Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  Helena’s hysterical murder accusation, however, I took less seriously, not only because it had no evidence to support it, but because it presupposed the fact that Dr. Hilton had told Janie of his intention to divorce her. I didn’t think he had. Just before the picnic Janie had been pleading with him to buy her a Scottie. Surely, if there had been a big scene between them and Dr. Hilton had denounced her as an about-to-be-divorced adulteress, she wouldn’t have made such a simple conjugal request.

  This, I realized, was a rather tenuous thought. But then so were all my other thoughts on the subject. I arrived in Grovestown feeling just as confused as I had been when I left the Lanchesters’.

  I spent a couple of hours with Cobb and the D.A. in which nothing was achieved. The D.A. was appalled by the news of Dr. Hilton’s death and was still in a state of mental paralysis. That afternoon he had received word from a high Washington source emphasizing the importance of the conference and forbidding any action which would throw the spotlight on the Lanchester house. Never before had he been in touch with such terrifyingly exalted contacts, and he was panic-stricken at the prospect of anything being done until Washington had been informed and instructed. At last, when he was still juggling with long-distance telephone calls, I realized that nothing more was going to be done before the morning at the earliest. A little of the D.A. went a long way. I slipped off while he was screaming at telephone operators, and left poor Cobb holding the bag.

  It was quite late when I reached the Kenmore Valley. In fact, it was just after twelve as I drove into the winding road which led past Dr. Stahl’s and the Lanchesters’ to my house. As I sped by Dr. Stahl’s, I saw a light in an upper window. Lisl, apparently, was on her way to bed. I drove on, and soon the Lanchester house, shrouded in darkness deep as mourning, loomed at the side of the road. I was going by when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a faint twinkling light deeper into the Hilton property beyond the gardens.

  Immediately I realized that the light could only be coming from the music room. I slowed my car to a halt. Yes, dim but unmistakable rays of light seeped out from behind the closed curtains of one of the windows in the converted tobacco barn.

  My curiosity was aroused at once. Cobb had placed no ban on the music room. There was no reason why someone should not be in there; and yet it seemed strange, after the catastrophic musicale, that anyone should want to be prowling around there at this hour of the night. It was a simple matter to interpret my curiosity as a legitimate desire to investigate. I slipped out of the car and made my way silently through the perfumed summer gardens toward that vague, twinkling light.

  I was almost up to the music room when the light was extinguished. For a moment I hesitated. Then I took the three or four extra steps necessary to land me at the closed double doors. I knew there was no other exit, and since there was no reason for being secretive, I pulled the doors open a foot or so and called:

  “Is anyone there?”

  The darkness inside was silent as a tomb. Then the soft tinkle of the ormolu clock chimed the quarter hour. It is curious how one can tell, even in silence and darkness, that someone is in a room. As I stood there, I knew that there was a human being there somewhere, inside in the shadows.

  I called once again: “I saw the light, saw it go off. Is everything all right?”

  There was a subdued scuffling, and a voice whispered: “Oh, Dr. Westlake, is it you?”

  I recognized the soft, female voice at once. “Yes. It’s Janie, isn’t it?”

  Janie’s voice replied, and I could tell then that it was racked with misery, very close to tears. “Yes, yes, it’s only me, Dr. Westlake. I … oh, evewyone was so howwid, so beastly. I came away. This was the only place to be alone. Oh, Dr. Westlake, why do they have to be so cwuel with George dead and—”

  A sob sounded in the darkness, swallowing up her words. I took a step into the room. I had always been sorry for this loneliest and most shunned of the dear girls, and Helena’s sordid accusations had made me, if anything, more sorry for her.

  I said: “You mustn’t mind too much about what Helena says. You must try—”

  “No, Dr. Westlake. No, please.” Her voice, through the sobs, was almost unendurably sad. “Don’t talk about it. It—it only makes it worse. Leave me alone. Please, please, leave me alone. I’ll be all wight; here where they won’t come.”

