“I don’t think so, dear. I don’t think they are at all intimate, even if they are sisters. They’re too different, I think. But, on the other hand, Carol is awfully indiscreet.” I mopped my brow, and wondered how Patrick could keep looking so cool. Well, maybe it was because he could think when relaxed. Not me, I twisted my face, and sat taut. I squirmed all over when thinking, and got warmer every minute. “Pat, do you think we could postpone the date with Aunt Rita to look at the house? Three o’clock is the hottest time of day, and the house will be darkened all over and everybody will be taking siestas, and...”
“Aunt Rita herself set the time, dear. Perhaps she is anxious to get it over with. She is worried on Roger’s account, as you know. I hope it isn’t a flop.”
“Listen, do you think Jonas told the truth when he said his men didn’t come in this apartment? In that case, who took that book?”
“If I knew who took the book,” Patrick said, as he flicked an ash into the tray, “and could prove it, there might no longer be any mystery in the death of Helen Clary.”
There was a short moment of silence.
“No,” he said then. “I’m not that good.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Whoever hit me with the book would have the book on his mind. Perhaps he saw you take it. He would miss it from—from where you got it.” That was Roger Clary’s room. It was Roger’s book. Roger had seen the book here in this room. Everything, every single time, went right back to Roger. “Whoever took the book from this room must have been in the herb garden because we found those two dill seeds on the linoleum. The book was taken while we went with Jonas to see if the woman in the hospital was the nurse. The policemen were still searching the house at that time. When we came back we met Toby Wick looking entirely smug with a handful of mint. He got the mint in the herb garden. The dill seeds came from the herb garden.”
Patrick looked quizzical and unimpressed.
“Everybody goes through the herb garden, dear. Paulette haunts it. She was up here straightening up while you were in the drawing room. Aunt Rita is often in the herb garden. Aunt Dollie and Ava and Carol—any of them, because there is a little walk among the herbs which is part of the general walk around the garden. Uncle George. Roger. Hugo. You. I. The policemen. Any of them might have picked up the dill seeds on their shoes or clothes. The dills aren’t much, Jeanie.”
It was true.
“Anyway, most of those people would have no excuse to come up here, Pat. Aunt Dollie or Carol or Ava or Uncle George couldn’t be seen coming in here without explaining it, and they would have had a hard time slipping in here while we were out and there were still policemen all over the place. Not to mention the family. Toby specially could hardly come in the front door and come up here and go out again without attracting attention. I’m disappointed. I sort of counted on those dill seeds, dear.”
Patrick put out his cigarette. “Never mind. I’ve still got the chip off that blue bead.”
“You think that’s important?”
“It might be.”
He turned his face toward the door into the hall. As usual, he had heard the slight stir before I had.
The doorbell rang, sharply, suddenly. I was conscious of a feeling of having been listened to, spied on, as Patrick went to open it. The door was not very near us, but also we had not lowered our voices.
It was Carol Graham!
Carol said in a low, tense voice, from the doorway, “Aunt Rita asked me to remind you that you are to look over the house at three o’clock.”
“Thank you,” Patrick said. He stepped back, holding the door open. “Come in, won’t you, Carol?”
“I don’t want to come in,” Carol said. She looked stiff, angry, and very young. She still looked as if I made her sick.
“I want to talk to you,” Patrick said. He spoke very quietly. Carol, after a moment, gave her hands a small indignant flip, and came in. Patrick shut the door. “Come over and sit down,” he said. Carol walked to the entrance of the kitchenette and, continuing to avoid my glance, remained standing.
Patrick said, in a way that accused her of childishness and put her on the defensive, “If you’re behaving like an infant today because you think we informed on you and Roger last night, you’re being very silly, Carol.”
A slow flush went up Carol’s face, tinting her little ears, which looked charming under the thick brown hair pinned high for coolness. She was wearing a fresh pink frock with ruffles over the shoulders. Her pretty arms were bare.
She braced herself to go on being furious, but already her certainty was shaken.
