The Indigo Necklace

Frances Crane

• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781504075411
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

In wartime New Orleans, a crime-solving couple looks into an heiress's death in a tale of "family skeletons, bittersweet romance, and [deft] sleuthing" ( Saturday Review).
 
Marine Lt. Pat Abbott is currently stateside, posted in New Orleans, where the French Quarter is packed with wartime crowds seeking a bit of entertainment. But when Jean finds a body at the home of the prominent old Creole family with whom the couple is staying, Pat must return to his civilian role of private investigator as the pair become entangled with an assortment of aristocrats and quirky characters . . .
 
Praise for the Pat and Jean Abbott Mysteries
"One of the more interesting married teams of detectives . . . A sort of globetrotting Nick and Nora." — Thrilling Detective
 
"Pleasant reading." — The New York Times
 
"[A] lively, well-plotted and mystifying case." — Saturday Review

Chapter I

I woke feeling that someone was in the next room. The feeling was so acute that I was immediately wide awake. I lay perfectly still in the huge four-poster bed, watching and listening and remembering that this was the third time I’d been awakened in this creepy fashion during the week we had lived in this house.

And, as before, there seemed to be no reason for it.

Insects chirped in the old French garden. On the Mississippi River several blocks away a seagoing ship was sounding a melancholy siren. A ferryboat uttered a flat series of hoots. A thin bell rang, far away.

After a long moment the silvery and slightly eerie bells of the clock in the St. Louis Cathedral sounded a quarter to three.

My husband, Lieutenant Patrick Abbott of the United States Marine Corps,^* had been gone three hours. His call had come shortly before midnight. I went over all that. Where had he gone? For what purpose? Why had he been assigned to New Orleans? Certainly not for the casual desk job he held during the daytime at Marine Headquarters. Patrick had served overseas in the Intelligence Service. New Orleans was a vital port. I could put two and two together, but I had to work out all the answers myself.

I went back to listening.

The tall, square room was softly dark. It was flanked on two sides by verandas, galleries they call them here, or rather by one single gallery which ran along this wing on the courtyard side and turned across the back end over the garden. A spiral staircase at the corner connected our gallery with the one below. Tall French windows, two on each side, opened from our bedroom onto the gallery. They were open, but the wooden shutters were closed and latched. Moonlight coming through the chinks between the slats gave the room enough illumination to show up the huge mahogany armoire, the big bureau, the black-marble mantelpiece, the dark drapes outlining the windows, the charming old gold-framed French mirror, the black oblong which was the open door to the short hall leading to the living room.

Perhaps the noise had come from the living room.

I lifted myself on one elbow. It made scant difference. The insects chirped a little louder, the river siren seemed nearer, the thin bell farther away. A light wind suddenly picked at the shutters and brought a wave of heavy scent up from the flowers, summer flowers—roses, stocks, white petunias and pinks.

I had been wakened, I decided then, by strictly nothing at all. I wasn’t used enough to the place. Perhaps a cat had walked along the gallery, our gallery, or some person had walked upon the Roger Clarys’ gallery below, or on one of the galleries off the main wing across the wide courtyard. The place crawled with galleries. Maybe Miss Clary, Aunt Rita to the family, had been taking a night stroll. Maybe one of her two grandnieces, Carol and Ava Graham, had come home late. Maybe it was Uncle George. Uncle George—Mr. Sears to us—had a habit of prowling at night and, though immensely fat, he walked light as feathers on astonishingly small feet. Aunt Dollie, Uncle George’s wife, was Aunt Rita’s sister. The house belonged to Aunt Rita. Or maybe it was that nurse.

Yes, very likely. It must have been the nurse doing some nocturnal service for her mistress, Mrs. Roger Clary, in the apartment below ours. She was a queer-looking Negress, a native, Roger had told us, of Martinique, a tiny woman in her late thirties, I should think. She wore a white starched uniform, a white kerchief or tignon knotted around her hair, and white nurse’s shoes. She also wore a string of indigo beads. You could see them flashing blue at her throat as she came across the flagstones. Her skin was a glossy blue-black, a fine healthy-looking prune color.

