Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (20 page)

I knew by that viscous stickiness what was on them. I leaned over, trying not to touch him again. The twilight was deep but still I could make out the outlines of Dr. Chivery’s anxious face and popping eyes, for once fixed and direct. His throat had been cut.

Then I heard again a rustle and snapping of twigs. This time it was clear and definite. This time I knew what it was.

It was the soft sound of something moving in the dense brush beyond the brook, on the slope between me and the Brent house.

As I listened it stopped. There was just silence and night coming on and the bloody thing at my feet.

W
ITH EVERY SECOND IT
was growing darker; I don’t know how long I listened like that, but it seemed all at once fully dark. There was no further sound from the thickets on the slope ahead. And I had to get to the house.

I got awkwardly to my feet, tripping on my cape, spilling nickels. There was nothing I or anyone could do now for Claud Chivery. And I was afraid.

All at once I started to run—back, along the way I had come, for I couldn’t follow the path into those shadowy thickets where something had moved. I ran as Anna had run, gasping for breath, listening behind me, running.

Eventually, after an eon of time, I reached the wall and nothing came out of that black and haunted meadow behind me. Then I was on the public road and I still had to circle (on the road now) around that dark and horrible meadow in order to reach the house.

Yet nothing, really, seemed to have a meaning except the hard-packed, winding road, the loud sound of my feet upon it, the dark lines of wall and hedges, the trees on either hand, the silence of the night sky above. It was as if I was suspended in a strange and ghastly world, cut off from everything I’d ever known, aware only of the road—and the grotesque and horrible thing I’d left in the little thicket, flung down like an empty sack.

Well, I got to the gateposts which loomed sudden and huge in the dusk. I could then see the lights of the Brent house, glimmering through the trees.

My throat and lungs smarted and stung. Yet I was horribly watchful and aware of the shadows and shrubs along the driveway. But there was a light in the hall; the many-colored stained glass window was garish above me. The door was unlocked, for I flung it open. And fell, literally, into Beevens’ arms.

He caught me and his face seemed instantly to sharpen, so lines stood out and it turned the color of skim milk. I knew I was talking, trying to tell him.

He cried, “Dr. Chivery—Dr. Chivery …”

Someone else said, “
Where
?
Where
?” sharply, and there was a flash of color and Alexia, in her long green tea gown, came hurrying from the door of the library. Nicky floated into my vision too and seemed to have followed Alexia. Then Anna came from somewhere, and it was Anna who screamed.

She screamed so sharply that Beevens turned to her and said in a voice of snarling authority, “Get back to the kitchen. Shut up.”

Someone—Nicky—was helping me to a chair. Beevens ran to the telephone beyond the stairway and Alexia was telling him what to say, her pointed face a white, vehement mask.

And then the trooper (Drue’s guard; not Wilkins but another man) came running into the library, and wrested the telephone from Beevens’ hand. “I heard you! I heard everything. Are you sure he’s dead? What happened exactly? Operator, operator …”

He jiggled the hook and I tried to reply and he finally got the police. Alexia came back. “Where is Peter?” she cried. “Have you seen him? Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do. He took her home.”

“Took who home?”

“Maud Chivery. In the car. They left me at the corner. Someone was on the meadow—don’t you see—someone was there! Tell them that.”

The trooper was already shouting the news of murder (“Another murder! Dr. Chivery! In the north meadow down by the brook …”) presumably into Nugent’s distant ear. We all listened. “She doesn’t know who did it. Well, that’s what she says. Just now, five minutes ago. No, the Cable girl’s still in her room …”

Alexia looked at Nicky and Nicky looked at Alexia in utter silence, as if they didn’t need words; it was a secret look, communicative, with a kind of mutual question and answer. It was baffling, for I could feel those elements in it, yet there was nothing I could really interpret. The trooper said, “Okay—okay—okay,” and emerged into the hall again. “They’ll be here right away. Now then …” I’d never noticed what big and extraordinarily substantial-looking revolvers the troopers wore strapped to their trim waists, until I noticed the revolver this one held poised in his hand. He said, “Don’t leave the house, any of you,” and ran into the hall and up to the landing where he stopped instead of at Drue’s door. It was evidently an order from Nugent and it was a fairly strategic spot, for he could see the whole of the lower hall and part of the upper.”

