Once the car had been emptied, they didn’t need me, and I found a door to the garden that now occupied the outdoor enclosure of the fort. I walked into the mild evening with its scents of tropical growth, laced by a tangy hint of the sea. The area had been thickly planted, with brick walks and sandy paths winding between trees and shrubbery. Here and there a light burned, but the garden was mainly a place of shadows, patched by radiance from the moon.
I wandered idly. In the center of the garden stood a brick ruin that had once been the watchtower of the fort. As I walked under a brick arch and followed another path, I found this mysterious, haunted place more and more disquieting. Too many dark memories had stained this earth.
Now I had time to feel alone—too far away from the others. A faint rustling reached me, as though someone might have followed me out here but was staying back in the shadows. Probably I’d just heard some small nocturnal animal, or it might even be palmetto bugs—that polite term for outdoor cockroaches—rustling among the shrubbery. Yet my feeling of being followed persisted.
“Who’s there?” I called. There was no answer. I had reached the outer rim of a garden that had begun to seem wild and junglelike, and I turned back toward the lighted doorways of the fort.
At that moment a shadowy figure stepped from behind a tree, blocking my way. I gasped, and when he put a finger to his lips, I saw it was Eddie Burch.
“Ssh!” he said. “They watch me all the time. They don’t want me to talk. It’s not just Derek—it’s the women. They’re afraid of what I might know.”
He sounded a little wild, so that I wondered if his recent experience had left him unbalanced.
I spoke as soothingly as I could. “You can talk to me, Eddie. You can tell me what you saw that night on the Aurora.”
He stepped out of shadow into moonlight, his eyes shining in the white oval of his face.
“Not here,” he said. “They’re watching me.”
“They? You mean they’re all in this together?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like they are—protecting each other. Other times I don’t know. My head still feels sick a lot of the time.”
“No one’s watching us now, Eddie. They’re all inside. So tell me what you saw.”
He turned away, looking over his shoulder. “The trouble is I can’t guess why it happened. That’s what bothers me—it doesn’t make any sense. So maybe I’m crazy—maybe I didn’t see anything, after all.”
He suddenly ran off into the nighttime wilderness of the garden. The place had set its spell on him too, and I could only wait and hope to catch him in some more familiar atmosphere.
I was eager now to get back inside, and I hurried toward the nearest door. When I stepped into the room with the fireplace, I saw that the display had been completed, and no one was there.
The bank of orchids looked beautiful in its arrangement of single blooms and lovely sprays, the colors blending, yet individual, and all framed by the old bricks of the fireplace.
Another wide brick archway framed a section that was open to the sky. This could have been where the brickwork had been damaged by guns. A dome of latticework had replaced the ruined roof and let in air and shadowy moonlight. Here plants and pots were placed against the brick walls and rose in tiers, offering a bower of greenery. Someone had called this the “bird cage” room because of that overhead latticework.
I stayed for a little while, waiting for someone to come for me. The echoing rooms were silent now, and I wondered where everyone had gone.
As my uneasiness grew, I retraced my way through brick arches, to find each casemate empty until I reached the reception room near the door. There Alida sat on a small chair, her hands folded and her eyes closed. She heard my steps and looked at me without speaking.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Derek’s searching for Eddie,” Alida said. “He’s afraid Eddie’s trying to get away. Iris and Fern are out there looking too.”
“Derek? He’s here?”
“He came right after you went out. He wants to take Iris somewhere tonight, I guess. Eddie would have to disappear.”
“I saw him a little while ago. He seemed upset—almost irrational.”
Alida nodded. “He’s frightened. Derek scares him.”
“Maybe I can help find him,” I offered. “He can’t have gone far.”
She gave me a sour look, discounting my usefulness, but I went outside anyway. In the garden Derek was shouting Eddie’s name, but there was no answer. Out there in the dark, he could easily hide in a dozen places.
I followed a path, calling to him. “Eddie, we’re ready to go now. Where are you, Eddie?”
A faint sound reached me, and I whirled to catch it. The others were moving about on the far side of the garden space, but this sound had seemed closer. Had it been a groan?
I walked quickly toward a part of the enclosure that I hadn’t explored, and Alida came out to join me. There appeared to be a pavilion of some sort rising hugely against one wall, with massive concrete steps running up on either side.
“What’s that?” I asked her. “Where do the steps go?”
“The old powder magazines are over there. The steps were built during World War I as emplacements for coast artillery.”
I moved toward one concrete flight and heard the sound again. I ran toward it, but Alida was already ahead of me, dropping to her knees beside Eddie.
“He’s hurt,” she said. “Call the others!”
I shouted for Iris and Fern, and Derek heard me and came as well—all apparently from different parts of the garden. The moaning had stopped. As Marcus had done earlier, Derek picked up Eddie’s slight body and carried him into the fort. There was a terrible bleeding wound on one side of his head. Now it was Alida who moaned. When Derek went to telephone and had talked to the police, I called Marcus and was able to catch him. He promised to come at once.
