“Then you have no idea where she went when she left?”
“Didn’t even know she was gone until the milkman told me.”
I showed her the kitchen window and she said her husband would fix it. Also she would take the cat until Mrs. Benjamin came home, and at last I was free to get into the car and start home. I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but somehow I was not hungry. I was seeing Mrs. Benjamin at the end of our pool, her newly bleached hair about her face, and her thirty thousand-odd dollars in a New York savings bank.
They could not help her now. Nothing could help her. But why had she come to The Birches? What did she know that caused someone to kill her?
Chapter 16
IT WAS, HOWEVER, MERELY the beginning of what was to be an unpleasant day: my job of housebreaking, my near discovery by the woman next door, and the long tiresome trip home. For Judith was in a furious temper when I got there.
There had been no sign of O’Brien at his cottage, and as his car was gone, I drove straight to the house.
Helga and Jennie were having tea and toasted muffins at the kitchen table, and I sat down with them. I was still there, eating ravenously, when Judith stormed in.
“So here you are!” she said nastily. “Perhaps you’ll tell me why you chose to go off and leave me this morning. You knew I was going to the city.”
“You had Bill,” I said. “And anyhow the car is Phil’s and mine. I don’t have to account to you for where I go.”
“That rattletrap of Bill’s! And he drives like a lunatic.”
“Well, he got you there and got you back, apparently.”
“No thanks to you. And I’ll remind you I’m paying my way here, including the gasoline for the car. I have a right to expect decent treatment, and what do I get? Rotten food, everyone spying on me, pretending people throw rocks at me at night! I was a damn fool ever to come here.”
“The food’s as good as you’ll get anywhere,” Helga said indignantly.
“I notice you do all right by yourselves!”
Both of the women had risen when she came in, something they never did for me, but she ignored them completely. For the first time since my childhood I saw her in what Helga called one of her tantrums. She picked up the plate of muffins from the table and flung it, cakes and all, at the stove. Then she turned on me.
“What were you doing today? You were out with O’Brien, weren’t you?”
“Certainly not. I haven’t seen him.”
Under her makeup she was white with anger.
“You’re plotting something against me. Oh, I’m not blind. I’ve seen you slipping in and out of his cottage. You were there until all hours last night, and God knows how many others. An Irish cop! And don’t tell me he isn’t a cop. It’s written all over him. A cop!” she repeated shrilly. “You sicced the police on me, and I won’t have it.”
She picked up another plate and was about to throw it at me when Helga went into action. She caught the plate with one hand, and with the other she slapped Judith in the face. It was a real slap, too. It almost knocked her down. Certainly it surprised her. She stared hard at Helga and then at me, and suddenly the wild look was gone.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and dropping into a chair put her head down on the table and began to cry, deep choking sobs which shook her whole body.
Helga looked at me.
“I had to do it,” she said. “I did it when she was a child, too.” Then she moved over and put a calloused old hand on Judith’s lovely hair. “It’s all right, Judy. Don’t cry, darling. Don’t cry.”
I belong to a different generation, I suppose. The old soothing methods do not occur to us. We don’t like our bruises patted or kissed. And our usual answer to any emergency is a drink. At any rate I shot out of the kitchen, got Phil’s decanter of brandy, and brought it in with a glass. Judith was still crying, but more quietly.
“Here’s some brandy, Judy,” Helga said. “Just take a sip of it. It’ll help. You’re worn out, darling, and scared, too. Just a little taste now, for old Helga’s sake. And, Lois, if you’ll fix her bed, Jennie and I will get her upstairs.”
I knew it was a sign-off. Helga wanted to get rid of me, and I was glad to go. I went up to Judith’s room and after turning down her bed I filled a hot-water bottle—a relic of my air-warden lessons—and put it between the sheets. Then I retreated to my nursery, and to my utter amazement burst into tears myself, I was still crying, facedown on the bed, when Helga came in.
She came over and stood beside me.
