GEORGINE MCKINNON had reached home about a quarter of twelve, having been offered a ride by a neighbor whom she had luckily met downtown. She came toward her house from the rear, down the cross-street where the friend had dropped her, feeling at peace with the world.
This neighborhood seemed almost deserted, too, at this time of day, but it was a different sort of quiet from that of the evil alley in San Francisco. These windows gave back the sun as blankly, though from cleaner panes; but you knew that in one house a woman might be fixing the sandwiches for a tea party that afternoon, and in another a new baby was perhaps getting its first home bath from a mother divided between ecstasy and mortal terror. A nice, middle-class neighborhood; she would not ask for anything better as long as she lived. Even the man fixing the engine of his delivery truck, at the corner of Cragmont, looked pleasant. He glanced up at her with a cheerful grin, as she went down the narrow path to her own kitchen door.
She had forgotten her keys in the morning’s wild rush. It had seemed to her that she’d put them in her purse the last time she used them, but the way her brain was working these days, she might have moved them a dozen times since. Now, if only Todd had forgotten to put that chair under the knob— oh, good luck, he had. A slight jiggle and heave got the door open and she walked in and threw her hat on a chair with a sigh of relief.
It was wonderful to be in her own house, alone, in the full knowledge that the police were taking care of any disturbing matters. Georgine found a piece of stale gingerbread in the cake box and ate it, trying out her new inlay, which performed its duties admirably. She glanced idly around her, noting that Todd had done a nice job on the breakfast dishes—even to emptying the sugar bowl and washing it; she had observed some crystals stuck on its rim that morning, but it was shining and empty now. The left-over coffee in the Silex was gone. No matter, she’d make some more when she came downstairs… He’d even drawn the shade at the south window, against the blinding sunlight.
She strolled up to the bathroom for a better look at the inlay, and did a little work with toothbrush and dental floss. The cabinet needed to be straightened up, but that too could wait. There were Todd’s vitamin capsules far up on the top shelf, violently red in their glass jar. Better put them down lower where he’d be sure to remember to take them. They looked smaller than she’d remembered, somehow; a funny effect for glass to make…
The bathroom was built out on a little jog over the kitchen, with a window in the jog. She looked out and saw something that caught her attention: the clothesline whirligig cast a shadow on the hedge, and that shadow showed that there were clothes hanging on it. Had the Manfreds come home, then, without notice? And was their post-vacation wash of such magnitude that they’d had to borrow her lines? She craned out a little farther. Her own big clothes-basket was there on the grass, with a few white pieces still in it.
She’d run over and see, she thought, as soon as she’d changed her shoes. She was going down the hall to the closed door of her own room, when the telephone rang downstairs.
What Todd had to say was just a little unnerving, she thought, talking to him with her eyes on the dim upper hall. Just how did that theory about Cass tie in with the wash on the line? Yes, she’d get out—
“Good-by, Georgine,” said Todd at the other end of the line. As the words struck her ear she saw the light in the upper hall gradually change, brightening as if a door had silently swung open: a door that gave on a southern room—her bedroom. “Todd!—There’s someone here!” She called into the transmitter, and in the middle of the sentence heard the click of his receiver going down.
Georgine kept the telephone off and wildly jiggled the bar. If the operator would only answer, she could yell “Police!” and the law would be notified—but it took them long seconds to realize you were trying to get them again—
A flying figure swept round the head of the stairs, and down them. Georgine gave one muffled scream, backed away still holding the telephone, and found herself facing Cass Johnson.
“Don’t, don’t scream, please,” Cass was saying in a hoarse voice of entreaty. “I won’t hurt you, you ought to know that, and she—she can’t hurt anyone now.”
Georgine was dumb and motionless from sheer surprise; only for the space of a few seconds, during which someone quacked from the telephone, “Operator. May I help you?— Operator.” Cass put a quick hand on the bar, breaking the connection. “No, don’t! Please, wait just a minute, let me tell you—why, Georgine, you look scared to death! Oh—you didn’t think it was me, did you—that’s been doing all this? I didn’t believe she could fool you, too!” She reached over and took the handset from Georgine’s almost unresisting grasp. “It’s all right. Ryn’s upstairs in your room. She’s killed herself.”
“She—what?”
Cass nodded. Her gray eyes were swollen from crying, but their gaze was steady. “She took all those seconal capsules of hers, about an hour ago.”
“She can’t have died right away!” Georgine found herself stammering. “It—it would take—”
“No, she’s not dead yet, but she’s going to be left to die in peace, do you hear me?”
“Get away from that telephone,” said Georgine, suddenly angry. “This is a police matter, and the police are looking all over hell’s half-acre for you, don’t you realize that?”
