“Mom . . . I need to tell somebody . . .”
“Robbie, for heaven’s sake, don’t bother me now. I’m going to have to shorten that dress myself, obviously, unless I can get Aunt Grace to do it. Is she still here?”
“She’s upstairs,” Teddi volunteered, coming through the back of the house with a loaded tray.
“Where are you going with the refreshments?”
“For Darcy and Aunt Grace and me. Darcy says we won’t have time to sit down for lunch.”
The doorbell rang.
“Robbie, see who . . . Wally, where are you going?”
“I have to go see French. It’s important, Marge; it can’t wait until Monday. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“What about the champagne? It has to be iced down . . .”
“Maybe you can find someone else to do it. Otherwise, I’ll do it when I get back. Don’t worry, I can pick it up any time up to midnight, honey. Rob, stay out of trouble and help your mother a little bit, will you?”
The doorbell rang again.
Mr. Mallory opened the door. “Oh, hi, Derek. Go on in, I’m just leaving. See you later.”
Derek stood uncertainly just inside the doorway. “Mrs. Mallory?”
“Hello, Derek.” Rob could see it when she remembered that his aunt had just died; the expression that crossed her face was a mixture of sympathy and reluctance to be the one to break the news.
“I thought maybe there was something I could do to help . . . run errands, or something.”
“Derek . . . I appreciate the offer, and there are things . . . but maybe you’d ought to go home. The police . . . I mean, I think they’ll have notified your mother by now, and . . .”
Derek stared at her. “The police? What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t heard about your aunt, then. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be the one to . . .”
Teddi, coming back down the stairs, paused on the bottom step. “I forgot the salt. Derek, haven’t you had the radio on or anything? They just announced it on the radio.”
“Announced what?” Derek’s eyes swept across all their faces, evaluating what he saw there. “Something’s happened to Aunt Bea?”
“She’s dead, Derek.” Teddi descended the final step. “She fell out the window, and she’s dead.”
“From falling out her own window?” Derek asked.
“She was wearing those binoculars, and the strap caught on the limb of the cherry tree.”
Derek swallowed. “She . . . hanged herself?”
“I guess so. Anyway, she’s dead. The police and the ambulance took her away. Won’t your mother need you at home, then? Will she be terribly upset?”
“She’ll be in hysterics,” Derek allowed. “Which means it’s no place for me to be. Dad’s home, he’s not working today. Let him handle mother. I’d rather run errands than cope with that, if there’s something I can do to make myself useful.”
“Well, if you think it won’t upset your family more . . .” Mrs. Mallory hesitated.
“I’d rather run errands,” Derek repeated firmly.
“Well, Wally was supposed to pick up the champagne this afternoon. From Bullocks. There’s room for part of it in the refrigerator at the Country Club, but the rest will have to be iced. We’ve got the cans, but someone has to pick up the ice, too.”
“I’ll be glad to do that for you, Mrs. Mallory.” There were sounds overhead and Derek glanced up, no doubt hoping for a look at Darcy, but it was only Aunt Grace.
“Marge, that dress will have to be taken up about three inches to fit this girl. You want me to do it?” Aunt Grace asked, leaning over the railing.
“Yes, would you? That would be a tremendous help. Here, Derek, I have the check written out to pay for the champagne, and I’ll find some cash for the ice . . . oh, here’s the key to get into the reception hall . . . it’s for the back door.”
Derek looked at Rob. “You want to come along and help, sport?”
Rob licked his lips. “I need to talk to Mom for a minute, first.”
“Robbie, I don’t have time to talk to you. Go on, you can help Derek handle the champagne. And while I think of it, did you get those spiders out of the living room?”
“No, not yet. I’ll put them on the back porch.”
His mother’s voice was firm. “You get them completely out of the house, the way I told you. I don’t want anyone coming across a jar full of spiders and being startled into a fit or something.”
“But somebody might take them if I leave them around outside,” Rob pointed out reasonably.
