The Unsuspected (25 page)

The rope went down with a loop at the end of it. Gahagen lay on the floor, looking over, calling encouragement and instruction.

Jane was a frozen bundle huddled at the brink. Her hand was flat on the dirty floor. Tyl thought,
How can she bear to get her hand so dirty?
 

Somebody called out from the big entrance way, and Oliver came running across the floor. He wound up, panting, "Cop told me! Where's Grandy? Tyl, what happened?"

Tyl thought,
No time for gossip.
 

"He fell."

Oliver's eyes bulged with horror.

Grandy was dangling now. They were pulling him out. He was rising from the pit on the end of the rope. They hauled him over the edge and he crumpled into a heap on the floor. His lids went down wearily.

“Fainted."

"No wonder."

"Oh, by the way, gentlemen," said Grandy's velvet voice calmly, "there's nothing in the trunk but some pieces of plaster, I think, and some old rags."

"My God, Luther, you're game!" cried Gahagen. "Good man!"

"After all," said Grandy wryly, “I was in the neighborhood." He turned his head, eyes closed, a tired old man.

Somebody laughed. Somebody swore. Somebody must have given a signal then, because the rumbling whispered out of silence, began and grew.

Oliver was kneeling at Grandy s side. He was the image of devotion. "Get a doctor," he demanded. "Get an ambulance."

"Nonsense, my dear boy," said Grandy, but his lids were trembling. He looked very sick. He was filthy and contaminated—fastidious Grandy! An old man, after all. He lay on the dirty floor.

"This'll be the end of him!" cried Oliver in despair. "Call a doctor, one of you! Hurry, can't you see! Tyl, snap out of it"

Tyl stood looking on. She had not fallen on her knees. She felt unable to bend or to move at all. She contemplated the image of devotion. She saw the puppet working to swing attention and concern. She saw Grandy lying filthy on the floor and the people all

beginning to swing, to center him.

The scene had nothing to do with her. She was alone, outside the circle and alone, suspended, lost. A puppet without strings would be as limp and lost. The bucket descended, to fall again at its work. She noticed that it had a weakness. She felt it was curiously repulsive that the great wicked tiling with its greedy mouth was so weak

at the neck. It had no neck, only cables. It fell weakly, and then it would nibble and chew and scrabble about, and gape and close and rise sternly, with the cable taut, to carry its load over the wall. Mathilda's eyes followed it.

Jane wasn't in the circle, either. That circle around Grandy, where invisible bands drew like elastic, where he was pulling them with the magnet of himself, and they were responding like iron filings.

Jane screamed. Jane got up from the crouching position and fastened on Blake s arm. "No, stop it! Don't let it start! You've got to look!"

"Look where, Miss?"

“In the trunk! In the trunk!"

"Mr. Grandison looked." The big arm rejected her.

"No, no, not Mr. Grandison! You can't trust him!"

"What do you mean, you can't trust—"

Oliver got up. "What the devil's the matter with you, Jane?" he asked severely.

"Francis is in that trunk! In a minute that thing is going to take it! Where does it take things? Where does it go?"

"The chutes. To the fires," somebody said.

"No!" Jane was nearly hysterical. "I tell you, you can't take his word! Any one mans word! You've got to stop that thing! Open the trunk! Let me see! Let me see inside!"

"Now, just a minute, miss. After all—"

"It's your duty!" she cried. Tears ran down her face. She was frantic.

Oliver said, "Slap her, somebody. Slap her in the face." His voice got shrill. "We've got to get Grandy out of here! He's a mess! Tyl!"

"Seems to me we've done our duty," Blake was answering. "Mr. Grandison saw what was inside the trunk. Now, miss—er—you don't know the trunk came from Press's house, do you? It could have come from anywhere in town. It's full of typhoid germs."

Tyl thought dully,
Grandy'll catch typhoid.
She was watching the bucket, on its way up now. It seemed to be working a little faster. The men who tended the fires wanted to get through and get home.

