The Case of the Weird Sisters (2 page)

There was the tiniest flicker, a mere flame of reproach in her blue glance, and then she turned. Innes blundered out of the brush with three wood anemones in his hand. "Oh, Mr. Whitlock," gushed Alice, "aren't they sweet! What are they?" .

That was an "if' moment. Every so often there is a point at which, if one looks back, the course of events can be seen to have taken a turn. Most moments are details between fixed points. This one was a point from which Alice's life branched off in a totally new direction. If Fred had not asked her that quick, impudent question with his eyes and if she had not, perversely, refused to answer it—partly, of course to punish him for the impudence—if she had not called out in that false voice, meant to deceive, "Oh, Mr. Whitlock . . ."

At that moment, she might just as easily have called him Innes because she had been engaged to marry him for fifteen minutes.

He'd waited no longer than after lunch. He'd put his enameled coffee cup down, reached for her hand, and said, "Alice, my dear, I want you to marry me." It was very simple and rather touching. She had been able to turn to him with real surprise and say, "Why, Innes! I'm glad you do." Innes had, thereupon, kissed her. It was a few minutes before she could say lightly, "Of course you know I'm marrying you for your money?" To this Innes had replied with a happy sigh, "Just so long as you marry me ..."

Innes had come through it very well, Alice had felt. She was a little ashamed of telling the plain taith in so deceptive a manner. Therefore, it was perhaps the first stirring of a sense of loyalty to a new alliance that made her withdraw from even the shadow of a conspiracy with the chauffeur.

If marks an alternate trail, along which one can see no farther than the first comer.

"What's the matter with it?'' asked Innes impatiently, some hours later.

"Nothing I can't fix m an hour," Fred said. "Sorry, sir. Shall I limp into the next town?"

"Will it limp?"

"Just about."

"Where are we?"

Fred reached for his map. ''Sixty-five miles to camp yet. We're ten miles out of Ogaunee, sir."

"Oh, lord," Imies groaned. "Don't tell me."

"If you and Miss Brennan don't mind just sitting here I can get busy right away. I thought— "

"Yes, yes." Innes pasted his hand over his brow with artistic weariness. "Are you cold, Alice?"

"Chilly," she said She felt exhausted, mentally and spiritually. The long afternoon drive had been a strain, she wasn't quite sure why. She thought perhaps their swift flight along the roads was too comfortable and oddly static. "I'm a little tired of riding. Can't we walk up and down while he fixes it?"

Innes said, "No, no. Better try to make it into Ogaunee, Fred. We'll get this girl warm. Stay for dinner if we're asked."

"Asked?" Alice said, startled.

"My sisters' house is in Ogaunee. We'll stop in there."

"I didn't know you had a sister."

"I have three sisters," Innes said. "They still live up here. It was my father's house. My dear, I'll tell you a secret. I was bom in Ogaimee, MicWgan."

"Oh?" Alice invited more. ' "I must confess Fd planned to skip by, this time," he went on uneasily. "They're another generation, really. Half-sisters, you see. My father was twice married."

Alice felt she ought not to say "oh" again, so she kept quiet.

"You don't mind, do you?"

"Mind? Of course not."

"It'll be more comfortable than sitting here," Innes said a little doubtfully, with an effect of gnawing on his mustache. Then he smiled. "We'll be some excitement for them." He patted hex hand.

The big car crept forward, complaining. Alice knew nothing about the insides of a car. She looked at the back of Fred's neck and wondered if it hurt him, this humiliation of his Proud Beauty. She herself sat ridiculously tense, as if the car had pain,

"This isn't going to damage the engine?" demanded Innes, who evidently knew nothing about the insides of a car either.

"No, sir," Fred said stolidly.

For a long time no one spoke, as if the car's plight cast a spell of silence over them. Only Innes cleared his throat from time to time, but he never quite said anything. Alice thought it tactful to ask no questions. She simply sat, and slowly began to wonder what it was he felt he ought to say and couldn't

It was a curious ten miles, full of reluctance. Not the nightmare quality of trying to get to a place and always failing, but an equally nightmarish feeling of taking much labor and some pain to get to a place where one didn't want to be. Ogaunee was a gash across the smooth face of their plans. Furthermore, it required bracing. One had to brace oneself. Alice felt that.

