Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (25 page)

After a moment I said heavily, “Was it your father, then? Why? Was it a quarrel over—well, was he jealous of Alexia?”

I couldn’t read his eyes. He drew up his knees and clasped his unbandaged arm around them. “Forget that, Miss Keate,” he said decisively. “The thing for us to do is to insist upon Drue’s alibi for that night when I was shot.”

“You said ‘There’ll be murder done.’ You said that the afternoon before your father was murdered.”

“I remember, vaguely. I wasn’t sure—I’m not sure now exactly why I was shot. But I had a vague notion that I ought to tell Claud that it was an attempt at murder.”

“But that isn’t what you said. You didn’t say ‘There
was
an attempt at murder.’ It was in the future, as you put it. You said ‘There’ll
be
murder …’ ”

“I know. You see, I had sense enough to know that since the first attempt had failed another attempt might be made.”

“Do you mean you wanted protection?”

“In a sense. Yes. I wanted someone to know. I wasn’t clear in my head. I only knew there was danger—everywhere.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because,” he said.

Which was not exactly illuminating. “Why Claud?” I persisted, getting nowhere fast.

“Because Claud was Claud. He wasn’t much in the way of force. Yet he—he knew all about us; he smoothed things over, he could always manage my father; he was in the queerest way devoted to him. I think,” said Craig slowly, “it was partly because of Maud; she thought there was no one like my father. In many ways Maud has a much stronger character than Claud had; he gave in to her about everything but money. Maud’s a little overfond of money and would have been a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes if Claud had let her!”

“Oh, she wouldn’t have murdered Claud on account of the will,” said Craig quickly. “They did have a quarrel lately about money. Claud told me. But it was only about some money they had invested, twenty thousand or so; Maud wanted the cash in order to make another investment. Claud didn’t know—or at least didn’t tell me what it was.”

“I suppose,” I said on a wave of astuteness, “that Claud knew who shot you. And got rid of the bullet so it couldn’t be traced.” (As he would have done, I thought, for Conrad, to keep a family secret.)

But Craig’s face was instantly blank and hard. “Do you?” he said flatly. So I got nowhere with that. And, as I lifted my arm to look at my watch, something rustled in my pocket and I remembered what, actually, I’d forgotten, the Frederic Miller checks. I gave them to him at once. “They were in Alexia’s room, in the cupboard …”

He snatched them out of my hand; he looked at them and examined them and questioned me and then lay for a long time staring at the sprawling gilt figures on the dark wall paper, a queer look in his eyes, his fingers tapping the checks, an expression in his face that I couldn’t read. I tried to question him.

“Do you know who Frederic Miller is, is that it?”

“No—no—that is, perhaps I do. I’m not sure. Let me think. …”

But he didn’t want to think any longer, for almost at once he turned quickly to me, excitedly. “Look here, Miss Keate. Will I be able to get out tomorrow?”

“You may be able to get out of bed and walk around the room—that’s about all,” I said slowly. “You’ve done extremely well, as a matter of fact.”

“Can I get to the Chivery cottage?”

“No.”

“But I’ve got to.”

“All right. You’re free, white and twenty-one. Go ahead and kill yourself.”

“I’ll keep these checks.”

“Are you going to give them to the police?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve got to think. If they arrest Drue, I’ll do anything—everything. …”

I gave as jeering and mean a laugh as I could contrive—and succeeded so well that it startled even me. Craig jumped and stared at me. I said, “Anything, yes! Except tell her you still love her. And use your common sense about Nicky.”

“If she loves me,” he said slowly, “that’s enough.”

“I’ll bring her here,” I cried again. Practically with eagerness. “I’ll get rid of the trooper on guard—I don’t know how. But I’ll get her …”

“No,” he said again and firmly. “You’ll bring Alexia here. Now. If you please, Miss Keate.”

“Alexia! What on earth for?”

The queer look of speculation was in his face again. He said quite coolly, looking remarkably like his father in his more unpleasant moments, “Because I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

“Marry Alexia! But, good heavens …” I broke off. “If you think you’ll keep her from giving them the hypodermic that way …”

“Please go, Miss Keate.”

