Death and the Maiden

by Q. Patrick

  “I want to tell you several things and ask you several things. At last Grace Hough’s movements are more or less accounted for from the moment she arrived at the Cambridge Theater until the time much later that night when she came back to Wentworth. The basic reason behind everything she did is still obscure but we do know her immediate purpose in returning to Wentworth was to keep an appointment. We presume that the appointment was to have been with a man, a man she had been expecting to meet at the theater, a man who had been Writing her a series of letters which we believe to be love letters. The appointment almost certainly took place at the quarry.”

  He paused, twisting the fragile stem of his cocktail glass. “We know she made a telephone call from a service station. We know she was driven to the quarry where she was killed. You will understand how very important it has become to discover whether or not the man with whom she had been carrying on that passionate correspondence did actually keep his appointment.”

  I thought that Marcia flashed a glance at Penelope. I thought the tight line of the Dean’s mouth had drawn a little tighter but I couldn’t be sure. It was Robert who broke the delicate silence.

  “You are suggesting that this man killed her?” he asked thinly. “You will pardon my obtuseness, but if he were writing her passionate love letters, he presumably loved her. What motive would he have to murder her?”

  “Surely it’s not hard to imagine a motive, Dr. Hudnutt. Since no one, not even Miss Lovering, was taken into Grace’s confidence, we may assume that the relationship was a clandestine one. Perhaps this man killed her because he was a married man and she had begun to endanger his social position. Perhaps he killed her for some financial motive which has not yet come to light.” The detective looked at his thumbnail. “Or perhaps he killed her because she had found put something about him which he was desperately anxious to keep unknown—something which she held over his head so that he could never break with her in any other way than by murdering her.”

  There was a queer tone in his voice as he said that, a tone which made me wonder with acute anxiety whether he could, by some miracle, have discovered the tragedy in Robert’s past and guessed that Grace had threatened him with exposure—as actually she had done.

  Lieutenant Trant had looked up again. He was smiling at Marcia. “Or, there again, perhaps that man didn’t kill her at all.”

  “And what does that mean?” asked Marcia calmly.

  “The relationship between this man and Grace Hough was obviously reaching some sort of a climax. Suppose there was some other woman in his life, a woman whose own happiness and career was menaced by Grace, and who had found out about the appointment in the quarry. That woman or some other woman—or perhaps some other man. We don’t know how many people might have been vitally concerned with that rendezvous, do we?”

  Penelope Hudnutt said jerkily: “We don’t know anything at all, Lieutenant. Knowing things, surely, is rather more your province.”

  “Exactly, Mrs. Hudnutt. And I’m beginning to realize that Grace Hough was far more complex than she seemed, far more potentially dangerous to a great many people here at Wentworth.”

  He put down his cocktail glass. Its clatter echoed startlingly loud. “When I last spoke to you all, you implied that none of you saw Grace Hough that night after you had left the theater. Are you still prepared to stand by that statement?”

  “Of course we do,” said Penelope quickly. “It’s the truth.” Trant shrugged. “It just occurred to me that the telephone call Grace made from the service station might have been to this house.”

  Penelope snapped: “We know nothing about a telephone call and it’s absurd to suppose any of us could have seen Grace again.”

  “That’s strange, Mrs. Hudnutt.” Trant smiled sadly. “You see, I happen to know that one of you did leave the college that night. Miss Lovering and I found tiretracks in the quarry, tracks which could only have been made during the rainstorm that occurred on the night of Grace’s death. The car which left those tracks is owned by one of you three people.”

  “One of us!” Penelope’s voice came taut and high. “But it’s simply not true.” Her sharp gaze moved to Robert and Marcia. “Robert, Marcia, tell him it isn’t true.”

  Neither Robert nor Marcia spoke. Lieutenant Trant looked up from his hands, letting his gray, gentle gaze settle on Robert Hudnutt. “I’m afraid it is impossible for anyone to deny it. I also think it is extremely unwise for the person involved not to admit it. Don’t you agree, Dr. Hudnutt?”

