Bring the Bride a Shroud

by Dolores Hitchens

  “Remind me,” Jessop muttered thickly, “to leave tequila alone.”

  “If I was you I’d leave anything alone.”

  Jessop ambled slowly up the hall toward them. “Damn that rolling pin. Don’t ever tell me a woman can’t hit what she aims for. I know better.”

  “Going to sleep in your usual?” Stacey asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just let me have a look around up there first.” Stacey thrust knife and pipe into his pants pocket.

  “I had an idea I—” Mr. Pennyfeather stammered.

  “Later, bud.”

  They went off into the lobby, where Jessop made an entry in the ledger while Stacey watched him.

  Very well, thought Mr. Pennyfeather. I meant to tell you about Mrs. Andler being hidden in the window seat. Now I’ll do my own investigation. Tonight.

  The lights of Superstition had gone out one by one like candles in a wind. The black sky with its multitude of stars looked down on the huddled and slatternly buildings in which no sign of life showed, on streets in which nothing moved. The last bus for Camp Frey had lurched off into the desert, and the earliest hadn’t even been thought of. Everything slept.

  Everything except Mr. Anonymous Pennyfeather.

  He sat on the side of his bed and listened to Tick’s breathing and watched the place where the door had been before he had turned off the light. There was now nothing but pitch blackness, but he knew that the door was there and that it was open. If anything happened to go by in the hall outside he should be able to hear it and perhaps catch some sign of movement.

  Tick was sleeping like a log. He had come away from Taffy and Mrs. Blight with a dazed, unhappy face and an air of being confused, and for a long time he had rolled restlessly. Now, being young and being tired, he was as peaceful as a baby.

  Mr. Jessop had met Tick in the hall. It had happened that as Tick came out of Taffy’s room, Mr. Jessop had started for the bath. Tick had nodded blindly. Mr. Jessop had stared. There could have been, in Mr. Pennyfeather’s opinion, a shade of alarm in Mr. Jessop’s expression. The braying of Mrs. Blight had been quite audible.

  Mr. Pennyfeather had wondered what Taffy’s demand had been, but Tick hadn’t told him.

  A long minute ticked away in darkness while Mr. Pennyfeather sat on the side of the bed. He thought about Tick and about Tick’s foolish and beautiful mother and about Mrs. Andler, who had been foolish without being beautiful at all. Mrs. Andler’s room was right next door, and Stacey’s stupidity in not keeping it locked might mean that Stacey believed the old saw about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. He might be keeping the door open as an invitation. Or there just—as in the case of Mr. Pennyfeather’s room—might not be any key.

  Mr. Pennyfeather put out a bare foot to hold his weight. The bed squeaked a little, but Tick didn’t move.

  He found his trousers on a chair and wriggled into them, then shook each shoe before putting it on. Mr. Johns’s centipede was still missing. The thought of putting bare toes upon its writhing length made him a little dizzy in the dark.

  Under the bed were a candle and a box of matches he had purloined from Mr. Johns’s counter in the lobby. He put them into a trouser pocket and stole out into the hall. It was black and breathless here—Mr. Johns being very saving of electricity—and there was a little whiff of Miss Comfort’s antiseptic smell, as though she might be sleeping with her door ajar—or perhaps wandering about.

  Miss Comfort had been brought up late by the doctor and the sheriff, one to each arm, protesting still that she hadn’t seen who wielded the chloroform. Stacey, not being a fool, must have instructed her to lock herself in. The antiseptic whiff was puzzling.

  Mrs. Andler’s door made a chirp like a cricket’s when he opened it; Mr. Pennyfeather’s heart leaped at the sound. He stopped and stood listening. From outside came the sigh of the desert wind, but there seemed nothing near. He went in and shut the door and struck a match.

  The red coat on the rack loomed up instantly, splashy as new paint in the dull light. The other clothes, the row of shoes on the window seat, had a slightly for-sale look to them. There was a gray furring of dust on Mrs. Andler’s toilet things on the dresser, a breath of cobweb on her gloves.

  A ghostly idea that he might be doing something extremely silly flittered through Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind. He subdued it pushingly, went over to the window seat and stood there, getting the candle started. He looked up all at once, realizing that he faced the bare pane. The duplicate of the candle flame wavered there, and outside was the night.

