Three Bright Pebbles Read online

  The

  Wrong

  Woman

  To

  Love . . .

  Dan Winthrop had met her just once, and known her only for a night. But that was enough to fall desperately in love.

  Now at last he had found her again. Just one thing was wrong. She was his brother’s wife.

  Until the next morning, that is. Then she was his brother’s widow.

  And unless Grace Latham and the redoubtable Dr. Birdsong found the murderer, falling in love was going to cost Dan Winthrop his life . . .

  “Excellent characterizations, action, verve, and wit. Good reading”

  —SATURDAY REVIEW

  LESLIE FORD has become one of the most widely read mystery writers in America. Her first novel was published in 1928 and since then she has written around forty others.

  THREE

  BRIGHT

  PEBBLES

  By LESLIE FORD

  Copyright © 1938, 1966 by Zenith Brown.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  1

  Dan Winthrop shifted his blond six-feet-two a notch lower in the green and white awning-shaded chair, and stared moodily at the large divot he’d been digging with the heel of his shoe in my blue-grass lawn.

  “Oh, I know, Grace. But the thing nobody realizes about Mother is she’s never really happy unless she’s stirring up a hell’s broth for somebody else to stew in.”

  It was hot and sultry out there in my back garden in Georgetown, the air pungent and heavy like ominous ripe fruit ready to burst. I tried to tell myself—being a sensible woman, mostly—that it was the weather, so appallingly unseasonable for early June, that was making this young man whom I knew very well into somebody I didn’t know at all. His jaw was set so that his big good-natured mouth, usually twisted into an infectious and engaging grin, was drawn grimly down at the corners. His blue eyes, ordinarily lighted with an exasperating sort of nothing-sacred twinkle, were as somber and sultry as the leaden clouds gathering behind the summer sky . . . and as disturbing.

  I shifted in my own chair, as if moving would dispel the strange uneasiness that had settled between us.

  “Actually, of course, darling,” I said, “your mother’s one of the most utterly charming people in the world.—Isn’t she?”

  I didn’t add, as my colored cook Lilac had done when Dan Winthrop appeared on our doorstep two days before, “And aren’t you just like her.”—“Law, Mis’ Grace,” Lilac had put it, “ain’t Mist’ Dan sho’ the spit of his Ma?”

  He gave me a gloomy grin.

  “That’s the trouble again, Grace. You see her when she opens Romney for the Garden Pilgrimage, or pours for the Colonial Dames. You don’t have the morning mail turned into a slow motion ticker tape to see whether your stock is up or down or just out in the snow—if you know what I mean.”

  I don’t think I’d ever heard quite such unemotionally distilled bitterness before . . . certainly not from Dan Winthrop. I’d got out of the habit of expecting anything else from his brother Rick, whom I used to run across from time to time, or his little sister Mara, whom I see occasionally. But Rick Winthrop is drunk all the time, or most of the time, and Mara . . . well, I just wouldn’t know about Mara. I didn’t see her often enough even to know whether she was sticking to Alan Keane because she loved him or because it infuriated her mother. And because the children-in-revolt movement always seems rather unreal to me—most parents and children I know getting on more like friends than relatives—I never thought much about it. And if I did, after I’d spent a little time with any of them, I always came comfortably back to the fact that Dan Winthrop, at least, really got on marvelously with his mother. That seemed to make everything all right, some way. Even Mara had a sort of grudging admiration for the way he managed to smooth all the paths.

  Rick, so far as I’d known, never managed to get along with anybody, least of all, apparently, with the girl he’d married just before Christmas—against his mother’s wishes, of course—and deposited, bag and baggage, in the front hall of Romney while he returned to café society. But Dan hadn’t ever gone in for night spots. He’d even had a job that he’d got himself with a shipping company in Paris. He’d been over there three years, and while Mara insisted he only got the job to get on the good side of his mother, he’d certainly kept it, and even gone ahead in it.

