“I know,” she said. She turned to him repentantly. “Oh, Grandy, you’re such a sweet—”
“I want you to sleep well,” he said, petting her. One hand on her silver hair, he reached in his pocket with the other. “Some of your little pills, darling? They’ll help you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Grandy, sometimes Oliver’s so stupid.”
“There,” he said. “There. There are these little adjustments.”
She took the pills childishly, a lot of them. He held the glass of water for her. She turned to dry her lips. “I hope I don’t dream.”
Grandy went around the sides of the glass with a towel slowly. He put the glass in her hand. Automatically, she set it in its place.
“Latch the door, chickabiddy. Sleep well.” His beaked, beaming face, alight with loving-kindness, remained in the door a brief moment.
“You, too, Grandy,” said Althea affectionately. She flicked the latch.
Grandy slept well enough. Jane’s head ached where she rested it against her door. Francis, in the garden, was cold. Mathilda had dreams. Oliver, down at the country club, couldn’t sleep at all. Althea slept and dreamed no more.
17
The sudden and unexpected death of Althea Conover Keane, caused by an overdose of sleeping tablets, was called an accident. Tom Gahagen was handling the case himself. He had them all together in Grandy’s study, late that morning. All, that is, but Jane Moynihan, who had gone off to New York early. She had been on her train before Oliver came home. It was, of course, Oliver who came home in the morning and, finding it impossible to waken his wife by pounding on the locked bedroom door, had got in through a window finally, and found what there was of her.
Grandy sat behind his desk, and Mathilda’s heart ached for him as, indeed, it also ached for poor white-faced Oliver for poor Althea, for the dreary day, for herself, for everything. Grandy’s hands shaded his face and he kept looking down at the polished wood, too desperately sad to raise his eyes, even to answer questions.
In this privacy, Gahagen at first said he assumed it was suicide. There was the fact that she had locked herself in, locked the hall door after Oliver when he had left her, about midnight. The connecting bathroom door to Grandy’s room was bolted, and had been for years. She was securely locked in. She had wanted to be alone. The stuff she had taken was available there in her medicine cabinet. Althea had been fond of dosing herself. Locked in alone, obviously she took the stuff herself.
Added to this was her note. “Darling. Forgive me, please do,” it read, and it was signed boldly with her big sprawling “Althea,” of which the last two letters trailed off insolently, as if she assumed it wasn’t necessary to be legible. Everyone would know.
A sad and cryptic little note, it was. Francis had found it on the floor, after Oliver had got in through the window and cried out and opened the door, and Grandy had rushed in to stand by the bed and look down at her. In all the confusion, Francis had seen the paper fluttering at Grandy’s slippered feet, stirred, no doubt, by the breeze of his passing.
“Now, I’m mighty sorry,” Gahagen said, “but I’ve got to ask you if anybody knows why she’d have wanted to do a thing like this?” The silence fell in a chunk, as it did here, in this unnaturally soundproofed atmosphere. “What did she mean— ‘Forgive me’?”
Tyl thought, But that was what she always said. She remembered Althea’s easy, charming “Forgive me’s.” Something she, herself, could not say at all. The phrase sounded to Tyl, in her own mouth, pretentious and wrong. For Althea it had been so easy. “Forgive me for not telephoning yesterday.” “Forgive me for splashing your dress.” “Forgive me for not listening.” Gahagen wouldn’t know how trivial a matter could call out that phrase. She felt too heavy to make the effort to tell him so.
“Who’s the note meant for?” he was insisting. “Who’s ‘darling’?”
Oh, anybody, thought Tyl. Everybody.
Grandy answered as if he tolled a bell. “Surely she meant ‘Forgive me for what I am about to do.’ God help me, I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“I don’t like to say this now. Yet it’s all I can think of. It obsesses me. I had a warning.”
“What do you mean, Luther?”
“Premonition. The house felt wrong. She was not right. Not herself.” Grandy took off his pince-nez and rubbed his nose. The homely gesture punctuated his talk. It was as if he’d made a homely gesture to reassure himself.
“Was it something she said, Luther?”
