The Applegreen Cat

  The Applegreen Cat

  A Pat and Jean Abbott Mystery

  Frances Crane

  1

  Whenever I think of those two little Renoirs, companion pieces you might say of the one in Patrick’s office in San Francisco … if we ever get back there again … I mean, they are portraits of the same rosy-cheeked long-eyed woman wearing a dowdy hat … though not the same hat … well, any way, they remind me of a country week-end we spent in England with the Heywards … which, unfortunately, meant murder.

  But maybe I’d better begin the way it all began.

  When Patrick got back to London from wherever he’d been that time—you don’t know too much about a husband’s doings when he’s in the Intelligence Service of the United States Marine Corps*—I told him about the Heywards.

  “They’ve stayed at this hotel twice since you went away last time, Pat.”

  Patrick said, “Um-m.” He lay on the divan in our room, with a Scotch and soda in one hand, and read—for pleasure, mind you—the classified notices on the front page of The Times. Patrick had his knees up and his long legs crossed. The gay red stripe on his trousers stood out against the fine blue. I do so love the uniforms worn by the Marines.

  I stood by the window with the view over The Green Park, but I faced Patrick.

  “Mrs. Heyward’s strictly super, darling. Fortyish, maybe, but with a young shape and a young face. Blue-gray hair, gray-blue eyes, wears gray-blue a lot. She’s got wonderfully expressive black eyebrows.”

  Patrick read on.

  I said, “Mr. Heyward’s nice, too. Tall as you are, or almost, but of course not so lean.” Nobody is ever so beautifully long and lean as Patrick. “He’s big in the chest and shoulders and stoops a little, and he’s got hands and feet too small for his size. I don’t like that, do you?” Patrick made no reply. “Dark hair, deep voice, full sort of face, big softish brown eyes and those extra-heavy horn-rimmed glasses. Looks at your legs, but somehow you don’t mind, and neither does Mrs. Heyward seem to, perhaps because her own legs are very strictly okay.”

  Patrick continued reading the notices.

  I let my voice go lazy to say what I had been leading up to.

  “They’ve invited us to their country place for this next week-end.”

  Patrick let that pass, too.

  “It’s called Old House,” I said. “They say Queen Elizabeth or somebody started building it in fifteen hundred something and the Heywards finally completed it when they installed American plumbing in 1933.”

  Patrick was against taking off week-ends. He thought that the way to wind up a war was for everybody to stick on his spot in the job twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He knew I knew how he felt, so he made no answer. But all the same I went on talking.

  “A week-end invitation to Old House is pretty special, Pat. The Heywards have kept it filled with convalescent soldiers for a long while, but just now it’s being converted into a proper hospital, and that means that this may be their last week-end with only family and friends for a long time to come.”

  Patrick yawned, and dropped The Times. When he spoke, I realized that I was getting nowhere at all.

  “What this country needs is more funnies. Dick Tracy. Flash Gordon. Superman.”

  I said firmly, “What you need is a country week-end in this country, darling.”

  “Hum-m,” Patrick said. In the negative.

  “But the Heywards should be so nice to know, Pat. They’re Americans. Did I say that? Mr. Heyward owns an advertising agency here in London.”

  “Sounds like an unhappy kind of thing to own.”

  I nodded. “Business is all shot by the war, of course, but England is their home. They’ve lived here twenty years. Their son Kip’s in the R.A.F. You’ve met Kip,—that young squadron-leader Sally O’Neill’s so crazy about. Sally’s how I came to meet the Heywards in the first place.”

  “Sally—face like a monkey?” Patrick asked.

  “That’s Dicey. Sally’s pal. Sally is perfectly beautiful. And Kip Heyward, of course, is handsome. Dark level eyes, fair hair.”

  I was aware that I had been overstating my case. Patrick’s pretending to be dumb about Sally and Dicey reminded me that I’d better brush up on tactics. For he knew perfectly well that Sally O’Neill and Dicey Turner were the two U.S.O. girls who had come to England on the same flight with me. I’d seen a lot of them both since we’d all been in London. Patrick was stalling me off, trying to keep from saying a flat no to the week-end.

