by Rufus King
“I’d feel like a fool. No, honestly, Lorrimer, just look at it from my point of view. I’ve started a business venture and I’m going to run it as a businesswoman, not as a social violet. I’m not a social violet, Lorrimer. I’m tough.”
“Very tough. Just the same, Mrs. Buck moves in.”
“Seriously, Mrs. Buck does not. Very seriously.”
“I’d sleep better. Honestly I would, Lily.”
“I’m afraid it’s still insomnia.”
The steel, it was out again, from beneath all of her lovely softness, and Keith wondered what on earth you could do. Wondered also whether she might not be right or, conversely, whether it mightn’t be better if Lily were to get a stomachful at the outset and then give the whole idea up. When you looked at it sanely there wasn’t any outright danger. The world was filled with Parnes and they rarely, as individuals, ran amok, any more so than any other individuals. No, you really couldn’t put a finger on any concrete objection, and his feeling about Parne was nothing but distaste, nothing more than plain snobbishness of the rankest sort. Yes, perhaps a good dose right at the start…
“I suppose if you insist, Lily.”
“I do, Lorrimer.”
He took papers from his pocket and Lily signed them, mortgaging the Benjamin West.
“I had hoped to stay for a while, Lily, but they’ve called some fool meeting of the Board of Trades.” (To stay not only for the evening but for the night, a wakeful police dog on the stubborn alert against Parne, but that would be something. Something for Laurel Falls. Funny, a total stranger could come along and hand over a few bucks and stay all night, and not so much as a tongue-tip would wag. But if a friend who had his own home in town did it. Lord!) “Your balance is good and healthy again at the bank. So any time you want to quit this, Lily.”
“Thanks, Lorrimer. And you know how I feel about everything you’ve done. Good night.”
“Good night.”
* * * *
It couldn’t very well be Lorrimer coming back again.
Not at ten o’clock.
Lily opened wider the hall door of her bedroom. Possibly Mr. Parne had gone to the stables to get something from his car and it was he whom she had heard closing the heavy front door.
A voice called faintly from below: “Darling? Where are you?”
There was no other voice like that one, certainly not for Lily, like Nan’s. The swift surge of joy which she always felt whenever Nan, unexpectedly, would be near her was pricked by a stab of fear. What on earth had brought the child home? Lily thought: I’m worrying again at shadows. I’ll turn into a neurotic idiot if this keeps up. But the money Nan had wanted was concrete, and that puzzling sentence in her letter: Things just do happen, don’t they, Mother?
Lily forced herself to put the thought with its nameless implications aside. She managed to call loudly, “Nan, dear, I’m up here. I’m coming down. I’m so glad, darling.” She managed, too, to run down the broad curved stairs, to look with welcoming eagerness at Nan, snowflaked and bundled in mittens and furs, glowing faced, to take Nan in her arms and press her, all frosty, tightly to her. And smile.
“I had to come.”
“But of course, darling.”
“I lost my job.”
“There—now the galoshes—do sit down, dear.”
“I’ve used very little more out of the fifty than the bus fare, Mother. There’s scads left.”
“Your hands are icy. Soup or hot chocolate?”
“Hot chocolate, please, Mother. Mother—that sign at the gates. I hadn’t any idea. Oh, Mother!”
“Stop it. It’s coming down tomorrow. Lorrimer’s fixing everything until the mines are worked again.” (Into the discard with any more finer feelings, let Sheffield’s and Delilah’s ceremented recriminations fall where they might. Mortgage—sell everything: the glass, the silver, the Vanderlin, the Rembrandt Peale, the fry. Sell Sheffield and Delilah. But have no more Parnes in the house with Nan at home.) “Stop it, Nan, I say.”
“All right.”
Sheffield, looking utterly unsalable, was coming long the hall.
“Miss Nan, I do declare. I’se heard your voice. Well, welcome home.”
