The Town Cried Murder Read online

  Bill Haines speeded the car up, and we went along, just as Hallie Taswell came out of the Lane gate and hurried past us down toward Palace Green. Her face was streaked where the powder she’d hastily daubed on had touched tear streaks; it was as ravaged as a garden after a storm had gone over it.

  I saw Bill glance at her, and I knew he’d seen her creep through the hedge. His lips twisted ever so faintly.

  “You’re a… an intolerant young man, aren’t you?” I said.

  He looked straight ahead.

  “I…guess so,” he said briefly.

  “You haven’t lived very long, yet,” I said. “The only thing I’m afraid of is that you won’t, unless you mend your ways. Summers Baldwin said you wanted to be an architect. You’d better stick to bricks and mortar and let people’s lives alone. Especially down here. People are awfully chary about strangers interfering in their private business.”

  He flushed a little. “This is different. That fellow’s a louse.”

  “I dare say,” I said. “Possibly Faith might have done something about it until you blundered in. Now she’ll marry him or bust, just to show you you can’t do… all this sort of thing.”

  He’d drawn up on the cobblestone siding in front of my house and sat slumped down behind the wheel, his battered hat pulled down over his eyes, utterly and almost comically dejected. I started toward the house.

  “Say, Miss Lucy,” he called suddenly. I turned back. “I mean, people do fall in love at first sight, don’t they? Or am I just nuts in the May moon?”

  “Both propositions are self-evident, Mr. Haines,” I said.

  He grinned ruefully and slumped still farther down behind his wheel.

  I opened the door and bent down to pick up a card that had been slipped under it. It was Mason Seymour’s, and on it was written, “Requests the pleasure of your company at supper Saturday evening at half-past seven o’clock.”

  I tore it in two and threw it in the fireplace. I didn’t want Bill to see it. There was something too final and rather smug about it.

  That day was the first day in her life, except when she had measles and mumps and was away at school, that Faith Yardley didn’t come to see me. When she was a child it had been twice a day she’d trudged across the Court House Green and into Francis Street. But today she didn’t come, and I regarded Mr. Bill Haines, lurched in front of the fireplace on the needlepoint ottoman, without favor. He never stayed in the office. It was like having a sick Newfoundland puppy at my heels.

  And then, all of a sudden, he got up and picked up his hat. I glanced up from the sock I was knitting for the Alaska mission, a sudden feeling of alarm contracting my heart. I could hear the church clock striking ten as I said, “Where are you going, Bill?”

  “I’m going to see Seymour.”

  I got to my feet instantly.

  “Please don’t!”

  There was something in his face that frightened me.

  “You’ll just be sorry you didn’t keep out of this——”

  He’d gone. I heard the hinge of the office door creak, and his heavy steps on the wood floor, and the hinge creak again, and then the engine of his car start.

  I sat there actually trembling. How ever had I got so mixed up, I thought, with this absurd young man… and all in less than thirty-six hours! But I had. He’d barged into my placid life just as he had into Doctor Yardley’s… and Faith’s. He’d probably restore us, like Williamsburg, if he didn’t first send us all to Bruton Churchyard from nervous prostration.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I know that the church clock had struck the half-hour, and the hour, and he hadn’t come back. I suddenly realized that I was pacing the floor as I hadn’t paced it since that day in 1927 when the Restoration came to Williamsburg and I knew I’d always have a roof over my head and never have to depend on the bitter charity of kinfolk, even if I lived to be as old as Methuselah.

  Then I heard Bill’s car stop quietly, and waited, my heart in my mouth, for his step in the hall. But it didn’t come, and after a while I got up and slipped out into the bright moonlight over to the office. He was sitting on the doorstep, his head bent forward on his two hands, his elbows on his knees.

  He looked up, his face as pale as death in the moonlight.

  “You were right, Miss Lucy,” he said. “You said I’d be sorry—and I am.”

  He got up, bent forward suddenly and kissed my cheek.

  “Good night, Miss Lucy.”

  If anybody ever in all the world had told me that I’d do what I did that night, I would have been utterly horrified, as well, of course, as utterly incredulous. If it hadn’t been that I saw it all in the papers, over and again, for weeks afterwards, I wouldn’t have believed I actually did it, even after I did. I don’t even know what I had in mind. I only know that I suddenly realized that my own life would never have meant anything without Faith Yardley, and now this young man had given it another kind of meaning, and it was all a sort of destiny, my life and theirs.

  And I had to do something.

  I went back into the house—I know it sounds terrible and quite unbelievable, but it’s quite true, it was in the New York papers—and got the old pistol that my father had always kept in the linen press and that I’d kept after I lived alone and the locks on the doors and windows were rusty and dilapidated. I put it in the old reticule that I keep bits of calico for patchwork quilts in, and turned out the lights. Then I crept out and through Miss Mary Seaman’s back garden to Duke of Gloucester Street, and zigzagged to Botetourt Street and to Nicholson Street.

  It was quite light, almost as light as day, in the moon, and the honeysuckle and roses along the way were almost overpowering, they were so fragrant. I slipped into the dark jungle garden of the Lane house and around in back, past the old brick kitchen and the smoke house, and through the fence down by the spring house into Mason Seymour’s garden.

