“I guess I’ve only got myself to blame,” she said, picking up the conversation where it had left off, and still with that curious casualness of manner. “It was the girl at Heideger’s. He‘s been hanging around her for quite a while. Jim was sociable, you know, and lately, with the baby and the house, I haven’t had much time for him. At night I was tired.”
The detective nodded. “So he took the gun and went out, I suppose?”
“Not just like that. He often carried a gun. You know, since that hold-up at the plant—”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know very much. From what I gather, because with everybody talking at once I got kind of mixed up. It seems that the clerk from the drug store walked into Heideger’s while Jim was there and asked the girl what she meant by fooling around with a married man. Then he told Jim to come home because his baby was sick. I’d sent over this afternoon for some medicine. That was the start. The trouble came then.”
“And after the trouble Jim came home,” the detective prompted, “and then what, Molly?”
“Then Jim came home,” she repeated in a spiritless voice, “and said he was in trouble and he would have to leave town. I gave him all the money I had and got his winter overcoat out. It smelled of moth balls, but there wasn’t time to air it. He put it on and went.”
The detective sniffed. “Moth balls!” he said. “That’s what I’ve been smelling. You must have spilled them around.”
The hands which still held the shawl about her closed convulsively, but her face was quiet.
“I suppose so.”
“He didn’t say what the trouble was?”
“No, I didn’t ask him. I never thought of a shooting. I thought it was the girl.”
She was utterly impersonal. He had some faint glimmering, as he sat there, of how life had betrayed her: trapped her and betrayed her. And in the silence he could hear, through the flimsy floor, the baby’s croupy cough overhead.
“I suppose men are just naturally unfaithful,” she said, when the coughing had ceased.
“Not all men, Molly. This girl, she just got around Jim.”
“She was pretty,” she agreed, as though that answered all questions. “You can hardly blame him. I guess here in the town they’ll say I drove him to her. I have the reputation of thinking more of my children than I do of my husband. In the evenings I liked to read. Jim was no hand for reading. A man likes a woman to be gay and cheerful. But the baby’s been delicate and I tire kind of easy these days.”
For a few moments there was silence in the parlor, save for the creak of the self-rocker in which the detective gently swung himself. He yawned and stretched out his legs.
“You don’t mind if I smoke in here?”
“Jim smoked all over the house. Is the drug clerk badly hurt?”
The creaking of the self-rocker stopped. The detective looked hard at his stogie. “Yes, he’s pretty bad,” he said, after a moment. “He’s—well, Molly, you will learn it soon enough anyhow—He’s dead.”
For the first time her self-possession left her. She dropped down limply on one of the plush chairs and sat turning her wedding ring on her finger. Her jaw quivered nervously. She could scarcely articulate. “Then it’s murder?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Out of delicacy he did not glance at her. There was a furtive look about her just then; a recklessness, too. But the detective was busy with his own thoughts. When at last he glanced at her, her face was as quiet as ever.
“Funny!” he said. “That moth stuff seems stronger than ever!”
“I don’t like it. It gives me a headache.”
Suddenly he turned to her and put a hand over hers.
“Listen to me, girl,” he said. “Don’t take this too hard. Something of this sort was bound to come sooner or later. If he gets away, you are better without him. If he doesn’t—” He threw out his hands. “He has never supported you. You have worked for him, haven’t you, and borne his children? What have you had out of it? Try to be sensible. Things are pretty bad just now, but—they have been pretty bad for you for the last eight years. It’s been drink and gambling and other women, and I am going to tell you the whole thing straight. There is no use cutting off a dog’s tail an inch at a time. He shot the girl, too. They are both dead. The sheriff is out with a posse, and there is a thousand dollars on his head. Heideger’s offering it.”
She sat back with her eyes closed. But she was not faint. She was thinking. Both of them! Jim had killed them both. Then the girl from Heideger’s was gone. She was dead. She would never again come between herself and Jim. Cooper was swaying unhappily in his chair, and the creaking of the springs said to her quite plainly: Dead, dead, dead…
“Two of them!” she said at last. “Oh, my God. The drug clerk was a nice young man. We used to talk about books and articles in the magazines. And now—oh, my God!” She pulled herself together sharply. “It’s a pity of the girl too,” she said, quietly. “She was young and the men made a fool of her. I guess she wasn’t really bad.”
The detective said nothing. He rose, hoisting himself slowly out of the low rocker.
“Well, back to work!” he said. “It’s been mighty good of you, Molly. I am warmed through now.” He yawned again. “I suppose there isn’t anything I can do?”
“I’m all right. The doctor gave the baby something to make him sleep. I guess he thought I needed the rest.”
Cooper threw the end of his stogie into the stove, drew a revolver from his coat pocket and glanced at it, remembered suddenly that the action was hardly delicate, and thrust it back. “I suppose he’s hardly likely to come back here? There’s no reason that you know of, to bring him back?”
“He’s not likely to risk his neck to see me again. Or his children,” she added, with almost the first bitterness she had shown. But the next moment she was calm again. Her mind was working again—a subconscious intelligence that seemed to have been scheming all the while.
