HE LEFT THE HOSPITAL that afternoon. Alex had stood by while he dressed, his one eye watching every movement.
“I’ll bet that leg’s bad again, sir,” he said. “You aren’t fooling me any.”
“Leg! I wouldn’t know I had a leg. I’ll be going back soon, Alex. I have a little business to transact first. Then I’m off.”
“What sort of business?” Alex inquired suspiciously. “Any more murders around?”
“This is different,” Dane said, carefully knotting his tie. “Very, very different.”
He was sober enough when he reached Crestview. Tim admitted him, a grinning Tim who reached for his cap with a differential air, and spoiled it by clutching him by the arm.
“What the hell’s cooking?” he said. “You’re a tightmouthed son of a so-and-so, but if you’re letting me scrub pots while you have the time of your life running over the country and getting shot—”
Dane smiled.
“The pot scrubbing’s over, Tim.”
“Well, well! I suppose Floyd killed the girl. He’s the only one I haven’t suspected.”
“I’ll tell you later. Where’s Miss Spencer?”
“Locked in her room. Maggie’s been up half a dozen times with coffee. She won’t let her in.”
“I’ll go up. She may see me.”
He went up the stairs. He wasn’t limping at all. In the upper hall he stopped at the door to the yellow room and looked in. It was a pretty room, he thought. The baseboard had been nailed back in place, the mulberry curtains were in neat folds, and the fragment of candle had been replaced by a fresh one, in case a storm shut off the electric current.
He glanced back along the hall. The linen closet had been repainted. It gleamed fresh and white in the light from the patio, and in the patio itself the pool had been repainted and filled. It shone like a bit of the sky overhead, where a bomber was droning along, as if to remind him that there was still a war, and he had a place in it.
He moved along to Carol’s door and rapped.
“It’s Jerry,” he said. “I have to see you.”
He thought she hesitated. Then the key turned and she confronted him. She looked exhausted, but she was not crying. She stood aside to let him enter, but she made no movement toward him.
“I have to thank you for a great deal,” she said quietly. “You’ve saved Greg, even if you had to kill Colonel Richardson to do it.”
He looked puzzled.
“You told him about Don, didn’t you? People don’t die of joy. You called him from the hospital, and told him.”
“I couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know, Carol,” he said gravely.”
“What does that mean? If Don came here and killed that girl—”
“Listen, my dear,” he said. “I’m feeling pretty low just now. I’ve made a mess of a lot of things, and I don’t like the way the case has turned out. But remember this. I asked you today to withhold judgment. I needed something I didn’t have at that time. Now I’m asking a question. Suppose Don is innocent, Carol?”
“You don’t mean that Greg—”
“Not Greg. No. I’m wondering how you feel about Don, now that he is alive. You cared for him once. Now he is more than alive. He is fighting like a man. You can be proud of him. And the affair with Marguerite—can’t you understand that? The hunger a man feels for a woman when he’s been cut off from them for months, or years. He was young, and he’d been in training for a long time when he met her. He didn’t know she was a—well, what she was.”
“Are you defending him?”
“I am. He is even braver than you know, my dear. You see, he confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. That takes courage. Perhaps that changes things with you—and him.”
“I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t understand,” she said steadily. She sat down, looking lost and unhappy. “Why would he do such a thing?”
He told her then, moving around the room as he did so. Sometimes stopping in front of her, again looking out the window, where the bomber was circling lazily overhead and the empty harbor with its emerald islands lay below. Once he stopped and offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head.
“Go on,” she said steadily. “I want to know it all. It’s time I did, isn’t it?”
When he had finished she sat very still. Nevertheless, except that she had lost color, she had taken it better than he had even hoped.
“It’s hard to realize,” she said, rather bleakly. “If it was anyone but the colonel. He was so kind, Jerry, so—gentle.”
“He was a man,” he reminded her. “Very much a man, my dear. When that little tramp tried to bribe him he struck at her. I’m afraid I’d have done more than that.”
