Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  “Sure, come on.”

  I didn’t carry his pathetic confession any further. I knew he was young enough to torment himself that this perfectly normal battle psychosis was the result of weakness in his own character, and I didn’t want to twist the knife any deeper in his wound. Dawn too, thank heavens, had enough sense to keep quiet.

  Caleb didn’t speak until the lights of the Bray house glistened ahead of us through the rain. Then he said gruffly:

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you? I mean, I kind of wish …”

  “Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

  I could see his face now, very young and strained. He gave me an embarrassed smile and strode ahead toward the light. When Dawn and I reached the shelter of the terrace, shaking the rain off our shoulders and hair, there was no sign of him.

  There was no sign of the others, either. But one by one they started to stumble, drenched and complaining, onto the terrace. Renton Forbes and Avril came first. Renton had unbuttoned his jacket and had tucked Avril’s tiny little body under it too. Normally, this degree of intimacy with a man would have started her excited silvery laugh tinkling. But there was no tinkling laughter now. I understood the reason when Avril came under the light. The curl had deserted her auburn hair, which clung lank and faintly metallic around her face. Some of the delicate mauve shadow under her eyes had streaked across her cheek, and the skirt of her peasant costume flopped clammily around her legs.

  She no longer looked dainty, and certainly she no longer looked nineteen.

  “Oh, the wetness!” She managed one unconvincing squeaky giggle and ran off to the comfort of the nearest bathroom.

  Love Drummond came next, muttering and stamping her feet. Soon George Raynor appeared with the other picnic basket and Phoebe close behind him, pretending she had enjoyed the murky trip in an attempt to justify her unfortunate choice of a picnic ground. Lorie slipped in next. And, after her, the Reverend Jessup, whose soaked clerical black made him look like a wet, sulky crow.

  Phoebe sent Lorie scuttling for a bottle of brandy to warm everyone, and jiggers of it had been passed round before Love exclaimed:

  “The twins! Bobby and Billy—what’s happened to them?”

  That was the first moment I realized that the whole party had returned except for the White boys.

  Love crossed to the edge of the terrace and called: “Bobby—Billy.”

  Her voice echoed eerily out through the rain-swept darkness, but there were no answering cries.

  Love turned to Dr. Jessup. “Hilary, I thought you were bringing them down.”

  The Reverend Jessup sniffed and said irritably: “My dear Love, you gave me no such instructions. I assumed you had them under your wing.”

  Avril, some of the ravages of the storm repaired, appeared in the doorway from the living room and exclaimed:

  “Oh, the little naughtinesses! I expect they’ve run back to the sawmill.”

  Love called: “Bobby—Billy” again. Some of the others joined the cry, grouping around her heavy-hipped figure at the edge of the porch.

  Renton Forbes growled: “I know we’d all as lief have them devoured by wolves, but we’d better start a search party. Have any flashlights, Lorie?”

  “Yes.” Lorie darted off.

  In a few moments they were all crowding out again into the rain. I would have joined them, but Dawn sneezed at that moment. She was still recovering from a recent mastoid operation, which had been the principal reason for my decision to have a brief vacation from Kenmore in Skipton. I had wanted to give the convalescent a change of scene. Now the sneeze made me more worried for Dawn than the White twins and, promising to join the search on my return, I borrowed a raincoat from Lorie, wrapped it around Dawn, and hurried off down the drive towards home.

  By the time we reached Phoebe’s modest house, which stood on Skipton’s single road at the foot of Ernesta’s drive, the rain had stopped. There was only a short trip to the house belonging to my old friend Dr. Stokes which I had rented for the two months of our stay. We passed the Raynors’ house on the left, Love Drummond’s immaculate cottage on the right, and the white, delicately steepled church at whose side Dr. Jessup’s rectory nestled in a semicircle of elms. Our house stood across the street from the rectory, and, as I bundled Dawn into it, the faint, thumping strains of an orchestra trailed from the Community House farther down the street, where Skipton’s villagers—as opposed to Ernesta’s “our type of people”—were frolicking through their regular Saturday night square dance.

