Wolf in Man’s Clothing

15

DRUE HAD MADE ONE quick, stifled motion to snatch the box, but I had it in my hand.

“Drue…”

It was dreadful to see the color simply drain out of her face until she looked like a ghost.

“I found it,” she whispered. “Sarah, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you any more. I’ve said too much now. Don’t ask me-don’t…” She stopped. And put her face down on her arms and against the little dog and began to sob. Dry, long, shuddering sobs, as if every one of them fought against her will. I think I put my hand on her shoulder. She said, in a stifled way, “Go away. It’s all right, Sarah. Only go away. Please.”

Drue never cried; it wasn’t her way of facing trouble.

After a moment I went. I took the medicine box with me; I had to. And I had to try to think, not that up to then I had got very far in that direction. But first I hid the little flat box in a handkerchief and pinned it inside the blouse of my uniform with a good, strong safety pin.

It turned me cold to think of the danger it had been to Drue. But there was only one explanation for her possession of the box, for her tears, for her refusal to explain it to me, and that was that she was protecting someone. There was a corollary to that, too; the only person she would protect was Craig.

Well, then, why hadn’t she destroyed the box? And did she have some reason to believe that Craig had killed his father? As Soper had said, there is really no alibi for a poison murder. Craig could have done it by ingeniously (how, I didn’t know) using his father’s own medicine, fixing it (somehow) so he knew his father would take the poison that night, and at the same time (by faking an accident on the previous night, really shooting himself) arranging an alibi for himself that couldn’t be shaken. An alibi that covered actually twenty-four hours (and might easily be made to cover much more than that) thus allowing a margin of time. So that if, say, he had put poison in the brandy (or in anything else his father was in the habit of taking) it didn’t matter when Conrad voluntarily took the stuff, for Craig still had an alibi.

The flaw was his wound; nobody in his right mind would have come so near killing himself, when he could (with exactly the same effect) wound himself less dangerously and less painfully. And I still didn’t believe Craig had killed his father-but Drue was afraid he had, because she believed Craig had a motive. I saw that, then; she believed that Conrad had shot Craig, so Craig’s motive might be self-defense, or it might be a long-standing jealousy between the two men over Alexia!

When I reached that point, I got up and put on my cape. I had to get outdoors. I had to reach some sensible conclusion about that box and Drue and Craig.

In the hall, as I was starting for a walk, I met Anna. She had an enormous black eye, a perfect mass of black and green and purple bruises. I stared and she said quickly, “I ran into a door, Miss.”

“Really, Anna. Dear me.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Of course one does encounter a door sometimes. It doesn’t make a round mark, however; and there is almost always a sharp red line on the eyebrow made by the edge of the door. I said, “You’re sure you didn’t see anyone in the meadow last night?”

“Yes, Miss. That is, no. I didn’t see anyone but you.”

Certainly I hadn’t given her a black eye. But I couldn’t think of anyone who might have done it, either. With the possible exception of Delphine who was of a jaundiced enough nature but much more likely to scratch. However, I persisted. “I thought you might have seen someone in the meadow. Someone you were afraid to tell the police about.”

But she didn’t blush or show any change of expression; she just stood there neat and respectable in her long black uniform and white apron and cap. “No, Miss,” she said stolidly.

But Nugent had been sufficiently impressed by my story of the shooting to question Anna. For she added unexpectedly, “The Lieutenant says it must have been someone hunting-last night, you know. Someone from the town, perhaps. He searched the house and he says the only guns in the house that anyone knows about belonged to Mr. Brent. A revolver,” she said flatly, “which the police took from Miss Drue’s room yesterday. And a shotgun which hasn’t been fired for a long time. They said they could tell. So you see, Miss, I-I was right.”

“I see, Anna.” Her eye looked terribly painful. “Try alternate hot and cold packs for your eye,” I told her and went for a walk.

I had walked along the driveway down to the public road, meeting no one, deep in thought of Drue and the little medicine box, before it occurred to me that if I had been the possible if extremely unwilling target for gunshots the previous evening, I might well be again. This time perhaps more successfully from the hunter’s point of view. It was getting on toward dusk again and the February landscape was very quiet and deserted, but there were plenty of little thickets of brush and evergreens, to say nothing of the opportunities for concealment offered by the walls and hedges. So I turned back, but before I had gone more than a dozen steps, Peter Huber came along in a long and very handsome gray coupe and stopped. He’d been to the inquest, he said, leaning bareheaded from the car. “Is everything all right at the house?”

