“No others?” she said, and he raised his eyebrows. “I mean,” she said, “when you were growing up here. Farmers? People who worked on farms and—that sort of thing?”
“Oh,” he said. “People like that—yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking of them. There was even a place everybody called ‘shack-town.’ A rural slum, they would call it now, I suppose. I was thinking of the people we knew.”
“Of course,” she said, but now with only politeness in her voice. Then, “Are we swimming?”
Paul Craig swam very well. Like most people, he enjoyed doing what he did well. Margo Craig, in the eleven months of her life with Paul had noticed that, as she had noticed a good many things.
She was a small, quick girl; she had the deeply red hair of all the Camerons—hair so deeply, darkly red that a few women, not of generous nature, looked on it with skepticism, feeling that if valid it was outrageously unfair. She wore white shorts and a white shirt which had, for no special reason, a small green dragon embroidered above the breast pocket. She watched through an open window of the house on Hayride Lane and said, “He’s even later than—there he is now,” and said it to her cousin, and went out of the house and down the drive to get the mail.
Caroline Wilkins, who had been washing up after the late Saturday lunch, dried her hands and went to the door and watched her cousin go quickly, with something like exuberance, down the drive. As hopeful, of course (Caroline thought) of a letter from that Alan of hers as I of one from that Brady of mine. And then, somewhat irrelevantly, Damn the Navy anyway.
But Caroline Wilkins did not, of course, mean really to damn the Navy. One’s family may well prove irritating, but one does not really damn one’s family. Three years ago—no, going on four years ago—Caroline had married the Navy, in the person of Lieutenant Commander (then Lieutenant) Brady Wilkins. So now she was a Navy wife. But before that, and always—except for three months not to be counted, never to be remembered—she had been a Navy daughter—daughter of Vice Admiral Jonathan Bennett, USN (Ret.). She had been in China when she was four, and in Singapore when she was six, and in France from the time she was ten until she was twelve. There was always, for Navy families, much tentative perching on new branches. As, of course, now.
This particular perch was, to be sure, even more tentative than most. When Lieutenant Commander Brady Wilkins, USN (Annapolis, 1945; special courses at M.I.T., 1947–1948) had been transferred from Norfolk to the headquarters of Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier, 90 Church Street, New York City, a rented house in Northern Westchester had seemed a quite reasonable perch. She had assumed—they had both assumed—that for a couple of years (one planned no further ahead than that) Lieutenant Commander Wilkins would live a life reasonably like that of any other man who worked in a New York office and lived outside it. He might be expected to catch a train in and, most nights—when he did not have “the duty”—a train out.
It had not worked out that way; they should both have guessed it would not. Wilkins’s assignment to Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier, turned out—as they might have expected—to be more subterfuge than fact; it was a place to hang up his pay account, his health record. It was a place at which the Bureau of Naval Personnel could, officially, point a finger and say, “There he is.” But there he seldom was. He was in Alaska, in Florida, in, as likely as not, London. That was what two intensive years at M.I.T. had done to Lieutenant Commander Wilkins—made him an always unpredictable migrant, veiled by security, most mysteriously employed.
And, the summer before, after they had rented a white house on Hayride Lane and moved into it, this had led Caroline to feel herself almost as much Navy widow as Navy wife. “For the next while,” Brady told her one evening, on the terrace—“for the next quite a while, I’ll be here and there. If you’re going to stay here, you’d better get somebody to stay with you. Dorcas?”
And Dorcas—Cousin Dorcas, Dorcas Cameron, daughter of Caroline’s Aunt Dorcas Cameron—it had turned out to be; turned out, on the whole, most satisfactorily to be. Four years younger, which had seemed a span a dozen years ago, and seemed a snap of the fingers now; destined, it now appeared, to rejoin the Navy community from which her mother had seceded—if the Navy would let Lieutenant Alan Kelley light long enough; small and quick and gay, with burnished hair; by her own, slightly rueful, statement “cute.” “You’re beautiful,” Dorcas had said when they were discussing such matters. “I’m—cute.” But that was not, Caroline thought now, looking down the driveway toward Hayride Lane, fair to Dorcas. The term diminished Dorcas.
