Cass’s breath caught in a sob, but her eyes were unwavering. “Aunt Chloe, you mustn’t ask that.”
“Yes. I must.”
“It’s the Beyond-Truth,” Cass whispered. “About—about marrying.”
“What do you mean, my dear? Not that she wanted to marry, and was afraid to?”
“No. No, don’t you see? It forbids world marriage, doesn’t it? And neither of us ever met a man who’d agree to that, so when a—a courtship began to look serious it meant—oh, Aunt Chloe, that poisoning, Ryn’s illness during the summer—that was when Hugh was still after me, and I couldn’t make up my mind—and then David began—”
“Cass, you must speak more plainly. Are you telling me that your sister was jealous of you and tried to kill herself then?”
“Not—not quite. She meant it to look as if I had been poisoning her; and then—if I accepted David—I’d die, and it would look as if I’d been caught in my own trap, and no one would ever suspect her.”
The grizzled brows drew together. “This—in order that she might have David Shere herself?”
Georgine had begun to inch unobtrusively toward the door. They were both absorbed, she thought. She could get out and yell from the bathroom window—
“Stay where you are, Mrs. McKinnon,” said Chloe Majendie, with a slight gesture of the hand holding the gun. Georgine stopped as if she had actually been shot at.
“She didn’t want him. Oh, no, Aunt Chloe. She was sure that neither of us should ever make a world marriage, she wanted us to keep on being together always; but if I—showed signs of breaking away, it was better for me to die.”
“My dear Cass, don’t tell me that Ryn was still living up to everything that the—original rules of the Beyond-Truth taught or forbade.”
Cass nodded vehemently. She had not once taken her heavy eyes from her aunt’s, but now it seemed as if they were not focused. “Yes, everything, the fasts and the forbidden foods, and the marriage laws.”
Georgine drew a quick breath and was on the verge of speaking, but the old lady broke in. “But it forbids the taking of human life!”
“Not if it could be construed as the Hand of God. It would be, if it even looked as if she were innocent. And then, how else could she get the money?”
“What money?” The beautiful old voice was harsher now than Georgine had ever heard it.
“My share of the estate. We’d already had Bell’s, of course, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Enough for what, my dear child?”
“Why, to live the way you do, to have everything you have,” said Cass simply.
Mrs. Majendie let go of her shoulder and stepped back a pace. Her weather-beaten face seemed all at once to develop new lines, as if the flesh beneath it had fallen away, and her eyelids drooped. “God forgive me,” she said in a very low tone. “So Joan had to die—I should have listened to her when she told me that one of you was going the wrong way. And you tell me now that Ryn is dying because her plans failed?”
“Yes, Aunt Chloe,” Cass said. “You wouldn’t try to stop her from that, would you?”
Chloe Majendie opened her eyes full, and bent their piercing gaze on her niece. “No, not for a moment,” she said ringingly, “if I were sure that she was the one whose plans failed. Cass, do you realize that everything you’ve told me about her motive might apply to you?”
Cass fell back a step, a hand over her mouth, her gray eyes glinting wildly. “Me? No!” she said explosively from behind the hand. “You can’t think that!”
“I’m not sure of it. How can I be? But I must be sure, before any more time is lost.” The old lady’s head bent a little. “Your story sounds like the truth. God help me, I can believe it. But—”
“Mrs. Majendie,” said Georgine urgently, “it’s the Beyond-Truth! It’s the kind of truth that they tell at the Colony, that isn’t quite a lie, but is twisted to suit them—the kind Miss Godfrey used to tell when she got that queer shine in her eyes. Haven’t you watched Cass’s eyes?”
“You’re not against me too?” Cass cried out. “No, Georgine, not after your husband nearly got caught in that last trap she set!”
“The fire? She couldn’t have meant that for you, you were already gone!”
“And so was she! It was meant to look like a gadget that was supposed to kill her, only she would have escaped. It was something I could have set before I went away—only I didn’t set it.”
Georgine opened her mouth and shut it again. It could have been that way; she had thought of it as something Ryn did—but to catch Todd, not to go off when the house was empty.
