by Rufus King
With her whole heart, as each step drew her closer, she prayed that a miracle would have occurred. Seeming ones so very frequently did happen in those exciting stories she had such a weakness for. Lots of times in the stories the Body, when you went to look at the scene of the crime again or else were leading the detective to it, would have vanished. Later, of course, it would always pop up in the most unexpected places, and in this case Mrs. Giles most fervently wished it would do just that. In as remote a one as possible.
There was no miracle.
As she parted the azalea tops Mrs. Giles saw that the body was still there. A bee buzzed importantly and a dragonfly darted eccentrically in the warm sun. A sickish sensation would have brought on a fainting spell if a voice shouting “Hi!” hadn’t shocked her into an atavistic stance of defense. Mrs. Giles permitted the azalea tops to close and turned around.
Another bicycle was spraying gravel to a stop. Another burly youngster jumped from it and shook off sweat from a glistening face.
“I want one of your rooms,” he gasped. “There’s a field of about twenty strung out behind me. Did I make it in time?”
Mrs. Giles by now had fair control over her breath.
“I’m sorry.” (Strangely enough, looking into his eager young face, she really was. How much better—what heaven, really—would it be to have a fine boy like this one under her roof rather than that wicked female spy.) “They’re gone.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, all.”
“Well, thanks anyhow.” The youngster glanced over his shoulder. “Better duck. They’re jamming the gate.”
Mrs. Giles cast one look toward the gateway, where a tangled mass of bicycles plus belligerently shouting riders were throwing all courtesies of the road to the winds in an effort to force a way through.
“I wonder,” Mrs. Giles said with a slender smile—she would have liked to give him a real warm one, but her heart was too stricken with the knowledge of the body lying so close to them—“whether after I’ve ducked you would be kind enough to tell them that the rooms are filled?”
“Leave them to me.”
“Thank you.”
Mrs. Giles hurried into the house. Leila was hovering in the entrance hall.
“Your tea is ready.”
“Thank you, Leila.”
“Are you well?”
“Well?”
“Yes. You look white and sick. You look like Mamma looked just before she had her stroke.”
“I’m not sick, dear. I’m perfectly all right. Perfectly.”
CHAPTER 11
Mrs. Giles found small relief in the hot, fragrant tea.
She sipped it slowly and looked with bleak eyes at the paintings which Papa had bought for the walls of the large handsome dining room. Even as a child Mrs. Giles had thought that Papa had overdone a good thing a little in his wholehearted adherence to that distant day’s trend. It was a trend which had leaned heavily, for dining rooms, toward still-life groupings of vegetables, loaves of bread, wine bottles, fish by Chase, and slices of roast beef by Chardin. Pictorial encouragements for hearty appetite.
Whom could she produce as a countercheck to Miss Ashley for Kent? To break the evil spell. So many of the girls in Kent’s set had joined one or another of the women’s service organizations and were stationed in distant places. So very few were left in town—the barest handful, really—and as Mrs. Giles sorted them over she admitted dispiritedly that not one possessed a tenth of the high-powered (no matter how wretched) allure or sultry good looks of Miss Ashley. They were a pallid field.
Her bemusings were shattered by Leila’s coming in and announcing Dawn Davis. Not only announcing her but actually showing her in.
Miss Davis remained every bit the smart society columnist of the Bridgehaven Gazette in spite of the fact that eight in the morning was, for her, the middle of the night. Her attack, too, was as bold as ever.
“I’m here for a follow-up,” she said, drawing a chair from the table and sitting down. “It’s one of the best human-interest stories so far this year. How does it feel to be sprouting into a national heroine? I think that Betsy Ross touch was especially good, don’t you?”
Mrs. Giles summoned a social smile. Here, she told herself, is the press, and how shortly might it not become advisable for Kent’s sake to have it on their side!”
“Miss Davis will have tea, Leila.”
“No.” Miss Davis conquered a shudder. “No tea.”
“Coffee? Surely something?”
