by Rufus King
He said to Estelle, “How is he?”
“Better, Ludwig. But you know.”
“Yes, I know. And good morning, Miss Ledrick.”
“Good morning, Mr. Appleby.”
His prominent dark eyes were lively with speculation. “Washburn tells me that Justin sent for you to come to him as well as for Estelle.”
“Yes.”
“You know, I find that very interesting.”
“I found it so too, Mr. Appleby. I am returning to New York this morning.”
“Are you?” Appleby waited until a crash of thunder had subsided. Then he said, “How?”
“That’s it, my dear,” Estelle said equably. “Of course if you insist we’ll arrange for a plane to take you at the earliest possible moment.” Her eyes turned vaguely toward rain-sheeted windows. “These storms are tiresome things, Ann. They last so long.”
CHAPTER VIII
There was nothing left to do but pack. Pack and wait until a zero ceiling lifted and would permit a plane to depart. The camera was still in the room with the ocelots, and Ann went and got it. The three cats were completely indifferent to her and remained absorbed in their pre-captivity dreams while the storm hurled down tons of water with endless monotony.
Ludwig met her in the hallway on her way back. He was standing before the elevator door, but Ann thought that the scene was arranged: a chance position on Ludwig’s part which he could hold indefinitely until he caught her on the return to her room. He bulked darkly in the storm-light gloom, and she experienced a sheer overpowering effect of bone and flesh. His smile was senseless with artificiality.
“Do let me,” he said.
He had (before a wit could help her) the camera and the flash-bulb case in his hand and was opening her living-room door and ushering her in with remarkable expedition. He came in too. He placed the camera and the flash bulbs on a table. He offered Ann a thin gold cigarette case half filled with fat-looking cigarettes.
“Will you?”
Automatically Ann took one and thought, while Ludwig lighted it: He’s turning it all on. All of the manner that he must have found (especially among dowagers) so thoroughly successful during these later years which, although hesitating on the plumpish, were still imbued with a hung-over virile force.
“Thank you, Mr. Appleby. And now, if you will excuse me, I intend to pack.”
Ludwig remained rootedly stolid.
“You remind me of an aunt of mine. Aunt Deborah.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. If she were starting on a journey on a Tuesday her packing would be done the week before. Her bags, in consequence, were always in a state of flux.”
“I assure you that mine won’t be.”
“Justin said something that disturbed you?”
“I scarcely think, Mr. Appleby—”
“No, you are quite right. It is no business of mine.” Ludwig’s eyes, Ann noticed, were no longer on her. Rather, they were darting about the room in what surely were purposeful glances: observing the walls, the furniture, even the rugs. Why? It reminded her of her favorite criminal literature in which, before whisking open the wall safe, the principal scamp would first case the joint.
“But,” Ludwig was saying, “I am curious. I am fond of Justin. Very fond. His attitude toward you, a stranger, has frankly made me apprehensive. I hint, of course, at hallucinations. Tell me, did he strike you as quite normal?”
Marlow hadn’t. Anything but. But Ann had no intention of following Ludwig’s lead into an open discussion of the manias.
“Perfectly.”
“I am delighted to hear you say it. Even though it does leave me still far up in the air as to why you are suddenly decamping with the ocelots as yet not immortalized. Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down, Miss Ledrick?”
“No, Mr. Appleby, I am not. I am going to pack.”
Ludwig must have finished with his casing, because his bold dark eyes were again exclusively about her.
“Very well,” he said. He gave her his best false smile. “I must be slipping. Perhaps I need a new technique.”
He left.
Ann did not at once start packing. She put through a call for Fanny Mistral instead. The lines were not affected by the storm and shortly, via Miss Dingley, Ann heard Fanny’s voice.
“What on earth was that background crash, Miss Ledrick?”
“Thunder,” Ann said. “And more thunder.”
“Of course. Those mountain storms. Grieg did them so much better. Why are you calling? Don’t tell me that the ocelots are cowering under beds.”
“No, I’m leaving.”
