Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  “Hello,” he said. The next instant he was wide awake, everything that had got mixed up with a nightmare fantasy that had dogged his sleeping mind back again, not at all a dream but very real and very clear.

  “Dr. Smith? This is Elizabeth Darrell. My grandfather, Professor Darrell, asked me to call you and ask if you’d like to come in after church.”

  She was making it sound as if she had never seen him and only barely heard of him before. Then, as if he might possibly misunderstand her, she added quickly, “It’s an old Annapolitan custom if you don’t know. You go to church and then you have a mint julep. My grandfather would be happy if you’d come, if you aren’t busy, but—”

  “I’d like to very much. Thanks a lot.”

  He interrupted her before she could say anything that would make it awkward for him to accept. “And she doesn’t want me to come,” he added to himself as he put down the phone. That was evident through the clipped forced cordiality in her voice, if it could be called cordiality at all. Ten to one her grandfather was there by the phone listening. So that was that. He was going to see her whether she wanted him to or not.

  He sat thinking things over. What he was acutely interested in knowing about was what had happened in re. the body of the man Gordon out on Arundel Creek in the Milnors’ cottage. How he was going to find out was another matter. There was nothing about it on the radio. Annapolis, he knew, had no Sunday edition, either of the Capital or the Southern Maryland Times. It was too late for it to have made either the Baltimore or Washington papers even if he had wanted to go out and find one. But there was no doubt he would find out, sooner probably than later, as towns without a newspaper at all always seemed to have the most effective grapevine.

  He was thinking of that as he went along the Court to Professor Darrell’s house just as the last moving notes of the Sailors’ Hymn died away and the chimes under the green copper dome of the Naval Academy Chapel were silent again for another week.

  He was not to be the Darrells’ only guest. A flashy and expensive maroon convertible with the top down was negotiating the narrow curve of the cobblestone drive that the carriage and pair of bays it had originally been constructed for could have done with less damage to the magnolias and ancient shaggy yew trees. It drew up in front of the door as Jonas reached the iron hitching post set in the granite block to the right of it. The young woman who eased herself out from under the wheel and across the leather seat out onto the cobblestones was as expensive looking as her car and as strikingly un-Annapolitan, a product of nature and art that Jonas took one look at with happiness that he had come. Her hair under an exhilarating creation of brown and beige silk poppies was a rich tawny gold. Her skin was warm and suntanned, and she had on a sleek-fitting silk suit, toast color, that flared out, gracefully bell-shaped, around a pair of long and elegant legs. She paused on the second step and gave Jonas a gay and friendly smile that lighted up her brown eyes like sunlight sparkling through a glass of sherry wine.

  “Hello,” she said. “You’re Jonas Smith, aren’t you, our new cutter-up and general medico? I’m Philippa Van Holt. I heard you were coming in today.”

  The sherry-bright sparkle in her eyes seemed to Jonas to be doing the business of a slightly mocking adding machine, taking him in and totting up the score of his various points with an experienced and intelligent accuracy.

  “How do you do,” Jonas said. He looked at her with an easy grin. “Don’t tell me you’re an Annapolitan.”

  “Good Lord, no.” She laughed. “You have to be born here, or live here forty years, before you can call yourself that. I’ve only been here a month. And if I stay another it’ll only be because creeping paralysis is infectious. Or is it contagious? I don’t know the difference. Anyway what I mean is catching. No, Dr. Smith, I’m not a native crab. I’m a writer. I’m here getting what we laughingly call local color.”

  “Oh,” Jonas said. He glanced up past her at the open door of the Blanton-Darrell House. The slight sinking feeling in the bottom of his stomach was nothing a mint julep wouldn’t fix—he hoped. “What kind of a writer?”

  “Oh, bad, very bad, I guess. But it pays, and the nice thing about it is people never recognize themselves in print.”

  The sherry eyes were giving him another critically detached summing-up.

  “Of course I don’t mean you,” she added calmly. “You’re an outlander same like me. I mean these characters you see in houses like this, that… oh well, you know. They’re dead but they won’t lie down, as Gracie Fields puts it.”

