Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 (24 page)

"It doesn't upset me, not really. It's happened; it's a fact; he's dead! In sheer self-defense we must develop some kind of callousness or go out of our minds. But do we need to make jokes about it?"

"Nobody's joking, ma'am; that's the very last thing we'd think of." Captain Ashcroft shook his fist. "All I say is: however Henry was killed, he wasn't killed in that way. Nothing was thrown at him, either a baseball or any other weapon, because it would have had to land in a soft surface like sand. Even a five-ounce baseball would have made an indentation as plain as a footprint. Do you see any indentation there?"

"No, of course not!"

"So I'll make no more remarks about bug-houses or padded cells, which seems to rile these others as much as jokes rile you or talk about old Testament characters riles me. But it's time Dr. Fell lived up to his reputation and advised us. Come out of the clouds, King Cole; arise and shine! We're smack up against a blank wall again; which way do we turn?"

Dr. Fell made noises of distress.

"You lean on a broken reed, I fear." His vacant, feeble-minded gaze seemed to be tracing a pattern along the sky. "Until these wits are unsealed, if in fact they are ever unsealed, I must repeat in abject apology that I can't help you with the method. And yet I have a feeling, amounting to virtual certainty." His look grew tense, his voice thunderous. "Something is there—just round the corner, just waiting to be grasped, but hid in obfuscation of my own accursed making! What is it? Archons of Athens, what
can
it be?

"Meanwhile, with your permission, I must concentrate on those chinks and glimmers of light which do most certainly appear. What happened in these grounds on the night of Sunday, May 2nd? Did a resolve to commit murder crystallize at last? Not the manner of doing it; that's hardly likely. But was the vow taken and the course determined then? To a certain interview, out there under the magnolias by the gate, we have now only one available witness."

"Who?" demanded Yancey Beale.

"You," said Dr. Fell.

He said no more. The screen door under the house's portico, whose slam had been the prelude to several interruptions, once more opened and banged shut. Valerie Huret, emerging in her customary hurry, stood for a moment leaning one hand against a tall white pillar. Then she ran down the steps and hastened towards them.

"You've been shouting like a political convention!" she cried. "You've been shouting fit to wake the—oh, what
am I saying? Dear God, why am I
always chosen to be the one who sees it? Whatever you've been shouting about, you'd better stop and come inside. There's another message on the blackboard."

They were far from James Island now. It was a quarter to two by the dashboard clock when Alan's car, with himself and Camilla in the front seats, and Dr. Fell and Yancey Beale piled into the back, crossed the soaring two-mile span of the Cooper River Bridge, and dipped down to Highway Number 17 north out of Charleston.

They had left town by way of Meeting Street and turned right for the bridge. Sandwiches at a drive-in provided some sort of lunch. Now, under a sky still dark but with occasional flashes when sun-shafts pierced cloud, they swept down from the bridge through low-country suburbs not too entangled in Saturday-afternoon traffic. Bypassing the village of Mount Pleasant, they continued - on 17 until Alan made a right-hand turn at the sign for Highway 703 and an arrow-sign beneath it that read
To Sullivan's Island.

It was Camilla who broke the silence.

"Sullivan's Island and Fort Moultrie! I've never been there, but why Sullivan's Island and Fort Moultrie
now?"
Just because that ridiculous blackboard said—!"

"May I point out," remonstrated Dr. Fell, who had tried in vain to light his cigar against the wind, "that it is not a ridiculous blackboard? It may be an infuriating blackboard, a wrong-headed blackboard; it may display warped humor or a slyness we could do without. But 'ridiculous' I submit it is not It has struck close to truth so far."

"Yes, but what has it told us?" Alan argued. "Three times there has been a message; three times Captain Ashcroft has rubbed it out and sworn blue murder . . ."

"And the last time," said Camilla, "I thought poor Valerie would have another fit. She flew out at George, and told him to get rid of the blackboard at once. George never lost a hairline of dignity. He said he couldn't even move it without orde
rs from Miss Madge, who's in no
state to give orders about anything. Odd, isn't it, that it should be Valerie who discovered some new writing twice in a row?"

"Is it so odd, do you think?" asked Dr. Fell, pointing with the unlighted cigar. "Mrs. Huret is quite an intuitive person, I should say. About that third message—"

"About the third message," Camilla twitched her head round, "I can't help agreeing with Alan. 'If you want to know how the murder was done,'" she quoted, " try Fort Moultrie any day between 8 and 5. There is a photograph which may prove enlightening. Yours in homage to the great one, N.S.' What does
that
mean? And Captain Ashcroft . . ."

"Captain Ashcroft wouldn't come with us," Alan supplied. "Not that! He's 'expecting important messages' at his office, is he? He'll have an apoplectic stroke if he doesn't soon learn how the murder was committed. And yet he wouldn't come with us! When Dr. Fell invited him, he refused as angrily as though he'd been asked to help rob a bank."

"Captain Ashcroft, you will have observed, is more temperamental than his appearance indicates. But the most fruitful line of enquiry," said Dr. Fell, "has been suggested by Miss Bruce. What can we expect to
find
at Fort Moultrie?" He looked at Alan. "The present fort, I take it, is not the original one?"

"No; hardly. The original Fort Sullivan, successfully defended by Colonel William Moultrie when a British fleet under Sir Peter Parker attacked it in 1776, was only a double wall of palmetto logs with sand in the space between. A subsequent fort was made fairly formidable during the Civil War, and 'modernized' with concrete gun emplacements in 1898. That's the one you'll see."

