Irene Stanley sprang up.
"That's Stuffy," she said. "He promised to ring me every hour, whether they had any news or not. Excuse me."
She disappeared through an opening in the curtains, while Cy studied three faces whose eyes followed her.
"She's wonderful," Jean breathed. "I'd always idealized her; I'd thought of her as being just like that. But I couldn't think it was true."
"Jean, are you crazy?" Bob asked in a fierce whisper. He was frightened through his whole gangling height. He seized Jean's wrist. "Didn't you get what she meant?"
"Meant?"
"She meant it was one of us who attacked Dad!"
All voices were lowered, because they could hear every word spoken by the woman behind the curtain. Crystal, in her sleek satin coat worn over a gold evening gown, approached Cy with veiled, shining eyes.
"Jean's right, you know," Crystal said. "She is rather fine. But I think she's a little mad. Cy!"
"Well?" asked Cy, who had taken from his inside pocket a pencil and an old begrimed letter.
"Do you believe the other thing she said?"
"She said a lot of things. Which do you mean?"
"That men value women simply for their physical attractiveness?"
"Lord, Crystal, I don't know!" he groaned. She herself made his judgment worse each time she was near him. "Probably it's true. Yes."
"Damn you," Crystal said softly.
"But I'll tell you this, my pet, if you think age matters. You're twenty-four. Your mother must be about forty-three. But if you both walked into a ballroom at this minute, there isn't a man who would look at you."
Crystal started to say, "Damn you," hesitated, and herself increased the nerve tension with tears.
"What are you doing," she asked fiercely, "with the back of that letter?"
Cy glanced over at H.M., who was now sitting and glaring at a stogy. Though it was no business of his as a reporter, he had sketched out a headline and a hanger, with quick notes below.
"You see Foxy Grandpa over there?" he asked.
"Wh-what about him?"
"I'm certain now I know the line he's working on: not only to solve the case, but to put everybody in the right place. There's one blank space in the middle: that damned swimming-pool puzzle. The rest I've got If we can anticipate things with a newspaper story..
"Thank you, Stuffy," rose a voice behind the curtain. "You will keep me informed, won't you?"
They heard the phone replaced on its cradle. Elizabeth Manning, now plainly Elizabeth Manning and not Irene Stanley, came out into the studio.
"He's just the same," she said. "No better, no worse." H.M. rose to his feet
"Now, ma'am, about these 'plans' you and Fred made..."
"Sir Henry, for God's sake!"
"You care a lot about your husband," H.M. told her. "Do you care anything about his reputation?"
"Reputation?"
"Lord love a duck, don't you know he's supposed to have robbed the Foundation and done a bunk with a hundred thousand dollars?"
"Oh, that's absurd!"
"So? You said you read the afternoon and evening papers. Didn't you catch any rumour of it?"
"No!" She reflected, with a shocked kind of look, her hand pressed to her forehead. "They said—or I gathered—Fred had disappeared because of a bet or something of that kind. Wait! There was one obscure little item..."
"Pretty obscure," said H.M. "The District Attorney's office won't let out a peep until they're sure. If somebody played a lost-in-the-shuffle trick with news, you can thank this feller here." He beckoned to Cy. "I say, we've been a bit informal about introductions. Me, I'm always proper."
The woman smiled vaguely. "Mr.—?"
"Mr. Norton," supplied Crystal, taking Cys arm. "Mr. Norton is my guest."
The tone of her soft voice made the meaning very clear. Her mother regarded her (those eyes that were so much alike!) and took a deep breath.
"I've followed you career," she said, "at a distance. Your last husband was some Balkan dignitary named Count Yummy-Yummy, or words like that. Did you love him?"
"No," replied Crystal. "But I don't use his title, you notice."
Cy, who hated this kind of talk, was enabled to slip the back of the letter into H.M.'s hand. H.M., with a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, at first tried to shoo him away. Then he glanced at what was written. Then he read it.
