Legacy Of Terror Part 4

Lee lifted his face from his hands and looked down at his palms, as if he felt he had left his soul in them. 'Yes,' he said. 'She was such an enthusiastic girl, so pretty and quick*'

Rand turned away from Lee Matherly and faced Dennis. 'And you, I believe, were the only member of the family to know Celia Tamlin before tonight. Is this correct.'

'Yes,' Dennis said.

'How did you meet the young lady?'

Dennis said, 'I am a painter. Originally, I met Celia at an art show at Kauffman's. She had come to scout for paintings that she might want to purchase for her company's gallery. For use in interior decoration.'

'Did she purchase any of your work.'

'As a matter of fact, yes. That's how we became friends.'

'Did you date Celia Tamlin?'

Dennis looked worried, for he could see where the questioning might lead if the detective wished to take it that route. 'I did,' he said. 'Half a dozen times, perhaps.'

'What kind of girl was she?'

Dennis licked his lips and looked around the room for support. Elaine looked away from him, suddenly frightened. Of what? Did she suspect he had some hand in the night's events? She gripped Gordon's hand more tightly.

Dennis said, 'She was a fine girl. Always interested in things, very bright, a good conversationalist, sensitive. I can't think of an enemy for Celia. She was friends with everyone!'

'Not everyone.'

Dennis looked suddenly stricken. Elaine thought he was about to burst into tears. She disliked such emotions in men, except for old men like Jacob who had earned the right to cry. She distrusted emotional men.

'And you were upstairs, in the attic, painting at the time of the stabbing?' Rand was perched on the edge of the desk now, tapping the open notebook against his knee.

'I had been, earlier,' Dennis said. 'But when the scream came, I was in the kitchen, having a gla.s.s of milk.'

'Alone?'

'Yes.'

Elaine expected Rand to pursue it further, but he did not. Instead, he turned to Gordon. 'And where were you, again?'

'In my room, reading,' Gordon said.

'What were you reading?'

'A suspense novel.'

'Alone?'

'Yes, alone.'

Rand turned to Paul Honneker. 'You?'

Paul was as disheveled as he had been at supper, perhaps more so. The clothes hung on him as if he were nothing more than a chair they had been thrown across. His collar was open an extra b.u.t.ton. His beard had darkened and p.r.i.c.kled his face like black wire. There were bags under his eyes and a drawn look to his normally jolly face.

'I was sleeping,' Honneker said.

'You slept through the entire incident,' Rand said. 'Through the scream as well?'

'I didn't hear any scream,' Paul said.

'When was the first you knew what had happened?'

'When Lee came to tell me. Just before you arrived.'

'You must be a heavy sleeper.'

Hesitantly, sadly, Paul Honneker said, 'I'd had a drink or two.'

'Just that?'

'Maybe a few more,' he said.

Rand looked at him a while, abruptly dismissed him. He saw the same, sorry lack of initiative and aimlessness in Paul which everyone else came to see eventually.

The probing questions continued, with little else of interest developing. The only moment when Rand seemed intrigued was when Dennis mentioned the fact that Celia often picked up hitchhikers. 'She trusted everyone,' he had told Rand. 'Often, she lent money to the most untrustworthy borrowers and never saw it again. That never dissuaded her. She continued to lend money like a bank.' At last, sometime after one in the morning, they were excused. Rand, apparently, was going to push a search for any hitchhiker who may have been seen in the area before or after the murder.

Before she went to bed, Elaine stopped by to see how Jacob was reacting. She found him as she had left him, in the funeral pose, breathing lightly, sound asleep.

Jacob would not believe the hitchhiker story.

But then Jacob was old and ill.

For something to do, she took his pulse.

It was normal.

Ought to go to bed, she thought.

She opened the medicine cabinet and took out one of Jacob's sedatives. It was the first time in her life she had ever had need of such a thing.

She went to her room, and she locked the door this time.

Her second floor window was a good distance above the ground, but she locked that as well.

She did not feel the least bit foolish. There was something quite concrete to fear now. This was no longer a fantasy of a dear but doddering old man. One must take precautions.

She said a prayer for Celia Tamlin, then took the sedative. She did not sleep entirely in the dark, but let one bedside lamp burn throughout the long, uneasy night.

