The Simple Way of Poison (23 page)

I hurried down. Colonel Primrose was in the den, waiting, the telephone in his hand, his face set. I didn’t find out who he was trying to call, for just as I heard his sharp “Hello!” a car drew up out in the drive. I heard a door bang, and another, and running feet in the gravel driveway, and a frantic key in the lock. Then the front door flung open and Lowell Nash burst into the hall, and stopped dead, her body contracted like a steel spring, her face white and taut, staring wild-eyed at me. Behind her I saw a tall grey-haired man, a hat two sizes too small perched on the top of his head, an overcoat three sizes too big slipped on over a surgeon’s white uniform. I stared at them and they at me. Lowell’s lips moved.

“Are we… too late?” she whispered.

I nodded. Her red mouth drooped, she closed her eyes, her body sagged like a young plant in the noonday sun.

“It’s too late,” she said in a dull voice. She was speaking without turning to the man behind her. “I was afraid we’d be too late. I’m sorry I dragged you out. He’s… in there.”

She pointed past me to the den. He came forward, slipping off his overcoat. I took it from him as he passed me and put it on the table, picked up his hat and put it there too. Lowell came into the room and sat down on the horsehair chair by the door, staring at the floor. After a moment she raised her hand in a slow dazed gesture, peeled the peaked suede cap off her short black curls and dropped it beside her on the worn flowered Brussels carpet.

“Isn’t it ever going to end, Grace?” she whispered. “It’s so… so horrible!”

Colonel Primrose and the doctor came out of the den.

“It
looks
like cyanide. The risus sardonicus. Have to be a post mortem to tell conclusively. I can’t understand how it could take so long. The young lady said he was all right at first, then started feeling bad, but she hadn’t seen him take anything. Cyanide acts very quickly, you know.”

Colonel Primrose nodded. “I know,” he said grimly. “I’ve called the police. They’ll be here in a moment.”

He turned to Lowell.

“What happened?”

“I drove him here, from tea,” she said, in a broken little voice. “He wouldn’t stay to dinner. He knew she didn’t want him. I said I’d drive him, because I… I wanted to talk to him, alone. I wouldn’t let Mac come, either.”

“When did you leave, Lowell?”

“About quarter past five.”

“You came directly here?”

She shook her head.

“He had to stop at Hofnagel’s. He didn’t say what for. He was only there a few minutes.”

I looked at Colonel Primrose. It seemed to me all of a sudden as if I could feel the sinister squalid figure of Lavinia Fawcett crouching in the shadows of the lives of both these men who had been murdered.

“You came here then?”

“No. He asked me to stop in Gil St. Martin’s shop. There wasn’t any place to park there, so I drove around the block twice. The second time he was waiting. Then we came here. He let us in and we sat down in there to have a talk.”

She looked toward the door of the little room.

“I must have been thinking about something and not looking at him, because all of a sudden I did look, and he was staring straight ahead of him, looking perfectly dreadful. His face was grey and he had perspiration all over his forehead, and his eyes were terrible—just as if he knew he was being… killed, just like my father. I jumped up and helped him to the sofa. He was dreadfully ill. I grabbed the phone, but I knew I could never get a doctor in time. I dashed out and drove to the Medical School in Reservoir Road.”

She nodded at the doctor.

“He came with me.—I don’t know his name.”

A smile flickered faintly for an instant in the doctor’s dark intelligent eyes. I didn’t know then that his name was very well known indeed, that he was one of the leading abdominal surgeons in the United States, or that Lowell had literally hijacked him in the hospital corridor on his way to the operating theatre and rushed him into her car. The overcoat and hat that she’d grabbed for him belonged to a couple of his students.

She put her hand into the pocket of her beaver coat and took out her car keys. She handed them to him.

“I don’t feel like driving you back,” she said simply. “You can just leave them at the office there. I’ll get the car tonight. Thanks, very much, for coming with me.”

There was a glint of admiration in his eyes as he took the keys. He nodded, put on the overcoat, looked at the hat with a sudden whimsical smile that was gone again immediately, and followed Colonel Primrose to the door. I heard them talking for a moment, and Colonel Primrose saying, “Thank you, I’ll be in touch with you,” and the door closed. He came back into the room.

