“Yes,” said Peter shortly and helped me out.
“H’m,” said the clerk and, as Peter offered no comment but steered me along the sidewalk in the direction of the inn (a long, sprawled, white building with the sign Coach Inn, 1782, hanging above its door), the clerk called after us, “You look fine, Mr. Huber. Glad the things fit.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Peter. “Yes, they were all right.”
“I’ll never forget what you looked like when you came to the store that morning,” added the clerk with a chuckle that carried clearly through the winter twilight and silence of the little street.
Peter grinned back at the chatty (and curious) clerk and we crossed the narrow white porch of the inn.
It was a hospitable and warm old tavern. We went along a dark passage so narrow that my cape brushed the walls and entered the tap room, all smoke-stained rafters and age. Aside from nearly braining myself on a low rafter, I reached a table without misadventure and looked around me. Except for the bartender, no one else was there-or at least I could see no one, although the high-backed settles along the side walls cut off my view of one corner of the room.
Beside the bar was the kind of machine where one drops in nickels (or dimes or quarters, if one is really just a gambler at heart) and takes what comes, if anything. With this machine it had to be nickels. It was very quiet; I had had a kind of expectation of some kind of repercussion from the inquest, but if the police or Soper were still in town, I saw and heard nothing of them then.
The bartender knew Peter, too. He came forward, wiping his hands.
“Hello, Mr. Huber.”
“Hello, John. I guess we’ll have a-what do you want, Miss Keate?”
I took ginger ale. Peter ordered whisky and soda. And suddenly the bartender chuckled much as the haberdashery clerk had chuckled. “You certainly look different, Mr. Huber,” he said. “Ever find your baggage?”
“No,” said Peter. “Guess it’s gone forever.”
“Too bad. You looked as if you’d been shipwrecked,” the bartender laughed.
“Felt like it, too,” said Peter. He unbuttoned his short leather jacket, untied the white scarf around his throat and said, “Anybody been in here from the inquest, John?”
The bartender’s face sobered instantly. “That’s a bad business, Mr. Huber,” he said. “First murder in Balifold since-well, I can’t remember another and I’ve been here a long time. Ginger ale for you, Miss? And whisky and soda.” He ambled away.
Peter leaned his chin gloomily in his hands. “I lost my baggage,” he said ruefully. “I arrived here in what amounted to fancy dress. The natives can’t forget it. They all but burst into hysterics whenever they see me.”
If he was trying to divert me, he didn’t succeed.
“You were at the inquest, then,” I said. “What happened?”
“Nothing, really,” he said, staring at the bare table and biting his knuckles. “They didn’t intend anything to happen, I suppose. It was a formality. Dr. Chivery was there; he and the police doctor both testified as to what they had found. The police testified, too-that is, Nugent and one of the troopers. Then they had the lawyer that had drawn up Brent’s will tell something of its contents. I suppose that was only to show that Brent was a rich man and that there might have been a motive for his murder.”
“Was that all?”
“That was all. Or about all. They adjourned then.”
“Then they said nothing of-of Drue?”
He shook his head, rubbed his hands across his thick, curly blond hair and then put them flat on the table. “Not a word. And Soper can’t ask for a Grand Jury indictment until after the inquest reconvenes and delivers a verdict. Or so they tell me. So Drue is safe till then. They had to hold an inquest in order to give the police a kind of ticket to go ahead. Soper can go back now to the county seat or wherever his office is. And Nugent stays here and goes on with the investigation, calling on Soper whenever he needs him. The inquest can’t be concluded, I understood, until they have more evidence. There couldn’t be a verdict, but they made no bones of calling it murder.”
The bartender ambled toward us and set our glasses on the table. Peter cupped his hand around his own with a welcoming sigh. “Alexia wanted me to go and hear what was said, so I went. She didn’t want to go herself.” He took a long drink, put down his glass and said unexpectedly, “He had really a lot of money. Conrad, I mean. And it won’t come to Drue, so that ought to help out your little friend. I mean, she hadn’t money for a motive.”