Cy watched him. Over H.M.'s face have gone many expressions, most of them baneful. But Cy saw, very briefly, what he hoped to see. It was the look of an urchin, entranced beyond glee, just lighting a large firecracker under the chair of the school principal.
"Is that the proper line, H.M.? May I release it to the press with your backing?"
"Son," the great man replied gravely, "you release it" He handed back the paper. "Not from the phone here, curse you! They'll all hear it! Outside!"
And Cy, with brief apologies, maneuvered his way out.
His footsteps echoed as he hurried along the broad corridor with the red-and-white walls. Cy's principles were New England or plain British: a decent reserve outside, the Old Adam always lurking inside.
At the end of the corridor, near the iron stairs, he found a telephone booth. At first he thought of rejecting the Echo, his old paper and a morning paper, and to hell with 'em! But old loyalties, though they swear and kick, do not die. He dialled the Echo's number, got through to the city desk, and spoke for several minutes.
"Now look," retorted a cold voice, "I didn't get you fired, Cy! That?s not my department. I'm all for you!"
"I know that, Zack. I know it!"
"So if this story is alcohol talking from a bar, and that's what it sounds like..."
Cy risked a chance with sixty-forty in his favour.
"If you want confirmation, Zack, get the District Attorney's Office. Then get Headquarters. You could even try White Plains."
And he hung up. Having now done his duty (somewhat), Cy rang the A.P., the U.P., and also several newspapers where he had a friend. Then he hurried back to the studio. When he opened the door, the first words he heard were those infuriating words, swimming-pool mystery.
Furthermore, the emotional temperature here had gone up to danger point.
Elizabeth Manning, seated on the edge of the sofa, had lowered her head and was plucking at the edges of the cushions. H.M., having thrown away his stogy, had drawn his chair close to her. Crystal, Jean, and Bob stood near them with white faces.
"Now look here, my wen—I mean, ma'am," said H.M., as though he were handling high explosives. "Have you got it through your head they do think he stole a hundred thousand?"
"Yes."
"And that they'll put you through the hoops because they think you're mixed up in it, unless I head 'em off?" "Yes."
"So are you willing to let me ask questions, short and sweet, and you'll answer 'em the same way?"
"I will," she told him, without lifting her head. The single light glistened on her dark brown hair, which had no trace of grey.
"You say you and Fred were going away for a second honeymoon. Where were you goin’?"
"Mexico City."
"When?"
"On a plane that leaves—or left, rather, at midnight tonight."
"Where were you goin' to meet before then?"
"Here. In this studio. Fred promised to be not later than nine o'clock."
"Did you know he intended to 'disappear for a while?"
"Yes. I knew that"
Elizabeth Manning sat up straight, her breast heaving. But she looked H.M. straight in the eyes. "Why was he goin' to disappear?"
Everyone present seemed to hold his breath. Elizabeth Manning gave a brief glance at Crystal and Jean and Bob.
"He said," she replied in a level voice, "that he'd never liked his children when they were young; I knew that, of course; and he hadn't been fond of them until they were grown up. Fred said they must know it or feel it, and, quite rightly, hate him for if
"Quiet!" snapped H.M., holding out his hand towards the group waiting behind him. He did not look at them, but at their mother.
"But she said, "that gave him the idea—don't you see how inevitable it is?"
"Maybe I do. Go on."
"Fred suddenly thought, years ago, 'If that's what my children think, what about other people?' He lived for his school and for his memory of—well, of me. He thought he probably hadn't a friend in the world.
"Then he found me. He was so exuberant about our second honeymoon that he decided to 'disappear,' as though he were a fugitive. Then he could find out whether anybody gave a curse whether he lived or died. In either case, he said, it didn't matter. Because he was bringing me home."
She stopped suddenly, and pressed her hands over her eyes.
Again H.M., with a gesture, silenced that shivering group behind him.
