Murders in, Volume 2 (2 page)

“Well—think of Bernhardt, and Ellen Terry, and so on. They got away with murder.” He rose, and walked over to a stand piled with foreign newspapers. From among them he extracted a London
Observer
several weeks old, looked through it, and finally cut a fragment from the middle of a column. Miss Vauregard, watching him absently, objected:

“But Angela isn't Bernhardt, or Ellen Terry, and so on.” She added, as Gamadge came towards her, the fragment in his hand, “She isn't even Mrs. Patrick Campbell. I don't know anything about acting, of course, but—”

Gamadge looked at her, looked at the clipping, seemed to reconsider showing it to her, and put it into his wallet. He said, with a half smile: “Let's assume that you know nothing about anything, Miss Vauregard, and let it go at that. Anyhow, your family has entrusted you with the delicate task of employing a private investigator. But exactly what for? Aren't you going to explain?”

Miss Vauregard did not speak for some moments. At last she said: “I've been putting it off. I can hardly bear to tell you the story, it sounds so mad. But Uncle isn't mad. I want you to see him as soon as possible—this afternoon, if you'll come—and then meet the family, and talk it over.”

“Talk what over, Miss Vauregard?”

“I'm just going to tell—oh, what a lovely cat. Here, kitty, kitty—Ouch! Take away your horrid pet, Mr. Gamadge; he has bitten me.”

“I hope he didn't break the skin? No? Good.” Gamadge clasped the big orange cat about the middle, and swung him in a low arc out of the doorway and into the hall. He trotted angrily away. “I'm frightfully sorry. Most peculiar cat, Miss Vauregard. He will lie on your lap for hours, if you'll let him, rubbing his head against your hand. But if you rub his head, it's all off. He wants to do all the petting himself.”

Harold, Gamadge's assistant, a short, dark young man, came silently through a door which led to the laboratory. A white blouse covered his apple-green slack suit, and he held a glass slide between a finger and thumb. Gamadge said: “I'm in conference.”

“You wanted this as soon as I had a report on it.”

“Is it late eighteenth-century paper?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then don't bother me. Write and tell the client so.”

“The ink ain't. Somebody got some old paper and wrote the letter on it; not so very long ago, either.”

“Oh, the devil. Excuse me, Miss Vauregard. All right, I'll look into it later. Tell the client to hold everything.”

Harold dematerialized, and Miss Vauregard said: “He looks most intelligent, but very young. Where did you get him?”

“I didn't get him; he turned up on the doorstep one day, like Martin the cat. But he works for his keep, which is more than Martin does. And he hasn't bitten me—not yet.”

“You mean you don't know anything about him?”

“Not a thing, except that he's going to be good in more than one branch of science, and his taste in dress is awful, and he won't eat decent food, and I'd trust him with my last cent, and with my life. He doesn't know that, though.”

“Is he good at detective work, too?”

“Oh yes, he loves it.”

Miss Vauregard looked melancholy and thoughtful. Presently she said: “I suppose he might help you.”

“But what at, Miss Vauregard? What at?”

“I'll just have to get it over with, Mr. Gamadge. Do you know what the old Vauregard house is like?”

G
AMADGE CONSIDERED
for a few moments before he answered. “I've never been inside it; I remember the outside of it quite well. It's a nice, plain, flat-faced affair; red brick with white trim—early nineteenth-century Classical Revival, I believe. There's a white portico with columns, a white door, fanlight, side lights, white marble steps. There are two windows on each side of the door, five above, five below the flat roof. A high brick wall with a double iron gate in it, surmounted by a lantern, extends from the left-hand front corner of the house to the property next door. I shouldn't be surprised if it surrounded the whole Vauregard place—what's left of it.”

“It does.”

“When I was in Traders Row the gates were hospitably open. I stood and looked in. There's an old brick-paved driveway, with a three-foot grass border on either side of it. It goes straight back past the house, and ends nowhere. There's a latticed side door—kitchen, I suppose—towards the rear. A border—when I saw it there were pansies, candytuft and verbena in it, and I wondered again at the apparently spotless virtue of the neighborhood—a flourishing and well-kept flower border runs along beside the house, and stops short when it reaches what looked like a very nice little garden. I think I observed a fountain, and beyond it a sort of summerhouse, with vines on it.”

