Wolf in Man’s Clothing

2

DRUE WHISPERED, “ALEXIA…”

Well, I didn’t know who Alexia was (unless, by the look on her face, a descendant of one of the more expert Borgias), but it looked as if she might leap straight across the bed, tigerlike, for Drue’s throat instead of her own, where her lovely hand still clung to her pearls quite as if one of us intended to snatch them.

I disliked her even more strongly. I said abruptly, “Be quiet!”

Neither woman looked at me and neither spoke or moved, although Anna got a good three inches smaller and made an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to shrink into the wall. I went across to the door into the hall, opened it and made a sweeping gesture which must have been rather imperative, for Drue walked toward me, and the woman, Alexia, her eyes still fixed upon Drue, came too. There was an instant when it looked as if they would meet at the door with something of the effect of gasoline and a match in careless juxtaposition, but they didn’t, for Drue came quickly into the hall and Alexia followed. I closed the door (it seemed to be my only function so far in the Brent house) and, possibly with some further idea of clarifying things, I said as I had said to Anna, “I am Nurse Sarah Keate. Miss Cable and I were sent here…”

The woman in red interrupted, still looking at Drue. “Oh, yes,” she said, with a little scorn in her voice, “I’d forgotten you were a nurse. So that’s the way you got into the house. These seem to be your tactics. Craig was sick when you got hold of him in the first place, wasn’t he? It will be different this time. I’m here and this is my house.”

Drue went as white as paper. “But he didn’t marry you. I watched the papers. He didn’t marry anyone.”

There was a gleam of triumph in Alexia’s eyes. She said, “You didn’t read them thoroughly enough. I’m Mrs. Brent.” She added slowly, smiling, watching Drue, “Now you know how I felt the night you came back here with Craig.”

“Alexia…” Drue said stiffly, and stopped. And Alexia, still smiling, said, “But I’m not Mrs. Craig Brent. I married Conrad, instead. It was a very quiet wedding-Conrad wished it so. But now, you see, this is my house, and I have every right to protect Craig from you now…”

“Conrad!” cried Drue. “Craig’s father!” Color came back into her lips.

Alexia said sharply, “Naturally. For your own good I’m telling you you’d better leave. Craig doesn’t want you. Conrad won’t have you here.”

Up to that point the interview had been candid to an embarrassing degree. But just then there was a kind of secret shifting of the emotions which had been hurtling around my defenseless (but I must say heartily listening) ears. Drue said slowly and thoughtfully, “I came here, Alexia, because they said Craig might die. But now that I’m here, if I can, I-I’m going to find out what really happened.”

Alexia’s eyes sharpened.

“What do you mean?”

“I believe you know what I mean,” said Drue rather slowly, watching Alexia.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Alexia swiftly, too swiftly.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Drue said, still very quietly, “Perhaps not. But I’m going to talk to Craig.”

“He’s-he’s too sick,” said Alexia quickly. “You can’t. Besides, Conrad won’t let you.”

“Conrad can’t stop me,” said Drue.

“Oh, can’t he!” cried Alexia. “You’ll see.”

Again Drue seemed to consider for a moment. Then she said with something very honest and appealing in her voice and face, “Alexia, you are Conrad’s wife. It’s nothing to you-what happened in the past. I don’t suppose we can be friends…”

“Friends!” said Alexia with a sharp little laugh.

Drue went on steadily, “… but there is no reason why you should object to my nursing Craig, and to my having an understanding with him.”

“You’ve had your understanding,” said Alexia, “via the divorce courts.”

“But that,” began Drue, very white now and firm, “was because he wanted it and…”

