The Late Clara Beame (8 page)

Laura sighed. “That explains it, then. Everything sounds queer in the night.”

Laura dressed hurriedly, for the little stove did not give off much heat. She chose a thick tweed skirt and a sweater, brushed her hair and touched her pale lips with lipstick. “Why did it have to be so stormy, darling? If it were nice, David and Alice would be walking all over the country and we — ”

“Could have had a little time to ourselves.”

Hand in hand, they walked downstairs, Henry carrying the stove. The hall was flickering with candlelight. Henry took the stove into the dining room, which was in total darkness, and Laura waited for him to return. Everything seemed to have been explained. But still, there had been something, there still was something, that did not quite fit all the smooth explanations. She knew eventually she would remember what it was. Henry came into the hall. “Now, smile; that’s my girl.”

The men stood up when Laura came in, smiling with determined brightness.

“Why doesn’t one of you give Laura a drink,” Alice suggested. “She needs it.”

“I will,” David offered. “Martini?” John Carr smiled at Laura and her spirits rose. The nightmare was over.

And when John walked with her to the tree, she was vivacious in telling him the story of many of the ornaments. Alice listened, remembering again bitterly that all this was Laura’s now. She glanced up to see that John had returned to the fireplace and was watching her seriously. There was something about his expression that touched her. It was as though he knew her thoughts.

No one mentioned the shooting episode at dinner that evening. They talked instead of the storm. Henry told his guests: “Until it calms down, they don’t do too much about the lines. They expect that we residents have had the intelligence to fortify ourselves with auxiliary systems — oil lamps and candles — so we can wait it out. But we had no need of anything, until this year.”

“I’d think,” Alice commented, “that with a house in town you’d stay there all winter.”

“We’ve rented it,” Henry replied. “We needed the money.”

“You needed the money,” Alice began. Then she saw that Laura was embarrassed. “Henry insists we live on his salary, and we do,” Laura said shyly.

“Noble,” David commented. “Keeping his self-respect. Really heroic.”

“Anything wrong with that?” Henry asked.

“No. But what are you two saving it all for?”

“Our children,” Henry answered simply.

“Any on the horizon?” David asked with interest.

Henry smiled at Laura reassuringly. “Not yet, I’m afraid. But soon. After all, Laura had quite an experience last summer.” He looked directly at David, who was carefully cutting his steak. “She might have been killed. Isn’t that so, David?”

David looked up. “Sure, she might have been killed. I knew, as a doctor, how badly she was hurt. Concussion, as well as everything else.”

“Please, let’s not talk about it.” Laura was ill at ease. “We’ve got the whole future.”

“Yes, indeed,” David agreed.

But Henry pursued the subject. “I’ve often wondered about the ropes on the swing. You see, when I was alone the day before, I sat in the swing, myself, and I weigh at least fifty pounds more than Laura does. I wanted to find out what was so fascinating about the swing to Laura. I’d never been on one before, so, I stood up, and swung. ‘Way out.” He paused. “And nothing happened.”

“That’s what probably did it,” David remarked casually. “If you hadn’t reverted to your second childhood, and caused the old strands to loosen, Laura wouldn’t have gone through what she did.” He smiled. “The day after, I looked those ropes over, myself. Particularly the broken one. Raveled away into threads. A little more, and you’d have gone sailing into the trees yourself, Hank.”

“I’m glad it was me,” Laura added quickly. “Just so nothing happens to Henry.”

There was a sudden silence. Both David and John regarded her gravely. Henry neatly cut the meat from the steak bone. “I wish it had happened to me. I could have stood it better than you, Laura. Now, let’s forget it.”

The rest of the evening went smoothly. Alice and the three men played bridge, and Laura picked up a current best seller, but soon the print blurred. She waited for a pause in the bridge game, and then stood up. “I know I’m being a bad hostess, but I’m not feeling too well. Please excuse me. No, Henry, don’t get up.”

They watched her go, and then as she climbed the stairs she was assailed by a truly devastating sense of desolation. She forced herself to walk faster. She lit the candle in the bedroom, and undressed quickly. The sheets were icy cold and the windows were covered with frost, which glittered in the candlelight. It was an old candle, twisted and red, left over from last Christmas. Laura remembered that she hadn’t asked Mrs. Daley how many candles were left. I’m afraid to ask, she told herself, smiling a little. She decided to be reckless and let the candle burn for Henry. The old grandfather clock downstairs chimed midnight. Thinking that it was Christmas Eve now and that surely the plows would be out by morning, she drowsed into sleep.

