Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  He went down to the beached boat, got in and rowed out into open water. The single red eye by the Navy Experimental Station winked at him over the trees. It was a sinister wink now, not friendly and bibulous as it had seemed when he was lying there on the Fergusons’ pier, at peace with himself and all the world, before Gordon and Jenny, Tom and the future Mrs. Jonas Smith had shattered everything. He pulled across the shimmering silver saucer of the creek. All he could think about was her. The second girl, the one who was a conscious and determined accessory after the fact of the killing of Gordon. The girl he knew he was going to marry. It was not until he was in the living room of the cottage, switching on the light on the table by the telephone, that he thought: “What a hell of a way to begin marrying her.”

  He stood looking down at the phone with as much distaste as if it had been a dead weasel curled up in front of him. Then he picked it up and dialled the operator.

  “There’s been some trouble out at St. Margaret’s, on Arundel Creek. Who do I call?”

  “Is it a police matter? You call the County Police in Eastport. 4526. Or do you want me to call them for you?”

  It was a straw. Jonas clutched for it. “Will you? Tell them it’s the Milnor cottage on Arundel Creek.”

  He put down the phone. Then as if he had figured it out from the moment everything began and had known precisely from the beginning what he would do, he went across the room, gathered his records into a pile on the top of the phonograph and went swiftly into the bedroom wing.

  Roddy was lying on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  “Boy, we’re going.”

  He put his gear in his suitcase. It was twenty-two minutes past two o’clock. At twenty-five minutes past two he switched off the light, closed the windows and went out. He stopped at the door of Natalie Ferguson’s bedroom. There was a beach bag in there, in the closet. He went in quickly without hesitation and got it. As he came out he stopped by the door, listening, wondering if it was a car he had heard out somewhere behind the house. He went through the living room and out onto the screened porch. If the County Police had got there already, from Eastport ten miles away, someone had called them before he did. Or they could have had a radio patrol car out on the Ferry Road, he thought suddenly. He stood listening, watching across the marsh, waiting for the glow of headlights through the trees. There was nothing. No sound, no light except the pale yellow glow through the Milnors’ side windows. The whole place was as quiet as the grave it was.

  At twenty-five minutes to three he was headed down the dirt road toward the paved highway into Annapolis. A mile down the highway he saw the suffused glare of headlights reaching out toward him, and turned left into the winding remnant of the old St. Margaret’s Road. It could be headlights on the green police sedan he’d noticed in town, coming toward him from the Ritchie Highway, headed for Arundel Creek. He kept on, swung down the last curve of the old road and shot up to the left onto the approach to the Severn River Bridge. The stop sign at the intersection before the Bridge, the right of way belonging to the old vehicle rattling down the main highway from the still empty site of the Ritchie Memorial, were matters he noted automatically as he went by.

  He slowed down as he crossed the deserted bridge. Behind him now, the red Cyclops eye had become a twinkling figure in a whole rose-colored ensemble dancing a stately minuet high above the woods of Ferry Farms. To his left the Severn widened out into the shimmering stretches of the Chesapeake. It made a silver girdle along the twenty-seven square miles of the United States Naval Academy, the walled reservation where twenty-eight hundred midshipmen were sleeping in the great granite pile of Bancroft Hall. He rounded the sharp bend at the Post Graduate School and kept on into Annapolis, not concerned with the Academy that had been there since 1845 or its small Liberal Arts neighbor St. John’s College that had been there since 1785, though he was going along the street that separates them.

