Accent on Murder Page 4

  He had a late dinner at the Old Stone Inn. He walked, in the evening’s coolness, for a time in Van Brunt Center. He went back to the Old Stone Inn and went to bed.

  “I,” Lieutenant Alan Kelley—USN, but momentarily in sports jacket and slacks—said across the table, “should very much like to marry for money. In fact, I was brought up to expect it. It is an old Annapolis tradition and I am an old Annapolis grad, steeped in tradition.”

  “‘Grad’ indeed,” Dorcas said.

  They had reached coffee and cigarettes. To celebrate, they had also reached tiny glasses of cognac. They were at a table for two under a bust of, Dorcas thought, Hermes. But, perhaps, Apollo; one Greek god looks very like another. They were in a restaurant in Ridgefield.

  “Then,” Dorcas said, “you will have to look farther. Much farther.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t,” Alan told her. “Over and above the call of.”

  “I’m sure of it,” she said. “I don’t doubt it for a moment. It’s really ‘proceed and report’? And ‘to count as leave’?”

  “Commander, Atlantic Fleet, for service aboard DD 197. 15 July. To count as leave. You keep changing the subject.”

  “For how long?”

  He touched her hand. He shook his head. He said, “Now baby.” He said, “You keep changing the subject.”

  “Money,” she said. “I still haven’t got any.”

  He managed to look extremely sad. He shook his head very sadly.

  “And otherwise,” he said, “you’d do nicely. Very nicely. It’s rather a pity.”

  “I know,” she said, and managed to sound sad. Two weeks, she thought, two weeks, two whole weeks—“We would have made such an attractive couple, too.”

  “But,” he said, “think how red haired they all would have been. Perhaps it’s just as well.”

  “All?” she said. “What do you mean, all?”

  “Now,” he said, “take Brady. Take the commander. Marries into the same family and—look at them. Rolling in the stuff.”

  “Well,” she said, “not really rolling.”

  “I’d consider it rolling. Rolling is as rolling does.”

  “My uncle the admiral,” Dorcas said, “married it. Not for it—at least I don’t think so. My mother the admiral’s sister—” She sobered suddenly. She thought of her parents, who had died almost together, as if by—almost as if by—some deep agreement that neither would live without the other.

  He touched her hand again. He was quick to follow. The touch said, We quit playing now. The touch said, It wasn’t much of a game—just a little game.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Doctors don’t make fortunes. Not in small towns they don’t, anyway. Small towns in Indiana.”

  “I wish,” Alan Kelley said, “I’d known your father. I wish I’d known you when you were a very small girl, and remembered the teachers you remember. I wish I’d been in the seventh grade of the Horace Mann School when you were in the third grade.”

  “The Longfellow,” she said. “And—you wouldn’t have come within blocks of me. You’d have said, ‘Girls!’ No—more like ‘Gu—rrls!’ With a growl in it.”

  He told her that she must have known very unpleasant little boys. He told her that he had been a very pleasant little boy, polite and considerate always. Especially to little girls who had red hair. He said, “Since you haven’t got money, it’s very fortunate you have red hair, isn’t it?”

  “I,” she said, “am terribly sorry about the money, Alan.”

  “Well,” he said, “when we get to be admirals, we’ll have a limousine with an enlisted driver. We’ll have a Navy house. We’ll buy food at commissary rates. We’ll buy drinks at half price at the officers’ club.”

  “That’s nice,” Dorcas said. “Of course, we’ll be about—about what? About a hundred?”

  “Little faith,” he said. “That’s what you’ve got. Little faith as well as no money. Only red hair. Probably, since I’m so unusually polite and considerate, I’ll be an admiral by the time I’m—oh, forty-five or fifty. A small admiral, of course. But an—” He stopped. “You know,” he said, “you’re very lovely. I love you very much.”

