A Town of Masks

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She had to dare as much as he did. “Then why didn’t you do it? I’m not afraid of it! The whole of Campbell’s Cove knows it. I have their sympathy, their confidence. No muckraking politician can destroy that.”

  Walker smiled. “I wonder. Gossip is one thing—testimony, something else, especially coming out of a murder investigation. You haven’t forgotten that, have you? There was a murder. You and I can’t tell when the lid will pop off that, can we? As I say, gossip is one thing. You can live that down. In fact, you can use it. People can feel ashamed about gossip. If you’re big stuff in a community, you can use it to your advantage. Right?”

  Right, Hannah thought, but she did not answer.

  “Now let’s talk about testimony, especially when it gets sanctified in the headlines. That’s when you get specific, Miss Blake. That’s gospel. Take that little poem you wrote—how did it go? ‘Love has unbound my limbs’—can’t you see it? ‘Spinster’s love poems revealed.’”

  “I didn’t write it,” Hannah said. “I copied it out of a book.”

  “Poor dear,” Walker said solicitously.

  Hannah fastened her hands on the arm of the chair. She must not let him drive her to fury, or beyond it. A little twist to her mind or temper, and without intending it at all, he could catapult himself into the office of police commissioner. One way or the other, she thought, he would ride in on her back. She was, in fact, his prisoner—and her own. She was jailor and prisoner to herself, and bribing him was in effect self-bribery. She shook her head. A labyrinth of her own making.

  “Well?” Walker demanded.

  “I’ll not make bargains with the devil,” she said.

  Walker flipped his cigarette to the lawn. “You’ve already made it, Miss Blake. Beware the day of forfeiture.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Walker?”

  “No more than you just tried on me,” he said, getting up. “Now I’ve got a little job to do—padlocks for the murder house.”

  “Aren’t you late with them?”

  “Am I?”

  “I suppose you know your business,” she retreated.

  “Mine and yours. By the way, Miss Blake, your visitor this morning wants me to find her boy friend.”

  It was a mistake, Hannah realized, to have turned on him.

  “You should not have much difficulty,” she said as quietly as possible.

  “None if I set my mind to it.”

  “Mr. Walker,” she said, trying to lift her head above the hypocrisy of her speech, “he’s not important enough for you to take that much trouble over.”

  Walker grinned. “Funny, I thought we’d agree on that. Now I’m really going to have to work on Matheson. He’s like a hound dog.”

  “I know. He was sniffing around my place last week.”

  “Was he?” Walker said easily. “Well, I’ll see if I can find a kennel for him.”

  40

  WELL, IT’S DONE, HANNAH thought, walking through the house. The bargain’s made and it’s done. What had she bought, really? A little time, a little power? He had not known he was selling time. Fancy, selling a pig in a poke! And it was something less than power she wanted, or something more. She was no longer sure. Not power perhaps, but its complement, esteem. Thus had she come to so despise Walker. In what low esteem he held her, and holding her in such esteem, what monumental contempt for the people who elected him and whose support he expected to rally for her, or her to rally for him and the master machinist, Senator Cravens. He had approached her as an equal. He had quoted to her the recommendation—an old and pious family. He spat upon them, putting her up, and she going up at his bidding.

  Oh, God, she thought, it cannot be that Walker and I are one, he the face and I the soul! No, no, no. She moaned aloud with the pain of it. I made a mistake, she tried to reason, one mistake, confiding in him the need to be rid of Dennis Keogh. I could not have used him to that purpose. Like Tom Merritt, I could contemplate doing a bad thing to a good end, but when it came to its accomplishment, my honor would not have permitted it. My honor rooted in dishonor … faith, unfaithful … falsely true—

  A conundrum! Words, only words.

