The Town Cried Murder Read online

  “Did you see anybody around?” John Crabtree drawled. “Was there any company yesterday?”

  Mr. Luton hesitated again. “As a matter of fact, sir, there were a number of people here all evening.—The last that I saw was Mr. Haines here.”

  My lodger was absorbed in trying to straighten a bent and mutilated cigarette into sufficient resemblance of the original so that it would draw.

  He barely glanced up. “Go on,” he said.

  Mr. Luton moistened his lips. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “But I have to tell these gentlemen what I saw.”

  “Sure,” Bill said. “Go right ahead. Don’t mind me.”

  He threw the cigarette into the fireplace and pulled out his pipe and his tobacco pouch. John Crabtree’s eyes rested oddly on him, and Sergeant Priddy turned and spat out of the window. Nicotine is very good for roses, as a matter of fact, except that it does spot them right badly.

  “Mr. Haines came over about ten o’clock, sir. Mr. Seymour was engaged.”

  “Doin’ what?” the Commonwealth Attorney drawled.

  “He was talking to a young lady.”

  “Name?”

  “It was…Miss Ruth Napier, sir.”

  The man didn’t look at Marshall Yardley, and Marshall sat there without moving a muscle or batting an eye.

  “Go on.”

  “Mr. Haines didn’t come in. He stood out on the porch. I came downstairs and told him Mr. Seymour did not care to be disturbed. He said that was too bad, because he was going to be disturbed plenty. His manner was very… belligerent. I presumed he must have been drinking.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Bill Haines said placidly, “I’d had three glasses of Miss Lucy’s raspberry shrub. That stuff is mighty powerful.”

  A hogshead of it wouldn’t discommode a fly, except for sheer bulk. I saw the Commonwealth Attorney smile a little.

  Mr. Luton’s discreet voice went on.

  “Mr. Haines’s manner was equally flippant last night, sir. I had to call Mr. Seymour. He came out, and I gathered he recognized Mr. Haines, because he said, ‘Oh, it’s the White Knight again.’ Mr. Haines said, ‘No, it’s the Eagle Scout, and I’m behind on my good deed for the day. That’s why I’m here—I couldn’t go to bed till I’d got it done.’ Mr. Seymour turned around and told me to tell Miss Napier he’d be back shortly, and they went into the dining room and closed the door. I went back to the library, but Miss Napier wasn’t there.”

  “Where was she?”

  It was Sergeant Priddy who thrust that in.

  The lift of the servant’s brows was barely perceptible.

  “I didn’t attempt to inquire into that, Sergeant. I went back upstairs, undressed and went to bed immediately.”

  John Crabtree fished a wadded piece of paper out of his coat pocket and unfolded it. “So that, to the best of your knowledge, the last person to see Mr. Mason Seymour was a young man named Haines.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  That statement scrawled on a leaf torn out of Sergeant Priddy’s notebook had, I take it, been responsible for my young lodger’s being routed out of bed at daybreak. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked extraordinarily composed, leaning forward easily, his forearms resting on the back of the chair, a detached and even mildly amused expression on his not handsome but certainly very attractive face.

  In fact, it seemed to me he looked almost too composed. It wasn’t natural and it wasn’t human, and he’d been so extremely both up to this time. I thought back to his barging out of the house the night before, and his coming back, sitting there in the office door, saying, “You said I’d be sorry, and I am.” And he’d meant it. If he’d never meant another thing in all his life he’d meant that—I’d stake my own life on it. And yet here he was, letting them go on without putting in a serious word in his own defense, exactly as if nothing of the least consequence had come to his personal notice for days and days.

  “Was anybody else here?”

  John Crabtree’s voice ambled along like an old horse in the shade. “I mean, beside the lady and Mr. Haines here?—How about this gentleman?”

  He looked at Mr. Talbot Seymour, who instantly and with great aplomb projected himself into the very center of things.

