“You’ll find the kitchen door unlocked,” I said coldly. “And if the newspaper people disturb you—they’re all around in front.”
Again the woman made no move. Skipper was wriggling in my arms, and she gazed at him curiously and then looked up at me.
“You’re Anne, aren’t you? Tell me. Just what—what is the present situation? I mean—do they know yet who killed Amanda?”
“Nothing has been decided,” said I.
Half the village was palpitating for information of the Hieronomos, and her curiosity was not particularly surprising. But I didn’t propose to satisfy it.
“I wish that I could help,” she said tensely. “You may not believe that, but I do. But a person must look out for herself, mustn’t she? I’ve always had to. I can’t really help anyway. I’ve thought and thought until I’m nearly crazy . . .”
“Miss Gay!” I said, astounded.
Her emotion was apparent and, I thought, excessive. But perhaps she had been a close friend of Amanda’s, and in consequence had arrived at a theory which she didn’t care to carry to the authorities. Some people have an abnormal fear of the police, and Miss Gay was in business in a town that was very small.
“Amanda brought it on herself,” said Verona Gay abruptly. “She was such a domineering woman, and mixed in with all of her romantic notions—her ideas of what was right and what was wrong—and how all the rest of the world should fall in with what she thought— well, Amanda Silver was bound to come a cropper.”
I decided then that she was no friend at all, but was a most peculiar person. Her appearance—the thick rouge on her cheeks, the painted mouth, the incredible hair—made it difficult to put much stock in her. On the other hand it was evident that she was sincerely troubled in her mind. Altogether, the situation had an unreal quality and I didn’t know quite how to handle it. I kept still.
“It goes back to John Hieronomo’s money,” said Verona Gay. “It goes back to that gold that the Hieronomos have mourned for the better part of all their lives. It ruined them and ruined the other family, too. That’s the line that Sheriff Glick should take. You might tell him so.”
She spoke in an agitated and peculiar fashion, as though some hidden meaning lay behind her words; but how my great-grandfather’s dissipated fortune could impinge on Aunt Amanda’s death, I could not imagine. I said as much. But she didn’t seem to hear me, nor did she care to entertain my baffled questions. Indeed, she started toward the door.
“If you know anything,” I called as a last resort, “you should go to the authorities.”
She hesitated.
“Policemen,” she said finally, “aren’t interested in guesses and surmises. What they want is logic—cold, hard facts. And I have my own position to consider, just as you have yours. We can’t always put our trust in the police, can we? You should understand that, surely.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
She gazed at Skipper. She smiled a little. Whether the glance and the smile were accidental I couldn’t tell, but this time, as she hurried from the barn and toward the house, I didn’t try to stop her. Let Patience question Verona Gay, which I was confident she would do exhaustively and with more success than I. So far as that went, I was by no means sure that I didn’t prefer for the real estate woman to keep her theories entirely to herself.
But as soon as I could get rid of Skipper—I pushed him firmly through the opening in the fence to the other side—I, too, hurried to Hieronomo House. I didn’t mean that Patience should have Verona Gay to herself. I meant to join them in the drawing room. Unfortunately, in the kitchen I ran into Glenn.
“Where have you been?” he asked irritably, and didn’t wait for any answer. I saw then that he was excited. “Verona Gay is here with Patience.”
“I know. I saw her outside.”
Glenn looked disappointed. “Then you’ve already heard what’s happened about the sale. The family is in an uproar. Patience is mad as hops, saying that it was no more than she expected from the very first. But it’s been a blow to the rest of them.”
I frowned. “Whatever are you talking about?”
His eyes opened.
“Miss Gay and I didn’t discuss Hieronomo House, or anything about the sale,” I said. “She’s a queer woman, isn’t she?”
“I didn’t think so particularly,” said Glenn. “It was Aunt Amanda who was queer. And damned queer, too. She didn’t try to sell the house, Anne. There aren’t any buyers and there never were. The stuff she wrote us all about the place becoming an inn was pure invention. What do you make of that?”
