Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

“The man who stopped, out there. On California One.” Price understood Macroy’s fragmented attention.

  “He was very kind,” murmured Macroy.

  “What he was,” said Price, “was very drunk. Oh, he corroborates what you say, of course. He’s a salesman. Admits he was in high spirits, to coin a pun, and in the mood to pick up waifs and strays. Which is a risk, you know.”

  “It is?”

  “Matter of fact,” said Price cheerily, “it was one of his strays who phoned the Sheriff’s office. Your kind friend was in no condition to dial, I guess.”

  The minister turned his clean-shaven face and it was full of pain.

  Price said quietly, “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to say he wasn’t kind. Look, I’ve got some further details. I suppose you’ll want to know—er—just how she died. Burns will tell you. Or I can, if you like.”

  “Thank you,” said Macroy. He came back into the bedroom and started to unbutton his rumpled shirt. “Yes?”

  “She broke her neck on the rocks,” said Price. “So it was instantaneous, if that’s any comfort. No pain at all.”

  Macroy’s face was still.

  “She—well, you see—” Price was remembering uncomfortably that it may have taken very little time to fall forty feet, but it had taken some. “She was washed to and fro until she was—” Price didn’t have the heart to say how battered. “Well, soaking wet, for one thing. The Coroner says that her bladder was empty, but that has no meaning. With death—”

  Macroy sat down abruptly and put his hands over his face. “Go on,” he said.

  “That—er—part of it,” said Price. “It’s a little unfortunate that it has to be brought out. But I think I can assure you that it will all be handled in good taste. I think, by the way,” Price changed the subject gladly, “that Minter was cooled off considerably. He certainly made a few poorly chosen remarks last night—about her estate, I mean. But he’s thought twice about it and he’ll be more circumspect in the future.”

  Macroy was shaking his head. “I don’t want her money. I won’t

  have anything to do with Sarah’s money. That wasn’t what she was worth.”

  Price was unable to keep from sighing his relief. “That’s fine,” he said innocently. “Now, please don’t worry about Friday’s inquest, sir. I’ll be there, right by your side all the time. The thing is to give your testimony as quietly as possible and try to—I could coach you a little, perhaps. I’ve been through this before, you know.”

  “Thank you. Have they—finished with her?” Macroy took his hands down and seemed stiffly controlled. He didn’t look at Freddy Price.

  “The body will be released in time to be flown to Santa Carla for services on Saturday. Mrs. Minter wants the services there—because of her mother’s friends. I’m sure—” Price stuck. The fact was, he couldn’t be sure that Macroy was going to be welcome at his wife’s funeral.

  Macroy stood up and reached for his clean shirt.

  “As for this inquest, that has to be, you know,” said the young man. “It will be an ordeal. Why should I lie to you?”

  Macroy looked at him curiously.

  “But there’s nothing to worry about, really,” said Price heartily. “The important thing is to get you completely in the clear.”

  “Is it?” said Macroy monotonously.

  In the car later on, the Bishop excused himself and began to work on some papers. Price was riding next to the Bishop’s driver. Macroy sat silent in a rear corner.

  When they pulled up before. St. Andrew’s, the Bishop noticed that Macroy was looking at it as if he had never seen it before. “Come,” said Everard briskly, “run in. Your secretary will be there, I assume. Just make your arrangements as quickly as possible.”

  Price looked around. “You clergymen sound as if you’re in the old rat-race, just like everybody else.”

  “Too true,” sighed the Bishop, “too true.”

  Macroy got out and walked through the arch and across the flagstones and then into his office. Miss Maria Pinero, aged forty, leaped up and cried out, “Oh, Mr. Macroy! Oh, Mr. Macroy!” She had heard all about it on the air.

  In the car Price said to the Bishop, “It’s still a little hard to figure how she could have fallen. They didn’t find a thing, sir. They can’t even be sure just where she went over. Too many people messed around out there, while they were getting her up the cliff. But there’s nothing for him to worry about, that’s for sure.”

