The Innocent Flower

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Duff, although he knew now what ailed him and why he was haunted and by what, didn’t look at her. It gave him bitter pleasure not to. He did wave at the children on the terrace. Then he turned off around the pool to where the white gate led to Eve’s.

  Behaving like a fool kid, roiled inside, sulky outside, jumping to the most absurd conclusions, nevertheless, he was bitterly happy and cherished his pain. He was in love. At his age. In love with Mary Moriarity, six children and all. He was … damn it … jealous.

  He must lay the mocking ghost of Professor Moriarity.

  CHAPTER 14

  Beyond the gate, Duff crossed Eve’s garden on a path to a side door. Her house was about the vintage of Mary’s, although smaller. The garden was smaller, too. Duff felt sure, although he knew nothing at all about it, that it was not half so fine.

  He rapped, there being no bell here. Eve was at home. Her face, reminding him again of the skull beneath it, appeared in the window, and she let him in with exclamations of welcome. Her house was full of old things, shabby things, not fine. But it was neat and nearly cozy. Eve herself, at home, was not quite so unraveled. She said she was just about to sit down to lunch and wouldn’t he have some, although it was nothing much.

  “Please go ahead and eat yours, Mrs. Meredith. I won’t disturb you. Mrs. Moriarity sent me over to ask if you have a picture of her husband, a snap, anything. I wanted to see one.”

  “A picture of Denis? Why, I don’t know. I did have.” Eve led him into a front sitting room. She pulled an album out from a low shelf under a little table, blew on it for dust “I have a lot of old pictures in here. Maybe you can find one, but I don’t remember exactly …”

  “Let me look,” he said quickly. “And you go back to your lunch, please.”

  “Well …”

  “I see you have captions. Why, this is wonderful. I’ll just sit here, if I may.” Duff established himself in a chair with the album on his knees and tried to look permanent. She seemed to be standing on one foot and not sure where to plant the other.

  “Mrs. Meredith, if you let me keep you I shall be offended.”

  “Well … if you’re sure … if you don’t mind …” He shoveled her out with more protestations, and at last she withdrew, reluctant and uncertain, looking back.

  Duff opened the album. It was an old album. The photographs were held by fancy little black cut-out corners. Three or four snaps to a page, arranged in a variety of geometric designs. Under each, in white ink on the black pages, Eve had written in a round hand some comment, often identifying but sometimes merely witty. The wit was rather pathetic. “Aren’t I cute?” said one.

  It was Eve’s own album, arranged by her, although it began earlier than herself. She soon appeared, however, in ruffles, in gingham, in high laced shoes and a middy blouse.

  Duff turned the pages rapidly.

  The room was still. He felt hidden, here in this strange house with its past on his knee, and some of Mary’s past, too, and perhaps a part of her future. A picture caught his eye, and he slipped his finger in the place. Not now. Later. Now he was looking for one face only, the face of Moriarity.

  The room was warm. Duff felt a dew on his brow.

  “Ah!”

  He came to a page with three square snapshots arranged symmetrically with the place where a fourth had been. Under the square in the upper right position the white scrawl read Mr. and Mrs. Moriarity! The exclamation point was Eve’s.

  Yes—Duff’s eyes lingered to make sure—it was certainly Mary, younger, but Mary herself. And the man beside her, in whose arm she had thrust her own, looked straight out of the photograph.

  Duff sat entranced.

  In a moment he shifted his body, crossed his leg.

  He wanted to laugh.

  The shock was good. His whole body tingled A mist seemed to roll off his brain. “But I should have known,” he said out loud. “Of course.” He stretched out his legs, then, and slid down a little. He relaxed.

  So.

  Well, then …

  He looked back at the page. At upper left the caption said The house next door. Duff studied that picture. It was the Moriarity house. His eye followed every line. Taken from this side. Yes. But no terrace, no roses, no vine, no dainty little tree, there at the corner. Stark and ugly it had looked in those days, when Mary’s skirts were short and her hair cut like a boy’s and her belt down on her hips. When? The twenties, he guessed.

