“Ah, Wendy …” He said it. The crying of his heart was in the timbre of his voice. “I wish you could have talked to me, whatever it is. I wish I could have listened, in those days. But I thought … I was young. I thought you had everything.”
No one stirred.
“What was it that you wanted?” he asked, in another moment.
No answer.
“Why did you ever marry me?” If he could only reach her, this one last chance.
She rolled her dark head, suddenly. “I forget,” said Wendy drearily.
“Now you want to marry him? So much?” “Hell-bent,” Edie had said. Harold was breaking his heart to understand.
“I don’t know,” said Wendy faintly.
“I wish I could have figured out what it was you really wanted. I wish you could have come away with me, and lived in an apartment.” He did wish that. He did wish she could have got away from here.
“That was not for me,” she said. “Not for me.”
But why not for her? he wondered. “Did you feel … so bad,” he asked her, “about the baby’s ears?”
“No,” said Wendy. “Not for me, that’s all. Not for me.” It was so dreary. She sounded as if she had always been defeated.
“Wendy, do you love …?” He was thinking about sermons that said you must love or perish. He didn’t know how to finish.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, wiggling. “Don’t talk.” Then she raised up. “Anywhere,” she burst. “I wish …” But she didn’t say what she wished so fervently.
Harold said, gently, “If I could do it all over again, I would. I wish I could.” He wasn’t asking for the future. He waited to know whether she understood his basic apology for not having been what she wanted. “Do you know that?”
In a moment, Wendy’s head fell and turned slowly to bury one ear. Her hand came up and covered the other. Harold guessed it didn’t matter whether she knew. She didn’t care. It was an answer of sorts. “I’m truly sorry,” he murmured. The strong arm, that had been something to lean against, now seemed to be helping him sink back. He wanted to say thanks but he didn’t, couldn’t. Love and let go.
Edie stared out the window. She had hated Wendy. She had let her temper go, just now, and that wasn’t any good either. Anger and hate. The destroyers. She heard, in Harold’s voice, what was right. To try to understand, to forgive, to go on loving. (Oh, poor kid!) Well, that’s fine, she thought. That’s right and good, I guess. BUT. ALSO. MEANWHILE. She rebelled, fiercely.
She looked up into the tree and thought that there was a huge and flaming BUT, and a hard ALSO, and an urgent MEANWHILE. It was a good and useful idea to learn to dissipate the destructive emotions that ate on one’s own insides. The boy had learned to do it, in order to save himself.
BUT, was it enough, just to save yourself from that? When long before you could “save” somebody like Wendy, you had to fight what she did? Didn’t you? MEANWHILE, she mustn’t be allowed to go on, ruthlessly lying and destroying. Oh yes, try to understand her. ALSO try to stop her. If you could stop her, without hating her, so much the better. But she had to be stopped, just the same. My father was wrong, in part, she thought. Or I’m not like him. No, I am not like him. I thought I was. She turned.
Tyler was coming in. The ambulance men were behind him—two in white coats—to take Harold away. Harold agreed. He was even now trying to get to his feet. Poor kid! Chewed up in this house, and spat out, and never mind his pain? His injuries?
Edie thought, But here is a wrong. And it is Wendy’s doing, this wrong. It’s her false witness that is forcing them to take him as a suspect. Why doesn’t my witness count? Can’t I stop it?
It seemed she hadn’t. So it was dead-end, frustration alley. The police would take the scapegoat off to a prison ward, for another black mark on him and another martyrdom. Harold would survive. But would he ever get his child?
Edie had been in on custody cases. She could hear a judge saying, “In view of the fact that he is a young man, alone—in view, also, of his psychiatric history and his police record.”
“Your Honor, he was acquitted.”
“I am aware of that. Even so, in view of the circumstances and position of the mother’s family, and this child’s affliction—all things taken together—for the best good of the child …”
But the Whitmans would not be for the best good of the child.
So, you kicked and screamed a little, but then your wits began to work like rats, hunting and searching for some way to stop them.
Granny said, suddenly and imperiously, from her frozen face that looked blind because she could not hear. “Will someone be kind enough to bring me a glass of cold water?”
And Edie was up on her toes.