  “I—”

  “Please, Dr. Westlake.” She was weeping hopelessly now. “Leave me alone, please.”

  It was impossible not to obey that heartbreaking plea. Softly I turned and moved out of the barn, closing the double doors behind me. By the time I reached my car, the windows of the music room were still dark.

  I had visions on my homeward journey, visions of that forlorn, pretty girl alone in the dark struggling with—what? Unhappiness? Guilt? Or both?

  I reached my own house to find it ablaze with lights. As a father, I knew my daughter’s night-owl propensities only too well. There was nothing Dawn enjoyed more than staying up until the early hours of the morning if she was given half a chance. That night, of course, she had been given much more than half a chance. I parked the car in the garage and hurried up to the front door, preparing myself to be stem but just.

  As I reached the door, it opened. Dawn, dressed in pink pajamas which, as always, were too large for her, stood on the threshold, silhouetted against the light behind her. At her side, black and dour, squatted Hamish.

  “Well—” I began.

  Suppressing a yawn, my daughter announced: “I know I shouldn’t be up so late, Daddy. And I wish I wasn’t. But I had to be because you have a visitor.”

  “A visitor?”

  Dawn took my hand and drew me into the hall, closing the front door behind us. “Vic,” she said. “He’s been here for hours and hours and hours, and he’s awfully difficult to entertain. I gave him fudge and whisky and made Hamish do his tricks and played the violin, but he didn’t seem to like it—any of it, I mean. Maybe he’s sad about Dr. Hilton being sick.”

  She took me to the living room. The door was open. Inside young Dr. Roberts was perched uncomfortably on the edge of a chair, smoking a cigarette as if he hated it.

  “Here’s Daddy now, Vic,” said Dawn. She turned to me, yawning again and staring from injured eyes. “Is it all right for Hamish and me to go to bed now?”

  “Sure,” I said. Both Dawn and Hamish did an about-face and padded solemnly up the stairs.

  Vic Roberts got up when he saw me. He stood in the center of the room, handsome, arrogant and yet uneasy too.

  “I followed after you when you left the Lanchesters’. I thought you’d be coming here. I’ve been here a long time.”

  “I’ve been in Grovestown,” I said.

  “With the police?”

  I nodded.

  He looked for an ash tray and stubbed his cigarette, the dark hair flopping over his forehead. He jerked his head, throwing the hair back.

  “I came about what Helena said—about Janie and me.”

  “You did?” I said.

  “Back at the Lanchesters’, in front of Mrs. Lanchester and everyone, I made out Helena was lying. It was the only thing to do. But Helena wasn’t lying. So far as she knew, she was telling the truth.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but he forestalled me by adding sharply: “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean Janie had anything to do with Hilton’s death. That’s what I’ve come here to make you see. It’s just that … well, I’ve been thinking, and I guess it’s best for you to know the real story, what actually happened.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I needed a drink. I poured myself one and one for him too. He took it and gulped at it abstractedly.

  “I guess you don’t have much of an opinion of me, Westlake. I mean, as a moral character or whatever it’s called. You’ve seen me fooling around with Rosalind. You’ve—None of that matters. I’ve never gone in for the pure-knight-on-the-white-charger act. I’ve never pretended to.” His b
lack eyes, behind their black smudge of lashes, glared at me. “It’ Janie I want to put you wise about. Helena’s always hated her. Helena hates everyone anyway. Helena wanted you to think Janie was just a—a cheap floosie. That isn’t true. Not at all.”

  Although I said nothing, his voice became more belligerent, as if I had contradicted him.

  “Okay. So Janie did go away with me one week end. Just one week end. I admit it. I’ve got to admit it now. But I want you to know the story behind it.”

  He sat down on my sofa, crossing one muscular leg over the other. He was still far from being at his ease.

