It was early June by that time, and quite warm. The little wild garden Father had planted by the creek was flourishing, and when Phil came home in the evenings he would take a dip in the pool. I used it, too, although the water was still cold. And I was sitting on the bench beside it one day after a swim when I thought of him.
I had gone back mentally to the old days, when Judith would be there surrounded by boys of all ages, and I would climb to the top of the platform, an often toothless straight-haired seven-year-old, and yell to them to watch me dive. Just to prove I could still do it, I climbed the ladder, and suddenly I remembered the one time I had seen Ridgely there.
He had been standing by the pool watching me, and he said, “That’s too high for you. What’s the idea? Showing off?”
Funny! I had forgotten that entirely until then. To my childish eyes Ridgely had appeared out of the blue, walking down the church aisle with his bride on his arm!
Judith was in town that day, so I called him on the telephone and asked him to have lunch with me as soon as possible.
His voice sounded apologetic.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said. “If you don’t mind the Yale Club, meet me there at one tomorrow. How is everything?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you,” I said, and hung up.
He was not particularly cordial when I met him. He said he hadn’t much time, and to get on with it. He was as dapper as ever, but I didn’t think he looked well. I suppose a divorce is as hard on a man as on a woman, although I was sure he had long since ceased to care for Judith. He ordered cocktails and then sat back and surveyed me.
“You look a trifle desperate, Lois,” he said. “You’re thinner, too.”
“That makes a pair of us,” I said. “Judith is losing weight, too. Ridgely, when she left you, you thought she was in some sort of trouble. Did you ever find out what it was?”
“I thought she might be being blackmailed. Why?”
“Because I don’t think it’s that. She’s afraid. Physically afraid. Blackmailers don’t kill, do they?”
“Not as a rule,” he said dryly. “Who’s she afraid of, Lois? Not me surely.”
“Not you, of course. I think it’s somebody she saw in Reno.”
“Reno? For God’s sake, why Reno?”
But, of course, I had no idea. I told him the story, the locks on her doors, her windows over the porch nailed shut, and her attack on the train from Reno and her odd behavior after it. He seemed puzzled rather than uneasy.
“Sure she’s not merely dramatizing all this?” he asked. “She was rather good at that sort of thing.”
“She’s making a real job of it if she is. I wondered—Is she really afraid her jewels will be stolen, Ridge? That’s the excuse she gives.”
He shrugged his well-tailored shoulders.
“She was always fairly casual with them. I can’t imagine such extreme measures.”
“Well, I’ll ask you another,” I said. “Was she always afraid of taxicabs?”
“Taxicabs?” He looked astonished. “Not that I know of. Of course, she didn’t use them often. She had her own cars. What’s all this about taxis? It doesn’t sound sane.”
“Maybe I’m crazy,” I said. “Only it looks odd to me. Even Phil has noticed it. So have I. I think she’s gone back to Doctor Townsend, too. But she walks everywhere here in the city, rain or shine. She won’t use a cab. Did she ever have any trouble about one? Run into it or something?”
He shook his head. If she had, he said, he had never heard of it, and he almost certainly would if it had been serious.
“I can think of a lot of things,” he said grimly. “If the trouble is real—and you know Judith, she imagines a good bit—it may be blackmail. Only the hell of it is I can’t learn anything about it. As a matter of fact, I put a private inquiry agent on it after she left me. I felt responsible in a way. He worked for six weeks. He went back a dozen years and turned up a lot of dirt about some of the people she played around with, but nothing about Judith. Absolutely nothing, Lois. She always—to use his own phrase—landed in her own bed, and no mistake about it.”
So that was that. No blackmail. No lovers. Probably even no anxiety about her jewels. Then what?
I felt vaguely dissatisfied when I left him. He was too cold, too detached. After all, she had been his wife for a long time. I wondered that day if her life with him had been any bed of roses. He was a gentleman and a Chandler, but he must have known something, or why had he paid me to go to Reno? And why of all things a private detective?
As it happened, it was that same evening that Jennie added her mite, if you can call it that, to our general bewilderment, which led Phil, sweating and exhausted, to drop into a chair and light a cigarette with shaking hands.
“If I’ve ever made any cracks about having Judith committed,” he said, “just forget it. I’m the one who needs it. A cell and a nice straitjacket sound like heaven to me.”
Yet the incident itself was not hair-raising. It was simply bewildering.
We were in the living-room, and I had been telling him about Ridge. He was listening comfortably, his highball nightcap in his hand, and looking up now and then at Mother’s portrait over the mantel.
“So what?” he said when I finished. “He doesn’t give a good goddam. After all, since Judith never cared for him, why should he bother?”
Then we heard Jennie. She was running screaming toward the house, and the next moment she was in the room, still shrieking. Phil dropped his glass and catching hold of her shook her.
“Stop that noise!” he shouted. “What the devil’s the matter? Stop it, I say.”
She began to cry then, and little by little we got it out of her.
She has what she calls a boyfriend in the village and, as Helga strongly forbids “followers,” their usual meeting-place is the bench by the pool. What Jennie said after she became intelligible, was that she had been waiting there for him when a man came through the shrubbery from the unused Adrian place, and pointed a gun at her from across the pool.
