The Town Cried Murder Page 6

  That was why I didn’t hear the hinge of the office door creak during the night, or hear Sergeant Priddy come the next morning. Although I’m not sure I would have, even if I’d been upstairs, because it was already eight o’clock when I woke up. Through the last remnants of sleep I heard the silver bell in Bruton Church tower, and lay there, my eyes still closed, trying to tell myself all the vague horror in the threshold of my mind was something I’d dreamed, that it had never happened, couldn’t have happened—not in Williamsburg.

  Then I opened my eyes. Community’s black kinky head was thrust between the apricot pink of the door and the frame, her eyes the size of coconuts, her face the color of chocolate that has been exposed to the summer heat.

  “If you was done gone, an’ the young gennaman was done gone, Miss Lucy, Ah wasn’t know what to think.”

  She drew a deep collapsible breath and licked her thick lips.

  “Isn’t Mr. Haines here, Munity?” I asked sharply.

  “No’m. They done got him in jail, leas’ that’s what they tell me. John say he sawr Sergeant Priddy takin’ him off fust thing this mawnin’.”

  She put my early coffee on the round Sheffield waiter on the table—it was my mother’s that I bought back from a cousin after the Restoration came—and poured me out a cup.

  “Then it’s all true,” I thought desperately. “Mason Seymour is dead. I didn’t dream it.”

  That black hunched figure through the window swam behind my closed eyelids.

  “They tell me who it war shot Mr. Seymour used an ol’ shotgun lak you hunt possum with,” Community said. She pushed the shutters open so that the sun streamed across the threadbare roses and lilies in the brussels carpet.

  I sat up abruptly and reached for my coffee, but my hand trembled too violently. Community, who isn’t as stupid as she looks, came back to the bed, emptied the saucer into the water pitcher on the washstand, and handed me the cup not quite so full.

  “They say Mr. Luton—that’s the valley, they call him—he foun’ him stark daid this mo’nin’ when he come down stairs. Say he call the po-lice. Say he runnin’ roun’ lak a chicken with his haid off.”

  I put the coffee cup down, trying desperately to keep it from rattling against the silver waiter. Community—she’s the fifth generation of the family that’s worked for mine; even her name, before she married a perfectly trifling worthless nigger, was the same as mine—stood looking at me for an instant. Then she bent down and picked up my white shoes. The heavy dew had drenched them so that where they’d dried, a brown stain was left like a wave above the thin soles. She scraped off a blade of grass that had stuck and dried to the glazed kidskin. Then she reached down again, picked up my damp stockings, and went out the side door onto the piazza. When I got up I saw my shoes on the rail, freshly cleaned. On the steps, drying in the sun, was the pair of brown-and-white oxfords that Bill Haines had had on the night before. They too had been freshly cleaned, and the faint line of demarcation where they’d been wet and had dried was visible where the cleaner hadn’t dried yet.

  I looked from one pair of them to the other, and my heart stopped very quietly for a moment. If Community hadn’t known what to think when she’d first come that morning, she knew now, and was acting accordingly. The position of the two pair of shoes, Bill’s and mine, almost ostentatiously having no relation to each other, was proof of that. For an instant I had an almost irresistible impulse to hurry down the narrow brick path to the kitchen and tell her that Bill Haines and I hadn’t gone out, hand in hand, through the dew and put an end to Mason Seymour, but I stopped just over the threshold of the chamber and went slowly back, not at all knowing what to do. If I went out in back, Community would be eyeing me, and if I went out in front I’d probably run smack into a great many things I’d prefer to avoid permanently.

  Not that I could, of course. Already every time I looked through the window I saw the glass curtain of my neighbor across the street fall hastily back into place. The phone had rung four times while I was trying to find some laces for my last summer’s shoes. I had the panicky unhappy feeling a caged animal must have, sensing a strange new world closing in about him. The phone rang again as I got one shoe on, and for a moment I thought of not answering it again, and then I knew I didn’t dare not, because Faith Yardley might be calling me.

