by Jerry eBooks
She started out and Pete hurried after her. By the time I got to the house they were both upstairs, and he had broken an ammonia capsule under Mrs. Wilsons nose and was feeling her pulse and telling Pat everything was under control.
He came downstairs after the doctor arrived, and stood at a window looking out.
“Does that girl live with this old woman all the time?” he asked.
“She’s her mother. What else can she do?”
“It must be the hell of a life,” he said glumly. “She was engaged to Gardiner, wasn’t she?”
“I think she was. She never said so.”
“Anything to escape, eh?”
I had no time to speak. Pat herself came down, looking almost collapsed, and he put her on a sofa and offered to get Lulie for her. She only closed her eyes and nodded. I suppose he located Lulie—it was movie night on the island—and I heard him coming in very late.
We still had the south wind the next day. Mrs. Wilson was better, but I was nervous and irritable, and so was everybody else. They had stopped the search for Hugh’s body, and in a way it was a relief. After all, death was all around us anyhow. Every now and then some poor lad would crash his plane into the Gulf and never be seen again. And it was time for the mackerel and kingfish to come in. All the boats were out loaded with visitors and with boxes and barrels for the catch, but the only people who got anything were the guides, who were being paid. We saw very little of Pete, although he turned up each night for dinner. He had hired a bicycle, but I didn’t think he was using it for exercise, although he seemed to be all over the island.
Then, three days after his arrival, I decided to go out with Bill Smith to get a breeze, if nothing else, and that was when they found Hugh. I had just closed about four million pores when I saw Bill staring seaward with his sharp fisherman’s eyes.
“Something going on out at that channel marker,” he said. “Maybe we better run out and see.”
It was a good thing we did. The people in the boat were guests from the hotel, and one woman had already fainted. There was something behind them in the water, and the guide was holding it with a gaff. We left him there, and took the others back to the guide dock in our boat. Then I telephoned Tom.
“You’d better come down,” I said, “and bring Pete if you can. I think they’ve found Hugh.”
I passed the two of them in the local taxi as I went home, but they didn’t see me. And Tom had nothing to say when he came back, except that it was Hugh, all right, and that he was glad I hadn’t seen him. Pete didn’t turn up until the next morning, and then it was only to say grimly that Hugh had been shot in the head with a bullet from a rifle, and that they had the bullet.
“Not too hard a shot,” he said. “Anybody on the beach near the Pass could have done it. Bill says they weren’t far from the lighthouse when it happened.”
Well, there we were. With all the tropical stuff around our houses, the beach was practically cut off, and as I said at the beginning none of us really had an alibi, except Tom. What with the shooting in the air and the bombers and even the blimp that were constantly overhead, the noise would never have been noticed. And the next day Fanny came in, looking like death and on the edge of hysteria.
Pete had taken Roy’s rifle away.
She sat down as though her legs wouldn’t hold her, and stared at me out of red-rimmed eyes.
“Maybe he did do it,” she said. “I’ve tried not to believe it, but I lied to you before. That rifle wasn’t in his golf bag. I looked. It wasn’t there until the next morning.” She tried to light a cigarette with shaking hands. “If you tell that, I’ll deny it, but it’s the truth.”
“He couldn’t have seen well enough to shoot anybody,” I said. “His eyes are bad. I just don’t believe it, Fanny.”
But she only got up and put down her cigarette. “It had a telescopic sight,” she said drearily, “and I’d like to bet Mary Pearl was out of the house the minute I left it that day.”
She went back to the house, leaving me pretty thoughtful. It might be, I considered. Maybe that was what our colored servants knew, that Mary Pearl had been out, and that Roy’s rifle had been missing that evening when Fanny looked for it. That wasn’t all they knew, of course, but I didn’t realize it then.
I didn’t even realize it that same night when the Wilson garage was burned.
