The bride wore black (19 page)

"And his arm has to be around her," crowed the win-dowsill sitter. "We want our money's worth!"

"Huh!" snorted the man killer in the chair self-confidently. "That'll be putting it mild; the best parts 11 never get on the snapshot. If I ever really go to work on him, hell probably follow me back here on the end of a leash."

"HowH you get away from here?"

"I've got everything thought out. I've been daydreaming about it for the longest time, in French class and places like that, so I know just what to do. You

know how scared stiff Miss Fraser is of epidemics if you show two red dots on your face she can't get rid of you fast enough. And my people are away right now "

"You better see that you win," one of the neutrals commiserated, "or youll be broke for thirty days straight and don't expect us to lend you any pocket money."

The one bunched on the floor flew apart suddenly. "Fraser!" she hissed wamingly. "I hear her step in the hall!"

The room dissolved into a flux of flurried motion, in which they all darted at cross angles to one another. Two of them made for the communicating door to the adjoining room and fled back to their own quarters. The one who had been on the windowsill dove for the recently vacated bed and disappeared with a great welling up of covers.

TTie one who had been in the chair was left stuck with the cigarette. She snapped out the light and its red ember made hectic spirals around in the dark, in search of a landing place.

"Take this! Take this!" she whispered frenziedly.

"Kow take it!" the unfeeling reply came back. "You were the last one holding it."

It described a parabola out the open window, the bedcovers billowed up a second time, and then there was a sort of heaving silence. An instant later a grimly vigilant head was outlined against the insidiously opened hall door. It sniffed the air suspiciously, remained poised an uncertain moment or two, then finally withdrew, defeated but unconvinced.

When it had inspected the adjoining room, as well, and gone on from there, a whispered conversation in the latter was eagerly resumed.

"Don't you think there's something funny about her? I mean, she's not like the rest of us, she seems older."

"Yes, I've noticed that, too."

"After all, there's nobody here really knows anything about her. Her parents didn't even bring her here when she registered; I heard Miss Eraser say her application was received by mail and she was enrolled on the strength of a recommendation. Who is she? Where did she come from? She suddenly plops down in the middle of us from nowhere and in the middle of the term, too."

"Well, she was transferred."

"Oh, that's what she says."

"Nobody's ever seen her people. And she never gets letters from home like the rest of us."

"Why is she so insane about that silly writer? I don't see anything so wonderful about him."

"He has a country place not far from here; maybe that's why she came here to be near him."

"Maybe she's not a schoolgirl at all."

There was a moment of silent, shivery conjecture.

"Then what is she?"

HOLMES

H

OLMES'S ROADSTER WAS CRAWLING along at his usual snail's pace, hugging the extreme outside of the road, German shepherd stiffly erect in the seat beside him, when the taxi flashed by, going the same way he was. He habitually drove in low like that, to help his thinking. He found he could get quite a lot of it done when he was out alone in the car for an airing, just drifting along aimlessly.

He couldn't be positive, of course, but the cab had seemed to him to have just the one girl sitting in the back of it. The reason he figured it that way was the back of her head occupied the exact center of the small oval glass insert in the rear, and when there are two or more passengers they are usually more evenly distributed on the seat than that.

By the time he neared the cutoff that led into his own place, the cab should have been long out of sight, at the clip it had been going, but to his surprise it was still in view ahead as he crested the last rise. It was dawdling along erratically now, as though experiencing a contradiction of orders on its passenger's part.

Just as it came opposite the cutoff, with its warning, T. Holmes, Private Road, No Thoroughfare, stretched across it, three acoustically perfect screams winged up from it. The next moment, the door flung outward and the figure of a girl either jumped or was flung bodily onto

the soft turf edging the road. She rolled over once in a complete somersault, then came to a stop right side up. The taxi put on speed and spurted down the road, red tail glowering vindictively.

Holmes glided to a stop opposite her a moment later and got out. She was in a sideways sitting position now, clutching her instep with both hands. The German shepherd undutifully remained in the car, as though that was his first love, rather than his master.

