The Glass Slipper (15 page)

Luckily they saw no one they knew; it would have reminded them of the ugly thing that, for those moments, Rue was trying instinctively to forget. Andy helped her. He talked of anything and everything; and made love to her gaily, as if there were no obstacles between them, as if they were carefree and young and had all life before them. With nothing tragic to forget.

Or to face.

Coffee came at last; and the things they must talk of could no longer be pushed aside. Andy began it:

“I talked to Brule this morning. Have they found your nursing kit, Rue?”

He didn’t need to say who.

She shook her head. “We looked for it this morning, Rachel and I. And I asked Rachel about the charts; I think she knows where they are; the charts for Crystal’s illness, I mean.”

They talked of it; and of the inquest; and of Rue’s trip to the hospital.

“Alicia is still at the house?” asked Andy at last.

She looked at her small coffee cup.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Rue — Rue, how much longer —”

“No, Andy. Don’t talk of it.”

“But I must. Rue. It’s so unfair to you. Doesn’t Brule even offer to — to explain? To give her up? To —”

Brule. He’d asked her not to see much of Andy. But lunch with Andy was so small a thing; and she’d needed the bolstering that Andy supplied. The friendly reassurance he gave her.

Or was that all? Had she really, deep in her heart, come to a decision of some kind? A decision that was like a fire laid in the hearth, ready for a flame to light it.

There was something obscurely inept about the simile. Fire? Flame?

Her hand lay on the cloth, beside the lamp. No one could see, and Andy again put his own hand over it. He leaned forward, and there was something urgent in his blue eyes, something urgent on his tongue and about to be spoken.

But she never knew what he’d been about to say. For a man stopped beside their table and said, “Well, hello there,” and it was Brule.

Speaking with the utmost coolness and nonchalance, except that his eyes were so bright and his face so masklike.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he said.

A
ndy relinquished Rue’s hand. Brule had seen it, of course. A waiter, hovering, brought an extra chair, and Andy had got to his feet. Then both men were seated again, and there was a menu card in Brule’s hands. Menu cards, reflected Rue, are such a help; be nonchalant, look at a menu card.

He ordered quickly.

“Have you been at the hospital?” he asked Andy.

“Yes,” said Andy, “that’s where I picked up Rue. Were you operating this morning? I didn’t see you.”

Brule shook his head.

“No. I was at the office. Just happened to come in here for lunch and saw you both.”

That, thought Rue, is not the truth. Yet there was no way for Brule to know that they were there, they hadn’t known themselves that they’d be lunching together or that they would be at the Blackstone. How could he have known it, then?

Andy apparently believed it.

“That Sims woman from downstate is going to make a go of it,” he said. “I’m going to feel pretty good about that case. I followed your advice to the letter, Brule, and she’s improving.”

Rue listened idly while they talked of it, of another case or two, of the cloakroom thefts at the club, of the morning’s political news; with a start she remembered the police car that had followed her to the hospital. She’d forgotten it altogether. Had it followed Andy’s car from the hospital to the Blackstone? Then had Brule happened past and recognized the car or the policemen in it? That didn’t sound right somehow, either; Brule was the kind of person it was difficult to reconcile with coincidence of any kind.

But after his arrival it was different. The music, the flowers, the lights, the soothing little chatter of voices lost their power to lull her into gaiety; became all at once just so many pleasant props to a stage setting. Now that Brule had arrived, the delusion of escape vanished. The orchestra launched just then, very softly, into “Speak to Me of Love,” and it sharpened, curiously, the sense of falseness in that hour or so that she and Andy shared. Brule was there; with him intangibly were all those things they couldn’t escape, couldn’t avoid in any way but by plunging through them.

Brule was as always quietly hurried. He ate with dispatch and a good appetite and ordered brandy afterward.

“I’ll take Rue home,” he said briskly, while the brandy made a bright hot little lane down Rue’s throat. “I’m going that way.”

They went together to the door, passing tables — which seemed quite suddenly silent and observant as they passed as they had not been silent and observant until Brule, whom everybody knew, had joined them. They went past the bowing but reserved headwaiter, who said: “Good afternoon, Doctor Hatterick,” and down the broad steps. In the palm-laden lobby Andy said he had to get back to the office and gave Rue a long look that tried to tell her all the things he couldn’t say. But the gaiety of their lunch seemed now false and thin.

Brule’s coupé was at the curb. The doorman, too, said: “Thank you, Doctor Hatterick. Good afternoon,” and watched them with speculative eyes.

Their ride along Michigan Boulevard homeward was silent. Brule didn’t say, I told you not to see much of Andy. He didn’t say anything.

Gross opened the door for them and took Brule’s coat and hat. There was music there too — coming from Steven’s studio.