“But I …”

He lifted himself on his elbow; his eyes flashed and his chin and nose seemed to grow hawkier, if you understand me. He snapped crisply as a drill sergeant, “Do as I tell you! Bring her here!”

Well, I did it. I’ve never met a man yet that could make me change my mind; I obeyed him only because—oh, because I did. I was furious, too. I caught a glimpse of myself marching back out of the room with my red hair flaming and two bright spots of anger on my cheeks. But I got Alexia. She was in her room, undressing, and I had to watch her select a diaphanous creamy lace garment that set my teeth on edge and not because it courted pneumonia and, as to that, every possible rheumatic ailment. I only hoped, following her lovely figure and noting how seductively the creamy soft folds of lace and chiffon melted into it, that she would be thus attacked and succumb quickly. In fact, before she reached Craig’s room.

It was a wild hope. The trooper down at the end of the hall saw us and even at that distance I could see him snap to interested attention when his gaze fell upon Alexia. We reached Craig’s room and she swept straight to the bed and Craig said, “Alexia, did you give the police the hypodermic?”

“Why, I …” She settled down on the bed, sitting very close to him, her short, dark hair cloudlike and beautiful about her pointed, delicate face. “Yes, I did, Craig,” she said softly. She shot a glance toward me. “I thought I ought to. It was my duty. I gave it to Nugent tonight. He’s taking it to be fingerprinted. And to have the sediment inside the barrel tested for digitalis. I’m sorry, Craig, but I had to do it.”

“Yes,” said Craig slowly. “I suppose you had to. Well, you’ve done it now. Alexia, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“Yes, Craig.”

“Will you marry me?”

I shut my teeth so hard that I bit my tongue and uttered a stifled ejaculation which turned out, after I’d said it, to be highly profane. Alexia didn’t hear it, not that I would have been anything but pleased if she had, but she was leaning over toward Craig as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “
Why, Craig
!” she cried.

“Will you?” he demanded, his eyes holding her own intently and his profile exactly at that moment like a belligerent young hawk’s.

“Why, I—oh, Craig darling.” She hesitated. Then she seemed to get a kind of hold on herself and leaned over nearer him, lace and chiffon and all. “Oh, my darling,” she breathed. “At last …”

He pushed her away, rather abruptly, so I hoped she’d fall off the bed, but she didn’t. He said, “I don’t mean just sometime in the future. I mean now. Right away. Tomorrow.”

“But your father—Conrad—what will people say?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’ll not know. I can fix everything. Will you, Alexia?”

Which was just exactly more than I could bear. I whirled out of the door and gave it such a good hard bang behind me that the trooper away down at the end of the hall jumped three feet in the air, and came down facing my way and running, with his revolver in his hand.

We met at the stairway.

“Don’t hurt yourself with your revolver,” I said waspishly. “It was only a door.” And sat down on the top step to brood. Which was an unwise move because the more I brooded the more discouraged I got about it, and the more suspicious the trooper, eyeing me distrustfully from before Drue’s door, looked.

But it wasn’t long that I had to wait; in fact in a surprisingly short time Alexia came swirling out of Craig’s room, gave me the fraction of a glance and went quickly to her own room. I couldn’t see the look on her face very distinctly because of the distance between us and the dimness of the night lights. But it did strike me then that there was something surprised, yes, and a little disorganized in her usually poised and self-possessed manner;

I didn’t go to see Drue, then, either; I didn’t want to have to tell her anything. Morning would be all too soon for it to break over her head.

Well, I went back to Craig’s room because it was my duty as a nurse. And neither one of us actually spoke another word that night. I arranged his pillows, gave him one of the pills poor, dead Claud Chivery had left for him, and turned out the light beside his bed. He watched me—the queer, thoughtful look still in his eyes. He didn’t give me back the Miller checks, and I didn’t ask for them. I had enough clues on my mind—or rather, pinned to my anatomy—that I didn’t know what to do with without adding to them.

Again I folded up like an accordion on the couch. But not to sleep for a long time. Craig didn’t sleep either; I could tell by the way he turned and twisted. But I wouldn’t have given him an alcohol rub for all the emeralds in Barranquilla.

