Date with Death

by Zenith Brown

  Jonas nodded. He sat there staring in front of him.

  “What’s happened to your lamp?” Philippa asked as she came back through the window.

  “What?”

  “Your desk lamp. You know. The thing on your desk that gives artificial light, for you to read by.”

  “Oh,” Jonas said. “It’s out of order. I’ve got to get it fixed.”

  He could have known her sharp eyes would not miss that.

  She sank down in the canvas chair again. “That’s too bad. It was a nice one. I was going to ask you where you got it, but I’ll wait till they’re perfected, as the man said about the motor car.”

  She sat there for a moment, her brows together, chewing at her lower lip, snapping her gold cigarette lighter off and on. “Jonas,” she said at last, “I don’t believe in ghosts. The ordinary kind, I mean. Some kinds I do. I believe in ghosts of people’s past actions, that start haunting them and driving them sort of nuts, making them do pretty strange things. Things they wouldn’t do in their right minds. I’m just wondering. I’m wondering if my brother-in-law is mad enough—”

  She stopped again, holding her lip in her white even teeth.

  “—Or haunted enough, to think that if he got rid of me…”

  She gave her head a quick shake. “Anyway, I’d like to tell you—just for my own protection—why my brother-in-law, and Agatha Reed if the idea of her being in on it doesn’t offend you… why they were in such a desperate and frantic dither to see my husband Saturday night.”

  Jonas stirred his coffee in concentrated silence. He was thinking, “—It’s funny she never calls them Gordon and Franklin. She always says ‘my husband’ and ‘my brother-in-law.’ She hasn’t mentioned their names since…”

  It came back to him suddenly. “. . . since Sunday afternoon at Miss Olive’s, when she said ‘Gordon—I mean Franklin—Grymes.’ ”

  He had thought it was a slip of the tongue because the two of them were such extraordinary replicas of each other. He listened now, his mind going back over the various conversations he’d had with her, and out at the Milnors’ cottage when she was talking about them to Sergeant Digges. She never used their given names.

  “It was because my husband—”

  Philippa broke off. She raised her head sharply. At the Blanton-Darrell House a screen door banged shut. There was the sound of feet racing across the wooden porch and down the steps, running wildly across the dry ground toward the hedge.

  “Jonas! Jonas!”

  “My God, don’t tell me Grandfather’s had another stroke.”

  Jonas dashed for the wicket. Before he got half-way across the garden Elizabeth had come through it and was running to meet him.

  “Jonas! Jenny… she’s done it! She’s—oh!”

  She stepped back with an involuntary gasp wrenched from her throat as she saw Philippa relaxed cosily at the table on the terrace. “Oh!” Her face, already shockingly pale, turned a dead sick white. She turned and ran back. Jonas caught her as she reached the bottom step of the porch. He took her shoulders with both hands.

  “Stop it, Elizabeth!” he said curtly. “Stop being a… I can’t kick her out when she walks in.”

  “But what’s she there for? What’s she there for? Why does she always come!”

  “Cut it out, Elizabeth. Jenny… what’s she done?”

  “She’s gone to Sergeant Digges.”

  Jonas’s hands dropped from her shoulders.

  “She wrote me a letter, before she left for school. Then she sent it back by a colored child after she’d gone, so I couldn’t stop her. It’s my fault, Jonas. She thought she was ruining my life too! And she’s gone, to tell him she killed Gordon—”

  His name froze on her lips. Her eyes were fixed and bright, staring past Jonas. He turned sharply.

  Philippa Van Holt was at the corner of the hedge behind them. She was standing rigidly immobile, her face an expressionless mask… a woman alone, withdrawn and intense, strangely moving in some way, and at the same time profoundly disturbing… a woman who had been a friend and had become an enemy.

  Jonas put his arm out and drew Elizabeth to his side, a protective gesture, involuntary, instinctive. Philippa dropped the cigarette between her fingers onto the ground and rubbed it into the dry grass without taking her eyes from them.

  “I’m sorry it was Jenny.”