“I won’t get away,” said Cass. She saw Georgine starting to move toward her; she grabbed up the telephone and banged the transmitter hard on the corner of the table. Something made a crushing sound, and a fragment of vulcanite bounced on the floor. “There, you can’t talk through it now. I won’t let anyone interfere with this!”
The door was three long strides away from the telephone table. Georgine’s hand was on the knob when she felt Cass close behind her, pressing something cold and hard behind her ear. She jerked her head around; it was Todd’s gun.
“I don’t want to shoot you,” Cass was saying, breathing hard, “but I’ll have to if you try to get help. Can’t you see? She’s my sister, I don’t care what she’s done, they’re not going to take her to—I guess it would be the—the asylum. She’s chosen her own way out and I’m going to see that she succeeds.”
“You!” said Georgine furiously, “forcing your way in here and breaking our telephone, and stealing Todd’s gun to threaten me with! He’ll be here in twenty minutes, himself; he knows you’re around here, and you can’t get away with any lies. Ryn upstairs—I don’t even believe that!”
“You can come up and see,” said Cass in a weary voice. She motioned Georgine ahead of her to the stairs. “I’m sorry, it makes me sick to have to do it this way, but—I can’t do anything else. If Todd comes I think he’ll see I’m right. I’ll stall him, anyway.”
Georgine, torn by doubt, an uneasy feeling that Cass might be telling the truth and be justified, and a frank terror that the gun would go off, was mounting step by step with her head over her shoulder. She saw the face that had once been roundly pretty, now ravaged by emotion, the dark hair loose and disheveled, the smart dress crumpled as if it had not been changed in several days. “I was a fool to run away,” Cass was continuing drearily, “but I—I didn’t expect her to do anything like what she did to Joan, and when I found out I lost my head. Oh, Georgine, I hope it’s over soon for her.”
They turned the corner. A flood of sunlight came through the door of the big bedroom, spilling out from the cube of light in the room itself. It seemed as if the very brightness should wake the still, colorless figure on the bed, the warmth revive the body whose hand, when Georgine touched it, was so softly cold; but Ryn Johnson lay there unmoving, her long lashes black against bluishly transparent cheeks.
“Cass,” Georgine cried out, “I can’t just stand by and let your sister die!” She felt for Ryn’s heart, and discerned a slow throb under her fingers. “Why!” She turned about, aghast— “How do I know she really—”
“You see?” Cass said. “I was foolish enough to run, I thought everything would tell against me, and now—I suppose I won’t even be believed about this. But it’s true, Georgine.”
“But when did you run?”
“Wednesday morning. Ryn had—had come in late the night before, when she thought I was asleep. I heard her sort of muttering to herself, but she’d got so she resented my trying to take care of her, so I didn’t go in. I knew something had happened at the greenhouse, and the next morning I got up as soon as it was light and—and went up and looked through the peep-hole. And then I knew, surely, that she’d meant to—to lay it onto me, and I was scared.” She looked down at the still figure. “—I can’t stay here and tell you, not over her. Couldn’t we go into the next room or somewhere?”
Georgine assented, in a sort of daze. She looked from Ryn, who was dying, to Cass, who still held the revolver. Who could tell the right thing to do? If she screamed and got shot for her pains, would there be anyone near to hear her? And Todd was on the way…
Cass locked the door of the big bedroom behind her, and left the key outside. The key to Barby’s room was still in the lock as it had been when Ryn had been released that morning, but she made no move to shut herself and Georgine in, which was something of a reassurance. She sat down on the bed and raised her shadowed gray eyes again. “I just—wandered around all that day, I didn’t know where to go.”
“Why didn’t you go to your aunt, at once?”
Cass’s eyes glowed suddenly. “I’d never let her know what had been happening to me. I would have been tortured rather than tell her! I love her, can’t you see that? And you know how she is, she would have got it out of me, and—never mind. I couldn’t go to her. When it got dark I realized I had to have some place to sleep. I’d seen where you left the key to that house next door, it was easy enough to steal it and then put it back when I’d got the place open—and when you were all asleep. But Ryn knew where I’d be likely to come. This morning she came back here, she’d stolen your house keys out of your bag so it would look all right if anyone was following her—you know, not having to break in or anything—and—and she thought someone was watching, there was a man—well, it doesn’t matter, but she hung out the clothes in your yard so it would seem natural for her to be going back and forth. And she came and called me.”
Georgine, still in a daze of doubt and indecision, was about two sentences behind Cass. A man, she thought, watching—oh, heavens, it must have been the one who was fixing the truck! The thought seemed to raise her bodily off the slipper chair and launch her toward the window—
“Sit down!” Cass snapped, and the gun was pointed.
