by Andre Norton
Fredericka summoned all her strength and tried to push him away from her.
“Come, Fredericka, you can’t mind a little affection—”
He held her arms now and tried to pull her towards him. His voice was sensuous and persuasive.
Fredericka felt trapped and desperately frightened. “Will you please let me go—at once” Was he trying to make love to her—this lecherous beast—or was he—? Oh dear God, was he going to kill her—? His grip tightened. “I shall scream.” She spat the words out in an agony of desperation.
A step sounded behind them and James dropped his arms suddenly. “You must forgive me, Fredericka,” he said softly. “You are a most attractive woman. Perhaps—when you know me better—”
The footsteps grew louder and a group of people came up from behind and passed them. Fredericka hurried to keep up with them. She could not speak. She wanted only to escape this great beast who was so near and so terrifying.
They turned into the main street and, a moment later, stepped together into the glare of the neon-lighted drug store.
“As I was saying,” James remarked calmly, “that business badly needed someone like Philippine. Oh, there she is now!”
They had walked past the crowded tables and the rows of neat booths along the walls to the back of the large room where the soda fountain gleamed—a Victorian prop, resplendent in pink marble. Philippine, looking cool and fresh in a blue linen suit, was standing at the counter. She saw them and smiled. “Hi!” she greeted them and then, looking up at James, added; “You see how I improve in my American, ‘Hi,’ I say, instead of ’Ello,’ and ‘O.K.’ instead of ‘all right.’ Did I not learn fast?”
“James Brewster will be the first to sign your diploma, Phil, and yes, I’ll add a golden seal to it, too. Nothing like being in the business.” James beamed at Philippine as he answered her.
Fredericka was glad to be forgotten. As she recovered her composure, she watched the two covertly. What kind of a man was this who would force himself on one woman, and a second later, make up to another? She looked at Philippine and admitted to herself that one couldn’t blame James for being attracted to her. She looked efficient and capable and yet she had not suffered as a woman—she was better described by James’s word “remarkable,” perhaps, than his earlier adjective “good.”
Feeling Fredericka’s eyes on her, Philippine turned away from James and said: “My treat. What would you like? I am having a shake of chocolate milk.”
The boy behind the counter guffawed loudly. Philippine, sensing that he was laughing at her, frowned, and for a moment it was as though a dark cloud had shaded her pleasant face. But she recovered quickly and laughed herself. “What do I say now, Jo?” she asked, and then with a look of despair: “And I have just been boasting that I speak such good American!”
The boy looked embarrassed and Fredericka said quickly: “Just limeade for me.” It didn’t matter what she had. She only wanted to stay in the lighted room and not move again into the darkness.
Jo tossed the paper cup into its silver sconce, filled it with a flick of his hand, and put two straws expertly into the arsenic-green liquid.
Philippine pretended a shudder of distaste. “How can you drink that bottled poison?” she asked.
“Come Philippine, don’t run everyone’s life,” James said amiably, lowering his large body on to one of the counter seats. “We all know you run yours perfectly but you’ll never get a husband if you’re too managing.”
Philippine pouted like a child and looked up at him disingenuously. Fredericka did not miss the look of understanding that passed between them. She had no desire to talk and it seemed best to stay out of the conversation. Turning away from the counter she held her drink in her hand and looked around her over the tops of the straws. She was aware that her hand was trembling and she made an effort to steady it.
She saw that the room was filled with young people, high school age for the most part, and a scattering of older men and women. They sat crowded into the booths or around the marble-topped tables in the centre. Fredericka recognized a few of the bookshop’s customers and then, in the distance, she saw Margie. The girl was standing by herself at the far end of the room reading a comic. She seemed conspicuously alone and forlorn in the noisy room where everyone else of her own age was apparently having such a good time.
In spite of her own discomfort and her antagonism to Margie, Fredericka could not help feeling sorry for the girl. She was about to go and ask her to join them in a drink when Philippine, who had been watching the direction of her gaze, said: “I’ve asked her already but she says ‘No.’ Margie is always having—how do you say it?—the sulks. She is a nice child really but she thinks everyone doesn’t like her—and so they don’t because she thinks it.”
“Can’t anything be done about her face?” James asked.
“It’s a nervous thing, I think, really,” Philippine said with obvious concern. “We’ve tried everything.”
“All your fancy herbs?”
“Yes. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if she doesn’t grow out of it. Poor kid.”
As though aware that she was being observed and discussed, Margie looked several times in their direction and then put the comic back on its pile and banged out of the door.
“Bother the child,” Fredericka said under her breath. She had failed again to ask Margie about that wretched box. Well, too much had happened too suddenly. She couldn’t think of everything at once. Even Peter would understand that. But she couldn’t tell him about James. He would think—what would he think?
She was still standing, deep in thought and sucking absently at her straws when a familiar voice said: “Aren’t you making a rather childish noise, Fredericka? Your drink happens to be finished!”
She looked up into Peter’s friendly gray eyes and tried to hide the joy and relief she felt at sight of him.
“Have another on me, and stop that racket,” he persisted. “And then I’ll ‘see you home,’ as they say in this town.”
