The velvet hand

by Helen Reilly

  Philip smiled scathingly. “Women don’t break into houses in the middle of the night to smash younger rival’s hats, and then plan to hang around on the premises and drink tea.”

  The question then arose about going to the police. Hugo was in favor of it. Philip flatly refused. “What are we going to tell them? That a hat was destroyed? I won’t have those bunglers meddling in my business. They wouldn’t find out anything anyway.”

  Ever since he had gotten his first ticket Philip had been violent on the subject of the police; the very sight of a uniform infuriated him. The abortive conference broke up. Hugo left for New York, Miriam went to dress, William resumed his work with the mower and Philip got up abruptly and stalked into his study. Poor man—Kit’s heart ached for him. If only she could do something, but there was no closeness between them and it was too late for that now. The morning dragged on. Nothing happened until a quarter of twelve. Then there was news, not of Libby, but nevertheless important.

  Unable to settle to anything, Kit went out to get a breath of air. She was wandering aimlessly around near the hedge at the foot of the lawn when a car pulled up. It was Jill Crofton, a young married woman and a friend of Libby’s, who lived farther along the road. Libby had promised to help with the club dance on the nineteenth. Jill said, “I’ve been trying to get hold of her. Your uncle said yesterday that she was away. Is she back?”

  Kit said no, and Jill went on chattering. “I thought maybe she was when we saw the car parked near your orchard gate last night.”

  A car parked near the gate—Kit’s heart missed a beat. “What car, Jill?”

  “The yellow convertible with the black top that that perfectly marvelous-looking friend of Libby’s drives. We ran into them over at Longnook Inn two or three times last month. He’s certainly stunning, and a terrific dancer. What’s his name? Wilcox, Wallace. . .”

  “Tony Wilder?”

  “Yes, Wilder, that’s it.”

  Kit kept her interest mild, brows lightly raised. “What time was it that you saw the car, Jill?”

  “It was pretty late,” Jill said. “Threeish. We were at the Norths’ party. There was a woman in the car in evening dress. She must have thought we were crazy when we honked our horn and started to stop. Then we saw it wasn’t Libby and went on.” She said that the woman was tall and not young—they couldn’t see very clearly.

  It was enough for Kit. The woman must have been Eleanor Oaks. She was alone in the car. She wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat, so there had been someone with her. And the convertible was parked near the gates into the orchard, which meant opposite the side entrance to Anita’s. . .

  Jill was becoming curious. She was too polite to show it openly, finally drove on. Kit went, straight as an arrow, over the lawn and across the road and downhill to the long low ranch house, windows flashing in the sun. Sun and air, openness, order, these belonged to Anita Stewart, were her setting. She was as far apart from the slightly soiled Park Avenue apartment and Eleanor Oaks and the man Pedrick as the moon was from the earth. But, considering what had been done the night before, Kit had to know as much of the truth as it was possible to get.

  Anita was home. Her car was parked under the elms and her little boy, Bobbie, was playing in his sandbox. Kit called to Bobbie and he waved a shovel gravely and returned to the mountain he was building. Anita opened the door herself and they went into the big bright living room. “No news?” she asked with a glance at Kit’s set face.

  Kit shook her head. She refused tea, coffee, a Coke or a drink. “Well, at least you’ll accept a chair,” Anita said, smiling. Kit didn’t return her smile. She did sit down on a footstool near the huge fieldstone fireplace. Get it over with. “Anita, last night. . .” She sketched a quick resume of the ladder, the hat, the kettle and the open study window.

  Anita listened absorbedly, bewildered and distressed. But she was on her guard, and she was holding stronger emotion in check. When Kit finished she didn’t seem to notice, sat on, a cigarette burning unheeded in her fingers, her eyes on a distant vista of rolling fields. Kit plunged doggedly ahead. “I just found out that a yellow convertible belonging to Eleanor Oaks was parked outside this house at three a.m. this morning.”

  A pause, a long one. Blood swept up into Anita’s cheeks. She said in a cool tone, looking at Kit as though she were a stranger, “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at—or what all this has to do with Libby. ... I didn’t see any parked car last night—and I don’t know anything whatever about Eleanor Oaks. I never saw the woman in my life.”

