Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  He stopped as Cheryl and Mara, passing the door, saw us inside, hesitated a moment and came in. Cheryl’s hyacinth eyes, moving past his tall figure to the exhibits on the table, widened. She seemed slimmer, and more vulnerable, just then than she had seemed before. I saw Irene’s eyes resting on her harden as she came forward quickly, her lips parted, her long gold-flecked lashes suddenly moist. It was the first time any memory of her short life with Rick that I’d seen called up had seemed to move her, or bring back anything that didn’t put her still further on the defensive.

  She came up to the table and stood looking down at it, her face a little pale.

  “He . . . he was asking for it, last night,” she said.

  In the silence that fell in the room Dr. Birdsong’s voice was oddly quiet, though alive like his dog’s eyes.

  “For what, Cheryl?”

  I glanced quickly at Dan Winthrop. He had one eye on Cheryl and one on Dr. Birdsong, and the muscles under his sun-bronzed jaw were thin white ridges.

  “The lighter,” Cheryl said. “It was the only thing he had that he really liked very much . . . that he’d never sell when he needed money. He won it from Mr. Dunthorne. It always brought him luck, he said.”

  She turned toward Irene.

  “He told me to be sure to remind you . . .”

  Her voice caught for a moment.

  “. . . to remind you to give it back to him. But so . . . so many things happened I forgot about it.”

  We all stood there, totally breathless. Only Irene’s blank horrified face as she turned slowly and looked up at the man beside her showed that it was not herself but Major Tillyard—the man she was about to marry—who was, in light of what Dr. Birdsong had just been saying, being quietly and with complete unconsciousness of the act, accused of the murder of her son.

  We all stood, utterly aghast. And Major Tillyard, I may say, was as aghast as the rest of us.

  14

  The fact that Cheryl—and no matter if with the utmost innocence and naïvete—was virtually accusing her mother-in-law’s prospective husband of murder was of course absolutely incredible. It was also a very awkward thing to cope with according to the established rules of etiquette. I don’t know who turned the whitest there, Major Tillyard himself or Irene . . . or Cheryl as she realized, without understanding, that she must have done something pretty awful. She looked from one blank face to another—at Irene’s, at Mr. Purcell’s, at mine.

  “Have I . . . I’m terribly sorry . . .” she stammered.

  Major Tillyard took a very deep breath and ran his finger around under his collar.

  “It’s . . . it’s the timing that makes it . . . well, rather overwhelming, Cheryl,” he said.

  The color came gradually back to his face.

  “Now, Irene!” he added quickly—for Irene Winthrop had also recovered herself, and was, I saw, on the point of becoming exceedingly vocal.

  He turned to the State’s Attorney.

  “I did have Rick’s lighter. He handed it over for me to hold yesterday afternoon when you and he and Natalie were in swimming. I forgot to give it back to him until I started home with Birdsong. When I remembered it then, I came back.”

  He glanced at Dr. Birdsong, who nodded.

  “I put it on Rick’s desk, and on my way out I met him, and told him I’d put it there. He asked me to wait a minute and get a letter to post for him as I went through Port Tobacco—Jim had already taken the mail pouch down to the barn. Which I did.”

  He glanced again at Dr. Birdsong, who nodded again. I remembered that letters at Romney had to be in the leather pouch in the hall by ten o’clock so that the colored stable boy could take it down to the barn, where the first milk truck picked it up in the morning without disturbing the household.

  “It was to Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne in New York. If I’d known Mr. Dunthorne was spending the night at the Fountain Inn, I could have delivered it in person, but I didn’t, so I posted it.”

  Major Tillyard’s arm tightened around Irene’s slim black-clad shoulders. “Now, now,” he said. “She hadn’t any idea of what she was saying. How could she have known I returned the thing?”

  “Oh, of course she didn’t mean anything, Mother!” Mara cried. “What—”

  Irene’s voice breaking in was icy calm, but her face was still pale with anger.

  “Then perhaps one of you can tell Mr. Purcell who took Rick’s lighter off his desk?”