He looked very gloomy. I said, a little gloomily myself, “Unless they think she hoped to remarry Craig and thus get money. That is, if Craig does inherit.”
“Oh, yes, he inherits. Conrad wouldn’t have cut him off; Conrad was strong on family, you know. A little cracked really on the subject. Had all kinds of grandiose ideas.”
“Yes, I know,” I said dryly, remembering what Conrad had said of Drue. “Anybody’s wife, yes,” said Conrad, “but not my son’s.” I added, “He seems to have felt that Alexia fitted into his family particularly well.”
Peter glanced quickly at me, and I felt the way you do when you’ve said something that sounds more disagreeable than you meant it, and a man gives you that look of “So-it’s-true-about-women-and-cats.” He said slowly, “Perhaps he married her because Craig had as good as jilted her. The honor of the family-all that.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “He was in love with her; he…” I hesitated and then went rashly on, “Perhaps he’d been in love with her, really, without knowing it, for a long time. But that doesn’t matter, anyway, and it’s nothing to me.”
“Nor to me,” said Peter, and added thoughtfully, “But there’s Mrs. Chivery. An extremely handsome and brilliant woman. I should have thought somebody like-well, like Mrs. Chivery, would have attracted Conrad.”
“Mrs. Chivery!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything,” he said hurriedly. “It’s only that she’s very-well, attractive, you know.”
I stared at him. He had a pleasant face; his calm blue eyes were well spaced above high, rather sharp cheekbones; his blunt chin and his wide mouth and thick blond eyebrows suggested a certain uncompromising strength. He was no Adonis, certainly, but he was not bad-looking, either. And I was visited by a more or less fantastic idea. Perhaps it was Maud he’d fallen in love with and not Alexia, so Craig was right in guessing his emotional temperature, so to speak, but wrong in his diagnosis of its cause. True, Maud was at least twenty to twenty-five years older than he, but what with all the liberties playwrights and scientists are taking with time these days, that might not make so much difference. Time might be actually a sheer question of relativity; and I might be skipping rope again at any moment. Which was a fairly blood-curdling thought and shocked me back into a semblance of common sense.
Peter said, “Chivery knew about Conrad’s will; we sat together and before the inquest began he told me about it. Dr. Chivery himself inherits fifty thousand dollars.”
“Fifty… Good gracious!”
“They were old friends. And Mrs. Chivery managed the house for Conrad for years. Until he married Alexia. Then there were a few bequests to servants, something like five thousand to the butler, small sums to the others. The library rug was willed to a museum. A blessing, that; it ought never to have been put on the floor. There were smallish sums to one or two charities. The rest was divided between Craig and Alexia.”
So Alexia had that for a motive. But if money were a motive for murder then it was widespread, for it included everyone. Everyone except-suddenly I remembered Nicky.
“Nothing to Nicky Senour?”
“No. But Nicky’d already had his share.”
“Nicky! But he’s only Alexia’s brother. He…”
Peter said, in a matter-of-fact way, “The police have already got to that. For two years or so Conrad has been paying Nicky Senour fairly substantial sums. At irregular intervals. By check.”
If that was true the
n Nicky Senour had every motive to keep Conrad alive. Peter went on calmly, “But I don’t think that it was blackmail. “It…” His head jerked around and his eyes fastened on something behind me. I hadn’t heard a sound or a rustle, but Peter got quickly to his feet. And I turned around just as Maud Chivery emerged from the high-backed settle in the corner.
She wore a long black cloak and no hat on that neat, high, black pompadour. She floated toward us, noiselessly, her small white face suspended above that black cloak, her bright, peering eyes upon us.
The bartender materialized too, beside us, but more noisily. “That’ll be for three brandies, Mrs. Chivery,” he said, and Peter began to dig quickly into his pocket. Maud said to Peter, “I thought Claud would come in here after the inquest. I wanted to know what happened.” (I thought, parenthetically, that she had heard that, and some other things too.) She went on quickly, “Have you seen him?”
“He left the inquest a few minutes before it was adjourned,” said Peter. “Ten or fifteen minutes before, I imagine. I don’t know where he went.”
