Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

It seemed obvious that this was the person who had killed Nanny before she could make good her threat.

  What it was Nanny had known, of course, was completely mysterious to me. It was natural to think back to the possible poison attempt on Dr. Hilton’s life. But that was not necessarily the right explanation.

  Nanny had known something, however, and if I could find out what that thing was, I would not be far from finding out who had murdered her.

  I reached home quite tired from my succession of colorful interviews. It was refreshing to be greeted by Dawn, who had returned alone from Dr. Stahl’s. It was refreshing to hear her enthusiastic prattle about the beauties of the rats. It was even refreshing to find that, against all household regulations, she had been practicing her violin in the living room.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, brandishing the violin, “I do love Lizzle. I’ve been playing A natural for hours and hours, and Hamish howled. And I’ve got to start everything over again from the very beginning. Forget everything Mrs. Graebner taught me and begin again. Isn’t that exciting?”

  To me it would have been a most discouraging prospect, but then I lacked the exuberance of youth. Ecstatically my daughter arranged her violin and bow and drew a long, booming note—presumably the inevitable A natural.

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” she asked.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “By the way, we’re invited to supper with the Lanchesters again, and you’ll be expected to play. You can hardly get by on A natural. I guess you’ll have to revert to Mrs. Graebner for one night.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Dawn loftily. “They’re only amateurs. They won’t know the difference.” She untightened her bow and put it and the violin tenderly into their case.

  She picked up a bag of popcorn then and, grabbing some, stuffed it in her mouth.

  “Oh, Daddy, when you were out Mrs. Henderson stopped in with the laundry on her way to church. Rebecca didn’t have any money so I searched your pockets. Two ninety-eight.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Chewing on the popcorn, my daughter stared up at me. “Daddy, why were you carrying that package of arrowroot around?”

  “Arrowroot?”

  Then I remembered the arrowroot which I had found, so carefully wrapped, under Nanny’s pillow the night before. With a sudden linking of two memories, I thought of Rosalind on the davenport in the attic staring at me tensely and saying: “Nanny did say something else, but it was just gibberish. I only got one word. She seemed to say it over and over again. Arragh.” I thought of Nanny’s thick Scottish burr.

  Arragh … Arrow … Arrowroot.

  I gripped my daughter’s arm. “Where is it? The arrowroot?”

  Dawn looked faintly pained. “Oh, Daddy, why would you care? It’s no good anyway. I threw it out in the garbage.”

  “No good? What do you mean—no good?”

  “I’d call it no good.” Dawn blinked and looked bored. “After all, what’s the good of arrowroot if you can’t eat it? Of course, I hate it anyway. So sticky and gooey. But that package—the moment you looked at it in the light, you could see.”

  “See what?”

  At that moment Hamish trundled in from the hall. Dawn dropped to her knees and started to weave her fingers in and out of his dour black beard.

  “See what?” I repeated.

  Dawn glanced up. “See the glass, of course. Something got broken in it. It was all full of little pieces of glass.”

  Without waiting for any more, I stumbled over Hamish and out of the room. To the astonishment of Rebecca, I ran through the kitchen and made a leap at the garbage can. There, lying on top of a mound of orange rinds and mercifully unspilled, was the package of arrowroot

  I picked it up and poured some of the white powder onto my spread palm. My daughter, of course, was right. Here and there in the powder, little diamonds of glass gleamed brightly and lethally in the sunlight.

  So it had been as simple as this. The “thing” which Nanny had threatened to expose to the police had been in my possession for almost twenty-four hours and I had been too dumb to examine it.

  I knew then why that package had been so painstakingly sealed and so craftily hidden.

  It hadn’t been just a package of arrowroot at all.

  It had been a damning proof that someone in the Lanchester-Hilton household had been planning—a murder.

  XI

  I drove to Grovestown with unseemly speed. I found Inspector Cobb in his office. At my precipitous entrance he looked up placidly.

  “Well, Westlake, just in time to hear the autopsy and analysis reports.”