  The great clumps of box were black where they cast their shadow, and pale grey-green where the moon touched them. The grass was wet with heavy dew, and my soles were thin. I slipped through the box at a place I knew—had known since I played there forty years and more ago—and into that secluded secret garden that helped make Mason Seymour as fascinating and dangerous as he was. Then I tiptoed across the brick path and the terrace with its elaborate summer furniture, by the pool with its yellow marble basin, and up to the lighted window of the garden room…library, I suppose he called it, because it does have some books, and the writing table with a marble top like the one in the upstairs hall of the Palace.

  I don’t know now what I thought I would or could do…just as I expect the old duck in the Palace Canal doesn’t know very clearly what she hopes to accomplish when she sets up such a racket and clatter, drawing visitors away from the nest snuggled down in the myrtle and creeper at the foot of the chinaberry tree.

  I know I crept forward very quietly. I could see him, sitting at the table in the soft shaded glow of the lamp. The window was open. As I came closer, across the elaborate planting myrtle and rhododendron and roses and bay I saw his face, just as I opened my lips to call his name, and found them frozen and soundless. Mason Seymour was there, but he was motionless and quite dead, his face hideously wounded and mutilated.

  CHAPTER 6

  It seemed an eternity that I stood there, staring at the silent awful figure of Mason Seymour. And when later the Commonwealth Attorney kept saying, “What did you think, Miss Lucy?—You must have thought something!” I could only say over and over that I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought anything. The slumped figure at the table blotted everything else from my brain. It was like gazing into a brilliant incandescent light and turning away, the image of the filament still burning on the retina, blinding one for the moment to every other image. Even when I turned and groped my way back the zigzag path I’d come by, it was all I could see, in the glistening pool, against t
he moonlit box—that terrible silent figure.

  I’ve never understood people’s doing things and not remembering they’ve done them. Even under the influence of strong drink or strong emotion. I suppose it’s because I was never under the influence of anything, either drink or emotion, that was very powerful, until that night. Because I do understand it now. I know it’s possible to complete a whole extraordinary pattern of events and have no memory of the individual steps that composed it. All I know now is that I reached the hedge and started back through it, and that all of a sudden my knees turned to water and my heart gave a nauseating lurch as something reached out, catching at me. The soft warm leaves of the box closed in around my face, suffocating me, so that I struggled like a drowning person, my breath strangling in my throat. It was so silent and horrible! I wrenched and fought my way through and out into the air, staggered through the tall wet grass behind the old spring house, through the overgrown garden, past the deserted tumble-down house into Scotland Street, too terrified to look back.

  And when they asked me if there’d been any one else in the garden, I had to admit there might have been a whole race of giants there and I’d never have seen one of them. All I could see was that image of Mason Seymour burned on my brain, all I could feel was the box suffocating me with its warm leaves and that thing pulling me back.

  Then I was at the garden gate of Yardley Hall. That’s why I can believe now that people can do things and not know they do them…for I didn’t know I’d fled down Scotland Street across the old mill bridge and past the hanging tree, across England Street, until I reached the white picket gate with the cannonball weight, and stopped dead, held by a new fear greater even than the one I’d left behind. I think God must take care of foolish people. I don’t know-any other reason there could be than that, for me to halt abruptly as I did, suddenly aware of where I was, my hand on the iron latch, almost as if a warning voice had spoken at my side.

  Because the sound of the chain on the old wheel in the tiny well house was too thin and cautious to have pierced my numbed senses by itself, and the shadowy hand moving to draw the dripping oak bucket to the whitewashed ledge too dark and stealthy for me to have seen without knowing that I must look just there.

  The pale unearthly light that fell on the peaked roof of the well house cast its shadow across the figure beside it, so that I couldn’t see it, even after I heard a splash and dabble and the thin sound of the chain again. The frogs in the little brook in the ravine down by the spring house waked, and croaked a time or two, a catbird stirred and was still, and after that the only sound I could hear was my own heart pounding in my ears.

  Behind me, across Scotland Street, were the dark gardens of the old Audrey house, and the Tucker mound, and the dark clipped cedars like ominous sentinels. In front, at the end of the brick path, was Yardley Hall, visible only because I knew it was there, beyond the great old elms, through the screen of crape myrtle and mimosa and the rose gardens. And between me and it was some one hidden in the shadows.

  I’ve never pretended to be very brave, and I’m not really ashamed to admit that a panic such as I didn’t know my mind had room for seized me. I turned and ran—certainly faster than you’d believe I could run, looking at me. I’d never known the streets of Williamsburg were so dark and silent and deserted before, or that the gnarled tumorous trunks of the old paper mulberries could be so liquid and full of terrifying movement. I fled along England Street, across the Court House green, past the Powder Horn and into Francis Street, my footsteps echoing so that it seemed to me the whole town must wake out of its sleep. I know my heart almost burst with relief as I came in sight of Bill Haines’s car parked by the white hitching rail in front of my house, and the garden gate closing softly behind me brought sharp tears to my eyes.

