Girl Meets Body

by Jack Iams

  “Give us a lift, Ludlow,” said Mrs. Barrelforth.

  They spread one blanket on the floor in front of the fireplace, pushing hassocks and taborets aside, and slid Squareless gently out of the chair and onto the blanket, his head resting on the pillow. He made grumbling noises but didn’t protest otherwise.

  “You’ve got to lie down and you’ve got to keep warm,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, as if she felt called upon to explain.

  “Isn’t there something I can do?” asked Sybil.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “You can put out that cigarette. Air’s thick enough in here as it is.”

  “I didn’t even know I had it,” said Sybil.

  The housekeeper came back with the rest of the articles requested except bandages. “I brought a sheet,” she said.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Tear it into strips, will you, you and Mrs. Ludlow.”

  She bathed the wound, which, Tim saw now, was just above Squareless’s right ear. “Razor,” she said with a surgeon’s briskness. The housekeeper handed her a straight razor and she deftly shaved the hair around the wound. “Adhesive. Scissors. Matches.” She cut a strip of adhesive tape and ran the flame of a match along it, then pressed it firmly to the naked little oval in the grizzled hair. “Bandages.” Sybil handed her strips of cloth and Mrs. Barrelforth wound them around and over Squareless’s scalp until she had achieved a neat white cap effect. Then she sighed complacently and looked up. “Now,” she said, “brandy.”

  The housekeeper handed her a decanter and a balloon-shaped glass. “Get a tumbler,” said Mrs. Barrelforth sharply. “He doesn’t want to sniff the bouquet. Fetch several while you’re about it.”

  A faint grin crossed Squareless’s drained face.

  “I’d feel better if this thing had a couple of stitches in it,” Mrs. Barrelforth said to Tim. “However, there’s a limit even to what the Association can do, and if our friend doesn’t want a doctor, that’s his privilege.”

  Squareless gave a gratified grunt.“Although,” Mrs. Barrelforth added, “an apple a day isn’t much help when you’re shot. Ah, here we are.”

  She poured a stiff hooker of brandy into the tumbler the housekeeper handed her and lifted Squareless’s head while she held the glass to his lips. Squareless smacked them. “My best brandy,” he murmured. “Eighty years old.” From his weak voice it wasn’t clear whether he was pleased or annoyed.

  “Delighted to hear it,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, filling glasses, with ease and aplomb, for Sybil, Tim, and herself. She glanced hesitantly at the housekeeper.

  “No, thank you,” said the housekeeper coldly.

  “Here’s luck,” said Mrs. Barrelforth to Squareless. “And, believe me, you’ve had plenty tonight. An eighth of an inch to the left and—well, here’s luck.”

  She drank, and so did the others. Tim could feel the bracing warmth spread all through him. It was a good feeling and his brain seemed to grow clear along with it.

  “If we’re not going to call a doctor,” he said, “I presume the next step is to notify the police.”

  An angry rumble came from Squareless and he tried to lift his head. “Damn it, sir,” he gritted, “there is no need to involve the law.” Then his head fell back.

  “Easy,” warned Mrs. Barrelforth.

  Tim stared around bewilderedly. He had been brought up to call the police in certain given circumstances and he had always assumed other people did the same. Sybil’s eyes met his impassively.

  “I give up,” said Tim. “What is the next step?”

  “A little more brandy, if you’re asking me,” said Mrs. Barrelforth cheerfully. “And it Mr. Squareless feels up to it, perhaps he’ll tell us in a few words what happened.”

  Squareless’s chest heaved irritably. “If you must know,” he said, articulating with difficulty, “I was cleaning one of my guns. As you see, I have a great many. Damned thing went oft. That’s all.”

  “And you thoughtfully put it back?” said Mrs. Barrelforth.

  “I was just putting it back as it went off.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. She waited a moment, then casually, glass in hand, she strolled across the room to the curving windows. She glanced back at Squareless’s easy chair and seemed to be calculating briefly, then she passed her hand over the panes between two of the half-drawn curtains. She smiled to herself and walked back to the fireplace.

  “Strange,” she said idly, “there’s a little round hole in one of the windows. Hail, perhaps.”

