“Alexia! What on earth for?”
The queer look of speculation was in his face again. He said quite coolly, looking remarkably like his father in his more unpleasant moments, “Because I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
“Marry Alexia! But, good heavens…” I broke off. “If you think you’ll keep her from giving them the hypodermic that way…”
“Please go, Miss Keate.”
“But I…”
He lifted himself on his elbow; his eyes flashed and his chin and nose seemed to grow hawkier, if you understand me. He snapped crisply as a drill sergeant, “Do as I tell you! Bring her here!”
Well, I did it. I’ve never met a man yet that could make me change my mind; I obeyed him only because-oh, because I did. I was furious, too. I caught a glimpse of myself marching back out of the room with my red hair flaming and two bright spots of anger on my cheeks. But I got Alexia. She was in her room, undressing, and I had to watch her select a diaphanous creamy lace garment that set my teeth on edge and not because it courted pneumonia and, as to that, every possible rheumatic ailment. I only hoped, following her lovely figure and noting how seductively the creamy soft folds of lace and chiffon melted into it, that she would be thus attacked and succumb quickly. In fact, before she reached Craig’s room.
It was a wild hope. The trooper down at the end of the hall saw us and even at that distance I could see him snap to interested attention when his gaze fell upon Alexia. We reached Craig’s room and she swept straight to the bed and Craig said, “Alexia, did you give the police the hypodermic?”
“Why, I…” She settled down on the bed, sitting very close to him, her short, dark hair cloudlike and beautiful about her pointed, delicate face. “Yes, I did, Craig,” she said softly. She shot a glance toward me. “I thought I ought to. It was my duty. I gave it to Nugent tonight. He’s taking it to be fingerprinted. And to have the sediment inside the barrel tested for digitalis. I’m sorry, Craig, but I had to do it.”
“Yes,” said Craig slowly. “I suppose you had to. Well, you’ve done it now. Alexia, there’s something I want to ask you.”
“Yes, Craig.”
“Will you marry me?”
I shut my teeth so hard that I bit my tongue and uttered a stifled ejaculation which turned out, after I’d said it, to be highly profane. Alexia didn’t hear it, not that I would have been anything but pleased if she had, but she was leaning over toward Craig as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “Why, Craig!” she cried.
“Will you?” he demanded, his eyes holding her own intently and his profile exactly at that moment like a belligerent young hawk’s.
“Why, I-oh, Craig darling.” She hesitated. Then she seemed to get a kind of hold on herself and leaned over nearer him, lace and chiffon and all. “Oh, my darling,” she breathed. “At last…”
He pushed her away, rather abruptly, so I hoped she’d fall off the bed, but she didn’t. He said, “I don’t mean just sometime in the future. I mean now. Right away. Tomorrow.”
“But your father-Conrad-what will people say?”
“It doesn’t matter. They’ll not know. I can fix everything. Will you, Alexia?”
Which was just exactly more than I could bear. I whirled out of the door and gave it such a good hard bang behind me that the trooper away down at the end of the hall jumped three feet in the air, and came down facing my way and running, with his revolver in his hand.
We met at the stairway.
“Don’t hurt yourself with your revolver,” I said waspishly. “It was only a door.” And sat down on the top step to brood. Which was an unwise move because the more I brooded the more discouraged I got about it, and the more suspicious the trooper, eyeing me distrustfully from before Drue’s door, looked.
But it wasn’t long that I had to wait; in fact in a surprisingly short time Alexia came swirling out of Craig’s room, gave me the fraction of a glance and went quickly to her own room. I couldn’t see the look on her face very distinctly because of the distance between us and the dimness of the night lights. But it did strike me then that there was something surprised, yes, and a little disorganized in her usually poised and self-possessed manner;
I didn’t go to see Drue, then, either; I didn’t want to have to tell her anything. Morning would be all too soon for it to break over her head.