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Nothing fancy. The old girl died of cyanide poisoning, and the silver polish contained enough cyanide to liquidate a couple of Scotch Nannies. Of course, until we get the formula from England, we can’t be sure someone didn’t add extra cyanide to the polish. But right now, Westlake, looks like you were barking up the wrong tree. She didn’t wipe the polish off the teapot; some of the polish got into her tea; she died.” He shrugged. “The D.A.’s tickled silly. He’s already called Hilton and told him that the accident was an accident, that everything’s going to be hushed up, and that everything’s okay.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “He’ll have to call Hilton again and tell him the accident wasn’t an accident, that everything can’t be hushed up, and that everything isn’t okay.”

  “Which means—?”

  “Which means,” I said grimly, “that Nanny was murdered.”

  Cobb blinked. “Geez,” he said. Then, weakly: “Sit down.”

  I sat down. “And that holds good whether the silver polish was legitimately lethal or whether someone doctored it with Lisl Stahl’s compound. The death looks like an accident, sure. It looks like an accident simply because it was meant to look that way.”

  I told him everything I had learned then, ending up with the clinching evidence of the cup of tea Mrs. Kenton-Oakes had drunk.

  “Plain enough now, isn’t it?” I concluded. “Nanny knew something damning about one of the bunch. Just before they all went over to Dr. Stahl’s for lunch, she threatened to expose that person to the police. At Dr. Stahl’s, he or she picked up Legal Medicine and Toxicology and saw the perfect method for killing Nanny staring them in the face. Not only that. In a couple of minutes they were visiting Dr. Stahl’s lab where there was all the poison in the world just for the picking up. It must have been a terrific temptation simply because it was the easiest murder to commit on record. All that had to be done was to slip up to Nanny’s room when she was sleeping just before the picnic. A dash of Dr. Stahl’s compound in the can of polish; a smear of polish around the rim of the teapot, just enough to be sure a lethal dose would get into Nanny’s next cup of tea—and that was that. After that, the murderer could stroll up with the rest to Indian Rock, chew on Mrs. Lanchester’s baked beans and potato salad—and wait for Nanny to kill herself.”

  Cobb had produced the unlit pipe. He stuck it between his teeth and sucked on it, watching me steadily.

  “Okay, Westlake. You’ve got it figured out that far. Figure it out a bit more. What was it Nanny knew about this person?”

  I had been keeping the package of arrowroot for the most telling moment. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it him. While he examined its contents with a grunt of surprise, I said: “That’s what the old woman knew. She knew someone had been trying to murder someone with ground glass, and she had the package as evidence. That’s what she was going to tell the police.”

  The inspector looked up from the package. “I guess you’re going to drag in Dr. Hilton’s attack of ptomaine now. I guess you’re going to say it really was a murder attempt. But how are you going to get away with that? Dr. Stahl says the ptomaine was genuine. I’m not a doctor, but I’ve got enough sense to know that a big-time toxicologist isn’t going to mistake ground-glass poisoning for ptomaine poisoning. The symptoms, things like that”—he waved his hand—“th
ey’re’way different, aren’t they?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Cobb put the pipe back in his mouth. “Then—what?”

  “Then—arrowroot. When a patient’s suffering from ptomaine, he has to eat. But he has an awful choosy stomach. What’s one of the things any doctor would prescribe as an invalid food?”

  “Arrowroot?”

  “Exactly. That’s what I mean. Dr. Hilton’s attack of ptomaine was genuine. But someone tried to use it as a screen for a murder attempt. Someone knew he was taking arrowroot, so they slipped the ground glass into the arrowroot package and hoped he’d die and leave everyone thinking he’d died of the ptomaine. It was kind of clumsy. I can’t imagine its having worked with Dr. Stahl on the job. I can’t imagine a doctor doing it either, unless he was deliberately bungling to make it look like the doings of an amateur. In any event nothing ever came of it, because Nanny must have found out before any of the glass ever got into Dr. Hilton’s illustrious intestines. She found out and kept the package. She had the would-be murderer just where she wanted him.”

  Cobb whistled. “And she felt she could take care of the situation herself without the police?”

