Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  The barn was in complete darkness. Vaguely, I too was worried by the thought of Janie sitting there all this time in the darkness alone. We came to the double doors. Vic pushed them open with unnecessary violence and called into the black interior:

  “Janie.”

  And then: “Janie. Are you here?”

  There was no answer. Vic was ahead of me. I heard him stumble over something and curse. Then he found a switch, and the whole huge room leaped into light.

  At first I saw nothing—nothing unusual, that is. I saw the dowdy sofas and chairs still drawn up in lines before the musicians’ dais. I saw Perdita’s cello propped grotesquely on the bare boards, with Rosalind’s viola at its side. Everything was the way it had been when Cobb and I left the place.

  Vic was ahead of me.

  “Janie,” he called again.

  He crossed past a high-backed davenport toward the corner where the radio-recording machine stood. He was striding; then suddenly he stopped. He stared down. I could see his face, see the color go from his cheeks and the horror jump into his eyes.

  “God!” he said.

  I ran to his side. I saw a little rickety table. There was an empty glass on it. Then my gaze shifted down, and I saw what Vic had seen.

  Janie Hilton was lying on her back along the faded carpet. Her eyes were open and staring. Her arms were sprawled above her head, and her small hands protruded from the sleeves of the sweater, clenched into fists as tight as the claws of a bird.

  I looked.

  I did not have to look again to know that she was dead.

  XVIII

  Janie Hilton lay there. Her white face stared up, with the faded sentimental rose design of the carpet as a background. The corners of her mouth were dragged down in a stiff smirk; her little body was rigid and twisted by the convulsion which had obviously preceded death. I could only think of the most obvious things. I thought of cyanide, of Lisl Stahl’s compounds. Nanny’s old face rose in my mind; and Dr. Hilton’s. One, two, three dead faces.

  Three deaths by cyanide.

  A memory came of Janie Hilton’s voice, infinitely sad and choked with sobs, as I had heard it in the darkness of this room hardly more than an hour ago. With a kind of panic I realized she had sent me away then not because she wanted to be alone but because she had decided to kill herself.

  That was the way everything seemed to happen in this case. I had warned Dr. Hilton of his danger while he actually held the flute case in his hand, and I had not known that inside the case was the instrument of death. Chance had taken me to the barn a few minutes before Janie’s death, and I had not realized what was on the verge of happening.

  I felt a sudden horror of that genteel room with its musical instruments tumbled on the dais and its rows of chairs and davenports drawn up in front of the platform in respectful obeisance to culture.

  My eyes focused gradually on the single glass which stood on the rickety table near the body. I bent to examine it. It contained a quarter inch of colorless liquid, presumably water. That was how she had done it, of course. She had poured some of Dr. Stahl’s odorless, deadly compound into the water and drunk it.

  As I stared down, something on the floor beneath the table gleamed in the dim light. I stooped and picked it up. It was a test tube, an ordinary test tube like the dozens I had seen in Lisl Stahl’s laboratory.

  A few drops of moisture still clung to its glass side.

  Vic Roberts had not moved. He was still standing, his broad shoulders hunched, staring down at Janie. The silence was thick. His shocked gaze came up slowly to meet mine.

  “So I was right,” he whispered.

  I dropped on my knees at her side, not because I thought there was anything I could do for her, but because the doctor in me reacted instinctively. And automatically the doctor in me started an examination.

  “Dead about an hour,” I said.

  Vic’s hands tightened into fists. “If they’d been decent to her, she wouldn’t have—”

  “Killed herself?” I looked up at him. “You were afraid she might do this. That’s why you came to me, wasn’t it?”

  He did not answer. His muscular arms hung limp at his sides.

  “You were afraid she’d kill herself,” I went on, “because she’d brooded about that week end in New York she’d spent with you?”

  His gaze leaped up to meet mine. “Because of that and because the Hiltons were so lousy to her and because her husband was dead and because she was alone.”

