by Zenith Brown
In the fan of soft yellow light from the open door Jonas saw haunting anxiety in her eyes, and knew the desperate fear in what she meant.
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” he said gently. “I’ve just talked to her like a Dutch uncle. I think she’s got a lot of stuff out of her system. So—”
“Did she talk to you?” Elizabeth interrupted him quickly, and turned away for an instant as he nodded. “Oh, dear. But maybe it’s a good thing. She’s always chattered and gabbled about everything, until… until he came along.”
“Well, it was her first love affair. I guess she was pretty tangled up. She knew everybody disapproved of it. And she’s not very proud of herself right now.”
“I know. And I guess I didn’t use much tact—when I found out he was meeting her after school and taking her all over the countryside. I could have killed him myself. And he was so darned attractive when he wanted to be.”
“Were you in love with him too?”
It was a form of personal torture he was inflicting on himself, but it seemed terribly important for him to know. He tried to suppress the acute pang of jealousy that made his stomach feel as if it were being put through a rock crusher just then.
“No—don’t be silly,” Elizabeth said curtly. “I’ve got a little sense and I’m not seventeen years old. And I’m not sure he didn’t go after Jenny just to get even with me… at first, anyway. He was terribly vain and frightfully spoiled. I like men who’re men, and don’t stand around like peacocks. Gordon missed his calling. He ought to have been in the movies instead of writing about the people who are.”
She stopped and looked up at him searchingly, trying to find in his face some answer for the questioning perplexity in her mind.
“I wish I could understand you. I just don’t. I really don’t.”
“Isn’t it pretty obvious?” Jonas asked gently. “I’m very simple. Philippa says I’m just plain transparent.”
At the mention of her name he saw Elizabeth stiffen, withdrawing from him as if she had actually walked away, her defenses up, regretting her momentary lapse from them.
“That’s what I don’t understand about you, Dr. Smith,” she said evenly. “And it rather frightens me. I don’t see why you’re doing what you seem to be doing, unless… well, I just don’t know. One minute you seem to be… to be on our side. And then you aren’t. You seem to be letting yourself in for a lot of trouble, but I don’t see why. It seems sort of crazy, to me.”
“I suppose it does,” Jonas said soberly. Her hand was still resting on the corner of the porch. He had to put his own in his pocket to keep from reaching out and taking hers. A moment before he could have done it, but not now when she was remote and withdrawn, being very cool and practical in summing him up. “But it really isn’t crazy at all. It has a sort of super-sanity, in fact. It’s one of those things I never believed in, much, until it walloped me. It’s a… a sort of coup de foudre. I never really believed you could see a girl just once and from then on not care how much trouble you got yourself into if it was going to make anything a little easier for her. That’s what happened to me. I’ve just fallen in love, that’s all.”
Her face was turned up to his. In the suffused light from the windows on the porch it had a pale luminous radiance as she listened to him, her lips parted a little, her eyes wide like a child’s making a faltering approach to a meaning that was not wholly clear and waiting… just to be entirely sure.
Jonas took his hands out of his pockets.
“Elizabeth!”
Her name was on his lips, but it was Miss Olive’s childlike voice that gave it sound and totally different substance, and tore to shreds the gossamer web the magic moment had woven between them. Elizabeth took a quick step backward.
“Elizabeth! Come and get something around you. You’ll catch your death of cold. Papa was always very particular about a young girl being out after dark without something around her.”
Jonas’s arms, for once in complete agreement with one of Papa’s dicta, fell to his sides.
“I’m coming right in, Miss Olive.”
“Oh dear, I don’t want to take you away from Dr. Smith. I wouldn’t do that for the world. You just wait… I’ll hand you a wrap. I wouldn’t think of—”
“Please, Miss Olive.—Good night, Dr. Smith.”
She ran up the porch steps.
CHAPTER 14
Jonas could still hear Miss Olive, protesting and plaintive, and Elizabeth patiently trying to reassure her, as he crossed the grass toward the wing. Disappointed and sore, he could have throttled Miss Olive. He kicked open the wicket in the hedge, banged it shut and crossed the small enclosure to the french window into his consulting room. And stopped. The window was open. From inside he could hear the bony crack-crack of Roddy’s tail on the floor welcoming him home. The glow of a lighted cigarette shone briefly in the dark. His mind did a quick flash-back, wondering how long his guest had been there, as he glanced over through the hedge, doing some rapid calculation of the distance to the bench where he and Jenny had sat. Sergeant Digges would have to have the ears of a lynx to have heard anything she’d said, but the mere fact of the two of them sitting there together in the dark, if he had seen them, would certainly have suggested something to his eager mousetrap of a mind.
“Good evening,” he said. He stepped through the window, reached for the light on the desk and pressed down the switch.
“Oh,” he said.
“It’s me. Remember me, doctor? I’m the woman you said could come and see you this evening.”
Philippa Van Holt uncurled her slim legs and sat up in the big red leather chair by the fireplace. She tossed her cigarette into the grate, stretched her arms and yawned, an amused smile on her lips.
“I’ve had a very pleasant time, and Roddy’s been telling me the story of his life. The only thing he wouldn’t do was break out your Scotch. I could do with a drink. Can I help get the ice or something?”
