Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

‘Sprinkled them with arsenic.’

  ‘Any arsenic in his workshop at Bar Harbor when you cleaned it out?’

  ‘Yes, a full jar, and one half full.’ Harland saw that Ruth’s lips now were white.

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘I took those jars and some other jars and cans down to the dory and rowed offshore and emptied them into the water and then sank them.’

  ‘Empty out the arsenic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Knew what it was, did you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When’d you do all that?’

  ‘Last summer.’ Ruth bit her lips.

  ‘That envelope you put the sugar in, what’d she do with it after she got through using it?’

  ‘Why, I don’t know. Put it back in the hamper, I suppose.’

  ‘The rest of you didn’t take sugar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You knew beforehand that you and Mr. Harland wouldn’t take any, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Knew Leick wouldn’t drink any coffee, didn’t you?’

  ‘Why yes. I knew he never drank any on the camping trip we all took together, earlier that summer. I meant to take along some tea for him, but I forgot.’

  ‘So you knew Ellen’d be the only one using that sugar.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Her voice suddenly was weak, and Harland cried furiously:

  ‘That’s enough, Quinton! We’ll not answer another damned question till you tell us what this is all about.’

  Quinton met his eyes, and the chubby man smiled that mirthless smile which always came too easily to him. ‘Notice any lies in what she’s said?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not. She’s told the plain truth.’

  ‘Think of anything she’s left out?’

  ‘Blast you, Quinton! What are you up to?’

  Quinton looked at Mrs. Parkins. Got it all down, have you, Sophy?’ he asked. She nodded, and he turned to Harland again. ‘I’ve been talking to her, up to now, but now I’ll ask you a question,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Suppose I told you Ellen died of arsenic poisoning?’ Harland sagged under the sudden shock, and Quinton grinned. ‘Take your time. We’ve got all night. Suppose I told you that. What would you say?’

  – II –

  Quinton’s question summoned out of the past into Harland’s mind two scenes. He remembered that day they drove north from Boston, and Ellen sought to win him and he told her she could never do so, and she said at last in quiet surrender: ‘Then let us go on to — Bar Harbor,’ with a faint pause before the last two words. And he remembered too that on the last morning of her life, when the seal’s sleek head, sinking out of sight, reminded him of Danny so that he turned to tell her they must part, she had said: ‘Well, don’t look so serious, Richard! It’s a fine day for — a picnic, just the same.’ Again that faint pause, not conspicuous then but memorable now, making blindingly clear what her thoughts then had been. He saw as surely as he would ever see it, the truth; that when she knew she had lost him beyond recapture, Ellen chose to die.

  He was silent so long that Quinton prompted him. ‘What would you say to that, Mr. Harland?’

  ‘I’d say it was absurd!’ His thoughts were his own, and loyalty to Ellen bound his tongue. ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘It’s possible, all right,’ Quinton assured him. ‘Know anything about the way arsenic poisoning hits a person?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve looked it up.’ Quinton was almost cheerful. ‘There’s vomiting, and a burning pain in the stomach, and awful thirst but they can’t even keep water down, and cramps, and collapse, and sometimes coma and sometimes not, and then they die.’ Harland was shivering uncontrollably, his teeth locked to keep them still. He felt Ruth’s hands clinging to his arm, and Quinton asked, ‘Isn’t that just about what happened to her?’

  Harland said doggedly: ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘Any good doctor, seeing her die, would have said the way she died is the way she would have died if someone had given her arsenic.’

  ‘Damn it, no one gave her arsenic!’

  ‘Mrs. Harland here gave her sugar for her coffee,’ Quinton pointed out, with a nod toward Ruth. ‘She knew no one but Ellen would want sugar, and she brought some along special. That sugar was over half arsenic.’

  Harland was beyond coherent thought. His retort was pure emotion. ‘That’s a damned lie!’

  ‘It’s no lie,’ Quinton assured him; and he spoke so confidently that Harland accepted the statement. But if it were true, then — Quinton was in so many words accusing Ruth; and in this realization Harland forgot all thought of protecting Ellen, and he cried:

  ‘Well, if she died of arsenic poisoning, she committed suicide!’