Dorcas, at the mailbox, looked toward the house, and held her right arm up and waggled something white in her right hand. So he had; at any rate, one of them had. Dorcas came up the driveway from Hayride Lane with a considerable collection of mail under her arm, and something slipped out of the collection and lay, small and white, on the gravel. “Hey!” Caroline called from the door, and pointed, and Dorcas stopped and said, “Oh,” and went back for the something white.
She came on—quick; there was commonly something of a trot even in Dorcas’s less hurried movements—and dumped mail on a coffee table in the living room. She said, “Here it is,” and held an envelope out and said, in the same breath, “Mine didn’t, the bum,” and shuffled through the rest of the mail, leaving Caroline to hers. Most of it was what they dismissed as “trash-can stuff.” Part of it was the weekend edition of the North Wellwood Advertiser and part the (rather fragile) Saturday edition of the New York Herald Tribune.
There was also—and it was that which had slipped away and been reclaimed—a small envelope; an invitation envelope. Its inadequate surface was crowded with address:
Cdr. and Mrs. Brady Wilkins,
Miss Dorcas Cameron,
RFD 1,
North Wellwood, New York.
“Glory be to God that there are no more of us,” Dorcas sang—soundlessly—to herself and opened the little envelope. Then she said, “Why, the old dear,” this time audibly, but when she looked at her cousin she saw that Caroline had something more important to listen to. So she waited until Caroline had finished listening to the far away (she supposed; he usually was) voice of Lieutenant Commander Brady Wilkins, assigned to an operation apparently too secret to have a name; now—she had allowed herself to look at the postmark—in San Diego, but probably by now, by this Saturday afternoon, somewhere else.
Caroline finished her husband’s letter, but held it, still, in both hands in her lap. She’s far away, Dorcas thought—so far away. Do I look like that when I read a letter Alan has written, listen to Alan’s voice? Not quite like that, of course. With us it is—it’s tomorrow, or the day after. And with them it’s now—complete.
Caroline looked at her.
“How’s your sailor?” Dorcas said. “Home from the sea?”
She was very matter of fact, very casual.
“Seems to be fine,” Caroline said. “Might even—” She was matter of fact, too. But her voice, for all that, wavered a little. “Might even honor us,” she said. “Next weekend, even. If something he can’t mention happens to something he can’t write about at a place which shall be forever nameless.”
Then she raised eyebrows, enquiring.
“Not a line,” Dorcas said. “Not an ever-loving line. Or any other kind. I—”
“Well,” Caroline said, “after all, it’s only been three days. And if it is sea duty it’ll probably be ‘proceed and report,’ maybe even with ‘to count as leave’ thrown in.” Caroline, twenty-six, three years married, looked at her cousin—twenty-two, marriage arranged for whenever the United States Navy decided, in its wisdom, it could spare Lieutenant Alan Kelley long enough. How the child’s eyes shine at that, “to count as leave,” Caroline thought, and said, “The rest for the ash can?”
“Pretty much—” Dorcas said, and then said, “No. The sweet old thing’s giving a party,” and held out the invitation from the sweet old thing—an appellation which would have pleased Walter Brinkle
y, Ph.D. had he known of it.
“Cocktails, five to eight,” Caroline read, and, “June twenty-eighth” and “RSVP.”
“The lamb,” Caroline said.
They had known the sweet old thing for less than a year; for most of the time they had shared the house on Hayride Lane half a mile or so north of the “old Brinkley place”; a house just (for Dorcas) within commuting distance of an editorial assistant’s desk in the city; a house where Navy wives (present and to come) could hold each other’s hands against emptiness. (And keep a shotgun handy to frighten away marauders, who had not appeared.)
