CHAPTER 12

For a dazed instant Jonas Smith heard not believing he had heard, staggered by the direct assault out of the blue and by the impact of what he saw, with a flash of mental clarity, was the most extraordinary and implacable logic. He was facing the window. The ledge was on a direct level with his heart. A gun there, aimed easily at him as he stood now, would do to him precisely what it had done to Gordon Darcy Grymes held in the hands of an hysterical girl facing him from the other direction, across the wide room from the porch door. The angle would be the same, the difference in her height and his made up by the foundation of the cottage. The distance even, between killer and killed, was not greatly different, across the room where Jenny Darrell would have been standing, and from the window in the kitchen where he himself had stood, to where Gordon Darcy Grymes had stood. It was logic. All it didn’t have was the truth.

Jonas looked from the window to Sergeant Digges.

“No,” he said calmly. “He wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t see him standing up. He was lying on the floor. That stuff was all bright red and still wet. I see what you mean, Sergeant… but it just happens I wasn’t the guy that did it.”

“Then why don’t you tell me the truth, doctor?”

“I’ve told you the truth.”

“Not all of it. Not the whole truth.”

Jonas shook his head. “Sergeant, I don’t know the whole truth—about anything. In my profession that’s the first thing they try to teach you. Now if you want that statement you’ve been talking about, I’ll be glad to make it. Or is it the local can? Make up your mind, will you?”

Thinking it over, some minutes later, he was wondering why Sergeant Digges had made up his mind the way he had. He was still not in jail. Or not yet. Up to the last minute, there in the Milnors’ cottage, he hadn’t been sure the Sergeant wasn’t going to spring it on him in good earnest, as a means if not an end in itself. Behind his hardly veiled exasperation and annoyance Jonas could see him weighing the obvious advantages of locking him up against the whole flock of imponderables that made up the less obvious disadvantages of it. It had been touch and go, and Jonas had guarded his tongue for fear he might say something that could be construed as a wise crack sufficient to tilt the balance and land him behind the bars. Even when he set out with Roddy to walk back over to the Fergusons’ house, he was not entirely sure the offered lift into town wasn’t actually intended as one leg up in the direction of the jail.

However, he was at the Fergusons’, not the jail, and as he called a taxi and put down the phone his hand lingered on it, the impulse to pick it up again and call Elizabeth Darrell so strong that he tore himself away by force and went barging out onto the terrace, to get away from the temptation and try to examine himself with some degree of ordinary sanity. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to hear her voice, to be sure again she was real and not a dream. The excuse of calling to ask about her grandfather that kept popping back into his mind every couple of seconds was plausible, but not really valid. Until Dr. Pardee formally invited him back he had no standing in the case.

“Gee, I want to see her! I’ve got to see her!”

He flopped down in the Gibson Island chair on the terrace, took out his pipe and knocked it out on the arms of the chair. He was acting like a damned fool, and he knew it. Everything that had happened since he had looked at her, standing on the other side of her grandfather’s bed in the darkened room, was driven out of his mind. The creek, its shining waters girdled with young green and gold with the reflection of the trees on the banks around it, and serenely blue from the cloudless sky above, the creek and the white herons wading the marsh, the rustling leaves of the oaks, the croaking of the frogs, all of it mingled into something warm and lovely, making him forget Sergeant Digges, and Gordon Darcy Grymes, and remember only a smooth golden head and fringed wisteria eyes and a moving velvety voice.

He moved abruptly. “I keep forgetting she doesn’t think I’m so hot.” He got up and put his pipe back in his pocket. “Oh well, the hell with it.” There was an old poem about What care I how fair she be if she is not fair to me. At his age, with his experience, he ought to start making some kind of emotional sense, not going around having mystical visions and practically landing in the jail-house through his own unaided efforts.

He whistled to the dog, busy at a snake hole on the bank, and sat down again. He couldn’t go until his taxi came, and it didn’t hurt him to think about her… especially when he couldn’t help it. He looked down at Roddy, obediently there beside him, gazing up into his eyes. He reached down and rubbed the drooping damp ears.

“It’s the first time I’ve really been in love, boy.” He grinned. “Don’t look so bloody doleful. It’s not you it hurts.”

He straightened abruptly. The phone was ringing. He sprang to his feet. It was Her. You couldn’t want anybody so intensely without communicating it some way. He dashed to the door, yanked it open, and stopped half-way to the table. It wasn’t her. He was crazy. It was Van Holt, or somebody… somebody he didn’t care whether he ever talked to again or not. He went the rest of the way soberly, picked the instrument up and said “Hello” so brusquely it surprised him.

