The Amethyst Spectacles, page 6
Patrick was standing outside the Castillo.
“I don’t think there’s any rush, Scott,” Patrick said, when we parked and Scott insisted he’d got to dash on out to Ames’ somehow. “There’s nothing anyone can do. The doctor gave Maurice a hypo and he was asleep when we left. If you want us to drive you out there right away, okay, but you can’t do anything and you would have to come back for your car.”
“What does the doctor think it is, Pat?”
“Come on in and have a drink and I’ll tell you all I know,” Patrick said.
Scott hung back. “What about Edwina? How is she taking it?” he asked.
“Edwina isn’t there,” Patrick said. He didn’t spare Scott, but after all he wasn’t as conscious of his obsession for Edwina as the rest of us. “She went up to the Kennicott ranch.”
“After—after Maurice got sick?”
“Everybody knows it, Scott,” I said.
Patrick said, “She went even after the doctor told her Maurice was fatally sick.”
“She didn’t think,” Scott said. “It was such a shock. She didn’t consider how it would look.” He seemed devastated. “Well, if I can’t do anything, I suppose I might as well wait here with you. If you don’t mind. I expect you’re hungry.”
“I expect you are too,” Patrick said. “Have dinner with us, Scott. Seriously, you can’t be of any use out there at all. The doctor had got one trained nurse and he was staying on the job till she got there. There are servants enough, everything.”
“I’m thinking about Edwina,” Scott persisted.
I said, “Bee went to Edwina. Did she come out to the Ames’, Pat?”
“Not while I was there.”
“Then she went to Sky Valley,” I said. “Trust Bee, Scott. She’ll look after Edwina.”
“Bee’s wonderful,” Scott said, after we had gone in and sat down. Scott wouldn’t have a cocktail, but he accepted a glass of sherry. “They all are. They are the most remarkable women we’ve ever had in Santa Maria.” He was so sincere that you couldn’t have disputed him even if you didn’t entirely agree, as I did. He sat a little forward in his chair, his wrist resting on the table and his fingers clasped around the sherry glass, and his eyes warm with enthusiasm.
“People tell such lies about Edwina,” Scott said. “It’s because they’re jealous. All women are jealous of Edwina.”
I held myself in, then I gazed inside myself, and I knew that he had spoken the truth. I was jealous of Edwina. And how.
“There might be something in that,” Patrick said.
That made me cross. I said, “Edwina makes people mad. Also, she ought to watch her step, Scott. She’s too crazy about Hugh Kennicott.”
“No, she isn’t, Jeanie,” Scott said gently. “She’s fond of him, of course, but she’s dying to have him marry Karen. You know how those things are. I mean, she can’t say so, but she is as nice as possible to Hugh, has him round, does what she can in a quiet sort of way to further the match.” Very quiet sort of way, I thought, thinking of their two silhouettes in the shadowy hall last night, meeting by prearrangement, very sneaky—a very nice way, indeed, to promote romance for your kid sister! “Hugh was terribly knocked out when he first came out here, Jeanie. He thought his whole life was ruined because he couldn’t kill Japs the way he had trained to do—and a lot of people around here were bored with him because, after all, it looked to them as though Hugh had pretty much everything anyway. I think I can understand how Hugh felt. He was young. His life lay ahead of him and he had been cut off from what he expected to do.” Yes, Scott could understand that, because it had happened to himself, but he was different, he hadn’t everything, he couldn’t retreat to a ten-thousand-acre ranch in an idyllic valley. “Edwina met him somewhere and she sympathized. Maurice was nice to him, too, still is, but Maurice grates on people. Maurice takes a lot of understanding. You know that, Jeanie. But Maurice does a lot of understanding, too. It works both ways. Maurice understands Edwina.”
Who didn’t, I thought, coldly, but I kept it out of my face, and, glancing at Patrick, I saw that he was taking it as Scott meant it, agreeing with him in every way.
“Maurice is swell about Edwina,” Scott said. “He realizes that she needs people her own age. He knows how lovely she is. He doesn’t expect her to be a cut-and-dried housewife. Maurice realizes that Hugh is half in love with her, but he knows that that will pass.”