Georgine obeyed slowly, her skin prickling with the realization that Cass really would shoot to protect her sister. Or was it protection? Was the victim of a murder gradually dying in the next room, while she sat here?
“And I ducked over here,” Cass went on with a choking sigh. “She said she—she knew it wasn’t any use, but she didn’t want to be alone when she died, she wanted me with her. And she emptied the powder out of all those capsules—looking at me—and put it in some coffee with lots of sugar so she could get it down, and—drank it.”
“You let her—you knew what she was doing?”
“Of course I knew! I thought of the same thing she did, of a trial, and a commitment—that would be the best thing she could hope for, wouldn’t it? I thought of Aunt Chloe, and of myself. Of course I knew. We sat and talked while the stuff took effect, and then she came up here and lay down on your bed. She’s been asleep for two hours, and in another hour they won’t be able to save her, I should think. There must have been twenty grains of that seconal. Think, Georgine—she’s just sleeping slowly into death. If it were Todd, or your Barby, wouldn’t you do anything to let her go that way?”
“Three hours—” Georgine heard herself murmuring aloud.
“She hasn’t an idiosyncrasy like mine,” said Cass matter-of-factly. “If I’d taken all that I’d be dead by now. Until I heard her telling, calling to me from downstairs in the next-door house, what she meant to do, I was afraid to answer, to admit I was there; I wondered if she meant to try killing me with it. But I believed her when she said she’d given up, she’d tried too many ways, and then Joan got in the way and she knew they would get her for that one. She thought Todd suspected. And this was the only way. —Oh, Ryn!” she said suddenly, on a cry of desolation.
“Cass, you can’t do this.” Georgine tried once more, desperately. “It’s like an execution. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Oh, yes I do!” The gray eyes filled with light, and Cass’s head went high. “And nobody’s going to stop me!”
From the lower floor of the house came the sound of a door opening, of firm steps on the floor. A beautiful clear penetrating voice called, “Casilda! Dorinda! Where are you?”
Cass Johnson’s face had changed at the first syllable, and her head swung quickly from side to side. The revolver was hanging at the end of an arm suddenly gone limp. Georgine pulled herself together and leaped for it, but Cass retained just enough of a grip so that it could not be immediately wrested from her—and in the doorway Mrs. Majendie said, “Just what are you doing? Cass, behave yourself. Give that gun to me.”
Georgine saw it relinquished with a sense of relief that was near to collapse. Her knees gave way and she sat down abruptly on the slipper chair.
“Where is your sister?” said Mrs. Majendie.
Cass put both hands over her face and turned away, stumbling against the bed.
“She’s in the next room, Mrs. Majendie,” said Georgine thickly. “Cass says she’s dying of an overdose of seconal. I—I’ll get help now; she wouldn’t let me, before.”
Chloe gave her a long penetrating look. “No, Mrs. McKinnon,” she said, “don’t call anyone. There are a few things I must know first.”
“What—how did you happen to come?”
“Your husband telephoned me to say that I should probably find both my nieces here, and that one of them was a murderer. He didn’t say which one. I am going to find out.”
Her big hand, holding the weapon, was at her side. She reached out the other one and shook Cass gently by the shoulder. “Look at me, my child.”
As if against her will Cass turned. Her hands came down from her pallid face and her eyes met Chloe Majendie’s. “She took the seconal herself, Aunt Chloe,” she whispered.
“You were with her? You might have called me, Cass.”
“I—I didn’t want you—to know.”
Chloe looked at her for a silent moment. Then she said with infinite gentleness, “Why should Ryn want to die?”
Cass’s breath caught in a sob, but her eyes were unwavering. “Aunt Chloe, you mustn’t ask that.”
“Yes. I must.”
“It’s the Beyond-Truth,” Cass whispered. “About—about marrying.”
“What do you mean, my dear? Not that she wanted to marry, and was afraid to?”
“No. No, don’t you see? It forbids world marriage, doesn’t it? And neither of us ever met a man who’d agree to that, so when a—a courtship began to look serious it meant—oh, Aunt Chloe, that poisoning, Ryn’s illness during the summer—that was when Hugh was still after me, and I couldn’t make up my mind—and then David began—”
“Cass, you must speak more plainly. Are you telling me that your sister was jealous of you and tried to kill herself then?”
“Not—not quite. She meant it to look as if I had been poisoning her; and then—if I accepted David—I’d die, and it would look as if I’d been caught in my own trap, and no one would ever suspect her.”
The grizzled brows drew together. “This—in order that she might have David Shere herself?”
