“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
She turned and came to me across the shadowed room. Again her hand was in mine, and again I felt a little shock at its coldness.
“I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Grieg. I’ve always found myself clumsy about such things. Please extend my sympathy to Miss Hadley’s family.”
“There’s only her mother,” I said. “I’m going to see her now.”
Behind me, as I shut the door of the room, there was no sound hut the spaced reverberations of Oliver Moon’s eternal chords.
Chapter Three
The Orphanage
The railroad station was at the east end of the main street, and from its platform you could look straight through the town to the fields on the west side. It was a distance of about ten city blocks. Two of the blocks were occupied by stores and offices. There were also a couple of restaurants and a movie theater painted bright blue. I went down the street to one of the restaurants. A fat woman in a stained white wrapper was behind the counter. There was a peculiar little bulge beneath her lower lip, and pretty soon I saw that she was loaded with snuff. Even that was not enough to kill the hunger that was gnawing at my insides. I ordered a hot beef sandwich and coffee. By a battered alarm clock sitting on a shelf in front of some canned soup, I saw that it was shortly after two o’clock.
“Nice town,” I lied.
The woman looked at me as if she considered the lie too obvious to encourage.
“You figure to stay?”
“No. Just stopping for a few hours.”
“I thought so. Fewer the better. For you, I mean. This town’s a jumping off place. No one in his right mind would stay here.”
She took a shot at a Number Ten can on the floor, and I applied myself to the sandwich. It wasn’t hot, but the gravy hadn’t actually begun to congeal, so I managed to choke it down. I considered telling the fat woman how good it was, just for the sake of points, but I remembered in time she wasn’t susceptible to lies. I ate and kept still.
“Looking for someone in particular?” she asked.
“Yes. A Mrs. Hadley.”
“Sarah Hadley?”
“I guess so. I don’t know her first name.”
“Must be Sarah. She’s the only Hadley in town.”
“This Mrs. Hadley is a widow.”
“That’s Sarah. You know where she lives?”
“No. Maybe you could tell me.”
“Sure. Go right through town. First corner west of the business district, turn south. There isn’t any numbers on the houses. Hers is the second one, east side. Needs paint.”
I thanked her and went out, leaving a half dollar on the counter. Without asking a question, I’d learned one thing. The news of Maggie’s murder was not yet known in the town where she had lived as a child. If it were known at all, it would be known to everyone. Apparently Muller was in no hurry about sending a man to see Mrs. Hadley. No doubt he had his reasons. One of them, I thought suddenly, might be because he was busy at the house of a Mrs. Crowder. The house where an old librarian sat dead in his chair before a repetitious phonograph.
I turned at the corner as directed by the fat woman and saw the house that needed paint. The floor of the front porch sagged under my feet as I crossed it. It was a decadent, defeated house. Not a house of death, but a house where death would be a kind of salvation.
The woman who answered my knock might have been designed by a dyspeptic interior decorator to harmonize with the dreary architecture of the house. Her face was the face of a woman caught up in perpetual sympathy with her own misery. She didn’t speak. She whined. I felt a shock of dull pain to think that Maggie had come from this place. From this woman.
“Mrs. Hadley?”
“That’s right, young man. What do you want?”
“My name’s Norman Grieg. I’d like to speak with you a few minutes. I’m a friend of Margaret’s.”
Her lips twisted against her teeth. The whine sharpened her nose.
“I don’t know why a friend of Margaret’s should come to see me when Margaret doesn’t bother to come herself. You can come in, if you want.”
In a square, ugly living room, I sat in a lumpy mohair chair. Mrs. Hadley sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa which was the chair’s mate. Behind her, the wall was a design of soiled and faded roses. A stain had spread on the ceiling and crept almost half way down the wall.
“Now, young man, perhaps you’ll tell me what you want.”
I wondered how to begin. How do you tell a sour, defeated woman that her daughter has been strangled? How do you tell her what you want, when you don’t really know yourself? Just a hint of something. Just the shadow of a finger out of the dead past pointing to a murderer.
“Margaret’s dead,” I said.
She just sat looking at me. I saw no shock in her eyes. No grief, no pain. Just a sharp retraction into a kind of breathless weariness.
“Dead?”
“Yes. She was murdered. The police will be contacting you.”
The wariness was there in her eyes, remaining, and now there was also a son of ugly hunger, a flash of unholy satisfaction. I felt suddenly sick. The cold gravy was slime in my stomach.
“I told her she shouldn’t go. I told her when she went away with her grand ideas of education. She thought she was too good for me and for the community whose charity she took. Was she in trouble? Who killed her?”
“I don’t know who killed her. Neither do the police. She was in trouble, but it wasn’t the kind of trouble you’re thinking. Mrs. Hadley, someone had a reason for killing your daughter. It must have been a big reason. There may be something in the past, something that happened in this town, to explain it. Can you think of anything?”
She was prim again. Rigid and guarded. Untouched by love or grief or death itself. In no gutter of any city could you find a woman more damned.
“She was not my daughter, you know,” she said.
For a moment we sat alone, that lost woman and I, in a still world bounded by faded roses. Then the clean wind of a bigger world blew in, and I felt a great relief to know that Maggie, who had died in pain and ugliness, had at least not been tainted by the sour blood of Sarah Hadley.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“She was not my daughter. Anyone in this town can tell you that. I took her from the orphanage when she was twelve. I thought she could help me around the house. I thought she would remain in common gratitude to care for me in my old age. But she went away. When she was eighteen, it was. Ten years ago. She never returned. Not once. And now she’s dead, you say. You will understand, perhaps, if I seem unmoved.”
“You never legally adopted her?”
“No. I took her to raise. She used my name. That’s all.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted her dead?”
“No one. To my knowledge, I am the only person she ever injured.”
“Think, Mrs. Hadley. Can you recall anything at all that might have any significance? Maybe something that seemed very minor at the time.”
“I can think of nothing.”
I had no heart for more. At the door, I turned and said, “This orphanage, Mrs. Hadley. Is it near here?”
She stood at the sofa, making no move to show me out.
“It’s just out of town. About a mile by the road. Go out of town by the main street. West, that is. Go north at the first turning. It’s about a mile altogether.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I made no effort to keep the irony out of my voice. “I’m sorry to bring you this bad news, Mrs. Hadley.”
But she was untouched, beyond recall in her own sour hell.
“Margaret Hadley became a stranger to me ten years ago, Mr. Grieg. I’m a poor woman. I have enough only for my own needs. You will not expect me to assume any obligations.”