I said, “So it looks as if I wasted the liquor.”
Jud did not seem amused. He said, “Keep your eyes open tonight, Addy. You may have a good time scooping the big papers on Delhart’s next wife.”
IV
IT WAS NEARLY nine o’clock when Nellie and I galloped over the bridge. Twilight was just giving way to full dark so that Nellie’s wobbly headlights made a respectable looking yellow tunnel along the tree lined road.
I was glad for the comforting sounds from my old car. I was afraid of the forest at night; I knew many normal people to whom it gave a claustrophobic feeling. The formlessness of the thick-trunked trees and the endless tangle of underbrush was terribly oppressive. I thought about it particularly tonight. The way the long, dark branches of the big firs reached out over the road gave me a shivery feeling.
It was a relief to turn from the road onto the very smoothly gravelled driveway that wound around, looped back on itself, and finally ended in a floodlighted area way before Carson Delhart’s “cabin.”
He called it that but it was really a two-story log house complete with balconies overlooking two lovely ponds, and a big veranda that offered a view of the forest and his prize flower beds, filled with almost every rose ever invented.
I had visited here before, to see Mrs. Larson who was the cook when Delhart stayed in the country. Her husband, whom everyone called Big Swede, was the gardner and watchdog of the estate. And their son, Tim, improperly called Little Swede despite his six-feet three inches, acted as Delhart’s chauffeur. I had gone to school with Little Swede and we had enlisted in the service together. The Larsons were particular friends of mine but they could be of no help now. This was the first time I had entered the lion’s den when the lion was in residence. And despite my cocksureness of the afternoon, I was not feeling too good about it.
Delhart was smart and he was not giving me this interview simply to help me forget the scene of the afternoon. I did not like the man, remembering his firm grip on my arm and the way he had looked down at me.
The floodlight was very harsh and bright, throwing a cold, chiselled glare over the flower beds and the trees that lined the driveway and, in some cases, pressed almost against the second story of the house. I parked Nellie directly in front of the veranda steps, hopped out, and hurried to the front door. I could hear nothing from inside, no muted talking, no sounds from a radio, none of the normal noises one expects from a houseful of guests. I rapped hard on the door, using a fancy brass knocker that had been cast in the shape of a crouching bear.
In less than a minute I heard footsteps. Then the door opened. The man who faced me gave the impression of shortness of stature and complete lack of color. He was quite young, in his early thirties, I judged, with sleekly plastered and dull brown hair, very thin and precise-looking lips, and brown eyes as dull as his hair. I had seen him before at a distance. This was Potter Hilton, Delhart’s secretary. He was the owner of the trained voice I had heard over the telephone.
“I’m Miss O’Hara.”
“Yes,” he said. He stepped aside. I smoothed my full skirt and went into the hallway. It was beautifully finished, the walls being the planed down side of the original logs and varnished to a lovely glow. It made me glad I had lived up to the place by wearing my best black and white dress rather than the slack suit I had originally chosen.
Hilton was about my height but he was very short legged and long trunked, giving him an odd appearance from the rear. I followed him, fascinated by the sight he presented. But I forgot my amusement when he opened a door and ushered me into the Delhart idea of a rough and ready living room.
It was as nice, in its way, as the hall. The walls were of knotty pine and decorated with electric lights made to look like kerosene lamps. They were of burnished copper. Assorted hunting trophies hung above the two fireplaces and thick bearskins were scattered on the floor.
The room’s occupants weren’t appreciating the decoration at all. Even I, entering cold and practically a stranger, could see that. There were four of them, two seated and two standing by a portable bar near French doors at the far side. The one thing they seemed to have in common was silence. None of them was Carson Delhart.
I looked inquiringly at Hilton. “Isn’t Mr. Delhart here?”
