Lady Afraid

by Lester Dent

  Dewey Cokerham had wheeled. He was staring at Yellow-shoes malevolently. Cokerham had made both hands into fists.

  The woman in the cabin said violently, “For God’s sake, Dewey! He’ll talk us all into the pokey.”

  “Nah,” Cokerham said. “But he’s beginning to make me sick. And he’s doing us no good.”

  Sarah ignored this. She threw a question at Yellow-shoes. “Why was there no furniture in Brill’s office when I went there last night?”

  “Huh?” His mouth became a foolish hole for a moment. “Oh, that. Why, we needed some money to charter this boat. Brill was short. We were all short. So Brill sold his office furniture and law library to get expense money. The people who bought the stuff came and got it yesterday afternoon.”

  Blankly, Sarah gasped, “Brill… sold his office furniture and books!” The simplicity of the explanation stunned her. She felt a most incredible fool.

  The emptiness of Brill’s office last night had been such an insoluble mystery…. But the man had merely bargained his belongings for ready cash. It was so simple, like a kick in the face.

  “Oh no!” cried Sarah. “Don’t tell me I was that stupid! All the answers I thought of—but never that obvious one! Brill had sold his things. That one answer was too childish for my great mind!” She was extremely angry with herself.

  “You’ll give the police what I’ve told you?” Yellow-shoes peered up at her anxiously. “You’ll make it clear that we didn’t really commit-any crime?”

  “You didn’t… any crime!” Sarah exclaimed incredulously. “But you took my son from me! That’s a crime.”

  He shook his head frantically. “Oh no, no! Not a legal crime! No—that was just protective custody.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” Sarah exclaimed.

  “It’s true. Brill wasn’t a fool, lady. He wouldn’t lay himself liable to no abduction charge. You see, we took the boy from you acting as the authorized agents for—”

  Dewey Cokerham came at the man, side-stepping in a sinister fashion. Now, without any warning, he struck Yellow-shoes with a fist. It was a hard sneak blow. The recipient fell to the deck; his citrine footgear flew up and back to the deck with a crack.

  “I told you,” Dewey Cokerham said to the dazed man, “that you’re running off at the mouth. Now get up and scram.”

  Lida Dunlap flounced from the cabin. The woman’s face was gullied with impatience, hard, unsmiling. She glared at the fallen man. In an enraged voice she said, “You’ve got no more nerve than a piece of string.”

  Yellow-shoes lurched to his feet. He pawed his way up to the canal bank. Holding a hand over his jaw, he slunk away.

  Lida Dunlap wheeled on Cokerham. “Fighting!” she sneered. “That’s a big help.”

  “He’s broke,” Cokerham said unfeelingly. “We’d just have to loan him money. Let him look out for himself.”

  Lida Dunlap made a vulgar sound. Then she glanced at Sarah. “I’m in a nice fix, aren’t I, Sarah? A beautiful idea gone haywire. The goose not only didn’t lay the golden egg, but the goose killed Brill…. Poor Brandy Brill. I think he had this same trouble all through life—he liked schemes that were too gorgeously complicated to quite work. But Brandy’s where he won’t have to connive now…. Can you get the old woman aboard?”

  Sarah asked tensely, “Are you really—”

  “Going to give you the boy? Of course. Good grief, do you think we want real trouble?”

  “Is he—”

  “Aboard? Yes.” Lida Dunlap gestured grimly at the cabin. “Below deck. He’s fine. He’s a great kid. Asleep…. But wait! Get old lady Lineyack on the boat. We’re going to clear out, Sarah. But we would appreciate you giving us a little head start. You and the old lady stay on the boat for a time. How about that?”

  Sarah nodded. “If Jonnie’s all right,” she promised, “I’ll wait a little while.”

  “Good. You’re a nice egg, Sarah. I’ve been sorry all along that you were picked for fall guy.”

