Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  Mr. Gillespie was agreeable to this. She waited in his car on Wednesday night, observing the fervor with which he kissed his wife good-by at the door, and was astonished to have him start down the hill by the longest route.

  Being not without an education in the ways of wolves, she had thought of Harry as strictly monogamous. Had she read him all wrong? If the road led into any dark canyons, she’d better be prepared.

  “Flattering myself,” Georgine reflected dryly when, after five minutes, Mr. Gillespie abruptly turned about and drove back to Grettry Road. He was purposeful, he offered no explanation, he looked narrowly at the lighted windows of Hollister’s house, and then got out and went into his own home.

  He came out almost immediately, looking obscurely satisfied and relieved. “Forgot something,” said Harry, and drove off again, this time by the direct route.

  H’m; funny. He hadn’t—surely he hadn’t expected to find his wife entertaining company at this time of night? Had he gone back in that hope, or fear?

  He was very sociable now, chatting about the difficulties of night work. “Sure, like you say, it turns your life upside down. It’s like walking around in a bad dream half the time. But hell,” he added simply, “the job’s there to be done and it’s up to anyone who can, to pitch in and do it. ’Tisn’t much when you think of what the boys took on Bataan.”

  He meant it, Georgine discovered with respect. You didn’t often run across such candid patriotism.

  “The toughest part,” Gillespie went on, “is leaving Mimi alone, nights. Of course she’s got that da—her brother Ralph with her. Not that he’s much good,” said Ralph’s host with appalling frankness, “but he’s fond of her, I’ll say that for him.”

  His ensuing silence seemed to demand comment. “I thought he didn’t look very well,” Georgine ventured.

  “Well!” Harry grunted. “He’s prob’ly as strong as I am, they got him patched up good enough after that time his plane crashed, three-four years ago. But he feels pretty sorry for himself, seems like the gov’ment never has done right for him since he was old enough to vote.”

  “He, uh, suffers with his nerves, I gathered.”

  Mr. Gillespie gave a short laugh. “He’s worried. Hasn’t felt right for a month, since they sentenced his old pal Pelley. Hell, I oughtn’t to ’a’ said that, he wants it all forgotten about him being in the Silvershirt gang for a while; but I say, what’s the odds if he’s out of it now?”

  I bet you never let him forget it, Georgine thought with a flash of reluctant sympathy for Ralph. “Oh, look here,” she exclaimed as the car went round a familiar curve, “you’re not to take me all the way home! Just drop me by the street-car line.”

  “Not on your life,’ said Mr. Gillespie gallantly. “I got plenty of time. Say, if you’re going to be working nights you ought to let Hollister know. He’s death on knowing just who’s at home in his block.” His voice was heavy.

  “Really,” said Georgine, opening the car door. “I hardly think that’s necessary. He’s enough of a dictator already!”

  “You said it,” Harry Gillespie agreed. “Well, see you tomorrow night.”

  It was odd, she thought, how omnipresent this Roy Hollister seemed; he kept turning up either in person or in conversation.

  And yet the man himself was so ordinary! If you tried to describe him, you’d start out, “Well, he’s an air-raid warden”—and then find yourself stumped. You might also say he was bluff and hearty: a manner which did not appeal to Georgine, but which doubtless was well-meant. He had strolled out at noon to chat.

  “Well, well, Mrs. Wyeth! Still with us?”

  “For a few days more, Mr. Hollister.”

  “Not finished yet? How you gettin’ on with the old boy’s great discovery? He showed you the Death Ray yet?”

  “That’s only his joke,” said Georgine coolly. “I don’t know what he’s working on.”

  “You don’t?” The warden laughed heartily. “You’re nearly through, and you haven’t found out yet?”

  “It’s just words to me. I only copy, you know.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Hollister vaguely. She thought, What an empty sort of man he seems; a face like ten thousand others, and nothing but platitudes behind it… Or was that all? He was looking searchingly at her, and for a moment something stirred and uncoiled beneath the idle sentences they had exchanged.

