Another Woman's House (13 page)

Because Myra was carrying Tim's coat, because she caught her heel in a dragging fold of it, because she fell backward and flung up her hand and caught at the newel post, hard, pushing backward and up with all her weight in order to save herself from falling, she found the gun.

The tall, sharply pointed top of the newel post, carved in minute detail like a pineapple, its point upward, gave a silent kind of tug and the whole top, down to the square post, came loose and fell and clattered downward loudly on the rug. A gun lay in the unfinished wooden hollow of the post directly under Myra's eyes.

The clatter reverberated hollowly through the hall and stopped.

The house again was still and silent.

Myra was quiet, too, frozen into stillness as if she would never move again. A gun, a revolver—a Smith and Wesson, thirty-two.

The gun. The gun that had never been found. Richard's gun.

I
T WAS, OF COURSE,
obvious why the police had not found it.

To tear the house apart had not meant literally to tear it timber from timber, brick from brick. If there had been secret hiding places, hidden cupboards, hollow panels, the police would have found them. If there had been loose bricks around the fireplace, a wobbly flagstone on the terrace just outside the library windows, a hollow secret space in the old secretary, they'd have found that. But blank and solid walls, floors, balusters—a newel post, had offered no hiding place.

But the newel post
had
offered a hiding place. And someone—who?—had known it.

That someone had known that it was loose, had known that below the wooden top, carved in the shape of an upended pineapple, there existed an unfinished, raw wooden hollow which was big enough and deep enough to hold a gun.

That someone had fastened the pineapple—who? when?—so solidly upon its base that when the police came the night of the murder, and when they searched, and in all the time since, until now, no one else had known the gun was there. Indeed it was unlikely that anyone who did not know would so much as consider the newel post as a possible hiding place. Myra herself had assumed, if she thought of it at all, that it was a solid piece of wood, carved and ornamented, but one solid piece. And even if, during the police investigation, anyone had tentatively tried to move the pineapple-carved top, it fit down so solidly into its socket that it resisted the pressure of such a hand. And indeed only the strong upward lift she had accidentally given it would have, in all probability, dislodged the ornamental top.

Her mind was racing. She forgot to listen to the house, listen for sounds, listen for the swish of a skirt in the hall above or the padding footsteps of Barton away off in the dining room.

When had it been hidden? Almost certainly the night of the murder and before the police took over and searched every inch of the house.

Who then had hidden it? The murderer? Who else could it have been?

Who had known of that hiding place? Webb? Richard? Tim? Alice?

Webb could have known about the loose post and the hiding place it provided. It was at least within the realm of possibility that if he were a fairly frequent visitor to the house he could have discovered that it could be moved, loosened, lifted entirely. It was not likely but it was possible.

Alice might have known. Tim might have known. Richard might have known. Could anyone else have known? Aunt Cornelia—possible. Barton—possible, or his wife, the cook, or Francine, the middle-aged French housemaid. Or even Mildred Wilkinson.

But none of them had been in any sense suspects.

She was standing on the lower step. Suddenly she felt as if she were spotlighted, as if the whole house watched her—listened, aware of what she had found. She looked along the hall. There were lights in sconces against the dark paneled walls. A great, rose-shaded lamp stood on a table against the wall beside the door to the ivory-and-gold drawing room where Alice's portrait, in her wedding gown, reigned, so beautifully and surely mistress of the house. That room was darkened. It was never used. There was a light coming from the arched dining-room door wider than the others, at the end. Nobody was near; nobody could see her. She took the gun in her hand.

She did not then think of fingerprints, either her own or any others. The gun was cold to her touch and felt, somehow, clammy and sweaty. She concealed it in the folds of Tim's coat. She moved, crouching to take up the carved mahogany pineapple with its delicate diamond pattern and tracery of stiff pointed leaves, in her other hand.

It was not as heavy as she had expected. She felt a slight sensation of surprise on lifting it.

Again she glanced up along the stairway—down along the hall—and then carefully replaced the carved top upon the hollow post. It settled down firmly into the socket that was made to receive it; so firmly that when she tested it, it would not move.

