Another Woman's House (24 page)

Methodically, too, she went over the too-short list of people in the house—Sam, Tim, Aunt Cornelia, the servants. None of them would have smashed the cupid and it was not an accident. She was tempted to call it accident, to dismiss it as accident, and she could not, as she could not dismiss the insidious sense of danger, pointing out its own existence.

If she accepted its existence, then what? Suppose she accepted it, only hypothetically, only for a moment. Jack's murder, of course, was fact. But could Mildred have been murdered?

It was, even as a hypothesis, untenable. Myra had seen her die. Alice had seen her die. And Alice had been with Mildred for at least ten minutes or more before Mildred's death and no one else had been there. Consequently, if Mildred had been murdered (how?), only Alice could have murdered her.

Those were facts, too. Well, then, examine them. Were they facts that allowed no loophole for the present existence of other facts? For the existence of murder?

Certainly Mildred had died of poison. The doctor, everyone, had said so; therefore it had to be self-administered. Besides, if Mildred had not been a suicide (in spite of the letter of confession she had written, in spite of the poison which Mildred herself had purchased with terrible and significant-appropriateness a few days after Jack's murder), if, in spite of all this, Mildred, by any conceivable means
had
been murdered, there had to be a motive.

That was the keynote, the center, the whole basis for any hypothetical structure which included murder.

What then could that motive have been? Why would anybody desire to murder Mildred? More importantly, why would anybody have to murder Mildred? For murder has a dread and obstinate twin and that is urgency. Why, then, should anyone have been forced to murder Mildred?

Myra put out her cigarette, got up, walked the length of the room and back again, and still that hypothetical line of thought persisted, and would not, yet, be dismissed. Well, then, go on. Suppose Mildred threatened somebody.

How?

That question at last brought her in a full circle back to murder—a known murder, a proved murder. Jack Manders had been murdered, and Alice's pardon had re-opened the investigation into his death. If the manner of Mildred's death could be questioned for a moment, the basis for inquiry would have to concern itself with the recent, immediate events: Jack Manders' murder; Alice's pardon and return home; the opening of a new investigation. Could Mildred have known anything at all about Jack's murder which now became dangerous? So dangerous that somebody had been forced by that danger to kill Mildred and thus silence her?

Suppose Mildred had not murdered him (this denied the confession which no one could have induced her to write if it had not been true), but suppose, thought Myra rather desperately, Mildred had not killed Jack. What happened if one removed the fact of the letter?

But it was a full circle of thought in more ways than one, for it brought her up against impossibility again. Only Alice was present when Mildred died and Alice had no motive.

Alice indeed, of all people in the house, could have had no fear of anything that led to Jack Manders' murder, for Alice could not again be charged with Jack's murder. Alice was safe.

And besides, even if she had wanted to, even if there had been some terrible, mysterious need, she would not have murdered Mildred. She would not have risked a murder only a few hours after her pardon and release from prison, in her own house, and in circumstances which, if the word murder ever was uttered in the case of Mildred's suicide, would instantly and inevitably point to her as the murderer.

Alice would not have murdered Mildred or anybody—and only Alice was with Mildred when she took poison.

She went back to Richard's chair.

The intrusive sense of danger, as if the walls of the room, the bricks of the house knew and subtly, mutely, endeavored to reveal that warning and that secret, was wrong. Murder had once existed, but it had stopped.

Suppose Alice had not told everything!
Suddenly Myra remembered the opened window, the stained wet patch on the curtain. Suppose someone else had been there, too! Someone who had, say, threatened Mildred. Suppose there had been some trickery about the poison, suppose Mildred had not intended the thing she took actually to be poison, suppose …

She sank back again, realizing that her fancy had traveled too fast. Mildred had bought the poison; Mildred had brought it there; and Mildred had written her suicide letter. So she couldn't have been murdered and thus Alice could not—either knowingly or unknowingly—protect anyone else.