“People who make dates over public telephones with switchboards shouldn’t be so quick to accuse,” Patrick said. “Besides, someone else may have seen you.” Carol shook her head. “What time did you leave your hospital last night?”
“I don’t see that...”
“Answer the question!” Patrick said. “And keep standing up if you like, but I’m going to sit down.” He turned a chair around and straddled it and folded his arms across the back.
Carol stood tall.
“If it hadn’t been for that—I mean, if we hadn’t been told on—the police would have had no real grounds for continuing to spy on Roger. And they’re doing it. There is one hanging around across the street, just as before...”
“We know that. I asked when you left your hospital last night?”
“At half-past eleven....”
“You waited a good while then, near the church?”
“No.”
“Oh—you went someplace else?”
Carol wriggled with annoyance. “What difference? I walked down Bourbon Street and when I got to the corner of St. Ann I looked in the corner window of Toby’s place and saw Ava sitting at a table by herself. So I went in and sat with her a while.”
“You told her you were meeting Roger?”
“I didn’t. Of course not!”
“What did you talk about?”
“Talk about? What possible difference...?”
“Answer the question, Carol.”
“We talked mostly about Toby, if you want to know. I didn’t talk much, because Ava was just babbling along about Toby and the crowd she was waiting for and so on, and—well, I’m ashamed to say it, but I sort of forgot myself and gave some advice.”
“Advice?”
“I told Ava that if she wouldn’t give herself away so with Toby she’d get places faster, and she blew up.”
“You made her mad? Well, she may have taken your advice.” Patrick waited. “She’s got Toby where she wants him today, Carol.” He had got that from me, but no difference.
Carol looked blank. “Oh, I don’t think what I suggested would work that soon. I think it will take time. I simply suggested that she play hard to get, which is Toby’s tactics, but really I don’t care about that, because it’s their business, after all. I guess I was in a dither. I was sorry at once that I made her cross. She got up and left me sitting alone at the table. The waiter came over and I had a coke and waited, thinking Ava would come back, but pretty soon I saw she wasn’t there. I thought she had left by another door so I paid for my drink and left and went to meet Roger.”
“Which way did you go?”
“I walked down Bourbon to Orleans and then went through Orleans Alley to the church, then in front of the Cabildo. Roger was already there. I was just arriving when you saw me.”
“You didn’t see Ava again?”
“She was at home when I got here,” Carol said. She drifted to a chair, and sat down. Patrick gave her a cigarette and lighted it. She hadn’t yet looked at me.
“What time was that?”
“I don’t know exactly. My room connects on one side with Aunt Rita’s and on the other with Ava’s. All the rooms in this house open into each other, you know. Toby had to have a door into the library and two into your hall shut off to make his apartment private. I stuck my head in both rooms and said good night. Aunt Rita answered, but Ava didn’t, bu
t I could see her in her bed and I thought she didn’t answer me because she was cross. I was sorry I had said anything. It was none of my business. I think Ava is much too fine for Toby, but that’s not my business, either, I guess.”
“It’s a pity you didn’t note the time.”
Carol thought about it. “Well, Roger and I weren’t together long. There was somebody talking, on your gallery...”
“That must have been Helen Clary,” I said to Patrick. “If Carol happened to come in just then I wouldn’t have noticed, even though she wasn’t quiet, because my attention was simply glued on Helen Clary. I suppose I was a little frightened.”
“Roger told me about that,” Carol said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry you think we told on you, Carol.”
“I’m sorry I was such a dope to think you did,” Carol said, and the suspicion she had held me in was gone, like that. “Anyway, I slipped right into bed and then—then—well, that was all.”
“Yes?” Patrick said.
Carol seemed rather distracted then. “It was such a queer night. First that haze, then the funny wind, and all. People walking—that was Helen, I suppose, or maybe I imagined it, or maybe it was the wind, which came up and started any loose shutters flapping, as always. People leave them unlatched, and that is what makes the noise. Usually I’m not bothered but last night I lay awake—but not all the time, because I was certainly asleep when Uncle George came in and said that Helen was dead and that I was needed.”
