CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Cheryl and I dashed out of that ghastly rendezvous at full gallop, our heads ducked to protect our faces from the sharp stinging slaps of the dogwood blossoms along the narrow path. My mind groped desperately to remember something in our talk the night before that might explain the terrible distorted figure back there. And nothing would come except the image of those few shocked seconds, the dogwood, the leaden swaying body, the rigid white hand clutching the red branch of death. I’d taken it all in, even the grass beneath, blue with late violets, her dark blue straw turban, her gloves lying in the middle of the rustic bridge across the brook, as if she had been snatched back to her death while she was fleeing. From something she had feared? I hadn’t thought that the night before. I hadn’t thought of fear as having anything to do with it—it seemed just a sort of nostalgia, the modern form of remorse. Getting out because it was the thing to do. Then I wondered how early she’d gone—and I thought of something else, and dug my heels in the mare’s side and literally flew, wanting, desperately, to keep my faith with Agnes Hutton. If I could get there before someone else got there and got the things she wanted me to take to New York for her!

My horse and Cheryl’s behind me pounded down the drive, and Magothy, with a blue apron round his stomach, sweeping the paved entry to the big hall, stopped broom in hand and stared at us as if we were the hosts of the damned descending on him.

“Get Mr. Perry, Magothy!” Cheryl gasped, but before the old Negro could move we were both off our horses and in the house. “You phone the police, Louise, and I’ll get Perry and Victor. Oh, why isn’t Lieutenant Kelly here!”

I ran into the library and picked up the phone, and waited interminably for the languid “Number, please,” and then interminably until I heard Mr. Doyle’s voice. I told him, and told him also that Lieutenant Kelly wasn’t out yet, and hung up. In the hall people were coming downstairs, talking excitedly, rushing about, collecting in circles. I could hear Mrs. Trent say it was just like Agnes Hutton to do something of the sort when we already had trouble and to spare.

I slipped to the other end of the library and up the stairs in the family wing. No one was in sight. I ran quickly to Agnes’ room and opened the door. Her bed was rumpled up but it hadn’t been seriously slept in, and her yellow silk nightdress was crumpled just enough to deceive a colored maid who didn’t care anyway. Otherwise the room looked the same as it had the night before.

I went quickly to the dresser drawer, thinking it was lucky I had my riding gloves still on, and opened it. There was a little bundle of papers there, and several pads that looked like shorthand notebooks, all fastened together with a wide rubber band. I took them out and started back across the room to get the book. The window was open, and I heard Mr. Archer’s voice from outside: “Lock up her room until the police get here.”

I made a dash for the door, and got into my room just as Mrs. Trent, coming upstairs, said, “Give me the key, Magothy, I’ll lock the door. You go see about breakfast. We can’t all go round on empty stomachs all day.”

I stuffed Agnes’s bundle of papers between the mattress and the rope springs of Queen Elizabeth’s and my bed, and rushed downstairs again. Somehow I felt a lot safer. Everybody was gone, and I started out too, and stopped, thinking someone ought to be there at the house when Mr. Doyle came. I was standing there in the drive when Magothy came out and said my breakfast was on the table out on the dining room terrace if I’d like to have it. That’s where I was, eating popovers and honey and thinking as hard as I could, but without much point, when a Ford coupé rattled up and Lieutenant Kelly got out, resplendent in a very light gray suit, a crushed raspberry shirt and stiff collar, a green tie, and with a green silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. It seemed almost a shame to tell him there was another murder. It was obvious he didn’t know it—he looked too pleased with himself and his get-up and life generally.

It’s curious now to remember that I ran out and told him what had happened. I could almost swear he was as stunned by the news as we had been by the fact. But his recovery was instantaneous. Sergeant Lynch was with him in the car, and he rapped out orders to him to stay at the house, lock Miss Hutton’s door, watch everything and move nothing.

