Later Hilda tried to recall in order the events of the next few days, beginning with the lunch that followed this scene. Marian, she remembered, had been silent. In daylight she looked even more ravaged than the night before. Janice had seemed uneasy and distracted. Carlton was irritated and showed it. And Mrs. Fairbanks, at the head of the table, watched it all, touching no food until the others had taken it, and pointedly refusing the sugar for her strawberries.
Only Carlton’s wife, Susie, seemed to be herself. Hilda was to find that Susie was always herself. She was a big blond girl, and she sauntered into the room as casually as though an aged Nemesis was not fixing her with a most unpleasant eye.
“Put out that cigarette,” said Mrs. Fairbanks. “I’ve told you again and again I won’t have smoking at the table.”
Susie grinned. She extinguished the cigarette on the edge of her butter dish, a gesture evidently intended to annoy the old lady, and sat down. She was heavily made up, but she was a handsome creature, and she wore a bright purple house gown which revealed a shapely body. Hilda suspected that there was little or nothing beneath it.
“Well, here’s the happy family,” she said ironically. “Anybody bitten anybody else while we were away?”
Janice spoke up quickly.
“Did you have a nice trip?” she asked. “Oh, I forgot. This is Miss Adams, Susie. She’s taking care of Granny.”
“And about time,” said Susie, smiling across the table at the nurse. But Hilda was aware that Susie’s sharp blue eyes were taking stock of her, appraising her. “Time you got a rest, kid. You’ve looked like hell lately.”
She spoke as though Mrs. Fairbanks was not there, and soon Hilda was to discover that Susie practically never spoke to her mother-in-law. She spoke at her, the more annoyingly the better. She did that now.
“As to having a nice trip. No. My feet hurt, and I’ll yell my head off if I have to inspect another chicken house. I’m practically covered with lice—if that’s what chickens have. Anyhow, Carl can’t buy a farm. What’s the use?”
“Are you sure you would like a farm?” Janice persisted.
“I’d like it better than starving to death, honey. Or going on living here.”
“Susie!” said Carlton. “I wish you’d control your tongue. We ought to be very grateful to be here. I’m sure Mother—”
“I’m sure Mother hates my guts,” said Susie smoothly. “All right, Carl. I’ll be good. What’s all this about last night?”
Hilda studied them, Marian vaguely picking at what was on her plate, Janice looking anxious, Carlton scowling, Susie eating and evidently enjoying both the food and the bickering, and at the head of the table Mrs. Fairbanks stiff in her black silk and watching them all.
“I wonder, Carlton,” she said coldly, “if your wife has any theories about some of the things which have been happening here?”
Carlton looked indignant. Susie, however, only looked amused.
“I might explain that I’ve spent the last three days alternating between chicken houses and pigpens,” she said to her husband. “I rather enjoyed it. At least it was a change. I like pigs.”
All in all it was an unpleasant meal. Yet, remembering it later, she could not believe that there had been murder in the air. Differences of all sorts, acute dislikes and resentments; even Susie—she could see Susie figuratively thumbing her nose at her mother-in-law. But she could not see her stealthily putting poison in her food. There was apparently nothing stealthy about Susie.
Marian she dismissed. She was too ineffectual, too detached, too absorbed in her own personal unhappiness. She wondered if Mrs. Fairbanks was right and Marian was still in love with Frank Garrison, and what was the story behind the divorce. But over Carlton Fairbanks she hesitated. Men did kill their mothers, she thought. Not often, but now and then. And his position in the house was unhappy enough; dependent on a suspicious old woman who was both jealous and possessive, and who loathed his wife.
He was talking now, his face slightly flushed.
“I’m not trying to force your hand, Mother,” he said. “It’s a good offer. I think you ought to take it. This neighborhood is gone as residential property. A good apartment building here—well, what I say is that, with war and God knows what, a farm somewhere would be an ace in the hole. We could raise enough to live on, at least.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. What do you know about farming?”
“I could learn. And I like the country.”