  “You didn’t think there was any other reason why she should commit suicide?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I stared straight at him. “Because she killed Nanny and Dr. Hilton?”

  “That isn’t possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you. I knew Janie. I know she couldn’t have done it.”

  I held up the test tube. “You know what this is?”

  He stared. I don’t think he’d noticed it before. “It—”

  “Someone stole poison from Dr. Stahl’s lab—stole it to kill Nanny and Dr. Hilton. This is probably the test tube it was stolen in. It was right here. Janie had it. And she died from hydrocyanic poisoning. Where would she have gotten the poison unless she’d been the one who stole it?”

  He looked down at Janie dazedly as if, in the shock, he had given no thought as to how she had died.

  I added quietly, because I was sorry for him: “Maybe you were wrong about Janie. Maybe you had her figured out—wrong.”

  “But she couldn’t—” Vic swung to me. “You’re trying to say she killed Hilton because of me, because she was messed up with me and wanted to get rid of him. That isn’t true. She hated me. It was me she hated. She—” He broke off and added jerkily: “A note. There must be some kind of a note. She’d never have done this without leaving some—some explanation.”

  “I haven’t seen any note.”

  He glared around the room and then started a wild search, pulling cushions off the sofas, peering under tables. He turned back to the radio-recording machine which loomed in the corner behind Janie. As he went to it, I noticed that its lid was open. I have a quirkish memory, and I was almost certain the lid had been shut when Cobb and I last left the barn. He was staring down into the machine. I crossed to his side, and as I did so, he said:

  “Westlake, look.”

  I had never seen one of those things before. It was much like an ordinary phonograph, except that it had two sound arms, one light and one heavy. There was a record on the turntable, one of those make-your-own-recording disks, and a second disk was lying next to it. The light sound arm was set on the outside edge of the first record, as if inviting us to play it.

  Vic said: “These were made tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Must have been. Mrs. Lanchester makes them all the time when the girls are playing, so they can hear their mistakes. But these aren’t any of those, I’m sure. Rosalind and I were up here just before the picnic, playing some swing records she’d smuggled in behind her mother’s back. No one used the machine after us or during the musicale. These must have been made after—after Hilton died.”

  We stared at each other. Impulsively Vic turned the machine on. The needle hissed. We both watched the black disk revolving under it as if it were hypnotizing us. Then the hissing stopped and a voice came. It came so clearly that I started back. It was a woman’s voice, low and husky and faintly southern, with a lisp. It was Janie’s voice, and so lifelike that it was horrible to hear it emerging from the machine while her dead body lay huddled at our feet.

  With the almost inaudible scratch of the needle behind it, the voice said:

  “It’s only fair you should know. I realize that. I can’t do this without letting you know, and when you’ve heard you’ll see how I’m not fit to live. Oh, it’s so difficult to say things the way they really were. It’s because all my life I’ve always been thinking. I’ve never been really happy, never unless I’m thinking
. When things were always so awful and drab and there was no escape from them, I’d think myself away into a life that was wonderful and gay, where I was rich and happy and had everything I wanted. That’s it. That’s really it. My thinking was real, and nothing else was. And then, after I’d thought so much, I tried to make life like my thinking. That’s what I did. It was like a play to begin with; I’d thought so much about it that when I did it, it wasn’t like doing it with real people and real things but like doing something make-believe in a play. But now, when it’s done, I see. I see that what was so easy, so wonderful in my thinking is horrible, horrible. I’ve killed real people. It’s a nightmare. And I want to die.”

  That small, sad voice with its childish lisp cast a spell over me. I could feel the drum of my pulses in my wrists. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Vic’s profile, gaunt and ash-gray.

  “I used to dream of being rich. But that was only part of it. Always, ever since I can remember, I was thinking about the man who would come sometime and love me. Oh, I knew exactly how he would look, what he would be like. And I. used to think about him so much that he was realler than anyone, much realler than George, realler than anyone. I never talked to anyone about him. No one ever guessed. He was all mine for myself. And then—then one day in Boston I saw Vic and I knew right away, at once, that he was the man.”

