CHAPTER NINETEEN

When I came downstairs that night, half an hour before dinner, Mr. Archer, Major Ellicott, and the State’s Attorney Mr. Doyle were standing together out on the terrace, talking. Perry Bassett, a little grayer, I thought, and even more than before like a frightened rabbit, was sitting close to the open window, pretending to be doing nothing and listening as hard as he could. He looked up when I came and put his finger to his lips. The three men on the terrace must have heard me, because they moved away out of sight. Perry Bassett motioned me to a chair beside him.

“They found the rest of the rope,” he said in a semi-whisper. “It was cut off a coil of mine. I could have told them that. I knew it when I saw it, first thing. It was in the shed where I keep my things.”

“Where’s Michael now?” I asked, without any connection except a vague shapeless fear in my own mind that the three men outside constituted a definite danger to him.

“He’s in his room. That man told Emily’s doctor that he could go talk to him. Emily’s doctor had an idea. I don’t know what it was. They won’t tell me. I think they ought to—it was my rope.”

Perry Bassett knew one other thing too. They had found five cigarette butts tossed into the bushes near Agnes’s body. They were an ordinary brand, but Michael happened to be the only person around who smoked it. The interesting thing, however, was that two of the butts had lipstick on them. Lieutenant Kelly had decided that whoever had hanged Agnes Hutton had talked things over with her first.

Perry Bassett lit a cigarette nervously.

“I don’t like any of this,” he said. “I wish they’d do something. You know-”

But he didn’t get any farther. We heard a gay fat flutter of laughter, and saw Mrs. Trent, her left hand tucked coyly in Dr. Sartoris’s crooked arm, her large black lace hulk listing heavily to port, coming along the terrace toward the table where Magothy stood with a tray of tall frosted mint juleps. Mr. Doyle was at her other side. Cheryl brought up the rear with Major Ellicott and Mr. Archer. Her face was as waxen as the dogwood petals, and the crimson slash of her mouth reminded me suddenly of the Judas Tree.

She seemed to me to be carrying on automatically, her mind very far away somewhere, imprisoned behind a wall of ice. I noticed that Perry Bassett started when he saw her, and she came over to him at once when he and I went out on the terrace. It was the strangest cocktail hour I’ve ever been through. As a wake it wasn’t enough, and as an event in a house whose master has been buried not five hours before, it was altogether too much. If it hadn’t been for Cheryl’s frozen blue wide eyes and the black crêpe heart on Magothy’s sleeve, I should have thought we were celebrating Mr. Trent’s departure for the Fourth of July week-end in Paris. Mrs. Trent was in fine spirits. She laughed and tapped her doctor coyly on the ear with her platinum lorgnette when he said he hoped he could get away in the morning.

“No, Victor—we’re never going to let you go,” she cooed.

Major Ellicott winked at me.

“Why not buy in the Foster place, Emily,” he said, “and turn it over to Sartoris for a hospital?”

Mrs. Trent’s foolish smile faded and disappeared. Her face ran through the whole gamut of emotions—or all that she was capable of: surprise, annoyance, anger and what not; and ended on a high blank note, as if she hadn’t the slightest notion what he was talking about, and no interest in finding out. And she refused to be drawn. Fortunately Magothy helped her out by announcing dinner.

I don’t know whether it was the mint juleps or the fact that Michael was upstairs that made Mr. Doyle quite willing to discuss what Mrs. Trent had suddenly started referring to as our cause célèbre. He told us about the cigarette butts.

“We think they didn’t go down there together, because we found several places where his footsteps on the clay path were on top of hers, when there was plenty of room for them to walk side by side.”

I glanced at Cheryl. Her cocktail fork had stopped halfway to her mouth; she was staring at Mr. Doyle like a snared canary at the family cat.

“Then you know?” she asked quietly, lowering her fork and controlling her voice with a great effort.

Mr. Doyle laughed.