  Now, today, the old house dreamed in the luxury of its June garden, and it had an air. Then it had been untouched by Mary’s loving skill, and it was grim. Duff was impressed. “She’s wonderful!” he thought, and a part of his mind smiled at the antics of the rest But he had it clear, now. He could make his discounts, and he could think.

  He looked at the third picture. It showed him four young women in the garb of a little earlier day, who stood linked in a row in front of a porch railing. They were, of course, all laughing gaily. The caption, Four little girls from school! Duff examined the faces. At the left, the tallest wore a face he couldn’t recognize. Next came Brownie. Big-bosomed, even then. And horsy of face. Very jolly she looked. Very bold and sure of herself. Next Mary again, smiling with some restraint, looking dainty, in a different dress and wearing her hair a little longer. That was Eve, of course, on the end. A very pretty Eve, too. Rounder and softer of cheek and body. A happy young Eve who may have been, probably was, carrying a child. That dress looked suspicious with its ties and bows. Ralph was nineteen, she’d said. Duff subtracted rapidly.

  Under the place where a picture had been and was gone, the caption remained. It read, Mr. and Mrs. Meredith! and then, in parentheses (We didn’t know ‘twas taken!)

  Duff sucked his cheek, felt a twinge of embarrassed pity, and then he looked at Mr. Moriarity once more, fondly. He snapped his finger at the page, clicking his nail on Moriarity’s pictured chest He went back to where his other hand was still keeping a place.

  Four pictures had been on this page, too, and one of them was gone. The time was much earlier, nearer the turn of the century. At the left, on top, two women in long skirts and shirtwaists, with Howard Chandler Christy hair, stood drooping gracefully against each other on a lawn. The caption, Mother and Aunt Edie. Duff studied them. Obviously sisters, both had long oval faces and slightly protruding eyes, startled-looking. Both had thin noses and thick brows and narrow little mouths, parted in ladylike simpers. Was one simper less easy than the other? Duff couldn’t tell. One had a jabot, the other a mannish necktie.

  Below, the one with the jabot drooped gracefully against a man in a dark suit whose legs were planted in that ancient and elegant stance for the virile which required the feet to make a right angle, and one thigh to turn out, as if it belonged to a ballet dancer. He had his arms folded, too, and his mustache, like a plant from a hanging basket, hung over his mouth … The background was the same lawn, although now the corner of a perambulator could be seen, just behind them, from which fell a froth of fringe on a cover of some sort. Caption, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Edie. Ah, yes.

  But the third picture was the one that had stopped him. Duff bent his eyes on it. This was another woman entirely. This time she sat on the grass in a puddle of white skirts. Caption, Nursey. Yes, she must have been a nurse. Indeed, Duff thought he spotted a thermometer in her pocket. A starched, sober-eyed woman, sitting with a straight back and with her feet decorously hidden. In this picture, also, he could see a corner of the same perambulator, with the same fringe falling in the same folds. Behind the white-clad woman there was a round flower bed.

  Duff studied every shadow, every fold, every leaf and blade of grass.

  He sighed and looked above, to where the picture was gone. One of its little black corner holders was still there, loose and sliding. The caption, Baby Edarth.

  Duff shook his head and looked back at Edie and her jabot Baby Edarth was gone.

  Edie was gone, deceased, he supposed, 1940.

  Uncle Arthur would be very
old now if alive. Mother was gone, probably. Nursey? Nursey could be somebody’s mother, by now. Somebody’s mother was something, somewhere. Duff sifted his recollections vaguely. He ran the pages through to the end of the album. None of these people appeared again.

  Instead, there was Ralph. Ralph was a fat baby, then a thin urchin, then a middle-weight boy. He was there in all his doings, moods, seasons, stages, until he had been fifteen or so. Then there were no more Ralphs, no more pages in the album.

  There had been gaps and sometimes his name in white ink, but no picture of Edgar Meredith at all.

  Duff went back to the page with the jabot. He brooded.

  It was coming clear. His mind, released from prison or wherever it had been, leaped, guessed, checked, clicked, meshed, and wove the answer.

