Skeleton Key (24 page)

Poor Mimi's little veneer of correct speech had worn away, and the true self was coming through, common, not too brilliant, pitiably devoted to her husband and her worthless brother. Georgine felt a pang of sympathy. The little creature must have been living in a hell of terror.

“And Roy—about a coupla weeks ago, he told Ralphie maybe he wouldn't have to turn him in to the gover'ment if he'd do something to prove he was loyal after all. It was to—to carry some secret papers to Mexico, somep'n the army or navy fliers couldn't do, because it was secret service. If he did it, Roy said, the gover'ment would forget about him being a Silvershirt.”

“Your brother didn't believe all that!” Georgine said in spite of herself. The minute after, she thought:
Of course he did. Someone “told him what to do,” and he was frightened enough to think he must obey
.

“I dunno,” Mimi said despairingly, “He was scared to and scared not to. He thought he might get killed, shot at or somep'n, but when Roy said what they'd do to him if he didn't try to go on this business, he thought he might's well die. He was—he hated Roy, but he couldn't keep away from him. He'd go see him, nights, or beg him to come over here after Harry left.”

Georgine could hear Hollister saying, “You can quit doggin' my footsteps.” For a while, his monster had turned on him, watching his every move. He had to get Ralphie away, so that he might make sure of being completely unobserved. It would be doubly secure if he knew where Ralph was—and with the same stroke perfected his own plan.

She said slowly, “Your husband didn't know about this?”

“Oh, God, no. We'd never dare tell him. He hated Ralphie, he only had him here because I begged, and Ralphie swore he'd forget all his old ideas. Harry would've—jumped at the chance to—” Mimi dropped her head in her hands.

She had had to stand by, credulous and terrified, and watch her brother being mentally tortured, and never say a word.
How she must have hated Roy Hollister
, Georgine thought.

And thought again, with a dreadful shock,
I shouldn't be listening to all this! I shouldn't know anything about it
.

“Have you told this to anyone else?” she said. “To—Mr. McKinnon, for instance?”

“No!” Mimi said. “Not him! I wouldn't—” There was a little silence. “I was nearly crazy,” she added, her voice going dull again. “Ralphie didn't have near enough money, and I couldn't get any more out of Harry without him guessing. I thought I might have to borrow. Then Roy said he could maybe get a little bit, and he come in with thirty-seven-fifty, and that about did it.”

“He gave your brother some of his own money?” Georgine breathed. Surely, when that happened, they must have seen that it was all false…

“Sure. He was trying to help, Roy was. He said he'd back Ralphie up”—Mrs. Gillespie poured it all out, her words tumbling fast—“if he got caught. He'd keep still about the reason why Ralphie had to steal back his plane and get out of the country. He'd say it was all his fault, Roy's I mean, because he worried so about the way people didn't take the war hard enough and thought there wouldn't be any more blackouts, and if there was one it'd teach 'em a lesson. He was going to say that. Or maybe he wouldn't,” she added tonelessly. “Maybe he'd of let Ralphie down. So Ralphie told me all about it before he went away on Thursday. He was s'posed to go up to the ranch and stay there till Roy phoned him, when there was a fog and it'd be safer. And then he had to circle round over here, once or twice, so Roy'd know it was him, and be sure he was doing like he was s'posed to. And then he was going to make for the border. He had an extra gas-tank in his ship, and it'd ought to 'a' been about enough to get him there.

“I don't know where he is, or what's happened,” she cried out suddenly, in a dreadful voice, and got to her feet, swaying. “I never saw him nor heard from him again, after Thursday. And I tried, I called up Roy that morning after, and begged him and begged him not to make Ralphie do that, only I couldn't say it right out. I guess he didn't mind me knowing,” her voice dropped again, miserably. “He had me where he wanted. He knew I'd never give Ralphie away. But Harry heard me phoning and that's why he come back here that night, and—have I got to tell? Have I got to?”

Georgine thought it over. “I don't know if it would help. Don't you see, if Harry only
thought
he had a reason for jealousy, that'd be plenty of motive? But, Mimi, listen to me. The police ought to know this about your brother. You just have to tell them everything you know.”

