Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (18 page)

Drue was sitting at the writing table when I reached her room but wasn’t writing. Sir Francis lay like a little brown muff on the table beside her, his head on her arm.

“Sit down, Sarah. What happened? Did Dr. Chivery drive you away again?”

“Alexia, this time,” I said a little grimly.

“Oh, Alexia.” Her eyelids went down and she patted the little dog’s vigilant head. And said suddenly, looking at the dog, her voice quite clear but completely without expression, “He’s in love with her, you know. I suppose now—after a decent interval—they’ll marry.”

Well, if Alexia had anything to say about it, it was more likely to be an indecent interval. I repressed my evil nature to the extent of not saying it, and she went on, “I was wrong about everything. I thought if I saw Craig again—but I was wrong.”

I said, energetically if ambiguously, “Nonsense.”

“No. It isn’t nonsense. You see, I know. He’s still in love with her, Sarah. Nicky says so. Besides I—know …” She took up a pen and traced a circle with it slowly. “I’d better tell you, Sarah. I think that’s what started everything. Alexia and Craig, I mean. You see—Alexia was in the garden with Craig a few minutes before he was shot. Nicky told me. And I think”—mindful of the trooper outside her door, she whispered—“I think Conrad shot him.”

“Shot
Craig
!”

“Sh. He’ll hear you.”

“But—you mean Conrad was jealous?”

“Conrad made a kind of fetish of being old-fashioned,” she said slowly. “And he was in love with Alexia.”

“If his father shot Craig in a fit of jealousy and Craig knew it, he wouldn’t tell—that’s true.” I was struck by a sudden memory. “Was that why you told Conrad you had found his revolver in the garden?”

“Yes. I knew it was his revolver; at least I knew he had one. And I knew him. I didn’t know what had happened—I don’t really know now. But I thought—you see, I was afraid. For Craig. If his father had shot him in a fit of jealousy, I wanted him to realize, the horrible thing he’d done. Everyone else, I knew—Craig himself, and Claud and anybody else who knew or guessed the truth,—would try to cover it. Conrad was defiant; he said I couldn’t have found it where I did find it. He said I was trying to blackmail him into letting me stay. But I wasn’t—I really wasn’t, Sarah. I never thought of it.”

I knew that. And Conrad’s defiance savored of guilt; it sounded as if he already knew of the revolver, for, if he didn’t, his normal reaction ought to have been to start an immediate investigation.

Yet, again, I couldn’t believe it.

“No, Drue, it’s impossible! I can’t think jealousy over Alexia would so blind Conrad. Don’t believe Nicky. Don’t believe anything he tells you. He’s in love with you himself. …”

“Nicky in love with me!” She laughed shortly.

“But why then—Drue, he asked Craig if you were perfectly free. From your marriage to Craig, he meant.”

“He asked Craig that?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t look at me. “What did Craig say?”

“Nothing,” I said hurriedly, perceiving shoals too late.

“What did he say?” she repeated.

So I said reluctantly, “He only said that your divorce was final. But, my dear …”

Her lips had closed tightly. “Quite right and correct of Craig.
And
Nicky.”

“You can’t really think of marrying Nicky!”

“He hasn’t asked me. But if he does, why not?” she said, and began making circles again, rapid ones now, jabbing the pen into the blotter.

“But …”

Her mouth and chin were set, there were two scarlet spots on her cheeks. I stopped and took another course.

“Drue, you said you intended to find out what really happened here. When Craig came back, I mean, at the time you left this house and went back to New York. And Conrad said Craig wanted a divorce. Did you?”

“It’s too late for that.”

I was about to say tritely and not at all truly that it is never too late. But she flung down the pen. “It’s too late, Sarah! I was a fool to try it. I …”

The abrupt motion of her hand had knocked over a little blue jar of pebbles intended to hold the pen that rolled across the desk. And we both looked just as a little pasteboard box fell out upon the desk amid a shower of colored pebbles. It was a medicine box; there was the prescription sign and Conrad’s name and Dr. Chivery’s and directions and it held digitalis. Rather it had held digitalis. It was empty now, for I picked it up and opened it.

D
RUE HAD MADE ONE
quick, stifled motion to snatch the box, but I had it in my hand.

