His weary jaw set stubbornly.
"That's all that I—or any of us—will have to say."
The photographers flashed a final bulb at his set face, and began packing their equipment. The radio man coiled up his cable and took down his microphone. The newsmen scattered reluctantly, to file their stories of an obscure and unresolved event.
Barbee looked for April Bell and glimpsed her entering the terminal building. She had slipped away, he supposed, to telephone her story to a rewrite man on the Call. But Barbee's own deadline was midnight, for the early edition of the Star. He still had time to try to solve the riddle he felt in Mondrick's death.
He pushed impulsively forward to seize Sam Quain's arm. The tall explorer recoiled from his unexpected touch with a little gasping cry, and then manufactured a tortured grimace of a smile. Naturally he was nervous after that tragic ordeal. Barbee led him aside, toward the tail of the huge silent plane.
"What's the matter, Sam?" he demanded huskily. "Your deflation of the suspense was good—but not good enough. Old Mondrick's build-up rang true. I know you were all scared spitless. What is it you're afraid of?"
Dark and wild, Sam Quain's blue eyes looked into his. They searched him, Barbee thought, as penetratingly as if to discover and unveil some monstrous enemy. Sam Quain shivered, hunching his wide shoulders in the tight borrowed coat, yet his patient, weary voice seemed calm enough.
"We were all afraid of exactly what happened," he insisted. "We all knew Dr. Mondrick was ill. We had to climb over a cold front on the flight here from the coast, and the altitude must have strained his bad heart. He insisted on making his statement here and now— probably just because he knew his time was nearly up."
Barbee shook his head.
"That makes sense—almost," he said slowly. "But asthmatic attacks aren't commonly fatal, nor heart attacks predictable. I can't help believing you were all afraid of something else." He caught Quain's arm. "Can't you trust me, Sam? Aren't we still friends?"
"Don't be a fool, Will." A quivering urgency began to mar Quain's forced calm. I don't think Dr. Mondrick quite trusted you. There were few he did trust. But of course we're still friends."
He shrugged uneasily, and his hunted eyes fled to the locked box with Spivak and Chittum tautly alert beside it.
"Now I must go, Will. Too many things to do. We must arrange about Dr. Mondrick's body, and take care of the box, and get the rest of our freight hauled out to the Foundation." He shucked off the tight coat, shivering. "Thanks, Will. You need it, and I had a coat on the plane. Excuse me now."
Barbee accepted the topcoat, urging: "Take time to see Nora—you know she's here to meet you, with little Pat." He nodded toward the lights of the terminal building. "Old Ben's over there, to see Rex, and the Spivaks came all the way from Brooklyn to meet Nick." Bewilderment echoed in his voice. "What's the matter, Sam? Can't you take a moment to meet your own families?"
Quain's eyes turned dark, as if with agony.
"We'll see them when we can, Will." He paused to find a worn leather coat in the pile of battered luggage and stout wooden crates unloaded from the transport. "My God, Will!" he whispered hoarsely. "Don't you think we're human? It's two years since I've seen my wife and baby—but we must take care of Dr. Mondrick's box."
Nervously impatient, he started to turn.
"Hold on, Sam." Barbee caught his arm again. "Just one more question." He dropped his voice, too low for the group about the ambulance to hear, or the men unloading the plane. "What has a cat to do with Mondrick's death?"
"Huh?" He felt Quain's arm jerk. "What cat?"
"That's what I want to know."
Quain's sick face turned very pale.
"I heard him whisper—when he was dying—but I saw no cat.
"But why, Sam?" Barbee insisted. "What would a cat matter?"
Quain's eyes searched him, narrowed and strange.
"Dr. Mondrick's asthma was due to an allergy," Quain muttered huskily. "An allergy to cat fur—he took sensitivity tests which proved that. He couldn't go in a room where a cat had been kept without getting an attack."
The frightened man caught his breath.
"Will, have you seen a cat here?"
"Yes." Barbee nodded. "A black kitten—"
He felt Sam Quain stiffen and saw April Bell coming back from the terminal building. The lights caught her red hair, and she looked strong and quick and graceful as some prowling jungle cat—he wondered why that comparison struck his mind. Her dark warm eyes found Barbee, and she smiled gaily.
