Death and the Maiden

by Q. Patrick

  I pushed myself to my feet. Completely unconscious of the throbbing pain at my temple, I started to rush down the dark aisle. I reached the repair shop. I banged with both my fists against the heavy wood of the sliding door.

  “Jerry … Jerry…!”

  But there was no answer from inside. Only the steady, relentless drone of the automobile engine.

  I fumbled wildly along the door for a lock. I had no matches. I couldn’t see. My fingers found a little square of metal at the extreme end of the door. I realized then that it was a spring lock—a lock that worked mechanically when the door was pushed to.

  He was locked in, and I could not get to him. I went on beating futilely at the door, shouting hoarsely for help. I had seen the old attendant downstairs in the office. He would have a key. He must hear me—and come.

  And then, after an age, the whole floor was suddenly ablaze with lights. I spun around. The man was’there at the head of the ramp, his hand still on the electric switch, Staring sleepily through the rank of cars toward me.

  “Quick!” I cried. “The key to this door. There’s a man inside, suffocating to death.”

  He shuffled toward me. There was the clinking of keys. I saw his old, uncertain fingers selecting one. He was pushing it into the lock. The doors swung back.

  “Watch out,” he called anxiously. “The gas from the exhaust!” But he might as well have told my heart to stop beating. I pushed him aside and dashed into that small, windowless room. Jerry was there. I saw him at once, sprawled on the floor just where he had fallen, not two feet away from the exhaust. I caught desperately at his wind-breaker. With all my strength I was dragging him away.

  “Switch off the engine,” I shouted.

  I heard the man hurry past me and then heard the throbbing of machinery fade. I had Jerry out of the shop now. The man came and together we half dragged, half carried him to a window.

  I dropped to my knees at his side, kicking the long skirt of my ball dress out of the way. I bent over him. His lips were bluish and there was a faint blue tinge to his cheeks. It was an agony to see him that way. Fighting back the dread inside me, I slipped my hand around his wrist. I felt his pulse throbbing, faint but steady, beneath my fingers. I could hear him breathing too.

  A great wave of relief surged through me. I put my arm under his head, supporting him. “Jerry, Jerry darling. You’re going to be all right. It’s all going to be all right.”

  Slowly his eyelids stirred, flickered open, showing his eyes, blue and flat, staring upward, not seeing. Then he shifted his head slightly. His tongue came out, moistening his lips. He was looking at me, knowing me.

  And suddenly, before I realized, I was crying, crying like a baby.

  XXVI

  I managed to pull myself together. It was bad enough for Jerry already without his having a weeping female on his hands. The attendant and I helped him into the nearest car which happened to be Steve’s. I told the man, who was bewildered and rather frightened, to drive to the college infirmary, while I sat in the back seat with Jerry, supporting his head on my shoulder.

  Dawn was breaking over Wentworth, gray and somber. As we sped through the empty streets, I felt as dejected as I have ever felt. I had made a criminal fool of myself. In disobeying Lieutenant Trant, I had achieved absolutely nothing except almost to cause Jerry’s death. In the horror of our experience at the garage, I had forgotten the torn letters which we had gone out to find and which we had found. Where were they now, I wondered? Were they still lying there in the garage? Or had they been taken by the person who had done that diabolical thing to Jerry?

  At the infirmary the nurse was marvelous. She asked no questions. She just took Jerry in hand, put him to bed in an empty ward and assured me there was nothing to worry about. I wanted to stay with Jerry but, weak as he was, he insisted on my getting some sleep, too.

  So I left. I knew I should have gone to the police station, or at least I should have telephoned to report what had happened. But I didn’t. I couldn’t even bear the thought of ever having to see Lieutenant Trant again after what I’d done. I just walked over the cheerless gray campus to the Hudnutts’ house and let myself in with the key Penelope had given me at the courthouse.

  No one seemed to be awake. In the bathroom I found some lint and plaster. I made a rough dressing for the bruised cut on my temple.

  I crept back to our room, slipped into my pajamas again and tumbled into bed. The early morning light seeped through the curtains showing Elaine’s face against the pillow, a quiet expressionless mask of sleep.

