Murder Comes to Eden

by Zenith Brown

  As if there were some kind of design in the universe, functioning to save or to destroy, to prove the truth or to confound the lie, the radio in the sheriff’s car started its hollow crackle as they heard the metallic voice out of the crash of static droning its report.

  “Joe Anders, Yerby. Foggy Bottom. Chasing the yellow midget. Foggy Bottom road west to Strip. We’re going eighty. Light in back room My Hideaway. Caught ’em prying back off a slot——”

  There was a crash of static, and another crash. The whine of tyres, the crash still reverberating, a confusion of voices scrambling the short wave, and Anders, panting, coming clear again.

  “They were thrown out before they hit, Buck. I don’t know whether they’re alive or dead. Get the ambulance quick . . .”

  Anita stood motionless, as if in some way she had herself died, her face a terrible mask, raddled, great circles spreading under her eyes like india ink spreading in the snow. She swayed a little, holding to the car window.

  “They’ll . . . take them to the hospital, won’t they? Come, Father . . .”

  “Do you want me to drive you over, Anita?” O’Leary asked.

  “Oh! Why should you, after all I’ve . . . I’ve done to you?” Her eyes suddenly flooded with tears. As suddenly, she moved towards him, her arms around him, her blonde head pressed an instant against him. “Oh, forgive me, Spig—I’ve been a beast!”

  “I’ll take them in.” Yerby pushed the seat forward. “You get in with her,” he said to her father, whose whole handsome façade had suddenly crumpled. Then he reached in the compartment, took out a gun and handed it to Spig. “Take a look in the studio. I think there’s somebody up there. I’ll be back—either here or your place.”

  Spig stood in the lighted drive looking at the gun in his hand, then at the blinking red light disappearing out the Ashtons’ road. He kept his eyes on the studio door and called Tip, his voice echoing sharply back to him. In a moment he heard him and Mädel scrambling out of the woods. Tip’s pyjamas were ripped and his face and legs torn with thorns.

  “John Eden took her over to Eden, Tip.”

  “Oh . . .” Tip’s eyes widened. “I’d better go see about it.”

  Spig nodded. “And look. Our post box——”

  “I know it,” Tip said. “I got worried if Mother’s still a friend of his. I moved them to a safer place. Come on, Mädel.”

  If individual initiative in the young is desirable, the young O’Learys were doing all right. The ironic glint in their father’s eyes faded as he went over to the apartment door, switched on the light and went upstairs. He knocked and waited an instant before he opened the door and reached around to switch on the light there. The slashed portrait of Molly was gone, the only change in the room, except for the quality of the silence. Some difference in it made him take Yerby’s gun out of his pocket and slip the safety catch. Across the room he could see the edge of the flush workroom door not quite flush. He went silently to one side of it and kicked it sharply open.

  “Come in, damn you. I’m waiting for you.”

  O’Leary stood motionless a bare instant. “Hold it,” he said. He went on in. “What the hell . . . ?”

  “I thought you were Dunning.”

  Nat Twohey’s voice was as steady as the barrel of the gun in his hand and his eyes as steely.

  Spig looked past him to the table by the wall. On it was a straight-edged razor and a pile of canvas ribbons. Under the table was a heap of empty stretchers.

  “The gallery of rural types,” Nat said. “And what was left of a portrait of Molly.”

  Spig glanced at the window. “How’d you get in here?”

  “Lucy was kind enough to give me the key. She said I’d like to see the other portrait of Eloise Dunning was painting. The swine . . . not fit for my father to spit on, and raking up a dead man’s past. Now I’d like you to get out. I’m staying till he comes.”

  “You’re crazy, Nat,” Spig said. “You’ve lost your mind.”

  “I’ll appreciate that testimony later.” The flicker in Nat Twohey’s eyes was very like his father. He nodded towards the easel under the skylight. “I left that . . . for him to explain.”

  Spig slipped the safety catch back and put the gun in his pocket, moving around in front of the easel. It was a long moment before he heard Nat’s voice through the pounding of the blood in his ears, as he looked down at the paper pinned on the drawing board, trying to shake off the slow paralysis creeping down his legs and the chill of the grave along his spine.