Well, I went back to Craig’s room because it was my duty as a nurse. And neither one of us actually spoke another word that night. I arranged his pillows, gave him one of the pills poor, dead Claud Chivery had left for him, and turned out the light beside his bed. He watched me-the queer, thoughtful look still in his eyes. He didn’t give me back the Miller checks, and I didn’t ask for them. I had enough clues on my mind-or rather, pinned to my anatomy-that I didn’t know what to do with without adding to them.
Again I folded up like an accordion on the couch. But not to sleep for a long time. Craig didn’t sleep either; I could tell by the way he turned and twisted. But I wouldn’t have given him an alcohol rub for all the emeralds in Barranquilla.
About three, Delphine turned up and yelled at the door, so I had to let him in. He created an unwelcome diversion by bringing in what looked like and was a newly deceased mouse. Before I could bring myself to dispose of the creature, Delphine did it for me with really horrid zeal and sat there licking his chops and enormous whiskers while Craig grinned from the pillows and looked all at once young and boyish and rather nice. Which paradoxically made me crosser than ever.
I went back to my couch without a word and eventually I slept. I neither knew nor cared about my patient’s slumbers, except I hoped they were troubled.
And in the morning early, just after Beevens brought in a breakfast tray for each of us, the police came.
It was as I had feared and known it would be. They came directly to Craig’s room and told him. The hypodermic had Drue’s fingerprints on it and mine. There was a very small residue of digitalis in the barrel-but enough to identify. They had informed the District Attorney of it and of her fingerprints on the drawer of the desk where Conrad had been accustomed to keep the missing medicine box (the medicine box that to me was anything but missing; I only wished it had been). Soper, over the telephone, demanded an immediate and formal arrest on a murder charge. But that wasn’t all. For it was then, when they sent a trooper to bring Drue into the room to be questioned (Craig, looking terribly white and drawn insisted upon hearing them question her), it was then that they found she was gone.
She had disappeared during the night; nobody knew when or how. In her cape and without her shoes.
I knew that, for it was I that counted the row of slender, sturdy little pumps and oxfords. She’d brought four pair, including some stub-toed red bedroom slippers. They were all there in a row.
You don’t go out into the night on purpose without shoes.
18
THE TROOPER, QUESTIONED, SEEMED dazed but insisted, looking frightened, that she couldn’t have passed him. There were no other exits from her room unless she got out the window and it was a sheer drop for nearly twenty-five feet with no shrubbery at that point to break a fall.
At noon they still hadn’t found her; the household was nightmarish that morning-at fantastic sixes and sevens, with Beevens red-eyed and Craig like a crazy man, his eyes blazing out of a hollow, drawn white mask. We made peace somehow, Craig and I, without knowing it, conscious only of Drue and that little row of slippers. No matter what the police said, I knew it wasn’t escape. Craig knew it, too.
Nugent gave orders, however, that started a wideflung, hurried search by telephone, radio and police cars, with alarms sent to neighboring states and hurriedly reinforced squads of state troopers searching the hills.
Much of the inquiry itself took place in Craig’s room; he made Nugent stay there so he could hear everything. Soper telephoned frantically with a dozen different theories and directions; he believed that Drue had escaped. Very cleverly, he said; how, he didn’t know; there were n
o cars gone from the garage. But he suggested that she’d got a ride with a passing motorist. And he blamed Nugent for letting her get away.
I listened and watched and kept going back in my mind over and over again, seeking for any small thing Drue had said, any hint of an intention to leave, anything at all that would serve to show she had gone of her own accord, willingly. There was nothing. Yet she must have got past the trooper somehow.
I kept going back into her room, too-and looking and finding nothing, except for the little dog, Sir Francis, who was still there; he had been there when they knocked and called to her and opened the door at last and she was gone. He wouldn’t leave, but sat on the foot of her bed, bright eyes terribly watchful and worried. About noon, I think, I took him outdoors and tried to feed and pat him and he struggled away from me and took up his post in Drue’s room again, watching the door, listening. I thought she would have taken him with her if she had gone voluntarily. And she would have told me.
