Murder Comes to Eden. Leslie Ford
along the line.
“We’ll just mosey on over and have a look at my place,” he said. “Anita’s got plans for a house she wants to build. We’re going to turn the old shack into a garage with a guest studio upstairs. Anita knows a lot of topflight artists. They can come down and work, be company for her while I finish the new book. They’ll be a bit of leaven for the local dough-heads.”
A little towards the woods between the two places, he left Anita and came back. “I knew you’d be crazy about her,” he said. “Her first husband was a louse, stinking rich, but her father’s a lawyer, so she got enough to do as she pleases. You’ll probably want to get some of the neighbours in, but let’s keep it small—just the Camerons and Potters. We brought some Scotch in the trunk. We won’t be long.”
The Camerons and the Potters had the only show places, except Eden itself, out on the peninsula known as Eden’s Neck. The rest of the neighbours were people like the O’Learys, with jobs in Washington, people who wanted a place for their kids and had bought two or three acres when Sudley sold off a worn-out farm across from Miss Fairlie’s gate on the old road.
Spig tried to avoid the pale shattered look in Molly’s eyes as she stood there, a white line around her lips. Then he went over to her.
“I’m all right.” She turned abruptly away. “How could he? Oh, how could he!” she whispered. “What’s happened to him? He used to be so——”
“Don’t, Molly . . . please.” Spig was sick himself, and then angry, at the callous nonchalance of Stan Ashton’s announcement. “And I’m damned if we’re going to call the Camerons.”
“Yes.” Molly’s eyes kindled. “Yes, we are. We’re not going to be rude to her.” She turned quickly back to him. “Spig—she won’t take Molly A., will she? I couldn’t bear . . .”
“I don’t think we need to worry.”
“Then you call the Camerons. Ask them to lend us some Scotch—I wouldn’t touch theirs. And ask them to bring ice—the kids took ours to Miss Fairlie’s.”
They thought about Kathy’s child, but they didn’t think about Kathy’s property. Not till later when Joe Cameron and Spig were out in the kitchen. Over the pink geraniums on the long window sill they could see the airy silver structure of the bridge, soaring gallantly out across the Devon, white sails like a flock of shining sea birds resting on the blue, sunlit water beneath it. Its landfall was hidden at this end by the pair of great chestnut oaks on the Ashtons’ shore. The only sign there was a highway over there was a wide gap in the tree tops, in front of the taller beeches and willow oaks that filled the shallow arc between the road and Sudley’s fences.
“Lucky for us old Stan’s a Town Planner and a big wheel in highway improvement circles,” Joe Cameron remarked. He was a big, red-faced man with light hair and stupid, ox-brown eyes, as steady as an ox and very shrewd. “The little lady looks more like Bailey’s Beach than Plumtree Cove to me, and that’s a nice fifty feet Stan’s got between the bridge and Sudley’s place. And about three hundred yards along the road? Might be a temptation to cash in . . . if she didn’t like it down here.”
Spig shook his head. “That’s all settled. We’re giving that little strip between the road and Sudley’s fence to the State for a picnic area.” A sort of memorial to Kathy, he would have added before Anita came. “If she doesn’t like it here, we’ll buy back the four acres this side of the road. That’s the agreement. It’s in a letter of stipulation Stan signed after Kathy died. Like the one we signed for Miss Fairlie. We pro-rate it at what we paid her, plus the cash he’s put in.”
It was that simple to Spig O’Leary.
“Let’s hope the house they’re talking about isn’t too fancy, then,” Joe Cameron said. “I still wish to God we could get the Commissioners to pass a zoning law for this county. Nobody’s safe until they do. I don’t see why Sudley can’t see it. The road isn’t a year old and look what’s happened to it—right up to his own cow pasture. It’s a crime.”
It’s worse than a crime. Spig O’Leary told himself that twice a day, five days a week, driving back and forth to work in Washington. Coming home, he didn’t need the Colonial signpost in the parkway planting of dogwood and laurel to tell him he was entering Devon County. Dave’s Drive-In (For White) on the left and Cab’s Overnight and Eatery (For Coloured) on the right were like a pair of watchtowers on the county line, where the Governor had cut the broad, white ribbon, officially opening the new highway around Devonport to the bridge. “My friends of this great and lovely county in this great and lovely State . . .” Spig could still hear him as he stood bareheaded, scissors in his hand, flowers on his tongue. “Be ceaseless in your vigil, tireless in your guardianship. Let this magnificent artery of peace and prosperity be a boon and a blessing. Do not let it become a menace to your children, a curse to you.”
And Devon’s answer stretched from the county line to the Sudley pastures, for five miles on both sides of the road. “Devon Death Strip,” the Washington and Baltimore papers called it . . . a nightmare in flowing neon, red, green and shocking pink. Liquor. Beds. Beer. Dance. Soft Drinks. Gas. Oil. Fried Shrimp. Package Goods for Fishing Parties. TV. We Never Sleep. Nor did anyone else within range of the sonic attack from the jukes, the callipoe at Colby’s Carnival and the perpetual grind of the slot machines. Five miles of taverns, motels, gas stations, wooden shacks and cut-rate liquor stores had erupted like atomic mushrooms almost before the concrete was dry. The merchants of Devonport had rushed out to help reap the golden harvest. There were super-markets, hardware and farm implement stores, new and used cars, a branch of Sudley’s bank cheek by jowl with the Breezy Inn. Along both sides, five miles of cut-throat competition, the turf in the centre parkway chewed up with tyre gouges, littered with beer cans, paper cups and empty bottles, from the county line to Bill’s Live Bait, Blood Worms and Peelers next to Sudley’s winter wheat on the left, across from the Three D (Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance) next to Sudley’s cow pasture on the right.
From there, the highway ran between Sudley’s new white-painted fences, mile-long ribbons, to the woods of Eden’s Landing and down through them, fifty feet from Sudley’s line, into the Plumtree Cove tract to the bridge crossing the Devon—a little over two miles in all. That was what was left of Devon’s highway that was not a shambles.
And it was safe. Sudley loved the land and by Devon standards was a rich man. Old Stan Ashton was the high priest of highway sanctity. Miss Fairlie was eccentric, but not eccentric enough to chop down the woods of Eden to build a shopping centre two hundred yards from the gate on the old road that she still padlocked every night and all day Sundays. At Sylvan Shores the Home Owners’ League was fighting off a boat repair yard, and at Chapel Creek a canning factory. But the O’Learys and the people like them who’d socked their last dime into the homes on Eden’s Neck—they were safe.
Or so they thought until Monday evening the second week in June.
Spig O’Leary saw the men putting the signboard up in the corner of Sudley’s buttercup-gold and green pasture as he slowed down, blinded by the sun glinting on the blue glass octagon of the Three D (Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance). He took it for granted it was the sign for the County Fair, held every year on the Sudley Farm. The red light blinking on one of the sheriff’s cars at the front door of the Three D caught his eye, and he saw the sheriff himself then, standing by a yellow convertible with two kids in it, neither of them more than seventeen. He saw Spig and motioned to him to pull in.
“. . . If I catch you in this county again,” he was saying. “Now get going, punks. Get the hell out of Devon County and stay out. You hear?”
The driver gunned the motor and the car roared out into the road, across the parkway, ripping the turf open, both of them laughing, not hearing Buck Yerby’s bellow.
“Damn them,” he said violently. “I wish this road had never come here. I just dropped in for a pack of cigarettes or Nick’d be on the floor with his head open. He caught ’em putting slugs in his slot machines and that punk driving had a bottle ready