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  Yesterday’s Murder

  Craig Rice

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  “Is it that Telefair is the illusion we have cast up in our minds?”

  PART ONE

  1

  He had never been to the Island before, yet now as he approached the end of his journey every detail of the countryside through which he was passing seemed known and familiar, even to the littlest leaf on the smallest tree. It was not only the landscape itself, with its continually unfolding vistas of scrubby wood and dismal marshland, but the very act of traveling through it was familiar, as though he had gone over that same road too many times to be remembered.

  The cold gray rain that had been falling all day had stopped in one last, despairing flurry, and in the west the clouds had lifted a little, so that the sunset cast a garish light over the somber ground. Watching the woodland and marshes as they picked up and reflected the reddish glare, it seemed to him that he had made the journey so often that he knew every bush and branch and stone, every rough patch in the narrow and muddy road. Yet he knew that he had never been to the Island before, no, not in all the twenty years of his life.

  He was the only passenger on the rattling old bus that was the one means of transportation to the Island. The driver, a dour and taciturn man, had stood by the door of his ancient vehicle with a discouraged air, as though he expected no passenger, had never had a passenger, and never would have one, but would continue to pilot an empty, rattling, and possibly haunted bus over that road day in and day out in the fulfilment of some self-appointed destiny. He had, indeed, expressed some surprise at the ultimate destination of the one passenger who did arrive, and had taken up the ticket as though he anticipated that no good would come of it. Beyond that, he had had nothing to say, and now sat hunched over the wheel, sending the bus leaping and bounding over the road as though some malignant spirit pursued it through the seemingly unending woods and marshes.

  The whole journey had been colored by a curiously unreal, dreamlike quality, even from the moment when the letter from old Philip Telefair had come, inviting him to the Island. He remembered the feel of the envelope now, cool and smooth on his palm, with hard, sharp corners, one bruised and blunted a little. He remembered the look of the envelope as he held it in his hand, creamy, oblong, the postmark slanted and blurred. He remembered reading his own name, David Telefair, written across it in black, square, heavy letters, remembered reading the address over and over again because it was the first letter that had ever come to him from the Island. As he had held it there in his hand, unopened, warming to his touch, it had conveyed to him a sense of nameless dread, a sense of things impending and still to come that could in no way be avoided. It was as though each day of his lonely and uneventful life had been lived through simply to bring him to the arrival of that letter, to this journey, to the moment ahead when he would first set foot on Telefair Island.

  It had been very long ago, when he was still a very little boy—perhaps even before he had been put in school, though he could not really remember a time when he had not been in a school. There had been a female relative of his mother, an aunt, perhaps, or a sister. He could remember her no more than the mother he had never seen. But he did remember the words she had used. “Old Philip Telefair is very good to the child.”

  Strange, that he should think of it now! Yet while the bus jolted over the uneven road on the way to the Island, David closed his eyes and forced his memory of the scene back to mind against his mind’s will: the dark, damp mustiness of the school parlor (yes, it had been a school even then), the stiffly rustling silks worn by the female relative, the heavy, funereal odor of long-destroyed flowers, old unopened books, and dusty draperies, that clung to the room. What the rest of the conversation between the female relative and the school head had been, he could not remember, nor did he try to remember. Only the one phrase had stayed in his mind after the visit was over, and from it he had made a picture of Philip Telefair as a white-haired and beneficent old man who led an improbable existence in some shadowy land for the one purpose of showering gifts and kindnesses upon small, lonely David Telefair.

  Old Philip Telefair is very good to the child!

  Later, when he was older, he knew how very good indeed Philip Telefair had been to him. It was Philip Telefair who paid for the succession of expensive schools, the well-recommended summer camps, the holidays in the company of tutors. Indeed, without Philip Telefair’s seemingly unending kindness, David would have been an extremely unfortunate small boy, growing up forlorn and unwanted in a poverty-stricken New England parsonage.

  Living, as he did, always in camps or schools, it seemed to him in those early days that he must have come into the world without father or mother, without anyone of his own, as some elf child might have strayed into this other country from a lost land of twilight and mysteries. For old Philip Telefair, with all his kindness, never came to see him, never sent for him to come to the Island, never, indeed, gave him any sign of affection in all his generosity. So he grew up, one way or another, a quiet, rather shy and friendless child, always shrinking a little from his companions, never in one school long enough to make either friends or enemies, never spending any two holidays with the same tutor, so that in all his life he had had no opportunity to love or to hate any other human being. His mother’s family he never knew at all; after that one visit from the female relative he never saw any of them again.

  In later years he learned that had been one of the conditions imposed by old Philip Telefair’s kindness to him.

  By the time he knew that much, he had become a lonely young man, going to college through Philip Telefair’s generosity. He knew a little more about his origin then, but not a great deal. His father had been a nephew of Philip Telefair, his mother had been the daughter of a New England minister; she had died at the birth of her one child, no more than a year after her marriage to David Telefair’s father. A few months later his father had died suddenly on Telefair Island, leaving a penniless and unwanted infant to the kindness of Philip Telefair.

