“Maybe she didn’t mean it,” I said. “You know Judith. She has erratic spells, when she does crazy, silly things. She’s always had them, but they’re never serious, and she gets over them in time.”
“She’s not getting over this,” he said his voice grim. “She’s going to Reno as soon as I can get space on a train. Yes, she’s let me do that. And she’s in a hurry. She wants to get out of town. I left her packing her clothes. I think I’ll have that drink after all, Lois. I guess I need it.”
I got a bottle of Scotch from the liquor closet and cracked some ice from the refrigerator. We had no ice cubes at The Birches. The big gloomy kitchen was empty but warm, and I went over to the coal range and stood there for a minute, thinking. That Judith was in a jam of some sort was obvious, but what sort of jam? I agreed with Ridge that it was not like an affair of any kind. A more generous woman might let herself go in that fashion, but not Judith, unless she had something to gain by it.
Then what? Or who? Some millionaire who had fallen for her looks and was offering her a yacht or a house at Palm Beach? But the sea made her sick, and she could go to Palm Beach any time. Then, again, why get out of the country?
I put the question bluntly to Ridge when I gave him his drink, but he only shook his head.
“You tell me,” he said heavily. “Tell me why she hasn’t been herself for the past few weeks, and why she locks her door at night. She’s not afraid I’ll bother her. What’s she afraid of, Lois?”
“It’s not like her to be afraid of anything, Ridge.”
“It’s possible, of course, that she’s afraid of me. But why? We had established a pretty fair modus vivendi. I couldn’t live her sort of life. She liked gaiety; she wanted crowds around her. Sometimes I felt as though I was running a nightclub. Or she’d be out late and I’d be afraid she had had an accident with her car. You know how she drives. Of course, the very fact that I worried got on her nerves. She wouldn’t take the chauffeur unless she couldn’t help it.”
I knew all that. Judith at the wheel of one of her smart cars—she had a new one every year or so—was enough to set one’s teeth on edge. How many times she had been arrested for speeding I didn’t know, but Ridge probably did. He must have had to bail her out fairly often.
“You don’t think it’s a hit-and-run case?” I asked. “If she ever hurt anyone—or killed them—she would lose her head probably. Just go and keep on going.”
“Why would that make her divorce me?”
I looked at him. Even when he married Jude he could not have been a romantic figure. Now, in Father’s old leather chair and clutching his highball glass, he looked what he was, an elderly gentleman of what we used to call the old school who was, to use more modern jargon, in one hell of a mess.
“Of course, it must be blackmail,” I said. “Nothing else would explain the jewels, would it?”
“I’m not blackmailing her, and it’s me she’s leaving,” he said sharply.
I thought of the old woman who left her husband because she had just lost her taste for him, but I said nothing.
“Anyhow, blackmail for what?” he went on. “I know she’s seen Anne. Has she told her anything?”
“Anne’s as much puzzled as you are, Ridge. She doesn’t know what it’s all about.”
Curiously enough, he seemed to relax at that. He finished his highball and leaned back in his chair.
“Good whisky,” he said.
Apparently we were through with Judith for the time, but I still thought him rather a pathetic figure. After all, he had stood by Jude for a good many years, submitted to her crowds, her hectic life, and her vagaries, which had ranged from parties for dogs and other pets—in the apartment!—to taking over the piano in a nightclub and transposing the music so that the soprano burst into tears and left the platform. The treasure hunt was only one of a series, and Ridge showed the wear and tear of those years, although she had been less often in the papers recently.
“Living with her has certainly been an experience,” he said with his cool smile. “But in spite of the fact that we’ve lived separate lives for so long, I still don’t believe there is anybody else. She likes admiration. She likes being one of the best-dressed women in America. She likes crowds around her. But she prefers notoriety to scandal, if you know what I mean.”
He looked rather better after he had finished his drink. The divorce was settled he said. He had even arranged what alimony he was to pay her, which, oddly enough, was all she asked. Also he had already had his lawyer wire another one out there in Reno to do the dirty work, and I wondered if there wasn’t a bit of relief behind all these plans. He was certainly shocked and bewildered, but he was tired and not too young. I wondered, too, whether he rather looked forward to peace and quiet after what he had endured for so long.
It was, however, what came next that got me up, so to speak, all standing.
“What brought me here,” he said, “is that she is frightened about something. It’s real. She’s not dramatizing herself. Personally I don’t believe she’s in any sort of danger, but you know her. I’ve always looked after her as much as I could, and before we were married your mother did the same thing. I suppose we’ve spoiled her, but there it is. She’s reckless and unstable, and I don’t want her to get into trouble out there. I thought, if you went with her, you could—well, keep an eye out for anything which might turn up.”
I think my very soul revolted, but at least I managed to keep from shrieking.
“She would hate it, Ridge,” I said. “She’s never been fond of me. And I’d be useless in any sort of crisis.”
“I don’t expect a crisis, as you put it,” he said grimly. “But I do expect her to behave herself. Also I have a right to know what, if anything, she’s afraid of or why she wants to leave this country. And I think she means to take her jewels, and she’s careless about them.”
