“So far as I know anything about it, you behaved as anyone would.”
“The Yates boy was so sure it was somebody in the house—somebody belonging here. I knew that was ridiculous, but he hypnotized me into thinking the tramp might be hiding here, and so we searched the house first. It wasn’t his fault—a stranger couldn’t know the geography of the place, and how close the Carringtons are. How close we all are to one another, for the matter of that. I’m glad those traveling men got away—it’s so hard on people of that sort when these things happen. You’re always afraid they may have been up to some silly little kind of misbehavior or other, and then they’re suddenly in the limelight and get found out.”
Gamadge said: “That Yates fellow seems a nice kind of boy. I had a word or two with him on the porch.”
Miss Wakefield gave him a quick look. “He is—very nice fellow indeed. He’s been most considerate all the way through; no fussing or complaining, and actually helps me out in the kitchen.”
“You knew the late Mr. Carrington well, of course; his death must be a good deal of a loss to you all.”
“Well, you might say I knew him; but I wasn’t a contemporary. Too young for him, too old for Lawrence and Lydia. Our families were always intimate here, but after I left school we stayed in The Mills the year round. The Carringtons only came up for a month or two in the summer, and now and then at Christmas.”
“Interesting personality, George Carrington’s, I gather.”
“Not particularly interesting; very attractive to some people. I don’t care much for these old Turks myself.”
“Turks?” Gamadge was amused.
“Women’s place is the parlor, if it isn’t in the laundry and the kitchen. Lydia should have been encouraged to play the piano in public. No man was good enough for her, or for Nadine either; so Nadine went and married Jenner and Lydia never married at all. She ought to have had a big interest in life to take the place of all that. Then George started mewing Rose Jenner up in the same way.”
“Mewing her up? She could drive all over the countryside alone—”
“That’s nothing; who can’t, nowadays? That was no substitute for young friends and young men. They had plenty of company themselves. But nobody was good enough for Rose Jenner—the old story. Not that she ever complained—the Carringtons are perfect, to Rose Jenner. But she’s a spirited girl, has a lot more spirit than Lydia ever had. I shouldn’t have been a bit surprised if Carrington had had another elopement on his hands sooner or later. Well, nobody cares now what she does, poor little thing. I used to ask her here when my guests had little parties for the young people; but there was always some excuse. I hope she saw a little life at boarding school, but I don’t think so; any boarding school Carrington picked out would see that she didn’t.”
“Carrington was the complete egoist, was he?”
“Yes, but he had his good points, as his behavior about taking Rose Jenner in shows. It meant spending money out of his income. That annuity—they all insist it was a good thing, gave them all a better life, and I’d have given George Carrington at least twenty years more myself; but I don’t think he bought that annuity for anyone’s sake but his own. Not George Carrington. He spent right up to the income; told me so only this summer. Didn’t even have insurance—catch him paying out the premiums!”
She paused, drummed on the table, and frowned. Gamadge reflected gloomily that those knotty fingers and strong hands, those bony wrists, could probably control the biggest bay that ever came out of the Wakefield training stables; that Miss Wakefield’s long legs were probably equipped with muscles as good, and powerful knees. What a waste. He would have liked to see Miss Wakefield astride a good big bay horse. Or would she ride sidesaddle? There was plenty of science in that, too, and more danger.
“Rose is badly worried about Lydia,” she said. “I wish to goodness you’d see what you think, and let me know; tell me if you think Lydia’s in for a breakdown.”
“I’ll try to observe.” Gamadge rose. “Thank you very much, Miss Wakefield, for offering me rooms; and I’ll write to my wife. We’re booked for October.”
“I hope you’ll come.” Miss Wakefield got out of her chair springily, “And I hope Mrs. Gamadge doesn’t count on gaiety. One little boy, you say?”
“Yes. My wife will like it here, although we’re not a middle-aged couple. Don’t judge her by me, you know.” Gamadge smiled. “My wife is beautiful and young, as—er—the young Flora in her prime. Am I quoting or did I make that up? Probably I made it up, it’s a trifle tautological.”
