Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Hadley himself opened the door to the little house in Potbelly Lane. “Hello, gentlemen!” he said welcomingly. “Please come in, please. I cannot tell you how happy you have made me with your conclusions, Mr. Lenox. Even now I am restoring some of the collection I had to leave here to their superb little display cases. Would you like to see them, I wonder?”

They then passed the most stultifying forty seconds of Lenox’s life, pretending to be fascinated by what looked like a piece of common granite, but which Hadley assured them was a rare and invaluable example of something-or-other-in-Latin.

“Mr. Hadley,” said Lenox as soon as he decently could, “I wonder whether we could have a word with Mrs. Watson?”

“Mrs. Watson? Of course! She’s in the kitchen. You know the way, if you would like to speak to her privately.”

“That would be ideal — thank you so much.” Seeing from Hadley’s face that he had been abrupt, he added, “I hope we may hear more about your collection at a moment when our time is more our own. You understand, of course.”

Mollified, the insurance salesman nodded. “I do, gentlemen, indeed I do.”

The charwoman was polishing a silver teapot. Lenox and Edmund greeted her and asked whether they might have a moment of conversation, to which she assented.

Not altogether happily, Lenox noted. The first question he asked was whether she had had any contact with Mr. Stevens in her life.

“Only to see at the market, sir,” she answered, “or I suppose I must have seen him about the hustings, election time.”

“Has your sister told you anything about him? About interacting with him at the town hall?”

She shook her head. “She goes in after everyone’s gone for the evening, you know.”

“And yet Stevens worked long hours sometimes.” Without a direct question to answer, she looked unsure of how to reply, and Lenox forged on. “Are you close with Mr. Calloway?”

Her face took on a look of pity. “We tried to be family to him, after my sister died, poor Cat. She was a ray of light, that one.”

“He rejected your friendship?”

“For a year or two he would sit down to a glass of wine with us, right enough. But in the end he lost his mind, did Calloway. Never had a very firm grip on it to start with, mind.”

“Do you know of any reason he would attack Stevens?”

“I’ve been puzzling over that all morning myself,” she said.

“Could it have been for you, or for your sister?”

She laughed with disbelief. “For us? He wouldn’t open the door of his ’ouse for us.”

After this response, Lenox asked her to look over the list of Stevens’s secretaries. It became clear very quickly that she couldn’t read, however — and equally clear that she would stand there till the final battle between good and evil on the day of judgment rather than admit it — so Lenox took the list back and read her the names.

She knew all of them; her face screwed up in anger and pity at the name Ainsworth. But she didn’t have anything particularly useful to say. She wasn’t related to any of them.

Lenox paused. “This is a small town, Mrs. Watson,” he said, “so I will come out with it plain. You are connected to Mr. Stevens and Mr. Calloway in a dozen different ways. Both you and your sister, in our conversations, seem to me not to have a great affection for the mayor. The mayor — who has been attacked. I’d feel more comfortable if I knew why.”

This gambit of openness, Lenox saw almost as soon as he started speaking, was destined to fail utterly. A pitiless blankness descended on the maid’s features. “Don’t have any feeling about him one way nor the other, sir,” she said. “I’m sure I wish him quite recovered.”

The repudiation in her voice was absolute. By asking about her sons, Edmund managed to bring her around to a better humor before they left, but a last casual question about Stevens from Charles elicited no further information.

Peculiar, peculiar.

They were standing out on Potbelly Lane in the brisk air a few moments later, looking up and down the cobblestoned street. The sky was white, wan, a net of birds rising from a field and turning across it as they looked toward the countryside. Lenox sighed.

“What now?” asked Edmund.

Lenox stood still for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “Let’s walk back to the house. I would like to sit alone with a pot of tea and think for a few hours.”

“Why? Do you have an idea of who did it?”

Lenox shook his head. “No. And yet I’m sure that I also know exactly who did it, if I can merely piece all of the clues together and realize that I know it! Something … something about the whole business … something about Miss Snow and Mrs. Watson … and Miss Harville…”

Edmund waited patiently after he trailed off, and remained mostly silent as they walked across the town and out across the field toward Lenox House, blessedly. Lenox was deep in thought. Back at the house he gave quick, distracted kisses to Sophia and Lady Jane, said hello to Toto and George, and then, mumbling his excuses, made immediately for his father’s old chess room.

Charles and Edmund’s father had been a devoted chess player; his fiercest lifelong opponent had been an illiterate farmer named Paxton, who had come up to this room every few evenings for thirty years. It was an odd, very small chamber on the second story, barely more than a closet, with just space enough for two chairs and a tiny table, inlaid with a chessboard — but it had a vast window and, sitting near the corner of the house, gave a long and beautiful view of the dipping and rising green countryside.

Lenox sat down in the chair closer to the door, with the view. Edmund had left the room exactly as their father had had it, though he wasn’t a chess player himself. After a few minutes Waller came up with the pot of strong tea that Lenox had asked for and set it down. Lenox stood up and cracked the window, which let in a bracing coolness. Then he poured himself a cup of tea, added sugar and milk to it — and set about considering the case.

There were many aspects of it that he pondered. A few kept returning to him.

Adelaide Snow, for instance, saying I would recall seeing Mad — seeing Mr. Calloway.

Calloway’s behavior; and the behavior, too, of both his sisters-in-law.

Those library books.

That terrible drawing on the steps to Hadley’s house; on the wall of Stevens’s office.

Paxton had been a superior player — Lenox’s father would have been lucky to get three out of ten games from him — and as Lenox fiddled with the chess pieces, thinking, he felt a burst of love and fondness for his father, who would come downstairs with his rueful smile and see Paxton off, promising his revenge next time. They’d been friends, though they’d spent most of their lives in such different ways, Lenox’s father with the great men of the land, Paxton amid turnips and pigs.

Now they were both gone. How was it possible? It was amazing how real the dead could seem, as if they might walk in from the next room. Where had they gone? When would they come back? Why shouldn’t they sit at this table again, each smoking, Charles’s father in his red evening jacket, Paxton in his heavy brown cardigan, pondering their respective strategies? It was so strange. When his father had died, a great comfort had gone out of life, and being back here made him see that, and made him pity James and Teddy for losing their mother. To have Jane was an enormous consolation, but a parent — while one’s parents were alive, if they were decent parents, one was always at least in some small part of one’s self protected from life, from fear, from reality.

Lenox thought of Molly, and then of the line, the greatest line written by an Englishman between Chaucer and Shakespeare: O death, thou comest when I least expected thee.

He made his way through cup after cup of tea, sitting there in silence, staring into the countryside. It grew dimmer and then dark. The hours passed.

When at last he stood up, it wasn’t with a snap of recognition, or a revelation — but he had it. He was suddenly extremely tired.

He went downstairs, where his brother, Toto, and Jane were in the long drawing room, chatting amiably. “Charles!” said Jane. “How are you?”

“Oh, fine, thank you,” he said, smiling. “Edmund, do you think you might send word asking Mickelson if we could borrow his dog for the day?”

“Sandy? She’s not a scenting dog.”

“Yes, Sandy, if you wouldn’t mind. Unless Stevens steps to it, I suspect it’s that dog who will tell us the truth at last.”