The Westgate Mystery

By Darby St. John

The Westgate Mystery, first published in 1941, is an intriguing murder mystery set at a Pacific coast estate. As a series of murders take place, the estate’s owner, Mrs. Longtree, assisted by a local judge, investigate and attempt to solve who is behind the grisly killings.

From the dust-jacket: When Roger Longtree returned to Westgate with Penelope, night-dub singer and adventuress, as his bride, the event reopened old wounds and created new stresses which set off a series of sensational murders. For Roger was the favorite grandson and heir apparent to the fortune of old Mrs. Longtree, affectionately called “Aunt William,” who tells the story and who ruled over the wealthy and fashionable little Pacific coast community as a dowager queen. Naturally Roger was involved, as were his brother Gilbert and all others in the household, to say nothing of various friends and relatives who came under suspicion and who played their parts in the tangled skein of mystery.

But Mrs. Longtree was equal to the emergency and announced a party at Westgate that night to introduce the bride. Penelope never appeared, for she was found in the rose arbor stabbed through the heart. Roger was missing and later gave an incoherent account of chasing an intruder down the bluff. But there were others, too, whose motives were not clear and whose movements that evening were in doubt.

So, while the police fumbled and the District Attorney blustered, Mrs. Longtree and the urbane Judge Havoc, family friend and counselor, unearthed clues and dealt with the series of shocks which kept the residents of the bluff in a frenzy of apprehension. As new murders were committed, the case became more and more complicated and the participants more terror stricken.

Here is a smooth and exciting story in the Mary Roberts Rinehart tradition, with characters who live as human beings and a plot that will keep you guessing every minute.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocion Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789129496

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

The Westgate Mystery

by

DARBY ST. JOHN

The Westgate Mystery was originally published in 1941 by Random House, New York. All the characters in this book are purely fictitious.

• • •

From the dust-jacket: When Roger Longtree returned to Westgate with Penelope, night-dub singer and adventuress, as his bride, the event reopened old wounds and created new stresses which set off a series of sensational murders. For Roger was the favorite grandson and heir apparent to the fortune of old Mrs. Longtree, affectionately called Aunt William, who tells the story and who ruled over the wealthy and fashionable little Pacific coast community as a dowager queen. Naturally Roger was involved, as were his brother Gilbert and all others in the household, to say nothing of various friends and relatives who came under suspicion and who played their parts in the tangled skein of mystery.

But Mrs. Longtree was equal to the emergency and announced a party at Westgate that night to introduce the bride. Penelope never appeared, for she was found in the rose arbor stabbed through the heart. Roger was missing and later gave an incoherent account of chasing an intruder down the bluff. But there were others, too, whose motives were not clear and whose movements that evening were in doubt.

So, while the police fumbled and the District Attorney blustered, Mrs. Longtree and the urbane Judge Havoc, family friend and counselor, unearthed clues and dealt with the series of shocks which kept the residents of the bluff in a frenzy of apprehension. As new murders were committed, the case became more and more complicated and the participants more terror stricken.

Here is a smooth and exciting story in the Mary Roberts Rinehart tradition, with characters who live as human beings and a plot that will keep you guessing every minute.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

One 6

Two 11

Three 16

Four 21

Five 27

Six 30

Seven 35

Eight 40

Nine 47

Ten 51

Eleven 54

Twelve 60

Thirteen 64

Fourteen 68

Fifteen 71

Sixteen 74

Seventeen 77

Eighteen 85

Nineteen 89

Twenty 93

Twenty-one 100

Twenty-two 103

Twenty-three 108

Twenty-four 112

Twenty-five 119

Twenty-six 123

Twenty-seven 127

Twenty-eight 130

Twenty-nine 133

Thirty 137

Thirty-one 140

Thirty-two 144

Thirty-three 147

Thirty-four 153

Thirty-five 159

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 166

DEDICATION

TO

E. E. R.

One

LAST NIGHT I AWAKENED sharply, hearing the sudden blast of a fog horn from somewhere on the bay below my windows. Since our harrowing experiences last summer there has been something of warning to me in the sound, an involuntary chilling reaction, and I sat up in bed and listened. I was remembering that other night that I had been awakened in the same manner, when by a trick of the wind the blast seemed to come from beside my very window. That night murder had stalked in our house.

