CHAPTER TWENTY

The inquest on the body of Agnes Hutton was held the next morning. Dick Ellicott and I were the only people going from Ivy Hill, except Lieutenant Kelly, who had come back out some time the night before, and appeared, all barber-shaved and powdered and polished up and ready to go, before I’d begun my breakfast. He decided that because Major Ellicott’s car was stuck gasless out on the road the three of us would go out in the police car and take some gas with us, and Dick Ellicott could drive us into town. There was some rumor that Mrs. Trent had ordered her car brought around at eleven o’clock, and he didn’t want the police car to be away—apparently just in case.

I hadn’t seen Cheryl to talk to, although I knew she and Perry and Michael had gone out before breakfast and hadn’t returned by the time we started. I wondered if she was still planning to marry Dick Ellicott that day. I figured, however, that she couldn’t marry him as long as he was with Lieutenant Kelly and me, and something might come up to give her back her courage. Dr. Sartoris, who was making short work of a large flurry pile of flannel cakes and honey at the other end of the table, said he was happy to say Michael was better this morning. Not as overwrought as he had been last night. Lieutenant Kelly, who ate with us when Mrs. Trent wasn’t down, said “Yeh?”—and that finished that.

When we left Dr. Sartoris was standing in the drive. It may have been my imagination entirely that gave him the air of a man speeding an inopportune parting guest before he went back to his own affairs. Anyway, we drove off, and found Major Dick’s car. Lieutenant Kelly unscrewed the cap of the gas tank and Dick Ellicott emptied a gallon tin into it.

“That’ll take us fourteen miles,” he remarked, and put the tin back in the police car.

It was rather a tight squeeze. Lieutenant Kelly said he thought I ought to reduce, and laughed heartily. Major Ellicott entered into the spirit of the thing and computed our combined weight at five hundred and thirty-five pounds. My hundred and thirty was rather overpowered in the middle, and I got awfully mixed up with the gears and brakes and things when Dick Ellicott started the motor, turned off the windshield wiper, shifted in my opinion a lot oftener than was necessary, and drove us into town. We stopped at a service station at the end of the bridge, and while the man was filling the tank Lieutenant Kelly went in the shop to telephone. He brought me out a package of gum.

The inquest was brief and most perfunctory. The sheriff was present, and explained that Lieutenant J. J. Kelly of the Baltimore Bureau of Detectives was Special Investigator in charge, and then retired to a side table, where he struggled audibly with what I should imagine was a hollow tooth. Dick and I were the only witnesses immediately connected with the Ivy Hill family. We told about finding the bodies, and the jury immediately returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown, and were dismissed by Dr. O’Brien. Lieutenant Kelly later told me that he’d pulled a fast one to keep them from hanging the whole works on Michael Spur from the drop of the flag. He didn’t say what the fast one was.

After that there was a sudden relaxing in the room. Lieutenant Kelly and the other out-of-town people present—they included a dozen or so reporters from Baltimore and Washington—gathered around the sheriff, and there was a lot of heavy humor indulged in. I didn’t know what the joke was, but it was obviously on the sheriff; and then we were told by a young chap standing by us that Mr. Doyle’s office had been burgled the night before and four half-gallon jars of ten-year-old evidence, and some other truck, carted off. As it was one of the few burglaries the town had ever had for years, it was funny in itself, but I gathered that to have the police burgled was of course immensely more so.

As we were going out I was surprised to see Mr. Archer. I hadn’t noticed him come in. He nodded to me and drew Dick Ellicott off to one side. Lieutenant Kelly, seeing me standing there, came over and asked me if I’d like to see Mr. Doyle’s museum in its present state. I said I would, very much. He ambled over leisurely and shook hands with Mr. Archer.

“I was goin’ to look you up this morning,” he said. “One of my men traced a safe deposit box of Mr, Trent’s. Under the name of Harrington.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Archer curtly.

“Well, he found it. And it was empty. Nothing in it.”

“Empty?” said Mr. Archer. The color faded suddenly out of his face, and left it the color of dirty putty.

“Yeh,” said Lieutenant Kelly placidly. “Empty.” He added as he turned away, “Thought I’d tell you. Thought you might like to run uptown this morning and have a look.”

Mr. Archer’s lips closed firmly. I saw that he was a man of good stuff; the color came back into his face.

“I’ll go now,” he said.

Lieutenant Kelly followed him a few paces, telling him whom to see in Baltimore.

