The Unsuspected (13 page)

Grandy's beautiful bathroom, a bubble of glass and luxury, had been designed and built for him by one of his famous friends, an architect of the modern school. It had been installed for some four years. Before that, Grandy had for his own the bath between his room and the garden room, which bath now served the garden room alone. The connecting door to Grandy's room had been locked and forgotten.

So it was that Jane, sitting in the dark with her eye to the faintest crack at the edge of her own door,k where she had just not quite closed it, saw Grandy come out of Mathilda's room, the gray room, go up toward the front of the house and enter his own place. She did not see him come out again, as indeed he did not, for she watched until dawn.

But Althea, gargling her throat, heard his tapping on the locked and bolted door.

“Grandy?”

“Slip the latch, chickabiddy. Are you decent?”

Althea slipped the latch. “I'm decent,” she said sulkily.

He stood in the half-open door, looking at her with a worried frown. “Oliver?”

“Oh.” Althea slashed at the rack with her towel. She had a white satin negligee pulled tight around her hips. The wide sleeves were embroidered in silver. "We had a fight. A regular knock-down, drag-out."

Tm so sorry" said Grandy. "So sorry, dear."

"Hell get over it," she said. She looked angry to the point of tears.

"Was it because of Francis?"

"Such stupid nonsense!" cried Althea.

"He thought-"

"I don't know what he thought, but I can guess. Just because I wouldn't tell him what we were talking about."

"But why not, chicken?" Grandy moved in a little, all benevolence, all loving concern.

"I might have told him if he hadn't been so nasty." She sniffed. "Oliver gets on a high horse and he's just unbearable."

"Then it wasn't a secret?"

“I don't know," she said thoughtfully. A funny cruel little smile grew on her sulky face. "You know, Tyl's a sly one."

"Tyl?" Grandy showed his innocent surprise.

"Francis didn't tell me much," she said, "but he's all upset." She turned away to reach for her lotion. Grandy didn't move. "Such a lot of jealous nonsense!" she stormed. "So Oliver's gone of for the night, and let him! It'll do him good! After all, if Francis wanted me to talk to him, why shouldn't I? Francis isn't very happy."

"Why shouldn't you, indeed?" murmured Grandy mildly. "But you're upset now, chickabiddy, and you mustn't be. It spoils your pretty face."

Althea looked into the mirror.

"Better sleep " said Grandy gently. "Better try to sleep it all away."

"I know," she said. She turned to him repentantly. "Oh, Grandy, you're such a sweet—"

"I want you to sleep well," he said, petting her. One hand on her silver hair, he reached in his pocket with the other. "Some of your little pills, darling? They'll help you."

"Yes," she said. "Grandy, sometimes Oliver's so stupid."

"There," he said. "There. There are these little adjustments."

She took the pills childishly, a lot of them. He held the glass of water for her. She turned to dry her lips. "I hope I don't dream."

Grandy went around the sides of the glass with a towel slowly. He put the glass in her hand. Automatically, she set it in its place.

"Latch the door, chickabiddy. Sleep well." His beaked, beaming face, alight with loving-kindness, remained in the door a brief moment.

"You, too, Grandy," said Althea affectionately. She flicked the latch.

Grandy slept well enough. Jane s head ached where she rested it against her door. Francis, in the garden, was cold. Mathilda had dreams. Oliver, down at the country club, couldn't sleep at all. Althea slept and dreamed no more.

Chapter Seventeen

The sudden and unexpected death of Althea Conover Keane, caused by an overdose of sleeping tablets, was called an accident Tom Gahagen was handling the case himself. He had them all together in Grandy's study, late that morning. All. that is. But Jane Moynihan, who had gone off to New York early. She had been on her train before Oliver came home. It was, of course, Oliver who came home in the morning and, finding it impossible to waken his wife by pounding on the locked bedroom door, had got in

through a window finally, and found what there was of her.

