CHAPTER I

I

The heavy glass and bronze door revolved, and released from its sections, out of the grizzly November mist and into the rosy and fragrant hotel lobby, malice and envy, joy and enthusiasm, vanity and greed. Fear, masked with dignity, wrapped in sealskin and topped with a charming bright red hat, came quickly and alone.

Two egg-shaped matrons glanced, lengthened and set their glances.

Purple-and-henna breathed, “Beautiful wrap.”

“I’ll tell you about her in a minute.” Brown-and-gold spoke from her throat.

Their gazes followed the sealskin down the long strip of Mosul to the mahogany desk behind which a glossy clerk suddenly discovered reverence and added it to his attitude.

“She’s one of the Quilters,” Brown-and-gold informed. “They are among the best-known families here in Oregon. They have an enormous ranch over east of the mountains in Quilter County; half of that country over there seems to be named for them. They’re millionaires. Ken says everything they touch turns into money.

“I’ve never met her—exactly; that’s why I didn’t speak. But she was at a tea where I was, two years ago; it was given for the blind. Quilters are supposed to be very charitable; but why shouldn’t they be? As I told Ken, a dollar doesn’t mean any more to them than a thin dime does to us.” She paused to sigh.

“Does she live here at this hotel?”

“No. No—she lives out at the ranch. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live away from things, like that. The ranch is beautiful, though; quite a show place. Too bad you’re leaving so soon—we might motor over to see it. Her brother, Neal Quilter, has been stopping here for a couple of days. I suppose she is here to see him. I’ve seen him twice lately in the dining room. He is awfully handsome—a bachelor, too. Will you look at the bellhop sliding to ring the elevator bell for her? I’m always allowed to ring it for myself. I hope she has to wait as long for that elevator as I usually do. The service here seems to be getting worse and worse; and, considering the prices they ask——”

“She’s as slim as an old maid. Or is she married?”

“She’s a widow. Judith Quilter Whitefield. Has been, for years and years. Funny she’s never married again, with her money. She’s kind of sweet looking yet, don’t you think? I guess she just didn’t want to marry. I don’t blame her; why should she? She toured Europe last year with her sister, Lucy Quilter Cerini, and her husband——”

“Oh! Is that who she is? I didn’t connect the names at all. I reviewed one of Lucy Quilter Cerini’s books for our ladies’ literary society, back home, last year. I remember I found then that she was born in Oregon, but I didn’t place her at first. So she’s her sister?”

“Yes. I’ve never read any of her works. Was the book you read good?”

“Well—yes. You know she’s very highly spoken of——”

The elevator door slid open, clinked shut.

Judith looked into the panelled mirror. She was too pale. She ducked her head and pinched pink into her cheeks with trembling fingers.

“Fifth floor, madam. To your right.”

Five hundred and two—buckle my shoe. Five hundred and four—shut the door. Five hundred and——How slyly, furtively soft these felt-padded carpets were. They had turned her into a sleuth, creeping, sneaking up on Neal. She wished that her advent might have been heralded by at least the smart clicking of heels. One could not, of course, whistle down hotel corridors. Perhaps she should have asked the clerk to telephone. But no, last night and again this morning she had thought and thought of that, and had rejected it.

Five hundred and sixteen. She paused, unfastened her fur collar and set it back from her firm white throat. She unclasped her handbag, took from it a gold locket of the sort that dangled from long bead chains in the eighteen nineties, and snapped it open. In one of its circles was the picture of an old gentleman with a white, squarely cut beard, a wide brow, small sensitive nostrils, and a humorous quirk near the eyes that miraculously saved the face from the frailty of saintliness. In the opposite circle, printed in tiny letters, was, Judith had long thought, a truer portrait of her grandfather. He had called it a rule of conduct, and had given it to her during the happiest period of her life: just after she and Gregory Whitefield had announced their engagement; months before the suspicion that “Greg’s bad cold” could be serious.

“Judith Quilter,” the words read. “Achieve tranquillity.”

Greg had never fully understood. Once, during those tremulous months in Colorado, when all life’s worth hung on the slender thread of mercury in the clinical thermometer, he had asked, when she had opened the locket: “What’s the magic of it, dear? How does it make things better for you?”

“It doesn’t,” she had declared. “Not a bit. All it does is to make me better for things.”

Twenty-eight years ago; and now, still: “Judith Quilter. Achieve tranquillity.”

She closed the locket, tucked it into the perfumed silk of her bag, pulled off her glove. At any rate, her knock should not sound surreptitious.

