Five Fatal Words (10 page)

The man with the waxed mustache looked away from her and Melicent forgot about him. She even laughed soundlessly at herself for allowing herself the vanity of being pleased by his obvious admiration. The water between the ship and the shore was now half as wide as the river. The crowd and the waving handkerchiefs had melted into a single spot of color on the wharf. By turning her head in a semicircle she could perceive the entire extent of Manhattan Island. She looked at it wistfully. It had been her home for a long time and although it had sometimes been hard to live there she had always found it exciting and she had always felt safe inside its roaring, impersonal boundaries.

Now she was embarked on a strange journey to a country she had never seen, with people she scarcely knew. Her thoughts went that far and then she questioned them. She scarcely knew them and yet the things she knew about those people would have caused ninety-nine people out of a hundred to discontinue any association with them. She knew that her employer lived hour by hour and day by day under the threat of violent death.

She knew that the brother of her employer had been murdered in the house where she had lived for two days. She knew that the house had been burned down to obliterate the traces of that murder.

Her knowledge went further. There were three Cornwall sisters still alive and one Cornwall brother and of those four people it was conceivable to Melicent that some or all of them were scheduled to die.

Her eyes turned inward and she no longer looked at the skyline which passed in review before her. Strange people whom she scarcely knew? Involuntarily she shook her head. Already in these few days she knew them better than anyone she had ever known before; or at least she had become more intimately involved in their affairs, in their fears, and in their fates.

A breeze was blowing, a clean, clear wind from the sea; invigorating and cool.

Had she let herself become over-affected by the family fears? Had she come under the spell of imaginings of minds dwelling day after day, year after year, decade after decade with one obsession--the obsession of each sister and brother that she or he must outlive all the others. Everitt Cornwall had denied it, but he was the only one that did, and he was dead.

Might his death have been merely accidental after all? She had read of it so plausibly explained in the newspapers. He had come to visit his sister in the old house and, using a room long in disuse, he had touched a defective fixture and been killed and a short circuit in the same defective wiring that night had destroyed the house.

Might not the death of Daniel Cornwall--Donald's father--also have been natural?

Donald himself had written: that the chemist had not been able to prove that his father had been poisoned.

But there were the messages--the five meaningless words: "doubtless even a tulip hopes"--"don't ever alter these horoscopes"--each message a herald of what its initials spelled--death.

She tossed her head and faced into the breeze. Behind her lower New York was vanishing in a haze over the flat surface of Governor's Island. They steamed through the narrows and out into the harbor. Coastlines became low and purple, an orchestra began to play somewhere on the ship. A voice at her side startled her. "How do you like it?"

She turned. "Oh! Hello, Mr. Cornwall."

Donald grinned amiably. There was no hat on his red hair. He wore knickers. He was seemingly enjoying the departure from America. "Couldn't you arrange to call me Don, or something of the sort?"

"Don't you think your aunt would disapprove?"

He shook his head. "I will fix it with her. 'Aunt,' I will say to her, 'it would facilitate conversation in the Cornwall ménage if your secretary had permission to call me by my first name.' Incidentally, what is your first name?"

She told him before she thought. "Melicent."

"Melicent. That's a swell name. Wonderful name. You could only have a few names, anyway. Let's see. You might be Genevieve, but that hasn't quite the right sound. You might be Guinevere or possibly Cytheria, but Melicent is by far the best, although as far as I am concerned I believe you exhibit an undue amount of formality and cruel frigidity. You couldn't be prevailed upon to call me Don? I don't like Donald. I never did like Donald. It smacks of small boys who obey their mothers. It has a Sunday school sound. But Don is different. It's romantic. For instance, there's Don Juan. Imagine how far he would have gone if his name had been Donald Juan."

Melicent smiled. Then she said ironically, "There was Donald Quixote."

"The gentleman who tilted at windmills--to whom you seem to compare me. Maybe you're right. I'd like to believe it that all that bothers us is made up in our minds."

