The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

He smiled again, with a fine mock seriousness that was pretty hard to overlook. Especially when Ï was really trying to help him out of what looked like a very nasty hole.

  “It was Mrs. Trent, Miss Gather. Does that answer you, or would you like to see the invitation?”

  His tone was that one uses toward an impertinent but fairly attractive child.

  “I’ve seen the invitation, thanks,” I said coldly.

  He looked a little startled.

  “And furthermore,” I went on, “it wasn’t Mrs. Trent who sent it. Does that interest you? It was Agnes Hutton. Lieutenant Kelly traced the telegram and found that out.”

  I was trying to be cold and matter-of-fact, but I was actually very excited and breathless. So much so that for a moment I hardly noticed the sudden contracting of his eyes. When I did I saw that he’d become instantly alert, and was thinking hard, though there wasn’t much evidence of it when he smiled and said: “That’s very interesting, isn’t it? Perhaps I’d better be a bit more careful about getting my invitations confirmed hereafter. But I do thank you very much, Miss Cather.”

  He looked at me with a faint half-smile and held out his hand, and I, like a perfect fool, put mine in it and said, very heartily, “Oh, you’re quite welcome!”

  He laughed a little, and then, just as I was getting furiously angry, he became serious again.

  “I really take this as a genuinely friendly act, Miss Cather,” he said very gravely.

  I was painfully conscious that I always managed to act like a convent-bred seventeen-year-old every time he spoke to me. I almost decided to go back to my room and practice writing, say, about a hundred times, Mr. McCrae’s favorite admonition every time I started on a new assignment: “Now for God’s sake use your head, Louise—that’s what it’s for.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Instead I wandered downstairs, by the family wing staircase, and stopped to look at the suit of armor on the landing. It was rather like the one of the youthful Henry VIII in the White Tower, except that it had a spear in its mailed fist and was on foot. Must have cost a lot, I thought. I went on down, wondering what was going to happen to Mrs. Trent if she kept on throwing her money around on one thing and another now that Mr. Trent was gone and wouldn’t be making any more. After all, there wasn’t much difference between her purchases and her brother Perry’s, except that you could always burn the pretty printed paper and the little slips he got in Wall Street and her stuff was practically impossible to get rid of. Anyway, I wasn’t buying the Foster place; that was settled, and it was a load off my mind.

  I was in the downstairs hall, where I’d only been that night I lost my head and fled from Perry Bassett when he turned out the light behind me, and left me to go backwards into the unknown or forwards past Mr. Trent’s dead body. It was very dark then. It was brilliantly lighted now, with the end doors both open and the sunlight streaming in. I looked in the door at my left and saw a billiard room, with the walls all covered with heads of various dead animals, and a fine arrangement of scabbards without any swords in them over the enormous stone fireplace that had “Trent 1698” wreathed on it in cut stone.

  I was standing looking at it when I noticed that someone was in the room and my eyes met Major Ellicott’s across the top of the Baltimore Sun. He was watching me, and when I saw him he rose with a smile.

  “Looks strange, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  I followed his eyes to the empty scabbards.

  “I had them taken out the day we got Michael’s telegram,” he explained. “I thought there was no use taking a chance, with Emily’s fancy doctor making such dire predictions.”

  He frowned a little. I got the impression that he wasn’t really as offhand about it as he was trying to appear.

  “Sit down, won’t you,” he went on. “I don’t ever seem to get a chance to talk to you. Cheryl tells me you’ve been awfully decent to her. I’m very grateful to you. She’s had a bad time of it and she needs somebody around.”

  I immediately began to revise my opinion of Major Elli-cott. He was terribly nice.

  “Also, Perry’s just told me about Mrs. Trent’s latest crazy notion.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve told both her and Sartoris that this is a rotten place for a sanatorium. At least, the kind I imagine he’d run. Not that I have anything against him—I haven’t at all. But if Emily’s a sample of the kind of patients he’d have, it ought to be where it’s a little more exciting.”

  “It seems like a rather expensive venture,” I said.

