Never Walk Alone

by Rufus King

  Mrs. Giles started back for the house, skirting because of the sharp gravel the grassy edge of the driveway that fringed the evergreens and shrubs. She caught at a coster blue spruce to save herself from falling and then looked down to see what she had stumbled over.

  A man’s leg.

  It was not Kent. The cloth was of dark tweed, and Kent had been in uniform. The shoe was black, and even in the soft moonlight it had an air of fine leather and good bench workmanship. Like the shoes which Papa had always worn.

  Shock lost its initial protective numbness, and Mrs. Giles began to tremble. She choked back a scream. She conquered an urge to run for the shelter of the house. She had to know. For Kent’s sake she had to know. Then maybe she would be able to decide what must be done.

  She parted the azaleas among which the man had fallen. The face was a distinguished one, elderly, around sixty, Mrs. Giles imagined. Looking down at it, she thought of ambassadors and foreign courts. It was no one whom she knew or had ever known. The eyes were wide open. Too open. Sightless, dead.

  The man’s coat was thrown (jerked, it looked like) open, and she could see the handle of the knife now, its blade being sunk through the white dark-stained shirt. A wave of nausea almost caused her to fall forward, but she steadied herself. Dimly in memory returned the sound of the scuffle which she had heard and this time with its new significance of a man stabbed to his death.

  No hurry now. Mrs. Giles drew a breath in deeply to conquer giddiness, then her eyes were held by a spot of silver, bright in the moonlight, which lay touching the fingers of the man’s right hand. It struck her, oddly, as being something with which she was familiar, and she stooped and picked it up.

  She knew.

  She felt she must have known instantly what they would be: the platinum bracelet and Army identification tag which she had had made and had given to Kent when he had entered the service. The moonlight was strong enough to identify the numbers and the lettering and to crush Mrs. Giles with the wrenching assurance that this was so.

  But it did not crush her. All her knowledge of him, from the days when he had been a baby until war had taken him away, fully assured her that Kent had not done this thing. Until war—no. Not even this appearance in the night when he had wired he would not be here until morning, neither that clandestine touch nor the utterly inexplicable scene with Miss Ashley…

  Miss Ashley. It was Miss Ashley who had enmeshed him in this murderous act. Miss Ashley was the murderess, her undoubtedly well-practiced hand the wielder of the knife. By what witch’s sorcery had she first evoked and then cast her spell on Kent? What powers, what dark devices had she employed to bring him to the spot at the moment when the deed was done?

  What of the police? Mrs. Giles’s reaction was at once to obey all precepts of the law and summon them. And then? She saw herself telling them: “I heard a scuffle on the driveway. From my living-room window I saw my grandson and Miss Ashley talking. I found that stranger stabbed to death. Beside his hand I found my grandson’s Army identification tag.”

  No.

  She saw the end of many things for Kent: his value to Washington’s bond drive shattered, a hero besmirched, Mr. Roosevelt with the medal and no breast to pin it on, while Kent for dreary days, perhaps months, was confined in a federal prison awaiting court-martial for the murder of a civilian.

  Her sense insisted that on the other hand Kent might have some perfectly rational explanation which would clear him from any involvement at all. But if this were so, why his clandestine appearance and present flight? Had Miss Ashley during that brief and inexplicable moment so strongly meshed him in her power?

  Had it been Kent? Uniforms could make men look extraordinarily alike, certainly so in moonlight and from the angled view that she had had from the upstairs window. Kent’s identification tag spiked that. No plot so lurid, so involved as to include the tag being stolen from Kent in Washington and then whisked by magic here to be dropped beside the hand of a corpse, could obtain even during such mischievous days as these.

  Somewhere the answer lay to this problem of what to do. Not with Kent, but with Miss Ashley. Perhaps among her things? Mrs. Giles, who normally would have recoiled at the thought of rifling a guest’s personal belongings, was far past any recoiling. And now would be the moment to do it, while Miss Ashley (definitely astride her broomstick) was abroad in the night.