Now that’s funny, Lily thought. Nan was doing nothing about Sheffield’s greeting. Nan was looking over Lily’s shoulder toward the library doorway. At Parne. Lily’s heart stopped dead. It was later, much later during the insufferable hours of the night, before Lily was able to dissect the one intense look that passed between Parne and Nan, like a cold clear light in darkness before a veiling mist set in. Only one thing was certain to Lily at the moment: they knew each other. Then at last Nan said, “Thank you, Sheffield. Do you think that Delilah could produce some hot chocolate?”
“I jest knows as she can, Miss Nan.”
Lily felt her lips saying, “Nan, dear, this is Mr. Parne. Mr. Parne is taking one of our rooms for the night. My daughter.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Elser.”
“Mr. Parne.”
“This is surely no night to be abroad in.”
“It is pretty grim.”
(They weren’t looking at each other now. Just talking. Holding their eyes, with a certain care, just off each other’s faces.)
“Come from far?”
“From Detroit by bus, Mr. Parne.”
“Well, I bet it was tough going, although I must say those babies can pound over the road no matter what the weather is. It beats me.” Then once more he looked at Nan directly. “Yes sir, it docs beat me—Miss Elser.” Parne’s good, strong teeth flashed brightly at Lily. “Would it be all right if some of that proposed hot chocolate was shared by the lodger?”
“Of course. Shall we go into the living room?”
* * * *
The clock struck one.
Lily turned on the reading lamp beside her bed. She realized it was useless to try to sleep. And it was then, after moments of thinking, that the look between Nan and Parne became finite: there had been recognition in it and, on Nan’s part, shock. Recognition had lain in Parne’s but there had been no shock, rather, after an initial touch of surprise, almost an expression of satisfaction. A satisfaction at something unexpectedly—Lily tried to segregate the proper word—helpful.
Five people in the storm-swept house. Herself and Nan here in the south wing, with Sheffield and Delilah on the floor above to the rear, and, in the north wing, Parne. It gave Lily a curious satisfaction to focus this factual picture in her mind, like a map stuck with bright-headed pins. Nan’s rooms were separated from her own by the suite that had been Milton’s. Lily had wanted in her deep worry to suggest to Nan that Nan spend the night with her, in the hope that during the peculiar intimacy of the close, warm darkness the years would be effected and Nan would tell her what the trouble was, as she always had when she was little, and tell her what definite fright had brought into her eyes that look of shock.
Fright—fear—the words were out now, and Lily thought she might as well face them. Nan was afraid, the way a young animal is afraid of something formless but which comes closer and closer with an inexorable sense of fate. It was so stupid to tell yourself that you were stupid, to upbraid yourself for what was done. It had seemed so wise to Lily to place distance between Nan and Gene Forrest. At the time. But now, even with Gene’s record of past capers, with his youth, with anything—how much better it would be.
The clock struck two.
Three.
Lily went into the bathroom and bathed her face with cold water. She pulled a chair up close to the basin and sat for a while, wetting the cloth and pressing it across her grating eyes. It didn’t help much, and she wondered just what would help. Waiting wouldn’t. Just waiting never had. Attack? Go straight to Parne and clear this fog and find out precisely where the field of battle lay? Go and face him and tell him that she kn
ew that he and Nan knew each other, and she knew that he had come to the house purposely (but she didn’t, not know it, but she had to) and what was there between them?
Five o’clock struck as Lily let herself out into the hall.
She had taken several steps before the darkness struck her like a blow, making this house which was her own seem unfamiliar, for she had never moved about in it before without lights. She went more swiftly through this inimical strangeness, to the left, past the wide vault of the stairway, to the left again and then on until her fingers brushed Parne’s door. Any hesitation would have defeated her, so she rapped lightly, waited and then rapped again.
“Mr. Parne?”
There was, Lily realized, small need for any whispering. She doubted whether even a scream could be heard by Nan or Sheffield or Delilah in their distant places in the house. She rapped more loudly and said more loudly, “Mr. Parne!”
A revulsion of fear overcame her as she recalled her earlier pictures of a stranger wandering through the rooms, moving with stealthily investigating footsteps along the halls. Suppose Parne were behind her, standing perfectly still and listening and watching and making up his mind just what he was going to do. Her fingers closed on the knob in panic and she opened the door.
