He kissed her again and then let her go. In the instant of turning away she had the strangest feeling of being watched, and then on the heels of that, she remembered what was wrong about Uncle Bax’s telling her to take Mr. Coulter his letter.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” she said hurriedly.
“Yes?”
“It’s the … the fact that Uncle Bax seemed to know that there was just one letter remaining. Mr. Coulter’s. At first, you see, he said to take one certain letter out of the stack of four, and there wasn’t a stack so I just took Mr. Shima’s, using my own judgement. But I might have taken Mr. Coulter’s …”
“What is it, then? I don’t see—”
“I’m not explaining it very well. But it’s as if Uncle Bax knew—knew the order in which I had delivered the letters, the two I’ve taken, and knew somehow too that Mrs. Appleton’s letter wasn’t going to be delivered because she came to me ahead of time, she refused to have it—”
“You think Bax is having you followed?”
“I don’t know. I just … I just have this feeling that he knows be Coulter letter is all that’s left. And that’s why he sent the five hundred and sort of promised to send more along from time to time. There was no mention of anything further for me to do. I … I guess I’m saying it so confused, so mixed up, you can’t follow—”
“Yes, I know what you mean. I can see that. You feel that Bax knows everything that happened—as it happened—and that what he has you doing now is based on that knowledge. This is the last letter. He knows it because he knows the others went to Shima and Fallon, and that Mrs. Appleton refused hers. He’s right on top of everything, just as it happens.”
“Yes.”
“And still, you know, it could be that Shima’s letter was the one he meant, the first one you were supposed to deliver, and everything else came along because what you did was what he wanted you to do.”
“Yes, that’s possible,” she admitted. “But I think that … I mean, I feel … that the other is true, that Bax knows where I go and what I do. He knows that I’m here now, with you.”
Chapter 17
“Maybe we’ll find out something in here.”
They stood together looking at the blank, dark face of the old house. There was enough light from the streetlamps in the block to the west, and from the railroad yards to the east, to make out the general shape of the house, to see that it was gingerbready in the best Victorian style, with cupolas and towers shutting out the sky and with a cavernous porch fronting the street. Of the lighted window they’d glimpsed from the corner there was no sign. Either the light had been put out or it shone from another part of the house.
“Mom’s place,” he offered. “Dracula’s mom, that is. Shall we see who’s waiting in the parlor for the fly?” He touched her arm; his hand was warm and strong. They went up to the floor of the porch. “No doorbell that I can find. Here’s a knocker. I’ll bet it raises the dead.”
In the dimness, she half-saw, half-sensed that he lifted something large and heavy and then as the weight pounded on the iron plate fixed to the face of the door, she flinched. They were surely hearing it in the block of houses westward, if not even in the railroad yards amid the hoot of diesels. Mr. Dunavan gave a half dozen hearty reverberating thumps and the old house seemed to vibrate like a drum.
“That ought to do it.”
“Yes, it should.” She wanted to make herself narrow and small, invisible to whoever was going to look out at her.
A light went on almost at once, a cheerful yellow glow inside the frosted glass of the door panel. By the reflected light Jennifer saw porch furniture a dozen or so feet away in a sheltered corner, and beyond the porch railing, in the yard, a ghostly plaster cupid pouring nonexistent water from a jug into a broken fountain fringed with weeds. This had once been a country home of sorts, she thought, a nice place, and now occupied by Mr. Coulter who was letting it go to ruin.
The door opened and an aged child looked out, peering upward past steel-rimmed bifocals. Thick white hair tousled itself across an enormous forehead. The mouth was pink. The costume was straight out of a Victorian novel—the Rake at Home. Velvet lapels on a velveteen smoking jacket with a satin sash. Pumps. Plum-colored trousers not concealing the shape of too-skinny shanks. I’m being mean, Jennifer thought. He’s actually gazing at us in a pleasant manner.
“Yes, sir? Yes, madam?” The voice was husky, almost grating, the voice of someone who had been screaming at the top of his lungs for so long he’d ruined his vocal cords. Or else, had bronchial tonsils. “You rang, sir?”
