Lay On, Mac Duff! Read online

  “How in the world does the cook know what to cook?” I said.

  “I really don’t know.” Lina looked helpless. “It’s remarkable, I think.” We both laughed.

  “Also,” she said, and I somehow knew this was what she’d come to tell me, “there’s another rule. When Charles is in his room, back of the library, you know?”—I nodded—“he is never to be disturbed. Never. Unless, I suppose, the house burns down or something.” She smiled.

  But I had a vision of my uncle saying, “Do you suppose that girl knows enough to stay out of here? Better tell her.”

  “Say to Uncle Charles that I understand that,” I said rather theatrically.

  “I will, Bessie dear,” she said. “I hope you’ll be happy in this house.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. But I thought to myself, Uh huh, this house is run to suit Uncle Charles.

  She went to dress for dinner.

  Oh, Lina. I felt sick at heart about her. I couldn’t understand. Was she happy in this house How could she be? Where did she get her radiance? Was it a picture, to take shelter behind, like my being a little country girl? Was she just carrying out her part of a bargain? If my uncle had bought her, was it her task to stay lovely so as not to diminish the value of the purchased goods? Why did she go out with that horrible Frog? And why didn’t she accept Guy Maxon’s surreptitious invitation? And why was it surreptitious? And what did she feel about her father, in a home for the aged, while she lived here where it reeked of money? Did she love luxury so, love it enough to derive that glow from its possession?

  Lina wasn’t selfish. I “knew it in my bones,” as we say up home. Nor was her beauty a dead thing. It was no picture. She was alive from the inside out.

  I was jealous of that old Frog. How could my uncle not be? Was he furious, with a controlled fury of course, when he so quietly got tickets for his wife and another man as a favor? Hadn’t Gaskell been nervy to ask him? What did the Frog mean when he said he was not afraid?

  I was afraid.

  And what about Guy Maxon? Surely he was raging with jealousy. What had I thought about Maxon? Oh, yes, he had delayed at the door last night. Perhaps the parcheesi men fell from the window before he got away from the house. He might have picked them up.

  I must tell J.J. Jones. Oh, heavens, I must tell Hugh. How I’d blabbed everything when we’d agreed not to blab. But he had told. He’d been forced to tell about the red man. But not the police. Just my uncle.

  What kind of man was my Uncle Charles?

  There was a soft rap on my door. Hugh, I thought, but it was Effans.

  “Mr. Jones—” he began.

  “Oh, where!” I cried.

  “In the drawing room with a Mr. Duff.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  I could have flown down, but I had to tell Hugh. I waited until Effans had gone, then rapped on the door next to mine.

  “There’s a friend of mine downstairs,” I whispered. “I told him everything this afternoon. He … he’s brought … there’s a man with him.”

  “Who?” Hugh said. He didn’t seem displeased as I had feared.

  “Mac Duff, his name is.” Hugh’s face changed. He looked glad.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know who he is. Do you?” Hugh said slowly.

  “He’s some kind of professor,” I said, “who can see through stone walls. Come down, why don’t you?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  I turned and went down the stairs two at a time. But as I passed the library doors, I stopped. Paralyzed, I stood there, my hand on the rail of the stairwell.

  “What’s the matter?” Hugh’s face looked down at me, his hand on the rail above me.

  “Something’s burning,” I whispered.

  “What!”

  “That smell …!” And it was the same stench, a wisp of that unmistakable odor that had come out of the library and caught me there, terrified, looking up at Hugh’s hand, whitening on the rail.

  “A red man,” he said thickly, as if he were choking.

  I ran, broke out of the spell, flew downstairs, across the hall into an overcoat that put its arms around me.

  “What is it? What’s the matter, darling? What’s happened now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and pressed my nose into the overcoat, which was cold and woolly and smelled nice. “Is it you, J.J.?”

  “You know it’s me,” he said. “Who else would it be that loves you so?”

  “N-nobody,” I said. He wasn’t any city slicker. He was my beau.