  I steadied myself against it for an instant, drew a long breath… and then stopped short as I happened to look down, staring with utter—oh, I don’t know what to call it: horror isn’t the word, for that’s what I’d felt gazing in at Mason Seymour, and terror isn’t it, for that was what the shadow by the well house had brought; consternation, I suppose, or deadly panic again—at the old silk cord of my reticule still clutched tightly in my frozen grasp. The reticule was gone. Only the frayed cords were there.

  For one dreadful instant I stood there, then my hand felt for the latch. I had to go back! Somewhere on that journey home I had dropped my bag—with my father’s pistol in it—and I had to find it.

  And then I heard the hinge on the office creak and groan, and silhouetted against the white clapboard was the tall dark figure of my boarder. I tried to move, but my feet had turned to lead. My own door, with the brass knocker shaped like a lute gleaming in the moonlight, was as far away as ancient Troy. And as Bill Haines’s towering figure loomed closer and closer, I felt my knees give way altogether. Melusina says it’s silly to faint, and I suppose it is; but I know there was something extraordinarily restoring in feeling myself being lifted up as if my legs were feathers, not solid lead, and finding myself the next instant on the sofa in my own parlor.

  Or there would have been if Bill Haines hadn’t been gazing so strangely at the frayed black cords still wound around my wrist and clutched in my fingers.

  I tried to close my eyes again, but he’d seen me open them. He reached out his big bronzed hand and smoothed the hair back from my forehead, looking at me the way a doctor looks at a feverish child.

  “Where have you been, Miss Lucy?” he asked quietly. “And what’s this?”

  He picked up the old cord.

  I shook my head. “It’s nothing, really.” But that wasn’t true. I had to go back and find that bag. I tried to struggle upright. He saw, I suppose, the panic in my face, because his eyes sharpened. Then his grasp on my wrist tightened so abruptly that I sank back, suddenly rather frightened of Mr. Bill Haines.

  Yet I know now that nothing in the world could have held me there if I’d known that across the Green, like the dotted lines they use in restoration drawings to connect a missing foundation with parts they’ve unearthed still standing, there stretched a line, invisible but oh so horribly inexorable, connecting those broken ends of the cord of my reticule… connecting my house at the one end with Mason Seymour’s at the other. Or not Mason Seymour’s house but—murder… and not my house, and—oddly enough—not me, but the young man sitting there beside me, with the old frayed cord in his troubled hands.

  I know it sounds all too dreadful. No one ever believes that murder, or the suspicion of murder, can actually fall on oneself, or the people one knows—being in some way reserved for persons who live in a vague limbo that people of our sort never touch from the cradle to the grave. Ten thousand shall fall at thy right hand and ten thousand shall fall at thy left, but it shall not come nigh thee. Believing that, I suppose, about all catastrophe is what makes people go on doing dangerous, or even quite ordinary things, like crossing streets. And, of course, the comforting thing about it is that it’s perfectly true. The surprising thing is when one finds one is suddenly and inexplicably mixed up in the ten thousand on his right hand.

  And if anybody had told me, the morning I bought that black cord at Miss Mullins’s old store that ran back and back like a train of toy box cars from the Duke of Gloucester Street where the Parish house is now, and where the hopes and fears and joys and sorrows of Williamsburg used to meet each day, that I would use it some day as a noose to tie around the neck of people who meant more than anything in all the world to me, I should have thought they had taken leave of their senses. Even while I lay there on the sofa, every muscle in my body painfully protesting against the violent and unbelievable exertion it had been put to, I didn’t realize how much that cord was to mean. If I had, I should never have taken it out of Bill Haines’s hands and tossed it into the fireplace.—Not without instantly getting up and setting a match to it, at any rate. And I should certainly never have left it there for the City Ser
geant to unearth from under the rolls of coagulated dust and lint out of the carpet sweeper that Community, my colored maid, still deposits there and that I’ve long since given up the futile business of protesting against.

  I suppose it’s equally futile to say that if I hadn’t lived all my life in a small town, and learned, not without bad blood and bitter tears, that the least said soonest mended and that saying nothing is the best of all defenses, I wouldn’t then have kept on saying, “It’s nothing, really it isn’t!” For if, instead of saying that, I’d come out with the whole awful thing, it wouldn’t have looked to everybody—including Bill himself—that I thought he’d done it, and that was why I hadn’t spoken. Whether I actually thought—I’ve tried so many times since then to make up my mind about it—that it was all too fantastic, and like most horrible things would vanish with the light of day, or—and if this is true I hope I’ll be forgiven it—whether actually, deep in my secret heart I did think Bill had done it, I don’t really know. When they kept saying “Why didn’t you call the police?” I couldn’t think of any reasonable answer, and when Bill said, “For God’s sake, Miss Lucy, why didn’t you tell me?” it sounded too utterly stupid to say I wanted to deny it as long as I could. It may be I was just too exhausted for my brain to function. I know my extremities wouldn’t, and for the first time in years, when I’d sent Bill back to the office, I crept up into the fourposter in the chamber behind the parlor, where my father and mother had slept and where I was born and where my father had been born, instead of climbing upstairs to my own dormered room.