The man shrugged and pointed to a pay instrument at the rear of his tiny store. “May I have nickels, please?” Todd snapped, grabbed up the slowly given change and plunged at the telephone.
“Yes, she was here, Br. BcKiddod,” said the voice of Georgine’s hairdresser, “but I’ve got ad awful code in the head, ad she was afraid of catching it, I cad’t blabe her. I’d tried to get her earlier to cadcel… I thigk she said she’d go right hobe, there wasd’t adother operator free, ad she was cobig back this afterdood.”
Three nickels jingled down into the maw of the telephone. Todd got the operator again and asked for his own number. He didn’t know quite whom he expected to find there, or what would be going on, but after several rings the voice of Georgine herself answered, sounding placid and cheerful. Yes, she had got in about ten minutes before, she hadn’t wanted to stay in the hairdressing shop; look at all the trouble they’d got into the last time one of them caught a cold! Why, certainly everything was quiet. And where might he be?
Todd told her. “I thought you were safely downtown for at least three hours, or I wouldn’t have come out here. Look, Georgine, I have a fairly shrewd idea that Cass has been hiding in the Manfreds’ house.” He went on talking through her exclamations. “She may still be there, for that matter. You get out of our place, will you? Go across the street and telephone to Nelse, and then stay there.”
“All right,” said Georgine, “but there’s nobody here. I’ve been upstairs, and the study door and Barby’s were both open, not a soul inside. I’ll do it, though.”
“That’s the girl. I’ll be home inside of half an hour.”
He put the receiver back on the hook. In the split second before the connection was broken, he heard Georgine’s voice once more; far-off, but quick and urgent. “Todd—” it said.
He snatched the receiver up again, but the line had already gone dead. She’d thought of something—of course, it might have been only to tell him that his suit was ready at the cleaners’ and he should stop for it on the way home; but one couldn’t be sure. She’d thought of something, or she’d heard or seen something… The toll call to Berkeley was fifteen cents, and he had only two nickels left.
“Will you cash a check? A small one?” he called to the storekeeper. The storekeeper said “No,” explosively.
Todd swore again, silently, and clawed through his pockets. He had a few pennies—four—no, there was one more. “Well,” he said testily, “will you accept legal tender and gimme a nickel for these?” Reluctantly, the storekeeper counted the pennies and pushed the nickel across the counter. The McKinnons’ home telephone gave back the busy signal: brr, brr, brr, over and over. Todd, listening, looked around him with unseeing eyes; weeks later he could remember every detail of the store’s meager stock even down to the stain on the label of a can of tomatoes.
His home line was still busy. He hesitated, seeing the bright autumn day outside the door, thinking that Nelsing had never failed to be one jump ahead of him and probably had been through the Manfred house long before this… You called, you said “I think my wife’s in danger,” and—assuming that they believed you on such slender evidence as one word spoken in an odd voice, you sent the police up to your house only to have them find that your wife wanted a loaf of bread.
He lifted the telephone and called one more number.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GEORGINE MCKINNON had reached home about a quarter of twelve, having been offered a ride by a neighbor whom she had luckily met downtown. She came toward her house from the rear, down the cross-street where the friend had dropped her, feeling at peace with the world.
This neighborhood seemed almost deserted, too, at this time of day, but it was a different sort of quiet from that of the evil alley in San Francisco. These windows gave back the sun as blankly, though from cleaner panes; but you knew that in one house a woman might be fixing the sandwiches for a tea party that afternoon, and in another a new baby was perhaps getting its first home bath from a mother divided between ecstasy and mortal terror. A nice, middle-class neighborhood; she would not ask for anything better as long as she lived. Even the man fixing the engine of his delivery truck, at the corner of Cragmont, looked pleasant. He glanced up at her with a cheerful grin, as she went down the narrow path to her own kitchen door.
She had forgotten her keys in the morning’s wild rush. It had seemed to her that she’d put them in her purse the last time she used them, but the way her brain was working these days, she might have moved them a dozen times since. Now, if only Todd had forgotten to put that chair under the knob— oh, good luck, he had. A slight jiggle and heave got the door open and she walked in and threw her hat on a chair with a sigh of relief.