"It's a horrible thing," the woman added abruptly, and looked up towards Bob and Jean and Crystal, "to think one of them may have tried to kill him. If you did-well! If you didn't"-the face softened—"I humbly beg your pardon."
Cy Norton, standing a little way behind Crystal, glanced across at the painting of Manning on the easel.
He had no doubt that Elizabeth Manning's story was true. It was characteristic of Frederick Manning. It was Frederick Manning. Cy could have predicted it, if he had known what to predict It explained almost everything. Cy Norton felt a dizziness of gratitude that a man he admired had been cleared, or almost...
But H.M., not a muscle moving in his face, seemed ruthless and without mercy.
"Now about this money," he said, and a cold little shock fell again. "How much money was he goin' to take with him on your second honeymoon?"
Manning's wife sat rigid again.
"I didn't ask. I think he mentioned something about two or three thousand dollars."
"How long did he intend to stay vanished?"
"Not long! Two weeks, something like that"
"Uh-huh. But, if he intended to be even a fake fugitive, they'd be lookin' for him. I mean the police. How could he board an airliner, or make stops, or cross the Mexican border, without being recognized?"
Over her face went that smile, wry yet pleased, indicating her philosophy (and most women's) that all men are children.
"In my bedroom there," she nodded, "he had a— well, a kind of disguise. He said it would work. He was going to put it on here."
"You mean when he was supposed to get here at nine o'clock tonight?"
"Yes."
"Two or three thousand dollars. Is that enough money to make a brief case bulge?"
"I—I never heard anything about a briefcase." Her thin eyebrows drew together. "But I shouldn't think it would bulge, even with money in small bills."
"I agree. Did Fred tell you he was going to do a vanishing trick at the swimming pool?"
"Yes."
"Did he tell you how he was goin' to work it?"
"No. He said he would tell me later. It delighted him. Fred—Fred liked to mystify people."
"I’ve noticed that," H.M. said grimly. "He didn't tell you anything about it?"
"I don't think so. No—wait!" Here eyes seemed to grope, while someone in that group took a quick gasping breath. "Only that it was somthing to do with his hat"
(His hat? thought Cy Norton, now near frenzy. First his wrist watch and his socks, now his hat)
"Did he tell you"—H.M. hammered the questions without cessation—"he'd disappear at nine-thirty in the morning?"
"Not—exactly."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, the last time he phoned was yesterday, I mean Monday, morning. He said he'd probably 'vanish' on Tuesday morning. But he couldn't join me because he'd have to wait He had an appointment in—in the cenotaph of the old graveyard."
The woman's eyes grew hot with a kind of dry despair.
"I said eighteen years ago," she added, "there ought to be a 'To Let' sign on that graveyard."
"A graveyard to let? Why?"
Across that tension, once more with a sawing against nerves, clamoured the ringing of the telephone.
"That's Stuffy again," said Elizabeth Manning. "Please excuse me."
And she hurried towards the curtains. Cy had never seen H.M. look as he did then: as merciless as an executioner.
"Stuffy always was a terror with the phone," he snapped. "He'd get time wrong; he'd mix up messages; he'd butt in, like this, when you didn't want him. Ifs not been anywhere near an hour since..."
"Why can't you go easy on her?" asked Bob Manning, clearing his throat huskily. The Adam's apple worked in his long neck, and he sounded vicious. "Why have you got to talk like a cop?"
Jean did not speak; she turned away to look at the painting of her father. But Crystal intervened on Bob's side.
"You haven't any right to do this, Sir Henry! And you know you haven't!"
"Have I led you right so far?" snarled H.M.
Beyond the curtains they heard Elizabeth
Manning put down the phone. When she came out again she was pale, evidently with the long ache of waiting, and her body drooped. But she straightened up, with all her charm and smile.
"No change," she told them, and sank again on the sofa. "Just the same. Always just the same." She regarded H.M. vaguely. "You were saying ..."
"A graveyard to let," said H.M.
