“The surface,” Woar complained, “is not improving.”
Nor were the detour signs. They stubbornly avoided a place named Bazaar (marked on a lonely sign) and headed west again. Almost immediately they pointed south, then west, then south, till Woar had no sense of direction except up and down.
Wet clay degenerated into the stuff bogs are made of. The clump and slap of what was kicked up by the wheels against the underbody became a monotonous thunder. All too frequently a pool of water would show up in front of them, and shatter into a great deluge before the wheels. Woar slowed to twenty and often changed down into second.
“Ain’t there some place we could stop?” asked Cicely, suddenly aware of bad going and increasing storm. Her voice sounded unsteady.
“All too many places,” said Katheren. “We’re trying to avoid them.”
A whoosh of water from a particularly deep puddle smote the windshield. Cicely gasped. The motor faltered, ran unevenly on five or six cylinders, then slowly recovered its stride.
Woar said, “If I wet all eight plugs at once, we’ll stop for the night. However...”
“However what?”
“I’m afraid daybreak may offer no advantage.”
So Woar kept on.
Pursuit of Milton Smalnick—Lefty, the real Smalnick had called him in his telegram—was becoming a far-off dream, slightly farther off with every sloshing mile.
A savage, angry little creek wove along close to the road, frequently passing under it, foaming within a few inches of the insecure plank bridges in the hollows among the hills. The bridges had a nasty way of quivering under Hilda’s wheels.
They came to a settlement named Wonseur. At least Katheren supposed so after consulting the map. Wonseur was dark, like a lamp that has blown out in the wind. The detour markings had forsaken them.
Woar had to admit it. He was completely and supremely lost.
Then a choice of two roads confronted them; two equally uninviting mud sluices leading off into blackness.
“Which?”
“I don’t know,” Katheren confessed. “The left leads away from the highway, the right leads toward it. But that’s only woman’s intuition. I may be wrong.”
Woar chose the right fork.
A distant dancing glimmer far to the rear after they made the turn, encouraged them a little. Another car, lost as they were? Some living thing at least and the first they had come upon in half an hour.
“Coming after us,” said Katheren.
“I can see it,” said Woar.
“Rather fast, too.”
“Idiot!”
The glare of headlamps overtook them. Woar twisted the rear-view mirror up to keep the light out of his eyes. He let the Buick slow from twenty to ten; he pulled as far to the edge of the road as he dared; he wound the window down, to be ready to signal.
The car behind tooted imperiously, started to pull out.
Woar saw water in the road ahead, and a narrowing of the road at the bottom of a short declivity. He signaled a warning not to pass. The car nosed alongside, attempting it nevertheless.
Treading with terrible delicacy, Woar braked.
The other car shot past.
Woar felt his wheels slither, perceived a majestic and uncontrollable skid that would chute them to the bottom of the hollow. There was nothing he could do about it. The car that had passed them bounded briskly into the water ahead, sent up a grand muddy cloud and suddenly nosed down—a dead stop in the middle of the bridge! From under its hood came a fine large cloud of white steam.
The whole affair had passed out of Woar’s hands. He was skidding, he would hit it, and there it was.
He shut his own eyes and flung out an arm to cover Katheren’s face. He heard a beautiful rending crash and a great roaring of water. He felt a jolt that flung his middle against the steering wheel and knocked the wind out of him.
One way or another, he had caught up with Smalnick’s car at last.
Twelve
WOAR, wondering if he had broken a rib, got out. He stood in a foot and a half of very cold running water to assess the damage. The Buick had lost front bumper, left headlamp, most of its chromium nose and all recognizable shape from both mudguards.
The Lagonda’s exquisite coachwork was no longer exquisite.
What lay under water had to be guessed; but Woar felt reasonably sure that the left front wheel had gone through a rotten plank in the bridge, leaving the car resting on its front axle. Since it blocked the narrow bridge, and since Hilda had skidded in at an angle that left her immovable while the Lagonda remained in the way, obviously the Lagonda had to be made to run. Woar looked inside.
