Lisa

by Joan Van Every Frost

  “He found it in Christian’s stall,” Jarrell remarked.

  “Possibly it belongs to that distillery man,” Mrs. Stephens said disdainfully. “It looks like something a person of that sort would buy.”

  “But in Christian’s stall?” Jarrell asked.

  “Perhaps he tried to pat Christian, and the horse bit it off him,” Eric offered, though he looked unaccountably upset.

  “Well, I’ll try to remember to take it with me when I go to check on Teddy,” Jarrell said carelessly.

  They all split up after dinner and went their separate ways. Cynthia and Eric went down to the stables, ostensibly to say goodnight to Christian and give him an apple; Carrie Stephens, Jarrell, and Mrs. Lewis retired to the study to go over some accounts for gardening implements; and Lisa went slowly upstairs, feeling very bruised and sore despite the long hot bath she had taken before tea in the afternoon. When she reached her room, it was dark, which surprised her, since she always left a lamp burning when going down to dinner. As she entered the room and was feeling her way across the darkness to where she had left the lamp beside the bed, her face suddenly encountered something soft and furry. Stifling a shriek, she ducked and found the matches by the bed. By the dim matchlight, she saw Tommy swaying and turning, attached to a beam on the ceiling by a string around his strangled throat.

  13

  Lisa felt a mixture of sickness and rage so strong that she couldn’t move until the match burned her fingers. Hands shaking, she lit the lamp and with a pair of scissors cut Tommy down, tears running down her face. She laid him gently on the bed; he was already stiffening. Though her first instinct was to run downstairs to Jarrell, she forced herself to sit down and think.

  Obviously someone was trying to make her life here so impossible that she would leave. Why? Carrie Stephens, the first one to come to mind, didn’t have that much reason. She knew that Lisa was leaving in September at the latest, why would she risk her position here to get rid of her immediately, especially since Cynthia had now claimed Eric’s attention? Cynthia would have been capable of cutting the saddle girth all right, but she would never have strangled Tommy, whom she loved with all her self-centered heart. Mrs. Lewis Lisa couldn’t even begin to provide with a motive. In fact, Lisa found it difficult even to consider Eric and Jarrell as serious suspects. Eric was as fond of her as he could be of anyone, and Jarrell — Ah, Jarrell ... She suddenly knew that he was incapable of that kind of viciousness, and knew, too, what he was talking about when he said that there were people he judged instinctively. She remembered his commenting once that in the early years at Hartsite Eric had done some hunting up on the moor, but that shooting wild things, turning them from graceful beautiful creatures into ugly bundles of blood and fur or feathers, made him himself sick. No, it wasn’t Jarrell.

  The sheer malice behind Tommy’s murder terrified her, for anyone who would do that was capable of killing larger game as well. Or could she have mistaken the motive? Could it be revenge instead? She put her head in her hands and heartily wished that she were back at the farm by the peat fire, Aunt Sarah knitting, Uncle John licking his finger each time as he slowly read through a section of the Bible, and she herself immersed in the Farmer’s Almanack. They could have their wretched slabs of meat and corrupting richness; she’d rather feed on gruel and feel secure and clean and decent.

  Pulling herself together, she went down the stairs even slower than she had mounted them earlier. When she knocked and entered the study, she saw that Jarrell and Mrs. Lewis were alone, and from a slight awkwardness in their manner guessed that they had been talking about her.

  “Pardon me, but could I ask you to come with me for a moment, Dr. Jarrell? I have something to show you.”

  She must have looked stricken because Jarrell said, “Were you injured, then, after all, Lisa?” and Mrs. Lewis looked worried.

  Lisa shook her head. “You come, too,” she said to Mrs. Lewis, and they trailed up the stairs after her.

  When they were in her room, looking increasingly puzzled, she lifted the towel off Tommy on the bed. “He was hanging there when I came upstairs.” She pointed to the cut string swaying gently back and forth from the rafter.

  Mrs. Lewis gasped, “Who would do such a wicked thing?”

  Jarrell felt the cat with practiced fingers. “If cats are like humans, this must have been done in the last hour or so. Who came down to dinner after you?”

