A bluebottle buzzed in through the open window of Hawkins’s little room under the roof over the Goulds’ two-car garage, and out through the door. I stood there, staring from Rosemary Bishop to the plump little man with the sparkling black eyes. Whether Rosemary expected that her simple statement that she had been with Jim Gould at one o’clock would be sufficient to clear him of the murder of his wife I don’t know. I do know that the only person in the hot stuffy little room over the garage who was particularly surprised was Sergeant Buck. He made an audible “Tch, tch!”
Colonel Primrose looked rather as if he had been expecting just something of the sort.
“Then . . . you both perjured yourselves?” he inquired casually.
“If you want to call it that.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head with a sort of kindly impatience.
“It isn’t what I want to call it, Miss Bishop,” he said. “It’s what the State’s Attorney will instantly see it is. You see, that makes it right up his alley.”
He hesitated a moment, looking at her queerly, and went on.
“Not so much that Jim Gould was with you when his wife was murdered—but that you both were with her. If you can’t prove most satisfactorily that you weren’t with her, I’m very much afraid you’ll be charged with murder.”
Rosemary’s fingers tightened on my arm.
“You sure got yourself out on a limb, miss!” Sergeant Buck’s harsh worried voice before he snapped back to rigid attention was curiously comforting. I didn’t look at Colonel Primrose. He’d already said that Sergeant Buck under his granite lantern-jawed exterior was a sentimental jelly that only needed a beautiful maiden in distress to make him fairly quiver. There was certainly no comfort or sympathy in his own voice. “It’s always a good plan, Miss Bishop, either to tell the truth in the beginning, or keep it to yourself to the very end. It depends on your position—in relation to the crime, of course. As it is now, I’m afraid Buck’s quite right. You’re definitely out on a limb, and Jim Gould’s out there with you.”
“In which case I’d better climb back before somebody saws it off,” Rosemary replied coolly.
“By all means, if you can, Miss Bishop,” Colonel Primrose said.
I didn’t look back at the window over the closed garage doors as Rosemary and I crossed through the hedge to my garden. I knew nevertheless that both men were watching us and that so far as Rosemary was concerned the limb they were on was already as good as crashing to the ground. I wondered, too, what Colonel Primrose thought when we didn’t go to the house but walked on slowly, down to the lane running along the top of the bank above the beach. Both of us, Rosemary and I, I think, wanted to be somewhere where nobody could listen through walls or from behind closed doors . . . and neither of us trusted Colonel Primrose or Mr. Parran the State’s Attorney further than we could see them, if indeed so far.
“I’m afraid I’m not very bright,” Rosemary said.
Her face was set and she was looking straight ahead of her, walking automatically, quite unaware, I think, of where she was going.
“As if it wasn’t foul enough for Jim already.—And it was me that made him swear he’d never tell anybody . . . just because I was . . .”
She didn’t finish. She stopped suddenly. “Oh, I’ve got to see him!” she broke out. “I’ve got to, Grace—now!”
Her dark eyes were almost wild with all sorts of mixed-up passionate emotions that I couldn’t begin to make out. But I did know very well that she couldn’t see Jim, just then; not without cutting off the limb with her own hands, so to speak.
“Look here, my dear,” I said. “From all I can see you’ve made a bad enough mess as it is without rushing to Jim and making it worse. If he goes off the deep end, you’ll sink—both of you. I take it you were with him last night.”
She nodded.
“I—”
But this time I stopped her myself.
“Look, darling. If you don’t tell me, I won’t know anything. And therefore I won’t have to tell Colonel Primrose anything. Because if I do know it, he’ll get it out of me whether I want to tell it or not.”
I suppose I was thinking all the time about the petals clutched in Sandra Gould’s dead fingers.
She shook her head. “Then he’ll figure out that the reason I didn’t tell you is that I’m trying to hide something. I think I’d rather tell you, so . . . so you can tell him.”
We had reached the white rail fence at the end of my land and were leaning against it, looking out over the blue Chesapeake. Suddenly Rosemary turned away.
“I don’t know why we came back . . . this place is so full of ghosts.”
I realized then what I’d forgotten through years of being so close to it. We were looking down at the inlet where they’d found Chapin Bishop one Sunday morning seven years before.
“I might be dead, walking back through all my life that’s worth remembering,” Rosemary said.
I saw then that it wasn’t Chapin she’d been thinking of, but something else that I wouldn’t know about. Something connected with Jim, and days of lost ecstasy.