Mimi looked at her. The brown eyes were not focusing well, now, and Georgine wondered,
Can she still think clearly?

But it seemed she could, up to a point. “They'll think I—” she whispered, and could not go on for a moment. “They'll think—they asked me how I felt about Ralphie. That dick, he says, ‘You're very devoted to your brother, ain't you, Miss Gillespie.' That's how he says. He'll hear about this, and know I knew there was gonna be a blackout, and he'll think I—”

“That's a chance you'll have to take,” said Georgine.

“I'm scared,” Mimi said. “I'm scared. You didn't think it'd help if I told, and so I'm not gonna. And don't you tell!”

“I'll go down to the police station with you, if you want. I'll back you up as much as I can.”

“And s'pose they haven't caught Ralphie?” Mimi said with a kind of sodden shrewdness. “I'd be giving him away for nothing. I don't know what they'd do to him! They might think I made up that story about Roy makin' him do it, nobody couldn't've heard Ralphie telling me about it. If they had, they could anyway say that was what he believed; but there wasn't a soul around who could've heard us.”

“Not your husband? He couldn't have—pretended to be asleep, and crept downstairs to listen?”

“No,” said Mimi Gillespie. She got up, not too steady on her feet, but not actually staggering. It was remarkable that her speech had not thickened. “No. We was—we went down there,” her arm described a sweep toward the canyon, “behind that little round clump o' bushes that makes a sort o' room. I wish there'd been somebody who'd—Oh, I wish I could get tight and not be scared.”

“Don't you take another drink,” said Georgine firmly, snatching the bottle before it could be tipped up. “You're going to put on your clothes this minute, before you lose as much nerve as you've got, and go down to the police with me. You must, Mimi! This might not get Harry free, but it'd give the detectives something new to think about. If you don't—I'm awfully afraid I'll have to tell them.”

“No! Oh, for God's sake, don't you. I—I guess I'll tell 'em,” poor Mimi said on a groan. She began to move toward the hall door, her tousled golden head hanging, her furry slippers padding with a touching childishness. “You let me tell, please. You just back me up.” She passed into the hall, her hand lingering on the doorpost. “If there was just somebody—but
nobody
could've heard us.”

Her feet, still remarkably steady, padded on down the hall. The door that closed off the staircase opened; the footsteps paused. Then, “
Oh
, my God,” said Mimi Gillespie in a stifled voice; the door slammed behind her, and Georgine heard her feet thudding on the stairs. Somewhere another door closed.

“Sick,” Georgine said half-aloud, with a wry smile. She had never been one to rush in and hold people's heads; Mimi might better be left alone, to become more sober.

She thought:
If I can just stay impersonal, if I can only get that poor creature to tell her story and be done with it!
Nelsing wouldn't allow any miscarriage of justice.

But what if Mimi, her tongue loosened by whisky, had told the truth only up to a point, and then been afraid to go on? She had pointed out her own strong motive for hating Hollister, but she hadn't said “I didn't kill him.”

Well, in that case
, thought Georgine, moving into the living-room in search of cigarettes,
in that case, she's the one who has to tell about it. I couldn't give her away by myself, going up to Nelsing's office, all virtuous
. “I think you ought to know, Mrs. Gillespie is a murderer.”
I couldn't
, Georgine thought with a shudder.

She had never been in this house before. She glanced around the L-shaped living-room, exactly like the corresponding room in Roy Hollister's house. Looking at Mimi, you'd expect to see an ultra-feminine room; but this was furnished for the comfort of men. The sofa and chairs were of colored leather, they were big and roomy and equipped with footstools. The place had been exquisitely neat, but a thin one-day film of dust now lay over every surface.

The gray afternoon light came hard and merciless between the slats of the Venetian blinds. The house was very still, except for the dry wind that now and then slid past to rattle a window.

Georgine smoked her cigarette, and stubbed it out, and waited. She began to wonder how much time had passed; five minutes, ten, a quarter of an hour? She hadn't looked at the small electric clock when she entered the room. And how long was it since she had heard Mimi's feet softly thudding on the staircase? There had not been a sound since then, she realized; she had never heard those steps moving above her.

