There was a packed, dreadful silence. Suddenly Bunty fancied Jacob Wait’s ankle and made a small dash toward it, and Verity bent and scooped her up under one arm and held her, her face gray with horror over the wriggling little dog.
Verity had said murder was like something unchained. Something let loose.
“Where’s the arsenic, Mrs. Godden?” said Jacob Wait.
“I—but I—I don’t know anything about it. I—”
“You didn’t mention it last night. You named everything else in that convenient order from the hardware store, but not the arsenic. Why?”
“I—forgot it.” She had. Altogether. But how fatally false her own voice rang!
“Oh, then you knew it was there?”
“Look here,” said Rob. “Godden wasn’t killed with arsenic. What do you—”
“Oh, yes—Copley.”
He reached, deliberately into his pocket again. Marcia’s heart pressed suffocatingly against her throat, and she thought she could never breathe again. He had a square white envelope, and he turned to Verity and thrust it before her eyes.
“Whose handwriting is this?” he said.
Perhaps Verity knew it was no use to try to evade. Perhaps she couldn’t have evaded.
“My—son’s,” she said as if she were choking.
CHAPTER IX
MARCIA’S HANDS CLUNG TO each other. And her whole soul and being clung to one small fact that emerged from a rocking, crashing world.
It was the envelope he held. It was only the envelope he held.
And quite suddenly and clearly she remembered the tiny separate swishes the letter and the envelope had made as they fell into the cupboard.
The envelope argued the possession of the letter. But still it was the envelope he held.
Luckily, however, she didn’t speak. Her voice and her words would have been too sure to betray her and to betray Rob. And as she stared at Jacob Wait, Rob stepped forward so he towered over the sallow, mournful little man. His voice was perhaps too deliberately steady and his eyes too blue. He said, “What of it?”
“Uh?” said Jacob Wait.
“I said, what of it? The envelope, I mean.”
So Rob was thinking the same thing. That it might be the straw that would save them all from drowning.
“Well,” said Jacob Wait, “you didn’t send an empty envelope to Mrs. Godden.”
“Certainly not.”
There was a pause. Jacob Wait’s eyes were unfathomable pools of black, hiding all his knowledge but giving somehow a guarantee that it existed. He would bring the letter out. He would tax Rob with it then and there.
Verity, looking very white, said abruptly and rather hastily, as if to forestall any statement from Rob, “There’s no stamp and no postmark on the envelope. It might have been addressed—carrying some trivial message—any time during the past few years.”
Wait’s brown eyes shifted to Verity briefly.
“Your housemaid delivered it yesterday,” he said in a bored way. “The message was not trivial. It was urgent.”
They had the letter, then, too. Or was it bluff?
Rob had to know. His chin moved a little jerkily, he pulled a package of cigarettes from his pocket and said directly, “There’s no secret about it. I wrote a note to Mrs. Godden reminding her of my mother’s dinner party last night. Have a cigarette?”
Well, it would end the horror of that suspense, anyway. The detective would have to say, now, “No, you didn’t. That wasn’t why you wrote to her. We know why it was written, because we have the letter. And in it was a threat against Ivan Godden. We know.”
But he didn’t. His heavy lids drooped over his eyes, and he took a cigarette from the package Rob extended and said enigmatically, “In that case Mrs. Godden will show us the letter, I’m sure.”
Was he encouraging them to walk further into an entangling web of lies and half-truths? Was he opening the door to a trap?
Rob turned so his back was toward Wait and he faced Marcia, and under pretense of extending the package of cigarettes to her gave her a compelling look. He wanted her to talk. The only thing she could do was subscribe to his story.
She said, in a voice that seemed to come out of the top of her head, “Why, certainly. If I can find it.”
“Any doubt about your being able to find it, Mrs. Godden?” said Jacob Wait too kindly.
“See here,” said Rob in a conversational way that stopped short of belligerence. “What do you mean by this?”
