by Zenith Brown
“Because you know Rick had finally made up his mind to get a divorce. It was just a question of how cheap he could get off.—At least he had until Dan barged in last night.”
It seemed to me that since sitting down on that marble bench that Irene’s husband had picked up for a song in some Italian garden, I had run through my entire emotional gamut. I had now finally got to anger.
“Look,” I said. “I know you don’t like Cheryl. I don’t see why, except that I suspect you wouldn’t like any girl one of your sons married. But you can’t do this sort of thing, you simply can’t! If she were a Polynesian leper you couldn’t do it!”
She raised her brows, maddeningly casual.
“Don’t get excited, darling. Wait till some penniless nobody marries one of your sons. We’ll see whether you’ll be so detached about it.”
“If one of them is bright enough to marry a girl like Cheryl I’ll thank heaven on my bended knees,” I retorted . . . knowing all the time how stupid I was to let her get under my skin. I got up.
“There’s only one thing I’ve got to say, Irene,” I said, as calmly as I could. “If you start—however disarmingly—the notion that Cheryl killed Rick, I’ll feel perfectly free to tell Dr. Birdsong, and everyone else, everything you told me last night.—And everything I saw, as well.”
She looked inquiringly at me.
“Where, for instance, were you, when Rick was shot?”
I knew it was stupid to ask that, the minute I did it.
“I? Why, my dear, I didn’t leave my room all night,” she said quietly.
“Then how did you know Cheryl wasn’t in hers?”
A little smile played on her delicate porcelain lips.
“Quite simply, my dear. Her husband came and told me so.”
I didn’t believe it—naturally—and she knew I didn’t. But it left me out on a limb . . . unless I wanted to tell her I’d seen her out on the landing, watching Rick and Mara in the hall below. Which I didn’t . . . almost instinctively, I supposed, analyzing it later.
Irene got up suddenly and held out her hands to me.
“Oh come, Grace, we’re old friends—let’s not quarrel. We’re both upset. I’ll not even mention Cheryl. She can leave this afternoon, and I’ll never see her again.”
I looked at her in blank surprise, in spite of myself.
“Are you forgetting,” I asked, “that she’s your son’s widow?”
We’d started to the house. She turned to me, stopping abruptly, a new oddly bewildered look in her eyes.
“You mean . . . you think she’ll expect to inherit Rick’s share . . .”
I couldn’t help that feeling of hopeless anger again.
“Is money all you ever think of?” I inquired. “I was thinking chiefly of the funeral . . . and the police.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said shortly. “She’s got to get away from here—right away. I can’t have her here. Not while Dan’s here.”
“I thought you said last night,” I observed pleasantly, “that Dan recognized her as an adventuress.”
She didn’t answer, and I glanced at her. She had stopped dead in her tracks and was looking across the gardens, her lips parted. Chugging up the wagon road from the farmhouse was a rickety old truck piled high with chairs and tables, a shiny old brass bedstead topping the lot. It looked like an outpost of a train of flood refugees. And Irene, standing there, said, I think, the one genuinely sincere word, instantly recognizable as such in my new view of her, that I remember her saying that week. She said, “Oh!” and there was no doubting the dismay in her voice.
Then she seized my hand, and we hurried across the garden and came out of the box lined path just as the truck rattled around the big pink and white apple tree at the curve in the road. Irene darted out directly in front of it. There’d never been any doubting her nerve, or her complete confidence in herself—not many people, I thought, would have cared to give an injured person such a handmade plea of accidental manslaughter.
Mr. Keane jammed on his brakes and stalled his old machine, which meant—not that Irene would mind, of course—that he’d have to crank it half an hour to get it started again. Its pitifully meager load wobbled dangerously, but finally stuck, and Mr. Keane hesitated a moment, then climbed out of the cramped seat and took off his hat. He had on a blue denim work shirt, unironed but freshly washed, the top button sewed on with red thread. I remembered there’d been no woman on the farm since his daughter had married and gone away four or five years ago. I’d known that because Irene had worried about his marrying again . . . chiefly because the right kind of woman would insist on having a bathtub put in the tenant house, and she didn’t, of course, want the wrong kind there, and she couldn’t think of going to the expense of plumbing, for after all they had electric lights.
