Calamity Town Read online

  Ellery was the first man on his feet. Frank Lloyd was the last; the thick neck under his shaggy hair was the color of brick.

  Pat saved the day. ”I must say this is a fine time to come down to dinner, Nora!” she said briskly. ”Why, we’ve finished Ludie’s best lamb. Mr. Smith, Nora.”

  Nora offered him her hand. It felt as fragile and cold as a piece of porcelain.

  “Mother’s told me all about you,” said Nora in a voice that sounded unused.

  “And you’re disappointed. Naturally,” smiled Ellery. He held out a chair.

  “Oh, no! Hello, Judge, Mrs. Martin. Aunt Tabitha . . . Doctor . . . Carter . . . ”

  Frank Lloyd said: “Hullo, Nora,” in gruff tones; he took the chair from Ellery’s hands neither rudely nor politely; he simply took it and held it back for Nora. She turned pink and sat down. Just then Henry Clay marched in with the magnificent mousse, molded in the shape of a book, and everybody began to talk.

  Nora Wright sat with her hands folded, palms up, as if exhausted; her colorless lips were twisted into a smile. Apparently she had dressed with great care, for her candy-striped dinner gown was fresh and perfectly draped, her nails impeccable, and her coiffure without a single stray wine-brown hair. Ellery glimpsed a sudden, rather appalling, vision of this slight bespectacled girl in her bedroom upstairs, fussing with her nails, fussing with her hair, fussing with her attractive gown . . . fussing, fussing, so that everything might be just so . . . fussing so long and so needlessly that she had been an hour late to dinner.

  And now that she had achieved perfection, now that she had made the supreme effort of coming downstairs, she seemed emptied, as if the effort had been too much and not entirely worthwhile. She listened to Ellery’s casual talk with a fixed smile, white face slightly lowered, not touching her mousse or demitasse, murmuring a monosyllable occasionally . . . but not as if she were bored, only as if she were weary beyond sensation.

  And then, as suddenly as she had come in, she said: “Excuse me, please,” and rose. All conversation stopped again.

  Frank Lloyd jumped up and drew her chair back. He devoured her with a huge and clumsy hunger; she smiled at him, and at the others, and floated out . . . her step quickening as she approached the archway from the dining room to the foyer.

  Then she disappeared, and everyone began to talk at once and ask for more coffee.

  Mr. Queen was mentally sifting the evening’s grist as he strolled back to his house in the warm darkness. The leaves of the big elms were talking, there was an oversize cameo moon, and his nose was filled with the scents of Hermione Wright’s flowers.

  But when he saw the small roadster parked by the curb before his house, dark and empty, the sweetness fled. It was simply night, and something was about to happen.

  A gun-metal cloud slipped across the moon, and Mr. Queen made his way along the edge of his lawn on the muffling grass toward the little house. A point of fire took shape on his porch. It was swaying back and forth about waist-high to a standing man.

  “Mr. Smith, I presume?”

  A woman’s contralto. Slightly fuzzed with husk. It had a mocking quality.

  “Hullo!” he called, mounting the porch steps. ”Mind if I turn on the porch light? It’s so beastly dark¯”

  “Please do. I’m as curious to see you as you are to see me.”

  Ellery touched the light switch.

  She was curled up in a corner of the slide-swing blinking at him from behind the streaming veil of her cigarette. The dove suede of her slacks was tight over her thighs; a cashmere sweater molded her breasts boldly. Ellery gathered a full-armed impression of earthiness, overripe, and growing bitter.

  She laughed, a little nervously he thought, and flipped her cigarette over the porch rail into the darkness.

  “You may turn off the light now, Mr. Smith. I’m a fright; and besides, I shouldn’t want to embarrass my family by making them aware I’m in their immediate neighborhood.”

  Ellery obediently switched off the porch light. ”Then you’re Lola Wright.” The one who had eloped and come back divorced. The daughter the Wrights never mentioned.

  “As if you didn’t know!” Lola Wright laughed again, and it turned into a hiccup. ”Excuse me. Seventh hiccup of a seventh Scotch. I’m famous, too, you know. The drinking Wright girl.”

  Ellery chuckled. ”I’ve heard the vile slanders.”

  “I was all prepared to hate your guts, from the kowtowing that’s been going on, but you’re all right. Shake!” The swing creaked, and steps shuffled to the tune of an unsteady laugh, and then the moist heat of her hand warmed his neck as she groped. He gripped her arms to save her from falling.