I stared at him. “But Verona Gay was the agent.”
“It turns out,” said Glenn, “that she wasn’t. Aunt Amanda didn’t hire an agent, she didn’t advertise, she didn’t lift a finger to dispose of the property. Way last spring, Verona Gay, realizing that the house was supposed to go on the market, came to Aunt Amanda and tried to get herself the business. Amanda wasn’t interested. Odd, isn’t it? Apparently Aunt Amanda called the family conclave for nothing.”
He took my arm and piloted me toward the drawing room, where the family was gathered in agitated council. In the foyer, Great-aunt Patience stood at the front door, parting with the visitor who had been the bearer of this distressing and mystifying news. The two women were partly shielded by the angle of the door, and only Aunt Patience’s stout, familiar figure was visible to me. I couldn’t understand how the real-estate agent could possibly have brought her business to such a swift conclusion nor how she could so quickly have escaped from Patience, but evidently she had effected it.
“I’m very sorry, Verona,” Patience was saying, “that it had to turn out like this. I am quite unable to fathom Amanda’s behavior. But now that you are in charge, I trust that you can move the property quickly. Frankly, we need the money.”
“I’ll do my best,” said the other.
I stopped. I caught Glenn’s arm. I gasped.
“Is—is that Verona Gay?”
“Of course,” he said crossly. “I thought you said you’d met her.”
I had not met the woman who stood in the foyer. I had never laid eyes on her before. She was short and plump, her round and shiny face was innocent of powder, and her firm, straight mouth was untouched by lipstick. She had not bleached her hair and she never would. It was wound around her head in neat and mousy coils, and as Patience had earlier insisted, was in hue an uncompromising gray.
The true Verona Gay bore no resemblance whatever to the woman with whom I had talked a few minutes earlier.
XV
I WATCHED THE DOOR CLOSE behind the real Verona Gay, and watched Patience turn around. For that instant, sheer astonishment held me speechless. Patience was much too perturbed herself to be conscious of my emotions.
“You’ve heard what’s happened, Anne! How Amanda tricked us! I planned,” said she in tones of outright tragedy, “to use my share of the sale price for my sabbatical.”
“We’ll have to find another buyer,” said Glenn soothingly.
“Easier said than done,” cried Patience, “with a house of thirty rooms! Verona isn’t optimistic, let me tell you.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. Even after we joined the others, I kept still. I had borne so many shocks that day that I felt I couldn’t bear a spirited cross-examination by the family. I needed time to think and to wrest some sense out of the situation. For a while at least, I decided that the woman in the barn, the false Verona Gay, should remain my personal problem.
It’s possible that there was an underlying and deeper motive in my silence. Except for Glenn, I didn’t really trust the Hieronomos. Richard, with his fraudulent alibi and his delayed and melodramatic arrival at the house; his sister Patience, with her curious reaction to the discovery of the whistle. I wasn’t even entirely sure that Hoy and Glenn didn’t share a secret. It seemed to me that every one of the Hieronomos was hiding something.
Of course, I soon discovered that I needed help. B
ut it wasn’t until after dinner, when Glenn and I were occupied with washing dishes, that I spoke to him. In the meantime, my own brain turned endlessly.
Who was the woman with the bleached blonde hair? What had she been doing in the barn? Where did she figure in the mystery?
To these questions I found no answer. One thing alone was clear. The woman with the brassy hair had not introduced herself as Verona Gay, but had merely taken advantage of my mistake. I had addressed her as Verona Gay and, for some purpose of her own, she had accepted the identification. It was the reason for my mistake that interested me.
Amanda Silver herself had led me into error. When I had first seen the woman in the cupola of the barn, I had spoken of her to Aunt Amanda. I had described the unknown visitor accurately and in detail. I remembered clearly how definite, how almost emphatic, Aunt Amanda had been in her identification. Aunt Amanda had made no mistake. She had deliberately deceived me, just as she had deceived me about the gun, and had deceived the others about the house. Why?