It was a horrible, nightmarish day. Yet things happened. The police inquiry, for instance. Nugent’s questions when I gave him the letter I had written about the hypodermic syringe; I was glad then that I’d written it, for I’d put down all the facts about the hypodermic syringe so it explained her fingerprints on the desk drawer; I’d said that Conrad begged her for his medicine and she looked for it but it was gone and it was only then that she’d remembered she had digitalis and had got it and the hypodermic syringe, and given it to him. But I still didn’t tell them about the medicine box; I didn’t want them to know she had so much as touched it.
Nugent did everything he could do short of sending for bloodhounds, and I’m not sure he wouldn’t have done that. And I was in the room when Craig told him that Beevens had seen Nicky going toward the meadow (or at least toward the garage) just before the discovery of Claud’s body.
Nicky, questioned, flatly denied it.
I heard that, too, for the Lieutenant had Nicky come to Craig’s room. And the curious thing was the flatness and boldness of Nicky’s denial. It sounded true; his eyes were bright and inquisitive, but he wasn’t frightened, even when Beevens, summoned also, said he couldn’t have been mistaken and seemed very nervous but certain. Nugent finally dismissed them both.
Sometime that morning, too (thinking of what I knew and what I only guessed of the attempt upon Craig’s life) it occurred to me that if the person who tried to kill Craig was not the same who had killed his father, then an alibi for the time Craig was shot did not automatically constitute an alibi for the time of his father’s or Claud Chivery’s murder. And once, when we were alone, I asked Craig again about that meeting with Alexia in the garden just before he was shot. After a moment’s thought he said, “It was an unintentional meeting. She was walking there too; she was there when I went down the steps. We walked up and down the paths for a little and then she went back to the house.”
“Was it your father who shot you?” I asked him again directly. And again he wouldn’t answer.
And Nugent came back into the room, shook his head to the anguished question in Craig’s eyes and, that time, sent for Maud. When she came, looking horrible with great dark pockets around her eyes and her face the color of wax, he asked her about the decanter of brandy that stood habitually on Conrad’s desk. For her fingerprints were on it, it developed, and so were mine.
I explained my fingerprints on the decanter quickly; I had touched it. I was shocked, I started to take a drink of brandy, and then didn’t. And Maud said in a tight, strained voice that was exactly what she’d done. “It was a shock to me; Conrad-dead like that. The brandy was on the tray and…”
“It was on the desk,” I said.
“No,” said Maud, “it was on the tray. I stood right beside it. I would have noticed if it had been on the desk; that decanter drips and alcohol ruins the desk top; I bought the tray for it myself.”
“How much brandy was in it when you touched it, Nurse Keate?”
“I’m not sure I remember-not very much-the rim of the brandy came to not more than an inch from the bottom of the decanter.”
Maud said, “You’re quite wrong, Nurse. It was more than half full…”
Nugent said, “Perhaps you are both right. If poison was in the brandy…”
“Did you find poison in it?” I cried. “Did you find digitalis in it?”
“No. Not in the brandy that was in the bottle when we arrived that night. But we can find no other way by which Conrad Brent might have, without knowing it, taken poison. He had a habit of drinking brandy at odd times; it’s why he kept it constantly on his desk. Poisoned brandy may have been put in that decanter while he was out for his walk. In that case, he returned, drank it and died. Then in the time during which the room was empty the poisoned brandy was removed from the decanter (there’s that little washroom on the other side of the panel; the poisoned brandy could easily have been poured down the drain and washed away with water from the faucet) and ordinary brandy put back in the decanter. It could have been done, like that. It’s a good thing you didn’t drink any, Miss Keate,” he said a little drily.
I was thinking that myself, rather vehemently. He went on, “Conrad had to get the poison, somehow. It’s the only way that hasn’t been eliminated-so far as I can discover, at any rate. All that method needed were three things-the digitalis, a knowledge of the household and where to get more brandy, and opportunity to make the change after Conrad was dead.” He looked at me gravely; I think he felt sorry for me. I know he was almost as frantic as I was, and as Craig was, about Drue’s disappearance; he only controlled himself better and went on about his job.