  She returned to the map in the study. Heads without faces. So must Walker look upon all people, she thought, so many pins to be manipulated, up and down in the pattern of politics. She pulled the map and the board on which it was attached from the wall, and stepped back, steadying herself on the desk. She felt as though she were on the edge of something, not a great depth, a small sort of incline that required a step down, and yet, she felt, if she took it she would get a jolt, like coming to the bottom of the stairs expecting one more step. She felt the jolt without moving. This is in my mind, she thought. There’s something wrong. If it doesn’t pass, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  She eased herself down to the desk chair, and opened the letter folder for distraction. Bills and solicitations. Not a letter in it worth the reading—a little fleck of black ash. She turned the partitions and here was what was left of her love poems. A monster, bitter-sweet, and my unmaking …

  “True prophetess, Sappho!” she said aloud.

  She pushed away from the desk, got up, and went to the window. Still they labored in the garden. Surely there were not vegetables enough in all of Campbell’s Cove to take so long in the gathering; up and down, the rhythm of the bodies in endless labor, as in her dream of the wheatfield—toiling for the sake of toil, for the dread of waking, for the need of weariness, for the cry to sleep.

  She went to the sofa and stretched out on it, the sleep she craved upon her almost before she reached it

  41

  WHEN SHE AWOKE, HANNAH hastened to Front Street, glad to have slept the day to where she need make haste. O’Gorman was waiting on the docks for her, and with him was Matheson. It was disconcerting to find the police chief there. She had somehow felt that in making her bargain with Walker, she had banished Matheson.

  “A fleet of fifty!” O’Gorman said proudly, sweeping the Cove with the gesture of his big hand. “If the weather’s fair in the morning, they’ll be a grand sight going out.”

  “Beautiful,” Hannah said. “You’ve done a wonderful job, Dan.”

  “I’ll collect my thanks when it’s over. Are they as well organized on top?”

  “They don’t have your spirit.”

  “That I know. There’s no spirit like that bred of necessity. I’m pressing Matt, here, into the lead boat.” He clapped the policeman on the back.

  Making up to him, Hannah thought, for his defense of the Front Streeters. Still, the explanation of his presence eased her.

  “I didn’t know you were a sailor, Matt,” she said.

  “I’m just directing traffic on water—which is about what I’m good for these days—in the estimation of some.”

  So, she thought, Walker had already acted on his part of the bargain.

  “Not in ours,” she said.

  There was a moment’s silence in which should have been at least a word of thanks for the compliment, she thought. But the policeman stared grimly ahead of him.

  “What happened to the pilot you promised me, Miss Blake?” O’Gorman said.

  Hannah turned up the collar of her jacket, using the wind as an excuse against a quick answer. O’Gorman knew he was gone. He must know. Why else would she have given him and his the run of her gardens?

  “Gone,” she murmured, and then for no reason except that she seemed not to have said enough: “Gone to the wars, I guess.”

  O’Gorman shook his head. “Like all good pilots.”

  “Not that one,” Matheson said. “I don’t think they’ll want that boy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s got a plate in his head from the last one.”

  Hannah jerked her head up, feeling as though she herself had met a blow. “He was too young,” she managed. She glanced up at O’Gorman. “Wasn’t he too young?”

  Why turn to him for help, she thought
. He had planned this. Surely such information was not casual talk.

  O’Gorman shrugged to her question.

  Matheson answered it. “He got it for a present for his eighteenth birthday.”

  Much came clear to her now—the greatest of Tom’s objections to Dennis, the gesture to his forehead that morning in her office, and his words “a little bit off.”

  “How do you know this, Matt?” she demanded.

  “I don’t see as it’s any of your business, Miss Blake,” the policeman said with a boldness that shocked her. “But I got it from Elizabeth Merritt. She’s worried he’ll do something desperate.”

  Hannah curled her lips in hurt scorn. Everyone was entitled to information except Hannah Blake. They parceled it out to her as though she were a small cup and would run over with too much of it.

  “He’s run away,” she said. “I shouldn’t call that anything desperate.”

  “Would you call it desperate if he was to come back, Miss Blake?”

  “Meaning what, Matt?”

  Matheson did not take his eyes from the water. “Meaning he might tell us why he run away.”

