Bring the Bride a Shroud

by Dolores Hitchens

  “Why are you so quiet?”

  “Hm-m-mh? Oh, just thinking. I’m stiff as an ax handle, too, from squatting in the cold. Damn old lady Blight!” He rose with a faint rustle of clothes to loom above Mr. Pennyfeather in the dark. “Are you suggesting, Doc, that we try the hotel?”

  His tone hoped not; but Mr. Pennyfeather reassured him. “We’ll slip up the back stairs and find an open room and go to bed.”

  “I’ll have to get out early,” said Tick.

  “I’ll help you get up on time. Come on. Quiet, now.”

  They went in at the rear and felt their way along the stuffy hall. The stairs squeaked faintly underfoot, and the upper corridor was cold and breezy. Mr. Pennyfeather’s fingers, touching the newel post, found the unmistakable texture of his windproof draped over it. He lit a match with caution. The faint yellow light showed him Tick, somewhat scratched and sleepy, and a row of doors all shut except two in the shadows at the back.

  Mr. Pennyfeather felt suddenly tired. He wondered if he looked quite as gray and as dusty as he felt, and at least twice his sixty-odd years. Tick yawned.

  They went to the back of the hall. The open door on the right led into the bathroom and, beyond it, a linen-and-mop closet. The door on the left showed an open bedroom, not so nice as Mrs. Andler’s but very inviting after the cactus garden. There was a double bed under an unbleached cotton coverlet, a dresser painted yellow, a rocking chair into which Tick promptly fell.

  “I don’t dare get into bed,” Tick muttered. “Never get up. I’m going to snatch some shut-eye right here.”

  He seemed to go immediately to sleep. Mr. Pennyfeather took one of the pillows off the bed and stuffed it under Tick’s neck. Then, closing the door after him, he went down to replace the fuses.

  When he had done this job, he stood for a little while at the back door, looking out at the night. He felt a terrible need for rest and warmth, and at the same time he wanted to think. He must think about Tick and the mess Tick was in and try to figure a way out of it all.

  Tick had brought it on himself, but putting the blame where it belonged didn’t help matters. Tick was just Tick—he wasn’t a pompous Tichenor the way his father, Major Burrell, had hoped; nor was he the bishop his beautiful silly mother had dreamed; he was a gray-eyed devil with a flair for getting into scrapes and a rather wistful manner of asking for help to get out of them. He was also his aunt Martha’s bread and butter.

  That cursed will of old Major Burrell’s, of course…. If Tick could have married early; married someone like Glee Hazzard, who was so frighteningly unconventional she made Tick into a model of propriety by sheer power of reaction … Hm-m-m-m …

  Mr. Pennyfeather’s eyes stung with a need for sleep. The town had grown very quiet, and there were few lights showing. From far away off the desert came the roar of planes on night patrol; and, near by, the scuttling of mice and lizards. Mr. Pennyfeather sighed. He’d have to meet Caroline, of course. Perhaps, though in a different way from Glee, she had the power of keeping Tick in line.

  His mind sidetracked back into the details of the trip: … Glee leaving her coupé, riding into town on the bus—for sympathy, obviously … the nurse, asleep with her mouth open … that odd and ugly detail about Mrs. Andler’s slashed wrist.

  He didn’t like that part at all. Either Mrs. Andler was very determined to influence Tick in her direction, or she had an enemy who could fly in and out of doors invisibly, carrying a weapon.

  He shivered a little, feeling the wind. If Mrs. Andler had planned a campaign—he recalled her venomous looks toward Taffy—she must think that Tick was still infatuated with the yellow-haired girl, and didn’t know about Caroline.

  When she did know … ?

  Would it help, he wondered, if he were to talk to her in Tick’s behalf? Could he make her see the situation as he saw it, pointing out the danger in Tick’s progress as a wastrel, his eventual degeneration into something not at all likable and well-meaning as Tick was now? He chose a few words, thoughtfully, for a beginning.

  The halls and the lobby sprang into bright relief when he pushed the switch into place. Upstairs again, he rapped gently on Mrs. Andler’s door.

  There wasn’t any answer. A few flies had come to life and were buzzing about the bulbs in the ceiling. The man across the hall was snoring again.

