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  Mischief

  Charlotte Armstrong

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  CHAPTER 1

  A Mr. Peter O. Jones, the editor and publisher of the Brennerton Star-Gazette, was standing in a bathroom in a hotel in New York City, scrubbing his nails. Through the open door, his wife, Ruth, saw his naked neck stiffen, saw him fix his image with his eye, heard him declaim over the rush of running water, “Ladies and gentlemen …” She winked at Bunny.

  Ruth in her long petticoat was sitting at the dressing table, having resolved to be as perfectly, as exquisitely groomed as ever a woman was in the world, this night. She was very gently powdering her thin bare shoulders. Every fair hair on her head was already in shining order. Her carefully reddened lips kept smiling because she knew this long-drawn-out ritual, this polishing of every tooth and every toenail, was only to heighten the wonderful fun.

  It was The Night. Ruth sighed, from a complexity of emotions.

  What a formula, she thought, is a hotel room. Everything one needs. And every detail pursued with such heavy-handed comfort, such gloomy good taste, it becomes a formula for luxury. The twin beds, severely clean, austerely spread. The lamp and the telephone between. Dresser, dressing table. Desk and desk chair (if the human unit needs to take his pen in hand). Bank of windows, on a court, with the big steam radiator across below them, metal topped. Curtains in hotel-ecru. Draperies in hotel-brocade. Easy chair in hotel-maroon. The standing lamp. The standing ash tray, that hideous useful thing. The vast empty closet. And the bath. The tiles. The big towels. The small soap. The very hot water.

  Over this basic formula they had spread the froth of their preparations, in that jolly disorder that a hotel room permits. Her rose-colored evening dress swung with the hook of its hanger over the closet door. Peter’s rummaged suitcase stood open on the luggage bench and his things were strewn on his bed. The dresser top was piled with stuff that at home would have been hidden in the drawers. Powder and ashes had spilled gloriously on the carpet All the lights were blazing.

  All the lights were blazing in Bunny’s room, too, the adjoining room that was exactly like this one, except that left was right and maroon was blue.

  Peter turned the water off, reached for a towel, stood in the bathroom door in singlet and his dress trousers with his suspenders hanging down over his rump. Turning out his patent-leather toes, he bowed. “Ladies and gentlemen …” He began to pantomine, clowning for Bunny. Ruth thought, fondly, How clever he is! She turned to watch what she loved to see, the smooth skin of Bunny’s face ripple and twinkle as it always did before the giggle came out.

  Bunny was nine. Her dark brows went up at the outside just like Peter’s. In her blue wooley robe, Bunny hunched on the foot of Ruth’s bed, her arms around her ankles, and one bunny-slipper stepping on the toe of the other. Her dark hair went smoothly back into the fat braids, so often living and warm in Ruth’s hands. Ruth’s heart felt as if something squeezed it, quickly, and as quickly let it go.

  Peter, with a fine-flung gesture, called down fire from heaven to be witness to his wordless passion, and bowed to make-believe applause. Bunny took her cue, let go her ankles, clapped once, lost her balance and toppled over, giggling. “You see!” said Peter, poking the blue bundle on the bed in a ticklish spot. “Going to mow ’em down!”

  “Peter,” said Ruth in fright and curiosity, “do you know what you’re going to say?”

  “Well, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to rise up and take a good grip on the rug with my toes and open my mouth. Oh, sure, I know what I’m going to say, in a way. I don’t know how I’m going to put it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Oh, Peter!” She sucked in breath. She didn’t understand how anyone could do such a thing as make a speech. Something made her heart jump at the mere thought of it.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Peter. “I’m terrified.” She knew he was. She knew he’d make the speech, nevertheless, and do it well. She knew, too, that her own tense partisanship was helpful to him, and even her fright was a channel that drew off some of his.

  “… time is it, honey?”

  “Quarter after six.” Their eyes met, briefly. Hers with a flick of worry. His with that quick dark reassurance.

  He picked his dress shirt with the studs all in place off his bed. “Which one of you two dames wants to button me up?”

