The Unsuspected (9 page)

Francis said, "That's quite true, sir."

"You will stay on . . . in the guest house?"

"Naturally," said Francis.

Chapter Eleven

Grandy s house stood on its own acre. It faced the westernmost street of the small city, a street that was almost like a country road, and its gardens spilled down a slope back of the house. Grandy said he had managed to have all the advantages of open country and yet escaped the need to do without city services. He claimed that his house was poised on the exact hairline of geographical wisdom. Grandy was full of theories about everything.

The house was not large. It was adapted to him. To the left of the hall ran his long living room, where he held court. On the south wall, a blister of glass was used for plants and porch furniture, and continued to the second story, where it became Grandy s exquisite

and rather famous bathroom. His kitchen—another famous room—was directly at the back of the house. His study was not large—a one-story piece of the house tucked in between the kitchen and the living room. The dining room lay north.

He ran the entire establishment without servants. In the kitchen, he would preside over a collection of quaint copper pots, garlands of gourds, strings of onions, mixed in among all the latest gadgets in chromium and glass. He kept there a chefs hat which he wore

seriously. Meals in his house were rituals in which the preparation of the food was just as important as the eating of it. He would bustle about and illuminate the proceedings with lectures in his fascinating voice. His lore, his stock of old wives' tales, was inexhaustible.

Mathilda came down in the green dress, and there he was in his cap, doing delicate last-minute things to the sauce. Oliver lounged against the wall. Francis was dusting glasses with a towel. Jane was setting the table.

Althea, on a high stool, was timing the spaghetti with Grandy's big round silver kitchen watch. She was still in her yellow gown—some soft silk with a wide skirt. She wore a lot of yellow. It was odd and striking on her. It gave a gold-and-silver effect and was arresting when black velvet would have been obvious.

Grandy came to embrace Mathilda. The big spoon waved back of her shoulder. He smelled of talcum and a little garlic. He beamed tenderly.

"Grandy," she murmured, close to his ear, "I need to talk to you. I have things to tell you." She knew it wasn't a good time, not with the sauce at the stage it was.

"I know," he crooned in her ear, "I know, dear, I know." Mathilda felt sure then that he did know. It didn't occur to her that he had been told, but just that he knew somehow. "After dinner," he murmured. "Let us be alone, eh?"

She was convinced that they must be alone while she told him. "Yes," she said eagerly, "alone."

He looked into her eyes. How anxious he was, how tender, how wise! Yes, he would know, of course. He sensed it already. She was quite safe. There was no hurry.

They trooped after Grandy, who carried the deep wooden bowl of spaghetti as if he held it on a cushion to show the king. But Grandy was the king too. There was candlelight. Mathilda at his left, then Oliver. Althea at the foot. Then Francis. Then Jane. Happy family. Mathilda felt gay. No hurry; and, meanwhile, it was all so terribly amusing.

There was Oliver, on her left. A mild man, married to dynamite, and he didn't know what to do, she could tell. He was a mild man, a little man, in spite of his size, a drifting kind of creature, willing to be available and kind. But he didn't know what to do about the

flagrant behavior of his bride. He fluctuated between stern anger and the determination to put his foot down, and another mood, a conviction of weakness and the tired thought that it didn't really matter.

But Althea, in all her glamour, was down at the foot, being a young matron with such amusing reluctance. And Francis, beside her, was looking very gloomy, very much subdued. Mathilda was glad to see it. She felt it was only just that he should have to sit

at the table with the ax hanging over his head.

At the same time, she felt a surge of violent curiosity about him. What was the man up to, this Francis Howard? What kind of man? Well-bred, you could tell at table. Really quite attractive, if you liked that dark type, that lean kind of face. "Fortune hunter." She

remembered her formula. She looked at his clothes. They were in expensive good taste. But if money wasn't his motive, what could it be?

