Another Woman's House Page 11

  He paused for a moment, and Myra thought, but she could have hidden it, so easily, so quickly, running back into the hall to the telephone; while Webb, according to the true situation, was opening the curtain and making his ugly plan to accuse her. The newel post was visible from where Myra stood now. From the narrow, important window at the other end of the room it would not have been visible.

  Sam said, “I suppose Webb was afraid to say anything about the gun for fear it would be discovered somewhere outside the house later and thus tend to disprove his whole story of Alice. If he said, for instance, that when he came into the room, and Alice ran across after she shot Jack and was kneeling beside his body, she then had the gun in her hand—he’d have had to explain what she did with it during the next few minutes, certainly not more than two or three, if that, between the time he sent Alice out of the room, ran across himself and pulled open those curtains and got back and there was Tim. He sent Tim right out after Alice. No, it wasn’t safe for Webb to make any statement about seeing the gun.”

  She said slowly, “If whoever shot him stood there in the doorway to the hall and escaped that way, he could have taken the gun with him and disposed of it …”

  “Dropped it in the Sound,” said Sam. “Right. And I always thought that’s what happened. Unless Webb hid it himself.”

  “Webb! How could he have hidden it? Why?”

  “Because it didn’t have Alice’s fingerprints on it, naturally,” said Sam, looking at her as if she ought to have known the answer herself. “He could have found it, where whoever shot Jack dropped it, picked it up while she was out of the room, hidden it …”

  “Where?” whispered Myra.

  “Anywhere. Somewhere outside, I should say.”

  “Tim would have seen him.”’

  “Not if he worked fast. It would have been easier for Webb to hide it somewhere here, in this room, but the police could never find it. If Webb did hide it, he’s going to want it now.” He smoked and said, narrowing his eyes, “If the gun is in the Sound, it’s safe. But if it is merely hidden somewhere, then whoever hid it is going to want that gun.”

  “Why? Is it so important?”

  “Important!” Sam stared and gave a short laugh. “If I had that gun I’d …” he stopped, brooding.

  “What would you do, Sam?”

  “What would I do?” he laughed shortly again. “I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d set a little trap. A very neat little trap.”

  “Trap …”

  “I’d let everybody know how important that gun is. I’d talk about it, I’d stress it, I’d scare hell out of whoever shot Jack and got rid of that gun. Then I’d watch. It’s simple. That is,” he said, with a kind of sigh, “if the gun were hidden somewhere and I knew where. But it can’t be done.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no gun. To all practical purposes. There was a gun. Dick’s gun. But it’s at the bottom of the Sound. Or somewhere equally safe.”

  It’s in the newel post. It’s scarcely twenty feet from where you’re standing. She caught back her thought with a kind of terror lest Sam could pluck it, unuttered, from the air. She said, “But if it was hidden then, that night, temporarily, whoever hid it has had plenty of time to remove it. To dispose of it, finally. Why, Sam, it’s been nearly two years.”

  “Well,” said Sam. “Webb couldn’t have, not if it’s in this house somewhere. Alice couldn’t have, even if she knew. Tim couldn’t have …”

  “But he …”

  “… I was about to say even if he knew that the gun was here. But there’s no use talking of it, Myra. No use trying to find it …”

  “But what could anybody prove if it was found? Fingerprints …” Her own were there now; but she’d been in England; she was not suspected of murder. How strange that fingerprints on a gun were real, too. Fingerprints, things you read about in newspapers.

  “I could prove who killed him,” said Sam.

  Almost in that moment, she gave him the gun. But then he said slowly, “I’d hate to have the police get it. Dick’s gun. And most certainly Dick’s fingerprints on it.”

  CHAPTER 11

  HE LOOKED SLOWLY AND with a kind of longing around the room. His sharp, nervous eyes shifted back to her. Again with an effort she tried to make her face blank, her eyes unrevealing. He said, “Why are you asking so many questions about the gun?”