When at last they crawled past a house or two, Innes burst into speech. It was his home town, after all.

"This is iron-mining country, you see. This is the Menominee Range. What they do here is underground. Up on the Mesabi they strip off the earth and take the ore out of an open pit. Makes a mess. But it was pretty here when I was a kid. My father owned the land all around and brought in Eastern captial in the old days. There's a shaft-house; see? That's Briar Hill."

The wounded car crept aroimd a curve. Ahead, the road dipped and staggered over a kind of earthen bridge. On either side of the built-up causeway the ground fell precipitously into two great deep pits, down the far sides of which was scattered debris, as of shattered houses.

"Good heavens! It's fallen In!" cried Alice. Innes said carelessly, "Well, you see, when they mine

underground they honeycomb the place. Where the ore comes out, they prop up the roof with timber and go deeper, down to another level. Of course, later, when the ore's all gone, the timbers rot, I suppose, and collapse."

"And the earth falls in!" Alice said, awestricken. "The houses, too?"

''Same of them were over the mines." "But how terrible!"

"Oh, no. Nobody gets hurt. It's not like an earthquake, you know. It's slow. It just sinks."

"I still think it's terrible. It isn't going to fall m any more?"

"No, no. Although they have to keep filling in this road." She looked at him, horrified. "Oh, it's all over now. Don't worry. These mines were played out long ago. This is what you might call a ghost town." "Is it, really? Like the ones in the West?" "Not so romantic," said Innes. "Why do people stay here?"

"I do not know." Innes dropped his guidebook manner and was personally vehement. "I wouldn't." Then, with that curious reluctance, ''Of course, my sisters . . ."

"I don't know if she'll take the hill, sir," Fred said over his shoulder, "but I'll try."

"Look," Innes said, pointing out his window and up. "That's the house. That's the back of it." 

Alice leaned, almost lying across his lap. "The house where you were born?" 

"Yes." He supported her shoulders tenderly. "It was quite a place once, if you can believe it."

Alice saw a whitish structure above some rocks which rose out of the side of the pit and went up. She had goodeyes. "What a queer place for a door," she said. "Why, there's a door way up in the wall that just leads right out into space."

Innes looked, too. His mustache brushed her cheek. "There used to be a back porch. It was torn down years ago. Got pretty shaky. Lord, I'd almost forgotten. I must have been about ten."

She tried very hard to think of Innes as about ten, to see his much-shaven face soft and hairless, his smudged eyes fresh and naive; to pare away hi her imagination the central paunchiness of his figure, the settled and not un-feminine width of his hips; to take out of him the starch that thirty years had put into his body and mind, to see him lithe and free and about ten. It wasn't easy.

"You had a rocky backyard to play in," she said, with the best sympathy she had.

"No, it was a pine woods," Innes said dreamily. "All this land was higher than the road is now. It just sloped off, all trees. I used to know the paths. I used to lie on the ground and hear them blasting, deep under."

Alice squeezed his hands. For a moment she thought she understood why he was reluctant to revisit Ogaunee.

"You never grew up in a mining town. You never heard the steam shovels puffing and snorting all night long. Or lived by the whistles. Well it's dead now. I . . ."

They were across the pit and in the village. Almost immediately they turned sharply to the right and began to climb. Innes forgot his reminiscence. "Look here, Fred, we can get away right after dinner?" He spoke not to a servant, but to a man who knew the answer.

"Sure we will. Why wouldn't we?" Fred answered boldly, like a man who did know and could reassure another.

Back of them, to their left, and soon below, the town lay wholly exposed. A block of frame buildings leaned together with a gap here and there, like a tooth gone. Dwellings marched evenly in a few rows, then broke ranks and scattered. A few were lost in the hills. Across the far end, a line of railroad track made a clean edge between town and swamp.

Alice caught this maplike impression out of the comer of her eye. She had to help will the car up the hill when it shuddered and seemed to fall, when it took heart, then seemed to slip and hang on the brink of backward motion, then coughed and pushed weakly up with scrambling wheels, catching for a hold.

Once Fred said, "The cottage, sir?"

"No, no," Innes said, pushing on the floorboards with his suede-shod feet "Go on, don't stop, go on."

Fred leaned forward and by sheer stubbornness seemed to call out a spurt of power that lifted the car up the last incline and rolled it, dying, to the level drive before the door.

