Jane Mallory walked alone toward the kitchen. Lieutenant King left the family in the parlor and stopped in the living room. He let his face show all and sundry that he wanted to be alone.
Patrick and I went outdoors. The night was lovely. My pet summer constellation is the Scorpion and it was shooting like a glorious rocket across the southern sky. We could see it clearly above the trees below and along the creek at this point. There were a couple of elms behind the house, old ones, tall and vaselike. The lilac hedge sloped on down to the creek’s edge and gave off its dazzling fragrance. These were purple lilacs, so you couldn’t see them in the dark unless a cluster happened to be silhouetted against the brilliant stars.
We took the flagstones from the back steps in the direction of Uncle Victor’s cabin. Patrick stopped me just after we passed through the hedge.
“Just where were you pushed, Jeanie?”
“There. Which one do you suppose of this normal happy family pushed me?”
He didn’t reply. He took out his pocket flashlight and examined the ground where I’d fallen. He searched the hedge. Another walk of flagstones went toward the drive on the back side of the hedge. He searched all the way. He could find nothing to indicate that anybody had been there, except myself. A rose leaf had tumbled from my hat. He picked it up and pocketed it.
“I suppose you’re going to prove I pushed myself, aren’t you, dear?”
He didn’t answer. He walked back along the flagstones and turned the flashlight on the ground and the hedge. He found nothing that could be a clue to the pusher. On coming back toward me this time he kept the light on the hedge, as though he thought the lilacs might conceal something. He found nothing.
“Who left the room while I was out, Pat? When King sent me upstairs to collect Amelia?”
“Denise Clarke was already gone, as you know. Mrs. Rollo wasn’t about, so far as I could make out, and Sarah Mallory was apparently bedridden.”
“Like fish,” I scoffed. “How about Jane Mallory?”
“King let her go to the kitchen to tell those two maids who live out that they might go home. He’d forgotten them until Mrs. Rollo suggested it.”
“But Mrs. Rollo was outside when I fell. I think she pushed me.”
“She appeared at the parlor door just after you went upstairs to bring Amelia. King told her he’d think it over. She didn’t come back at once, so King asked Jane Mallory to go to the kitchen to tell the maids they could leave.”
“He trusts Jane, then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was trying her out for some reason. He could have sent me or Seth Godwin or Uncle Victor or Bart Wayne to do his little errand, but he sent Jane. She went quickly and came back and the two girls left by the dining room exit and walked away along the drive. They live not too far from here, I guess.”
“Are you sure Jane herself didn’t ask him to let her go?”
Patrick hesitated.
“Speak up, darling.”
“As a matter of fact, she did ask.”
“You’re protecting her,” I said. “You’ve tumbled for her lovely face and figure, like the others.”
“Could be.”
“What evidence do you suppose she destroyed in the front yard? When the nurse was watching?”
“I don’t know. It bothers me.”
“Did she kill her husband, Pat?”
“I don’t know. I wish I could be convinced that she is innocent. But the way she sits in silence and takes that diatribe from her mother-in-law and the nurse worries me. Speaking of an iron will! Sarah Mallory’s isn’t a shadow to Jane’s. Jane can take it!”
“King wouldn’t let her go upstairs for Amelia. He sent me.”
“Maybe he thought he was protecting Amelia. Or Jane. Don’t know.”
“Maybe. I guess Mrs. Rollo went directly to the kitchen after you saw her in the parlor and heard me going down those outside stairs and popped right after me and … pushed me.”
“Could be,” Pat said, the second time. “Let’s have a look at the cabin.”
I shivered. Spiders.
The steps to the porch under the wisteria were steep and shabby. The porch was floored with wide boards with cracks between them. Both rooms had doors and these were closed. It was easy to see which was the spider room because lights were on in both rooms and the front window of the one on the right was thickly festooned with webs which glistened in the artificial light. Looking through the webs you could see boxes, framed displays on the walls, some shelves. The entire room was draped in webs and full of that quick sly motion which goes with spiders. Watching, there seemed to be prolonged stillness, then quick darting movement. The eye was snatched here and there. That’s spiders.
“Ugh!” I moved back on the porch, felt a web on my face near the wisteria, and pawed it away. “Let’s go.”
Patrick had parked his face against a windowpane.
“Don’t do that, Pat. They’ll come out.”
“Huh-uh.”