  Terror again, with neither form nor mind, nevertheless, laid its touch upon her. “You spoke of it, Sam.”

  “Yes, but …” His eyes probed. “You haven’t seen it around anywhere, have you? Any kind of gun?”

  She said, surprised at the ease with which an evasion came from her own cold lips, “I don’t think Richard has another gun. Sam, I’m frightened, I think. Who … ?”

  “Who killed Jack? Everybody’s scared. You’re not the only one.”

  “What will they do?”

  “Do you want it straight? They’ll pin it on Dick.”

  And Richard’s gun would help—Don’t tell him; don’t tell anybody about the gun!

  She said aloud, fighting for self-control and fighting instinctively for Richard, “But you said the Governor was honest …”

  “Oh, he’s honest. So’s the new district attorney. But he’s got to have a conviction. The Governor’s got to have a conviction.”

  “But you said pin …”

  “The man was killed. Somebody killed him.”

  “Not Richard …”

  Nothing in Myra’s life had prepared her for the thing Sam then said. Yet she had known already that a path—a dangerous and dreadful path of thought—had to be traveled.

  Sam said slowly, “If Dick did shoot him, Myra, he was probably within his rights.”

  “He could not have killed him!”

  “Why not? Look here, Dick’s my friend. Don’t misunderstand me. Neither he nor Alice ever told me that Dick killed Manders, or ever said anything that would have led me to believe that Dick killed him. But if he did, it’s the same as with Alice, in my mind. Manders deserved it. Don’t look at me like that, Myra. Good God, I’m here to help Dick.”

  She’d been right not to tell him!

  Her lips were cold and stiff. Her hand, she realized with horror, had gone of its own volition into her pocket and closed, tight, on the shell. She said, “Richard would not have let Alice go to trial. Richard didn’t kill him. …”

  There was a short silence. Then Sam said, “But you see, Myra, you weren’t here. You couldn’t know, but the fact is nobody expected Alice to be convicted. Legally of course, there was nothing else for the jury to do; but actually nobody expected, especially in the beginning, that any jury would convict her. Suppose Dick thought that.”

  “No.”

  Sam said rather gently, “It’s all new to you, Myra. It’s not quite real yet. Dick said we’ve got till tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish we could get some sort of new line on it before then. If only there was somebody, somewhere, who wanted to get rid of Manders. Well, I went all over that at the time …”

  “What sort of man was he? Did you know him?”

  “Oh, I knew him. Casually. Not very well. I never liked him much. Yet there was never anything I could put my finger on. If he was a polite heel, as I always felt he had the capacity for being—and a brute and a bully as well—still I could never prove it. Heaven knows I tried. There must have been women in his present or past life, but, if so, nobody knew anything that was of any use to us. I worked on that angle. If I’d found anything at all I’d have tried to get Alice to change her story, say that she shot him and plead self-defense. It wasn’t the truth, but it would have given her a better chance.”

  He looked away from Myra, fumbled in his pockets, reached out to touch one of the lilies of the valley. He said (not like Sam; not like an able and skilled trial lawyer, accustomed to speaking to that most intent of all audiences, twelve men and women in a jury box), “I’d have shot Mand
ers myself if I’d walked into the hall or up on the terrace and Alice had needed … but I didn’t. I was here that night. I mean, staying at the club. The police phoned. The first thing that shot into my mind was that Manders—drunk maybe—had made a pretty violent scene and Alice had panicked and shot him. Or that Dick had come in and saw red and …”

  He stopped abruptly. His sharp eyes went toward the hall. There were voices on the stairs. She turned.

  Barton had appeared from the dining room and was waddling anxiously forward. Miss Cornelia called over the banisters, “Will you get out my chair, please, Barton? I decided to come down.”

  “Yes, Madam, certainly. You didn’t tell me,” said Barton rather reproachfully, but hurrying toward the wheel chair under the stairs, near the telephone.

