The Frightened Fianc?e

by George Harmon Coxe

  THE FRIGHTENED FIANCÉE

  The Sam Crombie Mysteries

  George Harmon Coxe

  contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  one

  IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that John Holland returned from Chicago on the day of the murder. He did not just happen to arrive in Grand Central on the Commodore Vanderbilt on this Friday morning in July; rather his decision to return was motivated by a quiet urgency which had been growing inside him the past few days, and this in turn resulted in a rush of activity that enabled him to clean up his work ahead of time and get back to New York two days before anyone expected him.

  He was not due back in the office until Monday. More important, Monday was the day Tracy Lawrence had promised him her answer, and he had agreed to wait. Thirty days was what she had asked as a period of grace, and since he knew of the tragedy which had taken one fiancé from her two years previous, Holland understood something of the reasons behind her request.

  She had admitted it was an odd way of answering a proposal of marriage when she kissed him good-by twenty-eight days earlier outside the train gate. She went further. She admitted that she loved him. It was, she said, only the idea of marriage that required additional thought. And once he realized that she was serious about this thirty-day period of reflection Holland had not argued, since the month in Chicago had already been assigned to him and the only additional sacrifice his promise entailed was that he neither write nor telephone her during this time.

  “No engagement, darling,” she had said. “No engagement ring. If the answer is yes we can go down to City Hall. Quickly and quietly, please, John,” she’d said. “Without any family or friends. Just us.”

  He remembered her words, all of them. Because he felt confident that no girl could say such things unless she was pretty sure the answer would be yes.

  The thought had sustained him during the past month. It had encouraged him to buy a thin platinum band paved with small square-cut diamonds. He could feel the pressure of the little box in his pocket as he stood in the vaulted waiting-room while a redcap trucked his bags up the ramp from the platform and now, the conviction growing in him that he was right, he saw a way to hedge somewhat the agreement he had made without violating the principle that he neither write nor telephone, nor ask for a definite answer until the thirty-first day.

  The heat of the city, already rising from walls and pavements where it had been stored since the day before and the day before that, may have influenced him. The hot, empty week-end stretching before him might have been a factor, or the idea that it would be futile to report at the office on a Friday afternoon. More likely these things were but ready-made excuses which augmented the growing desire to see Tracy as soon as he could, not with any idea of forcing a decision but just to look at her, if only for a few minutes, to watch her smile, to tell her he was back and still willing to wait for her answer.

  The mere thought of this was enough to make him overtip the redcap and the taxi driver. Later the glow of his anticipation made him impervious to the weight of his bags as he lugged them up the two flights of stairs to his apartment. It was hot and stuffy here after the weeks of vacancy, and he began at once to open the windows. This done he stripped to his shorts, a dark-haired man of twenty-eight, not noticeably tall but with a nice depth of chest and a leanness through the stomach and hips. His face, well-boned but too angular to be called handsome, had a sort of durable good looks that became at once attractive when he smiled.

  He had acquired the habit of neatness from living alone and he made a pile of soiled linen for the laundry, another for the cleaner. He put the bags away and produced a smaller one which he tossed on the bed unopened. He laid out clean things, and when he had showered he sat down and reached for the telephone directory.

  When he had checked on trains and learned that there was a 4:05 train on Friday that stopped at Saybrook, he put in a call to the Mansion House in Old Lyme. Assured of a room, he devoted the hours after lunch to the papers in his briefcase so that he would have his reports in order for Monday morning; then, at 3:50, he was back in Grand Central, threading his way among the perspiring commuters and week-enders who, like himself, were outward bound.

  The afternoon newspapers kept John Holland occupied until the train stopped at Madison. Here he watched the platform reunions of fathers and families, the ensuing dispersion to the line of waiting cars and station wagons. He sat up as the train picked up speed, looking for a glimpse of the Sound, until minutes later the tower of the Clinton Community Hall was visible over the treetops. Presently there was a stirring in the car as others bound for Saybrook began to reach for packages and bags.

  Heretofore Holland had paid little attention to those about him but now, as he folded the newspapers and put them aside, a girl stood up two seats ahead of him and across the aisle to claim his attention. Casually, but with growing interest, it came to him that she would probably be noticed in any company; for she was tall and nicely made, about his age, he thought, though she could have been a year or two older, with hair like old copper and a sultry prettiness that seemed due, in part at least, to a skillful and judicious application of the proper make-up.

  For a moment as she turned to put her case on the seat her glance met his, but her eyes passed on as she adjusted the jacket of her suit, a dark-blue creation in some summery material that could have been linen. Then she was going down the aisle and he was following her, noting now the well-shaped and sheerly clad legs, the high-heeled spectator pumps. She was still ahead of him when she alighted and now he saw her smile in profile as she started across the platform, the object of her attention a heavy-set but straight-standing man of fifty or more with thinning sandy-gray hair, a well-tanned, prosperous-looking fellow who waved and came quickly to meet her.

