“Ryn Johnson?” Georgine shrieked. “Certainly not! When there’s a fifty-fifty chance that she’s a criminal?”
“Seems she’s begging for your company.”
“Who does she think I am, her loving mother? Nelse must be crazy.”
“You come and talk to him,” Todd said.
She picked up the telephone, and immediately Nelsing’s voice said, “All right, Georgine, I could hear you refusing. Now listen. Ryn’s in a bad state. The matron’s trying to cope with her, but there’s no use our letting her work herself into a collapse. She hasn’t slept for a couple of nights, her sister’s missing, and what she needs is just one night in an ordinary home.”
“One night of having her go to pieces all over us?” Georgine broke in. “No, thank you!”
“She’ll have a sedative. All you have to do is give her something to eat and turn down the bed covers.”
“And then lie awake all night myself wondering if she’s going to creep in and knife me?”
“What’s the matter?” said Nelsing elaborately. “You and Mac got separate bedrooms now?”
“Certainly not. She’d knife him first.”
“She won’t with a police officer on guard. We’ve got to hold her, Georgine, and make sure she’s safe. So far as I can find out, she’s not a material witness to anything—and she won’t go home.”
“Absolutely not, Nelse. If you feel I owe you favors, I’ll come down and scrub floors at the Hall of Justice, but—”
He was murmuring to someone else, at the other end of the line. The next voice that spoke was Ryn Johnson’s, heavy with strain and fatigue, but holding by a thin thread to control. “Georgine,” Ryn said. “Please let me come, just for one night. I need it so.”
“If you’re afraid to stay alone, why don’t you for heaven’s sake go to your aunt’s?”
“No.” The low-voiced monosyllable seemed to brim over with repugnance and terror. “No. I can’t, Georgine. I’m afraid.”
“Then I think you’d better stay right with the police.”
“Oh, please.” The voice shook with entreaty. “Look, wasn’t there ever someone who helped you when you were in trouble? And didn’t you feel that that help couldn’t ever be repaid? Please, Georgine, pass it on to me, and I’ll help someone else some day.”
Georgine’s lower lip folded over the upper, and her eyes sought Todd’s. He was leaning against the kitchen door; now he bent forward and whispered, “It’ll be safe. I promise.”
“Well,” said Georgine into the telephone, “I don’t see what good I’d be to you. I have to leave the house at nine-thirty tomorrow morning, and I won’t be back till early afternoon. It’s going to be a terrible rush—”
“Oh, that would be enough, just tonight. You will let me come! I won’t ever forget it, I’ll be so grateful—”
“All right, come along,” said Georgine crossly, hanging up the telephone. “Darn the woman,” she added to Todd, “she would use the one argument that would have any force with me. But that won’t make me glad to see her!”
Todd patted her shoulder and laughed. “Maybe not, but I know you. You’ll be taking care of her as if you were her loving mother.”
***
It was certainly a pitiable young woman who arrived twenty minutes later, in company with an extremely personable officer. She was paying no attention to his good looks and manners; her eyes looked straight ahead at nothing, with that look of trying to evaluate pain that Georgine had noticed once before, and her hair was uncombed and seemed actually to have lost its sheen. She was trying to retain a grip on her own manners; she murmured a few words about gratitude, and then sank limply into a chair and sat there with her head bowed into her hands.
“We’d better get you to bed,” said Georgine briskly. “What’s Nelse running down at the Hall, a sort of Gestapo?”
“No,” said Ryn drearily, “he’s awfully polite, you know. But I—I want my sister. I want to find my sister.”
“Tomorrow, honey. Come along upstairs now. Did they give you some pills or something to take?”
“I thought I’d go home and get my own. We should have gone up on the way here, I guess, but all I wanted was—just to get to you. If I could just rest a few minutes—”
“I’ll go and get anything you want,” Todd said, “if you’ll tell me where to find it.”
“You’re so kind.” Ryn raised shadowed eyes. “There isn’t much: a robe out of the closet—my room’s just next to the stair that goes down to the studio—and a nightgown out of the second drawer. The capsules are on my bed-table.”
