Bring the Bride a Shroud

by Dolores Hitchens

  “I wanted you here so that if Caroline and I could slip away, you could act as a rear guard to cover up.”

  “The army tactics have helped you somewhat, Tick. Your old method was to rush at your aunt and start whaling her with a mental two-by-four. And she whaled back with a four-by-eight. Now you’re getting better. At least, your planning is.”

  “Just what,” said Tick guardedly, “do you think she’s cooking up for me?”

  “An affair about an attempted murder. She pulled off a bit of queer business in Little Creek, where we stopped at sundown for sandwiches. She tried to make me think that someone had slashed at her in the ladies’ room. I’m pretty sure nobody did. I’m also pretty sure that she dug herself with one of the remarkable instruments which women carry in their purses: a nail file or a pair of scissors or some other gadget. She had just found out, you see, that I was coming here to meet you. Come on, Tick. Catch her while she’s sleepy.”

  “The old bat!” said Tick ungraciously. “She’ll bite my head off.”

  But under Mr. Pennyfeather’s urging he went inside.

  The lobby was brilliantly lit by four unshaded bulbs in the ceiling; it was also deserted. The air held the unfragrant ghosts of dead cigars and old varnish. The scuffed carpet shed a powdery dust. A semicircle of old leather chairs sat facing a window. This, Mr. Pennyfeather judged, made it seem like a lobby. The chairs showed no sign of having recently been sat in. Some wit had put a piece of cactus on the cushion of the one nearest the door. The cactus had spider webs on it. Mr. Pennyfeather investigated a counter across the room. A very battered ledger lay open with a pen and a bottle of ink beside it. Carelessly, lettered in a hurry, a strip of cardboard said: Write Your Name Down Here. Vacant Rooms Have Doors Open.

  A second strip of cardboard, clipped to the first, added: Upstairs Only.

  “This seems to be a very casual kind of hotel,” Mr. Pennyfeather remarked. He studied the ledger and its recent entries:

  Miss T. Whittemore, Beverly Hills 25

  Mrs. Ida Blight 23

  Mrs. Martha Andler 27

  Mr. Joe Jessop 28

  Miss Glee Hazzard 21

  Miss Dorothy Comfort, RN. 22

  “Perfect,” chuckled Mr. Pennyfeather. “One might almost say, perfectly perfect!”

  “What’s perfect?” Tick wondered, peering over his shoulder at the ledger.

  “Why, the idea of a stern-beaked female like that one with Taffy being named Ida Blight. It’s like that old poem: Ida Blight, Keep Your Eye Upon Me.”

  “That’s a song,” Tick pointed out, not impressed very much. Of course, he hadn’t seen Mrs. Blight. “And I think it’s Dinah, or somebody.”

  “Well, then, anyway we’ve still got Miss Comfort. Having a name like that would make up for the teeth.”

  “Aren’t you wandering a bit?”

  “Awful teeth,” Mr. Pennyfeather explained. “Big. Sharp. Regular snappers.”

  “You used to do this in class, and I appreciated it. Character study and everything. Like the day you had us all write an essay on our favorite lady professor and I did Dr. Beltner.”

  “I burned those essays,” Mr. Pennyfeather said guiltily. “I didn’t dare let them out of my sight. They were libelous.”

  “So I’m either losing my sense of humor or the prospect of bearding Aunt Martha has unnerved me.” He grinned maliciously. “Beard is right. Did you see—”

  “I saw it, and it isn’t gentlemanly to bring it up,” Mr. Pennyfeather reproved him. “Come on. We’ll find number twenty-seven.”

  The stairs led from the lobby to a point about midway in the upper hall. Here were more unshaded bulbs, the sound of snoring, the feeling that a lot of dust had whirled around until it was tired and had now settled for sleep. Mr. Pennyfeather began reading numbers on doors. The second on the left, facing the rear, proved to be Mrs. Andler’s. “Suppose you do the knocking, Tick.”

  Tick strode up and beat a rapid tattoo on the panel, and they waited. The snores stopped—they were across the hall—but there wasn’t any response from Mrs. Andler. Tick knocked some more.

  Someone groaned, quite loudly.

  Tick looked quickly at Mr. Pennyfeather, who shook his head. “It’s over where the snores were. He didn’t like your knocking.”