  “When did Rick tell you to remind him of it, Cheryl?” Dr. Birdsong asked.

  “When he was dressing for dinner.—Oh, I’m so terribly sorry!”

  Major Tillyard turned to the State’s Attorney.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of proof, Purcell.”

  Irene’s face brightened.

  “But you have!” she cried. “Rick had his lighter when he came in my room to ask me where Cheryl was! He showed me a letter he’d got and burned it in my fireplace. The reason I remember he used his lighter is that I don’t smoke, and so I never have any matches in my room. I wanted to light a candle earlier in the evening, because the light in the attic closet is burned out, and I had to ring for Yarborough to light it for me.”

  Major Tillyard took another deep breath. “Thank you, my dear. I hope you aren’t just making that up to help me out of a tight spot.”

  “Or if you are you’ll stick to it,” Mara said, with perfectly inexcusable flippancy.

  Irene looked at her and reached for the petit point bell pull. When Yarborough appeared in the door she said, “Did I call you upstairs just before dinner, last night?”

  “Yas ma’am, yo’ sho’ did—when Ah was tryin’ to get th’ table set,” the old darky said. He shook his white kinky head. “Yo’ couldn’ fin’ no matches, to light a candle with.”

  “Did you leave a box of matches in my room?”

  “No ma’am, Ah forgot, but Ah’ll go do direc’ly.”

  “Don’t bother,” Irene said curtly. “That’s all.”

  She looked at Mara.

  “I’m sorry!” Mara mumbled. “I was just being funny—I didn’t mean what you said wasn’t true.”

  Irene was so angry that she had quite forgotten to be charming. She turned to the State’s Attorney. And I suppose her distress was quite genuine.

  “This is all terribly . . . unfortunate, Barney. It makes it just that much more imperative to find out who did . . .”

  She turned away and put her handkerchief to her mouth, trembling uncontrollably.

  And poor Cheryl! The color had seeped gradually back into her face, and burned now in two intense spots under her steadfast hyacinth eyes. Mara, standing a little behind her, tugged gently at her belt. Immediate retreat, I saw, was clearly her solution for the situation. It struck me abruptly that retreat had always been Mara’s solution of her mother . . . and that it was strange, and rather fine, that in spite of that she wasn’t letting Alan Keane retreat when it would have been so much the easier way.

  Cheryl was different. I don’t think retreat was in her nature. It certainly didn’t show now, in her lovely head as proud as a race horse’s, or her level unflinching gaze. It seemed to me that her chin had come up, defensively; and then I realized why when I looked away from her and saw Mr. Purcell the State’s Attorney, his rather viscid gray eyes resting on her with about as much enthusiasm as you could see in the eyes of a buck shad on the end of a trolling line. He had furthermore the air of a pretty shrewd observer to whom this was no surprise of any kind—this was, in fact, precisely what he had been waiting for.

  “It seems to me, Miss Cheryl, that this would be a good time for you just to tell us what happened between yourself and your husband here last night.”

  Irene raised her head sharply.

  “Barney—you promised me you wouldn’t drag out all Cheryl and Rick’s difficulties! What can the point be, except to distress and mortify everybody!”

  “That was before anybody had been practically accused of murder, Ir
ene,” Mr. Purcell said.

  Major Tillyard managed a smile.

  “I don’t think it was Cheryl who accused me of murder,” he said dryly. “It was all the rest of you. Cheryl merely stated a fact that was true as far as she knew.—Just because you’re coming up for election again, Barney, is no reason for chucking your weight about unnecessarily.”

  Mr. Purcell’s eyes and mouth hardened. He was, I thought, a man who could be flattered and enticed, but he couldn’t be pushed. He still looked at Cheryl. And she couldn’t have been more adequate to the situation.

  “I’m perfectly willing to tell you what I know about last night, Mr. Purcell,” she said quietly. “It’s quite simple, really. You probably know Rick and I weren’t particularly . . . compatible. I don’t think it was all Rick’s fault.”

  Irene’s hand winding in her pearls stopped still.

