Chocolate Cobweb Read online

  “Shall we work today?” asked Tobias, “or are you too tired, child? I’m afraid I’m spoiling your visit.”

  “Since she is getting roughly the equivalent of a four-year course for free,” drawled Thone, “I don’t think she’s complaining.”

  Amanda swallowed hard. “Heavens, of course I’m not complaining!” She put her chin up, smiled at Tobias. Her thoughts were on this pattern of their own. She knew Thone was right to be cool or worse to her. She felt that Ione had noticed and would notice everything between them. Indeed, everything between Amanda and anyone. So she smiled, radiantly, at Tobias. But she didn’t see him. She wasn’t looking for the subtle reaction on the father’s face. She forgot, and Thone forgot, that Tobias was also a receiving instrument.

  They played for Ione. Tobias, also, saw the show.

  It was decided to get on with the portrait.

  Ice-green satin! She could have ripped it off her shoulders and thrown it down and trampled on it. Someday she would. But for now she had to sit still, with her spine straight and yet easy, with her face turned to the light, with her hands quiet.

  Thone, using his crutch, got nimbly to the sofa. She could not even look in his direction. He had to sit there with his foot up and pretend to drowse or read, while Wednesday went by. While Tobias worked along. While Ione kept the house.…

  Mandy began to think about Belle, Belle in all her pretty costumes. What was the rose-and-gold ball gown made of? she wondered. Satin? “And a golden rose for her hair.” What had she worn to die? Mandy wrenched her mind from that. What had she worn on the islands? Something gay, no doubt. Color, of course. Coral, bright pinks, hibiscus shades. Thone would remember her in luscious color. His whole boyhood must have been soaked in brilliance and laughter. Mandy knew, because it was there in those paintings, in the laughing quality of the island paintings. That deep, bright happiness! She wondered dreamily how Thone could escape wanting to paint. Why was he, in a way, so somber, with his feeling for form, shape, mass, line. Had Belle been so? She puzzled and dreamed, forgetting.…

  Tobias worked along. He was saying very little. He was working slowly. The first quick, sure, eager, plunging certainty of this work was over. The thrill was gone. He had not worked like that for years now. He would never reach it again, never touch it, the magic.

  What had excited him so, if it had not been a brief revival of old magic? Now he felt heavy. He felt old again. Oh, he was skilled and disciplined. His hand would not fail. He would command it delicately and it would obey. An obedient hand! Ah, not the same thing as body and soul that flowed, all one substance, out at the finger tips!

  He would teach this sweet girl all he knew, and it would amount to very little, after all. For who could teach magic? It was given, it arrived.… And when it was gone, one called for it in vain.

  He was old, but not dull enough. Things hit on his naked nerve ends. He was battered and tossed. He was defenseless against so many intangible buffets. Thone, so remote and tense, so cautious and closed up against contact … Pale marks on this girl’s cheeks, barely preceptible new planes in this young face … Spiritual breezes that blew from he knew not what source, in which he swayed and staggered as they passed him by.

  He was not strong any more. Not able to understand, not told, and yet, pitifully, not indifferent, either.

  They were so young. He wished … He wished … In their new and complicated world, which they must understand, if he did not, he wished they were standing together. But he feared … he felt …

  He did not know why he began to cry in his heart, to hunt back down the years for her. For Belle.

  Ione had a letter in the afternoon mail.

  About the fuchsias [it ran], if you insist, my dear, of course. Although it’s a hell of a way from where you are to the airport. Our flight leaves, as I think I told you, at ten-five P.M. I’d run them out to you, gladly, but I’m crazy with packing, you can imagine. However, I could easily do it in a week or so, after we’ve come home. So for pity’s sake, if you can’t get down there Thursday, don’t worry. I’ll stick the cuttings in the checkroom with your name on them, and remember, if they die, we can always take more.

  Ione folded the sheet of pale blue paper over the backhanded scrawl. “Barbara McPhail! Why, the dear girl!” she exclaimed, her eyes round with pleasure. “Toby, what do you think! She’s going to give me a mess of green cuttings from her wonderful fuchsias!”

  “Very nice,” said Tobias, squinting at his palette.

  “She and Charles are flying to Seattle tomorrow. She’ll bring them as far as the airport. Isn’t that dear of her?”

  Thone’s sleepy lids lifted.

