“Well, I won’t!” she assured him. “I never met the poor man who got killed. And of course it happened a long time ago, when I was only a little girl. But I’ve never forgotten that part about the plate and the big silver jug!”
Here Jeff glanced at Dave, who refused to meet his eye. Instead Dave glanced into the room behind them. Whatever he may have been feeling, he did not forget his manners.
“I apologize for the informality and the dressing-gowns, Kate. Still, no use standing out here, is there? Care to join us in a drink?”
For a moment Kate Keith seemed badly upset.
“I’d love to, honey, as you know very well! But I was only walking to make me sleepy; it’ll be all right now. So I’d better not; truly I’d better not!” After one last twist at a button on Dave’s pajama-coat, she stood back, her eyes never leaving his face. “I need more sleep than some people, unless I find better pursuits to keep me occupied. Good night, good night, good night!”
Away she went, heels rapping, forward along the texas deck. Dave continued to watch the retreating back of the lissome, soignée widow who left so little doubt of what motivated her. Jeff, drawing back into the doorway, also watched until Mrs. Keith, so far towards the bow as to have become invisible, opened some very distant door, beyond which a small lamp glimmered, and slid herself inside.
“What stateroom would that be, Dave?”
“It’s not a stateroom at all; it’s one entrance to the texas lounge. Somebody’s left a light on. Well …”
They both re-entered Dave’s room. Dave closed the door and then shook his fist in the air.
“‘Po’ li’l me!’” he mocked savagely. “Po’ li’l this, po’ li’l that! What about the po’ bastard who hears her?”
“Kate Keith,” Jeff was musing. “K.K. There ought to be a third initial, oughtn’t there?”
“There is. Her maiden name was Kettering, if you can imagine her as maiden in anything.”
“She’s got designs on you, obviously.”
“Kate’s got designs on any male currently available. She may be alone now, but she won’t be alone for long. She makes this trip as regularly as the river gamblers did in my grandfather’s time. Damn her, Jeff! Damn her to hell and back!”
“Easy, Dave. She’s a very attractive woman.”
“Oh, Kate’s attractive. And she’s got all the right skills, if only she’d keep from talking. But the variety of things she wants, and how often she wants ’em … !”
“Since when did you start preaching sermons?”
Dave seemed to struggle within himself.
“I don’t want to sound like a Christer, which I’m not. I couldn’t preach sermons if I wanted to. There’s a gal in my own life, as there usually is. It doesn’t seem to affect many of us; it does affect me. When I think of something I oughtn’t to do …”
“That doesn’t prevent you from doing what you oughtn’t to do; it just prevents you from enjoying it?”
“My damn guilty conscience is all over me! Yes, there’s a gal on my mind right now. But, though I mustn’t sound like Kate either, I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Never mind.” Jeff soothed him. “This slight family acquaintance, Thad Somebody …”
“Thad Peters, of Danforth & Co., Baton Rouge.”
“Thad Peters, of Baton Rouge, the one who fell downstairs and broke his neck. Do you mind talking about him?”
“No; is there any reason I should mind?”
“That’s the point, Dave. Since it happened seventeen years ago, or almost seventeen years ago, why does it affect you now?”
“It doesn’t, as a rule. I haven’t even thought about it in years. Recently, though, I remembered some peculiar circumstances that didn’t become generally known at the time …”
“Peculiar circumstances? You never passed ’em along to me.”
“No, you bet I didn’t! I was told to keep my mouth shut or lose my allowance.”
“They made us shut up about everything in those days. Anyway, what’s all this about a plate and a big silver jug?”
Dave, who seemed about to preach or at least to lecture, made illustrative gestures.
“That very large, ornamental silver water pitcher, with its silver tray. It used to be on the sideboard in our dining-room, which everybody calls the refectory. Remember the pitcher and tray?”
“I probably saw both, but didn’t notice. There was a lot of stuff on the sideboard. Here’s the problem, Dave. Is there anything so very peculiar about a guest falling on those stairs? The athletic Mr. Peters starts downstairs—in the middle of the night, if memory serves—he misses his footing …”
“No, Jeff; wrong again. He wasn’t on his way downstairs, you see. He’d been downstairs, and was on his way up again, when … Want to hear about it?”
