Town of Masks (16 page)

Matheson colored, and Wilks raised his head and his voice. “Justice for everybody, uptown and down. Now, so that we won’t keep you from your job any longer, I’ll entertain a motion that your report be accepted with the board’s thanks and confidence.”

The motion was made, seconded, and carried, the crowd joining in the “ayes.” Glancing back, Hannah saw the O’Gorman coterie joining the chorus. They stood up and cheered when the parade went by, and they didn’t mark the difference between a wedding and a funeral.

But Matheson stood where he was, his head a bit lower. “What about the Front Street business?”

Wilks smiled. His smile was rare, Hannah thought, and those on whom he bestowed it, small beneficiaries.

“Matt, do you remember what you said a few minutes ago about the crowd outside Mrs. Verlaine’s?”

Matheson nodded.

“Don’t you see how much this situation is like it? It’s too bad what’s happened on Front Street—if it’s as you say it is. But even while we’ve been talking about it, they’ve probably done their worst. We are all agreed that it must not happen again.”

What a fine little lecture,
Hannah thought,
what art elegant twist! Wilks, the lion tamer!

As Matheson pushed the gates apart and made his way through the Covites, she watched their faces—sympathy on all of them, sympathy and the mild rebuke of the contagious Mr. Wilks; tolerance, also after his example, the long patience with a policeman who had to be forgiven his petulance and reminded of his own worth. And the Front Streeters—she watched them edge toward the door. How long would it take until they realized they had been duped? The time between now and their reaching a water-front pub. They’d wash down their grievances with malt and grumble all the way to bed. And from now until their next uprising, they would strain still farther from the community.

At the council table Wilks was thumbing through the notes Copithorne had turned over to him. She heard him question, “Civil Defense Invasion, what’s this?” And she heard the word “Postpone.”

No, Hannah thought, it cannot be postponed, not even a moment. She was at the table before the whispered conference reached a decision.

“May I have a moment before the council, gentlemen?”

They had little choice in the matter. Wilks frowned, but Copithorne nodded assent.

She turned to the restive townspeople and called out, “Mr. O’Gorman, will you stay, please?”

She saw him throw back his head at the sound of his name in the chamber. He would stay. If Wilks could dismiss him, she could restore him. She could raise him up, and climb herself on his shoulders. She addressed the council, but she talked to Dan O’Gorman. Forgotten tonight was her awkwardness that one day in his house. Well forgotten. She would never be awkward there again.

“Gentlemen, we were divided tonight, and then we were admirably reunited by Mr. Wilks.” That to her boss, let him take it as toast or tactic. “Nobody ever worked harder for unity in the Cove than Maria Adams Verlaine. Therefore I don’t feel that I’m lacking in respect to her memory when I want to speak to you tonight on Campbell’s Cove Day. Gentlemen, we live in an age of violence. We must meet it in whatever shape it comes upon us, with prepared force. We must meet it united. And this town never needed unity as much before. On our anniversary this year, I propose that we give ourselves to dedication, not to nostalgia. I propose that from Front Street to High Street we demonstrate our will to survive an enemy’s attack upon the town. For the purposes of demonstration, we shall assume that the attack is military, atomic. But we shall be showing our strength of spirit as well as our ability to defend ourselves.

“The civil defense corps proposes to evacuate the town under the simulated conditions of an air attack. The army and air force will give us every co-operation. Mr. O’Gorman will organize a fleet of fishing craft to meet the emergency, as he would do in our actual need. I submit the plan, gentlemen, for your approval.”

For once in her life, Hannah thought, moving back from the table, she had said what she intended to say, she had articulated her thoughts. Were she given command of a legion of angels, it would not be half so satisfying as the marshaling of her own thoughts.

There was no general acclaim for her plan, no outburst of support. Nor had she wanted it. That would have smacked of demagogy, and she felt very humble. A stir of conversation swept the audience instead, as though she had given them something to think about, rather than something to cheer. Good. It was long past time they did some thinking. In the end, the council promised an answer within the week, and in the meantime assurances that the project would have approval.

Quite enough, Hannah thought. Before she had reached her place among the ordinary citizens, the meeting was adjourned, and moving on then, toward the great doors, she was given a word of commendation here and there, at which she demurred. At the door, Matheson laid his hand on her arm. There was nothing of authority in his grip and yet she sensed a chilling restraint.