“You,” said Jacob Wait, “are not exactly in a position to make demands, Copley. Mrs. Godden, wasn’t Robert Copley the subject of your quarrels with your husband? You may as well tell us the truth, you know.”
“No. Never,” said Marcia almost violently. “There was no reason to quarrel with my husband about him—or anyone else.”
He looked at her through smoke. A pretty young wife, his look said, another man—or men—husband murdered. He said, “What about this quarrel on the day your husband was—in an accident?” His tone implied that it was not an accident.
“Better tell him,” said Rob coolly, and all at once Verity sat down as if to save herself from falling.
“We quarreled, yes,” said Marcia, still in a tight voice which seemed to come of its own volition. “But the—quarrel was over my dog, Bunty.”
Wait glanced at the dog and seemed very bored.
“What had the dog done?”
“She hadn’t done anything,” said Marcia. “It was just that—my husband thought she wasn’t well. That she should be destroyed. I didn’t think so.”
Verity said suddenly, “Ivan Godden was a very peculiar man, Mr. Wait. You may as well know it—if you don’t already. He gave the dog to Marcia about a year ago. She grew rather fond of her. Then quite suddenly, a month or so ago, he decided to have Ancill—the chauffeur—take the dog and kill it. He told Marcia the dog was ill. The dog was perfectly well.”
“How do you know?”
Verity shrugged. “You can see for yourself. However, I offered to keep the dog for Marcia—Mrs. Godden. And I had our friend, Dr. Blakie, look at the dog immediately. He said there was nothing wrong with her.”
“All this,” said Jacob Wait, “happened on March eighteenth?”
“It was the day Ivan Godden was injured,” said Verity. “If that’s March eighteenth.”
“During the morning?”
Verity’s nose looked very white and clear.
“Yes—about noon. Mrs. Godden brought the dog over here and asked me to keep her. I guessed something of what had happened and asked her outright, and she told me only the bare outline of it. If she had openly quarreled with her husband about the dog she did not say so.”
Her tone adroitly implied that it hadn’t occurred—that quarrel. But Jacob Wait knew better. He said rather dryly, “Well, they had. Miss Godden knew of it and told me this morning. It seems that Mrs. Godden became—hysterical— and struck her husband.”
Rob was white with anger and did not dare show it. Verity said steadily without a glance at Marcia, “If she did, she was driven to it.”
“Your story, then, is that Ivan Godden was cruel to his wife?”
Verity saw that trap in time.
“He wasn’t kind. But his cruelty to her was not so extreme as to cause her to murder him, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Jacob Wait turned—or rather merely shifted his great dark eyes to Marcia.
“The servants tell us a different story,” he said. “They say that particular quarrel came to physical violence.”
“It did,” said Marcia, summoning strength from some hidden reservoir. “He—my husband—was a very strange man. He was angry with me, he had given me the dog expecting me to grow fond of it, as I had.” It had surprised her a little, that gift—until he had threatened to take the dog away and she had realized that the gift had been from the beginning only one of his subtle ways of torturing her. She went on, “He said Ancill would do i
t, that I needn’t worry. And he said—” she braced herself and told it because she must—“he said I need not shed any tears, but if I did he would have the pleasure of—of kissing the tears away.”
Rob made a strangled sound and said, “Is this necessary? Don’t you see how very painful—”
“This is murder,” said Jacob Wait wearily. “Go on, Mrs. Godden. What happened then? Or may I guess—he approached you, you struck him and ran outdoors.”
“Someone told you,” said Marcia in a mere statement of fact. He nodded.
“Ancill?”
“No.”
“The cook—Mrs. Beek?”
“No. Beatrice Godden told me that your quarrels with her brother came to violence. I asked her. She supplied particulars. It would have been better if you had admitted it all last night when I asked.”
“Beatrice—” began Verity explosively and stopped.
“You see,” said Jacob Wait slowly, “it seems that Mrs. Godden’s behavior was so very unexpected—so singular, indeed, in its—er—extremity, that Ivan Godden felt it necessary to tell his sister. To,” said Jacob Wait, “warn her.”
