The Hangman's Whip (10 page)

The sheriff’s statement, however, must have been almost as cautious and noncommittal as Calvin’s. He said it was murder and told them why; but for the first day, at any rate, there was no mention of Search, except casually, as a member of the family.

They were not so kind to Richard. Every newspaper in Chicago broadcast it. Immediately following the murder of his wife Richard Bohan had escaped. Anyone who saw him and identified him was to notify the nearest police.

Search knew none of this until Diana came to her door and knocked and then entered.

It was then late in the morning—a gray cloudy morning with mist along the willows edging the lake and a chill in the air. Diana had on a gray tweed skirt and green sweater and, except for the paleness of her face and the brightness of her eyes, looked alert and composed as always.

“I hated to wake you,” she said perfunctorily, “but I had to—”

“I wasn’t asleep.” She had been sitting on the bed, knees drawn up and her arms clasped around them, staring at the gray window. “What’s happened? Is there news—”

“Nothing. The sheriff is still here. Reporters—photographers. … It’s a beastly day—cold …” Diana shivered. And plunged straight into the thing she had come to say.

“Howland’s waiting for you. He wants to see you. But, Search, listen. Is there any truth in what the sheriff said last night? Were you at the cottage?”

There was no point in trying to lie, as Richard had told her to do; the sheriff already knew the truth.

“Yes,” said Search.

“Why?”

“To meet Richard.”

There was a little pause. Diana stood at the foot of the bed, her fingers curled around the railing.

“Why?” said Diana again.

“Howland as good as told you,” said Search wearily. “Richard and I wanted to marry. He thought he was free. Eve came back and—and Richard went to Chicago to see Howland. He telephoned to me yesterday morning.” A flicker in Diana’s face told Search she remembered. “I went to meet him at the cottage. Eve was already there; she was already—dead. And Richard didn’t do it.”

Diana’s eyes didn’t waver; her thick fair eyebrows were a level line; the red stood out sharply on her lips.

“You—
you
and Richard planned to marry?”

“Yes.”

There was a little pause. Diana’s lips folded tightly together; her long narrow chin seemed to set itself. Then she said slowly and deliberately, as if she had come to a decision: “No; you are quite mistaken, Search. Richard is not going to marry you.”

It was completely unexpected.

Search stared incredulously at Diana. “I don’t know what you mean! You can’t stop our marriage. You—really, Diana, this is no business of yours.”

“Isn’t it?” said Diana. Her white long hands locked themselves around the railing of the bed; her eyes were clear and cold; her voice clear, too, and authoritative. “I think otherwise. So will you in a moment. I made up my mind to tell you the truth, Search, in order to let you withdraw from a situation you”—Diana took a calm breath and said—“you cannot hold.”

“Cannot—”, Search gasped. “Listen, Diana, you don’t seem to understand. I love Richard. I have always loved him. Nothing that you could do or say would change that fact.”

“But that doesn’t matter,” said Diana. “The point is that Richard …” She paused and bit her lip a little, as if arranging in her mind the thing she intended to say. “Richard owes me a great deal. He has been promoting a company formed to manufacture and sell an airplane he designed. In order to help him I bought a large block of stock in this company. So far they have not been able to build a plane that will pass certain government tests; they are in a bad spot just now. Richard owes me, morally, all that money, as he owes other stockholders. He needs money now. He can’t go on until he gets it. I can give it to him. And you—can’t,” said Diana coolly.

“That doesn’t affect—”

“Oh yes, I’m afraid it does,” said Diana. “You must be reasonable, Search. I can make Richard—or, frankly and simply, I can break him.”

“But he loves me. He wants me. What difference does that make to you?”

Diana lifted one hand quickly. “I have decided, Search. I don’t intend him to marry. So I expect you to end this—”

Search, her voice choking and uneven with anger, interrupted. “This is nonsense, Diana. I won’t listen to you. You can’t arrange my life and Richard’s like this. You can’t—”

“Can’t I?” said Diana. “You say he loves you. But what of his ambition? What of his work? What can you do for him? I intend to help him. I have told him he could have all the money he wanted. I said that anything that was mine was his too. So you see—”

“Did he take the money?”

“Not—not yet. But he was going to. He has to have it.”

“After all,” said Search slowly, “some of your money ought to have come to Richard. Did you offer to divide with him?”

