The amethyst spectacles, p.1
The Amethyst Spectacles, page 1
The Amethyst Spectacles
A Pat and Jean Abbott Mystery
Frances Crane
People in this Book
Patrick Abbott, a lean and lanky Westerner who wouldn’t give up.
Jean Abbott, his stylish young wife.
Julia Price, attractive young manager of the Indian jewelry shop.
Hugh Kennicot, former pilot, and now a sheep raiser in Sky Valley.
Scott Davies, County Health Officer.
Sheriff Jim Trask, a friendly bull-dog type of man.
Max Ottoway, the State’s Attorney, who is in a perpetual hurry.
Bee Chandler, short and curly-haired co-owner of the amethyst spectacles.
Karen Chandler is the spitting image of her mother, Bee.
Edwina Ames, is more glamorous than her sister, Karen.
Maurice Ames, Edwina’s rich husband, who fancied himself as a Spanish don.
Ray Thayer, whose real friends rallied round after his death.
Dorrie Thayer, his wife, friendless and scared to death.
Chapter 1
It was a fresh clear afternoon in the early spring. I sat in the corner seat back of the adobe fireplace in the Turquoise Shop and looked down the length of the room through the big show window into the plaza. The sunshine twinkled on the new green leaves of the cottonwoods and made the new grass golden-green. It made special magic with the pink or blue shawls worn by the Indian women going about their marketing, and it dealt gaily with those harsher colors, the scarlets and cerises, the heavy greens and lush yellows, which the Mexican men and women favored. The Anglos, men and women, stuck to blues and browns, going bright only with a scarf, or at most a loud shirt.
I kept seeing people I knew. I saw Karen Chandler, in khaki jodhpurs and an old tweed jacket, with no hat on her short gay blue-black hair, laughing near the bird-bath in the middle of the plaza with a ruddy, square-shouldered young cowman. I saw Sheriff Jim Trask. He stood for a while under the edge of the arcades on the north side of the square listening to what seemed to be a harangue from a plump-looking youngish man in a navy suit and felt hat.
“Who’s that with Mr. Trask?” I asked Julia Price.
Julia looked up from the high stool behind the jewelry counter, where she was polishing silver jewelry.
“That’s Max Ottoway,” she said. “The state’s attorney.”
“He seems trying to talk the sheriff into something.”
Julia Price sniffed. “He’s been nagging at him ever since he got elected, Jeanie. The truth is, he wants to get rid of Mr. Trask.”
“He must be crazy!”
“You said it. But Max Ottoway wants to be up-to-date fast. He says the office of sheriff went out with the Ark. He wants to call on the state troopers for everything, in spite of the fact that there’s not enough state police to go round, specially now with a lot of them gone to the war. Ottoway doesn’t seem to know that Santa Maria County is the best watched over in the state, even though it’s one of the biggest. Why, this county is bigger than all of Connecticut, and Mr. Trask and five or six deputies, and two of those among the lame and halt, have to preserve law and order. And they do it dam well, by gosh! Ottoway’s jealous, that’s all!”
Julia snorted indignantly, her chin quivered, her Indian bracelets and bangles jingled. She always wore eight or ten silver and turquoise bracelets on each arm, earrings, several necklaces, and a silver concha belt. She was one of the nicest people in the world, and to me one of the most attractive. Her brown eyes were too big, her nose was top small, her mouth too wide, and her chin was too tiny for her smooth broad forehead but it all worked up into something very pleasing to my eye. Her hair was at present auburn. Her long-legged shape was encased in a red-and-blue checked shirt, and navy trousers tucked into fancy cowboy boots.
“The thing they really clashed on was Ray Thayer’s death,” Julia said. I looked at her suddenly. I hadn’t heard that Ray was dead. “Ottoway said it was suicide after he couldn’t prove it murder.”
“Julia!” I felt shocked. “I didn’t know Ray was dead.”
“I wrote you myself, Jeanie. It was when you were in England. Poor Ray was—well, he fell—into the Rio Grande Canyon, there at The Rock.” In my mind I saw The Rock jutting like a headland above the feverishly colored canyon. I saw Ray Thayer falling, his arms waving foolishly, and his legs taking those futile steps in the air. “His body was utterly crushed,” Julia said. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said then.