  Tim said, “Easy now, Aunt Cornelia. Just because you look sixteen you don’t have to act like it.” His voice was rather nervous and unnatural. Miss Cornelia had changed for dinner. She wore black lace and pearls, and her head was high. Her jeweled hand rested on the carved top of the newel post.

  Myra’s heart gave a kind of lurch.

  Yet Aunt Cornelia couldn’t have murdered Jack, She couldn’t have hidden the gun; she was in England: She was, as a matter of fact, lying on a narrow, high bed in a nursing home, with her broken hip in a cast, at the time the murder occurred.

  And Aunt Cornelia’s pearls, the way she held her head told her that Aunt Cornelia too had considered all the implications that followed Alice’s release—and she was going to face it out. She had looked that way, she had behaved that way, during the blitz, when her own adopted country was undergoing horror. Her eyes lighted on Sam Putnam. She cried: “Sam! I didn’t realize that you were here. You can’t have had dinner. Barton …”

  Barton, pushing the chair toward her, was not perturbed, although there was a subtle, resigned something in his manner that suggested that nothing, that night, would further amaze or confuse him. “Yes, Madam. Do you wish to dine downstairs, after all?”

  “I’ve made you extra work. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all, Madam. Now then, if you’ll just steady the chair, Mr. Tim.”

  Barton, of course, knew exactly how to lower Miss Cornelia into the chair. Tim, helping, looked down at her. “Okay?”

  “Oh, quite. I’ll just hold to the newel post … Ah, that’s right …”

  Myra quite literally held her breath.

  The small old hand relinquished the newel post.

  “Thank you. Now, Tim, push me into the library.” They came through the doorway, Tim’s head bent, intent upon the chair, Miss Cornelia erect, her eyes bright and resolute. She said, “Sam …” and put out her hand which he went forward quickly to take. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Dick told me over the phone about the pardon.”

  “I have not yet seen Alice. I feel she should rest and be alone for a bit.”

  “Any other woman would have collapsed,” said Sam.

  “I fancy she is very near it.” She looked suddenly rather bleak. “We ought to be a very happy and thankful family, Sam. Indeed, we are, except … Sam, what does a new investigation mean?”

  “Why, only that, Miss Cornelia.” His tone was carefully unperturbed.

  “Does it mean—will they arrest anyone else?”

  Again he tried to reassure her. “Not necessarily. So far as I know there’s no new evidence.”

  “I see.” She looked at him steadily for a moment. “New evidence, such as what, Sam?”

  “Well.” Sam shrugged and said as he’d said to Myra, “If, for instance, they got hold of the gun.”

  “Have they?” asked Miss Cornelia, directly.

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “But that was …” she paused to catch an uneven breath. “But that was Richard’s gun,” she said, suddenly cold.

  “Dear Miss Cornelia, whoever killed Manders got rid of the gun forever, that night. Or certainly if not that night, since then. I only …”

  “Sam, will they say Richard killed him?”

  Tim put his hand on her shoulder. Sam cried, “No, no …”

  But her eyes, so suddenly old, silenced him. “Tell me the truth.”

  Myra said, in a voice that sounded in her own ears half-suffocated. “I’ll go now and—and change.” Miss Cornelia did not look at her. Sam, taking the old woman’s hand, began to talk gently, reassuringly. In spite of herself, bent on escaping, Myra still had to linger in the doorway to hear him. “Believe me, Miss Cornelia, if that gun has turned up, the only thing that could incriminate Dick would be—well, the place, say, where it was hidden, or—oh, fingerprints.”

  “Richard’s fingerprints?”

  “Anybody’s fingerprints.”

  “But Dick’s would normally be there; so would mine,” said Tim suddenly. “We’d used it, target shooting, only a few weeks before the murder.”

  “Would fingerprints last nearly two years?” asked Miss Cornelia.

  “Not,” said Sam forcibly, “if that gun is where I think it is. That’s in the middle of the Sound.”

