That was simple to say, and it was simpler to do then than it was later, when each time I closed my eyes I opened them to find the net around Iris Nash drawing tighter and tighter, until it seemed there was no human agency that could release its strangling hold—not even Belden Doyle, who was after all too human.
I put down the phone and went back to Iris. She was sitting motionless where I’d left her, staring into the dying fire. Her lips moved. I leaned down. “I never knew what happened to make him change so much,” she whispered.
I’m not sure which I dreaded most when I opened my eyes in the Nashes’ blue guest room at eight o’clock and remembered all at once why I was there: the morning meeting between Iris and Lowell, or the return of Captain Lamb with the report from the autopsy. I suppose it was the first because it seemed the more imminent. I rang for the maid. When she came in—scared pea-green—she brought me a bag with my daytime clothes that Lilac had sent over.
“Oh, it’s horrible, Mrs. Latham,” the girl said, in a hushed voice. “But they’ll never make me believe she did it. I never believed she poisoned Miss Lowell’s dog either. Miss Lowell will never be the lady she is if she lives a hundred years.”
I looked at her, a little surprised at her vehemence. She was a large apple-cheeked girl with blue eyes and light hair, vaguely familiar though I couldn’t quite place her.
“Where were you last night?” I asked, pouring out a cup of fragrant coffee.
“Mrs. Nash let us all off right after dinner. She’s awful nice that way. Except Wilkins—he’s the butler except when he drives Mr. Nash.”
“He’s new, isn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am, pretty new. He came this Fall. I’ve been here since May. You don’t remember me, but I came just before you went away in June. I used to work in the bakery—my name’s Molly, I’m Mrs. Murphy’s youngest girl.”
“I do remember you, very well. Your mother died, didn’t she?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Nash lets me come here and go to school in the afternoons.—Mrs. Latham, can’t you make Miss Lowell be nicer to her?”
“Oh dear!” I thought.
She flushed crimson, but went on. “Because Wilkins says when the police find out what a dog fight goes on in this house they’ll hang her for sure.”
“Is there a dog fight?” I asked.
“Not out loud. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was. It’s just underneath. Miss Lowell’s always doing just what Mrs. Nash doesn’t want her to do, and being mean to Mr. Mac all the time.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Molly, if I were you,” I said.
“No, ma’am. But… maybe you’d talk to Miss Lowell…”
I looked at her. There was something pleading, and frightened, in her round wholesome face that startled me.
“What’s the matter, Molly?”
She hesitated for a moment, flushing again.
“Oh, it’s just that this morning, ma’am, when I took her tray in, she was talking to somebody on the phone, telling them she knew her father had been poisoned, because that dog of hers was poisoned.—She kept calling him A. J. That’s Mr. McClean, isn’t it?”
“Have you said anything about this in the kitchen?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Latham. I wouldn’t do that.”
“You see you don’t, Molly. I’ll talk to Miss Lowell.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She went out. I put down my coffee cup and leaned my head back against the cool pillows. Nothing in the house had seemed to me to make sense, this last week, but this made less. The “A. J.” Lowell had been talking to was Mac’s uncle. He was Randall Nash’s oldest and most intimate friend, Angus was named after him. I tried to remember all I knew about him. Mac, who was A. J.’s brother’s son, had lived with him since he was a small child and both his parents were killed in a train wreck in Colorado in 1915 on their way to the San Francisco Exposition. It was usually said in Georgetown that the reason A. J. had remained a bachelor was that he and Randall Nash both wanted to marry Marie Lowell and Randall got her. I wouldn’t know how true that was. Certainly if he envied Randall the possession of Marie after a short time it only shows there are some people who don’t recognize a break when they get it.
A. J., I knew, was president of the Colonial Trust Company, had rheumatism and indigestion, lived in a crazy rambling house out Foxall Road, was austere and upright, thought the world had gone definitely to hell and didn’t approve of lip stick and young people drinking. Just how it happened that he did approve of the idea of Mac’s marrying Lowell, when he didn’t approve of at least one-half the things Lowell does, is something that’s always defeated me. However, that’s the way it was. Oddly enough, Lowell and Mac were all for it too, really. The only person who seemed undecided about it had been Randall Nash—not seriously opposed, I think, but certainly not wildly enthusiastic about it. At least not when he’d talked to me in the Spring before I went away.