  Sleep! How could anyone have ever been to sleep?

  But, almost instantly, I was asleep myself. It was a deep, dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion which might have gone on indefinitely if Penelope hadn’t wakened me some time, much later, when the sunlight was bright and warm as it struck across my pillow.

  The Dean of Women was standing at the foot of the bed, watching me from grave, steady eyes. Vaguely I realized that Elaine had gone, but all my sleepy attention was fixed on Penelope. She was as calm and handsome as ever, and yet I realized suddenly that she had changed. It was a very subtle, fundamental change, as if the heart-break of the last weeks had thawed some of her protective coating of ice. Her mouth was softer and there was a new sympathy in her eyes.

  Somehow she had heard of our escapade at the garage, but she didn’t scold me. She just sat quietly down on the bed.

  “I hope that cut isn’t bad, Lee?”

  “Cut?” I remembered then, and my hand moved to the plaster. “It’s nothing—nothing at all.” I paused. “How’s Jerry?”

  “He’s coming round nicely. Twisted his ankle, but not seriously. Lieutenant Trant is with him now in the infirmary. He wants to see you, but I’m having some breakfast sent up first.” Her voice changed as she added: “You’ve had a terrible experience, my dear I only hope you have some courage left. I feel we’re all going to need it.”

  “Why—what’s happened?”

  “I don’t know, but I think Chief Jordan is swearing out a warrant.” She sighed. “I suppose it’ll mean an arrest.”

  I nodded wearily. “So Lieutenant Trant was right. He told me last night that he knew—had an idea who did it. In a way I’m glad. I used to feel the worst of all would be knowing. But—after what happened to Norma last night, and to Jerry …”

  “Yes, Lee, it’s far better for us to know the truth.” Penelope took both my hands in hers. “And I want to say something that’s very difficult to say. Marcia has told me all you did in trying to protect the college—my husband and myself. It’s rather beyond my province to say whether you were right or wrong. We’ve all been foolish, all made mistakes, but I want to thank you—to let you know I’m grateful.”

  She bent forward and kissed me on the cheek. Then, very brusque and impersonal again, she rose to her feet.

  “I’ll have breakfast sent up immediately. We mustn’t keep Lieutenant Trant waiting.”

  Breakfast came. I managed some coffee and toast. With typical efficiency Penelope had seen that some of my clothes were sent over from Pigot. I dressed and went downstairs.

  I went to the infirmary, taking a circuitous route around Broome. Once again, as on the day after Grace’s death, the campus was crowded with students reading newspapers and massed in excited groups. I couldn’t stand the idea of having to run the gauntlet of those curious eyes. The prospect of seeing Trant was bad enough.

  And I met him, moving down the infirmary corridor away from the room where they had put Jerry. He looked pale, tired, and rather harassed.

  “I was coming to find you.” He paused in front of me, gazing from gray eyes with no smile in them. “Although you were responsible for getting young Hough almost killed, I suppose you’re to be congratulated on saving his life.”

  He couldn’t make me feel any more miserable than I was already. “I’m sorry. I know I was crazy. I never thought the murderer…”

  “You have a very peculiar conceptio
n of murderers,” he cut in. “It’s about time someone got tough with you, and I’m glad about that bump on your head. I hope it hurts. It may help to remind you that people who take other people’s lives aren’t precisely the type one asks in to afternoon tea and croquet. You’ve been At Home to murderers ever since this case began, and you’ve been a—:a damned nuisance.”

  “What does it matter if I’ve been a nuisance or not?” I said, feeling angry and ashamed. “You’ve broken your case anyway, haven’t you? You’re smart enough to have broken it if there’d been fifty of me trying to stop you.”

  I think I would have broken down and cried for the third time in twenty-four hours if his eyes hadn’t relented and if that slow, sympathetic smile hadn’t crinkled the corners of his mouth.

  “Okay, Lee Lovering. I apologize. It’s just that I get mad when I think what might have happened this morning if—” He glanced at the bandage on my temple—“if your head hadn’t been quite so hard.”

