by Mabel Seeley
“No evidence has shown how this possible murderer locked the animals and the remains in the kitchen, and left the one key inside.
“You must also bear in mind that the fact that Mrs. Garr’s possessions may have been searched in her absence does not prove that such a thief committed murder.
“Nor must you be influenced by merely the strong belief some of the witnesses have shown that Mrs. Garr was murdered.
“I shall now consider the case of natural death. In that case, the simple course of events would seem to be this.
“Mrs. Garr descended into her basement on her return to the house around eight thirty. She may have sat in the storage room on her accustomed chair. She has left her wraps and handbag in the storage room. Sometime before ten o’clock, she has opened the door of the basement kitchen, and the cat escapes. She may have been down there when Mrs. Dacres returned at ten. No one in the house will admit having gone to the cellar that evening, at any time before the search. At some time between ten and midnight Mrs. Garr recaptures the cat, returns it to the kitchen with the others. She may have been listening for prowlers; at any rate, she sits in the kitchen in the dark. She is subject to heart attacks. She suffers, then, such an attack and is overcome by apoplexy or any sudden illness. She dies. This may have been before or after the search of the house; it may even have been the sounds of the attack on Mrs. Dacres and the subsequent tumult that brought on her illness.
“It is extremely regrettable that the basement kitchen was not searched with the rest of the house that night; there is great possibility she was still living; at any rate the cause of death could then have been easily ascertained.
“The foregoing is all conjecture, I repeat. All that is known is that the remains of Mrs. Garr were found late the next Thursday evening, in such condition that it has proved impossible to determine the cause or exact time of her death.
“Circumstantiating evidence for a natural death is the key to the room in which Mrs. Garr was found. The door was locked, and the key inside. Fiction to the contrary, this is very difficult to effect, for any murderer.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you have been given exact accounts of the admitted activities of all persons well acquainted with the house at 593 Trent Street. If your verdict is murder you may, if you have determined by whom it was committed, name that person.”
He stopped talking.
The jury stood up, in a dazed, blundering way, and straggled out of the room by a side door.
I looked back to the coroner. He was sitting expansively back, his hands patting his sides. Lieutenant Strom, next to him, was smiling slightly. I started—was he smiling at me? I had only an instant to wonder in—he turned immediately to speak to the coroner.
Hodge Kistler, beside me, made the whisper of a whistle.
“What’ll the answer be?”
“Murder. I’m sure it’s murder,” I whispered back.
“You had your mind made up beforehand.”
“Didn’t you?”
“M-m-m-m.”
“How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Any time, up to and including hours.”
“F’heaven’s sake! Then let’s take up our legs and walk!”
We both got up, stretched, walked around the room. The others, when they saw we weren’t stopped, got up to do likewise, pausing in little groups of three and four to whisper and talk. The atmosphere around the audience was heavy with suspense; only the policemen walked in lighter air. They huddled to talk, too, though; I waited until Lieutenant Strom was momentarily detached, and went to speak to him. Mr. Kistler followed.
“Excellently well reasoned, Lieutenant Strom.”
“Why aren’t you congratulating the coroner on that?” He glinted at me, smiling with his lower lip.
“I recognized the style.”
“Nice to be appreciated.”
“Oh, I did. I was thinking I couldn’t have done better myself.”
The lieutenant howled.
“Of all the conceited little minxes!” And to Mr. Kistler: “How do you ever stand a girl like that?”
“She thinks I haven’t any, so she hasn’t started judging my mental output yet,” Mr. Kistler said.
“Surprised?” the lieutenant asked me.
“No. Why?”
“You mean you haven’t changed your mind about anything?”
“No. Why should I?”
“How’d you like to have me pass judgment on your mental processes?” He laughed again.
“Go ahead.”
“Spare the child,” Hodge Kistler broke in. “What’s the verdict going to be?”
“Ask me, with all these powerful intellects around?”
“Don’t you know yourself?” I put that one in; it was the worst I thought up on the spur of the moment.
“Sure, I know. But do I tell? Just this much—there won’t be any detective in your front hall tonight. You haven’t had a tail all day. There. Think that one out.”
He laughed at me again and went back to his coroner.
“What does he mean?” I asked Hodge Kistler excitedly. “Does he mean they have it all solved? They have the murderer?”
“Maybe.” Mr. Kistler’s eyes showed thinking, too. “Or maybe they think the whole thing’s just a washout. Just an insignificant old woman, better dead, dying of the infirmities of age.”
“It’s just got to be murder! I know it’s murder!”
I was in a fever of impatience. We went out to get chocolate bars at the stand; I kept running back, thinking I heard sounds of the jury returning. The others were nervous, too. Mrs. Halloran flounced away from her husband and stood twisting her hands. Mr. Grant sat without moving in his chair, his face thinner than it had been, curiously empty. Mr. Buffingham strode back and forth along the side of the room, tapping his eternal cigarette ashes on the floor, fixing his eyes moodily downward, or darting quick glances at one group or another. Miss Sands whispered to the Wallers in a corner. The Tewmans wandered to the door, looking at passersby, standing where everyone bumped them going in or out.