She snatched her hand from the door and put its knuckles to her parted lips. “Oh, dear!” she whispered. How could she have done that? How could she have produced that insultingly authoritative racket, which must, because of its very quarrelsomeness, be met with the rebuke of this smothering silence?

“Judy! You doggone pesty little hound!” The kiss prickled at the sides, but it was heavily, satisfactorily, smokily Neal.

“Golly, but you’re pretty, Jude. Been pinching your cheeks, I’ll bet a dollar——”

“Look, dear. My new hat.”

“Yes, at your age! Running around buying gaudy red hats and smelling of violets—no, of one violet. Stand off; let’s have a look at you—you friendly little Jezebel, you!”

“But, Neal, don’t you like the new hat?”

“Not much. It’s too shockingly becoming. But, whither, Judy? I thought I left you at home forcing Lucy’s babies to entertain your guest?”

“I brought Ursula with me, silly. We felt the need for some shopping so we motored over yesterday evening. We got in late, and rose rather late this morning. But there’s been time for the hat, and some toys, and luncheon. Then I happened to think you might have tea with us, later; so I’ve run up to ask you.”

“Your naïveté is faultless, darling.”

“Neal! If you have to be a killjoy, you might try to be a humane one.”

Achieve tranquillity. Do not notice the shadow, dimming the splendid blondness, the averted eyes, the contracted shoulders.

“Judith, how did you know that I was here?”

“But, dear, where should you be? You have never stayed at another hotel in Portland, have you? I felt a traitor myself. But I did wish to impress Ursula with the glories of the Trensonian. I think, though, Neal, that before you left you might have stuck a note on your pincushion, or——”

“Drop it, Jude. Is Ursula going back to Q 2 with you?”

“Did she bore you? Was it she who drove you away, silly?”

“Heavy tact. You know and I know; so, what’s the use? I’m mad about her. Repellent, isn’t it? A man of my age. I’m forty-six damn years old.”

“Yes, so you say. But Ursula isn’t a young girl. She has been a widow for eight years. She loves our West, and our Q 2, and——”

“You’re as sentimental as a hammock.”

“I don’t care. She does. And she loves you, too, and has for the past three years. You’d have known it if you hadn’t been blind. Neal—— What is it?”

Merely a dream: a preposterous dream, about an absurd play in which a man, who looked like Neal, went towering, shaking blond fists at his own shoulders; went muttering, giving an amusingly over-acted performance of rage. Neal, who was always gentle and funny and kind, would laugh at such exaggerations and say, “the cross-patch,” or something of the sort. Though, if Neal were ill, he might—— Lucy said that Neal was ill, very ill. Lucy was a genius. She should be here. Judith was a simple, stupid old woman. Judith Quilter. Achieve tranquillity.

“Sorry, Neal, if I was inept. Something seems to be quite the trouble. Perhaps, if you’d care to tell me, I might understand.”

“Understand?” he accepted the word and seemed for a moment to caress it. “Understand!” he snarled it to pieces and flung it back, a shattered brutality. “Try understanding this, then. And, when you’ve finished with it, give it to the graceful Ursula, and see whether she can understand——”

“Neal, dear! Don’t!”

“Don’t! I thought not. You’ve guessed it, of course. You and Lucy guessed it years ago, together. And now you tell me—don’t. Don’t tell the truth. Keep my secret, since I’ve kept it only a lifetime. God, what I’ve lived through! Sorry. Almost began on that foxy Spartan stuff. No matter. I’ve kept my mouth shut. I promised. Or—did I? Sometimes I think my life has been pinned shut with a promise. Sometimes I think it has been fear, pride—— Take your choice. I’ve kept my secret. And I would have kept it if you’d let me alone. It’s your fault. You brought Ursula. Bent on your matchmaking mummery. I came away, didn’t I? Here you are, with Ursula in the offing. Tracking me down, sneaking—— Sorry. You’re sweet, Judy. But I tell you, you’ve forced a confidence. You’ve forced me, and I’m glad of it, into the luxury of a confession. Take it!

“I killed Father. I did, I tell you. I knew about the insurance. It seemed the only way out. I fooled them all. I cut the red mask from Olympe’s satin frock. I—— Judy, don’t look like that. Put your new hat on. Stop rumpling your hair. Lovely gray hair you have, Judy. See, dear, it needn’t matter a lot now—about the murder. We’ll never tell it—you and I? It needn’t matter at all—except for Ursula. I can’t marry her. I can’t ever marry, Jude. That needn’t matter. I’ve never cared a lot about marrying. Loathed women, mostly. All but you girls, and—Ursula.

