Gift Shop

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Would you like to know,” she said, “what’s going on in the castle and who the guests are?”

  He grunted as ungraciously as possible and sipped his whiskey while Jean’s fingers slipped along the sides of her glass and she talked rapidly and from time to time she bounced a little; she smiled a little. (She could not help it.)

  “It’s haunted!” she said. “The castle is. They have no less than two ghosts. No connection, either. One is a hundred years older than the other. Can you imagine? Well, it seems Mr. Butler has become a kind of ghost buff. Aficionado? So what’s going on is … they have a medium up there, an English woman, and they also have a psychic researcher, a man, some kind of professor, suspected to be, if not English, too—at least not Irish. Mr. Butler would love to have an authenticated ghost, you see, and that’s what he’s after. But Mrs. Roach, who was telling me, she thinks that any decent Irish ghost will not oblige. And the whole village is betting on the ghosts, both of them, not to show up.”

  Jean bounced with delight. (She could not help it.)

  “You see,” she tried to simmer down, “Mr. Butler belongs to a branch of an Irish family, which branch went and traitorously lived in England for a while. It’s his wife who belongs to the castle. I mean, the castle belonged to her folks. So she’s okay with the villagers, but they aren’t crazy about Mr. Butler, or his habit of hiring too much English help. The ghosts, you see, are only his ghosts-in-law. Oh, I think it’s such a … I’m sorry, Harry.” Jean snuffled, in order not to chortle.

  “So?” said Harry. “Ghosts, is it? That’s your contribution? And you’re thinking, what a chance for me to dress up and go be a ghost, thus stealing the you-know-what, clanking chains the while.”

  He looked so gloomy as he spoke this nonsense that Jean thought she was going to die. She said, half strangling, “It’ll have to be me. There’s always a White Lady. I could make do with a sh-sheet …”

  “Damn it,” said Harry, looking around fiercely. “In broad daylight, on Sunday afternoon, they’re not hunting ghosts now.”

  “The village is dying to know whether they are,” said Jean, with bright moist eyes, “because it’s very bad luck to poke up ghosts on Sunday. Oh, Harry, I don’t mean to be so t-tickled.”

  “Drink your drink,” he said coldly. “Ghosts-on-Sunday, hell-on-Monday. We’re going up there. On business.”

  So Jean took a large swallow of Irish whiskey, neat, and now she thought that she would die.

  Harry got her on her feet, pounding her back, and he took her out of the hotel, blind as she was, with streaming eyes, and held her dangling over his arm while he asked the lad for directions.

  “You’ll go back the way you came,” the lad said in a sunny fashion, “and turn to the right, the first way you’ll come upon, and you’ll be brought to the gatehouse.”

  “So there’s a gate, eh? In a fence? Or a wall? Or what? A moat, perchance?”

  Jean strangled away, coughing and laughing like a madwoman.

  The lad said, “Oh, they’ve a great fence, up there.” He used his pipe for emphasis. “But not all the way around,” he added merrily.

  Harry took poor, helpless Jean over to the car and put her into it.

  Ignoring her paroxysms, he drove back the way they’d come, took the first right turn on a road that wound charmingly through the wood and upward. When the car came out into the grassy open, there was the fence. Tall. Iron. There were the tall gates. Closed. There was a cottage that must be the gatehouse.

  Harry stopped the car about fifty feet away.

  Jean had not quite died. By opening her mouth wide, and breathing hard and achieving a kind of whoo-whooing—like a strong wind in a pine tree—that cooled, she had fought back to some semblance of control. Harry got out and stood in the road, looking gloomily at her. The gloomier he looked the more she wanted to scream with laughter. She had taken a strong hold on herself, but it couldn’t last.

  She said, “You’d better go by yourself. I w-wouldn’t inspire much confidence.”

  “Not with a breath like the tongue of a dragon,” said Harry, “and cackling like a little red hen, in the bargain.”

  She squeaked like a mouse. She was going to die, this time.

  She breathed hard. “Whooo, whooo. Whoo-eye don’t you just go? I want to admire the b-beauties of nature any … hoo-hoo-how.” Keeping her mouth stiff, she whimpered helplessly.

