The Glass Slipper (20 page)

DEAR RUE:

The girls told me you were here, and we were speculating about whether or not Julie could have been having some kind of love affair. I think she had had, because this note was in a book in her room. I think it was from him, whoever he is, and that she’d gone to meet him the afternoon she was murdered. It’s written, but I don’t know the writing and it’s not signed. I’m sending it to you instead of to the police; if it doesn’t really mean anything I’d rather nobody else knew. I’d hate Julie’s little love affair in the papers, poor kid. She had so little. Telephone if you want to see me.

ELIZABETH

Rue read that first. Then she unfolded the enclosed note.

Rain drummed steadily upon the top of the car, sounding like footsteps sloshing through the wet.

“My sweet,” said the note in heavy, markedly backhand writing.

MY SWEET:

Be sure you meet me this afternoon: in the restaurant on Rush Street at four. Did I tell you how long I’ve loved you? How, in the hospital, I’ve tried to find you, made excuses to talk to you. Among all the nurses and their white uniforms, I know the square little set of your shoulders and the knot of smooth brown hair under your perky little cap. Don’t fail me this afternoon.

It was not signed. It needed no signature. She did not even reread it. There was no need to.

“… the knot of smooth brown hair under your perky little cap…” Only, that other time, it had been gold hair. Her own. “Among all the nurses in the hospital…”

She broke off. She felt completely, utterly detached from her body, yet she knew there was danger.

It was her first clear thought.

Another one, racing, followed it; perhaps it came first and subconsciously roused her to danger, sounded the small clear tocsin of warning.

Andy hadn’t wanted her to talk to Julie, because if Julie and she got together something would come out. Something that was hidden because — why, because it was the medicine. The medicine she herself had given Crystal. She hadn’t prepared it, and
Julie hadn’t prepared it
, for if so Julie would have made a note of it on the chart, and there was no such note. She hadn’t prepared it, and Julie hadn’t, yet the medicine was ready and waiting in a glass at seven, and Andy had been with Crystal at six o’clock.

He could have sent Julie out of the room on an errand. There were a dozen ways he could have accomplished a moment or two over the table of medicines. Just at that time, when Julie left and Rue came on duty, so Rue, naturally, would assume Julie had prepared the medicine.

She didn’t pursue it further.

For every conscious thought and feeling she had was submerged in one only, and that was a blind, compelling instinct of escape. She was out of the car, into that murmurous, wet darkness with rain on the top of the car which sounded like footsteps sloshing along toward her. She could see little. Lights reflecting eerily on wet pavement ahead, the light outside the filling station winking uncertainly through the rain and making a blurred halo around the gasoline pumps. Andy was back there somewhere in that dark wilderness between her and the area of light.

Yet the light outside the filling station was the only light to be seen.

She wanted Brule; she must find Brule; that was blind, unreasoning instinct too.

There would be a telephone in the filling station. The small, low building itself had looked as if it were closed. Andy had said: “I’ll rouse somebody or break in.” If somebody were there, she would be safe.

How could she travel that black, treacherous area between her and the light of the filling station and in doing so avoid Andy?

By listening, by watching for him, by knowing that he would be coming and, when she saw him (as see him she must against the light which would be behind him), by deserting the paved highway and taking refuge in the uncharted blackness at the side of the road. Perhaps there would be a hedge, a wall, anything she could crouch behind so there would be no betraying shadow.

She couldn’t wait to consider any plan. Telephone, Brule, filling station — hide when you hear a footstep or see anything move against the light. Her conscious thought probably ran like that.

She must have left the car almost instantly, for she was all at once in a completely black, wet world, with rain on her face now and her own footsteps barely audible through the murmur of the rain upon pavement all around her.

It was incredibly lonely.

Had Andy really gone to the filling station?

That stopped her sharply, her heart giving a great terrified leap. But, answering it, all at once rectangles of light sprang up ahead and were the outlines of windows. He had roused someone, then — or he had broken in in order to get the key to the gasoline pump.

She must have begun, then, to run. As much space as she could cover before he started back to the car with the gasoline can would in that race for time count for her.

What would he do when he found she’d left the car? First start the car, then probably call to her — perhaps drive ahead on the road a way. He’d be uncertain, perplexed. She could count on time for him to arrive at the conclusion that her escape was intentional — thus that she knew the whole horrible and dangerous truth. It would be then that he’d think of the telephone in the filling station.

