The Swimming Pool Read online

  “Look,” he said. “Do you live here?”

  “I do. Why?”

  “Well, I want you to take a good look at me. Would you say, just casually, that I am a thug or a gangster? Or that I’ve got horns and a tail?”

  “Not casually,” I told him. “I don’t know what investigation might disclose.”

  He managed a grin.

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s like this. Mrs. Chandler was in the hall when the maid opened the door. She just took a look at me, yelped, and ran up the stairs.” He took off his hat and mopped his face and head with a handkerchief. “Darnedest thing you ever saw, or heard.”

  So Judith was really in hiding. It was the first time I had actually believed it. It was silly, of course. It had already been in the press, as witness Ridgely’s call. But as she never looked at a newspaper, perhaps she did not know it.

  My cameraman left after that, and I wandered slowly up the stream toward the old stables. The birch grove was on my way, and I stopped to stroke the smooth silver-white boles. They were big trees now, and I was a big girl. Too adult at least to be as uneasy as I was beginning to feel. And the grove quieted me. It had always done that. There is something soothing about a tree. It is so permanent, and in a way so patient.

  I was feeling better when I went back to get the car, although Helga was indignant when I carried the groceries into the kitchen.

  “You’re late,” she said snappishly, “and what’s all this about some man attacking Judith? Jennie says she’s locked in her room and won’t come out.”

  “Nobody attacked her. A newspaperman wanted a candid-camera shot of her. That’s all.”

  “And when did she ever run from a camera?” Helga asked shrewdly. “The attic’s full of snapshots of her down at the pool in the old days.”

  None of it made any sense to me. How on earth did she expect to hide? She had always been the columnists’ delight, and while we were out at Reno Anne had sent me an envelope of clippings. To quote one is to quote them all:

  The beautiful Judith Chandler is in Reno, ending an apparently happy marriage of twenty years. She and Ridgely had been drifting apart for a long time, Judith preferring the white lights while he stayed at home and read a good book. What Judith plans for the future is unknown, but if there is a romance involved no one seems to know.

  I never showed any of them to her, but I think it was the cameraman’s visit that put her virtually in a state of siege. For days after it she did not go beyond the front porch in the daytime, although at night she would put on a dark cape and walk up and down the drive. She always left the front door open, however, and if she could induce either Phil or me to go with her she seemed happier.

  I made the best of an uncomfortable period. My old nursery was in the wing over the living-room and, I hoped, remote enough to enable me to work. It was not too comfortable, of course. Shelves which had been adequate for a little girl’s books did not begin to hold mine. Also I had forgotten the piano, and it seemed to me at that time that I never went to my typewriter but Judith simultaneously sat down at the Bechstein.

  She did not do it deliberately. I want to be fair. It was simply something for her to do when I was not available. For the curious thing was that she had apparently cut herself off entirely from her old life. She telephoned nobody, and such bits of mail as came for her outside of her alimony checks seemed to be largely advertisements or travel circulars.

  Even Phil noticed it.

  “What’s happened to her old gang?” he asked inelegantly. “Don’t they call her up or anything?”

  “Out of the papers out of mind,” I suggested.

  “Well, I suppose there’s a difference between alimony and ten million dollars,” he said philosophically. “See here, Lois, I haven’t said this before, but has it occurred to you that Judith has some sort of persecution complex?”

  “Who on earth is persecuting her?”

  “How do I know? But I’ve watched her. I’ve begun to think she’s a schizophrenic, although God knows what that means. Can’t you sic her back on Townsend—or whatever is the psychiatrist fellow’s name?”

  But Judith was no schizophrenic, although ultimately she did go back to Doctor Townsend. I must admit, however, that even I was puzzled when she had been back a few weeks—it was early in May then—when one day a locksmith came out from town and asked for her. I was in the hall, and I stared at him.

  “A locksmith,” I said incredulously. “What are you to do? Or did Mrs. Chandler say?”

