Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 (25 page)

"Last night?"

Dr. Fell indicated Camilla and Alan.

"It was you, Mr. Beale, who drew their attention to the second message on the blackboard. Almost your first words to me this morning were that you did not understand it. Yet the message was direct, not to say stark. What was it you failed to understand?"

"Look!" said Yancey, as though holding hard to reason. "You and Camilla have quoted the third message, the one that brought us sky-hootin' out here. Let me quote the second one. 'The man you want,' meaning the murderer, 'is Madge's lover.' Remember that, Maestro? You seem to think this joker with the blackboard can call the shots pretty accurately."

"Well?"

"Excuse me if I make it personal," said Yancey, "but what did the joker mean by 'lover'? Did he mean it in the romantic or Victorian sense, of a follower who's just devoted to his lady? Or did he mean it in the modern sense, of a conqueror who stalks in and bowls her over and takes her to bed with all the privileges a
ppertainin' thereto? If
the joker's right, dollars to doughnuts it
?
s the second. But what about Madge herself? I'd hate to think that sweet-faced little gal was . . . was . . ."

"Less than perfect?"

"Oh, perfect! Who wants perfection, for God's sake?"

"Then what are you trying to say? Would it upset you very much, sir, if the image you have created in your mind turned out to have attributes other than sugar-candy?"

"Don't ask me what I mean, because I don't know myself! Upset me? Yes, reckon it would; I'm only human. But who am I to give Madge orders and tell her what she's to do, or go out and chew worms if she can't see the sterling qualities of ol' Yance?

"Keep your eyes on the left of the road, ladies and gentlemen. In about thirty seconds, past a cross street, you'll see the brick bastion of Fort Moultrie as they built it for the Spanish-American War. What we expect to find there absolutely beats me, but then the whole business beats me. I give you a motto: To hell with everything!"

A minute or two later, parking on the right-hand side of the road because the left-hand side was already cluttered with cars, they crossed Middle Street to Fort Moultrie.

The central wall, red brick faced with concrete, was set well back behind a stretch of grass, with wings projecting at either side. Visitors moved in and out through the arch of the front entrance, which opened into a kind of tunnel through the wall. But Alan did not go towards the front entrance. Camilla, for some reason in a mood almost like the mood of late last night, linked her arm through his. Drifting to the left, past the immense black barrel of a rifled cannon,
circa
1863, they ascended some outer steps to what in time of siege would have been the rear parapet away from the sea.

The sky had grown still darker, smokily tinged. Distant thunder rippled and rumbled beyond that curtain. Below Camilla and Alan the open interior of the fort, hummocks of grass and hard-packed earth, sloped down and then up again to the sea-wall, where gun emplacements without guns faced south-west towards Fort Sumter. The whole place boiled with an invasion, from serious-minded sightseers aiming cameras to children who screamed as they ran. The stars and stripes on its flagstaff curled out in a damp breeze from the sea.

Alan, leading Camilla downhill towards the door of what had once been a bombproof shelter for storing ammunition, glanced back. Up over the parapet rose the head and shovel-hat of Dr. Gideon Fell. Yancey Beale loomed beside him, stabbing a finger down towards something they had left.

"That, Maestro, was the grave of old Osceola, the Indian chief who gave 'em so much trouble during the Second Seminole War." Then Yancey looked ahead. "Well, burn my britches, we're not so far from home after all!
There's
somebody we know."

A baseball whacked into a glove. Alan also looked ahead.

Dr. Mark Sheldon—in Bermuda shorts, a fielder's glove on his left hand—had just thrown the ball to a twelve-year-old youth in Boy Scout's uniform, also be-gloved. His gesture checked the boy's return throw. He advanced towards the newcomers, who had gathered together.

"Camilla!" he said. "Yancey! And, as I live, Mr. Grantham and Dr. Fell! This is my nephew Benjie. Benjie —" More formally he repeated the four names.

Benjie, though responding politely, had something on his mind.

"Uncle Mark, have we
got
to go now?"

" 'Fraid so, old son. Your Aunt Annette—"

"She's kind of crabby, ain't she?"

"Mind your manners, Benjie! Dr. Fell," continued a harassed uncle, "I'm free at the moment, as you see; not because it's Saturday, but because even a doctor has got to have
some
time off duty. And yet I can't call this meeting a pleasure. After all—"

"You've heard what happened last night?"

"About poor Henry Maynard? It was in the paper this morning. I wonder you're not besieged by reporters!"

"We almost were. A police-officer named Captain Ashcroft gave them the story and sent them flying. May I ask whether you yourself, sir, have anything to contribute?"

"To the whole tragic affair? No, I'm afraid not. I left before it happened, you remember. But what could I have done if I had stayed?" Troubled, indecisive, Mark Sheldon drove his fist into the palm of the glove. "We always fret ourselves," he continued, "asking where we went wrong, how we could have done better, and the rest of it. And yet this time I did nothing wrong; I can incur no blame."

"No blame," Dr. Fell agreed, "but some amount of curiosity. In one respect at least your behavior might be called mysterious."

"Mysterious?" echoed the other, staring at him.
"Mysterious?"

"Yesterday, if I am correctly informed, you called on Mr. Maynard to tell him something, but changed your mind and left without speaking. Will you pardon my impertinence, sir, if I ask what you wanted to tell him?"

"Benjie," Dr. Sheldon said sharply, "get on out to the car and wait for me. I'll join you in two minutes. We must go; we ought to have gone already."

"Uncle Mark, is it about Aunt Annette?"

