False to Any Man

by Leslie Ford

  Down the crape myrtle path I could see dark clusters of people gathered around the little carriage house. The lights had been cut off, but the powerful searchlights trained on it from the fire engine made it a white island in a sea of darkness, lighting every nook in it like an X-ray. I hurried down. Old William, the Candlers’ butler and man-of-all-work, was standing at the end, huddled up in an old pink chintz quilt. His eyes were like rolling eggs.

  “Twah’nt me, miss,” he whispered as I stopped beside him. “ ’Deed an it wasn’t. Ah only used th’ ee-lectric stove, Ah nevah touched no gas. Mus’ was somebody else, miss. You tell Miss Jerry tell that man.”

  For a minute I couldn’t see Jerry. When I did, she was standing by a tall light-haired man about forty, with a lean intelligent face and a sharp but controlled manner, who seemed to be in charge. I made my way toward them through the broken glass. The firemen had put a rope around the house, and two of them, wearing masks, were standing by for orders. The man with Jerry went over to them. One of them shouted back to the engine, someone dashed up with another mask that Jerry’s friend put over his face. The three of them stepped across the rope, and in another moment I saw them lunge against the door with their shoulders. It gave in, the firemen stayed there while the tall man went inside. Through the window, its Venetian blinds ripped down now, I saw him go up to Karen Lunt, stoop and lift her, and carry her quickly out. He laid her on a tarpaulin on the snow. I turned away as the pulmotor from the fire engine went into action.

  Jeremy’s fingers clutching my scratched arm made me suddenly quite sick again.

  “Oh, don’t, Grace, don’t!” she whispered frantically. “Oh, poor Karen!”

  I heard someone say, “What’s Fox doing?”

  The man who’d carried Karen out was back in the little mirrored room. I saw him bend down by the cherry love seat, pick up a piece of note paper from the floor, look at it and look around—his head with that mask horribly grotesque in the white light. He folded the paper, put it in his pocket and made his way toward the kitchen. He struggled for a moment with the crystal rosette and the glass panel, opened it at last and went inside. I saw him put out his hand toward the hot water coil. He came back into the glass room, stood looking around a moment and came out.

  Someone at the edge of the silent group around the pulmotor said, “She’s a goner.”

  Jerry’s grip tightened again on my aching arm.

  “It’s all my fault, Grace,” she whispered. “I’m a beast, a hideous selfish beast!”

  “Hush,” I said softly. The man called Fox was coming toward us again through the dreary little crowd.

  “Where is the lady who gave the alarm, Miss Candler?” he asked.

  Jerry nodded toward me. “This is Captain Fox, Grace. He’s the Captain of Police. This is Mrs. Latham. She . . . she found her.”

  Captain Fox’s grey eyes fastened on my face.

  “You look as if you needed the pulmotor on you,” he said, not unkindly. “You’d better go back to the house—both of you.”

  Just then the long yellow headlights of a car stretched along the dark street. A patrolman in uniform stepped out and held up his hand. The car stopped. I saw two familiar figures scramble out. The shorter one spoke to the officer, and they came quickly toward us. Captain Fox turned, stiffening for an instant. Then he stepped forward and held out his hand.

  “Glad to see you, Colonel—howdy, Sergeant. I guess it’s all over here but the shouting.”

  My knees seemed suddenly just plain fluid. Sergeant Buck, who can spot me as a buzzard can spot, a carrion sheep—not that I’d dream of thinking of Sergeant Buck as a buzzard, but I’m not sure he doesn’t think worse than that of me—nudged the Colonel’s elbow.

  “How am I going to explain to Jerry?” I thought unhappily; but I’d forgotten for a moment that Colonel Primrose, whose grey hair and snapping black eyes and anything but military bearing wouldn’t indicate it at all, has an extraordinary sense of atmosphere. I don’t think it took him two seconds to see the spot I was in. Except for a quick flash of concern in his eyes, he mightn’t have known I was on earth.

  “We’re on our way south,” he said quietly. “Got the radio call in the car. Knowing it was your bailiwick I thought we’d drop in.”

  “Stick around, sir, if you aren’t in a hurry,” Captain Fox said. He turned to Jeremy. “This is Colonel Primrose, Miss Candler. And Mrs. Latham. She was the first on the scene. I was just telling her she looks too rocky to be standing around here.”

