Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  “Here I am,” I said. “Down here.”

  Mrs. Gould started violently at the sound of my voice from the porch.

  “What are you doing down here?” she said in a low voice, coming over.

  “I couldn’t sleep. It’s so hot in my room, and Sheila’s so restless. I just came down.”

  She looked at me a moment as if trying to make up her mind whether to believe me or not.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know. I can’t find half my family.”

  “Sandra?”

  “And Andy. Jim’s in bed, Lucy Lee’s pacing the floor.—I don’t like to wake Hawkins at night, he barricades himself in.”

  Hawkins is her old colored butler and handy man.

  She looked at me again. I noticed then that she still had on the print dress she’d worn that evening but she’d taken off her pearl necklace.

  “Sandra’s such an impulsive child,” she said. “Sometimes I’d like to shake Andy. I know he hasn’t a notion of how he upsets Lucy Lee. Who’s a little ninny, of course.”

  She smiled wearily.

  “I’m worried about Sandra, Grace. Do you realize that she tried to drown herself tonight?”

  “She what?” I gasped.

  Mrs. Gould nodded.

  “She’s been threatening to kill herself all day. She’s got some horrible notion that she’s ruined Jim’s career and now she’s ruining his life. She’s so terribly impulsive!”

  “You ought to go to bed, darling,” I said—which was an easy way of putting it. “I’ll walk back with you. Andy’s probably home by now and so’s Sandra.”

  I took her arm, and was startled at how curiously rigid her body was, and immovable.

  “You’re tired, Alice; do come back,” I said. She relaxed suddenly. I could hear her long relieved breath.

  “Thanks, my dear. I suppose I am.” She pressed my hand quickly.

  “And you’re cold.”

  “No, no. I’m just . . . disturbed.” She laughed softly. “My children are such—wretches.”

  The night wind shivered in the stiff magnolia leaves. The boys’ pigeons in the side yard cooed and rustled as if something strange had passed them. Somewhere from the bay there was the faint sound of a guitar and voices singing. But that was far away. Around us in the dark was nothing but an eerie silence, throbbing and uneasy.

  “Come along, darling.”

  We moved across the grass. It was cold through my slippers, and the tall blades on the edge, where Julius’s sickle had missed, brushed against my bare ankles, sharply intense. At the hedge I pulled back a branch of white althea for Alice to pass. Released, it brushed, softly cool, against my shoulder. I started so that Alice stopped.

  “What is it, Grace?” she whispered.

  “Nothing, darling.”

  I pressed on my flashlight. A white moth dashed out of the dark, an enormous potato bug trundled across the dirt path.

  “I’ll just get my bag out of the car,” Alice said. “If you’ll lend me your light and give me a hand with the doors.”

  The garage loomed white and ghostly above the dark line of shrubs. We turned to the right along the narrow path that leads to the double doors at the end of the drive from the road.

  Suddenly I knew what I’d been hearing . . . what it was that had given the throbbing undertone to the clear still night.

  “Somebody’s left his motor running,” I said.

  “That’s one of Sandra’s tricks,” Alice Gould said. “She’s back, then. It’s funny the things that annoy husbands,” she went on. “That’s a much worse offense in Jim’s eyes than burned rice pudding.”

  I tugged at the white door. The padlock wasn’t on, but the doors seemed jammed tighter than usual. Finally I got them open, after skinning my knuckles and breaking at least two fingernails. I swung them wide, started in, and then remembered that I had no idea of how long the motor had been running and that the garage had been tightly shut.

  “We’d better let it air out a minute,” I said. Mrs. Gould nodded. We stood there a minute or two, looking in. Jim’s car was parked in front of me, Andy’s was in the other half.

  “It’s Andy’s motor that’s on,” I said. “I’ll turn it off while you get your bag.”

  I wriggled around behind Andy’s sedan, squeezed along the running board to the door and reached inside to switch off the engine and take out the keys. My hand struck something woolly and hard. The smell of Scotch whisky hit my nose and almost took my breath away. I caught myself sharply. Mrs. Gould’s voice was running along pleasantly as she fished around in Jim’s car for her bag.

