Night Walk

by Elizabeth Daly

  “Almost incredible.”

  “‘Private’ meetings, you know; the jaded rich. Well, she’s showed no ill effects.”

  “I believe this tragedy leaves her unprovided for?”

  “Well enough provided for; Lydia and I will take care of her. Our circumstances are very much changed, of course—a madman changed them for us. But Rose will be all right.”

  “Do you know anything about Miss Wakefield’s guests, Mr. Carrington?”

  “Nothing about the Silvers; they seem decent ordinary people, from the glimpses I’ve had of them. Silver’s connected with some small college. We know old Tom Compson, of course. I’m glad he wasn’t here on Thursday night. If there’d been any serious idea that there was a sane reason for those visits, Compson alone would explode it. His money all goes to his university. As for Hattie Bluett—! I’m glad that lock was out of order—the lock on her Library screen door.”

  He straightened, and faced Gamadge. “We’ll see you this evening?”

  “Of course, and thank you very much for your help. Tell your sister I greatly appreciate—”

  “She’s the grateful one.”

  Carrington turned and went down the walk. Gamadge rang, and was admitted by Miss Pepper.

  “Hello there,” she said. “You still want Miss Studley? She’s still on the porch.”

  “I still want her.” Gamadge tried to think up some reason why he should have wanted her. He went into the dining room and through a French window on the right. The big screened porch was comfortably fitted out with a glider, cushioned wicker chairs, and glass tables. Miss Studley sat at a table doing accounts.

  “First of the month coming,” she explained, “and income tax instalment two weeks away.”

  “It isn’t good for your patients to listen to that kind of thing.” Gamadge leaned up against the doorframe. “I wanted to know whether I could get vitamins in the drugstore here.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t. Sometimes they have some.”

  “Vitamin B2.”

  “I’m sure not those.”

  “I’ll drive in to Westbury tomorrow for them.”

  “Somebody will be going in from here. Have you the prescription?”

  “No, but I know just what they look like. Amber beads the size of a small pea.”

  “Your doctor won’t like you to buy medicine that way!”

  “I know the size of the little brutes. Oh—I shan’t be in to dinner tonight, Miss Studley.”

  “Won’t you? I’m sorry.”

  “Funniest thing you know—I find I’m acquainted with Lawrence Carrington.”

  “No!” Miss Studley’s eyes gleamed with interest.

  “He evidently heard somehow that I was here—”

  “News travels fast in Frazer’s Mills. Everybody knows you’re here by this time.”

  “Interested in strangers, are they?”

  “Wildly interested, especially now.”

  “Well, he heard, and he came along to ask me to supper tonight. Until I saw him I didn’t realize that he was the Carrington I run into at my club. Perhaps I never knew his first name. I rather hesitated to accept.”

  “You’ll cheer them up. Poor things.”

  “So he seemed to think.”

  “And the body’s at Westbury.”

  Gamadge, taken aback by this nonchalance, which he supposed professional, said that he had assumed it was.

  “Be sure to tell us tomorrow what that Jenner girl’s like. She’s never in the village. Hardly anybody’s spoken to her.”

  “I’ll tell you all about her.”

  Gamadge went back through the house and left it by the side door. He followed a path around to the front, but noted that it was possible to walk on turf all the way.

  He strolled across the street and past a group of the cottages; some were of whitewashed brick, some of wood; the first kind very plain, one or two of the latter with scrollwork around the edge of roof and porch. He saw Miss Studley’s latticed birthplace. All the cottages had gardens, grown and overgrown with dahlias, zinnias and asters. Their doors were closed.

  Gamadge crossed the street again and walked up a broad flagged path to the Wakefield Inn. He found the front porch occupied by two young men; one, his chair tilted back against the wall on the house, had rumpled hair and wore spectacles; a book was open on his knees. The other, facing him and seated on the railing, was Garston Yates.

  Yates glanced casually at Gamadge and looked away again. The young man in spectacles—he was certainly well under twenty—favored Gamadge with a stare.

  Gamadge paused on the top step. “Miss Wakefield at home, do you know?”