  Again Squareless mumbled and again his head thrust itself up from the pillow. “By God,” he blurted in feeble rage, “I’ve had enough of your poking about. I’ve told you what happened. I’m grateful for your help. Now leave me alone. D’you hear me? Leave me alone!”

  A mottled pink had suffused his face and his eyes glared balefully. Then his head fell back on the pillow once more, and his eyelids slowly shut. His breathing, after a convulsive jerk or two, became regular and peaceful. He began to snore.

  “Looks like a reasonably healthy sleep,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “He’s lost a good bit of blood but he’s still got enough to color up with. A good sign. Still, somebody had better stay with him, just in case.”

  “I’ll be here,” said the housekeeper.

  “What would you do in event of a hemorrhage?” asked Mrs. Barrelforth. The housekeeper was silent.

  “How about you?” Mrs. Barrelforth asked Sybil.

  “I know what to do,” said Sybil quietly. “I’ll stay.”

  “Good girl,” said Mrs. Barrelforth.

  “You don’t stay without me,” said Tim.

  “Nonsense,” said Sybil. “I’ll be quite all right.”

  “Is there any reason to think,” asked Tim, “that Mr. Squareless’s gun may not go off again?”

  “I think it most unlikely,” said Sybil.

  “Okay,” said Tim. Sybil glanced at him suspiciously and he thought perhaps he had yielded too suddenly. But she didn’t say anything more.

  The housekeeper walked to the front door with Tim and Mrs. Barrelforth. It was still raining but the wind had died down and the faint, gray tinge of false dawn appeared beyond the quietly breathing sea.

  “Well,” Mrs. Barrelforth began, but the housekeeper interrupted her.

  “I think Mr. Ludlow’s right,” she said. “We should call the police.”

  “Thank God somebody else thinks’ so,” said Tim. “What about it, Mrs. B.?”

  “The victim seems rather strongly opposed to it.”

  “There’s such a thing as carrying a passion for privacy too far,” said Tim.

  “It’s more than that,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Hasn’t it occurred to you, Ludlow, that our friend Squareless knows, or thinks he knows, who shot him?”

  Tim stared at her. Then he said slowly, “You may have something there.”

  “Of course I have,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, “but I’m not sure what. I’m a stranger here myself. A very sleepy stranger, I might add. Let’s go.”

  “You can drive, can’t you?” asked Tim.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I think I’ll stick around a while.” He glanced into the gray darkness and lowered his voice. “Wait till we’re in the car,” he said to the housekeeper, “then switch off the hall light. I’ll slip out and Mrs. Barrelforth can drive away.”

  “A quixotic plan,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, “but I suppose it’ll make you feel better.”

  “It will also make me feel better,” said the housekeeper. “We are in the midst of evil. I am frightened.”

  “Try a little brandy,” said Mrs. Barrelforth encouragingly. “It’ll change your whole outlook.”

  “Among other things that worry me,” said the housekeeper, ignoring the suggestion, “is what has happened to Goethe. It would be terrible if he a
ttacked Mr. Ludlow.”

  “Goethe?” repeated Mrs. Barrelforth. “Ah, yes, you mentioned him. The watchdog, I take it.”

  “Yes.”

  “That,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, snapping her lingers softly, “explains there having been two shots. I’m afraid your Goethe is past attacking anyone. Let’s have your torch, Ludlow.”

  She took Tim’s flashlight and stepped through the doorway into the dripping rain. Sending a yellow circle ahead of her, she walked across the lawn toward the lat side of the house, then suddenly stopped. “Look,” she called.

  Tim hurried to her side, through the wet grass that brushed his bare ankles. The housekeeper followed him. In the blob of light that silvered the rain lay a dark, furry shape. Four legs stuck stiffly out of it, so stiffly that they almost seemed to quiver.

  Tim could hear the housekeeper’s short, horrified breaths.