  Oh, he and Elizabeth had been in fine communion, she thought. “The jewels,” she said. “Have you changed your mind since breaking and entering upon my property to search for where he might have hidden them?”

  “No,” he said slowly, “but it wouldn’t take much now to change it.”

  O’Gorman rubbed his hands together. “Well, I’m going up to my supper if you’ve no last-minute instructions, Miss Blake.”

  “None,” Hannah said. “We’ll meet in the morning, gentlemen, God willing.”

  “Aye,” Matheson said. “We’ll meet in the morning if the night’s long enough.”

  42

  THE JEWELS, HANNAH THOUGHT, driving up from the water front. She had mentioned them once too often. They were becoming a dagger to her mind. They must be plucked from it. Yet they must remain the distracting issue to everyone except herself. She must know where they are, and that they will stay there forever. They must remain the unproven motive for the murder.

  Then the triumph of their absolute banishment occurred to her. If they were gone forever, she might free herself of Walker for as long. He had become a leprosy upon her soul. And she must be whole again!

  With nightfall she drove past the house on Cherry Street. It was in darkness. Walker had padlocked its doors, and taken the last of his deputies back to the county seat.

  She returned home and put the car in the garage. This was the effort that would take the greatest courage. No impulse. No improvisation. No fury to drive it home. It needed to be planned, and carried out with boldness. A plan for survival—her survival.

  She put on a dark dress and a gray raincoat. Gray to match the moonlight. A small steel hammer, gloves, and a bag. How provident the circumstances of the day, her emergency first-aid kit with the draw strings. She could sleep with it at her bedside, and in the morning carry it with her and lose it in the deep waters of the Cove. And she thought Maria might have approved that end for the cursed French jewels.

  Leaving her own house well lighted she went out and across the fields—even as Matheson had come that night. A short walk, really. She had been permitted to take it alone as a child. Too short, she thought, the Verlaine house before her eyes so soon. Lying black and ominous, the reflection of the moon catching different windows with every few steps she took, it was like a sleeping beast of many eyes that stirred and cast one and another of them open and closed again.

  Let fancy desert me, she prayed. Let me not imagine anything alive there. Let me be strong enough only to face the dead. Her footsteps sounded on the brittle-dry grass. The dead march, she told herself, trying to make a rhythm of her step. A radio was loud somewhere. Good. Let that distract the living. The back gate swung open at her touch. Well-oiled still, she thought, but soon rusty now. She stopped at the kitchen door. Walker had indeed padlocked it. A bright new lock where the old one had scarcely been used. The kitchen window was fastened as she was sure all the windows were, and the shades drawn. She must not be afraid of sound, she thought. But she waited, hearing a truck approach, and at the height of its rumble past the front of the house, splintered the center pane with two sharp blows of the hammer. She waited a long moment. The sound of the truck diminished, the radio picking up. No other sound except her own breathing. She put her gloved hand to the window lock, unfastened it, raised the window, and maneuvered her big body into the house.

  The house was already in decay, she thought, the musty smell, the feeling of compression. To be in it was to feel buried alive. She stood a long time in the kitchen waiting for the moonlight to cast a dim path when her eyes grew accustomed to the indoors. No need to hasten in a grave, she told herself. A board creaked beneath her, a scurrying sound beneath that—a mouse, or mortar crumbling.

  She guided herself along beside the scrubbed and bone-white table. It was Annie’s pride, that table, and the pride of the old biddy Maria’s mother had before her. Hannah paused, remembering a tale from her childhood forgotten all these years. Norah, the maid, thick-tongued with the brogue, had remarked in Maria’s hearing that the table always reminded her of home, of the women dressing the dead and laying them out on the door taken from the house of the corpse. As children, Maria had told her the story in the dark one night, and dared her to come down to the kitchen and see what was laid out on the table. She had come, creeping with fear, and screamed at the sight there—something humped and covered with white. It was loaves of bread left to rise over night. She half-giggled now, sensing the hysteria, the giddy, wild relief.