“He’ll be in shortly,” Hilton said in his precise voice. He drew me toward the long, low, and luxurious couch. “Have you met …”
I admitted I knew Mr. Willow and was introduced to his wife. Mrs. Edna Willow reminded me of a butter tub. She was brown-haired with the hair in little sausage curls that popped out all over her head. She was so sweetly smiling I distrusted her on sight. She didn’t burble, she didn’t say anything. She just smiled like an overdose of saccharin. Titus Willow added his beam to hers. He was still pink and pudgy and done neatly in flannels this evening.
At least, I thought, I seem to be a ray of sunshine. I bounced after Hilton who had me delicately by the arm and was steering me across a dangerous stretch of hardwood floor toward the couple by the bar.
Daisy Willow was watching Arthur Frew nurse a drink. They both agreed to meet me. Daisy much more gracefully. She smiled as her parents had, too sweetly. Frew has a steady, glum look as if it were a habit. He was about my age, a few years older than Daisy, a thin, pale boy with what looked like a perpetual droop to his underlip. He sucked at his highball and grunted at me.
Daisy was in yellow slacks that set off her almost black hair. She was small, but well padded in the correct places. She gave promise of her mother’s bulk in another twenty years and I decided I preferred to look at her under water. She had a rather cute face, on the pert side, and when she looked at me she blushed all over again.
“Oh, you’re the reporter!”
“More or less,” I admitted.
“I’ve always wanted to meet a newspaper woman.”
As if her father hadn’t seen to it that she was surrounded by them—on their way to interviewing Titus, of course. “But not like you did this afternoon,” I said.
Daisy blushed again. “Oh, it wasn’t that—I mean it didn’t look like—it—”
“Nuts,” said Arthur Frew. He went back to his drink.
There was a moment’s silence. I glanced back toward the divan. Both the Willows were sitting glumly, Titus staring at the floor and his wife idly pushing a knitting needle in and out of a ball of pink yarn. She looked up and saw me watching and put on her smile until I turned my head away.
Smile or no smile, I could feel the full weight of the tension in the room. The silence was of the kind that begins as an uncomfortable lapse in conversation and grows into something embarrassing. Only, instead of being embarrassing, I felt this silence was malevolent. It was a heavy, alive thing, like shrouds enveloping each of us separately. I felt like shivering. I wanted to say something, or have someone else say something. Anything.
I turned toward Daisy Willow, hunting for a conversational opening. She was looking at Arthur Frew. And in her large, dark eyes was worry. I had seen it before, overseas. It was the worry of fear. The child was frightened. Of young Frew or for him. I couldn’t know. But despite the blank “company” look on her face there was no masking her eyes.
I turned away from her. Frew kept his eyes on his drink. His sullenness told me nothing; I suspected it was his natural expression.
Hilton made a motion with his hands, “Can I offer you a drink, Miss O’Hara?”
He had torn the silence and I was grateful to him. I said, too gushingly, “Yes, please!”
He went to the bar, and when Frew made no attempt to move, gently and quite firmly shouldered him aside. Frew sidled two steps without lifting his eyes. Hilton seemed unaware of the rude young man. He said to me, “Soda or ginger ale?”
“Soda,” I told him. I watched him mix the drink. His hands were short and strong looking, with broad, spatulate fingers; and he handled the liquor and mix in a decisive way. It was a funny way for me to think of it, I know, but it seemed to
fit my impression of Hilton. His movements were as precise as his speech, and he achieved his purpose as deftly.
He mixed two highballs and handed one to me. “Mr. Delhart is inspecting the fish. He should be in soon now.”
Stupidly, I said, “What fish?”
Mrs. Willow came sweetly to life and stopped stabbing her ball of yarn with the knitting needle. “Oh, don’t you know about the fish farm? It will make a lovely story for your paper.”
A lovely story! “I haven’t heard a thing,” I admitted.
“It’s awfully interesting,” Daisy gushed at me.
Frew grunted something to the bottom of his glass and turned to mix himself another drink. Pink Titus Willow was bobbing his head. In agreement with the sentiments of the family, I presumed.
I blessed the fish farm, whatever it might be. It had, at least, livened up the party. Hilton began to explain it to me.
