The Case of the Weird Sisters (22 page)

For God's sake, did one of them ever study poisons?"

Duff said, with a gleam, "Who knows? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps she only hoped . . . This is a chancey murderess."

Alice took hold of her own hair, in the back, and pulled it, hard. The pain was steadying.

"How do you carry these?"

"In a bottle, sir."

"May I see?"

"Yes . . . yes."

"It's marked, of course?"

"Oh yes, plainly. And it's blue glass, not white. Besides that, the bottle—here it is—is ridged, you see. So that one can't make a mistake in the dark."

"Oh," said Alice. "Oh."

Duff took the botde and pressed his fingers on the ridges.

"The phenobarbital?"

"Another bottle.'' EVuff took the smooth white glass botde in his other hand and sniffed at the top.

The doctor was badly shaken. "I must have filled the pillbox and never noticed that odd one tumble in with the rest. Mr. Duff ... I... I should have been ruined."

"What a chance that was to take," said Fred in awe. "That the bad pill would tumble in."

"It was on topj" said Duff. "But she's chancey. Oh, she's chancey."

He looked down at the two botdes in his hands. His long face was grave and sad. "Not easy," he said. Then, "Doctor, I should like to make off with one or two things you can give me, if you will?"

The doctor was willing to do anything at all for Mr. Duff. Anything.

22

The haughty face of the Whidock house was indifferent to their return. Duff twisted the bell, and Josephine came to let them in. Alice walked through the open door first, with Duff behind her, and Fred last. They were all three still in

single file, and Josephine still stood with her hand on the doorknob when they heard it.

An odd httle sound, a scraping in the throat, the rusty unconscious stirring of a voice, a caw, a crow, of delighted malice, of secret rejoicing.

Alice turned swiftly around and looked up at Duff. Fred stepped closer and gripped Duffs arm. Josephine's round eyes rolled to and fro, with recognition and fear.

Duff read, in their three faces, confirmation that this was the sound. Were they going to catch her? Now? As easily as this?

In a body, the four of them moved opposite the arch. They looked past the velvet drapes into the parlor.

Gertrude sat in there, erect in her chair. Her face was calm, blank, secretive, and her hands were folded in her lap. Maud was there, too, with her heels on the fender. She was scratching among the wild strands of her fantastic coiffure with a big bent wire hairpin. Her fat face brooded. Isabel was also in the parlor, sitting on the edge of a small narrow sofa with her two feet flat on the floor, looking as if she were ready for flight, though she held a book in her lap.

Isabel held her page down with her left hand and looked at them with her quick, close-lipped smile. "Just in time for dinner. Alice, dear, Mr. Killeen is dining upstairs tonight. He is leaving, you know, on the ten o'clock train. Innes will have company, so you must join us and our guest. Won't you?"

Gertrude said, "Of course, Alice, dear. And will you show Mr. Duff where he may wash, my dear?"

"Say, I'm hungry!" boomed Maud. "Where you folks been?"

Alice couldn't say a word. Duff bowed. "I've been taken exploring," he said smoothly, "I'm sorry if we've been long. You must forgive the enthusiasm of a man who has a hobby."

The three of them, stiU in a body, moved past the arch, while Josephine went by toward the kitchen, almost running. Duff motioned them upstairs.

In the upper hall he called them close. His face was more disturbed than Alice had ever seen it. "That was the

sound, of course," he said. "You're sure? It was the very same? No difference?"

"Oh, no," they said, "that was the same."

He let his head drop, as if it would fall off its stem, limp until his chia touched his chest. He stood, bowed and silent, thinking. Alice dared not move. She looked at Fred and caught a httle comfort from his eye.

Duff raised his head finally and drew an old envelope and a pencil from his pocket. He began to make quick marks on it. Alice could see them. It looked like algebra. There was a, b, c, d, and checks and symbols. Diiff reviewed his problem. His face relaxed.

"Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other," he said. "So . . ."

"So what?" Alice and Fred spoke together, and he caught her hand so naturally that they stood, hands clasped, like a pair of children, and never knew it.

"Logic," said Duff, "is a wonderful thing, after all. Yes, I know."

"Who?"

"Only one of them," Duff said.

"Which one?"

