Fair Warning (16 page)

Marcia was pressed backward against the desk, Beatrice’s long hands on her shoulders. She was trembling and, strangely and terribly, Beatrice was trembling, too.

Marcia said, gasping, “But you see—I didn’t know there was a will. I didn’t know that you already knew of it.”

“You—lie!” said Beatrice after a moment, in a labored way.

“You were absolutely safe,” said Marcia. “You needn’t have told me—you needn’t have feared me.”

“Ivan told you. He told you when I went to dress. Last night. When I left you two here.”

“No. He only hinted at it. I never thought of a will.”

Beatrice believed her. She dropped her hands as if they had turned to stone and stood away from Marcia—facing her, thinking.

“Give me my letter,” said Marcia.

That roused her from that queer, dark abstraction. She laughed. .

“
Give
it to you!
Give
it! You must think I am out of my mind. I needn’t have told you. I see that. But since I have, the situation is the same. You are in my hands—your very lives are—”

The effort to control the rage in her voice made it shake. She checked herself abruptly and listened and said, “I thought someone knocked.”

Someone had. It was repeated softly—so softly that it had the effect of surreptitiousness.

Beatrice took a long breath. It was rather dreadful to see that deliberate assuming of calm. She flashed one dark, warning look at Marcia and unlocked the door.

It was Ancill.

“It’s the detective again, Miss Beatrice. He wants to see you.”

“Very well.” She was completely mistress of herself again. “Let him come here—no, take him to the front drawing room. I’ll see him alone. And, Ancill—”

“Yes, madam.”

“Hereafter, don’t listen at doors.”

“But, madam—”

“And when you knock, do so less lightly. You may go.”

She stood there for a moment gathering her forces. She put one hand to her shining black braid, lifted her face, and without another word or look at Marcia went out of the room.

To see the detective. To talk to Jacob Wait. To tell him —what?

After a while Marcia realized that she must tell Rob. Tell him that the police didn’t have the letter. Not yet. Not so long as Beatrice kept its existence a secret. And that would be only as long as she chose.

Yes, she must tell Rob.

That was about noon. It was raining harder.

I
T KEPT ON RAINING
.

Whatever went on during the interview with Jacob Wait behind closed doors of the front drawing room, there was no clue to it in Beatrice’s face or bearing when at last she emerged. Wait vanished abruptly.

Shortly before lunch, and while Beatrice and Wait were still talking, two men came again to the house and spent some time in the library. The policemen were about, too; not the two who had been there during the night, but different ones. So that when Marcia attempted to go to the Copleys’ again, they stopped her. She was asked to remain in the house, they said, respectfully but with a remarkably efficient air, and although she could have gone into the garden, it was raining.

She was obliged to accept it. To insist would have revealed the urgency of her errand. She turned to the telephone before she realized that the telephone, in all likelihood, was also being watched, and it was only a small, prompt click, as of another connection being made secretly somewhere along the line, that warned her of that. She put down the receiver in something like panic. It had been rather a close escape. Another moment and central would have asked for the number and she would have given it and—probably— talked openly and without evasion to Rob.

She sat there at the telephone for a moment. Policemen in the house watching every move, searchers all over it respecting no barriers and no household dignity and reserve.

Telephone lines tapped. Every move and every breath under surveillance.

That was what they did when murder entered a house.

And Beatrice had the letter.

Ancill was sounding the lunch gong when she came into the hall, and the long, mellow notes were hollow and resonant and filled the hall and reached up the well of the stairs. Gally came downstairs through the eerie bands of light there at the landing, and Beatrice followed him. Gally looked a little embarrassed and aware of his desertion as he met Marcia’s eyes, and Beatrice was altogether cold and calm and enigmatic. She sat, as if by right now that he was dead, in Ivan’s place at the table, and lunch was one of the most unpleasant social amenities Marcia had ever been called upon to endure. Ancill walked on cat feet around the table, Beatrice sat in stony silence with rigidly erect shoulders, and Gally wriggled, essayed one or two conversational attempts which withered under Beatrice’s blank regard, and jumped nervously when Ancill materialized at his elbow with celery.

