A dram of poison

by Charlotte Aut Armstrong

  But all this was only delay. The stiff, shabby, spotless parlor seemed airless and stagnant.

  Miss Severson said, "I sat pretty well forward in the bus. You must have been sitting behind me." Her grave eyes examined Mr. Gibson. "I'm sorry." She turned her face to Lee Coffey. "You were clever to find me," she said.

  "One day," said Lee, "I saw you breathing through a lilac ..."

  "Are you from the East, too?" she said warmly, "that you noticed a lilac?"

  "I'll tell you another time," said the bus driver softly, "how come I noticed the lilac."

  The blond girl let her lashes down. "I wish I could have helped you," she murmured.

  Paul twitched. "Say, if the police have been broadcasting a warning all this time, maybe we should call . . .?"

  "Call," said Rosemary with her hands clenched.

  Virginia Severson showed Paul the telephone. Mr. Gibson surrendered himself to his chair; hope faded. All the magic belonged to the bus driver. The poison was still lost, still threatening.

  The girl came back, biting her lips. "I am a nurse, you know," she said to them. "This . . . well, it shocks me.

  "A man has his reasons," said Lee Coffey, gently. "It's easy to say he was crazy. It's also lazy."

  Virginia Severson tilted her head and shot him a glance that was suddenly alert. "His reasons aren't the question, right now, are they?" she said. "I meant unlabeled poison, Mr. Coffey. Floating around. That's shocking! I'm trained to be careful with drugs."

  "We'd like to find it. Miss Severson. We'd mighty like to find it," he drawled. His intent gaze was challenging.

  "Of course, you would," she said. ''I would, too." She seemed to feel the force of his challenge. "Let me try to think . . ." she said soberly and sat down, pulling the long blue around her pretty feet.

  Paul came back and spoke reluctantly to Rosemary's yearning face. "Nothing." He looked nervous and defeated. "Not a word. It's three thirty. Where is that stuff?"

  "It's somewhere," said Rosemary with a little gasp. "Somewhere."

  Mr. Gibson found himself pushing his imagination, too,

  trying to picture the bottle in the green bag . . . somewhere. But where?

  "Rosie, this is too tough," said Paul. "I don't think we're accomplishing anything."

  "Yes, we are. Be quiet," said Lee Coffey reverently, "Virginia is thinking." The nurse smiled at him. She had a lovely smile, and the bus driver let his face look fond.

  "Lee ..." said Rosemary, her voice ready to break, "Miss . . . Virginia. It's no time for . . ."

  "We're not," said the bus driver quickly.

  Mr. Gibson understood perfectly. But Paul Townsend didn't. His tall frame remained in the archway and his handsome face wore a lost expression as if to say. But what are you all talking about? Virginia had understood too, Mr. Gibson guessed, as her lids went down again. And Virginia agreed.

  How remarkably quickly, thought Mr. Gibson, things can be communicated. Lee Coffey has told this girl he's long noticed her, has liked her looks, likes her now, and expects a good deal of her. And she has told him she is . . . not offended. She would even like to deserve his good opinion. She already knows this is an interesting man. Yet both of them resolve that they will not pursue this enchantment . . . that, first, they will help me if they can. A bus driver, he thought. A blonde. His eyes stung suddenly.

  Nobody spoke. Until the little nurse said, at last, in her quiet unexcited voice, "There was somebody I know, on the bus. Would that help?"

  "Oh yes, it might," cried Rosemary, jumping up. "Oh yes! Oh, good for you!"

  "You see?" said Lee Coffey.

  "Mrs. Boatright was on that bus," the nurse told them, getting to her feet. "Mrs. Boatright. I remember now, wondering how three or four cars could all be unavailable, at once. She had a heap of packages, too. On the bus. It seemed strange. She's so very wealthy ... at least her husband is. She lives in a huge place on the hill. I'm sure it was she. I once met her at Red Cross headquarters."

  "Walter Boatright . . ." Lee Coffey sprang up and dove into the hallway and came back with the phone book.

  "But I'm afraid she'd have an unlisted number," Virginia said. "In fact, I know she has."

  I'Not what the number is?" The bus driver lowered the book.

  "No. Sorry."

  "Do you know the house?"

  "Yes, but not the street number, either."

  "Can't we go there?" Rosemary cried. And Paul half groaned and the bus driver looked at his blonde.

