Read Online Deadly Nightshade by Elizabeth Daly - Free Book Online

grudging tone:
    â€œThey know him, but it’s little or nothing we’ve seen of him since the old gentleman died. Didn’t he telephone down, though, on Tuesday, when he didn’t know if his little b’y would get well, and ask the master would we have him in our graveyard?”
    â€œHave Tommy Ormiston in the Bartram graveyard?”
    â€œI took the message meself.”
    â€œWhat in the world did he do a thing like that for?”
    â€œOrmiston has no graveyard. Where would he put the little b’y? And wouldn’t it be like him to borrow a grave?”
    â€œI suppose it would, if you say so.”
    â€œMrs. Ormiston is a good, kind woman. She was down here, askin’ if she could help us; and she’s at the funeral now. It was herself told Mrs. George that Ormiston couldn’t wait to get back to the city to his paintin’, and he was half crazy with the delay. What’s a little b’y to him?”
    â€œYou seem to have it in for him, all right,” said Mitchell.
    â€œMrs. Ormiston is a kind woman. I said to her: ‘Take your children away from here, before worse happens to them. Take them away,’ I said. ‘There’s a curse on the place.’”
    â€œI know; you’ve been saying so right along. But things happen in most places; this isn’t any worse than any other place.”
    â€œAnd I said the same to Mrs. George Bartram. I said: ‘Take your child away from this dreary seacoast.’”
    â€œYou must have been a big comfort to ’em. Anything you’d like to ask this old lady, Mr. Gamadge?”
    Annie turned vague eyes on Gamadge, in which he read a vast bewilderment, and a definite fear. He said: “You can’t see the summerhouse from your kitchen, Annie; I know that. Can you see it from your bedroom upstairs?”
    â€œMe room upstairs?”
    â€œYes. Is it on the west side of the house? Can you see the summerhouse from the window?” As she continued to look at him blankly, he went on: “I wondered if you had happened to go up there on Tuesday, between twelve and one. If you had seen anything unusual going on in the garden you’d have mentioned it—I know that; but I thought you might have seen something that you didn’t think important at the time, but that might interest us.”
    She drew away from him, looking very much frightened.
    â€œ Did you look out of your window?” persisted Gamadge.
    â€œI have not climbed a stair in this house since the stiffness got into my knee, a dozen years ago. The old madam gave me the little room next the kitchen for my bedroom, and she put a bathroom for me where the old scullery used to be.”
    â€œWhich side of the house are you on?”
    â€œThe east side, and me windows are choked up with vines. It’s strangled we are with the trees and the bushes, but the old madam would not have them cleared away. ‘Annie,’ she told me, ‘the old master liked the shade. We’ll cut nothing down while I live.’ That was when young Mrs. Carroll wanted the landscape artist to come in and make a garden among the rocks.”
    â€œSo if that little gypsy had wandered in through the gate on Tuesday, at noon or thereabouts, you wouldn’t have seen him from the kitchen door, or from any window.”
    â€œThank God, not a thing did I see.”
    â€œYou were pretty busy that morning, weren’t you?”
    â€œI was; and the new girl never came until most of the work was done. By the front door she came, like a visitor; ‘It’s Miss Gibbons I am,’ she says. And I pushed her back into the kitchen before she had her hat off.”
    â€œSo she never had a glimpse of the summerhouse.”
    â€œIt’s many a glimpse she’s had of it since; and didn’t she try to bring her young man in yesterday, to have a look at it. And hasn’t she gone off to the funeral this morning, like one of