  He rapped a second time, wondering how soundly she slept and whether the long discomfort of the trip might not make her hard to waken. He wondered about Tick, then, and walked back to the door of their room and glanced inside.

  Tick had moved. He was sprawled face down on the bed, breathing deeply.

  Mr. Pennyfeather went back and rapped for a third time and waited. He was really very tired. If she didn’t answer this time, he would be tempted to make other plans, to try to see her in the morning. He looked absently at the doorknob, and a shining something on the floor drew his eye.

  A drop. A drop of blood.

  The memory of the moment by the bus came back, vivid with apprehension. The wind and the loneliness and the smell of sage seemed to crowd themselves into the hall; and he recalled the lights going out one by one in the deserted café, and the feel of the dust underfoot. He pulled his coat closer and put his hand on Mrs. Andler’s doorknob.

  The lock moved easily, and the black space widened. He saw the movement of curtains across the room, the curtains that the wind blew from the other side of the open pane. Dimly he made out the dresser and its silver toilet accessories, the clothes on the pipe rack, and the bed with a very still figure in it.

  “Mrs. Andler!” He advanced a step into the room. “Mrs. Andler, wake up, please. It’s Mr. Pennyfeather. If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk—”

  From somewhere near, very softly, came the sound of a door being shut. Mr. Pennyfeather glanced behind him, but the hall was empty—at least the space across from Mrs. Andler’s door was.

  She had a crouched, unnatural look among the bedclothes. He saw the clutching fingers of one hand against the pillow, a bare and frozen-looking foot sticking from under the sheet, the streaming disarray of her hair.

  The hair, like a pile of stuffing pulled from a mattress, somehow told him the truth. The Mrs. Andlers of this world do not go to bed without their curlers. Tremblingly Mr. Pennyfeather drew away the bedding. What he saw then he could never afterward describe, though it haunted his nightmares for years.

  She had been struck a great many hacking and dreadful blows. Even as he stood there her last breath fluttered and was gone.

  Chapter Five

  When the sheriff came, he proved to be tall and brown, chewed tobacco, wore a gun as though he were used to it, and had a habit of squinting up one eye when he paused for thought. His name was Stacey. He took one look at the horrified crowd in the corridor and sent them packing below to wait for him in the lobby. He brushed off spidery Mr. Johns, who owned the hotel, with a remark that nothing could hurt the reputation of the place, because it hadn’t any.

  Then he went into Mrs. Andler’s room and shut the door. When he came out some minutes later, he went to the telephone in the lobby and called headquarters in San Diego and after that the local doctor.

  He leaned against the counter and looked them over: the crowd of soldiers, half-dressed, bewildered, near the stairs; Tick Burrell, who was sick and incredulous; Mr. Pennyfeather, a sparrow of a man wrapped like a squaw in the windproof. Then the women: Taffy Whittemore, who wasn’t up to the occasion and showed it by having turned the color of her gray satin negligee; Mrs. Blight, like a hawk who has just run into an electrified fence; the nurse, Miss Comfort, huddled in her cape and watching everybody.

  Glee Hazzard hadn’t appeared.

  “Got to wait a bit and get some people here who know more’n I do,” the sheriff said frankly. “Guess you might tell me a few things. I gathered from some papers in her suitcase the lady’s name was Martha Andler. Anybody here acquainted with her?”

  There wasn’t any answer. Tick, deep in m
isery and shock, just stared. Taffy Whittemore shuddered and covered her eyes, and Mr. Pennyfeather recalled that she’d rushed in and had a look in spite of his warning.

  Someone had to speak up. Mr. Pennyfeather coughed apologetically and began: “Mr. Burrell here is Mrs. Andler’s nephew. I—I had met the lady on the bus coming from San’ Diego. I believe the other passengers”—he nodded toward the group of women in the leather chairs—“must have known her by sight.”

  The sheriff took another good look at all of them. Then he turned to the hotel ledger and tore out a couple of blank pages, fished a battered silver pencil out of his pants and began to write.

  “Cousin, you said?”

  “Nephew,” corrected Mr. Pennyfeather.