“Think we’d better tell Ursula? Think that’s the immediate decency required? She’ll run away back to her Italy, then, and thank her stars she’s well out of this. She wouldn’t tell on me, do you think? I’d hate being hanged, you know. All the aspects—personal and public, is that the way it goes?—of hanging I’d hate——”

“Neal——”

“Wait, Judy. I want the straight of this. The low-down on it. Am I mad? Wasn’t that why Lucy had the psychiatrist visiting at Q 2? No, not what you are thinking. I committed the murder. I’m guilty—guilty as a dog. But am I mad? I might well be, having done in a member of the family. Do you remember, wasn’t Aunt Gracia a bit mad? All that bunk of her religion—that Siloamite stuff? We none of us ever admitted it, of course. And Father—— I wonder whether normal, sane people ever do kill? What I’m getting at is, there may be a strain of insanity in the family. Oh, for the Lord’s sake, Judy, won’t you stop pushing the waves all out of your hair?”

“Yes, dear, of course. I was trying to think about this madness. I’m sure that you are mistaken. Aunt Gracia was a mystic. But you must remember how sane and wise she was. There may have been something a bit bleak about her wisdom, but it was deliberate. Father killed the man exactly as he might have killed a rattlesnake coiled to strike at Mother. But you, Neal, forgive me, don’t seem entirely sane to me to-day.”

“Convenient insanity?”

“No, no, Neal. Why be cruel? You suggested it; but I did say it stupidly. I should have said that you are quite sane, but that your memory isn’t. The whole trouble is merely a question of memory. If you will remember, it is absolutely impossible that you could have killed Father. I don’t mean morally impossible—that, too, of course—but physically impossible. Remember. You were locked in your room at the time. Within two minutes after the shot was heard, Lucy came running from her room into yours, through the connecting door, and found you trying to batter down your door, that led into the hall, with a chair.”

“Lucy was only a kid at the time. She was much too frightened to know what she saw.”

“Not at all, Neal. Lucy was twelve, and unusually precocious.”

“Yes, and I was eighteen, and—unusually precocious. I tell you, I did it. But I’m not going to tell even you how I managed it. If the thing should be raked up, and come to a trial, you wouldn’t wish to know. And, in the event of a trial, I’d like my little alibi.”

“Dear me, Neal! Really, you are talking now like a book; a third-rate detective thing.”

“Third rate, nothing of the sort. They are sweeter than the sex stuff, and a pile more interesting. I’ve been going in for them lately; and pausing to thank my lucky stars that we didn’t have a French or a Thorndike at Q 2 Ranch in 1900. It wouldn’t have taken one of those birds long to see through seven doors being locked with ten keys, or the rope from our own attic being swung out of Father’s window, or Olympe’s being killed the same way Father was——”

“See, Neal, how false your memory is? Olympe was not killed that night. She lived for years after that. Since your memory has begun to play tricks of this sort, why won’t you trust our memories—my memory? I know, and all the others know, that there is no possibility of your having had anything to do with Father’s murder.”

“You weren’t there, Judy; so, naturally, you’d remember all about it. Yes, you bet. But that’s what I want you to know, just the same. You, and the others. It hasn’t mattered much, until Ursula——”

“Marry Ursula, and it won’t matter then.”

“Chris’s duplex psychology?”

“I suppose so. I’m not clever with it. Come home with us this afternoon. Tell Chris what you’ve told me. He’ll straighten it out for you.”

“For me—or for Irene?”

“Shame on you, Neal.”

“Surely. Sorry. But it has always bothered Chris a lot, you know, having that dapper honour of his sort of uncreased, as it were, by the fact that Irene was out straying around loose in the hall that night when the rest of us were locked up. If you don’t mind, that is, a lot, I think I’ll ask you not to mention this to Chris—nor to anyone.”

“I shouldn’t have, in any case.”

“Ursula?”

“I think not. Since it is unimportant and false, it couldn’t interest her particularly. I regard it, rather, as a wave you’ve done, or had done, to your memory. You know, exactly like those horrid permanent kinks that Irene had put in her hair a few years ago. It is artificial and false and ugly. But, like the hair kinks, it will grow out straight in time. Until then, the less attention we call to it the better, I should say.”

“I should say so, too; for that reason, or—another.”

