Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

  The woman said softly. “Yes, if she must. You have raised her well. And to Elizabeth, my dear, you have kept all your promises. ‘In sickness or in health,’ you said, ‘until death do us part’.”

  Maude Seton, listening from the passage, thought, Oh Gawd! She was infuriated. How icky can you get? Did they still think she was going to fall for this junk? As if anybody took the mouthings in the marriage service for anything but mouthings! And a third husband, at that! How simple-minded did they think she was? If they were putting on this sickening act for her benefit—but why?

  “I see,” she said loudly. “You want me to tell the world that the old woman was Elizabeth Rose.”

  And that’s pretty cute, she was raging to herself. Just fool Seton and you’ve got it made. Oh, wouldn’t you like to bury Elizabeth Rose again, and publicly, and somewhere else! Oh, wouldn’t you just!

  “You know she is,” the woman said coldly. “You heard.”

  “Philip, darling, eh?” Maude had begun to snarl. She hated Philip Mortmain with her whole being. She must hurt him! “Did the poor silly old thing sometimes have the delusion that she was her own adorable daughter? Being mad—about her daughter’s charming husband, for instance?”

  He stood up and came toward her. She held her gas gun ready. But she was not displeased to notice that he was seeing her now.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked quietly.

  “What’s bugging me?” she said flippantly. “You don’t know, then, that she told me? ‘My daughter is buried in the garden,’ she said.”

  Then Maude’s heart lurched as the woman moaned dismay.

  Philip Mortmain said, with sudden force, “And you intend to tell that to the world?”

  “Oh, when I am given an assignment,” she said, “I do like to tell the whole story.” She was being perfectly reckless and her heart was banging, but there was a savage joy in it, and suddenly the dusty look was gone from his eyes.

  The doorbell rang and made her jump. But he just stood there, looking at her. “Her daughter was buried in the garden,” he repeated slowly. Then he bowed slightly. “Why, yes, that is true. Excuse me.”

  He wasn’t going to kill her. It seemed he wouldn’t bother. He was merely going to answer the door. Maude put her back to the passage wall. She just stood there. Her brain seemed to have stopped.

  It was a doctor who had come. She saw him crouch to throw back the tablecloth, and she saw Mortmain kneel. Yah! Still playing pious devotion to that—that scarecrow! What if the doctor’s in the plot too?

  The two men began at last to walk toward her. “Why the devil everything has to come out now,” the doctor was saying crossly, “I can’t see. Listen, Philip, Missing Persons have known exactly where Elizabeth was, and in what condition, for fifteen years now. And so has her manager. And her bank. Everything’s been in order. Now, why does every lip-licking twerp in the city have to have this private tragedy dished up at breakfast? Keep on thinking about Barby, I say.”

  He stopped to stare at Maude. He was a rosy-fleshed, somewhat rotund, middle-aged man, and seemed almost ludicrously respectable. “Who is this?”

  “This is Maude Seton,” said Philip Mortmain coldly, “a journalist of some sort. She came here, uninvited, to accuse me of murder, to blind me with tear gas, to upset Elizabeth, to hear us call her name—”

  “What the devil is it her business?”

  “She says it’s her business to tell the whole story.”

  “Is that so?” the doctor said angrily.

  “I’m very sorry, Doctor,” said Maude brightly, now that she had managed to slip along the wall and was between them and the way out. Whether the doctor was a dupe or not, let him look after himself.

  “Just a minute,” said Philip Mortmain, “Are you going to tell the whole story?”

  “Philip?” The doctor sounded worried.

  “Then you’ll tell,” Mortmain went on, “that when Elizabeth accidentally knocked her small daughter over the railing, she thought she had killed her. You must also tell how Elizabeth had nearly finished burying the living child when I came on the scene and pulled the unconscious little girl out of the earth just in time.”

  The doctor said angrily, “Damn it, Philip, why did you have to bring up that gruesome bit? Elizabeth was mad as a hatter, half her brain eaten away, but you could have spared Barby that part of it.”

