Death and the Maiden

by Q. Patrick

  “Grace made a rather unsuccessful bid for romance herself. She tried it with Steve Carteris but their little affair didn’t get anywhere. Then she fell for Dr. Hudnutt. Of course, there wasn’t a hope of that getting anywhere, either, especially after his marriage. But it’s easy to see how much Grace would have wanted it to get somewhere. Hudnutt was the most romantic figure on the campus. If only he had been in love with her, she would have far outshone the other girls, even Norma Sayler. It would have been so simple for her to start pretending, to write those first special delivery letters, signing them Robert.”

  He was speaking slowly as if it were difficult for him to pick the right words. “Then the letters started to arrive at Pigot and the other girls began taking an interest. The rumor went around that Grace had a boy friend who wrote her letters every day. That made her intriguing, mysterious. Before she realized, probably, Grace found herself in the spotlight where she’d never been before. That sort of thing’s darn dangerous—like dope. The more attention she got, the more she’d want. Once she found she could fool the other girls, she had to go on writing more and more letters. And if you go on fooling other people long enough you’re liable to fool yourself.”

  Jerry was still watching him, perplexed and anxious. “You don’t mean Grace reached a stage where she really believed the letters came from Hudnutt?”

  “No, I don’t think that. That’s too extreme. But I can see how those letters coming every day would make the pretense seem more and more real. She was wishing so hard that Hudnutt was in love with her; in time it would have been easy for her to kid herself that perhaps he was. After all, he was a faculty member, a married and an honorable man. Even if he was interested in her, his position would make it impossible for him to show it. Maybe he smiled at her one day when he said good-morning; maybe he singled her out for praise in class. Once the idea was in Grace’s mind she could have interpreted those purely mechanical gestures of politeness as proof positive of an admiration which he didn’t dare admit to.”

  He was watching his hand again. “That’s the way I see it. With absolutely no real justification, Grace kidded herself that Hudnutt was as much in love with her as she wanted him to be. And then, that afternoon, she followed him to the quarry. It’s not hard to read between the lines of what Hudnutt told us. Probably they’d never been alone together outside the campus. Grace thought she was giving him the ideal opportunity to break down and admit his love. He was completely bewildered, of course. Disappointment made her angry. She lashed out, accusing him of discriminating against her work, anything that came into her head. Hudnutt was quite out of his depth. When he couldn’t calm her down, he blurted out something about seeing her at the theater and left her.”

  He looked up. “I guess, if things hadn’t gone so far in Grace’s mind, she might have realized then that it had all been a pipe-dream. But by that time the dream had become the most important part of her life. She clutched desperately to save it, and Hudnutt had given her one straw. He’d said he would see her again at the theater. Because she wanted to so much, she could twist that one phrase around until she believed he had suggested they should meet there. Perhaps she convinced herself there had been reasons that afternoon why he hadn’t been able to admit he loved her; perhaps it would be all right at the theater.”

  I said softly: “So she went back and wrote that last special delivery letter.”

  Trant nodded. “The few phrases from it which gave me the clue. By then the letters had become the main prop of her dream. She must have written that last one just the way she would have wanted Hudnutt to write it. She made him plead forgiveness for his behavior in the quarry, made him promise that everything would be different at the theater.”

  It was heart-rending now to see the pathetic, frustrated truth behind those last movements of my roommate which before had seemed so completely irrational.

  “You know the rest,” Trant was saying quietly, his eyes moving to Jerry, “Your sister gave up Steve’s party at the Amber Club and went to the Cambridge Theater, as she thought, to meet Robert Hudnutt. She put on her best dress; for the first time she experimented with make-up; she borrowed Lee’s fur coat. That night was to be the big night. And then, almost as soon as she reached the theater, the first blow fell. Lee told her Mrs. Hudnutt was there. What did that do to her dream of a romantic téte-à-tête? You can imagine how she must have felt sitting through that first act alone, knowing Dr. Hudnutt was up in the balcony with his wife, Miss Parrish and Dean Appel. You can imagine her disappointment and, above all, her bitter resentment against Robert for what she thought was a betrayal. In the first intermission she went out into the lobby, determined to force the issue once and for all. She found Robert and cornered him.”

