And in her heart, horribly, instantly convinced, she was sure that she herself, schooled and trained to save life, had literally taken it.
And Andy knew it. Andy had known it.
He stood now watching her, his face drawn and gray-looking, older suddenly and stern, his eyes blazing with knowledge.
“You say Julie had prepared it? Before she went off duty?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his hands through his hair.
“Oh, God,” he said. “If it was in the medicine anybody could have put it there. Who was in the house — But it doesn’t matter. There’s no use in our asking questions, inquiring, trying to run the thing down now. The thing is to admit nothing. Tell them nothing — and hope that nothing will show up in the autopsy. After a year —”
“It’s been a year,” she said slowly. “If she was poisoned, would it be traced? Could it be traced? Oh, I know arsenic would remain, but it wasn’t arsenic, Andy. There were no symptoms of that.”
“Any organic poison can be traced — or almost any organic poison. The symptoms — coma and all that — suggest morphine, opium, possibly luminal in sufficient quantity. If I’d thought of murder… But Brule —”
Brule had been there when she died. Brule had bent over the bed, had had his wise and expert fingers on her faint pulse; had lifted her eyelids and looked, there at the last. Rue wrenched herself back to that night, she tried to recall details of that scene; Andy, too, was trying to remember. He said, low so Gross if he were in the hall could not hear:
“Do you remember her eyes, Rue? Were the pupils either enlarged or small? Was there anything —”
Rue shook her head slowly.
“There was nothing, Andy. Nothing I can remember. Brule was there, and you know how it is with him. Nobody ever questions him. He is so strong, so sure of himself; so certain; he said she was dead. He — I think you came just then. And I remember Brule sent me to see to Madge. Madge was hysterical; Steven and I tried to quiet her, but Steven was almost as bad as Madge. Someone sent for the undertaker — I think Brule told Gross to telephone. There was nothing. Andy, where are you going?”
He was buttoning the overcoat he had not removed.
“I’m going to find Brule. If anyone telephones, if anyone comes, don’t say anything.”
He had gone before it occurred to her that he must know where Brule was.
The house was silent. The narrow, five-storied brownstone house where Crystal had lived and married and died at last.
It was cold in the French drawing room; the gilded mirrors looked indescribably vacant and cold and shallow, yet they had seen so much. She shivered under the furs she still wore, rose and went through the narrow hall, which ran along the length of the house, to the library. There was a sullen cannel-coal fire there in the small marble grate.
She took off her furs and knelt to poke the coals to a brighter blaze. She would wait for Brule.
She had never waited for him in their brief married life. Instinctively she knew he would not like her waiting; would not like her to assume any air of possession.
She pushed a deep, leather-cushioned chair closer to the fire and sat down, stretching out her silver sandals.
From a modern light wood frame above the mantel Crystal stared enigmatically down at her, a half smile on her thin, painted lips, her eyes secret, cool, uncannily observant, and the pearls she wore glowing. Madge was to have those pearls.
It was half-past one when Brule came.
The heavy jar of the front door roused her. She was chilled and too much aware of the house and its silence. The fire had gone out long before. She had curled up in the great chair and put her head upon her arms and pulled her furs over her bare, slim shoulders as the house grew colder. But she had not slept. Once she wondered, in the waiting, night silence, if ever again anyone could sleep in that house where Crystal’s sleep had been too deep.
Brule saw the light in the library and came in, and Rue stirred and moved cramped muscles.
“Rue!” he said. He was in evening dress and carried gloves and a hat in one hand. He put them down on a table. She saw at once that he was angry. His usually ruddy face was pale, and there were lines in it which only showed under extreme fatigue. His bright, black eyes had points of light, and his straight black eyebrows were frowning. His black, short mustache made a straight, displeased line, too. He was built like a soldier; there was about him a rigidity and compactness that actually meant a trim hard body, always in good condition. He frowned at her questioningly, hesitated and then went to a small cellarette.
“Waiting, Rue?” he said over his smoothly tailored shoulder and bent to take out glasses and a tall brandy bottle.
Her voice stuck in her throat. Of all the things those hours of thought had stirred in her mind to say to him, nothing seemed poised and able to cut through the hard and brilliant shell which always, as long as she had known him, encased the great and clever Brule Hatterick.
