The Balcony Read online

  The Balcony

  by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  Random House • New York

  1940

  ALSO BY DOROTHY CAMERON DISNEY

  Death in the Back Seat (1936)

  Strawstack (1939)

  The Golden Swan Murder (1939)

  The Balcony (1940)

  Thirty Days Hath September (1942)

  Crimson Friday (1943)

  The Seventeenth Letter (1945)

  Explosion (1948)

  The Hangman's Tree (1949)

  THE BALCONY

  By Dorothy Cameron Disney

  A gloomy and cavernous old family mansion, peopled with a group of characters who are all obviously concealing something, has always been a favorite setting for a really first-rate murder story. When a past mistress of her art like Dorothy Cameron Disney takes a hand at the game, the result is bound to be a cause for rejoicing for those who like to read their books sitting on the very edge of their chairs. The Balcony is the best mystery story that has come along in many a day!

  The story of The Balcony opens with the summoning of the Hieronomo clan for one last reunion at the ancestral seat in Maryland before a hotel corporation takes over the property. Those who know old Aunt Amanda realize that she has not assembled the family for nothing. A deep mystery has surrounded the place ever since the founder of the dynasty, a Civil War hero, used it to harbor runaway slaves. His violent death exactly twenty-five years before The Balcony begins, reveals the fact that his fortune has vanished. Where did it go? And more important, just how did he amass it? Before the nerve-racking climax of the book, these questions are answered in an unexpected manner. Miss Disney has added a convincing love story and a small town feud to round out her story.

  THE BALCONY

  by DOROTHY CAMERON DISNEY

  RANDOM HOUSE • NEW YORK

  Published simultaneously in Canada by the Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd.

  Copyright, 1940, by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  I

  MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, the John S. Hieronomo whom students of the Civil War may remember as a leader in the abolitionist movement in the South, died before I was born. Almost every family lists one individual with a rare quality of magnetism and personal excitement whose words and acts and even mannerisms pass into legend after he is gone. My great-grandfather, from the moment of his foundling birth to his dramatic death in a runaway carriage, was such an individual. At sixteen years old he was a full-fledged hero, deep in the counsels of that group of brave and almost forgotten men who risked their lives to smuggle slaves from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. Three times John S. Hieronomo narrowly escaped lynching at the hands of infuriated plantation owners whose human property he had spirited away.

  As does not always happen, his zest and appetite for living long outlasted his romantic youth, indeed were with him until the end. He learned a creditable waltz when he was more than fifty, conquered Greek and Latin at fifty-five and must have been nearly sixty when he decided to open and operate a banking house. At seventy-two, more than six feet tall, straight as an arrow and crowned with red, unfaded hair, he won the love of a woman a third his age and would have married her except for a pair of spirited and skittish horses terrified by an incoming train. John S. Hieronomo undoubtedly was the great man of my family.

  Tales of my great-grandfather’s daring and intrepid deeds, of his unconventional behavior (bankers in the 1900’s seldom owned private race tracks or planned undignified second marriages), tales of the fortune he made and lost, of the gold he carried always in his purse, scorning currency and any metal so base as silver, were my childhood’s common fare. Sometimes—so vivid were my father’s stories—I almost felt I knew John S. Hieronomo, just as, when I was ten, I felt I knew each vast room of the splendid house built in far-off Maryland to be an enduring monument to the glory of the founder of the family. A proud, courageous and arrogant man in the shadow of whose personality my own struggling, unsuccessful father lived all his days—thus I pictured John S. Hieronomo.

  But, after all, at twenty-four one lives in the present. It did not occur to me that the dead hand of my greatgrandfather would affect my own life and the lives of many others. It did not occur to me that his will, probated in 1913 and typical of his generation and feudalists type of mind, would plunge us all into tragedy. I knew so well the provisions of that amazingly shortsighted will, the particular clause which had caused such family dissension and dismay—the clause providing that “Hieronomo House, my Mount Hope residence, be held for a period of twenty-five years as a common dwelling place for the members of my blood.”

  In 1913, I dare say it was easier to contemplate the founding of a dynasty and to ignore awkward realities. What my great-grandfather calmly overlooked was that his once substantial fortune, accumulated during the expansive decades that followed the Civil War, had dwindled to the point where it would not support a dynasty, that his residuary estate was barely large enough to cover the taxes and upkeep on a residence of thirty rooms. In short, he left Hieronomo House and virtually nothing else. His hapless heirs—his three living children and two orphaned grandchildren—could not sell the house, nor, practically speaking, could they afford to live in it. My great-aunts and my Great-uncle Richard made occasional visits to the little village of Mount Hope, opened Hieronomo House and took out the yellowed linen and soft old silver and dined from the Haviland china—entailed, like the house itself—and I dare say warmed themselves with the glories of the past; but this, my father had refused to do.

  “I left Maryland forever,” he would say, “when grandfather was buried. Wisconsin is my home. But some day, Anne, I hope that you can see Hieronomo House.”

