The Innocent Flower

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Mary sat down suddenly. Taffy and Davey began to whimper, feeling emotion present, as little animals might feel it and be affected. Mary hushed them. Duff got up. He looked exhausted.

  Pring said, “What’s the idea? I don’t know if I follow.… He put some stuff on her hands afterwards, you mean?”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Duff wearily. “That’s what he did. Overdid it ‘Out, out, damned spot!’ Play’s full of quotations, you know. Oh, if Eve says she saw it, I think we can believe it was there. But I didn’t see it. So I know it wasn’t there when I put her down.”

  “But you’re lying! You and Mary!” The doctor was at bay now. “Of course, you’d lie. It’s your word against ours. Who’s going to decide?”

  Mary’s face was luminous with faith as she looked at the jury, and Duff stood pat on the truth he knew.

  Eve said, “All I know is I saw this brown stain that looked and smelted like tobacco.”

  “Coal tar from his holder,” said Duff carelessly. “Anything, to give the impression. Of course, there’s the other nurse.”

  “What nurse?” said Dr. Christenson.

  “The one who was beside me as I put her down.” Duff’s voice was silk now. “We can inquire.”

  The doctor was standing. He stood very still. He twisted his head, turning it very slowly, looking around at Eve. He said, slowly, tentatively, “Eve, did you put something on her hands? Did you …?”

  Eve froze. She sat in her crouching rigidity.

  Pring cleared his throat.

  Miss Constance Avery got up suddenly. She said, sounding as tired as Duff had sounded, “There’s no use, is there, Mr. Duff? He did it. We were together in his car this morning, and he left me in the back lane to go into Eve’s house. When he came out he said she had already gone to the funeral. But he was in there. This morning. Do you understand?”

  “Another link,” said Duft “Thank you.” But the doctor was looking at Constance, first in incredulous horror, then in rage. “Keep your mouth shut, you damned bitch!” he screamed and dove across at her. “You’d betray me, would you? Would you? I did it for you!” he sobbed. “You’re to blame … You’re the one.

  Alfie got him by the left leg and held on like a plump bulldog. Paul twisted one of his arms back, expertly. Paul was very strong. Yet it took Duff and Robin, too, to pull him finally away and let Constance fall, mussed and terrified, into Mary’s pitying arms.

  The doctor was crying tears and beating his hands on the floor.

  “O.K., Mr. Haggerry,” said Duff, panting. “Here’s your reward … your dream comes true. I guess you scooped the story.”

  “Holy smokes!” said Mr. Haggerty, biting a half-inch clean off his pencil. “That’s right! I got it! Where’s the telephone?”

  “Mommy,” said Taffy a little later, “was he bad? Are they going to put him in jail?”

  “Yes, darling. At least they’ll put him somewhere where he can’t hurt anybody any more. He was very bad.”

  Taffy sobbed once. She was a little upset, but she was adjusting. Duff squeezed her fingers.

  “He was awfully bad,” said Davey. He wiggled off the couch and stood in front of them with his ears like cup handles and his funny little face with its soft baby nose screwed up fiercely. “He put bad poison in Brownie’s glass.”

  Duff started to speak, but Mary put out her hand. “How do you know, babe?” she said to Davey.

  “I saw him,” said Davey. “Whin they were out in the hall.”

  “Davey, you didn’t!”

  “I did so!”

  “He must have heard what you said …”

  “Bit I could see,” said Davey. “He put the glass down on top of the radiator.”

  Duff had a sudden vision of that handy, flat-topped radiator and the doctor using two hands on the little bottle.

  But Paul struck himself on the forehead, and Dinny rolled her eyes. Alfie’ made queer noises through his teeth. Mitch said, aghast, “I’ll betcha he did!”

  Davey said, airily, “I certainly certainly did.”

  The Moriaritys and Duff looked at each other in wonder and despair.

  “We’ll never know,” said Dinny.

  “He’s a peanut,” said Paul, sighing.

  CHAPTER 18

  Everyone had gone away.

  Mr. Haggerty had babbled a long time into the phone and gone away in a happy hurry.