Dick Ellicott said, “The old “fellow seemed pretty shaken for a minute.”

I nodded

“I’ll bet he wishes Agnes Hutton was here.”

“Why?”

“She knew more about the Trent and Spur affairs than anybody in the place. I guess they thought sometimes she knew too much.”

Lieutenant Kelly came back just then and told Dick he was going down to Mr. Doyle’s office for a few moments and that I was going with him.

“Then I’ll come along,” Dick said.

The sight of Mr. Doyle’s office, still pretty much the way his visitor had left it, seemed to give Lieutenant Kelly a good deal of quiet fun. The cabinet that had held the museum was practically empty, and the large file that had held the four jars of ten-year-old evidence was entirely so. Papers were dumped about, and Mr. Doyle’s secretary, whose name was Miss Lacey, was a very worried woman.

“It’s the Ridge Beach papers I can’t find,” she said. “We’ve got to have them.”

Lieutenant Kelly nodded affably, and when Miss Lacey went out of the room he winked at me.

“This’ll keep the Big Shot busy for a month. Won’t have so much time to pleasure himself around Ivy Hill.”

He chuckled gorgeously, and I looked severely at him.

“Did you do this yourself?” I demanded in a whisper; but Miss Lacey was coming back, and Lieutenant Kelly remarked blandly, without any apparent relevance that I could see, “There’s more ways of killing a horse than choking him on butter.”

When we went out and got into Dick Ellicott’s car he still seemed very well pleased with himself. We stopped at a drug store on the Circle, and while Dick Ellicott was inside I accused him again of resorting to very low methods to get rid of Mr. Doyle. Not that I blamed him much. Mr. Doyle was certainly on the side of what Mrs. Trent called “managing things.” But Lieutenant Kelly was not to be drawn.

“Anyway,” he said smoothly, “it’s no lower than the way you’re walking off with Miss Trent’s feeancy.”

I stared at him open-mouthed. “What do you mean?” I demanded hotly.

“Plain as the nose on your face,” he said, “except that you ain’t got much of a nose to speak of. But it’s plain, anyway, that the major ain’t looked at Miss Trent half a dozen times since you been around.”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“No, I ain’t crazy. It’s you’re crazy not seeing he’s crazy about you. What do you suppose he comes to town with you for?”

“Don’t be absurd,” I replied hopelessly.

“I ain’t absurd,” he said soberly.

When Dick came out he remarked, as blandly as you please, “We was just saying you must be buying out the store.”

Dick Ellicott smiled at me.

“Dr. Sartoris asked me to get some sleeping powders for his patient,” he said.

To get to Ivy Hill from town we had to cross three drawbridges—one over College Creek, one over the Severn, one over a little inlet about a mile this side of the road that ran down to the gates. For some curious reason Lieutenant Kelly suddenly began to take a great interest in their operation. He stopped the car while he got out and passed the time of day with the keepers of the first two. Dick Ellicott and I stayed in the car and talked, and I found it a little uncomfortable, at first. If Lieutenant Kelly thought I was trying to make off with poor little Cheryl’s dashing major, what might the major himself think—and Cheryl too?

But we did get on very well together, and once he said, “I wish we didn’t have to go back, don’t you?” I said, very primly, that I thought Cheryl would miss him if we stayed away too long. Then he asked me how it had happened that I hadn’t married anybody. That’s always been something to explain. A lover lost in the war is a pretty good explanation, but the war was awfully long ago and I was only thirteen when it ended, So I said I didn’t know. He said he thought we’d hit it off awfully well, and I was about to say something acidly about his scheduled elopement with Cheryl, when Lieutenant Kelly came back. Fortunately the little bridge over the inlet hadn’t a keeper.

When we got back to Ivy Hill there was a man from Baltimore waiting. He had a brief case with him, and he and Lieutenant Kelly went into the library together. About two minutes later Lieutenant Kelly came out and asked me to get hold of Mrs. Trent and bring her to the library at once.

She was out in the lilac sheltered summer house, I eventually discovered, with Dr. Sartoris. I approached as noisily as I could, and when I got up to them she was standing looking down towards the water. Dr. Sartoris was doing what in a less poised and confident person would be called desperately pacing the floor.

“Lieutenant Kelly wants to see you right away, Mrs. Trent,” I said. She turned around. She had been crying, and the mascara on her eyelashes had run so that she looked exactly as if she’d got a couple of black eyes in a tavern brawl.

