Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  “Look, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Everybody who shoots around here uses what they call the point-of-aim method. Nobody shoots point-blank—which is what shooting at Rick with his lighter for a target would have meant. Nobody could have been sure of a hit that way. When you’re hunting with a bow and arrow it doesn’t matter if you miss the first time; the arrow’s silent, it doesn’t frighten an animal. I’ve hunted game with a bow and arrow in Zambesi, which is how I happen to know. If you’re hunting a man it’s different.—And nobody hunts game here, and everybody uses a point-of-aim.”

  I had then even less knowledge of archery than I ended my week at Romney with, so I hadn’t a very clear idea of what he was getting at.

  “I suppose a point-of-aim is something you aim at so you can hit your target?”

  “An arrow describes an arc when it’s projected from a bow, Mrs. Latham,” he said patiently. “If you aimed at your target you’d go a long way over it. They put something on the ground in front of the target to aim at.”

  “And . . . if they could have had a point-of-aim?” I inquired.

  “Several people qualified,” he said, with an ironic glance. “Irene’s about the best. Mara’s almost as good. Cheryl’s even better if she’s at top form. Tillyard isn’t bad, Rick himself was about even with Irene. But there couldn’t have been a point-of-aim—not at night.”

  “Which lets out Irene, Cheryl, Mara and Major Tillyard.”

  He shook his head.

  “Which lets out the point-of-aim.”

  “Well,” I said, “if—in some inconceivable way—there had been a point-of-aim, are they really the only ones who could have killed Rick? I mean, would it let out Natalie, and Alan Keane and his father, and Mrs. Jellyby? And Mr. Dunthorne is already out, and Dan . . .”

  “Dunthorne was at the Fountain in Port Tobacco,” he said quietly. “And all I’ve said about Dan is that if it was a target arrow he shot, he didn’t kill Rick with it. It isn’t going to be easy for him to explain the cuts on his knuckles and the bruises on Rick’s face.”

  I said nothing.

  “You see, no matter how bizarre a method anyone uses to murder a person, the fact still remains, Mrs. Latham, that the two important points to consider—in any murder—are first, motive, and second, opportunity. The business of detection begins there. They are the points-of-aim, Mrs. Latham. They may seem pretty pedestrian, but there they are.”

  “So if it turned out that Irene was the one person in all Charles County who could have let fly an arrow that could have killed her son, she still didn’t do it, because she’s also the one person who’d have no motive for killing him.”

  He looked at me oddly again.

  “If you’d been around here for the last six months, Mrs. Latham, you’d think Irene had about as much reason to kill Rick as . . . anybody.”

  That quarrel of the night before—and no doubt many other quarrels too—was public property then, I thought.

  “Rick’s opposed his mother’s marriage to Sidney Tillyard as bitterly, and violently, and publicly as could be done. There was a scene at the Fountain bar the other night that hit a local all-time high. I doubt if the Colonial clergyman who was convicted of bigamy made a worse noise.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Oh, Rick had had too much, and Tillyard dropped in on his way home for a nightcap.”

  “Which gives Major Tillyard—not Irene—a motive for killing Rick, doesn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “And he can shoot a bow and arrow?”

  “Yes. On the other hand, he was with me, on the other side of Port Tobacco, eight miles away.”

  “Well,” I remarked, “if you’ve ever read a detective story, you know eight miles is nothing if there’s an obstacle between a man and the woman whose money he wants to marry.”

  “Tillyard has as much money as Irene, if not more. And has rheumatism in his knee, furthermore. I mean, he couldn’t possibly have got back here. He’d left his car. Even if he could have borrowed or hired one in Port Tobacco at that time of night—which he didn’t, so far as I can find out—he couldn’t have walked to the house from where that tree was down across the road.”

  “He wouldn’t have had to,” I observed. “His car was out there.”

  Dr. Birdsong frowned.

  “I’m not insisting,” I said. “I just thought that while we were going in for motives, there’s no use not seeing the one that’s closest under our noses.”

  He smiled.

