CHAPTER SEVEN

I told them what had happened.

What I remember most clearly now is the abrupt hushed silence, and the way every head turned to Michael Spur as if he’d been a magnet and they were bits of iron. He looked blankly at me, and then at Major Ellicott, standing next to him. Then the color drained from his face and neck, and he raised his left hand to his forehead, and slowly, like a man in a dream, ran his trembling fingers through his curly tousled hair to the nape of his neck.

“My God!” he whispered, and swayed for a second, dazed.

Major Ellicott caught him firmly by the shoulder.

“Brace up, old man,” he said sharply. “Get back in your room and stay there, will you, until Doyle gets out here. Agnes, wake Archer and send him downstairs.”

I was left standing there, thinking in spite of everything that it was odd that nobody seemed to think of Cheryl and her mother. Then I heard a door open somewhere behind me, and I turned quickly. Cheryl had turned on the light in the transverse hall at the end of the one in which I was standing. She came sleepily toward me.

“What’s the matter, Louise?”

My face must have frightened her. Her blue eyes suddenly widened, her lips parted breathlessly.

“There’s been an accident, Cheryl,” I said gently. “Your father.”

“He’s dead?” she gasped.

She clutched my arm tightly.

“Yes, Cheryl.”

She closed her eyes as if to break the force of the shock. I thought for a moment that she was going to faint, but she didn’t. Her grip on my arm tightened, and she leaned forward, every nerve in her body tragically and intensely alive.

“Where is he?” she said.

“In the library.”

“I’ve got to go down.”

I caught her arm.

“No,” I said. “You don’t want to go down. It’s rather bad.”

“I’ve got to, Louise! You don’t understand. They don’t care what happens to him!”

“Cheryl dear!” I said as gently as I could, to make her understand. “It’s too late. There’s nothing you can do. Nobody can do anything for him.”

“They can hang him!” she cried passionately. She tore away from me and ran wildly down the hall.

For the first time I understood that it wasn’t her father she was talking about. It was Michael Spur.

One thing stands out in my mind in the confusion that followed in the next few hours. That was the tacit agreement, not expressed in so many words by anybody but Cheryl, but perfectly definite nevertheless, that the murder of Mr. Trent was not his tragedy. The tragedy was Michael Spur’s. Duncan Trent was an accident. Any one of us might have been sitting there with a bullet through his heart, staring into eternity. It had simply happened to Mr. Trent, and not someone else, and that was all. “A prawn in the hands of fate,” Mrs. Trent had called him, with a certain tragic triumph. “I told him so,” she said. “You can’t get away from psychology. He should have listened to Victor.”

It was curious how quickly she dropped any pretense of being on purely formal terms with Dr. Sartoris. She gave the impression of simply turning over her problems to him as if anything that was hers was his too—even a murdered husband. And I must say he rose to the occasion with exactly the sympathetic impressiveness I expected of him. It seemed to annoy Mr. Archer, but he’d been annoyed from the beginning. First at being got out of bed at two o’clock (Perry Bassett whispered to me that he hated having his rest broken, he was most particular about it), and second at Mrs. Trent for keeping everyone waiting, once he was up.

It did take her a very long time to come down. The long streak of mud under her ear, where she hadn’t got quite all her complexion pack washed off, was excuse enough for anyone’s being slow. There was no particular reason for Mr. Archer to object to her pastel rainbow-hued marabou and peach lace and satin negligee, or to the elaborate and artfully tousled curls over her ear. Except, of course, that it was all rather silly and heartless.

Mr. Archer had no more than time to call her a wicked old woman when Mr. Doyle, the State’s Attorney from Annapolis, showed up with Dr. O’Brien. Dr. O’Brien was the coroner, and he was very short and very fat, with a definitely pre-Volstead nose, and generally rather jowly and purple. He wheezed when he talked, and he smoked perfectly foul cigars, which he parked around on mantels and tables so they were always getting knocked off. However, he turned out to be unexpectedly kind-hearted and even sweet about everything, and I don’t know how we’d have managed without him.

“You see cases like this cropping up all the time,” he said in a whiskey bass, putting down his bag and parking his cigar and snaking hands with Major Ellicott. Both he and Dr. Doyle seemed to know Michael Spur, and to know he was home, and that he’d “gone off again,” as Mr. Doyle put it. “Had one last year,” Dr. O’Brien went on. “Fella used a hatchet, blood all over the kitchen.”

He looked at me, shook his head, and cleared his throat.

“I never get used to it. Always makes me nauseated. Once I was in Venezuela . . .”

“All right, Mr. Archer, we’ll look into it,” said Mr. Doyle briskly. “You can count on us.”

He had been talking with Mr. Archer in low tones in the doorway.

“Ready, Joe?”

Dr. O’Brien picked up his bag and went out into the hall. Major Ellicott followed him, and left me and Agnes Hutton alone. Dr. Sartoris and Mrs. Trent were upstairs with Cheryl and Perry Bassett. Michael, as far as I knew, was still alone in his room.

