by Unknown
“I’ve called up Levy,” Charleroy said. “He’s got to know. The whole thing’s got to be cleared up.”
“Yes,” Helen said. “I think I will go to bed now. I’ll have my supper on a tray, if you don’t mind.” She sat leaning back in the chair, smiling, serene; but she looked exhausted.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Marcher shouldn’t have allowed it.”
“I was worried,” she said.
“Why?”
“From the very beginning, when you told me Julia had come out here to take care of Miss Ewing, I knew it was—queer. I was sure Julia would have stayed in New York, where she could see me in the hospital every day, unless there was something serious. I telephoned out here to Mrs. Brady, and then I was sure. She told me about Julia’s eye; she told me that Miss Ewing was perfectly well.”
“Why didn’t you speak to me about this?” Charleroy asked.
“I knew you’d put me off, somehow,” she said, and looked up at him. “You’re very clever, Carrol.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
“The more I heard from Mrs. Brady,” she went on, “the more worried I was. Of course, it was plain, from the start, that it was something Miss Ewing had done.”
“How was it plain?”
“When Mrs. Brady told me that the poor woman was actually bullying Julia, I knew that she must have some hold over you both. And there was only one sort of hold she could have.”
“I don’t quite see—”
“If Julia, herself, had done something dangerous, or wrong, she’d never have tried to placate anyone, to keep it quiet. But she’s so much like you. You’re both so quixotic. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do, both of you, to help anyone you imagined had a claim on you. You’re—” She paused a moment, and he saw her lips tremble a little.
“Helen,” he said, “you must take it easy.”
She frowned, with tears caught in her sandy lashes.
“You don’t belong in this era,” she said. “You’re feudal, you and Julia. Like a medieval baron and his daughter. Your vassals have to come and fight for you, if you need them; they have to grow crops for you. But, in return, you’ll protect them—against anything.”
“That’s rather farfetched Helen.”
“Leon,” she said, “the Bradys. So many others. You’re—romantic, Carrol.”
He began to walk up and down the room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you’ve got into this.”
“If you’d only told me,” she said, “from the beginning.” She put a handkerchief to her eyes, perfunctorily, as if annoyed, “We’ve been married so long . . . surely there could be frankness.”
He stopped beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “That note?” he said mildly.
She was silent for a moment, and very still. “I could have given it to you before lunch,” she said. “But I thought she’d gone away. I thought the note would tell you where she’d gone. I knew you’d feel obliged to rush after her, and it seemed to me much better to let her get away. If I’d had any idea what she really had in mind—”
“It’s better this way, my dear. Better for her.”
“I know. There wasn’t anything ahead of her but disgrace and misery. I know that.”
“But there’s one thing you don’t know,” he thought, “and you never will know it.” Levy would want to see that note, but he had torn it up and burned the scraps. He remembered it, though, and always would. The woman had written:
“If I’ve got to be driven away from you, I don’t want to go on living. I’ve got a little bottle of something that I’ve kept for years, in case things got too bad. Things always have been bad, for me. I never got my chance as a concert pianist, because all the people around me were so jealous and spiteful. But when I met you, so many years ago, it was all right. I felt I could do so much for you and your children. I saw that your wife never really cared for you or understood you, but I do think that, through the years, I have been able to make up to you for that, at least a little. When she was sent to the hospital I thought that perhaps my great hour had come. I thought that I could look after you, and cook for, and play my music for you.
“But she has come back, and she means to drive me away. I’m going over to the garage with my little bottle. It’s quick stuff, but I’m going to wait there for an hour. If you can think of any way that I can live, and see you, even now and then, come and tell me before it’s too late. If you don’t come, it’s the end for Katrinka Ewing.” . . .
• • •
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “The poor woman must have been out of her mind.”
“I don’t think so,” said Helen.
“Must have been. The whole thing—giving Julia those pills. No possible sane reason for that.”