“You see?” Cass had detected the return of her doubt. She came across the space between them, catching at Georgine’s hands. “And when you asked her about it, didn’t she look terribly frightened, and refuse to say anything, as if she were shielding me?”
“Yes,” said Georgine slowly, “she did. And I’ll admit it made me think afterward that she was—suspecting you, but not able to put it into words. She loves you.”
“We love each other, why, we’re sisters. But there was one thing more important, and that was the Beyond-Truth… I don’t know if she could have—just stood up to me and shot me, if she’d found that gun. I don’t think so. But if it could happen quietly—”
Cass paused, and a new sort of terror came into her eyes, as if a black shape had appeared in a room that was not yet totally dark. “Oh, my God. I hadn’t thought of it before. It— this suicide of hers—you’re thinking about it, you and Aunt Chloe, just what she wanted you to: that it’s my doing! Why didn’t I see that? She is killing me, she’s taking me down with her. How am I ever going to—”
She stopped; her head turned sharply, and so did Mrs. Majendie’s, as a voice sounded from below. It was Todd’s.
“Everything under control?” he called cheerfully.
“No!” Georgine shrieked. They wouldn’t dare shoot her with Todd coming up the stairs. “Get the ambulance, Ryn’s dying of an overdose of seconal, the telephone’s broken—”
Todd’s footsteps had paused only for a moment, midway up the staircase, and then continued upward. “Don’t come up, you lunkhead!” she cried out despairingly. “Do something!”
In the next second Todd appeared in the doorway. He looked at Cass, who was still clutching Georgine, and at Georgine who was vainly trying to break away. Lastly, he turned and gazed gravely at Mrs. Majendie and his own pistol.
“So you didn’t notify the police, as I asked you?” he inquired of her interestedly.
“Indeed I did not, Mr. McKinnon. This is going to be settled within the family before anything is done,” said the old lady levelly.
“Thank you for including us in your family. And I suppose you’ll shoot me if I don’t do what you say?”
“I will shoot your wife, Mr. McKinnon; not fatally, but painfully.”
“Damned if I don’t believe you would,” said Todd, grinning at her. “There sits Nelsing’s man outside, told to close in if anyone tries to escape; and nothing’s happened but two or three innocent persons walking in and never coming out. Reminds me of that story, you know; The Three Big Sillies, all lined up in the cellar, doing nothing but talk things over and cry until the sensible man came down to see what gave. How about my calling the sensible man?”
“No,” said Mrs. Majendie.
“Todd McKinnon,” said Georgine furiously, “didn’t you hear what I shouted at you? Why did you have to walk in here too?”
“It’s our house,” said Todd mildly. “I thought I’d see what was going on in it.”
“But we don’t know whether Ryn killed herself or Cass did it for her! —You let me go, Cass Johnson, I haven’t made up my mind and I don’t believe your aunt has either. —Do you know, Todd?”
“Kind of a toss-up, isn’t it?” Todd said. He surveyed the three women with a faint smile. “Do you mind letting me hear the story?”
Georgine was almost beside herself. “Don’t ask that! I
keep telling you Ryn’s dying in the next room, and you want to talk some more!”
Todd said, “She took all the capsules, did she, Cass?” Cass nodded, her eyes hopefully on his face. “Where’d she get them?”
“Why, from that box on her bedside table. We came up here together, and I saw her slip it into her coat pocket.”
“That’s all right, then,” said Todd in his most casual voice. “She’s getting a good rest, and she ought to wake up feeling wonderful. Only two of those capsules had seconal in ’em, and the others are my vitamin prescription. I changed them last night.”
“You didn’t,” Cass moaned. She sat down limply on the bed. The gray eyes seemed to hold no terror now, only despairing grief. “Oh, you couldn’t have been so cruel—to let her think she’d found the way out, and have it all for nothing!”
“Seemed best at the time,” Todd observed. “And was it all for nothing? She confessed to you, I suppose, Cass?”
“Yes.”
“But she mustn’t be made to answer for it?”
