Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (3 page)

“Conrad can’t stop me,” said Drue.

“Oh,
can’t
he!” cried Alexia. “You’ll see.”

Again Drue seemed to consider for a moment. Then she said with something very honest and appealing in her voice and face, “Alexia, you are Conrad’s wife. It’s nothing to you—what happened in the past. I don’t suppose we can be friends …”

“Friends!” said Alexia with a sharp little laugh.

Drue went on steadily, “… but there is no reason why you should object to my nursing Craig, and to my having an understanding with him.”

“You’ve had your understanding,” said Alexia, “via the divorce courts.”

“But that,” began Drue, very white now and firm, “was because he wanted it and …”

“Certainly, he wanted it,” cut in Alexia. “Did he ever come back to you later? You don’t need to answer that. I know he didn’t. It’s no good arguing with me, Drue. Besides, even if I used my influence with Conrad in your favor—and I have influence, don’t mistake that—he would still not listen. You wrecked all his plans for Craig. He won’t have you in the house. And Craig doesn’t want you. There’s no mystery about the thing; if you’ve come here with that in your mind, you may as well leave voluntarily. You left Craig; you went to Reno; you sued for divorce. You were offered a settlement which you, rather unwisely, I thought, refused. The divorce went through without a hitch. That’s all there was to it.” Alexia paused, caught her breath and added quickly, “If that’s why you’ve come back—to get some money, I mean—Conrad won’t give it to you. He would have given it to you at the time of the divorce. He offered what must have seemed to you, in your circumstances”—her glance swept Drue up and down quite as if Drue’s skirt were threadbare and her shoes patched (as a matter of fact, Drue has all the American woman’s clothes sense and always looks soignée and smart, and did that day)—“what must have seemed a fortune to you,” said Alexia, and smiled. At that Drue went dead white and so rigid that only her eyes were alive, and they were blazing. Alexia stopped smiling and became perfectly still, too, and tense. So I knew it was time to do something. I’ve dealt with too many hysterical patients and even occasionally a hysterical student nurse not to know that when a woman stops talking and looks like that one must act—but quickly.

I put my arm through Drue’s and said with some haste and firmness, “I’m going to change my uniform. Come with me, Drue.”

I drew her along with me toward the rooms at the end of the hall where our bags had been taken. Alexia called after us, lifting her voice, “There is a six-thirty train. The station wagon will be at the door at six.” She stood there, I was sure, watching our progress down the hall. The little terrier had quietly emerged from the bedroom close to Drue. I wasn’t aware of him until we reached my room and I saw that Drue went inside first and the terrier came, too.

Again I closed the door. I said, “Well …” a little forcefully and put down my handbag and gloves, and took off my hat.

It was a pleasant room, plainly furnished, but bright with chintz and plenty of windows. It was obviously intended for just such use—a trained nurse, an extra guest. Along one wall was a door into a bathroom which connected on the other side with the room Drue was to have, and her bags were stacked there, for I went and looked.

When I came back, Drue was standing by the window, holding the dog tight in her arms, looking down through the streaming rain. I took out my keys, knelt to open the suitcase that held a supply of uniforms and said, “All right. What’s all this about?”

She turned from the window. “I had to do it this way, Sarah. I had to come and I had to have you with me. I didn’t dare tell you he’d been shot. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

“You knew good and well I wouldn’t have come.”

“They telephoned to me, you see, from the Registry office. As soon as I heard it was—was Craig, it was like—well, fate. As if …” Her voice stopped and, after a moment, she said in a kind of choked way, “As if that was why I had learned to be a nurse. So I could nurse him. They said he might not live, and”—she finished in an unsteady whisper—“there is so much I haven’t said to him.”

The room was very quiet for a moment. That’s the gnawing heartache of death, of course; the thought of the things you didn’t say and now cannot ever say. The permanent severance of communication.

It did no good to think of that. I rustled out a starchy uniform and said briskly, “Well, you’re here now and so am I.” I got up from my knees—not too easily, for I’m well past the age of springing lightly from cliff to cliff like a gazelle, or perhaps I mean a mountain goat—well, at any rate I got up and put the uniform on the bed. “He looks pretty tough. That’s why you telephoned to me yourself?”

