Читать книгу The Dead Can Tell - Helen Inc. Reilly - Страница 6

No Longer There

Cristie didn’t know what to do. Margot was her first thought, but Margot was in the dining room with Euen’s father and mother. She couldn’t very well interrupt them with a bald announcement that one of the guests had a gun. If only Steven would come! She sat down on a chair in a deserted row in the living room. She was glad to be back where there were lights and laughter and people. The darkness had been terrifying.

A man hurrying past paused in front of her. It was Johnny. Cristie tried to smile up at him but the presence of that ugly black weapon hidden in the silk-lined pocket of the ermine cape in the bedroom beyond was a weight, a question, dragging her down, putting pallor into her cheeks, stiffness into her vocal cords.

Johnny didn’t notice her condition. He said, “Seen anything of Sara Hazard, Cristie? I’m looking for her.”

He didn’t say why. Cristie looked at him dumbly. Why was Johnny so anxious as to Sara’s whereabouts when he had announced his dislike of her only a few hours ago? Cristie felt as though she were treading a slow measure of nightmare with the golden figure of Sara Hazard appearing and disappearing in its coils. She was the object of a peculiar attention on the part of Margot, Johnny, Euen, and Kit Blaketon, an attention all the more striking because none of them seemed to care for her. Johnny appeared to sense her unspoken query. He said vaguely that someone wanted Sara Hazard on the phone.

Cristie told him that Sara was or had been in Margot’s bedroom a few minutes earlier.

“That’s funny,” Johnny said, “I looked there before.” Cristie said coldly, “Mrs. Hazard left here, went out somewhere a while ago. But she’s back.”

“Sure, Cristie?”

“Quite sure.” If only she weren’t so sure of what she had seen from the darkness of the terrace!

Johnny left her without another word. He made for the study and the telephone there. Cristie’s perplexity thickened. Why didn’t Johnny find Sara Hazard and take her to the telephone instead of going back to it himself? She brushed the cobwebby incongruities aside only to have them crop out in another place.

Sara Hazard wasn’t the only person being sought in that maze of people at Margot’s engagement party. Mary Dodd was hunting for her niece. She looked worried. Cristie heard her inquiring about the lithe, red-haired girl with the green eyes. She got out of her chair, went to Miss Dodd and told her about Kit Blaketon’s departure.

Cristie said, “She left some time ago. She may have returned, though. Can I help?”

Before Mary Dodd could reply a man joined them. Mary murmured his name. He was Clifford Somers, Assemblyman Clifford Somers, the man Kit Blaketon was engaged to. He was a well-set-up young fellow of twenty-eight or so with a pleasant, likeable face, a good jaw, and straightforward blue eyes. Cristie knew who he was then. She had heard Margot speak of him.

Clifford Somers had made a name for himself in politics. He was talked of for bigger things than the Assembly. Part of his success was the result of his own ability, but part of it was due to the influence of his brother Pat.

Steven and Margot had both talked to Pat Somers. He was one of the most powerful men in New York. He never figured in the news but he was one of the real behind-the-scenes big shots. Pat knew everybody and went every place. Cristie had met him. He had been at the penthouse for dinner when she first came.

Clifford Somers was talking to Mary Dodd. He said, “I hope she’s not sore, Mary. Where is she? It was hard breaking away from the Penobscott Club. I thought the speeches would never end. But I had to sit through it. I’m running this year, you know, and I’ve got to mind my p’s and q’s.”

His face fell when Mary Dodd told him that Kit wasn’t there. “I hoped she was with you, Cliff. Miss Lansing saw her go out a while ago. Was she alone, Miss Lansing?”

Cristie hesitated. The Penobscott Club. Queer. That was the place Sara Hazard was calling when Kit Blaketon was listening to her outside the door. Ought she to tell Mary Dodd privately what she had seen and heard? She decided against it. She might be making a mountain out of a molehill and, anyhow, it wasn’t any of her business.

She said aloud, “Yes, Miss Blaketon was alone, but she had her coat with her.”

Mary Dodd said hopefully, “She may have run over to the Turners for a few minutes, Cliff. They live near here. She’ll probably turn up. She wouldn’t go for good without letting me know. Where’s Pat, Cliff? I thought he was coming tonight.”

Cliff Somers’s, eyes were roaming the crowd absently. “Pat? No, Pat couldn’t make it. He meant to, but he had to go to Albany to have a talk with the Governor and he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.”

Mary Dodd and the young Assemblyman gloved toward the supper room. The party was at its peak. It was a decided success, but then it would be with Margot running it. In spite of her temporary absence, Sara Hazard was very much in evidence. She seemed to be everywhere. She was very gay. Other people besides Cristie watched her that night.

Sara chatted with Margot, rumbaed with Euen Firth, had champagne with Johnny. Toward twelve o’clock she did a solo with Gorkin, the dancer. The rest of the room was darkened and a spotlight played over them. Sara’s black-sheathed figure with its small golden head swayed and twisted in perfect time with the musical comedy star’s.

Watching from the sidelines, Cristie kept telling herself that it wasn’t really very late, not much after midnight. There was plenty of time. Steven would be there soon. And then she saw him.

