by Helen Reilly
Cristie recognized the voice. It was Euen Firth and Euen seemed to be pretty well plastered. Sara Hazard welcomed Euen’s arrival, tight or no tight. She took his proffered arm, said acidly, “Good night, Mr. Somers.”
Euen’s long cream-colored roadster was parked at the curb a little farther along. Euen helped Sara into it, got in himself. Pat Somers watched them drive away. The tip of his cigar glowed and ashed and glowed again. He took the cigar from his mouth, threw it in the gutter and, as the roadster disappeared around the corner, he started for the Avenue.
Cristie found a cab at the corner of Madison and Sixty-third. She gave the driver general directions. She dismissed the cab on the side street to the west, walked toward Franklin Place, paused near the opposite corner. Euen Firth’s roadster was standing in front of Steven’s apartment hotel, a big building overlooking the East River. Sara and Euen were seated in the cream-colored roadster. There was no sign of Steven up or down the block.
Perhaps he was in the rooms on the fourteenth floor already. Perhaps he had returned since she had called from the penthouse. But perhaps not. She must telephone again and make sure. She looked back along the dark side street. Yes, the garage was there, she had noticed it when she drove past. Its lights streamed out. Garages always had telephones. She turned her back on Franklin Place, walked toward it quickly.
The telephone was in a booth just inside the big doors. No one stopped her or interfered with her. Luckily she had change. She called the Hazard apartment. Again it was the maid who answered. Thank God. Steven wasn’t home. She was in time. But she would have to hurry.
Back near the corner opposite the towering apartment house, dotted here and there with a few illuminated windows, she settled down to wait.
Sara Hazard was out of the cream-colored roadster. She was having trouble getting away from Euen. It was very quiet. Cristie heard Euen urging her to go down to Jimmy Kelly’s with him for “ ‘nother little drink” but Sara refused. She said good night curtly and disappeared through the big grilled iron doors.
The night was still warm but Cristie was shivering. Suppose Steven had gone in while she was telephoning from the garage. No, that was scarcely likely. If he had, Sara would probably have gone upstairs with him. Where was he and what was he doing? Pain seized her again, numbing her faculties, destroying her equilibrium. She climbed clear of it with effort, braced her shoulders against the brickwork of the wall against which she leaned in a dense bank of shadow and kept her eyes fastened on the apartment across the way and to the north.
Euen’s car was still standing at the cum. He sat sprawled back against the cushions. Only the fact that he was smoking showed that he hadn’t fallen asleep in an alcoholic stupor. A man and a woman entered the apartment hotel. A colored man came out and sloshed water on the steps, went in again. Someone was polishing the inside of the doors.
Fifty feet farther away a dim globe burned above the service entrance. When Cristie had been standing there for about ten minutes, a woman came out of it, a slender blonde in modish black. Euen Firth moved. He sat erect, put his hand on the door of the roadster. She heard him call “Mrs. Hazard.” The woman passed the main entrance, glanced at him curiously and continued on her way. Euen sank back. The woman wasn’t Sara Hazard. The colored man was on the steps with another bucket of water. He spoke to the woman. Cristie didn’t know that it was Eva Prentice, the Hazard maid. Presently Euen Firth drove away.
The apartment door opened. Cristie caught a glimpse of women on their knees with mops and pails. A clock somewhere struck three. The door started to close. It was Sara Hazard who came out. She had changed her evening gown for a dark suit and a small dark hat. Cristie caught the gleam of her hair beneath the hat brim. She was carrying her purse under her arm.
Where was she going at that hour of the night? There was a suggestion of watchfulness about her. Out on the Place, she paused, looking right and left.
A couple of stray cabs went past. An ambulance clanged distantly. The faraway murmur of traffic rose and fell. It was fainter now. New York was approaching its zero hour.
After that sharp right and left stare, Sara Hazard walked to the corner, the corner opposite the one on which Cristie stood well back in deep shadow. Sara Hazard turned into the side street running down to the river. A car was parked in the obscurity near the top of the short steep hill. Its back was toward Cristie.
It was facing the East River Drive below. It was Steven’s gray convertible.
