Town of Masks (13 page)

The fool, Hannah thought, the stupid fool, with a sheriff’s badge and a politician’s arrogance.

“I don’t know where Elizabeth was last night,” the old woman continued listlessly. “Tom drove me up to Jefferson City. Elizabeth wouldn’t come with us.”

“She was working,” Hannah said.

“Yes. And then she came home. Tom called her from the drugstore in Jefferson City.”

That was a lie, Hannah realized, and anyone could guess it from the way the old woman had said it by rote.

“Where is Tom?” she asked.

“I think he’s with Elizabeth now. They were going for a drive.”

Hannah felt the anger rising in her. What right had they to leave the old woman alone like this at such a time?

“It’s a fine time for a drive,” she said.

“I’m glad they’re together,” Mrs. Merritt said, unaware of Hannah’s implied criticism. “They were always very close. Too close, maybe. I just don’t know. When I was a girl down on Front Street, we used to have evening prayers together, around the kitchen stove. Then we could go out till bedtime. Or when we got older we could have the parlor. But my father and mother sat in the kitchen till we all went to bed. It’s no good, a woman sitting there alone.”

Hannah was not sure of her meaning, except that perhaps she waited for children who did not come to her.

“Where will Tom and his bride live?” she asked.

“Here. That’s why I should be so busy. I just don’t know where to start.”

Why here?
Hannah wondered. The house was small, adequate to three people, but not to four when two of them were just married. Nor was it poverty. Elizabeth could support herself and her mother. Tom could afford a home of his own.

“A few weeks ago I suggested to Tom that he start his own business,” Hannah said. “I told him—maybe not in so many words, but in effect—that I thought the financing of it could be done through the bank. I wish you would remind him of that.”

Mrs. Merritt smiled, her face alive again. “That would be very nice. Tom is a good boy, Miss Blake, and he’s marrying a real nice girl.”

“Has he known her for long?”

“She’s a demonstrator in the Worthy Stores. He’s known her a long time.”

Nothing special in the way of a match, Hannah thought. She pondered a question and then decided to risk it. “What’s Elizabeth’s objection?”

Mrs. Merritt shook her head. “I don’t know. She’s been at him to marry Phyllis for a long time. I was the one who didn’t want it very much. I wanted him to marry a Catholic girl, but she’s turning. I just don’t understand Elizabeth. And now this awful business.”

Hannah leaned back. Tom Merritt had always had the reputation of having an easy way with the girls. It accounted for his long bachelorhood. No doubt Miss Phyllis was one of the easy ones, and Elizabeth, so highly moral, had tried to prod him into marriage with her. It was simple. Now it was quite and horribly simple; there was no end to which Tom Merritt would not go to prevent his sister from her association with Dennis Koegh. He was marrying to that purpose, and bringing his wife here where their presence might be a constant reprimand to Elizabeth. But what was the source of his deep antagonism to Dennis? That he was a poet? A laborer? His youth? The answer was not here, not with Mrs. Merritt.

“Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Merritt. The sheriff and his deputies are talking to everybody who knew Maria. One of them came to see me this afternoon.”

“Did they want to see your jewelry box, too?” she asked bitterly.

“Not yet, but I expect it.” Hannah got up stiffly. “Sit and rest yourself, Mrs. Merritt.”

“Will you come again, Miss Hannah? We used to have such nice visits together.”

“I’ll try,” she whispered, leaning close to the old woman and brushing her forehead with her lips. “God bless you.”

H
ANNAH KNEW, THE INSTANT
she turned into her own driveway, that she had not been neglected by the sheriff. Two county cars were parked there, and at the garage door Deputy Schenk was talking to Dennis. He tipped his hat as she drove up.

“The sheriff’s waiting for you inside, ma’am,” he said.

Dennis, his expression darker than she had ever seen it, looked as though he wanted to speak to her as their eyes met. Schenk, however, insinuated himself between them, making an elaborate business of opening the car door for her and closing it behind her.

“Dennis—”

The deputy interrupted. “Sheriff Walker’s been waiting quite a while, Miss Blake.”