I glanced over at Agnes Hutton. She was resting her head against the high carved back of a chair with a red velvet seat and gold tassels, staring abstractedly up at the oak-beamed ceiling. She was rather pale, I thought, and her lower lip was caught when I looked at her under the sharp white edge of her teeth. She was a curious contrast to Mrs. Trent. She had on a green flannel tailored dressing gown, her hair was neatly brushed back from her high white forehead, her face was calm but there was something terribly poignant in her dark eyes, gazing unseeingly at the ceiling. At last she looked down and our eyes met.

“In Venezuela,” she said coolly, “they hung up four men in front of Dr. O’Brien’s house and cut pieces off them twice a day. That’s his story, and he’s stuck to it, winter and summer, for twelve years that I know of. You might as well get used to it. Oh God, what a mess!”

She got up and began to walk up and down in front of the fireplace. Then she sat down.

“That’s funny too,” she said.

I looked blankly at her. I hadn’t noticed either what was funny then or anything funny before.

“I learned that from him,” she said. “He always paced up and down when things got pretty foul. He was an awful old pirate, but I . . . I liked him. He was decent to me; and I’m telling you—for your information, I don’t give a damn about the rest of them—that I wasn’t his mistress. He never had one, or I guess I would have been.”

I rather wished Dr. O’Brien would come back and tell me about Venezuela, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Agnes Hutton had returned to her study of the ceiling. I said, “It’s too bad.”

“You’re telling me?”

“No, I’m not telling you. I’m just saying it’s too bad he’s dead, that’s all.”

But like Cheryl, I found I was thinking about Michael Spur, not about Mr. Trent. I glanced covertly at Agnes Hutton, wondering what she was really thinking about, looking up at the ceiling like that. Her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of her dressing gown, one knee was crossed on the other. She was quiet, rather, I thought, as a cat is quiet before it does something drastic about a bird. Now and then her free foot moved, the way a cat’s tail moves and is still again.

“I suppose you’U want to get off to New York first thing in the morning,” she said after a long time.

“I suppose so,” I said. As a matter of fact I hadn’t even thought of myself and what I was going to do. It seemed rather odd that she should have been thinking of it, when she must have had much more important things on her mind. For some reason, it made me a little uneasy. But I hadn’t time until later to give it much thought, for just then somebody opened the library door and we heard Mr. Doyle’s brisk business-like voice assuring Major Ellicott that everything would be taken care of with as little trouble as possible.

They came into the living room where Agnes and I were. Dr. Sartoris was with them, and I gathered from what was said that Mr. Doyle and Dr. O’Brien both agreed with him that Michael Spur should be left in his care until Mr. Doyle had talked the situation over with Judge Rose in the morning. Dr. O’Brien had certified the cause of death to have been a bullet that pierced the heart and caused instant death. He told Dr. Sartoris that he thought any doctor familiar with the case history would have predicted the present tragedy, and seemed in some way to imply that Mr. Trent had got about what was coming to him for not having taken the precautions that were suggested.

I don’t think Mr. Archer liked it very much, seeing Dr. O’Brien so obviously impressed by the New York specialist, but he didn’t say anything. His face got a couple of shades redder and he snorted twice. But no one paid any attention to him. Major Ellicott said that he hadn’t realized the gravity of the situation, but that he was now willing to advise Mrs. Trent to go the limit in protecting Michael from the consequences of his folly. Agnes Hutton smiled her Mona Lisa smile at that. I didn’t realize how funny it was. I found out shortly that the surest way to stop Mrs. Trent from doing anything was to have Major Ellicott suggest it to her. At the time his statement seemed very impressive to me. I thought Agnes was smiling just because she was rather horrid.

Mr. Archer and Dr. Sartoris went with Mr. Doyle to see Mrs. Trent. When they came down Dr. O’Brien, who had been talking quietly in” the hall with Major Ellicott, went up again with Dr. Sartoris to give Cheryl a sedative. They must have given Michael something pretty stiff, because I heard Dr. O’Brien say he guessed that would hold him till morning, and Dr. Sartoris agreed that it certainly ought to.

It wasn’t until they had their hats on and were leaving that Agnes Hutton brought up a point that was certainly sensible enough, but was rather startling at first, by asking Mr. Doyle if he wasn’t going to lock the library.

Mr. Doyle looked surprised, and she explained that Mr. Trent kept a number of valuable papers there, and that he had always made a practice of locking the room at night, which, as it turned out, was perfectly untrue. However, Mr. Doyle locked it, and gave the key to Mr. Archer, who put it in a drawer in the hall table as soon as Dr. O’Brien’s Ford coupé had rattled out of the drive.

Agnes watched Mr. Archer with her slow smile.

“That wasn’t very clever of me after all, was it,” she remarked, and shrugged her shoulders.

“I guess I’ll go to bed. Coming?”

But I don’t think she did go to bed. Ï heard her moving about in her room, next to mine, for a long time after I’d turned out my light, and when I woke up about five o’clock I heard her bath water running.

I lay there in Queen Elizabeth’s bed, trying to think what she reminded me of. All I could think of was a white gardenia I once saw on the desk of the Police Commissioner in New York. It had enough high explosive tucked carefully in between its waxen petals to blow Ivy Hill into a million pieces.