  “I’ve got it here.” He put down his bag and got out a card. “It says new locks and bolts on main bedroom and bathroom. All right with you?”

  I had no chance to answer. Judith appeared on the stairs then and took him up with her. She never explained, nor did I ask, but the next time I heard her at the piano I investigated. In the early days, I suppose Mother’s bathroom had served several of the family, for in addition to opening into the bedroom it also opened into the hall. Later on, of course, other baths were installed. Even my nursery had one. So did Phil’s, and several of the guest rooms. Now, however, there were heavy new locks on both Judith’s bedroom and bath, and a chain on each of them.

  I stood staring at them for some time, and that night I told Phil. He did not seem surprised.

  “I told you,” he said. “Now maybe you’ll listen to me. If she won’t go back to Townsend, get her to go to someone else. Suppose she sets fire to herself with a cigarette? We’d never get her out.”

  I hesitated. We were getting along rather better, Judith and I. She was never sisterly to me, but at least she no longer seemed to regard me as one of the help. The only open warfare in the house was between Helga and herself. It puzzled me. I even wondered sometimes if Helga knew something about her, but if she did she kept it to herself.

  Then, too, something happened a day or so later which took my mind off Judith as having nothing to do with her. Or did it? I was not even sure of that.

  The spring was well advanced by that time. One day our itinerant gardener appeared and cut the lawn, and I was reminded of the cottage which I hoped to rent.

  It was a pleasant little place, a one-story bungalow-type house, with a shed behind it where in the early days the men at work on the grounds had stored their tools.

  I walked down that afternoon armed with the keys and a broom and dustcloth, and wearing an old pair of slacks. As usual I stopped at the pool, which was clear by that time, and I saw a car in the drive next to ours. As the Adrian house had been closed for years, this rather surprised me. I saw nobody around, however, and promptly forgot it.

  The cottage stood close to the main road, with a path from our drive leading to it, and it smelled musty and damp when I went in. The door led directly into the sitting-room, and beyond it were two small bedrooms, a bath, and the kitchen. As all were shuttered, the place seemed dark and uninviting.

  I stopped as soon as I went into the kitchen. Someone had been smoking there. The ashes apparently from a pipe had been dumped into the sink, I thought rather recently, and the reek of smoke was over everything. I was annoyed rather than startled. After all, the agent had another set of keys, but if he had sent someone to see the place I should have been notified.

  Rather indignantly I opened a window and the shutters, and I had just stepped back when I heard a car on the road. As it is not a main artery, there is not much traffic on it. What with most of the summer places closed what usually passes us are delivery trucks to the village a mile or so beyond, an occasional pair of lovers seeking privacy, or a family out for a Sunday jaunt. So I glanced out the window, to see the car I had noticed leaving the Adrian drive and going rapidly toward town.

  It was a yellow taxicab from the city. Our local ones are cream colored with blue fenders. But I had no time to see who was in it. As I looked around the cottage, however, it became more and more clear that someone had been inside it, perhaps for some time. There was a glass on the living-room table where the intruder had
taken a drink of water, and further investigation showed a defective shutter and a window not entirely closed. Whoever it was had not been sent by any agent.

  I did no cleaning that day, although I was angry rather than frightened. And as that was the night Phil chose to suggest a psychiatrist to Judith, I promptly forgot it.

  Chapter 7

  JUDITH HAD BEEN MORE relaxed since the extra locks had been placed on her doors, but she still looked drawn and tired. She must have realized it, too, for at the dinner table she said she really needed a shampoo and a facial. Phil pushed away the tapioca pudding he loathed and looked interested.

  “Do you good,” he said. “Go to a beauty parlor and get fixed up. Can’t neglect yourself at your age, Jude. How about the old nerves? Sleeping better?”

  “My nerves are all right,” she said sharply.

  “Then you certainly don’t show it. They can sure play the devil with a woman’s looks.” He had touched on a raw spot, and he knew it. “You’ve been ready to jump out of your skin ever since you came back from Reno. Why don’t you see somebody about it when you’re in town? A good psychiatrist might help you.”

