Trial Run

by Anne Metikosh

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  My first impulse was to call in the police right then and there. Some fleeting rag of sensibility eventually persuaded me that I had to be sure of his guilt, beyond all reasonable doubt, before I destroyed a man’s life.

  When I considered it rationally, all I really had to go on was hearsay and circumstance. Rumor might say anything about anyone; Rolph had no eyewitness evidence that Mel Deloitte favored children; indeed, he and Brent only knew of the single episode of a young girl coming to The Clubbe, which made blackmail no more than a flimsy theory. As to the weapon involved, lots of people owned guns, even derringers. But that, at least, gave me a place to start.

  It was quite true that the walls of Deloitte’s study were laden with firearms, but I had no idea if there was a derringer among them. I tended to notice only the larger items in his collection, the Winchesters and the Remingtons, whose polished stocks made them look more like works of art than instruments of death. Until now, the smaller pistols had held no real interest for me.

  A key to Deloitte’s house was locked in my father’s old bureau at home, along with other keys entrusted to me by clients who naturally anticipated that I would use them only to do my job, not to spy on them, or to search their homes for evidence of guilt in a murder. As I slipped Deloitte’s key into my pocket, I suffered a pang of conscience in which I clearly heard my mother’s voice telling me to respect other people’s privacy. For an instant, I wavered.

  Such are our defining moments: we do something, or refrain from doing it, and so create the pattern of our lives.

  I debated having something to eat before going back out, but decided not to take the time. Instead, I stuffed a chocolate bar into my pocket as a buffer against the fatigue that was beginning to drag at me.

  When I used my key to open Mel Deloitte’s back door, it was just after six o’clock. The house was quiet. As a matter of course, I’d rung the doorbell first, but I knew Mel had a regular dinner meeting of the local bar association on Wednesday nights and it wasn’t likely he’d be home much before ten. I wasn’t worried about the neighbors; houses in that part of town were set far enough apart to ensure privacy.

  Deloitte had timers on several lights, including the one in the kitchen, because he hated coming in to a dark house. Down the hall, the study was deeply shadowed, but as it didn’t face the street, it was unlikely anyone would notice if I turned on a lamp.

  It was a high room, with two velvet-draped windows overlooking the ravine. At one end, it opened to a second floor accessible by a spiral stair. On the outside, this part of the house looked like the turret of a castle. Inside, it reminded me of Professor Higgins’ library. Now I wondered if Mel Deloitte had brought any Eliza Dolittles here for instruction.

  The second floor was warmed and darkened by oak bookshelves that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. On the main floor, the shelves stopped at mid-point. The upper half of the wall was covered in grasscloth, against which Deloitte’s gun collection was displayed.

  At a glance I could see nothing missing, no telltale lighter patches against the wallpaper, where something might have been removed. When I considered it, there was no reason why there should be. If Mel had used one of his own guns to shoot Randy Outray, he could simply have brought it home again and hung it back where it belonged.

  I made a careful tour of the room, comparing the smaller firearms on the walls with the picture of the derringer that Brent had printed for me. Eventually, I found a pair of them by the door, hung at an angle to each other, so that they framed a blurred daguerreotype underneath.

  I squinted at the woman in the picture. She was dressed with the fussy elegance of the late nineteenth century, her expression severe. There was something vaguely familiar in the set of her mouth and the shape of her nose that made me wonder if she were one of Mel’s ancestors and if the pistols had once belonged to her.

  With no clear idea of what I was doing, I lifted the little guns from the wall one at a time, and looked them over. On police shows, the experts seem to be able to tell if a gun has been recently fired by sniffing the barrel. Holding each in turn gingerly, afraid one or the other might go off accidentally in my hands, I inhaled cautiously in the direction of the barrel.

  All I noticed was a mild, greasy smell.

  I didn’t know how to tell if the guns were loaded, and wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

  I’d been a fool to come. What had I really hoped to accomplish on my own? I was Debbie Domestic, not Dick Tracy. As I hung the derringers carefully back on the wall, I noticed that my hands were shaking.

