Another Woman's House (17 page)

The night was still, in spite of the scudding clouds, with only intermittent breezes. Almost, she thought, she could hear the slow swell of the tide along the Sound far below where she and Richard had stood and talked, argued and lost the case against themselves, and then—for a moment, for an instant, there at the break in the hedge not far below her had thought that they might win. So briefly, so shortly … “There's just one thing that's really important. I'm going to marry you. …” Richard had said, and had looked up and the lights of the house were blazing, and Alice was waiting in the warm and lighted room.

Myra shivered a little under her thin red jacket. Suddenly she realized that the thing she clutched so tightly in her hand was her own evening bag. She had planned to get rid of the shell and it was now simple. Dig a little hole somewhere, under some hedge, along the path, anywhere out of sight, push leaves over it.

As suddenly the thing that Sam had suggested about the gun, which had seemed so tremendous, so intricate, so impossible for her, Myra, to achieve, seemed almost as simple.

The gun was in the newel post. Someone had hidden it there; now that there was a new set-up, a new round of poker, somebody might have to get rid of the gun. All she had to do was watch.

It would not be Richard.

A night bird rustled somewhere. Perhaps it was Willie on a night prowl.

Behind her the terrace doors opened and a rectangle of light shot out upon her and then vanished as the door closed again. “Myra,” said Richard's voice, “I thought you were there,” and came toward her.

His face emerged dimly from the night, yet she knew it so well that every line seemed clear to her. He sighed and put one foot up on the balustrade and leaned on his knee. “Myra, I told Sam just now the truth about Tim's action in going to the Governor. I was of two minds about doing it, but Sam insisted that Tim
couldn't
have forgotten the curtain. He suggested that Tim had shot Jack and then, kid-like, got scared. So I told him. But I don't want anyone else to know—not even Aunt Cornelia or—Alice …” He took a long breath and got out a cigarette and lighted it, tossing the match down in the deep black shadows below the balustrade.

It was again for an instant very quiet, so night sounds made themselves manifest—a faint rustle in the shrubbery, a soft breeze away down in the pines where she and Richard had walked so short a time ago. Richard said abruptly, “I talked to Alice. Not much—while we were having dinner. I think she knows about us, Myra.”

“Yes …” began Myra and remembered Alice's plea for secrecy. Richard needn't know, he must not know, Alice had said. But that was unfair! Myra had every right to tell Richard of that interview, even though nothing she or Richard, or even Alice, could put in words, could change or alter facts.

But without marking her hesitation, Richard went on, “It's just as well, perhaps. God knows what this thing is going to do to us all, or where it will end. But when it does end …” His cigarette, scarcely lighted, made a small red arc out over the balustrade, across the darkness below. He turned and took her suddenly and closely in his arms.

The breeze stirred the pines and the dark, thick growth below the terrace. The flagstones felt cold under her slippered feet. Richard said, “I love you. I'll always love you. …”

Sam stood in the doorway. He could not have heard. He must have seen the closeness of their figures. He called, “Webb is here.”

“All right,” said Richard but held her.

Sam closed the door.

Quite slowly and deliberately Richard turned her face and put his own hard cheek against it for a moment. Then abruptly he released her. “Will you come in? You don't have to listen, you know. And I don't know whether or not we'll accomplish anything. Even if Webb knows anything he may not tell it.”

She had to have time in which to quiet the uneven pounding of her heart. She had to veil the look that must be in her eyes before others saw it. “In a moment,” she said.

“All right.” He took a long breath, seemed to square his shoulders and went back along the terrace, in at the lighted door.

She stood quite still. The clouds had drifted so fully across the sky that only a few stars now showed through. The hedges were like lines of soldiers, black, standing solidly at attention. The clipped privet was outlined in dense black humps. Her small gold evening bag was cold in her fingers. Somewhere down there she'd hide the shell. She walked slowly across the terrace in the direction of the steps and then down into the mingled shadows below. Willie apparently heard her. He came in a scramble from somewhere, waggled happily when she spoke to him and attached himself to her.

