The Indigo Necklace Read online

  Now that Roger had gone, it was dust that I smelled rather than iodoform. That would come from the draperies which had fallen with the curtain pole. They had been picked up and tossed over a chair. The thick brass pole glinted among the curtains in the lamplight.

  Roger did not return immediately, so I sat up again and after a moment took hold of one of the open windows and pulled myself to my feet.

  The window felt sticky. No, it was my hand. There was blood on my hand, on both hands, and there was a smear of it on my white bathrobe. I felt a wave of nausea and held tightly to the French window. Then I stepped out on the gallery.

  Roger was coming up from the garden.

  “I told you to stay where you were!” His voice was low but angry.

  “I’ve got to wash.”

  “You can wash when the time comes.” He thrust me into a chair on the gallery. “Now, you sit there! I don’t like head injuries, hear?”

  “Well, you needn’t be so cross.”

  “Sorry!” He went in and came out with two blankets and two medicine cases and ran down the steps to the grass plot. He got out a torch. In its light I could see the woman lying just as motionless as ever on the grass. Roger took out his stethoscope and bent close to her as he applied the main tube to her chest. I was puzzled and felt another wave of nausea. I was positive that the woman was dead. It made me feel sick to see Roger listening for a heart that was no longer beating.

  The clock in the St. Louis Cathedral a couple of blocks away struck a quarter hour. A quarter past what? How long had I lain in that room? What had caused the curtains to fall down? Where was the nurse? Where was my husband?

  Roger covered the woman with the blankets.

  I got up and started for our stairs. Roger Clary apparently had eyes in the back of his head, for he shouted for me to stay sitting down. “God dammit—can’t you wait?” he yelped. It was the first real noise that either of us had made and immediately—too immediately, I thought later—Uncle George Sears piped up from the lower gallery of the other wing.

  Uncle George had a rather high reedy voice and sometimes stuttered.

  “I s-say? What goes on?” he called out.

  Roger left his wife long enough to take a few steps in the direction of Uncle George. “Shush. No sense in waking everybody. Helen fell down the steps.”

  “W-what steps?”

  “Never mind that now. Call Carol and tell her to phone Dr. Postgate and ask him to come at once. Oh, by the way, don’t you go upstairs. Remember your heart. Call Aunt Dollie and have her wake Carol. Then tell Carol to come here. Tell her to fetch hot-water bottles.”

  “I’ll t-take care of it, Roger!” Uncle George’s high voice was positively rippling with delighted excitement.

  “Mind that heart!” Roger said, again.

  He hurried back to his wife and applied the stethoscope and again picked up her wrist. What was all this? I had felt her wrist. I wasn’t any expert, but I had taken the time to feel it carefully and there hadn’t been any pulse. That woman was dead. The sight of Roger hovering about her blanketed form in the blend of torch and moonlight made me sick all over again.

  I concentrated for a moment on keeping a level stomach and sat very still.

  Miss Marguerite Clary now came out on the upper gallery of the other wing. She came to the railing outside her bedroom, which was situated, like ours, at the back end of the second floor in that wing. She spoke in French. The precise elegance of her enunciation and the clarity of her voice was striking at such a time.

  “Roger, dear, what can I do?”

  “Nothing, Aunt Rita. Sorry you were waked.”

  “Carol woke when you spoke to George, Roger. She is phoning the doctor.”

  “Good.” Roger was speaking from a position close above the dead woman. “Was Postgate here tonight, Aunt Rita?”

  “I didn’t see him. Where’s Victorine?”

  Roger’s answer was low and angry.

  “I don’t know.”

  The old lady’s voice tightened. “Roger—did that girl go away and leave Helen? Alone?”

  “Apparently. Never mind it now.”

  “E-everything is f-fine!” Uncle George puffed from the other end of the forbidden upper gallery. “C-Carol got the doctor. He’s coming right over. I’ll be right down, Roger. C-carry on, old man.”

  “My God!” Roger growled, under his breath.

