It was Alice’s argument, in almost the same words. Myra tried to speak and Richard would not let her. He said definitely, “There’s no use in talking, Sam. It’s all settled. Alice agreed once to a divorce …”
Sam did not appear to hear. Alice sat in silence; only her eyes moved, watching. Sam said to Myra, gently, “It’s tough. But you are too nice a person to want to break up a marriage. Nobody blames you or Dick for what happened before Alice was pardoned. You had every right then, both of you, to let yourselves”—he hesitated and said—“to let yourself believe that you were falling in love.”
“We do love each other,” said Myra suddenly and, to her own ears, unexpectedly.
Richard turned then and looked at her and, across the room, across the lilies Mildred had brought, through the warring, subtle elements of strife in the room, their eyes met. Richard smiled a little. His look said, It’s all right, I’m in control, I love you.
Sam started to speak, saw their look and stopped.
Alice got up with a soft swish of motion. She walked quickly across the room, between Myra and Richard, her face white again as a piece of stone. Sam said, “Wait, Alice! They’ll understand …”
But Alice turned in the doorway. She looked at Myra and she looked at Richard, and said, “You can’t divorce me, Richard. And I won’t divorce you. That is final.”
She stood for an instant, a small, childish figure in the demure, pale-blue dress, her hand on the door casing, her fair head lifted. Then she moved again, and, without another glance at any of them, up the stairs and out of sight.
Sam said, “She’s right, Dick. In time, only a little time, you’ll see that she was right. You couldn’t put her out of the house right away, anyhow. You can’t treat her so cruelly.” He paused and thought for a moment, rubbing his hand nervously over his bald spot. He said then, brightening, “That’s it, of course. Take time. Give yourself time. Give Myra time to think. Give Alice time …”
Time. That of course was what Alice wanted; time to win Richard back.
Richard said slowly, “I’ll not put her out of the house. You know better than that, Sam. I’ll give her all the time she wants.”
Sam’s worried face lightened further. “Fine,” he said. “That’s the thing to do. Wait a bit. Give yourselves time to think and …”
Richard whirled around. “It will make no difference, Sam. I won’t change—neither will Myra.”
“Okay,” said Sam agreeably—too agreeably, since he had won his point. “Okay. But don’t be in a hurry. Alice has had a hellish break. She’s got to have time to get over it, time to get her bearings again …”
Time, thought Myra again; time to win Richard back again, to entrench herself again in her own house. Time …
Obviously Sam was thinking the same thing. With time, everything would settle, itself. He came to Myra and his very solicitude betrayed his certainty. He said, with real compunction and real sympathy, “I’m sorry, Myra. But after you’ve had a chance to think, you’ll see that there’s only one thing to do that’s fair to Dick and Alice and to yourself …”
He was on Alice’s side, as he had frankly said.
Richard said again, quickly, “Believe me, Sam, I love Myra and she loves me and nothing will change that.”
“But you’ll wait? You’ll not do anything in a hurry?”
“We’ll wait,” said Richard. “Naturally. That’s reasonable.”
Sam’s face brightened again. His look almost said that he—and Alice—had won. He put his hand on Myra’s arm. “Everybody, Myra, some time, has a spot of rough weather. I’m sorry about all this. But I think Alice is in the right. And I think that you think so, too.” He turned abruptly to Richard. “I’ll go up now. If the D. A. does come around, call me.”
“All right.” Sam went away quickly, and up the stairs. Richard said, with a queer, half smile, “He’s too good a lawyer to stay when he thinks he’s won. But he hasn’t won, Myra.”
Richard didn’t know. Alice’s and Sam’s plea for time seemed to him only reasonable. And it was reasonable. Fatally reasonable.
Richard said thoughtfully, “Alice will agree. I can’t force her to divorce me, but she’ll see that it’s the only thing to do. I’ll give her time. …” As if time to him had a very different and specific meaning, he looked quickly then at the clock and came to Myra and put his arms around her.
“The district attorney is on his way here—that is, to the police station. He’s driving. There’s something I want to see about before he gets here. Wait here for me,” he said. “I’ll be back. …” And suddenly he was gone, running along the hall, stopping to snatch his coat. The front door closed again.
The room seemed very empty after he had gone, and yet, in a curious, indefinable way, inhabited. The rosy cupid smiled at her complacently—and rather slyly. Everything about her suddenly seemed sentient, aware of her—the intruder, in Alice’s house, and inimical, arrayed stealthily against her.
She went to Richard’s deep lounge chair and sat down and stared into the dying fire. Rain dripped unevenly on the terrace like recurrent whispered steps.
Where had Richard gone? What was it he had to do before the district attorney arrived? But it didn’t matter, she thought again. Nothing connected with Jack Manders’ murder mattered now, except that Richard was no longer in danger. Even if they found Richard’s gun, it didn’t matter.
But they hadn’t found the gun.
Why not?
The house was very quiet. Nothing moved or breathed except the whisper of the rain, the hushed sigh of the fire. Yet it was as if the rain, the fire—the motionless red curtains, the walls themselves repeated it: Why not?
Murder had walked in that house and the house remembered it. Almost at her feet a man had died.
