DIANE AND I MOVED AWAY FROM THE window and let the heavy cherry-red curtain slip back into place. Neither of us spoke. She went slowly across the room to the sofa and sat down, staring ahead of her into nothing, her face white. The dog watched her anxiously, made that soft little sound that spaniels do, and touched her knee with his paw. She put her hand down automatically and rubbed his ears.
The silence crept out of the corners and lay like a pall over the house. A log burned through in the middle slipped down from the andirons. I jumped as if a tree had fallen there. The spaniel raised his head, growling softly.
Diane looked at me and looked away again.
“I think I’d better go,” I said. I started to get up.
“No, please!” she said quickly. “Wait. I—I couldn’t—”
She didn’t finish it, but I knew what she meant. She was afraid to be there alone when her mother came in. It seemed a terrible thing, but I, for one, certainly didn’t blame her. I was waiting there, too, for the door to open and Mrs. Hilyard to come in, with a kind of cold dread paralyzing my will to talk and to seem casual and natural when she did come.
The spaniel made a rush for the door, suddenly, barking. I heard a key turn in the lock and the door open.
“Hello, Peter. Down, Peter. Don’t jump.” Mrs. Hilyard’s voice was short, and it sounded tired—or weary rather than tired, weary and strained.
“Diane?” she called, as if she weren’t sure the girl would be there.
Diane took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a second. “Yes, mother,” she said. It was spoken so naturally I could hardly believe it was the same girl. Then, as if preparing her, she added, “Grace is here, mother.”
There was a short silence. Then Mrs. Hilyard came across the hall to the library door. It was a little startling, seeing her there—not because she looked startling, but because she didn’t. Her long black covered-up dinner dress, the black Persian-lamb coat draped around her shoulders, the black lace scarf she carried in her hand had none of the sinister robed quality they’d had when she was pacing so slowly along the terrace. She looked as any bereaved woman would look, coming in from dining quietly with her married daughter, stopping in to speak before she went up to her room. Her face was very pale, with tired lines around the mouth and eyes, which was natural enough. There were only two things that weren’t right. One was the red lipstick, freshly and hastily put on with a not very steady hand. The other was a kind of inner conflict that seemed to go beyond the plain ordinary irritation that showed as she came into the room and that all her casualness couldn’t quite conceal.
“I’m so glad you came,” she said. The muscles of her face moved in the orthodox pattern of a social smile. “I was worried about Diane being here by herself. Did you just decide to come?”
“I called her up and asked her,” Diane answered for me. “And I did call Stanley. You see, I am an obedient child. He thinks it’s mumps he’s got. The doctor’s got him incommunicado.”
“I didn’t insist on your calling him,” her mother said a little curtly. “I thought it would be a nice thing for you to do, when he’s been so thoughtful.”
Diane, it was plain, didn’t know what had happened to her one-time count. I couldn’t tell whether Mrs. Hilyard did or not, though I rather doubted it. It struck me, too, that this was the first time Diane had mentioned him all day. He certainly didn’t seem to occupy much of her mind.
I realized just then that Mrs. Hilyard was looking across Diane’s head at the window. Her hand moved quickly as she steadied herself against the edge of the table by her.
“What have you two been doing?” she asked pleasantly.
“Just talking,” Diane said. “How are Mr. and Mrs. Eaton?”
Mrs. Hilyard flared up like a piece of oiled paper with a match touched to it. “Diane! I’ve asked you a hundred times to stop calling them that, and I want you to do it! You act as if they were no relation to you whatever! And get that dog off the sofa! I’m sick and tired of——”
She stopped abruptly, gripping the side of the table. Her hand in the half circle of light under the green shade impressed me again as it had that first day. It was almost shockingly determined. She dropped it to her side again and took a deep breath. Diane was looking at her calmly and without surprise.
“I beg your pardon, both of you,” Mrs. Hilyard said unsteadily. “I’m … nervous and upset. I think I’d better go upstairs. . . . You’ll excuse me, please, Mrs. Latham.”
“I didn’t mean to irritate you, mother,” Diane said. “I just call them that for fun. . . . You get down, Peter.”
She gave the dog a little push off the sofa.
“Well, stop it, please,” her mother said shortly. . . . “Good night, Mrs. Latham.”
I heard her heels clicking sharply on the stairs, and her door close. Peter, the dog, jumped up on the sofa again and settled down.
Diane stood up suddenly and stood there looking down at a small wadded piece of paper lying on the floor by the table where her mother had been standing. She must have had it in her hand and dropped it when she became aware of the window so abruptly. Diane went over and picked it up. I watched her unravel it. She looked at it for a minute and handed it to me.
