A Town of Masks

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “May I have a moment before the council, gentlemen?”

  They had little choice in the matter. Wilks frowned, but Copithorne nodded assent.

  She turned to the restive townspeople and called out, “Mr. O’Gorman, will you stay, please?”

  She saw him throw back his head at the sound of his name in the chamber. He would stay. If Wilks could dismiss him, she could restore him. She could raise him up, and climb herself on his shoulders. She addressed the council, but she talked to Dan O’Gorman. Forgotten tonight was her awkwardness that one day in his house. Well forgotten. She would never be awkward there again.

  “Gentlemen, we were divided tonight, and then we were admirably reunited by Mr. Wilks.” That to her boss, let him take it as toast or tactic. “Nobody ever worked harder for unity in the Cove than Maria Adams Verlaine. Therefore I don’t feel that I’m lacking in respect to her memory when I want to speak to you tonight on Campbell’s Cove Day. Gentlemen, we live in an age of violence. We must meet it in whatever shape it comes upon us, with prepared force. We must meet it united. And this town never needed unity as much before. On our anniversary this year, I propose that we give ourselves to dedication, not to nostalgia. I propose that from Front Street to High Street we demonstrate our will to survive an enemy’s attack upon the town. For the purposes of demonstration, we shall assume that the attack is military, atomic. But we shall be showing our strength of spirit as well as our ability to defend ourselves.

  “The civil defense corps proposes to evacuate the town under the simulated conditions of an air attack. The army and air force will give us every co-operation. Mr. O’Gorman will organize a fleet of fishing craft to meet the emergency, as he would do in our actual need. I submit the plan, gentlemen, for your approval.”

  For once in her life, Hannah thought, moving back from the table, she had said what she intended to say, she had articulated her thoughts. Were she given command of a legion of angels, it would not be half so satisfying as the marshaling of her own thoughts.

  There was no general acclaim for her plan, no outburst of support. Nor had she wanted it. That would have smacked of demagogy, and she felt very humble. A stir of conversation swept the audience instead, as though she had given them something to think about, rather than something to cheer. Good. It was long past time they did some thinking. In the end, the council promised an answer within the week, and in the meantime assurances that the project would have approval.

  Quite enough, Hannah thought. Before she had reached her place among the ordinary citizens, the meeting was adjourned, and moving on then, toward the great doors, she was given a word of commendation here and there, at which she demurred. At the door, Matheson laid his hand on her arm. There was nothing of authority in his grip and yet she sensed a chilling restraint.

  “You know what I was thinking when you were talking there, Miss Blake?” He waited for her encouragement. She said nothing. “I was thinking: shades of Mrs. Verlaine.”

  She dared to meet his eyes. Praise or irony, she could not tell. “Thank you, Matt.”

  24

  HANNAH WAS AT HER desk but a few minutes in the morning, when Franklin Wilks came to the door of her office. “Do you have a moment, Hannah?”

  Rarely had he approached her in this manner. She had often thought he begrudged her a moment even on bank business. “Of course.”

  He came in and sat down at her desk. “That was a remarkable performance last night, Hannah. I shouldn’t be surprised if you saved the night there. It had the makings of an ugly business.”

  “It doesn’t take much to turn a brawl into a rally,” she said.

  “It works the other way, too,” Wilks said. “I talked with the county people this morning, by the way. Walker was not grinding a political ax—though I wouldn’t put that past him myself. But he had good reason to give the Front Streeters a going-over.”

  “Oh?”

  “They turned up one of Maria’s pieces, an old-fashioned tie pin. The maid, of course, swears that Maria gave it to her. And she gave it to her nephew.”

  “Annie was with Maria a long time,” Hannah said.

  “She’s not necessarily under suspicion. You can’t blame her for lying to save the nephew either if that’s the case. But there’s no doubt she carried tales about the jewelry down there. And no doubt they got the full picture of Maria’s carelessness. It’s a terrible thing to say, but Maria asked for this. You can’t expect people who have very little to take your attitude toward valuables.”

  “Scarcely,” Hannah murmured.