“All right,” said Todd. “You left the house locked, I suppose?”
She rubbed a hand across her forehead. “Did I? Yes, I remember snapping the lock and taking the keys when I ran out to—to the greenhouse. I haven’t been back there since, have I?”
“Give me your keys, then.”
There was just a second’s hesitation. She wet her lips and looked away from him. “Give me your keys, Ryn,” Todd repeated. Georgine thought she detected a curious urgency about his manner.
Ryn put her hand in the pocket of the green coat, and brought out a bunch of keys. Looking dubiously at Todd, she laid them in his hand.
“I’ll just pick up the things and be right back,” said Todd cheerfully.
“That,” muttered Georgine for his ear alone, “was what you said the last time.”
“Oh,” Ryn added suddenly, “would you mind turning off the floor furnace? I’m quite sure I left it going.”
“I’ll attend to everything. Didn’t I tell you I was a domesticated man?”
Todd left, with Georgine gazing suspiciously at him from the doorway. The personable officer was standing calmly behind her, every line of his face and body proclaiming competence. The situation was well in hand.
Todd drove the now-familiar streets to Cuckoo Canyon rapidly. He didn’t want to be away any longer than would seem normal for his errand, but there was one more thing he meant to do in the Johnsons’ cottage. He wondered if Ryn had suspected he meant to do it.
The robe, a handsome one of Chinese brocade, was easy enough to find in Ryn’s exquisitely ordered bedroom. He took a satin nightgown from the bureau drawer, dropped the prescription box from the bed-table into his pocket—after a quick glance at the red capsules inside—and then laid robe and gown on a bench at the head of the stairs and conscientiously turned the key of the floor furnace. “Business before spying,” he remarked to himself, and ran downstairs to the studio. One couldn’t call it breaking and entering, when one had the owner’s keys.
The studio was warm, redolent of turps, and—when he had flicked the light switch—uncompromisingly lit with white fluorescent lamps. There was no work in progress visible; the few canvases stacked against the wall proved to be blank. Todd looked around speculatively. There were one or two other doors which might lead to closets; another two in the wall which might be cupboards.
He stepped over to open a section of the big window, and cold night air flowed gratefully in. Then he began methodically with the cupboard nearest the window; it held nothing but artists’ supplies, neatly ranged. The next was a closet in which hung cotton slack suits with paint stains on them. There was one more big cupboard on this east side, and he unlocked it in its turn.
There was what he had been looking for: Ryn Johnson’s paintings. The wooden racks held perhaps a dozen of them, and with no pangs of conscience at all he lifted them out and stood them along the window-ledge, first looking at the back of each. It was on these that Ryn had been pasting the labels, the night he had seen her through the window. That was last night, he thought with a little shock of surprise. It seemed a full week ago.
Sure enough, Ryn had had a “green period.” Six or seven of the paintings showed portrait subjects withering away in a jungle gloom, and abstractions which seemed to have sprouted fresh moss, and there was indeed something haunting about them. The other four pictures, however, were what
interested Todd.
One was a curious and pleasing angled pattern in dull red-brown, ochre and white; another a formalized picture of a black cat sitting upright and somehow menacing against a gray wall, a bowl of lemons beside it, and the cat’s eyes repeating the exact tone and shape of the lemons. There was, amazingly enough, a representational painting of the Bay on a steel-gray afternoon, with the Marin hills a deep violet shadow on the far side. The last was what Todd always thought of as a nightmare picture, of a forest of leafless trees against a lowering sky, brown trunks reaching away into a sullen distance, and two or three unhealthy-looking fungi of a vivid orange in the foreground.
He admired them sincerely, especially the cat and the nightmare, but that wasn’t what he had come for. Breathing in the night air, thinking abstractedly that one of those autumn-leaf bonfires must still be smoking away in a near-by garden, he turned the pictures over. The cat was labeled, “Vassily, September 1948.” Todd slid his penknife blade under the paper label and began working it gently off. On the canvas underneath had been penciled some other letters. Ryn had tried to erase them, but there was enough pencil left to be legible. They read, “Vassily, June 8.”
