“You’ll be thirty-three in two weeks.”
“Will I?” He seemed surprised. “You must remember to send me a pint of cyanide for my birthday.”
“Where are you going after... after all this?”
“Home,” he said. “Unless the police choose a new address for me.”
“Home,” she repeated. “Where do you live, George?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Same place.”
“Is it exactly the same?”
“I think so.”
It seemed strange to her that it should be exactly the same. She said, “Except my room, of course.”
He looked at her gravely. “Your room is exactly the same too. I like yellow curtains.”
“So do I. Like the sun.”
“Yes, like the sun,” he said.
Their breathing was quick and uneven. She turned her head away.
“You’ll come back,” he said.
“No.” She lifted her hand slowly to her head. “No, it’s too late.”
Prye came in with Nora and her mother, and then Jane and Aspasia clinging to each other, two gloomy wraiths. Jane’s eyes were swollen and the lids were pink and transparent.
“What’s the matter with Jane?” Prye asked Nora in a whisper.
“What’s the matter with all of us?” Nora said. “Murders. Our emotions don’t operate on the sub-zero level that yours do. Besides, she’s just found out that Duncan left her almost nothing.”
“Who told her?”
“Dinah,” Nora said grimly. “Who else?”
Jackson came in with the soup. When he had gone out again, Mrs. Shane said, “Do let us have a pleasant meal for once. I’m sure everything will turn out all right and that all of us will come out unscathed.”
Aspasia was in the grip of the tragic muse again. “I might have saved these young men,” she said sonorously. “But no, no one would listen to me. I was scorned, even as Christ and Cassandra—”
“And President Roosevelt,” Dinah said.
“I might have saved them.”
“How?” Mrs. Shane inquired acidly.
“By concentrating on Good,” Aspasia replied.
“Nobody was stopping you.”
“It requires more than one.”
“Aunt Aspasia is right!” Jane cried defiantly. “If you hadn’t all been so unpleasant, so offensive even— But you have been and you are and you always will be! And now I’m going to s-s-starve to death.”
“The argument is a little hard to follow,” Prye said. “Are you going to starve because we’re offensive or—”
Jane turned to him. “And you! You’re supposed to be a detective and you haven’t detected anything, not a single thing. If I were Nora I’d think twice before marrying you, I’d think twice!”
Prye said to Nora, “You did, didn’t you, darling?”
Nora grinned and said that if all her thoughts on the subject were laid end to end they’d reach from the level of the present conversation to that of the Einstein theory.
“I don’t want any lunch,” Jane said stiffly.
“That’s fine,” Dinah said. “Good common sense. If you’re going to starve anyway you might as well train for it. Eventually, why not now?”
“Oh, do sit down, Jane!” Mrs. Shane exclaimed. “Don’t be so childish. Really, you’d think I was running a boardinghouse the way people jump up and down and dash in and out at mealtime. Jane!”
Jane sat down and finished her meal in a cold and disapproving silence. After lunch she went up to her room and locked her door.
“Sulking,” Nora told Prye in the drawing room. “Duncan used to do the same thing. She’s copying him. It’s not Jane’s real nature to sulk. She’d prefer to weep prettily to an audience of six or more males.”
“God grant I be not one,” Prye said fervently. “I’m a bit weary of weeping ladies.”
“I’m sorry for that. I’m due to break down any minute.”
“You’re different,” Prye said. He kissed her thoroughly to prove how different she was.
“I don’t feel much better,” Nora said gloomily. “Is it true that you haven’t tried to help Inspector Sands?”
“No.”
“But you just can’t do anything, is that it?”
He did not reply. She looked at him sharply.
“Paul, you know who did it? Tell me.”
“Do you want to know?”
She turned away. “No. I don’t know. It’s all such a muddle. That young boy—”
“Sammy,” Prye said. “Without Sammy we couldn’t have found out—”
“We?”
“Sands and I.”
“Is he — going to arrest anyone?”
Prye said, “It’s Sands’ problem. I’m keeping out of it.”
“Because of me?”
Prye took her hand. “Don’t think or talk of it. We don’t know what’s going to happen or when. But there’s nothing we can do, except go on as we have been.”
“Until somebody else is murdered?”
“There won’t be any more murders,” he said quietly. “The only person who is in danger realizes her danger — and locks her door.”
14
In her room Jane sat in front of the dressing table applying a new brand of cold cream. It was Jane’s infallible cure for her injured feelings. The sight of her own face in the mirror was a tonic.
She followed the directions religiously, crying a little at the same time. After all, people had treated her dreadfully. Even Duncan. Duncan had left her to starve.
She got up and went to the clothes closet to examine her last year’s mink coat. The thing was in tatters, really, but it might do for one more year. The silkiness of the fur on her arm was pleasant and she was almost cheerful when she went back to the dressing table to remove the cream.
It’s too bad Dennis isn’t here, she thought. I think I could have become quite fond of Dennis. But there’s Jackson—
She changed into a blue wool dress, powdered her face, applied lipstick very cautiously, and went downstairs. There was no one in the hall except a large policeman, who smiled at her. Jane smiled back and went on through the dining room into the kitchen.
Jackson was sitting at the table playing solitaire. He got to his feet hurriedly when he saw her and said, “Oh. Sorry, Miss Stevens.”
She laughed and said, “Sorry? Have you got anything to be sorry about?”
He shifted his feet and looked embarrassed.
“Mayn’t I sit down?” she asked with an arch smile. She sat down in the chair he’d been sitting in. The warmth of him was still there. It crept through her dress and she shivered and looked up at him.
“You’ve made the chair warm for me.”
Jackson blushed painfully. “Yes. I... I was just playing solitaire.”
“Were you lonesome?”
God, this is awful, she’s trying to make me, Jackson thought. He said, “Yes, madam. Hilda has gone.”
“Has she? Is that what’s making you lonesome?”
“I miss her,” he said.
Her eyes lost some of their warmth. “It’s funny the police let her go, isn’t it? I mean, she was here like the rest of us.”
“The police let Mr. Williams go. And Hilda’s just a kid, eighteen. She wouldn’t have anything to do with the murders.”
“I’m twenty-two,” Jane said.
He was surprised. He was going to say she looked older but he caught himself and laughed instead. “Are you? Well, you’re just a kid then too.”
“I feel very old,” she said. “So much death — makes you feel old.”
Her eyes were sad and her mouth drooped. Jackson thought she looked adorable and so did she.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
A lovely fat tear rolled down each cheek. “I’m going to be poor. Duncan didn’t leave me anything. I’m all alone.”
She didn’t look quite so adorable now to Jackson.