He was suddenly serious. "Does it seem that way to you sometimes?"

"Sometimes," said Melicent. 

"Then let's have it seem so as long as we can. Here I have met the most delightful girl I have ever seen in my life and the auspices are--or were--shockingly depressing. We won't have them so. After lunch there's going to be a tea dance. I'm sure my aunt won't mind if you join me in treading a measure. I don't mean to inflict myself upon you, but we are going to be on sea for five days and if I prove any help to you in passing the time--"

Melicent said "Thank you" and walked slowly along the deck to a companionway and down to her stateroom. She would have enjoyed his banter under most circumstances, but now she could not help feeling that it was out of place. It did not fit her thoughts, it did not belong in the somber fates of the Cornwall family which he was lightly trying to fling off. Well, if he could fling them off for a while, why shouldn't he? She was sorry for her rudeness--it had been almost that, and she returned to the deck, but he was not to be found and she was sorry. As she thought about him she realized that his chaff often was a mask for something else he had in mind.

Later she encountered Granger, and he asked her to the dance, but she refused him because, having declined Donald, she would not attend with another, and so she lost out altogether and spent much of the afternoon with Miss Cornwall. 

She had arranged for herself and Melicent two connecting staterooms, and at bedtime they performed exactly the same charade which they had initiated at Blackcroft.

Melicent went into her room and locked the door; Miss Cornwall was already in her room. At 9:30 they exchanged chambers, but before the operation was complete, Miss Cornwall talked for a little while with her secretary.

"I would like to express my sincere appreciation of the favor you are doing me in accompanying me to Belgium. You are an intelligent girl and you have doubtless perceived the cloud under which all the members of the Cornwall family live. Our father feared death above all other things and perhaps we have inherited some of that fear. I suppose you have heard that he left his fortune to the one of us who will be the last to survive?"

"I have heard something about it," said Melicent.

"To my mind he did it as an incentive to us to take care of the precious years granted to us on this earth. Father never took care of himself until too late, and at fifty he was in ill health. I imagine he designed his will to force us to do what he had not done--to live exemplary lives. It is the pressure of that circumstance which has gradually reduced me to an overcautious behavior." Her dark eyes gazed piercingly at Melicent.

She merely said, "I quite understand, Miss Cornwall."

"I wonder," the old lady murmured. "I wonder if you do." In a moment she proceeded. "There is something which occurred since we got aboard the boat which has disturbed my nephew," she said positively. "He denies it, but I am not easily deceived. Can you learn from him what it is?"

"Perhaps," said Melicent guardedly. So her instinct had been right. Don Cornwall had approached her with chaff to conceal something else.

The next morning she found him, and on the sky deck they placed two chairs in the lee of a big life boat, and they were alone.

"I was rude yesterday," she said.

"But you weren't!"

"I came back to find you afterwards."

"I wish you'd come into the smoking room."

"I had a funny idea that I'd stopped you telling me something you meant to."

"You did."

"What was it?"

His eyes had been on her, but now he looked away over the sea. "Perhaps it's better left unsaid."

"Why?"

"Probably there's nothing to it. There can't be anything in it, of course, but--"

"Please look at me," said Melicent.

"You haven't got to ask that."

"You've discovered something more about--about the thing that bothers us."

"I wouldn't dignify it with calling it exactly a discovery. You save that word for such things as stumbling upon America when you're looking for China and finding the planet Pluto and so on."

"Well," demanded Melicent, smiling, "what did you do?"

"I noticed something quite interesting about our family names. I mean the given names of my father and of his sisters and brothers--Daniel, Everitt, Alice, Theodore, Hannah, and Lydia. That does not happen to be the order of the family by birth, but they can be arranged in that order. Perhaps they are being arranged in that order."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you make anything out of the names of the first five, taken in that order--

Daniel, Everitt, Alice, Theodore, Hannah?"

Melicent caught her breath. "D E A--" she began.