  “Maria was one of those strange souls to whom possession means very little. I’m executor of her estate, you know.”

  “Are you?”

  “It’s less than ten thousand dollars, except for the house and the jewels, or insurance on them.”

  “Who’s the beneficiary?”

  “Annie Tully in the matter of cash. The Christians get the house for a museum.”

  “Oh, my, that’s too bad,” Hannah said.

  “Why?”

  Hannah lifted her head. “Annie’s getting the cash, I mean. That makes her more suspect than ever, doesn’t it?”

  “Mmm,” Wilks said. “And there’s no disposition of the jewels. The will was made out before she acquired them.”

  “Did Annie know of her inheritance before this happened?” Hannah asked.

  “Yes. She admits that frankly. Maria had promised to leave her well provided for.”

  “It would seem, then,” Hannah said, “that if Annie contemplated anything like—murder, the time to have done it was before Maria spent thirty thousand dollars in the French courts.”

  “So.” Wilks nodded. “And then there’s this view of it—with her inheritance spent on them, she might have felt she was entitled to them.”

  Hannah shook her head. “That’s not like Annie. She was content with her lot in this world from the day she was born into it.”

  Wilks permitted himself to smile. “Are you taking over the championship of Front Street?”

  “In time I might,” she said, “when they’re in need of it.”

  “And when you’re in need of them?”

  “Perhaps. One hand washes another.”

  “And one hand shakes another,” Wilks said. “For your Cove Day celebration, you’d like a few dignitaries?”

  “With enough of them, I think we can arrange a coast-to-coast broadcast. It should be worth their time, too.”

  “I hadn’t realized you were cynical, Hannah. But then, there’s quite a bit about you, I discovered last night. It was a revelation. Copithorne went to pieces, didn’t he?”

  “I’m not cynical, Mr. Wilks. And for my little part, I’m determined the cynics won’t inherit the earth.”

  “A nice phrase, and I know who’d like it—Tom Michaels.”

  “The governor?”

  Wilks nodded. “I think he’d come on a proper invitation. We won’t be able to keep Cravens away, of course. But the country might find it interesting to have them in the same reviewing stand.”

  Hannah’s visions kept pace with his. She measured his power as national committeeman. “Will you invite them?”

  “If you compose the letter, I’ll sign it,” Wilks said.

  Hannah felt the color rise to her face. To her brief relief the telephone rang. She excused herself, watching Wilks strum a tune on her desk with his finger tips. The call was from the sheriff’s office. Walker wanted to see her.

  Her first panic was stemmed by the realization that if it were a dire call for her it would not come over the telephone. “Where shall I see him?” she asked.

  “At 327 Cherry Street.”

  “At Mrs. Verlaine’s house?”

  “Right.”

  Hannah put the receiver in the cradle carefully, the care symbolic of her self-shepherding.

  “Let me give you a mite of advice on Walker, Hannah. Keep him in his place. Use him, or he’ll use you. There’s only one thing more ruthle
ss than a man on the way up. That’s the fellow on the way down trying for a comeback.”

  “I’ll remember that, Mr. Wilks,” she murmured. “Thank you.”

  He got up then and started to the door. He paused and turned back, his mouth set in wry amusement. He took a letter from his pocket and put it on her desk. “This is a small bank, Hannah—and I’d be very happy to be one of your constituents.”

  He left abruptly and she opened the letter. It was one of the several she had signed her name to the morning before.

  25

  EVERY DECISION TO BE made seemed an impossible one as she prepared to meet Walker. She thought at first to put the car in the garage for repair and take a cab to Cherry Street. Fearing that might pique the sheriff’s curiosity, she drove, but the act of driving to Maria’s house once more set her nerves on edge. A good driver, she had never ground the gears in her life except that night, but now every time she put her hand to the shift, she was as leery of it as she would have been of a molten rod. She feared also that the car, parked where it was that night, might prod a laggard memory. She could even imagine someone, seeing it, in the very act of recollection—Wilks, for example—“By God, I remember seeing Hannah’s car there the other night. That was the night—”

  “No. No,” she said aloud, turning into Cherry Street. She picked up speed that she might not have to shift the gears in front of the house, and coasted the last hundred yards. She parked where she had always parked, visiting Maria—beyond the driveway. Having forced her courage to that decision, she restored a measure of inward calm. She even lingered, crossing the lawn, to survey the damage wreaked on Maria’s lovely yard by the curious and their dispatchers. The shrubbery was almost stripped of leaves, the leaves half-withered mingling in small whirlwinds with gum and cigarette wrappers. The grass was beaten down and matted into the soil.

