The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  Mallory pushed the glass towards him with the faintest suggestion of a smile.

  “If you’re still trying to track down my poor old Jerry, you’re never the one I should be sharing this with. Or is it perhaps for Byrd that you’re spreading nets clean up to Baltimore?”

  “I’m meeting with singularly little success, in any event,” said Sheridan, with a rueful twist to his smile. “The only mortal soul that set foot on a Baltimore or Washington field Saturday night except the pilots and mechanics was an elderly gentleman with a limp and a German accent, and a black band on his overcoat, headed for Hasbrouck Heights, near Hackensack, with a consignment of a new serum for an infantile paralysis case.… Well, that seems to dispose of any tenants of Stillhaven as suspects very neatly! … What do you say when you drink good health and good fortune to a fellow in your Ireland, Mallory?”

  “You say ‘Slanta,’” said Dion Mallory, clicking the little tumbler until it rang like a bell against the edge of Sheridan’s glass, “as I say it to you. Slanta, Sheridan, slanta—and may we be saying it many’s the time again!”

  VI

  Party for an Actress

  There was moonlight on the Lindsays’ wide terrace, as Sheridan stepped through the French window that led to it, a good two hours later. The dancing bubbles of the Venetian lanterns, dull silver, ice blue, palest green, mirrored rather than destroyed its reflections.… All along the shallow flight of steps that ran its full length, cushions of those lunar colors had been strewn with lavish hand, and it was there that the party had gathered. Their voices were as gay and unchastened as ever, but the moon had done strange things to their uptilted faces, investing them with a curious, glittering beauty, haunted and remote, that was surely never their natural heritage. Sheridan would hardly have recognized them.

  Mallory had deserted him in order to park the car, and he felt curiously disoriented. That slim silver sheath with the blue-green girdle belonged to Andrée Chevalier, assuredly—and the swirl of cloudy blue was the exquisite Joan, deep in conversation with some stranger. Who was that in smoke color almost lost against the distant curve of the balustrade—oh, Vicki Wilde, with the scarlet drained from lips and scarf by the strange alchemy that harmonized even the garish and the blatant. He selected two of the most isolated cushions and crossed towards her. She looked as lonely as he felt—and there was more than one thing that Vicki Wilde could tell him.

  “Are you going to be merciful to a stranger in your midst?” he asked with his most charming smile. “Might I sit here while we are waiting for supper—or, if I am sufficiently lucky, might I sit here for supper, too?”

  Vicki stared at him blankly, before the defiant, unhappy little face was suddenly flooded with recognition.

  “Oh, it’s Mr. Sheridan, isn’t it? Tess’s boy friend I Yes, please sit down. I feel like a stranger, too. I haven’t seen you since the Temples’ dinner dance Saturday, have I?”

  “No—not, to be exact, since I saw you and Dr. Byrd leaving for some kind of a backgammon party. I hope that you found good fortune there?”

  In the moonlight the face lifted to his looked suddenly tense and pale. After a moment she turned from him and said slowly, in a voice so low that he had to bend his head to catch it:

  “No—not there.… You see, we didn’t go on to that backgammon party.”

  For one startled and incredulous second after the husky young voice trailed off into the moonlight, Sheridan’s guard slipped.

  “Byrd—you say that Byrd didn’t go on to the backgammon game?”

  Something in the relentless triumph of the tone in which he echoed her words brought her lowered eyes flying to his face. But even before the swift journey from the flame-colored scarf that she was twisting, half nervously, half absently, through her fingers to the dark countenance bent to hers was accomplished, the guard had slipped back, and the most charming and imperturbable of smiles was waiting to greet her. Just one second too late, however. The childish face lifted to his had already hardened into the tense and wary mask that had met his two nights before across the spring flowers of the Temples’ dinner table.

  “No. I said that neither of us went on.”

  Sheridan begged in a voice all gay, friendly contrition:

  “Forgive me. I am truly a boor of the very first water to begin what I hoped was going to be a pleasant evening for both of us by pouncing on you in a voice that the wolf would have hesitated to use to little Red Riding Hood! But for the moment you took me completely by surprise; Saturday night you seemed so entirely to have set your heart on that backgammon game.”