“Just wait till George blurts out that last night I said I’d probably kill Sandra before I left here,” she said suddenly. Then she smiled a little. I stared at her. “I don’t know what it is about George that won’t let him keep his mouth shut. If it was just other people he got into a mess, you could understand it, but it’s mostly himself.”
I started to ask her if she had really said that, and changed my mind. If Rosemary didn’t want to talk about Sandra and Jim, I was glad enough—in spite of a certain natural curiosity.
“He hasn’t changed much, has he?” I asked.
“No. We thought after he got enough to live on he’d set up a bachelor establishment, but he didn’t. You know, he’s not very well. He’s got something that ought to come out, appendix or something—but somebody told him people act frightfully odd when they’re under ether or avertin and he actually won’t risk it. Now if that were Paul . . .”
She laughed, not very convincingly, and I realized that this was the point we were finally getting at.
“Do you suppose that if we gave Paul ether he’d tell us what he knows about Sandra?”
“Why don’t you just ask him?” I said.
Rosemary stared at the small white handkerchief she’d tied into a string of hard knots. “I did,” she said shortly.
“And what did he say?”
“He said he didn’t know her. That was yesterday when we were coming back from the club before dinner. I was going to let it go at that, because . . . well, after all, I couldn’t say, ‘That’s odd, because she certainly recognized you.’ But George could, of course. And did.”
She nodded, smiling a little in spite of herself.
“He said, ‘Isn’t that funny, because I could have sworn she recognized you when you first came in—don’t you remember, Paul?”
“What did Paul do?”
“Paul looked like a war cloud over the Bosporus. And George, having put his foot in it beautifully, tried to get it out.”
“And made it worse?”
“Much. He giggled and said but of course Sandra wasn’t the sort of girl a man would be likely to forget if he’d once even seen her, and Paul said, on the contrary, she was an extremely common type in the East, you saw them in every café and Palais de Danse in Asia. And so George, to help matters again, said wasn’t that funny, because that’s where Jim met her.”
Rosemary smiled, trying to hide the sudden tears in her eyes.
“I suppose it would have gone on indefinitely if Dad hadn’t told him to shut up.”
“But I don’t quite see what all that’s got to do with Paul.”
“Don’t you?”
She looked full at me for a moment, and looked away again.
“I suppose nobody would—but me,” she said after a long time. “Only, you see, he did know her. He must have, because later, you remember, she came up to him and said something about his going out with her for old times’ sake. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember he looked rather blank,” I said, but she shook her head.
“That’s it. It must have been something he doesn’t want to remember. And . . . well, I wouldn’t want to marry him, because I couldn’t ever forget. And . . . I’ve got to forget all about her, Grace—all about there ever having been anybody like her . . . if I’m going on living at all.”
She looked out across the water.
“It’s been pretty rotten. I don’t seem to have . . . managed things very well. And if . . . if she’s been in Paul’s life too—well, it looks as if she’s sort of an albatross round my neck.”
“You haven’t forgotten she’s dead, by any chance, have you, darling?”
“I guess a dead albatross is harder to get rid of than a live one,” she said. “You see, I asked him again on the way home about her. I suppose I was crazy, but . . . I can’t help it. He didn’t say anything at first. Then he said he thought he had known her, but he also thought we’d be a lot happier if we didn’t pry into each other’s past lives, or something of the sort. Let the dead past bury its dead, that sort of thing. Except, of course, that they don’t stay buried.”
We stood looking over the bay. It was almost deserted, the last straggling sailboats heading for the basin.
“She called him up while we were at dinner. Pearl recognized her voice. He came back from the phone quite angry. And, Grace, there’s no use beating about the bush. If she was murdered—and I guess that’s settled—then somebody must have done it.”
I looked at her, wondering. “Jim seems to be the favorite.”
I was sorry, because she drew back almost as if I’d struck her.
“Or do you really think it was Paul?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Grace. I’m terribly frightened. Because—well—Paul doesn’t have a Western notion about the sanctity of human life. They don’t in the East. There are such billions of people—one more or less doesn’t matter, especially if he isn’t in the ruling class, or . . . or happens to be a woman. I don’t mean he’s not . . . well, almost overcivilized He’s marvelous, and all that, Grace. But I’d be a fool if I didn’t see that he could be perfectly ruthless if . . . if he had to be. And if he’d come here, knowing her before, not expecting to see her . . . oh, don’t you see?”
