Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  It was then, before Gabrielle could retreat, while those two inside stood that way, completely absorbed in each other, that the curtains beyond them stirred. One of the folds of ruddy brocade masking the entrance to the dining-room moved, very slightly. Neither Tyrell nor Brenda Holmes saw the movement. Gabrielle did. The faintest flash of a thin jeweled hand; Alice was behind the curtains looking in at her husband and Brenda Holmes.

  Chapter Twenty: The bloody coat

  STEPPING BACK, letting the hemlock boughs swing to, and alone in blackness and the icy embrace of the fog, Gabrielle found herself shaking uncontrollably. Tyrell and Brenda loved each other. No other conclusion was possible. She fought against it, for Alice’s sake. It was useless. Alice had suspected it, that was what had caused the change in her in the last few months. Now she knew. Alice and Tyrell. Their marriage was an institution; they weren’t two people, they were one. John also knew, or guessed. That was why he had questioned her so closely about Brenda and another man.

  Gabrielle refused to make a moral judgment; only the people involved were fully aware of their own compulsions—where John was concerned she couldn’t resist a throb of mingled pain and what was almost triumph. John had had no eyes for any other woman but Brenda, no other woman really existed for him. What was he going to do when he found out? What was Alice going to do? What was going to happen?

  If it hadn’t been for Miss Nelson’s coat in her locked hatbox, Gabrielle would have walked away and not come back. She couldn’t do it. She was forced to re-enter the house. She fumbled her way to the front door with the deepest reluctance. The hall was blessedly empty when she went in; she was out of sight, at the top of the stairs, when that orchestration began. Instruments in concert, first one and then another. Sounds first, the sound of a car outside and Alice’s entrance; her second entrance, as open as the other had been secret, was followed by the small slam of the front door as the rising wind caught it. Alice to a maid: “Miss Morrow and Miss Holmes arrived, Parks?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Amory. George met them. They came on the four-two.”

  Brenda then, even, pleasant, unperturbed: “Alice, dear—how are you?”

  Tyrell coming into the hall from another direction and cutting in there: “Hello, old girl. I am glad you’re home. I was worried about you. The roads are pretty bad. Have a good time at Mac Garron’s?”

  Gabrielle retreated. She couldn’t stand any more at the moment. That, she reflected sardonically, stripping off her wet things and getting under a hot shower after she had made sure that the hatbox with the coat in it was safe—that was what people called being civilized.

  The evening continued as it had begun. Gabrielle didn’t know why she was so astonished. Everyone lived a secret life; the one beyond the top one was always there. You said words aloud, they were never your inward words. Even in trivial matters, if you spoke the truth as you saw it, the world would go to pieces. You said, “How are you, Mrs. Georgia? Oh, yes, of course, do sit down and join us,” and to yourself: Why did I look at the woman? She’s a most horrible bore; now we’ll be stuck with her for ages!

  That was the way it was that night. It was as though the scene in the little room beyond the dining-room had never taken place. The complete absence of reaction on anyone’s part was subtly terrible. An outcry, accusations, sobs, screams, even blows, would have been preferable.

  Alice pretended that she knew nothing, had seen nothing, and the pretense was so excellent that if it had been possible Gabrielle would have been deceived.

  Dinner, and then a bridge game afterward, with Alice and Brenda as partners against Tyrell and Lucy Morrow—Gabrielle didn’t play. During the game Lucy Morrow felt cold and her maid brought her a jacket. More illumination: the woman Gabrielle had seen earlier, the woman Alice had been talking to on Ninth Street, was Lucy Morrow’s maid. Brenda lived with Lucy… The depths to which Alice had had to descend, Gabrielle thought sadly. She had evidently bought or tried to buy information about Tyrell and Brenda from Lucy Morrow’s maid. It was horrible.

  John didn’t come. He phoned that he was going to have to remain on in town on business. By half-past ten they were all in bed, or at least in their rooms. Gabrielle fell asleep thinking of Alice and Tyrell, Tyrell and Brenda, Brenda and John, and of the dead woman’s coat, and how she was to get rid of it. She woke to the sound of foghorns and the whiteness of mist banked against her windows. Susan called at ten o’clock; there was nothing the matter with the children but a bad cold. If Gabrielle wasn’t afraid of catching one…?

