by Leslie Ford
As he came back Gus moved aside for him to open the cellar door. “Watch the old blood pressure, Chief,” he said, grinning. “It boils the brains.”
“Uh-huh,” Swede Carlson said. “Funny thing, when I get blood-mad’s when I start makin’ my big mistakes. I guess that was okay, too. It was a colored boy’s voice. I guess John Maynard is anxious, maybe.” He took his watch out. “And it ain’t late. It’s only ten minutes past twelve. She must ’a been out later ’n this several times in her young life.”
He opened the cellar door. “Now the rest of ’em are out of the way I want a good look around down here. Comin’? Watch these steps, they’re carryin’ weight with the two of us.”
SIX
CONNIE MAYNARD STARTED VIOLENTLY and whirled around to the man standing in the semidarkness beside her car. She hadn’t heard him come out of the kitchen door or cross the yard or seen him till he spoke her name. She shot her hand up to her mouth, stifling an involuntary gasp. He was a policeman. He was saying, “Miss Maynard.” She stared at him in the dim light with a speechless, somehow extraordinary horror.
“Miss Maynard!”
Connie Maynard gripped the wheel tightly. “I—I’m sorry!” she said. For one dazed and dizzy instant she had thought the policeman had come for her. She shook her head and pushed her hair quickly back from her forehead. “I’m sorry. I must have been asleep.” She hadn’t been asleep, unless it was a sort of hypnotic slumber, induced by the darkness all around her, outside and in.
“Your father called up to see if you were still here,” the officer said. “Chief Carlson said to tell you Mr. Blake could go in with him. They may be quite a while yet. He says you better go on in.”
“Thanks.” She had to moisten her lips before she could say it casually enough. “Tell Mr. Blake I’ll wait just the same.” She tried to think of something to add to make it seem amusing if determined, but there was nothing. She was still too stunned by the effect his appearance had had, coming just when it did, in the rapidly mounting horror building itself up in her mind.
Murder—I’d be a murderer, too, She was saying that to herself in the dark recesses of her mind just as he spoke her name, so profoundly absorbed that his abrupt appearance had made her lose the connection between herself waiting for Gus in the substantial reality of the Wernitz house and yard and spring to the insubstantial reality she herself had built up.
She ran her tongue over her dry lips again. If Janey Blake wanted to kill herself, it wasn’t her fault. If Janey was fool enough to get herself in the kind of jam she was in and couldn’t think of any better way out of it than a handful of sleeping-pills, it was no problem of hers. If it was anybody’s fault but Janey Blake’s, it wasn’t Constance Maynard’s. It was her mother’s. Her mother ought to know better than to leave her sleeping-pills in the drawer by her bed where anybody who wanted them could help herself. Or her mother’s doctor’s fault, for letting her have a whole bottle full because he was going away for a month and she’d asked for them and he couldn’t refuse John Maynard’s wife. He had no right to give them to her, and she had no right to leave them there. She always made them lock up their guns when they came in from duck- or squirrel-shooting, and insisted that all antiseptics for external use be hidden away on a top shelf, and the most seductive lethal invention of them all she left in her table drawer, along with her reading-glasses and the box of yellow cleansing tissues. And she talked about them—she was always passing out one or two, to help somebody sleep.
To sleep for a single night, not forever. Connie Maynard shivered and dug her hands deeper into her fur-lined pockets. Her jaw hardened stubbornly. Nobody could blame her if anything happened to Janey. She happened to know Janey was in an awful jam. She happened to go upstairs because Gus sent her to see if Janey was all right after the fantastic scene she’d made, winning the jack pot down there in the playroom. Who would even know she’d seen Janey there, the bottle of sleeping-pills in her hand? Nobody would ever know. Nobody but herself. If Janey took the pills and didn’t wake up, nobody would ever hold Connie Maynard responsible.