“She must have put it in his tea,” Lowell said with a quiet dreadful bitterness. Colonel Primrose’s glance cut short what I was on the point of saying hotly. I closed my mouth, with an effort. Lowell was staring straight in front of her, her dark brooding eyes burning in her white face. I gazed at her, an aching wonder in my heart at so much bitter hate; and as I did her face changed slowly. Her lips parted, she shrank back in the tufted horsehair chair, her eyes sharpening to pinpoints of terror as she stared directly in front of her. Suddenly she threw her arm up in front of her face, protecting herself from some dreadful sight.

I whirled about, my blood curdling. The window next to the fireplace was in the direct line of her vision… and my eyes were riveted on it as I stared at the leering thing there, brought into ghastly relief against the night, its face pressed gray against the glass, its claws raised, making hurried frantic signs. For an instant I couldn’t move. Then I ran to the window. It was gone. I ran to the door and out onto the porch, and saw it streaking across the lawn toward the gate.

Behind me I heard Colonel Primrose coming out of the kitchen hall.

“I thought I asked you to tell Annie to keep Lavinia here until I could talk to her, Mrs. Latham?” he was saying curtly.

I rallied myself from that sight.

“I did,” I said. “I don’t suppose Annie could keep her if she didn’t want to stay. She’s just gone.”

I went back into the parlor. Lowell was still crouching in her chair, staring ahead of her again, unseeing and bewildered. Colonel Primrose glanced at me with sharp interrogation in his eyes.

“Lowell and I both got a nasty jolt, seeing Lavinia peering through that window under the curtain, like a… malevolent scarecrow,” I said, as casually as I could. My heart was still beating like a triphammer. The crafty-eyed, loose-lipped face of Lavinia Fawcett was more than just a face; it had become a symbol of something violent and horrible that was tracking the lives of people I knew.

I gave an involuntary shudder. Colonel Primrose put his hand on mine and steadied it. His grip was warm and reassuring and confident… more confident than the troubled questioning smile he backed it up with.

I managed a sorry grin.

“I’m getting nervy, I guess.”

“Don’t,” he said gently.

He looked at Lowell again. She had moved like somebody coming out of a trance. She rubbed her hand over her forehead, pushing her dark hair back the way she did when she was troubled or angry—the difference showing only in the tempo of the gesture. She looked like someone going through a hard struggle, though no sign of any showed, really, in her blank pointed little face with its flaming lipstick and wide clear forehead. Then she stood up, swift and straight, looking first at me and then at Colonel Primrose.

“I told you I wasn’t at home last night. But that’s not true. I was.”

She looked squarely at Colonel Primrose and waited, a little defiant, expecting obviously that some sort of a minor cataclysm was to come.

He nodded. “I knew you were.”

Her eyes contracted sharply.

“Then she did tell you?”

“Who?”

“Iris, of course!”

Colonel Primrose raised his eyebrows, and shook his head.

“No, she didn’t. I didn’t know she knew it. I happened to know it myself, because when I saw you leave the Assembly you wore a white coat, and when you came into the library with Mac you had on a red one. I had a man look into it. He found out that you and Mac had come home. Mac stayed down in the car because he had to double-park. Cars were going back and forth so he couldn’t risk leaving it there. He was out there between fifteen and twenty minutes.”

Her face was blanker than ever. Genuinely this time, I thought—not the product of conscious art.

“Oh,” she said.

“I’m supposed to know such things, Lowell—sooner or later. Go on.”

“Maybe you know all the rest of it then.”

“That’s all I know.”

I doubt if Lowell got the ever so slight emphasis on that last word, or realized its significance, coming from a man who was used to filling in large gaps so shrewdly that it was awfully hard most of the time to know what he knew and what he had guessed.

“Well… I went up the steps and remembered my bag with my key in it was still in Mac’s pocket. So I started down again. But I had my hand on the door knob when I thought of that, and it turned, so I didn’t need the key. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was too busy trying to keep my heels from making any noise, so I wouldn’t… I mean, disturb my father in… in the library.”