  Which was when, as I have already written, she told him not to be a fool; that she had no intention of spilling her guts to any Peeping Tom. She was suspicious, too. We were not supposed to have known of the Townsend visits.

  “I suppose you have someone already picked out for me!” she said. “If you have, forget it.”

  “Not me,” Phil told her. “Pick your own, or consult the old girl Lois writes about. Of course, if you want to lose your looks that’s your business. When I go to bed I go to sleep. That’s how I keep my beauty.”

  But if Judith repudiated the idea of a psychiatrist, I did not. There was something badly wrong with her, and in common humanity I felt we should know about it. I resolved that night to see Doctor Townsend, and making the excuse of having to see my publisher, I called at his office the next morning.

  I had no appointment, so it was some time before I saw him. Anne had been right. He was a handsome man, and he looked relieved when I said I was not a patient, but I had called about one. He glanced at the clock on his desk.

  “I can give you ten minutes or so,” he said. “Who is this patient, Miss—Miss Maynard?”

  “My sister, Judith Chandler, Doctor.”

  He gave me a quick glance.

  “Mrs. Chandler left me some months ago. You know that probably.”

  “Yes. Of course, she had been in Reno. Now she is living with us in the country. Do you mind saying why she came to see you, Doctor? I’m not merely curious. It may be important.”

  “What do you mean by important?”

  “She’s not well. She’s—well, she’s in a curious state of mind. My brother thinks she has delusions of persecution. I don’t agree with him.”

  “So?” He looked thoughtful. “Well, Miss Maynard so far as I know she came to me because she was not sleeping. I suppose that’s understandable. If she was contemplating divorce—”

  “I don’t think she was really,” I said flatly. “I think something scared her. I don’t know what, but she’s still scared into panic, and I believe she needs help.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Quite definitely she needed help when I saw her. Only—suppose you tell me what you know.”

  I did. No halfway measures were any good and I knew it. Also I felt I could trust him. There was something quieting about him, too, as though no depths of the human mind would shock him. I began with the night Ridgely had found her with her jewels, and went on from there to her sudden determination to go to Reno, and what happened at the station there and on the train. He listened absorbedly, as though he was trying to reconcile it with what he knew of Judith.

  “Of course,” he said, “if this terror is real, it is a matter for the police. On the other hand, your brother may be right. I have no idea why she wanted a divorce. Quite frankly she never mentioned it to me. But you have to remember that divorce in itself is often a sort of psychic shock.”

  He went on. He had to deal with such people quite often. They had reached the end of one road, and unless another opened up they felt lost and confused.

  “Especially with divorced women,” he said. “Up to that time they’ve been sheltered. At least there was someone around they could depend on, in case of burglars, for instance!” He smiled at me. “Someone to keep house for, order food for, even to dress for. If they marry again, all right. At least they are back in a familiar groove. If they do not, what have they? They haunt the movies and the beauty shops, they gamble frantically, and some of them end up in this office, out of sheer loneliness and despair.”

  “I suppose she does miss her old life,” I agreed, “but she’s not only lonely. She’s sick with fright. If someone like you could find out what it is—”

  He shrugged.

  “She was difficult,” he said. “I often wondered why she came at all. She only talked about unimportant things. Of course, it’s normal for the human mind to protect its privacy, and we don’t use medication, Miss Maynard. In this job of mine all we have is words. I get sick of hearing my own voice sometimes,” he added. “Your sister did, I know, but she never really came clean. Actually I never knew what she was thinking. And it was deliberate. She didn’t want me to know.”

  “Would you try again, if she came back?”

  He hesitated.

  “If she came of her own free will,” he said. “Otherwise it would be the same story all over again.”