Constantly, every few moments, there would be a report from someone-somewhere-looking for Drue. Troopers mainly, tall and well built and military-looking in their dark, trim uniforms, in the way they snapped into the room, snapped to attention, took their orders, snapped out again. But still time went on and there was no news.
He stopped then to listen to a report of a girl picked up near Northampton. It wasn’t Drue; this girl was five feet eight and had black hair and wore a lambskin coat. (She turned out, as a matter of fact, to be an innocent Smith College Senior out for a walk and was highly indignant.)
And then he went back to Maud. “Mrs. Chivery, I must ask you again. If you know you must tell me. Why was your husband killed?”
Maud shrank back, her eyes sunken deep in her face, her black dress like heavy mourning. “I tell you I don’t know. I’ve told you that many times!”
And Craig, watching and listening, gray with anxiety, leaned forward. “Maud-Claud said you quarreled. Lately. About money. What was it?”
She whirled on him. “I didn’t murder Claud,” she said.
“Why did you quarrel?”
She eyed him for a moment, her little face taking on a deep, queer flush. Then she told him. “It was an-an investment I wanted to make. He thought it unwise and refused to sell some bonds we owned together. That’s all. It was nothing.”
“What investment?”
She refused to tell. “It’s a secret,” she said. “It has nothing to do with this.”
I said, rather absently really, for I didn’t think Maud or anybody in his senses was out to buy a Spanish castle just then. “Truckloads of jewels.”
Maud whirled around toward me then-silently as always-but there was alarm in her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean!” she cried sharply.
I didn’t either; but I could and did quote her words to me over the nickels, and quite explicitly.
“Nonsense,” said Maud flatly. “I said nothing of the kind-or if I did, it meant nothing.”
There was a silence-and again that look of concentration in Craig’s eyes. And another trooper came in to say that the knife that had killed Chivery came from the Brent kitchen; Beevens, he said was willing to swear to it. But no one knew just when it disappeared.
It was all written down in shorthand.
Maud silently disappeared and I think it was just
after that that Beevens himself made his not inconsiderable contribution to the thing.
“It’s about the vase, sir,” he said to Nugent, his blue eyes worried. “Or rather, I mean about the noise-the sound of something falling, if you’ll remember, the night Mr. Brent-died.”
“What do you mean?” said Nugent. Craig got up on his elbow to listen. I stood there, in my starched white uniform, at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t seem to settle down and it did no good to prowl the corridors and look out the windows and keep going back to Drue’s room.
“I think I know what it was, sir,” said Beevens and told his queer little story. He’d felt all along, and Mr. Craig had agreed with him, he said, with a side glance at Craig, that whatever that sound had been it had not indicated an intruder in the house and that therefore it must have some special significance. It was not, in other words, accident.
“So I took a look around,” said Beevens. “This morning I found it.”
“Found what?”
“The vase, sir, broken in fifteen or twenty pieces, all of them gathered up and wrapped in brown paper and shoved into the bottom of one of the ash barrels. The ash barrels,” said Beevens austerely, “are removed once a week by a truck from the village. There was also a large, thick twine-at least twenty feet long, and one end of it was tied around the lower part of the vase. The kind of twine that I keep in my pantry for tying up parcels; anybody could have taken it.”
He went on to elaborate, and he had a theory. It was a large vase, at least three feet high, he said, and heavy. Its rightful place was on a table in the second-floor corridor. He hadn’t missed it because the household had been so upset that he hadn’t really taken a look around the upper hall as he usually did (regularly) just to be sure it was all in order, but had left it entirely to the housemaid. And she had apparently assumed that he had removed the vase. But when he had missed it, he had looked for it with the result that he believed it had been placed at the top of, possibly, the back stairs.
Wolf in Man’s Clothing Page 20