Miss Wakefield laughed. “Gives me the idea, anyhow.”
Gamadge, shifting the Monster from one arm to the other, asked diffidently: “Would I be making myself out too much of a sensation collector if I said I’d like to see the celebrated side door, Miss Wakefield?”
“Not at all; everybody wants to see it. The trouble is, there’s nothing to see. They took the axe, I don’t know why.”
“Gives them something.”
“To look at, I suppose. Or they may think we’ll kill one another with it after all.” She led the way through a door in the north wall into a narrow corridor. It was cut by a cross passage, and Gamadge stood in this passage and looked along it to the door that now opened on greenness and sunshine. Then he turned and glanced at the back stairs, and at the brackets above the fire buckets where the axe had hung.
“My curiosity is slaked,” he said.
“You’re more easily satisfied than some. That’s Mr. Compson’s room, just along there. We’ll go to the front through the parlor.”
They did so, and she left him at the front door. On the porch, Gamadge exchanged a word with Yates:
“Your landlady’s sticking by you.”
“Nice woman. Wish I could tell her the whole thing.”
“Wouldn’t be fair to saddle her with the responsibility.”
“Rose didn’t say a word to me when she left.”
“Of course she didn’t. Your Miss Jenner is no fool.”
“Gamadge—you can’t judge, seeing her now; but don’t you think she seems very tense—under an awful strain?”
“Her reaction to strangers isn’t sympathetic. I thought that might account for the tension.”
“How could it? I suppose Miss Carrington is sapping her vitality. Simply collapsing on her. As for you—I wish she’d known you were here on our account.”
“Your account.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“She’s not to be told, you know; nobody’s to be told why I’m here. That’s understood.”
“I wouldn’t put that responsibility on her, any more than I’d put it on Miss Wakefield.” He added, as Gamadge went down the steps: “What’s that thing you’re carrying?”
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN Criminology
GAMADGE WENT DOWN to the street, turned right and passed the Tavern. A few people were in the drugstore. He walked on. A thick grove of lilac bushes hid the rear premises of the Tavern, ending at the hedge that bounded the Library domain. Beyond it came the shadowy lawn of the Rigby place; he turned up the winding path.
The path took him around to the north, where a half-grown youth sat on the doorstep reading. His baseball bat was lying beside him.
He looked up. “Name and occupation,” he said, “and cards of identity.”
“Gamadge. Document man.” Gamadge solemnly fumbled for his wallet. Willie Stapler read what was on the blue card, and looked at Gamadge’s fingerprints with a knowing air. “Where’d you get this?”
“Somebody required me to fill it out during the war.”
“Fingerprints too?”
“As you see. Rather a nice idea, don’t you think? Now I can’t commit any crimes.”
The Stapler boy searched for the gap in this reasoning, abandoned the search, and returned the card. He asked: “Business here?”
“Something to read. I heard Miss Bluett was on the premises.”
“You’re at Studley’s.”
“That’s right.”
The Stapler boy got up, went into the Library, and came back with a square-faced, square-bodied woman who looked at Gamadge sharply through pince-nez. She said: “Not open for business.”
“I know, Miss Bluett, but I’m a kind of writer, and I thought you might be willing to allow me to look at an encyclopedia. I want some data on Aubrey, the melodious twang man.”
Miss Bluett said after a pause: “Well, come in. Reference shelves to the right.”
Gamadge followed her into the cool depths of the big room, found his volume, and laid it out on a shelf. Miss Bluett stood contemplating him for a few moments; the kind of person, thought Gamadge, who won’t ask questions.
She retreated to her alcove. Gamadge had placed his bundle on a chair when he came in; he left it where it was, after he had replaced the encyclopedia, and wandered along looking at books.
Miss Bluett was surrounded by the Carrington donation. Gamadge, having completed his tour of the north and west walls, approached her diffidently and picked a small octavo, bound in peach-colored cloth, from the nearest pile.