"Hurt yourself?" Holmes bent over her, took her below the arms and helped her to her feet. She immediately teetered against him.

"I can't stand up on one of them. What'll I do?"

"Better come into my place a minute. It's right down the way there."

He helped her into the car, drove the short distance down the private road, helped her out again in front of a typical remodeled-for-city-occupancy farmhouse. The dog didn't have sense enough to follow even then, until Holmes had turned and growled at it, "Come on in, you fool. What do you want to do, stay out all night?" The dog leaped over the side of the car and approached the door independently, with an air of not belonging to anyone.

A manservant opened to the clomp of the Colonial knocker affixed to the door. He greeted Holmes with the familiarity bred of long years of association. "Well, did you get a bang-up finish for that chapter troubling your mind?"

"I did have one," said Holmes somewhat moodily, "but it was knocked right out of my head again. This young lady's had a mishap. Help me get her to a chair, then go out and put the car in."

The two of them helped her down a long pine-paneled living room that ran the entire depth of the house, with a gigantic conical fireplace of cobbled stones set into one

side, from floor to ceiling. That is, the trim was ceiling high; the aperture itself was about shoulder height or a little less.

She attempted to stop and sink down when she had reached a large overstuffed chair standing out before it, with its back to the salmon-pink glow. The manservant quickly gave her a Httle hitch onward, toward another a few paces away. "Not that one that's his inspiration chair."

Seated, Holmes studied her by the firelight, aided by the watery glow of light from the ceiling. The electricity was obviously generated on the premises, judging by its insufficiency.

She was young, and the mere fact that everything about her tried to convey the exact opposite impression showed how young she really was. Eighteen; nineteen at the very outside. Her hair had probably been golden when she was a child, it was darkening to chestnut now, but with golden overtones still lingering in it. Her eyes were blue.

She had acquired, if nothing else, a generous coating of leaves and twigs in her roll by the roadside just now. She brushed at them sketchiiy, almost as though she hated to efface them until she was sure he had taken note of what bad shape she was in.

"What happened?" he said as soon as Sam had left to see about the car.

"The usual thing. Whenever you see a girl come out of a car without waiting for it to stop, you can draw your own conclusions."

"But it was a city cab, wasn't it?" It occurred to him it was a little far out for that sort of thing.

"And the ideas in it were city ideas." She didn't seem to want to talk about it any further.

"I guess we'd better have a doctor in to look at that foot of yours."

She didn't show any particular eagerness at the suggestion. "Maybe it'll go down if I just stay off it."

"It hasn't gone up any, from what I can see," he pointed out.

She withdrew it a little behind the first one, so that its outline wasn't so distinct.

Sam had come back. ''Sam, who's the nearest doctor to us?"

"Doc Johnson, I reckon. He don't know us. I can try him if you want."

"It's pretty late maybe he won't want to come," she mentioned.

Sam returned to report, "Hell be here in half an hour."

She said, "Oh," sort of flatly.

After a while, while they were waiting, she said, "I've always wondered what you were like."

"Oh, then you know who I am?"

"Who doesn't? I've read you from A to Z." She sighed soulfuUy. "Imagine sitting here in the same room with you!"

He turned away. "Cut that stuff out."

"And at least you're like you should be," she went on, undeterred. "I mean so many of these people that write red-blooded outdoor stuff are skinny anemic little runts wrapped in blankets. You at least cut a figure that a girl can get her teeth into."

"You oughta be poured over waffles," he let her know disgustedly.

Her eyes roamed the raftered ceiling, flickering with flame reflections Hke sea waves. "You Hve in this big place all alone?"

"I come out here to work." If there was a gentle hint in that, it glanced off her.

"What a fireplace; I bet you could stand up on the inside of it."

"They used to smoke whole hams and turkeys inside it in the old days; the hooks are still set into the inside of the chimney. It's almost too big, takes it too long to draw and get heat up. I tried to cut it down by relining it, putting in a dummy top and sides of zinc."