I told him yes, and that Alexia was staying with Craig while I took a rest.

“Good,” he said cheerfully. “How about a little ride? I’ll tell you, we’ll drive back to the village and get a drink. Hop in.”

It suited me perfectly, for I wanted to hear about the inquest. So I got in beside him, looking with rather stunned admiration at the inconceivably luxurious car. It didn’t have platinum handles and diamonds set in the wheel, but it had everything else. He saw me looking at it.

“A beauty, isn’t it?” he said, backing expertly and swiftly so as to head the long gray hood toward the village. “My means don’t run to cars like this, though. It’s Alexia’s.”

His voice didn’t caress her name in loverly fashion, certainly; but then there was no reason why it should, even if, as Craig had hinted, he was actually rather infatuated with her. Craig hadn’t said how he knew, but then one can usually tell these things about people one knows very well, without words and without definite proof; it’s something in the eyes, something in the air. But it occurred to me that if Peter intended to wait, discreetly, until he could press his suit with propriety, then he was reckoning without Alexia’s singular directness.

In any case, whether or not there was anything in what Craig had told me, certainly both Peter Huber and myself, chance wayfarers, really, in the Brent house, were yet inexorably and inextricably bound up with the things that had happened there.

I sighed a little at that thought and he glanced at me.

“Tired? They’ve kept you going. I don’t suppose you’ve really rested since Conrad died. Well, since before that really. What with Craig sick and all the goings on before Conrad died.”

“There weren’t… Oh, you mean the bump on the door and seeing Nicky?”

“Seeing…” The car swerved toward the stone wall at the edge of the road, jerked back to the middle, and Peter said, “What do you mean? Was it Nicky you saw in the hall when you opened the door?”

“No, no. I didn’t see anybody. I opened the door after there was that-well, bump against it. But not right away. So whoever went past the door, carrying Heaven knows what, was out of sight by that time. It was earlier when I saw Nicky. And he wasn’t doing anything, really. Just coming out of some room along the hall.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “I thought the way you spoke you had seen Nicky in the hall.”

“No, no! Not then.” Nicky! If he’d hurried, the night before, taking a short cut through the meadow to the house, he might possibly have arrived before me. In any case I made it clear. “I didn’t see Nicky then. It was earlier.” Suddenly I remembered Conrad’s white starched shirt front and black tie. “Nicky must have changed after dinner again. Unless he didn’t change for dinner. Do you remember?”

“Do I-oh, I see what you mean.” He frowned, seemed to think back and said, “Why, yes! He wore a dinner jacket at dinner that night. So did Conrad; he always did. I changed, too. But I believe-yes, you’re right. It must have been my room you saw Nicky come from; he’d been in to get a book I was reading. And I remember now, he had changed back to, I think, tweeds; a brown checked coat, anyway. But I…” He drove in silence for a moment, watching the road ahead. “I thought nothing of it then. And I don’t see now that it makes any difference.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t either.”

We had already topped the ridge where I stood the previous night; now we turned into the main traveled road. We could see the village ahead, very snug and peaceful and rather distant in the gentle dusk. And then all at once, neither of us speaking, we were there. The little main street lengthened, the white houses attained sudden height, and we turned and parked along a street of small, low-roofed shops, in front of a small haberdashery, in fact, and a clerk lounging in the doorway recognized Peter and spoke to him. “Evening, Mr. Huber.”

“Hello.”

“Hear there was an inquest this afternoon.” The man’s eyes were curious.

“Yes,” said Peter shortly and helped me out.

“H’m,” said the clerk and, as Peter offered no comment but steered me along the sidewalk in the direction of the inn (a long, sprawled, white building with the sign Coach Inn, 1782, hanging above its door), the clerk called after us, “You look fine, Mr. Huber. Glad the things fit.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Peter. “Yes, they were all right.”

“I’ll never forget what you looked like when you came to the store that morning,” added the clerk with a chuckle that carried clearly through the winter twilight and silence of the little street.

Peter grinned back at the chatty (and curious) clerk and we crossed the narrow white porch of the inn.