  “She does,” Colonel Primrose said. “You go inside at once, Mrs. Latham.”

  He nodded to the huge figure at his side, and Sergeant Buck stepped forward smartly the way he does, as if he were clicking his heels together and saluting before executing some very complicated manœuvre.

  “Come along now, ma’am,” he said. It was exactly as if he was speaking to a rookie who’d got a sunstroke and was running amok in an arsenal and had to be handled carefully.

  “You’d better go, Grace,” Jerry whispered. “I’ve got to find . . . Dad, and Sandy.”

  I could feel myself swaying. I was quite faint all of a sudden. Colonel Primrose’s sparkling parrot eyes rested on me.

  “I thought the radio report said gas,” he said shortly.

  Captain Fox nodded. “Couldn’t you smell it a mile off?”

  “Then what’s that?”

  Colonel Primrose pointed to my coat. I looked down. I was a lurid mess.

  “It’s blood,” Sergeant Buck said, out of the corner of his mouth. The menacing way he spoke, exactly as if it was somebody else’s, not my own, was all that kept me from keeling over in a dead faint. But oddly enough it was Sergeant Buck, back in Judge Candler’s study, who slit the sleeve of Sandy’s bathrobe and mopped off my arm, which was practically in ribbons, while the coroner gave me a tetanus shot. William, who’d discarded his eiderdown sari, made a blazing fire, and I was warm and alone at last.

  I don’t know how long it was that I sat there before the rest of them came back in. The winter dawn was seeping up from the west. William had made coffee and put it on a great old silver waiter on the desk. Sergeant Buck handed me a cup. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have the feeling he’d gladly have choked me with it. Then the rest of them came in, Captain Fox and Colonel Primrose, and Jerry and Sandy, both looking as if they’d been through the fires of hell. I heard the heavy tread of the firemen bearing Karen up to the room she’d spent all her school vacations in. Philander Doyle came, and Roger. For once Mr. Doyle was silent. He sat heavily down in a chair beside the door, his great head bent forward on his chest, the folds of his collarless neck lapping under his chin. Roger Doyle stood beside him, his hand on his shoulder. Philander Doyle put his big hand up, patted his son’s briefly and dropped it again. His face had a heavy flush. If and when he died, it would be apoplexy, I thought suddenly.

  Colonel Primrose, moving over to the fireplace, picked up my bandaged arm as he passed and looked at it.

  “It’s amazing,” he said, and I suppose only Sergeant Buck and I who knew him attached any meaning to his casual remark, “how severely one can be hurt and not notice it, under stress.”

  He put my arm gently back on the arm of my chair and stood by the fireplace, his eyes moving from one to another of us. Captain Fox, who’d gone upstairs, came slowly back into the silent room. He looked like a man who never had entirely got used to this aspect of his job. It made it easier, in some way, to sit there, waiting for I dreaded to think what.

  He spoke to Colonel Primrose and came over to Jerry.

  “Your father’s upstairs, Miss Candler. He’ll be down directly. I’d like to wait for him.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, and put it down as the front door opened. I heard Miss Isabel Doyle’s voice, and old William answering her.

  “It isn’t true . . . about Miss Karen?”

  “Yas, ma’am, Miss Isabel, it’s true a’right,” the old darkey said. “Ain�
� no way gettin’ round it.”

  I couldn’t hear what she said then.

  “Yes, ma’am. But ain’ lef’ no gas on. ’Twarn’t me. Ah don’ have nothin’ do with this here gas people usin’ nowadays.”

  Miss Doyle came in. She was swaddled in the most outlandish assortment of old shawls topped by a sealskin tippet brown with age. She stood in the doorway an instant, looking at her brother; then she went quickly up to Roger Doyle and gave him a shy, strangely touching embrace.

  “Oh, my dear boy!” she said. “I know how much this means to you—but you mustn’t give way, you mustn’t Roger!”

  Roger Doyle, who looked less like giving way at that moment than anyone else in the room, released her arms, not unkindly but with some embarrassment. “Sit down quietly, Aunt Isabel,” he said.

  Jerry pushed a chair over by her brother and she sat down, huddled in her shawls, looking older, without her sometimes almost startling makeup, than I’d ever seen her. I noticed Colonel Primrose’s black eyes sharpen with interest. Whether Miss Isabel herself was the cause, or the obvious relation she’d indicated between her nephew and the dead girl, I wouldn’t know. I do know that Captain Fox—who did know Miss Isabel—pricked up his ears too, and studied Roger with more interest than he’d shown in him before.

