Three Bright Pebbles

by Zenith Brown

  “Look, Mr. Winthrop,” I protested, after an interminable time. “Are you rehearsing for a Christmas pantomime, or what?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell the connection is,” he said.

  “Between what?”

  “Between anything,” he groaned. “Just come back here.”

  We went back to the stump.

  “See that?”

  “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Well, can you see what this is?”

  “I can,” I said patiently. “It’s a chip—probably off the old block.”

  “Precisely. And the point is this. Mr. Keane says he saw Rick out here with an axe, yesterday afternoon, chopping at this.”

  We both looked down at it.

  “What for?” I said.

  “I don’t know. What would you think?”

  “Well,” I said, “it seems a rather circumlocutious method of forestalling a visit from Mr. Dunthorne. It would have been simpler to burn down the house, or wire a stick of dynamite to his battery. I could think of lots of better ways to keep Mr. Dunthorne at home. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Dan nodded. “I know. But the tree has been chopped.”

  I looked at it again.

  “Are you sure Rick did it? You know Mr. Keane hasn’t any particular reason to love Rick.”

  “And a lot of very good reasons to hate his guts.—Look here, Grace,” he added suddenly. “What if he did it himself, to give Alan an alibi?”

  He whistled softly.

  “That’s what it did. I mean, Mr. Keane pointed out to Sam Dorsey that Alan couldn’t have got in unless he walked through the mud.”

  “Except that he—” I started to say that he was in, and stopped, remembering I’d got that information by eavesdropping. I’d got information by eavesdropping many times before, but this was different, someway.

  “Except that weren’t you out there,” I said, as casually as I could manage, “and didn’t you see a lot of things that must have interested you in your capacity of deputy sheriff?”

  He brought the French lighter—one of those things with a dozen yards of rope on it—to a dead stop half-way to his cigarette.

  “Just how much of this are you in on, Grace?”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said sweetly. “For instance: Dr. Birdsong, who’s hunted game with a bow and arrow in Zambesi incidentally, tells me nobody could have shot Rick, even with the flame of his lighter as a target—because everybody around here shoots in the approved target method of ladies’ archery classes, with a point-of-aim. None of them, except possibly your mother—whom he can’t abide—could possibly hit a target without it. Or so he says. And your mother, on the other hand, says Cheryl is the best shot on the place.”

  “And she can’t abide Cheryl.”

  “Precisely. But the point is that that’s what Dr. Birdsong says, and it’s Dr. Birdsong who found the lighter, and it’s Dr. Birdsong who says the lighter hasn’t got Rick’s fingerprints on it.”

  “That was the Department of—”

  “I know. But it was Dr. Birdsong who took it up there, . . . and who could have wiped all the fingerprints in China off it between here and Pennsylvania Avenue. And it was Dr. Birdsong who shot game point-blank in Zambesi.”

  He looked at me very oddly.

  “Look here, Mrs. Latham—I’ve always thought you had a nice mind.”

  We’d got in the car again and had come almost to the end of the long white lane. The sun, down in the western sky, slanted a few last rays across Romney’s tobacco fields, and glistened in the tiny discs in the Stop Boulevard sign at the gate. I slowed down in semi-obedience to it. And then I jammed my foot on the brake and stopped dead, stalling my engine, staring at that sign.

  Dan looked at me patiently, the way men look at women who kill their engines.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I sat there in a complete daze for a moment . . . and then what had been tugging at the shuttered windows of my mind all during the conversation Dr. Birdsong and I had had about shooting bows and arrows down at the float that morning came sharp and clear into my consciousness. And I knew now why he’d come down there, and why he’d stayed there at what must have been a dreary session for him.

  “I suppose you’re in the Mid-summer pantomime,” Dan said.

  I shook my head, opened the door of the car, and got out, the memory of a thing I’d seen there the night before, when Dan and I had come in in the storm, very clear in my mind. I crossed the oyster-shell road to the double right-angle sign to the left, on the highway, that indicates a road coming in on one side only, and stopped again. Three of the small glass buttons were gone out of it, and I could see the marks of a sharp instrument that had pried them out.

