There is No Return (2 page)

Two miles out of Carrolton it is necessary to cross the Carol River. “So this is the famous pontoon bridge,” murmured the young man beside the driver. “No wonder they advertise it as the longest pontoon bridge in the world.” He glanced back at me with a chuckle.

“I don’t suppose they’d tolerate one anywhere outside this state.”

I bristled. His accent, as well as his self-assurance, stamped him as an Easterner; from New York, I thought. It has always nettled me, the way New Yorkers have of looking down their noses at everything west of the Hudson. The pontoon bridge over the Carol River is a ridiculous piece of work and maddeningly inadequate, as I was to realize, heaven knows, before we were through with that ghastly affair at Lebeau Inn, but I had no intention of admitting as much at this stage.

“If you are pointing your remark at me,” I said icily, “I am not responsible for this bridge or any other, but I believe it has served for a number of years and will probably continue to do so, no matter what you may think on the subject.”

“Pleasant old girl,” he murmured sotto voce to the driver, “if one likes snapping turtles.”

The driver shook his head. “This here pontoon is all right,” he said cautiously, “provided it don’t get beside itself.”

“Beside itself?” I repeated with some sharpness.

“Course a pontoon bridge is just a floating raft tied to each bank,” he explained, “and the Carol’s like all mountain streams. If it goes on a rampage, can’t nothing hold it. Three-four times it’s done up and scattered this here pontoon bridge high, wide and handsome.”

“Isn’t that something to look forward to!” exclaimed Chet Keith with a sardonic smile. “I can think of several thousand places where I’d prefer to be marooned.”

I studied him with some curiosity and I thought he changed colour when he met my eye. It occurred to me that he was an odd type to be going to Lebeau. It had never attracted bright young people, and I was increasingly of the opinion that he was more at home in Times Square than anywhere else. I should have expected to find his prototype at Atlantic City or Jones Beach, entirely surrounded by pretty girls in very brief bathing suits, but not at a down-at-the-heel summer resort which catered to elderly invalids and teething babies.

It seemed to me that he changed the subject with suspicious haste.

“What did they lay this road out with? A corkscrew?” he asked, wincing a little as the ancient bus jounced alarmingly on a hairpin curve.

“You would think that, with a gasoline tax of seven cents on the gallon, we might at least have decent roads,” I muttered, holding on to the sides of the vehicle for dear life while we wheezed up the incline.

At this moment, with a warning blast upon its twin sirens, a long sleek machine passed us, throwing a flurry of fine pebbles and stifling dust into our faces.

“Let somebody run that can run, eh?” murmured Chet Keith.

The driver shook his head. “We’ll overtake him,” he said with what I considered unjustifiable confidence.

However, on the second hairpin turn we did indeed overtake the other car. lt was having difficulty negotiating the narrow curve.

The chauffeur was backing and filling, close enough to the edge of the precipice to make me shiver. I caught a glimpse of a tall thin man in the rear seat. He was fuming over the delay and he gave us a black glance as we went by. I heard Chet Keith whistle softly.

“Thomas Canby!” he exclaimed.

I don’t say I should have recognized the power magnate if I had not heard the name, although I had met both Thomas Canby and his wife twenty years before, met them by a coincidence at Lebeau Inn the summer I was there with my father. Naturally that was before Canby developed into the millionaire he was to become.

He was, in fact, at that time merely a lineman for the local light company, one of the companies which he later organized into his tremendous utility group.

As I have had occasion to recall, he and his wife had a very difficult time finding the money to keep her and their baby at Lebeau that summer. The child was quite ill and the doctors had prescribed mountain air. I had not thought of it in years, but I distinctly remembered now how terrified little Mrs Canby had been and how she had hung over the baby day and night until it was better. She was a pathetic, colourless little woman, one of the timidest women I ever knew. I had not thought of it before, but I wondered what effect her husband’s tremendous fortune and national reputation had had upon her.

“It’s queer for Canby to be going to Lebeau,” I remarked without realizing that I was speaking aloud. “I thought they were supposed to have a summer home at Southampton.”