"Oh, yes, I see that chink that seems to border it all around; I thought it was a fault in the stones."

Sam was thrusting at the fire with a heavy iron poker when the doctor's knock sounded at the door. He stood it up against the stone facing, went out to admit him. Holmes followed him into the hall to greet the doctor. He thought he heard her give a sobbing little moan of excruciation behind him, but the doctor's noisy ingress drowned it out.

When they came in a moment later, her face was contorted and all the color seemed to have left it. The iron poker lay horizontal on the floor, as though it had toppled down of its own weight.

"Let's have a look," the doctor said. He felt gently with his fingers, and she winced, gave an inarticulate little cry. The doctor clicked his tongue. "You've got a bad contusion there, I should say so! But it's not a sprain, more like one of the little cartilages is smashed, from something heavy dropping on it. Wrap it up in cotton wool. You'll have to spare that foot for a day or two, give it a chance to mend."

Even while the overflow wrung from her by pain slowly trickled out of the comer of each eye, the look she gave Holmes seemed to hold something of triumph in it.

Afterward, when the doctor had gone, he said, "I don't know how we're going to do it. The station's a forty-minute pull from here, and I don't even know if there are any more trains in tonight. I could drive you all the way in to the city myself, but we'd get there about daylight."

"Can't I stay?" she said wistfully. "I won't bother you."

"It isn't that. I'm single and Tm alone in the house. Even Sam sleeps out over the garage."

"Och." She tossed that off like a puffball. "The dogll be chaperon enough."

"Well, er, won't your people worry about you if you stay away overnight?"

Something like a choked laugh sounded in her throat. "Oh, sure, three days from now. They're in New Mexico. By the time they hear I wasn't home, HI be home all over again."

He gave Sam a look and Sam gave him one. "Fix up that ground-floor room that has the cot in it for the lady, Sam," he said finally.

"Freddy Cameron's the name," the childish-looking figure ensconced in the chair supplied. "Short for Fred-erica, you know."

They sat there in silence, waiting for Sam to get the room ready. Holmes sat staring down at the floor, she sat staring at him with all the unconcealed candor of a child.

"Why do you keep all those rifles and shotguns stacked up in the corner?"

"Because I do a lot of hunting when I'm not working."

"Are they loaded?"

"Sure they're loaded." He waited a moment and then he added, "They give a terrible kickback when they're fired."

"G'night, Mr. Holmes and lady," Sam called on his way out. The front door closed after him.

The silence became almost cottony, the sort of thing that can be tasted in the mouth.

"Why don't we say something?" she suggested after about a quarter of an hour.

His eyes flicked over her, then down to the floor again, for answer. There was something wary about the slight deflection.

She bunched her shoulders defensively, looked behind her. "Something about this place, it gets you. It's like something was going to happen."

"It's like," he concurred curtly, and got up and left her without anything further. He moved up the stairs to the upper floor with almost painful deliberation, head bowed as though he were listening intently.

A cooling log ash exploded in the fireplace; his shoulders squared off, then relaxed again. Then the heavy, oily stillness came rolling back again and obliterated the momentary sound. His door closed, up above somewhere.

Sam CAME IN and found them sitting at the table together.

"What's this?" he cried with mock outrage that had an undercurrent of pique to it.

"The Number-Two Boy rustled it up for him this morning. But she has no luck, he won't eat."

"He's thinking of a plot," Sam suggested.

Holmes gave him a startled look, as though the remark was disconcertingly shrewd. He filled a saucer from his cup, put it on the floor. The German shepherd came over and noisily siphoned it up.

"Well, is the plot finished yet?" she wanted to know presently.

"Incomplete," Holmes said. He had been watching the dog. "But 111 get it later." He took up his cup, drained it, held it out to her for more.

He got up, threw her a brief, "See you tonight," and went into the living room.

"What does he mean, 'See you tonight?'" she asked Sam blankly. "What am I supposed to be, invisible until then?"