“I was thinking,” she suggested, “that if I leave the latch off you could come in now and then and get warm. I can leave a cup of tea on the stove. Do you want milk in it?”
“Sugar, thank you, and no milk,” he said. “You were always a thoughtful woman, Molly.” There was something almost wistful in his voice. Mindful of the sleeping baby, he closed the door cautiously behind him as he went out.
She stood inside, listening to his feet on the frozen ground outside. Then she went back into the parlor, and from behind the plush sofa retrieved a man’s heavy overcoat, redolent of moth preventives. This she carried upstairs and placed carefully behind the baby’s crib and then, closing the door into that room, she went into the kitchen again.
So the girl at Heideger’s hotel was dead… Never again would she flirt with the traveling men at the hotel, passing them with her bold eyes and swaying hips. And never again would she lure Jim with that insolent young body of hers. She felt no pity, but a hard sense of relief. It was as though, now the girl was gone, she could think once more, could plan, even calculate.
* * *
The posse was out in the hills after Jim. Only the most casual search had been made of the house. Jim Carter had been seen after the tragedy to go home and shortly after to drive fiercely out of town in his buckboard wagon headed for the mountains. No one in the village had tried to stop him. He was grim, white-lipped and armed. The posse had found the buckboard eight miles away at nine o’clock that night, the wagon wedged in a fence corner with a wheel off and the horse lame. There was every likelihood that Carter was in the hills.
But she knew what the posse did not, that Jim Carter was not in the hills.
In the kitchen she moved about methodically, built up the fire again, put on the tea-kettle. She was not tired now. She felt strong, capable of anything. There was method now in her movements, in the deliberation with which she at last approached that portion of the wall where the paper still showed faintly damp. She lowered her voice.
> “Are you all right, Jim?”
“For God’s sake put out that fire. I’m stifling.”
“I’ve got to dry this paper. And anyhow I’m boiling the kettle. Cooper’s coming in again for some tea.”
She could hear him muttering his disgust and anger from beyond the wall but she paid no attention. His hiding place was well conceived, for the night at least.
The plan had been his. He had thought it out when the horse had gone lame and he had had to work his roundabout way back home through the commencing storm. But the execution was hers, and the work was well done.
Beside the range there was a small unlighted closet with a flat wooden door which fitted close without a frame. Long ago the door had been papered to match the kitchen. It had been the work of only a few moments to take off the lock. After that he had gone inside and drawn the door to behind him, shutting out from her sight his shaking hands and death-coloured face. Then, neatly and with dispatch, she had repapered that portion of the wall. The door had disappeared. Now the paste was almost dry. Let them find the wagon and search the house. In the lamplight the unfaded strips did not show against the old ones. Daylight would reveal them. For tonight at least Jim was safe.
Her voice was more gentle when she went back to the wall again. “Can you breathe?” she said, cautiously. The reply came with astonishing clearness through the thin wall, even the sound of a body turning in a narrow space. “I am making another air hole. Go out and see if any chips fall out.”
“I can’t, Jim. Tom Cooper is across the street.”
“What did he say?”
“It’s bad news, Jim.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. He did not know about the girl. Perhaps he did not even know that he had shot her. He had emptied the revolver at the man and then fled out of the back door of the small frame hotel.
She opened her mouth to speak, shut it again. He would know soon enough. As she listened she could hear the soft grinding of the drill stop for a moment, then go on. What was he thinking about in there, fighting for the very air to breathe? Was there any grief in him, any remorse? Was he wondering about the girl, afraid to ask her? But when the sulky voice spoke again, it was to tell her to go out and see if the sawdust outside could be seen.
She made the tea, crossing and recrossing the little room cautiously. When she came back from placing the cup on the fender of the parlor stove, the querulous voice was speaking from the other side of the partition. “What the devil do you mean by bringing Tom Cooper in here anyhow?”
“I thought it looked as if I hadn’t anything to hide, Jim. He’ll never think you are here now I have left the latch off so he can go in and out when he likes.”
“Well, you’d better see about those chips. Wait until he comes in the next time and then slip out the back door.”
“The snow will cover them. Listen, Jim, can you hear me plainly?”
“Yes.”
“The doctor sent some sleeping stuff for the baby. Do you suppose Cooper would notice it in a cup of tea?”
“I don’t know. Not with sugar, maybe.”
“If he would drop off, you know, you might get away yet. On the milk train. They wouldn’t be looking for you there.”
“I might, if I could get out of this hole—”
The sound of the drill had ceased.
“And if you did and got settled somewhere, you’d send for us Jim, wouldn’t you? You’d owe us that, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure I’d send for you, Molly. You and the kids.”
She listened to the facile promise of his; it did not ring true, and she knew it. She had listened to his promises before. But this time, she told herself, things were different. He had had his lesson. Surely now, in some quiet place—
“If I could get to the barn,” he grumbled, “I could work around behind Shultz’s fence and get to the railroad siding. Where is that fool standing?”
“He’s just across. You can’t get to the barn.”