  ‘You’re a little late thinking up that one,’ Quinton drily commented, and he asked: ‘By the way, why didn’t you have an autopsy? Doctor Seyffert asked if you wanted one.’ His eyes turned to Ruth. ‘Mrs. Harland here said no, and you backed her up.’

  ‘He never mentioned an autopsy!’

  ‘He offered to get some other doctors.’

  ‘After she was dead.’

  Quinton said amiably: ‘Oh all right, we’ll pass that. But why did you have her cremated?’

  ‘She’d asked me to.’

  ‘I hear she’d asked to be buried in Mount Auburn?’

  Ruth spoke. ‘She wanted to be cremated, Mr. Quinton. She told me so, a day or two before she died. She said she’d asked Mr. Harland to have it done, and she made me promise to remind him.’

  ‘Funny she’d speak of that just before she died. As if she knew something might happen to her.’

  Harland cried again: ‘Of course she did. I told you, she committed suicide! She knew she was going to.’

  Quinton sat forward in his chair. ‘Well,’ he said crisply. ‘The grand jury didn’t think she killed herself. They’ve indicted Mrs. Harland here for murder.’ He let that word shudder in the silence, and Harland saw all their eyes — the deputy’s, the stenographer’s, Quinton’s — fixed upon Ruth. His arm encircled her protectingly, but he could find no word.

  Quinton rose. ‘So there it is. Now I can get the local police to arrest her, and then start extradition proceedings; but that’ll take time. If you want to be reasonable, we can all drive back to Maine tonight. Whatever you say.’

  Harland turned to Ruth, wondering that she could be — or seem to be — unmoved. ‘I’ll get a lawyer,’ he cried. ‘We’ll fight this rotten foolishness every step of the way.’

  But Ruth shook her head, steady and strong. ‘Let’s not bother with technicalities, Dick,’ she told him quietly. She smiled. ‘Besides, I know enough about law to know it wouldn’t do any good. He can make us go, so we’ll make no fuss. We’ll go with him to Maine.’

  – III –

  Quinton proposed that they make the journey in his car. A sedan, it would accommodate five people readily enough. But this seemed to Harland intolerable. ‘I’ll take my car,’ he insisted. ‘Mrs. Harland and I will go in that. You can follow us. We’ll not try to get away.’

  Quinton said reasonably: ‘I don’t know as I can stand for that, Mr. Harland. If you did make a break for it, we’d have to do some shooting. No, I’ll have to keep my eye on Mrs. Harland.’

  Ruth would have submitted. ‘He must do what he thinks is his duty, Dick,’ she pointed out; but Harland said furiously:

  ‘To hell with that! We’re making it easy for him! If we fight we can hold him up here for weeks.’

  ‘We’re not going to,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Not if he’s reasonable,’ Harland agreed; and he told Quinton strongly: ‘But if you’re not, we’ll start fighting right now. Either Mrs. Harland and I travel in my car, and alone, or you’ll have to drag us.’

  Deputy Hatch roused himself. ‘If there’s any dragging to do, I guess’t I can handle it,’ he said heavily; but Quinto
n intervened.

  ‘Let it go, Joe. We’ll trail them.’ He told Ruth: ‘I don’t want to make this any harder for you than I have to.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t,’ Ruth assented. She smiled. ‘I’m sure, for instance, that you’ll let me pack a bag,’ she said.

  ‘Sophy can go up with you?’ he agreed.

  So Ruth and Mrs. Parkins, Ruth calling Mrs. Huston to help her, went upstairs. Harland’s own bag was ready — he had not unpacked it since their return that afternoon — so he took this opportunity to telephone Roger Pryde, who handled his legal business, and enlist his aid. Roger did no criminal work, but he promised to locate the best legal talent available, to join Harland in Maine tomorrow.

  It was not yet eleven o’clock when they set out, Harland and Ruth in his car, Quinton and Hatch and Mrs. Parkins following close behind. Harland drove slowly, as much because his senses were still confused as out of any consideration for Quinton; and there was in him a stifled, futile rage so that his hands were tight on the wheel, his jaw set, his cheeks hot and stiff. Ruth beside him linked her hands through his arm, and for a while they did not speak at all, till he drew from her a measure of her composure and she felt the hard muscles in his arm relax.

  ‘There, darling,’ she said at last. ‘You’re all right now.’

  ‘This isn’t real, is it?’ he demanded. ‘Isn’t it just some sort of nightmare?’

