The View from the Cherry Tree (6 page)

Max hesitated, looking up the stairs. “Hey, Teddi! You up there?”

She appeared on the upper landing, clad in
a pale blue, full-skirted long dress. One of the bridesmaids' dresses, Rob knew. She looked quite un-Teddi-ish, even to Rob, with her hair caught back with a blue ribbon and a touch of lipstick on her mouth.

Max pursed his lips in a long drawn-out wolf whistle. “Hey, come on down, loverly, and let's see you!”

“No, I'm afraid to try the stairs in this. Darcy'd kill me if I stepped on the hem and tore it or broke my neck falling. But it's pretty, isn't it?”

“You're pretty,” Max said and there was a different note in his voice. Rob recognized it with regret. Yep, old Darcy was moving on, but Teddi was going to take up where Darcy left off, with all the guys in town.

Teddi showed her dimples. “Wait a minute until I get it off, and I'll be down.”

“Okay.” Max turned to look at Derek. “I thought you were running off somewhere.”

Still Derek hesitated. “I am. Only I thought it would be a help to have another pair of hands. I think I'm handling something like ten cases of champagne, if I heard Mr. ­Mallory right.”

“Well, these hands are going to be otherwise engaged. Thanks for the invitation.” Max put his hands in his pants pockets and walked into the living room, switching on the TV. Derek looked at Rob, who shook his head.

“See you later, Derek.”

Derek muttered something under his breath, letting himself out the front door. It was quiet when he had gone. Rob licked his lips and made one more effort.

“Max . . . he made it sound funny, but it wasn't. It was true.”

There was a cartoon show on the screen. Max flipped it off and straightened up. “What was true?”

“That I saw somebody push Mrs. Calloway . . .”

Max shook his head. “I'd have been tempted to push her myself. I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but who can be sorry that old biddy has cashed in? No matter who moves into that house next door, it's got to be an improvement over her.”

Momentarily diverted, Rob asked, “You think someone else will move in?”

“Well, not right away. They'll have to read
her will, and it'll go through probate and all that jazz, and maybe it'll belong to Derek's mother, partly, anyway. Did she have any other relatives? They won't want it themselves, so they'll either rent it or sell it, more than likely. So somebody will live in it eventually.”

“Max, would it be murder if somebody pushed her?”

Max regarded him casually. “Rob, you watch too much of the wrong kind of TV. Or maybe that's the only kind there is.”

“No, I mean it. Would it be murder, if he didn't really intend to kill her? I mean, he couldn't have known the strap on the binoculars would catch on the tree, but you couldn't murder anybody by pushing them out a first floor window, could you?”

“If it was old Mrs. Calloway, I'd say the entire neighborhood would express its gratitude. Hey, you look good in ordinary clothes, too, girl.”

It was no use. He couldn't get through to Max. He hadn't gotten very close even before Teddi showed up. There was no sense trying now; Max wasn't listening.

Teddi looked different, somehow, even back
in her normal jeans and open-necked shirt.

“I don't dare go away,” she told Max. “If Mom needs me, I have to be on call.”

“I think there's a load of stuff to take over to the reception hall. Champagne glasses and paper plates and stuff like that. Can I tell Mom your car's available?”

“If you go along with the glasses and the paper plates,” Max conceded. “So long, sport. Don't watch any more TV; it's bad for you.”

And they were gone, and he hadn't had a chance to talk to Teddi, either. Ordinarily, he'd have been sure Teddi would listen. But after seeing her just now, the way she was turning on the sparkle for old Max, Rob thought in discouragement, he wasn't sure of anything.

Seven

He fixed himself something to eat and fed Sonny, whose breakfast had been lost in the shuffle. The cat ate greedily, crouched over the plastic dish on the kitchen floor.

He wondered how his father was coming with Mr. French, if he'd managed to calm him down. Mr. French must have discovered his money was missing. Rob wondered, idly, what his Uncle Ray had done with twelve hundred dollars. It seemed like an awful lot of money.