  “Robert!” Penelope spun round toward her husband. I was looking at Hudnutt, too. His face was a hard white mark except where the narrow scar, suddenly visible on his forehead, showed livid and pulsing. He made a little gesture of resignation with his hands.

  “Very well, Lieutenant, I might as …”

  “Robert! Don’t!” The words came from Marcia like a pistol shot.

  “What’s the point, Marcia? He’s found the tracks.” There was absolutely no tone in Robert’s voice. “I admit that I did drive into the quarry.”

  “You, Robert? You drove into the quarry?” It was Marcia who spoke, her voice dry, husky. “You never told me. I—I never knew that.”

  She took an impulsive step toward Robert only to stop dead when Lieutenant Trant murmured:

  “I did not know it, either, Miss Parrish, although I am very grateful to Dr. Hudnutt for informing me. He must have driven in before the rain had been falling long enough to make the ground muddy. You see, the tracks in the quarry weren’t left by his car. They were left by yours.”

  I saw, of course, how diabolically clever Lieutenant Trant had been. He had deliberately held back what he knew, deliberately thrown that challenge at Robert in the hopes of forcing just this admission from him. In one second he had sent spinning to the ground the whole flimsy house of cards which Marcia and I had built. And he had done far more than that. With a sudden feeling of hopelessness I realized how he had shown Marcia up as lying to me. Marcia, who had seemed so nakedly frank and yet, like Steve, had kept back the one really vital fact—that both she and Robert Hudnutt had driven into the quarry.

  Penelope broke the silence.

  “Robert,” she said and her voice was superbly unmoved, “it really was very silly of you not to tell me about this.”

  Marcia moved to her side, laying a light hand on her arm. “We didn’t tell you, Penny, because there wasn’t any point.”

  She turned to Trant. “If anything we knew could have helped solve Grace’s murder we would have told you. But neither Dr. Hudnutt nor I saw Grace that night. Did we, Robert?”

  “We did not.” Robert’s voice was almost inaudible.

  Marcia continued: “I suppose it was stupid trying to keep it back. But we had a reason.” Her eyes were on Penelope again. “Grace did telephone this house. Robert and I happened to be downstairs alone. It was very late. If we told the truth, all that would have come out. Everyone knows Robert and I were engaged once. Everyone knows, too, just how a scandal founded on nothing can blaze around a college campus. We wanted to save ourselves that senseless embarrassment.”

  All the time she spoke, the two women had been watching each other. Gradually I saw the tiny creases deepen around the corners of Penelope’s eyes.

  I knew what that frown meant as certainly as if the Dean had spoken. Marcia’s insistence that there had been nothing between herself and Robert was just a little too emphasized. Penelope suspected it. And she had given her hand away to me. She was jealous of Marcia, desperately jealous of what she knew or guessed had been her relationship with her husband.

  Lieutenant Trant’s gaze was still on Robert. He said: “Perhaps you would tell me just what you did do on that night, Dr. Hudnutt.”

  And then Robert was talking, his voice very quiet and steady again. He was telling the story of that dreadful night just as Marcia had told it to me—the telephone call from Grace asking for a lift, his drive to the service station and his finding Grace not there.<
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  Marcia broke in at that point, telling how she had followed Robert and how she, too, had found the service station deserted. She did not mention the letter from Grace to Penelope, that second of Grace’s three last letters with its cruel revelations and its implied motive for murder.

  I gripped the arms of my chair, waiting for the detective’s next question. It came, very cool, addressed to Marcia. “And how about the little side excursion to the quarry, Miss Parrish?”

  “That is simple to explain,” said Marcia deliberately. “You have to pass the quarry on the way back from the service station. It’s right there on the bend of the road. I was worried about Grace’s disappearance after she’d telephoned. I saw the mouth to the quarry. Robert had told me how he had met Grace there in the afternoon. I suppose that made me associate the place with her. I just turned in on impulse.”

  Lieutenant Trant nodded abstractedly. “Wouldn’t it have been rather odd for Grace to have gone to the quarry after she’d called Dr. Hudnutt to drive her back to Wentworth?”