  Eve had been calm. It was as if she spent her life in training for crises, and now that one had come, she was ready. She was prepared. She had watched them take the doctor out, seeming to be quietly resigned. It was Constance, unprepared, who fell to pieces. A disheveled, unstrung Constance who wept and began to blurt out hopes and fears and disappointments in one great breakdown of reserve. Duff had encouraged her to go home. He had encouraged Eve to take her there.

  It was, he felt as they went, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. One lonely female would find another who was willing to hear all about it and probably agree that men, on the whole, were louses. Eve,, full of pity and strength, seemed not to be worrying, yet, about Ralph. Perhaps she would, later. Duff felt she would, unless her time could be taken up otherwise. She was one to fill the vacuums in her life with worry. He hoped these two could ally themselves against an empty world. He was sorry, in his happiness, for all troubled souls.

  But when he telephoned Mr. O’Leary, he broke the news quickly and coldly and left that gentleman high and dry with his disillusionment. Duff wanted no part of any transference, of any devotion from that quarter. He was quite selfish about it. All he wanted, at the moment, was to clear everything and everyone away and have a quiet supper with the Moriaritys.

  They scratched a supper together, ate it in the bare-floored dining room. Afterward, Taffy and Davey got put to bed with ceremony. Duff was included. Everybody except Duff seemed to take this very much for granted. After Davey had been pommeled by Paul, had his toes tweaked by Alfie, had been smacked on either cheek by his big sisters, it was Duff who must lean over and feel the baby nose pushed into his cheek while the airy kiss landed in the air.

  “Good night, Davey.”

  “Good night, Mr. Mac Duff.”

  Mary patted her smallest, seeming to mold him into a sleepy knot. Then they all trooped into Taffy’s room.

  Paul said, all gentleness, “Good night, sweetheart.” Duff had to choke down the rush of feeling in his throat After all the tension and relief he could have blubbered to see Taffy receiving, like blessings, the love that belonged to her and doing it like a little queen, not arrogant, but sweet and sure. He added his own, humbly. He loved them all, but Taffy was the rose of the world.

  He was still a bit exalted when he and Mary and the four bigger ones gathered in the shabby living room where Brownie had died and where her murderer had lost control and given himself up and been taken away. Now, with windows open to the evening air, it was cool and homely.

  “How did you know?” they besieged him.

  “That’s going to be hard to say,” Duff confessed. He was eased into a big chair. He looked at home there. He felt at home, and his heart was tender toward them. “There were a couple of things that kept bothering me,” he told them. He didn’t much want to think of clues, and his mind groped reluctantly back. “For instance,” he said, “I kept wondering why he hustled Taffy off to the hospital. It didn’t seem as necessary as all that. He jumped at a chance to get Mary out of the way, to muddle things with crisis and comings and goings.”

  “So he could get at the wine bottle?”

  “Partly that. He went through the kitchen, I think, following inside the house the course the boys were taking outside. He fixed the wine in the pantry, nipped in and changed bottles. Thereafter, he was on the phone, and as quickly as possible out of the house. He was going to take Taffy himself. He’d be gone.”

  “Leaving the children,” said Mary suddenly.

  Duff said, “His concern for the children didn’t exist except in reverse. O
f course, he tried to make it seem that he feared for Taffy, wanted to get her away before the police came, because she might betray herself. For that,” he added quietly, “I do not forgive him.”

  “Nor I,” said Mary, just as quietly. “Is he insane, do you think?”

  “No,” said Duff. “I don’t think so. But he may be. I wouldn’t be the one to say. All along, you know, he thought of Taffy as his way out. He thought she could take his guilt, if necessary, without suffering. I suppose it was his idea of doing no harm.” Mary looked simply grim and said nothing, nor did the kids. “For that we do not forgive him,” repeated Duff, “but let’s see … what else. Of course, there was my famous dream. His analysis was so fantastically unrelated to anything in my mind, I was forced to wonder from whose mind it came. He was very careless. Of course, O’Leary adored him and hung on his words. O’Leary had made the doctor his personal savior. Nervous cases do that, often. Usually the savior is the psychiatrist who treats them. O’Leary was a devoted barnacle who both flattered and puzzled Christenson, but who was his great audience before whom he couldn’t resist performing. Yes, he was careless.