  Tick turned the knob gingerly. “If she’s in her corsets, or anything like that, God help us,” he whispered. He peered into the lighted room. “Nobody’s in here. Maybe she signed for the room and then changed her mind.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather looked in above Tick’s khaki shoulder. “No, there’s her suitcase. Dark blue. I remember it from the bus depot in Los Angeles. She’s even unpacked a little.” He pointed to an arrangement made out of gas pipe and painted yellow, the room’s only apparent answer to the closet question. “Her red coat. Two dresses. And an—er—”

  “Foundation garment,” Tick supplied.

  The room wasn’t as ugly as Mr. Pennyfeather had expected. There were blue curtains at the windows, a couple of clean rag rugs, flowering wallpaper only a trifle faded, and a big bed with a peach-colored chenille spread. The dresser had Mrs. Andler’s silver toilet articles laid out neatly on an embroidered runner. Her shoes, five pair, were in a row on top of the window seat.

  The window seat, painted gray, with copper hinges, filled in the space where the three windows jutted out to form a bay. Mr. Pennyfeather went over and bent across it to look down. One pane was raised, and the wind blew through with the dry smell of the desert night. He saw, vague and tortured, the forms of the cactus below and, beyond, the lights of Superstition.

  “She’s in the bathroom, no doubt,” said Tick, studying the clothes on the gas-pipe rack. “She’s put on a robe and gone to wash her teeth. She’ll come back with her hair in metal curlers and her face covered with grease, and she’ll be madder than hell for us seeing her that way. Say, Doc, let’s get out of here.”

  The “Doc” was a trick which Tick used when he wanted especially to please Mr. Pennyfeather. Mr. Pennyfeather was working for the Ph. D. with a study on Nature in Chaucer. So few people had ever noticed the nature in Chaucer at all—owing, no doubt, to their interest in the more ribald aspects of his writings—that Mr. Pennyfeather had decided to bring it to their attention. But he wasn’t, as yet, a “Doc.” He was merely a Master.

  He took a last look through the open window, and it seemed that something in the cactus graden had moved. There was a space without a hump, where he thought there had been a hump before. “Come here, Tick. There’s somebody prowling down there.”

  “I’d be surprised if there wasn’t,” Tick said. “The MPs go over that place on the hour, every hour. You’d be surprised at the reputation of that cactus garden. It’s scandalous.”

  He was at the door, fiddling with the knob, and Mr. Pennyfeather saw how he disliked the idea of meeting his aunt Martha under unfavorable circumstances. Mr. Pennyfeather straightened the row of Mrs. Andler’s shoes. “Coming now,” he said. Then he stopped. From the toe of one shoe had rolled a cigarette butt stained crimson with lipstick. Mr. Pennyfeather picked it up. The color of the crimson mark reminded him of Glee Hazzard; it was a nervous, vivid red.

  For no reason that he could afterward think of, Mr. Pennyfeather flipped the cigarette butt through the open pane. “Coming,” he repeated. He passed the dresser and looked down.

  Tangled in the comb was some dark hair. It struck Mr. Pennyfeather as odd, since Tick had mentioned the business of putting herself into curlers, that Mrs. Andler hadn’t taken her comb with her. And the little wad of hair, black without a touch of gray like Tick’s aunt’s, seemed a strange touch, too. He held the comb toward the light briefly and saw in the teeth little ridges of oil.

  They stepped through Mrs. Andler’s door, and Tick shut it carefully. They turned together toward the stairs. And drew a single breath of amazement.

  Taffy faced them. She was a wraith in yellow chiffon, a very lovely wraith with tears, with beseeching hands, with
a child’s mouth whispering of loneliness and love, with a little bosom under the gauzy gown as roundly formed as any Chaucer had dreamt of.

  Quite, quite beautiful! thought Mr. Pennyfeather.

  But Tick had backed nervously into a wall. “Go get your clothes on, Taffy! Oh, dammit, don’t make a scene!”

  “Love, oh Love!” cried Taffy softly. “What have I done that you should treat me so?” She walked forward, and her pink toes seemed to mesmerize Tick. He watched them, cringing.

  It was odd, Mr. Pennyfeather conceded, how a little girl could terrify a big man, just by walking toward him in a yellow nightdress. Tick seemed trying to crawl backward through the opposite wall.