There was enthusiasm in his voice. He even looked hopeful for a moment. But his mother shook her head. “This place will never be an apartment,” she said, putting down her napkin. “Not so long as I am alive, anyhow,” she added, and gave Susie a long, hard look.
Hilda watched her as she got up. Old she was, bitter and suspicious she might be, but there was nothing childish about her standing there, with her family about her. Even Susie, who had lit another cigarette and grinned at her mother-in-law’s hard stare, rose when the others did.
Hilda slept a few hours that afternoon. The house was quiet. Susie had gone to bed with a novel. Carlton had driven out in the car Amos had washed. Marian had—not too cheerfully—offered to drive with her mother. And Hilda, looking out her window, saw Janice cross the street to the doctor’s office and come out with him a few minutes later, to enter a shabby Ford and drive away.
When she had wakened and dressed she telephoned the inspector from the empty library.
“Any news?” she asked.
“I’ve got the report. Nothing doing. Your Noah’s ark is as pure as lilies. Anything new there?”
“No. Nothing.”
She hung up. There was a telephone extension in the pantry, and she did not want to commit herself. But she was uneasy. She did not think Maggie’s story had been pure hysteria. She put on her hat and went across the street to a small electrical shop. There she ordered a bell and batteries, with a long cord attached and a push button. It took some time to put together, and the electrician talked as he worked.
“You come from the Fairbankses’, don’t you?” he said. “I saw you coming out the driveway.”
“Yes. I’m looking after Mrs. Fairbanks.”
He grinned up at her.
“Seen the ghost yet?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“You’re lucky,” he said. “The help over there—they’re scared to death. Say all sorts, of things are going on.”
“They would,” said Hilda shortly.
She took her package and went back to the house. It was still quiet. The door to Mrs. Fairbanks’s room was open, but the closet containing the safe was locked. She shrugged and tried out her experiment. The push button she placed on the old lady’s bedside table. Then she carried the battery and bell out into the hall. To her relief the door closed over the cord.
After that she made a more careful inspection of the room than she had been able to make before. She examined the walls behind the pictures, lifted as much of the rug as she could move, tested the screens and bars at the windows again, even examined the tiles in the walls of the bathroom and the baseboards everywhere. In the end she gave up. The room was as impregnable as a fortress.
She was still there when the door opened and Carlton came in. He had a highball in his hand, and his eyes were bloodshot. He seemed startled when he saw her.
“Sorry,” he said, backing out. “I didn’t know—I thought my mother was here.”
He was looking at her suspiciously. Hilda smiled, her small demure smile.
“She hasn’t come back, Mr. Fairbanks. I was installing a bell for her.”
“A bell? What for?”
“So if anything bothers her in the night she can ring it. I might not hear her call. Or she might not be able to.”
He had recovered, however.
“All damn nonsense, if you ask me,” he said, swaying slightly. “Who would want to bother her?”
“Or want to poison her, Mr. Fairbanks?”
&nbs
p; He colored. The veins on his forehead swelled.
“We’ve only got young Brooke’s word for that. I don’t believe it.”
“He seems pretty positive.”
“Sure he does,” he said violently. “Look what he gets out of it! An important patient, grateful because he saved her life! If I had my way—”
He did not finish. He turned and left her, slamming the door behind him.
Hilda went downstairs. Ida was out, and Maggie was alone in the kitchen. She was drinking a cup of tea, and she eyed Hilda without expression.
“I want to try an experiment,” Hilda said. “Maybe you’ll help me. It’s about those raps you heard.”
“What about them? I heard them, no matter who says what.”
“Exactly. I’m sure you did. Only I think I know how they happened. If you’ll go up to Mrs. Fairbanks’s room—”
“I’m not going there alone,” said Maggie stolidly. Hilda was exasperated.
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s broad daylight, and anything you hear I’ll be doing. All I want to know is if the noise is the same.”
In the end an unwilling Maggie was installed in the room, but with the door open and giving every indication of immediate flight. The house was very quiet. Only a faint rumble of the traffic on Grove Avenue penetrated its thick walls, and Hilda, making her way to the basement on rubber-heeled shoes, might have been a small and dauntless ghost herself.
