Date with Death Read online

  It was too late to go back to the lane, poison ivy or no poison ivy. He went on, looking for the path leading into the old unused wagon road that was a short-cut to the Milnors’ orchard. He came on it in a few steps through the undergrowth, a narrow silver ribbon in the dark woods. Along the curving back road he could see the banks of laurel blossoms glowing in the moonlight sifting through the oaks and dogwood trees. As he stepped through them he thought of the poison ivy again. It was all through the violets and honeysuckle that covered the old tracks and flourished down the middle of the road.

  “Forget about the ticks and the ivy, Smith,” he said to himself. “Get on with whatever it is you think you’re going to do.”

  As he looked around before starting out for the oyster-shell lane that led to the cottage he started violently, and relaxed with a grin. The bulk there was only the Milnors’ old black jalopy, standing forlorn and abandoned by the woodpile in the curve of the road. He went on toward the lane, through the orchard. What exactly was it he did plan to do? He shook his head. Nothing, except stand by, in case there was more trouble from Gordon, or whatever the trouble was, until Tom came, whoever Tom was, and took the Baby home. It would be simple. Through the top of the orchard he would come to the big three-pronged-tulip tree a hundred yards from the cottage. He could stay there, quietly, on hand if needed, unobserved if not needed.

  He went through the orchard, across the meadow, and stood by the big tulip. The lights were still on in the cottage. The girl was nowhere in sight. He waited, and heard her. She was pulling the boat up on the muddy beach.

  “The poor little devil,” he thought. She must have been sitting down there in it, ready to pull out into the creek if she had to. He had a sudden impulse to go over to the cottage and let her know he was there, to help her if he could. He took a few steps from the tulip tree. She was coming up from the beach then, tiny and fragile in Natalie Ferguson’s black dress. As she came onto the lawn in front of the cottage she pushed her hair back from her head with a gesture so tragic and hopeless that he stopped. She crossed the lawn to a group of painted wood chairs and sat there, small and lonely, watching the lane.

  As she sprang up suddenly Jonas took a quick step into a clump of dogwood. A car was coming. He could hear the motor, the tires grinding on the oyster-shell, and finally see the lights through the trees. The car swung around the bend into the clearing and braked to a sharp stop. Two doors opened and slammed shut. A man and a girl were running toward the cottage. The girl on the lawn stood, waiting for them.

  “—Jenny! Jenny baby…what is it?”

  The girl stood speechless, her hand raised, pointing at the cottage.

  “Jenny!”

  It was the man speaking. Jonas saw the glint of the insignia on his cap, the glint of the single gold stripe of an ensign in the United States Navy on his sleeve.

  He heard Jenny’s voice. “There…inside. It’s Gordon. I…I’ve killed him…”

  Three people stood rigid…Jonas Smith as blank and dazed as the young ensign and the girl by him.

  “—I tell you, it’s Gordon. He’s in there. I’ve killed him.”

  The girl said it again, quietly. Then, as if their shocked immobility was more than she could take, she threw her hands out to them.

  “Oh, don’t just stand there! Do something! Can’t you hear me? Can’t you hear what I’m saying? It’s Gordon. I’ve killed him—he’s dead! Oh, do something! Please…do something!”

  The two turned quickly then and came running up the path to the cottage. Jonas Smith took a quick breath. The girl Jenny was standing there on the lawn, her head down, her arms hanging limp at her sides. The ensign and the other girl were running across the porch. He himself was standing there. He was Jonas Smith M.D. He was a doctor. He had an obligation to himself and to his profession. It was his duty to dash in there, see if the man was dead, save him if he was not, do everything he could to save him. And he hadn’t moved.

  The ensign had opened the cottage door. He stood there motionless, one arm held back to stop the girl coming up behind him. Jonas heard her voice.

  “Don’t be a fool, Tom. Is he dead?”

  She pushed his arm away, stepped quickly into the doorway, and stopped.

  “Oh, dear God!”