  “Poor old boy,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. She doused the flashlight and handed it back to Tim. “Nothing to be done about it now. Let’s be off.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Three Guesses

  The hall light went off and Tim crawled awkwardly past Mrs. Barrelforth’s large knees and out of the unfastened door on her side of the car. She gave him a couple of seconds to reach the shelter of the stone wall, then sent the car forward with a crash of worn gears. Crouched in the shadows, Tim listened to the sound of the engine growing fainter and fainter among the dunes, and his spirits fell with it. Mrs. Barrelforth’s departure made him realize how comforting her hearty presence had been, just as the evanescence of false dawn made it seem darker than ever. An advantage, no doubt, but a double-edged one.

  He heard footsteps in the gravel driveway and jumped, then recognized the figure of the housekeeper coming to shut the gate. It closed with a crunch and he heard the bolt pushed rustily into place. Then the footsteps passed near him again and re-entered the house. The front door closed, and then there was silence everywhere except for the steady, oblivious drip of the rain.

  Now that his vigil had actually begun, it seemed a more nebulous undertaking than it had when the brandy was hot in his throat. It was like the eternal vigilance of liberty—a commendable idea but hard to put into practice. At any rate, he had better be moving about, he decided, before his feet, squishing in soaked bedroom slippers, grew numb. He started sidling cautiously along the wall as well as he could among the bushes that hid its base. Their rustle as he pressed through them sounded so loud that he felt like General Braddock’s redcoats crashing four abreast through the Pennsylvania forests to surprise the twig sensitive Indians.

  He drew even with the corner of the house from which swelled the embrasure of Squareless’s den. It was only a rounded outline now, no light showing, not even the glint of rain on the windows. Still, remembering where Mrs. Barrelforth had spotted the hole in the glass, he could more or less reconstruct what must have happened. The ground sloped away from the house but a man standing close to the windows would have found their ledges roughly level with his chest. Between the parted curtains of the first window he would have had Squareless’s easy chair directly in front of him and almost facing him, as Tim recalled its position. Chances were, he thought, that Squareless must have heard a noise and turned his head slightly just as the shot was fired.

  But matters of this sort, he told himself irritably, were obviously matters for the police. Why the devil didn’t anybody want to call the police? Did Squareless have something to hide? Why was Sybil so leery of the normal processes of law and order? That damned editorial crept into his mind again, and just then the end window opened.

  Sybil’s head and shoulders appeared, framed by a faint and ruddy light that evidently came from the coal fire. There was no reason to suppose, certainly, that she was doing anything more than taking a breath of air, and yet, in his tired brain, a queer little suspicion was taking shape. Was it conceivable that she was expecting someone? Was that why she had insisted on staying?

  He tried to brush such thoughts aside by concentrating on how beautiful she was in the light that just tipped her features. Apparently she was resting her elbow’s on the sill, her chin cupped in her hands. Tim thought of that night when the bomb fell in St. James’s Park, of her white face turned toward him in the moonlight.

  Even as he watched her, she grew more distinct. The darkness was yielding to a thick, wet gray as the real dawn appeared like a pale patch above the rim of the sea. Tim glanced toward the eastern horizon and then he saw that he was not the only one who was watching Sybil.

  The upper half of a man’s body protruded from the bushes that apparently marked the end of the lawn and the beginning of dunes. He wasn’t more than twenty yards away but it was still too dark for Tim to see what he looked like. He seemed to have a hat on and he was standing motionless, but more than that, Tim couldn’t tell.

  Then Sybil closed the window and the glow of the fire vanished with her as, evidently, she let the curtain fall back into place. Tim’s eyes moved quickly back to the fringe of bushes in time to see the intruder drop out of sight in the amorphous thicket.

  Or was he, Tim, the intruder? Had he stumbled upon the carrying out of some prearranged signal? Sybil couldn’t have seen the man, he was sure, but that wouldn’t prevent the opening of the window from having been something agreed upon.

  But why, by God, shouldn’t the man himself answer these questions? The very thought, with its angry promise of satisfaction, turned into energy and he scuttled in a crouch along the wall till he reached the row of bushes. Edging among the brambly clumps toward the spot where the man had stood, he saw that immediately beyond them the ground fell steeply and sharply to the beach. It was almost like the white cliffs of Dover in miniature, a drop of perhaps fifteen feet but curving at the bottom into soft sand.

