The Red Carnelian

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  A look at Owen told me that his heart wasn’t in his department either, though he made a pretense of having called me down about the window signs to advertise the style show.

  “We’re holding the dress rehearsal tonight, you know,” he told me, “and the first show will go on tomorrow afternoon.”

  He might have been talking about the weather in South Africa for all the personal interest he appeared to be taking in the matter. He looked awful. There was no pinkness to his skin now. It was a gray, muddy color and his plump face seemed to have fallen into hollows and deep lines.

  After a few more perfunctory remarks about the show, he stopped pretending.

  “Anything new upstairs, Linell?” he asked. “Any word of Sondo?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. And did you know Bill Thorne is missing too?”

  He didn’t seem impressed. It was Sondo’s disappearance that held his interest. He said, “If she doesn’t come back—I mean if—”

  “You mean if something happened to her?” I asked directly.

  There was horror in his blue eyes that were so much like Chris’s. Then, with a quick rush of words, “If something’s happened to Sondo, she can’t go to McPhail with all that stuff about last night.”

  “You mean about Chris?” I asked.

  “Yes. Linell, do you see what it means if they find out she was in the window? Do you see what they’ll do to my poor little girl?”

  “Perhaps they’ll find the murderer before it needs to come out,” I said without much hope.

  If anything he turned a little grayer. “It’s horrible—Chris being in the window when it happened. And keeping it all from us. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to save her.”

  He looked so broken and helpless that I leaned across his desk and patted his hand. “The police are sure to end it soon. There’ll be a slip somewhere and they’ll catch the person behind all this.”

  “And then what?” Owen said queerly and put his hands over his face.

  He looked strange and rather terrible, sitting there with his plump hands over his face. As if he were dying a slow, torturing death inside, because of Chris, for whom he’d wanted so much, and with whom life had dealt so cruelly.

  When I left his office I noticed the bustle of excitement in the department. Murderers might come and go in Cunningham’s; people like Sondo Norgaard might disappear, but the models were concerned with their own lovely persons and ambitions. Tomorrow Cunningham’s big semi-annual style show opened, and tonight was dress rehearsal!

  When I got back to my office Keith was grinning broadly into the telephone and shouting, “Here she comes now! Wait a minute, Bill, wait a minute!”

  I took the receiver from him and collapsed into my chair.

  “Hello, baby,” Bill’s voice said. “Miss me any?”

  Human nature’s a funny thing. I’d missed him achingly until that very moment and then I’d have willingly killed him.

  “Miss you?” I said coldly. “Why on earth should I?”

  “Never mind, honey,” he consoled me. “I’ll take you to breakfast, too, one of these days. It’s surprising the things that come out over early morning coffee. Maybe you’d even discover how fond of me you are.”

  “Have you got Sondo with you?” I asked, ignoring that last.

  “Sondo?” He sounded surprised. “Why would she be with me? What’s happened to Sondo?”

  “That’s what we’d all like to know,” I told him. “McPhail thinks she’s the murderer and that she’s skipped town.”

  I could hear Bill draw in his breath. “I saw her at the store this morning. Didn’t you get the note I left on your desk?”

  “Note? I didn’t find any note!” I didn’t want to pretend any more. The anxiety I’d felt broke through in words. “Oh, Bill, I’ve been so scared. I couldn’t find where you’d gone, and what with Sondo’s disappearing too, I thought maybe—maybe—”

  Bill swore softly but distinctly. “I might have known better than to leave something like that on your desk. But you hadn’t come to work yet and I thought I could be cryptic.”

  “What did it say, Bill?”

  “Just to keep an eye on Sondo because something fishy was going on and that I was off to Mexico.”

  “Off to Mexico!” I gasped.

  The operator came on just then and I heard the drop of coins. That was the first I realized that Bill wasn’t talking to me from Chicago.

  “Where are you?” I demanded.

  “Listen, honey,” he said, “the less you know the better. That crack about Mexico was figurative. I’m not very far away. I’ll tell you just this much and you’re not to repeat it to a soul. Understand?”

  “I won’t!” I promised fervently.

  “Carla let something slip at breakfast. I don’t think she meant to. She knows more about Monty than she’s telling. It seems his unsavory qualities date pretty far back. There was a girl he was tangled up with down in Mexico a long while ago, and there’s a possibility that she’s cropped up in his life again. If she has, we may have something. But the thread’s a slim one, and right now I’m playing detective for all I’m worth. I’ll be back in town in a day or so.”

  “What do you think’s happened to Sondo?” I asked. “What did you mean about something fishy going on?”

  “Well, she all but threw me out of the apartment this morning. She was rushing around in a feverish state and she told me to get out quick and stay out.”

  “You know that mannequin Tony calls ‘Dolores’?” I asked. “Was that in the room?”

  “Sure,” Bill told me. “Dolores was there. She had on a red dress and Sondo was pulling it off in a great hurry.”

  “Did Sondo have on her green smock?”

  Bill thought a minute. “I think she did. In fact I’m sure she did. Why?”