“Certainly, he wanted it,” cut in Alexia. “Did he ever come back to you later? You don’t need to answer that. I know he didn’t. It’s no good arguing with me, Drue. Besides, even if I used my influence with Conrad in your favor-and I have influence, don’t mistake that-he would still not listen. You wrecked all his plans for Craig. He won’t have you in the house. And Craig doesn’t want you. There’s no mystery about the thing; if you’ve come here with that in your mind, you may as well leave voluntarily. You left Craig; you went to Reno; you sued for divorce. You were offered a settlement which you, rather unwisely, I thought, refused. The divorce went through without a hitch. That’s all there was to it.” Alexia paused, caught her breath and added quickly, “If that’s why you’ve come back-to get some money, I mean-Conrad won’t give it to you. He would have given it to you at the time of the divorce. He offered what must have seemed to you, in your circumstances”-her glance swept Drue up and down quite as if Drue’s skirt were threadbare and her shoes patched (as a matter of fact, Drue has all the American woman’s clothes sense and always looks soignée and smart, and did that day)-“what must have seemed a fortune to you,” said Alexia, and smiled. At that Drue went dead white and so rigid that only her eyes were alive, and they were blazing. Alexia stopped smiling and became perfectly still, too, and tense. So I knew it was time to do something. I’ve dealt with too many hysterical patients and even occasionally a hysterical student nurse not to know that when a woman stops talking and looks like that one must act-but quickly.

I put my arm through Drue’s and said with some haste and firmness, “I’m going to change my uniform. Come with me, Drue.”

I drew her along with me toward the rooms at the end of the hall where our bags had been taken. Alexia called after us, lifting her voice, “There is a six-thirty train. The station wagon will be at the door at six.” She stood there, I was sure, watching our progress down the hall. The little terrier had quietly emerged from the bedroom close to Drue. I wasn’t aware of him until we reached my room and I saw that Drue went inside first and the terrier came, too.

Again I closed the door. I said, “Well…” a little forcefully and put down my handbag and gloves, and took off my hat.

It was a pleasant room, plainly furnished, but bright with chintz and plenty of windows. It was obviously intended for just such use-a trained nurse, an extra guest. Along one wall was a door into a bathroom which connected on the other side with the room Drue was to have, and her bags were stacked there, for I went and looked.

When I came back, Drue was standing by the window, holding the dog tight in her arms, looking down through the streaming rain. I took out my keys, knelt to open the suitcase that held a supply of uniforms and said, “All right. What’s all this about?”

She turned from the window. “I had to do it this way, Sarah. I had to come and I had to have you with me. I didn’t dare tell you he’d been shot. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

“You knew good and well I wouldn’t have come.”

“They telephoned to me, you see, from the Registry office. As soon as I heard it was-was Craig, it was like-well, fate. As if…” Her voice stopped and, after a moment, she said in a kind of choked way, “As if that was why I had learned to be a nurse. So I could nurse him. They said he might not live, and”-she finished in an unsteady whisper-“there is so much I haven’t said to him.”

The room was very quiet for a moment. That’s the gnawing heartache of death, of course; the thought of the things you didn’t say and now cannot ever say. The permanent severance of communication.

It did no good to think of that. I rustled out a starchy uniform and said briskly, “Well, you’re here now and so am I.” I got up from my knees-not too easily, for I’m well past the age of springing lightly from cliff to cliff like a gazelle, or perhaps I mean a mountain goat-well, at any rate I got up and put the uniform on the bed. “He looks pretty tough. That’s why you telephoned to me yourself?”

“I made the girl at the Registry office let me telephone to you and make the arrangements. I was afraid if she talked to you she’d tell you the truth…”

I said tritely, “Honest confession is good for the soul,” and got out my nursing watch with the second hand on it and strapped it to my wrist.

“Oh, Sarah, you are a darling.”

“Fiddlesticks. You mean, I’m a good nurse.” But I let myself look at her then and she smiled faintly.

“You’d better take off your jacket and get on with the story,” I said practically. Obediently she slipped off her suit coat. She looked very young in her plain white blouse and short green skirt; she pushed her shining curls upward with one hand, absently, and said bleakly, “You heard Alexia. They’ll try to make me leave. But I’m not going.”

Well, certainly the interview with Alexia had left little to the imagination in that respect. But I didn’t think Drue had stolen the family silver or murdered Grandpa during what must have been a fairly brief sojourn under the Brent roof. For I had known her when she was in training, a thin, hard-working child of eighteen or thereabouts, with a gay smile and intelligent eyes. I had then been a Supervisor (which I understand the student nurses spell with an n and two o’s) but had liked her nursing and remembered her later when we met again, both doing private duty. We knew each other well, in spite of the constant coming and going-the interruptions, the weeks and sometimes months of dropping out of sight while on a long or troublesome case-that make up a private nurse’s life. Yet she had never mentioned nor hinted at this particular interstice, so to speak. Unless the sudden dropping away of a very smitten and attentive young interne, a few months ago, was such a hint.

