Fair Warning (29 page)

“First time I’ve had a chance to get a stroll by myself for days. Want to come along, Marcia? Do you good. Though a policeman or detective will likely turn up before we’ve gone ten feet. Well,” said Gally generously, “let him. Coming?”

She shook her head without really hearing him, and the front door presently closed with a jar.

In the back of the house the sounds of kitchen work and of Delia and cook talking gradually died away, and silence descended upon the house.

After a while Marcia wandered into the library, turned on the light above the big chair, and settled herself there to wait for Miss Wurlitz.

Rain slid against the french doors and whispered at the windows. Ivan’s room—and Ivan’s desk.

She wondered what had happened to the paperweight. How well she remembered Ivan’s fingers caressing it—those cold, beautiful fingers which had closed around her throat while Rob, outside, watched.

She wondered when they would find Ancill. It was because he was a witness, then, that they wanted him. They’d said he was wanted for murder merely because it was in connection with a murder.

The lamp above shed a glow on her head and around her. Just at its edge was that area which had been chalked and where, even now, she could see a faint, blurred line, marking the spot where Ivan had died.

After a time she stirred; her legs were cramped, and she moved restlessly and put her head back against the chair.

It had been, she realized suddenly, quite a long time since Gally had gone.

How empty and quiet the house was around her!

Perhaps the police had gone, after all. They would know that if she made an effort to escape they could, by merely putting out their hands, have her again in their clutch.

She got up and walked uneasily into the hall. The small, muffled sound of her footsteps on the carpet, the rustle and whisper of her skirt seemed loud in the hollow silence. There was a light in the empty length of the hall; there was a light at the landing, and the stairs stretched emptily upward to it. There was no sound from the back of the house: Delia and Emma Beek had gone to bed long ago. She went on to the dining room and turned on the lights in the crystal-hung chandelier and looked around the room, and the crystal drops reflected points of light upon the polished buffet.

The drawing room was empty, too; she left lights on there.

She went back to the library, wondering what had kept Miss Wurlitz. Perhaps it would be better not to wait.

In the library, as always, the sound of the rain was louder. Louder. And one of the french doors was open.

I
T GAVE HER A REALLY
ugly shock: a moment that was like a blow. But it was only a moment. Only, probably, a second or two.

For Dr. Blakie came from the rain and darkness into the room, shaking the rain from his coat. Marcia gave a kind of gasp, and he looked at her and said quickly, “Oh, my dear, I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He tossed the coat upon a chair and came toward her. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. I was alone and feeling a little nervous.” She sank into the big chair and managed to smile reassuringly.

“I didn’t stop to think,” he said contritely. “You see, I’d rung at the front door, and apparently no one heard me, so I came around here and saw the light and opened the door. You ought not to be left alone like this. Where’s the nurse I sent you?”

“She went home with Verity. Gally’s out for a walk. I didn’t hear you ring, and I suppose Delia has gone to bed.”

“Oh.” He looked at her worriedly. “Well, I’d better stay till someone gets here. I wanted to talk to you a bit, anyway. That’s why I came around. How are you getting on? Nurse taking care of you?” He took her wrist in his hand, putting firm fingers on her pulse. “Miss Wurlitz is one of my best nurses. That’s why I sent her. But she oughtn’t to run off like this. See here, I must have given you a shock coming into the house as I did.” He released her wrist and took her hand in his, still watching her with intent gray eyes. “I’m so—so awfully sorry. Don’t be frightened, my dear.”

It
had
been a shock. She was still a little fluttery, and her breath was coming in quick gasps. Silly.

“Nerves,” she said. “Sit down, Dr. Blakie.”

After a moment he went to a chair near her, sighing rather wearily and watching her with an intent, shining look which, Marcia felt, could almost see through walls. Could certainly see through one’s own eyes to the thoughts that lay back of them.

“Well,” he said. “Such a day! No word of Ancill yet, I suppose?”

“No. Unless it’s something I haven’t heard.”

He seemed very tired. The fine lines around his eyes made small pouches, and there was a taut, worn look about his mouth.