But Mildred had shot him—and Mildred had died. So the house should, now, forget. The walls, the silence, the air itself should no longer send out danger warnings.
Danger? But that was absurd; that was fancy.
Nevertheless, she sat up abruptly. She listened almost in spite of herself. She looked around the room, trying to search out an invisible enemy, to identify and conquer an inaudible voice. There was nothing there, of course.
But all at once the intangible sense of danger became tangible for it focused sharply upon the gun.
A gun was dangerous.
A gun had fired five bullets into the man who had died in that room.
Suddenly it seemed to Myra that murder itself, once summoned into being, still dwelt with stubborn furtive purpose, within that house. She rose and went to the room where Mildred had died and looked for the gun.
CHAPTER 18
SHE ARGUED TO HERSELF. She told herself there was no danger. She went into the hall and the door to the ivory-and-gold drawing room was open and lights were still on, reflecting themselves brilliantly in the long mirror. Aside from a certain disorder, a mute and indefinable atmosphere of recent disturbance, there was nothing to testify to the horror and the dreadful disorder that had obtained in that dignified and gracious room. She walked past the place where Mildred had died and into the room. She closed the door into the hall and began her search.
Chairs were pushed a little awry. Someone had spilled cigarette ashes on the thin, garlanded old Aubusson carpet. Alice’s portrait looked down upon it all, her brown eyes soft, her luminous and tender beauty untouched by the thing that had happened there.
The gun was not there and it had to be there. Only Mildred could have taken it from the newel post. Only Mildred could have hidden it, probably not on that terrible June night, nearly two years ago, for there wasn’t enough time, but later. After Alice was charged with murder, in the hope the police would find it? In the hope that it would seal the case against Alice? So that, if any question ever arose, there was the gun, hidden in the house, mutely testifying against Alice?
Or against Richard.
But not (if she were suspected) against Mildred. The police would bel
ieve (obviously Mildred had reasoned) that Mildred herself would have had a chance to get rid of the gun forever and would have done so. But that Alice, in prison, could not have removed it. And that Richard, living in the house, able to dispose of it at a moment’s notice, believed it safe. Perhaps Mildred had reasoned all of that and more; perhaps she had not reasoned at all but had acted merely at the erratic biddings of an erratic, terrified mind.
Myra looked everywhere—in the cushioned sofas, in the drawers of the small desk where Mildred had written her last words. She searched the elaborate tortoise-shell and Buhl commode against the further wall. She went to the long windows at either side of the fireplace and searched behind the stiff draperies. One window was still open and rain had blown in so there was a damp, dark patch upon the silk. Rain on the terrace murmured; the glass glittered as if eyes beyond it, in the night, watched her. She closed the window. She searched in places where she’d looked before, almost feverishly, driven by a kind of nervous tension within her, as if merely physical exertion could prevent her from thinking of herself—and Richard and Alice. She looked again among the ivory velvet cushions of a delicate French sofa and there was no gun. She looked for a third time within the depths of the same arm chair and stopped.
The gun was gone. And she didn’t know and could not imagine what Mildred had done with it. She might, of course, have hidden it outside. There was probably time for her to do so before Alice came downstairs (since Mildred had entered the house either by the long window Myra had just closed, or by the unlocked French door in the library), or she might even have removed the gun earlier, before she roused Alice. In that case it could be anywhere.
Or, and in spite of Richard’s and Tim’s belief, the police might have it and have taken it away without telling any of them—intentionally, perhaps to test it secretly.
She went to the door and turned out the lights as she went into the hall. Richard had not returned. No one was in the library. She returned to it slowly. The night was really over—or would soon be. The clock struck a brisk half hour. It was still dark; morning would be stormy and late and dreary.
She thought vaguely of turning the lock in the French door. It was not a custom of the house but she started toward it. And then saw that while no one was now in the room, someone had been there.
The small Capo di Monte cupid lay smashed and shattered as if flung by wanton, evil hands against the hearth. The cupid Alice loved.
Small rosy pieces, a blue sash, the tiny slivered fingers of a hand, picked themselves out rather horribly upon the hearthstone at her feet.
She took a step or two toward it and stopped.
The room, otherwise, was exactly the same.
But the shattered pieces at her feet seemed to confirm her obstinate sense of danger, as if murder chose deliberately to leave a token of its presence.
Murder.
She wanted to hurry from the room—from the drone of the rain on the flagstones outside, the wavering curtains, the cupid. She made herself sit down again in Richard’s chair. She would think and reason out—and then dismiss this intrusive, stubborn uneasiness which nudged at her as if it had hands, pointing, a voice saying in a breathless whisper, look, look, here I am: Murder.
She caught herself sharply. She made herself take a cigarette and light it. She made herself try to analyze. Jack had been murdered, yes. But Mildred had shot him, and now, nearly two years later, had confessed and taken poison and died. Therefore murder as a presence, as a continuing force did not exist. It had begun with Mildred’s hatred; it had ended with Mildred’s death.
So put that on one side, jot it down on the ledger; that was fact.
On the other side, the debit side, the danger side, were two things where there had been one—the gun, the shattered cupid.
