Arrow Pointing Nowhere (8 page)

“But it has a message!”

Everybody laughed except Craddock and Alden Fenway. Alden had risen when Craddock did, and stood as if amiably waiting for the moment when he could sit down again. Gamadge took Mrs. Fenway's hand.

“It was good of you to let me come up and see you,” he said.

“I beg and pray that you'll come again!”

“I shall.” Gamadge picked up his novel, and bowed to Mrs. Grove. Mrs. Grove bowed, Craddock bowed, Alden ducked his head. The three others accompanied the guest out of the room and to the top landing of the stairs.

“I'll take you down,” said Mott. “We spare old Phillips.”

“For if we wear him out,” smiled Caroline, “where shall we find his like again?”

“Ruthless child!” Mott benevolently surveyed her as she stood with her arm through her father's. “She will have no cant in the house. Very uncomfortable for the rest of us, who employ ever so much of it.”

Fenway protested: “I only hope that Mr. Gamadge understands your peculiar sense of humor, and Caroline's.”

“Oh, I'm sure he does,” murmured Caroline.

Gamadge said that there was room in the world at present for an essay on pure candor by Miss Fenway.

Caroline laughed. “I'm sure there isn't. There never was room anywhere for any of my writing, Mr. Gamadge. I've done all of it I'm ever going to do. I stopped that sort of nonsense a long time ago.”

“Perhaps you stopped too soon.”

“At least I had high hopes once. What was I going to do, Father? Do you remember? Found a salon, or a magazine?”

“My dear, I could never understand why the editors wouldn't have your work.”

“After you finished censoring it, darling, it never had a chance.”

Those two understood each other; they bade Gamadge farewell, standing arm in arm and smiling, as he went down the stairs with Mott Fenway.

“I could find my own hat and coat, sir, you know,” said Gamadge.

“A little deception; I wanted a private word with you.” Mott glanced over his shoulder, keenly enough for all his joking manner. “Have you a quarter of an hour?”

“Certainly.”

“So private that I don't want the rest of them to know I'm having it. Shall we go to the library? They'll all be upstairs now until teatime.”

“I have some books to pick up there.” But as they reached the lower hall, and Mott turned towards the darkening end of it, Gamadge paused: “Forgive the suggestion; if they're to think I've gone, wouldn't it be strategy on our part to slam the front door?”

Mott, hands in the pockets of his loose old lounge coat, also stopped. He looked amused. “I'm a child in the hands of the expert. Slam it, by all means.”

Gamadge did so. Then he said: “Now perhaps I'd better have my hat and coat. Then, if somebody should drop in on us, I could say that I'd forgotten something, and you'd let me in again.”

Mott was highly entertained. “I see that I've come to the right shop; presence of mind and subterfuge are what I want, and I think I may be going to find them in you, as well as the
intellect I'm already sure of.” He opened the door under the stairs, and Gamadge found his possessions among a closetful of outer garments; then they went on down the hall and into the library. Gamadge dropped coat, hat and novel on top of the wrapped parcel of books that he had left on the long table, and turned to face the other. “Well, sir, what can I do for you?”

“It's this matter of the lost view of Fenbrook, Mr. Gamadge. A curious riddle. Let's tackle it sitting down.”

“Well, sir—” Gamadge looked at the wide doorway through which they had entered, walked to it, and stationed himself, with a smile, against the left-hand jamb. He spoke amiably: “You sit down. I'll keep a lookout.”

“Upon my word!”

“You care to run the risk of being overheard?”

“We shouldn't be overheard, Mr. Gamadge, because nobody in the house thinks that there's anything to overhear. Only Caroline knows that I have suspicions, and she doesn't imagine the worst of them.”

“If you have suspicions, there must be at least one suspect; a suspect may have an uneasy conscience. I'll stay comfortably here, if it's all the same to you.”

“Not quite the same to me as having you opposite me in front of the fire. However, I'm in no position to bully you; I'm about to ask a favor.” He moved a chair to face Gamadge, and sat down.

T
HE FIRE HAD DIED
to red embers. Fenway put out a long, delicate-looking hand towards it, crossed one long leg over the other knee, and contemplated Gamadge thoughtfully. At last he said: “I'm hoping that this may turn out to be a business proposition; if I didn't have that hope I shouldn't have the colossal cheek to take up your time.”

“Very glad to be of service, if I can be.”

“I myself, of course, have no money at all. I'm a pauper, the clothes on my back and the loose change in my pocket provided for me by my cousin Blake. You will guess the sort of person he is when I say that neither of us ever thinks of the obligation. But I can't pay your doubtless high fees. However, I can promise you that Caroline will, if you're inclined to help us.”

“Let me understand you, Mr. Fenway. Has Miss Fenway asked you to consult me about the plate that was torn out of the book of views?”

“Good Heavens; no; she doesn't dream that I'm consulting you. I didn't think of doing so until I had had a chance to—er—
study you a little this afternoon. Your books prepared me to find you very competent, but one cannot always judge a man's—er—code of manners from the books he writes, can one?”

Gamadge said, laughing, that one certainly could not.

“There is a certain disloyalty to Blake, of course, in taking you into my confidence; or would be if I didn't feel that I could trust you with a lot of family stuff that Blake would never confide to anybody. He's very reticent, sensitive, clannish, you know. I have told you what I owe my cousin, or part of what I owe him. I've known him since he was born—I knew Cort—and we have the same background and the same memories. But I am not—” he smiled—“in the best Fenway tradition, as you see. However: there is Caroline to be considered too. One can always tell whether young people resent one's presence in a house or not.”

“Yes.”