“You—”
“Hush, Rob!”
“It’s true, he told me he was going to do that. It was his punishment.” Marcia took a breath. “He said he would tell Mrs. Copley, too. He—he—”
Verity was at her side.
“There, Marcia. Don’t, child!” She faced Jacob Wait over Marcia’s head. “If Mrs. Godden for once defied her husband, it was only what a less controlled and patient woman would have done years ago. I assure you—knowing her well—that she is not given to hysteria or anything approaching it. And that Ivan Godden’s vile pretense at warning would have reflected only and rightly upon himself. He—” Her eyes blazed blue fire, and the torrent of anger was getting out of hand. Rob saw it and said something unintelligible, and Jacob Wait watched and listened. “He deserved a much worse death than he had,” blazed Verity, and Rob put his hand on her small shoulder and said, “Verity, stop!”
She stopped, still angry, and Jacob Wait gave Rob a regretful look. This was the kind of thing he liked to get started; this was what gave him sidelights and information and evidence. Evidence. He sighed, gave Verity a long, mournful look, and then said suddenly to Rob, “What would you do if I arrested you and Mrs. Godden now?”
“You can’t,” said Rob quietly. “You haven’t a case.”
“Oh, haven’t I?” said Jacob Wait. He favored him with another long, unfathomable look and repeated, “What would you do if I arrested you?”
“Try to get bail, I suppose,” said Rob.
“That’s what I thought,” said the detective and turned around and walked out of the room. At the door, however, he stopped and looked at them again. “Of course, you wouldn’t succeed. But you’re as good as under arrest right now,” he said. “You can try to get away if you want to. I don’t care. But I wouldn’t advise you to try it.” He was unhurried, unruffled, altogether certain of something, and they didn’t know what it was.
That was the trouble.
It was as if some definite, absolute knowledge was in him and upon it he had built a program. They couldn’t guess it; they could not trim their own course thereby. All through those days they were to be acutely conscious of it, as one is conscious of walls surrounding one even if they do not directly press or touch against one.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
That was the trouble.
He went away as unexpectedly that morning as he had come. It was for a moment or two difficult to believe that he had really gone and had not just walked into the hall to interview the maid and would return.
The two policemen, stolidly but observantly, as if they were huge machines guided and controlled by a small wheel which was Wait himself, followed him.
Rob stared at the door, and Marcia held her breath, and Verity turned to listen sharply. The door in the front of the house closed at last, and Rob became suddenly galvanized and disappeared into the hall. He returned.
“They’ve gone, all right. Driving away in a car. Well—”
He got out his handkerchief and wiped his face and lit a fresh cigarette with hands that were inclined to shake. “Well, anyway,” he said, puffing at the light, “they didn’t take us to jail.”
“There’s always a next time,” said Verity somewhat morosely. “Have they got your letter?”
Rob, hopeful, said no. Verity shook her head. Marcia, limp and exhausted, thought both ways.
“Somebody has it,” she said. “And if they have the envelope”
“And it’s quite true,” added Verity, “that with the case as it is—so far as we know—just now, and in spite of what he said, you might be able to get bail and he’d be actually no forrader. No. What that man wants is an indictment or nothing.” She turned suddenly from staring into the fire, and her voice broke. “Oh, my children,” she said, “what are we going to do?”
But she recovered at once. She looked at Marcia curiously and with some approval. “Did you really strike Ivan Godden?”
“Yes,” said Marcia. “I didn’t mean to. It was as if I went—out of my own body. He’d been so—”
“Beastly,” said Verity. “I see that. You didn’t tell us— well, never mind. I’m glad you did it. I didn’t think they’d left you that much spirit.”
Rob said suddenly, “What did he do, Marcia?”
Marcia swallowed convulsively. It was not easy, even then, to talk of it. Yet Verity’s terse, prompt comment had already mysteriously covered something of the scar that frenzied moment of primitive defiance had left.