She still wore the perfectly formal stereotyped mask of contemporary youth, but she couldn’t help the sudden guarded look in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you want to see your father, Lowell?” Colonel Primrose cut in as she started on.

The color rose faintly on her high sharply modelled cheekbones. She looked at him, compressing her red lips stubbornly, like a small willful child.

“It’s quite true that your relations with your father hadn’t been as smooth as they might have been, for some time, isn’t it?”

“Then she
has
been talking to you!” she said furiously.

Colonel Primrose’s black eyes snapped fire.

“Lowell—listen to me! I don’t want to hear that again, do you hear? Iris hasn’t said one word against you… not one single word! If you weren’t such a sickening little egotist you could understand it. Even if you can’t, just
get
it—it’s true! And get this too: every bit of the mud-slinging that’s been done has been done by Lowell Nash… not by Iris. And every bit of the information I have about you I either had before this began or I’ve got from
you,
without your knowing how transparent you really are.”

She stared down at the ground. Then she went on, with a kind of sullen meekness.

“Well, it wasn’t my fault. My father hadn’t been himself at all, not since she… not since summer. Nothing anybody could do pleased him. He’d never been very keen about Mac, and when Steve Donaldson first came to the house he said there was the kind of chap he’d like me to marry. Then there was always trouble about Angie. But that has nothing to do with it. I just didn’t want to have to stop and explain that I was with Mac, and going out again. He’d think I ought to be in bed by half-past twelve, not just starting out.”

Colonel Primrose lifted a quizzical brow. “Odd of him,” he said.

“Well, I got upstairs all right, but I was too scared to risk it again, so I sneaked down the back stairs into the kitchen hall.”

She moistened her lips.

“I heard something, scratching at the door. First I thought it was Senator, and then I remembered he was… dead. I… well, I don’t know. I had a funny feeling all of a sudden that maybe he was… cold, out there in the ground, and his ghost was trying to get in where it was warm. I guess it sounds crazy, but…”

She rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand and blinked her eyes.

“No. It doesn’t,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “Go on.”

“I guess it does, but it didn’t then. Well, I ran over and opened the door.”

Her eyes widened.

“It was Lavinia. And before I could slam the door shut and lock it she was inside. And I’m so afraid of her! I’ve always been afraid of her!”

Not all the fashions in faces of a century could have kept the memory of fear from living in her eyes and etching itself on her wide mobile mouth. That scene on Christmas Eve flashed into my mind again with a new and rather terrifying significance.

Colonel Primrose was watching her with puzzled intentness.

“Sit down, Lowell.”

He pushed a chair closer to her. She sat down stiffly, like an obedient child.

“Why are you so afraid of Lavinia?”

“My father sent me down to Hofnagel’s once when I was about ten, to take her some money,” she said in quick colorless tones. “She wasn’t there, I had to go to her room. I was afraid to, but I knew he’d be angry if I didn’t. So I went. It was dark, and dirty, going up the stairs, but I went. I was going to put the money under the door and run, but she heard me coming, and looked out and made me come in. I was afraid not to. Then she made me sit down.”

She shuddered suddenly.

“She gave me some candy. It was chocolate, all grey and funny-looking, the way it gets when it’s kept where it’s too hot, but I didn’t know that then. I was afraid not to eat it, and all the time she kept saying ‘You should have been my little girl—I should have been your mother’… over and over again. And then she got a ragged old letter out of a drawer and read it to me. I didn’t understand much of it, but I understood it was from my father. It was about how young and pretty she was and when they were married they’d go to Paris.

“I guess I fainted, I don’t know. I don’t know how I got out, but I ran all the way home. And the door was locked and I couldn’t get in. I kept feeling she was behind me. When they did let me in I tried to tell my father, but he wouldn’t listen… he just lectured me on the poor and needy and said I’d have to take her money to her every week so I’d learn to be kind.”

She rubbed her hand over her forehead with a dazed tired gesture.

“I dreamed about her—all my life I’ve dreamed about beating on that door with her behind me. I’ve tried not to be silly about it, but…”

She raised a pale frightened face. For the first time since I’d been home I saw the child I’d known for fourteen years with the bright lacquer peeled off, the sting gone from the tongue.