And who, besides Richard, would she protect? Richard could not possibly have escaped the gold-and-ivory room by the French window, run along the terrace, to enter the house and go up the back stairs in time to come running down the front stairs at the time when he came.

There was no murder. She told herself that again, and again a nagging little voice persisted, trying to refute it: who gained by Mildred's death?

What did it accomplish, if you viewed it from that angle?

Well, in the first place, it stopped the new investigation. So, therefore, it might, for the purposes of argument, be said to benefit Richard, Tim and Webb. And possibly Sam.

And more remotely herself, because of Richard, and because of Tim.

Could Alice so strongly wish to protect any of those people that she would refuse to give evidence against him, even though she knew it to be murder and knew who had murdered Mildred?

Richard?—yes. Tim?—yes. Sam?—yes.

Webb?—no.

Alice had every reason to hate Webb. If Webb had been in that room, if Webb had had anything to do with Mildred's death (yet how could anyone have murdered her?), Alice would have told it at once.

Unless she were afraid of Webb.

Yet the only fear she could hold of Webb would have had to do with Jack's murder and Alice could never again, in any circumstance, be charged with Jack's murder.

Again, methodically, Myra went over the whole circle of conjecture, and again reached the only conclusion—none of her surmises had even attempted to explain away the sheer, bald facts of Mildred's death. And all those simple clear facts still stood out in bold black letters on the safe side of the ledger and could not be erased.

For an instant, with a surrendering flare, the other side suggested some sort of chicanery (unknown by Alice, or its perpetrator protected by Alice) some sleight-of-hand trickery which had tricked and fooled Mildred—but it was a dim sort of suggestion, obviously blocked by facts. It had to be dismissed. It belonged to a realm of quicksand fancy, where there was no stratum of rock anywhere for a foothold.

With a feeling that a long time had elapsed, she looked at the clock and discovered that her whole expedition into the tortuous maze of speculation had taken exactly five minutes. It seemed much longer and she wished that Richard would return.

And her gaze went to the cupid. Nothing in all her journey through the dark and twisting jungle which included murder, had explained the gun or the cupid.

Yet neither the gun, nor the cupid, could have validity. And the warning of murder (Murder here, murder there: Look for me, I am near; I am within touch of your hand!)—all that was her own fancy, the trickery of her own nerves.

Someone knocked lightly at the French door.

Myra got to her feet. She backed around behind the chair. The terror her own thoughts had conjured up caught her so she could not speak. The knock was not repeated. The red curtains quivered and moved as the door opened. Webb Manders said, “Don't scream …” and came in.

She couldn't have screamed. He shut the door. His hat and coat were dripping. He said again, quickly, “Don't scream. I am not going to hurt you.”

He did not take off his hat. Its wet sodden brim shaded his pale face. He shoved his hands in his pockets and eyed her for a moment from the shadow and, as she made some move toward the door, he said quickly again, “Stay there. I tell you I'm not going to hurt you.”

Miraculously, still in the grip of her self-induced terror, she achieved uneven, rapid words: “They've been trying to reach you by phone. Mildred Wilkinson confessed to having murdered your brother. She took poison and died. The police were here. They've gone now. …”

He did not move. His tall figure, his half-shadowed face, even his eyes did not seem to change, and all at once some quality in that changelessness seemed wrong. It was too still, too unmoved.

She cried with swift and utter conviction, “
You already knew!
”

He said coolly, “I was out walking along the road. I saw the police cars and followed them here.”

“Where have you been … ?”

“I did not know what had happened. I didn't wish to be questioned. I thought it wiser to”—he shrugged—“to keep out of sight until they had gone.”

So Webb had been there' all the time—hiding in the shadows of the hedges? Skulking behind the glossy, concealing banks of laurels? Watching? Waiting? For what?

He said coolly again, “Don't look at me like that. I didn't kill her! She committed suicide.”

“You knew that, too.”

“The terrace window was open. And then I saw them take her away.” He waited an instant and said, “She did commit suicide, didn't she?”