Smalnick, or Lefty or whoever he was, sat helplessly at the wheel, muttering an unprintable litany. Catching up with the man, Woar gathered, was no job at all compared to extracting sense from him. Arrogance, shrewdness and whisky had boiled down into a solid lump of misery. For once his incorrigible habit of picking up company came in handy, though; a fair-haired, blue-eyed youth in sweater and corduroys sat beside him, making hasty repairs to a bloody nose.
Woar said, “Hello. Where did you come from?”
“Baltimore. You folks going to Salt Lake?”
“No. Dodge City and Santa Fe. I meant, how did you get here?”
“Used the old thumb. This bird stopped for me outside of Emporia—and believe me, mister, if he ain’t tight, he’s nuts.”
“He’s both,” said Woar. “Come on, give me some help.”
The hitch-hiker produced a cheerful smile, stripped off shoes, socks and trousers, and climbed out. Leaving Smalnick to his sorrows, the two lifted the Lagonda’s hood.
“Wet plugs. Maybe the coil and ignition, too.”
Woar said, “Plugs first. Now if I can get a match to burn...”
He did, and they burned the spark plugs dry with gasoline from the strainer. They mopped as much water as they could from the wiring. Carburetors, fortunately, stood high enough to be out of the flood gurgling about the crank-case.
At first try, the Lagonda popped and snapped. At the fifth, she took it, slowly warmed, and at last began hitting on all twelve cylinders.
Infinitely more difficult, since the axle lay under water, was the job of raising the front wheel. For that they took apart a fence for levers. Prizing the axle, blocking the wheel, they laboriously raised it enough to improvise planking for the tire to ride on.
“Now—can you drive?”
“If I can’t,” said the cheerful hitch-hiker, “I’m outa luck, because I’m taking the wheel from here in. I got a home and mother to think of.”
With Woar calling directions, the boy drove up to what passed in that part of Kansas for dry land.
Next came Hilda’s turn.
Mechanically she was undamaged. With help from the boy, she was inched across the makeshift planking in the bridge—more difficult than it sounds, what with an unhappy tendency on the part of the planking to float off downstream.
The beam of the remaining headlamp pointed up into the clouds.
“I’ll have to follow your lights,” Woar decided. “Stop in the next town.”
Which was Elm Point, on high ground and the highway.
Woar’s injunction to stop there, however, wasn’t needed.
They were lucky to reach the town under mule power, and by midnight.
How many motorists spent that night lost in the maze of mud lanes about Wonseur isn’t known. Those that got through to Elm Point found a wide, fast torrent between themselves and the town proper. Somewhere under the torrent, reputedly, lay a bridge.
For five dollars a car, an enterprising farmer towed futile mechanism over that bridge, with nothing but faith in his mules’ feet to keep them from running off the edge. With motors turned off and with passengers holding their feet up from the flood seeping under the doors, each car was. pulled through the river.
Almost in vain, it seemed, when they reached the other side.
First the La
gonda, then the Buick drew up before the five-story brick building, dark and rain-washed, the wan pride of Elm Point and unmistakably named Hotel Excelsior.
“What do you think?” Woar asked, looking up dubiously at it.
“To me,” said Katheren, “it’s a palace of delight. And come what may, we’re going to sleep in it.”
2
It can be said for them that they tried.
They straggled yawning and groggy into a bare, fly-specked hotel office. Its very lack of character was deceptive. Hotel Excelsior only revealed itself by slow degrees.
The Tozers had been caught in its web, and the Winter twins and Ray Kemp; Nick Leeds and Ruth Shanley; and likewise five other motorists, sixteen passengers from a stranded bus, a highway inspector on emergency duty and a woman rumored to be expecting a child.
The roster should have been warning enough in itself. At the time, it only pointed out the surprising resources of the hotel, that it could accommodate them all.
