Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

Call to Witness by Nancy Schachterle

The police captain himself came to see Allison. That pleased her immensely; but it’s only right, she thought. The Ryder name still means something in this town, even if the last survivor is an old maid of eighty-three. Secretly she had been afraid that she had been in the backwater of age for so long that most people, if they thought about her at all, had decided that she must be long since dead.

Everett Barkley, he told her his name was. He was tall and well-built, filling his uniform to advantage, with little sign of the paunch that so many men his age allowed to develop.

Barkley helped himself to her father’s big leather chair, slumping comfortably to accommodate his frame to its rump-sprung curves. Allison started toward a straight-backed chair suited to the erect posture of her generation, then yielded to the pleading of well-aged bones and lowered herself carefully into her familiar upholstered armchair.

The policeman surveyed the piecrust table at his elbow, laden with silver-framed photographs. Gingerly he reached out and picked up Dodie’s picture.

“Mrs. Patrick. She must have been very young when this was taken.”

“Nineteen. She sat for that four years ago.” And she had watched, not an hour ago, Allison recalled, as they carried Dodie to the ambulance with a blanket entirely covering her.

“Did you know her well? As you probably know, I’ve been in town less than a year and I had never seen her before the... before this morning.”

Allison shuddered slightly. Automatically her hand went to her lap to caress Snowball, to seek comfort in the warm, silky fur, and the pulsations of the gentle, almost silent, purr. With a start she remembered that she had let him out in the early hours of the morning, and he hadn’t yet returned. Worry nagged at her.

What had Captain Barkley asked? Yes — about Dodie. Did I know her well?

“She came toddling up my front steps one day when she was about two, and we’ve been fast friends ever since. At that time she lived just up the hill, in the next block.”

“And since they were married they’ve lived next door to you?”

“That’s right.”

“Miss Ryder...” The policeman shifted his position, slightly ill at ease. “Would you tell me something about Dodie? Anything you like. Just your mental picture of her.”

Allison reached to take the photograph from him. “This shows her spirit well, those laughing, sparkling eyes. She was a happy girl. She used to come running up those steps — she never walked, always running — and she looked so full of life. Vital is the word that comes to my mind. Dancing, tennis, swimming, golf, singing — that was Dodie.” Allison looked down at the gray old hands that held the picture, with their knotted veins and their liver spots. Dodie had been the youth she herself had lost.

“I can see her right now, sitting on the porch railing, swinging those long, tanned legs. ‘Frank finally asked me to the dance, Miss Ryder,’ she told me! She was leaning so far out to look down the street that I was afraid she’d fall into my sweet william. ‘Here he comes now. ’Bye. See you.’ And she was gone, laughing and waving to him.”

She had been pleased about Dodie and Frank, Allison remembered. All she knew of Frank Patrick was a dark, goodlooking boy with a quick grin and a cheery wave. She didn’t know then that he was one of those helpless, hopeless creatures who feed on hurt. His charm swept up people like lilting dance music. Then, when they were dizzy from his gift of pleasure with themselves, he launched his barb and sucked at the wound. As his victims shriveled, Frank swelled with a grotesque satisfaction. Given the choice between kind and cruel, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, he’d rather go the lower path each time.

Allison handed the picture back to Captain Barkley. Carefully he placed it back among the dozen or so others that crowded the little table.

“Nieces and nephews, and their children,” Allison remarked. “I even have one great-great,” she told him, with visible pride. “But Dodie was closer to me than any of them.”

The policeman shifted his cap between his fingers in a broken, shuffling motion as if he were saying the rosary on it.

“Miss Ryder,” he said, lifting his eyes to meet hers, “it’ll be out soon, so I might as well tell you, the doctor is virtually certain it was an overdose, probably of her sleeping pills. We’ll know for sure after the autopsy. What I’m trying to do now is get a picture of her, of her husband, of her life. Now, the Patrick house and yours are very close, can’t be much more than fifteen or twenty feet apart, and their bedroom is on this side. I noticed the window was open about eight inches at the bottom. Knowing how easily sound travels on these warm, summer nights, I wondered...” He paused, waiting for Allison to volunteer the ending to his sentence. She was wearing a look of polite attention, but said nothing.

“Well,” he continued, “I just wondered whether you might have heard anything.”

Absently Allison’s hand reached again for Snowball’s head. Where could he be? She had heard him yowling his love songs on the back fence about three this morning, so she knew he was near home. Then she shook herself mentally, and tried to remember what the officer had been saying. Oh, yes. Did I hear anything?

“My bedroom is on the far side of the house from the Patricks’. I’m afraid I can be of no help to you, Captain... Barkley, isn’t it?”

Allison shrank into herself a little, half expecting a bolt of chastening lightning from above. But she hadn’t lied, she decided. Her bedroom was indeed on the far side. She needn’t tell him that most nights she didn’t sleep well, and it was cooler out on the screened porch, practically outside Dodie’s open window.

Barkley nodded, musing. “I understand Mrs. Patrick was a complete invalid for the past couple of years. Can you tell me anything about that?”