Professor Brinkley had waved at them, quite as if he had known them for some time, the previous autumn—a glowing yellow day in autumn—as he was fishing mail from his rural box and they were driving past in an open car. After that, they had asked him to tea—which had seemed a suitable beverage for a white-haired, retired professor—and Walter Brinkley had drunk it without protest. But during the Christmas holidays—when it is especially dreary to be alone; Brady Wilkins had been, mysteriously as always, in Alaska—“the sweet old thing,” known alternatively as “the lamb,” had invited them down, also for “tea.” He had, however, said, “If you really like the stuff,” after which matters proceeded in more conventional paths.
“Neighbors?” Dorcas said, and Caroline raised slim shoulders under the fleece of a summer sweater.
“Of course,” she said, “it could be more professors.”
“From the sample,” Dorcas said, “professors seem very nice. Woolly.”
At the barracks of Troop K, Hawthorne, New York, invitation envelopes are infrequent, the mail consisting of what are known as “squeals,” which are often rambling and seldom short, and official communications which seldom have to do with the more cheerful aspects of everyday life—such as, for example, cocktail parties. But the small envelope addressed to “Captain M. L. Heimrich, BCI, State Police Barracks, Hawthorne, N. Y.” did, dutifully find its way into the proper “In” basket, where it was quickly buried under bulkier papers. Captain Heimrich is, however, a man prone to get to the bottom of things, even of “In” baskets, and in due time he found that he was invited to have cocktails with one Walter Brinkley, in Wellwood.
This did not, immediately, convey anything to Heimrich, who closed his eyes better to consider. There was a “Brinkley”—something very like Brinkley, at any rate—who had been sent up for aggravated assault. It seemed improbable that he would request the pleasure of Captain Heimrich’s presence at any function which did not involve blackjacks. There was a “Brinkley”—no, that was more like Barkly—who thought he had invented a new method to kill a wife, and found himself mistaken. Not this Brinkley, obviously. This Brinkley—
Heimrich was shaking his head when he remembered. A round engaging man, pink of face, white of hair and, as recalled, worried of expression. A man who had been meticulous; who had spoken of the indeterminate sound of a vowel and so, somewhat abruptly, brought a brief investigation to an acceptable end. Professor Walter Brinkley. That was the man.
It is always difficult for a detective, and especially one concerned primarily with homicide, to “RSVP” with any confidence. People kill other people at cocktail hour, as at other times; on Saturdays as on other days.
On the other hand—although why he thought of it in that way was not entirely clear—a gray-eyed young woman named Susan Faye would, on the Saturday in question, be driving a grave-eyed boy named Michael to summer camp. (There would be a mournful big dog in the car.) She, therefore, would not be available. So—if murderers would refrain from murdering, naturally—it might be pleasant to see Professor Brinkley again, with nothing hanging on vowels, determinate or indeterminate.
II
It was surprising, Walter Brinkley thought at four-thirty on the afternoon of Saturday, June twenty-eighth, how one guest led to another. It had been different in the old days; it had been, “They’ll start coming in about an hour, dear, so don’t you think—” in the gentlest, the dearest remembered, of voices. It had been, “You will remember to be especially nice to poor dear Thelma, won’t you, Walter?” But then too there had, usually, been more people than he would have expected, and now, more clearly than before, he understood why. It was, specifically, that one guest did lead to another.
The Sands, of course. And the Farnleys. And Jerry Hopkins—the cantankerous old galoot. But if the Sands, then, if one was not to be rude, the Abernathys, who went around so much with the Sands. And if the Abernathys, the Thayers, also, since he knew the Thayers equally well, and had known them for as long a time. And dear old Mrs. Belsen—who was really a person one invited to tea, instead of to cocktails—would be surprised, and in her gentle way might even be hurt, if other old-timers, like the Farnleys, for example, were invited and she was not. Mrs. Belsen, of course, led inevitably to the Misses Monroe, listed in telephone directory as “Monroe, Misses, the,” a form which had always delighted Walter Brinkley. And since the party was, after all, for young Craig (How boyhood habits of thought do linger!) it would be unpardonable to omit the Knights, although Walter did not, himself, much care for Jasper Knight. (There had been the matter, while it was Jasper’s turn, in the methodical revolution of Republican wheels, to be town supervisor, of the exemption from two-acre zoning of a considerable area of land, almost all of which had happened to be the property of Jasper Knight.) I must, Walter Brinkley thought, a little worriedly, try not to be prejudiced against Republicans.