It was after six when the jurors went out. When seven came and they hadn’t returned, I asked Mr. Kistler: “What’s it usually mean when the jury takes a long time?”
He shrugged. “Someone’s a holder-outer.”
If there was just one holder-outer, he was a passing good one. It was nearly eight before we saw the doorknob of the door behind which the jury had retired turning, and the widening space between door and frame.
We all scrambled for our seats; the jury filed portentously into theirs.
There was one of those solemn hushes.
The coroner, speaking in ordinary tones, asked the question.
One juryman had remained standing; he was the one that replied.
“We find that Mrs. Garr died a natural death, from cause or causes unknown.”
I couldn’t believe it. I swung my eyes quickly to Lieutenant Strom. This time there wasn’t any doubt of it. His hooded eyes were directly on me, and his lips smiled triumphantly, sardonically.
I felt as if I had been sailing away up in the sky under a parachute, and the parachute had suddenly folded.
So that was the answer. That was the end.
“Do you mean to say,” I asked Mr. Kistler as he hustled me out, “that that’s all there is? The police won’t do any more?”
“Sure. Your mystery’s exploded—there wasn’t any mystery. All there was was a poor old lady dying off by herself, in the wrong company. That’s what the police department thinks. As far as they’re concerned, it’s settled. There won’t be another detective in that house from now until its last brick is dust in a pedestrian’s eye.”
Oh, how mistaken he was about that!
But I didn’t know that then. Not knowing, I enjoyed my hamburgers very much
. That’s what we had for dinner. Reversal to type, Mr. Kistler said, after our fancy lunch.
Mr. Kistler took the inquest calmly, but I—there’s no second way of diagnosing my emotions—was furious.
“To think a man is capable of handling facts and ideas as beautifully as Lieutenant Strom did in his summing up of the case, and then this is the conclusion he draws! Of all the idiots!”
“Did the thought ever trickle into your sweet little head that Lieutenant Strom might be right? After all, he’s had experience with murders. You haven’t. All you have is a feeling for drama. You feel nothing but murder would fit the particularly nasty circumstances, and so you keep plugging for death by violence.”
“Strom can’t be right. I know he’s wrong.”
Mr. Kistler waved the hand holding the hamburger.
“Let’s hear you prove it. You wouldn’t want to send anyone to the electric chair on feelings, would you?”
I couldn’t prove it, of course.
“All right, that laughs you down. Now forget it. This is a holiday. Anytime I take you out is always a holiday. Let’s go to a movie and otherwise dissipate. Did you ever send any rum down your intellectual neck? I thought not. Tonight sees the beginning of a new life for you. Not too literally, I hope, of course.”
We had fun. I had my first rum sling and saw a movie through it, and we danced. All that hasn’t a lot to do with the death that lived and walked in Mrs. Garr’s house, so I’ll leave it with this honorable mention.
It was perhaps three o’clock when we went home, groping in the dark, quiet, unpoliced hall, pausing to say good night at my door. I unlocked my door, took a swift look to see that all was well—I did this every time, now, knowing how many skeleton keys might unlock my door when I was gone—and reported all okay before Hodge Kistler went upstairs.
I felt good; I was happy, the rum was still a sweet fire inside me. I got ready for bed happy, but not too happy not to hook my chairs under the knobs as usual. I felt awfully safe in the security of those chairs; I smiled back at the evening; I forgot Mrs. Garr entirely, and slept.
* * *
—
I HAVEN’T ANY IDEA how much later it was when I woke.
I woke thinking, How dark it is! and lay there, puzzling about the dark. Even if the moon doesn’t shine, the streetlamp on the corner always makes my room full of that yellow haze in which objects are perfectly visible.
There wasn’t any light there now. Only blackness.
I moved my face slowly, enough so I could see where the windows usually were. Blackness. But no. A thread-thin line of light.
My shades were down.
That was the last moment I breathed.
As surely as if I saw it then with my eyes, I saw myself letting those shades up that night, as usual.
There was sound and movement in the room now. Air, shaken, flowed over my stiffened face. Sound of movement—stealthy, purposeful, deadly. Death. The death that lived in Mrs. Garr’s house. Death walking slowly, quietly, surely in my room.
My body was iron, my throat was an empty tube; I opened my mouth to scream and no sound came out of me. An inch at a time I moved my stiffened, weak right arm toward the side of the bed.
The tips of my fingers touched cloth.
* * *
—
I DON’T HAVE TO guess what will go on in my mind when my life is over. I got ready to have it end then. Somewhere in the quiet inside me my lost voice said, “Oh, God, I prepare to die.”
The same instant a stunning blow came at me out of the darkness.
16
PEOPLE IN GOOD HEALTH sometimes take a ghoulish enjoyment out of talking about death. I’ve heard them, so that means I’ve listened.