Thinking about the nurse started me wondering again what was wrong with Mrs. Clary. Roger had said only that his wife was ill and was waiting for a room at a hospital. You waited for anything and everything these days in crowded New Orleans, so it was perfectly logical to wait for a hospital room. It was also logical in a great old French house, sprawling around a courtyard and a garden, with its own outhouses and servants’ quarters, and with a number of people of different ages living in it, that there should be plenty of noises at night. Very logical.

Everything, I thought, yawning, was eventually logical.

And even if it weren’t, I reminded myself for the nth time, what could you do about it? You were a darned lucky war wife to have a place like this! If Patrick hadn’t met up with Major Roger Clary and they hadn’t taken such a liking to each other you’d still be in that airless little room at that hotel. Major Roger Clary. He must be pretty smart to be a medical major at twenty-eight. He’d had two years overseas already and was now assigned to the surgical wing of one of the big military hospitals out on Lake Pontchartrain. He was in love with Carol Graham.

Oh, dear, I hadn’t intended to bring that up. What about that wife?

All the same, it was true. Roger was in love with Carol and so, oddly enough, was Toby Wick, the green-eyed pussyfooted character who had the duplex at the front of our wing on the street. Toby ran the chic Good Angel Bar over on Bourbon Street. Now, Ava Graham, Carol’s older sister, was nuts about Toby Wick. Figure that one out. Ava loves Toby who loves Carol who loves Roger who also loves her but has that invisible wife.

That was not logical.

This was an interesting place. It had charm. On its surface it had tranquillity. Underneath, strange currents ran darkly. Roger Clary had an invalid wife. The wife had a nurse. The nurse spoke only French. Aunt Dollie and Uncle George Sears had been visiting Aunt Rita Clary for seven years, but they were waiting to go back to Paris. The Graham girls called this their home, and Toby Wick had the run of the place when he didn’t seem in the least to belong. It was very interesting. And we were lucky to be here.

I didn’t know I had dozed off until I woke again, very wide awake. Now somebody was certainly in the living room.

Fingers worked at the latcn of the shutters at the French window nearest our entrance. The shutters opened. Moonlight fanned into the room from the courtyard.

The shutters closed gently. The latch clicked into place.

Footsteps light as silk brushed along our gallery and ceased to be audible at the head of the twisting stairs.

In the Cathedral the eerie silvery bells chimed the four quarters, and a harsher bell clanged three times.

A bath always makes me very logical. Specially a long-drawn-out sweet-scented tub is probably the best place in the world in which to think. And so next morning, two or three hours after Patrick had left home again after what passed for a night’s rest, I stretched out in the tub and resolved firmly and forever not to tell him about someone going through our living room in the night.

Pat loved this house. He said that in this day and age it was entirely unique because it was not only old but still in use by the family which had built and continued to live in it.

Also, the tall, wide rooms gratified his craving for space. Patrick had been born in Wyoming. Until the war started us hopping all over, our home had been on a hilltop in San Francisco. There were neither hills nor wide-open spaces in the French Quarter in New Orleans, but immense rooms are something.

Eyeing my shape in the as yet unsoaped water, hoping that the rich Creole food wouldn’t make me put on weight, I decided all over again that it would be silly to leave this fine place just because somebody chose to walk through our private portion of it in the night. Maybe it was a ghost. A ghost is not terrifying the morning after, specially when it is only an idea of a ghost. A house a hundred and forty years old, and aristocratic in its conception and its occupancy, rated a ghost.

Anyway, it always got back to the same thing, that there was no other place to move to.

