The Oldest Flame (5 page)

“She’s very upset.”

“Yes,” said Rose.

Mrs. Meade looked at her. Rose’s answer had
been simple agreement. The very slight inflection of questioning in
Mrs. Meade’s remark must have passed her unnoticed. Or perhaps it
was a natural circumstance for Mrs. Grey to be very upset.

Mrs. Meade added in the same low tone, laying
a hand on Rose’s arm, “Don’t you forget either, dear. I’ll be on
hand if you need me for anything.”

Rose nodded, with a little bit of a smile,
and closed the door.

Mrs. Meade went downstairs to the empty
drawing-room and sat down. She thought back again over the events
of the previous day and night. And the one thing that kept
returning to her mind was the memory of Mark Lansbury’s voice
saying, “The essence of a man’s character—the trial by fire, so to
speak.”

She sat still, while the breeze stirred the
curtains and light gray clouds dimmed the afternoon outside. The
drawing-room was shadowy by the time she heard a ring at the
doorbell, and a moment later familiar clumping footsteps in the
hall.

Royal came into the room in a way that
indicated he had expected to find her here, for he made no initial
remark or greeting as he looked at her. He scratched the back of
his neck, and then sat down heavily in a chair opposite her.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got something. It’s
just a hint, but it’s something. Might surprise you. And I don’t
think you’ll like it any too well.”

Mrs. Meade said quietly, “Is it something to
do with Mark Lansbury?”

Royal’s jaw actually dropped—he stared at her
for a few seconds and blinked. Then he pulled himself together.

“You’re right, as usual. Though I don’t see
how you can know it, unless you’ve already talked to the girl
yourself?”

“Which girl?” said Mrs. Meade a little bit
quickly.

“The maid. Mrs. Lansbury’s maid. Seems she
overheard him say something funny last night that put her mind onto
it.”

“When she—oh, yes. That would be it.” Mrs.
Meade nodded, reflectively. “
‘It couldn’t have been planned any
better’
—that was it, wasn’t it?”

“That’s it. You were there too, weren’t you?
Now, what I want to know is
why
. The maid gave me a long
rigamarole about a romance and a rival and a rose and I don’t know
what all, and I’m blamed if I can make head or tail of it.”

“That’s very nearly it,” said Mrs. Meade;
and, tailoring her narrative style to her audience, she gave him,
with as little sentiment as possible, a description of the state of
affairs between Mark Lansbury, Rose Grey and Steven Emery.

Royal listened, and grunted without much
interest when she finished. “All nice for a novel,” he said. “But I
don’t see what it’s got to do with the fire. Still what the kid
said sure makes it look like
he
had something to do with
it.”

“You’d think appearances were even blacker
against him, I’m afraid, if you had heard what he was saying to me
yesterday afternoon,” said Mrs. Meade, “about how a man is only
given a chance to prove himself in a ‘trial by fire’.”

Andrew Royal nearly jumped out of his chair.
“What!”

He listened much more intently as Mrs. Meade
explained the whole of the conversation she had had with Mark in
the garden. “So you think,” he said, “that he started the house on
fire, so he could rescue the girl or somebody, and make himself out
to be a hero?”

“I should hate to think that!” said Mrs.
Meade with surprising energy. “It’s only that I made up my mind to
be frank with you from the first, Andrew, whatever my own opinions
may be. I know it certainly wouldn’t do Mark any good if you were
to hear of such a thing later on.”

The sheriff leaned forward in his chair,
examining her keenly from under his bushy eyebrows. “Tell the
truth, Lettie. You think the boy did it.”

“I don’t know, Andrew,” said Mrs. Meade,
looking down at her folded hands in her lap and shaking her head.
“I’ve known Mark since he was a little boy, and I would not have
thought him the kind to risk harming other people by doing
something that could go so horribly, dangerously wrong. But he was
terribly in love, and very wrought up over it, and he could have
reached the point where he was ready to do something reckless.”

Royal grunted again. “He’d have had to be
pretty far gone. What kind of idiot sets his own house on
fire?”

“Well, it’s rather less audacious then
setting someone else’s house on fire,” said Mrs. Meade. “If it
comes to that, Mrs. Lansbury says the house was well insured. Mark
likely would have known about that.”