“Thanks to both,” Fredericka said. She turned quickly to include Philippine and James, and to her amazement found that they had disappeared.
Seeing her look of surprise, Peter said: “They left as I came in. You were in such a trance, you saw nothing. I expect they both kissed you goodbye and you were quite unaware of it. Now tell me what’s on your mind. That may help us to bear up under the burden of our loneliness, don’t you think so?”
Chapter 9
As Fredericka and Peter Mohun walked back to the bookshop together, she found it a blessed relief to forget her anxieties, to talk of ordinary things and to pretend to herself that Margie and even James were figures of her imagination and that the dead body in her hammock had been nothing more than the climax of a bad dream from which she had now awakened.
Sensing something of this, Peter did not press her to tell him what she had been worrying about when he had found her in the drug-store, and the bad news he had for her could wait, too. He slid his arm through hers and said easily: “I’m very glad it happened to be Fredericka Wing who came to South Sutton, and not the kind of librarian I had pictured when Lucy Hartwell announced that she had found a manager pro tem.”
“I am glad it was, too,” Fredericka answered, ignoring the implied compliment but enjoying it all the same.
“I don’t know very much about you though—even now. You were a librarian. You are writing a book. I know that. How goes it? And what else have you written? Come clean, girl, please, and tell all.”
“I’ve played at writing all the years of my life without success. I once actually finished a murder-mystery—” Fredericka stopped abruptly. Her words had sounded too loud in the darkness and silence of the night. They hung in the air like an evil omen. She hurried on, trying to bury them, to put them back into the nightmare from which she knew herself to have wakened. “That—that wasn’t any good, though. I couldn’t be bothered with clues. They all seemed so obvious
. Now, at last, I really have hope for my present undertaking—the Victorian women one I told you about. A publisher has even written me an encouraging letter.”
“Good,” Peter said quietly. He had observed with some anxiety the note of hysteria in her voice. This thing was getting her down—as well it might. “But you haven’t told me much about it or where you’ve got to.”
“Don’t urge me. I’ll go on all night if you do. I’m absolutely steeped in the works of these incredible Victorians. I find Miss Hartwell has a whole shelf of the novels I’ve been looking for—some of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins and Mary J. Holmes and I’d searched every library in New York. They really are an extraordinary group of women—all bestsellers ’round about 1850-60. But I expect I’ve told you all this before or am being enlightening about something you know more about than I do.”
“I have just heard of The Wide, Wide World—but beyond that I confess total ignorance.”
“That is, of course, a beautiful example of the teary school but it’s interesting all the same.” She stopped and was silent for a moment. Then she went on slowly. “You know, just before I came here I spent hours copying out the quilting party scene from Susan Warner’s Queechy. It was a frightful job because the print was so fine, I couldn’t type directly from the book but had to do it longhand. It was worth the effort though, pure Americana—”
“No doubt that’s why you won Mrs. Pike’s quilt.”
“I know. It’s certainly one reason why I wanted it so much. But it just shows what a state I’ve got into when I confess to you that the beautiful thing is still on the rocker in my kitchen where 1 dumped it when I came in that—that night. What’s more, Mrs. Pike, herself, came into the shop today for no other reason, I’m sure, than to tell me that she had made that quilt, and to talk about it. But I was so fussed about catching Margie and asking her about that miserable box that I couldn’t even talk to her—and there was really so much I wanted to say.”
“It’s understandable, though. This business isn’t exactly what you bargained for and you’re too intelligent to be able to shut your mind against it.”
“I ought to be too intelligent to panic, though. If only it wasn’t quite so evident that I’m not as brave as I’d like to be.” She hesitated for a moment and then said quickly, “Did Thane Carey tell you about my last night’s adventure?”
“No.” Peter tightened his hold on her arm. “What happened?”
“I don’t suppose it was anything except a mad prank of Margie’s but—well—I didn’t like it much.” She then told him briefly what had happened, and, when she finished, she thought again of telling him about her more recent adventure with James, but, again, she thought better of it.
For a full moment Peter was silent. They had now reached the gateway to the college campus and were about to cross over to go up Miss Hartwell’s walk, when he stopped abruptly and said: “This settles it.”
Fredericka was startled and a little annoyed. Was he going to leave her here? Had she given him some mysterious clue? She had been dreading the moment when she would have to lose Peter’s comforting presence, but even if he came in, the night would be all the blacker and lonelier when he left.
“Settles what?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. The fact is that I have some news for you, too. It isn’t really for you but I think I must tell you, though it isn’t my business to at all, and I happen to know that Thane’s calling on you early tomorrow—no, don’t start to run like a hare—he’s not going to arrest you!”
“Arrest me?”
“Oh damn, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick somehow. Now just listen to me quietly for a moment, and don’t faint until I come to the end of my sad story.”
“I don’t faint.”
