by Zenith Brown
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say.”
Her bare bosom had angry splotches under the filmy pink tulle, her eyes snapped angrily.
“Hold!” The strident pitch of her voice filled the hall. “Do you think it was any accident that gave Harlan Sudley his brother’s fine, big farm? Do you think for one minute that that crazy woman doesn’t know what hap——”
“Eloise!”
Mrs. Twohey clapped her hand over her mouth, dismay in her startled eyes. They were like darts thrown at the library door, held there, waiting. Behind it Spig could hear Nat Twohey’s slow unsteady tread coming from his bedroom behind it. Mrs. Twohey’s eyes were fixed rigidly. Without moving she seemed to have shrunk, her pink finery standing out around her like something that was no part of her. The door opened and Nat Twohey stood there, leaning against the frame, grey-faced, his lips blue, only his eyes intensely and cogently alive, in them a kaleidoscope of emotions, anger and disgust the chief, but so varied it was hard to follow them.
“Come in, Spig.” He stepped aside for O’Leary without looking at him, his eyes fixed on the speechless old woman across the hall. Spig felt his second twinge of sympathy in seven years.
“Listen to me, Eloise,” he said, with a frigid dignity that was worse than unbridled rage. “Harlan Sudley had nothing whatever to do with his brother’s death. There are penalties for slander. Just keep your mouth shut hereafter. And go take off those ridiculous clothes. Or if you can’t do that, have the decency to stay away from the front door. You’re the laughing stock of the whole street.”
He closed the door after Spig and stood there steadying himself against it.
“The woman’s mad,” he said bitterly. “This house has been a nightmare ever since that fellow started coming here.”
He went over to the worn leather chair in front of the old judge’s desk and sat down. His hands, bloodless except for the blue shadows dyeing his nails, were trembling.
“I should have seen from that outrageous picture that there was something behind it. But what’s his motive? I was . . . shocked when I . . . Yesterday morning at breakfast, Eloise asked how you proceeded with an order for exhumation. Then it came out. She’s never been able to keep anything to herself. Just like a child. But she didn’t say it was Harlan Sudley this man Dunning’s after. Good God! Harlan Sudley was on the other side of the river all day. I was with him. We didn’t start back until time for him to milk. His brother had been dead for hours, his body brought into town, the cottage nailed up. No question it wasn’t an accident. No question of any kind or description.”
Except for a heart attack when you heard it’s being questioned now . . . Neon letters, ten feet high . . . Spig O’Leary sat down, studing the worn carpet between his feet, his own heart cold. This was the compulsion nagging him to come and see Nat Twohey. He recognised it then, without knowing whether he’d come hoping Nat would somehow relieve him of his own fears about the old judge or whether it was a confirmation of them he was hunting before he went on—if he was going on—to stop Dunning . . . if there was any way of stopping him.
He put his hand in his pocket and got out a cigarette. It was an odd thing. It wasn’t till that moment that he was conscious that was what he was going to do, or conscious of the reason. Or perhaps it was Mrs. Twohey’s “But you wait! Just you wait!” that had focused the picture already in his mind.
“Look here, Nat,” he said deliberately. “What’s behind this deal? Where did it start?”
“I don’t know,” Nat Twohey said curtly. “But it’s mischief. I know that. Mischief and malice.”
“Behind Mrs. Twohey’s part in it.”
“She’s always resented the Sudleys. They were Father’s and my best friends.”
“I’m not talking about Sudley. She didn’t start with him. She started with Miss Fairlie.”
“My father was in love with Miss Fairlie. She’s never forgiven either of them for it.”
He took a small cotton-covered cartridge out of his dressing-gown pocket, crushed it in his handkerchief, held it to his nose, breathing in laboured gasps until the tension in his chest relaxed.
“I’d better go.” Spig got abruptly to his feet.
“No, sit down. If you’ve got any explanation, I want to hear it. It’s important to me . . . desperately important.”
The poor devil, Spig thought. He sat down again. Whether it was actual knowledge that his father had killed George Sudley, or the fear he had, long held, long hidden, more harrowing than knowledge, the hideous irony of having his father’s widow the unconscious harpy, hell-bent on tearing it all wide open, he didn’t know. One or the other was the switchblade giving an almost lethal twist.