  “Well, Emily’s used to her own way. I suppose we could always add the property to Ivy Hill. There’s only a couple of small farms between us, and they could be bought in.”

  “What would you do with that much land?”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders and smiled.

  “Cheryl and I could farm in earnest. Raise tobacco and stock. She’s keen on horses and so am I. I’ll admit it would be a sizable job.”

  “Mr. Archer told Mrs. Trent she really couldn’t afford the place—that the estate had shrunk the way everything has,” I said. “But she seems absolutely determined.”

  He laughed.

  “Don’t take old Archer too seriously. As long as I can remember he’s always raised hell every time Emily’s wanted to buy anything. If you listen to him we’re headed for the poorhouse. There’s no doubt he’s perfectly sincere about it, though. He’s the best friend this family’s ever had, and he’s honest as the day is long.”

  Which I thought was very odd, remembering that he was Michael’s guardian with Mr. Trent, and that Michael’s fortune was apparently exactly nil at the moment.

  “How much is the Foster place worth?” I asked.

  “You could get it for ten thousand, easily.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “I’d thought of it as much more than that, and Mrs. Trent does too, I’m sure. She mentioned thirty thousand, and then said to go as high as necessary.”

  “She did?” he said. “She . .

  Then he stopped and laughed again.

  “Oh, well,” he went on, “don’t worry, they’ll fight it out. I’d try to talk to Emily, but it wouldn’t do any good. She buys land the way Perry buys stocks. I run about ten tobacco farms in southern Maryland and Virginia that she bought because she liked a chair they had on the porch or the calf nipping buttercups by a brook. She’s a great old girl, really.”

  I don’t know how long this would have kept up if Magothy hadn’t appeared and said Mr. Archer wanted to talk to Major Ellicott in the library.

  It was after lunch that I told Mrs. Trent flatly that she’d have to get somebody else to manage the Foster business for her. She said that was all right, she’d go to the sale the next day herself. I didn’t see any of them again until they drove off, in two cars driven by uniformed chauffeurs. About three minutes after they’d gone another car appeared with five men in it. One of them nodded to Lieutenant Kelly, and they set out after the others. I gathered that the family were not to get far out of sight.

  The cars had barely disappeared past the lake when four other men upstairs started what was the most minute police search I’d ever seen. All the places I’d picked out at one time or another as the ones where Vd hide a diamond necklace if I’d happened to steal one were the first places they looked in. Under the center table; in shoe bags, in the toes of slippers, in the center of the hearth broom. They looked everywhere. They practically turned inside out the rooms of Mrs. Trent, Dr. Sartoris, Perry Bassett, Cheryl and Dick Ellicott, and I’d defy anyone to have guessed they’d even been inside the doors when they were through. My room was done too—as Lieutenant Kelly politely explained, it would have been easy for somebody to get in and hide something there.

  And nothing turned up. I gathered that from the heavy scowl on Lieutenant Kelly’s face as he stood in the middle of the hall scratching the back of his head. He gave me an abstracted fey look out of the corner of his left eye as I passed
him, but he didn’t speak to me.

  I strolled about for a while, looking in odd rooms downstairs and having a very nice time with the house all to myself. I could almost feel the house itself relax, now that all its tense strained occupants were gone. I knew it wouldn’t be for very long, and I was quite pleased when I ran into a closet that had tennis rackets and a couple of mashie niblicks, a croquet set and a shelf of modern novels in it. I looked the books over and got one of them, and wandered outside to a grove of white and purple lilacs in full gorgeous bloom, about two hundred yards from the house. It was in the opposite direction from where Lieutenant Kelly’s men were crawling about under hedges and around bushes, following the path Agnes Hutton had taken for her last ghastly journey. I found a little pool beyond the lilac grove, and a summer house where the sun sifted through long clusters of purple wisteria. There were comfortable wicker chairs there, with high backs like spread peacocks’ tails, and I pulled up a foot rest, settled myself in one of them, drew a long satisfied breath and closed my eyes.

  I suppose I went to sleep. When I opened my eyes the light through the curtain of wisteria was a deeper blue, and I thought at first that I must have dreamed of hearing Major Ellicott speaking somewhere not far from me. But the dream went on.