"There's an 'if.' Two 'ifs.' If this and if that, why, then I know. Not only that our wicked one is only one, but which one. The two sets of facts check, 'if' and 'if.' But the logic's so clear. The 'i£s' are nearly answered. They have to fit. After all, probability's a law, too."

Killeen came out of Innes's door. "Hello."

Duff paid no attention. He put his hands on Alice's shoulders and looked searchingly iato her face. "That funny Uttle sound," he said. "Why do we hear it now! What's happened? What thought went through that brain and set it off? Something's happened, if only a thought. If only an idea. Look here, my dear, we forgot something. There's another chance. Suppose she doesn't bother to unmurder Innes? Suppose, instead, she murders you7''

"M-me?" said Alice.

"What is this?" said Killeen.

"Murders you first," said Duff. "Do you see? Then, let Innes get his pill. Let that plot proceed. You can't inherit while he's still alive. And you can't inherit once you're

dead." He turned. "Mr. Killeen, if Alice dies and then, soon after, Innes dies, not having changed the will you've just drawn, what happens?"

"He'd be intestate, as far as the bulk of his fortune goes," said Killeen, looking white and shocked. "He directed that it be put in trust for Alice, and then for his children."

"But if there were no children?"

"To his kin," said Killeen.

"Not Alice's heirs?''

"No, no. Since she's not, herself, his natural heir. Not yet. Not until they are married. No, it would go to his mother and sisters."

"Why didn't he set up a trust for them, here and now, to continue whether he lived or died?"

"I wanted him to," said Killeen. "But he was so bent on making it plain and clear that they'd better leave him ahve."

"He overreached himself," said Duff. "You see? He should have made his life or death a matter of indifference to them."

"Listen," said Fred to Alice. "You've got to get out of here."

Killeen said, "Alice, take the train with me tonight."

"Yeah, go ahead," said Fred.

"We have to get down to dinner," she said. "We're late. We mustn't let them know what we think. Must we? Mr. Duff, you'll be here. Nothing will happen while you're here. Hadn't we better go down to dinner?"

Duffs face didn't lighten. "It may not be my departure, but Killeen's, she'll wait for. It may occur to her that, with 'KDleen handy, Innes could draw still another will.''

"After I'm dead, you mean," said Alice, with strange calm.

Fred said, "You're not going to be dead. You're going to scram out of here."

"Why take a chance?" Killeen pleaded. "Alice, what's the percentage . . .?"

"Ssh," she said. "Well have till ten o'clock, maybe. We ... we have to think."

Duff said, "Yes. Let's meet after dinner, in Innes's

room. I'll go there now. Susan?"

"Still here," said Killeen. ''Innes wants her to stay for dinner."

"You mean the trap?" said Fred. "You're going to tell her what to do? Are we going to go ahead with that?"

"May as well." Duffs face was grave and sad. "No harm. But this evil . . . How can we anticipate the works of a brain that works as this one does? Chancey, you know. How can we foresee what wild grabs at the passing skirts of mere chance she'll make, and we'll have to guard against? Alice, my dear . . ."

"But you know who it is!" she said.

"Suppose Vm wrong?" said MacDougal Duff.

He went into Innes's room,

Fred said to Alice, steadily, "Nothing's going to happen to you."

She snuled. "Oh, I don't think so either," she said, as if it were she who did the reassuring.

Killeen put his arm around her. "I won't leave unless you do," he said. "Listen, darling, you've got to play it safe. Safe for you."

He looked very stem and noble.

Alice slipped out of his arm, and her voice shook. "I know. Don't worry. My goodness, so nobody wants to die!"

The bathroom door closed on her light and shaky laughter, and they stood outside, Killeen on guard, like a soldier, Fred gnawing his thumb in worried thought

Dinner was pretty grim. Alice fiddled with her food. She couldn't help thinking of poison. She tried to taste only that which came from a common dish or what all three sisters were eating, and she tasted very littie. Her throat was too full to swallow, anyway. She must be frightened, she thought. But the fright was so deep, she knew it scarcely showed. She was able to do her part in the trap setting, as they had planned it, when the moment came.