  “I got to town here about half-past nine,” he said. “I’m on my way up from Southern Pines to New York. I read the announcement of my cousin’s engagement in the Richmond papers, thought I’d drop down and congratulate him. I phoned from the Inn, about a quarter to ten. He said he was tied up for the evening, and that Luton had gone to bed, so if I didn’t mind would I crawl in where I was, bring my kit over first thing this morning in time for breakfast, and stay on for the wedding.”

  Mr. Talbot Seymour made a slight movement with his shoulders.

  “And this,” he said, “is what I walk into.”

  I think we all—except Bill Haines—shifted a little uneasily, as if we were each of us, in some way, personally responsible for his unfortunate breach of Southern hospitality. Talbot Seymour lighted a cigarette and blew a long slow column of smoke through his thin nostrils.

  “Then you didn’t see your cousin at all?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t, I thought, seem particularly grief-stricken at that fact, but then he wasn’t trying to pretend he was, I must say that for him. He did, however, have the air of a man who was watching his own brief with a pretty sharp eye—almost sharper, it seemed, than the occasion demanded. But then he had no way, I realized, of knowing we were all perfectly honest. And after all, his cousin had been murdered. It wasn’t as if he had just died of pneumonia, or something.

  “And you’re staying at the Inn?” John Crabtree asked.

  Talbot Seymour laughed shortly. “Well, I stayed there last night. My things are here now. I don’t suppose there’s any objection to my continuing on. After all, I’m the nearest relative. I suppose I’d be expected to stick around till the mess is cleaned up.”

  There was an instant silence in the room, not sharp or dramatic at all, but the kind of drawing-room silence that meets a pretty profound breach of good taste. Even Mr. Seymour, whose skin, I should imagine, was fairly thick, felt it.

  “Of course, I’d be glad to clear out if the local gendarmes want to kick up a row about it.”

  “Wouldn’t want to put you to any extra trouble at all, sir,” John Crabtree drawled courteously. I imagine that only Sergeant Priddy and I, who knew him of old, knew that Mr. Talbot Seymour had made probably one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

  The Commonwealth Attorney turned back to Mr. Luton.

  “Anybody else here, last night?”

  The valet hesitated again, and when he spoke his quiet voice was still more reluctant than it had been. “Several people called during the evening, sir. Doctor Yardley came, just as Mr. Seymour was sitting down to dinner.”

  He turned to Marshall Yardley, beside me on the gold brocatelle sofa.

  “And I beg your pardon, sir.—Mr. Marshall Yardley was here, after dinner. 1 happened to see you, sir, when I was bringing the brandy and soda from the sideboard.”

  Marshall Yardley’s lips twisted in a wry smile.

  “I don’t think I’ve said I was not here, have I?” he asked, a little angrily. “The Commonwealth Attorney knows he can have a complete and detailed account of my movements at any time he cares to ask for it.”

  He sat forward, his flexible mouth a little grimmer than I’d seen it before.

  “In fact, I’d like it to go on the record, John, that I object to all this elaborate air of discretion that Luton’s putting on for the simple purpose of damning everybody. My uncle and I both came in the front gate and went out the front gate. If Luton didn’t happen to be at the front door to let us in the house, it was probably because he had business elsewhere. I dare say the same applies to both Miss
Napier and Mr. Haines. I object strongly to this beating about the bush that implies we all crept in and out through a hole in a hedge.”

  My heart sank to the bottom of my now dry shoes and lay there, trembling.

  Marhsall ground out his cigarette in the ash tray on the Chippendale coffee table in front of us, and added quietly, “I can understand about people not wanting to be seen coming to this house. But as far as I know, nobody seems to have had sense to put it into practice.”

  “Well,” the Commonwealth Attorney drawled, with a slow smile, “it sure looks like somebody did. There’s no getting away from that. Somebody crawled through a hole in the hedge. Mason Seymour was shot from the terrace through the open window, while he was sittin’ at the table writing, by somebody he never expected to do him any harm. You can tell he was surprised by the look on his face, and the way his pen’s clutched in his fingers, and his chair pushed back hard, so it caught up the rug—as if he tried to get up all of a sudden and couldn’t make it.”

