Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  Sergeant Digges turned and looked down at Jenny. “Take her out, doc, and bring her to. That’s your job. Leave me do mine. You crazy fools, it’s a wonder you didn’t drive the kid clear out of her mind. Get her out of here onto the porch. Get some water, Elizabeth—or do I have to do your job as well as my own?”

  CHAPTER 22

  “—You didn’t do it, Jenny! It wasn’t you, baby… you just thought you did it! It was somebody else, it wasn’t you!”

  Jonas, back inside the cottage, could hear Elizabeth saying it over and over again. Jenny out on the porch was still white and dazed, still not understanding. Inside, Sergeant Digges was still tight-faced and hard-jawed.

  “It went straight through his heart on a line from that window ledge and into the cinder block there next to the fireplace.—I asked you about my taking out an appendix, doctor. Maybe you’d better study something about ballistics.”

  The stinging sarcasm, the realization of his own folly, brought Jonas Smith out of the stunned daze he’d been moving in.

  “—And I’m sorry, Miss Van Holt,” Sergeant Digges said. His voice was a shade more gentle. “I know it’s not pleasant for you to have to—”

  “I’m just glad it wasn’t Jenny, Sergeant. It’s… oh, the pattern was all so recognizable. It… it has some kind of justice. He had no right to bring a kid out here. That’s all I was trying to say to you… that she shouldn’t have to pay for… for that. And now it’s somebody else, isn’t it. I don’t understand. It’s… frightening.”

  She looked silently at Jonas. It was the way she’d looked that morning, telling him about the night at Miss Olive’s. “It means somebody else was here. I don’t understand.”

  “There’s only one person known to have been present,” Sergeant Digges said moodily.

  Jonas shook his head. “You’re just wasting your time if you still think it was me, Sergeant. I’d never seen either of them. I just came over after the shot woke me up, to see if I could help out. I didn’t know she’d shot him or thought she’d shot him until I heard her tell Elizabeth and Tom. Then I looked in the kitchen window and saw him.”

  Sergeant Digges nodded. “Sure, that’s all you did. You just stood in the mint bed with your size twelves and tramped out all the tracks that were there before. Or that’s what you’re telling me now you did. If you’re telling the truth now—”

  “He is telling the truth.”

  Elizabeth had come to the door and was listening, her eyes bright.

  “Because he was at the Fergusons’. He had to be there, to see Jenny put her dress and shoes in Natalie’s beach bag. He brought it in town and it’s in the wing now.”

  “Or he went back after he’d shot him, saw her footprints going to that closet and got the bag out then,” Sergeant Digges said. “We’ll skip it for the time being. Maybe the doc never did see Grymes before. It sure wasn’t any stranger Grymes saw looking in that window at him with a gun aimed at his heart. The doc mentioned that surprised look on his face. It’s in the pictures we took of him. He was standing there, after he’d tossed the gun to Jenny, and he heard a noise, or something. He turned and saw somebody he knew and didn’t expect to see, and it surprised the hell out of him. And they fired and killed him just when Jenny thought she did, and when she ran out they came in, took the gun Jenny’d had and put theirs down on the floor.”

  “Jenny dreamed someone else was here,” Elizabeth said slowly. “It was a… a kind of nightmare she had. Maybe she really knows…”

  “Isn’t there some drug you can use, to help her to remember?”

  Sergeant Digges looked reproachfully at Philippa Van Holt. “Truth serum? They use that in the movies. If Jenny knows any more, now you experts are through with her and she’s not going on having the liver scared out of her for something she didn’t do, it’ll come back of its own accord.”

  He went out on the porch and put his hand on her shoulder. “They’re going to take you back to town now, Jenny.”

  “I…I don’t have to go to jail?”

  Sergeant Digges stroked her hair back from her brow with his callused fisherman’s hand. He shook his head. “No. Come on, now. Elizabeth’s going to take you in.”

  “Why don’t I take her?”

  Philippa came to the door. “Elizabeth must want to go and see Tom at the Academy. I should think this would make some difference to him.” She smiled faintly at Jonas. “He won’t have to break any more regulations to see this girl I never believed he had.”