  “That won’t tell us anything,” Lisa replied glumly. “After I left my room, I went to Teddy’s room to make sure they hadn’t left anything and to bring the puzzle downstairs. It took me a while to dismantle the puzzle and put it in its box. Then I was in the drawing room for a while looking at the newspaper brought from the village this morning. Anyone could have put him in there during all that time. As far as that goes, he may well have been killed somewhere else and brought to my room later.”

  Jarrell was drumming his fingers on the table and staring unseeing at Tommy. “I think you had best take the hint and leave,” Jarrell said. “I have friends in London you could stay with until September. You could easily have been killed this afternoon, and this killing of Tommy shows a mind unbalanced enough to be capable of anything.”

  Mrs. Lewis nodded in agreement.

  “I’m damned if I do,” Lisa said, furious. “If I go, you’ll never find who did it, and whoever did it is a dangerous maniac. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to catch this murderer and — and punish him somehow,” she ended lamely.

  “That’s not using your head, Lisa,” Jarrell remonstrated. “It’s far more important to keep you safe than to find out who did it.”

  “And I say that until you find out who did it, none of you are safe, either. Whoever is capable of such evil toward me is capable of it toward you as well. Oh, but I’m sorry it was my poor old Tommy who had to suffer.” Her voice broke. Not only had she been very fond of the droll little cat, but he was her last tie with her childhood, her only memento of a happier time.

  Mrs. Lewis was the practical one. “We’d best get him buried before Cynthia finds out. It will be easier for her to think he ran away looking for a love life than to see him like this. She is so besotted with Eric that she’ll hardly notice he’s gone.”

  They carried him downstairs, but had the ill fortune to meet Eric and Cynthia just coming in from the garden. “Why, whatever are you doing with Tommy?” she asked, reaching out to pat him.

  “Cynthia, he’s dead,” Jarrell said sympathetically.

  Her eyes grew large in her whitening face. “You must be joking. Of course he’s not dead.” But even as she was saying it, she took in his open, unseeing eyes and the bared teeth of his death grin. She snatched him from Jarrell’s grasp. “Ah, Tommy, Tommy, him’s not dead, is hims?” she crooned desperately in the baby talk she always used with him. “Oh please, Tommy, don’t be dead,” and she burst into tears.

  “For God’s sake, take him away from her and bury him.” Eric sounded desperate himself.

  Lisa gently disengaged the body from Cynthia’s loosening clutch, and she and Jarrell headed toward the stables as Mrs. Lewis and Eric led a sobbing Cynthia upstairs to her room. At the stables they got a shovel and then buried him deep in the garden where he used to play at catching butterflies.

  “I hope there are butterflies and lots of trees to climb wherever he’s gone,” Lisa said with tears in her eyes as Jarrell shoveled the earth back over Tommy’s final resting place.

  In silence they walked up to the house. Jarrell took her good hand in his. “Please reconsider, Lisa. I can’t bring myself to throw you out, though for your sake I ought to. Whatever sense of self-preservation you have should be telling you to leave, and the sooner the better.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Lisa promised, though she knew her mind was made up.

  That night she couldn’t get to sleep. Her physical aches and pains made themselves felt every time she turned over, and her mind raced like some engine out of control
. At last she gave it up, and throwing on a robe went downstairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot milk. How strange, the light was on in the kitchen. The sight that met her eyes as she pushed open the kitchen door was even stranger, and in its own way even more horrible than the sight of Tommy dangling from the beam on the ceiling.

  Cynthia was sitting — crouching rather — at the big wooden table that was covered with things she had gotten out of the larder. There were half-eaten cheeses, a ham with a huge chunk torn out of it, a gnawed bone that was all that was left of tonight’s roast, a half-consumed cooked chicken, spilled milk, syllabub enough for the whole family’s dessert with great handfuls dug out of it, and apple and pear cores all over the table and floor. With both hands Cynthia was literally stuffing whatever she could reach into her mouth and choking it down as fast as she could gulp it. There was a sheen of grease and sweat on her face, and already her features looked swollen.

  “Cynthia!” Lisa gasped, shocked.