"Oh, yes!" Her manner became eager. "In the very old days, Sir Henry, about four families would club together and buy what they thought was a big burial plot for their dead. And then—oh, it might be almost a century!—it was all different. They found it wasn't big enough, or the family moved somewhere else. But they'd bought it in— what's the term?—in perpetuo.
"Even in my time a Mr. Van Sellars had bought all the burial plots from the original owners. They didn't bother. And it wasn't until we lived at Maralarch that Fred discovered some of his forebears were buried there.
"Fred wanted to tidy the place up. Mr. Van Sellars was furious; he thought it was picturesque. And he owned it, and nobody could do a thing. Fred told me, only recently, that Mr. Van Sellars once had him in court"
H.M. ruffled his hands over his head.
"But what’s this,"he persisted, "about a ‘To Let’ sign?"
"For murderers."
"So?Meanin' what?"
"God forgive me. I said that myself, a long time ago. You see, the Manning cenotaph and the Renf ield mausoleum, opposite it on the south side, were never opened. Nobody goes to that graveyard. If you had a key to a mausoleum, you could kill someone and lock him up there. And nobody would ever know it, except by accident"
"Yes," said H.M. "I told you, earlier tonight, your husband was attacked in the cenotaph."
Elizabeth Manning ran her tongue round her lips.
"You mean—I'm responsible?" she asked in horror.
"No, no! But..."
"You don't honestly think so?"
"Cross my heart, no! But you knew Fred was meeting somebody in the cenotaph. Did he tell you who the person was?"
"No."
H.M. was growing desperate. "Didn't he give you any kind of indication? Or hint?"
"No." She swallowed, and swallowed again. "Oh! Except that it concerned a member of the family."
"Which member of the family?"
"I don't know. But Fred wasn't joking. He was horribly serious. After he met the person..."
"After that?"
"Fred said it wouldn't take long. Then he said he would walk along Fenimore Cooper Road to Larchmont, and catch the three-to-eight train here. Then we should meet."
More than a shade of change had crept over Elizabeth Manning. Her speech and manner were those of a girl about Jean's age. It was as though she were retreating into the past, and living there.
"We should meet," she repeated.
Suddenly Bob Manning, with a noise in his throat, leaned across the back of H.M.'s chair.
"What's the matter with her?" Bob asked, with restraint and tenderness. "There's something wrong!"
The woman rose to her feet, and looked slowly round at her children.
"I'm sorry," she said gently. "I didn't tell you what I really heard on the phone. Your father is dead."
It was the first time she had said, "your father."
Amid a paralyzed silence, she tried to walk steadily towards the painting of Frederick Manning, stretching out her hand as though to touch it. She did not quite reach it. Her knees gave way, and she fell heavily on her side in front of the easel.
"What's the matter with her?" Bob asked again. "Has she fainted?"
H.M., stung out of whatever stupor or mind wandering had possessed him, was kneeling beside her.
"No, son," he said. "She's poisoned."
There was a crash as Jean, backing away, upset a small table of magazines. Jean was white to the lips, but her whisper carried.
"'If he dies, I die,'" Jean quoted. "She had it all ready! By the telephone."
H.M., as he tested the pulse, opened the mouth for scrutiny, and gently lifted one eyelid, seemed to be cursing himself with inner fluency. Cy gave a hand to hoist him to his feet After this H.M. lumbered straight towards the screen curtains, blundering there to find an opening. Cy found it for him, and they both went in.
They were in a long, narrow, curtained cubicle, with another partition which evidently screened off the bathroom. One electric light glared over a trim cot and a chest of drawers.
"That's the feller, son!" H.M. muttered.
On the bedside table, near the telephone, stood a five-ounce bottle, the cork out and lying beside it It was labelled, Mother Meera's Mixture.
"But that stuffs made in England!" muttered Cy. "You're supposed to take it in very minute quantities with a lot of water, for a cold. What’s it doing here?"
"I dunno, son. But do you know what's in it? If s loaded with tincture of aconite."
"Aconite," said Cy.