  I caught my breath, and said, as casually as I could—knowing how she hates for people to drink too much, “Well, here’s our precious Andy.”

  I could hear her suddenly stop her fishing about.

  “Where?” she said.

  “Right here. Fast asleep.”

  I turned off the engine and switched the lights on. Then I stood there motionless, my hand out in front of me.

  It wasn’t Andy Thorp under that wheel. It was Sandra Gould—and it didn’t take the ghastly open-eyed stare on her strangely colored face to tell me she was dead.

  Hardly knowing what I was doing, I took the flash from Alice Gould’s paralyzed fingers and turned its beam on the lifeless girl. Her arms were sunk down at her sides. Clutched in one hand was the torn petal of a blue velvet flower.

  I held the flash on it for a long time. Only in a strange remote part of my consciousness was I aware of Alice Gould’s hands moving over the window ledge and quietly, calmly disengaging from that dead hand the evidence that might easily have hanged her son . . . or her son’s lost lady.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Alice Gould’s simple act of disengaging the torn and crushed velvet petals from her daughter-in-law’s dead fingers was small and unobtrusive enough in itself. Its implications were appalling. Even at that moment, still balanced on one foot on the running board of Andy Thorp’s car, with Sandra Gould sprawled inert and so terribly silent on the seat, I recognized a few of them. First, and above all, it meant that we tacitly and definitely accepted the fact that Rosemary Bishop was in some way involved in whatever had happened. Second, it meant that both of us pledged ourselves to keep the fact from getting out—lined up on Rosemary’s side, as it were, against Sandra—and became quite simply accessories after whatever the fact might turn out to be.

  “I’ll stay here, Grace,” Mrs. Gould said at last, quietly. “You go and get Jim and phone Dr. Potter.”

  “I’ll stay,” I said. “It’ll be better for you to tell Jim.”

  I’m not sure now whether I actually shrank from telling Jim Gould that his wife was dead, or whether it was because in some secret law-abiding place in my heart I felt some obligation to social order. Whether I felt it wasn’t safe to leave Alice Gould alone there with Sandra, or whether already I had some deep-seated fear that Jim . . . But that was nonsense, of course. I think Alice Gould understood, however, because as our eyes met across Sandra’s body a faint infinitely sad smile moved in hers.

  “I’d rather go, Grace,” she said. “I just didn’t like to leave you alone . . . again . . . with death.”

  She went then, and I went over to the switch by the side door to turn on the overhead light. It seemed odd to me suddenly that neither of us had thought of it before. I squeezed in front of Andy’s car and stubbed my toe on something, making noise enough, or so it seemed in the small completely silent segment of night that engulfed me, to wake even Sandra sprawled there. I felt down on the floor to see what it was, and picked up the monkey wrench Jim had had in front of Mr. Toplady’s store that morning.

  I put it on the shelf and went, feeling my way cautiously, in front of Jim’s coupé to the door. I turned on the light. Everything was instantly stark and dismal in the bright glare of the single unshaded bulb set in the middle of the ceiling. A huge moth miller flew in and bashed himself against the
bulb; insects of all sorts came suddenly swarming in from the night. I stood alone there with Sandra, waiting.

  Outside I thought I could hear someone coming. I moved back in front of Jim’s car and between his and Andy’s to the door, and looked out. No one was there. I listened a moment, but no one was moving. A dog probably, I said to myself, and looked at my wrist, but I hadn’t my watch on. It seemed a long time that I’d stood there, and it was longer still before I heard a door slam and heavy feet dashing down the brick path from the house.

  Jim came running around to the back, took one look at me and stopped abruptly.

  “Is she dead, Grace?” he asked . . . as impassively as if she were someone he scarcely knew.

  I nodded.

  Then, more like a man walking in his sleep than anything else, he went inside.

  “In Andy’s car,” I said, because he’d gone straight to his own. He looked bewildered and uncertain, but he turned. I saw him catch the window ledge with both hands to steady himself, and stand there motionless . . . for ages, it seemed. Then he dropped his head down on the back of his hands. I thought he was sobbing—his shoulders moved convulsively once or twice—but when I went over to him and put my arm round his shoulders he raised haggard anguished eyes that had no tears in them. I had no idea what was going on in his mind.