“I knocked,” Mr. Dunavan corrected. “We’re looking for a Mr. Coulter?”
“Oh? And may I ask for what purpose?”
“We have a letter for him.”
“A letter? Indeed. Are you perhaps employees of the postal service?”
“We are not,” Mr. Dunavan said, adopting the same tone of playful doubt shown by the old man, “but we have a missive just the same. It is addressed to Mr. Coulter and we have to be sure—we have to be very sure—that we’re giving it to the right person.”
“Well, well,” said the ancient child, pouting out the pink lips and tapping them with a nervous forefinger. “A letter. A letter in the middle of the night—”
“Hardly that,” Mr. Dunavan protested. He seemed to find the gnome funny and interesting.
“—and being delivered by two people who would seem, from appearances at least, to be most respectable, really.”
“Thank you.”
The gaze through the bifocals sharpened. “Are you bringing this letter or is she?”
“She has the letter.”
“Were you followed here, do you think?”
“We didn’t see anyone,” Jennifer offered, speaking for the first time. The old man’s gaze turned to her instantly and for a silent moment or so he studied her. There was nothing friendly nor playful in this; he was suddenly morose and serious, and she felt chilled waiting there under his eyes.
“You wouldn’t. No, you wouldn’t see anyone at all. Do you know a woman named Sara Caymill?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Hmmm. I have a pretty good idea what you’ve brought, but you aren’t the one, or perhaps I should say the kind of one, I expected to be bringing it. Sara Caymill is dead, by the way. Does that mean anything to you? Apparently not. Poor Sara … But come in, come in, so we can talk.”
Jennifer walked into a large hall paneled darkly, old wood that still shone from the care given it long ago. A few chairs with dusty leather seats lined the walls. Stairs led upward in gloom at the far end of the hall, and there was a light that shone out from a door beyond, a door out of sight behind the rise of the stairs. “You may come in here,” said the gnome formally, going ahead to switch on lights in a parlor. “Choose a chair that pleases you.” He motioned for them to be seated.
Mr. Dunavan sat down in a carved monster upholstered in green plush, and she took a small maple rocker nearby. “You seem to know why we have come,” she said.
He pulled the plum-colored pants up at the knee, sat down and remained fastidiously erect in a chair whose legs seemed to have been shortened for him. It was a chair all curved and embellished like the one which held Mr. Dunavan. The whole parlor was filled with ornate, inlaid and carved stuff, and the odor of the room was stuffy and shut-in. “I see that you are admiring the furniture,” he said to Jennifer. “These pieces belong in a museum. Old. All of it very old.” With a small hand he stroked the lavishly contorted arm of the chair. “Most of it was collected in Europe by my grandmother. Ages ago. Stuff out of castles, palaces. Relics. She was a greedy old woman. But I don’t know to whom I ought to leave it, when I’m gone. I have no one, personally, that is. It should go to an institution where it could be cared for, displayed—but I just drift along and use it day by day and let it remain neglected and shabby…. Hmmm. And yes, answering your remark, I have a very good idea of what brought you he
re. A letter, I take it.”
Was he actually Mr. Coulter? He hadn’t said so.
“I am supposed to make sure—”
“Of course you are. Let me get something from my desk. I’ll only be away a minute.” He rose spryly; the pumps were silent on the beautiful old carpet. He was gone a brief time.
Another passport. She opened it. The picture inside was definitely that of Mr. Coulter. The passport looked entirely genuine, perfectly honest, but she was remembering what Mrs. Appleton had said about Mr. Shima and his ability to produce forged ones.
“All fine, is it not?” He seemed to be inviting her to doubt.
But she had no desire to argue, to withhold the letter; she wanted to be rid of it. This gnome, Mr. Coulter or not, was in the place Mr. Coulter was supposed to be. She opened her purse.
He took the letter gingerly, turned it over to examine the taped back, giggled hoarsely. “Bax,” he said in his gravelly scratch of a voice. “Dear loving old Bax.” He tapped the corner of the letter against his lips. “Are you sure you didn’t meet Sara Caymill?”