Mrs. Hazard got in and switched on the lights. They did little more than make the darkness visible. There was no sign of Steven. Get as near as possible to the apartment, Cristie thought, so as to catch him when he arrived.
The mouth of the steep side street was almost directly in front of her on the far side of Franklin Place. The car with Sara Hazard in it was some fifty feet from the corner. Cristie started across. The roadbed was smooth, even. She was in the middle of it when she jolted to a stop. There was movement in front of her, in and around the gray coupe.
Cristie’s knee twisted under her and she almost fell. She recovered herself, stumbled over the curb, collided with a stanchion. She was oblivious, ducked around it and raced on, fighting for breath.
Less than thirty seconds later she stood motionless at the top of the hill. Her senses reeled crazily. The red tail light of the gray convertible, Steven’s car with Sara Hazard at the wheel, was plunging down the precipitous grade and weaving from side to side.
A flash across the darkness beyond and below. The gray convertible hurtled out of the side street at a terrific rate of speed. It shot straight across the Drive, struck the iron railing on the far side, crumpled it like so much papier-mâché, sawed into the air, and dropped like a stone into the swirling waters of the black East River.
V
George Morris, a paper salesman of Pelham, New York, was an eye witness of what took place. He gave the police an accurate account of it later. Morris was proceeding north along the East River Drive after a somewhat hilarious night at Barney Gallant’s when the accident happened. Conscious that he wasn’t in the best possible shape, Morris was driving slowly, a fact for which he was to thank his lucky stars forever after. Otherwise he would have been a gone goose.
The gray convertible with a woman in it cut directly across his path less than ten feet away. The crash, the leap into the air, the sickening dive, jarred every tooth in Morris’ head.
He managed to bring his own car to a stop. He was shaking. Sweat covered him from head to foot. He wasn’t the only one who raced for that jagged gap in the iron railing above the river. Running feet pounded the pavement, there were shouts, cries. They gathered volume. There! Where? The fence. God—look!
A few minutes earlier the Drive had been deserted. People began springing up out of the darkness. A policeman arrived. A radio car appeared. The crowd thickened. Someone must have telephoned because an ambulance pulled up in short order just after the police emergency squad rolled up and took over.
The throng of spectators, dense by this time, was ordered back. A space was cleared. A wrecking truck eased its way to the broken fence above the river. Spotlights were trained on the sluggish black water. Two or three big policemen, stripping hastily, had already dived in. They were swimming around in circles and calling to each other.
The crane with chains suspended from it went down slowly. They had to try twice before the men in the water could dive down and fasten the chains securely round the car lying in the mud eighteen feet below. When it was almost up, the car slipped. A groan went up from the crowd. The whole process had to be repeated.
Pale light that was the precursor of dawn was coming up in the east when the hood of the submerged car at last broke the surface. Voices were raised. Someone moaned. The gray convertible belonging to Steven Hazard had gone into the river with a woman at the wheel. There was no woman in it now.
The car was empty.
Sara Hazard’s gloves, her purse, her keys were in the tangle
d wreckage of the car that had been fished up out of the East River. Her body wasn’t recovered for twenty-two days.
They were twenty-two days of unmitigated hell for Steven Hazard. Interviews with the police, with the searchers, with the detectives of the Missing Persons Bureau; it was the uncertainty that was the worst. August went by and September came and the days mounted into weeks. There was no news of any kind. Where Sara Hazard had been there was simply a void.
Steven Hazard’s friends rallied around him, did what they could, Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon, Pat Somers, his chief in the office and two or three others. He saw Cristie only once during that terrible interval. They met like strangers.
Steven showed no desire to be alone with Cristie. He was silent, remote, wrapped in a shroud of doubt and fear and torturing suspense. The South American trip was off. National Motors had sent another man to the Argentine.
For once anticipation of the dreadful ordeal that lay somewhere ahead lagged behind actuality when it finally came.
