Lady Afraid (12 page)

“Brill said that the Maine statutes say the consent of parent is required except in case of insanity or intemperance. He said that the intent of the law is that there shall be no cutting off of parental relationship without consent, and that adoption is of statutory origin and the statutes must be strictly complied with.”

“But, my dear, the law offers recourse!” Arbogast exclaimed. “The portals of justice are always open! This man Brill, if he’s an attorney at all, should have merely filed petition with the juvenile division of circuit court covering the matter.”

“But Brill said,” Sarah explained, “that the circumstance of two years elapsing might be against me, so that the court could feel I had not really wanted my son. He said that if I took Jonnie—desperately, the way I took him—it would go a long way to establish intense mother love in the emotional eye, if not the legal, of the court. He said that my taking Jonnie wasn’t the usual way, but that the court would be influenced by the fact that I did it on a lawyer’s advice, and I wouldn’t be considered—well—a little cracked because I took my son that way.”

Arbogast considered this, with his lips pushed outward thoughtfully. “That,” he admitted, “isn’t such bad reasoning, I’ll admit. But it’s unorthodox.”

“I knew the idea was unusual,” Sarah confessed. “Brill had another point: He said we should let the court see that the Lineyacks were the aggressors, the persecutors. By taking the boy, I would create a situation where the Lineyacks would have to take the initiative. The court would then see the kind of methods they’d been using on me.”

“Hah! He had psychology there!” But Mr. Arbogast shook his head vehemently. “The psychology may have been for your benefit—just arguments to trick you. Have you thought of that, Sarah?”

Sarah lowered her head miserably. “I’ve thought of so many things. None make sense.”

“You poor dear!” Arbogast exclaimed. “Your son, your child—oh, how awful you must feel!”

The sympathy upset Sarah so that she did not trust herself to speak.

And then Mr. Arbogast jumped. “Lida Dunlap! My receptionist!” He sprang to his feet, trotted excitedly to the table, and poured himself another drink. “Sarah, are you positive it was Lida you spoke to?” he demanded.

“Oh yes! I am—I’m certain. It was Lida.”

“How odd!”

“But I am sure it was Lida.”

“Yes! Yes, I’m almost inclined to think—” Arbogast gestured animatedly with his glass of liquor, spilling some on his fingers. “Sarah, I believe your story. I do.” He put down the glass and whipped out a handkerchief. “I must tell you something, Sarah…. Lida Dunlap started her vacation today.”

“Vacation?”

He waved the handkerchief excitedly. “That is quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you think?”

It was more than a coincidence. “Where could I find Lida Dunlap?” Sarah asked.

“Goodness knows. I have no idea.”

“But—”

Arbogast blotted his fingers hurriedly with the handkerchief. “Because Lida’s gone. Gone, Sarah. Lida informed me she was sailing on a small sloop with a girl friend and the girl friend’s husband. They were going to loaf in the Bahama Islands for two weeks. Lida was, she said, leaving last evening, and would be out of touch with civilization for two weeks.”

Here was fresh evidence of plot, Sarah thought grimly. And she was aware of movement, realizing that Captain Most was going again to stand silently by the window with fingers holding the blind slats apart. This time he returned quickly. He dropped a mouth corner a trifle to show her the police car was still there, then asked some questions himself about Lida Dunlap.

“Lida Dunlap,” said Most, “may not have told the truth.”

“That’s possible,” Mr. Arbogast admitted.

“If she’s in this, and said she was going to sail away from civilization on a sloop, it’s likely she has disappeared by doing something quite different.”

Arbogast stuffed his handkerchief into a breast pocket. “I don’t know what to think.”

“When did Lida fix it for her vacation to start today?” Most asked.

After thinking and counting off on his fingers, the first time Sarah had seen him use that mannerism, Mr. Arbogast said, “Why, it was nearly six weeks ago!” He looked up. “That isn’t very helpful, is it?”

“Six weeks?”

“Yes.”

Most seemed to arrange this fact in his mind, and then he remarked, “So this plot was put on to cook that long ago.”

Mr. Arbogast’s face was now darkly concerned. “You know, we may be wrong about Lida. She’s been with me nearly four years.” He looked at them helplessly. “Lida… she seemed honest.”

And Lida has interesting legs, Sarah thought bitterly. Then she said, “Yet you appear to think that Lida took my telephone call when you were out of the office and switched it to someone who imitated your voice.”

