Eden said quite slowly: “You must take me for a fool, Averill.”
And Averill laughed softly.
“No, darling. I only want you to see quite clearly that your—love as you call it, for Jim is out. Definitely out, my dear. Jim doesn’t want you—he may have been a little carried away last night, there in the shadow of the pines; men are only men and you’re a very pretty girl and it was starlight and romantic. But he doesn’t love you, really; this thing—Creda’s death—is serious. So serious that he realizes now that his little affair with you was only a trivial—and if you don’t mind my saying it—a rather unpleasant little flirtation. He regrets it and he wants you to understand that. Don’t pretend to be so obtuse, Eden. After all, when a man asks you to end a thing, even a trivial kind of affair—”
“Jim looks quite capable of defending himself against unwelcome feminine advances,” said Eden in a cold voice that didn’t sound like her own. “You are lying to me, Averill.” She groped for half-glimpsed motives, whose presence she felt without being able to define. “I don’t know what you expect to accomplish. But I don’t believe a word you’ve said about Jim.”
“Very well,” said Averill. She rose. There was a curious secret smile in her eyes; a shadow of it on her lips. She drew herself up, her slender neck at its full height, her small demure face somewhat triumphant. “If you don’t believe me, ask him. He’ll tell you it is the truth.”
“I will ask him,” said Eden slowly.
Chapter 13
BUT NEVERTHELESS WHEN AVERILL had trailed her crimson gown away, Eden thought of the certainty and assurance in her manner, of the look of demure triumph in her small face. “Ask him,” she had said promptly and had smiled.
After a while Eden bolted the door, glanced at the traveling clock which said now three-fifteen—only fifteen minutes had that struggle with Averill lasted; again briefly a sense of the amazing suddenness and inexorability of a moment in time touched her and went on—and this time she turned off the light before she returned to bed.
She lay for a long time staring into the darkness. Uneasily aware of a growing conviction that somewhere, somehow, Averill had a basis for her statements.
Yet that wasn’t possible either. The things Averill had said sounded like Averill—not like Jim.
And Jim loved her, Eden—as she loved him. She deliberately permitted herself to live over again every instant of those moments in the shadow of the pines—in Jim’s arms, with his lips on her own. She repeated to herself every word he had said, and every word still held an almost unbearably lovely truth. “I fell in love with you,” he’d said, “the instant somebody trotted you out on the terrace and said this is Eden.” And she herself had looked at him and the whole world and all her life had changed its beat and its rhythm for this was love.
She turned restlessly, putting her face upon her crossed arms, thinking of Jim and the starlit sky and the hushed and tranquil night. Refusing for the moment to think how horribly that tranquillity had so soon been destroyed. Holding one memory out of that night intact and untouched.
How strange it was to be suddenly touched by and then swept irresistibly into that gigantic current! To be all at once a part of the. deep pulse of being and life instead of an onlooker. All her life up to that moment became pallid and without meaning in comparison to the exciting significance every heartbeat now mysteriously possessed. It was, she thought suddenly, like a key with which to open doors of tremendous experience and (curiously, in the distance) doors that held promise of the deepest content.
Jim loved her. How could she doubt the strength of the thing that swept them together?
Yet—yet Averill had been so certain. Ask him, she’d said, smiling.
The night went on. Stars passed serenely and distantly above, tracing their precise course through the dark sky. Stars that had seen many strange things.
Lights were on in the old ranch house all night and in one of the cabins. In the gray, cold hour before dawn coffee was brewed in the low-ceilinged kitchen for men who had been up all night. They were tired and low-voiced, talking laconically among themselves as they did not talk when strangers were about.
“Well, I’ll bet anything anybody wants to bet that one of them murdered the woman.”
“You got no takers, Bill. It’s a cinch there wasn’t anything but a coyote and some jack rabbits around the place tonight. And they weren’t what you’d call strangers.”
“I say there’s something behind it all. Coffee, Charlie?”