  She turned back, brought her clenched fist to her mouth and stood, shocked and perfectly still for an instant, before she went slowly across the narrow porch to a chair. She stood holding to the back of it with both hands.

  She straightened up and turned back. “Tom—what’ll we do?” Her voice was controlled. “Where’s Jenny?”

  “I’m here.”

  The girl came around the end of the cottage and stood there by the screen door.

  The ensign’s voice was curt. “Keep out of here, both of you.”

  “No. I’m coming in. I did it. It was—”

  “Shut up, Jenny.”

  “But I did. I tell you I did it.”

  “All right, Jenny baby.”

  The other girl’s voice was quiet and reassuring. “We’d better go in, Tom, and shut the door. We’ll wake everybody in St. Margaret’s.”

  Jonas Smith moved out of the dogwood. The ground was carpeted under the pines. He went silently across to the end of the cottage. A dim light showed through the window there. He went up to it. Through a tiny kitchen and the open door across it, he could see into the single living room. As he saw the thing lying there on the green composition-tiled floor, he felt a sudden guilty sense of relief. No matter how he had acted, there was nothing he could have done for Gordon—nothing anyone could have done for him. Gordon had been shot through the heart. It was not pretty, but final. The look of surprised horror on the handsome face staring up from the floor was evidence enough, more evidence than the bright crawling stain still moving through the white string rug in front of the fireplace.

  “—And quit riding her, Sis.”

  Jonas could not see any of them, but their voices came through clearly.

  “She’s not riding me. She told me not to go out with him. She told me what he was like. And I didn’t mean to. I did go to the hop. I went just so I wouldn’t have to go out with him. I didn’t know he was going to meet me at the gate. I couldn’t say no, I didn’t want him to take me home. And then—”

  “But your note said you were going to the dance at St. John’s—”

  “That’s where we were going, Sis! You’ve got to believe me! We were going to the dance. But he said he had to pick up the Milnors and take them in too. That’s why I came. It’s true, Sis—it really is!”

  The girl’s voice was rising, dangerously near the hysterical breaking point. Jonas tried to piece it together. The two were sisters, the ensign was their brother. The hop would be the dance at the Naval Academy. He had sisters who’d been hop girls in their day. The gaps in what Jenny had said were simple. If she’d had to leave the Yard to go home alone, it meant the midshipman she’d gone with was a last minute date who hadn’t signed up for liberty to take her home. Jonas knew about late dates too, an old Annapolitan custom, deplored by the midshipmen who brought them down and fed them but whose hops ended at midnight, enjoyed by the St. John’s students who danced on till two and didn’t care what time they said good-night. He looked through the little kitchen down at the body on the floor. This was no St. John’s student. There was nothing of the college man about him, not even of the returned veteran. There was an aura of sophistication that was not like Annapolis. Gordon was too experienced, too worldly, by far too well dressed.

  “But you knew the Milnors are in Cambridge—”

  “He said they were back, Sis. They’d called him up.”

  “Skip it,” the ensign said.

  “No. I’ve got to tell you. You’ve got to listen to me. And don’t look at me like that, Tom—don’t! I didn’t mean to do anything I shouldn’t. I tried to go home
, but he wouldn’t let me. He threw the car keys away, in the creek. He did it on purpose—he told me he did when we got in here. He said we’d come in and phone for a taxi, and I…I forgot till we came in that they don’t have any phone. Then I…I couldn’t get out, and…he said horrible things. He said I wanted to come. And then he pulled out that gun, and threw it to me, and said I could…I could shoot him if I wanted to, it was one thing or the other. And I was so scared I did. I did shoot him, and he fell over. He fell over just like that—”

  “Oh, Baby, stop! Stop it, Jenny. It’s all over now. We do believe you, Baby.”

  The poignant tenderness in her sister’s voice sent a sharp thrilling warmth up from the roots of Jonas Smith’s spinal column.

  “—He’s dead. There’s nothing we can do about that. He was no good—he shouldn’t have brought you out here.—What do we do now?”

  The ensign broke in crisply. “Who saw you come out here, Jenny?”

