The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “As you say, too late.… Will you give me once more your hands, Tess?”

  She held them out to him, unquestioningly as a child, and he held them as carefully and as gently as though he realized that it was to a child that they belonged.

  “So cold!” he said. “Too cold, my poor Tess.… Mallory came to you Sunday afternoon, was it not? Did he return to Baltimore-by plane to get his car?”

  “No. He took a train—rather a slow one, so that there wouldn’t be any chance of his meeting anyone that he knew. He got his car out of the garage where he’d parked it the night before, and drove over to Stillhaven to try to see Jerry—and when he found that he couldn’t, he came back to Washington—he came back to me.”

  “And did you tell him then that you knew that it was he who had killed Fay? Or did he, perhaps, tell you?”

  “No.” The hands that were already as cold as ice seemed suddenly colder still. “I thought then that maybe I wouldn’t ever have to tell him—that maybe if I gave you the note and the backgammon markers, they would absolutely clear him.… I was a fool, of course. If I’d told him then, he’d have warned me about the note and the glass—and I might have saved him. But I was afraid. I was afraid that if we ever—we ever even whispered it under our breaths to each other, it would be a sword between us forever.”

  “When was it, then, that you told him?”

  “I didn’t. He told me.… Tonight, after he heard you get that message from the field.… Sometime between six and seven, wasn’t it? Just after you’d both had the sherry, and he was supposed to be dressing for dinner. He came straight to me because he simply had to find out if you had the note with the red stamp. And I had to tell him that I’d given it to you. He only stayed about twenty minutes—but he wasn’t angry with me at all, K.” Her voice broke for the first time, and she added proudly, in spite of that quaver, “It was me that he was sorry for all the time—it was me that he wanted not to be hurt. If you knew Dion, you’d understand.” She sighed suddenly—a long, exhausted sigh—and leaning her head back against the cushions of the couch, she murmured, “You can’t imagine all the plans that he had—all the ways, even in twenty minutes, that he had to prove to me that everything was going to turn out all right.”

  “What kind of plans were those, Tess?”

  “Oh—” She moved the bright head restlessly, and her lips curved for a moment, hunting for a lost smile. “The kind of plans that a little boy might make who’d been reading Treasure Island. If he was convinced this evening that you definitely suspected him, he was going to clear out as soon as you’d gone to bed—get over the Mexican border some way, and work his way down to Costa Rica, where he’d suddenly appear with a beard and forged passports, and acquire a coffee plantation near San José and settle down as an Australian gentleman of distinguished but obscure background, to wait till I came to join him.”

  “You, Tess?”

  “Yes. I was to arrange to go on a cruise next winter, and simply disappear—preferably in the vicinity of Port Limon—and with the family reputation for suicide, the entire world would leap to the conclusion that I’d simply jumped over the nearest deck rail. Of course what I was actually supposed to do, by Dion, was to dye my hair jet black and join my supposed Australian husband in the uplands of Costa Rica.… And we were to live happy ever after.”

  “He was leaving no excuse for his flight behind him? It was to be taken by his colleagues and Washington in general as admission of guilt, pure and simple?”

  “Oh, he wasn’t admitting any guilt at all! He was leaving a neatly constructed letter for me, with a postage stamp on it and everything, that I could turn over to the police—saying that he simply couldn’t face life any longer, that I knew what Fay’s death had meant to him, and that this seemed to him the only way out, and that even if it appeared cowardly, he was taking it.… It didn’t actually say that he was committing suicide, but I think that it would have satisfied even you that he intended to.”

  “Why are you so sure of that, Tess?”

  “I ought to be sure. I dictated it so that it should sound exactly like that.”

  “When? Early this evening? At your house?”

  “No—no. If I’d done it there, it wouldn’t have had the right paper—or the right ink. You’ve taught me quite a lot about notes, K—if it comes to that, you’ve taught me quite a lot about how a well-staged suicide should look. Dion wrote the note only an hour or so ago—with his own fountain pen, on his own paper.… Don’t you think that I ought to be going now?”

  “Did you let Dion think at first that you agreed with those plans of his?”

  “I don’t know what he thought—except that he loved me, and that I loved him.”

  “Why were you trying so desperately to reach him at Joan Lindsay’s tonight?”

  “Because I was desperate.” She sat quite still, making no effort to release the cold, quiet hands that he held in his, but he felt, somehow, that she had left him a long time ago. “Nell Tappan called up to say that tomorrow she would give me back Fay’s backgammon markers that she’d won from her, if I wanted them, but that she was taking them tonight to Joan’s, as she’d asked her to bring some extra ones. And I knew then—I knew then that everything was over. Even if you hadn’t found out yet how to read the writing on the stamps. I knew that you would see those markers and learn that they were Fay’s. And I was afraid that Dion might see them, too, and lose his head. I had to see him; I had to see him quickly.”

  “You wanted to make him realize that those plans of his were quite impossible? That you would have no part in them?”

  “I wanted to make him realize it—yes—but I couldn’t tell him. How could I tell him, K, that I couldn’t bear life chained to a fugitive and a derelict? That even if I could bear it for myself, I couldn’t bear it for him.… I couldn’t tell him that—ever.”

  “Still, you think that in the end you made him see it?”

  “In the end, yes—in the end, I do think that I made him see it.… Even though we did drink our Happy Landings toast to Costa Rica.”

  “Happy Landings? That is the Royal Flying Corps toast, is it not?”

  “Yes—that’s what it really is, of course.” She smiled at him faintly, but he knew that the eyes fixed so gravely and docilely on his did not see him at all. “But with us it’s just a childish trick that we’ve gone through every time we’ve had a party together since we really got to know each other this spring. We drink to the next time and place that we’re going to meet—that way it makes it seem safer and surer, somehow. And tonight, because it seemed to us a specially important night, we drank it in champagne.… I’d just finished drying and putting away my glass in the kitchenette when you came in … so that no one would know that I had been here. Dion agreed when I came that that was a very good idea.”

