Wolf in Man's Clothing (25 page)

“She could murder anybody.”

He looked up at me quickly. There was a short silence. Then he said slowly, “Not unless she was so angry that she didn't stop to think. But that's why I'm afraid of what she might do to Drue.”

There was a sincerity in his voice that didn't give my spirits what you could call a lift. But I did decide (provisionally) that Craig Brent had not murdered his father. And I must talk to Drue and among other things tell her that. Perhaps, then, she would explain about the medicine-box—that is, if her determined silence regarding it really was, as I thought it was, to protect Craig. Which meant obviously that at some time it had been in Craig's possession and she knew it. And that reflection brought me around the full circle again and in spite of myself I wondered whether Craig's continued and repeated statements of regret at not being able to get around were as sincere and frantically frustrated as he made them sound!

I was thinking that (and it was definitely not a happy thought) when he said abruptly, “That shooting in the meadow night before last; you remember?”

“How could I forget?” I demanded with some earnestness.

“Nugent thinks it was a kind of spur-of-the-moment attack on you.”

“Just an idle impulse, no doubt,” I said, bitterly. “Well, I didn't like it just the same.”

“Anna was sure it was only a hunter. Hunting in the meadow is not uncommon, you know.”

“Besides being a fine alibi!”

“Yes. There's that too. But are you
sure
he shot at you?”

“I'm sure two bullets whizzed over my head. Of course, he may have been aiming at Anna. Or he may have been just a little prankster, bent on having his fun and giving us both a scare.” I said it sarcastically, but he looked perfectly sober.

“Perhaps,” he said, and added, “Anna's honest and loyal.” And before I could remark upon the curious way Anna, terrified, with a mysteriously black eye, kept obtruding herself at every turn (to say nothing of a masculine voice, hurriedly hushing, drifting out of the keyhole), he went on, “I suppose there'll be traces of digitalis in the little—what do you call it, barrel?—of the hypodermic?”

“Yes. Unless it's been cleaned. Did Alexia see me put it there?”

“She didn't say.”

I thought back rapidly to the hurried moments following Conrad's death. “She was walking up and down in the library, just behind the big desk. She must have seen me put it under the fern. Beevens was coming down the stairs just ahead of me. When I turned I saw no one. But—yes, the stair landing is visible from the library; she must have moved out of sight just as I turned. Then I suppose she took it—later, on her way upstairs, immediately after she left the library.”

“Miss Keate,
who
telephoned for the police?” It was of course a pointed and significant question and had been from the first. But it was still without an answer.

“I don't know. I simply don't know.”

“If we could find out who did that and why. If I could do anything—anything …”

I looked at him, decided to meddle, took a long breath and said, “Look here, you still love your wife.”

“She's not my wife. You forget that.”

“Fiddlesticks. There's no law against remarrying. If Nicky …”

“What about Nicky?” The question was like a pounce.

“I'd hate to see her marry him.”

“You'd hate …” he stopped. “Listen, Miss Keate, there's something you don't know. That's why she left me. Because of Nicky.”

T
HE BREATH SIMPLY WENT
out of my lungs, so I couldn't say a word.

“Oh, yes, it's perfectly true,” said Craig quietly. “She loved him. There's no other explanation for it. I didn't blame her. How could I? It's nothing you can help or do anything about. Love, I mean. I knew Drue. No cheap emotion would have made her do it. It was the real thing.”

“But
Nicky
!” I gasped, incredulous.

He smiled a little. “That's another thing about love; you don't choose. If you're in love and it's the wrong man or the wrong woman, still you can't help it.”

“N-nonsense,” I exclaimed, rallying a little. “Of course you can help it! You can nip it in the bud! You can—why, that's a very immoral statement!”

He shook his head a little. “They went away together. Only a little while after she became my wife. It's been Nicky all along; only he wouldn't marry her because of the money. My father was grateful enough to Nicky for breaking up our—the marriage …” He said it swiftly. “He paid Nicky regularly for that, all this time. That is, I'm sure, the explanation of those checks to Nicky. But my father wouldn't have given Nicky a cent if he'd married Drue.”