  She moved on. What a long way since then—from one hysteria to another. The halltree and its mirror, showing nothing now but her own dark movement before it. The living-room. The shades drawn as Maria had never remembered to draw them. Not one for privacy, Maria. Whatever she did was right, dogma. Sin or charity, it was right because Maria said it was right. The truly confident!

  Hannah plucked the shade from the window just far enough to glimpse out—the unattended lawn like a scrubby field, the bushes like low-slung clouds in the moonlight and the lights on in the Wilkses’ house. Bridge?

  She turned to the bookshelves, forbidding herself the sight of the mirror over the mantel. It doubled the dim light in the room. Her ally. Twice her ally. Or twice her foe? Enough self-torture. She groped along the books. No color now. Only light and dark covers. Lavalle, volume 4. Why four, she wondered. Its size made a friend of it. She found it on the bottom shelf and carried it close to the window. A flashlight would have made it easier. And more dangerous. Her hands were marvelously steady, but her nerves taut. A sound now could undo her. Or if this thing in her hand were indeed a book—what then? She shook it. No sound, and yet not a book in weight, not with the heavy gilt edges, the thick paper of the flyleaf. The leaves seemed merely stuck together. She held it up so that the pages should have fanned out. They did not. Nor was the back cover loose as was the front. She had been right. She tried to read the print on the flyleaf, and risked raising the window shade to its accomplishment. French. But that much French even she could translate—Libretto to the Jewels of the Madonna. How appropriate. The neat French touch! Maria Madonna? The words made a musical sound. Maria Madonna, she thought, ha!

  But how to open it—how to bring from it the music? She ran her gloved finger, and the nail through it around the binding trying to pry the back cover loose. It would not yield. She shook it and worked at it frantically, the perspiration seeping out of her. She dared not leave until she was sure the book contained the jewels. The gloves. Curse gloves. But a lady always wore them.

  She sucked in her breath. Her nerves were getting brittle. She could almost feel them breaking off inside her, raw-edged, jabbing her heart, her mind. So simple; a silken ribbon, a place mark of such almighty nuisance now, she tried to tear it from the book, and it sprang the volume in two. There in a dozen dainty partitions were the jewels anchored in
satin ridges. She saw them, but she could not remember a one of them or their settings. No matter, remembering. They gleamed with evil in the moonlight, until she closed the book on them again. Madonnas should not have jewels, she thought. Jewels were the devil’s barter.

  She left the house as she had entered it, with only a pane of glass, one small pane out of twelve in the frame, to show that it had been violated.

  It occurred to her, crossing the fields again, that it was fortunate she had not discovered the thrill of housebreaking earlier in her life. She thought she understood then the stories of bank clerks varying their dull, moneyed routine with a little larceny. What a wondrously satisfying thing it was, just once, to be bold, to be bravely bold.

  43

  “WE GET ONE HOLIDAY in the year nobody else in the country gets, and here we are, opening up as usual. I don’t see why we can’t play blackjack or something till the sirens go off.”

  “Sh, sh, sh—”

  “Don’t shush on my account,” Hannah said, running her finger along the black marble of the teller’s cage. No customers had disturbed the dust that morning. “And why don’t you play blackjack? Mr. Wilks is at the station meeting celebrities. He won’t be in.”

  “Do you mean it, Miss Blake? I mean playing blackjack?”

  Hannah pointed her finger at the teller and smiled. “With your own money.”

  That rolled him back on his heels, she thought. She had never felt more confident. At her desk she set the first-aid bag in an open drawer. She would as soon have given it to the guard to hold for her. She took her change purse, lipstick, and comb from her pocketbook and tucked them into the pocket of the light wool jacket she was wearing for the day. She would carry only the first-aid bag. A dollar’s worth of adhesive, iodine, cotton, and bandage—on the top. Underneath, a fortune in jewels and the splintered fragments of a false book.

  She waited, watching the clerks cluster about together in conversation. To be fully effective, the mock air raid should take them entirely unaware. They should turn from their cages, as they would in the terror of reality, and the wily among them should perhaps grab a handful of currency—There was a limit to realism.