She said into what was still just further darkness, “Mr. Parne—I—This is Mrs. Elser, Mr. Parne!”
He must be gone, because she caught no sound of breathing. If he wasn’t just lying there quietly and holding his breath. Lily found the switch for the ceiling lights and pressed it.
Parne grinned at her from the floor.
He was dead. Lily stood there without effort, feeling no weight on her feet, while she thought of the Latin for that grin which at times twists the lips of the dead. Risor—risum—mortis—and all the while she floated on air over closer to Parne. Otherwise (ignoring the grin) he was so neat.
Saffron silk pajamas were open at the throat, exposing a V of thick black hair shaved across the top in a straight hard line. Leather slippers were on his feet and a roman-striped linen bathrobe over his pajamas. His head was across the sill of the bathroom doorway, his leather slippers toward her.
Then, thoughtfully, his tongue stuck out.
* * * *
Light was a faint gray against windows when Lily came to with Parne beside her, dead on the floor. She felt stronger and far more sane. She got to her feet and looked at Parne’s wrist watch on the bedtable. Six o’clock. Sheffield and Delilah would be waking up, then getting up, then coming downstairs and very soon finding that Mr. Parne was a corpse.
Shot.
Blood on the bathrobe told Lily that. The gun told her that. It lay just inside the hall doorway. She recognized it as the small pearl-handled .22 which Milton had kept in the drawer of the secretary down in the living room. The Sheraton. It had to be that gun. Pearl handles were so rare that they scarcely existed any more. Lily had known it was kept in the secretary; Nan had known, and Nan had known Parne and Parne had known Nan—a second surge of faintness forced Lily to sit down before she would fall down.
She desperately wanted advice. Lorrimer Keith could advise her; so could Dr. Colin Starr, who had attended Milton during his final illness. Gene Forrest could. But none of them could. Because she would have to say: A man has been murdered, shot by a gun that we kept in the secretary in the living room, and Nan knew him. Never (this at least was clear and final) must anyone ever know that Nan knew him.
The letters.
The letters which Parne had gone into the library to write. There might be references, something in them to establish a connection between himself and Nan. Lily fought back her faintness and stood up. Ten terribly careful minutes satisfied her that there were no letters in Parne’s clothing or in the room. Unless they were in the open bags on the luggage stand.
Sheffield and Delilah would by now be out of bed.
Lily went over to the bags. This time she didn’t just run her fingers through them. She took everything out. That, of course, was why she had missed it before: flat on the bottom of the Gladstone. Staring straight up at her. It was a picture. A cabinet photograph of Nan.
She took it out of the bag, thinking: Well, it’s true. No chance had brought Parne to the house. That, naturally, was final. His coddled car in southern California, his heading East, his avid relief at the signboard which had spared him further storm-harried steps, all of those fictions could be jettisoned with assurety. What had there been, what could there have been between a man like Parne and a girl like Nan to (yes, face it!) have driven Nan into taking the little pearl-handled gun and—
Sheffield and Delilah would be pretty well dressed.
Then something about the portrait held her. It wasn’t Nan at nineteen, at now. For more than a year Nan had been wearing her hair fairly short with a careful youthful carelessness that had satisfied, apparently, Nan’s nascent spirit of revolt—whatever it had done to her appearance. The hair was up in the picture, far off the face, in the fashion of a couple of years back when hats had stayed on only after hours of tactful effort and collusions. And the hair seemed longer.
The mat was embossed with the Detroit branch crest of Endermann & Endermann.
Two years ago Nan had been away for six weeks during the summer, taking a course in design in Cleveland, living there at the Young Women’s Christian Association, working daily at the Elkhart studios which were run by that violent Austrian woman who had never got over batiks. In Cleveland, not in Detroit. Not, however, so very far away from Detroit.
…and had shot Mr. Parne.
Delilah would be putting their bed in order, and Sheffield would be ending the intricate knotting of his tie.