“
Drue …
”

It was dreadful to see the color simply drain out of her face until she looked like a ghost.

“I found it,” she whispered. “Sarah, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you any more. I’ve said too much now. Don’t ask me—don’t …” She stopped. And put her face down on her arms and against the little dog and began to sob. Dry, long, shuddering sobs, as if every one of them fought against her will. I think I put my hand on her shoulder. She said, in a stifled way, “Go away. It’s all right, Sarah. Only go away.
Please.
”

Drue never cried; it wasn’t her way of facing trouble.

After a moment I went. I took the medicine box with me; I had to. And I had to try to think, not that up to then I had got very far in that direction. But first I hid the little flat box in a handkerchief and pinned it inside the blouse of my uniform with a good, strong safety pin.

It turned me cold to think of the danger it had been to Drue. But there was only one explanation for her possession of the box, for her tears, for her refusal to explain it to me, and that was that she was protecting someone. There was a corollary to that, too; the only person she would protect was Craig.

Well, then, why hadn’t she destroyed the box? And did she have some reason to believe that Craig had killed his father? As Soper had said, there is really no alibi for a poison murder. Craig could have done it by ingeniously (how, I didn’t know) using his father’s own medicine, fixing it (somehow) so he knew his father would take the poison that night, and at the same time (by faking an accident on the previous night, really shooting himself) arranging an alibi for himself that couldn’t be shaken. An alibi that covered actually twenty-four hours (and might easily be made to cover much more than that) thus allowing a margin of time. So that if, say, he had put poison in the brandy (or in anything else his father was in the habit of taking) it didn’t matter when Conrad voluntarily took the stuff, for Craig still had an alibi.

The flaw was his wound; nobody in his right mind would have come so near killing himself, when he could (with exactly the same effect) wound himself less dangerously and less painfully. And I still didn’t believe Craig had killed his father—
but Drue was afraid he had, because she believed Craig had a motive.
I saw that, then; she believed that Conrad had shot Craig, so Craig’s motive might be self-defense, or it might be a long-standing jealousy between the two men over Alexia!

When I reached that point, I got up and put on my cape. I had to get outdoors. I had to reach some sensible conclusion about that box and Drue and Craig.

In the hall, as I was starting for a walk, I met Anna. She had an enormous black eye, a perfect mass of black and green and purple bruises. I stared and she said quickly, “I ran into a door, Miss.”

“Really, Anna. Dear me.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Of course one does encounter a door sometimes. It doesn’t make a round mark, however; and there is almost always a sharp red line on the eyebrow made by the edge of the door. I said, “You’re sure you didn’t see anyone in the meadow last night?”

“Yes, Miss. That is, no. I didn’t see anyone but you.”

Certainly I hadn’t given her a black eye. But I couldn’t think of anyone who might have done it, either. With the possible exception of Delphine who was of a jaundiced enough nature but much more likely to scratch. However, I persisted. “I thought you might have seen someone in the meadow. Someone you were afraid to tell the police about.”

But she didn’t blush or show any change of expression; she just stood there neat and respectable in her long black uniform and white apron and cap. “No, Miss,” she said stolidly.

But Nugent had been sufficiently impressed by my story of the shooting to question Anna. For she added unexpectedly, “The Lieutenant says it must have been someone hunting—last night, you know. Someone from the town, perhaps. He searched the house and he says the only guns in the house that anyone knows about belonged to Mr. Brent. A revolver,” she said flatly, “which the police took from Miss Drue’s room yesterday. And a shotgun which hasn’t been fired for a long time. They said they could tell. So you see, Miss, I—I was right.”

“I see, Anna.” Her eye looked terribly painful. “Try alternate hot and cold packs for your eye,” I told her and went for a walk.

I had walked along the driveway down to the public road, meeting no one, deep in thought of Drue and the little medicine box, before it occurred to me that if I had been the possible if extremely unwilling target for gunshots the previous evening, I might well be again. This time perhaps more successfully from the hunter’s point of view. It was getting on toward dusk again and the February landscape was very quiet and deserted, but there were plenty of little thickets of brush and evergreens, to say nothing of the opportunities for concealment offered by the walls and hedges. So I turned back, but before I had gone more than a dozen steps, Peter Huber came along in a long and very handsome gray coupe and stopped. He’d been to the inquest, he said, leaning bareheaded from the car. “Is everything all right at the house?”

