Deep Water (19 page)

       "At the Ardmore in Wesley," Mr. Carpenter replied.

       "Oh, you'll love it here once you get settled," Melinda put in with animation. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, smoking a cigarette. "The mornings are so cool and fresh around here. It's really a pleasure to get a car and drive along some of these roads at seven or eight in the morning."

       Vic couldn't think of a single morning when Melinda had been up and out at seven or eight.

       "I expect I'll like it," Mr. Carpenter said. "I'm sure getting myself settled won't be much of a problem."

       "My wife has a real genius for getting people settled," Vic said, with an affectionate smile at Melinda. "She really knows the houses and the countryside up here. Let her help you." Vic smiled directly at Mr. Carpenter.

       He nodded slowly at Vic, looking as if he were thinking of something else.

       "Trixie, go in the other room," Melinda said nervously to Trixie, who was sitting in the middle of the floor staring at all of them.

       "Well, she might be introduced first," Vic said, getting up. He pulled Trixie gently to her feet by both hands. "Trixie, this is Mr. Carpenter. My daughter, Beatrice," Vic said.

       "How do you do?" said Mr. Carpenter, smiling but not getting up.

       "How do you do?"Trixie said. "Daddy, Can't I stay?"

       "Not now, hon. Do as your mother says. You'll probably see Mr. Carpenter again. Run out and play and we'll finish our game n a little while." Vic opened the front door for her and she ran Mr. Carpenter was eyeing him sharply when Vic turned around.

       Vic smiled. "Might as well let the child get some air on a day like this-Oh, look." He picked up Trixie's copybook from the cocktail table. "Don't you think that's a pretty handsome page? Look at it compared to last week." He opened the book at an earlier page to show Melinda.

       Melinda tried to pretend interest, tried quite well. "It looks fine," she said.

       "I'm teaching my daughter calligraphy," Vic explained to Mr. Carpenter. "She's just started in school and they put her in a class beyond her age group." Vic turned over the pages of Trixie's copybook with a fond smile.

       Then Mr. Carpenter asked how old Trixie was, asked a question about the weather around Little Wesley, and then stood up. "I must be going. I'm afraid you'll have to drive me back," he added to Melinda.

       "Oh, I don't mind a bit! We might go by that-that place we were talking about in the woods."

       "Charley's place," Vic supplied.

       "Yes," Melinda said.

       "Well, you must come back again," Vic said to Mr. Carpenter. "I hope you enjoy your stay. Kennington's a fine place. We're very proud of it."

       "Thank you," Mr. Carpenter said.

       Vic watched them until Melinda drove off, and then he turned back to the croquet game. Trixie had banged the balls all over the lawn. "Now, where were we?" he asked.

       As he played, and gave Trixie pointers that were usually not followed, Vic thought about Mr. Carpenter. It would be much more fun not to let Melinda know he suspected anything, Vic thought. Then there was the possibility that he could be wrong, that Mr. Carpenter was a psychotherapist and nothing else. But would a psychotherapist get into a car with a strange woman and be driven around in search of a house to rent? Well, that was barely possible, too, he supposed. But Mr. Carpenter was not Melinda's type for a boyfriend, that was one thing he felt sure of. He had an unmistakable air of being serious about something, whatever it might be, the look of a man who didn't let himself be distracted. Still, he was quite handsome. A detective agency might well have chosen him for a job like this. For the second time Vic tried to remember if he had seen Mr. Carpenter anywhere on the streets of Little Wesley or Wesley. He didn't think he had.

       Melinda was back in a very short time, not long enough for her to have gone by Charley's house. She went into the house without saying anything to him. When Vic had finished the game with Trixie, he went into the house, too. Melinda was washing her hair in the bathroom basin. The bathroom door was open.

       Vic took the 'World Almanac' down from the bookcase and sat down with it. He read about the antidotes for arsenic poisoning. She came out of the bathroom, went into her own room, and Vic called:

       "Did you get Mr. Carpenter back all right?"

       "Um-hm."

       "Show him Charley's place?"

       "Nope."

       "He seems a nice fellow."

       Melinda came in in her robe, barefoot, a towel around her head."Um-hm, I think he is. He's got a lot of brains. The kind of man you'd like to talk to, I should think." There was the old nagging challenge in her tone.

