by S. T. Joshi
For now, I needed to learn more about the personalities in this case. I suspected that old George Sarsfield might be the best source for certain initial inquiries, and I was glad to see he made no fuss about being interviewed by a person who had no vital or official connection with the case.
Retreating to the drawing room for privacy, I asked him bluntly what he could recall of the few minutes before the crime had occurred.
“Not much, Mr. Scintilla,” he said. I almost felt sorry questioning him, for his ashen complexion made me worry about his ability to carry on in this difficult time.
“You were in your room, I take it, when Edward Kellar’s scream roused everyone?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you by chance hear anything before that? There’s no carpeting in that hallway upstairs, is there? If Judith was walking down that hallway, then someone must have come up behind her to . . . er, kill her. So there must have been two sets of footsteps just before that scream. And whoever the killer was must have retreated to his or her room right after . . . unless, of course, you think that Charles Jameson is the perpetrator.”
My flurry of questions seemed to disconcert him, and he just shook his head in combined weariness and perplexity. “I don’t know what to think, Mr. Scintilla. I would hate to think of my own nephew as a . . . a murderer. What possible reason would he have for killing Judith? People say he was trying to stop her from revealing the solution of the riddle—but, in the first place, we don’t even know that she had solved the riddle, and in the second place, I’m certain Charles really didn’t care one way or the other . . . just as I don’t.”
He paused, then looked me right in the face.
“As for footsteps . . . I had retired early—I wasn’t feeling well, am feeling worse now—and I’m sure I heard all manner of footsteps coming and going . . . no telling whose they were. But I’m reasonably sure I heard just one set of footsteps—I guess they must have been Judith’s—before that . . . that scream.” He shuddered visibly.
“Only one? How can that be?” I pursued.
“I have no idea.” He gazed at me blankly, as if suggesting—rightly—that that was a problem I had to solve.
I shifted to another tack. “What can you tell me about your sister Judith? What sort of a person was she?”
George heaved a sigh. “Mr. Scintilla, I will be frank with you . . . Judith was not the easiest person in the world to be around, or live with. John Kenneth was the oldest of the four of us, followed by myself, Judith, and Henrietta. I must have more than thirty years on you, sir . . . we were all raised in a century very different from the one we now find ourselves in.” I couldn’t help feeling that George wished this century had somehow never come into existence. “Girls . . . women were treated differently then. They were sheltered, protected, shielded from the grim rigors of life. Little Henrietta didn’t mind, but Judith rebelled at that treatment, even though it was meant for her own good.
“So she became a bit hard, a bit ruthless, even a bit cruel. I think she came to believe that the world was against her—she was smart and dynamic, so why wasn’t she getting ahead? Our parents refused to let her get a job—it would have been unthinkable for a Sarsfield woman to be a . . . a tradesman”—the scorn with which he said that word could only have been managed by a scion of the nineteenth century—“and so all she could do was to marry advantageously. And she didn’t even do that. She was, physically, not what one would call attractive, and so the best she could do—and it was far from the worst—was Edward.
“I liked Edward”—George said that frankly and ingenuously—“but I think he was not a good match for Judith. Even as a young man he was shy and unworldly—I think Judith largely bullied him into marrying her, chiefly because he was just about the only one to show any real interest in her. And somehow she got it into her head that he would become distinguished in his field, and thereby reflect distinction on her; but her constant prodding him to do more work and be more determined and aggressive—qualities he had in very short supply—must have been very trying for him. And then there’s Jacob . . . .”
“What about him?” I added, sensing that George was not inclined to speak on the subject.
George eyed at me with a sort of quizzical expression. “I don’t know what to say about Jacob. I’ve never understood him. He’s . . . odd. One never knows where one stands with him. Erratic, freakish, unstable . . . .”
“Mr. Sarsfield,” I said quietly, “do you think there’s any chance that . . . .”
“That what?” George said, almost daring me to finish the thought.
