The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Miss Welsh also testified to overhearing a few things. Was that testimony accurate, Callista?”

  “Oh, reasonably, so far as Miss Welsh knew, I’m sure. Mother was crying a little at one time, and I guess I did quote something or other from Shakespeare. I was sort of making a fool of myself.” Ten minutes from now, Mother, will it dawn on you what I said? You see, I haven’t a notion what I’ll be saying ten minutes from now. By the way, Mama, I don’t see Cousin Maud. Is she home with the Plum Jam? “What Miss Welsh didn’t hear, couldn’t very well know, Mr. Warner, was that at the end we did get things sort of cleared up.” All right, stranger—no smile, just sad maternal forgiveness. One of Callie’s little emotional upsets, you know—children are SO difficult! “And—here’s why I thought it might not be out of place to mention it—that evening, that’s when the suicidal depression left me. I wanted to live again. After I’d—said good-night to Mother.” Mama darling, why don’t you lean over the rail, ask that fat guy at the press table, the bald one who looks intelligent—I think he’ll tell you this is a murder trial. They’re trying the funny-looking broad with the gimp leg.

  “It left you suddenly, Callista, the depression? Like the end of a sickness?”

  “Yes.” Cecil, I love you. “Yes, it was very much like that, Mr. Warner. Like coming out of a fever, or pain all at once ending. There was—too much upswing also, I guess you might call it. I was back with some of my illusions. I mean the illusions about Jimmy. I’d once more talked myself into imagining there might be—you know, a separation, what I’d been trying to write Jimmy about in that letter I never mailed. Most of the day, and even while I was talking with Ann on the phone, I was able to fool myself with that. Self-deception, it’s like walking a tightrope, I guess: so long as you don’t look down at the fact of the ground a long way below, you can truly believe there’s no danger, you’re just walking. I think that all that day, until Ann came, I was—living inside of that illusion. Wanting something so much I couldn’t see how ridiculous it was to expect it.” Look, Mother: I know I hurt you plenty of times. I was always nasty and hellishly difficult until I escaped from Shanesville and from you—but I never hurt you THAT much.

  “I think now, Callista, you might go ahead and tell, in your own way, everything that happened that Sunday evening and night. I realize you’ll be mostly repeating what you told Mr. Lamson last August, but I believe the jury wants to hear it direct from you, so—so just go ahead, my dear—take your time, try to remember everything important.”

  Don’t be scared, Cecil. Yes, I know: this is it. “Ann came to my apartment about quarter to eight, Mr. Warner. I can’t bring back the early part of the conversation too well, except I know it was nothing important. Just usual comments on the weather, I guess—it was a very hot evening, sticky hot. Her suit—the powder-blue—it was summer weight of course, but I remember it looked sort of warm, I think I asked something silly about how could she stand wearing even the jacket in such weather, and—Mr. Warner, do I understand it right, that I shouldn’t repeat any of the things she said? It seems reasonable that I shouldn’t—after all, Ann’s not here to set me right if I misquoted her.”

  “That’s how it is, Callista. I’m sure you understand it. Just tell your own side of it—what you did, what you observed, what happened.”

  “Yes, I’ll try. There was that small talk for ten minutes or so, and then I was going ahead, very clumsily I guess, telling her about—Jimmy and me. Oh, wait, one thing—I remember that at the start, when she’d just arrived, I was going to offer her a drink, and I didn’t because I had a sort of half-memory that she didn’t take alcohol. A mistaken memory—likely had her tastes confused with someone else’s—but I know that was in my mind, that’s why I didn’t offer her one.” Cecil, I just invented this: is it any damn good?

  Apparently he was not displeased. “You didn’t offer her a drink then or any time, is that right?”

  “That’s right. You see, I—Ann Doherty and I were never really very well acquainted. I knew the Dohertys as neighbors of course, from the time they moved in there, but my mother and stepfather saw much more of them than I ever did. I can’t say I really knew Jimmy, either, I—” (Cecil, please give me a lift with this one)—“well, I said something like that before, didn’t I?”

  “The episode with him was—really no more than that, an episode?”

  “Midsummer madness. I must have been ready to go overboard for someone. It was chance we happened to meet, that May-day.” Handkerchief back in the sleeve, girl—let the palms stay wet, wouldn’t look good to be wiping them. “And things got out of control. So far as the affair is concerned, Mr. Warner, if there’s any question of blame or responsibility, I’ll take it. Nothing could have started if I hadn’t allowed it. And Jimmy—well, I can’t speak for him, but I know he didn’t realize until much later how terribly important I’d let it become to me, for a while. He just slipped, but I went all the way over, head over heels, for a while, and nobody to blame but myself.” (Give me that look, won’t you?—the Cecil Warner special. Tell me I’m doing all right.) “Then later when he did understand how I was making such a thing of it—well, poor Jimmy, he’s not an unkind person and never would be, he was in a spot, I think. He couldn’t bear to hurt Ann or me either, and couldn’t do anything at all without hurting one of us. I don’t know what he could possibly have done except what he did—break off the relation and let time take care of it.” (Did the jury see him go? I didn’t. Here at the start of the day, that I know.) “Do I need to say any more about this, Mr. Warner?”