  “Me!” squealed Bunny. So Peter sat on the hard rim of the footboard. “Daddy, why does your shirt pretend it buttons in the front when it buttons in the back?”

  “Civilization. Tradition in the front. Business in the back. How you doing?”

  “O.K.,” said Bunny with a puff of effort. She never questioned Peter’s polysyllables.

  Business, thought Ruth darkly. “Peter,” she said, “I hope you know what I think of your sister, Betty!”

  “I couldn’t print it,” he answered promptly.

  “Business,” said Ruth as darkly as she felt. “Her and her business appointment! On a Saturday night! I think she’s got a heavy date.”

  “Can’t tell,” said Peter lightly, cautiously.

  “I don’t see how she could break her date with us! Do you? Really?”

  Ruth heard again Betty’s high and somewhat affected voice on the phone. “… Terribly sorry, darling. Of course, if you simply can’t get anyone, I’ll cut this thing and I will come.… But I thought perhaps, if you could …?” and Ruth stiffened once more with that shock and the anger.

  Important! What kind of business appointment could be so important for Betty Jones—the silly little chit! Here in New York six months, with her job that paid what? fifty dollars a week? What on earth could Betty Jones do on a Saturday night that could be Important Business?

  For years, now, Ruth had resented but been unable to combat, her sister-in-law’s manner that assumed, so ignorantly and unjustly, that Ruth was done for. Ruth’s goose was cooked. Oh, Ruth was buried with the rank and file, and the drab stones all said Housewife, that drab and piteous label. There was no use. One could only wait and someday …

  “We’ll try, Betty,” Ruth had said, very coldly, and hung up and turned an anguished face to Peter. What if she had to plead and beg? Or not go to the ball?

  But Peter had fixed it. By some hocus-pocus, he had fared forth into the halls and passages of the hotel, and he had fixed it And Ruth had called Betty back and said, coolly, “Don’t bother …”

  “But how could she welsh like that,” murmured Ruth, “when she knows …”

  “Hold still, Daddy.”

  “Excuse it, pet. Look, Ruthie. Sis takes herself awful hard as the career girl. You know that. Someday …” Their eyes met and the gleam in Peter’s was satisfactory. “Besides,” he went on, “I don’t suppose she thinks this convention amounts to much. Corn-fed gathering of country editors. Provincial, hm?”

  “There you are!” said Ruth indignantly. “There you sit, seeing her point of view. But can she see ours? Night of the banquet, and your speech, and it was all arranged weeks ago. What if we couldn’t have gotten anybody?”

  “She did say she’d come if she must. No use to be bitter.”

  Ruth bit her lip.

  “Don’t fret, Cinderella,” grinned Peter. “You shall go to the ball.”

  Ruth blinked, because he was right … no use to be bitter. She kicked off her mules and bent to reach for her evening shoes, feeling the soft brush of her own hair on her bare shoulders. “Oh, dem golden slippers …”
whistled Peter, and Ruth saw Bunny’s solemn eyes peek around his shoulder. For the audience, Ruth fell back into the rhythm. She arched her pretty feet and put them slowly, ceremoniously into her golden slippers.

  “Someday,” said Peter, with his dark eyes glowing, “do you know, girls, who’s going to be putting on her golden slippers to go to the ball?”

  “Bunny O. Jones,” said Ruth at once.

  “And who’s going to be sitting with her bedroom slippers on, watching her?”

  “You and me,” Ruth said. Their eyes met, smiled. We’ll grow old. It won’t matter.

  Bunny said, in a practical voice, “Is my sitter coming pretty soon?”

  Peter pinched the toes in the furry slippers. “Pretty soon. And you’re going to go to sleep in your room with two beds, one for each pigtail. And what are you going to do in the morning?”

  “Telephone,” said Bunny.

  “And say?”

  “Room service.”

  “And then?”

  “This is Miss Bunny O. Jones. I want my breakfast, please.”

  “In room?”

  “Room 809.” Bunny flushed and started over again. “‘This is Miss Bunny O. Jones in room 809. I want my breakfast, please.’ And if they don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll say, ‘My Daddy, Mr. Peter O. Jones, ordered it last night.’”