“I wouldn’t say we know” he said. “I really don’t come in this yet. Technically speaking, Lieutenant Kelly, as a kind of special agent here, gets the evidence, and puts it in front of me. I interpret it, and I prosecute.”

He leaned back in his chair, much pleased, but in a very decent way, at being here in pretty much the position of a valued friend of the family.

“Of course,” he continued, “I’m pretty much interested in this case. Lieutenant Kelly’s a good man, in his way, but he can’t see back of things, the way the doctor here does, or if I may say so, the way I can in this particular case. I guess I’ve mentioned to you all about my little museum.”

Cheryl looked a little frantic, and I gathered she’d heard it several times before.

Mr. Doyle turned to me.

“Now I guess that would be something to write about for your magazine, Miss Cather. I’d like you to come down and see my little collection some time. I guess that would be something new, now, wouldn’t it?”

“I’ve been in the museum at Scotland Yard, Mr. Doyle,” I said.

“Sure enough?”

I nodded.

“Well, then, you’d like my little collection. I’ve got the brick doorstop a young nigger boy killed his grandmother with, and I’ve got the piece of corset lace that tripped old Mrs. Oliver down the steps and killed her deader than Hector, when she’d put it there herself to trip her husband.”

I expected momentarily to see Cheryl topple forward into the asparagus and hollandaise on her plate. Mrs. Trent seemed perfectly enchanted, and nobody else seemed to mind.

“Of course,” Mr. Doyle went on, “my prize exhibit is the gun that Michael shot his father with. It was my first case as States’ Attorney. I keep it and the bullet we got out of Spur’s heart in a special place. I’m going to add another gun and a piece of rope to it pretty soon now.”

I don’t know what Cheryl thought, or even what she looked like just then. I felt a wave of nausea, and I had to look steadily down at my plate. I didn’t hear what Mr. Archer said, but I did hear Mrs. Trent’s reply.

“Oh, that will be all right. Victor will certify that he’s quite insane.”

Victor looked a little startled, I thought, but he should have recovered instantly under the icy shower of Mr. Archer’s remark that it took three doctors to certify in the state of Maryland and they had to have Maryland licenses.

Major Ellicott stepped into the breach.

“I’m sure Miss Cather would like to see your museum, Doyle,” he said. “Cheryl and 1 might run her into town after dinner and have a look at it.”

He turned to me,

“You haven’t been off the place since you came, have you?”

“I think it would be a very good plan for all you young people to go to town and go to a movie,” said Mrs. Trent.

There was a silence. Not even Mr. Archer seemed to think of anything to say. Then Cheryl spoke. “I’m sorry, mother,” she said. “I don’t feel like going to a movie tonight. I think it would be very nice for Dick to take Louise to town.”

I would rather have waited to see Mr. Doyle’s museum, granting I had to see it some time. But Mr. Doyle wouldn’t hear of it. The idea of having his museum “written up” seemed to have got hold of him. I tried, but unsuccessfully, to explain that I had very little to do with what Mr. Mc-Crae decided to publish.

And that explains why I was standing in the door with a black velvet jacket on, waiting for Major Ellicott to see something about his car, when Lieutenant Kelly came downstairs. He looked pretty near fagged out. I gathered that he hadn’t had a particularly successful day.

Going somewhere?” he inquired, touching my jacket sleeve.

“Going to town to see Mr. Doyle’s crime museum,” I said. Then I added, rather annoyingly, “I’m sorry I can’t wait until he’s added the other gun and the piece of rope. Which I understand is to be done as soon as Michael Spur is put in a sanatorium.”

“I ain’t so sure that’s what I’d call it,” he said dryly.

I gasped at that.

“You don’t mean you think Michael killed Agnes Hutton?” I demanded.

“I don’t know what I mean, lady.”

He ambled off just as Major Ellicott came into sight driving a Buick roadster. He got out and said, “Half a minute while I find Kelly.”

“He’s just gone into the library,” I told him.