  “I don’t think anybody. We didn’t even pass a car on the road. That’s when I first began to get a little scared.”

  Jenny’s voice was muffled and streaked with tears.

  “Who saw you get in at the gate?”

  “Everybody coming out of the Yard could have. I wasn’t trying to hide. George took me to the gate. I was going home, and—”

  “Who saw you leave the house?”

  “Nobody. Nobody was home. That’s when he said why didn’t we go over to the dance at St. John’s and maybe Sis would be there.”

  “All right. You didn’t leave the house, Jenny. You got to the house and said good night to him and went to bed. That’s all you know, and that’s the last time—”

  “No. I won’t do it. I’m going to tell them I did it. I’m not going to tell a lie about it.”

  “You want to go to jail, and be tried for murder, and have everybody—”

  “Oh, no! They—”

  “Let her alone, Tom,” the other girl said quietly. “I’m afraid you’d have to, Jenny. But it’s not jail so much. It’s Grandfather.”

  Jonas heard the younger girl’s short terrified cry. Her voice was hardly audible then. “That’s why I didn’t call you, Sis. I didn’t want him to find out I was…I was in a jam. He’ll be furious!”

  “Oh, the hell with him.”

  The ensign moved into the space visible from the window. He was tall and erect, the part of his face not shadowed by his cap hard and intense. He reached down to the small snub-nosed automatic on the floor.

  “You shot once?”

  “Yes.”

  He held the gun to the window curtain and wiped it.

  “Oh, please don’t, Tom! I’m not afraid…you’ll just get in trouble—”

  “He’s already in trouble, Jenny. Terrible trouble. You know he is. You might as well face it. And stop crying. It’s too late to cry.”

  “—You know what’ll happen, Elizabeth,” the ensign said. His voice was curt and cool. “And it’s not going to. He was a louse, he had it coming, let him take it.”

  He stepped over the dark stain on the floor, picked up the dead man’s hand, pressed the gun into it, brought the hand back to the floor.

  “Where did you go in here, Jenny?”

  Her sister’s voice was controlled. Jonas Smith shook his head. She’d weighed the consequences, decided to play it with her brother, not as Jenny wanted it. It was wrong. He knew it was wrong. “—But if it were my sister…” He shook his head again, remembering the small pointed face, the hollow terror-stricken eyes and trembling young mouth.

  “Try to think, Jenny! What did you touch? Did you go out in the galley?”

  “No. Yes. No, I didn’t. He went out, to get some water for his drink. I didn’t. I didn’t touch anything—I didn’t move from here.”

  “All right.—Your dress, Jenny…that’s not your…”

  “It’s Natalie’s. Mine’s over there, and my shoes. In the beach bag in her closet.”

  “We’ll get them in the morning. Nobody’d think of going there even if they find him. It’s Tom we’ve got to think about now… he’s got to get back in—Leave the light on, Tom Oh, Tom… there’s blood on your cuff. And look at the mud… Jenny, go on out. Both of you. I’ll get the mop. Be quiet.”

  Jonas moved to the side of the window. She was coming into the little kitchen. He saw her hand reach behind the icebox for the mop. Then he saw her face. It was reflected, for a tiny but to Jonas Smith indelible moment, in a round piece of mirror of the kind women put on the table to set a bowl of flowers on. The mirror was propped up between a pair of glass candlesticks at the back of the linoleum-covered shelf under the wall cupboard, and it held the reflection of the girl’s face for a brief instant that transmuted itself in the mind of Jonas Smith into a fragment of eternity. She was lovely, and as different from her younger sister as dawn is from dusk and flame from smoke. She was blonde, her fair hair drawn back and tied with a black ribbon at the neck, slender and thoroughbred, with a pale intent oval face and calm grey eyes. There was something else that shown out from behind the grey eyes and that had the same warmth and moving tenderness that her voice had.