“I made the girl at the Registry office let me telephone to you and make the arrangements. I was afraid if she talked to you she’d tell you the truth …”

I said tritely, “Honest confession is good for the soul,” and got out my nursing watch with the second hand on it and strapped it to my wrist.

“Oh, Sarah, you are a darling.”

“Fiddlesticks. You mean, I’m a good nurse.” But I let myself look at her then and she smiled faintly.

“You’d better take off your jacket and get on with the story,” I said practically. Obediently she slipped off her suit coat. She looked very young in her plain white blouse and short green skirt; she pushed her shining curls upward with one hand, absently, and said bleakly, “You heard Alexia. They’ll try to make me leave. But I’m not going.”

Well, certainly the interview with Alexia had left little to the imagination in that respect. But I didn’t think Drue had stolen the family silver or murdered Grandpa during what must have been a fairly brief sojourn under the Brent roof. For I had known her when she was in training, a thin, hard-working child of eighteen or thereabouts, with a gay smile and intelligent eyes. I had then been a Supervisor (which I understand the student nurses spell with an n and two o’s) but had liked her nursing and remembered her later when we met again, both doing private duty. We knew each other well, in spite of the constant coming and going—the interruptions, the weeks and sometimes months of dropping out of sight while on a long or troublesome case—that make up a private nurse’s life. Yet she had never mentioned nor hinted at this particular interstice, so to speak. Unless the sudden dropping away of a very smitten and attentive young interne, a few months ago, was such a hint.

I got out studs. “I’ve got to hurry. You and this Craig Brent met and married. It must have been very quiet—I usually know about these things. Well, then you were divorced. Conrad must be Craig’s father and he must have money. Alexia, who does not appear to be exactly a friend …”

“She was, well, expecting to marry Craig, when we met, Craig and I,” Drue said in a dry voice and stopped.

“It must have been charming for her,” I said.

“Sarah.” She whirled around. “It wasn’t—I didn’t mean—oh, …” She bit her lip and looked at me with eyes that were bright with tears.

“Charming for all of you,” I said. “At any rate, last night Craig was shot and you inveigled me (under false pretenses) to come here with you on the case. That’s all I know.”

“It’s all there is to know,” she said, bleakly. “It was all wrong, you see, from the beginning. I’d better tell you. We oughtn’t to have married. He—we were so young. That was over a year ago.”

A year ago! So now she felt aged and adult and looked back on herself a year ago as being very young. She couldn’t have been, allowing even for the years of her training, more than twenty-four at the very most.

She went on quickly, “Craig—you see, he was sick; he was home on leave and he was in an auto accident and broke his arm. It was a compound fracture and he was in the hospital five weeks. Five weeks,” she said, “and three days. I was one of his nurses. And the day he came out we were married.”

“On leave?”

“Yes. That—that was one of the troubles later. His father, you see, wanted him to be in the diplomatic service. All his life he’d been destined for that and he’d got, a year or so before, his first appointment. It was a consular appointment, not much, but a beginning. It was in South America, and it was when he was at home on his first leave that we met. Like that.”

I put in a stud and said, “And married.”

“Yes. He—oh, it’s one of those stories. So simple really and so wrong. We oughtn’t to have married then. We didn’t know each other, really. There wasn’t time. We’d tried to tell each other things; things about our lives and the things that had happened to us before, but none of it seemed to matter then. We …” She stroked the little dog’s head, her face bent above him. “We had a little time together; not much, because his leave had been extended but still it was nearly up. So we had to come home. That is, we came here. To see his father.” She stopped again. I fastened in the last stud and said, “I take it Papa was surprised.”

“He hadn’t been told.” Her face was still lowered over the dog but had a kind of fixity and whiteness. “You see that was wrong, too. He had other plans for Craig.” She stopped again, stroking the dog’s head.

“Alexia,” I said.

She glanced at me once, quickly. “Yes. They weren’t really engaged, she and Craig. If they had been, Craig would have told her, before we married, in another way. But it was a kind of understanding; it had been for a long time. I didn’t know that, then. Until we came here and Alexia was here. It was a clear, cold night in January over a year ago and we came into the hall downstairs. It was after dinner and they were having coffee in the library and his father came out of the library with a cup in his hand and then Alexia came. She was so beautiful—she wore a crimson, trailing dinner gown and she went straight to Craig and put up her face to be kissed and he said, ‘Alexia, this is my wife.’ ”

“Dear me,” I said, keeping to myself the strong impression that young Craig might have well deserved the shooting he had got. Certainly Alexia couldn’t be expected to greet Drue now or ever with anything like joy.

