"But you know who it is!" she said.
"Suppose Vm wrong?" said MacDougal Duff.
He went into Innes's room,
Fred said to Alice, steadily, "Nothing's going to happen to you."
She snuled. "Oh, I don't think so either," she said, as if it were she who did the reassuring.
Killeen put his arm around her. "I won't leave unless you do," he said. "Listen, darling, you've got to play it safe. Safe for you."
He looked very stem and noble.
Alice slipped out of his arm, and her voice shook. "I know. Don't worry. My goodness, so nobody wants to die!"
The bathroom door closed on her light and shaky laughter, and they stood outside, Killeen on guard, like a soldier, Fred gnawing his thumb in worried thought
Dinner was pretty grim. Alice fiddled with her food. She couldn't help thinking of poison. She tried to taste only that which came from a common dish or what all three sisters were eating, and she tasted very littie. Her throat was too full to swallow, anyway. She must be frightened, she thought. But the fright was so deep, she knew it scarcely showed. She was able to do her part in the trap setting, as they had planned it, when the moment came.
Duff and Gertrude bore the conversational burden between them, but Duff wasn't sugary with her any more. He was sterner now. He let his views of history be little sermons. Alice wondered which one he was trying to touch and convert. He spoke some of the sifting history did. He said that only long-term virtues stuck to people, after history got through with them. He said patience, and endurance, and selfishness, and all the least flashy and dullest attributes stuck out like rocks after the looser soil had been washed away in the tides of time. He said the good opinion of one's contemporaries was unreliable. He said a truly fine person must disregard it in favor of his own approval or the vague thing called integrity, which was, nevertheless, one of the most solid things in the world. He said that was a fact.
Again he spoke, and said the day of greed was passing. He said it was outworn. It had done its worst. It would have to be over. Because it had wound the world up to a climax and brought forth the ultimate consequences for all to see. He said greed was in the process of committing suicide.
He said, again, apropos of nothing in particular, that to dodge one's responsibilities was to dodge life itself and die unsatisfied. He said that people's idea of heaven was a state of perfect ease. But, he said, we aren't built to endure that.
The Whidock girls were polite to him. Except Maud, of course, although even she forbore to interrupt him often with her hoarse irrelevancies. Gertrude listened as one superior being to another. Isabel listened, with her half-abstracted air. They agreed. Oh, yes, they agreed. His preaching struck off their surfaces. It got no deeper.
Alice tried to think ahead. Could she think through this night? Or was her intuition warning her, as it had twice before? Were her antennae cut off? She couldn't tell. She didn't have any subconscious promptings. She had too much fear in full consciousness.
One picture wouldn't seem real, the one about Alice and Art Killeen getting on the train together, riding away, leaving this mess behind them for somebody else to straighten out. Her mind wouldn't paint it or give it color. But that wasn't subconscious. That was just deliberately unconscious.
Josephine came down at last with the message from Susan, the one Susan had been told to send, the one that was part of their trap. Their silly litde trap.
Said Josephine, "Miz Lines says she wants to know where are Mr. Innes's pills, Miss Brennan. It's time for him to have one."
"No, it isn't," said AJice, glancing coolly at her watch. She was sustained by the plan. This she knew how to do. "I gave him one when I came in. He can't have one now."
"But . . ." Josephine hesitated.
"I left them on the mantel," said Alice, loud with impatience. Then she leaned over to Maud and smilingly, with gestures, borrowed that one's pad and pencil.
On the page she wrote, forming her letters clear and large, "In the blue box. But don't give him one now." Maud was beside her. Alice felt her glance, as if her fingertips could feel it. She handed the slip of paper around the table. It went through Gertrude's hands to I>uff, who took care to hand it to Isabel. Isabel gave it to the servant, with one of her abrupt twists of the body by which she seemed to compensate for her onesidedness.
That was done.
Now. She who could hear, but not see, would think the pills were on the mantel. And there was a white box of pills on the mantel up there, easUy found by questing fingers. She who could see, but not hear, would believe the pills were in a blue box. There was a blue box, a pillbox, conspicuous on the table beside Innes's bed. She who could both see and hear would look for a blue box on the mantel, and inside a blue china box, thereon, was a third pillbox. None of the pills in any of these boxes were dangerous. But they were different.
Very tricky, thought Alice. But perhaps it was too lat< for tricks. Her fork clattered on the dessert plate. She tool hold of her nerves and commanded her fingers to steadier.
When dinner came to an end at last, Mr. Duff excus( himselL He said he would go up to talk to Innes for a litdc while, and then he really must go home to bed. Alice sai< she would go upstairs, too.
So far, nothing. So far, so good.
Fred was lurkiag in the upper hall and followed them into Innes's room, where the defenders gathered around his bed, Innes, all smiles, happily imconscious of their new forebodings, was just saying an affectionate good night to his mother.
She went beaming away, and they let her go.
"Sit down. Sit down," said Innes. "You know, my mother has been scolding me. Really. She complains that Fm doing so much for the girls and nothirig at all for her. So Fve promised." He smiled tenderly. "Of course, it isn't that she needs it. Father left her very well off. It's just that she's jealous," he said
Duffs eyes looked alive and a little sly with amusement. "It's a very human failing," he suggested.
"Of course it is," said Innes, all wise and magnanimous. "Only natural. Mother's getting old, you know. She needs me. Well ... how did it go at dinner? You set the trap did you?"
"Mr. Whitlock"—Duff disposed his long bones in a chair, sorrowfully—"we smell danger. I'm sorry to have to point out that, unintentionally, of course, you have put Alice in a doubtful position."
As Duff talked, Innes began to disintegrate. His terror came back, all the worse for haviag been temporarily forgotten, and crept over him, drained his happy mood away, reduced him to a cowering, sweaty, pale, plump, middleaged man in fear of his life.
"Yes, I see. Yes, I see." He touched his dry lips with his tongue. "Alice, dear, you must get away. If you go and they can't get at you, then Fm safe." Even in his state, he caught the ungallantry. "We're both safe," he amended. "That's so, isn't it, Mr. Duff? Alice, dear, you will have to go."
"And then what?" said Alice.
"What do you mean, dear? Then they won't . . . Mr. Duff, explain it to her."
But Duff said, "What were you going to say, Alice?''
171
"I only want to know what happens to our plans if I go away."
"Our plans, such as they are, proceed," said Duff. "At least we can see who is interested in which pillbox. For she will have to unmurder Innes, surely, once youVe gone."
"I don't think much of that," said Alice.
"It's feeble," Duff agreed quickly. "But it may help."
"Here we are," she said, "three of you able-bodied men, and Innes, who's perfectly well able to yell, at least, and me, who am able-bodied and young and more or less bright. Do you mean to say that all of us are so scared of one handicapped old woman that we have to scatter and run?"
"Listen, don't be dumb," said Fred. "You .. ."
"I'm not dumb," said Alice hotly. "But what on earth's the use of fooling around with halfway measures? If you really want to play safe, Innes, why don't you make a big fuss? You can a&ord it. Get people in here, rouse the town, get the police. Or hire an ambulance and go somewhere else. Or hire a special train, for heaven's sake, and let's all run away!"