Call After Midnight (4 page)

Fiora said shrilly, “But I wanted Jenny, too …She’s my friend,” she added and gave Jenny a curious look which Jenny could never in her life have interpreted. She glanced at Peter whose face showed nothing.

Blanche smiled at Fiora. “Oh, Fiora! You really must face facts. Jenny was Peter’s wife and you—that is, we all know the situation.” She flashed a smile at Jenny. “Forgive me, Jenny, This is all rather unpleasant for you—”

Fiora cut in swiftly as a knife, “I wanted Jenny to come! I told Peter I was glad he had phoned to her!”

Jenny felt that things had gone far enough; she also felt as if she were walking through a strange and shadowy jungle. But one thing was clear. She said, “Cal is right. He’ll call the doctor—”

Cal spoke from the doorway. “No use arguing. It’s been done. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes or so.” He came back to his chair, settled down, lifted his glass and said, “We may as well make ourselves comfortable and wait.”

Blanche turned toward Cal so Jenny could not see her face, yet somehow she imagined a change in it from radiance and warmth to utter but polite blankness. She said, “You’ve done a harmful and unnecessary thing. I’m sorry.” She sat down and took up her cigarette.

“Peter, I’m frightened,” Fiora said.

“I don’t think there’s any need to be,” Peter said. “Calling the doctor is merely a precaution.” He sat down on the end of the sofa. Fiora put her hand in a proprietary way on his arm. Jenny looked away.

Cal said, “By the way, what happened to the gun?”

Peter looked slowly at Cal. Blanche replied. “Fiora put it back in the drawer in the hall—”

“I didn’t!” Fiora cried. “I never touched that gun.”

“Your gun?” Cal said to Peter.

“I’ve got a gun, yes. I keep it in a drawer in the table, right there in the hall. It’s still there.”

“We looked,” Blanche said. “But we didn’t think of looking for it until after I’d got bandages and Peter had got some brandy for Fiora. She was here on the sofa. She had plenty of time to get the gun from wherever she dropped it and put it back in the drawer—”

“I didn’t!” Fiora said furiously. “You keep saying that—”

“What did you do with the slug, Peter?” Cal asked.

“I pitched it out into the Sound.”

Cal said shortly, “Let me see the gun.”

“All right,” Peter said agreeably, rose and went out into the hall. Cal followed him. The women could hear their voices.

“Hasn’t been fired,” Cal said. “Not lately. At least I don’t think so.”

Peter sounded a little surprised. “Do you know, I never thought of that! Shows you, I really did lose my head.”

“Do you have any other guns?”

“No.”

“Then somebody did come into the house and take a shot at Fiora.”

Fiora said to Blanche, “I told you so.”

“Too bad you threw away that slug,” Cal said, in the hall. “It would have proved that your gun wasn’t used.”

There was a long pause. Then Peter said slowly, “I acted too fast. Always a mistake. There was Fiora, fainting, blood all over her dress. Well, I can’t get that slug back now.”

“Why on earth did you throw it away?”

“Use your head,” Peter said coldly. “I didn’t know what had happened. I only knew it was a gunshot and I had a gun. If my gun had been used and Fiora had died, the first person the police would suspect would be me. A slug from my gun would be very convincing evidence.” A touch of impatience came into Peter’s deliberate voice. “And don’t look at me like that, Cal. Nobody knows what he’s going to do in an emergency until it happens. I made a mistake in judgment.”

“You thought Fiora had shot herself with your gun?”

“What else was there to think—?”

“I didn’t!” Fiora screamed. “I didn’t!”

Cal came back into the room. Peter followed him. “How about you, Blanche?” Cal asked. “Do you happen to have a gun?”

“No!”

“Fiora?”

“No! Never. I’m afraid of them. You see—I kept telling you, Peter, I didn’t shoot myself.”

Cal said to Peter, “Too bad you didn’t call the police immediately. I think you’d better do it now.”

Peter thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it does look as if somebody got into the house. Yes, I’ll call them now. Besides, the doctor will have to report it.”

“I’ll call them.” Cal went out into the hall again.

“Peter, you didn’t believe me!” Fiora cried plaintively. “I
told
you I didn’t shoot myself!”

“I’m sorry,” Peter said in a controlled way. “I thought you were hysterical.”

