The Simple Way of Poison (30 page)

“What did Gilbert St. Martin come here for last night?” he asked, with intense seriousness. “The truth, please—for your own sake, my dear.”

“He wanted to see Iris,” I replied. “He didn’t want to go to Beall Street. He asked me to tell her to come here, at ten o’clock.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. She said she didn’t have any interest in seeing him. I came back to tell him so. Somebody was here.”

“You didn’t see him?”

I shook my head.

“The lights were out. He came out of the dining room behind me. It was a man, I’m sure. Strong as steel, and tall— taller than I am. I felt that by the leverage of his arm and hand over my mouth. How did he get in?”

“He broke a window in the front area after Julius and Lilac left.”

“How did the Sergeant know I’d gone?”

Colonel Primrose thought a long time.

“It’s all very interesting,” he said deliberately, his eyes sparkling as he looked down at me. “Just as Steve Donaldson left, Edith St. Martin came. Buck was out in the hall. Lowell let her in. Buck says she stewed around a few minutes with Iris and Lowell in the drawing room, then asked where you were. Lowell said you were upstairs. Mrs. St. Martin said wasn’t it nice to have you around all the time, and Lowell, for some reason I can’t make out—I can’t make that girl out anyway—decided to get you to come down. So she went up. Now, the thing nobody’s quite sure of is whether Edith St. Martin went to the telephone and called your house
before
Lowell came back and said you were gone, or
after.
Anyway—as soon as she did say it, Buck dashed out and over here… and I’d say just got here in time.

“I came out to see Yates off, and saw Lowell at the phone on the upstairs landing. Now Buck says when he got here the phone was ringing, and when he answered it nobody was on it—they’d hung up.—Back in Beall Street, Iris was the only person not rushing around telephoning. She was sitting in the drawing room looking at Edith’s pekinese. When I came in she said, ‘You know, they’re really very engaging animals— look at its little tongue… and can’t you get its mistress to take it home and stay there permanently with it?’ Well, its mistress came in just then and said she’d have to go home, dear Gilbert would be worried if she was out too late you know, he’s so protective you know, I really feel sometimes he thinks I’m as helpless as precious little Golden Bells here. She picked the peke up and kissed it and got out.

“Well—I didn’t realize, until Lowell came down, that you and Buck had dashed off separately. I thought of course he was with you, now knowing you’d run out on him.”

“Well,” I said, “on my part, I don’t quite see, exactly—or nearly, what all that has got to do with anything.”

He shook his head. “I don’t either. Not till we find out who Lowell and Edith were telephoning so frantically to.”

“But… what happened to me?”

“You nearly got killed, Mrs. Latham.”

“I know that very well,” I said. “But… who, and why, and—”

“That’s something else I don’t quite understand. It… doesn’t seem to fit in, some way.”

“Fit in with what?” I asked wearily.

“With what else I know.”

He hesitated a moment, and moved his chair closer.

“I know,” he said slowly, “—for instance—who killed Randall Nash, and A. J. McClean. Not to mention Senator McGilvray.”

I was too worn out, emotionally and physically, to do anything but lean back against my pillows.

“Really,” I said.

He nodded placidly.

“And do you know who put me on to it, eventually?”

I shook my head.

“It was you, Mrs. Latham. You and your friend Lowell. Her—”

He broke off abruptly as Lilac stuck her head in the door. “That Mistah St. Mahtin’s heah, Mis’ Grace.”

Colonel Primrose moved his chair back.

For once Gilbert wasn’t just behind her. He’d waited with a new formality in the hall. When he did come he didn’t look as glowingly immaculate and self-confident as usual, though for the life of me I couldn’t have said at what point in particular he was less so. His black hair was as glossy and smooth as ever, his clothes as expensively debonair, his face as handsome and perfectly shaved, his manner toned with just the proper sympathy, as he came forward with a heavenly bunch of white calla lilies and laid them whimsically on my recumbent form.

“Darling! I got them just in case you didn’t pull through!”

“They’re lovely. Thanks!”

“As a matter of fact they are damned decorative, you know,” he said. It was precisely, I remembered, what Marie Nash had once said about her husband’s second wife.

He peeled off his chamois gloves and took out his thin gold cigarette case. “You know, it’s a funny thing, about last night, Colonel Primrose. I came here, Lilac said Grace wasn’t home. Still, I’ve told you all this.”