Duff and Gertrude bore the conversational burden between them, but Duff wasn't sugary with her any more. He was sterner now. He let his views of history be little sermons. Alice wondered which one he was trying to touch and convert. He spoke some of the sifting history did. He said that only long-term virtues stuck to people, after history got through with them. He said patience, and endurance, and selfishness, and all the least flashy and dullest attributes stuck out like rocks after the looser soil had been washed away in the tides of time. He said the good opinion of one's contemporaries was unreliable. He said a truly fine person must disregard it in favor of his own approval or the vague thing called integrity, which was, nevertheless, one of the most solid things in the world. He said that was a fact.

Again he spoke, and said the day of greed was passing. He said it was outworn. It had done its worst. It would have to be over. Because it had wound the world up to a climax and brought forth the ultimate consequences for all to see. He said greed was in the process of committing suicide.

He said, again, apropos of nothing in particular, that to dodge one's responsibilities was to dodge life itself and die unsatisfied. He said that people's idea of heaven was a state of perfect ease. But, he said, we aren't built to endure that.

The Whidock girls were polite to him. Except Maud, of course, although even she forbore to interrupt him often with her hoarse irrelevancies. Gertrude listened as one superior being to another. Isabel listened, with her half-abstracted air. They agreed. Oh, yes, they agreed. His preaching struck off their surfaces. It got no deeper.

Alice tried to think ahead. Could she think through this night? Or was her intuition warning her, as it had twice before? Were her antennae cut off? She couldn't tell. She didn't have any subconscious promptings. She had too much fear in full consciousness.

One picture wouldn't seem real, the one about Alice and Art Killeen getting on the train together, riding away, leaving this mess behind them for somebody else to straighten out. Her mind wouldn't paint it or give it color. But that wasn't subconscious. That was just deliberately unconscious.

Josephine came down at last with the message from Susan, the one Susan had been told to send, the one that was part of their trap. Their silly litde trap.

Said Josephine, "Miz Lines says she wants to know where are Mr. Innes's pills, Miss Brennan. It's time for him to have one."

"No, it isn't," said AJice, glancing coolly at her watch. She was sustained by the plan. This she knew how to do. "I gave him one when I came in. He can't have one now."

"But . . ." Josephine hesitated.

"I left them on the mantel," said Alice, loud with impatience. Then she leaned over to Maud and smilingly, with gestures, borrowed that one's pad and pencil.

On the page she wrote, forming her letters clear and large, "In the blue box. But don't give him one now." Maud was beside her. Alice felt her glance, as if her fingertips could feel it. She handed the slip of paper around the table. It went through Gertrude's hands to I>uff, who took care to hand it to Isabel. Isabel gave it to the servant, with one of her abrupt twists of the body by which she seemed to compensate for her onesidedness.

That was done.

Now. She who could hear, but not see, would think the pills were on the mantel. And there was a white box of pills on the mantel up there, easUy found by questing fingers. She who could see, but not hear, would believe the pills were in a blue box. There was a blue box, a pillbox, conspicuous on the table beside Innes's bed. She who could both see and hear would look for a blue box on the mantel, and inside a blue china box, thereon, was a third pillbox. None of the pills in any of these boxes were dangerous. But they were different.

Very tricky, thought Alice. But perhaps it was too lat< for tricks. Her fork clattered on the dessert plate. She tool hold of her nerves and commanded her fingers to steadier.

When dinner came to an end at last, Mr. Duff excus( himselL He said he would go up to talk to Innes for a litdc while, and then he really must go home to bed. Alice sai< she would go upstairs, too.

So far, nothing. So far, so good.

Fred was lurkiag in the upper hall and followed them into Innes's room, where the defenders gathered around his bed, Innes, all smiles, happily imconscious of their new forebodings, was just saying an affectionate good night to his mother.

She went beaming away, and they let her go.

"Sit down. Sit down," said Innes. "You know, my mother has been scolding me. Really. She complains that Fm doing so much for the girls and nothirig at all for her. So Fve promised." He smiled tenderly. "Of course, it isn't that she needs it. Father left her very well off. It's just that she's jealous," he said

Duffs eyes looked alive and a little sly with amusement. "It's a very human failing," he suggested.

"Of course it is," said Innes, all wise and magnanimous. "Only natural. Mother's getting old, you know. She needs me. Well ... how did it go at dinner? You set the trap did you?"