She jammed down the handle of the door and swung her feet around and out onto the hard ground. Nobody but yourself, Connie. It burned in her mind. She’d know it. She could never forget it. She stamped her feet on the ground to bring some life and warmth back into them. She’d always know it. She’d always know she was responsible. She paced back and forth on the uneven ground. It was the darkness that was doing this to her—the darkness, and the shock of her first contact with murder, and the frightening, horrible emptiness of it; the grim-faced, hard-eyed man brushing her aside, and her sitting out there by herself and seeing them cart the body away as if it was anything common and ordinary—like the ad somebody ran in the Gazette—Dead Horses Removed. It was sordid and terrible, and morbid. The whole atmosphere reeked with morbidity and death. If only she’d insisted on staying inside with Gus—
She shot her head up, listening. Somewhere not far away a siren had begun its low, warning whine, rising slowly to a demanding scream, diminishing again as a twirling red light appeared between the black cedars lining the dirt lane from the country road. Long yellow fingers reached out toward the yard. The Fire Department’s shining new ambulance streaked past her and pulled up. Two men jumped out. The policeman who’d told her to go home held the door open for them to bring the stretcher through. She caught her breath sharply and moved back, reaching for the chromium arrow on the hood of the car, gripping it to steady her. An ambulance coming there— She remembered one of the detectives in the kitchen saying Buzz Rodriguez, the colored boy, out in the passage, was punch-drunk. But they’d had to call an ambulance. If somebody called an ambulance for Janey—
They were bringing the boy out on the stretcher. She saw Chief Carlson in the doorway. The young policeman she’d seen in the hall got in the ambulance behind the stretcher. She didn’t see them close the doors and start off. Gus was there in the doorway with Carlson. The racing excitement that catching a sudden and unexpected glimpse of him always built up inside her was there now. She wanted him. If it weren’t for Janey— She turned away quickly, biting her lip until the salt tasted on her tongue. Then she stopped abruptly, suddenly aware that the ambulance had gone and she was there alone in the yard again, nothing but silence and the small sounds of the night around her.
She drew a deep breath. You can’t do it, Connie. No matter how much she wanted Gus, it was something she couldn’t do. It was horrible. She saw Janey in her mind again, saw her, from halfway along the carpeted hall, there at her mother’s bedside table, with the bottle of pills in her hand. She saw her resisting them, putting them quickly back, shoving the drawer shut and stepping away. She could have spoken to her then. She could have said, “Hi, Janey—are you okay?” Or she could have done it when she saw Janey’s body stiffen and saw her twist her head around on her shoulder and hold it there tightly a moment before she took a quick step forward, pulled the drawer open, grabbed the piece of yellow tissue out of the box, picked up the bottle, and unscrewed the top, pouring the capsules into the tissue, twisting the ends together, and thrusting it into her bag.
I should have stopped her then. She whispered it to herself. But she hadn’t. She’d even smiled, watching her. She put her hand up to her frozen cheek and rubbed it violently, horror seizing her again. She could still feel the smile on her face, and the upward tilt of her brow as she stepped quietly through the open door of her father’s room and waited there, in the dark, until Janey came running out, clutching her bag in both hands. She could still feel herself standing there, and feel the satisfied smile that was on her face. She shivered suddenly. It was something evil, hideous, inside her. She’d known it was wrong then, but it hadn’t mattered. Everything was working out perfectly. With Janey out of the way, everything would be just as she wanted it. But out here alone in the dark, where she had to stop and sit and listen to the sharp, shrill voice of the conscience she didn’t often bother to listen to, i
t suddenly mattered. It mattered a great deal.
You can’t do it. You get what you want, but you don’t get it that way. Not even her father would approve of that. John Maynard was ruthless and he was none too scrupulous. She knew that. But this was callousness—plain and horrible.
She thought of Janey, at home in the narrow brick house, the capsules in her hand. She wouldn’t take them right away. She’d resist them, the way she’d resisted the impulse to take them from the table drawer. Connie Maynard moved back to the car. She’d tell Gus, on the way home. She started to get in under the wheel. Somewhere behind the dark fringe of trees around the yard something slithered through the dry grass. A small animal squealed and was silent. There was no sound except the slithering movement in the grass. Across the darkness came the high pitch of the siren as the ambulance screamed through Newton’s Corner. Connie tried to swallow. Her throat was as dry as the hard, parched ground under her feet. Maybe she couldn’t wait till Gus came out and she drove him home. Maybe it was too late already—
She ran across the yard, catching her foot in a dry rut behind the green truck, stumbling forward, catching herself again and running on to the door. “Oh, Gus?” She pulled the door open. “Gus, you’ve got to go home!” As she stumbled into the kitchen and saw Chief Carlson and Gus Blake as they whirled around from the passage door, staring at her, she was conscious that no sound had come from her throat.