"The stuff," grunted H.M., picking up the bottle, "isn't as quick actin' as your famous prussic acid, but if s deadlier. It don't burn, but you take far longer to die."
"Can't you do anyting?"
"Oh, son!" H.M. lifted both fists. "Without a stomach tube? Without atropine and (lemme think!) digitalis? Without—which we may need-oxygen? Burn it I don't suppose we can get a doctor in a railway station?"
"We can try," retorted Cy Norton, and picked up the phone.
It appeared that they could not only get one doctor, but several. Dr. Jacobs would be on his way at once. For the first time Cy realized the smooth-working, effortless efficiency of this labyrinth below. H.M. introduced himself to the doctor on the phone and gave a quick explanation.
Then he appeared in the studio.
"Carry her inside and put her on the bed," he ordered Cy and Bob. They carried her in gently.
"When the doctor gets here, all of you keep out of this 'bedroom.' The sight's not pretty, and you won't be needed.
"H.M.," Cy spoke in a fierce whisper, "how much of the stuff did she take?"
"Son, I can't tell whether the bottle was full to begin with! If it was, about an ounce and a half."
"And thaf s pretty bad?"
That's worse than bad."
In five minutes, which seemed like a gnawing hour, Dr. Jacobs arrived with a porter to bring what he needed. Low-voiced and efficient, he disappeared with H.M. behind the grey curtains.
Afterwards came the long period of waiting in the studio.
In actual point of time, Elizabeth Manning had collapsed at just on a quarter to. one in the morning. There it was, incredibly, on Cy's watch. But more than incredible seemed the time which followed.
Crystal, removing the satin coat, sat vivid and flamboyant in the gold gown, and stared at the floor. As so often happens after breakdown in nerve strain, Jean had fallen fast asleep on the sofa.
Bob paced up and down so restlessly that they yelled at him to stop. But he could not be still. Finding a self-portrait of Elizabeth Manning among the canvases, he carried it under his arm like a talisman.
"I suppose the old romantics would say," Crystal once remarked, "that it's better for them to go together."
But Mrs. Manning, for some reason, had got into Cy’s heart, and he only snapped at Crystal.
Cy, smoking cigarettes endlessly, looked at his watch so often that at last he unstrapped it and dropped it into his pocket.
From the first, the mere noises beyond those grey curtains...
The curtains would sway and bulge as Dr. Jacobs or H.M. passed behind them. Much later Cy could faintly hear the low, muttered, impersonal voices. "I don't like this; digitalis now." "How much, son?" "Hundredth of a grain." And much later, amid a vacuum of time: "Oxygen; but we'll keep up the artificial respiration too."
The suction noise of the oxygen, barely audible, nevertheless beat in Cy’s mind like a huge bellows. Leaning back and closing his eyes, he tried to work out the position of this studio at the top of Grand Central.
' The high windows must face out, from the back of the flattened roof curve, across Forty-second Street and down Park to Fourth Avenut. If you went some distance down Fourth Avenue, say about Twelfth Street, you found a host of those second-hand bookshops of which Manning was so fond and Cy was fond, too.
The proprietors of these bookshops—like those in Charing Cross Road—didn't bother you or ask questions. You browsed and browsed, amid dust and the sudden unexpected leap of a title you wanted. Or a passage somewhere, or a line of
O lyric love, half angel and half bird...
No, damn it, that was Browning again! Cy, glancing over at Crystal, saw that she was cold and lonely, and he felt ashamed of himself. He went over, plucked Crystal out of her chair, and sat her down in his lap.
She did not speak. She put her arms round his neck and her head against his shoulder. Thus they remained, while Jean slept and Bob paced with the canvas under his arm.
Once Bob stopped, hollow eyed.
"Half-past seven," he asked cryptically, "was the time you and H.M. started out for the field, wasn't it?"
Cy absently agreed without bothering to think about it.