  His gaze turned to me now. “I’ve been talking to Hudnutt this morning. He told me frankly just what did happen during that scene which you interrupted.” There was an infinitesimal trace of the old ironic smile in his eyes. “With your usual staunchness you kept the truth back from me because, you thought it was so damning to Hudnutt. It wasn’t. But it was the crux of the whole pitiful story. Grace accused him of deliberately trying to make her love him. He was horrified, of course. If he’d been a little more used to young girls and the way they felt, he might have eased the shock. But he didn’t. He came right out and said she’d made a terrible mistake. He shattered the dream.”

  In my mind I was back again in the lobby of the Cambridge Theater; I was seeing Grace standing there with her hands clenched at her sides, her eyes staring right through me, not recognizing me. I felt a stab of pity. I had seen her face to face at the moment when she realized she had lost all the things she had never really had.

  Trant was saying: “I think we all know Grace well enough to guess just how she would have reacted. Grace who never forgave anyone for hurting her had been more lethally wounded than she had ever been before. Of course, it wasn’t Hudnutt’s fault. But that only made it worse. She couldn’t have suffered any more even if the whole imaginary relationship had been real. While she was with the Wheelers in Baltimore she found out about Hudnutt’s California trouble. She threw it in his face, threatened to tell his wife, threatened to ruin him. She wanted him to suffer as much as she was suffering.”

  He glanced apologetically at Jerry. “I hate having to say these things about your sister. But since I’ve got to say them, I figured it was best to let you hear first.”

  “Sure,” said Jerry in a low, stifled voice. “I understand.”

  “I want you to think of Grace that way. But I want you to think of something else too. Hudnutt wasn’t the only person who had let her down that night. Except for Lee, you, Jerry, were the one other person at Wentworth whom she really cared for. That night you’d offered your fraternity pin to Norma Sayler, the girl she hated. You seemed to have gone over to the enemy too. Those first few moments of the second act of Phèdre were probably the blackest moments in Grace’s life. Everything that meant most to her seemed to have deserted her. I think it was then that she made her plan. It was an extraordinary plan but in a way it was very consistent with her character. And, once she’d decided upon it, she stuck to it with remarkable determination.”

  His voice was suddenly crisp and official. “From then on we have all the facts. It’s just a question of interpreting them properly. Grace left the auditorium and went to the lounge to write letters, one to you, Jerry, one to Mrs. Hudnutt and a third which I found last night in the lining of Lee’s coat. She was one of those people who instinctively turned to letters for self-expression in emotional moments. Her plan was absolutely typical of her. She wanted to make all the people who had hurt her as unhappy as she was herself.”

  He paused. “She wrote to you, Jerry, saying the nastiest things she could think of about Norma. That was to hurt Norma and partly, I believe, to hurt you. She wrote that second letter to Mrs. Hudnutt which, thanks to Miss Parrish and Lee, never reached her. In that letter she was carrying out her threat to Hudn
utt to expose the California episode.”

  “And the third letter?” I broke in hesitantly.

  “That better wait for the moment.” Trant paused again, adding quickly: “By the time she’d finished writing those three letters, the second act was almost over. We know she intended to leave the theater then. David Lockwood saw her coming out. But there again Grace acted in character. She knew you girls would be arriving any moment from the Amber Club. Here was a chance to convince you once and for all that she did have a handsome boy friend. She kept up that little pretense to the last. She made Lockwood go through that act.”

  He went on: “As it happened, David Lockwood fitted in perfectly with her plan. She wanted one thing very badly which Lockwood could give her. She also wanted somewhere to stay for several hours until she was ready for her next move. She got what she wanted from him. And she did stay with him, as you know. She took a drink at his apartment, too, something she had never done before. She took that drink because what she intended to do needed all the real and artificial courage she could muster.”

