Town of Masks (12 page)

“How are you, Hannah?”

“Very fit, John, thank you. John, our civil defense efforts are gone to seed. We need something special, something dramatic.”

“M-m-m,” he said, and she could imagine him rubbing the back of his neck. “Any ideas, Hannah?”

“A good one, and I’ve already explored it, a mock invasion here for Campbell’s Cove Day.”

There was only silence at the other end of the phone. He was thinking of the work involved.

“Really, John, it’s more timely than our pageants. There hasn’t been anything new for years. Other towns have tried it. We could make a success of it. And we can involve the whole town, the state in fact, from the governor to the block warden.”

He made a noise in the phone she took to be indicative of small favor. He was a slow-thinking man with the best of his imagination at work on matching a false tooth to a real one.

“Think of the boats, John. There’s a whole fleet of them in the Cove.”

“Fishing boats, Hannah?”

“Fishing boats, gunboats. The navy will co-operate.”

“Fishing boats are kind of obsolete,” he said stubbornly.

“We can evacuate the town in them, can’t we? Shouldn’t we have to if there were an air raid?”

“That’s right,” he said, his literal mind finally catching something to hold onto.

“Think of Dunkirk,” she said to nail the picture before him.

“Uh-huh.”

While Copithorne was mulling it, Jeremiah Tobin arrived. Hannah noted the time. He was ten minutes late. She bade her secretary have him wait beyond the rail.

“You’d take charge of it, Hannah?”

“If I were given the authority,” she said. “Complete authority.”

“Naturally. Are you free tonight?”

Hannah lifted her head. “I expect to be.”

“Come up to the chamber and put it before the council meeting. I’ll support you.”

“Thank you, John.”

There was a day’s work started, she thought, hanging up the phone, well started even if it were never done. The things she could start now and, given a chance, the things she could bring to a fine conclusion. When Tobin had waited the ten minutes she had waited for him, she beckoned her secretary to bring him in. Measure for measure.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Tobin.”

“I was late,” he apologized. “My clerk didn’t show up this morning.”

“The telephone?” she suggested.

“There was orders coming in,” he murmured. “And it just didn’t seem right to come to the bank for a loan when there was business on the phone. Business isn’t bad, you see, Miss Blake. It’s just that I’ve got to get more of it. Now if you’ll let me tell you the way I figure to do that—”

Hannah’s mind slid away from his dubious economics as he expounded them at length, driving them into her desk with a black-bordered fingernail. Twenty minutes to eleven, a quarter to eleven.

“You see, Miss Blake, the chain stores make it tough for the likes of me. The margin of profit they buy on, they can afford to cut prices.”

She was not aware of any sound merchandiser buying on a margin of profit. “And you can’t cut prices under any circumstances?” she interrupted.

“That’s right,” he said. “I got a conscience, you see. I got to do right by myself.”

“I see,” Hannah murmured, and a second later when she did see she smiled. “That’s a marvelous conscience, Mr. Tobin.”

But Tobin by then was off and winging over the fine store he intended to build. She rocked in her chair, half-listening, waiting. Her awareness of the change in the street, among the patrons and employees, came on Hannah as the sun might pass behind a cloud, casting a ponderous shadow. She stiffened, sensing it, and then watched fascinated, as with the quick lightnings tokening an imminent storm.

Across the street, Jim Hendricks came out of his barbershop. He elbowed a customer out of the way as he locked the door. His hand went to his pocket, touching the gun there. He glimpsed the inside pocket of his coat—his auxiliary police badge there. The whole street had seen the badge and gun the day he got them. He crossed the street, spoke to the bank guard, and then ran to his car. The guard moved to the police call box. Hendricks’s customer had stopped two women, their arms full of groceries—It was the last specific incident Hannah observed, for inside the bank the customers had broken their rank at the teller’s window, the clerks had abandoned their files, the accountants their ledgers—and Jeremiah Tobin talked on.

“‘Let him on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house,’” Hannah said.

“Beg pardon?”

“‘Neither let him in the field turn back for his coat.’”

Tobin looked at her, his mouth sagging. Hannah was tempted to laugh in his long, silly face. “Excuse me,” she said. She pushed the desk buzzer for her secretary. In long demanding rings she drove her finger down on it.