“Leaving?” Fanny screamed. “My dear child, you can’t. They wanted you for at least a week, and I am charging them for your priceless services at a daily sum which brings the roses even to my withered cheek. Spoil a thousand shots if you have to in your search for absolute and costly perfection, but for the love of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., do drag it out.”
“They never wanted any pictures in the first place, Miss Mistral.”
“Are you serious about this?”
“Perfectly. Mr. Marlow told me so this morning. He’s dying.”
“Dying?” Fanny screamed.
“Yes. He has just admitted that the pictures were only a device to get me up here.”
“But why? That sort of plot went out with bustles.”
“Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m getting out. Bill called me up last night and painted in the background.”
“Look here—nothing has happened, has it? Along the more lethal lines?”
“No, I just don’t like it.”
“No slithering screams?”
“Not a groan or a shriek, but there’ll be a few if I have to spend another night here, and they’ll be mine.”
“You’re perfectly right, Miss Ledrick. Marlow must have gone completely insane. By all means leave. Leave now.”
“I can’t until the weather clears.”
“Of course, the planes. Well, I wouldn’t worry. It isn’t a pleasant situation, but it’s absurd to think there could be anything dangerous. How is the cousin? Is she gibbering too?”
“No, she’s very nice. So is Mr. Marlow. I’m simply worried over having been brought up here by a trick.”
“Justifiably so. Is there anything I can do? Would it help if I were to talk with Estelle Marlow?”
“I don’t see how it would. She is perfectly agreeable to my leaving as soon as possible.”
“At least keep in touch with me. I’ll leave word with Dingley where you can reach me all day. Incidentally, what’s Marlow dying of, or don’t you know?”
“Pernicious anemia seems to be the base of it.”
“Seems—hmnn! Take care of yourself, Miss Ledrick.”
“I will. I’ll pack now and wait.”
“I’m sorry about this. Really sorry.”
“You didn’t know. I’m glad I called you.”
“I am too.”
“Good-by.”
“Good-by, and, for heaven’s sake, escape by pack horse if they start airing out the dungeons.”
For several hours Ann found herself left alone. With the packing done, there was nothing left for her to do but wander restlessly about the living room and let the storm get more strongly on her nerves.
There were books and magazines, but she found it difficult to concentrate enough for reading, and there was little pattern to her thoughts. Shortly before one o’clock there was a rap on the door.
“Come in!”
The young man was a stranger. He wore an acid-stained smock and carried several 8x10 prints in his hand.
He said, “Miss Ledrick, I am Harley Brown. I take care of the photography lab. Mr. Marlow sent over the film pack you took of the ocelots this morning and asked me to develop them. He sent word that he wanted a specially good job done, as he wanted to show you how greatly he appreciated your work. Well, I thought I was crazy, so I made enlargements and—Oh, tak
e a look, will you? Tell me if you see what I see?”
Brown put the prints on a table. The ocelots were stunning, but spread across the surface of each exposure, almost ephemeral in its faintness, was the silvery skeleton of the bones of a hand.
“Do you get it, Miss Ledrick?”
“Yes—like silver bones—”
“That’s what I thought. And it’s on all of them. Might be part of a hand. Those two could be fingers.”
“They are fingers.”
And Marlow, Ann remembered, had held the film pack in his hand, had kept it pressed against his chest.
“Mr. Marlow did take the pack in his hand,” she said, “but I don’t see what that could have to do with it. It might be a defect in the whole batch of film, of course.”
“I’ve never run into anything like it.”
“Neither have I. It’s uncanny.”
“I felt that way. I got sort of a chill. What do you think we ought to do? I don’t like to show them to the old gentleman. His heart isn’t any too good, and in the state he’s in today it might kill him. Seeing bones like that.”
“How do you get hold of Dr. Johnson?”
“You just telephone him. Why?”
“I want him to see these. It sounds impossible, but I think those bones are of Mr. Marlow’s hand. They’re like an X-ray shot. He might know the reason.”
Dr. Johnson, ten minutes later, was impressed.