Rain, wet pavement, blackness; her own breath coming in painful gasps, she was perceptibly nearer the area of light. Gasoline tanks loomed scarlet and shining with rain. Then she became aware that the rectangles that were windows had vanished. When? Surely not more than a moment ago; she would have noticed. But it meant he was coming.

She left the pavement; stumbling in the darkness, half falling down a kind of embankment. She paused to listen, and it was well she did, because Andy was coming along the road. She could hear his footsteps plainly, and he was making a curiously irregular progress — first walking very rapidly, with almost feverish eagerness for a few steps and then going very much slower, almost stopping altogether, and suddenly, decisively, quickening his pace again.

What had been his plan? Perhaps he had none. Perhaps that hesitancy, that abstracted silence, that anxious seeking for roads, indicated his dreadful indecision. Indecision only as to means; from the beginning he had realized the threat her very existence offered him. “Come with me,” he had said the night the thing began. Come away with me he had meant, so I can watch you, so I can keep the police from asking you certain things. So you will not talk to Julie; so you will not remember what you must not be permitted to remember.

Dark as it was, she had a horrible moment of certainty that he would see her, huddling there below him; that he would feel her presence, that her very thoughts would be lines guiding him to her.

But he didn’t. He went on, running for a few steps, and then stopped, until she thought she could bear the silence no longer and would scream — and then realized that his footsteps had blended at last with the drumming rain.

At last she crept out of the ditch and, finally, to the highway again.

Afraid, even then, that she had been deceived by some sound of the rain; that it hadn’t actually been Andy who passed her there on the road.

But it was. The lighted area of the gasoline tanks was bare and empty. Away back along the black path she had come was a blur of lights outlining an object that was the car, and a tiny red dot that was its rear light.

The shabby car. That looked as if it had come from a junk heap.

She must cross the area of light quickly. She did so, flashing like a hunted small animal for cover.

The door of the little white building was closed but not locked. He’d broken in, for the bolt hung by one staple. It meant no one was there.

Would there be a telephone?

She didn’t dare turn on lights as Andy had done. But the light from outside came faintly through the little window, and square in the path of it was the counter and telephone.

She grasped it, and her hands were so cold or so unsteady she couldn’t, for a moment, dial correctly. She forced her fingers to steadiness; she could barely see the slots in the dial.

But she did dial her own number, and after a long time a voice came over the wire — and it was Brule.

“Brule —” She didn’t know she sobbed.

“Rue — Rue, good God, is it you? Where are you? Rue —”

“Brule, come for me. Come — hurry. It’s Andy… Come —”

“Rue, where are you? What do you mean? We’ve been looking —”

“Listen.” She must make him understand. “Brule, listen. Andy killed her. Julie. And Crystal. He — he’s out there now, on the road. He’ll be looking for me. I’m in the filling station, telephoning. Brule, come for me —”

“
Where
are you, Rue? Answer… tell me exactly… you must tell me. Ask the filling station attendant —”

“There’s no one here. It’s closed —”

“Closed — Rue, I’ve got to know where you are —”

“It’s north and west of Chicago — near Morton Grove, I think. I don’t know what road we’re on. There are no houses —” She couldn’t speak lucidly; she was sobbing and couldn’t stop it.

Brule’s voice came sharply.

“Rue, listen — is he near you?”

“Not now. He’s at the car. It’s a horrible old car—”

“How far away?”

“About a half a mile —”

Someone was talking to Brule — and Brule was answering; someone was beside him talking, and she could hear their voices but not what they said. Then Brule said urgently:

“What’s the number of the telephone you’re using? Quick —”

She couldn’t see the numbers in the little plate. She couldn’t turn on the light. She’d given Andy back the little pack of matches.

“I can’t — I can’t see it, Brule,” she cried brokenly.

“Stop that, Rue. You’re hysterical. Listen. I will come. Understand. Tell me the number.”

“But I can’t see it — I can’t turn on the light. I—”

“Can you hide from him? Do you mean he knows that you know?”

“Yes — yes —” She was sobbing again. She forced herself to reply slowly and distinctly:

“I’ll try to hide. It’s dark. Oh, Brule, come.”

There was another quick colloquy beside the telephone.

Brule said tersely: “When you leave the telephone, don’t hang up the receiver. Leave it hanging. We can get the address. Do you understand?”

“Y— Yes —”

“And listen, Rue — Is he coming?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell me. Quick. The afternoon Julie died, what did Andy do with his overcoat — when he came into the room, I mean — did he have it with him?”