The new spring lawn was soft and damp below her slippers. As she drew nearer, the entrance to the path became clearer, the outline of the hedges sharper. She reached the path between the hedges and entered it, glancing along its length down toward the pines and up at a gradually ascending slope which it took along the house and at an almost parallel line with it, until it turned and gave upon the graveled driveway, fairly near the front entrance. Empty now in both directions, as far as she could see, the path ran like a gray ribbon between the two sharp black lines of the hedges. Willie followed her and stopped when she stopped.

It was much more difficult to bury the shell than she had thought so small and simple an act could possibly be. The soil was loose and damp. She used a twig and then her fingers to dig with, and finally opened her bag and got out the shell itself and pushed it deeply into the loose little space. She covered it carefully, stepped on the loose soil to flatten it and dug around into the roots of the hedge for leaf mold and raked it over the spot. But it was her feeling of stealth that was difficult—something like guilt, as if it were a small and terrible grave. She looked quickly along the path again before she rose from the deep shadow. Nothing moved anywhere except Willie who had watched her with interest, sniffing at the leaves. She stood, her breath coming fast. No one would think of looking for a shell. The gun, perhaps, but not a shell.

Her scarlet silk jacket was thin. She shivered and, merely because it was then a nearer approach to the house, started along the path in the opposite direction from the pines, toward the driveway and the front entrance. Willie, bored, disappeared somewhere in the shadows again.

The turf was soundless and seemed cold and damp. Her skirts whispered lightly against the black walls of the hedge.

Perhaps Webb would confess. Perhaps Webb, really, had murdered his brother and then tried to escape by accusing Alice!

She reached the end of the path and came out upon the graveled space, lined with thick black clumps of laurel, which lay around the stately, pillared front entrance to Thorne House. A light shone over the steps and spread outward to the white gravel. There were three cars parked there. Sam's of course, and Webb's, and the old, enormous Cadillac custom-made, majestic, bought by Mildred's father years ago and used now by Mildred. Anything the Wilkinsons ever bought was the best that could be bought and they used it, determined apparently to get the last cent out of it, forever. And quite suddenly the lights of the car were turned on, full and dazzling in her face.

She caught her breath and put up her hand to shield her eyes and instantly the lights blinked out again. The car door opened so the interior of the car lighted and Mildred said, “Myra—Myra …”

She'd been crying. Her pale-blue eyes were rimmed with scarlet, her eyelashes wet, and her face, in the cruelly sharp downward glare of the lights, was streaked with tears and was old-looking, with lines showing under the rather thick make-up she habitually used, and her lipstick was blurred. She clutched her coat around her thin throat and said, unsteadily, “Myra, I saw Webb Manders come. What are they going to do?”

“I don't know.” She was shivering so her own voice was uneven. “Is anything wrong, Mildred?”

“Wrong!” said Mildred and laughed in a high, half-hysterical way and stopped and cried. Her mouth stretched in a sobbing grimace. “
Wrong!
Oh, no, no! It's only—only Alice. It hurts me to—to see her like that.” She steadied her lower lip with her teeth, and stared at Myra. Her eyes had bright, sharp black pupils. She cried, as if Myra had turned away. “Wait a minute, Myra. I wouldn't think that Dick would let Webb enter the house. I can't see why …” She stopped and sucked in her breath and cried again, “What are they doing?”

“I don't know.”

“You do know! I can see it in your face. I can guess—why, of course!” Comprehension flashed across her distraught, blotched face. “That's it, of course! They're trying to patch up something all together that will hold against the investigation. To protect each other. Richard and Webb and—why, Tim! Your brother! He was here that night, too.”

“They're not trying to patch up something, Mildred. Please don't say that to anyone. It's not true.”

“No, no, I won't! Trust me. I—I didn't mean to ask questions. I—it's only that seeing Alice again has upset me. I suppose it seems strange to you, my feeling for Alice, I mean. But you see …” Suddenly she turned away from Myra and stared ahead across the shining dark hood of the car. Her hands beat softly on the wheel. She said jerkily, “I haven't had many friends, Myra, not really. I don't think I'm the kind to make friends somehow. I—it isn't easy for me. And then I've always been so hedged in with all that money, with being a Wilkinson. Now I'm alone and—life has gone by somehow—and the money doesn't give me the pleasure I thought it would. Alice …” She took a long, uneven breath and said, “Alice was always so beautiful.”

