Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  The other shrugged, her mouth corners got a sullen warp, and she banged the doors shut and slapped the control over. The cage jumped unpleasantly. “I ain’t supposed to do this!” she snapped.

  Sarah remembered Lawyer Brill’s office door. A neat pastel-green steel door with an opaque glass and the gold-lettered words: CALVIN BRANDEIS BRILL, Attorney-at-Law.

  The number was 540. Sure of the door, positive of it, she went straight to it. But at once she sensed the absence of something that should have been here. There was no name. The lawyer’s shingle was no longer on the door. Sarah took this fact unwillingly, incredulously—actually wanting physically to back away from it.

  No name. No shingle. The opaque glass in the door had no light behind it. Yet this was Brill’s office. It was the right number, 540. The number was 540…. When she had been here before, Brill’s name had been conspicuous and resplendent on the door where now there was nothing.

  Sarah had the feeling of standing on no foundation at all, with the sense of being robbed of reason. She felt her control drawing apart at the seams, and suddenly, able to do nothing against hysteria, she threw herself at the door. “Mr. Brill!” she cried. “Mr. Brill!”

  The charwoman had been standing with hands planted on hips. Now the old woman’s arms dangled; her face jutted forward in surprise. She didn’t look sorry. Quite the contrary. The only thing this meant to her was that here was a pretty, well-dressed woman with trouble. The monotony of a night filled with scrub brushes was broken.

  “Dearie,” she said, “that’s an empty office.”

  Sarah did not turn and gave no sign that she had heard. But her hands no longer pounded, but merely rested, against the door.

  “ ’S empty, I tell you.” The old woman was shuffling close now, sounding like something being dragged on the floor, and she added, “I oughta know! I give it a sweep when I done this floor.”

  “It can’t be!” Sarah said in a tight, far voice.

  The charwoman sniffed gleefully. “Okay, don’t believe me, then.”

  “You only mean there’s no one in there, don’t you?”

  “Nope, I mean there ain’t nothing, dearie. Nothing! Nothing but the bare walls.”

  “But that can’t be true!”

  The old woman’s head was tossed; she had been insulted. And she liked it because it was more excitement. The old woman flourished the dust rag so that it popped noisily.

  “Sister, I’ll just show you. I got a key. I’ll show you—we’ll see!” she said indignantly.

  In a moment the door sprang open under the grimy hand, and Sarah stumbled through. She faced blank walls, bare flooring, and windows without blinds. A naked empty suite consisting of reception room and inner sanctum.

  Blue! She stared at the walls. Blue. Brill’s office walls had been this shade. There was no question now about this being Brill’s place. It was.

  “Did Mr. Brill move to another office in the building?” Sarah demanded. “He must have?”

  The charwoman had reached a conclusion of her own. She leered and asked, “Some guy give you the slip, huh?”

  Sarah ignored this and wheeled and went into the inner office. Here the emptiness was not complete to the last detail. A telephone, a handset, stood on a Miami directory on the bare floor. She sank beside these.

  The old woman was being ignored and she resented it. She slapped the rag about vigorously. “Well?” She made the word ring out in triumph like a rooster crowing on a fence. “Well, are you satisfied, dearie?”

  Sarah took up the telephone.

  “Hey! I ain’t so sure,” said the woman, “that I’m gonna let you use that phone.”

  Sarah turned slowly and slowly took a step toward the woman. She said, “I think I’ve had enough.” And the woman fell back and lost her grin, along with most of her pleasure in the situation. She watched wordlessly, her face twisting into various expressions, monkey-like.

  Sarah’s finger moved the telephone dial. She had a good memory and it yielded Mr. Arbogast’s phone number, even as excited as she was. She got a quick answer.

  “Mr. Arbogast?” Sarah asked tensely.

  “Yes,” replied Mr. Arbogast’s jolly-man voice. “Oh!… Sarah, isn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t sure you would be home. I thought you might still be—not at home.” She paused, trying to level her breathing.

  Something in her urgency yanked some of the softness from Mr. Arbogast’s tone. It sounded as if he must have brought the phone close to his plump lips. “Sarah, is something wrong?”

