Murder is Grim. Samuel Rogers
you show Kate is her own room. Felix took up her bags. And then she may doubtless want to be left in peace to unpack.’
‘I’d love to have June help me unpack’, said Kate. ‘That is, if she wants to.’
‘You bet I want to’, June said. ‘I’m crazy to see your clothes. You always had such pretty clothes.’
‘Well then, my little dears,’ Mr. Gladstone said, making only a token gesture as if to rise from his chair, ‘I’ll be seeing you before dinner.’
As the two girls walked upstairs side by side, Bobbie climbed ahead of them, putting first her two front feet on each step above her and then bringing up her hindquarters with a little bounce and jerk that made Kate think of a mechanical rabbit. At the top of the stairs they turned to the left along a pleasant hall, with green and white straw matting on the floor, and then turned to the right into another wing which led toward the back of the house.
Presently they reached the end of the corridor. ‘Here we are’, June said. ‘Your room will be this one straight ahead, and mine is here to the left. They’re next to each other.’
Kate pushed eagerly through the door into her room, and then couldn’t help smiling because she loved it so. On the floor there was the same green and white matting, whose damp smell reminded her of Matunuck. The chintz curtains had a pattern of cornflowers and poppies, and near the bed stood a luxurious chaise-longue.
‘It’s not so big,’ June said, ‘but I’ve always liked this room. I used to wish it was mine, but I couldn’t have it because it was used as a guest room. Do you like it, Kate?’
‘I just love it!’ Kate said. ‘I can’t imagine a nicer room.’
She walked gaily across to one of the windows. ‘And what a pretty view!’ she exclaimed. ‘It looks so quaint and peaceful.’
An oblong of turf, like a bowling green, stretched smoothly to a little house of white brick, with mossy red tiles and blue shutters like the main building; but this was as miniature and dainty as a cottage in a fairy tale. Behind it a wall of trees rose so steeply that she had to lean out of the window to look up at the sky. And from the little house she could hear the sound of a violin.
‘I suppose that’s Mr. – I suppose that’s Jo’, she said. ‘Felix told me about him.’
‘Yes, that’s Jo’, June said, and if Felix’s tone had suggested disapproval, June’s expressed real dislike. ‘He lives out there so his practising won’t disturb us, but sometimes when he plays late at night it keeps me awake. Mavis, that’s mother, accompanies him; she plays pretty well; but lately it’s been mostly Clotilde. She plays too.’
Kate smiled. ‘You don’t think much of him, do you?’ she said. ‘Felix didn’t seem to either, not that he wasn’t very polite. What’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with him really,’ June said after a minute, ‘except that he’s a sponge. I don’t blame him so much. He’s no worse than the rest of them.’ And then her face darkened into a scowl, the kind of scowl Kate remembered when girls at school had bothered to tease her. ‘It’s just that it’s all so nasty. Everything’s nasty around here. It’s always been that way ever since I can remember. It’s not fair for things to be so nasty!’
Her face suddenly lightened, and she looked with the new intensity of her glance directly at Kate. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted you to come’, she said. ‘Because you won’t mind it, I guess. It’s not your family.’
At that moment Kate was so sorry for her that she felt like putting her arms around her and kissing her, but it might be just as well not to start a precedent. She wondered if she were referring to any special things. Whatever they were, she was perhaps exaggerating.
‘We can treat everything like an adventure’, she said. ‘And we won’t have to bother with people when we don’t want to.’
‘But Kate’, June went on after a minute, in a new tone of voice, no longer passionate but rather stilted and hesitant. ‘That’s not the only reason I’m glad you’ve come. That’s not the main reason.’
‘What is it?’ Kate asked curiously.
When June spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. ‘The main reason is that I’m afraid.’
Kate felt a crawling sensation inside her stomach, as if the roller coaster had begun its downward plunge, but she tried to smile incredulously. ‘Afraid!’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you afraid of?’
‘You mustn’t laugh’, June said. ‘It’s not my imagination. Listen, Kate. A week ago I was walking with Bobbie on the river bluffs. I walk around here a lot. I always have. That hill out there behind the little house is the start of a bluff. It rises for just a few hundred yards, getting steeper and steeper, and then there are rocks, and the bluff drops almost straight down into the river. It’s quite wild all along the shore. The bluffs go on for miles, and there are lots of little nooks and caves. I guess nobody knows them all, unless it’s Professor Hatfield. Felix said you met him on the way out here. Well, on one of the bluffs about a mile down the river from here, Bobbie started barking and barking. I thought it was at some animal so I began to explore. Over the crest in a kind of steep place I found a little cave I’d never noticed, because a juniper tree spread out from the bank right smack above it. It was sort of hard to get down, but I’m a pretty good climber, and inside there was an old blanket and some whisky bottles and an electric torch and a kind of tin lunch box that I didn’t look into. Bobbie was still yelping on top of the bluff, because she couldn’t get down, and all at once I had the most awful creepy feeling that someone was near. I don’t think I heard anyone. I didn’t see anyone. It was just a feeling, but it was so awful I could hardly climb back around the juniper.’
‘I can imagine that’, Kate exclaimed. ‘I’d have never dared climb down in the first place. I suppose it was just some camper. Or perhaps a hunter, if anything’s in season.’
‘I don’t think it was an ordinary camper’, June said.
‘But why not?’ Kate asked. It almost scared her to feel such relief that June’s fear was irrational: what had she been expecting anyway?
‘Wait a minute’, June said. ‘I’ll be right back.’ And she hurried out of the room.
Kate wouldn’t have believed how empty June’s absence would make it seem. Even Bobbie lying beside the bed, her slim hind legs spread backward like a frog’s, was scarcely a consolation. She could still hear the violin, but it only increased the silence of everything else. That wall of trees seemed now rather suffocating, as if it shut out the natural air and light. Thank heaven, at least, that Ralph was here! She gave a faint start as June came back into the room, just as she had started several hours ago (it seemed like an entirely different day) when Felix had knocked at her door back in town.
Then as June handed her a letter, her heart began to beat so violently that it was almost an agony to force herself to smile. Because she recognized that envelope, that printing.
‘It came in the mail just two days later’, June said. ‘That was five days ago.’
Kate felt that she could not trust her voice. She took out the paper, and there printed in the same red crayon – blood-red it looked to her now – she saw the following message:
IF YOU GO ON POKING YOUR NOSE INTO THINGS, YOU’LL BE SORRY. AND I MEAN SORRY!
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