  His face was suddenly grave again. “You’re right. I do know who killed Grace Hough and Norma Sayler. Chief Jordan agrees, but there’s very little evidence at the moment. That’s why I want you and Jerry to help me clear up certain points. You knew Grace and Norma better than anyone else here. Ready?”

  “I’m ready,” I said shakily.

  We went down the corridor together to the bare infirmary room where Jerry was lying on the bed. He was dressed again, but his ankle was bandaged and his face was very white. He managed a smile, I sat down next to him on the bed.

  “Jerry knows what I’m going to do, Lee,” said Trant, sitting down on the only, chair. “I’m going through the whole thing as it came to me—an outsider. I want to see if you come to the same conclusion. I shall have to say quite a few unpleasant things about Grace. That’ll be tough for Jerry. But the whole thing has been tough for all of us—-and it looks like staying tough.”

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking how probably no other detective in the world would set any store by my opinion at this stage.

  “I got an idea quite early on. I got it from you, Lee. It took me around a long way, but it led right in the end. In most murder cases somebody tries to shield somebody else. And since most murders are pretty straightforward, nine times out of ten the person who is being shielded turns out to be the guilty party. But this case wasn’t ever straightforward. And the least straightforward thing about it was the quite obvious fact that one girl, Lee Lovering, was shielding at least five different people.”

  He paused, his eyes moving absently around the hygienic walls of the small room. “It was an intriguing situation, particularly when I found that four of those five people seemed to have been on the scene within half an hour of the crime and that each of them was trying desperately to keep back that information from the police. It was even more intriguing when it gradually came to light that all five of them, to a different degree, had perfectly good reasons to wish Grace Hough dead.”

  His glance turned, faintly apologetic, to Jerry. “In a homicide case the character of the deceased person often gives the vital clue. But your sister puzzled me. At first she seemed so very much like any of a hundred other college kids; her few problems seemed just the ordinary problems of any young girl—mild love affairs, mild jealousies, mild disappointments. It was only gradually that I realized the difference. Your sister went through life without armor. Things that the more usual girl takes in her stride wounded her badly. And once she’d been wounded she never forgave the person responsible. She had the passionate vindictiveness of an ultrasensitive person. That was the key, as I saw it. It was just that one little trait which made it possible for five people to want to murder her.”

  My hand found Jerry’s. For a moment the little room was preternaturally still.

  “You see,” continued Trant, “that was my first idea. I had the crazy notion that all of those five people must have conspired together to murder her or to shield the one of them who had done so. There seemed absolutely no other explanation for their all being so deeply involved in those last crucial moments of her life.”

  He was looking at me now. “I didn’t think that way for long. It was too fantastic, but it gave me the lead to another, far more plausible explanation. I was certain those five people were not tangled up in it purely through chance. The logical conclusion, of course, was that someone, either one of those five or someone else, knew just how much the others had become involved with Grace and had deliberately worked out a plan to implicate them as deeply as possible. And I had only one very elusive clue to work on.”

  “The special delivery letters?” I queried.

  “Exactly, or rather the few phrases from the last of those letters which I managed to pick up second hand through David Lockwood and Dr. Hudnutt.”

  He was staring down at the plain linoleum of the floor as if he could trace there some pattern invisible to us. “The special delivery letters, of course, were the crux. The last of them came on the evening of Grace’s death and motivated everything she did. Having read it, she gave up Steve Carteris’ party and went to the Cambridge Theater to meet someone. You, Lee, saw her at the theater with David Lockwood. By all that was logical he could have been the writer of the special delivery letters. But he wasn’t.”

  He glanced up. “And yet someone wrote them. Who? Grace was planning to meet someone at the theater; she was planning to meet someone later at the quarry. David Lockwood had glanced at the letter; he was ready to swear it was a passionate love letter from a man. What man? Everything fitted for Dr. Hudnutt, of course. He was at the theater. Grace telephoned him from the service station. I was certain at that stage he was guilty. I beat at him constantly, trying to make him confess in every way I could think of. And I did make him confess. I made him admit that he killed Grace Hough.”