  "You all start," Virginia said. She was already at a plain white door the far side of the room. "Don't wait I'll catch you at the car."

  Lee Coffey grinned and glanced at his watch, and then took Mr. Gibson by one wing. "Is she a blonde?" he murmured, almost carrying Mr. Gibson down the porch steps past the lilac bush. "Do you blame me?"

  "She's a lovely blonde," said Mr. Gibson, overwhehned' "This is so good of you."

  "And all for money, too," said Rosemary tartly. "All for material advantage." Mr. Gibson looked at his wife, who had his other arm. Her blue eyes were bright.

  "Listen, we got our teeth in it now," said Lee with enormous gusto.

  "We're going to find it," said Rosemary.

  Mr. Gibson could almost believe this.

  Chapter XVIl

  THEY STUFFED HIM into the tonneau and Rosemary sprang in, too. She shoved over, and Lee Coffey, using nothing but an air of expectancy, stuffed Paul Town-send in at the other side of Rosemary. Then he slipped into the driver's seat and turned the key. The motor caught. The door of the house opened. Virginia skipped down the walk, wearing a brown jumper over a white blouse, brown pumps on her bare feet; her blond hair was neat and shining. The bus driver grinned and let the car move just as she slipped in beside him. He had not waited even one-tenth of a second. She had not failed him either. Paul said admiringly, "That was a quick change!" Nobody paid any attention to him. It would have been better not to have commented.

  As the car moved, the little nurse began to describe the location of the house they were seeking, and Lee sent them spinning around the block, across the Boulevard, and on north. They were heading for a swelling slope in the northwest section of the town where lawns grew wider and houses larger as they stood higher on the hill. Mrs. Boatright's house, she said, would be close to the top, on a short street, where there were only three or four houses, and hers had vast lawns behind a wall.

  "The higher the fewer, I guess," said Paul.

  Virginia turned to look back. "Is there an antidote to this poison, Mr. Townsend?" she said in a professional kind of way.

  "Paul," he suggested.

  She smiled at hrni. "What ought to be done ... in case . . . ?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know of any antidote," Paul confessed, sliding forward in the seat, the other side of Rosemary. "Of course I'm no doctor. All we understand, in our business, is what the danger is. We're trained to be careful, too."

  "How did he ever get hold of it?" the nurse frowned.

  Paul told her. As Mr. Gibson listened, he began to know that Paul Townsend was projecting himself somehow and being quite skillfully charming to this most attractive little person. Mr. Gibson found himself curiously affronted.

  He looked at Rosemary, dear Rosemary, who sat still between them with her hands clenched . . . whose resolution was their strength, who had begun this fight and fired them all from her own spirit and collected these valiant lieutenants.

  He said, "What a fighter you are, Rosemary!"

  "I am a rabbit," she said bitterly. "I was always a rabbit. I should have begun to fight long, long ago."

  Paul turned and covered her tense hands with one of his. "Now, now, Rosie ... try to take it easy. You'll make yourself sick. Worry doesn't tiflp any, does it, Virginia?"

  The nurse did not answer. The bus driver said, "She's getting a lot of mileage out of her worry. Hey, Rosemary?''

  "Yes, thank you," said Rosemary, rather forlornly, collapsing a little from her rigidity. Paul t
ook his hand away. "I'm worrying now," she said, "trying to imagine a wealthy

  woman picking up a strange package on a public bus. I don't suppose she would."

  "She might," said the nurse brightly. "By mistake, you see? Suppose she gathered it up with the other packages she was carrying. I didn't see her get off. I got off first. But who can say? And suppose she had things to eat in her own packages? She might dump them all in the kitchen. And she surely has servants. Her cook, for instance, wouldn't know. Her cook might think Mrs. Boat-right had meant to bring home some olive oil."

  "A little bottle?" said Rosemary pathetically. "A very small quantity? What time is it?"

  "Three thirty-seven," Paul told her.

  "It's still early, anyhow," said Rosemary, with a desperate smile.

  But Mr. Gibson thought, It's late. He thought of time gone by. Time enough for someone to have died already and very mysteriously, too. So that the news of the result might not yet have caught up with the cause. This fight might already have been lost, for all they knew.

  "The Boatright kids are in their teens," said the nurse thoughtfully. "They certainly wouldn't be fed their supper this early."

