Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  She looked at me steadily.

  “It’s a terrible thing to say, Grace, but I’m glad she’s gone. I’m sorry it had to be this way. I tried to get her to divorce him, but she just laughed at me. You know Jim never used to drink. He’s drunk much too much these last two years, while she was making a fool of every man that came within sight of her.”

  She got up and went to the window, and looked out a long time. Then she came back to the table suddenly.

  “Colonel Primrose is coming up the walk,” she said quickly. “You’d better go. I just told you, Grace, because I want you to know that I feel there’s nothing . . . no wrong done to her . . . that equals the wrong she’s done to Jim. And that no sacrifice of convention—”

  She shrugged her fragile shoulders.

  “I think you know what I mean I just wanted to tell you. Now run along, out the back.”

  Which was a mistake, because Colonel Primrose, dispensing with the formality of a proper entrance, was coming in the back.

  “Oh, good morning,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve been hunting for you everywhere”

  He smiled, but his black eyes weren’t involved in the smile at all. They were sharp and probing He took my arm. “Come back inside. I want to talk to you.”

  Mrs. Gould rose from the table as we came in. Nothing in her manner or her face showed that she was the least surprised at the failure of her plan to get me out.

  “Good morning, Colonel Primrose,” she said, extending her hand to him with a simple dignity that matched his own. They were the same generation and the same sort of people. They seemed to be meeting on common ground even if they were in opposite camps.

  “Let’s go in there,” she said. She led the way into the large white living room. The Venetian blinds were drawn. The sun through the open slats made gay little ladders along the thick grass rugs. Alice Gould sat down in one corner of the deep sofa, folded her hands in her lap, and motioned me down beside her. Colonel Primrose pulled up a hard chair and sat down, straightening out his rheumatic knee with a deprecatory smile. Then he looked at me.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d find you alive this morning,” he said soberly. “She was shot at twice last night, you know.”

  He turned to Alice.

  “Oh, it was obviously a mistake,” she said earnestly. “I can’t think anyone would want to . . . to hurt you, Grace.”

  “My boy scout training came in handy,” I said.

  “What were you doing, Mrs. Latham?”

  “Nothing. I answered the telephone and came back to the living room. You had gone. Sheila wanted to go out and I went with her. I forgot all the things you’d said—I’m so used to being perfectly safe here. Then I walked down the path as far as the white chairs under the sycamore tree. Sheila growled, and I . . . well, I began to get a little uneasy. I started back to the house, and—well, that’s all.”

  “It came very close to being quite all, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said. He shook his head seriously. “You must see now that what I told you is true—that you know too much for somebody’s peace of mind . . . and that one murder makes another seem simple—and necessary.”

  He turned back to Alice Gould. She was sitting perfectly still. Even her fingers that usually pleated and unpleated her handkerchief were still, almost as if she dreaded something that must come and was bracing herself for it.

  “This is getting to be a very serious matter, Mrs. Gould,” he said. “I’d like you to tell me about Saturday night again, please.”

  “Gladly, Colonel Primrose.”

  I thought there was a subtle note of relief in her voice.

  “I’m very happy to do so, if it will help. Of course it does involve a certain amount of public linen washing, but I have the utmost confidence in your kindness and discretion.”

  I looked at Colonel Primrose and shook my head. I hadn’t. From all I could make out, he would hang his grandmother with the greatest urbanity, if the necessity arose.

  “You were at the clubhouse when the business about taking the boat out in the storm came up?” Alice asked. “Andy was supposed to have taken Lucy Lee home early. One of the children has a cold. But in the excitement at the dock he forgot all about that. I brought Lucy Lee home. We sat here waiting for Jim and Andy to come. Lucy Lee is a silly little goose, and like a great many wives who aren’t awfully interested in sports she feels that Andy’s week ends are too much taken up with sailing and golf and all that. Saturday night, after I’d got her back here, she worked herself into a fury. She’d been looking forward to the dance, and the orchestra was late and so on. So when Andy came in extremely early—it was a little before midnight, as a matter of fact—they had a good old-fashioned family row.”