“Yes.” She could see it again, in a queer flash, against the darkness of the little filling station, with its smell of oil and gasoline, and the heavy drumming of rain on its low roof.

“It was on a chair. He put it on a chair.”

“It’s that. You’re right; it’s the cloakroom theft business!” It didn’t sound sensible, but it was what she heard Brule say — not to her, but to someone near him. Brule said quickly and sharply into the telephone:

“Hide, Rue. Get away from him and hide. They’ve got the evidence — the bartender’ll talk now too. Everything’s all right if you can hold out till I come.”

Andy was coming. She couldn’t see out toward the black stretch of highway. She couldn’t hear, for the sound of the rain drowned more distant sounds. But she knew he was coming.

“It’s one of the western highways,” she cried desperately. “It intersects Milwaukee, but it’s before you reach the intersection. Brule —”

The drumming of the rain on the roof took on rhythm — became louder — was the wheezing throb of the engine of a car. Headlights glanced against her, searching her out through the window as a car swung jerkily into the paved square and stopped at the door, which was open.

S
he was never able to remember the next moment or two; she’d had no consciousness of leaving the telephone, of any movement or conscious and lucid thought at all. But sometime in that blank interval she found the back door and tore her fingers on some kind of bolt and was outside the ghastly little trap of walls and into the rain and darkness again.

It gave her for an instant a promise. But only an instant, for there was no place to hide, no shelter except darkness, and the lights of the car could seek through that.

She ran — and had no direction; she stopped, gasping for breath, trying to plan, to think. She couldn’t. There were no outbuildings, there was no hedge. She stumbled through the rain, instinctively trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the lights behind her. And then she found the shrub.

A little shrub with thorns. It loomed, a small blotch of deeper darkness, beside her and caught at her coat. And Andy called behind her somewhere: “Rue… Rue…”

Rain blurred the voice. She couldn’t tell where he was — far away or near.

She crouched down beside that thorny little shrub. Rain drowned the sound of his footsteps.

She was too near the filling station.

But his voice came again, nearer, so she could distinguish the queer pleading in it: “Rue — don’t be afraid. Rue, where are you?… Rue, I won’t hurt you…”

And it was so much nearer that she didn’t dare move; didn’t dare seek a better hiding place.

Rain and darkness; time must be passing, though it seemed to stand still. There were sounds; her own heart beating heavily, loudly. She thought he’d gone once and was about to move cramped muscles when she heard him. Quite near:

“Rue, where have you gone? I won’t hurt you. Don’t be afraid…” It was queer, not quite intelligible. A monotonous murmur.

It stopped. And she became aware that he was trying new tactics, making a short little rush in this direction and that.

“I know you’re here, Rue. You hadn’t time to go far. You’re here somewhere. You’d be afraid to go into the fields — and leave the station and — There you are.” He chuckled deeply. He’d seen her, he’d caught a glimpse of the solider shadow in all that blackness. But he hadn’t, though once he passed so near she thought he’d touched her.

Time stood still but must be passing.

He began to range further from the filling station. He must have passed the pitifully sparse little shrub a hundred times. Its very smallness, she realized suddenly, helped conceal its presence and her own.

Unless he blundered into it… She wondered suddenly if she’d left the telephone receiver hanging, still connected so they could trace the number. She couldn’t remember.

She realized all at once that for a long time she’d heard no sounds. Had he gone? Or was it a trick? She waited, cramped, breathing lightly. She was right to wait, for his voice said, clearly through the rain, almost at her side: “Ah — caught you that time,” and he chuckled again and made a little rush — which took him to one side of the shrub and away from her again.

So she was in a way prepared for it when he said loudly, almost shouting from somewhere near the filling station: “Rue — all right, Rue. You’ve won. I’m leaving. Do you understand? You can come out now from wherever you are — I’m leaving…”

For an instant she believed it. Believed it, too, when the car started up and moved away — slowly, into the highway — believed it, yet some instinct told her not to move. So she crouched there, still and cramped but able to draw long breaths — and the car all at once swerved and turned and swept its light back and forth over the vacant, flat area, piercing the gloom not brightly but clearly enough so her own scurrying, hurrying figure would have been caught by those swerving fingers of light. And they fell upon the shrub — fell and lingered, and she could see its outline and her own, humped and solid, and the sparse grass so near her face.

It lingered, and she thought she was seen; then it swept on.

But he came back. Came back slowly, deliberately got out of the car.

