Murder Comes to Eden

by Zenith Brown

  Old David was on his knees on Ammon Fairlie’s grave without a stone. The Lord knows where to fin’ him, the Devil too. On the grass beside the grave was a strip of brown tarpaulin with clumps of ivy he had dug up there and clumps of myrtle in deep spadesful of earth he was putting in their place. “That fella near ’bout ruin my ivy. But I been fixin’ to move it. Mr. Ammon never liked ivy. Seem like Miss Fairlie never get away long enough to get much done. No use remindin’ her of what she bes’ forget.”

  He reached for a clump of myrtle and set it in place. Under it was a print of the heel of his work shoe, sunk deep in fresh-dug earth. The ivy had been level with the ground. The myrtle clumps were raised. So when the soft earth settles . . . O’Leary stood there, his heart beating not as if it belonged to him. He’d already seen what Molly had been hunting for. It was the brass jacket of a used shell, glinting under the dark leaves of the myrtle growing around the outside of the iron paling, a sombre ribbon tying the clipped yews together. He turned, strangely slow motion, and looked across the Cove. The upstairs windows of their bedroom, where Molly had left one bed half made, were in full and open view. He let his breath out carefully. When his voice came he was surprised how normal it sounded.

  “Did you happen to see Mr. Dunning over here this morning, David?”

  “The artist fella.” David put the last two clumps of myrtle in place. He got up then and came out through the rusty gate, looking back. “I get it cleaned up, it’ll look like it growed there itself,” he remarked with satisfaction. “Mis’ O’Leary was tellin’ me you all was huntin’ the fella. I expec’ he’ll show up in his own good time, as they say. I ain’ bother about him long as he leaves us alone. Them children sure done Miss Fairlie a world of good. Don’ want him gettin’ her all upset and sick again.”

  He gathered up the tarpaulin with the ivy on it, took his spade and trudged off across the garden. Spig stood there a long time. He picked up the shell case then and went over to the temple. It took him a moment to find the rifle. It was tucked down under the ivy that grew, a thick mat, around the stone foundation.

  When he crossed the bridge he could hear the phone ringing. It was ringing still when he was half-way to the house, but when he got inside and picked it up the dial tone was all he heard. He put the rifle in Tip’s rack, took Molly’s upstairs and slipped it through the trap-door into the attic. Then he went past the unmade bed to the window and looked back across the Cove. David was coming out from behind the temple, moving slowly around, as Molly had done. On the floor at Spig’s feet was a cigarette with a tint of lipstick on the end, burned to the filter tip before it went out, almost its entire ash still intact, the paper burned into the floor board. She must have just lighted it as she stopped there and saw . . . whatever it was she’d seen. He looked back at David then, still crawling around, poking in the myrtle where the shell case had been, until suddenly he got up and disappeared quickly into the arbour.

  It was the jeep coming. Spig heard it before he saw it, heard the children shouting and laughing, saw it then come bounding down between the borders. Miss Fairlie at the wheel, Molly beside her, hanging on for dear life, the children bouncing around in the back, the dog barking on the bridge, the crow cawing. He held his breath as Miss Fairlie bounced them down the bank and swerved to a stop at the bridge, all still intact, jumping out then, trooping noisily across the bridge, waving back at Miss Fairlie, John Eden running back to say good-bye again. Miss Fairlie drove the jeep back up the bank, through the borders towards the picket gate.

  Without partiality or prejudice, faithfully to perform . . . The words of the oath he’d taken slipped quietly into his mind as he stood there listening to Molly and the children, laughing, hurrying towards the kitchen hyphen.

  “You get the bags down, Tip,” Molly was saying. “And Kitsy, you help Molly A. John Eden, wash those ears again. I have to get dressed.”

  She’d be coming up in a minute. Spig went quickly out and down the stairs into the living-room. He couldn’t face her then without her seeing his dismay—if that was what it was—and there was no time to go into anything before she started the drive to the airport. He heard her come out of the old cottage, run lightly up the stairs, go across to the window and stand there several moments. He could hear her steps overhead then and trace each move, the dressing-table to the closet again, the rap of high heels to the dressing-table, and down the stairs.

  “I don’t know where Daddy is,” he heard her say, and saw Tip lugging the bags over to her car.