  Sarah said, “That attorney, Calvin Brandeis Brill—the one I talked to you about this afternoon—can you tell me whether he has changed his office? Has he—”

  “Wait! Hold on, Sarah.” Mr. Arbogast sounded startled. “I’m puzzled. An attorney? Brill, you say? I don’t believe I understand.”

  “Brill—the lawyer about whom I spoke to you.”

  “You spoke to me—but—why, you must be mistaken. When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “No, no, Sarah. I don’t recall that.”

  “But I did!”

  She could picture Arbogast’s soft mouth open in surprise at the other telephone, the dependent, acquisitive little mouth.

  “Why, I did not talk to you this afternoon, Sarah.” He said this with conviction.

  “But you did! It was about ten minutes after two. Yes, about that time.”

  “You… Was it at my office?”

  “Yes. On the telephone.”

  “But I wasn’t even there in the office at ten past two, Sarah. I was still at lunch, I think, at that time.”

  “You know Brill, do you not?”

  “You say the man’s an attorney? What is his full name, my dear?”

  “Calvin Brandeis Brill.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know him?”

  “I’m afraid not. I do not believe I’ve heard the name before.”

  “But the man is a lawyer! And you did tell me—”

  “There are many lawyers,” said Mr. Arbogast slowly. “Sarah, what is—These are very odd things you are saying.”

  “Yes, odd,” Sarah said dully. “Very odd.” She breathed deeply against tightness and then added, “Thank you, Mr. Arbogast.” And then she laid the handset gently on its cradle.

  The charwoman’s face had by now tried many expressions, all of them indignant, and had settled on one of sullen pleasure. She scratched a thigh with two fingers, then folded the dust rag precisely in a square.

  Sarah dialed another number on the telephone. This time she called Miss Fletching, secretary to Mr. Collins, who owned the yard.

  “Miss Fletching, this is Sarah,” she said tensely. “Did I get you out of bed? I’m sorry. Can you give me Captain Most’s telephone number?… Yes, I’ll wait.” Shortly Mr. Collins’s secretary returned to the wire and gave her Most’s number. Sarah’s “Thank you” was quietly given, and again she dialed.

  Most’s voice, oddly thick, finally responded.

  “Sarah Lineyack speaking, Captain Most,” Sarah said gravely. “Could I see you immediately? It is quite important.”

  His reply, while not given at once, was, “Of course. I’ll have to dress and go get my car.”

  “No! No, I’ll come there.”

  Most was again hesitant, and she sensed that he did not wish it that way.

  But when he spoke, it was to tell her how to find him.

  Chapter Seven

  AS SARAH DROVE SHE had time to weigh the reasons—emotional or whatever they were—for taking this to Most. The notion of seeing Most had sprung at her quickly, strongly, coming in a way that she had learned to trust. There is an innate force about a solid idea that lets you realize its value instantly, and this had been like that. Most was Arbogast’s employee, the man Arbogast had hired to skipper Vameric. Therefore Most logically had an interest in this strange thing—it touched his boss. But Most is probably the strongest man I know, she thought.
Although their acquaintance had been short, she had given Most a pattern in her mind, and it was not a weak pattern. He was a man of fiber, a quiet man, one who spoke softly and backed it with common sense and good reasoning. She remembered hearing stories about him having a temper, and they might be true, but a temper is sometimes to a man’s credit.

  She needed a man like Most. He would be a reassurance; it would be a solidness to stand beside him. Being a woman, she placed a great value on these emotional comforts. Men, she suspected, were perhaps more able to coldly weigh, measure, and pass judgment on the basis of physical actions. Women followed their hearts, always. Even if their hearts frequently led them to act the role of idiots.

  As to her one great motive—wanting to have Jonnie, her son—she felt strongly in the right. Nature was fundamentally involved—a mother should have her child. She was following more than her heart there; it was the way of all womankind, intense, compelling. But in the matter of Most she was not sure what was involved exactly. She might well stand aware, incidentally.

  She parked the car and walked to Pier Four and threw open the small wooden gate that had PRIVATE FOR YACHTSMEN, KEEP OUT on it. She walked out toward the boats. Pier Four was for yachts, a pleasant place with overhead wooden canopy, water lines, telephone connections. To lie there was not expensive, and Pier Four was popular with the more practical owners.