  “What is that, Spig?”

  He heard himself, factually casual. “It looks like a study of some kind.” It was several pencil sketches of a skeletal hand, a draughtsman’s study. “Interested in anatomy, I guess. But I don’t think he’ll need it any more.”

  He ripped the sheet off the board, took it over to the fireplace and held a match to it.

  “I’m going home,” he said. “I’d advise you to do the same. Counsellor.”

  “I’m staying. And before you go . . . Miss Fairlie’s settled the problem of the Ashton place.”

  “She’s not buying the Ashtons’——”

  “No. She’s keeping them from selling it for commercial use. There’s a State law that prohibits a commercial entrance within five hundred yards of a State-owned bridge. That’s why Ashton had to have the use of your road in from the highway to your gate, and get you to give him the right-of-way through your woods, if he wanted to sell to the gamblers. But your road from the highway to your gate is on Miss Fairlie’s property. She’s closing it and refusing them permission to use her lane. They’re bottled up. They can’t sell to any commercial outfit. It’ll be a jolt to Anita when she finds it out.”

  “She’s had all the jolts she can take right now, Nat.”

  Somehow the whole thing had lost its importance when he thought about the hands . . . on the drawing-board, in the shallow grave. And his need to know what Molly had seen.

  She was coming down from John Eden’s room when he got home.

  “Oh, the poor lamb, Spig! He told me . . .”

  She caught her breath, pale again. He shook his head quickly.

  “It’s something else, Molly.” He drew her into the old cottage and closed the door. “You saw something this morning. What was it? It’s not Dunning in the grave . . . if that’s what you thought.”

  “Oh . . .” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I . . . was afraid it was. David was . . . dragging something to the graves. It was after the shots. Tip’s rifle was gone. I was afraid to tell you. Then when you and Buck were going over I was terrified, so when you were in here I ran over. David said Tip loaned him the rifle and he’d seen Dunning up at the gate and fired, just to frighten him. But . . . he’d been digging—and he’d do anything for Tip. You’re sure nothing’s happened to Art Dunning?”

  “I’m sure he’s not in the grave.”

  The phone rang. He went quickly to the desk. The line was blank at first. Then he heard a click. “Hallo.”

  “Daddy! It’s Miss Fairlie . . . come quick! I’ve called the doctor. The letters, Daddy—they’re under my mattress. Molly A.’s asleep. Hurry, Daddy!”

  He turned back on his way to the door. “Yerby’s coming. Wait for him, tell him to come to Eden. Get the dog in with the kids. Lock the doors and come with him. Something’s happened to Miss Fairlie. Molly A.’s all right.”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  HE TOOK the children’s stairs in two leaps and tore up the mattress on Tip’s bed. Flattened under it was his old army knapsack, Tip’s now. He grabbed it and dashed down and outside, pounded across the bridge and up between the borders, seeing the first lights he’d ever seen at Eden except in the kitchen, light on the porch spattering through the chinks of the downstairs shutters, the front door open.

  “Here, Daddy!”

  Tip was calling from the parlour to the left. A single drop bulb in the centre of the chandelier was spraying the lovely room with rainbow drops of crystal
light. There was a door open beside the fireplace across the room, beyond it dust-covered steps leading down into the closed hyphen, a single-room brick floored passage that connected the main house with the vine-sealed wing that balanced the kitchen wing on the other side. It was pitch-black down there except for the ball of Tip’s flashlight. Miss Fairlie was lying at the bottom.

  “Oh, Daddy, she can’t be dead! She can’t! she can’t!”

  Tip’s face looking up at him tore his heart. He went quickly down and knelt in the dust, his hand to her pulse.

  “She’s alive.” He lifted her up, a tiny fragile thing, and carried her up the steps. “Where does she sleep, do you know?”

  “In there.” Tip pointed across the hall. Spig carried her over. There was a four-poster bed there, at its foot a child’s trundle bed, with a real child really asleep in it, Molly A.’s dark curls on the pillow, a rag doll in her arms. He laid Miss Fairlie gently down on the huge bed. The bottom of her white wrapper was black. She did not speak except for the vague smile in her blue eyes for an instant before she closed them.