I’d only seen Mr. Keane, this time, in the semi-light from the hall. Now in the full sunlight I saw his face, lined and weather-beaten under his short shock of thick gray hair, a curiously tragic face, lined with toil and with suffering too, I imagined, but certainly with nothing meek or fawning in it. The impression I got was one of a sort of kindly dignity and simplicity that most people, I think, would not have tried to take advantage of.
I glanced at Irene. She was standing there in the road, looking up at him with a hurt, almost tragic expression in her blue eyes.
“Why, Mr. Keane,” she cried, “I don’t see how you can do this to me! At a time like this, after all the years you’ve been at Romney . . . and you know how I’ve always depended on you, ever since Mr. Winthrop died, you’re the one person I always thought I could count on!”
Mr. Keane’s face reddened uncomfortably.
“I was told last night I wasn’t wanted any longer at Romney, ma’am,” he said.
“Oh, but Mr. Keane!” Irene cried. “You know the trouble I’ve had with Rick! I’ve been simply at my wit’s ends—I was ready to do anything to keep peace! But poor, poor Rick!”
She turned away. Mr. Keane would have had to have a heart of granite to withstand that. He turned redder still, fumbled in his pocket and brought out that blackened stumpy pipe, and stood uncomfortably poking the dark shreds of his home-cured tobacco into its bowl.
“I’m mighty sorry about Rick, ma’am,” he said.
Irene turned back, her eyes bright with tears.
“Oh, Mr. Keane, you won’t leave me, will you? I couldn’t run the place without you! I’ve always felt Romney was your place as much as mine—and you know how miserably I feel about the way Mara has acted about Alan, but you know as well as I do neither of them would ever be happy a moment!”
Mr. Keane frowned a little. “Alan’s a good boy, ma’am,” he said quietly. “But I don’t blame you. It wouldn’t be the thing. I’ve told the boy that. He knows the way I feel. He couldn’t never do for her like he ought to if he was to marry her. I’ve told him so many a time.”
“Then you will stay, Mr. Keane? And we’ll make a new contract, you really deserve more . . .”
“I don’t want more’n I’ve got now, ma’am,” Mr. Keane said. “Jus’ to have the boy let alone, and nobody interferin’ with the farm, is all I want, ma’am.”
Irene smiled through her tears and held out her white delicate hand with its scarlet nails. Mr. Keane wiped his hand on the seat of his pants and took hers, his face a dull mahogany.
He was still cranking his truck when Irene and I were almost to the house.
“Thank God!” she said practically. “The whole crop would have been a dead loss if he’d gone. I intended to go see him the first thing this morning. I could never get anyone to do what he does. I can’t see what I was thinking about, to let Rick . . .”
“And—Mara and Alan?” I asked, when she didn’t go on.
“I’ll have to arrange that some other way,” she said calmly.
8
As we came up to the house she gripped my arm sharply. “Ssssh—there’s Dr. Birdsong.”
I glanced
up. He wasn’t in sight, but his dog was sitting on the porch, looking at us. He grinned as we came up the steps. Dr. Birdsong was standing in the doorway, with a tall completely emaciated figure in an old black alpaca suit and a soiled panama hat, and another man in spruce freshly laundered gray seersuckers and a new clean panama hat. The first man was hot, his scanty gray hair sticking to his moist forehead; he had white mustaches stained with telltale tobacco juice and wore a badge pinned to his white shirt. The other man looked enormously upset. He came toward us and held out his hand to Irene.
“I’m sorry!” he said. It seemed to me he was genuinely moved.
Irene pressed her lips together and looked away, gripping his hand tightly. “Oh, Barney, it’s too horrible!” she whispered. She turned to me, her hand still in his. “Grace dear, this is Mr. Purcell the State’s Attorney. This is my cousin Mrs. Latham, Barney. She’s never liked poor Rick, but now that he’s gone . . .”
I’m afraid I must have looked as completely stunned as I really was, for she gave me a pale smile.
