Murder Comes to Eden Read online

  It was a frail hope, but the only one Spig O’Leary could see, as he quickened his pace abruptly half-way along the trail. He must have heard the dog barking before he was consciously aware of it. A silent dog who never spoke without meaning, she was barking now, her sharp danger bark, and Spig, running, cutting swiftly off the trail towards the field, saw her before he saw Tip, out in front between him and something that was over in the O’Leary’s corn, the other side of Tip’s garden. She was barking savagely, hackles up. He saw Tip then, and Greg Pappas, hurling clods of dried clay at the thing in the corn. Tip was shouting angrily—Tip who was never angry. Spig cleared the woods out into the field. The clods were flying. Then he heard what Tip was shouting.

  “Keep out! Keep out of my garden! I hate you! I’ll kill you if you come in here! You keep away from my mother! I’ll kill you if you don’t!”

  For a blank, incredulous moment Spig O’Leary stopped dead in his tracks. Across the end of the corn was a black-bearded face and a blue denim jacket. It was Arthur Dunning, ducking through the corn to the raspberry bushes to get out of the barrage Tip and Greg were sending after him. It was so fantastic that Spig’s feet were paralysed, until he saw a clod hit and shatter.

  “Tip! Tip! For God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing?”

  He sprang forward across the field.

  “Daddy! Make him keep out of my garden! I’ll kill him if he doesn’t!”

  He hurled another clod before Spig could reach him. Tears of rage were furrowing muddy lanes down his face, flushed and swollen as he swung round to his father, a sturdy little figure facing him, confident of support, the tears nothing but the impotent outrage of a small boy defending his rights. It stopped Spig’s hand. This was a Tip he didn’t know existed. It called for wisdom, not anger.

  “All right. Put that down now,” he said quietly.

  “I won’t! I won’t! Not till he gets out of here! I hate him!”

  Spig saw his hand tighten on the clod. Dunning was standing erect now behind the raspberries, smiling, lighting himself a cigarette.

  “Move along, will you, Dunning?” Spig called. “Sorry. I’ll be over in just a second.”

  “Right,” Dunning said. “So sorry . . . I didn’t mean to upset the Lord Proprietor.”

  Before Spig could catch his arm Tip let fly again. The clod caught Dunning between the shoulders. He jumped and turned, smiling as before.

  “Quite all right, O’Leary. The Artist has been stoned throughout the Ages.”

  “Just beat it, will you?” Spig was getting sore himself. “All right now, old fellow.” He put his hand firmly on his son’s trembling shoulder. “Let’s take it easy. You know better than this. What’s the trouble? What’s he done?”

  “He won’t tell, Mr. O’Leary.” Greg Pappas had retired, a little pale, on Spig’s arrival, but he came forward now. “He won’t even tell Kitsy.”

  “I won’t tell anybody. I hate him! He’s got to keep away from my garden . . . and he’s got to keep away from my mother! I’ll kill him! I’ll——”

  “That’s enough, Tip.” Spig took a cigarette out of his pocket. “We’ll let it go for now,” he said quietly. “Put your tools away and let’s go for a swim and cool off. You go in. I’ll be with you in a second. Scoot, both of you.”

  He moved off, lighting the cigarette, not sure he was going to be obeyed. He wouldn’t have believed this if he hadn’t seen it. Tip, who never raised his voice, never lost his temper, made him and Molly ashamed when they lost theirs—he’d been an enigma to Spig ever since he’d come back home. He was always reasonable, like the time Molly A. pulled up two whole rows of young carrots that took longer than anything else to grow. “She thought she was weeding, Dad. Just trying to help.” At times, he’d almost broken Spig’s impatient heart with his child’s stoicism in the face of his child’s disasters. Now he was an enigma on a totally different level.

  He glanced back. The two boys had gathered their scuffle hoes and were racing each other and Mädel down to the house. There were still clods, in a pile at the end of the row. It wasn’t a spur of the moment defence—that was clearly indicated by the stockpile of strategic materials.

  He crossed the grass through the line of cedars into the drive. Dunning was pulling out, grinning, his vivid, black eyes bright with mischief.