“What other explanation could there be?” Mr. Arbogast cried.

Captain Most now threw the discussion at another point. He said, “You were at the Lineyacks’ tonight, weren’t you?”

“Oh, of course,” Mr. Arbogast told him. “I was Mr. Lineyack’s dinner guest…. It was I whom Sarah passed in the upstairs hall. Although I confess I didn’t recognize her. I do vaguely recall passing someone in the hall whom I supposed to be a housemaid. But I wasn’t aware it was Sarah—not until she told me so a few moments ago.”

“Were you the only dinner guest?”

“No. There was one other. But is it important?”

“Who?”

“A man named Driscoll, Louis Driscoll.”

“Who’s he?”

“I believe,” said Arbogast, “that Driscoll is quite a figure, a truck-line tycoon. He lives on a houseboat, a sumptuous one, which is tied up now not far from the Lineyack home.”

“Would this Louis Driscoll have any connection with Sarah’s difficulties?”

“I’d say,” said Arbogast firmly, “that such an idea would be preposterous.”

“Was Louis Driscoll a dinner guest tonight for any reason you can think of?”

“He is merely a friend of Mr. Lineyack, like myself.”

“And all evening,” said Most pleasantly, “since you were at the Lineyacks’, you knew Sarah had taken her son.”

Mr. Arbogast jumped, frowned; presently he put on a smile that was sparse. “Captain, you don’t intend to act like an assistant district attorney, I trust…. But your answer is: Yes, qualified…. I
did
know the boy had disappeared. It was pretty awful, too. There was tremendous excitement at the Lineyack home…. But my answer is qualified in this way: I didn’t know Sarah took the child. How could I?”

“Didn’t you hear about the notes Sarah left explaining she was taking her son and why?”

“I was not told of them, no.”

“The police were called immediately? They see the notes?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“They bother you any?”

“Not after they learned my identity,” Mr. Arbogast said. “They permitted me to leave at once.” Mr. Arbogast was now cool toward Most, cold but still smiling.

Most was not much bothered by the disapproval. He drew the pipe from his teeth but immediately stuck it back again without speaking. Both his eyes and his mouth became narrower, and abruptly he dropped the questioning. He went to the window again and stood there with sober interest, scowling down into the street.

Mr. Arbogast came to Sarah, laid a hand on Sarah’s arm, and the hand was gentle and warm, a big kitten’s paw. “Sarah, I’m so sorry about the little boy. Is there anything I can do?”

To be offered sympathy, Sarah thought, can sometimes be like having quicksand slid under your feet. The clear fact was that she was beginning to wonder how much of this she could stand. Already she found need to control herself consciously; it was as if her body were a sailing craft that was getting a knockdown of gale; the excess had to be spilled, but so carefully.

She asked, “Alice Mildred… how did she take it?” Paul had always called his mother Alice Mildred, so it came naturally for Sarah to so speak of her.

“Mrs. Lineyack?… Sarah, I don’t think they should have told her. I really do not.”

Sarah, sitting in the chair, remembering the mother of the man she had married, saw again Alice Mildred’s spooklike aloofness and incalculable inwardness.

“If she was upset, I’m sure no one would know it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mr. Arbogast soberly, “that the affair may be—well, too much for her.”

Sarah lifted shocked eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Alice Mildred has not been well, Sarah. Not well at all.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.” Now Sarah sat stiffly, a hand pressed to a cheek that was too cool and slightly numb. She said tightly, “I had no idea Alice Mildred has been ill. I wouldn’t know, naturally. They haven’t let me in the house. Is it something serious?”

“Mr. Lineyack seems to feel so.”

“What is wrong, do you know?”

Placing a hand on her arm, Mr. Arbogast smiled wryly. “Sarah, I’m probably not as close a friend of the Lineyacks as you imagine. Truthfully, I can’t tell you much except that Mrs. Lineyack’s difficulty is a neurosis—as you might guess. And it has been developing for some time. She came here to Miami from the summer home in Maine early in the fall. Since you know the Lineyacks, you will recognize that as quite a departure. They invariably spend autumn at the New York apartment, never coming to Miami before Christmas. But Alice Mildred has been here since October, and when Mr. Lineyack came down in December he instantly put her under treatment by a psychiatrist. He was alarmed by her condition. I have gathered also that she hasn’t been responding well to treatment.”

“Then she’s really in poor condition?”

“Alice Mildred has changed, Sarah. You did not see her tonight, I take it?”

