What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (16 page)

A
fter the last two days of recuperation, Blanche was feeling better, much more alert; the real had begun to unravel itself from the unreal. Aware, as she awakened on the morning of the third day, of an intermittent scratching sound coming from somewhere beyond the drapes, she realized almost at once that it was only the branch of the eucalyptus touching the sill outside and she wondered if there was a spring storm on its way.

Jane had spent considerable time at Blanche’s bedside these last two days. There had been times when her voice seemed to fill the room endlessly with its murmuring unhappiness. Word came crowding upon word in some agony of contrition which Blanche, in a state of dozing unawareness, had not quite been able to comprehend. Meanwhile, Jane had fed her and cared for her with an almost feverish solicitude.

Flattening her hands out upon the bed, Blanche attempted to shove herself up into a sitting position, but without success. She hadn’t regained nearly the strength she had thought. Trying a new tactic, she reached up to the lifting bar. She managed to secure her grasp on it, but when she tried to pull herself up she wasn’t able even to budge the dead weight of her body. Evidently she would have to wait a day or two before she tried again.

Again there was the scratching sound from outside, and she lay there thinking that when Jane came with her breakfast she would ask her to open the drapes so that she could look out. She turned
to the button that rang the bell downstairs in the kitchen. But then, with a sudden, strange feeling of bleakness, she hesitated to use it.

She lay for a moment, pondering this curious thing she had felt, wondering what had prompted it, what fleeting impression or memory had brought it on. She tried hard to summon it back, but it would not come. There was still so much she didn’t remember. She supposed she would never know how long she had been left there in the darkness behind the locked door; she knew she would never have the courage to ask.

Let it go, she told herself firmly. All she needed to know for now was that the worst of it was over. Jane’s anger, her drinking and even, perhaps, this last painful period of extreme contrition, were at an end, and everything should go on again as it had before. Still something nagged at her, a feeling of uneasiness; there was something impending that needed her most urgent attention. There was something… At a sound, she looked around just in time to see Jane come into the room carrying her breakfast tray, and she realized with a sense of surprise that she had been concentrating so hard she had not heard her sister’s approach on the stairs.

Blanche felt herself tense slightly at the first sight of the tray and she made herself relax. Jane, quite noticeably, was not dressed in her soiled wrapper this morning, but in a freshly laundered house dress of pale green. Her hair was combed back neatly and plainly, and her face was scrubbed clean of make-up so that she looked, in contrast to her accustomed appearance, oddly pale and washed out. Her manner was one of almost unnatural composure. When she put the tray down carefully on the stand and uncovered it, it contained only Blanche’s breakfast.

“You’re better?” Jane fussed with the things on the tray, avoiding Blanche’s gaze.

Blanche nodded. “Yes.”

Jane reached out and helped her gently into a sitting position against the pillows. Blanche studied her sister’s face with a
faint expression of incredulity. In Jane’s lowered gaze and meek demeanor was a touch of saintliness that, under different circumstances, might have been very close to comic.

“It—it seems a little cooler—today,” Blanche managed in a hoarse rasp.

Jane nodded, and if she was aware that these were the first words Blanche had actually spoken aloud since her liberation, she gave no sign. “I’ll get your robe,” she said.

When she had helped Blanche into the robe, she retreated to the bathroom and brought a warm cloth and, again, bathed Blanche’s face. That done, she placed the breakfast tray on the swiveled invalid’s table and swung it forward across Blanche’s lap. Retreating to the door, she paused to look back.

“I’ll be back when you’re done—to clean up.”

Blanche nodded. “Thank you, Jane.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

Blanche looked after Jane’s departing figure with a frown of troubled speculation. This mild, pious tone, this self-effacing manner—neither of these was natural to Jane; it hardly seemed possible that they could be genuine. But if Jane was shamming, what purpose could there be in it? Blanche picked up a piece of toast, took a bite from it and absently began to chew. But her gaze remained on the open doorway.