  Gabrielle emphatically wasn’t. Tony drove over at around eleven, and over Alice’s protestations and to her own infinite relief, she was out of the house before lunch.

  That afternoon she found the letter, but not at once.

  After she got to Susan’s, Gabrielle’s one idea was to dispose of Miss Nelson’s coat. If it hadn’t been for John Muir, if John hadn’t been involved, she would have confided in Susan and Tony, enlisted their help. As things were, she couldn’t, and the task she had set herself wasn’t as easy of accomplishment as she had hoped. The day continued to be wretched, cold and damp, with intermittent fog and a wind off the sea. It confined them indoors. Tony was at work in his studio in the garden, Gabrielle with Susan before the fire in the living-room; it was unexpectedly difficult for Gabrielle to get away by herself.

  She had made up her mind what to do with the coat. To burn heavy cloth in that weather would not only be impracticable, it would be literally a signal fire to the detective she couldn’t see, but who she was convinced was somewhere in the obscurity beyond the windows. Now and again she went to one, probing the half-seen gardens, the road in front of the house. She saw a bakery truck, the two Misses Whitraub, perambulating pedestrians in all weathers, an occasional car flitting past, some linemen busy on a pole at the head of Evergreen Avenue branching off to the south—nothing and no one suspicious.

  At around two o’clock, when she said she thought she’d stroll around outside and get a breath of air, Susan went with her. At a little after three when she announced her intention of walking in to the post office, Tony said he’d drive her. It began to look as though she would have to wait until night, and then, shortly after four, her chance came. Susan was busy with the children in the nursery, giving them their baths, and Tony was in the village getting meat for dinner.

  Gabrielle didn’t waste any time. Into her room and out of it again by the door opening on the side veranda; she wore a tweed suit and carried the brown coat, plaid side out, over her arm. The house was between her and the road. The place for which she was making was a pine wood over the hill to the north. She moved quietly but with an affectation of nonchalance, in case eyes were watching her. Once inside the wood, a wood in which she and Susan had played as children and which in spite of its new growth she could still chart accurately, she felt confident that she could throw off pursuit. The path to the pine wood ran past Tony’s studio, down into a gulley, across the brook, and over a rise to another long dip filled with twenty acres of green shielding branches.

  There was still plenty of light left. The fog wasn’t as thick as it had been yesterday evening at Alice and Tyrell’s. Alice and Tyrell. A wave of sick distaste hit her. She switched her thoughts hastily and walked on. This was the danger spot. She was out in the clear now, in the middle of what was the croquet lawn in summer. Grass underfoot, dry and brittle, a small whirl of faded leaves; if she was under observation this was where she would be seen.

  She paused near a leafless snowball bush at the far side. Opening her purse, she took out a cigarette and turned, as though idly studying the weather—and her heart stood still. High up, to the south, above mist, a gigantic bird poised in mid-air was facing in her direction. It was a telephone man, at the top of a pole, silhouetted against the dark sky. Only it wasn’t a telephone man. The flash of a pair of glasses, the intent attitude… The man was a detective. She was convinced of it.

  The distant figure was swinging rapidly d
own. He disappeared from view. The detective was some distance away. There was a lot of ground between them; if she ran she could easily lose him. She turned, started on at a headlong pace—and collided with Tony, coming out of the studio.

  “Gabrielle! What in the world—” Tony righted her, laughing. “Where are you off to in such a rush?” His smile faded as he looked into her face.

  She had to get away. She said quickly, “I think there’s a detective pretending to be a telephone man watching me, Tony. If he comes this way, keep him, will you? Tell him—oh, I don’t care what you tell him.” Caution made her add hastily, “I’m sick and tired of the police, sick and tired—let them worry for a while. All I want is a couple of hours of peace. I won’t be constantly molested and spied on, I simply won’t!”

