Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  Since I did not want to risk arousing her suspicions by a too abrupt switch to Nanny, I went on discussing George Hilton until I veered the subject round to his health and the attack of ptomaine poisoning from which he had recently recovered. Dr. Stahl, the passion still on her, swallowed this bait with gratifying avidity.

  “Dr. Heelton sick—hah! You should see eet with Dr. Heelton seeck. It ees not a man who is seeck; it ees a god. That old Nanny, she vatch over heem like a vitch doktor. And you know vat she do? She cannot believe her dear Georgie could get seeck to the belly like a mortal man. Oh no. She cannot believe that. So she tell the vorld that someone poison him!”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Poison heem! Stuff nonsense. I examine Dr. Heelton myself. A large fee, I charge. A very large fee. Vat is wrong? I tell you. It ees seemple. The seemple case of ptomaine poisoning because he ees a peeg and eat so much from some lobsters that go bad.”

  That settled another point. If a toxicologist of Dr. Stahl’s caliber had diagnosed Dr. Hilton’s misery as ptomaine poisoning, Cobb’s expectations of unearthing a murder attempt in Boston seemed doomed to failure.

  Having brought the conversation to Nanny, I ventured: “I guess when a woman gets to that age, she’s apt to have pretty crazy ideas.”

  “Crazy ideas!” Dr. Stahl’s eyes, beady as the eyes in the cages around us, watched me unwinkingly. “Crazy ideas, you say? That old beetch, she was for Dr. Freud—for dear Sigmund, as Mrs. Lanchester would say. All the Heeltons, they are hers. She clutch at them like they are cheeldren at her breasts. George, Emily—vat she call herself, that pink, fat one like a cow?—Belle. Yes, Perdita, Rosalind, Helena, too—they must all love only the old Nanny. Vy she hate leetle Janie and make her life miserable? Sex. Because she is jealous. Vy she snoop and peer all the time after those poor sneakery Lanchester girls? Sex. Vy she hate Veek? Sex, sex, sex.”

  “I didn’t know she hated Vic,” I said, to encourage her.

  “Oh, she hate heem most of all. And I tell you vy.” Dr. Stahl was pouring into her analysis of Nanny as much scientific ardor as she would pour into an autopsy of one of her rat’s intestines. “She hate Veek because he ees sex. Just to look at heem make all the women theenk: Sex, sex, sex. He ees a real man, not a bloodless theeng like a Heelton. And Nanny know that. Nanny know that to Veek to make love with a woman is—pouff, like to drink a cup of tea, pouff, like to eat a sandveech. That ees vy she hate heem. She ees scared he haf some sex with her leetle mousy girls.”

  Risking it, I asked: “And does he?”

  Dr. Stahl shrugged disinterestedly. “How do I know? Maybe, yes. Vy not? They are young; they are not unattractive.” She shrugged again. “After all, I am much older and I am ugly. He does with me.”

  For Kenmore, I had always considered myself pretty sophisticated, but that calm statement of fact, taking me unawares, started me blushing like a choirboy. Dr. Stahl, however, did not notice. Frowning slightly over her own thoughts, she continued:

  “Those poor leetle Lanchester girls that are made spinsters before they are from their cradles.” Suddenly she looked up. “If I have my way, you know what I prescribe for the Lanchester girls? Sex, sex, sex—morning, noon, and night. Maybe with sex there is hope for them.” Dr. Stahl shook her head mournfully at the unlikelihood of her wish coming to pass. “Oh, it ees a mess by those Heeltons. A mess and it steenk. That ees vy yesterday ven thees old beetch die and before I see the silver polish that I say—murder. Because you know vy? Because she should be murdered. An old beetch like that. Keel her off, keel Mrs. Lanchester too, poison them, haf sex.”

  Having delivered herself of this passionate and most un-Hiltonian piece of philosophy, Dr. Stahl seemed to lose interest in the subject under discussion. She glanced at her watch and then grabbed my arm.

  “Come, you see enough rats and leesten to enough chatter. Ve go back to the child.”

  She swept me out of the barn and back into the house, where the melancholy drawn-out A indicated that Dawn was still on the job. Rushing into the living room, Dr. Stahl hovered over my daughter as if she were an eagle about to pounce and suddenly burst out:

  “Good, good, good. You get it. Good. Soon I take you to see the rats. Again. Queeck. Again.”

