The Oxford Book of American Det (41 page)

“Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head. “See the patient.”

“How about it, Miss Gordon?” Shane asked.

“You can read the exclusive story,” Clare said, “in tomorrow’s edition of the Chronicle.”

“Listen—“ Captain Shane roared.

“Hello, Dinah?” I said in the telephone.

“Howdy, my cherub,” Dinah said. “All serene and sound?”

“Not serene,” I replied, listening to Shane, “but quite sound.”

“Good,” said Dinah. “So what?”

“Get out the cold cuts,” I said, “and the beer and potato salad. Daffy’s on his way up to see you.”

MIGNON G. EBERHART (b. 1899)

(M)ignon G(ood) Eberhart turned to plotting fictional murders in order to break the boredom induced by following her husband to the civil-engineering projects that took them to odd corners of the world. But what this Mystery Writers of America Grand Master had added to detective fiction by the time she’d published her fifty-ninth novel and reached her eighty-ninth year had more to do with her instincts as a storyteller.

Eberhart was born in Nebraska, studied at Nebraska Wesleyan College, married A. C.

Eberhart in 1923 (and again in 1948 after a divorce), started her writing career with short stories, and published her first novel in 1929. Her first five books were in the Mary Roberts Rinehart pattern. They featured a middle-aged nurse, Sarah Keate, and her young policeman friend, Lance O’Leary. About the only thing new about these early books was a series character who grew younger as time passed and Hollywood began filming the novels.

Eberhart then created two amateur detectives. The mystery writer-sleuth Susan Dare anticipates many imitators. And the banker-sleuth James Wickwire is also a good example of a character who brings his professional expertise to bear on his amateur detections.

When Eberhart decided to give up the quest for a series character, she—as critics love to say—found her own voice and blazed a new trail. If we can credit Rinehart with developing the ‘Had I But Known’ form, Eberhart was best known for adapting the Gothic ‘dark and stormy night’ and elements of romance into mysterious crime. She is credited with an unusual ability to make those stormy nights, and particularly the places where those tempests raged, highly realistic. This is because, as she put it, “a good many of these places, I’ve lived in myself.” She used the places she had visited during travels with her husband to provide her exotic settings, thereby anchoring her scenes with specific details that lend reality to inherently suspenseful and physically strange or threatening situations.

Eberhart was also keen on romance. She frequently featured a female protagonist and a love affair—described without the coyness usual for the period and also without the explicit sex that writers of her later years would be describing.

Spider
features Susan Dare and illustrates the author’s use of devices from Gothic romance to heighten tension. While today’s feminists might find reason enough to fault her characterisation of the female, it was a long step ahead of what other writers were doing in the early 1930’s.

Spider

“But it is fantastic,” said Susan Dare, clutching the telephone. “You can’t just be afraid. You’ve got to be afraid of something.” She waited, but there was no reply.

“You mean,” she said presently, in a hushed voice, “that I’m to go to this perfectly strange house, to be the guest of a perfectly strange woman—“

“To you,” said Jim Byrne. “Not, I tell you, to me.”

“But you said you had never seen her—“

“Don’t maunder,” said Jim Byrne sharply. “Of course I’ve never seen her. Now, Susan, do try to get this straight. This woman is Caroline Wray. One of the Wrays.”

“Perfectly clear,” said Susan. “Therefore I’m to go to her house and see why she’s got an attack of nerves. Take a bag and prepare to spend the next few days as her guest.

I’m sorry, Jim, but I’m busy. I’ve got to do a murder story this week and—“

“Sue,” said Jim, “I’m serious.”

Susan paused abruptly. He was serious.

“It’s—I don’t know how to explain it, Susan,” he said. “It’s just—well, I’m Irish, you know. And I’m—fey. Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” said Susan. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.”

“Just—watch things. There ought not to be any danger—don’t see how there could be. To you.”

Susan realised that she was going. “How many Wrays are there, and what do you think is going to happen?”

“There are four Wrays. But I don’t know what is going on that has got Caroline so terrified. It was that—the terror in her voice—that made me call you.”

“What’s the number of the house?” said Susan.

