by Helen Reilly
Almost two hours later, Gabrielle got up and did what she hadn’t intended to do, took her sedative. She would look like a scarecrow tomorrow if she didn’t get some rest. Brenda Holmes always looked marvelous. Her beauty didn’t depend on light and shade, the emotion of the moment. She had the changeless perfection of a marble or a bronze. Yes, it was a wonder that she hadn’t married. She would make a perfect wife for a man of wealth and position.
There were only six pills in the little box. Gabrielle swallowed two, smoked a cigarette at the window. The frosty November night was very still. There were no sounds as there were in the spring and summer, and then there was a sound. It was low, distant—and hurting. Susan was crying again. What was the matter with Sue? Gabrielle climbed into her bed worried and uneasy until the sedative took hold, then drifted off.
Thunder woke her. The thunder was Tony Van Ness rapping resoundingly on her bedroom door. “Hi, Gabrielle. Up, up, the British. It’s half-past eleven and Susan’s shouting for you.”
A clutter of voices drifted through the open window; someone laughed. Gabrielle got out of bed. She was stupid with sleep and her eyelids had weights on them. A shower would help but there was no time for one. It was the maid’s day off and Susan would have her hands full. John would be there, perhaps already was, and Brenda Holmes… Why couldn’t you always sleep, she thought, getting into dark-blue slacks and a yellow pullover. When you were asleep nothing mattered. There were no hurts, no problems. Twice she got her lipstick on crooked before she was ready. The sun was shining. It came in and lay down in bars on the wide old floor boards. Soon there would be snow. She felt oddly peaceful, indifferent. Sleep was still in her freeingly. It would have been good to sleep the day out.
The big old-fashioned dining-room was down the hall and around the corner to the right. Voices and laughter again. Gabrielle went through the dining-room door. They were all there, in the living-room beyond, Alice and Tyrell and Brenda and John and the Hardens. Tony was fixing drinks for some of the men. Susan, smart and pretty in green wool, was at the buffet laden with covered dishes, manipulating her coffee urn. There was no trace of the tears of the night before. She looked up with relief as Gabrielle came in.
“Thank heavens! I hated to wake you but I’m all thumbs this morning. Sleep well? Good. Make the tea, will you, darling? Everything else is ready.” She called to her guests. “Breakfast—come eat it.”
Gabrielle turned her back on the advancing throng and began to busy herself with the tea things. Cups were ready on the Georgian silver tray that had been her uncle’s, the silver kettle was hissing over its flame next to the big Derbyshire teapot and the canister and spoon. People called greetings to her and Gabrielle answered over her shoulder, her hands busy, listening for John Muir’s voice, waiting for him to come up to her.
“How are you, Gabrielle, dear? It’s ages since you’ve been here.” That was Celia Harden. Gabrielle said she was fine, asked how Celia was, poured water in a long stream, put the lid on the pot, and swung round. John was looking at her from across the room. He threw up a hand in salute, tall and straight in breeches and boots and an old tweed jacket.
Gabrielle smiled at him. Brenda Holmes was also in riding-clothes, propped on the arms of a chair, biting into a small crisp sausage on a toothpick. She had no hat on. Her fair hair shone like satin above silvery whipcord and her eyes were dazzlingly blue. “Can I have a cup of tea, Gabrielle?” she begged. “I’m simply dying of thirst.” Alice and Celia Harden wanted tea too. Most of the men were drinking coffee. Gabrielle lifted the big teapot and poured, handing out the three cups. The sugar and cream and lemon were on the buffet.
Chit chat, banter, sunlight on warm paneling, the children running around outside, Tony, geniality at large, a glass at his lips… Suddenly someone, Alice, gave a little scream. The scream was followed by laughter. Brenda said in an amused tone, gazing down into her cup, “Me, too. Is this something new? Or what?” All three women looked at Gabrielle. She felt heavy, helpless, didn’t know what they were talking about, what was going on. The others had stopped talking. Everyone was staring. Alice explained.
“Look what Gabrielle’s done to us. Hot water. She forgot to put in the tea.”