  "Olive oil?" said Rosemary. "What would a cook do with it?"

  The nurse said, "Salad? Oh ... to moisten a sandwich filling . . . possibly for a snack . . ."

  "Don't say that!" said Paul.

  The nurse said, "I guess I'm helping her worry."

  ". . . Resembles thought," muttered the bus driver.

  But Mr. Gibson was appalled. A child! Oh, if a child were to get the poison! He said aloud, "All of you ought to leave me. You are very good to trouble yourselves—"

  "No trouble," said Virginia. Mr. Gibson discovered that he believed her. "I believe you," he said to her in surprise and she smiled.

  "Don't worry," Paul began.

  "Stop saying that," said Rosemary quietly. "It doesn't help, Paul."

  "I told you, Rosie," he said rather crossly, "you ought to have talked to him, laid things on the line . . ."

  "You did. You told me. You were right," said Rosemary, looking straight ahead. "Yes, Paul." Her hands twitched.

  "You musta seen something brewing, Rosemary," the bus driver said sympathetically, not quite understanding. He hadn't the background. "A man doesn't decide in a day."

  (But I did, mused Mr. Gibson, wonderingly. In a night. I seemed to.)

  "Have you been ill, Mr. Gibson?" the nurse asked, "or taking drugs for pain? I see you limping."

  Mr. Gibson was bewildered. (His heart hurt. He wasn't dead at all.) "A broken bone or two," he murmured. "Just an accident." Rosemary turned her face to look at his. He looked away.

  "I only wondered," said Virginia gently. "There are illnesses that can be very depressing. And some drugs, too."

  Mr. Gibson, gazing at a curb whizzing by, thought Doom, yes. Here comes doom, again.

  "I was depressed," he said without spirit. "That's a name for it."

  "If you had only seen a doctor," the nurse scolded him delicately, with her soft regret. "So often a doctor can help these depressed feelings."

  "By a little tinkering in the machinery?" said Mr. Gibson rather bitterly.

  "They do know how to help sometimes," the nurse said, rather mechanically. She seemed to be tasting, perhaps diagnosing this answer.

  "You go for this psychosomatic stuff?" inquired the bus driver abruptly.

  "Don't you?" she said.

  "Long ago," he declaimed, "long ago I threw a whole bunch of arbitrary distinctions outa my head. Either—or. Body or mind. Matter or spirit. Hah! Now it turns out matter is less solid than spirit, far as I can figure what they're talking. Nothing's any more un-gross than the human body. Or a chair, either. Zillions of cells—atoms and subdivisions of same—whizzing around, and . . . they made outa what? Waves. Rhythms. Time itself, for all we know. Caution to the jaybirds," he concluded.

  Virginia laughed out loud, delightedly.

  But Mr. Gibson was on his way down for the second time. Doom, he said to himself, and aloud, "I suppose I was ill. At least that's a name for what I was."

  ''NowI' said Virginia. "Look, we are so ignorant."

  "Yes, we are ignorantI' said Rosemary gladly.

  "Anybody who knows anything at all about medical science—or any other, I guess—only begins to know how ignorant we are," said Virginia. She looked brightly back at Mr. Gibson. She expected him to be glad.

  "Where there's life there's hope, you mean?" said PauL He seemed to think he was joining in.

  The nurse frowned. Her small chin was almost resting upon the back of the front seat as she sat twisted around to talk to them. "I meant we know enough to know there's an awful lot more to be found out. We do know just a little bit about how to find it. Don't you see, Mr. Gibson? There are people looking for ways to help all the time and they've found some. I've seen. Nobody knows what they might find out by tomorrow morning. You should have asked for help," she chided.

  "So should I," said Rosemary not very loudly.

  Mr. Gibson didn't reply. He was busy perceiving something odd. It was hard to fit into the structure of doom. That was what was odd about it. Say the individual is depressed because of his internal chemistry, call it his machinery. Even so. He is not quite doomed . . . not if his fellow men, men who hold their minds open because they humbly know their ignorance . . . not if these have discovered even some helpful things to do for him. And this was strange, a strange weakness—wasn't it?—in the huge hard jaws of doom.

  "That's funny," he said aloud.

  Nobody asked him what he meant and he did not tell. The car slid up a tree-lined street and all the passengers were silent for a block.

