Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  A buoy came out of the darkness ahead. He could make out the white deposits the seagulls had left on it, and the number: 35A. It was the buoy off Polling Creek. He remembered, suddenly, a slight snub-nosed girl running lightly across the grass in the sunshine.

  Changing course, he told himself that he was a fool and that she would probably be startled and certainly very puzzled at having a strange, half-soaked young man drop in on her by water in the middle of the night. Her father would be even more puzzled. They would probably think he was delirious and insist on driving him home and getting him a doctor. He grinned at the thought. Suddenly he was almost happy.

  At the mouth of Polling Creek a reedy spit made a shadow on the water, reaching out from the shore to the right as he came in; and from this spit, he knew, a long submerged sandbar extended a hundred yards toward the steep dark bank of the opposite shore, half closing the entrance. But in the small centerboard boat he did not have to worry about the depth of the water. He coasted in with the wind aft, gradually losing it as the shores enveloped him. The centerboard struck bottom, popped up in its trunk, bounced a few times while the reeds slid past to starboard, and dropped down again. Safe in deep water, he jibed the sails over and stood up toward the first dock in the cove ahead, where the trees on the high bank seemed to overhang the shore. There was a light in the cottage behind the trees.

  He luffed, and a small gust of wind reached into the creek to rattle the sails loudly; then he had them down on deck. The momentum carried the boat alongside the dock. He thought it was a pretty neat landing.

  He tied up astern of a small outboard runabout, the large motor of which was tilted clear of the water and secured to the boat and the dock with a heavy padlocked chain.

  As he climbed stiffly to the dock he heard a screen door slam in the cottage above. He stood waiting, feeling gingerly of the seat of his slacks, wet with the spray that had run along the deck. The girl came to the head of the stairs above him and stood looking down at him. She was still wearing the embroidered black peasant skirt and the thin white blouse that she had worn earlier in the day at Sand Point, and the wind blew the full skirt against her legs as she stood there.

  It gave him a curious feeling to see her waiting for him up there, alone, as if she had known he was coming. It seemed as if both of them had known he would come. He limped along the dock toward the stairs. The cramped quarters of the cockpit had made his leg quite painful, and he could feel a dozen bruises he had thought to be healed. She waited for him at the head of the stairs in the moonlight. She did not move at all, except once to brush at a strand of her hair blown across her face by the wind, until he reached her. Then she stepped back to let him up.

  “Isn’t it rather late to be out sailing, Mr. Phillips?” she asked, smiling.

  He was catching his breath from the climb and did not answer. It made him feel awkward to be so weak. He had felt no lack of strength while he was sailing, but now he felt drained and empty, and he wanted to sit down.

  The girl’s face became worried. “Should you go out alone like that, so soon after…? I mean, if anything happened, you wouldn’t be able to swim very far…”

  “I’ve never drowned yet,” he said.”

  “I heard your sails,” she said. “Dad’s gone to Washington. I…” She laughed. “… Sometimes I get to listening when I’m here alone.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Something in his voice made her glance at him quickly. “Is anything the matter?”

  He looked down at her face in the moonlight and thought that it was strange the number of different ways that girls had of being attractive. He liked the incongruity between the snub-nosed face and the slender, leggy figure; snub-nosed girls were generally quite small and often plump.

  He could not seem to catch his breath completely, and he reached out to support himself by one of the two-by-fours of the stairway railing. A growing roaring in his ears became stronger than the sound of the wind in the trees around them; and suddenly he was desperately frightened at the way his head hurt, as if there were something wrong with it.

  He looked at the girl again and her face did not look the same; it had a blunt, blurred, animal-like quality, and there was something sinuous and boneless in the way she moved, coming toward him. He told himself that it was part of going crazy to imagine everyone against you, but he drew back instinctively. In his mind, as his foot slipped, he saw the precipitous stairs behind him; then he was falling.

  The girl caught his arm. He felt himself half turned in the air and he sat down heavily on the top step.

  “Don’t…” Shirley Carlson was saying breathlessly. “Don’t try to get up. Just sit there for a moment…”

  He could feel her hand still gripping his arm. He could not bring himself to look at her face as she kneeled beside him. In the moonlight he could see her shoulders and the very fresh clean straps of her undergarments through the almost transparent material of her blouse; but they looked innocent and unprovocative.

  She rose abruptly and put her hands under his armpits and tried to lift him back from the stairs. She was not nearly strong enough, and suddenly he found himself laughing.

  “Cut it out,” he gasped. “Cut it out. I’m ticklish…” He turned his head to look up at her as she let him go. Her face was quite all right again, but it looked almost angry.

  “You were afraid of me!” she said accusingly. “You thought I was going to push you!”

  He felt himself flush, and he tried to rise. She took his arm quickly.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” When he nodded, she went on breathlessly, “You did. I could see it in your face. You thought…”

  He did not deny it. “I’m sorry. Things have been a little mixed up lately.”

  “I’m going to take you up to the house,” Shirley Carlson said. “And when you feel all right I’m going to drive you home…”

  “I thought you said your father had gone to Washington…”

  Suddenly he was flushing again, and she had turned to look at him. He could see the quick hurt and anger in her face.