  “I shall have to just run down,” said Ione. “I hope Burt and I can root them. She has such a clever man who comes in once a week. He’ll pack them moist, I hope.”

  “Airport?” said Thone. His voice was almost empty of significance, barely even curious. Mandy’s fingers in her lap curled suddenly.

  “Inglewood. Oh, dear, it is a drive,” Ione lamented. “Let’s see, if their plane goes at ten, they’ll plan to be there in good time—by nine-thirty, I should think.”

  “How long will they be in Seattle?” asked Tobias absently.

  “My dear, she doesn’t say,” lied Ione. “It’s so sweet of her to think of me before they go away. I must tell Burt.”

  “Burt can fetch them,” murmured Tobias. Ione didn’t answer. She didn’t remind him that tomorrow night Burt would be out. She went trotting on her little feet as if to arrange, to see about it, to give her happy orders.

  “Lovely things, fuchsias,” said Tobias. “Barbara’s, especially.”

  On the girl’s face, in the light, there was a strange tightening of the skin on the bones, as if the softly rounded young flesh were thinning and failing before his eyes.

  “God damn this foot!” Thone’s sudden violence was a shock. “Excuse me, Dad—Amanda.” Amanda caught her breath. The shock shook and relaxed her.

  Tobias put his brush down and looked curiously at his hand. “We’ll stop. Amanda is tired and so am I. And Thone is bored.” He hoped it was so. He looked at their faces pleadingly. At their suddenly bland young faces, their blank, though smiling, eyes.

  Not once did Ione leave the house that day. That Wednesday. Burt ran the errands. The day dragged on as if Time itself had open jaws and they were narrowing, slowly, slowly, as the clock ticked.

  After dinner Tobias had his dose, reached for it eagerly, for the sleep it promised, for some integrating rest, however found. Amanda had her Herbsaint. It was already the tradition of the house. It was a matter of course.

  Thone said in that lazy voice, so emptied of meaning, “I say, Ione, how about me?”

  “Whisky, dear?”

  “No, I think I’ll try the same.” He stretched and grinned, playing bored.

  “Ah, but I shall have whisky,” trilled Ione. “Amanda, dear, will you come, take these?”

  So Amanda went to fetch the pretty little glasses, the dainty stemmed glasses from the bar. “I think I was stingy,” said Ione sharply. So Amanda smiled and touched the bottle that looked so much like a wine bottle but that held Belle’s firewater. She put a little more Herbsaint in each glass. Ione’s hands were both busy. Jigger in one, ice tongs in the other. “Look out for the …” She pointed with her elbow. Amanda’s hand touched the box that held the chloral.

  “This?”

  “Thanks, dear. Just push it away from the edge—there.”

  I am very obliging, thought Amanda. Very obliging am I. If she wanted me to touch it, now I’ve touched it. I shall do everything she seems to suggest, quite willingly. Although I will be taking notes. I must go along with her … to a point, to a point. It must run smoothly, as far as she knows. And how smoothly it does go! How easy it must seem! Nothing has happened at all. And yet so much. All bits and pieces, each so innocent. Bits and pieces of a pattern. So we really see a pattern? Are the jaws of Wednesday closing down? Will it be T
hursday, tomorrow?

  She felt strange, as if she were drifting. She brought Thone his glass. “Nice night out,” he muttered, with a dark restless look.

  “Poor Thone, poor boy,” crooned Ione. “So uncomfortable. So confined. Never mind. It’ll soon be healed. I’m so glad it’s no worse.” She sighed. She beamed around her, at the family, the cozy end of Wednesday.

  CHAPTER 17.

  NOT QUITE ENDED.

  It was a nice night out. But Amanda knew he’d meant her to come. So she climbed, in the dark, with the most delicate care. He was waiting for her, sprawled on the balcony floor. Lips at her ear, he said, “It’s plain, isn’t it? You’ll be the one to go for those fuchsia cuttings. Fanny’s coming to dinner.”

  “I know.”

  “Somebody will have to go, or they’ll die, she’ll say.”

  “I know. I see.”

  “There’ll be chloral in your favorite drink tomorrow night.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “But then what? How can she work it?”

  “I can’t see any further,” she confessed.

  “How will she start the car? Be sure that it is started? And rig the doors? How can she?”

  “There must be a way. It’s what we don’t know. It’s what we—”

  “Mandy, tomorrow you’ll have to get out of here long enough to call Kelly.”

