by Helen Reilly
At the end of five minutes the little detective rose. He didn’t immediately go. He said, “Well, I guess that’s about all, Miss. No. One more thing,” and sprang it on her in his deceptively mild voice. “Who is Mr. John Muir, could you tell me? Was he a friend of Mr. Middleton’s? We talked to most of Mr. Middleton’s friends at the time, but I can’t recall—was Mr. Muir in New York when Mr. Middleton died?”
Gabrielle sat very still. No one must know of John’s flying visit to her on that distant, dreadful day. No one did know, she was sure of it, and she could answer truthfully. “Mr. Muir wasn’t in New York at the time, he went to Sao Paulo in the early spring, only got back yesterday morning… Just a minute, please.”
She had been aware all along of a bubbling sound somewhere. It was coming from the bathroom. She crossed the hall, opened the bathroom door, and stared incredulously. The hot-water tap was on full. Water ran chucklingly, swirling and eddying in a pool in the basin, filling the air with clouds of steam. Gabrielle gazed at the tap blankly. She had turned the water off before she went out, she was positive of it. Besides, it was only dripping then, and now it was on full. Had someone been in the apartment while she was at the dentist’s? Susan might have come into town, or Tony—Susan had a key. But would either of them have left the water on? Scarcely.
Was she mistaken? Had she meant to give the faucet a twist and forgotten? It seemed to her that she could feel the faucet’s cool smoothness in her palm and against her fingers when she had turned it tight before going out, unless—coldness struck at her—the feeling existed only in her imagination. Yesterday she had imagined that someone was trying to kill her.
She roused herself, shut the water off decisively, and went back into the hall, to find the little detective looking at her interestedly. “Anything wrong, Miss?” he asked, and continued to gaze at her. Conscious of the whiteness of her face, Gabrielle said with unnecessary violence, “Nothing whatever, except that I left the water turned on.”
Todhunter said, “Oh? Well, thank you, Miss,” and picked up his hat. He had intended to query her about the affair on the subway platform yesterday afternoon, but she seemed upset, and the Inspector had said not to alarm her. If she thought anything of it herself, had any suspicions, she would have mentioned the incident. There were other ways. He took his departure.
Outside the closed and locked door, Todhunter heard the slam of the bolt going home and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. In her account of where she had been last night Miss Conant hadn’t mentioned meeting up with Mr. John Muir, whose name and address he had obtained by following Muir home. What bothered him still more was the tailspin she had gone into because water was running in the bathroom. Was she—he fingered a loose button on his coat meditatively—quite all there? The little detective’s doubt of Gabrielle’s mental stability would have been enormously increased if he had seen her twenty-four hours later.
On the following morning she got a surprise phone call. Brenda Holmes rang her at a little after eleven and asked her to a cocktail party. She was having some people that afternoon, and would Gabrielle come?
Gabrielle’s brows rose. Word that she was out of seclusion had evidently been passed around, but while she and Brenda had been meeting at the houses of mutual friends for a long while they had never been intimate. Why this sudden attention? Go and see. Perhaps John would be there and might have news, although it was unlikely so soon.
Gabrielle thanked Brenda and accepted, and got into a soft gray wool dress that made her skin very white and her eyes a misty sea color. By that time she had pushed the incident of the running water to the back of her mind. She had more important things to think about. It was half-past five when she arrived at her destination and gentle dusk was falling over the square. Trees made twisted charcoal-black patterns and birds flew in the pearly shadows underneath. It was the loveliest hour of the day, when darkness drew in and thousands of lamps were lighted against it and nighttime existences were taken up.
Brenda welcomed her pleasantly to the small pretty apartment on Washington Square West where she lived with an elderly invalid cousin.
“Nice of you to come, Gabrielle. You’re looking so much better. I said so to John the other night.”
Proprietorship? Don’t be a cat, Gabrielle told herself. “Thanks, Brenda, I feel much better.” They chatted for a minute. Didn’t Gabrielle loathe the new hats? Did she find winter dried her skin—nothing deeper than half an inch. Brenda led the way to the diminutive living-room. “You know everyone, I think.”
