Date with Death. Leslie Ford
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1949, 1976 by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
*
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
CHAPTER 1
The young man lying at the end of the pier, over the moonlit water of the creek, adjusted his lank loose-jointed frame to cooperate with the uneven oak plank under him and shifted his pipe to the other side of his wide mouth. The Llewellyn setter stretched out beside him raised his head and thumped the boards with his feathered tail.
Jonas Smith M.D. put his hand out. “Not yet, boy. It’s our last night. Look at that moon. Just look at it, boy. Where’s your soul? Don’t you like solitude? You’re as bad as Agatha.”
The dog put his head down between his paws again. Jonas Smith drew a long satisfying breath, filling his lungs with the cool soft fragrance of pine and swamp magnolia as his soul was filled with all the intangible loveliness of marsh and woods, fields and moonlit water in the Spring. He was happy; he had never been anywhere near so happy when he was in love with Agatha Reed as he was now, out of love with her. What a break, he thought, for both of them, that they hadn’t waited too long to find it out. In less than the month since it had happened she had faded almost completely out of his mind, coming back only when something happened that reminded him of her lacquered unyielding conformity. Agatha was beautiful, but Agatha was a snob. Agatha laughed but Agatha had the sense of humor of a rachitic newt. Crisp and positive, Agatha had been hurt and querulous before they’d quarrelled and broken the engagement for the second time. And Annapolis, Maryland, was the third time, the last time, and for keeps, Jonas Smith was thinking…whether Agatha knew it or not. Agatha wouldn’t come to Annapolis. She wanted to stay in Baltimore, Maryland. It was incomprehensible why anybody who didn’t have to should want to start his practice in a one-horse town. Particularly in Annapolis.
“A civilian in Annapolis has no prestige, darling. Now if your father had been an admiral, or your grandfather… Or even if you’d been more than just a lieutenant in the Reserve…”
Jonas Smith propped his head up on his arm and looked over toward the little town, quietly asleep at the mouth of the Severn, eight miles away over the silvered rim of oaks and tulip trees that fringed the south side of Arundel Creek. On the one radio tower at Greenbury Point visible above the woods, the red beacon light went on and off like an aerial Cyclops genially winking his solitary eye.
“—Maternal and Child Care Clinic!” Agatha’s adrenaline turned on easily, like tap water. “You don’t have to go to Annapolis for Public Health clinics. What you mean is the sailing, and fishing, and crabbing and duck shooting. And if that’s all the ambition you have then it isn’t me you want to marry!”
Jonas stretched his long legs and winked back at the bibulous red eye over the trees. He took his pipe out of his mouth. Agatha was so right. The question now was whether he wanted to smoke another pipeful before he went to bed, or whether he’d just lie there on the little pier a few minutes longer, watching the moonlight that softened the outlines of the shore and made the broad creek look like an isolated mountain lake, infinitely secluded and remote, no one there at all but himself and his dog, and an occasional muskrat crashing in the silent night across the shimmering surface to the other wooded shore. It was their last night. Tomorrow, Sunday, he and Roddy would leave their borrowed cottage retreat and go in to Annapolis, Monday they’d open shop. It was all set, his office and living quarters in the wing of the Blanton-Darrell House in Darrell Court, his name-plate already on the door. He fished in his pocket for his tobacco pouch and sat up.
“One more and then to bed, Roddy,” he said.
He looked back at the cottage, and then across the marsh, farther along the creek. The other cottage there belonged to some people he’d just met. Some day he’d get a spot on a creek like this. There were hundreds of places like it, little arms of the Chesapeake, hidden off the main roads, unbelievably remote and quiet. In the week he and Roddy had been here, the only people they’d seen were the watermen, crabbing from their dingy boats along the shore, poling silently with their slow rhythm by the shallow margins where the soft crabs lived under the shore grass and seaweed. No one else had come at all.
Then, as he put his pipe in his mouth and reached in his pocket for matches, he was suddenly aware it wasn’t true. A car was coming up the road of the other cottage along the creek, the place across the marsh. He could hear it before he could see the lights through the trees.
The dog raised his head and growled.
“It’s all right, Roddy. We couldn’t have it this way for forever.”
The yellow glow of the headlights came out of the wooded lane into the clearing and stopped a little way from the Milnors’ cottage there on the point. Jonas looked at his watch. Even without the illuminated hands he could have read it easily in the high white brilliance of the waxing moon. It was just after twelve-thirty, and it was an odd time for a car to be coming in. It wasn’t the Milnors. They were with the Fergusons, whose house he was using for the week, in the Fergusons’ car and not leaving Cambridge until after lunch Monday, according to the phone call he had had around five o’clock. Because they had asked him to keep a casual eye on the place, he waited, mildly interested.
The headlights went off. He heard the car door slam. Then, in the utter silence of the night he heard a girl’s voice, as clearly as if she were on the screened porch of his own cottage on the shore fifty feet behind him.
“You said they were expecting us. Look—they’ve gone to bed.”
“They’re on their way out. They said to go in and have a drink and wait for them.”
The man’s voice answering her was cultivated and easy.
“—Oh, baby, what a night! Isn’t that a honey of a moon? Come on down and look.”
Jonas saw them, first through the gap in the hickory and gum and holly trees fringing the Milnors’ shore, and again when they ran hand in hand down the steps on the bank and out to the end of the Milnors’ pier. Except for the sound of feet on the oak planks in the still night, he could have thought the girl was a disembodied spirit. She was slim and ethereal in a long filmy white dancing dress that floated out behind her as she ran. The man was very tall, in dinner clothes, his shirt front gleaming.
It was all right. They were obviously friends of the Milnors. Jonas relaxed, still wondering a little about the phone call at five o’clock from Cambridge.
“Let’s go for a row.”
“Oh, we can’t, Gordon! We’ve got to get back.”
The girl moved toward the shore. “Come on, Gordon, please. I shouldn’t be here unless the Milnors are. Sis would hit the ceiling.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” The man’s voice was abruptly impatient. “Let’s have a drink. A snort’ll do you good.”
The moonlight gleamed on the silver flask. The girl moved farther toward the shore.
“You know I don’t drink. And you’ve had enough, Gordon. Please don’t drink any more…and please come on.”
The flask raised to the man’s lips, his head tilted back. It was a long snort.
“Gordon!” The girl’s voice rose abruptly. “We’ve got to get back! Please! If you don’t take me I’ll go by myself!”
“Okay, baby, okay.”
The man put his flask back in his pocket, his voice suddenly amiable again. Jonas reached for his matches again. He had even wondered, for a moment, if there would be any point in making himself known. It was no real business of his. The two people over there, on the pier across the marsh, seemed to be friends of the Milnors. If gals would wander at night, they ought to be able to take care of themselves.
“Okay,” Gordon said again. “Give me one kiss and we’ll go.”
The girl hesitated, and stepped quickly forward into his arms. Jonas waited. When the man spoke again his