Читать книгу Ill Met by Moonlight - Leslie Ford - Страница 9

Alice Gould’s simple act of disengaging the torn and crushed velvet petals from her daughter-in-law’s dead fingers was small and unobtrusive enough in itself. Its implications were appalling. Even at that moment, still balanced on one foot on the running board of Andy Thorp’s car, with Sandra Gould sprawled inert and so terribly silent on the seat, I recognized a few of them. First, and above all, it meant that we tacitly and definitely accepted the fact that Rosemary Bishop was in some way involved in whatever had happened. Second, it meant that both of us pledged ourselves to keep the fact from getting out—lined up on Rosemary’s side, as it were, against Sandra—and became quite simply accessories after whatever the fact might turn out to be.

“I’ll stay here, Grace,” Mrs. Gould said at last, quietly. “You go and get Jim and phone Dr. Potter.”

“I’ll stay,” I said. “It’ll be better for you to tell Jim.”

I’m not sure now whether I actually shrank from telling Jim Gould that his wife was dead, or whether it was because in some secret law-abiding place in my heart I felt some obligation to social order. Whether I felt it wasn’t safe to leave Alice Gould alone there with Sandra, or whether already I had some deep-seated fear that Jim . . . But that was nonsense, of course. I think Alice Gould understood, however, because as our eyes met across Sandra’s body a faint infinitely sad smile moved in hers.

“I’d rather go, Grace,” she said. “I just didn’t like to leave you alone . . . again . . . with death.”

She went then, and I went over to the switch by the side door to turn on the overhead light. It seemed odd to me suddenly that neither of us had thought of it before. I squeezed in front of Andy’s car and stubbed my toe on something, making noise enough, or so it seemed in the small completely silent segment of night that engulfed me, to wake even Sandra sprawled there. I felt down on the floor to see what it was, and picked up the monkey wrench Jim had had in front of Mr. Toplady’s store that morning.

I put it on the shelf and went, feeling my way cautiously, in front of Jim’s coupé to the door. I turned on the light. Everything was instantly stark and dismal in the bright glare of the single unshaded bulb set in the middle of the ceiling. A huge moth miller flew in and bashed himself against the bulb; insects of all sorts came suddenly swarming in from the night. I stood alone there with Sandra, waiting.

Outside I thought I could hear someone coming. I moved back in front of Jim’s car and between his and Andy’s to the door, and looked out. No one was there. I listened a moment, but no one was moving. A dog probably, I said to myself, and looked at my wrist, but I hadn’t my watch on. It seemed a long time that I’d stood there, and it was longer still before I heard a door slam and heavy feet dashing down the brick path from the house.

Jim came running around to the back, took one look at me and stopped abruptly.

“Is she dead, Grace?” he asked . . . as impassively as if she were someone he scarcely knew.

I nodded.

Then, more like a man walking in his sleep than anything else, he went inside.

“In Andy’s car,” I said, because he’d gone straight to his own. He looked bewildered and uncertain, but he turned. I saw him catch the window ledge with both hands to steady himself, and stand there motionless . . . for ages, it seemed. Then he dropped his head down on the back of his hands. I thought he was sobbing—his shoulders moved convulsively once or twice—but when I went over to him and put my arm round his shoulders he raised haggard anguished eyes that had no tears in them. I had no idea what was going on in his mind.

Quite abruptly over our heads we heard a knocking. Old Hawkins’s voice came down querulously.

“Mis’ Gould, ain’ you all never goin’ to bed? We got to be out here at seven o’clock, an’ you all can sleep till dinnertime.”

Sandra’s oval face, dyed red with carbon monoxide, stared up at the ceiling. Jim tried to speak, but not a sound came. Outside we heard a car coming along the road from April Harbor, and two long white fingers of light stretched through the night and turned, flattening themselves against us as the car came into the Goulds’ drive. Jim’s mother appeared then too, in the door, and went to the car to meet Dr. Potter. And then, without the least warning, Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck came through the hedge from my garden. Sergeant Buck was dressed. Colonel Primrose had on a striped flannel dressing gown. He looked sleepy; Sergeant Buck did not.

The Colonel came into the garage. His black eyes darted in every corner at once before they fastened themselves on Jim and me, and beyond us where the light from the ceiling struck Sandra’s head. He glanced out then at Dr. Potter and another man who were hurrying along the drive, and at me, but he said nothing. He merely backed out of their way and stood near the door, the massive square figure of his sergeant looming portentously behind him.

