Delay
I myself heard the sheriff say to Sam, late in the afternoon of the
day we had found Canneziano, strangled in his bed, “I tell you what,
Sam, this is a pretty dirty business—all of it. If you had anyone but
Lynn MacDonald on the case, I reckon it would be up to us boys to step
in and take a hand. But she has sure given us some pretty good
dope—and we’re waiting. She’s got the rep. There’s that Dolingfetter
movie murder. She put that through when all the police force and all
the dicks in the country had failed for a year. And the Van Muiter
case—and a dozen others. I know you’re square, Sam. All us guys around
here know it. But I’m damn glad you’ve got Lynn MacDonald on the job
to prove it to the country.”
As I say, I heard that conversation with my own ears. And yet, in the
week that followed, I had times of thinking that, anyway, Sam had
likely made a mistake in keeping Miss MacDonald on, alone.
I couldn’t begin to describe the horror of that week. It is, I
suppose, what books call a paradox to say that the worst thing about
the week was that nothing, just nothing, happened. To all outward
appearances the Desert Moon Ranch was as peaceful as an empty grave:
hollow peace, false peace, and all of us conniving at the falsity made
it worse.
One day, for instance, when we were all at dinner, Zinnia dropped the
teakettle in the kitchen. We women all screamed. Sam whipped his
six-gun from his back pocket. John rushed to the kitchen. He came
back, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“Zinnia dropped the teakettle. It didn’t hurt her.”
We all looked foolish, and began to be very busy, passing things, and
pretending that our actions had all been the ordinary, conservative
actions of people who had heard anything heavy dropped.
Sam locked up the house early every evening. Then, trying to make it
casual, one and another of us would go sauntering around to make sure
that he hadn’t overlooked a door, or a window. People were constantly
jumping, and starting, and looking behind them at nothing. None of us
women ever went far from the house, except Mrs. Ricker to visit
Martha’s grave. For one thing, Sam had increased the guard around the
place, and I never felt sure, when I ran down to the dairy, that one
of the cowpunchers wouldn’t think I was trying to escape and take a
shot at me. For another thing, though both murders had been done in
the house, there was a feeling of safety about four walls that I
couldn’t get in the open air.
As I have said, Mrs. Ricker went every day to visit Martha’s grave.
She went alone. I would not have gone with her, not for any price. I
was afraid of her. I was afraid of Hubert Hand. By Wednesday of that
week I was afraid of everyone in the house except Miss MacDonald and
Sam. Friday found me doubtful of Sam.
Losing my mind? Of course I was, or it was losing itself in the black
shadow of crime, by which the Desert Moon had been eclipsed. A mind
can’t go straight, in darkness, any more than a body can. None of our
minds went straight, those days. I am sure that the mind of each one
of us on the place—always excepting Miss MacDonald’s—did as mine did.
It went groping in the dark; it bumped into obstacles of doubt; it
tripped over fear and fell into senseless stupidities; it lost its
way, and wandered into wild suspicions. I tell you, there were times,
during those frightful days, when I found myself seriously considering
whether or not I had committed the two murders.
On Thursday evening, of that week, Mrs. Ricker said to me, with no
concern at all in her manner, “I wish I knew just how that lethal
chamber that they use for executions in this state, felt. Whether it
hurts to be executed that way, and how long it takes to die in it, and
all about it.
“Because,” she went on, still unconcernedly, “if it didn’t hurt too
much, I’d much rather confess to the murders, and get it over, than to
keep on living like this. I am going insane. I think that I can’t
stand another week like this one. Every hour, now, is worse than a
quick, painless death. Too, I’m afraid of what I might do, if I go
clear mad, with all these horrors in my mind. Though, perhaps, I have
already gone mad. Do I seem to you to be insane, right now, Mary?”
I told her no. But it was a flat lie. At that moment I was certain
that everyone on the place was more or less insane, especially Miss
MacDonald. I think yet that I was right about the others. I know, now,
that I was wrong about Miss MacDonald; but she had certainly given me
plenty of reasons for thinking either that she had lost her senses
entirely, or else that she had never had any to lose.
Apparently, after Sam had agreed to keep her on the case, she had at
once given up all interest in it. She had a short talk with me, and
told me that she would no longer need my help, and expressly
instructed me to stop watching Danny and the others.
“As far as it is humanly possible,” she said, “I want you to go about
the business of living as if nothing at all unpleasant, even, had
happened. I don’t want this to be an appearance. I want it to be a
fact.”
Then, as if she knew I couldn’t follow those fool instructions, and as
if she were bound to have them followed at any cost, she began to
follow them herself. She got sort of childish about it.
On Tuesday evening she produced a bunch of paper and some pencils.
When we had all thought that something important was going to happen,
she suggested that we play that old, silly game of “Consequences.” And
when we one and all had other things to do, she was none too pleasant
about it. Said that she was tired of reading, every evening, and that
the radio made her nervous. She fussed about, until Danny, feeling as
she did, got John and Hubert Hand to make up the four to play Bridge.
All week I could see Sam watching her and growing more and more
impatient. On Thursday he said to me that she was too busy flirting
with John to have time for anything else. That was not fair. She
didn’t flirt with John—she wasn’t the sort who would flirt with
anyone. But she surely did begin to notice him, and his attentions to
her. It was not that she treated him too well, in any way. It was,
only, that she did not treat him quite according to our standards for
the way unengaged girls should treat engaged or married men. Not once
did she encourage him to neglect Danny; but, after John had neglected
her, Miss MacDonald seemed to be, usually, right on the spot, ready,
waiting and willing, to be pleasant and friendly to him.
I tried to make excuses for John. Poor little Danny wasn’t, I had to
admit, much like the girl he had fallen in love with. She had lost
practically all of her prettiness, and she looked, all the time, too
white and wan and generally dragged out to seem quite wholesome. Like
the rest of us, the strain of fear and suspicion was too much for her;
but she was frailer than any of us, so the strain told harder on her.
She had explained to John about the reference to her and to her doll
in the code letter. He had taken it all right, and had been, as she
said to me, “sweet” about it, and about never doubting her word at
all. Still, I sort of thought that a grain of suspicion might still be
bothering him. And I knew that he had not been quite able to forgive
her, not for telling of her suspicions concerning Sam, but for
suspecting Sam in the first place.
Yes, I could make some excuses for John. But the process of trying not
to blame him, personally, resulted in my opinions of men in general
being forced down several degrees. As I may have suggested, that took
them just about to where the thermometer stops registering.
On Friday morning, when Sam came zigzagging into my kitchen, ordered
Zinnia out of it, his voice all thick and husky, and fell down into a
chair, I did not doubt for a minute that he was dead drunk. I knew
that he had not touched a drop of liquor for forty years; but what men
could do, men might do, and worse.
“Mary,” he said, “we’ve got the report from the ’Frisco chemists.”