Georgine had begun to inch unobtrusively toward the door. They were both absorbed, she thought. She could get out and yell from the bathroom window—
“Stay where you are, Mrs. McKinnon,” said Chloe Majendie, with a slight gesture of the hand holding the gun. Georgine stopped as if she had actually been shot at.
“She didn’t want him. Oh, no, Aunt Chloe. She was sure that neither of us should ever make a world marriage, she wanted us to keep on being together always; but if I—showed signs of breaking away, it was better for me to die.”
“My dear Cass, don’t tell me that Ryn was still living up to everything that the—original rules of the Beyond-Truth taught or forbade.”
Cass nodded vehemently. She had not once taken her heavy eyes from her aunt’s, but now it seemed as if they were not focused. “Yes, everything, the fasts and the forbidden foods, and the marriage laws.”
Georgine drew a quick breath and was on the verge of speaking, but the old lady broke in. “But it forbids the taking of human life!”
“Not if it could be construed as the Hand of God. It would be, if it even looked as if she were innocent. And then, how else could she get the money?”
“What money?” The beautiful old voice was harsher now than Georgine had ever heard it.
“My share of the estate. We’d already had Bell’s, of course, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Enough for what, my dear child?”
“Why, to live the way you do, to have everything you have,” said Cass simply.
Mrs. Majendie let go of her shoulder and stepped back a pace. Her weather-beaten face seemed all at once to develop new lines, as if the flesh beneath it had fallen away, and her eyelids drooped. “God forgive me,” she said in a very low tone. “So Joan had to die—I should have listened to her when she told me that one of you was going the wrong way. And you tell me now that Ryn is dying because her plans failed?”
“Yes, Aunt Chloe,” Cass said. “You wouldn’t try to stop her from that, would you?”
Chloe Majendie opened her eyes full, and bent their piercing gaze on her niece. “No, not for a moment,” she said ringingly, “if I were sure that she was the one whose plans failed. Cass, do you realize that everything you’ve told me about her motive might apply to you?”
Cass fell back a step, a hand over her mouth, her gray eyes glinting wildly. “Me? No!” she said explosively from behind the hand. “You can’t think that!”
“I’m not sure of it. How can I be? But I must be sure, before any more time is lost.” The old lady’s head bent a little. “Your story sounds like the truth. God help me, I can believe it. But—”
“Mrs. Majendie,” said Georgine urgently, “it’s the Beyond-Truth! It’s the kind of truth that they tell at the Colony, that isn’t quite a lie, but is twisted to suit them—the kind Miss Godfrey used to tell when she got that queer shine in her eyes. Haven’t you watched Cass’s eyes?”
“You’re not against me too?” Cass cried out. “No, Georgine, not after your husband nearly got caught in that last trap she set!”
“The fire? She couldn’t have meant that for you, you were already gone!”
“And so was she! It was meant to look like a gadget that was supposed to kill her, only she would have escaped. It was something I could have set before I went away—only I didn’t set it.”
Georgine opened her mouth and shut it again. It could have been that way; she had thought of it as something Ryn did—but to catch Todd, not to go off when the house was empty.
“You see?” Cass had detected the return of her doubt. She came across the space between them, catching at Georgine’s hands. “And when you asked her about it, didn’t she look terribly frightened, and refuse to say anything, as if she were shielding me?”
“Yes,” said Georgine slowly, “she did. And I’ll admit it made me think afterward that she was—suspecting you, but not able to put it into words. She loves you.”
“We love each other, why, we’re sisters. But there was one thing more important, and that was the Beyond-Truth… I don’t know if she could have—just stood up to me and shot me, if she’d found that gun. I don’t think so. But if it could happen quietly—”
Cass paused, and a new sort of terror came into her eyes, as if a black shape had appeared in a room that was not yet totally dark. “Oh, my God. I hadn’t thought of it before. It— this suicide of hers—you’re thinking about it, you and Aunt Chloe, just what she wanted you to: that it’s my doing! Why didn’t I see that? She is killing me, she’s taking me down with her. How am I ever going to—”
She stopped; her head turned sharply, and so did Mrs. Majendie’s, as a voice sounded from below. It was Todd’s.
“Everything under control?” he called cheerfully.
“No!” Georgine shrieked. They wouldn’t dare shoot her with Todd coming up the stairs. “Get the ambulance, Ryn’s dying of an overdose of seconal, the telephone’s broken—”
Todd’s footsteps had paused only for a moment, midway up the staircase, and then continued upward. “Don’t come up, you lunkhead!” she cried out despairingly. “Do something!”
In the next second Todd appeared in the doorway. He looked at Cass, who was still clutching Georgine, and at Georgine who was vainly trying to break away. Lastly, he turned and gazed gravely at Mrs. Majendie and his own pistol.