“Look here, Marcia,” he said. “I’m worried. I—I don’t know what the police are going to do about you. I mean, of course, that half their case against Rob is this letter he wrote to you. I—well, to be honest, I expected them to put you under arrest today. And I don’t see how they can fail to do it—soon.”

She felt he had intended to say “tomorrow” and had softened it.

But it was no new thought to her.

“I know. But there’s nothing we can do.”

A damp current of air drifted through the room, and they could hear the murmur of the rain. Finally he said thoughtfully, “No, I suppose not.”

He was uneasy, too. He reached for a cigarette and struck a match with a sputter that sounded loud and sharp in that silent, waiting room. He rose to get an ash tray, flipped the spent match into it, and strolled toward the open french door and closed it. The sound of the rain was immediately more distant, but the house became again a hollow shell of silence. He was still uneasy and didn’t want to sit still but walked, with the light quick precision that characterized him, up and down the rug, smoking and thoughtful.

The nurse ought to be returning soon. Or Gally. Odd neither of them came. Well, the doctor was there. She was perfectly safe; ridiculous to feel recurrent waves of something like terror. It was because of that one instant of shock. It had left little tremors along her nerves. That was it. She huddled closer into the unfriendly chair, and the glasses along the bookshelves caught now and then piecemeal reflections of the doctor’s slender gray figure, his fine hands, a little quick and impatient with the cigarette, his worn, preoccupied face, the wreaths of blue smoke trailing sluggishly after him.

“What are you going to do about Rob?” he said suddenly, turning toward her.

“Rob?”

“I meant about the trial. I suppose you’ll stand up for him. And he for you. And—and so far as I can see, you’ll not have a chance. Either of you. Look here, Marcia, I hate to talk like this. I’m frightening you. But you’ve got to look at things as they are. Rather—just for this moment —let’s look at things at their worst.”

“Yes,” said Marcia faintly.

“Well—suppose you both are charged with murder and tried. As—well, there’s no use evading it—as you will be. As Rob is, actually, already. Suppose we—can’t get you off.”

Putting thoughts into words gave them dimension.

She put her hands over her eyes, and he went quickly to her again and took her hands, drawing them from her face. “Look at me, Marcia. I’m your friend; I’ll always be your friend. I’ll do everything there is to do to help you. You aren’t alone, you know. But you aren’t a child; and you’ll—you’ll have to help me help you.”

It was, for just a moment, his cool, omnipowerful physician’s tone. Prescribing wisely and kindly for a patient.

“Help?”

“Yes. I—well, I’ve come with a plan. I don’t know how it will work. You may not think it is—worth it. It’s altogether up to you. I’m only offering it—to help you.”

His hands were trembling a little, and yet couldn’t be, for his hands never were unsteady. He was leaning over her, close above her. So close that she drew back a little.

Why didn’t Miss Wurlitz return? The thought flashed sharply through her mind, and she thrust it away and tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

Funny his mouth looked so—so tight. Almost—twisted.

He said, “You may think it’s nothing. You may not want to do it. But it’s the one way to save Rob. And to save yourself.”

He had noticed her small, stifled motion of withdrawal, for he straightened suddenly but still held her hands tightly. And he looked down into her face with intent, compelling eyes and said, “You can marry me, you know, my dear.”

“
Marry—
” said Marcia, out of a kind of deep well of confused incredulity.

“You—you—don’t want to?”

She must get her hands away. She must stifle a wild, awful impulse to run. To scream. To—Where was Gally! Oh, Gally, please come back. Please come, Miss Wurlitz. Please come, somebody.

“I—I—”

“You are surprised, of course. But don’t—You needn’t look like that, Marcia. I—I only want to help you. Don’t pull your hands away as if you were afraid of me.”

She had to get her hands away from him. She couldn’t help …

He released them suddenly and looked strangely down at her.

“You aren’t afraid of me, are you? I—why, my dear, I wouldn’t hurt one hair on your little head. I—” He checked himself suddenly, walked away from her and back again, and said in the quiet precise voice which was familiar to her, “It occurred to me as a means of proving that there was no conspiracy between you and Rob to murder Ivan. If you marry someone else—quite soon—it will show that you were not in love with Rob; that you did not conspire with him to murder your husband, in order to marry Rob. Do you see?”