Blanche said, “Really, Fiora, everything was horribly confused. We didn’t know what to do except see to you as fast as we could. You don’t realize—”

She broke off as they heard Cal at the telephone in the hall. He was speaking for Mr. Vleedam; someone had entered the house and shot and wounded Mrs. Vleedam. No, Mrs. Vleedam was not seriously wounded. No, there was apparently no intruder in the house now; it had happened nearly two hours ago. No, Mrs. Vleedam had seen no one. Nobody had seen the prowler. Well, it hadn’t been reported sooner because they had been upset about Mrs. Vleedam and hadn’t thought of the police. He listened for a while, said thank you, and came back. “They’re sending a prowl car at once.”

Fiora cried shrilly again, “You wouldn’t believe me, Peter! Why didn’t you look at your gun? Why didn’t you believe me?”

If there was a flash of exasperation in Peter’s eyes it did not show in his face. He sat down again on the sofa beside Fiora. “It’s not hurting much, is it?” he said.

Devotion? Jenny thought. She couldn’t be sure.

She leaned back in the too deep chair so as to avert her eyes from Peter sitting there beside Fiora who was now his wife. It seemed odd that Fiora had said so flatly and so very unexpectedly that Jenny was her friend. She was no friend of Fiora’s.

She wished that she and Peter had met alone, with no watching eyes. She wished that the meeting had been different. She eyed a brilliantly blooming box of fuchsias at one of the windows and then looked around the room.

So here she was again. This was the house she had thought of as home, and had been poignantly homesick for, during the whole of the past year. Same roof, same rooms—different, of course. Very different. Fiora must have called upon the services of decorators to change every inch of the vast place. It surprised her again because it was in Peter’s nature to hate change. He had changed wives though. And he must have permitted Fiora to change the house. Perhaps Peter was happy with Fiora.

She wouldn’t think of that now. She let her eyes travel over the entire room. She missed ranks of bookshelves which had disappeared. She missed a huge old writing table which had stood solidly before the fireplace, and then found it, in a corner, its heavy wood bleached to a kind of gray beige. The top was carefully arranged with jade paper knife, jade inkstand, a tall orange lamp with a white shade. She missed the thin old rug, but it had been really too old and too thin and Fiora was certainly quite right to replace it with a mustard green, thickly piled carpet. But it was a very different room. Fiora had made her mark on the house as Jenny herself had never done.

In fact she couldn’t think of anything in particular she had done herself to change the house. She wouldn’t have thought of changing anything, for it had seemed to her as if even the massive mahogany chairs and tables were a part of the house and had earned their right to stay exactly as they were. Besides, Peter had secretly loved every one of them.

She felt a sneaking admiration for Fiora’s courage in discarding anything she—or the decorators—chose to discard. At the same time she missed the odd comfort of familiar and loved things.

She lost herself in thinking of the two enchanted springs she had spent in that house. The doors at the end of the room opened upon a terrace overlooking the Sound. When there was a storm at sea, waves dashed against the sea wall below the house and sent salt spray up over it. She and Peter had walked on the terrace many times and heard the peepers in the spring, shrilling out musically everywhere, and watched gulls dropping mussels down upon the stones to crack them open and swooping to pick up the exposed food; Peter had laughed and said it was a hard way to earn one’s dinner. She remembered the great trunks of the wisteria which lined the terrace and burst into masses of softly purple bloom, and the jonquils which came out brilliantly gay and yellow.

But the present was Fiora lying back on the pillows with her eyes closed. The present was Peter sitting beside Fiora. The present was Blanche, upright and composed, her ankles neatly together; there was no lounging for Blanche. Her eyes looked rather pale and abstracted, yet Jenny felt that if she so much as moved a finger Blanche would know it. The present was waiting for police to investigate a prowler and a gunshot.

Jenny looked at Cal and he was looking at her. Unless she imagined it there was a kind of warning in his eyes, as if he wanted to say, Don’t get involved in this.

How
could
Fiora have failed to see someone standing in the pantry, someone with a gun?

It could have happened if that someone had managed to approach Fiora as she bent over the refrigerator.

Cal said abruptly, “Is anything missing? Was it a robbery?”

Peter gave him a deliberate look and rose. “I didn’t look.”

“I did,” Blanche said coolly. “There’s a bracelet and a necklace on Fiora’s dressing table.”

Fiora’s eyelids fluttered. “The rest of my jewelry is in the safe. In Peter’s room.”

