Murder Comes to Eden - Leslie Ford

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socially or physically. But you the jury must consider the provocation and weighing the undeniable fact of trespass, it will be your duty to determine the credibility of this witness.”

      He raised his glass. “To Miss Fairlie’s continuing eccentricities, Mr. O’Leary. And to your own long life and happiness at Eden, sir.”

      “Thank you,” Spig said. “No cyanide?”

      Judge Twohey smiled. “On the contrary.” He put the bottle back in the cupboard and took out his black straw hat. “We’ll finish our business after lunch,” he said, still smiling. “The Board of County Commissioners meet to-day. We’ll see them at Devon House.” He stopped at the desk, looking down at the plot. “Actually, you have nearer sixty acres than fifty here. This is a very old survey. The marsh you see indicated has filled in. Mr. Harlan Sudley had his line resurveyed last February. He found his fences well over on Eden’s side. But Miss Fairlie said it was a reasonable exchange, as the land that filled the marsh was Sudley land, due to Sudley bad farming practice.”

      He put the plot in a desk drawer. “Malice, I’m afraid, is a sin not even old age can cure.” Spig thought it was Miss Fairlie’s malice about Sudley farm practice he meant until they got across the square to Devon House and he met the six commissioners. They were eating in a small dining-room with Rotary and Lions club banners under the flag over the piano in one corner. Harlan Sudley, president of the board, was at one end of the table.

      Miss Fairlie’s neighbour, the one who offered her a thousand dollars an acre and had had his land resuveyed. Spig noted as they shook hands. Sudley was a big burly man with a soft voice, grizzling sandy hair, a ruddy sunburned face and shuttered pale blue eyes.

      The judge took his place at the other end of the table, Spig beside him.

      “Mr. O’Leary has bought the Plumtree Cove tract,” he said very casually—by way of explanation, Spig thought, until he heard the crashing silence, and the loud burst of guffaws that broke it. But not from the president of the board.

      “Hear that, Harlan?” The man sitting next to Sudley gave him a boisterous thwack between the shoulder blades.

      “I did. I’ll be glad to have Mr. O’Leary for a neighbour.”

      That took a definite effort and brought another round of hearty mirth. This was the malice Judge Twohey meant. It was friendly, but it was malice just the same. Sudley had really wanted that land; an unknown young man had got it. Spig was too dazed at the miracle of the O’Learys having it to think below the surface. All he could think of was getting back to Judge Twohey’s office, writing his cheque for two thousand dollars and then calling Molly . . . when it was done and nothing could possibly slip. He could see her face and Tip’s there in front of him as he ate, with no idea what he was eating. It never entered his mind to ask why Judge Twohey had insisted on the stipulation, or Sudley had offered a thousand dollars an acre for the tract, or why the silence and the loud guffaws.

      Nor did he listen to the sharper warning three months later when he and Molly—with a new son named John Eden O’Leary—their hearts full to overflowing, bursting to share their boundless good fortune, decided to give Molly’s sister Kathy the ten velvet acres for a wedding present.

      “This is seven hundred feet of waterfront you’re giving away, Mr. O’Leary,” Judge Twohey said. “I strongly advise you to keep it. It may greatly increase in value. Family dissension over land and money is as bitter as it seems to be inevitable.”

      “Not this family, sir. Miss Fairlie’s seen Kathy and she’s agreed. Kathy’s wonderful. Stan Ashton, this lad she’s marrying—he’s one of the best. He’s an idealist. I don’t think he even believes in money. He’s a sociologist, works for the Town Planning Commission in Washington. He can drive back and forth with me. Kathy’ll have their car and be down here with Molly. It’s the perfect set-up for all of us. None of us’ll ever have money enough to fight about, anyway.”

      “Perfect set-ups have a way of becoming imperfect. Life and circumstance—both change.” Judge Twohey shook his head. “Well, Mr. O’Leary, I understand that God takes care of fools and children—my experience to the contrary notwithstanding. I wish you’d listen to me. But if you won’t, you won’t.”

      CHAPTER III

      IF SPIG O’LEARY had asked, no one would have told him. The site of the bridge that was to cross the Devon River, picked by the Corps of Army Engineers, and the location of the super-highway, Devon County’s link in the new coastal defence system, were top secret in the hands of the State Roads Commission. There were rumours in Devonport, but Spig O’Leary was clearing honeysuckle, week-ends and nights when he got home. It took him another three months to find out that the bridge site and almost a mile of the dual-lane approach to it were on the Plumtree Cove tract, on the Eden’s Landing side of Harlan Sudley’s fence line. The reason for Judge Twohey’s warning was also clear. The bridge site and a good two-tenths of a mile of the approach were on the ten velvet acres the O’Leary’s had given Kathy for a wedding present—very velvet for Kathy and Stan Ashton. The bridge, fifty feet from Sudley’s marker on the shore, took two hundred feet of the Ashtons’ beach. The two-tenths of a mile right-of-way on it took four of their ten acres. The Ashtons took eight thousand dollars. The next section of right-of-way was five acres belonging to the O’Leary’s, but it was through the filled-in marsh and not good for much. The O’Leary’s got the standard fifty dollars an acre.

      But there wasn’t any dissension. The O’Leary’s could have used the eight thousand dollars. They were a little rueful, but they weren’t bitter, and by the time the cheque came, they were glad it gave Stan Ashton the chance to take a couple of years off and write his book, “Safety Factors in Highway Control.”

      “It’ll make him famous and we’ll all be so proud of him . . .” Kathy was starry-eyed and confident. And it did make him famous, but not at once—not until a paper-backed edition of the book was brought hastily out when Kathy was killed in the first hideous accident on the new two-million dollar bypass around Devonport. Coming home from a strawberry festival at the church, she put on speed to pass a gasoline truck in front of the Breezy Inn as six punk kids roared out into the road, cutting directly across in front of the truck. Seven people were dead, before or after the truck exploded no one knew, and the driver died that evening. That was just three months after the Governor had come down to open Devon’s link in the new highway. The O’Learys were bitter then, not about land or money but about the road and about Stan Ashton and his book. It had a new title, “Death Takes the High Road,” with a lurid picture on the front cover, maybe not Kathy but somebody like her, and a sub-title, “An Author’s Personal Tragedy,” with a note about the author’s three-year-old child. Maybe none of it was Stan Ashton’s fault, but having a best seller certainly eased his personal tragedy. The O’Learys and Molly Ashton, the three-year-old who’d come to stay with them, saw him on television but seldom in person. Until one Sunday afternoon, not a full five months after Kathy’s death, he came out driving a Cadillac convertible that belonged to the blonde girl in the seat beside him.

      “This is Anita,” he said happily. “I wanted her to meet you. We’re going to be married Wednesday. You’ll put her up overnight, won’t you? She couldn’t stay in that flea bag in town, and you know my stand on motels.” As an afterthought, he asked, “Where’s little Molly?”

      “She’s with our kids,” Spig said. “They’re having a picnic supper over at Miss Fairlie’s.”

      “Well, then, don’t bother,” Stan said. “Anita can see her later. She’s got a kid of her own. Lucy. She’s sixteen.”

      “Fifteen,” said Anita. She was slim, sleek and self-possessed, not as young as she’d looked in the car, dark-eyed, with long hair in a knot of glittering gold at the nape of her neck. She was polite and detached, a transient at a convenient inn. She tossed her floppy black hat on the sofa and tapped her lips to smother a yawn. “Don’t you get horribly bored, way out here?”

      “We love it,” Molly said.

      Stan

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