“You must come with me, Victor.”

“You’ll manage better alone, Emily.”

He spoke kindly but very firmly.

“But I’m doing it all for you!”

I don’t like to say she sniffled, but that’s just what she did

“I think you’d better take Kelly into your confidence, Emily,” he replied quietly. “You have very little to gain, and you have a great deal to lose.”

“But it’s only you-”

I interrupted just then, quickly.

“I’ll go with you, Mrs. Trent, when you see Lieutenant Kelly, if you want. But you must come along and wash your face, and see what he wants.”

I took her by the arm, and by dint of talking continuously I got her to her room and got the mascara mopped up, and took her downstairs, protesting but subdued.

I must say I wasn’t prepared for what we found on the library table, or the look on Lieutenant Kelly’s face as he stood behind the table. One hand jingled the change in his trousers pocket, the other pointed sternly to the photographs in front of him. They were a dozen or so greatly enlarged fingerprints. They were all the same, and even an amateur could tell they were identical with the smaller set on another sheet, labeled “Mrs. Emily Bassett Trent.”

She looked at them. I felt her stagger, saw her clutch at her throat and go the color of painted chalk. I steadied her with one arm round her waist, or half-way round anyway.

“What about it, now, Mrs. Trent,” Lieutenant Kelly said furiously. “These are your fingerprints.”

If a King Cobra could talk I imagine he’d have just that sort of flat cold deadly voice. I was genuinely frightened.

“These are your fingerprints, Mrs. Trent—and they were all over Agnes Hutton’s room.”

“I know it,” she gasped helplessly. “I was there.”

“Sit down,” he said in the same tone. “What were you looking for? “

“Oh my God!” said Mrs. Trent. “Where’s Mr. Doyle?”

“For God’s sake!” said Lieutenant Kelly. “He ain’t here—forget about him, and tell me what you were up to!”

His voice rose to a harsh shout, and I thought Mrs. Trent was going to faint.

“Mr. Doyle ain’t going to get you off,” he shouted; “what were you after?”

She clung to my arm and sobbed convulsively.

“Oh, God forgive me,” she cried, “I was hunting letters.”

Lieutenant Kelly’s eyes flashed.

“What kind of letters?” he barked.

“I thought Victor—Dr. Sartoris—was writing her letters, and I wanted to find them. I hated her, and I wanted to know, to be sure. I saw him coming out of her room. Oh, I can’t stand it!”

“When was that?”

“The night before—late. Oh, I was so unhappy.”

She choked miserably.

“Then in the morning they told me she was dead, and I said I’d lock the room. That’s when I went in.”

“What’d you find?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Lieutenant Kelly moved around the table with incredible speed and thrust a stubby finger accusingly in her face.

“Mrs. Trent!” he said slowly, “we know you took a book off her table. Where is it? And what else did you take?”

She gave a couple of convulsive sobs. And then a strange thing happened. Just as one can see air coming into an inflating balloon, I felt something—strength, or desperate courage, decision, perhaps just craft—coming into Mrs.Trent. Her next sob rang very false, and when she looked up at Lieutenant Kelly her face was blank and vapid.

“I didn’t take anything,” she said. “I wanted to find Victor’s letters because I knew she knew him. She told me about him first two years ago. I thought he was in love with her. But I was wrong. He didn’t write her any letters, and he assures me he never was in love with her at all. She just pestered him the way women all do.”

I understood exactly why Lieutenant Kelly was so pleased that Mr. Doyle was out of the way—he never would have allowed the ordeal that Mrs. Trent was put through during the next fifteen minutes. And Mrs. Trent was as adamant, so to speak, as an indestructible jellyfish; and when she was finally allowed to go and the door had closed behind her, the man with the funny little toupee who had brought the brief case down, and was sitting with it across his knees, expressed it very adequately, I suppose: “You didn’t get to first base, did you, Joe?”

Lieutenant Kelly mopped his brow with a large purple silk handkerchief.

“Let’s see what else you got,” he said placidly.

I didn’t know until later that Lieutenant Kelly was slowly getting the tangled skein of the Ivy Hill murders untangled and laid neatly across the back of a chair. For instance, though I might have guessed it, I didn’t know that he’d sent Agnes’s shorthand notebooks, that I’d stowed away under my mattress, to Baltimore to be completely transcribed. I didn’t know that in four days he’d traced the lives of Michael Spur, Agnes Hutton, Victor Paul Sartoris and Louise Cather so that he knew as much about each of them as they knew themselves. And I was as much surprised as Cheryl was when she and I were sitting in my room after lunch, talking, and he stuck his head in the door.