Then I relaxed and lay back again. It was all over; our tragedies had run their course. No longer any need to strain my ears wondering if I had heard a stealthy sound in the hall. And I should probably never again experience the terror of waking suddenly to find someone in my room. The house was peaceful, as I had despaired of its ever being again; there was nothing but the waves gently lapping the shore beneath the bluff, and Shando’s soft purr from the foot of my bed.

It is odd, but not until yesterday afternoon when the rug was returned from the cleaners’ did I actually grasp the fact that this chapter in our lives was definitely closed.

Sometimes I find myself wondering, rather ineffectually I admit, if some of our catastrophes could not have been avoided. But I do not see how we could have acted differently than we did. We had no choice. Even Roger could not have acted differently. I am quite strong on that point now, although at the time it impressed me as sheer hot-headedness. I can see now that Roger was like a tightly coiled spring, and he just went off at the wrong time.

It was inevitable, of course, that our tragedies should cause a sensation in a town the size of Westgate. Before it was all over the attention of the entire country was centered on this small, rather gangling northwestern town situated at the end of Puget Sound. Of all the motley company which converged on us Judge Havoc was the only one who didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Perhaps that was why it was he who cleared up our mystery in the end.

I shall never forget that night last May when we stepped out into the rose arbor together to find a white, crumpled figure lying there on the flagstones beside the fountain. The first time I had looked upon violent death. I remember Judge Havoc’s firm grasp on my arm and his low even voice.

Steady, Mrs. Longtree——

Well, it is all over now. There is nothing to disturb my peace, except possibly the fog horns that blare up from the sound at night like the voices of lonely sea monsters. But I do not mind them; they have been a part of my life. Shando is a comfort—he is really Eva’s cat, not mine—sitting with his golden eyes half closed, taking in the world with the complacency of a Buddha. Shando, who knew some of the summer’s tragic secrets long before I...

As I mentioned, it was Judge Havoc who actually solved our mystery, and without his help I don’t know where we would have been. A small, dapper figure, he moved through our recent catastrophes with a taciturn calm that impressed even Grisell, our impulsive district attorney. In the course of our tragedies I saw him lose his poise only once; and I saw that, of all things, in the haze of returning consciousness in a rat-infested room that reeked with the indescribable smell of a musty prison.

The other day he found me on the pistol range which I have had set up since our tragedies, for I have become a firm believer in the art of self-defense. I had had the target set up between the tulip bed and the rose arbor, not far from the edge of the bluff. Leonard, my butler of thirty years, concealed rather nervously behind a nearby elm while I fired, emerged to change targets and call out the score.

Hadn’t you better get in, Mrs. Longtree? suggested the Judge. He cast me a worried glance. You might catch cold, and at your age——

My age, indeed! I replied testily. I am only seventy-two.

I fired at the target, and I think it was the bull’s-eye that silenced him. He sat down on a wheelbarrow nearby and lighted a fresh cigar, watching me with mingled amusement and disapproval. Next thing you’ll be hunting tigers, I suppose!

I will, if they come prowling into my bedroom at midnight, I replied pointedly. From now on I am going to answer all unexplained noises with a bullet.

I doubt if that will be necessary, he said quietly. I’m sure—would you mind pointing that thing somewhere else?—I’m sure we have reached the end of the murders, and the mysteries, too.

And so we fell to talking of our tragedies; and, inevitably, of Penelope and her unexpected reappearance in Westgate last May. I don’t know why, after an absence of only three years, we should have been surprised to find her as glossy and chic as ever. A careful woman doesn’t change much between thirty-one and thirty-four, especially if she spends a little time on her face, and a little pommeling by an experienced masseuse in the right places will do wonders.

On her first trip to the bluff three years ago Sonny Roark brought her down from Seattle as his fiancee to meet his mother. They were an odd combination, Penelope, with her experience of the world, her laughing indifference—Sonny, with his artless sincerity and his humble, fervid eyes. He just worshiped her, in a queer craven sort of way. He adored her in much the same way that he adored a small hexagonal wrist watch, a Clerkenwell piece, that I as a doubtfully proficient godmother brought him from London my last trip. She had been a night club singer somewhere, a rather successful one.