Allison sat a little more upright, legs crossed at the ankles and hands quiet in her lap. Absurdly, a seventy-year-old picture flashed into her memory of the class at Miss Van Renssalaer’s Academy for Young Ladies absorbing the principles of being prim and proper. What did any of it matter now, she wondered, after all these years? It was people, and what they did to each other, that mattered. Dodie, too, had gone to a private school, and see what happened to her.

“She went out driving by herself one night,” she told Barkley, “and... had an accident. Her spinal cord was crushed, and she was paralyzed from the waist down.”

Allison remembered that night much too clearly. The stifling heat had been emphasized by the heartless cheerfulness of crickets. About eleven o’clock, Allison had prepared a glass of lemonade for herself, and moved to the old wicker lounge on the screened porch. It seemed cooler with the light off, so she sat in the dark, sipping the tart drink and resting. At first the voices had been muted, simply alto and baritone rhythms, then they had swelled and she caught phrases rising in passionate tones. Finally, there was no effort to hush their voices, and Dodie’s anguish had cried across the night to Allison: “She’s going to have a baby, and you expect me to be calm? How could you betray me so, and with a... a creature like that?”

Frank’s voice had resounded with mocking laughter. “You can’t be that much of an innocent! Do you honestly think your simple charms could be enough for a man like me? Susie wasn’t the first, and you can be damned sure she won’t be the last. Come on now, Dodie. You’re a sweet kid, and your family’s been real helpful in getting me where I want to go, but you just can’t tie a man down.”

Allison cringed, remembering Dodie’s wounded cry. It had been followed by the slam of the screen door, then footsteps pounding across the porch and down the steps. The car door slammed and the engine roared to life. Gravel spurted as Dodie took off into the darkness.

Only Dodie knew whether the smashup truly was an accident. Perhaps she had simply tried to numb the pain with speed — but she had been twenty-one and she never walked again.

The policeman cleared his throat. “Miss Ryder?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you’ll excuse me for asking you so much about your friends and neighbors, but you see... well, it’s all going to come out eventually, and I’m sure you’ll be discreet. There are only three possibilities to account for Mrs. Patrick’s death. Crippled as she was, she had no access to the supply of sleeping pills. They were kept in the bathroom and her husband gave them to her whenever she needed them. It may be that she hoarded her pills, hiding them from her husband somehow, until she had enough for a lethal dose, and took them herself. Or it could be that Mr. Patrick was careless — criminally careless — and she received an accidental overdose. Or...” and he paused, while Allison’s eyes searched his. “Well, you realize, we must consider the, uh, possibility that... perhaps the overdose wasn’t accidental. Mr. Patrick wouldn’t be the first man burdened by a crippled wife who took the wrong way out.”

“Captain Barkley,” Allison said. “There was no reason in the world for Dodie to kill herself. What does Frank say happened?”

“He insists she must have taken them herself. According to him she suffered a great deal of pain. He claims she must have saved up the sleeping pills, which rules out any chance of an accident. This is why I wanted to talk to you. You were very close to Mrs. Patrick. Was she in much pain?”

Allison’s fingers unconsciously pleated the plum-colored fabric of the dress over her lap. Her head went a little higher, and an imperious generation spoke through her.

“I have already told you, there was no reason in the world for Dodie to kill herself. To my certain knowledge she was seldom, if ever, in pain. In fact, I can give you the names of three or four ladies who could confirm that fact, out of Dodie’s own mouth. We’d often gather on the Patricks’ front porch in the afternoon, so Dodie could be part of the group, and not a week ago we were discussing that case in the papers — you remember, the man who shot his wife because she was dying of cancer? Dodie was most upset. She was a dreadfully sympathetic child. She was torn between her distress at his immoral action and her sympathy with his concern for his wife’s suffering. ‘Perhaps I might judge differently,’ she said, ‘if I were in pain myself. I’m one of the fortunates, suffering only from the handicap. But even if I were in pain, I don’t believe that anyone but God has a right to take a life.’ The other ladies will bear me out on this, captain.”

Yes, she said to herself, we were discussing the case. Maybe nobody else noticed, it was so skillfully done, but Dodie herself was the one who maneuvered the conversation around to mercy killing. I didn’t know then, Dodie, but I can see now what you were doing.

“Mrs. Patrick said herself that she was in no pain? Ever?”

“At the time of the accident, and for several months afterward, yes, she did have pain. But not recently. I never once heard her complain.”

There now, Allison, she realized, you did tell a lie; you can’t wiggle out of that one. The same night as that get-together you told him about, remember? — and Sunday night — and last night...

The scene had been the same all three nights, and the script had followed the same lines. Allison had been in her comfortable corner on the porch, Snowball’s faint purrs pulsing against her caressing hand, the creaking wicker of the lounge cool against her bare arms. That first night it had rained earlier, breaking the heat, and the lilac leaves had whispered wetly to each other in the dark. Gentle dripping from the eaves seemed to deepen the quiet, rather than break it. Dodie’s blind had been pulled down only to the level of the raised window. The muted voices were carried across to her by the force of their intensity.

“Please, Frank! Please!” Never had Allison heard such pleading in Dodie’s voice.

