Murder with a Past

9

The distance from town to the Lake was a hundred and sixty miles. Tully covered it in under three hours, taking the final twists of the mountain road shortly after nine o’clock.

The Lodge lay at the northern end of the great lake — a rugged, spreading two-story ranch building of ivy-overgrown fieldstone and hand-hewn logs. The west terrace was lighted with copper torches. Cooks in tall chef’s hats were serving an outdoor barbecue to the music of a strolling trio of cowboy-clad guitarists. Half the terrace tables were unoccupied.

The beamed lobby with its great field-stone fireplaces was quiet. An attractive woman of middle age was on duty behind the desk.

“I was to meet my wife here,” Tully said. “Do you have a Mrs. Tully registered?”

The woman consulted a register-file. “I’m sorry, sir, she hasn’t arrived yet. If you have a reservation, would you like to register for the two of you?”

“No. I want to see the manager.”

Tully was hungry-faced and gray. The woman hesitated.

“It’s important.”

She looked him over carefully. “Just a moment, please.” She lifted the wicket, crossed the lobby and disappeared through the tall doors that led to the terrace.

She came back several minutes later with a sunburned young man. He smiled and said, “I’m the manager of the Lodge, Mr. Tully — Dalrymple is the name. Don’t worry about your wife’s not getting here on schedule. It happens all the time.”

“May I speak to you in private, Mr. Dalrymple?”

The young manager’s smile became rather fixed.

“Of course. This way, please.”

In his office, Dalrymple offered Tully a chair. Tully shook his head, and the manager chose to remain standing, too. He was no longer smiling at all. “I really don’t see what the problem is, sir, if it’s merely a matter of your wife’s being delayed—”

“She may be here already,” Tully said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Registered under another name.”

The manager now sat down, slowly. “I see,” he said. “I see... Of course, Mr. Tully, the management can’t accept the least responsibility—”

“I’m not asking you to accept any responsibility. I’m not here to make trouble,” Tully said. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and showed Dalrymple a clear snapshot of Ruth. “This is my wife, Mr. Dalrymple. All I want to know: Is she here? Under any name?”

The manager accepted the wallet photo and sat studying it a moment. “No, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. We’re not a large hotel. Vacationers are our stock in trade, and I make it my business to know every guest. I assure you, your wife isn’t registered under her own or any other name.”

The manager was smiling again. He started to rise. “If that’s all, Mr. Tully...”

“It’s not.”

The manager remained in mid-rise.

Tully’s pallor had taken on a haggard caste. “Two summers ago... the first week of June... May I see your register for that period?”

“Certainly not!” The manager completed his rise as if a spring had been released.

“I’ll have to insist, Mr. Dalrymple.”

“It’s absolutely against our rules! I’m sorry, sir—”

“Would you rather I ask the police to take a look for me?”

“Police?” Dalrymple blinked. “Of course, if a crime has been committed — although I assure you, sir, no crime has ever been committed on these premises!—”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“What kind of crime?” the manager asked abruptly.

Tully hesitated. Then he shrugged. “Murder.”

Mr. Dalrymple went oyster-white. “How is the Lodge involved?”

“There’s a question as to whether or not a certain man and...” Tully licked his lower lip “...and the original of this photo visited the Lodge two years ago... together... or at least at the same time. If I can check it out here and now, Mr. Dalrymple, the police may never come into it at all. Of course, I can’t guarantee that. Do you let me see your register or don’t you?”

The manager stared at Tully for a long time. Tully withstood his calculating appraisal with indifference. A numbness was setting in, not so much a lack of feeling as a suspension of it.

“Well?”

Dalrymple’s glance wavered to Ruth’s photo, which was still on the desk between them. He sat down and began to scrutinize it very carefully. “This woman — I mean your wife, Mr. Tully — is she...?”

“Yes.” He almost started to add, But that was before I married her.

“Two summers ago, eh? I must say the face looks familiar... The trouble is, I see so many people come and go—” He rose again, handed the snapshot back to Tully. “What was the man’s name?”

Tully found himself able to say, “Cox. Crandall Cox,” without choking.

“Wait here, please.”

Dalrymple left, shutting the door emphatically behind him. Tully remained where he was. He had not shifted his position six inches since entering the office. He simply stood there, not thinking.

