by Rufus King
“She was skittish while I was harnessing her.”
The cameramen were finished with the close-ups, and Kent stepped into the victoria. Sleek and black and strong, the roached mare danced into a trot.
“She ought to be in the Ballet Russe,” Kent said.
Mrs. Giles settled herself more firmly against the cushion. “I remember so many parades, dear. In almost all of them some stout official astride a white horse would land on the pavement before they were over. We are perfectly in style.”
Mrs. Giles said it lightly, but a brief break which the mare made and which Hopkins adroitly controlled sent a tremor through her; almost one of premonition.
She asked as casually as she could manage, in this first moment of privacy with Kent since last night: “Did you and Miss Ashley enjoy the evening?”
“Very much. We pounded the parquet at the town’s best deadfalls until the dawn drove us home with banshee screams.”
Mrs. Giles’s large heart filled with lead.
“I am glad, dear.”
“What in heaven’s name am I supposed to do?” Kent asked as he caught sight of the crowds lining the farther reaches of the avenue.
“I would just give the victory sign when they cheer, dear, and if you find me bowing to right and left stop me. This show is for you.”
Suddenly, inescapably, Mrs. Giles felt terribly proud. All things, all her doubts and fears and worries, seemed so trivial, seemed to become picayune in the face of that great thing which was being done by all boys like Kent. Everything else shrank into unimportance by comparison.
A man wearing an arm band stopped Hopkins and gave him a few instructions. Just-ahead was the intersection where the official cars and the home-defense units were lined up.
It was while Hopkins had his head turned to repeat to Mrs. Giles what the man had said that the mare bolted. She reared once, plunged, and then her body lashed out with the speed of a one-heat racer.
Mrs. Giles choked back a scream. She compressed her lips and clung to the rim of the seat. She heard the explosion as a policeman gave his motorcycle the gun and shot out in front of the by now maddened mare. This only succeeded in augmenting the delirium which seemed to be attacking the animal as she careened the victoria along the avenue at sickening speed.
Kent leaped forward to climb up on the raised driver’s seat to help Hopkins but was flung back. He managed to distort the fall so as to avoid crushing Mrs. Giles.
“No, no, you fool!” Mrs. Giles cried as the motorcycle policeman again swung alongside and grabbed at the near rein, while the staccato backfires of his machine completed the mare’s frenzy.
The victoria, at an insane speed, crashed against the stanchion of a street lamp.
Bedlam, it seemed to Mrs. Giles, followed. The next thing she was able to grasp coherently was about an hour later. It was Mayor Saltensburg’s most mellifluous and political voice.
“It is with heartfelt relief,” the mayor was saying into a battery of microphones, “that I can report to you that Lieutenant Giles, by shielding his grandmother in his arms and himself bearing the full brunt of the crash, not only saved her life but enabled her to come through the accident unharmed. Michael Hopkins, the coachman, was not so fortunate. He has been taken to Central Hospital, suffering from concussion. His condition is considered serious. Lieutenant Giles, although severely shaken, is standing here beside me now. In a moment you will hear his voice.”
Mrs. Giles sat very erect on the governor’s right, effacing with her carriage the rips and dust of the ecru lace dress. Reaction from shock had not yet set in. She still felt numb all over, almost as though her brain were disassociated from her body. She knew that Kent, beneath his tan, was deathly pale. Dimly she was aware of Miss Ashley’s face coming into focus from among the sea of faces lapping the apron of the platform. She thought Miss Ashley’s expression was tragic: grim, and set, and hard, and whitened with a powdering of—was it terror? No sultry allure on it now. No, none.
Kent was talking. Mrs. Giles understood nothing of what he said. Then at length, at great length, she and Kent were being driven home by Mayor Saltensburg. They said good-by on the porch. The mayor had to dash back to see the governor off at the train.
“I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a minute,” Kent said when they were safe in the dim cool hallway.
The white, sharp agony of his face snapped Mrs. Giles right out of it. Her head cleared as though she had plunged it in ice water.