“You know what I was thinking when you were talking there, Miss Blake?” He waited for her encouragement. She said nothing. “I was thinking: shades of Mrs. Verlaine.”

She dared to meet his eyes. Praise or irony, she could not tell. “Thank you, Matt.”

H
ANNAH WAS AT HER
desk but a few minutes in the morning, when Franklin Wilks came to the door of her office. “Do you have a moment, Hannah?”

Rarely had he approached her in this manner. She had often thought he begrudged her a moment even on bank business. “Of course.”

He came in and sat down at her desk. “That was a remarkable performance last night, Hannah. I shouldn’t be surprised if you saved the night there. It had the makings of an ugly business.”

“It doesn’t take much to turn a brawl into a rally,” she said.

“It works the other way, too,” Wilks said. “I talked with the county people this morning, by the way. Walker was not grinding a political ax—though I wouldn’t put that past him myself. But he had good reason to give the Front Streeters a going-over.”

“Oh?”

“They turned up one of Maria’s pieces, an old-fashioned tie pin. The maid, of course, swears that Maria gave it to her. And she gave it to her nephew.”

“Annie was with Maria a long time,” Hannah said.

“She’s not necessarily under suspicion. You can’t blame her for lying to save the nephew either if that’s the case. But there’s no doubt she carried tales about the jewelry down there. And no doubt they got the full picture of Maria’s carelessness. It’s a terrible thing to say, but Maria asked for this. You can’t expect people who have very little to take your attitude toward valuables.”

“Scarcely,” Hannah murmured.

“Maria was one of those strange souls to whom possession means very little. I’m executor of her estate, you know.”

“Are you?”

“It’s less than ten thousand dollars, except for the house and the jewels, or insurance on them.”

“Who’s the beneficiary?”

“Annie Tully in the matter of cash. The Christians get the house for a museum.”

“Oh, my, that’s too bad,” Hannah said.

“Why?”

Hannah lifted her head. “Annie’s getting the cash, I mean. That makes her more suspect than ever, doesn’t it?”

“Mmm,” Wilks said. “And there’s no disposition of the jewels. The will was made out before she acquired them.”

“Did Annie know of her inheritance before this happened?” Hannah asked.

“Yes. She admits that frankly. Maria had promised to leave her well provided for.”

“It would seem, then,” Hannah said, “that if Annie contemplated anything like—murder, the time to have done it was before Maria spent thirty thousand dollars in the French courts.”

“So.” Wilks nodded. “And then there’s this view of it—with her inheritance spent on them, she might have felt she was entitled to them.”

Hannah shook her head. “That’s not like Annie. She was content with her lot in this world from the day she was born into it.”

Wilks permitted himself to smile. “Are you taking over the championship of Front Street?”

“In time I might,” she said, “when they’re in need of it.”

“And when you’re in need of them?”

“Perhaps. One hand washes another.”

“And one hand shakes another,” Wilks said. “For your Cove Day celebration, you’d like a few dignitaries?”

“With enough of them, I think we can arrange a coast-to-coast broadcast. It should be worth their time, too.”

“I hadn’t realized you were cynical, Hannah. But then, there’s quite a bit about you, I discovered last night. It was a revelation. Copithorne went to pieces, didn’t he?”

“I’m not cynical, Mr. Wilks. And for my little part, I’m determined the cynics won’t inherit the earth.”

“A nice phrase, and I know who’d like it—Tom Michaels.”

“The governor?”

Wilks nodded. “I think he’d come on a proper invitation. We won’t be able to keep Cravens away, of course. But the country might find it interesting to have them in the same reviewing stand.”

Hannah’s visions kept pace with his. She measured his power as national committeeman. “Will you invite them?”

“If you compose the letter, I’ll sign it,” Wilks said.

Hannah felt the color rise to her face. To her brief relief the telephone rang. She excused herself, watching Wilks strum a tune on her desk with his finger tips. The call was from the sheriff’s office. Walker wanted to see her.

Her first panic was stemmed by the realization that if it were a dire call for her it would not come over the telephone. “Where shall I see him?” she asked.

“At 327 Cherry Street.”