  “I see,” said the Bishop, looking sternly over the tops of his spectacles. “Guide him, Freddy, will you? He’s in a sad state, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you think, sir,” said Freddy Price, “I could possibly ask him to tone down his voice? It might sound—well, just a bit theatrical.”

  The Bishop’s brows moved. “Bring it to his attention. That is, if you can get his attention.” The Bishop sighed deeply. “No relatives. Nobody who can reach him on that needed human level. Well . . .”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Miss Pinero was saying. “Of course, I will.

  I understand just how you feel. It seems so cruel. To get out, just to stretch her legs after a long, long drive—” She began to weep.

  Miss Pinero was not an unhandsome woman, but something about her did not appeal to men. As a matter of fact, Miss Pinero did not like men, either. But the Reverend Macroy was different. So kind, so clean and gentle—and so distant. She would do almost anything for him. She had been so happy that he wouldn’t be lonely any more.

  “But God knows, doesn’t He,” she wept, “and we must believe that it is, somehow, for the best?” Carried away by her own noble piety—for it was her loss, too—she snatched up his right hand. Macroy snatched it away.

  She looked up at him with tear-dimmed vision. She had never so much as touched him before, but surely he must know that taking his hand would have been like kissing the hem of his garment.

  “I must leave now.” He sounded strange.

  “I’ll be here,” she cried, “and whatever you ask—”

  “Forgive me,” he said hoarsely.

  He walked away. She knew that he staggered as he turned a corner, and her heart skipped. He sounded as if he couldn’t bear to think of what she had almost done. Neither could she. Miss Pinero trembled. She wished it hadn’t happened. She wished that Sarah Bright was still alive. Maria had felt so deliciously safe, and free to go on worshipping him.

  The newspapers gave the story considerable space. After all, it had everything. They cautiously asked no questions, but they inevitably raised them. How could the elderly bride have fallen? There were some blithe spirits in the city who took to collecting the assorted circumlocutions having to do with the poor woman’s reason for going off alone into the foggy dark. There was one columnist, based in the east who—supposing that, of course, there was no such thing in Southern California as a religious group that was not led by some crackpot—was open to a suit at law. The Bishop considered it wiser to ignore him.

  Macroy did not read the newspapers.

  On Friday the inquest came rather crisply to the verdict of “Death from Accidental Causes.”

  Halley, telling how he had been the first to see a body, down below, was a model of professional objectivity. The medical part was couched in decently euphemistic language. Eunice Minter had not attended at all. Geoffrey Minter said that, as far as he knew, Mrs. Sarah Bright Macroy had been a happy bride. He exuded honorable fairness. Freddy Price was pleased on the whole with Macroy’s behavior.

  The minister, however, looked beaten and crushed. His voice was low and sad and tired. Everything droned along properly. When the Coroner, who was a straightforward country type, said bluntly, “You got back into the car for reasons of leaving her alone to do what she had to do?” Macroy answered, his voice dead against the dead silence of the room, “I thought, at the time, that it was the courteous thing to do.”

  A soft sigh ran across the ranks of those present.

  “So you have
no idea how she came to fall?” pressed the Coroner.

  “No, sir.”

  And the Coroner thought to himself, “Well, the truth is, me neither.”

  But when Price spoke finally, to inform the world in a quiet and matter-of-fact manner that the Reverend Macroy firmly and irrevocably refused to have any part of the Bright money—that did it.

  Price got the minister through the swarming cameras and away, with an air of “Aw, come on, boys, knock it off,” jaunty enough to arouse nobody’s aggressions.

  But afterward, as they drove back to the Bishop’s house, young Price for the life of him could think of nothing to chatter about. Freddy would have enjoyed hashing it all over; he’d done his job. But this man was a type he didn’t understand. So Freddy made do with the car radio.

  The Bishop’s spacious residence was well staffed; Macroy had every creature comfort. But the Bishop was simply too busy to spend many hours or even an adequate number of minutes with his haunted guest, who from time to time renewed his plea for a release from his vocation.