“No, nothing she said. Nothing she did. Nothing I can describe. It was … the lurking death wish that lies so secretly in the heart.… Oh, my house,” groaned Grandy, “my poor tragic house.” Tyl felt the world would come apart at the seams.
“Sorry, Luther,” said Tom Gahagen. “You know I’m sorry. Got to ask a few questions, get it straightened out.” He shifted uneasily.
Grandy said, “Don’t mind me, Tom.” Then, in tones of pure heartbreak, “I am wondering, of course, what I ought to have done that I left undone.”
“Aren’t we all?” said Francis in a queer, harsh, angry voice. It was as if he’d been rude. Grandy’s gentleness reproached him.
Oliver said monotonously, “We had a quarrel, a dumb, jealous quarrel. She’d been out in the guest house with Howard, and I didn’t like it. So we said a lot of bitter, nasty stuff and I slammed out of here. She wouldn’t tell me what they’d talked about, and I wanted to know. I thought it was my business. She said it wasn’t.” The careful voice broke. “It couldn’t have been over me that she did it. Because I didn’t matter that much to Althea, and that’s the truth.”
It didn’t sound like Oliver. He’d been shocked into honest humility. Tyl could have wept for him.
Gahagen looked at Francis. “What were you and Mrs. Keane talking about so long?” he asked with cold precision.
Francis said, “She was in no suicidal mood.”
“What d’you mean?”
“She was in no suicidal mood.” He repeated his statement quietly. “I spent a good while last evening talking to her, and I would have known.”
“What were you talking about?”
Francis shrugged. “As a matter of fact, I was telling her my troubles, and she was very kind,” he said smoothly. “And she was not thinking about suicide.”
Gahagen’s glance passed from one young man to the other. His thought was transparent on his tight face. A triangle. Jealousy. Trouble. No way to get to the bottom of it.
Grandy said softly, “We can’t be sure that note was not just a note she’d written some other time. Perhaps this was an accident.… Is that possible, Tom?”
Gahagen examined this soft suggestion and thought he understood it. Some tangle of emotions here that could not be publicly explained.
Mathilda spoke up at last. “Althea did use that phrase, ‘Forgive me,’ such a lot.”
“She did. She did,” murmured Grandy. “You’re right, Tyl. So she did.”
“You don’t think it was a suicide note at all?” Gahagen sounded tentative, as if he might, in the end, take their word for it.
Grandy said, “Not necessarily. Quite possibly, it wasn’t.”
Francis said coldly—almost as if he knew, Tyl thought—“She didn’t commit suicide, Mr. Gahagen.”
“Then you think it was an accident?”
Francis didn’t answer.
But Oliver’s new and bitter voice said without drama, “I’d rather think so.”
There was one of those silences.
“She was,” said Francis firmly, insistently, even loudly, “in no more suicidal mood than Mathilda is right now.”
Heads turned. What an odd thing to say! Gahagen’s brows made puzzled motions.
“I’d like you all to look at Mathilda,” said Francis easily. That is, his voice was easy; his arm, hanging over the back of the chair he sat in, was dangling with an effect of being relaxed. But here were two hard little lines near his mouth that Jan
e would have recognized.
“Why should we look at Mathilda?” purred Grandy. He had himself looked up at last. His black eyes were narrow behind his glasses. He looked wary and alert and as if he were listening hard, trying to hear more than Francis’ quiet voice as it went on.
“Because I don’t care for these suicidal rumors,” said Francis. “I don’t like premonitions after the fact. I want all of you to look very carefully at Mathilda, and if you see anything … ominous, then let us arrange to take very good care of her.” Francis opened his hand, looked at the palm, turned it over, let it fall. “Since two pretty young girls have died in this house,” he said, “I’d just as soon there wasn’t any third one. So take a good look at Mathilda now. And if she’s in a dangerous mood, let’s have nurses in and watch her. Let’s take no more chances.”
There was silence—rather a strained silence. Tyl shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“You want to live, don’t you? You’re not depressed? Not brooding? Not low? You feel well? You’re young and looking forward? You’ve got something to live for?” Francis barked questions at her harshly, angrily. “You don’t want to die?”