  “I think you’re tilting at windmills to keep from having to see the motive just under your nose.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  “What about this?—Irene has kicked like a steer at giving Rick his allowance or his share of the estate. She agreed to make him an allowance when he married. He did, and she didn’t—on the pretext that she didn’t approve of the marriage. That just doesn’t make sense. If he’d married a hoofer, or a waitress, it might have. But he didn’t. The point is, Mrs. Latham . . .”

  He stopped. I had the feeling that he was suddenly aware of being pretty serious, and was also a little surprised at finding himself in the position of discussing his neighbor for all the world like the village barber. He shrugged his shoulders and went on more casually.

  “The point it . . . that Irene Winthrop is a miser—just as surely as one of these old women who dies on relief and has ten thousand dollars cached in the mattress. The difference is in the externals of it. If Irene conceivably killed Rick, it wasn’t because she was opposed to his marriage or he was opposed to hers: it was because he was demanding his inheritance and she didn’t want to let him have it. If Tillyard killed Rick, it would only have been in self-defense, and this obviously wasn’t. Rick wasn’t a serious obstacle to his mother’s marriage. Irene is just as determined to marry as Tillyard is. Perhaps more so. And while each of them sees the advantages in it, they’re not starry-eyed lovers, like Alan and Mara, ready to sell their souls as well as risk their necks to have each other.”

  The idea of Irene being a kind of miser kept going around in my head so that I scarcely heard the last of what he was saying. If true, I thought, it explained many things. But it was hard to reconcile that with the lavishness of Romney or with Irene’s own personal extravagance, in clothes and jewelry and furs.

  “Of course,” Dr. Birdsong went on—and his voice, detached and casual, struck like a white-hot poker into my consciousness—“it’s Cheryl that’s on the spot.”

  He turned and looked at me with startling abruptness, with that sudden uncanny awareness of unspoken truth that all good doctors seem instinctively to have. And he smiled faintly. “So that’s what you’re trying to sidestep, is it, Mrs. Latham.—I didn’t know you knew her.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I never saw her until last night.”

  He looked at me steadily for a moment and turned away. After a while he said, very soberly, as if speaking from something pretty deep inside him, “Money has always seemed to me to be the most powerful corrosive in human life. Those old Hebrew johnnies who said the love of it was the root of all evil hit the nail on the head.”

  As this tack seemed to me to veer directly opposite any path that would lead to Cheryl, and eventually to Dan, I clutched at it.

  “I don’t see who gains by Rick’s death,” I said, “except people who already have a good deal of money. Irene, and Major Tillyard, if she really did intend to divide the estate, as she says she did.”

  “Or any of the others who’ll come into it some day, like Dan and Mara.”

  He apparently didn’t know about Natalie, I thought, or my own two sons, who’d some day get one-fourth of one-fourth of the estate. I tried vaguely to think how much that would be. More, of course, now that Rick was dead.

  “And chiefly Cheryl, as Rick’s widow.”

  “But Irene has the apportioning of the estate,” I said. “She doesn’t have to include Cheryl—just as she didn’t even have to include R
ick.”

  Dr. Birdsong gave me an ironic smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been wondering about that.”

  “I shouldn’t imagine it was a secret,” I said. “Mr. Winthrop’s will is probably registered at Port Tobacco. If the county registrar is anything like the one in the town I was brought up in, everybody knows what’s what without even having to bother to go to the court house.”

  He nodded.

  “I forgot Mr. Winthrop died here.—That ought to absolve Cheryl . . . knowing as she does that her mother-in-law regards her as complete poison.”

  I don’t know how long this conversation would have gone on if the big bell outside the kitchen that once called in the hands from the tobacco fields and now calls in the family and guests hadn’t broken it up. In one way I was very glad . . . for I don’t know how long I could have gone on being immune from something in him that made me—quite against my better judgment—want to open up and tell him everything I knew, and a lot, probably, that I didn’t.