It was a hospitable and warm old tavern. We went along a dark passage so narrow that my cape brushed the walls and entered the tap room, all smoke-stained rafters and age. Aside from nearly braining myself on a low rafter, I reached a table without misadventure and looked around me. Except for the bartender, no one else was there-or at least I could see no one, although the high-backed settles along the side walls cut off my view of one corner of the room.

Beside the bar was the kind of machine where one drops in nickels (or dimes or quarters, if one is really just a gambler at heart) and takes what comes, if anything. With this machine it had to be nickels. It was very quiet; I had had a kind of expectation of some kind of repercussion from the inquest, but if the police or Soper were still in town, I saw and heard nothing of them then.

The bartender knew Peter, too. He came forward, wiping his hands.

“Hello, Mr. Huber.”

“Hello, John. I guess we’ll have a-what do you want, Miss Keate?”

I took ginger ale. Peter ordered whisky and soda. And suddenly the bartender chuckled much as the haberdashery clerk had chuckled. “You certainly look different, Mr. Huber,” he said. “Ever find your baggage?”

“No,” said Peter. “Guess it’s gone forever.”

“Too bad. You looked as if you’d been shipwrecked,” the bartender laughed.

“Felt like it, too,” said Peter. He unbuttoned his short leather jacket, untied the white scarf around his throat and said, “Anybody been in here from the inquest, John?”

The bartender’s face sobered instantly. “That’s a bad business, Mr. Huber,” he said. “First murder in Balifold since-well, I can’t remember another and I’ve been here a long time. Ginger ale for you, Miss? And whisky and soda.” He ambled away.

Peter leaned his chin gloomily in his hands. “I lost my baggage,” he said ruefully. “I arrived here in what amounted to fancy dress. The natives can’t forget it. They all but burst into hysterics whenever they see me.”

If he was trying to divert me, he didn’t succeed.

“You were at the inquest, then,” I said. “What happened?”

“Nothing, really,” he said, staring at the bare table and biting his knuckles. “They didn’t intend anything to happen, I suppose. It was a formality. Dr. Chivery was there; he and the police doctor both testified as to what they had found. The police testified, too-that is, Nugent and one of the troopers. Then they had the lawyer that had drawn up Brent’s will tell something of its contents. I suppose that was only to show that Brent was a rich man and that there might have been a motive for his murder.”

“Was that all?”

“That was all. Or about all. They adjourned then.”

“Then they said nothing of-of Drue?”

He shook his head, rubbed his hands across his thick, curly blond hair and then put them flat on the table. “Not a word. And Soper can’t ask for a Grand Jury indictment until after the inquest reconvenes and delivers a verdict. Or so they tell me. So Drue is safe till then. They had to hold an inquest in order to give the police a kind of ticket to go ahead. Soper can go back now to the county seat or wherever his office is. And Nugent stays here and goes on with the investigation, calling on Soper whenever he needs him. The inquest can’t be concluded, I understood, until they have more evidence. There couldn’t be a verdict, but they made no bones of calling it murder.”

The bartender ambled toward us and set our glasses on the table. Peter cupped his hand around his own with a welcoming sigh. “Alexia wanted me to go and hear what was said, so I went. She didn’t want to go herself.” He took a long drink, put down his glass and said unexpectedly, “He had really a lot of money. Conrad, I mean. And it won’t come to Drue, so that ought to help out your little friend. I mean, she hadn’t money for a motive.”

He looked very gloomy. I said, a little gloomily myself, “Unless they think she hoped to remarry Craig and thus get money. That is, if Craig does inherit.”

“Oh, yes, he inherits. Conrad wouldn’t have cut him off; Conrad was strong on family, you know. A little cracked really on the subject. Had all kinds of grandiose ideas.”

“Yes, I know,” I said dryly, remembering what Conrad had said of Drue. “Anybody’s wife, yes,” said Conrad, “but not my son’s.” I added, “He seems to have felt that Alexia fitted into his family particularly well.”

Peter glanced quickly at me, and I felt the way you do when you’ve said something that sounds more disagreeable than you meant it, and a man gives you that look of “So-it’s-true-about-women-and-cats.” He said slowly, “Perhaps he married her because Craig had as good as jilted her. The honor of the family-all that.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “He was in love with her; he…” I hesitated and then went rashly on, “Perhaps he’d been in love with her, really, without knowing it, for a long time. But that doesn’t matter, anyway, and it’s nothing to me.”

