Town of Masks (21 page)

Next time it would be Dennis who came, she thought, with another of his “God damn your prying soul”—if he had the courage to take the phone in his hand.

Her measure of time was more difficult, and she paced the room marking each cold minute by her watch. On the third call, the phone was caught up almost before the bell rang, and the voice jarred against her expectation, a breezy, male “hello” and a medley of laughter behind and about it. Tom Merritt was home with his bride. Hannah could not suppress a giggle. She clamped the phone down on it. What right had he to such gaiety? To be so pleased with a wife he had taken so unlovingly?

She stood a long time at the desk, limp and exhausted. Gradually a sickness came over her in the contemplation of what she had been doing. She lumbered to the window then, and one hip on the wide sill, sat for some moments breathing the damp coolness, deeply, deeply that she might be relieved of the reek of her own mind.

Dennis’s footsteps scuffed up the driveway presently. She had never known hatred before, she thought. He had destroyed all decency in her.

S
HE AWAKENED TO THE
sound of church bells, and in the first few seconds of consciousness remembered what a time there had been in the Cove when St. Cecilia church had installed their first large bell. One benefit and another had been held to raise the funds for it, every merchant contributed, and said halleluiah when the sum was sufficient. Then the bell was hung. Its first sounding was to toll a six-o’clock Mass. No one within the town limits had slept through it. Those who slept after it were roused at the seven-o’clock Mass. Very few were still in bed at nine. The priest then, a reasonable man, agreed to silence the big bell until eleven. But what a ringing it got at that hour, booming out over every other church bell in town. Protestants, at regular worship, bowed their heads and waited until eleven-five, and the children giggled. When the Catholics were called, the Protestants might worship.

All the bells, including St. Cecilia, had been muted since; and it was soothing, Hannah thought, to lie in bed and hear the first of them on Sunday morning. Bells were for resurrection. Bells were for joy; and this day past, she might expect her share of it. She must guard against a sense of elation, she thought, getting up. There was solemn prayer and resolve to be made, a devil to be cast out.

She made her own breakfast Sundays that Sophie might go to church with her family. She had need of a good breakfast, and ate well. How many good cooks there were in the farmhouses in the neighborhood of the Cove, trained by Hannah Blake. She herself had learned the art from a farm woman, not her mother, surely. Her father had always said that she could manage to burn water. But then he cared so little about food. He took no meat to speak of. No wonder he had never had a son. What a strange thought, she mused, gathering the dishes into the sink—that meat-eating was a male characteristic. It came, no doubt, from men’s needing meat to do the hard day’s labor. In a time of divided labor, equal rights, a woman was no less a woman, sharing the tastes of men.

She dressed, a pleasant lethargy her state of mind. It was as though a full portion of gladness was within her reach, and her only decision the moment at which she should choose to enjoy it.
I’ll put it off,
she thought,
till I come home from church, and then if needs be, I’ll put it off again.

The subject of the sermon was most appropriate, she thought, reading the announcements in the glass-framed plaque on the church lawn.
Fear not to walk alone.

She greeted the Copithornes on the church steps, and nodded to the Wilkses across the aisle from her as she settled in the Blake seat, a seat worn pale by the restlessness of many generations. Sitting quite still, she would leave no mark on it herself, another peculiar thought. The organ music was pleasant. Bach and Mozart, and the sunlight through the amber-tinted windows spun a haze between her and the other worshipers.

“Fear not to walk alone in righteousness,” the reverend doctor commenced. Which, she thought, was not quite what he had announced outside. But then righteousness had come to have a formidable meaning. Righteousness had no place in a world of expediency. It admitted no compromise. There was indeed a message here for her, but not in the words he intoned. The message was in her own heart, in the summoning of the savage strength she must have to be at last truly righteous. To this burning purpose everything must be sacrificed if Maria’s death was to have any meaning. And it had meaning, if she had the courage to prove it. Elizabeth must not be spared either, however much she suffer, and Hannah Blake suffer with her. To be exorcised must be to suffer, but to be possessed, damnation.