  My feet and hands were as cold and remote as if they belonged to a woman in Greenland, not to me in Williamsburg.

  CHAPTER 8

  I barely heard Bill Haines saying abruptly, “How do you know he was shot from the terrace, Mr. Crabtree?”

  “Because the waddin’ from the shotgun shell’s out there, and you can calculate how far off the fellow was standin’ by the spread of the shot.”

  “Have you found the gun?” Talbot Seymour asked.

  John Crabtree shook his head.

  “We’ve got one gun, but it’s not the gun that killed Seymour. And that’s a funny thing… about your hole in the hedge, Marshall.”

  He glanced at Sergeant Priddy, who went out into the hall. I’ve often wondered how long any one’s heart can stop beating and he still go on living. It’s a very long time, I’m sure, because mine had stopped absolutely dead for some time before Sergeant Priddy came back into the room. In his hand was my grandmother’s black-beaded reticule. He put it down with a thud on the table in front of the Commonwealth Attorney, the frayed broken cords lying there, burning my eyes as if they were made of molten fire, not ancient rusty silk. I felt Bill Haines’s eyes pinioned there too. Without looking at him I could see the blood recede under his deep sun-bronzed skin. Then John Crabtree’s hands fumbling at the broken cord blotted everything else out from my consciousness, and then the bag was open, and there on the shiny satin lay my grandfather’s old pistol.

  I never knew a room could be so still. The only sound in it was the tiny tick-tick-tick of the enamelled French clock on the mantel and the roar of the blood in my ears. And then John’s slow voice, each word hour-long, like water dropping from a leaky tap at night when you’re sick.

  “Sergeant Priddy found this caught in the box hedge this mornin’. Somebody was gettin’ through there. The long grass in the Lanes’ place is trampled down where they came in, and where they made a bee line back for the street again.—But this isn’t what Mason Seymour was killed with.”

  He turned the pistol over, looking at it intently.

  “The interestin’ thing about it is that somebody thought they were goin’ to kill him with it, and I reckon it’s plain enough it’s a woman. Nobody else would think of tryin’ to kill a body with an old thing like this.”

  …And all the time it kept pounding in my ears that I ought to lean forward and say, “That’s mine, John. I didn’t really plan to kill him. I don’t know what I planned to do.”

  I should have done it, of course. I even think now John would have understood if I had, that I could have made him understand. But then it seemed that, if I did, now that they knew Bill had been there it would point at some hidden connection, and if I didn’t speak they might never know I’d been there at all. First one thing burned in my mind, then the other, and then it was too late. John Crabtree pushed the bag aside. I watched it as I imagine a half-crazed collector would watch a priceless relic being indifferently thrust aside by an auctioneer who had no inkling of its value, biding his time.

  And then suddenly I saw Bill Haines straighten up. I knew in one dreadful flash that he was going to speak for me. And then my eyes met his. I don’t know what he must have seen in them—or thought he saw—but he turned away silently. Then John Crabtree’s voice came in, smooth and slow as molasses in January, saying, “Well, you all can go along now.”

  He began gathering up his things, and turned with his pleasant grin. “Mr. Haines, it looks like you’re goin’ to have to do a little explainin’ around here, but there’s no use puttin’ you in jail. I reckon I’ll just put you in Miss Lucy’s custody instead—if she’ll promise to produce you any time you’re needed.”

  He grinned at me. My knees were like water.

  “Okay, Mr. Crabtree—I’ll see she does,” Bill said.

  It wasn’t till we’d got out in the street that he said, “What he means is he’ll put you in my custody. For God’s sake why didn’t you tell him that was your bag?”

  “I couldn’t,” I gasped.

  “You’ll wish you had. I ought to have done it myself. What in…what did you think you were doing? Those guys aren’t fools. If they could see through that glamor boy in the checked coat and through all ten layers of lard on that bird Luton, where do you think you’ll land when they start on you?”

  “Oh, dear!” I said, and then I didn’t say any more, because Marshall Yardley caught up with us just as we got to England Street.