  Because there was something about Dr. Birdsong that was curiously . . . fascinating is too much of a word, intriguing too little. Perhaps fascinating is nearer to what I mean, because it does imply a certain sense of danger, and at the same time indicates that one is free to take it or leave it alone. I suppose it also implies that one hasn’t sense enough to do the latter. And I gathered, abundantly I may say, in the next few days, that I wasn’t the first woman who had found Dr. Birdsong pretty irresistible with practically no encouragement of any kind . . . except a willing ear and a detached smile. But let any attractive man reach the age of forty unmarried, and he’s bound to become legendary in the countryside. If he’s also a doctor, the fact that every woman adores a good bedside manner and an understanding professional ear that won’t send her a bill oughtn’t to be entirely ignored. Not, I hasten to say, that I didn’t stoutly demolish every impulse I had to talk about my sinuses, or that my surprising visit to him wasn’t wholly inadvertent. But that was still to come. Now we went up the stairs together, each with his own thoughts, and not—if the truth were told—very flattering ones at that.

  The peacock strutted before us up the broad alley of box like something out of the Lord Mayor’s show. Half-way up to the pillared portico I said, “Would you mind, by the way, telling me why you’ve been asking me so many questions? Or why I answered them?”

  “You asked me just as many,” he said, with an amused sudden grin. “And I answered them—or evaded them just as you did. Except rather more reasonably. You see Mrs. Latham, I’m trying to find out who murdered Rick Winthrop. I’m a special officer.” He held open his jacket and I blinked at the silver badge with “Special Officer—Charles Co.” on it.

  “Then you’re . . . you’re official?”

  He nodded. If it’s true that drowning people re-live their whole lives in one swift moment, they’re certainly cleverer than I am. I couldn’t even re-live the last half hour of mine, try desperately as I did to remember what I’d said—or implied—and what its consequences would be.

  “The only thing you told me that I didn’t know already, Mrs. Latham,” he remarked casually, with that exasperating intuition of his, “was that Cheryl had some strong motive for wishing Rick out of the way that has nothing to do with money.”

  “Did I tell you that, or are you guessing it, Dr. Birdsong?” I asked quietly.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said. There must be times when God forgives people for lying.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said.

  It was not only a lie, of course, but a very foolish one; and it didn’t need the insight of a highly trained observer of human behavior—which Dr. Birdsong definitely was—to spot it instantly. Dan and Cheryl could no more be in the same room without establishing a magnetic field than two parts of hydrogen could come in contact with one part of oxygen and not form water—if that is what they do. They didn’t seem to look at each other, and hadn’t, so far as I knew, said two words, beyond “Good morning,” but each was so intensely aware of the other that anyone not as blind as a bat couldn’t help seeing it. And when, after the simple buffet lunch in the dining room, Irene excused Cheryl and Mara, Dan’s eyes unconsciously following her were so poignantly revealing, Dr. Birdsong’s level gaze so undeceived, that I whispered to him, “Stop it, you’re being indecent.”

  But for the rest of that day I saw Dr. Birdsong’s slate-blue eyes resting on him with a new tranquil interest.

  12

  I don’t think, looking back on it, that that in itself was the reason for the slow sick feeling of apprehension that curdled the spoon bread and deviled crab in the pit of my stomach. It was much more the sudden sharp-eyed calculation in Irene Winthrop’s blue unclouded eyes, the almost imperceptible tightening around her red mouth as she glanced from her son’s face to Cheryl’s taut gold-tipped figure going through the carved rubbed-pine door before she turned her back and held Mr. Purcel’sl cup to the silver coffee urn.

  I should have liked to see her face just then. I have the feeling that that moment crystallized her antagonism to her elder son’s young widow . . . and I’m not sure, as a matter of fact, that it wasn’t the most justifiable moment of that otherwise totally unjustifiable week. I doubt if any mother, even one with as rudimentary a maternal feeling as Irene had, could have been completely composed just then. She couldn’t have helped realizing, just at that moment, that whatever hold she had on her son was powerless.—Or most mothers couldn’t. Ordinary norms didn’t seem to apply to Irene.

