“He’s somewhere outside,” I said. “He got out this window when he heard us coming. He can’t be far away. Perhaps you can catch him.”
I don’t think he relished the suggestion. Nevertheless, he took the poker from the fireplace and started for the door. He stopped there to glance at me with a sickly grin.
“God help me if Fowler sees me with this!” he said, and disappeared.
I stood listening. Darkness had fallen suddenly, and I could hear him beating through the shrubbery. Nothing happened, however, no car started up, as I had expected, and Phil found no one. He came back, covered with burs and looking disgusted.
“Why the brainstorm?” he asked. “How do you know whoever it was went out that window?”
“Because it was open. And Henrietta was scared off her perch. You heard her squawk yourself.”
He damned all chickens while he picked the burs off his trouser legs. But he was impressed, nevertheless.
“If there was anyone here, how did he get in?” he asked. “Who has a key to this place?”
There were only two, I told him, O’Brien’s and the one we kept at the house, on the hall table.
“Helga uses it to get the chicken feed from the kitchen,” I said, “but she always puts it back. Phil, did you look in the chicken house?”
“No, and I don’t intend to,” he said grumpily. “I need a vacuum cleaner and a drink. Or reverse it. A drink, then the vacuum.”
As a result it was I who went out to the chicken house, taking O’Brien’s flashlight with me. It was too late, of course. The hens were stirring unhappily, but the shed was empty. The doors were open, however. Someone had been there, listening and waiting for a chance to escape.
It did nothing to soothe my feelings to find the key in its usual place when we went back to the house.
I was still upset when I prepared Judith for bed later on. She was up and about by that time. Her wrists had healed with only small scars, but she continued to stick to her room and her locked doors. The terror, whatever it was, still obsessed her. She had tried to escape it by dying, but when that failed, it remained with her.
Yet in a way I thought she was less desperate. Certainly she was easier to get along with. Perhaps when one has deliberately faced eternity as she had, one’s perspective must be altered, and even death may have lost some of its horror. She was still weak, however. I fixed her bed and got her into it before she noticed chicken feathers in my hair and asked about them.
I could not tell her our invader was back again. It would have destroyed what little equanimity she had recovered. I invented something about a fox after O’Brien’s girls, and let it go at that.
She turned over as usual to let me rub her back, not interested in chickens, not interested in much, actually, except to get away from all of us and start a new life elsewhere.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’ll be sure to get a sailing soon, with the rush almost over. And a lot of my clothes are still in the apartment. If Ridge lets you in, would you pack them for me? The trunks are in the storeroom.”
“Of course,” I told her.
“If you can find Clarice, she might help you. She’s a wonderful packer.”
Clarice had been her personal maid for several years, but thinking of the raft of servants she always employed for some reason reminded me of Dawson.
“I’ll try,” I said. “Ridge probably gave her a reference. Speaking of her, I wonder if you remember a butler we used to have?”
“What butler?” she asked idly. “We had dozens.”
“His name was Dawson.”
To my surprise I could feel her stiffen under my hands. Every muscle went rigid, and at first she did not speak. Then, “What about him?” she asked. “I think I remember him. It must have been years ago. Why?”
“Only that he was there when Father died,” I said. “Phil and I were going over old times tonight. What became of him? Do you know?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea,” she said.
I was confident she was lying, but I could not be sure. Certainly it was some time before she relaxed. Also certainly she did not revert to him again, and I did not dare to pursue the subject.
But the name had meant something to her, something unpleasant, perhaps even something dreadful, for she was very pale when I went out and she locked and bolted the door behind me.
Clearly whatever her secret was she meant to keep it to herself if it killed her. And as things turned out it almost did.
Chapter 25
I RESOLUTELY PUT JUDITH’S problem behind me when I went to my room that night. I had two reasons for thankfulness. One—an important one—was that sometime during the evening Phil had told me O’Brien was out of bed. The other, of course, was the prospect of Judith’s going abroad.
I tried to visualize what it would mean, a return to peace and safety, time to work at my neglected novel, and a move back to Mother’s room, warm in winter and with a sunny window for my typewriter. I even played with the idea, if I finished the book, of buying a station wagon instead of our old car. Which shows my state of mind, as well as how little I knew.
But it was dampening to realize that O’Brien would probably leave when Judith did. He liked me. I knew that. He even kissed me in an impulsive moment. Yet I knew instinctively that he was a man’s man. He had been a tower of strength to me, and he was as masculine as they come. But he had no illusions about women. It might, I thought, be very difficult for him to love one.
So discouraging was the idea that I crawled out of bed, washed my hair, and after a disconsolate look at my nails, ignored largely since Gertrude’s, filed and painted them.
This last was not a good idea. I had to wait for them to dry, which gave me time to think: about the chicken house that night, about Fowler and Selina Benjamin’s necklace, even about Doctor Townsend’s suggestion that Judith might have carried Phil’s golf club to the pool.
Even when my hair and nails were dry I was not sleepy, and I remember that was when I drew the black cat on the pencil pad beside the bed. I always kept the pad there, in the vain hope that some fugitive idea about my work would come in the night.
