Fair Warning (27 page)

It was a small contribution, but it had its place and its twisted importance in that whole.

Marcia, because he kept fumbling about, muttering of the paperweight, rose and went to the desk.

“It’s been put away, I suppose,” she said, to silence Gally.

It didn’t silence him.

“Funny thing to put away,” he said stubbornly. “Who’d put away a chunk of glass? Remember how Ivan always held it in his hands while he talked to a person? Kept looking in it like a—what-do-you-call-’em? Crystal gazer. I always hoped he’d look in it and see a—well, streak of generosity or something. But instead he got his nastiest answers out of it.” Gally looked reminiscent and said, wincing, “He used to lecture me about jobs.”

“Somebody’s taken it away,” said Marcia. “It doesn’t matter.” It wasn’t in any of the drawers, either, she was discovering, opening one after another.

And it really was an odd sort of thing. Odd, but, Marcia thought—in the top of her mind and above that deep preoccupation—in the confusion it had been misplaced.

Verity and Dr. Blakie were talking of going to see Rob, of getting a lawyer.

Miss Wurlitz for the second time that morning knocked at the door, peered gingerly into the room when Marcia said “Come in,” and told the doctor the hospital was telephoning again.

“Tell ’em I’ve gone,” said Dr. Blakie.

She nodded and closed the door with an efficient little click.

Gally had stopped pushing papers about and was staring at the desk fixedly.

“Wouldn’t it be queer,” he said suddenly in a thin, dreamy voice, “if that paperweight was what killed Ivan? Fractured his skull, I mean. I’ve often thought as I watched him stroke it that I’d like to heave it at him myself.” He blinked and added quickly and vehemently, “But of course I didn’t.”

His words, as was not infrequent with Gally, produced a kind of startled silence—a silence that gradually filled with a crowd of unspoken speculations.

Dr. Blakie said slowly, “The blow was on the back of the head. And it takes a pretty heavy blow to fracture a skull. At the same time skull fractures are uncertain; sometimes they fracture like eggshells under very light blows. You can’t really say anything very definite about them. Still, I suppose the paperweight might have done it. I remember it well. Are you sure it’s not there, Gally? Perhaps Beatrice put it away somewhere.”

“When did you last see it, Marcia?” asked Verity.

She couldn’t remember. It was as if it had always been there, and yet … sometime, not too long ago, she had thought how empty the desk looked. Was it the paperweight she had missed?

“I can’t remember.”

It was Gally who thought of Ancill and went to call him.

“He’ll know,” he said: “he always knows,” and went into the hall. He did not return at once—did not return for at least ten minutes. They were talking again of lawyers for Rob, when Gally came back into the room and stood there looking at them with his eyes glittering with excitement.

“He’s gone,” he said jerkily. “Cook says he left not more than fifteen minutes ago. He said he was going on an errand and that you were in a hurry for whatever it was. He took the light car. Did you send him on an errand, Marcia?”

She hadn’t, of course. Later she realized that they ought then to have had some inkling of the truth.

B
UT THEY HADN’T. ALTHOUGH
Jacob Wait was going over sheaves of reports again and finding one small, curious gap. It was a gap that he thought might account for Beatrice’s murder. But just then it seemed to him to add to the case against Rob, and he was mournfully exultant about it.

And Rob in his cell with that barred door beside him was staring whitely at the bare floor and doing over and over again a simple bit of logic. It was an ugly bit of logic; the result of which forced him to face what he had not till then faced. It was inexorable; it opened an incredible vista. He had no proof: but did he want proof? And Marcia, he thought, was safe.

Late that afternoon Dr. Blakie brought the lawyer to him. But still in the grip of that remorseless bit of logic he refused, white-faced, to talk and wanted only to ask questions. Was Marcia all right? She was not under arrest, then? What was going on? Oh, so Ancill had escaped!

That put a new light on things, and he studied the lawyer frowningly and lost in thought. But still he didn’t want to talk, and the lawyer finally went away convinced in his heart that Rob had killed Ivan Godden and was refusing—as they did at first—to admit it to anyone. Even to the defense lawyer. He would return the next morning, he said. If Rob wanted him. Rob said absently that he did. But that Verity had better not come.