  Dan peered over my shoulder, looking perfectly blank.

  “This morning, when your mother and I went out and found Rick,” I said slowly, “there were three little glass discs in the grass, about the middle of the range. I bent over to look at them, because with the sun on them they looked like Aladdin’s jewels in the grass. I didn’t think of them until I went back and noticed they were gone. But don’t you see?”

  He didn’t, or didn’t seem to, anyway. And maybe it was too fantastic.

  “Dr. Birdsong,” I said, “who seems to be the village expert, says Rick couldn’t possibly have been shot with that arrow that he was obviously shot with unless William Tell was here in person. Even if Rick’s lighter was lighted and made a first-rate target. No one here could have been sure of such a hit; no one would dare to take such a chance, because in such a case you couldn’t afford a miss—Rick would know, and all that. The only way anybody here could have been fairly sure of hitting that mark—assuming he was a very good shot—would be by using the scientific point-of-aim method. And he couldn’t possibly have used the point-of-aim method at night.”

  A light dawned slowly in Dan’s big face.

  “I get you,” he said. “They did have a point-of-aim, even in the dark. Those glass buttons were it?”

  I nodded.

  He shook his head. “You don’t think they’d catch the light from a cigarette lighter, darling?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. But they’d catch light from the hall, or the upstairs windows, or a flashlight, or the parking lights of a car, or the long lights if the car was parked even as far down the drive as that fallen tree.”

  He took out a pack of cigarettes and stood, apparently absorbed in the business of opening it.

  “I don’t know what Dr. Birdsong was trying to prove,” I said. “But there’s one thing that interests me very much.”

  He glanced over at me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why didn’t he see these glass things in the grass himself? He was there with Irene after I left. If he didn’t see them then, somebody else who knew what they meant picked them up.”

  He looked down at his cigarette for a moment.

  “You think it was Mother?” he asked, quietly.

  16

  “Look, Dan,” I said. “I wouldn’t put it beyond your mother, if it was anybody but Rick. I can’t bring myself to believe that she’d . . . Oh, well, the point is that she wasn’t the only person on the range.”

  His eyes sharpened.

  “You don’t mean Birdsong?”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “I mean, is there any reason, just because a man barges in and takes charge of a thing like this, that he’s automatically excluded from suspicion himself?”

  “But he hasn’t any reason—”

  “You mean so far as you know, darling. And he has. He told me himself he’s got a sense of justice . . . and the fact that Mara and Cheryl and Mr. Keane are getting a tough break at Romney apparently burns him up. That’s aside from any personal quarrel he might have had with Rick. And I certainly couldn’t prove that when he came down to the river to tell me nobody could have shot that arrow without a point-of-aim, he had the point-of-aim neatl
y tucked away in his own vest pocket; and I couldn’t say the pebbles he kept shying out into the water were it. I’m just saying he had as much chance to get them as Irene did. And it seems to me now that he was trying to find out if I’d noticed them.”

  Dan shook his head. “He wasn’t on the place—he went home with Tillyard.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. But—unlike Major Tillyard—he had a car.”

  “You think he drove back and walked in from the tree?”

  “He could have, easily enough. But he didn’t have to. He had very neatly arranged with Major Tillyard to take his car as far as the tree, and get into his own on the other side. So all he had to do was get Major Tillyard home, come back to the tree, change to Major Tillyard’s car, drive in, and out again. I should think a first-rate deputy sheriff would arrange to find out if any of all that happened.”

  We’d gone back to the car and were just going over the brow of the hill. Spread out below us, Port Tobacco lay nestled in the twilight, in the narrow valley of Potobac Creek. The lighted clock face in the tiny steeple watched like Cyclops over it. Lights flickered among the fishing craft and sailboats and yachts moored in the basin, like chicks swarming over the feeding pan. Up the hill at our left the chimneys of Rose Hill stood dark and somber against the sapphire sky.

