The velvet hand Page 5

  Every time the phone rang the disappointment was newly bitter. It was nine o’clock and then it was ten, and Libby had been gone for more than forty-eight hours. All three men were going to stay the night, William and Hugo in the house, George at the hotel in the village. When she heard them discussing it, Kit closed her eyes. For what were they preparing? And yet in words nobody would admit that there was anything to be really worried about.

  At half-past ten Kit found herself unexpectedly alone with Hugo. George had gone over to the hotel to book a room when he couldn’t raise the desk, William was upstairs with Miriam, and Philip was in his study. Hugo had gone for a walk. Coming in, he strolled across to where Kit sat near the hearth, propped an elbow on the mantel and looked down at her. He was too close. The glow of the fire made him larger than lif e.

  He spoke abruptly. “I’m sorry about this morning, Kit. I was pretty rough, but you do get my goat, you know. You’re so sure you’re always right.”

  She cut hastily across his half-humorous apology—an apology of sorts. “It’s all right, Hugo, I’m not worrying about it. I suppose I was stupid jumping that Oaks woman. . .”

  Hugo leaned over, took hold of her shoulders gently, and kissed her under one eye. He was too quick for her to escape him completely. She pulled back. Her cheek felt as though it had been scalded. Hugo was erect again, tall and assured. He was smiling. She gazed past him into the flames. Skip it or tackle it; she heard herself speaking before she had made up her mind.

  “Forty-eight hours since Libby went,” she threw her head back and looked up at him, “only forty-eight hours. What a lightning readjustment, Hugo. What am I—a consolation prize? Or are you just trying to make me happy out of the goodness of your heart?”

  Hugo didn’t answer at once. Hands thrust into his pockets, he stared down at her like a zoologist observing a new and interesting crustacean, his head a little on one side. “Kit, my sweet. . .”

  Whatever he was going to add was left unsaid. Someone had come into the hall. Hugo moved off indifferently, lighting a cigarette. It was George who walked into the room. If he had noticed their closeness he didn’t give any indication of it. He was quietly cheerful. He had gotten a room at the inn and he was going to use it. Kit ought to get some rest. Tomorrow would be the day—they would hear from Libby tomorrow, he was sure of it. If Kit offered him a last drink he’d be on his way. “How about you, Cavanaugh?” Both men had highballs. Half an hour later Kit was in bed. Her eyes were heavy and almost immediately she was asleep.

  At a quarter of three she woke abruptly. Something had aroused her, some sound. . . . Lying still in the darkness, she listened. The house was silent. There was nothing but the faint whirring of her electric clock and a whisper of wind. Turning on her side and pulling the blanket higher, she sat up sharply. The window beyond the closet, the one that faced east, was brighter than the other two. She got out of bed, went over to the window, and looked out. Behind drawn shades the light was on in the kitchen.

  Libby, Kit thought, her heart leaping. Libby had come back. She had let herself in with her key and was down there in the kitchen getting something to eat. Throwing on a robe, Kit went along the hall and ran lightly down the stairs. The lower regions were in complete blackness except for a thin orange line at the bottom of the door that led into the pantry. She opened the door and went through the pantry and into the kitchen. The light in the ceiling was on. The big square room was empty.

  Kit’s disappointment was keen for a moment—but then, she hadn’t really believed it was Libby. She looked around. Althea’s money had made the kitchen a new place; it was all a gleaming white except for the red cork floor. Everything was in order, giant icebox, counters, sinks, table, just as the maid had left it when she went. Kit’s ranging glance stopped dead. Her eyes widened and she caught her breath. She hadn’t been frightened in the darkness of the halls; standing there in flooding light she felt something close to panic. Polly put the kettle on and we’ll all have—someone had put the kettle on. It began to boil, sending out little puffs of steam from the spout.