  The sheriff frowned at Tick. “Did she come up here to see you?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather prodded Tick with an elbow, and Tick muttered, “Hm-m-mh? Oh. Yes, I guess she did.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather knew what was bothering Tick; but there was no way that Tick could take back now those angry and disrespectful things he had said about his aunt. They’d go on chewing him inside, and he’d have to take it.

  The sheriff scribbled, then asked, “When did you last see her?”

  “I didn’t,” said Tick. “She told my friend here she’d talk to me in the morning.”

  “You were upstairs, though. Had a room, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  The sheriff squinted at the light with his right eye almost shut, and appeared to think. “How’d you get along with your aunt?”

  He’s about as subtle, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, as a fat man sneaking a second piece of pie. Tick groaned. “We had a lot of arguments. We were always having arguments.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, money and things. She was my guardian.”

  The sheriff studied Tick’s big frame. “You look kind of old for one of them.”

  “That’s the way my father fixed things.”

  The sheriff scribbled with relish. “Now, according to what this friend of yours, Mr. Um-m-m—” He shot a look at Mr. Pennyfeather, who obediently supplied his name. “—Mr. Pennyfeather tells me, this murdered woman was just breathing her last when he looked in on her. From the shape she’s in, I don’t see how she could have lived very long after the murderer got through with her. The doctor’ll settle that, of course. But anyway, what were you doing just prior to the excitement?”

  Tick went on looking dazedly at nothing, never realizing, so far as Mr. Pennyfeather could see, that the sheriff had fastened on him as suspect IA.

  Mr. Pennyfeather had to nudge Tick again and whisper the sheriff’s query.

  “Just before?” said Tick. “Why, I guess I was asleep.”

  “He was asleep,” confirmed Mr. Pennyfeather stoutly.

  “I take it you was with him then,” said Sheriff Stacey suspiciously. “All through the evening, maybe.”

  “Practically. Of course, I—” He stopped, horrified. He was remembering those minutes he had lingered at the back door after replacing the fuses. The long minutes of listening to the night sounds, of smelling the wind off the sage, of trying to figure a way out for Tick. And had Tick—young and ruthless and full of the teachings of war—had Tick been solving his problems in his own way upstairs? No. Unthinkable. Mr. Pennyfeather put it out of his mind. “I was out of the room now and then for a moment or two.”

  The sheriff had marked the pause and hadn’t liked it. “Like when you checked up on Mrs. Andler? Now you just tell me how you came to do that, just then.”

  “I—Well, Tick and his aunt had some problems to iron out, and I thought that if I could put in a word or two before, I might be helping the situation. And then, just as I was knocking, I saw a drop of blood in front of the door. I pointed it out to you when you first came, if you remember.”

  “I remember.” He did some more squinting. “Maybe I’d better ask a few questions of you other people. Names, I guess, first.”

  He wrote down their names in order on one of the ledger sheets.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Now. Is that everybody?”

  Mrs. Blight said nastily: “There’s a young woman hiding upstairs somewhere. She was wrapped up in bandages, as though she were injured. She came in on the bus.”

  “What makes you say she’s hiding?” Stacey asked.

  “She isn’t here, is she?”

  “Was she in the hall with the rest of the crowd?”

  “No,” Mrs. Blight admitted, “she wasn’t.”

  The sheriff looked a trifle worried; at the same time, Mr. Pennyfeather could see that he was reluctant to leave the group in the lobby to their own devices. The situation was saved by the arrival, at that moment, of the doctor and an MP.

  The doctor, a little mild-looking man with a bald head, went upstairs with Stacey. The MP stood guard at the outer door. He was a very big MP and carried a very impressive night stick. Nobody moved, though Mrs. Blight went on talking.

  She addressed the shrinking Taffy, though her voice was tuned to carry even beyond the room. “When they find that imitation cripple, they’ll find who killed Mrs. Andler. She’s probably skinning down a rope of tied sheets even now. Didn’t you see the looks they gave each other? Poison. Pure poison.”

  “Madam,” said Mr. Pennyfeather, “it might be wise to curb your tongue. There are libel laws in this state which have teeth in them.” Mr. Pennyfeather knew about libel laws from Professor Dart of the Law School. Professor Dart was always hoping that someone would say something libelous about him. He’d know so well what to do.

