Fair Warning

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  Some other time he’d made laughing little apology about jokes. Oh, she mustn’t let herself go off at a tangent like that. She must think of what he was saying. She must draw all her force to meet some emergency that was suddenly upon her; some—some catastrophe … He’d been joking about Ivan, that was it! He’d said that doctors’ jokes are likely to be a little grim. And had said there were a lot of things to do, whole laboratories full of them. Test tubes laden with botulism cultures. Typhus germs … Oh, stop, stop! … What are you going to do? How are you going to meet this thing that has happened?

  What is it that has happened?

  He was talking again, quietly, reasonably. He hadn’t changed at all.

  “… For, after all, when you’ve been out in the world a little, living a normal life a woman should live, you may find that your—affection for Rob was partly a result of propinquity. And because he was your only connection with the kind of life you needed. You were afraid of Ivan. However, there’s time later for any adjustment—any kind of—of arrangement you want to make. Just now—and whenever you wish—here is, at, least, my—the protection I can give you.”

  He was whirling the globe, spinning it madly on its axis. And it was as if time were flying there, too, with the days and nights that spinning globe was marking.

  The strong sense of catastrophe pressed more heavily upon her. Bewildered her so she heard herself speaking as if someone else in that room, where there was no one else, were speaking.

  She said, “I wouldn’t marry Rob because people would say he killed Ivan. If— Wouldn’t they say it of you?”

  “No,” he said. “I saved Ivan Godden’s life. They will say that if I had wanted him to die I would—have let him die then. That I wouldn’t have put all my skill and soul into saving him. As I did. No, they’ll not think I killed him.”

  He twirled the globe again and repeated it thoughtfully, assuredly: “No. No one would ever think that I killed him. It would have been so easy to let him die that day a month ago.”

  He watched the globe—the small imitation of all that humans in thousands of years had managed to learn and to know certainly about. It whirled and whirled, slowly at last and more slowly, measuring its small imitation time. It stopped, and he took a long deep breath that was like a decision and turned to Marcia and approached her again.

  “I think it is the only thing for you to do, Marcia,” he said. “Will you?”

  She shrank into the chair. Something queer and guarded in her measured the distance to the door, but her conscious mind rejected flight. As it rejected another deep, instinctive prompting. She said, fighting that instinct, using all her reason against it, “I don’t—I can’t—I—”

  He took her hands again, and it silenced her. It and the look in his face. He said, leaning over her, “You must do it. All this—” He stopped there, staring at her. His face was moist and glistening. “You must do it, Marcia. How can you hesitate?”

  The globe had stopped completely.

  The house and the room were hushed, too, waiting her reply. Silence and that bright and empty house, and the man above her, his hands holding her own so tightly her wedding ring cut into her finger—his eyes holding her own so she could not have looked away from him. Holding her until all the rest of the world was lost and gone, and it was as if they were standing alone above an immeasurable height. A cliff. A precipice.

  With disaster below. At her feet—so one small step would send her over an appalling brink.

  The french door opened with a clatter, and Rob came into the room, and they jerked toward him like figures on strings, and things rocked and moved and became all at once familiar again.

  “Rob!” said Marcia like a sob.

  He came into the room, closed the door, and rain shone upon his coat. Dr. Blakie released Marcia’s hands and took a neat step or two toward him.

  “Why, Rob—” he said.

  “They let me out.” He glanced once at Marcia but did not approach her. Something, she thought obscurely, had happened to him. He was changed, too. Different. Older.

  He took off his coat and flung it across the chair.

  “What happened?” said Dr. Blakie. “When did they release you? Why?”

  “New evidence. Where’s Gally?”

  He didn’t address Marcia, but she replied, “He’s gone. I don’t know where he is. Oh, Rob—are you—did they let you go, really? Are you free again? Are you—” She was on her feet now, starting toward him as if to make sure it was no dream, that he was there in flesh. But he didn’t look at her, and something about that queer avoidance perplexed her, and she stopped where she was, beside the great leather chair.