  She answered slowly, twisting the scarf so tautly about her left hand that it looked almost like a bandage:

  “I hadn’t set my heart on it. I’m not particularly good at backgammon, and no one’s very keen about things they’re not good at, do you think? It was just that I had a down on the world in general, and Freddy Parrish’s leaving me stranded like that struck me as rather a dirty trick—especially when I wanted like the very devil to get away from that particular party.”

  “Yes; yes, of course. That I understood even then.”

  “Understood it? Understood what?”

  “Just why you wished to leave that particular party. You must forgive me again. I am afraid that I am being, even for myself, unusually indiscreet.”

  She said, without any particular emphasis:

  “I wouldn’t know, would I? You see I don’t know how indiscreet you usually are.”

  Sheridan’s laughter was so swift and disarming that after a second she yielded him a grudging smile.

  “I knew perfectly well what you understood, of course. Tess told you, didn’t she? Not that it makes any difference. Everybody in Washington—and most of the people out of it, apparently—know that Jack and I had a row.… That nasty little beast X had it spang at the head of his column.”

  “Tess told me because she was upset by the somewhat awkward fact that you were sitting next to Dr. Byrd,” he said gently. “Because she knew that once you had been engaged and now no longer were.”

  “No,” she murmured, her eyes on the flame-colored bandage. “Not any longer.… As a matter of fact, we never were, exactly. But people in Washington have a trick of jumping at conclusions. Do people in Vienna?”

  Whatever else the Wilde girl was, Sheridan decided with promptness and a regrettable lack of enthusiasm, she was no fool. And even as he smiled down at the small face, guileless with the expert innocence of the street urchin who has just hurled a snowball at an old gentleman in a high hat, he had an irritated consciousness that she undoubtedly thought that he was.

  “Occasionally, I fear. But some of us, believe me, make fervent efforts to keep our feet on the ground, no matter how temptingly narrow and twisting the path that leads from one fact to another may be.”

  “That’s good,” commented Vicki Wilde affably. “Because I’d just happened to run into one of them that struck me as darned well qualified for the champion running and standing broad jumper at conclusions of the universe.… Did Tess happen to mention what Jack and I had the row about?”

  “She did not go into details, naturally,” replied the young man from Vienna, wondering bitterly whose inquisition this was turning out to be. “But I understood vaguely that it had something to do with—money.”

  “Yes. I understood that you understood that. I’m defective in several ways, but not when it comes to hearing—not even hearing nice low voices two places away from me at a dinner table. But it just happens that you both understood wrong.”

  Sheridan, concealing under his most agreeable expression an irritation that threatened to engulf him at any moment, told himself sharply that this surprisingly annoying young woman was nevertheless the repository of information more valuable than much fine gold, and lifted his hands in a gesture that implied complete surrender.

  “Kamerad!” he implored, his voice carefully adjusted to a hint of laughter that he was far from feeling, “if you are tryin
g to make me feel seven kinds of a lunatic, Miss Wilde, you have already won, hands down! Shall we let it go at that? Why not declare a truce and let me join all these young men who are scurrying about with plates and glasses? However deplorable it may be that you and Dr. Byrd quarreled—for any cause whatever—and however more deplorable that the quarrel was not made up so that you could have continued on with him to the backgammon game, I must confess that I do not regret it as sincerely as I should. You see, if you will only permit me to continue to be your very humble servant long enough to prove that I am not quite the abject idiot that I must have seemed till now, his loss tonight will prove distinctly my gain.”

  “Oh, but we did make up the quarrel,” Vicki Wilde assured him in a voice that struck him as really maddeningly conscientious. “That was the reason that we didn’t go to the backgammon game. We went on to my apartment, and made it up so thoroughly that it took us two hours and a good gallon of cocoa before we even realized where we were.… Does all that talk about being my humble servant mean that you’re asking me for supper?”

