Ill Met by Moonlight. Leslie Ford
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past three. Sheila growled, gave a deep throaty bark and shambled over to the window. She stood there with her feet up on the sill, growling uneasily.
I put on my dressing gown and slipped out of bed. Sheila’s head was thrust forward, her tail straight and stiff. I went over to the window and pulled her down. A pale quarter-moon was high in the clear sky. All signs of thunder and rain were gone. Sheila growled uneasily and retired to the rug in front of the fireplace when I told her to. I peered out, but I couldn’t see anything.
I could, however, hear the motor of a car running quietly, rather close to me . . . then suddenly I realized that it was only Sheila breathing behind me in my own room. Why I didn’t abandon the whole business then and there, and put it down to an Irish setter’s nerves, I can’t quite say. All I know is that suddenly, almost as if I’d seen handwriting on the wall, I had an intense and unanswerable conviction of something terribly, horribly wrong. I could no more have denied it than Joe Bates could a drowning child.
I slipped on a coat and a pair of sneakers, told Sheila to lie down where she was, opened my door and looked out down towards the guest wing. I half expected to see Sergeant Buck posted sentry in front of the Colonel’s door, but the hall was empty. I closed the door and went quietly downstairs, taking the big electric torch off the landing table as I went.
Outside the night was quiet as the grave. I stood and listened. Still, somewhere near me, I thought I heard a car running quietly. I looked around for Sheila, but I knew she wasn’t there. Then I heard someone, somewhere between the back of my house and the Bishops’, moving quickly, and rather heavily, I thought. I crept to the end of the porch and looked out across the lawn.
A man was there. For an instant I didn’t recognize him—not, in fact, until he heard me, if it was me he heard, and stopped. The next instant he was gone, slipping into the shadow of the big cherry tree by the end of the house. I stood there a little bewildered, wondering not very happily why Rosemary Bishop’s fiancé should be dodging about my garden at that time in the morning. Then I heard the Bishops’ garage door close, and again that low throbbing of a running motor, and I remembered then that Rex Brophy’s Band Wagon had been expected to carry on till two-thirty, so that of course ten minutes past three wasn’t actually late to be getting home.
I stood there, nevertheless, unable to get the sense of impending disaster out of my head. If Dikranov was coming back from the dance with the Goulds, why should he be so extraordinarily furtive about trespassing on my grounds? Or had he, I wondered, had a clandestine meeting with Sandra there? I waited, hesitating to go back inside, hesitating still more to go any farther forward, when quite suddenly a woman came through the hedge and stood in my garden, looking about. She started to turn back, then changed her mind and came on, towards the porch. She stopped under my bedroom window and called softly.
“Here I am,” I said. “Down here.”
Mrs. Gould started violently at the sound of my voice from the porch.
“What are you doing down here?” she said in a low voice, coming over.
“I couldn’t sleep. It’s so hot in my room, and Sheila’s so restless. I just came down.”
She looked at me a moment as if trying to make up her mind whether to believe me or not.
“Is anything wrong?” I asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know. I can’t find half my family.”
“Sandra?”
“And Andy. Jim’s in bed, Lucy Lee’s pacing the floor.—I don’t like to wake Hawkins at night, he barricades himself in.”
Hawkins is her old colored butler and handy man.
She looked at me again. I noticed then that she still had on the print dress she’d worn that evening but she’d taken off her pearl necklace.
“Sandra’s such an impulsive child,” she said. “Sometimes I’d like to shake Andy. I know he hasn’t a notion of how he upsets Lucy Lee. Who’s a little ninny, of course.”
She smiled wearily.
“I’m worried about Sandra, Grace. Do you realize that she tried to drown herself tonight?”
“She what?” I gasped.
Mrs. Gould nodded.
“She’s been threatening to kill herself all day. She’s got some horrible notion that she’s ruined Jim’s career and now she’s ruining his life. She’s so terribly impulsive!”
“You ought to go to bed, darling,” I said—which was an easy way of putting it. “I’ll walk back with you. Andy’s probably home by now and so’s Sandra.”
I took her arm, and was startled at how curiously rigid her body was, and immovable.
“You’re tired, Alice; do come back,” I said. She relaxed suddenly. I could hear her long relieved breath.
“Thanks, my dear. I suppose I am.” She pressed my hand quickly.
“And you’re cold.”
“No, no. I’m just . . . disturbed.” She laughed softly. “My children are such—wretches.”
The night wind shivered in the stiff magnolia leaves. The boys’ pigeons in the side yard cooed and rustled as if something strange had passed them. Somewhere from the bay there was the faint sound of a guitar and voices singing. But that was far away. Around us in the dark was nothing but an eerie silence, throbbing and uneasy.
“Come along, darling.”
We moved across the grass. It was cold through my slippers, and the tall blades on the edge, where Julius’s sickle had missed, brushed against my bare ankles, sharply intense. At the hedge I pulled back a branch of white althea for Alice to pass. Released, it brushed, softly cool, against my shoulder. I started so that Alice stopped.
“What is it, Grace?” she whispered.
“Nothing, darling.”
I pressed on my flashlight. A white moth dashed out of the dark, an enormous potato bug trundled across the dirt path.
“I’ll just get my bag out of the car,” Alice said. “If you’ll lend me your light and give me a hand with the doors.”
The garage loomed white and ghostly above the dark line of shrubs. We turned to the right along the narrow path that leads to the double doors at the end of the drive from the road.
Suddenly I knew what I’d been hearing . . . what it was that had given the throbbing undertone to the clear still night.
“Somebody’s left his motor running,” I said.
“That’s one of Sandra’s tricks,” Alice Gould said. “She’s back, then. It’s funny the things that annoy husbands,” she went on. “That’s a much worse offense in Jim’s eyes than burned rice pudding.”
I tugged at the white door. The padlock wasn’t on, but the doors seemed jammed tighter than usual. Finally I got them open, after skinning my knuckles and breaking at least two fingernails. I swung them wide, started in, and then remembered that I had no idea of how long the motor had been running and that the garage had been tightly shut.
“We’d better let it air out a minute,” I said. Mrs. Gould nodded. We stood there a minute or two, looking in. Jim’s car was parked in front of me, Andy’s was in the other half.
“It’s Andy’s motor that’s on,” I said. “I’ll turn it off while you get your bag.”
I wriggled around behind Andy’s sedan, squeezed along the running board to the door and reached inside to switch off the engine and take out the keys. My hand struck something woolly and hard. The smell of Scotch whisky hit my nose and almost took my breath away. I caught myself sharply. Mrs. Gould’s voice was running along pleasantly as she fished around in Jim’s car for her bag.
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