Miss Withers Regrets (2 page)

He looked towards the pool, dropped the sack, and started hurrying. Pat Montague, kneeling beside the pool, heard the sound of feet and looked up, his face gray and pasty. He had been prodding down into the water with a garden rake.

“Lose something, mister?”

Pat did not answer, and the old man came closer, squinting with moist and bloodshot eyes down into the greenish depths at the deep end of the pool, under the diving board. Staring back at him was the round white face of his employer, Huntley Cairns, under two fathoms of carefully warmed and heavily chlorinated water.

Somehow the two men raked and tumbled the body out on to the tiles. It was dressed in some weird and outlandish garment which seemed to be a combination corset and underdrawers, stiff with stays and tight elastic. Pat whispered through stiff lips: “He may not be dead. We could try first aid. Sometimes you can bring them back—”

The old man shook his head brusquely. His cracked, thin voice was commanding. “Never mind that,” he ordered. “You get in there and phone for an ambulance, do you hear?” He was pointing to the open door of a dressing room in the white bathhouse behind them.

If there was anything odd about the old man, except for his smell, Pat didn’t notice it then. It seemed to him the most natural thing in the world to follow orders. He rose and ran obediently into a long bare room with a shower at the far end, a room which he vaguely noticed was furnished with wooden benches and wall hooks, presumably meant to be used by the masculine guests of the household. A couple of bathing trunks hung on the hooks, a towel and a wet suit lay in a puddle on the concrete floor, and a bathrobe and some men’s clothing were spread out neatly on a bench.

The extension telephone hung on the rear wall, near the shower. Pat grabbed the receiver, jiggled the hook feverishly, and then heard the door slam shut behind him. It wasn’t the wind, either, because a second later there was the definite, final sound of a key being turned in the lock.

Even then Pat didn’t have the slightest idea of what was happening, or of the trap into which he had walked so willingly. He peered out of the one window, which was placed so that it gave only a glimpse of whitish-gray sky. The door was securely locked; he made sure of that. Dazed, he went back to the telephone again, but when he put the instrument to his ear he could hear the cracked, excited voice of the gardener. “… yes, Searles! I work days for Mr. Cairns. I said he was
murdered
—I caught a young fellow in the act, I tell you!”

The voice at the other end of the line was masculine and calm. “Somebody’ll be right out there. Can you keep him?”

“Sure, sure. I got him all right! But make it snappy.”

Pat stood there, a foolish, frozen grin on his face. He watched a daddy-long-legs doing acrobatics up the side of the wall. And then the impact struck him, a delayed-action bomb going off in his head.

It was he—Pat Montague—they were talking about!

He turned and threw himself breathlessly at the locked door. In spite of the fact that his technique was exactly the same as he had always seen in the movies, nothing happened. His shoulder began to throb numbly. He backed up, took a deep breath, and prepared to try again.

Then he suddenly froze in what must have been an exceptionally ridiculous position as the lock clicked. Light struck him in the face, and he saw that a girl stood there, silhouetted against the stormy sky. It was a girl whom Pat had not seen for years and would have been very happy never to have seen again.

Lawn, Lawn Abbott. Helen’s changeling kid sister, the queer coltish girl who always used to go around in a cowboy shirt, with blue jeans turned up almost to her bony knees and moccasins on her feet. Now she wore riding clothes, jodhpurs, which flattered her straight, almost feral young body. They were soiled and wet, and she held a light thin riding crop with a silver knob on the top.

The face which looked so blankly into Pat’s was cool and aloof as always, the scornful lower lip glistening red. She bit a fingernail thoughtfully.

Of all people to find him here, Pat thought bitterly, it would have to be Lawn, who had always hated him and done her level best to spoil his romance with her sister! He swallowed. This was all the bad luck in the world rolled up into a lump.

What made it more
fubar
than anything was the fact that he had never been able to reach her, to talk to her at all. She had always slipped away like quicksilver, a strange, medieval girl who looked right through him. But he had to talk to her now. He had to make her see what it would mean to Helen if he were caught here like this, with Cairns lying dead on the tiles.

