by Leslie Ford
We heard him go out and close the door behind him.
“Well,” I said, “that’s that.”
She sat down as suddenly as if someone had knocked her feet out from under her. I went over beside her. She gripped my hand. Her own was ice-cold. Her whole body was trembling like a blade of grass.
She closed her eyes.
“I’m afraid, Grace,” she whispered suddenly, trembling uncontrollably. “Horribly, horribly afraid!”
I sat there stupidly, saying nothing. I couldn’t think of anything at all to say. Then quite suddenly she opened her eyes and looked around at me. “Will you do something for me, Grace?”
“Surely,” I said. “What is it?”
“Call up the Emergency Hospital and find out how Angie’s mother is. I’ve got to know.”
I looked at the clock on the mantel. It was twenty minutes past five.
“Hospitals carry on all night, I suppose,” I said, and got up. Then I came to a dead stop.
“There’s a phone in the pantry,” she said quickly.
The pantry light was still on. There was a tray of ice cubes in the sink, half melted where they’d been left and forgotten. Iris’s handkerchief was on the shelf above it. It was quite dry. I put it in the pocket of my lace jacket to give her, picked up the phone book and dialed the hospital number.
“Can you tell me how Mrs. Marie Lowell Nash is this morning?” I asked, trying to sound as casual about calling it morning as if I was just getting out the mop to start the day’s work instead of still being in a lace evening gown and silver sandals.
A crisp efficient voice answered me, with just a hint of surprise.
“Who is calling, please?”
“Mrs. Nash’s former husband’s home,” I said, hoping that way to get something more definite than the usual “She’s doing very nicely, thank you.”
And I did. The voice hesitated, and spoke quietly.
“I’m sorry—Mrs. Nash died this morning at twenty-five minutes past one. Her son has been notified.”
6
I stared stupidly into the wall, the telephone still in my hand, the dial tone zinging in my ear. Marie Nash dead… It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be. But it was. When at last I put down the phone and turned to go back into the drawing room, Iris Nash was in the door looking at me. She knew instantly, without my saying a word.
“Poor Angie,” she said softly.
“You’d better go to bed for a couple of hours,” I said. It seemed to me—and in spite of the Fifth Commandment—that Angie’s difficulties were definitely behind him, Iris’s were just beginning.
She shook her head, “I don’t want to lie down.”
We went back toward the drawing room.
“You’ll think I’m pretty ghastly, I suppose. Maybe it’s just the effect of shock and I’ll come out of it tomorrow. But right now I don’t feel any of the things I know I ought to feel. All I really feel is the almost unbearable relief of having Lowell out of my sight, and… and Randall.”
“Look, darling,” I said. “I know—but there are a lot of things you can’t say… not out loud, you know.”
“I know.”
She drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.
“But I’ve got to tell you this. I’ve never told anybody—not even myself, really. I only knew it tonight, while I was waiting for Randall to come home.”
She looked at me with wide open eyes, like a child.
“I couldn’t have carried on here another day, Grace. I couldn’t have come into this house tonight, by myself. My father drank too much. I just couldn’t have stood it any longer.”
She turned away with a faint sudden smile on her lips.
“I would have left before, except—and you’ll think this is pretty funny—I couldn’t bear to leave Lowell alone here with him. That and another reason that doesn’t matter now.”
She sat down and spread her hands out before the dying fire.
“I don’t know what it’s going to be like tomorrow, or next month, but right now I feel just as if I’d been struggling through a horrible nightmare, and had waked up suddenly and found… everything quite sane and lovely again.”
“Look here,” I said. “I’m sure you’d better get a lawyer. I’m going to call up a man I know and find out who to get. You stay here.”
She nodded. I went out into the pantry again and closed the door. Then, with only a very faint qualm, I dialed Colonel Primrose.
When he answered I said, “Tell me who to get for Iris.”
I’m sure he hadn’t been asleep, that he knew I’d call and had just been waiting.