  “I have a right to call you my little wife, because you’re going to be, and I love you.”

  “I know, Dick. But it’s . . . oh, I don’t know. But please don’t. And don’t touch me, please.”

  “Listen, Cherry. Are you sure you want to marry me?”

  “Oh, yes, Dick. Of course I do.”

  Her voice was a strange nervous contrast to the tenderness of his.

  “And there’s no one else, Cherry? “

  “Oh, no!” she cried quickly.

  “Then look,” he said. “I want you to marry me now—tomorrow, dear. So I can take you away from here, and from all this horror, Cheryl.”

  “In June, Dick. We can’t do it before.”

  “It’s May now, June’s only a month away. We couldn’t have a big wedding anyway, Cherry—and I want you.”

  His voice sank to a whisper. After a moment he said, “There’s no reason for waiting. Is there? “

  She didn’t speak.

  “Then we’ll go away tomorrow—just you and me, Cherry.”

  “They won’t let us!” she cried.

  I should have thought any man could have heard the wounded agony in that girl’s voice. But poor Dick Ellicott—I suppose he was so much in love with her that he couldn’t hear it; or if he did, like a man, he’d quite selfishly put it down to something very different.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that. Doyle’s coming out later and I’ll tell him. He’ll be tickled to death to help us.”

  “I suppose he will,” Cheryl replied in a dead little voice.

  “Of course he will. Let’s sit down a while, and I’ll tell you all the things I’ve been thinking about you for days and days.”

  “No, Dick,” she said quickly. “I’ve got to go back. Really I do.”

  “You’re always running off, aren’t you? Can’t you stay with me just an hour—or half an hour? “

  “No, Dick—please. I can’t really. I must get back. Don’t touch me, please.”

  “All right, Cherry. Kiss me once, and you can go.”

  Just what an eavesdropper can do under such circumstances is a difficult question. I suppose I did what most eavesdroppers do—I sat tight and hoped to heaven they’d go before they found out I was in the chair with the high fan-shaped back. I hardly dared to breathe. After a while I saw Major Ellicott on the far side of the lake. He was sitting there smoking a pipe, one arm thrown affectionately around a shepherd dog who usually followed at his heels all over the estate. I slipped quietly out of the summer house, through the lilacs and back to the house, feeling rather sorry for Dick Ellicott, major or no major.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When I came downstairs that night, half an hour before dinner, Mr. Archer, Major Ellicott, and the State’s Attorney Mr. Doyle were standing together out on the terrace, talking. Perry Bassett, a little grayer, I thought, and even more than before like a frightened rabbit, was sitting close to the open window, pretending to be doing nothing and listening as hard as he could. He looked up when I came and put his finger to his lips. The three men on the terrace must have heard me, because they moved away out of sight. Perry Bassett motioned me to a chair beside him.

  “They found the rest of the rope,” he said in a semi-whisper. “It was cut off a coil of mine. I could have told them that. I knew it when I saw it, first thing. It was in the shed where I keep my things.”

  “Where’s Michael now?” I asked, without any connection except a vague shapeless fear in my own mind that the three men outside constituted a definite danger to him.

  “He’s in his room. That man told Emily’s doctor that he could go talk to him. Emily’s doctor had an idea. I don’t know what it was. They won’t tell me. I think they ought to—it was my rope.”

  Perry Bassett knew one other thing too. They had found five cigarette butts tossed into the bushes near Agnes’s body. They were an ordinary brand, but Michael happened to be the only person around who smoked it. The interesting thing, however, was that two of the butts had lipstick on them. Lieutenant Kelly had decided that whoever had hanged Agnes Hutton had talked things over with her first.

  Perry Bassett lit a cigarette nervously.

  “I don’t like any of this,” he said. “I wish they’d do something. You know-”

  But he didn’t get any farther. We heard a gay fat flutter of laughter, and saw Mrs. Trent, her left hand tucked coyly in Dr. Sartoris’s crooked arm, her large black lace hulk listing heavily to port, coming along the terrace toward the table where Magothy stood with a tray of tall frosted mint juleps. Mr. Doyle was at her other side. Cheryl brought up the rear with Major Ellicott and Mr. Archer. Her face was as waxen as the dogwood petals, and the crimson slash of her mouth reminded me suddenly of the Judas Tree.

