Then, on that second day, Nina Rowland asked to see her. Tony brought the message, looking resentful as she did so.
“She’s worried about Aunt Alice,” she said. “It’s silly. I’ve told her she’s all right.” And she added, “She’s very excitable.” Please don’t stay long. All sorts of things upset her.”
“Is it only nerves?”
“She has a touch of neuritis in one arm,” Tony said unwillingly.
“What does the doctor say?”
Tony moved abruptly.
“She’s fed up with doctors,” she said. “All she needs is test, and to be let alone. Is three o’clock all right?”
She might, Hilda thought wryly, have been making a call on royalty. Nevertheless at three o’clock precisely by her old-fashioned watch she knocked at Nina Rowland’s door. Tony admitted her and she stood blinking in a blaze of autumn sunlight. Her first impression was one of brilliant color, of flowers everywhere and bright hangings and chintzes.
Then she saw the woman in the bed. Hilda was startled. What she had expected she did not know, but what she saw was a very beautiful woman, not looking her forty-odd years, and with a breathtaking loveliness that even Hilda—no admirer of feminine good looks—found startling. She was dark, like Tony, but there the resemblance ended. She knew Tony was watching her, but so great was her surprise that it was Nina who spoke first.
“It seemed rather unneighborly not to see you, Miss Adams,” she said. “My little girl takes almost too good care of me. I’m much better today.”
Tony said nothing, and Hilda did not sit down. She stood rather stiffly near the foot of the bed.
“I’m glad you’re better,” she said. “If there is anything I can do …” She felt awkward.
Tony was still watching her, and now she spoke.
“We won’t take you from Aunt Alice,” she said quickly. “She needs you. We don’t.”
Nina Rowland smiled pleasantly, showing beautiful teeth.
“No, of course not. How is poor Alice? Of all things, to fall down the stairs. It’s so—undignified.”
“She’s more comfortable today. The doctor says she will be quite all right.”
But now she was aware that Nina too was watching her. She was still smiling, but her eyes were sharp and wary.
“What does she think happened?” she asked.
So that was it. Hilda had been brought in because the woman in the bed was uneasy. But she had no chance to answer. It was Tony who spoke.
“I’ve told you all that, Mother. She stumbled. I was -in the kitchen when I heard her fall.”
“She’s lived here all her life. I don’t understand it.”
She did not look at Tony, but obviously the remark was made for her. For an instant Hilda wondered if there was some buried resentment there, if the girl and the woman were on less friendly terms than Alice had indicated. It passed quickly however. Nina Rowland put her arms up and fixed a pillow under her head, and Tony moved quickly to help her. She was too late, however. The sleeve of Nina’s bed jacket had fallen back, and showed a heavy bandage on the arm nearest the door.
Hilda glanced away hastily.
“What lovely flowers,” she said. “May I look at them?”
When she turned back the bandage was hidden again, but Tony was very pale. She stayed only a minute or two after that, but she left with a firm conviction that one of the two shots Tony had fired at her mother had struck her arm, and it had not yet been healed.
She told Fuller that night when she found him outside the house as she left for her evening walk, and he seemed impressed.
“Although I don’t know why the secrecy,” he said. “Dr. Wynant knows she shot at her mother, and if the bullet’s still there it may cause trouble.”
“I don’t understand it.” Hilda was thoughtful. “Miss Rowland isn’t the sort to keep quiet about a thing like that. I imagine she’s been spoiled and petted all her life.”
“Well, mother love, my girl!” he said drily. “If Tony actually shot her she may be keeping her mouth shut to save the girl.”
“I don’t think she’s as fond of her as all that.”
He eyed her.
“What would you expect? She’s tried to kill her twice.”
“But she doesn’t know that, does she?”
He stopped abruptly.
“Now look,” he said. “What’s on your mind? Did Tony push her aunt down the stairs?”
She shook her head.
“I think not. She was in the kitchen when it happened. Alice seems pretty positive she stumbled. It’s just—it almost looks as though Nina is suspicious of the girl. Why should she be?”
That was when he told her in detail the story as he knew it from Alice Rowland, the flight from Honolulu, the quiet years, the broken engagement, the shooting, the automobile accident, the psychiatrist’s failure, as well as his statement that Tony had something on her mind and might be heading for trouble. She listened attentively.
“So that’s the layout,” he finished. “Now you’ve seen them all. What do you make of it?”
“None of it makes sense,” she said testily. “The girl’s certainly devoted to her mother. Maybe she’s protecting somebody else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Alice Rowland perhaps. If Alice wanted to throw dust in your eyes she might have done what she did, gone to you saying Tony’s crazy. She’s no crazier than I am.”
“You don’t like Alice, do you?”
“I take care of my patients. I don’t have to love them.”
He laughed a little as they walked on. Hilda’s sharp tongue and warm heart always amused him.
“What motive would she have had? Alice, I mean.”
“Well, look at it,” Hilda said more reasonably. “She’s lived alone all her adult life. She’s had servants and money. Her house was her own, and her time. Then what happened? She finds her brother’s family parked on her, some of the servants leave, her whole scheme of living is changed, and she’s—well, she’s at a time of life when women are not always responsible. On the other hand….”