He told her. “It’s away north,” he said. “One of those old houses—narrow, tall, hasn’t changed, I suppose, since old Ephineas Wray died. He was a close friend, you know, of my father’s. Don’t know why Caroline called me: I suppose some vague notion that a man on a newspaper would know what to do. Now let me see—there’s Caroline.

She’s the daughter of Ephineas Wray. David is his grandson and Caroline’s nephew and the only man—except the houseman—in the place. He’s young—in his twenties, I believe. His father and mother died when he was a child.”

“You mean there are three women?”

“Naturally. There’s Marie—she is old Wray’s adopted daughter—not born a Wray, but more like him than the rest of them. And Jessica—she’s Caroline’s cousin; but she’s always lived with the Wrays because her father died young. People always assume that the three women are sisters. Actually, of course, they are not. But old Ephineas Wray left his fortune divided equally among them.”

“And they all live there together?”

“Yes. David’s not married.”

“Is that,” said Susan, at the note of finality in his voice, “all you know about them?”

“Absolutely everything. Not much for you to go on, is it? It was just,” said Jim Byrne soberly, with the effect of a complete explanation, “that she was so—so horribly scared. Old Caroline, I mean.”

Susan retraced the address slowly before she said again: “What was she afraid of?”

“I don’t know,” said Jim Byrne. “And—it’s queer—but I don’t think she knew either.” It was approaching five o’clock, with a dark fog rolling up from the lake and blending itself with the early winter twilight, when Susan Dare pressed the bell beside the wide old door—pressed it and waited. Lights were on in the street, but the house before her was dark, its windows curtained. The door was heavy and secretive.

But they were expecting her—or at least Caroline Wray was; it had all been arranged by telephone. Susan wondered what Caroline had told them; what Jim Byrne had told Caroline to say to explain her presence; and, suddenly, what Caroline was like.

Little Johnny hung his sister.

She was dead before they missed her.

Johnny’s always up to tricks,

Ain’t he cute, and only six—

The jingle had been haunting her with the persistency of a popular dance tune, and it gave accent to the impatient little beat of her brown Oxford upon the stone step. Then a light flashed on above the door. Susan took a deep breath of the moist cold air and felt a sudden tightening of her nerves. The door was going to open.

It swung wider, and a warm current of air struck Susan’s cheeks.

Beyond was a dimly lit hall and a woman’s figure—a tall, corseted figure with full sweeping skirts.

“Yes?” said a voice harshly out of the dimness.

“I am Susan Dare,” said Susan.

“Oh—oh, yes.” The figure moved aside and the door opened wider. “Come in, Miss Dare. We were expecting you.”

Afterward Susan remembered her own hesitation on the dark threshold as the door closed with finality behind her, and the woman turned.

“I am Miss Jessica Wray,” she said.

Jessica. This was the cousin, then.

She was a tall woman, large-boned, with a heavy, dark face, thick, iron-gray hair done high and full on her head, and long, strong hands. She was dressed after a much earlier fashion; one which, indeed, Susan was unable to date.

“We were expecting you,” she said. “Caroline, however, was obliged to go out.” She paused just under the light and beside a long mirror.

Susan had a confused impression of the house in that moment; an impression of old, crowded elegance. The mirror was wavery and framed in wide gilt; there were ferns in great marble urns; there were marble figures.

“We’ll go up to your room,” said Jessica. “Caroline said you would be in Chicago for several days. This way. You can leave your bag here. James will take it up later; he is out just now.”

Susan put down her small suitcase, and followed Jessica. The newel post and stair rail were heavy and carved. The steps were carpeted and thickly padded. And the house was utterly, completely still. As they ascended the quiet stairs it grew increasingly hot and airless.

At the top of the stairs Jessica turned with a rigid motion of her strong body.

“Will you wait here a moment?” she said. “I’m not sure which room—“ Susan made some assenting gesture, and Jessica turned along the passage which ran toward the rear of the house.

So terrifically hot the house was. So crowded with old and almost sentient furniture.

So very silent.

Susan moved a bit restively. It was not a pleasant house. But Caroline had to be afraid of something—not just silence and heat and brooding, secretive old walls. She glanced down the length of hall, moved again to put her hand upon the tall newel post of the stair rail beside her. The carved top of it seemed to shift and move slightly under the pressure of her hand and confirmed in the strangest way her feeling that the house itself had a singular kind of life.