“Mr. Tyler.” Her tone turned him. “There is a glass on the mantelpiece. When he came, yesterday, he was very hot and tired. That glass has my fingerprints and Harold’s on it. When did we put them there? Have you seen him offered anything? Don’t you think you ought to take along the evidence that proves his alibi?”
A kind of fading took place on Tyler’s face. He followed her gesture and found the drinking glass. He teased it out of concealment, gingerly. The boys from the ambulance, and one of the cops from the car, were on the foyer steps. “Hold it a minute,” Tyler said to them. (He hadn’t for some time, seemingly, doubted that the Page kid had this nutty alibi.)
“All right,” he said to Conrad savagely. “Now, you run me down, right now, exactly who was in and out of here last night.”
“I was on,” Conrad said eagerly, “from midnight.”
“Charles!” Ted yelped. “Surely …” You are my brother-in-law, the sentence finished, unsaid.
“Sit down,” roared Tyler and blasted Ted back into the chair.
He looked around. Ted settled. The old lady sitting still, deaf as a post. She hadn’t done it. Mungo, against the wall, keeping out of it in eighteen languages. Scared green, too. The Whitman kid, lying on her face. A nut. A kook. Harold Page half-up, sagged to rest on the arm of the chair. Edie Thompson standing there. “Sit down, Edith,” Tyler said, in a normal voice that was not unkind.
She said, “Thank you.”
“When I take over at midnight,” Conrad was eager to show his mettle, “Carlson tells me that the old lady is in, and her …” Conrad flipped a finger toward Edie, “and Mr. Whitman, he’d come in, the middle of the evening. Now, the young lady on the couch, there—she and the boyfriend—they came in just about then. I saw myself that he didn’t stay but a couple of minutes.”
Granny said, in the loud voice of the totally deaf, breaking in without regard to anyone’s thoughts but her own, “Are all of you deaf? I believe that I requested a glass of water.”
Ronnie Mungo said smoothly, “May I fetch Mrs. Whitman her drink, sir?”
“Go ahead,” said Tyler. (And if you run, boy, then I’ve got you.)
Mungo went edging along to the dining room door. Something was on his mind, all right. “And pretty soon,” the guard was continuing, “comes the last one in, the housekeeper or whatever she is. And that’s it, sir. And nobody got out.”
“Where is Mrs. Beck, now?” said Tyler, in a tone that was unusually light for him.
He had better find out!
He sent the cop into the east wing. (The other cop was out in the car, stirring up inquiries about Mungo.) When Ted Whitman began to sputter, Tyler sent him along to “show the man.” Ted was like a poorly trained small child; you had to give him something to do, to stop his nuisance.
Conrad said he knew the house, so Tyler sent him to the kitchen wing. As he went, Mungo returned with a glass of water. Mungo asked no questions. Tyler stopped himself from thinking that this was odd. It might or might not be. Tyler had to remember to compensate for his own prejudice.
The ambulance boys were enough to take over here, so Tyler gave them the nod, to look after Page and keep the peace. He himself went up the stairs.
The turret
room was a weird place. He glanced into its bath, the closet, amused to think that the whole dark prisonlike area was probably thick with Page’s fingerprints. That Edith was a spunky one, though. Young, and a little ignorant, as the young are bound to be. But a doer. The Chief rather fancied a doer. He could forgive a lot in a person who did things. Oh, she had a down on her cousin Wendy, that was for sure, and wasn’t going to let Wendy Whitman get away with a thing. If she could help it. Which she can’t probably, thought Tyler. He himself felt almost convinced that Wendy had been the one to battle Myra on Wednesday night. Senseless violence. That was from kooks. And she was a kook, of the purest ray serene. But where had Mungo been at the time? Tyler wanted to know that. And would.
Meantime, what about this housekeeper? A funny one.
He came out of the turret and climbed to the upper balcony. He glanced down into the deep room where Edie and one of the white coats were bending over Harold Page. Wendy Whitman, on the sofa, looked like a squashed fly from here.