  Whether Roger wanted it or not the house was now alive. Lights were coming out all over, including the picturesque but somewhat ineffectual old lamps about the garden. Old black Hugo hustled out of the servants’ house in the rear and after a moment Paulette sauntered out rubbing her eyes and muttering with annoyance. Doors opened and closed. I heard Aunt Dollie’s loud, stylish voice asking what on earth was the matter. Nobody answered, but that was usual with Aunt Dollie. She talked all the time and, like the music at a movie, you got so you noticed her only when she wasn’t talking. I heard Uncle George telling Hugo to go to a room rented for Victorine—she must have used it very little—on Dauphine Street and fetch her at once if she was there. Hugo said, “Yassir,” and had just got to the front door when it opened and Patrick stepped into the carriageway. He stopped short on noting all the commotion.

  “You’re in the very nick of time, Lieutenant Abbott!” Uncle George called. He went skimming to meet Patrick. “She will have to be carried in, no d-doubt, so we can use you, L-Lieutenant.”

  “What’s happened?” Patrick asked.

  “Come back here, will you, Pat?” Roger called out. “Uncle George, you stay where you are.” He spoke authoritatively. For the moment Uncle George obeyed.

  Carol Graham ran down the outside stairs of the other gallery carrying two hot-water bottles. She was dressed in a shirt and denim slacks.

  Ava Graham didn’t appear.

  Patrick dashed past where I sat, but on the lower level of the courtyard. I thought he did not see me. Uncle George skimmed in his wake. Roger spied Uncle George and ordered him to stay away. The fat man took a stand behind an oleander on my right and stayed there, listening hard.

  Patrick stooped beside Roger Clary and the prostrate woman and picked up one wrist. “She’s bleeding, Roger.”

  “She was. It’s not important. A scratch when she fell, I think.”

  “Fell?”

  “Down those steps. I don’t exactly understand her condition. It’s shock, I think, but that doesn’t seem to explain it entirely. You can’t feel any pulse in the wrist, but her heart is beating faintly and her breathing is so faint I don’t dare move her even enough to slip a blanket under her.”

  Patrick laid the wrist back under the blanket.

  Uncle George tiptoed past me to a handier oleander. I didn’t notice Toby Wick till he was so close against the railing that he spoke literally up into my ear.

  “What’s all the excitement?” he asked, with his lazy insolence.

  “It’s H-Helen,” Uncle George whispered, from up ahead. “She fell, apparently.”

  Toby’s laugh was a rattle deep in his throat.

  “She didn’t get pushed?”

  Uncle George emitted a nervous giggle.

  “Not that I know of,” he said.

  Toby took out his cigarettes and fumbled at the package. “It would be opportune. Very opportune.”

  Uncle George again giggled.

  There was a perceptible silence. Then Uncle George asked, with a touch of concern in his voice, “Toby, where is A-Ava?”

  Unexpectedly Aunt Rita made answer. She was now standing with Aunt Dollie in the middle of the flagged court, and her voice was crisp against Aunt Dollie’s low but excited monologue.

  “Ava is in her room, George,” she said, in English.

  “She w-wasn’t when I looked just n-now.”

  “Of course she was!” said Aunt Rita,

  “Possibly you were too excited to notice, dear,” Aunt Dollie said. She had put on the housecoat with huge poppies on a pinkish ground. You coul
dn’t distinguish colors in the light in the courtyard, but I had often seen the garment swishing about Aunt Dollie’s long legs and keglike middle as she went about the place.

  “I think Ava shows good judgment in staying in her room,” Aunt Rita said. “I think the rest of us might follow her example.”

  “I agree,” Roger spoke up.

  At that moment, the loud sound of the front doorbell shattered the hushed-up atmosphere. Since Hugo was not here, and Paulette had again apparently vanished, Uncle George was not stopped as he skimmed along to the door. A very whiskery doctor was admitted.

  Dr. Postgate walked as fast as his dignity would permit to the side of the patient. Meanwhile Toby Wick had edged up closer to the railing near my chair. I could smell liquor on his breath.

  He began talking softly into my ear. “They wouldn’t be sorry to be rid of her, maybe. She’s got one of the biggest fortunes in Louisiana. All the money in the world and nothing upstairs.” He paused, and added, “Must be a constant temptation, specially for a doctor.”

