Murder and Blueberry Pie Read online

  Apparently there was an answer, although Lois could hear none, because, after a second, he said, “Fine. Mrs. Williams will be glad to. Somebody getting Tony?”

  He had turned back toward the hall as he said this. “Coming,” a man’s voice said, and two men came in from the back of the hall, out of the darkness there. One of them, as he came into sight, was a plump man in a gray summer suit—a youngish man with receding hair. The other wore stained khaki slacks and a skivvy shirt and was, Lois thought, just getting beyond being a boy. He was swarthy, brown-eyed, dark-haired. Of course— Tony Bourgelotti, who, at one time or another, had cut almost everybody’s grass. Including, Lois thought, mine.

  Graham faced her and smiled again, and nodded and, needlessly, said, “All set, Mrs. Williams.” She went out into the hall. Tony said, “’Noon, Mrs. Williams,” in a soft voice. Graham said, “This is Mr. Keating, Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Harbrook’s nephew. Can’t witness because his aunt’s mentioned. That is—could, but somebody might think it left a shadow.”

  “Afternoon,” Keating said. “Good of you, Mrs. Williams.”

  He spoke, she thought, like New York—like New York City. He turned an affable smile on her. Unexpectedly, he held a hand out. She took it, briefly. It was surprisingly soft, for a man’s hand. The hands of men she knew were hard—narrow hands or broad hands, but hard with muscle. Keating’s hand felt uncomfortable in hers, and she released it.

  “Right in here,” Graham said, and the men stood away from the door across the hall, and she went through it. The room was larger than the library in which she had waited, but as low, as cool—and even duskier. At first, there seemed to be no one in the room.

  Then Mrs. Harbrook, who had, it was evident, been bending over something in a corner at the far side of the room, stood up and turned and said, “We’re all ready, Mr. Graham,” and then, turning back, leaning down, “Aren’t we, dear?”

  There was someone in the chair she leaned over in the dark corner. (Lois realized that curtains were drawn across the small window at the far side of the room.) Someone—a small, oddly crumpled figure which seemed to be swaddled. In a shawl? A blanket?

  “You get the girl?”

  The voice was thin, high-pitched. It was, however, unexpectedly clear, unexpectedly carrying.

  “Let me look at her.”

  Graham, standing near Lois, looked down at her. He shrugged his shoulders, just perceptibly, sharing an understanding—an understanding of youth, of today, in the presence of age, of yesterday. He touched her arm, the touch gently impelling. Lois Williams went across the room, white shoes of today against an ancient carpet, and Mrs. Harbrook turned to her and nodded and Lois looked down at an old woman in the low chair. It was a shawl wrapped around her.

  She had thin white hair and a small face which hardly seemed more than a whitish blur in the dim light. She looked up at Lois, the shawl half shielding her face, drawn up to either cheek, held below the chin with a safety pin.

  “Pretty,” the old lady said. “Young and pretty. You’re going to help an old lady, dear? Help get things—” She hesitated. She looked toward Mrs. Harbrook. She said, in the carrying voice, “What’s that he says?”

  “Your grandson,” Mrs. Harbrook said, not as a question. “Let me think, dear. Squared something?”

  “Squared away,” the old woman said. “Away. You live in town, girl?”

  “Mrs. Williams,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Yes, Mrs. Montfort,” Lois said.

  “Came about this tour,” Mrs. Montfort said. “Be good for them. Give them a feeling—where’s that young man?”

  Graham came across the room. He said, “Here I am, Mrs. Montfort. You ready?”

  “And waiting,” the old woman said.

  He said, “Good,” and nodded to Mrs. Harbrook, and the tall woman reached beyond the chair and brought out—lifting with one hand, easily—a small table with papers on it. She put the table in front of the low chair. Graham handed her a pen and she put it in thin fingers which came out from under the shawl to receive it.

  “Right here, Mrs. Montfort,” Graham said, and leaned down over the table, toward the woman in the chair, and pointed. Lois had moved back, out of the way. She could no longer see the small crumpled face but now, standing behind Graham but a little to one side, she could see the thin fingers guide the pen on the line Graham pointed to. The movement of the pen was completed. Graham reached down and blotted and said, with cheer, reassurance, in his firm voice, “And there you are.”