“I thought it was all over for her. You—Todd, you have that look—if I were guilty, I suppose you’d expect me to be in a panic when you told me that? You’re testing me, isn’t that it? Because I don’t believe you did change them!”
“Yes, he did,” said Georgine. “I saw the others in the bathroom cab—” She caught her breath as Todd cut in on her deliberately and loudly. “If I can test anyone, I will,” he said. “There’s plenty of time for Ryn to be questioned again. Oddly enough, what interests me is a li’le plan that someone dreamed up to compromise my wife. Did Ryn tell you about that?”
Cass nodded slowly. “She told me everything. She was afraid that Joan Godfrey really had put Georgine on the right track, and she had to be sure that nobody would believe the story.”
“That was done,” said Todd, “by someone who combined the discrediting of Georgine’s word with—something else. That person has a pathological hatred of sex,” his words clanged out with a savagely sardonic quotation, “of ‘marriage in the world sense’—Something that Georgine, I’m glad to say, advocates.”
Cass’s unmoving gaze took on a tinge of bewilderment. “You—you aren’t talking about that afternoon when David and I—but I told that to Ryn! I knew she liked Georgine, I thought—like a fool—that it might carry some weight with her! I’m sorry, I never thought that she might take it out on you, Georgine. Todd’s right about one thing—” her voice grew husky—“that it was pathological. She was insane, you see. She thought everyone else was, that’s a sure sign. She actually— went to Hugh Hartlein and told him that I was crazy, trying to kill her, and that neither of us could ever marry because there was insanity in the family. And so—he—you know what he did. He couldn’t bear to live any more.” She caught her breath on a sort of sob. “But you can’t think of Ryn as a murderer! She was just—she was swallowed up by the Beyond-Truth.”
A faint sound came from Mrs. Majendie, who had been standing silent and motionless, her tired eyes moving from one face to another. “I told myself it never did any harm,” she said, very softly. Her face still hung in those deep furrows. She looked like an old proud Indian chief who sees the last of his tribe gone.
For a moment there was silence. For the first time since she had entered this small room, Georgine felt the quiet of the house: a deeper, more sinister quiet than if there had actually been death in the next room. The doubts came back, beating at her in strong waves. Supposing everything Cass had said were true? Todd had interfered with a suicide, and instead had let a murderer live to be tried, to drag her sister and her aunt through utter horror; to take the foundation of belief from a score of happy old people who had accepted it sanely and lived by its harmless-seeming principles.
“Todd,” said Cass Johnson, with a beseeching gesture, “I can think of just one thing to do. Let me—let me get the real tablets and put them by Ryn where she is now. When she wakes up she’ll know what’s happened.”
Todd’s face was impassive and wood-hard. He looked at Mrs. Majendie. “Have I the right to pass judgment of that kind?”
“Perhaps you haven’t,” said old Chloe, “but I’m inclined to force it on you. Have you the right to do anything else? Can you go through the rest of your life, Mr. McKinnon, thinking that you denied a penitent the right to choose her own punishment?”
His face did not change. He said, “Georgine, you should have a voice in this.”
Georgine waited. Again the silence came flooding at her; she remembered the still figure in the sunlit next room, and the range of expressions that she had seen for days past on that beautiful pale face. There was that look as if of one in mysterious pain…
“You’re not sure?” she said faintly.
“How can any of us be sure?” Todd asked.
There was something struggling to be remembered, some detail about the rules of the Beyond-Truth. If the criminal had built everything on an obsession with the cult—
“Todd,” she said suddenly, “the day the girls were here to lunch, I gave them shrimps. Cass said she wasn’t hungry, but Ryn ate two helps. Isn’t that against all the rules?”
“What?” Cass exclaimed. “Ryn did that?” She looked almost more horrified than at the thought of her sister’s being a murderer. “She can’t have known what they were!”
“They were whole. You can’t disguise a whole shrimp.”
“Or,” said Mrs. Majendie wearily, “she may have realized that those minor rules were window-dressing. My husband was allergic to sea-food.”
