Hide in the Dark

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “Hardly. If that had been all that happened I should naturally not be trespassing on your time with this extremely personal story.… Just before dinner I went down to Hanna’s stateroom to see how she was feeling. We had given up the San José trip for the day—it was too infernally hot to stir, and Hanna had kept to her room.

  “She was sitting in front of a little mirror in her dressing table when I came in; she’d apparently started to put up her hair, and found it too much for her, because she was just sitting there with her head propped up in her hands, letting the tears run down her face without even troubling to wipe them off. When I saw her like that—when I saw her—crying, so recklessly and so hopelessly, something went off like a pistol in my head.

  “I came up behind her, and put one hand on her shoulder and asked, ‘If you are so inconsolable for your lover, why don’t you follow him?’ She dropped her hands, twisted around in her chair, took one long breath, and went off into the most appalling fit of hysterics that you ever heard in your life. Why everyone on the boat didn’t hear her is beyond me. Of course Lindy’s cabin was down at the other end and the maid was at supper—still … I couldn’t stop her, of course. I tried dashing water in her face, and smelling salts, and aromatic spirits of ammonia, but every time I touched her it simply made it worse. I was nearly out of my mind by the time that I remembered Doug King’s powders. He’d said they were a sedative—an awfully mild sedative—for quieting the nerves, and that if I took two of them they might make me sleep … I dashed into my cabin and mixed them up with half a glass of water, and managed to get most of it down her throat, by alternately going on my knees to her and using brute force. By the time that the steward came knocking at the door, it was beginning to take effect, and she was quite quiet, and a little drowsy—and by the time that I came back from dinner she was very quiet indeed. I hadn’t wanted Lindy to suspect that anything was wrong, so I simply said that Hanna’s head was rather worse, and that I wanted to get back to her as soon as possible.… She seemed to be quite sound asleep when I came in, but she was breathing in a curious, difficult way, and her lips were the strangest bluish colour—and they curled back a little, so that I could see her teeth. The maid said that she hadn’t moved since she came back from supper.… I bent over to feel her hand and it was cold—cold as ice, in spite of the stifling heat all around us. I tried to find her pulse, and I couldn’t find it—as far as I could tell, it had gone. And except for the painful labour of her breath, there was nothing to tell us that Hanna hadn’t gone, too.”

  He paused for a moment, turning abruptly to Sherry, still the lavish but shaken guardian of the decanter.

  “Pour me a brandy and soda, will you, Sherry? Rather more brandy than soda, and no ce to speak of. Thanks.… I won’t go into the rest of that night, if you don’t mind. Lindy’s told you already what a nightmare of a time we had getting a doctor; it wasn’t till after eleven that one of those West Indian cruisers dropped anchor, and we got the ship’s doctor and a nice kid from Johns Hopkins on board. I’d got hold of Lindy by then, and we’d done the best we could with whiskey and rum and hot-water bags—I’ll never forget what a trump you were that night, Lindy!”

  Lindy said softly from the shadows:

  “I’ll never forget what a trump you were, my dear. You did your level best to keep me from being frightened, when you were half dead with fright yourself.”

  “I was a little more than half dead,” said Gavin Dart slowly. “You see, I thought that I’d murdered her.… Not with the powders, understand; I hardly gave them a thought. I believed that it was a total nervous and emotional collapse that had simply been heralded in by the hysterics. Lindy thought it was a heat stroke … and then she’d heard somewhere of a kind of turtle poisoning that hit you almost exactly like that; a friend of hers in the Bahamas had had it, and almost floated out to Eternity before anyone realized what had struck her. It all sounded plausible enough; we’d had baked turtle ourselves an evening or so before, and while we were waiting for the doctors I made two or three frantic efforts to believe that it must have been something like that—with not very conspicuous success, I may say. But the young gentleman from Johns Hopkins was even less successful than I.”

  He stood contemplating the ebbing contents of his glass with a grimly reminiscent smile, fortifying himself with another long, slow drink before he went back to the sick frenzy of the small, hot stateroom on the Starling.

