Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

Now here was presage-fulfillment number one, the crucifix. Score openers for Gerard, she thought. She hoped the other things foretold proved as harmless. Still, as she took the winding, tree-framed turns that led to the old house itself, Eleanor continued to feel a faint stiffness in the hairs at the nape of her neck. It had been, for all of its inanity, an unnerving experience...

She emerged from the close binding of pines and birches into the large clearing at the far end of which Lakeside stood, its upper windows still lit with bright orange flame by the sunset. Actually, the house was an architectural Reign of Terror monstrosity dating from a century ago.

If it was cool in the summer heat, it was almost impossible to keep warm in wintertime. Its pale brown sandstone construction was lined with heavy wainscotting and brocaded wallpapers of an era mercifully long gone. Its many hallways, niches, oriels and windowseats, like its several pantries, were a monument to wasted space.

Yet, lit by the setting sun, it looked as properly in place as if it were a mezzotint structure of the Italian lake district in the brief twin flames of Shelley and Byron. Slowing her approach, Eleanor noted that the lawns were emerald green and smooth, the landscaped trees and hedges neatly pruned, the asters and other autumn blooms in their carefully nurtured beds as bright and orderly as greenhouse blossoms.

Although Eleanor had given virtually no notice of her arrival, she derived a definite impression that she had been expected and her arrival desired for months — although this was her first visit in more than four years.

The old house was in pie-á-la-mode order, the massive dining room silver brightly polished, the fine old Chinese and Persian rugs more lustrous than Eleanor remembered, the hundreds of windowpanes shining and spotless, the as-valuable-as-it-was-venerable furniture without a trace of the threadbare.

The unpleasant aftertaste of Eleanor’s tragic widowhood had caused her to forget the charms of the Herrick manor. It had caused her to forget the charm of the persons who served it as well...

The Patons were older of course wasn’t everybody? she thought with unseemly irreverence as Henry answered her ring at the doorbell. But they carried their years well and their warmth of greeting almost made Eleanor forget how horrid her life with Alan Herrick, Junior, had become before the storm driven night of disaster she had not the slightest wish to remember.

Henry Paton, old-fashioned Yankee straight-razor in shape and carriage, did not wear a butler’s uniform — yet in his short dark jacket and close-fitting grey slacks he somehow, perhaps through his unshakable inner dignity, conveyed the impression of wearing livery.

His wife, Verna, when she appeared beaming from the nether regions of the old mansion to greet her former chatelaine, was spotless and roly poly in starched white, the gold rims of her pince nez gleaming with hospitality. And little Angela, whom Eleanor remembered as a leggy, coltish sub-teenager, was still leggy but no longer coltish, a reserved, grey-eyed off-pretty young woman who performed her duties in assistance of her parents’ labors with effortless smoothness that verged on grace.

Eleanor’s father-in-law mixed the inevitable drinks as usual with the flair that had first attracted Eleanor. Her own upbringing had been straightforward upper-case New England, comfortable, disciplined, prosperous but never extravagant. If her father had a way with hot buttered rums, he could not tell one brand of champagne from another, while vintage remained as mysterious as Aramaic or Sanskrit.

Eleanor had attended good schools tailored to others like herself, had been expected to continue her studies (for what? she often wondered) in one of the Seven Sisters — and would have but for an August visit to a schoolmate whose family summered in Bar Harbor. There she had met and fallen in love with Alan Herrick, Junior.

It was her introduction to a new and fascinating world, a world where charm and beauty and the art of being interestingly attractive, as well as rich, were the gods at whose scented feet its devotees worshipped.

In Eleanor’s world, it was considered a major disgrace for a boy to flunk out of school or college. Alan had not merely flunked out of school — he had been fired for a series of hair-brained naughtinesses with girls and drink and explosive practical jokes from a full spectrum of America’s most expensive private educational institutions.

Yet, instead of feeling shame, he laughed at the experiences — as did his friends — and no one seemed to hold him in disrespect. Career? He wanted none but merely money to indulge his way of life — through an unending series of speculative deals, most of which, Eleanor suspected, would not have met the approval of the solemn faced State Street trustees who handled her own family affairs.

He captured Eleanor’s treasured virginity effortlessly on a moons wept beach, recaptured it as effortlessly two nights later on the Irish linen sheets of a guestroom bed. When he proposed marriage before the week was out, she listened to his proposal with disbelief.

“Why?” she asked him. “What have I left to give you?”

She still did not know the answer. It had not been money — there were scores of young women far richer than she who appeared quite willing to accept him on any terms. Nor could she believe that love had impelled him — love was far too simple an emotion for a young man like Alan Herrick, Junior.

His reply, typically, had been an embrace initiated in soft laughter and concluded with both of them in a condition beyond words. Perhaps, she thought, it had been love, at least in part — or something as near love as an Alan Herrick, Junior, was capable of feeling.

There had been a whirlwind wedding and honeymoon, and then Alan had brought her to Lakeside. There they lived the brief years of their marriage, Alan, Eleanor and Alan’s father, as well as occasional visitors. There they had lived and loved until the night young Alan vanished...

It was a fine old house, Eleanor thought as she moved along the carpeted upstairs hall. As she reached the head of the stairs, she stumbled over something soft and furry that emitted a furious screech. She felt herself falling as the big orange cat darted angrily away, felt herself heading out over the carpeted stairs in what had to be a disastrous crash dive.

Then she was caught by a strong pair of arms, caught and held and gently set down upright, on the top step. A pair of green eyes met hers evenly.

A flat young female voice said, “Careful, Mrs. Herrick. You have to watch your step with animals in the house. You could have had a bad fall.”

Eleanor barely suppressed a shudder. There had been an instant, while the girl held her bodily in mid-air, when Eleanor had thought that instead of saving her, Angela was going to hurl her over the banister to the hardwood floor fifteen feet beneath.

The cold green eyes that looked into hers were unreadable. Eleanor wondered what emotion they masked. Was it malevolence? If it were, she wondered why...

By the time she reached staircase bottom, Angela felt something close to relief. Clara’s Gerard had said nothing about tripping over an orange cat. The fact that he had missed this one took much of the portentiousness out of the scarecrow “crucifix.”

Composing herself, Eleanor went on to join Alan Herrick, Senior.

Seated across the table now from her father-in-law, Eleanor was seized with a sense of timelessness, a feeling that clock and calendar had rolled backward and that she and Alan were once again dining alone during one of his father’s infrequent absences.