I got out studs. “I’ve got to hurry. You and this Craig Brent met and married. It must have been very quiet-I usually know about these things. Well, then you were divorced. Conrad must be Craig’s father and he must have money. Alexia, who does not appear to be exactly a friend…”

“She was, well, expecting to marry Craig, when we met, Craig and I,” Drue said in a dry voice and stopped.

“It must have been charming for her,” I said.

“Sarah.” She whirled around. “It wasn’t-I didn’t mean-oh,…” She bit her lip and looked at me with eyes that were bright with tears.

“Charming for all of you,” I said. “At any rate, last night Craig was shot and you inveigled me (under false pretenses) to come here with you on the case. That’s all I know.”

“It’s all there is to know,” she said, bleakly. “It was all wrong, you see, from the beginning. I’d better tell you. We oughtn’t to have married. He-we were so young. That was over a year ago.”

A year ago! So now she felt aged and adult and looked back on herself a year ago as being very young. She couldn’t have been, allowing even for the years of her training, more than twenty-four at the very most.

She went on quickly, “Craig-you see, he was sick; he was home on leave and he was in an auto accident and broke his arm. It was a compound fracture and he was in the hospital five weeks. Five weeks,” she said, “and three days. I was one of his nurses. And the day he came out we were married.”

“On leave?”

“Yes. That-that was one of the troubles later. His father, you see, wanted him to be in the diplomatic service. All his life he’d been destined for that and he’d got, a year or so before, his first appointment. It was a consular appointment, not much, but a beginning. It was in South America, and it was when he was at home on his first leave that we met. Like that.”

I put in a stud and said, “And married.”

“Yes. He-oh, it’s one of those stories. So simple really and so wrong. We oughtn’t to have married then. We didn’t know each other, really. There wasn’t time. We’d tried to tell each other things; things about our lives and the things that had happened to us before, but none of it seemed to matter then. We…” She stroked the little dog’s head, her face bent above him. “We had a little time together; not much, because his leave had been extended but still it was nearly up. So we had to come home. That is, we came here. To see his father.” She stopped again. I fastened in the last stud and said, “I take it Papa was surprised.”

“He hadn’t been told.” Her face was still lowered over the dog but had a kind of fixity and whiteness. “You see that was wrong, too. He had other plans for Craig.” She stopped again, stroking the dog’s head.

“Alexia,” I said.

She glanced at me once, quickly. “Yes. They weren’t really engaged, she and Craig. If they had been, Craig would have told her, before we married, in another way. But it was a kind of understanding; it had been for a long time. I didn’t know that, then. Until we came here and Alexia was here. It was a clear, cold night in January over a year ago and we came into the hall downstairs. It was after dinner and they were having coffee in the library and his father came out of the library with a cup in his hand and then Alexia came. She was so beautiful-she wore a crimson, trailing dinner gown and she went straight to Craig and put up her face to be kissed and he said, ‘Alexia, this is my wife.’ ”

“Dear me,” I said, keeping to myself the strong impression that young Craig might have well deserved the shooting he had got. Certainly Alexia couldn’t be expected to greet Drue now or ever with anything like joy.

“Yes. Oh, I told you it was all wrong. Everything. But in a queer way, Sarah, we couldn’t help it. It was as if we had been caught in something we couldn’t stop. It wasn’t Craig’s fault, any of it, any more than it was mine.” I thought there were tears in her eyes again, but she lowered her face over the dog so I couldn’t see and began to smooth out his long forelock with fingers that trembled.

“So there were fireworks,” I said.

“It meant Craig’s career, really. I didn’t realize that when we were married. Perhaps it’s why Craig hadn’t told his father until after we were married. His father told me our marriage was impossible. He said it was a terrible mistake. He said Craig’s career demanded money; he simply had to have money to get anywhere. I hadn’t any money, of course. But that wasn’t the main thing: he made it clear that he had intended to help Craig himself with money. But he said that now, in view of our marriage, he wouldn’t. He said Craig’s career was washed up because of our marriage and that for that reason alone he would have refused him the money that was necessary, even if he had approved of his wife-me-as a person. He didn’t like me; but that wasn’t all. I-I was a nurse, you see.” She lifted her shining head a little proudly. “My family were good and old, too. But I couldn’t help him, socially. Not directly, you know, with wires at my hand to pull. He explained all that to me.”

