Bring the Bride a Shroud

by Dolores Hitchens

  “Do come for breakfast if you’d like.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather thanked her; he expressed in detail his joy over the dinner.

  “Yes, I am able to cook,” she said unaffectedly. “But do you know, I’m very tired of doing it.”

  She ushered Mr. Pennyfeather gently to the door—the back door. Carrie, it seems, thought that Stacey shouldn’t suspect he and Tick had had a talk. Mr. Pennyfeather wondered why. He didn’t like that alley. It was a black weedy tunnel fit only for bats. Mr. Pennyfeather wasn’t a bat; but when he was sure Mrs. Jessop wasn’t looking, he took off like one. He leaped over and ran around masses of stickers and dry crackling twigs. He panted. He acquired a pain in his side.

  He found Miss Comfort, too. She was still wearing his windproof. She was a huddled and motionless form, and he tripped over her. She was lying less than fifty feet from the hotel’s back door.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mr. Pennyfeather attempted to lift her, and she unwound leggily; there was the sound of heavy breathing and a smell of chloroform. He laid her straight and put an ear above her heart.

  She was stoutly corseted under the white uniform; her heartbeat seemed far away and vague. Shivers of apprehension ran over Mr. Pennyfeather. He decided to risk leaving her for a second to summon help.

  Mrs. Blight and Mr. Johns turned to look at him from opposite sides of the counter.

  Mrs. Blight said, “There you are! I’ve been looking all evening for you. Miss Whittemore’s very bad. She’s delirious.”

  Mrs. Blight said, “There you are! I’ve been looking all evening for you. Miss Whittemore’s very bad. She’s delirious.”

  “The doctor!” stuttered Mr. Pennyfeather. “The police!”

  “I’ve had the doctor,” snapped Mrs. Blight. “He thinks there may be a concussion.”

  “No, no,” cried Mr. Pennyfeather. “I want a doctor for Miss Comfort. She’s in the alley, chloroformed. She may be dying.”

  Mr. Johns’s hand reached mechanically for the phone.

  “Please come help me get her inside,” Mr. Pennyfeather went on. “Someone may come back to finish killing her.”

  In the midst of fairly jumping up and down with anxiety over Miss Comfort, he noted the odd appearance which had come over Mrs. Blight. He remembered the look: eyes icy and immobile behind her glittering lenses; skin pale, frosted with sweat; lips stretched in a catlike grimace of fear. Mrs. Blight had looked that way when he had made the remark about framing Tick. She hadn’t worn the expression at the discovery of Mrs. Andler’s body, so it was not her normal reaction to murder. What on earth regularly came over the woman?

  “Did she—” Her glasses fixed him. “Did she say anything?”

  “How could she? She’s unconscious.” Mr. Pennyfeather went on hopping about. “Please come with me!”

  Mr. Johns sputtered into the phone, listened breathily, and came out from behind the counter. “Stacey’s bringing the doctor. I’ll give you a hand.”

  “I’m coming,” Mrs. Blight announced suddenly. As in the other case, she had begun to put shock behind her. The glassy look was fading from her eyes—the look of one who sees all the imps of hell writhing up out of the ground at her—and she had stopped choking at every breath. “Wait for me. I’ll help you with her.”

  Mr. Johns snapped on a light outside by the rear entry. It illumined the alley dimly, showed the white mountain of Miss Comfort’s bosom, the dry weeds underfoot, and the blistered boards of the opposite buildings. They hurried together to Miss Comfort, and here Mrs. Blight proved to be of little help. She went poking off into the weeds on some search of her own.

  Mr. Johns belied his spidery looks by lifting Miss Comfort’s legs and hips while Mr. Pennyfeather struggled with her shoulders. She undulated in their uneven handling, not gracefully, her head rolling and her arms limp. The smell of chloroform seemed stronger, more sickening.

  Mrs. Blight wandered toward them out of the dark, a little bottle dangling in one hand. “Here’s what he used. It’ll have fingerprints on it.”

  “Yes—yours,” said Mr. Pennyfeather crossly.

  They got Miss Comfort into the hall at last, then into one of the lower rooms from which three soldiers had to be routed. Mr. Pennyfeather reflected sadly on the irony of things: if he had known the soldiers had been there, he would have used them to carry Miss Comfort. The corset must enclose a good deal of solid meat.