  He was deeply concerned about other things, thinking of the small tortured face of the girl Jenny as he’d seen her in Natalie Ferguson’s bedroom, ripping off the torn mud-stained dress now in the beach bag on the seat beside him… of the agony of terror he knew now she’d been in, knowing what she’d fled from on the floor of the Milnors’ cottage. It was unfair, pitifully unfair, in some way; she could pay all her life for something that had started out as just fun, ended as catastrophe. Maybe it was old fashioned for her to defend her personal dignity and honor. It was all right with him. There were infinitely more people her age, and Elizabeth’s and Tom’s, to say nothing of his own, who had the same code, in spite of all the talk that made juvenile practically synonymous with delinquency these days. He’d known when he left the Fergusons’ that he was all for her. He’d never have brought the beach bag along, with the telltale dress and mud-caked shoes, if he had not known it. He’d have stayed to meet the police if he had not been in it, in it as far as the ensign and Elizabeth.

  It was a funny thing what a difference two hours and one unleashed libido could make in people’s lives… in Jenny’s, in Elizabeth’s and the ensign’s. To say nothing of Gordon’s.—To say nothing of Jonas Smith’s, he thought. He remembered himself lying there on the pier in the moonlight. Then he grinned quickly in spite of everything, thinking of his landlord in Annapolis. Professor Darrell owned the Blanton-Darrell House, the right wing of which Jonas had leased, if the maze of restrictions and prohibitions he’d signed could be called a lease. So far as he could remember, there was nothing among them about coming in at three o’clock in the morning. On the other hand, from certain indications he felt definitely it would be a good thing, as he’d said he would be there Sunday evening, not to get Professor Darrell out of bed to see who was there now.

  He parked the car on College Avenue and went the rest of the way on foot. The Blanton-Darrell House stood in the center of Darrell Court, the only Georgian house in the heart of the old city still enclosed in its own brick wall, the only one left whose grounds had not been sold off to have frame houses and stores built up to meet or enclose it. Randall Court was to the west, the Chase House and Ogle Hall and the Hammond-Harwood House to the east and south—all distinguished monuments of the past glory of Annapolis, all within a long stone’s throw. Jonas stopped in front of the old house, filling the square block between College Avenue and Tabernacle Street, where Prince George divides to become Princess Anne Street on one side and Queen’s Street on the other. He looked across the open garden at the mauve brick façade sleeping quietly behind the magnolia grandiflora, guarding on either side like a pair of glossy and gigantic Nubian slaves. A fan of frail yellow light shone above the carved white wood, and the slate roof glistened like hoar frost in the slanting last rays of the moon. The floribunda roses were moonlit too, their blossoms transmuted into a bank of drifting lemon-colored snow high above the ragged black outlines of the old yew trees.

  He went quietly along the narrow brick walk to his own front door. A stray shaft from the street light over the brick wall lighted the brass plate there. “Jonas Smith M.D.” It had been his father’s. Seeing it, he felt a small tightening in the cords of his throat, remembering the years of his life it had been on another door. What would his father have done if he’d been at the cottage on Arundel Creek? You could never say how any older generation would act about a younger generation’s problems. Maybe, he thought, that was what Elizabeth had meant out at the cottage when she said, “It’s Grandfather I’m thinking about,” and the younger girl had cried out suddenly. It was certainly when the ensign had made up his mind and picked up the gun.

  He went inside and switched on the light. There was a small parlor off the vestibule that was to be his waiting and reception room. He turned on the lights, put his suitcase on the old leather sofa that had been his father’s and set the beach bag on top of it. He went back into what had been a dining room wing, opening out into a small garden now fitted up as office and consulting room, and turned on the lights t
here. His two sisters had moved him in and arranged things. His bag was on the desk in front of the windows, the calendar was torn off to Monday, May 17th, when he would presumably start the practice of medicine.

  He looked around with a sense of satisfaction and contentment, in spite of the last hour, and groaned suddenly as Roddy scrambled to his feet off the hearth, growling, his tail out, pointing toward the front of the house.

  He should have pulled the curtains so Professor Darrell could not see the lights. It was too late now. He could hear the footsteps himself, coming along in front of the wing from the main house. He looked at himself in the mirror just as he heard the knock on the door, reflected that he looked more like a deck hand than a doctor of medicine and there was nothing he could do about it, went out into the vestibule and opened the door, a vision in his mind of an irate and plethoric landlord, in pajamas and dressing gown probably, as mad as a hornet undoubtedly, demanding who the hell he was . . .

