Celia was immensely strong, and his weight was a fragile one. She could have leaned over the balcony railing and tried to lift him, or at least secured him a firmer grip. She could have called, “Hold on, I’m going for help!” and raced down the stairs, shrieked at the top of her lungs on the sidewalk, sped around to the garden and managed to break his fall.
She stood very still among the brown broadloom, thrown-back white candlewick, old-fashioned dresser and photographs which marked Mr. Tomlinson’s private precincts. She had been here often before, of course, making the bed and dusting, but now she took careful note of the framed bird pictures on the walls—the one of the black-and-yellow hen in which nestlings could be seen if you looked closely, and the glowing watercolor of massed canvasbacks at evening, with no set of down-sweeping wings the same.
An echo said somewhere, “It’s done.” But it seemed an eternity, when she took her gaze away from the walls, before the ivory-knuckled hand slipped almost wispily from its grip on the iron railing. It took so long that there were small dark-red crescents on the cushions of Celia’s thumbs where her nails had bitten.
After a muffled sound of impact on the square of concrete below, there was total silence. The house was full of the smell of burning oatmeal.
Six
WHEN the contents of the will became known, Mrs. Cannon demanded an autopsy. As her timing showed only greed and vindictiveness—she had been quite content with accident until she learned of her uncle’s bequest to his housekeeper—and as the police surgeon and the hospital were in full agreement with Dr. Fowler as to the cause of death, this was denied.
For, although after a lightning glance at Mr. Tomlinson’s bonelessly crumpled form Celia had assumed it safe to telephone Dr. Fowler at once, Mr. Tomlinson wasn’t quite dead. True to his parentage, he had lived for six hours, unconscious, in the intensive-care unit of the nearest hospital. Celia stayed in the waiting room until Mrs. Cannon arrived, her total pallor appearing to reflect horror—as it did. At any time the old man might wake and mutter what must be uttermost in his appalled brain: “I kept calling Celia, and I heard her come”—like all the deaf he was hypersensitive to vibration—“and she wouldn’t answer me.”
But he did not wake. Along with his neatly folded clothes in the hospital room where he died of deep shock were the field glasses which had been removed from around his neck, a mute statement of how he had come to be on the balcony at all.
So much for the actual cause of death, but what had immediately preceded it? Somewhat stiffly, in view of the rather unusual circumstances and Mrs. Cannon’s deadly perserverance, an inquest was granted. From it emerged Mr. Tomlinson’s earlier attack of dizziness, the lack of a single mark on his body that would not have been occasioned by his fall, and Dr. Fowler’s firm conviction that Celia had had absolutely no previous knowledge that she would benefit under the will. “Mr. Tomlinson told me of his intention in confidence.”
He was asked alertly, “Why was that, Doctor?”
Dr. Fowler’s sharp gaze did not go anywhere near Mrs. Cannon’s yellow eye as he said austerely, “I had been Robert Tomlinson’s friend as well as his physician for fifteen years.”
The reekingly burned breakfast, evocative of a housekeeper hurrying in response to a cry of distress or alarm, seemed to speak for itself, particularly in view of Celia’s frantic summons of Dr. Fowler on the occasion of his earlier attack. Mrs. Meggs, who had worked at the house far longer than Celia and not been mentioned in the will at all, carried unobtrusive weight when, asked if it was her impression that the housekeeper knew of any expectations, she shook her varnish-brown head. “She never said anything to me. Well, I guess she wouldn’t anyway, but it stands to reason that she would have changed, sort of, doesn’t it?”
The verdict of accidental death, a moral certainty ahead of time, now became official. Mrs. Cannon stopped Celia in the tan-painted corridor outside. She wore black with a twist of gray chiffon at the throat and an expression of cold amazement that, a year ago, she had actually sought out Celia in a guest bedroom at the Strykers’ and invited her into this costly fringe of her life.
For the first time, openly, they were not semiemployer and servant but two well-matched feminine antagonists. Mrs. Cannon said in a low and bladelike voice, “I don’t know how you managed it, but I will never believe that you didn’t have a hand in my uncle’s death. I’ll contest the will, of course.”
Celia, in a subdued taupe dress with white collar and cuffs, tipped her head briefly in a way that did not quite say, Go ahead and try it. What she said aloud, with the conviction of perfect truth was, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Cannon. I don’t know how to convince you, but I never laid a finger on Mr. Tomlinson.”
And she hadn’t.
She spent the night at 4 Stedman Circle, because nobody had cautioned her not to, and walked through its rooms like a very young girl in a dream. Downstairs, the kitchen, lavatory, dining room, living room, study; upstairs, guest room and bath, her own room which now looked shabby and shrunken, Mr. Tomlinson’s bath and bedroom, mysteriously restored by Mrs. Meggs so that it bore no trace of his violent departure from it. A steep little flight of stairs led to an attic, but Celia did not go there.
She paused in her tour and looked at herself in mirrors as she passed them, and in some manner her reflection within the various frames, against the