“What if it doesn’t?” I asked, thinking of Edwina having all the food from the icebox destroyed before she ran away up to Hugh’s ranch. Now, why?
“But it will,” Scott said. “Hugh will marry Karen.”
“I wish I thought so,” I said.
Little lines tangled between Scott’s sky-blue eyes. “If he doesn’t, it will be Karen’s fault. She is too impulsive. Karen is so jealous of Edwina. It is the one real flaw in her character, I think. I wish—I wish you would tell her that, Jeanie. A man can’t.”
“Neither can I,” I said. “Besides, I don’t believe it.”
Scott did not argue it. He waited a moment, then asked, “Just what does Dr. Johnson think about Maurice, Pat?”
Patrick said, “He says he has encephalitis, Scott.”
“What’s that?”
“Inflammation of the brain. When we got there Maurice was out of his head. He had a lucid interval or two, but they didn’t last. The doctor gave him a hypo then and he dozed off. He may come through it all right.” The worry lines went out of Scott’s forehead. “And then he may not,” Patrick said, and Scott drooped again. “Johnson seemed pretty worried, Scott. He’s staying right on the job.”
After dinner we dropped Scott at the garage and drove oft home. We built up our fire. Patrick stretched out on the sofa. I pulled up a stool and leaned my head against his knees. The Venetian blinds were open. Once before, one of the first times Patrick had been in this house, somebody had tried to shoot him through that window. I should close the slats, I thought. I would, in a minute. I wasn’t worried. History never repeats itself.
“Tell me every little thing,” I said.
Patrick said, “Well, I told you every little thing, really, except some of my own imaginings, which I didn’t want to tell Scott. He’s pretty intimate with the Ameses and the Chandlers and I didn’t want to be quoted. The thing that made me suspicious was the way the doctor behaved. He didn’t want us to go into the room. When we did, he kept hanging around. Ames was lying in the middle of an enormous old rosewood bed.”
I knew the bed. Maurice had found it in Mexico City. It was made of Central American rosewood, and it was big enough for three or four people. Maurice must look odd in such a big bed.
“God, he did look terrible, Jeanie. I felt scared. When Johnson wouldn’t go out of the room, though, he lost his temper and raved. He said he would prosecute him as an accessory before the fact. The doc got nervous then and left, but he snooped at the door. He oughn’t’ve left the room, Jeanie. I hate a weak-willed doctor.”
“What did Johnson say to you? Frolicking around like that?”
“He didn’t say anything. He was too worried about Ames. He said his pulse was failing rapidly. Ames kept wanting water.…”
“Why?”
“He was thirsty, I suppose. Anyway, he really did have only a couple of really clear intervals after Johnson left the room. Ames said in one of them that he meant what he said about the hundred thousand bucks, and I said to forget that and to go ahead and say what he wanted to tell us. He said he had been poisoned. Then he said to forget what he had said last night about shadowing his wife.”
“Oh, oh.”
“He said Edwina was not guilty, in any way, of what was happening to him. It was something else entirely, he said. Then his throat was paralyzed. He couldn’t speak. Then his eyesight went. That did it. He screamed with terror, and back came Johnson on the run, and stuck him with a hypo of morphine. He wasn’t really conscious again after that.”
“Funny that he remembered about the money, Pat? If his brain was inflamed.”
“Maybe that part of his brain wasn’t inflamed.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“No. Not in the least.”
“Oh. Did he speak with his British accent?”
“Good God!” Patrick said.
“Karen gave me that idea,” I said. “Well, go on.”
“Well—that’s all. I prowled around the house some. The sheriff and the doctor stayed in the room with Ames. In the kitchen the Indian cook was in a temper. She wouldn’t say why, but one of the girls told me …”
I put in, “That everything in the icebox had been thrown in the incinerator.”
“How did you know that?”
“Everybody knows it. The girls gossiped.”
“Not the cook.”
“Nope.” I glanced at the window, thought about the open slats. “Go on.” I said.