Always the oxygen. On and on and on! Lights looked brighter, faces more sharply outlined, with the dwindling night. Those windows up there should be whitening with dawn. Cy could hear his watch ticking in his pocket
Then the oxygen dwindled away and stopped.
After a whispered conference of what seemed some hours, H.M. stepped out from behind the grey curtains. It shows the great man's state of mind that he gravely searched for his hat, put it on, and turned towards the door; then a recollection struck him, and he turned round.
"It's all right, son," he told Cy in a heavy voice. "She's goin' to live."
Cy's arms, his back and shoulders, felt cramped and numb from holding Crystal. Crystal slowly stood up. Bob was motionless, his mouth open. And then, from behind the curtains, rose the shrill ringing of the telephone.
"You shut up!" H.M. took it out on somebody by turning round and bellowing towards the phone.
"I'm not goin' to answer "
But Dr. Jacobs, it seemed, had already answered. The doctor appeared from beyond the curtains.
"It's for you, Sir Henry," he said. "It seems to be the District Attorney. Speaking from Maralarch."
"Byles, hey? And what does the reptile want with me?"
The dark-complexioned Dr. Jacobs, who had won an almost hopeless case against aconite, was himself under a strain.
"So far as I can gather," Dr. Jacobs answered, "he wants to put you in jail. I think you should speak to him."
The doctor came out from behind the curtains, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. Cy took the wrist watch out of his pocket, finding with stupefaction that it was just five minutes past three. Slowly, like a tiger, H.M approached the curtains and the telephone.
Byles's voice sprang out of the receiver.
"Now listen!" said the District Attorney, with a cold and deadly jump.
"You listen!" H.M. bellowed back. Then he wavered. "Looky here, Gil. There's been some pretty nasty business here tonight The old man's not just exactly in the mood for sword crossin' now. Ever since we heard Fred Manning was dead..."
There was so long a pause that you might have wondered if the line had gone dead.
"Manning?" repeated Byles, in a startled and suspicious tone. "What are you talking about? Manning's not dead."
This time the pause was at H.M.'s end of the line.
"Manning's not dead?" he yelled.
From the studio there was a wooden rattle as of a picture canvas dropped. Someone, probably Crystal, cried out.
"When we got here," said Byles, "the maid told us what Dr. Willard said. Manning's out of danger. Hell have a bad time, congestion and fever, but hell be up in a month. If anybody's been worried..."
H.M.'s gaze travelled slowly down to the figure on the bed, now covered to the chin with a blanket
And here, it must be confessed, the old sinner was a little moved. H.M. stretched out his hand-he would have died rather than let anyone see it— and patted the shoulder of the unconscious woman.
"That's good news," he said to the telephone. "That's downright good news."
Whereupon, clapping his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, his shout to those outside the curtain indicated he hadn't believed a word of it.
"Didn't I tell you," he called, "that fool Stuffy was always gettin' messages mixed up?"
But the telephone was now coldly raving.
"And what," demanded Byles, "are you doing there at three o'clock in the morning?"
"Well, what are you doin' there at three o'clock in the morning?"
"I drove out here," Byles told him with loving murderousness, "for the pleasure of waking you up out of bed. I couldn't resist it. I want to tell you just how long I can keep you in jail."
H.M. half closed one eye.
"So you think you can chuck me in the cooler, hey?"
"At the present moment," said Byles, "I am nursing my wrath to keep it warm. I am getting all my dockets in order."
H.M. griped the phone, slowly lowered it as though he were bending over a prostrate enemy and holding the tatter's throat with one hand. But his hat fell off, somewhat marring the gladiatorial gesture.
"I warn you, Gill If you..."
"Also at the present moment," the cold voice pursued, 'you are in the apartment of the. real Irene Stanley." The voice changed. "Brother, what I'm going to do to you!" Again it changed. "Now get out here to Maralarch immediately!"
"Wait a minute! Has something else happened?"
"Happened?" groaned Byles. "Oh, my God! Now you get out here to Maralarch immediately!"