  “You alone here?” said Rob in a way that could actually have been called casual.

  “Except for me,” said Dr. Blakie. “But good God, Rob, tell us what’s happened. We were—were struck dumb with surprise when you walked into the room. Couldn’t believe our eyes. Can hardly believe our ears. Why—why, it’s incredible! What was the evidence? Tell us about it.”

  Rob looked at him unsmiling.

  “Got a cigarette?” he said.

  Marcia, frozen there beside the chair, watched them as if they were pictures, flat silhouettes on a screen. Watched Dr. Blakie take out his case and the two men meet there beside Ivan’s desk. Rob’s lean brown hands were steady on the cigarette; he tapped it lightly and leaned over toward Dr. Blakie, who held a light for him.

  The small flame flickered, and Dr. Blakie lighted his own cigarette and said through smoke, “Evidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  They’d forgotten Marcia. There was something between them only; something they only knew.

  “Just,” said Rob, puffing smoke, “evidence. Something new and clinching—”

  “Against someone else?”

  “Naturally,” said Rob after an instant’s hesitation.

  The doctor didn’t ask who, as Marcia wished to do. He seemed, oddly, to know. And Rob did not, now, look at Marcia at all or seem to be aware of her presence.

  “Naturally,” he said, putting his hand in his pocket and standing there smoking. It was an easy posture, but it did not look easy. It looked instead taut and alert.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Blakie, “I see.”

  Rob said abruptly, “Sit down, Doctor. We have time. Let’s talk of it. You see, Wait just discovered why Beatrice was murdered. And he also found the paperweight and a—something else. And he—”

  “By all means,” said Dr. Blakie. “Let us hear everything.”

  Rob held the cigarette in his mouth, while he looked at his watch.

  “Right,” he said. “But there’s not too much time. You know, I was thinking of—well, it’s a silly thing, but it was a game we used to play when I was a kid. I can’t remember anything about the game except that it was very—very heated and full of shouts, but there was one thing we used to shout at a certain stage of it. Fair warning. That was it. Fair warning. Funny thing to remember.”

  Marcia said, “Rob, Rob, tell us what’s wrong. Don’t sit there talking in circles. We’ve been—last night—”

  He did glance at her then, easily and naturally.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing: They’ve built up a pretty convincing case, you know. But I expect you both know their outline.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Blakie. “But tell it as you heard it from them.”

  “Well—to begin with, the motive, they think, is you, Marcia. I mean,” he said quickly, “somebody got rid of Ivan because he needed murdering and because whoever did it, then, was devoted to you. They suspected me mainly for these reasons: I’m in love with Marcia; I wanted her to marry me; I had access to the package of garden things and the paperweight. Now they say the paperweight was actually used to fracture his skull and that he was stabbed afterward and that that night the murderer got to thinking of the arsenic which he had also put away in the cupboard but hadn’t needed to use. And he remembered he�
�d left fingerprints on the heavy paper sack. So he came back into the library and threw the arsenic in the pool to get rid of it and burned the paper sack, or otherwise destroyed it. They say that—whoever murdered Ivan—decided to do it on the day he was injured in the auto accident. Saw the three weapons of death on the desk here—every one of them leading to someone in the household—and simply put them all in the cupboard for future use. A month later he used the dandelion knife and the paperweight and murdered him. And then had to murder Beatrice because she knew too much; because there was the suggestion of an alibi for the fifteen or ten minutes during which Ivan was murdered that was really an alibi.”

  He paused there, and Marcia thought, “Verity—can it be Verity? Is that why Rob is so different? So—so careful?”

  Dr. Blakie said, “And the new evidence?”

  “The new evidence,” said Rob, “was their finding the paperweight and—well, a sock—”

  “Sock?”

