Bring the Bride a Shroud
Page 17
“I hadn’t been bothered by a headache, yet,” said Taffy. “They are headache tablets, aren’t they?”
Stacey prodded them gently, rolled one over, studied some imperfections on its underside.
“I’ll take them all, now, if you’ll get me a glass of water,” said Miss Comfort quickly. “There’s nothing wrong with those tablets. They’re just a compound resembling aspirin. You can buy them in any drugstore.”
Stacey held the pillbox toward her gingerly, and her hand reached for it.
“No!” yelped Mr. Pennyfeather; at the same instant Stacey jerked back his hand.
Mr. Pennyfeather, with a careful eye for any sign of movement from the centipede, took out the other pillbox from the basin. “Is this one of your old boxes, or something?” He let Miss Comfort’s eye linger on it for a silent minute. “It seems to have a sort of loose powder in it.”
“You think I took her away to poison her,” Miss Comfort said at last. “You’re wrong. You’re making a dreadful mistake.”
“Do you deny,” thundered Stacey, “that you chloroformed Mrs. Andler and Mrs. Blight?”
A struggle went on in Miss Comfort’s mind, a struggle reflected in eyes behind stubby and trembling lashes. At last she said: “No. I don’t deny chloroforming them. I did that.”
Stacey snapped the little box shut and put it into his pocket with an air of everything being finished.
“But I didn’t kill them. I don’t know anything about the murders,” Miss Comfort rushed on. “I learned to give people anesthetics when I did surgical nursing. It seemed like a good idea to put Mrs. Blight to sleep when I needed a chance to talk to Taffy.”
Mr. Pennyfeather’s mind raced back to the scrabbling and whispering in the night, the low-voiced conversation he hadn’t been able to understand.
“With Mrs. Andler—there were two reasons. One was that she was going to interfere with Taffy’s attempt to make up with Mr. Burrell. The second was that she was going to unmask me. She knew, you see, that I was Taffy’s aunt.”
“And it was you instead of Miss Hazzard whom she nodded to at the top of the stairs,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. I knew what that nod meant. She was willing to give me a chance to talk to her, to promise to get out of the picture and leave Mr. Burrell alone. When I did go in to talk, I took a pad soaked in chloroform with me.”
“And then put her neatly away into the window seat so that no one would find her until after Taffy’s accident on the stairs was over.”
Her eyes crept, begging and ashamed, to the fair glow of Taffy’s head. “I wanted to help. She’s my sister’s child.”
But Taffy was crying: “No, no! How dreadful to hint that the accident was all arranged! It wasn’t! I fell and got hurt. Tick knows I did!” She buried her face in Tick’s comforting khaki bosom.
Miss Comfort’s voice went stumbling on. “I was careful with Mrs. Andler. I didn’t wish her any harm, but just to be out of the way and not making any trouble for Taffy.”
“And not interfering with the guidance of that five million or so,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “By the way: how did you happen to know of Taffy’s plans, since you and she weren’t seeing each other?”
“I—I’ve kept friends with a maid in her hotel,” Miss Comfort admitted. “She overheard things.”
“And Miss Hazzard’s plan requiring a nurse must have seemed like a gift from heaven,” Mr. Pennyfeather said. “You would, though, no doubt have come up here on your own if Miss Hazzard hadn’t proved so co-operative.”
“You mustn’t think lies about what I did,” Miss Comfort flung out. “I didn’t kill Mrs. Andler. I put her neatly into bed, still asleep but safe. Someone came in afterward and did—did the other thing.”
Neither Stacey nor Mr. Pennyfeather moved. The heat pressed in like the advance of a fiery tide. Tick’s gaze above Taffy’s bent yellow head had the hardness of flint. Mrs. Jessop drew a deep breath.
Joe Jessop spoke. “You aren’t going to believe that, are you? She’s nuts. She’ll say anything to get out of—”
“Joe,” said Stacey almost kindly, “that remark of Miss Comfort’s was something we’ve been waiting to hear. Now we’ll pass around the pan.” He took the basin off the table and showed it in turn to Tick, to Taffy Whittemore, to Glee, to the Jessops, to Miss Comfort, and to Caroline Pond.