  “No,” said Philip, “the world must have the whole story. You do understand? I put Miss Seton in the garden because I couldn’t talk to her until I’d soothed Elizabeth. She climbed up to the balcony. Don’t you see what happened?”

  He turned. “Tell it all,” he said, “or, I promise you, I will.”

  He went into the sitting room and pulled the draperies closed. He sat down in the gloom, far away.

  The doctor was looking at Maude in a curious way. “Well, well,” he murmured. “Seton is the name? Miss Maude Seton? I must phone the authorities.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Listen.”

  “You will be a bit of a freak, won’t you?” This doctor wasn’t ludicrous any more, but a shrewd citizen of Maude’s own country. “Climbing up the back of a man’s house? Why? Carried away by melodramatic fancies? Or in a fit of paranoia?”

  Maude was a moth against the wall and the pins were going in. “Please, if you all think it’s better—”

  “Too late,” the doctor said cheerfully. “What Philip Mortmain promises to do, he will do. Don’t think he won’t. An unusual man, eh?”

  She whimpered; he was too shrewd for her.

  Then the doctor touched her, benignly enough, just pushing her a little. “Could be, you don’t yet realize what happened? What part you played?” Then he left her and went off to the kitchen phone.

  So Maude Seton looked into the mirror on the wall and realized there was also a mirror in that bedroom upstairs. Then she saw what had sent Elizabeth Rose at last to her death. A white female face, rising so slowly and so silently from out of the garden, all streaked and smudged with the black earth—just come from her grave.

  No! But no use crying “no.” Seton knew that she was destroyed. A temporary tidbit at the bars and after that, a fool forever. Who in the world would pity the whole story? Pity these hands that had grubbed in a flower pot, frantic to escape—

  On guard! On guard! Lest anything as uncomfortable as sun or rain or love or faithfulness or sacrifice should fall upon Maude Seton and she should grow!

  Saint Christopher may no longer be canonized to protect travelers, but Armstrong suggests in this South of the Border/North of the Border journey that one’s own quick wits and ability to trust in others may do so. Clearly what happens in Mexico does not necessarily stay in Mexico, nor where one expects it to. This tale of a young married couple’s beach camping trip to Mexico appeared in EQMM in 1965.

  PROTECTOR OF TRAVELERS

  She crawled out of her sleeping bag and from under the half tent they had rigged to keep the sand from blowing into their faces—and also, Ann thought, to provide at least a token privacy.

  She didn’t much like having a third person along—this man from Toby’s office, whom she barely knew. She had no reason to dislike him—not really. He was just an amiable man who liked fishing. He performed his share of the chores, cheerfully, and he behaved very well. But. It would have been so much more fun to have slept out of doors and awakened this long week-end on this lovely deserted Mexican beach, just the two of them, Toby and Ann Hartman, a man and his wife.

  We can’t really play or have fun, she thought resentfully; we can’t act as young and silly as we still know how to be. This third person, Byron Reynolds, was a kind of anchor to their upper-middle-class-American civilization; he was a drag on their spirits.

  Toby had said, “Look, honey, he wants to come with us so bad. He’s older than we are, and I don’t think he goes fishing much any more. But he won’t be any bother. Do you mind?”

  “If he’s willing to leave at midnight,” she had sa
id, “and drive all night, the way we’re going to do.”

  “He’s willing and eager. He’s got to be at this stupid Company dinner, too. So you can pick us both up, downtown. He’ll bring his stuff over here the night before, and we’ll just light out, the way we planned. It’s kind of wild, down there,” Toby had added. “Another man along might not be such a bad idea.”

  So Ann had agreed. She was no outdoor girl, except as Toby’s devoted pupil and follower. There could be crises that she was not prepared to meet. Maybe, she had thought, it isn’t such a bad idea.

  Now, she thought, it was a bad idea and Toby knows it, too. Oh, well, they were stuck with it.

  Toby was a tuft of brown beloved hair in the shadow. Byron Reynolds was a motionless lump in a tan sleeping bag, over there. Meanwhile, here was Ann, the only soul awake in this dawn which was beautiful enough to make you bawl, if you didn’t watch out.