  Then Paul fidgeted. "I should have called home. I wonder if Jeanie got back . . . and Mama's O.K."

  "It must be nearly four o'clock," said Rosemary. "Ethel will be home." She lifted her head; it was almost as if she tossed it haughtily.

  Ethel! Gibson felt shocked. What would Ethel say? He couldn't even imagine. Absolutely nothing that had happened since eleven o'clock this morning had made Ethel's kind of sense.

  "I don't think he was ill," the bus driver blurted. '7 think he was shook."

  Virginia tilted her head to look at him respectfully.

  "To his foundations," said the bus driver.

  "But everybody loved him," said Rosemary, and raised her clenched hands like a desperate prayer.

  "Why sure, everybody thought a hell of a lot of Gibson," said Paul indignantly, as if Mr. Gibson had offended un-pardonably.

  "Everybody?" said the bus driver nmiinatively. "Now, let's not promise candy."

  "Candy?" said the nurse with curiosity.

  "He had something on his mind; it wasn't hardly just missing the brotherly love of his fellow man," said Lee. "Hey? And look, honeybunch," he said to his blonde, "we are now on Hathaway Drive, so where's this mansion?"

  "It's the white Colonial," said Virginia.

  Rosemary said, "Maybe the poison is here."

  Mr. Gibson was a chip in a current. He got out of the car with all the rest of them.

  They had pulled up within the wall, in the wide spot where the drive curved before the pillared entrance. The wide and spanking-white facade looked down upon them, and all the exquisite ruffles of the dainty window curtains announced that here money, and many hired hands, made order.

  ' Now Virginia took the lead. She rang the bell. A maidservant opened the door. "Is Mrs. Boatright here? We must see her quickly. It's very important." Virginia's crisp grave manner was impressive.

  The maid said, "Come in, please," looking as unsurprised as she was able. She left them standing on the oriental rug of the wide foyer. To their left was a huge room. A pair of saddle oxfords hung over the arm of a gray-and-yellow couch, which shoes wiggled, being attached to a pair of young feet. There must be a girl, flat on her back on the sofa. She was talking. There was no one else in there. She must be talking on the telephone.

  A boy
, about sixteen years old, came in a jumping gallop down the broad stairs. "Oh, hi!" said he, and romped off to their right, where there was another room, and a lot of books and a piano. The boy snatched up a horn and they heard some melancholy toots receding.

  Then Mrs. Walter Boatright, in person, sailed out of a white door under the stairs. She was about five and a half feet tall and about two and a half feet wide. Every

  ounce under the beige-cotton-and-white-lace was firm. She had short white hair, nicely waved, and a thin nose made a prow for the well-fleshed face. Her eyes were blue (although not so blue as Rosemary's) and they were simply interested. "Yes? Oh, Miss Severson. How do you do?"

  Virginia gave a little start at being called her own name, but she omitted any more preliminaries. "I saw you on a bus, today, ma'am ..."

  "I'm so sorry," cut in Mrs. Boatright, her words mechanical, while her eyes still inquired and expected. "Had I seen you my dear . . ."

  The little nurse brushed this aside. "Please. Did you pick up a small green paper bag by mistake?"

  "I doubt it," said Mrs. Boatright, accepting the abrupt manner as urgency without showing a ripple in her poise. "Now shall we just see?" She turned. Her bulk moved with surprising ease and grace. "Mona."

  Mona turned out to be the maid.

  "Ask Geraldine if I brought in a small green paper bagi"

  "Yes, Mrs. Boatright."

  "What is in the bag?" inquired the lady of the house of her callers.

  Virginia told her.

  Mrs. Boatright compressed her lips. "Yes, I see. This is serious," said she. "Dell." The girl on the phone bobbed up, using the muscles at her waist, and said, "Hold on a sec, Christy. Yes, Ma?"

  "Put up the phone," said Mrs. Boatright. "We'll need it. Get Tom. Tell him to search his car carefully for a small green paper bag with a bottle in it."

  "Yes, Ma. . . . Call you back, Christy. Bye now."

  "My son picked me up at the bus stop," said Mrs. Boatright in explanation, meanwhile saiHng toward the phone.

  The girl, Dell, who was perhaps eighteen, went across before them in a gait like dancing. Her eyes were curious but smiling.