She gathered strength in the very act of forcing herself to listen through the sermon, without moving even a hand to her face to brush away a fly. She gave a quarter to the collection plate, pulling down on herself the scorn of the usher, who expected a dollar at least. And that added a mite to her strength, to defy opinion. She did not sing although the hymn was to her liking and her voice among the best in the congregation. And the services over, she mingled among people for whom she had small affection. Mrs. Wilks got the compliment she expected on her hat, and Ruth Copithorne an account of the disgraceful scene at the funeral home she wanted because, she said, John could never tell anything straight.

She drove home then, and leaving her purse, hat, and gloves on the car seat went to the foot of the garage stairs and called up them. Dennis answered her, but before he could come down, she climbed up to his room.

“I
T SEEMS A LONG
time since you and I had a talk, Dennis.”

That he viewed with alarm her coming to his room was obvious. He had stood before her at the top of the stairs as though he would bar her way at first, and then retreated in haste making the place as tidy as he could with the sweep of his hand. No papers, no books, she noticed. Whatever he had been doing in his room lately had been in his mind only. The disorder was his clothes, the contents of his pockets.

“May I sit down?” she asked.

He motioned to the chair at his table. The one arm chair in the room was draped with his work clothes. He sat on the edge of the bed, and ran his hand through his hair as though it were not disheveled enough.

“You’re nervous,” Hannah said. “I’ve been to church myself. It’s a wonderfully calming influence.”

“I’ve tried it,” he said. “It doesn’t work for me.”

“So you intimated to me once. Perhaps the only influence to which you respond is—feminine. Have you ever thought of marriage, Dennis?”

“Are you proposing Sophie again, Miss Blake?”

“Don’t berate Sophie to me, young man. She’s a fine child, and innocent in spite of you.”

The veins rose on his forehead.

“I’m not proposing Sophie, and you know it. In fact, I’m not proposing anyone. But I think it’s time we considered your position in Campbell’s Cove.”

“We?”

“Yes. You and I. Where you want now to tell me it’s none of my business, I’d hesitate if I were you, Dennis, because I’m in a position to do something about it.” She drew her finger through the dust on the table, and changed her tone. “Tom Merritt is home with his bride, I hear. I wonder was he setting an example? Not to you, of course. He doesn’t like you very well, does he, Dennis? Perhaps he’s jealous, too, because you’re a poet. Everybody it seems is jealous of you. Flattering, isn’t it?”

He clenched his hands between his knees, and sat, his eyes intense on her.

“I should like to explode the myth of Dennis Keogh. I think it’s time. Apparently Maria tried it, and got small thanks. I’m not afraid to try it—and get no thanks. Does Elizabeth know of your experience in Florida last winter, sailing out of Pensacola, was it?”

He started violently, little beads of sweat bubbling to his forehead.

“I take it you haven’t proposed marriage to Elizabeth either—just your company, and your poetry, of course.”

“It’s the jungle,” Dennis murmured, getting up. “It’s slogging through the bloody jungle again—”

The beast in the jungle, Hannah thought. “Or am I wrong?” she pursued flamboyantly, sure now that she was right. “Tell me you’ve offered marriage to her and I’ll go down from here. I’ll apologize and go down.”

He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. “You aren’t wrong. I haven’t said the word to her. I’m not sure. I thought I was till Mrs. Verlaine let me have it. I don’t want to hurt Elizabeth. She loves me. I know that—and, Christ, it’s good to be loved.”

Hannah shut her mind against the appeal in his words. “You say you don’t want to hurt her. What do you think you have done to her in the last week? What has this marriage of Tom’s done to her? And you have credit coming for that. What of that scene there in the funeral parlor—what did that do to her?”

“I can’t help that,” he said. “I can’t help any of this, and maybe Tom Merritt did right. Maybe his conscience was bothering him, and he just needed something to push him into the decision. You can do good not meaning it, you know.”

“Dennis,” she said very quietly, “you can do bad not meaning it, too.” This was an easier way, she thought. “There are people in this world who are the instruments of evil. There are people who are the devil’s advocates without knowing it.”

“I don’t believe in the devil.”

“Nor in hell?”

“No. Only the human mind is diabolical enough to conceive of it. When heaven’s too tame, he makes hell for himself.”

“A lesson from Mr. Sykes, no doubt.”