Nan on the witness stand. The polite district attorney. The motive. The sudden tough district attorney. The motive. There must be no murder. No. Mr. Parne was not murdered. Mr. Parne committed suicide. The gun would have to be put closer. It would have to be put into Mr. Parne’s dead hand. Lily picked the gun up and wiped it with her negligee. That wasn’t enough.
Doorknobs.
Mr. Parne dragged easily: a loose, fluid weight. His slippers came off, showing nicely tended feet. Must remember to put them back on. Lily wiped the knobs of the hall door, letting Mr. Parne lie on the floor. Then she pressed his right, complacent hand on both knobs. She pulled him back again so that his head once more lay across the sill of the bathroom doorway, because there was some blood on the floor and he ought to be beside it as he had been. She tore the cabinet photograph into small pieces and flushed them down in the bathroom. She put the slippers back on Parne’s nice feet. The gun looked all right in his hand, even though his fingers were indifferent about gripping it.
Lily backed away from the bathroom doorway, hysterically fascinated by Mr. Parne’s broad grin.
* * * *
It was her room.
It was her bed.
The clock struck eight.
Lily roused, under the slight shaking of her arm, from the warm, blessed confusion of exhausted sleep into which her breaking nerves had plunged her.
“Oh—good morning, Delilah. What time is it?”
“Good mawning, madam. It is eight.”
The full force of recollection pierced Lily. Somehow, instantly, she must warn Nan—no, not warn, but must be constantly near her, strongly close to her, to say clearly, firmly: Suicide. When the body was found.
“I thought you had better know, madam.”
(Here it was.)
“Yes, Delilah?”
“We just got us another tourist. He’s a pleasant-spoken gentleman from Kansas City, Kans., and he’s gone got himself all tuckered out from fighting that there blizzard through the night.”
“No—Delilah, we can’t—I mean I’ve arranged things at the bank. The sign is coming down.”
“Wish I’d known of that, madam. I reckon it’s too late. As I
done said, he was a dead-tired gentleman so I showed him straight up to the room next to Mr. Parne’s. He said he planned on just to take a good hot tub and then turn in. I done explained to him, madam, about the bathroom being in between.”
Chapter 2
How do you dress for the death of a stranger?
Lily amended this into how do you dress for the death of a stranger when you (still) don’t know about it. She kept her eyes just past Delilah’s face, which had acquired with the years the texture of a placid coconut, and thought: Every hour from now on I must be on guard against mistakes such as that. They are the little signposts which lead the mind trained in criminology into unmasking you. A minute-by-minute vigilance against the fatality of minor slips. I know nothing Mr. Parne is—was—a stranger who applied for lodgings out of the storm. At eleven o’clock last night he said good night to my daughter and to myself and went to bed.
“Have you the gentleman’s name, Delilah?”
“Yes, madam. Mr. Horace Hangaway from Kansas City, Kans. Maybe it’s jest because he’s so tuckered, but he’s a mighty peaked-looking gentleman. His eyes appears like they been all burned up.”
“He—how long has he been here?”
“Why, he’s jest come, madam. Sheffield is putting his car away because he was too far wore-out to do it by hisself. Will I take breakfast up to Mr. Parne or do I wait until he rings?”
Lily’s hand did not quiver on the counterpane but lay there placidly, almost (she thought) as though it really belonged to her.
“I would wait, Delilah, until Mr. Parne rings.”
“Yes, madam. May I draw your bath?”
“Please. And the gray wool, Delilah.”
“Yes, madam.”
It was important to be dressed, to feel the bulwark of clothes about you when the climax would be faced. You could not dress in seconds, not bathe and dress, not with casual normality, and surely seconds were all that would be granted. If even they. If only Delilah for once wouldn’t putter, be deliberate about bath temperatures; would simply turn on water, then rip the gray wool from the closet and then go.
The sound of water peacefully pouring came from the bathroom, then it was stronger, and finally it steadied down. Perhaps Mr. Horace Hangaway of Kansas City, Kans., had not been able to take it any more than Lily had: the neatness of Mr. Parne and the impersonal quality of his sticking tongue. Mr. Hangaway with his general peakedness and his clinker eyes might have fainted too.