  “I think,” Kit said steadily, “that there was a man with Eleanor Oaks. I think the man was Samuel Pedrick ”

  They were both standing now, facing each other. Anita’s color was gone. It had faded as suddenly as it had risen. Her lips were pressed tightly together. There was a ring of pallor around them. She was bitterly, furiously angry. She was fighting hard to control her anger. She said in a curiously gentle voice, “You don’t know, you just think this man Pedrick was with the Oaks woman—and I still don’t see what it has to do with Libby.”

  “After what happened in our house last night you don’t think a car parked outside our gates at three in the morning is important?” Kit asked.

  The cigarette burned Anita’s fingers. She tossed it into the fireplace, rubbed the tips of her fingers on her plaid skirt, and laughed. It was a hard, brittle laugh. “Come, Kit, surely you don’t see that woman, or that man either, climbing ladders and smashing hats and putting kettles on to boil in a strange house in the dead of night?”

  Kit refused to be diverted. “I’ll tell you what I do think, Anita. I think you know Pedrick. You denied it, but I think you do. I saw you yesterday in our living room when his name was mentioned.”

  Anita stared at Kit whitely, her eyes burning. Suddenly she buried her face in her hands. Her body began to shake. It was then that Miriam walked into the room, walked in hurriedly like a woman trying to catch a train, loaded down with baggage. The baggage was Bobbie, whose hand she held. “Anita,” she cried. “Have you heard . . . ? Oh, Catherine’s told you. I got worried about Bobbie. With things like this going on no one is safe.” Her eyes bored into Anita’s. “I don’t think you ought to let him play outside alone—he’s so little.”

  Bobbie took his hand from Miriam’s indignantly. “Mama, please can I go back to my sandbox? Please can I? I’m making a mountain.”

  And so, Kit thought grimly, looking from one woman to the other, am I—and not out of a molehill. For it was a mountain. A mountain where a plain had been, rising suddenly from the earth, the knowledge that there was a bond between Anita and her aunt, that in some obscure way Miriam dominated Anita. Her aunt’s hasty arrival wasn’t accidental. It was deliberate.

  If Anita had been on the point of breaking down, she wasn’t now. She was still white and her eyes had an odd glitter to them, but she was in control of herself. “Bobbie— your face—and let me look at that knee. Your burglar last night, Miriam? Yes, Kit’s been telling me. . . . Dreadful. It gave me a jolt. You must think me a perfect fool, Kit.” And you, Kit said to herself, must think me one. Anita wouldn’t look at her, fussed, which was most uncharacteristic, about Bobbie’s cut, a mere scratch. “We’ll have to use iodine, darling.”

  Kit went, leaving her aunt in possession of the field. Out in the air and sunlight, from which the sparkle had gone, she walked slowly down the driveway thinking about Anita Stewart, assembling what she actually knew. It wasn’t much. Anita had come to Denfield when Bobbie was an infant in arms. Her husband was dead. He was a colonel in the Air Force, and had been killed in a test flight in Japan after having come safely through the war. There was a portrait of him in uniform in Anita’s living room which Bobbie proudly pointed out to visitors. Anita had disliked California, where she had lived when her husband was in the service, and she had come to Denfield, she said, because she loved the New England countryside, its tough quality and rugged smallness.

  Ki
t looked at the spot where the yellow convertible must have been parked, and walked on. Anita was an only child, and her father and mother, who lived in Virginia, generally spent a month of the summer with her. They were charming people. Such friends as she had in Denfield, and she was highly selective, she had made since she came. For the rest she lived well but quietly on an income she eked out by occasional free-lance jobs as a fashion artist. She had never been particularly friendly with Miriam, had laughed her soft, amused laugh at Miriam’s vagaries as related by Libby or Kit. Where did a man like Pedrick fit in—and what was Anita’s real relationship with Miriam? Had they known each other before Denfield? If so, it was odd that no mention of it had ever been made.