       Vic smiled. "`Well, let's see more of him—if he's got any time for us."

       On Monday, Vic called Kennington Institute from his office. Yes, they had a Mr. Carpenter there. Mr. Harold Carpenter. He was not always at the Institute the woman on the telephone said, but she could take a message. "Is this in regard to a house?" she asked.

       "Yes, but I'll try again," Vic said. "I haven't found anything yet for him, but I wanted to keep in touch. Thank you." He hung up before she could finish her question of what real estate company he represented.

Chapter 14

They were playing it very carefully, Mr. Carpenter and Melinda, Vic thought, if Mr. Carpenter was a detective. Even after a week Vic wasn't quite sure, and he had seen Mr. Carpenter two or three more times. Once he had come to the house for cocktails and once Melinda had asked him to drop in at the Mellers', who had given a cocktail party with about eight guests. Here Mr. Carpenter met the Cowans and the MacPhersons but not the Wilsons, because the Mellers—like the Cowans—had crossed the Wilsons off their list. Horace talked for a while with Mr. Carpenter at the party, and later that evening Vic asked Horace what they had talked about. Horace said they had talked about brain injuries, and asked where they had met him. Vic told Horace what Melinda had told him about their meeting. In fact, there was only one thing interesting about the evening at the Mellers'. Vic noticed that Melinda paid more than necessary attention to Harold Carpenter. Vic thought it was deliberate, and for the benefit of their friends as well as of himself. He smiled at both of them, with a benign good humor. What did they expect to do? Provoke him to another murderous attack? Was this the first small, calculated step?

       After about ten days Harold Carpenter began to come to the house quite often. He had taken Charley De Lisle's former house after all—which had not really surprised Vic, because the house made a good conversation piece: Harold could ask all kinds of questions about the deceased Charley, ask not only Vic but all of Vic's friends as well. "Where are you staying?" was a question nearly everybody would put to a newcomer like Carpenter, and then Carpenter was launched. Vic supposed that within three weeks Carpenter had heard at least ten people's versions of the evening Charley had drowned. He must have done it very subtly, too, because neither Horace nor Phil came to him to tell him that he had been interrogated by Carpenter.

       "Have you met Don Wilson?" Vic asked Carpenter one Saturday afternoon when he had dropped in to borrow Vic's hedge shears.

       "No," Carpenter replied a little wonderingly.

       Melinda was within hearing.

       "I suppose you'll get around to it," Vic said, smiling. "My wife sees the Wilsons quite often. You might enjoy him, I don't know." Vic had no doubt that Carpenter had met Don. Don had probably picked Carpenter out for the job, gone to New York to do it for Melinda, because any trip she made to New York would have been noticed by Vic, she went so seldom. And an assignment like this would have needed personal contact. Harold Carpenter was a good private eye. Nothing rattled him. Vic said:

       "When did you start your psychiatric training?" Carpenter had told him that he was in his last year at Columbia, and that he needed only his thesis plus some examination for his doctorate.

       "Start? Oh, not until I was twenty-three. I lost some time by having to go to Korea."

       "And when did you stop?"

       Carpenter did not bat an eye. "Stop? What do you mean?"

       "I meant stop your classes to start your field research for the thesis."

       "Oh, well, at the beginning of the summer, you might say. I went to some summer classes." He smiled. "In psychiatry, there's never a limit to how many courses you can take—or should take, to be a good doctor."

       It was all rather vague to Vic. "And schizophrenia interests you most?"

       "Well—I suppose so. It's the commonest affliction, as you know."

       Vic smiled. Melinda had gone into the kitchen to freshen her drink. Neither Vic nor Carpenter was drinking. "I was wondering if you thought my wife had any schizophrenic tendencies."

       Carpenter frowned and smiled at the same time, showing his square white teeth in his generous, full-lipped mouth. "I don't think so at all. Do you?"

       "I don't really know. Not being an authority on the subject," Vic said, and awaited something further from Carpenter.

       "She has a lot of charm," Carpenter said."A kind of undisciplined charm."

       "You mean the charm of no discipline."

       "Yes," he said, smiling. "I mean she has more charm than she thinks she has."

       "That's quite a lot."

       Carpenter laughed and looked at Melinda as she came back into the room.