  “It all starts with me and Hilton. After this evening, you know how I felt about him, but you’d better get the whole picture. Five years ago, when he made me assistant director of research, I was young, unknown. It was a terrific break for me, and I was terrifically grateful. To begin with. Only to begin with. Soon I saw why he’d done it. Hilton was a smart guy. He knew I had the makings of a good research chemist. He hired me on the gamble that I’d develop something important and on the gamble that I’d be young enough and grateful enough and unknown enough to let him walk off with the full credit. That’s why he hired me.”

  “Dr. Stahl told me much the same thing about herself,” I put in.

  “Yeah. Lisl had a tough time with him too. Everyone did.” Vic swallowed half his drink. “Well, we soon started clashing. But things only got really bad a couple of years ago, when I first isolated these esters.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Right after the preliminary clinical tests, he saw I had something big and he started to get in on it. He was clever all right. Of course, he had the position, the authority, everything. He operated so smoothly that by last fall I was in danger of being pushed out altogether. That’s when I struck. I told him that if he didn’t give me a square deal, I’d stop all work right then, quit. He hated me for it, of course, but that fixed him. For a while things went better.” He paused. “And then last winter—this spring, rather—there was some trouble—some trouble with the girls in the lab.”

  “Dr. Hilton told me about that.”

  “It was nothing really. Certainly nothing that had anything to do with my work. But Hilton raised an awful stink; pulled the girls out of the lab; raved at me; told me any other boss in the world would have fired me. It was all just a smart maneuver on his part, of course. It put me in the wrong. I was supposed to feel I owed him a terrific debt of gratitude.”

  He went on: “It was just after that that I met Janie for the first time. She came to the lab looking for Hilton. She was attractive. I liked her right away. I—” He grinned sheepishly. “How can I deal this to you without you thinking I’m a louse? You see, she was attractive. That was part of it. But most of it was that I was mad at Hilton, hated his guts, would have done anything to rile him. And I knew the thing that would rile him most in the world was me getting places with his wife. See what I mean?”

  I indeed saw what he meant

  “Okay. We talked awhile. Hilton wasn’t there. Before she left I asked her to lunch. She accepted. After that we met quite often. Oh, she kept it from Hilton, of course, but it was all absolutely innocent. On her part. She was lonely and miserable most of the time in the Hilton house. Hilton treated her badly, and Helena and Nanny treated her worse. But she was one-hundred-per-cent loyal to Hilton. To her, I was just a little excitement, a little gaiety. God knows, she needed excitement and gaiety so much, poor kid.”

  He put down his empty glass. “That’s the way it was to begin with. And that’s the way Janie would have liked to keep it. But, louse that I am, that wasn’t my idea at all. I worked on her slowly. It took a long time, but at last the moment came. It was just before Hilton got sick. He’d been awful to her for a long time; Helena had been impossible. She was in a mood, and—well, I got her to promise to go away with me for the week end. Of course, I’d had no idea that Helena had been snooping, that she followed Janie to the station. But it was just that once, that one week end.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose the story should go romantic here; we ought to have found out that we were madly in love with each other. It didn’t happen that way. Almost before we started, she began to get a guilty conscience. She made scenes. I hate women who make scenes. By the time we came back, we weren’t speaking to each other. And she wouldn’t ever see me alone again.”

  He got up and started striding about the room. “That’s the truth, Westlake. It may not smell very nice, but it’s the truth. I’d wanted to score over Hilton, and it’d gone sour. Janie’d wanted some fun, and it’d gone sour. After that, there was nothing between us—nothing.”

  His face went suddenly surly. “I soon found out about Helena knowing, of course. Right after the week end, she confronted me with it. I’d never had anything to do with her, never touched her, not even in the lab days. I’d despised her from the moment I set eyes on her. But she’s shameless, the way only these strictly brought up girls can be. She figured she could drive some sordid kind of bargain. If I was nice to her, she wouldn’t tell on me to her father. The whole business dragged messily on. Finally, yesterday, I couldn’t take it any longer. I told her that she and her dirty little ideas of sex could go to hell. She was mad as a hornet, threatened to split the whole Janie-me thing wide open with Hilton. I was mad too. I said go ahead.” He threw out his hands. “And so she went ahead. Last night she told him everything.”