  “The young gentleman from Johns Hopkins thought it was something quite, quite different.… It was after ten the next morning before they pronounced her out of danger and were actually able to turn from symptoms to causes. They were a good deal quicker about it than I at that! … I’d explained when they first came that she’d been upset by the heat, had complained of a headache, had been nervous and hysterical—quite unlike herself—and that I’d given her a sedative to quiet her down—but no one seemed to pay any attention to anything that I said at the time. That next morning, though, while they were busy rolling down their sleeves and mopping off their brows and packing things up, young Ladd took up our conversation just about where we’d left off. He asked, ‘What kind of drug does Mrs. Dart use?’ I said, ‘Drug? She doesn’t use any drugs. Why?’ Ladd said, ‘I certainly understood you to say that you had given her some kind of a bromide last night.’ I said, Oh, that! That wasn’t a drug; it was just a very mild sedative that a New York physician recommended as being absolutely safe.’ Dr. Ladd stopped packing long enough to raise his eyebrows. Then he asked, rather slowly, ‘Who was the physician?’ I told him that I couldn’t remember—a name like Patterson, I thought. He raised his eyebrows a little higher at that, and asked, ‘What was in them?’ I said that I didn’t know that either; that they’d been turned over to me by a friend of mine who assured me they were too mild to do any damage to an anæmic kitten. The ship’s doctor, who was finishing up the bag, remarked pleasantly that he wished these guys who handed around dynamite as though it were cough drops could be hung by the neck till dead, and Ladd put his coat on and said that he’d like to know whether my friend was a qualified expert on kittens’ stamina.… I began to see a little light then—and a good deal of darkness.… I said, ‘Dr. Ladd, do you think that there’s a possibility that those powders might have had something to do with my wife’s illness?’ He said, ‘Think they had something to do with it? I know damn well they had something to do with it! Her heart gave out. Do you happen to have the containers for the powder anywhere about?’

  “I found the papers on the dressing table, and handed them over, but they were just plain white paper, and there wasn’t a vestige of the powder left in them. Ladd seemed to find them interesting, however. After a minute he put them down and asked whether my friend the kitten expert advised the use of two. I said, ‘He told me they were absolutely safe. But the whole thing’s beyond me. I never dreamt for a minute that Hanna had a weak heart.’ He said, ‘Good God, man, there wasn’t anything the matter with her heart. If Mrs. Dart had had a weak heart, she’d have been dead and gone before we got here.’”

  Gavin Dart put the empty glass down on the mantel very carefully.

  “And that,” he remarked pleasantly to the flickering embers, “is that. Any further questions, Kit?”

  “I’ve got some further questions,” said Neil Sheridan. He rose, and came toward the mantel a trifle unsteadily, placing a half-filled glass beside the empty one, and directing the incredulous glare that had adorned his visage since the beginning of Dart’s narrative full at the grimly controlled countenance of that gentleman. “If this cock-and-bull yarn of yours has a word of truth in it, why didn’t you run Doug out of the country on the strength of it?”

  “For two reasons,” said Dart slowly. “First, because I didn’t care to involve either Hanna or myself in the very ugly scandal that would have resulted from any exposure of King’s attempt to murder me. Second, because I had no corroboration of any kind of my story. No one heard me tell King that I had a weak heart;
no one heard him tell me to take a double dose of what he assured me was absolutely harmless.”

  “Well, what makes you think that we’re going to fall for it?” inquired Sherry passionately. “Who’ve you found to corroborate this rigmarole since then?”

  Hanna Dart lifted her head abruptly. There were two flicks of scarlet across her cheek-bones, and behind the clear serenity of her eyes little flames danced, menacing and lovely.

  “He has me,” she said clearly. “I heard him tell Doug King about his heart—and I heard Doug offer him the powders.”

  Dart said:

  “Hanna, your cabin was at the opposite end of the boat. I’ve slashed every atom of pride that I have to ribbons to-night because you thought that you could help me by telling a lie. Don’t try to help me again by telling another one.”

