Perhaps she was deliberately ignoring it. Karen was a queer person – nervous, temperamental – she might be so annoyed at the ’phone that she wouldn’t answer it out of pique. It was an army rule in the house that she wasn’t to be disturbed for any reason whatever while she was in her quarters working. So the telephone … Eva relaxed on the pillows as the bell rang once more.
But she sat up very quickly a moment later. There
must
be something wrong! Kinumé had said Karen was ‘liting’ – but what was she writing? Kinumé had brought her stationery and envelope! Then she wasn’t working on her new novel at all she was writing a letter. But if she was writing a letter, why didn’t she answer her telephone?
The telephone rang for the last time, gave up.
Eva scrambled off the couch, skirt flying, and ran across the sitting-room to the bedroom door. Something had happened to Karen. She was ill – Kinumé had said so – she
had
looked poorly the last time Eva saw her – perhaps Karen had fainted or had an attack of something. That was it!
She burst into Karen’s bedroom so precipitately that the door banged against the wall and swung back, bumping into her. And Eva stared, her heart hammering, hardly knowing what to expect.
At first she thought the room was empty. There was no one in the low funny little Japanese bed and the writing-desk in front of the oriel windows was untenanted. In fact, the chair behind the desk, facing her, was pushed neatly into the knee-hole on the farther side, for Karen’s desk and chair were so placed as to catch the light from the triple window over her shoulder when she worked.
Eva crossed to the far side of the room, looking around, puzzled. Everything was in place – the beautiful Japanese screen beyond the bed against the wall; the water-colors; the large empty bird-cage hanging beside the bed; the Kakémono by the great Japanese painter Oguri So¯tan, which Karen prized so dearly; the delicate bric-à-brac – everything was in place except Karen herself. Where was she? She had certainly been in the bedroom a half-hour before; Eva had heard her voice. Unless she was upstairs in the attic no one had ever seen …
Then Eva spied two tiny Japanese shoes, toes down, hanging over the steps of the little dais behind the desk, where the floor of the oriel was raised above the level of the bedroom. And Karen’s feet were in the shoes, clad in white Japanese stockings, and there was a scrap of kimono visible …
Eva felt her heart contract. Poor Karen! She had merely fainted after all. Eva ran around the desk. There was Karen lying face down on the dais, stretched along the step of the dais, her kimono almost fastidiously draped about her little form … Eva opened her mouth to call Kinumé.
But her mouth closed again. She blinked and blinked and blinked, in a futile, dazed way, everything in her paralysed but her eyes.
There was blood on the dais.
There was
blood
on the dais. Eva kept blinking, so stunned her brain could think nothing but that.
Blood!
Karen’s face was twisted sideways to Eva, resting on the polished dais, and the blood was staining the floor near her white throat. There was so much of it, as if it had gushed out of that hideous slit, that red-lipped wound in the soft front of Karen’s throat … Eva covered her eyes with a little animal whimper.
When she put her hands down one part of her numbed brain was already functioning weakly. Karen was so still, her exhausted cheeks were so white, so bluish-white, her lids so marbly and veined – Karen was dead, Karen was dead of a stab-wound in her neck. Karen was … was
murdered
.
The thought repeated itself, ringing in her head like the telephone bell that had rung and rung. Only the telephone bell had stopped, and the thought would not. Eva’s hand groped for the desk; she felt she must hold on to something.
Her hand touched something cold, and instinctively she jerked away and looked. It was a piece of metal, a long piece of metal tapering to a point and with a bow on the other end. Scarcely conscious of what she was doing, Eva picked the thing up. It was – that was queer! she thought dully – half a pair of scissors. She could even see the little hole at the base of the blade, between the table and the finger bow, where the screw which held the two halves together had once dropped out. But it was the oddest-looking scissors she …
Eva almost screamed this time. That blade, that sharp wicked point … the weapon, the weapon that had killed Karen! Someone had killed Karen with half a scissors and wiped the blade off and – and left it! Her hand jerked again, and the metal thing fell, striking the edge of the writing-desk and slithering off into a little waste-basket half-full of paper debris to the right of the chair. Unconsciously Eva passed her fingers over her skirt, but the cold and evil feel of the thing remained.
