Wolf in Man’s Clothing

14

WITH EVERY SECOND IT was growing darker; I don’t know how long I listened like that, but it seemed all at once fully dark. There was no further sound from the thickets on the slope ahead. And I had to get to the house.

I got awkwardly to my feet, tripping on my cape, spilling nickels. There was nothing I or anyone could do now for Claud Chivery. And I was afraid.

All at once I started to run-back, along the way I had come, for I couldn’t follow the path into those shadowy thickets where something had moved. I ran as Anna had run, gasping for breath, listening behind me, running.

Eventually, after an eon of time, I reached the wall and nothing came out of that black and haunted meadow behind me. Then I was on the public road and I still had to circle (on the road now) around that dark and horrible meadow in order to reach the house.

Yet nothing, really, seemed to have a meaning except the hard-packed, winding road, the loud sound of my feet upon it, the dark lines of wall and hedges, the trees on either hand, the silence of the night sky above. It was as if I was suspended in a strange and ghastly world, cut off from everything I’d ever known, aware only of the road-and the grotesque and horrible thing I’d left in the little thicket, flung down like an empty sack.

Well, I got to the gateposts which loomed sudden and huge in the dusk. I could then see the lights of the Brent house, glimmering through the trees.

My throat and lungs smarted and stung. Yet I was horribly watchful and aware of the shadows and shrubs along the driveway. But there was a light in the hall; the many-colored stained glass window was garish above me. The door was unlocked, for I flung it open. And fell, literally, into Beevens’ arms.

He caught me and his face seemed instantly to sharpen, so lines stood out and it turned the color of skim milk. I knew I was talking, trying to tell him.

He cried, “Dr. Chivery-Dr. Chivery…”

Someone else said, “Where? Where?” sharply, and there was a flash of color and Alexia, in her long green tea gown, came hurrying from the door of the library. Nicky floated into my vision too and seemed to have followed Alexia. Then Anna came from somewhere, and it was Anna who screamed.

She screamed so sharply that Beevens turned to her and said in a voice of snarling authority, “Get back to the kitchen. Shut up.”

Someone-Nicky-was helping me to a chair. Beevens ran to the telephone beyond the stairway and Alexia was telling him what to say, her pointed face a white, vehement mask.

And then the trooper (Drue’s guard; not Wilkins but another man) came running into the library, and wrested the telephone from Beevens’ hand. “I heard you! I heard everything. Are you sure he’s dead? What happened exactly? Operator, operator…”

He jiggled the hook and I tried to reply and he finally got the police. Alexia came back. “Where is Peter?” she cried. “Have you seen him? Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do. He took her home.”

“Took who home?”

“Maud Chivery. In the car. They left me at the corner. Someone was on the meadow-don’t you see-someone was there! Tell them that.”

The trooper was already shouting the news of murder (“Another murder! Dr. Chivery! In the north meadow down by the brook…”) presumably into Nugent’s distant ear. We all listened. “She doesn’t know who did it. Well, that’s what she says. Just now, five minutes ago. No, the Cable girl’s still in her room…”

Alexia looked at Nicky and Nicky looked at Alexia in utter silence, as if they didn’t need words; it was a secret look, communicative, with a kind of mutual question and answer. It was baffling, for I could feel those elements in it, yet there was nothing I could really interpret. The trooper said, “Okay-okay-okay,” and emerged into the hall again. “They’ll be here right away. Now then…” I’d never noticed what big and extraordinarily substantial-looking revolvers the troopers wore strapped to their trim waists, until I noticed the revolver this one held poised in his hand. He said, “Don’t leave the house, any of you,” and ran into the hall and up to the landing where he stopped instead of at Drue’s door. It was evidently an order from Nugent and it was a fairly strategic spot, for he could see the whole of the lower hall and part of the upper.”

Alexia looked down at me. “Do you know who did it?”

“No. No…”

Nicky said, almost dreamily, “Claud-well, he must have got in somebody’s way.”

“Suicide,” said Alexia, all at once. “It must have been suicide!” And Nicky said sharply, leaning over me, “What’s she got on her hands?”

“I fell-I told you. He was on the path…” I began jerkily. Alexia and Nicky drew a little together and just looked at me, so their faces, so alike, and the eyes shining from behind those long silky eyelashes, were almost like one face, seen in duplicate, with one expression.

It was Beevens who came forward, clucked disapprovingly and exactly like a hen when he saw my hands and said, “This way, Nurse. You’ll want to wash them.” I followed Beevens through the library and into the narrow little washroom adjoining it. There was soap there and I scrubbed my hands and then saw a small stain on the hem of my white skirt and I took that out with cold water too and shook myself and felt better. Although I’d lost my cap somewhere. Probably in the woodland and the police would find it and say I killed him.

And then I thought of Craig. Alexia hadn’t been with him, she’d been downstairs and in the library. So he was alone.

When I came back into the library Beevens was gone, and Alexia and Nicky were talking.

“Beevens said Maud walked into town about three-thirty this afternoon; she said she would wait in town and come home with Claud after the inquest. The inquest took place in the hotel,” Alexia was saying.

“But she must have missed him,” said Nicky. “Otherwise she and Claud would have come home together.” He turned to me. “You said, didn’t you, that Peter took her home in the car?”

“Yes.” I went to the couch to gather up my cape. “I rode into town with Mr. Huber; we went into the bar and Mrs. Chivery was there.”

“Maud?” cried Alexia.

“Claud must have walked from town,” said Nicky. “He often does. And he must have intended to stop here; everybody takes the short cut through the meadow.”

Alexia said, “Somebody’s got to tell Maud. I’ll telephone.” She started briskly for the telephone, quite cool and unperturbed.

I said, “It’s going to be a shock,” and looked at her trailing green tea gown-not a costume for walking in the meadow. Yet Chivery had been dead for some time when I found him, so she or anybody else would have had time to get home and change. And just at that moment I suspected anybody and everybody in the house, even Anna and Beevens and Craig.

But Drue had an alibi; she’d been under police guard. And now they’d release her, for this proved, didn’t it, that she hadn’t murdered Conrad! For, as Craig had said, simply on the basis of averages and logic, there weren’t likely to be two murderers, mysteriously converging in our midst.

At that thought and its implications I took a long and thankful breath.

Alexia had reached the door when Nicky said, “You’d better let me do it. I’ll have Peter bring her here…”

As Alexia paused, I walked past them quickly toward the stairway. The trooper let me pass; he didn’t speak or try to stop me; it was his presence there (uniformed, armed, waiting because he had to, alert as a coiled spring with only the excitement in his eyes betraying the man) that was a threat of power to come. Investigation, evidence, accusation. One attempt at murder: Craig. One murder by poison: difficult to prove. One murder by stabbing. Outright, cold-blooded, horribly feral. Wolfish.

Drue’s door was unguarded and I wanted to go to her, but that would have to come later. I hurried to Craig’s room; the door was open and he was sitting bolt upright, wrapped in a dressing gown, in the chair near the fireplace. His eyes blazed at me; his face was stiff and white. And I knew by the look on it, that he already knew. He said, “Shut the door.”

I did. “What are you doing out of bed? Who helped you…?”

“Come here. Put down your cape. Sit down-no, over here on the couch. Tell me about Claud. I heard the