Sara Hazard’s body was discovered floating in the waters off the North Beach airport by a boat patrolling the seaplane lanes. It was taken to the morgue and subjected to extensive examination and various tests. Steven Hazard was summoned. The clothes had already been identified as the missing woman’s, black silk suit, underwear with her monogram on it. Toeless sandals still clasped the once pretty feet, now shapeless and swollen. The hat was gone and the hair that had been bright gold was no longer bright. It was bleached and stained and bedraggled from long immersion in the shifting tides of the river.
The brown eyes were mercifully closed. But the body itself was a bloated and hideous caricature of the beautiful Sara Hazard. Not nice, not easy to take.
Steven Hazard looked at her under the watchful gaze of a group of officials. Assistant District Attorney Dorrens said, “You must allow for—certain differences. The—er—water, you know, and the length of time...”
Steven Hazard said, “Yes.” The captain of the detective district raised an eyelid carefully. He indicated the clothing, the hair, what was left of the teeth, a bracelet embedded in the flesh. Hazard stood beside the drawer looking down. An iron rein held his emotion, his outraged sensibilities in check. He identified the body. After a long moment he said huskily:
“Yes. That’s—my wife. That’s—Sara.” He turned away.
An autopsy was duly performed. Sara Hazard had been neither shot, strangled, poisoned nor stabbed. The lungs were full of water. She had been alive when she went into the river. She had been drowned as a result of the crash.
What had happened was clear. A late party, a projected excursion elsewhere. The Hazard convertible with the top down had been parked in its usual place when it wasn’t in the garage, at the top of the sharply inclined street around the corner from the apartment hotel. Sara Hazard had lost control. The car had turned over when it hit the fence before diving into the river. She had fallen out, to be battered back and forth for all those days in the swiftly moving currents until her body turned up off the airport.
It was on the twenty-fifth of August that the fatal crash occurred. It was on September sixteenth that the body was found. Two days later Sara Hazard’s body was buried in the little cemetery a couple of miles away from the Hazard farmhouse in lower Dutchess County. A cold September rain beat down on the handful of mourners. Cristie Lansing wasn’t there. Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon were, and Pat and Cliff Somers and Steven’s chief.
That was on Wednesday. On the succeeding Monday, Steven Hazard returned to the office. Work was good for him, took him out of himself. His friends encouraged him. He began to look more normal. He went to the World’s Series with Pat, spent an occasional evening at the Dodd house. Mary Dodd was very kind to him, very gentle. So was Kit Blaketon.
Steven was too much wrapped up in himself to notice the change in Kit or that Cliff Somers no longer dropped in at all hours. Mary didn’t say anything. She talked of his work, of the future, made him talk.
Steven had closed the apartment on Franklin Place. He put the things in storage and moved to his club. He called Cristie once or twice, but it wasn’t until after the first of October when a refreshing tingle of frost was turning the leaves, that he began seeing her regularly again. The first meeting was awkward, they were stiff and shy with each other.
The stiffness began to wear off. Steven would call Cristie from the office and they would meet for a quiet dinner and a play. They didn’t do much talking. There were so many things that had to be left unsaid.
The shadow of Sara persisted. Cristie began to wonder with a dull ache at her heart what was going to happen and whether Steven would ever speak to her again as he had spoken that day in the little café around the corner from Margot’s.
Late one afternoon in the middle of the month, Margot St. Vrain called Steven at his office and asked him to the penthouse for dinner and the evening. Steven thanked her, but said he had an engagement to dine with Mary Dodd and Kit Blaketon. Margot suggested that he bring the two women over after dinner. She said Harry Woods, the song writer, was going to be there, that he was going to try out a new number for them.
Steven spoke of Margot St. Vrain’s invitation to Mary Dodd during dinner and Kit was enthusiastic about the idea. She hummed, “When the red red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along” with a touch of her old gaiety and said, “Let’s, Mary, I’d adore meeting Harry Woods. He’s marvelous, absolutely grade A.” Mary was agreeable. While Kit was getting her hat, Mary told Steven she had been a little worried about the girl but didn’t tell him why.
When they arrived at the penthouse, Margot received them cordially. Her fiancé, Euen Firth, her cousin Johnny St. Vrain and Harry Woods were there. Woods was a lean gaunt fellow with an attractive smile.