Chapter 5.

Elaine slept later than she had in years, but woke feeling as if she had just put in a hard days work. She showered, applied what little makeup she needed, dressed and went to check on Jacob. He had already had breakfast and was sitting in one of the easy chairs in his room, reading a popular novel.

'You look very pretty this morning,' he said.

She was dressed in a lemon skirt, brown blouse, lemon hairband, and she wore a simple brown bead choker at her neck. Lee Matherly had made a point of the fact that he did not wish her to wear uniforms, for that would only depress his father.

'Thank you,' she said.

'Were I, say, forty years younger, I should surely be courting you, young lady.'

She laughed as she got the instruments to take his blood pressure, temperature and heartbeat. She pulled a chair next to his, rolled up his pajama sleeve, and wrapped the pressure cloth around his withered biceps.

'Indeed,' Jacob said, grinning at her with the good side of his face, 'it's a miracle you aren't married already!'

'Marriage isn't for me,' she said. 'At least not for a long while.'

'Don't bet on it,' he said, patting her hand.

She said, 'Have you heard anything about Celia yet?'

He frowned. 'Lee says she made it through the operation. She's still in a coma and still on the critical list, however.'

'If she makes it, she can tell us who it was,' Elaine said. 'Then this terrible expectancy will be over.'

His face was stony now. 'Captain Rand believes it was a hitchhiker. He says only Dennis knew the girl, and therefore only Dennis would have a motive. But Dennis doesn't have one that anyone can see. So it must have been a hitchhiker who forced her into the drive without getting out and then tried to kill her.'

Elaine remembered his adamancy that one of the family was the guilty party, and she wondered at this sudden switch. Could it be attributed to his stroke-weakened mind? Or was it something utterly different than that-was it wishful thinking? Rand had offered a good out. The faceless. .h.i.tchhiker. If we could believe in that, she thought, how much easier.

'What I recommend for you, my dear,' Jacob continued, suddenly having recovered his composure and good humor, 'is a walk about the grounds, a bit of suns.h.i.+ne and clean air-as clean as we can get this close to a city.'

'Look who's the nurse now,' she said.

But when she had finished her morning duties with him, she decided that his suggestion was not to be laughed off. She did feel as if she needed to get out, to shake off the clinging oppressiveness of the old house.

Five acres of grounds can be, she discovered, a great deal of land, especially if it is broken up by s.h.i.+fts in geographic contour and by stands of pines and willows which give it the illusion of a forest. All of it was well tended and crossed by flagstone walkways which wound even through the trees, through the cool, heavy shadows that did not seem ominous as the shadows in the house had. She had wandered about for nearly an hour before she came to the low, stone wall which separated the Matherly estate from their wealthy neighbors.

As she followed the wall, watching the birds wheel across the early summer sky and feeling somehow reborn in the glow of suns.h.i.+ne and the fresh air, she eventually noticed the neighboring house. It was not quite so large as the Matherly place, but a formidable dwelling in its own right. It was in the colonial mode, of red brick with many large windows and white shutters, high balconies and white pillars. The grounds were well landscaped, though smaller than the Matherly estate. She liked it, she thought, more than the house in which she now lived, for it was a terribly functional home. It was squared and simple, as colonial houses had always been, and not larded over with fancy pieces of stonework and gables and multi- leveled, multi-angled roofs.

As she walked further, she saw the patio, a simple brick affair which was surrounded by a knee-high brick wall A man and a woman were lying on cots, sunbathing. They were, Elaine supposed, in their middle forties. The wife was still trim and attractive, while the husband had allowed himself the luxury of an expanded middle. She looked away from them, not wanting to be nosy, and had gone another twenty paces before they called out to her.

When she turned, she saw that the woman was sitting up on her cot and waving.

She waved back.

'Come over for a drink,' the woman said.

'Is there a gate?'

'Another fifty feet along,' the woman said. Her husband had sat up by this time, and he was nodding agreement.

She found the gate, crossed through, and went over to the patio.

The neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw, Syd and s.h.i.+ela. Before she could even introduce herself, they had to get the subject of the drink settled. They were surprised that she only wanted a c.o.ke, but let it rest when they couldn't persuade her to have Scotch or a gin and tonic. The Bradshaw butler, a young, rather handsome man named William, delivered the drinks on a silver tray, along with a variety of prepared snacks. When that was done, s.h.i.+ela and Syd were ready to settle down to some conversation.

