Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22

by John Dickson Carr

  "Sir," demanded Dr. Fell, "may I ask just what is worrying you so much? The situation confronting you has confronted every father since time began. If it is only a question of finding a suitable husband . . ."

  "Oh, suitable!" the other said with some bitterness. "Both young men are suitable enough. For my own reasons I should prefer Yancey. He has certain natural advantages denied the other. But I should give my blessing to Rip too; I am no snob. Rip worked his way through my own college and through law school. He is with the best legal firm in Hartford and has a brilliant future. If sometimes he seems a little too aggressive for quiet tastes, shall I hold this against a young man making his way in the world?

  "What happens next, I ask myself? Where are we going? Where will it end? It is enough to ... it is enough to ..."

  "No!" roared Dr. Fell. "It is NOT enough to haunt and hag-ride you as so obviously it does. What else is there? Out with it, man! Have you brought me a thousand miles merely to act as marriage counsellor? And is it the young lady or the father who can't decide?"

  Henry Maynard, who had been pacing beside the writing-table, stopped short.

  "With your permission, Dr. Fell, I will now address myself to Mr. Grantham. You don't mind, young man?"

  "No, of course I don't mind. What is it?"

  "Forgive me," said their host, "if I seem abominably ill-mannered. Forgive me also if I sound like prosecuting counsel at a trial. Mr. Grantham, where were you on the night of Sunday, May 2nd?"

  Alan stared at him.

  "Sunday, May 2nd," repeated the other, "just twelve days ago. About ten o'clock at night, say. Where were you then?"

  "I'm trying to remember, that's all!"

  "Were you by any chance in the grounds of this house?" Henry Maynard pointed. "Under some magnolia trees by the front gate? Embracing my daughter there?"

  "Good God, no!" said the flabbergasted Alan. "And I've just remembered where I was."

  "Yes?"

  "In Pearis, two hundred miles away. At ten o'clock I had just finished having dinner with Dr. Leffingwell, the President of King's College, his wife, and three members of the faculty."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "If I had to prove it in court, Mr. District Attorney. I could bring at least five witnesses. I wasn't embracing Madge or anybody else. What makes you think I was?"

  "I don't think you were. It was an unworthy suggestion, and again I apologize. But it did strike me that once upon a time you seemed rather interested in Madge. For want of another candidate, I wondered."

  Candidate? Candidate? Now just how, Alan was thinking, is anybody supposed to answer a remark like that?

  ('I could say,' he continued to himself, 'just possibly Madge might have had another conquest if I hadn't seen Camilla and gone head over ears down the drain. But I can't very well tell the old boy that; and, anyway, what the hell is this all about?')

  He was spared the necessity for answering anything.

  "There is another difficulty," said Henry Maynard, taking out a key-ring and twirling it round his finger. "I had thought no harm would be done if I told both of you everything. There would still be no harm in this. The trouble is that I can't do it; literally, physically I can't do it! Will you think me over-squeamish, Mr. Grantham, if I ask you to leave us while I tell the rest of the story to Dr. Fell? Would you mind very much?"

  "I'd not mind at all, Mr. Maynard. Excuse me."

  "One moment!" The key ring stopped twirling. "Whatever I may think of your judgment, Mr. Grantham, I have the highest respect for your discretion. You won't pass on to Madge any words that have been spoken here?"

  "I won't tell Madge or anyone else," said Alan. "Now excuse me."

  And he marched out simmering.

  Alan didn't particularly mind being exiled from the conference; he had half expected it. But nothing was more unlikely than that he should go to Madge and say, "Look here, little one: your father thought I might have been making passes at you (or more than passes) under the good old Southern magnolias. Who did make passes, Madge?"

  No, nothing was more unlikely. Had Papa Maynard really imagined he would tell Madge?

  And so Alan simmered, his thoughts back with Camilla again. He was descending the enclosed stairs, where light struggled through a little staircase window, when he almost bumped into somebody on the way up.

  The newcomer, a shortish, thick-set, handsome young man of about thirty, wore a conservative charcoal-gray suit and carried a black medical bag in his left hand.