Jane returned half an hour later to straighten the room and carry the tray back down to the kitchen. Again there was the air of calm restraint, of concentrated subservience, and again Blanche suffered a curious reaction of apprehension. As Jane started from the room, Blanche remembered about the drapes. She started to call out, but she had only managed to speak Jane’s name when her gaze fell to the hallway carpet and the words died abruptly in her throat.

“Yes?” Jane asked, turning back in the doorway. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

The sight of the stain on the carpet had stunned Blanche into
a paralyzed silence. The thing that had remained obscured in the dimness at the back of her mind was suddenly thrust forward into the blinding light of complete recall. Angry voices echoed clearly against the inner ear of her memory; and the figure was there again before her, silhouetted sharply in the doorway. And then there was a second figure, holding something in its hand, raising the thing and bringing it down viciously upon the head of the other. The rest was as it had been before. The first figure fell. The second stepped forward and slammed the door.

“Blanche? What’s the matter?”

Blanche looked up, drawing her gaze by force from the carpet. “Nothing,” she said quickly. Her breath, though, was so constricted in her lungs she could hardly get the words out. “I—I just had an attack of dizziness. It’s nothing. I’m all right now.”

But Jane lingered in the doorway, one hand on the knob, watching her with a strange air of indecision. She remained a moment longer, then finally turned away and pulled the door closed after her.

Blanche sat staring into the shadows, thoughts of feverish, remembered terror winging through her mind like screaming black devils.
I didn’t mean to kill her,
Jane had said. Kill… Blanche brought her hand up to her mouth against an inadvertent sob of anguish. She knew now who the figure in the doorway was. She knew—that Jane had killed Edna Stitt.

Miss Blanche, I just worry about you. I get to thinking about what could happen… and I lay awake at night.

Mrs. Stitt had tried to warn her, and she hadn’t listened. Tears of remorse burned her eyes and she let her hand fall away. All these years she had gambled blindly. And she had thought herself so wise. Now she saw that her blindness had destroyed two precious lives—that of the person who had served her all these years—Jane—and that of the one who had tried to save her—Edna Stitt. The guilt, then, was hers just as much as Jane’s.

So Jane’s present mood of contrition was explained; she was
trying, in her own pathetic way, to atone. For murder. It was too horrible, too ugly.… Blanche wanted to cry out against the nightmare she now shared with Jane, but she forced herself to be still. Evidently Jane’s crime had not been discovered; she must have managed somehow to conceal Mrs. Stitt’s body. Perhaps in this very house. Blanche shuddered as with a sudden chill. The police had to be told at once. Whatever the consequences, there was no alternative.

Blanche stopped, forced all at once to the realization that she was no less at Jane’s mercy now than before. Possibly Jane still controlled the telephone from downstairs. Her gaze lifted to the closed door. If anything, she was more helpless; even if the phone were available, she was too weak to reach it. Slowly the old panic began to build up inside. She had to get out… had to find some way to reach help.…

Her gaze came to rest on the draped window. Before she had started to drop a note to the woman next door. Mrs. Bates. Perhaps, if she could only manage to get out of bed and across the room… Guided by the memory of her previous effort, she reached into the pocket of her robe, found the piece of paper that she sought and pulled it out.

Mrs. Bates: This is from your neighbor, Blanche Hudson…

Thank heaven Jane hadn’t found it; it was a sign perhaps from divine providence. Blanche read the note over carefully. It would serve.

At the sound of footsteps out in the hall, she hastily thrust the note beneath the covers. Pretending to have fallen asleep, she dropped her head to the pillow and closed her eyes. Outside, mercifully, Jane passed her closed door and moved on without interruption down the hall. Blanche opened her eyes again and simply lay there listening.

After an interval, when Jane had returned downstairs, she retrieved the note from under the covers and sat up again. Despite her present state of physical depletion, she was filled with the
urgent conviction that she must act at once before the chance was lost. Taking a deep breath, she shoved back the covers and turned to the curtained window.