  Chapter Eight

  MacDougal Duff was waiting in the drawing room, and pretty soon we went in there. He was a tall leanish man with a long face and a long-lipped mouth and a long bony hand that had warm life in it for all its gauntness.

  J.J. said, “This is Bessie Gibbon.”

  “How do you do,” I said.

  All Duff’s long limbs balanced themselves quietly as he stood there. His color was quiet, from the clothes he wore to the quiet brown of his inconspicuous neat hair. His eyes were hazel, I guess, neither blue nor brown, and the lids over them were heavy and fallen at the corners as if they were tired of keeping open to watch what he understood too well.

  He had a melancholy face, seamed and lined as if he had been through a lot, and yet the lines were lightly etched as if for a long time some peacefulness of spirit had been working to erase them. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but like my uncle he knew too much to be young. Much about him was like my uncle.

  Yet the great difference between him and my uncle was just what made them seem most alike. That sounds crazy, but it was as if two extremes, two opposites, were so far from each other that they met again around at the back of the circle. Uncle Charles was tough, hard, armored with experience. He was a seasoned fighter, a veteran disillusioned and dangerous. Mac Duff had been through the wars, too, but for him the battle was over. He was marked with wisdom but also with weariness and some sadness. And there was this quietude about him, this deep resignation, which was his power, so like my uncle’s and so different.

  They were both powerful men. But I knew Mac Duff had the only kind of strength against which my uncle’s strength would have no purchase.

  I realized all this gradually, of course.

  They sat me down between them, and, still glowing from the warmth of J.J.’s … well … his greeting, I turned to Mac Duff all ready to listen.

  But he didn’t say anything.

  There is something uncanny about a man who doesn’t say anything, especially if you feel he isn’t either inconsequential or embarrassed. “I don’t know a darned thing about American history,” I blurted. Duff didn’t smile, but his eyes widened at the heavy corners as if they might twinkle in a minute.

  “We aren’t going to talk about American history,” J.J. said, patting my hand, “though if you knew what he knew, you’d wish we were. O. K., Mac. What do you want her to tell you?”

  “What just happened,” Duff said.

  So I began to tell them about the red man, how my uncle had forced Hugh to show it, how it had fallen on the table, the effect, the lowering pressure, the evil, same as before.

  “Wait, please.” Mac Duff stopped me. His voice was quiet, a little tired, low, not the organ music my uncle carried in his throat, but it had the same quality of making what it said sound significant. “You didn’t mention that, J.J.”

  “I assumed you wanted only facts. She thought she felt a tension in the atmosphere, malice in the room, that sort of thing …”

  “It’s a fact she felt it.”

  “It’s a fact she thought it was there,” J.J. said, “but still that’s not what I’d call evidence.”

  “Evidence,” Mac Duff said, “Shall we talk about evidence and leave out facts? Emotion’s not only a fact, it’s a factor. It’s more important than logic. It’s behind all reasoning. It’s the bottom of all human activity. Speak to me not of evidence. Only let me understand.”

  �
�Yah, but,” J.J. said, “she felt hatred in the air. How can you take it for fact that there was hatred in the air? She’s young and strange here, and probably tense, you know.…”

  “In other words, we must recognize the fact that Miss Gibbon herself has emotions. All God’s chillun got emotions, J.J., and each sees the world through the distorting glass of how he feels.” J.J. grunted. “Ever see the world through rose-colored glasses? Ever have the blues?”

  “Granted. Granted,” J.J. said.

  “Granted,” I murmured, remembering how fear had painted the stairwell with pale green gloom not long before.

  “Do you think anyone often sees the world exactly as it is?” Mac Duff inquired.

  “If you’re arguing that the way I feel makes a difference to me,” J.J. said impatiently, “there’s no argument. We’re talking about her ability to feel other people’s emotions.”