“Call Belden Doyle in New York in the morning,” he said calmly. “I’ll get in touch with him. He’ll be expecting you. Now you go to bed, both of you.”
That was simple to say, and it was simpler to do then than it was later, when each time I closed my eyes I opened them to find the net around Iris Nash drawing tighter and tighter, until it seemed there was no human agency that could release its strangling hold—not even Belden Doyle, who was after all too human.
I put down the phone and went back to Iris. She was sitting motionless where I’d left her, staring into the dying fire. Her lips moved. I leaned down. “I never knew what happened to make him change so much,” she whispered.
I’m not sure which I dreaded most when I opened my eyes in the Nashes’ blue guest room at eight o’clock and remembered all at once why I was there: the morning meeting between Iris and Lowell, or the return of Captain Lamb with the report from the autopsy. I suppose it was the first because it seemed the more imminent. I rang for the maid. When she came in—scared pea-green—she brought me a bag with my daytime clothes that Lilac had sent over.
“Oh, it’s horrible, Mrs. Latham,” the girl said, in a hushed voice. “But they’ll never make me believe she did it. I never believed she poisoned Miss Lowell’s dog either. Miss Lowell will never be the lady she is if she lives a hundred years.”
I looked at her, a little surprised at her vehemence. She was a large apple-cheeked girl with blue eyes and light hair, vaguely familiar though I couldn’t quite place her.
“Where were you last night?” I asked, pouring out a cup of fragrant coffee.
“Mrs. Nash let us all off right after dinner. She’s awful nice that way. Except Wilkins—he’s the butler except when he drives Mr. Nash.”
“He’s new, isn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am, pretty new. He came this Fall. I’ve been here since May. You don’t remember me, but I came just before you went away in June. I used to work in the bakery—my name’s Molly, I’m Mrs. Murphy’s youngest girl.”
“I do remember you, very well. Your mother died, didn’t she?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Nash lets me come here and go to school in the afternoons.—Mrs. Latham, can’t you make Miss Lowell be nicer to her?”
“Oh dear!” I thought.
She flushed crimson, but went on. “Because Wilkins says when the police find out what a dog fight goes on in this house they’ll hang her for sure.”
“Is there a dog fight?” I asked.
“Not out loud. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was. It’s just underneath. Miss Lowell’s always doing just what Mrs. Nash doesn’t want her to do, and being mean to Mr. Mac all the time.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Molly, if I were you,” I said.
“No, ma’am. But… maybe you’d talk to Miss Lowell…”
I looked at her. There was something pleading, and frightened, in her round wholesome face that startled me.
“What’s the matter, Molly?”
She hesitated for a moment, flushing again.
“Oh, it’s just that this morning, ma’am, when I took her tray in, she was talking to somebody on the phone, telling them she knew her father had been poisoned, because that dog of hers was poisoned.—She kept calling him A. J. That’s Mr. McClean, isn’t it?”
“Have you said anything about this in the kitchen?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Latham. I wouldn’t do that.”
“You see you don’t, Molly. I’ll talk to Miss Lowell.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She went out. I put down my coffee cup and leaned my head back against the cool pillows. Nothing in the house had seemed to me to make sense, this last week, but this made less. The “A. J.” Lowell had been talking to was Mac’s uncle. He was Randall Nash’s oldest and most intimate friend, Angus was named after him. I tried to remember all I knew about him. Mac, who was A. J.’s brother’s son, had lived with him since he was a small child and both his parents were killed in a train wreck in Colorado in 1915 on their way to the San Francisco Exposition. It was usually said in Georgetown that the reason A. J. had remained a bachelor was that he and Randall Nash both wanted to marry Marie Lowell and Randall got her. I wouldn’t know how true that was. Certainly if he envied Randall the possession of Marie after a short time it only shows there are some people who don’t recognize a break when they get it.
