Wolf in Man’s Clothing
Mignon G. Eberhart
A woman is accused of a murder she had every reason to commit.
Mignon G. Eberhart
Wolf in Man’s Clothing
A book in the Sarah Keate series, 1942
INTRODUCTION
Carl D. Brandt
BRANDT & BRANDT HAS been fortunate in representing Mignon Eberhart since 1933 and since I was not born until 1935, this brief introduction will have more to do with her working life than her personality. I do know from family pictures that Mignon spent weekends at our house near Clinton, New Jersey, when I was very young, but my childhood memories of her are vague. The image that remains is of a smallish woman with a well-controlled head of red-blond hair who had a surprisingly deep voice and a truly infectious giggle. She and my father loved telling stories, the longer and shaggier the better, and while most of them were far over my head, the joy and good humor were wonderful to be near.
In 1945 we moved to New York and I saw less of Mignon. We no longer had those weekends, and in any case I was busy with school and jobs for the next dozen years. When I did come into the office in the beginning of 1957, shortly before my father’s death, Mignon was working with my mother, who remained as her agent until she herself died in 1984. Now she works with my able colleague, Charles Schlessiger, and while there is no new prose with which to work, there is still a great deal of interest in reprints both in the United States and abroad. Besides, Mignon’s wonderful characters are sure to appeal to the many producers who are competing to successfully fill the ever growing hours on the ever growing number of television channels. She’ll keep us busy, which is the way she has always wanted it to be.
There is one facet to Mignon’s professional life about which I have seen little written, and that has to do with the role of magazines. They were of great importance to her and of even greater importance to many other writers. I believe that the disappearance of so many of the great magazines that were published in the thirties and forties and early fifties has had a disastrous effect on writing in this country, particularly on the writing of fiction. I’ll get back to that, but first want to briefly describe Mignon’s magazine career.
In 1933 she sold a novelette to Redbook for $2500, three short stories to Tower for $225, and another short story to Delineator for $700. In 1934 the Delineator bought one story for $700, and then commissioned six more, four at that price and two at $800. That same year, the Ladies Home Journal bought first serial rights to The House on the Roof for $7500. Remember, these are Depression dollars.
After 1934 there was a lively competition for serial rights in the novels between the Journal, Colliers, and the Saturday Evening Post, then a weekly. Her price rose rapidly, and while not every novel went to the magazines, a high proportion did. By 1939 she was getting $15,000, and that rose to $22,500 at the end of World War II. During this period she continued to write short stories and novelettes and she could count on a minimum of $35,000 a year after 1935 from magazines alone.
The money was, of course, welcome. But there was also the training in her profession that she received from a series of highly skilled editors who worked closely with her to ensure that what appeared was the result of her best efforts. In addition, the magazines allowed her to experiment with different ideas and styles, and paid her for doing so. She could write a story in the present tense, or the first person, and find out whether that style was comfortable and workable for one of the novels. She didn’t have to run the risk of losing a half year’s work to learn that something was not going to work in longer form… and she was paid to learn it.
By the mid-fifties many of those magazines had folded, or had changed format or frequency. The American, Woman’s Home Companion, and Colliers joined the Delineator, Bluebook, and many others in the magazine graveyard. The Saturday Evening Post was to become a monthly, and the surviving magazines have continued to cut or even eliminate the amount of fiction they run. By the sixties, Mignon’s first serial sales were limited to the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, which eventually phased out its fiction in the seventies.
Mignon was gifted, and the magazines played an important role in her life. She would have been a successful writer of mysteries without them, but they provided her with public recognition, money, and a graduate classroom.
It is the last two of these elements that I miss the most in the current scene. Where are writers going to learn their trade? It is vitally important for young writers to be professional in their work, and that means being paid for what they do while having to satisfy skilled, hardheaded, and patient editors. Book publishing cannot do that at the learning stage, and I find it hard to believe that teaching creative writing at an early age is an educational or broadening experience.
All of this seems distant from Wolf in Man’s Clothing. But reading it is the whole point, and Mignon would be the first to say that it should speak for itself. She has always been the complete professional, demanding of herself, and generously concerned with the fate of her fellow writers.
Cast of Characters
NURSE SARAH KEATE, who, so far as the author knows, has been knitting for five years.
DRUE CABLE, a young nurse, once married to
CRAIG BRENT, son of
CONRAD BRENT, now married to
ALEXIA SENOUR BRENT, whose brother is
NICKY SENOUR.
Also
PETER HUBER, staying at the Brent house
DR. and MAUD CHIVERY, also friends of the Brents
and
assorted police, state troopers, and domestics, including ANNA HAUB, a maid; and BEEVENS, a butler.
There is a cat, but he did not do the murder.
1
ANNA HAUB OPENED THE door, and at the same time, for me, opened the door upon murder. Naturally, I didn’t know that and take to my heels.
Her solid figure was a sharp black and white against the baroque richness and color of the hall behind her. She wore a white cap, as crisp and fresh as her apron. Her face was round and shone; her light straight hair was drawn tightly backward. But what I really saw was the look of frightened recognition in her china-blue eyes. She was not looking at me; she had given me the barest glance. She was looking at Drue, who came with me.