  I had the feeling that this was the prologue for much more of the same. My head suddenly ached unbearably. My stomach hurt, too. I felt sure I’d be sick. I jumped up and hurried upstairs. If Roger Clary saw me he did not try to stop me.

  It was two-thirty-five when I walked into our apartment by way of the window whose banging shutter had waked me just before two o’clock. Then the quarter-hour which the chimes had sounded after I came out of what might be called my curtain-pole blackout had been a quarter past two. A lot can happen in thirty-five minutes.

  I threw my blood-stained robe and my pajamas in a hamper, scrubbed my hands clean, took a shower, took two aspirin tablets, combed my hair and, gently feeling at the bump on top of my head, thought it was lucky I’d had my hair up. I pinned it up again, got into fresh pajamas, and was sitting in bed wondering what next when Patrick came up. He threw his cap and tunic on a chair and turned to go out again. “Just wanted to see if you were all right,” he said.

  “Did you know I was downstairs, darling?”

  “I saw you.”

  “Oh. How is she?”

  “She’s gone, they think. We carried her into her bed. They’ve sent for a pulmotor and meanwhile they’re going to try artificial respiration and I’ve got to get back to help.” He gave me a puzzled glance. “I wonder what was wrong with her?” he asked.

  “She’s mental.”

  He gave me a sudden angry look. “Why didn’t somebody say so?”

  “I didn’t know it till tonight, dear. Did you?”

  “Certainly I didn’t.” He was very angry. “Roger says you’re the one that found her, after she fell.”

  “I heard a sort of thud and looked over the railing and saw her lying on the grass. I ran down and thought she was dead. You see, I couldn’t find any pulse. I—I—oh, well, Roger came right away and after that I just sort of hung around till Toby Wick started chumming up, then I came upstairs.”

  “Was Wick in the garden when you went downstairs?”

  “Why, I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody except Mrs. Clary. It was pretty dark, except for the moon. Why do you ask?”

  Patrick’s face was very grave.

  “When we moved Mrs. Clary to her bed, Wick helped carry her. There is a chandelier in that room and it was turned full on, making a lot of light. I happened to notice that Wick’s shoes were damp and had a few blades of grass sticking to the leather. There aren’t many places in the Quarter outside of the private gardens where you can get grass on your shoes.”

  “Is there a garden at Toby’s Good Angel?” I asked. Patrick answered with a shake of his head. I said, “Besides, what’s he doing here at this hour, Pat? This is the very peak of the evening in his business, and a Saturday night, too. He’s always complaining that he can’t get enough help.”

  But Patrick’s mind was back on Helen Clary. “Postgate kept saying to watch her neck. When we were moving her, I mean. He kept warning us that the neck muscles were unusually relaxed. He seemed very upset.”

  “Darling, she was dead when I found her!”

  Patrick shook his head. “Postgate said she was breathing and he could count a perceptible heartbeat through the stethoscope for several minutes after we got her in to her bed. You look kind of pale, Jeanie.”

  “Oh, I’m just scrubbed,” I could tell him later about the silly curtain pole. The aspirin had already eased the ache. “Did Hugo find that nurse?”

  “She wasn’t in her room. God knows where she went. But for once Uncle George’s snooping turns out to be quite useful. Seems he saw her leave the house shortly after two o’clock. Roger says the clock struck the quarter after he came in, so...Look, dear, you’re sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I tried hard to sound convincing. But I was thinking about that nurse. If she left the house between two o’clock and a quarter after, where was she when Helen Clary was lying in the garden and I lay blacked out by that curtain pole?

  “I won’t be long, dear. They may not even need me.”

  He went down the front way, leaving a light burning in the living room and closing the front door twice to make sure it caught. I knew then that he thought that something downstairs didn’t click.

  Then Toby Wick wasn’t the only one who considered Helen Clary’s death suspicious? Patrick, too!

  What did Toby know? Where was he when Helen fell down those steps? Why, if he got that grass on his shoes in our garden, didn’t he step up earlier and help?