  She said, with only a faint break in her voice: ‘I feel ever so important, being indicted!’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he assured her. ‘Quinton has probably always hated me for marrying Ellen, and of course he could tell the grand jury anything he chose. We’ll straighten it out damned quick tomorrow.’

  Ruth asked after a moment: ‘Even if the sugar did have arsenic mixed in it — how can he know, Dick?’

  Harland had had no time for such considerations. ‘I don’t know. How could he?’

  She considered. ‘What became of the lunch hamper?’

  ‘I think we left it on the beach. I don’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘Leick probably has it.’

  ‘He didn’t go home at all after he came to Boston with us, when we brought. Ellen. He went off to the woods, left me in Bangor.’

  ‘I expect he went down to the beach and got it, and his wash boiler, that night Ellen died. He had plenty of time, after he brought the doctor.’

  Harland thought long before he spoke again. ‘If Leick has it, he wouldn’t give it to Quinton. But even if he did — didn’t Ellen use all the sugar?’

  ‘I suppose not. I put in plenty. It was in an envelope. She tore the corner off and poured some into her cup.’

  ‘She must have put the envelope in the hamper, and Quinton’s got hold of it somehow.’ Harland added bitterly: ‘Or else he’s lying. Maybe he planted it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  He said slowly: ‘You know — I believe Ellen killed herself, Ruth.’

  She looked at him wonderingly. ‘Why, Dick? Why do you think so?’

  He hesitated. Upon his tongue he had set a seal so long, but now he was weary of silence. ‘I had told her we’d have to separate,’ he admitted. ‘We’d been discussing it for a long time; and that morning I decided finally to leave her, and told her so.’

  She waited, and he was conscious of the white blur of her face upturned to his. He kept his eyes upon the road till her hand at last pressed his arm.

  ‘Why, Dick?’ she asked again. ‘If you want to tell me.’

  So he told her what he had thought he would never tell anyone. He told her how Danny died; and he heard her low murmur of pitying grief. She asked no questions; but his tongue, once loosed, went on, omitting nothing. ‘She didn’t know, not for a long time, that I knew,’ he said at last. ‘You see, that day — while I was trying to revive Danny — she said we were going to have a baby. So I couldn’t tell anyone the truth, couldn’t even let Ellen herself know that I knew. And I tried to — keep our love alive, tried to make life together possible for us. Perhaps if our baby had lived, I could have done it. But it died.

  ‘Then one day we quarrelled. She accused me of loving you, and — I can see now that I did love you then, because the accusation made me furious. So I told her I knew she had — killed Danny.’

  Still Ruth did not speak; and he said at last: ‘And after that she tried to win me back, and when she saw she couldn’t, she killed herself.’

  She lifted his right hand from the wheel with both hers an pressed it against her cheek and kissed it over and over. ‘Darling, darling, darling,’ she whispered. ‘How wretched you’ve been.’

  ‘Not since I’ve known you love me.’

  ‘I want to be so good to you.’

  ‘You have been. You are.’

  ‘And now this!’ She said miserably: ‘I don’t mind for myself, but it’s terrible for you.’

  They drove a while without speech, and she pressed close to him, and the headlights of Quinton’s car behind them shone through the rear window, so that sometimes when he turned his head he could see her eyes, deep and steady, and when she met his eyes, she smiled. He said at last:

  ‘What started Quinton digging into this now, I wonder?’ She did not answer. ‘Maybe he’s been at it right along,’ he hazarded. ‘Or — maybe he just waited till we were happiest, so he could hurt us most.’

  ‘Sh-h! Don’t, darling,’ she urged. ‘Let’s stop thinking till we know more about it. Please!’

  ‘You’re a wonderful woman!’

  ‘You’re a wonderful man!’

  ‘You don’t seem to think of yourself at all,’ he protested. ‘But — it’s you he’s after! You’re the one he’s had indicted.’

  ‘You’re the one I’m thinking about, darling. I just wish there were some way you needn’t have to — suffer so.’

  He laughed in a sudden lifting strength. ‘Suffer? Me?’ he cried. ‘Why, Lord love you, Ruth, this gives me a chance to fight for you, to do something for you! Quinton’s done me a favor, really. He’s giving me a chance to show how much I love you!’