“Thanks, I’ll get it.”
Jonas went out into the kitchen. She followed him and took down a pair of glasses from the cupboard.
“I hope you don’t mind my being here,” she said seriously. “I thought I couldn’t take Miss Olive tonight, but when I got home and found she was going out for the night, I decided I could take the place better with her in it than I could alone… just me and Papa’s ghost. I guess I must be cracking up. I simply couldn’t bear being over there alone. So I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Glad you came.”
He handed her a Scotch and soda. She was the last person in the whole blue creation he felt like spending the rest of the evening with, but she was there, and she did not look very happy. He reminded himself that after all Darcy Grymes had been her husband, and she’d said she loved the guy.
“I’m a mess,” she said all of a sudden. She was back on the red leather chair, her legs curled up under her again, her head on one hand, her drink in the other resting on the arm of the chair. In the black dress, her face pale and drawn, all the glamor and glitter that shone around her when he saw her get out of her car for the after-church julep was so gone that it took an effort for him to remember what she had been like then.
“I just wonder,” she said after another long moment of silence. “I wonder if it’s worth all the stress and strain. He’s dead, and nothing’ll bring him back. I don’t think Sergeant Digges is getting very far very fast. And if I sort of give up, I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe they won’t decide it was suicide after all. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t told him about the date Gordon had last night—for dinner and what not. It was with Jenny Darrell.”
“I thought he had dinner with his brother,” Jonas said deliberately.
“Because she broke it. I guess Elizabeth and Tom got after her. You know—or I guess you don’t know—my husband was a curious melange o
f noble and ignoble characteristics. He was spoiled. Everything was too easy. He liked to eat his cake and have it still intact with the frosting on it and the candles lit at the end of the party. He was never really handicapped by what you’d call a moral sense. Maybe it was part of his charm, and he certainly had it. He didn’t have any sense of responsibility, which I guess is why he married me… a sort of wife-mother-guardian-business manager arrangement. I’m going to miss him a lot more than you’d think to hear me talk, because he was terribly good for me. I’d still be a fourth-rate actress if he hadn’t got me interested in writing publicity, and he was always swell to me. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do without him.”
She sipped her drink slowly, staring over the rim of the glass at something visible only to herself.
“Jonas,” she said finally. “Jonas… this is a crazy, cockeyed notion—but do you suppose by any chance he could have picked her up after the hop? He had a gal out there at the creek. There’s no use pretending he didn’t, with those keys in the water. He had even more behavior patterns than most of us. I could always tell when he’d lost money at the races, or was getting ready to do something fabulously extravagant. You can’t live with a person and work with him without knowing him.”
She stopped a moment, still staring in front of her.
“I just wonder. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I got home. She went to the hop. I know that. She and her date came by for Miss Olive to see her dress that Miss Olive had fixed up out of an old one of Elizabeth’s for her. The hop isn’t over till twelve, and her date was a first classman who doesn’t have to be in till one.”
She frowned and set her glass on the floor. “You know, I’ve been wondering if that was what happened. If she called him up, or they’d worked it so he met her after her midshipman went back to the Yard. That would explain him leaving the hotel at a quarter to one.”
“But you thought that was his brother… not him.”
“I did, but I’m beginning to wonder,” she answered slowly. “If he was whipping out to meet Jenny—or any late date—it explains the time and the big rush. And I haven’t any real reason to think it was his brother. I was down in his room this evening and none of his papers are gone.”
“And they would be if it was brother Franklin?”
Jonas gave her a sardonic grin that faded promptly as she shrugged her shoulders and lifted her arched brows.
“Quien sabe?”
She picked up her glass again. “I’m not making any more judgments in re. my honorable brother-in-law until somebody produces a few facts. I can be so wrong about people… especially when I dislike them as intensely as I do him.”
“Why do you?”
“Well, for several reasons that are neither here nor there. But let’s skip it. It’s all water under the bridge, now that I won’t ever have to have dear Franklin in my hair any more. And it goes double, of course. Anyway, let’s not talk about it. I’ve got to forget, so the quicker I begin the better off I’ll be. Let’s have one more drink, and you tell me about you. What on earth did you come to this latent burial ground to practice medicine for?”
“—Because Elizabeth Darrell was here,” Jonas thought. He wondered what she was doing then… if she was thinking about him, his head swimming around in the rosy glow of the stratosphere.
“I thought I’d like it here,” he said. “There’s really not much to tell…”
“Well, it’s all completely fascinating.”
Philippa Van Holt drained her second Scotch and soda at last and got to her feet. “I’ve got to go. You have to work in the morning, don’t you? I’ve stayed too late as it is.”
She went through the reception room to the front door.
“I sort of hate to stay in that house by myself tonight. Miss Olive even took the cat with her. And it’s absurd of course, because she’s certainly no protection. Miss Olive, not the cat. She’s one of these people that never sleep a wink, you know, and you could knock the house down two minutes after they’ve gone to bed and it wouldn’t make them turn over. And it’s revolting, the way she snores.”
She shivered a little.