Jane said, “I know I can't make you believe he's lying. But he could be mistaken. You can't afford to take even that chance. Suppose he's mistaken? It's a man's life! Mathilda knows he was there in that house."

Tyl stirred. "Yes," she said dully. She thought,
If I can trust my own senses.
 

The bucket was dropping down. Its cables were slack. It fell with that disgusting weakness at the neck. It fell, it nibbled, it crept quite near. Quite near the old turtleback trunk that lay half buried. The buckets jaws were big enough to take it up—just about big

enough. Perhaps next time.

". . . nobody in the cellar."

". . . girl musta made a mistake."

Blake said impatiently, "Now, look, miss. If I thought there was any danger—"

"I don't care what you think! I know there's danger!"

Oliver said, "What's this about, anyhow? I wish somebody would—"

Jane said, "Don't take the time to tell him."

Maddeningly, Blake began, "This young lady—"

"Stop that thing, I tell you!" Jane's voice was ugly with her terror. "Stop it!" She tore her throat with the cry.

Gahagen said, "Aren't you a little bit hysterical?"

Oliver said, "For God's sake, with Grandy maybe dying—"

Grandy was just lying there, pale and wan, filthy, done in, so weary and ill and pathetic.

Jane s eyes turned in her head to catch sight of the bucket going up. Not yet had it got the trunk into its jaws.

Mathilda was alone. She knew they were all gathered around Grandy, who lay so dramatically exhausted at their feet. She could hear voices talking, talking, and Jane arguing, reasoning, pleading. And the bucket was coming down again.

She heard Jane cry, "Somebody help me! . . . Mathilda, help me!”

One would have to answer such a cry.

But Grandy stirred, and she heard his voice, "Where's Tyl?" It carried through every other noise, that beloved voice, so rich and tender. "Where's my duckling?" he said. He called her to him. "Is she all right?" That was his anxious love. "Tyl, darling."

Mathilda's head turned. His hand was out, waiting for hers to slide within it. Appealing to her. Confident of her. His darling. Yes, of course, she was his darling.

She saw something on the floor. It was as if there was an explosion inside her head.

She gasped, put out her hand. "Oh, please . . . please." The words rose out of her throat to join Jane's. Then she thought,
Talk, words. Words wont do it. What's the use of talking?
For Jane had been talking; Jane was still begging them, weeping, pleading. But Grandy, lying on the floor with his eyes shut, was too strong.

Mathilda's body was taut now, and it felt strong and alive. Leaning a little forward, she said, quietly, aloud, "If Francis is down there, it's got to stop."

She flung up her arms. For a second she was poised in the air, a Winged Victory indeed. Then she had done it. She was falling, falling. She struck the soft, rotten, evil heap. She had leaped. She was down in the pit.

Above, men were shouting again.

Oh, yes, now the bucket would not come down. Mathilda smiled. She'd stopped it. She'd stopped it quickly the only way. In a moment or two, she struggled up and began to wade, as Grandy had done. She toiled and struggled. It was nightmarish, that journey through the evil muck. Her hand reached the trunk, touched its hard surfaces. Both hands now were at the lock.

From above, they saw what she was trying to do, and they saw her fail. They heard her when she called to them. Heard her cry when she said, "I can't! The trunk's locked! It's locked!"

"Locked?"

Gahagen looked at Blake, and he looked down where Grandy lay, rolled on his side now, peering over. Grandy's big, thick-knuckled hand on the curb, the rim of the pit, tightened, loosened.

Down in the pit, where the fumes rose and overpowered her, Mathilda fainted.

Chapter Thirty-three

 Mathilda was bathed, scrubbed, scented and immaculate. She lay on the couch by the fire, wearing a coral-colored frock. Her legs were lovely in her best sheer prewar stockings. Her feet were comfortable in gold kid mules. Her hair had been washed and

brushed until it shone. It was tied back with a coral ribbon. She looked very young and a little pale.

