Puzzle for Fiends (22 page)

“That’s easy too. We’ll have Jan drive you up. In fact, you can keep him to take care of you. You can trust him. If you asked him to bury a body, he’d do it and forget it five minutes afterwards. And if the policeman asks where he is, we can say we’ve fired him. We still have a right to fire our servants.” She swung round to face the others. “Any complaints?”

To my surprise, both Selena and Mrs. Friend seemed pleased. Selena said: “I think that’s really rather divinely clever when you think of it.”

Mrs. Friend, completely calm again, murmured: “Yes, dear, all things considered it is the most sensible plan from everyone’s point of view.” She smiled at me. “You’ll wait for the autopsy report, of course, dear? If you ran away before you really needed to—I mean before Inspector Sargent was obviously planning to arrest you—you’d make us all seem unnecessarily suspicious.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll wait till Sargent’s report comes in. But you’d better start getting plans set.”

“Selena will ask Nate. I’m sure he’ll understand.” Mrs. Friend seemed to have adopted Marny’s plan as her own. “How pleasant to have things settled. Not, of course, that I am worried, because I am sure this entire murder theory is just a figment in the mind of Mr. Moffat, that weevil-like borer.” She glanced at her watch. “Good heavens, it is past time for lunch. I wonder what is keeping them in the kitchen.” She rose. “I must investigate. And, Marny, do go and see Grandma. She gets so peevish when’s she hungry. Oh dear, do you suppose we’ll have to explain all this to Grandma? It’s really rather complicated for her, isn’t it? But then, since she seems to take to criminality like a duck to water…”

Her voice trailed off as she moved out of the room. Marny murmured: “Oh, all right’ and hurried out to cope with Grandma.

Selena and I were alone.

She still sat at my feet, letting her hand rove caressingly over my knee. Suddenly she looked up with a grimace.

“Darling, was I hateful just now? I mean, suggesting you stayed and took the blame. You’re not still suspicious of us, are you? It wasn’t anything. It was just an idea.”

“Not one of your better ones.”

“Baby,” she sighed. “Isn’t this dreary?”

“That’s one word for it.”

“I do hope you don’t have to go off and hide in that cabin of Nate’s. Jan used to drive me up there sometimes for guilty assignations with Nate. It was meant to be romantic. It’s incredibly dismal—all trees and views.” Her hand moved to my arm. “Darling, wouldn’t you be awfully bored up there with only Jan and no memory? Wouldn’t it be nicer if I came too?”

I smiled at her. “For a smart girl you’re almost feebleminded, aren’t you?”

“Am I, baby?” She laughed. “I suppose I am.” Her face, warm and heady as a summer afternoon, was suddenly close to mine. “But, darling, all those things I said last night I meant.”

“What things?”

“About how you excite me. About touching you. It’s true. This is different from anything else. I think about you when you’re not there. It doesn’t matter who murdered who or… Baby.”

Her lips were torridly on mine. She squirmed up so that she was half sitting on my knees. Her arms weaved around me. I pulled her closer. Her fair, tumbling hair tickled my eyelids. Through the hair I saw something moving in the room. I pushed her hair back, still kissing her.

Dr. Nate Croft was standing in the doorway.

He stood very stiffly, staring at us, his eyes blazing in a cold, stricken face.

“Selena!”

Selena twisted away from me, stood up and saw him. She pushed her hair back behind her shoulders and smiled at him cheerfully.

“Hello, Nate, dear.”

Most men, feeling the way he obviously felt, would have done something violent. Dr. Croft, apparently, was not the violent type. He dropped into a chair, as if his legs had suddenly melted.

In a pinched voice, he said: “Does it have to be every man, Selena?”

“What do you mean?” She stared, open-eyed. “Really, aren’t you being rather complicated?”

He looked up, his face haggard and exhausted. That’s what happens when you love Selena, I thought.

“This time I thought it’d be safe. I put on the casts. I… Oh, what difference does it make?”

“Darling, please. So stuffy.”

“Stuffy?” Anger and a sort of weary hopelessness made his voice shake. “I gambled everything helping you because you said you loved me. Remember? You said you’d divorce Gordy and marry me because you loved me.” A laugh forced its way between his pale lips. “You’ll never marry me, will you?”