  “Good-bye . . . good-bye!” He waved his beret. “Good-bye, you happy savages! Maybe you’re not as happy as you think. Good-bye! Give my love to Molly-O!”

  He streaked off, bouncing over the uneven drive.

  Spig watched the swirl of dust settle as the yellow car disappeared into the woods, his grey eyes flat and hard as flint.

  Why don’t you take a week off and stick around, O’Leary?

  He turned and went into the house. Molly was in the kitchen. His heart gave a sudden lurch as he saw her, still the Sea King’s daughter, slender, crystalline cave-cool still, the golden flecks in her eyes warm with laughter. She was his, and he knew what he had whether he had any brains or not. Dunning had better watch himself. The rest of them didn’t matter.—As long as she wasn’t in love with any of them.

  “Hi, darling. The boys’ll be ready in just a second, so hurry, won’t you?” She shook her head quickly at him, the family signal to skip it now, discuss it later, as she gave Kitsy and John Eden, there in their bathing trunks, a small shove over to the door and out. “I’ve got a casserole. The kids ate early.”

  “Won’t be a minute.”

  “We’ll wait on the pier, Daddy.” Tip and Greg came galloping down the stairs. “Where’s Kits? Where’s Molly A.?”

  They dashed out. The laughter faded from Molly’s eyes. He’s angry about the vegetable contract . . . angry at Tip about the business up in the garden. I wish Art Dunning would go away from here.

  She brushed her red-gold hair back from her forehead, straightened her shoulders and went through the entrance hyphen to get the rest of the glasses from the terrace. She stopped, hearing Spig upstairs. He was talking on the telephone. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the muted sound of his voice disturbed her again. Then the children began to yell. “Hurry up, Daddy! Hurry!”

  A moment later he came down in his trunks, long and lean, the muscles rippling over his sun-browned body. He stopped to kiss her and hold her tight a moment.

  “Don’t let them stay in long, they’re bushed,” she said quickly.

  Spig nodded. “You put ’em to bed, will you? Leave my supper in the oven. I’ve got to run in town a minute.”

  “Spig . . .” She caught his arm. “Not about Tip’s contract . . . I knew you’d hate it. But he’s so proud, and so is Greg. We can’t hurt Greg’s pride in his own father. It’d be cruel, Spig.”

  “Hurry up, Daddy!” It was John Eden shouting. “Hurry up!”

  “We’ll talk about it. I’m not delivering any vegetables to the Three D.”

  “Then I’ll do it. Mr. Pappas called and asked me if it was all right. You’re just a snob, that’s all!”

  “Look here. I——”

  “Daddy! Come on, Daddy!”

  “Go on. I’ll put them to bed. But you’re not going to see Mr. Pappas. Promise me that. I really mean it. I really do.”

  She moved sharply away from him. “He’s coming!” she called down to the raft, laughing. “First one to the raft’s a waterbaby!” It was the signal for them all to dive, and Spig had to dash down.

  “Easy, Molly A.” The dog was swimming in circles around them.

  “Last one’s the waterbaby,” John Eden shouted, because Molly A. was always last. They tumbled on to the balsa raft and waited for Molly A. to pull her aboard.

  “Easy back, and then to bed,” said Spig. “Your mother’s S.O.P. I’ve got to go in town.”

  “My father never swims with us,” Greg said, and Spig started at the wistful note in his voice. “He isn’t ever home, except early in the morning. He’s closed on Wednesday, but he has to go to Baltimore to market to get his meat
and things. He can’t hire anybody, because there’s four of us to go to college. But he’s a good swimmer. He learned in Greece. He says the water’s bluer there. Blue like the glass at our new place.”

  A small school of alewives broke water, the soft slap of their silvery bodies very clear on the gently swaying raft.

  “What time does your father want the vegetables, Greg?” Spig O’Leary asked.

  He drove along between Sudley’s white-painted fences on his way back into town. The Three D was lighted now, a sapphire pool down at the end of the pasture on the other side of the road. Blue like the glass at our new place . . . Nick Pappas’s nostalgic memory of the wine-dark sea. Then the neon lights hit him. Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance. The last words in bubbling bright red, doing a blatant minuet, dancing on one at a time, all off and all on, then back to a single one again.