Georgine felt a wave of hysteria coming over her. “We’re standing here like judges, saying whether someone shall live or die, and the talk keeps going off—Todd, did you really take away those capsules?”
“Maybe I didn’t,” he said. There was a curious expression in his eyes. “Maybe my instinct was right, that she was guilty and that—I’d let the law have its chance, and watch to see if it took advantage of that, and if not—” He drew an audible breath and shook his head sharply. “And yet, it shouldn’t be in our hands, in any private person’s hands. Joan Godfrey was struck down, perhaps in panic, but her death was ensured in the most cold-blooded way.”
Cass shuddered once, strongly.
“You knew she was dead, Cass? Didn’t you realize that you should have spoken then?”
“I wouldn’t turn my sister in for a dozen Joan Godfreys,” Cass said in a thick voice. “All I could do was to get away, to make sure I wouldn’t be next. And even then Ryn was trying to put it on me! I knew I’d be suspected—there was that evidence, it would point directly to me—”
“You saw it,” said Todd in a level voice, “when you discovered that Joan was dead in the greenhouse?”
“Yes. I couldn’t see Joan through the peep-hole, but I could see the boardwalk, and the heel-tip of a shoe caught between the boards. I didn’t dare go in to get it. The gas was still strong.” She closed her eyes for a second. “There was a pair of my shoes gone from the closet, she said she was taking them to be repaired for me. I knew she’d pried off a heel-tip and kept it, they’d be sure to find out that it was from my shoe.”
“Did she tell you that in her confession?” Todd said in a pained voice. “She might have spared herself that.”
“Yes. She told me everything.”
“Then,” said Todd in a suddenly metallic voice, “she lied, or you are lying on the basis of having read my story outline. Except in my own imagination, there never was any heel-tip in the greenhouse!”
Cass’s eyes flew open, wide and glittering. For half a second he was impaled on a gaze of murderous hatred; then she launched herself like a swimmer starting a race, straight across the room to the door, and in the same split second Chloe Majendie reached out an arm and jerked Todd aside. He fell sprawling at her feet, and the door slammed, and there was the click of a key turning.
The old lady stepped swiftly away and set her back against the door. “Now,” she said, “not a sound from
either of you, or I will shoot. You’re going to give her a chance.”
“A chance to kill her sister, really, and then escape?” Georgine gasped.
“She will not go near her sister again. Listen!”
Todd, picking himself up slowly, remained poised on one elbow, and Georgine held her breath. The room was full of soft light reflected from the hillside across the street, and the three figures were caught in it as if in a dim photograph, static, spellbound. Through the closed windows came faintly the sound of a car humming down the hill, and of someone whistling, very far off.
“You saw which way she turned, Mrs. McKinnon?” whispered Chloe Majendie. “Toward your bathroom.”
Water was running at that end of the hall. It was shut off, and there was the rattling clink of a glass set down hastily, just anywhere. Then there were footsteps in the hall; they came slowly past the door of Barby’s room, and its occupants lifted their heads a little, simultaneously. The steps did not continue down the hall to the big bedroom. They went down the stairs to the first floor, deliberately, step by step. At the bottom they died away.
“She has taken the sleeping powders herself,” said Mrs. Majendie. “She must have her chance. An hour should be enough; we will stay here.”
Todd got up without haste. He looked at the gun held steadily in the big hand; he glanced at the closed window as if calculating how far into the street his voice could be heard. His eyes met Georgine’s.
He glanced again at Mrs. Majendie. “You are taking the decision out of our hands?”
“I am taking it out of your hands.”
“Then,” said Todd, “we may as well sit down. An hour is a long time to be on your feet.”
The three of them sat down. There was a long pause.
It was absurd, it was embarrassing. Todd gazed at the foot of Barby’s bed and the old lady looked straight ahead at nothing, while with infinite slowness the light changed in the still room. The silence had a curious quality. It was chilling, with the soft cold of snow-laden air, heavy and motionless. Once or twice Georgine tried to say something, anything, but her mouth was too dry.
The Smiling Tiger Page 22