I sniffed. You couldn’t look at Drue Cable and not know she had good breeding; it was in every line of her face and every motion of her body as it is in a thoroughbred. I am no snob. I’ve nursed too long to have anything but a kind of respectful recognition of certain qualities like courage and truth and gentleness which, Heaven knows, can exist anywhere. But I’ve nursed long enough to have seen something of heredity; natural laws are natural laws, and you can’t get around them.

“So Pa Brent resorted to the good old-fashioned disinheriting threat. Or what amounted to it. What did Craig say to all this?”

“Craig laughed at first. Then he wouldn’t even talk of it. He told me to forget it; he said it wasn’t important, to pay no attention to what his father said. But I couldn’t help paying attention. Because Mr. Brent told me that the only thing to do was for us to end our marriage as-as abruptly as it began.” She was quoting. I could tell it from the bitterness that then, for the first time, came into her voice.

I got out of my wool dress and reached for my uniform and I remember that I stood there for an instant staring at her. For the way she spoke gave me a hint as to what was going to come next, and I really couldn’t believe it. “You surely don’t mean to say you agreed to that,” I cried, astonished.

She started to braid the dog’s long forelock, her fingers very gentle but still unsteady. “Not just then. I couldn’t. We stayed on a little. Craig’s leave had been given another month’s extension. Then Alexia came back and-and Nicky,” she said, bending over the dog. “Her twin brother.”

There was a rather long pause while she braided and rebraided the soft forelock. “Then,” she went on finally, “Craig had to go to Washington. His father wanted me to stay here; he said we must get to know each other better. That pleased Craig; he hoped it meant his father was coming around. So he asked me to stay, and I did. I went to the train with him and he kissed me and said he’d be back in a week. It was there at the station-where we got off the train…” She bent closely over the dog again. “I never saw Craig again until today.”

“Never-why not?”

“He had to stay longer in Washington, two weeks, three weeks. It-it wasn’t…” She broke off and, after a moment said, “His father didn’t want to know me better. Alexia was here all the time, too. It wasn’t very pleasant.” Her voice hardened a little and she said, “Besides, there was Nicky. Craig didn’t come back, and I couldn’t stay here. I went away.” She stopped, as if that was all the story.

“Do you mean to tell me you let them influence you like that? So you walked out and never returned?”

“That wasn’t all,” she said and seemed to think for a moment, arranging facts in the order which would make them clearest to me. She frowned and said: “You see, Sarah, I couldn’t stay here. So I left. But that wasn’t all, because Craig gave up his job. That was why he stayed so long in Washington. He had decided to get training as a pilot. It was before the war began. I mean before we got into it, naturally…”

I nodded. Naturally. It had been then only a matter of weeks since Pearl Harbor.

“He wanted to get into the air force. He hadn’t talked to me about it before he went, and I understood why. It was because he knew that I would feel that he was giving up his chosen career because of me. I wouldn’t have let him do it, at least, I would have tried to stop him. But, you see, he didn’t know that at that time, and if he got the training he wanted he had to be unmarried. Then, and for that particular course of training, they wouldn’t take a married man. He didn’t know that until he applied for it. I didn’t know it until Mr. Brent wrote to me and told me.”

I am not a profane woman. At the moment it was really a pity, for it left me simply nothing adequate to say. She nodded slowly, as if I’d asked her a question. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I did. I believed him-Mr. Brent. How could I help it? He was obviously sincere about the whole thing. He wrote a letter that I wish I’d kept. I didn’t. I burned it. He said that I had wrecked Craig’s chosen career. He said that Craig now wanted to take training as a pilot and that I was-again-the obstacle. He said that he regretted everything he had said to me; he said that he was ready to accept our marriage-that is, our eventual marriage.” She stopped and took a long breath and I saw the picture complete.

