'After I'm dead, you mean,' said Alice, with strange calm.
Fred said, 'You're not going to be dead. You're going to scram out of here.'
'Why take a chance?' Killeen pleaded. 'Alice, what's the percentage . . .?'
'Ssh,' she said. 'Well have till ten o'clock, maybe. We ... we have to think.'
Duff said, 'Yes. Let's meet after dinner, in Innes's
room. I'll go there now. Susan?'
'Still here,' said Killeen. ''Innes wants her to stay for dinner.'
'You mean the trap?' said Fred. 'You're going to tell her what to do? Are we going to go ahead with that?'
'May as well.' Duffs face was grave and sad. 'No harm. But this evil . . . How can we anticipate the works of a brain that works as this one does? Chancey, you know. How can we foresee what wild grabs at the passing skirts of mere chance she'll make, and we'll have to guard against? Alice, my dear . . .'
'But you know who it is!' she said.
'Suppose Vm wrong?' said MacDougal Duff.
He went into Innes's room,
Fred said to Alice, steadily, 'Nothing's going to happen to you.'
She snuled. 'Oh, I don't think so either,' she said, as if it were she who did the reassuring.
Killeen put his arm around her. 'I won't leave unless you do,' he said. 'Listen, darling, you've got to play it safe. Safe for you.'
He looked very stem and noble.
Alice slipped out of his arm, and her voice shook. 'I know. Don't worry. My goodness, so nobody wants to die!'
The bathroom door closed on her light and shaky laughter, and they stood outside, Killeen on guard, like a soldier, Fred gnawing his thumb in worried thought
Dinner was pretty grim. Alice fiddled with her food. She couldn't help thinking of poison. She tried to taste only that which came from a common dish or what all three sisters were eating, and she tasted very littie. Her throat was too full to swallow, anyway. She must be frightened, she thought. But the fright was so deep, she knew it scarcely showed. She was able to do her part in the trap setting, as they had planned it, when the moment came.
Duff and Gertrude bore the conversational burden between them, but Duff wasn't sugary with her any more. He was sterner now. He let his views of history be little sermons. Alice wondered which one he was trying to touch and convert. He spoke some of the sifting history did. He said that only long-term virtues stuck to people, after history got through with them. He said patience, and endurance, and selfishness, and all the least flashy and dullest attributes stuck out like rocks after the looser soil had been washed away in the tides of time. He said the good opinion of one's contemporaries was unreliable. He said a truly fine person must disregard it in favor of his own approval or the vague thing called integrity, which was, nevertheless, one of the most solid things in the world. He said that was a fact.
Again he spoke, and said the day of greed was passing. He said it was outworn. It had done its worst. It would have to be over. Because it had wound the world up to a climax and brought forth the ultimate consequences for all to see. He said greed was in the process of committing suicide.
He said, again, apropos of nothing in particular, that to dodge one's responsibilities was to dodge life itself and die unsatisfied. He said that people's idea of heaven was a state of perfect ease. But, he said, we aren't built to endure that.
The Whidock girls were polite to him. Except Maud, of course, although even she forbore to interrupt him often with her hoarse irrelevancies. Gertrude listened as one superior being to another. Isabel listened, with her half- abstracted air. They agreed. Oh, yes, they agreed. His preaching struck off their surfaces. It got no deeper.
Alice tried to think ahead. Could she think through this night? Or was her intuition warning her, as it had twice before? Were her antennae cut off? She couldn't tell. She didn't have any subconscious promptings. She had too much fear in full consciousness.
One picture wouldn't seem real, the one about Alice and Art Killeen getting on the train together, riding away, leaving this mess behind them for somebody else to straighten out. Her mind wouldn't paint it or give it color. But that wasn't subconscious. That was just deliberately unconscious.
Josephine came down at last with the message from Susan, the one Susan had been told to send, the one that was part of their trap. Their silly litde trap.
Said Josephine, 'Miz Lines says she wants to know where are Mr. Innes's pills, Miss Brennan. It's time for him to have one.'
'No, it isn't,' said AJice, glancing coolly at her watch. She was sustained by the plan. This she knew how to do. 'I gave him one when I came in. He can't have one now.'
'But . . .' Josephine hesitated.
'I left them on the mantel,' said Alice, loud with impatience. Then she leaned over to Maud and smilingly, with gestures, borrowed that one's pad and pencil.
On the page she wrote, forming her letters clear and large, 'In the blue box. But don't give him one now.' Maud was beside her. Alice felt her glance, as if her fingertips could feel it. She handed the slip of paper around the table. It went through Gertrude's hands to I>uff, who took care to hand it to Isabel. Isabel gave it to the servant, with one of her abrupt twists of the body by which she seemed to compensate for her onesidedness.
That was done.