  "Afternoon!" he said in a pleasant voice. "You're Alan Grantham, aren't you? I'm Mark Sheldon."

  They shook hands. Rather ruefully Dr. Sheldon held up the black bag.

  "Dunno why I took this out of the car; I'm not here professionally, Force of habit, I guess; it is my afternoon round. Do you think I might intrude on the paterfamilias and tell him something?"

  "Unless you've got something very important to tell him, I didn't advise it now. He's talking to Dr. Fell, and he's not in the mood."

  "Well!" Mark Sheldon hesitated. "In one way it's important; in another way it's not. Reckon it'll have to wait. Yes," he continued, as they tramped together down the stairs, "I heard Dr. Fell was here in all his glory. Have you met the others?"

  "I already knew Camilla and Madge. We met a Mrs. Huret and a Mr. Crandall."

  "Valerie's not here now. As soon as the rain stopped, they tell me, she grabbed her car and buzzed off in a hurry. Old Rhadamanthus ... do I mean Rhada-manthus . . . ?"

  "Rhadamanthus, the judge or critic? Otherwise Bob Crandall? Yes, that will do."

  "He's in the library, orating to beat the band. Madge and Camilla are with him. Speaking of Camilla, what have you been doing to her?"

  Alan exploded. "So it's Camilla now, is it?"

  Passing the bedroom floor, they were descending the main stairway to the big main hall. The handsome young doctor had great ease of manner, and wiry hair of so dark a red that it looked almost black.

  "Sometimes," he said, "I think everybody in this house needs a tranquillizer. No offense was intended, take my word for it! Camilla's in a state, that's all, and Madge thinks you're responsible. Yancey and Rip are in the cellar, probably looking murder at each other. Make my excuses to the others; I've got to run. You can tell where they are, can't you?"

  Alan could. In the lower hall a grandfather clock, its ticking unimpaired after more than two hundred years, indicated the time as twenty minutes past four. The door to the library stood wide open. Dr. Sheldon took his hat from a table and left the house, letting the screen door bang after him. And Alan made for the library, towards the sound of an upraised voice.

  In the library, with its four big windows facing front, Madge Maynard in a brown-and-beige dress sat on a yellow-upholstered Victorian sofa with her yellow head bent forward, intently listening. Behind the grand piano in one corner sat Camilla, listening less intently. Bob Crandall stood at the other side of the piano, declaiming. He was in mid-doggerel and mid-flight; the syllables rolled and soared.

  "Delve in problems philosophic,

  How did Adam lose his rib? What's the chance of war in Europe?

  Has the Herald scooped the Trib? Oh, our present world is better;

  Still, a longing I confess For the chop-house in the alley,

  When the paper's gone to press."

  Here he interrupted himself, hooking his thumbs in his belt and looking lofty.

  "Yes," he informed Camilla, "it's pretty poor stuff, as you were saying. And yet I've always liked it. I'd have liked it still better if the would-be poet hadn't said 'scoop.' No newspaperman has ever said scoop, just as he never says 'front' page; he says 'first' page. We called it a beat when we called it anything at all. But it's been forty years or more since I can remember one. With some goddamn big syndicate grabbing up every goddamn paper in town, what chance have you got?"

  Madge raised her head. "Mr. Crandall, must you be so very serious?"

  "Yes, young woman, when I feel stro
ngly about anything. Mine is a simple, primitive nature. I can't help howling when I get kicked or cussing my head off when I get mad. And there's a lot to make us mad in these days."

  Alan went down the four steps into the library. Above the fireplace, in that impressive room, a full-length portrait in oils showed a graceful, fair-haired, blue-eyed woman in an evening gown of the mid-1930's. Alan scarcely glanced at this. He was looking at Camilla, who had risen partway from the. piano bench before sitting down again. Her resemblance to a Botticelli angel, pink and white, could not be marred even by an expression more lofty than Bob CrandalFs.