  “Aunt Mel wants to see you, Cousin Lucy,” he said. He turned to Bill.

  “Why don’t you go on in with Cousin Lucy, Haines, and as soon as I run over to the courthouse we can do a little checking up on this?”

  “No, thanks,” Bill Haines said briefly. “I’ve got to push along.”

  When Marshall left us at the garden gate I said, “Won’t you come in, Bill?”

  “I said No, thanks,” he repeated rudely.

  “You mean they’ll see through everybody but you,” I said with some heat. “Why, a beetle could see through you! Don’t you think the first moment John Crabtree starts inquiring why Mason Seymour called you a White Knight, and why you took it upon yourself to call him out in the middle of a tête-à-tête with Ruth Napier, and why she then disappeared from sight, and why you then turn up with all this elaborate nonchalance that wouldn’t deceive a rabbit, they won’t instantly connect you with Ruth? And then, as soon as they find out you don’t even know her, don’t you think they’ll go straight to Faith Yardley?”

  His jaw tightened ominously.

  “I don’t know what happened while you were out last night,” I went on, “but I do know it must have been a great deal to make a man who yesterday was inventing the most preposterous yarn to get into a girl’s house to tell her he’d fallen in love with her, refuse this morning—when she probably needs friends worse than she ever needed them in her life—to accept a polite invitation to step in the place.”

  “Take it easy,” Bill Haines said. His face was flushed a little and quite angry.

  “All I have got to say is,” I said, “that so long as you’re in my custody, you’ve got to act as if you at least had half sense. Or else I’ll insist they lock you up.”

  He stood there for a moment, his lips compressed, his eyes smouldering and unhappy and resentful. Then he shrugged. “Okay, lady.”

  He followed me—not with the best grace, I’m afraid—through the white picket gate into the side garden of Yardley Hall. I was so cross that I marched ahead of him well into the grounds before I suddenly felt my steps falter and my heart go quite cold.

  In front of me, at my right, beyond the soft jade mountains of box, was the narrow peaked roof of the well-house with its black wheel and oiled chain. And with one sickening flash the whole unreal business of the night before leaped into my mind—the shadowy hand in the moonlight, the thin sound of the moving chain, the eerie splash and dabb
le of dripping water, and the hollow thud of the bucket hitting the depths of the well. I felt again the awful panicky desire to turn and flee, as I had the night before, but I dared not. I forced myself on, telling myself there was nothing there now in the broad May sunlight; the night was over.

  Then I came even with the well and realized I’d stopped short before I knew it, because Bill, coming behind me, bumped into me and mumbled an apology. Then his warm strong hand closed hard on my arm.

  “What is it, Miss Lucy?—Are you ill?”

  I couldn’t answer him. All I could do was stare at the whitewashed board that the raised bucket rested on. There was a brown stain there, against the gleaming white surface. It was blood. I knew it instantly, and with an instinct as sure as death. I felt Bill Haines’s hand on my arm tighten in a sharp spasm, and relax. He saw that mark too, and he too knew what it was.

  I tried to move, but I could not. All I could do was stand there with it going through my brain:

  “There’s blood on the well at Yardley Hall. There’s blood on the well at Yardley Hall.”

  That rang through my head, over and over again, until he literally moved me bodily forward, saying nothing, just making me go on toward the house, around to the front, up the stairs to the big closed door. He lifted the polished brass knocker and let it fall.

  “If you want to keep anything to yourself, now’s the time to start, Miss Lucy,” he said, just as Abraham’s black face appeared in the narrow opening, and the chain fell, and we entered the dim cool hall with its far-off fragrance of potpourri and roses and spice pinks. A big copper basin of California poppies and blue anchusa burned on the sunburst table. Abraham closed the door, and as he did the library door opened quietly, and Doctor Yardley looked out.

  He gazed at us for a moment as if we were people from a strange land. Then he passed his transparent hand over his high white forehead, and said, “May I speak to you a moment, Lucy?—You might wait in the parlor, Mr. Haines, if you please, sir.”