“Uncle George told you Helen was dead?” Patrick said. His diffidence denied the sudden green look in his long eyes.
Carol’s frank blue eyes lingered on him a moment and I had the feeling that she deliberately reneged when she said, “Oh, I don’t know if he said just that or not. Maybe it was an impression. I mean, with the nurse on the job you would naturally think the worst if you got waked up like that in the night.”
Patrick said quietly, “Would it have been something you wished had happened, Carol?”
Tears brimmed the blue eyes.
“How can you say such a thing?” Her voice was clouded. “But it is true. It was the first thing I thought of. But, believe me, I wasn’t thinking of myself at all. Don’t you realize that she lost her mind only a few weeks after she and Roger were married, and all this time she’s...”
“I don’t think her losing her mind so soon is going to help Roger any, Carol. I speak bluntly, but you might as well face it. Roger is in a bad spot.”
“He won’t be,” Carol said doggedly, with her chin high, “when they find that nurse. Victorine adored Roger. She’ll tell the exact truth.”
The injustice, she was thinking, the low-mindedness of people, to think Roger could do anything wrong. Anything.
The doorbell sounded belligerently. It was three o’clock. Everybody was coming the front way this afternoon, I thought, and I wondered why Aunt Rita was being so vigorous, keeping her finger on the bell like that till Patrick got there and opened the door.
Roger Clary marched in, alone.
He threw Carol an angry glance which asked what the hell she was doing here anyway, and without more ado he demanded in ringing, indignant tones what Pat meant by dragging Aunt Rita around this big house in the heat of such a day? Didn’t Patrick realize that Aunt Rita was seventy-five years old? Anything might happen. If Patrick had to search the house, which was plain silly on the face of it after the police had gone through it inch by inch, why not wait till the weather cooled somewhat?
He stopped for breath.
Aunt Rita’s clear, bell-like voice sounded in the hall, slightly breathless from her climbing the stairs. “Don’t pay any notice to Roger, Lieutenant Abbott,” she called ahead. “The heat does not bother me. I’ve had a lifetime to get used to it.” She appeared at the door, slender and straight and cool-looking in her sheer lawn dress and her white hair. “I told you that I myself suggested the time, Roger.”
Roger was less aggressive, more distracted.
“But it’s foolish, Aunt Rita. The police have searched. I told you why I wanted you to wait. It will rain after a while and the air will cool. You needn’t bother on my account, Pat. When Victorine comes back,” and I wondered if Roger’s hesitation was entirely to take breath, “she will settle everything. Meantime, let’s take it easy.”
Aunt Rita settled one point, that of showing the house.
“Roger, it is best to do something while you’re waiting. At a time like this I always do little tasks, clean out bureau drawers, do some perhaps useless but absorbing work about the house, when there is a crisis. I can’t bear to sit and twirl my thumbs and worry, dear. I want to show the Abbotts the house anyway. I love doing it, as you know. You come with us, Roger. Carol, too.”
We started by following Aunt Rita down the staircase in our front hall, Roger keeping a little ahead of her as if he thought she might fall, and Aunt Rita floating after him with more certainty of step, I thought, than his own. Carol brought up a stubborn rear.
Aunt Rita told us about this wing having been what they called the garçonnière, that is exclusive for the use of the boys in the family, yet no detail had been spared to make it as good as the main part of the house. But a different artist had designed the stairs, which were not quite so fine as those opposite. That mirror was one of many which had been made to order from special designs, in France. They were all screwed to the walls. In most of them, after a century of service, the glass was still entirely perfect. The mahogany chest, Aunt Rita said, had come from Havana in the nineties. She said that the hall looked odd without the door which had led into the room that was now the living room of Toby Wick’s apartment, but naturally it was better to have dispensed with it entirely. It had been removed, the walls filled in, plastered and painted until you wouldn’t know it had ever been. Toby’s living room had been the first Roger Clary’s office, which accounted for the original ironwork on the stairs leading to his bedroom, which, originally, connected by way of the library with the main house.