  “A black silk sock”—Rob was looking at Dr. Blakie— “initialed ‘I. G.’ Ancill had apparently found the sock when he cleaned the lily pool; it was muddy and had been in the water a long time. They think it scared him and he just dropped sock and paperweight back in the pool and left. The paperweight, you see, was in the sock. Not necessary with a weight so heavy, but lending a pretty vicious swing to the thing when the murderer brought it down on Ivan’s head. Funny I didn’t think of the sock myself,” said Rob in a conversational way. “I remember thinking—when we were in this room just after Ivan was dead and the police saw the bandage on his foot and asked about it—I remember thinking it was funny he didn’t have a sock over it. But tonight—tonight I stopped at home before coming here. And the nurse was there with my mother, and she said something about putting the sock over his bandaged foot when he left the hospital that day, and some nonsense about how well he looked except for that bandaged foot. So somebody removed it, and it could only be Ivan, and there’s only one reason for his removing that sock—only one person whose presence would be in any way connected with Ivan’s voluntarily taking that sock off. … Oh, yes, and I knew where I’d got blood on my coat. There was just one place where I could have got it. … The letter, of course, was sent by the murderer, who hoped to— ” Rob put down his cigarette and stood up suddenly and looked very strange and white—“who hoped to build the case against me until it was so solid that no jury in the world would acquit me. And thus the murderer would kill two birds with one stone. Assure his own safety. And assure—”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Dr. Blakie in a natural, pleasant way. “Yes, probably you are right. However, there were a few loopholes, I suppose?”

  “A few. Not many. Remember, Ivan came home unexpectedly on a night when my mother was having a dinner party. Quite unexpectedly—to most of us.”

  “Not proof.”

  “No—merely consistent. But there are so many consistencies. And such a confusion of alibis. The whole case, in fact, that they built up against me is altered so little. Altered only in that the smear of blood on my coat—”

  Dr. Blakie stood suddenly, too. He said quietly, “I think I’ll be going. Good-bye, Marcia. I’ll—”

  Rob glanced at his watch again.

  “I—I suppose it’s not exactly fair warning,” he said, “unless I tell you that they—figure Ancill knows; that he knew as well as they that there was only one person and one reason for which Ivan would have removed that sock. That they think he’s scared and that’s why he ran away. And that—that they have sufficient evidence to make an arrest and build up a pretty strong case; so they are going to make the arrest, wait until they get their hands on Ancill again as they certainly will; and in the meantime they’ve got the bag.”

  Dr. Blakie looked at Rob and walked quietly to the French doors. “Yes,” he said. “So it wasn’t just lost. That was your doing, I presume. Well—”

  “Try the back gate,” said Rob and turned suddenly so that his body was interposed between Marcia and Dr. Blakie.

  She could not see Dr. Blakie; she could not see his departure. She heard only the swish of his coat as he took it from the chair, presently the closing of the french door.

  The library waited—the whole house waited. And there were footsteps in the rain-drenched garden. Rob turned and looked at Marcia dazedly, as if he didn’t see her, and took his empty hand out of his pocket, gave it a queer look, and all at once sat down and put his head in his hands.

  “Rob!”

  He didn’t move, and she went to him and put her arms around him, and he lifted his head and put it against her.

  “There wasn’t any other way,” he said. “They knew it —I knew it. I had to do it. You see, the only possible place I could have got that smear of blood on my coat—after they knew, that is, that there were no bloodstains anywhere in the house—was from Dr. Blakie’s bag—remember?—when I went to get it just after Beatrice’s murder and to bring it to him so he could give you a sedative.”

  “He sent them your letter,” said Marcia.

