Fair Warning

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  Rob moved uneasily and passed a hand across his own forehead and said in a harsh, strained way, “Well, what did you see? Who killed him?”

  Gally was staring fixedly at the rug, his eyes wide and glassy-looking.

  “I didn’t—” he began huskily, cleared his throat and said again, still staring at the rug, “I didn’t see anything. Except that he was dead. The french windows were open and I closed ’em. Don’t know why. There was a scrap of something white on the rug, and I remember leaning over and picking that up, but I don’t know what it was or what I did with it. I was—I’m not too clear in my head about any of it. Except that I was perfectly sure he was dead.”

  “Did you approach him?” asked Dr. Blakie. “Did you take his pulse or do anything like that?”

  “God, no!” said Gally. “I was sensible enough to know I’d better not touch anything. All at once I realized it was murder and I was there and I hadn’t done it. I left. Went by the front way because of a fuzzy notion the murderer had escaped by way of the french doors and I’d better go the other way. I was scared,” said Gally candidly, “and I was sort of drunk. The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to get far, far away. So I did.”

  Rob groaned and rose and flung back over his shoulder, “Well, this is a nice mess. What are we going to do about it?”

  And Dr. Blakie said to Gally soberly, “What did you do exactly?”

  “Well, at the door I put the nutmeg, down on the table so as to open the door. Later I remembered it and was scared to death about fingerprints on it, but somebody must’ve put it behind the Indian vase without the police seeing it. I shut the door, and it made an awful jar behind me. I thought everybody in the house would hear it.”

  “I heard it,” said Marcia. “It was the second time it closed.” It was horrible, the way his story fit: it was true, then.

  “Then I legged it for my car; it was parked down the street under that big catalpa—top leaks, and it was about to rain. As I got to the cross street—Larch—I realized I was still clutching that damn glass and threw it toward the sewer intake. Then I got in the car and drove and drove and drove. My head began to cool finally, and I knew I had to get back or they’d wonder why I didn’t show up for dinner. So I came back. Fixed up my story on the way. And it was a good story,” he added plaintively. “Up to now.”

  It was like Gally, too, to throw himself on their mercy, thought Marcia sadly.

  For a moment no one spoke. Rob lighted a cigarette and threw down the match with a jerk, and Gally stared at the carpet, and Dr. Blakie rose and stood again beside the globe, spinning it absently so the small clear sound of spinning seemed to fill the waiting silence.

  Finally he said gravely, “You realize the position this places you in, Gally?”

  “Oh, my God, yes,” said Gally.

  “And you still think it best to tell the police about it?”

  “It’s not a question of what’s best. I think they already know. Or are getting warm. Only possible thing for me to do is to tell the truth.”

  “Very commendable, I’m sure,” said Dr. Blakie neatly. “But do you think they’ll believe you?”

  “Why not?” said Gally.

  Rob whirled around at that.

  “Look here,” he said harshly. “Answer a straight question. Are you sure you didn’t kill him yourself?”

  “Kill him! I never even thought of it. Which is more,” said Gally unexpectedly, “than you can say.”

  Rob’s eyes blazed.

  “What do you mean by that? I didn’t kill Ivan Godden.”

  Dr. Blakie poured oil hurriedly: “Gally doesn’t think you did. Look here, Gally, don’t you have some clue to the murder? Something you saw, I mean. Some very small thing, perhaps. God knows,” he said, with an apologetic glance toward Marcia, “I had little liking for Ivan Godden. Too little to want to see one of you convicted of murdering him. And it looks—it very much looks—as if the only way to prevent—that—is to find out who actually murdered him.”

  But Gally was still pettish.

  “I tell you there wasn’t any clue,” he said and looked at Dr. Blakie resentfully. “And if you’d been content to let him die a natural death there wouldn’t have been all this trouble.”

  “Gally!” cried Marcia.