“In other words,” I said, “what you want is a Saint Bernard dog with a keg of brandy around its neck. No, thank you, Ridge, you can do your own spying.”
He was annoyed. He put down his glass and stood up.
“Look, Lois,” he said. “Think back and you’ll realize you owe me something. The money that took you through college was not from some old stocks you had forgotten. It was mine. And as long as your mother lived I paid her a small annuity. Now I want a little help, and you refuse it.”
Well, there it was, take it or leave it.
I thought of the crime book I was writing. The story was just beginning to jell, and we needed the money for the old house. I have always said that when I died the words “guttering and spouting” would be found written across my heart, like Bloody Mary and Calais. I suppose he saw my face, for he hurried on.
“I’d be prepared to pay for your time, if you’ll go with her,” he said rather apologetically. “Say a thousand dollars and all expenses. You may be able to work out there, too. She won’t stay in town. She’ll be on a ranch. Horseback riding if you like it, that sort of thing.”
The horseback riding didn’t interest me. By the time I was old enough to ride anything but my pony the horses were gone from the stables at The Birches. The thousand dollars did however. In a burst of optimism the previous spring—as in the case of the swimming pool—I had repaired and furnished the lodge at the gates, in the hope of renting it to someone for the summer. But no one had taken it, and Phil called it Maynard’s Folly and said it depressed him every time he passed it on the way to the train.
“When is she going?” I said feebly.
“In a day or so. She wanted to go today, but it’s not easy to get a drawing-room just now. She’s afraid to fly.”
In a day or so! There must be something badly wrong, I thought, to cause such haste. It could not be Ridgely himself. You don’t live all those years with a man and insist on leaving him in hours.
“She won’t tell me anything, you know, Ridge. We’ve never been close. And what will I do if she won’t have me?”
“She’ll have you,” he said, still rather grim. “It’s one of the conditions I made, and she didn’t object. She hasn’t many women friends. Only that crowd of hangers-on and parasites who trail around with her.” He put a brotherly hand on my shoulder. “You’ll do it, won’t you? I’ll feel a lot better with you around. She’s in a queer mood, Lois. Badly as she’s behaving I don’t want her taking an overdose of sleeping-pills, or something of that sort.”
I think that was the first time I really felt the situation was serious. For I realized that Ridge was not only the deserted husband. He was frightened himself. Something was wrong. Under all his urbanity he was suspicious and alarmed. All through our talk he had been tense with strain.
“I suppose I’ll have to do it,” I agreed finally. “Only I wish I had some idea what to look out for. If you know it you should tell me.”
“My dear girl,” he said paternally, “if I knew I wouldn’t be asking you to go to Reno. Whatever it is it must have happened suddenly. She hadn’t been well for a couple of months, but when she went out to dinner the night I speak of she was entirely herself. She was wearing a new evening wrap, ermine and sable, and it suited her. I was at my desk in the library when she passed the door, and I’ll swear she was normal as you are. She even waved good-by to me.”
So she had waved good-by to him! It seemed as little as any woman could do for a new ermine and sable wrap, and when I thought of my own shabby muskrat I wondered why he had not strangled her.
But I was trapped and I knew it. I knew something else, too. As he drove away that day he looked not only relieved. He was a little smug, as though by making me his stool pigeon he had achieved something important to him. For all his air of ignorance I wondered if he knew more than he admitted about Judith’s terror.
I went upstairs feeling that I had sold my birthright for a college education, a small annuity to Mother while she lived, and a thousand dollars in cash. And the mood continued while I put away my manuscript and slammed the cover on the typewriter. That annuity to Mother worried me, too. I sat there in what had been her room and thought about her. Why had she forced Judith to marry Ridge? If she did. And why on earth had Judith agreed? She could be as stubborn as a mule when anything displeased her. Yet she had gone through with the thing, with Mother still in black for Father pulling out her white satin train and then marching stiffly up the church aisle on an usher’s arm. For all the world like a woman who had accomplished something and could now sit back comfortably and let Providence take care of the rest of it.
The roads were horrible as I drove in to town to meet Phil’s train, and he looked so tired that I waited until he had put on his old smoking-jacket and mixed his evening cocktail before I told him.
“I’m going to Reno in a day or two,” I said.
He almost dropped the shaker.
“For God’s sake don’t tell me you’ve been married all this time!” he said.
“Don’t be an idiot. I’m going with Judith. She’s divorcing Ridge.”
He stared at me incredulously. “Don’t tell me she’s letting go of ten million dollars,” he said. “I don’t believe it. Not our Judy. That’s fantastic.”
“Ridge was here this afternoon. It’s true all right.”
He sat down, his jaw dropped, and his long thin body looking collapsed.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s sending her off the rails this time? Got something better in sight?”
“Ridge doesn’t think so.”
He drank his cocktail thoughtfully.
“Well, it’s a break for him,” he said. “I don’t think our dear sister has been much of a wife. But if you ask me she’s not leaving the soft nest she’s got unless she has a plush-lined one waiting for her somewhere else.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong, of course. But when he learned I was serious about going with her—and within a day or so at that—he blew up.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “You never got along with her. Who could? And what’s the idea, anyhow? A woman thirty-eight years old! If she can’t take care of herself by this time she never will. As a matter of fact, she’s always taken damned good care of herself. And why all the hurry? What’s she running away from? Ridge?”
