Skeleton Key (3 page)

The big house had no doorbell. She grasped the knocker with unnecessary violence, intending to shatter the echoes; and before she could let it fall, felt it twitched from her fingers.

The door swung open. A majestic Negro woman, in a black dress and white apron, stood benignly gazing down at her. “Come right in,” said the apparition softly. “We been waitin' fo' you.”

The well-known sensation of walking down a step that isn't there was as nothing to the effect of this welcome. For a moment Georgine could do nothing but gasp. A reasonless feeling of terror touched her, and was swiftly gone. Then she opened her mouth to say, “You can't mean me!” and caught herself just in time.
Why not?
she thought;
there were characters who simply yearned to subscribe to magazines, and it would be crazy to give up the chance of meeting some
. In dazed silence she stepped into the dimness of a square entrance hall.

The dark lady retreated before her with a stately tread, reminiscent of the chorus in
Aïda
. “P'fessah! P'fessah!” she boomed in her velvet voice, into the rear of the house. “She got here.” A far-away shout answered, unintelligibly, as Georgine followed her guide into a small, hot, drab living-room that looked as if nobody ever lived in it.

The African Queen gestured nobly toward a chair. “There's been so many disappointed him,” she remarked, “I was right glad to see you comin' along the street, ringin' do'bells. You lose the address?”

There must be a catch in this
, Georgine thought. “I—yes,” she said vaguely. “People were at home, I heard them, but no one answered the bell.”

“Maybe you tried Frey's.” The deep voice was respectfully soothing. “He's stone deef. And the Gillespies, next to him, they unhitched the do'bell because Mr. Gillespie works nights.”

So that was it; simple, normal, only Georgine hadn't happened to think of it. Yet she gave a nervous start as another voice spoke from the doorway, “That's all, Mrs. Blake,” it said, and the housekeeper strode magnificently out.

The Professor was tall, bald and sixtyish. His sharp black eyes, narrowed in the hot glare from the window, looked Georgine over; once up, once down, He nodded, came briskly into the room and sat down on a straight chair. “Your name?” he snapped out.

Georgine's fingers moved toward the clasp of the little briefcase. She usually began by giving her name, though few forestalled her by asking. “Mrs. James Wyeth,” she said. Jim Wyeth had been dead for seven years, but to give her Christian name made her sound like a divorcee.

“Mine is Pah-eff, P-a-e-v,” said the Professor, adding angrily, “—the last young woman managed to misspell it in four several ways. Accuracy is my one desire.

“Now; I'll tell you at once that I pay by piecework. There are less than three hundred pages, and I will pay one hundred dollars for the job; one ribbon copy, two carbons. You must work here. Not one page, not one line is to go out of this house. Is that understood?”

Out of this speech, delivered in a furious staccato, Georgine really heard only three words:
one hundred dollars
. Around her floated a vague impression that there had been a mistake after all, that Professor Paev wanted some typing done, that there were certain conditions; but that sum of money loomed in her mind like a glittering promise. She could type; she could earn it.

One hundred dollars. It might be hay to some people, but it wasn't to her. It was more than her entire monthly income from Jim Wyeth's insurance, ten times as much as she earned in her best weeks at the subscription business. It would pay off almost all the debt owed to Barby's doctor since last October, and Barby could have a new winter coat after all, and she, Georgine, could draw a few free breaths. With scarcely a pause, she said, “I understand.”

It wouldn't take more than ten days, surely. And she had ahead of her two weeks free of responsibility, for that morning she had seen her little girl start off with the family of a kind neighbor for her first vacation away from home. Georgine firmly believed that no child, however delicate, should become wholly dependent on its mother. It had startled her no little to find that the seven-year-old Barby shared this view, but that was beside the point. Everything was falling into place.

Her shock of disappointment was therefore all the greater when she heard the Professor demanding, “Describe your knowledge of chemistry.”

Bang went the doctor's bill. “I had it for a year, in—in high school,” Georgine murmured.

“How much of it do you remember?”

