Dig Deep My Grave

by Cheryl Honigford

  No, Vivian hadn’t been the first of Hap’s conquests, but perhaps Constance had. Perhaps Constance had the misfortune of caring more for Hap than he’d ever cared for anyone other than himself. Constance had watched Hap seduce Vivian that summer. What would she do if she thought Hap, the man she loved, had designs on her younger sister? What would she do if she’d finally come to terms with the fact that the man she loved would not only never love her back, but never stop rubbing her face in his lack of concern for her?

  “Where’s Constance?” Vivian asked.

  “Sleeping,” David said. “Been sleeping all evening, or so I assume since she didn’t come down to dinner. She does this sometimes after a spell, hibernates for a week like a bear.”

  Vivian had seen Constance asleep in her room just before she’d gone outside and found Charlie and been dunked in the lake. Still, Vivian jumped from the sofa. She had time to register the astonished faces of Gwen and David as she bolted from the room.

  • • •

  Vivian jiggled the handle, but the bedroom door was locked. She pounded on the door with her fist. “Constance,” she shouted. “Constance!” But there was no response. She pressed her ear to the door. She heard nothing. Charlie nearly barreled into her as he rushed onto the landing behind her. Vivian looked up at him, panic rising in her chest. She could barely get the words out.

  “We have to get in there,” she said. “There isn’t any time.”

  Charlie jiggled the handle himself before pushing her unceremoniously out of the way. He backed up and hit the bedroom door with his shoulder, grunting in pain. The door shuddered in its frame but didn’t budge. Charlie backed away, rubbing his shoulder, his face a determined scowl. He took a step back toward the door when there came a shout from the stairway.

  “Stop!”

  Vivian turned to find David running up the stairs, waving something over his head. He stopped at the landing, panting, and held it out to Vivian. “A skeleton key,” he said. “Opens every door in the house.”

  She plucked the key from his open palm and turned to the door. Her hands were shaking so badly that the tip of the key missed the keyhole and skittered sideways on her first two attempts, but on the third, the tumbler turned and the door swung open.

  Vivian stood for a moment in the doorway. The room was dark and still. Constance lay in bed just as Vivian had left her earlier. Her hands were clasped loosely over her stomach on top of the white coverlet now, her pale face a mask of serenity.

  “Constance,” Vivian said. Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it thundered in the silence of the bedroom. “Constance.”

  No response. No movement.

  Vivian stepped forward into the room. Constance wasn’t snoring. She wasn’t breathing deeply. She wasn’t breathing at all.

  Vivian rushed to the bed. She spotted the bottle of Veronal on its side on the nightstand. Vivian picked it up and turned it over. It was empty. The same bottle had been full only this morning. She pressed her hand against Constance’s forehead. It was chilled and dry, but not ice cold. She moved her hand to inches in front of Constance’s mouth. She felt nothing. She crouched and pressed her ear to Constance’s face. A faint exhale tickled Vivian’s cheek, and Vivian exhaled herself. So Constance was still breathing, but very shallowly.

  She took Constance by both shoulders and shook her. “Constance,” she said. “Constance, wake up.” There was no response. Vivian glanced over her shoulder at Charlie, David, Freddy, and Gwen, who’d followed her into the bedroom and hovered near the doorway.

  “Oh God, what is it? What’s wrong with her?” David asked, pushing past Charlie to grasp his sister’s hand.

  “She’s not breathing,” Vivian said. “She’s taken an overdose of sleeping pills.”

  “Sleeping pills? Oh no. Oh no, Constance.” David shook his sister’s limp form so hard her teeth rattled together. “Constance, wake up.”

  “Charlie, call the hospital. There’s a telephone in a nook down the hall,” Vivian said. “And Gwen, go get your parents.” Vivian stared down into Constance’s serene face. She looked calm now; there was no tension in her brow, no suspicion in her eyes. She looked so much younger with all her hard angles smoothed out. She looked beautiful.