“I’ve been waiting to hear.”
“It happened,” Dave began oracularly, “in November of 1910; the exact day doesn’t matter. I was away at school; Serena had been visiting Aunt Betsy upstate. Apart from servants, there was nobody in the house but Thad Peters and my parents. Oh, and old Ira Rutledge, who’d been spending the night, though he doesn’t count.
“At two o’clock in the morning they heard one hell of a metallic crash, which woke everybody up. The whole house was dark. They found Thad Peters, in sweater and sports flannels and tennis shoes, lying at the foot of the main staircase with his neck broken. He had a flashlight in his pocket, but doesn’t seem to have used it. The silver pitcher and the tray, both fairly weighty, lay some distance away where he’d dropped ’em.
“Well, why?” demanded Dave, squaring himself. “You see what he did and must have done. In the small hours he left his bedroom; he went downstairs. Didn’t I tell you the pitcher and the tray were kept in the refectory: nowhere else? For some unknown reason, carrying a massive empty pitcher on its tray, he had started upstairs when he came to grief. And echo still answers, why? Those are the real facts, though they didn’t get into the press or come out at the inquest.”
Jeff found his wits whirling.
“There was a police investigation,” he said, “but the evidence didn’t get into the press or come out at the inquest?”
“For one thing, both the District Attorney and the coroner were family friends.”
“Still, even if they were both playing favorites …?”
Backed against the dressing-table, Dave again sighted along his pointing forefinger.
“Incredible as this may sound, they weren’t playing favorites or hushing it up. The whole business was handled by a capable police detective, Lieutenant Trowbridge, who afterwards made his name with some affair out at Bayou St. John. He’s retired now. In the case of Thad Peters, clearly an accident, the D.A. didn’t think any good purpose would be served by too much publicity. They had reached the worst possible impasse.”
“Oh?”
“They had found the truth, but the truth made no sense. It’s as though something on those stairs grabbed the victim and threw him down.”
“That won’t do,” Jeff retorted, “and you know it won’t.”
“But—!”
“You can’t be suggesting some malevolent force or presence on the stairs? I don’t believe that; you don’t believe it either. In fact, Dave,” he held his companion’s gaze, “it’s something else, isn’t it? There’s something else behind all this, isn’t there, that’s really been worrying you for so long?”
“Maybe there is. I thought I could tell you and get it off my chest, but some matters aren’t easy even to approach. If I do tell you, it’ll have to be by easy degrees. God knows I’ve got my reasons! Then, too, there’s Serena.”
“Serena? What about her?”
“I said in my letter, I think, that the Ice Maiden’s had her moments of brooding. Listen, Jeff. If I tell you something in strictest confidence, you won’t tell Serena you know?”
“No; I’ll respect your confidence.”
“Visiting Helen Westerby
, was she?” demanded Dave. “Helen used to live just outside Cincinnati; her husband’s a big noise in some big manufacturing firm. Just less than a year ago he was transferred to Jacksonville, Florida. Whoever Serena’s been seeing up north, it can’t have been Helen. Who was it?”
“Any ideas?”
“None at all; that’s part of the confidential information.” Dave hesitated. “I can’t help knowing, Jeff, she’s always had the reputation of being a teaser, or something very much like a teaser. You’re supposed to biff any man in the eye, aren’t you, if he suggests that about your sister? But I’ve got a pretty shrewd idea it’s true, or has been true in the past. I don’t think it’s true now. I think she’s got a boy friend, and has fallen hard at last. Who the hell he could be is another question. This fellow Saylor you mentioned …?”
“Possibly, Dave, though that didn’t seem to be the atmosphere. If Serena does have a boy friend, anything or anybody is possible. He may be Saylor; he may be the Prince of Wales or Douglas Fairbanks or Joe the Dog-Catcher. Is there any earthly reason she shouldn’t have a boy friend?”
“No, of course not! But what’s worrying her so much?”
“Well, what’s worrying you?”
Whereupon Dave the mercurial seemed suddenly to alter his mood.