“Kent—you’re suffering. You’ve been seriously hurt.”
“Maybe something inside. Boy, am I glad that job is over.”
“Can you walk upstairs?”
He could. He did. He lowered himself onto the bed. Sweat formed slowly on his skin.
“Guess it’s nothing more desperate than a collarbone,” he said.
Mrs. Giles went swiftly to the telephone. A miracle made it possible that Dr. Hesley could come at once. She grew a little feverish and lightheaded during the twenty minutes it took him to get there. He looked at her sharply with his intelligent and kind old eyes, after she had hurried him upstairs and into Kent’s room, and suggested that she wait outside the door.
The ten minutes which Mrs. Giles endured were agony. Dr. Hesley stepped out into the hall.
“He’ll be all right in a few days,” he said. “I’ve given him an injection. He wants to talk with you alone before it takes effect. I’ll wait out here for you, Mrs. Giles.”
She went inside and over to the bed. His hand fumbled and reached hers.
“I know you know,” he said.
“Yes.”
“About the other night. My getting here.”
“Yes, darling.”
“This thing’s too big. You and I don’t matter if it’s what I think it is.” Drugged lids were lowering. “Keep still. Keep—still—”
Mrs. Giles left the room and joined Dr. Hesley out in the hallway. He followed her downstairs.
“I am going to send a nurse, if I can get hold of one,” he said.
“I shall stay with Kent, Doctor.”
They had reached the front door, and he said to her in his friendly, heartening voice, “You are in no condition to, Mrs. Giles. I will be back after dinner. Good-by until then.”
The front door closed, and for this moment by herself, alone, Mrs. Giles felt like crying from the happiness of Kent having spoken to her. She no longer felt shut out. No matter what the answer was, they were together from now on.
Leila, as usual, had come up to her on soundless feet.
“Mr. Stedman is in the drawing room,” she said. “He wants to see you. He came while you were upstairs with the doctor.”
“Thank you, Leila.”
Mrs. Giles went in and greeted Mr. Stedman and asked him to sit down. She no longer feared him. She was filled with the strength of ten since Kent had accepted her into partnership.
“How is he?” Stedman asked.
“Dr. Hesley believes he will be all right in a few days. He has given him an injection and hopes to be able to arrange for a nurse by this evening.”
“I shall only detain you for a moment.” Stedman tried to plumb the curious change he felt in her expression. It was almost a glow that was making her look, yes, happy. Why in God’s name should a serious accident and an invalided grandson all of a sudden make her look happy? It was beyond him. He said abruptly: “Mrs. Giles, has that horse of yours ever bolted like that before?”
“No, Mr. Stedman.”
He considered this for a moment and then he said: “I am not a stupid man and you are not a stupid woman. Tell me what you have been holding back. Tell me what you know.” (“Keep still,” Kent’s voice said to her. “Keep still!”)
“You are mistaken, Mr. Stedman.”
Stedman stood up. He walked impatiently away and then came back again. He stood looking down at her for a moment and then he shrugged.
He said. “It is you who are making the mistake, Mrs. Giles. I wil
l do my best to convince you of that fact before it is too late. This will sound brutal to you, but I suggest you recall your view at the morgue of Russdorff’s corpse.”
CHAPTER 27
Stedman decided not to linger.
He considered that, having made his brutal thrust, the clever thing to do would be to leave Mrs. Giles and permit it to sink in. He wanted it to spread through her nervous system thoroughly until enough sheer fright would have accumulated to make her willing to talk.
He was not an unkind man, but he was a determined one and he honestly believed that his melodramatics would be the best thing both for Mrs. Giles and her grandson in the end. Also, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything. He was satisfied that conspiracy and murder existed and that she was involved straight up to her willowy neck. That carriage smashup not only worried him gravely, but it threw into the ash can what had been his pet theory up to date.