“How long did Mr. Marlow hold the film pack in his hand, Miss Ledrick?”
“For at least several minutes while I was with him, Doctor. He was still holding it when I left the room.”
“Yes, I recall now that he also held it while I was with him. I started to take it away, but he said he wanted it because it belonged to you. Queer ideas people get in his condition.”
“When Washburn brought the pack to the lab,” Brown said, “he told me that Mr. Marlow himself had given it to him, so he’d probably been holding it in his hand until then.”
“What time was that?”
“About an hour ago, Doctor.”
“He held it possibly for three hours, then. Is the film especially sensitive, Miss Ledrick?”
“Very, Doctor. It’s about the fastest emulsion there is.”
Dr. Johnson shrugged helplessly and looked sick. Slowly the color left his face and it became gray.
“I couldn’t have known,” he said. “No man could have. I am faced with this, Miss Ledrick. I have been treating Mr. Marlow for neuritis and pernicious anemia. The symptoms are exactly the same as those for radium poisoning, when some form of the substance has been ingested. I mean, by that, eaten. As Mr. Marlow must have done. There is nothing on earth that can or could have been done to save him. To all purposes he is dead.” A look of childlike amazement came over his face. He said, “It’s murder.”
CHAPTER IX
Thunder rolled, jarring with repercussive tremors all objects in the room and filtrating through animate nerves already vibrant and on edge. Dr. Johnson slowly dropped the prints back on the table.
Ann watched him, drugged by being face to face with murder, with the thought being still unreal, so divorced was it from all of the things through the years of her life which she had known.
Harley Brown watched him, caught in a similar state of inanimation, while Dr. Johnson placed the prints side by side, face up. Dr. Johnson seemed to have not the slightest awareness whatever that he was doing so. His jowly face, which held suggestions of at some time, years ago, having been handsome, appeared stunned and frozen while his voice, when he spoke, held the measured cadence of groping thought rather than of speech.
“This thing must have been going on for months, possibly for a year, many years. There is no way of telling for how long. No earthly way of knowing when the radioactive substance was given to him. One ingestion would have been enough. It would never have to be repeated. One little speck, so small it could have been a sugar seed upon a cake.”
Dr. Johnson looked at them helplessly, as if beseeching them to join in his wonder at this enormity for which he was so unprepared and against which all of his knowledge of science, which ranked among the highest in the country, offered him no weapons for combat.
“Are you going to tell Mr. Marlow?” Brown asked.
“I don’t know. I do not know what to do. What we are faced with is a man who is murdered and yet who is not dead. There is this about life: I must prolong it. I must keep it fanned until it dies of itself. His heart is bad. To tell him of this would be for me to kill him, to snuff out that flame I have been nourishing with such trouble, with every resource that I know. You see that, don’t you? Both of you see it?”
“Yes,” Ann said. She threw away her irritation at dupery and thought again of Marlow as a kind old man. She was suffused once more with pity for him in view of this horrendous act which had been done against him, with its recognized fate for which there was no known reprieve. Such time as was left him with its peculiar burdens of physical and mental pain, why weight it down further and add the gall of murder to his already bitter cup? She said, “What does it matter?”
“You catch my point, Miss Ledrick. The thought of retribution. Possibly Mr. Marlow alone could let us know toward whom to look, could give us some definitive indication as to his murderer.”
His murderer, Ann thought, is one of two people: his cousin Estelle, who presumably would inherit Marlow’s great fortune, or Ludwig Appleby, whose motive would be enmeshed in the decades-old murder of Alice and the electrocution of the son.
Who else?
Dr. Johnson was regarding her curiously, and he said: “No, do not jump at the obvious, Miss Ledrick. I can sense that you are making people suspect and are delving for a motive. I suggest that both you and Mr. Brown disabuse your minds of restricting Black Tor as a haven for the murderer. The very nature of the crime makes the possibilities most broad.”
“In what way?” Ann asked.