“At Mrs. Verlaine’s house?”

“Right.”

Hannah put the receiver in the cradle carefully, the care symbolic of her self-shepherding.

“Let me give you a mite of advice on Walker, Hannah. Keep him in his place. Use him, or he’ll use you. There’s only one thing more ruthless than a man on the way up. That’s the fellow on the way down trying for a comeback.”

“I’ll remember that, Mr. Wilks,” she murmured. “Thank you.”

He got up then and started to the door. He paused and turned back, his mouth set in wry amusement. He took a letter from his pocket and put it on her desk. “This is a small bank, Hannah—and I’d be very happy to be one of your constituents.”

He left abruptly and she opened the letter. It was one of the several she had signed her name to the morning before.

E
VERY DECISION TO BE
made seemed an impossible one as she prepared to meet Walker. She thought at first to put the car in the garage for repair and take a cab to Cherry Street. Fearing that might pique the sheriff’s curiosity, she drove, but the act of driving to Maria’s house once more set her nerves on edge. A good driver, she had never ground the gears in her life except that night, but now every time she put her hand to the shift, she was as leery of it as she would have been of a molten rod. She feared also that the car, parked where it was that night, might prod a laggard memory. She could even imagine someone, seeing it, in the very act of recollection—Wilks, for example—“By God, I remember seeing Hannah’s car there the other night. That was the night—”

“No. No,” she said aloud, turning into Cherry Street. She picked up speed that she might not have to shift the gears in front of the house, and coasted the last hundred yards. She parked where she had always parked, visiting Maria—beyond the driveway. Having forced her courage to that decision, she restored a measure of inward calm. She even lingered, crossing the lawn, to survey the damage wreaked on Maria’s lovely yard by the curious and their dispatchers. The shrubbery was almost stripped of leaves, the leaves half-withered mingling in small whirlwinds with gum and cigarette wrappers. The grass was beaten down and matted into the soil.

Schenk, most favored of the sheriff’s henchmen, she thought, tipped his hat and opened the door for her. Inside, the damage was even greater, and she could see two deputies going over the woodwork with chisel and hammer, the woodwork, the marble fireplace, the bookshelves, all the books piled on the floor. Walker apparently did not have his announced confidence in the theft of the jewels. At least, he was taking no chances.

“You can wait in the living-room, Miss Blake,” Schenk said. “I’ll tell the sheriff you’re here.”

She merely nodded and picked her way through the stacked furniture and books. The deputy working there left without a word on her arrival. She was glad of the moment alone, and glad of the disorder. To have entered the room and found it as she had last seen it would have been an ordeal, and to have done it under the sheriff’s eye, a greater one. Among her imaginings of the sheriff’s preparations for her, had even been a dummy image of Maria as they found her. Hannah’s face worked at the thought, a twitch she sought to control. She looked in the mantel mirror. There was no facial evidence of the contorting nerve. She remembered Maria’s telling her to look in the mirror, and turned from it now.

Walker might be watching, she realized. He was a great one for setting a scene. She turned a chair upright and sat down. There were footsteps overhead, hammering in the kitchen, noise all over, except in the room where she waited. At every lull of the hammer, she could hear a clock’s ticking within the room. She could not find the clock with her eyes. A calculated torture? She looked at her watch. How long was he to keep her waiting? What did he except her to do in this room where her friend had died? What his right to his slow play upon her nerves, her memories, her heart’s pain?

A minute, only one minute had passed when she looked at her watch again, unless she had been wrong when first she looked at it. She began to count. If he were to keep her waiting, victim to her own distraction, he would not see her look at her watch for five minutes. Not until she had counted slowly to three hundred. From seventy she was suddenly at twenty-seven. From twenty-nine she went to ninety-three. Better to read.

She got up and read the titles on the nearest stack of books. Mostly Dickens. The best of Dickens to her was
Tale of Two Cities.
The least to Maria. They had argued it in high school; and another argument, this one in class debate: Did Othello kill his wife in jealousy, or was his anger righteous and his act of murder a pure man’s intolerance of defilement? How she had fought for that interpretation! There was something of Iago in Walker, she thought—the charm, the dangerous, ingratiating charm. Catlike. Swift. She much preferred the dogged Matheson.