by Rufus King
Of course! That woman—Christine bête noire, who was always being shaken in their faces—would do.
“It is that woman, Hugo. The one who threatened Christine several years ago. The one she calls Laura.”
“Oh, surely not,” Lida said. “You can’t mean that some woman actually threatened Aunt Christine?”
“Laura Destin,” Cordelia said placidly.
“Destin?” Alan looked at Cordelia closely. “You know her last name?”
“Oh yes. One afternoon quite a while ago Christine told me all about her. We were steaming clams.”
“I dare say you think Christine told you all.”
“No, she was unusually factual. I think I will have a little cognac tonight, please, Alan.”
Hugo regarded Cordelia with fascinated admiration. “How you manage it, Cordelia, almost approaches the clinical.”
Alan, once more in stride, served cordials, and Lida said: “But what is this about this woman, Miss Banning?”
“Laura Destin was staying here as a friend, just as I am. Just as all of us are. Christine said Miss Destin did do the loveliest sewing. She had only been here for a week or two, but even so she evidently had come to consider the arrangement as a permanent one.”
“If Belder Tor had a theme song,” Godfrey boomed at Lida, “it would be called the ‘Song of the Leech.’”
“I’m just beginning to realize you don’t mean a thing that you say, Mr. Lance.”
“The child is not only fey, she drips with dew.”
“Well, anyhow,” Cordelia plugged placidly on, “before she came here Laura Destin had disposed of her sole piece of property, a farm up in Maine. She said at a loss. Then when she was downright mean to Christine, Christine just asked her to go.”
“I should like to know what form the meanness took,” Hugo said.
“She refused to hemstitch a dozen little towels.”
“Revolt!” Godfrey boomed delightedly.
“No, Miss Destin just turned horrid. She accused Christine of casting her adrift into a heartless world where she had neither relatives nor friends nor a pillow to rest her head.”
“Cordelia, that is straight out of East Lynne.”
“I can’t help it, Godfrey. It’s what Christine told me. Miss Destin did leave Belder Tor, of course, but she told Christine that she would come back and that Christine would be sorry for what she had done. She went so far as to threaten revenge. I understand that Miss Destin was Scottish. She put a malediction upon Christine in pure Erse.”
“Impossible. The language is devoid of vowels.”
Hugo smiled cynically at Alan and said: “But doesn’t all this come under the heading of Ancient History?”
“No, it doesn’t.” (This Destin angle was working out far better than Alan had dared to hope. Surely some icing, some embellishment could be added to make it even more palatable still?) “Christine mentioned the woman to me only this morning before she drove to town. I had the definite impression that Laura Destin had tried to get in touch with her.” He turned gallantly to Lida. “I hope this doesn’t alarm you too greatly? It’s mostly conjecture, but naturally I’m concerned.”
“I should think you would be. Why on earth doesn’t Aunt Christine report the woman to the police?”
“Christine,” Hugo said, “is a remarkable person, Miss Belder. She prefers to remain a force sufficient unto itself. Personally, Alan, I think your worries are rubbish. If Christine truly had received a letter she would never have stopped this side of Duse in capitalizing on it. No, the Destin woman was a worthless stray, and is probably either dead or in the poorhouse.” Hugo started to leave the room. He said, just before he went through the door, “I shall be busy in the laboratory until Christine descends upon us for bridge—in a poor attempt at catching up on the day’s wasted time.”
Godfrey picked up the Sheffield tray.
“Are you ready for the pearl diving, Cordelia? Shall we get on with our own slight task of love?”
“Won’t you please let me help you, Miss Banning?” Lida asked.
“Absolutely not, dear, but it is sweet of you to want to.” She followed Godfrey out of the room, and Alan watched them go while satisfaction mounted warmly in him at a fence that had been so competently, so artistically hurdled. His look turned to Lida, who was already increasing rapidly in value as a potential life line to save him from dark seas and along which he could conceivably drag himself back to a comparatively golden shore.
He realized with satisfaction that they were alone.
CHAPTER IX
Lida was anything but pleased in being faced with what obviously was the brink of a tête-à-tête with Alan. She did not actively dislike him. She simply did not consider him, except in the most impersonal fashion, as an adjunct of Christine’s. She would nevertheless most willingly have exchanged his present proximity for the suds session with Cordelia and Godfrey.
She observed, from the cool detachment of her eighteen years (plus the added distinguishment of a woman who has just become, officially, engaged and has marriage practically staring her in the face), the mannered gesture with which Alan opened a platinum cigarette case and offered her a cigarette.
The star-sapphire ring on his near-by finger, as he then offered her a light, fascinated her. It almost floored her. Lida’s excellent eyes (20:20) took in each detail of the lion-pawed setting and the tiny claws.
She said with incontrovertible truth: “I’ve never seen a ring just like that before. Aren’t they lion paws?”
“Yes.” Alan exhibited the jewel with a handsome gesture. “It isn’t bad. I saw it in one of the better shops, and Christine gave it to me for Easter.”
Lida did her best.
“She—she is awfully kind.”
“It was stupid of me to have alarmed you about her and Laura Destin.”