“It’s got to be a game,” he told Marcia later. He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “I try to catch Ancill. He eases in the pantry door, and if I see him before he appears at the table, I win. I only did it once at lunch, but I was upset. My batting average was low. I’ll do better at dinner. Oh, God,” said Gally miserably. “Dinner! And I can’t stay away. I’ve got such a good appetite. See here, Marcia,”—he turned to her with a glint of desperation—“I don’t like the way Beatrice looks at me. There’s something cold and—and calculative about her. Something sort of predatory. You don’t suppose she’s planning to polish me off, do you?”

“I don’t think so,” said Marcia absently. They were in the front drawing room. Beatrice had disappeared, and Gally had got hold of some of the morning papers. “Murder!” they shouted in headlines, but on the whole stuck to the facts, which were few. Jacob Wait, probably, had seen to that, thought Marcia. Preparing for his case, his big denouement, his grand-jury indictment.

“Don’t
think
so!” echoed Gally in injured tones. “I wish you’d stop reading the papers and pay some attention to me, Marcia. There’s not much there, anyway. They say Wait won’t let his cases be tried in advance in the papers. I dunno—that’s what they say. And I don’t like the gleam in Beatrice’s eyes.”

Marcia looked at him. Could Gally, she wondered, go to see Rob and tell him about the letter? He would do it in an instant if she asked him to; he would reach Rob with the message over policemen’s dead bodies if she told him how important it was.

“And I don’t see why she brought me here,” went on Gally. “I asked her, you know. Said I didn’t want to come. She said she wanted me—so I came. And what can she do with me? What am I here for? She hates me.”

“Perhaps it’s to have—oh, a man in the house. Protection,” hazarded Marcia.

It was not a good guess. Gally looked at her and snorted.

“Protection!” he said. “I’m the one that needs it.” He looked worriedly out the window, jingled things in his pockets, glanced over his shoulder toward the door and said suddenly, “Look here, Marcia, do you suppose
she
murdered him?”

It was a question that, all that long, dark afternoon, repeated itself endlessly in Marcia’s thoughts. That and those words of Beatrice’s—“You are both in my hands”—she and Rob; it was simple, direct. Terribly true.

“I don’t know,” she said, then, slowly.

“Look here, Marcia,” Gally said suddenly, “you’re not grieving over Ivan, are you? He was such a—” He checked himself abruptly and said, “Nothing to grieve over. I’m glad he’s dead. Told the police so. Told Wait. No use to pretend I liked him. No use to pretend I’m not damn glad you are free.”

No, it would be a mistake to tell Gally. Marcia said wearily, “Do be careful, Gally. Don’t say too much.”

“Why?” He stared at her and suddenly comprehended. “You don’t mean they might suspect me! Oh, come, Marcia! I didn’t kill him.”

“Can you prove you didn’t?”

“It’s up to them to prove I did, isn’t it?” He said it, after a moment, blithely enough. But he looked very sober.

A note, thought Marcia, suddenly. Gally could carry a note to Rob and need not be asked to share and guard that secret. But she decided against it in the same breath. It was a note that was likely to convict Rob now … No, no, she cried silently and looked at her watch. Three. And what could Rob do when he knew?

Gally was craning his neck at the window.

“Here’s another police car,” he said. “I’m going to duck. You’d better come along.”

“I’ve had my turn today,” said Marcia wearily, but her heart jumped as the front door opened. Was it something else—some new thing? Or had Beatrice told Jacob Wait what she had threatened to tell?

Gally was fidgeting, listening at the door. He looked relieved.

“They’re going into the dining room. I’m leaving.”

“Gally,”—a sudden irrelevant thought struck Marcia—“how about work? Did they let you off for today?”

He ran his fingers through his hair.

“Well,” he said, “no. Not exactly. That is—”

“That is what?”

“Well—I was fired. Six weeks ago,” said Gally and went rather hurriedly away.

More men came, and the doors to the dining room were closed, and they were again interviewing the servants. What were they saying?

They left finally after another long interview with Beatrice in her study.

Ancill, letting them out, again avoided Marcia’s gaze, but then he always did that. Delia had red eyes when she brought in the evening paper an hour or so later. Emma Beek, summoned to Beatrice’s study before the police had gone, had an air of veiled knowledge and impudence when Marcia encountered her in the hall. Marcia did not address her, and the woman did not speak but looked at Marcia with small, piglike eyes.