He did rouse to ask a single question, and that was, if there was any chance of his being released now that Ancill had disappeared.

“If he’s murdered, then I couldn’t have done it, because I was locked in here. If he’s run away, then it looks as if he’s the murderer.”

Yes, the lawyer assured him, Ancill’s disappearance certainly ought to alter the situation. But he didn’t know what the police would do. And he regretted to admit that the case against Rob was—well—

“Pretty tight,” said Rob.

Yes, he was afraid it was. But they would do everything they could. However, Rob must give him complete confidence.

He went away, wondering what young Mrs. Godden looked like.

By night Ancill’s disappearance became a settled fact, for it was then that the police found the light car in which he’d made his escape. It was abandoned on a little-used road far north of Chicago on the edge of the forest. There was nothing in the car to give them any clue as to why—or where—he had gone. It was abandoned because it was out of gasoline and apparently he had been afraid to stop at a filling station. And wisely, for within twenty minutes of his flight’s being known it was broadcast from every police radio. Middle-aged man, slender, dark, wearing chauffeur’s cap, driving small car—make—number—color—wanted for murder. Wanted for murder. Calling all cars—wanted for murder—middle-aged man …

The chauffeur’s cap was found in the car.

There was no clue, either, to be found in his orderly room in the servants’ wing at the back of the house. Nor in any previous conversation he had had with Emma Beek or with a weeping, shattered Delia. Detectives were there again, questioning, searching, making up for the momentary relaxing of their guard. There was an unspoken admission that Ancill had been, really, a suspect. And that with Rob’s detention they had let down a little the stringency of that guard.

Except for the two or three nearly concerned. Verity. Gally. Marcia.

But they said nothing of this. Only questioned, and no one knew anything.

Even Emma Beek was suddenly less communicative and came to Marcia in the middle of the afternoon and said, avoiding her eyes, that she wished to look for a new place once her month was out.

“Why, certainly.”

“You’ll not be needing me much longer, anyway,” said the woman craftily, and had gone before Marcia realized what she meant, and what that half-frightened, half-impudent look in her eyes meant. So that was it. The cook thought, and had thought from the first, that Marcia had killed Ivan. Marcia went to the door and called the woman back.

“It’s true that I shall not need you any longer,” said Marcia. “You may leave as soon as the police permit you to go.” For a long moment they looked at each other; Marcia cold with anger and the memory of many meetings, Emma Beek instinctively a toady to superior strength and force. She said, blinking and unexpectedly, “I beg your pardon, I’m sure, ma’am. I told the police about—about your trouble with Mr. Godden because Miss Beatrice said to tell. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble. And if you was to keep me on I’m sure we’d get along perfect.” She was sly and smiling and ingratiating; a product of Beatrice’s and Ivan’s training.

Marcia held back a small fury of disgust.

“You were right to tell them anything they asked so long as it was the truth,” she said. “And I shan’t need you any longer.”

Verity stayed there all that day, watching the detectives brought to the house by the search for Ancill, listening to that inquiry which was so fruitless; listening, too, for the telephone, sitting with an ashen blank face watching the rain. They said little, the two women, waiting and helpless in that chill, ghost-ridden house, where the rustle of Beatrice’s skirts still lingered on the stairway and the glasses along the bookshelves still held half-seen glimpses of Ivan’s handsome, pale face. Rain poured quietly and steadily all that day, as if the whole sky had become leaden and inexhaustible; foliage was growing lush and green, and the lawns were sodden and the hedges and evergreens drenched and bowed.

Once Marcia, going over and over that worn circle of conjecture and weary, terrible questions, reached again the matter of the arsenic and the goldfish. Why had Ancill denied it? And why, she thought in futile exasperation, hadn’t she asked him about that denial, made him explain?

She took a wrap and went down to the pool through the gray rain, her feet sinking into the sodden lawn, the rain cold on her face, her throat and her heart aching when she came to the summerhouse and remembered Rob coming to her there. The love and pain in his eyes. Holding her, a few moments later, in his arms with his mouth against her mouth. What had she brought him—and what was she to bring him! So terribly different from what she wanted to give him.