  She quickly located Most’s boat from his description—a black bugeye schooner lying in a slip well out on the pier. Drawing near, she could see that the little vessel was all black, even to sail covers.

  Moonlight, touching her and lathering the bay and piers with pale silver, had a hard, friendless quality. Nothing was soft for her now, and nothing calm. The surprise and shock had subsided dully in her, was no longer a padding for her fears. Without this anesthetic, her mind was clear and her terrors had sharp claws.

  Narrow catwalks extended out from the pier at each alternate slip, and Sarah moved on one of these until it brought her to the side of the black ship. Originally the name bugeye derived from the godawful symbols the Chesapeake oystermen put on the bows of their shoal-craft vessels. This was no craft born in a yacht-building yard. It was genuine, a five-log bugeye, the bottom made of logs drifted together with Swedish-iron rods. A centerboard boat, about thirty-six feet on the water line, schooner-rigged and with the typical raked-back masts. Sarah, with no room for interest in these things, noted them anyway because sailboats were her profession.

  A one-man ship, this bugeye was rigged for single-handing. All sheet lines, even the halliards and anchor lines, were brought back to the cockpit so that one man could sail her. While she was noticing these meaningful things about Most’s home, the shadows in the little cabin companionway stirred, and she realized the man himself waited there.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Lineyack,” Most said, and his voice was unusually grave and formal.

  “May I come aboard?”

  “Certainly. Why not?” Most moved slowly and in a rather bumbling way to assist her. But Sarah was at home on boats and she quickly stood on the deck of edge-laid teak-wood.

  “I had to talk to you,” she explained quickly.

  “Yes, I gathered that,” he replied carefully. “Won’t you be seated?” And when she had found a place in the cockpit, he treated her a bow that was as dignified as it was unnecessary, adding, “At your service, Mrs. Lineyack.”

  Sarah looked at him sharply. She realized now that he had been drinking, and that this probably explained his reluctance to see her.

  Most saw that she understood he was a bit crocked. He moved his shoulders some, as if shame had touched him. He sat down opposite her and said, “I didn’t expect you tonight, you know.”

  “Are you alone aboard?” Sarah asked.

  He nodded. “Yes, very much alone.” Then he pressed his lips together as if the statement was something from nearer his heart than he had intended. When he continued, it was more to himself than to her. “I think you’re upset,” he said.

  “I’m in terrible trouble.” Sarah gave him the story in a grim chain of sentences, telling how Brill had approached her with the news that she was legally entitled to have custody of her son, and then of Brill’s plan for her to get the little boy. She put it all in—her phone call to Arbogast to confirm Brill’s reliability, the abduction, the false policeman, then Yellow-shoes, then the disappearance of Jonnie from her apartment. The vanishing of Brill’s office furniture. Arbogast’s statement that he did not recall any phone conversation about Brill. And to the end of it all she tacked: “You’re working for Arbogast, and so I thought I had better consult you.”

  To this Most had listened without interrupting her, but now his head came up and he frowned, put a hand hard against the nape of his neck. “You’re still driving that rented car? Where did you park it?”

  She told him.

  He arose at once, frowning. “I’ll move it. The police might find it and give their attention to this neighborhood. Where did you rent the car?”

  Sarah told him that too.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take it back to them so there won’t be any trouble about it.” And then he smiled wryly and gave the true reason for his interest in the car, saying, “This will give my head a chance to clear.”

  “I didn’t come to you about myself,” Sarah said desperately. “It’s Jonnie I’m worried over, my little boy.”

  “Why, I see that, Sarah,” he replied gently. “But there appears to be an elaborate thing here. You have been used, if you ask me.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said bitterly. “Yes, I have been used.”

  Most sprang onto the pier and left. He walked steadily enough, Sarah noted, and she imagined that his condition might in part be self-consciousness. Most would be a man who would regard his own weaknesses with no favor, but neither was he likely to apologize for them.