  A groan came again, and a door opposite Mrs. Andler’s opened and a man staggered through it. He made a ludicrous figure in purple shorts and a white undershirt. He stared at Taffy, at Tick, and at Mr. Pennyfeather without saying anything. Then he groaned again.

  Taffy didn’t pay him the least of heed. She went close to Tick and put her arms around him. Tick broke away, but she was very quick. She caught him and clung hard at the top of the stairs.

  Mr. Pennyfeather felt a sort of tension come into the air, a prickling uneasiness that warned him, a trifle too late. He saw Mrs. Blight come out of the room on the other side of the stair well, the room just beyond Taffy’s own, and stand watching the two young people grimly. He wanted to cry out: “Tick, there’s something up!” and he couldn’t get the words out soon enough.

  Before he could speak, it had happened.

  Tick had tried to push the girl away, and she had stumbled and gone down screaming. All the way to the bottom of the stairs, into the lobby below.

  Chapter Four

  Mrs. Ida Blight Ran swiftly to where Tick stood, staring helplessly down the stair well. She screamed: “You’ve killed my little girl, you fiend!” Then she began to beat Tick in the face with her clenched fists.

  Tick backed away. “But I didn’t. She fell.”

  The man in the purple shorts ran a hand through his tousled hair and hiccupped. “Bad boy.’Nawful bad boy. Liddle girl go boom.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather decided that the fellow had—as Tick would put it—a snootful. He had a sudden curiosity to see what had become of Miss Whittemore; he left Tick warding off Mrs. Blight and ran downstairs. Taffy was pulling herself off the floor. When she saw Mr. Pennyfeather she began crying again.

  “The harpy upstairs,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, “isn’t going to leave any of Tick for you to marry. You’d better call her off.”

  The girl stopped crying to listen to the shrieks of Mrs. Blight.

  “And you might just slip into this,” Mr. Pennyfeather added, throwing his windproof around her shoulders.

  “The old witch!” the girl cried, as Tick came running down, with Mrs. Blight clawing from the rear. “Ida! Wait, let’s hear what he has to say.”

  “He says,” Ida panted, “that you fell by accident.”

  “It’s a lie!” shrieked Taffy, as well as Ida might have. “He struck me!”

  “We’ve got a witness,” Ida reminded, with a glance upward.

  Mr. Pennyfeather chuckled. “Your witness in the purple underwear is as boiled as an owl, in case you hadn’t noticed. And as for me, I’m prejudiced.”

  A door which had been closed behind the counter opened, and a spidery little man crept through it to stare at them. “Here, now. You can’t make all this racket. You’ll have me out-of-bounds.’Sides, there’s soldiers sleeping in these downstairs rooms. Be quiet.”

  Mrs. Blight pointed a knotted finger at Tick. “This man struck my little girl and knocked her downstairs. I’ve a perfect right to make a fuss. I want the police.”

  “No, no,” groaned Tick, horrified.

  Taffy shot him a quick look and grinned.

  The spidery little man was very gray and wrinkled. He looked as though the desert sun had dried him almost to transparency. “Wait a minute. We can’t have trouble. We got to figure things out better’n that. Now, about you folks being here. You must of come in after I set the register out and went to bed.”

  “That’s perfectly right,” snapped Ida Blight. “And we’re legal customers here, and I demand the law.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather longed desperately for some means of spiriting himself and Tick out of this impossible situation. He thought of magic carpets, Aladdin’s genie, all sorts of miraculous things. Even so simple an accident as the lights going out all at once….

  This last thought became so intriguing that he gently edged out of the group of angry people and stole back along the first-floor hall. Here was an air of sleep so thick it seemed to muffle footsteps and dull the lights. Ida’s nasal outrage was thinned to a whimper. Mr. Pennyfeather made out, though, that she was telling the hotelkeeper that Tick was trying to murder Taffy, his fiancée, so that he could take up with a WAC.

  She knows all about Tick’s new romance, then, Mr. Pennyfeather said to himself. I guessed that, though. And Miss Hazzard…. He remembered Miss Hazzard’s energetic beauty with admiration.

  The switch box was on the wall just outside the back door. Mr. Pennyfeather lit a match and opened the splintery lid and began to explore. He made a mental note of the location of the fuses and then pulled the main switch. The lights inside went out abruptly. He threw away the match and unscrewed the fuses with both hands and in a hurry. He ran into the cactus garden just as the sputtering steps of the hotelkeeper reached the door.