So far as I know, none ever did. All there was on the pad when I looked at it was a list of words with which at some time I had evidently intended to enrich Sara Winters’s skimpy vocabulary. I remember “functional” and “integration” were among them, as well as “photogenic,” which Walter Benjamin definitely was not.
I drew the cat absently, thinking about the Benjamin-Dawson puzzle, and about the cottage and what had happened there. Not only the theft of the clippings that night. There was the shooting of O’Brien, and before it there was the other time when I wandered in from the pool, soaking wet and furious, and he had used the telephone to order the roadblock.
Because he knew something I did not. Probably a great deal, for that matter. For I could still see him, able and competent, and annoyed rather than alarmed as I stood dripping before him. He had even known who the man was. It was in his voice when he said, “The poor crazy bastard.” And then his poor crazy bastard had come back and tried to kill him. Or had he?
I came, of course and inevitably, to Dawson, and to Judith’s reaction that night while I rubbed her back. She was not only shocked. She was instantly on the defensive. Why? If Walter Benjamin was Dawson, he was most certainly dead. I had no doubt O’Brien had verified this. And Helga had recognized the photograph. I knew it, and she knew I knew it.
That was when I remembered Judith in the attic, with the old-fashioned square trunk before her. She had not been looking for her wedding pictures in it, and whatever she was searching for she had not found. Her hands were empty when she left; empty and shaking, as though she had been caught in some nefarious enterprise.
There was no use trying to sleep after that. I got up and putting on a dressing-gown and slippers, I went out into the hall. It was dark, the only light a dim reflection from the bulb left on downstairs for Bi
ll, if and when he came home. But I knew the house too well to need any assistance.
The attic, however, was slightly daunting until I found the cord for the ceiling lamp. Then it sprang into life, a vast repository of the family’s history, with its broken furniture, its trunks, some of them with foreign labels, even the old toys Helga refused to throw away. They were on a shelf, and I could see my old doll’s house, its contents neatly arranged. It gave me a faintly nostalgic feeling for the old days. For Father, and a small girl standing by a Christmas tree and staring incredulously at what was beneath it.
“Like it, baby?”
“Oh, Daddy, it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful.”
Poor Father. The church had decided he was of unsound mind, so he had received a Christian burial. I had not seen his grave for years, but the last time there had been a potted geranium on it. Helga had not forgotten him.
The trunk of snapshots was where it had been before, under the light. As I raised the lid I was almost appalled. It contained the accumulated snapshots of years, from Phil’s boyish efforts to my own with a Brownie later and others probably donated from other sources. But after an hour’s hard work I had half a dozen or so clear ones of Judith and her crowd around the pool. In spite of their best efforts I had managed to edge into one or two of them, grinning toothlessly at the camera. Then, when I had almost given up, I found one of a man in a white coat, standing by the picnic table and looking up from slicing a large baked ham.
He was Dawson, right enough, the man I remembered helping Mother and Judith downstairs with their bags on their way to Arizona, and I did not need Phil’s cynical writing on the back to identify it. It said: Dawson catering to the locusts!
He was clean shaven, of course, a man of forty or thereabouts, and I tried to imagine him at sixty or more and with a beard. Except for the eyes I could not be certain. Nevertheless, I took it, along with half a dozen of the groups around the pool, and putting out the light felt my way down the stairs.
I was in the hall when I saw the man. He was hardly more than a shadow, and he had heard me, for he was flattened against Judith’s door as though to escape observation. I must have taken two or three steps forward before I screamed, for the next thing I knew my head struck the newel post, and he leaped over me and made for the stairs.
According to the best fiction I should then have passed out. I did nothing of the sort. I simply lay there and yelled until Phil bent over me and shook me.
“Stop it!” he shouted. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“The man,” I gasped. “He was there, outside Judith’s room. He knocked me down.”
“Get up and talk sense. What man, and where did he go?”
I got up indignantly. My head hurt and I was sick at my stomach.
“There was a man,” I said slowly and distinctly—and furiously. “He was at Judith’s door. When he saw me he knocked me down, so I hit that post and may have a concussion. He then ran down the stairs and by this time has escaped. Let go of me, Phil. I’m going to lose my dinner.”
He released me in a hurry, and I made my bathroom without a minute to spare. When I wobbled back to the hall Bill had evidently come home, the search below was in full cry, and Judith was standing in her doorway. Or rather she was leaning against the frame, as though she needed support.
“Did you see him?” she asked.
“Only an outline, Jude. I think he was wearing a cap.”
She made a queer little gesture of despair, and turning sharply went back into her room. I could hear her sliding the bolt on her door and putting up the chain.
I was in bed when the men came upstairs again. There was a sizable bump on the back of my head, but I got little sympathy for it. They said he had cut a neat hole in the pantry window so he could get at the lock, and the window was still up when they got there.
Phil had already called the police in town. He said a prowl car was on the way out, but the sergeant or whoever took his message thought too much time had elapsed.
“Fellow could lose himself in two minutes among those trees out there,” he said.