  “Oh yes, of course!” Elizabeth went forward swiftly. “Thank you, Philippa!” She put her hand out. “And thanks for trying to help Jenny. I didn’t—”

  Philippa Van Holt’s hands stayed in her jacket pockets. Her brows raised. “Don’t thank me, Elizabeth. Not yet. We still don’t know who was at the window. You may not want to thank me—if we find out.”

  She lowered her voice. Jonas could not hear what she said, but he saw Elizabeth’s cheeks flushed as she stepped onto the porch. “You’d better come with us, Jenny,” she said quietly. “You want to see Tom too, don’t you?”

  “Not very much.” Jenny shook her head slowly. “I’ll come if you want me to. If Jonas doesn’t mind.”

  “I’d like to talk to you, Miss Van Holt,” Sergeant Digges said. “I want some information about your brother-in-law.”

  “Which won’t help very much,” Philippa remarked. “He and Miss Agatha Reed being on their way to Baltimore when my husband was killed. However…” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled at him. “There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about. I’ve moved from Miss Olive’s.”

  Jonas heard that as he opened the screen door for Elizabeth and Jenny, before Philippa turned and went back into the cottage.

  “What does she mean?” Elizabeth whispered. “What’s she going to tell him?”

  Jonas shook his head. “I don’t think Digges will believe in ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  Jenny was ahead of them, getting into the car.

  “Somebody was around Miss Olive’s house last night. That’s why Philippa moved out. She seems to have an idea it might have been her brother-in-law.—Could it have been Miss Olive?”

  She didn’t answer, and as he glanced aside at her she quickened her step. “Don’t ask me, Jonas. I don’t want to talk about it, not in front of Jenny. And we’ve got to hurry. We’ve got to see Tom.”

  In front of the magnificent marble staircase in the great rotunda of Bancroft Hall, Elizabeth put her arm around Jenny’s shoulder and gave her a quick squeeze. “I’m going to see the Commandant. You take Jonas to the reception room and wait till we come.”

  She touched Jenny’s cheek lightly with her lips and gave her a smile. She looked back at Jonas. “I didn’t intend for her to go see the Commandant, or to see Tom, till he knows. I just didn’t want Philippa to have a chance to do a pumping job about… about all of us.”

  . . . About Miss Olive Oliphant, she was saying, Jonas thought. He watched her hurry across the empty rotunda toward the corridor at his right. Jenny touched his arm.

  “This way,” she whispered. “You tell them at the Main Office we’re waiting for Midshipman Darrell.”

  She drew him left toward the opposite corridor. “I’ll be in the reception room. I’m all right—don’t worry about me.”

  He was worrying about her. She looked bloodless and fragile, huddled in the corner of the sofa, when he came across from the Battalion Office and sat down beside her. She didn’t look up until he took her cold small hand and held it tightly.

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” she said. Her voice was hardly audible. “I mean, dreams are funny things, aren’t they?”

  “Very.”

  “Wetherby has a dream book. He’s always dreaming something and explaining it, but I don’t think he believes it. I think he just uses it for an excuse
to explain things to Grandfather and all of us. He told me he dreamed he saw me walking by a pit that was full of scorpions, and in the book that meant there was some wicked man I should look out for. I guess he heard from somebody I was being foolish, and wicked. Do you think it could have been a dream?”

  “I don’t know, Jenny. He could have dreamed it, I guess.”

  “And I had a dream last night, all sort of mixed up and crazy. I was asleep but I didn’t seem to be, and I heard a shot. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t, and I was trying to run but Miss Olive’s cat kept getting in my way, and the leash got all tangled around my feet, and Grandfather was pointing his finger at me and making a horrible noise trying to make me drop the gun. But I didn’t have it, then, and I kept trying to make him understand I didn’t have it. Then a bell started ringing, and I knew they were coming to get me and take me away. Grandfather was laughing and Miss Olive was crying, and it was terrible. I couldn’t move because I was tied with the cat’s leash. And Elizabeth was crying too sort of way off by herself, but I knew that was because I’d seen her crying yesterday when we came in. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her cry. That’s why I decided to go and tell Mr. Digges this morning.”