“Do you know, Jeff,” he burst out, “this unrelieved gloom of ours is the worst possible medicine we could take. If all the news from my camp is depressing, can’t we see any hope from yours? Are you going to find New Orleans dull after Paris? Or are you looking forward, just a little, to revisiting glimpses of the moon? Don’t you ever think about any of the gang you used to know?”
Jeff tried to catch at the same mood.
“As a matter of fact, Dave, only tonight I thought about little Penny Lynn. Penny was always such a charmer, though, that she must have married years ago.”
“Wrong for the umpteenth time, me bucko! She’s still there, and still unattached; won’t listen to any of her suitors. Serena thinks Penny’s carrying a torch for you. Do you understand what I mean by carrying a torch?”
“Yes, I understand. But I can’t think of anything less likely.”
“Why so unlikely?”
“I have seen Penny only three times in my life. Two of those occasions were disastrous.”
“Disastrous, eh?”
“By a couple of sheer accidents, one of them not even remotely my fault, she became convinced I only wanted to embarrass her in the worst possible way. It wasn’t true, naturally; I was as embarrassed as she was, or more so. But I couldn’t persuade her of that; I couldn’t even get past her parents to see her.”
Dave left the dressing-table and sat down in the chair he had previously occupied.
“Got any objection to telling me?”
Jeff had met Penny, as he tried to explain, during the Christmas vacation when he was seventeen, and the Lynns had just moved to New Orleans from Kentucky. There had been a very formal, heavily chaperoned dance at the home of old Madame de Saure. An image of Penny returned to him from the past: the fleecy yellow-brown hair, the gray-blue eyes vivid in so pretty a face, the whole concentration of femininity.
“She’s younger than I, and seemed very young, but so mature of face and figure she couldn’t have escaped notice. She wore a foamy, frilly evening-gown, lilac-colored, that there’s some cause to remember. We were getting along at a great rate; I thought I’d lost my heart and had begun to lose my head.
“As we finished about our tenth dance, I failed to notice my left foot—part of it, anyway—was on the hem of her gown. The music stopped. Penny jumped back to applaud the orchestra. Her gown split wide open from neckline to waist, and was yanked off her bodily. She had on underwear, of course; they all did in those days. But it left her in her underwear before the whole ballroom. Penny didn’t say anything. For a second she just stood there, paralyzed, then burst into tears and ran off the floor.
“Well, that was bad enough. The other occasion …”
“Yes, I do seem to have heard something about your second meeting. Tried to undress her again, didn’t you?”
“No, of course not! And it isn’t so very funny, Dave.”
“I know; sorry if I started to laugh. That sort of thing is funny only when it happens to somebody else. What’s the truth of the matter?”
Their next encounter had been harmless, and had occurred during the Christmas vacation two years later. Staying at Uncle Gil’s because the family home had been sold, Jeff was crossing Lee Circle one afternoon when Penny and her father had driven past in the letter’s Pierce Arrow. Penny had raised her hand in recognition, giving an uncertain half smile; even her old man condescended to nod. Judging himself forgiven, the culprit had telephoned and requested her company at some function the next week.
“It was a big do at the St. Charles Hotel. This episode also concerns a staircase, though not tragically except to dignity. I mean those broad, high stairs in the lobby of the St. Charles, from the lobby to the mezzanine floor. They used to be covered with thick, smooth red carpet …”
“They still are. Well?”
“Penny and I had been in one of the rooms on the mezzanine floor, and had started downstairs. I didn’t jostle her; I didn’t so much as touch her, in spite of what they said afterwards. She was walking rather fast, and she slipped. All of a sudden, before I could catch her, she pitched straight forward and rolled. It may have been something on the stairs; it may have been something in her corsage. This time her gown, a silvery-tissue sort of thing, ripped apart from corsage to hem. She scrambled up too quickly afterwards, before she realized it wasn’t only her dress she’d begun to lose. The underwear was torn too, and fell off down to the waist. Penny caught the underwear before it had slipped below her waist, but it did fall that far. And there weren’t many people in the lobby, but they did include her mother.