  Myra had reached the stairway. Her hand went out involuntarily toward the unobtrusive piece of wood. The small gesture frightened her. She went quickly up the stairs, aware of the continued murmur of voices in the library. Too much, she thought suddenly, had happened, too fast—like a tidal wave sweeping unexpectedly out of a calm summer sea, taking all before it, toppling towers and laying waste and so destroying familiar landmarks that it was difficult to know the way.

  One road alone emerged clear from all the debris, and that was actually two roads, one for her to take, and one for Richard. She passed the door to Alice’s room.

  It was closed. There was no sound from within, but she hurried past almost for fear she would hear something—Richard’s voice, Alice’s, mingled in quiet talk.

  She reached the wide, pleasant room she had used now for so many months. She entered it and closed the door and the false strength which had operated like a hypnotic spell, sustaining her, collapsed.

  She leaned back against the wooden panels of the door. The windows were open as she’d left them late that afternoon when she went downstairs to wait for Richard to come home—telling herself then that it was for the last time.

  Ironically, it had proved to be the last time but not as she had then foreseen it.

  The sound of the peepers was shrill and musical through the open windows. The book she’d been reading that afternoon lay open on the low table beside the chaise longue. How strange it would seem if she picked it up again, how far away and uninteresting the characters. How incredible it was that a page of black and white print, a paragraph, a sentence, could mark so great a change!

  The shrill sweet whistles of the peepers seemed sad now, full of longing. She’d stood down there on the shore, in Richard’s arms, hearing that distant thin treble. Good-bye to Richard, good-bye to Myra, good-bye to love.

  She caught that thought back. It was silly—melodramatic, self-pity. And true!

  Whose hands had last touched the gun?

  Whose fingerprints besides her own were upon it?

  “If Richard had come in and saw red …” Sam had said. And she had replied, “He wouldn’t have let Alice go to trial. …”

  It was a terrible, swift debate, as if she were two people.

  In order to escape it, as she had escaped the library, she made herself go to the windows and close them. She slid out of her suit and blouse and her little satin girdle and brassiere. She peeled her stockings with, since the war, habitually careful hands. She pulled her dark hair up tightly and turned on the shower in the adjoining bathroom.

  What could she do with the shell? The police would arrive the next day. What wouldn’t they make of Richard’s revolver, she thought again, despairingly! Suppose, this time, they found it!

  Sam had said it was at the bottom of the Sound. It occurred to her for a wild instant that she might row out in the night, drop the gun in deep water.


  She put the shell eventually in her small evening bag. Later, when it was dark, she’d get rid of it somehow, outside. It was curious how indestructible so small and inanimate a thing might be.

  She got into a long dress, choosing the first one that came to her hand, white with a scarlet jacket and scarlet fold that came to the hem; she was brushing her hair, smooth and close back to the soft, Grecian knot of loose curls at the back of her head, vaguely aware of the whiteness of her face in the mirror, the enormous darkness and anxiety in her eyes, when someone knocked.

  She thought for an instant that it might be Richard. It was not. The parlor maid, Francine, stood in the doorway. Her dark hatchet face was sharp with excitement and curiosity; her narrow eyes were avid. She said: “Madam wishes to speak to you, Miss Myra.”

  “Madam …” For a moment she thought only of Aunt Cornelia.

  “Mrs. Thorne, of course. Oh, Miss, isn’t it exciting! Barton says it gave him such a turn when he opened the door and there she was on the step cool as a cucumber. As if she’d been away only for a week-end.” The maid’s eyes were delving, curious, sharp.

  “Tell Mrs. Thorne I’ll be there in a moment.”

  “Yes, Miss,” Francine hesitated, plucked at her apron and went away.

  She made herself take time, she put on lipstick, choosing the shade that went with the dress as carefully as if it mattered, fastening her scarlet, highheeled slippers, touching hair and wrist and throat with perfume. The woman in the mirror looked strange to her, older, more matured. She forgot the small gold evening bag and went back to get it.