Date with Death. Leslie Ford
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caught herself and ran, back along the pier toward the bank. Gordon stood where he was. The moonlight shone again on the flask. Then he was standing there brilliantly visible in the yellow glare from the headlights of the car, his shirt front and blond hair shining. The car door slammed violently shut again, the white figure of the girl appeared between the trees and on the pier again.
“Give me the keys, Gordon—please! You stay and wait for the Milnors if you want to. I’ve got to get back. They can take you in. Please give me the keys!”
“Okay. Here they are.” Gordon’s hand reached in his pocket, reached out toward her.
“Toss them here. I don’t trust you.”
“Don’t trust me…or don’t trust yourself, honey?”
Jonas Smith moved slightly. The voice was unpleasant then. Something new, or something very old, had been added.
“I certainly trust myself.”
The girl’s voice was sharp with anger. She went forward and held her hand out. Jonas heard the splash.
“For the love of God!” the man said. “Look what you’ve—Now neither of us can get in. You couldn’t take them without knocking them in the water, could you?”
Jonas took his cold pipe out of his mouth and looked at it thoughtfully.
“This,” he said, “is time for us to sound off, Roddy.”
He got to his feet and stood there hesitating. The girl could have knocked the keys out of his hand. It could have been an accident.
Gordon’s voice was angry. “Stop blubbering, for Heaven’s sake. I’ll get you home. I always have, haven’t I? Just shut up and come on in. I’ll call up a taxi, and you can call your blasted sister and tell her we’ve had a flat and you’re out at the Milnors’.”
They went back along the pier in the full glare of the headlights, and up the steps to the top of the bank.
“Wait till I turn off the light, I don’t want the battery to run down.—Or go on in, the key’s over the screen door. Phone for a taxi while you’re at it.”
Jonas put his pipe in his pocket and bent down to roll up the mat. When he started up the pier to the house, the yellow path of light from the car was gone. He stopped a moment until he saw another light spring up in the window of the cottage.
The dog followed slowly at his heels.
“Come on, Roddy. It’s Life, boy—in Annapolis same like any place. People ought to keep their kids at home.”
As he reached the screen door he stopped to look back over the silver shimmer of the water. In the hushed silence of the wooded slope across the creek something of the enchanted loveliness of the night had died.
“Let’s turn in, Roddy.”
He dropped the mat on the bench by the living room door, went inside and switched on the table lamp. He stood looking down at his own telephone. Something stirred vaguely in his mind. It was something connected with a telephone. It escaped him…escaped but stayed with him, troublesome in spite of all his effort to put it out of his mind and quit worrying about it. It was still there when he turned off the light and went out with the dog into the end wing to go to bed.
It kept pricking at his mind after he turned out his light there and closed his eyes. Someone he was supposed to have called and had forgotten about? Something about the phone at his new office in the wing of the Blanton-Darrell House in Annapolis… He lay looking up at the ceiling, listening to the setter peacefully snoring on the floor at the foot of his bed. He gave it up and closed his eyes again.
When he woke abruptly the setter was over by the door, growling, the moonlight full on his spotted coat. Jonas sat up in bed.
“Quiet, Roddy.”
He pushed back the blanket over him and felt around with his feet for his sandals on the floor.
“—There is no telephone in the Milnors’ cottage…”
It was in his mind as clearly as if he were actually saying it aloud in so many words. That was it. It was how he’d met the Milnors. They had come over to use the phone out in the living room because they hadn’t put a line in.
But the awareness of that was not what had waked him, and certainly not what had waked Roddy.
CHAPTER 2
He looked at the clock on the table by his bed. It was eighteen minutes past one. He must have barely dropped off to sleep. He went over to the door and motioned the setter to his pad at the foot of the bed, left the door closed, stepped through the long open window out onto the screened porch and went quietly along it, keeping in the shadow of the sloping roof. He listened intently, stopped and drew back against the wall. The sound he heard was the creak of leather, oars dipping in the water. Then he saw the boat through the branches of the willow on his own bank and the white figure of the girl rowing. She turned her head to look, gave one long pull and raised the oars. As the boat slid noiselessly up the shallow beach she caught her filmy skirts in both hands and jumped. She came running up the bank. Jonas could hear her breathing, a strangled sobbing, as she ran up to the screen door.
He took a step forward, and stopped abruptly. The girl thought she was alone. Everything about the way she moved, silently, the passionate intensity of her breathing, showed it, even to the swift concentrated dash she made to the old lantern on the right hand side of the door where the Fergusons kept the key to the house. She thrust her hand in for it, drew it out and ran to the door. He heard it strike the metal in frantic fumbling haste before she got it in the lock, not knowing the door was already unlocked.
As she went inside he moved back so the light when she turned it on would not let her see him. Then he realized she was not turning on the light, and remembered the phosphorescent dial number card he had put there himself. She spun the dial around. When she first spoke her voice was shaking and inaudible. Then it was raised, compelling with some desperate urgency.
“—Tom! It’s Jenny, Tom. Listen to me. I’m…I’m in a mess, Tom. I can’t tell you what it is, but you’ve got to come. I’m out at St. Margaret’s, at Natalie’s. Only I’m really next door. No—I can’t call her! I don’t dare! Tom, I’m afraid…I’ve got to have help! I know, Tom, but you’ve got to help me! No—they’re away, they’re all away—both the Milnors and the Fergusons. I’m all alone. You’ve got to come out, Tom—and please, don’t tell anybody! Please, Tom!”
Jonas heard the convulsive sob as she put the phone down, missed the cradle and got it into place. Then she was moving inside, coming into the bedroom wing. He flattened himself against the wall, wondering how he could come out and offer to help her without frightening her still more. She was in the room next to him, Natalie Ferguson’s bedroom. As the shaded light on the dressing table there turned on, he took a step to the window. She was going quickly to the closet door, in her stocking feet, a pair of mud-blackened evening slippers in her hand. The filmy white net skirt hung in torn and bedraggled rags around her legs, the bodice was ripped. It was not the moment, Jonas saw, to let her know the house was not empty. She was pulling with her free hand at the fastener under her left arm, and as she reached the closet door the dress fell to the floor. She stepped quickly out of it.
As she pulled the closet door open, he stared at her with a feeling of pity, and anger.
“Good God,” he thought, “she’s a baby. She’s nothing but a kid.”
The small pointed face, drained white, the flesh sticking paper-tight to the high cheekbones, the frightened trembling mouth, the dark terror-ridden eyes so deeply circled they were almost lost under the white forehead with its cloud of smoky black hair…no single feature, but all of them added up, made her pitifully and tragically young. Seventeen, he thought; maybe less than seventeen.
She was struggling with a black dress she’d taken out of the closet, trying with trembling fingers to find the fastener. Then she was in it, took shoes