by Rufus King
“How soon do we clear out of here?”
“It will take at least a week, possibly two. And I suggest that you lower your voice.”
“Come over close then.”
Smith sat on the bed, choosing the foot of it in a desire to be as far away as possible from those strong, capable hands which Fergus was clasping under his neck. Funny how that thought was there whenever the fingers moved. Upsetting.
“That star stuff,” Fergus said.
“Of Miss Ashley’s?”
“Yes.”
“The rankest rubbish. An amateurish attempt to focus attention upon herself. Even if she knew what she was talking about, which I doubt, there would be nothing to it.”
“She told you to go ahead with finances,” Fergus said flatly. “What’s dopey about that?”
Smith drew his breath in sharply.
“So she did.” His brows contracted. “Now I wonder.”
“And I am to beware of skirts.”
“That, of course, was absurd.”
“Not if you look at it like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I know I’ve seen that skirt before.”
“Miss Ashley?”
“Yes.”
“Where? This could be tremendously important.”
“I think it was the day you went to the bond sale. I think where I saw her was down by the shack.”
Smith said with wretchedly controlled impatience, “Why in heaven’s name haven’t you spoken of this before?”
“Because I didn’t think of it before.”
“Wait here.”
Smith got up from the bed. He went out into the hall and assured himself it was deserted. He slipped like a shadow through its melancholy light to the door of Miss Ashley’s room and went into its darkness. He turned on a light.
Methodically for the next quarter of an hour he gave it a careful and thorough going over. Nothing escaped him and, when he was finished, everything was back in its place.
He put out the light and returned to his own room and to Fergus.
“Queer,” he said. “There was nothing whatever of significance. That in itself is significant. Such initials as there were were correct, E. A., but there was no correspondence of any kind. No photographs. I think some personal research may be called for at the first opportunity.”
“I’m worried.”
“Well, stop it, and leave things to me.”
“I like things quick. I don’t like it here. I want to get out of here.”
“I wonder if I can make you understand that, even if there should be anything a little unusual about Miss Ashley, it we were to leave here it would be the most foolish thing we could do. I mean even apart from upsetting the whole plan and delaying matters until it might be too late. Stedman is no fool.”
Fergus’ eyes grew smokier. A hot light played in them.
“Neither was Russdorff a fool. Much. You’re not making sense. A week—two weeks—with Stedman pushing his nose around.” The hands unclasped and one arm slid fluidly flat on the bed. The palm was up, the fingers gently curved. The palm was curiously deficient in lines. The plain of Mars was pronounced. A palmist would have been interested. “Where,” Fergus said, “does that leave me?”
Smith sighed. One uses, he thought, the tools which are given to hand. It would be as futile to chide or to attempt to shape Fergus as it would be to mold the wind. But was he being fair? Could Fergus with his primordial slant on things be right, both about Miss Ashley as a questionable quantity and in his instinctive anxiety to get out of River Rest?
Smith wondered frankly whether he was not blinding himself because of the incredible perfection of the layout. No, he thought not. The rewards would more than cover any risks, even the gravest.
“You don’t trust me.”
A hint of embers smoldered through the smoke.
“I got to trust you,” Fergus said.
CHAPTER 24
Mrs. Giles set the hand of her small traveling alarm clock for four o’clock. She had determined it as the morning hour most apt to find her world in bed and sound asleep, in that deepest sleep of the night. At its gentle, tuneful ringing she planned to arise and take care of that business of the blue silk wrapper.
As an aid to slumber she again took the fall of the Roman Empire with her to bed. She accompanied the son of Constantius while he conquered Maxentius at the Milvanian bridge in Rome and then, faced with a chatty but terribly learned dissertation on how he divided the empire with Licinius, she shut the book. The hour of the night was half-past twelve.
She put out the light.
Everything (but sleep) rushed at her through the darkness.