Diana’s eyes flashed. “Divide—certainly not! Don’t be childish, Search! My money is my own; I owe nothing to anybody. Besides, I—I did more than that. I told him, and I meant it, that he could have anything I had.”

“But Richard didn’t take it. He wouldn’t take money from you like that. He ought to have had Isabel Bohan’s share. If you wanted to help him why didn’t you give that to him fairly and legally?”

“It’s all my money fairly and legally. How am I to know what part of it was Isabel’s and what part of it John Abbott’s? It was all Abbott money when they died, and it all came legally and fairly from John Abbott to me. If it had come to you, and it was your money, you wouldn’t be so free about giving it away. But all this does not alter the situation. The truth is, I can send him into a dozen bankruptcies. Or I can save him—”

“Let me understand you, Diana. Are you actually saying, in so many words, that if I marry Richard you’ll refuse to help him?”

“I’m giving you a chance to help the man you say you love.”

“You mean you are threatening to bankrupt him unless—Diana,
why
? What possible motive do you have?”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Diana quickly.

“It does matter. He loves me; what possible difference can it make to you if we marry?”

To her surprise a small dull flush began to creep upward over Diana’s face. Her eyes, however, remained cold and businesslike.

“I’ve told you the facts, Search.”

“But you—can you possibly—” She stopped, remembering a small scene at dinner that first night at Kentigern. Diana’s hand upon Richard’s—warmly, possessively. “Are you in love with Richard? Is that it?”

“That has nothing to do with you.”

“But—but Calvin—”

Diana drew herself up. Something hardened away back in her light eyes. “I don’t intend you and Richard to marry. If you really love him as you say, you will, yourself, do what is best for him. But in any case I intend to stop it.” She said it coldly, quite unemotionally and with a kind of bland arrogance, as if a mere command to Search—the young cousin, the frequent object of Diana’s charity—was enough. There was even a curious touch of impatience, as if it annoyed her slightly to be obliged to thrust Search out of the way.

Search said crisply: “Diana, I am an adult. So is Richard. And he loves me. You can’t—”

Diana’s eyes flashed. “Richard is my—” She stopped abruptly, biting her underlip. It was almost as if she had started to say, “He’s my property. Along with the house and the money and everything else. Richard, too, belongs to me.”

But she didn’t say it. She said instead: “This is my thanks, I suppose, for being so generous with you and with Ludmilla. I’ve given her a home; I offered you a home, here with us. I’ve sent you clothes and presents. No one can say I’m not generous with my money. Not even you—”

“You needn’t give me anything more, Diana. I’ll leave as soon as the—the police will let me.”

There was a silence in the little room. Diana turned suddenly from the foot of the bed and crossed the room to stand at the window. Search mechanically got out of bed and reached for clothing. The mirror reflected them both, as it had done so many times. Search, childish-looking in her white cotton pajamas and her hair rumpled; Diana, tall and thin with the flush gone now from her face. Diana turned from the window. She avoided Search’s eyes but she said coolly that she was going now to see Ludmilla. Her eyes lighted on the box of rum-butter toffee still standing, forgotten, on the dressing table.

“That’s for her, I suppose,” she said. “Shall I take it along?” She picked up the box and went to the door. “Howland’s waiting to see you,” she said again. “The sheriff is still here; I’ve already seen him; he’s interviewing each of us—separately. He’ll want to see you.”

She went away, her fair head erect; nothing in her manner hinted at the things she had said. And, more curiously, had not said.

Search sat down absently at the dressing table. It was a singular interview in many ways. Diana always had a highhanded way of trying to arrange people’s lives. But was she really, under that cool determined exterior, in love with Richard? So she wanted him to be free?

She had despised Eve. Was that one of the reasons for the bitter things she had said of Eve?

But if she loved Richard what did she intend to do about it? She was married to Calvin.

And what
could
she do about it? thought Search with a wave of exultance and confidence. Richard loved her, Search. Nothing Diana could do or say would ever come between them.

And as to her money—well, she hadn’t all the money in the world. There were other ways—there must be.

Search put on a dusty pink skirt and sweater and went downstairs. Carter, with a tight, disapproving look on her bland English face, was wiping up muddy footprints in the hall. No one else was there.