“So you didn’t notify the police, as I asked you?” he inquired of her interestedly.
“Indeed I did not, Mr. McKinnon. This is going to be settled within the family before anything is done,” said the old lady levelly.
“Thank you for including us in your family. And I suppose you’ll shoot me if I don’t do what you say?”
“I will shoot your wife, Mr. McKinnon; not fatally, but painfully.”
“Damned if I don’t believe you would,” said Todd, grinning at her. “There sits Nelsing’s man outside, told to close in if anyone tries to escape; and nothing’s happened but two or three innocent persons walking in and never coming out. Reminds me of that story, you know; The Three Big Sillies, all lined up in the cellar, doing nothing but talk things over and cry until the sensible man came down to see what gave. How about my calling the sensible man?”
“No,” said Mrs. Majendie.
“Todd McKinnon,” said Georgine furiously, “didn’t you hear what I shouted at you? Why did you have to walk in here too?”
“It’s our house,” said Todd mildly. “I thought I’d see what was going on in it.”
“But we don’t know whether Ryn killed herself or Cass did it for her! —You let me go, Cass Johnson, I haven’t made up my mind and I don’t believe your aunt has either. —Do you know, Todd?”
“Kind of a toss-up, isn’t it?” Todd said. He surveyed the three women with a faint smile. “Do you mind letting me hear the story?”
Georgine was almost beside herself. “Don’t ask that! I keep telling you Ryn’s dying in the next room, and you want to talk some more!”
Todd said, “She took all the capsules, did she, Cass?” Cass nodded, her eyes hopefully on his face. “Where’d she get them?”
“Why, from that box on her bedside table. We came up here together, and I saw her slip it into her coat pocket.”
“That’s all right, then,” said Todd in his most casual voice. “She’s getting a good rest, and she ought to wake up feeling wonderful. Only two of those capsules had seconal in ’em, and the others are my vitamin prescription. I changed them last night.”
“You didn’t,” Cass moaned. She sat down limply on the bed. The gray eyes seemed to hold no terror now, only despairing grief. “Oh, you couldn’t have been so cruel—to let her think she’d found the way out, and have it all for nothing!”
“Seemed best at the time,” Todd observed. “And was it all for nothing? She confessed to you, I suppose, Cass?”
“Yes.”
“But she mustn’t be made to answer for it?”
“I thought it was all over for her. You—Todd, you have that look—if I were guilty, I suppose you’d expect me to be in a panic when you told me that? You’re testing me, isn’t that it? Because I don’t believe you did change them!”
“Yes, he did,” said Georgine. “I saw the others in the bathroom cab—” She caught her breath as Todd cut in on her deliberately and loudly. “If I can test anyone, I will,” he said. “There’s plenty of time for Ryn to be questioned again. Oddly enough, what interests me is a li’le plan that someone dreamed up to compromise my wife. Did Ryn tell you about that?”
Cass nodded slowly. “She told me everything. She was afraid that Joan Godfrey really had put Georgine on the right track, and she had to be sure that nobody would believe the story.”
“That was done,” said Todd, “by someone who combined the discrediting of Georgine’s word with—something else. That person has a pathological hatred of sex,” his words clanged out with a savagely sardonic quotation, “of ‘marriage in the world sense’—Something that Georgine, I’m glad to say, advocates.”
Cass’s unmoving gaze took on a tinge of bewilderment. “You—you aren’t talking about that afternoon when David and I—but I told that to Ryn! I knew she liked Georgine, I thought—like a fool—that it might carry some weight with her! I’m sorry, I never thought that she might take it out on you, Georgine. Todd’s right about one thing—” her voice grew husky—“that it was pathological. She was insane, you see. She thought everyone else was, that’s a sure sign. She actually— went to Hugh Hartlein and told him that I was crazy, trying to kill her, and that neither of us could ever marry because there was insanity in the family. And so—he—you know what he did. He couldn’t bear to live any more.” She caught her breath on a sort of sob. “But you can’t think of Ryn as a murderer! She was just—she was swallowed up by the Beyond-Truth.”
A faint sound came from Mrs. Majendie, who had been standing silent and motionless, her tired eyes moving from one face to another. “I told myself it never did any harm,” she said, very softly. Her face still hung in those deep furrows. She looked like an old proud Indian chief who sees the last of his tribe gone.
For a moment there was silence. For the first time since she had entered this small room, Georgine felt the quiet of the house: a deeper, more sinister quiet than if there had actually been death in the next room. The doubts came back, beating at her in strong waves. Supposing everything Cass had said were true? Todd had interfered with a suicide, and instead had let a murderer live to be tried, to drag her sister and her aunt through utter horror; to take the foundation of belief from a score of happy old people who had accepted it sanely and lived by its harmless-seeming principles.