Alexia looked down at me. “Do you know who did it?”

“
No. No …
”

Nicky said, almost dreamily, “Claud—well, he must have got in somebody’s way.”

“Suicide,” said Alexia, all at once. “It must have been suicide!” And Nicky said sharply, leaning over me, “What’s she got on her hands?”

“I fell—I told you. He was on the path …” I began jerkily. Alexia and Nicky drew a little together and just looked at me, so their faces, so alike, and the eyes shining from behind those long silky eyelashes, were almost like one face, seen in duplicate, with one expression.

It was Beevens who came forward, clucked disapprovingly and exactly like a hen when he saw my hands and said, “This way, Nurse. You’ll want to wash them.” I followed Beevens through the library and into the narrow little washroom adjoining it. There was soap there and I scrubbed my hands and then saw a small stain on the hem of my white skirt and I took that out with cold water too and shook myself and felt better. Although I’d lost my cap somewhere. Probably in the woodland and the police would find it and say I killed him.

And then I thought of Craig. Alexia hadn’t been with him, she’d been downstairs and in the library. So he was alone.

When I came back into the library Beevens was gone, and Alexia and Nicky were talking.

“Beevens said Maud walked into town about three-thirty this afternoon; she said she would wait in town and come home with Claud after the inquest. The inquest took place in the hotel,” Alexia was saying.

“But she must have missed him,” said Nicky. “Otherwise she and Claud would have come home together.” He turned to me. “You said, didn’t you, that Peter took her home in the car?”

“Yes.” I went to the couch to gather up my cape. “I rode into town with Mr. Huber; we went into the bar and Mrs. Chivery was there.”

“
Maud
?” cried Alexia.

“Claud must have walked from town,” said Nicky. “He often does. And he must have intended to stop here; everybody takes the short cut through the meadow.”

Alexia said, “Somebody’s got to tell Maud. I’ll telephone.” She started briskly for the telephone, quite cool and unperturbed.

I said, “It’s going to be a shock,” and looked at her trailing green tea gown—not a costume for walking in the meadow. Yet Chivery had been dead for some time when I found him, so she or anybody else would have had time to get home and change. And just at that moment I suspected anybody and everybody in the house, even Anna and Beevens and Craig.

But Drue had an alibi; she’d been under police guard.
And now they’d release her, for this proved, didn’t it, that she hadn’t murdered Conrad!
For, as Craig had said, simply on the basis of averages and logic, there weren’t likely to be two murderers, mysteriously converging in our midst.

At that thought and its implications I took a long and thankful breath.

Alexia had reached the door when Nicky said, “You’d better let me do it. I’ll have Peter bring her here. …”

As Alexia paused, I walked past them quickly toward the stairway. The trooper let me pass; he didn’t speak or try to stop me; it was his presence there (uniformed, armed, waiting because he had to, alert as a coiled spring with only the excitement in his eyes betraying the man) that was a threat of power to come. Investigation, evidence, accusation. One attempt at murder: Craig. One murder by poison: difficult to prove. One murder by stabbing. Outright, cold-blooded, horribly feral. Wolfish.

Drue’s door was unguarded and I wanted to go to her, but that would have to come later. I hurried to Craig’s room; the door was open and he was sitting bolt upright, wrapped in a dressing gown, in the chair near the fireplace. His eyes blazed at me; his face was stiff and white. And I knew by the look on it, that he already knew. He said, “Shut the door.”

I did. “What are you doing out of bed? Who helped you … ?”

“Come here. Put down your cape. Sit down—no, over here on the couch. Tell me about Claud. I heard the trooper at the telephone, and you when you came in the door. I know Claud was murdered.”

“But you …”

“Listen,” he said savagely. “I’m up. It didn’t hurt me to get up. Nobody let me; it was my own idea. And as soon as you tell me everything about Claud I’ll go back to bed. Not an instant sooner.”