“Oh,
dear
,” said Georgine aloud, exasperated. She was rather startled at the way her voice came back from the empty room. “Oh dear, I bet she passed out cold.”

She ought to go and see, she supposed. The hall, a dim, chilly passageway, stretched from the front door to the mid-portion of the house. Its end was closed off by two doors; she pulled open the right-hand one.

Yes these stairs led to the upper story. She began to climb steadily, for some reason acutely aware of the thudding of her own feet on the carpet. It was rather like that first day, when she had come down so innocently into Grettry Road, and no one had seemed to hear her, and her footsteps had echoed so queerly in the afternoon silence. There was only one bedroom up here, and a dressing-room and bath. Their doors all stood open, and through those doors she could see perfect order; and the day-old film of dust, again; and not a soul in any of the rooms.

A curious little chill went racing over her skin. It was so
still
, so still she could hear the faint drone of the electric clock on the bedside table, and a tiny thwack on the roof that might be a falling seed from the eucalyptus; and—something else, like music.

It was a tune clear as running water, and it was being played very smoothly now. It might have been going on for an hour, but she hadn't listened consciously until now, until she had begun to grow cold with this eerie feeling of something gone wrong. “
In einem Bächlein hel-le
…” every time she heard it before, it had presaged terror or danger; McKinnon's mouth-organ, playing
The Trout
.

“Mrs. Gillespie,” Georgine said aloud, hoarsely. “Mrs. Gillespie, where are you?”

She made herself move to the closet doors, fling them wide. Nothing there. Nobody behind the shower curtain, nor on the high-railed sun deck built over the living-room ceiling. Nobody here at all.

“Mimi!” Georgine heard herself almost screaming.

She was downstairs again, standing in the hall, her cold hands clasped tightly together. Mimi couldn't have come unseen down the stairs, past the living-room door.

She looked at her own face in the circular mirror above the hall console, and for a moment scarcely recognized it. A drop of water trickled suddenly in the sink, and made her start painfully.

It couldn't happen. It was like the
Mary Celeste
, no sign of violence, no sign of life. It
couldn't
happen; but Mimi Gillespie had run up those stairs, and at the top had vanished into thin air.

And, all at once more frightened than she had ever been in all her life, Georgine Wyeth snatched open the door and almost tumbled through it. The door banged to behind her, and the clap of sound echoed in the stillness of Grettry Road.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HERE WAS NO ONE
in sight.
I've got to get out
, she thought, and went up the steep slope at a half run. Lucky that she hadn't taken off her coat, that her keys and purse were in its pockets. She climbed frantically, like a miner who hears the walls of the shaft crumbling behind him. If she could only pass the top of the street unmolested, it seemed as if she would be safe.

“Hi, Georgine,” said a familiar voice. The hedge rustled, and there were footsteps coming after her. Georgine turned away her head, and almost ran. “Hi, wait up for uncle!”

McKinnon came up beside her, easily matching his stride to her hurrying feet. The echoes of that damnable little tune were still teasing her ears. She thought,
He's always there, announcing terror like those messengers in the Greek plays… that first day, when the Road felt so scary and I was uneasy without knowing why, the afternoon before Hollister died, last night…now
.

“My word, you're in a hurry,” he said. “More sensitive guys might take this as a brush-off.”

“Oh, no,” Georgine assured him, with no idea of what she was saying. “Not at all. It's perfectly all right.”

“Surely you're not going to be embarrassed about last night?”

“Oh, no, not at all. It's perfectly all right.”

“Handy set of phrases, those,” said Mr. McKinnon, chasing along beside her. “Seem to fit any situation. If you're sure it's perfectly all right, how about conceding the race?”

She looked sidewise at him, and saw the hard planes of his face, and the quizzical eyes under their jutting brows. She thought,
Am I off my head, tearing around the Berkeley hills in broad daylight as if someone were after me? This is only Todd, walking home with me after a day's work, trying to put me at my ease
.