Murder Comes First

by Frances

  “—not that we know of,” Aunt Thelma said. “Of course, one can’t help—”

  “—such a beautiful, strange story,” Aunt Lucinda said. “He kills this senator. So full of meaning—”

  “—you must have made them yourself,” Aunt Pennina said. “I know in Cleveland we can’t buy—”

  “Jerry,” Pam said. “Jerry, dear.” Jerry woke up to realize he had been asleep. “He works so hard,” Pam said. “Don’t you, darling? All last night.”

  Jerry looked at her in surprise.

  “The manuscript, dear,” Pam told him. “It must have been three when you—”

  “Oh yes,” Jerry said. “Of course. The manuscript.”

  It must, Aunt Lucinda told him, be wonderful to be a publisher.

  “Well,” Jerry said, “yes and—”

  “So many books,” Aunt Lucinda said, her face bright at the thought.

  There was, Jerry agreed, always that.

  “In any event,” Aunt Thelma said, “we must go. Pennina. Lucinda.”

  The aunts would not have any more iced-tea. Only Aunt Pennina would have another cookie. In the cab going toward the Hotel Welby, Pam suggested dinner later. Aunt Pennina nodded contentedly; Aunt Lucinda smiled brightly; Aunt Thelma told them they would be too tired.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Pam North said.

  “Tomorrow,” Aunt Thelma agreed.

  “Except,” Aunt Lucinda said, “there’s dear Grace, Thelma.”

  “Plenty of time for both,” Aunt Thelma said.

  “Grace Logan,” Aunt Pennina said, in her relaxed, contented voice. “You remember, Pam. Such an old friend, from the old days, you know. We always call on our way through. So lonely, poor dear Grace.”

  “Nonsense,” Aunt Thelma said. “Her son’s there, isn’t he? To say nothing of that Mrs. Hickey. And the servants.”

  “It’s not the same, dear,” Aunt Lucinda said. “And it isn’t as if she had ever read much.”

  “I—” Aunt Thelma began, but the cab stopped at the Hotel Welby and the driver knocked his flag down. He told them that here they were, folks. Jerry got out and handed down aunts. The doorman collected luggage. In the lobby, Jerry waited while Pam took the aunts aloft, feeling that it would be unsuitable for him to go where he might see beds in which maiden aunts would sleep. He waited ten minutes and Pam rejoined him.

  Pam patted her husband’s arm and said he had been very nice to the aunts. Jerry said he was sorry he had gone to sleep.

  “It didn’t matter,” she said. “It was hardly noticeable.”

  Jerry thought momentarily about this and decided not to disturb it. Instead, he asked who Felix might be.

  “Felix?” Pam repeated. “Oh—Felix.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said.

  “Some sort of a second cousin or something,” Pam said. “Why?”

  Jerry didn’t know why. He said he had never heard her speak of him before and wondered.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Pam said. “I haven’t thought of him in years. I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.” She paused. “He’s just a relative,” she said. “Everybody has them. Let’s go to the Plaza. To celebrate.”

  “What?” Jerry asked.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “There doesn’t have to be anything.” Then she paused. “I guess,” she said, “just not being a maiden aunt. Because, it would be so dull, wouldn’t it?”

  They went to the Plaza’s Oak Room bar. It made, as Pam observed, a nice start.

  The next morning, the Norths slept late. It was after three when Pam telephoned the aunts at the Welby to make definite the arrangements for dinner. But the aunts were not in their rooms.

  “Of course,” Pam said, hanging up. “I’d forgotten. Calling on Mrs.—what was her name, Jerry? The old friend?”

  Jerry didn’t remember it either. He didn’t try. Pam said it didn’t matter; that, indeed, it couldn’t matter less.

  2

  Sunday, 2:40 P.M. to 7:10 P.M.

  Grace Logan said, “But of course. You must” in cordial tones, listened a moment, said, “The sooner the better, dear” and replaced the receiver. She sat for a moment in the ivory and white room and looked at the ivory telephone. She rubbed her forehead gently with slender fingers in a gesture so familiar that its purpose no longer existed, although once it might have been, only half hopefully, massage to erase the lines that form on foreheads as, through years, one raises eyebrows in astonishment at the world, knits brows in puzzlement at it, laughs at it and laughs with it. When one has, within months, to expect a sixty-third birthday, one has had time to make many faces at the world.