“Now, then, lady!” he said, and together we ran—at least he ran, as easily as if he’d been in training for a marathon, and I fell out at the poplar alley, not being used to that sort of thing. That’s why everything was over when I got there. Anyway, it’s not easy to run in riding boots.

Major Ellicott had cut the rope and laid the body of Agnes Hutton on the grass. “Couldn’t stand seeing her hanging there like that,” he said later to Dr. O’Brien. Dr. Sartoris had pronounced her dead when he’d got there, and when Dr. O’Brien got there the two of them agreed that she had been dead not much longer than three hours. It was then a little after seven. What she had been doing there, a mile from the house, at four o’clock in the morning was a natural question. Her hat and gloves, and her bag with $55.00 in cash and a check book on a New York bank seemed conclusive evidence that she was leaving Ivy Hill on short notice.

So much was evident and not much more. Our horses’ hoofs and Dick Ellicott’s and Dr. Sartoris’s footprints had trodden the violet-carpeted turf into an effective mess. Lieutenant Kelly ordered everybody back to the house. I glanced at them while they were leaving. Mr. Archer was still in his pajamas and dressing gown. Perry had flakes of dried lather around his ears and under his nose. One side of his face was shaved and the other was not, so that he looked ridiculously like one of those before and after using ads for razor blades.

Michael Spur was partly dressed, and there was something new about him—he looked as if something had snapped and liberated him again, at least partly. I glanced at Cheryl, slim and straight in her white linen riding breeches and black boots and thin white turtle-neck sweater, her hair a living gold in the morning sun, her wide eyes the color of the purple iris just beginning to bloom along the sheltered sunny banks of the little brook. She was watching Michael, and when Major Ellicott put his arm around her shoulders to lead her away I thought she looked a little startled, as if she hadn’t expected it. I was rather startled myself when Dr. Sartoris said, “Let’s call a truce, Miss Cather. I want to talk to you.”

I looked up at him. His face was a little pale under the blond stubble of his morning’s beard, and his eyes were so deadly serious that I felt a little shiver go down my spine.

I turned to follow the rest. Just then Lieutenant Kelly barked at me, “I’ll want you a minute!” I said, “Later, Dr. Sartoris, ” and he bowed. Manners, I thought, are rather ridiculous when you’re not shaved and your pajamas have been slept in. And that struck me as rather odd.

“Dr. Sartoris’s pajamas were perfectly fresh at two o’clock the other night,” Í said to Lieutenant Kelly.

“The Hutton woman already told me that,” he snapped. After that I kept quiet.

It seems that all he wanted me there for was to order me, very brusquely, not to talk to anybody until I’d talked to him. I have an unfortunate impulse to sudden anger, and I felt myself flaring up, and he felt it too. He shot out his hand and seized my wrist in a grip of steel.

“Don’t be a fool, lady,” he said. “Look here.”

He let go my wrist and took a telegram out of his pocket. He thrust it at me. I saw in a flash that it was the same as the one that had fallen from Dr. Sartoris’s pocket on the train.

MICHAEL SPUR RETURNING URGENT
COME AT ONCE LOVE EMILY TRENT

I looked blankly at him. All my wrath had vanished—as it always does—into thin air.

“You knew about that?” he demanded.

I nodded.

He handed me another one. It was signed “Agnes Hutton” and it made a reservation on the Europa sailing at midnight Friday.

“Know the point about them two telegrams?” he said.

“No.”

“Well, it’s this—they were both sent by the same woman. Mrs. Trent never sent that. Agnes Hutton sent ’em both. She’s well known in town, they remembered her.”

I stared at him. When he spoke next his voice was not so rough.

“You get the idea? That’s why I’m telling you to be careful, lady. There’s a killer around here—there’s one of these good friends of yours wouldn’t stop a minute to treat you like that.”

He waved his hand casually up at the lamp post.

“So don’t you talk—see? You watch yourself. All right, now. You run along and finish your breakfast.”