She tottered around the desk and dropped to her knees on the dais beside Karen’s body. Karen, Karen, she thought wildly; such a queer and pretty thing, so terribly happy after so many shut-in years, and now so horribly dead. Eva felt herself go weak and put out her hand to steady herself on the dais floor. And this time her fingers touched something like tepid jelly, and she did scream – a formless, almost voiceless scream that whispered in the silent room.
It was Karen’s coagulating blood, and it was all over her hand.
She jumped to her feet and retreated blindly, half-mad with nausea and horror. Her handkerchief, she must wipe … She fumbled in the waistband of her skirt, ridiculously careful not to get a spot of the sticky red stuff on her skirt or waist. She found the handkerchief and wiped and wiped, as if she could never get herself clean; wiped her fingers and smeared the handkerchief with jelly-red smears and kept staring blindly at Karen’s bluing face.
Then her heart stopped beating. Someone was chuckling without amusement, dryly, behind her.
Eva whirled so fast she almost fell. She did fall back against the desk, the bloody handkerchief clutched to her breast.
A man was leaning in the open doorway of the bedroom, leaning and chuckling in that dry and humorless way.
But his eyes were not chuckling at all. They were very cold gray eyes, and they were watching not her face but her hands.
And the man said in a low, slow voice: “Stand still, gorgeous.”
The man heaved against the jamb, came straight, and walked into the room on the balls of his feet. He walked so carefully that Eva felt a hysterical impulse to laugh. But she did not, for it struck her remotely that there was grace in the way he walked on the balls of his feet, as if he had done it many times before.
The man refused to look at her face; all his attention coldly persisted in centering on her hands. The bloody handkerchief, thought Eva in a dim horror … She dropped the hateful thing on the floor and started to push away from the desk.
“I said stand still.”
She stood still. The man stopped, his eyes flickered, and still looking at her he walked backwards until he came to the door, and then he found it by groping for it.
“I – She’s –” began Eva, gesturing in a fluttery way over her shoulder. But her mouth was so dry she had to stop.
“Shut up.”
He was a young man with a bleak brown face, as crisp and seared as autumn leaves. The words came out of his mouth like drops of ice-water through lips that barely parted.
“Park it right where you are. Against the desk. And keep those hands of yours where I can see them.”
The room spun. Eva closed her eyes, dizzy.
Keep those hands of yours
… Her legs were frozen, but her brain was going like a machine. The words didn’t make sense.
Keep those hands of yours
…
When she looked again he was standing in front of her with a trace of puzzlement in the gray diamonds of his eyes. And now he was not looking at her hands, which were spread beside her on the desk, but at her face. He was reading her face. He was taking it in, feature by feature – her brow, her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her chin – going over them one by one, like an accountant taking inventory. Eva tried to make sense out of chaos, but nothing clicked into place. She thought it might be a dream, then hoped it might be a dream. She almost convinced herself it was a dream and closed her eyes again to make it so.
She did not hear him move, which proved it was a dream. For when she next opened her eyes he was gone.
But then she turned her head and there he was behind the desk, in the oriel, resting on one knee beside Karen’s body, not touching Karen, not touching the blood, almost not touching the floor he was kneeling on.
Eva could see his hard brown young face clearly, intent on the body. It was like no face she had ever seen; none of the men she knew – not Dr. MacClure, nor Richard Scott – had a face like this. It was perfectly smooth in its brownness, almost hairless, like a mask one molecule thick. Eva would have said it was the face of a boy if not for the hardness, the expressionlessness of it. It was as if a grown man had kept himself alive in a world of enemies by putting up an impenetrable brown shield. He had broad shoulders and large clean brown hands. As he leaned over, Eva could see no trace of wrinkled belly; he was flat and hard there, too, where Richard – where Richard was a little soft. Where Richard … Oh, Richard! … And his big body was clothed a little too nattily in a gray Palm Beach suit with a dark blue shirt and white silk tie, and he wore a hat a little too rakish – a white leghorn pulled down over one gray eye.