She found the furnace without difficulty. She could hardly have missed it. It stood Medusa-like in the center of a large room, with its huge hot-air pipes extending in every direction. She opened the door, and reaching inside rapped the iron wall of the firebox, at first softly, then louder. After that she tried the pipes but, as they were covered with asbestos, with less hope.
There were no sounds from above, however. No Maggie shrieked. The quiet of the house was unbroken. Finally she took the poker and tapped on the furnace itself, with unexpected results. Susie’s voice came from the top of the basement stairs.
“For God’s sake, stop that racket Amos,” she called. “Don’t tell me you’re building a fire in weather like this.”
Hilda stood still, and after a moment Susie banged the door and went away. When at last Hilda went upstairs to Mrs. Fairbanks’s room it was to find Maggie smiling dourly in the hall.
“That hammering on the furnace wouldn’t fool anybody,” she said. “You take it from me, miss. Those noises were in this room. And there were no bats flying around, either.”
Chapter 7
That night, Tuesday, June the tenth, Hilda had a baffling experience of her own.
Rather to her surprise Mrs. Fairbanks had accepted the bell without protest. “Provided you keep out unless I ring it,” she said. “I don’t want you running in and out. Once I’ve settled for the night you stay out. But don’t you leave that door. Not for a minute.”
She was tired, however, after her drive. Hilda, taking her pulse, was not satisfied with it. She coaxed her to have her dinner in bed, and that evening she called the doctor.
“I think she’s overdone, and I know she’s frightened,” she said. “Can you come?”
“Try to keep me away,” he said. “I use the short cut. One minute and thirty seconds!”
He was highly professional, however, when he stood beside Mrs. Fairbanks’s bed and smiled down at her.
“Just thought I’d look you over tonight,” he said. “Can’t have a nurse reporting that I neglect a patient. How’s everything?”
“She’s not a nurse. She’s a policeman,” said the old lady surprisingly. “I’m not easy to fool, doctor. That officer I talked to suggested a companion, and she comes. Maybe it’s just as well. I don’t intend to be murdered in my bed.”
He pretended immense surprise.
“Well, well,” he said. “A policewoman! We’ll have to be careful, won’t we? And I’ve had an eye on the spoons for weeks!”
He ordered her some digitalis and sat with her for a while. But some of his boyishness was gone. Hilda, following him out of the room as he went down the stairs, heard him speaking to Jan in the hall below. Their voices, though guarded, carried up clearly.
“We’re not so smart, are we, darling?” he said. “Miss Gimlet-Eyes up there isn’t missing a trick.”
“I don’t want her to miss anything, Court.”
“Are you sure of that?”
His tone was quizzical, but there was anxiety in it too.
“Certainly I am.” Jan’s voice was defiant. “So are you. But if the police—”
“Look, sweet,” he said. “If and when your grandmother dies, it will be a natural death. The police won’t come into it at all. Only, for God’s sake, don’t tell the family that the Adams woman is on the watch. If there’s any funny business going on—”
“You can’t suspect them, Court.”
“Can’t I?” he said grimly. “You’d be surprised what I can suspect.”
He went out the side door under the porte-cochere, his head down, his face moody and unhappy. Near the stable, however, he roused. A figure had slid stealthily into the door leading up to Amos’s rooms, and he dropped his bag and plunged in after it. To his dismay it was a woman. She was cowering against the wall at the foot of the stairs and softly moaning.
He let go of her and lit a match, to find Ida gazing at him with horrified eyes. She looked ready to faint, and he caught hold of her.
“Here, here,” he said, “none of that! I’m damned sorry, Ida. I didn’t know it was you.”
He eased her down on the steps. Her color came back slowly, although she was still breathless.
“I was scared,” she said. “I saw someone coming at me in the dark, and I thought—” She stopped and picked up a parcel she had dropped. “It’s my day out, sir. I was just coming home.”
“Better use the driveway after this,” he told her. “I’ll watch you to the house.”