He proved to be correct. When, an hour or so later, two big boys in blue examined the pantry window and came upstairs to examine me, they found me with a wet compress on my head and slightly gaga from the whisky Bill had poured into me.
“Come in and sit down,” I said cheerfully. “How about a drink?”
The idea appealed to them, but they said they were on duty. Maybe another time—And did the fellow who attacked me have a weapon?
“Certainly,” I said. “The newel post out there in the hall. Only I hope you don’t have to take it away. We really need it.”
Phil gave me a nasty look and took them away. It developed that if our man had a car he had not gone toward town. The only car they had seen was a New York taxicab, which had left some people beyond us and was heading back to the city.
The driver, they reported, had seen nobody.
The house settled down at last, Bill having adopted Judith’s idea of a booby trap under the broken window and using most of Helga’s tinware to do it. I locked myself in my room, however, and having hidden the snapshots behind some books on my shelves, crawled back into bed. I did not expect to sleep, but Bill’s whisky must have been operating, for I remember no more of the night.
Of course, there was trouble in the morning, with Jennie as usual threatening to leave and Phil having to raise her wages to induce her to stay. But the effect on Helga was appalling.
She sought me out in the storeroom, where I was making a list of needed supplies, and closed the door behind her.
“Bill says you saw this man,” she said. “What did he look like? Was he young or old?”
“I haven’t an idea. Not very old, I think, by the way he ran.”
“Look, Lois,” she said, “can’t you get Judith out of here? She’s not safe. Nobody’s safe, either, while she’s around.”
I confronted her, pad in hand.
“Does it occur to you,” I said, “that if you told everything you know we might all be safer? What do you know about it, Helga? You must know something.”
She drew a long breath.
“I’m not sure of anything,” she said slowly. “I only know it has something to do with Judith when she was a slip of a girl. They had to get her out of town, Lois. Your mother was about frantic. Maybe she killed somebody with a car, or maybe she was going to have a baby. And that Dawson—”
“What about Dawson?”
“He knew all about it, whatever it was. He and the madam were shut up in her room for hours one day talking. It wasn’t him last night, was it?”
“I think he’s dead, Helga,” I told her. “Anyhow, he would be pretty old now, wouldn’t he?”
“It’s got to do with him just the same,” she said, her face set obstinately. “You get rid of Miss Judith, Lois. Her middle name’s trouble.”
But I did not have to get rid of Judith. I found her packing her bags again, and she said she was leaving as soon as I’d packed her trunks in the apartment.
“I’m going to a hotel,” she said feverishly. “And I’ll sail on anything that floats. I should have gone long ago.”
As it turned out, however, she did not go. Only a few days later she was in bed in the hospital in town, being held for murder.
Chapter 26
I NEVER DID SEE O’Brien in the hospital. To my astonishment he came back that afternoon, against the doctor’s orders and refusing the ambulance as though it had been a hearse.
He looked much the same, except for the sling that supported his right arm. Perhaps a little thinner and with a slight limp, but his grin was as engaging as ever. When I saw him from the house he was outside in the chicken yard carrying on a one-sided conversation with Henrietta, who gave every evidence of hen hysteria, and when I ran down the drive he looked pleased.
“Somebody’s been taking good care of the girls,” he said, eyeing me. “Which is more than I can s
ay of you, mavourneen. But O’Brien’s back. We’ll have no more of these shenanigans. Do you think I could sit on my rump in that hospital and let fellows bang you on the head with a newel post?”
“He didn’t, you know,” I said. “He was only pushing me out of his way.”
“Well, you gave the town police a good story, anyhow. Fowler says how was she injured, and they state ‘she was struck by a newel post!’ Come inside. I don’t stand so good on this leg.”
It was what I had learned to call one of his Irish days, which I discovered later only came when he was deeply moved. And once inside, I suddenly felt shy. He seemed younger than I remembered for some reason; and for the first time it occurred to me that he was very good-looking. He was no Adonis. His features were too irregular for that. But any man would have considered him handsome, and a good many women, too.
To my surprise he looked embarrassed. After I sat down he stood on the hearth filling his pipe, and it was some time before he spoke.
“I suppose you wouldn’t know why I didn’t ask you to come to the hospital,” he said at last. “I suppose it’s because no man wants his girl to see him laid out and helpless. That’s a man’s pride, and he has a right to it. But I had another reason, too. I used to lie in that damned bed and figure what I was going to say to you when I got out and we were here together like this. I had it all fixed words and music,” he said. “Only I can’t remember any of it.”
I’m afraid I blushed, as I had not done for years, but I kept my voice even.
“Personally,” I said, “I keep a pad and pencil to jot down fugitive thoughts. You might try it.”
“Fugitive!” he exploded. “What’s so damn fugitive about it? It’s funk, my girl. I’m scared witless, that’s all. Only I’ve changed my mind. I propose to no woman while I have a game leg and an arm in a sling. Besides, I’ve got a job to do. I may stop another bullet before it’s over and not get off so easy. Because this is big-time stuff, my darling.”
I managed a smile.
The Swimming Pool Page 24