  I think it was about then that I realized just what the inevitable end to this strange, moving story was bound to be.

  “And then Grace had yet another use for David Lockwood,” the detective was saying. “He could chauffeur her to the place she wanted to go next. She had plenty of resourcefulness and, by threatening to make a scene, she compelled him to drive her to Wentworth against his will. I think she planned to have him take her all the way, but it so happened that she ran into Steve Carteris at the service station. That was the one coincidence in the whole affair and it made Grace’s scheme just that much more complete.

  “Carteris was another person who had hurt her. He’d been tactless enough not to fall in love with her but to fall in love with someone else. Here was a chance to weave him also into the web she was spinning for the people whom she thought of now as her enemies. She dismissed Lockwood. She made Steve take the letters and the fur coat, give her the red slicker that was in his car and drive her to the quarry.”

  His eyes moved very slowly from Jerry to me. “You’ve guessed of course what Grace’s plan was. She’d hit on the perfect way to solve her own problems and to pay back every debt of humiliation in full. She had telephoned Robert Hudnutt from the service station. She had persuaded him to come and fetch her. She had placed herself at the mouth of the quarry, there on the sharp bend in the road. She knew no other car was likely to pass that way so late at night. She waited until she heard an automobile heading toward the bend. At the crucial moment she flung herself forward.”

  Jerry sat up very straight. “So you mean …”

  “Yes,” cut in Trant. “That’s why I told Robert Hudnutt he was not responsible for your sister’s death. He wasn’t. No one rounding that bend, however carefully, could have avoided doing what he did. That’s why I stressed the fact that Hudnutt was switching on his windshield wiper at that moment and couldn’t see just what happened. If he had seen, of course, he would have known that Grace deliberately threw herself under his car, that she deliberately killed herself.”

  “So that’s the way it was,” whispered Jerry. “Grace committed suicide—just the way Dad did.”

  I put out my hand, touching his arm. But he didn’t seem to be aware of my existence. He was staring at his clenched fist where the knuckles stood out white and hard.

  Trant was saying: “Suicide, of course, seemed the one completely impossible solution. That was due partly to the fact that the body was moved and so many different threads tangled the real issue. But the main reason why all the evidence pointed to murder rested with Grace herself. Step by step she left behind her a perfectly built-up case against Robert Hudnutt. She even arranged for the actual method of death to re-create the California tragedy.”

  Jerry said huskily: “I can’t believe it. Grace wouldn’t have done a thing like that.”

  “I know, it’s hard to understand,” said Trant in a quiet, steady voice. “But you remember the old bromide—hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Grace had made her own hell for herself that night and she wanted to drag as many other people into it as she could. She was amazingly successful, too. These past days have shown just how much damage a vindictive person can do when she has nothing to lose. Grace made Carteris exchange the red slicker for the fur coat so that, when she was found dead, that slicker could be traced to a girl he’d been intimate with. She couldn’t have chosen a more ingenious way of putting him on the spot. She’d left behind her almost as strong a case against Carteris as against Hudnutt.”

  He paused: “And then there was Norma Sayler. Norma, whom she hated almost as much as she hated Hudnutt, wasn’t to be left out of it. She told Steve to put the fur coat in the baggage place of Norma’s car. The reasons she gave him sounded perfectly innocent. She didn’t want to have to lug the coat back to Pigot herself. It was too late for him to take it there. Why not leave it in Norma’s car where it would be safe? What could be more reasonable—or more ingenious? Another damning clue had been planted on another enemy.”

  I was listening in shocked silence now. During the past days I had learned just how relentless Grace’s spite had been, but I never dreamed she could have been as cruelly revengeful as all that.