  I tried silence. He promptly accepted it as my defeat. He drank off his drink, set down the glass, picked up the newspaper and went on reading.

  So I said resolutely, “I don’t care much for the Ericksons, though. I hope they don’t ask them for this week-end.”

  “Ericksons?” Patrick conceded.

  “Todd Erickson’s with the Heyward advertising agency. He must be forty, maybe even older, though it’s kind of hard to guess. He’s strange. I’d say sinister, if people didn’t so overwork that word. You’d think a man named Erickson would be blond. He’s dark. Coal-black eyes in a thin, tanned, sharp-featured face. Snow-white hair. The kind of white hair that looks as though it had turned white overnight.”

  Patrick put up one eyebrow.

  “Lorna Erickson fascinates me. In a horrible sort of way. She’s a lot younger than Todd. I’d guess her about thirty but I don’t think she would ever admit it if she is. She’s terrifically smart. She’s as tall as I am, and willowy, and she has smoky blue eyes and black hair. She wears her eyelids low and her hair high.” Patrick wiggled the eyebrow. “She’s got long hands with predatory nails—no, I don’t think she’ll be there for the week-end.”

  Patrick said nothing. I said:

  “She fooled me to start, though. I thought she was sweet. Kip Heyward said she was tops, and she looked so keen and all. We started using first names. She likes people to call her Lorna and Todd Todd, so I call him Todd even though it never seems exactly right. Then all at once she started letting down her back hair and being herself, and after that, I didn’t like her. For one thing she keeps pretending there’s something peculiar about my being in England. When I told her I was secretary to the Mr. Jones of our Lend-Lease, she laughed and said sarcastically, ‘Jones? It would be!’”

  It was no use. Patrick wasn’t interested in the Ericksons. You could tell that he didn’t care where they spent the week-end or what they looked like or what they said. I was getting nowhere. He had even lowered the eyebrow. From the slant of his gaze on The Times, I was sure he was reading the Marriages and Births, and that these notices about people we didn’t know and never would know were more interesting to him than my new friends, the Heywards, and those Ericksons.

  But I was saving my trump till the last.

  “Mr. Heyward collects,” I said.

  Patrick pretended not to hear it.

  “The house itself must be a collector’s piece, darling. He’s filled it with antiques. He also collects pictures.”

  Even this didn’t ring a bell. Art is my husband’s fatal weakness, but even art was laid away in some corner of his mind until the war was finished.

  But when I said with a very careful nonchalance that Mr. Heyward’s special passion was Renoir and that I had heard he had several, Patrick sat straight up, and The Times slid to the floor and stayed there.

  Patrick met Mr. and Mrs. Heyward that same evening and liked them both. But he couldn’t be definite about the week-end until Friday. Then he phoned me at our office that he’d arranged for liberty from Saturday noon till Monday noon, which was what I’d been allowed by Mr. Jones, and I telephoned Mrs. Heyward at Old House.

  She suggested our taking a train on Saturday afternoon, which l
eft Paddington Station at two, and arrived at Staples Common, their station, at five minutes before three. She would meet us, she said, in the car. It is very special indeed to be met with a car now in England, so at one o’clock when Patrick telephoned me at the hotel that he couldn’t make the two o’clock, I protested. With vim.

  “I can’t make it,” he said. With firmness. “You take the bags and go on along and I’ll get there when I can. I’ll phone you from London when to expect me and I’ll walk from the station. Kip Heyward says it’s only a mile.”

  “Kip?”

  “I ran onto him this morning on Piccadilly. He was taking the noon train, with those girls—Sally and Dicey.”

  “Oh. How strictly super, darling!” Then I had a qualm. “He didn’t say anything about the Ericksons?”

  “Ericksons?”

  “I don’t know why I even thought of them. Pat, listen, you’re really coming, aren’t you? You aren’t going away … somewhere?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I believed him, till the receiver was in place, then I sank, thinking how I never really knew, in advance.