  Mrs. Gould shook her head in mock despair.

  “It lasted until half past twelve. I put them both out then and told them to go home and stay there.”

  “That was at half past twelve?” Colonel Primrose said politely.

  Alice nodded her snow-white curly head and raised her serious unlined face.

  “Yes, you see Jim hadn’t come in yet and I knew he’d left the club. Andy had told me that. He didn’t say he’d brought Sandra home. But under the circumstances I think that was more than wise. Considering the state Lucy Lee was in.”

  I glanced uneasily at Colonel Primrose. If there was only some way I could head Alice off! She seemed absolutely bent on putting a noose round her own daughter’s neck, drawing it tighter then with every word she spoke. Then quite suddenly I realized the dreadful situation. Alice Gould still thought that Sandra was murdered at midnight . . . She did not know that her twelve o’clock alibi for her daughter and son-in-law was utterly worthless.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Colonel Primrose looked at me steadily and I closed it again.

  “Where did they go, do you know, when they left here, Mrs. Gould?”

  “Home. I watched them from the porch. I saw them turn on the lights in the cottage.”

  “And when did you find out that Andy had brought Sandra home?”

  “When Lucy Lee came back to the house a few minutes later.”

  “After she’d gone home,” Colonel Primrose said.

  Alice Gould nodded. There was obviously something wrong here, and I could see that Colonel Primrose saw it too.

  “She came back later. I gathered the quarrel hadn’t ended and she was coming home to Mother. In fact, she’s still here. She moved the children over the next morning.”

  “She stayed in this house Saturday night then?”

  Alice Gould nodded again.

  “And when did she get here, that last time?”

  “About one-thirty, I think, Colonel Primrose.”

  There was no change in the expression of polite interest on Colonel Primrose’s face.

  “And Jim?”

  “He came in about one o’clock, and went to his room.”

  “Did you tell him his wife wasn’t in, Mrs. Gould?”

  “Oh, dear, no!” Alice exclaimed. “I shouldn’t have thought of it. Not for an instant. You see, Sandra frequently stayed on to dance long after Jim was worn out. Some friend usually brought her home. Both she and Jim belong to the modern school that thinks husbands and wives cleaving together is nonsense. I’m afraid Lucy Lee is the only old-fashioned member of my family.”

  “And you, Mrs. Gould—didn’t you wonder about her?”

  “Oh, of course. But I’ve wondered about Sandra a good deal in the last seven years.”

  There was a slightly sardonic note in Alice’s voice.

  “I did glance in her room when I came in with Lucy Lee, and later Jim had gone to bed. That’s when I found her note.”

  She looked up, as guileless as a kitten, meeting those sharpened black eyes without a quiver. I forced myself not to look at Colonel Primrose.

  “I see,” he said. “About that note—I wonder if you would be good enough to show me just where you found it.”

  “With pleasure.”<
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  Alice led us up the wide white-paneled staircase, down a sunny hall to a room overlooking the walk to the garage. She opened the door. I think, strangely enough, it was one of the very few times I’d been in that room since it was Sandra’s. It looked more like a stage dressing room than a lady’s bedroom . . . all the superimposed bits that were Sandra’s anyway. The basic decoration of pink sateen was not unlike her, but it was the sort of thing a decorator would do.

  Around the mirror were snapshots, mostly of men about the Harbor taken with Sandra. There weren’t many of Jim—one taken several years before, another of him in a group on the club veranda, including, oddly enough, both Andy and Dr. Potter. Other bits of local interest hung about the room—a broken canoe paddle with a lot of names scribbled on it, invitations to cocktail parties, programs of the Harbor yacht races, the horse show and the dog show—and literally dozens of pictures of Sandra herself, at all hours of the day and night.

  Alice Gould picked her way through the room with a sort of humorous resignation. It wasn’t, you could see, her idea of a daughter-in-law’s room.