  “—Or all mine. It . . . just didn’t work. Rick wanted a divorce. I was brought up to believe that divorce, if it’s ever justified, is only a last resort—not a first. But I didn’t realize that Rick felt very . . . very differently about a lot of things. Before dinner he offered me a certain sum to divorce him. He’d been drinking, and I knew he didn’t have that much money.”

  She flushed as Irene drew a sharp breath.

  “It wasn’t that I wanted the money—it was that since I knew he didn’t have it, I didn’t think he seriously meant what he was saying. I said we’d decide it in the morning, when he was . . . more himself. But after dinner I realized he had meant it. And I realized also that I’d never been anything but a means to an end, and that the end hadn’t panned out, and the sooner I got out the better, for everybody.”

  She raised her wide tranquil eyes to Mr. Purcell’s shrewd face. I didn’t know whether either Dr. Birdsong or Mr. Purcell realized how much she was leaving out of this story that would have made her so much more sympathetic and appealing to any unbiased judge. Certainly the rest of us did. I thought even Irene must have had a twinge of conscience.

  “Anyway, I left,” Cheryl said quietly. “But Rick had changed his mind. He said . . . a lot of things I can’t seem to remember.”

  “But you came back?”

  “Yes. The tree was down over the road, and I couldn’t get a car out, and I . . . I didn’t have courage enough to walk as far as Port Tobacco by myself, so late.”

  “I see,” Mr. Purcell said slowly. “What time would it be that you came back?”

  “About half-past one.”

  “Then how do you account for the fact that one of the men on his way to milk saw you come in with your hat and furs in your hand?”

  I could see Dan’s arm tense, resting on the mantel, and his eyes change, never moving from Cheryl’s face.

  “I didn’t say I came back to the house. I didn’t. I went to Mrs. Jellyby’s and stayed till morning.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I didn’t want to come back here.”

  “Then why did you sneak back this morning?”

  Her lithe body stiffened, the blue of her eyes deepened. I didn’t dare look at Dan.

  “I didn’t sneak back. I came back because Mrs. Jellyby . . . persuaded me it was the sensible thing to do.”

  “Because you knew Rick was dead?”

  “Because I thought he was very much alive,” Cheryl retorted coolly.

  There was an amused gleam in Dr. Birdsong’s eyes that seemed to be focused on everybody in the room simultaneously.

  Mr. Purcell took a cigar out of his pocket and bit the end off with considerable deliberation. “I take it you were alone when Rick persuaded you to stay?”

  “He didn’t persuade me to stay.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  She hesitated a fraction of an instant—trying, like old Yarborough, I thought, to avoid, as skilfully as possible, the lie direct. I found myself wondering whether, if she’d known that Irene had stood on the landing watching Rick with his raised riding crop, and realized that Irene must know now that she was not telling the whole truth, she would have played so directly into Irene’s hands. I doubt actually if it would ever have occurred to her that Irene, no matter how deeply she resented her, would have gone to the lengths she did. Because it was Mara, of course, that Cheryl was trying to save, and it was Mara that Irene was perfectly willing to sacrifice in order to hurt Cheryl. At that, I don’t think Irene knew—not really—what she was doing to Mara. If she had, I think sheer vanity would have dictated another course. I’m not sure even now that it would have made any difference in the long run, however, or that the deluge set in motion could have been averted. Too much water had run under too many bridges, and backed into too many stagnant pools and stopped there.

  When Mr. Purcell stood there asking Cheryl if Rick had threatened her, her quiet “No” seemed very game and true, with perhaps a higher quality of truth than the literal statement of evasive fact that Yarborough went in for. Rick hadn’t threatened Cheryl. It was Mara he had threatened. He probably knew quite well, I thought, that for herself she was fearless. I suppose it was that about him that made Dr. Birdsong say he was a bully. At any rate, it seemed pretty nauseating to me that that denial of Cheryl’s should have been twisted around so that Mr. Purcell had practically no alternative, later, but to assume that Cheryl had just deliberately lied to save herself.