  “To begin with. That was typical of Nanny. She was so Hilton proud. She’d rather have risked a murder than have a scandal with the police. She was the perfect snooper anyway. She could be in every place at the same time. I guess she decided to keep the whole thing to herself and watch like a hawk to see that it didn’t happen again. And I guess that’s what she did until the day before yesterday, when she got sick and I put her to bed.”

  “So that’s why she made such a fuss about staying in bed,” put in Cobb. “That’s what she meant by there only being her to take care of Dr. Hilton. She was terrified of being in bed because that’d give this murderer a clear field?”

  “That’s what I think,” I said. “So she disobeyed me and got up anyway. She collapsed again. Something must have happened to make her suspect that the would-be murderer was going to make another attempt on Dr. Hilton. I don’t know what it was that gave her the idea. But she was scared. What could she do? She could call in the police right then, but to Nanny that would be like betraying the family. She did the only thing she could do. She summoned the would-be murderer to her room, told him or her exactly how much she knew, and threatened that, if he did try, she’d give the package of arrowroot to the police. It was desperate, of course. She must have realized she was taking a gamble. The gamble lost. Instead of being frightened of her, the murderer just—killed her.”

  Cobb looked grave. “And didn’t rescue the package of arrowroot?”

  “He didn’t find it. Nanny must have fooled him there. She probably told him it was still in Boston.”

  “If you’re right,” said the inspector slowly, “that means Nanny’s death wasn’t the main thing. It was just a kind of prologue.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the prologue to another attack on Hilton.”

  We stared at each other soberly. Then Cobb gave a groan.

  “Wait till the D.A. hears this.”

  “Wait till Dr. Hilton hears it,” I said.

  A faint smile moved the inspector’s mouth. “Well, Westlake, when I put you on this, I didn’t expect you to do quite so good a job.”

  “But you believe me?”

  “Sure, I believe you. That’s the hell of it.” He paused. “Now there’s one of two things we can do. We can break the glad news to the D.A. first or we can break it to Hilton first. I could take you in to the D.A. right now. And what would he do?”

  “Scream and tear his hair and say Dr. Hilton wasn’t to be bothered and roll off a list of names from City Hall in Boston.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I figure it’s best to let Hilton know first. Maybe this is an important conference; maybe he does want to brush Nanny’s death off as an accident, but he’s liable to stop wanting to brush it off when he knows someone’s planning to murder him too. Give him the works. Scare the pants off him. If I know anything about anything, he’ll be on the phone to the D.A. in five minutes, screaming for action.” He glanced at me slyly. “And, seeing how you’re a friend of the family and all, I guess the one to tell Hilton is you.”

  “I rather expected that was coming.”

  “Any objections?”

  “On the contrary. I’m due there for dinner and music anyway. It’s going to give me a certain strange satisfaction to take Dr. Hilton a little dinner music of my own.”

  It was almost five-thirty when I reached home. Dawn was already dressed for our dinner engagement with the Lanchesters, if a change from a set of elderly blue jeans to a middle-aged one can be called dressing. Fortunately she seemed to have forgotten the package of arrowroot. All her passionate concern was centered upon Hamish, who, during my absence, had had an unhappy experience with a woodchuck. While I scrambled into different clothes in my room, she remained outside the door, screaming the details of the battle to me. The woodchuck, it seemed, had unquestionably been the winner. It had bitten Hamish’s tail and withdrawn to safety under the barn.

  Dawn’s purpose in regaling me with this long saga soon became apparent. Through the keyhole my daughter yelled the suggestion that, as a sop to his wounded pride, we should take Hamish with us to the Lanchesters’. I yelled back that Mrs. Lanchester would not welcome an unknown dog unless, perhaps, it played some musical instrument. Dawn retaliated by claiming that Mrs. Lanchester already knew Hamish and thought him just the sweetest little doggie in the world. The argument went back and forth through the closed door. Finally, because her lungs and her endurance were younger than mine and because I was too hurried for a knock-down, drag-out argument, Dawn triumphed.