  He was helping Mr. Johns cover her with a blanket when he saw the flutter of her eyelid, instantly stilled. A moment later, turning from the door after peeping out to see what on earth had happened to Mrs. Blight, he thought that Miss Comfort had been watching. There was an alert smugness about the way she lay there, a hint of amusement at his and Mr. Johns’s frantic struggles in the alley.

  Mr. Johns moaned: “What’ll they do for her?”

  “Pump her stomach,” decided Mr. Pennyfeather. “Always.”

  “For chloroform?”

  “It’s routine. Very unpleasant, of course. Sickening rubber tube run down your throat, soapy water by the quart. They let you bring it up. You do it, too.” He was watching Miss Comfort, and he saw the impact of his words. The closed eyelids quivered, and she gulped. She decided to open her eyes.

  “Hello.” She looked all about at the room, and her pretense of surprise was very well done.

  Mr. Johns chafed her wrist and clucked over her. “Now, now, just lie still and close your eyes again. You’ve had a very close call. Someone tried to kill you.”

  Her face was blank. “Did they? I don’t remember anything.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather left them. He went into the lobby, and when Stacey came with the doctor he directed them to the proper room. He was disturbed, and he felt the need for thought. Miss Comfort’s encounter with the chloroform might have been genuine; Miss Comfort just possibly was not.

  He wondered if a real nurse would have been taken in by his fiction about the stomach pump; or whether Miss Comfort had just wanted to wake up then, anyway.

  He went upstairs to rap at Glee Hazzard’s door. She was at the front of the house. There was no answer from inside her room, but a moment after his knock she appeared at the door to the veranda.

  “I’m out here.” Some little trace of the tears induced by the beer still remained. “Come out, won’t you?”

  The veranda was cool and windy, and the light from Glee’s room revealed Tick, slouched in a wicker chair.

  “Hello,” Tick said with a trace of discomfort. “Sorry if I seemed to walk out on you back there. I had something to think over.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well…. I found Miss Comfort in the alley.” He sat down and went on to tell Glee about the woman’s misadventure, the suspicious reaction to his myth of the soapy water. “And I want to know just how you happened to hire her, and whether you’re sure she’s a nurse—a real nurse.”

  Glee was silent for a while. Her cigarette made a red spark against the night, and the glow through the curtains behind her showed her bent head, black and shining. “I don’t really know anything about her. She’s lived in my apartment house for a long time—a year or more. She’s always been very friendly. When this crazy idea about the splints and bandages occurred to me, I bought the stuff I needed, and a friend who was studying first aid—Tick, you remember Gertrude—did me up. Coming home, I met Miss Comfort in the hall. I’d never even known, before, that she did nursing.”

  “She announced the fact then, I gather,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “She did, and then I thought how much funnier and more impressive it would be if I came to see Tick with a nurse, too. I asked her what she’d charge for a few days’ care, and the price was very reasonable and I hired her.”

  “Just why,” wondered Mr. Pennyfeather, “did you decide to see Tick at this time?”

  “I really shouldn’t tell this. I wouldn’t, except to you.” While Tick muttered a complaint, she leaned toward Mr. Pennyfeather and whispered into his ear. “A boy named
Freddy wrote me. I think he’s in love with Caroline Pond, and I suspect he dropped a note to Mrs. Andler and to Taffy Whittemore, too.”

  “Calling for help,” answered Mr. Pennyfeather. “Now, getting back to Miss Comfort: did she impress you professionally?”

  “She didn’t have to, you see. I wouldn’t have let her have a peep under those bandages for anything. She just sort of hovered around and ran errands.”

  “I see.” Mr. Pennyfeather looked out thoughtfully to where Superstition’s scant neon display colored the night. Above was infinite dark sky and a million stars; the little town was as ineffectual as a toot on a tin horn in the company of a whole section of basses. And yet it was somehow a human and humorous ineffectuality.

  Mr. Pennyfeather sighed and turned his thoughts to the matter at hand. He found himself gnawed by a disgraceful yearning to prowl into Miss Comfort’s room. A glance at her belongings might tell so many things….

