The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  “Well, this Ellicott had got in a bad way, and when Miss Trent wouldn’t marry him he was just about desperate.”

  I thought with almost a blush at this point that I’d rather misunderstood Major Ellicott when he said Cheryl’s breaking her engagement meant a lot to him. It just goes to show how conceited women are—I’d thought he meant something else, not that he had to get money by hook or crook or take a chance on starving as well as hanging.

  “He didn’t have any money, and he had a lot of expensive habits. Then, when Mrs. Trent got married, he’d be outa luck all round. Well, I emptied all the gas tanks in all the cars, just in case. And when I said I had the gun from Doyle’s office he knew the jig was up. He’d thrown all the stuff from the bridge down here. Thought he might of thrown it from one of the big ones, but there was keepers there. That was just a chance, now, but he had to do something with it. He was getting ready to make away with the money, if he could find it, and without it if he had to. And then Miss Cather just up and took it to him. I was watching him, so I didn’t have no time to watch her too; and he’d gone into his room and out the window, the same as Mr. Spur did last night.

  “Well, I guess there ain’t anything else.”

  And Magothy appeared with a tray of tinkling frosted juleps with sprigs of mint sticking gaily out of them. He offered the first one to Lieutenant Kelly. It was as high a tribute as the old darkey could manage, being, as Mrs. Trent had once remarked, very particular about the amenities.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather have a glass of nice cold beer,” said Lieutenant Kelly.

  “Yes, suh? said Magothy.

  That night I was sitting out on the terrace looking at the mantle of the stars hanging low over the shimmering bay, and watching the lights of the Virginia boats, somewhere out there between heaven and sea. Cheryl and Michael were finishing the head of the soldier in the very stern of the boat. Perry and Mr. Archer were in the library figuring how much a week in New York would cost before the market sky-rocketed, as Perry thought it would any moment now if he didn’t get his $10,000 invested.

  “My sister left me the ticket back home, you know,” he said at dinner. It seemed to me the one last gracious thing Emily Trent had done.

  I heard someone coming out on the terrace behind me. A tall shadow rested over me a moment, and Dr. Sartoris drew up a chair and sat down. He didn’t say anything. The tiny gleam of his cigar lighted his face now and then. After a long time I felt him looking at me.

  “Do you still think I’m a dirty dog, Louise Cather?” he asked quietly.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I stayed on here tonight because I wanted to explain a few things to you,” he went on. “In the first place, I didn’t believe Mrs. Trent when she said she hadn’t sent that wire asking me to come down. I thought she was just being coy and elusive. I ivas interested in Michael—and I still hold to my theory about shell shock, although I’d never have mentioned it if I’d known he was coming back. It was purely . . . shall I say, academic. After all, one had to have something to talk to Mrs. Trent about.

  “I came down here first to see Perry Bassett, at Mrs. Trent’s request. I’d met Agnes in Bermuda a year or so before. I got Perry grounded in his garden. He’ll come back to it after he’s had a week or so in New York. Well, I recognized in Mrs. Trent the usual symptoms of a middle-aged woman with nothing to do and a great deal of money to do it with. The sanatorium was her idea from the beginning. Now I’m afraid I wasn’t above taking the hundred fifty thousand dollars and making her a patroness of the hospital—but it couldn’t be down here. And as soon as Mr. Trent was killed I realized it was time for me to clear out.

  “That letter you gave me, or that I took away from you, was in the nature of an ultimatum—elope and get the Foster place, or nothing. The letter Lieuten mt Kelly found in Ellicott’s pocket was my reply to Mrs. Trent. Ellicott had got hold of it, in some way, and she never got it. That explains why she went on with her plans, and why I was not a party to them. I want you to understand that.”

  “Why did you stay? And why did you let her think you were going to marry her?” I asked. Not that it made any difference to me at all, although I’m afraid my voice sounded rather as if it did.

  “I had to stay, Louise. First, because after Trent’s murder the police wouldn’t let me go; but before that, when Trent ordered me out, the thing had already begun to look like a cooked up job on me and young Spur. After I talked to Michael the first time I began to see that the boy had never been a very acute nervous case in his life. And the more I talked to him the more I came to see that the thing that was haunting him and pulling him back to this place constantly was a deep unconscious—if you’ll allow me to use the word—conviction that he hadn’t killed his father.

  “If any of you had told me the story of his stopping before he drove the spear into Cheryl, years ago, I’d have had more to go on. I suspect that somewhere in Spur’s soul there’s the knowledge that the shot that killed his father came in a spurt of fire from somewhere beside him. I also suspect that the information sent him by Agnes, that Cheryl was about to marry Ellicott, was what roused all those latent fears. It was that that sent him out at two o’clock in the morning to wire the Trents he was coming to Ivy Hill. Agnes Hutton tried to get him here in December and failed. He didn’t care about the money. She succeeded when she guessed that Cheryl meant a lot to him. Partly because he’d nearly killed her once, I fancy.”

  “I’m surprised Lieutenant Kelly paid any attention to your theory about there not being murder anywhere in Michael’s unconscious, or his libido, or whatever the two of you call it.”

  I glanced sideways at him. His glowing cigar showed his face in the night.

  “Lieutenant Kelly’s an unusually bright fellow,” he said with a smile.

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose that clears everything up. Doesn’t it?”

  He tossed his cigar out into Perry’s reconstructed tulip bed.

  “It leaves just one thing, Louise,” he said, leaning forward. “You’ve got to believe me when I tell you I never had the remotest intention of marrying Mrs. Trent. I’m no saint, but I’d never marry a woman for money. Marriage is something very different in my mind. I’ve never met but two women I wanted to marry. One of them was drowned on the Lust-tanta. The other . . . well, she literally knocked me off my feet the first time I ever met her.”

  I felt my heart doing one of its queer double back-flips. I suppose it must have been my libido sinking into the ultimate that Mrs. Trent talked about that told me it was me he meant . . . until he leaned forward, and I felt his hand on mine and heard him saying softly, “Louise, I love you!”

  I’ve not been able to decide which surprised me most, his saying that, or my saying—and I can still hear my voice, quite calm and impersonal— “Let’s wait, shall we, until we’re back in New York. Then I’ll know whether it’s really you . . . or just the lilacs and the dogwood, and the stars, and . . . all that sort of thing . . . you know?”

  He smiled.

  “Yes, I know,” he said gently. “And I’ll wait, Louise . . . as long as you like.”

  And I did write a success story when I got home again—only it was about Lieutenant J. J. Kelly of the Baltimore Bureau of Detectives.