  “Mr. Duff!” Eve was shaking him by the shoulder. “Mr. Duff, are you all right?”

  Duff murmured in his throat.

  “You’ve been sitting here so still!” she cried. “I came in five minutes ago, and you haven’t seen me or said anything. I’m sorry. I began to worry. I didn’t know …”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked down at the album in his hands. There was no dust on it.

  “Did you find it? The picture of Denis? I think there is one. Maybe I can …”

  “No.” Duff stood up with the album tight under his arm. He looked down at her. She was tense. He felt a great pity for her, momentarily. “Why did you take all of your husband’s pictures out?” he asked her gently. “What did you do with them? Throw them away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they made me think of old times I would rather forget,” she said harshly.

  “Because they were good or because they were bad?”

  “Whichever they were. It doesn’t matter.” Her hand on her throat pinched and pulled the skin. Her eyes kept his defiantly.

  “May I borrow this album for a day or two?”

  “What!”

  “Please.”

  She moistened her lips. Her eyes flew frantically to the corners of his face, combing it for explanation. “But what for?”

  “I need it.”

  “Well, of course, if you need it …” Her other hand went out behind her, reaching for the back of a chair. He couldn’t tell what her imagination was doing.

  “Thanks very much,” he said charmingly. “You’ve been very helpful. I’m very grateful” He moved on a wave of “verys.”

  “Why, that’s all right, Mr. Duff,” she tried to say. But she had to whisper it.

  Duff swung back through the gate and turned across the lawn toward the front of the Moriarity house. No one was on the terrace now, and no blue figure, he knew, worked among the cabbages.

  He got to his car and put the album down beside him with a pat of satisfaction. MacDougal Duff was himself again.

  He drove directly to the police station, spoke briefly to Robin, who was there although Pring was not, asked to see a certain exhibit, and made off with it. He told Robin to stop around at Mary’s later this afternoon, about five, and maybe … Robin spit his gum all the way out and said sure, they’d be there. Sure thing.

  Duff then went to Schrafft’s on Main Street, got into the telephone booth, called Maguire’s number, got a number to call, and got Maguire.

  “Duff. Go ahead. You’re in Haytonville?”

  “Yeak” Maguire wasn’t surprised. He never had been yet. “It’s Mrs. Meredith’s aunt, all right”

  “What’s her first name?”

  “Edith.” Duff smiled to himself. “Edith Norden.”

  “Norden!”

  “Yeah, Mrs. Meredith’s mother was Norden, too, married a distant cousin with the same name.”

  Duff clicked his tongue. “Go on.”

  “Edith Norden Sims. Mrs. A. Christopher Sims. That’s how they got her down in the records, both ways.”

  “A for Arthur?”

  “Yeah, A for Arthur. She was committed in 1919. Died, 1940. Natural causes. Emily Brown found out what ailed her. Told Edgar Meredith. He left his wife and baby, scared of it. Thought his kids would turn out nutty. That’s your feud.”

  “Good work. What else?”

  “Lemme see. Nobody liked her much, Miss Brown, I mean, but she came and went, always visiting. And I don’t find anything seems like it calls for murder. Not yet. Couldn’t get much about her and this Moriarity, though there was an old lady across the hall remembers Brown felt cool about him. She don’t know much. Could be Brown didn’t like any of her friends’ husbands much.”

  “Could be,” said Duff cheerfully. “Go on.”

  “That guy exists, all right. That guy that got away. Up at White Plains. They got him back last night. Found him in Patterson, New Jersey. Severson. His right name’s Patrini. No soap on the safe deposit”

  Duff grunted. “What did you see in her New York apartment?”

  “Only one room and bath. Not so much in there. She never stayed long. Nothing homey about it. All the time visiting, she was, like I said. Nothing in her past turned up yet.”

  “Did you find any photographs?” asked Duff.

  “Yeah, yeah. Her mother. Sad-looking old lady, gray hair, dead now. And her old man, dead years ago. Couple of snaps of a picnic, don’t know what people. Cabinet job on herself, pretty well touched up, I should say. Picture of a man, right in with the rest If she was sweet on him, well … she never had him framed.” Duff chuckled. Maguire was a little jewel. “Picture of a bunch of people and some palm trees. California, I guess. Picture of a baby.”

