The Dead Can Tell

by Helen Reilly

  She was relieved when the maid entered and said that Margot was wanted on the phone. Cristie wasn’t afraid of Johnny or of Euen. Men didn’t notice things, like women. Johnny went on reading the lyric of a new Harry Woods song and sipping a Tom Collins. Euen was engrossed in a newspaper.

  Margot was away for about five minutes. When she re-entered the living room, a modernistic room mollified by incongruous and comfortable additions that would have driven its designer mad, a change had come over her. Her mouth was constricted and her strong plain face was a bad color. Johnny put his feet, flung over a chair, on the floor.

  “Who was it, Margot?” he asked, frowning at his cousin.

  At Margot’s answer the blood rushed into Cristie’s face, stained her throat. Standing near a table, rolling a cigarette between the fingers of a large shapely hand, Margot said in a queer flat tone, “It was Steven Hazard’s wife, Sara.” The cigarette she was holding broke and tobacco dribbled to the floor.

  Cristie was aware of the fact that Margot knew Sara. They had been at Miss Brandon’s school together, and Sara had been a pupil there when Margot was teaching deportment for room and board and nothing a year before she started her upward climb. The connection between them was neither close nor intimate. Cristie’s hands tightened in her lap. What had Sara Hazard said to Margot to make her look like that? Something disturbing, certainly.

  Margot threw the ruined cigarette into the waste basket, got another from a box, lit it and said, without turning to ,Euen Firth, lolling in his corner with a highball, “Sara Hazard mentioned you on the phone just now, Euen. I didn’t know you were a friend of hers.”

  A surge of relief, a dart of surprise, wonder; it was then that it began for Cristie, that baffling sense of distortion, of values superimposed on other values, the underlying ones quite different from those that showed on top.

  Euen Firth blinked sandy lashes. His eyes were uneasy, furtive. “Sara Hazard...? Who the hell is Sara...” His long sallow high-nosed face and dish chin smoothed themselves out. “That’s right,” he said, “I remember now. Yes. I met a Mrs. Hazard at the Jettison’s on Long Island last winter.”

  He got up and helped himself to a fistful of Scotch and very little vichy. His narrow-shouldered back was turned. He forgot to release the siphon on the bottle and the vichy squirted over the tray in a wide pool.

  The other two didn’t notice, but Cristie did. Margot was looking at Johnny. It was a strange look, weighing, speculative. Cristie was conscious of a slight feeling of suffocation. Johnny didn’t meet Margot’s glance. He was gazing out at the terrace with its hedge of cedars in red terracotta pots against the broken frieze of the towers of New York and a mauve evening sky barred with long streaks of green.

  There was a funny little pause. Nobody said anything. Then Johnny said with a yawn, “I don’t like that woman. I ran into her the other day with the Henleys. I don’t care how long it is before I see her again.”

  Margot was crossing to her desk, a chromium and leather contraption with half a hundred drawers. She seated herself, took out a memorandum book and said over her shoulder: “Oh, but you will, Johnny, darling. You and Euen will both see her, shortly. She wasn’t coming to my party tonight. She’s changed her mind.” Her intonation was clipped, incisive.

  Euen’s highball halted halfway to his lips. Johnny’s brows drew together. Cristie saw them both through a mist. Her sense of foreboding, her latent fear had quickened, sharply. Steven had said that Sara was going to the theatre with friends. Why had she altered her plans? What did it mean? Cristie felt herself beginning to shake.

  She got up, walked to one of the windows and stood there with her back turned, looking out into the dusk.

  II

  With the coming of darkness Cristie’s spirits lifted. The atmosphere of the penthouse helped. It was anticipative, brisk, and every moment was bringing her nearer to Steven. Margot had thrown off her preoccupation and was busy with a thousand details. Sara Hazard’s name wasn’t mentioned again. Cristie tried to forget her. At seven Euen and Johnny went home to change and Margot and Cristie had a quiet meal together, just a bite because the dining room was filled with the caterer and his men.

  Cristie dressed quickly, slashing herself to renewed vigor with a hot and cold shower. Eau de Cologne, a mist of powder, cobwebs of stockings, white sandals. She applied lipstick and slid into cool white chiffon, yards and yards of it, bound round her midriff with a girdle of silver.