“Mr. Isaacs,” he said, “and I haven’t seen the old boy for a quarter of a century. How pretty covers used to be. Would it be too much for me to ask you to make me out a card, so I could take this back to Edgewood with me?”
Miss Bluett twitched Mr. Isaacs out of his hand, inspected it, and said: “All right, I’ve done this one.” She placed it on her desk and got out her pencil with the rubber stamp on the end of it. She took a library card out of a rack.
“References? Miss Studley will do.”
“I was going to say Lawrence Carrington.”
Miss Bluett was also one of the people who don’t like assistance when doing their job. But she was too much interested in the news that Gamadge knew Carrington to be really annoyed. She repeated: “Lawrence Carrington?”
“I know him a little. I’m having supper with them.”
“Oh.” Miss Bluett snatched up an eraser and rubbed out what she had begun to write on the reference line. She took Gamadge’s New York Public Library card from him and copied down what it said. “Going to stay here long?” she asked.
“Not long. Lovely little place.”
“Hope it’ll cure you of what’s the trouble.”
“Just overwork,” said Gamadge obligingly.
Miss Bluett stamped Mr. Isaacs and pushed it at Gamadge. Picking it up, he reflected that she was wasted on Frazer’s Mills. No scope.
“Two weeks, renewal if necessary, five cents a day overtime,” she told him, and took another Carrington book from a pile.
Gamadge moved along to the south wall. “Nice stuff here,” he said. “I’m rather sorry tomorrow’s a holiday and you’ll be closed up. But you won’t agree with me about that.”
Miss Bluett could no longer allow this fool to imagine that nothing had happened at the Rigby Library. She said shortly: “I might as well work. They won’t let me take my holiday.”
Gamadge swung to her and spoke incredulously: “You mean you can’t leave town because you thought you heard the murderer at the door on Thursday night?”
Miss Bluett rose to this promptly and with vigor: “I did hear him at the door Thursday night, and saw him too. I don’t know that I’d have mentioned it if I’d known I’d lose my trip.”
“Of course you would have mentioned it.” Gamadge came and leaned against the front of her desk. “Public servant like you—of course you’d mention it. What an experience. Terrifying.”
“Not terrifying at all, because I thought it was a moth or a squirrel.” She paused. “All I saw moving away was a shadow. And I needn’t have been here at all so late if it hadn’t been for this junk.” She cast a disgusted look at the rampart of Carrington books. “Nice thing to nearly lose your life for.”
“No good?”
“The first two lots aren’t so bad. I wish I’d never made Hawkins go for that last load on Thursday evening, but I didn’t know when I could get him to take his truck out again. He’s supposed to take entire care of the Library, and it’s a full-time job, and he’s paid for it; but he does odd work besides in summer. We have hardly anybody for that kind of thing in The Mills—clipping hedges and mowing grass; only Miss Wakefield’s help and Carrington’s man Begbie, and Miss Studley’s chauffeur. And Hawkins is so dumb. He had to go and leave a book behind after all.”
“Leave a book?”
Miss Bluett jerked her head to the left. “One of those bird books. It’s a set of twelve, and he only brought eleven. Maddening.”
Gamadge picked up the top book of the set—a thin quarto, nicely bound in green cloth and decorated with stampings of gold. He read: Birds of Our Woodlands.
“Regional birds?” Gamadge opened it, and a colored plate of The Blue-jay fell out. “Nice set. Too bad if the plates are loose.”
“The plates! That set’s ruined. Covers falling off, pages dog-eared, engravings torn. Hundreds of children been at it.”
Gamadge clapped the covers of the quarto, and dust flew. He picked up others and went on clapping.
“Don’t do that,” said Miss Bluett, “you’ll get dust all over the place. Hawkins does that. The Carringtons never cared about books; only the man that bought the Library, and now Lawrence. At least they tell me Lawrence does, but he never comes in here. Lydia comes now and then to get a current novel, and that Jenner girl is always in here reading. But she’s no relation. Horses and dogs, fishing and shooting, that’s all the Carringtons cared about.”