  It was strange, he thought, that he had never been asked to come to the Island before, not until now, when he had added a year of aimless wandering around the world to his long list of obligations to Philip Telefair. Stranger still, that on this, his first visit to the Island, he should be aware of the curious sense of familiarity, the feeling of returning once more to a place seen more times than he could count or recall.

  The sunset was beginning to fade now, and a singular electric, purplish light was spreading over the scene. Through the trees he could catch glimpses of a body of water that he knew must be Chesapeake Bay, pale and violet in the half-shadows. To the end of his life, looking back on those strange days, he was to think of the country around Telefair Island as a land of perpetual twilight, without sunrise or sunset, day or darkness, but always bathed in the half-light and the shadows.

  The bus veered suddenly toward the bay and began the ascent of a small sandy hill covered with scrub pine, that lay between it and the water beyond. Even the climbing of so gentle a slope seemed too exhausting for the ancient vehicle, so that halfway up the incline it shivered, coughed, and apologetically died. The driver began encouraging the wheezy motor to start again, and in the momentary pause David leaned forward and peered through the window, with a sudden breathlessness at the thought that now only a mound of sand lay between him and the first sight of his destination.

  A last, greenish-yellow light from the dying sunset hovered over the crest of the hill, shading above into the misted blue and lavender of the twilight sky, and, silhouetted against it, rising suddenly from the hill itself, David could see the sharp, black outline of a gigantic cross.

  It was monstrous, grotesque,
sinister, against the fading light, its massive arms reaching out, not in a gesture of forgiveness and welcome, but as a menacing barrier, a warning even, standing there malignantly to bar the way to Telefair Island. For one instant it seemed to David as though the fantastic object had some special meaning for himself alone. So strongly was he impressed by it that he wondered momentarily if it might not, indeed, be some illusion conjured up from the half-light and the shadows. But in the same instant the bus gave a sudden lurch and climbed miraculously to the top of the hill, and he could see that it was no illusion, but a solid creation of black and weathered wood, set firmly in a little nest of stones, as old and as enduring as the sandy hill itself.

  “That there’s the Telefair Cross,” the bus driver said gruffly, giving the rattling bus a little more speed. “Set on the very spot where Anthony Telefair was murdered, more’n a hundred years ago.” He lapsed again into his gloomy silence.

  David was conscious of a curious sense of mounting excitement. It was his first introduction to the history of the Telefairs, his first realization that they had been real people who had lived once and then died in a world of reality and not in the fancy of a lonely and imaginative boy. He looked back at the object which had startled him, and saw it fading rapidly into the continually darkening sky, growing fainter and fainter like some dissolving apparition until at last it vanished completely, leaving only the shadows of the sand hill and the ancient trees to mark the spot where some unremembered Telefair had come to a violent death more than a hundred years before.

  As David looked away from the scene, the bus driver in a sudden and surprising burst of sociability took one hand from the wheel long enough to point ahead of him, and said, “Look in the inlet, yonder. There’s the Island.”

  David could see, before and a little below him, where an arm of the bay reached up into the mainland and, almost in its point of cleavage with the larger body of water, a long, low body of land, heavy with trees. It was impossible to guess at the exact size of the Island from where he saw it, but he could tell that it was large, a long oval in shape, narrowing to a point that reached out toward the waters of the bay. Dimly through the trees he could make out a large white building, ghostly and mysterious in the half-darkness. That, he decided, would be the old house, Telefair.

  While he watched, one or two lights appeared in the distant building, winking on one by one as though they were aware of his approach and were signaling to him through the deepening gloom. It was in some unaccountable way as though this long, strange journey had begun with the very moment of his birth, or even before it, and all the rest of his life had been a process of bringing him at last to Telefair. He examined the far-off and faintly pale house on the Island as though it were not only his destination but his destiny.

  He knew little or nothing of the people who lived in that house. There was Philip Telefair; described in David’s childhood as “old Philip Telefair,” he must, indeed, be very old, incredibly old, by now. There was a daughter of Philip Telefair, a little less than David’s own age. He knew of no others on the Island. That his great-uncle had not left the Island in many years, he knew in some vague manner, with no remembrance of the means of his knowing.

  Watching the Island from the distance, seeing it take form in his sight, a dream came up slowly through the mists of his thought, a dream in which some heroic deed figured, making Great-Uncle Philip proud of him and pleased with him, a dream in which he met the daughter of Philip Telefair—tall, of course, stately, incredibly beautiful, and with a kind of gentle melancholy. In the dream he inevitably fell in love with her and she with him, and in time they were married splendidly at Telefair, with Great-Uncle Philip nodding and smiling beneficently in the background.

  A sudden lurching of the bus jarred him from his reverie, and he saw that the Island was now directly across the waters of the inlet, and that he had arrived at Telefair Landing.