Pat started making explanations, which really didn’t explain at all. But the girl just stared at him, the dark eyes—so like Helen’s but without her dream-weighted innocence—making a time exposure. Her eyebrows, the V-shaped, satanic eyebrows, were barely lifted. In some odd feline way she seemed to be enjoying this moment, savoring it to its last essence. Finally he ran down, not that he hadn’t more to say, but only because no sign of warmth or understanding lighted that bloodless Medici mask of a face.

Then she suddenly caught his hands in her hard, small brown ones, pulled him through the door, and thrust him down the hill, away from the house. Her voice was throaty, a deep contralto, and she spoke as though to a not-very-bright child.

“That way! Keep where you can’t be seen from the house. There’s the path I take to the stables, only you cut left just before you get to the shore. You’ll come out on the third tee of the golf course, and then keep right. The village is about a mile and a half.”

Pat tried to mutter something, but she caught him short, almost shoving him along as if possessed by some deep inner rage.

He started running, not pausing until he reached the shadow of the trees far below. Then he looked back and saw that Lawn Abbott was gingerly lifting the coat which the gardener had flung over the body of her brother-in-law. She didn’t look up or turn, but her hand gestured him impatiently on. The music from the big house continued, very softly, where someone was playing that most mournful of tangos:
“Adios muchachos, compañeros, de ma vida
…”

Pat turned and went on. Then, above the music and the hushing sound of the rain in the elms, he heard for the first time the faraway wolf call of the police sirens. It was a hunting call, and they were hunting him.

“I
SUPPOSE THAT WAS
my fault!” the thin pretty girl at the wheel of the convertible exploded, turning towards her husband. Midge Beale shrugged his hard, narrow shoulders. He was always nervous about Adele’s driving, mostly because he felt a deep though mute kinship with motors. She was always handling machinery as if she were angry at it, and a little contemptuous too, like a girl from the wrong side of the tracks suddenly made mistress of a big house and too many servants.

“You’d better stop,” he told her.

“Why should I stop, for heaven’s sake? I didn’t actually hit him, did I? And if you think I’m going to pick up every hitchhiker on the road …” Adele’s wide, thin-lipped mouth tightened under its generous layer of geranium lipstick, and she tossed her fluffy brown hair like an annoyed horse. “Probably just another discharged veteran thinking he’s entitled to free transportation.”

They swung around another corner and came out on the crest of the hill, leaving the elm trees and their shade behind. Spread out before them was a vast panorama of water and sky, with white fleecy clouds scudding along and a great thunderhead moving north towards Connecticut. Two sailboats, under light canvas, were beating their way around the point.

“I only suggested stopping back there because I thought I recognized that fellow you almost hit,” Midge said slowly.

His wife stared at him. “You mean somebody from the field?”

“No, my love. I thought he looked a lot like old Pat Montague.”

Adele’s mouth opened wide. “Pat? But he’s overseas in Germany or Austria or somewhere.”

“It may come as a great surprise to you,” Midge told her, “but they are even letting lieutenants out of the Army now.”

Adele thought about that, biting her lower lip with very white but somewhat prominent front teeth. “You’re probably just imagining things, darling. And if by some fantastic trick of fate it was really Pat, I’m certainly glad we didn’t stop. Do you think I’d want to appear at Helen Cairns’s housewarming with her old heart-throb in tow? That would be just a little too-too!”

Midge pointed out reasonably that he hadn’t wanted to appear at all. “If we really have to get drunk, why can’t we do it quietly at home?”

“Don’t be stuffy, darling,” Adele snapped. “Nowadays you can still dislike a man and drink his liquor. Otherwise our social life would be pretty limited, wouldn’t it? You’re certainly not jealous of Huntley, after all these years! Besides, he has a lot of connections, and he could help in getting you a different job.”

“There’s too much night work, working in the black market!”

“Oh, stop repeating gossip! Just because a man manages to get materials to build a new house and happens to get a new car before the rest of us …” Adele smiled. “Besides, Huntley is in some sort of public-relations work. Anyway, I was at Miss Prescott’s with Helen, and she’s a dear girl if you like that sleepy, almost bovine type. I couldn’t resist a chance to see her new house, could I? Helen always had no taste at all in decoration. I remember her room at school was just a hodgepodge of family pictures and sentimental souvenirs. I can’t wait to see the inside of the place.”