When the manager returned he had with him a dumpy gray-haired woman wearing old-fashioned gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

“Well?” Tully said.

“Well!” Dalrymple inhaled. He said quickly, “We had a Mr. and Mrs. Crandall Cox registered during the period you mentioned.”

“How long did they stay?”

“Three days.” The man gestured, and the gray-haired woman stumped forward; she had badly flat feet, Tully noticed, and then he wondered what difference that made, what difference anything made. “This is Mrs. Hoskins, one of our maids, Mr. Tully. Employed here fourteen years. Two years ago she worked the wing where Mr. and Mrs. — where this couple had their suite.”

“Suite,” Tully said.

“I remember them, all right,” the woman said. She had a flat-footed kind of voice, too, as if she had never learned to use it right. “He was the man took an afternoon nap with a cigarette in his hand and he burned the new couch in the suite, Mr. Dalrymple, you remember. He’d tied a real good one on—”

“Yes, yes, Mrs. Hoskins, thank you,” Dalrymple said.

Tully forced himself to take the photo of Ruth from the desk and across the room to Mrs. Hoskins.

“Is this the woman?”

Mrs. Hoskins adjusted her glasses and peered earnestly. “Looks like her. Yes, sir, I’d say she was the one. It’s been a long time, but I always remembered that couple real well even though they was here such a short time. Something about them two—”

“What?” Tully said.

“Well, for one thing, most of the guests the Lodge gets don’t drink so much. More refined, like.”

Dalrymple coughed nervously. Tully took the photo of Ruth from the woman’s worked-out fingers and replaced it in his wallet. He was surprised to find that his own hands were perfectly steady. “Do you remember anything else about them?”

Mrs. Hoskins became quite animated. “Oh, yes, sir! They were real lovey-dovey. Them two are honeymooners, I says to Mrs. Biggie — she was working that wing with me then. Mrs. Biggie says, ‘Whoever heard of honeymooners spending all their time getting tanked up?’ but I says to her, ‘It takes all kinds, and anyway I heard ’em smooching in there between drinks, like—’ not,” Mrs. Hoskins added hastily, “that I was listening or anything, but sometimes a maid can’t help—”

“All right, Mrs. Hoskins,” the manager said.

“I don’t suppose,” Tully said to the gray-haired woman, “you remember hearing the man use the woman’s first name?”

“I do indeed,” she said, beaming, “Ruth, it sounded like. The gentleman would say it over and over, like he liked it, too.”

“That’s all, that’s all, Mrs. Hoskins,” Dalrymple said. “Thank you.”

Tully drove away from the hotel sanely enough. But as the lights of the Lodge fell behind, his car seemed to take the bit in its teeth.

He sat like a spectator watching the mountain turns come up and past and away as if on film. Guard railings flashed by, one long blur. The Imperial’s engine seemed to gather its powers and streak forward...

A stabbing fear jolted Tully’s heart.

He jerked his foot from the accelerator in sheer reflex. And went limp and cold.

He drove the rest of the way at a crawl.

The house loomed remote, strange... still dark. He got out of the car heavily and let himself in.

As he trudged about turning on lights, the thought came to him that he had forgotten to eat anything. Without hunger he went into the kitchen, put together a sandwich, and sat munching.

The testimony of Maudie Blake might be suspect. But not that of the Lodge manager and the gray-haired maid.

And yet, Tully told himself, it doesn’t fit, it simply doesn’t fit. Ruth, even a single Ruth, spending three days at a resort hideaway with a man like Cox! Unless she was a sort of female Jekyll-Hyde...

The phone rang. Tully put aside the half-eaten sandwich and got up from the kitchen table and went to the wall extension.

“Yes?” He no longer had any real hope that the answering voice might be Ruth’s.

“Dave? Norma.” Norma Hurst’s voice was calmer than usual. Thank you, Lord, thought Tully, for small miracles. “I’ve been trying to get you.”

“I was out, Norma. Anything special?”

“No,” Ollie Hurst’s wife said, “it’s just that I haven’t had a chance to talk to you since the news about — since the news. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”

“No.”

Norma was silent. Then she said, “Dave, I want you to know we’re all with you. I just don’t believe Ruth could be involved in a thing like this. Or, if she is, it’s entirely different from the way it looks right now.”

“Thanks, Norma.”