He had not the slightest doubt that the brown, the gray and the violet pictures would tell the same story, but he meant to check on it. The date had been changed, he found, on one of the green ones at least; he attacked the label of the nightmare trees, paused, listened, and sniffed the air. Surely that bonfire was very close to this house—and very hot?
He had been standing facing the window, with his back to the stairs. Now he turned quickly. The second closet door, the one he had not opened, was next to the stair-well. The cracks around it were glowing a red-gold color that was discernible even in the hard white light of the fluorescent bulbs, and as he stood momentarily paralyzed a long tongue of flame came waving through the side crack.
In the next moment there was a dull explosion behind the wall, the cupboard door burst from its latches and swung open to reveal a raging mass of flame, and the whole opposite wall of the studio snapped into a blaze that went roaring up the open staircase.
The heat had barely struck across the room when Todd, by pure reflex action, had flung himself over the window-sill. Below it was a sharp declivity of earth and rocks and bushes; he scrambled wildly for a foothold, lost balance and went half sliding, half falling down into the Canyon. At some point in his descent he found that he was still clutching the canvas of the nightmare wood, and flung it heedlessly away from him. He was still on his feet, to all practical purposes, but he could not check himself, it was only by some sort of miracle that he kept his footing, and if he went head-first down here there were ugly outcroppings of rock that could crush one’s ribs or one’s skull. His foot skidded on a patch of gravel, he shot sideways, he was falling in the darkness—
A large manzanita bush received him like springs. Its stiff twigs crackled, but the bush held. Todd lay in its knobby embrace thankfully and lovingly, and when he recovered breath enough, said “Jesus Christ!” in all reverence.
His descent, at avalanche speed, could not have taken more than thirty seconds, and it was not much longer before he found that he was completely uninjured; yet when he extricated himself and turned to look up the slope, the Johnsons’ cottage was ablaze from cellar to roof. He had come to rest not far from a curve in the road. As he struggled through bushes onto the pavement, a car hummed by going upward. “Turn in the alarm!” Todd yelled to its unfamiliar driver, and then, his wind regained, sprinted up the road to get his own car away from the Johnson gate. Before he reached it sirens were screaming below, and the darkness had melted before the rush of flames.
Todd McKinnon had had enough of being detained on the scene of a disaster. They could bring him back later if necessary, but he meant to go home and telephone Nelsing from there. As yet no one had arrived to see him leaving; he started his car and gunned it up the hill.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GEORGINE HAD PUT her guest to bed in Barby’s room, washed the dinner dishes with the courteous assistance of Officer Wilmoth (who had left the door to the hall open and kept a vigilant eye and ear on the staircase) and was seated on the sofa listening to his able analysis of the recent election, when the front door opened to admit her husband. “I suppose your friend finished the whisky this afternoon?” was his greeting.
“Yes, he—Todd! What happened to you?” Her sewing shot from her lap and she was across the room, holding onto him.
“Kind of a narrow escape,” said Todd mildly; but his eyes and the set of his facial muscles belied the casual tone. “The police will probably want to know about it, Wilmoth, but before I tell you what I have to report, I want to see Ryn Johnson.”
“She’s just got to sleep, I think,” Georgine began.
“Wake her up, Georgine, and bring her down here. It’s possible she’s awake and listening anyway.”
After one more look at him, Georgine complied. He was right, she discovered as she entered the small bedroom and found Ryn sitting up in bed in her slip and her hostess’s bed-jacket. She said, “I guess it’s no use trying to get any rest, Ryn, until later in the evening. Will you get your dress on again?”
Ryn complied in absolute silence, her eyes on Georgine’s. They seemed to grow more enormous, and her face whiter, with every second of the two minutes it took her to slide the checked wool dress over her head and fumble the buttons into place. From below came the cautious murmur of male voices. “—to se’le a personal score,” Todd was saying as the women reached the foot of the stairs; Georgine cleared her throat and he stopped.
