Darker Than You Think (16 page)

"Will
Barbee?" she called sharply. "Is it you?"

"Yes,
Rowena," he said, and paused to fumble for some word of
consolation that wouldn't merely mock her grief. She didn't wait for
that.

"I
still want to see you, Will," she said urgently. "I hope
I'm not too late to help you. Can you come to the house this
afternoon—say, at four?"

Barbee
caught his breath, staring uncertainly at the stern purpose which had
almost erased even the grief from her thin white face, turning its
sad, patient sweetness into something almost terrible. He recalled
her telephoned warning against April Bell, and wondered again what
Mondrick's death had done to her mind.

"At
four," he promised. "I'll come, Rowena."

At
five minutes of four, he parked in front of the rambling old
red-brick house on University Avenue. It looked rundown and
shabby—the Foundation had taken most of Mondrick's own fortune,
besides the sums he raised from others. The shutters needed repair
and naked spots showed through the unraked lawns. He rang the
doorbell and Rowena herself came to let him in.

"Thank
you for coming, Will." Her low, gracious voice seemed entirely
composed. Tears had stained her face, but her grief had not
overwhelmed her. Moving as confidently as if she could see, she
closed the door and pointed to a chair.

He
stood a moment looking around the gloomy, old-fashioned front room
that he had known ever since he and Sam Quain boarded here as
students. The room was faintly perfumed from a huge bowl of roses set
on her grand piano—he saw the names on the card beside them,
Sam and Nora Quain. A gas fire glowed in the dark cavern of the old
fireplace. The huge dog Turk lay before it, regarding Barbee with
alert yellow eyes.

"Sit
down," Rowena Mondrick urged softly. "I've sent Miss Ulford
out to do some shopping, because we must talk alone, Will."

Puzzled
and rather uncomfortable, he took the chair she indicated.

"I
want you to know that I'm terribly sorry, Rowena," he said
awkwardly. "It seems so awfully ironic that Dr. Mondrick should
die just at the moment of what must have been his greatest triumph—"

"He
didn't die," she said softly. "He was murdered—I
imagined you knew that, Will."

Barbee
gulped. He didn't intend to discuss his suspicions and perplexities
with anybody else—not until he had managed to make up his own
mind about April Bell.

"I
wondered," he admitted. "I didn't know."

"But
you saw April Bell last night?"

"We
had dinner," Barbee said. He watched the blind woman as she came
with her almost disconcerting certainty of motion to stand before
him, tall and straight in her severely cut black suit, resting one
thin hand on the piano. A faint resentment stirred him to say
defensively: "I know Turk didn't seem to like April Bell, but I
think she's something pretty special."

"I
was afraid you would." Rowena's voice seemed gravely sad. "But
I talked to Nora Quain, and she doesn't like the woman. Turk doesn't,
and I don't. There's a reason, Will, that you should know."

Barbee
sat erect, uncomfortable in his chair. Mondrick's widow and Sam
Quain's wife weren't picking girl friends for him, but he didn't say
so. Turk stirred before the fire, keeping baleful yellow eyes on
Barbee.

"That
woman's bad," Rowena whispered. "And bad for you!" She
leaned a little toward him, cold lights glowing on her old silver
necklace and her heavy silver brooch. "I want you to promise me,
Will, that you won't see her any more."

"Why,
Rowena!" Barbee tried to laugh—and tried not to think of
April Bell's queer confession. "Don't you know I'm a big boy
now?"

His
attempted lightness brought no smile.

"I'm
blind, Will." Rowena Mondrick's white head tilted slightly,
almost as if her black glasses could see him. "But not to
everything. I've shared my husband's work since we were young. I had
my small part in the strange, lonely, terrible war he fought. Now
he's dead—murdered, I believe."

The
blind woman stiffened.

"And
your charming new friend April Bell," she said very softly,
"must be the secret enemy who murdered him!"

Barbee
caught his breath to protest—and knew there was nothing he
could say. A frightened impulse urged him to defend April Bell. But
he remembered Mondrick's gasping death and that strangled kitten with
the needle in its heart. He remembered her own confession. He
swallowed hard and murmured uneasily: "I can't believe she did
that."

Rowena
Mondrick stood taut and straight.

"That
woman killed my husband." Her voice turned sharp, and the big
dog rose uneasily behind her. "But Marck's dead. We can't help
that. You're the one in danger now."

She
came slowly toward Barbee, holding
Out
both
her thin hands. He stood up and took them silently. They felt tense
and cold, and they clung to his fingers with a sudden desperate
pressure.

"Please,
Will!" she whispered. "Let me warn you!"

"Really,
Rowena!" He tried to laugh. "April's a very charming girl,
and I'm not allergic."

Her
cold fingers quivered.

"April
Bell won't try to kill you, Will," she told him quietly. "Your
danger is something other than death, and uglier. Because she will
try to change you—to arouse something in you that should never
be awakened."

The
big dog came bristling, to stand close against her black skirt.

"She's
bad, Will." The blind lenses peered at him disquietingly. "I
can see the evil in her, and I know she means to try to claim you for
her own wicked breed. You had better die like poor Marck, than follow
the dreadful path where she will try to lead you. Believe me, Will!"