“Of course I don’t want to die! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” She was so angry she stood up without knowing she had done so. With her head thrown back, her chin up, eyes bright, her breath drawn with indignation, her lovely figure taut and poised, she was most vividly alive.
“Now, Mrs. Howard—” Gahagen began soothingly.
Mathilda flashed around to face him. She would have said she was not Mrs. Howard, but Grandy was around his desk and beside her suddenly, and his hands on her shoulders were quieting and warning her. “There, duckling, there. Francis worries. Naturally. Naturally. You mustn’t be angry.” He turned to Gahagen. “I think he’s made a point,” he said. “We could not possibly say there was any mood at all. I can’t condemn—” Grandy’s voice broke a little. “I dare not damn Althea with a piece of imagined nonsense which may have been my own mood after all. And if we can’t say for sure, Tom, ought we not to say it was an accident?”
“That—er—note—” began the detective.
“Such a strange little note,” said Grandy. “So vague. So meaningless. I fancy she’s written such a note to me or Oliver many a time. And as long as we do not know her reasons or even whether she had any, need we mention any note? To—to people? Frankly, Tom”—Grandy compressed his lips—“I don’t want to hear them speculating. I don’t want to hear their guesses. I don’t want to know they’re wondering why Althea wanted to die. For myself, I would rather believe Althea left us accidentally. I do earnestly believe that she loved and trusted us enough to wish to stay.”
Francis put both hands over his face.
Tyl thought, Francis is more upset than Oliver, even. She thought, Poor Althea, how could she make a mistake and die? She thought, Oh, my poor Grandy! Pity and grief wheeled around, tumbled each other in her consciousness and yet hardly roused her. They were pale images of coming emotions, only their mental shadows.
But Francis’ hands were hiding a black and deadly anger, full grown.
18
All afternoon people came. Tyl was still encased in an aching paralysis that hadn’t yet sharpened to pain. It didn’t occur to her not to remain in the long room, not to stay there and bear it. She was there, and people came—Grandy’s friends—and she stayed and watched and listened numbly.
Grandy was in his big chair. No tears, no sighs, no break in the rich gentleness of his voice. He made kind little inquiries of his friends about their daily affairs. Ever so gently, he kept his grief private. The assumption was that it lay too deep for tears. Tyl saw more than one turn away from him with a convulsed face. It was so beautiful a performance, such a touching thing.
Grandy’s friends. Personalities, all of them. They would go to him and receive his gentle greeting, his sweet questions. Then they would go to Oliver, who was in the room, although he seemed not to know where he was exactly, and only stammered “Oh, hello,” and “Thanks” and “Yes” or “No,” stupidly. Then they would come to Tyl and Francis, who was there beside her, and they would congratulate her, weakly, on being alive. They muted their joy in her return in deference to the death in the house. It was as if they were all saying, “Too bad. He’s lost his beauty, though of course he’s got this one back. Too bad.”
Althea would be a legend. The lovely girl with the silver eyes who died so young. She’ll never grow old, Tyl thought, but stay young and lovely in their memories. They will forgive her for everything. Well, she thought, I forgive her.
Francis was introduced as Mathilda’s husband. It didn’t seem to matter. It was too hard to explain now. Too involved and fantastic. Let it go.
Francis was taking a good deal on himself. It was he who, when the emotional pressure got too high, knew how to break the fever. When Schmedlinova made a gliding run all the way down to Grandy, wailing like a Russian banshee, it was Francis who made a cynical aside and steadied Mathilda’s jumping heart. It was Francis who was at her elbow to say the right thing when she couldn’t think of what to say at all. She found her eyes meeting his over people’s heads. They seemed to have suddenly acquired a full code of signals that went easily between them. It was he who rescued Oliver from the poet who kept quoting, when Mathilda asked him to with her eyebrow. He took slobbering old Mrs. Campbell away before Mathilda screamed. It was his shoulder she found behind her when a sudden wave of fatigue sent her reeling backward. It was Francis who told her quite rudely, at six o’clock, to go upstairs and lie down. It was Francis who brought her a tray, who pulled the comforter over her feet, who dimmed the light. Lying on her bed, weary and numb, she supposed, with dull surprise, that Francis had been acting very like a husband.