“The arbor.”

“I suppose that driveway used to go to the stables?”

“Yes. They're all gone, of course. Uncle keeps his car in a garage on the next street.”

“I believe I noticed a background of rather tall trees.”

“Yes, the yards behind Uncle's house are quite pretty, and the upper stories of those little houses in the rear are all studios. Uncle isn't overlooked at all, the north lights in the studios are too high.”

“He isn't much overlooked from the front, either; not as I remember Traders Row.”

“No, but it's too bad those great warehouses, or power-houses, or whatever they are, were put opposite him.”

“New York didn't begin to conserve its beauty spots until rather late in the day. Traders Row is a cul-de-sac, isn't it? I remember that it ends in a little park and a railing. The Vauregard mansion is on the south side, about the middle of the block, and the other houses are smallish brick affairs, most of them walk-up apartments.”

“Uncle couldn't buy up any of that property.”

“Rival landowner? Too bad. Anything else about the Row? Let's see; it has the biggest and bumpiest cobblestones I ever saw this side of Europe, and narrow, uneven brick sidewalks.”

“Yes. That garden of Uncle's—” Miss Vauregard began the sentence briskly enough, but broke off in the middle of it. She remained silent for so long that Gamadge, watching her, said at last: “You look tired, Miss Vauregard, you really do. How about adjourning to my library and having some tea? My servants were Bermuda trained, and they bring it in every afternoon, whether I want it or not.”

“I should love tea, but if we go to Uncle Imbrie's he'll give us coffee; he won't like it if we refuse any.”

“Well, let's make ourselves comfortable, anyhow.”

A little automatic lift carried them to the second floor. Gamadge ushered Miss Vauregard into the big, high-ceilinged room, installed her on the davenport, and provided her with cigarettes. Then, glancing at her again, and noting her strained and tense expression, he said: “You're feeling very low; let's have a mint julep—Theodore makes extremely good ones.”

“You're much too nice to me. How restful this is.”

She continued, when Gamadge had given his order and come back again: “Books, books, books. You'll laugh at Uncle's library. He only has what was always in the house, you know…I was going to tell you about the garden, Mr. Gamadge. Uncle adores it. There's a tree or two, shrubs, little flower borders—Uncle says they're planted just as they used to be—the fountain (somebody brought it from Italy once) and the arbor.

It's the original arbor, you know, and it's made of iron-work, painted white. There's a big wisteria vine on it. It's a tiny little place, with a seat just big enough for two.”

“Does Mr. Vauregard take his ease there—and his coffee?”

“He never sits there—nobody does. Nobody has, so far as we know, for over a hundred years.”

“Really?”

“Nobody even goes into it, except the gardener, and painters, and so on. But the family hasn't been inside it,” said Miss Vauregard, trying to assume a brisk, informative tone, “since May the third, 1840.”

“Dear me.” Gamadge studied her, half amused, half curious.

“I'll tell you who were living in the house at that time.”

“But look here, I don't think I can stand the suspense. Why hasn't anybody sat in the arbor since May the third, 1840?”

“I want to tell it properly, from the beginning, or you'll keep interrupting me with questions, and I shan't get it right at all. In 1840, Uncle Imbrie's grandfather—Angela's and my great-grandfather—lived in Traders Row with his wife, his brother Charles, and his three children—a boy and two girls. The boy—Uncle Imbrie's father—was the eldest. He was about nine. It was through him that most of the details came down to the rest of us, but by some miracle the story never got outside the immediate family. He isn't supposed to have said anything to a soul until he grew up and got married.

“What happened was this: Sometime during the year 1839 the Vauregard relatives in England sent over a governess for the children in Traders Row; a girl of very good family, army people, all of them dead. You know the sort of thing. Her name was Miss Lydia Wagoneur. The English Vauregards knew all about her. They shipped her over on a boat called
The Pride of Whitby
. She was a perfect treasure; a pretty girl, too—regular English beauty. Blond, fair skin, blue eyes. She was quiet and reserved, but romantic—in a ladylike sort of way. Read poetry.”

