“Hm . . .” The sheriff sounded mildly amused. “The talk is that he’s buildin’ a machine to make a death ray.”
The unconscious irony of that struck me so swiftly that I wanted to burst into laughter. I managed to throttle the impulse into a smile. “No, Sheriff, nothing like that.” Then I added, “Mrs. Marcy did tell me she’d heard the same story. But she knew better, too.”
“I see,” he said absently. Following the line of his eyes I saw that he was watching Anne. There was anxious apprehension on her face and in the way she was leaning forward to look at me. Her expression, every line in her body, revealed much more openly than anything I had said how deeply concerned we were with Julian’s invention. If I had hoped the sheriff could be decoyed from that scent, I knew that after one look at Anne it was a forlorn expectation. Well, I reflected, she was young and tired, and she couldn’t realize how much she was giving away to a shrewd man like Dan Hoskins. Probably it was a secret we shouldn’t be able to keep indefinitely under any circumstances.
The sheriff watched Anne for a moment and then shifted his eyes to the baseboard. I had the uncomfortable certainty that he could observe all he wanted or needed out of their corners. “I see,” he said again and went on, slowly and casually, “Mr. Blair wasn’t usin’ Elora in any way to help him with his work, was he?”
“What?” I was genuinely startled. “Good God, no!”
“All right, all right,” he said soothingly. “I’m lookin’ as much fer what didn’t happen as fer what did.” He scratched his head. “You’re certain sure Elora wasn’t mixed up in whatever it is the old man’s makin’?”
It gave me a shock to hear him call Julian an old man, but of course that was true of him, physically at least. Only . . . it had been such a short time ago that Julian was far from old. I called my mind back with a jerk to the question. “I’m positive. All she ever did was to sweep out his work room once a week.”
“Yestiddy?”
“I think yesterday was her day for that. I’m not sure. But honestly, Sheriff, I can’t see any connection. Mrs. Marcy tried to find out from me in the morning what Mr. Blair was working on.” That was stretching the truth a good deal, but this was no occasion for moral scrupling. “I didn’t tell her much, so she finally informed me that she was certain Julian’s work was on a radio of some sort. She poked fun at the people who talked about a death ray.”
He nodded his head several times, heavily, and was silent. At length he sighed. “You can’t think of anythin’ more you’d like to tell me? I’m clean out of questions.”
Fatigue was numbing my brain until I was almost unsure whether I was awake or asleep, but I went laboriously back over the story I had told. Most of it was the truth, if not the whole truth, but it finally occurred to me that I had made it unnecessarily meager. Mrs. Marcy’s fall was a natural accident, but I could at least suggest a cause for it, and thereby make it somewhat more credible. “Yes,” I told the sheriff, “there is one thing. It’s possibly not important, or even relevant, but if I’m going to sign any statement I’d like to have it included. The point is just this: Coming back from the water toward the house there was an exceptionally loud and alarming clap of thunder.”
Surprise was openly printed on Dan Hoskins’ face. “Thunder?” he said as if he had not heard me rightly.
“Yes. The noise was so sudden and loud that it even frightened me in spite of myself. It must have been very near the house. (‘another of my slippery half truths,’ I thought. ‘It was in the house or there’s something the matter with my ears.’) I’m inclined to believe that it must have startled Mrs. Marcy while she was coming downstairs. She slipped and fell.”
Ellen Hoskins was watching me, I saw, with speculation in the set of her eyes, but she said nothing. Her brother nodded without much show of interest. “Put that down, Ellen,” he said. “More’n likely the perfessor’s got something there.”
18.
ANNE’S story was substantially the same as my own of course. She told it in a low, steady voice that betrayed no emotion and in considerably fewer words than I had used. The sheriff listened to her with attention but no great show of interest. He did not interrupt at all and, even when Anne reiterated my statement about the noise we had heard, he asked no question, though there was a quirk in Anne’s tone when she called it “thunder” that I thought would arouse his vigilance.