How correct she had been in her estimate of Miss Ashley as a creature of guile. In addition to Mr. Stedman’s telephoned fly in the ointment that Miss Ashley had given Mrs. Aldershot Buffalo as a forwarding address instead of River Rest (not for an instant did Mrs. Giles swallow the trivial, excuse that Miss Ashley had done so to “shake off a man.” That, Mrs. Giles thought grimly, would be the day), Mrs. Giles now distinctly recalled their first interview.
In it Miss Ashley had certainly announced herself to be a gun inspector at the Merle plant. Merle. Unmistakably it had been Merle.
Yet in spite of this, Mr. Stedman had said over the telephone that Miss Ashley’s dossier had been checked at the Collins plant. And that was the plant where Mr. Smith and his nephew were enrolled.
Confusions piled on confusion. Miss Ashley and the two men had been strangers up to the moment when Mrs. Giles had introduced them in the drawing room. Or was this also a cut of duplicity to be stirred in with the rest of the noxious stew?
Surely in a war plant where thousands were employed Miss Ashley and the two men easily might never have met. It would be, she decided, like a crossing on any of the large liners where you reached Southampton and then saw dozens of new faces which you had never known were on board.
Nevertheless, it caused Mrs. Giles to pause on the lip of a readjustment of her extremely favorable impression of Mr. Smith and his nephew. But that was nonsense.
No sound in the silent house disturbed the eddied turmoil of her dark conjecturings. Hopkins stepped out from among them. Hopkins, seated on the box and waiting, and then impinging on his memory the foreign face of Mr. Russdorff. Where?
(The only value might lie in there being something indicative about the locality, Mr. Stedman had said.)
Mrs. Giles wondered in the room’s crepuscular moonlight whether Hopkins, when he woke up in the morning, would remember. Suddenly, as such things occasionally would with her, it came in a flash. She knew where, within the immediate past, Hopkins had sat waiting on the box and had viewed Mr. Russdorff’s face: at the end of Joroloman Street while he had waited for Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade to collect their luggage and bring it to the brougham from the tarpaper shack.
At no other time could it have occurred. With the exception of the bond sale and the railroad station, neither one of which Hopkins had felt to be the spot, his trip to pick up Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade to drive them to River Rest was the only other time when the carriage had stood waiting.
Good solid Mr. Smith and his dazzling nephew and, in their vicinity, the so-soon-to-be-murdered Mr. Russdorff. And the dazzling nephew had been thrown into violent illness when he had viewed, at the morgue, the proper corpse.
The only value might lie in there being something indicative about the locality.
Well, there was the locality all right. Plunk at the spot where had resided her two favorite roomers.
Mrs. Giles’s stout heart all but flipped over. It was now for Hopkins that she was concerned. What the basis of the whole wretched affair might be she did not know. She felt immeasurably confused, and her belief that Miss Ashley had killed Mr. Russdorff was befogged by further doubts concerning Mr. Smith and his nephew because of Hopkins’ having seen Mr. Russdorff near their shack.
It was tenuous; it was perfectly maddenin
g, but Mrs. Giles considered strongly that Hopkins was threatened with dangers from that simple thing. It still did not occur to her that similar, if not greater, danger was threatening herself.
She decided that nothing would stop her from talking with Kent the first thing in the morning. She would have gone in and talked with him right then, only she knew that he and Miss Ashley had not as yet come home. She had heard no taxicab crunching on the drive below.
Her eyes of their own volition closed.
They opened, still on darkness, to the gentle ringing of the alarm clock’s bell.
She lay still for a while, testing the stillness of the house and of the world outside. Even the birds had not as yet begun their murmurous cheeps.
Mrs. Giles turned on a shaded lamp and got up.
She moved quietly through this sleeping world with planned determination. She pulled the bastings which held it beneath the dinner dress and put the blue silk wrapper on. Then over that she slipped another wrapper of black China silk. She was fully aware of the hazards of disposing of incriminating evidence. Almost invariably it was done up into a bundle which the disposer lugged about in full view, half the time to his frustration and ruin.