She looked at him boldly. “Then a moment more won’t vex him.” He would have had to forcibly detain her as she brushed by him. “Dennis, at your convenience, and at the deputy’s, please put the car in the garage.” To Schenk she gave the explanation meant for Dennis. “I rarely go out evenings.”

“Yes, Miss Blake,” the boy said.

She turned toward the house and put one foot before the other in a rhythm calculated to avoid limping. What, she wondered, would Dennis take from the explanation? Twice—on her way from the house that morning and now—she had implied that she was home all evening and that she assumed he had been. That should fall in nicely with his needs also, if he intended to keep his meeting with Elizabeth a secret. The why of that was something else again, of course, and something she could not afford to think about at the moment. Still, it was a cozy arrangement, her accounting for Dennis, and Tom Merritt accounting for Elizabeth. But let it be so.

She closed her mind on it. Behind her, as she turned her head, she saw the deputy walking at his ease about her car, noticing her license number, perhaps. It might have been that the truck driver had observed it last night—a simple combination. No. In that case the state license bureau could have provided her name instantly. It would not wait the lazy observation of a sheriff’s deputy. Nursing such fears she was enemy to herself. No one had seen the car. The Wilkses lived across the street from Maria. They had not seen it. She could not even remember if there had been a light in their house.

Meanwhile, the sheriff was watching from the study window. What crassness, entering her house, and demanding of Sophie the run of it, and getting it. Precious little rein Sophie put upon them. Nor did Sophie have much rein on herself, Hannah observed at first glimpse. The child’s face was working, tear-streaked, and in that second Hannah felt a great compassion for her; there had not been much pleasure in this house for Sophie either, and she had been faithful to Hannah through her own misery over Dennis. Her worship of the boy was not to be made little of because Sophie was a “country girl.”

Lord God, what a torment of crosscuts was her own mind now, Hannah thought. Striking at malefaction, she had herself been stricken with a hundred wounds.

“I tried, Miss Blake,” was all the girl could say as she attempted to follow Hannah through the hall to the study. No one could keep the pace Hannah set, grinding her sore foot on the floor with every step.

“Of course you tried, Sophie,” she said without pausing. “Don’t let them make you cry.”

The sheriff met her at the door. “We don’t aim to make people cry, Miss Blake. We just like ’em to talk.”

“Then you and I shall talk,” Hannah said, feeling more calm in meeting this challenge than she knew to be her right.

“Good. I’ve been waiting quite a while.”

“Not without the hospitality of my house,” Hannah said. That he had been uninhibited in his exploration of it was obvious to her at a glance. A table drawer was not quite closed, the letter folder on her desk, when she put her hand to it, was backward. “I assume you have a search warrant, Sheriff Walker?”

The sheriff smiled, watching her scan the room for the changes in it. There was little of the county sheriff about him. Rather, he looked like an ambitious lawyer, well-groomed, the cut of his clothes almost dapper. And his smile was handy—to be used instead of words at the propitious moment. Altogether, there was more precision about him than the half-closed drawer and the folder indicated. They were a calculated ruse, she decided, intended for her intimidation.

“May we sit down, Miss Blake?”

“I should like to sit down, yes. It’s been a strenuous day.”

“For you, too?” he said, waiting for her to choose their seats. “No, I don’t have a warrant. Let’s just say I’m a bad-mannered guest. My deputy tells me you were a friend of Mrs. Verlaine’s.”

“I was.”

“Too bad—what happened to her.”

Hannah’s nerves responded badly to his ease. “For whom?”

“For somebody—in good time. I don’t suppose you have any idea where she kept those fancy jewels of hers?”

“None.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Hannah described the occasion and, on his query, the jewels themselves.

He drew a notebook from his pocket, selected the page, and handed it to her. It was Deputy Schenck’s notations from the safety box, that page devoted to a description of the jewels taken apparently from insurance papers. “Did you see all of these pieces that night?”

She scanned the page. “I couldn’t honestly say, sheriff. I didn’t count them.”

He grunted and returned the book to his pocket. It was almost a game, sitting here in her own study, detailing the inconsequential, a dangerous game, should she reveal her awareness of its unimportance. “I was the last one to see them that night,” she added. “And I remember thinking at the time, she took better care of her everyday silver than she did of them.”