He
dropped her cold hands, trying not to shudder.

"No,
Rowena," he protested uncomfortably, "I'm afraid I can't
believe you. I think your husband's death was probably just the
unfortunate result of too much excitement and fatigue for a man
seventy and ill. I'm afraid you're dwelling too much on it."

He
crossed hopefully to the piano.

"Do
you feel like playing something? That might help."

"I've
no time for music now." She patted the dog's great tawny head,
nervously. "Because I'm going to join Sam and Nick and Rex in
poor Marck's unfinished battle. Now won't you think about my
warning—and stay away from April Bell?"

"I
can't do that." In spite of him, resentment edged his voice.
"She's a charming girl, and I can't believe she's up to any ugly
business."

He
tried to warm his tone.

"But
I'm truly sorry for you, Rowena. It seems to me that you've just been
brooding too much. I don't suppose there's much I can do, since you
feel this way, but you do need help. Why don't you call Dr. Glenn?"

She
stepped back from him, indignantly.

"No,
Will," she whispered. "I'm entirely sane." Her thin
fingers clung fiercely to the dog's collar; and the huge beast
pressed close to her, watching Barbee with unfriendly yellow eyes. "I
need no psychiatrist," she told him softly. "But I'm afraid
you may—before you're through with April Bell."

"Sorry,
Rowena," he said abruptly. "I'm going."

"Don't,
Will!" she called sharply. "Don't trust—"

That
was all he heard.

He
drove back to town, but it was hard to keep his mind on his
reportorial chores. He took no stock in Rowena Mondrick's crazy
warning. He really meant to call April Bell's apartment, but somehow
he kept putting it off. He wanted to see her, yet daylight had failed
to dispel any of his tortured uncertainties about her. Finally, as he
left the city room, he decided with an uneasy relief that now it was
obviously too late to make the call.

He
stopped for a drink at the bar across the street, and had more than
one, and took a bottle with him when he drove back to his lonely
apartment in the dilapidated old house on Bread Street. A hot shower,
he thought, might help the alcohol relax him. He was taking off his
clothing when he found the white jade pin in his pocket. He stood a
long time, absently turning the tiny object on his sweaty palm,
staring at it— Wondering—

The
tiny malachite eye was the same color as the eyes of April Bell—when
she was in her most wary and alarming mood. The fine detail of the
running wolf's limbs and snarling head had been cut with careful
skill. From the worn sleekness of the white jade, he knew it must be
very old. A very odd trinket, it was cut in a wiry, lean-lined style
of workmanship he had never seen before.

Remembering
the white wolf coat, he wondered suddenly what the wolf, as a symbol,
meant to April Bell. Dr. Glenn must have found her, he thought, a
remarkably interesting analytic subject—he wished for an
instant that it were possible to get a look at Glenn's private
records of her case.

He
started and blinked, trying to rid himself of a disconcerting
impression that the malachite eye had winked at him maliciously. He
was almost asleep, standing half undressed in his narrow bedroom
beside the ramshackle chiffonier. The damned pin had almost
hypnotized him. He resisted a sudden, savage impulse to flush it down
the commode.

That
would be insane. Of course, he admitted to himself, he was afraid of
April Bell. But then he had always been a little afraid of
women—perhaps Dr. Glenn could tell him why. Even the most
approachable female made him a little uneasy. The more they mattered,
the more afraid he was.

His
hunch about the pin couldn't mean anything, he assured himself. The
damned thing got on his nerves just because it stood for April Bell.
He'd have to taper off the whisky—that was all his trouble, as
Glenn would surely tell him. If he obeyed that panicky impulse to
dispose of the pin, it would only be an admission that he believed
April Bell to be—actually— just what she said she was. He
couldn't accept that.

He
put the pin carefully in a cigar box on the chiffonier, along with a
thimble and his old pocket watch and a discarded fountain pen and a
number of used razor blades. His uneasy thoughts of April Bell were
not so easy to put away. He couldn't escape considering the faint but
infinitely disturbing possibility that she really was—he felt
reluctant even to think the word—a witch.

A
being born a little different, he preferred to phrase it. He
remembered reading something about the Rhine experiments at Duke
University. Some people, those sober scientists had proved, perceived
the world with something beyond the ordinary physical senses. Some
people, they had demonstrated, displayed a direct control over
probability, without the use of any physical agency. Some did, some
didn't. Had April Bell been born with that same difference, manifest
in a more extreme degree?

Probability—he
recalled a classroom digression of Mondrick's on that word, back in
Anthropology 413. Probability, the bright-eyed old scholar said, was
the key concept of modern physics. The laws of nature, he insisted,
were not absolute, but merely established statistical averages. The
paperweight on his desk— it was an odd little terra-cotta lamp
which he must have dug out of some Roman ruin, the black-glazed
relief on the circular top of it showing the she-wolf suckling the
founders of Rome—the lamp was supported, Mondrick said, only by
the chance collisions of vibrating atoms. At any instant, there was a
slight but definite probability that it might fall through the
seemingly solid desk.