  “Naturally, I didn’t see all this in any flash. But it bothered me. I told the dream to Haggerty, half in fun. After what he said, the thing bothered me still more.”

  “Then we analyzed it,” said Dinny.

  “Who was right?” asked Paul as if there were a certain answer.

  “Oh, I think you were. That is, you and Dinny.” Duff went on quickly. “Then again, I couldn’t help wondering why on earth Brownie would be packing that baby picture around the country with her. It ought to be significant. But I couldn’t guess how. Oh, I had some pretty fantastic thoughts, plenty of them. I thought maybe he had lied, and it wasn’t his picture at all.”

  “Oh, I knew it was,” said Mary. “At least, I knew it was supposed to be, and that Brownie had had it for a long time.”

  “I ought to have asked you,” murmured Duff. “Then, I thought Brownie was in love with him, perhaps.”

  “No,” said Mary, “not exactly. You … hit it right”

  “She liked him,” said Dinny.

  “Sure she did,” said Paul.

  “But she didn’t really like anybody very much,” said Mitch suddenly and wisely. She had put herself close to Duff’s knee. He had a shaky feeling that even this wild spirit was letting him draw close. He smiled down and said, “No.” All the eyes looked thoughtful.

  “Say, listen, was his car really on the blink in all that rain?” demanded Alfie. “Or was he lying about that?”

  “I believe it was genuinely on the Wink,” said Duff “I think he really wanted to get out of the house himself, a kind of alibi after the fact, you see? I do believe it was the hand of—the rain that drew me into this.”

  “Lucky for us,” said Dinny warmly.

  “And how!” echoed the boys.

  Duff said, “Good luck is better than good management. For God knows I wasn’t managing this case. I was all mixed up.”

  “Ha ha,” said Alfie, without mirth but politely.

  “No, I meant that,” said Duff. “I stumbled into nearly every telling stroke. I didn’t like Constance Avery. I simply did not like the woman. I had a mean desire to give her her come-uppance. So, when I wanted to shake the doctor up, I chose to do it by attacking her. Because she annoyed me. Malice. Or else some good subconscious angel. For only by attacking Constance could I have got that hint about the tea party at Eve’s.”

  “Hint? What hint?”

  “Why, the doctor said—it slipped out hysterically—’Maybe I should have let her go to the tea party.’”

  “But he explained that,” objected Dinny.

  “He tried to explain it. But if the thought in his mind had been what he later claimed it was—mark his words. Look at his language. Remember his state Wouldn’t he have said, ‘Why, I could have let her go to the tea party,’ or ‘I might as well have let her go.’ Not, ‘Maybe I should have.…’ No, that meant what I heard it mean. Danger.”

  Dinny nodded. Her lips moved over the phrases, an actress testing lines.

  “So you ran,” said Paul, grinning.

  “You sure did run!”

  “Gosh!”

  “You flew!”

  “I wish you coulda seen yourself go over the gate!”

  “With all my leaping and bounding, I was too late,” said Duff sadly.

  “But it turned out all right.” The kids sighed happily.

  “More luck,” he said.

  Mary disagreed, boldly. “I shouldn’t call it luck when you stood here and maintained we wouldn’t lie, the way you did.”

  “Oh, that was wonderfull” cried Dinny. “It felt good. Didn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” the boys admitted. And Mitch wriggled.

  Dinny said, “And we don’t, as a general rule. Even Davey just makes things lip. He doesn’t really lie.”

  “Oh, making things up doesn’t count,” said Duff, smiling at her. “Hessians, for instance.” Everybody looked at Dinny for a moment. Then Duff went on. “All I could do was state my own faith,” he murmured. “After all, my faith has a right to get stated. It’s got as good a chance as anybody’s to be justified.”

  “Better,” said Paul, with admiration.

  “Though scarcely scientific,” Duff murmured.

  “Science,” said Mary suddenly, looking straight at him, “isn’t all it takes.” His heart left out a beat and went on faster.