Gamadge had ceased from his labors. He stacked the Woodland Birds again and looked at some of the other piles, bending sideways.
“Miss Jenner’s a reader?” he asked. “From what I’ve heard I shouldn’t have thought so.”
“More for something to do than anything else, I guess. She doesn’t take books out, just sits here and looks through things. The only book she ever asked for was Chess Strategics.” Miss Bluett glanced at him crossly. “Chess Strategics!”
Gamadge straightened, dusted his hands off, and shook his head.
“And when I said we didn’t have it, she said never mind, she only wanted to show Mr. Carrington something. Evidently she knew it by heart.”
“Extraordinary.” Gamadge returned to the west side of the Library and looked along a shelf that he had noticed before. He said: “Criminology; always interesting.”
“I call them morbid.”
“Morbid? Here’s the Tichborne Case, of all things. Trials aren’t morbid, Miss Bluett.”
“I mean those crime books.”
“But you get such wonderful contemporary detail, and you don’t get it anywhere else; not in memoirs, or letters, or even journals. Only in crime books, and above all in murder cases. Everything comes out in a murder case, all the trivia that are never recorded anywhere else. And why?”
Gamadge, The Tichborne Trial in his hands, looked earnestly at Miss Bluett.
“Well, why?” She was mildly amused by this easy-mannered stranger who had handled Birds of Our Woodlands so tenderly.
“Because in a trial for murder the simplest annals of the middle class and the poor suddenly become of the first importance—they’re weapons in a battle of life and death. They’re handled like jewels—by the judge, who’s so particular; by counsel, who are so persistent; by witnesses, who rack their brains and talk their heads off. Old or new, Star Chamber or jury trial, out it all comes—the recipe for soups, fatal or otherwise; the way to make a fire; the medical treatment for that vague ailment that turned out to be the effects of laurel water.”
“Laurel water?”
“Very bad for you.”
“What’s laurel water?”
“Now, Miss Bluett, don’t be morbid.”
Miss Bluett found herself laughing.
“Why, if this murder case, the Carrington murder case, ever comes to trial,” Gamadge went on, “or even if it doesn’t, even if it
ends up as a Great Unsolved Crime, you’ll be immortal. A hundred years from now people may be reading all about you—you and the Rigby Library, the holiday you never got, the bird book that Hawkins didn’t bring, the catch on the door that slipped and saved your life. Intellectual curiosity isn’t morbid.”
Miss Bluett said: “You’re making a mistake about my never getting my holiday. I’m going to get it, all right, don’t worry. I’m going away after the inquest for a good long rest.”
“Fine. And I suppose you’ll be closed up tomorrow. Nice for you, but I must say I wish I could come back here before I leave. Lots of things I’d like to look at again.” He replaced The Tichborne Trial. “This, for instance. Fascinating detail, even if it was only a trial about a claim to an estate. The claimant was so fat, he—”
Miss Bluett again condescended to laugh. “Tell you what,” she said after a short hesitation, “you seem to know how to handle books, and you’re a friend of Lawrence Carrington’s. I could let you have my key.”
“Miss Bluett, that’s really most—”
“Be careful of it, it’s the only one except Hawkins’ cellar key. Every time you use it you’ll have to leave it with Mrs. Stapler.”
“Of course.” Gamadge accepted the key and put it away in a key case with his others.
“Perhaps you’ll clap some more books for me,” added Miss Bluett. “You’ll do it without tearing the covers off the way Hawkins does, and I won’t be here to get the dust all over me.”
Gamadge showed appreciation of Miss Bluett’s humor.
“Now wouldn’t you like to wash your hands? There’s a bathroom in back there along the passage next to the kitchen.”
“I should like to wash my hands. Why a kitchen, Miss Bluett?”
“This last Rigby fixed the house up for himself and his help. He was a bachelor. Bedrooms upstairs, for them; his bedroom and bathroom down here. Nice kitchen, we didn’t do anything about it—it’s gone to waste.”
“The housing people will get after you and install a family.”
Night Walk Page 10