  Ann stretched her body in the heavy knit pants and top that she wore night and day, which was, in the circumstances, more decent than otherwise. What now? she asked herself, knowing that she couldn’t bear this wild beauty for very long at a time. She would remember it forever, of course. But now—make up a fire? Put the coffee on?

  The coffee can was on the tailboard of their station wagon, parked farther up the beach, on the margin where some tough grass grew. She stripped off the socks she had worn to bed and felt the cold sand lump under her insteps and slip and slide away. One more hot shining day. One more cold pale night. One more dawn. She kept her head down and filled the coffee pot from the water barrel, dumped the coffee in, and began to slog across the sand to where they had made a fire place.

  Toby was up and stretching.

  “Early bird,” she yelled.

  “Good morning, worm,” he yelled back, grinning. Ann had never been a dawn fancier. Oh, she was going to be kidded when they got home.

  She struggled toward the circle of stones, carefully not looking at the tan sleeping bag that was beside her path, expecting Byron Reynolds to sit up and greet her. But he did not stir when she passed, and Ann was glad.

  She was arranging the little sticks and the big sticks, kneeling on the chilly sand, anticipating the dear sharp heat, absorbed, and at the moment rather blissfully happy, when Toby touched her.

  She smiled up. “Hi.”

  “Look, Annie.” He squatted beside her. “Something’s kind of wrong, I’m afraid.”

  “What?”

  “Trouble.” His eyes sent the trouble straight into hers. “I think,” her husband said, “Byron must have passed out in the night. He seems to be dead, Annie.”

  Ann panicked. There was nothing else to call it—she just panicked.

  They sat on the sand, several yards away from the body. It was a body. There was no doubt at all about that.

  Ann said, “Toby, I can’t. I just can’t. I know I’m panicking, but I’m going to have to walk right out on this. Y-y-you’ve—” her teeth chattered—“heard stories about Mexican jails. What if they don’t believe us? And I don’t see why they should. I mean, we’re Americans. I’ve read about Americans who have just a little traffic accident down here and who can’t get a lawyer or even find out why they’re being held. They can’t even get a doctor. They just lie in their blood in some dirty jail. And we don’t know anybody. We can’t even speak the language. We might not even be able to get in touch with anybody in the United States. Toby, I’m scared—plain scared!”

  His eyes winced.

  “They say it takes money, lots of money,” she babbled on. “B-bribes, and all that. Listen, I don’t know if what they say is true or not, but that’s what I’ve read in the newspapers. And what if we were locked up, not knowing how to ever get out, and not being together? I would go out of my mind, Toby, right straight up the wall. I’m sorry, honey—you married a coward. But I’d better not kid either one of us. I’m absolutely terrified!”

  Toby’s face was somber. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”

  Then there was no sound but the surf. A few gulls wheeled by. The sun was up now, full gold. Not another soul had appeared on the horizon. Yet.

  “Wh-what h-happened to him?” she chattered.

  “I don’t know. When I looked over there I just knew something was wrong.”

  He shrugged in despair. “You could take the station wagon, Ann.”

  “No! I won’t leave you,” she wailed. “I can’t do that, either.”

  “Honey, if you could get across, into San Diego, you’d be able to stir people up—in case there was trouble.”

  “What can Americans do in this country, to protect us?”

  “Something, I guess,” he answered gloomily. “I’ll admit I am only guessing.”

  “Toby, we don’t even know the laws down here. They’re not going to be like ours. For us, there would have to be an autopsy—to prove what did happen. But do they have a law like that? And if they do hold the—

  I mean, him—oh, poor Mrs. Reynolds! Could we at least find a telephone and call somebody on the other side of the border before we . . . Could we get a lawyer to find us a lawyer down here? Maybe I wouldn’t be s-so s-scared.”

  Toby looked at her shuddering wretchedness and said abruptly, “Let’s go. Start packing the stuff. Just take it easy, but do it.” His arm was tight around her shoulders. Ann’s heart was racing. “Now, don’t worry,” Toby said grimly. “We’re not going to leave him.”