I sat up, reached for the soap, scrubbed myself with the brush, did my hair, finished up the whole operation in the shower and, after putting in the pins, went out to dry my hair on the gallery. It was a fine sunny morning and not at all too warm. The life in the great house was purling along as usual. Old Hugo, the grizzled Negro butler, was washing the windows in Aunt Rita’s bedroom, which was just across the courtyard from ours in the other larger wing. Paulette, his strapping chocolate-colored daughter, was cleaning the dining room, which was just below Aunt Rita’s bedroom. Marie, Hugo’s wife and the cook, was doing something in the kitchen garden. Aunt Rita Clary was walking at the back of the garden near the little summer house. She wore a lavender print. She was a slender, straight-backed, white-haired old lady, in her seventies I should think, with long, tilted black eyes in a small triangular face, exquisite hands, and a young-sounding voice clear as a bell. All the Clarys had tilted eyes. Roger’s were exactly like Aunt Rita’s. Aunt Dollie’s were green and rather prominent, but up they went at the outer corners like the others’.

Aunt Dollie was younger than Aunt Rita, and larger. She flung her keg-shaped body around on her long legs and wore high heels to make her look extra tall. She dyed her hair red. Aunt Dollie and Uncle George had lived abroad a good part of their lives and their clothes and talk and manners were, I supposed, very cosmopolitan. As I sat drying my hair, I could hear Aunt Dollie talking like mad, as usual, in the room next to the dining room they called the morning room. Perhaps she was talking to Ava Graham or to Uncle George.

I saw the nurse.

The little prune-colored nurse came out of the apartment below ours and walked across the flagged courtyard and, by way of a garden walk, went on to the detached kitchen concealed from my view by the other wing. Paulette stopped her work long enough to give the nurse a very dirty look. Hugo ignored her. The nurse ignored them both. She came back presently carrying a heavy-looking tray. She had her head thrown back to balance its weight and I saw the blue beads gleaming against her black throat.

She did not speak to anyone, and, aside from the sinister glances tossed her by Paulette, attracted no attention, save mine.

A week passed.

If anybody walked again through our apartment I didn’t notice. Life rippled along in the house. I knew its routine superficially now but, except with Carol Graham, I seemed to have got into it no more intimately than at first. Definitely, we were outsiders.

I had formed a real attachment to Carol. She was a fine girl, almost twenty-one, and she not only held a defense job but did nurse’s aide on the side. Ava, the family beauty, was two years older than Carol. They had lived with Aunt Rita since their parents had been killed in a motor-car accident when Carol was ten. Their maternal grandmother had been a sister of the two aunts.

“Aunt Rita has held this family together,” Carol said. “She hung onto the house. Even though she had to turn some of it into apartments to have an income. It has always been home to all the family and now practically all the family that is left is in it.”

Roger was a distant cousin, Carol said, but he called Miss Clary Aunt Rita just the same.

I had grown very curious by this time about Mrs. Roger Clary. She never put in an appearance and nobody ever mentioned her. She still hadn’t gone to that hospital.

Things started happening on a Saturday night a little more than two weeks after we moved in.

Patrick had liberty that Saturday noon, until Monday.

We started what we planned to be the first of a couple of evenings of mild revelry with cocktails at Pat O’Brien’s, going on to dinner at Arnaud’s around nine o’clock. It was a wonderful dinner. I love everything about that restaurant—from its spooky-looking outside and the prim-bowing headwaiter Michel to the genuine French cognac they serve you with the black New Orleans coffee.

Patrick had ordered dinner in advance. We ate a special sort of crab canapé, trout broiled with almonds, chicken papillote—which is chicken baked in a waxed-paper bag—and for dessert had fresh peaches burned in brandy at the table. We had the restaurant’s special Maidenblush cocktail as an aperitif. We drank champagne, a Clicquot ’28.

Pat was having a beautiful time. His long blue eyes and his white teeth kept gleaming in his lean brown face. He was wearing his summer khaki uniform. I wore a silk print which was gaudy enough to have won admiration even from Aunt Dollie.

“Think of showing your own wife such a binge, Pat.”

“I like showing her off, Jeanie.”

“You pay smooth compliments...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XV
• Chapter XVI
• Chapter XVII
• Chapter XVIII
• Chapter XIX
• Chapter XX
• Chapter XXI
• About the Author
• Copyright