The brown man came to his feet in a bound and began to stalk. From object to object in the room, stalking. That was it, thought Eva; stalking like a hunter. He was looking the place over without touching anything, looking it over and looking for something at the same time. And always he managed to keep her in full view, turning and walking and stopping with a delicate nervous energy that reminded her of a race-horse.
Who was he? Eva thought. Who was he? Once the thought came, it flooded her with panic. Who was he? She had never seen him before. It was inconceivable that he was a friend of Karen’s or of anyone Eva knew – she knew no men like him. He was different even from the race-track gamblers he vaguely resembled, or the strange men who lounged about Times Square.
Who was he? How had he got into the house? Could he have been in the bedroom all the time? But Eva knew it was empty except for Karen when she had burst in. Then why had he come? What was his business? Was he a – gangster? There
was
what might have been a bulge … Had – he –
Eva’s breath caught, and he was in front of her before she could move. He caught up her two hands and held them in one of his with an easy clutch that hurt her. With the other he gripped her chin and shook her head a little; but her teeth rattled and tears came to her eyes.
“Talk fast, sweetheart.” He spoke like a machine-gun now. “What’s your name?”
She was surprised to hear herself say, in a fascinated way: “Eva. Eva MacClure,” like a child.
From the slightest constriction of his hands she knew that he recognized the name; but his eyes gave no sign.
“What time did you blow in here?”
“Four. About four o’clock.”
“Who spotted you?”
“The maids.”
She wondered idly why she was answering this stranger’s questions, but all the will had gone out of her and she could only respond to stimuli like a jellyfish being poked.
“Jap?”
“Kinumé was up here giving Karen some stationery. I heard Karen’s voice from the sitting-room but didn’t see her. She didn’t know I was here. Kinumé came out and told me Karen was writing. I sent her away and waited.”
“What for?”
“I wanted to talk over – something – something with Karen.”
“How long did you wait?”
“It was four-thirty when the telephone rang in here,” said Eva mechanically. “It kept ringing and finally stopped.” Somehow she knew he knew all about the telephone call; but how he knew it, or how she knew he knew it, she could not have said. “I was frightened and came in here and found – her.”
Her voice somehow got to the end of the sentence. The man was weighing her again, again puzzled. It was remarkable how those gray eyes could hold you …
“What were you doing with the bloody handkerchief?” The handkerchief was at their feet; he kicked it.
“I – I went over to look at Karen and got some blood on my hands from the floor. I wiped it off.”
He released her hands and chin slowly; she felt the blood seep back into the grooves his fingers had made.
“All right, sweetheart,” he said slowly. “I guess you’re too dumb to lie.”
Eva’s knees gave way and she sank to the floor, leaning against the desk and crying and crying, like a fool. The brown man stood over her wide-legged, looking down, still puzzled. Then his legs moved away, and although she could not hear him she knew he was restlessly prowling again.
Richard … If only Richard were here. In his arms she would be safe – safe from this brown man with his terrifying eyes. Oh, if she were only his – for always, married, safe, safe forever. She wished fiercely that she could stop crying, but try as she would she could not. Richard … And her father. But the instant she thought of Dr. MacClure she shut the thought up in a locked closet of her mind. She refused to think of the huge tired man on the high seas.
Glass exploded behind her and something flew over her head to thud in front of her on the floor.
The stranger, who was just about to step on the dais behind her, almost got the missile in his face. His arms went up in a blur to shield his eyes from the spattering glass of the oriel’s central window; and then he and Eva from opposite sides were looking down into the garden from which the missile had come. How she had got up from the floor Eva had no idea. All she remembered was the crash of glass, and then she was in the oriel with the brown man. The blood, the little quiet figure … She found herself pressed against the brown man’s hardness.
But the garden was empty; whoever had broken the window was gone.
Eva began to laugh so hard she thought she would never stop. She rocked against the brown man in little convulsions of mirth, feeling him hard against her, not feeling him at all. Then she stepped down from the dais and swayed against the desk and laughed and laughed until the tears flowed again.