“No use crying over spilled milk, Lois,” she said. “She probably won’t even remember what happened.”
I managed to sit up. Helga got some tissues from my bed table and handed them to me.
“I’m not crying about what she said,” I told her. “I’m crying because I’m so damned sorry for her.”
“You’d be sorrier if you’d taken off her clothes,” she retorted. “She’s nothing but skin and bones. She’s been padding her breasts and hips so she could wear her things and we’d not notice. I’ll bet she don’t weigh more than a hundred pounds.”
“What is it, Helga? Haven’t you any idea what’s scaring her?”
“I can think of a lot of things,” she said evasively. “From the day she was a baby. I wouldn’t try to see her yet, Lois. I gave her one of her sleeping-pills, and she’s best let alone.”
She stood looking across the room, with the geese and frolicking lambs on the walls and my typewriter covered on its table.
“How’s the book coming?”
“Book?” I said bitterly. “You don’t write books in a lunatic asylum.”
“She’s not crazy, Lois.”
“Then I’m about to be.”
I doubt if she even heard me. She turned and went out, and I could hear her creaking down the stairs.
I lay back on my bed. It had been a long day and a wretched one: the long drive, the breaking into the Benjamin house and being caught there, and Judith’s strange outburst. All, I thought resentfully, because of a newspaper clipping and a man named Flaherty.
What did Flaherty matter to me? Or the fact that O’Brien had loved him like a father? I had got myself out on a limb for no good reason whatever. Even O’Brien was not sure the Benjamin woman had anything to do with that dead-and-gone case. Yet she had been murdered. Murdered and then thrown helplessly into our pool.
Why had she come there? To see O’Brien after her previous failure? Why then have Ed Brown leave her at the Adrians’ drive and have to break through dense shrubbery on a dark night?
I wondered what my woman detective, Sara Winters, would have done under the same circumstances. Probably made fun of the regular police and at the end triumphantly produced the real criminal, someone like Phil, for instance, whom nobody had ever suspected.
For some reason that apocryphal case cheered me. I got up and dressed for dinner, putting on the new pale-blue silk I had paid for with part of Ridgely’s check, and was rewarded when, over cocktails in the living-room, Bill burst in and gave a loud wolf call.
“Who’s the family beauty now?” he inquired. “You’re a knockout, Lois.”
But he was full of Judith’s excursion to the station in the Ark, and at the table he related it with gusto.
“She said it would probably fall to pieces on the way, and she made me dust the seat before she got in. As to speed, I could have kicked a barrel faster.” He glanced at Phil, who was surveying with disgust the tapioca pudding in front of him. “See here,” he said after Jennie left the room, “who’s she afraid of? Don’t tell me she isn’t. She watched one man for ten minutes before she’d get out of the car. Then he turned around, and I guess she saw it was all right. Anyhow she began to breathe again. So did I.”
He wolfed down his dessert, lit a cigarette, and sat back.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Locking herself in her room, sticking in the house this hot weather, and making someone go with her when she walks out at night.
It doesn’t make sense. What’s the idea, if any?”
Phil had apparently forgotten the tapioca, for he grinned.
“You don’t know your aunt Judith very well,” he said. “I imagine she’s dramatizing something or other. A sort of play, with herself as the star. Maybe Ridgely Chandler is the villain. I wouldn’t know. Man at the station look like Ridge?”
“No, Ridge is short. This fellow was tall.”
“That wouldn’t make any difference to her. She has to have a villain. That’s all.”
He glanced at me complacently, but Bill was not having any.
“Look here,” he said, “do you mean she has a persecution complex? That’s not so good, is it?”
“Whatever she has, I imagine she’s enjoying it,” Phil said cheerfully. “Gives her the center of the stage again. She’s used to it, you see. She’s been the society editors’ baby for years.”
I can look back on that evening now with a certain amount of perspective: Judith locked in her room and shaken by terrors we did not understand, Phil’s easy acceptance of her fears, and young Bill’s bewilderment.