“I met a woman named Sara,” Jennifer replied after hesitating for a moment. “I didn’t learn her last name. She seemed to be employed as a … a sort of housekeeper by a man named Mr. Fallon.”
“Theo Fallon,” grinned the gnome. “Oh, yes. He’s in New York? Oh, of course Bax has told you not to answer that. Well, no doubt Theo has been tired of poor Sara for a long time, but to go to such lengths—”
Some things seemed to be stirring in her mind, making patterns for themselves, and she felt very uneasy. “How did you learn of Sara’s death?”
“On the radio at first. Of course that didn’t give much. Just something about a woman found dying in an arcade with a dog. I didn’t connect it to Sara. The cops were being very close-mouthed about it all. But just now, just before you got here, they flashed her picture on the TV—I have my TV back in the kitchen, it’s cozy there and I can make my tea and fix my snacks and everything. Foolish to put it in here among the relics. Anyway, they flashed poor Sara’s photograph, taken in death, and asked if anyone knew who she was. It seems she hadn’t the least scrap of identification on her. They had her fixed up quite presentably, poor dear, hair neat and face composed. Sara wouldn’t have wanted to look messy in front of the public. Very shy. Always very shy.”
Jennifer’s thoughts were whirling. She knew with sick discovery just what had happened to Sara. Sara had been dying there in front of her eyes. Clinging to the pillar and dying. “Are you going to telephone in an identification?”
“I think not.”
“Was she … was she with all of you in Nueva Brisa?”
His brows shot up. “Sara? Oh, heavens no! She hadn’t the taste nor the nerve for anything like that. You must understand, we were real adventurers. We had guts, courage, endurance, all of us. No, Theo met her here in New York a dozen or so years ago. Bax insisted that we break contact with each other and go underground. He said, for our own safety. But no doubt it had something to do with a plan of Bax’s own … don’t you know this? But of course you must. But Theo and I looked each other up once in a while until these last few years. I even knew him when he changed his last name slightly. Again, at Bax’s suggestion. Silly idea. I refused to change mine.”
“You are the only one to whom I’ve given a letter,” she stammered, “who hasn’t seemed frightened, or surprised, or reacted with displeasure.”
“Really? Are you trying to draw me off the subject of Sara, by the way?”
“Are you covering your real feelings by staying on the subject of Sara?” Jennifer asked boldly.
He shot her a hard look and a ghost of a smile touched his pink mouth. “Very clever. Very astute. Don’t defend. Fire back. Well, nevertheless, it seems they had thought at first that Sara had been the victim of a heart attack. A derelict-type, of course, wouldn’t have roused such an inquiry, but this was a well-dressed woman, a well-cared for woman. And the injuries, though they didn’t specify what they were, must have been strange.” He went back to his chair and sat down again with the precise gestures of pulling up his pants and keeping his back stiff. “There was a thing—a weapon—used in the old days. It was called the Needle. Most repulsive … Has Bax mentioned it?” He was holding Bax’s letter between his fingers; his eyes dwelt on it.
She shivered uncontrollably, and knew that Mr. Coulter marked it, though he wasn’t looking at her. So did Mr. Dunavan; a worried frown creased his forehead. “No. He never spoke of such a thing. The last time I saw him—” Into her mind’s eye came Bax, drunk, leering at the two tarts in the subway, licking his lips at them while they winked and giggled. “—he seemed to have only pleasure on his mind.”
Mr. Coulter smiled his brief twitch of a smile again. “That would be characteristic of Bax. But you seem much disturbed by this mention of the Needle—”
“There was a man named Shima,” Mr. Dunavan put in.
Mr. Coulter turned quickly to him. “Shima! Yes?”
“Shima died by being stabbed with a long thin blade which entered his body without causing much bleeding. The blade was then twisted, worked around inside his body—I hate to bring this up in front of you again, Jennifer—”
“It’s all right,” she whispered back.
She should have told Scott Dunavan all about the encounter with Sara long before this. But she couldn’t burst out with it now, in front of Coulter.