  He picked up the will, which was backed with stiff blue paper, and riffled through it—there seemed to be several pages—and looked at the last and nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Now Mrs. Williams. Tony.”

  He was businesslike. He walked across the room, carrying the will, and put it down on a table in front of a window. He said, “Give us a little light. All right?”

  “Not too much,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Her eyes.”

  He pulled one curtain aside, so that a streak of light came through, falling on the papers. He folded the upper sheets back, so that only the last was in sight.

  “Now,” he said. “Mrs. Williams. Tony. You have witnessed the signing of a last will and testament by Abigail Montfort. You now so attest by signing as witnesses, in her presence and in the presence of each other. Mrs. Williams.”

  He pulled a chair out for her and took a fountain pen out of his pocket and gave it to her and pointed to a line. She put her name down. Graham said, “Tony,” and she got up and Tony Bourgelotti brushed the seat of his slacks and sat down, on the edge of his straight chair, and signed his name under Lois’s. Graham looked at both signatures and said, “Fine. Everything in order,” and picked the will up. He waved it briefly. He folded it in the stiff blue-paper backing and put it in his pocket.

  “So,” he said, re-completing the completed.

  Lois, however, was left with a marked feeling that things were not completed. Perhaps— She turned back toward the little woman in the deep chair. Mrs. Harbrook was again bending over her. Lois took a step toward them.

  “I wonder,” she said, and spoke softly—spoke into yesterday’s dim hush. “I wonder, Mrs. Montfort, if—”

  Mrs. Harbrook stood up and turned toward her and put a finger to unsmiling lips. Lois stopped speaking and Mrs. Harbrook, moving cautiously, came toward her. She stood close to her and whispered.

  “Dropped off,” she said. “She does, you know. Bright as a button one moment and—”

  She pushed Lois toward the door to the hall, and Lois went, -stepping softly. Tony and Graham went after them. Keating stood in the hall and waited for them. When they joined him he raised eyebrows above close-set eyes. Mrs. Harbrook nodded and he said, “That’s good, Aunt Ella,” in a low voice, and, again, with the accents of New York.

  Mrs. Harbrook pulled shut the door to the living room. She still spoke softly—softly, Lois supposed, as the flatness of her voice allowed.

  “She dozes,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “She’s very old, you know. But I’m sure the tour will be all right, Mrs. Williams. Only yesterday, she was speaking about it and saying there were things we had to do—have the hedge trimmed, you know. Things like that. Put our best foot forward—that’s what she said. So, you see.”

  “The committee will be pleased,” Lois said, in a tone of duty.

  “Just leave it to me,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Next Saturday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lois said. “This coming Saturday.”

  “I’m sure it will be all right,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “When she wakes up I’ll tell her I told you. Get her to write a little note to the committee. It was so good of you to come, Mrs. Williams.”

  “Whew,” Howard Graham said, standing beside her on the long porch. “In a word, whew!”

  He smiled down at her, welcoming them both back into summer warmth, into today.

  “It,” he said, “sort of closes in on you, doesn’t it? Sweet old thing, from all I hear and what little I’ve seen. All the sam
e—”

  He paused. She nodded. She breathed deeply of the warm air—the freshness of the warm air.

  “As for me,” Graham said, “I could do with a drink. Can’t I buy you a drink, Mrs. Williams?”

  “I don’t—” she began and stopped and thought, Why not? And then, a little to her surprise, she heard herself laughing softly, deep in her throat. “So could I,” she said. “I’d like very much to have you buy me a drink, Mr. Graham.”

  They had two cars. They met at the Inn. There were a dozen people in the old taproom of the Inn—the taproom low-ceilinged as the Montfort house and, with chilled air flowing from vents, as cool. And—as utterly different as one room could be from another.