She was a fool. A brave, fine fool, but still one. It hurt him to watch the happiness melt from her face under the impact of that Russdorff’s-corpse body blow. He wanted to relent at least a little bit and let her know that neither he nor the police were in any sense just sitting around with folded hands, but he steeled himself against doing so.
He had his own fright to contend with: the element of time. Too many balls were being juggled in the air, and his fear lay in the chance that the rhythm would be broken and the killer consequently startled into striking a second blow. He thought they were loaded with death, death of the most callous nature in the sense that it would be so impersonally bestowed. Like swatting flies.
He studied Mrs. Giles almost clinically. Had he done enough or should he loose another of the arrows in his quiver? No, this was enough. Let her taste this fright, let it keep on spreading its virus until it compelled her to talk. The sooner the better.
He said good-by. He said he would drop in and see her again after dinner. He managed to imply without in any way being rude about it that she might, by then, have come to her senses.
He had succeeded admirably, for Mrs. Giles began to suffer the first sproutings of these seeds of fear almost on the disappearance of Stedman’s heels. It was a fear which was to increase with cruel gentleness through the balance of the afternoon. It would not reach its dire peak until late that night.
And all of this worry, all this filtering dread were to be with her against a background of constant concern over Kent’s condition. A few moments were to stand out, and each of them in the bedlamite finish succeeded in adding its share toward building up a midnight which the Furies themselves would have found quite suitable as a haunt.
For a moment or so after Stedman’s departure Mrs. Giles stayed seated in the drawing room. Although she refused to consider it, the truth was inescapable that bones and muscles did not, at seventy, have the resiliency of their younger days. In spite of Kent’s wonderful shielding of her, the accident had shaken her very much. She was not unbruised, and above all else she was dog-tired.
So she sat for the next ten minutes in her armchair by a window for the plain reason that she was physically incapable of getting out of it. She heard the faint sound of the telephone ringing out in the hall and knew that Leila would answer it.
A summer shower was piling thunderheads in the sky beyond the distant hills, and it occurred to Mrs. Giles for the first time during her many years that the drawing room did have a gloomy air. Its elegance was much too ponderous and somber.
Was that detestable Miss Ashley right? And had Papa and all of his rich generation been wrong? Was this room, as Miss Ashley so concisely had put it, little better than a mausoleum suitable as a storage vault for shrouds? Heresy, yes, but wouldn’t chintz—chintz, and the ponderous paintings all donated to a museum…
A change, Mrs. Giles felt, would do her good.
Leila came in and gave her a message telephoned from Central Hospital.
“Mr. Hopkins has come out of his concussion and wants to see you. The doctor wants you to come right out to the hospital because Mr. Hopkins is getting a fever from not being able to tell you something he thinks you ought to know.”
Mrs. Giles compelled her aching muscles to lift her out of the chair. She went back to the kitchen and asked Ella to go up and sit in Kent’s room until she returned. She consoled Ella and promised to carry her love to her husband.
When Mrs. Giles returned to the hallway Mr. Parling was coming down the stairs. Again he looked glisteningly shaved and well done in gray flannel.
He said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Giles. I’ve just enjoyed the best sleep I’ve had since coming to Bridgehaven.” He looked at his watch. “Almost time for you and your grandson to start for the reception, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Giles realized that of course he wouldn’t know. Daytime events would naturally be a blank to men on night shift. She told him briefly what had occurred. He was sincerely concerned.
“I have just had word that Hopkins wishes to see me. I understand it is a little urgent. You will excuse me, Mr. Parling, if I go upstairs for my things?”
“How are you going to get to the hospital?”
“I shall call a taxi.”
“Let me drive you. I put the car in the stables this morning.” Parling looked again at his watch. “I’ve plenty of time for it. You get your things on while I bring the car around to the door.”
“Thank you, Mr. Parling, very much.”
Mrs. Giles went upstairs. She looked in on Kent. The injection which Dr. Hesley had given him was holding him in deep sleep. She went to her rooms and put on a linen coat and hat, took gloves, and then went downstairs and out onto the porch.