After she had finished, the big man sat silent for some time, slumped in his chair and staring at the rug. He lifted his eyes after a time and stared directly at Anne. “Miss Conner.”
“Yes.”
“When you came back from town with Dr. Rambouillet, was Mrs. Walters’ dress wet?”
Anne knitted her forehead for a second. “No. She had on a different one. In the morning and early afternoon she was wearing a black crepe. When we came back she’d changed into a dark-blue wash-silk she has.”
The sheriff grinned. “You got that, Ellen?”
“Naturally I’ve got it.” Her fingers moved like a pianist’s when she was taking notes. She was never a word behind. I began to envy the Cambridge professor who had her for a secretary.
Dan Hoskins seemed to have come to a dead end. He stretched his tree-trunk legs out in front of him and knocked the tips of his heavy shoes together slowly and rhythmically. It made a noise that was too loud for the hush of the room. The rest of us simply sat, waiting for his next move.
“I’m a nacheral-born fool, I guess,” he said. “There ain’t no real call I can see to keep you folks here any longer, or ask any more questions. O’ course, I’ll have to talk to Mrs . . . Walters before I go. But somehow I got a feeling . . .” His voice trailed off and he went back to knocking the toes of his shoes together. Then he cleared his throat. “Miss Conner,” he began almost diffidently, “would you give me some kind of picture of how you folks are all connected?”
Anne was surprised. “You mean, what relation we all are to each other?”
He nodded. “Something like that. More, how you know each other, how it comes that you’re all here at once in this house.”
“Oh.” She began to explain that Julian was her brother-in-law, mentioned Helen’s death, floundered through an awkward explanation about me, flushing when her voice stumbled, and added that when she’d arrived she’d found Mrs. Walters with Julian, and what she’d been able to gather about that. “She’s sort of an assistant of Uncle Julian’s,” was the way she summed it up, finally.
That, it seemed to me, was a dangerous simplification. If the woman herself did not subsequently admit what she was, Julian himself was likely to do so, and I didn’t want the sheriff to begin wondering, later, if we’d been holding things back from him all along the line. Besides, it seemed to me that I saw a safe way of explaining Mrs. Walters. In thinking it would simplify things at all I was reasoning from an abysmal ignorance of Barsham Harbor and the way its people thought and felt. It would, perhaps, have been better if I’d kept my mouth shut then, but I wanted to forestall the obvious, scandalous implications in Mrs. Walters’ presence in the house. “Wait a minute, Sheriff,” I broke in. “There’s more to it than just that.”
He grunted. “There must be. They been here alone, or pretty much that way, most of the summer.”
Ellen Hoskins frowned. “Really, Dan, I’m afraid you have an unpleasant imagination.”
“Never mind about my imagination. Human beings’re human.” His tone was impatient but indulgent.
“What I was going to explain,” I went on firmly, “is this. When Mr. Blair’s wife died, it hit him very hard. He’s never really got over losing her. So he did something that even the greatest scientists have done, more than once, in the same situation. He turned to spiritualism.”
The big man snorted. In spite of my own convictions, which were all in agreement with him, the scorn and contempt he managed to make vocal in that short noise drove me to Julian’s defense. “All right,” I said sharply. “You’ve a right to despise the subject
if you want, but there’s nothing unusual or disgraceful in being a spiritualist. Lots of sane people are, I assure you. Even some scientists, as I said. And that’s the explanation for Mrs. Walters. She’s what is called a medium. Julian believes that he can communicate with Helen— with his dead wife, that is—through her. That’s why she’s here.”
“Have it your own way, Perfessor.”
“It’s the truth,” I said wearily.
“Of course it is, Dan.” His sister’s voice was quietly amused. “In Barsham, Professor Sayles, they relish their scandal and Dan’s no better than the rest.”
I thanked her with a smile, but what she said made me wonder whether I had been altogether wise. “By the way, Sheriff,” I told him, “I don’t know whether it will help particularly to have the fact of Mrs. Walters’ being a medium known. Perhaps it would be better not to mention it.”