“Y-yes.” Yes, certainly. But all those dim and vague and stubbornly persistent intimations of disaster, intimations of murder, came flooding back upon her. He said, “How?”

“She took poison.”

“I mean, how did she confess?”

“She wrote a letter. The police have it.”

“A letter saying she had killed my brother?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she kill him?”

“She said he was tired of her. She had been in love with him. …”

Again for a long moment Webb Manders stood, immovable in his long, black mackintosh, which glittered with rain, watching her with that cold, half-hidden look. Finally he said, “Why do the police want me?”

“To tell you what had happened. And to ask you what you knew of it.”

“Of Mildred's affair with Jack?” He seemed to consider for a moment and then said, almost casually, as if it had no importance just then, “I expect it was true enough. She had a lot of money. Jack was younger than I, ten years younger. He had his faults, but he kept his affairs to himself. Of course old Wilkinson wouldn't have wanted Mildred to marry Jack. He'd have stopped any plan of theirs to marry if he had known about it. Probably Jack and Mildred both preferred to keep it a secret. And then—well, I don't blame Jack if he decided that the money was all right, but he didn't want Mildred. You can't blame a man for changing his mind. I expect she killed him, all right. Probably he was the only man that ever had been interested in her and she was sore as hell. She was spoiled, too, with all that money. It's a case of a ‘woman scorned,' ” said Webb, and gave a dry whisper of a laugh.

“You didn't see her!” cried Myra with a sharp stab of remembered pity. “Poor Mildred …”

“Poor Mildred!” The derisive, half-smile on his mouth changed to something like a snarl. “She shot my brother.”

How ready he was to accuse, thought Myra irresistibly. Too ready … He had accused Alice, and now Mildred.

In this case he was right. Yet she said angrily, all her vague dislike of the man suddenly crystallized, “You accused Alice, too.”

He was still very cool, casual, as if it was an idle conversation, none of it with significance. Actually it was as if some deep preoccupation held him so engrossed that he gave the things they were saying only a fraction of his attention. “Of course I accused Alice. I thought she shot him. I thought there was some sort of affair between Alice and Jack. That's why I came here that night. I'd got home and Jack was gone and I came straight over here. I knew he'd been seeing a lot of her and if there was anything of the sort, I intended to find out and put a stop to it. She'd never have left Dick and his money for Jack. It only meant trouble for everybody. Jack was nobody's saint but he met his match in Alice. At least that's what I thought then. I never thought of Mildred.” He spoke abstractedly, looking all around the room. His cold, seeking eyes found the cupid, fixed themselves upon it for an instant and went on. He said, “The case is closed then?”

“Sam thinks so. The district attorney is on his way. He's driving.”

His eyes jerked back to her. “The district attorney! Oh. Well. I just thought I'd ask you what, exactly, had happened. …”

A sudden, rather queer question came out of his words. She glanced at the curtain, drawn securely over the French window. He could not have seen her, sitting there by the fire, engaged in her own private struggle with fear. She said, “How did you know that I was here?”

“How …” He too glanced at the curtain. And then again, suddenly and mirthlessly grinned. “Oh, I took a chance.”

She said slowly, “You were on the terrace. You were watching. You saw me in the room where Mildred died. …”

“Yes,” said Webb. “I saw you searching the room.”

And all at once, imperceptibly yet certainly, his abstraction, his air of impersonal, almost uninterested conversation was gone. She knew it. And she knew that now, in the lifting of an eyelid, he had come to the heart of his intention.

She waited, her heart suddenly hammering in her ears. He moved toward the door, the mackintosh rattling and catching glittering highlights. He put his hand on the latch.

Surely he would hear the pounding of her heart; surely he would sense her waiting, as an animal senses a trap.

He didn't. At the door he turned and said the thing she knew he had come to say. “What about the gun?”

The gun. The center of his purpose in coming into the house. The core of his indirect questioning. He had been, she saw suddenly, trying to pump her for knowledge—not of Mildred's suicide, not of the investigation, not of anything but the gun.