  “An old-fashioned baby?”

  “Yeah, pretty old-fashioned.”

  “Sitting on the grass?”

  “Yeah, that’s right Bonnet and a lotta clothes.”

  “Boy or giri?”

  “My God,” said Maguire, “who can say?”

  “White kid shoe with tassel?”

  “Yeah, yeah, only one shoe showing.”

  “That’s it,” said Duff. “O.K.”

  “Wait Say, I got nothing on any Haggerty. Not a trace.”

  “Never mind,” said Duff. “Go home. I’ll call you later.”

  Duff walked back into the restaurant. He was still carrying the album. He ordered lunch and afterward sat long and quietly in a corner, staring at the murals of the Huguenots landing with even his historian’s eyes blind to them.

  He was laying the ghost At last he remembered the odd gesture Haggerty had made, that night when Duff had turned him away at the front door.

  A waitress, who had thought the gentleman in the corner to be dozing with his eyes open, nearly dropped her tray at the sudden beautiful warm smile he gave her.

  He made another phone call.

  It was three in the afternoon when he came back to Mary’s house. Everyone was out of doors. Mary wandered dreamily among her plants, snipping here and there, not really working at anything, Taffy, looking like a little lady-doll above the shoulders, with her braids pinned up on top of her head but wearing only a pair of red gingham overalls, was playing by the pool. She and Davey had a game.

  Duff went over to see. what they were shrieking about It seemed they each had a piece of shingle, boats, they said. The point was to roil up the water by beating it with a stick so that one boat or the other was driven across the pool. Davey sat at the rim with his knees drawn up to his chin, looking like a pixie, and whammed away, let the spray fall where it may. A good deal of it fell on Duff. He retired to a drier distance. He had a clear premonition that sooner or later Davey would fall in.

  Taffy, pink in the face with delight, looked as if she had never been sick or troubled in her life. Mitch and another little girl were up in the apple tree, chattering like jays.

  Dinny had washed her hair and lay on her stomach on the grass, her white mop over her eyes like a terrier. She had a book. The noise of hammering came sporadically from the stable, adding the pleasant sound of someone at work to the pervading sense of busy peace.
/>   Duff drifted to where Mary was and offered his premonition about Davey. Mary agreed that he would probably fall in, said he usually did. She beamed upon him. “Where were you? We set your place for lunch. Have you had any?” He nodded. “You did go to Eve’s, didn’t you? She called me. Did you find what you wanted?”

  “And more,” he said.

  She straightened her back, frowned, let a moment of silence go by. Then she said, “You’re different.”

  “I am a new man.”

  Mary closed her scissors. “Why?”

  “I’m in the classical position of one who knows all and can’t prove it” He smiled. She said nothing but looked sharply into his eyes. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Are the doctor and Miss Avery going to Eve’s for tea?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary turned to snip off a dying blossom. “Mustn’t I ask questions?” she said, with her back turned.

  “I’m going to ask the questions,” he told her, explaining himself, as if she’d understand. “Not of you, Mary. But I’m going to surrender the luxury of being always right. I’m going to trot my unproved guesses right out into the open. This is no time to insist on being any mastermind. I hope to smoke out the truth by attacking, proof or no proof, with all my suspicions. Let me not, this time, wait for another murder to prove my case.”

  “Another …!” She was alarmed.

  “Never mind. Just believe me. Your children had nothing to do with it.”

  She believed him, and she sighed. He saw her count her chicks with a sweep of her eyes around the garden. For the first time, she began to thank him.

  “I wonder what I can ever do …”

  “Give me one of Taffy’s roses.”

  She snipped him a quaint striped blossom. She held it out. “Rosa Mundi,” he murmured. “Rose of the world.”

  “But you like the others better, don’t you?” They strolled into the rose garden proper.

  “What do you call them?” He didn’t care what she called them. He was very happy. She had believed him.

  “This is Christopher Stone,” Mary touched a red rose. “There’s Alice Stern.”