Well, there was no use struggling over it; I was still shaky and my knees were unsteady. I just sat there looking at him and wishing I could smack him and above everything else not really caring much about anything, I was so tired. And he said suddenly, in a less hard and terse way, “You’d better lie down a minute, Miss Keate. What about some brandy?”

The brandy made me think of Maud and her violet sachet and what had happened afterward and I refused it with a shudder. But I told him about Claud Chivery. Told him the whole story, and watched the gray, drawn look tighten around his mouth.

“Now then,” I added wearily, “you’d better get back to bed. I thought Mrs. Brent was going to stay with you; I wouldn’t have left you alone so long.”

He was looking at the rug with narrowed, intent eyes that didn’t see it. “I thought you ought to have some rest. That’s why I didn’t send for you. Alexia went away only a moment or two after you left. Miss Keate …” he looked at me then. “Do you have any idea who did it? Tell me what you saw, everything. I’m tied here. I have to depend on Pete to get around for me. And you. If I could only get out of here …” He started impatiently to rise, turned a blue-white, and I sprang forward just as he sat down again on the edge of the chair, clinging to the arms of it rather desperately.

“Well, you can’t,” I said.

“I’ve got to. I know I could do something.”

“What?” I asked. It was a pungent question.

He said, “I don’t know. But something. There must be clues. There must be something the police have missed. There must be—well, somebody. Somebody we don’t know about …”

It was not a nice suggestion. It conjured up a lurking, homicidal figure hidden in some forgotten room or out-building, waiting to pounce. Something seemed to crawl along the back of my neck, and I shot a rather nervous glance toward the door, which was closed, and into the corners of the big room where there were only empty shadows, and said rather sharply, “
Who
?”

He stared at the fire. “Nobody,” he said finally. “It’s just that murder—is so unaccountable. So—well, so hideously erratic. You can’t hook it up with anybody you know.”

There was another little silence. I agreed with him altogether too heartily. At last I said, “If you were able to get around, what would you do? Where would you look for what you call clues?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, his eyes somber and brooding, watching the fire. “I don’t know. Pete is doing what he can. But I—if only I could be sure that Drue is safe!” he burst out all at once and looked at me with a sudden appeal in his glance that was boyish and direct and touched with anguish.

“She’s all right,” I said quickly. “That’s one advantage of being practically under arrest. She is protected by being guarded.”

His eyes clouded again. “Yes,” he said. “And that’s another danger. If they arrest her—Miss Keate, I can’t move. I couldn’t get as far as the door without collapsing. Don’t you see you
must
help me? Be my
eyes,
my—my
ears.
If I could only get out of here!” He struck the arms of the chair and gave a kind of groan. And said, “Tell me everything you saw or heard. Everything. You can trust me.”

Which, for no reason at all, made me wonder if I could. Indeed, after seeing Claud Chivery as I had seen him I would have had a mental reservation about trusting my own image in the mirror.

Still Craig was the one person (besides Drue) who couldn’t have killed Chivery. He might be able to get out of bed by himself and reach the chair; he might even—the night his father was killed—have walked as far as the linen room and collapsed. But he couldn’t (at least I was fairly sure he couldn’t) have waylaid Chivery at the brook; and he couldn’t have hurried up that slope back of the house, along the rest of the path (the short way I had not dared attempt), reached the house before me and got back to his room unobserved.

Although someone could have done just that, and it didn’t improve my state of mind to realize it. The path was a short cut; there would have been time. And certainly whoever it was in that shadowy brush had gone somewhere.

But I didn’t know who it was nor why he was lingering there so long after Chivery must have died. I had no idea who, and telling Craig that, I almost said
what
as if the thing in the meadow had only horrible being and not humanity. Which in a dreadful sense was very near the truth.

Well, I answered his appeal as fully as I could answer it by simply repeating, in detail, the events that had taken place since I had left him with Alexia in the late afternoon. Or rather, since I had left him alone, for he’d said that Alexia stayed in the room only a moment or two. He listened intently but asked only a few questions. And eventually I got him back to bed; he didn’t resist; he seemed indeed scarcely aware of me. But he spoke of Drue, and he thought the same thing I thought. “They can’t prove anything against her now,” he said suddenly looking up at me. “They had her under guard at the time Claud was murdered.”