  Georgine rose, and he laughed again and strolled away. “Got a call to make,” he said over his shoulder; almost as if that remark were significant.

  She thought, Darn him anyhow, reminding me of that old yarn about the Death Ray… I never did look at the Professor’s flower bed; I wonder what it’s like from down here… I could step round this side of the house and find out…

  She had just managed to force her way through the outer layer of flowering shrubs when she looked up at the bathroom window. It framed a bald forehead, an ear-fringe of black hair, a pair of black eyes which were watching her steadily. The Professor appeared to be drying his hands. He was taking a long time to do it.

  Georgine gave him a sunny smile and a wave, and with a falsely nonchalant air turned and waded off through the bushes, in quite another direction.

  It was later that Thursday afternoon when she held brief converse with Claris Frey. Claris had emerged from her own front door, waving good-by to Mr. Todd McKinnon, resplendent in his warden’s armband, who had seemingly been paying the last of his duty calls. Then she came wandering down the road, fetching up beside Georgine and gazing disconsolately out across the canyon. “Darn him,” she murmured vaguely, “darn him, anyhow!”

  “Who?” Georgine inquired, smiling, “Mr. McKinnon?”

  “Oh, no. He’s a good Joe; he dried the dishes for me, while he was waiting to call on Daddy, and then he never did get to. No, I mean Mr. Hollister. Did you see him come out of our house?”

  “No, I just came out.”

  “I bet he was lookin’ pleased with himself,” Claris said, her soft hazel eyes bright with resentment. “He pinched me.” She rubbed herself reminiscently. “As if it wasn’t bad enough that he kept Dad until too late for us to go downtown! We were going to buy a war bond, and then get me a new sweater—Dad always thinks he has to choose the color—and now the banks are shut and it’s too late. I broke a date, too, just so I could do something Dad asked me to, for once, and old Hollister has to come in and tell dirty stories for an hour first, and hold us up!”

  “Dear me,” Georgine said. “Dirty stories, to you?”

  “Oh, no. I was in the kitchen, but I think that’s what he was writing to Dad. On the pad, you know. Fact is, I’m almost sure, because the pages he’d written were burning in the fireplace when I went in—and I could hear him laughing while Dad read them.”

  “Always pleased with his own jokes,” Georgine murmured. “Was your father amused?”

  “How do I know? He doesn’t laugh aloud, much. I could hear just about what he usually says when people are writing on his pad. ‘No, I can’t do that,’ and ‘what makes you think so,’ and ‘I see your point there.’ Sounds absolutely dumb,” said Claris languidly.

  “Has your father been deaf long?” Georgine asked.

  “Since I was little. My mother was living with us then. I don’t remember much about it, but he told me there was an explosion in the factory where he worked, and he—well, he couldn’t even talk for a couple of years after.” Georgine clicked her tongue. “Oh, they paid him for it, we’re still getting money from some kind of a fund they had, but—he learned to talk again, but he couldn’t go back to work because he couldn’t hear. He doesn’t seem to mind, most of the time,” said Claris with superb callousness. “Look, there he goes down into the canyon to work.” She sighed, her lovely young face slack with boredom, and turned to depart. “Maybe I’d better see if I can unbreak that movie date, I haven’t got a darn thing to do.”

  Georgine said something which sounded so arch that she immediately regretted it. “Isn’t
Ricky at home this afternoon?”

  Claris twitched round as if startled, and looked full at Georgine. Then she moistened her lips and smiled, slowly. “Ricky Devlin? As if I had anything to do with him, except living next door!”

  “I’m getting spoiled,” Georgine told herself wryly; “when I’m in Grettry Road, I can’t step outside the door without meeting someone, and then I have to come home and go into an empty house.” She said thanks and good-by to Harry Gillespie, on this Thursday night, and went serenely through the gate and up the long walk to her garden cottage, and opened the door with her key.

  The moment she stepped inside she knew that someone had been here during her absence.