  “Don’t you think it can be done? Do you think any wife, married to the same man for, say ten years, can’t tell a block away when he’s angry or pleased with himself or a little bit sheepish about something? And, close up, doesn’t she read him by an eyelash? Oh, she can’t recite the signs, but she knows exactly how he feels. And vice versa, of course. My dear fellow, what is sympathy? It’s simply granting the reality of the other fellow’s mood. That’s all. You may say it’s different with a stranger. Still, actors who are strangers to us let us know how they feel. If they’re any good. Besides, dislike or antagonism is one of the easiest emotions to detect. It’s as easy as its opposite. Don’t you think,” he went on slyly, “one can tell when there’s affection or attraction between two other people? Do lovers need to wear placards before you know how they feel about each other?”

  “I give up,” J.J. said, the blood up to the roots of his hair again. “All right. Granted.”

  Mac Duff smiled, and he had one of the sweetest smiles I’ve ever seen. It lightened his sad face so wonderfully, offered such a shy affection, revealed behind the tired mask someone so eternally young, so incorrigibly hopeful for the best in us, that I fell for him then and there. I didn’t care how much he teased. I was glad he knew we liked each other, and it even seemed more solidly so because he knew it.

  “What’s all this got to do with the case, though?” J.J. said.

  “What a man does,” Mac Duff explained, “depends upon how he feels, no matter what fine intellectual process of sifting pros and cons he deceives himself with later. Winberry’s murder had its roots in somebody’s feelings.”

  “You mean there’s no such thing as a cold-blooded murder?”

  “A cold-blooded murder is one committed as part of a plan, a calculated step in a plan toward an end. But the plan itself is rooted in somebody’s desires and urges. Somebody’s emotion. Very well. Here we find somebody’s emotion lying around loose, as it were. A mere feeling in a room. Let’s not dismiss it too lightly. Let us see, allowing of course for Miss Gibbon’s own feelings, what emotion it was, if any, and to whom it belonged. Because it’s important.”

  I told him all about it as well as I could. I described and repeated everything I remembered, just as I have done in this book.

  “How did you feel?” he asked me.

  “Oh, I was … sitting in a corner.”

  “Good girl. You bore no weight of anyone’s attention. You weren’t self-conscious?”

  “Not then. I was just curious. Of course, after a while, it scared me.”

  He said, “Who was in the room?”

  “Winberry, Gaskell, Maxon, Uncle Charles, Hugh, and me.” I counted on my fingers.

  “And who was in the room this afternoon when you felt it again?”

  “Not Winberry.” I shuddered. “Gaskell, Maxon, Uncle Charles, Hugh, Lina, and me.”

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Now tell me, when was the emotion dispelled? When was it gone?”

  “When Lina came last night. No, I think it was there after that, but I guess my attention turned toward her. I can’t tell exactly.”

  “It was not dispelled when some one person left the room?”

  “I forgot it before anyone left,” I said. “Besides, except for Hugh, they all left at once.”

  “This afternoon?”

  “It lasted only a second. I wasn’t so detached this afternoon.”

  “Another factor was present both times. The red parcheesi man.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes, I do think there’s something behind that. Hugh knows.” I told them how my uncle had burned the red man, about the odor, and how I’d recognized that smell again from the library upstairs. Mac Duff made no comment. “But Hugh knows something about it,” I insisted. “He’s staying here in the house. My uncle asked him to. And he’s coming down. J.J., I had to …”

  “How did she read that jealous twinge,” Mac Duff said, “eh?”

  “Don’t nag, now. Your point’s made,” J.J. said. “Who do you think was so mad at who in that lot?” Mac Duff shifted his shoulders in the tiniest shrug.

  “Gaskell was afraid,” I said. I told them about his queer parting statement.

  “But he didn’t mean he had no emotion of fear?”

  “No,” I said, “he meant he wasn’t going to be a coward.”

  “Good girl.”

  I could have purred. I just knew it wasn’t something he said to all the girls. There are some people it flatters you to understand. I mean, it makes you feel bigger and expanded, yourself, when you know they know that you know what they’re talking about.

  Mac Duff sat a while, perfectly passive and still in his chair. His long hand dropped off the arm of it limply. His foot fell away at the ankle where it dangled from his crossed leg. I never saw a man who could fall all to pieces the way he could and yet stay whole.

  “What you kids want me to do,” he said at last, “is find out whether Uncle Charles Cathcart is a murderer or an innocent uncle.”

