Date with Death. Leslie Ford
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looked back at her. Under the outward calm she was desperately frightened. It was all so mixed up, he thought, wondering what he ought to do. She was standing at the end of the sofa by the vestibule door, looking around with an interested air, without the remotest inkling that he’d been out at the Creek and had seen and heard everything, or nearly everything, that had happened. It was also plain that she seemed to have no remote inkling of the fact that some day she was going to be Mrs. Jonas Smith. It was all so mixed up, some elements of it so palpably absurd, in spite of the pathetic tragedy underneath, that he found himself smiling a little as he opened his bag. He got out a tube of pills, put six in an envelope and sat down at his desk to write out the directions.
He pushed back his chair and got up “Give her two now,” he said as he came back into the reception room. “Another one if she wakes up. And call me—”
He came to a halt inside the door. “What’s wrong—”
“I’ve got to hurry. Grandfather— Oh, give them to me, please—I’ve got to hurry!”
She took the envelope out of his hand and was gone. The door had closed behind her before he could get the picture of her white face and wide panic-stricken eyes straight in his bewildered mind. He stood blankly, listening for an irascible voice through the wall that divided the two houses. There was no sound except an occasional creak of the arthritic joints of the old mansion, and the setter asleep on the hearth, audibly dreaming of the open fields.
Still puzzled, he went over to where she had stood and looked around the room, wondering what could have alarmed her. Then he stared down at the sofa. The striped beach bag was there on top of his suitcase, tipped over on its side. He saw what he had not noticed before. The name “Natalie” was printed diagonally across the lower left hand corner in red, white and blue letters two inches high. Among all the beach bags in Christendom, nobody could mistake Natalie Ferguson’s.
“This,” he thought soberly, “is a big help.”
He picked the bag up and opened it. It was empty, the bottom still stained with the muddy seepage from the sodden evening shoes.
He glanced out toward the vestibule. It was an easy matter of the couple of minutes he’d been at his desk, and a handsome tribute, he thought ruefully, to his own stupidity. It was just a matter of quick thinking on her part; she could have them out of the bag, toss them out the front door to pick up on her way back, in an instant. If she hadn’t been standing there at the end of the sofa when he looked back at her, he might have remembered. If he hadn’t been dazzled and dazed by her sudden appearance, and her identity, he might have used his head. As it was, matters were different, suddenly, and more difficult.
He wondered what was going through her mind now, whether she wasn’t perhaps already regretting it. It was folly; it was almost like a second unconscious betrayal. Coming for the sedative was the first. Taking the dress and shoes was in effect painting the arrow already pointing to her sister a bright brilliant red, making it a dozen times its original size and significance. But the important thing was the danger to them that the knowledge he had must seem to her, the agony of doubt and apprehension she must be in, over there, fearful of how much he knew, how much she had given away without meaning to do anything but help her sister.
Sober-eyed, unhappy and angry at himself for being a stupid fool, Jonas moved around, turning off the lights to go to bed. Something apart from the immediate problem of Elizabeth Darrell and how she was going to take the fact of his being there, just underfoot, on her own doorstep, came vaguely back to him, shapeless and persistent, gnawing at his consciousness, the minute the lights were out and he was there in the dark alone with it. It was like his first unformed memory that there was no telephone in the Milnors’ cottage, a nagging, worrying, even frightening sensation, somewhere in the back of his mind. Darkness and danger seemed to associate themselves with it, sharpening it into something ominous and menacing. It was hidden in his mind in a maze of dimmed and blurred impressions, connected with Elizabeth and Jenny but not anything he could put a name to or say came directly from either of them or both of them together.
It was not the dead man, though his face was there abruptly in Jonas Smith’s mind, a visual after-image, the look of surprise and horror as vivid and startling still as it had been in actual fact. Nor was it the ensign, Tom.
Though there was something about her brother too. “He’s already in trouble. Terrible trouble…” He remembered Elizabeth saying that to Jenny out in the cottage.
He let Roddy out in the small enclosed garden for a few minutes, thinking about that. What terrible trouble could an ensign get into in Annapolis, Maryland? Trouble usually reserved itself for the brass and the gold braid. Jonas had never heard of it stooping to the lowliest rank.
CHAPTER 4
Jonas Smith shook the dazed cobwebs out of his head and sat up, looking around him for a bewildered moment. Outside the air was full of the noisy clamor of bells and the sound of the marching feet of the midshipmen on their way to church in the town. Nearer at hand there was an insistent intermittent buzz that he finally recognized. He reached his hand out for the telephone.
“Hello,” he said. The next instant he was wide awake, everything that had got mixed up with a nightmare fantasy that had dogged his sleeping mind back again, not at all a dream but very real and very clear.
“Dr. Smith? This is Elizabeth Darrell. My grandfather, Professor Darrell, asked me to call you and ask if you’d like to come in after church.”
She was making it sound as if she had never seen him and only barely heard of him before. Then, as if he might possibly misunderstand her, she added quickly, “It’s an old Annapolitan custom if you don’t know. You go to church and then you have a mint julep. My grandfather would be happy if you’d come, if you aren’t busy, but—”
“I’d like to very much. Thanks a lot.”
He interrupted her before she could say anything that would make it awkward for him to accept. “And she doesn’t want me to come,” he added to himself as he put down the phone. That was evident through the clipped forced cordiality in her voice, if it could be called cordiality at all. Ten to one her grandfather was there by the phone listening. So that was that. He was going to see her whether she wanted him to or not.
He sat thinking things over. What he was acutely interested in knowing about was what had happened in re. the body of the man Gordon out on Arundel Creek in the Milnors’ cottage. How he was going to find out was another matter. There was nothing about it on the radio. Annapolis, he knew, had no Sunday edition, either of the Capital or the Southern Maryland Times. It was too late for it to have made either the Baltimore or Washington papers even if he had wanted to go out and find one. But there was no doubt he would find out, sooner probably than later, as towns without a newspaper at all always seemed to have the most effective grapevine.
He was thinking of that as he went along the Court to Professor Darrell’s house just as the last moving notes of the Sailors’ Hymn died away and the chimes under the green copper dome of the Naval Academy Chapel were silent again for another week.
He was not to be the Darrells’ only guest. A flashy and expensive maroon convertible with the top down was negotiating the narrow curve of the cobblestone drive that the carriage and pair of bays it had originally been constructed for could have done with less damage to the magnolias and ancient shaggy yew trees. It drew up in front of the door as Jonas reached the iron hitching post set in the granite block to the right of it. The young woman who eased herself out from under the wheel and across the leather seat out onto the cobblestones was as expensive looking as her car and as strikingly un-Annapolitan, a product of nature and art that Jonas took one look at with happiness that he had come. Her hair under an exhilarating creation of brown and beige silk poppies was a rich tawny gold. Her skin was warm and suntanned, and she had on a sleek-fitting silk suit, toast color, that flared out, gracefully bell-shaped, around a pair of long and elegant legs. She paused on the second step and gave Jonas a gay and friendly smile that lighted up her brown eyes like sunlight sparkling through a glass of sherry wine.
“Hello,” she said. “You’re Jonas Smith,