  In the next minutes, after a frantic survey of the small house and its contents, she was increasingly sure; and yet whoever had searched the place had tried to arrange that she should not know. There were only the few small signs, obvious only to a housekeeper’s eyes: the rug that had been left straight and was now slightly awry, the sugar tin in the kitchen turned the wrong way, and the clasp of her miniature briefcase hanging loose as if someone hadn’t been able to master the trick of its fastening; but stronger than anything was that sense of something alien. “Someone’s been sitting in my chair, said the middle-sized bear.”

  “I don’t like this,” Georgine said half-aloud. She stood in the middle of the living-room and turned slowly, her blue eyes growing dark with perplexity as she surveyed it inch by inch. Her hands were balled into tight fists in her pockets, and her lower lip folded over the upper in that oddly youthful gesture which with her meant not temper but perturbation.

  And, ten minutes later, “I might have expected something like that!” she said indignantly, dropping the telephone back into its cradle. What were the police good for, anyway? Her chin jutted out dangerously at the memory of that calm, reasonable voice at the other end of the wire. “Your house was entered in your absence. What makes you think so? Was the door open? Oh, it was locked. Any sign that the windows had been forced? They were all locked too? I see. Was there anything missing? I see…”

  It had gone on for several increasingly uncomfortable minutes, during which Georgine had battled with the impulse to shout, “Skip it!” and slam down the telephone. At the last, she and the desk sergeant had seemed to agree perfectly; it was all, they decided, in her imagination.

  “But it wasn’t,” she whispered, and darted another quick glance around the warm little brown room.

  Well, there was one solace in Barby’s absence. Georgine, not having to set an example, could leave the lights on. Only to her most secret self would she admit how much the dark frightened her.

  Friday came with such brilliant sunshine, such a heartening air of normality, that she convinced herself the sergeant might, after all, have been right. The day continued well with the arrival of a postcard from Barby, amazingly legible. The hostess must have held her hand while she wrote. “I am having a good time, I feel fine, we went wading today, X X X X Barby.”

  Georgine took it into the house and read it some eleven times. Then, realizing that she was late to work, she told herself not to be sentimental, and started off.

  She hadn’t yet done with receiving confidences from the neighbors. Her first encounter came as she toiled panting along the last lap of her journey, through the adjoining back yards of Grettry Road. Mimi Gillespie was in her garden, attired in a slack suit which only shipyard wages could have bought; Georgine had observed that Mimi dressed with almost painful suitability for every occasion. Her demeanor this morning, however, was not as debonair as her costume. She seemed to have been crying.

  “I guess I’m doing the gardening now,” Mimi said in answer to Georgine’s casual comment. She poked listlessly at a large milkweed. “My brother went away last night.”

  “Not for good, surely? Doesn’t he live with you?”

  “Oh, no,” Mimi said. “He goes up to his ranch every so often. It’s just a little stump farm out here”—she gestured vaguely northward—“with a couple of hands that help him work it on shares. I guess that’s really his home. He—did Harry talk to you about him, any?”

  Promptly and tactfully, Georgine lied.

  “Well, they don’t get on any too well. Harry doesn’t understand Ralphie at all, and they don’t feel the same way about the war. I do my best,” Mimi went on with a rather pathetic look of helplessness, “and I do so want to have everything nice, and have quiet at home.”

  “Of course you do,” said Georgine gently, beginning to edge toward the street. “I’ll have to hurry, I’m late. Look, would you tell Mr. Gillespie I shan’t have to impose on him tonight? I’m planning to get home by daylight.”

  She nodded to Roy Hollister, who had just emerged from the lower door of his house and was heading for the canyon path, and looked round to make sure Mimi had heard her. Mimi had disappeared into her own home, her thick-soled play shoes were even now clattering up the stairs from the basement game room to the street floor.

  The second encounter came during the noonday recess, when the wiry figure of Mr. Todd McKinnon appeared, strolling down the Road. Georgine, perched on the low fence at the end, greeted him with reservations. “Have you come to find out what sort of stuff I’m typing for the Professor? Everyone else wants to know, soon or late.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said agreeably, sitting down beside her, “but I’ll ask if you like.”

