Invitation to Murder. Leslie Ford
call. Off the record, I was told that de Gradoff was heavily involved when his first wife died.”
“Killed herself.”
“I’m purposely restricting myself to what has been reported to me as fact,” Reeves said quietly. “—To clear himself, de Gradoff borrowed a considerable sum on his interest in the first wife’s estate. It is that sum this so-called ‘friendly inquiry’ is about. The undisclosed principal was given to understand that he was marrying a rich American lady . . . at which time the debt would be paid.”
He put the letter in the safe, closed it and hung the picture of the many-towered mansion back on the wall. There was no ripple of expression in the dusty aridity of his face or in his voice when he spoke again. “Perhaps that is why de Gradoff appeared anxious to hear what you might have to say to Dodo this morning.”
Fish looked at him soberly. “Do we have any program—”
“None. I have no authority to pay such debts. If Dodo wishes to do it out of income, that’s her business. I advised the ‘undisclosed principal’ to take the matter up with her.”
As Reeves gathered up his papers, Fish got to his feet. “One other point, sir—if I may stick my neck out again.”
“Why not?”
“This French detective that Dodo—”
“You told me.” He looked at his watch. “It would seem to indicate that there’s a second ‘undisclosed principal’ making inquiries. But I have a meeting.”
He went out leaving Fish Finlay standing there much the way he was sitting now in the stalled truck, the problem that seemed simple on the face of it complicated by a feeling of uneasiness he could not define. He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five . . . late to drop in on anybody in the mint julep belt in the rig he was in. He was aware suddenly that he was in honest fact procrastinating and had been all day. He could have got half as many azaleas and had plenty of time to get to Dawn Hill Farm earlier, if he’d wanted to.
“You don’t want to let Dodo down . . . but you don’t want to force the kid to go to Newport. Make up your mind, Finlay.”
It was ten to one he’d passed the green and white mailbox without seeing it for the simple reason he didn’t want to see it. He started the truck. He’d give the rolling landscape one more roll and the empty road two more curves, and then backtrack. It was around the second curve that he saw the boy perched on the white culvert down in the hollow. He rattled down, braked the truck, leaned over to ask the way to Dawn Hill Farm, and saw it was not a boy. It was a girl in a white shirt and green jodhpurs, her green jacket and black velvet cap in a dusty heap on the road at her feet, and it was about as miserable and dejected a little figure as Fish Finlay had ever seen.
He grinned, looking across the road up to the open field.
“Lost a horse, sis?”
Then he braked the truck sharply. He couldn’t see the kid’s face, just the top of her dark tousled head, but her shirt was badly torn and her fists clenched tight.
“You’re not hurt?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t have a horse.” Her voice was strained, as tight as her fists. She raised her head then and Fish saw her face.
A feather of gold dropped from the wing of an angel there in the dusk. His hand stopped motionless on the door.
She wasn’t a kid. She was a girl, or maybe not a girl but a dream half-dreamed, only seeming real there in the golden dusk . . . the heart-shaped face, moon pale, the wide-set stricken eyes, dark gray-green under thick glossy brows and long black curling lashes, full lips with no lipstick to hide their pallor, nothing to hide the intense unhappiness that shot like a poignant arrow through the futile armor of Fish Finlay’s own unhappy heart.
She got up from the culvert and he saw her slim lovely body, high young breasts, girl and lost dream melted into one, as she stood looking at him for a moment of relief as poignant as her distress, and then picked up her jacket and cap and came over to the truck.
“Will you take me up the road as far as you’re going, please?” she asked. She brushed off her torn shirt sleeve. “I came through the woods, that’s why I’m such a mess. Some people dropped me, but they’ve gone. And I’ve got to get away.” She looked at the load of shrubs in the back of the truck. “Unless you’re delivering those around here? I could wait if you’d come back. . . .”
Fish Finlay pulled himself sharply out of his trance-shock.
“Sure,” he said. “Hop in.”
“Oh, good!” She ran around the front of the truck, yanked the door open before he could reach over to open it for her, climbed in and slammed it shut, an old hand at battered trucks.
“I’m so glad.” She sank down in the broken springs and skinned her hair back. “I didn’t know whatever I was going to do.”
“Where do you want to go?” He knew he sounded churlish, but he couldn’t help it.
“Westminster. About ten miles. Where are you going?”
“New Jersey.”
“Oh, good. It’s right on your road, this way.”
She glanced at his earth-stained paratrooper boots and back at the plants.
“Those are azaleas, aren’t they?”
“Right,” he said, trying to start the damned engine again, with another hill to climb. She was waiting, taut till it started, and when she didn’t relax, then he knew it was something else she was waiting for, as the truck made the grade around a steep bank of honeysuckle, dogwood above it. She turned her head painfully, looking across in front of him.
“Our house is up there, that’s our lane. Oh, watch it, the frost boils are awful.”
“Sorry.” Finlay steadied the truck. It wasn’t the frost boils. It was the green and white mailbox at the mouth of the lane. White with green stenciled block letters. Dawn Hill Farm. But it couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. There must be another house up the Dawn Hill lane.
She was silent for a while, lost in her own unhappiness again, before she roused herself.
“Are you a gardener?” she asked. “I don’t mean that. Gardeners are all so old. But do you work for one?”
“Like a dog,” Fish said.
She glanced at him again. “Or maybe you’re like my grandfather. He was a . . . a horticulturalist. But probably not, he was supposed to be crazy. My mother says so. He just disappeared one day.”
Finlay kept the truck steady. There might be another house on the Dawn Hill Road. There couldn’t be another girl living on it who had a crazy disappearing horticulturalist grandfather. Snap out of it, brother. It never was, it could never be. It was just an error in the golden dusk.
“My stepmother doesn’t think so.” Her voice was unsteady for a moment. “She thinks he just got sick of everything. But she loves gardens. My mother hates them. She says old men plant trees, young men dream dreams. But you plant trees, don’t you, or shrubs, anyway?”
“Or don’t I dream dreams? Is that what you mean?”
“Sort of, I guess.”
The maimed shadow of an old smile limped across Fish Finlay’s homely face, rekindling the memory of far-off unhappy things that for one enchanted moment back there on the empty road he’d forgotten, and that the shock of her being Jennifer Linton had brought painfully back to him. That there’d been a time when dreams were his to dream, back when he didn’t know an azalea from a privet hedge, and the brightest of them all had been another girl, a golden girl with amber eyes. And what he’d never told anybody, that it wasn’t because he’d been an Ivy League end that he couldn’t take his leg in his stride and had holed in, an old man planting trees. It was