  “Lida,” Sarah said excitedly, “Lida, I fully understand that you and the two men aren’t a really vicious sort. And now that a murder has been injected into the affair, you’re simply getting out. And I do appreciate your giving me Jonnie. Oh, I do!… But there’s so much that I still don’t know. Won’t you tell me the rest? You must.”

  “Sorry, kid,” Lida Dunlap said uneasily. “Little Lida and her playmates were just moths who didn’t know how hot the flame could get. One of us got roasted. That’s enough for you to know.”

  “But—oh, Lida—who killed Brill?”

  Lida shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ll pass that.”

  “It was the same person who wished Mother Lineyack insane. The one who wanted her testimony legally worthless. Who? Who is capable of such vileness, Lida?”

  Dewey Cokerham had gone below deck. He appeared again. He was carrying two suitcases, the feminine one obviously Lida Dunlap’s. He scowled.

  “Better not tell her that, Lida,” Dewey Cokerham said. “I been thinking… The party she’s asking about may not get caught after all. In that event, later on, said party might be good for a touch.”

  Lida Dunlap didn’t think highly of the future prospect he mentioned. “Once a fool, always a fool,” she informed him contemptuously, then swung to Sarah again. “But I’m not going to tell you, Sarah…. Get the old lady on the boat.”

  “You must! Lida, a murderer—you simply have to tell who—”

  “No. Flatly, no.” Lida’s voice was desperate. “Maybe I don’t know who did it. Who can prove I know? Do you think I want to rot in jail while they’re holding me for a material witness? Not me, sister. You can have the whole stinking mess. I’m getting out. Now, will you get that old woman out of the car and—”

  Defeated, Sarah went to the convertible. She said, “Mother Lineyack…”

  The old lady turned lifeless eyes to her.

  Sarah said, “Mother Lineyack… they want us to come aboard the boat. They want us to wait there awhile before we summon the police. I’ve promised we will. Do—are you able to come aboard?”

  A thin voice left the tired old body. It said, “Yes, my dear. But you may have to help me. The medicine I took—Dr. Danneberg’s medicine—seems to be wearing off.” The old lady stirred. Sarah opened the door. Alice Mildred got out by herself well enough.

  But when they were faced by the sharp drop of some four feet to the deck of the ketch, and Sarah would have simply handed Alice Mildred down to Lida Dunlap and Dewey Cokerham, the old lady began to tremble. “No! I won’t have their hands on me!” she cried. So Sarah jumped to the deck herself, and Alice Mildred slid down into her arms. The old body was so without flesh that Sarah was profoundly shocked.

  “Kid’s in the stateroom forward.” Lida Dunlap jerked a thumb.

  “Is he actually—”

  “All right? Sure. He’s fine, believe me.”

  Sarah stared at the Dunlap woman, not quite able to believe anything. And suddenly Sarah was seized by wildest urgency, the utmost need to see the little boy. Now. This instant.

  But Alice Mildred clung to her and whimpered. Two unnatural spots of color burned on the old lady’s cheeks. There was light enough to see these, for the sun was coming up, throwing an early scarlet across the city and bay, smearing the formidable thundercloud in the west with shades both somber and argent.

  Patiently, Sarah helped Alice Mildred along the deck. She assisted the old lady a step at a time down the companionway. It took an age. The last of the century was made doubly nerve-racking by the sobs that began erupting from Alice Mildred.

  Forward and portside in the cabin was a passage. To starboard there was a stateroom with a door that stood closed. Sarah kept Alice Mildred with her all the way to the stateroom door. Then she opened the door. The little boy sprawled like a frog on the berth inside. A smile that was a tiny elf perched on his soft face, possibly because they’d let him go to sleep wearing his cowboy rig.

  Chapter Nin
eteen

  “SARAH,” ALICE MILDRED SAID gently. “Sarah, do you wish to awaken your son?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah replied. “Is he accustomed to waking up this early?”

  “No. When he was a little baby he would arouse at four every morning. But not anymore.”

  “Then,” Sarah said with infinite tranquility, “we will let him finish his sleep out.”

  “Yes, we will do that,” the old lady breathed.