I had half expected Lieutenant Kelly to put a stop to our leaving. He didn’t, not even when Mr. Archer decided he’d go with us. Mrs. Trent remarked, very audibly, that she hoped he’d plan to stay when he got there.

We started, Mr. Archer very red with annoyance.

“I sometimes wonder why I put up with that woman,” he spluttered, mopping his pink brow. “If it weren’t for Cheryl, I’d throw up the sponge, I declare I would!”

I was rather crowded over against Major Ellicott, and I caught a glimpse of his dark face in the mirror over the windshield. He had an amused smile on his face.

“I suppose you nipped the Foster business in the bud,” he remarked.

Mr. Archer grunted apoplectically. “I had that out with her on the way home this afternoon,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it even mentioned again. But I must say,” he added reluctantly, “she was more reasonable about it than I expected.”

“That’s because Dr. Sartoris refuses to accept it if she does buy it,” I put in. I might as well have thrown a bunch of red poppies at a bull.

“What’s that?” Mr. Archer demanded angrily. I told him what Dr. Sartoris had said to me. He blew his nose violently.

“So that’s it,” he said. “He thinks he’ll get a hundred and fifty thousand out of her anyway? That’s probably where-”

He stopped short, or perhaps it was Major Ellicott’s sharp turn of the car that shook him into silence. He spent the rest of the trip fuming to himself. We dropped him at the post office, promised to pick him up at the home of a local bank president on our way back, and continued around Church Circle to Mr. Doyle’s office at the top of Main Street.

Mr. Doyle was already there. He’d left immediately after dinner and his display was already spread out in fine style. I must say there’s always something curiously unreal and sentimental to me about crime relics. The door stopper with which the sixteen-year-old colored boy had brained his grandmother (aged seventy-five) for the $2.35 she had in the old purse around her knee was nothing but a brick covered with a torn piece of old turkey carpet. It had a brown stain on one end of it, and it had sent a boy to the Cut for life. And Mr. Doyle showed me a blue steel automatic labeled “State of Maryland vs. Michael Spur, August 18, 1919,” and a bullet in a sealed glass box labeled the same way. It was just a gun and the spent bullet was nothing but a piece of blunted lead—and yet there on Mr. Doyle’s desk, with Major Ellicott and Mr. Doyle and me bending over it, lay the thing that had destroyed two men, a father and a son.

The State’s Attorney had that curious mania for publicity and being “written up” that you find among so many otherwise sensible people. He gave me a lot of pictures of himself at various peaks of his career, and somewhere I still have a list of his vital statistics. I was rather glad when Dick Ellicott took me by the arm and said, “Look here, Louise, you’re not going to keep me here all night.”

We got out, and I’m ashamed to say we went to a movie across from the State House and had a very pleasant evening. I forgot all about Dr. Sartoris—and from a number of little things that happened I rather think Dick Ellicott forgot all about Cheryl. At least when we called for Mr. Archer somewhere, and were told he’d decided to spend the night in town, Dick Ellicott grinned at me and said, “I’m glad—I like to talk to you,” and I don’t quite remember whether it was my knee or my wrist he squeezed by way of punctuation. Anyway, we got on very well, until he said, “You know, Cheryl and I are going to be married shortly.”

I said, “Yes, I know.”

“Well, do you know that for the last week I haven’t been very sure that it was the wisest thing to do?”

“For you or Cheryl?”

“Both,” he said. “There’s seventeen years’ difference in age, for one thing.”

“Have you just discovered that?”

“I’ve just been thinking about it. And . . . well, honestly, she seems different the last week or so, somehow. I don’t know whether it’s all this awful business that’s changed her, or what. She’s just not the same.”

“That’s natural enough,” I said.

“I guess so. Do you think she’s crazy about this fellow Sartoris—the way Emily is, and the way Agnes Hutton was?”

“That’s a quaint idea,” I said. “I shouldn’t have thought of it.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t,” he said, giving me a queer look. “But maybe you haven’t any idea of the number of times I’ve run across them in the summer house behind the lilac grove. In fact, that’s where they were the night Duncan was murdered.”

