The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “Not the glass that he used? K, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “The simple truth—the quite self-evident truth, if you stop for a moment to analyze it. I realized it some time before I had finished polishing away the dust, though not, I confess, before I found that it was guiltless of fingerprints. My mind is undoubtedly not at its best tonight—probably the result of too many railways, too many admirable wines, and too few hours of sleep for several nights past.”

  He did not add, And of a lady white as snow and golden as honey, who calls me “Dion darling” without even knowing what she has done, but his heart added it for him.

  Tess said despairingly:

  “Oh, I’m losing whatever mind I ever had. You actually mean that this glass didn’t have hyoscine in it?”

  “I did not say that. It certainly held whiskey and soda—and, if the murderer was as clever as I believe him to be, an insignificant amount of hyoscine as well. Because, you see, I am quite sure that from the beginning he foresaw the possibility of an investigation—however remote, however improbable, still it was there. And to the best of his ability—for you realize that he was handicapped—he prepared for that eventuality. To fit in with the theory of suicide, it was essential that there should be found, in this glass, whiskey, soda, further diluted by ice cubes, and hyoscine-hydrobromide. I am entirely convinced that if the dregs left in the glass had been analyzed, they would have contained precisely these ingredients.” He smiled, briefly and without marked amusement, as he indicated the glittering fragments on the hearth. “Obviously, it would be a little difficult to analyze the contents now!”

  Tess Stuart followed the eloquent gesture, unsmiling.

  “Yes, that’s fairly obvious. It was stupid of me to be so careless. How do you mean that he was handicapped, K?”

  “Principally, by time. Time is the great enemy of the murderer—and he had little margin, I think, to set his stage for suicide. There was always the possibility that some servant might turn up—that you might return unexpectedly early and run into him as he left—that his exit might be blocked if you brought someone with you and went into one of the rooms downstairs.… I imagine that he heard the wheels of Time’s chariot very clearly in his ears as he worked, and that even while he realized that it was insane to risk any chances of discovery by leaving something undone, he hurried desperately.”

  She murmured, her eyes as fixed on the bits of glass as though she were mesmerized:

  “Oh, yes. It’s insane to take chances if you can possibly help it. I know that.”

  Suddenly she jerked her head back abruptly, and for the first time he saw in her eyes panic, stark and appalled.

  “K—K, you make it sound so dreadfully, so horribly real. I was pretending it wasn’t real at all, and now I can see him hurrying and frightened and listening—fixing the glass, and fixing the note, and fixing—K, don’t let me believe it—don’t, don’t!”

  He caught at her wrists, holding them in a grip as relentless as handcuffs.

  “Tess, listen to me; no, do not try to get away—you must listen. If you do not wish me to go home as soon as I have telephoned for a doctor to take care of you, you must get yourself in hand at once. I will not have you making yourself ill with terror. I will not have you driving yourself into a collapse from nerves. I can stand many things, but not to see you break.… Shall I telephone?”

  She whispered:

  “No, don’t telephone. I’m all right now—you’ll see. Give me another chance; I didn’t mean to be troublesome.… You were saying something about a glass, weren’t you? That this—that this wasn’t the glass. Am I being stupid not to understand?”

  “You are being quite incredibly brave and clear-headed.” He released her wrists very gently and stood frowning abstractedly at the hands that had held them. “This room—I wish to heaven that I could get you out of this room. You should not be here, I should have thought of that before. There is no place that we could sit—a drawing room downstairs perhaps—a living room?”

  She shook her head, once more controlled and clear-eyed.

  “No—I don’t care to risk it. These rooms are actually cut off from the rest of the house and sound-proofed into the bargain. Dad had them fixed that way when they were remodeled, so that the phonograph and the radio wouldn’t bother him. But we’d have to pass by the servants’ wing to get down to any of the living rooms—and if any of the servants happened to hear us talking, it might make difficulties tomorrow, mightn’t it? Because we simply never use the living rooms; the servants aren’t any better than spies, and they know that we’re perfectly well aware of it—and so is Dad.”