  I’d seen him once in Paris, two summers before, working like a horse with everybody else off to Iceland fishing, or climbing about in the Tyrol. I’d expected, some way, when Irene Winthrop called me on the phone and said, “My dear Grace, it’s too marvelous, Dan’s coming home, he’s landing tomorrow, and he’s going to stop by for you, and you’re coming down to Romney with him—it’s really important, I’ll explain everything!” that he’d have grown up in two years, become more serious and adult. So I’d been surprised, when he first turned up, to find he hadn’t changed at all. His ready grin was just as boyish and debonair, and the quick twinkle in his eye just as infectious, and just as many girls phoned him at just as ungodly hours as they had done when he used to be down in Washington during vacations when he was at Williams.

  At least I’d thought he hadn’t changed, up to this moment. I wasn’t so sure, now. Was he, I wondered, like Rick and Mara, a chip off some atavistic block? Because certainly they weren’t any of them like Irene, or like their father, who was a cousin of my husband’s, and died the same month, eight years ago. Which is how I’d known them all so well during their adolescent and college days. Even then Dan had been the only one who didn’t complain constantly about his mother . . . a gay, charming woman, as capricious as an April day, and as lovely, who always seemed much more amused at having produced two great hulking blond sons and a dark elfin daughter than concerned with raising them, or training them for the business of living. I imagine that might explain how, in turn, Dan’s attitude toward her took on, as he grew up, an air of affectionate and protective, rather big-brotherish amusement.

  “I suppose I’m nothing but a first-class bounder,” he said morosely. “Or I’d have stayed over there and said the hell with it.”

  He sat up abruptly and hunched forward, elbows on his knees, plucking at the cellophane wrapping on a pack of cigarettes.

  “But the idea of brother Rick quietly sluicing the family finances down the drain burns me up.”

  I looked at him.

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that brother Rick was making practically the same complaint about you, the last time I saw him.”

  “I know. And the fact is I haven’t had a sou, except at Christmas, from Mother for two years. Not since I wouldn’t throw up my job and come home.”

  “I thought she was delighted you’d got a job,” I said.

  “She was. Only her idea of a job is something you go to Tuesdays, if you feel like it, and knock off for the week end at lunch Thursdays. She couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t take a couple of weeks off to go to Budapest to a party the new air attaché was giving for his freckle-faced daughter. So she stopped my allowance. Then she heard somebody lecture about Youth and Spring in Paris, and decided I was right to stay there, and started it again. Then she heard another guy on The Pitfalls of Paris, and wired me to come home on the next boat. That practically ended everything.”

  He lighted a cigarette, a sardonic grin in one corner of his mouth.

  “That was O. K. till somebody started advertising all this Frankly Forty stuff. That was when Mother decided it was time she had some grandchildren. She’s fifty-five, even if she doesn’t look it. So she trots out a whole stable of horse-faced gals and says it’s time you and Rick were getting ma
rried, and I’ll arrange a suitable income for each of you. And Rick does marry, and Mother doesn’t like Cheryl, or whatever her name is, so she doesn’t arrange the suitable income.”

  “And now it’s your turn?”

  He shook his head. “Wrong, darling.”

  “I thought that was why you’d come back after all these many years,” I said. “In fact—”

  “I know. She’s got her heart set on a gal named Natalie something. But that’s not why I came home. I’m not getting married. I came back because . . . Mother’s getting married.”

  I stared at him in the blankest amazement.

  “Darling—are you out of your mind?” I gasped.

  “No. Mother is.”

  “Who’s she going to marry?”

  “Sidney Tillyard.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “I mean, it’s all right. Old friend of the family, good-looking, nice fellow.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s O. K. with me. I don’t like it. I don’t suppose children ever like seeing somebody else . . . come in. But we aren’t children, and Mother has a right to her own life and all that. What I mean is, there’s no reason for Rick to chuck his weight about. He’s never home. And Mara’ll get a break. Mother’ll probably give her money enough to go to New York or some place.”

  “That’s not what Mara wants, is it?” I asked.