“I get her, absolutely.”

“She was highly accomplished, poor thing. Couldn't teach the children much of anything, but was good at watercolor painting, music, and fine needlework. What made her such an absolute treasure was that she didn't seem flirtatious at all; I can hear my grandmother telling the story: ‘She never cared for gentlemen'.”

“Or so she said, unfortunate Miss Wagoneur.”

“Well, it made her a great pet with all the eagle-eyed matrons in the Vauregard circle. All went well, until on May the third, 1840, at half past five in the afternoon, she went out to the arbor with a book. She usually strolled out there for a while after the children had had their tea, and she had had her supper with them, and they were off her hands for the day. After dinner the family sometimes had her into the drawing room to play the piano, or whatever a piano was called then.”

“It was called a piano.”

“Was it? On this particular afternoon she took a book with her, to read in the arbor. It was the second volume of a set of Byron's poems.”

“This kind of detail is very satisfactory to the antiquarian.”

“She was wearing a cornflower-blue silk dress with a white ruffle around the neck, and a white silk scarf. The coachman saw her go into the arbor; and from that moment, she was never seen again.”

“Good heavens.”

“She had disappeared off the face of the earth, and all that she took with her was the volume of Byron. It has never been seen again, either. Nothing was left to tell the tale but a gap on the shelf between Volume I and Volume III. For some queer reason, the gap was allowed to remain. It remained for a hundred years, and it was as much a part of the old house as the walls and ceiling were.”

“No queer reason at all, Miss Vauregard—integral part of a family legend, and I must say a rather eerie one. There never was any solution to the mystery?”

“Never.”

“Did nobody suggest that Miss Wagoneur might have found some gentleman to her liking at last?”

“Plenty of people suggested it, but the family wouldn't hear of such a thing. They told everybody that she had gone back to England, sudden crisis in her affairs, that sort of story. The English Vauregards never seem to have heard a word about it all.”

“Are you telling me that your great-grandparents made no effort to find this young woman?”

“None whatever. They argued that she must have vanished of her own free will, and that it was none of their business. They wished to hear no more of her.”

“They didn't ask themselves whether this friendless being might not have wandered off in some kind of seizure?”

“Evidently not. We have thought of that since, but if they did, they didn't say so.”

“Good heavens.”

Miss Vauregard gave him a cynical smile. “You don't understand, Mr. Gamadge! Think of the dear children! Any scandal about their governess might have reflected somehow upon them, the poor innocents. But the boy was old enough to refuse to swallow any such story. He didn't believe that his Miss Wagoneur had gone off to England without her bags and her boxes, without even her hat; and without saying good-bye to her dear little charges, either. He listened at keyholes, he hung over the banisters; but all he ever found out was that she had gone into the arbor with the Byron, and had never been seen again.”

“I suspect your Great-granduncle Charles. Was he a bachelor?”

“Yes, and quite a rake, I believe, but he wasn't even in the city at the time.”

“Never mind, I suspect him.”

“Not a breath of suspicion has ever attached to Great-granduncle Charles or to anybody else. The servants were blacks, faithful and responsible, and of course they never talked outside the family, but it was certainly through them that the idea originated—the idea that there was something wrong with the arbor. The children were forbidden by their mammies to enter it, and gradually the older people began to feel that it was just as well to keep out of it. The arbor lent a kind of fearful fascination to calls on Uncle Imbrie, and even he always seemed to view it with respect and awe.”

“Quite extraordinary that such an unusual bit of family superstition never leaked out into somebody's memoirs.”

“There was a ban on talking about it, too. I think we always had a sneaking sense of shame about Miss Wagoneur.”

“Well,” and Gamadge smiled at her, “the trail is rather cold. I suppose you don't want Harold and me to start on it now? I think you said Miss Wagoneur's relations were all dead. Their descendants are not likely to bring charges of criminal neglect against the Vauregards at this time of day.”