Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)

by Helen McCloy

  Basil was tempted to ask: “And what are they this year?” But it would be mere self-indulgence to antagonize a witness who could tell him so much, if she would, so he merely said: “Do you mean Freudian theories?”

  “Of course not! Have you never heard of Pavlov?”

  “I believe I’ve heard the name.” No point in telling her that he was a psychiatrist. She would talk more freely without that.

  She did. Far more freely than he had anticipated. Her Russian husband had known Pavlov and converted her to Behaviorist theories. Her examples of their effectiveness ranged from Watsonian experiments with children to the methods used in Thailand for training apes to pick coconuts. Before long Basil was sneaking glances at his wrist watch.

  “. . . and that is why I say Giovanni is incapable of mischief. He has been brought up to be independent. He doesn’t lean on me. When he was a baby and used to cry, I never picked him up or comforted him or even spoke to him. I just let him cry. Sometimes it would be a long time before he cried himself to sleep. It was hard.”

  “On him or on you?”

  “On me, of course. It was good for him. Character building. That’s why I did it. I never coddled him. No one can ever call me an overprotective mother.”

  “No?”

  “Well . . .” She smiled. “I try to be.”

  “Don’t fight your natural instincts too hard. All mammalian mothers spend a lot of time, care and affection on their young and by so doing teach the young habits of the species. It’s called ‘imprinting’ nowadays. As an evolutionist, I do not believe that such behavior would have persisted so long if it didn’t have survival value.”

  “But those animal mothers live in the state of nature. We have opted out of the straggle for existence. As members of organized society, we don’t have to worry about survival. Society takes care of that for us.”

  It was time to change the subject. “May I see Vanya? Or rather Giovanni?” Poor boy! It was hardly healthy to change your name so often. Name had so much to do with identity, and identity was always fragile . . . “I’d like to ask him what plans he and Lucinda had for last night—the plans that had to be canceled because of his sore throat.”

  “But I can’t wake him. He’s still asleep.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I told him to let me know the moment he woke, so I could take his temperature. If it’s down, he can get out of bed. If it stays down tomorrow and the weather is good, he can go outdoors for five or ten minutes.”

  “Then there’s no hope of my seeing him now?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Basil sighed and rose. “Let me take this tray out into the kitchen for you—”

  “Oh, don’t bother! I—”

  “No bother at all.” Basil wanted to see a little more of the house where Vanya lived. He put the mugs on the tray and carried it through the dining room to the kitchen.

  Mrs. Radanine had followed him. “Just put the tray down anywhere.”

  He hesitated. So many other things had been put down “anywhere” that for a moment he could not see an uncluttered place, but at last he discovered a small one beside the sink.

  “Thank you. I’m afraid that—” She stopped. She was staring at a chair in front of the kitchen table.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Giovanni’s ski jacket. It was there, on the back of that chair this morning, when I first got up to let in the milkman. Now it’s gone.”

  Basil caught a note of hysteria. He spoke quietly, hoping to calm her. “Could he have put it on and gone out after you went back to bed?”

  “Of course not! He knows he’s not supposed to go out this morning, but . . . Excuse me, Dr. Willing. It’s time I woke him.”

  She opened a door. Basil saw an enclosed spiral staircase. Backstairs. He stood at the foot, listening to her quick tread on the stairs, then in the hall above.

  “Giovanni! Time to get up now! I—”

  The silence was as sudden as if a soundproof door had shut. Then Basil heard quicker steps clattering along the hall and stumbling down the stairs. She surged around the last curve and halted as she saw him still standing at the foot of the stairs.

  “Dr. Willing! Giovanni is gone!”

  Chapter Twelve

  FOR A FEW MOMENTS neither Lucinda nor Vanya could move. They could only stand and stare. Outside, the fog was lifting. Suddenly a shaft of chill winter sunshine pierced the skylight and threw into high relief the contents of the trunk nearest their feet.