Selena moved to him, caressing his arm. “Darling, it’s so silly thinking about things in the future.”

“And if you do, it’ll still be every man that comes in sight.” His eyes met mine for the first time. “It’s wonderful. I recommend it. Try it sometime—if you haven’t already. Try falling in love with a tramp.”

“Nate!”

He swung round to her. “That’s the word for you, isn’t it?”

Selena laughed her deep, full-bosomed laugh. “It’ll do, baby, but I think you could have thought out a nicer one.” She kissed him perfunctorily on the ear. “Darling, you make such a fuss always. So suspicious. I was only kissing him because he’s going away.”

Nate stiffened. “Going away?”

“Yes, honey. The most exasperating thing’s happened. You might as well hear it now and get it over with. The reciting of the poem and everything went wonderfully. We thought we had everything in the bag. Then that dreary Mr. Moffat…”

She told him, with a bald callousness that shocked me, exactly what the dreary Mr. Moffat had done. Without giving him a moment to catch his breath, she went on with my theory about Gordy and the plan for getting me out of the house if the autopsy report was bad.

I’d been sorry enough for Nate before. I was almost too sorry for him as I saw his face crumple and his lips start to quiver. I’d taken a lot from the Friends but I had nothing much to lose. Nate had everything to lose. His hopeless desire to make a monogamous wife out of Selena had already lured him into gambling his entire career. Now he was faced with the possibility of exposure as an accomplice in a murder charge. A connection, however faint, with murder spelled the end of a doctor’s existence.

“So you see, baby?” Selena concluded, almost absent-mindedly. “If the police are objectionable tomorrow, we’ll somehow have Jan smuggle him out of the house and up to your cabin. That’ll be all right, won’t it? I mean, you don’t mind his using it?”

“But, Selena,” he stammered, “if the police find him hiding out in
my
cabin…”

“And, later, after a few days, when it’s time for the casts to come off, you can just run up there and do it for him. Then he’ll have to be on his own.”

She slid her arms around him and nestled against him, her lips close to his.

“I know you’ll be a darling about it, won’t you?”

“Selena…”

“And you mustn’t be selfish, baby. “She caressed his ear.” After all, you got him into this jam. The least you can do is to help him out of it.”

Mrs. Friend came in then. She smiled at me and then at Nate.

“Hello, Nate, dear. Just in time for lunch. How nice.”

“Lunch,” he echoed bleakly. “How can you talk about lunch when Mr. Friend…”

Mrs. Friend lifted her hand. “Now, dear, I’ve made the others promise not to talk about it any more. If things should go wrong tomorrow, we have our plans. There’s no point in harping upon unpleasantness.”

She crossed to my chair and started to wheel me towards the dining-room. She was humming some vague little tune.

“The only thing now’s to be patient until the Inspector comes tomorrow. I’m so glad Nate came to lunch. Cook’s thought out a really rather daring aspic…”

We
ate the rather daring aspic and settled down to be patient. Our plan, unsatisfactory as it was in almost every way, at least had the virtue of simplicity. Nate admitted his mountain cabin was stocked with canned foods. We decided that if the autopsy report indicated murder tomorrow afternoon, we would somehow stall the police from any serious investigation until the next day. As soon after nightfall as was safe, Jan was to smuggle me out of the house to Nate’s cabin by way of a disused track which wound from the rear of the Friend house over the desolate, uninhabited mountains. Jan had to be rehearsed in his role. That was all.

Marny and I decided to do it between us. She wheeled me down the corridor past her own room and Mimsey’s to the Dutchman’s quarters. Then we entered in answer to his call. We found him scrambling off his bed, tying the cord of a blue towel bathrobe around his waist. With the departure of the Clean Living League, he had obviously reverted to his customary nudism.

He grinned at Marny, stared inquiringly at me and tossed the blond hair back from his eyes.

Marny said: “He understands me if I talk slowly. Let me handle this.”

She put her hand on his huge arm. “Jan, tomorrow you take him”—she indicated me—“in car. Okay?”

He nodded, still grinning.

“You take him to mountains—place in mountains where you took Selena. Remember?”

He nodded again.

“When you get there, stay with him all the time. Stay with him.”

The blond lock flopped down again as he nodded.