  She kissed him at once, and Holland grinned his approval, having no personal interest in the demonstration but feeling a certain affinity that one in love feels for others in the same emotional state. For somehow he had the impression that this was no father-daughter or uncle-niece combination, and he watched the couple move toward a station wagon until a voice saying, “Taxi, sir?” claimed his attention.

  It was a quarter of seven by the time Holland had registered at the Mansion House, and because he had never met any of Tracy Lawrence’s family and did not want to barge in around dinnertime, he ate alone and waited until eight o’clock before calling another taxi, an ordinary sedan with a cardboard sign stuck in the windshield. Holland climbed in front with the driver and asked if he knew where Hawk’s Point was.

  “Sure. You want the Allenby house?”

  “I’m looking for Miss Tracy Lawrence.”

  “Okay.” The driver shifted and swung out on the highway. “She’s old Mrs. Allenby’s granddaughter.”

  Holland watched the wide, elm-lined street. “What is Hawk’s Point, a summer colony?”

  “Used to be. A small one. Four families owned it once—that was before my time—and then the hurricane in ’thirty-eight flattened everything but the Allenby place and the Carter cottage. The other houses had been empty for some years and Mr. Allenby bought up the land from the heirs and used what was left of the wreckage to build on to h
is own place. He died around ’forty-three.”

  “The family just comes summers?”

  “All but Fanny. She lives here year ’round with a hired couple.”

  “Fanny?”

  “That’s the grandmother. Name’s Frances but them that know her well call her Fanny.” He chuckled softly. “She’s a card.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Holland waited a few seconds. “In what way?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just the way she is. Seventy-five, they say, but don’t look it, or act it. Except she’s got rheumatism and has to use a cane. Comes from Boston and talks that way most of the time. Just to hear her you’d know she was somebody and yet once in a while she comes out with something that surprises you.”

  Holland made no reply to this, aware that the tree-lined street had given way to a winding black-topped road which wound through a countryside flat and open except for an occasional stand of trees. Presently a sign at the side of the road said: Dead End, and there was room here to turn around. Then the land narrowed as some backwater from the Sound closed in on either side while ahead a gravel road bisected an area of stunted cedars interspersed with a tangle of bullbriars and vines, beyond which a roof was visible. With this bottleneck passed, they came finally to the point itself, a plot of perhaps a dozen acres that sloped gently to the Sound and was dominated by a white house with green trim which, by virtue of two stubby wings on the land side, assumed the shape of a squat U. Here the roadway curved through oaks and swamp maples to a motor yard and a circular drive between the wings.

  “You want I should wait?”

  Holland shook his head. He paid the man and said he might call him later. Then, as the car got under way, he went up the steps to the heavy door which stood open, offering a view of the wide hall which stretched ahead to the door at the front of the house, also open, so that he could see the distant sheen of water in the fading evening light.

  He looked first for a doorbell. When he found none he stepped into the hall to examine the door itself. There was no bell here, or any knocker, and he stood a moment, awkwardly, hoping that someone had heard the car and would appear in the hall. When no one did, he rapped knuckles against the door, finding the resulting sound weak and ineffectual. He took another step, wondering what he should do next, and just then a young woman stepped from a room ahead of him on the left. She did not see him but turned toward the front of the house, so he called to her.

  “Pardon me.”

  He saw her wheel and hesitate; then she was coming toward him, in silhouette a tall, slender girl who carried herself beautifully and moved with grace.

  “Yes?”

  “I couldn’t find any bell or knocker,” John Holland said, “so I walked in. I’m looking for Miss Lawrence.”

  He thought she looked at him strangely. She said, “Tracy?” on a rising note and her voice held an odd inflection.

  “I’m John Holland, a friend of hers.”

  He could see in the half-light of the hall that she was blond and darkly tanned. She looked like something out of Vogue—slim and sleek and expensive, but not sexless.

  Now she said, “Oh?” and the inflection he had noticed was still there until she added, “I’m Tracy’s sister—Frances Erskine. I think she’s on the pier. You can come this way.”

  He thanked her and walked along the hall until he was opposite the door from which she had come. Then a voice called to the girl, a deep but feminine voice that carried a connotation of authority.

  “Who is it, Frances?”

  “A friend of Tracy’s, Nana.” The girl moved into the room. “Mr. Holland—my grandmother, Mrs. Allenby.”

  “Come in, young man. Do you by any chance know a seven-letter word meaning a nonelectrical particle the size of a proton?”

  The digression was so direct and unexpected that Holland nearly laughed aloud. For now he saw the woman in the wing chair by the front windows of the long, low-ceilinged room, noticed the cane on the floor beside her. She had a folded newspaper in her lap and he found nothing formidable in her appearance except the voice which sounded as though it should emanate from a larger woman, though she was not small. Her bobbed hair seemed more blond than white, as though some special rinse had reduced it to a pale nameless color which contrasted sharply with her black lace dress.