“These here objects,” Stacey went on, “aren’t what we told you they were. They aren’t clues we picked up. They’re stuff the murderer left up in the attic. This centipede was going to be used, I’ve got a hunch, to try to scare the daylights out of Mr. P. again. The pillbox has a fairly obvious story. It must have been an old one Miss Comfort had discarded. The wadded bandage, I guess, would have been left at the scene of Mrs. Andler’s murder if the murderer hadn’t seen the clever things Miss Comfort had already done.”
“I’m sorry that I planted a skein of your hair and your cigarette,” Miss Comfort jerked out, turning to Glee. “Sometimes people have no memory of things which happen just before they go under the anesthetic. I thought I might give Mrs. Andler the idea you had chloroformed her if I left those things where she’d find them when she woke.”
“Skip it,” said Glee, not looking up.
“Now there’s one object here,” Stacey continued, “which represents a pretty bad blunder on somebody’s part.” He had picked out the green button from Mr. Jessop’s sweater. He held it up, and the plastic surface gleamed in the light from the street. “I’m going to try to explain what this button means. It’s kind of simple, but it’s important.”
Taffy was drying her eyes on Tick’s handkerchief.
“The murderer got hold of this button on the night of Mrs. Andler’s murder. That’s the only time Joe had the sweater here and was—uh—incapacitated enough not to know what was happening.”
Jessop rubbed his temple with a shaking hand.
“Furthermore, I think the murderer got the button the same time he—or she, of course—ditched the hand ax in Jessop’s room. I can’t prove that, but it’s logical. Time was short, and a single trip to Joe’s room would be smarter than two or more trips.”
Caroline Pond moved restlessly, looked at her aunt, and frowned.
“You’ve got to keep in mind,” said Stacey, “that the whole house was by then pitch dark and had been for some time. Ever since, in fact, Mr. P. here had got away with the fuses.”
A tightness had crept into Tick’s jaw, into the protective hand holding one of Taffy’s own.
“We have—according to Miss Comfort’s story—Mrs. Andler lying in bed under the influence of chloroform. The murderer comes in, does what he—or she—wants to do, goes out in a hurry to ditch the ax in the nearest room. In Joe’s room. Well, murderers always look after themselves, especially the cute kind of critter this murderer has turned out to be. And the thought goes through this murderer’s mind: Just in case I need another clue to scatter around, I’ll take one off Joe’s sweater. And does it.”
The room had grown very silent except for the sound of Stacey’s talking. When the centipede made a leggy scrambling noise, Taffy jumped. She had been hanging on Stacey’s words with an uncommon interest. The heat had brought out a fine perspiration across her upper lip and on her temples.
“Only, folks, this here button business was a damned bad mistake. You must remember, don’t you, that only one person of all of you saw Joe Jessop in the light before the murder of Mrs. Andler?”
He watched, and they were silent, searching their memories for the identity of the murderer.
“The murderer had to know just what a funny colored sweater and what damned bright buttons they were. Don’t you see that?” His voice persuaded them. “Not in the dark. In the bright light in the hall.”
Miss Comfort began to sag in the queerest way: first at the shoulders, dropping forward slowly as though she were going to pray, and then at the knees like a rag doll with its sawdust leaking.
&
nbsp; Taffy screamed. “Catch her! She’s falling! Give her a tablet!” She leaped from Tick’s arms and snatched up the pillbox and jerked it open. Tick came up behind her and put hard hands on her elbows and hung on. She arched backward, biting and kicking. She called him names no young lady should know.
Mr. Pennyfeather caught the tablets. All but one. That one, in her struggles, Taffy Whittemore managed to get into her mouth.
When Tick put her back into the leather chair she looked like a big mannequin, perfect and waxy and expressionless and still.
And as dead as they come.
Mr. Pennyfeather looked up from the open suitcase on the bed to meet Stacey’s gaze. “Come in,” he said. “Hot, isn’t it?”
“Always hot,” said Stacey. “Look, how did you know—”
“Must we?” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Wasn’t it obvious that no one could have been so wishy-washy as Taffy Whittemore was and still have stayed so grimly to the same purpose? She wanted Tick, and she pursued him in the cleverest and grimmest way she could: by making it seem as though older, more mercenary females were guiding her efforts.”
“That’s what I thought, but not just in those words,” said Stacey. “Look, I got files to keep and things. How’s about giving me that first name of yours just for a favor?”
“Never,” said Mr. Pennyfeather flatly. “By the way, how’s Miss Comfort doing?”
“She’s still shivering,” Stacey said, “over how close she came to taking one of those headache pills on the bus.”