  Her voice was quiet and dispassionate.

  “I’ve been thinking it was you, Elizabeth. I figured it must be you Jonas was trying so hard to cover up for. I’m sorry it was Jenny. I wanted it to be you, Elizabeth.”

  She looked at them steadily for an instant, turned and disappeared behind the hedge.

  “What’s she going to do?”

  Elizabeth’s lips were dry, her voice a muted whisper. Jonas felt the convulsive tremor shiver through her body as he held her.

  “Where’s she going? What’s she going to do?”

  She whispered it again, her eyes still fastened on the corner of the hedge where Philippa had stood and had vanished from almost without the sensation of physical movement. The crushed cigarette, a scarlet smudge of lipstick on a mutilated bit of white paper, was the only evidence that she had stood there… stood there and heard and spoken, and disappeared.

  “—I don’t know,” Jonas said. “I know what we’re going to do. Was Jenny going to Digges’s house, or the Police Station?”

  “The station.”

  “Come on. My car’s out in the street. We can’t stop her, but we can see he doesn’t throw her in the cooler. He’ll have to let us get a lawyer. Come on… quick.”

  “—I’m afraid of Philippa. I’ve never liked her, but now I’m afraid of her.”

  Elizabeth said it twice… as she huddled down in the front seat of Jonas’s car and again as they passed the Yacht Club crossing the bridge over to Eastport. The rest of the time she sat tense and silent, staring sightlessly in front of her. Jonas Smith was silent too, silent and absorbed. It would have been better, after all, to have made a clean breast of it at the very beginning, before Philippa’s malice and anger had been roused. It would have been better for all of them—Jenny, Elizabeth and Tom. And for Agatha Reed and the other Grymes, Gordon or Franklin, whichever one it was still alive and quaking in some abject fear, haunted, as she said, by some ghost from his own past.

  “There it is.” Elizabeth pointed to the small wooden shack with “Anne Arundel County Police, Eastport Station” on a sign over it. Jonas stopped the car, they went in.

  “I’m Elizabeth Darrell. Is Sergeant Digges here?”

  The officer at the desk turned down the radio. “He’s not here.”

  “Miss Darrell’s sister was coming in to see Sergeant Digges. Did she come?”

  “The little dark-haired girl? Yeah. Heard him say they were going out in the country some place. It was about that Grymes deal out on the Creek.”

  “Thanks,” Jonas said. He took Elizabeth’s arm. She was trembling again. Out in the car she slumped down in the seat and closed her eyes.

  “I can’t bear it,” she whispered. “The poor little kid. The poor baby…”

  Jonas took his hand off the wheel and gripped hers.

  “Take it easy. We’ve got to face it.”

  They crossed the bridge again. On the right, across the sea of small craft in the Yacht Basin and the red tin roofs and brick end chimneys of the old house on the waterfront, were the green athletic fields and massive stone buildings of the Academy. Elizabeth turned her head away.

  “Poor Tom,” she whispered. “What’ll he do now?” Then, remembering what Tom Darrell had missed doing by a fraction of an inch, she shook her head quickly. “Jonas—I just can’t believe he did it…”

  The music of the band was coming over the wall as Jonas turned up King George Street… the work and pageantry of a
Service school going on its efficient routine. Somewhere in it, carrying his own burden of knowledge, Tom Darrell was moving, a depersonalized unit, waiting for the end to come that would cut him out as the Brigade closed in and went on, with nobody but a classmate or two to miss him and none of them to know why he went and what his going meant to him. But what would happen now, when Jenny had refused that sacrifice along with the others? Jonas was thinking of that as they rounded the bend at the Post Graduate School.

  “He’ll resign now, I suppose.”

  Elizabeth said it as if he had asked the question aloud.

  “He’s so proud I don’t think he could stand having the whole Brigade talking about her. They wouldn’t mean to be cruel. But he’d feel responsible. He’d feel he’d never live it down.”

  “That’s silly, of course.”