“Sure, there’s something behind it. Got to have a reason for murder, don’t you? Pass the sugar.”
“He means something important. Something about this airplane engine that crashed. That’s why they came out here to see the boss.”
“Who told you?”
“Pilot. Strevsky.”
“Yeah, and he might’ve done it, too.”
“I don’t like the looks of that Italian fellow myself.”
“Who? Pace? He’s not Italian, he’s English.”
“If he’s English I’m an Egyptian. I think he’s plain American myself. More doughnuts, Chango.”
“Tough on the girl that found her.”
“Tough on the girl that was killed, if you ask me. What’s the matter, Charlie? You’re not eating.”
“I’m all right, not hungry.”
“Charlie had to help the boss. What really killed her, Charlie, did you find out?”
Chango, still smiling, serving them.
Sloane himself and Jim had about that time a prolonged talk in another room—a small, crowded room which was P. H. Sloane’s own study and held, packed in cupboards and along shelves, all the slowly acquired paraphernalia of a profession he had once disowned. A light burned, too, all that night in the cabin where Creda Blaine still lay.
And sometime that night Sloane talked, also, to Noel and to Strevsky and even to the boyish and frightened steward, Roy Wilson. It chanced that Eden herself was present when he had his first interview with Major Pace.
The day then slowly dawning, with the shapes of sagebrush growing gray, and the tall black cottonwoods looming like sentinels against the pale sky, and the cry of a coyote off in the distance was to have its influence and its weight upon many lives and among them Eden’s.
About five the sheriff telephoned from the other end of the county and held a long conversation with P. H. Sloane. At six, fortified with breakfast, three cowboys carefully wrapped the thing that was left of Creda Blaine, lifted it gently into a car and drove slowly away along the fifty-mile route, scarcely more than a car track in places, toward Rocky Gap.
“Where do you suppose Miss Blaine will want the body sent, when the coroner is done with it?” asked P. H. And Noel told him Louisiana and added wearily that they’d send telegrams.
“Better not be in a hurry about the telegrams,” said P. H. “There’s only one newspaper in Rocky Gap and the editor of it is also its crime, weather and society reporter and occasionally sets type, when his typewriter goes on a spree as he does once in six weeks. But the Blaines have a certain importance. The moment the news gets on the wires there’ll be reporters from St. Louis.”
“Right,” said Noel apathetically. “Okay, no telegrams till we have to send them—God, what a night.”
It was, however, full morning by that time with the sun tipping suddenly over the black ridge of mountains toward the east. From the east they made a shimmering crimson wall, but from the ranch the wall was black and looked impassable, as if it hemmed them all rigidly inside its confines. “You’d better get some rest,” said P. H. “There’s nothing more you can do just now.”
He disappeared, alone this time, still in dinner jacket and black tie, into the study at the end of the hall, beside the billiard room; Jim and Noel talked a little, wearily and without conclusion, and at last went to their rooms, upstairs now, in the main house, where Chango had brought their bags. Tiptoeing carefully past closed doors so as not to wake anyone. The sun
had reached the top of a clear blue sky, and the shadow of the cottonwoods lay short and thick upon the sagebrush when Eden awoke.
She lay there for a moment, thinking again and instantly of Jim, of Averill, of Creda’s death and the horror into which that death plunged them. Sunlight lay across the floor; she rose finally and went to the window. The air was clear and dry; the sun poured down from a cloudless sky upon the ranch with its oasis of green, and upon the vast flat reaches of, she supposed, grazing land. Away in the distance the mountains were now vaguely blue and hazy-looking in the heat.
Near at hand so far as she could see there was no movement and no activity except for a squat, thick figure, the thicker for its foreshortening, which waddled out from the porch below and along the paths. It was Major Pace, in white linen which obviously and amazingly had been pressed; he was smoking and looking idly about him, quite as if murder and horror by night had no concern with him. His attitude was so completely and elaborately that of an observer that it was too elaborate. It struck Eden rather sharply that the lack of concern in that strolling, ineffably nonchalant figure was assumed, altogether artificial.
