Murder Comes First (19 page)

“Thisa it,” Mr. Brisco assured her. “You wanna wait?”

“Wait?” Miss Lucinda said. “Oh, no, I don't think you need wait. I'll—I'll telephone you when I want to leave.”

Mr. Brisco looked back at her with apparent doubt. He looked with interest at her hat, which seemed to distract him, or perhaps to reassure him.

“Youadoc,” he said. “Maybe she cutta off no?”

“No indeed,” Miss Lucinda said politely. “How much is it, please?”

“Twoa doll,” Mr. Brisco said. She paid him; she tipped him a quarter. She got out of the cab. It was not until the cab had backed, cut, backed once more and departed that it occurred to Miss Lucinda that Mr. Brisco might have meant to suggest that the telephone had been disconnected which would, certainly, make it difficult for her to telephone to be picked up. She had heard, she now remembered, that people sometimes had disconnected the utilities in country places which were closed up for the winter.

There was little now to suggest winter. The air here, fresher than it had been in the city, still was balmy and the breeze was gentle. It was true, of course, that the sun was already very low in the west; looking at her watch, Miss Lucinda was surprised to learn that it was only about four o'clock. She recalled to herself that the days were drawing in; that in another two hours or so it would be almost dark. She would want to start home before dark. Now—where should she begin? Inside, or out? She decided that inside would be most probable, if she was right at all. And oh, I hope I'm not, Miss Lucinda thought. But somebody has to make sure.

Getting inside a locked-up country cottage would have seemed, had she thought of it at all before this moment, a bridge to be crossed when she came to it, but now she had come to it unexpectedly and without plans. She went to the front door, as the most probable—and certainly most proper—place to start and, since it was not her house, she knocked. There was no response; she waited and knocked again, gently, since she was a gentle woman, but still with some decision—although not, as she thought to herself, loudly enough to wake the dead. Only after waiting again, did she try the door. It was, of course, locked. She had thought it would be.

She then, the pink hat bobbing, circled the house, trying first one window and then another. All the windows on the first side she tried were locked, and then she began to try those on the rear. They seemed to be locked too, and shades were drawn over them. All at once, Miss Lucinda began to feel forlorn. She had really been very foolish, now that she thought of it; no amount of understandable desire to help dear Thelma, or to escape momentarily from dear Thelma—and both things had, she realized, entered into it, together with whatever it was in her which had made her buy the pink hat—could exonerate her of having been foolish. Foolish, it now appeared, to no purpose. The back door was locked, as the front had been.

An electric meter was on the outside wall near the door and a little wheel was turning in it, as little wheels turn in electric meters. It was odd to be consoled by a little wheel, but Miss Lucinda momentarily was. Somehow, it seemed to bring the world closer. Miss Lucinda went on around the next corner and—the little wheel had been a token after all—found a window several inches open from the bottom. She tugged at it, and it opened fully.

Miss Lucinda looked around to be sure she was unobserved, because it would obviously be impossible to keep her skirt in its proper place while climbing in a window and, seeing no one who might observe her, did climb in the window. The pink hat was knocked a little crooked in the process, but not really damaged, and when she was standing—in a bedroom, as it turned out—Miss Lucinda straightened the hat. Then she began her search.

It was about the time Miss Lucinda, having broken and entered, straightened her pink hat and looked around a dim, apparently empty, bedroom that Pamela North took her car up the Twenty-third street ramp onto the West Side Highway and said, “Thank heaven!” Dorian Weigand, sitting a little shaken beside her, agreed in stronger terms.

“I know,” Pam said, working into traffic on the elevated highway and picking up speed. “I
hate
trucks. Great, hulking things. Like the time Teeney was treed.”

There was no answer to that but “What?” and Dorian made it.

“Like Great Danes,” Pam said, “only it was really a police dog. They make Teeney furious and she always runs at them, only this one didn't run. I mean, not in the right direction. She was terribly frightened but she found a tree. I feel the same way about trucks.”

“Once there I thought we were going to need a tree,” Dorian said. “I thought you were going to settle for one of the pillars.”

“He hadn't any business turning out,” Pam said, turning out herself and going around, remarking, to her own steering wheel, that there ought to be a minimum just as much as a maximum. “Anyway, I had plenty of room, or almost.”