  “Of course it would have been odd,” agreed Marcia. “I merely went into the quarry as one of the few places where Grace might possibly have been.”

  “And you, Dr. Hudnutt?” The detective was watching the Dean’s husband. “Is that why you turned into the quarry, too?”

  Robert looked back at him. “It is.”

  “You went to the quarry before Miss Parrish, of course, Dr. Hudnutt?”

  “I did. In fact, just as I was inside, I heard a car pass along the road. I presume that was Miss Parrish on her way to the service station.”

  “And neither of you saw Grace at the quarry?”

  Dr. Hudnutt shook his head bleakly.

  Marcia said: “We did not.”

  “So that is what happened,” murmured Lieutenant Trant.

  It was impossible to guess what he was thinking. Of course, I myself had no way any more of telling whether they were speaking the truth. But I could see how pitifully weak Marcia’s claimed reason for going to the quarry had been. Why should she have been worried about Grace when she had arrived at the service station after Robert? Naturally she should have taken it for granted that he had already taken Grace home. Knowing as I did of the spiteful letter which had really urged Marcia to follow Robert, I could see why she might have turned into the quarry for quite another reason. She might have been afraid that Grace had forced Robert to take her there to discuss her cruel determination to expose the California tragedy. I could see that. But Lieutenant Trant didn’t know about that second letter which I myself had destroyed.

  Or did he?

  The detective’s eyes were fixed with rapt concentration on the cloudy mass of freesia by Marcia’s chair. “There are a great many remarkable coincidences in this case,” he offered suddenly. “You realize, of course, that Grace was killed less than an hour after that telephone call was made at the service station. During that time at least three people, all of whom claim complete innocence, went to the quarry.” He paused and added thoughtfully, “How carefully did you search the quarry for Grace Hough when you turned in, Miss Parrish?”

  “Oh, not at all carefully.” Marcia gestured with a cigarette. “It was raining very hard at the time. And—well, I was just looking for a car and there wasn’t one.”

  “Then Grace might have been there alone on foot and you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed her?”

  “That’s true.”

  Trant nodded slowly. “In other words, Miss Parrish, when you arrived at the quarry after Dr. Hudnutt, Grace might already have been lying there on that pile of stone—dead. She might already have been murdered.”

  Marcia’s face went suddenly blind, her eyes slowly contracting into pin-points of horror. I saw, of course, just how Lieutenant Trant had tricked her.

  Penelope crossed to her husband’s side and put her hand, white but very steady, on his arm. Marcia somehow managed to be in control again.

  Very firmly she said: “I suppose you are implying that Dr. Hudnutt murdered Grace Hough. That is not possible. He left Wentworth in his car about twenty minutes before I did. When I returned to the Hudnutts’ house after another fifteen minutes, Robert’s car was back in the garage. I saw it through the open door. He could not possibly have killed Grace at the quarry and have taken her to Greyville in thirty-five minutes.”

  “If that is so, Miss Parrish, I agree with you that he couldn’t have taken her to Greyville straight away.” Trant’s tone was quite unyielding. “It is not pleasant for me to say this but I’m sure Dr. Hudnutt understands that it is my duty as an officer of the law to point out unpleasant facts. It would have been perfectly possible for him to have killed Grace, left her in the quarry, driven back to Wentworth and then—at some later time that night—gone out again and carried the body to Greyville.”

  A few seconds ago I had been reassured that Robert’s alibi was perfect. I saw now how Trant had ripped it wide open. All of us, I think, were staring at Robert.

  But it was Penelope who spoke. She gazed icily at Trant.

  “Before you continue with this hypothetical accusation, Lieutenant, I think you owe it to yourself to produce a motive. I know that at one time Grace Hough had an adolescent infatuation for my husband. Infatuations of that sort are an inevitable feature of college life. But surely you, as an intelligent man, do not consider that a motive for murder.”

  “I can see how it might have something to do with a motive for murder, Mrs. Hudnutt,” replied Trant evenly. “But you must remember Grace was not too normal. Dr. Wheeler, the neurologist, told me some very interesting things when I called him up on the phone last week. He’s a family friend of the Houghs, I believe.”