“A gun?” Phil said. “It was dark, wasn’t it? How could you see a gun?”
She didn’t insist on the gun after that, but she did insist that he spoke to her.
“He spoke to you! What did he say?” Phil asked.
“He said I was to stay there until he could talk to me,” she said surprisingly. “And that I knew damned well what it was about.”
“And that’s all?”
“That was plenty, if you ask me, Mr. Phil. I just yelled and ran.”
Luckily Judith had gone to bed or we might have had trouble. As it was, the two of us, Jennie not voting, made a careful search of the grounds that night. We found nobody, but there were some broken branches among the rhododendrons across the pool, and above it someone had crushed a few of the lilies-of-the-valley Father had planted there.
But it seemed incredible that Judith had heard nothing, and later I was to wonder whether she did. Whether she had not lain shivering in her bed that night, listening to those shrieks of Jennie’s and realizing that The Birches was no longer a haven.
I think she did, for the next day she began to make inquiries over the telephone about ship sailings. She was too late, as it turned out, for that was the summer of the great hegira to Europe. But those inquiries of hers eventually led to her tragic undoing.
Chapter 8
LATER IN THE MONTH to my amazement I happened on the O’Brien man again. I had almost forgotten him, but there he was, big and smiling and holding out his hand. I had been to the butcher’s in town that morning, and I was clutching a leg of lamb when he confronted me.
“Well, look who’s here!” he said. “I thought you lived somewhere in this neck of the woods, Miss Maynard but I certainly never expected to see you.”
He had been smoking a pipe. He emptied it and dropped it in his pocket, and we shook hands like old friends. After which he insisted on taking me into a drugstore and buying me a Cok
e. Over his glass he inspected me with some care.
“You’re thinner,” he said. “Anything wrong? Or is your lady detective working you too hard?”
His eyes were keen and very blue. Also he was not wearing his spectacles, although he got them out later and put them on. But I realized he had the trained eyes of a policeman. What he looked at he really saw. They could be cold, too. Oh, God, how cold they could be!
“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m not working well, but I have those spells. All writers do, I think, especially if their heroines have only looks, no character.”
He ignored that. “And your sister? How is she?”
“She’s staying with my brother and myself at The Birches, five miles out of town.”
“Five miles!” he said. “That’s a short ride but the devil of a long walk. I like your neck of the woods,” he went on. “I’ve been looking it over. But I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a farmer. I have no natural affection for cows or even pigs. Chickens are about my limit.”
I laughed and his eyes twinkled.
“What I really need is a small place somewhere,” he said. “I’d like to sow some seeds and see what comes up, if anything. Maybe keep a few chickens, and get an egg or so at the source, so to speak. What about that little place of yours? Rented it yet?”
It was too casual, too easy, somehow. And there was that pipe of his in his pocket.
“No,” I said. “Didn’t you like what you saw of it the other day?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You were out there, weren’t you? In a taxi? I saw the cab, and I knew someone had been inside the house.”
He actually looked startled.
“I’ve never been near the place,” he said. “What’s this all about? Been having trouble?”
I told him about Jennie’s intruder, and he listened carefully.
“No idea who he was?”
“None whatever.”
He was thoughtful, but I still was not trusting him entirely in spite of his disarming manner, and just then he put his hand in his pocket and rather sheepishly threw a bunch of keys onto the drugstore counter.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I’ve never even seen your place, Miss Maynard, but I’ve been in to see your agent just now, and he gave me those keys. Want them back? Or shall we go out and look it over?”
I hesitated.
“What about your job?” I said. “Does a lieutenant or whatever you were in Homicide simply walk out and raise chickens?”
He looked impatient.
“I’ve told you all that,” he said. “I had some trouble in the Pacific. Not mental—I didn’t have to take sitz baths and weave rugs! But enough so I’ve got what you might call a protracted leave of absence. Got shot in a lung and am supposed to have a good rest and breathe some good country air. Your agent says that’s what you have.”
Of course, his being a wounded veteran made a difference, I told myself, but I thought, too, that it might be a good idea to have a policeman on the place. What with Jennie’s experience and someone breaking into the cottage itself, some of my former confidence in the peace and security of The Birches was rapidly vanishing.
“We have the air,” I conceded. “I’m not so sure you’ll have a rest.” Which, as he told me later, was not only prophetic, but an understatement of considerable magnitude.
The clerk behind the counter had disappeared, so sitting there I told him my story: Judith’s terror and the extra locks, Jennie’s man with or without a gun, even the yellow taxi in the Adrian drive, and the intruder in the cottage. When I finished he was looking grim.
“I don’t know what it all adds up to,” I said. “It’s a sort of Chinese puzzle, isn’t it?”
“What it all adds up to,” he said soberly, “is that I’m taking the cottage, whether you want me or not. No reflection on brother Phil, but if there’s dirty work at the crossroads I don’t think it’s precisely a lawyer’s job. But,” he added, “I’d better tie a string to this. I’m not going there as a cop. For one thing, I don’t believe your sister would care to have an ex-policeman at her heels. She hasn’t been very cooperative about her trouble, has she?”