  Azaleas again concealed the dead man. All but the leg. Delay seemed of the essence to Mrs. Giles now that her course was charted to by-pass the police. She stooped and shoved, and then the leg was concealed too. An ague of fever gripped her, but she shook it off and started for the house with Kent’s bracelet and identification tag clenched in her hand.

  She fumbled in the darkness until she found the bronze statue of Mercury, then carried it up and set it back on the landing post. She went to her rooms and shoved the bracelet and identification tag deep under lingerie in a dresser drawer. Then she hastened down the hallway to Miss Ashley’s door.

  She rapped.

  She turned the handle and stepped in. A lamp flashed on brilliantly, and Miss Ashley, alarmed under bedcovers, said sharply: “What is it?”

  Blood slowly flushed into Mrs. Giles’s face. The dread importance of murder curiously became insignificant for the moment before this surge of mortified embarrassment. Mrs. Giles accomplished a swift marshaling of her wits.

  “I heard a sound of something falling out in the hallway, Miss Ashley. It worried me, and after a while I thought I had better just come in and see whether you were all right.”

  Miss Ashley’s face continued expressionless. So did her voice.

  “I heard it too. It woke me up. A single thump seemed mild for a house like this. I’ve been expecting clanking chains. Thanks anyhow for coming. And now, good night.”

  “Good night, Miss Ashley.”

  Miss Ashley waited until Mrs. Giles’s fingers touched the doorknob.

  “Better change your slippers,” she said, “or you’ll catch cold. Those are wet.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Mrs. Giles retraced her steps along the silent hallway to her rooms. Inside them, reaction set in.

  She turned on lamps and poured a small glass of sherry from a bottle which she kept in the medicine cabinet on the bathroom wall. She felt distressingly faint. She returned to the living room and sank into an armchair beside an open window. She sipped sherry, growing almost immediately somewhat warmer and better for it.

  How much time had elapsed between the moment when she had last glimpsed Kent and Miss Ashley down on the driveway and when she had re-entered the house? Mrs. Giles thought it would have been twenty minutes fully.

  Twenty minutes during which such an accomplished graduate at skullduggery as Miss Ashley could with ease have flitted back up to bed (certainly during that moment while Mrs. Giles had stood at the branch road peering toward the stables) and thus have been prepared to greet any alarms which might transpire with sleep-drugged eyes and that nightgown which—well!

  What boldness, what superb effrontery on Miss Ashley’s part to have seized the bull by its horns with that parting crack about the dew-wetted slippers. With one stroke it had reduced Mrs. Giles to the disadvantage of being on the defensive.

  Mrs. Giles clearly read Miss Ashley’s true import wrapped up in the statement’s deceitful simplicity: You were outside on the rain-wet grass. The sound of the scuffle on gravel brought you to your window. You saw me and you recognized Kent. (This was another reason, Mrs. Giles decided, why Miss Ashley had so cannily hustled up again to bed: to be awakened from sleep if Mrs. Giles came to question her.) You came downstairs and went out and discovered the body. Otherwise you would have demanded of me frankly and normally why Kent had not come in to greet you and where he had gone. You are afraid to call the police. You are afraid to accuse or even to question me because you do not know what knowledge or power I have for harming your grandson. Between you and me there must exist a truce of silence.

 
All that in a statement of eleven words.

  And it was true. Mrs. Giles was thoroughly aware of the bonds which tied her hands. There was nothing she could do and nothing she could say until she had talked with Kent. And if he, too, should copy Miss Ashley and erect a barrier of silence, what then?

  She found a small solace in the philosophy that things usually work out satisfactorily if they are right. Age had taught her the truth of this. Age also had taught her the dangers which lurk in any interference based on a laudable purpose of trying to be helpful. It rarely if ever was so and usually served only to roil a muddy situation still further.

  Like that time years ago when Papa had tried to be helpful about her undying love for the grocer’s delivery boy. Papa’s well intentioned if pyrotechnical methods had only prolonged love’s death struggle to an all-time high: one which had fallen just short of the final act of Tristan und Isolde.