  “Only that Hering and I found her smock stuffed in a drawer of my desk.” I said. “And Dolores had her head smashed in. With a hammer.”

  Bill said, “Oh, God. And Sondo hasn’t shown up?”

  “No,” I said. “Not a trace.”

  There was an urgency in Bill’s voice that hadn’t been there before. “Look, Linell, I’m coming back to town. But there isn’t a train out of this dump till midnight. I’d like to phone you again before then. How late will you be home tonight?”

  “I have to stay for the windows,” I told him. “But I won’t be any later than ten o’clock.”

  “Good. I’ll call you at home. And, Linell—”

  “Yes?”

  “Honey, be careful. Don’t take any chances. Promise!”

  “I promise,” I told him, with my heart doing a sort of highland fling in my breast because it mattered to Bill Thorne if I took chances.

  After he’d hung up I sat there smiling idiotically at the telephone. Bill was safe. He’d had breakfast with Carla because he wanted information. He’d called me “honey,” and I felt about sixteen and loved it.

  I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t think of the fact that I’d told him I’d be home by ten o’clock, which was one promise I’d not be able to keep. I wasn’t even thinking about his warning me to be careful. Because how can you know when to be careful when you don’t know around what corner danger lies?

  18

  The red windows were going in.

  Tony and his helpers were all at work. Sondo’s backgrounds had been hung and the checkered floors were down. Tony was busy dressing the mannequin that was to take Dolores’ place, though not in the dress originally intended for the window, because the belt was still missing.

  It was my job to add finishing touches, to contribute any brilliant ideas I might have, and to keep in close touch with the window work in order to write better sign copy. Keith was anxious to learn something about the window decorating end and he was there
too, mostly getting in the way.

  Right at the moment I was wandering dreamily around the cosmetic counters selecting a few odds and ends I wanted for a window.

  I don’t think I was quite all there. Monty’s death and Chris’s grief and all the queer undercurrent things that I couldn’t understand, had gone away from me for a little while. There was one spot in me that woke up every now and then and clamored, “What about Sondo?” But mostly I was moving around in a haze of happiness that was personally mine and that horror couldn’t touch. I’d never felt like this about Monty. There’d always been a sure knowledge that I’d be hurt if I loved him too well. But I didn’t think Bill was going to hurt me. Not for all his teasing. It was wonderful to have somebody who’d worry about me the way I’d worry about him. It was wonderful to have Bill.

  So I moved around in my foolish, happy daze and I suppose it’s just as well I had my little moment, because it wasn’t going to come again for a while.

  I picked out a small red tower of a box that held cologne, then a red and gold compact and a lipstick with a bright red container. After that I went over to costume jewelry and found a long strand of big red beads. I showed my selection to the watchman—the usual routine—and went back to Tony’s window.

  I hadn’t been in a window since the day I’d found Monty, but I didn’t think about that. I was feeling too happy about Bill for any queasiness. It didn’t even matter that Tony looked like a thundercloud and snapped at everybody who spoke to him. I paid no attention, but carried my things to the right front corner of the window and knelt down to arrange them as a little eye-catching accent in red.

  The heavy depression of the day had finally lifted. Rain pounded against the big plate glass window behind me. If I’d stopped to think, conditions were very much the same as they’d been on Tuesday. But my own golden haze kept me from thinking.

  Under the circumstances, I don’t know how it happened that what Tony was doing registered with me at all. I opened the box of cologne, tried various arrangements of compact, lipstick and coiled red beads. When I achieved a combination that satisfied me, I sat back on my heels to get the effect.

  “How does it look, Tony?” I asked.

  Tony’s soul was still rankling under the indignities to which he’d been submitted, and he only glowered at me and went on trying to crush a hat that simply didn’t belong there onto the head of a mannequin.

  I said, “Heavens, Tony, stop it!”

  The elaborate net and horsehair wigs they put on mannequins these days are stunning to look at, but they often drive the window decorators crazy because they lack the softness and pliability of more natural wigs.

  “This hat’s got to be used,” Tony said grimly and made another attempt to arrange it on the stiff wig of the mannequin.

  I came out of my haze enough to feel sorry for him. This series of red windows was Tony’s own brain child. The whole idea was really a knockout and if it was done as Tony had planned, we all knew it would make a stir on the street. But Tony had had too much handed him and now that the opportunity to put the series across was actually in his hands, he was going to pieces with resentment over past wrongs, instead of trying to meet and fulfill his present chance.

  I went over and took the hat out of his hands to have a try at it myself. But the hat and the mannequin were simply not to be mated.

  “Look, Tony,” I said, “this won’t do at all. But what about that blond figure upstairs? You know—the one with her hair parted in the middle. I think you could use the hat on that one.”

  Tony said something intelligent and encouraging like “umph,” and I knew he wouldn’t do anything about it on his own. There was still a lot of work to be done in the windows and all his boys were occupied. Keith wouldn’t know where to look if he went. I was the third hand that could be spared.

  “I’ll go get her,” I offered. “Her coloring’s good and she’ll be much better all around.”

  “Dolores was the one,” Tony said, but he didn’t object to my going.