But that was all beside the point. What concerned me about Angus James McClean as Molly closed the door and left me alone was that with his devotion to Marie Nash and Randall and their daughter Lowell he combined a strong dislike—or mistrust, or suspicion, or more probably a little of all three— for Randall Nash’s second wife. Since Iris had come to the house in Beall Street A. J. had come only when he had to, and then usually when he knew she’d be away. It seemed to me, just off-hand, that nothing would please him more, probably, than to have his worst fears realized so… and that Lowell Nash, knowing that, was hitting definitely below the belt.
I moved my tray off my lap to the foot of the bed and got up. I’d told Molly I’d talk to Lowell, and while I didn’t look forward to it with joy, I knew somebody had to do it. I slipped on the green quilted satin robe Iris had given me, took a deep breath, went out into the silent hall and down to Lowell’s door, knocked and went in.
She was curled up in a wretched sullen ball on an Empire chaise longue, her breakfast tray untouched on the floor beside her. The morning paper was spread out on top of it. She looked up at me. There was no trace of tears in her dark thick-fringed eyes or in the last night’s makeup still on her face. And that was going to make it harder, I saw at once. If she ever really had a soft edge to her valiant little spirit no one could guess it.
I sat down at her feet. I saw the guarded look come into her eyes that should have told me I was about to waste an awful lot of breath.
“Lowell,” I said. I must have sounded insufferably stuffy to her. “There are a lot of ways of fighting… and some of them aren’t very sporting.”
“Was it very sporting to poison a helpless dog—or my father?” she said bitterly.
“Listen, darling. Until you
know
your father was poisoned it’s stupid to say that.”
“I do know he was poisoned.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. That’s all.”
“Listen, Lowell,” I said. “If he was poisoned, it means he was murdered. Do you seriously believe, honestly, in your heart, that Iris murdered him?”
Her lips closed in a tight red line to keep from quivering. Her dark eyes faltered ever so imperceptibly. Then she nodded her head stubbornly.
“Nobody else would want to,” she said dully.
“Why do you think she did want to?”
“She hates all of us—she wants to marry Gilbert St. Martin.”
I caught my breath for an instant.
“Isn’t divorce the more usual procedure, in that event?”
She flushed. “Father wouldn’t divorce her. Edith St. Martin tried to get him to, but he wouldn’t.”
I tried not to gape like an idiot.
“What are you talking about!” I exclaimed, in spite of myself.
“That’s right. And maybe I’m old-fashioned…”
My heart sank. That was Marie Nash’s opening gambit every time she set in to flay the hide off some poor woman who’d done anything from drinking a cocktail to hijacking somebody else’s marriage. I had the upsetting feeling that I was seeing an exhibition of dual personality, or some unearthly terrifying survival—looking at Lowell, hearing her mother.
“… She’s always with Gilbert St. Martin. And—”
I interrupted her.
“You’re not being old-fashioned, Lowell. You’re being unintelligent. You’re certainly not going to tell me that when you marry Mac you couldn’t go out to lunch with Steve Donaldson, say, without planning to murder Mac—”
“I’m not going to marry Mac.”
I stared again.
“Did you tell A. J. that?”
That was a mistake. Her cheeks flushed hotly. “So my phone calls are tapped! And this morning I woke up early and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, and I found a note saying ‘Please don’t take Miss Lowell the morning paper.’—She thinks she can make it so unbearable here that I’ll go live with my mother. I’ll just show her.”
My heart sank. I stared at her, speechless. She picked up the paper.
“I’ll just show her.”
Then I saw her whole body tense and her lips part suddenly. She was staring at the paper with wide incredulous eyes. I looked down at it. On the back page was a picture of her mother. It was quite a long “Flash.”
“Well-known Divorcee Dies Here. Socially Prominent Figure in Depression. Divorcee Succumbs to Pneumonia at Emergency Hospital.”
I’ve never known how much Marie Nash meant to her daughter, and I didn’t find out now. Just then Molly tapped on the door. I opened it.
“Mrs. Nash says to tell Miss Lowell that Mr. Angus is downstairs.”
Lowell got up. What little color there had been in her face before was gone. I watched her dress with slow automatic movements and slash a bright lip stick across her lips. At the door she stopped.
“Did she know my mother was dead?” she asked slowly.
