Dear Mrs. Friendley,
Miss Dora Brevard has asked us to visit with you about the Tarrant Family. She believes you can be very helpful to an inquiry she has asked us to undertake. My wife, Annie, and I will return to see you at nine A.M. tomorrow. If this isn't convenient, please call me at the St. George Inn where we are staying.
Very truly yours, Max Darling
At Annie's suggestion, Max added the phone number in a P.S. and tucked the note on top of the waiting mail. 'There. She can't miss that.' He slipped the notebook back in his pocket. As they returned to the car, he pulled out a fax, the latest they had received from Barb. 'Here's one name Miss Dora didn't come up with. As soon as Louis tracked this one down, I knew we could really be onto something.' He wasonce again in his customary good humor. 'Who knows everything in an office?'
It didn't take a marriage counselor to know the right response to this one.
Annie answered obediently, 'The secretary, of course.'
Odors of disinfectant and boiled cabbage mingled unpleasantly with those of honeysuckle and banana shrub. A nursing aide in a blue pinafore pointed down the wide corridor. 'Go all the way to the end and you'll see the door to the screened-in porch. Miss Nelda spends most of the afternoon out there, reading. She's a great reader.'
Warehoused human beings.
Annie made an effort not to look as they walked down the hall, passing open doors, but some glimpses could not be avoided.
An ancient woman in a bedraggled pink chenille bathrobe was bent almost double over her walker as she progressed with aching slowness down the hall.
A sharp-featured, grizzled old man slumped against the restraints that held him in his wheelchair.
A middle-aged woman leaned close to a bed. 'Mother, it's Emily. How are you today?'
A wheelchair scooted past them, and its pink-faced occupant, her white hair in fresh, rigid curls, gave them a cheery hello.
Annie pushed through the door to the porch with immense relief. To be outside, to breathe sweet-scented air, to feel the easy grace of muscle and bone moving as bidden was, for an instant, a glorious reassurance.
Two elderly men hunched over a checkerboard at the far end of the porch. One of them looked up eagerly as the door squeaked, then quickly away. The sudden droop of his mouth revealed his disappointment. His companion never moved his glance from the red markers in front of him.
A small, birdlike woman with a beaked nose and thick glasses sat with her back to the game players, her wheelchair
facing out toward the garden. She was immersed in a book, her face somber. The set of her mouth, Annie decided, was forbidding indeed. And she had to be Nelda Cartwright, who had served Augustus Tarrant as a secretary when he was in private practice and followed him to the courthouse when he became a judge.
'Miss Cartwright?' Max inquired.
Faded blue eyes, magnified by the lenses, peered up at him. 'I don't know you.' Her voice was reedy but decisive.
'No, ma'am,' Max said quickly. 'I'm Max Darling, and this is my wife, Annie. We are investigating the death of Judge Augustus Tarrant in May of 1970 on behalf of Miss Dora Brevard, who was—'
'Young man, I know who Miss Dora Brevard is.' Heavily veined hands clapped her book shut—Annie was surprised somehow to identify it as Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay—and the expression on the old woman's face turned fierce. 'What is there to investigate? The Judge died from heart failure.'
'No,' Max said gently. 'If you will permit me to explain . . .'
As Max described the revelations by Julia Tarrant and the other family members during that remarkable gathering at Miss Dora's, Nelda Cartwright's unwinking gaze never left his face.
She spoke only once. 'Augustus murdered! The devils.'
When Max had concluded, Nelda Cartwright hunched in her wheelchair, the book in her lap ignored, her wrinkled face rigid with anger, her eyes blazing, her blue-veined hands gripping the wheelchair arms.
'Will you help us?' Annie asked.
'Augustus murdered. I should have known. I should have known! They all pulled at him constantly, wanting money, time, special attention, always making excuses.' Her voice was cold and disdainful. 'Whitney fancied himself as quite the man-about-town, too busy playing golf to get his proper work done. That's where he met Jessica Horton, of course. Whitney knew the firm was representing Alex Horton in thedivorce proceedings, but did that stop Whitney? And you can't tell me it wasn't deliberate on Jessica's part. Who knows what she got out of