  The wheezing fiddles and the half-audible shouts of the caller gave the night a certain festive quality. I could still hear the music as I rushed Dawn into a hot bath, saw her safely in bed, and, with stern adjurations to stay there, kissed her good night.

  As I left her, Hamish, our gloomy Scotch terrier, lumbered into the room and jumped into his privileged if unhygienic sleeping place against her pillow.

  I was tired and wet myself and had very little desire to return to the Bray house and the search party. But, after a gulped highball, I found that my conscience was still nagging me, so I got a raincoat and a flashlight and hurried back up the street to the dim, clod-hopping strains of “Oh, my darling Nellie Gray” from the Community House. The storm clouds were dispersing as I started up the Bray drive, and a watery moon poured down a thin strain of light.

  I found Lorie, Avril, and Caleb in the Bray living room. Lorie was standing stiffly at the window staring out. Avril was on a couch close to Caleb, who had put on a turtle-necked sweater and blue jeans.

  Without turning from the window, Lorie announced that the search party was still out, adding sarcastically that Caleb had been too lazy to join them.

  From Caleb’s quick, hurt glance at me I could tell that he had not confided his morbid fear of the dark to his cousin and that his pride was suffering badly from this taunt for which he had no reply. To make matters worse, Avril, flirtatious again, nuzzled against him and exclaimed:

  “Caleb’s not lazy. He just knew someone had to keep poor little me company.”

  I was glad that my intention of joining the search gave me an excuse to leave immediately. As I stepped out onto the terrace, Lorie called:

  “They’ll most of them be up by the sawmill. Try the other trail past the duckpond. The twins might easily have taken that by mistake.”

  I knew the Bray estate fairly well, and the moonlight was strong enough now to make my flashlight unnecessary. I went through the formal gardens and took a path through a dark pine copse which Ernesta’s landscape gardener had thinned and made into a feature. Beyond it a dirt track passed between two meadows, winging up the flank of the mountain toward the rear of the old sawmill.

  Ahead of me, echoing down the dark slope, came an occasional call of “Billy … Bobby,” telling me that the other searchers were still on the job. There is always something forlorn and rather ominous about a human voice calling at night. But I was not seriously worried about the White twins. In the past they had thought out methods, infinitely more diabolical than pretending to be lost, to torment the community in general. The ground was wet underfoot. I was most conscious of my soaked shoes, a general exasperation, and a certain concern over Caleb. I liked him and I liked Lorie. I didn’t like the tension between them or Avril Lane’s idiotic flirtatiousness.

  Rough hedges of chokecherry and shadbush fringed the track. The moonlight cast their shadows in bizarre patterns across silvered gravel at my feet. The trail took a sharp turn to the left, and the hedge dropped away, revealing the gleaming surface of the old pond which had been used as a duckpond in the pre-Ernesta days when the Bray house had been a working farm. A shift in wind or a trick of acoustics suddenly brought me the music of the square dance from the village below. Quirkishly, almost as if he were at my elbow, I heard the rough voice of the caller, singing:

  “Swing with your own

  And leave her alone

  And swing with the gay caballero.

 
; And when you have done

  Go back where you belong

  And swing with your Honolulu baby.”

  By contrast that gay, bouncy music seemed to make the stillness around me more forlorn than had the voices calling from the mountain. I was abreast of the pond now. No one had paid it any attention in years, and tall reeds had grown up, clogging its margin. Each individual reed was etched stiffly in the moonlight, and as I looked at them I stopped hearing the rustic music from the village and, in its place, a snatch from Lorie’s ballad repeated itself naggingly in my mind.

  “I’ll sing you one-O,

  Green grow the rushes-O.”