  The darkness again, the vague menacing shapes . . . Kit knew herself to be overwrought and keyed up with anxiety about Libby. Could she have imagined the entire situation? No—definitely no. Dandelions starring the grass, the apple blossoms were coming out; the beauty of the June day mocked at Kit. She hated to go into the house again, to Philip’s face, and the silent phone—silent as far as

  Libby was concerned. Again anger lashed her. How could Libby do this to them, how could she keep them in a suspense that was growing more unendurable with the passing of each hour? Were Libby’s charm and sweetness nothing but a mask that covered a cold, self-centered heart?

  She thought with a sensation of shock, I don’t know Libby any more. She had been blaming and still blamed herself for her neglect of her cousin for the last few months, but actually they had been separated for longer than that. After childhood Libby had remained at home while she had gone away to school and college. Their surroundings and their interests had been different. Nevertheless it was hard to conceive of Libby’s going overboard for a man like Tony Wilder. . . .

  She opened the front door and closed it with a slam. There was someone with Philip in the living room. It was his lawyer, Gerard Strait, Hugo’s boss and the senior partner of Keogh, Campbell, Strait and Frobisher. Strait was a tall man with a fine thin face and tired gray eyes. He greeted Kit pleasantly. Clients generally went to him, not he to them; he made light of his visit. He was in the neighborhood and thought he’d stop in and have a chat with Philip about investments, no use having an absurdly large sum of money not doing anything in the bank. Her uncle had been telling him about Libby—he turned to Philip, who said violently, “There’s nothing to worry about, absolutely nothing. It’s just damned annoying not to hear. . .”

  Mr. Strait said soothingly, “You’ll hear soon, I’m sure of it. In the meantime, we might try to locate her for you independently—with kid gloves on, of course.”

  “Trace her?” Philip expostulated angrily. “If Libby didn’t know any better than to leave home with the first plausible scoundrel she met, then . . He swung fiercely on William, coming in with the mail.

  William gave Mr. Strait the respectful bow he accorded money and position and said hurriedly, “I thought you’d like these, Mr. Haven ”

  “Yes. Fine. Thanks. Close the door behind you when you go out.” William went and Philip riffled through his letters. Nothing in Libby’s handwriting. Half a dozen bills; he tossed them down on the coffee table, paused at a long thin envelope, ripped it open and drew out the enclosure. It was a folded square of cleansing tissue.

  “What the devil!” He had received a lot of queer communications through the mail since his inheritance was first publicized in the local papers, most of them demands for financial help, up to and including the endowment for a home for over-age dray horses. This was the queerest of all. There was something on the tissue. He unfolded it, flattened it out on the table and scowled down. In the dead center of the soft sheet was the scarlet shape of a pair of lips. “Another crank,” he said disgustedly.

  Mr. Strait bent over the table and scrutinized the scarlet blot. There was a thin white vertical line in the soft bow of the upper lip, the single break in the redness. “Girl had a scar.”

  Kit gave a little cry. Philip went as white as milk. Strait looked from one to the other. It was Philip who spoke.

  He said in an odd light voice, “Libby had a scar. In her upper lip. She got it falling off a fence when she was fourteen. It had to be stitched.”

  VIII

  The room was very still. Outside, a man with a bag of fertilizer roared at a man with a hose. In the kitchen the maid was arguing with the delivery boy as to whether she had or hadn’t ordered avocados. A robin lit on the window sill and flew away. There was a pounding in Kit’s ears. Mr. Strait’s voice broke through it.

  “Better sit down, Haven.”

  Philip sat, suddenly, as though he were a puppet and a string had been pulled. The wrong string. One shoulder was higher than the other and his arms hung laxly over the side of the chair.

  Mr. Strait said with an affectation of briskness, “The thing to do is not to get excited. . . . Is your niece addicted to whimsy, by any chance?” He waved at the square of tissue with the rose-red signature in the middle of it. “This might be some sort of wedding announcement from her. Better examine the rest of your mail. There might be something else.”

  Philip obeyed. A bill from Bonwit Teller, Libby’s. Kit’s eyes blurred. She remembered Libby’s first expensive suit. It was a blue gabardine. Philip had gone along to help. She could see Libby’s expression of delight, hear her voice.

  "Oh, but darling, it’s two hundred and twenty-five,” and Philip’s, “Always buy the best, it’s an economy.”