Alida held Eddie in her arms, and he died quietly without regaining consciousness. I was near enough to watch her, and there seemed no pity, no grief, no shock of horror in her expression. She simply watched him sigh his last breath, then let him go and stood up. Fern was crying—probably with fright, since she’d never liked Eddie—and Iris stood apart. Apart from life, as well as death? When Derek touched her, she drew back a little.
Only a few minutes ago Eddie had been alive, and I felt stunned by the suddenness of what had happened. I even wondered if I might have pushed him to a farther point than he could endure. It seemed so unlikely that a man who was a diver, and presumably surefooted on a deck, should slip to his death off those wide concrete steps.
The police came quickly, and Marcus arrived a little after. He gave me a searching look, decided I was all right, and went directly to Iris, who still waited apart from the others while Derek talked to the police.
The questions in my mind wouldn’t be quiet. What could have so frightened Eddie that he had run away from me in the garden?
Since no one appeared to have been near Eddie at the time of his fall, there was no particular suspicion of anyone present. Why Eddie had been on those steps that led to nowhere was still an unanswered question. I might have thought that someone was pursuing him, but if that had been true, surely he’d have called out for help.
When the police had finished with us and Eddie’s body was taken away, Iris left with Derek, and Fern went home with Alida.
Marcus drove me, and when we were in the car, I poured out my doubts about what had happened. “Eddie was afraid,” I said. “Someone could have pushed him off those steps, but that’s only a hunch. I haven’t anything to go on.”
“I have the same feeling,” Marcus agreed. “Be careful, Laurel. Maybe it wasn’t right for you to stay in Key West, after all.”
We’d reached the house and were sitting in the car outside the gate. “It’s too late to have second thoughts,” I said quietly. “You were the one who wanted me to stay.”
“To help Iris and Fern recover and take up their lives. Not to get involved in what could be murder.”
That was the word I feared. Poppy had not been murdered. My father hadn’t been murdered. Now Eddie Burch, too, had suffered a fatal accident.
“If only he’d talked to me,” I said to Marcus. “He almost did—when I was with him in the fort garden. But he was either too scared, or too crafty, I think he knew who was with Cliff on the Aurora. Marcus, what are we to do? Iris will marry Derek, Fern will bury herself in orchids, and Alida in my father’s book. But what’s the future for any of them? Ever since Poppy died, everyone connected with Cliff has pulled away from any sort of social life. They don’t see the rest of Key West any more, though it’s a small town, and there must be a lot of social mixing. But no one comes to Cliff’s except you. What’s wrong—what is really wrong?”
“It’s like a blight they can’t escape,” Marcus said. “If Derek is pulled out of the center, where he’s planted himself, the pieces may fly into a healthier pattern.”
“How can that be managed?”
“I’m almost ready to go to the FBI. That paper Eddie lifted gives us something to go on. I wish we’d had it sooner. Maybe Eddie was holding out to sell what he knew to Derek.”
“Does Alida know?”
“If she does, she’s not talking.”
“What about Iris?”
Marcus looked so depressed that I wished I hadn’t spoken her name. I opened the car door, and at once he reached across to stop me. “Would it help if I stayed at the house tonight?”
“What point would there be in that?”
“Maybe I would feel easier if I stayed.”
“We’ll be all right. I don’t think anyone is after us.”
He let me go and drove away. Perhaps he was realizing at last that Iris had moved far beyond his reach or help.
Fern sat alone on the porch. The moment she saw me, she ran to the steps.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Laurel. I hate being alone tonight.”
“Where’s Alida?”
“She wanted to go home. I guess what happened to Eddie began to hit her, and she wanted to be by herself. Laurel, who do you think did it?”
So Fern, too, had her suspicions.
“Do you know why Iris was angry with Eddie?” I asked.
“Iris? Sure—Eddie had it in for Derek because of what happened a long time ago. That stiff shoulder he carries. But what difference does it make? We were all mad at Eddie some of the time. He was a creep. It’s Derek we need to watch. He went out in the garden looking for Eddie—maybe he found him.”
I had no answer for that. During the rest of the evening her restless movements took her from room to room. I stayed with her so she wouldn’t be alone, and she seemed glad of my presence. At least she avoided the orchid house, and I was grateful for that.
Later in the evening, I followed her upstairs to Cliff’s study, and there, sitting at his desk, she finally broke down and cried. She wanted no comforting from me, but only to have me there. I had cried like that too, and as I sat in the red leather chair watching her, I began to feel angry with my father. What had he really done for any of his daughters? His life had been his writing, the endless stories that stirred his imagination and poured out through his typewriter. But even as I thought these things, the feeling subsided. I couldn’t judge him. Perhaps I was angry only because anger helped the hurt a little.
“Cliff loved us so much,” Fern said. “He was a wonderful father.”
So that was the fantasy with which she comforted herself, and perhaps now it was the only way for her to go.
“I know how fond of you he was,” I agreed gently.
“You don’t know anything!” she cried in sudden reversal, and jumped up to run the length of the study and clatter down the stairs.
