Skeleton Key (22 page)

“I couldn't tell you to save me.”

From his corner, Todd McKinnon spoke. “That's nothing to kill a witness for. Even if she'd identified them, that wouldn't mean anything in a court of law.”

“Shut up, Mac, I know that. But suppose the murderer didn't?”

“You mean somebody's going to throw flowerpots at me because I very firmly said I did
not
recognize footsteps? I don't believe it.”

“Very well, we'll leave it. We'll go on. We talked about fingerprints; nothing there to alarm anyone. Then you said you thought there was another sound, after the footsteps. You couldn't remember what it was at the moment. Have you remembered since?”

“No.”

“Will you try to think of it now?”

She tried, while the room held itself still, while the two men looked at her; Nelsing as if to hypnotize her into recollection, McKinnon with an air of rigid suspense. Finally she spread her hands helplessly. “If it was anything, it won't come back to me. It couldn't have been important, Nelse; it must have been something like a barking dog, or an owl. It didn't make any impression of—unnaturalness.”

“Well,” Nelsing said heavily, “that wouldn't be cause for trying to kill you.”

“Are you sure,” McKinnon observed, “that the flowerpot business was meant for Georgine?”

“Who else?” Nelsing said.

“I just wondered—are you holding out yourself, Nelse? Have you dug up something that you didn't recognize as important? Go back over your own conversation.”

“That won't do,” said Georgine, entering into the spirit of research, “because nobody knew he'd be bringing me home. I didn't know it myself.”

“Yes, you did,” said Howard Nelsing almost under his breath.

“Why, no. All you said was, someone would pick me up.”

“You knew, just the same.” It might have been wrenched from him. For a minute their eyes held; then Georgine sank back, looking beyond him, her lower lip softly folding over the upper.

“All right. Skip it.” His teeth shut together with a click. “It boils down to this, that you know something that's dangerous, somebody feels you must be put out of the way before you betray him. What is it you know?”

“Shall we go round again?” said Georgine testily.

“Will you promise me something?” He leaned forward until their knees were almost touching. “Will you try to remember what it was you heard? It's important. I've a feeling that it's what I need. Will you try?”

“No, I won't,” said Georgine.

Nelsing pushed back his chair and got up, slowly. “What do you mean?”

She looked up at him, towering almost to the ceiling of the small room, his gray-clad shoulders outlined against the brown and cream of the walls, his face angry. Her heart began a dull thumping rhythm; but this had to be said. “I mean I won't help you if it means making a target of myself. It was bad enough tonight, having the Professor accuse me of that nonsense; and he didn't try to kill me, he couldn't have rigged up that flowerpot because we were with him every minute. But if there's a murderer listening to everything I say, and possibly planning to take another crack at me, I want him to know that I'm no menace to his safety!”

“You'd—deliberately conceal evidence?”

“Oh,
no
. I've given you all I had, and if I could remember now what I heard I'd tell you like a shot. But. I won't spend a week trying to remember.”

“Just how are the various suspects to know that?” Nelsing's eyes had turned bleak.

“Todd's going to tell them,” said Georgine, glancing at the motionless figure in the corner. “Everyone talks to him. He's going to let drop the fact that I've—as the detectives say, I've withdrawn from the case.”

“I can't let you,' said Nelsing harshly. “You hold the key, can't you see that?”

“I don't care if I hold a whole bunch of keys. I'm through.”

“That flowerpot business,” said McKinnon's voice languidly, “was a long shot. Ten to one, I'd put it. Anyone who pushed at the gate was almost sure to hear the thing scraping, and look up, and jump out of the way. May have been meant just to scare you out, Georgine.”

“If it was, it worked perfectly. I'm good and scared!”

There was a silence. Nelsing gazed incredulously down at her, and McKinnon raised the mouth-organ to his lips and blew through it. One faint chord sounded.

Howard Nelsing spoke, at last. “Scared out,” he said bitterly. “Rather let justice go to pot than take a nickel's worth of risk!”