“Yes. Oh, I told you it was all wrong. Everything. But in a queer way, Sarah, we couldn’t help it. It was as if we had been caught in something we couldn’t stop. It wasn’t Craig’s fault, any of it, any more than it was mine.” I thought there were tears in her eyes again, but she lowered her face over the dog so I couldn’t see and began to smooth out his long forelock with fingers that trembled.

“So there were fireworks,” I said.

“It meant Craig’s career, really. I didn’t realize that when we were married. Perhaps it’s why Craig hadn’t told his father until after we were married. His father told me our marriage was impossible. He said it was a terrible mistake. He said Craig’s career demanded money; he simply had to have money to get anywhere. I hadn’t any money, of course. But that wasn’t the main thing: he made it clear that he had intended to help Craig himself with money. But he said that now, in view of our marriage, he wouldn’t. He said Craig’s career was washed up because of our marriage and that for that reason alone he would have refused him the money that was necessary, even if he had approved of his wife—me—as a person. He didn’t like me; but that wasn’t all. I—I was a nurse, you see.” She lifted her shining head a little proudly. “My family were good and old, too. But I couldn’t help him, socially. Not directly, you know, with wires at my hand to pull. He explained all that to me.”

I sniffed. You couldn’t look at Drue Cable and not know she had good breeding; it was in every line of her face and every motion of her body as it is in a thoroughbred. I am no snob. I’ve nursed too long to have anything but a kind of respectful recognition of certain qualities like courage and truth and gentleness which, Heaven knows, can exist anywhere. But I’ve nursed long enough to have seen something of heredity; natural laws are natural laws, and you can’t get around them.

“So Pa Brent resorted to the good old-fashioned disinheriting threat. Or what amounted to it. What did Craig say to all this?”

“Craig laughed at first. Then he wouldn’t even talk of it. He told me to forget it; he said it wasn’t important, to pay no attention to what his father said. But I couldn’t help paying attention. Because Mr. Brent told me that the only thing to do was for us to end our marriage as—as abruptly as it began.” She was quoting. I could tell it from the bitterness that then, for the first time, came into her voice.

I got out of my wool dress and reached for my uniform and I remember that I stood there for an instant staring at her. For the way she spoke gave me a hint as to what was going to come next, and I really couldn’t believe it. “You surely don’t mean to say you agreed to that,” I cried, astonished.

She started to braid the dog’s long forelock, her fingers very gentle but still unsteady. “Not just then. I couldn’t. We stayed on a little. Craig’s leave had been given another month’s extension. Then Alexia came back and—and Nicky,” she said, bending over the dog. “Her twin brother.”

There was a rather long pause while she braided and rebraided the soft forelock. “Then,” she went on finally, “Craig had to go to Washington. His father wanted me to stay here; he said we must get to know each other better. That pleased Craig; he hoped it meant his father was coming around. So he asked me to stay, and I did. I went to the train with him and he kissed me and said he’d be back in a week. It was there at the station—where we got off the train …” She bent closely over the dog again. “I never saw Craig again until today.”

“
Never—
why not?”

“He had to stay longer in Washington, two weeks, three weeks. It—it wasn’t …” She broke off and, after a moment said, “His father didn’t want to know me better. Alexia was here all the time, too. It wasn’t very pleasant.” Her voice hardened a little and she said, “Besides, there was Nicky. Craig didn’t come back, and I couldn’t stay here. I went away.” She stopped, as if that was all the story.

“Do you mean to tell me you let them influence you like that? So you walked out and never returned?”

“That wasn’t all,” she said and seemed to think for a moment, arranging facts in the order which would make them clearest to me. She frowned and said: “You see, Sarah, I couldn’t stay here. So I left. But that wasn’t all, because Craig gave up his job. That was why he stayed so long in Washington. He had decided to get training as a pilot. It was before the war began. I mean before we got into it, naturally …”