“How do you know?” I said quickly, still not quite clear in my mind as to what he meant.

“I saw them there at half-past one. He was standing up talking and she was sitting with her feet tip on the chair with her arms around her knees listening to him.”

“On Monday night—the night Mr. Trent was shot?”

“That’s right.”

“What were they talking about?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“Jealous?”

“Maybe.”

“I suppose that explains why neither of them heard the shot.”

“Probably.”

“But it doesn’t explain,” I continued, “why you and Perry and Agnes didn’t, does it?”

“Or Emily, or Michael Spur, or Archer.”

“Mr. Archer’s a little deaf, isn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Major Ellicott admitted. “He’s the only one that’s got a decent excuse,”

“Mrs. Trent too,” I said. “She had a mud pack on her face.”

And then suddenly the car sputtered, faltered, and came to a dead stop. I looked at Major Ellicott. He was swearing softly but with considerable feeling.

“Ignition?” I asked. “Battery? Carburetor?”

“Empty gas tank,” he said curtly. “I told that damn nigger to fill her up this morning. We’ve got a thousand gallon tank on the place and this has happened twice to me this year.”

There’s something perfectly futile about an automobile with no gas in it. We sat there a moment.

“How far is it?” I asked.

“About two miles. And it looks like rain. Mind?”

“No,” I said. But I really did a lot. Two miles in the rain in high-heeled slippers, with a blistered heel from two miles in riding boots, is a long way, especially on country roads.

We started, but we didn’t get far. A car came up behind us and stopped by the side of the road. I laughed heartily. The men in it were Lieutenant Kelly’s. I understood why he’d been so willing for us to go to town, and I wondered if they knew we’d left Mr. Archer behind.

They were rather apologetic about getting caught, as it were, and explained that they’d have been closer to us but they stayed to see the end of the comedy and we left in the middle. However, they gave us a lift to the house.

As we were going in Lieutenant Kelly and Dr. Sartoris came out of the library. Lieutenant Kelly looked at his watch and strode out into the drive just as his men were parking the car. “Run me into town,” he said, and I heard them rattling off in the police car.

Dr. Sartoris looked at me and smiled faintly.

“Did you have a nice time looking at Mr. Doyle’s relics?” he asked.

“Very,” I said.

Mrs. Trent pounced out from the living room.

“Oh, Victor, is that you! My dear, I thought that dreadful man was going to keep you all night. You were in there almost two hours talking to him—and poor little me all alone with Perry and Cheryl.”

“You should have gone with us, Cheryl,” Major Ellicott said, sauntering into the living room as I went in.

“Oh, hullo, Michael. How’s the boy?”

“I’m all right, thanks. Has Kelly gone? I want to see him.”

“He’s just gone.”

“Oh, damn him,” said Michael bitterly. “I told him I was waiting for him.”

His hands moved nervously through his hair, and I looked at him almost in alarm. He seemed terribly on edge.

Just then Dr. Sartoris came in from the hall with Mrs. Trent clinging to his arm, and Michael glared at them.

“For God’s sake, Aunt Emily, can’t you quit hanging onto that fellow—at least till your husband gets cold in his grave?”

There was an appalled silence—on my part at least.

Then Michael thrust back his forelock with a savage movement, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Aunt Emily. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He cast a penitent glance at Cheryl and strode rapidly out of the room.

“Well, I declare!” Mrs. Trent gasped.

Cheryl, who was still sitting at the bridge table with Perry Bassett, twisted one corner of her red mouth in a sardonic half smile. “Buck up, mother,” she said dryly, getting up. “Let’s take a walk, Perry. I need a little air.”

Perry Bassett disengaged his legs from the legs of the card table and his chair and said he’d like to. But Cheryl turned back from the opened window.

“I guess we can’t escape that way,” she said; “it’s raining again.”