  Neither of us had spoken for a couple of miles. I was thinking—myself rather somber, I suppose—that in effect Cheryl had accused Major Tillyard of murder, I had accused Dr. Birdsong of murder, and it sounded, at least, as if Dan had accused his mother of murder. I started, eventually, to suggest as much to Dan, and glanced at him. He was gazing through the windshield with what, in a younger man, I would call a moon-calf glow in his eyes. Or maybe it was just the odd light from the slate roofs of the village. Anyway, I didn’t interrupt him.

  After a minute he said, “How soon could I decently marry Cheryl?—I mean, if she’d have me?”

  “I thought that was all off,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t know what a tough break she’d had here, or that she and Rick were on the point of splitting up. I guess that wouldn’t have mattered, anyway.”

  “Your mother will cut you off with a shilling, if you do marry her—any time,” I said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “With Cheryl?”

  “You don’t think she married Rick because she thought he had money, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I think she married Rick because of just one reason—he reminded her of you. And she never thought she’d see you again. You do have a definite resemblance, you know . . . especially when Rick was being decent, and when he wasn’t being hounded to death by his creditors.”

  We crossed the bridge over Potobac Creek.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “To the Fountain.”

  I pulled up at the curb behind a small roadster that had been reduced to its lowest terms. The top was gone, and the spare tire was gone, and the left rear tire was practically devoid of rubber, and the right rear tire was just as bad.

  Dan looked at it. “Isn’t that Alan Keane’s?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “If it is he’ll have to start hitch hiking shortly.”

  17

  We went up the verandah stairs of the old inn. It had been the center of the more abundant life when Port Tobacco was a center of trade in early days. A bronze plaque by the door had most of the names that colonial history remembers on it. Washington had dined there, Jefferson, Madison. John Wilkes Booth had dined there, I remembered, but his name wasn’t on the plaque. Now a half dozen farmers from the country were sitting in the old green rocking chairs strewed along the verandah, talking about the price of tobacco. The light in the ceiling was virtually obliterated by mosquitoes and gnats and millers.

  Inside a radio bawled swing music, and an old Chesapeake Bay dog was biting the fleas out of his webbed front foot. Two little boys about eleven were mending fishing tackle under a reading lamp on the table littered with old magazines and newspapers. Through the door at the side I could see a couple of fishermen from the city playing a slot machine. The big fireplace at the end of the main room was the only recognizable sign of the Fountain Inn’s past glory, or its antiquity. It had an old crane with an iron pot hanging from it, and above it on the mantel three fine if rather battered pewter tankards. Over them a couple of oyster rakes and an old-fashioned long barreled flintlock rested, as they had always done, on wood brackets in the pine overmantel. And hanging from one of the brackets was a leather bag that looked like a child’s golf bag, except that it wasn’t. It was a quiver, smoked and dust-covered, and sticking out of it were three smoked and dust-covered feathered arrows.

  And more disturbing to my mind than the quiver and arrows was the tall lank figure in the rusty alpaca suit standing in front of the empty fireplace, talking to Mr. Chew the proprietor and his plump red-headed daughter Betty.

  Mr. Chew was scratching the back of his scrawny neck.

  “I can’t rightly say, Sam, just when them arrows was missing,” he drawled. “There was five, at one time, wasn’t there, Betty?”

  The red-headed girl nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, dad. Because old Mr. Winthrop shot a sea-gull that got tangled up in the church clock hands, is how we happened to have them,” she said positively. “He shot four, and they got all of them back, out of the ivy, but one, and that was lost. I was in the eighth grade and we were reading the Ancient Mariner, and I kept thinking they’d killed an albatross and used to dream about it.”

  She looked up at the dust-covered quiver—Dan and I standing there fascinated.

  “I don’t know when the other two went. I never pay ’em much mind. Anybody could take one and nobody’d notice it.”