Jim and I moved back into the narrow space between the fronts of the two cars. I felt his sudden involuntary start as he recognized the man with Dr. Potter. Our Mr. Shryock is something like a turkey buzzard—we see him only at times like this.

“You say she’s dead, ma’am?” he inquired of Mrs. Gould. He caught sight of Jim and lowered his voice. “Tragic, tragic,” he said. “Tch, tch!”

Mr. Shryock’s trouble is that he has to reconcile the difficult roles of local undertaker, wanting private business, on the one side and local coroner doing public duty on the other. We’d seen him work before . . . when Chapin was drowned. We saw him now give Sandra’s body a perfunctory glance and look around then at the two men standing silently by the door.

“I’ll have to have a jury before the body can be moved,” he said. “Will you two gentlemen act? I’ll rout out some more.”

He stepped briskly out and hailed a man he had left in his car. They disappeared together. In a few moments there was a little circle of our shocked and white-faced neighbors, silent and terribly distressed, standing around outside in the drive, lighting cigarettes, whispering a little among themselves. I looked them over as they came—Ned Bryan, Pinkie Reed, Buzz Dixon. They all lived beyond the Goulds’. I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized that the coroner was headed away from the Bishops’. At least, I thought, they would be spared that embarrassment. But I was wrong. Mr. Shryock came back at last, with him Rodman Bishop, George Barrol and Yancy Holland, the Bishops’ caretaker and man of all work.

They made up the twelve. Rodman Bishop nodded to the rest of the group, then moved over to Alice Gould and took his stand beside her. His dressing gown and rumpled gray hair seemed extraordinarily deshabille beside her coat and print dress and properly arranged coiffure. George moved in with the other men, looking about as upset as I’ve ever seen him, trying to find out what had happened.

Mr. Shryock stepped up on a box in the doorway. “This is a very tragic mission, gentlemen, I’ve called you on,” he said. “I must ask you each, constituting the coroner’s jury, to file through the garage here and look at the body. We will then hear what Dr. Potter has to say, and adjourn to Mrs. Latham’s house—if she will be so kind as to allow us to do so.”

I nodded quite mechanically. It seemed a horribly offhand way of disposing of the awful fact of death.

“You’re to look carefully, gentlemen, as you will be called upon to make a decision as to the cause of death and the manner it was come by. You are all men of the world. I will ask you not to omit any fact that seems important to you—such as the odor in the car, for example.”

Mr. Shryock went on. It was his hour—he didn’t often come into contact with the April Harbor Colony. Most of us died decently in our town homes in the winter of pneumonia or old age. We came to April Harbor for rest and relaxation.

“All right, gentlemen.”

Jim Gould stood watching them, white-faced and haggard, as they went in, trying not to look at him, poor dears. They went one by one to the window where Jim had stood, looked in, turned away quickly, blundered back outside and lighted cigarettes again—even Rodman Bishop. George didn’t look at her, I’m sure of that. He just got to the door and hurried out, a little green about the gills, and I could hear him protesting in an undertone to the coroner that he oughtn’t to have to act, because he had driven home with her. But nobody paid any attention to him, except Colonel Primrose. He stood there quietly, with his head cocked and his sparkling black eyes resting on first one, then another, listening to everything, and rather more like a turkey buzzard than Mr. Shryock, if the truth were told.

That’s why I watched him when his turn came. He looked inside the car, and sniffed; bent his head close to Sandra’s face and sniffed again, picked up her hands and looked at them. Then he opened the door. A half-empty flask of whisky fell out onto the running board. He picked it up carefully and handed it to Mr. Shryock. Then he touched the back of the seat, and bent down to look at Sandra’s slippers. After that he moved away and made room for Sergeant Buck, who did exactly what the Colonel had done and moved away in his turn.

We waited, the twelve men of the jury and myself, for more than half an hour in my living room before the coroner and Dr. Potter and another man—tall, stooped and dyspeptic—came in.

“This is Mr. Owens Parran, gentlemen,” said Mr. Shryock. “He’s our State’s Attorney. Always on the job, that’s his watchword, and you’re all going to like his style, I know that. Would you like to say a word at this time, Mr. Parran?”

Mr. Parran shook his head and yawned. “Go ahead,” he said. I thought we might be going to like his style, but it was going to be hard to get over his manner. He did, however, shake hands with Rodman Bishop and Colonel Primrose. I suppose it’s part of being a good politician to be able to spot the most important men in any group without outside assistance.

“Dr. Potter,” the coroner said.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Adam Potter look as old and completely done in as he did then.