  The rushes didn’t look green here, though. They looked black. I paused a moment, gazing pointlessly over the unruffled surface of the pond. Suddenly, the way those things do, the frivolous and rather unfortunate remark I had made about the White twins earlier that evening came back to me:

  They should be hit on the head and drowned in the Brays’ duckpond:

  And, as I thought about it and regretted having said it, something pale in the water beyond the rushes caught my eye. I let my gaze rest on it idly at first and then with a prickling of attention. Down in the village the fiddles were scraping, the piano was thumping, the caller was singing:

  “Go back where you belong

  And swing with your Honolulu baby.”

  I still stared at the thing in the pond, and horror started to stir in my stomach like a snake uncurling. I lifted my flashlight. I aimed it directly at that shadowy object and snapped on its switch.

  The beam of light, cutting through the frame of reeds, revealed a small, green-clad arm and a little white hand thrust up from the surface of the water.

  The snake seemed to be writhing through me now. I plunged through the rushes into the water, my feet sinking into the cold mud of the pond’s bottom.

  My teeth chattering, I pointed the beam of the flashlight downward. The water was not deep. Beneath it, beneath the arm, I could trace the faint gleam of a face. And then, almost more terrible, I saw another arm in the water, six feet away.

  The jangle of the music from the village blared on. I was conscious of it. But the tune seemed to have changed. In my mind, no one was swinging their Honolulu baby any more. In my mind, the voice seemed to be chanting:

  “Two, two the lily-white boys,

  Clothed all in green-O.”

  Plunging my arms into the water, I picked up one of the little boys and rushed with him to the bank. For a second time I stumbled into the pond, lifted the other cold, unyielding body and laid him down on the bank next to his brother.

  I was too basically shocked to think, but the doctor in me was working automatically. My trembling fingers could find a pulse in neither of their wrists. Instinctively I turned both the small bodies, in their pitiful sodden green play suits, over on their backs. But before I started artificial respiration I saw something that brought the horror to its climax.

  I had been almost sure from the start that the White twins were dead. But there are ways and ways to die. Dimly I had pictured them losing their way, tumbling into the pond and drowning. But I knew now that there had been no accidental tumbling into that pond. For on the back of both of their heads was a crude, matted wound where they had been struck savagely by some lethal weapon.

  I started to work on them because in those first moments I could think of nothing else to do.

  But, as I did so, it seemed horribly that Dawn was still at my elbow, giggling and singing:

  “Two, two the horrid White boys,

  Clothed all in green-O.

  Hit them, hit them on the head

  And throw them in the pond-O.”

  CHAPTER III

  In a few moments I was sufficiently in control again to stop the useless artificial respiration. But I stayed squatting there by the bodies in the wet grass and weeds. Part of my mind knew that I was coroner for the county and would have to call Inspector Cobb in Grovestown. But the other part, less organized, scurried from one tenebrous thought to another. Dawn had invented that vulgar parody of the ballad, and someone had made it prophetic. Less than an hour ago we had been ordinary people chatting and squabbling our way through an ordinary picnic. Skipton had been just one of many little Massachusetts towns with its faintly pretentious summer people and its square-dancing natives.

  Now everything was different. The two small bodies, gleaming palely in the moonlight at my side, were more disastrous than an earthquake. An earthquake might have altered the contours of Skipton. But this brutal murder of two children would alter the very fiber of the community, the very minds of its inhabitants.

  Trailing up from the village, the base thumping of the piano exaggerated, came the strains of “Lay That Pistol Down.” A female voice, tired and irritable, sounded from the mountain above me:

  “Bobby … Billy.”

  Skipton didn’t know it yet—all except one of its members—but life had changed for it as remorselessly as day changes to night. And I had to be the herald of that change.

  I stood up. I stared down at the two small boys. They looked so cold. Absurdly, I stripped off my raincoat and laid it over them. I turned back into the trail which led down to the Bray house.