  The Bishop, refusing to consider this, continued to advise patience, pending a future clarity. But, he said, obviously someone else would have to take over the Sunday services at St. Andrew’s. The Bishop had resolved to do it himself.

  But he did think that if Macroy, with the help of God, could find the fortitude, he also ought to be there.

  This martyred innocence, thought the Bishop (who had read the papers) had its rights, but also its duties. A man, he mused, must stand up to adversity.

  On Saturday, at two o’clock, the funeral of Sarah Bright Macroy was well attended. The Minters and their two teen-age children sat invisibly in a veiled alcove. But those of Macroy’s congregation who had had the temerity to come, spotted him and nudged each other, when he arrived a trifle late and sat down quietly at the very back of the chapel.

  He did not join the family at any time, even afterward. Nor did he speak to any of his own people. When it was over, he vanished.

  He had looked like a ghost. It was a little—well, odd.

  On Sunday the Bishop, at the last minute, found himself unable to conduct the nine-thirty service, which had to be cancelled. (Although the organist played.) In consequence, at eleven o’clock, St. Andrew’s had all its folding chairs in its aisles.

  Macroy, in his robe, was up there, inconspicuously, at the congregation’s right or contra-pulpit side where, when he was sitting down, he was actually invisible to most. When they all stood, it was noticed that he did not sing the hymns; but he did repeat with them the Lord’s Prayer, although his voice, which they were accustomed to hear leading, so richly and musically, the recitation of the ancient words, seemed much subdued.

  Then the Bishop, who had never, himself, dwelt on some of the circumstances, and did not, for one instant, suppose that anyone here could do less than understand their essential pathos, made an unfortunate choice of words in the pastoral prayer.

  “Oh, God,” he prayed in his slight rasp, “Who, even in fog and darkness, seest all, be Thou his comfort; station him upon the rocks of his faith and Thy loving-kindness, that he may stand up—”

  The ripple ran, gasping from some of the listeners, yet not so much sound as movement, swinging the whole congregation like grass, before it ceased and all sat stiffly in a silence like plush.

  The Bishop sat down, a bit pinkly. He could not see Macroy very well. Macroy did not seem to have taken any notice. In fact, Macroy had been moving, looking, acting like an automaton. The Bishop was very much worried about him, and he now bemoaned his own innocence, which had tripped him up, on occasion, before. When it was time, he preached an old sermon that was sound, although perhaps a little less than electrifying.

  Then there they were, standing together in the Narthex, as was the custom at St. Andrew’s, Macroy a tall black pole beside the little black-robed beetle-bodied Bishop.

  Now the people split into two groups, sheep from goats. Half of them simply went scurrying away, the women contriving to look harrassed, as if they were concerned for a child or had something on the stove at home, the men just getting out of here. The other half lined up, to speak first to the Bishop and gush over the honor of his appearance in their pulpit.

  Then they each turned righteously to Macroy and said phrases like “So sorry to hear” and “Deepest sympathy” or a hearty “Anything I can do.”

  About twenty of them had gone by, like a series of coded Western Union messages, when Macroy put both hands over his face and burst into loud and anguished sobs.

  The Bishop rallied around immediately and some of the older men shouldered through to his assistance. They took—almost carried—Macroy to his own office where, Macroy having been put down in his chair, the Bishop firmly shut the door on everybody else. He sat down himself, and used his handkerchief, struggling to conquer his disapproval of a public exhibition of this sort. By the time the Bishop had recovered his normal attitude of compassionate understanding, Macroy had stopped making those distressing and unmanly noises.

  “Well, I was wrong,” the Bishop announced good-naturedly. “I ought not to have urged you to come here and I am sorry for that. You are still in shock. But I want you to remember that they are also in shock, in a way.”

  The Bishop was thinking of the reaction to his boner. He was not going to quote what he had inadvertantly said, since if Macroy had missed it, the Bishop would accept this mercy. Still, he felt that he ought to be somewhat blunt; it might be helpful.

