the time—liver it was,” one of the men went on. “It began to smoke, see, and that Mrs. Innes next door thought it was a fire and ran over. She was the one found her.”

  Almost before the impact of the murder reached him, Sherman had a shocking idea. He had always detested liver, which Sarah insisted he eat once a week because it was so full of—whatever it was full of, he’d forgotten. A shocking, treacherous thought: I’m glad the liver burned!

  He cleared the enormity out of his mind at once. Now came a new horror: It wouldn’t have happened if I’d just come back with her when she asked me to! For a moment he flagellated himself with guilty regrets. And then suddenly that idea too was gone, and he couldn’t remember what had been troubling him. It had all come and gone while the police told him the whole story.

  “Poor Sarah—murdered—” he said slowly, the words thickening up on him so that the two experienced officers got one on each side of him just as he folded.

  It took an hour or so before Sherman was able to go through her things. Sarah had had very little jewelry, having been a woman who avoided such fripperies. All he could say was missing for sure were her diamond earrings, a gift from poor David Kenyon on their first wedding anniversary—a frivolous gesture David had apparently never felt an inclination to repeat.

  Mrs. Innes had seen a disreputable looking man at the back door just about the time of the murder, but beyond that she knew nothing. When the earrings turned up in a pawnshop the next morning, a description of the Jeremiah Smyth who pawned them sounded enough like Mrs. Innes’s disreputable-looking man to give them something to work on.

  Even so they never caught up with the murderer because he, roaring drunk on the proceeds of the earrings, put himself completely out of their jurisdiction by walking across the wrong tracks at the wrong time. One derelict, executed by a train. He was never connected with Sarah Kenyon, and the case was accordingly never closed until one day when an extraordinary solution was handed to them on a platter.

  Sherman,
with a robustness of character rather surprising in so sheltered a young man, bore up well. He continued to live at home and went on with his law studies. This had all been planned for him by Sarah, so it required no independent thought. The income left by their parents now devolved upon him, and it was as if Sarah were still with him, paying his way, directing him.

  It wasn’t until he passed the bar four years later that he felt panic, but when it came it was complete. For days after getting the news that he was a full-fledged lawyer, he barely stirred. He felt as if he’d been pushed to the edge of a precipice. Below lay the black abyss of his uncharted future. Sarah had never gone beyond saying he was to be a lawyer. Had she meant him to set up for himself? Or was he to go into a large firm as one of its bright young men? Corporation law? Criminal law? He was close to collapse from the indecision when he received an impersonal little note from the family lawyer. It was a routine matter—he was to come in at his convenience any morning regarding a transfer of stock which Mr. Matthews wanted to discuss with him.

  It was the first time in almost two weeks that he’d left the house, and he was grateful for the summons. Once more he was being told what to do, even on so trivial a matter. It was as if he’d been led to a temporary rock to cling to.

  Mr. Matthews was not in at the moment, would he mind waiting? He was only too glad to prolong the incident, because at the end of it he could see only the same terrifying nothingness. It was very comfortable to chat with Mr. Matthews’ secretary, Ellen Pagett, whom he’d come to know over the years, although until today he had never really looked at her.

  Now, however, he found to his surprise that she was in some vague way a great deal like Sarah. Actually, although Ellen was six years older than Sherman, she did not at all look like his sister, being a trim little blond with cold grey eyes. However, basically he was right. In other more important ways she was so exactly like Sarah that he began to feel at ease for the first time in years.