  CHAPTER XXII

  HE WENT OUT. Molly and Molly A., dark curls shining, and John Eden all spit and polish, freckles glowing, were coming from the hyphen. Yerby was back. O’Leary saw his face as he pulled up, at the same moment he saw Anita Ashton’s big car coming out of the lane. Yerby got out, slamming his door shut.

  “It’s a court order, Spig. For the Ashton kid. She went to Judge Banks. It restrains you from moving the child. I tried to call you.”

  Spig held the paper Buck thrust at him, too numb to read it. He turned back to where Molly had stopped, her face drained very white, her feet frozen to the ground. It was like a horrible game of statues, with Tip and Kitsy and John Eden turned to marble where they were, and Molly A., the four-year-old, holding Molly’s hand, suddenly clinging tightly to it. Anita came across the drive, her lips thinned to a smile.

  “Just in time, aren’t we.” She turned to Molly. “Sorry to interrupt your trip, darling, but I’m glad the child is all packed. Get her, will you, Buck?”

  “Daddy!” It was John Eden. “He’s not going to take Molly A.! Don’t let him, Daddy!”

  “Sorry, fella,” Yerby said. He took a step forward and John Eden rushed at him, kicking, his fists hitting at Yerby’s long legs, tears of rage blinding him. Spig caught the dog’s collar, handed her to Tip and went back for his son.

  “It’s okay,” Yerby said. “It’s how I feel myself.”

  Spig pinioned the two small arms to John Eden’s side and lifted him, still kicking, out of Yerby’s way.

  Then the Sea King’s daughter smiled and stooped down to Molly A.

  “Darling . . . Mrs. Ashton’s come to take you to her house. You’ll have a lovely time, and go see Grandfather some other day. It’s over where Daddy lived . . . you remember. It’s the blue bag, Tip—will you bring it?”

  She took Molly A. by the hand and led her across to Anita. “You remember Mrs. Ashton.”

  The child held out a frightened hand.

  “Hallo, darling.” Anita Ashton took it, two crimson spots burning in her cheeks.

  Molly lifted her then and carried her over to the car. “You’re going to have a lovely time, baby.”

  “I tried to phone you,” Yerby said again.

  “It’s okay.” O’Leary was still holding on to John Eden, trying savagely to get away and over to Anita’s car where Tip was—the dog, hackles up, snarling, held in one hand, Molly A.’s blue bag in the other. “ ’Bye, Molly A. We’ll come see you.”

  “I think she’ll be happier if there’s a clean break,” Anita said curtly. “We shan’t be here long. You still have till Friday if you’re buying the place. Otherwise I’ve decided to sell it to Stan’s friends. There are some technical problems he knew that I didn’t. Good-bye.”

  The big car backed and shot into the lane. The stricken child’s face through the tinted glass stayed with them all.

  It was a nightmare day. A dragging nightmare of Molly’s wooden face, eyes washed grey-green, the gold flecks silver-pale, Tip and Kitsy in stricken silence, John Eden’s stormy tear-stained face and quivering shoulders passionately rejecting any comfort, and always the picture of Molly A. through the tinted glass. It was why Spig went around the house and collected every shell in it, took them down to the river and threw them in, and why he couldn’t talk to Molly or speak to Tip about the rifle and the stolen letters. But by the end of the day—an end he thought would never come, and hadn’t come, in fact—he knew what he had to
do. He had to find Dunning, and not on Eden. When he called Yerby in the morning, Dunning’s body was going to be as far from the Eden graveyard as he could get it.

  It was quarter to twelve when he let himself out of the house. It had taken that long for the sleep of sheer exhaustion to settle Molly, the children, already worn out, sound asleep. He crossed the circle down to the bridge where he stowed a tarpaulin with a spade and flashlight wrapped in it, under the honeysuckle on the bank. He got it and crossed the bridge silently, up and around the path to the graveyard. The moon was brighter than it had been the night before when he came on Dunning sitting there, laughing. He stopped to listen. The peacock-hoarse cry of the blue heron, disturbed, up the river, was the only sound, except for the velvet lap of the river and all the myriad tiny songs of the night, ceasing, beginning again, as he went by, the moonbeams on the water and the fireflies in the dark screen of cryptomeria that hid the house from him and him from the house, the only visible movement in the perfumed night.