Sitting alone in the big room, with only the desk lamp burning and one light at Alida’s end, the piano silent, I felt forlorn and much too lonely myself. There seemed no protective fantasy that I could build. I’d found no way to approach either sister. Iris held herself away from any emotional contact, and Fern was never the same for two minutes. In a moment I’d be weeping with self-pity, and I didn’t want that.
I got up resolutely and turned on more lights. Then I went up the narrow stairs that led to the roof and out through the trapdoor. When I’d climbed out onto the platform, I found the night quiet, the wind holding its breath for once, even in this high place. Trees that usually whispered in the garden below were hushed, their branches still. The roofs of Key West shone under the moon like pale silver, with lines of streetlights marking the crisscross of the ways below. The town was far from asleep, however, and sounds of partying came from the direction of Mallory Square and the tougher end of Caroline Street. So many of the streets, I’d noticed, were named for women.
As I stood looking down, a car stopped before the gate to the house, and Derek helped Iris out. He put an arm around her, and she clung to him for a moment. “I’ll be back,” he said. She ran out of sight beneath the pitch of the roof, while Derek got back in his car and drove away.
I went quickly down the stairs and reached the second floor as Iris came up. She stared at me for a moment, as though trying to make up her mind.
Then she said, “There’s something I want to show you.”
I followed her to the front of the house. This was the first time I’d been invited into her room, and I found it different from what I might have expected—the opposite of Fern’s flowery retreat, and almost cell-like in its plain, unfussy state. It was a tailored room, neat and trim, but somehow impersonal, and with little of the clutter that grew around most humans. Perhaps the clutter was inside Iris, and this room was another effort to seem serene.
In spite of her father having been something of a collector on his travels, the only ornament in the room was a large black and white shell with spikes all over it. A few books stood between African bookends—perhaps a gift from Cliff who had traveled in Africa. Since I always read titles, I looked at these and found they were all by English writers of another day: H. G. Wells, The Forsyte Saga in all its volumes; a novel by Arnold Bennett, who was mostly forgotten these days; Hugh Walpole’s Rogue Herries, Priestley’s The Good Companions, and even The Scarlet Pimpernel.
“Those were my grandfather’s books,” Iris said. “My mother’s father. I still read them.”
She sat on the edge of the bed with its unpatterned cream-colored spread and motioned me to a small wing chair.
“I never knew my grandparents. What was your grandfather like?” I asked.
“He was a sea captain, and he only came home now and then. The rest of the family never approved of him. It used to be a close family, but they’re all gone now. He read a lot on the voyages he made in the twenties and thirties—novels like those. For some reason, he never liked Conrad. Perhaps the sea he knew was different. I used to sit on his lap and listen to his stories whenever he came home—such magic stories. He died before Fern was old enough to remember him.”
“What about your grandmother?”
“She was supposed to be a great beauty in her day—magnolia skin and all that. I think she wanted to go on the stage, but of course this was frowned on. She was always busy with charities and social affairs, as I remember. Amateur theatricals. I don’t think she liked children a lot. Everyone loved Poppy—except her mother. Cliff was the outsider who came in and turned into a magnet that attracted everyone. My grandmother didn’t approve of him at first because he didn’t have a regular job. She’d have liked Poppy to marry someone she thought important. It didn’t matter that Poppy made the right choice for herself.”
“Did she?” I asked softly.
“Of course!” There seemed an unexpectedly sharp note in Iris’s voice, and her manner became less dreamy, more focused. “Don’t believe any stories you hear about Poppy—she was a happy wife.”
The words were so emphatic that I wondered if Iris might be tryin
g to convince herself first of all.
“What do you think about what happened to Eddie Burch tonight?” I asked.
Her beautiful eyes widened, and I could sense the tensing that gripped her. “What do you mean? What could I possibly think?”
“Do you believe it was an accident?”
“Of course it was an accident! What else? Maybe he’d been drinking.” Her control had slipped for a moment, but she recovered quickly. “No one was near him. Derek was never far removed from me, and neither was Fern. So who else was there, except of course for Alida and you. Alida would be a tigress if someone she loved was threatened, but that wouldn’t be by Eddie. So where were you?”
I answered her quietly. “I waited inside for a while, because I didn’t know where you’d all gone. Then I found Alida in the room where we first came in.”
“So don’t go fantasizing like Fern!” she said sharply.
I let that go. “What do you want to show me?”
She seemed to remember why I was here and went to pull open the top drawer of a bureau. From it she took a steel tool about five inches long. It was of smooth, rounded metal, except for its wedge-shaped tip that made it a chisel. I took the piece from her and looked at it blankly.
“What is this supposed to be?”
“Yesterday Alida found it in her desk upstairs, and she brought it to me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It was always kept in the toolbox in the orchid house. Alida says this is the metal wedge that was used to jam the door of the orchid house, so Poppy couldn’t get out. That’s what she says.”
I turned the cold metal about in my fingers. “Alida told me that she found the door jammed and removed the wedge. Cliff wanted to avoid unnecessary questions by the police, so he warned her not to talk about it. Alida also told me that the wedge disappeared a few days later.”
“So now it’s come back? Why?”
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