  Sarah went below. The bugeye cabin had an atmosphere which she would have enjoyed if less beset. She always got pleasure out of seeing a boat kept by one who had a feeling for boats. She could always tell by many small things—the stowing of charts in racks against the cabin carlings, the clean sparkle of kerosene gimbal lamps that were museum pieces, the whipping on a sheath-knife lanyard—that here was a vessel kept by a careful, knowing hand. To Sarah this wasn’t trivial. These were things she understood, and they showed the bent of a man’s ways.

  When Most returned, as he did in something like twenty minutes, he sprang aboard lightly for a man of his size. He dropped swiftly into the cabin, and only then did his haste leave him, so that she knew he’d had some doubt that she would still be here.

  “I drove past Brill’s building,” Most said. “The police were there.” He let this stand as a sufficient explanation of his anxieties, and he put a coffeepot on the alcohol stove.

  Sarah said thinly, “The police are looking for me, I suppose.”

  “I’d guess so.” He threw a stream of water into the coffeepot with the galley pump—four strokes—and replaced the pot on the stove, then changed his mind and pumped four more strokes into the pot. He was a man who made his own coffee, the same methodical amount each time, and the extra four strokes were for Sarah. Finally he said, “The police must have the notes you left at the Lineyack place.”

  “Why, yes, if they’re looking for Brill, they must have it,” Sarah agreed. “I’m the victim of something strange, aren’t I?”

  He did not deny it and measured brown grains of coffee into the pot, and when the pot was heating he took a seat opposite her. She felt that he had been speculating about her. This was correct, because he said finally, “It was a tricky thing. Queer business. Have you any idea what’s behind it?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I can’t imagine. I haven’t any idea at all.” She tied her fingers tightly together, troubled by the loose wild feeling of flying nerve ends around her heart. “Is Jonnie safe?” she gasped. “That’s what I’ve got to know!”

  “Sarah…” Most got up and l
aid a hand on her arm.

  “Don’t! Leave me alone!” This was hysteria talking.

  He said, “Look, the boy may be fine. But if he isn’t, you won’t help a bit by blowing up.” Then he gripped her arm for a moment and took his hand away.

  “But I—I’m so frightened!”

  “Sure you are,” Most replied. “But there’s sense in it somewhere. Let’s pick it apart. All we have to do is find the right thread and start unraveling. We’ll be led to something, no doubt.”

  “Mr. Arbogast… why did he say I hadn’t telephoned concerning Brill?” Sarah cried desperately.

  “We’ll look into that, Sarah.”

  Sarah shuddered. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Captain.” She made a discouraged gesture and added, “You know how it is to be sailing wing-and-wing and get caught like a fool by a wind so hard you can’t get canvas down and don’t dare jibe about? That’s the way I am now.” And then suddenly she asked, “Will you help me, Captain Most?”

  “Help you? Certainly I’ll help you.” He seemed surprised at the question. “What do you think I’m—Well, anyway, I will. But I’d like to know more than I do now.”

  “So would I,” Sarah said bitterly.

  “I mean the things you can tell me.”

  “For instance?”

  “Oh… background,” he said. “Let’s go back some. Say back to when you met Paul Lineyack, the man you married.”

  “Why,” said Sarah, shaking her head, “I do not think that would show anything. It was more than four years ago that I met Paul, and nearly two years since he was killed.”

  “The motive for this is buried somewhere. It may be back there.”

  “But… this connected with Paul? But how could it be?”

  “Tell me about him anyway,” Most said.

  Sarah, closing her eyes, moved a hand slowly against a cheek. Most was, she felt, taking advantage of her. He was curious. He merely wished to know what kind of a man she had married. That, she thought grimly, was like another man.

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “I met Paul conventionally…. It was, I suppose, about the only conventional thing that happened to us. It was at Larchmont. I had won a race in the Interclub class, using a borrowed boat. Paul made the cup-awarding speech and was miserable doing it. Miserable because his father had donated the cup.” She hesitated, frowning, then added, “The cup, and five hundred dollars first-prize money…. Money prizes aren’t usual in sailboat racing. The money was why I had entered. They laughed at the idea of the money prize—ridiculed old Lineyack for putting up a money prize—the real sail people did that, I mean. But I entered for the money. I needed it.”