  As the bus stopped, a sense of dread and foreboding came over him without warning; the weariness from the long journey, the strangeness that always came with the change from a known scene into an unknown one, and a sense of uncertainty at what might be ahead of him. Through the darkling shadows of early evening the Island, lying low on the green-gray water, seemed ineffably menacing.

  He felt a sudden impulse to turn back. It was as though his very life depended upon it. Indeed, for that one moment he was on the point of asking the driver when a return trip could be made, but the man’s gruffness and taciturnity discouraged and repelled him, and he felt that to ask if he could turn around and go back the way he had come would make him look like a fool.

  Besides, he had nowhere else to go.

  The driver had already plumped down David’s suitcase on the platform of what appeared to be a little store building. David climbed out of the bus, stretched, took a few hesitant steps on legs that had suddenly become stiff and numb. “How do I get across to the Island?” he called to the driver, who was busy locking the doors of the bus.

  “Don’t know,” said the driver, in a tone that made plain it was no concern or responsibility of his. “This bus don’t take passengers over the bay.” He dropped his keys in his pocket and walked away, jingling them.

  David called “Wait—” then stopped, chilled by a pang of uneasiness. Suddenly he recalled the old legend of the coach that never took its passengers quite to their destination, but left them a little distance from their doors and their dooms. True, he reminded himself, this was a small motor bus in bad repair, and not a coach drawn by raven black horses, and he was left not seven paces but the width of the inlet from where he wanted to go. It was no haunting that he feared; it was merely an inconvenience, and that not serious.

  Meantime the driver, paying no attention to him, was rapidly disappearing into the twilight; he had done his duty in bringing his passenger to the end of the line—now he was through with the whole matter and was simply walking away from it.

  David stood staring after him, feeling extremely foolish, and wondering what to do. It occurred to him suddenly that he ought to have informed Philip Telefair of the day and hour and manner of his arrival. But the letter had simply said, “Come as soon as you can; I shall expect you in a day or so.” David had packed his belongings and left for the Island at once.

  It was too late now to spend time worrying over what ought to have been done. David was weary from his journey, and hungry, and a damp chill in the twilight air was beginning to penetrate to his very bones. There must, of course, be boats that went to the Island; the obvious thing to do was to find a telephone, inform Great-Uncle Philip that he was here, and a boat would be sent from the Island to carry him across the inlet. It was as simple as that.

  He turned toward the little store building, and saw that it was empty, unlighted, desolate. Boards were nailed across the door. In all the little cluster of buildings, not one light showed. The bus driver had vanished somewhere into the darkness.

  David suddenly felt very helpless; helpless, alone, and almost unendurably tired.

  In that instant, a gleam across the twilit waters caught his gaze. On the point of the Island, the end farthest from the great white house, there was a faint flickering of bluish light, moving above the water. It was no light David had ever seen before: like the glow of a reflected flame, coming from no apparent source save the waters of the inlet themselves, hovering over the shore line, always changing its shape, always in motion. And as it moved along the shore, in it and beyond it David could see a great, dark object, black and terrible against the water and the sky. From that distance it looked to him like a gallows.

  The skin on the back of his neck tautened unexpectedly, and he realized that he was not standing there alone. He turned, and saw a man standing near him, a minister by his dress, tall and almost wraithlike, with white hair haloed by the curious light.

  David looked at him for no more than an instant, then turned again to the pale flame floating just above the surface of the water.

 
; “What is it?” David cried. “What is it?”

  “Marshfire.” The minister’s voice was soft and friendly in the darkness.

  David’s frightened breath seemed to come back to him in a rush. Marshfire, that was all. Here at twilight, between the low-lying land and the salt waters of the bay, there would be marshfire.

  That was what it had to be!

  When he dared to look again, it was gone.

  “Oh, sir,” he said, a faint thread of desperation in his voice, “perhaps you can help me. I’ve got to get over to the Island.”

  “You’re going to the Island?” the stranger asked, as though David had announced his intention of going to the moon.

  There had been that same unexplained surprise in the bus driver’s voice.

  David was far too tired to wonder what could possibly be surprising about going to Telefair Island. As best he could, he explained the difficulty he found himself in; how he had come to the Island at Philip Telefair’s invitation, and now had no way to get across the water.

  The minister stood silent for a moment. Though his face was veiled by the dark, David had a curious fancy that he was frowning.

  “Forgive my surprise,” he said at last. “My rudeness, rather. But visitors to the Island are unusual. Unusual, and seldom welcome. Still, if you must get across—” Again he paused, apparently deep in thought. “I have a boat I would be glad to lend you. In fact, if it were not for a parish meeting, I would row you across myself. But at least, you are more than welcome to my boat.”

  “I can’t possibly thank you enough!” said young David Telefair, from the very bottom of his heart.

  There was a gentle laugh in the gloom. “I have so few opportunities to serve my fellow man, I am grateful to God for those that come my way.” He turned toward what appeared to be a hard-packed dirt path. “My house is only a few steps up the road.”