  But I didn’t answer it. I just sat there like the child in the nursery rhyme, one shoe off and one shoe on, perfectly appalled at myself. For that was the first time it had actually and literally occurred to my odd mind that if Mason Seymour was dead, then Faith Yardley couldn’t possibly marry him. I suppose that sounds like the rankest kind of nonsense, but it’s true, nevertheless. And if you’d lived in Williamsburg, where there’s not been a murder of any sort for years and years, and not one among the better classes since Judge Wythe’s nephew—or so they say—poisoned him for his money, you’d understand it readily enough. Even that happened in Richmond, but because the Judge’s ghost still haunts the house in Palace Green we tend to think of it as our own. And it happened well over a hundred years ago. And since nothing startling except the Restoration has happened that I can recall since the Armistice in 1918, you can see it isn’t as surprising as it might be that the mere fact of stumbling upon a murder at a moment when I had a sort of remote degree of murder in my own heart, and a weapon in my own hand, so to speak, should have for the moment driven out everything but the murder itself.

  But now, as I sat there in my grandmother’s slipper chair, one shoe hanging limply in my hand, the telephone ringing, ringing, ringing in my ears, the implications of Mason Seymour’s death crowded and swarmed in my brain, like a million termites, overwhelming me.

  Then I could hear, plodding up the stairs, like Merimée’s black Venus, Community’s heavy tread. She put her head in at the door—her face is always expressionless as an ebony mask, so there’s never any use of looking at her to see what to expect—and said, “Miss Lucy… Abraham he phone’ to say Mis’ Melusina feelin’ po’ly this mawnin’, an’ would you come ovah, if it’s convenient, jus’ as quick as yo’ can git there. Ah tol’ him yes.”

  She paused. “An’ heah’s yo’ shoes. They’s near about dry.”

  She put my shoes that weren’t in the least dry and still had that unhealthy grey look that shoes have before they do dry, in my lap, took the old one out of my hand, reached down and slipped the other off my foot. She set them both in the press and wiped off the door with her dust rag. I had the uneasy feeling that she was wiping off the fingerprints as they do in motion pictures, but I may have been wrong, of course. I do know, however, that never in the thirty years she’s waited on me, through very lean years and some not quite so lean, has she ever so much as allowed me to carry a damp pocket handkerchief. Some one she’d heard about had died of galloping consumption for wearing a freshly-laundered petticoat to a ball at the College.

  I put on the shoes without a word, however, feeling the way 1 expect a person who thinks he’s perfectly sane feels around some one he knows thinks he’s not. Community’s heavy steps plodding back down the stairs took my heart with them, down and down. That had the effect, however, of making me hurry. Melusina Yardley never felt poorly without considerable justification—no ordinary vapors had strength enough to overcome her. And whether it was just the fact that Mason Seymour was gone, and with him the prospect of the perpetual endowment of Yardley Hall, or whether there was something deeper behind it, I must admit I was almost vulgarly curious to find out. If I hadn’t, in fact, been quite so curious, I would have found out sooner. Instead of going down Francis Street, through the Travis House gardens and through Palace Green, which would have taken me a little longer but would have avoided the scene of the late unpleasantness, I was in too great a hurry. I rushed straight through Botetourt Street and into Scotland Street, and that’s as far as I got.

  A car coming along pulled up at the curb. I saw with dismay t
hat it had “Police Williamsburg Va.” on the door. And at the wheel was Sergeant Priddy, and beside him was the Commonwealth Attorney, John Carter Crabtree.

  CHAPTER 7

  To say that I couldn’t have picked two people out of the entire universe that I’d have preferred less to see is the most definite kind of an understatement. It happens that I’ve known both of them since they were little more than tadpoles. John Crabtree had been a mischievous freckle-faced imp in my Sunday school class. Sergeant Priddy had been there too, but was much better behaved. It seemed almost too ironical that the two of them now filled me with as much dismay as I dare say I filled them with Sunday after Sunday in the back room of the old Wythe house, where they turned up with telltale mud from the creek on their boots and no idea of what king ate grass in the fields of Babylon.

  John Crabtree ran down the window on his side and leaned out. He was definitely troubled.