  Margot wore stiff sweeping brown net that was superlatively smart and reduced mere prettiness to a wishy-washy non-essential. She had invited almost a hundred guests. Publicity was good for her business. Cristie got a fleeting impression once or twice in those last moments that she would have liked to call the whole thing off. There was nothing solid to tie it to.

  People began arriving at around half past nine. By half past ten the spacious flower-decked rooms were well filled. There was music, sweet and swing. There was dancing. There were games. There was impromptu singing. Voices were recorded on a special machine that Margot had for her composers. A number of the guests had a try at it and there were exclamations of dismay and corresponding laughter when the records were played back. A new baritone from the Met sang and there was a soft-shoe dance by Gorkin from the town’s hit musical.

  Men in white jackets and women in thin colorful gowns wandered into every room and out on the terrace. The drinks were plentiful and excellent. Euen Firth, tall and sandy and beaming, was in his element as auxiliary bar man. He was one of his own best customers.

  As the evening advanced and the time she might expect to see Steven approached, the penthouse began to be peopled with shadows as far as Cristie was concerned. Smile, reply, respond to talk, about the weather, about how well Margot was looking, about what a splendid fellow Euen Firth was. Her whole being was centered on the thought of Steven, when he would come and what he would have to tell her.

  She tried to banish Sara and her belated telephone call, tried not to speculate as to why Sara had given up the theatre and was coming to the penthouse instead. The attempt wasn’t a success. She wasn’t the only one who was troubled. She hadn’t imagined it; there had been something peculiar about the way Margot and Johnny and Euen had reacted to Sara’s shift in plans. Perhaps it was to see one of them, say something to one of them, that she was coming.

  Cristie was standing beside Margot in the long and wide hall that ran from the foyer to glass doors opening on the terrace in back when Miss Dodd arrived. The daughter of the eminent psychologist was a friend of Steven’s. Steven was very fond of her, had spoken more than once of her intelligence, her understanding. Tragedy had touched her early. She had seen her fiancé killed in an accident before her eyes when she was a girl. Mary Dodd had gone to school with Sara Hazard’s oldest sister and had known Sara from childhood, but she was Steven’s friend too.

  She was a tall woman in her middle thirties with an interesting face, not beautiful, her nose was too long for beauty, her forehead was too high, but there was dignity in her supple figure, sensitiveness in her thin, fine-boned hands and her clear hazel eyes were youthful. A streak of white running through her thick dark hair added to her air of distinction. She wore black that brought out the fresh tones of her skin.

  When Margot introduced them, Mary Dodd shook Cristie’s hand warmly. She said she had seen Cristie’s pen-and-ink drawings in the New Yorker and told her how much she liked them.

  Cristie was pleased. She said deprecatingly that they were silly little things. Margot said, “Don’t let her kid you, Miss Dodd. It’s swell stuff and she’s going places with it.”

  Miss Dodd wanted her niece, Kit Blaketon, to meet Cristie. She disentangled a girl in green from a laughing group. Kit Blaketon was lithe, slender-waisted, long-legged. Red hair in a long page-boy bob flamed away from a thin face with a pointed chin and an enormous pair of bright green eyes.

  Kit Blaketon was of no particular interest to Cristie then. Kit had lived with Mary Do
dd since the death of Miss Dodd’s father a year and a half earlier, was engaged to a man named Cliff. She gave Cristie a perfunctory smile, said to Margot, “Darling of you to have us. I’m mad about Gorkin. Do wangle it so I get a dance with him later.” A young man touched her shoulder and she waltzed off, humming the refrain of a popular song.

  Mary Dodd and Margot were talking. Cristie took a stout woman in pink velvet in tow, showed her where to put her wraps, abandoned her. Why didn’t Steven come? It was almost eleven. Her throat was tight. Could he have come in when she wasn’t watching? She kept looking anxiously through the throngs on the terrace. He was nowhere in sight. What could be keeping him? The prospect of his arrival made her feel light headed. At the same time there was a cold little core of fear at the heart of her expectation that wouldn’t dissolve.

