Mischief

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “The one,” she sobbed. “The man … the same one!”

  Perrin looked toward 809.

  He saw a tall man with a face of utter fury drag, by the hair of her head, a small blond girl through that door. Saw him drag her around the wooden frame as if he didn’t care whether she lived or died, as if he didn’t care if he broke her bones.

  “Drop that girl! Let her go!”

  Jed’s head went back and the eyes glittered down the long straight nose. “The hell I will! You don’t—”

  Perrin fired.

  CHAPTER 21

  Ruth O. Jones lifted her shoulders from the carpet, and pulled her twisted rags and tatters aside to free her legs. She wiped the blood off her mouth with her arm. She combed her fingers through her hair. Some of it, torn out at the roots, came away in her broken nails.

  She walked on her knees—there was no need to rise higher—over to Bunny’s bed.

  She paid not the slightest attention to the gunshot as it blasted off, behind her.

  She said, in her firm contralto, “O.K., honey bun? For goodness’ sakes, what happened to you?” Her cut mouth kissed the temple lightly. Her fingers were strong and sure on those wicked knots.

  Jed kept standing, somehow, because he had to keep an eye steady on Nell. She fell on the floor when he had to drop her as if she had been a sack of meal. As soon as he was sure she lay as limp as she seemed to lie, he looked at his right hand. He took it away from his left side and looked at the bright blood on it.

  He looked at the men, standing tense and threatening in his path, and he tried to smile. The elevator boy was behind them. Then he saw his girl, Lyn, behind him … looking, as if she peered through trees in glade, between the men’s bodies, in at the strange tableau.

  Ah, the little fool! “Go home,” he said.

  Then he heard it. In the other room, Bunny began to cry.

  Over Jed’s face passed a look of peace and thanksgiving. He turned, reeling, because he was wounded and no kidding, stumbled, and made for the big maroon chair. He thought he sat down in it Perhaps it was more like falling.

  “Oh, Jed!”

  “But that’s Towers …”

  “It’s the same man.…”

  Now, he was three. Or maybe only one, again. Or nothing. No matter. There was a difference in the way a kid cried. Funny … could you write down the difference in musical terms, he wondered. Pitch or timing or what? One kind of crying that gnawed on your nerves and pierced your head. This kind didn’t do that. No, it didn’t do that at all. It was a thing not unmusical to hear.…

  Perrin, kneeling over Nell, barked, “What did you do to this girl?”

  Jed didn’t feel like bothering to say.

  Miss Ballew let out another yelp of pure shock. Eyes starting from her head, she reacted to her sight of the little man in the hotel’s livery who was standing in the bath-room door, holding his head, looking out mouselike at them all.

  “Munro!” thundered Milner. “What—”

  Eddie blinked. Silence rustled down, that they might hear his feeble voice. “I guess … Nell musta got into more mischief. Did she? My niece? Nell?”

  “Who?”

  Jed pulled himself from the mists. “Nell, the baby sitter. On the floor.” He braced himself, watchfully. “Nutty as a fruitcake,” he said.

  But Nell only rolled, drowsily. Her arm fell aside in sleepy grace, revealing her face. Her eyes were closed. The blue gone, her small face was left perfectly serene. There was a long scratch from eye corner to jaw. It looked as if it had been painted there, as if she felt no pain. She seemed to be asleep.

  “That’s Nell. Yes, she …” Eddie tottered to look. “That’s the way she did—before,” he said in awe. “After the fire, they say, she slept … just like that.” He swallowed and looked around at all their set faces. “How can she sleep?” he whimpered.

  “Somebody,” said Jed wearily, “go see. I suppose it’s Mrs. Jones. This one pretty near killed her.”

  Perrin got off his haunches and lurched through the door. Milner’s horrified eye sent fury in sudden understanding where, from his point of view, it belonged. “Munro!”

  “I … didn’t think …” said Eddie. “I kinda kept hoping she’d be all right. But I guess …”

  “Next time, don’t guess,” said Jed. “Lyn go home.”

  “Not now.” She moved toward him, drawn. “I won’t, Jed. I’ve got to know …”

  He closed his eyes.