It was a terrific excitement. The fire siren got us all out of bed, and Pete was on his way before I was fully awake. The garage was dry and it burned with a tremendous noise and with sparks that flew all over the neighborhood. It was in full blast when I got there. The fire engine was useless, and for a while I thought the house would go, too. Even the palms were burning. Pete had carried Mrs. Wilson out and put her in a chair on the lawn, and Pat was standing beside her looking worried and bewildered.
“It’s the car,” she told Pete. “There was no time to get it out. Even if there had been, there was no gas in it.”
She was pretty well shocked, and Pete wanted to get her a drink. She shook her head, however.
“It’s queer,” she said. “We haven’t used the garage this year. I didn’t even keep my bicycle there. What in the world set it on fire?”
Just then the roof crashed in, and the whole structure fell. I can still remember Pete’s face as he stared at the ruins.
“Is there a cellar under it?” he asked.
“No. Why?”
“Because there’s no car there,” he said. “Not even the skeleton of one.”
Well, anyone could see that. The onlookers seemed to realize it, too. They were muttering. As for Mrs. Wilson, she was not too feeble to be furious.
“Somebody took it out and wrecked it,” she said shrilly. “That’s why they burned the garage. To cover it up.”
Nobody argued with her, even when she accused Pat of having done it herself. When it was all over, Pete and Tom carried her up to her bed, and we went home. Tom fixed some highballs and we sat around, but Pete seemed thoughtful. He spoke only once, and that was to say that Pat was an unusual sort of girl.
“Found her trying to carry the old lady downstairs herself,” he said. “Me, I’d have let her burn!”
But before he went to bed he said something else.
“If I knew why and how that car got away I’d know the hell of a lot of things,” was what he said.
It was still hotter than blazes the next morning. Pete stayed around the house. He seemed to be waiting for something, and it turned out finally to be a telephone call from the mainland. The next thing I knew he and Roy Raeburn were on their way to the dock. I felt a little sick, but if Tom knew anything he wasn’t talking.
“Does that mean the bullet came from Roy’s gun?” I asked anxiously.
“How do I know?” he said stiffly. “This is the hell of a vacation anyhow. Look at that thermometer!”
I didn’t look at the thermometer. I didn’t need to. And I tried to see Fanny that morning, but Mary Pearl said she was shut in her room with the door locked. She looked excited, as all our servants do when anything happens to any of us, but she looked secretive, too. And when I went to the Wilsons’ their Lulie looked the same. I lost patience finally.
“See here, Lulie,” I said, “if you know anything about Mr. Gardiners death you’d better talk, and talk soon. They put people in jail for suppressing evidence.”
“I don’t know nothing,” she said sullenly. “Me, I mind my business and let other people mind theirs.”
Which was, I thought, a not too delicate hint.
Pat looked rather better that day, although she was still bewildered about the fire. I wondered if she had really been in love with Hugh, after all, or if Pete wasn’t right and he had been an escape from the life she had been living, dragged around after her mother for years, and without much prospect of anything else. But there was a difference in her. She looked worried.
“I never thought of Roy,” she said. “He doesn’t seem the sort, does he? I suppose—well, H
ugh must have treated Fanny pretty badly, for this to happen.”
“She thinks he did,” I said, rather dryly.
That was as far as we got, for at that minute one of the clerks from the general store drove up in a car and we stared at him in astonishment. For the car he brought was the Wilsons,’ and he was grinning cheerfully as he got out.
“Found it up the island,” he said. “Went up for some pinfish, and there it was, on a back road. Looks all right, too.”
He eyed us both with interest. The village likes the winter visitors, but it is always curious about them.
“Not very far from the railroad trestle,” he said. “Looks like somebody stole it and then set fire to your garage. Unless you left it there yourself,” he added.
“I haven’t used it this winter,” Pat said, bewildered. “There wasn’t even any gas in the tank.”
“Well, there’s some there now,” he said. “Came back under its own steam.”