  Then I heard him.

  At first, I thought it was the surge of my own racing pulses that nailed me to the doorjamb. Then I realized it was the muffled thunk of the heavy front door closing.

  I glanced at my watch. It was barely six-thirty. The meeting must have been canceled, or maybe Deloitte had decided not to stay to dinner. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want him to find me here in his study with his guns. I was across the room and up the narrow, winding stairs to the shadows in the loft before I finished the thought.

  It didn’t occur to me then that I could simply have stayed where I was and told Mel I’d been doing some work on his ledgers. There was no reason for him not to believe me, no reason for him to suspect I suspected him of murder, nothing except my own fear and guilt at trespassing in someone else’s home.

  Apart from a leather easy chair and an antique Spanish chest, the loft was empty of furniture, and by extension, hiding places. Luckily, the lamp I had turned on downstairs was shaded to fall on the desk. The loft was nearly dark.

  I eyed the chest, which was deep but not very long. The bulk of the padded jacket I was wearing only added to the problem of space, but I managed to wedge myself between the chest and the shelves behind it, hoping that, from below, I would be invisible.

  Deloitte entered the study and went straight to his desk. That the light was on didn’t seem to register with him, or maybe he assumed the timer on it had clicked over. I heard him curse mildly as he shuffled files, opening and closing the drawers in the cabinet where he kept some of his correspondence. My heart thudded. He’d forgotten something he needed for the meeting; that was all. He had only come back to pick it up. Just a few minutes, I told myself, a few minutes, and he’ll be gone.

  There was silence now below me. Willing myself not to poke my head up over the top of the chest to look, I decided Mel must be reading something over, determining that the file in his hand was in fact the one he wanted.

  The muscles in my right leg started to spasm. I held my breath and moved fractionally to relieve the pain. As I shifted my weight, my boot scraped against the side of the chest. It was the smallest of sounds, but it filled the silence in the room like thunder.

  Paper rustled as Mel dropped the file he was holding back onto the desk. I heard another drawer slide open, and then he started for the stairs.

  My stomach muscles clenched.

  From my pathetic hiding place I could not see him, but I heard the climbing steps and knew where he was when he stopped, his head only a few feet below the level of the top stair. I could hear him breathing. He was looking up, but I didn’t think he could see me at that angle. I didn’t move. In any event, it was too late now for escape. I remembered the walls full of guns in the study below and stayed where I was, crouched, not breathing, against the Spanish chest.

  Deloitte paused where he was for a few seconds, then I heard him climbing back down the stairs. For one foolish moment I thought maybe he was satisfied, that he would collect the forgotten file from his desk and leave the house.

  He stood very still in the room below me, waiting.

  From my dubious shelter, I felt as if some sort of mental censor had suddenly dropped into place, separating me from reality. I was invisible, inaudible, powerless, the dreamer of the
dream.

  I suppose nobody ever believes that they will really die. I’m sure Susan Forrester felt this same strange sense of unreality as she watched her murderer raise his knife. I’m sure she thought, as I did, that something would happen to stop him. Other people might be murdered, but not me.

  I felt a sharp twist of pain in my cheek, where it was pressed against one of the brass hinges of the trunk. Touching my fingers to it, I found my face was wet with tears.

  I once read somewhere that when a man is hunted for his life, one of the greatest dangers he faces is the overpowering urge to give himself up. I hadn’t believed it. I had always thought that fear would drive him until he dropped, like a hunted rabbit. But I found out that it’s true. Whether it was fear, or fatigue, or the blind instinct of the hunted, the impulse to surrender came and I didn’t even try to resist it.

  I stood up, wiped my tear-stained cheeks with my hands, and started shakily down the stairs.

  As I got to ground level, I stumbled and nearly fell. Deloitte took hold of my arm from behind; I felt my skin shrink from his touch. He spun me around and I saw his eyes widen as the light fell on my face.

