by Zenith Brown
“Look,” he said, “what is this? If you know who killed my mother and Rick, why in God’s name don’t you say so, and cut out all this Fu Manchu.—Or do you know?”
“I do know,” Dr. Birdsong said gravely. “I have known for some time. In a sense I’m . . . responsible for your mother’s death, even though it was something I couldn’t possibly have foreseen. And it happened because I’ve been trying to save your sister—and I’m still doing it . . . and trying to save Cheryl.”
The silence in the room was as profound as the darkness that hid our faces from each other.
28
It seemed an age before he spoke again.
“Three years ago,” he said then, very quietly, “—just two weeks before you went abroad, Dan—fifty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds were stolen from the Merchant’s Bank in Port Tobacco. Alan Keane was sent to prison. He was let out after thirteen months of his sentence because some of us didn’t think he stole those bonds. For three years the bonds have been missing. Several people have thought Alan Keane has known a lot he’s never said, because he didn’t dare say it, without proof he didn’t have. And for the simple reason that no one in the world would have believed him.”
As he paused I could feel him looking steadily from one to the other of us.
“But he wrote a letter to Purcell, just before he put a gun to his head, knowing, I suppose, that a dying man’s word has a special truth—even a special legal truth. And that letter’s out there now, in the mail bag Jim collected from the hall this evening at ten o’clock. It’s in the mail, going to Purcell. And the person who can’t let that letter get to Purcell is the one who murdered Rick because Rick had persuaded his mother to divide the estate, and who murdered Irene because after Rick’s death she’d decided again to divide the estate so you could each find salvation in your own way—herself and Tillyard, you and Cheryl, Mara and Alan, and Natalie. She had to die because she made that decision—for if she did that, that fifty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds that she herself had been holding, in complete ignorance of their origin, for nearly three whole years, would come to light.
“Alan Keane didn’t put those bonds in his car. His hand was not the hand that held and drove that hunting arrow into Rick’s throat, and left three bright pebbles in the grass to make us think your mother, or your sister, or Cheryl, had shot Rick, and put the lighter under him to make us think he could be shot at night. Nor was it Alan Keane who slipped into Mrs. Latham’s room to get the letters, having seen her put them in her bag at the Fountain Inn, and found the letters gone but the pistol still there, with Alan’s fingerprints still on it.—And that person knows those letters are in the mail sack, hanging in there, in the tack room in the barn.”
The room was very still. I peered into the darkness, my eyes aching, trying to see their faces. Somewhere—like a door close at hand shutting quietly, or one at a distance opening—there came a sound. We waited. I could hear my own heart pounding, and the clock on the wall ticking. Then I heard Dr. Birdsong whistle softly, and through the open door I saw that dog of his get to his feet, hesitate, and set off toward the barn. Then, as sharp and urgent as a fire bell in a house filled with smoke, an alarm above the door clanged, and I saw Dr. Birdsong’s arm shoot out and jerk down a switch, and suddenly the whole world, it seemed to me, was filled with white light.
I turned quickly. Dan wasn’t in the room. I stood, it seemed to me for ages, leaden-footed, immovable. Dr. Birdsong went deliberately to the door. I ran up to him and peered out, almost blinded, across the barnyard as brilliantly white as noonday in the desert. The dog gave a high-pitched bark and dashed forward to the barn door, and stopped, his head thrust through the door, open just enough for a man’s body to slip through. He dropped back, barking frantically, jumped forward, and back again. Dr. Birdsong went out, walking slowly toward the door, and I went after him, with a confused and frightened sense of other people coming behind me. He came to a halt at the edge of the whitewashed enclosure, hesitated a moment, and whistled. The dog, every hair on his back bristling, his long pinkish tongue dripping, his eyes glittering through their gray fringe, came back reluctantly.
Dr. Birdsong went forward slowly toward the door, cautiously and steadily, his right hand in his jacket pocket.
On the threshold he stopped, and went on again. I saw him roll the white broad door back on its oiled runners, take one step into the barn, and stop abruptly.