“Caroline has always wanted me here and at Fenbrook. We are in sympathy, we get on; we have more in common, I'm afraid, than she and her father have, devoted though they are. She gave up a good deal to be with him, you know—her own independent life. I owe her something, and in doing what I'm doing now I am serving her. If we find that picture, Mr. Gamadge, she'll pay your bill—anything you care to ask. She hasn't her own fortune yet, won't have it until her father dies, but she has a certain amount of money from her mother, and could get more.”

Gamadge said: “This kind of investigation is really a hobby of mine, Mr. Fenway; I'm not a licensed detective, I have no facilities, and I can't promise results. If I could manage to be of assistance to you and Miss Fenway I shouldn't dream of taking money for the job.”

“But you must be an extremely busy man; why should you come to the assistance of comparative strangers for nothing?”

“Well, I like a puzzle.”

“That is fortunate for us. If I'm to put this one fairly before you, I must begin with those indiscretions I hinted at. Perhaps you don't need to be told that this household is divided into two camps?”

Gamadge looked enquiring.

“Surely you noticed that Caroline and I—and Blake too, though he won't admit it—get more enjoyment out of a guest like yourself when we have him to ourselves?”

“In the upper hall?” Gamadge smiled.

“Exactly so. Blake is really in our camp—Caroline's and mine; or I should say that we are really both in hers. But his consideration for others makes him practically a neutral, and he is not and could not be a party to our conspirings.”

Gamadge said: “It's a large house.”

“It is, and there's no reason why we shouldn't all live comfortably enough in it, going our separate ways; but Blake cannot bear to feel that his sister-in-law should be left out of things and forsaken. All this must come oddly from me, since I'm a hanger-on myself.” He paused, and looked at Gamadge.

“No, I understand; you're of their blood, and all the rest of it.”

“Yes. As for me, I can get on with anybody and put up with anything; that's one of my few virtues, the virtue of a professional dependent. But it's hard on Caroline.”

“I can see that it might be.”

“Might be? My dear Mr. Gamadge! Caroline gave up her separate life, and what might have been something of a career, to preside in her father's house. For two and a half years Belle Fenway has been in the house with her afflicted son and her entourage. Wherever Belle Fenway happens to be, she will always impose her personality; she can't help it. She's always had an establishment of her own until now, and she sometimes forgets that she isn't the mistress of this one. Invalided, confined to her rooms upstairs, she dominates us.

“And it all came about so naturally; Blake asked her to come here until she was able to take Alden to a house or an apartment—they're of course well able to afford anything; the poor fellow is a rich man. She won't be separated from him—that's natural enough too, though I think it's a great mistake on her part, both for his sake and her own. By the way, I'm assuming that you are aware of his affliction.”

“It's not obvious.”

“Poor Blake thinks it's invisible, and Belle, of course, is never so happy as when she can persuade herself that Alden is a normal member of society. Well, we have them here, we have the enigmatic—Mrs. Grove, we have Craddock—a young fellow who is as well equipped to deal with a patient like Alden Fenway as I am—and we have, or had, Hilda Grove. A very nice child indeed, I am quite fond of her, but a fifth outsider. Five is a good many.”

“It is.”

“Belle's injury is slower in healing than the doctors at first expected; some nerve was involved, I think. Alden is a perpetual source of—we'll say awkwardness; he's a spiritual depressant. It isn't generally known, by the way, even now, that there's anything wrong with him, but it's bound to leak out. Rather a blight on a house.

“Mind you, if there were no more to it than that, I should strongly advise Caroline—as I have advised her in the past—to seek grace and say nothing; to keep things smooth and comfortable for her father. But now—it's a responsibility. I've known certain disturbing things for some time now, suspected others; Caroline's begun to feel that something's wrong in the other camp. She's getting very nervous.

“I'll go back to the first incident, which I wasn't over-much perturbed about at the time; two years ago Caroline's dog was found dead in the street.”

Gamadge had been thoughtfully smoking. Now he looked up, startled.

“Nice fellow, a Dalmatian,” continued Mott Fenway. “She'd only had him down here in New York for a month. Some ear trouble, needed long treatment at a vet's. Well-mannered dog, we were all fond of him; he did no senseless barking. Had the run of the yard and lawn all day, but was kept indoors at night; his bed was in a lobby off the basement hall. One morning he was found with his head crushed, in the gutter opposite the service door; you know it? Door in the wall.”

Gamadge nodded.

“Everybody said he'd been struck by a car, and everybody thought that old Phillips had forgotten to lock him in the night before, and had also left the service door open. He's as likely, by the way, to leave the front door open; but there seemed no other explanation, and Phillips didn't defend himself from the imputation with any great violence; he'd scorn to. He denied it, and that was the end of that.

“I must now explain that my room is a northwest one, on the top floor. Craddock has the northeast corner, and there are a bath and a long clothes closet between us. I'm in the habit of sitting up late to read, and one night, about a year ago, I sat up unconscionably late over a good book. When I opened my west window—it overlooks the yard, and I seldom do open it at night, I don't like to be waked by milkmen and the rest of it—I saw an exodus. Don't ask me who it was that flitted through the service door; the yard is as dark as pitch in the dim-out.

“Well; I've already said that I mind my own business, and I'm not the man to lose sleep spying out of a window. I made a few eliminations, of course; the servants? You should see them; their midnight excursions—after-midnight excursions, it was two o'clock—have long ceased. Burglar? We have an alarm, which must have been switched off indoors. The possibilities reduced themselves to young Craddock and Mrs. Grove.

“I dismissed Mrs. Grove as unlikely in the highest degree. I did not knock on the communicating door to Craddock's room; first because he was not then—is not yet, in fact—a well man, and I didn't care to risk waking him; next, because I rather sympathized with him. His must be a dull, a deadly life; I didn't find it in my heart to grudge him a little irregular amusement.