Date with Death. Leslie Ford
Читать онлайн книгу.
3
He heard himself saying it aloud in the quiet of the whispering woods and the lap-lap-lap of the water on the shore, and as he said it he felt a glowing sense of confidence and warmth that made him feel, suddenly, as if he had moved all his life half-asleep to come now to this abrupt and vivid wakening. He took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadow of the tulip tree into the moonlight. Then he stopped short. The lighted cottage across the clearing on the point was still there in front of him. A man named Gordon was in there on the floor, dead. In a few timeless moments his own inner life had been changed and illumined. The fact of the dead man’s body in there had not changed. It was solid and incontrovertible. Something had to be done. Jonas Smith was the man who had to do it.
What he had to do was go at once to the telephone in the Fergusons’ cottage across the creek and call the police. There was such a thing as law. He believed in it. His duty was clear and tangible. It was to find the nearest officer of the law and report what had happened… everything that had happened. The nearest officer of the law was exactly as near as the Fergusons’ telephone. It was all simple, and no problem whatever. On the other hand . . .
He shook his head. “There is no other hand, Smith,” he said to himself. “There’s only one hand, and you’ve got hold of it.”
He went through the pines to the cottage. Two other facts were solid and incontrovertible. The sister of the girl he was going to marry—the girl whose last name he didn’t know, whose face he had only seen reflected for a tiny instant in a piece of mirror propped up against a kitchen wall—was legally guilty of homicide. The girl herself, Elizabeth, and their brother the young ensign, were legally, technically and in fact accessory to it. A third fact just as solid and incontrovertible came suddenly into his mind. He was himself accessory, as of the last fifteen minutes. He would continue to be as long as he did nothing about it.
He shrugged his shoulders, went inside the cottage and looked down at the motionless figure on the green-tiled floor, his eyes resting on the surprised and horrified face staring sightlessly up into nothing.
“—He never expected her to shoot. He never had any idea he was going to die until he got it.”
The impression on his mind was so vivid that it seemed audible, and he looked around involuntarily to see if by some chance there was another person in the room saying it to him. There was no one there except himself and the thing on the floor. He looked down at it again. The face was handsome, the wavy blond hair as neatly in place as if Gordon had smoothed it back just before his last fatal gesture. His dinner clothes, messed up now, were perfectly cut, of silky finely woven midnight blue cloth. His hands were soft and well manicured, with colorless polish on the nails. There was a green scarab ring on one finger, and on the left wrist a watch in a wide flexible gold bracelet. Jonas did not like men who wore gold bracelets, but he knew there were places—not Maryland—where they were considered fashionable and in good taste.
Jonas shook his head. All in all Gordon did not look like a fool, like the kind of man who sober or drunk would toss his only set of car keys in the creek or toss a loaded gun to a terrified hysterical girl and say “Shoot me, baby.” And he had done both. Was he an actor, used to dramatic gestures, so experienced he believed he was irresistible, so convinced of his own charm that he was hardly taking a chance? Jonas gave it up; stepped back carefully and opened the door. Outside the air was clean and cool. It washed the reek out of his nostrils and cleared out of his mind the momentary anger at what had happened, at what he himself had done. If he’d only stayed in the Fergusons’ cottage, gone to bed when the dog had wanted to… He might have known nothing about all this, Jenny and Elizabeth and the young ensign Tom might have got away with it. But he hadn’t, and there was nothing he could do except one thing.
He went down to the beached boat, got in and rowed out into open water. The single red eye by the Navy Experimental Station winked at him over the trees. It was a sinister wink now, not friendly and bibulous as it had seemed when he was lying there on the Fergusons’ pier, at peace with himself and all the world, before Gordon and Jenny, Tom and the future Mrs. Jonas Smith had shattered everything. He pulled across the shimmering silver saucer of the creek. All he could think about was her. The second girl, the one who was a conscious and determined accessory after the fact of the killing of Gordon. The girl he knew he was going to marry. It was not until he was in the living room of the cottage, switching on the light on the table by the telephone, that he thought: “What a hell of a way to begin marrying her.”
He stood looking down at the phone with as much distaste as if it had been a dead weasel curled up in front of him. Then he picked it up and dialled the operator.
“There’s been some trouble out at St. Margaret’s, on Arundel Creek. Who do I call?”
“Is it a police matter? You call the County Police in Eastport. 4526. Or do you want me to call them for you?”
It was a straw. Jonas clutched for it. “Will you? Tell them it’s the Milnor cottage on Arundel Creek.”
He put down the phone. Then as if he had figured it out from the moment everything began and had known precisely from the beginning what he would do, he went across the room, gathered his records into a pile on the top of the phonograph and went swiftly into the bedroom wing.
Roddy was lying on the floor at the foot of the bed.
“Boy, we’re going.”
He put his gear in his suitcase. It was twenty-two minutes past two o’clock. At twenty-five minutes past two he switched off the light, closed the windows and went out. He stopped at the door of Natalie Ferguson’s bedroom. There was a beach bag in there, in the closet. He went in quickly without hesitation and got it. As he came out he stopped by the door, listening, wondering if it was a car he had heard out somewhere behind the house. He went through the living room and out onto the screened porch. If the County Police had got there already, from Eastport ten miles away, someone had called them before he did. Or they could have had a radio patrol car out on the Ferry Road, he thought suddenly. He stood listening, watching across the marsh, waiting for the glow of headlights through the trees. There was nothing. No sound, no light except the pale yellow glow through the Milnors’ side windows. The whole place was as quiet as the grave it was.
At twenty-five minutes to three he was headed down the dirt road toward the paved highway into Annapolis. A mile down the highway he saw the suffused glare of headlights reaching out toward him, and turned left into the winding remnant of the old St. Margaret’s Road. It could be headlights on the green police sedan he’d noticed in town, coming toward him from the Ritchie Highway, headed for Arundel Creek. He kept on, swung down the last curve of the old road and shot up to the left onto the approach to the Severn River Bridge. The stop sign at the intersection before the Bridge, the right of way belonging to the old vehicle rattling down the main highway from the still empty site of the Ritchie Memorial, were matters he noted automatically as he went by.
He slowed down as he crossed the deserted bridge. Behind him now, the red Cyclops eye had become a twinkling figure in a whole rose-colored ensemble dancing a stately minuet high above the woods of Ferry Farms. To his left the Severn widened out into the shimmering stretches of the Chesapeake. It made a silver girdle along the twenty-seven square miles of the United States Naval Academy, the walled reservation where twenty-eight hundred midshipmen were sleeping in the great granite pile of Bancroft Hall. He rounded the sharp bend at the Post Graduate School and kept on into Annapolis, not concerned with the Academy that had been there since 1845 or its small Liberal Arts neighbor St. John’s College that had been there since 1785, though he was going along the street that separates them.
He was deeply concerned about other things, thinking of the small tortured face of the girl Jenny as he’d seen her in Natalie Ferguson’s bedroom, ripping off the torn mud-stained dress now in the beach bag on the seat beside him… of the agony of terror he knew now she’d been in, knowing what she’d fled from on the floor of the Milnors’ cottage. It was unfair, pitifully unfair, in some way; she could pay all her life for something that had started out as just fun, ended as catastrophe. Maybe it was old fashioned for her to defend her personal dignity and honor. It was all right with him. There were infinitely