It was a violent few weeks that Penelope spent in the plush and gray stone propriety of the Roark house down the bluff. There was something about her overweening confidence that put Aurelia Roark, Sonny’s mother, in a towering rage. I used to see Aurelia, with her prominent eyes bloodshot and her massive jaw set, tramping past the bank or descending on Brand’s department store. She was a fierce woman. And Sonny was all she had.

We can see it now for what it was—the prelude to our tragedies of last summer. But that we did not foresee the danger then is something to wonder at.

Aurelia used to snort over Penelope’s vagaries; at the way Penelope would envelop herself in the smoke of incessant cigarettes. Training for the spot she belongs, she declared grimly. Someday she’ll smoke out the devil and take his place.

Penelope, for a time, held her own with her insolence, her airs, her lazy low laugh, the jangling of her bracelets, the aura of her suggestive perfumes. She was very sure of herself. Already she fancied herself as mistress of the huge gray stone house; she even began to talk of throwing out the red plush furniture and doing the place over. Aurelia’s massive jaw trembled when she heard it.

And all the time there was Sonny, the prize, completely cowed between the two embattled females. The picture which rises most readily to mind is that of Penelope at the dub, amusing herself with her coterie of admirers while Sonny drank himself into insensibility in miserable solitude at the bar.

It couldn’t go on, of course. What happened is one of those things that passes into the history of a town and becomes legend. For every house on the bluff there was a different version of what took place in the gray stone mansion on Penelope’s last night there. It was a violent scene. Old Mrs. Portman, who, with her husband, Major Portman, is the closest neighbor, declared that she saw the servants flee the house in terror, which will give an idea.

At any rate Penelope left town hurriedly the next day. Her departure, however, was overshadowed by its baffling and mysterious aftermath. A few days later Sonny disappeared. A year of frantic searching disclosed no trace of him, and Aurelia has worn black ever since.

I have been particular about Penelope’s first visit, for the day came when she catapulted into our, own lives even more disastrously than into that of the Roarks. That was where I, Wilhelmina Longtree, called Aunt William by the family—I wish I knew why—and my two grandsons, Roger and Gilbert, came in.

The day that saw the beginning of our own catastrophes was last May fifteenth.

It is hard now to realize that at that time Roger was only three weeks away from his graduation from the University and not far from his wedding to Catherine Page, who lives in the third house down the bluff from ours. Dear Catherine, whose candid gray eyes were opened to so much before the end!

Roger and Catherine here one of those childhood attachments that survived; they were inseparable through high school, and while Roger was in college it developed into what Gilbert facetiously liked to call the love of the century. Roger had grown to look extraordinarily like his father; he had the same athletic frame, the laughing eyes, the stubborn chin. What is perhaps more important, he was like him—a fact which may explain much of what happened later. He was Rufus, impetuous and lovable to the last fault. I used to be thankful for Catherine’s calm, for the way she paused to think before speaking.

Gilbert, the elder and more florid of my two grandsons, was married and had two children; when Rufus died four years ago Gilbert succeeded him as president of the City Bank. Last year Gilbert and Nedda, his wife, bought a house down the bay near the dub. During the last week of April Nedda called me up to say they were having it done over, and could they move in with me until it was finished. Her mother, she said, would take the children.

It’s such a bother, she complained in her rather whiny voice. But I told Gil I just couldn’t stand that bilious wallpaper in the breakfast room another season.

That, then, was the way things stood last May. Roger away at school, due home in three weeks; Catherine Page eagerly awaiting his return and the setting of a date for their wedding; Gilbert and Nedda moving into his old rooms in the east wing of the house for an indefinite stay. As Jennie, my maid, observed, it was exactly like old times.

It is hard to think back past the tragedies of the summer to that day, the fifteenth, when the bay glistened blue in the sunlight and our pontoons moored everything from steam yachts to canoes. There were even a few speedboats about; looking at them I decided, I remember, to buy one and learn to manipulate it myself.

At that time there was only one shadow; on the weekend of May fifth Roger had come home from school, and on Saturday night, when they were with the gay younger crowd at the club, he and Catherine had had a violent quarrel. I had been able to get nothing out of him, however; when I pressed him he fell darkly silent, and he went back to school in an angry mood totally unlike him.

