by Rufus King
“Why, certainly not.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Certainly not.”
Will stood up. His back was very erect as he walked away. His footsteps echoed impressively on the floor. A mild crash of glass from the direction of the kitchen assured Valcour that Will had reached it.
Valcour got up reluctantly—it was a very comfortable chair—took a log of wood from the wood basket and placed it on the embers. Then he sank back into the chair again.
The fresh log hissed and crackled with an occasional sharp pop that fired an ember against the meshed fire screen. Certain woods in certain stages of dryness acted like that. Some of the pops were as loud and clear as a shot…certainly as much so as the sound made by a little Colt automatic, caliber .25…and Alice Tribeau had been shot by a Colt automatic, caliber .25… That would explain why the sound of the shot, even if anyone had heard it, might have passed unnoticed. Vera hadn’t said anything about hearing a shot, and Will—well, Will’s whole mind seemed batteried on Vera.
How deeply rooted, Valcour wondered, was Will’s obsession that his marriage to Vera and Vera’s presence in the house were killing his father. Valcour respected obsessions, not from any importance directly attached in themselves, but because of the shocking things they occasionally forced their harborers to do. They were the most fertile sort of breeding places for crime; pestilential swamps spotting the brain and encroaching minutely on normalcy with their creeping tentacles of disease. And when obsessions were further inflamed by alcohol… Will’s footsteps were returning again.
Will was relieved to see that Valcour had not vanished. He sat down carefully, and a third of the highball had disappeared before he took the glass from his lips. He was rather pleased with the strength of his stomach. This stuff had no more effect upon it than so much water. He wondered with momentary politeness about his friend Valcour’s stomach, and was going to mention it, but then thought better about it. The subject would scarcely fit in on their plane. They had been on a plane; discussing something excitingly important. Oh, yes—Vera.
“It’s funny how quickly some good-looking people get ugly without their faces changing a bit,” he said.
“Features do seem to alter with a more intimate knowledge of their owner’s character.”
“Don’t they? Why, Vera’s like a different person. She looks like a different person. Am I clear?”
“Quite.”
“She doesn’t look like the same person I met at all. I’m astonished at it. We met—I beg your pardon—at a camp. It was pitiful—very pitiful.” Will’s eyes, as he belched again slightly, were rather large and sad.
“What was?” Valcour said.
“Her story. Vera’s perfectly pitiful story. You wouldn’t believe what Vera’s gone through.”
Valcour was afraid to acquiesce too vehemently. “I’m sure I wouldn’t,” he said.
“Her childhood was terrible—terrible. Her girlhood was terrible. Every minute of her whole life was terrible until—I do beg your pardon—she met me.”
“Her parents must have been rather, well—” Valcour selected the word with nice discrimination—“heartless.”
“Heartless?” Will snorted. “They left her in an orphanage.”
Valcour could not resist a “By dying?”
“No, no.” Will waved the remnants of his highball to brush away any solution as reasonable or obvious as that. “Deserted her. She doesn’t even know them. Hasn’t an idea who they were.”
Valcour attuned his ears to the old familiar strains. “Surely there were some marks of identification—her baby clothing was of fine linen, wasn’t it?—and perhaps a little jeweled locket on a slender gold chain hinting at rich parentage, if not exactly kind parentage?” He severely repressed a “There always is, you know.”
“She must have told you about it herself.”
“After a fashion.”
“Well, I figured I’d change all that—you know, make up to her the things she’d lost.” Will’s eyes groped foggily for understanding. “The damnable part is I really loved her.”
Valcour’s “of course” was very soft.
“I did.”
Valcour strengthened the “of course.”
“Well—phffitt!”
Will snapped the again-emptied glass right out of his fingers. Valcour tested the phffitt! He imagined it signified the flight of love. Will’s eyes grew brooding and heavy. His voice was almost defiantly bitter.
“I shan’t say anything about thanklessness,” he said. “No one wants gratitude ladled out by the person he loves. But you do expect a certain restraint, a certain”—he plunged abruptly into the word—“decency.”
Will sat back (it amounted to a collapse) as if to say: “There, now, you’ve got it; it’s off my shoulders. What do you make out of it?”
“It is a difficult problem.” Valcour gave a discreet little sigh. “A difficult and a very unpleasant problem.”
“You can’t reason with Vera. And look here, there isn’t a thing in her nature that can be appealed to.”
“You’ve tried?”
“Of course I’ve tried. All she does is fly into a temper. She has an awful temper. I’ve given up trying because it just doesn’t work.”
“How bad is her temper?”
“Bad? It’s terrible. She hasn’t any restraint at all.”
Valcour stepped forward on felt. “Do you suppose it’s so ungovernable that she might shoot somebody she was mad at—if she happened to know of a gun that was handy?”
The idea was momentarily sobering. The flush had gone from Will’s cheeks and they were a little clammy looking.
“That’s a pretty funny question to ask,” he said. “What do you mean by it?”
“I’m sorry if you think it’s too personal.”
“Oh, well—I don’t know. She might.” Will felt a surge of sickish dizziness. The skin of his forehead was like a cold and sloppy wet rag. There was something terribly important he wanted to impress on his good friend Valcour…of course: “But there isn’t any gun in the house.”