“Well, I went back upstairs and asked Johnson why the food was destroyed. He said that Maurice told Edwina to have it done. He was there when Maurice said it. He followed Edwina out and told her not to bother, but she said that if she didn’t Maurice would say she hadn’t done what he asked. So Edwina made the cook destroy everything. So, you see, she wasn’t to blame about the food.”
“Dear, dear Edwina!”
“Do you think you’re being fair, dear?”
“Yes, I do. Go on.”
“That’s about all. Oh, Hugh Kennicott came out. He does hate Ames. It was hard for him to ask after him civilly. He went away, right away.”
“Because Edwina wasn’t there?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Do you think Maurice will die?”
“I don’t know enough about him to think. The doctor thinks he will.”
I said dreamily, “A hundred thousand dollars!”
“Darling!”
“We could put it in war bonds,” I said quickly.
Patrick snorted. “Maybe he hasn’t got a hundred thousand bucks. And the doctor would testify he was out of his mind.”
Patrick was stroking my hair, curling it around his fingers. I closed my eyes. The room was filled with a curious, dense quiet. The clock ticked on the wall. The fire sighed and rustled. There was nothing but stillness roundabout, no sounds of cars passing on the road at the foot of the hill, no footsteps in the lane. When there came a noise slight as the breaking of a twig and on the terrace perhaps, I opened my eyes automatically, and Pancho’s glance caught mine, questioning me, and I smiled and shook my head. It would be a mutt, probably, from the throng that lived a sparse communal life in the Mexican section across a wide corral behind our house.
Pancho kept listening. He had his long ears up. He kept watching me.
I shut my eyes and turned my cheek so that it rested against my husband’s hard muscular thigh. I felt comfortable and warm and content.
The dog’s maniacal bark caught me off guard. I sat up. Patrick sat up. The dog dashed around the sofa and begin a frantic noisy leaping at the window.
I looked in time to see a hideous blue-glinting line of steel beyond the black windowpane. I heard the gunshot and the clicking cracking of the window. It was like nothing compared to the frenzied roaring of the dog, which filled the room with a blare of cacophonic sound.
I jumped up then and snatched the cord which closed the slats of the blind. I didn’t realize that Patrick had been hit until I saw him then, lying pale and lifeless.
Chapter 7
I reached for Patrick’s wrist. His pulse seemed normal. His face looked pale. I tried to think what a First-Aider did when there, was concussion. Was it concussion? Should I look at his eyes to see if the pupils were uneven? Well, I couldn’t decide. I was too frightened.
The dog had run to the door and was barking like mad.
“Hush!” I said. Pancho stopped for a minute, then started it again. “Be quiet!”
He was quiet, and suddenly there seemed to be no noise in the world, none at all—and then I heard a car start up at the foot of the hill.
I had closed the slats. But the shot had broken out a windowpane. I could hear the engine as plainly as though I stood outside. There was an odd little tappet in one cylinder. It distorted the rhythm of the motor.
Patrick sat up.
“Darling!” I said. “Lie down!” You kept them lying down. I could remember that, anyway.
He went on sitting up. He gave his head a little shake and blinked and his fingers explored his crew cut. They found something. I looked, and saw a red welt. I felt faint.
“What happened?” Patrick asked.
“You got shot!”
He jumped up, and quickly sat down.
“Get me some whisky,” he said.
“Nope,” I said. You didn’t give them stimulants anyway. “Lie down, darling. I’ll get the ice-bag.”
“An aspirin would be more like it. I’m getting a headache.”
I got both. Patrick sat rubbing his head. He set the bag on the welt at a cocky angle and said, “Too bad it doesn’t show.”
“Don’t joke about it, darling.”
“Must have been a Nip.”
“Darling! No humor, please.”
He rearranged the ice-bag. “Somebody’s taking Ames’ interest in me pretty seriously,” he said.
“Is that what it is, darling?”
“What else? And, the other night, after we were at The Rock, somebody lurked about this house. So there’s a connection!”
“What kind of a connection, darling?”
“Between Ames’ illness and Ray Thayer’s death.”
