The shoe sounds behind him were getting closer.
With the last of his strength, Polk managed to lift his face off the pavement, see Chief Harry standing with fists on his hips in the station’s doorway. The smaller lettering under “POLICE” arced above the peace officer’s head.
The sign read:
Polk Greshen thought about all the paperwork that might cause, and why Chief Harry might be too busy to worry about toting a gun himself.
The Secret
by Eileen Dewhurst
© 1998 by Eileen Dewhurst
Eileen Dewhurst is primarily a novelist, only occasionally a short story writer, and in her stories she appears to revert to themes that she has treated at greater length in her novels. Crime writer and editor Martin Edwards once commented, “Dewhurst (is preoccupied) with questions of identity.” He notes that her first novel, Death Came Smiling (Robert Hale/75), was concerned with “identical twin sisters who have very different characters” — a subject she returns to here.
The weather was so hot in Provence at the time Monica Millican drowned herself in her twin sister’s swimming pool that her sister — the widowed Comtesse de Chameux-Periard — persuaded Monica’s husband Roland, via a telephone call to England, that it would be prudent for his wife to be cremated where she had died. A memorial service, the Comtesse suggested, could be held later at home.
Not, of course, that the funeral could take place in either France or England to the usual time scale, in view of the necessity for a postmortem examination and an inquest. But at least the local morgue had the best freezing facilities in the area, and the Comtesse, with her unique local influence, was able to arrange the funeral for the day immediately following the body’s release.
In view of Monica’s state of mind at the time of her death — she had had to resign from her teaching job and had already made an attempt to take her life in her own bathroom — Roland was required to be present at the inquest. As his French was so poor, he was given an interpreter through whom he was able to explain to the satisfaction of the coroner that his wife’s death was the tragically logical outcome of her behaviour over recent months. The coroner clicked his tongue sympathetically when Roland added that Monica had in fact been visiting her sister in an attempt to free herself from what had so sadly proved to be a clinical depression. A verdict was brought in of Suicide alors qu’elle n’était pas responsable de ses actes. “Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed,” as the interpreter, seeing Roland’s bewildered face, hissed into his ear.
“C’était gentille, cette pauvre Madame Monica!” sobbed the cook, when the Comtesse went into the kitchen on her return from the court. “Et comme enfants, ces deux petites!... ont du être mignonnes... y a une photo, Madame?”
The Comtesse found one after a search, and when she had shown it to the cook and to Roland she took it away and looked at it herself. At the two shyly smiling little girls who were Madeleine and Monica Thompson; clean, tidy, and precisely alike.
Which they never had been, of course.
As she gave instructions to her staff, wrote the letters and made the telephone calls arising out of her sister’s death, moved between the cool shade of the house and the dazzling sunshine of the terrace in intermittently successful attempts to avoid the brother-in-law she disliked but to whom she had been obliged to offer hospitality, the Comtesse found herself unable to stop thinking about those two little girls. Monica the one who had hung back, Madeleine the one who had led the way, the one who had been first to tell the time, tie her shoelaces, write her name. Even when Monica turned out to be the academic one, Madeleine had continued somehow to outshine her — perhaps because academic achievement was not something by which Madeleine set much store. For her, it was more important to be quick-witted, lovely to look at, exciting to be with. And married to a man with wealth and influence.
By the time Monica went up to Oxford, Madeleine was already establishing herself as a model. Whether she would have reached the top of her profession no one would ever know, because on a visit to Oxford to see her sister, Madeleine met Felix Brion, elder son of the Comte de Chameux-Periard, who was on a postgraduate course in comparative estate management, and embarked very soon afterwards on her second career as his wife.
Monica, meanwhile, who had never developed charisma, drifted into a lacklustre affair with a fellow undergraduate reading Mechanical Engineering, and married him a year after they had both gained Second Class Honours degrees.
Following her marriage, Monica continued to teach; but following hers, Madeleine, at her husband’s request, ceased to model. Her father-in-law died soon after his elder son’s wedding, and on inheriting the title Felix dedicated his working life to the extensive estate surrounding the family chateau in the valley of the Loire, an activity in which his wife had been gratified to assist him.
Neither marriage had been blessed with children. Monica had a couple of miscarriages and Madeleine never became pregnant — to the infinite disappointment of the Comte, who knew he had terminal cancer for some time before telling his wife and had hoped to leave a son and heir behind him.
So when he died, the chateau, the estate, and the title passed to his younger brother Andre. Not too much to Madeleine’s chagrin: She was sole heir to Les Pigeonniers, the property in Provence, and to her husband’s personal fortune, and although she had enjoyed assisting him in his running of the chateau and the estate, she lacked the energy and the motivation to relish the idea of shouldering the responsibility of them on her own. And, as Andre showed no interest whatsoever in the female sex, there was unlikely to come a time when she would be obliged to insert the word douairière — dowager — into her title.
Madeleine had been the Comtesse de Chameux-Periard for fifteen years at the time of her sister’s death, and Monica was in the thirteenth year of her marriage to Roland Millican. During their married lives the twins spoke to each other on the telephone every few months, sent each other birthday and Christmas presents, occasionally met. Over the years, the Millicans spent a few holidays at Les Pigeonniers, but Roland was the only one who enjoyed them, and the sisters’ regular meetings took place in London, where Madeleine went twice a year to shop and see friends. Monica, of course, always invited her twin to stay with her and Roland at their home outside Birmingham, but Madeleine regularly excused herself on the grounds that her time in England was short and the other people she wanted to see, the things she wanted to do, were in or near London.
Monica had always gone willingly to their meetings, the Comtesse mused as she moved restlessly about her house and garden. Partly, of course, because she enjoyed the rare break from Roland and the night at the Dorchester to which Madeleine always treated her. (Poor cow! the Comtesse thought, with a rush of contemptuous sympathy, pleased with so little. Poor weak, frightened, stupid cow!) But also because of their tacit agreement that occasional meetings were necessary for the preservation of their secret.
The secret that, despite being identical twins, the sisters did not like one another.
Monica had always made it plain to Madeleine that she considered her shallow and superficial, while trying to hide her envy of her sister’s place in the sun. No less obviously, Madeleine had no time for what she saw as Monica’s narrow life, and pitied her for her dullness and her boring husband with the lascivious gleam in his eye on those rare occasions when he encountered his wife’s glamorous sister.