Then she was staring straight ahead of her through an open, lighted doorway. Beyond it was a large room, half bedroom and half sitting room. A lamp on a table cast a circle of light, and beside the table, silhouetted against the light, sat a woman with a book in her lap.

It must be Marie Wray—the older sister; the adopted Wray who was more like old Ephineas Wray than any of them.

Her face was in shadow with the light beyond it, so Susan could see only a blunt, fleshy white profile and a tight knot of shining black hair above a massive black-silk bosom. She did not, apparently, know of Susan’s presence, for she did not turn. There was a kind of patience about that massive, relaxed figure; a waiting. An enormous black female spider waiting in a web of shadows. But waiting for what?

The suggestion was not one calculated to relieve the growing tension of Susan’s nerves. The heat was making her dizzy; fanciful. Calling a harmless old woman a black spider merely because she was wearing a shiny black-silk dress! Marie Wray still, so far as Susan could see, did not look at her, but there was suddenly the flicker of a motion on the table.

Susan looked and caught her breath in an incredulous little gasp.

There was actually a small gray creature on that table, directly under the lamplight. A small gray creature with a long tail. It sat down nonchalantly, pulled the lid off a box and dug its tiny hands into the box.

“It’s a monkey,” thought Susan with something like a clutch of hysteria. “It’s a monkey—a spider monkey, is it?—with that tiny face.” It was turning its face jerkily about the room, peering with bright, anxious eyes here and there, and busily, furiously eating candy. It failed somehow to see Susan; or perhaps she was too far away to interest it. There was suddenly something curiously unreal about the scene. That, thought Susan, or the heat in this fantastic house, and turned at the approaching rustle of skirts down the passage. It was Jessica, and she looked at Susan and then through the open doorway and smiled coldly.

“Marie is deaf,” she said. “I suppose she didn’t realise you were here.”

“No,” said Susan.

“I’ll tell her—“ She made a stiff gesture with her long hand and turned to enter the room beyond the open door. As her gray silk rustled through the door the little monkey jerked around, gave her one piercing black glance and was gone from the table in a swift gray streak. He fled across the room, darted under an old sofa.

But Jessica did not reprove him. “Marie,” she said loudly and distinctly.

There was a pause. Jessica’s flowing gray-silk skirts were now silhouetted against the table lamp, and the monkey absently began to lick its paw.

“Yes, Jessica.” The voice was that of a person long deaf—entirely without tone.

“Susan Dare is here—you know - the daughter of Caroline’s friend. Do you want to see her?”

“See her? No. No, not now. Later.”

“Very well. Do you want anything?”

“No.”

“Your cushions?”

Jessica’s rigid back bent over Marie as she arranged a cushion. Then she turned and walked again toward Susan. Susan felt queerly fascinated and somehow oddly shocked to note that, as Jessica turned her rigid back to the room, the monkey darted out from under the sofa and was suddenly skittering across the room again in the direction of the table and the candy.

He would be, thought Susan, one very sick monkey. The house was too hot, and yet Susan shivered a bit. Why did people keep monkeys?

“This way,” said Jessica firmly, and Susan preceded her down the hall and into exactly the kind of bedroom she might have expected it to be.

But Jessica did not intend to leave her alone to explore its Victorian fastnesses. Under her somewhat unnerving dark gaze, Susan removed her cockeyed little hat, smoothed back her light hair and put her coat across a chair, only to have it placed immediately by Jessica in the enormous gloomy wardrobe. The servants, said Jessica, were out; the second girl and James because it was their half day out, the cook to do an errand.

“You are younger than I should have expected,” she said abruptly to Susan. “Shall we go down now?”

As they passed down the stairs to the drawing room, a clock somewhere struck slowly, with long trembling variations.

“Five,” said Jessica. “Caroline ought to return very soon. And David. He usually reaches home shortly after five. That is, if it isn’t rainy. Traffic sometimes delays him.

But it isn’t rainy tonight!”

“Foggy,” said Susan and obeyed the motion of Jessica’s long gray hand toward a chair.