  Tony grinned at her. In the mist, with shadow filling his eye sockets, he looked vaguely like a skull… Was his gaze on the coat over her arm? It didn’t appear to be—and he seemed to understand. “Okay,” he said, “take yourself off, honey. I’ll cover for you, but be sure and be back for dinner, I got a swell roast of beef.” He was looking past her, toward the road. “Quick,” he said, “someone’s coming around the corner of the house,” and started forward.

  Gabrielle didn’t linger. Pausing for breath behind the garage she heard Tony say loudly in answer to a murmured query, “Miss Conant? Who the hell are you?” And then, not quite so loudly: “No, I haven’t seen her, I don’t know where she is. All I know is that she didn’t come this way.”

  She was safe, but by what a narrow margin. Gabrielle filled her lungs with air and resumed her interrupted journey.

  She was right about the telephone men. Two of them were detectives. There were more detectives in the Amory grounds, and outside Joanna Middleton’s house in North Stamford. In New York, at four o’clock that afternoon, McKee sat gazing through the window of his office at blurred rooftops with distaste and uneasiness. The weather was the same in the city as it was in Greenfield. Fog blanketed the entire East Coast. Fog… He knew that Gabrielle had left the Amorys’ and was with her cousin, Susan Van Ness. She was in no more danger there than anywhere else, perhaps less… He took his glance from the afternoon, already darkening down, and turned back to the woman primly upright in the chair beyond his desk.

  The woman was Mrs. Pendleton, Mark Middleton’s ex-housekeeper. Mrs. Pendleton had very little to add to her previous statement, but there was one new thing. She hadn’t seen Mark Middleton’s visitor, the visitor who had killed him. She said that when she left the apartment Mr. Middleton was alone in his study. She had seen the pearls. She was very positive about it. “Yes, sir. The box, a green-leather box, was on his desk, beside the telephone. It was open. I noticed the pearls laying in it particular, they were so pretty, kind of glowed.”

  The Scotsman drew a starfish on the pad on his desk, put eyes on it, and a slobbering mouth; he had been right. The pearls were in Mark Middleton’s possession when he died.

  Mrs. Pendleton said, “I thought maybe the necklace was for Miss Conant, a nice young lady…”

  A nice young lady. Would she stay nice, could he keep her nice? McKee wondered, after Mrs. Pendleton had gone. He thought of Florence Nelson’s face in that room in the Rothingham when they lifted her from the floor. Almost, then, he regretted not having let Dwyer take Gabrielle Conant into protective custody—for questioning. But phrase it ever so finely it would still have been an arrest, and the stigma would stick, unless the case were speedily resolved.

  The fog thickened over the rooftops. McKee went on doodling. The starfish grew three extra tentacles. John Muir owned fifty-one percent of the stock of Tritex, the company he headed, Alice Amory owned, or had owned, a sizeable block of shares, so did Joanna Middleton…

  The door opened. Siebold stuck his head in. “Car’s downstairs, Inspector.”

  With the movement of a man escaping from a trap the Scotsman was on his feet and flinging into his coat. Consequently he was not in the office three-quarters of an hour later when the message came through from Detective Bernstein in Greenfield that they had temporarily lost contact with Gabrielle Conant.

  In that escape from surveillance to which she was helped by Tony, Gabrielle felt nothing but a vast relief. John had failed to turn up, and she had to get rid of Miss Nelson’s coat, unaided, by herself. Thanks to Tony, it was almost done. She hadn’t been pursued, stopped. Silence and the fog, bare black branches beaded with moisture—and just ahead the green wall of the pines, waving a little in the faint wind. The air was raw but not really cold. The path she was following ended abruptly at the spreading green paws of an enormous white pine. It was a specious ending. Gabrielle lifted boughs aside, and the path was there again in the brown gloom that was almost night, but less perceptible now, the slightest of depressions on deep layers of dried needles that were resilient and slippery underfoot.

  Even at midday with a brilliant sun it was dim in the pine woods; now it was all but dark. She had had the forethought to bring a flashlight with her. She took the flashlight from her purse, switched it on. Dry interlacing branches from which the needles had fallen impeded her progress. They snapped with tiny explosions as she pushed them aside. Occasionally she paused uncertainly between familiar landmarks, the blasted chestnut, the fallen oak. It was for the pool in the hollow that she was making. The little pool was in the very middle of the wood that stretched from the back of Susan and Tony’s land as far as the state road. The ground around the latter was soft, would be easy to dig. Scatter dead leaves and pine needles over it and it would look as though the surface had never been touched.