Patrick had moved a little along the hall as she talked. He suddenly straightened, stared, and then strode back to the chest. He opened the lid. Inside lay the crumpled body of Helen Clary’s nurse!
XIII
NO ONE cried out.
For a moment the family resemblance was startling. Three sets of eyelids let down briefly over three pairs of eyes-three mouths tightened.
Aunt Rita then reached vaguely toward the balustrade for support and Roger stepped over and took her arm. “The poor, poor thing!” she whispered.
A half dozen emotions overran Carol’s face, the last the blank glum look of nausea as she bolted through the door into the carriageway. She left the door open and from where I stood I saw her enter the other wing. Uncle George called out from somewhere asking Carol what was wrong, and, as might be expected, he was the next to arrive on our scene.
Meanwhile Patrick was stooping beside the chest which made a coffin for the nurse. “Rigor mortis is complete,” he said. “She’s been dead more than six hours, and not more than sixteen. She wasn’t in this chest at ten minutes past two.” That was less than sixty minutes ago, when we came back from lunching with Captain Jonas.
Patrick stood up, casually took his handkerchief from his shirt pocket, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His voice continued matter of fact. “Better look at her, hadn’t you?” he said to Roger.
“I’d better take Aunt Rita to her room and give her a sedative first,” Roger said.
Aunt Rita said, in French, “I wish you’d let me make my own decisions, Roger. And I don’t want a sedative. How did you happen to open the chest, Lieutenant Abbott?”
“The lid was open a crack. The body didn’t—fit exactly.”
Roger frowned. “It’s a very hot day, Aunt Rita. This is a shock for you, so...”
She was irritated by his consideration.
“Of course it’s a shock. But why should I run away and hide in my room now? My place is here.”
“There’s nothing you can do, Miss Clary,” Patrick said, in a gentle tone. He spoke to Roger, “You’d better call the police.”
“The police?” Uncle George said, from the door. He was wrapped in a robe of navy tie-silk with large white polka dots. He came into the hall. “By J-Jove!” he said. “I-I s-say, Rita—Roger...”
“Go and call the police at once!” Roger Clary barked at Uncle George. The fat man turned obediently and hurried away.
“Have a look at the body, will you, Roger?” Patrick said.
Roger insisted that Aunt Rita sit down on the stairs, near the bottom where she couldn’t see the nurse, and then joined Patrick beside the chest. Roger’s examination was necessarily superficial, but he seemed reluctant to touch the nurse. He said the body must not be moved. There was nothing any doctor could do, he said.
“The face suggests suffocation,” Patrick said. Roger did not say. “I notice that one of the beads on her necklace is chipped. Do you think she got hit on the back of the head or on the neck?” Roger looked at the blue beads, but did not touch them or in any way examine the nurse’s kerchief-wrapped head. The nurse looked horrible. Her slight form in its white dress was all in a huddle, the knees drawn up, the arms tight against the body to the elbows, the forearms reaching upward, with the hands claw-like. One of them clutched something. Victorine’s eyes were rolled back, showing only the whites. Her tongue protruded. The splendid prune color of her face had given way to a lifeless blackness, as if her skin had been dusted over with a sort of gray bloom.
I had stepped forward in order to see the nurse at close hand, but after one good look I retreated to a spot near Aunt Rita. I felt sick. Only the effort needed to get upstairs—and my fear that I might miss something—prevented my bolting, like Carol.
Then Roger spoke.
“But Uncle George saw her leave the house?”
“Obviously,” Patrick said crisply, “she returned.”
Roger did not argue it. He stood up and turned his back on the nurse.
“What’s that in her hand?” Patrick asked.
“Is there something in her hand?” Roger asked. He did not look, and Patrick said, after stooping down again, “It’s basil. I don’t know much about herbs, but I do happen to know that one.”
The Indigo Necklace Page 12