I didn’t, quite. That is, I didn’t see whether she was desperately worried for fear it was Paul, or whether deep in her subconscious mind she wanted it to be Paul—so that it couldn’t be Jim. Whether she was like Lucy Lee, willing to toss one man to the wolves to save another.
“You aren’t seriously accusing the man you’re going to marry of murder, are you, darling?” I inquired as casually as I could. “Or are you going to marry him?”
She didn’t answer for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to.
“Last night I told him I wouldn’t marry him unless I knew about Sandra,” she said finally, with a twisted little smile. “I’m afraid he’ll tell me the same thing—after he sees the morning papers. I don’t think he’s the sort that’ll like the idea of my being out with Jim till half past one. Not when I’ve told the police I went to bed at half past twelve.”
I don’t know how long we would have stood there in the gradually lowering dusk, going over and over the same ground, Rosemary telling me nothing, and not knowing that I knew anything but what she had told me. As it turned out, she knew a great deal that she’d never tell. I’m not sure that it would have done much good, because the things she did let slip meant nothing to me, and didn’t later—not until I saw them neatly spliced together with others, and knotted and woven into one of the most deadly nets that ever trapped a jungle beast.
Because that was what Colonel Primrose had insisted that he was after from the beginning, no matter how fair-seeming and pleasingly gentle its face or how velvet his claws. It seemed a bit fanciful when he said it. It wouldn’t seem so now, when we know how terribly bloody those claws were, how narrow the road that some of us had walked with death.
While we were still standing there, looking out over the bay, a strange thing happened. We both heard someone coming along the lane from our left. That in itself wasn’t startling, although the lane isn’t used very much. The startling thing was that the man coming was obviously moving in an extremely stealthy fashion, coming on a little ways, stopping to give an elaborate pantomime of just standing there enjoying the evening mosquitoes and not really looking behind him at all.
He was doing that for the second time when we recognized Andy Thorp and saw that he had something inside his gray flannel jacket, pinioned under his arm by the simple act of having one hand in his trousers pocket and his elbow against his side. He stopped before he got as far as my gate and looked around again. Then he dived with extraordinary speed down the bank towards the beach. We heard a few rocks fall, and after a moment Andy appeared again. He brushed the dirt off his legs, emptied the sand and gravel out of his sneakers—using both hands—and strolled back the way he had come. He had not looked our way once, though I discovered later that we had been pretty well concealed behind the tall bunches of Queen Anne’s lace that grew along the lane and along the Goulds’ fence.
“What does that mean?” Rosemary whispered. It showed how furtive an air Andy Thorp had had, in spite of his nonchalance. Neither of us had spoken. In fact we’d practically held our breath.
“It means that he got rid of whatever he had under his arm,” I said.
Rosemary shivered.
“It’s getting cold. Let’s go up to the house,” she said, slipping her arm into mine. It was trembling. She glanced behind us several times on our way up the path, and when a large square figure loomed quite suddenly in front of us she started violently and gave a sharp frightened gasp before she saw who it was. I hadn’t realized what a highly nervous state she was in till then—although as a matter of fact the appearance of Sergeant Buck, standing at a sort of modified attention in the shadow of the crape myrtle hedge, had been a little abrupt.
“The Colonel ordered me to tell you ladies you’re not to stay out in the dark alone, ma’am,” he reported stiffly. Then he added, to Rosemary, “It ain’t safe, miss, not when a killer’s loose. Take it from me, the Colonel knows what he’s talking about. I been with him twenty-eight years, and he ain’t never been wrong yet.”
Then, with an almost imperceptible coming to present arms, he waited for us to pass, and fell in as a rear rank, and marched us up to the house in a sort of squads right. There was something very comic about it, but there was also something definitely reassuring, though it wasn’t at all dark yet. Rosemary had quit trembling, and she didn’t look back again.
“I guess I’ve got the jitters,” she said as we came up on the porch into what I erroneously had regarded as the privacy of my own home.
I had not counted on my guest. He was in the living room. More than that, Mr. Parran was with him, and also a hot-looking young man obviously from the city. They were around a table, bending over a small gray sheet of note paper. I didn’t have to get a very close look at it to see that it was Sandra’s suicide note. They had two other pieces of paper that they were apparently comparing it with.
“I hope we’re not intruding,” I said.
Colonel Primrose cocked his head down and peered up at me. He grinned.
