She turned toward home and did not know she had been followed until she arrived again at her own street and a block away a man, inconspicuous in his slouch hat and raincoat, let his footsteps lag and finally pause altogether on the corner below the house as she turned in again at the gate.
A plain-clothes man, then. Watching them.
Bench opened the door for her.
“A young woman,” said Bench, “is waiting. She did not give her name. She’s in the small drawing room. She asked to wait.”
But there was no one in the small drawing room. No one, either, in the large drawing room.
Bench was incredulous and confused.
“But she was here, Miss Dorcas! She insisted on waiting!”
“And she wouldn’t give her name?”
“No, Miss Dorcas. But she insisted on seeing you. I know, of course, you are not in to reporters but this young woman,” said Bench with simple conviction, “was not a reporter. She——” He lifted a cushion and looked behind a table and said distractedly: “She was small, slender, wore a black-and-white checked coat and a green hat and green scarf. She was a blonde, I believe, Miss Dorcas, very—er—bright hair.” Dorcas shook her head slowly.
When he was out of sight she went back to the small drawing room. No one, of course, was there and there was no clue to her mysterious visitor.
The house was very quiet and shadowy. Outside on a darkening cold corner a man slouched in growing shadows to watch them as a hunter stalks and watches.
Jevan was in the study, Bench said, and she went to find him, overcoming a strange and rather absurd moment of something that was neither embarrassment nor diffidence but was like both.
He was sitting over the long table, with papers all over it. Neatly stacked papers, with typewritten, margined figures and words. He looked up as she entered, squinting as the hard light from above struck full in his face.
“Oh, Dorcas,” he said. “Come in. I’m trying to make a start on these things.”
These things—oh yes; the brown brief case lay gaping on its side. She sat down. He leaned back in the chair. “Bench said someone was waiting to see you.”
“Yes. She went away. She wouldn’t give her name.”
“What’s that?” said Jevan sharply and questioned her at length, even going so far as to get up and go prowling, through the drawing room and hall as if the woman in the checked coat and green scarf must still be somewhere about. She wasn’t of course. Back in the study he laughed a little. “It was nothing. Somebody wanted a charity subscription—something like that. She got tired of waiting and simply walked out.”
He linked his hands together and frowned over them at the reports on the table and told her he had traced the telephone call of the previous night. “It was Marcus Pett’s number,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
“MARCUS!”
“Yes. He says he didn’t telephone. Seemed absolutely astounded. I got him at the club and asked him about it. Says he slept like a top all night and never thought of telephoning here.”
“But—are they certain? I mean, the telephone operator. How can they trace a call?”
“I don’t know exactly how. I’ll find out. But in the meantime I’m pretty well convinced that they were right.”
“Marcus—oh, but, Jevan, if he says he didn’t telephone, he didn’t. He would have no reason——” She broke off abruptly as Jevan’s hand made a slight, almost imperceptible little motion toward the laden table. She followed the gesture and looked up directly to seek the answer in his face.
She found it. For he said quietly: “I think you’d better start to work on these reports.”
“Marcus is as honest as the day. He’s taken care of everything for us for years. He was my father’s friend. He——”
“Marcus,” said Jevan, “tried to borrow fifty thousand dollars of the Stock Bank two months ago. On his own account. Not yours. Willy’s a vice-president there. He found it out today and told me. Marcus was refused.”
“That has nothing to do with me or my affairs.”
“I hope not,” said Jevan heavily. “But there’s something else you don’t know. And that is …” He paused and looked up at the stag and said simply: “The stag, this morning, wasn’t quite square and straight with the world.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t be a dunce, Dorcas. I mean the picture had been moved sometime, probably during the night. Probably, too, by our midnight visitor who makes free with the doors and laundry chutes. And who can’t come again tonight.”
“Jevan, you are implying impossible things. You are saying Marcus——”
“I’m saying nothing except that you ought to examine these reports. And that the picture was moved during the night and these reports had just been placed in the safe.”
“But Marcus,” Dorcas began and stopped because it simply wasn’t possible.
“I know,” said Jevan rather grimly. “None of it makes any sense, for it’s contradictory. If Marcus—well, call it by its name—if Marcus embezzled he wouldn’t insist upon us looking at the reports. He wouldn’t bring them to us so promptly and invite us so urgently to examine them and then turn straight around and make a secret entrance into the house at night in order to recover them. Besides, he telephoned from his house—at least someone telephoned from his house—at exactly the time someone was prowling about here last night. Therefore could our visitor have been Marcus? Answer comes there, saying no. But, again contradictorily, the house was entered also the night we were mar—that is, the night before last. Before Marcus had brought his reports. Thus if the reports are the purpose of the nocturnal caller he must have thought the reports were already here at that time. Or——” Jevan stopped, rose, made an impatient turn across the room and said crossly: “Or anything! There’s no sense to it. Except I think we ought to look at these reports. And keep them in a better place than the safe. For if Ronald——”
“Ronald?”
“Well, suppose Marcus embezzled and Ronald knew of it, threatened Marcus with exposure and Marcus——”
“Marcus murdered him! Oh no!”
