There is No Return (12 page)

“Thank heaven!” cried Ella and then she regarded me sternly.

“I know your penchant, Adelaide, for dabbling into things which do not concern you, but here is one piece of advice I urge you to take. Let this fiendish business alone, just as I intend to do from here on.”

So saying, she led the way into the dining room, the doors to which Captain French had at that moment thrown open. Because of the general dreariness of the day and the murky effect of the clouds, which had settled down upon the mountain like a coverlet of wet grey down, the room was again lighted by the big chandelier with the green shade, and the guests who straggled in by ones and twos to breakfast looked even more haggard and drawn than on the night before. Nobody appeared to want to be alone. I saw Fannie Parrish beckon to her table the young mother who had been at the séance, and shortly afterward they were joined by the dyspeptic-looking old gentleman who had received the message from his brother Peter.

Ella made a grimace at me and said, “They are going to have the inquest the first thing this morning, and Fannie is all of a twitter.”

I was spared the effort of a reply by Judy Oliver, who at that moment came into the dining room and hurried over to us. “Do you mind if I sit with you?” she asked a little breathlessly.

I raised my eyebrows. None of the Canby party had put in an appearance at that time except Jeff Wayne, who was sitting by himself, pretending to be absorbed in a paper, although there were no morning papers of course, and I was positive he was merely using the crumpled sheet in his hand for a shield behind which to hide his face.

“I don’t feel as if I could bear my own company this morning,” said Judy.

She did not look at Jeff Wayne, and the only sign he gave of being aware of her presence was an involuntary twitch of the hand which held the newspaper.

“Sit down by all means,” said Ella cordially and gave me a mutinous glance.

Ella and I rarely like the same people, but I merely raised my eyebrows again, and to my surprise Judy Oliver coloured painfully.

“Jeff and I haven’t fallen out or anything,” she declared in a tone of false levity, or so it seemed to me. “It’s just that-that ...” She caught her breath and started all over again. “You see, we never were – I mean, it was all a mistake thinking that we – that we were in love with each other.”

I stared at her curiously. She could not even speak the boy’s name without tripping over it. She could not meet my eyes, either, and her hand strayed without her volition to that tiny piece which had been clipped out of her ear.

“Jeff was in love with Gloria,” she said sharply. “He still is.”

“So I heard him say last night,” I remarked in a dry voice.

She glared at me. “It’s true!”

“Only you didn’t believe it until last night,” I said, “and your cousin Gloria died not believing it.”

Her small pointed face crinkled as if she were about to burst into tears. “You have no right to judge people by what Gloria Canby thought or said!” she burst out. “She was a horrible person.” Her lips quivered. “I know you aren’t supposed to say things against the dead, but Gloria — she was three years older than I. She was sixteen when our father died and Patrick and I came to live with Aunt Dora. We hadn’t a penny to bless ourselves with and nowhere else to go and-and Gloria never let any of us forget for a minute that we were living off charity.”

I felt myself weakening and Ella must have seen it, for she gazed at me triumphantly. I realized that she had heard all this before.

“I had to wear Gloria’s old clothes,” went on Judy in a bitter voice. “Aunt Dora would have bought me new ones and Uncle Thomas was not stingy, so long as he had the say-so, but Gloria begrudged me everything, even-even friends. She threw a tantrum every time I had a new hair ribbon, and if people acted as if they liked me it made her furious. She told them all sorts of terrible tales to put them off. She said I was a little sneak. She said I couldn’t be trusted not to steal your purse or-or your sweetheart behind your back.”

“People usually aren’t greatly deceived by slander like that,” I said. “Generally if they know a person they form their own conclusions.”

“But you see, nobody knew me very well,” said Judy. “I’ve always had to be – to be kind of a companion to Aunt Dora. Unless you were around the house a lot you never knew me well at all.”

“Jeff Wayne was around a lot after he got engaged to your cousin?” I suggested with what I considered perfect suavity.

Judy winced. “Yes,” she said, “Jeff was around a lot.”

“Maybe he took your part against Gloria?”

She flushed. “Yes, he did,” she said, then added quickly, “But it wasn’t because he had fallen in love with me, as Gloria thought. It wasn’t that at all. He just-just... She really was rotten to me!” she finished passionately.