Mrs. Giles intended to have none of that. Should the worst occur and someone accost her, her hands would be innocently empty while the guilty wrapper would be safely concealed, and she would simply say that she had stepped out to investigate a suspicious sound. Let them make of it what they would. She could always, as a last resort, take refuge in her dotage.
She took a pencil flashlight from a bureau drawer and, after turning out the bed lamp, let its beam guide her through the quiet house downstairs into the kitchen. She selected the keys for the tool shed and the back door and stepped out into the night.
It pleased her to think that she had had the foresight to wear galoshes, as the dew on the grass was heavy. She stood still for a moment, accustoming her eyes to the crepuscular half tones brought out by the starlight, then took the path through the vegetable garden to the tool shed.
Inside this cluttered cubicle she used her flashlight sparingly to select the spade fork. She carried this with her to the erstwhile formal garden where, among the delphiniums, she dug a satisfactory hole. Nothing had alarmed her, and the darkness continued to offer its protecting screen.
She took off both wrappers and replaced the black China silk one before wadding the blue one into a ball and shoving it down into the hole she had dug. Earth was replaced and the surface smoothed with the fork’s tines. She knelt and replaced as best she could the surface pad of weeds which she had set to one side. She thumbed it carefully down.
A shadow merged gently into the darker shadow of a lilac bush.
Mrs. Giles stood up. She took the spade fork and returned it to the tool shed, where she cleaned its tines with a burlap bag. She locked the shed and returned to the house. She carried a sense of victory with her upstairs to her rooms.
The shadow left the darker shadow of the lilac bush and went over to the delphiniums, where it kneeled.
CHAPTER 25
A brilliant sun rode high toward noon when Mrs. Giles opened her eyes. Leila was standing beside the bed. Leila was saying that Miss Dawn Davis was calling and had insisted upon Mrs. Giles’s being awakened because of the parade.
Mrs. Giles remained groggy with sleep. Physically she felt tremendously refreshed, but her powers of concentration were still not all they should be.
She did her best to co-ordinate Leila’s further statements that Mr. Kent had had to go down to the City Hall for a conference with Mayor Saltensburg on the reception for his official welcome to the town, and the hour for this had been set ahead from five o’clock to two, because of the governor’s convenience, and although Mr. Kent would still get the key to the city there weren’t going to be any cocktails.
Slowly Mrs. Giles got out of bed. She asked Leila to tell Miss Davis that she would be down soon. Her clock said half-past eleven.
The dregs of sleep cleared, and frustration hit her sharply. Her nocturnal activities among the delphiniums had caused her to oversleep to this hour when Kent had already left the house. So her frank talk with him was again delayed. It might even continue to be delayed until after the reception was over. She recalled the urgency she had felt last night because of Hopkins.
This morning, her head clarified by sound sleep, the threat to Hopkins took solid form. Precedents abounded: any number of times one of the characters would be attempting to remember something which, when recalled, would prove desperately detrimental to the murderer. The character would sleep. Sometimes in a hospital bed, sometimes in his own. And before his subconscious could shove the memory up to be seized by his mind on waking, the murderer would kill him. Thus sealing the secret in the tomb.
Which was precisely what Hopkins had been in the process of being last night.
Mrs. Giles hurried to the house telephone and punched the stable button. Relief flooded her as Hopkins answered it. “Good morning, madam.”
“I’m so glad. Good morning.”
“What was that, madam?”
“I will want the victoria earlier than we had planned, Hopkins.”
“Yes, Leila told us that the reception was set ahead to two o’clock. I’ll be ready.”
“Thank you. And, Hopkins—”
“Yes?”
“Do you think the locality where you saw Mr. Russdorff could have been where you were waiting for Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade at the foot of Joroloman Street?”
“Yes. That’s it. I remember his face being quite clear under a hanging bulb, sort of a makeshift street light. I’ll telephone Mr. Stedman and let him know.”