  “And when the man knocks on the door?”

  “I’ll unlock the door and run quick back in my bed.”

  “That’s right. The key’s in your door. And then they’ll bring in the wagon.”

  “Daddy, it isn’t a real wagon.”

  “No horses, I’ll admit. A mere pushing type of wagon. And on it’s going to be a whole bunch of silver dishes and your orange juice sitting in the biggest mess of cracked ice you ever saw, enough to make about four snowballs. And you’ll eat your breakfast, putting on as much sugar and cream as you want, and after a while Daddy will groan and wake up.”

  “And tomorrow’s the day,” Ruth said, “you’re going to the magic eating store.”

  “I don’t bleeve it!” said Bunny, but her face was rippling.

  “Oh, you don’t, Miss Bunny O. Jones? Well, you’ll see!” They all three had the middle initial O. Ruth’s name had been Olsen, and Peter was delighted with the coincidence. People named Jones, claimed he, had to do something. Peter O. Jones, he always was. And Bunny ran it together so that, more than once, school records had used the apostrophe.

  “Quite a lot like a zoo,” Peter was explaining. “A whole bunch of little glass cages and in one there’s a hot meat pie, and in the other there’s a big fat salad, and all you do is put in your nickels and presto chango”

  “But you have to have nickels,” said Bunny shrewdly.

  “Well, yes,” said her daddy. “In the olden days, a magic wand was the thing. Now, of course, it’s nickels.” He grinned. He had begun the struggle with his collar.

  “Peter,” said Ruth suddenly, “do you believe in the elevator boy? Do you believe in his niece? Is she coming?”

  “Certainly,” said Peter, with his brows winging. “Why would he say so?”

  “I don’t know—” For Ruth, the room was rocking. The bright box it was had become dreamlike. And the city over which it hung was fabulous and all its denizens were phantoms.

  “Said she’d be glad to,” Peter was saying. “First, I spoke to that colored woman, that awfully nice-looking woman, the one who was so friendly? But she’s—uh—dated up. So this Eddie overheard us and he offered. Glad to earn the money, he said.”

  “It takes nickels …?” murmured Ruth.

  “Papa’s wand. Imagine, hon. This Eddie’s been running the same elevator for fourteen years. You know which one he is, don’t you?”

  “I guess …”

  “Lives up in the Bronx. No children, he told me. He’ll tell you, at the drop of a hat. Speaks fondly of his wife. Must be a nice woman. This girl, now … they seem to have taken her in out of the goodness of their hearts since his brother died.” Peter sucked his cheek. “Fourteen years, up and down. And he still runs that elevator as if his heart was in it to do it perfectly. I’ve seen ‘em so blasé—make your hair curl. Wonder what he gets a week?”

  Ruth sighed. Her momentary feeling that it was all myth was blown away. The little man who ran the elevator was real, of course … a human being, with a life, a wife, a budget … with brothers and sisters like everybody else and a niece to oblige. It was just like home, after all. You needed somebody. You asked around. It was just like asking the Johnstones who might say all their sitters were busy but they knew someone who knew somebody. You set up a kind of chain of inquiry and after a while it dredged up what you wanted. People were people and they passed the word and obliged each other and that was the way it went all over the world, truly.

  “The niece comes from the Middle West someplace,” Peter was saying. “Experienced, he says. I suppose a little extra means something in a setup like that.”

  Ruth thought, all at once, that it was better to be paying someone, hiring someone, having the leverage of that power, than taking such a one as Betty’s time for free. She smiled and reached out her hand.

  “Oh boy,” said her husband, “comes the twelve-dollar smell!”

  “Twelve dollars and fifty cents, don’t forget!” Ruth took the tiny stopper out, touched her shoulders with the precious stuff.

  Peter bent over and sniffed violently. He said in her ear, “Would a couple of symmetrical toothmarks look good?” She saw herself laughing, in the glass, and Peter’s dark keen face against her yellow hair.

  “… me smell,” demanded Bunny.