“He didn’t do anything,” she said wearily. “Not then. He just stood there looking at me with that queer, blank look in his eyes and the red streaks my fingers had made getting clearer and clearer on his cheek—I didn’t know I was going to do it. It was as if just for a moment something possessed me—”
“Marcia!”
“I couldn’t help it. It was—I didn’t know I was going to—I didn’t intend to—I was horrified when I saw what I’d done—” She looked at Verity and at Rob beseechingly, and Rob said again, “Marcia, dear!”
“Nonsense,” said Verity. “Don’t worry about it. It was sheer self-defense.”
“It’s damaging,” said Marcia. “Now—”
It was. Now that Ivan Godden was murdered. Now that the police knew of that one moment of defiance. There was no use denying it.
Presently Verity said, “It was that same afternoon that Ivan was injured?”
“I went home, you remember. Ivan had already gone into the Loop—Ancill was driving. No one came and nothing happened all afternoon—I sat there wondering what he would do to me when he got back. Then finally Dr. Blakie came to tell me he’d seen the dog, as you asked him to do, and that she was all right.”
“He stopped here first. I wish you could have seen his face when I showed him the dog.” Verity’s voice quivered with a nervous little wave of mirth. “I thought Ivan would have to take the word of one of America’s finest surgeons. I sent him on to see you.”
“He was there when Ancill telephoned to tell us about the accident. Later, when Ivan was better, I expected him to say something about the dog. But he didn’t until—last night.”
“Last night?”
“Yes.” Marcia looked at Rob. “Was it you at the french doors?”
“I—yes. So that was the thing—” Rob got up and roved uneasily about the room. “What did he say, Marcia? Anything in particular? I mean, did he make any threats?”
“He said he’d already told Beatrice of my—my peculiar behavior and that he would tail Verity if it became necessary. And that I would understand something he’d done—” She stopped suddenly. “Something he’d done—I wonder—”
They were both watching her anxiously. For a moment Ivan Godden’s beautiful dead hand stretched out toward her in threat.
“What?”
“I don’t know,
Rob. I don’t know—that was all he said.”
“Knowing Ivan Godden —” began Verity and stopped.
Rob went to Marcia again and took her hands. “And remember, Marcia, we’re going to be married.”
“No—”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Rob, we can’t.”
Verity rolled Bunty over with her small foot and said, “Stop chewing my ankle, you little black devil. Marcia’s right, Rob.”
She got up, and paid no attention to Rob’s angry look. “And just at the moment,” she said crisply, “there are more urgent problems,” and walked out of the room.
“Marcia, she’s wrong. Nothing can stop our marriage. Don’t think of—”
“Rob, Rob, don’t you see what it would do to you! Everywhere we go, everybody we see, pointing or thinking, “There goes the man that murdered Ivan Godden and married his wife.’”
He took her rather savagely into his arms.
“You can’t—you mustn’t—don’t even think such things.”
“But it’s true. Rob, it’s true.”
“Marcia, do you love me?”
Someone coughed in the doorway. Rob lifted his head, and Marcia pulled suddenly and guiltily away from him, or would have done so had he not held her. It was Stella, pale blue eyes avid and face flushed with interest.
She lowered her eyes confusedly as Rob looked at her, and mumbled of the telephone and Mrs. Godden and Miss Godden.
“It’s Beatrice,” said Marcia. “She wants me to come home.”
It was. She had known, being Beatrice, where Marcia had gone.
“I’ll go with you,” said Rob, but Verity, appearing again, vetoed that.
“The less you see of Marcia just now the easier it will be for her.”
“But my place is with her.”
“Your place,” said Verity, “is staying as much as possible in the background. Do be sensible, Rob. You can’t storm around and attract everybody’s attention by your devotion. It may relieve your feelings, but it doesn’t help Marcia. Although,” she added a little crisply, “I must say you’ve already got yourself in the way of plenty of attention on the part of the police. Good-bye, Marcia, my dear. You’re—” It wasn’t possible for Verity to say much. Her blue eyes grew luminous, and she put a small strong hand on Marcia’s shoulder and said, “You’re all right, my dear.”
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