  “No, it isn’t. He’s young. It would always be on his record. Everything goes down. Every time he comes up for duty, or selection, some officer would have to read it again. You just don’t forget things in the Navy. And if the papers have gone up to the Secretary, it doesn’t matter. It would take an act of Congress to put him back in. There’d have to be a hearing. That would be worse, really.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head wearily. “I’m so sorry for him. A lot of boys come to the Academy because their families get them the appointment. They don’t really care. It’s all Tom ever dreamed of doing. When we came back here from China, after Mother died when Jenny was born, he’d come over to the Yard and watch the midshipmen march. One day the Superintendent stopped and said ‘Are you going to be a midshipman, son?’ Tom said, ‘No, sir, I’m going to be an admiral.’ Now he won’t even be an ensign. But it’s Jenny I’m frightened about. I don’t even care about all the… all the mess it’s going to be. I’m just terrified shell do something awful to herself. Oh, when Grandfather hears about it… oh dear, oh dear!”

  Jonas had been thinking about that too.

  They drove on in silence for a while. Elizabeth put her head down in her hands and covered her eyes. “We’re almost there, Jonas—Jonas… what are we going to do?”

  He shook his head as he turned the car into the white oyster-shell road that branched down across the marsh to the Milnors’ cottage. It had a kind of grim inevitability that made words of his futile.

  As they made the last wooded turn into the clearing, and saw the cottage down on the point, Elizabeth straightened up. She put her hand quickly on Jonas’s arm.

  “That’s her car. She’s out here.”

  Jonas had already seen the maroon convertible through the trees.

  “What’s she doing out here?”

  He shook his head again, and stopped his car behind Philip-pa’s on the road half-way down to the cottage. There was an empty police car near the house, where Gordon Grymes’s car had been that Saturday night. The whole place was strangely quiet, the only movement around them as they went toward the point the rippling of the water and the slow flap-flap of a pair of white herons winging their way toward the Fergusons’ shore.

  “—Say that again, Jenny. You were inside here?”

  Sergeant Digges’s voice came through the open kitchen window as they passed it. Elizabeth ran around the corner of the cottage and tore open the screen door. “Jenny! Jenny!”

  Jonas came up behind her. Jenny was standing by Sergeant Digges. A uniformed officer was sitting at a small table in a corner, his notebook open, pencil in hand. Philippa Van Holt was sitting on the raised hearth, her face pale above the scarlet linen of her jacket.

  As Elizabeth ran forward Jenny drew back, her face bloodless in the cloud of dusky hair. There were deep violet circles under her eyes.

  “I’ve already told him, Elizabeth,” she said. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it was clear and firm. “I should have done it right away. So please don’t say anything now, Elizabeth. I had to do it. I’ve told him everything.”

  She looked past her sister at Jonas.

  “Make her go away. I don’t want anybody to worry about me, any more. I’ve made just too much trouble for everybody as it is.”

  From the doorway Jonas looked across the room at Sergeant Digges. His grey uniform shirt with the blue chevrons was drenched with sweat. Jonas had never envied any man his job less. He felt a sudden feeling of pity for this man with the job that was his to do.

  Sergeant Digges nodded at them.

  “I’m as sorry about this as you are, Elizabeth,” he said stolidly. “Now you’re here you can stay if you want to. You’ll have to stand outside and not make any trouble.—Miss Van Holt, I’ve already told you to keep quiet.”

  His voice rose harshly. Philippa relaxed against the brick fireplace with an impatient shrug.

  “You can shut up or get out of here. There’s no use talking to me—save it for the State’s Attorney. I’m neither judge nor jury. I’m an investigating officer. You needn’t keep on yelling about self-defense. I’ll tell you frankly you’ll do a better job to let Jenny tell her own story and you keep out of it. I’ll do everything I can for her. My God, what do you take me for?”

  He looked from one to the other of them and turned back to Jenny Darrell, his manner changing instantly.

  “All right, Jenny. Don’t pay any attention to anybody else. What I want you to do is try to think as clearly as you can, and tell me exactly what you did. Everything that happened. You came in here to telephone. Go on, Jenny.”