  Schenk, most favored of the sheriff’s henchmen, she thought, tipped his hat and opened the door for her. Inside, the damage was even greater, and she could see two deputies going over the woodwork with chisel and hammer, the woodwork, the marble fireplace, the bookshelves, all the books piled on the floor. Walker apparently did not have his announced confidence in the theft of the jewels. At least, he was taking no chances.

  “You can wait in the living-room, Miss Blake,” Schenk said. “I’ll tell the sheriff you’re here.”

  She merely nodded and picked her way through the stacked furniture and books. The deputy working there left without a word on her arrival. She was glad of the moment alone, and glad of the disorder. To have entered the room and found it as she had last seen it would have been an ordeal, and to have done it under the sheriff’s eye, a greater one. Among her imaginings of the sheriff’s preparations for her, had even been a dummy image of Maria as they found her. Hannah’s face worked at the thought, a twitch she sought to control. She looked in the mantel mirror. There was no facial evidence of the contorting nerve. She remembered Maria’s telling her to look in the mirror, and turned from it now.

  Walker might be watching, she realized. He was a great one for setting a scene. She turned a chair upright and sat down. There were footsteps overhead, hammering in the kitchen, noise all over, except in the room where she waited. At every lull of the hammer, she could hear a clock’s ticking within the room. She could not find the clock with her eyes. A calculated torture? She looked at her watch. How long was he to keep her waiting? What did he except her to do in this room where her friend had died? What his right to his slow play upon her nerves, her memories, her heart’s pain?

  A minute, only one minute had passed when she looked at her watch again, unless she had been wrong when first she looked at it. She began to count. If he were to keep her waiting, victim to her own distraction, he would not see her look at her watch for five minutes. Not until she had counted slowly to three hundred. From seventy she was suddenly at twenty-seven. From twenty-nine she went to ninety-three. Better to read.

  She got up and read the titles on the nearest stack of books. Mostly Dickens. The best of Dickens to her was Tale of Two Cities. The least to Maria. They had argued it in high school; and another argument, this one in class debate: Did Othello kill his wife in jealousy, or was his anger righteous and his act of murder a pure man’s intolerance of defilement? How she had fought for that interpretation! There was something of Iago in Walker, she thought—the charm, the dangerous, ingratiating charm. Catlike. Swift. She much preferred the dogged Matheson.

  Matheson. At odds with the sheriff, he was dangerous, and the sheriff at odds with him was more dangerous, but Matheson was an honest man—So are they all honorable men.

  I will not wait, she thought. I will not be kept waiting. I shall go back to the office and he can come to me, for me—

  She returned to the books, another stack of them, taken by the armful from the shelf. One at the bottom caught her attention: an elegant, gilt-edged volume, red leather, gold embossed—L’Opera Grand v. 4. A title in French, one Maria had not turned over to the Verlaine collection. Volume four. She leaned farther to see the rest of the set. Not in sight. She stared at the one book, her heartbeat quickening. It was large enough, quite large enough—to be a dummy. She dared not touch it. They had taken the books out in clumps. They might put them back that way, if at all. She took the nearest book within reach, just to have something in hand. Thomas Mann. She held it before her, should the sheriff walk in without warning.

  The Magic Mountain. She tried then to concentrate on that, but her mind slipped away—I fell from a high mountain … how love fled and paced the mountains overhead—She flung the book from her, tumbling the pile from which it had come. She must not be alone like this; she must not be idle.