“The reason is perfectly simple,” said Helen. “She didn’t know Julia would be going out, and she gave her the pills so that she’d go to sleep right after dinner.”
“But why?”
“So that she could be alone with you,” said Helen. “Play the piano for you.”
“What?”
“And I’ll tell you why she shot that man,” Helen went on. “She didn’t think he was trying to attack Julia. She did it so that you wouldn’t find out she’d given Julia those pills. She knew you’d never forgive that. She knew she’d never be able to see you again.”
“Me?”
“I’ve known, for a long time, how she felt about you, Carrol. But it didn’t seem to me at all—dangerous.”
“Good—heavens!” said Charleroy.
“She did it all for you,” said Helen. “She must have been frantic when that man came and started talking about the pills. She felt that she had to keep him quiet, before you found out anything.”
“Helen,” he said slowly, “I can’t believe this.”
She reached for his hand and laid it against her cheek for a moment; then she let it go and leaned back again, smiling a little. “I can,” she said.
CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG
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1905–1969
During the 1950s and 1960s, CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG was among the most prominent American writers working in the suspense realm. She wrote twenty-nine novels under her real name and an occasional pseudonym, Jo Valentine, winning the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1957 for A Dram of Poison. Armstrong was nominated two other times for the same award in 1967 for the novels The Gift Shop and Lemon in the Basket, while three of her many short stories—“And Already Lost,” (1957), “The Case for Miss Peacock” (1965), and “The Splintered Monday” (1966)—also garnered Edgar nominations.
Armstrong, born in Vulcan, Michigan, and at one time employed by the New York Times in its advertising department, spent much of her later life in Glendale, California, with her husband, Jack Lewi, and their three children. From there she had a good vantage point of Hollywood, which was naturally receptive to her type of suspense, concerned as it was with ordinary people, especially young women, getting mixed up in matters far beyond their control. Don’t Bother to Knock, the 1952 film about a disturbed young woman entrusted to babysit young children at a hotel, marked Marilyn Monroe’s move into dramatic roles and was based on Armstrong’s novel Mischief (1951). The filmmaker Claude Chabrol also relied on Armstrong’s work as a source for several films, including La Rupture (1970) and Merci pour le chocolat (2000).
I chose “The Splintered Monday” for the collection not just because of its award-nominated history, but because it shows Armstrong in fine form late in her career. The death of Alice Brady, which appears to be an accident, is the catalyst for long-simmering fissures to open up within her family. Armstrong’s smooth, sophisticated writing turns what could have been a prosaic page-turner into something far more thrilling.
THE SPLINTERED MONDAY
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MRS. SARAH Brady awakened in the guest room of her nephew Jeff’s house, and for a moment or two was simply glad for the clean page of a new day. Then she found her bookmark between the past and the future. Oh, yes. Her sister, Alice, had died on Monday, been buried on Wednesday. (Poor Alice.) This was Saturday. Mrs. Brady’s daughter, Del, was coming, late today, to drive her mother back home tomorrow.
Now that she knew where she was, Mrs. Brady cast a brief prayer into time and space, then put her lean old feet to the floor.
The house was very still. For days now it had seemed muffled, everyone moving slowly in a quiet gloom, sweetened by mutually considerate behavior. Mrs. Brady had a feeling that her own departure would signal a lift of some kind in the atmosphere. And she did not particularly like the idea.
She trotted into the guest bathroom to wash herself, examining expertly the state of her health. Mrs. Brady had an uncertain heart, but she had lived with it a long time, and she knew how to manage. Still, she tried to get along with as few drugs as she successfully could, so she opened the medicine cabinet, peered at her bottle of pills, but did not touch it.
No, on the whole, she thought, it would be better to get through the morning without a pill—at least, to see how it would go. She dressed herself briskly and set forth into the hall.
It was going to be a lovely summer day, weather-wise.
