The Grindle Nightmare

by Q. Patrick

  The two boys seemed tired after hunting all day for the missing child. They had nothing new to tell us. No clues of any sort had been found. Baines was still out. They had just met him and he had, apparently, repeated to them his vow not to rest until Polly was discovered.

  I offered them a drink although I knew perfectly well that old Seymour, who was as much of an autocrat in his own house as he was in the neighborhood, forbade his grandson to touch liquor. Gerald refused, flushing slightly as he did so. But Peter Foote, though a guest in the Alstone household, had no such scruples. He followed Toni into the kitchen, and I could hear their voices, excited over their recent series of experiments. The Goschens had withdrawn into themselves as they always did when there was a member of the Alstone family present. They sat a little apart from the rest of us, fiddling with their drinks, and it was left to Valerie to rescue the conversation by chatting amicably with her cousin, who always stared so closely into her face when talking to her that I sometimes wondered whether he was not in love with her.

  We were all sitting around looking rather frigid, when Sancho jumped out of Millie’s lap and ran to the door, barking frantically.

  “Sancho, you ass,” called Valerie, “this isn’t your house. Who asked you to be a watch-dog?”

  As she spoke there was a ring at the bell. It seemed that everyone in the neighborhood had chosen that evening to call. But this was more than a call. It was a visitation. Roberta Tailford-Jones had burst into the room like an influenza epidemic. She was followed by Edgar, her diminutive husband, whom she completely overshadowed, usually to the point of hiding him from view.

  Despite the fact that she is hovering around the early forties, Roberta is the most magnificent woman in our community. To me, however, she always suggests an insect, or rather, a series of insects. Her hair is burnished like the wing of a Japanese beetle. Her eyebrows point upward like heraldic grasshoppers. Her mouth is long and soft like a coral slug, while her frequently gesticulating hands are somehow reminiscent of a praying mantis. I might also mention that she does not like me any better than I like her. Tonight she was after my blood. There was a look in her eye that I knew of old.

  She nodded distantly to our guests and then turned to me.

  “Dr. Douglas Swanson, I demand an explanation.” She towered over me and her husband as we stood with our backs to the wall, looking very foolish. “No, don’t stop me, Edgar. I intend to. handle this matter in my own way.”

  Colonel Tailford-Jones did not look as if he had the slightest intention of stopping her. Though he was reputed to have helped stop the German advance on the Argonne front, he had never been known to stop his wife in anything she wanted to do.

  “If there is something you wish to say to me,” I remarked mildly, “perhaps you’d care to talk it over in the dining-room.”

  She gave a scornful laugh.

  “I,” (and she uttered the pronoun with significant emphasis) “I have nothing to say which cannot and should not be heard by everyone. Do you or do you not use animals in your vile experiments out at the college?”

  “Why, of course, I—we—,” I stammered, feeling like an interne faced with an irate chief.

  “And have you been heard to say that the authorities do not give you enough creatures for these—these?”

  “I doubt whether you’ll find any research worker in America who couldn’t do with more than the quota of animals supplied.”

  “I thought as much,” she snapped. “I knew I was right.”

  “My dear …” put in Edgar timidly.

  But she brushed him aside like a cockroach, and wheeled triumphantly to the others.

  “Now that explains where my Queenie has gone—the poor, poor precious!” She began to weep noisily, and through her tears we could hear, “I shall write to Dean Warlock tonight—a personal friend of my father’s. I shall get in touch with Mrs. Scruggs, the Rhodes representative of the S. P. C. A. I shall—”

  “Good God! Roberta’s throwing a scene!”

  Toni and Peter had come in from the kitchen, both disturbingly handsome after a liberal sampling of the drinks. The susceptible Roberta reacted to them immediately. For a moment I saw Toni through her eyes—the muscular expanse of chest, the splendid teeth, the dark Italian hair. It made me feel very undersized and insignificant.

