Nothing Can Rescue Me (2 page)

“Do all these people know about the unpleasantness, whatever it is?”

“Oh, yes. Florence talked of nothing else. Now she's talking about nothing else but you.”

“You say it may be some silly game. Miss Wing more or less agrees?”

Sylvanus, rather uncomfortably, said she did.

“How do the others react?”

“Mason declares it's a stupid joke, meant to tease Florence; that's more or less what I think and Miss Wing thinks, but he's amused and we're not; his sensibilities aren't too fine, you know. Susie Burt has no opinion—her mind's a blank on the subject. Percy won't express himself at all—but then he's out of it—no axe to grind. I mean—” Hutter coughed. “He's too intelligent to do such a thing, if you know what I mean; just as Susie isn't intelligent enough.”

“I don't in the least know what you mean; you won't tell me.”

“He's too intelligent. Wouldn't bother. Sally says it's the spirits.”

“Says the spirits are playing a trick on Florence?”

“She's really not herself since her divorce from Bill.”

“And you occasionally wonder whether she or Florence isn't playing the trick in some trance?”

“Only because any other theory seems so incredible. Florence is badly upset, Gamadge.” He looked suddenly piteous.

“I'll come if she needs me.”

“Needs you? She begs you to come. She implores you to come.”

Gamadge's mind travelled back through the years; to school and college vacations when his mother and father had been far away, and he had been invited to Underhill. He remembered the glorious food, the parties, the winter sports, the camping and fishing, the pretty girls. He remembered Miss Florence Hutter presiding over the household and spoiling Syl's friends; lively, affectionate, kind, but subject to sudden tempers and jealousies, easily bored with her protégés, easily made suspicious of their loyalty. Domineering—too domineering to marry while she was young. She had always seemed to Gamadge extraordinarily vulnerable in spite of her shrewdness.

“Well, I shan't be able to stay long enough to do much good,” he said. “As I told you, I must go back on Sunday.”

Hutter, expelling a long breath, seemed also to expel care. He instantly got to his feet, gently shook one leg and then the other, and spoke with all his normal serenity: “Thank goodness. Mason and I are driving up to-night in his two-seater, but the big car's in town being overhauled, and I'll have Smith pick you up to-morrow morning. Will nine be too early? It will get you up to Underhill in time for a talk with Florence before lunch.”

“I'll be ready.”

“And I'll telephone Florence now. Take a load off her mind.” Sylvanus hesitated, and assumed the look that Hutters assumed when they were about to discuss money. “By the way, Florence expects you to accept a fee.”

“Very nice of her.”

“People sting her awfully, but she knows you won't. We don't know the proper fee for consultation, but Florence thought she might suggest what she pays her specialist for a visit—a hundred.”

“Well, I don't know,” said Gamadge, enjoying himself. “Let's say no remuneration unless I exorcise the spirits from Underhill; and if I do, she can pay me what she pays Macloud—if he's still her lawyer—for exorcising some of the decimals out of her supertax.”

“Oh, good God, my dear fellow!” Hutter looked frightened.

“That or nothing,” smiled Gamadge.

“Talk it over with Florence; and Smith shall drive you home on Sunday.”

Sylvanus shook hands warmly, and trotted off. Gamadge mounted to a vast brown room, on an upper floor, and sought a lean man who was reading in a corner. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Nobody here—we can talk.”

“No, we can't. I'm busy.”

“I want to know how Nahum Hutter left his money, and how much he left.”

Mr. Robert Macloud raised his saturnine visage from the
Law Journal
, but maintained a grip on it. He said: “Nahum left about ten millions. Florence and Sylvanus have the use of the income, share and share alike, until one of them dies. The survivor—presumably Syl—then gets the whole capital, and can spend it.”

“You don't say.” Gamadge let himself down into the depths of a leather chair.

“Nahum fixed it that way for his two children, Florence and Washington; Washington and Mrs. Washington died, and Nahum transferred the arrangement to Florence and Syl—Washington's only child.”