  “I’ll tell you something, Macroy,” he said. “You have got a fat-cat suburban bunch in this church, with economic status and—may the Lord help them all—middle-class notions of propriety. My dear fellow, they can’t help it if they don’t know what to say to you, when it has probably never crossed their minds that the minister or his wife might sometimes have to go to the bathroom.”

  Then the Bishop sighed. “This is especially difficult for them, but they’ll stand by you—you’ll see. I’m sure that you can understand them, as well or better than I.”

  “It’s not that I don’t understand them,” said Macroy. “It’s that I can’t love them.” He had put his head down on his desk, like a child.

  “Oh, come now—”

  “I cannot,” said Macroy. “So I must give it up. Because I cannot

  do it.”

  “I think,” said the Bishop in a moment, “that you most certainly can’t—that is, not yet. You must have time. You must have rest. Now,

  I shall arrange for substitutes here. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t you still understand?” said Macroy drearily.

  “Of course I do! Of course I do! It was simply too much for you.”

  “Yes. Yes, if you say so.”

  “Then, if the coast is clear, we had better go home.” The Bishop thought that this might become a serious breakdown. Poor tortured soul.

  That evening the Bishop bustled from his study into his living room, where Macroy was sitting disconsolately idle.

  “Now,” the Bishop said in his raspy voice, “you know that you are very welcome in this house. There is plenty of room. The cooking is not bad. Everything here is yours. However, I am afraid that I shall have to be out of town for a day or two, beginning tomorrow. And I do not like to leave you all alone in your present state. So I am going to ask you to do something for me, Hugh. Will you promise?”

  “Yes?” said Macroy listlessly.

  “Will you talk to a Dr. Leone tomorrow?”

  “A doctor?”

  “He is a psychiatrist whom I’ve known for years. There have been occasions . . . he is excellent in his profession. He can give you a full hour tomorrow, beginning at one o’clock. I have set up the appointment and I think it is wise—very wise—that you keep it. He can help you through this very bad time.”

  “What?” said Macroy strangely. “Isn’t God enough?”

  “Ah, ah,” said the Bishop, shaking a finger, “you must not despise the scientist. In
his own way he is also a seeker after the truth. And God knows that you need some human help. That’s why I simply cannot leave you here—don’t you see?—alone. Yet I should go, I must. So will you please be guided by me and please do as I suggest?”

  “Yes, I will,” said Macroy apathetically.

  “She died when you were twenty-five?” Doctor Leone said. He had observed the harsh lines on this face relax in memories of childhood, and he began to forgive himself for his own faulty technique. Well, he had to push this one. Otherwise the man would still be sitting silent as an owl by day, and there wasn’t time. The doctor already knew that he would never see this man again.

  “You were the only child?” he continued. “You must have adored her.”

  “I didn’t pray to her, if that’s what you mean,” said Macroy with a faint touch of humor. “I loved my mother very much. But she wasn’t perfect.”

  “How not?”

  “Oh, she wasn’t always—well, she didn’t love everyone. She had a sharp tongue sometimes.” But the voice was as tender as a smile.

  “Didn’t always love you, for instance?” the doctor said lightly.

  “Of course she loved me. Always. I was her son.” This was unimpassioned.

  “Tell me about your father.”

  “He was a machinist, a hard-working man. A reader and a student by night. Very solid and kind and encouraging.”

  “You were how old when he died?”

  “He died when I was twenty-seven—suddenly and afar.”

  The doctor listened closely to the way the voice caressed a phrase. “He loved you, of course. And you loved him.”

  “He was my father,” the minister said with a faint wonder.

  The doctor was beginning to wonder. Is he putting me on? He said with a smile. “Just background—all that we have time for today. Now, tell me about your first wife. Was it a happy marriage?”

  “It was, indeed,” said Macroy. “Emily was my young love, very dainty and sweet. A cherishable girl.” The doctor heard the thin and singing overtone.

  “You had no children?”

  “No. We were sad about that. Emily, I suppose, was always frail.”