“It would seem to be Aunt Christine who needs the alarming.”
“I know, but, as Hugo indicated, she is a woman without fear. Adamant.” Alan gazed charmingly at Lida and thought: A good, cold cucumber if there ever was one. Well, he’d warm her up. He lapsed suddenly into an attractive, boyish bluntness: “Look here, Lida, you must have wondered about us, didn’t you? This May-and-September marriage sort of thing?”
“Why, no, of course I didn’t.”
“And of course you did. How much did Christine write you? About herself and myself, I mean?”
“Simply that she had decided—I mean that she and you had decided to get married. My principal knowledge of the wedding came from the newspaper accounts.”
“Good lord, what a shock it must have been!”
“Well, it was. A little. Of course it wasn’t as though Aunt Christine and I had ever been truly close.”
“How like Christine to do a thing like that!” The ham in Alan ripened, and he pulled out several of his best stops. “Strange the tricks which life can play! Or should one say Fate? You yourself admit that you do not know Christine—not as she really is—whereas I, and I think I can say this in due modesty, I had a prescience about her from the instant we met. Have you ever felt like that about a person?”
“Oh yes—why, the first time I saw Barry I—”
“Exactly!” Alan said, snatching back the scene. “Lida, I took one look at Christine and said: Here is one of the great tragic figures of our time—a splendid woman, old, childless, widowed, and with her special temperament. What, I asked myself, was there left for her in life?”
“Why, Aunt Christine had lots of things to live for, Mr. Admont.”
“Oh, my dear child! And do call me Alan. Christine had nothing. Nothing beyond the meretricious power to manufacture what golden dross she could from her lingering hours.” Alan brushed all that away with a rueful gesture. “We met. I, in my poor fashion, as tragic a figure as herself. Traduced by the critics from the profession which was to have been my life. Rejected from serving my country by a weakened heart.”
“You do have my sympathies in that
, Mr. Admont.”
“Alan.”
“All right. Alan.”
“But Christine, too, had her cross. Why wasn’t the perfect solution that we bear it together?”
“Cross?” Lida said incredulously. “Aunt Christine?”
“Our mutual loneliness—our empty lives. She looks upon me as the son she never had, and I on her as a dear, dear friend. The marriage? It has no significance other than that she wished me to inherit her money.” (Better play this safe.) “I can say so to you without offense because you have a fortune of your own. You do have a fortune of your own?”
“Yes, but I don’t see why, if Aunt Christine wanted you to inherit her money, she took out this annuity—Oh dear, why do I say things like that?”
Alan returned to earth with a bang. “Bilked!” The word was a scream of rage.
“Oh!”
He grabbed at recovery and said swiftly, earnestly: “Not I—do not misunderstand me, Lida. It is Christine who has been bilked—hoodwinked by that putrid alligator who calls himself a lawyer—thwarted out of her true wishes by his miserable cajolery and bag of tricks.”
The force of Alan’s “Bilked!” had sent Lida into retreat, one which carried her over to the spinet desk. Alan followed her swiftly and, again within range, began battering her with his charms.
“But enough of me,” he said, not without a struggle. “Tell me about yourself. Give me the true you.”
Lida, in mild desperation, picked up a silver frame from the desk.
“Has Aunt Christine ever done any acting?”
“No. Not professionally.”
“I thought, from this costume she’s wearing, she might have.”
“Costume?” For an instant Alan didn’t get it. Then the blockbuster struck home. The heady wine of dreams which had charged him following Joe’s departure in the morning had completely driven from his mind the empty frame from which Joe had taken Christine’s portrait to give to the Dove. “You did say costume?”
“Yes. What a pity the photograph was folded. The crease shows right across her throat.”
The Dove.
None but the Dove could have replaced that picture, could have done it during the hour while all of them were in the dining room downing Godfrey’s pheasant. So he was here. Sweat broke into beads on Alan’s noble brow. The portrait was tangible proof that the Dove was here in the house, and now. And that falling boar’s head had been the Dove’s first device. The ultimate rags of hope shredded further and fled. For a moment of darkness Alan nose-dived into chaos.
“Are you ill?” Lida said.
“You must forgive me, but I am more worried than I care to admit.”
Alan opened the desk drawer and took out a long, powerful flashlight.
“Is it about Laura Destin?” Lida asked.
“Yes.” (Why didn’t the silly little fool shut up? Stop nagging him with her squeakings?) “I am psychic. You must accept it as a fact. I am filled with a premonition that in some fashion she has filtered into the house. Forgive my desertion, but I feel compelled to make an immediate search for him.”
“Him?”
“Her!”
Alan turned and fled up the turret stairs.
CHAPTER X
Lida put the silver frame back on the spinet desk. She was beginning to wonder whether Barry hadn’t after all had something on the ball when he had been dubious about Belder Tor being a seasonable place to pass a night in. Her practical mind rejected the thought as silly.
Still there had been a strangling quality about Alan’s voice just now, and his exit up the stairs had been in the nature of a restrained track star waiting for the gun. It must have been the portrait of Christine which had caused the spasm.
Why?