Gabrielle took an unsteady step. No, her mind shrieked. And Yes, another part of it said, yes. This time you’re caught. You meant to put in the tea, thought you put it in—and you didn’t. Barriers hemming in sanity loosened. She was foundering in fog, with chains dragging her down. Her elbow struck something a sharp blow. It was the Derbyshire teapot. She staggered drunkenly among the fragments, would have fallen except that John Muir caught her.
“Get some more cushions.”
“Her head ought to be down.”
“What do you suppose made her—?”
“She hasn’t been well, never really recovered from—”
“Where’s that liquor?”
Gabrielle was on the divan in front of the living-room fire. She hadn’t lost consciousness, had kept her eyes closed as a protection, burningly aware of the scrutiny directed at her, the wonder, the guesses, the alarm. She opened her eyes. Susan was kneeling beside the sofa, chafing her hands. The others stood around in a semicircle.
Gabrielle sat up a little. The tip of her nose itched and her lips were dry. She had to make some kind of explanation—and there was one of sorts. “I’m all right … what I need is coffee. It was those pills.”
“Pills!” Susan exclaimed, and Alice demanded, “What pills?”
“The sleeping-pills Dr. Cutter gave me.”
She told them, sipping a cup of hot black coffee Tony rushed to her, about having taken two of the pills the night before and how drugged she felt when Tony called her at eleven-thirty. “I couldn’t seem to wake up.” If only it was the pills, she thought, if only it was nothing more than a drug.
Understanding, relief; they accepted the pills. “That’s exactly what happened to me once.”
“Me, too. I took the stuff after I had pneumonia and I want to tell you…” Sedatives I have known was a popular subject.
Breakfast was resumed. Alice thought Gabrielle should have something to eat and Tyrell, looking worried under his cockatoo brush of flaxen hair, brought her toast and bacon, and Tony, lean and dark and Machiavellian, brought her more coffee. They all seemed to be wearing masks. Inner fear was a hard tight core behind Gabrielle’s surface recovery. She bemoaned the teapot. Susan said, “It was yours, darling; anyhow, perhaps it can be patched up.”
Could her mind be patched up, Gabrielle asked herself grayly, or was the disease incurable? Not to know what you were doing, always to be afraid of what you might do next… People drifted about, groups mingled, broke up, re-formed; John Muir didn’t approach Gabrielle directly, but twice, across the width of the room, he sent her a message with his eyes. She couldn’t interpret it. The Deans came, and Ellen Tribeau and Oscar Force, and then Joanna Middleton and Claire and Blake Evans. They were week-ending with the Amorys—so like Alice, she could never get enough guests.
The same old group, tied together by long association. Gabrielle had a sudden longing to be free of it. Neither Joanna nor Claire came near the couch on which she was propped up. But Blake Evans did, and she wished he wouldn’t. Manlike, he was oblivious of under- or overtones.
“What’s the matter, Gabrielle? You look all in—don’t bother answering if you don’t feel like it. When I’m sick I want to be left alone.”
Blake was nice. He was quiet and perceptive and able to interpret your mood. He had an almost feminine gentleness. It was that rather than his looks that made him popular not only with men but with women. Susan had been crazy about him when she was seventeen. Too bad Susan hadn’t married him instead of Tony… She said, “I’m fine now, Blake. I just got dizzy, that’s all. Go and get something to eat.”
Her curtness puzzled him. He gave her a quick glance and sauntered off to join Claire Middleton.
Gabrielle was beginning to feel stronger physically,
more wide-awake. Perhaps it was the sleeping-pills that had made her forget the tea, perhaps there was nothing wrong with her. Ten minutes later she was plunged back into the depths. Her mind played another trick on her.
She had gone to one of the long windows at the front of the room, was gazing out at the wintry landscape, when she went rigid. The two children and the Airedale romping with a ball, cars, sun shining on the coats of the horses John and Brenda had ridden over on, a couple of chauffeurs chatting and smoking, three women with canes walking past on the road; a face came into view around the clump of cedars near the gate, was abruptly withdrawn. But not before Gabrielle thought: It’s my cab man—the man who drove me to Grand Central yesterday afternoon.