“Nor to me,” said Peter, and added thoughtfully, “But there’s Mrs. Chivery. An extremely handsome and brilliant woman. I should have thought somebody like-well, like Mrs. Chivery, would have attracted Conrad.”

“Mrs. Chivery!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything,” he said hurriedly. “It’s only that she’s very-well, attractive, you know.”

I stared at him. He had a pleasant face; his calm blue eyes were well spaced above high, rather sharp cheekbones; his blunt chin and his wide mouth and thick blond eyebrows suggested a certain uncompromising strength. He was no Adonis, certainly, but he was not bad-looking, either. And I was visited by a more or less fantastic idea. Perhaps it was Maud he’d fallen in love with and not Alexia, so Craig was right in guessing his emotional temperature, so to speak, but wrong in his diagnosis of its cause. True, Maud was at least twenty to twenty-five years older than he, but what with all the liberties playwrights and scientists are taking with time these days, that might not make so much difference. Time might be actually a sheer question of relativity; and I might be skipping rope again at any moment. Which was a fairly blood-curdling thought and shocked me back into a semblance of common sense.

Peter said, “Chivery knew about Conrad’s will; we sat together and before the inquest began he told me about it. Dr. Chivery himself inherits fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty… Good gracious!”

“They were old friends. And Mrs. Chivery managed the house for Conrad for years. Until he married Alexia. Then there were a few bequests to servants, something like five thousand to the butler, small sums to the others. The library rug was willed to a museum. A blessing, that; it ought never to have been put on the floor. There were smallish sums to one or two charities. The rest was divided between Craig and Alexia.”

So Alexia had that for a motive. But if money were a motive for murder then it was widespread, for it included everyone. Everyone except-suddenly I remembered Nicky.

“Nothing to Nicky Senour?”

“No. But Nicky’d already had his share.”

“Nicky! But he’s only Alexia’s brother. He…”

Peter said, in a matter-of-fact way, “The police have already got to that. For two years or so Conrad has been paying Nicky Senour fairly substantial sums. At irregular intervals. By check.”

If that was true then Nicky Senour had every motive to keep Conrad alive. Peter went on calmly, “But I don’t think that it was blackmail. “It…” His head jerked around and his eyes fastened on something behind me. I hadn’t heard a sound or a rustle, but Peter got quickly to his feet. And I turned around just as Maud Chivery emerged from the high-backed settle in the corner.

She wore a long black cloak and no hat on that neat, high, black pompadour. She floated toward us, noiselessly, her small white face suspended above that black cloak, her bright, peering eyes upon us.

The bartender materialized too, beside us, but more noisily. “That’ll be for three brandies, Mrs. Chivery,” he said, and Peter began to dig quickly into his pocket. Maud said to Peter, “I thought Claud would come in here after the inquest. I wanted to know what happened.” (I thought, parenthetically, that she had heard that, and some other things too.) She went on quickly, “Have you seen him?”

“He left the inquest a few minutes before it was adjourned,” said Peter. “Ten or fifteen minutes before, I imagine. I don’t know where he went.”

“Oh,” said Maud. “Well, then I’ll go home with you, if you don’t mind.” She folded her cloak around her, fixed her bright dark eyes upon Peter and said, “Are you sure about the money? Conrad’s money, I mean. Doesn’t any of it come direct to me?”

“Dr. Chivery told me the money comes to him,” said Peter. “But Conrad must have meant it for both of you.”

Maud’s lips set tightly. “Yes. Yes,” she said with an odd effect of resolution, as if she were casting a vote or making a vow. She pulled her cloak closer around her and let Peter pay for her drinks and I got up and prepared to go. I didn’t leap to the conclusion that Maud Chivery was a dipsomaniac because she chose to retire to the depths of Balifold’s bar for a little private drinking.

I did think that in spite of her clear speech, her eyes were a little glassy. And I thought too that it was time for me to go back to the Brent house.

On the way out I stopped at the slot machine.

Peter and Maud had gone on ahead when rather unexpectedly I found that my fingers had explored the pocket of my cape and found a nickel. So I put it in a slit in the machine and then, as directions said to do, turned a kind of crank. I can see why these instruments have a certain attraction, for instantly a veritable shower of nickels shot out of the machine. Being unprepared, I didn’t catch all the nickels and they went everywhere, rolling merrily on the floor. Peter and Maud came back quickly in a startled manner, and helped me gather up nickels. At least Peter did. Although I’m not sure that Maud didn’t pick up one or two in spite of her aloof attitude, but, if she did, she didn’t give them to me.