  He threw out his hands in a little rueful gesture. “And, as soon as I heard his story, I knew that I’d been wrong and that he’d been wrong, that in spite of what he thought, he hadn’t been responsible for Grace’s death. He hadn’t written those special delivery letters.”

  He went on quickly: “My reason for that is obvious. The person who murdered Norma Sayler had certainly destroyed that letter by the time Hudnutt confessed. No one would ever have a chance to read it. If Hudnutt had been guilty, he would never have been so foolish as to pass on to us what Norma told him about it, things which patently pointed suspicion at him. I knew then that he couldn’t have written the letters. And from those facts and from the fact that Norma admitted the letter said things derogatory to her, I realized who must have written them.”

  His eyes, very gray and steady, were fixing my face. “I thought you would have guessed, Lee. Norma Sayler, to begin with, was convinced that Hudnutt had written the letters. She must have had a very good reason for thinking so before she accused him to his face. And there’s only one reason she could have had. She thought he had written the letter because it was deliberately phrased so that anyone reading it should think it had been sent from Robert Hudnutt.”

  I tried rather fruitlessly to struggle with that point. “You mean it was a deliberate hoax—someone wrote all those letters to Grace to hoax her into believing they came from Dr. Hudnutt?”

  “That is exactly what I mean. Almost—but not quite.” Trant’s voice was soft. “The letter spoke of a quarrel that day. Grace had quarreled with only one person—with Dr. Hudnutt at the quarry. The letter spoke of a date at the theater. Dr. Hudnutt had made some sort of vague remark about seeing Grace at the Cambridge. As a final, clinching proof it was signed Robert. That was the only solution. Someone had been writing to Grace under Robert’s name and had fooled Grace into believing the letters were genuine.”

  Jerry leaned forward. “But that’s crazy.”

  “It’s crazy until you realize who actually wrote them. Then it’s all quite simple. The two of you know the people involved. Who could have had a reason for wanting to write love letters to Grace as from Robert Hudnutt? Who could have h
ad enough subtle insight into her character to realize the surest way to please her was to slam Norma? Who could have known about the scene in the quarry or have foreseen the meeting at the theater? Above all, who could possibly have written letters day after day, long, intimate letters, making references to little private things in Grace’s life, the kind of letters that kept her satisfied and never gave her the slightest cause to discount them as a hoax?”

  He paused, looking down at his thumbnail with that quiet, intent gaze. “You’ve guessed now, of course.”

  Jerry’s face was blank. But I had guessed. The truth came to me in a blinding flash.

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes,” broke in Lieutenant Trant, “that’s what made it so very difficult and what could have made it so very easy if I’d worked a little less hard and had thought a little harder.”

  His lips moved in a slight, crooked smile. “Those special delivery letters were written by Grace Hough herself.”

  XXVII

  That did not bring as much surprise with it as it might have done. For, as soon as Lieutenant Trant said it, I saw just how inevitable a solution it was.

  Jerry’s eyes were still blank. “Grace wrote letters to herself!” he echoed. “That can’t be true. I know she was highstrung. She had a bad time after Dad’s death. But she couldn’t have done a thing like that. Why it’s—it’s mad.”

  “No, not mad, Jerry. A little unbalanced maybe but not more so than a thousand other girls who do the same thing—girls who are lonely and haven’t any friends. Some of them, like Grace, write themselves love letters; some of them refuse dates with girl friends saying they’re expecting important telephone calls which they know will never come. It’s a kind of compensation for romance. If I’d been a psychologist instead of a policeman, I might have stumbled on it in your sister’s case right away.”

  Trant was looking at Jerry again with that quiet, sympathetic gaze. “It’s very easy to see now how your sister could have started doing that. Lee’s told me how the shock of your father’s death and your financial worries changed her. Overnight it left her with very little to cling to. The importance which wealth and position had given her were gone. Think of her here at Wentworth. She was rooming with Lee who had all the friends and fun she wanted; next door was Norma Sayler who had a dozen different admirers and never passed up a chance of reminding Grace that she wasn’t popular with the boys. She saw excitement and romance all around her and she was left out of it.