  “There he was, all set to die,” said Gally peevishly, “and you had to step in and cure him.”

  Dr. Blakie looked very sober.

  “Well, if you want to know,” he said suddenly. “If I had known what his home-coming would mean, I—I might not have worked so hard. However, that was my job. And I didn’t know the things I know now. And—” he looked at Gally quietly—“and I sincerely hope you had nothing to do with that car accident.”

  Gally wriggled again.

  “They’ve been after me about that, too. I had to sit there and hear that damn sneaky houseman of yours, Marcia, act as if it might have been me. Oh, he didn’t say so right out. He just coughed and wouldn’t look at me and hedged around, saying he couldn’t be Sure just what kind of car it was and all that, until every damn one of ’em thought he knew damn well it was me and he was trying to protect me. Protect me!” snorted Gally wrathfully. “And I wasn’t anywhere near. And anyway, if I had been, I’d’ve done a better job of it. And gladly.”

  “Was the cupboard open?” asked Marcia suddenly.

  “When I came in and Ivan was dead? No. I don’t think so. ”

  “He wasn’t dead,” said Rob and checked himself. “That is,” he added hurriedly, “it’s possible he was just unconscious then, and revived later.”

  Gally stared.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “H’m. I wonder. What makes you say that, Rob?”

  “Nothing,” said Rob hurriedly. “Nothing at all. I was only talking.”

  Dr. Blakie came to his rescue, evidently agreeing that it was as well for Gally not to know the exact truth of Marcia’s ugly discovery.

  “And you’re positive there’s no clue? What about the white thing you picked up? Couldn’t be—oh, in your pocket somewhere—or your car?”

  Gally considered him.

  “Maybe,” he said reluctantly. “But I don’t remember anything about it. Not even what it was.”

  “Paper?” suggested Dr. Blakie. “Part of a dress? Cloth?”

  Gally shook his head.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it was anything much.”

  Marcia, listening, had come to a decision.

  “You mustn’t tell the police,” she said. “You can’t do it, Gally. There’s too much against you.”

  “But I didn’t kill him!”

  “I know,” said Marcia slowly. Did she? She could feel something at the same time warning and disapproving on the part of the other two men. “I know,” she said. “But wait. Wait just a little, Gally, and maybe something—something will clear up, some evidence will come out, something Gally, don’t you see that it looks as if you murdered him!”

  He saw it, of course. But he was set and stubborn, and it took their combined and, except for Marcia, not very earnest efforts to persuade him to wait.

  But he said finally that naturally he wasn’t keen to get himself arrested and agreed to wait.

  “It doesn’t really matter much,” he said in a volte-face that was unexpected. “Anything you say goes, Marcia. It’s a relief to get it off my mind, though.” He got up and looked suddenly rather cheerful. “I missed my lunch,” he said. “I’m going to ravage the pantry. If Emma doesn’t run me out.”

  Dr. Blakie’s face was a study as Gally ambled away, and Rob’s was no less perplexed, Marcia looked at them and knew what they were thinking and couldn’t explain that Gally was like that. Changed his mind without any apparent reasons. Was and always had been a weathercock. She couldn’t explain because they would say that after all he was adult though he behaved occasionally like a child.

  And they didn’t want to talk of it before her. For they made only the most general re
marks after Gally had gone and went away themselves almost at once.

  But they were sorry for her; she saw that, too. Rob said, “Don’t worry, honey, it’ll all come out somehow. The main thing now is to get our hands on the letter Beatrice had— and I’ll do it somehow. I promise you.” He kissed her, lightly under Dr. Blakie’s half-smiling regard, and grinned a little too reassuringly and said, “Keep a stiff upper lip.”

  And Dr. Blakie said something reassuring, too, and told her not to worry about Wait hounding her any further that day, because he’d tell him she wasn’t able to be questioned.

  The plain-clothes man in the hall was still there and still reading. And as they went out the gate, he put his paper down and sauntered, too, out the door and along the walk.