  So Harry took her by the chin and turned her face up and kissed her with such great and tender skill that Jean felt as if she were going to die, all right—but in quite another way.

  When he let her go, he said, “All right, now? Sober?”

  Oh, he knew too much. She closed her self-betraying eyes. He patted her cheek. “Find something to think about, why don’t you? I’ll be quick. Or holler, if I need you.” Harry went loping away, onward to the gates.

  Jean scrunched down in the seat and kept her eyes tight shut, to admire the beauties of nature. Because he … Because gosh … Because, what was this, for heaven’s sakes!

  Chapter Fourteen

  With his ego pleasantly reviving, for after all there were some areas in which Harry Fairchild could deem himself an expert, he knocked upon the gates and then upon the cottage door a second time, and finally wheedled his way into the house and finally persuaded the woman there, a thin woman who looked as if she had fed upon porridge with lumps in it ever since she had been born, to let him speak on the private telephone.

  Where he wheedled and insisted until Mr. Henry Butler, pried at last away from the supernatural, came on the line.

  Harry made his pitch. The man had a clipped and choppy way of speaking and a perfectly obtuse conviction that Harry could not possibly matter. Furthermore, Mr. Butler had spoken. He had already and, in his opinion, most graciously, agreed to see Mr. Fairchild in a day or two. Mr. Butler was not going to take this pronouncement under any kind of advisement with any notion of altering it. It was very good of him, as it stood.

  At last Harry went so far as to say that all he wanted to do was buy a ceramic piggy bank. At which time Mr. Butler distinctly snorted. He said that that was an insubstantial excuse for so much argument, was it not?

  “A pig is a little more substantial than a ghost, is it not?” yelled Harry.

  “Good day.”

  Harry hung up, too, cursing his own too-short temper, and thought about making a dash, physically, and getting into the damn castle by main strength. But by now a man had appeared in the cottage, rather a large fellow, and dour, too. Harry didn’t think he’d make it.

  He also thought better of asking these guardians-of-the-gates, man and wife, to tell him how to break in, for the purpose of pig-snatching. No, he must retreat for the nonce, in all wisdom, and regroup himself.

  He was thinking that persistence might do it, viz. little drops of water. He would phone in an hour. And then again, every hour on the hour. Wear Butler down. Meantime, consider whether a spot of burglary was feasible. After dark, of course, if it ever did get dark in this country, and if they didn’t have vicious dogs, or some breed of dragon, guarding the joint.

  Absorbed in the problem, he walked down the road to the car. When he was ten feet away he thought Jean must have folded over on the seat. Not asleep again, was she?

  He hurried a little. There was no one on the seat of the car.

  Harry felt annoyed. Now what? Gone after wild flowers? She certainly was nowhere on the open grass. He walked away beyond the car and began to peer into the thin fringes of the woods. He saw where the iron fence ended. Yah, not all the way around! Just a front, eh? he jeered silently. But where the devil was that girl?

  He kept walking, peering as best he could down what natural vistas there were. It was green, in there. Very green – shadowed and cool. But he could not see her anywhere.

  Should he wait in the car? Or look the other direction? It was true that he wouldn’t have seen her, had she walked past the cottage. So Harry raced off in the other directio
n. The iron fence ran some distance. How could she have got this far?

  From here, he could see a portion of the village. Maybe she had walked back to the hotel. Mad at him. Nonsense. If there was one thing he knew for sure, Jean Cunliffe was not that kind of girl.

  Harry felt twinges of alarm. He seemed to have lost her. But this would not do. He hurried back to the gatehouse. The man who had arrived might have seen something as he was arriving.

  The man had. He had walked past a car and it had been empty. He had seen no young woman at all. He had seen a moving car, indeed, a man driving, wavering over to the right side, the way it was dangerous, and hadn’t he thought so at the time?

  Harry said, “Okay. How do I get in touch with the village constabulary?”

  But in the village, they told him, there was no constable. Why would there be?

  Jean came to herself with a pang of pain like a drumbeat, and a continuing pounding in her head. Why was it so dark? Was she blind? No, there was a shadow, a human presence, a man. Harry?

