by Jan Burke
“So, if this Mrs. Huddleson was there, how did the young couple manage to elope?” the sheriff asked.
“Everett went fishing. Mrs. Huddleson asked to be brought back here—she had much to do, and Everett’s habit was to take a basket of sandwiches and a thermos with him early in the morning and stay out all day. Jeannie was completing some work in the kitchen, and Billy said he’d make a second trip. Mrs. Huddleson thought nothing of it. They were careful not to raise any alarms here—took none of their possessions from this house, although Everett said Billy cleared out all his own things from his quarters at the quarry.”
She hesitated, then added, “Perhaps Mrs. Huddleson knew what was going on and aided them—if true, that wouldn’t surprise me. Billy grew up here and is much doted upon by the older staff, who have all adopted him to one degree or another.”
Wishy’s brows drew together. “But if the Hudson was still at the quarry, how’d the lovers run off? I mean, not a second automobile missing, is there?”
“Billy wouldn’t have stolen an automobile from us,” she said. “Everett was convinced that a friend must have aided them—drove up to the cottage while Everett was out on the water, fishing.”
“Two days ago,” Slye said, musing. “Since Mr. Grimes was then left without help, did he drive himself back here?”
“No. He was in a foul mood and said he didn’t want anyone to disturb him, that he had plenty to eat and would just drive the Hudson down to the village if he needed anything more.” She shook her head. “He was emphatic about being left alone, but I swear to you, I had no idea that he meant to do himself harm.”
“Please don’t let that trouble you,” Slye said. “You had no way to predict what would happen at the quarry.”
“Yesterday,” the sheriff asked, “who from this household went there?”
“Mrs. Westley. He asked for her specifically, but it would probably have been her anyway—I’m the only other person in the house who drives. She drives as well as Billy, so she took the Ford—we have a Model T that she uses for errands.
“Everett was so upset when I spoke to him, and behaving so oddly, I told her to take Mrs. Huddleson with her, even though that left us very shorthanded here. I asked them to work together and to try not to be out of each other’s sight. Everett wanted to have someone clean the place thoroughly, and the small house, too. They spent most of the day there. It was rather cruel of him, I think, to take his frustrations out on Mrs. Westley. She’ll eventually come to accept Billy’s decision, but right now she’s unhappy about it.”
“What time did the women come back?”
“About four, I think. Then they drove back later, to take his dinner to him.”
The sheriff looked to Slye, who said, “Mrs. Grimes, may we please speak to Mrs. Westley?”
“She is so upset—”
“Please. It is important.”
She watched him warily for a moment, then rang for the butler and asked that the housekeeper be brought to the parlor.
Mrs. Westley’s face bore the marks of grief in more than her swollen eyes, reddened nose, and trembling lips. A sturdily built woman of a certain age, she nevertheless seemed to me a fragile being, lost in some fog of remembrance, nearly unresponsive to her environment. I offered her my chair. She suddenly seemed to see me for the first time and cringed away from me, but when I moved aside from the chair, she collapsed into it.
“Mrs. Westley,” Mrs. Grimes said, “you must answer the questions these gentlemen put to you. And thank you, Dr. Tyndale. I apologize for my housekeeper’s lapse in manners. Forgive her—she is not herself. Please, have a seat here by me on the sofa.”
This speech had a fortifying effect on Mrs. Westley, who offered her own apology.
“Mrs. Westley,” the sheriff asked, “did anything seem unusual when you were at the cottage yesterday?”
“Mr. Grimes was in a strange mood, and behaving as if he was angry with me, telling me I had done a poor job of raising my son to have him run off with Jeannie. I expected as much of Mr. Grimes.”
“Anything else?”
She twisted her hands together in her lap, then said, “I saw that he had been moving the furniture about, which was unusual. He seldom does things for himself, but if he gets a whim, there’s no telling what he’ll be up to. He had got rid of one of the headboards—in his room, that is. And the room smelled of patch and paint, but we didn’t dare ask him about it. Mrs. Huddleson and I just did our work and tried to stay out of his way. He upset me, I admit it. I am sorry that things have—have come to this. Truly sorry.”