She was trying to think things out, from this new angle.
“Then it was the colonel who scared Lucy, and shot Elinor. I—I don’t believe it.”
“Not the colonel, my dear. Don shot Elinor. I don’t think he meant to, any more than Mr. Ward intended to hit me. It was an accident. He was trying to get away.”
But he did not tell her, would never tell her, what he knew now was the real tragedy of that night; of Don, anxious for a last sight of his father, slipping down from Pine Hill in the rain to peer through a window and see the colonel, standing in full view in that lighted room. Or of the heartbreaking thing that had followed, the colonel starting up the lane after him and Don desperately trying to escape.
“What would happen if his father saw him? Can you imagine the Colonel keeping that news to himself. And what became of Don’s statement to the Wards that he had killed the girl? Was he to tell his father that? The man who had done it without knowing it, and who had a bad heart anyhow. What did Elinor Hilliard matter, in a situation like that?
“He probably came across her unexpectedly,” he said, “and he was pretty jumpy. Don’t ask me where he got the gun, my darling. I don’t know. It may have been Nathaniel Ward’s. Don never meant to be taken alive. Be sure of that.”
He sat down near her, watching her, wondering at the fortitude she had shown for the past month. Perhaps it was the same courage which had won Greg his decoration. Whatever it was he knew that he loved her more than he loved anything else in the world. It was not time to tell her so, however. Not so long as the bewildered look was still in her eyes.
“I still don’t know why she went out at all that night, Jerry.”
“I rather imagine,” he said quietly, “she had decided to do away with the things on the hill. Too much was happening; Lucy’s death the night before, for instance.”
“Why did he come back, Jerry? It seems so strange. To hide out, up there on the hill—”
“Well, look, my dear. He was trying to protect his father. He waited for the inquest, but if Lucy knew anything she didn’t tell it. Nevertheless he knew Marguerite too well to trust her. If she had told Lucy she was to see the colonel that night Lucy might break down, under pressure.
“So he saw Lucy that night at the hospital, and because she thought he meant to kill her, or perhaps because she thought he was a ghost, she—well, she died of fright. That’s all I know, and it doesn’t matter now. What does matter, my darling, is that it’s over. All over.”
She cried a little then, not for the colonel, at peace at last, not even—he realized gratefully—for Don, doing his man’s work in a man’s war. Some of it was relief, but there was grief, too; for the colonel, for Lucy, and for Joe now sitting alone in his empty house. For Mrs. Ward. And even, he thought wryly, for Marguerite herself, because she, too, had been young and had wanted to live. He let her alone, beyond giving her what he termed a perfectly good shoulder to weep on.
“More beautiful women than you have sobbed on it,” he said. “But to hell with them. You’re my girl now. Or are you?”
She smiled after a minute or two her old smile, which had so endeared her to him from the beginning.
“I’ll be good to you, darling,” he said gravely. “I’ve got a job to do, but I’ll be coming back. I’d like to know I was coming back to you. Men have lived because of that, you know,” he added. “Because they had someone to come back to.”
“Why do I have to wait?” she asked. “I’m tired of being the spinster in the family. Or are you really asking me to marry you at last?”
He drew her into his arms, the muscular arms which had been trained to kill in many wartime ways, but which could also be gentle and protective.
“I’m asking you to marry me,” he said. “Here and now. Before I go. Will you?”
“Tim gives you excellent references.”
“Never mind Tim. Or Alex either. I’m not marrying them. Will you, darling?”
“Of course,” she said. “I thought you’d never really say it.”
There was nothing saturnine about his smile as he held her ever closer. He had forgotten his job. He had even forgotten his leg, which was fine. He put his full weight on it, and without warning it gave a jump and began to ache furiously. He released her with a grunt
“Hell!” he said. “We may even have a little time for a honeymoon, sweetheart.” And sat down abruptly on the nearest chair.