  “Miss Lucy, what all do you know about that young fellow that’s staying with you—William Haines?” he asked.

  “Nothing at all,” I said. “Except that he’s considerate and right well behaved.”

  I hesitated. If I said Summers Baldwin sent him to me it would be all over town in five minutes. I’ve never known about walls, but I do know that in Williamsburg the grass and trees have ears; and I didn’t know just how far Summers Baldwin would care to extend his sponsorship of the young man. He might, I thought, quite reasonably draw the line at murder, for instance.

  So I said, “A friend gave him my address. He’s studying architecture.”

  John Crabtree grunted.

  “Is it true you put him in jail?” I asked.

  He shook his head. It was obvious he was puzzled about just what to do with Mr. William Quincy Adams Haines. Sergeant Priddy muttered something to him and his face brightened.

  “I wonder if you’d mind steppin’ over there a few minutes, Miss Lucy?” he said.

  No one in all the world will ever know how very much I minded just that very thing. But with both of them—and they constituted, between them, the entire force and majesty of the local law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in spite of the fact that they once put a frog in the font when some very important Northern baby whose parents had bought a plantation on the James River was to be baptised—craning their necks out of the police car at me, all I could do was say, “Not at all.”

  That’s how it happened that I found myself in Mason Seymour’s house instead of in Yardley Hall just then. And I wasn’t alone. When Sergeant Priddy opened the door into the drawing room—it always astonishes me how professional interior decorators can make all rooms look alike and all look like museums—I saw my lodger. He was slumped down on the small of his back in a canary-yellow leather fireside chair, his chin resting on his collarbone, his jaw set, looking as if he didn’t want any part of it and the sooner they took it all away the better he’d like it. I had the idea that that applied especially to the other two men in the room.

  I didn’t know one of them, except that I could see from his sleek dark hair and small dark mustache, and the way he closed his white even teeth and smiled so that an astonishing number of them showed, and his brown checked coat and yellow pullover sweater, that he was kin to Mason Seymour in temperament as well as in blood. I was surprised, because I hadn’t known that any of Mason’s relatives were in Williamsburg. The other man was Luton, the valet. He was really more than that. He was a sort of confidence man, although I think that means something I don’t mean. I mean he didn’t go about selling public bridges and gold bricks, which I believe is what the word implies. But he had Mason Seymour’s complete confidence—managed his household affairs and the colored servants, arranged his parties and that sort of thing, and I suppose knew more about Mason Seymour’s business than Mason knew himself. In fact, if he hadn’t had that discreet black-coated air and worn a derby hat I don’t think any one would ever have taken him for a servant. He stood by the closed door off the library. He’d been talking to the other man, stopped when I stepped in, and bowed.

  “This is Mr. Talbot Seymour, Miss Lucy,” Sergeant Priddy said, and as frequently happens in Williamsburg, it was just naturally assumed that outlanders know who we are. I heard Luton whisper, “Miss Randolph, sir.” Mr. Talbot Seymour bowed politely.

  Bill Haines had got to his feet. He favored me with a wry grin, and devoted his attention thereafter to a studied examination of an embroidered map of the counties of England framed in bird’s-eye maple over a satinwood table that had a lovely old wine-cooler on it, filled with pale peonies the color of home-made strawberry ice-cream and smelling like an undertaker’s parlor. In fact the room had that general air, and there was something almost professional too about the way John Crabtree pulled up a chair and told us all to sit down.

  I gathered he’d only arrived on the scene a moment or so before. He glanced at Sergeant Priddy, who nodded almost reassuringly it seemed to me, and cleared his throat. But before he could begin there was a tap at the door and Marshall Yardley, of all people under the sun, walked in. He glanced around, nodded to Talbot Seymour, gave me a sort of puzzled frown as if it wasn’t clear just what I was doing there, and stepped over to John Crabtree. There ensued a brief whispered conference. I heard one bit of it, and it was sufficient to explain everything.

  “Aunt Mel thinks the family ought to be represented. I think we ought to stay out of it, but you know Aunt Mel.”