  “Even if I haven’t—” she began, and caught herself and was, oddly and for an instant, ashamed that she had not quite made the turn with him, since they went hand in hand. (Although now their physical hands no longer touched.) Not the game at this instant; not any of their games. “I know you do,” she said, quietly. Then, for seconds, they said nothing. Then he looked around the restaurant and, when their waiter saw him, scribbled in the air….

  It was a little after midnight when he stopped the Ford outside the Maples Inn in North Wellwood.

  “Why,” he said, “do they name so many inns after trees?”

  “There really is a guest room,” she said. “Not a very big guest room, but—”

  He shook his head.

  “Brady and Caroline are there.”

  “I,” Alan Kelley said, “am a polite and considerate Navy lieutenant, steeped in tradition. I am also allergic to—chaperonage.”

  “I wish it were—next Saturday,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But—we’ll never wish days away, will we? Even waiting days.”

  He kissed her. He moved very suddenly, very resolutely, out of the little car.

  “‘Get thee to a nunnery,’” he said, and she slid across the seat, behind the wheel, moving as quickly, as determinedly, as had he.

  “Yah!” Dorcas Cameron said, and drove away—drove, for a block or two, rather more rapidly than was really necessary because she so little wanted to drive away at all.

  Caroline Wilkins wakened very gently and lay awake, not surprised at wakefulness, although she supposed it was still the middle of the night, feeling at first no urgency of any kind. She wakened and listened. She heard, from the other bed, his slow, deep sleep-breathing. The bed isn’t empty, she thought. It isn’t empty.

  She lay quietly, so as not to waken Brady. He woke easily—she supposed always, but knew only that when they were together he wakened so. If she turned in bed he would waken. It sometimes seemed to her—although of course that was absurd—that if she thought “loud” thoughts, even that wakened him. She did not want to waken him now; she did not want things in any way other than, in this gentle moment, they were. She wanted only to listen to his slow breathing and know that—for these cradled moments—the other bed was not empty. She would not think—did not think—that the bed would be empty again so soon; that, by Monday night—do not count the hours until Monday night—she would not hear Brady’s sleep-breathing, could turn all she pleased and disturb no one; could think any thoughts she chose, and waken no one.

  Awaken no one, worry no one. She had managed the last for hours now—held the little worry in her own mind, willed it to diminish. And—it had diminished; so greatly diminished that not even Brady, who seemed (she sometimes thought) to live in her mind as immediately as in his own, had sensed the shadow there. The little shadow—the immaterial shadow. The shadow from the past, bringing back, with a sudden flicker of darkness, those months not to be counted, not to be remembered.

  Yet, she had remembered. When the telephone had rung the afternoon before, only minutes after Dorcas had left her to go to the party, and she had hurried to it, thinking it Brady again and heard the other voice—she had remembered. Not wanting to remember; thinking it almost forgotten.

  Not forgotten. It could not, of course, be that, nor was there any real reason it should be. But a thing relegated to the past, where it belonged—to the life of another girl; a silly girl who had thought herself wise, long ago in a place far away. A thing fenced away there, isolated; a small aggregate of ancient facts, moldering, no longer having color or poignancy. “Forget it,” Brady told her patiently, tenderly; had told her often. “It hasn’t anything to do with us.” And, gradually, that had come to be accepted, to be true.

  And it was true. Not even a remembered
voice—not, surely, the fact that the voice was remembered—could change that truth. It had nothing to do with them; had never had.

  Yet—she would have to tell Brady about it—now that telling him would no longer mar the perfection of first rejoining. Tell him the fact—the fact of a telephone call out of long ago; tell him (which would, in a sense, be harder) that the voice, long stilled to her ears and she had thought to her mind, had been, from its first (interrogatory) mention of her name, recognized, familiar.

  “So what?” Brady would say, when she told him. “You remember a voice.”

  (But he would say that, brush it off like that, only to brush it from her mind, because he would know it a shadow on her mind.)