“I wish he wouldn’t play that,” said Rue sharply and unexpectedly.

“That?” said Brule, glancing quickly at her.

“It’s the thing he was playing — when Julie died.” She felt a wave of impatient distaste. “ ‘Arabesque,’ he calls it.”

“Oh,” said Brule, and Gross said:

“The police are here again, sir. Waiting to see Madam.”

After a moment Brule said: “About anything in particular, do you think, Gross?”

“I don’t know, sir. The little one they call Funk is there too.”

“I see.” He turned. “Well, Rue. I’ll go with you.”

“In the library, sir. We were at lunch when they arrived.”

But they wanted to see Rue alone, it developed — politely, for Oliver Miller did the talking, and he was always oily with politeness. Brule went away, and Rue, wondering if she would ever grow accustomed to those frequent, unpredictable bouts of questioning, sat down and, as usual, tried to hold herself steady, tried not to show fright and above all, as Guy had coached them all, to think twice about answering anything.

The difficult thing about those interviews was the unexpected way in which the detectives thrust new evidence into them, pouncing at her in the middle of familiar and worn paths of inquiry to ask something totally new and unexpected. Today it was keys.

Keys to the Hatterick house.

Through what long and tedious avenues of inquiry Rue could only guess, they had discovered the locksmith who had made Alicia’s key. He had made it at Crystal’s order. They knew the date, over a year ago, now, and they knew that it had been given to Alicia promptly on the day the locksmith had delivered it.

But he had made two keys.

Did Rue know anything of an extra key?

Rue didn’t.

“Gross would know,” she told them.

The little Funk, standing in the shadow of a window curtain, darted forward, looking very grimy and scared, and said Gross didn’t know.

“All the members of the household except Miss Madge have keys, and Gross himself has a key. He says that’s all there are.”

“Perhaps someone lost a key, and the extra one was to replace it,” said Rue. It seemed an extraordinarily tenuous kind of clue — if clue they considered it.

She thought there was a kind of doubt on their faces, as if they agreed with her unspoken thought.

“Perhaps,” said Miller a little heavily. “But Gross says there’s been no key missing.”

“But — but there are so many possibilities; an extra key…”

“I know,” said Miller. “But the maids and the cook insist they have none, that Gross does all the locking and unlocking. He thought you might have had it, Mrs Hatterick. Or know something about it.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Rue a little crisply. “I have —” She searched in her enormous flat bag, and drew out a smoothly worn key. “I have this one. That’s all.”

They let her go after a few more questions, again about the time and manner of Julie’s arrival. They said nothing, that time, of Crystal’s death.

Madge and Alicia were in the studio with Steven, and he was playing the piano. Alicia sat looking like an extremely beautiful portrait in her green gown, watching the fire broodingly, with its soft light putting a pale gold flush on her beautiful face. Madge sat in the deep bay window near the piano, her chin on her hand, staring out at the dreary gray sky, her scarlet sweater in bright contrast to the heavy brown curtains, which were open, in daytime, for light.

Rue hesitated on the threshold. There was no place for her there. She went upstairs and, forgetting that her own room — Crystal’s room — had now been opened and cleaned, went to the little guest room beside Brule’s study.

She entered it and closed the door, thinking of the police; of Miller and little Funk with his black eyebrows lifted so he looked constantly frightened, and his clawlike hands. She wondered when they would remove the police guard about the house — unobtrusive, by that time a part of those days. A dark, thick bulk moving quietly along the hall; sitting in the butler’s pantry drinking coffee, meeting another equally thick and stalwart bulk outside the house, below the door, talking mysteriously, moving away — only to turn up as mysteriously at the back of the house somewhere. There was always someone there.

It ought to have been a kind of guarantee of safety. It wasn’t.

The continually recurring interviews with the police always frightened her. She had dropped her soft fur coat and sat down, thinking of that businesslike interview just past, when she realized that someone — a woman — was in Brule’s study. And she was crying and Brule was talking to her.

Afterward she sought back into her memory for other and preceding words — words she might have heard through that closed, concealed door, as she entered the room, as she flung down her coat, as she sat lost in thought of that recent bout with the police. But she never could remember anything preceding the thing she did hear.

The woman sobbed again, wretchedly. And a man’s voice said: “Give them to me. You’re a fool. Bring them at once — and stop that shouting.”

“I can’t… I’m afraid… Murder…”

“Oh, you fool —”

It was Brule. And he was angry, his voice at its very white heat of anger. She’d seen him that way once, when a surgical nurse forgot a tube and the patient, a boy of fifteen, choked and died before they could do anything.

Brule’s voice now brought the tragic, dreadful scene back to Rue.