  “Nina? My God, what are you doing here? You scared me half to death. Jesus, I thought you were a burglar or something. I might have killed you!”

  There was genuine horror in his voice. For the first time, I noticed that there was a gun in his right hand, not a derringer, but something larger and heavier that looked infinitely more deadly. The hand that held it was shaking almost as badly as mine had done.

  “My God,” Mel said again. “I had no idea you were here. I didn’t see your car outside. I just ran in to pick up a file and I heard … I could see … that there was someone there and I took the gun out of my drawer and … Jesus, why didn’t you say anything?”

  I almost wept with relief. Mel Deloitte wasn’t going to shoot me. My bullet-ridden body wasn’t going to tumble grotesquely down the twisting stairs onto the Aubusson carpet below. I sent a brief prayer of thanks heavenward.

  As he spoke, Deloitte had laid the gun carefully back in the drawer, shutting it with a decisive click. When I realized he was still staring at me, waiting for me to explain why I had been hiding behind the chest in his study loft, I took the lead he had given me, crossing my fingers on the lie the way Kerrin and I had when we were kids.

  “I just stopped in to check on a couple of things. I thought you’d be at your dinner meeting so I wouldn’t be disturbing you, but just as I was leaving, I heard someone in the hall. I guess I’ve been a little jumpy the last few days and, like you, my first reaction was ‘burglar!’ If I’d known it was you … ”

  I let my voice trail off in a suitably shaken tremolo.

  For the second time in as many days, I watched Mel Deloitte down a snifter of brandy in a single gulp. This time though, he offered me one as well. It produced the same effect as the brandy I had drunk at Ian Forrester’s, but it tasted a whole lot better. We spent about five minutes assuring one another that no harm had been done.

  “Where is your car anyway?” Mel finally said. “It’s not in the drive.”

  “I parked it where I always do, on the far side of the garage. If you came up by the front door, you wouldn’t have seen it.”

  Mel’s glass went down with a bang. “Christ, I forgot I left the engine running.” He checked his watch and scooped up a file folder. “Look, if you’re done here — you’re sure you’re all right? — how about I see you out. I’m low on gas as it is and I have to get back to that meeting.”

  At the door to the study, he stopped and tucked the folder under his arm, freeing his hands to straighten one of the derringers on the wall. I felt my mouth go dry.

  “These things are always shifting,” he complained.

  “Who’s the woman in the picture?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Your grandmother?”

  “Great-grandmother,” Mel corrected. “On my father’s side. Derringers were considered acceptable ladies’ weapons in her day, and I gather she liked to feel well-protected, though God knows she looks as if she could have repelled any boarders by force of personality alone. As far as I know, neither of these little guns has ever been fired.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It must have been nearly three when something woke me. For some time, I lay in that heavy state mid-way between sleep and waking, where it is hard to separate reality from dream. Something had woken me, but whether I had heard a noise, or whether it was the dream itself that had startled me awake, I couldn’t tell. I puffed the pillow under my head and prepared to drift back to sleep again.

  Thirty minutes later, I gave it up and decided I might as well brew a pot of tea and pick up where I’d left off in the latest issue of Traveler magazine.

  As I crossed the living room to the wicker basket where I keep my magazines, some movement outside caught my eye, and I went to the window for a closer look. Light from the streetlamp filtered through the shutters and the Boston fern that screened the glass. The movement I had seen was simply a shadow falling across the light, as some other wakeful soul walked his dog in the pre-dawn quiet. Perhaps it was their outbound journey that had woken me. A few delicate flakes of snow were falling, and I found myself envying the stranger and his dog strolling so peacefully through them. I often attribute to other people a state of mind lacking in myself. For all I know, the man on the street was no more at peace than I was, but it comforted me to imagine him so.

  My own feelings remained nearly as jumbled as when I had first arrived home after my little escapade at Mel Deloitte’s.