  So Rob was right about that; he was being followed.

  And Gally was the man in the library.

  After a long time the twin ghosts in that long room, darker now as the sky grew heavier, became too insistent. Upstairs, of course, Miss Wurlitz was waiting, and the thought of her presence was comforting, but Marcia didn’t want, just then, to face those shrewd, if kind, eyes. The house, of course, was curiously populated; every now and then someone—several—would walk along the hall, talking in low voices. Businesslike voices.

  And the shadows in the library were thick and whispering again and the blank white head up there changed in those veiling, clustering shadows and seemed less blank.

  It was perhaps four when Marcia took a coat and went into the garden.

  It was going to rain again.

  Her hand lingered on the latch of the french doors, and she thought of the rain the night Ivan had died; the rain and that moment, in the middle of the black, murmurous night, when those doors had opened wider and let the sound of the rain and something else into that room.

  She thought of the blue flannel coat. What had snatched it from her shoulders, twitching it into the unfathomable blackness? Where was it now? Why?

  Queer that the recollection of that coat being snatched from her stood out, was so clear and prominent, was not swamped with other more important, far uglier things. She could remember the moment of her entrance into the library the night Ivan was murdered; she could remember the bloodstain that had got on Beatrice’s swinging velvet ribbon. She could remember her hands on the handle of the knife.

  There wasn’t anything she couldn’t remember; there wasn’t anything she would ever be able to forget. Yet in all that, the instant or two of knowing in her heart and in every nerve of her body that there was a thing in the darkness of the library with her remained sharpest. Because it was present—walking, corporeal, she decided fumblingly. It was almost physical contact with an otherwise unseen and hideous force. But it was not possible to reconcile that presence with anyone she knew.

  She walked slowly down the wet flagstones toward the summerhouse.

  The sky was low and dark, and the shrubs and grass had grown lush with the continued rains and had a yellow tinge. She felt suddenly alone, as if she were on a prairie with only sky over her head and a far horizon of lonely, rolling land meeting the sky. She wasn’t; the house was above her, the shrubs crowding closely, the red Copley house across the garden wall. It was only the feeling of isolation man experiences in those oddly exciting moments preceding rain. As if he becomes, for those moments, part of the waiting earth again.

  It was, however, for Marcia just then a curious interval of detachment; it gave her time to think and time to assort, and she began to put aside clues and reason alibis and times and all the conflicting and agreeing stories the police had evoked. All that was the rightful machinery of the police. It was a science. It was a science of which she knew nothing at all. It was exact, too, and the last and final argument.

  And in those moments of isolation she put it all aside and let herself feel.

  Of course, she thought after a while, she wasn’t really alone; the windows of the cold gray stone house looked down on her; once a man came out of the Copleys’ back door who looked very like Jacob Wait. The kitchen door; he’d been interviewing Verity’s cook, then.

  The brown vines over the summerhouse had grown green and were hung heavily with leaves. The tulips were late but were lush and tall and about to bud. She pulled the collar of her straight brown coat up around her throat.

  If Gally had done it, then it was not for money; it was because he wanted to free her. To deliver her from Ivan.

  That was the way he would think of it; that was what the knights in the books they’d read together as children had done. Delivered the girl from the dragon.

  She clung to the thought, not stubbornly, but because she felt truth in it. But it complicated matters. She couldn’t expect Dr. Blakie and Rob to see it as she saw it. So she must persuade them not to turn Gally over to the police. She didn’t reason about that; she didn’t weigh right and wrong or social responsibility. She simply knew she couldn’t let them give the police that crushing evidence which Gally had coolly revealed to them. He was in the house at the time of both murders. But so was she!

  The cool air was refreshing against her face. The woodbine beside her was moving a little. A drop or two ruffled the surface of the lily pool.