  Oddly, this remembrance soothed Mrs. Giles and quieted the sharper edges of her nerves. She went to bed but not at once to sleep, for in the darkness, tempered by frail moonlight, hovered the soul-sickening vision of that body under the azaleas: a frame, a lump no more significant than earth, but it had moved and breathed and had lived its days for good or evil, or the usual balanced ration of both.

  Almost more than murder itself, it distressed her to dwell on the indignity of the body lying down there, and her self-reproach was rapidly approaching a point of torment when utter, absolute exhaustion took matters into its own hands and collapsed her into sleep.

  Leila woke her. She carried a Bridgehaven Gazette in her hand.

  Leila had on her important look. Oh dear, Mrs. Giles thought, she’s been up to something. Then Kent, Miss Ashley, the identification tag, and the body in the azaleas stepped out from the last veil of slumber, and the bright sunny morning crashed in shreds around her.

  “It’s all on the front page,” Leila said. “A picture of the house and you in that dress you wore to the Assembly a few years ago and all.”

  (Impossible—the police would have wakened her…)

  “It says,” Leila went on, “that your renting rooms to war workers should serve as a shining example to the womanhood of America and especially asks Washington papers to please copy. It also says all sorts of nice things about Mr. Kent and calls him our first local hero. Will I read it to you?”

  Relief came in a partial flood.

  “No, Leila. Just put it down on the table. What time is it?”

  “It’s half-past seven, and Mr. Hopkins telephoned the station, and Mr. Kent’s train is late and won’t be in until almost ten. They told him something about a derailed freight car holding up the line.”

  “Thank you.”

  The important look grew more decisive.

  “Here.”

  Leila reached into an apron pocket and handed Mrs. Giles a five-dollar bill.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I fixed it all by myself. He got here half an hour ago, and as he’s on night shift he wanted to go right to bed. He gave me the five dollars for the rent for the week, and I told him how lucky he was as there was only one room left. He went straight up to it and told me to call him at four o’clock this afternoon.”

  Bleakness added itself to the chill surrounding Mrs. Giles’s heart. How unimportant, how maddeningly distracting was the room-renting gesture in view of that body down below in the azaleas.

  “Oh, Leila!”

  Importance vanished, leaving a spanked look on Leila’s sensitive face, and a trembling lip.

  “Didn’t I do right? I only wanted to save you bother, and you told me last night you didn’t want me to wake you until half-past seven.”

  “Yes, clear. You were quite right. Most helpful. Who is this man?”

  Leila bloomed afresh.

  “He’s ever so nice. His name is Mr. Jefferson Parling. He looks just like Humphrey Bogart.”

  Mrs. Giles shut her eyes. She was fairly familiar with Mr. Bogart’s characterizations on the screen, and to have anyone of those blood-throttling roles in the house was the last straw. That was all, she told herself dismally, that was needed: a good, well-typed Menace.

  Furthermore, he was on night shift and he would be sequestered within the house during daytime. Even if he were to sleep the daylight hours through and she didn’t see him, she would know he was there.

  “Have the others gone, Leila?”

  “Yes. Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade left at seven and Miss Ashley at a quarter past. Oh dear, but he’s handsome.”

  Mrs. Giles decided the moment was at hand for taking a bull by the horns herself.

  “Leila!”

  “Well?”

  “I shall have to ask Joel to take you away from here if there is any of that.”

  “Of what?”

  “You know what I mean. I refer to Mr. Wade.”

  Leila managed to look both secretive and crushed. Her hands fluttered in a gesture which Mrs. Giles under less pressure would have interpreted as “Perish the thought!”

  “I mean it, Leila, and that will be all. Tell Ella that I will have tea and toast and will breakfast more fully with Mr. Kent after he arrives.”

  Leila vanished mystically, and Mrs. Giles got out of bed. She still held in her hand the five-dollar bill. It began to assume the characteristics she had attributed to its donor, and she put it on the dresser with a faint shudder and, going into the bathroom, turned water on in the tub.