“I think you know what I’m saying.”
“That Jacob killed his parents?” he whispered with a kind of venom.
I said nothing, but looked at him squarely.
He could not meet my gaze.
“I really don’t know, Mr. Scintilla,” he said after a long pause. “I really don’t know. It seems that anything is possible with someone like him.”
I paused, giving him time to recover his composure.
“Mr. Sarsfield, I believe you were talking to Judith the evening of her . . . death. Can you tell me the substance of that conversation?”
If possible, George blanched even more than before. For several moments his mouth worked; then he finally said:
“Nothing, nothing . . . it was nothing at all. She was just telling me . . . about some of her explorations. She’d found nothing about the riddle—in fact, she was trying to pump me about whatever I knew, even though she must have realized that I wasn’t making the slightest attempt to solve that damfool puzzle. I really have no idea what she wanted . . .” He trailed off.
I peered at him sharply for what seemed like minutes. When I became aware that he was not going to say more, I let him go.
Winthrop and Alice Sarsfield insisted on being interviewed together, even though I would have preferred to see them individually. Winthrop was pretty much what Charles had led me to expect—stout, full of self-importance, and with a persistent sense of outrage that he was compelled to remain here when he clearly had more important work to do. Relatively youthful though he was, he seemed older than his years. His wife, on the other hand, was as sprightly as he was stolid. Attractive in a fleshy, doll-like way, she still found it difficult to repress a kind of childlike thrill at being here under such peculiar circumstances—and that thrill was seemingly enhanced by the double tragedy that had just occurred. I didn’t wish to be unkind to her, but I was more than a little inclined to believe that she lived in a world of her own imagination.
I opened by asking them the same questions I had put to George, regarding those few moments before the scream that must have signaled the death of Judith Kellar. Neither of them had anything to add to previous accounts. I was not yet ready to put any great significance in this—the absence of a double set of footsteps, the failure of anyone to hear a door closing before that scream (assuming, for the time being, that Charles himself was not the killer)—because I was well aware how inobservant most people are and how little they can remember of even traumatic events that would presumably sharpen their memories.
But one thing Winthrop said did stir my interest.
“You know, Mr. Scintilla,” he said hesitantly, almost with a sort of perplexed embarrassment, “I did see something that may be relevant . . . .”
“And what is that?” I said sharply.
He was almost reluctant to speak, at least in the presence of his wife—he gave her a quick and harried glance before turning back to me.
“I . . . er . . . saw Aunt Judith perhaps two or three minutes before that horrible scream.”
There was nothing like that in the police report.
“You what?” I said quietly.
Winthrop was so agitated that he suddenly jumped up from the sofa where he had been sitting. “It’s not what you think! I didn’t kill her . . . why would I have? And anyway, when I say I saw her, it wasn’t as if I saw her face to face
. . . .” He stopped in momentary confusion.
“Why don’t you just tell me what you saw?” I said.
He made a move to sit back down, but his agitation led him to pace the floor back and forth in front of me.
“It’s like this. . . . My—our bedroom has a window that looks out on the balcony above the entrance. Well, it was very dark and I couldn’t see very well, but I couldn’t sleep and was going to go out for a stroll. Then I saw a figure there and she was looking over the railing. Suddenly she started and took a step backward, and then disappeared inside. Moments later—the scream . . . .”
I was thinking furiously. “Mr. Sarsfield, are you sure it was Judith?”
He uttered a mirthless grin. “Who else could it have been? That servant couple don’t sleep here, and the only other woman in the house at the time was my wife, and I could see that she was lying in bed sleeping.”
“Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”
Winthrop reddened almost comically. “I . . . I . . . I didn’t want to make trouble for anyone . . . .” Meaning, of course, for himself.
“Do you realize that it is a felony to withhold evidence of a crime?”