"Where?" Sam Quain was whispering urgently. "Where was any kitten?"
Barbee looked at April Bell's long eyes, and something decided him not to tell Sam Quain that she had brought the kitten. Something about her stirred and changed him, in ways he didn't want to define. In a lowered, hasty voice, he finished lamely: "Somewhere about the building yonder, just before the planes came in. I didn't notice where it went."
Quain's narrowed eyes seemed hard with suspicion. He opened his mouth as if to ask some other question, and closed it with a gulp when he saw April Bell beside them. It seemed to Barbee that he crouched a little, like a fighting man ready for a dreaded opponent.
"So you're Mr. Quain!" the girl cooed softly. "I want to ask you just one thing, if you please—for the Clarendon Call. What have you got in that green box?" Her long eyes glanced eagerly at the iron-strapped chest and the two wary men on guard beside it. "A bushel of diamonds? Blueprints for an atom bomb?"
Poised like a boxer on the balls of his feet, Sam Quain said softly: "Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid. Nothing that would interest newspaper readers, I'm sure. Nothing you'd bother picking up on the street. Just a few old bones. A few odds and ends of rubbish, broken and thrown away before man's history dawned."
She laughed at him gently.
"Please, Mr. Quain," she protested. "If your box has no value, then why—"
"Excuse me," Sam Quain rapped abruptly. The girl caught his arm, but he shrugged himself free and strode away, without looking back, to join the two men beside the wooden strongbox.
Quain murmured something to one of the officers, gesturing at the anxious people still waiting by the terminal building. Barbee stood aside with April Bell, watching as old Ben Chittum and the Spivaks and Nora Quain came back to the transport. The spry old man shook his handsome grandson's hand. Stout Mama Spivak sobbed in the arms of her thin, spectacled Nick, and Papa Spivak hugged them both.
Sam Quain waited for Nora by the wooden chest. He kissed her hungrily and lifted little Pat in his arms. The child was laughing now. She called for her father's handkerchief and scrubbed furiously at the tearstains under her eyes. Nora tried to draw her husband away, but he sat down firmly on the green box and took the child on his knee.
Mama Spivak, with both arms around her son, abruptly began wailing piercingly.
"Maybe there's nothing in that box, except what he said," April Bell purred in Barbee's ear. "But they would all of them give their own lives, along with old Mondrick's, just to protect it." Her long eyes peered off into the gloom above the field lights. "Wouldn't it be funny," she whispered faintly, "if they did?"
"But not very amusing," Barbee muttered.
Something made him shiver again. Perhaps he had got chilled, while Quain had his coat. He drew a little away from the girl because suddenly he didn't want to touch that sleek white fur. He couldn't help wondering about the kitten. There was a slight, uncomfortable possibility that this red-haired girl was an extremely adroit murderess.
Barbee didn't like that word. He had seen female criminals enough, on the police court beat, and none had ever looked quite so fresh and bright as April Bell. But now a man was dead, killed by the airborne protein molecules from a kitten's fur as efficiently as if a strangler's cord had done it; and this tall, alluring redhead was responsible for the presence of the kitten.
Barbee was startled, when he looked automatically for the snakeskin bag in which she had carried t
he kitten, to see that it was gone. The girl seemed to follow his eyes. Her own turned dark again, and her face seemed pale as the fur she wore.
"My bag!" She spread her empty, graceful hands. "Must have mislaid it, in all the excitement of filing my story. It's one that Aunt Agatha gave me, and I simply must find it. There's a family heirloom in it—a white jade pin. Will you help me look, Barbee?"
Barbee went with her to look where the departing ambulance had stood, and then about the telephone booths in the waiting room. He wasn't very much surprised, somehow, when they found no trace of the lost bag. April Bell was simply too efficient and intensely awake to mislay anything. At last she glanced at a diamond-crusted watch.
"Let's give it up, Barbee," she cooed, without visible regret. "Thanks awfully, but perhaps I didn't have it anyhow—Aunt Agatha probably picked it up without thinking when I gave little Fifi back to her."
Barbee tried not to lift his eyebrows, but he still suspected Aunt Agatha to be entirely imaginary. He remembered seeing the bag, savagely twisted in the girl's long fingers as old Mondrick lay struggling on the ground, but he didn't say so. He didn't understand April Bell.