“Nothing. Thank you very much. I judge from that battered mob I plowed through as it straggled away that you’re already filled up?”
“Yes, the rooms are all taken. That will be all, Leila.” Miss Davis, who was well in the clutches of a hang-over, did not find the state of her nerves improved as she watched Leila’s phantasmal departure.
“Does she always do that?”
“Leila? Do what, Miss Davis?”
“Float. Look as though she were waving chiffon. Oh, you must know what I mean.”
“Leila is a little vague. She’s a dear girl, perfectly all right. Just vague.”
“I’d say she was deficient in gravitation. Look, Mrs. Giles, do you mind if I interview the new roomers?”
“I’m afraid that just now it’s not possible. Mr. Smith and his nephew, Mr. Wade, and Miss Ashley have all left for their work. Mr. Parling”—the name came in a flash—“is on night shift and so is sleeping.”
Dawn Davis pounced.
“Miss! Miss? Ashley, is it? Do tell me about her.”
No. Definitely no.
“I understand she is a gun inspector, and that is all I know.”
“Oh, but that won’t do at all. I want the human reactions, her relief at being able to find a room in a magnificent house such as this one. Her awe.”
Tea all but spilled from the cup.
“Awe?”
“Certainly. Wasn’t she overcome with it?”
“I found Miss Ashley quite—well, self-contained.”
“Not for my column she won’t be. What about the three men? Surely you see what I’m after. From-hovels-to-palaces sort of thing.”
“Mr. Smith and his nephew are plain, pleasant gentlemen. Mr. Parling I have still to meet. Leila arranged his staying here before I got up. I am sorry. I’m afraid there is nothing”—Mrs. Giles gagged slightly—“dramatic about any of them. And I do hope your paper will just let the matter drop.” Dawn Davis cast a fly on fresh waters.
“Now what’s the latest on Kent? We want a follow-up on him too. Anything further about his arrival?”
It was so abrupt that Mrs. Giles could not repress a start. She felt herself paling.
“Kent’s train is due in here from Washington around ten,” she said swiftly.
“This morning?” Miss Davis all but screamed it.
“Yes. He wired last night that he would be home for breakfast.”
“Why, that’s in a couple of hours from now. You’ll be at the station to meet him, of course?”
Chill gripped Mrs. Giles afresh as she sensed new dangers: Dawn Davis would certainly arrange to be on the platform with a press photographer prepared to snap Kent descending from the train and gathering her (Mrs. Giles) in one of his swift, exuberant embraces.
Possibly a regular news reporter would be with Miss Davis. The Bridgehaven Gazette might even cook up an impromptu demonstration of welcome. Mayor Saltensburg was famous for dropping everything and tearing off into the limelight whenever a camera was slated to click. The City Fathers. The City Band. All mustered within under two hours? It could be done. There was power in the press.
And Kent would not step down from that train.
Kent was already in town. Concealed somewhere, waiting since last night to show up at the house at the moment he had announced. An accomplice, no matter how innocent a one, in the murder of that ghastly, pitiful body beneath the azaleas. Kent, a helpless pawn enmeshed within this truly desperate situatio
n through that devastating young woman’s wiles.
Bright determination spread itself across Miss Davis’ face. She stood up.
“I’ll run along now.” She cast a planning look over her shoulder from the doorway. “There isn’t much time, but don’t worry. We’ll break out as much ticker tape as we can.”
Mrs. Giles sat quite still.
Automatically she finished her cup of tea. She rang a silver bell. She said, when Leila came in, “Ask Hopkins, please, to bring the brougham around at half-past nine. I have decided to drive to the station and meet Mr. Kent.”
She went upstairs to her room. A leaden hour went by.
During it Mrs. Giles had devised a tentative plan. She put on a white linen jacket and a conservative leghorn hat. She selected a pair of knitted gloves from a dresser drawer. Her face, as she saw it in the mirror, startled her.
In desperation she found and applied some rouge.
CHAPTER 12
The tumbrel rolled.
