by Rufus King
CHAPTER VIII
Lieutenant Valcour hesitated for a moment at the head of the stairs. The feeling that some person had just quit the hall as he and Vera had come into it insistently kept recapturing his attention. Valcour had a great respect for intuitive feelings, particularly if they were his own. Yes, the lighting in the hall was a bit shoddy (he did agree with Vera to that extent) but then these old houses were hard to wire effectively, and there was no reason why the place should be blazing at this time of night, anyway.
He looked at his watch. It was three minutes after midnight. It seemed longer than that—an age almost—since he and Vera had been standing at the head of the attic stairs and listening to the chimes. Something was going to happen. His intuitive faculties were working alarmingly. Better get on with the search. Not that he really thought he’d find anybody.
He started to descend the curving stairs. Their woodwork was painted ivory and they were carpeted in a deep-piled faded rose. Their treads did not creak beneath his weight, and as he walked down he made no sound at all.
He wondered whether Mr. Sturm were fanatic. Old men sometimes were, when living autocratically in a location not easily accessible to suitable society—suitable to them. There was no autocracy quite so secure as a mental autocracy, and a big mental frog in a little mental puddle…well, such a one might easily dress up in the togas of a Caesar. Would he find Mr. Sturm such a frog? From all reports he had heard of the man he thought that he would.
The furnace must be dying, as the house seemed to be getting colder. He wondered who attended to the drafts; Will, probably. They were funny people, both of them, both Will and his father. They scuttled to their warrens like rabbits and stayed there. The simile seemed inept and Valcour altered it to a brace of chieftains withdrawing to their tents. But that presupposed a battlefield. And wasn’t there? With Vera for the opposing camp. Behind the two men would be generations of tradition, and their own years spent in creating what would become tradition to their heirs; but there were no heirs. And what a curious motive that would offer for murder, if divorce were emphatically and definitely denied…and also what nonsense.
Valcour stood staring at the spot where Alice Tribeau, according to Vera, had fallen. There was no trace of blood on the highly waxed surface of the floor, nor was there any indication that the floor had recently been mopped up. Any such use of water would, he knew, have left a dull spot on the polished surface. And it stood to reason that where Alice Tribeau had fallen there must have been some blood. Perhaps she had fallen on a rug and the rug had been removed. But Vera had said nothing about any rug. Later it would be well to look about the surface of the floor for recent signs of moppings.
He felt there would be a cupboard under the curving stairs. He found one and as a matter of principle opened its door and looked into it. There was no one there. Some fishing tackle and old hats were sprawled in one of its corners. He closed the door and walked around to the kitchen. The kitchen was colder than the house. The coal stove afforded its only heat and the fire was banked for the night. He wondered how to get down into the cellar, and then saw a trap door that let into the floor. He lifted this and walked down a short flight of steps. His flashlight located an electric switch and he turned it.
The cellar was divided into four large compartments, each lighted by a single hanging bulb. The furnace and winter’s coal supply were in the southeast compartment. Its only occupant was a large gray rat that walked deliberately across a vast pile of coal and disappeared. It was warm in the cellar, cozy almost, and immeasurably still. The storeroom for winter vegetables, the wine room, and the compartment for log wood held no intruder.
Valcour mounted the cellar stairs and closed the trap door. There was a door at the kitchen’s farther end. He opened it and stepped into the icy dead air of a shed. A sliding door led from the shed to the outside. The shed was empty. He came back into the kitchen. The tray for ice cubes sloppily dumped in one corner of the sink caught his eye as he passed it. There was also something there that glittered—minute pieces of broken glass. Stuck in the sink’s drain was a soggy piece of paper. He fished it out and looked at it. It was scraped from a label of some nature and on it were two dots—curiously shaped—curious, and yet of a shape that ought to be familiar. He placed the bit of paper in an envelope that was in his pocket.
Vera hadn’t bothered to refill the ice tray. What an uncomfortable hornet she must be in this ordered household! And it had the effect of being well ordered, too. Valcour wondered by whom. By Mr. Sturm, of course; that strange Mr. Sturm who was such an impressive and silent ruler over silence. What a house it was—devoid of young life, dedicated to the fixed ideas of autocratic age. For a moment he felt that any number of palliating circumstances could be advanced for Vera.
And Will seemed sort of spineless—plenty of gentility but no spine, and it was rubbish to say that the two attributes couldn’t go together. He turned on a lamp in the dining room and looked at such sections of the polished floor as were not covered with rugs. The room was separated from the living room by a large archway with folding doors. The doors were open and a section of the polish on the floor beneath the arch was dull.
So Alice Tribeau had fallen here and not at the foot of the stairs. The possibilities were perplexing. The wound was such a minor injury that she could well have stumbled here, if shot at the foot of the stairs, before collapsing. People had walked miles and miles with such simple wounds, and then hadn’t collapsed at all. Of course her temperament would govern that. Or she might have been shot right here.
