The Pact
All the while I was getting a make-shift dinner ready, that last
thought of mine kept bothering me like the smell of something burning.
So, as soon as dinner was over (I need not have bothered with it;
everyone straggled in and straggled out again, without doing any
justice to good food. Mrs. Ricker and Martha did not even come down.),
I told the Indian girl, whose name was Zinnia, to manage the dishes
the best she could, and I went off up to my room.
I took up some dinner on a tray with me, for Mrs. Ricker and for
Martha. When Mrs. Ricker opened her door, I managed to get the
information that Martha was awake, at last, and that Mrs. Ricker had
just been helping her with her bath.
“Is she all right, now?” I questioned.
“I—suppose so.” She edged the door shut, in my face.
I went into my room and combed my hair. I can always think better when
I am doing some absolutely unimportant thing like that. But, to-day,
it was as if someone had put an egg-beater into my mind, and was
beating it to best time. My thoughts whirred, and tossed, and foamed.
Sam’s pipe ashes. The key in my pocket. Chad’s suicide. Chad’s note of
confession. Gaby’s fear. Mrs. Ricker alone in the house. What it was
that Danny knew and dared not tell? Not all plainly, and separately,
as they look in writing; but all jumbled, and each one seething with
its own details and complications.
Sam’s pipe ashes—— Lands alive! What had been the matter with me? Sam
was the only member of our household who smoked a pipe, but he was not
the only man in creation who did; nor was his the only pipe, I
supposed, that had ever dropped and spilled its contents. A very nice
and comforting thought, if I could have fooled myself into believing
it.
Try as I might, I couldn’t keep from thinking that part of Sam’s talk
was bluff—that is, soon as I got away from him I thought that. Did it
mean that he was trying to shield Chad? No. It could not mean that.
Besides, Chad himself had surely been trying to shield someone. Sam?
Gaby had feared someone, when she had left the house. No woman had
ever feared Sam.
Mrs. Ricker had hated Gaby. But, so had John hated Gaby. Mrs. Ricker
had said—— John had said——
I jumped to my feet, holding my head in my hands. It seemed to me that
the only decent thing I could do, since it held my brainpan, was to
wrench the disloyal thing off and sling it away. How dared I think
such thoughts of people with whom I had spent the best part of my
life? They were the only friends I had in the world. I had never seen
one of them do an unkind thing. Never. Mrs. Ricker was as queer as
Dick’s hatband, but she had always been gentle and patient. She had
always been the first to spread crumbs on the snow for the birds in
winter. Though, of course, she had said to Hubert Hand—— I was off
again.
I could not endure the thinking of such thoughts. I must stop it. I
must find work to do; someone to talk to. I ran across my room and
pulled open the door, just in time to see Hubert Hand straighten from
where he had been stooping to my keyhole.
He brazened it out. “Sorry, Mary. But I guess it will be dog kill dog
around here, from now on.”
“Hubert Hand,” I said, “what I want to know is, why are you listening
at my keyhole?”
“I wasn’t listening. I was looking, or trying to. This keyhole peering
is the bunk, Mary. You might as well cut it out yourself.” With that
he turned and walked on down the hall.
I stood watching him, trying to account for an odd sense of relief
that had come to me. In a minute I understood. Since he had been at my
keyhole, he must have had some suspicion of me, for something.
Possibly he had a good reason for that suspicion. As good a reason as
I had, for suspicioning Sam, and John, and Mrs. Ricker. He was clear
off the track with his suspicion. Probably, I was just as far off with
mine.
He turned, quickly, and came back to me. He looked up and down the
hall. He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “Mary,” he said,
“I’ve gone at this all wrong. I’m off my nut to-day—that’s all. I’ve
discovered that I—— Well, I guess I cared a lot more for the girl than
I thought I did. By God, I believe I loved her. It is hell—having her
clear gone. But my hanging for her murder isn’t going to do her any
good; not now.”
Horrified, I backed away from him. For one wild moment I thought that
the man was confessing to me.