  So what? indeed, she told herself, lying quietly in bed, listening to the quiet sleep-breathing of a loved man in the other bed. He would be right when she told him; right to dismiss it. And, she did not doubt, in his own mind he would dismiss it, since he had an ability to live now, in the immediate moment of living. An ability, she thought (her mind digressing) I had always believed more a woman’s than a man’s. But, it seems, an ability not mine.

  She willed her mind steady, willed “loud” thoughts out of it. Send those months back to the—the segregation ward. Nothing—and surely not this trivial thing—can bring them into now. I made a mistake. Long ago I made a mistake. Everybody does, Brady says, and Brady is right. When one is nineteen and certain—so very certain, so pathetically certain—one is entitled to make mistakes. And the mistakes made then do not really corrode, really blemish. They only—leave a little smudge; a smudge that fades slowly, that time erases.

  It is because I am still too young, she thought; young enough to want past and present alike perfect, the whole thing of one perfect piece. Well, things aren’t that way, and now is fine—the now of my life perfect. It is only because of that, she thought, because moments can shine so, that I fear shadows. It is the mind’s wariness; the mind’s instinctive knocking on wood.

  I should go to sleep, she thought, and thought then of her father and thought, Thank you, father; thank you very much for what you did—for everything, for taking the quick (but quickly passing) fury of a child you loved, and not being swayed by it. And, most of all, for being right. I must write him tomorrow, Caroline thought; it’s been two weeks since I wrote him.

  Very softly, she reached out toward the watch on the table between the beds. She did not think she made any sound, and looked at the glowing dial and saw that it was a little after two, and Brady Wilkins said, “Carry? You all right?”

  “I’m here,” she said, very gently. “I’m fine, Brade. Go to sleep.”

  She did not herself return to sleep until once more she had heard the soft sleep-breathing from the bed beside her own.

  “Very tall,” Margo Craig said, and sipped breakfast coffee. “Very large altogether. But with the smallest possible voice.”

  “Oh,” Paul Craig said. “Mrs. Belsen. The big house at the corner of Parley Street.”

  “We’ll see her?” Margo said. She lighted a cigarette. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Paul,” to a husband who could not stand cigarette smoke—anybody’s—until he had entirely finished breakfast. She put the cigarette out.

  “Probably,” Craig said. “From time to time.”

  “And the cute little old ladies? The Misses Something?”

  “Monroe,” he said. “Cute, Margo?”

  “Perhaps that isn’t the word,” she said. “Perhaps the word is ‘quaint’”.

  “I doubt we’ll see a great deal of them,” Craig said. He smiled, faintly. “They’re not exactly contemporaries of mine, my dear.”

  She was quick to say of course not; to add, that she had not meant anything so absurd. She said that she was only trying to sort people out; that he must remember they were all new to her, and met in quick succession. “And,” she added, “when I already had a headache coming on. I’m so sorry about that, Paul.”

  “Sorry?” he said. “Nobody chooses to have a headache, my dear.”

  “All the same,” Margo said and now, since Craig had finished, was himself shaking a cigarette from a pack—was, indeed, holding the pack out to her—lighted a cigarette. “A new wife among old friends. And, she—conks out.” She used the alien word with just enough hesitancy to show her appreciation of its foreignness.

  He nodded. He understood—even her use of the slangy word.

  “Probably,” he said, “we’ll run into—oh—the Thayers. Jas Knight. At the country club. Not the Misses Monroe, I imagine. Or Mrs. Belsen, come to that. Although I’ve seen her lunching there.”

  “With a hat?” The query was innocent.

  He smiled.

  “Quite probably,” he said. “A difference in generations, Margo.”

  She hesitated a moment. She said, “Only that? Because—in most places—that is—”

  “More sophisticated places,” he said. “If we have to use that word. The wearing of summer hats—I don’t mean sun hats—”

  “We mean the same thing,” she said. “Little—little round hats, with flowers.”