  Then she could hold herself from doing it no longer. She walked to a living-room window and looked down.

  She could almost see, she thought, the section of the azaleas where the body lay. The general view was quietly serene: a normal summer’s morning with the grasses all fresh from last evening’s shower. She leaned out across the sill. She could see nothing disturbed about the shrubbery’s matted tops.

  A bicycle whizzed around the curve in the drive, and a burly young man shouted up at her: “Is this River Rest?”

  “It is.”

  “Got any left?”

  “Left? I beg your pardon?”

  “Rooms—them things you got the ad in about. Are they all taken?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Grandma.”

  The wheel turned, scorched off, and Mrs. Giles withdrew from the window. She found herself shaking, although “sizzling” might have been a better word. She picked up the Bridgehaven Gazette, and pride filled her as she read its splendid tribute to Kent, and determination was strong to do everything in her power to shield him and the service he represented from the slightest blot.

  She turned to the column devoted to herself, and blood pressure mounted as, at its close, she found herself being publicly slated for a niche in history alongside such women as Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Betsy Ross.

  She managed to bathe and put on a dress of heliotrope linen. It had a pocket in its blouse, and she went to the dresser and took out Kent’s bracelet and identification tag. She folded them loosely in a handkerchief and arranged it in the pocket.

  Then Mrs. Giles stood quite still.

  CHAPTER 10

  Leila’s voice had come back to her: “Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade left at seven and Miss Ashley at a quarter past.”

  Miss Ashley was out of the house.

  More than ever it seemed of importance to Mrs. Giles swiftly to find out what she could. She stepped out into the cool quiet hallway and walked along it past the doors to Mr. Smith’s room and Mr. Wade’s. She stopped before Miss Ashley’s.

  Directly across the hall was the door to the room which Leila had just rented to the fourth lodger. She tried to recall his name. Purl-something? Parl-something? All she could think of was Bogart. No sound came from his room. Perhaps he was already asleep. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps he was sitting in there and brooding with a dead-pan look and his mind a-boil with schemes of sabotage.

  Mrs. Giles opened Miss Ashley’s door and went inside, closing the door behind her. The room was surprisingly neat. Not
hing was strewn about, as Mrs. Giles had expected things to be: a stocking here, a slipper kicked there, and that nightgown left dropped where it had been stepped out of. No, Miss Ashley’s belongings were all properly in place.

  This well-ordered effect surprised Mrs. Giles decisively as it seemed out of character. It also increased her repellent distaste of the job which faced her.

  Ten minutes did the trick and left Mrs. Giles, so far as she could see, just where she had started. Nothing. No papers of any sort. And certainly none of the prescribed paraphernalia for Miss Ashley’s Mata-Haran occupation, such as invisible inks, pertinent drugs, or small, flat black automatics which could be whipped out during moments of stress from beaded evening bags or chinchilla muffs.

  Mrs. Giles grew frightened. Was not this very void of things a strong confirmation that her suspicions were sound? It was unnatural that a normal young woman (granting just for the moment that Miss Ashley was a normal one) should be away from home for a lengthy time and not have with her the slightest ties, such as letters, photographs, mementos, some bond to link her with her roots.

  She had no past.

  Mrs. Giles then paradoxically decided that Miss Ashley certainly did have one, but not a nice past, not one that you could put out openly on your dresser top or leave lying around in a desk drawer. It was all in Miss Ashley’s head. That’s where she kept it, cleverly, securely, utterly safe from prying hands or eyes. The very height of superb artifice lay in the thought.

  Mrs. Giles left the room and went downstairs.

  Her second and far worse task lay before her. No one was about. She opened the front door and stepped through the vestibule onto the porch, where she breathed deeply of the fine morning air, as if (should there be lurking eyes) to give her movements an innocent motivation.

  She forced herself to step down onto the gravel drive and walk along it with casual pauses during which she hoped her gestures and expression portrayed a passing interest in the state of the shrubbery’s health.