About three, Delphine turned up and yelled at the door, so I had to let him in. He created an unwelcome diversion by bringing in what looked like and was a newly deceased mouse. Before I could bring myself to dispose of the creature, Delphine did it for me with really horrid zeal and sat there licking his chops and enormous whiskers while Craig grinned from the pillows and looked all at once young and boyish and rather nice. Which paradoxically made me crosser than ever.

I went back to my couch without a word and eventually I slept. I neither knew nor cared about my patient’s slumbers, except I hoped they were troubled.

And in the morning early, just after Beevens brought in a breakfast tray for each of us, the police came.

It was as I had feared and known it would be. They came directly to Craig’s room and told him. The hypodermic had Drue’s fingerprints on it and mine. There was a very small residue of digitalis in the barrel—but enough to identify. They had informed the District Attorney of it and of her fingerprints on the drawer of the desk where Conrad had been accustomed to keep the missing medicine box (the medicine box that to me was anything but missing; I only wished it had been). Soper, over the telephone, demanded an immediate and formal arrest on a murder charge. But that wasn’t all. For it was then, when they sent a trooper to bring Drue into the room to be questioned (Craig, looking terribly white and drawn insisted upon hearing them question her), it was then that they found she was gone.

She had disappeared during the night; nobody knew when or how. In her cape and without her shoes.

I knew that, for it was I that counted the row of slender, sturdy little pumps and oxfords. She’d brought four pair, including some stub-toed red bedroom slippers. They were all there in a row.

You don’t go out into the night on purpose without shoes.

T
HE TROOPER, QUESTIONED, SEEMED
dazed but insisted, looking frightened, that she couldn’t have passed him. There were no other exits from her room unless she got out the window and it was a sheer drop for nearly twenty-five feet with no shrubbery at that point to break a fall.

At noon they still hadn’t found her; the household was nightmarish that morning—at fantastic sixes and sevens, with Beevens red-eyed and Craig like a crazy man, his eyes blazing out of a hollow, drawn white mask. We made peace somehow, Craig and I, without knowing it, conscious only of Drue and that little row of slippers. No matter what the police said, I knew it wasn’t escape. Craig knew it, too.

Nugent gave orders, however, that started a wideflung, hurried search by telephone, radio and police cars, with alarms sent to neighboring states and hurriedly reinforced squads of state troopers searching the hills.

Much of the inquiry itself took place in Craig’s room; he made Nugent stay there so he could hear everything. Soper telephoned frantically with a dozen different theories and directions; he believed that Drue had escaped. Very cleverly, he said; how, he didn’t know; there were no cars gone from the garage. But he suggested that she’d got a ride with a passing motorist. And he blamed Nugent for letting her get away.

I listened and watched and kept going back in my mind over and over again, seeking for any small thing Drue had said, any hint of an intention to leave, anything at all that would serve to show she had gone of her own accord, willingly. There was nothing. Yet she must have got past the trooper somehow.

I kept going back into her room, too—and looking and finding nothing, except for the little dog, Sir Francis, who was still there; he had been there when they knocked and called to her and opened the door at last and she was gone. He wouldn’t leave, but sat on the foot of her bed, bright eyes terribly watchful and worried. About noon, I think, I took him outdoors and tried to feed and pat him and he struggled away from me and took up his post in Drue’s room again, watching the door, listening. I thought she would have taken him with her if she had gone voluntarily. And she would have told me.

It was a horrible, nightmarish day. Yet things happened. The police inquiry, for instance. Nugent’s questions when I gave him the letter I had written about the hypodermic syringe; I was glad then that I’d written it, for I’d put down all the facts about the hypodermic syringe so it explained her fingerprints on the desk drawer; I’d said that Conrad begged her for his medicine and she looked for it but it was gone and it was only then that she’d remembered she had digitalis and had got it and the hypodermic syringe, and given it to him. But I still didn’t tell them about the medicine box; I didn’t want them to know she had so much as touched it.

Nugent did everything he could do short of sending for bloodhounds, and I’m not sure he wouldn’t have done that. And I was in the room when Craig told him that Beevens had seen Nicky going toward the meadow (or at least toward the garage) just before the discovery of Claud’s body.