Mrs. Giles hung up the receiver. She continued to enjoy the relief which the sound of Hopkins’ voice had brought her. She went to the wardrobe and wondered what on earth to put on.
Leila had definitely said a parade, which suggested some sort of official reviewing stand, and Mrs. Giles took it for granted that she would be invited to sit with Mayor Saltensburg and the governor.
The day promised to be warm, and she decided on a moderate version of a picture hat because of having to sit outdoors in the sun. She took from its box a nice one she had bought in London. It was very English. She thought it would be just right: that dowager-at-a-royal-garden-party note which Mayor Saltensburg would expect. Yes, it and the ecru lace dress.
She went down to the drawing room and found Dawn Davis in her usual state of surcharged excitement. Mayor Saltensburg. Miss Davis said, had sent her out to arrange things at this end with Mrs. Giles while he himself cooked the program up with Kent at the City Hall, and, my dear, you look exactly like a duchess heading for the strawberries and clotted cream.
Mrs. Giles smiled amiably.
“What are the arrangements, Miss Davis?”
Miss Davis said happily that the thing had got completely out of hand and was assuming the proportions of a whoop-de-doo on the scale of a fête de grand luxe. The newsreel services were taking it up. Their plan was to shoot Mrs. Giles and Kent as both stepped into the victoria at River Rest.
Mayor Saltensburg had originally planned that Kent would ride in the official car, but the movie people had insisted on the victoria idea from the moment when they learned that Mrs. Giles used a horse. Something to do with pounding home the conservation of gasoline.
Mrs. Giles repressed a shudder. She thought: Very well, if that is what they wish it to be. If that was how they wished to honor her grandson and to have him in turn do his service and the country the most good. To nourish that puzzling, that temperamental matter called morale.
“We will be completely at the mayor’s service,” she said.
Dawn Davis momentarily lingered.
“I missed them last night, Mrs. Giles.”
“Missed?”
“Kent and Miss Ashley. I went to all three of our better tinseled sluicing premises, trying to run her down for an interview, but no dice.”
Mrs. Giles, w
ith a remarkable effort, retained her serene front.
“Perhaps they had decided to do their sluicing on some premises with less tinsel.”
Miss Davis smiled briefly.
“Perhaps.”
She stood up and thanked Mrs. Giles and said good-by. She left with her personal knowledge that there was no perhaps about it. She had searched for Kent and the Ashley creation on a descending scale through all the stews and cesspools of the town. With no result beyond a hang-over which was piloting bulldozers about inside her head.
Mrs. Giles sat still and pondered this latest advice. Where had Kent and that poisonous product of a miasmic demi-world gone? To what dens (secreted even from the eyes of the press) had she lured him? She was unable to picture the sterling worthiness of Bridgehaven as possessing any dive so plushily and incense-ladenly apt. She gave it up.
The delphiniums.
It would be wise in this bright light of noon to view her handiwork. Mrs. Giles went out of doors. She made her way in leisurely fashion toward the garden, being careful (in case Leila were again observing the performance) to clutch at no bushes en route.
She paused and looked down at the spot where she knew she had dug. Nothing looked disturbed. No trace of digging showed. It had been a splendid job.
Splendid.
CHAPTER 26
The one-o’clock summer sun was bright and hot.
Mrs. Giles accepted Kent’s hand and stepped into the victoria while cameras cranked. She thought that Hopkins seemed worried.
“Did you telephone Mr. Stedman?” she asked him while some close-ups of Kent were being shot on the drive.
“I couldn’t get him, madam. A man at his office told me to call later this afternoon. He asked whether it was important and I told him no.”
Like a cloud shadowing the bright sunlight, a wave of dread sifted over Mrs. Giles as her conviction increased that it was important.
“You look worried, Hopkins. Is it because you couldn’t get hold of Mr. Stedman?”
“No, madam. It’s the mare.”
“Perhaps the confusion and these cameras annoy her.”