Although practically on the brink of entering the younger-matron set, Lida still lacked the accolade of its poise, its self-sufficiency when alone in strange places.
And heaven knew that Belder Tor was strange, no matter how determined she was to look upon it objectively as the home of a great, if somewhat unstable, aunt.
What was more, she felt alone. It was all right to say that Christine was near by in her suite, that Godfrey and Cordelia were potting and panning in the kitchen, while Alan, plus flashlight, was probing the empty upper regions of the dismal pile for a fugitive from East Lynne; the fact remained that for all the good they did her they just weren’t.
It would be nice to call up Barry, but he probably hadn’t reached the Plaza as yet, and even if he had, what would she say? I must tell you, darling, that a fog is pressing with wraithlike fingers against the windows? That mine host is hot after a vengeful woman who threatened Christine in Erse? And how, dear, are the aunts? What dismal bilge!
A look told Lida that so far as the fog was concerned her thoughts were correct: the panes of the windows and french doors were a beady black. That is, except for one of the doors, and that one distinctly showed, pressed against its glass, a woman’s face. Oh, she thought, that good old pressing face! Never mind. Bromidic as the chill-stirrer was, the face was there, and Lida’s sturdy, well-controlled heart did a flip.
The face had evidently decided not to act true to form: it did not vanish, with the almost obligatory background music of a shriek from Lida and, when all would rush out, an empty terrace. No. Its eyes stared right back at her, and then, without further ado or spine-icing trappings, the woman opened the french door and stepped into the room.
Lida noted that the woman’s furs and style were in the rating of super-elegant, that the knitted head scarf loosely knotted at the throat and the gloves and leather handbag were a violent cerise, that the face was handsome and hard and the general manner was nervous. This, Lida decided at once, is Laura Destin.
“Is this Belder Tor?” the woman said.
“But you know it is.”
“Listen, dear, in this pogo field for zombies anything could be anything. I tried the front door, but nothing happened. I pushed every knob I could find that might have been a bell and then walked around the house and saw you. I want to see Mrs. Admont.”
“Then you aren’t Laura Destin?”
“I’m not. No matter who she is. My name is—well, never mind what it is. Just tell Mrs. Admont I want to see her.”
“She’s resting.”
The woman seemed nervously tired. She sank into an armchair. She said: “Look, dearie, you go and tell her that this is important. It’s important to her.”
It is important, Lida thought, that Christine be warned immediately that Laura Destin was in the house. Not for a moment did Lida decide to swallow that never-mind-what-my-name-is stuff.
“I’ll let her know.”
Belle Crystal watched Lida open the door to Christine’s suite and disappear. Now that the step had been taken, Belle wasn’t quite so sure. It had seemed a good idea in the morning while Belle had been listening to Joe talking with Alan on the telephone. It had seemed the only idea. Then.
Belle had known for some time that Joe was nearing the point where he’d wash her up, an operation that had always been perfectly final with her predecessors. Joe, when Belle came right down to it, was a simple soul. His range included none but the primary colors in life. And in death.
Belle shivered beneath her costly summer furs. There was nothing to lose, when you came right down to it. Sell her information and conjectures to Christine Admont as to the mess which Joe and Alan were unquestionably boiling, sell it for whatever she could, and then beat it. Beat it like hell.
She opened the cerise handbag and took out a mirror. Her lips could stand a repaint where she had been biting them. She got out the lipstick and went to work. Her back was partially toward the doorway leading to the dining room, kitchen, and lower general rooms of the wing. It was partly reflected, this doorway, in the little mirror, and (Belle started suddenly) there was someone, or something, standing very quietly out in the dim shadows of the hallway.
Was it?
Belle’s gloved fing
ers trembled.
She forced herself to go on with the job on her lips.
CHAPTER XI
The morning room was empty when, about ten minutes later, Christine came into it with Lida. The french door which Belle Crystal had used stood ajar. The corridor door was closed. Fog sifted thinly in from the terrace and the dark, quiet night.
“But she’s gone,” Lida said.
“Yes. I remember her as having been strange.”
“Do let me get Mr. Admont, Aunt Christine.”
“But he’s already looking, dear, you said.”
“Not outside. And that terrace door is open. She closed it after she came in.”
Christine shrugged.
“My dear, you couldn’t find a haystack here at night, much less a needle. But get him if it will make you feel any better.”
Christine finished buckling the belt to the velvet house dress she had been putting on. She watched Lida run up the turret stairs. She found herself standing near the spinet desk, with the half-emptied glass of Prunelle still on its surface, where she had left it. She picked it up.
She was about to finish the Prunelle when her eyes concentrated on the open french door. Her hand hesitated in mid-air and she returned the glass to the desk. She went over and opened the french door further. She called into the darkness of the night and the limpid fog: “Laura? Are you out here, Laura?”
It was very queer. Lida’s description of the woman could have applied to Laura Destin, but Christine felt oddly that it did not. There was a flamboyancy about the summer furs and brilliant accessories which engendered doubt. Laura had been a rockish, all-but-drab creature. But there had been a certain flair. Could it have come to fruition during the few brief years?