  “I don’t think so. You’re free to of course, if anything else occurs to you later. Do you want to get back to the Sunday evening now?”

  “Yes.” Mother’s gone too, behind the Face—but that happened a long time ago. And Cousin Maud with the Plum Jam, I hope. What’s the matter, you nice people—isn’t the Monkshood Girl putting on a good show? Herb—shall I project the voice at you, Herb? “Where was I?”

  “You’d spoken of starting to tell Ann Doherty about it.”

  “Yes. I tried to do it reasonably, but I think all I did was blurt one hint after another until she—understood. She did, I know—that is, she understood what had been happening. As I think I told Mr. Lamson, I didn’t get as far as telling her I was pregnant. I got the other facts said, somehow or other, and she—said something that showed she understood, and then I was suddenly sick to my stomach.”

  “She didn’t appear angry?”

  “No, Mr. Warner. I believe—I believe what I said could have been taken to mean that the thing was completely ended. Of course I’ve no way of knowing if that’s what she thought. She wasn’t angry. And then my sickness, coming like that, confused everything else. I ran for the bathroom. I know Ann was sorry for me, trying to help. I was—call it hysterical. I yelled at her, couldn’t stand the idea of her touching me while I was sick, only wanted her to go away. But she wouldn’t, so I ran from her again, into my bedroom, and I locked the door.” (Help me now!) “Yes, I know I locked the door.”

  “That part is a perfectly clear memory, Callista? The physical act of turning the key or throwing the latch or whatever it was?”

  “Yes. Old-fashioned key—why, I probably never had used it before, no occasion to. But I did then. I threw myself down on the bed. My throat was still raw and sour from vomiting, I remember that.”

  “Now you told Mr. Lamson that there’s a stretch of a few minutes, in the bedroom, that won’t quite come back. I take it for granted that since then you’ve been trying to fill in that gap in memory. Suppose I put it this way, Callista: is it possible now for you to add anything to what you told Mr. Lamson that day in his office?”

  Not quite a direct lie required—thanks, friend. Not that it matters, direct or indirect. The letter killeth—inner Puritan, drop dead, drop dead! “No, Mr. Warner—as you say, I’ve tried ever since
to clear up that part in my mind, but—I can’t add anything now.” I don’t dare look toward a certain flinty intelligent face—the name is Francis Fielding—and yet I’ll do it.

  He was very quiet, Mr. Fielding, alert, interested; no change or wavering in his smart bird-like eyes as she met their probing and tried briefly, unavailingly, to win a glimpse of the self behind them. Once I watched a heron in my famous field glasses, motionless at the edge of a stream. Motionless, hunting motionless. That had been only the summer before last, a trip alone in the Volks to the hill country. More of the day came back, a good day and the summer hush. Eighteen. The heron had remained a somber painted image until the frog returned to the bank; then he got his meal: too large a frog to swallow whole, so he knocked it to pieces against a rock and resumed his stillness. But Cecil was speaking.

  “I’ll make a suggestion, Callista—a sort of hypothetical question, though I won’t try to phrase it in precisely that form. Before you broke away and went into your bedroom you’d been, as you say, hysterical, sick, nauseated: too early for ordinary morning sickness I suppose, but the pregnancy must have had at least some influence on your condition. And you had undergone, were still undergoing, an intense emotional strain: the anticipation, the build-up to your inter view with Mrs. Doherty, then sudden realization that it was wasted effort. Now I suggest that all those things coming together at once might have produced a plain old-fashioned fainting spell, a blackout from exhaustion. And I’ll ask: is everything you remember about those moments consistent with that? It makes sense to you, that this could be what happened?”

  Again the aid and comfort to the idiot Puritan: don’t know why it should help to avoid the phrasing of a direct lie—superstition—somehow it does though and he knows it—my love is wiser than other men—“Yes, it could have been like that, Mr. Warner.” A half-seen glimpse of something kind in black-haired Dolores Acevedo might mean feminine sympathy, fellow-feeling—or something else, or nothing at all. The experts say, Callista remembered, that a person with an obsessive notion never actually performs the fantastic act he imagines performing—like for instance leaning forward in this chair and saying: “Dolly, I bet you know how it feels to go nuts for a good lay.”

  “After going into the bedroom, what is the next thing that you remember positively?”

  “The next thing—the next thing I am really certain about is hearing Ann walk across the living-room—her high heels—to the front door. I heard the door close, heard her car start up and drive away. It somehow—released me—I can’t think of a better word. I unlocked the bedroom, came out, got myself a drink of water. I went into the kitchenette to get that instead of to the bathroom. Then—not right away but very soon—I saw the brandy bottle had been pulled forward on the shelf, and there was a glass with a few drops in the bottom, and I knew what must have happened. It brought me out of my fog anyway. I knew I had to get to her at once if I could, and I wasn’t able to think beyond that. What I ought to have done—I know it now—was call the police and tell them the emergency. They might have got to her in time and done something for her. But I was shocked silly, I couldn’t think of anything except going after her myself, and that’s what I did—tried to do.”

  “Well, you didn’t lose any time, I’m sure.”