  Ida was making a sound like a siren in the night, and there were curses and protests from the open windows of the lower rooms.

  Mr. Pennyfeather found a cactus; or rather a cactus found him. He retreated into more spines than he had dreamt existed. He stood still and then edged down slowly among the humped dark shapes. The hotelkeeper was looking into the fuse box by the light of a match. Now if Tick just had sense enough …

  Tick had. He came blundering through the cactus, crying “Ouchl” now and then in a voice which was unmistakable.

  “Pss-sst!” warned Mr. Pennyfeather. “Down, you young idiot!”

  “I’m a goner,” groaned Tick. “When the MPs get a load of that Blight and her bleat—”

  “Shut up!” He found Tick’s mouth and put a hand on it rudely. “I’ll swear that it was two other soldiers. Wasn’t I a witness?”

  “That mmmmfff ug ug purple underwear,” Tick managed to get out.

  “Ignore him. Listen. Ida’s quit yelling. I think she’s missed you.”

  They waited, frozen, while candlelight began to show in a few of the rooms. The hotelkeeper and Ida seemed to be making a joint search. The candles came out in a procession at the back: Taffy’s, the spidery little man’s, Ida’s, even a staggering one held by the purple underwear. They went back in, must have gone at last upstairs. A flickering light came into the windows of Mrs. Andler’s room, then disappeared suddenly.

  After that there weren’t any further signs of them, and no further shrieks from Ida. The grumblings in the lower floor subsided, and an air of peace and a few snores floated out through the windows.

  Mr. Pennyfeather made Tick remain crouched, though, just to be sure. Ida might be sitting at an open window, hawk-eyed, waiting to pounce. Taffy might be keeping vigil in the black lobby, ready to discard Mr. Pennyfeather’s overcoat and become a Circe in yellow at the slightest sign of Mr. Tichenor Burrell….

  “I hope that this will teach you—” began Mr. Pennyfeather, when Tick gripped his arm.

  “Here they are. MPs. Right on schedule. Oh, Lord, how’ll I ever get out of this?”

  The chill of the desert and its endless spaces of night seemed to settle in Mr. Pennyfeather’s soul. He trembled, wondering what horrid penalty they deserved according to military law. To be sitting under a cactus in the dark wasn’t exactly a crime in civil life. But Tick’s fear was contagious.

  Then something in the manner of the walk of these two approaching people caught his ear. Surely no MP ever lagged or stumbled or hesitated so much as
one of them. Nor should an MP be worrying about runs in his hose, as was the other.

  A girl’s voice, an attractive voice with a forthright, throaty tone, said something then which Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t catch.

  A man’s voice answered. The voice, like the footsteps following the steady tripping of the girl’s, was heavy and uncertain and lonely. “Now I guess we’ve got everything settled, we might as well say good-by.”

  “Haven’t we said it?” She was very businesslike, very frank.

  Tick muttered a startled word in the dark, and Mr. Pennyfeather was obliged to pinch him.

  “I haven’t been in your way, have I, darling?”

  “With him? No, you haven’t. But don’t call me by that word.”

  “I won’t be calling you anything any more.”

  “Don’t make yourself miserable, Freddy. We were good friends, and it was fun. Now I’m engaged to be married and we mustn’t be seen running around together.” From her tone she might have been patting a stray dog and offering it a word of comfort.

  “But you knew I was falling in love,” he said miserably.

  “How could I?” She moved away with a sudden brisk urge. “Freddy, this spot has a vile rep. And we’ve got to make it back to camp. Come on. No more looking back, please!” Mr. Pennyfeather caught a glimpse of profile against the glow of Superstition’s lights, a sharp profile with a sensible nose and a chin with a good deal of determination in it, and a fluff of hair under the cap of a WAC private.

  The man following was tall and thin and stood looking rather lonely as she motioned him to stay while she walked on. After some minutes he, too, melted into the shadowy street.

  Tick sat for a long while in what Mr. Pennyfeather thought was an unnatural quiet. The stars grew a little colder, the night deeper and farther above their heads. A lizard—Mr. Pennyfeather hoped it was a lizard—slid across his shoe with a scaly touch.

  “Tick!” he whispered. “Perhaps we could go in now.”

  “Yeah,” said Tick absently. “Sure.”