  “Nuts,” O’Leary said to himself. “It’s still a lousy joint.” That was the trouble with people, thinking with their hearts, not with their heads. He had nothing against Nick Pappas, or the widow with five kids selling beer and soft crab. But he had plenty against making the road a shambles. A menace to your children, a curse to you. But for the first time, he could see there might be a two-way pull for a guy like Sudley . . . none for a louse like Ashton. Sudley believed in what he did; Ashton knew he was a swine. That’s why he got himself blind drunk. And the thing to do was catch him first thing in the morning when he’d sobered up and show him the letter of stipulation, before Anita or Dunning had a chance to work on him. He couldn’t deny his own signature.

  He glanced at the clock on the dash as he turned off the by-pass into town. The young judge, as they called Nathan Twohey the old judge’s son, had said he’d meet him at the office at half-past nine. He turned into the courthouse square, not dingy now, the cupola shiny gold in the new street lights, a serpentine brick wall around the sodded yard with herringbone brick paths and green-painted wooden benches under the sycamores. You still went under the small rounding arch to go up to the judge’s office, but the walls were painted and the steps new.

  There was a light behind the door where the old judge’s name still stood in its honoured place. Under it was: “Nathan Twohey II—Private.” At the back end of the hall another door now led into a reception room. Spig knocked on the door that said “Private” and opened it. There were two changes, inside. The man behind the desk in the corner would never be the man his father was, they said in Devon. The mould was lost. But there was a shadow of his father in the lively eyes he fixed on Spig O’Leary as he came in. The other change was the dog-eared file boxes covering the walls. They were gone; in their place, a bank of grey steel cabinets under the shelves still filled with the old judge’s law books. One of the file drawers was pulled out and had an empty space that had held the file Spig saw now on the desk.

  “You’ve come about this Ashton business, I suppose.”

  Nathan Twohey was in his middle fifties, his dark hair beginning to frost. He was the judge’s boy, son of his first wife, who had been with George and Harlan Sudley at the duck blind that winter morning when George Sudley went overboard and rowed back to the Fairlie cottage to make a fire, dry his clothes and clean his gun.

  “Everybody seems to have known it but me,” Spig said evenly.

  “I advised Harlan Sudley to talk to you. He was so convinced you already knew that I wasn’t able to interfere. He called me this evening to tell me he’d changed his mind. I was just calling you when you called me.”

  He got up and went over to the corner cupboard where his father had kept the bottle of rye and his black straw hat. He opened it. There was a safe now behind the wooden doors. He took out a letter, and came back to the desk.

  “This is for you,” he said. “My father wrote it last Christmas, just before he left us . . . to be delivered to you in precisely this eventuality. He never trusted Stanley Ashton, not after Kathy was gone.”

  Spig took the letter. It was a blue envelope, “Mr. O’Leary” written on it, “Personal and Private” across one corner, with a pen that spluttered, in a hand that was old, a heartbeat pulsing in the uneven strokes. There were red wax seals on the flap.

  Spig looked at it and started to unseal it. Then he stopped and put it in his pocket.

  “It’s the letter of stipulation I’ve come about,” he said. “The one Ashton signed after Kathy’s death.”

  “That’s what I was going to call you about,” Judge Twohey said quietly. “I don’t have it, Spig.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t have it?”

  Judge Twohey shook his head. “Ashton came in a month ago. I was in court—as he knew, we’d spoken on my way over. He asked my secretary for the Plumtree Cove file, to check his deed. She gave it to him. When Sudley told me about the agent down here last week, I looked for the letter of stipulation at once. It was gone.”

  “But the one Kathy signed. You’ve still got that.”

  “I’m sorry Spig. It’s gone, too,” Judge Twohey said.

  CHAPTER VI

  “HE TOOK BOTH letters, Spig,” Nathan Twohey said. “A month ago. Maybe longer. But the letter itself isn’t essential. If we choose to regard it as in the nature of a contract between you and him for the protection of your property, we have evidence that it does, or did, in fact exist.”