It seemed only a short time later when she awoke, with a sharp pain in her stomach, a cramping, tearing pain, followed by acute nausea. She sat up, retching, and then dragged herself out of bed and staggered into the bathroom, where she was violently ill. She cried out, loudly, again and again, in terror.

Immediately there was the sound of running footsteps on the stairs, and Henry rushed into the room, followed closely by David. “Here,” Laura sobbed from the bathroom. “I — I was sick.” Suddenly she bent double, as the pain returned. David pushed Henry aside roughly and looked. “Blood,” he said, and swinging Laura up into his arms, he carried her to the bed. “Get me some salt, fast! And hot-water bottles! Hurry up! Don’t stand there like an idiot!”

Henry stood blankly, his face without color, his eyes glassy. He caught the side of the bathroom door. “You damned fool, hurry!” David shouted, pulling the blankets over Laura. “She’s been poisoned! Alice! Everybody! Come here quick!”

Laura, only semiconscious now, seemed to be in a whirl of pain. She kept drifting into darkness, and when she did so she felt her face being slapped hard. Someone was making her drink something salty, warmish, abominable, although she protested faintly. She was terribly cold, and hardly felt the hot-water bottles against the bared flesh of her stomach. Hands were all about her, and there was the blurred sound of voices and movement. Several candles had been lit, or at least there was light. It was Henry who was holding her, smoothing her hair. Then she was sick again.

She couldn’t see their faces; they were merely bobbing outlines in the light. It was Henry who whispered, “Don’t be afraid.” She felt a prick in her arm, then hot coffee, scalding and black, was brought to her lips. “No,” she whimpered, “please.”

“Drink it!” Alice’s voice was stern. “Every drop. Hold her head.”

Then, out of the blur of darkness and light, she heard David curse, close to her ear, and the pain began to recede. Hard fingers were at her wrist, feeling for her pulse. “Better,” David confirmed, out of the world of swimming lights and darkness.

“Shouldn’t you make her walk, or something?” a man’s voice asked, somehow familiar.

“You’re thinking of drugs,” David answered. “This wasn’t a drug. I have my suspicions. But what she needs now is sleep.”

There was another prick in her arm.

“Close?” said the man’s familiar voice.

“Too damn close,” David answered.

The pain ebbed away. She was unutterably weary and longed for sleep. “Henry,” she murmured. “Don’t worry.” The candles burned on. Once she woke, covered with perspiration. She felt a fresh, warm cloth against her forehead. With a sigh of contentment, she fell into a deep sleep.

Haggard and disheveled, the three men were sitting downstairs around a fresh fire with their drinks. It was half past five in the morning.

“She’ll be all right now,” David told them, filling his glass again. “She’ll just sleep off the injections I gave her. Lucky I never go anywhere without my bag.”

He looked at John Carr, who was sitting in silence, his lean face tense. Henry lay sprawled in his chair, utterly dejected.

“I think,” David said, “that we should have a talk. First, let me make this plain. Laura was poisoned. I think I know what it was. A lethal dose of arsenic.”

“No,” Henry said, shaking his head.

“Yes. The next point is, when did she get it?”

“It’s impossible,” Henry argued. “She’s been nervous for months. But she wouldn’t — ”

“Laura’s always nervous,” David said brutally. “I’ve never known her but what she’d go to pieces if you said boo to her. She’s alone too much up here. But, let’s get back to the subject. For one, I don’t believe she took the poison deliberately. She got it — accidentally. I can’t see Laura trying to kill herself. If she had tried she wouldn’t have screamed like that, and brought us running.”

“Perhaps,” Henry commented, in a broken voice.

“Where did she get the poison? How was it — administered?”

“Administered?” Henry asked, bewildered. “How? We all ate what she had.” He stirred suddenly and pushed himself up painfully in his chair. “She had a drink. I made it for her.”

“No, I did,” David corrected him. “And I drank from the same bottle. So, it wasn’t in that.”

“We all had the same food,” Henry reflected. “All the same food. Nothing different.”

John looked at David. “Let’s get Mrs. Daley and her niece.”

“They’ve hardly been in bed two hours,” David pointed out. “Let them sleep.”