But mostly he wondered how he was ever going to convince anyone that he wasn't kidding about Mrs. Calloway being pushed out the window. He wasn't sure how important it was, but it seemed as if someone ought to know, someone beside himself.

After one salami sandwich and one tuna
fish one, which he grudgingly shared with Sonny, he dished up some ice cream and poured chocolate syrup over it, adding a sliced banana as an afterthought, and carried it out onto the back steps. The more he thought about it, the more interesting it was.

Who had the man been, in there with Mrs. Calloway? She almost never had company. She was Derek's great-aunt, but Derek hadn't liked her any better than anybody else did, and he only went there when his mother made him deliver something. Derek's mother never came at all.

The neighbors, all of them, hated her. Because the Mallorys lived next door, they had more trouble with her than the others; but there wasn't a family within two blocks in each direction that hadn't had some problem with her at one time or another. She was always calling the police on somebody; not that the cops came, usually, but sometimes they would. They'd stand on the curb and explain that the old lady was complaining about whatever it was, and they'd roll their eyes toward her house, and ask if people wouldn't try to stay away from her.

Everybody did try, really. Only it was hard to know how to stop a cat from walking across her precious grass, or the wind from blowing a garbage can lid into her yard, or to keep the sounds down when she wanted to sleep in the middle of the day. Three different times she'd called the police to arrest Mr. Dunbarton for disturbing the peace when he ran his power saw in the afternoon.

Once she went around yelling and making threats when Mrs. Bond, whose property faced Mrs. Calloway's across the alley, sprayed some sort of insecticide and it drifted across the way and killed some of Mrs. Calloway's bugs. She said it would kill the birds, too. Boy, that had been a battle and a half!

He ate the ice cream slowly; it was good. Sonny had come with him and was squatting on the bottom step against one foot.

So who was it, then, in the house with the old lady just before she died?

Pretty soon, if they all kept making fun of him, he'd begin to think himself that he'd imagined it.

He knew he hadn't, though. There had been
a man in there, and he'd been angry enough to push the old woman out the window.

She'd said something, just before she fell, Rob remembered. What was it? He paused, trying to pin it in his mind.

She'd looked at the cherry pits and said something about a nasty little boy . . . meaning him, of course. And then she'd said . . . “You must be out of your mind to think I'd agree to any such thing.”

He thought about that, unable to imagine what that remark had been in reply to. Then he backed up his memory just a bit further, to when she had first come to the window.

“I will not,” she had said, and her voice had been hard and stubborn. The way it usually was.

Whoever he was in there, he'd wanted her to do something. Something she refused to do, and she made the man so angry he'd shoved her. Not thinking to kill her, probably, but just so mad he couldn't help himself.

It wasn't hard to imagine someone being that mad at her. What was hard was thinking of anyone who'd go into her house and ask her for anything.

He scraped the last of the ice cream out of the bottom of his dish and licked off his lips. He got up to take the dish back into the house and heard the telephone ringing. At the same time, the doorbell sounded.

His mother stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking upset.

“Robbie, go see who's at the door. I'll get the phone. Where's Teddi, do you know?”

“She went with old Max, to take some stuff over to the Country Club.”

“Oh. I'm coming, I'm coming!” she said to the phone, and reluctantly Rob moved toward the front door. Behind him he heard his mother's quick “Hello?” and then her low wail of protest. “Oh, Wally! Why? What for? . . . Well, I suppose if you
have
to . . . You'll be here for dinner, won't you? Don't forget rehearsal is at seven thirty, and ­Darcy's counting on you for that . . .”

From that he gathered that his father wasn't going to be right home, then. What had Mr. French decided? Were they sending the police after Uncle Ray? He wondered if they'd go with their sirens screaming and arrest him
and then the police would come and tell his mother her brother was in jail . . .