  When a fresh scream rose up, out there in the other room in another world, Ruth’s finger tips did not leave off stroking into shape the little mouth thay the wicked gag had left so queer and crooked. “That’s right. Just you cry. Golly, Bun, did you see me fighting! Wait till we tell Daddy … missed the whole thing …” Ruth held the little head warmly against her battered body. There was comfort soaking through from skin to skin. “Cry it all out, sweetheart. Cry.”

  “Mrs. Jones?” a man said to her. His hair seemed to her to be trying to stand on end.

  “Go away. Hush. Please call my husband …”

  She stroked and murmured on. Not until she heard Peter’s voice did her wounds and gashes remember pain.

  “We’re just fine,” Ruth said quickly. “Jeepers, have we had an adventure!”

  Peter’s face was dead white as he looked upon his wife and child.

  “She was the crossest sitter I ever saw,” Bunny said indignantly. Her arms went around her daddy’s dark head where he had hidden his face against her. “She tied my mouth all up, Daddy, so I couldn’t cry. She certainly didn’t want me to cry awful bad.”

  Peter roused and looked at those stockings.

  “Bound and gagged,” Ruth said quietly. Her face said more.

  “G-gosh, she must have had terrible ears.” Peter’s voice trembled. “I expect she’s got sick ears, Bunny.”

  His hands curled and uncurled. Ruth’s eyes said, I know. But it’s over. Be careful.

  For Bunny didn’t realize what had almost happened to her and it was better if she didn’t. You mustn’t scare a little girl who’s nine so that all her life she carries the scar. You must try to heal what scar there is. Ruth knew, and deeply trembled to know it, that someday she would leave Bunny again. And with a sitter, of course. She must. (Although not for a good while with a stranger. Maybe never again with a total stranger.) Still, they would go gaily as might be, on in time and they would not permit themselves to be cowed, to be daunted. They dared not.

  Poor Peter, shaken and suffering, right now, and fighting so hard not to betray it. Peter knew all this as well as she. They were tuned to each other. “Bunny’s fine and I feel fine, too,” she told him. “Really. A few scratches. Did they take her away?”

  “They’re coming. They’ll take her to a hospital,” added Peter, for Bunny’s sake, “because she’s sick, really. She doesn’t know how to get along with people who are well.”

  “Will she get better,” said Bunny with a huge snuffle, “from those sick ears?”

  “I don’t know, pudding. They won’t let her be with well people any more, unless she gets all better.”

  Bunny’s shuddering sobs were becoming like the soft far murmur of the last thunder of a departing storm. “Daddy.”

  “What, Bun?”

  Ruth felt the head turn on her breast “Did you have fun?”

  Peter couldn’t answer. But Ruth could. “Oh, Bunny, it was lots of fun. And Daddy made a good speech. I wish you’d been big enough to go.” She rushed on. “Daddy stood up and all the people, everybody was dressed up …”

  Peter looked upon the condition of his wife’s clothing. “Those … scratches, hon,” he said in a minute, sounding as if half his throat was closed. “There’s a doctor out there.”

  So the doctor came in and looked them both over.

  “You know,” said Ruth when he had gone, licking the antiseptic in her mouth, “I pretty near had her licked! I think!” She laughed. “I must look terrible but I feel fine.”


  And she did. Ah, poor Peter with the retrospective horror and the wrath locked in and buttoned down. But Ruth had got rid of it by tooth and claw. And she remembered, now, with relish, certain digs and blows. She felt quite peaceful Fulfilled, she thought, the tigress in me. “Hand me in some of my things, Peter. I’m going to bed in here with Bun.”

  “O.K., girls.”

  “Maybe we’ll order hot chocolate! Shall we? Lets!”

  “In the middle of the night!” squealed Bunny and the sweet smooth skin of her face rippled in the warning of delight to come.

  Peter O. Jones, with a smile covering (from all but his wife) the tears bleeding out of his heart, went back to 807.

  CHAPTER 22

  Eddie was gone, damned for a reckless fool, with all the anxious ignorant hope he’d called his caution, dust in his whimpering throat. (Don’t worry, Eddie, Marie would say.)

  Milner was gone, to harmonize with the walnut, downstairs. (Keep it out of the papers, if we possibly can.)