  “It’s the fact he took it that’s essential,” Spig O’Leary said dispassionately. “If he knew he was going to sell a month ago, he knew it when he got us to deed him the right-of-way for his fancy road through our woods.”

  “We may be able to show fraud in that case. What else we can do . . .” Nat Twohey opened a faded blue file packet. “These are some notes my father made when you bought Plumtree Cove. He refers to Real Estate Company vs. Serio, 156 Md. 229. Our Court of Appeals quoted Murray vs. Greene, 64 Cal. 367. ‘It is difficult to conceive of a condition more clearly repugnant to the interest created by the grant of an estate in fee simple than the condition that the grantee shall not alienate the same without consent of the grantor. With such a condition, if valid, annexed to the grant, it would be neither a fee simple nor any other estate known to law.’ Our Court held that the existence of such a discretionary control would be plainly incompatible with the freedom of alienation which is one of the most characteristic incidents of a fee simple title. He’s got a couple of pages of precedents here, but that’s the gist of it.”

  He riffled through the notes before he put them down.

  “He must have been convinced any restriction on resale would be held void and unenforceable or he’d have incorporated it in your deed, whatever Miss Fairlie’s instructions. His . . . extra-legal methods may have been open to occasional criticism, but never his law.”

  His eyes rested on Spig’s pocket.

  “There are times when he tended to be somewhat . . . unorthodox. I’d advise discretion in following any . . . suggestions he may have left you. Considering the circumstances in which they were written.”

  “Which were what?”

  “You remember when he sent for you?”

  Spig nodded. It was last Christmas Eve, three days before the old judge died.

  “I woke up about two. His light was on. He was at his desk, writing. He told me to go back to bed, and next morning he gave me that to seal and bring down here, to give to you at the first sign of trouble at Eden’s Landing. My stepmother was at church at the time.”

  He gave Spig a wintry smile.

  “I asked him if he expected trouble. He said he hardly expected anything else. Ashton had showed a highly developed sense of financial self-preservation and Anita was too obvious a realist to stay in Devon with Molly O’Leary next door to her. Then he said perhaps I hadn’t noticed Molly was a damned attractive young woman. He couldn’t conceive of either Stan or Anita Ashton putting sentiment above cold cash, and he’d never in any event known a situation in which a second wife had any sentiment not adverse to her husband’s ex-in-laws.”

  “He wasn�
�t too wrong, I guess. And vice versa.”

  Nat Twohey shifted with some embarrassment. “He said that, too. But it was Miss Fairlie he was concerned about. He talked about her, or tried to, but it was difficult with my stepmother in and out.”

  He shifted again, hesitating. “It’s a little painful to say this,” he went on unhappily. “But my father . . . well, I think his whole inner life was dedicated to Miss Fairlie. That was why he could be so extraordinarily objective with all the rest of us. My own mother died when I was six. I don’t remember her, or anything except that the house was always dark and cold until Celia Fairlie started coming and taking me out to Eden, to ride on an old pony of hers. All of a sudden everything was warm and gay, for a long time. Until George Sudley . . .”

  He stopped again for an instant.

  “With George Sudley dead, I hoped . . . But it didn’t work that way, of course.” He straightened forward in his chair. “That’s neither here nor there. What I’m trying to say is, I’m in a difficult position to advise you. You are the only person who can take legal action in this matter. Whether I’d be advising you to take it in your own interest, or in my interest in trying to protect Eden and Miss Fairlie . . .”

  “That’s my interest, too,” Spig said quietly.

  “I know. But I’d be highly culpable if I let you get involved in an expensive lawsuit with an outlook as bleak as this is. I only wish my father had left Miss Fairlie to somebody else. I’m not really capable . . .”

  He broke off abruptly. “However, there’s no use trying to decide anything to-night. You’re angry and I’ve had a . . . a difficult day. That’s a bad combination where litigation is to be decided on.” He pushed his chair back. “We’ll sleep on it and discuss it to-morrow. If my father were only . . .”

  His hand moved in a futile gesture. “I don’t know how long I’m going to keep on saying that. I say it a dozen times a day. Molly—what does she think about it?