Murder Comes to Eden by Zenith Brown

Author:Zenith Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

HE SAID that just as he came out into the open drive, just as the first faint chill of emptiness touched him, when no children came running from the garden, even before he saw her car was gone. It wasn’t in the circle and her space in the garage was empty.

He drove on around, parked, got out and stood listening to the suddenly desolate silence around him. He went into the house and listened again. It was so still he could hear the hum of the ice box out in the kitchen. Not even the cat came to purr and rub affectionately against his ankles. He went back outside and looked around. Then he saw the dog, sitting at Miss Fairlie’s end of the little white bridge across the marsh at the head of the Cove. That meant the kids were over at Eden. Miss Fairlie didn’t like dogs. There was nobody else in sight, except John Eden’s tame crow, hunched dejectedly between a couple of cedars along the drive. Then he saw the gnarled, stooped figure of David’s cousin, old Currier, out hoeing the corn in the O’Leary’s garden, not as tall as it was.

He went across the field. The old man straightened up and pushed his hat to the back of his grizzled head.

“ ’Mornin’, Mr. O’Leary.”

“Good morning, Currier. I guess the kids are over at Eden.”

“That’s right. Mis’ O’Leary fix a picnic lunch for ’em to take with ’em, ’fore she an’ that artist fella lef’ for Bawpmur.”

“Thanks.”

He was a little sore until he got back to the empty house, felt the hollow, also empty, in the pit of his stomach, and realised suddenly he hadn’t even bothered to tell old Currier that Ashton was dead. He stood there in the hall in a moment of unbiased self-scrutiny, slightly grim and wholly sardonic. How long ago—not more than half an hour—was it he’d been appalled at little Lucy when the facts of Stan’s death relieved her from the pressure of the sheriff’s arrival? That was bad. Callous. So what about O’Leary’s lightened heart when he thought the yellow midget still in the drive meant that Stan’s death had relieved him of the pressure of Dunning and his day with Molly? Now the pressure was on again he hadn’t even paid old Stan the common civility of telling his maid’s uncle he was dead. So what was the difference between him and Lucy except that he was old enough to know better? He went out and stood there in the drive, looking down at the white bridge that the dog was guarding till the children came back. John Eden’s crow was still there with her, perched on the hand rail now, like a raven, a moulting symbol of doom, or of the dead end O’Leary had come to. He’d never been at a total dead end before. It was a strange feeling, like trying to chew a mouthful of old and bitter ashes. It wasn’t despair, or hopelessness, or even anger, just a total dead end.

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