  “It’s all over now,” Jonas said gently. “She’s going to marry me, pretty soon.”

  “Grandfather won’t let her. That would just leave me, and he wouldn’t like that.”

  “You can come and live with us, Jenny.”

  “Then there wouldn’t be anybody to take care of him. I don’t think we could do that.”

  “—The hell we couldn’t,” Jonas thought. It was the first time he’d felt like laughing since he found Roddy drugged the night before. His feeling was short-lived. Jenny’s body tensed suddenly. She swallowed and moistened her lips as she heard them coming. She drew herself together, her eyes on the door.

  “Jenny!”

  Tom Darrell was there, erect and stiff-backed. She pulled herself unsteadily to her feet as he hesitated an instant.

  “Jenny, baby!”

  He came quickly across the room and put his arms around her.

  “Oh, Tom, you don’t hate me!”

  She hadn’t been sure. Not till the moment he came toward her had she been sure of anything. Jonas, studying the inscription under an old print of the Constitution, wondered how insecure you could be and not have your dreams a nightmare of binding cat’s leashes and terrible laughter, interpreting even the reality of the shot fired at him and the phone ringing when he called Elizabeth as accusatory echoes of a tortured soul.

  “I thought you’d still be mad at me even if it wasn’t me that did it. I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me…”

  Jonas turned. Elizabeth was beside him, her hand on his arm. Her eyes were shining.

  “It’s going to be all right. The papers have gone, but the Commandant says he’ll stop the messenger and review it again. He’s still on Class A offense. Jonas—he told the Commandant he frenched out last night. He told him himself.”

  Her hyacinth eyes were grave and full of meaning. She turned around.

  “Tom,” she said quietly. “Did you shoot at Jonas last night?”

  Tom Darrell took a step toward them. “Did I what?” he asked.

  “Did you shoot at Jonas last night?”

  “—Did somebody…”

  “You be quiet, Jenny. I’m talking to Tom. Did you—”

  His face flushed with anger. “Of course not. I may have felt something like it, but I didn’t happen to do it.”

  “Sorry,” Jonas said. “My mistake.” He went over to him. “I seem to make quite a few of them. I apologize, Darrell. I got the idea, last time we talked, you’d regard it as a pleasure. But as I plan to marry your sister, should we perhaps bury the hatchet?”

  He put out his hand. Philippa had refused Elizabeth’s, and for an instant he thought Tom was refusing his. Then he relaxed and put his hand out, with a half-grin.

  “I think she’s crazy, but it’s her hard luck.”

  He grinned more broadly then, and added, removing the sting but not the barb, “Have either of you mentioned it to Grandfather?”

  “I think you’re both very cute,” Elizabeth said. “It seems to me it’s beside the point. The point is, if Tom didn’t shoot at you, Jonas, who did? I think it pretty serious, myself.”

  Jonas had already thought of that. He was still thinking about it, in the back of his mind, when he deposited Elizabeth and Jenny on the front steps of the Blanton-Darrell House. It was quiet inside, except for a black-and-gold bumble bee buzzing angrily inside the screen door, trying to bully his way through it.

  He gave Jenny an encouraging pat on the shoulder. Her face was still drained of any lively warmth and her knees not too steady, but it was nothing that couldn’t be put down to intense emotional and physical fatigue. “Try to drink a big glass of milk with some sherry in it and get some sleep, will you?”

  He let off the brake and started up, looking back as he turned at the end of the drive to wave at Elizabeth. She waved back and went on in with Jenny.

  “—Hi, there.”

  He was just getting out of his car, parked outside the Court, to go back through the iron gate to the wing, when Philippa’s maroon convertible came alongside of him. She pulled in to the curb ahead and leaned across the front seat, her motor still running.

  “Did you settle all that?” she asked easily.

  As she saw him looking at the back seat she said, “It’s just the rest of my gear from the vine-covered cottage.”

