Unsuspected

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Grandy came to embrace Mathilda. The big spoon waved back of her shoulder. He smelled of talcum and a little garlic. He beamed tenderly.

  “Grandy,” she murmured, close to his ear, “I need to talk to you. I have things to tell you.” She knew it wasn’t a good time, not with the sauce at the stage it was.

  “I know,” he crooned in her ear, “I know, dear, I know.” Mathilda felt sure then that he did know. It didn’t occur to her that he had been told, but just that he knew somehow. “After dinner,” he murmured. “Let us be alone, eh?”

  She was convinced that they must be alone while she told him. “Yes,” she said eagerly, “alone.”

  He looked into her eyes. How anxious he was, how tender, how wise! Yes, he would know, of course. He sensed it already. She was quite safe. There was no hurry.

  They trooped after Grandy, who carried the deep wooden bowl of spaghetti as if he held it on a cushion to show the king. But Grandy was the king too. There was candlelight Mathilda at his left, then Oliver. Althea at the foot. Then Francis. Then Jane. Happy family. Mathilda felt gay. No hurry; and, meanwhile, it was all so terribly amusing.

  There was Oliver, on her left A mild man, married to dynamite, and he didn’t know what to do, she could tell. He was a mild man, a little man, in spite of his size, a drifting kind of creature, willing to be available and kind. But he didn’t know what to do about the flagrant behavior of his bride. He fluctuated between stern anger and the determination to put his foot down, and another mood, a conviction of weakness and the tired thought that it didn’t really matter.

  But Althea, in all her glamour, was down at the foot, being a young matron with such amusing reluctance. And Francis, beside her, was looking very gloomy, very much subdued. Mathilda was glad to see it. She felt it was only just that he should have to sit at the table with the ax hanging over his head.

  At the same time, she felt a surge of violent curiosity about him. What was the man up to, this Francis Howard? What kind of man? Well-bred, you could tell at table. Really quite attractive, if you liked that dark type, that lean kind of face. “Fortune hunter.” She remembered her formula. She looked at his clothes. They were in expensive good taste. But if money wasn’t his motive, what could it be?

  She thought, angrily, as she’d been taught to, All that stuff about my beauty. She thought, If he thinks he isn’t going to be caught out in his lies— If he thinks I won’t find out what’s at the bottom of them— She caught a suffering look from his dark eyes, and she smiled a little cruelly.

  Francis asked Jane for the bread. The little blond girl looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Tyl’s green eyes took stock of her.

  Nobody had even mentioned Rosaleen. Rosaleen was gone, although she had sat on Grandy’s right hand in her day.

  But they began to ask Mathilda questions, and she left off her puzzling to tell the tidbits she’d saved for Grandy. About Mrs. Stevens’ drinking spells. About Mr. Boyleston and his one eye at the bridge table. All at once it seemed funny and rather gay. Besides, it burned Althea up.

  Down at his end, Grandy listened. And his black eyes were restless and shrewd. Once he said, “Poor Tyl,” in the middle of the laughter and watched her face sadden obediently.

  Francis saw it too. He thought, Damn it, the kid looks intelligent. Can’t she see what he does? He directs her. Plays on her feelings like an organ, the old vulture. The beautiful bones of Mathilda’s face haunted and reproached him. He was miserably tense and unhappy. He wished the dinner were over. He wished he didn’t have to sit here, looking soulful, when what he would really like to do was to smash in that beaming hypocrite’s beaming face and snatch Mathilda and shake some sense into her, and then take Jane and get out of here. Damn such a game!

  Althea’s little foot was in his way under the table. He brought his own foot to rest, touching hers, and let it stay. Damn such a game, but if you have to play it, play it!

  When Mathilda had done, Grandy went to work and changed the mood. He brought sea mist into the room, gray, fast, lonely danger, salty death. He made them remember the coral bones of those lost at sea. He told one of his favorite ghost stories.

  Tyl began to look less vivid. She sobered and shrank. The wild mood, the free feeling ebbed away. After all, she was only poor Tyl, plain little Tyl, with all that money, who could never trust anyone very much. She’d have made a lovely ghost, a sad little green-eyed ghost with a broken heart and seaweed in her lank brown hair. She might have come to haunt them. She shivered a little. She saw Francis looking at her with scorn.