“No.” There was authority in John’s voice. “We’ve got to do it now.” He stood up and walked wearily into the hall and then slowly climbed the stairs. Henry, overcome with fatigue, dozed in his chair. His usually ruddy face was pale, and there were black shadows under his eyes.

David watched him for a moment, and then went to the portable bar, which no one had as yet removed. He took a sip of every bottle. Frowning, he came back to his chair, and sat down.

Someone here is a little quicker than we are, he thought bitterly.

When John came down, pushing the protesting Mrs. Daley and Edith in front of him, David looked at them closely. Both were clad in shapeless bathrobes and had their hair in curlers. Mrs. Daley. She had been with Aunt Clara for years. The old lady had left her two thousand dollars. Not much, for a couple of decades of service. Edith had not been here during the time Clara Beame had been alive. So that ruled her out. Or, did it?

“I don’t know what we can say, or do,” Mrs. Daley told them, falling into a chair. “I’m just — What’s the matter with Mr. Frazier?”

“Out like a light. He can’t take these things. Don’t mind him. Mrs. Daley, I wouldn’t have called you down just for a chat. Has Mrs. Frazier been depressed lately?”

But it was Edith who answered, in her sullen voice: “
Has
she! Mooning and crying all over the place. And talking to empty chairs, and standing in the hall talking to no one there.”

“Edith!” Mrs. Daley warned her.

The young woman lifted her head. “I don’t care. I know she’s crazy. She keeps saying to chairs, ‘Aunt Clara?’ I heard her, day before yesterday, and that ain’t the first time. And then I heard her crying to Mr. Frazier, about the baby she lost. Over and over, crying. She said, other night, and I heard her, ‘The baby would now be up in his crib tonight. His first Christmas.’ Mr. Frazier’s sure had it hard since last summer. Always calling her up and telling her to cheer up. But she won’t go nowheres any more.”

“Is all this true, Mrs. Daley?” David asked.

The woman hesitated. “Well,” she said, shooting a sharp look at her niece, “I don’t know that I should be talking about Mrs. Frazier, anyhow.”

“Just answer me. Is it true?”

“Well, yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Not that it means anything. She just adores Mr. Frazier; lives for him. And him for her, too. Never saw anything like it. Married five years, and like honeymooners. You can’t blame a girl, having a broken head and leg, and losing her baby. She’s the lonesome kind. She wanted that baby.”

David said in a hard voice: “Mrs. Daley, think very carefully before you answer. Do you think Mrs. Frazier is the kind who would commit suicide, a young woman who loves her husband and who can have other children?”

“No, I don’t,” Mrs. Daley stated promptly. Then she looked down at her hands. “Well, you want my honest answer. She was almost out of her mind for weeks last summer. She wanted to die. She never did seem to get over it.”

“And you think, now, that she might have tried to kill herself?”

Mrs. Daley winced, tried to meet David’s eye, failed. “Well, she’s kind of tenderhearted. Cries easily. Things upset her, little things. She cried for a day when she found a dead bird, old bird, too, probably died of old age. Even Miss Beame, who was like a grandmother to her, would get mad because she cried so much. Always clinging to everybody, like she was lost. A frightened little thing. She went to school in New York, and every weekend she begged not to be sent back. She wanted to stay here. She was what they call — ”

“Unstable?”

“Well, nervous. Wanted to be alone, and then when she was alone for a little while, she’d come running out to the kitchen. She was sick two months when Miss Beame died. I thought she’d lose her mind.”

Edith snorted. “ ‘Lose her mind!’ She never had one, I’d say. I snapped at her once, and she looked like death.”

“That’s because she couldn’t stand people being mean!” Mrs. Daley retorted with spirit.

John and David looked at each other. “Just two more questions, Mrs. Daley. Was Mrs. Frazier in New York recently?”

“Yes. She went down to see her lawyers about something.” Again Mrs. Daley hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know. Guess it doesn’t matter what I say now. It was to deed over this house to Mr. Frazier. For a Christmas present.”

“Oh,” David said quietly. “He knew about it?”

“He did not!” Edith exclaimed. “I heard them fighting about it when she told him. He said she had to call her lawyers right away and stop it! That was the night before you came, Dr. Gates. He was real mad. Shouted how he didn’t want any of her money, and she’d got to live on his salary.”