“Oh, I know, dear. You couldn’t possibly approve of so many things he did. No one could.”
The idea that I had established myself as a moral censor to Rick, or anyone else, was definitely new to me. Rick could have lived his allotted three score and ten completely submerge in a tank of alcohol and it wouldn’t have bothered me. But it did bother me, rather, to have the State’s Attorney give me a swift inquisitorial glance out of his brown ferrety eyes, almost in a sort of “You’d better watch your step, my good woman” way.
I glanced without meaning to at Dr. Birdsong. His light blue eyes were resting steadily on me. I thought I detected the faintest ironical gleam in them. Whether it was a smile or a sort of comment on a confirmation of his own worst fears, I hadn’t an idea. I know I was annoyed and looked away quickly.
Mr. Purcell was a man of about sixty, and obviously quite susceptible to beauty in distress. He turned back to Irene.
“You can count on us to make this as easy as we can for you, Irene,” he said gently, patting her slim shoulder in its Lincoln green twill jacket.
She smiled gratefully up at him—and I don’t for a minute mean that she wasn’t genuinely grateful. Indeed I think that now he was there an enormous load had fallen from her shoulders; and as I learned more about Mr. Purcell I understood better why that was so. He had the old Comegys place next to Romney, and having been brought up on fatback and corn bread on a run-down farm in the next county he enjoyed, rather more than most, the frosted mint juleps in silver goblets and the candlelight and all the period elegance at Romney, and the flattering charming deference of a lady like Miz’ Winthrop. His own wife stayed at home most of the time, and there were those who said that if anything ever happened to her Mr. Purcell wouldn’t look around long. But that was county gossip, and anyway he could have looked longer and further—or so I’d thought until just recently—and done much worse.
The point, however, was not Mr. Purcell and his susceptibility to Irene as much as Irene and her susceptibility to herself. It’s useless to say that she hadn’t, in each of the guises and moods she’d appeared in so far that morning—and the night before—, been perfectly sincere. Everything she ever did was sincere . . . just as I’m sure Duse and Bernhardt were sincere in each role they ever played. For Irene was born an actress, and her life had developed her talent amazingly—on a stage far from Broadway, but just as much a stage. Every act of her life that I’d seen was motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by the effect it would have on her audience, let it be a group of tattered little colored boys or a dinner of foreign ambassadors. It made no difference to Irene, except in the role she chose, and she had a perfect sense of the fitness of any occasion. She could be a grand lady giving pennies to the little darkies, or a simple and oh, so charmingly ignorant woman to a stuffed and decorated white shirt.
And I think that what she had seemingly developed under her gay chameleon exterior was something that no one, least of all herself, would ever have predicted her being or becoming. Her own beginnings were well on the wrong side of the tracks—but neither Mr. Purcell nor Mr. Keane would ever have dreamed it. They were so lost and shadowy, and Irene so lovely, that no one, not even my husband’s two Back Bay aunts, one of whom had been her mother-in-law, remembered them any more. I’d never have thought of them myself, or dreamed that Irene remembered them even, until all her talk about Cheryl being a penniless nobody . . . and I only thought of them then because that’s precisely what the Winthrop family had called Irene.
All this is merely by way of explaining that it wasn’t, therefore, particularly designing or hypocritical of Irene that she seemed suddenly on the point of collapse after the harrowing experience of the morning. And of course it wasn’t odd that Mr. Purcell, as the oldest friend of the family present, should support her fragile drooping figure into the cool house.
The sheriff put his hat on, took it off, scratched his bald head and put his hat on again. He turned to Dr. Birdsong.
“Maybe she can give us the dope.” He nodded at me.
I saw that odd gleam again in Dr. Birdsong’s eyes.
“Mr. Dorsey wants to know, Mrs. Latham,” he said quietly, “how many people here can shoot an arrow in the dark, and hit the mark the first time?”
“I wouldn’t have the foggiest notion,” I said. “My guess would be none of them. Here, or anywhere else.”
He nodded. “That was mine, too.”
“It looks mighty like somebody did,” Mr. Dorsey drawled. “Rick couldn’t ’a done it by himself, now, could he?”