  Scorn! From that quarter! She straightened her back. She said adoringly, “Oh, Grandy, it’s so good to hear you talk!”

  Francis trod on Althea’s toe. “In the guest house. After dinner. Will you?” Her silver eyes were both surprised and delighted.

  12

  “I think they just stepped out, Mr. Keane,” said Jane. Jane was the shy little outsider all the while, the one who made the obvious remarks and did the right thing.

  Grandy looked at Mathilda, took the dish towel out of her motionless hands.

  “Fine thing,” Oliver said. He was trying to look very black. He seized on the state of Althea’s health. “She had that cold. She oughtn’t to be out.”

  Grandy said, “Poor Francis,” gently, watching Mathilda.

  She was wildly puzzled. Why was Grandy watching her so? What did it mean if Francis and Althea went out to the garden? Why “poor Francis”? Why Althea, anyway? She had a nightmarish feeling that the others knew what she did not know. She rejected it fiercely. Not so. It was she who knew and they who had been deceived. And the quicker she made it plain the better.

  Grandy said, “Shall we—”

  She thought he meant that they would talk now. “Yes, now,” she said. But the doorbell rang.

  “There now, answer the doorbell, Oliver. Please, dear boy. Who can it be?”

  They went into the long room. Grandy took his chair by the fire. Tyl took her low chair at his feet. Jane, who had followed them, went a little aside, picked up a bit of knitting and put herself meekly into the corner of a sofa. It was just as if Grandy had composed the picture, directed the scene. Even the firelight flickered with just the proper effect. Luther Grandison at home. Curtain going up.

  Oliver came in from the hall. “It’s Tom Gahagen.”

  Gahagen was the chief of the detective bureau, a small, lean, nervous man with a tight dutiful mouth, but a friendly face. He listened with an air of waiting, while Grandy enlarged charmingly upon Mathilda’s miraculous return from the sea. Then he said, clearing his throat naïvely, “As long as I’m here, Luther, there are a few questions. I thought it would be all right just to drop in and talk it over. Didn’t want to make it formal, y’understand?”

  Grandy nodded. “About poor Rosaleen?” Then he appeared struck to the heart by his own forgetfulness. He took Mathilda’s hand. “My dear child, forgive me. You don’t know—”

  “Francis told me,” Mathilda said.

  “That’s your husband?”

  Mathilda’s eyes widened. She heard Grandy say smootly, “Yes, yes, her husband.… What did Francis tell you, duck?”

  “Just that she—” Mathilda couldn’t continue. She was shocked because Grandy had said Francis was her husband. She’d had it in her head all along that Grandy, somehow, knew better.

  Gahagen said, “Very sad, the whole thing. Sorry to bring it back to mind, but there’s a point we’ve just come across. Funny thing, too.”

  Jane’s foot in the small black childish shoe rested on the floor, but only the heel touched and the ankle was tight. No one could see Jane’s foot. Her face was calm and her eyes cast down, watching her work.

  “You remember,” Gahagen went on, turning to Grandy, “that day, along about early afternoon, some of the newsmen got in here?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Took your picture?”

  “Did they not?” sighed Grandy. “Yes.”

 
; Gahagen’s eyes went to the mantel above their heads. “One of those shots was right here in front of this fireplace. That clock’s electric, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, of course.” Grandy’s voice was sirup sliding out of a pitcher.

  Gahagen said, “I’d like to have a look at your fuse box, Luther. Want to see what arrangement you’ve got in this house.”

  “Why, Tom?”

  The detective slipped away from Grandy’s bright and friendly gaze. He chose to explain all this to Mathilda. “You see,” he told her, and she couldn’t wrench her eyes from his plain, kind face, “the girl got up on Mr. Grandison’s desk in there. You know his ceiling hook—the one he had put in for hanging special lights? She—er—used that, y’see, and stepped off the desk, like.” Tyl felt sick. “Well, it isn’t pleasant to think about, but she couldn’t help it—kicking, y’know. Her leg got tangled in the lamp on his desk, pulled it over, wires came out of the bulb socket.”

  “So they did,” said Grandy. He sounded politely puzzled.

  “What we figure now,” the detective said, “is that she must’ve blown a fuse. Blown a fuse when she kicked the lamp, see?”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Certainly. It’s possible all right. Couple of bare wires, they’re going to short-circuit. I’ll tell you why we wondered. That electric clock up there was showing behind your shoulder in this picture, and it was all cuckoo. Gave the time wrong. It says twenty minutes after ten. And the picture was taken after two o’clock in the afternoon. We know that.”

  “The clock was wrong?”

  “Lemme look at it, d’you mind?” The detective got up to examine the black, square modern-looking clock. “Yeah, see? This one is the old kind. It don’t start itself.”

  Mathilda was near enough to Grandy to feel him suppress an impulse to speak. Oliver spoke up impatiently. “No. of course it doesn’t. You have to start it after the current’s been off. The new ones start themselves.”

  “Anybody cut the current off that morning?” asked Gahagen. “Was the master switch thrown at all, d’you know?”

  Oliver said “Not that I know of.”

  “Nor I,” said Grandy. He edged forward in his chair. “I’m not sure that I follow you, Tom. What are you getting at?”

  “Gives us the exact time,” the detective said. “That is, if it does. Y’see, there was no power failure that day anywhere in town. We’ve already checked on that. So it must have been something right here in the house made the clock stop, see? Now I’d like to look at your circuits, eh? If this clock actually is hooked in on the same circuit as the study lamp, why—”

  Again Grandy suppressed something. Tyl had a telepathic flash. Who’d told Gahagen about the clock and the circuits? The kind of clock it was, what circuit it was on? Because he wasn’t wondering. He was checking.

  “I don’t understand,” purred Grandy, “about the clock. But something’s wrong with your thought, you see, Tom, because the lights worked.”

  “Yeah, we know.” He nodded. “Lights were O.K. when we got here. So there’s this question: Did anybody put in a new fuse?”

  Oliver was looking blank.

  “If so, who?” said Grandy softly. “Fuses don’t replace themselves. I really—”

  “They don’t,” said the detective. “If a fuse’d been blown, somebody knew it. Somebody replaced it. None of my men did.” He waited, but no one spoke. “Well I don’t suppose it’s important. Still, I oughta—Where’s your fuse box? Cellar?”

  “Oliver, show him, do.… Jane, dear—”

  Mathilda held on to Grandy’s knee. The lights were going off and on all over the house. It was queer and frightening. Jane had gone to stand at the top of the cellar steps and call out which lights went off and when, while the two men below were playing with the fuses. Mathilda held on to Grandy’s knee, which was steady. She had begun to cry a little.

  Grandy was talking to her. He stroked her hair. “… nor will we ever know. Poor child. Poor, dark, tortured Rosaleen. She was so very tense. Tyl, you remember? Remember how her heels clicked, how quick and taut she was? Remember how she held her shoulders? Tight? Brittle, you see, Tyl. Strung too tight. Poor little one. No elasticity, no give, no play. And since she couldn’t stretch or change, she broke.”

  “But why?” sobbed Tyl. “Oh, Grandy, what was wrong?”

  “Not known,” he said, like a bell tolling over Rosaleen’s grave. “Not known. She didn’t let us into her life, Tyl. You remember? She was with us and of us, but she was, herself, alone.”

  That’s true, Tyl thought.

  “I think it was in the air,” he continued. “The house was waiting, days before. The storm in her was disturbing all of us, but we didn’t know. Or we put it down to sorrow and suspense over you, my dear. But now I remember that morning. She was writing a letter for me, and the typewriter knew, Tyl. It was stumbling under her fingers, trying to tell me. I felt very restless. I didn’t know why. Althea was fussing with a new kind of bread. She was in the kitchen, I remember. I felt the need of homeliness. I wanted to smell the good kitchen smells. Instinctively, I left her, Tyl.” He paused.

  “And of course, since it was rather a fascinating thing Althea was trying to do—cinnamon and sugar and apples in the dough—I became enchanted with the process. I’m afraid we forgot about Rosaleen behind the study door. Alone in there. Oliver was with us. The three of us were happy as children.” His beautiful voice was full of regret and woe. “But there is a fancy bread of which we shall not eat, we three.”

  She sobbed. “When—how did you—who?”

  “It was Oliver who—” he told her gently. “Noontime. He opened the door to call, and there was that little husk, the mortal wrappings—”

  Mathilda whimpered. She heard the men coming back, Oliver and Gahagen. Jane too. She wished they wouldn’t yet She wanted Grandy to say one thing more, something, anything to reconcile this tragedy, to heal it over, not to leave her heart aching.

  “Well, it’s on the study circuit, all right,” said Gahagen mildly. He walked over and looked at the clock. “But you tell me nobody put any new fuse in?”

  Grandy didn’t repeat his denial. He sighed.

  “Maybe somebody did and said nothing about it,” suggested Gahagen.

  “Possibly.”

  Oliver said, “But who? After all, we don’t have servants, you know.”

  “Funny.”

  “Could the clock have been out of order?” offered Jane timidly. She was back in her corner. Her blue eyes were round and innocent, and wished to be helpful.

  “It’s running now,” Gahagen said, frowning at it. “Who started it again after that morning?”

  “By golly, I did!” cried Oliver.

  “When?”

  “Let me see. That night. I noticed it, set it and gave it a flip. Never crossed my mind till now.”

  “Don’t sound like it was out of order. And it’s on that circuit, all right. Kitchen, study, and this double plug, backed against the study wall. That’s the fuse that went with the desk lamp when she kicked it over.”

  Grandy shook a puzzled head. He said wistfully, “I find mechanical contrivances very mysterious. Believe me, Tom, they are not always simply mechanical. They have their demons and their human failings. My car, for instance, has a great deal of fortitude, but a very bad temper. The oil burner is subject to moods, and the power lawn mower is absolutely willful.”

  Gahagen laughed. He said in a good-humored voice, “I don’t want you to think we’re snooping around after one of those unsuspected murders of yours, Luther.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Grandy humorously.

  Jane turned her ankle over convulsively. Her heel clattered on the floor. She stopped knitting to look hard at the stitches.

  “It’s just that it was funny and we kinda wanted to check. Er—this Mr. Howard, he—er—wasn’t here at that time, was he?”

  “No” said Grandy. “No.” His black eyes turned behind the glasses, s
lid sidewise in thought.

  Gahagen frowned. “Have I got this straight, Luther? Now, when he came here, he was a stranger to you?”

  “To me,” said Grandy, “he was an utter stranger.”

  Oliver said, “Nobody knew him except Tyl.” He said it with smiling implications.

  Tyl opened her mouth to say, “But I didn’t. I don’t.” She felt Grandy’s hand on her shoulder. It said, Be still. She thought immediately, No, no, of course, not now. She leaned heavily against his knee.

  “Where’s Mrs. Keane?” asked Gahagen.

  Grandy stepped smoothly in between Oliver and the answer. “She’s gone out, I’m afraid. Unfortunately,” he purred, “I scarcely know when to say she’ll be in.”

  Oliver looked up, and then down. He pretended to be busy with a cigarette.

  Grandy purred on, “But of course, in the morning—Suppose I ask her to drop in to see you at your office, Tom? Will that do?”

  “Good idea,” said Gahagen. “Yeah, do that. Couple of things I’d like to ask her. Maybe she changed the fuse.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Oliver laughed.

  “Well, if you’ll ask her to stop by, that’s fine. That’ll—er—ahem.” He cleared his throat.

  It had all been between two clearings of his throat, like quotation marks.

  When the detective had gone, Oliver said, “He was looking for fingerprints on that fuse. Now, why? What’s the fuss about, do you know?”

  “Dear me. Were there any fingerprints?” Grandy asked.

  “No. Those milled edges won’t take ’em. What is the meaning of all this?” Oliver looked alert. He wanted to hash it over. He liked to gossip.

  Grandy looked up. “Eh? God bless us every one, I don’t know, Ollie.” Grandy sounded tired and sad. “Alas, I do not—I will never understand the ins and outs of electrical matters. I have not put my mind to them, don’t you see?” There was something petulant in the statement, something childish, as if he were saying, “I could have if I’d wanted to. I did not choose to know.”