  “But if your father is so very stern with you, Tess, how does it come that he permits you to live in this sound-proof fortress unmolested?”

  “I imagine that one of the reasons is that I told him I’d walk straight out of his front door and take the first position I could get as a dress model, or a dance hostess or a clerk in a dry-goods store, if he didn’t give me some place where I could call my soul my own,” replied Fuller Stuart’s daughter in a voice as icy as her father’s. “He loathes notoriety, and he knows that I’m a good deal more apt to do things than to argue about them. And then he was trying to bribe Fay to behave herself—and of course he didn’t know anything about the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. I think that he’d worked it out that we’d have to share the sitting room if we ever wanted to see our friends, and that I might have a somewhat chastening effect on Fay’s activities.”

  “And did you, Tess?”

  “No,” said Tess, briefly and colorlessly. “You know that I didn’t.”

  “But all this?” He indicated the table with its array of bottles. “It was not forbidden? Or are the servants in so far your accomplices?”

  “Oh, of course it’s forbidden! But Fay tended to that.”

  She crossed the hearth to the bookshelves near the empty love seat, ran her fingers lightly down the molding that paneled it, and stood back in order to let him see more clearly the cupboard with its neat rows of bottles and glasses concealed behind the gayly colored books.

  “She bribed the carpenter who was remodeling it,” Tess explained in reply to his look of blank surprise. “I didn’t find out until quite a bit later, and I wasn’t precisely exhilarated by the discovery—but after all, you’ll have to admit that the carpenter made a good job of it. All those nice little bottle openers, and corkscrews, and the racks for the glasses—”

  “Exactly. The glasses—any number of glasses, aren’t there? And any number of things to put in them! Scotch, bourbon, bonded rye, House of Lords gin, cognac—what kind fairy godmother keeps this little cellar so well stocked, I wonder?”

  “Fay had her own sources of supply,” said Fay’s tall sister, in a voice infinitely remote from all such traffic. “She didn’t discuss them much with me; I’m afraid that I wasn’t a particularly good audience.”

  “No, I imagine not … Italian vermouth, Bacardi, white mint, half a bottle of curaçao—” He checked the last row of bottles and stood staring at them with a scowl of profound irritation. “No, but surely, Tess, there is something missing.”

  “Missing? From that cupboard?” She mirrored his frown, delicately and scornfully. “Oh, wines, you mean? Fay didn’t care for wine—and then of course you couldn’t keep them at the right temperature in a place like this.”

  “No, no, not wines. It is a little bottle that I am looking for—a little bottle about eight inches high in a wrapper with a great deal of printing on it. Where are the bitters, Tess?”

  “The bitters?”

  “Yes, surely—the Angostura bitters. On the wrapper it tells you how excellent they are with boiled fish or stewed prunes, but in this great country I think that you use them more in these rye drinks full of fruit peels you call Old Fashioneds, and now, it seems, even quite straight with gin. It should be—it must be—somewhere on one of these shelves.”

  “K, have you gone completely mad
? Why should there be bitters in the cupboard?”

  “Because there must be—because it is simply inevitable. Perhaps tucked in behind—”

  “There aren’t any bitters. Fay loathed anything like that; she said it reminded her of the medicine she had when she was sick with malaria in Puerto Rico when she was a baby.”

  “But her friends? Surely she would have kept some for her friends?”

  Tess said very slowly and dispassionately:

  “If Fay’s friends didn’t like what she liked, they weren’t very fortunate.”

  He asked, brushing aside the last remark as though he had not even heard it:

  “She wouldn’t touch anything bitter, you say? No, but that’s simply not possible.”