  Karl Sheridan, reminding himself of the truly admirable example of Talleyrand, of whom it had been said that so complete was his mastery of his emotions that even were he kicked hard from behind, not so much as the flicker of an eyelash would betray the fact, made a truly heroic effort to conceal his own stupefied displeasure. After a long moment he said in a voice from which he had banished every trace of expression:

  “Oh, for supper most assuredly! I seem to be the target for every stray bit of misinformation in Washington. Only this morning Dion Mallory told me that on Saturday night, no later than two, Dr. Byrd was in Baltimore with Jerry Hardy.”

  “Well, maybe he got there by quarter to two at that,” Vicki Wilde admitted meditatively. “I was probably boasting about the two hours. It couldn’t have been more than an hour and three quarters. No, it couldn’t even have been that, because the boy that took us up in the elevator said that he had a date to meet a colored lady friend on the corner at half-past eleven, and that if the good-for-nothing nigger who was supposed to take over the night service didn’t turn up in the next five minutes, he’d find a mighty sharp razor waiting for him.… Jack said he surely must have been drinking for hours on end, or he’d never have talked that way. He’s the quietest little bandy-legged coon you ever saw, with a whole face full of gold teeth. It’s a wonder that they haven’t rounded him up for hoarding. His name’s Cyril Demarest—don’t you think that’s a reasonably queer name for a darkey?”

  “It is an entirely preposterous name,” replied Sheridan with entirely spurious lightness, realizing that for probably the first and last time in his life he was watching a perfect alibi blossom and flower before his outraged eyes. “It belongs only in a dream—but then so does all the rest of it—the two of you plighting once more eternal friendship over those gallons of cocoa.”

  “Friendship?” inquired Miss Wilde, her eyebrows slightly arched. “What in the wide world made you think of friendship? And there were three of us, of course, or there certainly wouldn’t have been any cocoa. I was boasting about that cocoa, too. We probably didn’t have a drop more than a quart a piece. And now if there’s nothing more that you’d like to know for the next five minutes, I think that supper would be a perfectly swell idea.”

  “Supper by all means,” agreed Sheridan, bitterly, rising to his feet. “Though, as I gather that you suspected some time before I so casually placed my cushions next to yours, there are any number of things that I can hardly wait five minutes to find out. Just exactly what does one do about this supper situation?”

  “Well, you can’t get it out here by simply sitting around and looking magnetic, I’m afraid.… This is one of those buffet things where the poor boys earn every mouthful that they eat I There’s a table of hot things and another of cold ones right through that door there, and, knowing Joan, I’d say you can’t possibly go wrong on anything you take. By the time you get back I’ll have the blueprints of my past, present, and future life all ready for you. You’d better hurry—as one non-jumper-at-conclusions to another, you ought to find them illuminating.”

  “Thanks,” replied her supper companion in a voice that was far from grateful. “You are too kind—and likewise, I fear, too prophetic. I will not be long, you may be sure.”

  Just across the threshold of the door to the dining room, his eyes still dark with the thoughts that he was entertaining about himself, either as a full-fledged member of the Criminalistic Institute of Vienna, a future adviser to the Division of Investigation, or a mere wretched free lance, he collided squarely with Dion Mallory, bearing a succulently decorated plate in either hand.

  “Hi—watch it, watch it, young feller! Want to get another of these and join Andrée Chevalier and two or three convivial spirits out under those beeches to the left of the terrace? We could do with one or two more like you nicely.”

  “Thanks awfully, Mallory; I’d love to, but I’m just hunting up something for Miss Wilde and myself.”

  “Vicki Wilde, is it?” The deep blue eyes under the raised eyebrows gleamed with amused surprise. “Faith, you’re well able to look out for yourself, it seems! Why don’t the two of you join us later, if you’re feeling like it? And here’s to good hunting in the meantime.”

  It was easy enough to smile back at Mallory as he swung past him on his way to the beeches; never in all his life had he met anyone so friendly, charming, and entirely likable as this tall Irishman whom he had known for two or three fragmentary nights and even more fragmentary days, and who was not—no, who surely was not—Tess Stuart’s fiancé. Had not Tess herself told him so? And could Tess, with those wide eyes, clearer than candor itself, lie to a man whose honor, whose career, whose life itself she held so lightly in those long, cool hands of hers?

