I had not dreamed it. As I jerked my head up, it was repeated and for all the world it sounded like a chicken shaking its feathers.
It was a chicken shaking its feathers. Sitting on a nice small roost in a corner, with a newspaper spread beneath it as a sanitary measure, was Henrietta. I stood in the doorway and laughed while Henrietta inspected me, first with one eye and then with the other. I had no idea then that the determined little lady was to play her own part in our mystery. As it was, she went back to sleep, and it was not long before I followed her example.
It was two o’clock in the morning before a rap on the door roused me. It was O’Brien, and big and strong as he was, he looked exhausted as well as blue with cold. He did not say anything. He threw my other pump on the hearth to dry, flung my sodden bag on the table, poured himself a huge slug of Scotch and drank it straight, asked if the telephone had rung, and when I said no disappeared into his room. When he came back he was wearing his old dressing-gown over his pajamas, and he looked better.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I’m no fish. I’d about given up when I found the thing. How about some coffee? You probably need it. I know I do. And leave the bag. I want to open it myself.”
The coffee tasted wonderful, strong and black. It stimulated me as no whisky could have done, but as a result of waiting for it, it was half past two before at last he carefully opened the bag. As it was leather the contents were wet but not sodden. And to my surprise it contained not only the bankbooks and the photograph but a half dozen or so newspaper clippings. Then I remembered the woman pounding at the door, and having my hands full of things.
“They were in the desk,” I said. “I must have picked them up, and when that woman rang the doorbell I dropped them in my bag. I haven’t looked at them since. I just forgot I had them.”
“Mrs. Benjamin evidently had the clipping habit,” he said. “People do, you know. Like collecting stamps. Let’s dry them out, and the bankbooks, too.”
He did so carefully in front of the fire, and it was the bankbooks he inspected first. He made a note of the amount of the deposits, and their dates, but when he glanced at the clippings the first one he saw was about the woman herself, and there was no doubt of her identity. It was from a local newspaper. It showed her picture, and according to it she had won a prize at a charity card party. O’Brien showed it to me.
“Our woman all right,” he said. “Good job, Lois. You’d make a pretty good detective yourself.”
“It was easy,” I said modestly. “I just thought what Sara Winters would have done, and did it.”
“Winters? Who the hell is Sara Winters?”
“She’s the woman detective I write about.”
He snorted and went back to the clippings.
Among the others there was the obituary notice of a Walter Benjamin, aged sixty-four. It was brief, and dated some months before. It did not give the place of death. And there was one which O’Brien held for a time and then reluctantly handed to me. It was one of the articles about Judith’s divorce and her return to The Birches, and a picture of her, evidently taken previously, with a gay party at the Stork Club.
I sat staring at it.
“Rather interesting, isn’t it?” he said. “Your sister says she didn’t know her, never saw her. But this Benjamin woman cuts her picture out of the paper and keeps it. What do you make of it?”
I was trying to think.
“I think it’s very unlikely Judith would know her,” I said. “She’s lived for years in that little town.”
The telephone rang just then and he answered it. Someone was speaking at length.
“I see,” he said finally. “Well, better luck next time.”
As usual, he refused to explain further, and when I had put on my dress and my shrunken pumps and gathered up the rest, he took me back to the house. I was fairly confident that he had his gun in his pocket. He carried a flashlight, too, and when he reached the shrubbery he stopped and examined it. There were some broken branches and a few fresh leaves on the ground, which bore out my story but told nothing else. He seemed reluctant to leave me at the porch, however.
“Who locks this huge barn of a place at night?” he said.
“The last one to go to bed, although we don’t bother much about the windows. We’ve never had any trouble.”
“It might be a good idea to take a few elementary precautions,” he said rather dryly. “It’s more than possible that your Mrs. Benjamin was pretty deliberately murdered. It’s not a nice thought.”
There was a moment then when he stood looking down at me, and there was a softer tone to his voice.
“You see,” he said, “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Lois. You’re—well, you’re a damned nice girl.”
He waited until he heard me lock the front door before I heard him going down the drive. He walked lightly for so big a man, but I felt certain that he was not going back to the cottage.
He did not. I was barely up the stairs when I heard his car start and drive furiously toward town. I forgot about him immediately, however, for Judith’s door was open and her room empty.
Chapter 17
SHE HAD BEEN IN bed. It was mussed the sheet thrown back, and the book she had been reading lay on the floor. I went panicky for a second or so. If that man was still on the grounds and he found her—
Judith, however, was not out on the grounds. As I stood there I heard faint sounds overhead, and realized where she was. The house has only two stories, but above them are the huge attics where ever since the place was built everything was stored: the usual old trunks, broken furniture, and even ancient toys. It was years since I had been there, since the time when I was getting out Phil’s battered hobbyhorse for young Bill, and I doubted if Judith had ever been up there at all.