The door of the enormous front bedroom stood wide and her sister’s bed, neatly made, shouted that poor Alice was gone. Mrs. Brady sampled the little recurring shock. It was not exactly lessening, but it was changing character. Yes, it was going over from feeling to thinking. She could perceive with her mind the hole in the fabric, the loss of a presence, the absence of a force.
But Mrs. Brady found herself frowning slightly as she proceeded downstairs and back through the house to the breakfast room. This was her last day here. And her last chance? Had she cause to feel offended? Or to feel whatever this uneasiness of hers could be called?
Henny, the cook-housekeeper and general factotum, came at once with her orange juice. She was a big, rawboned, middle-aged woman with a golden cross dangling at her throat. Henny still had that sad and wary look in her big eyes. She had been much subdued, too much subdued, since Alice’s death.
She had taken to being very solicitous, treating Mrs. Brady as if she were an invalid. Yet Mrs. Brady and Henny had been good friends for many years. They had set up between them a kind of boisterous relationship, with a running gag that Mrs. Brady was a great nuisance to have around, and Henny, whenever Mrs. Brady visited, wished only to see the last of her.
Perhaps that gag was no longer in good taste—not today, not yet. But the continued coddling rather annoyed Mrs. Brady, who had never asked for it in the beginning and didn’t particularly like it now.
When Henny brought her eggs, Mrs. Brady said, “It’s surely hard to get used to Alice not being up there, in that room—she was there for so long. When did she last get out and go anywhere?”
“I don’t remember, Miz Sarah.” Henny obviously wanted to escape.
“Tell me, you last saw her right after she’d had her lunch on Monday?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Henny, looking miserable.
“And so did I,” said Mrs. Brady. “Karen didn’t think we should tell her we were going downtown. I didn’t even speak to her.”
“No. No. You don’t want to feel bad about that. Look, you spent the whole morning with her.” Henny seemed to be cooing and she was not a cooing woman. “You couldn’t know. Miz Del will be here for dinner, I guess. Right?”
“That’s right. Henny?”
“Your eggs are getting cold, Miz Sarah.”
“Henny,” repeated Mrs. Brady sternly, “is there something I haven’t been told?”
Henny was startled. Her eyes rolled, and her hand clutched at the cross. “I don’t know what you mean. I just don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think you should talk about it, either.”
“Why on earth shouldn’t I talk about it?”
“I mean . . . Well, you’ve got to go on,” mumbled Henny, “and what’s the good of talking about it? Poor thing. I mean, she’s probably better off.”
Then Henny put her head down and seemed to butt through the swinging door into the kitchen.
Mrs. Brady began to eat her eggs, reflecting on the contradiction of the golden cross and the horror of death—if that was what Henny was trying to be rid of, by calling death “better off.”
Well, Mrs. Brady herself was not so crazy about the idea of dying, but she accepted the fact that one inevitably would. It was presumptuous, in her opinion, to say that poor Alice might be better off. Maybe so. But maybe not.
Maybe Henny felt guilty because, during that seemingly normal afternoon, Henny herself had gone up to the third floor to “lie down,” as usual, and had not made even a token resistance to the coming of the angel of death, by being alert to his imminence. Nobody had expected Alice to die—not on Monday.
Shock? Maybe I am still shocked, she thought. But it didn’t click, as the truth should.
Bobby Conley came shuffling in.
“Good morning,” said his great-aunt. “No school today?”
“Nope,” said Bobby, getting into his chair in a young way that was far more difficult a physical feat than simply sitting down. “But I better hit the books some.” Bobby was twenty, and away at college during the winters. He was taking some summer courses, locally.
“Del is coming to fetch me,” said Mrs. Brady.
Bobby grunted that he knew. Henny came in with his juice and a mound of toast. Mrs. Brady poured his coffee.
“How do you feel about your parents flying off to Germany and France?” she asked him.
“That’s okay,” said Bobby. “I’ll be living on campus, anyhow.”