Catherine did not come to see me on Monday as usual. Nor on Tuesday, which was the eighth. Wednesday morning I literally bumped into her in Fairfield’s drug store.

Why haven’t you come to see me? I asked.

For a moment her eyes wavered. I’ve been rather busy, she replied evasively.

Fiddlesticks, I said. I added abruptly, What’s this nonsense between you and Roger?

Didn’t he tell you?

No, he didn’t. He drove off Sunday like Jupiter riding a thundercloud.

She turned away, and her lips tightened. Though I plied her with several other questions, I could get nothing more out of her.

The week passed uneventfully. I did not talk to Catherine again, although I saw her once tearing along the shoreline in her small boat, which churned a foamy white tail in its wake. I hoped Roger would come home for the weekend, but the weekend came and went with no word from him.

It was Tuesday morning that the thing happened.

Shortly after eleven o’clock I heard the sound of a car coming up the drive. I looked down from my windows and saw Roger’s sand-colored roadster circling to a stop at the front entrance. There was a slim, elegant woman beside him, but I could not see her face. I hurried downstairs without waiting for Leonard to open the door, vaguely apprehensive that Roger was not at school cramming—that, I believe, was Roger’s word for it—for his examinations.

I opened the front door, and my knees almost gave way beneath me. Roger, looking haggard, as though he had not slept well for several nights, was coming up the steps. The woman on his arm was Penelope. She was smiling as she used to smile, with that familiar hidden mockery lurking at the back of her eyes.

Roger looked almost frightened when he saw me. A slow flush rose from his neck and spread over his lean cheeks. But it was what he said that almost made my heart stop beating.

Aunt William, he said, this is—my wife.

Two

IN THE SILENCE that followed I do not remember what thoughts passed through my mind. The probability is that I was too stunned to think at all. It was Penelope who took command of the situation, and with characteristic irony.

Well, she said lightly, the bride comes home... Her eyes were mocking as they watched me from beneath the chic slant of her brim.

I looked at Roger. When did this happen?

Yesterday. He flushed painfully. Look, Aunt William. I know it’s—well, rather sudden...

Penelope was cool, even amused. We should have told you, of course, she said, still with that irritating smile. But Roger was—so impulsive.

Well, you might as well come in, I said grimly.

I’ll send Leonard for the bags.

I turned to find the servants lined up in full force behind me. Sophie and Tina from the kitchen, Clarence, and Leonard and Jennie.

Take Miss Penelope to the guest room in the east wing, I told Jennie, and help her unpack.

Later, in my rooms, I tried to look into the future, to visualize what our lives would be, but I could not do it. It was as though the smooth pattern of our lives had shattered in a thousand pieces within the space of five minutes. To heighten the funereal atmosphere of the house, Leonard came in, after a discreet knock, solemnly bearing a tray with a bottle of brandy and one glass. I have never seen his macabre face as unhappy as it was that day. He set down the tray and silently departed. Leonard has been with me ever since the days when my husband, Hector Longtree, was living.

Nor was the situation made any easier when I faced Roger later in his room.

I hope you’ll be good to Penelope, Aunt William, he said.

Why? I said.

She’s my wife, he said quietly. When I made no reply he went on, after a minute, You don’t understand. I might have expected that.

Well, I said wearily, stop me if I’m wrong. You ran into Penelope on the street, or at a party. It was very casual at first. But you were angry at Catherine. She was very sympathetic, and you confided in her.

He looked at me in a queer way, his eyes darkening. How do you know that? he said.

His lips began to tremble. He passed the back of his hand across them. Catherine never loved me, he said. If she had she wouldn’t have gone off with Frank Hanson in his boat Saturday night. She said they ran out of gas. Good God!

If Catherine said so, I replied quietly, I’m inclined to believe her.

His eyes were staring through mine. He made another effort to stop the twitching of his lips. I went to him and laid my hand on his arm, and something I s?w in his eyes made my own fill suddenly. He looked at me somberly a moment—and then he smiled. Dear Roger! It was the smile of a confused boy who has bitten off from life more than he can chew, a twisted sort of smile that nearly broke my heart.

"Penelope’s had a tough