  Cynthia looked straight at her, but drunk with food continued her obscene feast as if driven to it. Lisa began to clear the table until she had come to the things within Cynthia’s immediate reach. “All right, Cynthia, I’m going to take these as well, and then you are going to bed. I’ll sleep in the room with you again, you won’t be left alone.”

  “Tommy.” The word came out blurred and distorted by the mouthful of food, and two tears trickled down her pouched out cheeks.

  “Come on, love,” Lisa coaxed. “It’s late and time to go to bed.”

  “Oh Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” Cynthia mumbled.

  “There, there. Here we go.” Lisa got Cynthia to her feet and steered her out of the kitchen and up the stairs, Cynthia stumbling and hanging back until she reminded Lisa of the early days when they had had literally to haul her up step by step. In the bedroom, she took off Cynthia’s robe, greasy and spotted with food, to put her to bed, and saw that her stomach was distended as if she were pregnant. Cynthia was completely docile now but almost comatose, moving when Lisa moved her, staying as she was left. After getting her to bed, Lisa went across the hall and knocked on Jarrell’s door.

  “What is it?” His voice was blurred on the edges.

  “It’s Cynthia, doctor — she’s done something to herself.”

  “Blast!” The voice was alert now. “Be right with you.”

  He emerged in moments, tying the belt of his robe. His tousled hair made him look much younger. “What’s she done now?” he asked.

  “I found her in the kitchen, eating — no, stuffing would be a better description. She had obviously gone through the most incredible amount of food, Priddy will have a fit when she finds out. Now she acts as if she were drunk, and her stomach is out to here.” She indicated with her hands the gross abdominal swelling.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I thought I knew most ways there were to commit suicide, but this beats all.” His tone was almost admiring.

  “Do you really think that was what she was trying to do?” Lisa asked incredulously as they entered Cynthia’s room.

  He glanced at the figure in the bed, already snoring gently. He raised his eyebrows. “Does she always snore?”

  “Why, didn’t she used to? She always has since I’ve known her.”

  He took her pulse. “You should know that we weren’t just being unfeeling letting her take to her bed and eat,” he explained, ignoring her question about the snoring. “She made several really serious suicide attempts: once she took poison but vomited it all up before it could do her much harm, and the second time she cut her wrists with a razor.” He turned over her hand and Lisa could see a thin white scar she had never noticed running across the inside of the wrist. “There was blood all over everything, and I thought perhaps that time she might have succeeded. But it takes a great deal of nerve to cut your wrist deep enough to hit the artery, so it wasn’t too difficult to stop the bleeding.” His account was entirely dispassionate, and Lisa found herself disliking him again. “When she took to her bed and ate, we decided that was preferable to poison and razors.”

  “Was this before or after her child was born?”

  “Before. Long before.”

  “After the child was born dead, did she try anything else?”

  “She ate even more.”

  Poor thing, poor thing, Lisa thought. So gently raised, no doubt spoiled and pampered, then suddenly abandoned by everyone around her. It was surprising she hadn’t gone entirely mad.

  “Did she and Eric have a fight?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of. She kept mumbling about Tommy. Would the death of the cat really affect her that much?”

  “There is so much we don’t know about the mind ... In the more pampered segments of society that you, thank God, know nothing about, it’s not uncommon, especially for women, to treat pets as if they were children. Perhaps Tommy took the place of her child, but there is no way of knowing. I doubt she knows.”

  “Should I stay with her tonight?”

  “It would be best. Should she waken in the night upset, give her a tablespoon of this in a half glass of water. The best thing we can do is to let her sleep it off. I’m going to try to get some sleep myself, and so should you. Goodnight, Lisa.”

  Before she finally got in bed, she went to the window. As on the previous night, the moonlight splashed whitely across the garden, and as on the previous night, there was movement in the shadows. Lisa stood in the darkened room and watched the form of a woman emerge. It was impossible even to ascertain the color of her hair, gilded as it was by the moonlight. As if she knew someone was watching, she lifted her face toward the upper part of the house, and the white light struck across her features. Lisa gasped, terrified, for she found herself looking at the face of Tatty, a haunted, whitened version of Henry’s beefy wife true enough, but Tatty nonetheless. Lisa may have made a sudden movement, for all at once the apparition glided rapidly back into the shadows and disappeared. Lisa took a shuddering breath. Dear heaven, was she losing her mind? She suddenly felt smothered by this cruel house with its threatened suicides, obscene lusts, and strangled cats. She was a long time getting to sleep.

