A little blond piratess had spotted me. As I started to move on, she weaved up, thrust a drink in my hand, and made an out-of-focus sound that resembled a hiccup crossed with a giggle.
“Wups!” She put her fingers over her mouth, looked at me dizzily, and staggered slightly. She got the giggle out by itself this time. “Getting a little drunk out... Look, everybody, Blackbeard himself!”
As I started around her, she came up with another giggle and stumbled between me and the house. She caught a tuft of the brown mat on my chest that was exposed by the jerkin. She tugged lightly. “Mister Mans, you’re wired for sound!”
“Except my woofer is slightly on the blink.”
The giggle became a shrill, stupid laugh. “That’s barbed, that is.” She jerked a few shreds of chest spinach right out of the garden. “You’re the nearest thing to the real article at this blast. Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so.”
She reached up to give the beard a pull. I caught her wrist. “Naughty,” I said. “That will never do.”
“I want to know who you are,” she pouted.
“Honey, I’m old José Gaspar come back from the briny deep to see if you’re doing justice to my dedicated week.”
“We’re trying, José! We are really trying.”
“I can see that.”
“But who are you when you’re not José Gaspar?”
I flicked her tip-tilted nose with my fingertip. “Part of the fun, lovely.”
“I know what...” Her eyes became drunkenly sly. “I’ll find out. I’ll ask Keith who you are.”
Deliver me, I thought, from the urge to bust such a nice young rump.
“Good idea,” I said, wrenching a smile through the beard. “But you don’t know where he is.”
“Yes, I do, too. I do so know where Keith is!” She made a vague gesture toward the left wing of the house. “He’s in there with Natalie Clavery.”
“How about I find him for you?”
She brightened. “Okay.”
“You wait right here.”
“While I have a li’l ole drink.” She hiccuped. “But you hurry back to Hildy.”
“Sure, Hildy.”
“Don’t keep li’l Hildy waiting.”
“Don’t worry about a thing, Hildy.”
I escaped blond little Hildy by fading into the shadows at the ell of the portico. I stopped short as the sound of someone being slapped with an open palm came to me from a few yards away.
I turned, not seeing them at first. Then I made out the shadowed forms of Van and Natalie Clavery standing under the portico. She was absolutely rigid, except for the hand she was raising slowly to her stinging cheek.
Clavery’s wiry, intense body swayed under the assault of the emotion ripping through him. A strangled sound formed in his throat. His arms groped imploringly.
“Natalie...”
“No, don’t say anything, Van. Don’t make it worse by trying to apologize.”
“I struck you, Natalie...”
“So you did, Van.”
“I saw you in there with him, Natalie, with Keith Sigmon...”
“Were you spying, Van?”
“I wanted to kill him... of all men... Keith Sigmon. Then I saw Elena come in.” Clavery was so filled with feeling he was unable to speak above a thick whisper. “I saw you start out... I waited... And when you stepped onto the portico... Before I knew what was happening, my hand was raising, swinging...”
“I think I’ll go home, Van.”
“No, no! Please. I think I know why you were in there.”
“Do you, Van?”
“You think Keith and Elena have the old lady’s missing portfolio, the confession I wrote out, the promissory note. Isn’t that it? You thought it was the only way left to get the confession back. Tell me it’s true, Natalie!”
“Do you believe it’s true?” she asked him.
“Yes... With a moment to think, I know it’s true. You couldn’t have any feeling for a man like Keith Sigmon, Natalie.”
“Yes,” she said, “I have feeling. I despise him.”
“You’d despise me if I wanted, or even permitted, myself to be saved by that means,” Clavery said. “I’d rather rot in jail.”
“In any event, Van,” she said with sudden weariness, “you haven’t been saved. Elena came in before I had any chance to put my little last-stage plan in operation.”
Nineteen
In the left wing of the solid old mansion the noise of the party was a rising and falling muffled wash of sound.
From the door through which I’d eased off the portico, I moved slowly along the hallway. At the distant end of this same hall were the same rooms I’d visited previously, rooms where the old señora and Jean Putnam had slept and worked. Much nearer to me, light spilled into the hall from a partially opened door.
The murmur of voices led me toward the lighted room. As I came closer, my view of the room’s interior widened.
I heard Keith Sigmon say: “That’s better. Cool off and listen to reason.”
And Elena’s voice: “Well, I did find you in here alone with Natalie Clavery.”
Sigmon: “She’s twice your age.”
Elena: “You weren’t acting like it.”
My last step had carried me fully into the doorway. The room was a sort of combination den-library. The dark wood-paneled walls were lined with books. There was a fireplace of antique brick. Huge, comfortable couches and chairs graced the room. Tall French windows opened on a side lawn. Left of the windows was a well-stocked, tooled-leather bar.
Keith and Elena were in close contact, standing near an antique table on which a lamp glowed softly. He had one arm about her slender waist, pulling her tightly against him. With the fingertips of his other hand he was tipping her chin up, smiling and looking at her coaxingly.
“You’re very impish when you pout,” he said.
She began to relent. “I ought to claw your eyes out. You know that, don’t you?”
“You’d miss me dreadfully,” he said. “Anyway, it would all be for nothing. The Natalie Clavery bit didn’t mean a thing, I tell you.”
“It had better never repeat itself,” she said.
“It won’t,” Sigmon promised.
He slid his hand to the back of her small head, laced his fingers through the light hair, and pulled the sharp prettiness of the little face forward. “This is the only thing worth repeating,” he said softly. Then he kissed her, and with a soft sound in her throat, she responded.
I felt the tightness pull over my face, as if the skin had shrunk. I thought of the sickening shock a girl of Jean Putnam’s caliber had experienced, chancing to look on a scene similar to this one. And after she’d crept away, face hot with the shame for them, Jean had begun asking herself questions. She’d started to look for answers, to inquire, to investigate. The questions had opened the area to bigger questions. And when the questions became demanding, Jean Putnam had sought a private detective to help her get the answers that would either clear these people or damn them.
Jean Putnam had been killed because she’d refused to let the questions lie unanswered. She’d unwittingly condemned Lura Thackery by writing in a diary the things she had seen and overheard, by putting the questions in Lura’s possession.
It was that simple. The questions had the power to destroy — unless they were first destroyed.
With her dying breath, Jean Putnam had been trying to point to the very heart of the matter, the thing seen by chance that had raised the first question in her mind. She had not been trying to say the word “incense.’ The word she formed in death was far uglier: “incest.”
But the word comprised the question, not the answer. I spoke the answer with a soft hissing of breath: “Ginny... Ginny Jameson!”
Her involuntary response to her own name cleared any remaining doubt from my mind. The girl who’d posed as Elena Sigmon stood half turned in Keith Sigmon’s arms, a sudden frightening knowledge killing the color of the pixie face.