  When we set off for the Lanchesters’, Hamish plodded at our heels.

  We arrived at the little iron gate of their walled garden to see Mrs. Lanchester, dressed in summery cotton and a large garden hat, snipping dead flowers from the herbaceous border. She made a pretty picture and one extremely remote from the alarums and excursions of murder and violence. But as we reached her, I saw that she was not as placid as she had appeared from a distance. Her face was flushed, as it had been during her clash with Belle, and she was working her scissors with what seemed like unnecessary savagery. She did not look up at us. Bending forward to attack a bunch of marigolds, she merely said:

  “Dr. Westlake.”

  Her tone, usually so sweet, was that of a woman addressing an unwanted salesman who had rung the doorbell at a particularly wrong moment. Rather intimidated, I said:

  “We’ve come a little early because I want to see your brother.”

  “See George?” asked Mrs. Lanchester as if it were only with the greatest difficulty that she remembered her brother’s name. “Oh yes. I believe he’s in his upstairs office. If you hurry, you will catch him before he goes off to the music room to practice his flute.” The viciousness with which she said the word “flute” made me think that Dr. Hilton was the probable cause of her ill temper.

  “Thank you,” I said. “And where is his study?”

  “At the top of the stairs.” Mrs. Lanchester decapitated a perfectly good zinnia and straightened from the bed, crinkling her nose as her gaze fell upon Hamish. “Oh, you’ve brought your little dog. How unusual!” Then an apologetic smile smoothed some of the peevishness from her face. “You must excuse me, Dr. Westlake. I am not very civil, I’m afraid. It is just that I have received some disturbing news. Some most disturbing news.”

  Lunging at the bed again, she mowed down a whole row of wilted yellow daisies. She did not tell me what her disturbing news was. I wondered if it was as disturbing as the news I was bringing into her house.

  I left her, parked Dawn and Hamish in the empty hall, and mounted the stairs to the first floor. Mrs. Lanchester’s directions had been vague. I moved to the first door, hesitated and knocked.

  Instead of Dr. Hilton’s chilly baritone, I heard nothing but a scuffling sound. I knocked again. Then a voice which I recognized a
s Rosalind’s called:

  “Who is it?”

  “Dr. Westlake,” I said. “I’m looking for—”

  “All right.One moment.”

  There were whispered voices inside. Then the door was unlocked and opened and Perdita stood on the threshold.

  “Hello.” Her eyes were bright and excited. She took my arm. “Come in and see.”

  As she drew me into the room, I saw at once that I had misinterpreted Mrs. Lanchester. This was not Dr. Hilton’s upstairs office. It was a girl’s bedroom.

  And by far the most noticeable thing in that room was the girl who stood in front of the mirror. She wore a soft green sweater and a smart gray skirt, fitted closely around her narrow hips. Her fair hair was piled in a fashionable upsweep, revealing small, delicate ears. Her profile was distinguished and rather decadent with a slash of scarlet mouth and an exotic mascaraed eye.

  All this I noticed in the first instant. In the second instant, as the girl turned toward me, I realized it was Rosalind—a completely transformed Rosalind.

  The younger of the dear girls smiled at me with a poise in keeping with the make-up.

  “Hello,” she drawled.

  Perdita, dowdy as ever in her old colorless dress, was staring at her sister with hungry admiration. “Isn’t she beautiful, Doctor?” she breathed. “I’ve always known we could be. They’re Janie’s, the clothes. Janie’s awfully sweet to Rosalind. She gave them to her.” The green eyes slid me a quick glance. “But please, please, don’t tell Mother.”

  Rosalind had turned back to the mirror, where she was staring at her glamorous reflection. It is natural for a girl to admire herself in a glass. But with Rosalind the whole thing was unnaturally heightened. She gazed at herself with the greedy intensity of a drug addict contemplating a precious hoard of cocaine.

  Of all the pitiful scenes I had witnessed in the Hilton house, this struck me as the most touching. This was what two decades of regimented culture had produced. A couple of adult girls for whom the biggest thrill life had to offer was a furtive fashion show of secondhand finery.