“I don’t know why I should be so jittery. I’m sure nobody would want to…”
She broke off. Then she said. “But I don’t suppose he thought anybody would want to… to kill him. I wish I knew who it was out there with him. But I wasn’t going to think about it any more, was I? Good night.”
“I’ll walk over with you,” Jonas said, “and see you lock yourself in. I don’t think you need to worry.”
“You needn’t come. I’m a big strong girl.”
Philippa stopped. “Or come as far as the street. All this nursery stock around here makes me feel the redskins are lurking.”
She went ahead of him a little way along the path, stopped again and turned around.
“You know you’ve been terribly sweet to let me bore you with my memories. I never knew I could be so lonely. I’d have died tonight, without you.” She looked up at him. “Would you…” Her voice had sunk to a whisper. “Would you mind kissing me, just once?”
“I might even like it,” Jonas said with a grin. He bent his head down to kiss her cheek. She moved so that her lips met his and clung softly a moment.
“Good night, dear,” she said. “Don’t come any further. I have my car. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And how it happened Jonas did not quite know, but he jerked his head around just in time to see Elizabeth Darrell slip up the steps and into the Blanton-Darrell House. He heard Philippa Van Holt’s sudden ripple of lilting laughter.
“You… stinker,” he said.
She laughed again. “It’s for your own good, doctor. She’d have been a rotten secretary. And it’ll teach her a lesson not to go lurking about at night in bushes.”
She started to laugh again, stopped and turned abruptly, looking over at the big house.
“—Was she listening to what I was saying to you in there?”
Her voice was sharply edged.
“I shouldn’t think so. I guess she came out to get a little peace and quiet from her grandfather. He’s pulled through, you know.”
“I didn’t know. I thought Miss Olive was going over to be in at the death.”
“It was after she got there.”
“I see.”
Philippa was still looking at the Blanton-Darrell House. Even in the darkness Jonas could see her eyes narrowed. She turned back to him.
“Jonas—what did Tom french out of the Academy for, last night?”
“To meet a gal.”
There was no use trying to lie to her, pretend he didn’t know, and send her off to find out for herself.
“I thought he didn’t have a girl?”
“He must have, if he frenched out to see her.”
She looked up at him for a moment, shrugged and turned away.
“Well, I’m going. So long. I’ve had a very interesting evening. I think I’m beginning to see a lot of things I didn’t see before. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? And you know I’m really quite fond of Jenny. Good night.”
Jonas heard her car door slam, outside the gate, and the whirr of her motor. He stood there in the path. She hadn’t said “But I don’t like her sister,” not in so many words. The implication was too distinct for him to fail to get it. He turned slowly and looked across the grass. The windows of the big house were dark. The light over the front door was a frail yellow fan behind the glossy blackness of the two magnolias. He looked up at the windows a long time, and moved slowly back to his own door. They didn’t have a prayer, or a feeble hope of one, against the hard and shrewd tenacity of Miss Philippa Van Holt.
He went inside and through to his consulting room, sat down at his desk, reached for the phone and sat for a moment with his hand on it. He wanted to call her and tell her he
wasn’t really kissing Miss Van Holt, but he gave the idea up. It didn’t seem so important, now that they were faced with really serious trouble. He settled deeper down in his chair, a heavy scowl on his face, his mind a dismal kaleidoscope in which no picture was complete in all its parts and nothing rang with any high fine decisive truth that he could grab hold of and say This I know, This I can depend on. He seemed to himself to be caught out in some fantastic and shifting game of Which is Appearance, Which is Reality that didn’t make sense. The grimly troubling realities were all too clear. Nothing but wishful thinking taken to a schizophrenic degree could pretend they were otherwise. There was only one source of satisfaction that he could see in any of it. That was that he hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of counting on Elizabeth Darrell’s hiring herself out as his secretary. The hex Philippa Van Holt thought she was putting on that wasn’t causing any disappointment he had to swallow and take much time to get over.
He stopped thinking suddenly and held his breath, every nerve in his body alert and wary. The window behind him was still open. He listened intently, hardly breathing, not moving a muscle of his body. He relaxed for an instant, thinking it was Roddy pursuing the rabbit of his dreams, and saw that Roddy was across the room in front of him, stretched out flat on the tiled hearth. What he had heard, or thought he heard, was behind him.
He tightened himself together, a sharp thin streak of plain primitive fear shooting down his spinal column. Somebody was out there. He was being watched. He could feel it in every nerve. He tensed again, figuring what he should do. He could make the open window in about one jump . . .
Then Jonas Smith relaxed suddenly, and grinned. Who was he afraid of? Jenny Darrell was hardly likely to decide to shoot him, Tom Darrell, who conceivably might, was safely confined to his room in Bancroft Hall behind the wall of the United States Naval Academy. There was only one person who would be interested in spying on him. Now that he thought of it, it seemed a little strange that Sergeant Digges, after all his threats and accusations, had left him so peacefully alone, without surveillance, from the time he’d walked off from the Milnors’ cottage at five o’clock. Why it had not occurred to him that it was just more of the old line that Fisherman Digges was playing out for his final catch, he was at that moment at a loss to see, except that he had been too involved with the various women in his life to be using his head properly.