  Vic passed a hand across his forehead, wiping away the perspiration. The muscles around his mouth were tight.

  “Oh, I didn’t let him know. I didn’t let anyone know. And at first I was scared of him. I had him in my thoughts; I was scared of him outside my thoughts. But gradually things inside me changed until I wanted him not in my thinking but in real life. I wanted him more desperately than I had ever wanted anything.”

  In spite of the nightmare climax which I knew was coming, there was something heartbreaking about that inarticulate story. Vic had put his hand out to steady himself against the back of the davenport. We both of us kept our gaze glued on the square speaker of the machine.

  “It doesn’t matter what I said to Vic or what we did. It only matters what I thought. And all day, all night, I was thinking that I wanted him. Then the other thing started. Vic started to tell me about George, about what an awful man he was, about how he kept Vic down, stole all his ideas and was trying to ruin his career. Vic told me all these things. I’d never really thought about George much before, not even when I married him. But then suddenly I saw him as he was. I saw him and the family, and I saw how drab and lonely and unbearable my life was. And slowly I began to see how wonderful life could be if George wasn’t there. Vic would be a great, important person, the way he should be; I would be rich; and I would be free to go to Vic. I had read somewhere about ground glass. It seemed so simple. I used to think about how easy it would be, just to put ground glass into something he was going to eat. I would never have to see what happened; I needn’t be there. I could just put the ground glass in and he would die. I thought about it and thought about it. And then George became sick with ptomaine poisoning. That seemed to me like a sign, telling me to go ahead. And then one day I saw Nanny in the kitchen. She was making George some arrowroot, and the package was there. She went out; she forgot the package. Oh, you must believe it; it hardly seemed real. I got an electric-light bulb. I ground up the glass. I mixed it in with the arrowroot. Then I walked away. I put it out of my mind; it was as if nothing had happened. I…”

  With a grinding sound the needle came to the end of the record and the voice faded. Half in a dream, I went to the machine, took the record off and put the second one on the turntable. Vic watched me, his eyes fixed in a glazed, desperate stare. Once again the needle hissed, once again that soft, lisping voice trailed out into the silence:

  “In the back of my mind, I was waiting for George to die. But one day came and then the next and nothing happened and then he got well. And the thing in my mind was so faint then that I didn’t really think about it. It was as if what I’d done had just been in a dream after all. That’s why it was so terrible when we came to Kenmore and Nanny called me up to her room and told me she knew I had tried to kill George, that she had the arrowroot with the ground glass in it to prove it. At first, when she told me, I could hardly believe it was true. And then suddenly I knew it was true and I knew that she was going to tell the police and have me put in jail. I was frightened, so terribly frightened because I had put it all out of my mind and I hadn’t built up anything inside me to be strong. I left Nanny’s room in a kind of daze. And then we all went over to Dr. Stahl’s. And it was then that the second thing came that seemed like a sign.

  “They were all talking about something Dr. Stahl was working with, some poison that was full of cyanide. I wasn’t really listening, because I was so terrible inside. And I picked up a book, just some old book, and when I opened it there was a paragraph about people dying from silver polish because of the cyanide in it. I knew Nanny had been polishing the silver that morning. Suddenly I saw that this way I could make everything all right again. I was trembling so I was sure people would notice. But they didn’t, and we went over to Dr. Stahl’s barn and she showed us her cabinet where there was all this poison in test tubes. And that was like a sign too. It was so easy, so easy just to pick one up. I picked it up.”