She stopped. Fuller eyed her curiously.
“On the other hand what?” he inquired.
“Tony locks her mother in her room when she has to leave her.”
Fuller stopped and stared down at her.
“That’s fantastic,” he said. “Are you sure of it?”
“I don’t usually make statements I’m not sure about,” Hilda said stiffly. “I found it out yesterday. Last night I put the light out in my room and watched her go down to dinner. She looked around to be sure I wasn’t in sight, took a key from the neck of her dress and locked the door from the hall.”
“Then the mother knows?”
“I’m not sure. She’s in bed most of the time. Tony’s been doing it only since I came.”
“Hell’s bells, Hilda!” he said, exasperated. “Why don’t you tell me what you know, without my having to get it bit by bit? How do you know she’s afraid of you? Not that I blame her,” he added. “That baby face of yours never fools me. You’re as dangerous as a rattlesnake, and even it rattles before it strikes.”
Very properly, Hilda ignored that.
“Aggie’s bunions,” she said succinctly.
He stopped.
“Aggie’s what?”
“Aggie’s the housemaid. She has bunions. I told her what to do for them, so she talks. Are we walking or standing still? I need exercise.”
He went on and she explained. When Hilda had gone out the night before Tony had gone out too, and when Aggie tried to take fresh towels to Nina’s room the door was locked, and no key inside it.
“She said it scared the daylights out of her,” Hilda said reflectively.
“Now just why,” Fuller inquired, “did that scare the daylights out of her?”
“Because it hadn’t happened before. Because she doesn’t think Tony fired those shots at all. Because she thinks Nina Rowland tried to kill
herself and Tony got the gun from her and took the blame.”
“Could be,” Fuller said. “So now she locks her mother up. What sort of woman is she anyhow? The mother.”
“I’ve told you. Beautiful, spoiled, and self-indulgent. Scared too about something. Maybe about Tony. Maybe about her sister-in-law.”
“So now it’s Nina who’s crazy!”
Hilda was silent for a moment.
“I don’t think any one of them is crazy,” she said finally. “Something has happened, either to them all, or to one or two of them. Personally, I think it happened to Tony.”
“But it’s bad enough to set them all on edge? To put it mildly,” he added smiling.
Hilda did not smile.
“We have only Tony’s word that she was driving the car when the accident happened,” she said. “Maybe the mother did that too. But I’d say she’s pretty fond of her pretty self. She likes lying in bed, with flowers all around her and Tony waiting on her hand and foot.”
“Not the suicidal type, eh?”
“Definitely not.”
They had almost reached the Rowland house. Hilda stopped, and Fuller put a hand on her shoulder.
“Look,” he said. “I want you to take care of yourself in that house. I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t gone. This isn’t a question of crime. No real crime’s been committed, according to the way I see it. But one may be. There’s tension there, and it may snap. Keep out of the way, Hilda. Watch yourself.”
He left her then, and Hilda walked on. She was quite sure she saw a masculine figure lurking in the shrubbery across the street and wondered if it was Johnny. He did not approach her, however, and looking back from the porch she realized that whoever it was was not in uniform.
V
That night Alice Rowland asked Hilda to sleep in the room with her. Hilda had given her an alcohol rub and the tablet the doctor had ordered to make her sleep, and Alice held the pill in her hand and looked at it.
“I suppose it’s all right, isn’t it?” she said, with a bleak smile. “I mean—one or two odd things have happened, and—I suppose I’m being childish, but will you look at it?”
Hilda examined the pill.
“It’s all right. That’s the way they’re always marked. What do you mean by odd things, Miss Rowland?”
Alice did not answer directly. She took the pill with a swallow of water and put her head back on her pillow.
“You’ve been here a day or two,” she said. “I wonder what you think of us.”
“I haven’t seen much of the others,” Hilda said calmly. “Miss Rowland seems very fond of her mother. I’ve only had a glimpse of Mrs. Rowland.”
“I’m thinking of Tony. You’ve seen her quite a bit. Do you think she’s worried about anything?”
“She seems rather serious, for a girl of that age,” Hilda said evasively.
“That’s all? You think she’s perfectly normal? Please be honest, Miss Adams. I’m anxious about her. She broke her engagement a couple of months ago, and she hasn’t been the same since.”
“It may have upset her more than you realize. Unless she didn’t care for the man.”
“Care for him! She was quite shamelessly in love with him.”
Hilda raised the window for the night before she made any comment. The man across the street had apparently gone. She was more and more sure it had not been Johnny, but her face was bland as she went back to the bed and pulled up an extra blanket.
“I may have seen him last night,” she said. “A young officer saw my uniform and spoke to me. He was afraid Tony was sick.”
“I don’t see why he would care,” Alice said, her voice sharp. “She treated him outrageously. Everything was ready. His people were coming to stay here, and the presents were lovely. Then all at once it was over. I felt like a fool. It was too late to do anything but announce the postponement in the newspapers, and people kept calling up. All I could say was that he had been moved unexpectedly. I didn’t say he’d gone overseas, but I let them think so.”