  I still tasted gall when I thought about it. How could I have been so stupid? I had been willing enough to assume Mel Deloitte’s guilt to breach his trust. I had broken into his home looking for evidence to implicate him in a murder, then lied to him about my reasons for being there. Why? How could it have been so easy for me to believe such things about a man I knew and respected?

  The whip flicked me again. Not only my face, my whole body burned. I had wanted Deloitte to be the answer. Or at least, I had wanted David not to be. Every bone and fiber of my being rebelled at the thought that I might still have been wrong about David, but I no longer believed that Mel Deloitte had had anything to do with the murder of Randy Outray. His horrified distress at nearly shooting me had convinced me of that. Whether he was guilty of the other thing, I didn’t know, but considering it now, rationally, I didn’t think so. Based on my own knowledge of the man, it just didn’t seem credible. Whatever gossip Rolph had heard, had probably been just that; gossip. After seeing the damage innuendo and rumor had done to Ian Forrester, I was appalled at how nearly I had set someone else in the same trap.

  In the kitchen, the kettle started whistling. I abandoned the window and the now-empty street, and went to make my tea. Someone had given me a selection of herbal teas as a gift a few months ago and though I normally drank orange pekoe, tonight I chose chamomile, hoping it would help me sleep.

  I curled into the window seat, magazine open but unread, and thought about David. He had left a brief message on my machine that I hadn’t noticed when I stopped to pick up Deloitte’s key. He had called to let me know he was taking Ian to a nursing home in Concord, away from the publicity, and the police, in Kingsport. He would stay overnight with his parents and return in the morning.

  I wondered if the watcher in the green car would follow him all the way to Concord and back.

  I could understand him wanting to get Ian out of the public eye. Things had been bad enough before, but now, with David a suspect in Randy Outray’s murder, they would be intolerable. I thought too, that with Ian safely tucked into a nursing home, David would have a freer hand to look after himself.

  I bit my lip.

  That was the crux of it.

  I had seen David as a chance to make amends for all the times I had failed t
o look after the people I loved. All the desperate wanting, the good intentions, the heartache had not saved Brian or Rory or my mother or even, finally, Kerrin. What had happened to each of them had been something totally out of my control. They had been lost beyond my power to save them.

  This time there was no creeping disease, no devastating accident, no death of hope. This time, it wasn’t fate that mattered, but facts, and I had wanted to be the one to present them. But it seemed that that, too, was beyond my power.

  The grandfather clock chimed five. Looking up at it, I realized with a kind of shock that I still considered that clock to be my father’s. So much of what I lived with seemed still to belong to someone else. My mother’s table, my father’s clock, Brian’s wine glasses. Only my guilt was my own.

  Maybe it was time to let it go.

  I rinsed the empty teapot and set it on the stove. Sleepy Time had not fulfilled its promise; the sandman had apparently gone for good.

  Outside, the snow had stopped falling. The stars were fading. I slipped into jeans and my padded jacket and, wrapping a scarf around my neck, went out.

  • • •

  The path through the cemetery was dusted with snow. A single set of footprints had scuffed along it ahead of me, branching to the right where I held to the straight.

  I had brought Christmas roses to lay on the graves of my family. I didn’t, as a rule, bring tribute, but as I drove along Main Street in the gray dawn, supply trucks were just beginning to unload their wares at the grocer and the florist, ready for early Christmas rush opening. They nodded good morning as I slowed to a stop in front of Greavey’s. It was exhilarating to be out and about at that time of day, when the street was quiet and the shops still waiting to be peopled. Mr. Greavey recognized me; if he thought it strange that I was buying flowers at five-thirty in the morning, he was kind enough not to say so.

  Snow poofed under my feet when I opened the iron gate at St. John’s, and it muffled my tread on the gravel path. To my left, the sliding sparkle of the river was crusted and mute. Even the air was still. An oak tree edged the path, ribbing it with shadows. Through its branches, I could see the morning star, shimmering blue-white, like frost. No ghosts stirred.