“No. No, I did not see her. The only ones I saw were Ivan Lineyack, some of the servants, and you,” Sarah said, and then her throat tightened and she added, “Jonnie also, of course.”

“You would hardly know Alice Mildred, Sarah.”

“I wish I had known!” Sarah said miserably. “I suppose I would not have done what I did. I would not, not even as much as I wanted Jonnie, have taken him.”

Mr. Arbogast made sympathetic cluckings and peered at her anxiously. Reassured that she wasn’t going to break, which was more reassurance than Sarah had, he returned to his chair and sat down. He ran a hand across his hair without disturbing its neatness. “This
is
a dilemma,” he complained.

Captain Most took his pipe from his teeth and knocked the bowl out with hard impatient blows on his palm. He wheeled from the window, crossed to a bronze ash tray, and dropped the dottle into it. His eyes went then to Arbogast and stayed on the man while he drew out a handkerchief and cleaned with quick strokes the palm that had contained the dottle.

“Should Sarah go to the police?” he asked Arbogast. “She has asked me. You are a lawyer. You should know more about it.”

Arbogast lifted eyes that were quickly unfriendly. “Captain, that is an exasperating question.”

“Is it?”

“It places me in an awkward position. No attorney, no reputable attorney, wishes to be stood in the light of advocating anything other than full co-operation with the police authorities, who represent the arm of the law.”

“Should she surrender?”

“No—that is, I… Captain, I refuse to answer.”

“Then you think Sarah should keep away from the police as long as she can?”

“I shall not say so!”

Most’s face was expressionless. “You haven’t said so.”

Now a telephone began ringing, its bell in the room with them, making a startling clamor. Sarah was startled by it, her limbs jerked, her breathing momentarily was halted. Mr. Arbogast was almost as affected—his right hand went to his heart. Then Mr. Arbogast sprang to his feet and whipped open the door of a small cabinet and plucked a telephone from this concealment. “Yes… speaking.” His round face slowly blanched. “Why, I—yes, of course. But I—well, the truth is, I have guests. I had best come down to the lobby. Will that be satisfactory?… All right, I shall be down at once.” He replaced the telephone slowly, staring at the floor, then at Sarah and Captain Most. He moistened his lips by rolling them inward and outward.

“The police are downstairs!” he said in a voice that had gone up the register. “They wish to ask me questions.”

A
FTER ARBOGAST HAD HURRIED
, anxious of eye, from the apartment, Sarah was quite conscious of receiving Most’s concerned attention. There must be a great deal of plain fright on her face, she decided.

“Are you thinking that we should scram out of here?” Most asked thoughtfully.

Sarah shook her head, and it took an effort like moving a cannon ball on her shoulders. “No, I don’t care to do that,” she said. “I imagine the police would consider flight an iron-bound evidence of guilt…. It’s the sort of thing a criminal would do, isn’t it?”

Most’s head bent approvingly. “Good. You can think straight in a pinch,” he said.

And then he moved back to the window and spaded his fingers between the blind slats again, and his breath escaped in surprise.

“Police car’s gone from the corner,” he told her.

Sarah flew to the window. As he had said, there was no prowl car in sight.

“They came back, parked in front of this building,” she said wildly. “And they’re asking Mr. Arbogast about us!”

Most did not reply, but he did not care for this sort of tension, because he showed his unease by performing a totally unnecessary act. He stepped to the side of the window and explored behind the drapes for the venetian-blind lift cord and hauled the blind to the top, locking it there after experimenting with the cord until he found how it secured. Then he pocketed his hands and stood waiting, tight and watchful, thinking of the police.

There was moonlight. Sarah made herself notice that there was moonlight, and then she scanned the sky for the state of the weather. Everyone who sailed read the weather. Weather was extravagantly important to anyone in sail. There was probably no way in which a whim of nature could touch a human being with more cataclysmic violence than by using wind upon a tiny craft at sail on a sea endless to the horizons.

The window faced east and the lights of Miami were beyond the silver bay, while nearer there were the lovely islands with their Venice-like canals, yachts anchored out. The yachts were big Diesel jobs, sumptuous, a pure waste of good money in Sarah’s opinion. She barely glanced at the Diesel yachts and cabin cruisers, then gave her attention to the sail craft. Close inshore there was a dredged channel that would take the deep keels of sailing yachts, and a number of them lay to hotel docks or to mooring buoys.