“They have a duplex on Park Avenue, a lodge at Asheville and a tepee of forty rooms down on Long Island. So what?” demanded Chet Keith.

I knitted my brows at him. “The daughter must be about twenty-two now,” I murmured, still thinking aloud.

He gave me an odd glance. “Didn’t you know that Gloria Canby died last fall?” he asked.

I got the feeling that he was watching me closely.

“Died!” I exclaimed. “And so young. What a pity!”

“Perhaps,” he said with an ugly twist to his voice.

I gave him a scathing glance. “Are you one of those bolshevists who envy a capitalist everything, even his innocent children?” I demanded.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Thank God I’ve outgrown that rash,” he said, “and God knows nobody envied Thomas Canby his daughter.”

At this moment the power magnate’s long maroon car passed us again with another indignant flirt of loose gravel. “Apparently Mr Thomas Canby is in a hurry,” I remarked dryly.

Chet Keith nodded, then smothered a sharp exclamation. The machine ahead had stopped so abruptly, it was all our driver could do not to pitch directly into it. For a moment both cars hung sickeningly on the edge of the bluff, and I felt as if my stomach had turned a somersault.

“What the hell!” exclaimed Chet Keith. “Sorry,” he muttered with a perfunctory glance at me as he swung out of the bus.

The Canby chauffeur, a wiry, muscular-looking man in livery, had also leaped to the ground. They were joined by the bus driver. All seemed to be staring intently at something just around the short curve in front of us. I could see Thomas Canby craning his long thin neck from the back seat of the limousine. I suppose they expected me to have no natural curiosity. At any rate Chet Keith gave me an impatient glance when I crawled out of the bus and walked toward them.

“You might as well go back,” he said curtly. “It’s just a rock in the road.”

“I can see that for myself,” I retorted in a tart voice.

There was a large boulder lying on the inside of the curve. It seemed to have fallen from the side of the mountain just above, where there was a gaping hole of loosened earth and gravel.

“We’ll have it out of the way in a jiffy,” murmured the chauffeur, “if you’ll lend me a hand, brother.”

He glanced at the bus driver, who was scratching his head.

“Funny what made that rock fall,” he muttered.

Chet Keith again shrugged his shoulders. “Wouldn’t have been so funny if either of us had hit it going round that curve,” he said.

I shuddered and glanced away from the sheer drop at the edge of the precipice to our left.

“You’d think on such a road they’d take precautions against things like this,” I remarked.

The bus driver was still scratching his head. “That’s what makes it funny,” he said. “They do.”

The utility magnate spoke for the first time. “Can’t you clear that rock away, Jay?” he asked in a testy voice.

The chauffeur touched his cap. “Watch me,” he said.

He and the driver fell to and with considerable heaving and panting shifted the boulder off to the side of the road. Chet Keith did not lend a hand. Instead he climbed up the side of the mountain and stood looking down with a frown at the hole from which the rock had fallen. He was still there when the maroon car went on its way. The bus driver had gone back to his own machine, where he tooted his horn several times to attract our attention. I had not returned to the bus either. I was watching Chet Keith. He gave a start when he saw me staring up at him.

“Wind must have blown it over,” he said, giving me what I regarded as a distinctly shifty glance.

“Except that there has been no wind all afternoon,” I replied.

He frowned and tried to slip something into his pocket which he had picked up from a clump of withered grass at his feet.

“Accidents will happen,” he murmured.

“I wouldn’t call it an accident if a cold chisel had been employed to dig a rock loose,” I said with a sniff.

He looked at me as if he would have enjoyed wringing my neck, but he produced the object which he had attempted to secrete in his pocket without my seeing it. It was a cold chisel. Bits of gravel and clay still clung to its side.

“It’s probably been lying here for weeks,” he observed in a defiant manner.

“That’s why it’s all rusty,” I commented with elaborate sarcasm.

The cold chisel was not rusted. It looked bright and new.

“You don’t miss much, do you?” inquired Chet Keith.

This time it was I who reached up and plucked something from a clump of withered grass clinging to the side of the mountain.

“Not a great deal,” I said and would have pocketed my discovery without another word, but he caught my wrist and held it.

“A woman!” he exclaimed.