  "Did I mention the word 'big'?" Mr. Crandall demanded. "That's all we hear today. Big syndicates! Big government! Big taxes! Big brother!" Then he yelled. "With the goddamn government on its goddamn socialistic course, a man—"

  "You mean a goddamn man, don't you?" Camilla asked gently.

  "Something tells me," said Mr. Crandall, "we have here a sugar-candy flibbertigibbet with a taste for smart cracks. All right! Say a goddamn man; he'll deserve the adjective when our left-wingers have finished with him. Sooner or later, so help me Jinny, he'll need permission from some bureaucrat to change his job or sleep with his own wife."

  "Are you married, Mr. Crandall?"

  "No, thank God! I was saying—"

  "We know what you were saying," Camilla assured him. "And of course Alan agrees with you. He'd like to be back in the eighteenth century too. When Alan finds a situation he doesn't like, he never tries to use his reason or even approach it. He just loses his temper and swears."

  Alan was in the wrong mood for this.

  "Then how ought I to approach the situation, Camilla? Would you be better pleased if I worked it out mathematically?"

  Camilla dropped her lofty manner.

  "Don't you say anything against mathematics!" she breathed. "In the higher mathematics, for those who can understand, it's the most romantic and imaginative conception ever dreamed of! Mathematics gave us the space age . . ."

  "Hoo-ray." ' .

  ". . . and other things reactionaries sneer at because they hate progress! In the higher mathematics . . . not that I ever got that far myself ... !"-

  "Well, I never even got within shouting distance. To me mathematics means the activities of those mischievous lunatics A, B, and C. In my time they were always starting two trains at high speed from distant points to see where the trains would collide somewhere between. Which, as the man said in the story, is a hell of a way to run a railroad."

  "Does it say that?" flashed Camilla. "Say what?"

  "Does the problem anywhere say the two trains are on the same track? It doesn't; you know it doesn't; you won't stop to think! All the book wants to know is where those two trains will pass!"

  "And why does the book want to know that? So one engineer can wave to the other or give him a raspberry in passing? Why?"

  "Why, why, why? You're like a little boy in kindergarten! All you can do is ask why!"

  "Somebody's got to ask. You know, Camilla, it suggests a legal ruling once said to have been made in Arkansas about a disputed right-of-way. 'When two trains approach this intersection, both shall stop; and neither shall proceed until the other has passed.'

  "That's just about as sensible as most decisions now handed down by the United States Supreme Court. But we haven't finished with your tireless friends A, B, and C. When the silly dopes weren't wrecking trains or computing the ages of their children without seeming to know how old the brats were, two of 'em had a passion for pumping water out of a tank while the third poor mug pumped water into it. Camilla, how many afternoons do you spend doing that?" Camilla leaped to her feet.

  "I won't hear any more of this! I'm s-sick of your damn trains and water-tanks! I could kill you, Alan Grantham! And I'd do it, too, if I didn't—!"

  "Didn't what? Look down and despise me from your Olympian height?"

  "You've guesse’d that, have you?"

  "All right!" exclaimed Madge, getting up from the sofa. "If that's how you really feel, Camilla, you despise him as much as you please. But hadn't we better get on to something less controversial?"

  "An inner voice," Bob Crandall declared oracularly, "an inner voice tells me almost anything between those two is likely to be controversial. You pick a subject."

  Madge deliberated. Always she seemed a little apart, lost in some world of her own. Her golden-white skin stood out vividly against gray walls and towering wire-meshed bookcases.

  The fireplace was in the back wall of the library, westwards. To the right of it a big door gave on the room which must be the one Camilla had described as the weapons-room. Though the door stood open, Alan could see little beyond the threshold; shutters or curtains had been closed there.

  Madge made half a gesture towards the weapons-room before turning back.

  "Alan, what has Dr. Fell been saying?"

  "Very little so far. He's persuaded your father to do the talking. By the way, Dr. Sheldon dropped in . . ."

  "Yes; we saw him!"

  ". . . and asked me to make his excuses. There was something he wanted to tell your old man, but he thought better of it."