  “Forgive me, Miss Blake. I didn’t think you’d get here so soon.”

  “Nor did I expect to be kept waiting, Mr. Walker. I was getting into a nasty temper.”

  “So I noticed. Are you always that violent?”

  “Only under circumstances such as these. You’re doing a fine job on the house.”

  The sheriff lit a cigarette. “Considering the job that was done on her, I don’t think the heirs should object. That empty silver tray turned out a bust, by the way. All spoons. They’re in the factory getting replated.”

  Why, she wondered, did he tell her that? Expecting her to offer suggestions on other places to look? She said nothing.

  He tossed the match into the grate. “Quite a shindig you had at the town hall last night. I hear you saved the night.” He blew smoke into the reflection of his own face in the mirror. “Quite a trick.”

  “It was not a trick.”

  “I could show you a lot of them,” he said over her words. He blew dust from the mantel, dust or ashes. “Come here.”

  Despite her resentment, she obeyed.

  He tapped the mantelpiece. “Here’s one. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but the boys picked up a beautiful set of fingerprints, right here.” He indicated the place, wiggling his forefinger over it.

  “Mine?”

  He nodded.

  “I remember,” she said. “I remember on Monday standing right here. I was examining this scratch in the mirror.” She put her finger to her face and away quickly that the tremble of it might be concealed. “You can hardly see it now.”

  “I can see it,” he said. He brushed her away and strode between her and the mantel. “And here’s where the bell cord hung. For twenty-five years. Fifty maybe, and nobody ever laid eyes on it except Annie Tully.”

  “Forty years is closer,” Hannah said. “I remember when it was installed. Of course, I remember it.”

  “That’s better. It isn’t always smart to say no to everything.”

  “You described it as the cord from a bathrobe,” she said.

  “And you’ve got no imagination at all.”

  “Are you implying that I murdered Maria?”

  “When it comes to murder, I don’t imply. I charge. I want to drive home something to you, Miss Blake. D
on’t pick and choose what you tell me. You tell me, and let me do the picking and the choosing. There’s something very pretty about this case, from the point of view of the police; take away the jewels, and it’s very interesting.”

  “Indeed,” she murmured.

  “Indeed. Sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “I don’t mind standing.”

  “Isn’t it hard on that ankle of yours?”

  “You’re very solicitous,” she said, wanting to match his sarcasm.

  He righted a chair and slammed it on the floor beside her as though his next move would be to force her into it. It was foolish to anger him over so slight an issue. Obviously he liked to stand above his victims, to look down on them, and when they were both on their feet he was no taller than Hannah. To show a measure of independence, however, she sat in the chair she had previously taken out of the heap. Walker dragged the other chair beside her and put his foot on it. He was a policeman, after all.

  He tossed the cigarette into the grate. “You and Mrs. Verlaine were lifelong friends, right?”

  “Not as close as some people, but friends,” Hannah said.

  “On occasion, you took her to task—say for smoking too much, ah, for neglecting church—things of that sort?”

  “On occasion.” God knew, she had tried, she thought.

  “And Mrs. Verlaine felt free to return the favor?”

  “Yes, I suppose she did.” Only once had she taken that trouble, Hannah thought, that interest.

  “All right,” the sheriff said casually. “Do you know I’ve got a very nice case against a kid named Dennis Keogh?”

  “Have you?”

  “I could make a better one with your co-operation.”

  Hannah was startled in spite of herself.

  The sheriff smiled. “What I mean is—if you’d been cooperating up to the night she was killed. This is theory, you understand. Let’s say you were giving him money. Don’t interrupt. I said it’s theory, and money’s the easiest terms to talk theory in. Let’s say you were about to give him—a couple of thousand dollars, say for a sailboat. He likes to sail. Maybe you do, too. Or, let’s say it’s to go to college. You’re a champion of education. Anyway, Mrs. Verlaine discovers he’s a charlatan. This is interesting, huh? Because she actually did call him a faker a couple of nights before she died. But to get on with my theory, say she was about to expose him, to you, her friend. Doesn’t that make a nice picture—for murder?”