“I don’t know it’s the explanation,” Spig said slowly. “But I think Dunning just came here to paint Mrs. Twohey for his so-called gallery of rural types, until she got started going to town on Miss Fairlie. He never came here to do that candy-box top in there. Or maybe his curiosity about Miss Fairlie sparked the thing. Mrs. Twohey didn’t start out to do in Sudley. It’s Miss Fairlie she was down on. I’ll bet you anything I own that Dunning’s promised to help her put Miss Fairlie behind the bars in the looney-bin and that’s the whole reason behind it. It was George Sudley’s . . . murder that put her off in the first place. Dig it all up, she can go off again. God knows she’s border-line enough right now.”
He got up and moved back and forth across the free space in the room, to the black marble fireplace, back to the leather chair where he’d been sitting. When was it he became conscious that that had been where the old judge had always sat to read under the goose-neck lamp with the green glass shade? And when conscious that the worn horsehair carpet wasn’t worn except in the line from the chair to the black marble fireplace . . . the track he was pacing, worn deep in the tough red-and-blue dyed horsehair fibre? He stopped, a sharp sense of psychic identification prickling ice-cold down his spine . . . the old judge’s feet and his own pacing the same line, with the same anxiety, the same fear?
“Did your father kill George Sudley, Nat?”
The words were there, spoken aloud, words that came out of his mouth and that he’d no intention of speaking, that he’d had every intention not to speak . . . as if he hadn’t spoken them . . . as if the old judge . . .
“It’s strange how much like my father you sounded then,” Nat Twohey said simply, without tension of any kind. He hesitated only a brief instant. “I believe so. I’ve always known it, in fact. Harlan and I both know it.” He stopped again. “We weren’t across the river, Spig. It was too damned cold. We rowed up here. Our orchard went down to the water then, before they put the street through behind us. We came in here the back way. The house was empty. We looked. At the inquest my father said he was here, writing a brief at this desk.”
He looked calmly down at the desk he was sitting at, his voice low and perfectly even.
“Not answering the phone he said. It rang, but we didn’t answer it, either. The sheriff, Buck Yerby’s father, said he picked my father up here and took him out to Eden, the rector and the doctor a little behind them. The rector’s memory of it now is that he went out with them. My father had an old tweed overcoat he used to wear out in the country. He promised it to an old man who used to work around here. Gus. Gus found a piece of it in the furnace the next morning. It hadn’t all burned.”
He paused again, a long, slow, silent time.
“My father gave him a black chesterfield to take its place. It had a velvet collar. He was terribly proud of it. He told the story all over town. It used to frighten me till I nearly died. But nobody . . . nobody doubted my father’s word, or Yerby’s. Not then. Gus is dead. His son’s seventy now. Gus was a preacher on Sundays. His son asked me about a month or so ago if I remembered the coat my father gave his father, that he used to wear when he preached. He had a sermon about it, showing how the Lord takes something from you and returns it a hundred-fold. The son remembers it almost v
erbatim.”
He closed his eyes for an instant. “If Dunning hasn’t heard it I’m sure he will. Gus’s son sometimes preaches that sermon at parties where they bring in a group to sing spirituals. I heard it at the Ashtons’ when Anita first came down here. Folk art, I believe she called it.”
When he stopped then, Spig waited a long time to ask the question that had been forgotten, or omitted.
“Sudley, Nat. Harland Sudley. You said he knew.”
“Yes. He knew,” Nat Twohey said quietly. “His getting the farm had nothing at all to do with it. I’ll ask you to take my word for that, Spig. He loved his brother. It’s true he loved Celia Fairlie, too.” He smiled a little. “He still does, or he’d never have put up with her all these years.”
He drew his chair closer to the old desk and lifted the blotting pad. “I have this for you.”
O’Leary looked at the cheque in his hand.
“It’s for five hundred. Miss Fairlie wants an option to buy the Plumtree Cove tract under the terms of your agreement with her.”
Spig looked at him blankly.