She sought wildly for some recollection. “There was an experiment where you put sodium in a tank of water, and it ran around. Mine blew up,” said Georgine unhappily. “I'm afraid that's all I—”

“Any physics? Bacteriology?”

Bang went the winter coat. “None,” she admitted.

“You're hired,” said Professor Paev, briskly rising.

Georgine blinked at him. There was something odd about these requirements; but again, for a moment, the hundred dollars seemed to flutter within her reach.

And then the Professor flung over his shoulder, “I will call the Acme Agency and tell them that if you prove reasonably accurate, I shall be satisfied.” He was halfway to the hall before her voice stopped him.

“Professor Paev, I'm not from the Acme Agency.”

The man stopped short. Then, with a curious deliberation, he closed the door and came across the room to her chair. “Who sent you here?” he said harshly.

“Nobody. It just happens that I can type. I'm slow, but I'm accurate. And if it isn't taking the bread out of somebody's—”

“Who hired you to spy on me?”

“Nobody, I tell you!”

“It's diabolical,” said the Professor, breathing rapidly, “but I might have suspected it. Somehow, they must have figured that my experiments were nearly complete. They'd know how much I needed a typist. They should have prepared you better.” The high bald head swooped down at her. “You might as well tell me who it was, I'll pay for the information!”

“I think you're crazy,” said Georgine, and thrust herself to her feet. “Do I look like a spy? I came here to sell you some magazines, and before I got the words out of my mouth you offered me a job that it just happens I can do! Who wouldn't take it? I need the money, you need a typist. And what on earth would I be spying
about
?”

“Ah,” said Professor Paev with a mirthless smile, “you would like to know, would you?”

They stood glaring at each other. Neither moved, but Georgine had a fantastic mental picture of two cats jockeying for position before a fight. If she held this pose much longer she'd burst into laughter.

“This is absurd,” she said crisply. “I didn't intend to cheat you. It's a shame, too, when so many typists have disappointed you—but I see why, now.”

The Professor's eyes narrowed. He said nothing.

“Before I go, could I interest you in any subscriptions, renewals, gift offers? I was afraid not. Well, good-by.”

She heard an odd rusty sound. It seemed that Professor Paev was chuckling. “Wait,” he said. “We might come to an understanding. Perhaps—an exchange of references?”

“Did you say exchange?” Georgine paused on the verge of a step. “That's more like it.”

“Ah, yes. Someone whom we can both trust. I live alone here, you see, though Mrs. Blake is always present during the day. But perhaps I should tell you one thing: the consensus of the neighborhood is that I am perfecting a Death Ray in my laboratory.”

Georgine gave him a penetrating look.

“I admit,” he said blandly, “that I may have given them that impression myself. Indeed, in one sense it is not far from the truth. But you needn't feel any alarm, Mrs. Wyeth.”

Dear me
, she thought;
that gasp of mine must have been obvious
.

At five o'clock that afternoon Georgine was still at 82 Grettry Road, the home of Professor Alexis Paev; and she was still slightly dizzy and incredulous.

What an afternoon; up, down, up again in spirits; luck handed her, luck snatched away. The voice on the telephone, that of the President of the Parent-Teachers Association of Emerson School, who had fortunately remembered Mrs. Wyeth; the voice saying, “He's quite mad on the subject of science, but harmless every other way. We've known him for years, long before he resigned from the Faculty.” From such a respectable source, this should be completely reassuring; but the words
mad professor
carried inescapable overtones: that laboratory in the basement, walled in glass brick, probably full of evil vapors and steaming flasks, and long tubes glimmering with unearthly lights… A death ray, indeed. The old gentleman's jokes were ponderous, he looked odd when he smiled, as if it didn't suit his face… And he'd wanted someone who knew nothing about science, so she was actually sitting here in a hot little south room on the top floor, with one window that looked off into space across the deep canyon, picking away letter by letter, figure by figure, at a seemingly endless stack of work.

Culture medium Penicillium (spp.)
, she wrote,
adsorbed by norite. Elute with chloroform, distil, take up in ethyl alcohol and reppt
.

Oh, DEAR
, Georgine thought;
I can't do this… Yes, I can. I've got to
.