  There were a couple of suitcases, a typewriter and a brown paper carton of grimy oddments that bore the unmistakable stamp of the village antique shop.

  “—And so that’s that,” Philippa said. Her brows lifted ironically. “Neat, I’d say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was startled in spite of himself.

  “Oh, Jonas, my friend.” She looked at him with patient amusement. “You know, Jonas, you’ll do very well as a doctor, but you ought to go some place where there are a lot of rich women. You’d make a fortune. Sympatico, I believe is the word. Or romantic. You haven’t an ounce of the realist in you, have you?”

  Her full red lips curved in an ironic smile.

  “Still, far be it from me. I think it’s divine she’s going to get away with it. I’ll certainly remember if I ever get into trouble to pick a town where the—what “was it he called himself?—the investigating officer is a first cousin once removed. I thought he handled it very well.”

  Jonas stared at her. “For God’s sake, Philippa…”

  “Let’s not go into the righteous indignation routine,” she said wearily. “And don’t be a dope. Use your head, angel. I told you little Jenny was a Darrell through and through. You should have seen her when I gave her a word of friendly advice. Still water runs deep, as Miss Olive has often said, or will when she gets around to it… and it runs underground, Jonas. I told you she’d probably blow her top some day. You can’t be that repressed and frustrated without it’s coming out some place. And I like her, don’t forget that. But any gal who had the courage, and the presence of mind, to go whipping over to a presumably empty house and change her clothes and come back to where there was a man she even thought she’d killed, would certainly have what it takes when it came to the pinch with a gun in her hand.”

  She smiled pleasantly at Jonas. “It was a good show. She lives here, and we’re outlanders. It doesn’t make much difference what happens to foreigners in a hide-bound hole like this. So, the hell with it… only, I feel a little bitter—as you no doubt see, my lamb. I’ll bet you a million bucks Cousin Digges writes it off as a terrific unsolved mystery nobody’ll ever solve. It wouldn’t be the first one in Annapolis, Jonas. I could tell you several I’ve had whispered in my pretty ear. Ah well, what the hell. It was his own fault. A guy that gets tight
and forgets Annapolis isn’t Hollywood, and hasn’t found out there are still girls who aren’t pushovers for the quick take.… Or maybe he’d promised her Hollywood, and she knew he was going to renege.”

  Philippa slipped the car into low and moved forward.

  “—But me, I’m not quite sure yet whether I’m going to let them get away with it. I think I’ll break down and have a talk with my brother-in-law. I’ll let you know what I decide.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Jonas Smith stood staring at the flash of the sun of the maroon car as it rounded the corner of the Court.

  “Oh, Dr. Smith!”

  He turned. Martha was calling him from the gate. “Dr. Smith, there’s a lady with a child in here who wants to know is you engaged in the practice of medicine? I tol’ her I don’ know, but you was out here and I’d see if I could find out.”

  Jonas winced, and grinned. “Touché,” he thought. Now that the point had come up, he wondered himself. “I’ll be right in,” he said.

  The child had fallen and sprained her ankle. Before he had finished taping it another child appeared, still dripping wet from a swimming party where she had dived and cut her knee open on an oyster shell. Her brother who was with her had climbed a tree covered with a handsome poison ivy vine. Martha’s niece was fourth in line with an infected ear. If it was not a series of diseases a young Osler might dream about, it at least kept him busy for an hour and a half and anaesthetized the gnawing anxiety Philippa had left unhappily with him.

  He had just closed the front door on his last patient and stepped into the reception room on his way back to his desk, when the door into the kitchen opened. He glanced around, expecting to see Martha. But it was not. It was Miss Olive Oliphant.

  “—Oh, I thought I heard you go out, Dr. Smith.”

  Miss Olive tried unsuccessfully to back into the kitchen again, dropping a paper bag, embarrassed, her pink cheeks getting pinker as Jonas, picking up the bag, felt a splash of water on his shoe and looking up quickly saw that what Miss Olive was trying to conceal, imperfectly wrapped in newspaper, was the glass bowl with the two unhappy goldfish in it. She dropped a second bundle to the floor.