  Grace Logan did not, by some years, look so old as, during recent weeks, she had begun to feel. She was a slender woman of medium height; her body had almost the graceful roundness of youth, and the black dress she wore was artfully contrived; skilled hands had arranged the white hair which was so cleanly white, which contrasted so effectively with the darkness of her tailored eyebrows; practiced hands—in this case her own—had applied lipstick to lips which were still soft, not yet tightened by age. Grace Logan might easily have been thought a dozen years younger than she was, as at fifty she might have been thought a youthful forty. Paul had often told her that.

  He had said, when he was very ill, when they both knew he was dying, that he had had the best of her, and that was true—was true for both of them. She thought of Paul now, with Thelma Whitsett’s authoritative voice still in her ears; she thought of Paul, dead five years now, and thought “Poor Thelma” and then that it had been nobody’s fault—not Paul’s, not hers, not Thelma’s either. She thought “I’m lonely” and then that Paul should be here now she needed him. Then Grace Logan, with many things to consider, pulled herself together and considered the most immediate. She went down two flights of stairs and told Hilda that there would be three guests for early tea. “The Misses Whitsett,” she told Hilda, who said that she hadn’t realized it was time for them.

  “October,” Grace Logan told her cook, who agreed that, sure enough, it was October.

  “Regular,” Hilda said and then, after a moment, “Almost like birds, aren’t they now?”

  Grace Logan smiled and nodded, and thought of the Misses Whitsett migrating like birds, passing through New York in mid- or late October on their way south, passing through again in late March on their way to Cleveland. Lucy would enjoy the idea, Grace thought; Penny might. It would not appeal to Thelma. Going up a flight from the ground floor of her immaculate, narrow house to the front living room on the second floor, she wondered, as twice a year she wondered, what she and the Misses Whitsett would find to talk about. The old days, probably—the days they had grown up together, played together on the broad, unseparated lawns of two sprawling houses, gone to school together. So long ago, Grace Logan thought; so dreadfully long ago. Then, as she moved about the room, caressing it as women do the rooms they love, the lines of worry formed again between her eyebrows and again, not knowing she did it, she tried to smooth them away with the tips of her fingers. So much is wrong, she thought; so much worries me. And people are so—so thoughtless. They help so little, try so little to help. Like Rose that morning, after four years.

  “To call me selfish!” Grace Logan thought, and sat down quickly in an ordered, empty room. “And to go when I need her most!” And to go, she did not let herself quite think, but could not avoid a little thinking, leaving these doubts in my mind—these doubts about the boy. Grace Logan, who had stood up so well because she had the strength to stand up, erased the doubts. Everything she did for young Paul was what was best for him, and done because she loved him and he was all she had left. It was Lynn who made her mother hard; hardness was contagious. Rose was, of herself, gentle, understanding. All of it proved, if any of it needed proving, that she was right in the stand she had taken. But it left her alone.

  If it hadn’t been for the other thing—the obscure, puzzling other thing—she would have been patient enough to make Rose understand. Sh
e was too worried to be patient, that was the trouble. She—

  She heard footsteps on the stairs and went to the door to greet her guests. Mary, the maid, was hanging their coats in the hall closet below.

  Thelma led the way up the stairs and Penny came next and then, with the familiar eagerness on her face, Lucy. Lucy had really outdone herself this time. What a hat!

  “My dears!” Grace said, patting Thelma’s arm, putting an arm around Penny, reaching down toward the ascending Lucy. “My dears! How nice!”

  “You’ve done it over,” Thelma said, looking around the room. “So beautiful!” Lucinda Whitsett said. “I’ve always loved this room,” Penny said, and sat comfortably down in it. “So homelike, for New York.”