  She said quietly, “Yes, but he didn’t take the car, Mr. Phillips. Some people down the road drove him in their car.” He could see her mouth tremble as she tried to smile. “Would you care to search the premises?” He did not say anything. She went on, “I wish I knew what that sheriff man had told you about me.”

  He frowned. “He didn’t say anything about you.”

  “Well, somebody must have said something. Every time we meet you accuse me of something, Mr. Phillips. It’s true I did lie about what I saw that night and you were very smart to catch me at it, but really, my father isn’t hiding in the bushes so if you came here to kill me with that gun…”

  His hand went to his waist. He had forgotten all about the weapon but it was still there. The girl faced him stiffly.

  “Yes, it’s rather obvious, isn’t it? And I’m quite alone. So if you want to kill me because it was my fault that your wife…”

  “Shut up!” he whispered. He could feel himself trembling as if he had been cold as long as he could remember. He could see the girl watching him steadily, and the look in her eyes was horribly familiar, because he had seen the same look in the eyes of Christine Wells. She was afraid of him.

  “Oh, it was my fault,” the girl whispered. “I didn’t mean it, but it was my fault…”

  “Damn it, shut up!” He licked his lips. “Do I look like a murderer? You’re the second person tonight…” He saw her eyes widen, and he laughed. “Oh, no. I haven’t killed anybody. She accused me of murdering Janice. My wife.” Then he said very quickly, “After she’d gone, I had a nightmare and I woke up scared stiff and the gun… Then I had to get out of the house and I just sort of brought it along. I’d have left it in the boat if I’d remembered about it.”

  He saw the fear gradually go out of her eyes as she studied his face. She laughed a little uncertainly.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t fol
low all that, Mr. Phillips. But I obviously can’t let you out in that boat again tonight. You’d better come up to the house and have something to eat, and then I’ll drive you home. You can come back for your boat some other time.”

  He said, “Well, if you’re going to adopt me, you might as well call me Hugh.”

  IX

  Inside the cottage the furniture was varnished maple, scratched and chipped by generations of summer residents. The rugs were threadbare and the walls had not been papered since before the war. Someone at some time, not recently, had painted over the paper with pale green paint of the kind you mix with water. There was a half-packed suitcase on the living-room davenport and another visible, on the bed, through the open bedroom door.

  “You’re leaving?” Phillips asked, turning to look at the girl, who had stopped by the mirror in the small hallway to smooth her hair.

  She said, “Yes, Dad’s almost through in Washington. We’re starting back for St. Louis in the morning.”

  It disturbed him to think of her leaving. He stood waiting in the middle of the living room, feeling faintly embarrassed, as if they were lovers who had come down to this place to spend, for the first time, a weekend together. It was getting to be quite late at night and she was a very attractive girl. He watched her pat the hair at her temples and settle it into place with a small shake of her head.

  “What business is your father in?” he asked.

  “Filters,” she said. “Oil filters, you know, for cars. He had a contract with the government during the war and now he’s all wound up in red tape… You know how things are in Washington.” She turned from the mirror to smile at Phillips. “I don’t know anything about it, really. I just came down to keep house for him. He wanted to try to sneak in a little vacation while he was seeing people, that’s why we took this place instead of staying in Washington.” She looked at the dingy room and smiled again. “Isn’t it awful?”

  “Are you glad or sorry to be leaving?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s been nice,” she said, coming forward. She laughed at the tone of her voice. “I mean, it gets a little lonely in a place like this when you don’t know anybody…” Then, as if she had said more than she had intended, she walked quickly to the davenport, and closed the suitcase, waving him back. “Please sit down. It isn’t heavy.”

  “You know,” he said, “tonight makes the second time you’ve saved my life.”

  He heard her laugh in the bedroom. “I do make a habit of it, don’t I?” She came out, closing the door behind her. “You look chilly. Why don’t you light the fire while I get something in the kitchen… Do you take coffee?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I didn’t know. Some people won’t take it at night. They think it keeps them awake…” She stood with her back to the door, frowning a little. At last she smiled. “I was just trying to think whether you’d said anything about being hungry.”

  He heard himself burst into a loud spontaneous laugh and he knew that he felt better than he had for a long time. She was laughing with him.

  “Perhaps I just assumed it,” she said at last. “But you are, aren’t you? My mother used to say that…” She hesitated and glanced at him quickly, almost shyly, “… that if you didn’t know what to do with a man you could always feed him… I’ll be right back.”

  He watched her flee from the room, and laughed, and turned to the fireplace. When the paper was alight he backed away and watched the fire spread to the kindling with a growing roar. He stripped off his damp coat and felt the heat through his shirtsleeves. He hung the coat over the back of a chair to dry and took the gun from his belt and laid it on the mantelpiece. Shirley Carlson came into the room with a large tray which she set on the end table by the davenport. She sat down beside it.

  “Dad ought to be getting back pretty soon,” she said. “I always fix him a snack when he gets home. I hope you like tuna-fish salad. Please sit down. Maybe you’d like something to drink. I didn’t think to ask…”

  He said, a little stiffly, “It’s getting pretty late. I guess I should be getting home.”

