Chocolate Cobweb Read online

“Why?” she breathed. “Why?”

  “When my mother died …” She could hardly hear what he was saying. His voice was muted as if his deep alarm robbed it of strength. “I had a bad foot.”

  “Oh,” she gasped. She bent down. Her lips near his hair.

  “Mandy, for God’s sake, will you stay with me?”

  “Yes … yes.”

  “If it’s a pattern?” he said, “I don’t think she—tripped.” He kept his hand tight on her wrist but he closed his eyes, and when he opened them they were less wild. “It could be suggestion,” he admitted.

  “I know,” she agreed quickly. “The whole thing. We’ve rigged it against her. She can’t help but hate me. I know that. Anyone would.”

  He moved his fingers and now her whole hand was warm inside his. “Did she ask about your blood?”

  She nodded. “I said what you told me.”

  “Same as mine. Just to confuse,” he explained. “Oh, Lord, I was scared there for a minute.”

  “Does it hurt?” she whimpered.

  “Like hell.” He smiled fleetingly. “But it isn’t that.” He looked behind them and again the color and strength went out of his voice. “I can barely hobble. It’s the same as it was before.” And he shuddered. His wide shoulders shook.

  Mandy said blindly, “Oh, maybe not, maybe not. Maybe she didn’t …” She could feel, as if it were in her own heart, his shuddering horror. Ah, if Belle, so beloved, had been sent away! If, these six years, her lost radiance was less lost than stolen! She put her mouth against his hair. It was impossible not to. Impossible.

  His head, tilting, brushed her lips. “Mandy, will you go find a man named Kelly? El Kelly, they call him. Pasadena police. Your eyes are fresh. See what there was when my mother died. If I could, I’d go and do that now myself. Will you do it, Mandy?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Today.”

  “Come up the outside way tonight. My little balcony.” He looked behind again.

  “We’ll have to make sure,” she said quietly. “Now you can’t bear not to know for sure. Now it has seemed possible … I understand.”

  He let go her hand, a gentle releasing. “You’re the only one,” he said, as if he apologized for troubling her.

  She walked away a little. A deep trembling seemed to be shaking her whole body, although she walked steadily enough. It didn’t enter her mind, then—not then—that any pattern that might be forming had herself for its center. She thought it was terrible for him if it was true. Terrible for him even to have to wonder. Yet she was shaking with guilty joy.

  For she would stay with him. She would be with him. She was the only one he could turn to, the way things had fallen.

  CHAPTER 13.

  TOBIAS HAD BEEN TOO MUCH UPSET by the accident to work that morning. Ione ministered to him, as well as to Thone. She was the woman of the house, in control, firm and cheerful. She coaxed at their spirits, she brought tidbits and pillows, she was serene and busy. They must lean on her strength. All would be well. She was the captain. The ship of the house sailed on.

  Lunch was served in the studio for Thone’s sake. He seemed half drowsy with the codeine he’d been given, but out of pain and perfectly calm.

  Amanda chose a moment at the end of lunch to exclaim, “Golly!” Everyone looked at her. “I forgot! Oh, golly! I’ll have to go up to school. I never did sign my schedule.”

  “Will it be open?” asked Thone sleepily.

  “The office will be. Maybe this afternoon would be a good time.” She turned to the artist. “Or will you want to work, sir?”

  “I doubt it, Mandy.” His smile was all affection.

  “He should not work,” said Ione. “So you run along, my dear. Would you like to take my car?”

  Mandy’s lips opened. It could pass for awed delight.

  “Can you manage it?” said Ione. “I’m sure you can, you California child. I shan’t use it today.” She looked smug, as if she congratulated herself upon her devotion to the stricken house. “By all means …”

  “If you really don’t mind …” said Amanda slowly.

  “My dear, I shouldn’t offer if I minded.” Ione was Mrs. Santa Claus, pleased to please. She nodded and twinkled.

  “Such a beautiful car! Thank you, Mrs. Garrison.”

  “I’ll fetch you the keys,” Ione went trotting.

  Thone sat very still. Even counting the calming dose he’d been given, it was too still. Mandy found herself stiffening into the same kind of quiet. Tobias was finishing his cake. “My dear,” he said with normal fussy affection, “you’ll be careful, won’t you?” He wiped his lips.