As I say, I took up the problem with Glenn after dinner. Wanda had gone off to bed and left the dishes in the sink, and he and I undertook to straighten up the mess. We had the kitchen to ourselves when I told my story. In the beginning, Glenn was as confused and bewildered as I felt myself to be.
“All I can see is this,” said he. “Every blessed thing we learn goes to show that Aunt Amanda did her damnedest to befuddle every one of us. It almost seems,” he added fumblingly, “as though there were a kind of consistency about her attitude and actions. A sort of twisted pattern. But darned if I can fathom what that pattern is.”
I couldn’t either.
“You’re sure,” asked Glenn then, “that Aunt Amanda knew who this woman was?”
“She knew,” I said.
“If the woman’s been lurking about the place,” Glenn suggested suddenly, “she may be the murderer herself.”
He emphasized his point by a flourish of the dish mop, which put a Crown Derby platter in imminent peril. I rescued the platter, and shook my head.
“In that case, Glenn, she’d certainly make tracks elsewhere. This woman was no killer. Anyhow, she didn’t exactly lurk. It’s hard to put in words, but both times she acted as—as though she had a perfect right to be on the place.”
“She seemed to keep out of sight,” said Glenn dryly, and then as he spoke a startled look came into his eye.
Simultaneously both of us recalled the locked door of Aunt Amanda’s bedroom, and the sound that had emerged from there when every member of the household was accounted for. Glenn spoke first.
“I wonder if Aunt Amanda could have had a guest without any of us knowing it. It sounds incredible, but I’m beginning to be receptive to the incredible. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, and then, for a reason of my own, I added, “Patience was in the house a full week. Shouldn’t we ask her what her reaction is?”
Glenn hesitated. He looked uncomfortable.
“Why don’t we talk to Dad instead. If Dad can help,” said my Cousin, “he will.”
I knew then that Glenn was also distrustful of Great-aunt Patience. Personally, I wouldn’t have selected Hoy as a confidant, but when Glenn stepped out and brought his father back I couldn’t very well object. Hoy’s brain, I suspected, was not the sort that was equipped to deal with subtleties.
“From what I’ve heard today,” he said irritably, “Amanda has begun to sound unbalanced, and I never thought she was. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Amanda did have a secret guest, and maybe the guest did drop the whistle and manage to slip away. Where is that whistle, anyhow? I’d like to look at it.”
“We haven’t got it, Dad,” said Glenn, embarrassed. “It’s in Glick’s possession now. What we were hoping was that you might help us identify the blonde.”
Cousin Hoy, whose face seldom hid what he was thinking, gave me a highly doubtful glance. I gathered that he was wondering whether the blonde woman actually existed.
“I saw the woman twice,” said I.
“The woman was in the barn, Dad,” said Glenn, and it struck me there was something peculiarly insistent in his voice.
Hoy started violently. He looked at his son. A message that shut me out passed between the two. Cousin Hoy had shown no interest in the fraudulent Verona Gay until he learned her whereabouts. He was sharply interested then.
A moment went by.
I said, “I think, Glenn, I’m entitled to hear what’s on your mind. On your father’s mind.”
Hoy’s plump body stiffened. Glenn hesitated, looked at his father, and made up both their minds.
“I think you are,” he said at last, very slowly. “Well, here it is. Dad’s been worried ever since he heard where the gun was found.”
“Why in heaven’s name?” I couldn’t keep an edge of bitterness from my voice. “Those eighteen miles let the family out. None of us had any chance to go gallivanting off to Baltimore.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Glenn.
I stared at him.
Glenn gazed steadily at a heap of cups and saucers. “The fact is—Dad thinks someone took out his car last night.”
“Someone took out his car!” I echoed, through lips that felt queer and stiff. “Who?”
“We don’t know, Anne. That’s just the trouble. The car was in the barn, and Dad thinks . . .”