  The trip was so sweet, too. Everywhere the English are sweet to each other, on the trains and in the stations. The little toy of a train clipped along through a gentle pastoral sort of landscape. We dashed for thirty minutes, after which we were a local, and poked. I loved it, save for that ache because Patrick wasn’t along. Staples Common consisted of the station and one long row of houses, many of them timbered and thatched. Mrs. Heyward was waiting, in a gray car. She wore a gray-blue jersey suit and a cherry-red sweater which was matched by her lipstick and had a bow of velvet ribbon in her gray hair.

  “It was thoughtful of Pat to suggest walking,” she said, as we put the bags in the car. “We’re rationed to a dribble of petrol, of course, and we wouldn’t even be allowed to use the big car now, except that it’s large enough to accommodate a stretcher.”

  She got in at the wheel, and I beside her.

  She drove the length of the long village, crossed a bridge, and turned back along a narrow white road between tall hedges.

  “When Pat phones, be sure to tell him to take the path along the river,” Mrs. Heyward said. “On the station side. It’s nearer. Cars have to double back a little to cross the bridge. Tell him to whistle when he’s opposite a half-timbered house with many tall chimneys, and somebody will show up and row him across. Or we can leave a boat on that side for him, if we know when to expect him.”

  We passed the entrances of estates. The houses themselves were screened by trees from the road. Then we passed by an ancient beech wood and soon turned between mossy stone griffons into a curving drive between tall clipped yews, and there, entirely concealed but only a short distance from the road, was the house.

  So there are places like this, I thought, with a little catch in my throat. It had quantities of diamond-paned casement windows, and flocks of tall ornamental chimneys. Yellow roses bloomed against brown timbers and diagonally laid pink bricks. There was a date carved over the doorway. 1593.

  “It’s so wonderful!” I said, taking a deep breath.

  “You must say so to Stephen.”

  “So old.”

  Mrs. Heyward smiled.

  “Some that looks old is simulated. Stephen can tell which, but not I. He’s keen about the antique. For my part, I like best the American kitchens and bathrooms. Especially since we can’t get enough servants. Our soldiers have kept our place looking better than most—bless them.”

  The nail-studded door opened. A pretty maid came out.

  She was very pretty, in fact, with blue eyes and a braid of dark hair around her head under her stiff little cap. Mrs. Heyward said, “This is Mrs. Abbott, Elsie. Take her things to the yellow room, please. Is Miss Wells back?”

  “She is, Madam. She said to say she’d be playing tennis if you wanted her, Madam.”

  “Oh, no. Let her play.”

  “Thank you, Madam.”

  Elsie lifted the two bags, handlin them easily, though she was no huskier-looking than I. She was, in fact, about my size.

  “Do you play tennis, Jean?” Mrs. Heyward asked.

  “Sort of,” I admitted. My tennis is, to put it politely, indifferent.

  “Don’t, unless you wish. We play rather a lot of it here. Thanks to Joyce Wells.”

  She took the car on around the house. Elsie opened the door and stood aside and then picked up the bags and led the way through a big darkish hall paneled in black oak and paved with old black stones. A huge tapestry hung on the wall to the left of the entrance. On the right was a great staircase, in very black oak. All proportions were immense. It seemed a very longish space to the other end of the hall, where a gallery ran crosswise of the house, and a door and then a continuous row of casements opened onto a terrace. I caught a glimpse of flat green lawn and bordering it, the length of a city block away, the Thames.

  Elsie took me up the stairs, past a deep landing, and at the top of the second flight straight ahead, across another gallery with casement windows like the one on the ground floor. She opened a door into a big room with many windows, white woodwork, mahogany furniture, gay chintzes decorated with yellow roses, and its own yellow tiled bath. Frankly, I felt glad that our bedroom was not of the gloomy period of the hall. The chests were of the Regency period. The comfortable chairs and the wide bed with its tailored chintz cover and the headboard upholstered in the same chintz were very satisfactorily our contemporary George Sixth.

  Elsie set the bags on the rack at the foot of the bed and began the unpacking. I crossed to a window.