“You’ve seen the ponds, Miss O’Hara?” I said I had. He said, “Mr. Delhart has been reading about fish farming and I suggested that he might conduct an experiment and if it proved successful here in Oregon other local people could take it up. Naturally, it’s only a hobby with Mr. Delhart, but farmers can find it quite a source of extra income.”
He gilded Delhart in such a lovely, academic way. I smiled my interest and sipped at my drink.
Hilton went on: “Mr. Delhart rebuilt the two ponds. He threw a small dam across the creek that joins them so they are entirely independent of one another. There’s a screened outlet in the pond close to the house and it drains into the lower pond whenever the water level rises too high. Then he put a good-sized concrete dam at the far end of the lower pond and fixed it so that the overflow drains into the little creek that leads from it to the river below.”
I had a rather good picture of the set-up in my mind. I had seen the ponds before. They were fed by a spring near the house and before Delhart had fixed them were tree-cluttered swampy spots. He had had the trees removed and the depressions deepened. A narrow neck connected the two ponds, draining the water from one into the other. He had thrown a very ornate bridge of unpeeled poles across at this point. Below, the lower pond had a rather steep-sided, brushy ravine that ran about fifty feet from the dam into the Teneskium. When I had seen it, the dam was an earth fill.
I nursed my drink and listened to Hilton pour out statistics. My memory had held mazes of such material before and I knew I would have no trouble holding onto this information. At the same time, I watched the Willow family nod judicially or smile sweetly here and there during Hilton’s recital.
When Hilton stopped, Daisy squealed, “It’s such fun to fish in the ponds. The trout and bass simply snap at my hook. Arthur caught a beauty yesterday. Didn’t you, Arthur?”
Frew looked up and grunted again. He broke down long enough to say, “Four pound bass. Good fighter too.”
I said, “It’s very interesting.” I looked straight at Hilton. “Was this the story Mr. Delhart had for me?”
I had said the wrong thing. The fish farming had kept the group free of that oppressive silence that was so noticeable. But as soon as I spoke I could feel it coming down again, thick and heavy. I wanted to kick myself.
Hilton said briefly, “No.”
He might have said more but at that moment we heard a door slam loudly somewhere toward the rear of the house. Hilton and Willow got to their feet quickly, looking at one another in a startled, “What is it now?” fashion.
Someone was running. Another door banged. And then Glory Martin was at the entrance to the living room. She stood there in the doorway, staring at us and panting, her lovely mouth sagging. She wore the black slack suit; water dripped from it and from her face and hair and off the tips of her fingers into little puddles on the polished hardwood of the floor.
She was shaking. Her whole body shook so violently that it made her head wobble and caused her lower lip to quiver in a terrible way. She wasn’t drunk. I could see that. She was sober. Shocked, icily sober. She opened her mouth wider and her breath rattled in her throat.
“He’s dead!” she shrieked. She took a step toward us. No one moved. There was no sound but the ringing echo of Glory’s voice. “He’s dead! Oh, God!”
V
I HEARD A CHOKED sound beside me. It was Mrs. Willow. As I turned toward her she made a grab at the air with her puffy little hands and fell back on the davenport in a neat faint.
Titus said, “Edna!” But none of us made a move toward her because at that moment Glory Martin went into hysterics. She began to scream incoherently and we all made a rush for her. All, that is, but young Frew. From the corner of my eye I saw him make a step toward us and then retreat to take his stand by the bar again.
It was a jerky, unreal scene as if we were a bunch of poorly handled marionettes. Everyone got in everyone else’s way. Hilton, his mouth a straight, hard line, had to push tubby Titus aside to get at Glory. Hilton was no taller than she but he handled her as effectively as if he were a good six feet. He simply reached up and slapped her. His hand made a loud, cracking sound over Titus Willow’s loud breathing and Daisy’s bewildered sobbing. Glory’s terrible screams stopped as if Hilton had pushed a gag into her mouth. The wildness went out of her eyes and color rushed into her deathly pale face.