Holding the gun under Tim's coat, she went back quickly into the library. She moved away from the hall door, out of sight, dropping Tim's coat on a chair. She knew how to break a gun; Tim had showed her one time with his service revolver. The gun felt unclean in her fingers, owing probably—and merely—to the thin film of oil upon it, unrubbed and unwiped, collecting a faint coating of dust. She broke it.

It was a revolver. It was made to hold six shells; there was one left in it. And instantly, long-ago headlines, long-ago print leaped before her eyes as if she were reading again those creased and folded newspapers which had crossed the Atlantic with their ugly news.

Jack Manders had been shot five times. Five slugs in the body of the murdered man. Five …

A Smith and Wesson, .32. She turned it, looking at it, examining it, hating it.

If it was not Richard's missing gun, it was like it.

If it was not the gun that had been used for murder, it was like it.

So she had to give it to the police, who would be coming the next day to resume investigation into the murder. To question Tim. To question Richard. His gun, his house—Alice.

Richard could have hidden it there, if he had come home, secretly, earlier than anyone knew then, or later, if he had shot Jack, if he had escaped quickly through the hall so no one saw or heard him.

Tim could have put it in the post. There was time and opportunity after he came into the library. Webb was terribly engrossed, bending over his brother's body. Alice was at the telephone under the stairs; she could not have seen the newel post from there. Tim could have hidden it and neither Webb nor Alice would necessarily have known. Tim knew where Richard's gun was kept, he had said so only a few moments ago. Tim could have taken it, at almost any time.

There was no motive for Tim to have shot Jack.

But what about Richard? “You're their first choice,” Tim had said.

What couldn`t the police make of the gun in a case against Richard?

She made no conscious decision. She did not think of her own fingerprints on the gun; neither did it occur to her that the gun was potentially dangerous—that there might in that silent house lurk elements of danger, a mind that remembered the gun's hiding place, a hand that once before had tested its terrible efficiency. She removed the remaining shell. She held it in her hand and it seemed unreal, its cold, small weight perfectly harmless and innocent, a thing out of a fantasy.

She slid it in the pocket of her gray jacket. She closed the gun and the click of metal sounded remarkably loud. Where could she hide it?

Behind the books? Along some remote shelf? In a drawer of a table or the tall secretary? She was frightened, cold, despairing. She must get it out of the way before Tim came running downstairs again and found her with the gun in her hand. Before Barton came to tell her that dinner was served upstairs in Aunt Cornelia's room, before Richard …

Richard.
Deep in her consciousness, very obscurely, there was something like the snap of an invisible switch, cutting off a line of thought. It was a line of thought she must return to, a path she must explore, but, she thought, almost in panic,
not now!
Hide the gun! Hurry!

Where would it be safe from the police? Where
had
it been safe all that time? The French clock struck a half hour briskly, as if it, too, said hurry. Hurry!

The sweet fragrance of Mildred's lilies of the valley was almost sickening, it was so strong. The fire had gone to red embers. Barton would come in presently to replenish it with logs. Barton had an instinct for the exact moment when more logs were needed.

But he was not in the hall; no one was there or on the stairway.

She looked first, holding the gun concealed.

Then she went softly across the hall and quickly, very carefully replaced the gun in the newel post.

Quickly and carefully, yet when she stepped back from it her hands were trembling, her heart pounding in her ears. The post—looking so blank, so obviously one solid, unobtrusive piece of wood—caught a dull gleam of light from the lamp in the library behind her.

She went back into the library. There had been something that she had intended to do, some action she'd begun. Oh, yes, Tim's coat. She went to pick it up and, as she did so, the terrace door rattled and opened and Sam Putnam came in. “Hello, Myra.”

“Sam, I didn't know you were there!”
Had he seen her examining the gun?
She glanced swiftly at the red curtains but they were tightly drawn over the long French window. She glanced, too, thinking of the driveway with its view of the room, toward the other end, but Barton had drawn those curtains, too. Sam, his usually taciturn, sallow face now pale and excited, did not appear to notice her involuntary glance over his narrow, brown-clad shoulders. He said, “I just got here. I came as soon as I could. Luckily I'd driven out from town early. I was at the club. Where's Dick?”