  The windows looked three ways, and formed a bay. Here a chaise longue and easy chairs were grouped around a coffee table. English and American magazines and a few new novels lay about. From the windows, I looked at the views, at the smooth emerald green lawn, the soft misty hills in the distance, the river flowing gently by. There was an old wall edging the lawn at some distance on the left. It enclosed a kitchen garden. It was bordered with a blaze of purple, garnet-red, and yellow flowers. To the right, at the end of the terrace overlooked by the galleries, was another wing of the house, and slightly to its right and halfway to the river, two tennis courts. The courts were lined in startling white against the rich green turf. The backstops were covered with rose vines.

  Sally O’Neill and Kip Heyward played on the farther court. On the other Todd Erickson played against a stocky, blond, short-haired girl.

  I watched them for a moment. The girl seemed to be giving Todd a stiff game. Sally and Kip laughed and talked and had fun but the other two played as though their lives depended on it.

  I went to another window and did some more looking, then came back and stood watching the tennis.

  Everything within sight, I thought, was amiable, peaceful, even idyllic, save for Todd Erickson and the short-haired girl, each striving too hard to win.

  Elsie said, “Is there anything else, Madam? I’ve finished the unpacking.”

  I came away from the window.

  “You’re very quick.”

  Elsie blushed. “But there’s ever so little, when the gentleman is in uniform, Madam.”

  “And a lady with so little as I was permitted to bring to England, Elsie. That’s all, thanks very much.”

  “Thank you, Madam.”

  Then I noticed her hands. They were not red from housework but white, calloused, and freckled with the black spots some workers get in munitions factories.

  Quickly I glanced down, lest she were sensitive about the spots. And then I was really astonished. The girl had lovely legs and she wore exquisite nylon stockings.

  People who have not personally observed the English female leg in wartime—or, I’m told, the English working girl’s leg in any era—cannot possibly understand how truly amazing this was.

  Looking up, I was happy to notice that Elsie’s own eyes were professionally absorbed in taking in the room, to see if her services were needed anywhere in it.
r />   “Thank you, Madam,” she said again. The polite people of England are eternally thanking you for nothing. She walked towards the door, and, her hand resting on the knob, said, “If you’ll just leave your suit in the wardrobe, I’ll press it when I can, Madam.”

  “Why, thank you, Elsie.”

  “Thank you, Madam,” she said, and went out.

  I bathed, and changed into my gray flannel suit and a green cashmere sweater, hanging the jacket over my shoulders because I would need it later on. I put on white wool socks and saddle-oxfords. The outfit would discourage any overtures to play tennis, I decided, with a certain satisfaction, as I dropped my cigarettes and lipstick in a pocket and went downstairs.

  The paneling of the halls and galleries was of black oak and divided into small rectangular areas. The stairs were broad, with wide treads and easy risers, making them fun to walk down. The landing was large enough to be itself a room, and had casements at the back. As I descended the lower flight I noticed a large door on the left, open and revealing what looked to be a baronial hall. Ahead, another open door disclosed a gay room with more Georgian mahogany, white woodwork and chintz.

  I entered this room. It was the drawing-room, and had a charming Adam mantelpiece, painted white, pink roses in the chintzes, and a deep-piled pale-green carpet.

  On the wall to the right were two small Renoir portraits, framed in bright gold. I was looking at them and thinking how they would excite my husband when a lazy voice said:

  “Admiring the art?”

  I glanced up. Lorna Erickson stood in the French door open from the terrace. She wore a navy jersey slack suit and a red scarf. Her black hair was done high. There was a gleaming mocking look in her smoky blue eyes.

  “Hello,” I said. I waved a hand at the pictures. “My husband has a passion for Renoir.”

  “How amusing,” Lorna said. “And where is the dashing Leatherneck?”

  I said, with determined politeness:

  “He’s coming later.”

  “Don’t tell me the peace actually can wait?”

  I didn’t answer. I smiled firmly and started walking towards her and the door, to go outside and to the tennis courts, or anywhere so I wouldn’t be alone with Lorna Erickson.