“Sit down, Ryn,” he said pleasantly, and Ryn let herself down slowly into the blue chair. “You scare me, Todd,” she said with an attempt at a laugh, “sitting there like a trial judge.” He did look rather formidable, Georgine recognized with a sinking of the heart, upright in a straight-backed chair with his hands on the arms. “Is that what this is for,” Ryn added, “to frighten me again?”
“Not necessarily.” His voice was normally light, but there was a queer sort of purr in it. “Just a few questions I want to ask. I suppose you guessed that I’d go down to your studio and look at your pictures?”
“Yes. I—thought perhaps it was time,” said Ryn oddly.
“I had a li’le difficulty in finding them. That’s the neatest studio I was ever in. No brush-cleaning cans in evidence, no bo’les of turpentine or fixative—where on earth do you put those things away?”
“In a cupboard.” A puzzled frown creased her forehead.
“Which one?”
“The one nearest the window, where the paints live.”
“What lives in the one near the stairs?”
“Easels, a few oddments like tin carrying-cases for paints—what is all this about, Todd?”
“Never the cans of turps?”
“No, indeed. It’s too near the floor furnace. Of course, that’s on the floor above, but I don’t want any inflammable stuff right below it.”
“Very prudent,” said Todd genially. “Well, I’m glad to have seen your pictures, they seemed very fine to me. Here are your sedative capsules—” He took the box from his pocket and held it out to her, “—and I did all my errands, I believe. I turned off the floor furnace as you asked me. I’m sorry, though, that I couldn’t bring the robe and nightgown. I’m afraid they’re gone—along with the house.”
“What?” Georgine and Ryn exclaimed together.
“Yes. You didn’t hear the fire-engines? The place must be pretty much of a ruin by now. I got out in a hurry, luckily for me.” He was speaking more rapidly now, in clipped, clanging syllables. “Odd coincidence, wasn’t it, that your studio burst into flames about ten minutes after I turned off the floor furnace? Just time for the blaze to get started in the cupboard near the stairs, and work down to some open containers of turps; nothing but highly inflammable liquid could have gone off with such an explosion. It blew the cupboard door out, and for one second I saw w
hat looked like a long iron rod that went up to the ceiling of the cupboard. If I’d just turned that handle up above and gone away, the fire would have seemed spontaneous—wouldn’t it? Almost like the Hand of God. And if I’d been in the studio and hadn’t had the window open, I’d have been part of that bonfire— wouldn’t I?”
Ryn had sunk down in her chair, looking almost boneless. Her face was plaster-white. She whispered, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Our cottage burned up? All my pictures are gone?”
“Not quite. I saved one of them—or at least, I think so. It’s somewhere in the Canyon bushes. It was the brown forest—the one you painted in July, while you were supposed to be getting poison off brushes with green paint on them.”
“But—the floor furnace? I don’t know what you—I haven’t touched it, the thing’s been on—why, I haven’t had it off since yesterday morning, I was up all night, it was so cold—”
“So I turned it off at your request. There’s no doubt in my mind that that fire was set, down below. What was it meant to burn?”
“I don’t know. But they’re gone, my—my pictures—oh, God, a whole year’s work, and some of the best things I’ve ever done. I was planning on showing them next—” Her eyes suddenly became even larger. “Todd,” she breathed hoarsely, “what was that you said—that fire was set?”
“That’s my guess.” His voice still purred.
“But who—why—that doesn’t make sense! Why, it would be savage cruelty—for anyone to burn my pictures—”
Georgine, who had been struggling for breath, collected enough for a shriek. “Your pictures, you cold-blooded harpy! What about Todd? He might have been burned to death!”
Ryn looked at her as if with blind eyes. “Burned to death,” she said in a shred of voice. Then, slowly, her beautiful face went slack, her mouth dropped a little open. “Yes. But it—it wasn’t meant for him. Not for him.”
“He would have been just as dead!”
“You don’t see.” Ryn began to pull herself forward painfully in her chair. “It couldn’t be—no one could—” She was on her feet now, swaying. “My bedroom—it’s right above the studio.”
The Smiling Tiger Page 19