"He's going to produce now." Sam went in after him, as though his presence was required to set things in

order. She watched from the doorway. Sam shifted the "inspiration chair," cocked his head at it, readjusted the chair with haidine precision.

"Does that have to be in the exact same place each time?" she asked incredulously. "I suppose if it was two inches out of line he couldn't think straight."

"Shh!" Sam silenced her imperiously. "If it ain't even with that diagonal pattern of the carpet, it distracts him."

Holmes was standing looking out the window, already lost to the world. He made an abrupt backhand gesture of dismissal. "Get out! Here it comes now."

Sam tiptoed out with almost ludicrous haste, fren-ziedly motioning her before him. She stood there a moment outside the closed door, unabashedly eavesdropping. Holmes's voice filtered through in a droning singsong, talking into the dictating machine: "Chinook mushed on through the snow wastes, face a mask of vengeance under his fur parka "

Sam wouldn't leave her in peace even there. "Don't stand this close, you're liable to make the floor creak."

She turned away reluctantly, limping on her one slippered foot. "So that's how it's done. And there must never be the slightest variation in detail, not even in the way his chair stands."

Sam poised himself, watch in hand, outside the door, one fist upraised in striking position. He waited until the sixtieth second had ticked off, then brought his fist down. "Five o'clock!" he called warningly.

Holmes came out haggard, hair awry, shirt open down to his abdomen, cuffs open, shoelaces untied, even his belt buckle unfastened.

A prim, mousy little figure of a middle-aged woman, sitting under the antlered hat rack near the door, stood up. She wore an ill-fitting tweed suit, steel-rimmed spec-

tacles, and had her graying hair drawn tightly back into an unsightly little knot at the nape of her neck.

"I'm the new typist, Mr. Holmes. Mr, Trent says he hopes 111 be more satisfactory than the last one he sent you."

The Cameron girl had come to the doorway of her room, opposite them, drawn by the sound of his emergence.

"I'm afraid the damage has been done already," he said with a glance at her. "Did you come prepared to stay?"

"Yes." She indicated a venerable Gladstone bag on the floor beside her. "Mr. Trent explained the work would have to be done on the premises."

"Well, I'm glad you got here. I've already done six chapters into the machine. I don't know how fast you are, but itil take you at least three or four days to catch up."

"I'm more accurate and painstaking than I am speedy," she let him know primly. "I pride myself on never having had so much as a comma misplaced on any of my typescripts." She folded her hands limply together, dangled them out before her.

"Sam, carry Miss I didn't get your name."

"Miss Kitchener."

"Carry Miss Kitchener's bag up to the front second-floor room."

The Cameron girl came toward him, a look of sulky disapproval on her face, as soon as he was alone. "So we're going to have Lydia Pinkham with us for a while."

"You seem put out."

"I am." She wasn't being playful about it, either; she was seething. "A woman likes the run of the place. This was ideal."

He gave her a long, level look. "Ill bet it was," he said dryly, turning away at last.

Sam said later, "We're sure getting a run of women out here! Maybe you better do your work in town, where it's nice and lonely, after this, Mr. Holmes."

"I have an idea they'll be thinning out soon," Holmes answered, brushing his hair at the mirror.

The three of them sat back after Sam had taken out the dessert plates. Freddy Cameron still had the sulky look on her face. Throughout the meal she had tried, much to his amusement, to give the other woman the impression she was a legitimate member of the household.

"Sam," he called. And when the man had returned to the doorway, "How long since you've had a night off?"

"Pretty long. But ain't no use in having one out here. There's no place to go."

"Tell you what HI do. I'll treat you to one in the city. Ill drive you over to the station when I go out for my usual evening spin. There are some things I want you to stop in and get at the flat in town while you're there, anyway."

"I'd sure like that! But will you be able to get along without me, Mr. Holmes?"

"Why not? You'll be back by midmoming. Miss Cameron can rustle up breakfast for me, like she did today."

Her face brightened for almost the first time since the typist's arrival. "Can I!"

"And I can build my own fire when I'm ready to start work in the morning. Just see that there's enough wood on hand."