  “She always does things so beautifully,” Lucinda said. “Even when we were little girls at home. Remember—”

  That started them. Even Thelma, although with brief excursions into the problems of judging cocker spaniels, softened in the warm bath of memory. Lucinda thought, as she so often thought—and said—under similar circumstances, that they had been like Little Women. (And Thelma said, as she commonly said, “Nonsense, Lucinda.”) Thelma remembered a pony Grace had had, and how she envied her the pony; Pennina remembered picnics on the joined lawns and a boy named Harry, unremembered by the others. “He thought you were wonderful,” Pennina told Grace. “I wanted him to think I was.” She smiled comfortably at the memory.

  “Not the last time,” Thelma said, a little bleakly, and Grace, rather precipitately, rang for tea.

  “I,” said Thelma Whitsett, “would like to use your bathroom, if I may.”

  It was characteristic of Thelma, Grace Logan thought as she said “of course,” said that Thelma knew the way—it was characteristic of Thelma that she did not want to “wash her hands.” Her avoidance of circumlocution, particularly in matters of greater significance, was an oddly pleasant thing about Thelma, Grace thought, watching the eldest of the Whitsett sisters leave the room, erect and single-minded. It left you knowing where you were, at any rate.

  “Dear Mrs. Hickey isn’t home?” Lucy said, filling a hiatus.

  “I’m so sorry,” Grace said. “She’d have loved—” But then she stopped. There was no point in temporizing. “I’m afraid Rose has left me,” she said. “She’s going to live with her daughter. Lynn, you know.” Her voice changed a little, hardened a little, when she spoke of Lynn Hickey. “I suppose Rose felt—” She paused again and shook her head. “I don’t really know what she felt,” Grace Logan said, temporizing after all. “Perhaps she felt cooped up here.”

  “A very pleasant coop,” Pennina Whitsett said, and Mary came in with tea, began to arrange it on a table in front of Mrs. Logan. “Very,” Pennina added, looking at layered sandwiches, a napkin covering what might be—what turned out to be—hot biscuits; looking at chocolate cake.

  Mary had forgotten the vitamin capsules again, Grace noticed. Or, perhaps, thought the occasion of sufficient dignity to justify departure from routine.

  “It looks lovely, Mary,” Grace said and then, “I wonder if you’d mind getting my capsules? In the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, you know.” Of course she knew; she was merely—thoughtless. Grace sighed, and then remembered. “When Miss Whitsett returns,” she said, but that was needless, because Thelma Whitsett then returned. Mary, after an inspecting glance at the tray, went.

  “Goodness,” Thelma Whitsett said. “What a lot of tea!” She looked at Pennina. “Remember, Pennina,” she warned. Grace Logan poured tea; Mary returned, with a brown bottle, put it near Grace, and passed embroidered napkins, Haviland plates, sandwiches, biscuits, cups of tea. Conversation ebbed.

  Grace Logan herself did little more than nibble at a sandwich, although she drank tea. She was so seldom hungry and, watching Pennina Whitsett, who ate with great propriety but without dilly-dallying, wished she more often were. Perhaps the vitamin capsules took care of it. They were supposed to. She lighted a cigarette, to pass the stipulated fifteen minutes between food and what was, presumably, concentrated health.

  “Mrs. Hickey has left dear Grace,” Lucy Whitsett said and then, to the offer of a cigarette, “No, dear, I’m afraid I never do.”

  “Left?” Thema said. “Why?”

  “She wanted to go live with her daughter,” Grace Logan said. “I’m afraid I’d begun to bore her.”

  “It took her a long time to find out,” Thelma said. “Ever since Paul died, wasn’t it? Five years?”

  Thelma remembered when Paul died. What had she felt? Grace wondered. She said it had not been quite that long; Rose Hickey had come to live with her, as companion, as friend, about a year later.

  “Four years then,” Thelma said. “You’d think she could have found out in five minutes.”

  “I’m sure,” Pennina said, and swallowed. “I’m sure Grace couldn’t bore anyone.”

  “Nonsense,” Thelma said. “Anybody can bore someone.” She paused. “Not that I suppose Grace did,” she said. “There must have been something else. Quarrel?” The last was to Grace Logan, not about her.

  Grace merely shook her head, at first. But then she hesitated.

  “Perhaps we had a slight disagreement,” she said. “About—well, about her daughter and young Paul.”