  Vivian looked again at the empty bottle and then noticed what was underneath—a sheet of floral stationery. Vivian plucked it from the nightstand and focused on the single line of scrawled writing.

  It was an accident. God forgive me. I loved him.

  She sat back on her heels, the paper clutched in her fingers. Dimly, she heard Charlie speaking to someone on the telephone. “Now,” he said. “Sleeping pills. I’m afraid it might already be too late.”

  Someone crouched next to Vivian in the dim, silent room and gently plucked the letter from her fingers. She glanced up. Freddy nodded at her and stood. He would take care of it, she thought. Thank God for Freddy. She heard David sobbing quietly. He’d stopped shaking his sister and was now kneeling at her bedside, his head in his hands.

  Then came the thunder of footsteps pounding up the carpeted hall stairs.

  Adaline rushed into the room, followed closely by Bernard and Gwen, all of them soaked to the skin. Adaline stared wide-eyed at Vivian, a wet tendril of hair sticking diagonally across her forehead. Her eyes shifted to Constance unmoving on the bed, David kneeling next to her.

  “What’s happened? What’s she done?”

  “I think you know exactly what she’s done,” Vivian said quietly.

  “Oh God. Oh no. My Constance.” Adaline rushed forward and collapsed onto the bed on her daughter’s prostrate form.

  Charlie strode back into the room, pushing past Bernard, who seemed frozen in place near the door. “The hospital’s sending an ambulance,” he said. Then he gently pulled Vivian to her feet and led her from the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Imogene looked up from her typewriter and smiled. She glanced from Vivian toward Mr. Langley’s closed office door, and her smile disappeared. “Are you sure you should be here? You’re in deep, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean possibly fired deep.” Imogene leaned toward her on the desk.

  Vivian took off her gloves and folded them. Then she leaned against the corner of the desk, eyeing the closed door as well. “Oh, I know,” she said.

  “You don’t seem very concerned.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m alive,” Vivian said with a smile. “And Charlie’s alive. It’s a beautiful day, and the sun is shining.”

  Vivian watched her friend’s brow furrow. “Did you hit your head or something?”

  “I may have, but let’s just say I found a little perspective in Wisconsin. Oh, and I’m here because I have something to share with Mr. Langley. A trump card, so to speak.” Vivian leaned down conspiratorially. “I have a screen test at MGM on Monday morning. Mr. Mayer called me himself.”

  Imogene’s blue eyes widened. “You did hit your head.”

  “It’s true. I swear it on my mother’s name.” Vivian held up a pinkie and crossed it over her heart.

  “Well, knowing just how deeply you respect your mother… Say, why did you say all that about Charlie being alive? Last I saw you, you were crying over him being accused of killing someone. Was Charlie ever in danger of not being alive? What happened with all that? How can you just breeze in here as if that never happened?”

  Vivian sighed. “I’m still piecing it together myself, but the long and the short of it is that Charlie didn’t kill anyone, and now the police are savvy to that too.”

  “Oh… That’s good?”

  “Very good.” Vivian looked down at her watch. “Oh, gee, is that the time? Can you call Langley for me? I’m in a bit of a rush. I’ve got a train to catch.”

  Imogene shook her head
and pushed back her chair to head toward Mr. Langley’s office, but the door opened of its own accord. Morty Nickerson stepped out and stopped short at the sight of Vivian. He smiled at her in surprise.

  “Say, Viv,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Hollywood with Graham?”

  “Yes,” she said, moving toward the door. She stopped beside Morty and touched his arm. “I heard Fantasy Ballroom last night, Morty. Sounds like you’ve really got something with that idea.”

  Vivian smiled at Morty as he blushed from his toes to his hairline. She gave Mr. Langley a dazzling smile as he waved her into his office.

  • • •

  Vivian hurried through the bustling waiting area toward Track Five with Charlie just barely keeping pace beside her.