“Todd,” said Cass Johnson, with a beseeching gesture, “I can think of just one thing to do. Let me—let me get the real tablets and put them by Ryn where she is now. When she wakes up she’ll know what’s happened.”
Todd’s face was impassive and wood-hard. He looked at Mrs. Majendie. “Have I the right to pass judgment of that kind?”
“Perhaps you haven’t,” said old Chloe, “but I’m inclined to force it on you. Have you the right to do anything else? Can you go through the rest of your life, Mr. McKinnon, thinking that you denied a penitent the right to choose her own punishment?”
His face did not change. He said, “Georgine, you should have a voice in this.”
Georgine waited. Again the silence came flooding at her; she remembered the still figure in the sunlit next room, and the range of expressions that she had seen for days past on that beautiful pale face. There was that look as if of one in mysterious pain…
“You’re not sure?” she said faintly.
“How can any of us be sure?” Todd asked.
There was something struggling to be remembered, some detail about the rules of the Beyond-Truth. If the criminal had built everything on an obsession with the cult—
“Todd,” she said suddenly, “the day the girls were here to lunch, I gave them shrimps. Cass said she wasn’t hungry, but Ryn ate two helps. Isn’t that against all the rules?”
“What?” Cass exclaimed. “Ryn did that?” She looked almost more horrified than at the thought of her sister’s being a murderer. “She can’t have known what they were!”
“They were whole. You can’t disguise a whole shrimp.”
“Or,” said Mrs. Majendie wearily, “she may have realized that those minor rules were window-dressing. My husband was allergic to sea-food.”
Georgine felt a wave of hysteria coming over her. “We’re standing here like judges, saying whether someone shall live or die, and the talk keeps going off—Todd, did you really take away those capsules?”
“Maybe I didn’t,” he said. There was a curious expression in his eyes. “Maybe my instinct was right, that she was guilty and that—I’d let the law have its chance, and watch to see if it took advantage of that, and if not—” He drew an audible breath and shook his head sharply. “And yet, it shouldn’t be in our hands, in any private person’s hands. Joan Godfrey was struck down, perhaps in panic, but her death was ensured in the most cold-blooded way.”
Cass shuddered once, strongly.
“You knew she was dead, Cass? Didn’t you realize that you should have spoken then?”
“I wouldn’t turn my sister in for a dozen Joan Godfreys,” Cass said in a thick voice. “All I could do was to get away, to make sure I wouldn’t be next. And even then Ryn was trying to put it on me! I knew I’d be suspected—there was that evidence, it would point directly to me—”
“You saw it,” said Todd in a level voice, “when you discovered that Joan was dead in the greenhouse?”
“Yes. I couldn’t see Joan through the peep-hole, but I could see the boardwalk, and the heel-tip of a shoe caught between the boards. I didn’t dare go in to get it. The gas was still strong.” She closed her eyes for a second. “There was a pair of my shoes gone from the closet, she said she was taking them to be repaired for me. I knew she’d pried off a heel-tip and kept it, they’d be sure to find out that it was from my shoe.”
“Did she tell you that in her confession?” Todd said in a pained voice. “She might have spared herself that.”
“Yes. She told me everything.”
“Then,” said Todd in a suddenly metallic voice, “she lied, or you are lying on the basis of having read my story outline. Except in my own imagination, there never was any heel-tip in the greenhouse!”
Cass’s eyes flew open, wide and glittering. For half a second he was impaled on a gaze of murderous hatred; then she launched herself like a swimmer starting a race, straight across the room to the door, and in the same split second Chloe Majendie reached out an arm and jerked Todd aside. He fell sprawling at her feet, and the door slammed, and there was the click of a key turning.
The old lady stepped swiftly away and set her back against the door. “Now,” she said, “not a sound from either of you, or I will shoot. You’re going to give her a chance.”
“A chance to kill her sister, really, and then escape?” Georgine gasped.
“She will not go near her sister again. Listen!”
Todd, picking himself up slowly, remained poised on one elbow, and Georgine held her breath. The room was full of soft light reflected from the hillside across the street, and the three figures were caught in it as if in a dim photograph, static, spellbound. Through the closed windows came faintly the sound of a car humming down the hill, and of someone whistling, very far off.
“You saw which way she turned, Mrs. McKinnon?” whispered Chloe Majendie. “Toward your bathroom.”