He meant it. Unstable or not, Norma was a good egg. She might keep teetering on the brink of hysteria because of the brutal loss of her only child, but there was solid rock behind the thin edge.

“Norma... might I come over?”

“Oh, Dave, would you?”

“I mean now. I know it’s late — way past midnight—”

“I insist on it! I know what it means to be alone in the house where...” Norma stopped on a barely rising note. “Anyway, Ollie says he wants to talk to you — he didn’t get home till an hour ago himself. Have you had anything to eat?”

“Yes, of course—”

“What?”

In spite of himself, Tully grinned. “You’ve got me, sister. Half a sandwich of I-don’t-know-what.”

“You come right over, David Tully!”

He found a four-course buffet dinner waiting for him at the Hurst house, in spite of the hour.

Norma was tall and thin and long in the face, and her brown hair was dingy with neglect. Her charm had always lain in eyes of deep beauty and the quick warmth of her smile. The smile had died with the death of her little girl; the beautiful eyes had come more and more to resemble the eyes in photos Tully had seen of Nazi concentration-camp victims — socket-sunken, enormous, haunted and haunting. But tonight she seemed a part of the existing world; Ruth’s disappearance and predicament had apparently shocked her back to something like her old plain, friendly self.

Ollie made a great show of being normal, but his always restless hands were busier than ever tonight, feeling, pulling, scratching, rubbing — and the light bounced off his freckled skull like a yellow warning signal.

But there was reassurance in seeing Norma and Ollie together. Angular Norma, plain and warm as home-made bread; stocky Ollie, shrewd, transparent-eyed, in perpetual motion — it had always been hard for Tully to imagine them not married to each other. They were complementary; they had a mutual need, yet an individual stamp. Ollie Hurst had been a hole-in-the-shoe student; Norma had a comfortable income from stocks and real estate she had inherited. Norma herself had once told Tully that Ollie had never touched a penny of her money; it had been a condition of their marriage, at his unarguable insistence.

Ruth and I had some pleasant times in this house, Tully thought. Before little Emmie died. Before Ruth...

He shut down tight on that one.

It was impossible to recreate the past, in spite of Norma’s surprising recapture of her old self. She fed Tully quietly, while her husband tried to make small talk. But the food stuck in Tully’s throat, and Ollie seemed to dry up, and finally an awkward silence fell.

“Suppose we face this instead of pretending it hasn’t happened and that Ruth’s here,” Norma said.

Ollie said, “Nor...”

“Oh, shut up, Ollie, this is no time for your office psychology. You do it badly, anyway, when your emotions are involved... David.” Norma Hurst touched Tully’s hand. “Don’t lose faith in her.”

Tully was grateful. “What do we do about the evidence, Norma? Ignore it?”

“Yes,” Norma said, “until Ruth has a chance to explain.”

“Cox is no foggy abstract who’ll dry up with the sunrise. Cox is real. Or was.”

“So is Ruth, Dave. And she still is.”

“Norma,” Ollie said. “Maybe Dave doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“I think he does. I think it will do him good. Don’t you want to talk, Dave?”

“I need to do more than talk,” Tully muttered.

“You need to know you’re not alone,” Norma said. Her eyes retreated for a moment. “I know.”

But now it all came back in a rush, and Tully cried, “She knew Cox. That’s a fact. A fact.”

“How do you know that, Dave?” the lawyer asked quickly.

“Never mind—”

“I don’t care what you say,” Norma said, and there was a strange tautness in her voice that pulled even Tully around. “Even if she did know him, she’s innocent. I won’t believe anything else!”

The two men exchanged glances. Then Tully got up and went over to Norma and stooped and kissed her on the forehead. “Of course, Norma, of course. You’re a good friend. A great comfort.”

But she sat like stone. The old look of panic appeared in her husband’s eyes.

“I’m really pooped,” Tully said. “I’d better pop back home and hit the sack. Thanks, Norm, for the feed. Ollie—”

“I’ll see you out,” Ollie said. “Be right back. Nor.” At the door he said in a low voice, “Now don’t blame yourself, Dave. This has been coming on all day.”

“Norma said you wanted to talk to me—”

“I’ll drop by in the morning.” The lawyer shut the door swiftly. Through the big window as he passed Tully saw Ollie taking his wife’s hand with great gentleness. Norma was sitting as they had left her, without expression, except that tears were inching down her face.