“She called me this morning. She doesn’t think you’ll sell the place against her wishes, but she’s afraid you might try to raise money on it, to buy Anita out, and land yourselves head over heels in debt. The option will stop that.”
“We don’t have to give it to her, do we,” Spig said quietly. “It’s the only security we’ve got. We promised your father——”
“She told me you said that. Are you sure you understood what he meant, Spig? He had a way of saying things for you to figure out later. I’ve been thinking about what you said just a minute ago. That could be the threat to Eden my father had in mind—not the physical threat. I don’t know. You think it over.”
The phone rang as Spig was starting out. Nat Twohey answered it. “He’s right here. Just a second, Tip.”
“Daddy.” Tip’s voice was not too steady. “I had to call you. Mother’s gone . . . over to Mr. Dunning’s. We’ve got to stop her. Please, Daddy.”
“I’ll be right out, son.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
The dial tone zinged. Spig held on a moment. There was hardly any sound as Mrs. Twohey put the extension softly down.
CHAPTER XX
IT TOOK him forty minutes to get out. There were two accidents on Death Strip, a woman with an armload of groceries from the supermarket and a car going sixty in a twenty-mile zone; another car ploughing into the rear of a sedan waiting behind three other cars for a light to change. Then Joe Cameron came out of the bank.
“Hi, I took your youngsters home. At their request. Miss Fairlie’s taking them on safari to the Elm Tree Field. To hunt a rabbit. A red rabbit.”
He boomed it out, laughing. O’Leary looked quickly around. There were only half a dozen of Mrs. Twohey’s friends in earshot, none of them deaf.
Then when he came off the highway around the bend in his own road where he’d braked to keep from running head-on into Harlan Sudley’s green truck, when Charlie Sudley was disking the field, he braked sharply again, to keep from running down the county surveyor with his transit and stakes in the middle of the road.
“What’s the idea?”
“Ask Miss Fairlie. It’s hers. She says your road’s way over on her property. Plenty tough when she gets that little back of hers up.”
Spig flushed. “I know my road’s on her property. So does she. She told me to put it there so I wouldn’t have to cut those beeches.” He pointed to the silver trunks of the trees. “I’d have had to cut them or run into the marsh if I didn’t. It was her own idea.”
“Take it up with her, brother. I’m just a hired hand. She asked me to come check her line and I’m checking it.”
Spig went on, started in to the Ashtons, and slowed down when he saw the yellow midget flying towards him out of the oyster shell road through the woods. But Dunning wasn’t driving it. It was little Miss Lucy, in a hurry. She put on her brakes and stopped beside him.
“You’re not hunting for Molly, are you, Uncle Spig?”
She was clear-eyed and bright, with none of the strained taut look her mother had had through the tinted glass of her car window leaving the Three D after her deal with Nick.
“Because she’s gone home. I just saw her.”
Lucy’s face clouded with innocent concern. “I guess she didn’t know how crazy Uncle Art can get. She’s all right, but she looked awful, really she did. Running out of there with her blouse all torn. She was a mess. But for golly’s sake don’t let him know I told you. He’d be wild. ’Bye now.”
She was off, the yellow car bouncing through the gate out towards the highway. O’Leary’s car shot forward, the red fog building up, blinding him, until through it there focused a redder light flicking a warning so sharp that he jammed his foot on the brake and dug to a stop on the oyster shell surface.
Lucy. Lucy the born poltergeist. Lucy with the dynamite caps. A face too bright, too suddenly clouded.
He started his stalled engine and put it in reverse. You’ll damn’ well check this time, O’Leary. See if it is the truth . . . not another pixie diversion—at your expense. He was backing into the fork when another idea flashed up into his mind. At his expense? Or was this one at Dunning’s? Was the blue-eyed child egging him on for her own amusement, or was it just possible she’d like to see Dunning with a broken jaw? So he couldn’t talk, perhaps? He shifted into forward and went into his own lane, his grey eyes flat.
Molly’s car was in the drive. He saw it first, then Tip, running out of the house.
“Didn’t . . . didn’t you get her, Daddy?”
“Isn’t she home?”