  “There’s a car, maybe it’s the doctor . . .”

  Tip ran out and down the steps to open the picket gate. Spig followed as the car came around the boxwood and Yerby and Molly came running up through the garden.

  “—In here.”

  He went back with Doctor Parker. “She’d fallen. Tip found her.” He turned away as Molly came quietly in, bending quickly down to touch the sleeping child’s flushed cheek with her lips before she went on around the bed.

  “It looks like a stroke. We’d better get her to the hospital.”

  Spig saw Miss Fairlie’s eyes open in agony to his.

  “No. We’ll keep her here. Molly was a nurse’s aide, just tell her what to do.”

  He went out into the hall again. Yerby and Tip were talking on the porch.

  “Come on, Buck. Have you got a light? You stand by, Tip.”

  He took his own flashlight out and closed the parlour door behind them. The knapsack was where he’d dropped it by the open door down into the hyphen.

  “Tip said he didn’t have a chance to tell you,” Yerby said. “He got over here and she told him to stay with the kid while she went some place . . . the noise might frighten her if she woke up and heard the hammering. Then she went down here.” He played his flashlight down the steps and around the brick floor of the hypen. “He heard her fall then.”

  The dust on the bricks was heavy as the velvet pile of a rug, thick with mould. There were tracks across to the open door into the wing that balanced the kitchen. Yerby’s light rested on Miss Fairlie’s footprints and the blurred trail of her wrapper. Then it moved to a second line of prints, of a work shoe, leading to the door, coming back. The ball of the flashlight followed them methodically.

  “Easy enough to trace her—and those. You better tell me what’s on your mind, first.”

  “Just a guess. We’d better look.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  They went down the four steps, across the summer mould and the seeping dust of forty years, the cobwebs like black stalactites hanging from the ceiling, crêpe festooned along the cornices and over the shuttered and barred windows, already sealed tight with the ivy and creeper through which no light passed and no air. By the open door through the thick masonry walls into the sealed wing a corroded iron bar that had been taken down from it leaned against the wall, flakes of rust on the floor.

  “Watch out for spiders,” Yerby said. “You get the black widows in closed-up holes like this.”

  It wasn’t the dust and the turgid air catching Spig’s throat. The spiders. The black widow spiders were all she was afraid of.

  He followed Yerby through the door into a single large room, their lights on the floor. The tracks of the work shoes went to a great fourposter bed in the corner, and back to where they were standing in the doorway. Miss Fairlie’s tracks went to the hearth of the fireplace, and from there to the bed, and to the door again. But there were other tracks of small ribbed rubber-soled shoes, criss-crossed over the room, between the fireplace, the bed, the doorway, to the windows, where the inside shutters had been opened and the panes smashed to let air seep through the matted ivy and creeper, pale green shoots growing through the dilapidated louvres of the outside shutters still barred, held intact by the thick growth of the vines. From the outside there’d be no sign that the sealed room had been disturbed or entered.

  “He needed air,” Spig said evenly.

  “Who?”

  “The chimney sweep.”

  The white ball of his light followed the criss-crossed rubber-soled tracks into the corner of the room. A chair had been pulled up to serve as a makeshift easel, a canvas propped on it, another chair drawn up for the Tattoo Artist to sit on. On the table beside it was a box of oil paints, a box of tacks, a hammer and an electric lantern focused on the fourposter bed, as the chairs in the corner were angled to face it. The far side of the bed, the head and the foot, were a screen of spider webs, a fantastic net woven around it, completely enclosing it, torn open where it had covered the near side, as if the sleeper waking had thrust the curtain of them aside as he rose and before he drew back in its place the faded patchwork quilt that covered the bed. Lying on the hearth was a broom, the straw black with soot and webs.

  The witch with the broom.

  Yerby’s flashlight rested on Miss Fairlie’s tracks again, following them from the hearth to the bed, on to the door. He brought it back, raising it to the great overmantel with its rack of rusted guns, and brought it down until the white beam filled the fire chamber, littered with dead leaves, soot, rubble and the scaly rust of the damper-plate that had held them before it was broken through. On top of all of it was one blackened-soot brick, or part of a brick, the mark of a ribbed rubber sole on it. It had been broken off, the end a fresh rosy-mauve, not sooted.