  Kit watched the puffs stupidly, unable to tear her gaze loose. Tea in the middle of the night, no, at after three in the morning. Tea for whom? Philip? Perhaps her uncle mightn’t have been able to get to sleep. . . . She left the kitchen, returned to the main hall and went down it to Philip’s study. The door went in only an inch or two, there was something against it. She pushed hard; a crash and the door swung freely. Kit reached for the switch and the lamps came on. She stared at the chair lying on its side on the floor.

  The chair had been placed under the knob to keep the door from opening. Like the kitchen, the study was empty.

  Wind ruffled her robe, blew coldly around her bare ankles. . . . The study was empty now, it hadn’t been empty a minute earlier. The big west window was wide open from the bottom. Had someone just gone out through it?

  Kit ran to the window and thrust her head and shoulders over the sill. The stars were bright and there was a slice of moon low in the sky. The lawns, the sycamore, the stone walls—you could see clean to the edge of the orchard. Nothing moved. There was no one in sight. Kit shut and locked the window and started for the stairs, fast.

  Mounting, she slowed. Philip might have left his window open, but he couldn’t have placed the chair against the door from the inside. Undoubtedly someone had broken into the study. Her uncle was tired and needed sleep, but she’d have to get someone to help her make the rounds and see whether anything else was wrong. Hugo wasn’t to be thought of; she pulled her robe tighter around her and tied the sash. William, then. She went along the upper hall and was about to knock on William’s door when the door of the other guest room opened and Hugo stuck his head out. His hair was rumpled, his eyes bright.

  “Kit! What is it? What’s the trouble?”

  She said, “I think there was someone downstairs in Philip’s study.”

  Inside her room Miriam snored softly. She had an even, rhythmic snore like the sound of the sea. When they were children Libby and she used to wait for it before making midnight raids on the icebox, the old one, a big wooden tiling that was painted blue.

  Hugo said softly, "Half a minute and I’ll be with you.”

  He retreated, pulled on trousers and a coat and joined her. The study was just as she had left it, and as always, neat and in order. Nothing had been disturbed. All the other downstairs windows within reach were closed and locked. They went into the kitchen. The doors and windows there and in the pantry and in the entryway were secure.

  Hugo shrugged. “If there was someone here. . .”

  Kit said patiently, “My dear man, there was someone here. Chairs don’t put themselves on the insides of doors, kettles,” she pointed, “don’t boil unless someone turns the gas on under them, nor do ceiling lights come on by themselves.”

  Hugo smiled at her. “Suppose the maid left the light on and forgot to turn off the gas. Let’s see how much water there is in this.” He hefted the kettle. “Very little. All right, all right—don’t bite me. I know it doesn’t explain the chair in your uncle’s study. So there was someone here, so whoever it was is gone. As far as I can see nothing seems to have been taken. I’ll turn the lights off and stick around for a while down here to see if we get a return visit. You’d better go back to bed or you’ll catch your death.” He looked at her bare feet and ankles.

  Kit was shivering with cold, and reaction. “Maybe I’d better call William and he can help.”

  Hugo put up a hand. “God forbid.” At his expression she laughed and retreated.

  She slept late the next morning. It was after nine when the sound of the power mower woke her. It was William, guiding the new and expensive machine that Philip had insisted on buying over the grass, just as later he would industriously go for a ten-mile walk for his health and after that take Miriam for a drive in the Lincoln Philip had bought before he went to Mexico, whether her uncle wanted it or not. At least that was William’s usual ro
utine when he came to Denfield week-ends. Routine? Nothing was routine now. There had evidently been no word from Libby, or they would have waked her. But sleep had done her good and it was early yet, and the sun was out and the sky was blue. Dressing hastily, she went downstairs more cheerful than she had been for what seemed like a long month, and was actually little more than two days.

  George had gone back to New York. He left a message with the maid saying that he’d call her later. Hugo had probably gone too; he wasn’t anywhere around. Evidently the intruder of the night before had not returned. Philip was in his study working; she would tell him about last night as soon as his typewriter stopped pounding. She was drinking coffee on the sun porch when William came tramping dolefully into the house with a tale of broken bushes and the nurserymen. “They’re willing enough to sell you things, after that they don’t care.” Kit lit a cigarette and listened to William with only half an ear. He was going on and on about the nurserymen. “Those bushes should be charged to them. They should be made to pay”

  Kit said finally, “For heaven’s sake, William, who cares about a few bridal wreaths? There are masses of them anyhow.”