  She seemed to me to be carrying on automatically, her mind very far away somewhere, imprisoned behind a wall of ice. I noticed that Perry Bassett started when he saw her, and she came over to him at once when he and I went out on the terrace. It was the strangest cocktail hour I’ve ever been through. As a wake it wasn’t enough, and as an event in a house whose master has been buried not five hours before, it was altogether too much. If it hadn’t been for Cheryl’s frozen blue wide eyes and the black crêpe heart on Magothy’s sleeve, I should have thought we were celebrating Mr. Trent’s departure for the Fourth of July week-end in Paris. Mrs. Trent was in fine spirits. She laughed and tapped her doctor coyly on the ear with her platinum lorgnette when he said he hoped he could get away in the morning.

  “No, Victor—we’re never going to let you go,” she cooed.

  Major Ellicott winked at me.

  “Why not buy in the Foster place, Emily,” he said, “and turn it over to Sartoris for a hospital?”

  Mrs. Trent’s foolish smile faded and disappeared. Her face ran through the whole gamut of emotions—or all that she was capable of: surprise, annoyance, anger and what not; and ended on a high blank note, as if she hadn’t the slightest notion what he was talking about, and no interest in finding out. And she refused to be drawn. Fortunately Magothy helped her out by announcing dinner.

  I don’t know whether it was the mint juleps or the fact that Michael was upstairs that made Mr. Doyle quite willing to discuss what Mrs. Trent had suddenly started referring to as our cause célèbre. He told us about the cigarette butts.

  “We think they didn’t go down there together, because we found several places where his footsteps on the clay path were on top of hers, when there was plenty of room for them to walk side by side.”

  I glanced at Cheryl. Her cocktail fork had stopped halfway to her mouth; she was staring at Mr. Doyle like a snared canary at the family cat.

  “Then you know?” she asked q
uietly, lowering her fork and controlling her voice with a great effort.

  Mr. Doyle laughed.

  “I wouldn’t say we know” he said. “I really don’t come in this yet. Technically speaking, Lieutenant Kelly, as a kind of special agent here, gets the evidence, and puts it in front of me. I interpret it, and I prosecute.”

  He leaned back in his chair, much pleased, but in a very decent way, at being here in pretty much the position of a valued friend of the family.

  “Of course,” he continued, “I’m pretty much interested in this case. Lieutenant Kelly’s a good man, in his way, but he can’t see back of things, the way the doctor here does, or if I may say so, the way I can in this particular case. I guess I’ve mentioned to you all about my little museum.”

  Cheryl looked a little frantic, and I gathered she’d heard it several times before.

  Mr. Doyle turned to me.

  “Now I guess that would be something to write about for your magazine, Miss Cather. I’d like you to come down and see my little collection some time. I guess that would be something new, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’ve been in the museum at Scotland Yard, Mr. Doyle,” I said.

  “Sure enough?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, then, you’d like my little collection. I’ve got the brick doorstop a young nigger boy killed his grandmother with, and I’ve got the piece of corset lace that tripped old Mrs. Oliver down the steps and killed her deader than Hector, when she’d put it there herself to trip her husband.”

  I expected momentarily to see Cheryl topple forward into the asparagus and hollandaise on her plate. Mrs. Trent seemed perfectly enchanted, and nobody else seemed to mind.

  “Of course,” Mr. Doyle went on, “my prize exhibit is the gun that Michael shot his father with. It was my first case as States’ Attorney. I keep it and the bullet we got out of Spur’s heart in a special place. I’m going to add another gun and a piece of rope to it pretty soon now.”

  I don’t know what Cheryl thought, or even what she looked like just then. I felt a wave of nausea, and I had to look steadily down at my plate. I didn’t hear what Mr. Archer said, but I did hear Mrs. Trent’s reply.