"Thanks, Barbee," she said. "Now I've got to phone the desk again. Forgive me if I scoop you."
"'For the whole truth, read the Star.'" Barbee quoted his paper's slogan, grinning. "I still have till midnight to find out what they brought back in that green box, and why old Mondrick died when he did." His grin sobered, and something made him gulp. "Shall I—may I see you again?"
He waited painfully for her to answer, staring at her sleek white coat. He wanted desperately to see her again—was it because he was a little afraid she had murdered Mondrick, he wondered, or because he hoped very much that she hadn't? For a moment, a little frown of puzzlement creased her smooth forehead. He breathed again when she smiled.
"If you like, Barbee." Her voice was all velvet and moonbeams. "When?"
"For dinner—tonight?" Barbee tried not to seem too breathless. "Would nine be too late? Right now I want to find out what Sam Quain and Company are going to do with that mysterious box, and then I must write my story."
"Nine isn't late," she cooed. "I love the night. And I too must watch that box."
Dark again, her long greenish eyes stared at the three weary men, carefully loading the heavy wooden chest into Dr. Bennett's car. The little group of relatives stood back to watch, puzzled and distressed. Barbee touched April Bell's white fur, and shivered in the icy wind.
"At nine?" he said huskily. "Where shall I meet you?"
April Bell smiled abruptly, with a quizzical lift of her penciled brows.
"Tonight, Barbee?" she purred. "Nora will think you've lost your head."
"Perhaps I have." He touched the snowy fur, and tried not to shiver again. "All this is quite a jolt to me —Rowena Mondrick is still a friend of mine, even since her husband fell out with me. I do feel upset, but Sam Quain will take care of everything. I hope you'll decide to dine with me, April."
I hope you'll tell me, he added silently, why you brought that black kitten here, and why you felt it necessary to invent Aunt Agatha, and whether you had any reason to desire Dr. Mondrick's death. Something made him gulp again, and he waited hopefully.
"If I can manage." Her white teeth smiled. "Now I must run—I have to call the city desk, and then I'll ask Aunt Agatha."
She did run—as gracefully, he thought, as some creature never tamed. He watched her to the phone booth, aware of a vague surprise that any woman could stir him so. The caress of her liquid voice lingered in his mind. He filled his lungs and drew down his chin and flexed his fingers. Suddenly he wished he had drunk less whisky and kept himself more fit. He could see the gleam of her white fur inside the lighted booth. He shivered again; perhaps he was taking cold. Resolutely, he turned away. How would it make him feel, he wondered, if he should discover that April Bell really were a murderess?
Quain and his companions had taken the wooden box away in Dr. Bennett's car. Nora and the others, left behind, were trailing despondently back through the terminal building. Mama Spivak was still wailing thinly, with Papa trying clumsily to console her.
"It's all right, Mama." The little tailor patted the quivering bulges of her shoulder. "Nickie should come back to Brooklyn with us, when he has such great things to do for the Foundation? He surely knows how you cleaned and cooked for him till the whole flat is shining and rich with good smells. He knows his round-trip fare is paid already, but the love is what matters. Don't cry, Mama."
"I should mind the food?" she sobbed. "The cleaning? Even the fare to Brooklyn? No, Papa. It's that awful thing that was buried in that desert. That old, bad thing they brought back in that green box—the thing my Nickie won't whisper its name, even!"
Her shuddering arms clung to the tiny tailor.
"I'm afraid yet, Papa!" she wailed. "That thing they took to Sam's house in the box, it killed poor Dr. Mondrick. I'm afraid it will get Sam and Nora yet. I'm afraid it will take our own little Nickie, too!"
"Please, Mama." Papa Spivak tried to laugh at her. "Nickie says you're just an old silly."
His laugh wasn't successful.
Nora Quain carried little Pat, holding the child against her with a frightened-seeming tightness. Nora's face looked empty with distress, and she didn't see Barbee. Blinking, Pat was trying to smooth Nora's yellow hair. Barbee heard the child urge softly: "Now, Mother—don't you cry!"
The hurt on old Ben Chittum's dried-up face moved Barbee to call impulsively: "Come along with me, Ben —I'll drive you back to town."