Tobin finally looked around. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Nancy yielded her attention—a quick, annoyed glance from where she was crowding a huddle of clerks. Hannah waved her in. She came to the door.

“It’s Mrs. Verlaine. She was murdered. They say she was hanged. Isn’t it terrible?”

“That’s a mistake,” Hannah said, but the remark was inaudible under Tobin’s epithet.

“Holy Christ in the foothills!”

H
ANNAH WAS RELIGIOUS IN
her pursuit of normalcy, and she decided, should someone comment on her indifference, she would explain that she was merely setting a good example. That one needed setting was obvious, whole batches of employees taking off at once as though to the polls on election. Hannah stayed at her desk until twelve-thirty. She wrote notes on her plans for the celebration of Campbell’s Cove Day.

At twelve-thirty she walked down the street to lunch at the tearoom as was her custom, and while she had her choice of tables, the restaurant gradually received more patrons. The idle and the curious were returning to High Street. Her usual waitress was back in time to take her order for dessert.

“You should of seen the sheriff clean us out. Was he mad, Miss Blake!”

“You were in the house?” Hannah said.

“Not me. A lot of people were, though. Isn’t it awful what some people’ll do? And her lying in there. You should of heard the sheriff blaming Chief Matheson. Poor Matt.”

“Really,” Hannah said.

“Don’t take the custard, Miss Blake. It’s got lumps. A jackass he called him right in front of all them people.”

“I’ve never thought Matheson stupid,” she said. In fact, she had never really thought about the Cove police chief at all.

“What could he do—shoot people? There was swarms of them all over the place. That’s the sheriff blowing his own horn. Elections this fall.” She nudged Hannah’s arm.

“And Mrs. Verlaine is dead,” Hannah said.

“Yeah. Strangled. She was a queer duck. All right in her own way I guess. But I’ll tell you, Miss Blake, if anybody was ever to say to me—before this happened even—if they’d of asked me to name one person in the Cove who was the kind to get themselves murdered, I’d of said right off—Mrs. Verlaine. Now isn’t that a coincidence?”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “That’s a coincidence.”

“Something about her, you know, and living alone like that in a big house—”

“I live alone—and in a big house,” Hannah said.

The girl giggled, a silly, intimate ha-ha. “Sure, but you know how to take care of yourself.”

I’ve got a conscience,
Hannah thought.
I can do right by myself.

“Y
OU’RE MISS BLAKE?” SHE
met the eyes of the young man at her desk. All afternoon she had waited for his coming, him or someone like him. He stood before her, his hands on her desk, but behind them a cartridge belt shone with the nubbed heads of bullets.

“I’m George Schenk, deputy sheriff. I’ve got a warrant—” He straightened up and put his hand in his blouse pocket.

And she had even anticipated his first words, and steeled herself to the easy manner with which she would accept them, take her hat and purse, and walk from the bank in his custody.

“It’s to open Mrs. Verlaine’s safety box,” he explained when he had the paper in hand.

Hannah controlled her mouth, making a shape out of her lipstick, one lip smoothing the other. She spread the paper on her desk, free of her trembling hand. What it said beyond
Odenah County
she would never know.

“Come with me, Mr. Schenk,” She walked before him in stiff dignity, and at the vault bade the custodian bring him Maria’s box. She herself selected the key from the tray of duplicates and gave it to the deputy. “You will return it to my desk.”

She waited then, again alone in her office with the clock. Nothing in the way of direct clues had appeared, by the indication of this visit. Or was this the routine of duty? Of investigation? It was forty minutes later that the deputy brought the key, a notebook in his hand which he pocketed at her desk. Apparently, he had noted and described everything in the box, from securities to will, if Maria had left one. He looked very sour, she thought.

“Tedious,” she murmured solicitously.

“Not a damned thing in it except paper. Thank you, ma’am.”

She realized what he had been sent to look for. “You were looking for her jewels?”

“Yes’m.”

“They belonged here certainly,” she said.

What a fantastic turn! Her mind leaped to the implications of it—the pursuit of robbers, the delays, the questioning of all sorts of people. But the jewels should be in the house—right there before their eyes, in a place so simple they were blind to it in their search of dark corners.

“More than once, I recommended it,” she added.