It was wonderful to be in her own house, alone, in the full knowledge that the police were taking care of any disturbing matters. Georgine found a piece of stale gingerbread in the cake box and ate it, trying out her new inlay, which performed its duties admirably. She glanced idly around her, noting that Todd had done a nice job on the breakfast dishes—even to emptying the sugar bowl and washing it; she had observed some crystals stuck on its rim that morning, but it was shining and empty now. The left-over coffee in the Silex was gone. No matter, she’d make some more when she came downstairs… He’d even drawn the shade at the south window, against the blinding sunlight.
She strolled up to the bathroom for a better look at the inlay, and did a little work with toothbrush and dental floss. The cabinet needed to be straightened up, but that too could wait. There were Todd’s vitamin capsules far up on the top shelf, violently red in their glass jar. Better put them down lower where he’d be sure to remember to take them. They looked smaller than she’d remembered, somehow; a funny effect for glass to make…
The bathroom was built out on a little jog over the kitchen, with a window in the jog. She looked out and saw something that caught her attention: the clothesline whirligig cast a shadow on the hedge, and that shadow showed that there were clothes hanging on it. Had the Manfreds come home, then, without notice? And was their post-vacation wash of such magnitude that they’d had to borrow her lines? She craned out a little farther. Her own big clothes-basket was there on the grass, with a few white pieces still in it.
She’d run over and see, she thought, as soon as she’d changed her shoes. She was going down the hall to the closed door of her own room, when the telephone rang downstairs.
What Todd had to say was just a little unnerving, she thought, talking to him with her eyes on the dim upper hall. Just how did that theory about Cass tie in with the wash on the line? Yes, she’d get out—
“Good-by, Georgine,” said Todd at the other end of the line. As the words struck her ear she saw the light in the upper hall gradually change, brightening as if a door had silently swung open: a door that gave on a southern room—her bedroom. “Todd!—There’s someone here!” She called into the transmitter, and in the middle of the sentence heard the click of his receiver going down.
Georgine kept the telephone off and wildly jiggled the bar. If the operator would only answer, she could yell “Police!” and the law would be notified—but it took them long seconds to realize you were trying to get them again—
A flying figure swept round the head of the stairs, and down them. Georgine gave one muffled scream, backed away still holding the telephone, and found herself facing Cass Johnson.
“Don’t, don’t scream, please,” Cass was saying in a hoarse voice of entreaty. “I won’t hurt you, you ought to know that, and she—she can’t hurt anyone now.”
Georgine was dumb and motionless from sheer surprise; only for the space of a few seconds, during which someone quacked from the telephone, “Operator. May I help you?— Operator.” Cass put a quick hand on the bar, breaking the connection. “No, don’t! Please, wait just a minute, let me tell you—why, Georgine, you look scared to death! Oh—you didn’t think it was me, did you—that’s been doing all this? I didn’t believe she could fool you, too!�
� She reached over and took the handset from Georgine’s almost unresisting grasp. “It’s all right. Ryn’s upstairs in your room. She’s killed herself.”
“She—what?”
Cass nodded. Her gray eyes were swollen from crying, but their gaze was steady. “She took all those seconal capsules of hers, about an hour ago.”
“She can’t have died right away!” Georgine found herself stammering. “It—it would take—”
“No, she’s not dead yet, but she’s going to be left to die in peace, do you hear me?”
“Get away from that telephone,” said Georgine, suddenly angry. “This is a police matter, and the police are looking all over hell’s half-acre for you, don’t you realize that?”
“I won’t get away,” said Cass. She saw Georgine starting to move toward her; she grabbed up the telephone and banged the transmitter hard on the corner of the table. Something made a crushing sound, and a fragment of vulcanite bounced on the floor. “There, you can’t talk through it now. I won’t let anyone interfere with this!”