Neither did I, so I looked out on the plaza again, and my eyes fastened on Karen Chandler.
“Karen looks exactly like her mother, Julia.”
“She’s taller than Bee, and broader in the shoulders the way gals are these days. Otherwise, exactly.”
“Those sort of gaunt women certainly do have style. I saw a lot of that kind in England. If those English girls only had clothes they would be the best-looking on earth. Who’s the boy?”
Julia said, in a slightly different tone, “His name’s Hugh Kennicott.”
“Very elegant name, Julia.”
“Very elegant guy. Or at least I thought so, at first. You know that log hunting lodge up in Sky Valley we used to be so nuts about? Well, it belongs to Hugh’s father. The kid cracked up in an airplane shortly after the war started and they shipped him out here to get well. Right away he started raising cattle and sheep up in Sky Valley and did so well that by the time he wanted to get back into service the government told him to go on ranching instead.”
I saw Sky Valley, an emerald-green bowl three thousand feet above Santa Maria. It was ringed until midsummer with snow-capped peaks. I saw it teeming with white-faced cows and snow-white sheep, which was purely in my fancy, because when I had really seen that valley there hadn’t been anything noticeable in the greenness save the hunting lodge and a small clear lake.
Julia said, “That ought to make a match. Unfortunately, Edwina saw Hugh first.”
Edwina was Karen’s older sister.
“Edwina? Isn’t she still married to Maurice Ames?”
“And how,” said Julia.
I drew a long-breath.
“Things happen in this place, Julia.”
“But definitely,” Julia said.
Sheriff Trask strode across the plaza in the direction of the shop. He looked just the same, something over six feet of solid muscle and sinew dressed in a gray flannel shirt, corduroy pants in high laced boots, a stained windbreaker, a blue cotton bandanna, and a time-worn Stetson hat whose brim curled away from his lean sunburned wind-seamed gray-eyed face. There might be a few more crow’s feet raying out from his keen eyes, and maybe a little more gray in his hair, but the sheriff looked no older than when I had last seen him, two years ago.
He came into the shop. He ducked to avoid humping his head on the top of the door frame. He took off his hat. He held it in one hand as he gravely advanced across the shop. We had both got to our feet. We shook hands. We both felt a little awed by the sheriff.
“Mighty glad to see you, Miss Holly,” he said. “Excuse me, I mean Mrs. Abbott, ma’am.” He asked after our health. We asked after his. We mentioned the weather. We all remained standing, because the sheriff wouldn’t sit down. He held his hat in both hands and his bronzed capable fingers worked at its curling brim. “I saw you come in here, Mrs. Abbott. I been wanting to ask after Pat, ma’am.”
“Well, he’s doing fine,” I said. “Too fine, in my opinion. This climate is much too healthy. He’s already rarin’ to go. Before we know it, he’s going to be able to go back into active service, and I’d rather he wouldn’t, you know, but it’s what he wants, Mr. Trask.”
Julia said, “I suppose you’ve heard that Pat’s a hero, Mr. Trask? Pat came back with four Jap bullets in his chest and three citations on it.”
“Oh, Julia!” I said. “It was only two bullets, Mr. Trask, but three citations.”
“Anyhow, he was a hero,” Julia said. “He saved another man’s life.”
“It was just what any Marine would do for any other Marine, Mr. Trask,” I said. But proudly.
“They don’t come any better than our Marines,” said the sheriff.
“They were on reconnaissance, not in combat,” I said. “Their plane was shot down. It’s a miracle they got out alive. He was in the jungle for days—they were, I mean—and Pat got pneumonia along with the bullets. But he’s going to be fine.”
“He should have stayed in Europe,” Julia said.
“Pat’s a Californian,” I said. He had been born in Wyoming but he now called San Francisco home. “He didn’t rest till he got sent to the Pacific, and he hated it over there like sin, but still he won’t be happy till he’s back. Why don’t you drop round and see him, Mr. Trask?”
“That’s just what I stopped in to ask you if I could do, ma’am.”
“He’d love to see you. Come any time, Mr. Trask. We haven’t any phone, you know, so, whenever you feel like it, drop in.”
After the sheriff went out I asked Julia about Ray Thayer.