But from now on, anyone is going to have a hard time to make me believe dying is pleasant. The place where you go when you die is black; it’s a pit, and there isn’t even quiet there, no rest, there’s terrible pain; you have to break before there’s rest, you have to break and stop being. There’s terrible pain cracking your weakness, tearing you apart, shredding you, pulling you out thinner and thinner like faint elastic, pulling you out, until the thread of your life is so tenuous it isn’t there at all; you’re gone; you aren’t anymore, here or in heaven or even in death’s black pit.
I was almost there.
I was so close that all I had to do was just that final letting go, and then I could have been quiet, because there was no more of me.
It was frightful, coming back. I had to call my substance back, re-create it out of the black pit, and I was so weak. I’d flag, and flow away from myself again, and start anew.
I came back, of course. You know, or I wouldn’t be writing this.
I came back into white light, white heat, white pain.
Compared to it, even the black was better. I wanted to slip back, but THEY wouldn’t let me. THEY kept doing things to me. Peculiar things; I couldn’t distinguish what. It wasn’t for a long while that THEY began to break down into people. A man in shirtsleeves, working so hard. Hodge Kistler. White face. Mr. Waller. Lieutenant Strom. Funny. Lieutenant Strom. Not another detective . . . until dust in your eye. I tried to get away from them, but they wouldn’t let me. They slapped me and stuck me with pins and poured things down my throat. I was more and more awake. Much against my will. I could locate one worst pain now. My head. Appendicitis in my head. Rum. Did rum do that to me? No, not rum. The THING by the bed. Death.
I almost went out again.
But this time it was easier to come back.
I looked up at the face over me. Hodge Kistler’s face. White. Sweating.
“It hit me.” That was my voice. I must have left most of it back in the pit.
“Take it easy, but try not to drop off again. Try, try, will you?”
“My head.”
A river of air ran back and forth across his face with the smile on it.
“You’re still wearing it. It’ll fit again.”
He stood back, and his voice from away on the other side of the room said, “How’s she doing, Doc?”
“Fine,” another oceangoing voice boomed back. “Who’s going to be the nurse around here? Fine. Just don’t let her drop off to sleep before noon.”
It was quiet after that except for the noon whistles in my head. Sometimes Mrs. Waller and sometimes Mr. Kistler was beside my bed. Every time I closed my eyes, they slapped me, which didn’t seem kind when I felt so badly. So I found a way to sleep with my eyes open. They didn’t object to that.
Finally they really let me sleep. When I woke up, the light was on in the middle of my ceiling, with a paper bag tied around it. People do such ridiculous things. But I was better. My head had decided to run locomotives instead of whistles. Locomotives jar, but they’re nicer than whistles. My body was detached from me, but there I was inside it, even if I was loose. I reached up and turned my mind on, like a radio dial. Nice to think again, even if there was a lot of static. Hodge Kistler was sitting beside the bed, his legs stuck out in front of him and his hands in his pants pockets, looking grimmer than I’d ever thought he could look.
“Hello,” I said.
He jumped.
“Why, hello! Look who’s back in town!” He brought his face down close to me; he was smiling all over it.
“Who did it?”
“If you won’t be slithering away again I’ll tell you. We don’t know.”
“You mean you didn’t catch them?”
“Gwynne, it’s as much a mystery as all the rest.”
I wasn’t too weak for malice.
“Do the police—does Lieutenant Strom say it was a natural dea—say I fell out of bed on my head?”
He smiled with tight lips.
“If you want to crow, you can. You could buy two of Lieutenant Strom today for one mildewed Chinese yen.”
&
nbsp; “My head—is it broken?”
“Say, your head can’t be broken.”
“Then why do I feel so awful?”
“Listen, Gwynne. Smell.”
I smelled. “Funny. Like—”
“Like ether?”
“Yes.”
“Well, whoever it was went one better than ether. It was an ether dry cleaner. You’ve got a right to feel rotten.”
“I do. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Aw, Gwynee.” He took my hand. “I’m awfully, awfully sorry.”
“I should have taken you up on your invitation.”
“Don’t.”
“You aren’t going to leave me here tonight, are you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve stayed up all night before.”
That was a peaceful thought. I went to sleep on it, and this time I really slept. When I woke again, the light was still going inside the paper bag on the ceiling, but sunlight was flowing in the windows, too. Hodge Kistler was sitting fast asleep in the armchair jammed close to my couch, his head almost down to his shoulder, his feet up on another chair, his hands limp and open at his sides, with the palms outward.
It was the only time I’d ever seen him look pathetic.
Clearly I heard a step in the hall; startled, I turned my head. The face of the Wilson-chinned policeman appeared briefly around the door casing, turned owlish eyes on me, disappeared again.
I lifted my head cautiously from the pillow; it didn’t fall apart. In fact it was quite a decent head. It was sore when I touched it, but outside of a feeling that I ought to hold on to it with my hands to keep it in place on my neck, it didn’t bother me.
I slid down the couch, hoping not to disturb Mr. Kistler in the armchair. I wasn’t successful. At the first slide his eyes popped wide open.
“Hey, what’re you doing?”
“I’m hungry.” I was, too.
“Hungry?” he asked incredulously.
“Of course I’m hungry.”
“You can’t be hungry. Your stomach’s upset.”