  He opened the iron gate, stepped inside and laid the tarpaulin down as David had laid his, on the grass beside Ammon Fairlie’s grave. He took up the spade. The myrtle had been watered, but the square clumps of heavy clay soil were still intact, easy to lift out. He put them on the far edge of the tarpaulin, to leave room, as David had done, for the earth from under them. He worked quickly. Then he stiffened suddenly, alert, as a sound seemed to come from across the garden. He put the spade down quietly and slipped behind the cryptomeria. There was nothing he could see across the moon shining on the lilies and foxglove and the white waxen stars of the nicotiana. He stood there, every nerve intent, listening. But there was nothing.

  Silent as the grave. He thought it with a quiver along his spine as he went back and picked up the spade again. The clay under the myrtle was as soft to the touch, as newly dug, as he’d believed watching David lay the clumps neatly on top of it. He worked carefully, lifting it off in layers, laying it on the tarpaulin. Suddenly the taut nerves of his hand and fingers sensed through the steel and wood the touch of a different substance, soft as it caught and stayed the blade, not deeper than six inches under the heavy clumps of the myrtle on top. He knelt down and took his flashlight, holding it low and close so as not to show. It was burlap his spade had touched. Light new burlap. He took up his spade and lifted off more of the earth. What it struck then was not soft. He put it down again and pulled the burlap aside, his hands freezing motionless then, cold sweat drenching his back, the silence thundering in his ears.

  It was not Dunning. He knelt there motionless for a stunned moment, the white skeletal bones of a man’s hand shining in the ball of light he was too numbed to turn off. When he did, the hand still shone, pale, luminescent in the moonlight slanting through the clipped yews. And besides the fleshless bones of the hand were other bones, half hidden by the dark patches of cloth that had rotted but still clung to them.

  He thrust the burlap back into place then and worked, faster than he had worked in his life, putting back the earth and the clumps of myrtle above it, his heart pounding, his ears hearing a thousand sounds, all of them Dunning, waiting to hear the quiet hideous laughter . . . the sound he’d heard over in the borders real to him again as he pressed the squares of myrtle together, covering the grave, too numb to think, in too desparate a hurry to try to reason.

  He folded the spade in the tarpaulin, closed the rusted gate and went fast back towards the bridge, halting sharply as he saw two gleaming balls of fire in front of him there, like a wolf’s eyes, or a devil’s, until he realised it was the dog Mädel. He hadn’t known she was outside to follow him. But if Dunning had crossed there, she’d have barked. He stopped short, thinking rationally again. If the sound he’d heard had been Dunning, waiting there, biding his time . . . Dunning not dead but alive. . . He put the tarpaulin and spade on the ground, went quietly back to the borders, and stopped again, his heart sinking. Miss Fairlie’s kitchen light was on. He could see it like a spangle of tiny candles through the chinks in the shutters of the door and windows.

  Could she have heard . . . seen him in the graveyard, the moon glinting on the spade . . . ? A cold hand tightened on his heart. He moved quickly along the turf towards the kitchen, stopping to whistle softly, as he’d done the night before, and waiting then. He saw a long sliver of light grow down the centre of the shutters at the door, as one wing opened a little. Then she was there, peering out.

  “It’s me, Miss Fairlie. O’Leary.”

  She opened the shutter a little wider and slipped out, drawing it shut behind her, blinking at him, the moon on her long white wrapper and bare head as he came over to her.

  “Were you out in the garden just now, Miss Fairlie?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I thought I heard somebody. I was looking for Dunning.”

  It was the truth, a kind of horrible truth.

  “Go away now,” she said softly. It was hardly more than a whisper. “The chimney sweep . . . he hasn’t been here. But the child . . . the child’s asleep now. Go away. I’m not afraid. It’s just the spiders. The spiders worry me. But the child’s asleep. I must go now.”

  She stepped back inside and closed the shutter. He heard the bar come down and the door behind it close quickly, the bolt slip home.