  He stood there staring for an instant at the girl whose face he had last, and for the only time, seen reflected in the mirror on the kitchen shelf of the Milnors’ cottage. He pulled himself quickly together as she stared at him for an instant before she took a quick backward step.

  “Oh, I’m sorry… I’m terribly sorry! I thought Dr. Smith… I thought perhaps the doctor had come.”

  She spoke quickly, the color flushing up from her throat and warming the pale oval face turned toward him in the lamp light. She took another step back.

  “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  He found his voice as she turned to go, making it as matter of fact as he could.

  “That’s all right. I’m Dr. Smith.”

  He smiled down at her. “I guess I don’t look it, but that’s the way it is.”

  She had turned back and was looking him up and down, her eyes as incredulous as her voice. “You mean you—” Her color went a quick shade deeper as she broke off. “I’m sorry. I’m being awfully rude. I just thought you were going to be… going to be older, I guess.”

  “I am,” Jonas said. “Every day I’m going to be one day older.”

  “I mean I thought you were going to be middle-aged. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m Elizabeth Darrell, I live next door—”

  Sudden involuntary laughter bubbled up like champagne in her voice and lighted her grey eyes.

  “You rent the wing from my grandfather, Professor Darrell. I don’t see it’s any more surprising than for you to be Dr. Smith.”

  “It isn’t,” Jonas said.

  It wouldn’t have been, except for the last hour, and even then it was not half so surprising as the job she was doing, covering up what he knew was an acute and desperate fear. With no prior knowledge, she would have seemed only naturally worried about an emergency situation that was sending her out to hunt a doctor at that hour in the morning.

  The laughter had gone out of her voice and faded from her lips and eyes.

  “I came over to see if I could get you to help me. My sister’s had a… she was in sort of an accident tonight, and she’s pretty upset. She can’t get to sleep. I thought when I saw your lights on maybe you’d give me something to quiet her down.”

  “Would you like me to come over and see her?” he asked quietly.

  Her lips parted, the pulse in her throat throbbing.

  “Oh, you’re nice, aren’t you? But you don’t have to do that. She wasn’t hurt. She’s just sort of… shaken, is all. She’ll be all right if—”

  The glance she shot back toward the main house seemed to him to be sharper and more apprehensive than her fear he might insist on going back with her. She took a step inside the doorway where she could not be seen from her home.

  “I’ll be glad to come if there’s any point in it,” he said.

  “No, please!”

  She caught herself quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be abrupt. I couldn’t let you come. I… don’t want to disturb Grandfather. I mean… well, he doesn’t like to be disturbed. You’ll find that out if you’re going to live here. He’s really an angel, if he likes you…”

  “And vice versa?” Jonas suggested.

  She nodded, looking toward her grandfather’s house again. The warm color had faded out of her cheeks and throat.

  “He wouldn’t like it if he knew Jenny was upset. So if you will give me something for her I’d be glad if you wouldn’t say anything about it. And…I’ve got to hurry.”

  “Come in,” Jonas said. “I’ll get you something.”

  She followed him through the vestibule and stopped. “Oh, it’s pleasant in here, isn’t it?”

  He looked back at her. Under the outward calm she was desperately frightened. It was all so mixed up, he thought, wondering what he ought to do. She was standing at the end of the sofa by the vestibule door, looking around with an interested air, without the remotest inkling that he’d been out at the Creek and had seen and heard everything, or nearly everything, that had happened. It was also plain that she seemed to have no remote inkling of the fact that some day she was going to be Mrs. Jonas Smith. It was all so mixed up, some elements of it so palpably absurd, in spite of the pathetic tragedy underneath, that he found himself smiling a little as he opened his bag. He got out a tube of pills, put six in an envelope and sat down at his desk to write out the directions.