  Her uncle’s hands were shaking. A reprint check from his agent; he tossed it aside. The last envelope was soft and rather bulky. The rip of paper made a loud noise. Philip was holding a white doeskin glove that had been worn, but not for long. On the back a gold button was initialed L.T.

  L.T.—Libby Tallis. There had been no doubt before, the tissue was enough. There was a terrible certainty now, the glove clinched it. Philip said like a child wanting to show how reasonable it could be, “This is odd—wouldn’t you say?” and then, “Oh, my God.” He clutched at the table for support and his head fell forward.

  His agony was dreadful to watch; Kit looked blindly through a window. They knew now. Everything was clear. Libby hadn’t gone away of her own accord. She had been taken away. Snatched, that was the word, wasn’t it? The Lincoln was coming around the side of the house. William was at the wheel. He was probably going to pick Miriam up at Anita’s.

  Sunlight slanted in on the tissue, on the crumpled glove Philip held crushed in his hand. There should have been no element of surprise in the two grim messages that had come through the mail, Kit thought. The truth had been revealed that morning, in the broken cherry-colored cloche lying on the white rug in Libby’s bedroom with the hammer beside it. Kit realized that she must have known it obscurely then, but it was something that you couldn’t face. Hugo had faced it. He was responsible for Mr. Strait’s being here. Hugo had made the substitution they were intended to make, Libby’s shining round head under the cherry straw, instead of crumpled papier mache. . . . She felt as though she were going to faint.

  “You’d better sit down, too, Miss Haven.”

  “No, I’m all right, Mr. Strait.”

  But he led her to a chair. He wanted every detail they could give him. Philip looked like an old, old man; Kit went over it again—only how different everything was now. Libby hadn’t written the note to which they had pinned their trust, of her own free will. She hadn’t slipped out of the house, smiling and on tiptoe, with the man she loved. The note had been written under compulsion; that was why the letters leaned over and shook. Theoretically, she might have left some pointer, something that would have warned them. But Libby wasn’t theory. She was alone and afraid, a helpless girl staring terrified at a gun or a knife. She would have been only too eager to obey orders because she wanted to remain alive. Kit thought, and I left you alone, Libby—because you took away my plaything. Now they’ve taken you instead. . . .

  Was Libby bound and gagged in some dark place? Once long ago the
two of them had been shut up in a closet together, playing hide-and-seek at a children’s party. The closet had been Libby’s idea, but when they were in it she didn’t like the blackness. Holding the knob, Kit had whispered, “Just one minute, they’re going past us up the hall,” but Libby wouldn’t wait. She had begun to scream.

  “Now, Miss Haven, when you went to New York Wednesday morning. . .

  Kit described her visit to Wilder’s rooms, and finding Hugo already there. Strait said, “Oh?” on a note of surprise. “He should have come to me at once—you should both have come to me. After you left this man Wilder’s?” She described Eleanor Oaks and Samuel Pedrick and the yellow convertible, and what had happened in the house the night before.

  The kettle intrigued Mr. Strait, the hat worried him, but with the dry precision of the legal mind he refused to be overly impressed by a yellow convertible’s having been parked near the orchard gates at three a.m. that morning. “We don’t know it was Miss Oaks’s car, or that she was the woman in it, or that Pedrick was in it at all.” As for Tony Wilder’s having vanished from his apartment on Monday afternoon, and Libby’s disappearance on Monday night, there need be no connection; Wilder might have been running away from his creditors. “We’ll look these people up, of course, and we’ll try and get hold of Wilder.”

  They didn’t have to try. Less than a quarter of an hour later the front door bell rang. Philip was heartbreakingly, dangerously quiet, except for his unseeing gaze which roamed and was never still, and Mr. Strait had gotten brandy for him and was making him drink it. Kit answered the door, and stared into Tony Wilder’s face.

  He stood there confronting her, very much as she remembered him on the night of Daisy’s party, big and composed and exquisitely tailored, like something out of Esquire. His gabardine topcoat was without a wrinkle, its draping a triumph. His brown hat was set at just the right angle on his smoothly brushed head. They looked at each other in perfect silence for a moment. Then Kit gave way. “Come in, Mr. Wilder.” He stepped into the hall and she closed the door quickly. She had a feeling that she mustn’t let him get away.