Frightened determination became fearful doubt. She could never make it that far; she simply hadn’t the stamina. Still she looked around for some source of help. Her wheel chair was there against the wall just beyond the bedside table, just out of reach.

She
had
to get to the window; she had to think of a way. In a surge of frantic determination, she reached up to the lifting bar, grasped it with both hands and this time, with the advantage of being propped up on the pillows, managed to pull herself up into a sitting position.

She returned her attention to the chair. It was so terribly far away. But then, catching a glint of light reflected from some polished, curved surface just behind the bedside table, she remembered her cane and brightened. Bracing herself with one hand, she reached out and drew the cane out of its hiding place.

That done, she began to inch herself around on the bed. Using the lifting bar to keep herself upright, shifting so that she moved just a bit at a time, she angled herself around until she faced the wheel chair. When she had finally achieved this, she brought her hands down carefully beside her. Clinging to the edge of the mattress, she swung her numbed legs out and down.

Fighting down a new feeling of dizziness, she turned her attention to the bedside table and reached out for the cane, drawing it up close beside her. Then, sucking in another deep breath, she extended her arms before her and leaned forward.

Her hands struck against the top of the table joltingly, but her arms held. The dizziness came again, worse than before, but she refused to give in to it.

After a moment, she removed her left arm from the table, reached back for the cane and extended it toward the arm of the wheel chair. She was able to reach the chair easily. Hooking the handle of the cane in place, she pulled. The chair remained
stubbornly immobile exactly where it was, and with a sinking sense of disappointment she realized the brake was set.

For a moment she panicked, but then she began to see a way around this obstacle. Drawing the cane back to the table, reversing it, she aimed it at the foot lever that operated the brake and prodded.

It took several tries before the brake finally gave. Breathless from the exertion, Blanche lowered her arms to the table and leaned forward to rest. When she felt better, she pushed herself back again into a sitting position. Then, reaching out with the cane, she hooked it around the arm of the chair again and pulled. The chair moved easily forward.

When she had teased the chair into position, she looked down at her dangling legs, wondering if the right one still contained its fraction of strength and would support her for the instant needed to see her safely from the edge of the bed into the chair. She paused, listening; Jane seemed to still be moving about down in the kitchen.

When she felt steady enough, she reached out with the cane, jabbed at the brake and set it again. Bracing herself with one hand on the arm of the chair, she brought the cane down to the floor and lowered her feet to the footrest. Moving quickly, she threw herself bodily forward.

Using her arms to support and guide herself, she swung out for a moment into space, rested her weight for one instant on her right leg, twisted about as best she could, and fell back into the chair. She landed with a jolt, sharply aware of the edge of the chair biting into her flank, but breathless with triumph. She had made it! Gripping the arm of the chair, she pushed up with the cane and tried to improve her purchase on the seat. Then, all at once, she collapsed and fell back, the darkness billowing up around her with cruel swiftness. She fought as a swimmer fights the sucking tide to bring herself back from the dark depths, up again into the air and the light.

She remained quite still for several minutes, becoming slowly aware of an ominous silence from downstairs. She looked toward the door, straining for any disruption at all in the still pulse of the house. The last few minutes Jane could easily have come up the stairs without her knowing. She reached out to the footrest where the cane lay at an angle across her legs; it would serve as a weapon of defense, if need be. But then, there was a sound quite distinctly from below, and she leaned back with a sigh of relief. After a moment, taking a firm grip on the wheel, she turned around toward the window.

At the drapes, putting her hand to the center where they divided, she lifted the nearest, held it as far as possible away from her chair and, moving forward, let it fall behind.

The bright sunlight assaulted her eyes painfully, and for a moment she was blinded. Unseen, the eucalyptus plucked at the grille, scraped back out of the way. Blanche opened her eyes slowly giving them time to adjust. She pulled out the other drape and swung it behind to join the other. She sat for a moment listening to the stillness outside.

The sky, though incredibly blue, was dashed across here and there with wispy white clouds. In the distance the top plumage of another eucalyptus undulated under the erratic persuasion of a gusting breeze.