“She seems deadly afraid we’ll learn what it is.”
“Good enough. I’m a veteran, with a hole in my chest and maybe a bit of business to take me into town now and then. How about it? And how about another Coke?”
“Thanks, but it so happens I loathe the stuff.”
He reached out solemnly and shook my hand.
“So do I,” he said, and we both laughed.
It is hard to remember how cheerful I was that day! Because I liked him, and I thought he liked me. Because there was something dependable about his big strong body and steady eyes. And perhaps because, shut away in the country as I had been, I had been lonely for a long time, and here at last was a good companion and what I suspected would prove a loyal friend.
We made a small procession that day on our way to The Birches, I ahead in our old sedan while he followed in an equally shabby coupe. The place looked beautiful in the sunlight, and he got out and stood looking about him with a pleased smile on his face.
“Wonderful,” he said. “And don’t tell me that’s a swimming pool over there! I can’t believe it.”
I told him it was and that he could use it whenever he wanted although the water was still cold. Upon which I had some difficulty getting him into the cottage at all. Once inside, however, with the shutters opened and the windows raised, he stood in the sitting-room with his hands in his pockets, gazing about him complacently, although his size dwarfed the small room.
“It’s swell,” he said. “And that shed back there would be fine for chickens. I’m right handy with tools. And if you don’t mind chicken wire, I could make a place for them to run. How about it?”
“Do anything you like,” I told him recklessly. “I’ll go so far as to buy your eggs, too.”
“Well, maybe now and then I’ll make a present to your cook. There will be no money passing between the lady of The Birches and Terry O’Brien. I can tell you that.”
It was a little time before he settled down. Then I found him in the kitchen, inspecting the ashes in the sink.
“Fellow was a pipe smoker like myself,” he said thoughtfully. “Where’s the glass he drank out of?”
It was still on the sitting-room table, and I was about to pick it up when he yelled at me.
“Haven’t you ever heard of fingerprints?” he demanded. “Find me some paper, can you? If there’s real trouble afoot, this is as good a start as any.”
I found him some newspaper in the wood box by the fireplace, and he wrapped the glass carefully and put it in his car. He was thoughtful when he came back.
“Any chance your sister will remember me?” he asked. “That might be awkward.”
I didn’t think she would, and told him so. After all, she had not seen him when he picked her up, and she had really fainted after that. But he thought it best to try before he settled in so I took him up to the house for lunch.
He need not have worried. Jennie was having her day off, and a disgruntled Helga limped around the table, eyeing him as she did so. But when Judith wandered in, beautiful in a blue-silk house gown, she merely gave him a long stare as I introduced him.
“Mr. O’Brien has taken the cottage for the summer, Judith,” I explained. “This is my sister, Mrs. Chandler.”
She nodded and sat down.
“I always thought it was a dreary little place,” she said, without interest. “Maybe Lois has fixed it up.” Then she gave him a double take and scared me almost out of my wits. “Haven’t I seen you before, someplace?”
He smiled. “It’s possible, Mrs. Chandler. But if I had seen you anywhere, be sure I would never forget it.”
That is all I remember of the lunch, Helga’s smoldering eyes on him and Judith’s failure to show any interest whatever, especially in the chickens he insisted on discussin
g. I know she left the table as soon as the meal was over, and he looked thoughtfully after her.
“She gave me a bad minute or two,” he said. “She’s seen me, all right. Hit-and-run case, where the woman died. We never proved anything on her, and she denied it, of course. It was years ago.”
“Would that be the trouble now?” I asked. “Some relative, or something like that?”
But he shook his head.
“The old girl had no family. The city had to bury her. I have an idea Mr. Chandler suspected his wife at the time, but I don’t know.”
I remember showing him the lower floor of the house after that, and finding him totally unimpressed, except with Mother’s portrait. He stood in front of it for some time.
“Looks like a woman who knew her own mind” was his comment. Then suddenly: “What happened to the pearls?”
“I suppose they were sold long ago, like everything else.”
“Pity,” he said. “They’d look nice on you.” He turned and looked at me. “I’m beginning to think you’ve had the hell of a life, and that it’s not getting any better fast. You might just remember that I’ll be around in case of trouble. Or in any case,” he added.
We walked down to the cottage, and at the pool he stopped and pulled out a small black book. As I had always had the police in my fiction carry just such books, I was entranced to see him writing in it.
“You’ve got some sort of clue already, haven’t you?” I asked breathlessly.
“Clue?” he said. “Oh, the book. No, I’ll need some bathing trunks. That’s all.”
After which anticlimax I simply sat down on the running board of his car and laughed until I cried.
He arrived to stay a week later. Jennie and I worked hard over the cottage, and I must say it looked wonderful. The living-room-dining-room had shelves for books, and I carried down some of my father’s and a few recent novels. There were bright rag rugs on the floors, a big center table in the living-room, and one easy chair with a lamp beside it which I thought he would like. At least it was large enough for him!
The Swimming Pool Page 7