  “Perhaps if you called her up and talked to her—as a friend,” I went on hastily, seeing his face. “You see, it’s not only Judith who needs help. We all do. Life isn’t really bearable just now. This locked-door business is only a part of it. She hasn’t left the house, except at night when no one can see her. She doesn’t go far even then, only up and down the drive a short distance. And while she talks of going abroad I don’t believe she really will. She seems to have no initiative.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s understandable,” he said. “Someone else—her husband, I suppose—always arranged things for her before. But you must realize I can’t very well ask her to come back. However—wait a minute.” He rang a bell and the nurse appeared. “Miss Robey,” he said, “did anyone ever claim that gold compact?”

  “Not yet, Doctor.”

  “I see. Thank you.” He turned to me as she went out. “I might call her about that,” he said. “Ask if it’s hers. I rather think it is. She left me pretty abruptly the last day she was here.”

  He looked at his watch, and I got up.

  “Don’t expect too much, Miss Maynard,” he warned. “We may get her over her agoraphobia. The fear of open spaces, if that’s what it is. But if she is in real danger I suggest the police.”

  I was depressed when I left him, but to my astonishment his call that night worked like a charm. Not immediately. At first, as I have said, she was not only suspicious but resentful. But two days later she came down to breakfast, hitherto unknown, and announced she was going with Phil to New York. She was dressed in a thin spring suit, and with careful makeup she looked more like her old self. But she did not mention Bernard Townsend. She was, she said, going to have a shampoo and a facial. But she wore a heavy nose veil and a scarf she could pull up over her chin.

  It looked for all the world like an attempt at disguise. I did not mention it, however. And in spite of my growing sympathy for her it was a relief to me to get her out of the house. I did the first real day’s work I had managed since she came. Phil reported later that the excursion had taken on all the attributes of high adventure.

  “She wouldn’t get out of the car at the station until the last minute,” he said. “She sat there, eyeing everybody in sight, until I felt damned conspicuous. Same in the city. Look, Lois, why is she afraid of taxis? She wouldn’t take one. Wouldn’t go near one, in fact.”

  “Even in the city?”

  “Certainly in the city. She shies off
like a frightened horse when she sees one.”

  I was tempted to tell him about the one in the Adrians’ drive, but it seemed rather pointless. After all, there might be a dozen reasons for its being there, or someone breaking into the cottage. Curiosity perhaps, or someone thirsty and needing a drink. As for her phobia about cabs, I had no idea what caused it. Certainly she never explained it, although from that time on she went regularly to New York. It existed. I knew that. When I could not take her, or Phil’s train was too early for her, she used Ed Brown’s rattling one, which he kept in the village. She was looking better, however. A shampoo and a rinse had brightened her hair, and she was using a new makeup.

  I suspected she was seeing Doctor Townsend again, but she never admitted it.

  Perhaps I am spending too much time on that interval, before our real mystery began to develop. My only excuse is the change Judith made in our living, with the old peace gone, with Phil growing increasingly irritable and my own work suffering. The servants, too, were hard to manage. Jennie even threatened to leave, after Jude sent her breakfast down because she maintained the coffee was cold. I found her crying in the pantry.

  “How do I know when she’s going to ring?” she said. “And that coffee was boiling when I poured it. Only two of us in a house this size, and her acting like she was a duchess or something.”

  I spoke to Helga that day. It was raining and her arthritis was bothering her. But I knew and she knew that after forty years with us and at her age she could not get work elsewhere. Also she had known Judith since she was born, and apparently nothing she did surprised her.

  “She’s what she is, Lois,” she said. “She was a spoiled child from the day she could walk, and looking like a little angel all the time. She was sly, too. Your mother never knew half the things she did. But she’s not so young now. She isn’t cute anymore, or anybody’s angel, either.”

  However, she promised to talk to Jennie, and in the end Jennie stayed on.

  But I was still uneasy. Judith not only locked herself in her room at night, but sometimes in the daytime. She was losing weight. As Phil said, if she was fooling herself she was making a good job of it. Then one day I had a brainstorm. I decided to talk to Ridgely.