“No. A lesson from my own father. He was a minister of God, and when I was sixteen years old, he was convinced—as you are, Miss Blake—that I was the devil’s advocate. He had a Sophie all ready for me to marry because he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t responsible for her. I ran out on him.” He jerked his head back as though he would break a pain that had knotted behind his neck. “I think I’ve been running ever since.”

“Have you told this to Elizabeth?”

“Yes. I’ve told Elizabeth everything that has ever happened to me, every sordid patch of it. She’s tried to make me see that it’s not sordid.” He said it as though he were trying still to believe it. “She’s so lovely, Miss Blake—”

Hannah could not meet his eyes. She was not without pity, she thought, even for the damned. “Go away, Dennis. The greatest kindness you could do her would be not see her again. She deserves someone clean, someone who hasn’t been handed from one woman to another—”

“Don’t say that to me,” he shouted, but the words were lost to Hannah for his hand flew with them. He tried to draw away, unable to hold back the impulse to strike her, but the tips of his fingers slashed like claws across her cheek.

She felt the sting burning into her face but sat where she was, quite straight and oddly comforted by the pain.

Dennis clenched his hands in horror, opened them and examined them as though he realized them suddenly to be indeed the devil’s instrument. He slumped down on the edge of the bed and covered his face.

Hannah got up slowly. His cigarette was lying on the floor, still burning. What a strange coincidence, she thought, putting her foot on it. It was a dream, a recurring nightmare, from which she might awake in bed, and discover that no such person as Dennis Keogh had ever come to Campbell’s Cove.

T
HE CORONER’S PRELIMINARY FINDINGS
were reported in the
County Journal
the next morning. There were tests, not as yet complete, but there was every indication that the sheriff’s reconstruction of the crime would be confirmed medically. It was George Walker’s theory that Mrs. Verlaine, having taken some wine that evening, mistook her assailants for friends at first, and raised no cry. In the house, they made their demands for the jewels, and the woman had surrendered them so willingly the burglars suspected a trap. She might even have made a gesture of sounding an alarm to someone in the house by pulling the ancient bell cord. When it didn’t work they had at hand an instrument for quick and silent murder.

How ingenious a deduction, Hannah thought, setting the paper down and pouring another cup of coffee. How characteristic of Walker, with just enough of Maria’s habits to make it shine, the implicit and natural glow of truth! What a genius he had for the half-truth, and what a way of suggesting that the other half was quite within his reach should he wish to pull it out. A sleight-of-hand artist!

She glanced at the rest of the article. A full description taken from the insurance papers had been put out on all police communications. It was thought likely that the murderers would try to dispose of some of the smaller pieces before long.

It read like a lullaby, she thought.

She looked at her watch. It was time to leave for the office. A new week. She liked to be well rested on Monday morning, and she had not felt more fit for a long time.

The kitchen door banged, and before she had risen from the table, Sophie burst into the dining-room. The first sight of the child sent a cold chill through her. “Denny’s gone, Miss Blake.”

She sank down into the chair again in relief. “Gone?”

“He’s not in his room. His clothes—everything’s gone.”

“Well,” she said as though there should be comfort in the words, “he was a vagrant, you know, a wanderer. He’s just wandered off again.”

“He didn’t even say good-by,” Sophie said, hurt. “Goodbyes are difficult,” she tried to explain. “It’s much better to go without them. Some day, child, you’ll realize that.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Sophie said.

“Don’t think about it. Just go about your work.”

Before she went to work herself, however, she climbed the stairs to the boy’s room. The blankets and linen were folded, and the room quite bare. Not even a scrap of paper in the wastebasket. Going out, she turned the key and put it in her pocket. She would not have it occupied again.

S
HE WAS AT HER
desk but a few moments when her secretary brought word that Tom Merritt wanted to see her. She looked up from the paper work before her, and he was standing beyond the glass partition waiting for her answer. He smiled and nodded. She liked appointments made in advance of all calls, business or social, but one quick glimpse of his affability and good cheer and he was welcome. She wondered if it were the salesman’s way, or if things were really as right with him as the impression he gave of it. She beckoned him in and shook hands across the desk.