Then he held his breath, his heart beating so fast it almost choked him. He sat down in the chair by the table, smiling happily like a love-sick zany.

“Excuse me for calling you, Dr. Smith, but I was… worried,” Elizabeth Darrell was saying. “Philippa Van Holt was just here. She said she was afraid the police were… were…”

“They haven’t yet,” Jonas said cheerfully. “But thanks for worrying. How is your grandfather? Is the nurse there?” “Yes. There’s no change.”

“I’m on my way in town. If you want me for anything—”

“Thank you.”

Her voice cooled abruptly.

“I don’t see anything to be so cheerful about. Anyway, Dr. Pardee’s coming back. I think we’ll do very nicely. That wasn’t why I called. I just didn’t want you to be in any trouble on our account. Good-bye.”

Jonas held the phone for a moment, still smiling. Her rebuke was no doubt deserved. He didn’t mind. She was worried about him, she’d called him up… those were twin baskets of rubies and fine pearls tossed into the empty hands of a beggar in the streets. He bounded up, whistling, treading the golden mountain top, reprieved from the slough of dismal despond. The taxi’s honking in the drive was the song of the morning lark in his ears.

“Come on, Roddy! Let’s go!”

His delirium was brief. Its first set-back was the last words coming from the radio in the taxi before the boy switched it off to hear where Jonas wanted to go.

“—mystery woman believed to have been with the dead man at that time. Keep tuned to this station for late developments. It is now five-fifteen Eastern Daylight Time.”

The second was in town when he was eating a thick steak at Gregory’s on Maryland Avenue. In the bright blue-and-red leather booth in front of him were four young St. John’s students talking about Aristotle. Three girls in the booth behind him were talking about Gordon Darcy Grymes and Elizabeth Darrell.

“—Hubris is the pride and arrogance that leads the gods to strike you down,” said one booth. “It’s Nemesis that pursues you and does the—”

“—make any difference to Liz if Gordon was married,” the other booth was saying. “She can’t ever marry anybody while that horrid old man’s alive. Especially if he’s going to be paralyzed. He’s always managed to get rid of every boy Liz ever even started to like. She’ll end up just like poor old Cousin Olive. The Commodore told me once she had all kinds of beaux but she couldn’t leave Papa. At least he left her a little money to live on. All Liz’ll gets is that white elephant of a house and she’ll end up renting rooms and taking boarders. I just don’t get it.”

“Liz is super,” one of the other girls said.

The third one giggled. “You know what Miss Olive said? She said she didn’t see why we thought her generation was so repressed. She said they didn’t have cars to park in but she couldn’t see what could happen in a car that didn’t use to happen at coon hunts when she was a girl. Papa never did approve of coon hunts.”

“I guess they didn’t have ticks with spotted fever in the woods in those days,” the first girl said. “Anyway, I’d like to know who the mystery woman is somebody saw in Gordon’s car. Mother and Dad were coming home from a party around one. Gordon was just getting in his car, but he didn’t recognize them, he was in such a hurry, and Mother didn’t recognize the girl. But she was so busy holding Dad up I guess she didn’t have a chance. I don’t know why people drink so much.”

Jonas drained his beer glass, got up and paid his bill. He glanced back from the counter. The three girls had their bright little heads together. He couldn’t see their faces. But it didn’t matter. He’d heard enough. The mystery woman was not Jenny Darrell, as he’d assumed hearing the tail end of the radio broad-cast. It was whoever was waiting for Franklin Grymes when he came whipping out of his brother’s hotel room at a quarter to one o’clock.

He left the restaurant and hurried down toward Prince George Street to Blanton-Darrell Court. Just so it didn’t turn out to be Agatha Reed, he thought. It was one of those grim and preposterous ideas that he wished devoutly had never occurred to him, and that stuck like a tack in the heel of his shoe, more uncomfortable with every step he took. Having assured Sergeant Digges that Miss Agatha Reed was home and in bed, it would be funny as hell if Miss Reed had turned over a new leaf and taken to tearing around the country-side in the middle of the night. It would be so funny, in fact, that Jonas Smith groaned inwardly. The old eight-ball in front of him was looming to planetary proportions.

He entered the Court through the iron gate marked “Private, Keep Out, No Dogs Allowed” that was at the opposite end of the place from his, and out across the Darrells’ back garden to go in through his back door. Roddy sprang on ahead of him, and made a sharp detour, wagging his friendly tail.