  Lucinda stooped and picked up the feather fan with ivory sticks. The feathers were downy, not very large, white at the center, shading through off-white to oyster-white to gray at the edge. Fronds of feather drifted to the floor when she opened the fan.

  “I wonder what kind of feathers those are.” It was no effort to keep her voice down to a whisper now. Only a hushed voice could express her sense of shock. Her fingertips touched the feathers. “Soft as eiderdown.”

  “Maybe that’s what they are,” suggested Vanya. “Eiderdown.”

  Lucinda was looking at a ball dress of changeable silk, pale blue and rose, split down the middle because it had been handled so roughly. “How could anyone do such a thing?”

  Vanya smiled wickedly. “I bet you had something like this in mind when I caught you in Folly’s room only a day ago. Remember?”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  Her answer came slowly as if she were groping among a confusion of thoughts. “Perhaps some things are all right when you do them yourself, but dreadful when someone else does them. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Perhaps I’m changing. Perhaps yesterday I didn’t realize how obscene it would look.”

  “You thought of doing it because you hated Folly and the things were hers,” said Vanya. “But whoever owned these things has been dead a long time. Hate doesn’t last that long outside Corsica and Kentucky. Why was it done?”

  “I suppose these things belonged to David Crowe yesterday and belong to his wife now. Maybe someone hates the whole family. But who? You have to be awfully young to express hate this way.”

  “Like you yesterday?”

  “Like me yesterday. Young or insane. Or perhaps someone was looking for something and flew into a rage when the thing couldn’t be found.”

  “But what would anyone look for among all these old Crowe family things? David Crowe seems to have been the last of the lot and he’s dead.”

  “Mrs. Crowe perhaps? Looking for a will?”

  “Nobody keeps a will in a place like this. You leave the original with a lawyer and just have a copy in your safe deposit box.”

  “Then it’s madness.”

  “Or Mr. Splitfoot.”

  Lucinda looked at him sidewise.

  “I was only kidding,” said Vanya.

  “Then don’t. You didn’t hear those raps. I did.”

  She stooped and began folding the old silk dresses, putting them back into the trunk.

  “You’re not going to repack all this?”

  “Of course I am. We can’t let all these lovely old things get torn and dirty.”

  “But it will take hours and—”

  Suddenly he was speechless, Lucinda motionless. They could hear footsteps walking on a bare wooden floor. The upper floor? They both glanced toward the well by which they had climbed to the attic, listening for any sound that would mean the panel in the wall was moving. Everything had changed now they had found out that someone else knew about that panel—someone capable of violence.

  Lucinda reached out a hand and clasped Vanya’s. He helped her to her feet and they stood silent, listening. She let out a gusty breath. The feet were on the stairs now, going down, going away.

  Vanya dropped her hand and grinned, as if he were ashamed, as if he wanted to believe he had never been afraid of being caught even for a moment.

  Lucinda laid a finger across her lips.

&n
bsp; Voices were coming up the stairwell from the lower hall.

  “The living room will be the best place.”

  Vanya looked at Lucinda interrogatively. Without making a sound, her lips shaped A qwerty. “Captain Marriott.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Willing?”

  Again Lucinda’s lips shaped words: “Cyril Jones, village policeman.”

  On the side of the mountain nearest the Hudson, names were cosmopolitan, Armenian and Italian, Russian and Jewish, for the river was the original highway from the city. On the other side of the mountain, farther from the river, surnames were eighteenth-century English, and first names tended toward the rococo. Hard-working, simple men who looked like Jims and Joes and Bills answered to Algernon, Reginald or Vivian.

  Now Cyril Jones was speaking.

  “. . . and we can tell him what they say when he gets back. He ought to be here by now. Maybe he’s got lost in the woods again.” A touch of native scorn for the outsider.

  “Well, whatever is holding Dr. Willing up, we can’t wait for him.” That was Marriott once more. “Jocelyn, you’ll take notes.”