  “They’ve got nice manners, though, haven’t they?” Jonas asked. “I mean it’s nice of them to invite us vipers in to drink their liquor on Sunday morning.”

  Philippa Van Holt laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh of course. I forgot. You’re going to live here, aren’t you.—Oh, how do you do, Professor Darrell?”

  One thing about Philippa Van Holt, Jonas decided then and there, was that she must be radar-equipped, though it was difficult for the naked eye to see where she carried it. Unless, he thought, it was hidden under the large hunks of rose tourmaline set in gold medallions around each of her wrists, that he saw now she had stripped off her beige doeskin gloves. Or perhaps looking at them had deafened him as well as blinded him to the approach of his landlord-host.

  “You’re sweet to ask us here!” Philippa Van Holt was up the third step and inside the door shaking hands with Professor Darrell. “It’s always such a privilege to come inside this lovely old house. If I owned it I’d never let a barbarian like me or Dr. Smith put a foot inside it.”

  Barbarian or no barbarian, Jonas thought, there was certainly nothing of the classic Greek visible about Professor Tinsley Darrell. He looked like a schizophrenic evil-eyed old horse. His pale bulging grey eyes glared at them, his nose looked less like sculptured marble than a bulbous lump of slightly cyanotic clay thrown off-center at his face and left to harden there with no attempt at shaping. He was tall, heavy-set and wheezingly short of breath. There was, however, one thing Greek about him. Barbarian though she might be—and Jonas thought she conceivably had something—Miss Van Holt had struck his Achilles’ heel with a true and deadly aim. The glare in his eyes gave way to a watery glint.

  “Barbarian, ha! It’s a pleasure, Philippa. It’s always a pleasure!”

  He shook hands with her, brusque, but deeply pleased.

  “Good morning, doctor. You’ve met Miss Van Holt, I see. Come in, Philippa, come in, doctor. I want you to meet my granddaughter.”

  As he moved across the wide airy hall in his wrinkled grey seersucker suit he looked like a huge bag tied up for the laundry.

  “Oh, this heavenly room—I simply adore it!”

  Jonas wondered if Miss Van Holt wasn’t slightly overdoing it. One look over her sleek sweet-smelling shoulder as she paused ecstatically convinced him she was so far as Elizabeth Darrell was concerned. She was standing erect and poised across the room. As her eyes met his she looked quickly down, a faint flush showing for an instant. He saw Jenny at the same time. She was there beside her sister so quickly from where she had been sitting that he would hardly have known she had moved, if she had not brushed a section of the Sunday paper off a chair onto the floor. Jonas thought of a frightened fawn springing to its mother’s side. The contrast between the two of them was more striking than he’d remembered—outwardly, at any rate, for he knew Elizabeth was not as calm and self-contained as she looked. She was taller than he had thought, honey-blonde with a quality that some way made Miss Van Holt a little too glittering. By comparison Jenny seemed a changeling gypsy child, burning with a dark flame-like intensity, with her blue-black hair and small pointed face. The only thing about them that indicated blood relationship was in the grey-violet of their eyes, and it was less in their eyes than in the long dark curling lashes each had.

  Philippa Van Holt said, “Hello, Elizabeth—hi, Jenny.” It was evi
dent that she did not waste her charm on her own sex, and more apparent as she turned to a woman Jonas did not see until he was inside the room. She was sitting primly on a stiff sofa against the inner wall, white-haired and pink-cheeked, dressed in her Sunday best, with innocent china blue eyes, as mild and happy-looking as a small sweet-tempered child at a birthday party.

  “Hello, there, Miss Olive,” Philippa said. “How on earth did you get here?”

  “I walked,” Miss Olive said.

  “My granddaughter, Elizabeth Darrell, Dr. Smith,” Professor Darrell said. “Now let’s have a drink. Where’s Wetherby? Wetherby!”

  He glared around at the doorway.

  “And this is my sister Jennifer, Dr. Smith,” Elizabeth said.

  Jenny put her hand out, small, tense and very cold in Jonas’s.

  “How do you do, Dr. Smith?”