  How full it was, with the rains! It reminded her of Ancill and the goldfish and the arsenic, and she looked at the gray water, reflecting the sky but looking somehow crowded and heavy with the rushes along the edge and the masses of sedum and forget-me-nots and feathery linum. Did it contain arsenic? Where were the fish—he’d said “floating,” but there were none. She wondered about his inexplicable retraction, decided he had looked frightened, and put the whole thing away because, in that mood of detachment from the concrete, the trivialities of circumstance, she did not want to think of it. If Gally had done it he had done it for her. If Rob had done it, he had done it—in a different way—for her. But Rob hadn’t.

  She ranged further. Ancill—Emma Beek—Delia with her frightened manners and her pink-rimmed eyes. Ancill had been devoted to Ivan; Emma Beek, certainly, had been more than willing to give the police information, but beyond that there was nothing exactly suspicious in her attitude; Delia was merely hysterical with excitement and fear.

  There remained Verity and Dr. Blakie. She didn’t know why she absolved Verity and had from the first, so she snatched again at something on the surface and easily catalogued, and that was Verity’s alibi the night of her dinner party. And, she thought rather wryly, if Dr. Blakie had wanted to kill Ivan he would simply have let him die and, as Wait had said, no one would have been the wiser. Too bad that his work was all wasted, the nurse had said.

  She was grateful for the presence of the nurse. But she did wonder by what odd coincidence she was the very nurse who had taken care of Ivan at the last. Suddenly and fleetingly she remembered someone saying something of Ivan’s last month. Of how it had been spent in the hospital and that, after all, there ought to be some clues there.

  There were more drops on the lily pool and pattering lightly on the woodbine. She must go to the house. And it was darker. Miss Wurlitz would be wondering what had happened.

  There was no getting around one fact: Beatrice’s death had removed the main source of threat against Marcia herself and against Rob. Beatrice could not now tell the police she had seen Marcia apparently in the very act of murder. Marcia looked at her own hands, slender brown fingers spread wide, thinking of that instant when they had been rigid on the shellacked handle of a knife. Of Ivan’s look. Of Beatrice crying, “How could you!”

  She doubled up her hands and thrust them in her pockets and took her way toward the house—rain, now, on her face and bare head.

  And Beatrice couldn’t, now, send Rob’s letter to the police.

  Beatrice couldn’t.

  But someone else could.

  She went into the house, and the nurse was waiting, and she and the nurse and Gally had, later, a quiet dinner, with Ancill coming in and out noiselessly and very little mention of murder.


  It was late that night that she heard it. Verity telephoned and did not heed the possibility of listeners.

  “They’ve got the letter,” she said in a queer hard voice. “They’ve got the letter. And they’ve found—they’ve found blood on Rob’s coat. The brown tweed coat he wore last night.”

  “Blood!”

  “They’ve analyzed it. They say it’s the same group as Beatrice’s. It’s—it’s just a small spot—on the front of his coat.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  COLLUSION.

  It was an ugly word and, when the mass of evidence was simmered down, an inevitable one.

  The case against Rob was strong; the case against Rob and Marcia was stronger. One of them had killed Ivan; whichever one it was, it was done with the approval and perhaps with the actual aid of the other. For who else had so strong a motive? Who else indeed had any motive? And they had opportunity.

  And besides there was that damning weight of evidence against them.

  They took Rob that night to the police headquarters—not to the little Baryton station but to the county seat, where they were met by the county prosecutor.

  They took him quietly; if there was a reason for that semi-secrecy it was because both Wait and the prosecutor wanted, when they made a murder charge, a conviction. Thus there was one mercy, in that Saturday morning saw no headlines in the papers—headlines such as Marcia at intervals during that tortured night had envisioned. Sensational headlines. Horrible headlines. How hideous it would sound, that thing that had not been hideous and had not been wrong! It was her life with Ivan that had been wrong—ugly and warped and not normal. But she could see the obvious headline: “Young Love Jailed for Killing Husband.”