by Zenith Brown
For a moment I thought it might be Dan. Then I realized, from the altogether too expensive aroma wafted to my nose, that it must be Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne, in one of his apparently all-too-frequent solitary moments. I stopped automatically to turn back, and then, remembering that I’d promised Natalie Lane to get people to be decent to him, I decided I might at least have one go at it myself. He turned, rather startled at being approached . . . and from all I’d seen of the people who approached him, he might very well view such an action with misgivings.
“Lovely night, isn’t it,” I said.
He grunted very noncommittally, and looked at the long ash on the end of his cigar.
“That’s a marvelous cigar,” I said, sniffing. It really was.
“They’re not so bad,” he said, modestly. “I get them from a friend in Havana. They’re made specially for me—with my name on the band.”
“Really?”
“Some ladies don’t like cigars,” he said.
“I don’t like stale cigar smoke,” I said. “And by the way, Mrs. Winthrop asked me to tell you she does hope you’ll stop on here. Yarborough’ll put your things in the Green Room.”
Mr. Dunthorne looked critcally at his cigar ash.
“I don’t know as I want to,” he said, after a moment, and added, “I guess that surprises you, doesn’t it?”
“I . . . well, I . . . yes,” I mumbled—because it certainly did.
“I had an idea people that lived in places like this”—he waved his cigar out over Romney——“were a cut above the dog eat dog ruckus in there tonight. Of course, I’ve known a long time Rick didn’t get along with his folks. I figured it was because he was an out and out tank, so full of the jitters he couldn’t get along with anybody. Don’t know as I blame him so much, now I’ve met his old lady.”
Irene, I thought to myself, wouldn’t like that, no matter how much money you’ve got, Mr. Dunthorne.
“You see, I was brought up in Hell’s Kitchen, where you don’t expect any different. I always figured there was more in environment than there was in heredity. I figured you couldn’t do anything about your heredity, but you could do what you wanted about your environment. It looks to me right now that all environment does is teach you how to stage a murder without being sent to the chair.”
“We hang them in Maryland,” I said.
“Yeh? Well, I’ll bet you a thousand dollars you don’t hang the guy that bumped off old Rick.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “I haven’t got a thousand dollars, to bet, but I’ll bet we do.”
I hoped I didn’t sound as little positive as I felt, but I must have, because Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne said promptly, “All right, lady, it’ll cost you a hundred if they don’t—and I’ll pay you one grand if they do.”
I felt my hand being shaken and that compact sealed, not with blood probably, because I don’t think the skin broke, but very nearly with broken bones.
“You don’t, by any chance, know who killed Rick, do you?” I inquired dubiously.
“No—but I’ve got a pretty good hunch,” he said. “And I’ve always been pretty lucky backing my hunches.”
I saw the dining room of my house in Georgetown that I’d planned to do over in August staying a spotted Williamsburg blue for another year. Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne had a very convincing air.
He tossed his cigar over the river bank.
“I wish you’d tell me what Mrs. Winthrop’s got against Rick’s wife,” he said, turning to me.
“Just that she married Rick,” I answered. “She wanted him to marry Natalie.”
I felt Mr. Dunthorne’s shrewd eyes indirectly but very intently fixed on my face.
“Why didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Except that Natalie looks to me like the kind of girl that wouldn’t marry a man just because he or she would get money by it.”
I had my hand in the black chiffon folds of my full skirt, so he couldn’t possibly see that my fingers were crossed.
Mr. Dunthrone chewed his lower lip a moment.
“You don’t think she is?” he asked, not as nonchalantly as he tried to sound.
“Any girl who uses her father’s insurance to pay off his debts when she isn’t legally required to,” I said, hoping suddenly that Irene hadn’t just made all that up on the spur of the moment, “and has to get a job and support herself as an immediate consequence of it, certainly isn’t. It would seem quixotically honorable, to most people.”
