I Am the Only Running Footman by Martha Grimes Page B

the little graveyard. “We all loved Phoebe so much.”
    â€œI’m sure. I’ve never had children.”
    â€œNor I. My wife didn’t want any. Rose didn’t much care for the country here. Actually, she didn’t much care for me, I think, and the proximity to Mother. Mother can be, as you might guess, a formidable person. But she never interfered, never. It’s just her presence. She can move us about, you know.”
    There was no resentment in his tone. Melrose could well imagine Marion Winslow “moving them about.”
    â€œOne day I woke up,” continued Ned, “and she was gone. I don’t know where; she had talked about the States, about Canada. But she didn’t bother leaving a note. So I don’t know where, do I?”
    â€œWhere have you gone to . . .?” Melrose could not help but think of the poem.
    Ned looked from the graves to the wall to the sky. “There was another man, I’m sure. Didn’t even know she’d been seeing him. Didn’t even know him. That’s how blind a poet can be.”
    â€œOr how blind a wife can be.” Ned Winslow gave him the impression of a man who’d accepted the past as nothing but a missed train on a wasted journey; he would stand on the platform or travel through life with his cases empty.
    Melrose had been carrying the small book of poems in his pocket and drew it out. He thumbed through the pages until he came to the poem David had mentioned.
    â€œIt’s very old-fashioned, as David says. Rhyme, meter, quatrains.”
    â€œThere is something to be said for what you call ‘old-fashioned.’ Here it is.” Melrose read:
    â€œWhere have you gone to, Elizabeth Vere,
    Far from the garden, the blossom, the bole?
    Rain glazes the stream — ”
    Melrose looked off toward a small stream partly shrouded in ice that meandered close to the garden wall. “It sounds like this place. Was it meant for someone in particular?” He returned the book to his pocket.
    Ned stood looking off toward the grove of beeches, frowning. “A writer never really knows who he means, does he? Perhaps that really is blindness, not to know.” He changed the subject. “If you knew David, you’d know it’s impossible for him to have strangled that girl. Anyway, there’s no reason, no motive. Ivy must’ve been killed by a mugger, someonelike that. Wouldn’t you think that the obvious answer?”
    Ned Winslow looked at him as if Melrose were a magician who just might pull the right rabbit out of the hat. “If that were the case, the killer certainly didn’t want much. There appears to be no motive.”
    â€œThere’s none with David, either. He had no motive.”
    Melrose thought of what Jury had told him of the women, Sheila Broome and Ivy Childess. “ ‘Then glided in Porphyria —’ ”
    Ned reached out to pull a weed from between the stones of the wall. “That’s an odd allusion. If you’re thinking of David as a Porphyria’s lover type —” Ned laughed. “Believe me, he hadn’t any passionate attachment to Ivy Childess.” He turned those molten umber eyes on Melrose. “And what about Porphyria herself?”
    â€œPorphyria? She struck me as being rather pathetic.”
    â€œShe struck me as being a bit of a tramp,” said Ned, with a smile.

13
    â€œW THAT is the matter with you, Dolly? You’ve been in a sulk — well, not that perhaps — on edge, more, ever since you came here.” And as Kate set the cup of tea and a toasted tea cake before her sister, she wondered once again why Dolly had come. Her visits up to now had been in the spring or summer, especially summer, the clement weather and quieter ocean allowing her to show off her near-perfect figure. “Job? Man? What?”
    Dolly looked up at her sister. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just