  After a few liquid glances, Mrs. Tailford-Jones stated her case again, and this time, since it was for Toni’s benefit, with slightly less vehemence. She had lost her pet marmoset, a horrible little animal which she had dyed to match her hair. Everywhere Roberta went Queenie was sure to go. In fact, it had clung so constantly to her shoulder that it had been difficult to tell where the monkey began and the woman ended. It had always gibbered and snarled at everyone else—especially at poor Edgar—but its gibbering days were now, apparently, over. It had, she averred, oompletely disappeared while she was out that afternoon. She had seen my car go past her house—the inference was obvious!

  Toni had been listening with a curious smile on his lip.

  “So you suggest that Doug and I smuggle animals out to the hospital and vivisect them, eh?”

  Roberta looked a bit foolish. In her wrath she must have failed to realize that her denunciation, meant for me, would inevitably include Toni.

  “Well, I think it’s all awful,” she muttered. “Terrible and cruel!”

  “So now, Roberta, we’ve taken dear Queenie! You’d better search the house. Maybe you’ll find the Baines child, too.”

  “The Baines child?”

  Apparently Roberta had not heard the news about Polly. When we told her she became even more strident and finally burst out with:

  “It’s positively unsafe to live in Grindle any more. There are things going on—animals tortured in laboratories.” She glanced darkly at me. “It’ll be children next—if it isn’t already.” At that moment her eyes fell on the hapless Peter Foote who was innocently wolfing down his third highball. “You’re another of them. Don’t let me catch you around my place or I’ll—Valerie, I can’t imagine how you can bring that dog of yours here. You mark my words and look after it.” Gerald, who had been playing with Sancho’s ears, stared short-sightedly at the Sealyham and drew away his hand as though from a hot coal. “Experimental animals indeed! Why don’t you so-called doctors experiment on each other?”

  Smiling lazily, Peter Foote rose. “An excellent idea, Mrs. Tailford-Jones. I’ve always thought that we ought to be allowed to experiment on human subjects.”

  “You little beast!” Roberta’s blood-red mouth fell open. “You doctors are all just a bunch of sadists, pretending you’re doing good to humanity.”

  With admirable politeness, Peter pulled the well-known gag and inquired whether, if one of Roberta’s children were sick, she would refuse him the benefit of diphtheria antitoxin, pneumonia serum, adrenalin or other therapeutic agents whose usefulness had been proved largely through animal work.

  But, as the Tailford-Joneses had no children and, short of an Old Testament miracle, were quite unlikely to have any, Peter’s remark did not go down any too well with Roberta. Everybody in the valley knew that an unfortunately placed piece of shrapnel during the World War had left Edgar in the same predicament as Lady Chatterley’s husband and the hero of The Sun Also Rises.

  While the rest of us manfully upheld the decencies of polite conversation, Peter Foote continued to spar with Roberta. On both sides the sallies became more and more acrimonious until, at last, realizing that a vulgar scene was inevitable, Peter summoned Gerald from his corner and discretely left the battlefield.

  “Very odd!” spat Roberta, even before the door had closed behind the boys. “Very odd how those two boys are always about together. Never seen them with a girl or anything.”

  As this was the kind of equivocal remark that Roberta invariably made about any man, married or single, who was not actively engaged in having an affair with her, no one paid much attention. We flattered ourselves that we were a broadminded c
ommunity, but Roberta was just one of those Joneses that nobody wanted to keep up with. To me, personally, she had always been peculiarly poisonous, indulging herself by referring to me as “that microscopic runt.” She had nothing against me, so far as I could see, except that I had never betrayed any consciousness of her luscious charms and that, in contrast with Toni’s six foot four of splendid physique, I must have seemed rather a nonentity. That was one of the advantages of living with Toni. The amorous Robertas of the world passed me by. So—unfortunately—did the Valerie Middletons.

  “I think I know what you mean, Roberta.” Toni had caught up her last remark. “And all I can say is that I wish there were a few more students like Peter Foote at Rhodes. Give him five years and, in spite of his father’s money, he ought to be one of the best pathologists in America. Now, have a drink and don’t talk any more nonsense.”

  She had several.