Gabrielle did. Philip and Julie Bond were there, and the Ryecrofts and Simeon Clark and the Gasconys. “When,” Phil Bond demanded, bringing Gabrielle a Martini, “am I going to be able to talk business with you?”
That was another of the tasks she would have to take up. “Soon, Phil,” she promised. Big, ruddy, jovial, Phil Bond wasn’t a miracle of tact. He said to Bob Ryecroft with whom Gabrielle was standing, “Gather ye round, boys, this young woman’s going to be a catch.”
Mark’s dead, he’s gone, forgotten, Gabrielle reflected bitterly, and watched Brenda moving about the room. What was behind those blue eyes, that golden look? Shrewdness, calculation, the intelligence to conceal intelligence?—or simply a moderate portion of brains that taught Brenda how to use her beauty to the most advantageous end, i.e., a wealthy marriage? Well, what was the matter with that? Why did you expect so much of beauty like Brenda’s? And yet, in a way, it was fair enough. If the box was enchanting you expected the contents to be equally so, holding the mind and spirit as the outside held the eye. To be presented with mediocrity or worse was fraud.
Claire Middleton and Blake Evans came in then, diverting her thoughts. What little Gabrielle had seen of Mark’s young niece, she liked. Claire was a tall shy girl with a long narrow face, a delicate skin and soft brown eyes, gentle and sweet. Blake at once crossed the room to Gabrielle. “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you here.” She said, “Hello, yourself,” and they fell into gossip about Greenfield, and people they both knew. In the middle of it Gabrielle glanced up and got the impact of two brown daggers flashing at her from across the room.
She was blankly amazed. She and Blake Evans had gone to school together and she liked him and he liked her, and that was all there was to it. Was Claire Middleton jealous, or did the child dislike her for some other reason?
Gabrielle cut her conversation with Blake short and left a few minutes later. She got home at half-past six. When she opened the door with her key there were people in the living-room—a man and a woman—she could hear their voices. It must be Susan and Tony, she thought, and crossed the foyer to the living-room, to pause sharply in the doorway, again with that cold feeling of shock. There were no lights on and the living-room in twilit darkness was empty. There was no one in it. She switched on the lamps dazedly. The voices she had heard were coming out of the radio.
Gabrielle’s glance touched it, moved away, returned to the cabinet. Her breathing was flat, shallow. What was happening to her? She hadn’t had the radio on since yesterday morning. No one had apparently entered the apartment while she was at Brenda’s, the door was locked. And yet the radio, silent when she went out, was on full blast. Gabrielle went to it. She snapped it off. Stillness rolled against her eardrums. There were voices buried in it. Did you turn it on unconsciously—neglect to turn it off? Didn’t you? Did you? Are you beginning to forget things?
She went to the kitchen door. Like the front door, it was securely locked. The groceries she had ordered were in a box outside. She went back to the living-room, picked up the phone, and called Susan in Greenfield. That was it, of course. Susan had been there—or Tony. But when she got her cousin, Susan said no, neither of them had come into town that day, and asked why. Gabrielle said someone had been there while she was out, but it didn’t matter, talked for a few minutes without knowing exactly what she said, and rang off. She went down to the basement and sought out the superintendent, busy coaling the hot-water fire. He shook
his head at her question. He had admitted no one to her apartment that afternoon.
Gabrielle went slowly upstairs. The hot water on when she had thought she had turned it off, the radio playing when she hadn’t touched it—well, she hadn’t turned the hot water off, and she had turned the radio on and, face it, had—forgotten. That night she had to take two of the sleeping-pills Dr. Cutter had given her before sleep finally came.
She woke in midmorning to the shrilling of the telephone. It was John Muir. John was brisk, businesslike. He had nothing to report except that Pete Basil, his investigator, was on the job and that he’d let her know as soon as there was any news. Then Phil Bond called. Phil wanted to see her, something had come up. “How about this afternoon? I’ll be in your neighborhood anyhow.”
Gabrielle said listlessly, “Late this afternoon, half past four. Not any earlier. I have to go up to McGrath’s to get some stuff I left there.”