He snorted again. “Don’t worry. I ain’t going to tell it. Folks would laugh at me fer listenin’ to such trash. Some of ’em, that is . . .” His voice lost its certainty. “And the others might not take kindly to the idea of havin’ one of those things in these parts, anyhow.”
“Thank you.” I tried to sound ironical.
He waved a large hand. “Don’t mention it. Well, young lady, that’s your story, eh?”
Anne nodded.
The sheriff pulled his watch out of his vest and looked at it. “Gettin’ late. Or early, I should say. But I calculate we may as well hear the others right now, if there’s no objection. It’ll save me a trip back later.”
“Certainly.” I got to my feet. There was no sensation except that of leaden weight in my legs. “At least, I’ll go call Mrs. Walters. I don’t know about Julian. She may have given him a lot of opiate. The shock was severe, you know. He’s still sleeping and I wish you’d take him last, if at all.”
“O.K. Let’s have the woman first. You two don’t need to wait up. Just send her on down and get some sleep. From the looks of you, it’d be a good idea.”
His thinly veiled command was not as welcome as it should have been. I was dead tired, fatigue had seeped into every cell of my nerves and muscles, and yet I did not want to leave that room. I wanted to watch the encounter between Dan Hoskins and Mrs. Walters. I wanted to be there in case she flared up and undid the job I had tried to do in presenting our story. I felt, without knowing quite why, that we were going to need the sheriff on our side and I dreaded the prospect that Mrs. Walters would estrange him. But Anne was already on her feet and walking slowly toward the door. Clearly, there was no pretext by which we might stay and perhaps it would be wiser to get some rest. We were likely to need it in the next few days.
“All right,” I agreed. “We’ll call her and send her down to you. There’s coffee on the stove if you need it. And wake me if I can help.”
“Sure, sure,” he replied and we went out together. Going up the stairs, Anne and I exchanged no words. I put my arm around her and steadied her, but there was no emotion connected with that. The sense of unreality and dream was upon me strongly, then, and even Anne was a part of it. We were not real people, I thought, but only shadows on a screen or words on a page. We could not feel anything real. The sound of our feet on the treads seemed to come from a long way off.
We knocked on Mrs. Walters’ door. Her voice, when she answered, was not sleepy. “Hello,” she said. “Who’s there?”
I told her and explained that she was wanted downstairs.
“Wait one second till I come out,” she said urgently through the door. “I want to talk to you a minute.”
When she opened the door and came into the circle of our candle’s light, it was plain that sometime before she had been at least lying down in her blue dress. It was creased and wrinkled, and her hair straggled round her face. Most of the make-up was gone from her cheeks and lips, and she looked more than ever like a human ruin. But I swear there was no fear and no weakness in that face, or in the way she held her big, loose body. She stared at us each momentarily, as if trying to read from our faces what had been happening downstairs. It may even be possible that she was, but I think she had no occasion to wonder about that. I think she had been listening outside the door. She was too clever to leave anything to chance or guesswork. And she was in too tight a pinch to let even the smallest slip occur.
“I hope you told the truth,” she said to us in a low voice.
“Of course.” I could not resist adding, “And you’ll be all right if you do the same thing.”
She smiled at that and it was a thin, cold smile. “Thank you, Mr. Sayles. I was only hoping that you hadn’t embroidered your story with—noises, let us say, or stupid conjectures about me.”
“I mentioned the noise. As a clap of thunder, which I still don’t believe it was. And we told Sheriff Hoskins that you were a medium. It seemed to me better to do that than to let him go on thinking what was actually in his mind.”
“How chivalrous of you.” Without another word she turned down the hall, moving in the dark like a cat, and went soundlessly down the stairs.
Anne and I stood there in the dark hall until we heard a murmur of voices begin in the living room. Then we separated without a word or a gesture, and went at once to bed. This time I did not lie awake, even to listen. No matter what lived in this house, or what danger might be in its air, I could not think longer about it. Sleep came up over me at once, with Lethean intensity.
19.