  “That old ivy outside’s dead easy to climb,” Yerby said.

  The two of them went towards the fireplace then, moved by one impulse, their lights on the fire chamber, stooped down, the lights raising, jerking suddenly and coming to rest, as they saw what Miss Fairlie had seen. In the white glare the blackened tennis shoes, one scarred red from the broken brick, the sooted denim legs, flesh between sock and trouser cyanosed blue from asphyxiation, hung limp and motionless, the body still imprisoned in the flue. Yerby thrust his light into Spig’s hand. He knelt down, on the hearth, moved in, grasped the legs and pulled. He pulled again, lifting his whole weight, and jolted back as the body gave and came down, soot and brick pouring after it. They pulled Dunning out on to the floor, looking down at the bearded face, the black eyes glazed and staring, lips swollen and blue-black. The rope, knotted under his arms, coiled wire-tight around his wrists, had brought down at the other end a piece of iron. Yerby reached in the fire chamber and picked it out of the soot and leaves. It was the scroll-shaped metal, pin snapped off, driven into the chimney to hold the brick.

  He looked down at the rope. “That didn’t give when the brick snapped off and he fell,” he said somberly. “It caught on this iron. He was holding it with both hands over his head. Slipped a noose round his wrists. My God, what a way to die.”

  “He knew Miss Fairlie was alone here at night,” O’Leary said evenly. “He knew she could hear him. God knows how long he’d been coming, getting that stuff down the chimney, hammering his stretcher together and the canvas on it . . . It didn’t matter to him. He was getting another painting for his gallery of rural America . . . a companion piece to the graveyard scene he was starting last night. He knew she was helpless, in more ways then one. There’s the evidence he had for Mrs. Twohey and her friends.”

  He forced himself to cross the room and turn his light on the canvas propped on the chair, knowing what it was he was going to see, knowing now why Dunning was laughing when he sat down to paint his picture of Ammon Fairlie’s grave without a stone, and why he’d said he wasn’t hurting a soul . . . not a soul. Old
David’s work-shoe tracks in the dust to the now empty bed, the torn curtain of spider webs, the fresh-dug grave, the burden Molly had seen the old man dragging, the luminous white bones Spig had uncovered, thinking it was Dunning he’d find in the unmarked grave, the sketch of the skeletal hand on the drawing board in Dunning’s studio—all of it added up. Ammon Fairlie’s grave was unmarked because it was an empty grave—not a soul in it for Dunning to hurt, or a body either, not until old David had dug it that day and placed Ammon Fairlie’s bones there under the white myrtle for their final rest.

  He turned his light on the painted canvas and stood there, Yerby beside him, the silence growing intense, until he could hear his heart beating cold against his ribs. It was a painting of the bed, the front curtain of the spider webs not torn, finely, intricately woven, with a brush stroke so delicate it was itself a web. Behind it, the patchwork quilt was spread out, covering the sleeper, long dead, the bare skull resting on a pillow laced black with dust and cobwebs, the arms outside the quilt, sleeves of a tattered coat flat, the skeletal hands folded, not carefully painted but blocked in to show where they had rested. That much Spig had known he would see. What he had not known was that Ammon Fairlie had not died of a heart attack. In the centre of the painted forehead a spider sat in a splintered bullet hole squarely between the hollow sockets. Echoing in Spig’s ears was Dunning’s laughter, its devilish malice and evil delight. I’ll crucify Miss Crazy Fairlie.

  Yerby’s voice, deliberately matter-of-fact, broke through the silence as he reached down and switched on Dunning’s lantern, its broad white beam on the empty bed.

  “Am I crazy, or was he? I guess you call it creative imagination. If that’s what he thought he saw, he ought to have come to me.”

  He put his flashlight on the table, reached out to the painting, calmly ripped the canvas off the wood, rolled it up and handed it to Spig.

  “Let’s go. Tip says you’ve got the letter. I’ll get Parker in here.”

  The rip of the canvas from the wood had sounded to Spig as Anita’s voice had sounded. “Those kids, Buck . . . at the hospital?”