  So Ruth crossed with her pretty petticoat swirling, turned the plump little paw, touched the back of it with the perfume. “Deelicious!” said Bunny, sniffing violently as her daddy had done.

  Ruth looked down at the white clean part in the dark hair. All of a sudden, she saw their two connecting rooms, the two bright boxes on the inner rim of the doughnut of this eighth floor, suspended above the boiling city. And the rising noise surrounded them like smoke … the honks, clangs, shouts and murmurs, the sound and fury … and her heart was squeezed again. And she thought, We couldn’t have left her two thousand miles away … but we shouldn’t have brought her … but we couldn’t have left her.…

  The Hotel Majestic was neither large nor small, neither cheap nor costly. Not the last word, it wasn’t dowdy, either. It was conservative. It tried to be smart about it, in a modest way. It took the middle road. Even the elevators, although they ran smoothly, did so with a modest speed.

  Eddie Munro stopped for a light at the eighth floor. A young man got on, turned at once to face the door. They sank downward in silence.

  Out of the corners of their eyes, they typed each other, quickly. Eddie saw the easy grace of a tall body, the arrogant carriage of the high head, the crew cut that was somehow arrogant, too. The sharp cut of the good-looking face, the long nose with the faint flare at the nostrils, the cool gray eyes, long lashed, and almost beautiful in that hard-boned young face, but very cool and asking for nothing. A type. One of those young men who had come out of the late war with that drive, that cutting quality, as if they had shucked off human uncertainties and were aimed and hurtling toward something in the future about which they seemed very sure.

  His name was Jed Towers. It was his last night in New York. He had a dinner date.

  If he saw the little man out of the corner of his cool eye, it was just a little man, with his shoulders pulled back from his narrow chest in a frozen strut. With a gray face. With pale hair that never had any color to lose, lying long and lank over the bald part. Pale eyes that blinked often, as if Eddie Munro were never quite sure of anything.

  The car stopped smoothly at the main floor. Jed put his key on the desk without interrupting the long fluid strides that were taking him to the outside, to the city, to the evening.

  Eddie ran a nervous glance around the quiet lobby. He said to the next bo
y, “Gotta make a phone call. Watch it, will you?” He scuttled around a bend of wall with his nickel in his hand already.

  “Marie?”

  “Yeah, Eddie?” said his wife’s placid voice.

  “She leave?”

  “She went, yeah, sure.”

  “How long ago?”

  “In plenty of time,” his wife said. Everything she said carried the overtone, Don’t worry, Eddie.”

  “Take the subway?”

  “Of course.”

  “Listen, Marie, I think maybe I oughta stay around after I’m off. Folks might be late. Some kind of big shindig, the man said. O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  “I think I oughta stay and bring her home, don’t you?”

  “Good idea, Eddie.”

  “You do think the whole idea’s a good idea, Marie? She can earn a little money? You know? Get started?”

  “Sure it is, Eddie.”

  “She—uh—liked the idea, didn’t she?”

  “Sure she did.”

  “Well … uh …” He didn’t want to let go of the wire, leading to Marie and her voice saying, Sure.

  “Say, Eddie …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think maybe I’ll go to the show. Miz Martin said she’d go with me.” Eddie squirmed in the booth, blinking rapidly. His wife’s voice went on. “That picture we didn’t think we’d better take her? You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I thought I’d go—got the chance.”

  “Oh. Well. Yeah. Sure.”

  “Don’t worry, Eddie,” Marie soothed. “I’ll be home long before you and Nell, probably.”

  “Sure. Sure,” he said. He heard his wife’s tiny sigh whispering on the wire. “Go ahead,” he said, vigorously. “Have a good time.”

  “It’ll be O.K,” she told him. (Don’t worry, Eddie.)

  He went around the wall to his car. His eyes searched toward the revolving door, across the depth of the lobby. He threw back his shoulders, trying to stand erect, to look as if he were perfectly sure.

  In 807, Ruth slipped the rose-colored frivolity off its hanger and expertly lowered it past her shining hair. Peter’s strong fingers zipped her up the back. She made her curtsy to the audience.