Dick refilled his scotch and soda. “I could take her out for a sail in the bay and capsize.”
Bert frowned. “I think not,” he said. “After all, Alice went by drowning.”
“And Harry too, when we capsized fifteen years ago,” Marion said. “Three drownings would seem entirely too many to be coincidental.”
Harry had been Marion’s first, and only, husband. A wealthy apple grower in Oregon, whom she had married at a time when the family finances were at rock bottom, he had survived only seven weeks of matrimonial bliss. The waters in Puget Sound can also be quite tricky, and when the sailboat overturned Marion had been too concerned with helping her younger brother Dick (who was a splendid swimmer) to give her non-swimming husband a hand. Soon he was out of reach. He had been only forty feet away, but unhappily the forty feet had all been straight down.
Alice, Dick’s only wife — to date — had drowned only two years before, while swimming off a lonely beach at Acapulco, Mexico. Alice had been a dull, rather homely girl with a thin, curveless body, but she had been a splendid swimmer. When she met Dick — whose car had broken down in the small Midwestern town where she lived and who had visited the local swimming pool to while away the time until it was fixed — she had been overwhelmed with wonder that he found her attractive. No other man ever had, though possibly some might have if they had known, as Dick did, that she had a half interest in a two hundred thousand dollar estate, left in trust for her and her sister Jinny by their father.
Dick had been hoping for a better figure, using both meanings of the word, but a balance in the bank has always been worth two on the wing. He had therefore seized the opportunity and eloped with her, and he and Bert and Marion had jointly taken her off to Mexico to honeymoon. Alice had exulted in long swims out into the blue Pacific. Sometimes, when Dick was weary, she had swum alone. From one of these lonely swims she had not returned.
Cramps, said the Mexican authorities when her body finally washed ashore. But it may have been the overpowering lethargy brought on by sedatives mixed with the black coffee she loved to drink before starting a swim.
Anyway, now her money was gone, Jinny was almost twenty-one, and the share Alice had left her pretty sister, and which had been nibbled at, must be accounted for. The Farringtons, if a little provoked at Fate for forcing another murder upon them, were nevertheless facing up to their burden.
“It must be clearly an accident,” Marion said.
“Don’t give any gossip a chance to get started,” Bert agreed.
“Perhaps a picnic out by the old Cliff Point House,” Dick suggested. “It’s a long drop to the rocks.”
“If we can’t think of anything better,” Marion said. “But shhh — she’s coming back now.”
They watched the slender girl come across the field, the basket on her arm. Halfway to the house, she waved to a small man in a large checked cap who rode by on a bicycle. The small man was Mr. Downey, who had rented the next house for the summer. Mr. Downey was a bookish man whose hobby was geology and who rode hither and yon on his bicycle, chipping bits off rocks.
“Speaking of sleeping,” Bert murmured, “do you suppose the girl is psychic?”
“What do you mean?” Marion asked.
“These nightmares she’s been having the last two weeks since she came here to visit us. Every other night. Nightmares about big, dark figures closing in on her, whispering things she can’t make out.” He coughed slightly. “What I mean is do you suppose she—”
“Of course the girl’s not psychic,” Marion said. “She’s just undernourished and nervous, like so many modern girls. Also, she studied too hard at school. Imagine a chit like her, not yet twenty-one, graduating from college. However, no matter what’s causing her nightmares, I’m glad of them. The whole town knows about them, and Dr. Barnes can testify her nerves aren’t strong — that’s why I insisted she go see him. So no matter what happens—”
She broke off as the front door opened. A moment later Jinny Wells entered the room.
Jinny was a slender girl, small-boned, with a delicate, wistful oval face and a slow, soft-voiced manner of speaking. Her cheeks were pink now with heat and exertion, her dark eyes dancing.
“Oh, I found some!” she cried. “Found some mushrooms. Look!”
Her eyes, wide and admiring, smiled at Dick, who smiled back. She handed the basket to Marion, who glanced into it.
“Why, child—” Marion began, then recovered herself smoothly. “You’ve done well,” she said. “You shall have them for supper. Take them out to the kitchen; I’ll fix them myself.”
“Oh, thank you, Marion,” Jinny said. “But we’ll all have them.” She turned to go, and her lashes fluttered as she peeped at Dick beneath them. Then she went lightly out with her basket of mushrooms.
“Well, that takes care of that,” Marion said when Jinny had gone. “She’s mixed in some of the most deadly kind of mushrooms with edible ones that look a lot like it. What is the name of that mushroom, that terribly poisonous one? No matter, there’s quite enough to kill her. And she picked them herself and showed them to Mr. Downey, next door. We’ll be in the clear — quite in the clear.”
At last, Marion thought, her education was coming to some use. Which might still not be the case if it weren’t for that course she’d taken in botany.
The Farringtons were a rather attractive family, but like most of us, they sometimes got into an ugly humor. They were in one now as they sat in the fusty parlor. They were so upset that they could have killed someone.
The clock said eleven at night. The evening had gone badly. Marion had cooked a tasty dinner with wild rice and duckling, including a special side dish of mushrooms just for Jinny. There weren’t enough to go around, she had said firmly. Jinny had picked them and Jinny should have them. And she wished she didn’t have to include the edible ones, but the one portion would have been too skimpy without them.
Jinny had wriggled with joy at the idea of eating something she had actually garnered from Nature all by herself. Half a dozen times she started on them, meanwhile keeping up a lively chatter about her year at college. Each time, as they waited in frozen expectancy, she had stopped to tell them of some other funny incident of school life. But she, finally, put the dish firmly before her and started eating. She had eaten at least three of the mushrooms from her side dish of fatal and non-fatal types when the phone rang. As bouncy as a small boy, Jinny leaped up to answer it. And the dish of mushrooms had fallen to the floor and scattered across the rug.
Jinny was painfully embarrassed, but there had been nothing to do save throw the mushrooms in the garbage can. As for the phone call, it had only been from their tiresome neighbor, Mr. Downey, inviting them to tea the following afternoon.
They had waited hopefully for nature to take its course, if the three mushrooms Jinny had eaten were of the fatal type. But Jinny had gone up to bed quite healthy and now the Farringtons were under the annoying necessity of figuring out some other way to dispose of her. It was really very thoughtless of the girl to put them to so much trouble.
“It will have to be a fall from the cliff,” Marion said. “I told Mr. Downey we couldn’t come to tea because we were going on a picnic. Very well, we will go on a picnic. Jinny will see a very special flower she wants to pick, clinging dangerously to the side of the cliff. She will start down for it and slip and... well, we just weren’t close enough to catch her.”