  She had almost forgotten about Sara Hazard. And suddenly she saw her. Cristie stood where she was in the partial shelter of a tall sheaf of gladiolas. Her hands, hanging at her sides, were hidden in folds of white chiffon. The fingers were tightly clenched.

  Sara Hazard’s entrance into the party at the penthouse that night was, as always, spectacular. Three steps led down from the hall above. She paused on the top step and looked around. Cristie wasn’t the only one who stared.

  Sara Hazard had a picture sense where her extremely attractive body was concerned, managed to make you aware of it, in some subtle fashion, even when she was standing still. Perhaps her own concentration with it had something to do with the effect she contrived to produce.

  The word slim covers a lot of territory. Sara was slim enough but there were curves, the right curves in the right places. She wore a daringly brief evening gown of black and gold that left practically nothing unsaid. Her upthrust breast had the pout of invitation to it and the gently swelling hips under the gold corselet that defined the small waist seemed, in spite of her immobility, to sway a little.

  Her golden hair, hair that was really golden, was turned back from her long narrow white face in a soft roll. Everything about her was narrow, velvet brown eyes, straight nose, hands and feet, everything except her mouth. Her mouth was a full scarlet bow. The lower lip, a Hapsburg, was inclined to protrude a little. You didn’t notice it at first. The general effect was too good.

  Sara Hazard was alone.

  Cristie’s eyes absorbed the emptiness beside and behind her as Sara descended to the floor, located Margot and strolled in Margot’s direction. Heads turned as she passed and people stared, women with a touch of envy, men with admiration and here and there something rather more intense.

  Cristie stayed where she was, conflicting emotions driving to and fro inside of her. How could Steven care for her when he had such a beautiful wife—because Sara Hazard was very, very beautiful; there could be no two opinions about that. But Cristie’s critical faculties hadn’t deserted her. There was something self-centered, ruthless, beneath that smooth golden exterior, that lift of long-lashed white lids, the poise of the small gold head. The implication of cruelty was there. She must have made Steven suffer. Cristie understood now why he had spoken of her as he had that afternoon.

  Sara was in the middle of a knot of men. There was ferment around her, the stir of raised voices, laughter. There would be. There were other women like that, women who were insatiably vain, who knew the conventions of decent living thoroughly and who used them or cast them aside as it suited their purpose. They were women with the morality of emotional Al Capones. Danger was their natural orbit. Sara Hazard vanished in the crowd. Still no Steven. What could be keeping him?

  Cristie was standing in the shadowy embrasure of a window trying to reassure herself, telling herself not to be an idiot, when two women halted on the terrace just outside.

  “—but I’ve only got one life to live. What a woman’s husband doesn’t know is her own business.”

  Cristie turned her head. The light metallic voice was Sara Hazard’s. Mary Dodd was with her. The latter’s recoil was thinly veiled. Her tall figure was drawn up and she was gazing with displeasure at the lovely narrow closed white face looking intently into her own.

  Cristie wanted to move, to get away from that voice. She didn’t. The next moment she wished she had. Sara Hazard paused, then it came out with a rush. Fingers busy with a gold cigarette case, smooth head bent, she said abruptly, “Mary, can you loan me some money?”

  Mary Dodd didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said a little wearily, “Same old thing, I suppose, Sara. Bills again?”

  Sara Hazard struck a match. “Rather—and then some. A man from Prince and Consort’s actually had tho impudence to force his way into the apartment this morning and demand a thousand dollars on account immediately—or else. Can you imagine the nerve? There was nothing I could do with him. Heaven knows I tried.” She put the match to the tip of a cigarette. Her thin sinuous lips were curved in a smile. “Anyhow, Mary, the long and short of it is, I’ve got to produce right away or I’m sunk, irrevocably and irretrievably sunk.”

  Mary Dodd said slowly, not looking at her companion, “And Steven doesn’t know, I presume. How much do you really have to have, Sara?”

  Sara Hazard flicked ash from the gold embroidery clasping her white breast. “I’ve got to have the whole thousand, Mary.”

  Mary Dodd said firmly, “It’s impossible, Sara. I haven’t got more than a few hundred in the bank and it will be a couple of weeks before my regular checks come in.”