Tyler knew he couldn’t sweep her up and tidy her away to his jail because she had broken the law. No proof. No evidence. But the family doctor was coming, and Tyler thought that Wendy would be swept up, privately, into some expensive joint and be out of the way for a while, at least. It would be the best that could be done. A female. A rich one. A young one. Even if he had the proof, had the evidence, he thought bitterly.
But Wendy had not been the murderer. He couldn’t pin that on her, even in his imagination. Not her style. Nor did he doubt her alibi. Oh, she had put Myra into the hospital in the first place. Probably. Into the coma. Somebody hadn’t wanted Myra to come out of it. Who? Mungo? Or the housekeeper, maybe?
He wanted that one.
He pushed at a door. Wendy’s room. Quite a layout. Bath enormous. Built-in wardrobes. Even a kind of private sunroom overlooking the town.
He looked over his town. Funny, you could see the whole town from here; yet you didn’t really see it. It lay there like a … well, like a skeleton. You saw where the bones were connected with the bones. But the throbbing flesh, the moving changing blood of it, you could not sense from here.
Not that these people even try, he brooded. They don’t notice that they are a part of a world. Go through their lives, getting what they get. How am I? That is the question. The hell with what’s down there, or out there, or over there—unless and until it begins to bother me.
Many lived like that. Many, rich and poor.
Oh, he conceded that there were loners, natural loners, people who didn’t trespass but didn’t duck in a crisis, either. They were fine. Some of them were fine.
But there are some others—and Charles Tyler, for his sins or his fate, was one of them—who can’t help seeing all around, how things flow, how causes affect, and effects cause, and currents cross, and tendencies rise and fall. Can’t help trying to do something that will improve the whole body. Even if it is only to sweep one town, like a good housekeeper, every day, and in spite of the dust that would settle back, still keep the place at least from being buried under its own filth and rotting entirely.
Now, now, it wasn’t a bad little town. He watched it. He knew quite a lot that went on under those roof lids—in all-priced houses. But he kept the streets fairly safe and clean, enforcing the laws.
That was his job. He believed in it. You had to have law and the law had to be enforced. That might be the best that you could do, and not quite good enough, but that much had to be done.
He could see the Whitman gates from here. A bit of a crowd accumulated? Oh, sure. He wouldn’t be sitting on this nest of snakes all by himself for much longer.
Well, put the boy in the hospital—for his own protection, if for nothing else. And apprehend the murderer. He sighed, turned.
Guest room. Bare. Hall closet. Nothing. He started down.
Harold Page was having a vision. He felt pretty groggy. They said he was running a pretty good fever. He guessed he must be. Sunk in the chair … would it be forever?… he kept seeing the common room at the hospital, his hospital, and the people in it. It was a pattern and not a pattern. You’d think, at first, that it was just an ordinary bunch of people.
But the difference was, each person there was a bead, sliding on its own string. It might look as if the threads were crossing, the beads touching, clustering, attracted or repelled. But it wasn’t so. (Like a boy and girl could get married and all, and yet not really touch.) Well, those poor people at the hospital, each was a separate bead, sliding on his own thread, and each was very lonely and frightened.
Until the doctor came. And then the doctor, who was trained and who would know how … then it was as if the beads would melt and give a little. Or, the poor people would awaken to where they were and who else was there. So the pattern made a little something.
He sure hoped that he could get to be a doctor. He wondered whether he ever would. He would like it, very much.
Nobody moved here. Nobody spoke. Nobody connected.
Except Edie, who was trying to smile cheer and comfort to him. Harold smiled at her.
Conrad said, “No housekeeper anywhere out this way, sir.” Tyler had met him in the dining room.
“You check with your man on the back, whether she left the house?”
“Thought of that.” Conrad appreciated Tyler’s competence. “Malone was on the dining room corner, all right—only you sent him down to the gates.”
“Then she could have gone out the back way.”
“Could have. Probably did. But …”
“Take a look in the cellar,” said Tyler practically. “Try the outside cellar door. Maybe they heard her getting out that way.” But why? he wondered.
“Right, sir. But there’s something I got to thinking … Excuse me. The truth is, the Page kid hasn’t got a perfect alibi.”
“That so?”
“I don’t think so. Not if it could have happened, at the hospital, around midnight? Not much later?”
“That’s close. Goon.”