She gasped, “You …” and crumpled. Hilton was there to catch her. He carried her easily and put her on the davenport, his movements as gentle and sure as a doctor’s. Willow began to flutter close by again and Hilton said:
“Attend to Mrs. Willow, please.”
I had been standing aside, letting Hilton handle Glory. And now I steered Daisy to a chair and pushed her into it. She was crying in that bewildered way as if the whole thing were just too much for her to cope with. I said, “Mr. Frew, come here.” I turned my head and looked at him. He made no move toward me. I remembered my training as a sergeant. “Damn it, stop that guzzling and help this girl!”
Frew came, his mouth open in surprise. I moved away from Daisy toward Hilton and Glory. He was rubbing her wrists. He had a cushion under her so that her head was lower than the rest of her body. He still looked grimly efficient but there was a softness around his austere mouth that puzzled me. His touch was deft and extremely gentle. But Glory showed no signs of reacting.
I said, “That’s not the way for her.” Hilton did not even glance at me, so I crossed the room to the bar, took the first bottle handy, and went back. Titus Willow had his wife revived and she was sitting, pale and unsmiling, looking ill.
I uncapped the bottle and moved it in the direction of Glory’s lips. Hilton gave me a venomous look. “She doesn’t need …” He got no further. Glory’s eyes opened. She struggled up, the wildness in her eyes again. I stepped back as her swinging hand hit the bottle and nearly spilled it. Hilton put his hands on her shoulders and she fought weakly against him.
“I saw him!” she screamed. “I saw him.” Her eyes were huge and terrible, her face all contorted with whatever memory was driving her. “He was sprawled on the dam with his feet in the water. Sprawled all crazy like he didn’t have any bones!”
Hilton let loose of her and simply stared. Mrs. Willow made choking sounds again. If she fainted I didn’t know it. I was too busy with Glory. When Hilton got away from her I stepped in and pushed the bottle at her. Dipsomania never had a more willing convert than that girl. She dropped her scream to a gasping sound, put her hands on the bottle, and with my help took a big drink. She lay back then, shuddering. Hilton pushed me away, not too gently.
I stood back and looked down at her. Ice and silver, I had always thought of her. Now she looked more like shattered glass.
Hilton touched her. She began to tremble and mumble and jerk her head weirdly. He said to me, “All right, give it to me.” I passed over the bottle. By now I had noticed it was bourbon, good bonded stuff. I was relieved to get rid of it.
Glory took another drink, and then another. With each lowering of the level in the bottle Hilton’s face gre
w grimmer. But she was quieting. And inside of minutes she was relaxed and apparently asleep. I looked away.
Daisy was quieted too. She was still crying, but she had her face buried in her father’s shoulder. Mrs. Willow was stroking her head and making soothing noises, though of the two she looked the worse for wear. Titus Willow simply looked sick. Frew had gone back to the bar, evidently feeling he had discharged his duty. He offered me a morose glare.
When Hilton straightened from Glory, leaving her limp and quiet on the davenport, I could feel the tension clouding the room again. The necessity for action had left room for no thought beyond immediate movement. Now it was as if a gusty wind had died, leaving heavy stillness like a brooding thunderstorm. I could see the fear again, and now I could feel it beat against me.
No one had inquired the identity of Glory’s “him.” There was no necessity. It was obvious that everyone had the same answer.
Hilton took a deep breath. “We’d better go see,” he said.
He headed for the door and I followed him. He crossed the hallway and went into a study. It was a large, book-lined room done in the same way as the hall. There were a number of chairs upholstered in pale leather and I simply crumpled into one. I stared blankly at French windows across the room, watching the light that came in through the door reflect from their panes. Hilton went to a desk, one of two against the rear wall, and picked up a telephone.
In a moment, he said, “Larson? You and Tim go down to the dam. Mr. Delhart is hurt. Hurry it.” He cradled the phone and raised his head, looking at me. “Do you think …”
Give Up the Body Page 3