“Connie—for God’s sake!”
She clenched her fists to control herself.
“Gus—you’ve got to come home. I’m—I’m tired waiting.” She tried desperately to think what she could say. “I’m—I’m tired! Do you hear me? You’ve got to come home!”
She saw the alarm in Gus Blake’s face change as she stamped her foot on the floor. Anger flashed up in his eyes, his jaw tightened in white hard ridges. “Gus, please! I’m tired, Gus!”
Then she saw Carlson put his heavy hand on Gus’s arm.
“Go on, Gus. It’s late. I’m goin’, too.”
She turned, pushed the door open, and ran out again, across the dry ruts in the littered yard to the safe and cooling darkness of the car.
“Take it easy, son,” Swede Carlson said. “High blood pressure boils the brain. And find out why Miss Maynard’s so upset, all of a sudden. From what I hear, she don’t get tired till four or five in the mornin’, and not from just sittin’ in a car. Go on, Gus. Maybe we’d both like to know.”
The clock in the courthouse tower struck eleven as Janey reached the top of the narrow crooked stairs. She unlatched the folding gate that was there to keep little Jane from toppling down the steps, fastened it securely back again, and went along the passage to the front room where she and Gus slept. She switched on the light between the beds, went over to the dressing-table, and sat down, looking blindly into the mirror as she automatically pulled open the side drawer, put her velvet bag into it, closed it, and reached up and pulled the velvet bow off her hair. After a moment she got up and went back to little Jane’s room, picked up the warm sleeping child, took her to the bathroom, and brought her back, still half asleep. It was a nightly routine that ordinarily filled her with a warm glow of happiness. Tonight she went through it automatically, without feeling. She was too numbed to think or feel.
She put the pink wool panda back up straight in the corner at the foot of the crib, facing the lop-eared white rabbit in the other corner, saw that the picture book was on the chair where little Jane could reach it if she woke first in the morning, and opened the window a little. Out in the hall she reached up to turn off the light and remembered that Gus never remembered about the gate across the stairs when he came in late, always bumped into it, always swore. She left the light on, started back to her room and stopped. Little Jane had waked.
“Daddy.” Janey could hear her voice calling sleepily. “Daddy—little Dane wants a drink of water.” At two and a half she could pronounce all her letters except the J of her name. Blue-eyed and yellow-haired, she looked very like what she called herself. Her father called her the little Dane. The little Dane and the big Swede. It flashed into Janey’s mind. That was what he called the Chief of the County Constabulary. Her hand trembled as she went back to the girl’s door.
“Daddy isn’t here yet,” she said. “He’ll get you a drink of water in the morning. Good night, sweet.”
She heard the sleepy, “Night,” and closed the door. Her knees were watery-weak again. She put her hand on the rail across the stair well and stood there. She shouldn’t have thought of Chief Carlson. Doc Wernitz’s house was out in the country. The chief of the county police would be in charge. He’d be out there with Gus now. He was a friend of Gus’s. If he found the checks— She closed her eyes, holding on to the railing. It was all back again, all the writhing agony and despair. A thousand dollars, she thought dully. All the money she’d saved since Gus had turned over the accounts to her because he could never save anything. She’d worked so hard, and so gaily, saving it, had such fun shopping and planning, standing in line at the markets, making her own clothes and little Jane’s, doing everything she knew how to do. Nest egg, backlog, call it anything, money in the bank; something she’d worked so happily to build up for them, to match the secure enchantment of the other part of her life with Gus— and then turned on, tearing it down and throwing it away, when Constance Maynard came and she saw all her dream world dissolving before her. Now, there was nothing left. The money was gone, the dream was gone. How she could explain it, she had no idea. She’d destroyed the only thing she’d ever been able to do for Gus. She wasn’t beautiful and brilliant, the way Constance Maynard was, but she had been practical. She’d made Gus comfortable at home, and managed, and saved his money so he could buy a new car and have a new suit and new overcoat, or make a down payment on a house—and then she’d turned on him and thrown it all away.