Valcour’s head separated from its neck and then returned to it. With some difficulty Will established the phenomenon as a nod. Just the same, it was a disturbing sight and Will closed his eyes against it. Bright red worms of fire instantly dazzled across their lids and his head was a swing that carried him up and down…up and down…good, good friend…and friendship was founded on confidence, on truth…up and down…nasty feeling. Must stick to truth or friendship ceased… “There isn’t any gun in the house,” he repeated, and then added meticulously, “that Vera knows about.”
Up and down…up and down…up…up…
CHAPTER XI
Valcour stood up very softly. He stared down at Will. All stiffening seemed to have gone from Will’s neck, and his head lay loosely back against the chair. He wondered whether Will’s collar were too tight and might press against the swollen veins. He gently loosened the cravat and undid the collar button. Will’s fingers feebly brushed his hand away, but there was no change in tempo of the moist, sodden breathing.
He wanted to throw something across Will’s lap and down over Will’s legs. His fur coat was lying on the lounge in the library where Vera had left it. Dr. Harlan’s was there, too. Valcour went in and lifted them. They were both unwieldy, heavy. Underneath them was a folded woolen rug. He put the coats down on a chair. It might be better to get Will over here to the lounge if he could. But Will looked comfortable, and (it was like a conjuring trick) Vera was standing beside Will’s chair looking down at him.
Valcour stayed quite still and watched her. She must have come downstairs very silently and rather quickly while his back had been turned. He wondered whether she had been standing in the dim upper hallway and listening, her features contorted into heaven knows what sort of
emotional reactions. He wondered whether the sound of their voices could have carried that far intelligibly. He tried to interpret the expression in her attitude, but decided that there was none, and that the absence was caused by her distinct awareness of himself.
“If I throw this rug across your husband’s lap, Mrs. Sturm, do you think it will be all right to let him rest there for a while?” he said.
Vera did nothing so obvious as to start at the sound of his voice. She stopped looking down at Will, and looked at Valcour. He could feel her eyes even across the length of the room. She had wrapped a heavily embroidered long-fringed shawl about her dress. She wore it theatrically and suggested a revue. He speculated idly as she moved toward him whether she ever left her room without putting on fresh make-up. Her perfume preceded her by ten feet.
“Why did you let him get drunk?” she said.
Valcour disliked being bulldozed. “Is he?” The thin and careful line of her eyebrows became momentarily uneven. She arranged herself on the lounge, sinking deeply against its faded blue velvet cushions, her body hard and tight in silk against their softnesses.
“Got a cigarette?” she said.
He offered his case. Vera took one, and he lighted it for her.
“I’m sorry if you feel I’m responsible for your husband’s condition.”
“Oh, I don’t.” She waved the cigarette impatiently, its bright coral tip a point of fire in the dimness. “I’m a little nervous, that’s all.”
“Because he is intoxicated?”
Valcour sat down on the lounge’s farther end. Vera looked at him with studied laziness. She blew rings.
“Will’s different when he’s drunk,” she said.
“Everyone is, don’t you think?”
She expressed by a jerky shrug her continued objection to generalities that verged on smugness. “I can’t make him out very well when he’s sober, and much less when he’s drunk. I don’t like the way he looks at me when he’s drunk. I think he lets me see things that he hides at other times. I think he almost gets to the point of telling them.”
Valcour observed her with deepening interest. “Is he frequently in this condition?”
“Well, he’s been getting cock-eyed off and on for the past month, and I think Mr. Sturm knows it.”
“It would be pretty obvious to anybody, wouldn’t it?”
Vera looked critically at Will, who had collapsed farther into his chair.
“This is the worst yet,” she said. “He’s never passed out like this before. Usually you can only tell by the way he looks at you. He’ll stand in front of me and just look right at me. He’ll wait until I’m some place like in a corner and can’t walk off, or maybe I’m sitting in a chair. Then he’ll look.” Her manner became almost simple and natural as she added, “It scares me because I don’t know what it means. It isn’t hate. He isn’t even trying to tell me how much he despises me. It’s—I don’t know—it’s a dead look.”
Valcour could see the picture perfectly—Vera’s utter incomprehension of the business, so divorced in its nature from any attacks she had ever been subjected to before. Epithets, revilings, even a beating up; those things she could have understood and could undoubtedly have combated, come off (equally undoubtedly) victorious. But this… If Mars had discharged one of its fabulous forces against her the effect could have been no more demoralizing or complete. He made a vaguely sympathetic clicking noise with his tongue.
“When did he start drinking tonight?” he said.
“Right after dinner.”
“Oh! Before Alice Tribeau was shot then.” His emphasis on the “before” was very slender.
Vera’s body seemed a little harder, a little tighter. “What’s that got to do with it?” she said.
Valcour brushed deeper significances away with a gesture. “I was simply wondering whether the effect of the shooting had upset your husband to such an extent that he drank to steady his nerves.”
Vera’s eyes had stopped looking lazy. They were rather sharp, and she sized him up deliberately.
“Listen,” she said, “I know you didn’t mean anything like that.”