But it was owing to the nickels (and perhaps a little to the brandy she’d drunk while waiting for Claud Chivery) that Maud said just what she said.

Peter had pursued several spinning little disks behind the bar and he and the bartender were talking. And Maud leaned over toward me, touched the nickels in my cupped hands with positively loving fingers and said suddenly and low, her face all at once aglow, “Money-gold, silver, jewels. I’m going to have lots of money, soon. As soon as they can get the jewels. Heaps of jewels. All behind the church.”

“Ch-church!” I said in a kind of gasp, clutching nickels.

And Maud nodded briskly and brightly, with a shimmering hard glaze over her eyes.

“Truckloads of jewels. Spanish. Castles in Spain-my castles in Spain…” she said in a dry whisper. And then Peter came back with the last of the nickels.

I didn’t have time then to count them; we went directly out to the car, Peter laughing a little and Maud suddenly as silent and uncommunicative as a little black shadow. As well she might be, I thought a little tersely, if brandy affected her like that. Castles in Spain and truckloads of jewels! Truckloads. Well, really! In the car the odors of brandy and Maud’s violet sachet were quite marked.

It developed shortly, however, that she had an errand at her own house and Peter offered to take her there and bring her back to the Brent place. “Alexia insists upon me staying on,” said Maud.

So they let me out at the corner where the main road to Balifold branched onto the road past the Brent place. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” said Peter politely and, when I had to say I didn’t, Maud said suddenly,

“There’s a short cut to the house through the meadow; you’ll see the path just beyond the wall.”

So I got out and stood there, weighed down with nickels, watching the red tail-light of the car disappear along the main road south and east, in the direction of the Chivery cottage. And I didn’t at all fancy the walk I had so airily undertaken, simply because I didn’t want to refuse and then explain why. My road wound westward, skirting the northern wall of the meadow, and then, still winding, southward and eventually reached the Brent gate. A path through the meadow would be roughly the hypotenuse of the triangle and much shorter.

But I didn’t like the meadow and the shadowy patches of woodland and brush; I didn’t like the dense strip of brush and trees outlining the little valley of the brook; I didn’t like the time of day. I remembered too well the hunter of the previous night, and I still didn’t think it was rabbits.

Yet I couldn’t stand there in the chill, silent loneliness of the approaching night. And the road must be nearly twice as long a way as the path.

So in the end I scrambled over the wall and took the path. I guessed it would come out somewhere about the garage and kitchen end of the Brent house.

Until I had got quite a distance into the meadow I didn’t realize exactly how dark it was. I went along hurriedly, my ill-gotten gains making a small chinking sound in my pockets. The meadow was rocky and the path twisted around weed-grown boulders and up and down tiny valleys and mounds; I hadn’t realized either, looking at it from the road, how irregular the meadow was. I neared the belt of woodland and the strip of dark shadow which seemed to edge the brook.

What, really, had Anna run from, the night before?

The meadow, the strip of woods and thickets down by the brook were all clothed now in silence and in dusk. The sky was dark again and there were no stars and only a faint purple glow of lingering daylight in the west.

Once, somewhere in the shadowy distance, it seemed to me there was a kind of rustle and crackle of twigs, but when I stopped to listen there was nothing.

The path entered the strip of trees and sloped downward toward the brook. A twig caught at my cape and I jerked it away with a sharp tug, as if it had been fingers. And then I stumbled.

Something was in the path, lying like a sack in the middle of it. I fell on one knee, flinging out my hands to save myself, my cape swirling around me. My hand encountered the sack. Only it wasn’t a sack. For my hands came away and they were wet with a kind of stickiness.

I knew by that viscous stickiness what was on them. I leaned over, trying not to touch him again. The twilight was deep but still I could make out the outlines of Dr. Chivery’s anxious face and popping eyes, for once fixed and direct. His throat had been cut.

Then I heard again a rustle and snapping of twigs. This time it was clear and definite. This time I knew what it was.

It was the soft sound of something moving in the dense brush beyond the brook, on the slope between me and the Brent house.

As I listened it stopped. There was just silence and night coming on and the bloody thing at my feet.