"Thanks, Will, but I'm okay." The old man managed a stiff little grin. "Don't you worry about me. I know Rex will come on out to see me when they get that box safe to Sam's place. Of course I'm disappointed, but I'll be okay. Hell, I'm spry as a spring lamb!"
Barbee glanced back to be sure that April Bell was still in the telephone booth, and followed a hunch. He walked quickly to the big trash can behind the terminal building and fumbled under discarded newspapers and candy wrappers and a crushed straw hat.
It was the same sort of hunch that had led him to a hundred news stories—the sort of intuition, arising from nowhere and yet oddly certain, which Preston Troy called the essential equipment of the good reporter. The nose for news. Once he had mentioned it to Dr. Glenn, and that suave psychiatrist told him that the faculty was nothing more than logical reasoning, working below the level of his conscious mind. Glenn's glib explanation didn't quite satisfy him, but he had come to trust his hunches.
Under the broken hat, he found the snakeskin bag.
Two ends of red ribbon fluttered beside the clasp, crushed and twisted as if they had been wrapped around straining fingers. Barbee snapped open the bag. Inside was the small, limp body of Aunt Agatha's black kitten.
The red ribbon, tied in a slip knot, was drawn into a noose so tight it had almost cut off the little swollen head. The pink mouth was open, the tiny tongue exposed, the blue eyes glazed and bulging. The kitten had been expertly garroted. A single drop of blood on the white silk lining of the bag led Barbee to something else.
Stirring the lax little body with his forefinger, he found something hard and white buried in the tangled black fur. He pulled it carefully away and whistled silently as he turned it under the light from the building. It was April Bell's lost heirloom—that white jade pin. The ornamental part was carved into a little running wolf, set with a polished eye of green malachite. The work was very delicate and true—the tiny wolf looked as slim and graceful, he thought, as April Bell herself.
The clasp behind it was open, and the strong steel pin had been thrust into the kitten's body. A drop of dark blood followed when he drew it out. The point, he thought, must have pierced the kitten's heart.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Witch Child
Barbee remembered a little he had learned long ago in Dr. Mondrick's classes about the theory and practice of magic among primitive mankind, but he was no student of wh
at are termed the occult sciences. That wasn't necessary. The black kitten and the aged scholar had both died at the same time, in precisely the same way. April Bell must have killed the kitten. Had she thereby —ignoring whatever part in Dr. Mondrick's death might be due to that fashionable new biochemical magic called allergy—intended murder? Barbee believed she had.
But what was he to do about it? His first impulse was to carry the snakeskin bag and its disquieting contents out to Sam Quain's house—perhaps he could use it for a wedge, to get a glimpse inside that guarded wooden coffer. But he dropped the idea. Witchcraft might be a fruitful subject for the technical monographs of such scholars as Mondrick, but Sam Quain would only laugh, he felt, at any suggestion of a chic modern witch with penciled brows and enameled nails practicing her black arts in a live American town. Sam's distant curtness had annoyed him, besides—and he felt a curious reluctance to get April Bell involved.
Perhaps she hadn't killed little Fifi, after all—one of the small boys he had seen watching the airliner come in would be a more likely assassin. Perhaps her Aunt Agatha actually existed. Anyhow, if she decided to dine with him, he might learn a little more about her. Somehow, he knew he had to end the shocked uncertainty that tortured him.
His mind was made up. He wiped the blood from that steel point on the lining of the bag and dropped the little jade wolf in his coat pocket. He closed the snakeskin bag again and buried it once more under the broken straw hat. Briefly he wondered what the refuse collectors would think if they happened to salvage the bag, and supposed they were used to such minor mysteries.
The bitter wind, as he hurried back around the bright-lit building, set him to shivering again. The cloudy night seemed suddenly darker. He mopped his sweaty hands, and heard a ripping sound and looked down to see that he had torn his handkerchief across.
He strode eagerly to meet April Bell in the waiting room when she came out of the telephone booth. Her face looked flushed—perhaps only from the excitement of completing her first big assignment for the Call. Certainly she didn't look like a murderess. Yet he still had to find out why she had brought the black kitten here, and whether she had really stabbed and strangled it in a magical effort to stop the heart and breath of Dr. Mondrick.
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