Bring the Bride a Shroud

by Dolores Hitchens

“Not big teeth. But a mustache. I met a ver’ pretty girl, though, all in yellow. When I first went upstairs. And she was carryin’ a knife.”

  The impact of that statement didn’t appear all at once. Stacey’s eye seemed frozen in its half-squint. He cleared his throat mechanically. “Carrying a what?”

  “Great big long knife.” The drunken man made a lengthy gesture with his two hands. “Yellow girl. Fluffy hair. It was yellow, too.”

  “Jessop, if you’re making that up I’ll have your hide for it,” said Stacey, and he was turning toward Taffy—Taffy, whose yellow gown peeped from under the gray negligee, whose curls glistened pale gold under the light—with a look almost of apology in his face.

  Taffy didn’t wait for a question. She sprang out of the chair and ran for the stairs. Mr. Pennyfeather heard her panting breath, the shuddering words she kept repeating.

  “It’s a frame-up. A frame-up,” she was saying, strangled.

  Stacey put out an arm, and she darted under it. He swung in a quick and somewhat graceful movement that betrayed how well he must handle himself in the saddle. He reached, caught at the hem of her negligee. Taffy went down. She writhed, turned on him, and began to claw. Stacey pulled her up off the stairs.

  “Now see here, miss,” said Stacey, “you can’t go galloping off like that just because a drunk says something awkward. What if he did see you marching down the hall carrying a knife? Mrs. Andler wasn’t killed with any knife. She was hatcheted.”

  Jessop, the drunken man, looked up at him and at the struggling Taffy with an expression compounded of enlightenment and faith. “Of course,” he said.

  “Of course what?” snarled Stacey, who was getting angry.

  “The hatchet,” said Jessop.

  “What hatchet?” Stacey obviously could have shot him.

  “The hatchet somebody brought into my room,” Jessop went on, after a pause to hiccup. “Y’know, I thought they’d been killing a chicken with it.”

  Stacey dropped the girl—in fact flung her away—and almost fell over himself getting upstairs. There was the banging of a hastily opened door, then utter quiet. Mr. Pennyfeather felt his nerves crawl, felt his eyes sting with the effort to make out what Stacey might be doing in that upper hall.

  Stacey ran down presently. He held a short-handled ax by its tip, a handkerchief over the tip. “Anybody see this before? Look close, now. Try to remember.”

  He passed among them, and they looked. Mr. Pennyfeather shuddered, and Tick cursed, loudly and brokenly. Taffy screamed. Miss Comfort and Mrs. Blight both shook their heads. Glee gave it a glance and said, “I’ve never seen it.”

  Mr. Johns, the hotelkeeper, came out from behind the counter, where he had stayed with an air of barricading himself against unsavory guests. “Let me see that…. Yes. I thought so. I always kept it in the linen closet, next the upstairs bathroom. There’s an overhead scuttle there where you can get up to repair the roof. I used the hatchet to pry up some old shingles about two weeks ago.”

  Stacey hefted the ax gently, and the yellow glow of the unshaded bulbs reflected dully on the blade.

  “Now, Jessop, you tell me just how this thing happened to find its way into your room.”

  Jessop shook his head wearily. “I don’t know. Been asleep.” He groaned; it was one of the hollow groans Mr. Pennyfeather recalled from the upstairs hall. “Just noticed it a few minutes ago.” He plucked at a spot on the green sweater where a lower button was missing.

  Stacey prodded the rest of them verbally, one at a time. Mr. Pennyfeather was aware that at last Stacey had returned to Mr. Jessop.

  “… and this time you met the nurse at the bathroom—”

  “Didn’t meet the nurse,” Jessop corrected. “Just peeked out at her and saw those awful big—”

  “Never mind. You left the bathroom while she waited, didn’t you?”

  “I retired temporarily to my room,” said Miss Comfort icily.

  “But when I first went up I met a ver’ pretty—”

  “Yeah, I heard that. Well, I’m going to let you all go back to your rooms. I’ll want you here again at eight o’clock.”

  Some of the soldiers made a loud protest, and Stacey at last gave them permission to get back to camp. He was writing down their names as the rest of the guests dragged themselves upstairs.