She thought; angrily, as she'd been taught to,
All that stuff about my beauty. She thought. If he thinks he isn't going to be caught out in his lies— If he thinks I wont find out what's at the bottom of them—
She caught a suffering look from his dark eyes, and she smiled a little cruelly.

Francis asked Jane for the bread. The little blond girl looked as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Tyl's green eyes took stock of her.

Nobody had even mentioned Rosaleen. Rosaleen was gone, although she had sat on Grandy's right hand in her day.

But they began to ask Mathilda questions, and she left off her puzzling to tell the tidbits she'd saved for Grandy. About Mrs. Stevens' drinking spells. About Mr. Boyleston and his one eye at the bridge table. All at once it seemed funny and rather gay. Besides, it burned Althea up.

Down at his end, Grandy listened. And his black eyes were restless and shrewd. Once he said, "Poor Tyl" in the middle of the laughter and watched her face sadden obediently.

Francis saw it too. He thought,
Damn it, the kid looks intelligent. Can't she see what he does? He directs her. Plays on her feelings like an organ, the old vulture.
The beautiful bones of Mathilda's face haunted and reproached him. He was miserably tense and

unhappy. He wished the dinner were over. He wished he didn't have to sit here, looking soulful, when what he would really like to do was to smash in that beaming hypocrite's beaming face and snatch Mathilda and shake some sense into her, and then take Jane and get out of here. Damn such a game!

Althea's little foot was in his way under the table. He brought his own foot to rest, touching hers, and let it stay. Damn such a game, but if you have to play it, play it!

When Mathilda had done, Grandy went to work and changed the mood. He brought sea mist into the room, gray, fast, lonely danger, salty death. He made them remember the coral bones of those lost at sea. He told one of his favorite ghost stories.

Tyl began to look less vivid. She sobered and shrank. The wild mood, the free feeling ebbed away. After all, she was only poor Tyl, plain little Tyl, with all that money, who could never trust anyone very much. She'd have made a lovely ghost, a sad little green-eyed ghost with a broken heart and seaweed in her lank brown hair. She might have come to haunt them. She shivered a little. She saw Francis looking at her with scorn.

Scorn! From that quarter! She straightened her back. She said adoringly, "Oh, Grandy, it's so good to hear you talk!"

Francis trod on Althea's toe. "In the guest house. After dinner. Will you?” Her silver eyes were both surprised and delighted.

Chapter Twelve

"I think they just stepped out, Mr. Keane ," said Jane. Jane was the shy little outsider all the while, the one who made the obvious remarks and did the right thing.

Grandy looked at Mathilda, took the dish towel out of her motionless hands.

"Fine thing," Oliver said. He was trying to look very black. He seized on the state of Althea's health. "She had that cold. She oughtn't to be out."

Grandy said, "Poor Francis," gently, watching Mathilda.

She was wildly puzzled. Why was Grandy watching her so? What did it mean if Francis and Althea went out to the garden? Why "poor Francis"? Why Althea, anyway? She had a nightmarish feeling that the others knew what she did not know. She rejected it fiercely. Not so. It was she who knew and they who had been deceived. And the quicker she made it plain the better.

Grandy said, "Shall we—"

She thought he meant that they would talk now. “Yes, now," she said. But the doorbell rang.

"There now, answer the doorbell, Oliver. Please, dear boy. Who can it be?"

They went into the long room. Grandy took his chair by the fire. Tyl took her low chair at his feet. Jane, who had followed them, went a little aside, picked up a bit of knitting and put herself meekly into the corner of a sofa. It was just as if Grandy had composed the picture, directed the scene. Even the firelight flickered with just the proper effect. Luther Grandison at home. Curtain going up.

Oliver came in from the hall. "Its Tom Gahagen."

Gahagen was the chief of the detective bureau, a small, lean, nervous man with a tight dutiful mouth, but a friendly face. He listened with an air of waiting, while Grandy enlarged charmingly upon Mathilda's miraculous return from the sea. Then he said,

clearing his throat naively, "As long as I'm here, Luther, there are a few questions. I thought it would be all right just to drop in and talk it over. Didn't want to make it formal, y'understand?"