She was there now. There was a candle on top of a box, and she was kneeling on the floor before a small old-fashioned trunk. Its lid was up, and I shall never forget her face when she turned her head and saw me. I don’t think she could speak at first. Then:
“What do you mean, following me around?” she demanded irritably.
“I heard you, and your room’s empty. If you’re looking for something, maybe I can help you.”
She slammed the trunk lid and got up. “It was hot and I couldn’t sleep,” she said, more quietly. “Mother had a lot of my wedding pictures, so I thought I’d look for them.”
I remembered what she had said about Doctor Townsend not so long before, and I wanted to say something about setting forth the funeral baked meats for the marriage feast, or whatever it is. I did not, of course. She was still pale, but whatever she was looking for, it was not the huge expensive photographs of her wedding. The trunk in front of her I knew was filled with old snapshots taken hither and yon, but nothing else.
“I think there are a few in the library somewhere,” I told her. “I’ll look in the morning.”
She got to her feet and picked up the candle. Without makeup and with a glaze of cold cream on her face and neck she looked her full age that night, and older. But I let her get back to her room and wash her hands, which were filthy with the dust of years, before I asked her what I felt I had to ask. She was rubbing some sort of lotion on her hands when I spoke.
“There was a man on the grounds tonight, Judith,” I said. “I’m sure he thought I was you. He grabbed me and started to carry me off. When he found he’d made a mistake he pitched me into the pool. Do you know who he is?”
She stared at me. My hair and my wrinkled dress told her I was telling the truth, and at first I thought she was going to faint. She did not, however.
She simply sat down on the bench in front of her dressing-table. The bottle of lotion fell and spilled all over the place, but she paid no attention to it.
“Yes, I know who it was,” she said, in a dead voice. “It’s someone who intends to kill me.”
“Why? Why should anyone want to kill you?” I insisted. “What did you do, Judith? It must h
ave been something.”
And then, sick as she looked, she gave me a queer ironic smile.
“What did I do?” she said. “Well, for one thing I married Ridgely Chandler.”
“It wasn’t Ridge, Judith,” I said.
“Of course not,” she snapped. “He wouldn’t have the guts.”
It made no sense. Even now it does not make a great deal. But I got nothing more from her that night, nor did I get much sleep when I finally went to bed. Again and again I went over what I knew. What O’Brien had said about her danger, and her own fears ever since Reno. But why would anyone intend to kill her? What had she done, petted and cared for all her life as she had been? And what had she meant about marrying Ridgely?
There had certainly been no murder in the man who had stopped me in the drive, although his voice had been hard, almost fierce. But if it was Judith he was after, he had not meant to kill her. They were to have something out. She was to talk, but about what? And why had he killed the Benjamin woman, if he did?
Sitting up in bed with a cigarette and getting more and more wakeful every minute, I could not see how she belonged, or even why she had come to the pool. To whom could she have been a menace, that middle-aged woman with her clean kitchen, her big black cat, and her small fortune in the bank?
I watched the sun come up that morning. My room faced the east, and finally I got up and drew the shade, to try and get a few hours’ sleep. I could see the edge of the pool from the window, and after a moment or so I saw O’Brien there. He was sitting quiet on the bench, smoking his pipe, and I was pretty sure he had been there—or near there—all night.
I had my second talk with Doctor Townsend that afternoon. I had no appointment, and the Robey woman looked annoyed. However, he seemed to be free and, I thought, even glad to see me.
“I’ve been worried about your sister,” he said. “She was rather strange yesterday. Has anything happened?”
“That depends on how you look at it, Doctor. She blew up when she got home. I wondered if anything here upset her.”
“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I probed a bit too deep. You have to remember what my work is. Not to use too many technical terms, the theory is to bring any subconscious worries to the conscious mind; in other words, to make the patient dig up the buried anxiety and face it. Mrs. Chandler refuses to do it.”
“But it’s there—the worry, or whatever you call it?”
“It’s there, yes.”
“Would that account for her hysterical spell yesterday?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He pushed a cigarette box at me, and over the desk lit one for me. When he sat back he smiled.
“I’m sorry it happened to you,” he said. “You’ve been having a bad time for months, haven’t you? As to yesterday, let’s say a neurotic temperament under strain will occasionally blow up. It’s a sort of mental explosion. Usually when it’s over, it’s over.”
“Our cook, Helga, has been with us for years. She thinks Judith doesn’t remember much about them afterward.”
“That’s possible. It relates to something we call the censor, the thing that works, while we sleep, and raises hell with our dreams. Has it ever occurred to you that she regrets her divorce?”
“Never,” I said definitely. “She detests him. I don’t know just why. He’s behaved very well. And” I added, “you have to remember he’s a Chandler. They always behave well, the Chandlers, summer and winter, cold or hot, up and down and sideways.”
He laughed a little, but when I told him about my experience of the night before, his expression changed.
“I see,” he said. “Well, it’s been apparent all along she is afraid of something or somebody. This man wanted her to talk. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“It’s what he said. She’d talk or he’d kill her.”