  Mr. Pennyfeather got into bed with most of his clothes on. He slid almost immediately into a dream-ridden sleep and tossed and turned and relived the bus ride from San Diego. He saw the desert vividly again, the lonely waste of sage and cactus, and the wind blowing out of the sunset to touch his face.

  Hours afterward he woke to find the cold wind a reality. His windows were open to the blowing night as Mrs. Andler’s had been, and something tall and black was standing by his bed.

  Chapter Six

  The kind of cold that Professor Marx produced with his carbon dioxide experiments slid over Mr. Pennyfeather’s skin, an icy immobility right out of an arctic test tube. This wasn’t nightmare, though. The figure by the bed was real, and the wind was real, and the blind at the window was making a sound like a flapping wing.

  He wondered frozenly if Mrs. Andler had wakened to such a sight, and whether she had been frightened or just curious, and what the tall figure in the dark might have said to her.

  The sound of the planes was gone, and the night outside had an abnormal quiet.

  The figure moved, and Mr. Pennyfeather crouched away, so that his movement must have been seen. Tick’s voice came; it was hoarse with tiredness, but it was a very reassuring sound to Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “It’s nearly time for the first bus,” he said, “and Stacey is letting me get back to camp. I’ll see you this evening. I’ve told Stacey everything I know, and it’s gradually percolated that he thinks I murdered her.”

  “Here, now,” Mr. Pennyfeather said. “Don’t go imagining things, Tick.”

  “You weren’t with me,” Tick went on, “just before you found her. They’re pretty certain—Stacey and the doctor and the others from San Diego—that she was killed in those few minutes. I told them the truth. There wasn’t any use lying, though I know you tried to cover for me in the lobby tonight.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather sat up. “Then I’m a suspect, too.”

  “No, you aren’t. You haven’t the ghost of a motive. You hadn’t quarreled half your life with her.” He sighed and moved restlessly in the dark. “I wish now—of course, there’s no use my saying this—but I wish I’d been more decent about things. Being my guardian must have been tough on her, even if she did get paid for it. And then, thinking back, I guess she really was fond of me.”

  “I’m sure she was, Tick.” He saw how Tick’s misery possessed him. “We’d have to be more than human to see ahead, to know how short life can be. And, too, there’s a very good chance that your aunt’s own stubbornness was the cause of her being killed.”

  Tick seemed to be thinking this over in silence.

  “Someone wanted her out of the way very badly. I can’t think of any motive except that she had blockedor would block—someone’s planning. Perhaps preposterous planning, Tick, something so farfetched we can’t even imagine what it was. Like, say—well, marrying you.”

  Tick made a scornful sound. “Taffy? That rattle-brained child wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “Don’t jump so to conclusions. Taffy isn’t alone in what she’s trying to do, in case you’ve overlooked her stage manager. Nor is she the only girl hereabouts. You’ve got an exfiancee right in this hotel and another girl wearing your ring in Camp Frey.”

  Tick said instantly: “Why do you mention her?”

  “Just in passing. Just in summing up, as it were.”

  He seemed curiously defensive. “She’d never met Aunt Martha.”

  “Your aunt Martha did a lot of getting around, Tick. You can’t say flatly she hadn’t met your Caroline. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d managed to meet your commanding general. She was a very active and a very re
sourceful woman. She came up here, I’m pretty sure, to put the skids under somebody. Maybe that somebody was Caroline.”

  “Caroline has more honesty, more genuine principle, than anyone I’ve ever known. She’s in the Women’s Army Corps from the highest of motives—”

  “Tick, she’s human. She’s awfully human or she wouldn’t have fallen for you. Granted that the women in our army are a patriotic and high-minded group, they’ve still got private lives. And private lives can be very complicated affairs. Now, I’m not saying Caroline ever saw your aunt Martha. I’m just trying to give you a little perspective.”

  “I’ll bring Caroline in to meet you tonight,” Tick decided. “Then you’ll know what she’s like.”

  “Do that, Tick.