  Tick spoke. “You know—that crazy thing about Mrs. Blight and the remark you made to her—”

  “Hm-m-m.”

  “There’s an answer. One she didn’t give you.”

  “What was it?” He was not fully listening to Tick; he was mentally trying Miss Comfort’s door.

  “She couldn’t have planned something for Taffy to do when Taffy and I were going together, because she wasn’t around. There was an old-maid aunt or something that Taffy complained of, saying she had a face like a horse. I never met that one.”

  “Taffy has a host of relatives, then?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect this Blight woman of being a sort of manager. The aunt, too. Taffy has a kind of complex about managers, agents, and so on. She loves them. I gather Taffy herself is somewhat barren of ideas and needs their boosting.”

  He didn’t give much thought, then, to what Tick had told him. He was listening for any sound of steps in the upper hall. Evidently Miss Comfort was taking the doctor’s ministrations in the downstairs bedroom. He rose gingerly and peered back through the door.

  The hall was empty.

  Ideas had such an odd way of popping into his mind. It was at this moment that it occurred to him that Mr. Jessop’s startled surprise on seeing him that evening might be accounted for by Mr. Jessop’s having seen Miss Comfort in Mr. Pennyfeather’s coat.

  Mr. Jessop had come home through the alley; he might reasonably have glimpsed Miss Comfort in the windproof and mistaken who she was; and seeing Mr. Pennyfeather a moment or so later in his own house would make him doubt his senses.

  Providing a guilty conscience wasn’t involved, in the bargain.

  Mr. Pennyfeather, alert as an old fox at the door of a chicken house, stole along the hall. The murmur of Glee’s and Tick’s voices was behind him. At the stairs he peered downward. Some soldiers were writing in the register, and there was no sign of Mr. Johns. He went back to the front of the building, to the door across from Glee’s.

  Miss Comfort had already made the room thoroughly her own.

  There was a freshly pressed uniform laid out upon the bed, a starched cap as crisp as a magnolia blossom on the dresser, two pairs of low-heeled white shoes on the window seat. The bed had been turned down with hospital precision, and the corners of the lower sheet were mitered. There was a slight odor of antiseptic in the air.

  Mr. Pennyfeather meditated on Miss Comfort as he roamed about her room. She was either so thoroughly a creature of habit or so grimly trained that she did not, even in moments of relaxation, quit being a nurse. Or she was playing a part to its limit.

  Her comb and brush were white plastic and smelled of Lysol. Her blue cape on its hanger showed no sign of dust. A whisk broom lay near it on a shelf, a well-worn whisk broom from which Mr. Pennyfeather thoughtfully unraveled a bright red thread. He was remembering the hair twisted in Mrs. Andler’s comb, and he was frowning over a totally new idea.

  He went back finally to the veranda. The light from the windows angled out across Tick’s long legs, silhouetting a spider web on the pane against the khaki; and showed one of Glee’s hands nervously flicking a cigarette. They had quit talking. As he approached, Mr. Pennyfeather saw Glee shiver slightly, and he recalled her superstition about someone walking on her grave.

  He sat down without speaking. He sensed their mood, restive and lightly bitter and full of memories of other days. Tick had his head back against the chair and seemed to be studying the stars. Glee curled the cigarette into her palm, widened her fingers to make a pattern of the glow. Her profile was a cameo line as clean as chalk.

  “Did you find anything?” Tick asked at last.

  “Um-m-m-m?” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “Did you pick up anything from Toothy?”

  “Oh. No, nothing of importance. An idea or two, perhaps. I’ll have to give them a little thought.”

  “You think the chloroform was just a gag, don’t you?”

  “No, I can’t say that. I’m not sure.”

  “If it wasn’t a gag, and she was wearing your coat, as you said she was, then it might be that someone is after you.”

  “But so clumsily,” worried Mr. Pennyfeather. “None of it matching the job that was done on Mrs. Andler. Putting a centipede in my coat—”

  “What’s that?” cried Tick.

  “And then chloroforming a woman who’d make two of me because she happened to be wearing it. Don’t you see how inexpert they’ve suddenly become?”

  Glee looked at him worriedly; Tick’s long legs moved in the light from the window, and he cursed softly. “Do you see through any of it at all?” he asked.