Katheren remembers a tall, solemn woman, all in black like a piece of burned toast, who got them to write their names in pale ink on a yellowed register. Like previous names, theirs faded to a ghostly scrawling as soon as the ink dried.
The hitch-hiker, blue with cold and sneezing cheerfully, was the center of attention just then. Woar was demanding a room and fussing about a hot bath for him. The solemn woman resented fuss and the prospect of making hot water.
While this was going on, Cicely dropped out of sight. At least, she held aloof from the party, and Katheren had the impression she was off searching for an all-night lunch counter. In any case, she had seemed particularly determined to avoid Milton, and Milton stood at Woar’s elbow, explaining incoherently all the ways he might have let the Buick pass him in the maze of the detour. When they went to their rooms, Cicely wasn’t among their number.
The woman solemnly opened a door and beckoned. They followed her out of the musty lamp-lit office into a dark place where the musty smell seemed to originate and rain drummed loudly in the obscurity far above their heads.
She lighted a candle and placed it on a bare chair.
Its glow flickered feebly, shining in an immense cavity, a closed central court that ran from the ground floor to an invisible roof. Round the walls ran four galleries, one above the other, connected by stairs. From the galleries opened innumerable doors—that is, if they were doors, and not optical illusions.
The woman beckoned again, and led them up the stairs through layers of mustiness and slanting bars of shadow to the top gallery.
Number 547 was unlocked and opened for the Woars.
And Katheren, stepping over the threshold into the total darkness of her room, knew that she had come to the original source of the musty smell, and of all musty smells everywhere. That and the dust and stagnation, tinctured with the reek of a match she put to the candle on a marble wash-stand, had a physical effect on her like the first intimation of the flu coming on.
The room, Katheren decided, had not been disturbed in a decade.
“Look,” she said to her husband, and touched the gray counterpane on the bed. The gray was dust. Pale white showed where she wiped it away.
She touched the gray lace curtains, stiff and heavy as fretsaw work. Dust came down in clouds and scintillated in the candle flame.
She opened the mahogany veneer clothes press, and an outraged field mouse ran out.
“Bring Caligula up here,” said Katheren firmly, “or take me down to Caligula.”
“Right,” said Woar. “And food, and whisky. You need something. So do I. And if possible, I’ll have Hilda put right.”
He went down the stairs, accompanied by hollow echoes that redoubled till he sounded like the retreat from Moscow.
When he came back, he brought an oily egg sandwich, a bottle of fiery bootleg Scotch bought through a darkened alley window, and news.
“Beardsley and his wife started more than two hours ago for Newton. They didn’t arrive. Nick Leeds called through to find out. He’s worried.”
“Why?”
“The river runs beside the road all the way. It’s out of hand. The Beardsleys may be in it—or they may be comfortably stuck in the mud somewhere. We don’t know.”
“Well, we’re lucky to be here. We’ve got a dry bed to sleep in, at least,” and Katheren applied herself to sandwich and whisky.
“Cicely’s on a binge,” he told her.
“Is she?”
“Half seas over, at the lunch room. Relaxing after the nervous strain, I take it.”
Katheren wasn’t interested in Cicely. Caligula huffed and puffed at the smell of mice, and George was extracting his wiry body from wet clothes. That was enough for her.
Footsteps came clumping up the stair.
“More guests?”
“Kemp, probably,” said Woar, pulling a sweater over his head. “I asked him to come up. Do you mind?”
As Katheren remarked, what use her minding when Kemp was already knocking at the door? George took a carefully folded square of paper out of the pocket of the coat she had thrown over her legs.
“What’s that? A warrant?”
“Merely an I.O.U.,” he told her, and went to the door. The conference with Kemp took place just outside on the balcony, and in whispers, so that Katheren could hear practically everything they said.
Kemp seemed to be trying to express gratitude that was almost beyond his powers of communication:
“...Borrow the money somehow...Working my way through Stanford, and my folks can’t afford to help me much...Never forget this, Mr. Brendan, as long as I live...”