“Lady,” he said with a scowl, “what do you call that red stuff the Hutton woman had in her hand?”

For a moment I couldn’t think what he meant, and then the picture of Agnes Hutton clutching the bruised magenta branch came with nauseating clearness into my mind. I said, “Some places they call it redbud. Here they call it Judas Tree.”

“Yeh,” he said. “Thanks.”

He closed the door, and Cheryl shook her head.

“I wish they’d get somebody else down here,” she said.

We’d been talking, Cheryl and I, about Major Ellicott.

“Sometimes I don’t think I’m the person for him to marry, Louise,” she said. “He’s so much cleverer than I am. I used to think, sometimes, that even Agnes was a better match for him than I was, as far as brains went, because I’m an awful dud, you know. But a person like you could do a lot for him. And he ought to live in town, not in the country like this. That’s what Perry thinks too. You know, Perry’s funny—the other day he said, ‘Now your father’s dead, you don’t have to marry Ellicott.’ “

“Your father wanted you to?”

“Yes. I don’t know just why.”

The most ridiculous thing flashed through my mind then. If Cheryl’s father had insisted on her marrying Dick Ellicott, and Perry Bassett didn’t want her to, perhaps Perry had killed him so she wouldn’t have to. It seemed pretty farfetched, and also, I reflected, it certainly didn’t explain Agnes Hutton’s death, even if she was hanged with Perry’s rope. So I dismissed that idea and went on listening to Cheryl.

“Mother’s never liked Dick very well,” she was saying, “and I don’t think she was very keen about me marrying him before Dad died. But now she’s all for it. The sooner the quicker. I don’t know why. I suppose she’d like one of Dad’s wishes carried out.”

“You know, Cheryl,” I said, “I inadvertently heard your talk with Major Ellicott yesterday. I was in the summer house.”

“Oh—really?”

I nodded.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided to wait.”

I smiled at that.

“Maybe I’m just stubborn, but I thought I’d tell Mother about it. After all-”

She shrugged her shoulders indifferently and unhappily.

“There’s no use being silly about such things. Well, she was all for it. It’s the first decent word I ever heard her say to Dick. Wished him all sorts of nice things.”

She laughed mirthlessly.

“I just had the feeling that she was saying the ‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry’ sort of thing, and I balked. I told Perry this morning. He didn’t like it a bit. He’s funny. You know, Louise, I think he’d do anything for me. He said he’d even go to town to live if we could have some window boxes.”

“He’s sweet,” I said. “And speaking of sweet people, how’s Michael Spur? “

She turned two wide serious young eyes towards me.

“Oh, Louise,” she said, “I’m so afraid! Michael told me while you were in town that he knew my father and Mr. Archer had absolutely ruined him, but he didn’t care, because he sort of thought of it as part payment for his killing his father. It was his father’s money. And I talked to Victor then, and he said Michael couldn’t really forgive them, he must have some deep resentment. He might not be conscious of it, you see, but it could come out in one of his spells and he’d kill my father.”

“That’s just the same old idea, Cheryl, isn’t it?” I said. “And what’s more, it doesn’t explain Agnes Hutton.”

She held out both her hands in a helpless gesture of despair.

“I know, but it might. Agnes told Michael about the money business last year, and she’s known about it for years, you see, that they were . . . just selling him out. It was a sort of revenge she was getting, and it wasn’t any revenge unless he knew about it. She knew so much, you see.”

“Doesn’t sound sensible to me,” I said promptly.

“Oh, I hope not—I do so hope not. I couldn’t bear it, Louise, for him to have hurt her . . . that way. It’s so beastly cruel. She looked so awful. I’ll never forget it.”

She closed her eyes, and one large tear squeezed under her long lashes and slipped down her pale cheek.

“Michael was really awfully in love with her once,” she said. “I remember every time I wanted to see her she was off with him somewhere, and he always told her all our secrets. I hated him for it. I thought they were so important—about where the cardinals’ nest was and where I’d seen the first violets, and that sort of thing.”

She laughed unhappily.

“It doesn’t matter, though.”

“I suppose not,” I said very insincerely.

And actually it turned out to matter infinitely more before another day was over than it ever had when Cheryl was six and a cardinal’s nest and the first violets were all that was at stake.