“I’ll see,” Peter said and went at his usual solid pace out of the room. He was back in a matter of moments. “Nothing’s been touched. He must have got scared and got away. He must have been hiding on the back stairs and heard Fiora, thought she’d seen him, so he shot at her and escaped. That seems reasonable.”

“There’s a car,” Cal said.

It was the doctor. He was young, and unshaven at that hour, so he looked vaguely raffish and untidy. He also looked sleepy and a little unnerved, as well he might be, Jenny reflected, called out in the middle of the night to attend a gunshot wound.

“Sorry about this, Doctor,” Peter said, acutely sensing the young doctor’s weariness. “It was a prowler—thief, somebody got into the house.”

The young doctor’s face waked up. “Did you get him?”

“No, he got away. We’ve sent for the police.”

The doctor shook his head. “Too much of that around here. Big houses. Well, now let’s just see about it, Mrs. Vleedam.”

Mrs. Vleedam. It was the first time Jenny had heard Fiora called Mrs. Vleedam; she had always thought of herself as Mrs. Vleedam. Cal said, “Shouldn’t we get her into bed, Doctor? Wouldn’t it be simpler for you?”

“Yes, yes of course. Now if you can walk, Mrs. Vleedam.”

“Certainly,” Fiora said and rose briskly before she caught Blanche’s eyes, and suddenly sagged weakly against Peter. “Darling, carry me. I seem to be so dizzy and weak. I must have lost a great deal of blood.”

Peter caught her in his arms. The doctor said, “In that case, we’ll just give you a transfusion,” and carrying his black bag started for the hall.

Fiora gave a yelp. “Oh, no! I haven’t lost that much blood. I’m only—only weak.”

“Her pulse is strong,” Blanche said pleasantly.

The doctor paused to look at Blanche. “I understand you put on the bandage.”

Blanche smoothed out a nonexistent wrinkle over one knee. “Cal told you. Yes, I took a first-aid course.”

“Mmmm,” the doctor said and went out into the hall. Peter scooped Fiora up in his arms and carried her out. Cal followed and from the hall Jenny heard a little colloquy. Cal said, “Here, let me help—”

Peter said, “She’s not heavy.”

Fiora said rather crossly, “I’ll walk.”

That seemed to resolve it. There were the sounds of footsteps on heavily carpeted stairs.

Blanche sat very elegant and quiet as a cat at a mousehole. Jenny listened, too, and suddenly couldn’t stand it any longer. She couldn’t stand the sprawling depth of the lounge chair any longer either, so she hoisted herself out of it, went to another chair and lighted a cigarette. Blanche’s pale green eyes watched her for a moment. Then she sighed. “Dear Fiora. I’m afraid she’s being a little stubborn about this. It would be better if she would admit that by accident she shot herself.”

“SHE DIDN’T HAVE A GUN.”

“So she says.”

Jenny stared at her. “Do you doubt it?”

Blanche thought for a moment and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“It would be easy to find out.”

“How?”

“Why—why ask Fiora!”

Blanche smiled. “Cal did ask Fiora.”

“Well, then search for it—”

“In this house?” Blanche said again.

“Do you mean that you think Fiora really does have a gun and shot herself with it? And then she hid the gun somewhere?”

“I don’t say that—”

“I think you did.”

“I’ll be honest. It did occur to me because I can’t help thinking that if anybody had entered the house surely we’d have known it. I only wish Fiora had talked to me about whatever is troubling her.”

“You think that she did it intentionally. Why?”

“I cannot possibly imagine why. Unless she had some foolish little quarrel with Peter and—oh, wanted to arouse his sympathy or—I really can’t say. But poor Peter does look stricken.”

“If you mean he looks guilty or self-reproachful, he doesn’t.” He looks just as he always did, Jenny thought wistfully; just as attractive, just as strong and sure of himself.

Blanche shrugged. “I also think that Fiora’s going to stick to her story of somebody shooting her. Once Fiora makes up her little mind nothing will move her. You should know that,” Blanche said, stabbing neatly where it hurt.

She twisted the knife by saying quickly, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Jenny. I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for anything.”

Oh, wouldn’t you, Jenny thought. She said, “When the police get here they’ll find it—if Fiora really had a gun.” She picked up the crystal lighter absently and because it was a rabbit suddenly thought of Peter’s dog. She had gone to the kennels with Peter to buy him. During the past year she had been almost as homesick for the dog’s thudding feet as she had been homesick for the house. She said, “Where was Skipper when all this was going on?”