“And don’t tell anyone. Don’t say anything. Never, never tell.”

His big bronze hand moved over hers, enveloping it completely.

“Ja,” he said. “Ja.”

Marny glanced at me. “He’s got it,” she said. “I’m quite sure.”

“There’s only one place in the mountains where he took Selena?”

“Yes. Only Nate’s cabin. He drove her up there twice.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, wait a minute.” She turned back to Jan. “When you drive to mountains—don’t go out front drive. Go back way.”

His face clouded.

“Back way. The way behind the house. The old track.”

Jan still frowned his incomprehension.

“Here. “Marny picked up a pencil, found a piece of paper and drew a rough sketch of the house indicating the front drive and the winding track at the back. She showed it to him.

“Not the front way,” she pointed. “The back way. Go the back way.” She pointed again. “The way Gordy used to take. Gordy’s way.”

Understanding smoothed the wrinkles out of his tanned forehead. He took the pencil from Marny and drew a cross half-way down the back path. He looked at her questioningly.

Marny stared at the cross. “No, Jan. Not there. Just the back way. Gordy’s way. Take the car and…” She pushed the pencil along the track and then right off the paper, indicating he was to drive me straight off the property. “To the mountains. To Selena’s place. Understand?”

He understood then. It was obvious. He was grinning all over his face, pleased with himself. He was still grinning when Marny and I left.

It was nice to know that someone could find amusement in the situation somewhere.

After our visit with Jan there was nothing left to do but to wait. We spent the rest of the day waiting and, in spite of Mrs. Friend’s determination to look on the bright side, the hours passed with increasing gloom. The shadow of Gordy as a murderer or at least as a probable murderer hung over me like a pall. Nate had to go back to his sanatorium fairly early. The three Friend women and I managed to get through dinner and an evening of desultory card-playing. But I couldn’t keep my mind on four-handed gin-rummy. I saw so many pitfalls ahead, so many things that might happen to make a hash of my very makeshift plans.

Although the Friends were going to try to put the Inspector onto the track of the real Gordy, I was the Gordy he knew and it would be my trail from the house that he would follow first. Sargent would soon know, if he didn’t already, that Nate was a friend of the family. If he also discovered he owned the cabin in the mountains, it would be one of the first places he’d search. My plan was really no plan at all. It was merely ignominious flight from a predicament that was impossible to face. And my only real hope for saving my own skin and, incidentally, the Friends, was to remain hidden until the casts were off and then re-establish myself under my own real identity.

But that meant getting my memory back. That’s what it would all rest on. My memory.

I looked across the card-table at Selena who was my opponent. Her fair head was bent over her cards; her skin was soft and tanned to the color of brown sugar. Absurdly, although she had made a wreck of Nate Croft and even now, I was sure, would deliver me as a fall guy to the police without batting an eye if she could get away with it, I knew I was going to miss her. Even an amnesiac knows that Selenas don’t happen often.

She caught my eye and grinned.

“I’m ready for bed. I don’t know about anyone else.”

Mrs. Friend, playing Marny, discarded a card and then picked it up again with a little cluck and discarded another in its place. “Selena, dear, are you still going to sleep in the same room with this darling boy? It seems rather odd and I don’t know that Nate likes it.”

Selena laughed. “Of course I’m going to, Mimsey. After all, he’s so helpless. Even if you did walk out on him, he still needs a nurse.” She turned to me. “Don’t you, baby?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I’ll read you some more of Father’s poems to send you to sleep. There’s a wonderful one against sex. You’d like to hear that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, “I said.

Marny shot me a sardonic glance. Mrs. Friend said: “Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter in the long run. Oh, dear, I didn’t mean to throw away that jack of clubs. How foolish. It would have made a lovely sequence.”

In spite of the loss of the jack of clubs, Mrs. Friend still managed to collect a lovely sequence and ginned, finishing the game. She had won handsomely from all of us. I didn’t own any money so I couldn’t pay her. But she insisted upon collecting from the girls. Selena went off for her purse, telling me to bring the book of poems when I came. Marny picked up the grey volume of verse and opened it at random.

In a deep, booming voice she recited:

“ ‘Sex, sex, sex

Where the hussy solicits for hire.

Sex, sex, sex

Drags the flower of your youth in the mire…’ ”