  Perrin was gone. (“Sorry, Towers. You can see how it was?” “Sure. That’s O.K.”) He went with Nell.

  And Nell was gone. Still seeming asleep, looking innocent and fair. Only Jed spoke to her. Jed said (and it seemed necessary—somewhere once, this he had planned to say), “So long, Nell.”

  She was asleep so she didn’t reply. Yet there was a lazy lift of the lashes. (They won’t do anything to me.)

  Nearly everyone was gone. Miss Ballew remained, sick in her soul, with the doctor’s suggested sedative in her hand. Jed was in the big chair again, bloody shirt loose over the vast bandage. Lyn was still there.

  The doctor warned once more that Jed must take a few days’ rest before trying to travel with that wound. Then, he was gone.

  “You’ll stay over, Jed, won’t you?” Lyn’s mouth was stiff.

  “A couple of days, at least. I’ll see.” Jed’s side was stinging like the devil, now. Telegrams, he thought, but time for that later. Maybe he’d break his cross-country trip and stop to see the family. Felt like it, somehow. Worry them, though, if he turned up shot. “Lyn, will you please … Your family’s probably … Why don’t you go home?”

  “I will, soon.” She didn’t look at him. She looked at her trembling hands.

  Peter took Ruth’s things to her, came back, flipped up his tails, sat down, put his head in his hands. “Jesus.”

  Lyn said, with that stiff mouth, “You’re terribly upset, of course. Shouldn’t we go, Jed? If I can help you to your own room …”

  “Or I,” said Miss Ballew drearily.

  “Don’t go. Ruth wants to say good night. A minute.”

  “Your little, uh, Bunny’s all right?” asked Jed.

  “Soon be. Kids bounce back. Thank God. Drink with me?”

  Jed didn’t feel sure. He felt this room rejected him. But he was fallen in this chair.

  “I ought to go home,” said Lyn whitely. “I don’t mean to hang around … be in the way.”

  “I ought to go,” said Miss Ballew. (To be a worthless old coward and on top of that be fooled and fail in the mind, too!) “I was of very little use.”

  “Take it easy,” Peter said. “Better try and take it easy, all of us.”

  Jed shifted his stiff side, reached slowly for the pocket of his coat, for the envelope. He managed to open it with one hand. It said, “Dear Jed:” And that was all. No more.

  Well. He looked back into dim reaches of time. It would have been enough. It would have been plenty. He crushed it up and put it back in his pocket. He didn’t look at Lyn.

  Peter passed drinks. “Nonsense, Miss Ballew. You need this. There.” He sat down. His brown eyes locked with Jed’s gray. “As I understand it, you left Bunny tied up? But you told them at the desk on your way out?” Peter’s voice was light, tentative.

  “I figured it wasn’t my business,” said Jed levelly. “I didn’t want to get into a mess. I figured to get away.”

  Well, he hadn’t got away. He’d got shot. And Towers was a rat. So, then, he was. The little girl was O.K. now. Mother, too. Nothing, thank God, they couldn’t get over. So … if Towers was left in his rathood, that was not too important to them, any more.

  Gray eyes locked on brown. “That’s the kind of rat I am, I guess,” Jed said quietly. “Later, I got a little nervous … a little too much later.”

  Miss Ballew’s lips trembled. “I was so stupid,” she said. “I was worse than no use. My fault …”

  Jed’s gray eyes met hers. They said, Don’t blame yourself too much. They said, I understand. They said, Us sinners—

  “Seems to me,” Jed drawled, “if you’re hunting for blame … if I hadn’t come over here in the first place …”

  “If I hadn’t walked out,” Lyn said bleakly.

  “No. Lyn …”

  “You think I’m not doing any iffing?” Peter asked. Brown eyes met gray. “If I’d even looked at the girl with half my brain on it. Me and my big important speech! I left it to Ruthie. Of course, she got it. In her bones, the way she sometimes does. If …”

  Jed shook his head.

  “Ruth knew I needed her. She chose. Even Ruth can if …” Brown eyes said to gray, All us sinners.