Jevan looked at his cigarette.
“No,” he said after a moment. “It doesn’t seem exactly credible, does it? …It may take an accountant to give the reports a thorough check. I’ve not made a start and it’s an accountant’s job. It …” He paused again, flipped some pages of a sheaf of typewritten papers and said thoughtfully: “Marcus ought to have done that. He ought to have had certified accountants check these figures.”
He was right of course. Marcus ought to have done that.
Jevan’s hands straightened out upon the papers below them. Good hands, thought Dorcas irrelevantly, well shaped and firm and just now oddly tense looking. He said in a voice that was, however, not at all tense but quite nonchalant and cool: “There’s something else I want to say to you, Dorcas. It’s about our marriage. I—I can say it all in a moment or two. I realize now that I made a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“Yes. I ought not to have made you marry me as I did. But at the time it seemed the best thing to do—the only thing. In a way it still seems so. But I want you to know that as soon as this thing is over—this trouble about Ronald’s murder—I’ll go away and we can get an annulment. It can be managed quite simply…That’s all, Dorcas.”
That’s all, Dorcas. A mistake. It can be managed quite simply.
And just then Bench came to the door and said he had reached Mr Devany and he was on the telephone and Jevan murmured an excuse and went to the telephone.
After he had gone she sat for a long time without moving.
The wedding ring on her finger caught a small serene gleam of light. Her throat felt queer and tight. That, then, was the answer. He did not love her. He had married her, yes. He had all but carried her to the altar.
But not for love. Why, then?
She never knew how long it was before the stacks of papers on the
table began to thrust themselves upon her attention.
She must return them to the safe. She rose stiffly, as if she’d been sitting there for a long, long time, and went to the table.
Typewritten columns, figures, sheaves of papers clipped together. She made one or two motions to gather the papers together and then sat down and began, abstractedly at first, to look at them. One figure leaped at her out of a maze and had six ciphers and she stared at it, a little frightened and shocked at the weight of social responsibility it implied. As fortunes go her own wasn’t staggering; they had always lived quietly, with pleasant, sane simplicity and with the ingrained regard for real values of human conduct of the average American bourgeois household. They used for themselves only what they needed to use of their income; those people who gained livelihood from the wheels that the bulk of that money helped to turn profited as greatly from it as did any member of the family.
It was an interlocking system of mutual dependence and she had been bred to recognize the fact just as she had imbibed, inherent in her upbringing, other ideas of living.
Time passed. Jevan did not come back. Gradually some of the typed rows began to have meaning for her; now and then she recognized some personal item, an expenditure of her own, Sophie’s steady two hundred a month allowance, her mother’s larger monthly check; less often a stock transaction looked familiar and she would remember Marcus’ mentioning it to her.
It grew dark; the windowpanes at the other end of the room winked and glittered and reflected eerily a long mahogany table and her own cherry-colored sweater and the light shining down on her brown hair, making little gleams of gold in it.
The house grew silent. Once, dimly, through her preoccupation she thought she heard footsteps and a door closing distantly. And later there was a soft shuffle of footsteps again, for she glanced at the door expectantly. The hall beyond was dark and the light from above her head shaded so that it cast a rich pool of light downward but beyond the boundary of that pool it was dusk. She saw no one and the soft shuffle that had attracted her attention did not recur.
It was almost seven o’clock when she looked at her wrist watch. Seven o’clock and dinner at seven-thirty.
Where was everybody? Dressing for dinner, as she must do. But first these reports.
She gathered the papers together and began to stack them quickly, struck with a sudden impatience. It took a moment or two to get the safe open. It opened finally and she thrust the papers inside it, closed the door and twirled the dial. And someone, somewhere, spoke.
It was only a word or two, muffled by the little jar of the door of the safe, and it wasn’t very far away.
No one, of course, was in the room.
She went to the door. No one was visible in the hall and a cold current of air struck her face and she saw that the little side door was open; it made a dim grayish rectangle. The passage itself was dark except for the light which streamed into it from the main hall at the other end of it. She went to the side door and closed it.
Someone, carelessly, had left it open. When?
She turned. A path of light from the central hall stretched along ahead of her, outlining blackly the silhouette of a small table against the wall
She passed the door of the study again and the door of the laundry chute. She passed the telephone room.
Or rather she did not pass it.
For her foot struck something.
It was something soft and yielding—the rug rolled up, a coat dropped, she thought and looked down.
The thing on the floor was dim and white and it was a man’s hand.
She must have pulled open the door to the telephone room. For now it was open and, huddled awkwardly, half in and half out the little room, was a black lump that was completely sodden and inert.
It was the man whose hand she had almost trod with her foot and it was Marcus Pett.
She said something and put her hand upon him and jerked it instantly, sharply away.
The fingers were wet and dark and Dorcas screamed.
CHAPTER 15
BENCH, IN THE DINING room, heard that scream and came running with a napkin in his hand.
Dorcas knew that. Then, instantly it seemed, there were lights everywhere. There were people and somebody screamed and began loudly to sob and it was one of the maids. And all at once, too, Sophie was there in the middle of things in a pale green satin negligee with her face, under layers of cold cream, the color of the satin.