THE SUN was shining when I woke the next day. For a time I lay on my cot, simply observing the intense blue of the sky coming through the window and feeling the animal pleasure of a rested body. When I stretched, the blood in the muscles of my arms and legs felt like rich cream. I was content, and even more than that. I thought of Anne. I would see her again on this day; no wonder the sky was so bright. And then I remembered everything else, in a series of heavy resurgences of memory, and the good feeling went out of me.
It wasn’t particularly cold when I got out of bed, so I knew the morning was probably well advanced. And when I went downstairs to forage for breakfast, I found it was close to eleven. To my surprise, Julian was sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and picking at a piece of toast.
“Hello, Julian,” I said. “I see you slept late, too.”
He looked up at me, and I saw that his face was haggard and gray. “Yes. Later than I should have. I have no right to lose a morning in this fashion, but last night . . . yesterday, seems to have been a shock to me.”
“Did the sheriff wake you?”
“Yes. Almost at dawn. I should have stayed up then and gone to work, I suppose. But I was tired . . .”
The coffee on the stove was still hot. I poured a cup for myself, found some bread and butter and an orange, and sat down opposite him. “What did Hoskins ask you?”
“Routine questions. I had not heard about the accident until Mrs. Walters told me when she summoned me. It was tragic.” He massaged his face with his hand and took another sip of coffee. “I would give anything if it had not happened.”
“We all would give that, I guess.” When he made no further comment, I asked, “Did you see the woman actually fall on the stairs, Julian?”
His face was grayer than before, I thought, but his tone was steady. “I was in my own bedroom, Richard. I couldn’t have seen her fall.”
“My theory is that it was the noise that frightened her into falling.”
He moistened his lips. “So you heard that?”
“Of course. Listen, Julian, what made that noise?”
As if he had been rehearsed in the answer, he said, “Thunder. It’s often very loud and startling here in the valley.”
I gave him a look which I hope expressed my skepticism and went on with my breakfast. “I suppose,” I said at last, “you wouldn’t be willing to use me as your assistant while I’m here, Julian? There’s not much else to do and we used to work well together in the old days.”
He smiled at that and there was human w
armth in the look he gave me. “For an undergraduate, you were a remarkably capable laboratory man, Dick. But I don’t need any help. It’s best, I am coming to believe, if I work wholly alone. And besides, I’m relying on you to give Anne some fun.”
“I’d have time to do both.”
“No, Dick, no.” He looked at me somberly. “What do you think of her?”
“She’s a good kid.”
He nodded. “And a lovely one, too. Dick, if I should ever have an accident—say like Mrs. Marcy and fall downstairs—I want to ask you to keep an eye on Anne. I’ve bequeathed what little property I have left to her, in my will. You’re the executor.”
“But Julian—”
He held up a thin hand. “Don’t protest. There is no one else I could ask to do it.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I want,” he said and finished his coffee. The piece of toast which he had been holding when I came in was almost untouched. I wanted to urge him to eat more, but from the way he shoved it back I was sure it would be useless. “Well, Dick, it’s good to have you here. Perhaps I did not sound too cordial yesterday and I’m sorry. You’re a comfort to us right now, though. I’m only sorry all this should have happened.”
I told him not to worry and that it was nothing, and he moved out of the room. Even before I had finished speaking I could tell that his mind was abstracted, that he only half heard me, and as he went through the door his head was bent forward as I remembered it when he went into the lab in the old days. Without his telling me, I was sure he was going to that room of his where he worked and the thought gave me a twinge of uneasiness. Surely there were more important things to settle today? But I did not try to call him back. He had gone beyond me, beyond every other living person as well, I think. There was no way I could have held on to him. Even if I had known then what was to happen in the next forty-eight hours, I could not have held him back. Julian, in those last days, was scarcely a living person at all, as I have come to realize in thinking back over the whole terrible story. He was alive only because of the purpose that was in him, the determination to perfect that device of his before letting the death that was in every fiber of his body actually triumph.
The Rim of Morning Page 40
