opened.” She looked at Tippy. “I see you got him back. I didn’t mean to alarm you, but Miss Fairlie’s very . . . well, I expect you could see it. She’s quite mad, as mad as a hatter, really, you know. It was all right with David there. He watches out for her. Well, good-bye. Come again, won’t you?”
“Miss Fairlie wasn’t mad, Mother,” Tippy said, when they were on their way through the shaded lane to the outer gate. “She was glad. She liked us there. She told me so. She said she didn’t let people come in her house because they made a noise and there was a child asleep. But I don’t make a noise when Kitsy’s asleep, do I, Mother?”
“No, Tippy. She’s asleep now, so why don’t you take a nap too?”
“Yes, because we’ve had a very hard day,” said Tippy.
Neither Spig nor Molly said anything till she looked back and saw him sound asleep.
“I can’t bear it, Spig,” she whispered. “I just can’t. How can we explain to him? It’ll break his heart.”
“I know. I’m sorry. We should have got out of there when she started talking about the blood. You could see she was bats . . . the look in her eye. Do you want to go to the Camerons’? I don’t.”
Molly shook her head. When they got to the Devon Manor sign, she said, “No. Somewhere else. Virginia, maybe. I wish we’d never come.”
She cried herself to sleep that night in Spig’s arms, and he felt like crying himself. He couldn’t get the hurt, completely not-understanding look on Tippy’s face out of his mind. “I’ll go to a real estate agent in the morning,” he said, and he was shaving, getting ready to go, when the phone rang. Molly had taken Kitsy to market, and Tip with with them.
“Devonport calling Mr. Tipton James O’Leary, Senior.”
“This is Mr. O’Leary.”
“Go ahead, Judge,” he heard the operator say, and a dry, precise voice came on.
“Mr. Tipton James O’Leary, Senior?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Judge Nathan Twohey in Devonport. I understand you were at Eden, Miss Celia Fairlie’s place, yesterday.”
“That’s correct.”
“I understand you were offered a tract of her land?”
Judge Nathan Twohey sounded as if O’Leary had not only been offered it but had picked it up and carried it away with him and Judge Twohey wanted it back at once.
“Right,” said Spig.
“Then I must ask you to come to Devonport and discuss the matter here in my office.”
Spig’s jaw tightened. It was not a request but an order. He was just about to say, “And I must ask you to go to hell, Judge Twohey, sir,” when he thought of Tip’s face. Even if they had to pay more than two thousand—even if they could only get a piece of it . . .
“The property is for sale, is it?” he asked instead.
“That’s a matter I prefer to discuss in my office.”
“I’ll come down right away.”
Don’t count on this, he said to himself in the mirror. He scribbled a non-committal note—“Business. Back around five. Love, Spig”—and went down the service stairs so he wouldn’t meet them coming back from market.
CHAPTER II
HE DIDN’T see the dingy yellow line on the kerb when he parked in the somnolent tree-shaded square in Devonport. The courthouse was a faded brick building with a squat, rusty, gold cupola and a porch with pillars, like the little Greek Revival building outside the wall at the Gardens of Eden. There were broken-down green benches under thirsty trees whose exposed roots ribbed the dry ground where a few unhappy blades of grass struggled to live. He went up the uneven brick walk. A big man with curly black hair and deep-set dark eyes was lounging against one of the weater-beaten pillars in the sun.
“Can you tell me where I’ll find Judge Twohey?”
“Other side.” The man shoved a big fist out across the square. “That little round arch in the wall, upstairs to your left. And that heap you’ve got. It’s parked on a yellow line. I can make you a deal, if you want to turn it in. I won’t give you a ticket this time.” He grinned at Spig. “I’m the law in these parts. Yerby’s the name. Tell the judge I killed the fellow stealing his wife’s chickens. He’s a black snake about seven feet long. Don’t forget when you want a car.”
“I’ll remember when I get the dough. My name’s O’Leary.”
“Oh.” Yerby looked at him with alerted interest. “You’re the guy. Well, good luck. Be seeing you around . . . maybe.”
Judge Twohey was behind a beat-up oak desk across one corner of a musty room lined with old law books and dog-eared file boxes. He was very old, very neat in his black poplin suit, fragile and semi-transparent as a potato shoot in a dark cellar. But all Spig was aware of were the eyes examining him, intensely alive, unfriendly.
Judge Twohey spoke abruptly. “Here is the plot of the land you propose to buy.”
Spig took it. He looked at it. “Oh, no,” he said, his heart taking a sickening nose-dive into the pit. “Oh, no. There’s some mistake. She said several acres, not fifty. She said a . . . a pleasant piece of beach—not thirty-three hundred feet of it. She said two thousand dollars . . .”
“You’re not interested in the property, then.” Judge Twohey’s voice sounded a shade less hostile.
There was the sudden, sharp taste of tears in Spig’s mouth. “It’s not that, sir. We are interested. But we don’t have that kind of money. We couldn’t expect to buy . . .”
“It’s your opinion that if Miss Fairlie wishes to sell you this land for two thousand dollars, she hasn’t the legal right to do so?”
“Not that, sir. Not if she’s of sound mind.” He flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Except that there was this dame with a lot of teeth taking tickets out there yesterday said Miss Fairlie was mad. Mad as a hatter.”
“That dame was my wife, Mr. O’Leary.”
In the silence, of the kind commonly called abysmal, the sweat trickling down between Mr. O’Leary’s shoulder blades was very cold.
“My second wife. A capable and efficient woman with only the normal dentitional complement, I believe.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Quite. It does suggest the practical wisdom of keeping one’s big mouth shut.”
“You’re understating it, sir.”
Judge Twohey smiled a little. “Also, here in Devon we say ‘eccentric,’ not ‘mad,’ Mr. O’Leary. But you needn’t have any anxiety on the score of Miss Fairlie’s eccentricity in financial affairs. She has an uncanny