“The cause of death is quite clear,” he said in a dry expressionless voice. “The discoloration of the skin that you must all have noticed is due to carbon monoxide poisoning. I think there is no reasonable possibility of doubt that that is the cause of death.”

“Thank you, doctor. Now, gentlemen, I understood from Mrs. Gould senior that she and Mrs. Latham here found young Mrs. Gould. I should like to spare the natural feelings of the bereaved as far as is in our power, so I will ask Mrs. Latham to give her account of the situation.”

“I heard someone in my garden a few minutes after three,” I said. “I got up and came down. It was Mrs. Gould. She was hunting for Sandra—her daughter-in-law.”

I don’t know why I left out Andy Thorp, but I was quite definitely conscious that I was doing so.

“I thought I heard a motor running and we went into the garage. The engine of the sedan was on. I started to turn it off, thinking somebody had just forgot it. My hand touched a wool coat. I thought it was a man until I switched on the lights and saw Sandra Gould. She had on a man’s coat.”

“I wished to inquire about that jacket,” Mr. Shryock said.

“Mrs. Gould got wet during the evening. I suppose someone gave it to her to wear home so she wouldn’t catch cold,” I said.

“Undoubtedly got caught in the rain.”

I glanced at Colonel Primrose. He was just sitting there.

“Had Mrs. Gould been drinking?” Mr. Shryock continued.

There was no answer from anyone.

“I ask that,” he added, “because of the smell in the car, and because it would be extremely simple for a lady under the influence to drop off to sleep without switching off the engine of her car.”

A voice spoke up nervously.

“But it wasn’t her car in the first place, and she’d certainly not been drinking in the second.”

We all looked around, rather startled by this sudden contribution from the ranks of the jurors. George Barrol flushed. “I mean . . . you see, I came home with her. I mean, Mr. Thorp drove us both home from the club house, and they let me out at The Magnolias. Then they drove back. Unless they drank a lot after they left me, Mrs. Gould certainly wasn’t under the influence, as you say.”

The coroner frowned, and so did everybody else except Rodman Bishop. He looked at me and shook his head a little. The thing about George Barrol is that he’s always putting his own and other people’s feet into things that had best be left quite free of feet.

“Where is Mr. Thorp?”

The coroner looked about.

“Go get him, Frank. Will one of you gentlemen go with him to show him the way?”

Jerry Nolan went—glad to get out, I think, because he’d been quite devoted to Sandra the last two summers before he married Charlotte Putnam.

The rest of us still avoided looking at each other. Even Yancy Holland was lined up on the side of the Colony, trying to keep the matter as casual as possible. Now and then somebody glanced apprehensively at Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck. They were the imponderables. The rest of them could be counted on to help old Jim if he needed it. In fact, as it was turning out, the coroner was doing it all for them. Even I could think of forty embarrassing questions that had not been asked or even hinted at. The doors of the garage, for instance. If Sandra had gone to sleep, she couldn’t very well have closed the doors and sealed herself in.

Mr. Shryock was examining a piece of folded note paper he’d got somewhere. He had passed it to Mr. Parran, and Mr. Parran had examined it for a considerable time before he passed it back.

I went out to the kitchen to get some glasses and some beer. I didn’t feel in the mood to set fifteen men up to Scotch and soda. Moreover, I couldn’t in the least understand the coroner’s air. Here obviously was a group of people tremendously upset by what had happened, and he was setting about as if it were an all-night oyster roast.

I had just got back when we heard Jerry Nolan’s voice outside.

“Buck up, Andy—for God’s sake, old man!” he was saying. They came in. Andy Thorp’s face was ghastly. His eyes were bloodshot, he looked altogether as if they’d just swept him out from under a counter. There was a dazed and stricken look on his face and he kept muttering crazily and mumbling something about keys. He was six feet three of complete and total incoherence. He sat down, or rather Jerry Nolan pushed him into a chair. Then, to my surprise, Sergeant Buck was at his side handing him a stiff peg of whisky, and taking the empty glass away.

Andy groaned and dropped his head on his hands. He sat there kneading at his head with convulsive fingers.

“Mr. Thorp, I understand you drove Mrs. Gould and Mr. Barrol home from the dance at the club?”

Andy nodded.

“You dropped Mr. Barrol at The Magnolias. Now if you’ll tell us what happened next, please?”

Andy looked up. I think he was really nearer the point of collapse than any of us realized.