She tried to say, “And Rob? What will happen to Rob?”

But he went on quietly, “It will thus almost automatically remove the motive they attribute Rob for the murders. All this only at the cost of my giving myself a wife.” His smile wasn’t natural; it was stiff and queer. But he said, “And after all, if I’m to have a wife I’d rather it would be you. Don’t mind my little joke, Marcia.”

Some other time he’d made laughing little apology about jokes. Oh, she mustn’t let herself go off at a tangent like that. She must think of what he was saying. She must draw all her force to meet some emergency that was suddenly upon her; some—some catastrophe … He’d been joking about Ivan, that was it! He’d said that doctors’ jokes are likely to be a little grim. And had said there were a lot of things to do, whole laboratories full of them. Test tubes laden with botulism cultures. Typhus germs … Oh, stop, stop! … What are you going to do? How are you going to meet this thing that has happened?

What is it that has happened?

He was talking again, quietly, reasonably. He hadn’t changed at all.

“… For, after all, when you’ve been out in the world a little, living a normal life a woman should live, you may find that your—affection for Rob was partly a result of propinquity. And because he was your only connection with the kind of life you needed. You were afraid of Ivan. However, there’s time later for any adjustment—any kind of—of arrangement you want to make. Just now—and whenever you wish—here is, at, least, my—the protection I can give you.”

He was whirling the globe, spinning it madly on its axis. And it was as if time were flying there, too, with the days and nights that spinning globe was marking.

The strong sense of catastrophe pressed more heavily upon her. Bewildered her so she heard herself speaking as if someone else in that room, where there was no one else, were speaking.

She said, “I wouldn’t marry Rob because people would say he killed Ivan. If— Wouldn’t they say it of you?”

“No,” he said. “I saved Ivan Godden’s life. They will say that if I had wanted him to die I would—have let him die then. That I wouldn’t have put all my skill and soul into saving him. As I did. No, they’ll not think I killed him.”

He twirled the globe again and repeated it thoughtfully, assuredly: “No. No one would ever think that I killed him. It would have been so easy to let him die that day a month ago.”

He watched the globe—the small imitation of all that humans in thousands of years had managed to learn and to know certainly about. It whirled and whirled, slowly at last and more slowly, measuring its small imitation time. It stopped, and he took a long deep breath that was like a decision and turned to Marcia and approached her again.

“I think it is the only thing for you to do, Marcia,” he said. “Will you?”

She shrank into the chair. Something queer and guarded in her measured the distance to the door, but her conscious mind rejected flight. As it rejected another deep, instinctive prompting. She said, fighting that instinct, using all her reason against it, “I don’t—I can’t—I—”

He took her hands again, and it silenced her. It and the look in his face. He said, leaning over her, “You must do it. All this—” He stopped there, staring at her. His face was moist and glistening. “You must do it, Marcia.
How can you hesitate
?”

The globe had stopped completely.

The house and the room were hushed, too, waiting her reply. Silence and that bright and empty house, and the man above her, his hands holding her own so tightly her wedding ring cut into her finger—his eyes holding her own so she could not have looked away from him. Holding her until all the rest of the world was lost and gone, and it was as if they were standing alone above an immeasurable height. A cliff. A precipice.

With disaster below. At her feet—so one small step would send her over an appalling brink.

The french door opened with a clatter, and Rob came into the room, and they jerked toward him like figures on strings, and things rocked and moved and became all at once familiar again.

“Rob!” said Marcia like a sob.

He came into the room, closed the door, and rain shone upon his coat. Dr. Blakie released Marcia’s hands and took a neat step or two toward him.

“Why, Rob—” he said.

“They let me out.” He glanced once at Marcia but did not approach her. Something, she thought obscurely, had happened to him. He was changed, too. Different. Older.

He took off his coat and flung it across the chair.

“What happened?” said Dr. Blakie. “When did they release you? Why?”