  Two of “the flock” were in the taproom with frozen daiquiris in front of them. (“The flock” was, to a considerable degree, daiquiri-minded.) They smiled at her when she came in with Howard Graham and, with her eye caught, nodded in vigorous approval. Her expression disclaimed, but her eyes smiled.

  Was it possible, she wondered fleetingly, that the shadows had finally concentrated in the old Montfort house; that, coming out of it, she had made a first, tentative, but perhaps committing step toward a new brightness?

  “A martini,” she told Howard Graham, when he raised eyebrows to ask.

  “A girl after my own heart,” Graham said, and, to the waiter, “Two dry martinis.” Again his look enquired. “Very dry,” he said.

  II

  He said she lived—didn’t she?—in Long Meadow Manor? “And,” he said, “your husband’s one of the—” With that he stopped, as if he had stumbled. Then he said, “Damn. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Lois said. But her voice was dull. It had been absurd to think she had stepped out of dimness. “My husband was that Captain Williams.”

  There had been enough about it in the Glenville Advertiser. (The “local angle” of catastrophe.) He looked at her and, again, she said, “It’s all right, Mr. Graham,” and then, with what might do for a smile, “Really it is.”

  “I’m an idiot,” he said, and spoke low and shook his head. “A hopeless idiot.”

  There was no use saying, over again, that it was all right. There was no use in saying anything. She sipped her drink and thought, There’s not much use in anything. Now, she thought, he won’t know what to say next, and she drank more quickly than she would normally have drunk, because that was a way to get it over with.

  “The tour,” he said. “It’s shaping up all right?”

  She roused herself. She said, “Oh yes. Quite well,” and, for his sake as much as anything, “I do hope Mrs. Montfort will agree.”

  He snatched at that.

  “I’m sure she will,” he said. “She seems a sweet old thing and she’s—well, she’s a hundred per cent Glenville. She and her father before her and his father before him, from all I hear. Back to the day the first Montfort bought the house from the last Brown. A gloomy place, isn’t it?”

  “The way they built them then,” she said. “It is—gloomy. So dark and—everything.” She sought something else to say; sought to keep things going until the drink was finished and she could go herself. “But,” she said, “probably you’ve been there often. As her lawyer.”

  “Not I,” he said. “Twice before. Once to talk about her will, once to show it to her and leave it for her to read. And then today. It’s because old Snoddy died, you know.”

  “Snoddy,” she said. “Oh—Mr. Snodgrass. He was her lawyer before?”

  “Since the memory of man,” he said. “Why she turned to the likes of me.” He smiled again, without assurance. “Not that she had much choice,” he said. “If she wanted a local. Me or Jimmy Parsons. Probably tossed a coin. All the same, she’s bright as a button. As Mrs. Harbrook says. Knows her own mind. Probably you gathered that.”

  “I didn’t have much chance to gather anything,” Lois said, and heard the dullness in her own voice and saw, in his face, recognition of, depression because of, his failure. Obscurely, she felt that she was letting him down—that, by coming there for a drink, she had promised him something and now was withholding it.

  “She certainly seemed alert,” Lois said, and forced the dullness out of her voice. “At first, anyway. She’s a very old lady, isn’t she? Old and—frail?”

  “Eighty-four,” he said. “Eighty-four or eighty-five. Frail—yes. The other two times, though, she seemed—well, livelier than she did today. I suppose it was—what would you think? Reaction to getting done something she had been all steamed up about? And, with it done, just—well, dropping off to sleep?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “There’s no question about her mind,” Graham said. “I’m sure of that. Anybody would be who had a chance to talk to her. You could tell that, couldn’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” Lois said. “That was—you mean there’s some question about it? Or—might be?”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. After a time he nodded his head.

  “Cases like this,” he said, “it’s something one has to—keep in mind. At her age, with the money she’s got.” He smiled more naturally then and said, “Whew! The money she’s got!”

  “It’ll be nice for her grandson,” Lois said.

  “What?” Graham said and then, “Oh—she did mention him, didn’t she? But I’m afraid—”

  He stopped suddenly, the sentence unfinished. It was, Lois thought, as if again he had stumbled. The implication, however, remained hanging, undefined but nevertheless obvious.