Dorian had never seen a more alarmed face than that worn by a driver of a trailer truck who had observed, in West Street, Pamela North using what she now considered plenty of room. Of course, Dorian thought, I couldn't see my own. She shivered slightly.

“Whatever Jerry says,” Pam North said, speeding up, “it's been fifteen thousand miles, anyway, since anything happened. And then he tried to pass on the right. So sixty or so more shouldn't be hard.”

The last was clear enough. They were an estimated sixty miles from the place they guessed the Patterson cottages to be. At the moment, Pam seemed determined, if not destined, to make the distance in an hour.

“Who,” Pam asked, honking angrily at a man she considered about to get in her way, “would have expected it of Aunt Lucinda? The reading one? And—how did she get onto it? It must have something to do with Cripland not Gribland. But I can't think what.”

Neither could Dorian Weigand, holding onto the door handle, enjoying herself all the same. She hadn't, she thought, been this far into one of them since—oh yes, since she rode into New Jersey in the trunk of an elderly car, not by choice.
^*
At least, this time, she was riding sitting up. She wished she had had time to leave a note for Bill, when she couldn't get him on the telephone. But he and Jerry would get together. They probably would come steaming after. Dear Bill!

“Jerry won't get in until after five,” Pam said, as if Dorian had spoken. Trains of thought apparently had collided. Or perhaps, as Dorian had sometimes thought, Pam could jump without words. “They ought to get started by—oh, five thirty, unless Bill's lost somewhere. They'll have to take your car, of course.”

They stopped at the Harlem toll bridge and paid their dime. They went on, jumping, up the Henry Hudson toward the Saw Mill.

“It will be dark before we get there, or almost,” Pam said. “It'll be—I hope we get there first. I can't get over its being Aunt Lucy. It simply doesn't go with that hat.”

“I don't know,” Dorian said. “Perhaps it does, you know. Perhaps both things are a kind of breaking free.”

Pamela North, taking the inner lane at sixty-five on the Saw Mill, chancing the parkway police, said with some fervor that she wished Aunt Lucy had been content to take it out in hats.

“After all,” she said, “that hat is something you could do only once.” She speeded up a little. “I hope this isn't too,” she said, her voice very sober. “The poor little dear.”

*
Dorian's experience is recounted more fully in
Untidy Murder
. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1947.

9

Tuesday, 4:20
P.M.
to 6:10
P.M.

The bedroom in which Miss Lucinda first stood, instinctively straightening her hat, brushing at the skirt of her black silk dress with small, quick hands, was not a large room, and it was sparsely furnished. A bed, a chest, a chair—a lamp on the chest and another on a small table by the bed. The table teetered as one touched it, being unsteady on its legs. There were a few books on a shelf under the window by which Miss Lucinda had entered, and at some time the window had been left open during a rain, and the books were stained. A spread was thrown over a bare mattress on the bed and it did not lie evenly; almost without knowing what she did, Miss Lucinda brushed it into smoothness.

And the room was empty; not in it, surely, was what she expected, and feared, to find. She looked under the bed and found the floor dusty, but found nothing else. She went to the only door, opened it, and found herself in a living room unexpectedly large.

A stone fireplace held sway, unchallenged, over the wall opposite the door by which she entered. Ashes were piled high in the fireplace, almost covering the fire dogs; there was nothing to show whether it had been used the day before, or not since weeks before. There was a small window on either side of the fireplace, and to her right—toward the front of the house, next to the locked front door, there was a somewhat larger window. But the house was not faced toward the lowering sun of mid-October, and the room was dusky, filled with shadows.

There were many hiding places there, and this search took Miss Lucinda time. She sought at first without turning on the lights, seeking in the shadows. There were two sofas and several easy chairs, none of them new or newly covered, but all comfortable, inviting to relaxation. These things might, she thought, have been picked up second-hand some place, or moved from another house, or from a city apartment, when new furniture was bought to replace them. Under the windows on either side of the fireplace there were deep cupboards, and it was into them Miss Lucinda looked first—looked shivering a little as she opened each, relieved to find only the gear of summer life—tennis rackets, out-of-doors clothing for rainy days, a bridge table with its chairs, golf bags leaning in corners. Miss Lucinda, although in a certain way disappointed, was yet glad when she had done with the cupboards. She sought on.