  Also outside were the cactus garden and any eyes which might be watching. Stacey’s perhaps. Mr. Pennyfeather jerked down the shades. He couldn’t rid himself, however, of that sight of the black pane, of a sense of a faceless something looking in, an ironic humor finding fun in his attempts at solving the murder of Mrs. Andler.

  I’m getting fanciful, he thought. He lifted Mrs. Andler’s shoes down pair by pair, then stopped suddenly and began putting them back. He was remembering the moments he and Tick had spent here waiting for Tick’s aunt. If his surmise was right, Mrs. Andler during that time had been stuffed unconscious into the window seat. The shoes might help him prove it.

  He recalled the slipper from which he had shaken the cigarette end, the obvious plant meant to involve Glee. The shoe had been a black oxford. He saw that this pair was at the opposite end of the row from where he had found it before.

  Of course, Stacey’s men might have replaced the shoes in a different order, but he doubted it. The experts had studied the room fanatically, almost lovingly, and Mr. Pennyfeather suspected that they would have kept it as nearly as possible as it had been at the time of the crime.

  He lifted the edge of the window seat experimentally, and the shoes at once began to slide, to tumble together against the window ledge, to cause a scraping clatter the murderer would scarcely have risked.

  The person who hid Mrs. Andler here, he thought, put her shoes on the floor. Neatly. Quietly. The way I’m doing it now.

  When the shoes were in a row, out of the way, he raised the seat again. He held the candle low and looked inside. He felt a hot wave of triumph, a chill of warning. This was obviously the place where Mrs. Andler had been put, and Stacey and his experts must know it by now. Two bath towels had been smoothed out for padding; a third, which must have been used to dust out the cobwebs, was wadded at one end. One of Mrs. Andler’s gray hairpins was caught in the turkish fabric. And there was a shadowy smell of chloroform which brought Miss Comfort’s adventure sharply to mind.

  Mr. Pennyfeather did some startling mental addition.

  Mrs. Andler had been chloroformed, put carefully into the window seat which had been prepared meticulously with towels to keep her clean and comfortable.

  Then she had, afterward, been taken out and put upon the bed and butchered horridly with Mr. Johns’s little ax.

  The two procedures were insane; they didn’t jibe; they fitted together like two halves of different jigsaw puzzles. One part of the crime maintained an almost military neatness, a kind of callous regard for appearances. The second part was rage and sadism.

  He felt that the room had turned cold, and he shuddered.

  He pulled aside the padding of towels, shook out the one used to catch cobwebs. There was nothing further to be found. He replaced things as they had been, including the shoes, and wandered over to the dresser. In the glass, yellow with candlelight and looking as mysterious as a wizard’s, his own face glimmered back at him. He considered fleetingly that Freddy hadn’t done him justice: he wasn’t so much dried up as dignified—in a pleasant way, he thought. His eyes—when they weren’t popped out in the odd expression they now wore—had always seemed friendly enough.

  He picked up Mrs. Andler’s comb and let the candlelight shine through between the teeth. The oily film was there, fuzzed now with dust. He wondered if Glee had finished the list of preparations he had asked her to write and if the explanation
for the grease on the hair found here was in it. He ran a careful finger along the top of the comb, and it came away clean. There was no chance, then, of the oil having come from Mrs. Andler’s hair, since such a heavy soaking would have soiled the whole comb in normal use. He put the comb back upon the dresser and approached Mrs. Andler’s suitcase.

  It stood at the end of the bed, a blue leather overnight case, not very new. Opened upon the bed, it displayed an assortment of businesslike underthings, a few cosmetics, a writing portfolio in which unanswered letters were stuck into a pocket. Breathing a trifle faster, Mr. Pennyfeather examined the letters.

  There was a dutiful note from Tick, reporting his transfer to Camp Frey, two invitations to tea, and a polite hint from a Los Angeles department store regarding the new rules about thirty-day accounts.

  There wasn’t any trace of a letter from Freddy.

  I must remember to get out of Freddy, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, whether he sent Mrs. Andler the kind of appeal he sent Glee. It must be a very important part of the puzzle as to whether Mrs. Andler came up here because of Caroline or because of somebody else.

