Another Woman's House (10 page)

One should hate one's rival, instinctively; she could never hate Alice.

Her fair hair fell forward, like a child's, over the golden daffodils. “That's the right bowl for them. How did you know, Myra? But I suppose Barton arranged them. Barton would know.”

“I arranged them,” said Myra. “It was obviously the right bowl.”

“How clever of you to know!” Alice lifted her head and drifted over to the tall old secretary. The key to the glittering glass doors was in a drawer and she felt for it, without looking, took it out, unlocked the doors and swung them open.

“There's my cupid,” she said, and took out the delicate, lovely figurine and held it, smiling a little, in her hands, turning it. She glanced at Myra. “I found him myself,” she said. “I spent far too much money for him. But isn't he charming?” She stared at Myra and cried suddenly, almost wildly, “I can't believe it! That I'm home, I mean! Yet …” Her pansy-brown eyes sought Myra's pleadingly. “It seemed to me that it had to happen. Some time. I felt that all the way through the trial, through everything. At first I couldn't believe that they'd accuse me. I couldn't seem to comprehend it. Any of it! It was unreal, fantastic. It seemed to me that everyone must see I could not have done that. Even in prison, day after day and night after night, I could not understand their
not
seeing it!” She waited a moment and said more quietly, “I was sustained, I think, by knowing that some day they would see how wrong they were. That the truth must come out. Still—now it's happened I can hardly believe that either.”

Her soft brown gaze shifted. Richard's footsteps were coming back along the hall, toward the library. Alice said, “I'll go back upstairs. I promised Richard that I'd sleep.” She replaced the small cupid carefully and locked the doors and slid the key back into the drawer as Richard came into the room.

“You'd better rest now, Alice,” he said very quietly.

“Yes. I'm just going.” She hesitated, looking at Myra. “You've been so good to us, Myra.” Her voice broke a little. She held the handkerchief tighter in her hand. “You came to a house with a pall upon it. You stayed here, all this time for Aunt Cornelia—and for Richard. None of us can thank you enough but I am more deeply indebted to you, Myra, than anyone else. You've been—wonderful.”

I've fallen in love with your husband, thought Myra. If you had been one hour—one minute—later in coming home, I'd have consented to take your place. I'd have fought to take your place. And still in my heart I want it and I want your husband, and I've got to fight, all my life perhaps, against that longing.

Richard's face was white. She glanced at him and, with anguish in her heart, away again. He knew what she was thinking. He said, “Myra has been more than loyal; so has Aunt Cornelia. You must go, Alice. You can talk tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” said Alice, “in my own home. Every tomorrow—yes, yes, I'm going. But I can't sleep. I told Francine to have Barton serve dinner in my room for both of us. You'll come up then, Richard?”

Richard's lips tightened. “Yes, Alice.”

She smiled and gave a little, childish wave with the crumpled handkerchief and went away. The soft rustle of her silken robe, the light sound of her footsteps diminished. Richard stood, watching her. Myra watched as she reached the stairway and started upward, so small, so slight and delicate a figure against the dark panels and the solid steps. Neither of them spoke until Alice had disappeared up the wide steps and around the turn of the broad landing.

Then Myra turned and looked up at Richard and he was looking at her.

“Richard, you heard her!”

“Yes.”

“Thanking me!”

There was pain in his eyes and something else, something queerly like anger. Even through her own complex and mingled pain and self-reproach she saw that and was touched with question and a resultant small dismay because she did not and now never would know and understand his every look and every word with the dear accustomedness of marriage.

He said in a strained, almost angry voice, “You must not reproach yourself or me. Nothing has happened that could possibly be prevented.”

“We had no right …”

“Stop!” He interrupted her with a harsh note in his voice as if the anger in his eyes had flared into a spark. But then immediately, if that was true, he controlled it. He said very quietly, but with great earnestness, “Listen, and remember this always. We do not require justification, either of us. That is not specious reasoning; it is fact.”