  Dear God, he thought wretchedly, the saliva flooding his mouth. Then he stiffened, tensing abruptly, as he saw the floodlight leap on at the Ashton pier and then in an instant the floodlight on his own house, the one at the corner of the children’s wing that threw a white blanket over the field and garden. He dashed back down between the borders to the bridge, no dog guarding it now, and up across the circle. He saw Tip and Kitsy in pyjamas out in the floodlit field up towards Tip’s garden. “Molly A.! Molly A.!” they were calling, before Tip set off running across the field to the woods with Kitsy still calling, and Molly came around the back of the house in her dressing-gown, her face a white blur.

  She ran towards him. “She’s gone, Spig! Oh, the poor baby! Trying to get home! Hurry, go find her! Don’t frighten her. Anita called. Hurry! Here’s a flashlight—give it to Tip.”

  She thrust another flashlight into his hand. The floodlights behind the Ashtons’ went on. He caught up with Tip on the edge of the woods.

  “Molly A.! It’s Tip!” he was calling.

  Spig gave him the light. The dog was with him, dashing in and out, barking.

  “There’s places we hide, Daddy . . . I’ll look in them. Molly A.! It’s Tippy, Molly A.! Find her, Mädel—find Molly A.!”

  Spig ran on through the trail, the lights from both houses casting shadows heavy as blackened tree trunks across the path, out into the Ashtons’ drive. Yerby’s car was there, the light still blinking.

  “. . . the hell were you leaving the kid alone for?” he was demanding angrily.

  “I had to go meet my father.” Anita’s voice was like a strip of parachute silk being ripped apart. “She was asleep. Lucy was supposed to stay with her. But Arthur Dunning called—she had to take his car to him. She left a note. She hasn’t been gone but a few minutes. The time’s on the note—12.32.”

  She flashed around to Spig. “I thought the child was at your house. I thought Molly . . . till I called her.”

  “What room was she in?”

  They followed Anita into the house. It was the second door across from the dining-room, next to the room Spig had seen Lucy looking out of the morning of the blue glass splinter. The bed was torn up, the pillow still wet where a child had cried herself to sleep. Her clothes were there, except her shoes.

  “She took her toothbrush,” Anita said, her voice choking.

  The light was on, the window open. There was a chair she’d pulled up to climb on to unlatch the screen. Yerby and Spig went out through it and turned their lights on the grass. There were faint tracks in the dew, around towards the front of the house.

  “—We find her, she stays with you,” Yerby said curtly. “That note of Lucy’s. I don’t believe
a damned word of it. She wouldn’t have got mixed up and headed for these woods instead of yours, would she? The baby, I mean?”

  Spig had halted suddenly. “Wait a minute, Buck. I know. Get Anita out front. Where’s her father?”

  “He’s out looking on the woods road.”

  They went back inside. “Come out here, will you, Anita?” Yerby said. She followed him out. Spig went on to the kitchen phone.

  “Not yet,” he said to Molly’s taut questioning voice. “Where’s John Eden?”

  “Asleep. He didn’t wake up. I don’t want to——”

  “Take another look at him. Mädel was out—down at the bridge when I was at Eden. Call me back here.”

  He stood there. Anita’s father had joined the two outside, the benign confidence missing from his voice coming to Spig through the window.

  “. . . told you it was a mistake to take the child unless you have a staff of servants here. How far would Lucy have to go for Dunning?”

  Then he heard Yerby speaking monotonously. “All cars. That yellow midget convertible. Bring ’em in. Contact——”

  The phone rang. “He wasn’t asleep, Spig! He’s just pretending. His shoes are damp and there’s a grass stain on his pyjama legs. He had Tippy’s alarm clock under his pillow, set for eleven o’clock. He won’t say anything . . . but he knows, Spig!”

  “So do I. Don’t worry.”

  He put the phone down and went outside. “The kid’s okay,” he said curtly. “But it wasn’t any 12.32 that Lucy left here, Anita. It was before 11.15, anyway.” He hadn’t been at the graveyard long when he heard the sound in the borders. It wouldn’t have taken John Eden much time alone, but it would be a slow job with Molly A. “If I were you I’d worry about my own kid, right now. You can pay Nick off——”

  “That’s a lie. It wasn’t Lucy at the Three D. It was Art Dunning. He ran into the window. He gave me the money to pay Nick. It was after that that somebody got in and broke the slot machine . . .”