  As usual Edgar Tailford-Jones, or the little colonel, as we sometimes called him, did not say a word. He is so inconspicuous an individual and so completely submerged in the over-ripe personality of his wife, that it is difficult to remember whether or not he is in the room. It is difficult, too, to describe him. He is the direct antithesis of a colonel or indeed of any military man. At first glance, he seems to have no face. When one tries to draw a picture of him in one’s mind, only the mouth emerges, tiny and almost lipless, as though it had been stabbed out with a pencil point.

  He stood now in his corner, refusing liquor and cigarettes and occasionally glancing uneasily in the direction of his wife who was drowning her grief for Queenie in our whiskey.

  I cannot remember anything else that happened—at least not anything of real significance. Despite desperate attacks with a powder puff, Millie’s nose grew more and more shiny as the drinks piled up. Charlie got me in a corner and poured out an elaborate and rather childish theory about the disappearance of Polly Baines. Toni and Valerie—as usual—looked a little too long into each other’s eyes and, to Roberta’s evident annoyance, spent a little too much time in the back kitchen. And, as I watched them, I felt, as usual, that queer constriction in the region which is poetically referred to as the heart but is probably the upper abdomen.

  At last, I suppose, everyone left. We had all talked ourselves out, and Roberta had had at least one drink too many. The poor little colonel had some difficulty in supporting her into the car, and she was still talking about queenie and “vivvy-sexshun” when Edgar drove her off.

  “Well, what do you say, old man?” I asked, as Toni took off his shirt in the living-room. He had an unconventional habit of dressing and undressing anywhere but in the right place.

  “Roberta’s a goddam fool. But—” he started to switch off the lights—“something is rotten in the Vale of Grindle.”

  And this remark is memorable in itself, because I never knew before that Toni had even heard of Shakespeare.

  Chapter II

  The next day was a Sunday. After breakfast Toni and I borrowed two horses from the Goschens and went for a long ride to blow away the cobwebs of the night before. It was a clear day, sparkling and young. We galloped like centaurs over the hard, frosty fields and through woods brown with autumn. We climbed to Old Grindle Oak—a patriarchal evergreen standing on the top of the highest hill in the neighborhood—and raced each other down again. I had forgotten all about Polly Baines.

  She was brought back to my mind very forcibly, however, when we struck the road and the honk of a horn made me draw up to avoid a passing car. A middle-aged man was smiling out at me.

  “Well, Dr. Swanson!”

  It was my old friend, Felix Bracegirdle.

  Toni rode on, but I immediately dismounted and tethered Esmeralda to a tree. With Bracegirdle in the car were Jo Baines and a man whom I had never seen before. Bracegirdle shook me warmly by the hand and said that he had been appointed sheriff’s deputy in the Polly Baines investigation. I did my best to be helpful and told him about Roberta’s marmoset.

  “Yes, we’ve heard plenty about that already,” he said with a significant smile. “‘Love your neighbor’ doesn‘t seem to go so hot around here, eh? Well, well, I don’t believe all I hear.”

  It was evident from his tone that Bracegirdle had already interviewed Mrs. Tailford-Jones and that she had, as usual, been none too polite about me. He gave me a friendly smile.

  I had known before that Bracegirdle was in some way connected with the county police authorities, but I had not realized that he would have jurisdiction in our own particular neighborhood. Our friendship had started during the summer under rather remarkable circumstances. His wife had been brought into the University Hospital almost moribund with a rare blood disease characterized by a white-cell count of about 200 and a total absence of polys. It so happened that I did the hematological work on her case and suggested agranulocytic angina which afterward proved to be the correct diagnosis. I also suggested that the case be treated with pentnucleotide, then a comparatively new and unheard of drug which could not be obtained in the small town of Rhodes. Together Bracegirdle and I had raced through the night to Lampson where we woke up someone in the wholesale drug firm and procured this new remedy. Mrs. Bracegirdle’s response had been spectacular, and her husband always attributed the miracle of her recovery to me, though, indeed, I had done nothing but what common sense and good medicine dictated. During that long drive to and from Lampson I had got to know the man pretty well—at least, well enough to be glad for Baines’ sake that he was on the job. I had developed a great respect for him, and I think that he, too, believed in and trusted me as an almost omniscient creature.