Myra had never heard Mildred speak so earnestly. She had never, in fact, heard her speak without a certain flavor of affectedness and artificiality. The years-long devotion of a plain and lonely woman for a woman who had everything that to Mildred seemed desirable, was both moving and pathetic.

Mildred went on slowly. “We've been friends a long time, you know. She was always pretty and popular. She has the gift of charm. I was plain and rich and unpopular, but I loved her. I never believed she killed Jack, of course, and I never believed she would be convicted. They told me she wouldn't. Everybody said the jury would never convict a woman so—so beautiful,” said Mildred with a curious, sad wistfulness.

Myra said quickly, “Mildred, nobody could have been more loyal than you. All this time you've remained a friend to all of us. You've come here faithfully, you've never let anything shake your friendship with Alice.”

Mildred laughed again. It was a short, abrupt, laugh. She said, “I'll go now. Good night, Myra.”

She reached for the ignition. She turned on the engine and its sedate heavy throb woke the silent night. In the act of closing the car door she leaned out and said loudly over the throb of the engine, “Tell Alice I'll be back.”

The door slammed and the light inside the car went out. With a jerk of the gears the car began to move backward, around the semi-circle, in reverse. Myra, puzzled by Mildred's sadly revealing words, puzzled by her return, puzzled more than anything by that short, abrupt—and bitter?—laugh, watched the big, sedate car come to a stop, start forward, swerve and then go out of sight beyond the curve of laurels.

The sound of the engine gradually died away. Myra turned and walked back to the steps. The massive front door, with the great old knocker which had felt the pressure of so many hands, was unlocked. That was lucky, she thought, shivering in the cold. She would not have to ring for Barton. She went into the hall.

She was so chilled that she was trembling a little. She stood still, gathering warmth. The lights were still on in the hall, but the dining room was dark, the table cleared. Lights and the low and indistinguishable murmur of men's voices came from the library, at the other end. She walked slowly in that direction. The newel post again drew her like an evil magnet. As she passed the stairway, she could not help looking at it. She had to resist an impulse, again, to touch it. She stopped in the library doorway.

Richard was standing at the fireplace, his elbow on the mantel. Sam was sitting on the edge of a table, swinging one leg and staring intently at the knifelike crease in his brown trousers. Tim was smoking.

And something had gone wrong.

Everything had gone wrong.

S
HE KNEW IT EVEN
before she entered the room, before she saw Richard's face and before Webb Manders spoke—Webb who had been only a name to her then, not a personality, not a man who lived and breathed and walked, and had sent Alice to prison. She took a step forward and stopped. She had seen Jack casually a few times, while she and Aunt Cornelia were preparing to go to England years ago. Thus she remembered him when the incredible news of the murder came. She had never before to her knowledge seen Webb. He stood in an aggressive attitude, like defiance and anger, just before the terrace door. He looked like his brother and unlike him; he was tall, too, but more slightly built, with Jack's thick, curly black hair and blunt, thick features. Webb had a lantern jaw, however, the jaw of a despot or a zealot, a narrower, more angular face and just then a look of cold anger. His lips, curved and full like Jack's, were, however, pale and drawn into ruthless lines. Jack might have looked like that, thought Myra suddenly, ruthless and rather cruel, if he had so wished.

A flicker of Webb's eyes in her direction showed that he saw her and knew who she must be. He said suddenly, “So we have nothing to say to each other. I came because I was curious. I wondered why you came to me and why you wanted me to believe that you were friendly and that you thought we might get together to our mutual benefit. Mutual benefit …” said Webb with a kind of fury of scorn and anger. “Your benefit! You're only trying to save your own neck, Dick. You and Sam hoped to pin a murder charge on me. Well, I'm not having it. As for you, Tim, some time maybe you'll explain why you've done this. If I'd known yesterday that the only evidence the Governor had was your little story I'd have …” He stopped and drew in his lips and said, “I'd have taken a different line.”