  She giggled. “It doesn’t look like anybody’s been disturbing ’em lately. I’ll get a rag and do a little dusting.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I was you, Betty,” the sheriff drawled. “Dr. Birdsong he’s a great one for fingerprintin’ every thing he lays his hands on. Maybe there’s fingerprints on that.”

  The girl turned and saw us, and came across the room, her brown eyes sparkling.

  “Hello, Mrs. Latham! Hello, Dan! I heard you were back! Pa, here’s Dan! I was just talking about the day your father shot the seagull. Remember?—You and me and Rick were out in the kitchen . . .”

  “Eating gingerbread,” Dan said. “I remember. Dad bet old Colonel Masson he could bring down the gull, and Dr. Comegys said he could shoot at the steeple if he’d put up for the damage, because there wasn’t anybody could climb the stairs, they were so rotten.”

  I don’t know how long these childhood reminiscences would have gone on if Mr. Chew hadn’t offered us a drink, which we refused and Mr. Sam Dorsey the sheriff accepted on our behalf. But as soon as the two of them had gone into the bar the plump red-headed girl, her face sobered, drew us away from the bar door.

  “Listen,” she said. “They’re trying to make out Alan Keane swiped one of those arrows to kill Rick with.”

  She looked around at the dining room door where her mother was talking to one of the colored waiters.

  “Can’t you do something, Dan? Alan never killed anybody—not even Rick. But he’s going to do something, unless they let him alone. He came in here tonight looking awful. Pa’s been giving him a room when we aren’t full. Ma feeds him when he’ll take anything but Pa can’t give him a job because your mother holds the mortgage on the Inn, and she’d be sore on account of Alan and Mara. And now she’s found out he’s staying here, and she told Pa she didn’t think he was co-operating with her. So poor Pa had to tell Alan. He won’t go on relief like other people.—You’ve got to do something, Dan! Can’t you talk to your mother? She don’t realize what she’s doing to the kid. Honest, Dan, Alan’s okay.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dan Winthrop’s jaw in quite as ugly a stance.

  “Where is he?” he said quietly.r />
  “He is 321, third floor. It’s the only one empty.”

  She giggled suddenly, her brown eyes sparkling again.

  “I hope Pa don’t find out I sent two men in a swell car over to Miz’ Foster’s Ye Touriste Home. But I don’t guess he’d be very mad with me.”

  We went up the dark worn stairs of the old tavern. How it had escaped fire all these years I couldn’t imagine. The wood in it was so old that it must have been like a tinder box. The red light bulb up there with the painted hand pointing to the fire escape seemed hopelessly inadequate.

  “Your mother is thorough if nothing,” I said, as we went up the third floor stairs.

  “She can’t see anybody’s side but her own,” Dan said. He added, with a grin that had as little mirth in it as I’ve ever seen, “Me, I’m noted as a master of understatement.”

  “What are you planning to do, by the way?”

  “Take the kid out to Romney, to his father’s house, where he belongs.”

  “And what about your mother, darling?”

  I don’t think I’d better repeat his reply to that. He couldn’t have said it unless we’d been old friends of very long standing.

  We turned at the top of the stairs and went along to the room with “321” painted on it in white figures, at the end of the dark narrow hall. Dan, ahead of me, raised his fist to knock on that door, and stopped it in mid-air. I saw then that the old pine panelling between the crossboards had split—with the coming of steam, I supposed—and warped, so that the whole room was visible. I felt Dan’s body stiffen, and came up close behind him, and saw, through the wide crack in the old door, in the split second before his hand shot forward and threw the door open, the figure of Alan Keane sitting at the table, his right hand raised with a pistol in it, in the very act of putting a bullet in his brain.

  18

  It still seems incredible to me that Dan could have moved as trigger-quick as he did. A shot barked out, a bullet hissed past Alan Keane’s head and buried itself in the pink plaster by the window. With one great hand on the boy’s wrist, Dan wrenched the gun from his hand with the other.