Grandy nodded. "About poor Rosaleen?" Then he appeared struck to the heart by his own forgetfulness. He took Mathilda's hand. "My dear child, forgive me. You don't know—"

"Francis told me," Mathilda said.

"That's your husband?"

Mathilda's eyes widened. She heard Grandy say smoothly, "Yes, yes, her husband. . . . What did Francis tell you, duck?"

"Just that she—" Mathilda couldn't continue. She was shocked because Grandy had said Francis was her husband. She'd had it in her head all along that Grandy, somehow, knew better.

Gahagen said, "Very sad, the whole thing. Sorry to bring it back to mind, but there's a point we've just come across. Funny thing, too."

Jane's foot in the small black childish shoe rested on the floor, but only the heel touched and the ankle was tight. No one could see Jane's foot. Her face was calm and her eyes cast down, watching her work.

"You remember," Gahagen went on, turning to Grandy, "that day, along about early afternoon, some of the newsmen got in here?"

"Yes, yes."

"Took your picture?"

"Did they not?" sighed Grandy. "Yes."

Gahagen's eyes went to the mantel above their heads. "One of those shots was right here in front of this fireplace. That clock's electric, ain't it?"

"Yes, of course." Grandy's voice was sirup sliding out of a pitcher.

Gahagen said, "I'd like to have a look at your fuse box, Luther. Want to see what arrangement you've got in this house."

“Why, Tom?"

The detective slipped away from Grandy's bright and friendly gaze. He chose to explain all this to Mathilda. "You see," he told her, and she couldn't wrench her eyes from his plain, kind face, "the girl got up on Mr. Grandison's desk in there. You know his ceiling hook—the one he had put in for hanging special lights? She—er—used that, y'see, and stepped off the desk, like." Tyl felt sick. "Well, it isn't pleasant to think about, but she couldn't help it—kicking, y'know. Her leg got tangled in the lamp on his desk, pulled it

over, wires came out of the bulb socket."

"So they did," said Grandy. He sounded politely puzzled.

"What we figure now," the detective said, "is that she must've blown a fuse. Blown a fuse when she kicked the lamp, see?"

"Is that possible?"

"Certainly. It's possible all right. Couple of bare wires, they're going to short-circuit. I'll tell you why we wondered. That electric clock up there was showing behind your shoulder in this picture, and it was all cuckoo. Gave the time wrong. It says twenty minutes after ten. And the picture was taken after two o'clock in the afternoon. We know that."

"The clock was wrong?"

"Lemme look at it, d'you mind?" The detective got up to examine the black, square modern-looking clock. "Yeah, see? This one is the old kind. It don't start itself."

Mathilda was near enough to Grandy to feel him suppress an impulse to speak. Oliver spoke up impatiently. "No, of course it doesn't. You have to start it after the currents been off. The new ones start themselves."

"Anybody cut the current off that morning?" asked Gahagen. "Was the master switch thrown at all, d you know?"

Oliver said, "Not that I know of."

"Nor I," said Grandy. He edged forward in his chair. "I'm not sure that I follow you, Tom. What are you getting at?"

"Gives us the exact time," the detective said. "That is, if it does. Y'see, there was no power failure that day anywhere in town. We've already checked on that. So it must have been something right here in the house made the clock stop, see? Now I'd like to look at

your circuits, eh? If this clock actually is hooked in on the same circuit as the study lamp, why—"

Again Grandy suppressed something. Tyl had a telepathic flash. Who'd told Gahagen about the clock and the circuits? The kind of clock it was, what circuit it was on? Because he wasn't wondering. He was checking.

"I don't understand," purred Grandy, "about the clock. But something's wrong with your thought, you see, Tom, because the lights worked."

"Yeah, we know." He nodded. "Lights were O.K. when we got here. So there's this question: Did anybody put in a new fuse?" Oliver was looking blank.