  “Not the bridal wreaths,” William said patiently, “the rhododendrons, under Libby’s window.”

  Kit was outside in record time. They went around to the west wing. “See?” William waved. Kit frowned. He was right. Someone had plunged roughly through the thick planting of rhododendrons directly under Libby’s side window, the one to the north. Branches hung brokenly. Staring at the crushed leaves, the fresh breaks, Kit was puzzled. Philip’s study was at the other end of the house. You might have expected damaged shrubbery outside the window there if someone had jumped through it last night, but here—she pushed rhododendron branches aside. In the soft earth, a little out from the wall, there were two deep indentations. They had been made, there was no question about it, by a ladder. The ladder was there on its side, ten feet farther along.

  William said, “I told you so. It was those nurserymen. They broke these valuable bushes and they should be made to. . .”

  “Beg pardon, mister?”

  One of the nurserymen had approached unheard. He had come for the ladder, the rest of the dead wood on the apple trees at the edge of the orchard had to be pruned. The man, Joe Gauntlet, had put the ladder where it now was before leaving yesterday. He looked at the ladder. “Yeah, I put it here—but not the way it is now. The other side was top. Someone must have been fooling around with it after we went, that’s how the bushes got broken. Yes, sir, someone stood that ladder up against that wall and broke them branches. Not me.”

  A ladder against the house in the night, a ladder that must, from the marks in the ground, have rested under

  Libby’s window; Kit ran inside and up the stairs with William at her heels. Miriam heard them and called William.

  “Just a minute, Aunt,” William called back. “There’s something that needs attention. . .”

  Miriam said firmly, “I need your attention—now. My water pitcher’s empty and I want it filled.”

  William always seemed devoted to his demanding—and perhaps wealthy—aunt. His face was livid as he went obediently toward Miriam’s room. He looked as though he could wring her neck . . . Interesting. Kit had no time for it then.

  She ran on to the end of the hall and around the jog and opened Libby’s door. The north window was down, the one below which the ladder had rested, and nothing seemed to have been disturbed. She could no longer smell the perfume but the air was stuffy. She had better open the windows, set the curtains stirring; the room had too much the look of belonging to someone who had died, of being morbidly and sentimentally preserved exactly as it had been left by its owner. Kit started across the floor, and stood stock-still in the middle of it.

  Lying on the white rug beyond the foot of the bed was what looked like a decapitated human head, face down, a woman’s head with a hat on. It was one of Libby’s hat stands. The hat on it was a cherry-colored straw cloche with navy ribbon streamers that Kit had never seen her wear. The round red crown was split wide open by a blow that had all but crushed the papier-mache head beneath it. The weapon that had been used, a hammer, was on the rug beside the smashed head.

  VII

  Kit stared down at the exhibition at her feet, pushing away sickness and an odd sort of terror and trying to make her reason work. Who could have done such a thing, wantonly, deliberately—and why? The little hat had no intrinsic value. It looked like hatred, pure and simple, a hatred revenging itself symbolically on a Libby who was out of reach. It was also a piece of exhibitionism crying out to be noticed. “I hate her, do you understand, I hate her. This is what I would do to her if I could.” Unbridled rage, on the spur of the moment, had—it wasn’t the spur of the moment. In the dead of night someone had felt around for the ladder in darkness, had propped it against the house wall and had climbed rung by rung.

  She glanced at the closet. The hat and hat stand were one of a row that had been on the shelf on Tuesday night. Lift it out, put it down on the rug, and smash it with a hammer—as though the real target was Libby’s shining head under the cap of cherry-colored straw, as though the hand that held the hammer had tried to crush the skull beneath it and destroy Libby forever, so that she would never speak or move again. . .