It wasn’t her cab man. She went outside, walked quickly across dry grass. There was no one behind the cedars, no stranger in sight. Standing there under the leafless trees Gabrielle shivered uncontrollably. She was overwhelmed. Now she was beginning to see things… She returned slowly to the house.
Suddenly she couldn’t bear to face people. Inside the hall she went left and down the passage to her own room in the ell. The hall was dark. Opening her bedroom door she stood still, the knob in her hand. What was that sound? Had the other door, the door leading to the roofed-in terrace on the north, just closed? Had someone just gone out—or were her senses fooling her again? She advanced into the room and studied the door leading to the veranda. The bolt was pushed back, was free of its socket. It had been in place last night—hadn’t it? She swung sharply. A breeze was blowing her hair. The window to the right of the dressing-table was open. Beyond it a thick planting of overgrown pines that extended almost to the road obscured the light. Susan continually talked of having them thinned but Tony said they acted as a windbreak.
Gabrielle went to the window and thrust her head out. Thirty feet from her, back turned, a man was making his way through the pines toward the front of the house. He was moving fast and surreptitiously, as though he didn’t want to be seen. The man was John Muir. Gabrielle retreated into the room—and saw it. The box that held her pills had been moved. It was on the wrong side of the lamp on the table beside the bed. She moved across the rug, took the cover off. There had been four pills left in the box. There were no pills now. The box was empty.
The full implication of that emptiness was like a flash of blinding light. The pills—the pills weren’t what they were supposed to be. She wasn’t mad. There was nothing the matter with her mind. Her forgetfulness with the tea wasn’t psychological. It had a purely physical base. She had been drugged, deliberately, as witness the removal of the remaining four pills once she had called them to public attention. Relief as tangible as a flood of cleansing water washed through her healingly.
It ebbed, was succeeded by a wave of pain. Someone had removed the pills in order that they shouldn’t be found, perhaps analyzed. And less than half a minute earlier John Muir had walked away from this isolated wing, fast and secretively.
Chapter Eight: Missing fortune
KATY DID, KATY DIDN’T—John did, John didn’t… Gabrielle finally managed to have a word alone with John Muir in the hall before he and Brenda rode off.
“John, someone took my sleeping-pills, the four that were left in the box, from my bedroom a little while ago. I looked out—and saw you walking away.”
John didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he nodded. The nod was somber. Oddly enough, and it was frightening, he used the same words Mark had used in the lobby of the Devon on the day he died. “So that was it,” John said softly. “I thought it might be—” He stared at the newel post, at Gabrielle’s face, narrowed eyes smolderingly bright, drew a long breath.
“Yes, I was there. I was over on the north side of the pines when I heard someone leaving your room by the veranda door. I didn’t think it was you. I tried to see who it was, and didn’t succeed. Gabrielle—” He was harsh suddenly. “Don’t take any more pills. If you can’t sleep, stay awake. There’s something pretty nasty going on—far more than we two know about.” Then his tone changed. It became light, bantering. “You’re a fraud. Now how about you and I and Alice and Tyrell getting together for dinner and the theater one night soon? I’ll give you a ring.”
They were standing near the front door. Claire Middleton and Brenda were coming down the stairs. John left Gabrielle.
The question mark remained in her mind. What was John doing away from the others at the northern end of the house? It wasn’t that she disbelieved him exactly, it was that she thought he wasn’t telling her all the truth. He wasn’t trying to shield her. She knew him too well for that. He faced up to facts, however disagreeable they might be, expected other people to do so. Then why was he being evasive? Because he was. Let it go, she decided wearily, he would probably tell her when there was time.
One thing was certain. What John had said about more going on than they knew about was true. Someone in the house, or with access to it, had removed the four remaining pills from her bedroom. Remaining? Hadn’t other pills been substituted for her own and then taken away? Because, back again on safe ground, with her feet firm beneath her, Gabrielle knew that the other manifestations of mental instability had been superinduced, the running water in the bathroom of her apartment, the teacup upside-down on top of the lamp, the radio in her living-room turned on. Someone had managed, with pass keys or skeleton keys or whatever had been used, to get into her apartment at will. There was no other conclusion possible. Why? To undermine her faith in herself, make her shaky, indecisive, useless, to discredit her with her friends, with Tyrell and Phil Bond, and again that morning over the tea—all this in order to stop her talk of the round man and break her conviction that Mark had been murdered.