“It sure would to the people around here,” Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne said. “I’m not sure I don’t agree with ’em. She never mentioned that to me.”
I covered my tracks as casually as I could.
“Then I wouldn’t mention it to her,” I said. “Her aunt told me—is the only way I know about it.”
“Mrs. Winthrop?”
I nodded. “Her mother was Mr. Winthrop’s sister. You probably noticed his portrait over the library mantel. There’s quite a resemblance.”
I hadn’t really noticed much resemblance myself, but if Natalie, I thought, wanted this man impressed, I was delighted to help . . . and I must admit I was a little pleased at my apparent success. It would be funny, I thought quite suddenly then, if it turned out to be Natalie who’d murdered Rick. But I felt safe enough about that. She was the one person at Romney who had no conceivable motive for murdering him, and the only one who wasn’t more or less hovering about the scene of the crime somewhere about when it happened.
Mr. Dunthorne took out a thin gold cigarette case and extended it to me. I took one.
“These have your name on them too?” I asked.
“Just the monogram.”
He held out a lighter, larger and more golden and more magnificent than the one with which Cheryl had confounded Major Tillyard. I puffed at the cigarette. Whatever his taste in clothes and cars, Mr. Dunthorne had certainly had excellent advice on tobacco.
I was on the point of saying as much, and probably making the usual cliché about the cigarette’s having again made Maryland tobacco smokable and Southern Maryland profitable, when I happened to glance back at the house. Under the lantern in the blue ceiling of the portico I saw Natalie Lane’s burnished head. She was looking down our way, apparently undecided whether to join us—break in, I expect she thought of it—or not. I imagined she’d had time to think over our little scene in the upstairs hall and was ashamed, perhaps, of having revealed so much of the storm raging inside her.
I turned back to Mr. Dunthorne. “Shall I tell Yarborough to put your bags in the Green Room?” I asked, just enough down my nose to make it impressive.
“Oh, I say, thanks very much,” he said, in so much the same tone that we both laughed. And I knew that was what he’d really expected Rick’s family to be like—not so simple and unaffected, except for Irene and in spite of the slight touch of murder, as they were. He’d undoubtedly learned his manners from the movies.
I crossed the lawn. Natalie, still standing there, eyed me with a sort of tentative hostility. I went up the steps. “He’s staying all night,” I said. “I’ll have Yarborough bring his things up.”
She said nothing. I looked at her, a little surprised, after what I’d just been through in her behalf. Her cold lovely face with its high proud bony structure seemed paler than usual in the silver light, with the filmy brown net of her dinner frock high at the base of the white marble column of her throat. Her yellow-green eyes were like cat’s eyes in the dark.
“Did you tell her I asked her to ask him?”
“No,” I said—unblushingly.
“Then thanks.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
She went down the stone steps. The fireflies in the grass glided up about the soft folds of her skirt as she moved gracefully across the lawn. I saw her hold out her hand and catch a couple, and watch their light fade out, and light again, between her fingers, like a pale tiny lantern, as she walked toward Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne. If he was at all sus
ceptible to charm and the old South, that ought to finish him, I thought. My grandmother used to put fireflies in a bit of net and tuck them in her hair when she was a girl at a place much like Romney. I shrugged, quite involuntarily, I’m afraid. The conquest—or could it, I wondered, be the propitiation?—of this curious person seemed curiously out of character for Natalie Lane, with that face, and that hair, and with her head too . . . for even Dr. Birdsong agreed with me when we talked about it later that she was a very intelligent person . . . almost too intelligent, I imagine. If it was true that she had deliberately side-stepped Rick, it seemed odd she should be so interested in Mr. Dunthorne, for drunk or sober, Rick, it seemed to me—or would have seemed, up to the night before—was much the more eligible of the two. And as for Dan, so far as I’d seen Natalie hadn’t so much as looked at him, much less held out to him a shapely hand full of fireflies.