“Did you prepare Mr. Grimes’s dinner?”
“No, sir, our cook did.”
“Did Mr. Grimes eat the same food as was served here?”
“Yes, sir. No one wanted to eat much, with everything and everyone so upset. The cook had made a lovely carrot soup and soft dinner rolls. Mr. Grimes said that would be plenty for him.”
“Who prepared the soup for transport to the quarry house?”
She frowned in concentration. “Cook ladled it out of the pot and into a jar. I drove and Mrs. Huddleson carried the jar into the house and heated it up. Mrs. Huddleson was in the kitchen with me. We had brought a tureen with us. I poured the soup into it and helped her serve the meal.”
“And you were not in the house while he ate?”
“No, sir. We asked if he needed anything else, and he said he wanted us to hurry up and finish cleaning the servants’ quarters, and let him be. It had been a long day already, so we didn’t mind getting back to work in the other house.”
“Has anyone here who ate the soup become ill?”
“No, sir.”
“You had some of this soup yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was there anything strange in the taste of it?”
“No, sir. It was very good, spicy and sweet.”
Mrs. Grimes said, “I had some as well. It’s as she said.”
The sheriff hesitated, then glanced at Slye.
Slye smiled, then said to Mrs. Grimes, “May we look through the kitchen area?”
“Of course.”
“And perhaps you could ask Mrs. Huddleson to join us there?”
“Unless she’s gone to bed, I’m sure she’ll be there now.”
It was as she had guessed. Mrs. Huddleson, who proved to be of an age with Mrs. Westley, had a kindly face and easy manner. She was sitting with the cook, who was feeding a substantial breakfast to one of the sheriff’s deputies. The man was startled by the advent of his boss, and stood to attention. The sheriff waved him back to his seat and told him to finish his meal.
The kitchen was clean, if not as orderly as the one at the quarry house. It was not in disarray, it merely had the look, feel, and heavenly aroma of a kitchen in use, rather than the sterile environment of the one at the quarry. The cook bristled at the sheriff’s suggestion that the small remaining quantity of the previous night’s soup should be sealed and taken for testing, or that anything could be amiss with her soup.
“Do you think me a poisoner?” she thundered.
While the rest of us made efforts to soothe her—a task made more difficult when the deputy seemed to lose his appetite—Slye roved toward the area where the pots and pans were stored. Our discussion came to a halt when he said, “I believe I’ve found the poison.”
“What!” the cook shouted. Mrs. Westley turned pale.
“Oh, nothing you prepared.” He held up a jar. “This is your silver polish?”
“Yes, sir,” the cook said.
“Who polished the tureen today?”
“I did,” Mrs. Westley said weakly, sitting down in a kitchen chair.
Slye brought the jar to the sheriff. “Many brands of silver polish contain cyanide, as does this one. The tureen was quite large. If this polish was not rinse
d well from its inner surface, enough cyanide may have remained to mix with the soup and cause Grimes’s poisoning. There was recently just such a case in the city.”
Mrs. Westley was shaking now, her face buried in her hands.
“An accident, then,” Mrs. Grimes said firmly.
“Yes, of course,” the sheriff said, and a gust of relieved sighs went through the room.
Then the sheriff noticed that Slye was staring out the kitchen window, and had said nothing in response to his pronouncement. “Mr. Slye, do you agree?”
“I don’t think you’ll ever prove it to be anything else,” Slye said absently. He refocused on the sheriff. “It wants only a few minutes before dawn. I know your men are tired, Sheriff Anderson, and no doubt most of them should be allowed to seek their beds. Allow us to return you to the quarry house. I don’t like to delay you, but there are one or two matters upon which I’d like to reassure myself.”