  Sara Hazard turned so that her face was fully illuminated by shafting brightness from a battery of lamps over the piano. Her nostrils were flaring. “Sweetness and light, aren’t you, Mary,” she drawled, “except when it comes to the draw. You can’t give me anything but love, baby.”

  Miss Dodd flinched. She was white. She was about to make an angry rejoinder when a couple ambled in her direction followed by a tall man with a beard and a paper cap on. ‘Cristie was glad she didn’t have to listen to any more. Bills, mountains of them apparently, and Steven didn’t know. What else was there that Steven didn’t know? But perhaps he did. Perhaps that was what he had meant when he said there were things he couldn’t tell her. Cristie shook out folds of white chiffon. Over and above the trouble Sara could still cause Steven, she didn’t like the complications that were cropping up, tangled threads whose ends she couldn’t see.

  She turned instinctively in a movement toward escape. Two people blocked her way. As she edged around them, the voices of the two women outside followed her. Sara Hazard asked a question about “Cliff.” Cliff was the name of the man Miss Dodd’s niece, Kit Blaketon, was engaged to. Mary Dodd said something about the “Penobscott Club” and “eleven or twelve.”

  Cristie was to recall that later. She danced with Euen and then with Johnny, spoke to Margot who looked rather pale in spite of fresh lipstick and rouge. Margot was tired.

  Then she ran into Sara Hazard again, or rather didn’t run into her, because her place, the place of unseen observer, had been taken by someone else. Cristie was crossing the hall in the direction of her own bedroom for fresh powder when she turned the corner and stood still. Her bedroom door was open. Sara Hazard was seated at her desk. She was at the telephone. Her voice was low but the desk was close to the door and Cristie heard her say “Penobscott Club?” And then she didn’t hear any more. Her attention changed its focus.

  There was a girl standing between herself and Sara Hazard, a girl in green with flaming red hair. The girl was Kit Blaketon, Miss Dodd’s niece. Kit Blake-ton’s face was hidden but there was no mistaking the tension, the stress in the slim body pressed against wall and door jamb. She was invisible from inside the room. She was listening to what Sara Hazard was saying over the telephone.

  Cristie drew back, walked away, returned to the living room. She had only just reached it when she saw Sara Hazard leave the hall and go out into the foyer. She was wearing the gold jacket that was part of her gown but she had no wrap on. She had scarcely disappeared from view when the red-haired Kit Blaketon went th
rough the foyer doors in turn. She was carrying a green velvet coat over her arm. Something about the girl’s swift progress suggested a stalking. Was she, could she possibly, be trailing the other woman? Cristie watched the doors for some time. Neither of the two returned. She forgot them in her increasing tension about Steven.

  It was getting late, he must know that she would be anxious, would be waiting. She exhorted herself to patience. There were a lot of things he might have to do. It wasn’t nearly midnight yet. The party was still in its first flight. The din was continuous. Cristie listened to the music for a while, had a scotch and soda with Euen Firth and heard an interminable story with some vague point which Euen didn’t seem to have quite clear.

  The noise, the stir, the incessant merriment began to get on her nerves. They were raw and taut and the discord was like the rasping of a giant file. Her longing to see Steven, to know that he was all right, to know that everything was all right, was like thirst. Her cheeks were burning and her eves were tired from the colored lights.

  She evaded two partners, young friends of Margot’s, went out on the terrace and around to the far side. It was quieter there and cool and dim. She was leaning against the railing at the southern end with her back to the city below when she saw Sara Hazard enter Margot’s bedroom.

  Sara Hazard went to Margot’s dressing table, put her purse down, took off the tight-fitting gold jacket, powdered her face, neck and arms and applied fresh lipstick. She scrutinized her face carefully in the mirror, retrieved the jacket and purse. It was a big black velvet purse with gold corners and her monogram in gold on the front. Cristie thought she was going to leave the room but she didn’t.

  The raised bed was loaded with wraps. Sara Hazard’s wasn’t among them. Her cape of summer ermine was thrown over a chair in a recess beyond the bed. She crossed to the recess, paused beside the chair and opened her purse.

  Cristie stared. She straightened. The blood drained out of her face and from her heart.