“No!” he said. “Not that! I swear to God I’m innocent. But they are
going to try to pin it on me, and they may not have much trouble doing
it. I want to make a bargain with you. You’ll get the best of it, for
I know damn well that I’m innocent, and I don’t think that you
are—entirely. It is this. If you’ll keep your mouth shut, I’ll keep
mine shut. Fifty-fifty. Will you do it?”
“Hubert Hand,” I said, “I don’t know one solitary thing about you that
would be of any importance if I told it to the world. Anything that
you think you know about me, I’m glad and willing to have you
broadcast, or publish in the papers.”
“Sure of that? Sure you are willing to have me broadcast that you
found the body; that you didn’t scream; that you stayed there, quiet
and alone with it for ten minutes, before you gave the alarm?”
Fool that I was, I said, “It wasn’t nearly ten minutes. It wasn’t more
than four or five.”
He smiled. I saw what I had done. “It took me that long to discover
the truth. I thought she was asleep. I had to run up the steps——”
Double fool, to try to explain.
“Say it took you a minute to run up a few steps. Another minute to
discover that she was dead. Should it take you three or four minutes
to run down again, and give the alarm?”
“I was sick, stunned, dizzy with horror.”
“Probably any jury would believe that, all right. Just the same, I’ll
bet it would save you a lot of trouble, now and later, if no one knew
anything about your lonesome five minutes, or longer. I’ll tell you
how I know. I came out of my room at the minute you opened the attic
door. I saw you leave the hall to run up the steps. I went on
downstairs. Chad was kidding around down there, collecting keys. I
didn’t know what he wanted with them, fortunately for you, or I’d have
said you’d gotten the door open——”
I interrupted with a new, and it seemed to me a clever idea. “What you
are forgetting,” I said, “is that I fainted dead away.”
“Gosh, Mary, but you are a rotten liar. Don’t try it. Sam and I both
saw you totter and go down, just as we got to the top of the stairs,
after Chad had shrieked the news down at us. That was close to fifteen
minutes after I’d seen you open the door.”
“And—and,” I couldn’t keep my teeth from chattering, “you think I
killed her, then?”
“Rot! She had been dead for hours. Rigor was complete. No, all I think
is that you were—trying to cover someone, maybe. All that I know is,
that you know more than you are telling.”
“I did tell you. I was frozen, stiff, with horror.”
“All right. Tell the jury. Tell them, too, why you came rushing out of
your room, as you did just now, white and trembling. Don’t like your
thoughts, all by your lonesome, do you? Come on, Mary. Be a sport. We
are both innocent. But—— Fifty-fifty? Shut mouth for shut mouth?”
His talk about telling a jury scared me. I had heard of third degrees.
I knew that if I ever told anyone but Sam himself, about those pipe
ashes, the words would choke the life out of me, as I would want them
to do.
“Dog kill dog, then?” he asked.
“Hubert Hand, I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know what it is
you want me to keep my mouth shut about.”
“Don’t? Well, I want you to keep still about that conversation you
overheard between Ollie Ricker and me in the cabin. She went back to
get her parasol and saw you coming out. We knew you had been hiding
there in the closet, listening.”
With the sense I had been showing, it is a wonder I didn’t speak right
up and tell him that I had not been in the closet, but in the chest. I
did not.
“Lands alive!” I said. “I’d had no idea of telling that, anyway. It
was none of my business.”
“Fine! I didn’t have any idea of telling anything, either. It was none
of my business. Shake on it.”
I let him take my hand. I said yes, when he made me promise. I felt
like I’d been associating with a sidewinder.
I went on down the hall, wracking my brain to remember exactly what I
had heard in the cabin. Mrs. Ricker’s threat. That would incriminate
her, not him. And, though the threat had proven, of itself, that she
was in love with him, I had certainly come away with no idea that he
was in love with her. His mention of a previous attempt at murder,
made by her. Again, that was nothing against him. No; what he was
afraid of having told, must have been said in the room with the
closet. I found slight, but some comfort in realizing that, though I
had probably been a fool to make the promise to him, he had probably
been a worse fool when he made the one to me.