  “It’s not only possible; it’s a fact. After all, you didn’t know Fay and I did! Why, only a few weeks ago we were in Palm Beach, on a house party over Easter—and everyone was drinking Indian tonic and gin, and Fay thought that it was just a new mineral water. When she found out what it really tasted like, she simply dashed the glass to pieces on the patio tiles and went upstairs shaking and crying—and she couldn’t go to the dance at the Everglades that night because her head was aching so dreadfully. So you see.”

  “So I see nothing—nothing whatever. Not so much as half an inch into the darkness.… What was it that that tonic tasted of?”

  “Oh, it tastes of quinine, of course—and that reminded her of all those dreadful months of malaria, and she simply couldn’t bear it.”

  “Quinine. Quinine, no less. Well, that is the end! She could not take even a swallow of something that reminded her of it without becoming actually ill?”

  “No—I’ve told you so already. K, will you be good enough to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Certainly I will tell you. If what you say is entirely accurate, then the only conclusion that is possible for me to draw is that she was not murdered.”

  Tess, a little whiter than before, said scornfully:

  “That’s sheer insanity—or is it a trick so that you can get to bed earlier? I suppose that after she killed herself, she wiped off the glass and tipped it over on the floor?”

  He lifted his head, meeting the silver lightning of her eyes with a dark flash of his own.

  “Perhaps, as you so intelligently suggested, the glass was unusually wet because of the amount of ice that she put in it, and, therefore, failed to retain even fragments of her fingerprints. In any case, it was not murder.”

  Tess gave a frenzied stamp of. her foot, looking, for all her inches, like a thwarted and outraged child.

  “It was, it was—you know it was! How can you talk such revolting nonsense—how can you know that it wasn’t murder?”

  “Quite simply. No, do not say anything more until I have explained. You are very angry, I know—and I am a little angry, too. I did not appreciate as I should that remark of yours about a trick to get to bed.… Are you listening?”

  She turned toward him a rebel’s face. “Yes.”

  “Very well. You will have to listen carefully, because it is quite technical. How much do you know of the properties of hyoscine hydrobromide?”

  “Do you mean of its uses?”

  “No. Of its composition—its derivation.”

  “Nothing whatever.”

  “Well, then, it is an alkaloid, of the nightshade or henbane family. The alkaloids have one attribute in common: they are bitter. Brucine and strychnine the most intensely so, quinine considerably less, and hyoscine possibly the least of all—but still far too bitter to have a grain of it disguised by a hydro-alcoholic solution such as whiskey and soda, which would simply tend to intensify it. Do you follow me?”

  “Perfectly, thanks.”

  “So much the better. Then you will see without difficulty why I was sure that the hyoscine was not administered in a highball, and why I eliminated this glass. If it was suicide, a person who was not abnormally suspectible to bitterness might have managed to get it down, though I should imagine that it would be an extremely disagreeable drink—but it would be utterly and absolutely impossible to conceal the flavor from someone who was not deliberately making an effort to take it.”

  Tess, her eyes on the elaborate and invisible pattern that she was drawing with one steady finger on the shelves before her, asked carefully:

  “Not if she’d had several highballs?”

  “From what you tell me of Fay, not if she’d had a dozen. A hundred of those little white tablets ground up would fill a teaspoon with a powder bitter as the very devil. And if she could not bear the taste of anything bitter, how could it have been murder, Tess—how could it?”

  She said, gently and strangely:

  “Still it was murder. I see what you mean, K, but it was murder.… Couldn’t he have sweetened it somehow—with sugar-—saccharin?”

  “Enough sweetening to have killed that taste would have made her very ill indeed before she had half done with it.”

  “Well, then, what did he use, K? He must have used something.”

  “But I am telling you quite honestly that if what you say is true I can think of nothing that it is possible for him to have used. I thought first of a very dry vermouth cocktail—if there had been enough vermouth cocktails preceding it—but she would hardly have been likely to start a series of cocktails at ten o’clock at night, would she? Even if she liked vermouth!”

  “She hated it. The only kind she liked were Bacardis, and Orange Blossoms, and Clover Clubs—sweet things like that.”