  The young man in spectacles said: “She was a few minutes ago. She ought to be still, she’s entertaining company. You’re the new inmate at Studley’s.”

  “Grapevine in good working order, I see.” Gamadge smiled at him.

  “The hired man stopped by with the big news. It’s big news when anybody’s fearless enough to come to Frazer’s Mills. You’re Mr. Gamadge.”

  He made as if to tilt his chair forward. Gamadge said: “Don’t disturb yourself.”

  The young man looked at Yates. “Perhaps I’d better introduce myself. Fearless as he is, he may not care to stick around when he realizes that I’m at large.”

  Yates lifted his shoulders, disclaiming any part of this.

  The young man addressed Gamadge again: “I’m Silver.”

  “Are you? Very glad to meet you, Mr. Silver.”

  “You don’t blench. Haven’t they told you that I’m the monster?”

  CHAPTER TEN Monsters

  “REALLY?” GAMADGE LEANED against a post and lighted a cigarette.

  “This is Yates,” Silver told him, “one of my near-victims. I’ll get him yet.”

  Gamadge and Yates exchanged a brief nod.

  “It’s a case of adolescent disturbance,” said Silver. “My family’s protecting me because they think I’ll outgrow it. They want me to go to college, not to the booby hatch. No sense of the duties of citizenship at all.”

  Yates said in a tone of fatigue: “All this, Mr. Gamadge, is because Master Silver was asked a few routine questions by the sheriff and the police.”

  “Nonsense,” said Silver. “I guess I know whether I’m a monster or not; my object was extermination.”

  “You do seem to have been catholic in your tastes in victims,” said Gamadge.

  “Well, even I have preferences. I mistook old Mrs. Norbury’s room for Mrs. Turnbull’s. You’ve seen Mrs. Turnbull, I suppose? She embodies in her own person the whole meaning of the theory of Conspicuous Waste. Better dead; better dead.”

  “Drastic,” objected Gamadge.

  “I mean to be. As for Bluett, the last time I was at the Library looking for something to read, she offered me Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.”

  “Oh, has she that there? I’d certainly like another go at that,” said Gamadge.

  “Oh well,” said Mr. Silver tolerantly, “some people never do develop in certain directions. When I took out The Düsseldorf Monster she asked me if I really thought I’d better have it.”

  “Reading up on yourself, are you?”

  Young Silver, dropping his labored fantasy, tilted his chair forward with a bang. He pointed to the book on his knees. “Do you know anything about these monsters?” he asked.

  “About as much as you do, I suppose.”

  “You notice I’m sitting with my back to the wall. It isn’t by accident. I’m that way metaphorically until they catch the real monster or let us out of this. It’s merely silly to talk about a search; think of all the old cellar foundations and hollow oaks in these woods. This monster is just like the Düsseldorf Monster, and he was the worst in history. Men, women and children, morning, noon or night, it was all the same to him. The city was practically under quarantine for ages. And when they did find him—when they did find him, do you know what he was like?”

  Gamadge opened his mo
uth to assent, but young Silver was not to be beaten to his climax:

  “He was a harmless little guy, really harmless between bouts, perfectly respectable, and just like anybody.”

  “They seem to have all kinds of things in the Rigby Library,” remarked Gamadge. “I really must go there.”

  “And do you know what they did to this Düsseldorf maniac?” asked Silver. “They chopped his head off. Doesn’t that seem a funny thing to you?”

  “You mean it ought to have been looked at as a case of diminished responsibility?”

  “Why not? It wasn’t so long ago. What were the psychiatrists thinking of? In Germany, too, where they’re supposed to have been so up in all that kind of thing.”

  “Well, it’s a difficult problem. Very difficult. A person’s supposed to be legally sane if he can exercise control and ingenuity and foresight and so on. The Düsseldorf Monster was very careful. Courts don’t like—”

  “That isn’t the sensible approach to the thing. And in this case, look at the risks! Not much foresight here.”

  Gamadge looked across the lawn to his left, where the Rigby hedges rose. He said: “I wonder if Miss Bluett could be persuaded to take me into the Library. Too nervous?”

