Date with Death. Leslie Ford
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got to believe me! We were going to the dance. But he said he had to pick up the Milnors and take them in too. That’s why I came. It’s true, Sis—it really is!”
The girl’s voice was rising, dangerously near the hysterical breaking point. Jonas tried to piece it together. The two were sisters, the ensign was their brother. The hop would be the dance at the Naval Academy. He had sisters who’d been hop girls in their day. The gaps in what Jenny had said were simple. If she’d had to leave the Yard to go home alone, it meant the midshipman she’d gone with was a last minute date who hadn’t signed up for liberty to take her home. Jonas knew about late dates too, an old Annapolitan custom, deplored by the midshipmen who brought them down and fed them but whose hops ended at midnight, enjoyed by the St. John’s students who danced on till two and didn’t care what time they said good-night. He looked through the little kitchen down at the body on the floor. This was no St. John’s student. There was nothing of the college man about him, not even of the returned veteran. There was an aura of sophistication that was not like Annapolis. Gordon was too experienced, too worldly, by far too well dressed.
“But you knew the Milnors are in Cambridge—”
“He said they were back, Sis. They’d called him up.”
“Skip it,” the ensign said.
“No. I’ve got to tell you. You’ve got to listen to me. And don’t look at me like that, Tom—don’t! I didn’t mean to do anything I shouldn’t. I tried to go home, but he wouldn’t let me. He threw the car keys away, in the creek. He did it on purpose—he told me he did when we got in here. He said we’d come in and phone for a taxi, and I…I forgot till we came in that they don’t have any phone. Then I…I couldn’t get out, and…he said horrible things. He said I wanted to come. And then he pulled out that gun, and threw it to me, and said I could…I could shoot him if I wanted to, it was one thing or the other. And I was so scared I did. I did shoot him, and he fell over. He fell over just like that—”
“Oh, Baby, stop! Stop it, Jenny. It’s all over now. We do believe you, Baby.”
The poignant tenderness in her sister’s voice sent a sharp thrilling warmth up from the roots of Jonas Smith’s spinal column.
“—He’s dead. There’s nothing we can do about that. He was no good—he shouldn’t have brought you out here.—What do we do now?”
The ensign broke in crisply. “Who saw you come out here, Jenny?”
“I don’t think anybody. We didn’t even pass a car on the road. That’s when I first began to get a little scared.”
Jenny’s voice was muffled and streaked with tears.
“Who saw you get in at the gate?”
“Everybody coming out of the Yard could have. I wasn’t trying to hide. George took me to the gate. I was going home, and—”
“Who saw you leave the house?”
“Nobody. Nobody was home. That’s when he said why didn’t we go over to the dance at St. John’s and maybe Sis would be there.”
“All right. You didn’t leave the house, Jenny. You got to the house and said good night to him and went to bed. That’s all you know, and that’s the last time—”
“No. I won’t do it. I’m going to tell them I did it. I’m not going to tell a lie about it.”
“You want to go to jail, and be tried for murder, and have everybody—”
“Oh, no! They—”
“Let her alone, Tom,” the other girl said quietly. “I’m afraid you’d have to, Jenny. But it’s not jail so much. It’s Grandfather.”
Jonas heard the younger girl’s short terrified cry. Her voice was hardly audible then. “That’s why I didn’t call you, Sis. I didn’t want him to find out I was…I was in a jam. He’ll be furious!”
“Oh, the hell with him.”
The ensign moved into the space visible from the window. He was tall and erect, the part of his face not shadowed by his cap hard and intense. He reached down to the small snub-nosed automatic on the floor.
“You shot once?”
“Yes.”
He held the gun to the window curtain and wiped it.
“Oh, please don’t, Tom! I’m not afraid…you’ll just get in trouble—”
“He’s already in trouble, Jenny. Terrible trouble. You know he is. You might as well face it. And stop crying. It’s too late to cry.”
“—You know what’ll happen, Elizabeth,” the ensign said. His voice was curt and cool. “And it’s not going to. He was a louse, he had it coming, let him take it.”
He stepped over the dark stain on the floor, picked up the dead man’s hand, pressed the gun into it, brought the hand back to the floor.
“Where did you go in here, Jenny?”
Her sister’s voice was controlled. Jonas Smith shook his head. She’d weighed the consequences, decided to play it with her brother, not as Jenny wanted it. It was wrong. He knew it was wrong. “—But if it were my sister…” He shook his head again, remembering the small pointed face, the hollow terror-stricken eyes and trembling young mouth.
“Try to think, Jenny! What did you touch? Did you go out in the galley?”
“No. Yes. No, I didn’t. He went out, to get some water for his drink. I didn’t. I didn’t touch anything—I didn’t move from here.”
“All right.—Your dress, Jenny…that’s not your…”
“It’s Natalie’s. Mine’s over there, and my shoes. In the beach bag in her closet.”
“We’ll get them in the morning. Nobody’d think of going there even if they find him. It’s Tom we’ve got to think about now… he’s got to get back in—Leave the light on, Tom Oh, Tom… there’s blood on your cuff. And look at the mud… Jenny, go on out. Both of you. I’ll get the mop. Be quiet.”
Jonas moved to the side of the window. She was coming into the little kitchen. He saw her hand reach behind the icebox for the mop. Then he saw her face. It was reflected, for a tiny but to Jonas Smith indelible moment, in a round piece of mirror of the kind women put on the table to set a bowl of flowers on. The mirror was propped up between a pair of glass candlesticks at the back of the linoleum-covered shelf under the wall cupboard, and it held the reflection of the girl’s face for a brief instant that transmuted itself in the mind of Jonas Smith into a fragment of eternity. She was lovely, and as different from her younger sister as dawn is from dusk and flame from smoke. She was blonde, her fair hair drawn back and tied with a black ribbon at the neck, slender and thoroughbred, with a pale intent oval face and calm grey eyes. There was something else that shown out from behind the grey eyes and that had the same warmth and moving tenderness that her voice had.
Jonas Smith realized slowly that he had changed from a man alert and watching to an automaton, walking as if in a dream, without conscious awareness, back to the great tulip tree. Or he knew, when he thought of it, that he must have walked there. He was there when she came swiftly out and hurried to meet her sister and the ensign by the dead man’s car. He heard a door open and close, saw the three of them go quickly to their own car at the end of the clearing, saw its red tail light disappear along the oyster-shell lane into the woods. It was the way he would have seen them if it had been a dream.
He stood motionless, in the now utterly quiet night, looking unseeingly down at the cottage on the moonlight-flooded point. He was gripped by a curious sense of some new kind of reality that was the most profound experience of the twenty-eight years of his life. It had come quietly up out of some deep inner recess of his mind, a kind of intuitive knowledge, admitting neither question nor doubt.
“That’s