“Does she admit being in the cactus garden the night of Mrs. Andler’s murder?”
“Yes. She was down there watching the hotel. It must have been her who brought up the cactus thorn that caught on your overcoat.”
“It had to be. Taffy and Mrs. Blight were getting ready for Tick and the tumble downstairs.”
Stacey scratched his chin. “He had me fooled. I thought he was falling for Miss Whittemore. I wonder if he means what he’s doing now with Miss Hazzard?”
“Just what is he doing?”
“He’s kissing her right out in the lobby, and Carrie and the Jessops seem to be rooting for them.”
“I imagine that Tick means it, and I’m glad for Caroline. She’s going to have Freddy on her hands instead of on her conscience, and Mrs. Jessop won’t have to give up cooking. That,” decided Mr. Pennyfeather, “would really have been a crime.” He put two pair of socks into the suitcase and shut the lid.
Stacey was taking a list out of his pocket. “I’ve got a few names jotted down. Would you—well, would you give me three guesses?”
Mr. Pennyfeather hesitated for a half-second. Then: “Certainly. Three guesses. I’ll even tell you if you’re right.”
“Apollo?” Stacey boomed.
“No, no,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.
“Archimedes?”
“My father had no illusions that I’d have a gift for mathematics.”
Stacey swallowed. His finger crept down the line. “Atlas?”
“Not likely.” Mr. Pennyfeather showed a strange relief. “I was afraid for a moment that—Never mind.”
“Can I write you now and then,” asked Stacey humbly, “and have some more guesses?”
“Just one to a letter,” said Mr. Pennyfeather, setting the suitcase to the floor.
Stacey thrust the list back into his pocket.
“You might try digging up a motive for Mrs. Blight’s murder,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “I think that Mrs. Andler was killed to make sure that she wouldn’t keep Tick from his full inheritance when he and Taffy were married. That’s the line Tick was working on, incidentally, in pretending to have fallen again for the girl. He saw all at once how she had managed her so-called guardians instead of their managing her.”
“There were some scraps of paper in Mrs. Blight’s room, part of a note addressed to me. I haven’t got any doubt she was getting to realize the truth and Miss Whittemore had to get rid of her. Of course, that act with the pills would have come out perfect. Taffy Whittemore had a keen brain. She would have claimed that Miss Comfort was the murderer and had got the wrong pill by mistake—the one she intended for her niece. She’d have come back on the next bus wearing all that blue eyeshadow and gray powder, and I’ll bet even Mr. Burrell would have believed her.”
“I doubt it. I don’t think Tick was taken in for a moment. Of course, the thing that should have told me the truth in the beginning was that Mrs. Andler had come up here to spike Taffy’s game. Her little act with the cut wrist showed that. I doubt that she’d ever heard of Caroline.”
Stacey had absent-mindedly taken out his list again.
“No, you don’t,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.
“But I have a heck of a time writing letters,” Stacey complained.
“That’s what I’m banking on,” Mr. Pennyfeather told him, going downstairs.
Glee and Tick saw him off at the bus, which was full of soldiers and the smell of gasoline and heat.
The miles rolled away, and in the happiness of knowing Tick and Glee were together and in love, Mr. Pennyfeather fell gradually asleep. The hot wind out of the desert made a sound at his window like a hollow mouth blowing undistinguishable words; taking on as his sleep grew deeper the humble guessing quality of Stacey’s.
Apollo … Archimedes … Atlas …
Mr. Pennyfeather chuckled.
The wind went on whispering with its hollow breath.
Aeneas … Aphrodite …
“Silly,” he told the windy voice, “that would be a girl!” Adonis …
Mr. Pennyfeather choked and coughed and sat up awake. He was not noticed to sleep on that ride again. He looked out frequently at the waste of cactus and Joshua trees and sand, as if anxious for the journey to have an end.
And when he talked, it was not to give his name.
About the Author
Dolores Hitchens (1907–1973) was a highly prolific mystery author who wrote under multiple pseudonyms and in a range of styles. A large number of her books were published under the moniker D. B. Olsen, and a few under the pseudonyms Noel Burke and Dolan Birkley, but she is perhaps best remembered today for her later novel, Fool’s Gold, published under her own name, which was adapted into the film Bande á part directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1945 by Dolores Hitchens
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6697-6
This edition published in 2021 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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DOLORES HITCHENS
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