  “I found it just here.”

  She pointed to the dressing table with its profusion of cosmetic boxes and bottles and mirrors.

  “Was the light on?”

  “No. I turned it on. I could see from the hall light that she wasn’t here. She leaves her things strewed about when she comes in, and there was nothing on that chair. So I turned on the light.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. It seems a natural thing to do. And, of course, she might possibly have got in and laid down, without taking off her things.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded. “Did she drink?”

  “More at times than I approved of. Though I’m an old-fashioned woman, as I think I’ve said before.”

  “What did you do when you saw the note, Mrs. Gould?”

  “I read it, and I went out to hunt for her. As I told you before, I thought it was all part of the heroic nonsense that began with the boat episode. I never for an instant thought it was anything but a grandstand play for Jim—to make him more wretched than he already was. You see, Sandra was intensely a woman. She knew all the old tricks about appealing to a man’s sense of honor and so on.”

  Colonel Primrose hesitated a moment.

  “And you went to Mrs. Latham’s—”

  “Because I think Grace is one of the few people who know Sandra as well as I do. And—well, I wanted some moral support when I’d found Sandra about to slay herself, or even just pretending to be about to.”

  Alice shrugged, her face a little drawn, as if the strain of being casual about the things that really meant a lot to her was telling on her at last.

  “I don’t think it’s strange. I’ve come to depend a lot on Grace.”

  I tried to smile back at her, but I saw too clearly the bog she was getting both of us into to be very cheerful about it.

  We left Sandra’s room. Colonel Primrose, a little ahead of us, was looking back, talking, and he went past the stairs and blundered on in the wrong direction, into Alice’s bedroom. He jumped back.

  “I’m so sorry!”

  “Quite all right,” Alice said. “I don’t suppose the beds are made yet.”

  I wondered if she would have thought it was all right if she’d suspected that Colonel Primrose was not blundering, but very coolly looking to see if she had a telephone—and a clock—in her room. I was only surprised that he didn’t inspect the rest of the house while he was at it.

  Lucy Lee was in the living room when we came down the stairs. She was standing in front of the fireplace. She turned as we came, obviously expecting to see only her mother and me, and the plain fear on her face when she saw Colonel Primrose was a little shocking.

  “Oh!” she said. “I’m sorry, I thought you—”

  “Colonel Primrose was asking about Saturday night, Lucy Lee,” Alice Gould said quietly. “I’m afraid I had to tell him about the row you and Andy had here.”

  Lucy Lee stared at her mother, her face chalk-white, her lips parted stupidly.

  Alice gave me a quick alarmed glance and hurried to where Lucy Lee stood. “Child—what’s the matter!”

  “Nothing, Mother,” she said. She brushed the short chestnut curls from her forehead, trying desperately to smile. “I just heard, Mother, that it was one o’clock that Sandra was . . . killed, not twelve. He found it out.”

  She nodded towards Colonel Primrose.

  “Grace knew too—they all knew! Only they wouldn’t tell us! Oh, Mother!”

  She flung herself into her mother’s arms in a passion of tears. Alice Gould’s face above the dark soft head of her sobbing child was a mask of conflict—doubt, fear and anger.

  “I thought you knew it, until just a moment ago, Alice,” I said weakly. “Jim knew it last night. It never occurred to me he hadn’t told you.”

  “I’m afraid I prevented her from telling you, Mrs. Gould,” Colonel Primrose said quickly. “You see, I not only know that, I know a number of other things. One of them is that so far none of you has told the truth. If I may say so, I think you’re all pretty much at cross purposes . . . because you haven’t told each other the truth either.”

  A flush deepened in Alice’s face. Her lips tightened ever so faintly. Lucy Lee raised her head and stood there, face tear-stained, staring dully at the carpet, her mother’s arm round her slim shoulders.

  “For instance which one of you met Sandra as she was leaving the garage and quarreled with her, so violently that it woke Hawkins?”