  Sarah found that she could smile. It was perhaps the first time she had smiled tonight, and the first time she had felt like it in a long while. And she knew one thing clearly—she knew that now she understood Alice Mildred, fully and wonderfully. And Alice Mildred now had the same closeness. Sarah actually had an aesthetic feeling about it, as if they had been separated by a closed door for years in suffering and misunderstanding but tonight they had opened the door, had gone through; now they were together in the sunlight. That was wild, like talking in terms of the stars, Sarah thought. But it was true.

  “Mother Lineyack, you must be very tired,” Sarah said.

  “Yes. But not so much as I had expected to be.”

  “Would you like to lie down?”

  Alice Mildred did not reply for a moment. Then, in a tremulous voice crowded by eagerness, she asked, “Could I—would you mind, Sarah, if I just lie down beside him?”

  Sarah said she would not mind. She said so gently, and the most sacred part was how sincerely she meant it. She assisted Alice Mildred to the bunk, which was not high above the floor and easily reached. The old lady lay there, quite still, her tired face toward the little boy.

  Leaning across Alice Mildred, Sarah kissed Jonnie lightly. His small face twitched. But he did not awaken. The tiny sweet odor of a little boy sleeping was about him. Sarah gave Alice Mildred’s arm a gentle squeeze.

  Then Sarah went out of the stateroom into the cabin. No one was there. She moved to the companionway, climbed the steps. She had not heard Lida Dunlap and Dewey Cokerham go away, but they were gone. They were nowhere in sight.

  The coral light of the sun lay across the canal bank, was painted on the masts, the tall mainmast and shorter jigger mast, and made golden strands of the rigging, the mainstays, the halliards, the lazy jacks. The three scared people were gone, had taken their terror away into the sunshine.

  To the westward the dark rumbling and red-winking ogre of cumulo-nimbus, the thunderhead, stood in the sky. Perhaps they had carried their fears in that direction, Sarah thought.

  Without regrets, Sarah returned to the cabin. She noticed that Jonnie still slept and that Alice Mildred was lying peacefully and apparently had not stirred.

  The cabin of the fat white old ketch was a placid box for her new composure. She fell to examining it, drawing on her experience with the sea and with sail to read it like a book. The boat, she concluded, was owned by an unsentimental man, probably a callous one; he did not have inside him the spirit of sail. He had kept the inside of his boat the way a man keeps house—the kind of husband who stacks dirty dishes in the sink, confident his wife will come home. Sarah had noticed this by the rigging at first: there were Irish pennants and even a granny knot here and there. This was a charter craft, of course. Yellow-shoes had said that Brill had sold his office stuff to get money to rent the vessel. They had, it was reasonable to suppose, intended to cruise among the Keys or the Bahama Islands until the affair quieted down. But this was more than a boat just rented to anyone. It was a poor, unfortunate ship owned by some man who didn’t have sail in his heart.

  Again Sarah moved to stand in the stateroom door and smile at her son. Alice Mildred turned her head. The old lady’s eyes were motionless on Sarah for a time.

  “Sarah—you’ve been good to me tonight,” Alice Mildred said unexpectedly.

  Sarah was touched. Poignancy gripped her. “Have I?” she said unsteadily. “I—I’m afraid I haven’t really tried to be, Mother Lineyack. I haven’t had room for anything but worry about Jonnie.”

  “Oh yes! Yes, I know. And that’s what I mean,” said the old lady eagerly.

  Sarah gave her a friendly look. “I’m—I see,” she said.

  “You didn’t dislike me,” Alice Mildred said. “Tonight you didn’t hate me.” She spoke excitedly, as if it were quite important. “You weren’t acting, Sarah. I noticed. You weren’t just being kind to a sick old lady.”

  “Good lord, Mother Lineyack,” Sarah said wonderingly, “why should I pretend? What good—I mean, why bother this late in the game?”

  “That’s just it!”

  “Now, now! Please—you mustn’t agitate yourself, Mother Lineyack,” Sarah said soothingly.