But her own pain drove her on too quickly. “People always say that!” she cried. “It is always possible to justify some way a mean and shoddy …”

He came to her and took her by the shoulders hard. “You are not to say that! There is nothing mean and nothing shoddy between us.”

As suddenly as it had come the self-anger and wave of bitter self-reproach left her. “I was wrong to lash out at you like that, Richard.”

His hold on her shoulders relaxed. She wondered briefly whether or not he had stopped what amounted to hysteria on her part. He said, “Yes. But I knew why.”

“I felt ashamed and angry with myself. Until I saw her, I did not realize she was just the same. It was as if—the murder and the trial made a difference in her, as if it put her in another world, as if she wasn't Alice. I never knew her well. We'd met a few times before I went to England with Aunt Cornelia. Somehow she had become—removed, a name. Not Alice.”

“Yes, I know.”

It had to be said, before the courage to say it was quite gone. “Richard …”

His eyes quickened at the change and gravity in her voice. He waited, and she said, “Everything is different now.”

“Nothing between you and me is different.”

“She is your wife.”

“She is no more my wife than she was an hour ago! No more my wife than …” he stopped, released her quickly, and turned toward the mantel. He said in a different, quieter tone, “I really mean that exactly as it sounds. You are right of course, Myra. She is my wife and—this—does change things. Outwardly, that is; there are different things to consider. But she has been proved innocent, pardoned. Therefore,” he paused but went on, “therefore divorce …”

How could they have been so blind! “We were wrong! We didn't realize what a divorce would mean to her. We can't do that. Not now …”

He was looking into the fire. She could only see his dark head, bent. He said slowly, obliquely, “I love you. Nothing real has changed between you and me; nothing can change.”

Tears suddenly threatened her. She said, unsteadily, thankfully, longing to go to him, touch him, feel his arms holding her, shielding her, and knowing that she must not move toward him, “I'll remember that. Always.”

He whirled around. “What do you mean by that? Listen, Myra! I don't know what's going to happen right now, or how it's going to happen. I wasn't expecting this. There are—angles, things to think of. But you and I cannot change …”

She stood, holding the chair, to look directly into his face. “I can't argue, Richard. Both of us knew that anything between us had to be forgotten, as soon as we saw Alice. It's so—
different
,” she cried. “Now that she's home. We cannot add to the cruelty she's already unjustly—so horribly unjustly—suffered.”

She went to him then and put her hands upward, against his shoulders.

“Richard, dear Richard—we will forget …”

He did not reply, only looked at her with pain and again something like anger (With fate? With the way life arranged itself?) in his eyes and presently she put her head lightly against his shoulder, her face turned away from him so she looked at the ruby-red chair and the tall mahogany secretary. The Capo di Monte cupid smiled placidly at her.

She said, slowly, pausing between the scattered words, aware of his nearness, too, and that, never again perhaps could she stand like that, leaning upon his strength and tenderness almost as truly as she leaned against his shoulder and felt the warmth of his arms holding her, “There is no other way. Alice is like a person who's been sick and must have care. Like someone shipwrecked who must have safe harbor. We'll forget, Richard, because we have to. I'll go to stay with Tim. Perhaps—some time—the friendship we had in the beginning, Richard, will come back, without the—the other …” Her voice died away as she faced, in her mind, a bleak and arid space that lay ahead.

Richard said nothing and gradually she became aware of his silence. She turned in his arms.

His face was as blank as a wall; it was as if he had retreated behind that wall.

He said, from an incredibly remote distance, “It would be better for you to stay here for awhile, Myra. Until things are more settled. Until, well, somebody murdered Jack Manders and they're going to try to find out exactly who it was. And they have three suspects. Webb. Tim. And me.”

I
T WAS, AS A
matter of fact, salutary, like cold water in the face of a distraught and half-hysterical person. It drew her instantly from the future to the urgency, and indeed the threat, of the present. “You!”

“Well—yes. I'm sorry, Myra. I thought you knew that.”