As she did not reply he shot a quick, dark look at her.
“Will you join me?” he said and, taking her acquiescence for granted, poured golden-brown liquid into two small glasses.
She was icy cold. Or was it that the questions she had to ask frightened her, stiffened her tongue, made her hands cold and unsteady?
He turned and put a small glass in her hand.
“Drink that,” he said. “I see you know. Who told you — Andy? Well, you may as well know what has happened. I…” He paused, swallowed the brandy and went on: “I signed a consent for the exhumation of Crystal’s body. We’ll soon know the truth.”
I
n the end all the questions boiled down to one. She put the small glass on the table beside her and leaned forward. He met her eyes directly, but she had never been able to understand him, to penetrate past the guarded regularity of his face. He went to stand before the fire, his erect, soldierly figure blocking itself strongly against the marble behind him. Crystal looked down, watching them.
Rue said: “Is it true? Was she — murdered?”
Brule could be either brutally direct or neatly, coolly evasive; she had seen him in both moods. He looked at her, now, speculatively.
“What did Andy tell you?”
“Andy didn’t find you, then? When he left here he said he was going to see you.”
Brule looked at the glass he held, tipped it a little and said: “I haven’t seen Andy since about six. I take it he told you the main points.”
“He told me about the letters, about the police coming to your office. They were here tonight.”
“Tonight!” It startled him; she could see that by the way his eyes narrowed and lighted and the way his mouth straightened itself under his mustache. He added after a moment: “What did they want? Did they question you? What did they ask you?”
She told him swiftly, word for word as near as she could remember them. When she came to her memory of the medicine she faltered. But Brule extracted it quickly.
“Did you tell them you had given her the last dose of medicine?”
“No — that is, Andy said that naturally I had given it to her and that he had prescribed it.”
“And did you give it to her?”
“Yes.”
“You remember it distinctly?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because — because she said it was bitter. And then she drank it.” She had meant to question him. She still meant to. But he was questioning her.
“Did you tell the police that?”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“Why?” he asked again, watching her.
“Because I — Brule, you must tell me, was she murdered?”
For a moment she thought he intended to evade again, but he didn’t. Instead he put the small glass deliberately down on the mantel and turned slowly back to her again.
“You want the truth, don’t you Rue? Well then — I don’t know.”
“But — but what do you think? What are we going to do? What —”
“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do now.”
“Do you mean —”
“I mean only that. There’s nothing we can do. These things take time; perhaps they’ll never discover anything that — lends credence to their notion. Any kind of chemical analysis after so long a time has passed is difficult. Unless, of course, they know what to look for; but you can’t just fumble in the dark; different poisons show their presence by different and varying tests. Unless the police doctors know what to look for, and I take it so far they do not know, it will be difficult — it may even prove impossible to find and prove the presence of any particular chemical in a lethal quantity. The thing to do is sit tight. Go on with your usual routine. I won’t say forget it —”
“Andy thinks she was murdered.”
Brule’s eyes were bright, dark, altogether enigmatic.
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you think so?”
“I don’t know, Rue. I’ve told you that. When she died I did think once of suicide. But I saw no reason for publicizing that — speculation. And I had no very good reasons for it. Except — well, you were there when she died. You know how unexpected it was.”
“Who could have killed her?”
“Again, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem very likely that she was murdered. I don’t think the police will ever be able to prove anything.”
“Who wrote these letters? It must be someone who knows something of her death — and the truth of it.”
Brule lifted his eyebrows.
“Or someone who wants to make trouble. I don’t know who wrote them. But when the tumult and shouting have died down for lack of evidence, I intend to find out.”
When that look was in Brule’s face the nurses at the hospital cowered. It was only something cold and dark in his eyes and a kind of tight look around the clean line of his jaw. But Rue knew it well. She said: “There must be something we can do —”
“Believe me, my dear, there’s nothing. Did Andy take you to the opera?”
“I — couldn’t stay. He told me after we arrived. We went away. Alicia was there. She left just before we got in the car. We went into a drugstore, and when we came out we saw her leaving.”
“Did you? Well, Rue — I’m off to bed.”