  “No, just grabbed my handbag off the living-room table and ran down to the garage. It’s back of the apartment—overhead door always sticks, I remember I had to struggle with it as usual but it didn’t hold me up long.” Nice old Em Lake, you had such a time yearning after my friend’s mammaries—how will these do? Not big, but I bet anything you’ve seen worse. Drool, old boy, drool all you like if it makes a difference. Will I twitch my jacket back a little? Better, huh? Besides, away up there, sixty-five or whatever it is, doesn’t it seem too bad to die at nineteen?

  “Can you judge about what time elapsed, from hearing Ann’s car start to getting your own out on the road?”

  “It could have been as much as ten minutes. Until I saw that brandy bottle I was just dazed and stupid, not hurrying about anything. I don’t know how long I was, coming out of the bedroom, getting that drink of water. I didn’t look at the clock or anything, no reason to.”

  “To be sure. Well—you drove on out to Shanesville?”

  “Yes, fast as I could. Wasn’t delayed on the road. I pulled into the Dohertys’ driveway, alongside the Pontiac—it was just as Sergeant Shields described it. The house was dark. My headlights picked up her handbag lying in the path, so I knew at once she must have gone that way.”

  “Did you take the flashlight from your car?”

  “No, didn’t think of it till I’d started down the path. The moon was hazed over, but still pretty strong light.” The Monkshood Girl will now look at the Foreman of the Jury. “I supposed she must have gone to my mother’s house, but when I came to that spur path I—thought—” Peter Anson would not look at her; she was certain he had been doing so, and intently, the instant before her own eyes shifted.

  “Take your time, Callista—by the way, would you like a sip of water?”

  “Yes, please. Thank you.” Thank you for more than that. The water was cool and perfect; she held and turned the crystal of the glass until it gave her the excellent diminished star of the ceiling chandelier. Had it been burning all day? She couldn’t remember. Probably; a gray series of hours, this Thursday, with a whimpering of December wind. I’m sorry, Cecil, I know I’m stumbling, not doing very well—keep thinking about twenty-to-life—it wouldn’t let me come to you. “When I came to the spur path it was—oh, just a sort of sick feeling that I ought to look at the pond and make sure she hadn’t—it was only a few steps, the light fairly good through the trees. I saw something in the water. It was white, some part of her white blouse.”

  “You went down that steep path to your left, Callista? Stood on the path first and then over on the left side of the pond?”

  “Yes. I could see—enough to know. Then the pains began. I knew she was dead, and I knew what was happening to me. I guess I said, didn’t I, that I’d wanted the baby, I wanted to bear it? Did I say that?”

  “Yes, my dear, you told Mr. Lamson that—I believe it’s not been mentioned here until now. You really did want it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You needn’t say any more about that now unless you wish.”

  “All right. I…well, I don’t quite remember getting back to my car. I did it though, and when I reached the junction I remembered that thick second-growth woods across the road from my mother’s house. So I parked by the pines, got over there—” Don’t do it, Mrs. Kleinman: Mr. Fielding wouldn’t like it, anyway crying is just the glands going into an uproar. I’m not crying—see? Of course, if it means you don’t want to burn me—

  “About that also, Callista, you needn’t say any more than you want to. The fact of the miscarriage is enough, and I haven’t heard the prosecution contesting it. Did you happen to have your wrist watch on, by the way?”

  “No, the sticky hot weather, it was chafing my wrist—I’d taken it off at my apartment. Well, when it was over I got back to my car, made the turn in my mother’s driveway—” Sorry, Herb, manner of speaking: she’s a very important lady, you know how ’tis—“and I guess that was the way Miss Welsh described it.”

  “Do you recall seeing Dr. Chalmers on the porch, turning on the light?”

  “I think so. I was clumsy with the gears, backing and turning. Then I held up all right till I got home.”

  “And then?”

  “I found I’d left the apartment door open. I remember closing it and leaning back against it. Then I was on my knees—I don’t mean I fainted, I don’t think I did. I think—does this sound possible?—I think I just fell asleep. Remember being on my knees, dropping forward on my hands, thinking how soft the rug would be if I could hitch over to it, and I must have done so
, because when I came out of—it seemed like a sleep—I was there on the rug with my handbag for a pillow. After I got up I couldn’t stop shaking for a long while. I wanted a shower, but couldn’t make my fingers take hold of my clothes. The shoes were the worst. Did finally, had the shower too I think, and dozed off again. I didn’t see the sun come up—it was in my eyes when I woke. By ten o’clock I’d pulled myself together somehow, got dressed. I called Edith. I knew I’d have to call the police.”

  “You hadn’t done anything with the brandy bottle after you first saw it had been moved?”

  “No, I hadn’t, and I did nothing with it that morning—just left everything as it was. I supposed that was the right thing to do. But I didn’t get up my courage to call the police until after my stepfather had telephoned me, and told me about finding Ann’s body. I think it was about eleven o’clock that he called.”

  “And when you did call the police, what you got was Sergeant Rankin.”

  “Yes.” When we get this one over with we’re done, aren’t we, Cecil? Except for—except for—“He turned up about twelve o’clock.”