  “I’ll be careful,” said Mandy.

  Ione brought a small leather case in which hung a great many keys. She opened the zipper and selected two. “This is for the garden door. You just walk in, going down, but when you come back you’ll need it. So I’ve tied a bit of string on it. There. This is the ignition. Better hold it, dear. It’ll save fumbling. Now, can you find your way? Do you know what to do? The middle door’s not locked. You just go through. The garage doors have a bar inside. Just lift it and slam them open. Do you understand?” She purred these instructions.

  Mandy said, “I know the way.”

  “Just leave the big doors open. The garden door protects us. Will you be long, my dear?”

  “Not long, I guess,” said Mandy vaguely. “I’ll be back for dinner, of course.”

  “Good,” said Ione cheerily.

  Holding the right key in her fingers, Mandy went down through the house, snatched her purse and her short coat from her room, and went out through the lower door. She started down the paths, the turns and twists, the steps, the whole rambling, zigzagging descent into the canyon. She moved along the slope. Halfway down, she knew she went in terror.

  Down to the place of death.

  A shrine, he’d called it. Oh, God, prayed Mandy, let me remember that. Let me not begin to wonder, now, just how she did it. Or low Belle went down in the dark, this way, and died on the floor. Or how that little creature managed to make it happen. Let me not think about those things.

  She moved along rather slowly, but steadily. She came to the workshop door, what Ione had called the garden door. The knob rattled in her nervous hand. The door was quite thick and sturdy. Worked by some sort of spring, it closed slowly and with ponderous finality, by itself, behind her. Closed and locked, she realized. She stood there a moment, in the queer light that came uncannily through the glass bricks in the wall. Bracing herself for the place, the garage, that box, so stuffed and filled with the big car, so small and closed in, so cavelike … Would there be air? Could she breathe in there?

  She threw back her shoulders, marched the little way to the middle door, and tugged it open.

  So dim, down there. She tasted something bitter in her mouth. The taste of fear. She ran. Knowing that the door she released was moving behind her to close her in, she ran down the steps, past the shining body of the car, and almost in a panic bore her strength upward on the bar. The doors creaked and parted. It was all right.

  She could breathe.

  Sweat beading her face, Mandy pushed them wide. She leaned on each door then, pressing it back firmly into the grasp of its retaining hook. She shook each door a little. Both seemed to hold. She arranged the ignition key, ready, in her hand. She went swiftly to the car, got in, started the motor with the muscles of her leg sending long tremors up her body. She backed out, fast. The car popped forth.

  She was free. She was under the sky.

  Mandy drew a long shuddering breath and felt a little ashamed. She pushed back her hair. She drove out the lower road and felt the sun on her face.

  Ellis Kelly, called El, so that he sounded like a Hibernian relic of old Spanish days, was a hard-faced man of about forty-five. His lair was not hard to come upon. Fortunately, he was in it. When, after half an hour of waiting, Mandy was admitted to his presence, he met her with a cold, professionally suspicious stare.

/>   But Amanda was not going to be daunted. She chose to be both crisp and appealing. “Lieutenant Kelly, six years ago you were in charge or at least involved in the investigation of the accidental death of Mrs. Belle Garrison.”

  “I was.”

  “I’ve come because her son, Thone Garrison, asked me to come and talk to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My name is Amanda Garth. I’m a guest at their house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Was there anything about that accident—” now she was a little less crisp and a little more appealing—”that makes you wonder?” she finished.

  “You got a suspect?” he said coldly, so quickly it was as if she’d put her fingers near a trap and been caught.

  “I might have,” she said.

  “Who?”

  She caught her lip in her teeth. He simply waited, turning a pencil between his hands. “Mrs. Tobias Garrison,” said Mandy boldly. “Ione, his first wife. Now she’s his wife again. The one who died was—in between.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “What do you know?”

  “I don’t know a darned thing,” cried Mandy in exasperation. “I came to ask you.”

  “You got a feeling?” said El Kelly. “Or is it this son who’s got a feeling?”