I got up and blew out the candles.
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “I’m fed up to the teeth, if either one of you cares. Only don’t let Phil fool you, Bill, Judith is scared and plenty.”
Phil was free that night, and Bill’s Janey was otherwise occupied. To my annoyance I found myself with two men on my hands, and no chance to go to the cottage. The result was canasta, at which I lost three dollars before Bill began to yawn. It was half past eleven by that time, but from the porch I saw that O’Brien’s light was on, and by midnight when the house finally settled down I got my bag and started down the drive.
The night had turned cool, so I took Judith’s black cape from the powder room where she kept it and wrapped it around me. It was very dark, no moon and no stars, but as I knew every foot of the way I was walking fast when I heard a movement among the rhododendrons by the pool. The next moment someone caught hold of me and held a hand over my mouth.
“Don’t try to yell,” he said roughly. “If you do I’ll drop you in the pool. We’re going to have this out if it’s the last thing you ever do.”
He jerked off my cape and to my utter amazement picked me up like a child, ducked into the shrubbery and toward the pool. I did not dare to scream. He was strong and muscular, and I realized he had meant what he said. At the bench, however, he paused.
“You she-devil!” he said. “I ought to drown you, but I need you first. And you’re going to talk. Believe me, you’re going to talk and talk fast. You know what I want. You got my note all right.”
I had got my breath by that time.
“What note?” I gasped. “I don’t know what you mean.” He was certainly startled. His hold on me relaxed, although I was still in his arms.
“Good God,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Lois Maynard,” I said, “and if you don’t put me down I’ll scream my head off.”
He seemed as stunned as I was, but he still held on to me. Then unexpectedly he laughed.
“All right, scream!” he said, and pitched me into the pool.
It was the deep end, and I went in with my mouth wide open. I swallowed a lot of water before I fought my way to the surface and could swim enough to get out. Even that was not easy. The skirt of my new dress wrapped itself around my legs, and I was still coughing and choking. I stood there, dripping and shocked as well as outraged, until I heard a car starting and moving off, and I realized he was gone.
Somehow I staggered to O’Brien’s cottage and knocked at the door. His face was a study as he saw me, and I must have almost fallen, for he caught me up and carried me to a chair. He gave me a drink and put a match to his fire before he let me speak. Then he said, “Don’t tell me you fell into that pool. I don’t believe it.”
“I was pitched in.”
“I see. Bill playing tricks, or what?”
“No. I suppose it was the man who threw the stone through Judith’s window. He picked me up from the drive and carried me through the shrubbery to the bench by the pool. He said I had got his note all right, and I was to talk. To talk a lot. So I asked him what he meant. I guess my voice scared him. He asked who I was, and when I told him he pitched me into the pool.”
“Rather drastic, wasn’t it?” He was being calm, but he didn’t fool me. His face was set as he filled his pipe. “I suppose he escaped again?”
“He had a car. I heard him start it.”
And then he said something which almost brought me out of my chair.
“The crazy bastard!” he muttered. “The poor crazy bastard!”
I stared at him.
“You know who it was, don’t you?”
“I have an idea. I could be wrong.”
He had been standing on the hearth, with a dressing-gown over a pair of slacks, and for all the attention I got after that I might have been a stuffed codfish.
“How long ago was all this?”
“I don’t know. I swallowed a lot of water, and I had to swim the length of the pool. Ten minutes maybe, or more.”
He did not say anything. He went to the telephone and called a number in town. When he got it he lost no time.
“Try the road into town from here,” he said, “and be quick about it. Put somebody by the reservoir, too. Better block the road—Oh, hell, put your own car across it, man! Just see that you get him.”
Then for the first time he really looked at me. I was not a pretty sight, with my hair in dank strings, one of my white pumps missing, and my new dress a complete wreck.
“Of course, I had to wear the best thing I own,” I said sourly. “I don’t think the damned thing was meant to wash.”
He roused at that. He pulled my chair closer to the fire and threw another log on it.