“Is that how you rate it?” Once more Georgine looked up at him, “Now you listen to me for a minute. Have you thought about Barby? She's seven years old. Her father died five months before she was born, and for two years I fought for every minute of her life. She's just begun to get well since we came down here to a low altitude. If I take risks, and go round making myself into fine material for a second murder, and if I do get killed, who's going to take care of her? She hasn't anyone in the world but me, except some second cousins of my father; and where do you think they were the last I heard of 'em?
In Java
.”

Her eyes had gathered light and intensity until they seemed to give out sapphire sparks. She got to her feet and stood facing Nelsing. “I can't help what you think of me. This attack tonight has changed everything. I don't give a hoot for justice! You can catch your murderer or let him loose, I don't care. It won't be through me. Todd, isn't it safer this way?”

“Can't help agreeing with you,” said McKinnon.

Nelsing's dark brows drew together. He looked from one to the other, and made a contemptuous sound in his throat. “Sounds like the way the isolationists talked, before the war,” he said, “Save your own skin and let everyone else's go. Lock yourself in your own tight little house and never come out!”

“That's just what I intend to do,” said Georgine.

“And,” he went on as if she hadn't spoken, “plenty of those characters turned out to be fifth columnists.” He took a step that brought him close to Georgine and looked down into her face. “You did know I'd be here tonight. I picked you up from the sidewalk: you didn't touch that gate until we came home; you begged me to come in with you…”

With a wrenching effort she controlled herself. “You'd better go home. Haven't you forgotten some of those grand police manners?”

Without another word he snatched up his hat and stalked out the door. She flung a sentence after him. “Thanks for saving my life!”

Nelsing looked over his shoulder, and the corner of his mouth twitched up. It said as plainly as words, “I doubt you were worth the trouble.” Then he was gone, and the front door closed with ominous gentleness.

Georgine spun on her heel. Only Todd McKinnon was left, and on him she directed the full blaze of her fury.

“That fool, that idiot! And you're just as bad, you babble those crazy theories and act like a harmless screwball, and in the middle of it you slip in a suggestion that someone was trying to kill Nelsing! He'd never have thought of it without you! What does either of you mean, accusing me of—of—”

“Steady on,” said Mr. McKinnon, rising in a leisurely manner. “Nobody's accusing you. That was a slip of the tongue on my part. I meant Mr. X, not you.”

“All right, all right! Fine time to say so! And he's gone away thinking—thinking I don't know what! You act as if I'd wanted to be in this affair. All I want is to do my job and earn what I've been paid for it and get out!”

The hard-textured face remained completely unmoved. Todd McKinnon stood looking at her without expression, and after a moment she stopped and drew her palms vigorously across her face. “I'm sorry,” she said more quietly. “Temper's my besetting sin, and you've been treated to too many displays since we met.”

“I don't mind,” McKinnon said. “Easy to see why you get mad; it's your substitute for whining, or collapsing in tears. Besides,” he added with a faint smile, “it makes your eyes bluer. Very becoming.”

Georgine glared at him. “There are times when I detest men. Always thinking up the worst motives—I knew Howard Nelsing despised women, but to have you—”

“I like 'em,” said McKinnon peaceably. “I'm very, very fond of women.”

“So I've noticed,” said Georgine, lashing out in all directions. “Claris Frey seems to think of you as a great beau, and I've no doubt that Mrs. Gillespie—”

“I like them,” he continued unperturbed, “because I've had 'em around me a lot. No, not the five wives; my four sisters. Why shouldn't I like them?”

“Go home,” Georgine said. “Do for heaven's sake go home.”

“I don't want to leave you here alone,” he said bluntly.

“I'll be considerably better off that way!”

He was standing half turned away from her. He said something under his breath; it sounded like “Damnation.” Then Todd McKinnon swung round, took Georgine in a hard embrace and kissed her soundly.

For a moment sheer surprise held her quiet in his arms. There was time for her senses to register what had once been familiar and sweet, and had almost been forgotten since young Jim Wyeth died; warmth, and the scent and texture of male skin, and the sharp prickle of close-clipped hair; nothing more.