  “How do you move so fast on those short legs?” he asked.

  Vivian cast an exasperated look at him and then at the porter lagging behind them. “If he doesn’t get a move on, it won’t matter how fast my short legs can go.”

  Charlie put a large hand on Vivian’s shoulder, slowing her forward momentum. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Is it?”

  He squeezed her shoulder, and Vivian slowed her pace. There was something in that squeeze—comfort, reassurance, safety. She was starting to think everything would be fine after all. She knew Track Five and the shiny silver tail of the Super Chief would soon be in sight. She exhaled and looped her arm through Charlie’s. He was here beside her. And that’s where he’d stay, now that the police were no longer after him. She would make her train. She would be in Los Angeles in forty hours and meeting Louis B. Mayer bright and early Monday morning. And then? Well, then she’d have to work her way up to a whole new level of fine.

  “Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Charlie said in low voice. “But—”

  “I don’t,” she answered automatically. She started to quicken her pace again, but Charlie tugged on her arm, stopping her outright.

  “I know, but I’ve been going over it in my head, and it’s killing me not knowing what happened. Please, Viv?”

  Vivian glanced up at him. He was smiling down at her, actually showing his teeth. He smiled so rarely these days, she thought, and God knew she couldn’t say no to the dimple in his cheek.

  “One question,” she said begrudgingly. She hadn’t thought it through herself yet. She’d been avoiding it, skirting the events of the past few days and filling her mind with thoughts of Los Angeles and screen tests so she wouldn’t have to think of Hap’s death and the fact that Constance had caused it.

  Charlie leaned down toward her so that they wouldn’t be overheard by any travelers hurrying past. His smile faded. “How had Constance known you were going to meet Hap in the boathouse?”

  Vivian chewed the inside of her lip in thought. “Well, we switched bedrooms earlier in the day—at Constance’s request. When the family was at dinner that evening, Hap must have snuck up the back stairs to deliver the note to my room. Except my room had become Constance’s an hour or so earlier. He entered her room by mistake, and Constance woke from her doze and saw him—without letting him know he’d been seen. She hadn’t been sleeping well, and she thought she’d been seeing ghosts, hadn’t she? She thought she was losing her mind. She got up and followed him.”

  “She thought he was a ghost?” he said incredulously.

  “That’s two questions,” she chided.

  Charlie squeezed her hand, and she sighed at the comforting heaviness of it, the warmth of it through her white cotton glove. She decided she’d let another question slide if he’d just keep holding her hand like that.

  “Yes, at the time I think she did think Hap was a ghost. Then when Hap left my bedroom, Constance entered and read the note meant for me.”

  “And maybe then she realized that ghosts don’t leave notes to arrange secret rendezvous.”

  “Exactly. So Constance went back to her room and pretended to be asleep when I stopped by, intending to follow me outside and spy on our meeting. But then my aunt detained me for a few minutes in the parlor, and Constance must have slipped out in front of me. I don’t know what happened in that boathouse. We may never know. Maybe she became hysterical, and he pulled his gun on her in an effort to get her to leave. They fought over it. But somehow, she got ahold of it and shot him. Anyway, she claims it was an accident, and maybe it was.”

  “But why didn’t you see her leaving the boathouse? You got there only moments after, and there’s only one way out.”

  Vivian thought for a moment. “My aunt Adaline came out only moments after me. Constance must have…I don’t know…been crouching on the railing outside, just around the corner? It’s crazy, but that’s the only place I wouldn’t have seen her. There was nowhere else to hide. You know, when Adaline was rushing me out of the boathouse, she waved her hand like she was shooing someone away. That must have been Constance. She must have steered me away quickly so that Constance could make her escape. From there, I figure Constance ran in a panic, and when she realized she still had the gun, she threw it under the bushes. Gwen found the gun shortly thereafter and chucked it in the lake because she thought she was protecting David.”