       It crossed Vic's mind then that Carpenter was the only person who had ever been to their house who had not, in some way,

       betrayed surprise on finding that he lived in another wing of the house. Carpenter had slipped up there. One or the other of them, however, was going to be very surprised before long. Which of them was it going to be? Vic smiled at Carpenter in a friendly way, as a good sportsman might at an opponent.

       Carpenter stayed perhaps half an hour on the afternoon that he came to borrow the shears. He had a curious, half-absent way of looking around at everything, of staring at Trixie—as if there were anything odd about that specimen of rampant normality—of looking around in the garage, or the kitchen, or wherever he happened to be in the house. It was not entirely an absent look. Harold Carpenter was not an absent man. But he was around a little too much, considering their house was out of the way between Kennington and his own house, Charley's old house. That was another sign that pointed in the direction of his being a detective, or a psychiatrist hired, part-time, to look him over.

       And then on October 4, when the bank statement came in, there was $200, at least $200, withdrawn that Vic couldn't account for. It was curious to think that they might be in Carpenter's pockets, that the $10 bill that Carpenter had used to buy a bottle of champagne on the evening of Melinda's birthday might have come directly from the Van Allen account. Vic had run into Carpenter on Commerce Street, the main street of Wesley, as he was coming out of a jewelry store where he had picked up his main present for Melinda. Carpenter had a couple of large books under his arm. he often had a large book of some sort under his arm.

       "Are you busy tonight?" Vic had asked.

       Carpenter hadn't been busy, and Vic had asked him if he would care to come out to the house for dinner. It was Melinda's birthday, and Vic imagined that Carpenter knew it. They were having a small dinner party, only the Mellers were coming, and he was sure Melinda would be glad to see him, Vic said. Carpenter looked politely hesitant, wanted to call Melinda first, but Vic said no, let it be a surprise for her. So Carpenter had accepted and had bought the champagne when Vic had told him that it was Melinda's birthday.

       Vic and Melinda would have asked the Cowans, but Phil was away all week in Vermont, teaching, and Evelyn was feeling under the weather with a cold virus, she said. It was Vic who had proposed the dinner party, and he had had some trouble in persuading Melinda to give it. Melinda felt that their old friends were down on her lately, which was more or less true, but he pointed out that they were inviting her to their houses nevertheless and that if she wanted to improve matters she would have to invite them now and then, too. Vic had always had a hard time persuading Melinda to do any entertaining. Not that he felt they had to worry about what they owed their friends in the way of invitations—not in a town as informal as Little Wesley—but Vic thought that once or twice a year they might give a big cocktail party or an evening party, as the Cowans and the Mellers did at least three times a year. But the thought of even two people coming for dinner, or twenty coming for cocktails, put Melinda in a dither. She would worry that the liquor would run out, or that the 'ice' cream would melt before it could be served, or she would suddenly realize that the house needed a thorough cleaning, or that the kitchen needed new curtains, and she would fret so that Vic would finally suggest they abandon the idea of a party. Even with two people, old friends like the Mellers, a buried inferiority would come to the surface, and she would be as nervous and unsure of herself as a young bride who was being hostess for the first time to her husband's boss. Vic found it somehow very appealing, found Melinda appealingly young and helpless on these occasions, and he would do all he could to reassure her and give her confidence—even though for the preceding month he might have been annoyed by her single men friends whom she had invited for dinner twice in the week, and who never made her nervous in the least.

       Vic had not thought Carpenter's presence would make her nervous—it might help, if anything, he thought—and he had invited him simply out of friendliness and good will. And Melinda's face did brighten when Vic walked in with him at seven-thirty. The Mellers were not due until eight. Carpenter presented his champagne, and Melinda thanked him and put it in the refrigerator to keep cold until they would open it after dinner. Melinda was pacing the house, sipping a highball, checking on the progress of the duck every five minutes, and checking with her eyes the cocktail table on which clean ashtrays, muddlers, and a big bowl containing a sour cream and shredded shrimp mixture stood in unaccustomed orderliness. And she was entirely dressed now in a dark-green linen sleeveless dress, gold sandals with wings on them, and a necklace of white coral pieces that suggested feral teeth about the size of tigers' fangs. Above the necklace her face looked absolutely terrified.