  I knew then with blinding certainty that what I had suspected from the beginning of the interview was true. Lieutenant Trant did know of Robert’s tragedy in California. Probably he knew about him and Marcia, too. For days, probably, he had known just how strong their motive for murder had been.

  “Dr. Wheeler? I know of no Dr. Wheeler.”

  Penelope was staring, her eyes flat with incomprehension.

  Lieutenant Trant was speaking again: “Miss Parrish, you told me you saw Dr. Hudnutt’s car was back in the garage through the open door?”

  “Yes,” said Marcia faintly.

  The detective turned to Hudnutt. “Is it a habit of yours to leave the garage doors open at night when you don’t intend to use your car again?”

  Robert’s face was drained, of all color. He was like a drowning man, struggling to save himself from a vast wave which had swept him away at a moment when he had been utterly unprepared for it.

  “I—that is—” he began.

  “No, Robert, don’t you talk.” It was Penelope once again who had broken in. There was something splendid about her as she stood at her husband’s side, her face set and regal as the face of a carven statue. “You will probably think that point less important, Lieutenant, when you know that both my husband and I are utterly haphazard in the way we use our cars. We hardly ever close the garage at night.”

  “I see,” said the detective thoughtfully. “Even so, that does not alter the fact that it would have been perfectly simple for Dr. Hudnutt to have acted in the way I suggested, to have driven back to the college, waited …”

  I suppose I was carried away, out of the realms where common sense had any control. During those ghastly moments I only knew that Trant had managed to corner Robert and that I had in my possession one solitary fact which might change the whole course of the investigation. That’s why impulsively and so very unthinkingly I blurted out:

  “There’s another explanation. The garage was left open. The keys were left in the Dean’s car. Don’t you see how easy it would have been for anyone else in the college to have gone to the garage after Dr. Hudnutt and to have taken out the Dean’s car? The murderer, if he did come from the college, would have gone off some time between Dr. Hudnutt and Marcia and—and that’s just the time I saw the Dean of Women’s
car going by Pigot Hall.”

  Of course I could have cut my tongue out as soon as I’d said that. I could feel them all staring at me, the Dean very cold and still, Hudnutt with a sort of frantic unconcern, Marcia, her mouth drooped and rather forlorn.

  But it was Lieutenant Trant I noticed especially. There was that faint smile in his eyes which I knew so well.

  The detective said: “Now that is something I didn’t know, Lee Lovering. Mrs. Hudnutt’s car did go out that evening?”

  It wasn’t any use doing anything about it now. “Yes,” I said. “The rain woke me up, coming in through the window. I went to shut the window. That’s when I saw it—a yellow sedan. I recognized it. I—I thought, it was the Dean going out. I didn’t realize …”

  “Well, Mrs. Hudnutt,” broke in Trant, “do you know anything about this?”

  Penelope’s gaze, returning his, was amazingly level. “I know absolutely nothing about it.”

  “Lee must be right,” said Marcia desperately. “Someone else must have gone to the garage and taken Penelope’s car after Robert had gone.”

  Trant said: “I would very much like to see that yellow sedan. Chief Jordan’s men reported on having examined only Dr. Hudnutt’s car from your garage. Why was that, Mrs. Hudnutt?”

  There was another of those harsh, grating silences Then, with quiet dignity, Penelope said: “If Chief Jordan had asked me, he could very willingly have examined my car. But I heard nothing from him so it never occurred to me they would be interested. As a matter of fact, it’s not here. It’s been sent to New York for some—some alterations.”

  “What alterations?”

  “I had grown rather tired of that bright yellow shade. I had decided to have it sprayed some other color. I was having the summer slip-covers put on at the same time.”

  You could never have told from her voice that she realized—that she must have realized—just how damaging those few words of hers had been.

  Trant was looking at her. Marcia, her shoulders sagging, had moved away and was gazing blindly out of the window. Hudnutt, vepy gaunt and pinched, moved to Penelope’s side.