  Dimly back of the voice, as she spoke, came the faint recording of the ormolu clock on the mantel, striking the hour. Its twelve tinkly chimes sounded with eerie delicacy behind the dreadful words. And, at the same moment, the actual clock above the actual body chimed. The effect of the real clock following immediately after the recorded clock brought into sudden reality the scene as it must have been when the record was made. I could see Janie exactly as if she were standing in front of me, see her little body, still alive, crouching over the revolving disk, her face white with horror as she poured out the story of what she had done.

  “It was so easy. It wasn’t like anything real. I was thinking then only about Nanny. She was going to tell what I had done. She was the only one who knew. I didn’t go up to her room at once, because I was afraid she was awake. Then, just before the picnic, I saw Mrs. Kenton-Oakes come down. She said she’d been with Nanny and that she’d left her because Nanny was asleep. She told me to go up to the Rock with the other girls, and I said yes. But I didn’t go. I tiptoed upstairs. Nanny was there in bed asleep. I knew she kept the polish in a drawer. I got the can; I poured poison into the can, drop by drop, letting it spread all the way through. Then I scooped some polish out and put it around the rim of the spout. I kept myself from thinking. It was just that I was putting polish on the teapot’s spout. It wasn’t that I was doing something to Nanny.”

  Her voice faltered, and there was a tiny pause before it went on:

  “Until then I hadn’t thought about George. You must believe me. I’d put all that out of my mind. But then as I stood there and Nanny was asleep, I thought of the flute. I had seen Rosalind taking it to Nanny to be polished, and I thought suddenly: If there was some polish on George’s flute, then he’d die too and it would be all right for Vic and for me and—The thought came so quickly and, quickly while the excitement of it was with me, I slipped into George’s room. I knew he was down in the kitchen. The flute case was there where it always was. I—oh, it was nothing, just putting some of the polish there by the mouthpiece.

  “I went away quickly. I thought it would be all right. I thought it would go on not seeming real. And it did happen that way with Nanny. Suddenly she was dead. Everyone thought it was an accident. I thought it would be that way with George. I thought he would die when he practiced and I wouldn’t see and that they would find him and say it was an accident too. But it didn’t happen that way. He didn’t practice. And right there on the platform I saw him drop the flute and gasp and curl up and … oh, I saw him die. And suddenly it all became real. I saw the awful nightmare of what I had done. I saw it all. And … I can’t say any more. I can’t say about how I felt, about how Helena said those awful things that mad
e my love for Vic seem cheap, awful. I can’t …. It’s just that you had to know. You had to know what I did. You had to understand a bit why I can’t live any more. And that’s so easy too. I’ve put the poison into a glass of water. I have it in my hand. It doesn’t taste, the poison. I know that, because I’ve drunk it. I … Oh, Vic, I want to say to forgive me. I thought I could make life easier for you. I thought…”

  That was the most grueling moment of all. The voice from the machine faltered. There was a whimpering cry, the dim sound of a body falling. And then the sudden, senseless hiss of the needle whirling over blank wax.

  With a little groan Vic jumped to the machine and switched off the motor. He turned to me, his eyes sunken, his cheeks gaunt.

  “I never knew,” he muttered. “I swear to God I never knew it was that way with her.”

  I said softly: “But you did talk to her about Hilton that way? About his ruining your career?”

  “Oh, of course, I beefed to her. I always beefed to everyone about Hilton. But I didn’t think—I never dreamed—”

  Now that the spell cast by that tormented voice was gone, I felt spent and terribly weary. It was as if I would be haunted for the rest of my life by that confession of a woman hopelessly caught in the net of her own make-believe. I tried to think of Janie Hilton as I had always thought of her—sweet, pathetic, a little giddy. I couldn’t think of her that way any more. I could only see this new woman whom I had only known after her death—this woman whose perverse dream life had broken into reality with such calamitous violence.

  Vic was broken, but I knew there was nothing I could do to help him. He had started an affair with his boss’s wife out of frivolous spite, and it had grown into something too big for him or for anyone. I supposed there was a moral lesson in it somewhere, but I was in no mood to look for moral lessons.