It was nothing he’d needed to ask. He got out of the car. “Where are the other kids?”
“Gone to Miss Fairlie’s. I was just . . . just waiting.”
“You get along with them” He tried to keep his voice casual. “I’ll go over and meet your mother. She went through the trail, didn’t she?”
Tip nodded. “A long time ago. Right after the kids came home. She . . . she didn’t know I waited.”
“Okay. Trot along. I’ll wander over. Have a good time. Find the rabbit.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
Spig waited until he saw him running across the bridge up the bank to the garden, out of sight. Then he started across the field, wary again. It could be Lucy’s story was all made up—Molly running, looking awful, the torn blouse. A pixie diversion, to have him barge into Dunning’s studio to find them both . . . in what state little Lucy’s mind might imagine was neither here nor there except as it could be a product of her intense and excited awareness of Dunning’s naked passion as he’d watched Molly leaving the Ashtons’. But trying to sift what could be true from what might be false out of the little blue-eyewitnesses’s story was like sifting the sands of the wide blue sea.
He slowed down as he got across the field almost to the woods. Ten to one Lucy had him cast in the rôle of outraged husband, and the thing for O’Leary to do was be suave and casual . . . casual and suave as all hell, O’Leary. He suddenly remembered the row they’d had last night, or this morning, when he’d got back from Eden. He’d forgotten that, and Molly’s ten o’clock date with Dunning that if she didn’t cancel O’Leary would. Sergeant O’Leary, orders to the troops, in triplicate. The general’s daughter showing the sergeant just what he could do with all three copies. He grinned a little, feeling slightly more rational. It was probably all false, none of it true, just the product of two disordered imaginations.
He went along the trail through the dogwood and oaks, the sweet gums and tulip trees, whistling, relieved a little, and halted abruptly, swinging sharply to the side.
“Spig! Oh, Spig! Here I am . . . here!”
He saw her then, behind the old chestnut stump, pulling herself up from where she’d been crouching. He saw her bright hair first, then her face, white with circles smudged indigo-blue under her eyes, stricken pale. Then her white blouse, ripped
and torn, pushed under her bra straps to hold it in place to cover her. He sprang through the holly beside the stump and caught her as she stumbled towards him, burying her head in his breast, clinging to him.
“Oh, darling! I was hiding . . . I was afraid you were Tippy! He’s been down here. I was so afraid Mädel would show him where I was! I couldn’t go home as long as he was there. Oh, darling, hold me tight! He’s horrible, Spig! He’s evil . . . evil! Oh, Spig, we’ve got to stop him!”
She caught hold of his arms, shaking him, the way he’d shaken her coming from the Ashtons’, to break the rage she could feel in him.
“Listen, darling! Listen to me. I’m all right. It isn’t me. Listen, darling . . . please!”
There was the red fog then, no light flicking redder through it to warn him.
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, yes. It’s just my blouse. It’s nothing—I just didn’t want to go home when Tippy’s there. I could see him. I thought he’d gone to Elm Tree Field with Miss Fairlie and the others. I just didn’t want him to see my blouse torn. It’s not me . . . it’s the pictures, Spig. The gallery. They’re horrible. He can’t show them. We’ve got to stop him. They’re cruel . . . horrible. That’s why I went, Spig. That’s what our date was for. He hasn’t let anybody see them. But he wanted me to. He thought I hated everybody. He thought I was in love with him the way he is with me. He showed them to me. He . . . he’d said he would but I wasn’t going till you . . . you said there was something about the one of Tip’s garden. That’s why I went. And it is horrible. I don’t blame Tippy. Just slugs, and everything eaten and foul, and Tip too . . . the Lord Proprietor. It’s dreadful. It’s obscene. I . . . I couldn’t bear it. Everybody. Mag and Joe Cameron, the Potters, Mr. Sudley, Charlie, Anita . . . everybody.”
She put her head down, pressing her forehead against him, shaking convulsively.
“But I’m all right. He just frightened me. He was mad—crazy mad—when I wouldn’t let him kiss me.”
Spig held her arms hard against her, steadying her till she stopped shaking.