  She looked up, startled. After a moment she smiled. “I’m sorry. Was I acting…?”

  “Just a little,” he said. “As if you were telling yourself firmly that the crazy man wasn’t going to hurt you as long as you humored him.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” She laughed. “Please sit down, Hugh. It’s just that, well, out in St. Louis we’ve kind of got in the habit of leaving our shootin’ arns home when we go visiting.” She brushed back her hair and leaned back against the davenport cushions, looking up at him. She said frankly, “I mean, I’m not very brave, and this place gives me the creeps, anyway, if you want to know; and when a strange sailboat comes gliding up to the dock in the middle of the night and the fellow in it is carrying a gun and thinks I want to shove him down a flight of stairs and talks about being accused of murder… Well, it’s not very reassuring to an innocent maiden from the Middle West, Hugh.”

  He drew a large chair within reach and sat down. She gave him a plate and poured a cup of coffee for him.

  “Do you want to tell me?” she murmured. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “Would you feel better if I left?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said, laughing a little. “I would feel safer.” He frowned and she touched his knee fleetingly. “Don’t worry about it. Do you take cream or sugar?”

  “Both,” he said. “… That’s plenty.”

  He took the cup and looked up to see her eyes studying his face gravely.

  “Who thinks you’re a murderer, Hugh?” she asked. “Why should anybody think you’d killed your wife? After all, it was obviously an accident…”

  He opened his mouth to tell her about the truck-driver and the wrench and the words would not come. He had told the story twice and neither time had the reception been notably successful. He found that he did not want to tell this girl a story that he was not sure of, himself, any longer.

  “You’ve been reading too many detective stories,” he said. “In real life nobody pays much attention to what actually happened, because only those who saw it can be sure it actually happened. I mean, she read in the papers that Janice had been killed. She didn’t see it happen. All she knows is that I said it happened. You said it happened, but she doesn’t know you. You’re just a name to her. The police say it happened but you know the cops, they’re always being fooled. All she really knows is that Jan is dead.”

  “This is a girl you know?”

  Phillips glanced up quickly. “Oh. Sorry. Yes, her name’s Christine Wells. I’ve known her all my life.”

  “You’re in love with her?” Shirley Carlson asked, smiling.

  He laughed. “Obvious question. No, I was once. I was going to marry her. Then I married Jan instead… The night she was killed, Jan accused Chris and me of, well, you can fill it in. Jan was a little tight and it was a nasty scene. There wasn’t any truth in what she was saying. I was pretty sore at her for making a fool of herself like that. Chris must have seen that. The next morning she hears that Jan got killed on the way home.”

  Shirley frowned thoughtfully. “There must be more to it than that. Nobody would come out and accuse somebody they had known for a long time…”

  “Well, everybody knew we hadn’t been getting along. And I acted like a damn fool. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I…” He grimaced and dug at the plate on his knee, “… that I was glad she was dead,” he said, without looking up.

  “Oh!”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to have to say, isn’t it? You’re the first person I’ve said it to.”

  The girl looked up slowly. Her eyes were very wide and shocked. “It must have been dreadful for you when you realized it.”

  “I didn’t realize it until Chris accused me… But I did act like a damn fool, Shirley. I didn’t have to go around pretending to be broken-hearted… I hope you don’t mind my unloading all this on you. It must seem kin
d of funny…”

  “No,” she said. “No. It doesn’t. At all.” She shook her head minutely. Then she smiled at him. “But it should, shouldn’t it?”

  “I hope your dad won’t think I…” He glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece and saw the gun and grimaced. He set his plate aside, rose, took the gun down and put it on the chair that held his coat, hiding it under a fold of the coat. “Anyway,” he said, returning, “I was acting kind of funny and it was I who suggested that it might be murder.”

  “Hugh!”

  He looked at her bleakly. “I can’t tell you exactly… I had reasons… I’m not quite sure…” He gulped his coffee. “But you can see that Chris might put things together that way, once I had mentioned murder…”

  “But why?” She was watching him breathlessly, almost frightened again. “Why should you think…?”

  Suddenly he saw things very clearly. He saw that the truck-driver, even without a wrench in his hand, was still a very questionable figure. He saw that even if he, Hugh Phillips, had never seen anything between the time the car went over and the time he woke up in the hospital, he would still, now, have had to face the fact that Janice might have been murdered. Because it was straining coincidence to the bounds of reason to believe that a girl who had been involved in one murder, and who had later acquired a large sum of money in some way that she had not wanted anybody to know about, should shortly thereafter die accidentally under circumstances that were not ordinary.

  After all, under ordinary circumstances, the truck-driver would not have fled. Truck-drivers were respectable men who knew the laws better than ordinary drivers; they were used to seeing highway accidents; they were not especially noted for being easily shocked into panic. Better than most drivers, they knew the penalties for leaving the scene of an accident. Furthermore, better than most drivers, they knew where you should and should not park. Regardless of what Hugh Phillips had or had not seen later, he had certainly seen a large van standing in the center of the east-bound lane of the Washington-Annapolis highway just around a blind curve where no man with good sense would have left it.