“Jeff knows it; so do Allan and Lila. Anybody in the family can tell you how Gloria loved to torment things, animals and-and people, anything she could make suffer.”

“You all hated her?” I ventured.

“Yes!” she cried. “How could we help it? We were her poor relations and she loved to humiliate us. She liked nothing better than to goad us into a fury. It amused her because we were so helpless.”

“Helpless?” I repeated. “It seems to me there were numbers of things you might have done.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “we were quite helpless.”

“You might have appealed to your aunt,” I suggested.

“Gloria could always make Aunt Dora think that black was white.”

“Or your uncle?” I persisted.

She shook her head again. “It was no use going to Uncle Thomas with your troubles. You might as well have tried to get sympathy or understanding out of an adding machine.”

“You could always have left the house,” I said shortly.

“But I told you,” she protested. “We hadn’t any money, except what Uncle Thomas chose to give us.”

“You might have got a job. Other people with rich relatives have,” I pointed out with some irritation.

“Don’t you think we tried?” she cried. “Every one of us tried. Patrick loathes being an auditor in Uncle Thomas’ company. Patrick has no head for figures. He wanted to go in for aviation, and I think he’d have been quite good at it, but Uncle Thomas was determined to make an accountant of him. That was the only kind of schooling he’d pay for, so Patrick flunked and flunked before he finally got through college and he’s gone on flunking ever since, although he’s a vice-president. He says he isn’t worth a grain of salt in the office and he has quit several times, but you know how hard it’s been to get jobs since the depression and, after all, Uncle Thomas was a rich man. When Patrick tried to get on somewhere else people told him his uncle ought to give him a job. They told Allan that too.” She smiled crookedly. “Did you know you couldn’t even get on relief nowadays if somebody in your family has money enough to feed you?”

“I seem to have heard something to that effect,” I admitted.

“Allan hates being a figurehead in Uncle’s office; he hates it as much as Patrick does, maybe more,” said Judy. “Allan wanted to write. He even ran off once and started a novel, but he blundered into an epidemic of scarlet fever. Allan has always been unlucky. He was very ill and they notified Uncle, and of course he had Allan brought home and Gloria found the novel and burned it, but not before she had memorized parts of it. She used to recite them to people and die laughing. They were pretty amateurish, or she made them sound so. Anyway it finished Allan’s attempt to be a writer, and then of course he met Lila and she married him for Uncle’s money and after that he had to stick.”

I stared over her head. Allan Atwood and his wife were just coming into the dining room. He was very pale and there were dark circles under his eyes, but the beautiful Lila was the freshest-looking person I had seen that morning.

I frowned. “It seems to me a little farfetched for Lila Atwood to have married your cousin for his uncle’s money. As near as I can make out, the money goes to your aunt. There is no certainty that Allan will get a lot of it. At the time of the marriage, with Gloria Canby still alive, there must have been even less chance of Allan Atwood’s coming into his uncle’s fortune.”

“Oh, but didn’t you know?” asked Judy as if it were common knowledge, as no doubt it was in their circle. “Lila’s family was quite dreadfully hard up. Her father had signed a note or something and couldn’t pay. He was in very serious trouble. I think he might even have gone to jail. Uncle Thomas paid the note.”

I stared at her aghast. “You mean he practically bought Lila for his nephew.”

“That-that girl told the truth last night,” said Judy in a smothered voice. “Uncle Thomas did like to play the god, but he was terribly poor when he was a boy. He told me once that he had nothing to eat one whole week except raw turnips. I suppose it was then he got the idea that nothing matters except money. At any rate that’s why he paid the note for Lila’s father. You see, with all Uncle’s millions we had never cut any figure in society. You know what a dud Aunt Dora is at that sort of thing, and Gloria was expelled from three exclusive finishing schools. Once for lashing a thoroughbred horse until he bled when they were trying to teach her to ride. Once for doing something horrible, I never knew what, to a poor little French teacher who tried to discipline her for sneaking obscene words into her translations. Anyway, although Uncle spent a fortune on her debut party, Gloria didn’t click with the best social groups, so Lila was a godsend.”

“You mean she had the proper social entrée?”