She would see Howland and then get her breakfast. She turned toward the library, thinking she would find Howland there, and had reached the threshold before she realized that the sheriff had taken up his post in that room and was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in his hand. Jonas was there too, as bent and gnarled and cross-looking as she remembered him. Both men were looking at something that lay on the table, wrapped in a newspaper which Jonas was holding outward for the sheriff’s gaze.

“I tell you,” said Jonas, “that kitten was poisoned.”

“Get the cook in here,” said the sheriff. “We’ll find out who fed him. Poison, huh?”

“Arsenic,” said Jonas.

S
EARCH GAVE A LITTLE
gasp and came forward. The sheriff stood up and Jonas turned.

“I fed the kitten. Cook will tell you that; I gave it some meat scraps and some milk she gave me. I didn’t poison it.”

“She didn’t say you fed it,” said Jonas. “I—howdy, Miss Search.”

“Hello, Jonas. Where did you find the kitten? When did it die?”

He hesitated. His small, wrinkled brown face screwed into an expression of concentration; his tufty eyebrows shielded his little eyes. He wore what, so far as Search was concerned, he had worn for twenty-some years without deviation: a blue shirt and faded khaki trousers; he was getting on now—his thin hair was gray and he was bent with rheumatism. He had always been a man of active, stubbornly held ideas and prejudices; in his youth he’d read Kant, in his old age he had evolved a certain philosophy of life which enabled him to fill his own selected niche with outwardly a kind of sour and cantankerous efficiency and inwardly a definite contentment. He was a faithful employee and a loyal friend. He said: “Miss Search, I didn’t know you fed the kitten; Cook didn’t tell me that. She only said, yesterday, in the afternoon, ‘Bury this kitten.’ I saw how it had died but I went and buried it just the same. It’s—not the first kitten I’ve buried around here.”

“What do you mean by that, Jonas?” asked the sheriff.

Jonas’ small eyes shifted.

“Nothing,” he said. “Except—oh, Miss Diana doesn’t like animals.”

“Does she—Diana, I mean—poison them?”

Jonas’ thin shoulders lifted.

“Well, they disappear. But that’s not the point; the point is, this cat died from arsenic. At least I—I think so. Way it died, it looks like that. And I have arsenic in my tool shed.”

“
You
have arsenic!”

“Weed killer,” said Jonas severely, giving the sheriff a sour look. “And don’t you try to make anything out of that, Pete Donny.”

“Have you missed any of it?”

“Well,” said Jonas cautiously and evasively, “it don’t take much to kill a kitten. But I won’t say there’s as much arsenic in the can as there ought to be.”

The sheriff said slowly: “Look here, Jonas. No hints. You say straight out what you mean. If you think anybody’s been taking arsenic from your tool shed, you say so.”

“I’m not saying anything except this kitten was poisoned. And I wouldn’t have told you that,” said Jonas, “if I’d known it was Miss Search that fed him. She wouldn’t hurt a fly, and neither would young Dick Bohan, and—”

“That’ll do, Jonas,” said the sheriff. “Leave the cat here; I’ll show it to Doc Jerym. I’d like to talk to you a minute, Miss Search—sit down.”

Jonas said: “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Pete,” gave Search as sour and inimical a look as if she and not the sheriff had been the object of his disapproval and went away. The sheriff drew a large envelope toward him, fumbled inside it and then took out a small object.

“Did you ever see this before?”

He held it toward her, carefully, in his big fingers; it was a frayed, torn piece of chiffon, very small, savagely torn so the threads were all awry, and had been wet. Search remembered a branch catching at her dress in the dark, the jerk she gave to release it. She swallowed. “I’m not sure …”

“I’m sure,” said the sheriff. “I’m only showing it to you so you’ll not try to lie to me. I know you changed your dress last night—after you came back here from the cottage—”

“Who …” began Search. But hadn’t Diana said he had already questioned her?

“—and I know this was the same material as the dress you wore at dinner. Now then, Miss Search”—he sat down on the corner of the table—“tell me just exactly what happened.”

“Why—why do you think I was there?”

“Now don’t take that attitude,” said the sheriff, shaking his head. “This scrap of your dress will prove that—in a court of law. A jury likes material facts—like this.” He looked at the little torn scrap thoughtfully and put it into the envelope again. “I know you were there. I knew last night; now this little bit of stuff proves it. You went to meet Dick Bohan, didn’t you?”