  Peter got up to pace. “Ruth says she had her licked. But I don’t know …”

  “I don’t know, either, sir. I couldn’t say.” Eyes locked again. “Now, don’t kid me, sir,” Jed said gently. “They weren’t two steps behind me. They’d have been on time.”

  And then he smiled. Because it only mattered to Towers, now, and Towers could take it. “Tell you, it isn’t often a man says to himself, You ought to be shot, and right away, someone obliges.” He moved and made the wound hurt. It was not so bad. It was like a session with the hairbrush, or a trip to the woodshed. He didn’t mind.

  But then Lyn said, as if she broke, “I’m afraid.” Why, she was all to pieces. She wasn’t Lyn. She looked white and old and sick and she was shaking to pieces. “I’m scared to go home. That’s the truth,” she wailed. “I’m scared of the night. I’d g-go but I’m afraid. Such t-terrible things … I don’t know anything. I’m scared of what a f-fool I’ve been.” She wept.

  Jed winced. “And you ought to be,” he said grimly. But it wasn’t Lyn. It was sick and ugly.

  Ruth said, “Ssssh …” She stepped out of Bunny’s room, leaving the door wide. She wore a man’s woolen robe because she was cold, now, with shock. (And Jed was glad, remembering Nell in the long silk.) But her battered face was serene.

  Lyn choked off her whimpering.

  Peter held Ruth’s hand to his cheek. “Asleep?” he whispered and she nodded. She looked lovely, this little blond Mrs. Jones.

  “Drink, darling?”

  “Not on top of the chocolate.”

  “Ruthie, would you be scared if I took this young lady home?”

  “Why, no,” Ruth said, smiling.

  “Uh, you see, Towers can’t do it. He ought to be in bed.”

  Jed said, appalled, “Yes, and I’m going there. But listen, get the hotel to send somebody. Lyn can’t go alone. But you can’t leave Mrs. Jones, sir.” She’s had enough! he thought.

  Ruth smiled at them all. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, gently.

  “Here we sit, with our hair turning white,” murmured Peter, in a moment, but his eyes were shining. “ ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she says.”

  “Well, you dasn’t!” Ruth smiled. “Or what would become of us all?”

  She wasn’t long for them. She wasn’t all in room 807. She kissed Peter’s brow, made her good nights. She didn’t say thanks. Perhaps she forgot, or she knew … She withdrew, went back to her sleeping baby, and the door closed behind her.

  They sat, sipped quietly. Lyn’s face was pink, her eyes were ashamed, her back was straighter. Jed thought, I know her. I know what she’s made of. And, he realized, she knew more about Towers, the real Towers, than anyone else on earth. Something grew, here … never could have grown had they gone, say, to a sho
w. Something known, for better, for worse. He touched her hand. She turned hers and her icy fingers clung. “Put an ending on my letter, sometime, honey?”

  “How, Jed?”

  “The regular ending,” he said, soberly. Yours truly. That was the way to end a letter.

  Lyn smiled like the rainbow.

  I’ll just have to take care of her, he thought. She mustn’t be afraid. His finger moved, humbly, on the soft back of her hand.

  Peter said, “Yep. We oughta be scared, all right. Ignorant optimism won’t do it. Won’t do it. But we’ve got not to be scared, just the same.”

  “Courage,” sighed Miss Ballew. She rose to say good night.

  “We are strangers,” Peter said darkly. “Whom do we know? One—if you’re lucky. Not many more. Looks like we’ve got to learn how we can trust each other. How we can tell … How can we dare … Everything rests on trust between strangers. Everything else is a house of cards.”

  Miss Ballew went around to her room, having been drinking at midnight with strangers! Strangers and friends! She was, and not from liquor, a little bit intoxicated. She felt warm around the heart and a bit weepy and quite brave.

  Peter came back and sat down, gazed at the two of them, moving his lips. “Damn it,” cried Peter O. Jones. “I wish I’d said that!”

  “Said what, Mr. Jones?”

  “What I just said!” Peter was cross.

  Lyn’s eye met Jed’s and dared be a little merry. “But … Mr. Jones, you just did. Didn’t you?”

  “In my speech!” cried Peter. “Now, I have to think of a better ending.” He glared at them.

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