At this Winthrop turned almost apoplectic. “Mr. Scintilla, it wasn’t like that at all! . . . I’m not trying to hide anything! Anyway, what could it possibly have to do with the . . . the crime? It wasn’t as if anyone stabbed her while she was on that balcony . . . .”
I had to agree with him on that point. “But what could she have seen? Why did she give a start?”
It was Alice’s turn to jump up. “Don’t you see?” she cried, looking at us as if we were slow-witted children. “It’s so obvious! She had solved the riddle!”
I looked alternately at the two of them. Winthrop, in turn, turned to his wife with a slack-jawed expression.
“You can’t think . . . ,” he began.
“Of course I can! What else could it be? We have to go there right now!”
And with that, she turned on her heel and almost ran up the stairs. For a few moments we were stunned into stony inactivity; then we darted after her as if she were a fox and we were hounds at her tail. She was quicker than I had given her credit for, and she found herself on that balcony a good half-minute before we trudged up to her.
“Darling,” Winthrop began, “what could we possibly see now? It’s almost pitch dark . . . .”
Alice again looked at him as if he were a mentally deficient toddler. “Winthrop, you little fool, whatever Aunt Judith saw, she saw that night—so whatever it is must be visible only at night. What else makes sense?”
The balcony was rimmed on the three sides with urns that held luxurious and almost tropical foliage. I asked Winthrop to show me exactly where the dark figure of Judith had stood. I then went to the point he indicated, peering into the forest and the down-sloping fields beyond. After some moments:
“I can’t see anything. What about you?”
I was addressing Winthrop, but Alice took it upon herself to reply. “Nothing,” she said petulantly.
I continued to stare at that overgrown forest, not even conceiving what I could possibly be looking for. Then something caught the corner of my eye, and a chill of apprehensive disbelief went through me.
“Take a look at that,” I said softly to the both of them, pointing high up in the trees to my right.
What I—and, soon, they—saw were four skulls, apparently tied together by string, wreathed from the neighboring branches of two trees; shining with a lurid pallor that could not have been natural, and hanging at such a height that I wondered how anyone could possibly have placed them there.
Whose four skulls they were I did not have to ask. They may have been imitations, they may have been the real thing. I was not about to undertake any more unauthorized digging in graves—I’d had my fill of that in New Jersey on another case—and it hardly seemed necessary. I had, of course, a sinking feeling that the skulls were all too real.
Imagine a man who digs up the graves of his ancestors, covers the skulls with phosphorus, drapes them—somehow—across the branches of two trees like grisly Christmas decorations, so that they “laugh” eternally with the charnel laugh of the dead, and howl when the wind blew through their empty craniums—and then makes a riddle will that will plague his relatives with a macabre horror that he himself must have felt in some fashion in order to contrive this morbid joke. Such a man was John Kenneth Sarsfield.
And it seemed that the probing of his diseased psyche—the psyche of a man who had spent the last dozen years of his life in a sanitarium for reasons no one knew—would have some bearing on solving the tragedy at Sarsfield Manor.
Chapter Eight
I was not expecting, nor did I want, a share of the three million dollars that was the “reward” for solving the riddle of John Kenneth Sarsfield’s will. I had more important things to consider. One chief difficulty was a simple matter of chronology. If it was really the case that Judith Kellar had seen the four skulls shining in the forest on her late-night venture on that balcony, and if Winthrop Sarsfield was telling the truth that her visit occurred only minutes before she was found dead on the threshold of her own bedroom, then the chief motive—a motive that I had frankly applied to Alice Sarsfield, Winthrop himself, and even to my old friend Charles Jameson, for all his denials—that someone had killed Judith to prevent her from “winning” the riddle was severely jeopardized:
For who, beyond Winthrop himself, was there to have seen her at the balcony, and who, even if they had seen her, could have so quickly concluded that she had solved the riddle and, in what seemed like bewildering haste, snatched that dagger from the weapons room and stabbed Judith as she made her way back to the bedroom?