  John Crabtree nodded sympathetically, and Marshall Yardley came over and sat down on the gold brocatelle upholstered sofa between the windows, beside me. He crossed his legs and folded his arms, his jaw set very like Bill Haines’s.

  Life as Melusina’s favorite certainly had its corduroy stretches, I thought. Then I wondered, all of a sudden, looking at Marshall with oddly new eyes, if it had ever had much else. It must be eating bitter fruit indeed, I thought, to come here now, where the man Ruth Napier was so mad about lay dead, not fifty feet away from us. Almost as if he were answering me, he uncrossed his legs, ran his two open palms back over his head, drew a deep breath and relaxed back against the soft cushions.

  Of the four men in that room—Talbot Seymour the cousin, George Luton the servant, Bill Haines my lodger, and Marshall Yardley, Faith’s cousin—two of them hated the dead man; one frankly and for any one who cared to listen to hear; the other bitterly and quietly. Marshall Yardley had never in all his life been free to announce from the housetops that he hated anybody’s guts, as the extraordinary Mr. Haines had felt not the least compunction about doing… and dammed-up streams are dangerous streams. I’ve heard that at lots of Commencements, and besides it’s quite true. Moreover, I thought, Sergeant Priddy, regarding the various people in the room with a detached and shrewd eye, was just the man to see all that.

  “You can tell Mr. Crabtree what you know about this, Luton,” he said.

  The valet looked at the Commonwealth Attorney—I have to keep calling him that so I don’t get him mixed up in my own mind with the boy I’ve always known, and underestimate his intelligence and honesty, and kindliness.

  “I think, sir, I should be allowed counsel,” he said, and then, as everybody looked completely flabbergasted, he went on, his pale face quite expressionless. “You see, sir, it was I who found Mr. Seymour’s body. I was in the house alone with him all night. The doctor says he was killed between half-past ten and eleven; there was no one in the house then but myself. I should like to point out that my position is definitely equivocal.…”

  Many Virginians speak with what some people would call a drawl, I suppose, but John Carter Crabtree speaks even slower than most, almost as if he weren’t fully awake yet. It deceives a lot of people.

  “If you think anybody’s goin’ to railroad you to the chair, Mr. Luton, you’re dead wrong,” he said amiably. “All we want to know is what happened around here. I shouldn’t think you’d need counsel to tell us that. Would you, Marshall?�
�You’re a lawyer.”

  “Not unless Luton did it,” Marshall Yardley said. “You can’t make a man give evidence against himself, of course.”

  Mr. Luton winced, in a respectful way. Bill Haines left off his study of the geography of the British Isles, turned around with a grin and attended the remainder of the proceedings, leaning forward, his elbows resting on the high back of the canary-yellow leather chair.

  Luton hesitated only an instant. “I went upstairs shortly after half-past nine, then, sir,” he said.

  I looked at him rather curiously, never having seen much of him before. His head was oddly shaped, large across the skull and tapering to a pointed chin; his ears rather like an afterthought, when the proper size for his head had run low and a larger one had to be used. He was sandy-haired, with mildish blue eyes and a thin upper lip deeply grooved or possibly scarred. His shoulders were narrow, or possibly merely looked narrow beside the broad checked and somewhat padded shoulders of Talbot Seymour, the dead man’s cousin, lounging in the window near him.

  “Mr. Seymour was expecting a caller.”

  The valet stopped, and glanced ever so hesitantly at Marshall Yardley.

  “He suggested earlier I go to the movie, but he thought of such a number of things he wanted arranged after the colored servants had gone that I was too late for the second show. I went to bed instead. I didn’t hear Mr. Seymour come upstairs, but as his hours were always inclined to be irregular, I thought nothing of it until I got up this morning. I saw the lights still on and the front door open, and found him in the library. I called the doctor and Sergeant Priddy at once, sir.”

  “You didn’t see anybody, or hear anything?”

  “I didn’t hear the shot, if that’s what you mean, sir,” Luton said a little stiffly. “I’ve had a very hard couple of days, since Mr. Seymour’s engagement to Miss Yardley was announced, and I was glad to get off my feet. I have trouble with my legs, is why I’m in domestic service, sir.”