The surly taxi driver who she thought had followed her up here and who had slipped away when she went outside, might be a confederate of the round man’s, he might have been the one who made the appointment with her at Jordon’s and didn’t keep it. Tell John about him as soon as she got back. She had to be in Phil Bond’s office on Tuesday afternoon, Phil was getting things into shape, wanted her to sign some papers.
It was on Monday morning that she found out about Tony Van Ness.
Susan had said they were doing all right and certainly the evidence of it was there, in the new furniture and draperies, the furnace properly fixed, any number of odds and ends. Tony had told her at Alice’s party that he had delivered the cover to Drake’s, which accounted for it; he got good prices.
Tony hadn’t delivered the cover. On Monday morning Susan was doing her marketing in the village and Tony wasn’t around when the phone rang. It was the art editor of Drake’s calling. He demanded Tony. She said Tony wasn’t there and the irate voice, addressing her as Mrs. Van Ness, wanted to know where the devil the May cover was? Gabrielle corrected the editor and hung up.
So that was the explanation of Susan’s tears last night—Tony hadn’t done the cover. He was gambling again, and Susan knew it, and didn’t want her to know. Poor Susan, with her almost passionate desire for order, normality, engrossed in her children, her home, her garden, her friends.
Gabrielle had only turned away from the phone when it rang again. It was New York calling. This time the call was for her. A voice she didn’t know, a man’s deep resonant voice, said, “Miss Conant?” and when Gabrielle said yes: “This is Inspector McKee of the Homicide Squad, Miss Conant. Something of importance in regard to the late Mark Middleton has come up. We’d like to talk to you as soon as possible.”
Gabrielle caught the two o’clock train.
“Try this, Miss Conant. It’s not very comfortable, I’m afraid.”
The Inspector waved at a chair facing his desk near the single window in the long narrow room on the third floor of the Twenty-seventh Precinct.
Gabrielle sat down. McKee was a very tall man, with a thin clever face, a strong mouth, deep-set brown eyes, and a courteous manner.
Studying Gabrielle, the Scotsman was faintly surprised. She was younger
than he had anticipated, not, somehow, the sort of girl he would have expected Mark Middleton to have chosen for a wife. Middleton was pretty much of an extrovert, and his tastes were simpler, more obvious. This young woman was a delicate piece of mechanism, highly civilized and very sensitively adjusted. Gray-green eyes at a slight tilt under long brows, dark hair, a white skin, high cheekbones, a fine jaw line; she wasn’t conventionally beautiful. Her charm was too subtle for that, took time to register.
McKee was favorably impressed. It was beginning to look as though the girl had been right all along. The discovery Middleton’s lawyer, Bond, had dug up pointed that way, unless there was some adequate explanation. He told the girl about it, baldly.
Gabrielle listened with amazement. A little more than eight weeks before he died, Mark had converted eighty thousand dollars’ worth of blue chip securities into cash. The eighty thousand in cash had disappeared. If Mark had disposed of it himself there was no record of such disposal, at least none had yet been found.
“What can you tell me about this, Miss Conant?” the Inspector asked.
Gabrielle shook her head. She could tell him nothing.
“Mr. Middleton didn’t speak to you about any such transaction?”
“No.” She didn’t add that Mark wouldn’t have unless it concerned her. He didn’t believe in bothering women with business.
“You have no inkling, no idea—?”
A very terrible idea had darted through Gabrielle’s mind. Tony Van Ness—Tony, who had been pressed for money and who had miraculously found it somewhere…
“I have no idea whatever.” She couldn’t control the whiteness of her face, the too steady cadence of her voice.
McKee noted these items and went on talking, giving her dates. It had taken Mark several days to realize on his securities. He had asked his brokers for cash, had carried the cash away with him from their offices on the morning of the twenty-fifth of June.