  “Who d’ya wanna see first?” That was Cyril Jones again.

  “Women first. After all, the men have alibis and the women don’t. I think we might start with Mrs. Swayne. Will you tell her?”

  “Sure.” Footsteps. “Hey! What’s that piece of paper doing on the hearth? It wasn’t there earlier this morning.”

  “Looks as if someone had tried to burn it.”

  “It’s not scorched. Just got some ashes on it.”

  “Writing?”

  “Typing. A letter . . . Well, well! Take a look.”

  “Huh! No signature, and it’s just addressed to Dearest. Who’s Dearest?”

  “Maybe Mrs. Swayne can tell us. I’ll get her.”

  Vanya put his lips close to Lucinda’s ear and whispered: “Would we hear better to the front of the attic, over the living room?”

  Lucinda shook her head. “They might hear us if we moved now. It’s all right here as long as they leave the hall door open, I think. Voices come up the stairwell nicely.”

  She lowered the lid of the nearest trunk carefully and sat down on it as if her legs had suddenly refused to bear her any longer.

  Vanya dropped to the floor beside her and sat cross-legged, mouthing another sentence: “This may be fun.”

  Lucinda shook her head. Her lips were compressed. Her face looked even paler than usual. Was that just the wan light of the winter sun filtering through dusty panes in the skylight overhead? Or was it something else? Something like fear?

  She spoke in a whisper scarcely audible to Vanya.

  “If we could get out of here now without being caught, I’d go.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Oh, Vanya, I’m beginning to feel differently about a lot of things. I don’t want to know the secrets of other people’s lives any more. I don’t even want to know who murdered David Crowe now. It might be somebody we like.”

  “When did all this start?”

  “Just now, I think. When we saw someone had been throwing things around here in the attic. It was so ugly.”

  “You really are afraid of Mr. Splitfoot, aren’t you?”

  Lucinda gave him another sidewise look. “If you mean I’m afraid of a disembodied demon, no. But if you mean I’m afraid Mr. Splitfoot is a part of someone we know, yes.”

  This was a new idea to Vanya. “Split personality?”

  Lucinda shook her head. “Nothing quite so pathological. Just Mr. Hyde getting the upper hand of Dr. Jekyll, but each conscious of the other and remembering all the other does. It could happen to anybody. I think it happened to me when I wanted to wreck Folly’s room.”

  Vanya considered. “In that story the best thing is the place where Jekyll finds that Hyde can come when he isn’t wanted. Remember? Jekyll glances down at his hand and sees that it has become Hyde’s hairy paw without his knowing. Then he knows he’s damned and so does the reader.”

  “Yes, because it’s something everyone has experienced. If you give Hyde an inch, he takes an ell and then suddenly he’s you and the other you is dead.”

  Though she spoke in a whisper, Vanya heard emotion in her voice. He opened his mouth to answer her, but he was cut short by another sound from below. The rapid tattoo of high heels, the step of the older generation, female division. No one Lucinda’s age wore high heels any more.

  They heard Folly’s carrying voice, as if she were in the same room.

  “Don’t apologize, Captain Marriott. I’m glad to do anything I can to help in such dreadful circumstances. I only hope I can help.”

  Lucinda could visualize her stepmother. It wouldn’t be slacks for the police; it would be a dress and wool on such a cold day, the ivory white or the powder pink. The shoes would be claret red with the pink dress or ivory white with the ivory dress and there would be a scarf. Folly liked a scarf to match her jewels and contrast with her dress. Emerald satin and an emerald brooch with the ivory dress. Rose satin and a ruby brooch with the pink dress. She did not subscribe to the outmoded tradition that precious stones were for evening only. With her height and slenderness and her velvet voice she could carry off a certain extravagance in dress that would have been lethal to a dumpy woman with a harsh voice, a woman like Serena Crowe.