I said, “We are expected,” intending to explain that we, Drue Cable and I, were the nurses Dr. Chivery had sent for, but I didn’t, for I had to follow the maid’s look and I turned to Drue who stood beside me. As I turned, Drue took her hand from her mouth and said on a queer shaken breath, “Anna! Oh, Anna, how is he?”
That-and the look in Anna’s eyes-were my first indication that Drue Cable had ever seen or heard of the Brent family in her life. She had been extraordinarily silent and a little pale in the train that February morning; she had been extraordinarily determined that the second nurse (for they had sent for two) should be me, Sarah Keate; but she had not, that morning or ever, so much as mentioned the name of the Brents or the town of Balifold in the Berkshires-and I knew her extremely well.
Neither Drue nor the maid looked at me. Drue’s words seemed to give Anna a kind of confirmation that she had, bewilderedly, needed. She dropped an old-fashioned curtsy which billowed her full black skirt around her solid ankles. The look of fright, however, sharpened in her eyes, and she looked over her shoulder, backward into the depths of the house, and said in a low and distressed voice, “Oh, Miss! Oh, Madam, you oughtn’t to have come here.”
“I know. Anna…” Drue put out both her sturdy little hands in their pigskin gloves and caught the maid’s hands. “Anna, tell me quickly. Will he live?”
“He-he-I don’t know, Ma’am. It only happened last night. Miss-you’d really better g
o. Before they know.”
Drue took a long breath and said, “I hoped you would come to the door, you or Beevens. Anna, I’m coming in. What room is he in?”
“His own room. He, oh, but, Madam,” said Anna, on the verge of tears. Drue stepped inside the hall. I followed and closed the door behind me, for Anna was too stricken to move. There was a quick impression of a massive hall and stairway that was all dark wood paneling, and a floor made of squares of black and white marble; of high-backed chairs and long Italian tables; of rich but subdued color in the tapestries and rugs. Anna wrung her clean pink hands together, and Drue said, “It’s all right, Anna. I’m a nurse, you remember; they sent me here to take care of him.”
She too gave a quick look along the depths of the great hall; there were doors, solid slabs of dark carved wood, but there was a kind of thickness and padded quality in the place that made me feel no one was likely to hear our voices. She went quickly to the stairway and stopped and seemed to listen, looking upward. Her soft, green tweed suit was sleekly tailored to her slender, erect figure; her profile against the dark wood paneling was clear and white, and her crimson mouth was rather set, yet obviously it was held so only by the strongest effort of will.
Just then something happened that threatened it. For there was a tiny scamper of sound somewhere near, a pause and a silence which had a quality of the most intent observation. We all looked at the back of the hall; at the entrance to some passage stood a small creature in a veritable agony of watchfulness. Stood there for only a second or two, then Drue said with a break in her voice, “Sir Francis,” and with a tiny rush of feet, a throbbing sound in its throat, the little thing hurled itself across the great hall and toward us.
Toward us? Toward Drue. It leaped into her arms and strove frantically, almost sobbing, to lick her face and her hands. It was a Yorkshire terrier, a tiny thing, his long forelock hanging down over his glistening eyes.
Anna said, “He’s never forgotten, Miss.”
Drue held the little terrier tight and put her face down against its little frenzied body for a long moment. Then she looked up the stairway and put her hand to her mouth again. It was no longer the firm resolute line it had been. She took a quick breath, and, still holding the little dog, started up the stairs. The maid made a futile, prohibitive move forward and stopped. Drue did not look back. So again I followed.
And Anna finally followed me. As I turned at the wide landing and looked back, I saw her coming after me, her footsteps soft on the thickly carpeted stairway, round face lifted anxiously and faintly purple as she passed below a band of purple light from the stained glass window above the landing.
When I reached the top of the stairway, Drue was already halfway down a long wide corridor which seemed to run the length of the house and was intersected once by a narrow corridor which seemed to go toward a servants’ wing. Along the main corridor toward the north end of the house a man-the workman who had met us at the train-seemed to be sorting my bags from Drue’s by examining the initials and tags. Our rooms then were to be where he left our bags. I made a mental note of the door he opened and went along the hall southward, in Drue’s wake. Anna followed me.
Halfway along it Drue stopped. The hall was gloomy, for it was a dark day in the early spring with a fine, cold rain falling. But I could see her pause for an instant with her hand on a doorknob; then she opened the door and disappeared. The maid, Anna, who by that time was just behind me, said, “Holy Mother of God! But I could do nothing…” And wrung her hands again.
Probably I had some idea of clarifying the situation and my own confused state of mind at the same time. For I stated my position then, in a loud clear voice. “You don’t understand. I am a nurse. My name is Sarah Keate. Miss Cable is a nurse, too. Your local doctor, Dr. Chivery, sent for us last night. I was sent here to nurse a Mr. Craig Brent…” I stopped, for the maid didn’t hear a word I said. She, too, opened the door and went into the room beyond and naturally, again, I followed.