A tumbrel was what the brougham felt like right then to Mrs. Giles as the streets of Bridgehaven slid slowly past. Her plan was quite clear by now and it would work, she thought, if everything was to go all right. Kent was so odd about departures and arrivals. Not odd, really. Just frank.
Many people disliked being seen off or welcomed on a station platform, but Kent had the strength of mind to come right out and say so. He always claimed there was nothing worse than that set grin of parting and the vocal clichés which unavoidably accompanied it.
So for years Kent’s good-bys and hellos had always taken place at the house. Even when he had gone away the last time to that destination which had lain in Mrs. Giles’s heart so heavily as Unknown, her hand had been waved to him from the porch. It had waved until Ella had stopped her and told her that the carriage was out of sight.
So he wouldn’t be expecting anyone to meet him now.
And so, Mrs. Giles had reasoned, if she were to create a diversion Kent’s non-appearance from the train might be covered. It was perfectly feasible. The train was a crack flier and usually seemed endless in length. Traffic was terrifically heavy, and there were always many men in uniform on board.
Mrs. Giles’s intention was to throw her lifelong habit of reticent reserve in public places overboard. Carefully she rehearsed the scene in her mind. First a good audible cry of recognition to establish the pretense of having seen Kent on the platform of the forward car of the long train. Then (the prospect chilled her) she planned to run along the platform, with the assurance that Miss Davis, plus all cohorts, would be drawn in her wake.
This would later leave it open for Kent to say that he had got off from the rear car and had missed them. Then, not expecting to have been met by Mrs. Giles in the first place, he could claim that he had hurried to a taxi and gone out to the house. Mrs. Giles hoped to be clever enough in her words of greeting, when she returned to River Rest and would find Kent waiting for her, to throw Kent a lead and make this explanation for him both natural and simple.
She looked at her brooch-watch. It was a quarter to ten, and the facade of Merkwin’s Emporium sliding past the brougham’s window on her right reassured her that the depot was but a few blocks farther away. Her fingers released the watch and then touched for an instant the outline of Kent’s identification tag which still lay folded in the handkerchief in the pocket of her blouse. It, too, had a part in her plan.
She steeled herself as Hopkins swung right onto Maple Street and the Union Station loomed at the block’s farther end. It had seemed to Mrs. Giles during her glimpse of it that an exceptionally large crowd was gathered on the sidewalk before the main entrance, an impression which was verified as the brougham drew up to a stop and the flushed face of Dawn Davis looked in through a lowered window.
“We’ve accomplished marvels,” Miss Davis screamed. “We even dashed out to the broadcasting station and persuaded them to break in on Unwanted Wife with a news flash about Kent’s arrival. They cut just while Felicia Halloway was being told by young Dr. Mortlake that her disease was incurable and she’d be dead before her husband and the woman he’d run off with could be located. My dear, simply at the height of the suds.”
Mrs. Giles smiled grimly. She graciously permitted herself to be photographed while Hopkins handed her out of the brougham. She greeted Mayor Saltensburg with that touch of queenliness which she knew he expected of her. She rested finger tips on the crook of his arm and allowed him to conduct her along a police-opened lane through the station and out onto the platform. It was there all right: the City Band. And also, it seemed, most of Bridgehaven.
The din was indescribable. Voices were at full cry in the pressing crowd, and the band was blaring a march which Mrs. Giles had never heard before and sincerely hoped she would never have her eardrums split with again.
“Just as Lieutenant Giles steps down from the train,” Mayor Saltensburg shouted at her, “the boys will break into ‘Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes.’”
“Most thoughtful.”
“My message of welcome is going to be broadcast. That’s the mike they’re setting up over there. Then your grandson will say a few well-chosen words. Not much. We don’t want to take the edge off the reception tomorrow afternoon.”
“The what?”
“Reception,” Mayor Saltensburg shouted above a fortissimo passage for bassoons and cymbals. “Over at the City Hall tomorrow afternoon at five. Key to the city. Cocktails. The governor. In fact, the works. Like it?”