No, he decided, scuffing his feet through the shag carpeting, they wouldn't tell
her.
His grandmother, maybe, because Ray lived with her. Or would they tell anybody at all? Wasn't that what the one phone call you were allowed was for? So you could notify whoever you wanted?

He guessed his father would try to find Uncle Ray before the police did. That was supposed to be better, wasn't it, if you turned yourself in? He wondered, if Uncle Ray resisted arrest, if they'd shoot him. He hoped not. His mother would be very upset, even if it didn't spoil the wedding.

There was a delivery man at the door. He thrust a clipboard at Rob. “Sign here, please. Line twelve.”

Rob signed. “What is it?”

“Wedding presents, I guess. Somebody getting married?”

“My sister.”

The delivery man nodded. “Where you want me to put this stuff? There's quite a bit of it.”

The only downstairs bedroom had been filling with gifts over the past weeks. Rob showed him where it was, and the man carried in box after box. Darcy peered over the stair railing.

“Are those for me, Rob?”

“I guess so. They're all boxes from The China and Glass Shoppe.”

His mother had disappeared somewhere, maybe back upstairs. Rob hesitated, wondering if there was any point in trying to talk to Darcy.

He and Darcy had never been very close. Still, she was coming downstairs and there wasn't anyone else around, so maybe it was worth a try.

She moved past him into the bedroom, pouncing on the packages. “Dozens of them! I wonder if I ought to open this batch now? I wish Steve was here . . . it's as good as Christmas. When your time comes and they try to talk you into eloping, Robbie, don't listen to them. You don't get wedding gifts like this if you elope.”

He stood in the doorway, watching as his sister opened an envelope and then, making up her mind, began to unwrap a white-and-silver-papered box.

“Darcy.”

“Oh, wow! Look, isn't it beautiful?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He didn't even look at what it was. “Darcy, listen. I keep trying to tell somebody, but nobody listens. It's about Mrs. ­Calloway.”

“Darling, don't talk about Mrs. Calloway. I'm sorry she got hanged, but I don't intend to let it spoil my wedding. It's not as if she was a friend or anything like that. I'd rather not think about her at all, Rob, please.”

The telephone rang.

“Get that, will you, Robbie? If it's Steve, I want to talk to him.”

Reluctantly, Rob answered the phone. If Steve came over, maybe he'd listen. Steve was pretty sensible, except where Darcy was concerned. With her, he was as bad as the rest of them.

“Hiya, Robbie? Steve. Any chance of talking to my girl, or has she succumbed to the pressures?”

“She's opening presents. They just delivered a half truckload of 'em.”

“Great! Let me talk to her, huh?”

He met his mother in the hall. “Rob, what is that ungodly smell in your bedroom?”

“What smell? I have to call Darcy, it's Steve . . .”

“It smells like something's died up there.”

“Was it for me, Rob?” Darcy poked her head out of the bedroom. “Oh, hi, Mom. It looks like I've got nine place settings of my china, and eight of the crystal! Isn't that marvelous! Was it Steve, Rob?”

“Yes.” He stepped aside so his sister could get to the phone in the study. His mother was bearing down on him in a way that made him uneasy.

“Rob, whatever's making that odor, you've got to get rid of it! I'll get air freshener up there and I've already opened all the windows, but I can't possibly put anyone in there to sleep the way it is! Go find whatever it is and get it out of there.”

“I didn't notice anything.”

“Well, I did, and so did Aunt Grace. And you'd better find another place for that junk under the bed. Haven't you any room in your closet?”

“It's handier under the bed,” Rob said, but without much force. She looked about ready to hit him, and while she hadn't done that for a long time, he wouldn't rule out the possibility. “Maybe whatever stinks is Randolph; he's been missing for a few days. He got loose.”

“Well, whatever it is, find it and then scrub the spot where it's been. I hope to heaven we can get the odor out of there by evening or I don't know what I'll do.”