The door was three long strides away from the telephone table. Georgine’s hand was on the knob when she felt Cass close behind her, pressing something cold and hard behind her ear. She jerked her head around; it was Todd’s gun.
“I don’t want to shoot you,” Cass was saying, breathing hard, “but I’ll have to if you try to get help. Can’t you see? She’s my sister, I don’t care what she’s done, they’re not going to take her to—I guess it would be the—the asylum. She’s chosen her own way out and I’m going to see that she succeeds.”
“You!” said Georgine furiously, “forcing your way in here and breaking our telephone, and stealing Todd’s gun to threaten me with! He’ll be here in twenty minutes, himself; he knows you’re around here, and you can’t get away with any lies. Ryn upstairs—I don’t even believe that!”
“You can come up and see,” said Cass in a weary voice. She motioned Georgine ahead of her to the stairs. “I’m sorry, it makes me sick to have to do it this way, but—I can’t do anything else. If Todd comes I think he’ll see I’m right. I’ll stall him, anyway.”
Georgine, torn by doubt, an uneasy feeling that Cass might be telling the truth and be justified, and a frank terror that the gun would go off, was mounting step by step with her head over her shoulder. She saw the face that had once been roundly pretty, now ravaged by emotion, the dark hair loose and disheveled, the smart dress crumpled as if it had not been changed in several days. “I was a fool to run away,” Cass was continuing drearily, “but I—I didn’t expect her to do anything like what she did to Joan, and when I found out I lost my head. Oh, Georgine, I hope it’s over soon for her.”
They turned the corner. A flood of sunlight came through the door of the big bedroom, spilling out from the cube of light in the room itself. It seemed as if the very brightness should wake the still, colorless figure on the bed, the warmth revive the body whose hand, when Georgine touched it, was so softly cold; but Ryn Johnson lay there unmoving, her long lashes black against bluishly transparent cheeks.
“Cass,” Georgine cried out, “I can’t just stand by and let your sister die!” She felt for Ryn’s heart, and discerned a slow throb under her fingers. “Why!” She turned about, aghast— “How do I know she really—”
“You see?” Cass said. “I was foolish enough to run, I thought everything would tell against me, and now—I suppose I won’t even be believed about this. But it’s true, Georgine.”
“But when did you run?”
“Wednesday morning. Ryn had—had come in late the night before, when she thought I was asleep. I heard her sort of muttering to herself, but she’d got so she resented my trying to take care of her, so I didn’t go in. I knew something had happened at the greenhouse, and the next morning I got up as soon as it was light and—and went up and looked through the peep-hole. And then I knew, surely, that she’d meant to—to lay it onto me, and I was scared.” She looked down at the still figure. “—I can’t stay here and tell you, not over her. Couldn’t we go into the next room or somewhere?”
Georgine assented, in a sort of daze. She looked from Ryn, who was dying, to Cass, who still held the revolver. Who could tell the right thing to do? If she screamed and got shot for her pains, would there be anyone near to hear her? And Todd was on the way…
Cass locked the door of the big bedroom behind her, and left the key outside. The key to Barby’s room was still in the lock as it had been when Ryn had been released that morning, but she made no move to shut herself and Georgine in, which was something of a reassurance. She sat down on the bed and raised her shadowed gray eyes again. “I just—wandered around all that day, I didn’t know where to go.”
“Why didn’t you go to your aunt, at once?”
Cass’s eyes glowed suddenly. “I’d never let her know what had been happening to me. I would have been tortured rather than tell her! I love her, can’t you see that? And you know how she is, she would have got it out of me, and—never mind. I couldn’t go to her. When it got dark I realized I had to have some place to sleep. I’d seen where you left the key to that house next door, it was easy enough to steal it and then put it back when I’d got the place open—and when you were all asleep. But Ryn knew where I’d be likely to come. This morning she came back here, she’d stolen your house keys out of your bag so it would look all right if anyone was following her—you know, not having to break in or anything—and—and she thought someone was watching, there was a man—well, it doesn’t matter, but she hung out the clothes in your yard so it would seem natural for her to be going back and forth. And she came and called me.”