When Jane got off the train at seven-thirty, Gahagen’s men were there to meet her. They took her to his office without telling her why. It was obvious that she hadn’t known what had happened to Althea. She nearly fainted when they told her. In fact, Gahagen was alarmed and called the doctor. The girl was badly shocked. It was no fake, either. Gahagen was sorry that his duty had led him to distress her. After all, the poor little kid didn’t know anything, had nothing to tell them, sat there twisting her hands, looked dazed and unhappy. Gahagen sent a man to run her up to Grandy’s house.
Francis had taken so much on himself that it was only natural for him to meet her at the door and put his arm around her.
What they exchanged under their breaths was not much, because Grandy’s voice said, “Is that Jane?” and people leaned around the arch to say that Grandy was asking for her. It was only natural that Francis should keep his arm around her and lead her to Grandy’s throne.
It was a lovely scene. The yellow-haired child in the powder-blue suit with the little white collar kneeling there. Dear old Grandy bent over her so tenderly. And that tall, good-looking Howard man, standing there with Jane’s little blue cap in his hand, that he’d picked up when it fell. The long room was quiet.
“I know,” Grandy said. “I know, child. I know.” His voice was soft and sympathetic, and it didn’t change as it went on to ask, “What were you doing in the garden last night with Francis?”
Jane cut a sob in two. Francis, standing by, looked perfectly blank. He felt himself to be within the range of Grandy’s eyes, although those eyes were kept on Jane. He struggled for blankness.
Jane took down the handkerchief, revealed her tousled face, all lumpy with weeping. “Oh, Mr. Grandison, I didn’t know you knew. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what, dear?” They were speaking low. The people in the room couldn’t hear what they were saying. It all went for part of the tender little scene.
“He only had an hour,” wept Jane. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault I told him he shouldn’t have come and tried to see me, but, seeing that he had, I couldn’t just tell him to go away. So I thought it wouldn’t really … disturb you.”
Grandy said, “You�
��re telling me it wasn’t Francis?”
“Oh, no,” said Jane. “Of course it wasn’t. It was a—a boy I know. I’ll never do it again, sir. I’m so sorry.”
Grandy said, “But, my dear, I was not complaining. I was curious, y’know. Next time bring him indoors, child. We are not ogres.”
Jane began to cry again, as if such kindness were too much to bear.
Francis said, “What’s this about? Something to do with me?”
“Tyl thought she … saw you,” Grandy said, with a curious little break of hesitation and doubt. His eyes turned. Not his head.
“Tyl did?” said Francis. He kept his face blank, turned his eyes, not his head. Too bad. Tough on Mathilda, but the kid would have to put up with this. It looked as if Jane had really fooled him. But at any rate, Tyl’s evidence on what she knew or saw was tending to seem more and more unreliable.
Jane was getting to her feet. Francis took her arm. He said kindly, with just a trace of absent-mindedness, “Hadn’t you better come along upstairs and wash your face or something?”
In her room they faced each other. “Well?”
She said, “I got it.”
“What we thought?”
“Yes.” She told him rapidly and rather mechanically. “I listened to it myself. Told them a wild story about a bet. I got a girl there to listen with me, as a witness. Got it cold, and it’s what we want. The Phantom Chief said ‘Burn tenderly’ only once in that record, and he said it at ten-thirty-five.”
“Fifteen minutes.” Francis struck his palm with his other fist.
“Yes,” said Jane. There was no triumph.
“And Rosaleen hanging since the fuse blew at ten-twenty. That’s proof.”
“Yes,” said Jane.
“Proof!” Francis was bitter and old again. “Jane, he’s the devil. How can we fight the devil? That tongue of his, the power of it! He molds the thoughts in people’s heads with his tongue, Jane. Their brains melt. He makes them think what he wants them to think. They’re all his puppets. And he’s the great director. Look at him now. He’s killed twice, committed two murders, and everybody is down there weeping for him.”
Unsuspected Page 10