  “Gavin, it isn’t a lie. I heard you go out of your cabin, and I went after you. I was afraid that you were going to find Doug—I was afraid that he’d tell you—” She checked herself, wrung her hands hard together, and went on steadily, “I stood halfway down the companionway for quite a while—oh, almost half an hour—listening to you both talk. And then I began to feel so deathly sick that I was afraid that I was going to faint … so I went back to my cabin.”

  Sherry said bitterly:

  “I’ll certainly hand it to you two for good fancy team-work! Why didn’t you tell anyone that Doug King was going around trying to murder your husband?”

  “I didn’t believe that Doug was trying to murder him. I didn’t believe that people murdered each other—not people you knew. I wasn’t even sure that it was those powders that Gavin gave me.… That whole night was like a dreadful dream, and Gavin said it was the heat that had made me so sick. He did say so.”

  Kit Baird asked quietly: “What was it that you were afraid that King would tell Gavin, Hanna?”

  She said in a voice hardly above a whisper:

  “I was afraid that Doug would tell him that I wanted him to set me free—that he ought to set me free, because he was so much older, and that I didn’t really love him, that I was only sorry for him.… Doug told me that he would have to tell him that if I wouldn’t be—kind to him.”

  Kit asked: “And were those things true?”

  “True?” Her eyes stared at him, blankly incredulous. “They were dreadful, dreadful lies. But I was afraid that Gavin might believe them. They were all things that Gavin had said—himself.”

  Her lips trembled suddenly, and she laid her finger across them, as though she were chiding some invisible and recalcitrant child.

  Kit asked more gently still: “How did it happen that you saw so much of Doug on the Starling, Hanna?”

  She said despairingly:

  “Oh, Kit, I don’t know. At first it was because of Lindy—I thought that Lindy was treating him rather badly, and that it was making him terribly unhappy—and after that because I was … afraid. You see, it wasn’t till two or three days before we got to Port Limon that he told me that it wasn’t Lindy at all—that it was I; that it had always been I; ever since Washington—that he couldn’t live without me any longer. And it wasn’t till the last day that he told me that he thought that it was his duty to go to Gavin and put the whole case before him. I didn’t know how to stop him—I nearly went mad. I nearly go mad when I think of it now.”

  She rose, cast a desperate look about her, and crossed the space between the love-seat and the mantel, slipping her hand into Gavin Dart’s and clinging to it as though she were a lost child instead of a tall goddess.

  “Gavin, you promised that you’d never leave me again. Don’t leave me, Gavin.”

  He said, “I’ll never leave you.”

  Kit remarked, amiably casual:

  “There’s just one thing that I don’t quite get, though it’s probably perfectly clear. If you had such an unholy dread of having Doug meet your husband, Hanna, why did you bring him down here for this party?”

  “Oh, Kit, you don’t know how hard I tried not to! I used every excuse in the world, but I’m dreadfully poor about excuses—I tried Jeffrey’s cold, and a dinner that we were supposed to go to, and a luncheon that we were supposed to be giving—but he simply brushed them all aside, because he said that I was looking pale and a change would do me good—and besides that, he wanted to meet the rest of the March Hares.”

  “And why were you so anxious to come, Dart, under the circumstances?”

  “I wanted to see Hanna and King together again,” said Gavin Dart. “I’d made up my mind that if she were really interested in him I ought to place the facts of the Starling episode before her and let her decide what she wanted to do—or to have me do.… I wasn’t entirely clear that a murderer would make a good husband, but I was willing to be convinced.”

  “And what do you think now?” inquired Sherry unpleasantly.

  “What I think now is slightly academic, isn’t it?”

  “Like hell it is! What are you going to do—give Hanna a divorce, or let her find out for herself what it feels like to have a murderer for a husband?”

  Gavin Dart did not stir; only his eyes narrowed for a moment bleakly.

  “Are you by any chance implying that I murdered Doug King?”

  Sherry glared back at him, somewhat staggered by the unshaken calm of the level voice.

  “Are you by any chance implying that you didn’t?”