  Somehow, I never thought I would. I think perhaps I instinctively preferred that Mount Hope, Hieronomo House, the aunts, Uncle Richard, and the first cousin with whom my father had shared his boyhood games, remain in my mind magical and unchanged, and as they had been in Father’s memories. It was my Great-aunt Amanda’s letter, announcing that John S. Hieronomo’s will at last had run its course, that made me change my mind.

  The story of everything that happened in Mount Hope really began when I received her letter. Looking back, and trying to fix on the first step in the hideous events that were so profoundly to affect my future, indeed to change my life entirely, I fix inevitably upon the letter. For it was my Great-aunt Amanda who made me a participant in the dark drama that was to turn Hieronomo House into a place of horror. At her invitation, I took leave from an unexciting job in Wisconsin to attend that ill-starred reunion of my father’s family, which was planned—or so I thought then—to mark the closing of an era in a fitting, a formal and a seemly way.

  Directly because of Aunt Amanda’s invitation and my acceptance of it, I became involved in two brutal murders, involved to the point where quite deliberately I placed myself in greater peril than I ever expect to face again. So much is incontrovertible. Today it sometimes seems to me that, put to the test again, I would lack the courage to make the desperate choice that a short six months ago I made in Mount Hope. I know that today I am a vastly different person. I can be astounded now that I could meet Dan Ayres, a stranger to me and more than a stranger to the Hieronomos, and in the instant of meeting give him my liking and my trust. Even in the beginning, I knew that our meeting was important. Possibly, such experiences come only to the young. It may be that I lost the particular unthinking trust which belongs to youth in the same murky, airless little cave, guarded by three sentinel pines, where most certainly I lost forever the illusions that belong to youth.

  I destroyed Aunt Amanda’s letter long ago, but I recall with the utmost clarity the day I found it lying in the hall of my modest boarding house. I can see exa
ctly the slanting Spencerian hand that looked like copperplate upon paper of heavy gray, the old-fashioned, rolling phrases.

  My Great-aunt Amanda wrote:

  Dear Anne:

  Hieronomo House is to become a hotel. My dearly beloved father met his death on Thanksgiving Day, twenty-five years ago, and accordingly we are at liberty to settle his estate. Father’s cherished dream that Hieronomo House remain forever in the family, that one of his heirs would buy out the share of the others, has sadly failed of realization.

  This is your last chance to see the place that meant so much to all of us before it passes into alien hands. I am calling a meeting of the surviving Hieronomos so that we may discuss the sale, sit for the last time at my father’s board, and for the last time pay reverence to that name whose luster time cannot fade or tarnish.

  Affect, your great-aunt,

  Amanda Hieronomo Silver

  Postscriptum: Please come, dear. I beg of you. We need your presence and your youth at what will be, in all likelihood, a final gathering of the Hieronomos.

  It was a touching letter. Nothing in it hinted at the violence to come, or suggested the anxieties that must have been in my great-aunt’s mind and heart when she sent out her summons. I took each word at face value, and conjured up a pasteboard picture of an aging, filial daughter, chained to the past and to the wishes of a father twenty-five years in his grave.

  Nevertheless, I think I might have sent polite regrets, remained comfortably in Wisconsin and accepted in absentia Dad’s share of the proceeds of the sale of Hieronomo House, except for the postscript. The pathos of those last few lines, the plea that I join in what was bound to be a melancholy gathering, was too much for me. Or so I argue now. Perhaps I have rationalized too much. My mother died when I Was only three, and since Dad’s death I had been so peculiarly alone that I think some atavistic desire to mingle with my father’s kin, with people of my own blood, must have played its part in my decision. That, and the knowledge that if I were to visit Hieronomo House, it was now or never.

  There was nothing actually to hold me back. At twenty-four, I was accountable to no one except myself. And what a lonely feeling that sometimes was! Within the limits enforced on anyone who holds a job, I could do exactly as I chose. The date suggested by Aunt Amanda made it easy for me to arrange the details of the journey. After my graduation from the University of Wisconsin, I was lucky enough to obtain a job in the college offices. The school vacation for Thanksgiving coincided neatly with the date set for the reunion. I asked Professor Thomas for a few extra days, and my request was promptly granted. I called several friends and notified them of my plans, and listened while they envied me my independence and congratulated me upon my “expectations.” Money, though this may seem surprising, entered very little into my calculations. I was too realistic to suppose that a once-splendid house, neglected so long and located in a dying Maryland village, would bring any appreciable amount in a forced sale. Great-aunt Amanda had mentioned no amount; her chief concern seemed to be with the reunion, with the sentimental gathering of the clan. I know mine was. I thought of my father’s family very often in the week that elapsed before my departure.

  My final preparations were extremely simple. I packed a bag, and locked my room and left the key in my landlady’s keeping and told her that two weeks would see me back in Madison. I didn’t know then that I would never return to that comfortable, book-lined room which for three years had been home to me.