  “Yes,” he said. “At country clubs. On beaches and the like. Not many any more. A difference in traditions, of course. Something one finds in places like North Wellwood. A matter of—standards.” He ground his cigarette out. “Probably,” he said, “I sound stuffy to you. I find a good deal to be said for certain—standards.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course. It’s only a matter of—what is the word, Paul?”

  “Mores?”

  “Of course,” she said. “In Maryland—but I suppose the attitudes are much the same. Only the ways of showing them—” She let it trail off. “The cute little thing with red hair?”

  “The—? Oh—a Miss Cameron. Lives at the old Adams place with another girl—a Mrs. Wilkins. They rent the place. I believe Miss Cameron has a position of some sort in the city. Commutes. Mrs. Wilkins’s husband is in the Navy, I understand.”

  “She wasn’t at the party,” Margo said. “At least—of course, I met so many people I’d never met before—”

  “She got there late,” Paul Craig said. “Drove up just as we were leaving. With two men.”

  “Oh,” Margo said. “The very good-looking blonde? In a white piqué dress? With the red summer necklace—a Florida sort of necklace? One of the men was tall and had black hair and the other—”

  Craig’s long face showed rather more amusement than was common to it. He said he gathered she had noticed them. He said that yes, the very good-looking blonde was Mrs. Wilkins.

  “Mrs. Wilkins,” she repeated. “The Adams place.” She nodded her head briefly. “Just getting them straightened out,” she said. “One more—the red-faced man, rather stocky and—”

  But she stopped because, as was evident from his face, her husband was thinking of something else—of, she gathered, something rather unpleasant. He had not heard her words, but now he seemed to hear her silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Speaking of Mrs. Wilkins reminded me—I’ve decided I’ll have to let Joe Parks go, Margo. He’s proved not to be—trustworthy.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “But hasn’t he worked here for years and—”

  “Yes,” he said, before she finished. “I thought him quite reliable. It seems I was wrong.” She waited. “Nothing to bother you with,” he said. He stood up. “No use putting it off,” he said, and walked out of the breakfast room. She heard the slight click as he pressed a button in the base of the intercommunicating telephone. “Mrs. Parks?” he said. “Have Joe come up to the house, please.” He waited a moment. “Yes,” he said. “At once, Mrs. Parks.”

  IV

  THE MAGAZINE WHICH DORCAS Cameron assisted—to, admittedly, a minimal degree—in editing was published weekly and carried news. (More precisely, she sometimes thought but did not often say, its personal preference as to the news, the preference being that of editors of much greater importance.) As a result, it was edited seven days a we
ek; as a further result, its staff was “staggered.” (Dorcas thought of it so, sometimes with feeling.) As a final, and to her immediate, result, she was off on Monday, the thirtieth of June. And would much have preferred not to be.

  “Not tomorrow,” she said, with some indignation, to Lieutenant Alan Kelley at a little after eleven o’clock on the night of Sunday, the twenty-ninth. “But I’m off tomorrow.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said, letting her move far enough away to be looked at, “that’s the way the Navy says it is. To obtain second endorsement, reading: ‘Reported. Proceed in accordance with basic orders.’”

  “Of all the silly things,” she said. “You have to go into New York to have some officer—”

  “Probably,” he said, “a chief.”

  “Be still,” she told him. “To have somebody write something on your orders that merely says you are to go on doing what you are already ordered to do.”

  “And,” Alan told her, “that I reported. All in accordance with Navy regs., which are immutable. You must remember, Dorcas, that you are a mere civilian.”

  “But,” she said, “I’m off.”

  There was the slight semblance of a wail in this. Alan responded suitably.

  “All right,” she said, when she was again able. “That’s all very well. Very nice. Kiss and leave. That’s what it comes to.

  “I’ll be back by mid-afternoon,” he told her. “You can take me over to this country club of yours and we’ll have a nice round of golf. Followed by a nice set of tennis. Followed by several nice long drinks on the terrace, among the restricted flies.”