  She convulsed. There was something wrong with her body, the position of her limbs. Something must have hit her on the head. Something now stung, and stung again, the flesh of her calves and the tender area behind her knees.

  She was lying on a floor, and there was a man who said (in a voice not Harry’s), “You may as well not yell. I’ll fix that, too, in a minute.”

  He seemed to be wrapping a length of rope around her legs, at the knees. He was tying her up. Like a package for the post. She yanked at whatever was holding her arms. Her wrists seemed to be wearing, of all things, metal bracelets. Handcuffs! Chaining her wrists together behind her back! The effect was crippling. She opened her mouth to yell as loud as she could.

  The man put his hand over her mouth and squeezed her face cruelly. When he let go, she was in tears.

  He finished with the rope swiftly. “Okay,” he said, “open wide. I can’t mess around with you, right now.”

  Then he was stuffing something into her mouth and she gagged and choked. But she had seen and recognized his face.

  A memory of white flowers. Brown suit. Flickety little eyes. Varney!

  After a while, when she had learned how to relax her throat and endure the loathsomeness of the gag in her mouth, everything seemed very quiet. She had governed her breathing. Now she began to be able to see all around. It was not dark where she was, only dim. Dim and quiet. She was alone, wherever she was. The man had gone.

  She was lying on a floor of hard-packed earth, within walls made of great crude stones fitted together in a primitive manner. There was one tiny square, open to a greenish light. There was a broken door over there, half-closed. Over her head sagged a thatch, dusty and rusty and rotten. She was bound, gagged, handcuffed, and imprisoned within what could only be called a hut. A ruin. There was an ancient blackened fireplace, gaping cold and crawling with loathsome medieval insects, she had no doubt. Everything was too old. Her skin crawled. She longed for a wide, crisp, desert place. She was abruptly disenchanted with legend and antiquity.

  But, in a slow dawning, she seemed to know where she was. Surely she had seen this very ruined hut from the road, along the way they had come, and feasted on the sight, too. It must be visible from the road. Otherwise, how could Varney have found it? Varney, with his American voice, as foreign here as she.

  But if it was visible from the road, it was not far. Two hundred, three hundred feet? Could she roll, creep, get out of here, and to the road?

  She could not. The rope was attached somewhere, like a tether.

  Now that American voice played back, in her mind. She had heard, but not attended to, yet somehow had recorded this. In the midst of her choking struggles, the man had said to her, “Okay, Cunliffe. I guess you’ll stay. I got a thing to do. Then we’ll hear from you … all about pigs.”

  He was coming back, to hear all about pigs.

  So Jean lay trembling and began to think, in pain, about pain. She had never had much of it. Not yet.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Harry had roused the village. The lad with the pipe turned out to be the hotel man’s son, one Johnny Roach. He took to the rousing with gusto. He had put his fingers in his mouth and emitted shrieking whistles. Seven or eight males, and as many females, were even now gathered before the hotel and a great babbling was going up, arguments about procedure, joyously joined.

  Harry was inside on the phone, trying to rouse the authorities in the nearest sizable town. The man at the gatehouse had promised (providing he had Mr. Butler’s consent) to rouse the outdoor staff at the castle to search the woods. Harry was afraid, however, that Jean was no longer near enough to be found by beaters on foot. He had no proof. A driver, who tended to drive on the right, was flimsy evidence of international crime. He had no powers. Except to talk fast on the phone. He was, more or less patiently, trying to convey his serious alarm into a strange ear, when he heard a feminine American voice calling his name. His heart jumped.

  Dorinda said, “Oh, Harry, there you are! I’ve had the worst time finding you.”

  And there she was, elegant in a tawny dress, a tawny jacket, with a choker of gold-colored beads around her slender neck. Which Harry, at once, felt like wringing.

  He snapped some final words into the phone and left it.

  “Where is Jean Cunliffe?” he said to Dorinda, knowing now exactly what was meant by “a cold fury.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, darling,” she said. “Why did you run out on me? I wanted to talk to you, in Amsterdam. We’ve had the worst time. Oh, this is Vance Miller, who is with me. Here is Harry Fairchild, Vance. At last.”