“Let’s go over this carefully,” he said. “She had them laid out on a cloth—”

“A satin cloth,” Hannah prompted. “And as she was about to go to the door with me, she flung the surplus of it over them as if it were a dish cloth.”

“You’re certain, Miss Blake, she didn’t put them away while you were waiting?”

“Quite certain.”

“Was the maid there?”

Hannah remembered quite distinctly the woman Annie’s presence and titter over Maria’s debunking. But at the moment, she had no desire to involve poor Annie. “I don’t recall that she was.”

The sheriff got up. “It’s damned queer if she was so easygoing about them, nobody ever saw her put ’em away or get ’em out. Nobody admits seeing that.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if she kept them in a buffet drawer,” Hannah said.

The sheriff turned on her. “Can you show me the buffet drawer?”

She did not answer.

He was looking at her, but his mind was on something else. “I’d just like to be dead certain somebody didn’t walk out with them this morning—for a souvenir. Matheson might as well’ve sold tickets, he had such a crowd.”

“Matheson is handicapped by a small force,” Hannah said.

“That isn’t the smallest thing he’s handicapped by. My boys had to take over.”

“So I’ve heard,” Hannah murmured.
My boys,
she thought, her contempt for him rising the more he concentrated on the jewels. She would not have put it past his boys to have gathered souvenirs.

“Now it’s funny you should mention that silver, Miss Blake. There was a silverware chest on the buffet, and when we got to it, there was one tray empty. Interesting?”

“Perhaps someone helped himself to a handful of silver, too,” she said.

The corners of Walker’s mouth quivered with wry amusement. “Like Judas, huh?”

Hannah held her eyes on his, but for an instant he seemed to shimmer before them.

“Ever see a silk cord in her house—like a cord from a bathrobe, only longer, ten feet maybe, one tassel?”

“No.”

Walker straightened up. “Nobody saw a thing. A home for the blind, she kept!”

What went ye out to see?
Hannah thought, her mind spinning back with the phrase to another time when it had come to her, talking to Maria last night. No, not last night—long ago as a child home there for cookies and milk after Sunday school, white-frocked and white-minded.

“Yes?” Walker said.

He had been watching her. She relaxed her hands where they had grown taut on the arms of the chair.

“I was remembering,” Hannah said. “Remembering my childhood with Maria.”

“You were old friends,” the sheriff said. “Old friends aren’t always good ones. Tell me, did you like Mrs. Verlaine?”

Hannah tried to think about it. “I loved her,” she said, and the words, prompted from beyond her expectancy, moved her first to surprise and then to a sense of pain which burst within her like a blister, starting tears.

The sheriff touched her shoulder, passing. He walked to the window and back. “Understand, Miss Blake, this is my job. I’ve got to ask you all these questions.”

“Of course.” Hannah went to her desk for tissue, and returned with the box of it.

“When did you last see Mrs. Verlaine?”

“I called on her a few days ago, Monday, I think. I only stayed a few minutes. It was a trivial matter.” On Monday she had met Maria on the post office steps, but the fear that she might have left some sign of her presence in the house last night prompted the lie.

“What trivial matter?”

“Church, which is not trivial, but Maria took it rather lightly.”

“Who else was in the house, Miss Blake?”

Why this, why this?
she wondered. “No one that I noticed.”

“No maid to let you in?”

“I don’t remember Annie’s being about. I was there but a minute.” Dangerous, dangerous, she thought. Annie might swear she had not been there.

“Where did you sit?”

“I’m not even sure I sat down,” she said; “I don’t understand—”

“Never mind. She was pretty thick with this Sykes fellow, wasn’t she?”

“I believe they were intimate.”

“Intimate?”

“By which I mean they were friends. How should I know the extent of their intimacy?”

“Your loyalty isn’t going to pin your friend’s murderer to the wall, Miss Blake. I know Sykes has a wife in the East. They’ve been in and out of the courts for years over his—indiscretions.”

“Really,” Hannah murmured. “You’ve been marvelously quick in your work, sheriff.”

“No, I’m slow, in fact. I had a summons to serve on him once. But he has a lot of friends. I didn’t serve it.”

“So frank,” Hannah murmured.

“Realistic, that’s all, Miss Blake. I’m a politician and I admit it.”