  “Both of us.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, Miss Garth. Feelings have causes. They don’t come from nowhere. Whether the feeling you’ve got is caused by something inside or outside …” He lowered his head. He looked up at her from under his brows.

  “We don’t know whether it’s just in our heads, or whether it comes from her,” said Mandy. “That’s exactly why I’ve come here.”

  He got up and went to some files. In no time at all he had extracted a sheaf of papers. “We’ll take a look,” he said.

  Mandy breathed deeply. She smiled at him.

  “What was it that’s bothering you?”

  She found it difficult to say. At last she told him, picking her words carefully to be clear, about the sleeping potion in the chocolate. She did not tell him how she came to be there. Nor did she mention the confusion about her birth. She did not say how she felt. It made a bald little tale. Poison, how she knew. Gene. The handkerchief destroyed.

  He listened. “You figure she changed her mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “A tough thing for me to do anything about,” he told her. “Depends on what you and this chemist say. Nothing else to show. Nobody got hurt.”

  “I know.”

  “You figure that if she’s up to something now, maybe she was up to something then, six years ago?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mandy gratefully. “That’s it.”

  He glanced at the papers he held and sighed. “I’ll tell you frankly, Miss Garth, I’m never satisfied with anything so screwy as this accident. But I’ve got to have evidence, and I never had any. Since you bring it up, I remember Mrs. Ione. Struck me, right away, she’d have a motive. I went so far as to see did she have an alibi that night.”

  “Did she?”

  “Nothing much good. But that’s convincing, in a way. Lived alone. So who’s always got an alibi?” He shrugged. “Trouble is, if she had anything to do with it, how? She wasn’t there.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “No trace of her.”

  “N-none?”

  “Take a look.” He shoved the papers across the desk.

  Mandy said, “Thank you.” She began to look at them. They were typed reports of interviews, for the most part. Doctor … Tobias … Elsie … Burt … William Cheeseman, Consolidated cab …

  That would be Belle’s cab driver. She began to read a part of it.

  A: I got a call at nine-twenty. I was up there looking for the place about ten or fifteen minutes later. She was waiting outside the gate. She gives me a hail.

  Q: What did she say?

  A: She says, “Hey, cab. You, green cab.” So I stop. She says, “Are you for Mrs. Garrison?” I says, “Yes.” She says, “I’ve changed my mind. It’s so far I think I’d rather drive myself. Here’s for your trouble.” So she hands me a couple of bucks. Two dollars, that is. And she says, “You can go up this way and get down the other side of the canyon.” So I says, “O.K., lady, suit yourself.”

  Q: Was the light good? Could you see her?

  A: Sure. Sure I could see her. She had a blue scarf tied over her head, kinda tied under her chin. Had a dark coat. She had some keys in her hand.

  Q: You recognized her, then?

  A: Sure. Sure, it was Mrs. Garrison, all right.

  Q: You knew the lady?

  A: Sure. Poor lady. Looking back now, I remember she acted kind of funny.

  Q: You noticed that she was under the influence of a drug?

  A: Maybe that was it.

  Mandy turned the paper over. Thone’s statement.

  Q: Age?

  A: Seventeen.

  Q: Deceased was your mother?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Mandy skipped down the page.

  A:… Dad went to the phone. Somebody had a little painting of his he’d lost. He was crazy to get it back, naturally.

  Oh, Thone, wept Mandy. “Naturally”… not blaming Dad.

  Q: She intended to take a cab, didn’t she?

  A: Yes, sir. She asked me to call one for her.

  Q: You were laid up with that foot?

  A: Yes, sir. I couldn’t walk easily. But we have a long cord on our phone. Mother brought me the phone. She went to her room to get ready. I called a couple of places. Finally I got one. She came back, all ready to go.… We didn’t go to the door with her. Dad had a cold.

  Oh, Thone, wept Mandy.

  Q: She said nothing about driving herself?

  A: No, sir. We can’t understand it.

  Mandy turned the page. Burt Gibbons, gardener.

  Q: The extra keys to the garage and the car were kept in a drawer in the hall?

  A: Yes, sir. Always. I’d be the only one would use them once in a while.

  Q: When did you see them last?