  “And—another thing. You mentioned something about my aunt having some little plot in store for me, something about someone having slashed at her. Couldn’t that have been the real thing, in view of what’s happened since?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind went back to the lonely café, the wide pane through which he had watched the soldiers, Taffy and Mrs. Blight, and Tick’s aunt. “I still think it was a trick,” he decided. “I think your aunt meant to display her cut wrist and pump you full of a story about what awful people were after you. The queer part is that she seemed to have planned to alienate you from Taffy with this tale, when actually you are engaged to another girl entirely. That’s the inconsistency I don’t like. But as for the cut wrist—I’m as sure as I’ll ever be that she slashed it herself.”

  Tick sighed and moved toward the windows. “I’ll close these before I go. I had my head stuck through them, trying to come out of my daze. The sheriff wants all of you downstairs by eight o’clock. I guess you knew that.”

  He closed the windows and felt his way across the room. Mr. Pennyfeather, sitting in the dark, noted that there was now no light in the hall, and that Tick’s passing through the door relieved not a whit the impenetrable shadow. He recalled his movements at what must have been the time of Mrs. Andler’s murder. He had been putting in fuses, standing by the back door in the dark, then throwing the switch. He wondered suddenly if his action earlier in plunging the place in darkness had provided the opportunity the murderer had wanted. Had there bloomed then in some brain, like a dreadful flower opening on the night, the plan to do away with Mrs. Andler? Had he and Tick, crouched in the cactus, been unwitting co-conspirators in that crime?

  He got out of bed and shrugged into his outer clothing and went to the window to look out. Here in this room, as in Mrs. Andler’s and perhaps in all the others, was a bay occupied by a window seat with a hinged lid. He remembered with a sudden twinge of uneasiness the sight of Mrs. Andler’s shoes, neatly in a row, and the inexplicable cigarette butt that had rolled from the toe of one of them. The cigarette with the mark of a lipstick like Glee Hazzard’s. The cigarette he had tossed out into the garden below.

  He wondered abstractedly if he could find it again.

  The town was very dark, but the sky was beginning now to lighten, to show the first smudges of gray in the east. Mr. Pennyfeather was able to make out how the town lay in a little hollow in this sweep of desert. To the east and north, foggy mountains thrust up against the horizon. They looked remote, unreal. Between them and him were a sea of haze and a long level plain as flat as water.

  Some teasing thought—some idea in connection with Tick’s and his vigil in the cactus garden—fluttered like a moth in his mind. Something to do with a light, a fugitive light like the gray light now in the east…. He turned from the window and sat down and held his head. He had to remember!

  He forced himself to think through the things that had happened after Tick had come stumbling toward him through the night. They’d listened to Mrs. Blight, shrieking over Tick’s escape; they’d heard the conversation between the girl in uniform and her discarded beau. But wait. In between those two … the procession of candles!

  He rose and paced the room in excitement. Mentally he recreated the little procession the four people had made, searching: Taffy with her hair all gold; Mrs. Blight very grim; the little hotelkeeper fairly hopping up and down with anger; Mr. Jessop, who probably didn’t quite know what was going on.

  Mr. Jessop, then, must have come down to join the others at about the time of his and Tick’s escape. Wait a minute … if Mr. Jessop had been coming down the stairs, even in the dark, he should have known that Tick and Mr. Pennyfeather hadn’t gone up. Did that account, then, for the search being made through the lower floor?

  He recalled the flickering light made by the party’s progress from room to room. They must have roused some very unhappy and angry soldiers. The four of them had come out upon the back landing, an unroofed porch, and stood for a moment, their candles flickering in the wind, to try to see about. Then they’d gone back in. A moment or so later a very odd light had shown in Mrs. Andler’s room.

  A very odd light indeed, Mr. Pennyfeather thought with a chill. He had just recalled its color.

  He had connected it with the candles held by the four searchers, but he realized now that the excitement and suspense of getting Tick out of Mrs. Blight’s clutches had blurred his judgment. The candlelight had been yellow; he knew how Taffy’s bright hair had given back its gleam, and how warm a light it had seemed on the porch, under the faraway stars.

  The light in Mrs. Andler’s room had been blue.