  It must be hard, I thought, for anyone like Colonel Primrose, coming completely cold into a group that contained Miss Isabel Doyle, not to think she was something made up out of a piece of whole cloth. She was certainly fantastic; her getup, for one thing, and the startling way she had, for another, of uttering a plain truth at precisely the moment when it was the one thing that had best remain unsaid. I was thinking that just then, hoping she’d forbear this once at least. I suppose the vague, sort of aloof way she looked about was what made me think of it. Even then I wasn’t prepared for what did come.

  “You know, my dear,” she said, not to anybody in particular, just to the room generally, “I never liked Karen Lunt.”

  Her voice was so gentle that I don’t think any of us was aware for a full second or two of what she’d said. Then I thought her brother would stop her, of course; but Philander Doyle sat there quite motionless, as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Nevertheless, I’m very sorry she’s dead. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was unfeeling.—Oh, Peyton!”

  She got to her feet quickly and took a step towards the door. It was the first any of us had noticed that Judge Candler was standing there, his tall lean figure, distinguished even in his old mulberry wool dressing gown, towering over us in the doorway. His face was grey as death, the dark sombre eyes under his thick thatch of snow-white hair burning fiercely.

  Miss Isabel stood there, hesitating.

  “I’m afraid I was very unkind. Please forgive me, Peyton,” she said quietly, and sat down again, huddled in those shawls.

  Judge Candler crossed the room slowly, without speaking, and stood behind his desk, his face ghastly in the emerald light of the reading lamp, his lean jaw gripped tightly to keep it from working in sharp spasms. Neither his son nor his daughter moved from where they were standing, rigidly controlled, at opposite ends of the book-lined room. Whatever kinship there was between them and their father was powerless to affect them now. I saw Colonel Primrose’s quiet gaze move from one to the other of them. I knew, because he’d told me so, that he admired Judge Candler intensely, though he knew him only in the most formal way. No one could have stayed unmoved by the emotion in every rigid unemotional line of his body as he stood there now, plainly not trusting himself to speak too quickly after Miss Isabel’s casual heartless observation.

  At last he turned to the head of the Alexandria police.

  “Have you anything to say to us, Captain Fox?”

  His voice was quiet and controlled.

  “Nothing positive, sir,” Captain Fox said simply. “But from a superficial examination, I think I’m safe in saying it looks as if Miss Lunt took her own life.”

  There was no sound in the room except the hard impersonal crackling of the pine log in the fire and the deep personal tones of the old clock in the hall, booming the seven hours it had stored up since midnight. Miss Isabel Doyle’s cool vague voice flowed across it.

  “I think that’s most unlikely, Captain Fox,” she said.

  Judge Candler spoke quickly but almost gently.

  “Hush, Isabel. Captain Fox would hardly make such a statement if he hadn’t reasons for believing it to be true.”

  Captain Fox’s hand in his grey tweed pocket brought out the piece of note paper I’d seen him pick up in front of the love seat where Karen had been sitting.

  “She was writing this letter,” he said. He glanced at Roger, Doyle. “Perhaps . . . one of you can help me explain it.”

  He unfolded the small double sheet of delicate blue.

  “No one from the press is here?”

  Judge Candler shook his head.

  “I’ve assumed she was writing this as she was overcome by the gas fumes. The last word trails unevenly, the ‘t’s’ are not crossed.”

  Captain Fox spoke slowly and soberly, as if trying, I thought, to soften what he must think would be a terrible blow to Roger Doyle.

  “It says, ‘My dearest—I can’t bear what you said tonight, but I can’t bear to live without . . .’ That’s as far as she got.”

  He folded the paper again and put it back in his pocket, his eyes resting quietly on Roger.

  I realized suddenly that I’d quite unconsciously sat bolt upright in my chair, my lips opened to speak. It wasn’t fair to Roger for me not to. And then I could hear that clipped pleading voice: “. . . My family, our future, everything. . . .” If Karen had taken her own life, why should his—his family’s, his six unmarried sisters’—be ruined too? I settled back against the worn dark-green leather and held my peace.