A. J., I knew, was president of the Colonial Trust Company, had rheumatism and indigestion, lived in a crazy rambling house out Foxall Road, was austere and upright, thought the world had gone definitely to hell and didn’t approve of lip stick and young people drinking. Just how it happened that he did approve of the idea of Mac’s marrying Lowell, when he didn’t approve of at least one-half the things Lowell does, is something that’s always defeated me. However, that’s the way it was. Oddly enough, Lowell and Mac were all for it too, really. The only person who seemed undecided about it had been Randall Nash—not seriously opposed, I think, but certainly not wildly enthusiastic about it. At least not when he’d talked to me in the Spring before I went away.
But that was all beside the point. What concerned me about Angus James McClean as Molly closed the door and left me alone was that with his devotion to Marie Nash and Randall and their daughter Lowell he combined a strong dislike—or mistrust, or suspicion, or more probably a little of all three— for Randall Nash’s second wife. Since Iris had come to the house in Beall Street A. J. had come only when he had to, and then usually when he knew she’d be away. It seemed to me, just off-hand, that nothing would please him more, probably, than to have his worst fears realized so… and that Lowell Nash, knowing that, was hitting definitely below the belt.
I moved my tray off my lap to the foot of the bed and got up. I’d told Molly I’d talk to Lowell, and while I didn’t look forward to it with joy, I knew somebody had to do it. I slipped on the green quilted satin robe Iris had given me, took a deep breath, went out into the silent hall and down to Lowell’s door, knocked and went in.
She was curled up in a wretched sullen ball on an Empire chaise longue, her breakfast tray untouched on the floor beside her. The morning paper was spread out on top of it. She looked up at me. There was no trace of tears in her dark thick-fringed eyes or in the last night’s makeup still on her face. And that was going to make it harder, I saw at once. If she ever really had a soft edge to her valiant little spirit no one could guess it.
I sat down at her feet. I saw the guarded look come into her eyes that should have told me I was about to waste an awful lot of breath.
“Lowell,” I said. I must have sounded insufferably stuffy to her. “There are a lot of ways of fighting… and some of them aren’t very sporting.”
“Was it very sporting to poison a helpless dog—or my father?” she said bitterly.
“Listen, darling. Until you know your father was poisoned it’s stupid to say that.”
“I do know he was poisoned.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. That’s all.”
“Listen, Lowell,” I said. “If he was poisoned, it means he was murdered. Do you seriously believe, honestly, in your heart, that Iris murdered him?”
Her lips closed in a tight red line to keep from quivering. Her dark eyes faltered ever so imperceptibly. Then she nodded her head stubbornly.
“Nobody else would want to,” she said dully.
“Why do you think she did want to?”
“She hates all of us—she wants to marry Gilbert St. Martin.”
I caught my breath for an instant.
“Isn’t divorce the more usual procedure, in that event?”
She flushed. “Father wouldn’t divorce her. Edith St. Martin tried to get him to, but he wouldn’t.”
I tried not to gape like an idiot.
“What are you talking about!” I exclaimed, in spite of myself.
“That’s right. And maybe I’m old-fashioned…”
My heart sank. That was Marie Nash’s opening gambit every time she set in to flay the hide off some poor woman who’d done anything from drinking a cocktail to hijacking somebody else’s marriage. I had the upsetting feeling that I was seeing an exhibition of dual personality, or some unearthly terrifying survival—looking at Lowell, hearing her mother.
“… She’s always with Gilbert St. Martin. And—”
I interrupted her.
“You’re not being old-fashioned, Lowell. You’re being unintelligent. You’re certainly not going to tell me that when you marry Mac you couldn’t go out to lunch with Steve Donaldson, say, without planning to murder Mac—”
“I’m not going to marry Mac.”
I stared again.
“Did you tell A. J. that?”
That was a mistake. Her cheeks flushed hotly. “So my phone calls are tapped! And this morning I woke up early and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, and I found a note saying ‘Please don’t take Miss Lowell the morning paper.’—She thinks she can make it so unbearable here that I’ll go live with my mother. I’ll just show her.”