It was growing dark with the approach of early, rainy twilight when Gally paused in the door of the library where Marcia, despairing of reaching Rob, was standing at the french doors staring into the rain and dusk.

He looked harassed and said he’d been practising billiard shots in the basement game room all afternoon.

“It’s damn cold down there,” he said. “And sort of dark and lonesome. Awful lot of cellars all around. What’d they do with them all? Where’s Beatrice?”

“In her study, I think. Writing.”

He glanced over his shoulder, closed the door rather cautiously and approached her.

“I’ve been thinking about this will of Ivan’s,” he said. “It’s all wrong, you know. Unfair to you.”

“I know, Gally. But there’s nothing I can do.”

He hesitated.

“Do you mean—aren’t you even going to try to do anything?”

“What?”

“Well—fight it,” said Gally, looking at her anxiously.

Fight it—all the secrets of that house bared. Beatrice saying, “My brother believed his wife incompetent to handle her affairs.” “My brother warned me … hysteria … temper … attacked him …”

“No.”

“You mean, you’ll just let it ride? Let Beatrice have everything? Nothing for—for yourself? That you can do as you please with?”

“I suppose so. There’s nothing else to do. Let’s not talk of it now, Gally. It can wait. There’s so much else—”

Gally said suddenly, “If anything happens to Beatrice, you inherit from her, don’t you? Funny Ivan left it that way.”

“I don’t think he meant the will to stand, really,” said Marcia wearily. “I think he meant to change it later.”

“To change it later,” echoed Gally. He stared out into the wet gray dusk. “Funny, too, that he was killed just when Beatrice would come into his money.”

“Beatrice isn’t fond of money. Not inordinately, I mean,” said Marcia as much to herself as Gally.

“She’s fond of power,” said Gally with unexpected discernment. “Have you any money at all, Marcia?”

The abruptness of the question startled her.

“Why—why, no, Gally. Nothing.” She searched his thin, freckled face. Had there been something troubled, something anxious and urgent in that question? “You know I would give you anything you need if I had it,” she said gently. “Is anything wrong, Gally?”

After a moment he said no. Beatrice’s study door opened, and he sighed.

“Guess I’ll go back downstairs,” he said and vanished unhappily again.

What were the police doing now?

There was one sitting in the front hall reading the newspaper when no one came through the hall. She could hear it rustle as he turned it.

What were the others doing? Where had they gone and why? What had they learned? What was to be the result of the whole vast machinery which had been set going by one dreadful, mysterious moment the night before? In that room. Over there where the chalked outline on the carpet still showed. She hated the room and everything in it. Hated and in that slow, silent dusk feared it. But because of the french doors and the view of the Copley house she remained there, watching—hoping for a chance to get to Rob.

Had
Beatrice murdered him?

Beatrice had had opportunity. She had just gone from the house when Marcia came down and found Ivan dead. And she had heard no one else in the house. And the front door had closed twice.

Beatrice could have opened and closed it loudly once to make Marcia think she had gone. And then, really leaving after she had done that awful thing, had forgotten (or had been shaken and unsteady) and had let the door close more loudly than she’d intended.

Or someone else could have been there. Someone who did not know or remember that loud, dull jar the door made when it closed.

Or that sound could mean nothing at all. The murderer could have come and gone by the french doors.

And if Rob had killed Ivan—
and he hadn’t
—who had?

And who had been in the room during the night? There was that, too. Marcia turned suddenly and went to the closet. But the blue flannel jacket was not there. Was not anywhere in the room.

If she could only get to Rob. And yet, when he knew, what could he do? Take it from Beatrice by force? Absurd. Threaten her? Equally absurd.

Where was the letter? Where had Beatrice hidden it?

Was there any possibility of finding it, retrieving it— destroying it? Marcia considered it for some time. She came at last to the conclusion that in all that roomy old house, crowded with furniture and hiding places, there was not much chance of her finding the letter. Not if Beatrice, who knew the house so well, had determined, as of course she had done, that Marcia was not to find it. Perhaps, even, she hadn’t hidden it but carried it about with her. Or had locked it away in her desk.