Mrs. Westley looked up at that, frightened. Slye took her hands and said gently, “You have suffered a terrible ordeal, and you have my deepest sympathies.”
She began to weep in earnest. Mrs. Huddleson took her to her quarters.
Mrs. Grimes thanked us and said that she would remain at home, but to call if she was needed at the quarry house. She begged us to let her know if she could be of help in any way.
“It occurs to me to ask a question I should have posed earlier,” Slye said, turning to Mrs. Grimes. “Was your husband allergic to feathers?”
“Feathers? Why, no. In fact, nothing but a feather bed and pillows would do for him.”
“Ah. Thank you. And if I may have a word with Mrs. Huddleson before we go?”
“Certainly.”
Mrs. Grimes asked the cook to go sit with Mrs. Westley and to request that Mrs. Huddleson rejoin us in the kitchen.
“Just one question, Mrs. Huddleson. When you were cleaning Mr. Grimes’s bedroom, did you find any loose feathers on the floor?”
“Oh! Yes, a few. But he had changed the beds around, so I expect that’s when it happened.”
“Changed the beds?”
“Yes.” She glanced nervously at Mrs. Grimes, then said, “Pardon me, missus, but he was out of his head, you ask me.”
“I don’t doubt it, Mrs. Huddleson. You must speak very plainly to these gentlemen, without worry about my feelings. What happened with the bed?”
“I can’t really say. He didn’t want us asking about it, but when we went to work in there—well! We were surprised. And he got irritated and said it no longer suited him, and he could do as he damned well pleased, and not to ask impertinent questions—but we hadn’t. We both worked for him long enough to know better than to say ‘boo’ to him when he was in such foul mood.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Huddleson,” Slye said. “We’ll be going now.”
Once we were back in his limo, Wishy asked the question that was on all our minds.
“What the deuce was that about feathers, Bunny?”
“Do you remember the pillow fight we got into when we were seven?”
Wishy gave a delighted laugh. “Do I ever. Earned us each a tanning, and worth every blow. Feathers everywhere.”
“Exactly. Feathers, once no longer attached to their original owner, tend to scatter. Loosed violently from a pillow or mattress, they are nearly impossible to gather up again, as we learned when we were seven and were made to pick up the mess we’d made.”
“I agree, but I still don’t see what this has to do with Old Grimes losing his mind.”
“Oh, everything, Wishy. Everything.”
Slye did not reenter the quarry house, but invited us to accompany him on a walk to the dock. So we followed him across the property to the edge of the sheer drop down to the water. We could see our way now, but I was glad we had not made the attempt in the darkness.
In the growing light, I could see what an oasis it was, a deep, blue, walled-in lake, too perfectly rectangular along its shores, held in place by dramatic, hewn cliffs. Piles of cut and abandoned blocks of stone could be seen rising from the water here and there. The natural world had reasserted itself to some degree, with grasses and trees growing all along the sides, and a few trees rising out of the water closest to the cliffs. The quarry was an alluring place, if you could ignore the occasional rusted-out belt systems, rigging, and other derelict machinery that dotted its shores.
“From what you tell me, Sheriff,” Slye said, when we had paused on a stone landing about halfway down the steps, “loading a boat is more easily done from the other end of the quarry.”
“Yes.”
The sheriff was plainly losing his enthusiasm for Bunny’s methods.
This was not lost on Slye. “You are understandably tired and wishing for your bed. You are thinking that the matter of Grimes’s death has been resolved. And yes, in all likelihood, we do know how he was killed. But there remains the important matter of the other two murders.”
“What other two murders?” the sheriff was suddenly alert again.
“Of Billy Westley and Jeannie Lindstrom.”
“But they ran off—”
Slye interrupted him, saying in a fierce, quiet voice, “I cannot express to you how much I wish I could bring myself to hope that they are indeed on a honeymoon; how much I would love to learn that the two of them are cavorting about the countryside even without benefit of marriage. We could argue the moral implications of two healthy, good-looking, young people acting on their desires at that point, but first I would celebrate the fact that they must needs be alive in order to sin, if sin it is.” He gestured toward the water. “But this quarry lake, I am sad to say, is most probably their grave.”