  A: About a week or so ago.

  Q: Mrs. Garrison knew they were there?

  A: Oh, yes, sir.

  Mandy shook her head. Tobias, his statement.

  Q: You didn’t touch the chloral, the box with the powders in it, yourself at all?

  A: No. No one did. Except my wife.

  Elsie Gibbons, cook-housekeeper.

  Q: You washed up the glasses that had been used?

  A: Yes, sir. I always do. Can’t leave them set overnight.

  Q: You ever touch the box of medicine?

  A: No, sir, never. Mrs. Garrison took care of that herself.

  El Kelly said, rumbling, “Screwy thing. Two accidents, you’d say. First, she gets a knockout dose. Then, it has to hit her just exactly on the wrong minute. After the engine is started. But before the doors are fastened wide-open. Quite a coincidence, eh?”

  “Ye-es,” said Mandy. “It was.” She riffled the papers. No statement from Ione was there.

  “That’s why it passed through my mind,” Kelly said, “it could be suicide.”

  “Suicide! Belle!”

  “Well, take a look. She gets those keys, says nothing to her family, does she? She sends the cab away. Funny, if she almost never drives herself, as they say. Certainly looks like she must have handled the chloral. All right. Why couldn’t it be that she goes down there, starts the engine, fixes the doors to look right, lies down on the floor, right under the exhaust …”

  “But why?”

  “Why’d she try to make it look like an accident? For the kid’s sake, maybe.”

  “Oh!” Mandy sat back, tingling with alarm. “But why?” she cried again. “Why would she do that? For what reason?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ve got a hunch the old gentleman agrees with me.”

  “Tobias!”

  “Yeah. Maybe he knows a reason. He’d keep it from the kid, too, you know.”
>
  She thought, Is this why Tobias doesn’t face it? Is this his sorrow? Is this what hurts him so? That Belle wanted to die … She put her face in her hands.

  El Kelly gathered up the papers and straightened them. “You can look at it a lot of ways,” he said. “You’re kinda friendly with the son,” he went on calmly. “Reason I say all this to you … maybe it isn’t such a good idea for him to start figuring out what really happened. Get what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Mandy shakily. “I—thank you very much.”

  “Don’t like to see people feeling any worse than they need to feel,” he said, still hard-faced and stern. “I’d call the truth, if I was sure what it was. But …” He shrugged his shoulders. “Get what I mean?”

  Oh, what have I done! cried Mandy to herself. Oh, what have I done!

  CHAPTER 14.

  AFTERNOON SHADOWS FILLED THE bowl of the canyon early, and deepened, flooding upward to engulf the lower part of the house first and then rise, story by story, until by five o’clock only the topmost floor caught a little last sunlight, although on the other rim of the canyon and on the mountaintops the land was yet warm and bright.

  Mandy crept in at the lowest point of the house. Her room was dim and chilly. She washed, she fixed her face. She felt numb and calm. The energy of fear had left her. She felt that she had been meddling feverishly and ignorantly, indeed, and now the consequences would have to be met. Somehow, she would have to endure the rest of this week-long visit, endure Thone’s stirred-up agonies of doubt, hold herself steady, and without giving anything away, let emotions storm about her and fall of their own falseness to nothing.

  She went up through the house. Thone’s door was closed. She could hear voices behind it. Feeling outcast, accepting the feeling, she went by.

  Up in the studio, Ione sat alone. “Oh, Amanda. How is my car?” She amended this quickly. “Did it behave?”

  “It behaved beautifully.” Mandy gave her the keys. Ione’s hand closed greedily over the key case. It was plain that she hadn’t liked lending her car. Her car … her own … It crossed Amanda’s mind to wonder why, then, she had been so obliging. But the thought was fleeting.

  On the round table, between two fat chairs, were tall glasses. Ione herself had been sipping something. “Sit down, Amanda.” She put a finger on the tabletop and turned it a quarter of a circle. The used glasses moved as the tabletop revolved. “Fanny’s here. Thone was worn out and we felt he should be in bed. Burt helped him down. Now Toby’s taken Fanny to see him. We’ve had a wee nip. My dear, you do look tired. You must have something, too.”