  “Lord knows. It won’t help with Alan Keane. It was Tillyard got him out of the mess at the bank, of course. I’d guess that’s the sort of thing you can’t forgive anybody.”

  Somewhere in the distance a low deep roll of thunder moved the background of the silence that had fallen between us there in the garden. Dan was right, of course. None of them were children, even if they acted it from time to time. Rick was thirty, Dan twenty-seven, Mara twenty-one, and Irene Winthrop had been a widow for eight years. For seven of them everybody, including me, had wondered why she didn’t marry again . . . and now, probably, everybody, including me, would be amazed that she was going to marry.

  I glanced at Dan, sitting there, hunched forward, poking the grass back over the hole he’d made in my lawn.

  “You’re not going to marry Natalie?”

  He shook his blond head, almost tow-colored above his sun-bronzed face.

  “You’ve never seen her, have you?”

  He looked around at me suddenly, shaking his head, a smile on his lips, but in his eyes something else . . . not pain exactly, but something not far from it.

  “You remember those guys at King Arthur’s court that spent all their time hunting the Holy Grail?” he asked, pretty casually. “Well . . . that’s me.”

  “Really?” I said. “Who is she?”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s what I don’t know.”

  He got up abruptly, his broad white linen-clad back turned to me. Then he turned around and sat down beside me.

  “I’ve never told anybody this, Grace. It was two summers ago. A couple I knew were going to a chateau down near Dijon. I was going along until it came out there was an eighteen-year-old daughter in the house. I’d had a couple of narrow escapes before I learned that if you dance twice with a nice French girl you’re as good as married. So I dropped out, at a place called Vezeley. It’s a crazy little sort of hill sticking smack up in the middle of a plain, with a little cathedral on the top of it. They were going to pick me up two days later.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring down at the grass . . . back there in a cathedral town in Burgundy. The vague distant thunder and the oppressive heat of Washington were no part of his present.

  “Only it happened to be the eve of the Fête de l’Assomption, and everybody from the countryside was in the town, and there wasn’t any place to stay . . . the little inn at the foot of the hill was jammed. Well, I walked up the cobbled street to the cathedral place. There was a girl there, an American. We got to talking. All of a sudden she looked at her watch. It was half-past seven, and she had to meet two other girls at Avalon.

  “She had a rattletrap of a French car. She tried to start it, and couldn’t. So I offered to help.”

  The twinkle came back in his eyes for an instant.

  “The trouble was she’d left the ignition on in the first place, so every time she tried to start it she turned it off again. She tried to get a mechanic, but the mechanic had gone to bed and his wife wouldn’t get him up.”

  He grinned at me.

  “It wasn’t spring in Paris, Grace, but it was August in Vezeley, and the oleanders were in bloom. I had to spend the night there, so . . . well, I didn’t start her car. We had dinner at the inn, outside under the oleanders, and we sat up all night on the cathedral steps. The patron offered us his own room, and couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t take it. We talked all night, and we watched the sun come up. The patron brought us a jug of chocolate and a bag of croissants at half-past four—walked all the way up the hill with them—and at five the mechanic got up and turned on her ignition and started her car.

  “I watched her drive down the hill, and waved at her, and she waved back at me. Then she was gone . . . and it wasn’t till two days later that I found out I was in love with her. And I didn’t know where she lived, or even her name. All I knew was that her hair was the color of wheat in the sun, and her eyes the color of faded hyacinths.”

  “Pink, or . . . white?” I said.

  “Blue, Grace. Gray-blue with streaks of dark. Well, I couldn’t get her voice out of my ears. I went back to Vezeley. I went back to Vezeley fourteen times. Once she’d come, alone, just the day before, the patron said. I stayed a week . . .”

  We sat there a long time, saying nothing.

  Dan grinned.

  “I see her everywhere I go. I’m always getting arrested for following girls about. I see a plane flying, and I think of her . . . or ice on the edge of a pond in the woods, or lilacs in the spring, or a branch of yellow mimosa. In fact, Grace, I’m quietly going nuts. And I never so much as touched her, except when we shook hands saying good-bye.”