The timetable was simply too compressed. Winthrop himself would never have admitted to me that he had seen Judith so soon before that dreadful scream, for it rendered him an immediate suspect; and I sensed that he was genuinely puzzled as to what Judith could have been doing on that balcony, until his wife, considerably more eager to solve the puzzle than he, had clarified the matter for him.
It is true that there were two other suspects—old George and young Jacob—whose exact whereabouts during these critical minutes was unknown. It did not take me long to ascertain that Jacob, at any rate, occupied a bedroom that also looked out onto the balcony. Could he have taken the occasion to kill his own mother simply in order to gain the prize? Or was that merely an excuse to dispense with her for other reasons entirely?
Little as I relished it, the time had come to confront Jacob.
I was prepared to meet an unstable, potentially violent person, but as I found him puttering in the library I appeared to startle him by the simple utterance, “Mr. Jacob Sarsfield, I wonder if I could have a talk with you.”
The moment the words came from my mouth, he dropped a pile of books that he had been carrying—collected from the section of the library devoted to the old brothers Sarsfield’s impressive holdings of occult titles—and turned on his heel to look at me as if I myself were a supernatural creature. As he saw who I was, he attempted to regain his composure, but his eyes still betrayed his wariness and alarm.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Mr. Scintilla. I don’t want to go the way of . . . of my father.”
His face crumpled at the mention of his parent, and at once I sensed a turmoil of emotions in him that he was striving furiously to repress. Realizing that I may have misjudged him, I softened my tone.
“Jacob, why don’t we just sit down and talk? There’s no harm in that, is there?”
He continued to eye me with suspicion, but sat down with immense caution onto an overstuffed chair.
I sat in a chair facing him. For a time we both said nothing.
“Jacob,” I began at last, “I’m sorry that I have to question you at what must be a difficult time for you—”
He cut me off abruptly. “Don’t try to curry favor with me by false sympathy, Scintilla!” he lashed out
. “You don’t give a damn about my parents, and you and I both know it! All you care about is getting your client, the learned Charles Jameson, off the hook and out of the chair! Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Private Investigator”—his voice dripped with sarcasm—“I’m going to see him fry if it’s the last thing I do!”
I was not expecting such an outburst. Even in the depths of grief—if indeed he felt that—his bitterness and hatred of Charles took me aback.
I said quietly, “Why are you so convinced that he is the culprit?”
His sneer only deepened. “Oh, come now, don’t be so dense! His hand was right on the murder weapon—we all saw him bending down over my mother with that knife in her back! Explain that away if you can!”
“Anyone could have stabbed her,” I continued softly, “and anyone could have been found with a hand on that dagger. Perhaps he was trying to help.”
“Perhaps not,” Jacob parried, turning away from me with disdain.
I needed to steer the conversation in a different direction.
“Can you tell me something about your family life?”
That may have been even more of a mistake. He wheeled around to look at me and barked:
“Oh, no, you don’t! You’re not going to turn the tables on me! I know what they’re saying . . . that I hated my parents and wanted to do away with them . . . .” For just an instant his face again collapsed in pain before resuming its sneer. “If I hated them so much, why was I living there with them all this time? My father”—his voice choked with emotion—“my father was a wonderful man . . . no one better . . . God, what he endured from my mother! But I didn’t hate her either—her goddamn family had made her what she was!
“This whole family is cursed, Scintilla!” Jacob almost shouted. “Every one of them has some kind of taint! I must have it too, God help me, but I’m not a murderer! You can’t pin this on me!”
Again not raising my voice, I said, “That dagger came from the weapons room, didn’t it?”
“Of course it did!” he scoffed. “Where else? But don’t try to tell me I was the only one who knew about it, or could have taken it. That bloody case was unlocked—and everyone knew it. I’m sure every bloody Sarsfield in this house poked their nose into that room at one time or other . . . particularly that little tart Alice, who’s so intent on solving the riddle . . . she’ll do anything to get that money!”