Nothing more. She stood back, breathless and half laughing, and he let her go at once. “Well!” Georgine said, and let her hand slide to his and pat it, briefly, gratefully. “That's a new way to cure hysteria, but it worked. Did they teach you that in the Warden Service?”

The agate eyes looked out at her from their deep caverns. “No,” he said thoughtfully, “no, they didn't. I picked it up by myself.” He went back to the chair in the corner and got the mouth-organ which he had laid down there.

“I'll really be all right now,” she went on cheerfully. “It was only my getting worked up, but you'll admit it was nat—”

The rest of the word never came out. She sat down rather suddenly on the couch.

So there had been something more, after all, and it had just got to her. She looked at his averted head with astonished respect. Well, for heaven's sake. And he looked so cool and controlled!

Incredibly, she found herself hoping he'd do it again.

There, he was turning; he was crossing the room, bending toward her…

McKinnon's hand descended on her shoulder, in a gentle pat. “You're a nice woman, Georgine,” he said casually. “You're one of the nicest women I ever met. Don't take anything second-rate; you can have the best, you know.”

He turned at the door. “If there's any disturbance in the night, you might call me. I left my number near the telephone.” Then, with perfect aplomb, he gave her a slight wave of the hand and was gone.

Georgine began to laugh, helplessly, without much mirth.
Rags to riches; riches to rags
, she thought…
Handed right back to me… I'm so tired I could die, and I can't even fling myself across the bed as I am; I have to wash my face and put up my hair in curlers, and empty the pan under the icebox or there'll be a mess in the morning… I wish Barby were home! I want Barby, just to look at her, to know we're both safe…

And then the thing she'd almost forgotten came flooding back into her mind: the picture of the huge thing like a head, leaning slowly over her, falling… “There was malice behind that…” She hadn't wanted to be in this!

She could do only one thing to save herself. She must sit very still, crouching, not moving, like a field creature frozen to escape the eye of the hawk.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE KNOCKING WOKE HER;
knuckles tapping, diffidently but with persistence, on her front door. In the moment between sleep and waking Georgine found herself burrowing under the covers; trying to fling off that recurrent panic. She'd never feel safe again, not anywhere.

Then, as she reluctantly pulled herself upright and reached for her housecoat, another memory came swimming to her mind's surface: a rugged face and a pair of angry, hostile blue eyes. With a shock of relief she knew that anger or no anger, that was where safety lay. It might be elsewhere too, but she was sure only of Nelsing.

It wasn't he who was knocking. There would never be any diffidence about his touch. She peered cautiously through a crack of the door, and saw the last person on earth whom she'd have expected.

Professor Paev was speaking before she could get the door shut. “I apologize,” he said fiercely, and cleared his throat like a sea-lion demanding fish. “I have come especially to apologize, Mrs. Wyeth.”

Oh dear
, she thought,
I wish he didn't look so old and broken even when he's fiercest. I wish I didn't owe him anything
.

“Come in,” she said grudgingly.

The Professor sat down on the edge of her big chair, looking at the floor and crushing his hat into a shapeless mass. “My assumptions about you were quite unwarranted,” he said. “You have never shown any open disloyalty, and last night you—though you might have been more helpful, you did not deviate from the canons of scientific truth.” He paused. That part had been prepared; the next sentences came out in a broken rush. “I–I can't get anyone else, there's no one who can—it's got to be done, Mrs. Wyeth, it's the work of six years, and if it's not announced soon there will be—Could you overlook my rudeness,” said Alexis Paev, almost humbly, “and come back to finish the paper?”

Georgine said nothing. She sat gazing into space, her lower lip pushed up. She didn't feel safe in her own home, in broad daylight; she would be scarcely more uneasy in the Professor's house, guarded by the stalwart Mrs. Blake; and the humiliation of going to Barby's doctor and asking to borrow back the money that had paid her debt would be almost too much…