I nodded. “Looks as if.”

The object which I was holding was a hairpin, an amber-coloured hairpin made of cheap celluloid.

“Jees,” he said softly and then grinned. “Any reason why somebody at Lebeau Inn should crave to see you reach a sudden end?”

I thought of Ella and shook my head. “If I should have been taken down with a mild case of poison ivy it might not have been unwelcome, but” – I took another shuddering glance at the bluff on our other side – “nothing like this.”

“I wasn’t expecting to be met with a brass band either,” he admitted with his cocksure grin. “However, as you say, murder is a cat of another odour.”

I caught my breath. “Murder!”

He gave me a sharp glance. “The real question before the house is: Who tried to send Thomas Canby to kingdom come?”

I gasped, but he was already walking toward the bus and, feeling suddenly infirm in the region of my knees, I followed.

I shall never forget my first glimpse of Lebeau Inn that afternoon.

The storm which was slowly gathering made a sullen background for the rambling frame structure with which twenty years of neglect had wrought havoc. An effort had been made to repair the sagging columns along the wide veranda at the front. The grounds closest to the building had been cleared, but there was still something frowzy and unkempt about the shrubs which grew up so high as to obscure the lower panes of the tall windows on the first floor.

There were too many scraggly pines hugging the house. No wonder the place had a musty smell, I thought, it needed a good sunning.

I remembered that, being so high above sea level, the clouds had a habit of meandering in and out of the inn at the least excuse.

“I don’t know why everybody in the place doesn’t come down with rheumatism,” I grumbled as I was untangling myself from my cramped position in the bus.

Chet Keith grinned. “It does look a little on the dreary side,” he remarked, then added in what he evidently intended for a facetious tone, “A swell setting for a murder.”

I had succeeded in hanging my skirt again and, hearing a slight rip as I jerked myself loose, was not in the sweetest temper. “What are you going to do about that cold chisel?” I demanded.

“Do?”

“I suppose there is such a thing as police protection in this benighted spot.”

He changed colour. “I dare say you’re right,” he said slowly.

“What we saw will have to be reported — at least to Thomas Canby.”

“Well, I should think so,” I snapped and stared with a slight shiver at that angry black sky behind us.

“We’re probably making a great to-do about nothing,” he said.

I glanced at him sharply but he turned away, following the bus driver, who, laden with our joint baggage, was leading the way into the inn. The lobby, or lounge as they call it at Lebeau Inn, is a huge, barn-like room with high ceilings and distempered green walls in which the oak armchairs and leather-seated settees look lost. At the right as you enter is the desk, a tall walnut contraption with pigeonholes behind the counter for room keys and the mail.

At one end of the desk is a combination cigar and news stand. At the other is the door to the dining room. Opposite the desk is the entrance into twin parlours. At the rear of the lounge a single door leads into a long corridor from which opens a series of guest rooms, extending clear across the back of the building, there being only two storeys to the inn.

A blond young woman was presiding over the old-fashioned register which she pushed toward us with an ennuied gesture. In spite of her bored manner she took a lively interest in the young man who gallantly permitted me to register first. I saw her watching him from under her eyelashes. I thought Mr Chet Keith was aware of the fact. He struck me as a young man who was accustomed to exciting a ripple in feminine breasts. He was just a shade too nonchalant about the way he lit a cigarette and allowed his gaze to stray over the young woman’s rather blatant curves.

“Lady-killer,” I remarked to myself, having lived long enough about hotels to recognize the type which I abominate.

I did not miss the caressing gesture with which he accepted the pen from the girl behind the desk after I laid it down. However, upon reading the name which I had written the young woman transferred her attention to me.

“Oh, Miss Adams, Mrs Trotter left word for me to let her know the moment you arrived,” she said brightly. “I’ll give her a ring while Jake takes you upstairs. I’m sure you’ll both be pleased to know that we have been able to give you adjacent rooms.”

I had my doubts on that score as I followed the elderly porter to the stairs at the rear of the lobby. Lebeau Inn does not boast elevators. It was a stiff climb to the second floor. My arthritis being what it is, I did not look forward to manipulating those steps several times a day.