  While Dr. Stahl jabbered and my daughter scraped, I moved away from them, wandering aimlessly around the room. I had received so much raw material from my visit in Dr. Stahl’s barn that I wanted a moment to digest it. The Austrian’s plunge into the Hiltons’ psychology had hinted at a dozen crisscrosses of tension which might have been building up to murder. But I was less interested in possible motives than in the obvious fact that anyone could, physically, have removed cyanide from that cabinet.

  There was one qualifying fact, of course. If Nanny had been murdered with some of Dr. Stahl’s cyanide, the murderer must have had considerable knowledge of poisons, must have known, for example, that silver polish smeared around the rim of the teapot would have afforded an innocent-seeming explanation for the death. Only a doctor, and a good one too, could have thought of that.

  It was while this thought was in my mind that I picked up Dr. Stahl’s copy of that coroner’s stand-by: Legal Medicine and Toxicology by Gonzales, Vance, and Helpern. It was a much thumbed book, and the glue which bound the pages must have cracked at one point, for as I held it in one hand, the pages parted of their own accord at one particular spot.

  I glanced idly at the page where the book had opened. The first paragraph to catch my eye was:

  Poisoning by the cyanides in most cases is caused by their ingestion for suicidal purposes; photographers, electroplaters, and jewelers who use potassium cyanide in their work sometimes take a solution of the salt, and diamond dealers have been known to drink it in whisky. Accidental cases have occurred, as when a child drank it in white shoe polish, and when a cook inadvertently left traces of cyanide silver polish in a cooking pot in large enough amounts to poison a fellow worker who drank soup from that container….

  I read that last sentence twice. This was much more of a break than I had ever hoped for. I closed the book and let it open naturally in my hand. Once again it opened at that page. I tried the experiment three more times and invariably the same page appeared.

  Dr. Stahl was still chattering and Dawn was still fiddling, but I hardly heard them. I was thinking of someone, anyone, from the Hilton house coming into this room at lunchtime yesterday and idly picking up this book. I was thinking of this person, when the book opened, reading that paragraph and remembering that Nanny was already in bed because she had exhausted herself polishing the silver. I was thinking of that person realizing suddenly that here was the chance of a lifetime to put into practice that secret desire which, perhaps, had been goading him or her for years.

  Dr. Stahl’s voice came into my thoughts. “Good. Now we go to see the rats.” The famous toxicologist was at my side. “Dr. Vestlake, for a child, thees leetle peeg is not dumb.”

  I put the book down rather guiltily. “Oh, good. I’m glad.”

  Dr. Stahl’s rodent nose sniffed inquisitively after the book. “You come with us to the barn?”

  I was all agog to get to the Hilton house. “No, I don’t think so, thanks. I’ll be pushing on. Dawn can find her own way home.”

  “Okay.” Dr. Stahl’s hand shot out and hovered in front of me. “Breeng her tomorrow. Breeng her any time. Three dollar.”

  I found three dollar bills and dropped them into her hand. It folded over them with a predatory clamp.

  Most people would think that three dollars earned by making a little girl play a single note on an A string for an hour was easy money.

  I felt, however, that I had definitely got my money’s worth out of Dr. Stahl.

  VIII

  At Dr. Stahl’s I had learned that anyone from the Hilton house could have obtained cyanide from the toxicologist and, at the same time, by the simple process of picking up a book, could have stumbled upon an ideal method of doing away with Nanny. It now
remained to follow the hypothetical murderer’s movements back to the Hilton house. Obviously, if murder had been committed, the person who had stolen the cyanide must have visited Nanny’s room after her attack in order to have slipped the cyanide into the silver teapot and to have rubbed the “red-herring” polish around the spout. Since Nanny would have been dozing for a great part of the afternoon, this would have been easy to do without arousing her suspicions.

  My next step was to find out discreetly whether anyone had gone up to see the old nurse after Dr. Hilton had put her to bed, and if so—who that person had been.