Julia said, from the high stool, where she had again taken up her polishing, “Well, the truth is, Karen Chandler was sort of mixed up in that business, Jeanie. It was too bad.”
“Karen?”
Julia frowned. “I might as well tell you, darling. You’ll hear it anyway, and maybe not from somebody as friendly towards Karen as I am. I know she’s a tomboy and always banging away with a gun, but I love Karen. You said a while ago that Karen looked like her mother. Sh e certainly does. She is even a little nearsighted, the way Bee is. She has to wear glasses to see clearly at a distance—when she drives, goes hunting, or to the pictures, or to be sure who somebody is at the other side of a large room. You remember Bee’s purple-blue glasses?”
I nodded. It was the frames that were purple-blue, with the color and semi-translucency of uncut amethyst, and they were charming. They had been specially designed for Bee Chandler’s beautiful violet-blue eyes by somebody in Paris. The frames conformed to the lines of Bee’s eyes and straight black eyebrows. The color flattered her eyes.
“Bee gave those specs to Karen, Jeanie. Well, they found them in Ray Thayer’s car.”
“In his car?”
“After he was killed. His car was parked there beside The Rock, in that flat place where we always park. It was parked with the headlights facing up that trail which leads to The Rock from the Sante Fe road. Well, since everybody thought that Karen was going to marry Ray Thayer …”
“Karen?”
“Ray was crazy about Karen in his quiet sort of way. Well, Karen wanted to finish college. She was down at the state university in Albuquerque, you know. She finished in less than three years. Karen is smart, Jeanie. Well, anyway, when he came back from Hollywood with a bride …”
“Ray?” I saw Ray in my imagination, sleepy-looking and moony-eyed. He walked with a slight limp. Ray wrote western stories and made lots of money because they were very exciting, which was funny, because Ray Thayer was really rather dull. “Bride?” I said. I felt rather dizzy.
Jeanie, wait until you see Dorrie! Then you will be knocked for a loop.”
“Dorrie?”
“Dorrie’s the bride Ray brought from Hollywood. She’s the current problem child, Jeanie. First it’s one thing then another from Little Dorrie, as she’s generally called. She has a constant feud with Maurice Ames. The truth is, nobody has been very nice to Dorrie except Scott Davies, but of course Scott is nice to everybody and besides he and Ray were pals and neighbors and he says himself it’s easier to treat people civilly than not, so why bother to fight. Maurice plagues the little woman, baits her.”
“Julia,” I said, “I wish you wouldn’t mention this to Pat, if you don’t mind. It’s no time for him to get excited about the local murders.”
“Murder?” Julia said, with her eyes going very round and her lower lip hanging. “Oh, nobody thinks now that Ray was murdered. When it happened and Max Ottoway grilled Karen so mercilessly at the inquest, on account of her specs being in the car, it made a sort of tempest in the local teapot, but now that everybody knows Dorrie better they think Ray took a good look at her too late and then went out and jumped off The Rock.” Julia polished vigorously. “But of course, and why not,” she said lucidly.
Some customers entered the shop, and, after a while, when it was obvious they were going to hang around interminably, I said good-bye to Julia: and went home. I had walked the quarter mile from our house to the plaza. Walking back along the dry yellow rutted road, with the lush blue-green alfalfa field on my left and on my right the yellow mesa—where our low white house perched with its box-seat view of the village and the Santa Maria Mountains—I couldn’t get the Thayer business out of my mind. I kept thinking about Ray Thayer, Scott Davies and Maurice Ames. Their ranches adjoined each other along the Silver River road. Also I thought of Bee Chandler, Karen and Edwina’s mother. Mrs. Chandler was an attractive woman, with that thinness like Karen’s which was so amazingly chic. She was always rather standoffish. She was a widow. During her married life she had lived abroad. The girls had been educated in Europe. Seven years ago, when Edwina was seventeen and Karen twelve, they had come for a summer in Santa Maria. In 1939 Mrs. Chandler had bought a small rancho two miles northeast of town.
The older of the two girls, Edwina, looked like a Spanish fairy princess. The summer she was twenty she had married Maurice Ames. Maurice was twenty-four years older than Edwina, and she herself was now about twenty-four.