  “Here,” he said. ”You should have stopped at number six.”

  She placed her palms against his starched shirt and pushed strongly. ”Whoa, Geronimo! The man’ll think li’l Lola’s stinko.” He heard her totter back to the swing, and its creak. ”Well, Mr. Famous Author Smith, and what do you think of us all? Pygmies and giants, sweet and sour, snaggle-toothed and slick-magazine ads¯good material for a book, eh?”

  “Elegant.”

  “You’ve come to the right place.” Lola Wright lit another cigarette; the flame trembled. ”Wrightsville! Gossipy, malicious, intolerant . . . the great American slob. More dirty linen to the square inch of backyard than New York or Marseilles.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” argued Mr. Queen. ”I’ve spent a lot of loose time prowling, and it seems a pretty nice place to me.”

  “Nice!” She laughed. ”Don’t get me started. I was born here. It’s wormy and damp¯a breeding place of nastiness.”

  “Then why,” murmured Mr. Queen, “did you come back to it?”

  The red tip of her cigarette waxed three times in rapid succession. ”None of your business. Like my family?”

  “Immensely. You resemble your sister Patricia. Same physical glow, too.”

  “Only Patty’s young, and my light’s going out.” Lola Wright mused for a moment. ”I suppose you’d have to be polite to an old bag named Wright. Look, Brother Smith. I don’t know why you came to Wrightsville, but if you’re going to be palsy with my kin, you’ll hear a lot about little Lola eventually, and . . . well . . . I don’t give a damn what Wrightsville thinks of me, but an alien . . . that’s different. Good grief! I still have vanity!”

  “I haven’t heard anything about you from your family.”

  “No?” He heard her laugh again. ”I feel like baring my bosom tonight. You’ll hear I drink. True. I learned it from¯I learned it. You’ll hear I’m seen in all the awful places in town, and what’s worse, alone. Imagine! I’m supposed to be ‘fast.’ The truth is I do what I damned please, and all these vultures of women on the Hill, they’ve been tearing at me with their claws!”

  She stopped.

  “How about a drink?” asked Ellery.

  “Not now. I don’t blame my mother. She’s narrow, like the rest of them; her social position is her whole life. But if I’d play according to her rules, she’d still take me back. She’s got spunk, I’ll give her that. Well, I won’t play. It’s my life, and to hell with rules! Understand?” She laughed once more. ”Say you understand. Go on. Say it.”

  “I understand,” Ellery said.

  She was quiet. Then she said: “I’m boring you. Good night.”

  “I want to see you again.”

  “No. Good-bye.”

  Her shoes scraped the invisible porch floor. Ellery turned on the light again. She put up her arm to hide her eyes.

  “Well, then, I’ll see you home, Miss Wright.”

  “Thanks, no. I’m¯”

  She stopped.

  Patricia Wright’s gay voice called from the darkness below: “Ellery? May I come up and have a good-night cigarette with you? Carter’s gone home and I saw your porch light¯” Pat stopped, too.

  The two sisters stared at each other.

  “Hel/o, Lola!” cried Pat. She vaulted up the steps and kissed Lola vigorously.
”Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  Mr. Queen put the light out again very quickly. But he had time to see how Lola clung¯briefly¯to her taller, younger sister.

  “Lay off, Snuffles,” he heard Lola say in a muffled voice. ”You’re mussing my hairdo.”

  “And that’s a fact,” said Pat cheerfully. ”You know, Ellery, this sister of mine is the most attractive girl ever to come out of Wrightsville. And she insists on hiding her light under frumpy old slacks!”

  “You’re a darling, Pats,” said Lola, “but don’t try so hard. It’s no dice, and you know it.”

  Pat said miserably: “Lo dear . . . why don’t you come back?”

  “I think,” remarked Mr. Queen, “I’ll walk down to that hydrangea bush and see how it’s making out.”

  “Don’t,” said Lola. ”I’m going now. I really am.”

  “Lola!” Pat’s voice was damp.

  “You see, Mr. Smith? Snuffles. She was always snuffling as a brat. Pat, now stop it. This is old hat for us two.”

  “I’m all right.” Pat blew her nose in the darkness. ”I’ll drive home with you.”

  “No, Patsy. Night, Mr. Smith.”

  “Good night.”

