Skeleton Key (7 page)

Georgine said something which sounded so arch that she immediately regretted it. “Isn't Ricky at home this afternoon?”

Claris twitched round as if startled, and looked full at Georgine. Then she moistened her lips and smiled, slowly. “Ricky
Devlin
? As if I had anything to do with him, except living next door!”

“I'm getting spoiled,” Georgine told herself wryly; “when I'm in Grettry Road, I can't step outside the door without meeting someone, and then I have to come home and go into an empty house.” She said thanks and good-by to Harry Gillespie, on this Thursday night, and went serenely through the gate and up the long walk to her garden cottage, and opened the door with her key.

The moment she stepped inside she knew that someone had been here during her absence.

In the next minutes, after a frantic survey of the small house and its contents, she was increasingly sure; and yet whoever had searched the place had tried to arrange that she should not know. There were only the few small signs, obvious only to a housekeeper's eyes: the rug that had been left straight and was now slightly awry, the sugar tin in the kitchen turned the wrong way, and the clasp of her miniature briefcase hanging loose as if someone hadn't been able to master the trick of its fastening; but stronger than anything was that sense of something alien. “Someone's been sitting in my chair, said the middle-sized bear.”

“I don't like this,” Georgine said half-aloud. She stood in the middle of the living-room and turned slowly, her blue eyes growing dark with perplexity as she surveyed it inch by inch. Her hands were balled into tight fists in her pockets, and her lower lip folded over the upper in that oddly youthful gesture which with her meant not temper but perturbation.

And, ten minutes later, “I might have expected something like that!” she said indignantly, dropping the telephone back into its cradle. What were the police good for, anyway? Her chin jutted out dangerously at the memory of that calm, reasonable voice at the other end of the wire. “Your house was entered in your absence. What makes you think so? Was the door open? Oh, it was locked. Any sign that the windows had been forced? They were all locked too? I see. Was there anything missing? I see…”

It had gone on for several increasingly uncomfortable minutes, during which Georgine had battled with the impulse to shout, “Skip it!” and slam down the telephone. At the last, she and the desk sergeant had seemed to agree perfectly; it was all, they decided, in her imagination.

“But it wasn't,” she whispered, and darted another quick glance around the warm little brown room.

Well, there was one solace in Barby's absence. Georgine, not having to set an example, could leave the lights on. Only to her most secret self would she admit how much the dark frightened her.

Friday came with such brilliant sunshine, such a heartening air of normality, that she convinced herself the sergeant might, after all, have been right. The day continued well with the arrival of a postcard from Barby, amazingly legible. The hostess must have held her hand while she wrote. “I am having a good time, I feel fine, we went wading today, X X X X Barby.”

Georgine took it into the house and read it some eleven times. Then, realizing that she was late to work, she told herself not to be sentimental, and started off.

She hadn't yet done with receiving confidences from the neighbors. Her first encounter came as she toiled panting along the last lap of her journey, through the adjoining back yards of Grettry Road. Mimi Gillespie was in her garden, attired in a slack suit which only shipyard wages could have bought; Georgine had observed that Mimi dressed with almost painful suitability for every occasion. Her demeanor this morning, however, was not as debonair as her costume. She seemed to have been crying.

“I guess I'm doing the gardening now,” Mimi said in answer to Georgine's casual comment. She poked listlessly at a large milkweed. “My brother went away last night.”

“Not for good, surely? Doesn't he live with you?”

“Oh, no,” Mimi said. “He goes up to his ranch every so often. It's just a little stump farm out here”—she gestured vaguely northward—“with a couple of hands that help him work it on shares. I guess that's really his home. He—did Harry talk to you about him, any?”

Promptly and tactfully, Georgine lied.

“Well, they don't get on any too well. Harry doesn't understand Ralphie at all, and they don't feel the same way about the war. I do my best,” Mimi went on with a rather pathetic look of helplessness, “and I do so want to have everything nice, and have quiet at home.”

“Of course you do,” said Georgine gently, beginning to edge toward the street. “I'll have to hurry, I'm late. Look, would you tell Mr. Gillespie I shan't have to impose on him tonight? I'm planning to get home by daylight.”

She nodded to Roy Hollister, who had just emerged from the lower door of his house and was heading for the canyon path, and looked round to make sure Mimi had heard her. Mimi had disappeared into her own home, her thick-soled play shoes were even now clattering up the stairs from the basement game room to the street floor.

The second encounter came during the noonday recess, when the wiry figure of Mr. Todd McKinnon appeared, strolling down the Road. Georgine, perched on the low fence at the end, greeted him with reservations. “Have you come to find out what sort of stuff I'm typing for the Professor? Everyone else wants to know, soon or late.”

“I hadn't thought of it,” he said agreeably, sitting down beside her, “but I'll ask if you like.”

She wondered fleetingly how old he was; somewhere in the early thirties, she'd guess, though those lean faces never changed much with years. “No, don't bother,” she replied. “I don't know. I can see, though, why the old gentleman wanted a typist who could simply copy without understanding, because the neighbors are certainly curious. Do you think they really believe it's a Death Ray?”

“These days,” said Mr. McKinnon, “people will believe anything. And why not? Take my invention, for example,” he continued indolently, but cocking an eye at her. “It sounds impossible, but the Army and Navy have agreed that nothing could be more desirable.”

“Do tell me about it,” said Georgine, her eyes crinkling.

“It's a method of camouflage,” said the inventor, “that makes a bomber not only invisible but inaudible. The citizens of Tokyo wouldn't know what had hit them.”

“Remarkable. You've perfected this?”

