by Frances
13
The reflectors in a sign picked up the car lights, spelled out a name: “Payne.” Pam turned the car off the narrow blacktop, sharply up a graveled drive. The drive stretched more than two hundred yards ahead; it climbed and curved gently. The long low house was a long band of light on top the ridge. It seemed to float there.
Pam drove fast on the drive, urging the car. For the last few miles a sense of urgency had held her. Faith Constable, sitting beside Pam, had leaned forward, as if to speed the car. In the back seat, a dark shadow among shadows, Gladys Mason had sat quietly. Since they had stopped for directions at the drugstore, the mother of the boy they were trying to find had seemed to hide inside herself.
They had taken the Norths’ car because it was the only one—unless, as Faith had uncertainly suggested, they wanted to hire a Carey car, with a man to drive it. There had been no point in that, Pam had said. “Cumbersome,” she said. “What would we do with him?” They had had no difficulty—except the difficulties of darkness, toward the end of narrow, winding roads—in reaching Ridgefield. That far Pam—because Jerry had an author living in Redding and they had been to her house—knew her way. But when they reached a fountain on Route 35—a fountain sheathed, for the winter—what they next did was anybody’s guess. Pam turned left, driving toward lights up Ridgefield’s Main Street.
It was almost seven o’clock by then and most of Main Street appeared to have gone to bed. In the unassertive stores on Main Street, a street on which once had thudded the heavy feet of British soldiers, marching down from the burning of Danbury, night lights burned dimly. Except for a news store, except for a drugstore. Pam tried the drugstore.
The soda clerk knew where the Paynes lived. “Awful thing about poor Mr. Payne.” Pam was headed the wrong way. Turn—all right to U-turn at the traffic light, in a lane between parked cars—and drive two blocks or so to Branchville Road. Had a number—Route 102. Mile or so on it and, to the right, Nod Road. No number. Couple of miles more on Nod Road, beyond Whipstick Road, and the Payne house was a couple of hundred yards back, on the left—about three miles altogether. “You can’t miss it,” the soda clerk said, with confidence. Pam was less certain; even after she had got it repeated, committed to memory, she was not certain. Whipstick Road probably would throw her off; it sounded like a road which might.
“Can’t miss it,” the soda clerk repeated, firmly. “Like I told the other two.”
Pam had turned to go back to the car. She stopped. She said, “The other two?”
“Like you, miss,” the soda clerk said. “She needs people to stand by time like this. Tough to be out there all alone. At a time like this.”
“Yes,” Pam said. “Other friends of hers, of course. Men? Or women?”
Both the others who had asked had been men. The most recent, about half an hour ago. Tall guy. Dark. Had a car outside. “Course, I don’t know. There could have been a lady in the car.” He had, with proper impartiality, told him what he had told Pam, how to get to Nod Road. The man had gone out to the car and driven off.
The other had been earlier. Also a tall guy—tall and thin; younger, he thought, than the second enquirer. He had come in about two, or a little after. “Right after the bus stopped. Bus from New York.” He might have come on the bus. On the other hand, he’d probably had a car. Most people had cars, didn’t they? Hard to find a place to park at that earlier hour. Shoppers.
“Did you happen to notice,” Pam said, “whether either of them limped?”
The soda clerk put his head back and closed his eyes, in the attitude of one deep in remembrance. He opened his eyes and adjusted his head and said, “Can’t remember that either of them did. But I didn’t pay much attention. Pretty busy the first time and a lot of the kids at the counter the second. Neither of them was what I’d call crippled, if you know what I mean. But whether they limped—” He shrugged to end the sentence.
Either, but most probably the first, might have been Robert Mason, seeking to close a dangerous mouth. Pam had told the two women in the car and Mrs. Mason had drawn a slow, shuddering breath and gone back into herself. “Hours ago,” Faith Constable said. “He may—” She did not finish.
“We came as fast as we could,” Pam said. “As soon as we—as we had reason.”