  “Yes. If the things they were discovering hadn’t frightened him … But they were more thorough than he’d expected. And he’d made such a botch of the job. Funny, but—but that struck me from the first. He—he botched everything so. I suppose you would do that if all your training had been to save life—not to take it. And if, especially, you wanted every means of murder to look amateurish—I mean,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I mean not expert. Not—not scientific or as if anybody as deft as a surgeon could possibly do such a clumsy job. He planned it, I suppose, on the way to the hospital after he heard Ivan was injured. Made up his mind to do it, perhaps, when he stopped to tell you the dog was all right; realized, perhaps—as I did that day—what a hell Ivan was making of your life and how helpless you were—how—how crushed you were. And there were those three things on the desk right before his eyes. Like an invitation. He must have managed to hide them before he knew of Ivan’s injury. Perhaps while you were called to the telephone. Then, during the drive to the hospital where they’d taken Ivan, he made his plan. He’d save Ivan instead of let him die, first because he loved you and wanted to marry you and couldn’t if he let Ivan die on his hands—there’d be too much talk of it; and second, because if he made a—sort of spectacular effort to save Ivan and succeeded there would be—later, when he actually murdered Ivan—no suspicion pointing at him. People would say, as they did, ‘Why, Dr. Blakie saved his life when he could have let him die and no one would have been the wiser.’ “

  “Rob—oh, my dear!”

  “I know, I know, I’m talking a lot, Marcia. It’s—reaction. I didn’t know what to do. I knew they’d got his bag and found bloodstains on it—he’d tried to clean it, but there was still enough there; I knew they were going to arrest him for inquiry while they substantiated their case. They let me come home—sent me in a police car—and my mother and Miss Wurlitz were there—and she came out with that sock business; you see,”—he rubbed his forehead again confusedly and wearily—“you see, they knew it was Ivan’s sock all right and knew what it had been used for. And they think the scrap of white Gally saw might have been adhesive, or bandage, or something like that; and they’ll find it somewhere and prove it, see if they don’t. And the point was, you see, there was just one man who would want to look at the bandaged foot, and that was the doctor. God knows how he did it. Simple enough, I imagine. Simply walked to the cupboard while Ivan was bent over his foot, took out the paperweight, held it in his hand—managed to divert Ivan’s attention and get the weight in the sock and walk around behind him and—strike him with it. But he was nervous—panicky; didn’t kill him at once, so he took the knife and finished the job. Left him for dead—or so near, it didn’t matter. Shut the cupboard doors and ran across the garden again. All this happened after Beatrice had arrived at our house. Wait found this loophole and told me of it. Remember what she said? She said, ‘I was the first one there; though Dr. Blakie arrived shortly after.’ Then s
he said that Mrs. Copley came in and that after about ten minutes she went across the garden way to see what was delaying you. You see how vague it is. And how it sounds as if she and Dr. Blakie had been in the drawing room together. It was a stroke of luck for him. Well, they couldn’t have been, you see. I was upstairs shaving when he arrived. He stopped in the doorway a moment and said hello and vanished. I didn’t pay much attention to him. He saw your wrap and thought you were there and had an alibi. So then he apparently went downstairs and simply walked out the door, ran over here, knocked at the french doors while Gally was in the dining room, said he’d come to take a look at the foot. Ivan took off his sock—remember there was no struggle, or you or Gally would have heard it, and Ivan wouldn’t have voluntarily removed the sock over his injured foot for anybody but the doctor. It had to be the doctor. There was the smear of blood and his bag; the sock off that bandaged foot apparently vanished into space. That ought to have given us a clue in the first place, Marcia. Then, also, Ivan is permitted to come home the very night you and Beatrice are to be out of the house and Dr. Blakie has a reason for being just across the garden. And then, of course, the big thing—was that Ivan told you.”

  “Ivan told me?”

  “Why, yes. Ivan told you in so many words who murdered him. He said, ‘Get Graham.’ ”

  “But he meant—No, no, he couldn’t have meant—”

  “He meant, ‘Get Graham for this because he did it.’ But you thought—we all thought—he meant, ‘Get the doctor.’ ”

  The front door opened and closed with a shuddering jar, and someone ran down the hall.

  “Marcia, where are you? Marcia —” Gally burst into the room, white with excitement. “Marcia, they’ve let Rob—Oh, there you are, Rob. Have you heard—do you know—”

  Yes, they knew, Rob told him. Marcia listened while they talked of it—listened and watched Rob’s face and gradually became aware of the meaning of the things she had heard and was hearing.