  At the moment Folly would be seating herself with the grace of a woman who had been trained for the stage—head high, shoulders back, spine straight, ankles crossed, but not knees, hands lying negligently in her lap, palms up. No obscene groping for the seat of her chair with her bottom and no squatting with knees pointing north and south. Actresses were the only women who still knew how to sit, stand and walk. . . .

  The sound of her own name drew Lucinda’s attention back to the conversation below.

  “. . . any word of Lucinda?” asked Folly.

  “Not yet.”

  “She’s such a difficult child! You know she slept all through the fuss when David Crowe’s death was discovered.”

  “She’d had a sedative, hadn’t she?”

  “Yes, but still . . . There was quite a commotion. It woke everyone else but Lucinda. Even with a sedative I don’t believe I could have slept through that hubbub. As it was, I was awake for hours afterward.”

  Liar! I got up at dawn and you were snoring . . .

  “Of course after that I overslept and, when I finally woke, Lucinda was gone. It was such a shock on top of everything else.”

  “Don’t worry. She can’t have gone far, and I’ve got two men looking for her. Meanwhile, we must ask you certain questions. Have you and your husband known the Crowes long, Mrs. Swayne?”

  “Oh, yes, David Crowe and Frank were at school together and then at Harvard years ago. When David became editor at Alcott and Frank became one of his authors and that must have been fifteen years ago when Lucinda’s mother was alive. Of course I haven’t known the Crowes that long. I met them when I married Frank four years ago. And Frank hasn’t known Serena Crowe that long either. Only since she married David eight or ten years ago.”

  “Have you seen a great deal of them since you rented this house from them last year?”

  “We’ve seen more of David than Serena. She is very much a city person. She doesn’t like the country except in hot weather. David was brought up near Pratt’s Landing and he’s very much—he was very much attached to this neighborhood. All last autumn he came up alone for weekends during the deer season and later in winter for skiing, and he always stayed with us. Perhaps he came often because he was trying to persuade Frank to buy the house. Serena didn’t show much interest until last spring when I did a little altering and decorating. That was when we had finally decided to buy the house.”

  A little? Lucinda snorted. Just repairing the whole shebang and building a huge dining room and putting about ten gardeners at work so there was no peace outdoors and
she had to spend most of her time at Vanya’s house, where things were so much more relaxed. . . .

  “What did Lucinda mean by the name ‘Mr. Splitfoot’?”

  A crystal laugh. “Can’t you guess? The cloven hoof. Mr. Splitfoot is an old name for the devil around here. All sorts of curious old ideas linger in mountain country. Where transportation and communication are difficult, people are bound to be conservative.”

  “Or backward?”

  “That depends on the point of view. I can see you’re not a Green County man.”

  “I’m from Pennsylvania.”

  “Then you should realize that ecologically these mountains are part of the Appalachian montane block. Perhaps we’re part of Appalachia economically as well. There’s not much money here.”

  “Skiing will put an end to that.” It was Cyril Jones’ voice. “Give us a winter income—winter visitors as well as summer visitors—and real estate values will rise and everything will be different. We might even get light industry to move in.”

  “I wonder. David used to say that every attempt to establish industry here has failed as if there were a curse on the place. Tanning, quarrying, everything.”

  A masculine laugh. “Who’s responsible for the curse?”

  “The Indians, perhaps. They were afraid of the mountains, and, if you look up at them from the Hudson River valley, you can see why. They stand against the sky like a great rampart, wave after wave of smoky blue, remote, enigmatic. Game was plentiful, but the Indians did little hunting here. To spend a night alone here was a puberty rite, a test of manhood. Like the greater mountains of Attica and India, these, too, were known as the Abode of the Gods.

  “So . . .” The listeners could hear a smile in her voice.

  “High, wooded places have always belonged to Pan, the God of Fear. Mr. Splitfoot, who also walks on a cloven hoof, is a medieval version.”

  Vanya and Lucinda exchanged an uneasy glance.

  “Remember what you said,” whispered Vanya. “Mr. Splitfoot is just the Hyde part of someone we know.”