“Mrs. Latham would like to hear it,” Colonel Primrose said politely. I don’t know if Gilbert got the frozen sub-stratum under his formal courtesy. It was there, all right. Perhaps Gil is so used to meeting it in most men that he doesn’t mind it.

“Well,” he said, “there wasn’t much point in hanging about in the street…”

I hadn’t thought of that. Of course Lilac, disliking him very much, would never ask him in. I should have thought of that when I saw the curtains drawn in the garden windows.

“I said I’d come back, and walked along to Wisconsin Avenue. I got a pack of cigarettes at the drug store.”

“And telephoned, I think?” Colonel Primrose asked urbanely.

“Yes. That’s right. I did telephone. I’d forgot it. To the Nashes’ house to see if Grace had left. She had. So I wandered back. I saw the door sitting open, when I got here— no light in the house. It looked damned odd, you know. I called and knocked. No answer. Then I stepped in, and kicked the poor girl in the stomach.”

He raised one perfect eyebrow with a whimsical smile.

“I realized it was a… body, so to speak. I lighted my lighter, and saw it was Grace just as that wood-faced ruffian came barging in. The phone was ringing. I said ‘You watch her and I’ll answer it.’ He said, ‘I’ll answer it myself and you’ll come along,’ and went on acting as if it was me that bashed the poor child. We found the light…”

He shrugged.

“Well, it
was
a mess. However, it’ll give you a good excuse for doing something decent with the place, Gracie.”

He looked about with that marvelous patronizing air of his.

“It’s got possibilities. Oh, it’s not bad! Just needs polishing up a bit. I could sell that highboy for you for a lot of money, darling.”

I think if Captain Lamb hadn’t come in just then Gilbert might easily have found himself in an undignified heap on the garden wall, with the print of a military toe on the seat of his pants and his calla lilies marking the spot. As it was, they all adjourned into the dining room and closed the door. As they did so, the hall door opened a few inches and Lowell Nash’s dark head peeped in around its white edge.

“Can I come in?” she whispered.

She came in. I couldn’t tell for a moment whether it was my bleary eyes and throbbing head that made her look so strange or not.

She looked around the room. “Angie said it was a shambles,” she remarked shortly. Then she came quickly over to me, pushed the box of pills the doctor had left me off the cricket and sat down.

“How are you, Grace?”

Her dark eyes bored intently into mine, her hands grasping mine were cold as ice.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Suddenly she buried her head against my shoulder and held it there… not crying, just holding it there a long time. At last she raised it.

“I’d never have got over it if… if anything had happened to you, Grace,” she said quietly. “Never.”

“It seems to me I’m the one that wouldn’t have got over it,” I said.

She looked at me again; and I looked at her curiously. Her eyes had a quality of sheer pain in them that I’d never seen. They travelled slowly around the room. Lilac had put it back into fair shape, but it still looked a little rocky, as if it hadn’t really got its wind back yet.

She didn’t say anything. She just sat there holding my hands. At last she said, “Maybe I’m all wrong about Iris.”

I tried to get my reeling brain and jaundiced eyes focused on her. I couldn’t stand many more of these violent blows— this one, I thought suddenly, coming just after the terrible discovery last night that Randall Nash had been poisoned in his own home, by means of the syphon that Iris had charged. The memory of that scene in which I’d walked through her part whirled through my brain.

“I know it sounds crazy,” she went on. “But maybe… Angie’s right, and I’m nothing but a beastly jealous little cat.”

“Rat, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“All right, rat. It’s all the same.”

She’d dropped my hands and was sitting there on the cricket, her heavily-red lips set, her eyes brooding into space, her voice a dull monotone.

“I guess I got off on the wrong foot from the start. It never occurred to me that everything wasn’t all set, with my mother gone and me and my father left together. I thought it was perfect. I was so proud of keeping house for him… even if it was the housekeeper that did it. I thought it was me.”

Her lips twitched in a mirthless smile.

“I’d… missed him so all that summer, and counted the hours and minutes till I’d be in Washington again, and then counted the street lamps from the bridge to the house, each one bringing me closer to him… and there she was, staring at me. I… never realized she was as astonished to see me as I was to see her. All I knew was my father was there with his arm around her, saying ‘This is your new mother, my dear,’… and I hated her. You don’t know how I hated her, Grace!”