As I turned up the steep lane Patrick appeared at the front door, waved, and walked along the flags to meet me at the gate in the white adobe wall which enclosed the white adobe house, the garden, and the lone cottonwood which stood near the stoop. I thought suddenly of the first time I’d seen him, a lean lanky darkly tanned Westerner with blue-green eyes, white teeth, straight black brows, and those precise attractive lines the weather etches in Western faces. He looked just the same, except that his dark hair was now in a crew cut. He wore jeans and a navy wool shirt. His tight pants were belted low, cowboy style, on his lean hips. He’d got tanned so black in the Pacific that weeks in a San Francisco hospital had merely bleached him back to his normal brown. I kept thinking of him as I walked up the hill and I regret to say that I felt a sudden panic because he looked so disgustingly healthy. That meant he’d be going back to the war.
Two or three days went by. Each day was a little more beautiful. The sun would sail up gaily over the mountains. In the afternoons big white clouds would roll out of the west and sometimes there would be a short rain. The leaves of the cottonwood tree which shaded the flagstones that made a sort of terrace near the stoop were full-sized already, and each leaf was as perfect as though newly designed for this special season when we happened to be in the house. The alfalfa in the meadows which bordered the mountain rivers and irrigation ditches turned greener, if possible, and all over the valley the wild plums bloomed. Their thickets made little occasional drifts of white and their pungent scent filled the air. Some mornings there would be fresh snow on the peaks and in the valley their bases would look powdered with the whiteness of plum and apple trees. It was hard to remember, in the spring, that most of this valley was desert most of the year.
Mornings I stayed in bed till Mrs. Dominguez arrived, some time around eight or nine o’clock, then I would get up and take a bath and dress and bring Patrick his breakfast in bed. I loved that. He hated it. He grumbled but gave in, because Dr. Johnson said that if he stayed in bed till eleven every morning he could stay up the remainder of the day. If the weather was warm enough we lunched outdoors under the cottonwood tree. If it wasn’t we had it in the little dining room, where a pinon fire blazed in a little Indian fireplace set in the wall three feet above the floor. Big, brown, handsome Mrs. Dominguez cleaned the house mornings and got lunch and went home after she had finished the dishes, so that in the afternoons we were alone together—that is, except for Pancho the dog and Toby the cat. We would have tea out of doors if the weather was fine and supper in the living room by the fireplace.
I considered this life ideal. I wished it could go on forever, but Patrick was already restless, wanting to do this or that which the doctor said was too much exertion for him at this time. He started smoking too much. He sent to the plaza for a lariat and practiced rope tricks. He had been raised in the saddle and he was smart with the rope, but I felt worried because I was sure that even this was too strenuous.
I even encouraged him to paint, and if you had ever seen any of the painting which was his private passion you would understand the extent of my anxiety over his restlessness when I bought oils and brushes and canvas and urged him to do a still life.
Painting was strictly no sale. “A still life!” he snorted. “Any news on the plaza this morning? Doesn’t anything ever happen around here? Do you ever run into Jim Trask?”
“The sheriff is coming to see you, darling,” I had reported, after seeing him in Julia’s shop. When he did not come I had asked about him and found out he was off in another corner of the county on the trail of some rustlers. That made Patrick even more restless. Rustlers are specially verminous now because they sell their stolen meat on the black market. They put Patrick in a state. What he needed to make him feel fit was a good successful chase after such rustlers, he thought.
I quoted Dr. Johnson. He snorted and said plenty about the doctor, which, boiled down, was approximately no guts.
People dropped in. Bee and Karen Chandler, whom Patrick liked. He didn’t think Bee too standoffish, but I could see that her enigmatic character fascinated him. He thought Karen was marvelous-looking, and I couldn’t decide if she was or was not. Maurice Ames did not come, but Edwina drifted in, and we talked about how different she was from her mother and her younger sister. Julia Price and Scott Davies stopped in one afternoon after work. Scott was about thirty, blond and slender, with candid blue eyes and pale shining hair. I was afraid he would talk about Ray Thayer and say perhaps that his death was a mystery, or something, and get Patrick excited, and I could laugh, too, when I thought about that, because how often I had egged Patrick on into working on a case and now I was just as anxious to prevent any such happening. Scott was running the public-health office now and, to avoid the possible mention of Ray Thayer, I kept asking him questions about that.