  She was smiling. She was stripping off fawn-colored gloves. The man who was with her held his felt hat to his puny breast and nodded politely.

  Harry said, “What do you want with me? What do you want, Dorinda?”

  “Well, for pity’s sake,” said Dorinda, “don’t bite! I want the same thing you want, of course. I want the little girl. Where is she?”

  “What do you want with the little girl? What’s she to you?” He would wring her neck in a minute.

  “Why, she’s my little sister,” said Dorinda.

  The inside of Harry’s head began to roar.

  The Roach boy dashed in and said, “We’re off!” and dashed off.

  Dorinda said, “Vance, dear, could you find us something to drink, do you suppose? Harry, now come, don’t look so confounded. Sit down and tell me. What is happening here? Have you found another piggy bank? Was there a message in it?”

  Harry went into the parlor and sat down. The fact was, he didn’t know what else to do. She followed him and sat down, too, with grace. Her face had become grave.

  “I’m afraid it’s getting serious. Don’t you think so? Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  He said, “It’s getting serious, all right. Where is Jean Cunliffe?”

  “Your little friend? That’s what is troubling everybody?” She looked around as if to say, but should it, really?

  Harry said, savagely, “I’ll listen to you, for five minutes. Or less—if it isn’t fascinating.”

  “Oh, Harry,” Dorinda sighed, “why so grim?” The little man came in his shadowy way and, evidently having prevailed upon the hotelkeeper’s natural instinct to be hospitable, gave them whiskey. Dorinda thanked him. Then he too sat down, and where he sat, although it was in the middle of the room, became mysteriously a corner.

  “I had thought, you see,” said Dorinda, “that you and I were on opposite sides. But now I’m sure we had better join forces, at least for the time being. My poor little stepmother is in a hospital. Did you know that? Some people … Well, it just isn’t the time for fun and games.” She smiled and sipped. Expert and dainty.

  Harry didn’t open his mouth. He was listening. His very pores were open to receive the truth about Dorinda.

  “To begin at the beginning,” sighed Dorinda, “and, Harry, you mustn’t look so dense, my father married a wife. Five years
ago, I think. She’s rather a cuddly little creature, Marybelle. I didn’t mind, you see. I’m not at home very much anymore. And after all, one’s father has his needs.”

  Harry glanced at his wristwatch and Dorinda went faster.

  “But then this man, this Beckenhauer, he came and all the trouble began. My father hadn’t known a thing about Marybelle’s marriage to your father. Nor, of course, about a child. Well, it all came out. It had to. The point is, my father is a man of some … status. He doesn’t care for the idea of bigamy. So there was a period of … well, call it confusion. But Marybelle has her little ways, and he began to think that she must have her child—or lose her mind.” Dorinda made a moue. “He’s fond of her. But naturally, although he wants to find the child, for her sake, for both their sakes, he wants to do it without publicity, if possible. And since I happen to be fond of my father, I thought …”

  “That you would see what you could do,” barked Harry. “So you nipped yourself to Los Angeles and picked me up.”

  “Well,” said Dorinda, with her gentle smile, “the Fairchilds were a jump ahead. Father, of course, had hired people. But I thought I might find out just how far ahead the Fairchilds were.”

  (And chose the weak spot, thought Harry. Shooo-er you did! He didn’t know what else to believe—but this he believed.)

  “By following me, you’d get ahead?” he snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me, ask me?”

  “It was fun while it lasted,” she said wistfully. “But we can’t have that sort of thing anymore, can we? They’ll fight out custody. So now, Harry, darling, please? Tell me all about it?”

  She seemed to think that now he would.

  “How did you follow me here?” said Harry coldly.

  “Oh, Vance, you see …”

  “Who is he?”

  The little man said apologetically, “Vance Miller. Private investigator.”

  “Vance was able to guess—once we knew you were after piggy banks—that there was one in Ireland,” said Dorinda calmly. “He called airlines. In Dublin, we called hotels. We found the car-hire place. They said you had gone west and south.”