She’d forgotten coming bursting over to my house and sobbing all that night, and I didn’t remind her.

“She was so… so beautiful! Everywhere I’d go people would say, ‘Not the lovely Iris Nash’s daughter?’, and somebody would say ‘Oh, no, her stepdaughter,’ and look at me, and I’d nearly die. I was scrawny and ugly and black as a nigger where I wasn’t peeling. Then Angie fell for her, and… Mac. Only A. J. didn’t, and I knew, even if I wouldn’t admit it, that he was jealous of her too. And I used to make up awful things just to make it worse.”

She pushed her short black curls off her forehead.

“Then once she said, ‘Lowell, do you know you’d be a very lovely girl if you’d hold up straight and eat properly and give your skin a break.’ I told my mother that. She said ‘Don’t let her make fun of you, Lowell. You’ve got the Nash features and there’s not much you can do but spend a lot of time on the right clothes when you get out of the gawky stage.’ ”

She laughed bitterly.

“Instead of hating my mother and seeing she was jealous of Iris and too busy to care what I looked like, I just hated Iris worse. You don’t mind my boring you with all this, do you, Grace? I’ve never… put it in words before.”

I shook my head, painfully. She didn’t need that.

“Maybe if I’d ever been able to get under her skin I’d have felt better… but I couldn’t, and I hated myself for trying, and then I’d try again, and never get any further than seeing her eyes turn green, as if she could kill me—and I knew I deserved it. Then she’d just let it go, and I’d hate myself, and the more I hated myself the worse I hated her. I… I guess that’s what people do.”

I nodded.

“Well… I’m sorry,” she said humbly. “Lots of times I’ve wanted to stop being mean when she’d give me some perfectly swell build-up. Like once when she didn’t know I was around she said ‘Lowell’s not only beautiful to look at, she’s a perfectly grand girl, Mrs. Somebody or other’—I don’t know who it was. ‘If she’s going on that picnic you can be perfectly sure nothing will happen that you’ll need to have the slightest worry about.’ And she said it all as if she really meant it. No buts and ifs.”

She blinked back the sudden tears in her eyes.

“I wanted to go in and tell her I was sorry, and all that, but I… I didn’t know how. Then mother called me up and said she did hope I’d persuade my father to get me some new riding togs, she didn’t see how even a stepmother as self-centered as Iris could tolerate me riding in the park looking like a scarecrow. I guess mother didn’t mean it, really… she was just sort of taking it out on my father.”

“Well,” I said gently, “why don’t you go tell her now?”

“I… maybe I will.—You couldn’t go with me… could you?”

I would have gone with her if I’d had to be carried on a rush litter. And I’ve wondered ever since if some poltergeist was dogging my footsteps, or just Iris’s, that made that trip turn out as horribly as it did.

Lilac helped me dress. When I came back down stairs, Colonel Primrose was there, disturbed and anxious. I thought for a moment it was on my account, but I saw it wasn’t. He was looking at Lowell, standing by the fireplace, hard-eyed and tight-lipped, every vestige of color gone from her face. My heart sank. I could have slain him. Heaven only knew, I thought, when she’d get back in the mood I’d left her in. But I was wrong. She came quickly across the room into the hall and took my arm. Colonel Primrose saw me, and gave a surprised start. I shook my head so sharply that it nearly cracked, and he didn’t make any attempt to stop me.

Lowell took my car keys and got in behind the wheel. Her face was drawn, even more than it had been.

“Do you want to wait, Lowell?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I can’t wait,” she whispered. “I… might be too… late.”

I gaped at her.

“What do you mean, Lowell?”

“Nothing… really. Please don’t ask me.”

I said nothing. She maneuvered my car in between the butcher boy’s bicycle and a laundry truck in front of the house in Beall Street, and opened the door for me. Neither of us spoke as we crossed the walk and went up the steps. Lowell put her key in the lock and turned it. We stepped inside… not meaning to be quiet, either of us, though Lowell had on rubber sport shoes and I’d put on a pair too, to lessen the jar of high heels on my numb aching head that no pill could entirely deaden.

The door into the drawing room was open. Lowell stood aside for me to go in, and I started to, and stopped dead in my tracks, Lowell just behind me. We couldn’t help hear the low throbbing words that beat against our ears, paralyzing our feet and eyes and brains.