It was a cheaply printed leaflet, of the sort that are sometimes left in mailboxes by wandering sectarians who believe the Day of Judgment is at hand. This one was on that subject, with verses from the Old Testament and Revelation to prove it. “Who is that man, Diane?” I asked.
She went to the door, listened for a moment and came back. “Mother said we weren’t to talk about him,” she said slowly. “I don’t know why. He never tried to talk to me. Once he handed me one of those things, about the wicked flourishing like a green bay tree or something. I suppose he’s sort of cracked. I came in one night, and mother and father were having an awful row about him. I didn’t ask anything and they didn’t tell me.”
She stood there looking down into the fire. I got up and put my coat on. She watched me unhappily.
“I hate to leave you,” I said.
“Not so much as I hate being left.” She smiled suddenly. “I’ll be all right. I just wish I didn’t have to go to bed. Maybe I won’t.”
“You go to bed, and go to sleep,” I said.
She picked the spaniel up and carried him in her arms to the door with me. I waved back at them as I started down the street. They looked almost unbearably alone and pathetic, standing there under the fanlight in that silent shadowy street. If they’d really been alone I don’t think I should have been as unhappy about leaving them there.
It took me hours to get to sleep. Every time I dropped off I waked with a start. A tall black figure kept walking slowly across some kind of ghostly corridor of my dreams. I could open my eyes and still see those three white chairs, empty and motionless, in a bleak and distorted garden that was half my own and half a terrifying wasteland with water all around it.
Suddenly I woke again, the telephone buzzing in my ear. I reached for it quickly.
“Grace, it’s Diane. She’s gone out again—mother, I mean. I heard her go down the stairs and close the front door. She changed her dress, but she hasn’t been in bed at all. What can I do?”
Her voice was so sharp with alarm, and I was in such a state myself that I’d have completely misunderstood her if she hadn’t gone on. “Grace! What if something happens to her?”
That had me stopped, frankly. The idea that Mrs. Hilyard might be a victim instead of an active agent hadn’t occurred to me. Nor had I thought Diane had the kind of faith in her mother that made her blind to all the implications of the scene on the terrace. But apparently she did, and it wasn’t my business to try to disillusion her. So, instead of saying, “I think your mother can look after herself very well, my dear,” I said, “I’d go back to bed, if I were you, and try to go to sleep again. She must know what she’s doing. Or come over and stay with me.”
I could almost see her shaking her head.
“I can’t leave her here alone,” she said. “She’d be upset. I’ll just wait.”
“If she doesn’t come back pretty soon, call me and we’ll do something,” I said.
I looked at the clock. It was quarter to two. And it was eight o’clock when I woke up again. Lilac was putting the papers on my bed. She went over to put down the windows.
Among her other functions, Lilac acts as a spiritual rheumatic joint. I can tell what the weather’s going to be in our household for the next day by those first few minutes in the morning. Cloudy, with the glass falling rapidly, was the barometric reading now, as she went out, got my tray and put it across my lap without so much as a moody mutter.
“That chair,” she said then, abruptly.
“What chair?”
“That chair she’s tryin’ to make pretense came apart when somebody set on it. Boston, he say that man broke it. He come out of there blood-mad, Boston say. Shoutin’ he come after some kind of pie, and ain’ nobody goin’ to keep him from gettin’ it.”
“What man, Lilac?” I asked patiently. I’ve never known whether she thinks I really know about all the people and things she’s talking about and am just trying to make pretense I’m being obtuse.
“The one that came first,” she said. “He come with another man, tryin’ to make pretense he’s a lawyer. Who ever heard of a lawyer goin’ roun’ people’s houses bus’in’ up the furniture? Wantin’ some kind of pie.”
I understood, vaguely. “Pierorities, maybe?” I said.
“Tha’s it. I ain’ never heard talk of it till jus’ recently.”
There didn’t seem to be any point trying to explain, so I let it go. I was much more interested in the headlines screaming up at me from the front pages anyway.
DEAD OPM CHIEF HAD RESIGNED, I read.
“That man come out in th’ hall blood-mad,” Lilac said. “The one that called hisself a lawyer tryin’ to hang on to his coattails. But he go back an’ slam the door shut, an’ that’s when the chair got smashed. Boston, he peekin’ ’round the staircase, don’ know what goin’ to happen next. People comin’ in an’ goin’ out, rarin’ around sayin’ they is an’ they ain’. Boston says he ain’ never worked for them kind of people in his life.”
“Well, I wouldn’t talk about it,” I said.
“Ah ain’ goin’ to talk ’bout it. Ah don’ want nothin’ to do with them kind of people.”