  Young Silver burst out laughing. “Nervous? Bluett? She’s there now.”

  “Is she?”

  “Pasting labels on the new consignment, and the Stapler kid’s sitting on the doorstep with a baseball bat.”

  “Well, good for Miss Bluett.”

  “You notice the poetic justice?” inquired Silver. “A baseball bat is a log of wood.”

  Yates observed that very young people were so detached.

  Gamadge asked: “Did everybody know that Mr. Compson had gone away, Mr. Silver?”

  Silver blinked. “Compson? Oh. You mean did everybody think he was in his room Thursday night. Yes, they did; so far as they thought about it at all. Usually his annual trip to Cape Cod is like a durbar. You know he’s a descendant of one of the originals? They line up both sides of the street to see him off. But he drove off early on Thursday instead of Friday, some complication about trains, and we were all very much surprised when this transient here showed up instead. A little chiseling on the part of Miss Wakefield, I’m afraid.”

  “Keep off her,” said Yates, without emphasis.

  “Your sense of humor is in abeyance. Anyway, off he went; no fanfare, no peasantry gathered round his car to tuck the rugs in. I’ll tell you one thing: if I were the Monster I wouldn’t have killed old Carrington. What a type! Used to come walking down the street like the king of the Cannibal Islands; kind word for everybody.”

  “No conspicuous waste there?” Gamadge smiled.

  “Nothing bourgeois, nothing for show, all functional to old Carrington. You couldn’t blame him for conspicuous waste any more than you could blame a peacock for its tail. Intelligent, too, in his way. We had a lot of interesting chats about N.Y. history. He knew this part of the world like a book, from geology to bugs.”

  A harassed-looking man of scholarly appearance opened the front door, pushed the screen, and looked out. He said: “Dickie, your mother wants to know where you are.”

  “Right where you see me, Dad.”

  “Remember we absolutely forbid you to go off alone in the woods again.”

  Young Silver nodded glumly.

  “You might go down to the drugstore and get her some pop. Get two bottles while you’re about it.”

  Young Silver rose, went over and accepted coins from his father, and then descended the steps. Mr. Silver withdrew.

  As young Silver crossed the lawn Yates said out of the side of his mouth: “Great bunch of conspirators, are they not?”

  “Yes. Ludicrous.”

  “Rose is in there.”

  “In with Miss Wakefield?”

  “Yes. First time I’ve seen her since it happened. We had no chance for a word, with the Monster here.”

  Gamadge laughed. “Amusing brat.”

  “He’s dying to get off with a posse.”

  “Are you waiting for a word with Miss Jenner?”

  “Don’t think she’ll give me one. She’s evidently here for Lydia Carrington; she said something as she went in.”

  “I’ll go in myself.”

  “What’s your reason for seeing Miss Wakefield? General information?”

  “I’m inquiring about rooms.”

  Yates looked blank. He said after a moment: “Rose looks as if the thing had half killed her. She looks frightful. Have you—have you anything?”

  “I’ve been here a little over three hours.”

  Gamadge went to the door and rang. A plain woman whose hair was fuzzy from a recent shampoo answered the bell. She smiled at Gamadge austerely.

  “Miss Wakefield?”

  “I’m Miss Homans, a guest. The women servants are not allowed by their families to come to Frazer’s Mills. But it’s all right for us to be here.” Miss Homans gave a short laugh. “To alibi one another, you know. Idiocy.”

  Gamadge said: “What a shame. You’re the lady who was washing her hair, aren’t you?”

  “I am. My hair and I have been in every newspaper in the United States. Is there anything particularly funny in a shampoo? You’d think so; I provide comic relief to the case, I believe. It’s too bad I didn’t invite the Silver boy to sit and entertain me while I washed my hair on Thursday night; you’d suppose I was quite remiss in not having done so. And look at me! Who’s to wave me in this place?”

  Gamadge smiled politely.

  “You’ll find Miss Wakefield in her office.” Miss Homans stood aside. “I suppose you’re not from a newspaper? Those boys promised that they wouldn’t let any more newspapers through.”