And the shattered cupid carried with it another implication, another and perhaps more significant focal point of danger than the gun, and that was a hatred of Alice. And not only a hatred of Alice but a blind, insensate rage which had its outlet in sheer wanton destruction.
She forced herself, methodically, to consider how it could have been done. Obviously while she was in the gold-and-ivory drawing room, someone had entered the library and broken the cupid. She had heard no one on the stairs or along the hall. The French door was unlocked. Someone could have entered from the terrace. Who?
Methodically, too, she went over the too-short list of people in the house—Sam, Tim, Aunt Cornelia, the servants. None of them would have smashed the cupid and it was not an accident. She was tempted to call it accident, to dismiss it as accident, and she could not, as she could not dismiss the insidious sense of danger, pointing out its own existence.
If she accepted its existence, then what? Suppose she accepted it, only hypothetically, only for a moment. Jack’s murder, of course, was fact. But could Mildred have been murdered?
It was, even as a hypothesis, untenable. Myra had seen her die. Alice had seen her die. And Alice had been with Mildred for at least ten minutes or more before Mildred’s death and no one else had been there. Consequently, if Mildred had been murdered (how?), only Alice could have murdered her.
Those were facts, too. Well, then, examine them. Were they facts that allowed no loophole for the present existence of other facts? For the existence of murder?
Certainly Mildred had died of poison. The doctor, everyone, had said so; therefore it had to be self-administered. Besides, if Mildred had not been a suicide (in spite of the letter of confession she had written, in spite of the poison which Mildred herself had purchased with terrible and significant-appropriateness a few days after Jack’s murder), if, in spite of all this, Mildred, by any conceivable means had been murdered, there had to be a motive.
That was the keynote, the center, the whole basis for any hypothetical structure which included murder.
What then could that motive have been? Why would anybody desire to murder Mildred? More importantly, why would anybody have to murder Mildred? For murder has a dread and obstinate twin and that is urgency. Why, then, should anyone have been forced to murder Mildred?
Myra put out her cigarette, got up, walked the length of the room and back again, and still that hypothetical line of thought persisted, and would not, yet, be dismissed. Well, then, go on. Suppose Mildred threatened somebody.
How?
That question at last brought her in a full circle back to murder—a known murder, a proved murder. Jack Manders had been murdered, and Alice’s pardon had re-opened the investigation into his death. If the manner of Mildred’s death could be questioned for a moment, the basis for inquiry would have to concern itself with the recent, immediate events: Jack Manders’ murder; Alice’s pardon and return home; the opening of a new investigation. Could Mildred have known anything at all about Jack’s murder which now became dangerous? So dangerous that somebody had been forced by that danger to kill Mildred and thus silence her?
Suppose Mildred had not murdered him (this denied the confession which no one could have induced her to write if it had not been true), but suppose, thought Myra rather desperately, Mildred had not killed Jack. What happened if one removed the fact of the letter?
But it was a full circle of thought in more ways than one, for it brought her up against impossibility again. Only Alice was present when Mildred died and Alice had no motive.
Alice indeed, of all people in the house, could have had no fear of anything that led to Jack Manders’ murder, for Alice could not again be charged with Jack’s murder. Alice was safe.
And besides, even if she had wanted to, even if there had been some terrible, mysterious need, she would not have murdered Mildred. She would not have risked a murder only a few hours after her pardon and release from prison, in her own house, and in circumstances which, if the word murder ever was uttered in the case of Mildred’s suicide, would instantly and inevitably point to her as the murderer.
Alice would not have murdered Mildred or anybody—and only Alice was with Mildre
d when she took poison.
She went back to Richard’s chair.
The intrusive sense of danger, as if the walls of the room, the bricks of the house knew and subtly, mutely, endeavored to reveal that warning and that secret, was wrong. Murder had once existed, but it had stopped.
Suppose Alice had not told everything! Suddenly Myra remembered the opened window, the stained wet patch on the curtain. Suppose someone else had been there, too! Someone who had, say, threatened Mildred. Suppose there had been some trickery about the poison, suppose Mildred had not intended the thing she took actually to be poison, suppose …
She sank back again, realizing that her fancy had traveled too fast. Mildred had bought the poison; Mildred had brought it there; and Mildred had written her suicide letter. So she couldn’t have been murdered and thus Alice could not—either knowingly or unknowingly—protect anyone else.
And who, besides Richard, would she protect? Richard could not possibly have escaped the gold-and-ivory room by the French window, run along the terrace, to enter the house and go up the back stairs in time to come running down the front stairs at the time when he came.
There was no murder. She told herself that again, and again a nagging little voice persisted, trying to refute it: who gained by Mildred’s death?
What did it accomplish, if you viewed it from that angle?
Well, in the first place, it stopped the new investigation. So, therefore, it might, for the purposes of argument, be said to benefit Richard, Tim and Webb. And possibly Sam.
And more remotely herself, because of Richard, and because of Tim.
Could Alice so strongly wish to protect any of those people that she would refuse to give evidence against him, even though she knew it to be murder and knew who had murdered Mildred?
Richard?—yes. Tim?—yes. Sam?—yes.
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