Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (4 page)

I nodded. Naturally. It had been then only a matter of weeks since Pearl Harbor.

“He wanted to get into the air force. He hadn’t talked to me about it before he went, and I understood why. It was because he knew that I would feel that he was giving up his chosen career because of me. I wouldn’t have let him do it, at least, I would have tried to stop him. But, you see, he didn’t know that at that time, and if he got the training he wanted he had to be unmarried. Then, and for that particular course of training, they wouldn’t take a married man. He didn’t know that until he applied for it. I didn’t know it until Mr. Brent wrote to me and told me.”

I am not a profane woman. At the moment it was really a pity, for it left me simply nothing adequate to say. She nodded slowly, as if I’d asked her a question. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I did. I believed him—Mr. Brent. How could I help it? He was obviously sincere about the whole thing. He wrote a letter that I wish I’d kept. I didn’t. I burned it. He said that I had wrecked Craig’s chosen career. He said that Craig now wanted to take training as a pilot and that I was—again—the obstacle. He said that he regretted everything he had said to me; he said that he was ready to accept our marriage—that is, our eventual marriage.” She stopped and took a long breath and I saw the picture complete.

It was incredible, of course. Except that women like Drue can be just that incredible.

“So you believed him. You agreed to let bygones be bygones. And you promised to divorce Craig, let him complete his training, and then remarry.”

“That,” said Drue, “was the idea.”

“Good heavens, Drue!”

“I know. But then it seemed right. We had married so quickly, you see. Craig was giving up his job; and his father convinced me that the one thing he wanted was to get into the air force. Mr. Brent was—I can’t tell you how convincing he was. He asked me to forgive him for everything he’d said in anger. He said that he believed at last that Craig and I really loved each other. He said that Craig had set his heart upon becoming a pilot and getting into the army or the navy air force. He said Craig was deeply patriotic—and he is. I knew that. He said that what it—the divorce, I mean—really amounted to was merely a long engagement, and not very long at that. He made it seem so reasonable and so right. He said that Craig would never ask me for it himself and if I loved Craig I would get the divorce. And that as soon as the year of training was up we could remarry.”

It was clear enough; still incredible, if one didn’t know Drue, but clear. What was also pretty clear was dirty work at the crossroads.

“So you got the divorce?”

“Yes. It took six weeks.”

“And Craig got his training?”

“Yes.”

“What happened then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t …”

She shook her head and looked away from me. “He didn’t come back.”

“But didn’t he understand why you did it? Didn’t you see each other and write and …”

She shook her head again. “No. That is, I did write a few times. But he didn’t answer. The divorce went through very quietly and—and so quickly. And that was all.”

After a moment, I said, “And you never tried to see him?”

“No.” Her mouth moved a little wryly. “You see, I had my pride.”

And it had cost her enough. Well, I didn’t say it. I pulled my uniform over my head and struggled through it and glanced at my watch. For all she’d said so much it had been only a few minutes.

“But now,” she said unexpectedly, “it’s different. Pride doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’m older; I’m an adult now and a woman. I know what I want. I was—such a child then.”

She was still a child. I didn’t say it, but took my cap and went to the mirror so as to adjust it to hide the white lock in my rather abundant auburn hair. “And now you’ve come back.”

She sat for a moment in silence. In the mirror I watched a look of determination come slowly into her face. Finally, she said, “Yes, now I’ve come back. I had to.”

Watching her instead of what I was doing, I jabbed a pin into my thumb and muttered. So she’d made up her mind to fight, and she’d given up long ago her best and strongest weapon.

“I can understand your getting too much of Alexia,” I said briefly. “I can understand your leaving the house. I can even understand your—well, believing Pa Brent. And letting Craig go without any effort to keep him. But I cannot understand Craig.”

“Well, neither can I. Now,” she said, in a kind of abject voice which was not at all like her. Except for her flair of defiance with Alexia, she had been in a rather crushed state of mind ever since we started to Balifold, I realized then. This was not, however, her natural and customary reaction to life. She was a perfectly sensible and altogether charming young woman with considerable backbone—which up to then had certainly, however, been held in abeyance to a marked degree. But then love does do very odd things, and obviously she was still heartbreakingly in love with the man whom, nevertheless, she had divorced.