“Oh,” said Maud. “Well, then I’ll go home with you, if you don’t mind.” She folded her cloak around her, fixed her bright dark eyes upon Peter and said, “Are you sure about the money? Conrad’s money, I mean. Doesn’t any of it come direct to me?”
“Dr. Chivery told me the money comes to him,” said Peter. “But Conrad must have meant it for both of you.”
Maud’s lips set tightly. “Yes. Yes,” she said with an odd effect of resolution, as if she were casting a vote or making a vow. She pulled her cloak closer around her and let Peter pay for her drinks and I got up and prepared to go. I didn’t leap to the conclusion that Maud Chivery was a dipsomaniac because she chose to retire to the depths of Balifold’s bar for a little private drinking.
I did think that in spite of her clear speech, her eyes were a little glassy. And I thought too that it was time for me to go back to the Brent house.
On the way out I stopped at the slot machine.
Peter and Maud had gone on ahead when rather unexpectedly I found that my fingers had explored the pocket of my cape and found a nickel. So I put it in a slit in the machine and then, as directions said to do, turned a kind of crank. I can see why these instruments have a certain attraction, for instantly a veritable shower of nickels shot out of the machine. Being unprepared, I didn’t catch all the nickels and they went everywhere, rolling merrily on the floor. Peter and Maud came back quickly in a startled manner, and helped me gather up nickels. At least Peter did. Although I’m not sure that Maud didn’t pick up one or two in spite of her aloof attitude, but, if she did, she didn’t give them to me.
But it was owing to the nickels (and perhaps a little to the brandy she’d drunk while waiting for Claud Chivery) that Maud said just what she said.
Peter had pursued several spinning little disks behind the bar and he and the bartender were talking. And Maud leaned over toward me, touched the nickels in my cupped hands with positively loving fingers and said suddenly and low, her face all at once aglow, “Money-gold, silver, jewels. I’m going to have lots of money, soon. As soon as they can get the jewels. Heaps of jewels. All behind the church.”
“Ch-church!” I said in a kind of gasp, clutching nickels.
And Maud nodded briskly and brightly, with a shimmering hard glaze over her eyes.
“Truckloads of jewels. Spanish. Castles in Spain-my castles in Spain…” she said in a dry whisper. And then Peter came back with the last of the nickels.
I didn’t have time then to count them; we went directly out to the car, Peter laughing a little and Maud suddenly as silent and uncommunicative as a little black shadow. As well she might be, I thought a little tersely, if brandy affected her like that. Castles in Spain and truckloads of jewels! Truckloads. Well, really! In the car the odors of brandy and Maud’s violet sachet were quite marked.
It developed shortly, however, that she had an errand at her own house and Peter offered to take her there and bring her back to the Brent place. “Alexia insists upon me staying on,” said Maud.
So they let me out at the corner where the main road to Balifold branched onto the road past the Brent place. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” said Peter politely and, when I had to say I didn’t, Maud said suddenly,
“There’s a short cut to the house through the meadow; you’ll see the path just beyond the wall.”
So I got out and stood there, weighed down with nickels, watching the red tail-light of the car disappear along the main road south and east, in the direction of the Chivery cottage. And I didn’t at all fancy the walk I had so airily undertaken, simply because I didn’t want to refuse and then explain why. My road wound westward, skirting the northern wall of the meadow, and then, still winding, southward and eventually reached the Brent gate. A path through the meadow would be roughly the hypotenuse of the triangle and much shorter.
But I didn’t like the meadow and the shadowy patches of woodland and brush; I didn’t like the dense strip of brush and trees outlining the little valley of the brook; I didn’t like the time of day. I remembered too well the hunter of the previous night, and I still didn’t think it was rabbits.
Yet I couldn’t stand there in the chill, silent loneliness of the approaching night. And the road must be nearly twice as long a way as the path.
So in the end I scrambled over the wall and took the path. I guessed it would come out somewhere about the garage and kitchen end of the Brent house.