She swung the car from the curb, U-turned at the light. She drove faster than she should on a village street; on Branchville Road faster still, although Branchville Road is curving, not wide. She almost missed Nod Road and had to back to turn into it. It had, hurrying on a still narrower road, lights boring into darkness under arching trees, seemed farther than the man had said. But, finally, the car lights picked up the sign. Gravel spurted under rear wheels as Pam sent the car up the drive. Near the house, the drive went through a gap in a thick hedge. That was why, from below, the house had seemed to float. It floated above the hedge.
There was no other car on the drive, which looped in front of the long house—a house which, as they stopped in front of it, seemed all glass. A porch roof, cantilevered over a terrace, seemed to be tipping a hat to them.
Pam was first out of the car, but had to go around it. By the time she reached the terrace, Faith Constable was holding the rear door open. Mrs. Mason got out of the car slowly, as if she dreaded to leave the car—the safe shadows of the car.
They were only halfway across the wide terrace when the door onto it opened. Lauren Payne stood with the light behind her, her coppery hair shining in the light. A black dress hugged her slender body. She stood so for a moment, light-outlined, and then said, in her low, husky voice, “Why—hello.”
It had seemed, when she opened the door, that she expected them; it had been almost as if they were invited guests, a little behind their time. But when she spoke, she spoke with surprise. But then, a little vaguely, she said, “Why, how nice. Faith dear. Mrs. North.” She looked at Gladys Mason, her smile one of uncertainty.
“You’re all right?” Pam said, and Lauren looked at her for a second, as if puzzled, and then said, “All right?”
It had been, Pam thought, a strange thing to ask a woman violently widowed only twenty-four hours before.
“Why yes,” Lauren said, “I’m all right, I guess.”
She drew back from the door and said, “Come in.”
They went in.
“This is Gladys Mason, dear,” Faith said. “She’s—” She hesitated.
“I was Tony’s second wife,” Gladys said, and her voice was dull. “A long time ago.”
She looked around the room, as if her eyes sought something.
It was a long room, two sides of glass. There was a big fireplace in one wall, and a fire laid in it, but not lighted. There was no place in the room for a man to hide, or for a frightened, angry boy to hide.
“Do come and sit down,” Lauren said, and led them down the room to chairs near the fireplace. Then she shivered a little, and said, “Wait,” opened a narrow door in the wall near the fireplace and took out a foot-long, narrow box. She got a very long wooden match from the box and struck it and leaned down and touched the little flame to paper under wood. A larger flame leaped up. “Do sit down,” she said, again, and they sat down. But after a moment, Lauren stood up again and walked to the glass which faced the terrace and looked through it. She came back. “I thought I saw somebody coming,” she said.
A car’s lights, Pam thought, would be brightly visible as a car came up the drive, at least until the hedge intervened. The lights would hardly be something one “thought” one saw.
“We shouldn’t just have—barged in this way,” Pam said. “Probably you’re expecting—”
“Nobody,” Lauren said, quickly, in the voice too deep for so slight a woman. “It was good of you to come. I must get you something. I’m sorry—I’m not thinking very clearly, I’m afraid. I’ll—”
She started to move away, apparently to get them something.
“Dear,” Faith Constable said, “we came because—”
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nbsp; But Gladys Mason interrupted her. The woman in dull clothes spoke in a dull voice.
“Mrs. Payne” she said, “did you see my boy? Was that what you meant?”
Lauren turned back. She said, “See your boy? What do you mean, Mrs.—” she hesitated over the name, came up with it. “Your boy?”
“Robert,” Gladys Mason said. “He—he was a bus at the hotel. A tall, thin boy. Dark. Is he the one you meant?”
“I’m afraid—” Lauren said, and came back to her chair by the fire. “Should I know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Mason?”
“The boy,” Gladys said, and there was no change in her voice—she spoke methodically, with almost no inflection. “You don’t remember?”
“We weren’t at the hotel long,” Lauren said. “You mean the Dumont? We didn’t eat there. Tony said the food was terrible. He was like that about—things.”
“Not then,” Gladys said, and now there was a little impatience in her voice. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Mrs. Payne, don’t you remember me?”
“Remember? I knew there was—that Tony married someone after Faith, before me. Is that what you mean? Did we meet sometime? I’m terribly sorry. I don’t remember. I’m so dreadfully bad at—”
Gladys Mason shook her head.
