by Rufus King
Her blood was ice, but her courage never failed her.
“Mr. Parling, will you let me see your badge?”
His skin grew a little pale. Strangely, he was sorry.
“So you didn’t fall for it.”
His eyes casually traversed the bright large room. He caught, as they reached the cupboards which lined the eastern wall, the manner in which her muscles tensed.
“So they’re in one of those,” he said.
He did not have to tell her what he meant. He took the revolver with its silencer again from his pocket and held it negligently as he backed toward the eastern wall, facing her, watching her, ready to stifle a scream with the revolver’s gentle, deadly phutt!
And after her (she felt this like a dagger in her heart) he might kill Kent. His hand, she saw, was ready for the knob of the first cupboard door. This was the one in which she had always hung her smocks. But he would try them all. All of the doors until, with the third, he would come upon Leila’s cache. While he opened the door his eyes were still on her: wary, like a beast’s eyes sullenly watchful.
Which was why she, and not Mr. Parling, saw, standing in the cupboard among her smocks, Miss Ashley. Her brain could stand no more.
Effacing even her terror and all else, the appalling outrage crashed against Mrs. Giles in a blinding flare: My home, this house which Papa built, is full of crooks.
CHAPTER 35
Miss Ashley took a short swing and brought the wrench belonging to the hand press squarely down on Mr. Parling’s head.
The carnage was complete.
She stepped from the cupboard. She assured herself that Mr. Parling, now horizontal, was satisfactorily out. She approached the chair where Mrs. Giles, still spellbound, sat. Was, Mrs. Giles was wondering, the carnage truly complete?
“Is there an extension phone up here?” Miss Ashley asked.
Mrs. Giles gestured febrilely toward a corner of the room. She watched Miss Ashley move to it and heard her put through a call to Mr. Stedman. What was wrong? Of course: the swivel was no longer in Miss Ashley’s walk. And her voice, too, seemed to have changed. As she spoke with Mr. Stedman it could be anybody’s.
Miss Ashley hung up and then drew a chair close to Mrs. Giles and sat down. She rested the monkey wrench on her lap.
“There’s no necessity of your staying up here, Mrs. Giles,” she said in this newly pleasant voice of hers. “I’ll watch these three thugs until the police get here.”
The voice, the girl’s completely altered manner only clouded further Mrs. Giles’s dither of confusion. Miss Ashley reminded her so strongly now of any number of the girls who had been her schoolmates at Miss Davidge’s and, later, at Vassar.
She said impulsively: “Are you Vassar?”
“Yes, Mrs. Giles—’42.”
Then everything was all right.
Everything.
“My dear Effie, I wouldn’t dream of leaving you alone here with these three criminal characters. Do you think Joel should join us until Mr. Stedman gets here?”
Miss Ashley hefted the wrench.
“We won’t need him,” she said.
“Do tell me instantly, dear, just where and when you met Kent.”
The story was reasonably simple. As with so many of the young women in her Cleveland crowd, Effie Ashley had wanted to go into war work of a useful nature. She had purposely chosen a factory town away from home so that her normal social life in Cleveland would not impede her.
One day in the Collins plant cafeteria she had overheard a remark made by Wade to Smith (she had not known their names at the time) which had nudged her suspicions.
“The thought of sabotage is always on a worker’s mind, Mrs. Giles. Especially in a plant which manufactures explosives.”
“My dear child, I can well imagine. I can simply say I shudder.”
The remark had not been definite enough to turn in as a report, but it had worried Effie, and she had made it her business to follow the two men up. She located the shack where they lived and, standing outside its paper-thin walls one evening, she had caught further remarks made by Wade. His voice had been so loud that Smith had told him to keep quiet, but Effie by then had heard enough.
It wasn’t sabotage. It was counterfeiting, as Mrs. Giles now knew. At the moment it was still pretty vague to Effie, but the implications had struck her as more ominous than ever. This had been on Saturday evening, and she had returned to the vicinity of the shack on Sunday, hoping to be able to find some moment when both men would be out and she could search it.
Smith had come out during the afternoon, leaving Wade behind. Effie had followed Smith and had landed with him at the bond sale. She had overheard the triple chitchat among Dawn Davis, Smith, and Mrs. Giles. She had absorbed the news concerning Kent’s possible leave and the renting of River Rest’s rooms. She had flown out to get one, her plan being to go into a vampire act and lure the complete dope out of Wade.
“You were perfect, dear,” Mrs. Giles said. “You reminded me instantly of that splendid actress, Jeanne Eagels. I could cheerfully have strangled you.”
As for her meeting with Kent on the gravel drive, that had been the simplest of all. Effie’s uncle—her mother’s brother—held a quite important post in Washington.
Mrs. Giles, when she heard the man’s name, was profoundly impressed.