“He doesn’t think so. He believes something has happened to her,” I told him. “That she may be in trouble of some sort. She talks about living abroad.”
“I’d be for that,” he said callously. “What’s she been doing? Stealing some woman’s husband?”
“Not so far as he can find out.”
“And why you? Can’t she hop a train by herself?”
“I’m being paid. A thousand dollars. To act as Ridge’s stoolie.”
Phil’s reading does not consist of crime fiction, as mine does. He only looked confused.
“I’m to watch Jude and report to him,” I explained. “It’s a dirty job, but I’d fall still lower for a thousand dollars. Think of the coal it will buy!”
He grunted and looked depressed. The furnace was his job. Then Jennie announced the evening meal in her inimitable manner. It consisted of opening the library door, yelling “Dinner” loudly, and disappearing. Phil looked still more down in the mouth.
“I seem to remember a time,” he said sadly, “when some impeccable individual of the male persuasion politely opened that door and mentioned the fact that food was ready to be served. If Judith ever wants to come here—which God forbid—one week of Jennie would send her flying.”
“That’s silly. Why in the world would she come here?”
“Just out of general cussedness,” he said, “and our usual bad luck.”
Which again might have been funny if it had not been so horrible.
We had to drop the discussion during dinner, with Jennie in and out of the room, and when she slammed down the dessert, which was bread pudding, Phil stared at it with distaste.
“When I think of the poor little hungry birds outside in all this snow,” he said sadly, “I wonder why I have to eat all the stale crusts. Jennie, can’t you convey to Helga that it’s too late for them to make my hair come in curly?”
But Jennie only giggled and banged out of the room as usual. Phil ignored his dessert and lit a cigarette.
“If I were Ridgely Chandler,” he said, “I’d be cutting capers all over the place tonight. Only, of course, the Chandlers don’t do things like that. As it is, all I am grateful for is that Judith’s going abroad after it’s over. The very thought of having her here makes me shiver.”
I left him there with his coffee and went upstairs to look over my clothes. They were a skimpy lot compared with the old days when Mother’s handsome silks and brocades hung there. But as it turned out they did not matter. Nobody in Reno noticed me when Judith was in the vicinity.
There were times when I felt like her shadow, and when I had to gaze in a mirror to convince myself of my own reality. I did not really feel like myself until we were on our way east, and Judith fainted in the vestibule of our compartment car.
Chapter 4
THE TRIP WAS UNEVENTFUL, but when I met Judith at the railroad station in New York I realized that something had happened to her. Her face looked thinner, and she seemed to be watching the crowd feverishly. Her “Hello, Lois” was rather less than sisterly, but as I had not seen much of her for years I had not expected anything else.
She was traveling without a maid, to my surprise, and—also to my surprise—she looked almost shabby. She was wearing her hair differently, too, as though she had made a feeble effort at disguise.
“What!” I said. “No mink coat?”
“I won’t need it out there.”
“I thought it was cold in Reno.”
She did not answer that. Her eyes continued to stare at the people around us, and not until we were inside the train did she seem to relax. Even then she showed that she did not intend to bother with me, or even that I was particularly welcome. “What’s the idea anyhow?” she said peevishly. “If y
ou’re spying for Ridge, just forget it. There’s nothing wrong. He simply can’t understand how anybody can divorce a Chandler.”
“Personally,” I said, “I don’t give a tinker’s dam about Reno or your business there, Jude. I’m simply going along for the ride and a substantial check. I need the money.”
She looked startled. Then she laughed.
“So Ridge is keeping an eye on me!” she said. “Well, he won’t learn much, or you, either. You have the compartment next to my drawing-room, and I won’t need anything. I am going to rest and read. Just amuse yourself.”
I took the hint, and she spent almost the entire trip shut in her room and in her berth. I know she ate, for stewards brought trays and took them away, and once or twice the porter brought her ice, which I daresay meant a cocktail. After Chicago, however, the tension lessened. She even had the door opened between our rooms, and once we went to the diner together.
She had abandoned the semidisguise of the railroad station. Also she looked better, and as we went to our table I saw people looking at her, as they always did. It is hard to describe Judith. She is a blonde—an editor once told me that I must hate blondes, as I always made them obnoxious characters in my fiction—and her eyes have a little uptilt at the outer corners, which is unusual and attractive. But beauty is too hard to define. After all, the human individual universally has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a chin. It is the assemblage of those features that counts, and believe me Jude’s counted.
It was in the diner that day when she asked me about The Birches.
“I haven’t seen it for years,” she said. “How is it? Lonely as ever?”
“Pretty much. The village is slowly dying, since so few of the big houses are open. I’m fixing the old pool this spring. We need it in hot weather.”
“Do you still have Helga?”
“Yes, by the grace of heaven. But she’s getting pretty old. She has arthritis.”
The Swimming Pool Page 3