He refused to echo her tenseness.
“Really? What did I mean, then?”
There was a queer speculative look in her features, and she became obviously cunning.
“Dutch courage,” she said.
Valcour smiled. “All right. But for what?”
Her whisper was almost inarticulate in its impatience. “To pull the trigger—don’t you see?” She reached over and her moist hand closed hotly over his own. “At me…at me…”
It was too vehement. She had almost spat the word at him. Every bit of her attitude, every inch of her body, was saying to him: “See, now, I’m agreeing with you. You said I’d be shot at, and that was it. Will thought Alice was me. He got drunk so he’d have nerve enough to shoot that gun at me.”
Valcour didn’t even pretend to himself that he could follow the intricacies of her intrigues, whatever she expected to gain by this abrupt about face, this jettisoning of her former theory (assertion, almost) that it was the milk man who had shot Alice Tribeau after a lovers’ quarrel. But one thing he did know: Vera was a badly frightened woman.
“Have you any animals on this place—dogs, cats, livestock?” he asked suddenly.
“No.” She couldn’t see what he was driving at. “What’s the idea?”
Valcour shrugged. “Curiosity. Most people around here keep a dog, and almost everybody has a cat for rats and mice.”
Vera hoped he wasn’t getting conversational. “Mr. Sturm doesn’t like animals,” she said.
“I should think you’d be overrun with mice. What do you use to keep them in check?”
“Traps.”
“And there is no livestock?”
Vera’s nerves were jumpy and in no condition for suffering inanities. “There isn’t an animal on the place.” she said. “Shall we shift to the weather?”
Valcour smiled, and then said very slowly, “I’m still trying to figure out, Mrs. Sturm, what possible use there could have been for that bottle of poison.”
CHAPTER XII
Whatever pool of private worry she had been immersed in, Vera was jerked from it briskly. Her fingers became hot, tight little clamps about Valcour’s hand, and she compelled him to stare back at her.
“Who said anything about a bottle of poison?” she said.
He disengaged the hand she was holding, reached down, and picked up her cigarette. It had started a smolder on the rug. He pressed the spot with the toe of his shoe and crushed the cigarette in a tray. Then he leaned back and continued the subject casually.
“Don’t you know?”
Her voice started to shrill a little. “Why put it up to me? How should I know? Why is it always me?”
“Don’t let me alarm you, Mrs. Sturm.”
“Alarm? I should get alarmed! Say, why don’t you get this business straight in your head? I’m the sap that things are meant to happen to. And anyway”—her tone was thick with resentfulness as she threw any attempt at control overboard; she looked exceedingly ugly—“just where do you think you’re getting off? Who asked you to butt in?”
“Mrs. Sturm—”
“You came barging in here on a tin shield just because a hired girl’s been shot at accidental, and we should turn ourselves inside out so you can give us the once-over like so many bums. I guess you don’t know my position. I’m a lady—I’m a married lady—I’m a—” Incoherence choked her. She started to cry. She leaned forward until she settled against his shoulder, her fingers squeezing his other shoulder, and her sleek, scented hair was a small pot of fire near his chin.
“Mrs. Sturm!”
“Don’t listen to me. I can’t help it.” Her voice was muffled against the tweed sleeve. “I should be careful of
what I say, Mr. Valcour, but for a year I’ve been walking on eggs. Every step I took, Mr. Valcour, I’ve been walking on eggs.” She drew a handkerchief from his pocket, used it, replaced it. She sat up and stared through wet lashes. “I can’t help my temper,” she said.
It was her nearest approach to an apology. Vera was calmer, almost refreshed. She busied herself with a vanity case and a lipstick. Her lips offered a geranium smile. “There!” she said. The smile was very final. It said: “Now we’ve finished with all that tiresome business about a bottle of poison.”
Westminster chimes were sounding again. Their effortless and unhurried tones swam with indolent beauty to the farthest barriers of the silent house. Then, with an energetic whim, the clock struck one. The sound lingered, faded, was absorbed entirely, and was supplanted by the moist and slightly labored breathing of Will Sturm.
“Got another cigarette, Mr. Valcour? Thanks.”
“Surely you know what I’m trying to do, Mrs. Sturm?”
He cupped the flame of the match close to her lips.
“Sure I do. Thanks. You’re only doing your duty, and you’re trying to help us.”
Vera took his handkerchief again for a final wipe and then tucked it back, patting the pocket. He felt that the pocket was a negligible barrier; it was his chest she was patting. He began to wish he had selected a chair rather than the lounge.
“I do want to help, Mrs. Sturm, all of you. Even,” he added softly, “the person who fired that shot. But I cannot work in darkness; in darkness, and in fog.”
Vera, with her passion for literalness, took a glance at the lights. They glowed back at her reassuringly.
“I’m sure we’ve done all we can to help you, Mr. Valcour. Why not sleep on it? Everyone’s brain is so much clearer in the morning, don’t you think? I know mine is.”
“I doubt if I could rest, Mrs. Sturm. It would bother me—keep me awake.”
“Couldn’t you just put it all out of your mind for the night?”
Valcour shook his head. “I’d still be wondering whether all of the poison had been poured down the sink.”