Mr. Coulter was nodding to himself. “This is the Needle. I never used it. I considered it barbaric. A gun is the weapon of a man, a real man, a caballero. This Needle was invented, or discovered, or perhaps better—resurrected—by a man in Nueva Brisa we called the General.” And he pronounced General as Mrs. Appleton had done, in the Spanish way: heh neh ral, all syllables almost equally accented. “But Shima, now. Yes, I remember him. He was one of us. A forger and blackmailer. Very clever.”
The ghost of Mr. Shima seemed to rise, pale and bleakly Oriental, his shot-silk eyes gazing nowhere.
“This thing that happened to Shima—when was this?” Mr. Coulter’s voice seemed so hoarse that it was little more than a croak. Bax’s letter slid to the floor and Mr. Coulter’s hands gripped the chair arms. It appeared that the fact of Mr. Shima’s death was slow in having an impact but that now the impact was being felt.
“A week ago … It happened on a Friday night,” Jennifer got out. “He was stabbed, it seems, outside my apartment building. He staggered into the lobby to collapse. People there thought he’d had a heart attack—”
Just like Sara!
“Shima! I don’t remember hearing a word on the radio, nor seeing anything about him on TV.” Mr. Coulter stood up and moved with a jerky quickness toward a table against the wall, then halted, went back to his chair where he stood undecided. “Last weekend I worked upstairs, packing—uh, I mean packing up things to give to … uh … some charity rummage sale, or the Salvation Army, or somebody like that.” He stooped and picked up Bax’s letter and in that instant his control slipped and sheer rage looked out of his eyes. “I mean, I was busy upstairs, sorting and packing, and I get very tired these days and went to bed early, I missed seeing TV and I didn’t listen to the radio. I don’t take a newspaper—” He was glancing narrowly from Scott Dunavan to Jennifer. He was quivering with suspicion, or some other emotion. All of the pixie humor, the look of an ancient child, had disappeared. He was a wretchedly angry and frustrated little old man. “I don’t know whether to believe this about Shima or not. You may be trying to frighten me—”
“Mr. Coulter, you’re the one who expounded on the Needle,” Scott pointed out reasonably.
The pink mouth twisted and shook.
Jennifer put a hand over her eyes, rubbed hard. The exhaustion of this long day washed through her; she felt as if she must slide to the floor out of this little chair. She was sick. Her head hurt. And the thought of Sara, staring after her under the light from the dusty glass overhead, was bright inside her mind. It was t
rue that Sara had threatened her with a horrible death if she didn’t obey and do as Sara told her. That could have been just a threat, though. What had happened to Sara was real. While Jennifer had walked ahead of her through the arcade, being brushed and touched and pushed by the passing crowd, someone out of that crowd had touched Sara. A moment of pressure, of twisting …
Mr. Shima had wanted to talk to her. He had died.
Sara had been taking her to talk to Mr. Fallon. Sara had died.
What on earth could make it so fatally dangerous to want to talk to her?
What questions were meant to be asked?
I don’t know any of the answers, or anyway, anything that everyone else doesn’t know—
If not a question, what was to be told?
Was that it? Something she mustn’t know?
“I think you’d better go,” Mr. Coulter was saying.
“A real bright idea,” said Mr. Dunavan. He got out of his chair and came to Jennifer, helped her to her feet. “We brought your letter and that seems to be all that we have to do.”
“I don’t know whether to believe it about Shima,” the gnome croaked, perhaps a way of saying goodbye.
"Go to the library and look up last weekend’s newspapers. Or even Monday’s. You’ll find something,” Mr. Dunavan assured him.
Something moved into the doorway to the hall.
A man stood there, a tall somewhat bent figure in baggy tweed, with a large shaggy mustache, brown-rimmed spectacles, rusty hair. He lifted a large hand in greeting, and spoke. “How moving to find you here! A collection of old friends, except for—” His gaze was sly on Mr. Dunavan.
“Mr. Fallon!” cried Jennifer.
“Theo, you … you toad!” screeched Mr. Coulter.
Chapter 18
Mr. Fallon sauntered into the room, the typical English country squire at home, looking around half-myopically to be sure that everyone was accounted for. Mr. Coulter shrank back, trying to draw himself small, trying to cover his nervous shock with a look of indignation.
The Baxter Letters Page 16