Grandy sat behind his desk, and Mathilda's heart ached for him as, indeed, it also ached for poor white-faced Oliver, for poor Althea, for the dreary day, for herself, for everything. Grandy's hands shaded his face and he kept looking down at the polished wood, too desperately sad to raise his eyes, even to answer questions.

In this privacy, Gahagen at first said he assumed it was suicide. There was the fact that she had locked herself in, locked the hall door after Oliver when he had left her, about midnight The connecting bathroom door to Grandy's room was bolted, and had been for years. She was securely locked in. She had wanted to be alone. The stuff she had taken was available there in her medicine cabinet. Althea had been fond of dosing herself. Locked in alone, obviously she took the stuff herself.

Added to this was her note. "Darling. Forgive me, please do," it read, and it was signed boldly with her big sprawling "Althea," of which the last two letters trailed off insolently, as if she assumed it wasn't necessary to be legible. Everyone would know.

A sad and cryptic little note, it was. Francis had found it on the floor, after Oliver had got in through the window and cried out and opened the door, and Grandy had rushed in to stand by the bed and look down at her. In all the confusion, Francis had seen the paper fluttering at Grandy's slippered feet, stirred, no doubt, by the breeze of his passing.

"Now, I'm mighty sorry," Gahagen said, "but I've got to ask you if anybody knows why she'd have wanted to do a thing like this?" The silence fell in a chunk, as it did here, in this unnaturally sound-proofed atmosphere. "What did she mean— 'Forgive me?"

Tyl thought,
But that was what she always said.
She remembered Althea's easy, charming "Forgive me's." Something she, herself, could not say at all. The phrase sounded to Tyl, in her own mouth, pretentious and wrong. For Althea it had been so easy. "Forgive me for not telephoning yesterday." "Forgive me for splashing your dress." "Forgive me for not listening." Gahagen wouldn't know how trivial a matter could call out that phrase. She felt too heavy to make the effort to tell him so.

"Who's the note meant for?" he was insisting. "Who's 'darling'?"

Oh, anybody
, thought Tyl.
Everybody.
 

Grandy answered as if he tolled a bell. "Surely she meant 'Forgive me for what I am about to do.' God help me, I was afraid."

"Afraid?"

"I don't like to say this now. Yet it's all I can think of. It obsesses me. I had a warning "

"What do you mean, Luther?"

"Premonition. The house felt wrong. She was not right. Not herself." Grandy took off his pince-nez and rubbed his nose. The homely gesture punctuated his talk. It was as if he'd made a homely gesture to reassure himself.

"Was it something she said, Luther?"

"No, nothing she said. Nothing she did. Nothing I can describe. It was . . . the lurking death wish that lies so secretly in the heart. . . . Oh, my house," groaned Grandy, "my poor tragic house." Tyl felt the world would come apart at the seams.

"Sorry, Luther," said Tom Gahagen. "You know I'm sorry. Got to ask a few questions, get it straightened out." He shifted uneasily.

Grandy said, "Don't mind me, Tom." Then, in tones of pure heartbreak, "I am wondering, of course, what I ought to have done that I left undone."

"Aren't we all?" said Francis in a queer, harsh, angry voice. It was as if he'd been rude. Grandy's gentleness reproached him.

Oliver said monotonously, "We had a quarrel, a dumb, jealous quarrel. She'd been out in the guest house with Howard, and I didn't like it So we said a lot of bitter, nasty stuff and I slammed out of here. She wouldn't tell me what they'd talked about, and I wanted to know. I thought it was my business. She said it wasn't."

The careful voice broke. "It couldn't have been over me that she did it. Because I didn't matter that much to Althea, and that's the truth."

It didn't sound like Oliver. He'd been shocked into honest humility. Tyl could have wept for him.

Gahagen looked at Francis. "What were you and Mrs. Keane talking about so long?" he asked with cold precision.

Francis said, "She was in no suicidal mood."

"What d'you mean?"

"She was in no suicidal mood." He repeated his statement quietly. "I spent a good while last evening talking to her, and I would have known."