  Trant was saying incisively: “As it happened, Carteris didn’t come forward about the coat, and the police, knowing Norma’s car had not been out at the time of the crime, never thought of searching it. Grace’s planned revenge on Norma Sayler didn’t work. But revenge came last night—a more complete and horrible revenge than any Grace could have planned. In a sense Grace was responsible for Norma’s death because, either through an oversight or for some purpose too devious for us to fathom, she left that last special delivery letter in the pocket of that fur coat. And Norma found it.”

  He went on: “We know why Norma reacted the way she did to that letter. She thought very naturally that Hudnutt had written it and decided to have a little malicious fun at Mrs. Hudnutt’s expense to pay her back for having humiliated her publicly that day in Commons. But later in the evening, after Hudnutt had denied writing the letter, Norma told Miss Parrish she had another idea that would explain the special deliveries. It’s only too obvious now what that idea was. Having believed Hudnutt, Norma stumbled on the truth—that the letters must have been written by Grace herself. It wasn’t a far cry from realizing that to suspecting suicide. That gives us the real motive for her murder. Norma Sayler was killed because she had seen through Grace’s plan and had it in her power to expose the suicide.”

  His eyes, still on mine, seemed half rueful, half amused. “From the beginning of this business, Lee, you’ve been working overtime protecting your friends because you couldn’t believe that any of them were murderers. You were justified, of course. There was no murderer at Wentworth—until last night. There wasn’t any real crime for the police to investigate either.” He paused. “But Grace’s suicide had automatically made one person here a potential murderer.”

  Jerry said suddenly: “You mean someone who stood to benefit by keeping dark the fact that Grace had killed herself.”

  “Exactly.” Trant’s slow gaze moved to him. “Last night when I first realized that, there seemed to be only one person who could benefit. You, as Grace’s brother, were in the running for $150,000 insurance money provided the truth didn’t come out.”

  I drew in my breath and he turned to me with a slight smile. “Yes, last night Jerry seemed the only reasonable suspect.”

  “And then, later, I found that third letter which Grace had concealed in the lining of your coat in the hopes that you and no one but you would find it. That letter shed a great deal of new light and gave me at least two other suspects.”

  He was looking at Jerry again. “As I’ve already said, Jerry, on the night of your sister’s suicide, you had gone over to the enemy. You’d as good as given your fraternity pin to Norma. I’m sure Grace was very fond of you, but her hatred for Norma turned out to be str
onger than her sisterly love. Grace was shrewd enough to realize that, if her scheme worked, the insurance company would have to pay on the policy. There at the theater, it must have struck her that if you came into the money, Norma might possibly benefit. That thought, of course, was intolerable. And to make certain Norma could never get a cent of the money, she did something which rather gave away her intention to commit suicide.”

  He turned to me. “Remember how I said Grace wanted something from David Lockwood? Remember how surprised you were when he told us that Grace had asked for his autograph and Roulane’s too? Well, that was what she wanted from him. She needed those autographs to use as witnesses to her signature on a document. You see, that letter addressed to you was more than a letter; it was a will.”

  Both Jerry and I stared blankly. “A will?”

  “Yes. She wrote a will making Dean Appel’s father her executor and leaving the money away from Jerry—to someone else.”

  While I struggled with the implications of that extraordinary fact, Trant went on: “Whether or not that will can be proved valid doesn’t really matter now. There won’t be any money to leave anyway. But so long as Grace’s suicide was kept dark that will gave someone a fighting chance for $150,000.”

  Jerry, his lips very white, muttered: “Then you think the person who hoped to benefit by that will might have—have killed Norma?”

  “I do think that,” said Trant evenly. “I think that someone knew all along that Grace had committed suicide and also knew everything about the will. There was only one thing he didn’t know and that was where the will actually was.” He was looking at me quizzically. “That’s why I tried unsuccessfully to make you realize your danger last night, Lee. I guessed that person wasn’t going to stop at anything to get that will. What happened this morning at the garage proved my point rather forcibly.”