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Last night. After—after Tony was shot. After Mrs. North told you and—”
“I remember Mrs. North—coming,” Lauren said. Then she said, “Wait! Of course I remember you. It’s—it’s all been so—so like a dream. I keep forgetting things. You came and sat with me after the doctor gave me something to make me sleep. Somebody said, ‘This is Mrs. Mason. She’ll stay with you for a little.’” She shook her head slowly. “It was dreadful of me to forget,” she said. “I’ve been—nothing has seemed quite real. I’m—it was good of you to sit with me.”
She looked suddenly at Mrs. North and then, her eyes a little widened, again at Gladys Mason. Whatever she had forgotten, Pam thought, she remembered clearly enough now.
“But,” Lauren said, her deep voice very low indeed, “after you came I must have passed out. Passed out like a light, as they say. I remember your coming in and now somebody saying your name and I said, ‘a nurse?’ Didn’t I? And somebody said, ‘the housekeeper.’ Wasn’t that it?”
“Not all of—” Gladys said, and Lauren leaned forward in her chair and, again, said, “Wait. Please—did I say something to you? Something about your boy? But—how could I? I—I’m sorry, Mrs. Mason. I don’t know anything about your boy. Not even that you and Anthony had a son. Not his name. Not anything.” She looked very intently at Mrs. Mason. “You say ‘what I meant.’ Do you mean I did say something?” Then she looked quickly at Pam North.
“No,” Pam said. “Not to me. I told you that. But, to her—”
“You said,” Gladys Mason told the woman with coppery hair, who sat beside the fire, light from above touching her hair, “that he was not supposed to be over there. Your voice wasn’t clear, but you said that. It was as if you were talking in your sleep.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t know what I meant. Certainly nothing about your—”
“I asked you what you meant by ‘over there’ and you said, ‘The King Arthur, of course.’ That’s the hotel across the street. You said ‘he’ didn’t belong over there. ‘What’s he doing over there?’”
Lauren shook her head again.
“Maybe I did,” she said. “I don’t remember. If I did, I don’t know what I meant. Not belonging at the King Arthur? But—it’s just a hotel. Anybody can ‘belong’ at a hotel.”
“Not,” Gladys said, “a busboy who works at a hotel across the street. Oh—I don’t say it’s clear. But—did you see him? Or—was it somebody else? Going into the other hotel. Your husband could have been shot from there.”
“See somebody?” She shook her head again. “I don’t understand—” She looked toward Pam, then toward Faith Constable. “Can’t one of you,” she said, “tell me what this is all about? Why you’ve come here to—to ask these questions?”
“At the Dumont,” Pam said, “your windows faced the street. You could look across at the King Arthur. Mrs. Mason thinks you did, and saw her son going in. You see, she’s afraid. The boy hated his father because—oh, for lots of reasons. He may have had a rifle.”
“But—” Lauren said.
“You said,” Gladys told her, “that there was something the matter with his leg. The man, whoever it was, you saw. And—Bobby limps. Not all the time. When he’s tired and—”
“Listen,” Lauren said. “Will you—will all of you—listen to me a minute? I didn’t see anybody. I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I suppose—all right. I’m not questioning what you say, Mrs. Mason. I said some things when I was—well, when I was drugged. I don’t remember. What you say I said doesn’t make any sense to me now. But whatever it was, it couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened to Tony. Because—”
She paused and partly closed her eyes. She was, Pam thought, arranging what she wanted to say, getting it clear in her own mind.
“I suppose,” she said, and spoke slowly, as if she thought of each word, was still working it out as she spoke. “I suppose if I had seen anybody, it would have been a little while before Tony was killed. While the party was going on; after I left it and went up to the room because I had a headache. Is that what you mean, Mrs. Mason?”
“I don’t know when,” Gladys said. “But—yes, I suppose it would have been then.”
“No,” Lauren said. “I mean, it wasn’t. I had this headache—the noise, the—the strain. Everything. I went up to the room, yes. I took aspirin and lay down. Then, after about half an hour, I took a Nembutal and I was—I was asleep when you came to tell me, wasn’t I, Mrs. North?”