“Penny cried out: ‘What’ll you do to me next time, not that there’ll ever be a next time? Strip me completely?’ That was all, except for the uproar. Again she burst into tears and ran. Yes, the woes of adolescence are always supposed to be funny. But if you laugh I’ll break your neck!”
“I wasn’t laughing, Jeff,” Dave assured him. “You say you couldn’t smooth her down?”
“Not then; not afterwards. She wouldn’t see me again. When I did reach her by phone, her old man intervened and cut us off. I tried again later, but her mother broke it up with the same tactics. I tried several times, once when I could feel reasonably sure both parents were absent, and Penny sent word by the maid that there was nothing she cared to discuss. The psychiatrists, our modern witch doctors, might say she’d been through a traumatic experience. Probably she still holds it against me.”
“After all the time that’s elapsed?” scoffed Dave. “Don’t you believe it, son. Don’t you believe one word of it!”
“What do you know about the business?”
“Nothing, but I know women. Penny’s much too good-natured to have remembered for long. And if she is carrying the torch, as I suspect, she won’t really care what you did then or what you may do in the future. Anything else I can explain for you?”
“Yes. You can explain what’s worrying both you and Serena.”
A deep, hoarse blast of the steamboat’s whistle went vibrating up. And at that moment Serena Hobart herself, in the dark semi-formal dress she had worn at dinner, opened the door and entered from the deck.
“Really, Dave—” she began with strong disapproval.
The whole emotional atmosphere had altered. Dave sprang up, instantly defensive.
“It’s all right, Serena! I haven’t said one word of what mustn’t be said!”
“That’s a relief, if I can trust you. There’s at least one matter,” and a glance passed between them, “that must never be touched on or so much as hinted at, no matter how curious your friends may be. When I learned you were favoring us with your presence …”
“All right, all right! Sit down and make yourself co
mfortable, then. How’d you know where to find me?”
Blonde Serena, as poised as a Michael Arlen heroine, allowed herself to be installed in Dave’s armchair, and regarded him with pitying indulgence while he prowled and fussed.
“Not long ago,” she said, “I was sitting by myself in the texas lounge, thinking of this and that, when who should walk in but Kate Keith. I hadn’t seen her at lunch or dinner; apparently Kate hadn’t seen me, though she’d hardly have missed you. She said you were here, among other things.” Serena lifted one shoulder. “Of course I had to pretend I knew it all along, and knew what you were doing in this part of the world. Incidentally, Dave, just where have you been?”
“I went to consult the expert, that’s all! Then, since neither of us need be home much before May 1st, this seemed easily the most pleasant way to travel.”
“Pleasant, Dave? I’d have said so too, until this morning. Now I’m not at all sure.” Serena’s cool smile swept round. “Jeff here is something of a privileged character, let’s admit, but he mustn’t carry it too far. Still feeling so insatiably curious, Jeff?”
“I am curious,” Jeff retorted, “because I have been given considerable reason to feel curious.”
“Oh, really? What particular reason, for instance?”
Jeff looked at her.
“First Ira Rutledge writes me a letter, saying he wants to see me in New Orleans about some delicate situation (unstated) involving me and one other person (unnamed) outside the Hobart family. Then Dave writes in the same vein, but with more urgency, insisting I’ve got to be there because it’s so very important. The nature of this situation, or how it can concern one other non-relative besides myself, is never so much as indicated. Finally, what mystic significance attaches to the date of May 1st?”
“May 1st, Jeff?”
“Ira mentioned some date before the end of April. Dave specifically said May 1st, which he’s just quoted again. In short, what’s it all about and why May 1st?”
Dave whirled towards him, fuming.
“Now listen, Sabatini—!”
“The Hobart sense of humor,” Jeff pointed out, “is never long in abeyance. You called me Sabatini in the letter, if you remember. Earlier tonight, Dave, Serena herself muttered a name that sounded like ‘Merriman.’ She didn’t seem to be looking at me, but I’ve got a feeling she meant the late Henry Seton Merriman. If you both find endless amusement in christening me with the name of some comparatively recent historical novelist, alive or dead, you might vary the list. There’s Stanley Weyman, there’s Charles Major …”
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