But whatever it was all about, I said to myself as I took hold of the screen door knob, Natalie Lane was just the girl who could be trusted to take care of her own business, and I would do well to mind mine.
With that definitely commendable resolution I pulled at the screen. Of course, it was locked. I rattled it, expecting Yarborough to sidle out of the shadows muttering about the mosquitoes, but he didn’t. After a little I got tired of waiting, and started around the dining room wing to the other door. Yarborough was probably sitting on the kitchen stoop, giving the law to a hand up from the tobacco fields.
I stood for a moment looking down the formal gardens to the broad Potomac. At the right where the white balustrade marked the bank, I could see the outline of Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne’s dinner jacket, and the two red tips of his and Natalie’s cigarettes. The rest of them was lost in the shadow of the mimosa tree. I could see thin pencils of light through the drawn Venetian blinds of the library, where Irene was by now interviewing her wayward young. At the left, far down the river, I could see the faint light over the door of the tenant house, and beyond it the floodlights in the barnyard. I wondered vaguely why they should be on, knowing they were there largely for protection from prowlers and chicken thieves. The down-river wing of the house itself was oddly dark, it seemed, though why I should have thought then that its darknes wass odd I haven’t an idea. It had been dark enough the night before, even with the hyphen lights on and the candles in the dining room, when Dan and I stood where I was now, seeing Mr. Keane emerge out of the shadowy rain-swept path.
I stood there for a moment, letting the silence and peace of the night smooth out the furrows in my heart. Then I went slowly down the shallow old steps and turned into the dark path along the dining room wing. I walked along, aware, now that I’d quit projecting my own consciousness onto the night, of the small lovely sounds and tenuous eerie odors that live after the day is done: the million whispering voices, as remote and inaudible as the stars, in the old box looking dark and gigantic against the silver air, its fragrance that’s like nothing else in all the world cool and aromatic above the headier marsh smells from the river; and the fireflies rising up, dying and rising again from its dark bed, too coldly yellow and silent ever to seem very gay to me.
I stopped and looked up at the sky. Among the stars in the trackless paths of that dark infinity poor Rick’s soul was wandering, I thought, new and forlorn. A line from somewhere—Shakespeare, I suppose—came into my mind: the evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. I was wondering vaguely why that should have come to me just then when I was aware in the periphery of my consciousness of a new sound, very faint but never for an instant to be confused with the intangible disembodied sounds of the night. I heard the boxwood rustle, but it wasn’t only the dark brittle little leaves whispering to each other.
I stopped and waited, my heart quite still. Ahead of me, along the inky path, in a single spot, there were no longer any fireflies. Then one glided into that spot, and sped out, his tiny pendulous lantern still aglow. Someone was standing there, off the path, concealed in the boxwood where I had to pass, unless I turned back now—so close that I could hear a sudden spasmodic breath that could not be held another moment. I started forward. There was nothing at Romney to fear, I told myself, and thought, “Except murder, murder that lurked in the box for Rick.” Then I stopped again, and backed a step, too frightened to turn and run.
Silently as a ghost, a man stepped out into the path, his face wild and haggard in the silver glow of the moon. And for an instant I thought it was a ghost, and the dreadful idea that we hadn’t cheated death, Dan and I, struck my numbed mind . . . because I knew Alan Keane’s body was under padlock and chain in the jail in Port Tobacco.
22
“Alan!” I gasped.
He drew a quick breath, almost a sob of relief. I knew then he hadn’t been able to see who it was coming on him in the dark.
“What are you doing here?”
“Sam Dorsey let me out to see . . . my father. Purcell’s in Baltimore. I’ve got to get right back.—Have you got those letters?”
“They’re in my bag,” I whispered. “Upstairs.”
“Would you get them? I’ll wait here. I’ve got to have them.”
His face, and his voice, were desperately urgent.
I nodded.
He took a step toward me. “Look, Mrs. Latham—if I’m not here, burn them, will you?”
His hand on my arm was cold and trembling.