  The next morning, Lisa was more than ever inclined to put the vision of Tatty down to her imagination. She and Henry would never have come back so close to the scene of their crimes. Cynthia, burrowed under the bedclothes, was sleeping heavily, her snores louder than ever, and Lisa wondered how Jarrell ever put up with the noise. But of course he hadn’t, had he? It hardly takes an entire night to get someone with child.

  She was about to go down to get some breakfast when she saw the bottle of medicine Jarrell had left in case Cynthia wakened in the night and decided to take it to him rather than leave it where Cynthia might get her hands on it and do something foolish. Jarrell and Eric were eating breakfast when she came downstairs, and she held out the bottle to him. “You’d best keep this.”

  “How is she?” he asked absently, taking the bottle.

  “Sound asleep.”

  He looked at the bottle and frowned. “This isn’t what I gave you last night.”

  “It must be. It’s the only bottle in the room.”

  “Did you give her any?”

  “No, as far as I know, she slept all night. I’m a sound sleeper, but she never minded waking me when I slept in there before.”

  “Well, then, no harm done. Perhaps I did give you the wrong bottle, but a tablespoon wouldn’t have hurt anyway. This is tincture of laudanum, and I meant to give you a sleeping draught.”

  Somewhere an alarm bell rang in Lisa’s head, and she put down the piece of bacon she was about to eat. “Are you sure that’s what’s in it?”

  He opened the bottle, poured a few drops into a spoon, and smelled it. “It doesn’t smell as strong as it should,” he puzzled, then tasted it. “It’s water!”

  Lisa was already at the door running for the stairs with Jarrell not far behind. When they entered the room, she noticed a faint medicinal smell. Cynthia had
stopped snoring. Jarrell yanked back the bedclothes and turned Cynthia’s head toward him. Lisa bit back a cry, for her face was a dark purplish hue and the medicinal smell very strong. He pulled back one eyelid, and even Lisa could see that the pupil was contracted to the size of a pin.

  “Bring a cup of salt, Lisa — quick! And tell Priddy to start boiling up some coffee, very strong!”

  When she returned, he had Cynthia sitting up and was shaking her, her head lolling limply from side to side. He had Lisa pour salt into a glass of water. Then he opened Cynthia’s mouth, held her tongue down with his fingers, and poured the salt water into her mouth. Without being told, Lisa brought a basin. Cynthia started to choke and strangle, but some of it must have gotten down because she vomited in a rush. More salt water and more vomiting. Mrs. Lewis came in then with a pot of coffee. Jarrell and Lisa dragged Cynthia to her feet, forced some hot coffee down her, and marched her up and down the room. Afterward Lisa had no idea how long they kept it up. They and Mrs. Lewis spelled each other, the free one going down for more coffee and bathing Cynthia’s face with cold water.

  “It’s no use,” Jarrell said finally.

  The last few times they had tried to give her coffee, it had just dribbled down her nightdress, and though for awhile she had been half walking, now her feet were dragging. They laid her gently on the bed, and as if she knew she had come to a final resting place from all of her happiness, she gave one shallow sigh and stopped breathing.

  “I thought for a while we were going to make it,” Jarrell said wearily. “Where do you suppose she got the laudanum? There is no doubt at all she died of opium poisoning.”

  “Anyone could have gotten it from the surgery room,” Mrs. Lewis observed.

  “But why would she bother to replace the medicine in the bottle with water?” Lisa asked.

  “Perhaps she thought it would take us longer to realize what she had done,” Jarrell offered.

  “In view of what happened to Tommy, I must admit I thought at first someone else had done it,” Lisa said slowly, a vision of a white moonlit face stark in her mind, “but I don’t see how anyone could have given it to her with me in the room, or how they would have gotten her to drink it?”