“Rot,” said Woar’s clipped voice. “Forget it tomorrow. Let me see your hand.”
Sounds of slight movement outside, then Woar grunted:
“Knock him out?”
“Sure. I caught him on the side of the head. Dropped him like that.”
“You know that a short time later he was pushed under the wheels of my car?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Did you do it?”
Silence.
“Henry Tozer helped you that night. Why?”
Kemp’s voice, hesitant, sullen, replied, “No use asking. I can’t tell you.”
“If you’re shielding anyone, you’re making a damn bad job of it, Ray. Why did you strike Shanley? Why did you want him killed? How will you get away with it if you can’t answer those very obvious questions?”
“...Others to think of.”
George called him a fool. The footsteps clumped down the stair again. Woar came into the room and poured himself a nip of the whisky.
He locked the door, sprawled on the bed without taking off his clothes, and kissed her good night. A cool kiss, given in constraint and in constraint accepted. He fell instantly asleep.
He had the knack for it. Katheren hadn’t.
Long after silence fell in the queer structure, half-sounds persisted: whispering somewhere, or perhaps the gurgle of rain through the gutters on the roof; the creak of floors and furniture, like stealthy prowling; soft pressure on the door, pushing, relenting, pushing again, as if cautious fingers were trying the lock. And somewhere an almost inaudible moaning, doubtless the wind.
Katheren left the candle burning and coaxed an uneasy Caligula to sleep on the foot of the bed.
3
She never heard the cry that wakened her. She found herself sitting upright in bed, staring into the darkness and telling Caligula to stop barking.
Her candle, she gathered, had burned out. There really had been a cry, because George was throwing open the door, and other doors were being thrown open, and feet were running and voices asking empty questions.
She couldn’t find shoes or coat in the darkness. She threw the counterpane over her shoulders, shut in Caligula, and looked down from the balcony. Candles glimmered, matches flared up, an oil lamp in the hands of the solemn proprietress made a patch of light that started up the stairs.
Along the gallery below a
nd across the court hurried George with flashlight in hand. He and Nick Leeds together pushed through the open door into what Katheren by sheer conviction knew must be Ruth Shanley’s room.
Lamps, candles, voices and feet came from everywhere, concentrating there. Katheren, watching from above, had the deadly feeling of knowing what was to come, of having lived through the event in a previous time—a previous place—Migler’s.
Except for stocking feet on a very cold floor, she imagined herself suspended in a musty void, unrelated to that cluster of tourists and bus passengers pressing about the dark door. As she expected, in a little while the cluster began to come apart, turning blank faces away from violence and disaster. Their curiosities were satisfied. They had something to cluck tongues about.
Someone came up the stairs to Katheren’s floor—Agatha Tozer, with a candle.
“It’s too awful,” she said.
“Is she—?”
“I couldn’t see. How people do push and shove! But you can just imagine—a pair of hands coming out of the dark, getting you by the throat!”
“She was choked, then?”
“From what I could hear. Who choked her, I’d like to know? Dreadful business, Mrs. Brendan! You keep your door locked—not that a locked door did Ruth much good, did it? Mr. Brendan says the lock was picked with a hairpin. Connie, come to your room before you catch cold standing about in the halls...!”
It was later, when comparative quiet had fallen, that George came upstairs and told Katheren the rest:
“Felt hands on her throat, screamed, was knocked on the head for her pains. Nick’s bringing her up here. Nothing serious.”
“What would you call serious?”
“If she hadn’t been able to scream. Fatal. It would have been murder.”
Nick, grim-faced, opened the door for a pale, nerveless Ruth, who let herself be put in Katheren’s bed. Nick had trousers on and a leather jacket, but the fur on his broad chest stuck through. By candlelight, the man looked huge.
Woar took another nip from the bottle, passed it to Nick, and writhed into his mackintosh.
“More detecting?” Katheren asked him.
“Not this time. A hunt.”
If A Body Page 14