Mrs. Giles gibbered unintelligibly.
“I knew you would,” Mayor Saltensburg screamed. “Nothing too good for that grandson of yours. The town is his, and everything that’s in it.”
Including (the thought stabbed Mrs. Giles while the smile remained frozen on her face) the body out at home and a dark shroud of heaven knew what dangers that enveloped him.
A whistle blew.
Thunder crescendoed and decreased and the train was in.
Mrs. Giles opened her lips to go into her act. Her planned cry of false recognition choked with shock. That was Kent. Kent, really Kent, was standing on the platform of a car that jerked to a stop right in front of her. Their eyes met, and she sent her heart out to him. Her broken sob of “Oh, my darling!” was drowned in a shattering crash of “Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes,” done in full brass and percussion.
For a long moment their eyes held, shoving the sea of noise and people and flicking flash bulbs apart from them, creating a special privacy in the public clamor, but no message came from him, no special message that Mrs. Giles could interpret to relieve her misery. He looked strong and deeply tanned and hard, like a burnished copper statue almost, in the style of that Belgian sculptor who was so clever with men. Men. Perhaps that was it. For her grandson was no longer a boy.
The moment broke, and then with a rush he was holding her in his arms. “What in God’s name is this?” he said in her ear.
She managed to keep her tears from flowing and to mumble something back, then the crowd exuberantly broke through the police lines and crushed her apart from Kent. She thought they were mauling him, but they weren’t. Most honestly they were welcoming him, even though his uniform would probably be in shreds before they got through with it.
Shreds…might not the perfect moment be now? Mrs. Giles took the handkerchief from her blouse pocket and carefully, crumpling the bracelet and identification tag in it, dabbed at her eyes. She stiffened rigidly as a flash bulb flicked white stars in her eyes and a news photographer shouted at her: “That’s the stuff we want, sister.”
Her plan had primarily included a dropping of the identification tag somewhere along the station platform during her false-identification scene of Kent. She had had confidence that it would be assumed that Kent had lost it at the station on his arrival. This hearty, good-natured mauling the crowd was giving him, this miracle of his actually having come on the train made the setup seem perfect to Mrs. Giles. Any one of the dozens of hands which were trying to grip
his simultaneously could be understood to have torn the bracelet from his wrist.
The police were getting things under control. Mrs. Giles let the handkerchief unfold. Then, emptied of its desperately incriminating evidence, she replaced it in the pocket of her blouse.
It was at that moment that she saw Miss Ashley.
Even in the kaleidoscopic shift of faces it was not possible to mistake Miss Ashley’s. The creature was back in the throng, about eight or nine rows away, but Mrs. Giles with her willowy height could see her easily. Miss Ashley wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at Kent, where Kent and Mayor Saltensburg were standing at the microphone.
Mrs. Giles saw Kent’s answering look. Saw the careful mask that settled on his face. Saw the faint, the slightest gesture of warning which he sent to Miss Ashley before he turned and gravely gave his full attention to Mayor Saltensburg’s opening remarks.
Mrs. Giles felt sick. The flush, the joy over Kent’s having been aboard the train was at ebb. Of course Miss Ashley would have put him up to that simplest of all deceptions from her stuffed bag of tricks. Last night she would have advised him to take a train back down the line and so be able to appear aboard the proper one this morning. These things, these heart-torturing things, were true. Because of the identification tag which had lain beside the dead man’s hand and which was lying now on the platform at Mrs. Giles’s ice-chilled feet.
Finally it was done.
Mayor Saltensburg escorted her and Kent to the door of the brougham and saw them inside. He kept the door open while he elaborated on the reception slated for the following afternoon at five—a little speech—nothing formal, just a brief resume by Lieutenant Giles covering his experiences in the South Pacific. Lieutenant Giles would know.
Then Miss Davis was at the door of the brougham and saying: “You’ll be needing this, Kent. One of our brightest cops just picked it up on the station platform.”