It was some little time later that she realized that the snow was coming down steadily, and she began to watch it. If it kept on it would help him, would cover his tracks. It meant life to him, that snow. But if it stopped—She did not tell Jim it was snowing. From behind the papered door he was muttering complaints; of the heat, of his cramped position, of the lack of air.
“I’m suffocating in here!”
“For God’s sake, Jim, be still. He may come in any minute.”
“What’s he coming for? He’s always been hanging around you.”
That roused her to sharp anger. “He may be coming because there’s a thousand-dollar reward for you.”
She heard him swearing violently, and then—the wall was paper-thin—she heard him sliding cautiously about in that narrow space.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to sit down on the floor. I’m all in and I’ll need my strength.”
“Listen, Jim,” she said desperately. “Don’t go to sleep, will you?”
“God in heaven, so you suppose I’m sleeping tonight?”
“If you hear me cutting the paper, just keep quiet. I’ll rap three times first, to let you know. Be still! There’s someone outside!”
She turned toward the rear of the house, rigid with terror. A pair of peering eyes were staring at her from the window. She turned her back to them.
“Jim!” Almost a whisper, but he heard.
“What.”
“Mrs. Shultz is on the back porch.”
When she looked again the eyes had gone and her neighbor was trying the door. With a despairing gesture Molly blew out the lamp and opened the door.
“I’ve been in bed for three hours,” explained the visitor, “and seems like I can’t sleep, with you so near and in trouble.” She pushed herself through the half opened door into the room.
“I’m sorry. I guess there’s nothing anyone can do to help.”
“I could sit here by the stove. I can’t sleep anyhow. It’s a comfort, when you’re in trouble, to have someone about to lean on.”
There was a sort of ghoulish curiosity in her face, but there was real kindness also. She came close and lowered her voice.
“I thought you was talking to someone a minute ago.”
“I was speaking to the detective. I’m making him a cup of tea.”
The curiosity faded from Mrs. Shultz’s eyes. The kindness also left them.
“I don’t know that I’d care to make tea for a man who was waiting to hang Shultz or fill him full of lead!” She turned toward the door, hesitated. “I told Shultz I was going to stay. He locked the door after me. You wouldn’t mind, would you, if I lay on your parlor sofa?”
Molly was a mild woman, but now she was desperate.
“I’m afraid I would mind,” she said quietly. “This is a very sad night for me. I should like to be alone; absolutely alone.”
The kitchen door closed with a bang. She was alone—with the papered door.
The kettle had boiled long since. She ran up the stairs and brought down the sleeping powders in their pasteboard box. One she emptied swiftly into the teacup on the parlor fender. The box she put into the stove and waited until it was entirely consumed.
“I’ve fixed it, Jim. Listen for three raps. If he doesn’t drink it, or the powder doesn’t work—”
She broke down. There was only the sound of the bit from beyond, creaking as it turned. She opened the front door and called across in a low voice: “I’ve left your tea for you and the door is unlocked. Be sure to close it tight when you go out.”
Then she went upstairs. The baby slept soundly. She put out the lamp and, drawing her shawl close about her, sat down in a chair before the fire. She thought of many things: of the days when Cooper, across the street, had wished to marry her; of her husband; of the blond girl at Heideger’s; of the papered-up closet in the kitchen and the man in it drilling madly for breath.
Her eyes fell on a small white obj
ect on the floor. That brought her back with a start. She made another painful excursion to the lower floor.
“He smelt the moth balls on your overcoat,” she said to the wall. “I’ve got to hide it again. It’s under the parlor sofa. Where’ll I put it?”
“Hide it behind the wood on the back porch.” The voice was muffled.
“Jim, have you got enough air?”
“Oh, I’ll manage somehow.”
The kitchen clock struck, a thin metallic ring. It was a very old clock, with flowers painted on the dial. It had marked in its time death and birth and giving in marriage. But never, perhaps, had it marked so tragic a night.
Two o’clock.
She went back to her chair and sat listening. The blizzard had come now. Wind whipped the window sash and roared about the house corners. Beneath the ill-fitting frame a fine line of snow had sifted. She was painfully alive. Every sense ached with waiting.
More than once she mistook a slamming shutter for the closing of the front door, only to be disappointed. It came an hour later, when the clock with the painted dial was striking three. The bait of the unlatched door and the glow of the base-burner through the parlor window had caught their victim.
Cooper had compromised with his conscience by making a careful round of the house. At one place he stopped. In a lull of the wind it seemed to him that there was a curious grinding sound. Then the gale rose again, caught his hat and sent him running and cursing. When he came back the noise, whatever it was, had ceased. He stamped cautiously on the low porch and opened the door. A homely odor of tea met him, mixed with comforting warmth. He turned up the lamp and took off his overcoat. It was his best overcoat and shabby at that. If he had any luck and the storm drove Carter back, he’d be able to buy a new one. He dusted it off with his hands before hanging it over the back of a chair to dry. On one shoulder a few grains of sawdust caught his attention. He looked at them with speculation, but without suspicion. He had a sense of humor.
“Ha!” he said to himself. “Even the sky has gone in for adulteration. Sawdust in the snow!”
Toward the Golden Age Page 35