  “The fifth letter is R,” she said, adjusting her glasses. “At least I hope it is. Well?” she added with some impatience.

  “Could it be neutron?”

  Holland glanced at his companion as he spoke and she shrugged, her red mouth twisting in a crooked smile as if to indicate a complete familiarity with the procedure. He watched the older woman print the word he had suggested.

  “Right!” she said triumphantly. “Why didn’t I think of it? Why didn’t you, Frances?” She put aside the paper as she talked, skipping from one thought to another without regard for any recognizable sequence, her tone blunt, friendly, and to anyone familiar with the accent, definitely Bostonian.

  “What’s your first name? John? A friend of Tracy’s, you say? You can run along, Frances. I can direct John to Tracy as well as you can. Are you here for the wedding?” she asked when her granddaughter had withdrawn.

  Holland said no. He said he had just come up from New York and was staying overnight at the Mansion House. “I’ve been in Chicago for a month,” he said. “I just wanted to stop and see Tracy for a few minutes.”

  The woman made no immediate reply to this and nothing changed in her face except a new narrowness that came about her brown eyes to accent the steadiness of her bespectacled gaze. Holland found the inspection disconcerting. He felt he was being photographed, measured, catalogued, and weighed.

  “She’s on the pier,” she said, and picked up the newspaper. “Stop in on your way back. I may need more help on this confounded puzzle.”

  Holland backed from the room and fled along the hall. As he stepped from the wide front doorway to the porch that ran along the full width of the house he noticed two couples at opposite ends. On the right Frances Erskine was talking to a man he had never seen; on the left the girl he remembered from the train was perched on the railing next to the older man who had met her at the station.

  Holland went down the steps and along the grassy slope, aware that the others were watching him. He had the feeling that all of them knew why he was here and he began to wonder why anyone should find his presence so unusual. He noted that the beach was generally sandy, with here and there a cluster of smooth, rounded boulders, some of which reached out into the water; then he was stepping out on the pier, seeing vaguely the sailboat moored a short distance away, the speedboat tied up fore and aft on the left, the float opposite the end of the structure on which a dinghy had been overturned. But it was the bench at the end that held his attention, for a man and woman sat there looking seaward and he could tell from the shape of her head and shoulders that the woman was Tracy.

  Apparently they did not hear him because he had nearly reached the bench before the man turned and came slowly to his feet. Holland only knew that he was dark-complexioned and wore a loud sport coat, for he was watching Tracy and now Tracy saw him and stood up as though some secret spring had been released within her.

  In that first split-instant he saw her as the girl he knew and loved. The planes and curves of her face were sweetly familiar, the way the dark hair framed it, the straight brows and the eyes beneath them, dark blue, he knew, though the fading light obscured their color. He saw the tan of her bare arms and legs and the clean line of her firm-fleshed young figure; he even noticed that she wore a simple white dress with buttons down the front, before he was aware of her reaction.

  Her mouth opened though no words came from it. She thrust out a tentative, groping hand which stopped in mid-air and came quickly back to her throat. Her eyes went wide with a sort of nameless horror which startled Holland and left him shaken and uncertain.

  “John.”

  The wo
rd came in a voice he had never heard and now he knew that something was wrong, terribly wrong. But because he could not believe what his instincts told him he tried to grin. He said, “Hi,” inanely and stood staring while something cold swirled up out of the humid dusk and grew frighteningly inside him.

  “Monday.” She said, her voice a tortured whisper. “Not until Monday. You promised.”

  “Sure,” Holland said, quickly now. “I’m going to wait. But I finished up early. I came to see you, to—” he was stammering now in the face of her reaction—“to tell you I was back.”

  “I’m Roger Drake.” The man spoke in a flat, calm voice, and Holland had to turn before he could identify the speaker. “Did you come up for the wedding?”

  “Wedding?” Holland stared, trying to remember who else had asked that question. “What wedding?” he said.

  “Ours. Tracy’s and mine. Sunday afternoon at four.”

  two

  FOR PERHAPS FIVE SECONDS, though it seemed much longer, John Holland stood mute and immobile. It took that long for the state of shock to pass, and though he had heard each word distinctly he neither understood nor believed any part of what this man had said. Not now. It was too monstrous to be so easily assimilated and he found himself taking in details of the flashy jacket, the sport shirt, open at the throat, the gleaming perfection of the black hair parted in the middle.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, quiet now as the first words came to him. He turned to the girl and she had not moved. “It isn’t true—is it?” he said when there was no answer. “Is it?”

  She watched him with wide-open eyes, the horror still in them. Her lips trembled, but she seemed unable to speak and so he stepped close, the conviction growing in him that all this was exactly as the man, Drake, had said. He swallowed hard, his eyes sick. He put his hands on Tracy’s arms, determined to be quite sure.

  “Are you engaged, Tracy?”

  “Yes,” she said in a voice he could hardly hear.