  “I shouldn’t think they’d want to get farther than young Mr. Silver and Mr. Yates.”

  “I didn’t mean them; I meant the state police.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m Miss Studley’s new inmate.”

  “Mr. Gamadge; then it’s all right.”

  Miss Homans, looking very curious, showed Gamadge to the doorway of a room at the rear of the hall, and went away. Gamadge stood on the sill until Miss Wakefield, at her desk, looked up and saw him. A girl sat beside her, elbow on the desk and head supported by her hand. Her eyes were half-closed, as if the lids were heavy, but the eyes were brilliant. When she opened them to look at Gamadge he noticed their peculiar color—neither hazel nor gray, yellowish. She was very pale.

  Gamadge introduced himself. “I wanted to ask about rooms for later in the year, Miss Wakefield. I have a small family, and I thought this would be the very place for us all to stay in October. Must be lovely in the autumn. My little boy is three; I don’t suppose Miss Studley takes young children.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Gamadge.” Miss Wakefield looked at him doubtfully. “My guests do thin out in October, but—you wouldn’t want your family here until this trouble is settled.”

  “It will be, of course.”

  Rose Jenner got up. She said: “Then I’ll tell Lydia, Miss Wakefield.” From the moment that she had heard Gamadge’s name she had sat motionless, frozen. She had not looked at him again.

  “Tell her of course, Rose; of course. We’ll have plenty of flowers,” said Miss Wakefield.

  Gamadge said: “This is Miss Jenner? I found out a little while ago that I know Lawrence Carrington.”

  “You do?” Miss Wakefield was surprised.

  “Yes; he came to Edgewood to speak to me. Miss Carrington sent word that I was to have supper there this evening.”

  “Lawrence told us, when he—when he heard you were at Edgewood,” said Rose.

  “Then I’ll see you again.”

  “Yes. I’m glad you can come.”

  She went out of the room slowly. Miss Wakefield, looking after her, shook her head. “It’s been a horrible thing for that child. She was devoted to George Carrington. She found him, you know.”

  “Yes. Horrible.”

  “She’s not herself
at all.”

  Gamadge sat opposite Miss Wakefield’s desk. “I want to write to my wife about this idea of mine,” he said. “You do think you’ll have rooms for us?”

  “I’ll have the rooms.”

  Miss Wakefield’s study was large, and it contained besides the littered desk and some well-worn furniture a collection of toys and fancywork displayed on tables. The objects seemed homemade. Gamadge’s eye was caught by a large cinnamon-colored animal with stiff whiskers and a baleful look on its snouted face. He got up to examine it.

  “I really must have this,” he said.

  Miss Wakefield glanced at it without favor. “You like it?”

  “It would keep me awake at night, but my son has stronger nerves. He’ll be delighted with it. He may know whether it’s a dog or a bear. Or a monkey? Rabbit? It looks like something from the island of Doctor Moreau.”

  “I’ll wrap it up for you. The things were made here for the Library fund sale.” Miss Wakefield rose and got paper and string. She looked at the tag on the animal, and remarked rather disapprovingly: “Two dollars.”

  “May I contribute an extra dollar to the Library fund? I’d certainly pay three in New York for something not half so original.”

  “Thanks. Everything helps. Glad to get rid of it.” She wrapped the large bundle. Gamadge received it into his arms, and they sat down on opposite sides of her desk. He liked Miss Wakefield.

  “Here’s my price list. You can write to me.” She handed him a typed paper.

  “Thanks very much.”

  Miss Wakefield rubbed the back of her cropped head. She said: “I’m glad you’re going up to the Carringtons’ this evening. They’ve behaved very kindly to me about this tragedy. When you see them I wish you’d say something about the way I feel—I never can express myself properly when I feel upset.”

  “I will of course. I only know Lawrence, Miss Wakefield.”

  “Poor Lydia, you’ll meet a ghost instead of her best self. She represses her feelings too, only she’s worse off than I am because she doesn’t bang things around the way I do when things go wrong. If I’d only called them up as soon as the Yates boy told me about the axe; I’d have saved George Carrington’s life.”