  “And then Bernard and Adaline went about trying to cover up everything about Hap’s real murder.”

  “And it might have worked if I’d drunk that whole glass of spiked milk,” she said.

  Charlie’s gaze drifted over the top of her hat as he considered the explanation they’d come up with together.

  “You’re sure everything’s taken care of? Legally, I mean?”

  “As much as it can be,” she said. “The complete opposite of legally, in point of fact. I assume Bernard has paid a lot of money to someone to keep the details of Hap’s actual death a secret. A fudged death certificate, no inquest, cremation, Lord knows what else.”

  “And Constance?”

  “We found her just in time. Once she recovers, she’ll be sent back to the sanitarium in Switzerland.”

  “But why did she do it?”

  Vivian shrugged. “The most common motive of all, I think. Love, jealousy. You know, I always thought Constance was a cold fish, but that was just a front. From what I’ve pieced together in the past few days, she’d been in love with Hap most of her life. I never knew about it, but she and Hap had a fling at some point…probably when they were no more than kids. It ended badly, I assume. Things tended to end badly with Hap.” She paused, glancing over the faces of the people passing by. “He went away for a few years. But then he got hurt in that plane crash and came back to Oakhaven to recuperate. When he started something with me that summer, Constance couldn’t handle it. Adaline saw it happening. That’s what she meant when she told me that Hap was good at hurting people. Not just me, but also Constance because of me.”

  “But Constance was married with children at that point, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, but a marriage vow doesn’t stop you from loving someone else, does it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And then Hap came back again and stirred all those old feelings back up, and Constance was in such a fragile state that she had a breakdown of sorts. Then they fought in the boathouse and…bang.”

  Charlie shook his head, lost in thought. “And all that spy business. Was that ever real?”

  “Lillian as much as admitted it herself. She tried to drown us, after all. Is it so far-fetched to believe that she and Hap met in Spain and were both secret German spies?”

  “Yes, actually,” Charlie said drily. “It’s very far-fetched. All of it is.”

  “If it hadn’t actually happened to me…to us…I wouldn’t believe it either.”

  Charlie smiled suddenly and nodded to the newsstand behind her. Vivian followed his gaze to the Radio Stars magazine with her and Graham on the cover. He plucked a copy and stared down at
it with a smile, then walked to the counter with it, fishing some change out of his pocket.

  “You don’t need to buy that for me,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not buying it for you,” he said, slapping a dime down on the counter of the newsstand. “I’m going to have a lot of leisure time on that train, and I’m keen to find out if this gorgeous radio star on the cover has a beau.”

  Vivian smiled. “I’m fairly certain Graham’s unattached at the moment.”

  Charlie rolled up the magazine and tapped her playfully with it.

  A man’s voice came over the loudspeaker above their heads. “This is the last call for Train Number Seventeen, the Super Chief, scheduled to depart for Kansas City.”

  Charlie held his arm out to Vivian.

  The reporters were bunched near the front of the train. One of them spotted Vivian as she and Charlie rushed toward their car, and the reporters all moved en masse toward the couple.

  “Miss Witchell! Miss Witchell! A photo?” The calls came from all directions at once.

  Vivian paused at the stairs to Car 176 and turned, motioning the porter on ahead with their bags. Flashbulbs popped before she could answer.

  “Who’s this, Miss Witchell?”

  She smiled up at Charlie. “Shall I tell them?”

  He was squinting from the glare of the flashbulbs and the commotion, but he nodded and managed a smile.

  “My fiancé,” she announced, beaming up at Charlie. The flashbulbs lit up the platform of Track Five like broad daylight, and then the train whistle hooted.

  “All aboooard!” the conductor shouted as he walked toward them.

  “Sorry, boys. That’s us,” Vivian said. She turned, and Charlie helped her up the stairs. She was looking forward to the forty hours alone with Charlie on this train. No reporters, no questions, no murderous family members, no ghosts. Just the two of them.