  And I never thought about not going. I’d only have to carry a half figure downstairs and the figures we use now are very light. I never gave a thought to Bill’s warning that I must be careful. It seems amazing that I could go blithely off on that errand, without a care in the world and all disaster forgotten. Just because the word “honey” had gone to my giddy head and I thought I carried a talisman against the powers of darkness.

  The elevator man took me up and said he’d wait for me unless he got a signal. As we went past the fourth floor I caught a glimpse of bright lights from the dress section where the style show was being rehearsed.

  I got out on eight and started toward window display. The passenger elevators were at the very opposite end of the floor and it was quite a hike. I didn’t mind. It’s a wonder I didn’t skip as I went and maybe whistle a little tune. Never have I been so disgustingly carefree in my life—or with so little reason.

  I went past my office, with my heels clattering gayly on the wooden floor. I hurried across the little drawbridge effect leading into the department, without a thought for the gloomy depths of the freight elevator on one hand, or the old, open stairway on the other.

  I didn’t pause. I went straight on into the department. Only one or two lights were burning and I didn’t bother to turn on any more. I knew my way around the mannequin room, and I knew exactly where the half figures for the State Street windows were kept. There is something of a caste system among the mannequins. The older, cheaper figures are relegated to side windows, while State Street gets our prima donnas.

  I went directly to the right cabinet and pulled open the door. Cabinets ranged as high as the partition in the mannequin room, but this was a low one, at floor level. Only a dim light came over the partition, but I knew what I was doing, and there was enough light to make out the figures in the cabinet.

  I lifted out the first one, a luscious redhead, and set her to one side. Then I reached in for my blond. And knew immediately that something was wrong.

  The next figure was wearing clothes, and the mannequins were never put away dressed. I put my hand on her hair and then froze where I stood. My throat was choked with horror. For one long, dreadful moment I couldn’t even take my hand away.

  Instead of the stiff net of a mannequin’s wig, I’d touched hair that was soft and silky. Flyaway human hair that coiled about my fingers like something alive.

  But not alive.

  I stumbled backwards and closed the door quickly upon the thing that sat propped against the wall of the cabinet. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t need to look. I knew.

  My surroundings began to crowd in upon me, awareness quickened within me and all my senses tensed to listening. The old trembling weakness ran through me and my knees refused to obey. But I could listen and watch.

  I was aware of the lonely sound of rain whispering against the windows, and of all the dim, vast, echoing emptiness of the floor; the area of a huge city block. Far away the clang of an elevator gate told me the operator had not waited. I was the only living being on all that floor and within arm’s length, separated from me by only the thin wood of the cabinet door, lay something terrible and gruesome and dead.

  Now, in my awareness, other shadowy figures about the room took on threatening guise and the whole place was horror-filled. But the culmination of all terror was still to come. Into that listening and waiting, came a sound that closed my throat and turned my flesh to ice. The eerie, ghostly sound of music, of a phonograph playing.

  The needle had been set down in the middle of the record and the voice of the singer took up the words.

  “Let the love that was once afire remain an ember;

  Let it sleep like the dead desire I only remember,

  When they begin the Beguine.”

  Sondo’s favorite tune!

  And then I heard the other sound.
A queer slipping noise across the floor of Sondo’s workroom and I knew there was something more terrifying than being alone on that floor.

  I was trapped in the mannequin room. There was only one path of escape and that lay past Sondo’s workroom, where that dreadful music played and something slipped and slid across the floor.

  I took a step toward the door and some small object on the floor slid away from the touch of my foot with a tiny clatter. I stepped again and felt it small and hard beneath my shoe. Scarcely knowing what I did, I bent and picked the thing up, lest it clatter again, and slipped it into the pocket of my suit. And as I did so, I had the queer feeling that I was repeating a motion I had made long ago in the remote past, before I had ever reached a hand into a cabinet and touched silky hair that was no longer alive.

  The weird singing went on and on and I knew I had to escape before it stopped. I stole in stark terror into the corridor. The door to Sondo’s room stood open, but from where I crouched I could see nothing in the dim light. I could only hear—the music, and that light, strange sound.

  Was Sondo dead? Had it been Sondo in the cabinet? Or was it Sondo here in this room playing the music she loved? Was it perhaps—both?

  I screamed then. I couldn’t stop myself. There was no reason in me, but only a crazy tearing of sound from my throat.

  “Sondo!” I cried. “Sondo! Sondo!”—as if by crying her name aloud I could make her be alive, and not a dead thing propped in a cabinet, not a ghostly dancer to that awful music.

  But the music went on playing, though the other sound stopped abruptly. And nothing came out of that room. Nothing flew at my throat. No hands, living or dead, reached out for me, and I fled past the open door and ran wildly across the dark reaches of the floor toward the elevator.

  There I stood shaking the gate crazily, screaming for help, until the elevator came rapidly upward, the operator round-eyed with amazement and a passenger in the car.

  It was Sylvester Hering and never have I been so glad to see anyone in my life. I flung myself upon him, chattering hysterically and he simply put one big hand over my mouth and smothered me into silence.