" "There is a photograph which may prove enlightening.' What photograph?"

"I can't think. In a brick-and-concrete tunnel of a museum they've got a display of old relics: cannon-balls, swords, muskets, and other gear from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are photographs of the exhibits, and a photograph of Fort Moultrie as it looked in 1863. But it hardly seems helpful or hopeful."

"One moment!" Dr. Fell blinked. "We have already crossed two bridges, including the one you said was over Shem Creek. Isn't there another looking just ahead?"

"Yes.—That was the Ben Sawyer Bridge, and the last of them," Alan added thirty seconds later.

"When do we reach Sullivan's Island?"

"This
is
Sullivan's Island."

Dr. Fell gaped like an idiot, the cigar slipping through his fingers.

"Sullivan's Island? But it can't be!" "Why not?"

"These wide, swept streets and trim villas? This air of suburban prosperity a-doze? Forgive me," bumbled Dr. Fell, groping as though for sanity, "if my notions of the island are derived solely from Edgar Allan Poe,
The Gold Bug,
and that wild, desolate spot where they dug up Captain Kidd's treasure.

" "The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish.' (I quote from memory, but I think with accuracy.) 'No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard white beach on the sea-coast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle so much prized by the horticulturists of England. The shrub here often attains a height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burthening the air with its fragrance.'

"Poe, it is true, wrote that story for the Philadelphia
Dollar Newspaper
in 1843. Common sense suggests that a hundred and twenty-odd years must have brought one or two changes. Yet the dream is lost, the illusion a mockery! I return to woolgathering, and to Mr. Beale."

For some time Yancey had not spoken a word. Now, stretching his legs, he sat up with the air of one who would have preferred to sleep.

"I was kidnapped," he said. "I'm not complainin', mind; but let the record show I was kidnapped. I'm a lone lorn creature, and there's only one reason you brought me along at all. Whenever the maestro remembers it, he hammers me with another question about a certain Sunday night almost two weeks ago. Yes, I was there! Yes, there was a moon!"

"Dark of the moon, I think?" suggested Dr. Fell.

"What do you mean, dark of the moon? The moon that's waning now wasn't quite full at th
e time. I remember it distinctl
y, moonlight and mosquitoes and everything, because—"

"Figuratively speaking," Dr. Fell said impressively, "every act of this drama has been played out at deepest dark of the moon. Dark motives, dark deeds, creep side by side from the same cave. Imagine, please, that you are again approaching Maynard Hall on the night of May 2nd. What then?"

"Hold it, Maestro! I've already told you everything!"

"Everything, sir?"

"Well, almost everything."

Once more Alan swung to the right. As the car went bowling along Middle Street towards Fort Moultrie, Dr. Fell with intense concentration made mesmeric gestures at Yancey Beale.

"The little more, and oh, how much it is! Let me beg you to dig into your memory. Again, I say, you are approaching Maynard Hall on Sunday night. You stop your car in the lane outside the gate. You hear voices. Madge is there. And someone is with her."

"I've told you two or three times, I don't know
who
it was! Somebody about her own age, to judge by the voice."

"Had you ever heard the voice before?"

"I think so; can't be sure. It was a Yankee voice, I thought. But lots of people in this part of the world talk like Yankees. Anyway, wasn't much more'n a whisper. Wait, though! There
was
something else!"

"Yes?"

"I could have sworn I heard Madge beg him
not to leave her. And he said, ‘I
've got no choice; it's a hell of a thing, but I've got no choice.' Then he skedaddled, and I went in. There stood Madge under the moonlight, in a state I can't describe and won't try to. I asked who'd been with her; she said nobody, and I pretended to believe it There, Maestro!
I
haven't told you up to now, because . . ."

"Because you forgot?"

A spasm crossed Yancey's face.

"No!" he shouted. "Because I was so goddamn jealous that I—sorry, Camilla—!"

"Please don't apologize, Yancey. There are others of us," Camilla said in her clear voice, "who can be equally jealous at times, and yet have to hide it as you did. You
did
hide it, I gather?"

"I tri
ed to, though it wasn't easy. Ol’
Yance isn't much of a ladies' man, I reckon. Madge never looked and talked as distracted as that after she'd spent a few minutes in
my
company. And I didn't know who the man was. I could have slaughtered the bastard then and there; but I didn't know who he was and I still don't. Madge wasn't much help either. She started in about the loneliness of her life; how she was too young to be a hermit, and couldn't bear it. I tried to soothe her there too, but
I
didn't get very far. Down came the old man, also in a dither and worried about Madge . . ."

"I see," observed Dr. Fell. "Will you endeavor to amplify that part of the story as well?"

"All right; have it your own way. In for a penny, in for the whole bankroll! To an accompaniment of ghost-guns in the background, Madge and her old man flew out at each other with more words that made no sense."

In some detail Yancey recounted the scene under the magnolias.

"O
f course," he went on, "I said I
must have shouted the words Pa Maynard overheard, about what a disaster it'd be if he caught me with Madge. I did it to make Madge feel better. But it didn't make her feel better, and I don't think Pa believed it for a minute. Then there was all the byplay. Why did Madge burst out with, 'Sometimes I think it's not worth—' and what did she mean? What was eatin' the old man? So help me, Dr. Fell, there's not a word or an inflection I've left out. You don't want me to go on about Sunday night, do you?"

"No," agreed Dr. Fell. "The picture of Sunday night,
I
fear, is as complete as it is revealing. What of last night?"