She went on slowly, while he retrieved his bag. But his own nerves were badly shaken. He let himself into the house across the street, to find the slatternly girl in his back office avidly studying the plates in one of his medical books. He strode in and jerked the book out of her hands.
“Keep that filthy nose of yours out of my books and out of my office,” he snapped. “Not that I think you have anything to learn, at that. Now get out and keep out.”
The girl went out sniveling. He felt ashamed of his anger. And he was tired. He yawned. But he did not go to bed. He picked up a cap from the hall and, after a brief survey of the Fairbanks property across the street, went cautiously back there and moved toward the house.
Back at the Fairbanks house the evening was following what Hilda gathered was its usual pattern. In the small morning room behind the library Susie and Carlton bickered over a game of gin-rummy. Jan, after seeing that Hilda was fixed for the night, went to bed. And Marian, having read for an hour or two in the library, came up to bed. Apparently none of them outside of Jan suspected Hilda’s dual role. But Marian paused for a time in the upper hall.
“It isn’t serious, is it? Mother’s heart, I mean.”
“No. Her pulse was weak. It’s better now.”
Marian stood still, looking at her mother’s door. She looked better now, dressed and made up for the evening. Jan’s resemblance to her was stronger. On apparently an impulse she drew up a chair and sat down.
“I suppose she has talked about me? My divorce, I mean.”
“She mentioned it. That’s all.”
Marian’s face hardened.
“I begged her not to bring that woman here as Jan’s governess,” she said. “I knew her type. When she had been here a month I almost went on my knees to Mother to have her sent away. But she wouldn’t. She said Jan was fond of her.”
Hilda picked up her knitting. She kept her head bent over it, the picture of impersonal interest.
“All divorces are sad,” she said. “Especially when there are children.”
“I stood it fo
r years. I could see her, day after day, undermining me. I wanted to go away and live somewhere else, but my—but my husband didn’t want to leave Mother alone. At least that’s what he said. I know better now. Carlton had got out, but I had to stay.”
If anyone was to be murdered, Hilda considered, it would probably be Eileen, the second Mrs. Garrison. It was obvious that Marian was bitterly jealous of her successor. She changed the subject tactfully.
“Tell me, Mrs. Garrison,” she said, “when did all this begin? I mean, the arsenic and the bats and so on.”
Marian’s flush subsided. She pulled herself together with an effort.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “Mother wanted a safe in her room, God knows why. It was installed while I took her to Florida in February. We got home on the ninth of March, and a day or two later she got the poison. If it was poison.”
“And the bats?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell us about them at first. She said she opened the screens, and let them out. That was before she had her screens fastened. None of us believed her, I’m afraid. After all, bats and birds and rats do get into houses, don’t they?”
She smiled faintly, and Hilda smiled back at her.
“I suppose the raps come under the same category,” she said mildly.
Marian looked startled.
“Raps? What raps?”
“The servants say there are noises at night in your mother’s room. I talked to Maggie. She doesn’t strike me as a neurotic type.”
But Marian only shrugged.
“Oh, Maggie!” she said. “She’s at a bad time of life. She can imagine anything. And you know servants. They like to raise a fuss. Their lives are pretty drab, I imagine. Anything for excitement.”
She got up and put out her cigarette. She was slightly flushed.
“We have trouble enough without inviting any, Miss Adams,” she said. “I don’t give the orders in this house, but I’d be glad if you didn’t take the servants into your confidence.”
She went on into her room, her head high and the short train of her black dress trailing behind her. Hilda, watching her, felt that something like the furies of hell were bottled up in her thin body; hatred for the woman who had supplanted her, resentment toward her mother, scorn and contempt for Susie, indignation at her brother. She put down her knitting—she loathed having to knit—and considered one by one the occupants of the house. Marian, frustrated and bitterly unhappy; Carlton, timid toward his mother, slightly pompous otherwise, certainly discontented; Susie, shrewd, indifferent, and indolent. Jan she left out, but she considered Courtney Brooke for some time.
The Haunted Lady Page 5