“Yes, indeed. The Armed Forces got me a special deferment while I worked on it. I fixed up a bomber for them,” said Mr. McKinnon, taking his mouth-organ from his pocket and hitting it violently on the palm of his hand, “and there was a demonstration. One and all were agreed that it was a complete success.”

“That ought to revolutionize the conduct of the war.”

“Well, yes, but there's been a li'le trouble,” he said sadly. “We've never been able to find the bomber again—I'm afraid you think I'm not telling the truth.”

“Oh, why not?” said Georgine. “My eldest son was the pilot. So that's how you spend your time, inventing in the morning and playing the mouth-organ in the afternoon? Must be a fascinating life.”

“I'm the envy of all comers,” Mr. McKinnon agreed. “The noise doesn't disturb you, I hope?”

“No, I like it.
The Trout
is one of my favorite songs. But I don't hear it often. I'm working at top speed these days. And that reminds me. I'd best get started again, on some more of those scientific terms that don't mean a thing.”

“Slows you up, doesn't it, when you can't understand what you're writing.” McKinnon was sympathetic.

“Yes. I wish the Professor'd let me take work home.” A thought struck her as she rose to go into the house. “You don't suppose,” she said softly, half to herself, “that someone believed I did just that, and was curious enough to—break into my house and find out?”

McKinnon looked at her quickly. His eyes were gray with brown flecks, like particularly hard slabs of Scotch agate, and so deeply set under his brows that the upper lids were all but invisible. It gave them a curiously searching expression.

“Someone's been in your house? Recently?”

“Since I came to work here.” Georgine already regretted having mentioned it. “At least I thought so, it may have been my imagination. It's been running riot since last Monday.”

McKinnon looked up Grettry Road, his eyes resting on one house after another; then the eyes smiled at her, as if to say, “Someone here? One of these ordinary people?”

“You and the desk sergeant,” said Georgine cryptically, “must be brothers under the skin.” She went back to work, feeling, for some obscure reason, more comfortable.

She got up a burst of speed that afternoon, sliding the carbons from finished sheets and shooting them between fresh ones with scarcely a pause, feeling efficient and proud of herself. A remote part of her mind heard the afternoon sounds of the Road: the majestic footsteps of Mrs. Blake moving about the house; the telephone bell; an occasional car whirring past the intersection; and through it all the oddly carrying strains of the harmonica, from far up the street. Possibly in compliment to her, McKinnon was again playing
The Trout
.

Toward mid-afternoon Georgine paused in her work for a moment, conscious of some difference in the air. It was cooler, and the light had a new quality. She got up to stretch, and looked out the window.

The fog-bank outside the Golden Gate, which had lain quiescent through all these brilliant days, was moving at last in response to some mysterious law of weather. Lazily it had shifted and uncoiled, rising, hollowing like an enormous shell to roof the City and the Bay, streaming gray and thick toward the folded canyons of the eastern hills. For a few minutes you could still see the confetti-colored houses on the flat lands below, with the fog's shadow advancing across them smoothly, without haste. Then they were blotted out, and the sun also disappeared.

Georgine shivered, congratulated herself on having prudently brought along a topcoat, and returned to work. She began to separate the typed sheets which she had flung aside as fast as they were finished. Ribbon copy, carbon, onionskin; ribbon copy—She stopped, appalled.

At least half of the second and third sheets were blank. She had been putting on too much pressure, and in her haste had turned the carbon paper backward.

There was only one thing to do about this. Georgine burst into tears, put her head down on her arms and howled heartily for three minutes. Then, much refreshed, she dried her eyes and powdered her nose and started to type the pages all over again.

But it meant she'd have to work tonight; she was still behind schedule, and this horrible mishap, unless repaired at once, would make it impossible for her to finish within the ten days she'd allotted. “Oh, dear!” Georgine groaned, now typing with exaggerated care. “If I make any more mistakes, I'm sunk.”

She frowned in annoyance as a velvety voice sounded from below. “Mis' Wyeth! The P'fessah says could you step down to the lab'atory a minute, please?”

The laboratory? She'd never been allowed near it before, nor indeed into the basement story of the Professor's house. She found herself not unwilling to see it; she ran lightly down the stairs. Mrs. Blake had directed her to the door at the east end of the basement corridor, but there were two doors. Georgine tried one of them. No, this wasn't right; this was the garage, housing a well-preserved coupé of pre-depression vintage, also a remarkable collection of junk. The drive for “skwap wubbah” could not have penetrated this far, for Georgine saw lengths of hose, old gloves and at least three worn-out tires. Even the wedges that held the inner doors open were covered with rubber, so they would hold on the cement floor of the passage. Georgine grinned to herself, with a mental picture of the Professor's response to scrap collectors. If he had been approached by the little tike about two feet high, the luckless infant was probably still running.

She tapped at the door which was set at right angles to the inner entrance of the garage. “Come in,” said the abrupt voice of Alexis Paev.

Georgine saw, with an absurdly let-down feeling, that the laboratory was very dull-looking. There were jars of colorless liquid on glass-enclosed shelves, but they were neither bubbling nor sending off mephitic vapors. The rest of the furniture consisted of a long sink and a discolored table with a few racks of ordinary test-tubes; a stool; an empty wire cage.

The only picturesque detail was the remote humming sound that pervaded the air. Georgine glanced about quickly, hoping against hope to find a sinister source for this. There was nothing but a set of four small slatted openings, slightly protruding from the wall in which the door was set. They were high up, near the ceiling. Those couldn't be a Death Ray; they'd been built into the house.