Andrew Royal plucked at his moustache for a
moment. “Insured, eh?” he said. “Where’s Lansbury Senior, now? His
wife said he was suddenly called away on business yesterday.”

“In Denver. But I don’t believe he was called
away; he told us all he’d decided to go himself.”

“On the board of a railroad company, isn’t
he?” said Royal. “What’s he up to just now?”

“I understand he’s been planning the
construction of a short new line to connect two busy existing
ones—a rather bold project, I believe, since it will have to cross
some mountains to do so.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Royal. “I was talking to that
Steven Emery fellow, too. He said Lansbury’s having a job trying to
raise the capital for it.”

“Did Mr. Emery tell you why
he
had
chosen not to invest in it?” inquired Mrs. Meade rather
pointedly.

One corner of the sheriff’s moustache bent
upwards. “I think Emery’s a fellow who likes to put his investments
in a basket he can be sure won’t come back full of broken
eggs.”

“Mr. Lansbury is no charlatan,” said Mrs.
Meade, raising her eyebrows just a trifle.

“I’ll wager he’s no Rockefeller either. Could
be he won’t be too put out by his well-insured house’s burning down
just when cash on hand will come in handy.”

“But he was not desperate,” exclaimed Mrs.
Meade. “The Lansburys may not be extremely rich, but they’ve been
quite prosperous for—”

“For an awful short time. I’m not saying
anything against your friend, now, but I say when money comes
quick, you look around and see where it came from.

“Of course.”

Sheriff Royal seemed more nettled by her
unexpected acquiescence. “For all we know, all this could be built
on borrowed money,” he grumbled. “Three years ago Lansbury was just
a station master, and now look—big new house, trips to Denver, son
in college and wife wearing diamonds. And a butler. A
butler!
” repeated Royal with energy. “If you ask me he’s the
fishiest plank in the platform.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Meade, a
trifle bewildered by the sudden change of attack.

“It wasn’t natural the way he dug in his
heels over that bag,” insisted Royal. “Maybe he’d pitched something
out a window himself—stealing, and started a fire to hide it.”

“Burning down a whole house is taking a great
deal of trouble to hide a theft,” said Mrs. Meade, “besides leaving
himself with nothing else to steal.” She considered for a moment.
“Who gave the alarm when the fire started?”

Andrew Royal’s face assumed a studious
expression that was meant to be crafty. “What did
you
hear
first?”

“I woke to a commotion and a voice somewhere
in the house shouting ‘Fire,’ but I can’t say anything about it
other than that it was a man’s voice.”

“Well, there were only three men in the
house—Emery, the butler and the kid. Want to know what they had to
say about it?”

Mrs. Meade acknowledged her interest in the
matter.

“The kid says he didn’t wake up until a lot
of other folks were already up and making noise. So whether he’s
telling the truth or not, he’s no help. Mrs. Lansbury, now, she
says that when she came out of her room Emery and the butler were
both running around in the halls.” (Mrs. Meade credited the sheriff
with this description of the men’s activities.) “Emery says he woke
up to the butler shouting ‘fire.’ But this Chalmers fellow says
he
was woken up by a voice somewhere upstairs, and he can’t
even say whether it was a man’s voice or a woman’s.”

“A man’s or a woman’s,” repeated Mrs. Meade
thoughtfully.

The sheriff threw up his hands and slumped
back in his chair. “If you’re going to look at it that way, there’s
only one person can be counted out.”

“Who?”

“The Parrish woman. If she’d started the fire
she’d have been the first one out of the house, instead of staying
locked in her room.”

“Unless it was suicide.”

“Queer way to commit suicide. I don’t think
anybody’d have the nerve to sit and wait for a fire to come up to
them.”

Mrs. Meade gave an uncharacteristic shudder,
and Andrew Royal at once looked two-thirds grim and one-third
guilty. “Sorry, Lettie,” he said. “I—er—forgot you were there. Er—”
He cleared his throat several times and fell awkwardly silent.