“Yes,” said Judy. “After she married Allan the best people called on us and asked us places, so I suppose in a way Uncle Thomas was right. It does seem that all things are possible if you have enough money.”

She smiled bitterly and I leaned a little forward in my chair.

“Sheila Kelly was right about something else last night, wasn’t she?” I asked.

Judy’s small hand tightened on the edge of the table. “What do you mean?”

“You all hated Thomas Canby,” I said.

Every particle of colour drained out of her face. “Yes,” she said at last, “we all hated him like sin.”

It was perfectly apparent, when Sheriff Latham had herded us into that dreary parlour on the first floor at Lebeau Inn, that to him at least the inquest was a mere formality. The folding doors for the first time in my memory were closed, so that we were spared the sight of Thomas Canby’s dead body stretched out on a red sofa in one corner of the second room, although the jury filed in and viewed the corpse at the opening of the proceedings and filed back to their seats, looking a little seasick. I think all of us drew a deeper breath when Butch, the deputy, pushed the folding doors to again.

The coroner, a withered little old man named Timmons, Dr Riley Timmons, had been put to considerable trouble to collect a jury, what with the bridge being out. However, there was a gaunt old man who, it seemed, hunted and trapped on the mountain and lived the year around in a shack back of the inn, and a young fellow who ran a filling station in connection with the hotel, and a couple of guests of the house, elderly men who plainly wished themselves elsewhere, and Captain Bill French himself.

“ ’Tain’t as if this was more than a matter of form,” explained Sheriff Latham.

Coroner Timmons nodded, and Chet Keith and I exchanged a frown. It was obvious to both of us that the coroner was the sheriff’s echo.

“All you got to do,” Sheriff Latham informed the jury, “is decide to the best of your knowledge how this man come to his death and who in your opinion done it. Then it is up to the grand jury to indict.”

Nobody on the jury looked any the happier for this admonition, especially after Sheila Kelly entered with Mart Butler. She must have been conscious of everybody staring at her, but she did not lift her head as the deputy led her to a chair beside the table at which the coroner sat with Sheriff Latham at his right hand. Despair was in every line of the girl’s drooping figure. Not so the professor, who was escorted into the room by the deputy Butch. The night before I could have sworn that Professor Thaddeus Matthews was on the verge of collapse, but he appeared to have taken a new lease on life. He was positively chipper, and the glance he bent upon us all lacked no assurance. It was, in fact, next door to insolence.

“Why should he be so blooming?” I muttered to Chet Keith, who was sitting directly behind me.

“If we could guess that one we’d be a lot closer to the truth,” he said.

Both of us leaned a little forward, the better to see Dora Canby, who at that moment entered the room upon Judy’s arm. I do not know exactly what I expected, but it was startling how well Thomas Canby’s widow looked that morning — almost as if she, too, had taken a new lease upon life. Although her nephew Patrick hurried after her with a pillow and a grey knitted shawl, and her other nephew Allan made as if to steady her arm, she walked quite firmly to her seat beside Lila Atwood, and if Mrs Canby had shed any tears the night before for her husband the effects were not apparent.

“I had to be carried to poor Theo’s funeral,” said Fannie Parrish in a sibilant whisper, “but then, she couldn’t have cared for Thomas Canby; nobody could.”

Ella, sitting between Fannie and me, compressed her lips. “It’s a pity shrouds don’t have pockets, so he could carry all that money with him.”

Although I agreed with her sentiment I said nothing. I was watching Dora Canby trying to smile at Sheila Kelly. I think Mrs Canby would have gone over to the girl and spoken to her, but Lila Atwood laid her hand on the older woman’s arm.

“I wouldn’t, Aunt Dora,” she said softly. “Can’t you see she is at the breaking point?”

“Gloria could never be intimidated, Lila,” protested Dora Canby.

Nevertheless she settled back into her chair, and behind her Jeff Wayne drew a shaking hand across his brow. I noticed how careful Judy was not to look at him and what pains he took never to meet her eyes, as much pains as Allan Atwood went to in order to avoid his wife’s glance. Hogan Brewster, on the other hand, pulled his chair nearer to Lila’s and whispered something to her, something flippant, I suppose, for he was smiling, but she did not answer.