I nodded again, turned and hurried around the end of the kitchen. I could hear the clatter of pots and pans, and old Yarborough’s voice quavering some incomprehensible dirge that had all the undertones of a tomtom beating in the African night. I ran, as quietly as I could in spike-heel sandals, across the white oyster-shell drive. Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne’s car was still parked in it, and Major Tillyard’s, and my own. I hurried up the steps. The screen door was unlocked, for a wonder, probably because the great white door was closed, I supposed. The hall was empty and silent. I paused a moment, listening. Romney was as still as the grave. I slipped upstairs. No one was there either, except Yarborough’s undistinguished cat crouched at a mouse hole by a paneled cupboard under the third floor upstairs.
I went quickly along the hall to my room and opened the door, suddenly and quite inexplicably feeling something stealing open in my heart, the way a slow-motion camera shows a leaf or a petal uncurling, aware that when it was unfolded fear would lie there, as cold and intangible as a dark and terrifying bloom. I opened the dresser drawer and picked up my bag—it was white, made of wooden beads—and opened it. My knees were simply turned to water. Alan’s four letters were gone. His pistol was gone too.
I steadied myself against the tall mahogany chest and looked slowly about the room. Who had taken them? Who knew what they were, except myself and Dan and Alan? Who knew even that they were in my bag? The scene at the Fountain Inn flashed into my mind. I saw all of us standing there, the Chews, Alan, Dan, Sam Dorsey the sheriff, Cheryl and Mara at the door, and Mr. Purcell with his gray eyes on me in the dingy fly-specked pier glass. And even then, who knew where I’d put my bag, beside myself, and Natalie? And Natalie didn’t know about the letters.
Then another question seeped gradually into the center of my mind. Why was Alan Keane so desperately anxious to have the letters? What could conceivably be in them? What did it matter if his father, and the Chews, or even Mara, knew he’d been tottering on the brink of self-destruction? Then I remembered the fourth letter, under the others, the address of which I hadn’t seen. Whom had it been written to? For a moment I just stood there, my mind the most awful chaos of suspicion and doubt . . . so that looking back on it now I wonder that God, who my cook Lilac says strikes colored people dead if they wash clothes on Sunday, didn’t reduce me on the spot to my original atomic structure.
It seemed much longer to me, standing there dumbfounded, than it could have been, because when I snapped out of it and fled back through the empty halls Yarborough’s cat was still at the mouse hole, and Yarborough was still in the pantry chant
ing his melancholy dirge. I hurried around the kitchen and into the path. I could see Alan, looming taller against the white trim of the dining room windows, and I ran quickly toward him.
“They’re go—,” I cried, and stopped dead. Smack in the middle of the path I saw two round live coals of fire, totally disembodied in the inky blackness of the box. For once I was smarter than the thieves in the old fairy tale. I didn’t need light to tell me that supporting those live coals was the shaggy remainder of that unbelievable dog. And almost instantly I heard his master’s voice:
“What’s gone, Mrs. Latham?”
Since then I’ve thought of several quite bright things I could have said; but none of them occurred to me then, halted open-mouthed in the middle of the path. I just stood there, mute, wondering what could have become of Alan Keane, whether he’d got away in time to keep from being seen.
Dr. Birdsong disengaged his long frame from the side of the house—it was no wonder I’d thought a trick of the light had elongated Alan Keane—and moved toward me, so that we stood facing each other in the silvery glow of the night.
“You don’t have much confidence in me, do you, Mrs. Latham?” he asked quietly.
I moistened my perfectly parched lips and took a deep steadying breath. I was quite as surprised at that as I was at finding him there.
“No,” I said. And if I’d been in complete possession of my senses I’d never have added as I did, “Is there any possible reason why I should?”
I could feel his body tense abruptly and his eyes sharpen, searching my face. Or perhaps it was those glowing eyes of his dog that I felt. I must say it was getting so I didn’t in my own mind distinguish very clearly between them.