“What income do Florence and Syl struggle along on?”

“About a hundred thousand apiece, taxes paid; that's what they have now.”

“No provision for heirs, if any?”

“None. Old Ben Hutter didn't make his fortune from railroads until Nahum was grown. Nahum was born and brought up in something like poverty on the original Hutter farm. He seems to have made up his mind that Florence and Syl should be comfortable as long as they lived; I suppose he thought that the survivor would have so much money he or she simply couldn't lose it.” He added after reflection: “And I suppose he thought Florence wouldn't marry—she was forty when he died, and had turned all fortune hunters down. Very funny; there must be something about Mason that I missed.”

“I faintly remember Nahum as quite a terror.”

“A pet, compared to old Ben. Nahum was rather proud of his children; he liked their social success; but Ben Hutter cast his other son, Joel, into outer darkness because he wanted to stay home and fish in the stream. They had a frightful row; Ben didn't leave him a cent.”

“Did he mind?”

“Don't know; but he died.”

“Would it be indiscreet of me to ask if Florence and Syl have made wills?”

“You mean you want to know what's in 'em. No secret about Syl's; he hasn't much to leave. So far he's lived well up to his income, you know how—travel, financing excavations, putting out his books. What he has goes to museums.”

“Queer situation, in a way; both of 'em as rich as Solomon, and neither can make an impressive will until the other dies.”

“You're quite wrong; Florence can make a very good will indeed. She never financed digs; in the good old days she took her savings and went on the market. Just like her father, has the Midas touch. She made half a million.”

“Be a good scout and tell me how she's leaving it.”

“What are you, that you should be told?”

“It wouldn't be ethical of me to say.”

“You have no monopoly on ethics. And even if I did tell you, the information might cease to be of value any day. Florence, I am sorry to say it, has become a will-shaker.”

“Has she, though?”

“You been seeing them of late years?”

“Not for fifteen, except that glimpse I had of her at her wedding.”

“That wedding was her Rubicon.”

“She seemed pretty much then as she had always been, except that her poor face had been lifted.”

“She's turned despot, and is surrounded by slaves. Even Syl, who's financially independent of her, must do as he's told, or he'd have to go—the house wouldn't hold him.”

“Mason?”

“I'm not quite sure how much influence Mason still has, and I shall have no further opportunities for observation. They've fired me.”

“Syl and Florence have? What on earth for?”

Macloud made a face. “For sending in a bill, I suppose. They have a failing which they share with some other rich persons—they think paupers ought to work for them for love.”

“I'm going up there to-morrow on a job.”

Macloud removed his cigar to glance alertly at his friend. “Job? Books? Papers? Autographs? Didn't know Syl bothered with them.”

“He didn't really say what the job was.”

“Nothing in the criminological line, I presume? Ah, well; get the amount of your honorarium down in writing first, my boy, and take my blessing with you.”

“I'm doing whatever it is on spec.”

“Heaven help you.”

Gamadge, frowning, lighted a cigarette. “Florence was awfully good to me when I was young,” he said. “My father had to travel for his health, and my mother naturally went along; the Hutters took me in for holidays. Florence was awfully kind.”

“She's still kind; sometimes too kind. Then she gets tired of people, or suspicious of them, or something, and it's all off. The set-up there isn't too healthy, I sometimes think.”

“That's what I thought, from what Sylvanus told me tonight.”

“Well, I'm out of the picture now, thank goodness. Go away and leave me in peace, why don't you?”

Gamadge went away, but only to the opposite corner of the room. He got some books out of a glassed case, and settled down to read everything he could find on automatic writing, with special reference to the use of planchette.

But his thoughts would wander to Underhill in the old days; he remembered sitting in the Gothic dining-room at meal-times and wondering, as he listened to the homilies of Nahum Hutter, that Florence and Sylvanus were as decent as they were; for Nahum's homilies were variations upon one theme—that we live, after all, by our pockets, and that the man or woman who has something to give away must never hope to possess entirely disinterested friends.