  “And I’ve changed my mind. Come over and have a drink with me any time you like. Night, Snuffy!”

  And Lola was gone.

  When the last rattle of Lola’s 1932 coupe died, Pat said in a murmur: “Lo lives in a two-room hole down in Low Village, near the Machine Shop. She wouldn’t take alimony from her husband, who was a rat till the day he died, and she won’t accept money from Pop. Those clothes she wears¯six years old. Part of her trousseau. She supports herself by giving piano lessons to Low Village hopefuls at fifty cents a throw.”

  “Pat, why does she stay in Wrightsville? What brought her back after her divorce?”

  “Don’t salmon or elephants or something come back to their birthplace . . . to die? Sometimes I think it’s almost as if Lola’s . . . hiding.” Pat’s silk taffeta rustled suddenly. ”You make me talk and talk. Good night, Ellery.”

  “Night, Pat.”

  Mr. Queen stared into the dark night for a long time.

  Yes, it was taking shape. He’d been lucky. The makings were here, rich and bloody. But the crime¯the crime. Where was it?

  Or had it already occurred?

  Ellery went to bed in Calamity House with a sense of events past, present, and future.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of Sunday, August twenty-fifth, nearly three weeks from the day of Ellery’s arrival in Wrightsville, he was smoking a postprandial cigarette on his porch and enjoying the improbable sunset when Ed Hotchkiss’s taxicab charged up the Hill and squealed to a stop before the Wright house next door.

  A hatless young man jumped out of the cab.

  Mr. Queen felt a sudden agitation and rose for a better view.

  The young man shouted something to Ed Hotchkiss, bounded up the steps, and jabbed at the Wright doorbell.

  Old Ludie opened the door. Ellery saw her fat arm rise as if to ward off a blow. Then Ludie scuttled back out of sight, and the young man dashed after her. The door banged.

  Five minutes later it was yanked open; the young man rushed out, stumbled into the waiting cab, and yelled to be driven away.

  Ellery sat down slowly. It might be. He would soon know. Pat would come flying across the lawn . . . There she was.

  “Ellery! You’ll never guess!”

  “Jim Haight’s come back” said Ellery.

  Pat stared. ”You’re wonderful. Imagine¯after three years! After the way Jim ran out on Nora! I can’t believe it yet. He looks so much older . . . He had to see Nora, he yelled. Where was she? Why didn’t she come down? Yes, he knew what Muth and Pop thought of him, but that could wait. Where was Nora? And all the time he kept shaking his fist in poor Pop’s face and hopping up and down on one foot like a maniac!”

  “What happened then?”

  “I ran upstairs to tell Nora. She went deathly pale and plopped down on her bed. She said: ‘Jim?’ and started to bawl. Said she’d rather be dead, and why hadn’t he stayed away, and she wouldn’t see him if he came crawling to her on his hands and knees¯the usual feminine tripe. Poor Nora!”

  Pat was near tears herself.

  “I knew it was no good arguing with her¯Nora’s awfully stubborn when she wants to be. So I told Jim, and he got even more excited and wanted to run upstairs, and Pop got mad and waved his best mashie at the foot of the stairs, like Horatius at the bridge, and ordered Jim out of the house, and¯well, Jim would have had to knock Pop down to get by him, so he ran out of the house screaming that he’d see Nora if he had to throw bombs to get in. And all this time I was trying to revive Muth, who’d conveniently fainted as a sort of strategic diversion . . . I’ve got to get back!” Pat ran off. Then she stopped and turned around. ”Why in heaven’s name,” she asked slowly, “do I come running to you with the most intimate details of my family’s affairs, Mr. Ellery Smith?”

  “Maybe,” smiled Ellery, “because I have a kind face.”

  “Don’t be foul. Do you suppose I’m f¯” Pat bit her lip, a faint blush staining her tan. Then she loped away.

  Mr. Queen lit another cigarette with fingers not quite steady.

  Despite the heat, he felt chilled suddenly.

  He threw the unsmoked butt into the grass and went into the house to haul out his typewriter.

  Chapter 5

  Lover Come Back

  Gabby Warrum, the one-toothed agent at the railroad station, saw Jim Haight get off the train.

  Gabby told Emmeline DuPre.

  By the time Ed Hotchkiss dropped Jim off at Upham House, where Ma for old times’ sake managed to wangle a bed for him, Emmy DuPre had phoned nearly everyone in town who wasn’t picnicking in Pine Grove or swimming in Slocum Lake.