And certainly of all the people who might have murdered Creda the most likely suspect was, to Eden’s mind, the man calling himself Pace. She watched him stroll on down the path and stop in the shadow of the pines (almost at the spot where she and Jim had stood the night before) to light a fresh cigarette from the end of the one he’d finished.
Only last night.
She turned from the window, pushed her hands wearily through her hair, sighed and went to turn on the shower and rummage in her unpacked bags for clothing.
She looked at herself for a long moment before she opened the door into the hall. As she had done when she was starting from her little apartment to the waiting taxi—how long ago. New York and that small apartment where the last two years of her life had been spent seemed incredibly distant in space and time and completely unreal.
She thought of Noel—and her deliberate plan to marry him—if he could be induced to ask her and that too seemed incredible. It was as if it had been another person seated on the westbound plane, coolly planning and arranging her life as one might plan and cut a bit of dress material. She smiled a little, thinking of it, and the woman in the mirror with the pale face and grave eyes with shadows under them smiled too, wistfully, a little sadly. Yet she could see herself that there was in that woman’s face a kind of warmth, a luminous, almost intangible quality of eagerness that had not been there four days ago. Did women in love always show it in their faces?
And then she remembered going back into her apartment on that day that seemed now ineffably distant because she’d forgotten her gray chiffon scarf.
She turned away abruptly and the image turned, a slender woman in a white dress with a crimson belt and the lipstick on her mouth matching the belt. And with the shadow of remembered horror in her eyes.
Instantly the swift marching train of events that had developed since that day marched upon her again, catching her up in the inexorable procession.
At the door she remembered the letter Creda had begun to write and went back for it as she had done, days ago, for the gray scarf.
It was then that she had her first intimation of depths below depths taking their secret course. For the letter was not in her coat pocket. Was not on the dressing table, was not on the night table, was not anywhere in the room.
Someone, then, had taken it; the pocket of her coat was deep, it couldn’t have fallen from it.
Averill had been in her room, but had not approached the coat. She stood still, thinking rapidly of the previous night. Anyone, almost, could have taken the letter from her pocket. She had sat perfectly still for moments in the cabin, only half aware of what was going on. Jim had been beside her. Sloane had leaned over her, pressing a glass to her mouth. Noel had had more opportunity than anyone else; he had walked beside her, half-supporting her with his arm all the way from the horror-laden cabin to the house.
No one could have entered her room while she slept, heavy from fatigue though that sleep had been. It would have been scarcely possible for her to lose that crumpled bit of paper. Therefore it had to be removed from her pocket.
More troubled by it than she liked to admit even to herself, she unlocked and opened her door. No one was in the long hall, bisected further down by another hall; no one on the stairway. But in the lounge Noel sat staring somberly at his feet and smoking. She stopped in the doorway. At the end of the hall (back of the closed door to the room she was later to learn was Sloane’s study) there was a murmur of voices, the words indistinguishable. Noel saw her and sprang to his feet.
“Hello, Eden. So you’re able to navigate under your own steam? I thought perhaps last night was too much for you.”
“Where’s everybody?”
“Sloane’s in there with Jim and Averill. Dorothy’s having breakfast, I think. Pace has gone for a walk—and needs it I would say, never having seen a gent look greener around the gills.” He took her hand and drew it lightly inside his arm.
“What has been done?”
“Never mind. I’ll tell you while you have breakfast. Nothing much really. Come along.”
Dorothy, white as the tablecloth and not much more expression in her face, looked up as they entered the dining room, nodded, and went back phlegmatically to oatmeal. Noel pulled up a chair beside Eden’s.
“I can put it all in a nutshell,” he said as Chango, still indestructibly cheerful after his all-night vigil, brought in coffee and orange juice. “Creda was taken away this morning. The sheriff telephoned and had a long talk with Sloane; I don’t know what was said but I take it Sloane is still in the saddle and riding high.