He stood there without moving for so long a time that I ran across that flood-lit yard and came up by his side. And I caught at his arm again, just as I’d done when I’d heard that cry that was not the cry of a peacock . . . catching my breath and trying to stop the beating of my heart, and wishing I’d stayed back there in the tenant house, or anywhere.
The body of a man was hanging motionless from the hay trap above the broad center aisle—motionless, except that it was still swinging slowly around. I stared at it in a kind of dreadful fascination, seeing the leather straps of the mail pouch fixed over the old oak beam, and suspended from it by them . . . and still, it came to me with an incredible grotesqueness, rather prosperous and self-satisfied . . . the body of Sidney Tillyard.
I closed my eyes just as I saw Dan come around the side of the barn, and opened them again to see him and Dr. Birdsong mercifully rolling the great white door shut.
It was the next morning in Mr. Purcell’s office across from the Fountain Inn in Port Tobacco that Dr. Birdsong, Dan and I stayed on after the State’s Attorney had formally released Alan Keane, and he and his father had gone back to Romney together. Mr. Purcell was still pretty dazed. For three years he had talked over every phase of Alan’s affair with Major Tillyard; and you could see by looking at him that he’d spent a sleepless night just now, going back over it, trying to see how much and in what ways he’d been misled.
“There were two interesting initial fallacies about this affair,” Dr. Birdsong said. “That a man who defalcates inevitably loses money, and that he doesn’t take more than he needs. Three years ago Tillyard’s affairs were in perfect order. He opened all his private books to the Department of Justice. There was no evidence he’d need money, until much later, and then only a few thousands. The first time he put up collateral in bonds registered in Irene’s name, you looked into it, Purcell, you remember; but Irene said it was all quite regular, and you knew she loaned money to her friends—she’d loaned money to you. Tillyard knew Irene was a complete miser—he told me so, in fact. It was perfectly simple to trade her bonds, a few thousands at a time, have her send him the coupons, which he took up out of his own pocket and destroyed. Irene, who knew all about keeping money and nothing about finance, never questioned, I imagine, that his interest in helping her was because he was going to marry her. Which in a sense was true.”
He took out his oilskin pouch mended with adhesive tape and unrolled it thoughtfully.
“If after he’d doubled that fifty thousand—and he never had a loss—he’d been content to stop, trade back good bonds for the hot bonds, destroy them or have them turn up in an ash can in Baltimore, everything would have been invulnerable; but he couldn’t bring himself to it . . . until it was too late.
“When Rick forced himself into the picture then, Tillyard jumped at what looked like a perfectly simple and permanent way out. That tree going down was like a sign from heaven; it gave him a stunning alibi. Well, every day we sat out there looking at the river, and every day we saw that painting of General Washington waving good-bye from his barge. It never occurred to anybody—not to me until Cheryl brought out that perfectly damning and conclusive fact about the gold lighter—that from Tillyard’s place across Potobac Creek, Romney is eight miles distant by car, and three-quarters of a mile by water. Tillyard didn’t have a car, but he did have a boat. He came to Romney in it, stabbed Rick with a hunting arrow he’d probably had for years, and left the same way. He didn’t need the tree, in fact; he could have left his car in a garage to be serviced. That Rick had starte
d chopping the tree down was a bit of superfluous luck. And Rick was doing it for the quite simple reason that half the trees along the lane are over a hundred years old and most of them rotten. He’d been talking about doing it for days, and he gave up on that one when the storm was coming along, planning to go back to it.
“And using me for his alibi was just more of the same. I’d guess that when he said he was going back to see Rick, he gave him the note we found burned in the fireplace, making an appointment. He could have offered any number of things as bait. Rick’s letter to Dunthorne, that Tillyard said Rick asked him to mail, was the one Dan found on the desk. Rick wasn’t sending it, because he knew Dunthorne would be down in the morning; he’d called him in New York, he’d told Natalie he was coming. It was too late to try to head him off. He’d got the check from Irene that Tillyard did mail, but there was no use sending it.