It was nearly eleven when he drove slowly back to the house alone, after dropping off his loyal retainer at the depot. The German shepherd, aloof as usual, sat in the seat beside him. The countryside was as still as a grave. The road was empty; no speeding city taxi passed him tonight.

He put the car away himself, opened the house door with his own key. It seemed strange; he was so used to having Sam do these Uttle things for him. The Cameron girl was standing out at the foot of the stairs, listening. A sound like frightened, low-pitched sobbing reached him from above.

She smiled inscrutably, thumbed the staircase. "The old maid's walking out on you."

"What d'you mean?"

"She's packing up to go. She's got the heebie-jeebies. Somebody threw a rock through her window warning her to clear out."

"Why didn't you go up and calm her at least?" he snapped.

"I didn't have to. She came tearing down here to me in an 1892 flannel nightie and practically jumped into my lap for protection. That's only the trailer you're listening to now. I looked up the trains for her, as long as she wanted to leave that bad."

"It would have surprised me very much if you hadn't."

She ignored that. "Some mischievous kids must have done it, don't you think?"

"Undoubtedly," he said as he started up. "Only there don't happen to be any for miles around here."

Miss Kitchener was packing things into the Gladstone bag, between whiffs at a bottle of smelling salts. There was a fist-size rock on the table, and a crudely penciled scrap of paper that had been wrapped around it lay nearby. He read the message on it.

Get out of that house before morning or you won't live to regret it.

One of the small partition panes in the window was shattered into a star-shaped remnant.

"You're not going to let a little thing like that get you, are you?" he suggested.

"Oh, I couldn't sleep a wink tonight after this!" she snuffled. "I'm nervous enough other nights as it is, even in the city."

"It's just a practical joke."

She paused uncertainly in her packing. "Wh-who do you suppose . . . ?"

"I couldn't say," he said decisively, as though to discourage further questioning on that score. "Did you look out, try to see who was down there at the time?"

"Dear me, no! I ran for my life down the stairs as soon as I'd finished reading it. I I feel so much better now that you're back, Mr. Holmes. There's something about having a man in the house "

"Well," he said, "I don't want to oblige you to stay here if you're going to be frightened and uncomfortable. I'm willing to drive you in to the station and you still have plenty of time to make the quarter-of-twelve train. You can do the typing next week in the city, when I come back. It's entirely up to you."

Tlie avenue of escape he was offering obviously appealed to her. He saw her look almost longingly toward her open bag. Then she took a deep breath, gripped the foot rail of the bed with both hands as if to steel herself. "No," she said. "I was sent out here to do this work for you, and I've never yet failed to carry out anything that was expected of me. I shall stay until the work is complete!" But she spoiled the fine courage of the sentiments she was expressing by stealing a surreptitious after glance at the shattered window.

"I think you'll be all right," he said quietly, with a half-formed little smile at the corner of his mouth. "The dog's an effective guarantee that no one will get in the house from outside. And my own room's right down at

the Other end of the hall." He turned to go, then turned back to her again from the doorway. "There's a small revolver kicking around in one of my bureau drawers somewhere; would you feel any better if I looked for it and let you keep it here with you tonight?"

She gave a squeak of repulsion, palmed her hands at him hastily. "No, no, that would frighten me more than the other thing! I cant bear the sight of firearms of any descripton, I'm deathly afraid of them!"

"All right. Miss Kitchener," he said soothingly. "You're showing a considerable amount of gallantry in remaining even though there's really nothing to be worried about and I won't forget to speak favorably to Mr. Trent about it."

The Cameron girl was in the far comer of the living room, turning over a rifle in her hands, when he appeared unexpectedly in the doorway a few moments later. His descent must have been quieter than he realized.

He clasped hands behind his back, tilting the tail of his coat up out of the way. "I wouldn't monkey around with any of those if I were you. I think I already told you last night they're kept loaded."

She looked over at him, hesitated a moment before putting it down, even turned full face toward him with it still clasped in her hands but crosswise to her own body.