Ten or twelve days of it…the bill, Barby's coat…something to take up the slack of her loneliness while Barby was away. The stubborn insistence that it still came under the head of mental adventure…and the pay to be counted not in nickels and dimes, but in dollars; a hundred dollars to come… At five minutes after five it came, in a lump. The Professor tapped on the door, whisked in and inspected the three pages she had laboriously finished, nodded and got out a check book.

“Not all at once?” Georgine said, frowning at the check.

“All at once. Postdated, you will observe,” said Mr. Paev.

She raised grave blue eyes to his. “You're convinced that I'm honest, or will be three days from now?” The long bald head nodded. “And you want to make sure I'll keep coming back until the job's finished?”

“I believe I've read you correctly, Mrs. Wyeth,” said the Professor, his gaze doing its best to penetrate her skull.

“I think it's goofy,” said Georgine, reaching for the typewriter cover, “but I'm game.” The last words fell on empty air. The Professor was already halfway downstairs.

She had to stop work, but she couldn't go home yet. At four o'clock the African Queen had brought up a message; the block air-raid warden was to hold a meeting for all the residents of Grettry Road, even the temporary ones, at five-fifteen, at his home. Would Mrs. Wyeth be good enough to join them?

Mrs. Wyeth supposed she would. After the illogical sensations and unexpected developments of the last two hours, she felt that she could be neither surprised, irritated nor alarmed.

Having got her hands thoroughly inked in the struggle with an unfamiliar typewriter, she now went in search of a bathroom, without bothering Mrs. Blake for directions. There was one on the southwest corner of the house. It was obviously the Professor's own, but he could scarcely object to her drying her hands on one of his paper towels.

How like a lone man immersed in science to build such a house; all the furniture drab, hideous and far from inexpensive, most of the rooms an inconvenient shape, and the best view in the place from an upstairs bathroom! She raised the window and leaned her arms on the sill. You could see all of Oakland, shimmering under the heat-haze of late afternoon; you could see the lion-colored flanks of the bare hills to the south, and the plantations of trees nearer to Grettry Road, and the canyon that fell sheer from the fence at the end, and grew shallower as it swept around to the north past the back yards of the Road, dark with manzanita bushes, blue-green with bay and young gum trees.

And just below the window, you could see a thicket of flowering shrubs, and a spot right up against the house wall where, it seemed, the Professor had begun a garden.

That was a curious place for a flower-bed, hemmed round with bushes so tall that it could be seen only from this spot directly above. There were no other windows that overlooked it, for the living-room wall below was blank at that spot. There wasn't even a path leading to it.

It was a cleared space of earth, recently cultivated so that no weed marred its slightly mounded surface, and it was about six feet long and three feet wide. There was just one thing it resembled: a freshly made grave. The old man couldn't have
meant
that, about the Death Ray?

He was joking, I know he was!
Georgine told herself fiercely, clutching the window-sill, unable to avert her gaze from the spot below.
People simply don't murder other people and bury 'em in the back yard. They don't! Probably if I were down on the level ground, that patch would look quite different. It's just being so far above it that makes the thing look so uncanny. That must be it
.

She withdrew slowly from the window. Her fingertips ached from digging into the sill, and it took an effort to erase the frown that tightened her brows.

CHAPTER TWO

I
N THE LATE AFTERNOON
, it seemed, Grettry Road came to life, for the living-room of the block warden's home, thirty yards up the street, was respectably full ten minutes before the meeting began. Mrs. Blake, who had walked up with Georgine, withdrew in great dignity to an isolated corner. “Hired help,” she explained serenely, “ought to sit by itself.”

“Doesn't anyone else have help?”

“They used to,” said Mrs. Blake. A look of melancholy pleasure came over her ebon face. “They had Japs.”

The warden was not yet on hand. Georgine had gathered that he was a bachelor; the woman with the genuinely golden pompadour, who was arranging blinds and showing people their seats with a proprietary air, was only the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Gillespie; her husband, a large, handsome, sleepy-looking man, was also on hand and rather sulkily assisting her.