Yet when he spoke again his voice had changed. It was almost coaxing. He said: “Come now, my dear. You run along and do as I tell you. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Nothing at all… nothing…”

After a moment a door opened and closed, and there was silence in the study. Whoever had been there had gone. One of the maids? Cook? Who? Alicia and Madge were in the studio. Somehow the voice, sobbing though it was, had suggested Rachel. Brule must have gone with her.

But he hadn’t. For the telephone rang in the study, and Brule’s voice answered it.

“Yes — (it’s all right, Gross, hang up; I’ll take it) — yes, this is Doctor Hatterick.” Gross has answered simultaneously at the telephone downstairs. Brule’s voice came hard and clear through the closed door. “All right. I’ll come right away. Get a blood donor ready — I’ll operate right away; have the operating room ready. Get permission from his family. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes; ready to operate in twenty —” The telephone clicked, and the door to the study slammed. She reached her own door as Brule started down the stairs.

“Brule —”

He jerked back toward her.

“Emergency,” he said. “Let you know…” He was running downstairs. She heard him in the hall below. “Get my coat quick. Is my car still outside? No, I’ll drive myself. Quicker.”

He was gone.

She wished she could have gone with him, to play out the drama that would be played that afternoon, under great blue lights, in the heat and silence and suspense of the white operating room.

She went back to the guest room, perceived its slick emptiness, remembered that her own things had been removed to her room again and went, trailing her coat, into the laced, silk-draped bedroom with its French mirror and great bed.

There on the hearthrug, below that mirror and beside the delicately carved armchair with its pale gray silk upholstery, Julie Garder had died.

She sat there for a while, in the freshly cleaned and aired room, all tidy now with fresh pink roses on the small gray desk, resurrecting in her mind that scene. And the scenes to follow. Steven rushing into the room, eyes distraught. Andy and Brule following him, Brule stooping instantly over the girl, Andy flinging his overcoat upon a chair and kneeling, then, beside Brule.

She was there when Rachel came.

It had been Rachel in Brule’s study. Rue was sure of it. The girl’s eyes were red and swollen. She said in a subdued way that Gross had said the doctor had left.

“Yes, Rachel. There was an emergency at the hospital. What is it?”

But Rachel wouldn’t say. She looked at Rue with dark, haunted eyes and asked when the doctor would be back.

“I don’t know. Rachel, what is wrong? What — what is it you are hiding under your apron?”

“Nothing, madam. Nothing —”

“Nonsense. There’s something. What?”

“Really there’s nothing, madam. It’s nothing at all…”

“Let me see your hands. Rachel —”

The little organdy apron concealed only empty hands. Hands that were doubled up into tight fists.

Rue looked at them and said: “What —” and Rachel defiantly opened her hands and held them palm outward toward Rue, staring at her above them with somber, red-rimmed eyes.

“There,” said Rachel, “you see —”

Rue saw. Saw and shrank away and yet had to lean nearer to make sure she saw. But there was no mistake. Clear upon the girl’s palms were smudges and blotched streaks of green.

“Where… ?” breathed Rue at last. “How…?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know, madam. I — I washed my hands and there it was. I don’t know… but I know about her,” she cried, gasping and flinging out both stained hands toward the hearthrug as if Julie’s shabby little figure were still there. And then she looked at Rue again, and gave a strangled, sudden sob and ran out of the room. Hiding her stained hands below the scrap of organdy.

Rue did not follow her.

She didn’t know how much later it was that Steven knocked rather diffidently at her half-opened door and came in.

“All alone,” he said. “May I come in?… Well, how goes it, Rue? We’re just going out for a drive. I thought you might like to go along.” He was watching her kindly, instantly aware, as Steven was always aware, of some special trouble. He came to her and smiled down. He already had his coat and muffler on, and was carrying his hat. “Poor little Rue. The glass slipper isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

The glass slipper. He’d talked of it before, she saw herself in her blue-and-silver Schiaparelli gown, descending to the stairway to meet not Brule but Andy.

“Poor little Rue, caught between them,” said Steven soberly. “I know…”

“I know,” said Steven. And as she met his sober, dark eyes, all at once she saw something deeper than sympathy, something stronger than affection, and that was truth. Steven did know.

But she had to say it, faltering: “You mean — you know all about it, Steven? You know… But you can’t —”

“I know,” he said again. “Alicia and Brule and — I’ve known for a long time, Rue.”

It was very quiet in the rose-scented room. Rue looked up at the sensitive, slender face of the man who stood beside her.

“But you,” she said wonderingly. “You still — love her.” He nodded.

“I still love her. I’ll always love her, I suppose. I can’t help it. That’s love, my dear. I suppose, always, there’s a hope — like a little, flickering light at the end of a long lane.”

“Steven…”

“Don’t feel sorry for me.” He smiled again.