“Why not? I just tangled with one on that vine.”
“Uncle Victor hasn’t captured that one yet. There’s a lot of spiders in that room. Alive and dead both. Did you say that Amelia took something away from the spider room?”
“I don’t know which room she came out of, Pat. The doors are close together, as you see, and I was at a distance.”
Patrick tried the doors. Thank goodness, the one to the spider room was locked. The one to the bedroom was not locked. It was a simple room, very clean, with a divan bed covered in denim, a big fieldstone fireplace, an easy chair beside it which looked shabby but comfortable, a reading lamp. At one end was a desk and beside it a gray steel filing cabinet three drawers high. A good microscope was among other equipment on the desk.
There were pens, some drawing materials, some firm white paper, filing envelopes. Ink of various colors, and so on. All neatly arranged. An old-fashioned wardrobe contained a number of tailored suits similar to the one Uncle Victor wore this evening. A bureau with a marble top and three drawers held white shirts, monogrammed linen handkerchiefs, underwear and pajamas. Uncle Victor was orderly and immaculate. A collection of Charvet ties hung on a rack inside one wardrobe door. Nothing was new. Everything was fastidiously cared for. And next door were all those spiders.
Patrick tried the files. The top drawer was locked. All three were locked.
“Amelia took something from this room, Pat.”
“Not necessarily. Uncle Victor probably lets her know where he keeps keys. She might have removed something from the spider room. He says she’s not afraid of spiders.”
“Are you?”
“I wouldn’t keep them as pets.” He kneeled down and sniffed around the bottom drawer of the steel cabinet. “Almonds,” he said.
“Cyanide?”
“Possibly. Which way did she go when she left the cabin?”
We stepped out on the porch and closed the door.
“That way.”
There were more crude steps at that end of the porch. Easy to see why. Another walk led to a well, with a pump on the platform. Patrick pushed the pump handle up and down and water came. He sniffed at it.
“Almonds?”
“Can’t tell. If the stuff has solidified in a container, as it usually is for use in a zoölogical lab, she’s probably hidden it somewhere. Let’s look down the hill.”
There was no path down the hill, but the turf was that heavenly spongy stuff which covers the Bluegrass country like green velvet. Among the trees near the creek a large glass jar was only partially concealed. In the bottom white stuff had solidified. It wasn’t necessary to remove the top to catch the almond odor. Patrick picked up the object and we walked up the slope and around the cabin and paused beside the lilac hedge. He started his search again and this time he found a soft powder-blue thread. It wasn’t a thread. It was yarn. Tweed?
Pat put the jar of cyanide in the back compartment of our rented car, locked it, and we returned to the house by way of the white-lilac promenade and the side entrance. Jane Mallory was alone in the living room. Sarah Mallory was speaking to someone in the front hall. We listened.
“Have you got it the way I want it now?”
“You’re sure you don’t want a private funeral, Cousin Sarah?” She was with Bart Wayne.
“A Mallory with a private funeral? We’re old family. Everybody who is anybody will want to come.”
“It’s easier now to have them in a chapel …”
“A mortuary chapel? You’re quite mad. We’ll have him here, in this parlor. He would want to be at home. And no flowers except the family’s, remember. The white lilacs. Tell the florist when you call him to come very early in the morning and fetch anything he may need to arrange the lilacs properly and to get word around that no other flowers but ours will be used.”
“There isn’t much time to get word around, Cousin Sarah.”
“Well, there’s only one florist, Barton. They’ll all ring him up or go there. He won’t lose any money by it. I’ll see to that. And speak to the mortician again. I want you to go yourself when this awful policeman takes that woman away. The coffin must be a very good one. The best. Gray. There’s no need for a special copper vault. They’re already in our tomb. Now about the service. Mr. Peachey is so long-winded. Tell him to make it short. Not ramble. And no poetry. No solos, either. I can’t abide “Crossing the Bar.” Tell him I must see what he’s going to say before the funeral. What about that lawyer?”
“He should be on his way, Cousin Sarah.”
“What a nuisance. Well, I’ll go to my room and lie down for a while. Thank you, Barton.” There was a tiny lapse in the talk. “Oh, I wonder how things are in the cemetery. Have the mortician—the one named Jones, remember, not the other one—check up on our lot. Thank you so much, Barton. I don’t know how I could have managed without you.”
“That’s kind of you, Cousin Sarah.”