Parling was waiting beside a small coupe. He helped her in and they started off.
“You’ll have to tell me how to get there, Mrs. Giles.”
“I will. I’ve just looked in on Kent.”
“You’re worried about him, aren’t you?”
“Very worried.”
“I wouldn’t be. After all that he has been through in action a carriage smashup won’t add up to much. The doctor would have sent him to the hospital if it were serious.”
“Yes, I’ve thought of that. You turn left at the next crossing. Mr. Parling.”
“It’s something else you’ve got on your mind, then.”
“No, I assure you.”
Parling did not pursue this, and they said nothing further until he drew up before the entrance to Central Hospital. He helped her out.
“I’ll park over there and then will wait for you at the reception desk.”
“You are very kind.”
Hopkins was in the private room which Mrs. Giles had requested the ambulance intern to give him if it happened to be vacant. It was in the wing which Papa had donated, and its windows had a pleasant view across a stretch of woodland to the river.
A nurse starched over as Mrs. Giles opened the door. She looked past the nurse to the bed where Hopkins’ head, white with bandages, seemed to blend into the pillows.
“Dr. Mortlake suggests that you say as little as possible, Mrs. Giles. Just let him get whatever it is he wants to off his chest.”
“Thank you, Nurse.”
Mrs. Giles drew a chair close to the bed. She leaned forward and pressed one of Hopkins’ old hands. The skin was cold and she could feel the bones quite plainly. I suppose, she thought, that he can feel mine too.
“We’ll have you home again soon. Hopkins. Ella sends her love.”
“Thank you, madam.”
“Tell me what is troubling you.”
“The wheel.”
“Of the brougham?”
“Yes, just before we hit that lamppost. I saw the left rear wheel spinning along ahead of us. It had come off the hub.”
“The jolting must have loosened it.”
“It could have, but it worried me. I want you to take good care of yourself, madam.”
“Thank you, Hopkins, I will.”
“The wheel also made me worried about not having tel
ephoned Mr. Stedman about where I saw Mr. Russdorff. I don’t think I’m feverish about this. I think it’s all linked up together. Will you tell Mr. Stedman?”
Mrs. Giles skirted the outrightness of a lie.
“I will attend to it, Hopkins.”
“Now that I’ve placed the spot as near that tar-paper shack the scene is clearer. Mr. Russdorff wasn’t alone. He was talking with some man who had his back turned toward me. I could see Mr. Russdorff’s face because of the hanging electric bulb. I couldn’t see the other man except for the dark outline of his back. By the time Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade came out of the shack with their luggage the man and Mr. Russdorff were gone. Perhaps Mr. Stedman can make something out of it.”
“Perhaps he can.”
“Then there is nothing else except my love to Ella, madam.”
As she walked through the antiseptic air of the long corridor and went down in the large elevator Mrs. Giles determined on action. She asked Mr. Parling, after they were in the car, whether he would be kind enough to drop her at Merkwin’s Emporium instead of taking her back to River Rest. She would take a taxi home from the store.
Parling looked toward thunderheads piling their dark hills in the western sky.
“You’ll get caught, Mrs. Giles.”
“I think not. My shopping will only take a minute.”
“Just as you wish.”
Parling observed her speculatively as he helped her out before the department store’s main entrance. Shoppers were crowding from it onto the street and hurrying their steps to beat the threatening rain.
“It looks like closing time,” he said. “You’re just in under the wire.”
CHAPTER 28
Mrs. Giles stood in the store’s deep lobby, presumably fascinated with a display of three wax women having tea under a cerise-striped umbrella, until Mr. Parling’s car was out of sight. She hailed with determination a taxi. She asked to be driven to the end of Joroloman Street.
The driver, who had been satisfied that he had run into all of the foibles of humanity and the quirks of life, figured that here was one he must have missed. The end of Joroloman Street was no place, in his opinion, for an old tomato of the home-James type.