I wanted to shake him. Stupid, blind young idiot. I said, “She is in love with you. She always has been. She …”

He interrupted sharply, “There's no use talking of that, Miss Keate. She went away with Nicky while I was in Washington, shortly after our marriage. She asked for a divorce through a lawyer. She never tried to communicate with me.”

“She wrote to you.”

“No.”

“Yes, she did. She told me.”

“She …” He looked slowly at me. “I never got it. Are you sure? My father wouldn't have …”

“Your father would have tampered with St. Peter's mail if he wanted to. But it's too late now. What happened then?”

“But I can't believe … Well, then I went into training. She had gone with Nicky; she didn't even just go away and then meet him later; she actually left the house with him. My father told me. She didn't write to me. …”

“Look here,” I said in exasperation. “Five minutes talk with Drue would clear up everything.”

“No,” he said stubbornly. “All that's in the past and done with. Drue wanted a divorce. …”

“You wanted a divorce.”

“No, it was Drue. …”

“Nonsense. She only wanted it so you could get into training.”

“She …” He stopped and gave me a long look and then said very slowly, “Exactly what do you mean?”

“Are you trying to make me believe that you know nothing about that?”

“I haven't the faintest idea as to what you're driving at. What do you mean?”

“Now, see here,” I began incredulously and then, at the look in his face, gave up. “Oh, all right. Drue said that your father explained to her why you wanted her to ask for a divorce.”

“But I didn't …” Again he checked himself and said, “For God's sake go on. Why would
I
want a divorce?”

“To get into the training school, of course. Your father told her they wouldn't take married men.”

“They wouldn't at the time. But I could have gone to another …” He broke off again to question me. “He told her that?”

“Yes. He said it was the thing above everything else that you wanted to do—or at least he succeeded in making her think that. He convinced her so thoroughly that she consented to ask for a divorce—believing that you didn't want to ask her for it yourself. And that once the training was over you would come back and marry her again. He told her,” I added, quoting, “that it would be merely a long engagement.”

Craig's eyes were very intent and very bright—and a little sad. He looked at me for a long moment or two as if to test the things I had said and measure them in his mind against what he had formerly believed. “So,” he said at last, “he did that. And then I suppose if she wrote to me, he …”

“Obviously,” I said, seeing that he was reluctant to say it. “Obviously your father got the letters. And Drue being the kind of girl she is, I don't think she would write very many letters without a reply.”

“No,” he said slowly, staring at the mound his feet made under the eiderdown. “No, she wouldn't write very many times without a reply.”

I said, “I'm going to get Drue. I think I can manage somehow to get her past the guard; perhaps I can't but …”

“Wait a minute,” he said sharply. And stared at his feet, frowning. And finally said, “No.”

“But …”

“No, don't. You've forgotten Nicky.”

“
Nicky
!” I cried. “Drue's not in love with Nicky and never was! You're as stubborn as your father!”

“He had to finish what he'd begun. He couldn't help being the way he was.”

Nor you the way you are, I thought in furious exasperation.

“Oh, Good Heavens! Can't you see she's in love with you? That's why she came here. She wanted to find out what had happened, why you demanded a divorce without even seeing her again. They drove her away—your father and Alexia and Nicky. Your father planned the whole thing. He paid Nicky for whatever he did to help.”

He stopped my headlong flight into conjecture—yet, knowing Drue, knowing something of Nicky, it seemed to me reasonable conjecture. But he said, “So she went away with Nicky. Willingly.”

“But she—there's an explanation for it. Give her a chance and give yourself one. That—why, that's why your father meant to send her away. The night he died. She told him, I heard her; she warned him. She said she was going to find out the truth about the divorce.”