  “And Miss Oliphant, Dr. Smith,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s a great pleasure to meet you and welcome you to Annapolis, Dr. Smith,” Miss Oliphant said happily. “My father had a great friend who was a Dr. Smith, but I don’t expect you’re any connection of his. He lived in New Orleans. I don’t recall his first name, but he—”

  “Jennifer!”

  Jonas released Miss Olive Oliphant’s plump soft little hand with a start and turned around. Professor Darrell was standing over the section of the morning paper that had slid off the love seat, glaring as if it were a coiled snake.

  “Jennifer, haven’t I told you—”

  “That wasn’t Jenny, Grandfather. That was me.”

  Elizabeth’s warm beautiful voice that stirred the roots of Jonas Smith’s spinal column also slightly staggered him with its calm disregard for palpable truth.

  “I left that there, dear. Not Jenny.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference anyway.” Professor Darrell bent down and picked the paper up. “It’s the way they fold the damned things these days. Won’t stay together five minutes. Where’s Wetherby with those juleps?”

  He glared around at the door again.

  “I’ll go get him, Sis.”

  Jenny ran across the room and out. Jonas looked at Elizabeth. She had put all the papers on an ottoman by the fireplace and sat down where they’d been, smiling up at her grandfather. He wondered if it was a brief but vivid picture of life in the Blanton-Darrell House. Anything that Jenny did that was wrong was right if Elizabeth did it. Jenny was terrified of the old man, Elizabeth had no fear of him at all. He wondered about it, in terms of what had happened the night before.

  “Goiter is six times more common among girls than among boys,” Miss Olive said. “It tends to occur chiefly in adolescence. I read that in a magazine the other day. I cut it out, and I have it here in my bag somewhere. My father always encouraged me to read a great deal and to cut out and keep items of great interest.”

  She fished around in her rusty black bag, smiling happily at Jonas.

  “Although you probably saw it yourself. And I should think one of Elizabeth’s duties as your office assistant, and receptionist, I believe they call them these days, could be to mark interesting passages—”

  “Miss Olive!”

  Jonas, trying to make the bewildering jump from the newspaper incident to goiter to Elizabeth Darrell as his office assistant and receptionist, looked over at her. For once her poise had deserted her completely. She was sitting forward on the edge of the love seat, staring at Miss Olive with appalled embarrassment, scarlet-faced.

  “Why, Miss Olive!” she gasped.

  Miss Olive looked blankly around at everybody, and back at Elizabeth.

  “Didn’t Dr. Smith want you in the position? You said you were going to apply for it. I’m very sure you said it to me right here in this room, Elizabeth. I was sitting where Miss Van Holt—”

  “Oh, Miss Olive, please! That was before—”

  “Before you saw he was so young and handsome, dear?”

  Philippa Van Holt raised her eyebrows, uncrossed one shapely leg and crossed it with the other.

  “And unmarried? I should think that would be the chief reason—”

  “I’d be delighted to have Miss Darrell for my assistant,” Jonas said. He grinned cheerfully over at her. “I think it’s a wonderful idea. If your grandfather can spare you…”

  “If she wants a job she can have it, and I don’t see it’s anybody’s business but her own.”

  “It’s all set, then.” Jonas grinned at Elizabeth again. “Tomorrow at nine, Miss Darrell.”

  “You know she was one of the best nurse’s aides. Dr. French signalled her out for—”

  “Miss Olive—please be quiet!”

  “Oh, let her go on, Elizabeth,” Philippa Van Holt said. It seemed to Jonas to be little short of refined malice. “I think it’s fascinating and if Dr. Smith’s going to hire you, he certainly has a right to know your qualifications—if any.”

  Elizabeth Darrell had got to her feet. She was looking past Philippa Van Holt, through the long window behind her into the Court. The scarlet was gone from her face. Jonas saw her lips part a little, the pulse throb in her throat. Philippa Van Holt turned her head to look too.

  “Oh, midshipmen,” she said indifferently. She brightened at once. “Or is it Tom? Most midshipmen are so young, but I adore Tom.”

  Jonas took out his pipe and began to fill it carefully.—Midshipmen? Tom Darrell was a midshipman, yet he had worn the uniform of a commissioned officer the night before. He had been out long after midshipman hours. No wonder his sister had said he was already in trouble… if he got caught.