“Because we do not know and may never know just when the radioactive substance was given Mr. Marlow. Months ago, surely. Perhaps years. I am thinking of the dark days following the death of his son. You know about those things?”
“Yes, Doctor. The common reports.”
“Then you know nothing, really. I lived through them. I think I may say without boasting that I made it possible for Mr. Marlow to live through them. Night and day it was a problem of keeping his mind from going to pieces. I shall never forget. And this deed could have been done even as far back as then. I remember many people came here, people whom Mr. Marlow wished to question and observe. There were members of Alice’s family, her mother, Elizabeth, and her father, Morton Charing. Even though mourning had started to be an anachronism, Elizabeth Charing seemed shrouded in black, a white dot of a face lost in crepe. That was all before Mr. Marlow’s great seclusion. Before we became this shut little world.”
Dr. Johnson thought for a while and then said: “There is the law. Man’s law and the one of my profession. I hope a compromise can be arranged. I will telephone the state police and make a report. I will tell them exactly how things are. So much we must do.” The decision seemed to please him, for he shook off his lethargy and said: “Mr. Brown, have you spoken of these prints to anyone other than Miss Ledrick or to me?”
“No, I brought them straight up here.”
“Was anyone helping you in the laboratory?”
“No, Doctor.”
“I would not care for people to know about them. It would not be wise. In spite of what I have just said to you, Miss Ledrick, we cannot blind ourselves to any possibility. If the one responsible for this evil business should be among us and should learn that his plot has been discovered—well, even that confuses me. Because what further mischief could he do, beyond speeding with some swifter means Mr. Marlow’s already certain end?”
“What will I do if Mr. Marlow asks to see the prints?” Brown said.
“Couldn’t you say that the films did not turn out?”
“Blame me,” Ann said. “Say that I saw them and wasn’t satisfied. Say I destroyed them during a fit of my alleged artistic temperament.”
“Good,” Dr. Johnson said. “Will you take care of them, Mr. Brown?”
“I will, Doctor. And the films.”
Brown picked up the prints and went toward the door, and Dr. Johnson followed, saying: “This is not pleasant for you, Miss Ledrick. It cannot be helped.”
“I know that, Doctor.”
They left her, and Ann sat down and smoked a cigarette. It failed to soothe her, and her nerves grew increasingly jumpy. The sullen weight of storm light had not abated, and the room’s lamps tempered but did not dispel the general gloom.
She considered calling up Fanny Mistral again and then thought not. To tell Fanny would be to tell the world, and tomorrow’s papers, if the storm permitted them to come through, would reek murder and revel in a celebrated corpse which still was living and had breath.
Estelle or Ludwig Appleby would then read the report and would not let Marlow speak. One or the other of them would see to that. Dear Justin (this was Estelle), let me cool your fevered brow. And dimpled fingers would press, slipping tenderly downward over cheekbones to the windpipe. Hello, Justin (this was Ludwig), feeling better? Then a solicitous approach to the bedside and, with hairy, thick-set fingers, the same result. Ann felt sick.
There was a knock, and Estelle came in and Ann felt sicker.
Estelle’s face was still rosy and applelike, and all of her soft plumpness radiated its aura of kind good will toward all men. So strong was this aura that Ann repudiated Estelle from the villains’ corner and settled on Ludwig Appleby. Surely Estelle must be rich enough not to want more money, with her chateaux and Paris flat and emeralds now so cannily home with her, thanks to the ocelots.
Whereas Ludwig presented a murderer cut in the grand style. The man was cast to type.
“Ann dear,” Estelle said, tentatively reaching out dimpled fingers and then withdrawing them, “do come down with me to lunch. I feel so stupid about this business of your having been brought up here for another reason than your photography. Really, dear, it’s not a modernized version of East Lynne. Justin will be able to see you this afternoon, and then you will understand perfectly. Accept the situation for a little while, no matter how melodramatically outrageous it may seem to you.” Estelle glanced toward the windows. “In any case, you’ll have to. And we’re having squabs crapaudine and babas with kirsch for dessert. Have you ever had squab that way?”