McGrath’s was the advertising firm for which she had worked until a week before the wedding that had never taken place. Gabrielle made tea instead of coffee, rinsed the cup, put it on the drainboard and dressed. Blank spots, memory lapses: “Everything went gray… I didn’t know the gun was loaded”—they put people in asylums for that. Oh, stop it, she told herself wearily, everybody forgets sometimes.
There were two locks on the front door, the lower lock belonging there, and a special lock she had had put on when she first took the apartment and which she seldom used. She was the only one who had a key for the special lock. When she went out that afternoon she bolted the back door and double-locked the front door.
To empty out her desk and say good-by to Miss Hallstein and Jim Gregg and Barney, the art director, took longer than she had expected, and Phil Bond was on the sidewalk in front of the house when she got out of her cab. Tyrell was with him. Tyrell looked tired. He and Phil Bond had been inspecting one of Alice’s apartments. She had a good deal of real estate.
They went upstairs. Gabrielle switched on the lights in the living-room and the two men took off their coats. “You’ve been working too hard,” Gabrielle said accusingly to Tyrell and he admitted it. “Some day I’m going to take a long vacation and do nothing but sit in the sun.” Phil Bond was his usual cheerful self. He was armed with a briefcase. He began to talk about a block of Industrial Products, Inc. of Mark’s that had to be given immediate attention. “They ought to be disposed of at once, Gabrielle. They’re at their peak now—hold them another couple of months and you may take a big loss.”
She smiled at his earnestness. “Let me get my breath, Phil. What will you have? A drink? Coffee?”
Both men said coffee. Gabrielle threw her own coat down on top of theirs, pulled off her hat. “I won’t be a moment.” She started for the kitchen—and saw it. The cup out of which she had had her tea at noon that day, and which she had washed and put on the drainboard in the kitchen to dry, was upside-down over the upright of the stand lamp in the corner.
At her abrupt halt, Phil Bond and Tyrell stopped talking. She faced them slowly. They stared at her in alarmed amazement. Gabrielle felt herself swaying. Tyrell jumped up and came to her and lowered her into a chair near the window. “Just take it easy, Gabrielle… just take it easy.” Phil Bond was bringing her whisky in a water glass. She drank it, shuddered, and fought her way back to sanity, or as near to it as she could get.
“It’s that cup,” she said, waving at the little china dome crookedly upside-down on top of the lamp and trying to keep her voice level. “Before I went out I washed it and put it away in the kitchen. Or I was sure I did. There were other things.” She was shaking again. “Someone must have been in here. And yet you both saw me unlock the door, and I have the only key.” Her voice rose. “But I did put the cup on the drainboard in the kitchen. I did put it there. I know I did.”
Tyrell went to examine the doors. The bolt on the back door was in place, the lock on the front door didn’t appear to have been tampered with. The two men looked at each other. Phil Bond said heavily, “Gabrielle, you’ve been doing too much. You’re tired, overwrought. You ought to get away and have a good rest.” Tyrell said worriedly, “Two keys come with a lock. Lose the other one? Well then, someone could have found it and come in here.”
Why should anyone enter her apartment illegally to put a teacup upside-down on the stem of a lamp? Gabrielle could see the question in both men. Tyrell was examining the view from a window. Phil Bond took papers from his briefcase for her to sign, explaining whys and wherefores that sounded distantly in her ears. She did as she was told, stupidly, numbly. Tyrell had removed the cup, but the image of it was stamped on the retina of her eyes. Not to be sure of what you were doing, had done, not to know—the running water on Monday, the radio on Tuesday, the misplaced cup on Wednesday…
Phil Bond and Tyrell left, night came and went, and it was morning. Thursday and Friday passed without incident, and Saturday. Then, on Sunday, the full horror cascaded down over her in strangling folds from which there was no escape.
Chapter Seven: The white pills
SUSAN CALLED GABRIELLE early on Saturday morning. She was openly concerned. Evidently she had heard something from the Bonds, or from Tyrell and Alice. Susan said, “You’ve got to come up to Greenfield. I won’t take no. You haven’t been here since”—she hesitated, and plunged—“since Mark died. You know deep down you hate the city—and there’s nothing to keep you there. Now listen, you take the three-thirty from Grand Central and I’ll meet you at the station.”