He wondered just what it was that Vera wanted to conceal, why she had deliberately lied about finding Alice Tribeau at the foot of the stairs when Alice Tribeau had probably collapsed right here beneath the arch. Perhaps she hadn’t lied. Someone might have moved Alice Tribeau before Vera had stumbled against her; moved her and then mopped up the blood. Whoever did it might have heard Vera coming from the kitchen and have let Alice Tribeau down at the most convenient place, which had happened to be the foot of the stairs. It would have been someone who was strong enough to lift and carry Alice Tribeau. Vera was. Will was.
And Mr. Sturm was an invalid.
But it was astonishing the feats of strength that could be performed by some invalids, especially if the incentive were properly urgent.
Everything would of course be known when Alice Tribeau could speak and tell her own story. She could then bring what charges she liked against whom she liked and through her the state would prosecute its case.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. In every attempted homicide there were protective measures to be taken and kept in force until the criminal could be put under restraint. The average murderer-at-large was synonymous with a lunatic-at-large. Valcour took a penknife from his pocket and knelt on one knee. There were some minute flecks of blood hardening on the floor wax. He scraped them off and dropped them into the envelope with the bit of paper found in the kitchen sink.
A sound of shoes crossing bare wood brought him to his feet. He went and stood in shadow near the dining-room fireplace. He closed the penknife and slipped it into a pocket.
Valcour stood very still and Will didn’t notice him. Will’s eyes were lusterless and his body looked dejected. He went to the sideboard and poured some whisky from a decanter into a glass. The whisky seemed tasteless to him and unpalatably harsh. He took another. Valcour made a slight sound and Will turned slowly until he faced the fireplace. He wasn’t startled. He wasn’t even very curious.
“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Valcour,” he said. “The room’s so dim I didn’t notice you. Will you join me?”
There was a perceptible touch of thickness in Will’s speech. Valcour crossed to the sideboard. He noticed that Will’s cheeks were over-red.
“Thank you,” he said.
“If you like a tall drink I can get you some water and ice. There’s ginger ale in the ice box if you prefer
it.”
“I would like a ginger-ale highball very much.”
“I’ll have one with you. I’ll bring them into the living hall. It’s more cheerful there by the fire.”
“Thank you.”
Valcour went into the living hall. He pulled the sleepy-hollow chair up nearer to the dying embers and sat down, letting his body relax entirely in the chair’s comfortable curve. By turning his head he could see a section of the upper hall railings. They were slender ghosts standing at attention while something black and silken brushed them in its passage along the hall; a black silk dressing gown that would encase (inasmuch as Will was downstairs) the quietly moving body of Mr. Sturm: a ghost in ebony drifting past a company of thin and paler wraiths.
He took the envelope from his pocket and opened it so that he would examine the bit of paper marked at its torn edge with two dots. He studied them carefully. They weren’t dots. He knew what they were: each dot was meant to depict the end of a bone. And two bones crossed beneath a skull were the chemist’s symbol for poison.
CHAPTER IX
Valcour sipped his drink. It was very strong—three fingers at the least—and the color of Will’s highball was darker still. Will didn’t look like a heavy drinker, nor like a habitual one. Valcour doubted whether the shooting of Alice Tribeau in itself would have upset Will to the extent that his nerves would require so strong and unusual a sedative—if it was unusual.
“Your house is charming,” Valcour said. “It has an antiquity that has grown mellow in companionship with the people who have lived in it. It is very permanent. So few places, nowadays, give one the effect of being so.”
“It is good of you to say so.” The rigidity of Will’s hand relaxed spasmodically, and drops of amber liquor sank into the rug before he regained control of his fingers. “You’d think anybody would like to live here, wouldn’t you?” he said. Then he repeated with a faint truculence, “Anybody.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Valcour took another sip. “You always have to make allowances for various temperaments. It might be just the wrong sort of an environment for some people. It might grate. After all, this sort of setting presupposes any number of things. You have to be born into it, really, or else be the sort of person who should have been born into it.”
They were both of them, Valcour felt, like two observers looking over the edge of a cloudy pit, and at the bottom of the pit, dimly seen beneath several baffling layers, was Vera. They hadn’t mentioned her. Valcour couldn’t, and Will wouldn’t—as yet—but each was vaguely grazing her with the hazed fringe of slender searchlights.
“It’s a taste that could be cultivated,” said Will. “A home like this ought to grow on anybody, just by living in it.” He again repeated the “anybody.”
Valcour smiled pleasantly. “Such a growth takes curious shape at times,” he said. “Personally, I should be inexpressibly contented here.”
“I am,” said Will. “So is my father.”
Vera’s pointed exclusion from this picturing of domiciled felicity fairly shrieked for comment. Valcour attacked it from the widest possible angle.
“Your wife doesn’t find country life attractive?”
“Vera?” Will shook his head with overemphatic solemnity. “Oh, no. Vera doesn’t like it here at all.”
“Well,”—Valcour’s manner was the quintessence of impartial justness—“of course for any woman with an ingrained taste for cosmopolitan society—if the appetite for that sort of life amounted to a habit—one can well imagine that country life would grow irksome no matter how pleasant its setting.”
