Wolf in Man’s Clothing

Her mouth and chin were set, there were two scarlet spots on her cheeks. I stopped and took another course.

“Drue, you said you intended to find out what really happened here. When Craig came back, I mean, at the time you left this house and went back to New York. And Conrad said Craig wanted a divorce. Did you?”

“It’s too late for that.”

I was about to say tritely and not at all truly that it is never too late. But she flung down the pen. “It’s too late, Sarah! I was a fool to try it. I…”

The abrupt motion of her hand had knocked over a little blue jar of pebbles intended to hold the pen that rolled across the desk. And we both looked just as a little pasteboard box fell out upon the desk amid a shower of colored pebbles. It was a medicine box; there was the prescription sign and Conrad’s name and Dr. Chivery’s and directions and it held digitalis. Rather it had held digitalis. It was empty now, for I picked it up and opened it.

15

DRUE HAD MADE ONE quick, stifled motion to snatch the box, but I had it in my hand.

“Drue…”

It was dreadful to see the color simply drain out of her face until she looked like a ghost.

“I found it,” she whispered. “Sarah, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you any more. I’ve said too much now. Don’t ask me-don’t…” She stopped. And put her face down on her arms and against the little dog and began to sob. Dry, long, shuddering sobs, as if every one of them fought against her will. I think I put my hand on her shoulder. She said, in a stifled way, “Go away. It’s all right, Sarah. Only go away. Please.”

Drue never cried; it wasn’t her way of facing trouble.

After a moment I went. I took the medicine box with me; I had to. And I had to try to think, not that up to then I had got very far in that direction. But first I hid the little flat box in a handkerchief and pinned it inside the blouse of my uniform with a good, strong safety pin.

It turned me cold to think of the danger it had been to Drue. But there was only one explanation for her possession of the box, for her tears, for her refusal to explain it to me, and that was that she was protecting someone. There was a corollary to that, too; the only person she would protect was Craig.

Well, then, why hadn’t she destroyed the box? And did she have some reason to believe that Craig had killed his father? As Soper had said, there is really no alibi for a poison murder. Craig could have done it by ingeniously (how, I didn’t know) using his father’s own medicine, fixing it (somehow) so he knew his father would take the poison that night, and at the same time (by faking an accident on the previous night, really shooting himself) arranging an alibi for himself that couldn’t be shaken. An alibi that covered actually twenty-four hours (and might easily be made to cover much more than that) thus allowing a margin of time. So that if, say, he had put poison in the brandy (or in anything else his father was in the habit of taking) it didn’t matter when Conrad voluntarily took the stuff, for Craig still had an alibi.

The flaw was his wound; nobody in his right mind would have come so near killing himself, when he could (with exactly the same effect) wound himself less dangerously and less painfully. And I still didn’t believe Craig had killed his father-but Drue was afraid he had, because she believed Craig had a motive. I saw that, then; she believed that Conrad had shot Craig, so Craig’s motive might be self-defense, or it might be a long- standing jealousy between the two men over Alexia!

When I reached that point, I got up and put on my cape. I had to get outdoors. I had to reach some sensible conclusion about that box and Drue and Craig.

In the hall, as I was starting for a walk, I met Anna. She had an enormous black eye, a perfect mass of black and green and purple bruises. I stared and she said quickly, “I ran into a door, Miss.”

“Really, Anna. Dear me.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Of course one does encounter a door sometimes. It doesn’t make a round mark, however; and there is almost always a sharp red line on the eyebrow made by the edge of the door. I said, “You’re sure you didn’t see anyone in the meadow last night?”

“Yes, Miss. That is, no. I didn’t see anyone but you.”

Certainly I hadn’t given her a black eye. But I couldn’t think of anyone who might have done it, either. With the possible exception of Delphine who was of a jaundiced enough nature but much more likely to scratch. However, I persisted. “I thought you might have seen someone in the meadow. Someone you were afraid to tell the police about.”

But she didn’t blush or show any change of expression; she just stood there neat and respectable in her long black uniform and white apron and cap. “No, Miss,” she said stolidly.

But Nugent had been sufficiently impressed by my story of the shooting to question Anna. For she added unexpectedly, “The Lieutenant says it must have been someone hunting-last night, you know. Someone from the town, perhaps. He searched the house and he says the only guns in the house that anyone knows about belonged to Mr. Brent. A revolver,” she said flatly, “which the police took from Miss Drue’s room yesterday. And a shotgun which hasn’t been fired for a long time. They said they could tell. So you see, Miss, I-I was right.”

“I see, Anna.” Her eye looked terribly painful. “Try alternate hot and cold packs for your eye,” I told her and went for a walk.

I had walked along the driveway down to the public road, meeting no one, deep in thought of Drue and the little medicine box, before it occurred to me that if I had been the possible if extremely unwilling target for gunshots the previous evening, I might well be again. This time perhaps more successfully from the hunter’s point of view. It was getting on toward dusk again and the February landscape was very quiet and deserted, but there were plenty of little thickets of brush and evergreens, to say nothing of the opportunities for concealment offered by the walls and hedges. So I turned back, but before I had gone more than a dozen steps, Peter Huber came along in a long and very handsome gray coupe and stopped. He’d been to the inquest, he said, leaning bareheaded from the car. “Is everything all right at the house?”

I told him yes, and that Alexia was staying with Craig while I took a rest.

“Good,” he said cheerfully. “How about a little ride? I’ll tell you, we’ll drive back to the village and get a drink. Hop in.”

It suited me perfectly, for I wanted to hear about the inquest. So I got in beside him, looking with rather stunned admiration at the inconceivably luxurious car. It didn’t have platinum handles and diamonds set in the wheel, but it had everything else. He saw me looking at it.

“A beauty, isn’t it?” he said, backing expertly and swiftly so as to head the long gray hood toward the village. “My means don’t run to cars like this, though. It’s Alexia’s.”

His voice didn’t caress her name in loverly fashion, certainly; but then there was no reason why it should, even if, as Craig had hinted, he was actually rather infatuated with her. Craig hadn’t said how he knew, but then one can usually tell these things about people one knows very well, without words and without definite proof; it’s something in the eyes, something in the air. But it occurred to me that if Peter intended to wait, discreetly, until he could press his suit with propriety, then he was reckoning without Alexia’s singular directness.

In any case, whether or not there was anything in what Craig had told me, certainly both Peter Huber and myself, chance wayfarers, really, in the Brent house, were yet inexorably and inextricably bound up with the things that had happened there.

I sighed a little at that thought and he glanced at me.

“Tired? They’ve kept you going. I don’t suppose you’ve really rested since Conrad died. Well, since before that really. What with Craig sick and all the goings on before Conrad died.”

“There weren’t… Oh, you mean the bump on the door and seeing Nicky?”

“Seeing…” The car swerved toward the stone wall at the edge of the road, jerked back to the middle, and Peter said, “What do you mean? Was it Nicky you saw in the hall when you opened the door?”

“No, no. I didn’t see anybody. I opened the door after there was that-well, bump against it. But not right away. So whoever went past the door, carrying Heaven knows what, was out of sight by that time. It was earlier when I