  “And then, of course, I had thought of gin and bitters. But bitters are out, apparently, and anything remotely connected with the whole family of bitters.… I am feeling stupid and inadequate enough to satisfy even you, Tess. You should be a little kinder.”

  She said, touching his hand lightly:

  “I know I’ve been disgusting. I don’t like the way I’ve been behaving at all, but, truly, I don’t think that it’s all my fault. I’d counted on you so, and even though I know it’s outrageous of me, I can’t help feeling—I can’t help feeling that somehow you’ve deserted me.” She wrung her hands together in a despairing gesture, and he made a motion to go towards her—and checked it almost as soon as it was made. “K, for heaven’s sake, what is it? It isn’t that you’re being stupid and inadequate. I know that you’re being frightfully intelligent about everything, but you’re making me feel like a bad little girl being lectured by a very stern, disagreeable professor. But why, K? When I’ve told you—when I’ve told you over and over again that you’re the only person in the world that I could turn to for help?”

  To his astounded incredulity, he heard a voice that sounded distinctly like his own inquire dispassionately:

  “Why not Dion Mallory?”

  For a moment she stood staring at him blankly, lips parted, eyes dark with amazement.

  “Dion? What do you mean? Dion’s on his way to New York—he told you so himself.”

  “As you say. But surely you could send for him? I believe that you said that you were in constant telephonic and telegraphic communication.”

  “I said nothing of the sort. And why in heaven’s name should I send for him? Dion isn’t a detective.”

  “So I have gathered. But he has other qualifications, has he not?”

  “What qualifications?”

  “It is you who should know best, surely. Is not Mr. Mallory your fiancé?”

  She said slowly, her voice touched with incredulous scorn:

  “I think that you have lost your senses. What earthly difference can it make to you whether Dion Mallory is my husband? … As it happens, he is not my fiancé. Are you quite through with the cross-examination?”

  Karl Sheridan, feeling bands loosen suddenly about his tired heart—though there was little enough, heaven knows, in the words or tone of this frozen young goddess to unloose them—said very simply:

  “Forgive me, Tess. As you say, I have lost my senses. I am a fool and a boor, at that. It is not an
excuse that that strong, silent man of whom you make a little mock should give, but I think perhaps it is because I am rather tired. Today I have traveled a long way—farther than from New York. Farther, I think, than from Austria. If you will still let me help you, I will be very proud.”

  She unclasped the hard-wrung hands, brushed the hair back from her brow with the old childish gesture of bewilderment and fatigue, and bestowed on him a small, wan smile.

  “Poor K, I’m so sorry. It was horrid of me to behave like such a tragedy queen, but I’m afraid that I’m a little tired, too.”

  And he saw for the first time how desperately tired she was, this child with a face strange and lovely as a lost mermaid—even her eyes, the color of moonlight on water; even her parted lips, that faintest and purest of coral; even the soft, pale hair and the snow-white skin seemed drowned fathoms deep in fatigue.… He must be quick to help her, so that he could release her from this trance of weariness into sleep, and, please heaven, dreams less terrible than reality. He went to her, taking her hand in his; it was cold, and it clung to him as though in his touch she found comfort.

  “Too tired, is it not so, to go any further tonight, my poor Tess?”

  “No, no; too tired not to. If we stopped now, I might go crazy, I think. And there’s so much still to do. We ought to go over this whole room, oughtn’t we, to see if he left anything behind him? And we ought to find out what she actually took that hyoscine in. And we ought to move the love seats closer to the hearth, so that there won’t be the space between that one and the broken glass. Shouldn’t we do that first, so that we’ll be sure not to forget? I could help—I could help with the other end.”

  “No. I do not wish you to touch that love seat. Stand here, and I will do it myself.”

  But she clung to his hand desperately.

  “You can’t, K. It might tilt—or slip. If it slipped—”

  He could feel the shudder run like ice through the slight, cold hand, but even before it was gone she had released his and slipped from him.