Sophie must have taken charge of things, for somebody—Bench—was phoning for the police and Dorcas’ voice seemed to be replying to many questions and the replies didn’t satisfy Sophie, who pushed her away and cried: “Where’s Jevan? Where’s Jevan? Bench, where’s Mr Locke?”
Nobody knew. And Grayson, the chauffeur, came running heavily through the hall, his coat unbuttoned, his hair awry and wet. “Cook said somebody—oh, my God, it’s Mr Pett!”
In an incredibly short time the police got there. Dorcas was huddled on the stairway when they came and hadn’t any notion of how she had got there. Probably she had started instinctively to go to her mother and had stopped midway. Mamie was with Cary anyhow; Sophie had ordered her to go to Cary, to tell her anything but the truth. But where was Jevan?
Huge blue figures crowded into the hall; Sophie, holding up her trailing green satin, directed them.
They brushed past her. Sophie and Bench followed them. Cook and the chauffeur and one of the maids, the one who had screamed and burst into tears, stood in a little group, with Cook’s face the color of one of her own cream soups. The second girl peered into the little passage and clutched the chauffeur’s arm. Her name was Ethel Stone and she was to have that night her one moment of dramatic emergence from obscurity.
Where had Jevan gone? Why was he not there?
Dorcas shut her eyes and leaned her head against the railings and then had to open her eyes again, impelled by a horrible need to watch what was happening below her. No one for a while spoke to her; no one questioned her. The police were busy, here, there, everywhere; men in plain clothes were entering the door, bringing queer paraphernalia, being shown the body, taking pictures of it so flashes of light winked brightly through the hall. Wait was there; a police doctor was there with his bag. Abruptly reporters were at the door and being told to wait. The whole thing to Dorcas was indescribably confusing and she still felt sick and cold with shock.
But in the middle of it Jevan came back. He came hurriedly through the front door and she saw him and cried, “Jevan!” above the pounding of her heart. He didn’t hear her. Policemen had fastened upon him and led him instantly into the small drawing room; she had only a glimpse of him. But Willy Devany had followed him into the house and saw her and hurried up the stairs.
He took her hands. “Dorcas, what happened?”
She tried to tell him. Sophie passed below them along the hall, her green satin swishing gently, and disappeared in the little powder room below the stairway. When she came out she had rubbed off the cold cream and her face, up to now grotesque with smears of white cream, looked indecently bare and actually ghastly. She saw them on the stairway and came to join them.
“Jevan was with me,” said Willy without being asked. “There was something we wanted to talk about and he phoned me and I met him at the corner drugstore.”
“That’s neat,” said Sophie, looking at her hands, pink and moist as if she had just finished scrubbing them in hot water. “You have an alibi and so has Jevan.”
“Yes,” said Willy and then caught himself up shortly. “What do you mean, I have an alibi? I don’t need an alibi.”
“Oh, don’t you,” said Sophie. “Well, that’s lucky for you. The rest of us, I think, are in for a bad time.” She looked at her hands again and said with curious obliquity: “Dorcas, were you in the little powder room tonight? At any time?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing,” said Sophie and then they saw that Wait was at the bottom of the steps. Willy c
leared his throat and got up hesitantly.
“Do you—do you want something?” he said.
“Yes. You.”
Willy looked down at Dorcas with troubled, pale blue eyes and then back at Wait. “Oh, all right. But I don’t know what you want to question me for. I don’t know anything about this.”
He leaned over to pat Dorcas’ hand and went down to join Wait. They turned into the drawing room and still Jevan did not emerge.
Events telescoped. People came and went and reporters were met at the door and the telephone rang a good deal. Once when the door opened Cary’s doctor came into the hall and Sophie looked and exclaimed: “Mamie must have called him. Then Cary knows,” and went to meet him. He was curious, darting quick glances everywhere, but was also embarrassed as if he might be somehow and distastefully involved in the thing. He scarcely spoke to Dorcas as he passed her.
At nine o’clock Wait sent for her.
He was by that time in her father’s study, sitting on a corner of the long mahogany table. Some policemen were there, one with a notebook. Someone had been smoking—the air was full of smoke; Jevan wasn’t there, nor Willy, and over a policeman’s broad blue shoulder peered Bench’s face, pale and distressed.
A chair was pushed to her.
“Tell me,” said Wait, “exactly how and where you found the body.”
She did so.
Did so, in fact, not once but many times, all at once conscious of fantastically weak points of her story. A man murdered, his throat not very neatly cut, not more than twenty-five feet from where she sat, and she had known nothing of it.
Not only Wait questioned her; all of them took a hand in it. One of them, a big man in plain clothes, kept asking her about the knife. Where was it? Hadn’t she seen it? She must have seen it. Had she moved it? Had she touched it? And, at last, had she hidden it?
“No, no,” cried Dorcas. “There was no knife.”
The lights were terribly bright. She was terribly tired—so tired that their faces seemed to move, circling around her. She never knew how long it was before the plain-clothes man who kept asking about the knife had his answer.
Hasty Wedding Page 12