  All effort to be debonair and nonchalant had stopped some time before. I had the curious and rather awed feeling that it was the first time in Dan Winthrop’s life that anyone had seen behind that casually cheerful and good-looking façade . . . and that what was seen was good.

  He reached out suddenly and took my hand in his big brown paw. “We’d better get going if we’re making Romney by dinner,” he said—just as Lilac put her black head out of the door and rolled her eyes balefully up at the threatening sky: “You-all bettah get sta’ted if you goin’ get down to th’ country befo’ this here ol’ storm break, Mis’ Grace.”

  And because Lilac has dictated my goings out and comings in since I came to the house in Georgetown to live, long before I was left a widow with the two small boys she’s practically raised, I got up obediently. Besides, she was right—as always. Dan and I had sat there much longer than either of us had thought, and we were supposed to be at Romney by seven.

  Dan looked at his watch, then at me.

  “Let’s forget it, shall we?”

  I nodded.

  “I wish to God I could,” he added abruptly.

  2

  So it was already getting on toward seven when we crossed the bridge over the Anacostia by the Naval School of Music, where a lone trumpeter was having tough going with his upper notes, and turned out a road that runs through one of those depressed areas that cluster, drab and undernourished, round the Maryland and Virginia edges of Washington like poor relations below the salt.

  Romney—it was called Romney Marsh in the original patent granted by King Charles in 1671—is near Port Tobacco, about forty miles from the District Line on the Maryland side of the Potomac. If you’ve ever been on a Garden Pilgrimage in the spring, you’ve seen it, with its white fences covered with miles and miles of scarlet roses and honeysuckle, and its green lawns and long alleys of purple and white lilacs and somber fragr
ant box stretching down to the river. And you were told there how Washington used to come down from Mount Vernon, moor his barge at its dock and sit on its wide verandah, porticoed like Monticello, talking with his two physicians, whose houses were within a mile or so of Port Tobacco, and the old gentleman who lived at Romney then, childless because his three sons had fallen at Valley Forge. And you’ve seen, even if you didn’t know it was the original, still hanging over the pearwood mantel in the dining room of Romney, the picture of General Washington, in the stem of his boat, waving his slow last good-bye from the river, taken by the old gentleman from memory. Romney has passed through many hands since then, and many changes, but that picture, like the river and the boxwood, has never been moved . . . or the five Corinthian columns where the starlings used to nest before Irene Winthrop took them firmly in delicate iron hand and drove them out, along with the family of land terrapin that shared the smokehouse with the rats.

  It was almost eight when we turned at Duke of Gloucester Street in Port Tobacco, by the old Fountain Inn across from the Merchants Bank. We’d scarcely spoken at all since we left Georgetown. I was thinking of when I used to be at Romney a great deal, when my sons were small and my husband was living, and wondering vaguely why it was that I’d never been able to find time to go, these last few years—just once for a week end, in fact, in the three years Dan Winthrop had been away.

  I glanced at him, hunched down in the seat beside me, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. I think all that forty miles he must have been taking from memory—like the old gentleman Romney—another picture, the picture of the girl with the wheat-colored hair and hyacinth eyes, waving good-bye from the sunny plain below the little hill of Vezeley. I know at any rate that he was completely unaware of the brassy yellow light that made the road a narrow metallic ribbon through the parched anæmic corn and tobacco fields of Maryland, or the rumble of thunder coming ominously nearer and nearer as we moved through that yellow unreal twilight. And it wasn’t till we’d gone through Port Tobacco, and I’d turned in, at the crossroad marker with several of its bright glass eyes missing, between the tall white gate posts with their carved wood pineapple tops and sign saying “Private—The Public are Admitted on Specified Days Only,” that he came slowly to life again. It was a curiously unenthusiastic homecoming, some way, and I was a little shocked—or was till I told myself it was clearly none of my business. As far as that went, I myself—knowing Irene Winthrop, and Rick Winthrop, and Mara for that matter, so well—wasn’t really looking forward to it with any extraordinary elation.