  With a quick shaking of her head, Alice Mildred exclaimed, “Pooh! This kind of excitement won’t hurt me. It’s nice. It’s relaxing.” She lay back on the bunk, smiling. “I guess I’m being a silly old woman,” she added. “But I’m so pleased. Oh, so very delighted.”

  Sarah patted the thin hand. “We’re both—I’m pleased also, Mother Lineyack,” she murmured. And she almost added: Too bad we couldn’t have learned more about each other some four years ago. But she caught that back. Why clatter skeletons in closets? The words remained in her throat, tasting a little bitter of regret.

  Alice Mildred raised up.

  “The door opens! Sarah, the door will really open!”

  Sarah, startled, threw her eyes at the stateroom door. It stood ajar. But it had already been open—it hadn’t moved. Belatedly she realized Alice Mildred didn’t mean that door, or any door on the boat; not even, possibly, any door that one could actually see.

  The old lady smiled happily to herself. “Have you ever kept a dog for a pet, Sarah?” she asked. “You have. Then you know how a dog finds a warm place, soft and comfortable, and doesn’t want to leave for the cold outdoors. The older the animal gets, the more it wants to stay there in the haven it has found, sleeping life away… I’ve been like that. My mind found a comfortable place. A room by itself, where it wanted to stay. I was behind a door. It was getting so I couldn’t bear to open the door, even to peek out.”

  “Gracious, what a comparison!” Sarah exclaimed wonderingly…. Was the old woman’s mind really stable?

  “It’s crude, isn’t it? Childish, a bit. Dr. Danneberg—my doctor, you know—illustrated my mental condition to me with that little story. I mustn’t, he said, stay in the room, like an old dog, and dream myself away from reality. That was what he meant.”

  Sarah thought Dr. Danneberg must be a great one, comparing the minds of his patients to old dogs.

  Alice Mildred read her thought and smiled even more happily. “Oh no. No, Sarah—Dr. Danneberg’s a really wonderful doctor. You see, that homely comparison—to show what animal-like instincts the human mind owns—stayed with me. I think, more than anything else, that crude little story was responsible for me beginning to try to open the door that I’d almost closed forever.”

  “I see,” Sarah, still somewhat dubious, answered.

  “Am I so silly, Sarah? Do you think I’m awfully senile?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Ivan has always thought I was silly. I mean—always. From the day I met him.” Alice Mildred compressed her lips. “I shouldn’t ever have married Ivan. Isn’t that terrible to say?”

  No, you have something there, Sarah thought. You certainly have. Prudently, Sarah withheld affirmation, however, sure it would be unseemingly vehement.

  “Dr. Danneberg got me to start coming out of myself,” the old lady said, and folded her hands proudly. “He showed me that I really shouldn’t let Ivan walk over me. Ivan had, you know. For years—Ivan is an overbearing man. He’ll put your very soul in his pocket, if you’ll let him.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Sarah said grimly. “I know about Ivan. Oh, brother!”

  Alice Mildred nodded quickly. “Yes, Sarah. You—and I—Ivan treated us both like—well, in the only way he knows of treating people. Ivan’s so egotistical…. And how I enjoyed opposi
ng him, when I tried. Oh, I did! It was wonderful to learn that it could do my mental composure good to stand against Ivan.”

  Opposing Ivan, Sarah thought wonderingly, didn’t seem like a prescription for peace of mind. She hoped the psychiatrist, Dr. Danneberg, had known what he was doing.

  Then the old lady dropped a bomb.

  “The bribe-giving was only one thing I opposed,” said Alice Mildred.

  “Bribe?”

  “Yes. That is—you call it bribe, don’t you, when you have to pay Mr. Arbogast for letting you have an RFC loan?” Alice Mildred peered up at Sarah. “Bribery? Or what? Anyway, it’s crooked. It’s wrong.”

  Sarah groped for composure. She felt as if she had been shot at.

  “Mr. Arbogast is a crook?” she gasped.

  “Oh yes. Yes!” said Alice Mildred, nodding vehemently.