And it would be worse.

Collusion.

She fought against the engulfing wave of horror that thought brought with it; fought it back, as she had done many times.

But she wondered if ever again she could stand beside him. Would they let them seek each other’s eyes above a packed and arid courtroom? Or would his eyes at last turn away? Had she cost him too much?

She moved and knelt beside the pool, pushing the wetness from her face and trying to see into the disturbed gray waters of the pool. The rain murmured upon it, and the water was opaque and rippling, and she could see no flashes of gold below that splashing surface. She returned to the house, a little afraid of the wet, deserted garden, remote and gloomy and too quiet except for the rhythm of the rain.

Late in the afternoon the lawyer came, told them suavely that he had seen Rob, that he was well and in good spirits, that he was to see him in the morning, it would be better if they did not go to him just now—this with an oblique and rather surprised look at Marcia and a delicate cough—and went away, hurrying through the rain to his waiting car and getting his smart gray barcelona well spotted.

They could make little of that, and it was too suave and too reassuring to be comforting.

“But if Ancill’s gone voluntarily, it’s escape,” said Marcia. They had said it so many times it meant nothing, but she went on, “It’s flight. Well, then, there’s a reason for it. And if he murdered Ivan, then Rob didn’t. And they ought to release him.”

But the hours went on, and he was not released.

Yet that man hunt continued. And the papers that night had it.

“Mystery Man Sought By Police. Sensational Developments In Double Murder.” Verity read the headlines in a tight, dry voice and skimmed the rest with swift, darkly haunted eyes.

“Well, at any rate, they stick to Ancill and don’t mention Rob’s arrest. Thank God for that mercy. But it’s only temporary. When it breaks—” She stopped talking, as if she could literally say no more.

Marcia was walking up and down—a slender figure in a blue sweater and skirt.

“But there must be a reason for Ancill’s disappearance. He was frightened. I know he was frightened. If they can only find him!”

Verity assented wearily. They had gone over it all so many times and so futilely. He had denied the goldfish episode. Why? He had suddenly become frightened when—so far as they knew—all the evidence tended to involve only Rob—why? There were no answers.

Jacob Wait himself came about six o’clock. It was not a long interview; he was pressed for time, wasted no second, and looked sallow and ill and resentful.

He listened, however, while Marcia told him of Ivan’s death and, this time, omitted nothing. He listened while Gally, summoned from the billiard table again and looking himself rather resentful, told of his own presence in the house at the time of the murder. Listened but—so far as Verity and Marcia, who waited in the library while Gally and Wait talked briefly in the drawing room, could make out—asked few questions.

“If only he doesn’t tell about hearing Rob’s threat to kill Ivan!” thought Marcia anxiously. “If only he doesn’t tell too much!” She searched Gally’s face when he emerged, but could tell nothing from it; he vanished again with the hurried alacrity of a child let out of punishment, and Wait, still bored and curiously, deeply resentful of them all and showing it while Marcia—because of the puzzle of the arsenic it was so curious an inconsistency on Ancill’s part— told him of the goldfish and of Ancill’s denial of his tale.

“And are the goldfish dead?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see. I think so.”

“Do you know anything of the arsenic?”

“I think it was in the cupboard in the library. I think I saw it there. The night Ivan was murdered I—I came down to the library after you had gone.”

“Never mind,” he interrupted briskly, “I know all that. Knew the next morning that you’d been looking for something in that cupboard. What were you after?”

“How—”

He was impatient.

“Matches—pasteboard flaps with your fingerprints on ’em. Thought you were hunting for his will, when the affair of the will came up. Suppose now it was—this letter. Was it?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t find it? Why not?”

“I—” Should she tell, after all, about Beatrice? No; that morning they had decided it was too dangerous to Rob; that they would wait his decision about it. “No. It was gone. But someone was in the library that night.”

His eyes drooped a little lower as she told him of that.

“Have you seen the flannel jacket since?”

“No.”

It was the only thing that seemed to interest him, and he was silent for a moment, jingling things in his pocket and looking at Marcia.