Brinkley adjusted his blue bow tie, knowing that long before the party was over it would have ceased to pursue the even tenor of its ways, and that he would not remember to do anything about it, and went downstairs to ask about the ice.
Harry Washington wore a white coat which shone. He said, “Now jes rest yuhself, professor,” and that the ice—a big bag of the ice—was in the freezer. He said, also, that Ellen White, available since she did not work on Saturdays for the Craigs, would be there in plenty of time to pass the canapés, and that the inn had sent the canapés, and that Ben had been instructed about parking the cars, and that the bar was all set up and that there would be plenty of liquor, of all kinds, to go around—and around and around and around, if the younger set, the “ranch-house set,” felt like revolving.
“I make it forty-three,” Walter Brinkley said. “Will there be room enough, Harry?”
“’Ceptin around the bah,” Harry said. “Now you jes rest yuhself, professor. Only it’s forty-five if Mister and Miz Sands bring their weekend guests, like they said maybe.”
Walter Brinkley went out onto the terrace, and sat in a shady place, and was very glad that the afternoon was fine, because that meant that the party could, if it chose, spill over onto the terrace. It meant also, which is always important at country parties, that cars, which would necessarily be parked off the driveway, on the lawn, would not be mired there. Sometimes guests kept coming back for days, often with tow trucks, and what the turf looked like afterward—
I, Walter Brinkley thought, am getting so that I worry about not having to worry about things. A doddering old man—too old for this sort of thing. A fussy old man, anticipating dire consequences from the most innocent of things. What, really, could go wrong at a small party—and with Harry to see to things—on a pleasant afternoon in early summer? Jes rest yuhself, professor. And what part of the Deep South did Harry fancy his assumed, his so carefully assumed, accent came from? Professor Brinkley ran it over in his mind. Georgia? Not quite Georgia. Tennessee, then? Perhaps a little nearer Tennessee. It would be interesting to know where Harry’s parents had grown up since it must have been from them Harry mimicked the soft accents he used—when he remembered to—for, surely, his own amusement. Or, gently to ridicule—without hatred, conceivably to avoid hatred—the paler skinned ones he, and all his color, had cause to hate?
A car—the most ancient of Rolls-Royces, with the most ancient of men driving it—crept cautiously off Hayride Lane, into the driveway. That would be the Misses
Monroe. They would be surprised, fluttered, to be first. They had so been fluttered since he could remember, Walter Brinkley thought, and crinkled inside, and walked across the terrace, toward the drive, to greet his guests.
Lieutenant Commander Brady Wilkins had been in San Diego and then he had been in Texas—what was the Navy doing in Texas?—and then in Florida, at Key West, where it might be that the Navy was doing a variety of things. And now he was either in New York, probably at 90 Church Street, or—on his way to North Wellwood. They had been on the terrace, finishing lunch, when the telephone rang inside and, very quickly, Caroline said, “I’ll take it,” and spoke with a kind of excitement in her voice. She went through the open french doors; Dorcas could hear her steps—so much quicker than usual; it was almost as if she were running—on the wide boards of the living room floor. And, tensed too, listening, Dorcas found that she was holding her breath—holding her breath for Caroline, hoping for Caroline.
“Hello,” she heard Caroline say, and the ordinary word seemed somehow to tremble. But then Caroline said, “Oh. Darling,” and Dorcas got out of the terrace chair and walked off on the lawn until she had walked away from her cousin’s voice—from the eagerness, the happiness in a voice which belonged to only two and was nothing to be spied upon. I’m so glad, Dorcas Cameron thought; so glad for her.
She did not return quickly to the terrace; did not return at all, indeed, until Caroline stood on the terrace, in the sun, with the sun on her honey-colored hair, and looked toward her across the sweep of green and then moved her head in a gesture which beckoned. Dorcas went back, then, and went quickly, and did not need to be told, because her cousin’s face was lighted with it, and was told anyway.
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