  Then, being guilty as I was, I glanced quickly at Colonel Primrose. He was looking at me, of course, and there was an ever so faint smile on his lips as he turned back toward Roger Doyle.

  “Well, Roger,” Judge Candler said patiently. I realized that of course it would never have occurred to him that Karen would address any but the man she had an “understanding” with in such terms.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Roger Doyle said quietly. “It means nothing to me. I didn’t have more than a dozen words with Karen . . . all last evening.”

  “You must be quite sure, Roger,” Miss Isabel Doyle said quickly. “Mustn’t he, Captain Fox?”

  “I am quite sure, Aunt Isabel,” Roger said. His voice was cool, but his blue eyes kindled and his jaw tightened. I saw that he was looking across the room at Jerry, and she was looking at him. As their eyes met I couldn’t fathom his, but hers were burning with resentment, and anger, and doubt. She turned away, leaving him angry and resentful too.

  9

  Captain Fox got up. “I will probably want to talk to you later, Roger,” he said. He turned to Colonel Primrose. “Are you coming?”

  Colonel Primrose moved out from his post at the end of the mantel.

  “You’ll want to talk to Mrs. Latham, later, I suppose?” he asked.

  I’m sure Captain Fox had entirely forgotten me for the moment. He glanced at me in my informal and anything but glamorous attire—it flashed into my mind that that explained Sergeant Buck’s sudden tolerance—and said, “Do you live around here, Mrs. Latham?”

  “She’s staying with me,” Jerry put in quickly.

  “Then I’ll see you later, Mrs. Latham.”

  He went out with Colonel Primrose, the sergeant executing a sharp movement to close files behind. The front door opened, and closed, and silence fell on the house again. It was only for a moment. Philander Doyle got heavily from his chair.

  “Come, Isabel,” he said. “I’ll be at home today, Peyton, if there’s anything I can do. Coming, son?”

  Roger Doyle, looking at the burnished swirl of the back of Jerry’s copper head, hesitated. Sandy took a step so that he stood between
them—whether intentionally or not I wouldn’t know.

  “Goodbye,” he said shortly.

  The two stood facing each other for a moment like strange bull dogs.

  “Goodbye,” Roger said. He followed his father and his aunt out into the hall.

  Miss Isabel’s voice came back through the open door.

  “What is the matter? Has something happened?”

  I heard Philander Doyle’s great voice:

  “Only that Karen Lunt has been murdered, Isabel.—Try not to act like a damned fool for just once, will you?”

  Miss Isabel’s low cry of protest was drowned by the opening door. I looked quickly at Judge Candler, erect and motionless still behind the old mahogany table desk. If he had heard what I heard, and what I knew Jerry had heard, from the wild startled light in her tearless eyes, he gave no sign of it. Her reaction had been purely reflexive. The old business of breeding had clamped itself down instantly, she stood there shaken but controlled.

  Judge Candler sat motionless for a few moments.

  “I think we’d all better get dressed,” he said then.

  The door bell rang while he was speaking. We all waited while William padded out. He came back with a suitcase and my other fur coat.

  “There’s a colored man brought your car an’ some clothes, Miz’ Latham,” he said. “Say to let th’ cook know when you comin’ home.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It seemed to me I recognized the fine Italian hand of my friend Sergeant Buck in this, but I was glad to have them. I couldn’t go around all day looking like Miss Isabel wrapped up in blankets.

  “Breakfas’ is ready, Miss Jerry, when you all is,” William said.

  We might have been so many ghosts seated around that gleaming old Sheraton banquet table in the Candler dining room, William’s bunion-filled shoes creaking as he padded from place to place serving bacon and eggs and delicate golden-brown hominy grits fried in bacon fat. Nevertheless, I felt my own spirits rising in a still slightly nauseating aroma of gas. My lungs and every one of my hundred sinus cavities must have been filled with it. Mrs. Harris, purring happily, rubbed in and out among our feet. I could tell when she touched Jerry, even when she touched Sandy, by the slight movement of their eyes. Whether she skipped the judge or his nerves were under better control or he was impervious to cats, I wouldn’t know. Only once did Jerry slip her a crisp bit of bacon. I didn’t dare to. The presence of old mahogany, the silver urn and candelabra and the portraits of five generations of Candlers on the white panelled walls deterred me as much as the silent old gentleman at the foot of the long table.