So there was a new mystery. Not that it seemed very important at the time, although, of course, it was. The heat still obsessed us. The mosquitoes had come out of the mangrove swamps and hung around in clouds. The hotel porch was crowded with irritated fishermen who watched the flag on its pole still defiantly pointing north when it pointed at all. Tom was, I presumed, playing golf and using language unbefitting a gentleman. Fanny was still incommunicado. And late in the afternoon Mrs. Wilson had another heart attack, and the doctor got a nurse from the mainland to look after her.
I was in the patio when Tom came home. He drove up in the village taxi, and he looked as if he wanted to bite me when he saw me. He got his clubs out of the car and then lifted out what was obviously a heavy suitcase.
“What’s that?” I inquired. “And what’s in it? Bricks?”
“It belongs to Pete.”
“Good heavens! Is he planning to stay forever?”
He didn’t answer that. He carried the thing in carefully and took it upstairs, leaving me to get his golf clubs, and when I went up later to shower and cool off the door into Pete’s room was not only closed. It was locked. I marched straight into Tom’s room, where he was trying to pull a fresh shirt over his sticky body, and demanded to know what was going on. But the light of my life merely glared at me.
“You keep out of this,” he growled. “And let that room alone.”
“I’m no snooper,” I said tartly. “I merely wondered. If that things full of explosives, I’d feel better if it was in a bathtub full of water.”
“Explosives!” He laughed—he has a very nice laugh—and rather unexpectedly came over and kissed me. “Well, you can call it that, my wilted darling. Take a shower and forget it.”
Pete came home after dinner. Roy was not with him, and he looked tired and worried. I wasn’t surprised when he went to see Pat as soon as he had bathed and shaved, but he seemed depressed when he returned, although he said Mrs. Wilson was better. He was puzzled, too, about the car incident.
“It doesn’t fit,” he said morosely. “Nothing fits. Why the fire? Why steal the car and then leave it? Unless—”
He didn’t finish that. He went up to bed, but hours later I heard him going out again, and I was not entirely surprised the next morning to see his door open and the suitcase gone from his room. He himself was at the breakfast table when I went downstairs, and he was looking as pleasant and innocent as though he had spent the night in gentle slumber. It was Mother who added to my bewilderment.
“Did you see Lindy?” she asked him.
“I saw her. Yes.”
“Did she talk?”
“No. It’s what she wouldn’t say that matters.”
Well, Lindy is our colored laundress, and all at once I was filled with fury.
“What goes on?” I inquired. “Is this a guessing game, and am I supposed to guess? Or am I merely a stupid fool, too dumb to be told anything?”
Mother opened her mouth to speak, but Pete gave her a warning look.
“I merely wanted to ask Lindy a question,” he said mildly. She wouldn’t answer it, so that’s that.”
“And I suppose you took your washing to her in that suitcase, I said. “You should have emptied the bricks out of it. Lindy’s particular about washing bricks.”
Mother looked startled.
“What washing?” she inquired. “And what about bricks?” But the grapefruit came just then, and there was no more chance to talk.
The day passed somehow. Mother went to the club for bridge in the afternoon. The fighters were still shooting overhead, and the dirigible passed low over the treetops. Far out in the Gulf a few bombers were dropping practice bombs. They would peel off from the formation, dive, level off, and leave behind them what looked like small geysers in the sea. And Pete spent the afternoon simply loafing, if you can call it loafing when a man sits still for a minute and then jumps up and looks at his watch.
At five o’clock he got his bicycle and went to get some cigarettes, although the house was full of them, and at six he was back, looking as if he had lost all hope of heaven and pretending that the parcel he carried was tobacco. He went upstairs to where Tom had been taking a shower, and through the open window I heard him talking.
“What the hell am I to do?” he said. “There it is! Absolutely foolproof. Look at it.”
Tom apparently looked. I couldn’t hear what he said, but Pete was excited. I could hear him well enough.