Struck silent, we followed him as he made his way down to the dock. Birds were singing, a breeze rattled branches and whispered through the pines, bringing the scents of the forest to us. Our steps echoed on the stone stairs. No one spoke a word. The early light enhanced the colors around us, revealing a stunningly beautiful scene.
I could cheerfully hate it.
When we reached the dock, Slye said, “We observed several things, early in the day, that pointed the way. We learned other things from people who knew the three individuals well. We learned that Billy and Jeannie were smitten with one another. We learned that when fishing here, Grimes usually went out all day, that Mrs. Huddleson had been returned to the Grimes mansion by a young man who was no doubt looking forward to an encounter in a place where, for a few brief hours, no one would be telling him where to go and what to do, no mother or unofficial aunts and uncles coddling him or watching his every move. We know that Grimes, who had his own lustful plans for Jeannie, was hotheaded, competitive, thin-skinned, and had weapons at hand—some of which are missing from his gun room.”
He paused.
“I think more than one gun was taken in an attempt to confuse matters. Or he may have planned to construct a self-defense plea.”
“You mean,” Wishy said, frowning, “that Grimes fired off several weapons, and he planned to claim he’d been shot at, then fired back.”
“Precisely.”
“So what do you think happened?” the sheriff asked.
“No one living was here to witness what happened, but our observations give us the basics. Mr. Grimes repaired plaster on a bedroom wall, directly behind a point where two lovers’ heads may have been nestled together. Two shots at least. Others may have lodged in the mattress or the lovers’ bodies. As you know, Sheriff, there is unlikely to be self-restraint in such cases.”
The sheriff nodded. “Spurned lovers tend to overdo it.”
“Whatever he did required him to replace a headboard, a mattress, bedding. He opened windows on a chilly evening. He needed to telephone for help for further cleaning, and was very specific about who would answer that summons.”
“In that, he was cruel,” I said.
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br /> “Very much so,” Slye agreed. “Understanding that much of this is conjecture, but based on physical signs and what we know of the individuals concerned, here is what I believed happened. Grimes left the house at about this time of day two days ago. He took the rowboat out, but came back unexpectedly early.”
“Why?” I asked.
Bunny shrugged. “We can’t be sure, Max. Perhaps he forgot some part of his fishing tackle, remembered a new lure or something of that nature. Perhaps his unruly desire for Miss Lindstrom left him thinking he could send Billy and Mrs. Huddleson back to the mansion long enough to force his attentions on her. Perhaps, out on the lake, he happened to look into the window of his bedroom and saw them standing in an embrace. We will never know.”
“And they,” the sheriff said, “perhaps planning to leave his employ, thought to thumb their noses at him and make love in his own bed.” He shook his head. “What did Owen call him? ‘A cheeky bastard.’ ”
“Grimes and Billy perhaps had a few things in common,” Slye said.
“He grew up fatherless in Everett Grimes’s household,” I said. “His beliefs about manhood may have been molded by Grimes.”
“Likely, although until he could drive, he probably spent more time with the servants. As for using Grimes’s bed, since that is the only place in the house with a view of the lake, their choice may have been practical in intent—they could watch for his return, which they thought would come much later.
“In any case, finding these two in his bed must have enraged Grimes. I believe he reacted violently. He shot them both.
“Then what to do? He wrapped his victims up in the damaged and bloodstained bedding, and carried them down to the limousine. While not as large as Wishy’s Pierce-Arrow, the Hudson is a roomy vehicle. He included in his cargo the damaged headboard—perhaps he sawed it into smaller pieces first. He had the foresight to check in the small cottage and gather anything that might indicate Billy planned to stay. He overlooked or ignored The Count of Monte Cristo, which may have belonged to him, after all.”