  “I’m saying what’s true,” Mrs. Blight sneered. “Don’t tell me those two women didn’t hate each other. I know better.”

  “So what?” complained a soldier near the stairs. “Why can’t we all just go back to bed?”

  “Shut up,” said the MP. “This is murder, and it’s serious.”

  “Still, so what?” persisted the soldier. “It ain’t anybody I know.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather stole a look at Tick, but Tick seemed not to have heard. He was leaning against the wall, and his face was tight with misery. Mr. Pennyfeather shivered. It was horrible to see someone so young and cocksure as Tick being torn as Tick was.

  There were steps suddenly at the top of the stairs. Glee Hazzard looked down at them. She was fully dressed, as she had been on the bus. The bandages that swathed her head seemed unnaturally white in the shine of the overhead lights. The steel frame made a black line up the side of her neck. But she had discarded the crutches. She began to come down slowly, clinging to the banister.

  Tick didn’t see her until she was almost on the floor.

  He stared at her for a moment as though she were a part of the incredulous horror that had overtaken his aunt. Then his eyes focused on the white wrappings and the steel brace, on the arm in its sling under her coat. “Good God!” he said loudly. “You too, Glee!”

  He ran toward her clumsily, his arms out, and she warded him off. “This has nothing to do with what happened to your aunt,” she corrected. Then Tick caught her; he tried to put his arms around her, and she reached up to lay a stinging slap across his mouth. “Let me go, Tick. You’ve made a mistake.”

  He looked at her in the manner of a puppy which has just been kicked.

  “I wrecked my car a couple of weeks ago,” she said clearly. “The way I look hasn’t a thing to do with your aunt’s death.”

  She walked past him and sat down in one of the leather chairs which faced the windows and the street. The other women had twisted their chairs about so that they faced the stairs, but Glee didn’t. She regarded the dark pane and the shadowy street outside for a moment. Then she began the process of getting a cigarette out of her pocket and lighting it with one hand.

  Tick walked slowly back to his place beside Mr. Pennyfeather. He kept staring at the back of Glee’s head as though he wanted her to turn around. She didn’t turn. When she had the cigarette going she put her head back against the
leather cushion and shut her eyes. She looked tired, and she wore as always that look of leashed energy and impatience, but she didn’t show much sign of shock.

  Perhaps, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, from Glee Hazzard’s viewpoint Martha Andler had got just what was coming to her.

  A commotion started somewhere upstairs and grew gradually louder. The man in the purple underwear came into view, escorted by Sheriff Stacey. He had pants on, covering the purple shorts, a sweater of bright bilious green, and he held up the pants with alternate hands while he gesticulated with the other.

  “Wouldn’ kill a fly. Wouldn’ kill one ittsy fly. You know me, Al. I’m a good guy.”

  “And you’re drunker’n a boiled owl,” said Stacey angrily, shoving him ahead down the stairs. “Wait’ll Mr. Johns sees that bathroom. You’ll be out some cash for cleaning it up.”

  “Sure I’m drunk,” the green-sweatered man admitted with a hint almost of tears. “Sure I am. And my old lady don’t let me come home when I’m drinkin’. So does it mean I killed a guy?”

  “It wasn’t a guy,” Stacey said. He allowed the other to sink down upon a bottom stair like a gelatine pudding suddenly let out of a mold. “It was a woman. Maybe you saw her. She had the room across from yours.”

  A curious quiet came into the lobby, a cold, attentive quiet that sent a nervous prickle along Mr. Pennyfeather’s scalp. Everyone was watching the drunken man, wondering what he had seen. Someone in the group, perhaps, was much more interested than the rest of them—perhaps even a bit frightened. Mr. Pennyfeather thought that his ears grew a little, waiting for that answer.

  “Woman with great big teeth?” the bleary one wondered. “Awful teeth? Horse teeth? She drove me out of the bathroom.”

  Most of the soldiers looked rudely and amusedly at the nurse. Miss Comfort, who had been grinning at the drunken man’s predicament, promptly snapped shut her mouth. She glared at everyone in the room.

  “This was a gray-haired lady,” said Stacey, ignoring the byplay, “and she had a—a touch of a mustache, sort of.”