“You’ll have to get out of it,” he said. “Better strip off everything. No use your taking pneumonia. What else have you got on?”
In case he expected a maidenly blush from me he was disappointed.
“I’m wearing exactly one slip, one bra, and one pair of panties,” I said. “I’ll keep the slip and let the others go.”
If he recognized the paraphrase he did not show it. Instead he simply pulled my dress off over my head and wrung it out over the hearth.
“Get out of the rest,” he said. “I’ll turn my back if you’re too modest. Better hang them on the fire screen to dry.”
We made quite a picture when I finished, I in my low-cut white slip, with my dress, panties, and bra draped on the screen. I’m afraid I giggled, thinking of Judith that afternoon. O’Brien saw nothing funny in the situation.
“I suppose you didn’t get a good look at this fellow?”
“I never really saw him at all. He seemed pretty strong.”
“You think he mistook you for your sister?”
“He mistook me for somebody. Not necessarily for Judith. Anyhow, what has Jude to do with all this? Don’t tell me at the age of eighteen or so she shot and killed your Flaherty! I don’t think she’s ever owned a gun in her life, or fired one.”
He smiled, for the first time.
“Still the loyal little sister!” he said. “Of course she hasn’t. In fact, I think it might be as well if she did have one. I don’t like this thing tonight.”
“Maybe you think I do!” I said.
He only nodded which annoyed me.
“Why do you think he thought I was Judith?” I asked. “You do, don’t you? Something’s really threatening her, and that’s why you’re watching the grounds. It’s this man, isn’t it? Why don’t you tell me who he is? What is the danger? I have a right to know. After all, she’s my sister.”
“Of course,” he said. “Only I’m not certain. There are things I still don’t understand. When I get those straightened out—The man tonight wasn’t Chandler, was it?”
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”
“What about today?�
� he said as if he had suddenly thought of it. “Did you learn anything?”
I nodded. Suddenly I remembered.
“My bag! It must be in the pool. I know I had it when he threw me in.”
“Anything in it?”
“Everything,” I said despairingly. “Bankbooks, her husband’s picture, the works! And they’re gone.”
“Who was she?”
“She’s a widow. Her name was Benjamin, Selina Benjamin. There was a cat in the window. That’s how I found her.”
“Of course. A cat. That explains everything,” he said. “When you’ve stopped scaring me to death you might tell me about it. What did you find out from her house? And are you sure it’s the woman from the pool? We can’t afford to make a mistake there.”
It had never occurred to me that I might have been mistaken; that a bleached-blond woman named Benjamin might have left her home and her cat and been killed by a taxicab in the city. Or had merely chosen to disappear, leaving thirty thousand dollars in the bank. And as I told my story I could see he agreed with me.
“We’ll have to get an identification, of course,” he said. “The cat woman may be anybody. But what’s this about all that money?”
“It was deposited a long time ago. That’s all I know.”
“And the name of the bank?”
“I didn’t notice.”
He looked rather disgusted.
“You’d better stay here and dry out,” he said. “Take your stockings off. They’re soaking. I’d better make a try for the bag, although there’s only a remote chance I can find it in the dark. Where did you go in?”
I told him it was the deep end, and he grunted. But he disappeared into his bedroom and when he came back he wore only his bathing trunks. Annoyed as I still was, I had to admit he was the fine figure of a man, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. He was muscular, too. Not muscle-bound. Just strong. But he had a scar on his chest I had not noticed the morning at the pool. He almost dared me to mention it now.
“If the telephone rings, get the message,” he said. “And lock the door behind me. I may be some time. Only for God’s sake be sure who it is before you open it.”
He put another log on the fire. Then he was gone and I was alone. I smoked one of his cigarettes and tried to think. Nothing was clear, however, except that he considered Judith’s danger was real. But I had had a long day, and the fire was warm and comforting. I put my head back and was about to go comfortably asleep when a noise in the kitchen aroused me.
The Swimming Pool Page 15