It was almost, Gabrielle thought, listening apathetically, as though they had changed places. It was Susan who was decisive and clear and knew her own mind, she who doubted and questioned and in the end did nothing. A recognized phobia, wasn’t it?
Gabrielle agreed without argument to what her cousin proposed. The thought of getting out of the apartment, knowing that she wasn’t going to have to sleep there alone another night—waking to who knew what?—brought a faint release of pressure. She packed hastily, taking only essentials, among them her sleeping-pills. There weren’t many left. She would have to get Dr. Cutter to give her another prescription. The nights were the worst.
She had planned to walk to the station but rain was coming down drearily and there was a cold wind from the east. The usual cab was in front of the florist’s shop on the corner. The usual man wasn’t at the wheel. She got into the cab, said, “Grand Central, please,” and asked about the other man. She knew him well, knew his politics and that he liked the Giants and hated the Yankees and what he was going to do when his horse paid off. The new driver said without turning, “Joe? He’s sick. I’m playing that corner for a while,” in a surly voice. He was a disagreeable brute with a bullet head, a long thick nose, and a large brown mole on his forehead under the peak of his cap.
The three-thirty left on time. It was purple dark when Gabrielle reached Greenfield. Susan was there waiting at the station in the familiar beaten-up sedan, green beret sideways on crisp copper curls, and just for a moment as she climbed in, the world Gabrielle had once lived in came back, a world in which she had known her way about, who she was, where she was, what she did, intended to do.
She kissed Susan and said she was fine and asked about the children and about Tony. You always did ask in that fashion about Tony, as though he were something on the fire that might boil over with disastrous results. Were things going well? Susan said they were. Arrived at the sprawling house in the fields beyond the town’s rim, Gabrielle kissed little Joan and young Anthony, patted the dog, and admired some new furniture, with the proper responses. “Susan, the room’s lovely. Isn’t that bookcase an innovation, and those two chairs—and haven’t you done something with the curtains?”
Susan said absently that Tony had picked up a lot of stuff at auction, scrutinized Gabrielle in the fuller light, and frowned. “Are you all right, Gabrielle? You’ve lost weight and your eyes are enormous. I think you ought to go back to that Dr. Cutter for a checkup—I really do.”
/> Gabrielle laughed and said she hated doctors and that she was perfectly all right. The effort to be all right carried her through the evening without mishap. Susan apologized for not serving cocktails on account of Tony, but when Tony came in he brought a cargo of bottles with him. The liquor helped.
Tyrell and Alice had a house on the shore a few miles away. Gabrielle didn’t want to see anyone, but at ten-thirty, when Susan went to her bedroom, a big, rambling, pleasant, shabby room in the west ell, she said they were coming over for breakfast in the morning.
Sunday-morning breakfasts were an institution in Greenfield. People dropped in at other people’s houses in droves. It didn’t really matter. Susan switched on another lamp, turned down the bed, and Gabrielle roused herself. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you, Sue. Mark’s estate will be settled soon and there’ll be a lot of money, so—you don’t need to worry any more.”
Susan began to cry. Gabrielle was distressed; it wasn’t in character. For all her lightness, there was a stoical quality to Susan. “You’re so damn good, Gabrielle,” she said, through tears, “so-so swell.” She wiped her eyes, smiled. “That’s enough of that, but—thanks. Tony’s got plenty to do at the moment—but if we get into the doldrums again I’ll let you know.” After five difficult years, in spite of what he had done to her she still loved her charming, unscrupulous, irresponsible husband.
“Now go to bed and get a good sleep, Gabrielle,” she said at the door, added, “Brenda Holmes and John Muir are at the Amorys’, they’ll probably be over—and I want you to look nice.”
John Muir in Greenfield. She hadn’t heard from him since Wednesday, perhaps he would have news.
Gabrielle undressed quickly, switched off the lamps, got into bed, tried to sleep and couldn’t. Her mind was too alive, awake. Hadn’t she, contemplating her own burden, forgotten the main issue? Perhaps John Muir’s Pete Basil had picked up the round man’s trail…