"Exactly. D was my father Daniel; he's been killed. E was my uncle Everitt, and he has just been murdered. A is my Aunt Alice, and we are on the way to her."

MELICENT experienced a moment of helplessness. She had the sensation of being in the grip of something she had no power to combat. Suddenly it was as if a sentence had been passed upon another and she could only stand by and watch it being executed. She turned from Donald Cornwall and stared out over the sea and let the cool wind on her cheek bring back more rational thought.

"You believe that some one has arranged your family in that order?" she asked at last.

"Some one seems to have made a start, certainly." Donald would not let his feeling be blown away. "Some one certainly has killed D and E; I was wondering--that was all--if A might be next. You see," he went on after an instant, "after I first noticed the initials of that message which came to my father, I tried to argue with myself that they meant nothing; but not even you can doubt it now, after a message like it came to Uncle Everitt and he immediately was killed."

"Of course, I don't doubt it."

"Well, I got the same sort of feeling when I noticed how the names could be arranged in order. I tried to tell myself it was purely accidental; it meant nothing; but I couldn't forget it. But perhaps I should have kept it to myself."

"Not from me," Melicent put in quickly. "But I certainly wouldn't mention it to your aunt."

"I've no idea of it."

"How did you happen to notice that possible arrangement of the names? Did anything occur to call your attention to it?"

"No, I was just mulling over what happened--how my father, Daniel, was killed; then Uncle Everitt followed him, and now we are going to Aunt Alice. Then I thought of Theodore and Hannah."

"But Lydia is another name," objected Melicent. "Quite. Aunt Lydia seems to be left out. I was wondering what that might mean."

"So you feel sure that this--it-whatever it is--does mean something?"

He jumped up and, facing her, held out both his hands, seizing hers and pulling her to her feet. "Let's walk. What little hands you have. I like little hands, if they're long. . . . How many times about the deck makes a mile? Somebody on board always knows. He'll be English and doing twenty laps, at least. By the way, did I tell you that my Aunt Alice married an Englishman? She's a widow now, but I've cousins . . . you'll meet them. They're the reason that Aunt Alice wants to outlive the rest of her generation, so she can get all the money and leave it to her children. Quite English. . . . As I said, you'll meet them. . . ."

They began their walk about the deck and soon sighted Granger, who happened to be making the rounds in the opposite direction, and who was alone. They greeted him and passed on.

"You like him?" Donald Cornwall demanded, rather suddenly, of Melicent after they were out of earshot.

"Yes," said Melicent. "I like him."

"So do I," agreed Donald promptly. "Useful he was, I'll say, the night the house burned. Doesn't think first of saving his skin if anything's going on. But--well, lack of curiosity is not one of his sterling qualities."

Melicent smiled. "What would you think of a man knowing as much as he must know of your family affairs," she defended him, "and not being--curious?"

Donald did not reply directly. "How much does he know, do you think? Does he know, for instance, about the messages?"

"I've not told him," said Melicent.

"You won't, of course."

"No. Of course not."

"And that order of the family names I mentioned," Donald went on. "Let's keep that strictly between ourselves."

"Of course."

They did a measured mile about the deck, passing Granger several times. And then Melicent went below to Miss Cornwall, who observed: "You've been walking with my nephew."

"Yes."

"I was right, was I not? Something new has happened which he is keeping from me?"

"Nothing of any importance has happened, I'm sure," Melicent replied, to which Miss Cornwall countered: "Then he hasn't told you. It's getting rougher, isn't it?"

"I believe it is."

"I was afraid so. I am not a good sailor."

Melicent discovered, to her great relief, that she herself was a good sailor, the ship's motion distressed her not at all, although by late afternoon the wind had increased to a blow which raised such a sea that the decks were almost deserted, but Granger was on deck and as soon as he was alone he joined her.

"What's going on?" he challenged her without preliminary, as one saving time.

"What--where?" she returned.

"Where you are, on the inside," he said jealously. "What's he been telling you--Donald Cornwall?"