  But Alfie was squirming now. “Yeah, but even so, I don’t see why it couldn’t be Aunt Eve. I mean, gosh, it could have been. She’s so kinda unbuttoned most of the time, you wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “Being unbuttoned, though distressing, is no crime,” said Duff. “But don’t you see that if I believed your mother, who said she drank the wine, then the wine with Eve’s fingerprints came innocent into this house? And since Eve hadn’t been here to make any new fingerprints, it wasn’t Eve.”

  “Oh,” said Dinny. “Well, of course mother wouldn’t lie.”

  “No,” said Duff, “I know.’

  Mary said, a little hastily, “Look here, you kids, what I want to know is what you’ve been up to. All these monkey shines with ice cubes. What on earth …?”

  “Well, gosh,” said Alfie, “we heard them say it must be an inside job, nobody else in the house. We couldn’t let them get away with that!”

  “We thought we’d better mix things up a little,” said Paul.

  “And we did, too,” said Dinny, “for a while.” She looked at Duff out of the corner of her eye. “Of course, we didn’t know Mr. Duff-so well, then.”

  Duff laughed. “You and your Hessian! Making out you were covering up with a fake ghost, while all the while you wanted me to think that was what you were doing!”

  “And you did!”

  “Oh, yes, I thought,” confessed Duff, “what you wanted me to think. You were acting. It took me a while to find out that you were acting as if you were acting, too.” His heart began to beat fast again. “Of course,” he said casually, “I thought you were concealing your father here.”

  “Dad!”

  “Who else?” Duff asked.

  “Ye gods!” said Dinny. “We never even thought of that.”

  “But Dad doesn’t come near us any more. He’s married—”

  “Yes, I know, now. At least I …”

  “But what made you think …?”

  “How?”

  “Why?”

  Duff didn’t look at Mary. He told the kids. “I got a bit haunted by. my Professor Moriarity. Do you know, I thought perhaps our friend, Mr. Haggerty, was he?”

  They giggled.

  “Or again, I thought a Mr. Severson, who was hiding from the law, was really your father and was hiding here.” They gaped. “After all, if he was biding, I had to imagine why, didn’t I?”

  Mitch pitched backward and sprawled on the floor. It was like the last frame in a comic strip. She left the “Pow!
” behind her. “Oh, my goodness!” beamed Dinny, rocking.

  “I’m breaking down all your illusions,” said Duff ruefully. “I’m showing myself up. Why, I even went so far off the track as to think for one moment, there in the garden, that Mr. O’Leary was your father. I soon came to and remembered that he couldn’t be.”

  “Couldn’t be?” i “It was impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mr. O’Leary has blue eyes.”

  “Hm?”

  “Mitch’s are brown. So are yours, Dinny. So are Alfie’s.”

  “Mendelian Law,” said Paul. “Why, sure. Look at Mom.”

  Mary’s puzzled eyes were bluer than ever.

  “Oh,” said the twins together.

  Mitch sat up. “What’s the Mendelian Law?”

  “Never mind. Wait till you get to high school,” said Dinny. “Go on.”

  But Duff didn’t go on. He said evasively, “However, Mr. Haggerty and Mr. Severson both had brown eyes, and so have many other people.”

  They sighed. Mary hadn’t said much.

  Alfie wriggled with delight, and his feet massaged each other. “Yeah, but we fooled you that first night, huh? With the bathroom.”

  Mary woke up. “The what?”

  Dinny surrounded words with laughter. “Oh, Lord, Mother, you know what Paul did? He put a fishline around the handle of the t-toilet up in the front bathroom and hung it down out the window and went and pulled it, so the toilet flushed, but we were all right there, where he could see it wasn’t us.…”

  “Paul was standing in the front door,” said Alfie. “We tried to keep Mr. Duff looking at Davey.”

  “I nearly died,” said Dinny. “Davey was wonderful!”

  “Y’see, the fishline was double,” said Paul. “After it worked I just whipped the line away by pulling only one end. That was while he was chasing upstairs.”

  “Aren’t we devils!” squealed Dinny.