  Jonas Smith realized slowly that he had changed from a man alert and watching to an automaton, walking as if in a dream, without conscious awareness, back to the great tulip tree. Or he knew, when he thought of it, that he must have walked there. He was there when she came swiftly out and hurried to meet her sister and the ensign by the dead man’s car. He heard a door open and close, saw the three of them go quickly to their own car at the end of the clearing, saw its red tail light disappear along the oyster-shell lane into the woods. It was the way he would have seen them if it had been a dream.

  He stood motionless, in the now utterly quiet night, looking unseeingly down at the cottage on the moonlight-flooded point. He was gripped by a curious sense of some new kind of reality that was the most profound experience of the twenty-eight years of his life. It had come quietly up out of some deep inner recess of his mind, a kind of intuitive knowledge, admitting neither question nor doubt.

  “That’s the girl I’m going to marry,” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  He heard himself saying it aloud in the quiet of the whispering woods and the lap-lap-lap of the water on the shore, and as he said it he felt a glowing sense of confidence and warmth that made him feel, suddenly, as if he had moved all his life half-asleep to come now to this abrupt and vivid wakening. He took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadow of the tulip tree into the moonlight. Then he stopped short. The lighted cottage across the clearing on the point was still there in front of him. A man named Gordon was in there on the floor, dead. In a few timeless moments his own inner life had been changed and illumined. The fact of the dead man’s body in there had not changed. It was solid and incontrovertible. Something had to be done. Jonas Smith was the man who had to do it.

  What he had to do was go at once to the telephone in the Fergusons’ cottage across the creek and call the police. There was such a thing as law. He believed in it. His duty was clear and tangible. It was to find the nearest officer of the law and report what had happened… everything that had happened. The nearest officer of the law was exactly as near as the Fergusons’ telephone. It was all simple, and no problem whatever. On the other hand . . .

  He shook his head. “There is no other hand, Smith,” he said to himself. “There’s only one hand, and you’ve got hold of it.”

  He went through the pines to the cottage. Two other facts were solid and incontrovertible. The sister of the girl he was going to marry—the girl whose last name he didn’t know, whose face he had only seen reflected for a tiny instant in a piece of mirror propped up against a kitchen wall—was legally guilty of homicide. The girl herself, Elizabeth, and their brother the young ensign, were legally, technically and in fact accessory to it. A third fact just as solid and inco
ntrovertible came suddenly into his mind. He was himself accessory, as of the last fifteen minutes. He would continue to be as long as he did nothing about it.

  He shrugged his shoulders, went inside the cottage and looked down at the motionless figure on the green-tiled floor, his eyes resting on the surprised and horrified face staring sightlessly up into nothing.

  “—He never expected her to shoot. He never had any idea he was going to die until he got it.”

  The impression on his mind was so vivid that it seemed audible, and he looked around involuntarily to see if by some chance there was another person in the room saying it to him. There was no one there except himself and the thing on the floor. He looked down at it again. The face was handsome, the wavy blond hair as neatly in place as if Gordon had smoothed it back just before his last fatal gesture. His dinner clothes, messed up now, were perfectly cut, of silky finely woven midnight blue cloth. His hands were soft and well manicured, with colorless polish on the nails. There was a green scarab ring on one finger, and on the left wrist a watch in a wide flexible gold bracelet. Jonas did not like men who wore gold bracelets, but he knew there were places—not Maryland—where they were considered fashionable and in good taste.

  Jonas shook his head. All in all Gordon did not look like a fool, like the kind of man who sober or drunk would toss his only set of car keys in the creek or toss a loaded gun to a terrified hysterical girl and say “Shoot me, baby.” And he had done both. Was he an actor, used to dramatic gestures, so experienced he believed he was irresistible, so convinced of his own charm that he was hardly taking a chance? Jonas gave it up; stepped back carefully and opened the door. Outside the air was clean and cool. It washed the reek out of his nostrils and cleared out of his mind the momentary anger at what had happened, at what he himself had done. If he’d only stayed in the Fergusons’ cottage, gone to bed when the dog had wanted to… He might have known nothing about all this, Jenny and Elizabeth and the young ensign Tom might have got away with it. But he hadn’t, and there was nothing he could do except one thing.