“Pat! Be sensible, really! Maurice has inflammation of the brain. The doctor said so.”
Patrick paid it no notice. “Subconsciously, sick people; often know what ails them,” he said. “They can’t diagnose their sickness specifically, and they don’t know the name for it, but there is something, some nerve sense, that warns them of the cause. Ames thought he was poisoned. I think now he was right.”
I couldn’t argue him out of it. All I could do, finally, was to give him a sleeping tablet—saying it was another aspirin—and persuade him to go to bed.
I woke first.
Mr. Trask’s Buick was roaring up our hill.
I swung my feet onto the rug and slipped them into my leopard-skin mules and snatched up my bathrobe. It was a soft green wool between an emerald and jade, very tailored, with a long sweeping skirt which entirely covered up my yellow-satin nightgown. In a jiffy I was ready to step to the casement window which opened on the lane and without more to-do put a finger on my lips. The sheriff would understand that Patrick was still sleeping. He mustn’t be bothered after his narrow escape last night.
I was mistaken, for Patrick sat up and reached for a cigarette and was at the window, in his pajamas, as soon as I.
“Not a word about last night, mind!” he warned me.
When Mr. Trask stopped the noisy motor the morning seemed amazingly still, as the night had, last night, when Pancho stopped barking.
“Morning, ma’am,” he said, remaining in the car, as if he were in a great hurry. Now what? I felt breathless, wondering what he had come to tell Patrick. “Howdy, Pat.”
“Hi, Jim,” Patrick said.
“Sorry to get you out of bed, folks.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Trask,” I said.
“Time we were out,” Patrick said.
“Nice morning,” Mr. Trask said.
For heaven’s sake, I thought, do get on with what you’ve come for! What is it! What has happened?
“Looks darn nice,” Patrick said. He sniffed. He remarked, “Must have rained in the night.”
“We had a nice little shower along about four o’clock,” Mr. Trask said. “Too bad rain cain’t be rationed. If we had half as much rain every month the year round as we have in the spring and early summer I reckon we wouldn’t have any desert around here. Well, it’s a pretty country. You cain’t have everything.” Patrick blew a smoke ring.
“You said it, Jim,” he said.
There was one of those silences, and I thought, “The hell with these Westerners! Why doesn’t he get on with what he came about?” Maybe they wanted me to leave. Well, I wouldn’t. I myself wanted to know what had brought the sheriff and his snorting old Buick up the hill, so I took action.
“Have you heard from Maurice Ames this morning, Mr. Trask?” I asked.
“That’s what I come about, thank you, ma’am,” Mr. Trask said. He smiled pleasantly. “He pulled through the night, ma’am.”
“I’ll be damned!” Patrick said.
“Never thought he would make it, did you, Pat?” The sheriff was making himself a cigarette. He kept his eyes on Patrick, however, and there was a queer gleam in their blueness, as he said, “Doc Johnson stopped by my house as I was eating breakfast. Said he thought Ames was out of immediate danger.” The sheriff fixed his eyes on the cigarette. “Said Ames cain’t remember a thing that went on last night, Pat.”
Patrick chuckled. “What do you know!”
Trask said, “A man’s memory can be as handy as a pocket on a shirt, I reckon. Maurice Ames is tighter’n the bark on a tree. I wouldn’t be surprised if he started worrying in his mind about that money he offered you, Pat, and maybe he decided that checking out would cost him too much.”
Patrick grinned.
“Good thing it wasn’t spent yet, Jim. Well, I’m glad he made it. Johnson give you any details?”
“Nope. He looked petered out, couldn’t wait to hit the hay, I reckon. Wouldn’t be surprised if his memory fails him, too. Think we ought to drop out and make a polite little call on the sick man, Pat?”
“Might be a good idea.”
“Darling!” I said. I looked at his head. Maybe there was a concussion or something. He ought to take care.
“If you don’t feel up to it …” the sheriff began.
“I feel fine, Jim. I’ll get dressed and get some breakfast and stop over at your office. How’s that? Say in half an hour.”
“Okay, Pat. Good-bye now, Mrs. Abbott, ma’am.”