  On the 22nd of November, in a state of high excitement, I started toward Mount Hope. It was my first long trip. My hard-working father had found more immediate uses for his money than travel, and similarly the Eastern Hieronomos, bred in luxury, had been compelled to resign themselves to a genteel keeping up of appearances. In consequence, I had met none of the Eastern members of the family. My opinions of my father’s kin, and I had opinions, were preconceived and juvenile. My ideas were based upon what Dad had told me, qualified haphazardly by a trickle of correspondence which had continued through the years. The correspondence filled with the details of everyday existence was not particularly illuminating, and my dear Dad was a confirmed believer in putting the best foot of his family forward. As I was soon to learn, there were certain things I should have known that he had never mentioned or even hinted at. He spoke of the grace and gaiety of his people, but said not a word about less lovely qualities. Strange as it was to seem to Dan Ayres, I was in total ignorance of that ugly fence that stretched like a line of bitterness and hate between the Hieronomos and their nearest neighbors. These were real and important gaps in my knowledge of the family.

  In addition, curious contradictions existed in my mind. For instance, although I knew that Hoy Hieronomo, my father’s first cousin, had a son older than myself, I somehow quite illogically pictured Hoy Hieronomo as young and vital and ambitious, and not as a tired, defeated man who had become not a distinguished judge, but a perfumery salesman with a stomach ulcer. I knew that my Great-uncle Richard was nearly sixty, that for more than twenty years, accompanied by a semi-invalid wife, he had barnstormed through the South, an aging, unsuccessful—and presumably quite bad—actor, who hoped perennially for a chance on Broadway. In defiance of these facts, I pictured Uncle Richard as slim and dark and in his middle thirties, a handsome man with coal-black hair and glowing, lambent eyes who paced the Mount Hope beach and quoted Shakespeare to the stars.

  The aunts who brought up my father—Great-aunt Amanda and Great-aunt Patience—were more difficult to pigeonhole in such a fashion. Great-aunt Patience had taught Greek and Latin in a Baltimore finishing school since her father’s death, and school teaching is hardly a profession to romanticize. Also, Great-aunt Patience liked to send photographs at Christmas, and these annual offerings disclosed that her plaintive admission that she was growing “a trifle stout” was rank understatement.

  Amanda was the older of the sisters. I knew that Aunt Amanda’s life, though it struck me as romantic, had not been easy. I knew something of her valiant efforts to keep alive her husband, a neurotic, brilliant lawyer who finally drank himself into pneumonia. It was after Silver’s death that she moved into Hieronomo House, and began to act as a hostess to any of the family who cared to visit. She could hardly afford to heat the mansion, but characteristically, she managed by some legerdemain to keep two servants. She had not been brought up to cook and sweep. She never learned. She might not have enough to eat, but someone else set out the plate.

  Amanda had been Dad’s favorite aunt. He had spoken of her always as spirited and gay, as a daring and accomplished horsewoman. In the light of that melancholy letter, Dad’s description didn’t seem to fit. I decided that years of sleeping between fine sheets and dealing firmly with the grocer, the constant struggle of making much from little, must have broken Great-aunt Amanda. I’m afraid I swung to an opposite extreme and just stopped short of picturing her as a frail and beautiful old lady cozily ensconced in a wheel chair.

  The main point is, of course, that I expected to find at Hieronomo House the people whom my father, in his youth, had known and loved. I forgot the changes that might be wrought by the passage of twenty-five years. I forgot that not only could physical appearances change, but that character, too, could change. I forgot that people of one’s own blood could be strangers, inscrutable and mysterious to the end.

  II

  I ARRIVED IN MOUNT HOPE on November 24th, late at night, and in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. Snow had followed us from Washington, and the little one-horse train which stopped every few miles as impartially as a street car, was jammed with people who stamped their feet and clapped their hands and marveled to each other that such snow should fall in Maryland in November.

  It was nearly one A.M. when, long overdue, we reached Mount Hope. Stiff with weariness, chilled more by anticipatory nerves than by actual cold, I stepped from the train. I stepped into a white, an empty and a moving world. There was no one waiting on the platform. I peered uncertainly toward
a shed-like, unlighted station, heard behind me the mournful whistle of the train, the snort of the laboring locomotive. Sparks shot from iron wheels and threw a fiery light upon the snow.

  Beyond the area of light was only whispering darkness. Suddenly from the darkness came a long, unearthly scream. I jumped and whirled around. For an instant, absurdly, I was terrified. Then, as my eyes became adjusted, I relaxed.

  I saw the plunging, frightened horses before I saw my Great-aunt Amanda. An old-fashioned carriage was pulled up beside the station. An ancient Negro was struggling with tangled reins, sawing back and forth across the dashboard, his panic equaling the panic of the beasts. A tall, slim, booted figure—which I took to be a man—had leaped from the carriage to work at the tangled reins. There was no panic in the voice which cajoled the horses and sought to calm the demoralized Negro.

  “There, there, Princess. Quiet, Betsy! Easy does it, Amos. Betsy has a tender mouth.”

  All this occurred very swiftly. Actually the train had not yet pulled out when the situation was solved. The horses calmed, the Negro calmed, the reins were straightened. The booted figure turned and ran toward the platform. A low, hoarse voice, eerily like the voice of my own dead Dad, called:

  “Anne! Anne! Are you off, my dear?”

  My Great-aunt Amanda swept me into her embrace. I thought I felt tears against my cheek, and certainly there were tears in Aunt Amanda’s voice as she held me off and said: