Unsuspected

by Charlotte Armstrong

“That’s what I’ll do,” he said gently. “Go to the drugstore, duckling. Call from a booth. We can’t have this all over town,”

  “Give me a nickel,” she said resolutely.

  He gave her a nickel. Watching her, he knew she would obey the suggestions. She would go to the drugstore. She would ask for Gahagen. It would all take time.

  Mrs. Press opened the back door suspiciously. Then she let the door go wide, recognizing him.

  “What have you got to put him in?” said Grandy briskly, without introduction.

  “There’s a trunk,” she said.

  “Get it.”

  “It’s upstairs.”

  “Drag it down.”

  Recognizing emergency, she went without saying anything more. Grandy called a number on the telephone.

  “Press?”—crisply. “Can you send a truck here in the next five minutes? Trouble. Police. Tell them to pick up a trunk.” Sharply: “If you can’t do it in five minutes, there’s no use.” Coldly: “You realize what will happen if you don’t, this being your house?” Calmly: “Yes, I hoped you would. Tell them it’s full of germs. Yes, germs. Typhoid. Anything.”

  Grandy hung up the phone. There was a loud bumping and crashing. He went into the stair hall and helped Mrs. Press with the big old empty turtleback trunk.

  The two of them went down for Francis. Even with his limbs bound, even gagged and stiff and sore as he was, they had no easy time. Francis was sick at heart. This hurry, this wild anxiety of haste, could only mean that Tyl had made contact somewhere, somehow, and Grandy had found it out. So it was to be no good? No soap? Not even now, after she’d found him and thanked God? He would not see her face again, to thank her or to explain or just to see her face again?

  He was damned if he wouldn’t! The woman had great strength, and Grandy was not so weak an old man as he, perhaps, looked. They were desperate and in a hurry. They got him up the cellar steps, although all the way he bucked like a bronco. The scene in the hall was dreadful in its grim wordlessness. It was a voiceless battle of desperations. The yawning trunk was like a tomb, and the living man, in all his helplessness, refused to go.

  But he fell. He fell out of their weakening grasp, and he had no arms. He struck his head. They folded him over, jammed him in, stuffed him down.

  The woman, panting, said, “Better do it!”

  Grandy screeched, “No time! No time!”

  They shut the lid down. Grandy took the key and turned it in the lock. Together, they dragged again, tipped the bulky object over the front doorsill. Mrs. Press closed the door.

  “With a knife,” she gasped, “it wouldn’t have taken long!”

  Grandy said “Blood?” He sneered at her stupidity. Then he warned her, “You don’t know anything, when you’re asked.” He looked no more than a trifle worried now, a bit flustered. His frenzy was gone.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said contemptuously. She watched him go back toward the kitchen. She heard the soft closing of the kitchen door.

  The police car came wailing down the street to where Tyl stood, hopping with anxiety, on the drugstore corner. It barely stopped. It snatched her up. She showed them the way and told them as much as she could in the few brief noisy minutes it took them to swoop on, five blocks—the drugstore had been farther away than Grandy had said—down the street.

  When the big, clumsy gray garbage truck came rumbling along, going in the opposite direction, the men on top, in their dusty boots and aprons and heavy gloves, looked wonderingly down. They leaned against the big trunk balanced there, the last of their load.

  Chief Blake, who was driving himself, dodged by with a skillful twist and a brief snarl of his siren.

  30

  The car came to a skidding stop. One uniformed man went in a jogging run down the drive to the back of the house. Chief Blake and the other went up on the front porch. Tyl slid off Gahagen’s lap, where she scarcely knew she’d been sitting, hit the ground with both feet. Grandy was nowhere to be seen.

  “Got the right house?”

  “Oh, yes! Yes!” She looked for him on all sides.

  Then Grandy rose up out of the shrub border there by the driveway. He had old leaves in his hair. A smudge of earth streaked across his cheek. He came toward them. He was beaming.

  “Lurking Luther never took his eye off!” His thin lips smiled out the silly words. “It is there as it was there!” He made a flat triumphant sweep with his palm. “Not a soul stirred. Not a soul saw me. I lay low, by gum, I did! What an afternoon, at my age! I had no idea how fascinating it is to put one’s ear literally to the ground. Oh, cowboys! Oh, Indians!”

  Gahagen grinned. “Your little girl’s upset.”

  “But the marines are landing,” said Grandy, “eh? Now, how do you do this, Tom? This is most fascinating. Beard ’em, don’t you? Do we break down the door? I’d like to see that. I never believe it in the movies.”

  Mathilda’s heart ached. She felt tired out, all of a sudden. Grandy could set a mood; he always did. But this mood struck her wrong. It jangled. It hurt.

  “We try ringing the front doorbell first,” said Gahagen. “Come on.”

  Chief Blake said, “How d’ya do, Mr. Grandison? What goes on here?”

  “That’s what we wonder,” said Grandy, “and we do wonder, don’t we?”

  The chief was a big solid fellow, the type to be slow and sure—especially sure. “We’ll find out,” he promised.

  A thin woman opened the door and stood looking hostilely at them. “Well?” Thin and drab and sour, she wasn’t afraid of them or even particularly interested. “Well?” she snapped.

  “We want to look in your cellar,” said Blake, in all his huge simplicity.

  “What for?”

  “This young lady saw a man tied up down there.”

  The woman’s eyes were not so drab as the rest of her. They examined Tyl with contempt and curiosity. “There’s nobody in the cellar,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But there is!” began Tyl.

  Grandy’s hand warned her to keep calm, reminded her that they were among the officers of the law and all would proceed in due order.

  “We’ll take a look, if you don’t mind,” said Blake, and one felt that it would come to pass as he had said.

  The woman surrendered to that certainty. “I guess I can’t stop you,” she said ungraciously.

  The other uniformed man stood on guard where he was, there at the front door. The rest of them followed the woman into the house, down the dingy brown hall, past the doors to the sitting room, past a dining-room door. The cellar steps went down opposite here.

  The woman opened the door and snapped on a light for them as if she said, “You fools!”

  Tyl went down too.

  There was a little furnace room, cluttered with old boxes, not neat. It smelled of stale wine and coal gas. Tyl looked up and saw the woman, standing above them with her hot, angry eyes fixed on Chief Blake’s burly back.

  There were two doors out of here, one to a laundry. Gahagen opened that and peered in, closed it again. They all turned to the second door. It was not locked. It led to a perfectly empty room.

  “Any more rooms down here?” the chief said. His voice boomed.

  “The cellar don’t go under the hull house!” the woman called shrilly. “There’s nobody down there! I told you!”

  Mathilda stood in the empty little room and looked around at the stone walls. It was gloomy. Someone found the light. She blinked as the bare bulb sprang into glowing life.

  “Where would the place be?” Chief Blake looked down at her. “Which side of the house, Miss Frazier, eh?”

  “Mrs. Howard,” said Grandy softly.

  She felt her heart sink down—that sick, falling feeling. The taste of fear rose in her throat. Why did Grandy put that in? The fiction of her marriage? Why did he want them to think— She couldn’t understand.

  She moistened her lips. “It was right here,�
�� she said. Her voice was too thin. It piped up like a child’s voice. “Here,” she repeated, “because, don’t you see, that’s the window I broke?”

  They all looked up. Sure enough. The window was broken.

  “Now—uh—you say you saw him?” Chief Blake shifted around to face her—grill her, she thought.

  “I couldn’t see very well,” she admitted, “but it was Francis, because he answered me.”

  “You talked to him, eh?”

  “He couldn’t talk, but—”

  “But you say he answered. What do you mean by that, Miss—er—”

  “He did. You see, he could make a kind of thudding noise somehow. Like a heavy tap on the floor. So—” She swallowed. It didn’t even sound plausible to her. It sounded ridiculous, and yet it was true.

  “It’s true!” she cried aloud. “He did answer me! He pounded once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no.’ I asked if it was Francis!”

  “Pounded, eh?” Chief Blake seemed to take what she said perfectly literally, and he looked about him.

  Tom Gahagen said, “Maybe you weren’t as smart as you thought you were, Luther. Could be, you were seen. Better search the whole place.… What d’ya say, Blake?”

  “If the young lady’s so sure—”

  “I’m absolutely sure!” Mathilda told them desperately.

  So the house was searched. She went along. She had to see it for herself. The cellar. They thumped the stone walls. They shifted the low pile of coal with a long shovel. Then the kitchen, cupboards, pantry. The dining room. She saw Gahagen lift the long tablecloth and look under. It struck her as absurd, as if a man like Francis were a child, hiding from them. They searched the sitting room. Not there. They looked thoroughly into the clothes closet in the hall.

  The woman of the house stood by, against walls. She followed along and stood contemptuously back and watched. She was arrogant and sulky and sure.

  “There’s nobody here,” she kept saying.

  They went upstairs. Three bedrooms, more closets, a bath—a cubbyhole off the hall. No living thing. No dead thing, either. No person at all. They asked about the attic. There was a ladder to let down, and they let it down and a man went up. He came back sneezing.

  “Nobody up there,” he said.

  And that was all there was to the house.

  Chief Blake looked sidewise at Tyl’s white face. “Try the garage.”

  The garage was cold and vacant. Just a tin shack. Nobody, nothing in it.

  The men poked about the little back yard, lifted the slanting cellar doors with sudden energy and let them down again, slowly. There was nobody in the house or on the grounds except the woman, who stood on the porch now to watch in contemptuous silence.

  “Well,” said Gahagen. He let his shoulders fall helplessly. He looked at Mathilda. They all did.

  “But I know he was here!” she said.

  “He’s not here now, miss,” said one of the men.

  “But he was.… Grandy!” she wailed for help.

  “How long before you met Luther and sent him back to stand watch?” asked Gahagen sharply.

  “Not long,” she faltered. “A m-minute.”

  They shook their heads. They shrugged.

  She wanted to scream.

  “If you’re through, I’d be obliged if you’d leave,” the woman said, from the porch, her voice thin and dry with her contempt.

  Tyl turned to her. “What happened?” she cried. “You know!… Mr. Gahagen, don’t you see she must know? Why don’t you make her tell?”

  “Why, you—” The woman’s eyes blazed. “Call me a liar?”

  “Hush, hush,” said Grandy.…“Tyl, darling, it’s possible you were mistaken.”

  She moistened her lips. “No.”

  The woman said, “Now you seen what you seen, you better all get out of here.” She went indoors contemptuously.

  Grandy looked at Gahagen. “Perhaps Mathilda’s overwrought—” His voice was gentle and sad.

  “I’m not!” cried Tyl, knowing that the squeal of desperation in her tone denied her words. “I’m not.” She tried to make it sound firm and sane.

  “Oh, my dear”—in pity.

  “Francis was here!”

  “Hush.”

  Tyl thought, I won’t scream. I won’t cry. She said, “How could I have been mistaken? I told you about the candy.”

  “Candy? What candy was that, Miss Frazier—Mrs.—” Chief Blake would Listen.

  “Candy!” she cried. “That’s how I trailed him! He dropped pieces of candy, like a paper chase.… They were some of your Dutch chocolates, Grandy. That’s how I found the house. Did you think I went looking in every cellar window? Come out here to the front. I’ll show you.” Her voice rang with new confidence.

  But on the dull grass, just emerging from its winter brown, there was no glittering little heap of candies now. There was nothing there. Nothing on the grass anywhere.

  They stood and looked at the ground. Gahagen scraped with his sole, made a mark.

  Grandy said softly, “Come home, Tyl.”

  “No.”

  “He isn’t here, dear. You saw that.”

  “But he was!” she wailed. “Because I know he was! Grandy, you believe me, don’t you?”

  “There, there. Hush.”

  “This is the little girl that was on the ship?” Chief Blake was asking delicately.

  She knew Grandy was nodding. She knew glances flew, now, above her head.

  “She’s been under a strain,” Grandy said in his soothing way. His voice stroked and patted at the situation, stretching it here, pushing at lumps. He was going to cover over this indecency of the impossible. Everything would seem reasonable and able to be believed, after he had stroked the facts with his voice a while. “Dreadful strain,” he was murmuring. “First that, and then Althea’s death. Her own sister couldn’t have been closer. And now, you see, her husband has gone off without leaving any word. It’s no wonder. Poor child.”

  They were murmuring too. She could hear the hum of their consent and understanding.

  “It’s all been terribly confusing,” Grandy said. “I can’t even tell you all of it But she really— It’s no wonder if her senses begin to play her tricks. I think if you’d been through … stresses and the bewildering circumstances—” His voice murmured off, died in wordless sympathy.

  Tyl felt frozen and trapped.

  Her senses. Here it was again. She did not know what she knew she knew. Here was Grandy saying so! What Francis had said! She did not know what had happened. What she thought she saw, couldn’t be trusted. What she thought she remembered, no one else remembered, and even inanimate things shifted and changed behind her back. Because her senses played her tricks? Did they, in fact? She didn’t know, herself, at the moment. She wasn’t sure any more.

  Gahagen said cheerfully, “No harm done.”

  Blake said kindly, “Just as well to make sure. Say, that’s all right.”

  “Never mind, little girl. We understand,” their voices said.

  She stood still in utter terror. What it meant, her mind didn’t know. But her body was sick with fear.

  A taxicab pulled up abruptly. A girl got out. The girl was Jane. She came to them quickly. She was decisive and demanding.

  “What is it?” said Jane. “What are all of you doing here?”

  31

  The group shifted to let Jane in. There was a reluctance to say what they were doing here. No one volunteered.

  “Ah, Jane, dear child,” said Grandy.…“Gentlemen, this is my little secretary, from the house.… Look, dear, let us take Mathilda home in your cab.”

  “But wait a minute—”

  “I thought Francis was in there,” Mathilda said wearily. “I thought I’d found him.”

  The blond girl’s eyes didn’t flinch from hers. “That’s strange,” she said. “Because this is where Press lives.”

  “Press?” Grandy said it

  “Yeah, the nam
e here is Press, all right,” said Chief Blake.

  “You mean Ernie Press?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why, I am acquainted with him,” said Grandy. “Of course. Do you mean to tell me—”

  Jane said crisply, “I’d like to know what this is about, please.”

  There was a shocked little silence, the result of her rudeness. Then Gahagen began to tell her.

  Mathilda felt strength seeping back into her spine. Jane was no baby doll or child, either. Jane had force. Jane made sense. She listened eagerly. It was a different kind of sense from Grandy’s, but sense. Something clear.

  Tyl said, “Yes, and I did communicate, Jane. He did answer me.”

  “Let me tell you something,” said Jane in her clear and surprisingly bold voice. “Francis warned me that if anything ever happened to him, I should look up this man named Press.”

  This was odd. Tyl felt the balance shift. She could tell that they were checked, turned back, made to think again.

  “He works for the city,” went on Jane. “The D.P.W.”

  “D.P.W.!” cried Mathilda. “Of course! Yes, yes! Francis got into his car. His car, Jane! It had D.P.W. on it Ask the gardener.”

  Grandy bent forward, as if he drew a line across Tyl’s eagerness to cancel it. “But of course Press works for the city,” he purred. “Of course he does, child.”

  Jane paid him no heed. She went on, “I’ve been watching Mr. Press. He’s been at his office down in the city yard. A little while ago he left suddenly. And very fast. He drove to the corner of Mercer Lane. That’s about four blocks up and over.” Jane pointed. “I followed him there.”

  “My dear Jane!” murmured Grandy with astonishment, and still she paid him no heed. Jane was a doll without any strings. Mathilda stood straighter.

  “He spoke to the driver of a garbage truck,” said Jane.

  They all looked blank.

  “The truck started up right away. It turned off. I followed Press again, until I found out he was only going back to his office. Then I thought I’d see what that truck did. Did it come here?”

  “Eh?” said Grandy. He looked thunderstruck.

  “Did it?” said Jane. “Because it turned this way.” Her blue eyes were stern and clear. One would have to answer.