She patted the little dog. “Sarah, it was all so clear then. It’s only now, after I’ve had time to think and time to regret that I see it was all wrong. I believed it then, though. I never suspected.”

“Suspected what?” I said with a rather nervous glance at my watch again. “Suspected whom?”

“Anything. Anybody,” she said.

“And now you do?”

“Now I do. Now I”—she stopped and said in a kind of whisper staring at the rug—“now I’ve got to know what happened.”

That at least was a step in the right direction and one clearly indicated by the foregoing little tale. I said briskly and, I remember, almost gaily, “Good for you. It’s high time. I’m proud of you.”

“It’s not easy,” she said, and gave me a quick and rather diffident glance. “I mean—well, suppose Alexia is right. Suppose Craig
doesn’t
want to see me. I mean—well, I’ve no reason to think that he does, you see. He had every chance.”

“Look here,” I said, still briskly and full of energy and approval. “Obviously you had two people against you in this house—Pop and Alexia. I don’t know Pop, but I can’t say I took to Alexia. Maybe Craig repented his quick marriage and asked his father to get him out of it. But maybe not. As I see it, you’ll have to brace yourself for whatever comes. I mean, have an understanding with Craig.”

“That’s why I came,” she said in a whisper.

I went on, “You may have to take it on the chin, you know. Craig is free, white and twenty-one; he could have come to you.”

“I know,” she whispered again.

“On the other hand, all sorts of things could have happened. It’s a little difficult and melodramatic to suspect people of that particular kind of finagling—I mean, oh, destroying letters, lying, that kind of thing. Still it could have happened.”

“I’ve got to have it clear,” she said.

“Right. It comes under the heading of unfinished business. It …” I stopped abruptly, for someone knocked. I thought it was Anna and went to the door. But it wasn’t Anna; it was a man, young and slender, whose pointed, rather delicate face was instantly familiar to me, although I couldn’t possibly have seen him before. He was very sleek and very elegant with a wonderful brown and maroon color scheme (brown slacks, checked coat, maroon handkerchief and tie) and he seemed surprised to see me.

“Oh, I beg your pardon! I thought—Alexia said Drue was here.”

There was a quick kind of rustle behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and Drue wasn’t there. Dog, coat and all had vanished.

The word Alexia gave me the clue; he was amazingly like her. This must be the twin brother, Nicky. Hadn’t Drue told me?

He said, “Where is Drue?” and tried to look over my shoulder into the room.

It didn’t look as if Drue wanted to see him. I took my fountain pen and my thermometer. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m just going to my patient.”

He moved aside to permit me to step into the hall. As I turned along it toward the big bedroom where the sick man lay, he dodged along with me as gracefully as a panther and about as welcome. I’m bound to say that I instantly added Nicky Senour to my rapidly growing list of dislikes in the Brent house. He was watching me with a gleam of bright curiosity in his face “I say, you know,” he said, “Drue can’t stay here. She’s got to leave. You must make her leave.”

I had reached the door to my patient’s room. I opened it and turned to Nicky Senour and hissed (literally, because I didn’t want my patient to be roused), “If I stay, she stays,” and closed the door on his handsome but startled face.

There was no change in Craig Brent’s pulse or breathing. I didn’t want to rouse him, then, to take his temperature. He had an intelligent and a sensitive face and, from the nose and chin, a will of his own; his behaviour had shown anything but that. I thought of the gaps in Drue’s story. It was brief; it was necessarily elliptical. Obviously there were only two alternatives by way of explanation; either Craig had repented his hasty marriage and ended it in that way (in which case she was well rid of him, but that wouldn’t help Drue just then), or there was actually dirty work at some crossroads. In that case, a few words between Drue and the man before me would clear up a mere lovers’ misunderstanding.

But nothing in her brief and very deleted account of her almost equally brief marriage even touched upon a question that was beginning to assert itself more and more ominously in my mind. Definitely there was something fishy about the story of the shooting. So Craig Brent had been shot, intentionally, with murderous design, then why? And, furthermore, who?

Anna rose from the armchair across the room, within the curtained niche where old-fashioned bay windows made a semi-circular little room of their own. She had been crying and was wiping her eyes. I went to her and said a little sharply, “You can go. I’ll stay now.”