  She had turned her back on Elizabeth and Jonas, and stood erect and still, speaking quickly and clearly. The terror she had lived with had died, and left courage to face everything and be through with it.

  “He told me to come in and phone while he turned off his lights so the battery wouldn’t run down. I didn’t think then that they didn’t have a phone. Then I thought maybe they’d got one in. I started to look in the galley when he came in. He said I knew there wasn’t a phone.”

  “Where were you then, Jenny?”

  “I was half-way to the galley door. He came in. He was taking his flask out again. I was afraid of him then, and I wanted to get back close to the door, but he’d locked it. I didn’t notice that till he went to the galley to get a glass and I tried to get out. He laughed and showed me the key in his hand and said I could get out if… I don’t want to say what he said. He said a lot of things. I didn’t understand the words but I knew what he meant. Then he put the key on the arm of his chair and said if I wanted it I could come and get it.”

  “Where was he then?”

  “Over there.”

  She pointed to the chair in the middle of the room.

  “He was there. I was right here on this side of the table. I kept trying to make him see he had to let me go home. He’d finished his flask and started to fill it up out of a bottle on the bar there. Then he took out his gun and said I meant so much to him he’d kill himself if I didn’t, and I’m so frightened of guns, because Grandfather always said I’d kill somebody if I got my hands on one, and then he lurched up and I thought he was coming after me. I didn’t know what I was going to do. That’s when he threw the gun on the table. It slid over and hit me and I grabbed it. All I know is I had hold of it and he was saying ‘All right, shoot me,’ and all sorts of things, and all of a sudden I… I shot him. He made a funny sort of horrible noise and that’s what happened. He was down on the floor, and there was blood, and… I don’t know, I must have got the key, because I got out, but I don’t remember that. All I remember is I stumbled down the beach. I don’t know what I did, really, here, after I got the gun in my hands and he was talking and—”

  “All right, all right,” Sergeant Digges said. “Take it easy, Jenny. Just take it easy. All I want to know is this: you were standing right here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t mean somewhere near here, but right here?”

  She nodded.

&nbs
p; “And he didn’t take any steps, or move, before you shot him? He was standing right there, the other side of, the table, and he just doubled up and went down?”

  She nodded again.

  “Just where, exactly, Jenny? Help us out here, doc, will you? Stand over there where this fellow was standing. Is that it, Jenny?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Take this, now.”

  As he thrust the revolver into her hand she recoiled with a sudden cringing horror, her eyes screwed shut like a child’s at the taste of some bitterly loathed medicine. Her arm was out rigid, her hand shaking, the muzzle pointing dangerously not at Jonas Smith’s heart but at his knee-cap, her thumb fumbling for the trigger.

  “Shoot it, Jenny! Pull the trigger!”

  “I can’t shoot it! I don’t know how! I’m afraid of guns… I don’t know how to shoot it!”

  The revolver fell out of her hand to the floor. She clutched at the table, sobbing hysterically, and slid quietly down. Sergeant Digges took a quick step forward and caught her.

  His eyes moved grimly from Elizabeth to Jonas.

  “You people thought for one minute this kid shot somebody?”

  He put Jenny on the couch and turned back.

  “Let me show you damn fool amateurs something,” he said bitterly. “You’re standing right where Grymes stood when he was shot, doctor—and the position of the body showed he really was standing there. Now do a right-face.”

  Jonas turned. He was directly in front of the door to the tiny kitchen, and he was looking through it, for the second time, directly at the kitchen window through which he had first seen the Darrells close-up Saturday night.

  “Now, about-face, doc. Your back’s to that window. Look straight ahead of you. On the wall, right of the fireplace. You see that hole? That’s where we found the bullet that went through Mr. Grymes’s body.—I tried to tell you, doc. I told you, right in this room, as much as I could, the guy was shot from through that window. You figured we were saps. You figured we never looked into anything. You believed an hysterical frenzied kid. Maybe she should have shot this guy, but she sure didn’t.”