CHAPTER TEN

The three of us stared blankly at the white solid surface of the door. Mrs. Trent, oddly enough, recovered first. “Well!” she said. “Whatever do you suppose he means by that?”

Cheryl had leaned forward tensely.

“Louise!” she gasped, light dawning in her wide-open hyacinth eyes. “Does he mean that maybe Michael didn’t . . . do it? Didn’t kill my father?”

“Nonsense!” Mrs. Trent snapped. “Of course he did it. If he didn’t do it, it means somebody else did; and that means . . . murder.”

She hesitated, and then repeated the word sharply, very much as if she were shocked but determined not to be afraid.

“Murder.”

She looked at me.

“Nobody would murder my husband,” she said, her voice high and edged with a kind of fear and suspense, rather as if she wanted me to deny it if I dared. “Would they—you.”

It was obvious that she was speaking to me, and I don’t know but that I’d quite as soon be called “you” as Miss Mather. So I said, “No one that I know of, Mrs. Trent.”

“You see, Cheryl. She says Michael did it.”

“No, she didn’t, mother!” Cheryl said quickly.

I was astonished at the change in her. When I came in she was like a drooping water lily lying on a bank in the sun. Now her golden head was high, her lips parted breathlessly, her eyes bright. I don’t mean that she was happy. She wasn’t; but she was alive again and eager.

“Yes, she did!”

Mrs. Trent turned back to me pettishly.

“My brother says you’ve been talking to that policeman from Baltimore.”

“Yes.”

“What did he say, Louise?” Cheryl demanded quickly.

There was no use in trying to evade the point, and anyway Lieutenant Kelly had told me to break the news. This seemed as good a time as any, with Mr. Archer having prepared the way.

“I may as well tell you, Mrs. Trent,” I sad, “that Lieutenant Kelly feels there is a possibility that Mr. Trent’s death wasn’t accidental. That he actually was murdered.”

“You mean that Michael . . . that he wasn’t just walking around in his unconscious libido when he did it?”

“That’s evidently it,” I said.

I glanced at Cheryl. She was standing up, slim and straight; her face was pale, but the brave light was still in her eyes. She was moving her head slowly back and forth. I could almost hear her murmuring “Í don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.”

“Well, in that case,” said Mrs. Trent, shrugging her shoulders and reaching for the box of chocolates, “they’d better take him out of here at once. The sooner he gets away the sooner we’ll have a little peace.”

Cheryl moved quickly across the room.

“Mother!” she cried passionately, stamping her foot on the floor. “How can you bear to talk like that? I won’t listen to it! You’ve no right to say such things!”

A deep strangled sob choked her last words as she burst out of the room.

Mrs. Trent looked at me with genuine dumfounded amazement on her flabby carefully made-up face.

“Well, I declare,” she said. “What’s got into her?”

She sat down and picked up her magazine.

“You’d better go see,” she went on helplessly. “I’ve given up trying to understand that child,”

I started toward the door.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “My brother says he thinks you ought to stay here a while. So it’ll be all right.”

“Thanks very much,” I said, with what I regarded as devastating sarcasm.

“That’s all right,” she said vapidly, turning a page. I heard her hand fishing absently among the crisp brown paper cups in her box of chocolates as I closed the door.

“What a woman!” I thought.

I found Cheryl’s room by the simple process of opening every door until I came to it. It was at the other end of the corridor. A narrow passage ran between it and the railing around the stair well. It was a charming room, finished inivory and blue, and a good decorator had managed to use Pompadour chintz at the mullioned windows without being ridiculous. Cheryl was standing at one of them, looking down into the gardens. She was quite calm, and when I came in she said, “I’m sorry I made a scene, Louise. But Mother can be so provoking,”

It seemed to me to be putting it mildly.

“You are going to stay, aren’t you?” she said, coming over and sitting down in one end of a deep chintz-covered sofa. She tossed me a pillow and a cigarette and I sat down at the other end.

“Perry came and gave Mother the devil. He’s the only one on earth who can manage her, you know. And she said she’d ask you to stay. I don’t want you to go. I . . . I don’t feel quite so alone . . .”

“Well,” I said briskly, “I’m staying. I have to, in the first place. Lieutenant Kelly said so. He’s not letting anybody leave right now. Afterwards we’ll see.”

“Listen,” she said. “What Mr. Archer said. What do you think about it? “

“I don’t know, Cheryl,” I returned. “I don’t think I’d count on anything, if I were you.”

She laughed unhappily.

“Don’t worry. I know that. But I don’t believe he did it. I just don’t, some way. I mean I don’t think he’d do it.” “Do you think anybody else would?”

Something behind her eyes made them flatten curiously, and took all the velvety quality away, and left them cold and vindictive.

“I’d better not say—had I?”