  But that was all in the future. What surprised me a little at the moment was that nobody seemed to be conscious of the fact that Mara Winthrop’s face was the color of old newspaper, or that as she and Cheryl went out it was her step that was unsteady, not Cheryl’s.

  15

  I’d followed them out chiefly because ever since I’d read that unfinished note under Rick’s desk pad, and heard that he did finish some kind of a letter to Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne, I’d found myself more and more interested in that gentleman. If Natalie Lane had felt the necessity of calling him up in Port Tobacco, she must have known he was there. If she’d known that, why hadn’t Rick known? Why had he written to him in New York the night before? How well did Natalie know Mr. Dunthorne, and why, if she knew him well enough to phone him, had the two of them spent the afternoon within fifty yards of each other without speaking?

  It seemed very strange to me, and it seemed stranger when I wandered into the library to see Mr. Dunthorne there, all elegantly got up in a white dinner coat like the one Rick had worn the night before, down on his knees going through the bottom shelves of a corner cupboard that I’d never seen opened before in my life.

  “Looking for something, Mr. Dunthorne?” I inquired.

  I must say he was remarkably cool about it.

  “No, no. Just having a look at the dowelling on this door,” he said airily. “Extraordinary how those old chaps got things together, what?”

  “The old chap that got that cupboard together,” I said, “has a shop in Queen Street in Port Tobacco. The old one’s in the other corner.”

  He had the grace to blush. I don’t know whether we’d have got along any better after that or not, for the problem didn’t come up. I heard Dan calling me, and I went back through the hyphen to the hall.

  “What about driving me in to Port Tobacco?” he said. “I had the boy bring your car around, on an off chance.”

  “Look, darling,” I said. “You’re not taking yourself too seriously, are you?”

  I was rather startled by the expression on his normally quite irresponsible face.

  “Because that’s practically fatal, even to a deputy sheriff.”

  “No,” he said. “I just want to check up on a couple of things.”

  He stopped, looking out at the square figure of Mrs. Jellyby, in her peaked straw sombrero, moving methodically along the wire backstop of the tennis courts, tying bits of red string around the sweet peas she’d planted there and wanted saved for seed.

  “Fiddling while Rome burns,” Dan said, with something like his old familiar grin. “Mother says it’s got so every flower she wants for the house has
a claim staked on it.”

  He shrugged.

  “At that, she’s probably the only happy person at Romney.”

  We turned out of the circle and started down the long white oyster-shell drive between the rows of cedars.

  “What are you checking up on, and in which of your capacities?” I asked. “Official or unofficial?”

  “This—and both.”

  He pointed toward the roadside, and I put my foot on the brake and stopped the car at a hole in the black cedar line as gaping as a missing front tooth. It was a good half mile from the house. The old tree lay out in the tobacco field. I don’t know why it reminded me of a big dog lying dead at the side of the highway, except that it’s a grave defect in my psyche that I can’t bear to see a dog or tree torn ruthlessly down. That the wind had done this, and that it was all quite impersonal, didn’t help much.

  Dan opened the door and got out, and I followed him. The stump of the tree was quite rotten inside a thin circle of clean splintered wood. Dan examined it carefully, then clambered over the drainage ditch, full of wild roses and honeysuckle, and examined the tree. I started to follow him, snagged a new pair of stockings in the briar and thought better of it. After a few minutes he came back. He looked even grimmer than when we’d started out.

  “What is the matter?” I demanded.

  He shook his head.

  “Just dirty work at the crossroads,” he said, and went back to the stump of the old cedar. He began rooting around in the grass. Mysteries, I’ve usually found, defeat themselves, so I gave up and went along the road a little ways, looking for the print of Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne’s tires that Mara had so pointedly mentioned to him. I found it, without much trouble. He’d tried to turn around, apparently, but his car was much too long, and he’d obviously given up, after three or four tries, and backed out.

  I called to Dan, and when he came I told him about Mara and Yarborough and showed him the tire tracks. His face brightened for a moment, and then he stood gnawing at his lower lip, looking back at the stump and down at the tracks.