“That’s a good thing. Where was I? Oh yes. We were able to put on some pressure and the result of the autopsy has come in early. As we all suspected—yes, you, too, and don’t deny it—Catherine Clay was poisoned. It is unlikely—I might as well say impossible, that she took her own life because those capsules in the little silver box—”
“Then it was hers—that’s what I had about decided—”
“Yes, but don’t interrupt for a minute. As I started to say, those capsules were solid full of yellow jessamine—perhaps I should say Gelsemin C24H28N204. Our theory is that, immediately after lunch on Saturday she took what she thought to be one of her vitamin pills and it was, instead, a large dose of poison. She then visited the bookshop, probably very soon after you and I left, to return that book and, perhaps, to collect you to go to the bazaar with her since it would have been about the right time. But by the time she got to the shop she was feeling ill. The symptoms are nausea, pain in the brows and eyeballs, dilation of the pupils (this was noticeable, of course, but we put it down to the fact, admitted by her mother, that she sometimes took dope), paralysis and dimness of vision—more than enough to make anyone want to lie down—”
“Good heavens, Peter, she must have suffered agonies there all by herself in that miserable hammock.” Fredericka spoke calmly, but one hand clutched Peter’s sleeve tightly.
“It may not have been too bad, actually. There was no evidence that she was actually sick and it was a good-sized dose. No, the chances are that she felt odd, lay down, passed out and knew no more.”
“But that—that awful look on her face?”
“It may have been purely muscular,” Peter said, but without conviction.
Fredericka tried to forget the face which had haunted her all the long week, and, with an effort, shifted her thoughts from Catherine to her murderer. “Oh, Peter, who could have done it? Who hated her that much?”
“Ah—that’s the crux of the whole matter. If we’d only listened to Margie at the supper. We come back to Margie every time. She knows something, I’m sure, but she’s frightened to tell, so she just hints and runs away. I wonder what in thunder she was doing last night. If only…” his voice trailed off. Then he said slowly: “The murder looks more like hatred than expediency, doesn’t it?” Then, suddenly aware of the hand that was clutching his arm so fiercely, he went on quietly: “You mustn’t take this too hard, Fredericka. I tell you all this because I am convinced that the best thing in the world for you now is to put your very good mind onto helping me. Even your Victorian women will have to wait. We’ll put crime detection first for a little while.”
In spite of herself, Fredericka was interested. “But why you? I wondered about it yesterday when you said you’d been giving James the third degree. I mean I thought Thane Carey was the one—” She stopped and then said apologetically: “I don’t mean to be rude, only—well, you’re not Scotland Yard in disguise or anything, are you?”
“Do you know that we have been standing in front of the campus gate for five full minutes and that we could be much more comfortable in your living room, if only you would ask me in? No, don’t interrupt, I haven’t finished. I have a further suggestion to offer. If you don’t mind, I will just run in to my room and collect my toothbrush. Then if you’ll let me sleep on the couch in the office I’ll play watchdog for tonight. I’d been afraid to suggest it but after what you have just told me I must. By tomorrow I expect Thane’ll put a man on to the job. Of course you’re not in any danger. The fact that you weren’t touched last night is proof of that. It’s just that I think you’ll rest more comfortable like.”
“Oh, Peter,” Fredericka said, and the relief made her words trip over each other, “Will you? I mean, won’t it be grim?”
“Not in the least. As a matter of fact, I know that couch well. There was a burglary scare once and I played guard for Miss Hartwell until the thief was apprehended. Of course, you’ll have to give me breakfast and the town will hear about it from the alley cats and talk, but I’m banking on the fact that they’ll have something so much more interesting to talk about that they’ll overlook us.”
“But you haven’t told me why you know so much about all this—
and—” But Peter had left her standing alone by the gate.
“Back in two minutes,” he called cheerfully.
As the sound of his footsteps died away, the silence closed in around Fredericka. She moved toward the gate and leant against its cold iron face—conscious of her need for support and more than ever ashamed of her own terror.
“Scared, weren’t you?” Peter laughed as he rejoined her.
“Well, yes, I confess it.”
“Understandable, but no need to be. Otherwise Carey would have sent a man around at once after he talked to you on the phone this morning. Look at it reasonably and let your mind, not your emotions, run the show. Catherine Clay’s death here was accidental. There’s nothing to connect the murder and the bookshop. She could have taken that pill at any time and died anywhere. What’s more, you’re the least likely of anyone to be victim number two. You’re new to the place, and though you found the—er—corpus delicti, you don’t know anything more about what happened than twenty or more others do. You were at the bazaar along with me and nearly everyone else in the place. I’m just staying here tonight in order to help your beauty sleep, as I’ve already pointed out.”
They had entered the house and as Fredericka switched on the light she could see the broad grin on his face. “And how badly I need it, my dear Holmes,” she said, and was able to smile back at him. “Of course you and I alibi each other for the afternoon, but from what you say, those poisoned pills could have been put in—well—almost any time, but I suppose in the morning. Vitamins are usually taken after meals.”
“I like both your smile and your talent for deduction. Now I happen to know that dear mad Lucy keeps a small supply of nightcaps in a cupboard on the right-hand side by the kitchen sink—of all places. Shall we indulge, or was that revolting limeade strong enough for you?”
“I didn’t like it much,” Fredericka confessed. “Well, since you know so much about it, perhaps you’ll do the honours. And, I just might join you.”