  “I had thought,” he said, “that I came in very quietly.”

  “Oh, but you did,” she assured him consolingly. “It was just that I was rather expecting you. If I hadn’t been, I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t have heard you at all.”

  “There was one thing that struck me as somewhat extraordinary when I came in,” he said slowly, his hands closing a little more strongly on hers. “There was a light in the closet out there—in Hardy’s closet, where he kept his chemicals. I went in because I thought that there might be someone inside, but it was empty. Only I found that one of the chemicals that Mallory had told me that he had seen there only quite recently was gone. A small tin can of cyanide of potassium.… Do you know what cyanide of potassium is, Tess?”

  “Do you mean do I know that it’s practically the same thing as prussic acid, and that it’s a deadly poison? Oh, yes—I know that.”

  “Tess, do you think that it is possible that Mallory took that can of cyanide?”

  “I know that he did. I asked him to get it, just a few minutes before you came, while I was fixing the champagne cocktails.”

  “But, Tess, in God’s name why?”


  “I told him that I thought that it would look even more as though he were going to commit suicide if he left it standing by the letter to me,” she explained gravely. “Open, you know, with just a little sprinkle of it on the desk, as though he were taking some with him. He thought that was a good idea, too.… Can I go now, K? It’s really getting dreadfully late.”

  He felt his own hands turn colder than hers as he slowly released them and rose, standing aside to let her pass. He could feel the chill penetrating deeper—down through his flesh, down through his bone—as he followed the bright foam of the silvery train sweeping just ahead of him around the curves of the stairs. On the desk, she had said—open on the desk.… The silver cloak on his arm was heavy as lead.

  At the foot of the stairs she stood waiting, gracious and submissive, while he folded it about her, and then turned towards him, holding out both her hands with that valiant and heartbreaking smile.

  “It’s good-night again, isn’t it, K? Or is it good-morning? It must be long after one, isn’t it?”

  “Long after,” he said mechanically, letting her hands drop almost before he touched them. “Tess, you may think me the worst of fools, but that tin of cyanide—that tin of cyanide open on his desk—that I do not like to think of. Even though it may disturb him, I think that I will knock on Mallory’s door and ask him to give me that tin.”

  She said, her hands already on the knob of the street door:

  “Don’t knock. He won’t hear you.”

  Sheridan stood rigid, staring at the dark paneled door on which he was not to knock.

  “He has gone, then? After all you said, he is gone?”

  “No. I told you—he’s in there. He’s dead, K.”

  Her voice was as steady as her eyes, but Sheridan stretched out his hand and held fast to the newel post.

  “So that, Tess, is what you have been trying to tell me since you came up those stairs. That Mallory is dead—that he has killed himself?”

  She said:

  “No—no. I’ve been trying to tell you that I killed him.… Only you wouldn’t listen.”

  He whispered, not moving:

  “I do not believe you. You are mad.”

  “I don’t believe myself—quite,” Tess Stuart told him gently. “But it is true that I put the powder in his glass—quite a lot of it, so that it would be really sure and quick. I asked him to get my cloak from the hall, and when he came back it was all done. But, K, what I said was true—I do think in the end he understood—I do think so.”

  “Understood?” He fought to find his voice, as sometimes he had fought to find it in a nightmare. “What was there that he understood? That you were a murderess?”

  “K, hasn’t prussic acid got a very strong taste? A taste like bitter almonds?”

  “You seem well acquainted with all its properties,” he said.

  “You couldn’t ever disguise it just in a champagne cocktail, could you?”

  “No. As you say, not ever.”

  “Well, but then, don’t you see? I didn’t try to disguise it. I just put it there, and he touched his lips to it and said, ‘Happy Landings—in Costa Rica!’ And then he stood looking down into it as though—as though he saw something, and after a minute he lifted up the glass, and smiled straight at me, and said, ‘You’re braver than I am, aren’t you, darling? Still—Happy Landings!’ And he drank it down quite slowly, every drop of it, with his eyes still on me. He needn’t have drunk it, need he, K? He needn’t have drunk it unless he’d understood?”

  Sheridan lifted one hand to his eyes to shut out for a moment that white and shining face, terrible and beautiful in its fearless triumph.

  And it was the voice of the man in the nightmare that he heard crying to her.

  “Yes, that surely he must have understood. Thank God, then, Tess—thank God that you never really loved him.”

  He heard her own voice saying, touched with wonder:

  “Not love him? Oh, darling, but it’s you who didn’t understand.… He’s the only man that I’ve ever loved—he’s the only man that I’ll ever love in my life.”

  He could feel the cool rush of air from the street, and the sound of the door closing behind her as quietly as though it were not his own life that it had closed on.

  When he dropped his hand, the hall was empty; only the echo of her voice still haunted it—that deep young voice, clear and gallant as a child’s, even the echo of which was to make every other one that he ever heard again unreal as a dream.…

  THE END

  About the Author

  Frances Noyes Hart (1890–1943) was an American writer whose stories were published in Scribner’s, The Saturday Evening Post (where her novel The Bellamy Trial was first serialized), and The Ladies’ Home Journal. The daughter of Frank Brett Noyes, founder of the Associated Press, Hart was educated in American, Italian, and French schools before serving in World War I as a canteen worker for the YMCA and a translator for the Naval Intelligence Bureau. She later wrote six novels, numerous short stories, and a memoir.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1934 by Frances Noyes Hart

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-6062-2

  This 2020 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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