“But…” His assurance baffled her; yet he was right, too. What could they do that night?
“Andy said you were trying to pull wires.”
“Oh. I’ll do what I can. Guy’s coming in tomorrow. I’ll talk to him just in case. Don’t let this worry you too much, Rue. I’ll see to it the police don’t bother you; Guy will cook up some kind of protection for you. After all, they have no proof of anything. And they’ll probably never have proof.”
“But if she was murdered —”
“Well?”
“Oughtn’t we — do something? Tell the police —”
“Why?”
“Why, because it’s right. Because —”
“Crystal’s dead. Madge is very much alive and young. You are, too, Rue, and you are my wife. Steven is frail and horribly sensitive, and his music is of no small value. I myself have my — small importance in the world. Andy was her attending physician, and he’s just entered upon what promises to be a brilliant career. Why ruin five lives?… You don’t know, Rue, what a murder inquiry is… Now, my child, go to bed.”
He went to her and put his hand for a moment under her chin and looked down at her, smiling a little. “You’ll have weathered many things by the time you reach my age. How old are you, Rue? Twenty-five…”
“Twenty-six.”
“I’m close to forty. I’ve worked hard. I’ve learned, I think, in a hard school to control emotions —”
“You —” She stopped abruptly, checked by the hard directness of his eyes.
“You were about to say I have no emotions. Wasn’t that it? Well, that is as may be. Go to bed. It’s cold here. I’ll have another drink before I go up.”
She went. Wearily up the stairs through the chill and quiet house. Into the room that had been Crystal’s.
Because Rue had been a nurse she had known many nights when she must stay awake, therefore she knew familiarly the hours of the night. She knew their slowness and their silence, and the curious, terrifying isolation of the gray hours of the dawn. So that night was not unfamiliar to her except that, before, there had been only the need to perform skilled and expert duties; there had been no terrifying questions to haunt her, no tormenting pictures erecting themselves against the curtain of the night. No horror.
And Andy had said he loved her, had urged her to leave with him, had begged for her to let him rescue her. He knew, then, things that Brule would not tell her. Brule with his strength, his worldly shrewdness, his self-control. What did Brule know? What did he think behind that well-schooled mask that was his face?
It was the next day that Juliet Garder came.
Rue did not see Brule when he left the next morning; Madge left the house early, too, to go to the private day school she attended. Madge, who did not know the storm that was about to burst.
And when Rue went downstairs just before lunch she heard Steven’s piano. Steven knew nothing of it, then; otherwise that music would not have been tranquil glissades of sound from the distant wing.
If Brule had told neither Madge nor Steven, then there was a reason for not doing so. Rue would have liked to talk to Steven; he was always kind, and it would have been a help, that dark and anxious day, merely to talk to him, but she did not. She snatched the papers from the table in the hall and scanned them feverishly, at first; more calmly as she found no mention of the Hatterick name. When the news broke there would be headlines. The thought actually and literally sickened her.
Steven, in a working frenzy, had lunch sent to his studio, and Madge lunched at school, so Rue ate alone in the narrow long dining room at the back of the house. Gross stood at the buffet and watched morosely while the waitress served her. She wondered what Gross thought, what he knew, how Brule had insured the butler’s silence, as he must have done. Otherwise the whole house would have been alive and whispering with the thing.
The day darkened with afternoon, became all in a moment one of Chicago’s dark days. It is a curious thing, this sudden shifting of air currents (affected somehow but mysteriously by the lake), which combine themselves with a pall of smoke and fog and settle down like a blanket upon Chicago. Perhaps the extreme concentration of Chicago’s business area has something to do with it; perhaps Lake Michigan, stretching north and east into dull grays, enormous, incalculable, is the sole cause; however that may be, it is so accustomed an occurrence that Chicagoans accept it without comment, turn on lights and go about their business quite as if daylight instead of twilight mantles the streets.
Sometimes this pall of abnormal night holds itself upon the Loop district alone; sometimes it spreads beyond the Loop; sometimes it leaves the Loop altogether and travels north or west or south, and plunges some outlying suburb in gloom which necessitates street lights for a day, an hour, before it dissipates itself as mysteriously as it arrives.