  It was as stupid and meaningless as the boiling kettle in the empty kitchen at three o’clock in the morning, as the open window in her uncle’s study where nothing had been disturbed. It was beginning to seem as though someone, animated by a spirit of malicious evil, had sauntered into the house and out of it again slyly, posing problems that were mad.

  The word lodged in Kit’s brain, reiterated itself. Not sane. Twisted. Incalculable, delighting in pain and suffering and confusion. But it was an active insanity. Suppose Libby had written and her letter had been destroyed after it reached the house, or suppose she had called and the news had been suppressed? It could easily have been done. The phone wasn’t covered all the time. Libby had gone away with Tony Wilder because she was in love with him and knew Philip would disapprove, she had said in her note that she would get in touch with them, and she hadn’t gotten in touch with them.

  At the sound of a step behind her Kit turned stiffly. Her responses were sluggish. It was Hugo. He caught sight of her through the open door. He advanced into the room and saw the smashed hat.

  “God!”

  His voice tore at Kit. She knew then. If she had had any lingering doubts as to how Hugo really felt about Libby they were resolved in that moment, once and for all. He loved Libby and would always love her. His expression was terrible.

  Outside the wind blew and the sun shone. “Wilder,” Hugo said softly, on an exhausted note, as if everything were explained.

  “What do you mean?” Kit asked, bewildered. “Tony Wilders hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away now, with Libby.”

  Hugo raised his head. He looked at Kit directly, as though he hadn’t seen her before, hadn’t been aware that she was standing close to him. The blood had begun to return to his face and he was more nearly normal. But a vein in his temple pulsed in and out.

  “If it weren’t for Wilder, Libby would be here, wouldn’t she?” His voice was harsh.

  Kit didn’t answer. Her uncle was coming into the room. He didn’t say a single word. He looked down, looked again, and threw a hand across his eyes. Then William came, and Miriam. Miriam stared thoughtfully at the cherry-colored cloche and the hammer. Her expression didn’t change. She said, “What a waste, a perfectly good hat. That hammer belongs to us. It was in this room. Libby got it on Monday to fix one of the curtain rods.” She started to stoop but it was Hugo who picked the hammer up by the head. “Might be fingerprints on it.” Miriam gave him a cold stare. “Do people leave such things nowadays? I was afraid someone would trip over it.”

  By common consent they left the room. Downstairs in the living room they tried to make sense of the night that had passed and the things that
had happened, and couldn’t. Miriam threw up her hands at the idea of a cup of tea at three o’clock in the morning. She had been in bed and soundly asleep. So had William. Philip said that nothing in his study had been touched—except for the window Kit had found open. He had locked all the windows before going upstairs. It was plain that the house had been entered by way of the ladder and Libby’s room. The hat and the kettle remained bits of a pattern that refused to take a coherent shape.

  There was one thing; Kit voiced it. She said, "Whoever used the nurserymen’s ladder had to know it was there.”

  Blank faces, a silent enumeration; you didn’t have to be an expert at mathematics. They were seven. Philip, Kit, George, Hugo, William, Miriam—and Anita.

  Kit stared at the floor. Anita had denied all knowledge of Pedrick when she did know him. But Anita would never have done what had been done upstairs in Libby’s room. It was completely and utterly impossible.

  Miriam rearranged folds of her skirts, smoothed her hair. She said judicially, “Catherine is wrong. Dozens of people could have seen the nurserymen using the ladder, from the road.” Kit sat forward, a sudden light in her eyes. “Those people in New York, Eleanor Oaks and that man, Pedrick,” she exclaimed. “They could have been in Denfield yesterday.”

  Philip grunted. “What are you trying to get at, Kit?” he demanded irascibly. “You’re not seriously suggesting that the man and woman climbed the ladder, entered the house, and did that to Libby’s hat. What would be their objective, their purpose?”

  Kit said defensively, “Eleanor Oaks was jealous of Tony Wilder. You should have seen her face when I mentioned Libby; she spilled coffee all over herself. If she hated Libby. .