  He swallowed and sat very still. He had the sensation of having seen a part of Mrs. Andler’s murder: an obscure bit of a pattern which must unfold upon multiple horror. He had no idea of what to do about it, except to tell the incident privately to Stacey. There was no meaning, no relevance between the pale blue glow and the wielding of that short-handled ax.

  Finding the cigarette butt occurred to him again. There would be a sense of release in getting out of the room. He wrapped himself in the windproof and took his hat and stepped into the hall, which was filling now with a gray light. He saw at the front a door open, showing the foggy mountains in the distance and the timbered railing of a veranda. A sleeping man who had all of the outward appearances of a deputy of Stacey’s—including a gun in a holster—was propped in the frame of Mrs. Andler’s closed door.

  Mr. Pennyfeather tiptoed past, wondering if one of the deputy’s jobs might not have been to see that all of them stayed put until eight o’clock. He heard Mr. Jessop’s snore and the harsh scolding of some desert bird from out of doors.

  The lobby was empty, though it had an air of recent occupancy. There was a stir of dust floating about which made Mr. Pennyfeather want to sneeze, and smoke still curled from an ash tray on the counter. He slid out gently into the dry cold morning.

  The main street of Superstition was not beautiful in the dawning. It was wind-bitten and sun-bleached, shy of paint and of planting. There were two movie houses, three cafés (lights were burning in two of them), the bus depot, a general store, and a combination sheriff’s office and fire station. The store had been painted yellow. The rest had never been painted at all. An adobe building to the left of the bus depot displayed a sign: Mama’s Place. Mr. Pennyfeather decided, after some study, that it dealt in beer and not motherhood. He pulled his windproof tight and walked around the side of the hotel into the cactus garden.

  It was much bigger and much less mysterious than it had seemed the night before. He saw that the difficulty in getting through it in the dark was due to the pattern of its laying out, a kind of maze with intersecting circles. There were smaller species of cactus toward the street, giant species at the back. Here and there, little mounds of boulders and gravel had been planted with a creeping succulent growth like the advance of a myriad of spiders.

  It was a rather frightening kind of garden, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, and yet in the face of that savage stretch of desert he couldn’t imagine anything like his aunt Elizabeth’s climbing roses. The cactus dug its way into the baked earth and clung fiercely to life and hoarded its moisture in spite of the sun. To all other l
iving things—including Mr. Pennyfeather—it offered a barrier of thorns. There was a great deal of grimness and no fun about that cactus. Mr. Pennyfeather picked his way through it until he was under the windows.

  He saw almost at once what seemed to be the same cigarette butt he had tossed out of Mrs. Andler’s window. It lay on the bare earth, and he saw distinctly the red stain he had noted before. For an instant he almost bent to pick it up. Then he became aware of a brisk step coming in his direction from the street.

  He straightened and turned.

  She was very businesslike, very clean-cut in her uniform of the Women’s Army Corps. She wasn’t startlingly pretty; she was wholesome, with a fair skin on which showed a scattering of freckles. She had direct brown eyes—clear velvet brown—and a set of bright teeth which she showed Mr. Pennyfeather with a smile.

  “Hello. Are you Tick’s friend?”

  Two teasing memories seemed to converge in Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind. One was the memory of the snapshot of Caroline on a sand dune. The second, more elusive, had something to do with the cactus garden.

  “Mr. Pennyfeather?” she asked.

  “Um-m-m, yes. Yes. And you’re Caroline, aren’t you?”

  “I’m Caroline Pond.” She came close and held out her hand. There was nothing Unfeminine in the gesture, though the uniform gave it an air of authority. Her fingers felt warm and firm. “Tick’s in an awful stew, isn’t he? Poor fellow!”

  There was just a touch of impersonality here, Mr. Pennyfeather thought. “His aunt’s death was a shock, naturally.”

  “I only had a minute with him before his bus pulled out. He didn’t give me any details. Was it—what he thought it was? Murder?”

  “I’m afraid that’s right.”

  “How awful!” She stood looking at the hotel. “In there, wasn’t she? Was Tick the one who found her?”

  “I found her,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Perhaps you didn’t know it, but Mrs. Andler was a bit unreasonable with Tick. I had some idea of trying to win her over—”