  He pulled himself up sharply, the easy smile that he had flung after Mallory tightening down to grim humor. Tess Stuart could, without a single doubt in the world, lie to him as admirably and intrepidly as she did everything else. After all, there was not the slightest reason why she shouldn’t; so far, he had completely neglected to confide in her that his life was in her hands.… Perhaps because he was afraid that she might open the long fingers—and let it slip through? … Perhaps because he—

  “Well, well, well, this is a surprise!” murmured a soft drawl just behind his shoulder. “Young Mr. Sheridan, as I live and breathe. Fancy finding you here, of all people! It proves the world’s a nice, convenient size, after all, doesn’t it? I didn’t even realize that you knew the Lindsays.”

  Abby Stirling slipped deftly through the circle of urgent males clamoring about the supper table and proceeded to collect plates, silverware, and glasses with a rapidity that bordered on prestidigitation. Sheridan, eyeing suspiciously the smooth, taffy-colored head and the childish figure in the black taffeta frock that made her look as though she were dressing up for the grown-ups’ party, wondered moodily what it was about her that he liked so much. Ambiguous, serenely malicious, and—if he were to believe the evidence of his own ears and several wagging tongues—a clearly dangerous young woman, yet there clung about her something curiously disarming, something intangible as the fragrance of bay leaves and air sweet with salt and sunlight. Not the odor of sanctity, decidedly, but strangely enough something even more reassuring. The countenance that he turned to her, however, was far from expressing any such signal approval.

  “Not so surprised, believe me, as I am to see you! Of all the people in all the city of Washington, you are the very last I had dared to hope to find here.”

  “We’re going to get along magnificently, Mr. Sheridan, darling,” she assured him contentedly, arranging two small meat pies, so hot that they still bubbled, an airy froth of green cress salad, and a peach-pink aspic of foie-gras black with truffles on the plate in her hand. “If there’s one thing that I loathe more than another, it’s a fellow that beats around the bush, and the good Lord knows you’re no bushbeater. Is it a secret why
you’re so surprised to find me here?”

  “Oh, rather not. Quite simply, it is because I thought that you did know the Lindsays,” replied the non-bushbeater pleasantly. “Good heavens, what an embarrassment of riches they’re spreading out before us! You are sure that there is nothing better than those little hot brown pies?”

  “Nothing in this world.… By the way, what a nice rude young man you’re turning out to be! Are you implying, by any chance, that you’re surprised at the fact that we were invited?”

  “No, no! Only that you have come. Just as a matter of record, you may be interested to know that even my worst enemies consider me polite to the point of affectation. It has been somewhat of an affliction to me.”

  “I wouldn’t let it be,” urged Mrs. Stirling solicitously. “Not to the point where it destroyed your appetite, I mean. No fooling, now, what made you think I wouldn’t come?”

  “Quite candidly, because I had gathered recently from unimpeachable sources that you and Mrs. Lindsay had not been on the happiest of terms.”

  “Meaning by unimpeachable sources the Parrish woman crouched at the keyhole,” rejoined Abby Stirling calmly. “Ah, well, youth, youth—there’s nothing to beat it, even if it is half cocked! Maybe you won’t believe it, but I’m rather fond of Joan Lindsay.”

  “Maybe I won’t,” agreed Sheridan blandly. “Have you everything, then, that you need, or might I—”

  But Abby Stirling was already crooking an imperious finger in the direction of an approaching servitor.

  “Hey—hey, garçon—Rastus—Uncle Ned—bring one of those juleps over here, will you? No—better make it two. Come on, Sheridan; heel taps to the Vienna police force for sending its brightest light to shine over darkest Washington!”

  “They would hardly be grateful for that tribute,” he assured her grimly, lifting the frosted silver glass with the brief click of invisible heels. “Still, since you suggest it, here’s to the most admirable of institutes—from the least admirable of its members!” For a moment his eyes met hers squarely over the heady green sprigs, and then he added conversationally, “I ran across that announcement in this morning’s paper.”