Georgine, still in a daze of doubt and indecision, was about two sentences behind Cass. A man, she thought, watching—oh, heavens, it must have been the one who was fixing the truck! The thought seemed to raise her bodily off the slipper chair and launch her toward the window—
“Sit down!” Cass snapped, and the gun was pointed.
Georgine obeyed slowly, her skin prickling with the realization that Cass really would shoot to protect her sister. Or was it protection? Was the victim of a murder gradually dying in the next room, while she sat here?
“And I ducked over here,” Cass went on with a choking sigh. “She said she—she knew it wasn’t any use, but she didn’t want to be alone when she died, she wanted me with her. And she emptied the powder out of all those capsules—looking at me—and put it in some coffee with lots of sugar so she could get it down, and—drank it.”
“You let her—you knew what she was doing?”
“Of course I knew! I thought of the same thing she did, of a trial, and a commitment—that would be the best thing she could hope for, wouldn’t it? I thought of Aunt Chloe, and of myself. Of course I knew. We sat and talked while the stuff took effect, and then she came up here and lay down on your bed. She’s been asleep for two hours, and in another hour they won’t be able to save her, I should think. There must have been twenty grains of that seconal. Think, Georgine—she’s just sleeping slowly into death. If it were Todd, or your Barby, wouldn’t you do anything to let her go that way?”
“Three hours—” Georgine heard herself murmuring aloud.
“She hasn’t an idiosyncrasy like mine,” said Cass matter-of-factly. “If I’d taken all that I’d be dead by now. Until I heard her telling, calling to me from downstairs in the next-door house, what she meant to do, I was afraid to answer, to admit I was there; I wondered if she meant to try killing me with it. But I believed her when she said she’d given up, she’d tried too many ways, and then Joan got in the way and she knew they would get her for that one. She thought Todd suspected. And this was the only way. —Oh, Ryn!” she said suddenly, on a cry of desolation.
“Cass, you can’t do this.” Georgine tried once more, desperately. “It’s like an execution. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Oh, yes I do!” The gray eyes filled with light, and Cass’s head went high. “And nobody’s
going to stop me!”
From the lower floor of the house came the sound of a door opening, of firm steps on the floor. A beautiful clear penetrating voice called, “Casilda! Dorinda! Where are you?”
Cass Johnson’s face had changed at the first syllable, and her head swung quickly from side to side. The revolver was hanging at the end of an arm suddenly gone limp. Georgine pulled herself together and leaped for it, but Cass retained just enough of a grip so that it could not be immediately wrested from her—and in the doorway Mrs. Majendie said, “Just what are you doing? Cass, behave yourself. Give that gun to me.”
Georgine saw it relinquished with a sense of relief that was near to collapse. Her knees gave way and she sat down abruptly on the slipper chair.
“Where is your sister?” said Mrs. Majendie.
Cass put both hands over her face and turned away, stumbling against the bed.
“She’s in the next room, Mrs. Majendie,” said Georgine thickly. “Cass says she’s dying of an overdose of seconal. I—I’ll get help now; she wouldn’t let me, before.”
Chloe gave her a long penetrating look. “No, Mrs. McKinnon,” she said, “don’t call anyone. There are a few things I must know first.”
“What—how did you happen to come?”
“Your husband telephoned me to say that I should probably find both my nieces here, and that one of them was a murderer. He didn’t say which one. I am going to find out.”
Her big hand, holding the weapon, was at her side. She reached out the other one and shook Cass gently by the shoulder. “Look at me, my child.”
As if against her will Cass turned. Her hands came down from her pallid face and her eyes met Chloe Majendie’s. “She took the seconal herself, Aunt Chloe,” she whispered.
“You were with her? You might have called me, Cass.”
“I—I didn’t want you—to know.”
Chloe looked at her for a silent moment. Then she said with infinite gentleness, “Why should Ryn want to die?”
The Smiling Tiger Page 21