Her voice was so hard and so mature that I had to think to make myself remember that she was only twenty. Then I remembered that Constance Kent had murdered her brother when she was sixteen, and that Lady Jane Grey had been named Queen of England, convicted of high treason and beheaded all during her seventeenth year. Age doesn’t make much difference in the way a woman acts. It’s the propelling force that counts.

“I mean somebody did do it,” she said, still in that same hard little voice, “and I can think of several people who might have. Don’t you see, it’s got to be one of three things. Either it was Michael walking in his libido, as Mother calls it, just as Victor said he would. Or Michael did it in his right mind, for some reason he had that we don’t know. Or third, somebody else did it.”

I agreed with that.

“Well,” she said more calmly, “it might be the first. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it isn’t the second. I think it’s the third, Louise. It’s somebody that had a grudge against my father and knew Michael would get the blame for it.”

She got up and walked across to her taffeta-skirted dressing table, leaned over and powdered her nose.

“In fact,” she went on, “I’ll bet anything I’ve got on Agnes Hutton.”

I was a little startled, because exactly the same idea was passing through my own mind when she said it.

“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “Just because you don’t like the woman is no reason to think she’s a criminal.”

She tossed her powder puff back into the enameled French make-up box and faced me, with admirable if slightly obstinate loyalty.

“I’ll never believe iVIichael did it,” she repeated simply. Then suddenly her defiance faded out, and she was a wistful, rather pathetic little figure trying hard to keep her courage up.

“Oh, Louise, please don’t think I’m dreadful . . . but I’m awfully fond of Michael. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve adored him. They used to have that silly picture of Sir Galahad at school—you know the one with the horse and the armor? I used to pretend it was Michael. One day the other girls went to Boston to the theater, and I stayed behind with one other ratty mutt from the third form who’d done something too. I was supposed to do French verbs, but I sat there pretending Michael galloped in a fine suit of armor with a new pink plume in his helmet. I had an idea the picture was winking at me, and that Michael thought it was pretty stuffy too.”

She laughed.

“I suppose that’s what Dr. Sartoris calls ‘escape,’” she said. “It sounds like frightful wash, but I guess it’s what comes of growing up always bumping into Mother’s iron men and never seeing any real ones. Anyway,” she continued decisively, “I don’t believe Michael murdered my father. He couldn’t have—do you see? “

“I see perfectly,” I said, and I did. I saw that Cheryl had an image of Michael in her heart that probably Sir Galahad himself couldn’t have lived up to with all the new plumes in Christendom in his helmet.

I said, “You’re going to marry Major Ellicott, aren’t you?”

“Oh . . . yes. Of course. I’d almost forgotten that,” she said. “In June.”

“Well,” I said, getting up, “June’s a long way off. Why don’t you go talk to Michael? It might cheer him up to find out you don’t think he did it.”

“Do you think he . . . wouldn’t mind?”

I was surprised and I must have looked it, because she said, “You see, he always thought I was a terrible nuisance, always tagging along and getting in his way, scaring off the ducks or getting him stung with sea nettles or something. I wouldn’t want to bother him.”

“I don’t think he’d mind,” I said, without even smiling. Ridiculous as it seemed, Cheryl still thought of Michael as twenty and herself as six. I suppose that’s why the idea of marrying Major Ellicott in June didn’t seem to bother her at all. The two things were wholly unrelated. I wondered if Major Ellicott and Michael would be able to see it that way.

I left her at the door of Michael’s sitting room and went to my own room. About ten minutes later Magothy knocked at my door and said that Lieutenant Kelly and Mr. Doyle wanted to see me in the dining room.

I went out and met Cheryl just closing Michael’s door behind her. She was white and stunned.

“It’s terrible, Louise!” she whispered. “He just sat there with his head in his hands, and he told me to go away. I didn’t mind that, but the way he said it . . . as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me.”

Before I could say anything Magothy appeared at the other end of the hall.

“Miss Cherry,” he said, “they done takin’ pictures of yo’ fingers in the dinin’ room. Mistuh Doyle, he wants to know is yo’ comin’ down or is they comin’ up?”

“I’ll come down,” she said.

“Yes, miss—thank yo’, miss.”

Major Ellicott met us at the foot of the stairs and took possession of Cheryl, rather sweetly, I thought. When she had placed first her right fingers and right thumb, then her left fingers and left thumb on the paper that one of Lieutenant Kelly’s men prepared for her, he went out with her. I heard her say, “It’s nice to be with you again, Dick. Where have you been? “

“Next, miss,” said the man at the table—they called him “Skip” and it may have been his name. I stepped up and made my ten smudges that looked criminal on the face of them.

“That’s the lot, sir,” he said. “Except the old lady. I’ll get her upstairs.”

“O.K.,” said Lieutenant Kelly, “Get going.”

He turned to me.

“Know anything about shorthand?”

“A little. I’m not very fast.”

“You can help us out, then,” he said. “My man’s had a blow-out on the road.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

“O.K. Skip, tell Lynch to bring young Spur down. Get going.”