  “You mean that’s still going on?” Thelma asked.

  “Not really,” Grace said. “At least—”

  “You mean it is,” Thelma told her. “Well—why not, Grace?”

  “So many reasons,” Grace said, and kept her voice light. “They really aren’t suited. She’s so—” She paused, willing to let it go at that. But Thelma said, “So what?”

  “Competent,” Grace said. “So—so self-assured. And, I’m afraid, a little hard. Young Paul is so sensitive, you know. So—so gentle.”

  Thelma said, “Um-m.”

  “He is, really,” Grace said, and unscrewed the cap from the brown bottle, shook a capsule into her hand. “Vitamins,” she said, and repeated the phrase which had occurred to her a few minutes before. “Concentrated health.”

  “You look well enough,” Thelma told her. “Don’t believe in dosing, myself. But I told you that last spring. A change might be good for Paul. Some responsibility.”

  “Dear Thelma,” Grace said. “We can’t make people over.”

  “Nonsense,” said Thelma Whitsett, who thought you could; who thought that, very often, you should.

  “And Sally,” Pennina Whitsett said, as if she had not been listening, but offering a path leading away from disagreement. There was, she thought, so little reason for disagreement.

  “Dear Sally,” Lucy said. “And her wonderful husband. The one who writes.”

  “You make it sound as if she had a selection,” Thelma told her sister. “And he writes about biochemistry.”

  “He expresses himself,” Lucinda said. “So wonderful.”

  “I’m afraid largely in formulas,” Grace Logan said. “Sally’s—Sally’s fine.”

  There was something in her tone, and she heard it; she had not been casual as she planned. She put the capsule between her lips and washed it down with tea. “She’s out of town now,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d have tried to get her over. She’s so fond of all of you.”

  Thelma said, “Um-m” to that.

  “Do you mean,” she said then, “that she and that Sandford are splitting up?”

  “Heavens no,” Grace said. “Whatever made you think—I—I—”

  She put her hand to her head.

  “I’m afraid I’m not—” she said, and the words were oddly blurred. “Dizzy—I’m—”

  But then she opened her mouth, as if suddenly the air in the room had failed, as if she were trying to gasp it in.

  “Grace!” Lucy said, and, oddly, she was the first to move. “Grace! What—?”

  But then Grace Logan’s slender body moved convulsively, one foot kicked up and the neat shoe struck the tea table. A cup near the edge slipped off to the carpet, did not break, pou
red itself empty.

  Grace Logan fell back in her chair; for an instant her body arched, then seemed to collapse. For a second longer her eyes stared wildly, as if she desperately sought help. And then there was no expression in her eyes. She gasped for air for a moment more and blueness came into her skin, making her face hideous.

  “Heart attack,” Thelma said, and she was up, now. “Get—”

  “It’s no use, dear,” Lucy said. She was kneeling beside Grace Logan’s chair. “I’m afraid it’s no use now. And—and I don’t think it’s a heart attack, Thelma. Because—because she smells of peaches.”

  Thelma was beside the chair by then. She bent over Grace Logan’s body.

  “Pits, Lucinda,” she said. “Peach pits. But that’s—that’s impossible!”

  “It ought to be, Thelma,” Lucinda Whitsett said. “Oh, it ought to be!”

  Pam North telephoned the Hotel Welby at a quarter after five, seeking news of aunts and getting none. She told Jerry it was strange. “Because,” she said, “six thirty is dinner time.”

  “My God,” Jerry said.

  He was told that once wouldn’t hurt him, and expressed doubt that this was true. He pointed out that six thirty was in the middle of cocktail time. Then he brightened, and pointed out that, if this was to happen, they had better begin early. He hurried.

  But they were only in the middle of the first when the telephone rang and Pam, saying “Here they are now,” answered it. For a moment the voice on the telephone was strange in her ears; it seemed to shake, the words were hurried.

  “Pam dear,” the voice said. “This is Aunt Lucy. I—I guess we can’t have dinner with you and Gerald. Oh, it’s so dreadful. You see, Thelma—”

  “Aunt Lucy!” Pam said. “Something’s happened? to Aunt Thelma?”