He sighed and put out his cigarette.
“We’re not infallible, you know,” he said. “A shock or long-continued strain is often mistaken for a neurosis, and I gather this man is a fact, not a delusion.”
“He is, unless you think I went swimming in my best summer outfit.”
“Then it changes things considerably, doesn’t it? You see, it’s easy to say people have delusions, or persecution or what have you. A paranoid psychosis, if you like. I was inclined to think that of your sister. But now she has produced what looks like a real neurosis and is actually a fact. You say she won’t explain him. Who he is? Why he wants her to talk, and what about?”
“Only to say he means to kill her. Period.”
He opened her file and examined it. Then he slapped it shut.
“Just how much do you remember about her marriage?” he asked. “You were—what? Seven or eight, weren’t you? Children often have surprisingly good memories.”
“I don’t remember much, but my sister Anne says she found her that morning kicking her wedding dress on the floor. It doesn’t sound particularly ecstatic, does it?”
“Yet she stayed married for twenty years.”
“If you call it that. Personally I don’t think she was really married after the first week.”
“And you’re still sure her husband has nothing to do with this terror of hers?”
“Not directly, although she said a curious thing last night, after I found her in the attic and she said someone meant to kill her. I asked her what she had done to be so afraid, and she smiled and said, ‘For one thing, I married Ridgely Chandler.’”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Did she intimate that he killed the woman in the pool?”
“Absolutely not. After all, why should he? Even if he thought she was Judith? He had had a good many years with her, plenty of time for a murder if he wanted it. So he waits until he’s free of her and then knocks her out with a golf club!”
He was very thoughtful when I left. He seemed puzzled, and I wondered what his science did for him against a problem like this. I daresay he went home and ate a hearty dinner with a wife he was fond of, saw his children, if any, and played bridge or went to the movies later. But I carried a heavy load back with me.
It was on the train I considered Father’s suicide, and wondered if it could have been the psychic shock he had mentioned. It seemed impossible. Judith was only seventeen or so at the time, and not a particularly devoted daughter; and I at seven had been shut in the nursery of the city house and knew nothing about it. I had missed him, of course.
My nurse would not talk about it, so I would slip down to Helga in the kitchen.
“Where’s Daddy, Helga?”
“He’s gone away, darling. Don’t you worry about him.”
“But I want him. He didn’t say good-by to me.”
“He doesn’t like saying good-byes. You know that. Here’s some cookies. You’d better eat them here, so you don’t get scolded.”
There had been a butler at that time. I remembered him only as a rather dark sardonic person. He and Helga did not get along, and my only real picture of him was when Mother was going to Arizona, and he was carrying her bags and Judith’s to a taxicab. I did not remember him after that. I suppose he left with the rest when the house was closed.
O’Brien’s car was gone when I drove in past the cottage, so was Bill’s jalopy, and Phil and I ate dinner alone. With Judith still in seclusion, it was my first chance to talk to Phil in several days, and I asked him what he remembered about Father’s death.
“Why bring that up?” he said. “It just happened like plenty of others that year. The poor old boy was broke. That’s all.”
“Doctor Townsend spoke about some sort of psychic shock for Judith,” I persisted. “I wondered if that was it.”
“It was a shock for everybody. I think Judith fainted when they told her, but as I remember she was going through one of her queer spells at the time, anyhow; having a hysterical fit one minute and the next shut in her room and looking lost and forlorn. I think that’s why Mother whisked her off to Arizona.”
“She wasn’t engaged to Ridgely then?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. Not until they came back.”
“Look, Phil, did she want to marry Ridge?”
“She married him, didn’t she? Nobody pushed her to the altar—although Mother might have given her a shove. She was pretty keen about the match.”
With some difficulty I got him back to Father’s death. He seemed surprised how little I knew about it.
“Of course, you were only a kid, but I suppose you know when he did it?”
“After a dinner party, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, gave a look at the canned peaches Jennie offered him, and waved her away.
“I was there,” he said after she had disappeared. “I hadn’t gone back to college. It was the Christmas holidays, you know. The party was over and I had started to undress when the butler of the moment—I forget his name—rapped at my door. He said there was a police officer downstairs, so I put on a dressing-gown and went down. It seems the night watchman had been making his rounds and heard the shot. Anne and Martin were living with us at the time. Martin had gone broke after the crash, and I seem to remember Anne was pregnant. Anyhow I got Martin, and we went down in the police car. There was nothing to do, of course.”
“You’re sure he killed himself?”
He stared at me.
“Certainly I’m sure. He left a note for Mother on his desk. That was queer, too,” he said reminiscently. “I opened it, with the police all around, but it wasn’t just what you’d expect. All he said was that he could not and would not do anything against his conscience, even to save her pride. I told Martin about it, and we tore it up. Mother was up against enough without that.”
“It doesn’t sound like him, Phil. He was never cruel. And what did he mean? Why his conscience?”
The Swimming Pool Page 16