  He smiled at Alice Gould. Whoever it was, I thought, it plainly wasn’t she. I don’t think Alice had ever raised her voice in her life.

  “I think your husband could answer that if he would, Mrs Thorp.”

  Lucy Lee flushed.

  “Why don’t you go and ask him?” she said in a low voice.

  “I think I shall—unless you’d send Hawkins for him, Mrs Gould.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  And when Andy Thorp came he wasn’t yet any more like himself than he had been the day before. He ignored Lucy Lee completely, barely nodded to his mother-in-law and me, and turned to Colonel Primrose.

  “I can thank you for muffing a big deal for me.”

  He almost snarled it.

  “You can thank yourself, Thorp,” Colonel Primrose said curtly. “When you begin to give right answers to the questions that are asked you, and quit telling the most childish falsehoods, you’ll be allowed to go about your business.”

  Andy reddened under his sun-tanned hide.

  “It would be rather pleasant for everybody if you’d stop being an idiot, Andy,” Alice said gently. “No one thinks you had anything to do with Sandra’s death.”

  Andy looked at her an instant, said nothing, dug into his pocket and brought out a battered pack of cigarettes.

  “I’d just like to hear again what happened after you left the club, Thorp,” Colonel Primrose said. He spoke quietly, but there was an iron undertone in his voice. It must have been like hearing the head coach again. Andy answered almost civilly, still without even a glance at Lucy Lee.

  “Sandra dried out in front of the fire,” he said. “I guess she didn’t have much on but an evening dress. She borrowed somebody’s coat and was waiting for Jim. One of the colored boys came in and said Jim had gone with Grace.”

  He looked around at me.

  “Sandra wanted to go home then and said she’d join me and Barrol in the car. We waited about ten minutes for her, I guess. George was cold, he didn’t dry out as quick as Sandra, but neither of us had anything to drink on us. I started back to get a pint when she showed up. She was high as a kite.”

  He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace and lighted another.

  “She’d been drinking, inside?” Colonel Primrose suggested.

  “Not while I was there, except a toddy they made her. I don’t know what she was doing that ten minutes George and I waited in the
car.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded, looking at him steadily and I thought rather oddly.

  “We started off and dropped George. He was about half-tight with all the rye they’d poured into him at the club He staggered up the steps, and we came home.”

  Andy looked down at the carpet, his face a dull crimson.

  “I wanted her to take a ride, but she wouldn’t So we put the car in the garage and started up to the house. Halfway up she asked me for my keys. We had an argument, but I gave ’em to her. She started back to the garage I went on a little way and looked back. She was talking . . . to a woman.”

  “Yes,” Colonel Primrose said briskly. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know, I tell you.”

  “You didn’t recognize her at all?”

  “I didn’t recognize her at all. That’s English, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Colonel Primrose said, almost cheerfully. His old black eyes were shining, for some reason that I at least did not understand. “Yes, that’s English. It was no one you knew?”

  “I tell you it wasn’t.”

  “Was it light?”

  Andy nodded. “It was pretty light.”

  “You probably could have told, for instance, if it had been Mrs. Latham, say?”

  Colonel Primrose smiled at me. I tried to smile back, but I don’t think my attempt amounted to much.

  Andy looked at me an instant. “I should think so.”

  “Or . . Mrs. Gould, for instance?”

  “It wasn’t. I tell you again, and I hope to God for the last time, I didn’t know her.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded absently, as if he were thinking hard about something else.

  Then he looked at Andy very queerly.

  “It’s rather strange, isn’t it,” he said slowly, “that you should have looked back there and seen Sandra talking to a strange woman . . . a woman that you’d never seen before?”

  He shook his head a little.

  “I guess it is,” Andy said. “That’s what happened just the same.”

  “All right,” Colonel Primrose said. “What did you do?”

  “I started back. Sandra ran up to me and said to go on, she’d take care of it. I asked her who it was. She said, ‘Oh, a poor crazy woman.’ I didn’t pay any more attention to it. There are plenty of crazy women around. I came on up.”