“I think that is most unlikely. Go on, help Derek or do something to make yourself useful.”
He felt a slight stirring of resentment at the lack of sympathy in her tone. He didn’t want to go with Derek. Derek was perfectly capable of hauling champagne by himself, Rob thought. He wanted to talk to someone . . . maybe Teddi would listen. Teddi usually listened, better than the rest of them.
“Oh. Well, all right, whatever you say.” Derek hesitated, as if reluctant to leave. “What happened, exactly, about Aunt Bea? How did she come to fall out the window?”
“She was pushed,” Rob said, and saw no change of expression in Derek’s face.
“Oh, come on, Rob, that’s not a thing to joke about.”
“I’m not joking. I saw her.”
“You saw someone push her out the window?” Derek was juggling keys, money, and the check, unbelieving. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know. All I saw was his hands.”
“A man? You saw a man’s hands? What did they look like?”
With a growing sense of urgency, Rob tried to remember exactly how the hands had looked.
“I don’t know. I only saw them for a minute . . . more like seconds, really, I guess. They were just . . . a man’s hands!” He looked at Derek helplessly, shrugging.
“How did you know they were a man’s hands? As opposed to a woman’s?”
Derek wasn’t the one he would have chosen to tell, but at least he was listening, more than anyone had done so far. Encouraged, Rob tried to be specific. “They were . . . too big to be a woman’s. They were big, way bigger than mine.” He spread his own fingers and stared at them for a minute, trying to see those other hands.
“Did they have hair all over them, or what? Dark hair, maybe?”
Rob searched his mind. “Not that I remember. No more than anybody’s . . . Dad’s, or yours, or . . .” A shadow loomed on the other side of the screen, and he looked that way. “. . . or Max’s. Just hands.”
Max saw him looking and opened the door for himself. “It’s all right if I just walk in, isn’t it? Your mother looks like she’s ready to scream every time the doorbell or the phone rings, so I hate to use them. Hello, Derek.”
“Rob’s been telling me something interesting. He says somebody pushed Aunt Bea out her window.”
Max shook his head. “Honest to God, Rob, you’ve got a macabre sense of humor. You really have, kid. Where’s Teddi?”
“Upstairs. What’s macabre?”
“He means you aren’t funny,” Derek told him. “Listen, you coming with me after the champagne, or not?”
“No. You go on.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be interested, Max? In hauling the champagne over to the Country Club and icing it down? Mr. Mallory had to go somewhere.”
Max shook his head. “No thanks, man. I’m hoping Teddi can cut loose from this madhouse sometime so we can get out for a few hours before the rehearsal. Is it safe to go up there, Rob?”
“I hate to guess, these days,” Rob said. It was no use trying to tell anything to these two jerks. Maybe it wasn’t really their fault, because he had told them some whoppers in the past. For the first time he could see the point to that stupid story about the boy wh
o cried wolf. He’d never told them he’d seen anybody murdered before, though.
Max hesitated, looking up the stairs. “Hey, Teddi! You up there?”
She appeared on the upper landing, clad in a pale blue, full-skirted long dress. One of the bridesmaids’ dresses, Rob knew. She looked quite un-Teddi-ish, even to Rob, with her hair caught back with a blue ribbon and a touch of lipstick on her mouth.
Max pursed his lips in a long drawn-out wolf whistle. “Hey, come on down, loverly, and let’s see you!”
“No, I’m afraid to try the stairs in this. Darcy’d kill me if I stepped on the hem and tore it or broke my neck falling. But it’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“You’re pretty,” Max said and there was a different note in his voice. Rob recognized it with regret. Yep, old Darcy was moving on, but Teddi was going to take up where Darcy left off, with all the guys in town.
Teddi showed her dimples. “Wait a minute until I get it off, and I’ll be down.”
“Okay.” Max turned to look at Derek. “I thought you were running off somewhere.”