  Quite abruptly over our heads we heard a knocking. Old Hawkins’s voice came down querulously.

  “Mis’ Gould, ain’ you all never goin’ to bed? We got to be out here at seven o’clock, an’ you all can sleep till dinnertime.”

  Sandra’s oval face, dyed red with carbon monoxide, stared up at the ceiling. Jim tried to speak, but not a sound came. Outside we heard a car coming along the road from April Harbor, and two long white fingers of light stretched through the night and turned, flattening themselves against us as the car came into the Goulds’ drive. Jim’s mother appeared then too, in the door, and went to the car to meet Dr. Potter. And then, without the least warning, Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck came through the hedge from my garden. Sergeant Buck was dressed. Colonel Primrose had on a striped flannel dressing gown. He looked sleepy; Sergeant Buck did not.

  The Colonel came into the garage. His black eyes darted in every corner at once before they fastened themselves on Jim and me, and beyond us where the light from the ceiling struck Sandra’s head. He glanced out then at Dr. Potter and another man who were hurrying along the drive, and at me, but he said nothing. He merely backed out of their way and stood near the door, the massive square figure of his sergeant looming portentously behind him.

  Jim and I moved back into the narrow space between the fronts of the two cars. I felt his sudden involuntary start as he recognized the man with Dr. Potter. Our Mr. Shryock is something like a turkey buzzard—we see him only at times like this.

  “You say she’s dead, ma’am?” he inquired of Mrs. Gould. He caught sight of Jim and lowered his voice. “Tragic, tragic,” he said. “Tch, tch!”

  Mr. Shryock’s trouble is that he has to reconcile the difficult roles of local undertaker, wanting private business, on the one side and local coroner doing public duty on the other. We’d seen him work before . . . when Chapin was drowned. We saw him now give Sandra’s body a perfunctory glance and look around then at the two men standing silently by the door.

  “I’ll have to have a jury before the body can be moved,” he said. “Will you two gentlemen act? I’ll rout out some more.”

  He stepped briskly out and hailed a man he had left in his car. They disappeared together. In a few moments there was a little circle of our shocked and white-faced neighbors, silent and terribly distressed, standing around outside in the drive, lighting cigarettes, whispering a little among themselves. I looked them over as they came—Ned Bryan, Pinkie Reed, Buzz Dixon. They all lived beyond the Goulds’. I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized that the coroner was headed away from the Bishops’. At least, I thought, they would be spared that embarrassment. But I was wrong. Mr. Shryock came back at last, with him Rodman Bishop, George Barrol and Yancy Holland, the Bishops’ caretaker and man of all work.

  They made up the twelve. Rodman Bishop nodded to the rest of the group, then moved over to Alice Gould and took his stand beside her. His dressing gown and rumpled gray hair seemed extraordinarily deshabille beside her coat and print dress and properly arranged coiffure. George moved in with the other men, looking about as upset as I’ve ever seen him, trying to find out what had happened.

  Mr. Shryock stepped up on a box in the doorway. “This is a very tragic mission, gentlemen, I’ve called you on,” he said. “I must ask you each, constituting the coroner’s jury, to file through the garage here and look at the body. We will then hear what Dr. Potter has to say, and adjourn to Mrs. Latham’s house—if she will be so kind as to allow us to do so.”

  I nodded quite mechanically. It seemed a horribly offhand way of disposing of the awful fact of death.

  “You’re to look carefully, gentlemen, as you will be called upon to make a decision as to the cause of death and the manner it was come by. You are all men of the world. I will ask you not to omit any fact that seems important to you—such as the odor in the car, for example.”

  Mr. Shryock went on. It was his hour—he didn’t often come into contact with the April Harbor Colony. Most of us died decently in our town homes in the winter of pneumonia or old age. We came to April Harbor for rest and relaxation.

  “All right, gentlemen.”