  “Exactly,” J.J. answered for both of us.

  “Who pays my fee?” he said, but smiled.

  J.J. said, “We haven’t got your kind of money. It’s if you love us.”

  I was ashamed. “There isn’t any reason why either of you should …” I began.

  “There is too, shut up.” J.J. squeezed my hand. “He liked you right away. I read it in his eyelash.”

  “She’s got that window face,” Mac Duff said as if I weren’t there. “However, the view is lovely.”

  “Good,” J.J. said, “good.”

  “We can sit and figure. That’s cheap. If I can’t hire leg-work, we’ll sit and figure, anyhow.”

  “That’s what I want,” J.J. said, “and I’ve got legs, remember.”

  “I need to meet these people,” Mac Duff continued, “but, barring that, do something for me, will you, Bessie?”

  “Of course,” I said, happy to be Bessie all around.

  “Once over lightly. Don’t think now. When I say the name, give me a few words about each person. What he’s like. Whatever comes into your head.”

  “O. K.” I sat up straighter.

  “Put your head back,” he commanded. “Put your feet up. Take Winberry.”

  “Decay,” I said. J.J. chuckled. “Pink and white,” I said, “but nasty.”

  “Gaskell?”

  “Nasty and stubborn,” I added.

  Mac Duff nodded. “Good. The butler.”

  “Oh, meek,” I said, “meek and proud of it.”

  “Maxon?”

  “Sniffish. Prickly. Sharp. Silly.” I closed my eyes. “Dangerous.”

  “Lina?”

  “Oh, Lina. Radiant. A light inside.”

  “Hugh Miller?”

  “Tight,” I said, “cramped. Holding hard.”

  “Your Uncle Charles?”

  I was silent.

  “Your Uncle Charles?” Mac Duff repeated in the same tone exactly.

  “Power. Too much.” I said, “Too much man. I can’t …”

  “All right. J.J. Jones?”

  “Clear and warm,�
�� I said, feeling sleepy, “and bright and warm.”

  “Mac Duff?”

  “Oh, you?” I opened my eyes. “The battle’s over.”

  “Good girl.”

  “Little merry sunshine,” J.J. murmured, “that’s me, eh?” But he patted my hand and seemed happy. “What’s this? Hypnotism?”

  “She’s been strange here, nervous, acutely aware. Thank you, my dear. Now, events—”

  Someone’s presence in the hall, feet brushing the stairs.

  “First, tell me about those phone calls. How many times did the bell ring?”

  “Twice,” I said. “Twice, the first time.”

  “And the second time?”

  “Once.”

  “How long between calls.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “By your feelings or your watch?”

  “By my watch.”

  J.J. stood up. His face looked surprised, delighted, and a little awed. I turned my head, and there was Lina in a rich blue gown, holding her crimson, wrap. The stained-glass colors made her look like a streamlined Madonna off a church window. I looked at J.J.’s face again, sharply, but the devil was not there in his eyes. Of course, he thought she was beautiful. She was beautiful. Anybody would think so.

  “My aunt,” I murmured. “Lina, this is Mr. Mac Duff. And Mr. Jones.”

  Lina inclined her lovely head. Mac Duff stood up and did absolutely nothing. His quietude turned Lina’s face to him as if he’d called her. “Not MacDougal Duff?” she said. He didn’t bow, but he seemed to bow. “Why?” Lina said and caught her breath, “I beg your pardon. I didn’t know Bessie knew you.”

  “Nor does she,” Mac Duff said pleasantly. “We were discussing the death of Mr. Winberry.”

  “I see.” The faintest ripple of a frown crossed her forehead.

  Then Hugh loomed behind her, and I introduced him around.

  Lina said, “Dinner is served, Bessie dear, any time you and Hugh are ready. I … am going out.” She hesitated, then said to Mac Duff, “You must meet my husband.”

  Mac Duff said nothing.

  “I’m rather glad Bessie’s friend brought you here,” Lina went on almost defiantly.

  Mac Duff’s placidity was deep as the sea. “I shall be very happy to meet Mr. Cathcart.”