  He stopped in his search of the suitcase and forgot to hold the candle correctly, and the hot wax deluged his hand.

  There had been a sound, he thought, a muffled pushing and scrabbling noise from the hall. He blew out the light with what he could gather of suddenly depleted breath and stole through the dark to put his ear to the keyhole.

  He caught the sound of whispering—urgent, wheedling—going on very near. The pushing and scrabbling noise seemed to be made by the efforts of someone to get through a door.

  He turned the knob silently and put an eye to the crack. There was darkness for a moment; then a narrow lane of light sprang on from the direction of Taffy’s door. The yellow patch was interrupted by the distorted shadow of a human figure, wriggling through. The rushing whisper subsided. The lane of light closed to a dim thread, then blinked out.

  He stepped out. The hall was black except for the thin line around Taffy’s door to his right. Inside Taffy’s room a conversation was going on—but quietly. Mr. Pennyfeather, trying guiltily to eavesdrop, could make out nothing save that neither voice resembled the unmistakable bray of Mrs. Blight.

  He stole farther down the hall. There was shuttered, closed-in warmth, silence, and a feeling that the flies would begin to buzz the moment a light went on. Mr. Pennyfeather went as far as the veranda door and peered out. The porch was empty; the stars were very bright.

  He went back finally to his own room. He was full of uneasiness, of a feeling that something had escaped him which was important. He slipped back into bed with Tick and lay for a long while thinking, wondering who it was who had gone into Taffy’s room, begging entry and clawing at the doorjamb.

  He didn’t like that memory; there was some element in it which nagged and festered.

  When he had slept restlessly for some hours, when the room was full of cold gray light and the smell of dawn, he sat up suddenly, wide awake. As clearly as though someone had spoken his problem for him, he knew its phrases.

  While someone had begged and scrabbled an entry into Taffy’s sanctum, why hadn’t Mrs. Blight been at hand?

  Condor-eyed, with the wits of a fox, she had managed every utterance Taffy had made, supervised her every contact with other people. It wasn’t like her to lie sleeping while Taffy kept a midnight rendezvous—a noisy one, at that.

  He scrambled into his trousers; it seemed but the next moment that he was at Mrs. Blight’s door, rapping on the aged wood, shivering with apprehension. He felt for the knob when she didn’t answer, turned it, went in, and tiptoed toward Mrs. Blight’s bed.

  Mrs. Blight was in it, along with a bright new shiny hand ax, the duplicate of Mr. Johns’s old one. She looked much as Mrs. Andler had looked.

  She was dead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The lobby had assumed the air of a morgue: it was chilly, the light was dismal and colorless, there was a faint tomblike smell of enclosed dust, and the people who sat, waiting stiffly, had the hollow self-awareness of those freshly brushed by death.

  Glee Hazzard had begun an insatiable bout of chain smoking, her quick gaze roaming the stairs down which Stacey had promised to come. Taffy Whittemore, in a chair somewhat removed from Glee’s, had her face hidden in the crook of one arm, her crouching pose suggesting that she expected some danger for herself. Miss Comfort, paler than Mr. Pennyfeather had remembered, had a queer impulse, not well controlled, to grin nervously at the rest of them. She sat next to Taffy and held Taffy’s free hand in her own.

  Mr. Pennyfeather judged that this was a new alliance and that Miss Comfort had taken over at least temporarily the duties of Mrs. Blight. Perhaps nursing was a habit, like biting nails or knitting, and Miss Comfort had plunged into the work of her profession as a relief from strain. Or perhaps she and Taffy had decided all of this earlier….

  Joe Jessop, coming down last of all, and sullenly, had moved a leather chair so that it concealed him a little from the rest of the group. He gurgled with frequency and fervor at the contents of a bottle of whisky, and when he wasn’t drinking he appeared to sleep. At least he lay with his rumpled and thinning head of hair thrust back upon the cushion, his face pointed to the ceiling and his eyes shut. The smell of the whisky mingled with the smell of the dust raised by their walking, and with Miss Comfort’s antiseptic smell, and with the fragrance of a mignonette sachet that must be Taffy’s.