“I’ve told you, I just can’t,” he’d said. “If the pain’s so bad, let me get a shot for you, or something. But you don’t know what you’re talking about, wanting to kill yourself.”

“What good am I to anybody like this? And the pain — I just can’t stand it any more.” Her voice had risen with a startling anguish.

Allison, listening in spite of herself, had held herself tense, wondering. Just that afternoon Dodie had denied pain, yet now... Hot tears had welled in Allison’s eyes as she listened to the tortured voice.

If she hadn’t hated Frank so much for what he had done to Dodie, she might have been able to pity him as his voice broke with indecision. “Dodie,

I can’t do it! Don’t ask me to. Even if you’re ready to die, think of the position you’d put me in. They’d say I killed you. Think of me, Dodie! They’d give me the chair!”

The argument had gone on. Three different nights Dodie had hammered away. Then last night, while Allison, hypnotized, watched the shadows shifting on the drawn blind, Dodie had played out her drama. She had won. Frank gave her the pills.

Allison had no longer felt the heat of the night. Chilled with horror, she had fought her own battle. Her throat had throbbed with a scream to that silent window. She couldn’t let Dodie do this! But a thin hand to her lips cut off that scream before it sounded. What right did she have to interfere? Dodie must hate with an unsuspected fury to die for her revenge. She wouldn’t thank Allison for stopping her now.

Allison had sat quietly. Soon the Patricks’ light went out. Only then did she rise stiffly and plod to her bedroom, where no one could hear her poorly stifled sobs.

The white cat had followed her to the bedroom. One soft, easy leap settled him beside the tired, sorrowing old lady. Allison remembered the day Dodie had brought him to her.

“Frank says he’s allergic to cats, Miss Ryder. He won’t have one in the house. But he’s such a darling!” The vibrant face had gone quiet as she crooned over the kitten. “Snowball’d be a good name, don’t you think? If you kept him, I could see him often. I could help groom him, and things. It wouldn’t hurt so much if I knew you had him.”

So Allison had kept Snowball, but Dodie had never visited him in his new home. The accident came only days later. That’s what Allison resolutely called it, although she was very much afraid it was something else. Through those harrowing days the kitten grew, and comforted Allison. He was full-grown by the time Dodie left the hospital.

Please come home, Snowball, Allison begged in her heart, forgetful of the waiting policeman. I need you so. There’s not much left for an old lady. I had Dodie and I had you. Now Dodie’s gone. Snowball, don’t you know how much I need you?

A tear that couldn’t be restrained by a lifetime of self-discipline slipped down the wrinkled, gray cheek.

Captain Barkley, tactfully clearing his throat again, brought Allison back to the present. This policeman and his questions! Allison was weary. Please, no more decisions...

Barkley hoisted himself out of the deep leather chair. “Well, Miss Ryder, I think you’ve told us what we need to know. One thing — when you get the chance, could you just write down the names of those other ladies you mentioned, who heard Mrs. Patrick say she suffered no pain? I won’t trouble you now. I’ll send a man by later today for it.”

Dodie wins, Allison thought, but she felt no elation. Yes, Frank had killed Dodie, killed her youth and killed her innocence, and pummeled her spirit until she wanted to die. Yet, did Dodie, or did Allison, have the right to sentence him? Heedless of the waiting policeman, Allison closed her eyes momentarily, yielding to the grief that closed around her like a gray fog. Dodie was gone — but Allison didn’t have to decide. All she had to do was let things go ahead without her, and all those other people would have to decide.

Allison struggled out of her chair. Captain Barkley rushed to help her, but she waved him aside. “Thank you, young man, but I have to do things by myself nowadays.”

Yes, Allison, she mused, you have to do things by yourself. Once you make this decision, don’t fool yourself that somebody else sent Frank to the electric chair. They still execute murderers in this state, you know, and rightly speaking, Frank did not murder Dodie. For eighty-three years you’ve known right from wrong. You’ve faced up to truths, whether you liked the result or not. Now...

“Captain...” she started. Then her taut nerves jerked her like a marionette as the doorbell shrilled.

“I’ll get it,” the policeman offered.

It was another policeman, a close-shaven young man too big for his uniform, who bobbed his head respectfully to her, then turned to the captain. “Morrison says to tell you they’re all finished over there, any time you’re ready to go back to the station.”

Captain Barkley glanced in speculation at Allison. Her expression told him nothing.

“I’ll be out to the car in a minute.” He held the door open for the younger man.

“Oh, and I thought I’d mention that we don’t have to worry none about that big white cat the neighbors said was yowling early this morning. We found it in the Patricks’ trash can. Somebody’d wrung its neck.”

The captain nodded and turned back toward Allison where she stood by her overstuffed armchair, one hand lightly touching the back for support. Dodie smiled at him from the piecrust table.

“You were about to say...?”

Allison reached to pick a white cat hair off of the chair beside her. “Yes... I was going to say I’ll start on that list you wanted right away. You can send someone over for it in about half an hour. Good morning, captain.”

Head erect, shoulders straight, she shuffled resolutely across the room to close the door behind him.