  He pushed back his chair and got up “Give her two now,” he said as he came back into the reception room. “Another one if she wakes up. And call me—”

  He came to a halt inside the door. “What’s wrong—”

  “I’ve got to hurry. Grandfather— Oh, give them to me, please—I’ve got to hurry!”

  She took the envelope out of his hand and was gone. The door had closed behind her before he could get the picture of her white face and wide panic-stricken eyes straight in his bewildered mind. He stood blankly, listening for an irascible voice through the wall that divided the two houses. There was no sound except an occasional creak of the arthritic joints of the old mansion, and the setter asleep on the hearth, audibly dreaming of the open fields.

  Still puzzled, he went over to where she had stood and looked around the room, wondering what could have alarmed her. Then he stared down at the sofa. The striped beach bag was there on top of his suitcase, tipped over on its side. He saw what he had not noticed before. The name “Natalie” was printed diagonally across the lower left hand corner in red, white and blue letters two inches high. Among all the beach bags in Christendom, nobody could mistake Natalie Ferguson’s.

  “This,” he thought soberly, “is a big help.”

  He picked the bag up and opened it. It was empty, the bottom still stained with the muddy seepage from the sodden evening shoes.

  He glanced out toward the vestibule. It was an easy matter of the couple of minutes he’d been at his desk, and a handsome tribute, he thought ruefully, to his own stupidity. It was just a matter of quick thinking on her part; she could have them out of the bag, toss them out the front door to pick up on her way back, in an instant. If she hadn’t been standing there at the end of the sofa when he looked back at her, he might have remembered. If he hadn’t been dazzled and dazed by her sudden appearance, and her identity, he might have used his head. As it was, matters were different, suddenly, and more difficult.

  He wondered what was going through her mind now, whether she wasn’t perhaps already regretting it. It was folly; it was almost like a second unconscious betrayal. Coming for the sedative was the first. Taking the dress and shoes was in effect painting the arrow already pointing to her sister a bright brilliant red, making it a dozen times its original size and significance. But the important thing was the danger to them that the knowledge he had must seem to her, the agony of doubt and apprehension she must be in, over there, fearful of how much he knew, how much she had given away without meaning to do anything but help
her sister.

  Sober-eyed, unhappy and angry at himself for being a stupid fool, Jonas moved around, turning off the lights to go to bed. Something apart from the immediate problem of Elizabeth Darrell and how she was going to take the fact of his being there, just underfoot, on her own doorstep, came vaguely back to him, shapeless and persistent, gnawing at his consciousness, the minute the lights were out and he was there in the dark alone with it. It was like his first unformed memory that there was no telephone in the Milnors’ cottage, a nagging, worrying, even frightening sensation, somewhere in the back of his mind. Darkness and danger seemed to associate themselves with it, sharpening it into something ominous and menacing. It was hidden in his mind in a maze of dimmed and blurred impressions, connected with Elizabeth and Jenny but not anything he could put a name to or say came directly from either of them or both of them together.

  It was not the dead man, though his face was there abruptly in Jonas Smith’s mind, a visual after-image, the look of surprise and horror as vivid and startling still as it had been in actual fact. Nor was it the ensign, Tom.

  Though there was something about her brother too. “He’s already in trouble. Terrible trouble…” He remembered Elizabeth saying that to Jenny out in the cottage.

  He let Roddy out in the small enclosed garden for a few minutes, thinking about that. What terrible trouble could an ensign get into in Annapolis, Maryland? Trouble usually reserved itself for the brass and the gold braid. Jonas had never heard of it stooping to the lowliest rank.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jonas Smith shook the dazed cobwebs out of his head and sat up, looking around him for a bewildered moment. Outside the air was full of the noisy clamor of bells and the sound of the marching feet of the midshipmen on their way to church in the town. Nearer at hand there was an insistent intermittent buzz that he finally recognized. He reached his hand out for the telephone.