Will became mildly fascinated with watching his own fingers. He looked upon them as five separate entities divorced from his body. He admired their clever dexterity in shaking the glass they were holding just enough so that none of its contents spilled. It was quite clever, even if there wasn’t much liquor left in the glass to spill. His mind had never been more lucid or more penetrating. Answers to all sorts of problems that had perplexed him pressed forward in a clamorous mob. No, they didn’t, either. They weren’t answers, because they couldn’t be. There weren’t any problems. Even Vera had miraculously ceased to be one. Why, he hadn’t had such a feeling since the day he had started off for college—an emancipation from something too indefinite to define—new worlds—extraordinary freedom. He smiled companionably upon Valcour, and reticence slid from him with the effortless ease of a retreating wave.
“I beg your pardon?” he said. “I didn’t quite get what you were saying.”
Valcour smiled back. “We were discussing your wife,” he said pleasantly. “You were commenting on the fact that she found living up here in the country unpleasant.”
“Oh, yes—Vera.” Grapples were swinging out to drag him back again from this new and beneficent freedom. He dodged them smartly. Earnestness welled up in him, and great truths demanded instant expression. “Vera is a very peculiar woman,” he said. He wanted to tell this sincere and true friend facing him all about Vera. It was a funny thing he had never realized before how sympathetically soothing Valcour was. They must arrange to see lots more of each other in the future. Of course he’d never discuss Vera outright with anybody, no matter how intimate a friend, but one could at least indulge in allegory (was it allegory?) and he wanted so badly to indulge in something. “You know your Shakespeare?” he said.
“Fairly intimately.”
“Well, it says in one of the sonnets that festering lilies smell far worse than weeds.” He spread his hands (the glass, fortunately, was quite empty) in a gesture that plainly implied: “Well, there you’ve got her—that’s Vera.”
Valcour chose not to catch the allusion. “It must make it rather unhappy for Mrs. Sturm, for all of you”—he touched the word delicately—“her discontent.”
Will looked at him with over-bright eyes. “It’s so bad it can’t go on,” he said. “We’d go crazy.”
“As bad as that.” Valcour’s comment was a murmur.
Will leaned forward in his chair. “I feel responsible for it,” he said. “And I think it’s killing him.”
A shock ran through Valcour.
“Your father?” he said.
“My father.”
“He didn’t—well, approve?”
Will grew intensely eager to prove his point, the more so because of a faint irritation over the point’s vagueness even to himself. “He didn’t know a thing about it. He never knew a thing about it until I lifted Vera over the front door sill and said we were married.”
Valcour drifted warily along on banalities. “It surprised him?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him surprised. He looked at Vera. He kissed her. He’s been awfully courteous to her ever since. That was almost a year ago.” Will loosed another great truth: “Vera sort of resents courtesy.”
“I should think that Mrs. Sturm would have realized the sort of quiet and pleasant existence we live up here, that she would have been more prepared—prepared to adjust herself.”
Warm waves were surging unsteadily through Will’s hot head, and Valcour vanished uncannily with each wave and then, just as uncannily, appeared again.
“You wouldn’t believe some of the things I know,” Will said. He added apologetically, “Of course I can’t tell you.”
“Of course not.”
“I couldn’t tell anybody. Not anybody.”
“And it’s such a pity.” Valcour took up the thread. “Unburdening one’s mind, one’s troubles, does bring relief. Just sharing them verbally with someone else who is sympathetic lightens their weight immeasurably.”
Will nodded a profound agreement to this platitudinous truth. “I’ve thought of several ways out of it all,” he said.
“Yes?” Valcour was very wary; the hook and line lay very loosely in the waters.
“I don’t care for myself. I’m perfectly
willing to lie in my own mess. I’m thinking about him. He’s been seeing the doctor recently—Fred Harlan. He’s got something funny the matter with him. Well, you know what I think?”
Will was at the stage where any question, no matter how rhetorical, required its answer, and he would wait interminably until it got one. “What?” said Valcour.
“I think Vera’s the matter.”
“That’s an extraordinary idea.”
“Isn’t it? I knew it would astonish you. And he won’t do anything to help me.”
“Your father?”
“My father. I’ve spoken about sending Vera away—Europe—any place—on a trip. He won’t hear of it. He has ideas.” Will added defensively, “We all have our ideas. He says that a wife’s place is with her husband. Well—you see, don’t you?”
Valcour thought he did, but he wanted confirmation. “Not exactly,” he said.
“Why, it puts it up to me.” Will wanted his point made crystal clear. “I brought it on and so I’ve got to cure it.” He became elaborately confidential, elaborately mysterious. “Fred Harlan is not the doctor.” Will shunned contractions and his enunciation was almost brittle in its perfection. “I am the doctor.”
CHAPTER X
Will leaned back and lifted his hand to his lips. He was annoyed and somewhat puzzled that there was no glass in it. There the silly thing was—lying empty on the rug. Heat waves baked his head as he stooped and got the glass, and his eyes stayed foggy for several seconds after he had straightened up.
“I’m going to mix myself another drink,” he said, quite importantly. “Finish yours, old man, and I’ll mix you another one, too.”
“I’ve plenty, thank you.” Valcour raised his still filled glass.
“Oh, very well. I’m going to have another. You don’t mind, do you?”