The outside of the place, salmon-pink and imposing, suddenly presented itself around a turn in the drive, and Adele hit the brakes sharply before turning in through the gateway. “Now, darling,” she begged, “for the love of heaven, don’t go shooting off your mouth as soon as we get inside. I mean about your wild idea that you saw Pat Montague. It probably wasn’t him at all but just somebody who looked like him.”

Midge promised. He was forcibly reminded of that promise a few minutes later, when as he was still nursing his first martini he heard his wife’s clear, brittle voice from the other end of the long, bare, functional-moderne drawing room. She was trilling at their hostess: “Helen, my dear! Just guess if you can who Midge thought he saw today right here in Shoreham! Give up? It was Pat, Helen, Pat Montague!”

Helen took it without even batting her wide, sleepy aquamarine eyes. Her beautiful, almost too-tranquil face blossomed into a smile, the little-girl smile that always started with a twist of her mouth. “Really? Dear old Pat. How was he looking? Was he still in uniform or—”

Then, without waiting for an answer, Helen picked up the martini mixer and refilled somebody’s glass, which really didn’t need it at all. With the greatest of poise she proceeded to set the massive crystal cylinder down on thin air about six inches from the edge of the blond-mahogany coffee table.

After the deluge it was of course Adele who sounded off with the first “Ohs” of sympathy. Across the room her husband looked at her dispassionately and wondered how it would feel to take that thin white neck in his hands and twist it. Just because of things like this.

But somehow the moment passed. The party wasn’t well under way as yet, and Adele and Midge were the only people here who had known Helen when she was Helen Abbott, the only ones who realized how Pat had once fitted into the picture.

They—and Thurlow Abbott, of course. But her father didn’t count; he hadn’t counted very much since the days when bootleg gin had done something to his vocal cords, ending his career as a matinee-idol tenor in musical comedy. At this moment he was down on his creaky though well-tailored knees, trying to be helpful and mopping at his daughter’s lime-green hostess gown with a napkin coyly printed in silver “Helen and Huntley.”

Adele moved away, and Midge came up quickly behind her. “That was a nice fox pass,” he said in a low voice. “All I can say, it’s a good thing Cairns isn’t here yet.”

“I found out, anyway,” Adele murmured, half to herself. But she wouldn’t tell him what.

Somebody at the canapé table said that their host had been kept late at the office and would be out on the five-o’clock. Meanwhile, with Helen swiftly disappearing upstairs to do something about another gown and some different eyeshadow, the guests rearranged themselves, scattering through the vastness of the lower floor and the paved patio outside. Midge stood aloof for a few minutes, like a man on a springboard looking down dubiously into troubled waters.

A handsome, coffee-colored youth in a white jacket went by, and he hailed him. “Martinis?”

“Yassuh! With olive or without olive?”

“Nope, no olives. Can’t stand ’em. I want mine without onion.”

The boy laughed politely.

“That wasn’t so very funny,” Midge said.

“Nossuh,” agreed the boy. He moved away, but Midge managed to grab a glass.

“And to think that I used to enjoy these rat races,” he said to himself. Then his eyes brightened as he saw a pair of incredibly luscious twins across the room, duplicate pinup girls come alive. Probably models, Midge thought. If he went over and paid court to them Adele would froth at the mouth for a week. Besides, they were a couple of inches taller than Midge was. It would also, he thought, be quite a job to get them separated.

Adele herself had clamped her hooks on to Harry Radebaugh, the dark-eyed, prematurely gray young surgeon who’d opened his own clinic in the village and had made so much money the first two years that he’d bought the old Bailey house and remodeled it. She was probably, Midge decided, entertaining him with an account of her insomnia. But she had eyes in the back of her head; he knew that from bitter experience. The twins wouldn’t be worth it.

He went over to the table again and made a Dagwood special for himself out of caviar, cream cheese with chives, sausage, and an oyster. It would probably be all the dinner he would get.

Then he looked up to see his host, Huntley Cairns, come hurrying into the room through the front doors. He was apologizing right and left, which was typical. Cairns was the sort of man who was always begging you to forgive him for shaking your hand while wearing a glove, or because the big car was laid up and he had to take you to the village in the station wagon, or because there wasn’t any cognac, there was only Scotch and bourbon.