“Not about you! Not … Is that why the Governor looked so—so …” Hard? Implacable? “
Suspicious!
” she cried.

“I thought you knew,” said Richard again.

“No, no. I only thought of Tim. Oh, Richard, they
can't
suspect you!”

“I wish I hadn't told you. But then you'd know tomorrow when the D. A. gets around to us. Or as soon as you had a chance to think. And you must believe me there's no real evidence; they have to have suspects, that's all, and …”

She cried sharply, “But they never questioned you.”

“Oh, yes. They questioned.”

“But why? Because they thought Jack and Alice … ?”

“That was the theory. My wife, my house—my gun. But I didn't kill him, Myra, and neither did Tim. So I promise you I'll not let either Tim or me be railroaded …” Again she brushed away his attempt to reassure her. “You were not here! You were away! You didn't come home until after the murder. The police were already here. You had an alibi. …”

“I had an alibi of sorts. The conductor on the late train I took out from New York thought—rather vaguely—that he remembered having taken my ticket. I got here to the house after twelve. Jack was shot about ten-thirty. I
could
have come home about then, shot him from the hall or the terrace without Alice's seeing me, escaped through the woods, and later returned home again, arriving this time openly and boldly at the front door. To find the police already here. It could have been done.”

“Did they say that? Did they accuse you of it?”

“It was suggested and I was questioned. But you see then Webb told his story. He said he had seen Alice kill him. That was the big, the important factor. Nobody after that was really suspected by the police.”

“Nobody could believe that if you had killed him you'd let Alice go to prison.”

“You heard everything the Governor said. I think that the verdict was a surprise in an odd way to everybody because they had expected her to be let off, whether or not she did it. I might have reasoned, you see, the same way. That I, in a trial, wouldn't have a chance, but that she, a woman, young, beautiful, would never be convicted.” Suddenly he smiled. “But I didn't. So put all this out of your mind.”

She said somberly, “Is it—horrible? The investigation, questions …”

“It isn't nice, but they'll not question you.”

“But you had no motive, no …”

“There was no provable motive for Alice to have killed him. If there
had
been anything in the nature of an affair between him and Alice, why, then I'd have had a motive, according to them.”

It was merely hypothetical; it wasn't fact; but even as a motive it had been strongly enough supported by the existing circumstances (and mainly by Webb Manders' fraudulent testimony) that in a trial, in a court of justice, the jury had considered it so likely and substantial in its claims that they had accepted it, and had sent a woman to prison for life.

Richard said abruptly, “But believe me, Myra, it was not a theoretical motive that convicted her. It was Webb's lie. That was the keystone to the whole arch of evidence against her. I
could
have come home, leaped to conclusions that because Jack was here she'd been having an affair with him, and shot him and got away with it. But I think any prosecuting attorney would have a hard time proving it.” He looked at her soberly. “I think anybody would have an even harder time proving that Tim was implicated.”

Tim! “Tim could not have shot him, Richard. I don't know why he has done this. It does seem improbable that he could forget anything so important but …”

“We'll ask him,” said Richard. “He may not have realized the importance of the curtain. He may have forgotten. Or—well, we'll ask him. But whatever he says or doesn't say, he's doing what he thinks is right. Believe that too, Myra.” He took both her hands. “Wait till you talk to him.”

His face had suddenly a close resemblance to the portrait of his father that hung in the long, formal dining room—a fighting face, stubborn and a little arrogant, square-jawed, with deep-set eyes. “I don't like Webb Manders; but I don't think he killed his own brother. I don't think Tim killed him. I am certain about myself. So far we are the only suspects. But a fourth suspect—unknown, unseen, but a suspect would be a great help.”

She said half-puzzled, half-credulous, “Was there such a person?”

He waited for a moment again, looking down at her. “Why not?” he said. And suddenly put his hands around her face and, holding it, said, “Wait, Myra. Don't think, don't try to make decisions, don't do anything. …”