“I don’t think,” broke in Hoy, loud and emphatic in his own uneasiness, “I know that someone drove my car a considerable distance last night. I watch the mileage. The company pays half. Overnight, my mileage went up something over thirty miles. Thirty-eight miles, to be exact.”
“Thirty-eight miles!”
“I’m careless,” Hoy said slowly, “about leaving my keys in the ignition, and this morning I blamed Amos. But when I heard where the gun was found”—he stopped—“well, it occurred to me that thirty-odd miles would cover a round-trip to Baltimore. Naturally, I was disturbed.”
He had been disturbed indeed—so disturbed that he had carefully held his tongue until the presence of a stranger in the barn had afforded him an opportunity to blame an outsider for the unauthorized and mystifying journey of his machine. This he proceeded to do at once. His sudden about-face might have been amusing under other circumstances. Hoy not only acknowledged the existence of the blonde; he placed her in his car.
“This woman you saw in the barn,” he said, obviously much relieved, “could have taken out my car.”
“She was in the barn this afternoon,” said I. “I didn’t see her there last night.”
“She could have been there,” insisted Hoy.
The little man clung firmly to a notion that struck me as untenable, to say the least. At his insistence, Glenn and I eventually left the house and accompanied him to the barn. I don’t know exactly what sort of proof Hoy hoped to find—a few blonde hairs in his car, perhaps.
I do know that I didn’t relish the trip. At night, illumined only by Glenn’s flashlight, the barn was a ghostly kind of place, less appealing even than it had been that afternoon. But when we groped our way to the groom’s room, we found still lying on the dusty floor the scattered butts of the cigarettes that the mysterious visitor had smoked and discarded. Glenn stared at them as though they might tell us something of the woman who had tossed them there.
“She did make herself at home, didn’t she?”
“I told you that.”
Hoy, who had seated himself on the bed, muttered that it was up to us to find the woman. I agreed, but wondered to myself how we were to go about it, and whether Glick would be willing to undertake an assignment so amorphous. I knew I hated the thought of approaching him with that particular story.
Said Hoy unexpectedly, “If the woman’s been here twice, my guess is she’ll turn up again. There must be something here she wants.”
“Or someone,” said Glenn dryly, “that she wants to see. That’s more logical, surely. Didn’t you have the impression, Anne, that she was waiting for some
one?”
“Yes,” I said.
Glenn gazed at his father. “The possibilities are strictly limited. You must admit that, Dad. The blonde was expecting one of the servants, or—one of the family.”
Hoy’s face was a study. Perhaps because he had grown up in Hieronomo House he was more deeply steeped in the Hieronomo tradition; certainly he felt more loyalty to the elders in the family. I would not have dared to share with him my suspicions of Great-uncle Richard. It was evident that Glenn had not spoken to him of Patience.
“Well, Dad?” asked Glenn.
But Hoy had thought of something. He gazed at me suspiciously. “By the way, how does it happen that you were in the barn?”
It was an awkward question, and one I wasn’t prepared to answer. In a flash of insight, in one of those curious and discomfiting instants of self-knowledge, I saw myself as allied with the rest of the Hieronomos. I, too, had a secret. This was not the time or place to explain that I had slipped outside that afternoon determined to see Dan Ayres, that I had seen him, that after our miserable interview I had pursued Dan’s dog into the barn. I was silent.
Hoy’s face grew colder, and Glenn’s became hurt and puzzled. He turned his flashlight on the littered, dusty floor, and didn’t look at me.
“Exactly what was your conversation with the woman, Anne?” he asked quietly. “Can you repeat it to me in detail?”
“It was more her manner that impressed me than her words,” I said, grateful for the change of topic. “Somehow I got the idea that she wanted to help but that she was perplexed and frightened, that she didn’t know where to turn or what to do. She wasn’t fond of Aunt Amanda either. She said that Aunt Amanda herself was to blame for what happened.”
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