“About going home, dear. We had planned to leave shortly after tea, have dinner at that delightful new place on the highway, and spend the night there. Then, with easy driving, we should be at the ranch in time for luncheon to-morrow. Would that suit you?”

“On the square, Judy, I am sick of it here. But, if I go back with you, will you ship Ursula as soon as you can?”

“Yes, Neal. If that seems fair to you, I will.”

“Damn that red hat, Jude. It is the same colour that the mask was. I hate red, anyway.”

“Sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to endure it. It cost too much. Will you join us for tea?”

“I think not. Thanks, all that. Did you drive over, or did you bring George?”

“We brought George. He was so avid to show off Irene’s conception of a proper uniform for a chauffeur that I hadn’t the courage to refuse him. He’s a perfect guy in it, Neal; but as happy as Hallelujah.”

“Fine. I’ll ride in front with him, then. Be sure to fix it that way, will you, honey?”

“Yes, I will. Shall we come by for you at half-past five?”

“Wait, Judy, listen. No, I mean really listen. You remember the snow the night Father was killed? Well, if anyone from the outside had done it, there’d have been bound to be footprints——”

“Neal, dear, that was twenty-eight years ago. Need we go over it all, again, right now? I’ve always believed that, by the time any of you had regained your senses enough to look for footprints, the new-falling snow had covered them.”

“It won’t go, Jude. The snow had stopped before we heard the shot. We looked within half an hour. The footprints Chris made, going to the barn, were there plain as print in the morning. That is—— Weren’t they?”

“So you wrote to me, Neal. In all your letters you made a particular point of the absence of footprints in the snow. Do you think you would have written like that if you’d been trying to hide your own guilt?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything; except that, sometimes, I think I’ve brooded over this too long. I admit that I do get hazy about it now. Only——There is this, Judy. If I didn’t do it, who did?”

“Well, Neal, I believe that is what we are going to have to find out.”

“Golly, Judy, you’re the prettiest thing I ever saw when you poke up pert like that.”

“You’d be especially fit to look at yourself, dear, if you would shave. Half-past five, then? Good-bye.”

No, she could not stop and lean against the wall. She must walk steadily, oblivious of reeling worlds. She must keep her chin high; she must point her toes out—no, straight in front; she had been mistaught about toes. She must not snatch the hideous, vivid thing from her head and throw it on the elevator’s floor. She must———What was that thing? Achieve tranquillity. But how was that possible? What did tranquillity mean?

II

If the taxicab would stop bouncing her up and down through the streaming city she could make up her mind what she must say, or, more important, what she must not say to Dr. Joe. “We are concerned about Neal.” No. “Neal, of late, hasn’t seemed quite well.” No. Neal. Neal. Neal.

The not too tall, very fat man, whose white hair crowned his pink baldness childishly like a daisy wreath, took her shivering hands into a grasp that was tight, and warm, and secure.

She said: “Dr. Joe, I’ve found Neal. I mean—Neal has been here in the city for the past two days. I mean—Neal.”

“Sure, I know, Judy. Here, let me help you with that coat. Too hot in this office for a fur coat. Pretty lining. That’s a pretty hat, too. Cheerful, but small—that’s the rule for a hat.”

Ten twirling minutes later he said: “Look, Judy. What is it you want me to do? I’ll drive over to Q 2 for the week-end, and only too glad of an excuse. But Neal will be fit as a fiddle. I guess you know that his trouble is mental, not physical.”

“But, Dr. Joe, after all, is there a difference?”

“Hello, there! Been taking up Watson?”

“He is so beautifully utilitarian. Sort of in defence, you know, against Chris’s everlasting Freud, and Jung, and the rest.”

“Now you let your cousin Christopher alone. He’s a good boy. He’s getting better all the time. How old is Chris by now?”

“In his late fifties. He doesn’t look it.”

“He couldn’t. He’s a Quilter. Judy, here’s what I’ve been thinking. You had that psychiatrist—the Vienna man—at your place for quite a while last year, didn’t you?”

“For six weeks. He was a friend of Lucy’s, you know. But we weren’t positive, then, that anything was really wrong with Neal. So we wouldn’t allow Dr. Koreth to hector him. He and Chris had a splendid time together; but, as far as Neal was concerned, Dr. Koreth’s visit was useless.”

“You can’t blame him for that, Judy. I couldn’t cut out a man’s tonsils if I wasn’t allowed to let him know that anything was the matter with him.”