  “I’m implying nothing whatever. I am assuring you that the first intimation that I had of harm having arrived to Douglas King was after I opened the door from the service quarters and saw you all standing there with the lights on.”

  Sherry, stupor still claiming him as its own, waved this aside with a frantically derisive gesture.

  “Ah, tell that to the marines! Tell it to the judge and the jury and the whole world if you want to, but don’t try to pull it on me! What were you stringing us with all this rotten rigmarole about Doug and poisoned powders and agonizing jealousy for if you weren’t getting ready to alibi yourself out of the electric chair with a lot of hokum about the unwritten law?”

  “I was simply trying to explain that Hanna had ample reason to think that I was likely to make a fool of myself, and that that was why she had taken refuge in some rather damaging lies in order to protect me. Evidently I haven’t made a distinguished success of my explanation.”

  “I’ll say you haven’t! You may sound noble to the rest of the world, but you sound damn suspicious to me. I loved King better than a brother, and I’m not going to let any—”

  Trudi cut coldly across the thickened voice that was wavering perilously on the edge of tears.

  “Sherry, you really are making the most sickening ass of yourself. Why don’t you sit down and keep your mouth shut until it’s your turn to answer questions?”

  “Do you have to tell everyone in the world what you think about me, Trudi?” asked the luckless Sherry. “I know darn well what you think about me, and I’ll tell ’em any time they ask me. I’ll tell ’em now. You think I’m the rottenest, lousiest—”

  “Sherry, you’re drunk,” said Kit Baird critically. “You’re almost drunk enough to be entertaining, but not quite. My advice to you is to go out and hold your head under the cold water faucet until you feel normalcy descending on you once more.… All kinds of things must have been going on around here that I’ve missed out on, anyway. How long have you been our district attorney?”

  “Can’t anyone ask a question around this place without getting permission from you?” demanded Sherry passionately. “What is this, anyhow—a close corporation? A lot you care who murdered Doug King! For a plugged nickel you’d have murdered him yourself. You’re a fine one to—”

  “Sherry, listen to me.” Lindy’s voice struck across the ugly fever of his clamour as quietly and coolly as rain. “You’re destroying the whole structure of order and decency and fairness that we’ve been trying to build up in the last hour. You simply can’t do it. You can’t afford to do it, and we can’t afford to l
et you. We’ll all go raving mad if we don’t keep hold of ourselves … Kit, I think that it was outrageous of you to say that Sherry’s drunk and to make fun of him. He’s obviously knocked to pieces by Doug’s death, and you owe him an apology.”

  “Oh, a dozen of them, if they’ll help to restore law and order,” acquiesced Kit obligingly. “But I’d take it kindly of you, old boy, if you’d withdraw that little bit about a plugged nickel. That’s out. I’m not the boy to fall for a plugged nickel.”

  Sherry glowered darkly, subdued but unappeased.

  “All right—all right—but you didn’t waste any love on Doug, and you damn well know it. And who started all this inquiry stuff, anyway? Dart started it himself, didn’t he? I’ll say he did, and not an hour ago at that! And it was Dart who told us that all we had to do was to find some guy equipped with the means, the motive, and the opportunity for murdering Doug, and then sic the police on him, wasn’t it? I’ll say it was! Well, we’ve found a man, not two feet away from where I’m standing, haven’t we? I’ll say we—”

  “Sherry, what’s that on your arm?” Hanna’s grave, lovely voice trailed unhurriedly across the hot insistence.

  “What’s what on my arm?”

  “All that white stuff, just below your elbow?”

  “That stuff? Search me—dust or powder or something; I probably brushed against one of you girls.”

  Hanna touched the long white blur delicately with an exploratory finger tip.

  “It’s much too white for dust and much too thick for powder. What should you say that it was, Gavin?”

  “It looks like flour to me. You might have picked it up in the kitchen—or no, that’s out! You weren’t in the kitchen, were you? How about it, Lindy? Any flour scattered around the house?”

  “Only the bowlful that we were going to do the ring trick with.”

  “Oh, yes—the ring trick.” He swept the room with a swiftly appraising eye. “Now I wonder what became of that bowl?”