“I drove home and put the car in the garage. We got out and closed the door, and walked up the path to the house. Halfway up Sandra said she’d left something in the car. I always lock it, even in the garage—it’s a habit you get into in New York. I said I’d go back and get it for her, but she said she’d do it, so I gave her the keys and went on home. That’s all I know.—That’s all I know, I tell you!”

His voice rose almost to a scream in that last sudden outburst. We all stared at him. He dropped his head in his hands again, making curious strangled sobs. Jerry Nolan patted him anxiously on the back.

Mr. Shryock looked at him for an instant. Then he nodded soberly and picked up the note on the table in front of him.

“Is there anyone here who can identify Mrs. Alexandra Gould’s handwriting?” he asked.

Jerry Nolan flushed and raised his hand. There were several others, including myself and Andy. Mr. Shryock passed the thin elegant bit of gray note paper to Jerry.

“Do you recognize this as Mrs. Gould’s handwriting?”

Jerry nodded. I thought he rather paled too.

“Will you give it to the next gentleman?”

Bailey Fisher took it and handed it quickly to Frank Gerber, nodding his head.

“That’s her writing, all right,” Frank said. He gave it to me. I looked at it.

“Can you identify that as Mrs. Gould’s writing, Mrs. Latham?”

“I can,” I said in a low voice. I’d seen it—a childish uneducated scrawl—a thousand times. She was always writing notes about something.

I handed it back. My heart was like a lump of ice in the pit of my stomach.

The coroner put on his horn-rimmed spectacles and surveyed us over them for an instant.

“I have here a letter that you have heard identified as positively as possible under the circumstances. I’m going to read it to you and then I shall ask for your verdict, gentlemen.”

He looked down. We waited. I could hear Sheila scratching at the door upstairs. Outside a few early birds were chirping, getting the business of worms under way. The clock on the hall landing struck four-thirty.

My dearest darling Jim,—You must forgive your Sandra and forget her forever. It is wrong and wicked to kill myself, I know, but I have ruined your whole life Jim and you have been so good to me. In my country we are not afraid of death and I am not afraid now. Good-by, Jim. They say it does not hurt very much this way.—SANDRA.

The coroner stopped. All of us sat mute and horror-stricken. To hear Sandra’s childish English in the coroner’s flat nasal Maryland whine seemed unbearably incongruous. After a long time he looked up.

“Mrs. Gould senior found that note on her daughter-in-law’s dressing table tonight. That is why she was out searching for her. I think we know what happened, gentlemen. I await your verdict.”

I waited for it too. And when it came, after the twelve men, ten of us from April Harbor and two outsiders, had adjourned to the dining room, I sat with my head down, my hands shaking so I had to hold them stuck deep down in my pockets to keep them still.

They filed back. Rodman Bishop stood up, white-haired, square-faced, hard-jawed. “The jury finds that Alexandra Gould met her death at her own hands from inhaling carbon monoxide fumes while of an unsound mind,” he said.

Mr. Shryock looked at the State’s Attorney. Mr. Parran nodded sleepily.

“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you,” Mr. Shryock said. He rubbed his hands together and looked about. “I think that will be all. I’ll make my report in longhand, Mr. Parran, my typewriter’s being overhauled.”

I still sat there, my hands steadied against the seams of my pockets. Suddenly I looked up. Colonel Primrose was looking intently at me. My lips were very dry. I tried to moisten them without his seeing me. Surely there was no way of his knowing what was beating in my brain until it was numb with dread! The coroner’s hand stuck down towards me brought me to with a start. I scrambled to my feet and said good night to him and to Mr. Parran. Rodman Bishop patted my shoulder.

“You’d better get a little sleep, Grace,” he said. I thought he was telling me something else too.

I closed the door after them, and stood a moment looking out to the bay, silvery calm in the gray dawn. I knew Colonel Primrose was standing in the middle of the room behind me, waiting. At last I turned around and faced him, my hands behind me holding onto the door-knob to steady me.

Our eyes met, his sparkling black and penetrating, mine trying to hide what was in them. Then he smiled, suddenly and kindly.

“It’s hardly fair, is it? Especially when you didn’t invite me here.”

I took a deep breath.

“Maybe you’ll want to tell me about it in the morning,” he said after a moment. “I don’t mind confessing to you that all this worries me.—You’d better go back to bed.”

I’m afraid I literally fled upstairs. I don’t know what on earth Sergeant Buck thought, because he came in just at that moment—after having put the bottles away and washed up the glasses, I was morally certain. I saw him give the Colonel a pained admonitory look.

“Up to your old tricks, sir!” he said severely, shaking his head.

And I, stupidly, was the one who misunderstood him.