There was a little silence, then he shook his head slowly and deliberately. And I lost my temper. “All right,” I snapped, “think as you please. It's your loss. You can fix your own pillows and dress your own wound, too, because I'm through with you. I wash my hands of you. If you'd even tell the truth about the things you know it would help. You know who shot you, don't you? And you knew there'd be another murder. And you know about the yellow glove—the glove that they found beside Claud Chivery. And I think you know why he was killed.”

“If I knew anything I could tell the police I would do so. But you see, Miss Keate, that's the trouble. If I tell who shot me, it'll make it that much the worse for Drue. It wasn't the same person. The person that shot me, I mean, was not the person that killed my father—or Claud Chivery. If I tell the police that they'll say she murdered my father.”

After a moment I said heavily, “Was it your father, then? Why? Was it a quarrel over—well, was he jealous of Alexia?”

I couldn't read his eyes. He drew up his knees and clasped his unbandaged arm around them. “Forget that, Miss Keate,” he said decisively. “The thing for us to do is to insist upon Drue's alibi for that night when I was shot.”

“You said ‘There'll be murder done.' You said that the afternoon before your father was murdered.”

“I remember, vaguely. I wasn't sure—I'm not sure now exactly why I was shot. But I had a vague notion that I ought to tell Claud that it was an attempt at murder.”

“But that isn't what you said. You didn't say ‘There
was
an attempt at murder.' It was in the future, as you put it. You said ‘There'll
be
murder …' ”

“I know. You see, I had sense enough to know that since the first attempt had failed another attempt might be made.”

“Do you mean you wanted protection?”

“In a sense. Yes. I wanted someone to know. I wasn't clear in my head. I only knew there was danger—everywhere.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because,” he said.

Which was not exactly illuminating. “Why Claud?” I persisted, getting nowhere fast.

“Because Claud was Claud. He wasn't much in the way of force. Yet he—he knew all about us; he smoothed things over, he could always manage my father; he was in the queerest way devoted to him. I think,” said Craig slowly, “it was partly because of Maud; she thought there was no one like my father. In many ways Maud has a much stronger character than Claud had; he gave in to her about everything but money. Maud's a little overfond of money and would have been a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes if Claud had let her!”

“Oh, she wouldn't have murdered Claud on account of the will,” said Craig quickly. “They did have a quarrel lately about money. Claud told me. But it was only about some money they had invested, twenty thousand or so; Maud wanted the cash in order to make another investment. Claud didn't know—or at least didn't tell me what it was.”

“I suppose,” I said on a wave of astuteness, “that Claud knew who shot you. And got rid of the bullet so it couldn't be traced.” (As he would have done, I thought, for Conrad, to keep a family secret.)

But Craig's face was instantly blank and hard. “Do you?” he said flatly. So I got nowhere with that. And, as I lifted my arm to look at my watch, something rustled in my pocket and I remembered what, actually, I'd forgotten, the Frederic Miller checks. I gave them to him at once. “They were in Alexia's room, in the cupboard …”

He snatched them out of my hand; he looked at them and examined them and questioned me and then lay for a long time staring at the sprawling gilt figures on the dark wall paper, a queer look in his eyes, his fingers tapping the checks, an expression in his face that I couldn't read. I tried to question him.

“Do you know who Frederic Miller is, is that it?”

“No—no—that is, perhaps I do. I'm not sure. Let me think. …”

But he didn't want to think any longer, for almost at once he turned quickly to me, excitedly. “Look here, Miss Keate. Will I be able to get out tomorrow?”

“You may be able to get out of bed and walk around the room—that's about all,” I said slowly. “You've done extremely well, as a matter of fact.”

“Can I get to the Chivery cottage?”

“No.”

“But I've got to.”

“All right. You're free, white and twenty-one. Go ahead and kill yourself.”

“I'll keep these checks.”

“Are you going to give them to the police?”

He hesitated. “I don't know. I've got to think. If they arrest Drue, I'll do anything—everything. …”