When she had gone, I pulled a chair up near the bed where I could watch for the faintest shadow of a change in Craig Brent’s face. The brown was sunburn; under the tan his face was a kind of gray. I was sitting like that with my fingers on his lean brown wrist when the door opened and two men walked quietly into the room and closed the door behind them. One was the doctor. I had never seen Dr. Chivery before, but a kind of antiseptic spruceness about him identified him at once. He was a short, gray man with no chin, slender, except for a little watermelon in front, and pouches under his eyes. He looked nervous.

The other man was a state trooper in beautiful brownish gray uniform with bars on his sleeve. I must say, though, that the uniform was not a welcome sight; it was like a confirmation of general fishiness.

I got to my feet. The doctor and the policeman (a lieutenant, I thought, by the bars) came straight to the bed. The doctor glanced at me once absently, and they both looked down at my patient for a long moment. Then the doctor said, whispering emphatically, “Nobody shot him. Nobody could have shot him. It was an accident, I tell you.”

And the policeman said, “I’ll have to see the bullet. And the gun.”

D
R. CHIVERY’S HANDS STARTED
toward each other and then thrust themselves in his pockets; they were pink hands, a little shiny and wrinkled and none too steady. He said, “Well, that’s what I’m afraid you can’t do.”

The state trooper turned abruptly to look down at the doctor. He didn’t ask why, and the doctor fidgeted a little and said, “You see, the bullet was thrown out—accidentally; and the gun is gone. Nobody knows what happened to it.”

Again the state trooper said nothing but simply waited, watching the doctor and looking very tall and formidable in his trim uniform. Dr. Chivery said, “In the excitement somebody must have picked up the gun without remembering. It will turn up. But it hasn’t yet.

He waited for an answer again and this time the state trooper obliged. He said, “Ah.”

It was just then, by the way, that I discovered an odd thing about Dr. Chivery, and that was his habit of looking at the edges of things. For he glanced at the left corner of my cap, at a post of the bed, at my patient’s brown hair (so inordinately neat and wetly plastered that I surmised Anna’s fine firm hand) and at the trooper’s coat buttons. He said, “You know me, Lieutenant. Or perhaps you don’t. But the fact is, if I had had reason to think it wasn’t an accident (which is simply absurd on the face of it) perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so frank and prompt about reporting it. Ha,” said the doctor, still whispering vehemently. “Ha.”

It was intended to be a laugh and his mouth twitched upward nervously to accompany it. The trooper’s face was as grave and untouched as a stone image. He said, “Now let me be sure I have the facts straight. It happened last night at eleven?”

Dr. Chivery, eyeing the bedpost, nodded.

“The butler, Beevens, Mrs. Brent’s brother, Nicky Senour, and a guest, Peter Huber …”

“You talked to them yourself,” interrupted Dr. Chivery.

“… Yes, were in the library when it happened; the butler was locking up and looking at the window catches and Mr. Huber and Mr. Senour were reading the papers. They heard the shot and then heard his”—he nodded once toward the man in the bed—“call for help. They went to the garden, found him and—and no one else. They brought him to this room. …”

“And telephoned for me,” said Chivery nodding.

“At the time of the shot, so far as you know, Craig Brent was alone in the garden?”

“He was alone,” said Dr. Chivery. “I was at home, reading in my library. My wife was upstairs, writing letters. I mention us because we are—ha, ha,” he interpolated painstakingly again, “almost members of the family here. Mr. Conrad Brent—Craig’s father had gone to bed. Mrs. Brent was likewise in her own room; she had said good night to the others and gone upstairs only a moment or two before it happened. The servants …”

“I’ll question them. Thank you. You don’t know of any family disagreements …”

Dr. Chivery interrupted indignantly. “My dear fellow—really—this is not an inquiry into murder.”

The trooper looked at Craig. “Well, no—not yet,” he said somewhat pointedly.

“But,
really
,” began Dr. Chivery again, rubbing his pink hands together. His voice had risen shrilly and unexpectedly, so in spite of my intense interest I felt obliged to rustle and put my hand on Craig Brent’s wrist and look hard at the doctor.