  She wondered fleetingly how old he was; somewhere in the early thirties, she’d guess, though those lean faces never changed much with years. “No, don’t bother,” she replied. “I don’t know. I can see, though, why the old gentleman wanted a typist who could simply copy without understanding, because the neighbors are certainly curious. Do you think they really believe it’s a Death Ray?”

  “These days,” said Mr. McKinnon, “people will believe anything. And why not? Take my invention, for example,” he continued indolently, but cocking an eye at her. “It sounds impossible, but the Army and Navy have agreed that nothing could be more desirable.”

  “Do tell me about it,” said Georgine, her eyes crinkling.

  “It’s a method of camouflage,” said the inventor, “that makes a bomber not only invisible but inaudible. The citizens of Tokyo wouldn’t know what had hit them.”

  “Remarkable. You’ve perfected this?”

  “Yes, indeed. The Armed Forces got me a special deferment while I worked on it. I fixed up a bomber for them,” said Mr. McKinnon, taking his mouth-organ from his pocket and hitting it violently on the palm of his hand, “and there was a demonstration. One and all were agreed that it was a complete success.”

  “That ought to revolutionize the conduct of the war.”

  “Well, yes, but there’s been a li’le trouble,” he said sadly. “We’ve never been able to find the bomber again—I’m afraid you think I’m not telling the truth.”

  “Oh, why not?” said Georgine. “My eldest son was the pilot. So that’s how you spend your time, inventing in the morning and playing the mouth-organ in the afternoon? Must be a fascinating life.”

  “I’m the envy of all comers,” Mr. McKinnon agreed. “The noise doesn’t disturb you, I hope?”

  “No, I like it. The Trout is one of my favorite songs. But I don’t hear it often. I’m working at top speed these days. And that reminds me. I’d best get started again, on some more of those scientific terms that don’t mean a thing.”

  “Slows you up, doesn’t it, when you can’t understand what you’re writing.” McKinnon was sympathetic.

  “Yes. I wish the Professor’d let me take work home.” A thought struck her as she rose to go into the house. “You don’t suppose,” she said softly, half to herself, “that someone believed I did just that, and was curious enough to—break into my house and find out?”

  McKinnon looked at her quickly. His eyes were gray with brown flecks, like particularly hard slabs of Scotch agate, and so deeply set under his brows that the upper lids were all but inv
isible. It gave them a curiously searching expression.

  “Someone’s been in your house? Recently?”

  “Since I came to work here.” Georgine already regretted having mentioned it. “At least I thought so, it may have been my imagination. It’s been running riot since last Monday.”

  McKinnon looked up Grettry Road, his eyes resting on one house after another; then the eyes smiled at her, as if to say, “Someone here? One of these ordinary people?”

  “You and the desk sergeant,” said Georgine cryptically, “must be brothers under the skin.” She went back to work, feeling, for some obscure reason, more comfortable.

  She got up a burst of speed that afternoon, sliding the carbons from finished sheets and shooting them between fresh ones with scarcely a pause, feeling efficient and proud of herself. A remote part of her mind heard the afternoon sounds of the Road: the majestic footsteps of Mrs. Blake moving about the house; the telephone bell; an occasional car whirring past the intersection; and through it all the oddly carrying strains of the harmonica, from far up the street. Possibly in compliment to her, McKinnon was again playing The Trout.

  Toward mid-afternoon Georgine paused in her work for a moment, conscious of some difference in the air. It was cooler, and the light had a new quality. She got up to stretch, and looked out the window.

  The fog-bank outside the Golden Gate, which had lain quiescent through all these brilliant days, was moving at last in response to some mysterious law of weather. Lazily it had shifted and uncoiled, rising, hollowing like an enormous shell to roof the City and the Bay, streaming gray and thick toward the folded canyons of the eastern hills. For a few minutes you could still see the confetti-colored houses on the flat lands below, with the fog’s shadow advancing across them smoothly, without haste. Then they were blotted out, and the sun also disappeared.