"Never you mind what it's
about; just get going, you
hear me? No arguments, young fellow, and
I’ll
buy you another bag of popcorn on the way home."

With only a mild squawk Benjie departed, running out through the deep tunnel of the front entrance. Dr.- Sheldon, shortish and stocky, rumpled up wiry dark-red hair.

"This is ridiculous!" he exclaimed. "And there's no mystery about it. I was only trying to save Madge—Miss Maynard, I mean—I wa
s only trying to save her embar
rassment."

"In what way?"

"At least half a dozen times, since the Maynards got here in April, they've invited me to dinner. The last time was the Friday night a week ago, May 7th. When Madge phoned about it, she said, 'Dr. Sheldon,' she said, 'I didn't know you were married; I've just learned you were married; why don't you bring your wife?' I didn't say anything except that I was sorry, Annette couldn't make it. Then I got to thinking.

"Annette is . . . well, it's not true to say she's an invalid; she's nothing of the kind. But she suffers from nerves, poor girl. She won't go out with me, but she insists on my going—says it'll be good for the practice, as though I cared two hoots about that!—and then she worries and I worry too. Do you follow me?"

"Not exactly."

"It would have been too brutally blunt to tell Madge, 'If you don't know my wife never goes anywhere—and doesn't receive at home either, so I can't return your invitations—then you're the only one in Charleston County who doesn't know it.' I couldn't have hit her in the face like that, now, could I?"

Obscurely agitated, beginning to pace on the grass-plot where another exhibition cannon-barrel was mounted on concrete blocks, Mark Sheldon removed the fielder's glove and thrust it into his hip pocket.

"All right!" he said. "Maybe I'm making too much of myself and my own affairs, which are pretty small potatoes after all. But I had to tell Madge; I had to let her know somehow. So I thought it would be smoother if I dropped a hint to the old man, and
he
passed it on. Then, when I heard he wasn't in the mood, I backed off. That's all there is to it. If you ask me why I returned to the Hall
a
second time, last night, I can only answer that I'm damned if I know.

"
The world is too much with us; late and soon' we something-or-other. I liked both Maynards; I still like Madge, though she isn't as easy to talk to as some people think. The old man, if you'll pardon my saying so, was definitely peculiar. Why, for instance, did he hate charity?"

"Hate charity, sir?"

"The first time I went there to dinner was in April, after they'd just got here. There were the same guests as are there for the house-party now, with Valerie Huret and myself in addition. I was making conversation. Now that he was back in his old home, I asked, did he mean to patronize my local charity? And he changed color. No joking: he changed color! In a strangled voice he blurted out the oddest words heard at anybody's dinner-table.
'Not St. Dorothy? Not St. Dorothy?'
And his hand jerked, and he upset a glass of wine."

"Well?" prompted Dr. Fell.

"I'd never heard of any St. Dorothy, and said so. Instantly he had a grip on himself; he explained that he'd been in the clouds again—which, to be fair about it, he often was—and that I'd misunderstood him. Somebody once asked me whether there was a real St. Vitus, who gave the name to chorea or St. Vitus' dance. And there was; I looked it up. But I've got no idea about St. Dorothy. Maybe it wasn't what he said; it didn't mean a thing to anybody else at the table. And that's all I can tell you, even if it's not a bit of good, and I'm afraid I must go now. My sincerest condolences to Miss Maynard; everybody else, good afternoon and good day."

Off he bustled, almost strutting despite whatever sense of inadequacy he may have felt, and disappeared under the arch. More thunder rolled its echoes down the sky.

"Now what," Dr. Fell asked abruptly, "are we to m
ake of so delicate-minded a gentl
eman as
that?"

Yancey Beale pointed a long finger.

" 'The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.' Mark Sheldon never does finish a quotation, does he? Has it occurred to anybody he's a kind of tragic figure?"

"What's occurred to me," said Camilla, "is that every word in this affair has some meaning beyond its apparent meaning on the surface. It's so tantalizing never
quite
to understand! Mr. Maynard did say St. Dorothy, or something very like it; I was there; I heard him. I never saw him jarred so badly, just for a second or two, as he was then. What he meant, of course . . ."

"And it occurs to
me,"
observed Dr. Fell, clearing his throat loudly as though in reply to a heavier peal of thunder, "that we had better examine the museum and such photographs as it may contain. Where is the museum?"

"Continuing that arch where Dr. Sheldon and his nephew went," Alan pointed, "the tunnel of the museum runs through the earth and through the front wall. Follow me."

A moment later they were inside. And, inexplicably, they had the place to themselves.

Under a vaulted roof, all whitewashed brick and concrete, glass cases reflected back a glow of lights. At the far end another arch was the front entrance to the fort, with a window embrasure on either side. Nearer at hand, old relics glimmered darkly behind glass.

"From the small size of the wine-bottles they drank from," said Dr. Fell, "it is clear that the famous three-bottle men of yore had a thirst less heroic than their reputations warrant. Photographs; hang it, where are the photographs? For the life of me I can't imagine how the picture of some
object
could suggest means of committing an impossible murder. Are there any photographs of people?"

"The
re's one," Alan replied, "and I
can't imagine why I forgot it completely. Don't you see Edgar Allan Poe?"

"Where?"

Alan pointed to the left-hand wall. Also behind glass against the wall, amid canteens and badges and other military debris, peered out the photograph which has adorned so many biographies, clear-eyed but a little sinister. Alan went closer to it.

"When he ran away from home and joined the Army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, he became regimental sergeant-major here at Fort Moultrie. There he is, Dr. Fell. Does it suggest anything to you?"