I nodded. “Last night, when you were asleep. That’s why she told them not to bring you the paper.”
Anybody could have seen that. Anybody but Lowell in her present state.
“Wanted the pleasure of telling me herself, I guess,” she said coldly, and went out.
I simply put my head in my hands and sat there, completely and utterly mute, thanking the Lord my offspring were distressingly dull, normal, uncomplicated boys. I believe anything anybody tells me now about adolescent girls, no matter how completely unbelievable it sounds.
It occurred to me then, as soon as I could think, that I was supposed to call Belden Doyle. I went back to my room and put in a call. Colonel Primrose had spoken to him; he would come about ten. I got dressed and went down stairs. Angus had gone, taking Lowell with him.
“He’s terribly cut up, poor kid,” Iris said. She had on a dark brown frock, high at the throat, with long tight sleeves— she never wore black—and looked surprisingly fresh considering the ordeal she must have been through with Angus and Lowell.
“I called Mr. Doyle, he’ll be here at ten,” I said. “I’m going home. I’ll be back.”
“I wish you’d stay until after Mr. McClean comes,” she said.
I was hesitating when the doorbell rang.
“That’s him now, probably.”
She took a deep breath and waited, as Wilkins announced him with the slightly oleaginous air that is what makes it so difficult for strangers in Washington to tell the butler from a second-term Congressman.
A. J. McClean is a neat, precise, dry man in the late fifties, I suppose, not quite middle height, bald except for a fringe of gray hair under his hat line. A pair of rimless nose glasses pinched into his straight thin nose have made two deep perpendicular lines between his grey eyebrows and given him a severe schoolmasterish air that his thin lips accentuate. He greeted me with a formal bow—I’ve known him fairly well a long time—and shook hands with Iris, who can scarcely know him at all. I suppose he felt Randall’s death, no doubt, but he’s definitely the kind of a man who would be still more troubled by the circumstances of it. It gave him an odd appearance now of taking the fact of death quite for granted.
“I have come in the spirit of friendship, Mrs. Nash,” he said simply. Knowing as I did what young Lowell had been giving him not an hour before, I couldn’t help but be slightly skeptical about that. I knew, however, that he has the name of being most definitely a man of his word.
“I have every faith that the autopsy will prove our present fears to be quite groundless,” he went on earnestly. “Randall has been warned repeatedly that he can’t drink. His system wouldn’t stand it. When he came to my house last night I tried to reason with him.”
Iris looked up. “Did he come to your house?”
“Yes. He came there shortly after ten-thirty o’clock. He telephoned you from there.”
She nodded.
“I… I have been to Marie’s. Angus and Lowell are there.”
He paused, as if approaching a difficult situation.
“I would like to suggest, Mrs. Nash—and I hope you won’t think it premature, so to speak…”
He came to a stop, and began again.
“It’s about Lowell. I think she’s taking this much harder than any of us realize… coming together this way, of course. I’m sure both her father and mother would approve of my idea.”
“What is your idea, Mr. McClean?” Iris asked. She seemed disturbed and on her guard.
“All Lowell’s family that meant anything to her is… gone,” he went on quietly. “My nephew is the only person left at all close to her. I’m wondering now, Mrs. Nash, if it wouldn’t be a wise thing for them to marry, as soon as possible, and go abroad.”
Iris’s eyes widened.
“Is this Mac’s idea?”
“No, no. It is my own entirely.”
Iris got up.
“I’m glad of that.—I’m afraid I can’t approve of it, Mr. McClean, at all. But you know, of course, that I have no influence of any kind over Lowell. She’s entirely her own mistress.”
A. J. shook his head. “Fortunately or not, Mrs. Nash,” he said deliberately, “that is not the case. Her father’s will specifies that your consent is necessary if she marries before she is twenty-one.”
Iris looked at him incredulously. “Are you… quite sure of that?”
A. J. nodded.
She sat down mechanically, I thought more upset by this than she had been by anything else.
“There’s another point, incidentally, in his will that you should be prepared for, Mrs. Nash. The settlement made with his first wife at the time of their divorce was that in case he predeceased her she should receive what would have been her dower right had they not separated—one-third of his property. This arrangement was entered into in lieu of alimony. At the time of the divorce, as you may know, Randall was practically bankrupt, and Marie did not want to be a burden to him in his efforts to recover.”