Randolph was a mouse. He'd traded an old pair of skates for him, and then the mouse had disappeared the second day he had him. ­Gloomily, Rob tramped upstairs.

When he got to his room, he
could
smell something. Very faintly, however; nothing to get all excited about. He stood in the middle of the floor, wondering where Randolph would have gone to die. That Paddy Wilson, the crumb had probably known the mouse was sick or something when he traded him.

It took him ten minutes to find Randolph; he had crawled into the back part of the bookcase, behind some books. Up close, he had a rotten
smell, indeed. Rob scooped him up on a piece of cardboard, briefly considered putting him in a matchbox to return to Paddy, and then decided the smell was strong enough so there was no place he could expect to conceal the creature until Monday, which would be the soonest he could get to Paddy. Reluctantly, he flushed Randolph down the toilet.

He scooped the stuff out from under the bed . . . nothing to make a big fuss over, it was just a football and helmet and some rocks he was saving . . . and crammed them into the closet. Now maybe they'd leave him alone. It would help, too, if he could get someone to listen to what he had to say about Mrs. Calloway.

His aunt was in his parents' bedroom, hemming. She had the dress laid out across the foot of the king-sized bed and was working on it. She looked up when she saw him, her mouth tightening.

“Did you get rid of that stink in your bedroom?”

“Yes.” He considered. Was it worth trying to talk to her? He had never had much to do
with his Aunt Grace, she didn't like him. His father said it was because she'd raised only girls and had no concept of what a normal boy was like.

Still, it didn't matter what she thought of boys, did it? The important thing was that someone ought to know about Mrs. Calloway. Rob paused in the doorway.

“Don't get against this dress,” she warned, although he was a good five feet from it and couldn't possibly have damaged it. “One more catastrophe is about all we need.”

“Aunt Grace . . . is it murder to push somebody out a window, if it's not very high off the ground? I mean, nobody'd think it would kill anybody . . . only if it does . . .”

She grimaced with distaste. “Good grief, you do have a morbid turn of mind, don't you? It's allowing you to watch all that television without any supervision . . . horrid things they put on nowadays. I've told Marge it isn't good for you.”

“It's not on TV, it's Mrs. Calloway. She was . . .”

“Rob, run along. You're distracting me, and I want to hurry and finish this. It's a mile
around, I swear, and it's making me nervous, all this last-minute rush.”

“But I need . . .”

Her voice cut firmly through his. “Go along, do as I tell you. I don't like talking about such gruesome things; it's enough to give a civilized person nightmares. You might tell someone I'd appreciate a cup of tea, if they have time to fix it.”

He left then. There was little point in trying to talk to her.

Maybe it didn't matter if he didn't talk to anyone before his father got back. It would only be a few hours, and he knew his father would listen to him if he once got his mind off Uncle Ray going to jail or whatever they were going to do. His father didn't think he was morbid or gruesome; even his mother wouldn't ordinarily flip out over a simple thing like asking if something was murder.

The doorbell rang as he was going down the stairs. He wondered if his mother would kill him if he disconnected it. But it wouldn't do any good, anyway. Whoever it was pounded on the doorframe, then pushed on into the
house without waiting for it to be answered.

“Well, hi, there, Rob boy! Where is everybody? We're all here, safe and sound! Didn't want to miss little Darcy's wedding, so we brought the whole family. Shall we bring our bags inside?”

Rob caught the expression on his mother's face before the others saw her; she obviously wasn't happy. Well, it was her own fault. Who invited them?

“Sylvester! We didn't expect you so early!”

“Oh, we got a good early start. Didn't want to miss out on anything. Shall we bring our bags in, Marge?”

There seemed to be dozens of them. Mrs. Mallory must have been making her own count, because she said with only a slight tremor in her voice, “Who all came?”

“Oh, the whole family, and we stopped in Studeville and picked up Elsie and Rich and little Neddy. They wasn't planning to come because their car was broke down, but we had to bring two cars anyway, so we told them we had plenty of room.”