  Tick Burrell kept up a nervous marching at the beginning of the hall leading back to the lower bedrooms. He was watched by Mr. Johns from behind the counter; Mr. Johns had worn a continual glare since the murder of Mrs. Blight had roused the house; he bent the glare on everybody, as though there had been a communal crime. He had, though, an extra touch of fierceness for Mr. Pennyfeather, crouched in his overcoat on a lower stair, since Mr. Pennyfeather had had the bad taste to make the initial ruckus. When Mr. Johns wasn’t glaring he was examining the window ledges and the underside of the counter. For the missing horror with legs, no doubt, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, shifting a trifle to make sure he was alone on the step.

  He felt the sudden vibration of Stacey’s walk in the hall above and stood up. Stacey came down the stairs slowly, even uncertainly.

  “Well,” Stacey said, stopping at the lower newel post and leaning on it, “the Doc don’t think she’s been dead more’n an hour or two. Can’t tell much closer than that. Thinks she might have had time to put up a little fight. She’s scratched quite a bit. Maybe one of you heard or saw something I can use. Maybe she got out a scream or two.” He was looking at Taffy’s bent head, but Taffy didn’t look up.

  “She couldn’t have screamed,” Mr. Pennyfeather pointed out, “because she was already chloroformed.”

  Miss Comfort started, grinned glassily, coughed. Stacey frowned at Mr. Pennyfeather. “I just want facts, not what you thought,” he said.

  “You know, I thought—” Miss Comfort checked herself as though Stacey’s words had just penetrated. “Oh. You don’t want that.”

  “Sure I do,” Stacey amended. Evidently, all he didn’t want was Mr. Pennyfeather’s flights into fancy. “Go ahead.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather felt ire rise in him at Stacey’s unfairness. He tried to think of something startling—like the blue light. He wondered if Mrs. Blight had seen a blue light before she had died.

  Miss Comfort gnawed her lower lip with a big white tooth, reflectively. “I thought at the time it seemed like Mr. Jessop going to the bath—this sort of dragging noise. This creeping, sliggety thing.”

  “What’s sliggety?” Stacey demanded.

  “Oh—like a big worm. You know. Writhing.”

  “I do not,” said the suddenly unalcoholic voice of Mr. Jessop, “writhe or creep to the bathroom. Nor go there in a sliggety manner. I get there in a hurry, especially if I’m drinking.”

  Miss Comfort turned a shining crimson, took her hand off Taffy’s clinging one and coughed i
nto it. “Well, I—I thought I should just mention the sound in passing.”

  “A creeping noise.” Stacey squinted horridly at her. “What time?”

  “Just—nighttime.”

  “Did you have your door open?”

  “Oh no. No, indeed. You recall that someone tried to murder me earlier. I wouldn’t have—”

  “Or me,” said Mr. Pennyfeather sharply.

  She gave him a goggling stare. “What?”

  “Kill me. You were running about in my overcoat, you know.”

  “Was I?” The reminder seemed to have discomposed her, set some line of thought awry. “I don’t see, though—Oh! I understand. You think that the murderer mistook me for you in the dim light.” She gnawed the lip again. “Oh, but that’s quite improbable, isn’t it? I mean, we’re nothing like each other. No one could make such a stupid mistake. I was attacked, just as Mrs. Andler and Mrs. Blight were attacked, by this fiend with the chloroform.”

  “Why do you say that Mrs. Blight was chloroformed?” Mr. Pennyfeather said quickly. “You just heard Stacey say she wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t—” Stacey began.

  But Miss Comfort interrupted loudly and heatedly. “You said that she had been chloroformed, Mr. Pennyfeather! You discovered her, and you said that you found her that way.”

  “Indeed not,” he said. “I found her very dead indeed, but from other causes.”

  She stumbled, looking puzzled. “But—then—”

  Stacey boomed in anger. “Look here, who’s conducting this investigation, this inquire-y? You? Mr. A. L. Pennyfeather? Or me?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather might be said to have jumped and shriveled at the same time.

  “Sure,” said Stacey, grinning. “Thought thaťd surprise you. I got that much out of that college you teach at. A. L. I’m not resting, either.”

  “But there are so many more important things,” Mr. Pennyfeather ventured, recovering a little. “Like—well—Mr. Jessop creeping into the bath. If he did.”