I told him yes, and that Alexia was staying with Craig while I took a rest.

“Good,” he said cheerfully. “How about a little ride? I’ll tell you, we’ll drive back to the village and get a drink. Hop in.”

It suited me perfectly, for I wanted to hear about the inquest. So I got in beside him, looking with rather stunned admiration at the inconceivably luxurious car. It didn’t have platinum handles and diamonds set in the wheel, but it had everything else. He saw me looking at it.

“A beauty, isn’t it?” he said, backing expertly and swiftly so as to head the long gray hood toward the village. “My means don’t run to cars like this, though. It’s Alexia’s.”

His voice didn’t caress her name in loverly fashion, certainly; but then there was no reason why it should, even if, as Craig had hinted, he was actually rather infatuated with her. Craig hadn’t said how he knew, but then one can usually tell these things about people one knows very well, without words and without definite proof; it’s something in the eyes, something in the air. But it occurred to me that if Peter intended to wait, discreetly, until he could press his suit with propriety, then he was reckoning without Alexia’s singular directness.

In any case, whether or not there was anything in what Craig had told me, certainly both Peter Huber and myself, chance wayfarers, really, in the Brent house, were yet inexorably and inextricably bound up with the things that had happened there.

I sighed a little at that thought and he glanced at me.

“Tired? They’ve kept you going. I don’t suppose you’ve really rested since Conrad died. Well, since before that really. What with Craig sick and all the goings on before Conrad died.”

“There weren’t … Oh, you mean the bump on the door and seeing Nicky?”

“
Seeing …
” The car swerved toward the stone wall at the edge of the road, jerked back to the middle, and Peter said, “What do you mean? Was it Nicky you saw in the hall when you opened the door?”

“No, no. I didn’t see anybody. I opened the door after there was that—well, bump against it. But not right away. So whoever went past the door, carrying Heaven knows what, was out of sight by that time. It was earlier when I saw Nicky. And he wasn’t doing anything, really. Just coming out of some room along the hall.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “I thought the way you spoke you had seen Nicky in the hall.”

“No, no! Not then.” Nicky! If he’d hurried, the night before, taking a short cut through the meadow to the house, he might possibly have arrived before me. In any case I made it clear. “I didn’t see Nicky then. It was earlier.” Suddenly I remembered Conrad’s white starched shirt front and black tie. “Nicky must have changed after dinner again. Unless he didn’t change for dinner. Do you remember?”

“Do I—oh, I see what you mean.” He frowned, seemed to think back and said, “Why, yes! He wore a dinner jacket at dinner that night. So did Conrad; he always did. I changed, too. But I believe—yes, you’re right. It must have been my room you saw Nicky come from; he’d been in to get a book I was reading. And I remember now, he had changed back to, I think, tweeds; a brown checked coat, anyway. But I …” He drove in silence for a moment, watching the road ahead. “I thought nothing of it then. And I don’t see now that it makes any difference.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t either.”

We had already topped the ridge where I stood the previous night; now we turned into the main traveled road. We could see the village ahead, very snug and peaceful and rather distant in the gentle dusk. And then all at once, neither of us speaking, we were there. The little main street lengthened, the white houses attained sudden height, and we turned and parked along a street of small, low-roofed shops, in front of a small haberdashery, in fact, and a clerk lounging in the doorway recognized Peter and spoke to him. “Evening, Mr. Huber.”

“Hello.”

“Hear there was an inquest this afternoon.” The man’s eyes were curious.

“Yes,” said Peter shortly and helped me out.

“H’m,” said the clerk and, as Peter offered no comment but steered me along the sidewalk in the direction of the inn (a long, sprawled, white building with the sign Coach Inn, 1782, hanging above its door), the clerk called after us, “You look fine, Mr. Huber. Glad the things fit.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Peter. “Yes, they were all right.”

“I’ll never forget what you looked like when you came to the store that morning,” added the clerk with a chuckle that carried clearly through the winter twilight and silence of the little street.