Jane was sitting on the little low-backed chair, the skirt of her brown dirndl spread around her. A bracelet slid on her arm where she propped up her chin. Oliver was back a little, with his face in shadow.

These three were silent, listening to what Tom Gahagen and Francis were saying, trying not to think about what had happened to Grandy. Grandy was dead.

It was not yet certain whether or not from natural causes, whether his arrogant spirit had arrogantly fled from the prospect of disgrace by some hocus-pocus of his own will and device, perhaps by poison, or whether an old mans heart had been unable to stand the various excitements and had literally broken.

Anyhow, he was dead. There would be no legal aftermath. No long-drawn-out, sensational trial. It was all over really. Except the chase after Press and his wife. They would be caught and explode into headlines. Yes, it was all over but the headlines. And they, too, would pass.

Francis was not only alive and well, but looking extremely handsome in a soft blue country-style shirt without any tie. Shaved. Shampooed. His hair looked crisp and still damp.

They were, perhaps, the cleanest group of people gathered anywhere at that given moment. Mathilda had the thought. But she didn't smile. Her whole heart ached. Pale and quiet, she lay, and although she listened, something inside kept weeping, not for the shell of Grandy, who lay somewhere in the town, but for the Grandy who had never lived at all, for the Grandy that never was, the one she'd loved.

With the one she'd loved went everything she'd known. All gone. She could not yet be sure what anyone was, what anything was like. She'd seen the world through Grandy's eyes. That world was gone. Even his chair they'd pushed away. The long room was his no more. It was a strange room in a strange house where she'd always been a stranger.

Gahagen said, "He never made as much money in the theater as people thought. You see what he did? The head of the firm that handled the estate for Frazier, he died. So Grandy got into disagreement with the juniors and took the business away. So there was nearly two years when the fortune was fluid, and Grandy was handling things himself, buying, selling, changing things around.

While he had everything confused, he must have managed to transfer a pretty big hunk of the stuff into his own name. Then he gave the business to a new firm. How would they know she'd been robbed? But I can't figure out how you ever got on the track of such a thing from the outside."

"Jane had a letter," said Francis. His dark eyes were somber and troubled. "It was little Rosaleen Wright who got on to it." Mathilda's heart ached.

"I don't suppose we'll ever know exactly how," said Francis in that sad, patient way. "But she was here when Mathilda turned twenty-one and made her will. Maybe then—"

Mathilda said, "They did work on it a long time, the lawyer and Rosaleen. He wouldn't."

"Grandy wouldn't?" Somebody said the name she couldn't say.

"He said financial matters were too dull. He said it was a paper world." She turned her face to the inside of the couch.

"Maybe Rosaleen wondered why the records didn't go all the way back to your father's death," said Gahagen.

"She wouldn't have been fooled," said Jane suddenly. "There was something terribly honest about Rosaleen."

"You knew her well?" said Gahagen sympathetically.

"She was my cousin," Jane said. "We all grew up next door to each other."

"You never did think she killed herself?"

"No," said Jane. "And now I can imagine how he did it. I can imagine how he'd have asked her to write out that suicide note. He'd have made it seem plausible. He'd have—"

Mathilda closed her eyes.

Jane's voice was a knife.

"—maybe said to her, I'm experimenting, dear child.' There'd be that hook up in the ceiling. He'd have said he was trying to understand one of his old crimes. He could have got everything ready right under her eyes, because he'd have been talking, the way he

talked, all the time."

Mathilda shuddered. The spell was broken. She could see now that he'd been a spellbinder. She could feel a shadow of the spell.

Oliver said, with a whine in his voice, "I wish you people had come to me. I could have helped you. Althea did tell me about that Burn tenderly' business. I was your missing witness, if you'd only known. I didn't know that you needed a witness. We just didn't get