It was as the applause broke out and the lights flashed on again that Steven arrived. The width of the room and sixty or seventy people separated him from Cristie. She had only a glimpse of him beyond the door into the hall, wide-shouldered, lean, dark head high. The glimpse was too swift to tell her anything as she started across the floor.

It wasn’t until more than half an hour later that they found themselves alone together on the terrace. The night was warm with a soft wind. There were no stars. It was very dark. The millions of electric bulbs in the city spread out at their feet and the illuminated windows of the penthouse supplied light enough. Cristie knew what Steven was going to tell her before he spoke, had somehow, she realized dully, known it all along. Sara wasn’t going to give him a divorce.

Steven stood beside and a little behind Cristie. He was rigid as though part of him were somewhere else. He didn’t attempt to touch her. He stared straight in front of him into blackness as he said in a hard cold voice, a voice without cadences, without inflection, “She won’t do it, Cristie. Sara won’t give me a divorce. She won’t let me go.”

Cristie took it standing up, gripping the railing with her hands. She looked down at them. Her fingers were curled around the iron spikes. There was no sensation in them. The nail of her left forefinger had broken. The broken piece was folded back on the nail itself. That was all, her hands gripping emptiness. The city below had vanished. The only thing she was conscious of was her own pain and Steven’s. It was over, their brief delusion of happiness, of joy, of fulfillment, and completion.

She tried to speak, finally succeeded. She said slowly, “It wasn’t in the cards, Steven. It wasn’t meant to be that way. It was too good to be true.”

She groped for stability, acceptance. Steven was married. His wife refused to release him. The choice had to be Sara’s. Acceptance wouldn’t come. Instead, flame swept through her, a burning. She clenched her teeth under the drive of a dreadful blind resentment, against herself and Steven for their initial blunder, the way they had wrecked their lives at the start, against Sara Hazard’s clinging and the way the cards were stacked. She wanted to fight, to protest, to hurl defiance at the woman with the narrow white face and the sleek, golden head who held Steven in escrow, retarding and defeating him and making his existence meaningless, empty, a vacuum.

She wasn’t, aware that she spoke until she heard her own voice with its forlorn attempt at steadiness.

“What did she say, Steve?”

Steven said in that same harsh monotone, “I put it up to her as soon as I left you this afternoon. I offered her practically everything. She refused. She laughed. She told me not only that she wouldn’t give me a divorce, but that she was going to South America with me.”

Cristie’s grip on the iron railing tightened. “And you, Steven? Are you going through with it? Are you going away?”

“Yes.”

His voice changed, thickened. He put his hand on her shoulder fumblingly. She shivered, didn’t move as he continued, “There’s nothing else to do. I’ve got to get away, Cristie. If I stay in New York and you’re here—I wouldn’t be able to stand it. No. Unless…”

Every instinct within Cristie cried out to her to complete that sentence, to throw Sara aside, treat her as though she didn’t exist, fling her out of the way. The temptation was there, an almost overwhelming temptation. She couldn’t do it. Something deep, elemental, held her back.

“No,” she whispered. “No, Steve.”

Steven’s hand fell from her shoulder. He said quietly, “Then this is good-bye.”

Good-bye! The night rocketed into a thousand pieces. Cristie was alone in the middle of a spinning darkness. Anguish shook her, immense, unbearable. She tried to call out. Her throat was sealed.

Steven’s voice came to her dimly, from a long distance off. He was saying, “If it’s got to be, Cristie, let it be fast.” He went on talking. There was something about a ship, a ship that sailed on Monday. Monday—and this was Saturday. All that Cristie knew was that Steven mustn’t leave her like this. He mustn’t! She wrenched herself dear of chaos, turned.

Steven was no longer there. He was crossing the terrace with quick strides. He went through the glass doors. Had he misinterpreted her silence? She had to see him again, if only for a moment, to tell him the truth, tell him she loved him and would always love him, no matter what happened or how much distance separated them.

She started after him. The hall was crowded. She collided with people. They kept getting in her way. She was forced to a halt near the entrance to the dining room. Steven was standing less than twenty feet away. He was talking to someone. Who was it? Oh, Mary Dodd and Johnny. Johnny left them. Steven looked dreadful. Mary Dodd’s face wore a frown of concern. He went on talking to her. Mary Dodd looked frightened. She laid a hand on his arm, interrupting him. Steven shook her hand off. He swung, strode round a bank of azaleas and went into the living room.

Was he looking for his wife? At the thought of them together, weakness swam up around Cristie. She leaned against the door frame.

Then she saw Steven again. He was going into Margot’s bedroom. He was only there for a moment, came out with his hat in his hand. Had he left his hat in Margot’s room? Most of the men had put their things in the study. Cristie’s heart took a queer little sideways slip.

When she reached the spot where she had last seen him, Steven was gone. The fear was there in her then, vague, formless, unacknowledged. It steadied into deadly close-pressing certainty when she paused beside the chair in the recess beyond the bed on the far side of Margot’s room and lifted Sara Hazard’s cape of summer ermine. Again and again she sent her fingers exploring. She shook out the snowy folds. She looked on the seat of the chair, under the chair, on the gray felting, all around.

Steven had been in the room. He had no business there. Sara Hazard had dropped a gun into the pocket of her cape earlier that night. The gun was gone. And so was Steven.