"What were you talking about?"

Francis shrugged. "As a matter of fact, I was telling her my troubles, and she was very kind," he said smoothly. "And she was not thinking about suicide."

Gahagen's glance passed from one young man to the other. His thought was transparent on his tight face. A triangle. Jealousy. Trouble. No way to get to the bottom of it.

Grandy said softly, "We can't be sure that note was not just a note she'd written some other time. Perhaps this was an accident.... Is that possible, Tom?"

Gahagen examined this soft suggestion and thought he understood it. Some tangle of emotions here that could not be publicly explained.

Mathilda spoke up at last. "Althea did use that phrase, 'Forgive me,' such a lot"

"She did. She did," murmured Grandy. "You're right, Tyl. So she did."

"You don't think it was a suicide note at all?" Gahagen sounded tentative, as if he might, in the end, take their word for it.

Grandy said, "Not necessarily. Quite possibly, it wasn't.”

Francis said coldly—almost as if he knew, Tyl thought—"She didn't commit suicide, Mr. Gahagen."

"Then you think it was an accident?"

Francis didn't answer.

But Oliver's new and bitter voice said without drama, "I'd rather think so."

There was one of those silences.

"She was," said Francis firmly, insistently, even loudly, "in no more suicidal mood than Mathilda is right now."

Heads turned. What an odd thing to say! Gahagen's brows made puzzled motions.

"I'd like you all to look at Mathilda," said Francis easily. That is, his voice was easy; his arm, hanging over the back of the chair he sat in, was dangling with an effect of being relaxed. But there were two hard little fines near his mouth that Jane would have recog-

nized.

"Why should we look at Mathilda?" purred Grandy. He had himself looked up at last. His black eyes were narrow behind his glasses. He looked wary and alert and as if he were listening hard, trying to hear more than Francis' quiet voice as it went on.

"Because I don't care for these suicidal rumors," said Francis. I don't like premonitions after the fact. I want all of you to look very carefully at Mathilda, and if you see anything . . . ominous, then let us arrange to take very good care of her." Francis opened his hand,

looked at the palm, turned it over, let it fall. "Since two pretty young girls have died in this house," he said, "I'd just as soon there wasn't any third one. So take a good look at Mathilda now. And if she's in a dangerous mood, let's have nurses in and watch her. Let's

take no more chances."

There was silence—rather a strained silence. Tyl shook her head. "I don't understand."

"You want to live, don't you? You're not depressed? Not brooding? Not low? You feel well? You're young and looking forward? You've got something to live for?" Francis barked questions at her harshly, angrily. "You don't want to die?"

"Of course I don't want to die! I don't know what you're talking about!" She was so angry she stood up without knowing she had done so. With her head thrown back, her chin up, eyes bright, her breath drawn with indignation, her lovely figure taut and poised, she was most vividly alive.

"Now, Mrs. Howard—" Gahagen began soothingly.

Mathilda flashed around to face him. She would have said she was not Mrs. Howard, but Grandy was around his desk and beside her suddenly, and his hands on her shoulders were quieting and warning her. "There, duckling, there. Francis worries. Naturally. Naturally. You mustn't be angry." He turned to Gahagen. "I think he's made a point," he said. "We could not possibly say there was any mood at all. I can't condemn—" Grandy's voice broke a little. "I dare not damn Althea with a piece of imagined nonsense which may have been my own mood after all. And if we can't say for sure, Tom, ought we not to say it was an accident?"

"That—er—note—" began the detective.

"Such a strange little note," said Grandy. "So vague. So meaningless. I fancy she's written such a note to me or Oliver many a time. And as long as we do not know her reasons or even whether she had any, need we mention any note? To—to people? Frankly, Tom"—Grandy compressed his lips—"I don't want to hear them speculating. I don't want to hear their guesses. I don't want to know they're wondering why Althea wanted to die. For myself, I would rather believe Althea left us accidentally. I do earnestly believe that she loved and trusted us enough to wish to stay."