  “We couldn’t do that, either,” cried Ann.

  “He’s an American, too,” said Toby. “So we’ll go home, all of us.”

  Ann sat beside him as he drove north, proceeding very carefully, very soberly, and heavy, heavy over their heads hung the body of Byron Reynolds, swathed in both tent canvasses, stretched between fishing rods, disguised beside the rolled-up sleeping bags on the roof of the station wagon, along the ski rack.

  Toby had done all the bad part of the packing. He said that a body in a sleeping bag looked too much like a body. He thought the roof would be safer. It would look as if they had a large tent up there.

  Inside the station wagon was all their other gear—suitcases, camp icebox, water barrel, utensils, and their food supplies. Bathing suits flapped at one window. Near another hung the clear plastic bags with their civilized costumes inside of them—Ann’s green silk suit, in case they had gone to dinner somewhere, although she wasn’t fond of foreign food, and ridiculously, in the other two plastic bags, the dress suits the two men had worn to the Company dinner that now seemed long, long ago, in another world.

  Ann was bracing herself for the border inspection. She began to believe that they would get that far without any trouble. She knew the routine there. The check was usually perfunctory—unless something aroused the well-trained but mysterious instincts of the men who would or would not let them through. The Mexicans would probably just wave them by—

  it was the Americans who would check. But they had to get past both. Or be caught in some No Man’s Land between? Ann trembled.

  You are, she told herself, a fun-loving young American wife, dirty but happy, and glad to be getting home to your own tiled bathroom. Toby is a sports-loving young American husband who didn’t catch any fish to speak of, but who enjoyed trying. We wish everybody well and we expect to be wished well in return. And there are just the two of us. Keep remembering that—there are just the two of us.

  Her hands were moist. But if the Inspectors looked hard enough to notice there are two dinner jackets and all the trimmings in two of the transparent garment bags . . . Her hands slipped around each other. Few men took even one on a fishing trip. No one man took two. But she wouldn’t mention this to Toby. Too late to do anything about it now.

  Toby said, “If you keep on looking the way you do, Annie, we would do better to stop at the Police Station on this side, before we make more trouble for ourselves.”

  “I know,” she said. “I won’t . . . I’ll be all right.”

  “Think about something else.”
<
br />   “All right.”

  There was a St. Christopher Medal magnetized to the dashboard. Ann Hartman said to it, silently, “Protector of Travelers, tell me what to think about and what to do with my hands.”

  They were coming into Tijuana, somnolent at this hour. Toby’s hands looked normal on the wheel. I am a girl, Ann suddenly thought. She took up her handbag and got out her compact and lipstick. They trundled quietly through the town while she dabbed at her face.

  All the while, in countercurrent, her thoughts ran to Mrs. Reynolds, the widowed woman. What will there be to comfort her? There will be me, to say that he was happy yesterday. Will she believe me? Do I believe me? I never took the trouble to know the man, or to know if he was happy.

  Now they were in the plaza leading to the border. There was no traffic; there would be no delay. Ann slipped the blue scarf off her head and shook out her hair. The station wagon came demurely to a stop and the Mexicans on duty waved it on.

  Now the gate to the United States of America. Ann put the scarf on her head and crossed the ends under her chin. When it was her turn to lean forward, to look past Toby at the big American and tell where she was born, she was holding the scarf’s ends taut in her hands, and she managed to achieve her normal air of semi-mischievous query. And how do you know I’m not a spy or a smuggler?

  She must have done it perfectly. The Inspector was not amused by this girlish attitude. He saw it often and was never amused, by people who did not really believe in crime or have any notion what his job was. With a stony face he waved the station wagon through.

  It seemed to Ann as if she could feel the Bill of Rights settling cosily down all around them. She sighed her relief. The people of the United States were up and about on their way to work. There was traffic.

  Toby drove on, as carefully and as rigidly as before. Then Ann saw a great drop of perspiration spring out of his hair line and start down toward his brow. She whipped off her scarf and gently blotted it away.

  Toby sighed, “So far, so good.”