“Why, he’s practically,” she said, “the Merlin of the palace guard.”
Effie smiled.
“I know. I called him up from the corner drugstore near Mrs. Aldershot’s. He always knows about everything that ever goes on. He knew that Kent was already in Washington and was planning on reaching Bridgehaven the next day.”
He had been considerably impressed by Effie’s notions and agreed to get in touch with Kent and ship him on that evening by plane, with rendezvous arranged for in the drive, a locale which Effie could keep under comfortable observation from a drawing-room window.
Her idea had been that Kent, knowing the house, would facilitate any search for material which the conspirators might conceal. They had made such a search last night when they had returned to the house instead of going on to a night club.
“Kent and I had been talking out on the drive for about a quarter of an hour, Mrs. Giles, when Russdorff came along.”
Russdorff was already stabbed. He had scuffled along the gravel drive and had clutched, in his final agony, at Kent. That was how he had ripped the bracelet and identification tag from Kent’s wrist before collapsing back among the shrubbery. In death.
Effie had remembered Russdorff’s face. She had seen him talking with Smith and Wade before the shack. His death threw her and Kent into panic, and it was she who had planned the moves covering his “arrival” at the station the next morning.
Parling gave a feeble groan. Effie stood up and inspected the three wrecks on the floor.
“Shouldn’t we—are you sure they’ll last, dear?” Mrs. Giles asked.
Effie sat down again.
“They’ll last.”
“There are two things I would like to know. Why did you leave Buffalo as a forwarding address with Mrs. Aldershot and why did you tell me your job was at the Merle plant when you are at the Collins one?”
“I get quite a few letters, Mrs. Giles. The stationery—Mother’s especially—wasn’t the sort my vamp role would be liable to receive. Smith or Wade might have seen them if they were forwarded here.”
“Of course. How clever you were, dear.”
“As for the Merle business, I didn’t want Smith and Wade to know I was in their plant.”
There was one final bewilderment which Mrs. Giles wanted cleared up: just how dear Effie happened to be so fortuitously in the cupboard during the dreadful quarter of an hour which Mrs. Giles had just gone through.
It had not been entirely chance. The studio, with its hand press and materials, had struck Effie as a very logical spot for the concealment of the counterfeit plates. She had come back to River Rest through the storm around s
ix o’clock and, as no one had seen her enter the house, she had hung up her raincoat and hat, taken a flashlight, and had gone straight up to the studio.
She had searched for hours until she was exhausted.
She had finally given it up as a bad job and was starting for the stairs when she had seen Mrs. Giles and Wade coming up them. She had run back into the studio and had hidden in the closet, both to avoid being noticed by Wade and to see what would occur. Luckily she had found the hand press’s toolbox on the closet floor and, when the going seemed to be getting rough, she had selected the wrench as a weapon.
“Mrs. Giles, are the plates behind that etching you were talking about?”
“We shall see.”
Mrs. Giles stood up. Her legs were as weak as water, but they carried her determinedly over to Leila’s cache, and there the plates were: concealed in the space behind the little stag and the backing of the frame.
Then she saw Mr. Stedman standing in the studio doorway and what seemed like a press of blue uniforms behind him.
Stedman observed the litter.
“Could be a final curtain by Shakespeare,” he muttered. He came inside. He looked with respectful suspicion at Mrs. Giles. “Are you responsible for this?”
He took Mrs. Giles and Effie downstairs into the drawing room while the rest cleared up: a process which involved three stretchers. He heard their stories. He accepted Mrs. Giles’s clues and sent her into a faint blush of pleasure by assuring her that the fleck of gold-faced cigar band would rate during the trial as Exhibit A.
He took charge of the priceless plates. He even arranged that Policewoman Jones would stay with Kent until Dr. Hesley could get a real nurse, if Kent should longer need one.
Finally they were gone: Mr. Stedman, the three casualties, and all the law’s representatives.
Mrs. Giles locked up. She saw dear Effie to her room and fondly kissed her good night. She stopped in to take a look at Kent: how secure he seemed in his deep, peaceful sleep.
Truly so, at last.
She went to her room and undressed. She took two of Dr. Hesley’s pills. She thought, as sleep clutched her, how wonderfully right the house felt again.
Bright sunlight poured through the bedroom windows when she wakened. A clock struck eleven. She lingered awhile on the pillows and enjoyed the sun’s warm gold. She permitted herself to dream.
Kent and Effie were at the end of the dream, and possibly it wouldn’t be so far off after all. She had the feeling that it wouldn’t be. Even Papa would be pleased. She decided just to slip on a dressing gown and run in and see whether Kent was awake. With what a safe feeling she could do so now!
Mrs. Giles got out of bed with joy.
Another day.