Mrs. Meade had closed her eyes. She was
trying to forget the image in her mind of a hallway weirdly lit in
dull orange, the drifts of smoke clouding it, and an unresponsive
oak door upon which she had beaten to no avail. If only someone had
been able to do something…

Andrew Royal came out of his silence with
explosive force. “I still think the butler’s mixed up in it,” he
said. Mrs. Meade opened her eyes with a start.

Royal jerked a thumb over his shoulder as if
the butler were somewhere outside the nearest window. “You saw the
way he acted this morning. I’ll bet he was hanging around there
trying to make sure I didn’t happen on any clues to how the fire
started. Whether it was Lansbury or the kid who did it, he could’ve
been covering for either of ’em. He probably thought the bag was
evidence.”

“I would hardly credit him with the feelings
of a faithful family retainer, seeing that he has only been with
the Lansburys for a year,” said Mrs. Meade, drawing herself up
deliberately into something like her former composure, “and before
that he was headwaiter in the hotel at Coronet.”

She frowned, hesitated and then spoke again.
“But—if it
were
true—that Mr. Lansbury had arranged the
fire—Chalmers could have been his accomplice. Mr. Lansbury was away
from home when the fire occurred, and Mr. Grey was with him to
provide an alibi. Someone had to perform the actual details of
setting the fire—Chalmers seems most likely.”

“And what about the kid?” said Andrew Royal
with unaccustomed shrewdness. “I’m not forgetting what the maid
said he said. Suppose it was his father and
him
had the
whole thing planned before he talked to you. He could have got to
thinking the fire might do him some extra good in getting the
girl’s attention, too.”

Mrs. Meade shook her head. “That doesn’t seem
quite right. I hardly think—”

“But the
butler
,” said Royal,
reverting to his pet theory without seeming to have heard her. He
gestured slowly with a big forefinger, as if enumerating points of
argument. “Suppose Lansbury was going to burn his
own
house—but wanted to save something—and he hid it
outside
before he left—” He stalled for a moment, still gesturing, but
looking as if he had forgotten he was doing it. Mrs. Meade, perhaps
for reasons of her own, forbore to interrupt his thoughts.

“—and the butler was
in
on it, and was
supposed to fetch the stuff—and came around in the morning and
found
me
lugging your bag out of the bush!” He sat back,
looking rather exhausted, but pleased with himself.

She was not at all sure what she thought of
this theory, but she did not altogether object to having the
unfortunate butler absorb Royal’s attention. So many things seemed
to have gotten disquietingly complicated, and she wanted time to
think them through.

Sheriff Royal’s thoughts were moving along
very different lines, but at this point they evidently intersected
with hers.

He launched himself out of his chair with a
quickness belied by his rusty appearance. “Why, blast it!” he
sputtered, “if that’s so, then I’ve let that blame butler go right
back to get what he
was
looking for! Blast,” he repeated in
disgust. “I knew I should have arrested him this morning.”

* * *

Lansbury and Grey arrived home from Denver
the next morning. They found their families established at the
hotel in the nearby town of Coronet, where they had moved from
their temporary quarters in the neighbors’ homes. Mrs. Meade and
Steven Emery were with them, but Sheriff Andrew Royal was not
currently in evidence. He had begun the day by serving a search
warrant on the indignant Chalmers, who had taken up residence in
the staff quarters of the hotel, their hospitality having been
extended to him by his friend and successor as headwaiter. Having
accomplished nothing here beyond creating a disturbance that
eventually made itself felt as far as the manager’s office, Royal
collected his young deputy, whom he had summoned from Sour Springs
to help, and began digging around the ruins of the Lansbury house,
where he was still engaged in searching. With the possible
exception of Mrs. Meade, however, no one knew exactly what he was
looking for.

Descending the hotel staircase that
afternoon, Mrs. Meade met Mark Lansbury on his way up. He looked a
little soberer than he had two days before, yet he did not appear
as strongly affected by the events of those days as some of the
others in the party.

“What’s going on, Mrs. Meade?” he asked her.
“Do
you
know? Mother and Dad don’t seem to be saying what
they’re thinking, but I don’t think they like the sheriff’s being
here. And Chalmers has asked for his time. He says he’d rather be a
waiter and not be persecuted, whatever that means. What’s the
sheriff looking for, anyway?”