  “Tom’s a fine boy.”

  Professor Darrell glared about him. Then his old eyes brightened. He looked like a man who had been travelling a month in the desert and come at last upon an oasis that was no mirage.

  “Ha! Here we are. Where in hell have you been, Wetherby?”

  The white-haired old Negro crossed the room to him, bearing his silver tray and its handsome burden of white-frosted silver julep cups.

  “Ain’ been nowhere, Professor, sir,” he said serenely.

  Professor Darrell sniffed, tasted, and approved. He waved the old man around to the others.

  “Wetherby makes the best damned julep in Maryland,” he said. “And get some cokes and milk out for the boys. Never give a midshipman a drink in this house. Against regulations. Not my own son when he was at the Academy, nor my own grandson. Let ’em wait till they graduate. I began drinking when I was fourteen. ’S too early.”

  “They don’t want no milk, Professor, sir,” the old man said patiently. “They talkin’ to Miss Jenny. They ain’ comin’ in.”

  “What do you mean, they’re not coming in?” Professor Darrell set his julep down on the mantel. “Jennifer!”

  “I’m coming, sir.”

  The girl appeared in the doorway, as bloodless as a small ghost.

  “Where’s Tom?”

  “He’s… not coming out today.”

  Her blue-grey eyes were fixed on him unwaveringly, as if in some fascination of despair. “That was George. He came to tell us… to tell us Tom won’t be out today. He’s going to come back later. George, I mean. Tom…Tom has the duty.”

  Professor Darrell stared at her coldly. “That’s a falsehood. He had the duty yesterday.”

  He picked up his julep and drained it down. “And come in, or go away somewhere. Quit standing there shaking.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She crossed the room quickly to her sister and sat down by her. Jonas, intent on his own julep, glanced over. The girl was shaking, as if chilled to the marrow of her bones or badly shocked. Elizabeth had taken her hand and was holding it tightly, as deeply alarmed, Jonas thought, as she was.

  “And it’s too bad we can’t get poor Gordon Darcy any more,” Miss Olive said cheerfully. “He was such a handsom
e and attractive young man.”

  She paused to sip her drink.

  “This is very nice, Tinsley, although my father always thought it indelicate for ladies to drink anything but an occasional glass of sherry, or a little port. He allowed my mother a glass of port on Sunday evening. My father was famous for his juleps, Dr. Smith.”

  Jonas nodded politely. He kept his eyes carefully fixed on her. She was prattling on happily, like a child unconscious that it has left its playmates far behind and is alone in a deep and all-encompassing forest of silence.

  “Your father’s juleps weren’t fit to drink, Olive.” Professor Darrell’s fey eyes gleamed at her savagely. “And what the hell do you mean about Gordon Darcy? Why can’t we get him any more? Go phone him, Elizabeth, and tell him we want him over here right away. Do you hear—”

  “There’s no earthly use of phoning Mr. Darcy,” Miss Olive said. “None whatsoever.” A brief cloud obscured the bright happy candor of her china blue eyes. “Mr. Darcy committed suicide last night. I would have mentioned it earlier, but my father—”

  Philippa Van Holt’s silver cup crashed to the bare pine floor at her feet.

  CHAPTER 5

  Whatever further item of paternal wisdom Miss Olive was about to impart died unborn in the silent room. Her voice faded away. The cup rolled on the floor until it hit a chair leg and stopped. Jonas could have put a foot out and stopped it. He was intent on the problem of keeping his own grip firm on the damask napkin around the bottom of his own cup. When he recovered enough to look at the woman on the sofa beside him, Philippa was staring across at Miss Olive, her eyes distended, her red mouth stupidly open. The brown stain of applejack and bourbon whisky was spreading rapidly over her lap. She opened her mouth to speak. The color was drained out of her face as she got slowly to her feet and stood there, swaying.

  Her voice was a gasping whisper that rose to a hysterical cry.

  “Miss Olive… what are you saying!”

  “For God’s sake, Philippa!” Professor Darrell was not too steady on his own feet. “Smith—do something. For God’s sake what’s the matter with everybody?”