  Opinion, as Mr. Queen ascertained by prowling around town Monday and keeping his steel-trap ears open, was divided. J. C. Pettigrew, Donald Mackenzie, and the rest of the Rotary bunch, who were half-Country Club and half-tradespeople, generally opined that Jim Haight ought to be run out on a rail. The ladies were stoutly against this: Jim was a nice young man; whatever’d happened between him and Nora Wright three years ago wasn’t his fault, you can bet your last year’s bonnet!

  Frank Lloyd disappeared. Phinny Baker said his boss had gone off on a hunting trip up in the Mahoganies. Emmeline DuPre sniffed. ”It’s funny Frank Lloyd should go hunting the very next morning after James Haight gets back to Wrightsville. Ran away, of course. That big windbag!” Emmy was disappointed that Frank hadn’t taken one of his deer rifles and gone stalking through the streets of Wrightsville for Jim, like Owen Wister’s Virginian (starring, however, Gary Cooper).

  Old Soak Anderson, the town problem, discovered by Mr. Queen Monday noon lying on the stone pedestal of the Low Village World War Memorial, rubbed his salt-and-pepper stubble and declaimed: “

  “O most lame and impotent conclusion!’ “

  “Are you feeling well this morning, Mr. Anderson?” asked Ellery, concerned.

  “Never better, sir. But my point is one with the Proverb, the twenty-sixth, I believe, which states: ‘Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.’ 1 refer, of course, to the reappearance in this accursed community of Jim Haight. Sow the wind, sir; sow the wind!”

  The yeast in all this ferment acted strangely. Having returned to Wrightsville, Jim Haight shut himself up in his room at Upham House; he even had his meals served there, according to Ma Upham. Whereas Nora Wright, the prisoner, began to show herself!

  Not in public, of course. But on Monday afternoon she watched Pat and Ellery play three sets of tennis on the grass court behind the Wright house, lying in a deck chair in the sun, her eyes protected by dark glasses hooked over her spectacles; and she kept smiling faintly. On Monday evening she strolled over with Pat and a hostile Carter Bradford “to see how you’re coming along with your book, Mr. Smith.” Ellery had Alberta Manaskas
serve tea and oatmeal cookies; he treated Nora quite as if she were in the habit of dropping in. And then on Tuesday night . . .

  * * *

  Tuesday night was bridge night at the Wrights’. Carter Bradford usually came to dinner, and Carter and Pat paired against Hermione and John F.

  Hermy thought it might be “nice” to have Mr. Smith in on Tuesday, August twenty-seventh, to make a fifth; and Ellery accepted with alacrity.

  “I’d much rather watch tonight,” said Pat. ”Carter dear, you and Pop against Ellery and Mother. I’ll heckle.”

  “Come on, come on, we’re losing time,” said John F. ”Stakes, Smith? It’s your option.”

  “Makes no difference to me,” said Ellery. ”Suppose I toss the honor over to Bradford.”

  “In that case,” said Hermy quickly, “let’s play for a tenth. Carter, why don’t they pay Prosecutors more?” Then she brightened. ”When you’re Governor . . . ”

  “Penny a point,” said Carter; his lean face was crimson.

  “But Cart, I didn’t mean¯” wailed Hermione.

  “If Cart wants to play for a cent, by all means play for a cent,” said Pat firmly. ”I’m sure he’ll win!”

  “Hello,” said Nora.

  She had not come down to dinner¯Hermy had said something about a “headache.” Now Nora was smiling at them from the foyer. She came in with a basket of knitting and sat down in the big chair under a piano lamp.

  “I’m really winning the war for Britain,” she smiled, “all by myself. This is my tenth sweater!”

  Mr. and Mrs. Wright exchanged startled glances, and Pat absently began to ruffle Ellery’s hair.

  “Play cards,” said Carter in a smothered voice.

  The game began under what seemed to Ellery promising circumstances, considering the warm vital hand in his hair and Carter’s out-thrust lower lip. And, in fact, after two rubbers Cart slammed his cards down on the table.

  “Why, Cart!” gasped Pat.

  “Carter Bradford,” said Hermy, “I neverheard¯”

  “What on earth?” said John F., staring at him.

  “If you’d stop jumping around, Pat,” cried Carter, “I’d be able to concentrate on this ding-busted game!”