  Since I wanted to tell Dr. Hilton that the inquest would take place the next day, I had a good enough excuse for appearing at the Hilton house. The shortest route to it from Dr. Stahl’s was over the wooded hill at the back of the laboratory-barn. I took it, wading through clumps of milkweed aflutter with butterflies and up a rough, sun-splashed path through the hemlocks.

  It did not take me long to reach Hilton territory, and soon I emerged from the woods onto a level patch of ground which crested a meadow sloping gently down to the old farmhouse.

  An earlier generation of Hiltons had taken advantage of the flatness of the terrain at this point to build a lawn-tennis court which the Lanchesters had halfheartedly restored. As it came into view with its uneven turf and sagging net, I saw that Rosalind and Helena were playing Janie, who wore blue harlequin glasses, and Perdita. None of the players seemed in a particularly athletic mood with the exception of Helena, who, large and belligerent as an Amazon, was moaning:

  “Oh, Janie, why on earth don’t you wake up? What’s the point of playing if you don’t try?”

  From the looks of it, Rosalind and Perdita were far more listless than Janie, who, though sport was obviously not her métier, was making a valiant effort to be adequate. It was clear that in picking on her stepmother, Helena was merely riding her favorite hobbyhorse.

  Rosalind, seeing me, waved her racket.

  “Hello, Dr. Westlake. Observe the dear girls at play. The sport hour. Lawn tennis—so good for the bust. Mother doesn’t say what you do with your bust when it gets to be good”

  At that moment Janie managed breathlessly to return the ball so that it hit the turf at Rosalind’s feet. Rosalind made no attempt to reach it. Turning her back, she stooped to pick a blade of grass, which she stuck between her lips, and came toward me, slashing at the tall weeds with her racket.

  Helena glanced after her, scowling. “Oh, what the heck! It’s no use playing with you people. Perdita, you get out of the game too. At least I can have the satisfaction of beating Janie in a single.”

  Dowdily dressed as ever in a shapeless cotton frock, Rosalind reached me and stared up at me from blue cynical eyes. “What are you doing here this morning? Bringing Mother a fragrant little bouquet of sweetheart roses?”

  “I want to see your uncle,” I said, not very truthfully.

  “You can’t.” Rosalind made a swoop with her racket at a passing swallowtail butterfly. “He’s in supercolossal conference with Uncle Richard and Vic.” She looked across the court at Helena, who was driving the ball over the net with what looked like a deliberate and vicious attempt to hit her stepmother. “Helena ought to be beautiful, oughtn’t she? She has all the things the dear girls missed out on. And yet something’s wrong. She has the Hilton blight too.” She twisted around to me. “She isn’t attractive, is she? Oh, say she isn’t attractive. I couldn’t bear it if I thought Helena inflamed men. She’s such a horrid girl.”

  I grinned. “You can be horrid and attractive at the same time. Look at you, for example.”

  Her narrow face lit up with a naïve pleasure that was touching. “You really mean that? You really mean I’m attractive? Oh, I don’t mind being horrid if only I inflamed men.”

  “One day you’ll probably be inflaming them by the dozen. And you’re not even as horrid as Helena. At least, not as horrid to Mrs. Hilton.”

  Rosalind glanced back at the court where poor little Janie, sweater, scarlet nails, glamor hair-do, spectacles, and all, was running herself ragged trying to return deep backhand drives.

  “Oh, Janie. Everyone’s horrid to her. I am too. She’s so feeble, never fights back. Sometimes I’m sorry for her, though. She’s quite sweet really. She should have married someone who kept her on a satin cushion all day and fed her candy like a Peke.” She glanced sidewise at me the way she always did when she was more interested than she wanted me to believe. “Why do you have to see Uncle George?”

  “Just to tell him the inquest is fixed for tomorrow morning.”

  Ever since Helena had thrown her off the court, Perdita had been edging her bashful way up to us. Now she stepped impulsively forward, the hair, rather damp from her exertions, clinging around her face.

  “Hello, Dr. Westlake.”