She heard the door bang. Heard nothing for a while and then his footsteps. His voice even, murmuring as if the nightmare of the thing had touched him too. Saying: “It’s only a shrub. Too little… Rue, where are you? Rue, I’ve got to find you. Rue, I don’t want to do it. I never wanted to — not even with Crystal. I couldn’t help it. It was other people — not me; it was Crystal. I didn’t want to; she made me; she insisted; there was no other way to get rid of her: it would have — Rue — Rue.”

He touched the shrub. She felt it waver. And he swore and bent, and his fingers came out of the darkness and touched her face, and Rue screamed.

Against the rain — against the darkness. A darkness that became for Rue all at once entirely black, an engulfing current on which she drifted lost even to terror.

All black except it was pierced with sounds — sounds, lights, voices, men running, and above and through it all the steady throb and racing of engines — car engines, many of them, with great strong lights turning the whole bare little space into lighted tumult.

Someone was holding her, but it wasn’t Andy. Somebody…

“Rue — are you all right now? Had he hurt you —”

It couldn’t be Brule, and it was. Where had she been? How had all that turmoil happened without her knowing it was about to happen?

“I — fainted; he found me. He’s here —” She thought she was speaking with the utmost intelligibility, and Brule didn’t hear a word of it, for he put his face beside her own, and his cheek was hard and cool, and he said: “Oh, my God…” as if it were a groan.

The lights confused her; there were men shouting; gathering in a group. Brule was swiftly touching her; demanding; making her tell him she wasn’t hurt. She tried to reply.

It was all confused, too, when he took her to a waiting car. He put her in it and got in beside her and shouted to someone outside.

“I’m going back to the house,” he said. “You’ll find us there. I’m taking Mrs Hatterick.”

But he wouldn’t let her talk; during all that swift trip, swooping through rain, through darkness, through at last lighted streets, he wouldn’t let her talk.

They were at the house and the door was flung open; there were lights, people, confusion there too. But only for a moment. Then she was in the little guest room; a maid was there, and Madge, and Brule was giving swift orders.

Somebody (Madge? And was it possible there were tear streaks on the child’s round cheeks?) helped her undress; got her into a warm woolen dressing gown. Brule himself brought in a little white tub, and somebody poured hot water in it, and Brule had a homely little can in his hand labeled “Mustard.”

“Your feet go in this,” he said and knelt and pulled off her slippers himself.

“Ouch.”

“I know it’s hot. Keep them there —”

“Brule, I’ve got to know — everything —”

“Keep your feet in; all right.” He looked up at her and said: “I suppose you’ve got to. It was Andy. Sit still. I’ll tell you.” He tested the water with his hand and plunged her feet deeper into it. “It’s all very simple really. It developed, however, just tonight; after you — had gone. It was one of those — those stubborn little ways truth has of convincing us of her indestructibility. In other words,” said Brule simply, “malachite.”

“Mal—”

“Malachite and Funk being dragged from the thing here to investigate cloakroom thefts at the Town Club. He —”

“What is malachite? Brule, that water’s boiling.”

“No, it isn’t. Keep still. Malachite’s a dry stain, that’s a powder. They’d sifted it over things in the cloakroom; there’d been a series of petty thefts, and they were trying to detect the thief and stop it without resorting to the police. They thought some of the staff — a waiter or a page boy — was doing it. Anyway, the stuff was on Andy’s coat. He must have arranged to meet Julie —”

“Yes, there’s a letter — I don’t know what I did with it,” she said, bewildered. “I had it —”

“Look in her coat,” said Brule. Madge found the coat and said: “Is this it?” over a crumpled, soggy piece of paper.

It was. Brule read it.

“Andy wrote that?”

“Yes.” There were questions and answers unspoken; put aside.

Brule went on:

“When Andy met Julie she must have touched him, put her — hands on his arm.”

“Malachite —”

“Oh, that. It sticks to your hands, you see, and, when your hands perspire or are washed, turns green. Becomes a dye. It’s an old trick; forgotten with more modern methods. Remembered, luckily, by the old porter at the club. It isn’t too efficacious, as he found for his pains, for he’d scattered it so liberally that instead of catching his thief he immediately got complaints of club members — several, at any rate, who had lunched there the morning he essayed his little trap, and found themselves with unexpected streaks of green dye on their hands. They — five or six of them — were told the truth. Among the five or six was Andy. He’d accidentally avoided it himself by putting on gloves as he left the club. The porter did not use malachite again after his unsuccessful attempt; we wouldn’t have known of it if they hadn’t had to call in the police, finally. And no one came forward to tell us because that detail of the green stains was kept out of the newspapers. And the porter also remembered that Andy had lunched there the day of Julie’s murder; Andy himself told the police he’d lunched at some little restaurant on Michigan; they wasted a lot of time trying to check that story. But the lie, when they discovered it, was significant; Andy had learned of the malachite; he’d heard about the stain on Julie’s hands. He knew his own danger. Later the maid, Rachel, shaking up the cushion of the chair where Andy had put his coat when she cleaned the room for the first time since the murder, got the dye on her hands too. We figure Julie knew something of how Andy gave Crystal poison —”

“I know,” said Rue in a small voice and told him.