Still Derek hesitated. “I am. Only I thought it would be a help to have another pair of hands. I think I’m handling something like ten cases of champagne, if I heard Mr. Mallory right.”
“Well, these hands are going to be otherwise engaged. Thanks for the invitation.” Max put his hands in his pants pockets and walked into the living room, switching on the TV. Derek looked at Rob, who shook his head.
“See you later, Derek.”
Derek muttered something under his breath, letting himself out the front door. It was quiet when he had gone. Rob licked his lips and made one more effort.
“Max . . . he made it sound funny, but it wasn’t. It was true.”
There was a cartoon show on the screen. Max flipped it off and straightened up. “What was true?”
“That I saw somebody push Mrs. Calloway . . .”
Max shook his head. “I’d have been tempted to push her myself. I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but who can be sorry that old biddy has cashed in? No matter who moves into that house next door, it’s got to be an improvement over her.”
Momentarily diverted, Rob asked, “You think someone else will move in?”
“Well, not right away. They’ll have to read her will, and it’ll go through probate and all that jazz, and maybe it’ll belong to Derek’s mother, partly, anyway. Did she have any other relatives? They won’t want it themselves, so they’ll either rent it or sell it, more than likely. So somebody will live in it eventually.”
“Max, would it be murder if somebody pushed her?”
Max regarded him casually. “Rob, you watch too much of the wrong kind of TV. Or maybe that’s the only kind there is.”
“No, I mean it. Would it be murder, if he didn’t really intend to kill her? I mean, he couldn’t have known the strap on the binoculars would catch on the tree, but you couldn’t murder anybody by pushing them out a first floor window, could you?”
“If it was old Mrs. Calloway, I’d say the entire neighborhood would express its gratitude. Hey, you look good in ordinary clothes, too, girl.”
It was no use. He couldn’t get through to Max. He hadn’t gotten very close even before Teddi showed up. There was no sense trying now; Max wasn’t listening.
Teddi looked different, somehow, even back in her normal jeans and open-necked shirt.
“I don’t dare go away,” she told Max. “If Mom needs me, I have to be on call.”
“I think there’s a load of stuff to take over to the reception hall. Champagne glasses and paper plates and stuff like that. Can I tell Mom your car’s available?”
“If you go along with the glasses and the paper plates,” Max conceded. “So long, sport. Don’t watch any more TV; it’s bad for you.”
And they were gone, and he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Teddi, either. Ordinarily, he’d have been sure Teddi would listen. But after seeing her just now, the way she was turning on the sparkle for old Max, Rob thought in discouragement, he wasn’t sure of anything.
Seven
He fixed himself something to eat and fed Sonny, whose breakfast had been lost in the shuffle. The cat ate greedily, crouched over the plastic dish on the kitchen floor.
He wondered how his father was coming with Mr. French, if he’d managed to calm him down. Mr. French must have discovered his money was missing. Rob wondered, idly, what his Uncle Ray had done with twelve hundred dollars. It seemed like an awful lot of money.
But mostly he wondered how he was ever going to convince anyone that he wasn’t kidding about Mrs. Calloway being pushed out the window. He wasn’t sure how important it was, but it seemed as if someone ought to know, someone beside himself.
After one salami sandwich and one tuna fish one, which he grudgingly shared with Sonny, he dished up some ice cream and poured chocolate syrup over it, adding a sliced banana as an afterthought, and carried it out onto the back steps. The more he thought about it, the more interesting it was.
Who had the man been, in there with Mrs. Calloway? She almost never had company. She was Derek’s great-aunt, but Derek hadn’t liked her any better than anybody else did, and he only went there when his mother made him deliver something. Derek’s mother never came at all.
The neighbors, all of them, hated her. Because the Mallorys lived next door, they had more trouble with her than the others; but there wasn’t a family within two blocks in each direction that hadn’t had some problem with her at one time or another. She was always calling the police on somebody; not that the cops came, usually, but sometimes they would. They’d stand on the curb and explain that the old lady was complaining about whatever it was, and they’d roll their eyes toward her house, and ask if people wouldn’t try to stay away from her.