  He stopped his pacing and came back to me, leaning over me, his eyes fixing my face. “You see why I’ve washed all this dirty linen in your living room? Maybe Hilton was going to divorce Janie; maybe she was going to get thrown out without a cent to her name. But Janie had a guilt sense as long as from here to Boston. After that week end, she hated me and thought of herself as a scarlet woman. She even had some crazy idea of devoting the rest of her life to making Hilton happy, just as an atonement. God knows, women like that give me a pain in the neck. But Janie was one of them. You’ve got to understand that. You’ve got to see it’s absolutely fantastic to think she could ever have murdered him.”

  As he stood there, looming over me, staring at me so earnestly, I began to suspect that Vic was not as much of a “louse” as he wanted me to believe. In a funny way, there was quite a lot of the knight on the white charger about him. He had been prepared to paint his own motives and behavior in the blackest hues in an effort to keep me from suspecting Janie—a woman whom he didn’t even like any more.

  He unbent and stood in front of me, his thumbs thrusting down the front of his blue jeans. He didn’t look like a brilliant doctor at all. He looked like one of those beautiful farm boys that rich, susceptible women used to discover on summer vacations and set up to a Hollywood career.

  “You do see what I mean, Westlake?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Okay.” His eyes brightening, he fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. “There’s one thing more I want you to do. I want you to come right back with me to the Lanchesters’ now and talk to Janie.”

  “Talk to her?”

  “Try and make her see things straight.” He puffed uneasily. “I haven’t spoken to her for weeks, but I know her. I know just what sort of a hell she’s going through in that family. After you left, they all of them sided with Helena against her, of course. That’s them. The Hiltons against the world, however crumby the Hiltons are. Mrs. Lanchester”—he snorted—“instead of thrashing the hide off Helena, she was cooing over her until it made you sick. The poor darling, the poor little fatherless child. Last I saw of them, Mrs. Lanchester was taking Helena up to sleep with her in her room so she wouldn’t be lonely. And Janie—they just left her there, all of them. Left her alone to rot.”

  He paused and then blurted: “Westlake, we’ve got to go to her and stop her doing anything stupid.”

  “What sort of stupid thing is she apt to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know quite.” He flushed. “I—well, maybe you think this is crazy,
but with that guilt sense working overtime, Heaven knows what she’s thinking. She’s probably figured out that even if she didn’t kill Hilton, she’s such a wicked woman that somehow it’s all her fault. And if she does think that—”

  He stopped. I stared at him incredulously.

  “You’re not trying to say you think she’ll kill herself?”

  “I—I guess not. It’s just that—Well, she hates me; she hates the Hiltons. She’s got nothing much to live for. Westlake, she likes you; she respects you. You could help her.”

  “But I just talked to her a little while ago at the Lanchesters’. She was in the music room. Alone. I asked her if I could do anything, and she said no.”

  He gripped my arms with sudden urgency. “Of course she’d say that, but, Westlake, I mean it seriously. Someone’s got to be nice to the poor kid. Come, please come.”

  I could not quite understand his passionate insistence. Possibly, in spite of his promiscuous habits, he had just as highly developed a guilt sense as the one he ascribed to Janie.

  I said, somewhat reluctantly: “All right. I’ll come.”

  I didn’t exactly know what it made me, a sort of rustic cross between Dorothy Dix and one of Job’s comforters.

  Almost before the words were out of my mouth, Vic had reached the front door. He hurried me to the garage. Within a few minutes we were driving back down the lane toward the Lanchesters’.

  I drew up in front of the dark house. Vic got out and said: “Wait here.” He slipped through the front door. In a few moments he was back. His voice strangely anxious, he said:

  “She’s not in her room. She must still be over in the music room. Come. Quick.”

  He started down the path into the walled garden. I got out of the car and followed him. He was walking so fast that I had difficulty catching up with him. Finally I did so, just beyond the garden, and together we hurried across the expanse of grass which stretched between us and the barn.