It was all such stupid, sickening folly. And Connie Maynard knew she was stupid. It was in her veiled, patronizing smile every time she saw Janey or had to speak to her. And she was right. Gus would be better off with Connie. That was the worst of all of it. I’ve failed, him in the only thing I knew how to do for him.
She went back to their room, took off her dress, and got her pajamas and yellow wool robe. She put them on, turned down the covers on Gus’s bed and hers, and sat down, staring at his slippers on the floor. She was dumbly aware, somehow, that if she could get a moment’s release from the tension that was blinding her, there might be some way to get out of it. There was none now. She wasn’t even thinking straight in her own stupid way; if she had been, she would never have taken the sleeping-pills from Mrs. Maynard’s table drawer. As they came into her mind again she got up, went to the dressing-table, took her bag out of the drawer, and reached in it. She touched the gilded lucky piece first, pushed it aside, and felt for the folded tissue, to take the pills to the bathroom and flush them down. As they met her fingers, the telephone on the table between the beds jangled noisily.
She thrust the bag quickly into the drawer and shut it, almost as if the phone had eyes to see. As she picked it up, a cold hand closed sharply around her heart. Was it Gus now, calling from out there, to tell her he knew? She let herself sink down on the side of the bed. The phone rang again.
“Hello.”
A high-pitched voice, like an old man’s whispering, came over the wire. “Is Mr. Blake there?”
“No. He’s not in.”
“Where is he? Where can I get in touch with him? It’s important.”
“He’s out in the country.” She started to say, “on the Wernitz case,” and didn’t. “He’ll be here in the morning.”
She put the phone down. It was a disguised voice. She knew that without thinking about it particularly. A lot of times people called up in the middle of the night, disguising their voices, to tell the editor of the newspaper something they wouldn’t dare tell if there was any chance of their being recognized and held accountable. Usually slander, or— She swallowed a bitte
r doughy lump caught in the middle of her throat. Was this somebody calling to tell Gus— She stood up, took off her robe, and laid it across the foot of her bed.
“I’ve got to stop this,” she said softly. “I’ve got to stop being a fool.” She raised the window, got into bed and turned off the light. “I’ve got to quit even trying to think.”
She heard the courthouse clock strike the half hour, three quarters, twelve o’clock. Quietly lying there, her mind seemed to clear a little. The thousand dollars was gone. She had to face it, and everything else. There was only one thing to do. That was to tell Gus. She must stay awake, to tell him when he came in. It was all perfectly clear now. She got up, closed the window, and opened the hall door. She had to hear him when he came in, and get up and go down and see him downstairs, not up here, where he could fly into a rage and maybe shout at her and wake little Jane. He’d never flown into a rage and never shouted, but he’d never had any reason to before. She shivered a little, not knowing what he’d do, and got Into bed again. The quarter hour struck as she lay there staring up at the ceiling.
Then she heard him. Or did she think she’d heard him? She hadn’t heard a car drive up. But she wouldn’t; he’d drive home with Connie, and leave her and walk home. He wouldn’t let her drop him and drive home alone. Though she hadn’t heard his step on the walk, and he usually ran the last few feet and up the steps onto the porch.
She sat up and turned on the light, listening. Maybe she’d made a mistake. Or she could have heard a rat. Sometimes rats that had been abroad for the summer came back to the old grocery store, not knowing people lived there now. Then she heard his footsteps. He was being very quiet. He usually wasn’t. He usually ran into a chair and swore under his breath, the narrow stair well tunneling it all plainly up to her on the third floor. Janey wondered a little, now. He must be out in the kitchen, she thought. Always before she’d left coffee for him in the Thermos bottle in the pantry, but she had not tonight. Still, there was the coffee cake her mother had made. He could have coffee cake and a glass of milk. She reached for her robe and put her feet in her slippers. She’d go down and see him, and tell him. Now she’d made up her mind, she knew the quicker she did it the better, for everybody and everything. She went out into the hall. Her hands were icy-cold, her throat dry, and her legs not very steady as she took hold of the rail and leaned over to look down and tell him to wait there.