  “Any more news?” I asked seriously.

  “No, Doctor. We’ve combed the countryside for ten miles round without a trace.” Bracegirdle removed his hat and scratched his greying hair. “A ten year old kid can’t get far under her own steam—let alone a young kitten. We’re going off to get some blood hounds before the scent gets cold.”

  “Gosh, that’ll be fun—I mean, fine.”

  I glanced nervously at Baines, but he had not heard me.

  “Well, if you’d like to come along, we’ll be back at the Baines’ place by around two. The state troopers are going to lend a hand and it might be a good idea to have a doctor along. You never know.”

  When I arrived at the Baines’ cottage that afternoon, I found quite a crowd of people collected. I could tell from their eager eyes and unnaturally swift voices that the excitement of the day before had not abated. Bracegirdle was talking solemnly with Franklin Alstone, Gerald’s father, who had a sinecure and a large salary in the steel mills which had once belonged to old Seymour. He was a withered stick of a man with a droop and a bald head and, although barely forty-five, looked every bit as old as his septuagenarian father with whom he lived in the large Alstone house. Like his son, Gerald, he had a peering, furtive look. Like Gerald, too, he was completely under the domination of the old man. It was obvious that he had been sent to represent Seymour in this last desperate attempt to find Polly Baines.

  In the garden a state trooper was showing off the two bloodhounds with great pride to a group of dirty little Baines kids. They seemed fascinated, just as I would have been at their age, for I had always connected bloodhounds with something particularly exciting and sinister. But these friendly creatures certainly belied their names as they licked hands, fawned on all and sundry, and made strange wheezing sounds like an old asthmatic.

  While they were giving the dogs the scent, I went upstairs to say a few words of professional encouragement to Mrs. Baines. The poor woman’s pregnancy was far advanced and she did not seem to take in much of what was going on around her. I supposed that Dr. Thomson, our local G. R., was keeping her pretty much under the influence of sedatives. She seemed hardly to realize that one of her many children had been lost. But perhaps her arithmetic, like her fertility, resembled that of the birds and lower animals.

  When I got out into the sunshine again, the state trooper was ho
lding the dogs on a leash. Slowly they started to pick out the scent on the hard gravel of the garden path. For a while it seemed almost as if they were snuffing aimlessly, their noses to the ground. Then they began to move slowly forward, and the rest of us followed. Apparently the scent was still good, despite the lapse of time. As we passed out into the meadow behind the house one could almost imagine the figure of Polly Baines luring us onward like a will-o’-the-wisp. Silently, ploddingly, the bloodhounds went on, lifting their muzzles now and again to stare round at their master as if for approval. They skirted the side of an adjoining field, in and out of a little ditch that marked it off, and once again, it seemed, we could see Polly chasing her kitten in and out of that little ditch. There was an excitement, a queer, impersonal thrill in this hunt, such as I had never felt in my life before.

  At length the dogs turned toward the old dirt road with which we had been running parallel and followed it to a fringe of woodland about half a mile from the cottage. Here they paused and sniffed the air.

  “They’ve lost it,” growled the trooper and, as if to corroborate his statement, the hounds turned round and looked at him with bloodshot apology in their eyes.

  One of them licked his hand.

  “She can’t be far off,” exclaimed Franklin Alstone absently. “Let’s start our search here.”

  Baines was already moving in and out of the woods shouting “Polly” at the top of his lungs. He had the wild, frustrated exuberance of a man who had got so near and yet so far. Every time his voice rang out we all tensed ourselves to listen. But there was no reply.

  The trooper unleashed the dogs and for a while they nosed around in little circles.

  “Looks like she must have been picked up in a car,” commented Bracegirdle. “Where does this road lead to?”

  Franklin Alstone explained that it was an old, almost disused lane which led from Grindle Meadow to the cottage where Toni and I lived. We could see the deep ruts made by generations of cart wheels, but the ground was too hard for the impression of automobile tires. It would have been rough riding for a car.