  She smiled with him. ‘You don’t have to show me, darling. I already know!’

  ‘Then I’ll show the world,’ he declared, and they came to Portsmouth and crossed into Maine.

  Just beyond the bridge, the car behind suddenly drew alongside and passed and cut in front of them and stopped. Harland jammed his brakes, and Quinton on one side, the deputy on the other, came back to them.

  Harland asked sharply: ‘What’s wrong?’

  Quinton’s smile was like a gleeful shout. ‘We’re in Maine now!’ he said. ‘Mrs. Harland, you’re under arrest. I’ve an indictment warrant charging you with murder. Harland, the deputy sheriff will ride with you from now on. You’re held as a material witness. Mrs. Harland, shift into my car. You’ll go the rest of the way with me.’

  – IV –

  Perry’s Harbor is a town — or a city — of two or three thousand people, lying along a steep hillside above the water, most of the houses strung on roughly parallel streets which eventually angle together to form the Square. This is a tree-shaded triangle set with maples and tall elms. Cross streets ascend the hillside, and the county jail is on top of the hill. The courthouse is a block beyond the Square.

  Harland — the rotund deputy noisily asleep beside him, Quinton’s car ahead showing the way — drove into town toward ten o’clock next morning. He followed Quinton’s car to the jail where Ruth must be lodged, and he went in with her and Quinton and stood with her during the brief formalities. They had only a moment together. ‘All right?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine, darling! I slept till daylight.’ She added smilingly: ‘But I’m starved! I hope the food’s good here.’

  ‘I’ll have you out before night,’ he promised; and she touched his hand.

  ‘Don’t lose your head, Dick. We’ll need to be patient. It will take time.’ Then Quinton spoke to her, and she kissed Harland, and they parted. She followe
d the jailor through the heavy door, and Quinton and Harland were left together. Harland said harshly:

  ‘I suppose you’ll lock me up too.’

  ‘You’re on your own recognizance,’ Quinton explained. ‘I guess you’ll not run away.’

  There was something so sleek and sure in the man’s bland countenance that Harland choked with helpless rage, but he held his tone steady. ‘I’ll be at the hotel. How can I arrange bail for her?’

  Quinton said calmly. ‘You can’t. This is a murder charge.’

  ‘Damn it, Quinton, you know that’s nonsense!’

  ‘The grand jurors took it seriously, Mr. Harland.’

  ‘What started you on this now? Ellen’s been dead almost two years.’

  Quinton said mildly: ‘The evidence has only just become available. The news of your marriage led me to make an investigation — and the facts came to light.’

  ‘What facts?’

  ‘A motive, for one thing,’ Quinton told him. ‘I mean the fact that Ruth loved you. And I found proof that Ellen died of arsenic poisoning, found arsenic mixed with the sugar in the envelope in the hamper.’

  ‘Where’d you get the hamper?’

  ‘I got it; that’s enough.’

  ‘The arsenic could have been put there since.’

  The other shook his head. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to accept the fact, Mr. Harland. Arsenic was mixed with the sugar which Ellen put in her coffee that day.’

  Harland insisted: ‘Then Ellen put it there.’

  ‘Ruth put the sugar in the envelope, gave the sealed envelope to Ellen at the picnic.’ Quinton moved toward the door. ‘Now I’ve business, Mr. Harland. You can find me at my office. I may see you at the hotel.’

  Harland followed him out to the street. Mrs. Parkins was waiting in Quinton’s car. Deputy Hatch had disappeared, and Harland drove to the Perry House and registered. When he signed his name, the little old man behind the marble-topped desk looked at him curiously; but he said no word, took a key, picked up Harland’s bag and led the way to a room on the second floor. The room overlooked an area on which backed garages and stores, and Harland could see the waters of the narrow Bay beyond. The Perry House was an old hotel, its days of glory past. The wallpaper was stained, the carpet worn, the brass double bed sagged in the middle as though it had wearily surrendered to the burdens it was forced to bear. The pictures on the wall were familiar, of the sort that were sold by the gross in the years before the turn of the century, their gold frames permanently spotted by generations of flies. There was a stale smell of dust and coal smoke and disinfectant; and Harland opened the windows, fighting them when they stuck, pounding at the sashes till his hands were bruised.