My heart sank. I stared at her, speechless. She picked up the paper.
“I’ll just show her.”
Then I saw her whole body tense and her lips part suddenly. She was staring at the paper with wide incredulous eyes. I looked down at it. On the back page was a picture of her mother. It was quite a long “Flash.”
“Well-known Divorcee Dies Here. Socially Prominent Figure in Depression. Divorcee Succumbs to Pneumonia at Emergency Hospital.”
I’ve never known how much Marie Nash meant to her daughter, and I didn’t find out now. Just then Molly tapped on the door. I opened it.
“Mrs. Nash says to tell Miss Lowell that Mr. Angus is downstairs.”
Lowell got up. What little color there had been in her face before was gone. I watched her dress with slow automatic movements and slash a bright lip stick across her lips. At the door she stopped.
“Did she know my mother was dead?” she asked slowly.
I nodded. “Last night, when you were asleep. That’s why she told them not to bring you the paper.”
Anybody could have seen that. Anybody but Lowell in her present state.
“Wanted the pleasure of telling me herself, I guess,” she said coldly, and went out.
I simply put my head in my hands and sat there, completely and utterly mute, thanking the Lord my offspring were distressingly dull, normal, uncomplicated boys. I believe anything anybody tells me now about adolescent girls, no matter how completely unbelievable it sounds.
It occurred to me then, as soon as I could think, that I was supposed to call Belden Doyle. I went back to my room and put in a call. Colonel Primrose had spoken to him; he would come about ten. I got dressed and went down stairs. Angus had gone, taking Lowell with him.
“He’s terribly cut up, poor kid,” Iris said. She had on a dark brown frock, high at the throat, with long tight sleeves— she never wore black—and looked surprisingly fresh considering the ordeal she must have been through with Angus and Lowell.
“I called Mr. Doyle, he’ll be here at ten,” I said. “I’m going home. I’ll be back.”
“I wish you’d stay until after Mr. McClean comes,” she said.
I was hesitating when the doorbell rang.
“That’s him now, probably.”
She
took a deep breath and waited, as Wilkins announced him with the slightly oleaginous air that is what makes it so difficult for strangers in Washington to tell the butler from a second-term Congressman.
A. J. McClean is a neat, precise, dry man in the late fifties, I suppose, not quite middle height, bald except for a fringe of gray hair under his hat line. A pair of rimless nose glasses pinched into his straight thin nose have made two deep perpendicular lines between his grey eyebrows and given him a severe schoolmasterish air that his thin lips accentuate. He greeted me with a formal bow—I’ve known him fairly well a long time—and shook hands with Iris, who can scarcely know him at all. I suppose he felt Randall’s death, no doubt, but he’s definitely the kind of a man who would be still more troubled by the circumstances of it. It gave him an odd appearance now of taking the fact of death quite for granted.
“I have come in the spirit of friendship, Mrs. Nash,” he said simply. Knowing as I did what young Lowell had been giving him not an hour before, I couldn’t help but be slightly skeptical about that. I knew, however, that he has the name of being most definitely a man of his word.
“I have every faith that the autopsy will prove our present fears to be quite groundless,” he went on earnestly. “Randall has been warned repeatedly that he can’t drink. His system wouldn’t stand it. When he came to my house last night I tried to reason with him.”
Iris looked up. “Did he come to your house?”
“Yes. He came there shortly after ten-thirty o’clock. He telephoned you from there.”
She nodded.
“I… I have been to Marie’s. Angus and Lowell are there.”
He paused, as if approaching a difficult situation.
“I would like to suggest, Mrs. Nash—and I hope you won’t think it premature, so to speak…”
He came to a stop, and began again.
“It’s about Lowell. I think she’s taking this much harder than any of us realize… coming together this way, of course. I’m sure both her father and mother would approve of my idea.”