“Half asleep,” Pam said.
“I remember everything I did at first,” Lauren said. “Afterward—afterward it was hazy. I said that, when—when I came to ask you what I’d said, Mrs. North. But not at first. I took aspirin and lay down and then the Nembutal, when the aspirin didn’t seem to help. My nerves were jumping. And then I got that—that soft feeling. You know what I mean? Anyway, that’s what I call it. The ‘soft’ feeling. And then somebody knocked at the door and you came in and—”
She stopped.
“I’m making this long,” she said. “I know that. But, I’m remembering it step by step. That’s why. And—I never once looked out the window. Came up, took my dress off and my shoes. Went to the bathroom and took the aspirin, and got a Nembutal capsule and a glass of water and put them by the bed and—and got on the bed and propped my head up and—and waited. I didn’t look out the window. Why should I? There—there’s nothing to see from the window. Oh, lots of things. But not really anything. So—I didn’t see anybody I knew—knew shouldn’t be there, was out of place—going into the King Arthur.” She looked from one to the other. “Don’t you see?” she said, and looked at Gladys Mason. “I was only dreaming. I was—I must have been reciting a dream I was having. I don’t remember the dream at all, but that has to be it.”
She still spoke slowly. There was weight on each word.
“Don’t you understand?” Lauren said. “I’m sorry if I worried you, Mrs. Mason. About—what did you say his name was? Oh yes, Robert. Terribly sorry. I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anybody.”
Gladys Mason looked at Pam, and her eyes waited. There was, Pam thought, uncertainty in Gladys’s eyes.
“Of course, dear,” Faith Constable said. “Dreams are such jumbles.”
Which, Pam thought, was entirely true. Dreams are made of shadows and of words; dreams start from something and go anywhere and nowhere. One sees the name of a hotel on a sign and, somewhere, perhaps at some other time, a man limping, and the dreaming mind makes a fantastic story embodying both. The dreams are sometimes pictures; sometimes words. (Jerry has told her that his are always in words, and that what wears him out is editing sent
ence structures.) It might well be such a dream which had brought them hurrying northeast through darkness to this bright house. No—not quite that. What had brought them still was real enough.
“Mrs. Payne,” Pam said, “he hasn’t been here? Robert Mason, I mean?”
“Why,” Lauren said, “no. Not while I’ve been here. But that’s only about an hour. You see—”
She had taken an early afternoon train to New Canaan, which is the nearest railway station to Ridgefield—the nearest, at any rate, with anything approaching adequate service. When she and Payne had gone into New York several days earlier, they had left their car in a New Canaan parking lot. When she had tried to start the car this afternoon it had refused to start. She thought that was about three o’clock. She had had to walk to a garage, wait for somebody to be free; afterward to wait, reading (for want of anything more fascinating) catalogues of new cars, while a mechanic found what had blocked the fuel line.
It had been after six when, finally, she got home. She had fixed herself a drink, a sandwich. Which reminded her. She really must get them—
“No,” Pam said. She had a second thought. “Not yet, anyway,” she said. “And nobody has come? Not the boy? Not anybody?”
“No. Why should anybody? Why should—” Again she hesitated over the name. “Robert? I don’t—” She stopped abruptly. She had been facing Pam; she turned quickly to Gladys Mason.
“You told him,” she said. “This—this thing you made out of what I said.” She breathed deeply, and spoke more slowly, but it seemed to Pam with an effort. “So now,” she said, “he thinks I will tell somebody I saw him. Going into the other hotel. Carrying a rifle? That’s what—that’s why you came. You thought he might come here to—to make sure I didn’t talk. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Mason said, “Well—”
“Yes,” Pam said. “That’s it, of course.”
“You’ve rather put me on the spot, haven’t you?” Lauren said to Gladys Mason. “On quite a spot. And, you must be quite sure he did kill Tony, mustn’t you? That if I had been looking out the window I could have seen him, because he was there. I didn’t, but I could have. Because otherwise, what I might say wouldn’t matter, would it?”