“Well, right about then, was when I heard this dame screaming, inside. So I come in. It was only the Whitman girl, blowing her top. But see, then is when I searched the round room, the one halfway up. And there was nobody to see the front door, except the—what’s her name, Edith?—the one who’s on Page’s side all the time.”
“How long were you off guard?” Tyler was quick.
“Five minutes, anyhow. That’s time for him to slip in the front door. Murray, on the other corner, mightn’t have seen. Fact, see … he wasn’t supposed to cover the front door. I was. So I just thought …”
“Uh huh,” said Tyler.
(Yep, that kind of case. Timetables. And one hell of a lot of psychology, he thought gloomily.)
“What was she blowing her top about?” he asked. “The Whitman kid?”
“Well, I … uh … was a little late getting in. So I dunno.” Conrad looked earnest. “I wasn’t too sure what Mr. Whitman would want me to do.”
Tyler didn’t condemn him for being a hired hand, which he was.
Conrad was enjoying himself. He liked making reports. He liked not having the responsibility. But sounding sharp. It didn’t cross his mind that he had forgotten something.
In the big room, nobody moved. Nobody spoke. And it could not hold. Edie had a gone feeling, as if she’d had a tip that something terrible was going to happen, very soon.
Then Granny, with a languid motion of her arm, held up the empty glass and Ronnie Mungo, for his manners, moved helpfully and took it from her. He put it on the table at the end of the sofa. It clicked on the wood. And Wendy convulsed. She bounced to sit up. Her hair was a great tangle. Her eyes looked hot. Immediately, there was a force loose, and what it would do, no one could know. She sent one wild look around.
Granny could see, and her pale hand came up and her chin up, and it was an order. So Ronnie Mungo—who had constituted himself Granny’s aide-de-camp, somehow—with a closed obedient look on his face, bent over and to
uched Wendy on her nape.
Wendy was on her feet, like a rocket. “Who touched me?” she screamed. “Who touched me?”
Chapter Sixteen
MRS. BECK was roused from stupor to alarm at the piercing sound of Wendy’s voice.
Oh, no, no! No, no! She knew that note. What could she do? How could she stop it? She twisted, and lifted, and pain was brutal, but her hand got all the way up to the knob.
Ronnie moved to take hold of Wendy but she went whirling. She whirled back. “Ronnie …” A high shrill hysteria. “Let’s go. Why can’t we go?”
But now Granny had her ears turned on. “Wendy, you absolutely cannot elope. It would not do, at a time like this. Will someone kindly give that child a pill or a shot or something? Where is Dr. Brewster? I called him hours ago. Where is Mrs. Beck, for pity’s sakes? We pay the woman. Teddy …?”
Ted had come out of the east wing, blinking.
“We couldn’t find Mrs. Beck, Mother,” he said, querulously, and then, “Charles?”
Wendy whirled. Tyler was there. Conrad, behind him, was poised, watching, with his hand on the knob of the cellar door.
Wendy spun. She threw out her right arm, taut, to its fullest extension. “Look! It’s the madman! He’s inside, Daddy! Don’t let him hurt me anymore?”
She ran. In panic. Her small feet were quick in her ridiculous little shoes. She ran straight on, toward Harold. She veered. She ran toward the two men in white coats, who waited respectfully at the bottom of the foyer steps. She veered, reversed, and ran up the stairs.
Ronnie had been drawn after her. He called up, standing under the balcony, “Oh, come off it, Wendy,” like a man who had had enough, and more.
Wendy shrilled down. “You all don’t think he’s dangerous? Well, you are stupid! All of you!”
Wendy ran on upward, a flash of bright blue, vanishing like a brilliant bird in flight.
Or a bright bead, sliding …
And Granny screamed.
The light was bright enough to hurt, when the man opened the door and Mrs. Beck slumped forward. There was a commotion. Seemed like a lot of men. Her arm, her whole side, hurt like sixty. Two of the men were like doctors. She didn’t quite pass out under their ministrations. She knew she’d better not. Oh, it didn’t hurt to play as weak as she liked, until she saw a chance. Or saw whether she had a chance—as she thought she might. After all. After all. If you’re lucky—and if you are shrewd, of course, besides.
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