Innes sighed. "O.K., Fred. Bring Miss Brennan's bag. She'll want to freshen up. Then you can get busy."

The house was of wood, long painted white. Its facade was like a face. It had eyes, nose, and mouth, if one happened to notice. Alice looked up and saw the upstairs window eyes seeming closed under raised brows and thought the expression on the face was haughty and self-satisfied.

As they stood on the porch after Innes had turned the metal handle of the old-fashioned bell, she could see through a window to her right the outline of a pair of shoulders, tremendously broad. It was no more than an outline, dim behind the lace; but she knew it wasn't a woman.

"Are your sisters married?" she asked Innes hastily, ready to revise an unwarranted impression.

He looked shocked. "No," he said. "Oh, no, none of them." His small mouth under the mustache remained rounded for speech, but again he did not say what more was in his mind, though Alice waited. On this unfinished, even unbegun, communication between them, the door opened.

The woman who opened the door seemed, at first glance, pop-eyed with surprise. She was big-boned and rather thin, although her face was round and firm and her features melted into one another without any angles. She looked, thought Alice, like a Botticelli woman, but not so fat. There was a convex swelling under her throat, and the pop eyes were permanent. "Why, Mr. Innes!" she said.

"Hello, Josephine." Innes affected a great joviality, as if he were playing Santa Claus. "Alice, this is Josephine. The car's broken down, Josephine, so I guess we're here for dinner, if you can find anything for us to eat. Are my sisters .. . ?"

The woman nodded. She made a fumbling motion with her cotton dress as if she were drying her large bright-pink hands.

"Tell them, will you?" urged Innes. "Come in, Alice.

Put the bag there, Fred." Innes asserted himself as if he needed to prove that he belonged here. The center hall lay between two arches. He led the way through the velvet-hung opening at the right. The house seemed quiet and deserted. A new-laid fire was burning in the grate, the kindling just caught But there was no one there.

The room was warm and a little stuffy. It was fuU of furniture and knickknacks with rugs overlying other rugs on the floor. Every table had a velvet cover and a lace cover over that. The place had a stuffed and cluttered elegance. Eveything in it was elegant of itself, to the point of absurdity. A Victorian room, Alice decided, and no imitation, either. Yet, because it was the real thing it impressed her. The conviction that these furnishings were still elegant was hard to resist. Someone so patently thought so.

"Sit down, my dear.'' Behind them, Fred had vanished. Josephine had gone upstairs. Alice loosened her jacket. "rU ... er . .. just fetch Gertrude." Innes made for a door in the wall opposite the front of the house.The curiosity that had occupied Alice until now was touched with panic.

"Do I look all right?" she said.

Innes turned, not his rather too bulky hips, but his head only. His eyes appealed to her as he looked backward over his shoulder. "It doesn't matter," he said, and his reluctance broke like a crust. "My sister Gertrude is blind."

Alice sat still, feeling the shock ebb out of her nerves. Innes had left her. She was quite alone. She felt submerged in this unfamiliar house, drowned without an i-dentity. Her eyes went to the fire, which at least was familiar and alive.

Alone, she should be gloating, "Goody, goody, I'm going to marry a million dollars." No wonder she felt strange and out of herself. Nothing to worry about. No living to make. Living's all made. Quick work, Alice.

Only last Saturday morning Alice had sat in her office with no dowry, nothing to swap in the marriage market, no money, prestige, influence, nothing to bring to her wedding but the bride. Now, on Thursday, slie'd swapped just that for a million dollars. Show him. Show Art Killeen. Two could play.

Quick work since Saturday morning when he'd come in-

to her office and sat on her desk with his leg swinging and said, "I'm courting a North Side debutante these days, you know. I'm really working at it." Said it in laughter, given the message kmdly, lightly, in laughter: "Better give it up, Alice. It wUl never be." She was ashamed to think he'd known she thought . . .

Oh nonsense! Why shouldn't she have thought they were going to be married, she and Art Killeen? They were in love. She'd been so dumb she hadn't known. No percentage in love. A silly, unprofitable thing, so often an economic or political mistake. Leading, however, in her case to a million dollars. Had it not? Would she have come from New York to Chicago if Art Killeen hadn't thought it such a fine idea that he'd got her the job with his pet, his wealthiest client?