“He’s turned out, by the way, to be quite a lad. I’d hate to have his clutches on me. He’s got all kinds of stuff here—fingerprinting outfits, cameras, a whole chemical laboratory—my God, you never saw such a lot of stuff. He said he thought he’d never have a use for it again—well, he thought wrong. All the same—” His handsome face sobered and looked suddenly haggard; his peaked black eyebrows drew together. “All the same it wasn’t just square of Jim to bring us all out here as he did. Never a word of warning. Intending just to dump the lot of us and all his harebrained notions about the plane crash upon this detective. Between us, I’m not sure P. H. is so hot. If he was as good as Jim claims he was, what’d he leave his profession for? People don’t retire while they’re successful—not if they can help it. Success is too potent a drink.”
Dorothy helped herself to more cream with a reckless disregard for her already lumpy figure which would have dismayed Averill. She said blandly: “Don’t be too hard on Mr. Cady. He couldn’t have known what the result would be.”
Noel looked at her sharply. “Do you mean Creda was murdered because we came here? But why? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I suppose not,” said Dorothy calmly. “Still if we’d gone on to the plantation things might have been different. It only occurred to me that if”—she glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice—”if Major Pace hadn’t felt so far from police and regular detectives and all that—”
“Pace,” said Noel. “Well, naturally—who else?” But he was frowning thoughtfully. “I can’t get the hang of it, though. If there really was anything crooked about the plane crash—as Jim insists—why did Pace offer to pay us? He was about to get the whole thing, signed, sealed and delivered, to do as he pleased with. Why go to such lengths as to destroy the only model of the engine, steal the plans … And besides how on earth could he have fixed the plane to crash? A thing like that takes elaborate planning.”
“He hasn’t paid you yet, has he?” asked Eden.
“No. But the money’s there waiting. Oh, of course, he could now withdraw it and vanish with the plans, if he’s got ’em and the money. But—but if that’s the explanation, why murder poor Creda? Creda wouldn’t hurt a fly”
“Suppose she knew that was his plan,
” said Eden. “Suppose she threatened to expose him?”
“Even so—killing her like this only makes things worse. They’ll search the whole place for those plans, which are very likely put away in some of Bill’s things in St. Louis right now. Besides, Creda never ever knew Pace; the first time she met him was when he came to the house to dinner Monday night.”
“Are you sure of that?” asked Eden.
He gave her a surprised look.
“Why, yes. Reasonably sure. They were introduced and neither of them acted as if they’d ever met before. What—exactly what are you driving at, Eden?”
Dorothy, blandly attacking an enormous heap of pancakes, was suddenly as blank and receptive as a stenographer’s tablet waiting to be written upon. Eden said, “Oh, nothing really. I don’t know what to think.” And Noel frowned and snapped his fingers suddenly and said:
“Pace is out. He’s got an alibi for the whole time. He was right there in the lounge, sitting in one of the chairs, smoking one cigarette after the other. I saw him. He was there the whole time while Sloane was playing the piano.”
Dorothy’s languid eyelids lifted and there was a small spark in her light, flat eyes. “Why, yes,” she said with a flash of something approaching animation. “You’re perfectly right. I remember. He seemed to really be listening to the music and liking it. I remember thinking he must be a musician.” A faint shadow crossed her face. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. “It—it can’t be anyone except Pace, can it? But I—I do remember he was there, the whole time. He was there when you screamed, Miss Shore, and we heard it. He was there when Mrs. Blaine walked out of the room perhaps—oh, half an hour before we heard you call out from the cabin. Mr. Sloane had stopped playing then and we were just sitting, not talking much. That’s why we heard it so clearly.”
Alibis, thought Eden rather drearily. She hadn’t thought of alibis. And there were all the other well-known trails of crime detection. Somehow she hadn’t thought of them applying or being applied to Creda’s murder. It was so far from cities and police mechanism, so completely and entirely in an isolated world that it was as if that world ought to have its own laws.
Chiffon Scarf Page 13