  Maybe he’d killed her, or tried to, by pushing her down the stairs. There was blood on her arm. Maybe that wasn’t meant to be only a slight scratch.

  But why? What would be his motive?

  Well, he had already started trying to plant suspicion on Roger, hadn’t he? Why? That wasn’t hard to guess. Toby wanted Carol, and if Roger were accused of murdering his wife Carol wouldn’t go on caring about Roger....Only, maybe she would....Maybe, if that was Toby’s idea, he’d got Carol wrong.

  Carol was a fine girl. Carol had character, like Aunt Rita. Ava was more like Aunt Dollie, though it was hard to think that Aunt Dollie had ever had such beauty. But Ava was superficial, like Aunt Dollie, though a lot less kind. Aunt Dollie was a chatty old thing, but you couldn’t help sort of liking her and admiring her for her devotion to fat Uncle George. Visiting Aunt Rita for seven long years. My goodness!

  Where was that nurse?

  By this time I had nothing but pity for Roger Clary and compassion for Carol. If you were married to an insane person you couldn’t get a divorce in most states, and I supposed it was the same in Louisiana, and even if it weren’t there were a lot of buts and ifs, and, anyway, Roger wouldn’t be the kind to get a divorce hastily. Roger also had character. Roger and Carol and Aunt Rita had character.

  Of course, Roger shouldn’t have kept his wife here in the house.

  Well, why not? She seemed sweet and childlike. Besides, she was to go to a hospital, they had all said that, even if they didn’t say what kind, as soon as there was a place.

  Poor thing. Was she really rich?

  If so, why only one nurse?

  What a question! Everybody knows there aren’t enough nurses these days to go round. She was lucky to have even one nurse.

  I must tell Pat how sweet she was, how childlike.

  I wouldn’t tell him, though, about her walking through our apartment on three occasions in the night when he was out. What was the use? If she lived—I mean if they succeeded in pulling her through—they would certainly take her away now because they would no longer trust her with that nurse. They would have to find a place for her in a hospital now. The danger, or rather the feeling that she might slip through our place again, was past.

  I wouldn’t tell him.

  I chose to consider the whole business tonight an accident. The nurse for some reason abandoned the patient who wandered about till she fell down some steps. That settled it beautifully.

  I remembered h
ow she had gone down our winding stairs without being near the handrail. She had doubtless taken a header down the short flight, and Roger was correct in calling her condition shock. People often died of shock.

  I turned out the lamp beside the bed and lay looking at the peculiar shadows shaped by the massive furniture because of the other lamp in the next room. It was a lamp to the right of the front door as you entered. Patrick had turned that one on, considerately, because it couldn’t shine through the hallway and into my eyes.

  All at once a key sounded in the Yale lock. The door opened. I supposed it was Patrick.

  It was closed soundlessly. How thoughtful he was! How gentle!

  The light went out.

  There was a short silence. Then fingers fumbled at one pair of the living-room shutters. They opened and closed. The latch clicked back in place. Silky footsteps whispered along the gallery.

  IV

  THIS TIME, anyway, it wasn’t Helen Clary who walked through the room, unless she had miraculously revived. It had me worried.

  I got up at once and got dressed in the first dress I laid hands on, the green-and-yellow-silk print I had worn last night, and was just ready to go down and find Patrick when he came up the front way with Roger Clary. Patrick looked grave and Roger haggard. Patrick told me that they’d given Helen up and I said to Roger that I was sorry. Roger was carrying his black bag.

  “Roger tells me you had a blow on your head?” Patrick said. He looked grim. I said it was nothing and that I had already forgotten it, but Roger made me sit down under a strong light and be examined. His stethoscope was still hanging around his neck. He looked at my eyes and took my blood pressure and asked me questions. I asked if it was as bad as all that and he reminded me again somewhat impatiently that he didn’t like head injuries. Patrick stood against the mantelpiece and kept watching me intently. Roger finished by putting some tablets in an envelope and writing down what to do with them and then telling me, the way doctors always do, to remain quiet.

  Roger put away his apparatus and then, standing with his case in his hands, said, “I’m afraid I owe you both an apology.”