That day the black pall held itself close over the Loop and adjacent sections and thus completely blanketed the Hatterick house, for it was in that section of the early hundreds not far from the lake and the river which is called the near-north side. There are in that section many tall new hotels and shining, modern apartment houses. But there are also several streets of houses which are narrow, long and wedged together, built shortly before or shortly after the fire, and too well built to be wrecked, except in some instances, in order to give place to more modern buildings.
The house that had been Crystal Hatterick’s was one of those houses. It was brownstone in front, with a wide, carved mahogany door, and plate-glass windows with beveled edges which caught light in slivers that were all the colors of the rainbow. There was a basement entrance down a short flight of steps. The basement floor was actually the kitchen floor and still remained so despite more modern ideas of comfort. There were pantries there, and storerooms and a laundry and drying room, and the furnace rooms. A huge, creaking dumbwaiter carried food, in course after course, to the dining room, which was at the back of the long house and had windows overlooking a small back yard which they shared with their neighbor, Guy Cole. It was enclosed by a high brick fence and had sparse grass and shrubs. From the dining room you also overlooked other houses’ back yards, other houses’ stained and dark brick walls, other windows blank and shining.
There were, including the basement, five stories; the front and the back rooms of each story were naturally the desired rooms because of the light; in any of the other rooms (opening on each floor from a long narrow hall jutting around the stairwell) you needed artificial light even on a sunny day, for there was almost no space between the lateral walls of the house and those of the houses on either side of it. Heavy curtains masked the depressing, close view of other walls and other windows, but also shut out all the light.
Steven’s music room had been added; squeezed into the back where the hall left off, and projecting outward into the narrow back yard; it was a long room, extremely narrow, lighted by deep bay windows, heavily curtained, and was entered from the hall by a door at right angles to the dining-room door. Here were Steven’s large concert piano, his long writing table; his radio, his Victrola, his cabinets of records and of sheet music.
Altogether it was not a cheerful house, but it was well and conveniently located and had been kept in extremely good condition ever since it was built. And it had been one of Crystal’s main interests; the house, its decoration and redecoration; the pictures, the rugs, the authentic and carefully chosen objects of art had all been an important pattern in Crystal’s life.
That day, wandering from one room to another, Rue hated the house.
And hated more than any of its many rooms her own that had been Crystal’s, where she sat at last and waited. Waited for news, waited for further catastrophe; waited for Andy to telephone, waited for Brule to come home; waited, though she did not know it, for Juliet Garder.
It was late in the afternoon when Juliet arrived. Coughing a little from the smoke in the laden air, asking for Mrs Hatterick.
“Miss Juliet Garder,” said Gross at Rue’s bedroom door. “She gave me no card.”
“I’ll come down,” said Rue and then changed her mind. The house was quiet except for the distant faint tinkle of the piano in Steven’s studio below. It seemed too quiet and too empty and thus too full of a listening quality which only a silent and empty house, cavernous just then with that abnormal twilight, may possess. “Show Miss Garder up here, please,” said Rue. “And order tea. Bring it up when it is ready.”
He went away. Juliet. Why had she come? But it was obvious: she and Juliet had nursed Crystal: obviously between them they might be able to piece out a portion of the truth. All at once Rue wondered why she had not thought of going to Juliet. If she had not been so curiously paralyzed with waiting she would have done so; would have gone to the hospital to see Juliet during the nurse’s hours off. Her spirits lifted a little.
She had not seen Juliet since her marriage. They had trained together — Juliet a spare, homely girl with broad, hard-working hands; slow of thought, wiry, lonely, always pressed for money, squeezing through her examinations by a hair’s breadth.
They’d nursed together, had gone to hurried matinees and cinemas together. Had borrowed each other’s stockings and hats; had jointly hated the head nurse and jointly hero-worshiped Brule Hatterick. Propinquity and shared experience was the basis for their friendship, but it was a real friendship. That is until Rue’s marriage, when Juliet had quietly but quite definitely withdrawn. Rue had always felt that Juliet did not approve of her marriage.
But at any rate Juliet had come now. Rue moved about the room, pulled a chair nearer the fireplace, saw that cigarettes were at hand. It was the first time, really, that Juliet had seen her in her new role.