  “A little.” Mr. Pennyfeather, pausing to sum up some remarkable ideas, nodded at them. “Yes, I think I’ve got some of it figured out accurately.”

  “The murderer?” Glee whispered.

  “Not yet. Method, though. By the way, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you. Did you hire Miss Comfort on the day you came here—yesterday?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Did she help you to pack?”

  “No, I’d already packed.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather sat for a long minute sunk in thought. “Well, I’ll ask you to do a bit of work, if you will. Write out every last preparation you made for the trip, will you? Beginning with the time the idea for the bandages hit you.”

  “You mean little things like—polishing shoes?”

  “Everything, please.”

  A braying voice had come up into the hall. Mrs. Blight.

  “Oh, lord,” said Tick.

  “She’s been wanting you all day,” Mr. Pennyfeather told him. “I think it might be interesting if you went and saw what she had for you.”

  “Not me.” Tick eyed the railing that overhung the sidewalk.

  Mrs. Blight must be resenting the attention given to Miss Comfort. Perhaps she had ambitions, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, of drawing the doctor and Stacey upstairs. She was lamenting loudly over Miss Whittemore’s imminent death from skull fracture.

  “The one way you can quiet that woman is to listen to her,” Mr. Pennyfeather pointed out. “Let her talk. And keep an eye on Taffy and tell me later what you’ve seen and heard. Miss Hazzard, please make the list I asked you to.”

  He stood up and caught Tick before Tick could make the railing.

  “Glee—” pleaded Tick, wanting help.

  “I hope that she-wolf eats you,” said Glee coolly as Mr. Pennyfeather led him away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Stacey was in the hall outside the downstairs room occupied by Miss Comfort. He was cleaning the bowl of his pipe with a pocketknife and occasionally swatting at a fly when it buzzed too near. The overhead light shone in his steel-colored eyes. When Mr. Pennyfeather approached he glared suspiciously.

  “How is she?” asked Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “The Doc’ll find that out,” Stacey said shortly.

  “Does she remember who attacked her?”

  Stacey peered into the black bowl of the pipe as if seeking a suspect. “She
might. Don’t know yet.”

  “Did you get anything from the bottle?”

  Stacey shrugged.

  Mr. Pennyfeather saw that the sheriff, having got rid of his experts—who had no doubt become a trifle irksome—was going to be quite as mulish as they had wanted him to be.

  “Could I have my coat now?”

  “Yeah.” Stacey shifted his weight from one long leg to another. “Now we’ll get around to why the nurse was wearing it. You gave it to her, I suppose.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” snapped Mr. Pennyfeather. “She took it out of my room.”

  Stacey studied the knife edge. “Kind of odd, huh?”

  “She’s kind of odd. Why don’t you investigate her credentials?”

  Stacey slid a look over him as though mentally searching for a weapon. “Along with your front name?”

  “Oh, quit acting like Hopalong Cassidy,” fumed Mr. Pennyfeather, “and start sending a few telegrams. To the State Board of Nursing, for instance.”

  “Here, now,” growled Stacey, his back up, “she ain’t hurt anybody. She got chloroformed.”

  “Why should she have been?” Mr. Pennyfeather wondered if he looked as much like a sparrow hopping about as Stacey did a weathered and dyspeptic hawk. “Her only connection with the case seems to have been that Miss Hazzard rung her in on a scheme to get some sympathy from Mr. Burrell. She was wearing my coat in the alley, but anyone getting close enough to stick a wad of cotton into her face would know who she was.” He thought of Miss Comfort’s big teeth, gleaming even in the dark.

  Stacey snapped the knife shut; if he intended to give heed to Mr. Pennyfeather’s pushings, he hid the fact remarkably well. “Say, where is Mr. Burrell?”

  “He’s upstairs with Mrs. Blight.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather meant to bring the conversation back to Miss Comfort, but there was an interruption. The rear door banged open, and Joe Jessop practically fell in through it. He was wearing an old brown coat instead of the sweater. He stood rubbing the back of his head, avoiding their eyes sheepishly.

  “I’ll bet Lou took out after you,” Stacey decided. “I’ll bet you had a bottle cached away and you couldn’t let it alone.”