Water was running at that end of the hall. It was shut off, and there was the rattling clink of a glass set down hastily, just anywhere. Then there were footsteps in the hall; they came slowly past the door of Barby’s room, and its occupants lifted their heads a little, simultaneously. The steps did not continue down the hall to the big bedroom. They went down the stairs to the first floor, deliberately, step by step. At the bottom they died away.
“She has taken the sleeping powders herself,” said Mrs. Majendie. “She must have her chance. An hour should be enough; we will stay here.”
Todd got up without haste. He looked at the gun held steadily in the big hand; he glanced at the closed window as if calculating how far into the street his voice could be heard. His eyes met Georgine’s.
He glanced again at Mrs. Majendie. “You are taking the decision out of our hands?”
“I am taking it out of your hands.”
“Then,” said Todd, “we may as well sit down. An hour is a long time to be on your feet.”
The three of them sat down. There was a long pause.
It was absurd, it was embarrassing. Todd gazed at the foot of Barby’s bed and the old lady looked straight ahead at nothing, while with infinite slowness the light changed in the still room. The silence had a curious quality. It was chilling, with the soft cold of snow-laden air, heavy and motionless. Once or twice Georgine tried to say something, anything, but her mouth was too dry.
Throughout those interminable sixty minutes no one spoke but Chloe Majendie. “I shall not go out to the Colony again,” she said once. “I mustn’t—help the pretence any longer.” And, after another pause, “Let them finish their lives in peace.”
The shadows wheeled, and Georgine found herself falling into a kind of stupor. Along the street outside the children were coming home from school, their voices twittering in the cold air; then again the silence, and again Mrs. Majendie’s words abruptly breaking it.
“It’s my burden,” she said in a tired echo of her beautiful voice, “and nobody else’s. I didn’t believe in the rules myself, but I let the child learn them and counted on her finding out from ordinary people that it was all nonsense. When she grew up she began to laugh at it, and then—I thought she was safe.”
She raised her eyes for a moment. They looked different, somehow, as if they might never be young again.
For the only time during the hour, Todd stirred and glanced at her. Then he went back into his motionless contemplation. The electric clock on Barby’s bureau hummed faintly, and Georgine watched its thin second hand sweep round the dial. Another minute, and another; forty of them had gone past now. She laughed at it, Georgine thought, and it swallowed her. The smile on the face of the tiger…
Mrs. Majendie spoke only once more; not to her companions, not to herself, but to someone far off. “Nicholas,” she murmured, as if she were saying good-by.
But she’s old, thought Georgine, and was stabbed by an unbearable pang of compassion.
The hand swept around, and the hour was over. Mrs. Majendie laid the gun on the dresser and got slowly to her feet. As Todd raised a window to call the officer who waited innocently below, there were faint sounds from the next room.
The old lady waited with dignity while the officer unlocked the door. “I am going to my niece,” she said with a level look at him, and walked steadily to the bedroom where Ryn Johnson was beginning to wake—while somewhere her sister was falling deeper and deeper into sleep.
She couldn’t have gone far, the police said. She couldn’t have got off the property on which the McKinnons’ and Manfreds’ houses stood, every side of it had been under observation. There was not a corner of either house which was not searched, when at last the alarm had been given.
The search took nearly half an hour. When one of the officers had finished beating the shrubbery and turned his attention to the high-piled basket of laundry, so domestically waiting under the whirligig, Cass Johnson was not yet dead; but she had death in her blood, and the hour and a half had indeed been enough.
“So it was the Maniac-Sane-on-the-Surface after all?” said Georgine wearily. She stood in the upstairs hall, unable to shake off the fatalistic lethargy of the past two hours.
“No, dear Georgine,” said her husband from the door of his workroom. “Cass wasn’t insane. She was just as illogical as any criminal who thinks he can’t get caught, she was obsessed by the desire to have as much money and power as the aunt she admired, she had a deep-rooted aversion to normal marriage—but in the end, after she’d given way to violence, she followed a different pattern. She was the Damn Fool. And,” he ended on a sigh, “she very nearly fooled me.” He glanced down at the story outline in his hand, with the penciled confession which Cass Johnson had scrawled across one blank surface: “I killed Joan Godfrey, signed, Casilda Johnson,” he read, and shook his head. “The Damn Fool, running away, panicking, making clumsy efforts to deny her guilt—and nearly getting away with it because from the fiction-writer’s standpoint nobody could be as silly as that unless she were innocent.”
“How do you suppose she looked from the police’s standpoint?”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Todd with resignation, “that Nelse knew she was guilty. He probably had a nice li’le collection of fingerprints or something to pin her down with; but nobody tells me these things. Well—he’ll want this confession, I suppose. I can remember the outline without copying it.”
“You’re going to finish the story?”
“Sure; or one something like it. A story’s—nothing but a job of work.”