“I see,” Hilda said. “Was that when she started walking in her sleep?”
Alice looked startled.
“Who told you that?”
“Aggie said something about it.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Just that Tony was inclined to sleepwalking, and not to waken her suddenly.”
Alice’s suspicions were lulled. She settled back on her pillows.
“It was about that time,” she said. “Things were pretty confused here, what with calling off the wedding and everything. Her mother went to bed in a sort of collapse, and Tony looked like a ghost. Then she walked in her sleep one night and—I suppose you’ll hear it sooner or later—she found a loaded gun and almost shot her mother.”
Hilda registered the proper surprise and horror.
“Perhaps she was remembering the Japs,” she said. “Where did she find the gun?”
“Nina had it in her room. Tony knew where it was, of course. You see, don’t you, why I’m worried about the child? And now I’m afraid she’s sleepwalking again. I thought if you didn’t mind the couch here tonight—you’ll find it quite comfortable.”
“What makes you think she’s walking in her sleep?” Hilda persisted.
“She came in here last night after you had gone to bed. It must have been about two o’clock. I wakened to find her standing beside the bed looking down at me, with the oddest look on her face. She—I spoke to her, and she gave a start and shot out without saying a word.”
“You’re sure it was Tony?”
“She’d left the door open into the hall, and the light was on there. I saw her plainly.”
“Maybe she merely wanted to talk to you, and then decided against it.”
“Why should she go like that? I was awake, and she knew it.”
“Then you don’t think she was walking in her sleep?”
Alice looked annoyed.
“I don’t know,” she said fretfully. “I don’t know anything about girls. I certainly don’t know anything about Tony these days. She’s changed. She’s not herself at all. I’m half afraid of her.”
Hilda slept on the couch in Alice’s room that night. Or rather she lay there, keeping an eye on the door and trying to think things out. That Fuller was right, and that the tension in the house was building toward a crisis of some sort she felt confident, but what such a crisis might be she did not know. The vulnerable person was Alice, comparatively helpless in her bed. Yet she could see no rational reason for any danger unless she was involved in the shooting episode. Someone had fired the shots. According to Fuller’s story Tony had been found in a faint just inside her mother’s door, with a gun beside her and Nina trying to get out of bed. If Nina had been wounded she had managed to conceal it in the general excitement. Would that be possible? she wondered. Still, as Fuller said, if she was protecting her-own child …
It would have required considerable stoicism, she thought, but it could have been done, the bloody sheets rinsed out in the bathroom, a self-applied tourniquet to stop the bleeding, and perhaps the assistance of one of the servants. Not the garrulous Aggie. Stella, possibly. She determined to talk to Stella that next morning.
Alice had had her tablet and slept soundly. Because the night was warm Hilda had left the door open, and at two o’clock she heard a faint noise in the hall. It sounded like a door being stealthily opened and closed again, and unconsciously she braced herself. Nobody came into the room, however, and she got up quickly and looked out.
Someone was moving quickly and quietly down the staircase. She could not see who it was. The lower hall was dark, but whoever it was below was moving toward the back of the house, with the ease of long familiarity.
Hilda caught up her kimono and put it on as she went. For a woman of her build she could move rapidly and quietly, and she did so now. She was at the foot of the stairs almost before the door into the service wing at the rear had closed. After that how
ever she went more cautiously. The back hall was dark and empty, but someone was in the kitchen beyond. She heard the lifting of a stove lid and the striking of a match. There was a brief interval after that, practically noiseless. Then, so rapidly that Hilda had barely time to get out of the way, the unknown was opening the door in the darkness and on the way upstairs again.
Hilda had to make a split-second decision, whether to follow and identify the figure or to see what had been put in the stove. She chose the latter and went quickly to the kitchen.
It was quite dark, save for a small gleam of something on fire in the range. She made her way to it, striking her shins on a chair and making considerable noise as she did so. There was no indication that she had been heard, however, and she limped to the stove and managed to pry up the lid. The fire beneath was low, and whatever was burning had not been entirely consumed.
She found a box of matches by fumbling over the top of the plate heater where she knew Stella kept them, and lit one. The mass slowly charring was a surgical dressing of cotton and gauze bandage. Only an end of the bandage remained. The cotton was practically gone, but she had no doubt whatever as to what it was. Someone had burned a dressing from Nina Rowland’s arm.
She felt a little cold as she went back to her room. Anyone in the house except Alice could have crept downstairs, but why the secrecy? There seemed to be no question that Tony had fired the shots at her mother. But if she had really injured her why run the risk of infection now? Could there have been another gun in the case, and Tony’s shooting a coverup, perhaps for Nina, perhaps for Alice Rowland? Had the story as Alice had told it to Fuller been a clever device to protect someone, possibly herself?
Yet if it had been Tony the night before in the kitchen, she seemed entirely natural the next morning at the breakfast table. She was wearing again the sweater and short skirt, with her hair loose about her face, making her look about sixteen again. And she ate a normal breakfast, to Hilda’s relief. In fact she looked as though she had had a reprieve of some sort, which was the more surprising because of what she said.
Episode of the Wandering Knife Page 20