  Jim Gould stood watching them, white-faced and haggard, as they went in, trying not to look at him, poor dears. They went one by one to the window where Jim had stood, looked in, turned away quickly, blundered back outside and lighted cigarettes again—even Rodman Bishop. George didn’t look at her, I’m sure of that. He just got to the door and hurried out, a little green about the gills, and I could hear him protesting in an undertone to the coroner that he oughtn’t to have to act, because he had driven home with her. But nobody paid any attention to him, except Colonel Primrose. He stood there quietly, with his head cocked and his sparkling black eyes resting on first one, then another, listening to everything, and rather more like a turkey buzzard than Mr. Shryock, if the truth were told.

  That’s why I watched him when his turn came. He looked inside the car, and sniffed; bent his head close to Sandra’s face and sniffed again, picked up her hands and looked at them. Then he opened the door. A half-empty flask of whisky fell out onto the running board. He picked it up carefully and handed it to Mr. Shryock. Then he touched the back of the seat, and bent down to look at Sandra’s slippers. After that he moved away and made room for Sergeant Buck, who did exactly what the Colonel had done and moved away in his turn.

  We waited, the twelve men of the jury and myself, for more than half an hour in my living room before the coroner and Dr. Potter and another man—tall, stooped and dyspeptic—came in.

  “This is Mr. Owens Parran, gentlemen,” said Mr. Shryock. “He’s our State’s Attorney. Always on the job, that’s his watchword, and you’re all going to like his style, I know that. Would you like to say a word at this time, Mr. Parran?”

  Mr. Parran shook his head and yawned. “Go ahead,” he said. I thought we might be going to like his style, but it was going to be hard to get over his manner. He did, however, shake hands with Rodman Bishop and Colonel Primrose. I suppose it’s part of being a good politician to be able to spot the most important men in any group without outside assistance.

  “Dr. Potter,” the coroner said.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen Adam Potter look as old and completely done in as he did then.

  “The cause of death is quite clear,” he said in a dry expressionless voice. “The discoloration of the skin that you must all have noticed is due to carbon monoxide poisoning. I think there is no reasonable possibility of doubt that that is the cause of death.”

  “Thank you, doctor. Now, gentlemen, I understood from Mrs. Gould senior that she and Mrs. Latham here found young Mrs. G
ould. I should like to spare the natural feelings of the bereaved as far as is in our power, so I will ask Mrs. Latham to give her account of the situation.”

  “I heard someone in my garden a few minutes after three,” I said. “I got up and came down. It was Mrs. Gould. She was hunting for Sandra—her daughter-in-law.”

  I don’t know why I left out Andy Thorp, but I was quite definitely conscious that I was doing so.

  “I thought I heard a motor running and we went into the garage. The engine of the sedan was on. I started to turn it off, thinking somebody had just forgot it. My hand touched a wool coat. I thought it was a man until I switched on the lights and saw Sandra Gould. She had on a man’s coat.”

  “I wished to inquire about that jacket,” Mr. Shryock said.

  “Mrs. Gould got wet during the evening. I suppose someone gave it to her to wear home so she wouldn’t catch cold,” I said.

  “Undoubtedly got caught in the rain.”

  I glanced at Colonel Primrose. He was just sitting there.

  “Had Mrs. Gould been drinking?” Mr. Shryock continued.

  There was no answer from anyone.

  “I ask that,” he added, “because of the smell in the car, and because it would be extremely simple for a lady under the influence to drop off to sleep without switching off the engine of her car.”

  A voice spoke up nervously.

  “But it wasn’t her car in the first place, and she’d certainly not been drinking in the second.”

  We all looked around, rather startled by this sudden contribution from the ranks of the jurors. George Barrol flushed. “I mean . . . you see, I came home with her. I mean, Mr. Thorp drove us both home from the club house, and they let me out at The Magnolias. Then they drove back. Unless they drank a lot after they left me, Mrs. Gould certainly wasn’t under the influence, as you say.”

  The coroner frowned, and so did everybody else except Rodman Bishop. He looked at me and shook his head a little. The thing about George Barrol is that he’s always putting his own and other people’s feet into things that had best be left quite free of feet.