“It seems like half the people in Campbell’s Cove recommended it, Miss Blake. Too bad she didn’t take some advice.”

Hannah looked at him. “And this, you think, cost her her life?”

“I couldn’t say that, ma’am, but it could be.”

“Doesn’t the sheriff want to see me, Mr. Schenk? I was a friend of Mrs. Verlaine’s.”

He smiled patronizingly. “I’ll tell him that, Miss Blake. He’s real busy now, but I’ll mention it. Thanks for your co-operation.”

Hannah rose from her desk as he started off. “Do tell him,” she called after him from the office door. “It might be important.”

It would not have been out of character for Maria to have shipped the jewels back to where they came from, she mused, returning to her desk. Having won them, she was quite capable of flinging them in the faces of her French in-laws. It was very much in character. That, too, would come out in time if it were so, and people would say: “Just like Maria.”

And what was like Hannah, she wondered then; who knew her well enough to say of anything she did: “Just like Hannah.” Half the town thought they did. The clerks beyond her office had confided in their glances a smug understanding of her when she had called after the sheriff’s deputy. Not in a hundred years would they suspect her of so profound an accomplishment as—murder. There was the word, the word for the deed, the deed done. Only Hannah knew Hannah. But the deed undone, not in a hundred years, would she suspect Hannah either.

H
ANNAH TOUCHED THE DOORBELL
and waited. Through the screen door she saw the big yellow-and-black cat raise his head from where he was sleeping on the hall bench. He looked at her and then tucked his head again into his stomach. She heard slow footsteps overhead, and Mrs. Merritt called down from the top of the stairs, “What is it?”

Her voice was dull; sleep, perhaps, Hannah thought. Asleep on the day her son’s engagement was announced.

“It’s Hannah Blake, Mrs. Merritt,” she called out. “If you’re resting I’ll call another time.”

“I’m not resting, Miss Blake. Make yourself at home. I’ll be right down.”

It was a cold, or tears, not weariness in her voice, Hannah thought. She went in, playing her fingers over the sleeping cat as she passed on her way to the living-room. There was no joy here, she decided, no frenzy of preparation for the marriage feast. The room was as neat as a star, but Elizabeth and Tom, smiling, from their confirmation pictures, were the brightest things in it. It had always been a house she envied, despite its poverty. She had rarely visited here, whether to bring charity or to have a dress fitted, when half the neighborhood wasn’t crowding it. And among the warmest moments she recollected was Mrs. Merritt’s greeting. It always seemed to tell a newcomer that he was the most welcome of all. Now she heard her on the stairs, one footfall following another in heavy measure. Whatever it was oppressing this woman should not have been allowed, she thought. She moved back to the doorway and held both her hands out.

“How nice to see you, Miss Hannah.” Mrs. Merritt gave her the one hand free, and then the other when she let go of the railing.

Her legs couldn’t keep pace with her spirit, Hannah thought. But her smile still told its marvelous welcome, drawing every line in her face into it.

“I came to wish you joy,” Hannah said, choosing the best of words she could find. “I saw the notice in the paper this morning.”

“The marriage notice?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Merritt said. “Please sit down. I’ll put on the kettle.”

“No, don’t trouble, Mrs. Merritt. I can’t stay. Too much has happened.”

“Yes. That was a terrible thing.” She went to the window and raised the blinds. “The sun fades the carpet and it hurts my eyes a little.” She rubbed them, as though to prove it. “Elizabeth says I don’t have enough light to sew by. Maybe it’s time I listened to her. How are you, Miss Hannah?” The woman was slow in choosing her words, slow in her movements.

“I’m well, thank you.”

“Land’s sakes, sit down a minute at least.”

Hannah obeyed her, but waited until Mrs. Merritt herself had chosen a chair away from the light. Then she sat beside her.

“There’s so much to be done, but I just don’t seem to be able to get at it, and now this terrible business.”

“Has the sheriff been to see Elizabeth?”

“Yes. He was to see her at the library, and he was here.”

“Why here?”

Mrs. Merritt stroked the arm of the chair already worn smooth. “He wanted to know where she was last night. He wanted to see her jewelry box. Elizabeth doesn’t have a jewelry box, except the one the pearls Tom gave her came in.”