  She went past the prostrate trunk of the oak where she and Susan and Tod Derringer, dead on an island in the Pacific, had played as children. How huge the pine forest had seemed then! In reality, even with its new growth, it wasn’t very big. But it would do. People seldom came here nowadays… She continued to forge forward in an unreal world, magic and silent and still, here and there going around instead of through clumps of withered brambles. No use coming out of this looking as though she had been in the wars.

  The deep gloom—scarcely a wisp of daylight penetrated through the roof of green—forced her to keep her torch on continuously. The pool at last, a mere cupful of water surrounded by a few clumps of coarse grass—but Gabrielle was dismayed. The pine forest had been sliced off. Twenty feet beyond the western edge of the pond the trees stopped abruptly. Beyond thinning pine boughs light played mistily on a stretch of blasted stumps extending almost to the state road.

  She stood still irresolutely. Go back and bury the coat near the oak? No. An overwhelming desire to get rid of it decided her. Nobody would ever think of looking here. She threw the coat to the ground, knelt, and began to work. She had been afraid to bring a trowel with her; she used a piece of wood from a dead branch, and her hands. The ground was soft, frost hadn’t penetrated here. Fit the coat into the hole and see how much deeper she would have to go.

  Gabrielle picked it up. She had already looked in the pockets. They were empty. But as she doubled the coat unceremoniously into a bundle she felt a slight thickening under folds of the cloth. Straightening the coat out, she put a hand into first one pocket and then the other. There was a rip in the right pocket, a large rip, at the side. Had something fallen through the rip and down into the lining?

  Something had. Gabrielle undid loose stitching at the bottom of the hem and pulled out a piece of paper. It was a single sheet of notepaper, part of a letter—there was no salutation and the sentences at top and bottom were incomplete. It was written in pencil. Gabrielle held the torch close and read the indifferently formed characters.

  Not bad here but I miss you and wish you could be here too. The job is a snap. When it’s finished maybe we can get somewhere, maybe go south together. That’s what I’d like. I’ve got my rheumatism again because of the damp and being inside so much. You’ve always wanted to see Flori—

  That was all. There was more writing on the other side, not
consecutive, and equally unimportant as far as specific information went. It didn’t matter. The information was there in another shape. She reversed the sheet, her eyes on the heading. The paper was a fine bond. At the top was engraved: William Glouster, Sound View, Rorotan, Connecticut.

  Crouched at the edge of the little pool, oblivious of the stealing coldness, the silence and brown gloom, Gabrielle stared fixedly at her find. She knew the house from which the notepaper had come. It was five miles to the south, this side of Rorotan, a huge ugly Victorian house all turrets and battlements and bay windows, on a point swinging out into the Sound. She knew the Glousters who lived there, had met them at the Hunt Club. William Glouster, a great oak of a man with a military precision about him, was prominent in local affairs. He would have made an excellent drill sergeant, if he hadn’t been a very wealthy man. His wife, Dorinda, was almost as tall as he was, a large bosomy woman with a booming voice, a managing air, and a loud laugh.

  The sheet of paper, she hadn’t the slightest doubt of it, was a letter, or part of a letter, from the round man, the “Bert” of the photograph, to Florence Nelson. Otherwise; why should it be in Miss Nelson’s pocket? And Miss Nelson had spoken of a trip—and a trip was mentioned here. It was almost impossible to connect the Glousters with anything criminal—and yet it was their stationery and the paper was fresh, the writing unsmudged. It hadn’t been written very long ago…

  Gabrielle’s head went up. Behind her, in the direction from which she had come, there was a small sharp crack. It was the sound of breaking wood. She swiveled, a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her vulnerability was frightful. She was in the middle of a circle of light surrounded by intense gloom and walled in by trees and the edge of the pool. Had she been followed? Was someone watching her from the path along which she could see no more than a few feet? She switched off the torch, listened intently. The thudding of her heart was the only thing she could hear in the stillness.