  “Perdita, did you hear that? There’s going to be an inquest.” Rosalind slipped her arm around her sister’s waist. “You know, Dr. Westlake, yesterday when we heard Nanny was dead, Perdita and I thought we’d be glad. I suppose that’ll shock you. Everything I say does. But the point is that we’re not glad. We’ve been absolutely free this morning. Uncle George is in conference. Mother’s been squabbling with Aunt Belle. There’s been no one to boss us and—” She shrugged thin shoulders. “It’s a funny, sort of lost feeling. I even smoked a cigarette, and there wasn’t any kick to it, because I knew Nanny wasn’t going to boo out from behind a shadbush and sneak to Mother.” Her derisive eyes fixed my face. “How do you explain that, Dr. Krafft-Ebing? Masochism, isn’t it? The love of the whip. Perdita, Rosalind, M. Charlus. Oh, God, we’re such thwarted, distorted girls.”

  Perdita, still embraced by her sister, broke in timidly: “Dr. Westlake, why is there going to be an inquest?”

  “Oh yes.” From the quickness with which she broke in, I could tell that Rosalind was as eager to hear as her sister but had deliberately waited for Perdita to ask the question. “We’ve not been allowed to know anything. Spare the dear girls from the more sordid aspects of life. But all along we’ve guessed something was wrong. Nanny didn’t die of a heart attack, did she?”

  I was surprised and rather shocked that the older generation had kept the girls in ignorance of what had happened. I also saw a good opportunity to find out about the visitors Nanny had received in her bedroom the afternoon before. At the risk of incurring Mrs. Lanchester’s wrath, I told the girls how Nanny had died, emphasizing, of course, the accident theory.

  They both listened with fascinated eyes. When I had finished, Rosalind remained curiously silent. It was Perdita who spoke.

  “But, Dr. Westlake, it can’t have happened that way. I mean, if there was poison in silver polish, people”—she gestured vaguely—“housewives and things would be dying every day.”

  I gave her a little lecture on the menace which lurked in so many innocent household accessories. Perdita seemed only half listening, as if another idea had come. Suddenly she turned to her sister.

  “Rosalind, then you and I saw it happen.” The green eyes flickered. “You and I were in the kitchen when she was polishing the teapot and had her attack.”

  Rosalind started. “Me? What do you mean? I never saw—”

  “Oh no. That’s right. It was Helena.” Perdita looked at me, shaken. “Helena and I were there when Nanny was polishing the teapot, and suddenly the pain came and she collapsed. She dropped it. I ran to get Uncle George. I never realized—”

  “She was actually polishing the teapot when she had her attack?” This, at least, was a point that could be settled.

  “Yes. Yes. Later, after Uncle George had put her to bed, Helena and I took it and the tea kettle upstairs, because we knew Nanny always liked them by her bed.” Perdita’s face was drawn and pale. “If we’d wiped the teapot over, Nanny—Nanny would still be alive.”

  Provided the death had been accidental, that fact was obviously true, but, not wanting to add to her consternation, I hedged. It was then that Rosalind chi
pped in. She had been watching me very carefully, as if trying to decide whether there was anything in my mind that I had not put into words.

  “So that’s how it happened. Perdita and I couldn’t understand. You see, we knew Nanny’s attack hadn’t been serious. Mother made us all go up and visit her in bed. We trooped up one after the other. And she seemed perfectly all right, didn’t she, Perdita? That’s why we couldn’t understand how on earth she managed to die.”

  “Poor Nanny.” Perdita, off in some dream, was picking distractedly at the frayed binding of her tennis racket. “Swallowing silver polish. Ugh.” She shivered. “Such a horrible taste.”

  Helena screamed from the court then: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you two, come back. It’s impossible playing with Janie. She’s blind as an owl.”

  Reluctantly, but trained to obey the voice of authority even when it appeared in their cousin, the two sisters trailed back to the court where poor Janie, hot and panting, was snatching a moment to bring her sweater back under control.

  I was glad enough to get rid of the girls. I had learned all I wanted to learn. Nanny had, in fact, been polishing the teapot when she had her attack. And everyone had visited her individually in the bedroom after she had been installed there by Dr. Hilton.

  This new data both strengthened the accident theory and increased the chance for murder.

  Since the morning had so far been rich in pickings, I decided to take my informal investigation into the house itself. When I had crossed the meadow and entered the old-fashioned walled garden which stretched at the side of the house, I saw Mrs. Lanchester and Mrs. Kenton-Oakes seated together in faded deck chairs under a large sugar maple. They were both at work on embroidery and chattering rather heatedly, it seemed.