“Look how it shoots up here. And here,” he said. “You get it don’t you? Only I wish to God I knew the exact time. When did that bridge game start? And how long was Bill Smith in the Pass searching for the body? It didn’t take long, of course.”
That was all I heard, for evidently my suspicious lord and master had noticed the open window. He slammed it shut, and left my particular world to chaos and to me.
Pat’s mother died that night. She was already gone when Lulie ran over just after dinner, and we all went to the Wilson house. Pat was in the lower hall when we arrived. She looked dazed, but calm.
“She didn’t suffer,” she said. “She merely turned over in bed and—went. Perhaps it’s better. She hated being helpless.”
I said all the proper things, but I don’t think she heard me. She said her mother had been all right that day, but that she was tired after the doctor left that afternoon. He had taken an electrocardiogram, and it had exhausted her.
She didn’t really break until Tom and Pete came in. Then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, she went to Pete, and he put his arms around her and held her. That was when I wandered into the living-room and saw Pete’s suitcase. As I’ve said, I’m no snooper, but it wasn’t locked, and what was inside it was not laundry.
Some time later Tom and I left them together and walked home. Tom was having one of his taciturn fits, but I didn’t intend to be put off any longer.
“I suppose it’s the best way out, isn’t it?” I said casually. “It solves Pete’s problem anyhow.”
“What problem?”
“Pat. He’s crazy about her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tom said, in his best War Administration manner.
“And the Negroes knew it all along, didn’t they? That’s why they burned the garage. To prove it.”
“To prove what?”
“See here,” I said, “I’m not deaf or dumb or blind. That electrocardiogram machine was a lie detector, wasn’t it? The doctor put it on her and then asked the questions Pete gave him. That’s right, isn’t it? And the Negroes knew Mrs. Wilson could get around when she wanted to. That broken hip was healed long ago. Only they were afraid to talk, so I suppose they burned the garage to scare her into running out of the house and giving herself away. That’s why they saved Pat’s car.”
“You’re guessing, darling,” Tom said, with masculine superiority. “You haven’t an ounce of proof.”
“Haven’t I? What about Roy’s gun?”
He stopped and looked down at me.
&
nbsp; “What about Roy’s gun?”
“She knew he had it. She sent Lulie off, and she fixed it so that Mary Pearl went with her. Then she went to Roy’s house and shot Hugh from the porch. Only she didn’t have time to put the gun back. She put it behind some books in the library.”
Tom looked dazed.
“How on earth do you know all that?”
“Because I saw Roy find it that night. He thought at first that Fanny had done it, so he took the gun to the basement and cleaned it. Later on, I suppose, he suspected the truth. He probably knew Mrs. Wilson could walk. He knew a lot of things besides shells.”
Tom stood gazing down at me. Maybe there was love and admiration in his eyes or maybe he was just a male, irritated that a female had put something over on him. I’ll never know.
“I suppose,” he said, still trying to be superior, “you know why she did it. Or has that escaped you?”
“Maybe it was this south wind,” I said. “And, of course, she didn’t like him. But anyhow she didn’t want Pat to marry anybody. That’s why she played helpless. She wanted Pat to stay with her. And, of course, there’s the money, too.”
“What money?”
“Pat gets half of it when she marries. Hugh knew it, of course.” That, I think, was when he gave up.
“Then, Pete—”
“Certainly. Pete, the old college chum! Pete with a red carnation in his buttonhole so you would know him! Pete will marry money, my beloved. Only he doesn’t know it.”
It was dark, but I think he had the grace to blush.
“Colonel Peter Randolph of the Military Intelligence, my dear,” he said. “Gardiner knew a lot of stuff. When it looked as though he had been murdered, they sent Pete here. That’s all.”
“And who suggested that?” I asked sweetly.
He didn’t answer. He stuck a finger in his mouth to wet it and held it up in the air.
“By God,” he said, “I believe the wind is changing.”
DEATH OF AN AGENT
Harold Stover