He listened, asking no questions.

“I thought it must be something of the kind. Something that would be obvious only if you and Julie pooled your stories. It was so simple, that matter of the medicine; once you and Julie had occasion to be suspicious, he didn’t dare permit you to meet and talk of that night and of exactly how and when Crystal’s medicine was prepared. Julie — poor Julie — torn between suspicion and — Andy’s charm.”

Brule paused. “Andy’s charm,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Too much charm, too much of the wrong kind of ambition — and too little courage… Well…” He put his hand in the water and turned briskly to Madge.

“Give me more hot water, Madge,” he said and resumed: “It’s a direct trail, then. From Andy to Julie to the house; he had the extra key, the missing key; Crystal — must have given it to him. He let Julie into the house and didn’t call anyone. He figured she’d die before anyone could reach her; before she could reach you. Perhaps she insisted, dazedly, on seeing you. So he brought her directly from the little restaurant here, thinking there would be no danger. If Gross had been ten — even five minutes — later, Julie wouldn’t have reached you at all. As it was she only mumbled things he’d said to her. Repeating — dazed.”

Someone knocked hard on the door. Madge went, and it was Guy Cole.

“The bartender’s identified him,” he said. “They promised to let the fellow off if he told the truth; he says he’s sure it was Andy. How are you, Rue? I want to talk to you —”

“Later,” said Brule. “Close the door, Madge.”

“Wait a minute, I’ve not finished,” protested Guy. “He had a pack of matches in his pocket; advertising, you know; and they’d come from that little restaurant, and Andy said, at first, that he’d never so much as seen the place. So that was that. Rue, what’s the story —”

“I said later,” said Brule. “Get out.”

“Oh, all right,” said Guy reluctantly. “But after all —”

Madge closed the door.

The little table which had held a thermos and a glass caught Rue’s eyes. She said: “But the poison in the glass — in the house — would he dare?”

“Let the police worry about that if they want to,” said Brule, pouring more steaming water into the little tub. “I think he was scared; the whole business is one actuated by the extremest cowardice. Andy was always a coward. He could get into the home because he had a key. But he had to get the police out. And he probably figured he’d be safer if he got me out too; so he put in a phony telephone call, that’s the way we’ve figured it, anyway. But I think it’s right. More mustard, Madge.”

Rue’s feet were scarlet.

She made a tentative effort to withdraw them which was instantly foiled, and said: “It isn’t possible he actually entered the house — just to put poison in the glass as a threat.”

“Not impossible, for it happened; perhaps he intended something else — and lost his nerve.”

She thought of certain moments in the nightmare just past — that curious look of anxiety and terrible indecision.

“Did he really intend to… ?” she was whispering.

Brule looked at her sharply and said: “No. Certainly not. He — didn’t know what he was going to do. Forget it. All of it.”

“Brule, why did he kill Crystal?” began Rue and remembered Madge.

Brule glanced at her, too, and Madge came to Rue.

“Rue, I — I rolled the knife (that Alicia found in Father’s instrument case) in your scarf and put it in your room. It — it was a beastly thing to do. I — there isn’t any excuse.” She gulped. Her face flushed and paled. “I — you can’t forgive me. I was — crazy.”

“She was told to do it,” said Brule. “It doesn’t make it more forgivable, though.”

Madge’s dark eyes sought into Rue’s with the appeal of a small child’s.

“Will you — ever — forgive me?” she said. “I didn’t realize —”

In the warmth and safety of that room Rue could have forgiven anything. She put out her hand toward Madge. Madge said unsteadily: “I didn’t realize; I was — scared. She said, Alicia said —”

Brule, watching Rue, said: “Run away, Madge. I think Rue won’t be — unforgiving.” Madge put back her dark mane of hair and went away. And Brule said slowly:

“Are you, Rue? Unforgiving?”

There were things yet unspoken, hovering in the warm little room.