  I glanced back at Dr. Birdsong. He was looking at Natalie Lane, auburn-haired and handsome, with Fellowes Dunthorne by the Chinese Chippendale serving table. She looked at me exactly as I imagine a very well-bred and stream-lined tigress would look, waiting in a jungle bower for a chattering well-fed monkey to drop into her paws. And somehow I had the feeling that if any of the Winthrops was to be the monkey, it was not Dan but Irene.

  Mr. Fellowes Dunthrone I couldn’t, I’m afraid, entirely make out. He had turned, for some reason—or maybe it was his natural color, intensified by the very horsey jacket, cravat and pin he had on, though I must say without any olfactory tinge of the stable—a curious mustard color. His eyes roamed the room, avoiding the people in it but resting with something more than interest on the Sheraton banquet table, the Aubusson carpet, the Chippendale chairs, the oil painting of General Washington over the carved pearwood mantel. It may have been accidental, or I may have been imagining things, but I certainly thought I saw his thick very practical fingers move caressingly over the leg of the Hepplewhite sideboard and along its satinwood inlay. I know I saw him turn the heavy three-pronged fork over, and frown as if slightly confused by the 999/1000 on the back of it. I know that, because Major Tillyard, standing near Irene at the other sideboard opposite the fireplace, saw him too, and smiled as our eyes met.

  I wasn’t particularly surprised, therefore, later that afternoon as I started out of my room, to hear Dan’s voice saying, very offensively, “Is there something in my brother’s room you particularly want, Dunthorne?” and Mr. Dunthorne’s hasty denial: “No, no—I was just looking at that table with the spade feet.”

  And I heard Dan, who on occasion could be quite necessarily rude, answer, “Guests at Romney usually stay downstairs when they aren’t in their rooms, Dunthorne.”

  He closed his door. I saw Mr. Dunthorne beat a rather hasty retreat down the hall. I didn’t hear him going down the stairs, but when I looked out the window I saw him down on the oyster-shell drive, by his car, an elaborate silver-gray European number with yellow leather upholstery and so much chromium trimming that it was too dazzling to look at comfortably. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard him go along the hall to Rick’s room either, though I’d been listening because I wanted to speak to Cheryl when she came along. I looked down at the thick composition soles of Mr. Dunthorne’s shoes. It seemed very odd.

  Then I wondered if it was so very odd afte
r all, and I found myself suddenly very much interested in Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne. And for some inexplicable reason it dawned on me then that it must have been he that Natalie Lane was talking about over the phone that morning.

  Her words and her urgent tone came back to me: “You’re sure he’s coming to Romney?”

  I sat down on the love seat between the open windows. For the first time the problem of who had killed Rick Winthrop, and why, seemed to me to be extremely important . . . and extremely bewildering.

  I looked down on Mr. Dunthorne’s dazzling vehicle again, and on the bald-spotted top of Mr. Dunthorne’s head. Just then he glanced up with sudden alert interest. Old Yarborough had come out on the porch and was peering down at him through his thick lenses. Behind him, some way back, was Mara. Yarborough drew himself up in all his very considerable dignity, and said, in the deep voice he reserves for rather special occasions, “The public ain’t admitted to Romney at this time, suh . . . so we wish yo’ good day, suh.”

  The expression on Mr. Dunthorne’s thick face was definitely indescribable. It turned from mustard to deep red. And Mara giggled, and then controlled herself, and stepped forward with a dignity almost matching Yarborough’s.

  “This gentleman is a guest, Yarborough,” she said.

  The old darky pulled off his spectacles.

  “Mr. Rick’s guest.”

  “ ’Deed an’ Ah’m sorry,” Yarborough said. He turned to Mr. Dunthorne. “ ’Deed an’ Ah is, suh. But yo’ sho’ don’ look lak no guest to me.”

  He scuttled back into the house. Mara came down the steps.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Dunthorne,” she said sweetly. “But you do look awfully public, you know. We never see people as grand as you except Garden Week. And by the way, didn’t I hear you telling Mr. Purcell you didn’t try to come out to Romney last night? Because if you really didn’t, you ought to speak very firmly to somebody at the Fountain. Your tire marks are all over the mud just beyond where the tree fell. You ought to look into it, Mr. Dunthorne.”