I poured a cup of coffee and picked up the paper:
It was revealed late last night that Lawrason Hilyard, whose body was found in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal yesterday morning, had sent his resignation to the Office of Production Management. It was postmarked 10:30 and sent from a Georgetown branch of the post office. At OPM it was said that Mr. Hilyard’s reasons given were ill health and the pressure of private business. No further details were made public. It is believed, however, that the police regard the resignation as evidence to support the theory of suicide held by the family. When questioned about it at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Carey Eaton last night, Mrs. Hilyard refused to comment, except to say she had known for some time that her husband had intended to resign his OPM position. She did not know he had actually done so. He had no enemies, Mrs. Hilyard said. Her son-in-law, Carey Eaton, confirmed her statements. The family would leave Washington as soon as the necessary arrangements were made, he said.
The next column was headed, SEARCH FOR MYSTERY MAN CONTINUES. It said:
The police revealed late last night that the search for a man known to have been seen near the dead OPM branch chief’s mansion on Prospect Street was still being prosecuted. As descriptions of the man given by neighbors and by the servants in the Hilyard household vary considerably, the police are understood to be working out a composite picture similar to that constructed in the Bruno Hauptmann case, which will be issued shortly. It is believed the man may have followed the metal magnate when he left his Prospect Street residence to take his dog for a walk. He was last seen standing at the end of the Georgetown University campus wall across the street from the Hilyard house at about eight o’clock last night. He was found——
It went on with a rehash of yesterday’s details.
A bulletin in heavier type in the middle of the page caught my eye. It was headed POLICE QUESTION UNIDENTIFIED MAN. My heart chilled as I read it.
A man whose name was not revealed and whose identity the police are shielding for the present is known to have appeared at headquarters yesterday afternoon. (Continued on page thirteen.)
I turned the pages quickly.
It was learned that he had gone through a police line-up and had been identified by Joseph Bascombe, a waterman, as the person he had seen running along the towing path a little before midnight Tuesday. Mr. Hilyard, it has been authoritatively stated, died at about 11:35 that night. The police are trying to decide whether the bullet wound in his head was self-inflicted or whether he was a victim of violence.
Bascombe told reporters he was returning from getting a glass of beer on M Street. He had crossed the bridge and was going down to board his oyster boat when he heard someone running. He went up in time to see a man run up the steps of the canal bridge. The man wore a gray overcoat and no hat. It is assumed that this is the man whose hat the police were hunting for until a late hour yesterday. A hat found at the scene (see picture of dog, page ten) was tentatively identified at the time by Miss Diane Hilyard, daughter of the dead dollar-a-year man, but turned out not to be Lawrason Hilyard’s.
Bascombe stated that he identified the hatless man in the gray overcoat in the police line-up. Reporters were unable to learn his name. It is believed, however, that he was known to the dead metal king. Reporters questioning Bascombe were told that no one else was on the towing path at the assumed time of Mr. Hilyard’s death. Bascombe heard a car start, but made no effort to investigate. He went directly to the police when he learned that a body had been found. He had not seen the early papers, having slept until noon on his boat on the river.
I sat there, my coffee untouched, getting stone-cold, staring stupidly down at the blurred type. My eyes focused again gradually and I looked at the picture under the article. It was gaily headed, NEED A HAT? and it showed a grinning policeman standing beside an enormous pile of male headgear of every possible description. There must have been nearly a hundred of them. WHAT WASHINGTON DOES WITH ITS CAST-OFF LIDS, it said underneath.
Police combing the canal and its environs found all these. It’s an ill wind, as the old saying goes. They’re going to be cleaned, blocked and sold for the benefit of Bundles for Bluejackets. A well-known local cleaner and dyer offered his services free as his contribution. First they’ll be shown to Miss Diane Hilyard to see if she can identify the one she tossed out of her car window at the foot of Foxhall Road.
I turned the pages, glancing mechanically at the items I always read. At one of the gossip columns I stopped and looked again. It asked:
What’s happened to Stanley Woland, who gave up his title and changed his name to become a democratic American? Rumors connecting him with a lovely heiress fell flat yesterday, and other rumors cropped up all over the place. An early phone call revealed he’d left town for an extended sojourn. Later inquirers were told he hadn’t left town. Truth? Stanley has the mumps. Fate seems to be dogging the ex-glamour boy. It’s particularly unkind just now when Stanley’s well-known sympathetic manner might well have turned the trick.
I put the paper down. That column seemed so unnecessarily cruel that it was almost indecent. I felt beastly sorry for Stanley. I didn’t want to see him marry Diane, but I didn’t want him ruined either. And of course he simply had to stay in.
However, I thought, if he was on a spot, it was a lot better than the spot Bowen Digges was on.