Everybody did try, really. Only it was hard to know how to stop a cat from walking across her precious grass, or the wind from blowing a garbage can lid into her yard, or to keep the sounds down when she wanted to sleep in the middle of the day. Three different times she’d called the police to arrest Mr. Dunbarton for disturbing the peace when he ran his power saw in the afternoon.
Once she went around yelling and making threats when Mrs. Bond, whose property faced Mrs. Calloway’s across the alley, sprayed some sort of insecticide and it drifted across the way and killed some of Mrs. Calloway’s bugs. She said it would kill the birds, too. Boy, that had been a battle and a half!
He ate the ice cream slowly; it was good. Sonny had come with him and was squatting on the bottom step against one foot.
So who was it, then, in the house with the old lady just before she died?
Pretty soon, if they all kept making fun of him, he’d begin to think himself that he’d imagined it.
He knew he hadn’t, though. There had been a man in there, and he’d been angry enough to push the old woman out the window.
She’d said something, just before she fell, Rob remembered. What was it? He paused, trying to pin it in his mind.
She’d looked at the cherry pits and said something about a nasty little boy . . . meaning him, of course. And then she’d said . . . “You must be out of your mind to think I’d agree to any such thing.”
He thought about that, unable to imagine what that remark had been in reply to. Then he backed up his memory just a bit further, to when she had first come to the window.
“I will not,” she had said, and her voice had been hard and stubborn. The way it usually was.
Whoever he was in there, he’d wanted her to do something. Something she refused to do, and she made the man so angry he’d shoved her. Not thinking to kill her, probably, but just so mad he couldn’t help himself.
It wasn’t hard to imagine someone being that mad at her. What was hard was thinking of anyone who’d go into her house and ask her for anything.
He
scraped the last of the ice cream out of the bottom of his dish and licked off his lips. He got up to take the dish back into the house and heard the telephone ringing. At the same time, the doorbell sounded.
His mother stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking upset.
“Robbie, go see who’s at the door. I’ll get the phone. Where’s Teddi, do you know?”
“She went with old Max, to take some stuff over to the Country Club.”
“Oh. I’m coming, I’m coming!” she said to the phone, and reluctantly Rob moved toward the front door. Behind him he heard his mother’s quick “Hello?” and then her low wail of protest. “Oh, Wally! Why? What for? . . . Well, I suppose if you have to . . . You’ll be here for dinner, won’t you? Don’t forget rehearsal is at seven thirty, and Darcy’s counting on you for that . . .”
From that he gathered that his father wasn’t going to be right home, then. What had Mr. French decided? Were they sending the police after Uncle Ray? He wondered if they’d go with their sirens screaming and arrest him and then the police would come and tell his mother her brother was in jail . . .
No, he decided, scuffing his feet through the shag carpeting, they wouldn’t tell her. His grandmother, maybe, because Ray lived with her. Or would they tell anybody at all? Wasn’t that what the one phone call you were allowed was for? So you could notify whoever you wanted?
He guessed his father would try to find Uncle Ray before the police did. That was supposed to be better, wasn’t it, if you turned yourself in? He wondered, if Uncle Ray resisted arrest, if they’d shoot him. He hoped not. His mother would be very upset, even if it didn’t spoil the wedding.
There was a delivery man at the door. He thrust a clipboard at Rob. “Sign here, please. Line twelve.”
Rob signed. “What is it?”
“Wedding presents, I guess. Somebody getting married?”
“My sister.”
The delivery man nodded. “Where you want me to put this stuff? There’s quite a bit of it.”
The only downstairs bedroom had been filling with gifts over the past weeks. Rob showed him where it was, and the man carried in box after box. Darcy peered over the stair railing.