  Cautiously he poked his head through the bushes and over the crumbly edge of the sudden descent. Grayness shrouded the beach but its pale meeting with the dark inlet was clear enough and he was able to make out a small and rickety wharf at which two rowboats seemed to be tied up. One, no doubt, was Squareless’s dinghy.

  Before he could wonder about the other one, something moved directly beneath him. He was lying flat on his stomach now and he slithered forward until he could look straight down. A man—it had to be the same man—was standing in the shelter of the little cliff, looking toward the sea, his back toward Tim.

  Tim lifted himself on his hands, then to all fours, then to a crouch. He took the Luger out of his pocket, then slowly and laboriously he slipped off the trenchcoat. With the gun in his hand, he jumped.

  His feet struck the sand with a splash but the rest of him hit the target, and the man went over like a nine-pin, yelling as he did so, “Mother of God!”

  “You again, eh?” muttered Tim. He had landed astride the man’s back and he jabbed his knees into the other’s ribs and touched his head with the butt of the Luger. “Keep still,” he said, “or I’ll cave your skull in.”

  “You will, will you?” said a voice behind him and something cold and metallic touched his own head.

  Tim sat perfectly still. He was aware of terror, but objectively, as if he were watching himself from a distance. It seemed quite natural for him to say, “Night fishing again, are you?”

  “Yes,” said the voice behind him. “We like to fish at night. But we don’t like people butting in.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Tim.

  “Why?”

  “Three guesses.”

  The cold metal was withdrawn. “One, two, three,” said the man behind him and those were the last words that Tim heard for a while. Afterward, he couldn’t remember whether the blow on his head had actually hurt or not, all he remembered was the sudden blackness, a blaze of fireworks and then nothing.

  It was broad daylight when he opened his eyes although even alter a wholesome nap it would have been hard to recognize it
as such in the heavy mist and drizzle. He was lying on his face in the sand and his first sensation was that his mouth was full of gritty stuff. His next was a dull, throbbing ache in the back of his head. He sat up and looked around. The beach, as far as he could see in the thickness, was deserted. Then, painfully, his eyes moved toward the little wharf and he saw that only one rowboat was tied up.

  He got slowly to his feet, sending a stab through his head, and realized that he was cold, so cold that he was shaking all over. He sneezed twice and wondered how long he had been there. Not too long, judging by the pale light, but long enough to warrant immediate steps if he wasn’t to get pneumonia.

  He looked up doubtfully at the overhanging clifflet, then farther along he saw that from the wharf a narrow boardwalk led to a flight of wooden stairs that hugged the wall. He paused to look around for the Luger but naturally enough it wasn’t in evidence. Then he made his way to the stairs and mounted to the lawn. It would have been a bleak enough expanse, wet and shaggy around the sagging brown house, even without the grim figure in the center of it: stiff-legged Goethe, fur as limp as a muskrat’s.

  He found his trenchcoat among the bushes, bayberry bushes he saw now, and its inner lining was dry. He stripped off his plastered pajamas and stood there for a moment before putting on the coat in order to wonder at the ways of a providence that landed an earnest young Fine Arts instructor naked on a strange lawn with a dead police dog for company.

  Then he put on his trenchcoat, unlocked the front gate, and broke into a light trot for home and hot tub.

  Chapter Twenty

  Three Photographs

  Left alone in the big room, silent except for the hiss of the coals and Squareless’s heavy breathing, Sybil first drew the red curtains tightly shut. Then she switched on a lamp that stood on the broad teakwood desk and turned off the other one, which had been shining directly down on Squareless’s face, Hogarthian in its pallor under the cap of bandage.

  She poured a little more brandy into her glass and carried it to the desk, behind which she settled herself for her vigil, even as Tim, less comfortably, was doing at the same time outside. The desk was still cluttered with papers—bills, accounts, letters, a catalogue of sporting books, a bridge hand clipped from a newspaper, all carelessly shoved together. There were a couple of books, Burke’s Peerage and one about big-game hunting in Kenya. Neither struck her as exactly fascinating, and she had no mind for reading, anyway.