It was incredible, of course. Except that women like Drue can be just that incredible.

“So you believed him. You agreed to let bygones be bygones. And you promised to divorce Craig, let him complete his training, and then remarry.”

“That,” said Drue, “was the idea.”

“Good heavens, Drue!”

“I know. But then it seemed right. We had married so quickly, you see. Craig was giving up his job; and his father convinced me that the one thing he wanted was to get into the air force. Mr. Brent was-I can’t tell you how convincing he was. He asked me to forgive him for everything he’d said in anger. He said that he believed at last that Craig and I really loved each other. He said that Craig had set his heart upon becoming a pilot and getting into the army or the navy air force. He said Craig was deeply patriotic-and he is. I knew that. He said that what it-the divorce, I mean-really amounted to was merely a long engagement, and not very long at that. He made it seem so reasonable and so right. He said that Craig would never ask me for it himself and if I loved Craig I would get the divorce. And that as soon as the year of training was up we could remarry.”

It was clear enough; still incredible, if one didn’t know Drue, but clear. What was also pretty clear was dirty work at the crossroads.

“So you got the divorce?”

“Yes. It took six weeks.”

“And Craig got his training?”

“Yes.”

“What happened then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t…”

She shook her head and looked away from me. “He didn’t come back.”

“But didn’t he understand why you did it? Didn’t you see each other and write and…”

She shook her head again. “No. That is, I did write a few times. But he didn’t answer. The divorce went through very quietly and-and so quickly. And that was all.”

After a moment, I said, “And you never tried to see him?”

“No.” Her mouth moved a little wryly. “You see, I had my pride.”

And it had cost her enough. Well, I didn’t say it. I pulled my uniform over my head and struggled through it and glanced at my watch. For all she’d said so much it had been only a few minutes.

“But now,” she said unexpectedly, “it’s different. Pride doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’m older; I’m an adult now and a woman. I know what I want. I was-such a child then.”

She was still a child. I didn’t say it, but took my cap and went to the mirror so as to adjust it to hide the white lock in my rather abundant auburn hair. “And now you’ve come back.”

She sat for a moment in silence. In the mirror I watched a look of determination come slowly into her face. Finally, she said, “Yes, now I’ve come back. I had to.”

Watching her instead of what I was doing, I jabbed a pin into my thumb and muttered. So she’d made up her mind to fight, and she’d given up long ago her best and strongest weapon.

“I can understand your getting too much of Alexia,” I said briefly. “I can understand your leaving the house. I can even understand your-well, believing Pa Brent. And letting Craig go without any effort to keep him. But I cannot understand Craig.”

“Well, neither can I. Now,” she said, in a kind of abject voice which was not at all like her. Except for her flair of defiance with Alexia, she had been in a rather crushed state of mind ever since we started to Balifold, I realized then. This was not, however, her natural and customary reaction to life. She was a perfectly sensible and altogether charming young woman with considerable backbone-which up to then had certainly, however, been held in abeyance to a marked degree. But then love does do very odd things, and obviously she was still heartbreakingly in love with the man whom, nevertheless, she had divorced.

She patted the little dog. “Sarah, it was all so clear then. It’s only now, after I’ve had time to think and time to regret that I see it was all wrong. I believed it then, though. I never suspected.”

“Suspected what?” I said with a rather nervous glance at my watch again. “Suspected whom?”

“Anything. Anybody,” she said.

“And now you do?”

“Now I do. Now I”-she stopped and said in a kind of whisper staring at the rug-“now I’ve got to know what happened.”

That at least was a step in the right direction and one clearly indicated by the foregoing little tale. I said briskly and, I remember, almost gaily, “Good for you. It’s high time. I’m proud of you.”

“It’s not easy,” she said, and gave me a quick and rather diffident glance. “I mean-well, suppose Alexia is right. Suppose Craig doesn’t want to see me. I mean-well, I’ve no reason to think that he does, you see. He had every chance.”

“Look here,” I said, still briskly and full of energy and approval. “Obviously you had two people against you in this house-Pop and Alexia. I don’t know Pop, but I can’t say I took to Alexia. Maybe Craig repented his quick marriage and asked his father to get him out of it. But maybe not. As I see it, you’ll have to brace yourself for whatever comes. I mean, have an understanding with Craig.”