“And Suzanne back in boarding school. You’ll be able to keep an eye on her.”
Bobby gave her one blank look, as if to say, How antique to think that anybody should keep an eye on anybody. “Oh, sure,” he said tolerantly.
His sister, Suzanne, bounced in, looking like something out of science fiction, with her hair wound on huge rollers all over her small head. “I don’t want anything to eat, Henny. I’m reducing.”
Mrs. Brady cocked an eye at the bare waistline, exposed between two pieces of cloth, that seemed to her to be tiny enough to snap in a strong breeze. But she said nothing. She was not in firm touch with these young people. They had seemed fond of her, in earlier days, but even Susie, at fifteen, had grown away. They went their own ways. And, of course, they should. Mrs. Brady thought they’d had a better break than their father.
Sarah Brady had always felt a kind of responsibility for her nephew, Jeffrey, because she could see, better than anyone else, how he had been burdened all his life. Poor Alice had believed that to be born a beautiful female was all the Lord had ever required of her, and that to have been widowed in her early thirties was surely a preposterous error of some kind. It couldn’t happen to her! Poor Alice, with no personal resources, but plenty of money, had taken to the one hobby that appealed to her: she had gone in for ill health.
Sarah understood as much as there was to understand. Alice had been the golden-haired pet, the pampered darling, whereas she, Sarah, three years younger, had been the “clever” one. And the lucky one, thought Sarah now. It may be better to be born lucky than good-looking. She smiled to herself and sighed.
Alice’s one child, Jeffrey, had been at his mother’s mercy all his life.
But poor Alice, dead or alive, didn’t seem to bother Jeffrey’s children.
“You were at the beach, Susie, all day Monday,” said Mrs. Brady musingly. “But Bobby, you came home for lunch and you were in your room, studying, right across the hall from your grandmother.”
They both looked at her like owls.
“I didn’t bother her,” said Bobby, chewing.
It was Henny who had found Alice, and had called the doctor, after Henny’s customary “lie down.”
“And she didn’t bother you, eh?” Mrs. Brady said.
Suzanne looked at her with round eyes. “If you just didn’t tell her you were going anywhere.”
And Mrs. Brady thought, Touché? Or was the girl thinking of her father?
But Susie was thinking of herself. “I never told her when I was going to the beach. She’d just have a big fit about sharks.” One brown shoulder shrugged. “Or chaperones.”
Bobby said, “She didn’t even know I was going to summer school to pull up my grades. She’d have had a big fit about that too.”
“No, it wasn’t easy to tell her anything,” admitted Mrs. Brady with a thoughtful air. “It never was. I don’t operate that way. I’ll have a big fit if I think the world is kept a secret from me.”
They were eyeing her. With skepticism? Amusement? Pity? Or with a touch of wonder? Ah, thought Mrs. Brady, they are not as indifferent to death as they pretend.
“So she didn’t cry out? Didn’t ring her bell? You didn’t hear a thing?”
“Nope,” said Bobby. “Not a croak out of her.” Then he turned his face to her, quickly. “I didn’t mean to put it . . . I’m sorry.” And for one brief moment Mrs. Brady saw an awed and shaken boy, who had never before been across the hall from where someone had died.
But now Karen came in and said, “Good morning, all.” She had come in quietly. Her hand touched the young girl’s shoulder. Suzanne sat perfectly still under it. Then Karen touched her stepson’s hair lightly. Bobby did not flinch.
Mrs. Brady was thinking, They won’t give themselves away.
Henny came to serve the mistress of the house with her normal air of devotion. This was Karen’s house now. She was a pretty woman, in her thirties, small, compact, well-groomed, gracious in manner. She had been a nurse, hired to take care of poor Alice during one especially trying bout, almost six years ago. Karen and her patient had taken to each other. And when the patient’s widowed son had married the nurse, whatever else it may have been, it had seemed a useful and practical arrangement.