If she had realized what the nature of the conversation was going to be, she would never have crossed through the gate in the stone wall.

'You're Jacob's new nurse, I believe,' s.h.i.+ela said. She was a brown-haired, dark-eyed woman, with a lot of freckles on her face which somehow added to her pixie beauty rather than detracting from it.

'That's right,' s.h.i.+ela said.

'Poor Jake,' Syd put in. 'He was so active, so vital vital before his stroke. Too much cholesterol. That's what leads to circulatory problems, you know. Blood clots, heart attacks, the whole works.' before his stroke. Too much cholesterol. That's what leads to circulatory problems, you know. Blood clots, heart attacks, the whole works.'

'He still is vital,' Elaine said, possessed of a strange urge to defend the old man before this somewhat loud couple.

'You'll have to excuse Syd,' s.h.i.+ela said. 'He's a nut on the cholesterol subject'

Elaine looked at his overweight problem and decided it was mostly the result of liquor. Far better, she thought, to have achieved the added pounds through extra steaks, extra bread, extra potatoes.

s.h.i.+ela said, 'How do you like your job?'

'Fine,' Elaine said. 'It's the first time I've really been on my own.'

From there, the conversation drifted into harmless channels, light banter that Elaine found enjoyable, with but a few exceptions. She told them about nurse's training and about the orphanage. This last brought forth a gush of sympathy from them which she neither wanted nor respected. She had no use for sympathy. Life was what it was, and you only got bogged down if you began to lament what Fate had given you. She discovered that Syd Bradshaw had made his modest fortune through the motion picture industry; he owned a chain of full-sized and mini-theaters within the Pittsburgh area. This would have been a fascinating topic if the Bradshaws had not continued to lace their anecdotes with anti-Matherly epithets with which she could hardly sympathize, being a Matherly employee. It seemed that Syd was jealous of Lee Matherly's greater wealth. Heaven knew, he had more money than he could use himself. Still, he envied Lee the larger Matherly fortune. Both Syd and s.h.i.+ela often referred to Lee's having been 'born to wealth without having to work for a penny of it.' When Elaine ventured the suggestion that Lee had been successfully managing the family affairs for some years now, Syd said, 'And who couldn't make money if he had a fortune to begin with. If you have money, you can make more, even if you have no talent for it.'

The sun seemed to grow hotter, stiflingly warm, pouring down over Elaine like honey, burning honey.

She was perspiring and itchy.

The chair under her, a plastic-thatch lounge, seemed to have grown harder and more uncomfortable by the moment.

When the summer birds swooped low overhead and called out to each, other, their voices seemed magnified by the heat, converted into banshee wails that set her teeth on edge.

Eventually, she learned that Syd Bradshaw and Lee Matherly had been in the same high school cla.s.s, had been to the same college. Bradshaw had come from a far less well-to-do family, and he felt that the entire purpose of his life was to 'show-up' Lee Matherly, to prove the value of once having lived in poverty. He expounded the virtue of a poor childhood as loudly as he warned against the danger of eating foods too high in cholesterol. Because he had not made the fortune the Matherlys controlled and now knew that he never would, he was discontent. He could not enjoy his own achievements, his own wealth. Instead, he had to achieve his longed for dominance over the Matherlys by speaking against them and trying to lessen them in the eyes of others. It was all very sad-and silly. A childhood rivalry had ruined the adult life of Syd Bradshaw.

'Tell me,' s.h.i.+ela said, as Elaine was trying to think of some excuse to take leave of them, 'doesn't it frighten you, living in the same house where Amelia Matherly once lived?'

'Why should it?'

Syd said, 'You mean no one has told you?'

'About Christmas Eve?' s.h.i.+ela expanded.

Her boredom and discontent with these people was sluiced away as if by a fresh rain. She said, 'Jacob has hinted at some tragedy or other, but I don't know the full story.'

'With this latest murder, you shouldn't be kept ignorant,' s.h.i.+ela said. Her eyes sparkled now. She licked her lips, anxious to impart the story of the scandal. She had been infected with her husband's disease: incurable envy.