She had looked behind each of the sofas, and under each, she had even looked up the chimney and been again at once disappointed and relieved to see, unobscured, the sky above, when she finally abandoned the living room. It would have been too obvious and, of course, in other ways impractical as a hiding place of what she was unhappily sure had been hidden. She went down the room toward the rear and through a door into a kitchen which, a little unexpectedly, contained such modern equipment as an electric range and refrigerator (its doors standing open), a sink (but with a single spout; cold water only, it was evident), a large deep freezing unit, and, less modernly, open shelves now holding little except a few cans. It was quite dark in the kitchen, and Miss Lucinda turned on the lights. The light showed her nothing, and here there was no occasion for a prolonged search. The kitchen, Miss Lucinda thought, did not lend itself to the concealment of what she sought. She left it, turning off the lights.

There were, occupying an el, two other rooms on the ground floor—a much larger, now sun-flooded, bedroom and a reasonably modern bath opening off it. The bedroom had been, Miss Lucinda decided, built onto the original house in fairly recent years; its windows were larger, its whole feeling more of present times. It held twin beds, two chests with mirrors and a dressing table with another; there were two easy chairs, and french doors opened to a terrace. Connected with the room there was what Miss Lucinda—now more hesitant than ever, but forcing herself on—found to be a rather large closet.

The closet was filled with a woman's clothes, and this time not only with garments for summer's warm, lazy days. There were several dresses obviously meant for town wear; two coats in addition to a light coat for summer evenings, and several hats—the latter nondescript, Miss Lucinda thought, restraightening her own. To search thoroughly in the closet, Miss Lucinda had to move into it, among the hanging garments, parting them. They were faintly, pleasantly, fragrant.

And, Miss Lucinda thought, coming out of the closet without having found what she sought, there was now no real doubt she was right—no doubt at all. It was as if a little light had gone out somewhere, because Miss Lucinda had hoped—had
so
hoped—that she would be proved wrong after all. (Of course, Miss Lucinda thought in an aside, there might be a lot of other clothes; a really large wardrobe. In which case—)

There was, Miss Lucinda decided, no use seeking such escapes from logic. She must, as the English said—what charming books the English women wrote, to be sure. Dear Sheila Kaye-Smith—face
up
to it. She must, in her small way, prove master of her soul, as Mr. Henley had so famously been. She must not, as something prompted—but not her soul, certainly—pick up the telephone there on the table between the twin beds and ask for the return of Mr. Brisco. She must not—nevertheless, it might be as well to find out whether, if she wished, she could. She picked up the telephone and listened. There was only the faintest of empty sounds. She jiggled, but there was not even a clicking in her ears. Presumably the telephone had been disconnected for the winter. Mr. Brisco had been right. She was not, it appeared, entirely the captain of her fate; the New York Telephone Company also was involved. However—

However, Miss Lucinda told herself, sitting down in one of the chairs and smoothing black silk over her knees, first things must come first. Second might come how she got back to—to any place. The first thing was, where was it?

Not, apparently, in the house itself and, now, Miss Lucinda realized she had been doing the easiest thing first. It would be outside somewhere, under ground—she shivered again; surely it was really getting cooler as the sun sank—or in—why, of course! In the cellar. That was the most likely place of all. The question remained, however, was there a cellar? She had not noticed any door which seemed likely to lead to one.

She got up from the chair and noticed that the room was now by no means as sunny as it had been. It was, she thought, getting late very early. On this point, her watch confirmed her; it was now long after five. There was not much daylight left. Miss Lucinda went more briskly through the rooms, looking for a cellar. In the kitchen—she had, she realized now, dismissed the kitchen rather cavalierly on her first time round—she found an inconspicuous door and, opening it, the unquestionable smell of a cellar. Air which was almost cold, and certainly was damp, came up from it. Miss Lucinda shivered again and tightened about her the short, inadequate coat which had, early in the day, seemed only a nuisance. She peered downward into the dark. She sought, and did not find, a light switch.