“Upstairs.”

“With Alice? How is she?”

“Tired, of course.” It was with a physical effort that she replied. It was as if the discovery of the gun had plunged her into a morass from which she could not extract herself.

Sam had dropped his topcoat and was hunting nervously through pockets for cigarettes. He was not watching her. Instead, his quick glance was going here and there about the room, fastening for a moment on the narrow curtains at the further end. He found cigarettes with one wiry hand and settled his tie with the other.

Sam Putnam was an old friend of Richard's. He had gone to school with him; he had been Alice's lawyer and had defended her with tenacity; usually unemotional, with an icy, rather cold intelligence, he had infused his defense on that occasion with an emotional and fiery appeal which, had it not been for Webb's direct and forceful testimony so strongly and necessarily corroborated by Tim, would almost certainly have swayed the jury in Alice's favor. He was thin and dark, with marked, sallow features and a bald spot, circled with thin black hair. He was devoted to both Richard and Alice and, like Mildred Wilkinson, had been a faithful and frequent visitor since the trial.

He said, darting a quick look at her, “What in God's name is the matter with Tim? Dick says he claims to have forgotten the curtain. How
could
he forget! Is he here?”

She answered the last question, “Yes. He came a few minutes ago.”

“I'll talk to him.” Luckily, she thought, he left that question. There was no reason why they should not, all of them, confide anything they knew to Sam, yet she did not wish to tell him Tim's real explanation herself. Let Richard and let Tim decide that. Sam said, “Well, thank God, Webb buckled up and admitted it. A confession of perjury was something to get. I have to hand it to the Governor. He's a smart guy. Always was. He'd never have got Alice convicted without Webb's testimony and Tim's; that was the stumbling block from the beginning. That and the fact that Alice simply—obviously told the truth. There was no defense in her story; even if she'd shot Manders in self-defense there'd have been something for me to work on with the jury. But as it was there was only her denial. … Well, you say she's all right?”

“Yes.”

He was speaking, as was his habit, rapidly, rather nervously. Myra said suddenly, “You never believed that she had shot him, did you, Sam?”

“Did I … ?” His eyes turned to her and went blank; a kind of opaque veil seemed to come over them. He said, “I knew Alice pretty well. I'm very fond of her. I expect you knew that. No, I never believed it. Naturally, I was sincere in my defense. That is—if she
had
shot him for some reason, I'd still have been on her side, and not because I'm a criminal lawyer and I'll take only clients in whom I can have a reasonable belief—not because of that at all! But because I know Alice. She always said she didn't kill him and I believed her but, nevertheless,
if she had shot him
,” he shrugged, “I figured he deserved it. Dick says they're starting a new investigation.”

She nodded. He swept on with his usual nervous, jerky rush of words. “It's going to be tough—no use dodging that. The Governor has got to justify his action. Plenty of people will say he rose into his job on the strength of this case and the wide publicity it had—and now that he's safely elected he has turned around and let her out. He's an honest man. I have to give him credit for it. A lot of men in his position would have been afraid to release Alice until he had somebody else as good as under arrest in her place. Although—maybe they are pretty certain of being able to make an arrest soon. Did he say that he'd got any new leads?”

“Richard asked him if there were any new angles; he said there were not.”

“He'd say that whether there were or not. He's a politician, don't forget—cagey. I wonder what's their idea. I can't think of anything that might have turned up that would be new. Except an eye witness—another one and I imagine that's out. Or, of course, the gun.”

He said it casually, lighting the cigarette he'd been holding in his thin fingers. She was momentarily thankful for that and that he was not looking at her with those sharp, trained eyes. The shell seemed to weigh down her jacket. She had a fantastic impulse to glance downward and make sure that there was no betraying outline of it visible. Yet Sam was their friend; Sam was on their side.