It was a large bedroom, dusky, so the big, canopied four-poster in the middle of it was outlined bulkily against the gray light from the windows along the opposite wall. There was a fireplace with a couch drawn up before it; and the massive shapes of too much and too heavy furniture. Then I saw Drue, and she was kneeling at the side of the bed with her head down.
Anna gave a wavering little sound, a kind of angry moan. She went to a table and turned on the light in a lamp that stood there. Then I could see more clearly; a man lay on the bed, looking very long under the white blanket cover, and Drue had her face on his hand which lay outside.
Anna stepped toward the kneeling, slender figure and said softly, “Oh, you mustn’t. If his father finds you here…”
Drue lifted her head. She had flung off her hat, so her light brown hair, brushed upward from her temples and breaking into short curls on the top of her small head, shone softly, like gold, in the light and looked disheveled, like a child’s. Her face was very pale; she looked upward beseechingly at Anna and whispered, “Is he going to die?”
“No, no,” cried Anna. “No, please God.”
There was a moment of complete silence, with only the fine rain whispering against the windowpanes. Then Drue said, “No. I won’t let him die. I’m a nurse. I know what to do…” Her fingers were on his pulse. “Where is the chart? The doctor must have left orders. Give them to me…”
Anna went back to a table, and Drue rose in a swift motion and followed her. I went closer to the bed and stood there looking down at my patient-Craig Brent. He was asleep.
Obviously it was a drugged sleep. I didn’t know, then, what was wrong, and I didn’t like the drawn look in his face, young and lean, with good bones, a rather stern, brown profile, and deeply hollowed eyes. I didn’t like his pulse either when I put my fingers lightly on his wrist.
Whatever this man, this house and the people in it meant to Drue, to me then, the main thing was my patient. Drue and the maid had withdrawn with the chart to a curtained doorway which seemed to lead to a dressing room. I followed. It was a small room, with windows along one side and cupboards lining the other; at the other end of it was another door leading into a bathroom. Drue was reading the doctor’s orders intently, and Anna was close beside her, watching Drue’s face and knotting her fingers nervously in her apron. Drue was white, and the upward gleam of the light outlined the clean line of her chin and cheekbones, and cast a soft shadow around her eyes. She looked up directly at me with a poignant appeal in her eyes and her mouth. She thrust the tablet into my hands and said to Anna in a whisper that was as chilled and cold as the rain outside, “Anna, who shot him?”
Well, that gave me a real and most unwelcome start; it was the first I’d known of that. They had said at the registry office (or rather, I remembered suddenly, Drue had said when she persuaded me to take the case with her) only that there’d been an accident. Not that it was a shooting accident. I don’t like shootings. I held the tablet in a hand suddenly gone stiff.
Anna shook her head. “They said accident,” she whispered. In fact, our whispers and the dreary day, the silence in the great, thick-walled house and the whisper of rain against the windows gave the whole thing a kind of eeriness. Drue’s small hands caught Anna’s shoulders.
“Anna, you must tell me. What happened?”
“I don’t know, Miss Drue. I swear I don’t know. They found him in the garden, there by the hedge…”
“In the garden? When?”
“Last night. About eleven. They carried him into the house and sent for the doctor.”
“But what did they say? How could there have been an accident?”
“They said he was cleaning a gun.” Anna’s eyes wavered and went back to Drue’s.
“At eleven o’clock at night?” said Drue. “In the garden? Craig!”
Anna said nothing. The rain swished gently against the window behind her. It was then perhaps three o’clock in the afternoon, but it seemed later because of the dark da
y. Finally, Drue said, “Who brought him in? Who found him?”
The maid swallowed. “Beevens-you remember him-the butler…”
“Beevens! Yes, I remember. Who else?”
“Mr. Nicky and Mr. Peter Huber. You wouldn’t know him. He’s a friend, an old school friend of Mr. Craig’s.”
“I don’t remember him.” Drue was frowning. “Is he here, do you mean? Staying in the house?”
“Yes, Miss Drue. He and Mr. Nicky and Beevens heard the shot; they were in the morning room, and Beevens was locking up for the night. Mr. Craig called for help, and they found him-he’d fainted by that time. The doctor was called at once. Mr. Brent-oh, you must go! You can’t stay.”
Drue paid no attention to the maid’s pleading. “Who’s been taking care of him? You?”
“Yes, Miss Drue. And Mrs. Chivery. She came right away-as she always does when we need her. She stayed all night. She helped the doctor get the bullet out.”
“Bullet…” whispered Drue after a moment and seemed to shiver a little, and I looked at the tablet in my hand.
Drue waited while I read it. I knew she was watching me to see what I thought of what I read there and I knew, too, that she was counting on my skill and experience. That was why she had made me come with her.
Well, it was serious enough but not necessarily fatal. The bullet had entered his shoulder; they had got it out, without benefit of x-ray or operating room. It must have been a fairly ticklish task for the local doctor. I frowned, reading and weighing my patient’s chances. Drue said whispering, “Will he live?”
“I hope so. I’ll take night watch.”
“That’s the hardest,” she said. She put her hands on my arm and, with pleading in her eyes, said, “Let me take it. I’ll call you if anything goes wrong.”
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