After crossing the Hudson at Poughkeepsie the big Hutter car travelled north-west. It followed an excellent highway through the town of Bethea, and then bore off to the left and rolled sixteen miles into mountain country. Beyond the village of Erasmus (fourteen houses, a store, a church, and a handsome library) it turned left again, to proceed with due caution along a dirt road harrowed by winter storms. Gamadge looked out at the landscape that he had once known so well; at the hillsides covered with immemorial hemlock, the later growths of beech and maple in the valleys, the rocky fields and brown streams. Strange, wild country; haunted country in the past, when no Indian would camp where the hemlocks made day into night. Haunted country still, legend declared, on the mountains.

Three miles above Erasmus the Hutter house stood on its ridge, with a view to the south-west of Catskill ranges. It was sheltered on the east by a towering slope of hemlock, the hill that had given it its present name; a stream ran below the grounds to the west, and beyond it were cultivated fields and pastures. Long ago Underhill had been the Hutter Farm, but old Ben Hutter had come back to it in triumph after he made his fortune, and rebuilt it of field stone into a fine large house, a typical summer residence of the 'eighties. It was a kind of villa, like the villas that old Hutter was now invited to outside New York; he admired them very much, and saw no reason why one of them should not be set down among the hemlock forests. It was weather-tight, three stories high, and almost square, with a lawn and a carriage house. It had a bathroom, but water did not run in the house. It had no plumbing. Large fires burned on its hearths on all but a few summer evenings, and it was lighted by kerosene. It was not meant to be lived in during cold weather.

At the turn of the century when old Hutter died, his son Nahum allowed his children to modernize the house. They christened it Underhill, and introduced another bathroom, hot and cold running water, and sanitation. The grounds were landscaped, and there was a library.

By the time Nahum died—in 1925—Underhill made its own electricity, had an oil burner in the cellar and lost slices from its bedrooms; the slices became individual baths. Florence and Sylvanus came up at all seasons of the year, and steadily refused to do anything about the three miles of bad road from Erasmus; they were only too glad to be cut off from the tourist traffic.

By February 1942, when Gamadge stepped out of the car and looked at Underhill, it had encountered decorative art. The field stone had been filled in with stucco, and washed a delicate pink; a tracery of ironwork surrounded its roof and climbed up its walls; its pointed windows were now arches, and its porch had been shaved away. Gamadge stood upon shallow front steps and gazed at it. He feared for the once stately interior, but he ought to have trusted Florence and Syl and their decorator; when he had greeted old Thomas affectionately and entered the hall he was delighted. Underhill's dignity had been preserved, but its grimness was gone.

“Well, Thomas,” he said, “I'm glad to be walking on the old black-and-white marble again, and I must say it looks better than it ever did before.”

“Yes, sir. All the white does brighten up the house. But it's a dark house, sir.”

“So it is. These high, narrow windows.”

“Mrs. Mason would like to see you upstairs, sir. It's very nice to have you with us again.”

“Very nice to be here.”

Sylvanus popped from the library on the left. “Gamadge—this is splendid. Florence wants to see you, but will you have something to warm you up first? You must have had a cold journey.”

“Warm as toast. Not a thing, thank you, Syl.”

“I've put you in your old room, the one next to mine. Hope you don't mind sharing my bath?”

“Of course not.”

“I'll see you when you come down.”

Gamadge was glad that a stalwart Scandinavian maid possessed herself of his bag. He followed the ancient Thomas up to the second floor and along its wide corridor to the back of the house. Thomas knocked at an end door, opened it, and stood aside.

Underhill might be a dark house, but Florence Mason had contrived a bright room for herself by having partitions removed and securing an outlook to the north, south and west. She sat beside the crackling fire in what seemed a flood of sunlight, although the February sun was pale; sat among her light-blue draperies, on a tufted chaise-longue, and held out her arms to him.

“Henry, darling Henry, I'm so glad you could come!” Gamadge went over and hugged her. “Of course I came.”