  "I know what he wanted!" said Madge. "Poor Mark! He's so anxious to do the correct thing! Never mind

  Mark." She made another half-gesture towards the weapons-room. Then her brown eyes travelled round the group before fastening on Bob Crandall. "You remember that awful fuss last Friday night?"

  "We're not likely to forget it, young lady."

  "It wasn't only that they took my lovely scarecrow, the one I called Mr. Christopher. But in there—outside the French window, anyway—Camilla said she saw somebody at half-past three in the morning. Camilla dear, I'm most awfully sorry! I didn't believe you then; I thought you were dreaming too; and I wasn't very nice."

  "You didn't believe her then. But you believe her now; is that it? Why do you believe her now?"

  "Well, because," answered Madge, "because last night I saw something too."

  6

  "If you want me to handle this," declared the ex-editor, "fair enough. But don't say I didn't warn you! A good reporter has got to ask the same questions as a cop. Who? What? How? When? Where? Why? Do you understand that, young woman?"

  "Oh, I understand!"

  "You saw somebody at that window?"

  "Good heavens, no! How could I have? My room's at the front, practically over the front door. Anyway, if I'd seen something at the house or anywhere near it, I think I'd have had a fit. This may not have had anything at all to do with us. But I couldn't help wondering . .

  "Suppose you start at the beginning. What did you see? When and where did you see it?"

  "We were rather late getting to bed last night, you remember. With—with Daddy keeping us in our places, there was no talk of ghosts or anything to get nervous about. But you told that story about the young girl from Jersey City . . ."

  "Is this another limerick?" demanded Camilla.

  "No, dear, no; you remember. The girl from Jersey City! Before they put her in jail she had thirty-four husbands in three years, or practically one a month. Mr. Crandall was just beginning to speculate about what methods she used ..."

  "Anybody knows what methods she used," said Mr. Crandall. "Remind me to tell that one to Valerie Huret!"

  "Valerie'll be awfully pleased, I'm sure. Anyway! You were just wondering how she could keep one husband from meeting another—Camilla wanted to hear and I know I did—when Daddy shut you up. But it took a long time, didn't it? It must have been half-past twelve or later when we all went upstairs."

  "All right. Take it from there."

  Madge stood with her hand on the back of the early Victorian sofa. Her gaze roved round the library, as though seeking somebody who wasn't there.

  "It must have been half-past one," she went on. "I'd taken my sleeping-pill some time before, but it hadn't worked yet. I was standing at the window and looking out: first at the front gates, and then down at the beach on the
left.—Alan," she broke off suddenly to ask, "what's a gibbous moon?"

  "A what?"

  "In stories," said Madge, "the moon is always gibbous. To me it conveys something scary, like 'ghostly' or 'gibber.' But I've never looked it up. And is it ghibbous or jibbous?"

  "Jibbous, Madge. Soft g, usually, before e and i. There's no suggestion of the supernatural. The word means convex: bigger than the semicircle, but not the full-moon circle complete."

  "Well, this moon was smaller than that. Much past the full and waning, and yet with light enough to see by.

  "I'm not sure when I first saw him. And don't ask me what he looked like; I was too far away to tell. It was just a man walking along the beach below the terrace, walking from west to east. He was looking out towards the harbor, with his head turned, and carrying something like a sack over his right shoulder.

  "For a second or two it gave me quite a jump. But he was too far away to hurt me, I thought. Then I thought it was probably some stranger who had no connection with us—just there by accident" "What did you do?"

  "What could I do? I wasn't going to yell and alarm the house; it didn't scare me enough for that. And I hate being turfed out when I've gone to bed, which is why I was cross with poor Camilla last Friday. I closed the curtains on both windows, with the air-conditioner going full blast. I jumped into bed, and I must have been asleep in two minutes. When I opened my eyes again it was nine o'clock in the morning, with bright sunlight to make everything normal

  "I wasn't going to tell anybody about this; I haven't mentioned it until now. Then I began thinking. We said Camilla was seeing things, when she'd taken much lighter sleeping-stuff and hadn't drunk much either. Was what I saw only a coincidence too? Couldn't the man on the beach have been a part of something much scarier?"