I looked at him with rather more interest. I took it that he plainly had a kind of common-sense point of view that his sallow emaciated face and his threadbare alpaca suit hadn’t quite prepared me for.
“Of course, we don’t want to make any trouble we ain’t obliged to—but facts is facts.”
“I know,” Dr. Birdsong said. There was an ironic flicker in his eyes again. “That’s what makes it hard. I mean, it was an extraordinary hit.”
He had started to speak to me again when Mr. Purcell came to the door and beckoned the two of them inside. I stood there, wishing rather that my friend Colonel Primrose were here so I could go along. I didn’t, some way, trust Irene Winthrop, not with an audience of three men and herself in the tragic role . . . though I wouldn’t have cared, of course, if it hadn’t been for Cheryl and Dan and Mara. But Colonel Primrose and his Sergeant Buck were on their way to Alaska, doing something about alien fishing rights in the Bering Sea for the government, and Dr. Birdsong obviously regarded me as alien corn. And so for once I had the privilege of minding my own business and keeping quietly out of the way.
Or so I thought. I could, at any rate, have gone quietly up to my room, at that moment, and that was what I had in mind as I passed the door of the sitting room. Inside I saw Irene seated in the sofa by the fireplace, her head back against the gay flowered chintz curtains, her eyes closed. Mr. Purcell sat beside her, with troubled eyes; Mr. Dorsey the sheriff, obviously ill at ease, was standing by the door. At the other end of the room, visible to me in the Chippendale mirror over the mantel, was Dr. Birdsong. His hands rested lightly in the pockets of his tweed jacket, his head bent a little, watching the other three in a kind of grimly detached fashion that for some reason was rather disturbing. Whether he actually then knew all the things about Rick and the rest of us that came out later, and whether, knowing, he planned then to keep them to himself, I don’t know. I knew he was a strange man. But I believe it’s true that under different circumstances he would have let Irene’s personal influence with Mr. Purcell, and Lieutenant Regan’s inexperience in murder outside the colored, Saturday night and bootleg classes, together settle the unpleasant fact of Rick’s death in the pleasantest way possible. I even think he would have preferred doing it that way, if it hadn’t been for Dan . . . and for Mrs. Jellyby.
I hadn’t thought of Mrs. Jellyby then, nor for a long time, and I don’t suppose I
should have then, except that as I came to the staircase and started up I heard a voice that it took me a full second to recognize as Natalie Lane’s at the telephone on the upper landing.
“You’re sure he was coming to Romney?”
It must have been the urgency in her voice that stopped me from going on up, that and the fact that Natalie Lane seemed to me to be acting, on the whole, in a definitely quaint fashion—this being the third time I’d come upon her hovering about in the background of the curious things that seemed to be going on at Romney. At any rate I promptly went downstairs again, with as much clatter as my sneakers could make, and out the back garden door, the one Dan and I had come in the night before. The broken bow was gone, I noticed. Old Yarborough appeared in the hall and hooked the screen door, and padded away, muttering under his breath. I went down the stone stairs to the white oyster-shell drive, and stopped.
A uniformed state policeman was sitting on the running board of a khaki-colored car, smoking a cigarette. I looked past him down the grassy range to the big target, its golden heart gleaming in the sun. Beyond it, covered with a gray tarpaulin, poor Rick’s body lay, profoundly still. The policeman got up as I came down, pushed his helmet back on his boyish head—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two—and came toward me.
“Say, who is that old dame in the straw hat with the bag of seeds?” he said. “I guess they’re seeds.”
And when I looked blank he said, “She’s nuttier’n a fruit cake, if you ask me. She gave me these.”
He took a little white cloth sack out of his pocket and handed it to me. It had a paper tag, on which was written, in an old-fashioned delicate script, “Columbine from Romney.”
The young cop put it back in his pocket.
“I told her she couldn’t go over there.” He nodded toward the range, where they’d put up a couple of saw horses to keep people from treading on the grass. “She says to me, ‘Young man, my work won’t wait,’ and she went right ahead, picking things off the bushes. Jeez, I hope it’s all right.”