“That part was opportunist, but the whole thing had been deliberately planned. Mara’s glove, that I’ve seen a thousand times lying on the sofa in the hall with her riding crop and hat, the lighter, the alibi, the arrow. Then came the letters.”
Dr. Birdsong turned to me with an amused smile.
“You told me Tillyard came in, at the Fountain, after you’d got those letters from Alan. If you’ll think back—as I found out by interviewing the Chews—you’ll recall he spoke up after that. He was already there before anyone noticed him. There’s no doubt he saw you put them in your bag.
“Those letters, of course, were mixed up with the whole business of Rick and Alan. There’s no doubt Rick honestly believed Alan had stolen the bonds, added to which there was all the business of Alan and Mara. Alan now admits he always thought Rick stole them. You’ll recall it was just after their disappearance that Rick left the bank and started the gay life in New York. But Rick was a Winthrop and wealthy, and because of Mara, and his father’s job, Alan couldn’t say anything and didn’t. So while each of them suspected the other, neither suspected Tillyard. In that letter Alan wrote to you, Purcell, all he did was assert again—with all the solemnity that even the law admits to dying testimony—that he did not steal the bonds.
“Well, Tillyard didn’t know that—which is the beautiful irony of the thing, and shows, if it needed to be shown again, that the guilty soul is never a free soul. But he knew one thing very well: he knew Alan hadn’t confessed a crime that he himself had committed. And he was bound, as the guilty person, to fear that Alan might have pointed to him. The idea that he was suspected may have been growing in his soul for months, perhaps—built up out of a word, a look, or a gesture of Alan’s that was actually meaningless. Hence undoubtedly his planning of his new crimes to hang the boy. His eminent respectability and integrity was his protection, he couldn’t bear the shadow of a real suspicion. So he had to know what was in that so-called confession.”
He turned to me.
“Then you told me, Mrs. Latham—in Tillyard’s presence—that you’d got the letters from Alan when he was on the point of killing himself. Tillyard must have suspected even earlier that they were important—when he saw the relief on the boy’s face as he gave them to you. He tried to get them as soon as he could, to make sure, found they were gone and took the pistol. But until you told us then, he hadn’t known they were written in the shadow of death, when Alan would be released from any fear of saying what Tillyard, being guilty, thought he must suspect. At that point the necessity of getting those letters became desperate.
“The other person beside Alan to whom those letters would mean something would be Mara. I saw her, and persuaded her to give them to me. I read them. I was certain before who’d done all this and why—I’ve been thinking about it a long time, for three years in fact. So I confided to Tillyard, and no one else, that I’d got them—thus letting Mara out; she’d have been in pretty grave danger after it had come out that her prints were on the gun and it was plain she’d taken the letters. I told him I’d put them in the mail pouch to go to you, Purcell, for two reasons: first that I had no right to read them, and second because I didn’t want to risk carrying them around so Alan and his father could do away with me and get them.
“Well, Tillyard must have been in a dreadful quandary. Either I’d read that letter, or—as I told everybody—I hadn’t. If I had, either it said he was guilty or it was a confession or it said nothing about all this. But he knew it wasn’t a confession, and if it said nothing there was no reason in the world why I shouldn’t tell him so, and if it said he was guilty it was hardly likely I’d be talking to him as I was. So, with the fact that I really had no right to read it—morally, anyway—while the State’s Attorney had, his assumption of course had to be that I really hadn’t read it.
“He and I didn’t leave the hall until Jim took the mail. He knew, of course, that the pouch would stay in the barn until the milk truck picked it up. He went after it, and he forgot the alarm put in there last year when there was an epidemic of barnyard thievery. And when he heard that bell and saw those lights, of course he knew the devil had caught up with him—even if he had time to see that the letters were not in the bag. There was no reason in God’s world for an innocent man to be down there. It would instantly occur to him that I’d set a trap for him, that I consequently must know other things, and that many small things out of the past would take meaning in Purcell’s mind when he once started looking back.”
Dr. Birdsong studied the bowl of his pipe for a moment.