“That’s why I came,” she said in a whisper.

I went on, “You may have to take it on the chin, you know. Craig is free, white and twenty-one; he could have come to you.”

“I know,” she whispered again.

“On the other hand, all sorts of things could have happened. It’s a little difficult and melodramatic to suspect people of that particular kind of finagling-I mean, oh, destroying letters, lying, that kind of thing. Still it could have happened.”

“I’ve got to have it clear,” she said.

“Right. It comes under the heading of unfinished business. It…” I stopped abruptly, for someone knocked. I thought it was Anna and went to the door. But it wasn’t Anna; it was a man, young and slender, whose pointed, rather delicate face was instantly familiar to me, although I couldn’t possibly have seen him before. He was very sleek and very elegant with a wonderful brown and maroon color scheme (brown slacks, checked coat, maroon handkerchief and tie) and he seemed surprised to see me.

“Oh, I beg your pardon! I thought-Alexia said Drue was here.”

There was a quick kind of rustle behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and Drue wasn’t there. Dog, coat and all had vanished.

The word Alexia gave me the clue; he was amazingly like her. This must be the twin brother, Nicky. Hadn’t Drue told me?

He said, “Where is Drue?” and tried to look over my shoulder into the room.

It didn’t look as if Drue wanted to see him. I took my fountain pen and my thermometer. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m just going to my patient.”

He moved aside to permit me to step into the hall. As I turned along it toward the big bedroom where the sick man lay, he dodged along with me as gracefully as a panther and about as welcome. I’m bound to say that I instantly added Nicky Senour to my rapidly growing list of dislikes in the Brent house. He was watching me with a gleam of bright curiosity in his face “I say, you know,” he said, “Drue can’t stay here. She’s got to leave. You must make her leave.”

I had reached the door to my patient’s room. I opened it and turned to Nicky Senour and hissed (literally, because I didn’t want my patient to be roused), “If I stay, she stays,” and closed the door on his handsome but startled face.

There was no change in Craig Brent’s pulse or breathing. I didn’t want to rouse him, then, to take his temperature. He had an intelligent and a sensitive face and, from the nose and chin, a will of his own; his behaviour had shown anything but that. I thought of the gaps in Drue’s story. It was brief; it was necessarily elliptical. Obviously there were only two alternatives by way of explanation; either Craig had repented his hasty marriage and ended it in that way (in which case she was well rid of him, but that wouldn’t help Drue just then), or there was actually dirty work at some crossroads. In that case, a few words between Drue and the man before me would clear up a mere lovers’ misunderstanding.

But nothing in her brief and very deleted account of her almost equally brief marriage even touched upon a question that was beginning to assert itself more and more ominously in my mind. Definitely there was something fishy about the story of the shooting. So Craig Brent had been shot, intentionally, with murderous design, then why? And, furthermore, who?

Anna rose from the armchair across the room, within the curtained niche where old-fashioned bay windows made a semi-circular little room of their own. She had been crying and was wiping her eyes. I went to her and said a little sharply, “You can go. I’ll stay now.”

When she had gone, I pulled a chair up near the bed where I could watch for the faintest shadow of a change in Craig Brent’s face. The brown was sunburn; under the tan his face was a kind of gray. I was sitting like that with my fingers on his lean brown wrist when the door opened and two men walked quietly into the room and closed the door behind them. One was the doctor. I had never seen Dr. Chivery before, but a kind of antiseptic spruceness about him identified him at once. He was a short, gray man with no chin, slender, except for a little watermelon in front, and pouches under his eyes. He looked nervous.

The other man was a state trooper in beautiful brownish gray uniform with bars on his sleeve. I must say, though, that the uniform was not a welcome sight; it was like a confirmation of general fishiness.

I got to my feet. The doctor and the policeman (a lieutenant, I thought, by the bars) came straight to the bed. The doctor glanced at me once absently, and they both looked down at my patient for a long moment. Then the doctor said, whispering emphatically, “Nobody shot him. Nobody could have shot him. It was an accident, I tell you.”

And the policeman said, “I’ll have to see the bullet. And the gun.”