  “You must,” he said, “be running into some strange old-timers. Lining up the houses. Old Pruitt, I suppose?”

  His tone invited her to be amused—invited a new start for this whole episode. Partly because he was so transparent in this sudden changing of the subject, partly because she had met Old Pruitt—third oldest house, but not by Old Pruitt’s reckoning—Lois smiled at Howard Graham. She said she had indeed. A character Old Pruitt was, and one with strong views on the. antiquity of houses. Old Pruitt did not count additions; Old Pruitt was of the opinion that, when you came down to it, a lot of the houses people were all the time talking about were nothing but additions. “Find two bricks still stuck together and call it a house”—that was Old Pruitt. As for the Pruitt house—now there—

  “Don’t I know,” Graham said. “Did he tell you about—”

  He did not stop, this time, of his own accord. He stopped because one of the dining room waiters came into the taproom, looked around and, finding what he wanted, said, “Telephone call, Mr. Graham.”

  Graham said, “Damn,” and then, “Excuse me a minute, Mrs. Williams,” and went out after the waiter. Lois waited, there being nothing else to do. It hadn’t worked—not that there was any “work” promised. But she would have to sit, sipping what little remained of a martini no longer cold, until this pleasant—if bungling—man had the chance to return and offer her another drink, and she the chance to say she was afraid not, and that she had to be getting on. (Getting on to what, for the love of God?)

  The two members of “the flock” had finished daiquiris and gone their way. There were only a few people remaining in the taproom. The episode dwindled.

  Then, out of nowhere, a feeling of repetition came into her mind—the feeling, intangible and at the same time disturbing, that something which had just happened was happening again. She looked around her for a source of this, and listened for a source, and, with that, with her mind focused, she knew that she had merely heard a familiar voice.

  Now, consciously, she heard it again—a voice, a woman’s voice, familiar but—illusively familiar. A voice she had heard—recently? weeks ago or even years ago?—and had not forgotten, yet could not place.

  “I’m sure that will do very well,” the familiar—unfamiliar— voice said. “Probably only for a few days.”

  The voice came from the lobby outside the taproom. The woman was accepting, presumably registering for, one of the Inn’s guest rooms. The voice was a carrying v
oice—rather high-pitched; Lois shook her memory for the voice. Not that it mattered—how could it matter? It was only that to know yet not to know—to be so close to remembering and yet to not remember—was a haunting exasperation in the mind.

  “If someone will take my bag up,” the woman said. “I do need a cool drink and—I suppose the room itself isn’t air-conditioned?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Banks,” the room clerk said.

  Banks? There was no Banks in Lois’s memory. Yet the voice —she was certain about the voice. Only—was she now certain about the voice? If she knew no Mrs. Banks—of course, it could be someone she had known but not as Mrs. Banks. Or—and this now seemed more probable—was it merely a voice which had the carrying quality of a voice she had heard before? Was it only that special quality which had made her think—

  A small, slender woman, apparently in her thirties—a woman with short and rather unconvincing brown hair—came into the taproom and looked around and chose a table against the wall. The bar waiter came to the table and the woman said, “Could I have a gin and tonic, please?” and spoke in a low tone. But still the voice carried. And—still it was hauntingly familiar.

  And I am quite sure, Lois Williams thought, that I never saw this woman in my life before.

  Then Howard Graham came back into the room. He came grave-faced and shook his head a little as he approached—shook it as if in unhappy surprise. He sat down.

  “She’s dead,” he said. “Like that—” he snapped his fingers— “like that she’s dead. While we were sitting here talking about her.”

  “Mrs. Montfort?” Lois said. “You mean—just now? While we—

  “Quarter of an hour after we left,” he said. “Dozed off, you know. And—that was it. Mrs. Harbrook took her in a cup of tea and—well, that was it.”

  “Oh,” Lois said and then, more slowly, “I’m so sorry.” And found that she was sorry that an ancient woman, a woman met once only, had died peacefully in her sleep. Sorry and, because death came so close, was so immediate, obscurely a little frightened.