“Oh, hello!”

Less than forty-five minutes before, his heart would have leaped a mile at the sight of Elizabeth Darrell sitting on the stone bench in front of the myrtle tree. Now it only gave a jolt upward to become a sudden lump in his throat as he saw her there, Jenny beside her, both of them startled at his barging in, disturbing what had obviously been a troubled private conference.

“Hello.”

Elizabeth got up, not stiffly, but so nearly that it could reasonably be called that. Jenny Darrell drew back a little, her eyes larger and more haunted than ever. Then she managed to get up too, her small brown hand creeping like a child’s into her sister’s.

She moistened her lips. “Hello, Dr. Smith.”

Jonas went across to them. He wished they wouldn’t act as if he were an ogre of some kind, and throw up a hedge of thorns and a wall of glass every time he came near them. It was irritating, considering the spot he was in on account of both of them. And then he was ashamed of himself. They were scared. They were badly scared, and pathetically on the defensive, waiting for their whole world to crash down around their heads.

“I want to talk to you two,” Jonas said soberly. He looked around the garden.

“We came out here so we could talk, without the nurse or Wetherby hearing us,” Elizabeth said quietly. “We had the radio on. They’re hunting a girl…”

Jonas nodded. “They’re hunting a girl,” he repeated, “—but not the right one. They still don’t know what time Gordon went out to the Milnors’. They think it wasn’t till after one, because the bellhop saw him in the hotel. But don’t get your hopes up on that one. Digges hasn’t seen Franklin Grymes yet. He’s just talked to him. The minute he sees him it’s going to bust wide open. They’re identical twins, and even Philippa says she couldn’t tell them apart. She probably could, but I sure couldn’t. When it breaks, Digges is going to start back at the beginning. And there’s one thing I think I’ve got to tell you. You might as well know the worst.—Somebody else was out there last night. There was a car over on the old wagon-road. I saw it, and I heard it go out after you all left. It went without any lights, and it looks as if somebody wants…”

He stopped, aware of the tightening of Jenny’s grip on Elizabeth’s hand, and some imperceptible but definite communication between them. He looked from one of them to the other.

“Look. There’s no use leaving me in the dark, if you know something I don’t. I’m the guy they’ve got on the griddle at this point. I can make fewer errors and more runs if I know what the score is.”

“Tell him, Jenny.”

The younger girl moistened her lips again. “I don’t know. Dr. Pardee gave me something and made me lie down. I guess I was dreaming. I was out there, and Gordon was there… but there was somebody else. I just sort of… sort of knew it. I was just standing in the room, and I knew it. I don’t know how, but it was so… so plain I woke up—”

“She woke up screaming at the top of her lungs,” Elizabeth said quietly. “I thought it was just a dream. But I don’t know…”

“I don’t either,” Jonas said.

He looked intently at Jenny. It could be. It could be something she’d heard in a moment of shock and buried deep in her unconscious mind that had come up in a dream state. But that in itself was terribly important at the moment.

“You haven’t heard from anybody?”

“No.”

A tremor shivered through Elizabeth’s slim body.

“But it’s a ghastly sort of feeling,” she whispered. “What if somebody starts ringing up…”

Jenny pulled her hand away from Elizabeth’s and looked desperately up at Jonas.

“I’m going to go and tell them. Please make her see it isn’t right for me not to! Please! I don’t want you to be in trouble, or anybody else. It’s my fault, it’s me that ought to suffer. I did it. And it can’t hurt anybody, now. It won’t hurt Grandfather, he’ll never know. Elizabeth was just afraid he’d throw me out of the house, and there’d be no place for me to go without her having to leave him here alone, and something dreadful happen to him… but it’s happened anyway. Please, Dr. Smith, make her see!”

It could have been the Hubris that leads the gods to strike at pride and arrogance, or Nemesis pursuing the whole lot of them. Whatever it was, it chose its moment, Jonas thought, with pathetic irony.

“Miss Darrell! Miss Darrell!”

The shade in the window of the corner bedroom snapped up, the white figure of a frantic nurse leaned out.

“Miss Darrell! Come quickly! Your grandfather!”

“Oh, no!”

Elizabeth’s clenched fist went up to her mouth, her eyes blinded with tears.

“Oh, no, no!”

She started forward. Jonas was already half-way across the garden to the back door. He took one more step, and came to an irresistible halt. Through the upstairs window, hoarse and weak and full of the authority of life, not death, he heard a familiar bellow:

“Wetherby! Where’s that black scoundrel? I want a drink!”