“Not at all, Mrs. Latham. Come right in.”
He said it as cordially as later he invited me into his own yellow brick house on P Street in Georgetown.
“Awfully kind of you,” I said.
The quick amused flicker in the snapping black eyes disappeared instantly as he looked past me to Rosemary. She was just inside the door. Her face was like wax, and I had a sudden feeling that it had just turned that way, from something she had seen as we came in. I glanced around as unobtrusively as I could, but I couldn’t see through the large bulk of Law—so that whatever was on the table by the fireplace was out of my view. I hesitated, with Colonel Primrose watching me, to step deliberately around to where I could see.
Furthermore, it was perfectly apparent that they would be glad when we left. So we went—as far as the kitchen. Nobody has servants Sunday nights in April Harbor—they all go to church and we get our own suppers, usually everybody at somebody else’s house. I got Rosemary a glass of water. She drank some of it and put the glass down, staring at it on the table in front of her, opening and closing her fingers around it, watching the warm prints of her hot fingers against the cold surface fade out and disappear as the glass cooled.
“It’s funny to think they’re still there . . . and that they could make them come out again,” she said abstractedly, nodding towards the living room door.
“Is this an amateur lecture on fingerprints, Miss Bishop?” I asked. I was a little worried.
She didn’t pay any attention to me, just kept on making the prints on the frosty glass and watching them go out.
“Can they find them on cloth?” she asked.
“I think so.”
She emptied the glass into the sink and started to set it down when she stopped, listening.
Outside there was a faint scrabbling sound coming towards the door. It didn’t sound like an animal. We waited, a little breathless probably, until there emerged out of the dusk the stocky sober little figure of young Andy Thorp junior. His face was streaked where two big tears had been wiped resolutely towards his ears with dirty little fists. He blinked at us for a moment.
“Hello, Aunt Grace. Is Juyus here?” he said sturdily.
“No, Andy. He’s at church. Can I do something for you?”
He stood there irresolute, his four years weighing heavily on his blond little brow, determined not to cry.
“Juyus helped me find Daddy once, and I fought he’d help me again,” he said.
We stared at him for an instant. Then Rosemary sprang up and went over to him and picked him up in her arms.
“Oh, you lamb!” she said. “I’ll help you find him!”
She was weeping, but young Andy wasn’t.
“Don’t cry. Men don’t like people that cry all the time. That’s why Daddy doesn’t like . . .”
Some sixth sense propelled Rosemary out with him . . . or perhaps she’d seen the pantry door move. She and young Andy were gone just as Colonel Primrose cocked his head into the kitchen and followed it immediately.
“I wish you’d go away,” I said.
“I know you do.”
He smiled and shook his head sympathetically.
“But if I did, you’d be out hunting Andy too, and it isn’t safe.”
“Then you’d better send your sergeant after Rosemary.”
“No,” he said. “Rosemary’s safe enough.”
I stared at him, my mouth slightly open, I’m afraid. He grinned.
“Do you know, Mrs. Latham, you seem to me a curious example of a bright woman being almost abysmally stupid—or perhaps obtuse is a better word?”
“Meaning?”
He sat down and looked at me intently.
“Meaning that—like Gaul—all people who are around in an affair like this are divided into three parts. Those who are trying to find the murderer. The murderer himself, who is trying to hide. And thirdly, those well-intentioned—or not well-intentioned—people who are trying to hinder the investigation. So far, we’ve got Parran and myself in the first group. The second group is X—still unknown.”
“And . . . the third?”
“The third group is enormous, Mrs. Latham.”
His eyes sharpened, the amused twinkle in them quite gone. He leaned forward.
“In fact, Mrs. Latham, it includes—besides all the Goulds and the Bishops—such oddly assorted people as yourself and my Sergeant Buck.”
“Sergeant—”
“Exactly. I told you he had a heart of jelly. He also has a deep and abiding conviction that women are the root of all evil—and I’ve never seen him anything but a complete fool when he meets a pretty one in trouble. Now, I have a great weakness for Woman . . .”
“But not individual woman?”
He chuckled.
“Perhaps that’s putting it a little strong. I—”
There was a sudden elaborate clearing of a throat just outside, and the harshly disapproving face of Sergeant Buck appeared in the open window over the sink. I felt pretty silly, and also definitely annoyed, because it was perfectly obvious that Sergeant Buck was convinced I had the basest designs on his wretched colonel.