“I wish I’d left a gun there. He’d have preferred that, and so would all of us. He didn’t have one, because you can’t conceal a gun in a linen suit. He really couldn’t afford to have one on him anyway, or carry one in his car.”
He looked at me again.
“I asked you to think what had happened before each of these killings. Irene had announced her decision to divide the estate, of course.—Anything else?”
“Yes,” I said. “Irene’s saying Rick had the lighter when he came to her room; and the one simple act at the Fountain that you thought was worse than killing two human beings.”
He nodded.
“Irene’s story was a complete fabrication. She didn’t dream Tillyard had actually killed Rick, she was just defending him from what she thought was a horrible accusation Cheryl had made against him, and taking out a little spite against Cheryl. She hadn’t the faintest suspicion that Tillyard hadn’t given the lighter back to Rick, just as he’d said. Yarborough’s testimony was absolutely meaningless, of course. Even if he really had wanted to burn something, Rick would have had matches with him.—And the second point.”
His face hardened again.
“Tillyard asking you to come to Romney in his car—deliberately throwing Dan and Cheryl together just when it would infuriate Irene beyond endurance . . . and ruin for both of them something that I should think is pretty important.”
He didn’t look at Dan, but I did, and Dan was looking down at the floor between his feet.
29
It seemed odd, coming back to Romney, Dan and I, after we left Mr. Purcell’s office. He and Dr. Birdsong had disappeared into the Fountain bar. I think Dan would have liked to go with them, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t myself. But it wouldn’t have looked well, and in Port Tobacco that’s still important.
The State Roads Commission, I noticed, had put the glass pebbles back in the sign at the entrance to the cedar-lined drive. Mara was alone in the sitting room when we came in. I think we both expected to see Alan there, but he wasn’t. I saw Dan go to the window and look out. Natalie Lane, in her white-rimmed sun glasses, was sitting under the mimosa tree, and so, not much to my surprise, was Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne, in his. Dan cleared his throat, came over to Mara, sat down beside her, twined his big bronzed fingers in her small delicate ones.
“Where’s Alan?” he asked.
“He’s at his father’s,” she said. “He won’t come here—not unless you ask him.—If you’d rather not, we’ll wait till we can go away together.”
Dan got up
without a word. I saw his blond head disappearing over the box toward the tenant house; and it seemed to me less than a moment before he was back again, and Alan Keane and Mara were lost in each other’s arms, and Dan and I were definitely superfluous.
We went out into the hall, but at the door we stopped. Dan grinned. “I guess we’d better leave Natalie the farm girl to her haying,” he said, and we went out the other way and down the path through the arborvitae to Mrs. Jellyby’s.
I felt sorrier for him that I’d ever felt for anybody, I think, in all my life. He hadn’t mentioned Cheryl, not once, and every time Dr. Birdsong had spoken her name I’d seen one more drop of barren longing distilled behind his blue eyes. Yet he didn’t ask if Dr. Birdsong had found her, or if anyone had found her. I thought in a way it was keeping his last unspoken promise to his mother, a sort of penance for the doubt he’d had of her . . . for I think he hadn’t been sure at first, nor had he believed, just as I’m not sure I believed, that Irene had at last relented about Mara and Alan. Just once while Dr. Birdsong had been talking, he’d looked at me with a twisted smile and a shrug; but I knew he’d go on, as he’d said in my Georgetown garden, not seeing a plane in the air, or blossoms on a branch, or ice on a brook’s edge in the woods, without thinking about her.
Or certainly not a weeping willow on the river’s edge, I thought as we came down Mrs. Jellyby’s walk. She looked up from her wooden measure of columbine seeds, her clear level eyes serene and understanding.
“What’s the trouble with you?” she said.
“Nothing,” Dan said. “I just came to say good-bye. I’m going back to Paris.”
I blinked. I don’t think he knew himself that that’s what he’d decided to do.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Jellyby said. “You can’t keep running away from yourself. Sit down. Not there—that’s Cheryl’s seat.”
He stopped, balanced and suspended in mid-air, staring at her.