He didn't move. There was a dancing quality in his eyes, as though his muscular coordination was prepared to meet a need for instantaneous action, but he didn't show it in any other way.

She stood the gun up against the wall, ostentatiously brushed her hands. "Sorry. Everything I seem to do is wrong."

His hands unclasped, the skirt of his coat fell flat. "Oh, no, I wouldn't say that. Everything you seem to do is right."

He sat down in the "inspiration chair." She hovered around uncertainly in the background. "Am I intruding?"

"You mean at the moment or by and large?"

"I mean at the moment. By and large I am, I don't need to be told that."

"No, you're not intruding at the moment. I don't mind your being in here."

"Where you can keep an eye on me," she finished for him with a satiric laugh. Her eyes went up toward the raftered ceiling. "Did she decide to stay?"

"Much to your regret."

She sighed elaborately. "We either understand each other too well or not at all."

That was the last thing either of them said. The fire had dwindled to a garnet glow, dark as port. The rest of the room was all blue shadow. Just their two faces stood out, pale ovals against the surrounding gloom. A cricket chirped in the velvety silence outside that pressed down, smothered the house like a feather bolster.

He rose to his feet at last, and all you could see rising was the oval of his face; the rest of him already blended into the shadows. He went outside to the stairs, and the scuffing measure of his tread was audible going slowly up them. She stayed on in there, with the garnet embers and the guns.

He closed the door of his room after him, but he didn't put on the light. It was hard to make him out in the India-ink blackness. White suddenly peered faintly over there by the door, in two long columns and a little triangular wedge, and he'd doffed his coat without moving away from before the door seam. A chair shifted, and the white manifestations ebbed lower on it but still there up against the door. A shoe dropped an inch or two, with the sound a shoe makes; then its mate.

The cricket went on outside, and the silence went on inside, and the night went on outside and in. Once, an

hour before dawn, a faint disembodied stirring of air seemed to come into the room, but not from the direction of the window, from the direction of the door as though he had eased it narrowly open without permitting the latch to make any sound. A floorboard creaked in the distance, somewhere far below. Maybe it was just the wood contracting from the increasing night-long coldness. Or maybe stealthy pressure had been put upon it.

Nothing else sounded after that. After a long while, the extra little swirl of air was cut off again. Outside, an owl hooted in a tree and the stars began to pale.

The Cameron girl was unusually vivacious at breakfast, perhaps because she had had the making of it. She was whistling blithely when Holmes came down, a derelict with a shadowy jawline and soot under his eyes. Miss Kitchener was there ahead of him, shining with soap and water, her nocturnal timidity a thing of the past at least until the coming night.

"You ladies'll have to excuse me," he said, tracing a hand down his sandpapery face as he sat down.

"It's your house, after all," Freddy Cameron pointed out.

Miss Kitchener contented herself with a thin-lipped smile, as though there were no excuse for personal untidiness under any circumstances.

The German shepherd came muzzling up to him, evidently remembering yesterday. He ignored it. Freddy Cameron breathed, so low he barely caught it, "No poison test today?"

He shoved his chair back. "Samll be back about noon, to take up where he left off. Tm going in there now and expect to be left undisturbed."

"HI go upstairs and begin my typing," Miss Kitchener said. "I don't believe you'll hear me from where you are."

"111 paint Easter eggs," Freddy Cameron said dis-gruntledly.

He closed the living-room door after him, thrust cords of wood into the fireplace, kindled a wedge of newspaper under them. He stripped the oilcloth hood off the dictating machine that stood on the table, adjusted it to the best of his ability but with an air of somewhat baffled uncertainty, as though Sam had usually been delegated to attend to this detail along with all the others. The "inspiration chair," he noticed, was slightly out of true with the diagonal pattern of the carpet. He shifted it slightly, smiling a little to himself, as if at his own idiosyncrasies. Then he picked up the speaking tube appended to the machine, sat back, everything in readiness for a long day's creative work. Everything but one thing. . . .