  Lorie, Caleb, and Avril Lane were still sitting glumly in the living room. The shock I had experienced had been so violent that it seemed almost inconceivable that the three of them, obsessed with their tiny problems of desire, jealousy, and frustration, could have kept their mood unbroken. I half expected too that I must have brought the horror of what had happened with me on my face. But they didn’t seem to notice anything.

  Lorie said: “Given up already, Doctor?”

  Avril giggled: “The bad things, I expect they’re having high jinks in that old sawmill.”

  I said: “Where’s the telephone, Lorie? In the hall, isn’t it?”

  Lorie’s young face hardened then into sudden, anxious curiosity. Caleb swung round too and stared at me brightly.

  “What’s the matter? Has something happened?”

  I didn’t answer. I went out into the hall. The telephone stood by a smart, striped sofa in an alcove. Normally Cobb stayed late at his office Saturday night. I called Police Headquarters and reached him at once. Inspector Cobb was my oldest friend. There was no need for any Inspector-Coroner formality with him, but I wasn’t sure whether or not my voice could be heard in the living room, so I went into no detail. I merely told him to come and to come quickly and to bring the homicide boys with all their trimmings.

  Cobb asked the one, blunt question. “Bad?”

  “Terrible,” I said.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  I went back to the living room. All three of them had risen and were standing in a little group, watching for me. Avril Lane, looking bizarre with her sodden, wrinkled skirt, was arranging her face for Drama. Lorie and Caleb, young, blond, extraordinarily alike in their expression, stood instinctively close together. I was sure then that they had at least heard I was calling the police.

  Lorie said: “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” And then, tentatively: “Did you find them?”

  “I found them,” I said.

  Avril gave a faint scream. Caleb said: “And they’re okay?”

  I looked at Lorie. “How about a drink for me?”

  She ran to a sideboard, clattered glasses, and came back with a highball.

  Caleb repeated: “If they’re okay—where are they?”

  I took a gulp of the drink. Everything in me shied away from saying the thing that was going so terribly to change our lives.

  “Please, Dr. Westlake,” said Lorie, “tell us. Are they all right?”

  I sat down in one of Ernesta’s beautiful gold brocade chairs. I felt suddenly tired and spent.

  “They’re dead,” I said.

  Avril Lane clutched her throat. I never knew people really clutched their throats, but she did.

  Caleb, his face a sickly gray under his atabrine
tan, said: “You kidding?”

  Lorie whirled on him. “Don’t be a fool. As if Dr. Westlake would kid.” Her thin, cold hand clutched my arm. “Tell us. Please, please, tell us. You called the police, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then…?”

  “Let’s wait,” I said, “till the others get back. They’ve got to know. I don’t want to go over it twice.”

  To my surprise, even Avril Lane had enough dignity not to press the matter any further. Caleb poured himself a drink, and then all three of them sat down, picking chairs far apart as if they sensed that life was different now and that the new life might mean a drastic change of alliances.

  I sat with my drink, gazing at the luxurious, well-known room. Little things about it reminded me of earlier parties at Ernesta’s … The concert grand piano at which one of Ernesta’s protégés from New York had played Debussy, straining almost to its uttermost the loyalty of her Skipton following; the long Spanish refectory table at which Ernesta had, much more successfully, served a potent punch. The room was imbued with Ernesta’s energetic, bossy personality. Ludicrously, a Skiptonite after only three weeks, I found myself thinking:

  This would never have happened if Ernesta had been here.

  The moment I was dreading came. Confused footsteps and voices sounded on the terrace. Phoebe, Renton Forbes, and George Raynor came in through the french windows. They were disheveled, and their faces wore the tentative expression of people who were worried but did not yet want to appear so.

  Phoebe, trying to be her normal spry self, gave a little laugh and said: “Well, this time they’ve done it, the fiends. Poor Love’s distracted. I’ve made her come back. It’s hopeless, just a handful of us. We’ll have to call the police and collect a posse from the village.”

  Renton Forbes grunted: “If I had my way, there’d be two very bruised bottoms in Love’s house tomorrow.”