***
David Shere stood in the arched entrance of the McKinnons’ living-room, directing an unfriendly gaze at the big chair in which Ryn Johnson was reclining, pale and drawn and yet still lovely, like a ghost of the Princess Nefertiti.
“Well,” he said gruffly, “I didn’t help much—pretending to drop you and run after Cass so we could see if the poisoning would stop. How was I to know I’d halfway fall for her? She was so damned plausible!”
Ryn, looking back at him out of shadowed eyes, murmured some inaudible word.
“I’m sorry,” said Shere, as if it had been forced from him. “I shouldn’t have stopped believing in you. I wouldn’t have,” he added, his vitality blazing up in a crackle of anger, “if I’d ever been sure of you! —I suppose you thought the only way to bring things to a head was to let her kill you?” He took a step into the room, scowling, his hands in his pockets. “For God’s sakes, what possessed you, letting her alone here long enough to put all the powders out of those capsules into the sugar bowl?”
Ryn stirred. She said, on a tone that was scarcely more than an exhalation, “I knew it was all right. I’d seen Todd change them.”
Todd McKinnon, sitting across the room, emitted a faint groan and put his head in his hands.
“Well, it was a fool trick,” said Mr. Shere, scarcely mollified. “Now that it’s all over, do I try to get back into your good graces? I shouldn’t think you’d want to see me again.”
“Let’s not talk about it yet, David. Not about anything.”
David Shere removed his hands from his pockets, clenched them and raised them in the air. “Not yet, let’s not talk about it yet!” he said savagely. “My God, that’s all I’ve heard from you, from any of you, as long as I can remember. Can’t I ever get anything settled? Seems to me I’ve spent my whole life dangling after Johnsons, one or another of ’em.” He lowered his fists, and a look of surprise spread over his ruddy face. “I’m sick of it,” he told her. “So help me, I am. Why don’t I just quit, and get some of my own work done for a change?”
“Just as you like, David,” Ryn murmured. A faint smile had appeared on her lips.
“Then good-bye,” said the impassioned lover. “I won’t be around for a good long time.” He straightened, inflated his broad chest with a full breath of relief, and whizzed out the front door.
Ryn Johnson turned her head a little to watch him go past the window. The smile was still very faint, but it had spread to her eyes.
***
It was almost evening, and the McKinnons were alone in their house. The police had finished and gone. Ryn and Mrs. Majendie had gone away, too. Every time Georgine glanced at the window near the front steps she seemed to see, framed in its lower half, a craggy profile crowned with a bush of white hair, held stiffly erect as if braced against a burden.
Presently peace would begin to flow back into the household, but it was not yet there. In spite of her overwhelming fatigue she could not relax. “I keep asking myself,” she said restlessly, “just how we got into this. It wasn’t curiosity, it wasn’t all our own need. From the very first it’s seemed as if it had been laid on us.”
“There was a li’le free will involved,” said Todd mildly. He stood looking out at the cold sky.
“I suppose so; but I wish I needn’t believe it. We set off so much trouble and tragedy…”
“It was happening in spite of us, Georgine; and we didn’t get off scot-free ourselves. That was quite a reaming Nelse gave me,” he said reminiscently.
Georgine’s spirit began to revive. “I know, and how dared he? What else could we have done, with a gun pointed at us?”
“Well,” said Todd, turning slowly to face her, “some time during that hour I could have jumped Mrs. Majendie. Nelse’s man would have heard the shot and come running.”
“Oh. Isn’t that hindsight?”
“No. I thought of it then. But I thought, too, that if I handed Cass over to the police I could never be sure—”
He broke off. Georgine said, “Sure of what?”
He waited for a long minute before he answered, “—That I hadn’t done it to se’le a personal grudge.” His agate-hard eyes lifted, and he moved to stand close to her. “We aren’t made to administer strict justice, people like you and me. Could you have handed her over deliberately?”
She tipped her head against the back of the chair to look at him. “I couldn’t have, and I didn’t,” she said. “I—I knew how much laundry there was in the basket.”
Todd laughed softly and sat down on the arm of the chair to hold her close. “We’re well enough matched, dear Georgine,” he said, resting his cheek on her hair. “Take it easy now,” his casual voice went on. “We’ll se’le down soon into our old ways. I can get on with my job now—”
“We’ve got that much out of it anyway.”
“Bread as well as circuses,” he said lightly; but after a moment, when she looked up at him, his eyes were still somber and far away.
“It’s getting late,” said Georgine after a moment. “Close the blinds, will you? I’d better start supper.”
She went toward the kitchen, glancing over her shoulder at the empty lower half of the window. “Close them tight, Todd.”