Until I had got quite a distance into the meadow I didn’t realize exactly how dark it was. I went along hurriedly, my ill-gotten gains making a small chinking sound in my pockets. The meadow was rocky and the path twisted around weed-grown boulders and up and down tiny valleys and mounds; I hadn’t realized either, looking at it from the road, how irregular the meadow was. I neared the belt of woodland and the strip of dark shadow which seemed to edge the brook.
What, really, had Anna run from, the night before?
The meadow, the strip of woods and thickets down by the brook were all clothed now in silence and in dusk. The sky was dark again and there were no stars and only a faint purple glow of lingering daylight in the west.
Once, somewhere in the shadowy distance, it seemed to me there was a kind of rustle and crackle of twigs, but when I stopped to listen there was nothing.
The path entered the strip of trees and sloped downward toward the brook. A twig caught at my cape and I jerked it away with a sharp tug, as if it had been fingers. And then I stumbled.
Something was in the path, lying like a sack in the middle of it. I fell on one knee, flinging out my hands to save myself, my cape swirling around me. My hand encountered the sack. Only it wasn’t a sack. For my hands came away and they were wet with a kind of stickiness.
I knew by that viscous stickiness what was on them. I leaned over, trying not to touch him again. The twilight was deep but still I could make out the outlines of Dr. Chivery’s anxious face and popping eyes, for once fixed and direct. His throat had been cut.
Then I heard again a rustle and snapping of twigs. This time it was clear and definite. This time I knew what it was.
It was the soft sound of something moving in the dense brush beyond the brook, on the slope between me and the Brent house.
As I listened it stopped. There was just silence and night coming on and the bloody thing at my feet.
14
WITH EVERY SECOND IT was growing darker; I don’t know how long I listened like that, but it seemed all at once fully dark. There was no further sound from the thickets on the slope ahead. And I had to get to the house.
I got awkwardly to my feet, tripping on my cape, spilling nickels. There was nothing I or anyone could do now for Claud Chivery. And I was afraid.
All at once I started to run-back, along the way I had come, for I couldn’t follow the path into those shadowy thickets where something had moved. I ran as Anna had run, gasping for breath, listening behind me, runni
ng.
Eventually, after an eon of time, I reached the wall and nothing came out of that black and haunted meadow behind me. Then I was on the public road and I still had to circle (on the road now) around that dark and horrible meadow in order to reach the house.
Yet nothing, really, seemed to have a meaning except the hard-packed, winding road, the loud sound of my feet upon it, the dark lines of wall and hedges, the trees on either hand, the silence of the night sky above. It was as if I was suspended in a strange and ghastly world, cut off from everything I’d ever known, aware only of the road-and the grotesque and horrible thing I’d left in the little thicket, flung down like an empty sack.
Well, I got to the gateposts which loomed sudden and huge in the dusk. I could then see the lights of the Brent house, glimmering through the trees.
My throat and lungs smarted and stung. Yet I was horribly watchful and aware of the shadows and shrubs along the driveway. But there was a light in the hall; the many-colored stained glass window was garish above me. The door was unlocked, for I flung it open. And fell, literally, into Beevens’ arms.
He caught me and his face seemed instantly to sharpen, so lines stood out and it turned the color of skim milk. I knew I was talking, trying to tell him.
He cried, “Dr. Chivery-Dr. Chivery…”
Someone else said, “Where? Where?” sharply, and there was a flash of color and Alexia, in her long green tea gown, came hurrying from the door of the library. Nicky floated into my vision too and seemed to have followed Alexia. Then Anna came from somewhere, and it was Anna who screamed.
She screamed so sharply that Beevens turned to her and said in a voice of snarling authority, “Get back to the kitchen. Shut up.”
Someone-Nicky-was helping me to a chair. Beevens ran to the telephone beyond the stairway and Alexia was telling him what to say, her pointed face a white, vehement mask.
And then the trooper (Drue’s guard; not Wilkins but another man) came running into the library, and wrested the telephone from Beevens’ hand. “I heard you! I heard everything. Are you sure he’s dead? What happened exactly? Operator, operator…”
Wolf in Man’s Clothing Page 15