Steven introduced Mary and Kit. Woods resumed his place at the piano. Cristie came in during the middle of the new song. She slipped quietly into a chair near the door, a slim snow-white and rose-red figure in dark crimson wool that brought out the cherry blossom texture of her skin, the dark cloudiness of her hair. She didn’t single Steven out particularly. She gave him a smiling nod, accepted Kit Blaketon’s sizing-up stare, returned Mary Dodd’s pleasant half-smile and waved a hand to Johnny, leaning over the piano.
The song over, they all congratulated Woods. Euen Firth reappeared, followed by a colored maid wheeling a small bar. Drinks were served. Conversation became general.
As usual Euen helped himself to the liquid refreshment, his weak, good-natured face outfitted with a placating and permanent smile.
Cristie was waiting for a chance to talk to Steven, but to her annoyance Euen devoted himself to her. Her attention wandered. Toward what she hoped was the end of a long story about a Mexican and a goat, she glanced up. To her surprise, Euen wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at Steven who was talking to Margot and Miss Dodd on the other side of the room. There was no vacuity in Euen. His eyes were owlish, intent. As she watched, his aimlessness returned. He put a hand on her shoulder and finished his tale, echoing Cristie’s polite mirth with a cheerful guffaw.
Cristie was puzzled. It was no more than that, then. Another man and woman came in and later, Pat Somers arrived. He was accompanied by his brother Cliff. Cristie hadn’t seen either of them since the night of the party. That was what she called it herself, the only thing she permitted herself to call it. She averted her mind swiftly, pulled down a shutter. The act was automatic. She was getting used to it. Pat greeted Margot and Johnny, turned to Mary Dodd. He seemed glad to see her.
“I called the house and they told me you’d be here,” he said. A look of understanding passed between them.
Kit Blaketon joined Johnny on the other side of Woods. The girl had been laughing and talking a moment before, red hair tossing vivid fire around the pretty pointed face. It changed as Cliff Somers neared the piano. There was a beseeching air about him as he said, “Hello, Kit.”
Kit Blaketon stared back at him stonily. “ ‘Lo, Cliff.”
/> It was the merest scrap of a greeting, indifferent, curt, uninterested. She turned back to the song writer, threw an arm around his shoulders. “Go on, Harry,” she urged, “don’t stop playing.” Woods looked up at her with a grin. “All right, baby, what’ll you have?” Kit Blaketon’s voice, clear, metallic, rode the room as she answered, “Play Get Out of Town, darling. That’s the only tune I can think of at the moment.” Cristie watched the good-looking young politician flush and pale. How cruel girls could be when they wanted to! Then she stopped thinking about the curious incident. Steven was crossing the room. Beside her he said in a low voice, “I want to talk to you, Cristie.” He looked different. There was an air of purpose about him somehow. She said, “My room, down the hall.”
She was standing at one of the tall windows beyond her drawing board when Steven joined her. He paused just inside the door, his tall broad-shouldered figure, his dark head, outlined against the white paneling. He was thinner and older but the light was back in his face, the light Sara had almost succeeded in crushing out.
“Cristie!” His voice had a ring to it.
“Yes, Steven.” Her own was none too steady, her own small dark head was lifted. She was shaking inwardly. “You—wanted me for something?”
Steven was holding a cigarette in his lean brown fingers. He ground it out in an ash tray. He said,
“That’s just it. Yes, Cristie. I do want you. It’s time now. All the other is gone. It’s finished, done with, over.”
Cristie’s hands were clasped in front of her. Her fingers tightened. The dark pool at the bottom of her mind stirred a little. Was anything ever over completely? Did the past ever really bury its dead? Or were they just tucked away conveniently out of sight? She turned to the window, looked out into the clear star-spangled autumn night, said on an uneven breath, “Oh, Steven, Steven—I don’t know. Can we ever...?”
Steven was close to her. He put strong gentle hands on her shoulders, swung her round until she faced him. His eyes dove deeply into hers. She couldn’t get away, realized, a thin glow of rapture beginning to pervade her, that she didn’t want to. Steven continued, his eyes holding hers, “Yes, Cristie. We can. We can and we will.”