Drue stood perfectly still for a moment, terribly still and erect, in her long blue cape with her golden-brown hair shining, and the lining of her hood a scarlet banner over her shoulders. Craig met her eyes across barriers that now, I thought, could never be dissolved. Then Drue said clearly, “I’m going, Craig. And I’m never coming back.”
15
SHE TURNED SO SWIFTLY toward the door that I had to run to follow her.
No one was in the corridor. Drue swept along it like a queen with the folds of blue cape swirling around her, so the red lining was like her insignia of royalty. I didn’t speak to her; I took only one look at her blazing white face, her small lifted chin, the poise of her head upon her slender shoulders. At the stairway I hurried ahead to look down to the landing with some vague idea of stopping Drue so the trooper wouldn’t see her-although I could as easily, I fancy, have stopped a whirlwind. But he was gone, luckily; for Drue swept past without looking and on down the corridor and into her room. I followed her and said then, “Drue-Drue…”
“Sarah, don’t!”
The little dog was there and came quickly, his tail wagging furiously; I saw her take him into her arms as I turned away and press her white face down upon the wriggling, little brown thing.
I closed the door behind me. Funny how seldom you can really face anything with anybody you love, no matter how hard you try. It’s the everlasting loneliness of life; you are born alone, the alone, go up and down the winding road alone. Only in love you do ever really share, and I suppose that’s why it’s so important.
Well. I went back to Craig’s room. Alexia was sitting in a kind of sulky silence beside the bed, and Craig was lying there looking straight ahead; neither of them spoke when I came in, although Alexia’s eyes shifted toward me, measuring me again, I thought. Wondering, planning perhaps. And after a while she got up and walked out of the room. As she went Beevens came to the door; he still looked sick and his color was a pale blue-gray, but he said punctiliously enough: “The police are in the north meadow, sir; I thought you had better be informed of their arrival.”
Police in the north meadow.
But it was at least two hours before they came to Craig’s room and brought the things they brought.
It was a queer two hours which I remember in patches. Mostly we waited. Craig said nothing to me of Drue or of Alexia. Naturally, I said nothing of it to him and indeed made the few remarks I had to make as short and crisp as I could make them. He noticed it, for once I caught his eyes upon me in the oddest look; it had a kind of understanding, yes, and liking, and I don’t think I imagined it. If it was liking, however, I did not reciprocate; on the contrary, for I thought he had treated Drue abominably. Indeed, I thought a lot of things, none of them pleasant, and looked coldly back at him and asked him what he wanted for his dinner tray. My suggestion would have been, at that moment, a sprinkling of cyanide, but it isn’t really considered ethical for a nurse to poison her patient even though he richly deserves it. Which somewhat vigorous but merely fanciful line of thought brought me quickly back to unpleasant reality. Murder had actually happened in that house.
And on a dark and silent meadow.
It must have been about then, or earlier, that Peter Huber brought Maud back to the house. Alexia helped Maud to bed and later I gave her a sedative. Pills; nothing could have induced me to give her anything by way of a hypodermic. Maud said almost nothing; yet she seemed in a queer way to know everything we did, her eyes were so bright and knowing in her little sallow face. It may have been shock or brandy or sedative or all three-whatever it was, she went to bed docilely enough and then all at once to sleep. Alexia stayed with her for a while and, when she left, I think Nicky took her place.
We all had that curious feeling of haste that goes along with tragedy as if there’s a great deal to do (hurry, see to things!) and yet there’s really nothing you can find to do.
Every so often someone would bring a bulletin from the police in the north meadow and once Peter and Nicky and Beevens went to the back door and down into the meadow until they encountered a policeman who sent them back. There were by that time quite a number of police and cars; we could see lights (the long steady streams from the cars and searchlights, and the glancing, busy gleams from small flashlights going everywhere) like the lights of ushers in some darkened, dreadful theatre. Someone knew and told us when Chivery’s body was at last removed.
A trooper again was outside Drue’s door, and this time when I attempted to enter my own room and then go to Drue, he stopped me. “Orders, Miss,” he said. And when I said, “Orders nothing; it’s my room,” he removed my hand from the doorknob in a very muscular way and then put his hand on his revolver holster. So I had to give up; not that I thought he was going to shoot me, I just thought I’d wait a better chance.
Beevens gave us a kind of dinner, served from the buffet in the big elaborate dining room, with its crystal chandeliers and stiff, green and silver brocade draperies. It was an elegant room, too big and too cold. Anna didn’t help him serve; she was having hysterics in her room and I sent her some spirits of ammonia.
But before dinner Peter came to Craig’s room; I was there and remained so I heard everything they said. Peter told him of the inquest and of our visit to Balifold where we found Maud, and when and where he had left me.
“I’m horribly sorry, Miss Keate,” he said. “It must have been a terrible shock finding him like that. I ought to have taken you to the house. Craig, what’s your idea of this? Why do you think he was murdered? If it was because he knew something that was a danger to whoever it was that killed your father, then what was it?”
It was the only motive for his murder that had as yet occurred to any of us; I suppose because it was so obvious. But I thought Craig hesitated. If so, however, it was barely perceptible. He said, “It’s hard to say; Claud was very secretive. Pete, what about these checks to Nicky? It does look like blackmail, but there was nothing anybody could blackmail my father about. Nothing!”
Peter shrugged. “The police found the canceled checks. That’s all I know.”
Craig said suddenly, “I knew about the will, of course; Maud inherits now from Claud.”
And she would inherit fifty thousand dollars; I’d forgotten that. I remembered Maud sitting quietly in the bar while we talked, drinking steadily. And an ugly picture presented itself in my mind: Maud in her dark cloak waiting for Claud in the meadow-and then afterward walking in to Balifold, trying to establish a kind of fumbling alibi, and drinking because she had to, to steady herself for the discovery. She had told me to take the short cut which was the path through the meadow and led inevitably to the discovery of the murder; was that, again, to give herself a semblance of an alibi? Or had it merely happened; everyone knew of and used the path.
And what of the time? Claud had left the inquest fifteen minutes before it adjourned, which would have given him just about enough time to reach the meadow. So what of Maud? How long actually had she been in the bar? And how long had Chivery been dead? Everything would depend upon that, and I didn’t believe that anyone could fix the time of his death with real exactness.
Craig and Peter were probably thinking very much the same thoughts for, after a longish silence Peter said suddenly, “I don’t think she did it, Craig. A woman…”
Nicky came in just then to say there was a dinner of sorts in the dining room. A little to my surprise, Craig tackled him then and there about the checks.