  “Why?”

  “My God, to take care! Tell him he’ll have to be down in the canyon. It’ll be this way. In the first place, we’ll see that you don’t get any chloral. But she’ll think you do.

  We’ll have to take care of that. I’ll ask for some liqueur too, as tonight. Somehow, we’ll swap our glasses. If no chance comes up naturally, we’ll have to make a chance. You make a chance, if you can. For me to do it. Turn her away for a second. I have an idea. I’ll clear all the junk off that round table, the one with the revolving top. That’ll be the way to do it. You manage to sit near and put your glass on that table. Remember. Mandy, will you trust me to swap those drinks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Behind your back?”

  “Yes, Thone. Yes, but you—”

  “You must go ahead then, and drink yours, just as you always do. Mine won’t matter because I can dawdle with it. She won’t be thinking of mine or watching me. But listen, if it goes wrong and we’re not able to swap them, then you must not leave the house. I won’t allow it. I’ll open up the whole thing before—”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Mandy, is your heart O.K.?”

  “My h-heart?”

  “Chloral’s bad on a shaky heart. We won’t go another step if there is the slightest chance.”

  “My heart’s fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Doctor’s word for it?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “What the hell am I talking about? Listen, Mandy, you’ll get no chloral. Promise. Unless I say so, you mustn’t drink anything at all.”

  “All right,” she said numbly.

  “Now, in case … Tell Kelly that somebody will have to be down there to watch how she does it, for one thing. You’ll know, but we should have another witness. For another thing, to be sure you’re not caught in there, after all, the way …” His head fell on his hands.… “the way Belle was.”

  Mandy shivered. Her throat was dry with pity, with terror.

  He moved again. “Shall we call it off? I can’t ask you to do this! My God, it’s an impossible thing.”

  “We can’t call it off,” she said. “We don’t know yet.”

  “We know, well enough.”

  “Not how.”

  “No proof.” He groaned. She could feel his agony.

  “What will I tell Mr. Kelly?” she prodded.

  “To watch the garage. Keep listening. If he hears the car running with the doors closed, he’s to break in. But not to call the house. We better not risk that. He mustn’t be seen down there, either. Tell him early, tell him from eight on, to be sure.”

  “I touched the chloral box,” she said.

  “Did you?”

  “I thought she was—wanting me to.”

  “Was she?”

  “Oh, Thone, I don’t know. I don’t know. Are we scaring ourselves to death for nothing?”

  “I don’t think so. Mandy, can you walk into that trap? I wish it were the other way around.”

  “No, no. I’ll be all right.”

  “Your hands are cold.” He touched them.

  “I’m freezing.”

  “If it weren’t for—my mother …”

  She lifted her face away from the cold metal bar. “There isn’t really any danger,” she said. “It isn’t as if I were going to walk alone.”

  His fingers peeled hers off the bar and were warm around them. Then his whisper, so nearly soundless, “Nothing must happen to you, Amanda, Mandy.” She thought, then, that although the words stopped, he said, “Darling.”

  “What—did you call me?” she murmured, bewildered.

  He repeated, “Mandy.”

  She closed her eyes. No word, then. Yet he knew what word it was she hadn’t heard with ears. The night was star-spangled. The night was perfumed. Her mouth, in the dark, was smiling.

  Let him not speak, then. Neither would she.

  She thought, not moving her lips, Good night, dear Thone.

  “Good night,” he whispered, answering.

  CHAPTER 18.

  MANDY SLEPT WELL AND WHEN SHE awoke it was Thursday. It was a misty morning. The long vistas were closed in. The canyon swooned in green and gray. Trees blurred and wept. The world was smaller. It was a small round clearing within a dreamy margin, a circle that moved and followed the eye, in which one walked and carried like a horizontal hoop the close horizon.

  Tobias may have slept but he had not rested. His eyelids seemed barely able to lift and uncover his glance. He said he would do no work that day. No work at all.

  So Mandy was free to sit and shiver in her white and yellow cotton. She told herself, after a while, that it was stupid to be chilly, and ran down to get her woolly jacket. When she came back, Tobias had gone to write in his room. Thone told her. Thone had hobbled to the sofa in the studio, and there he lay.

  They looked at each other. There was much they could have whispered, had they dared. But nothing to say aloud, across the room. No words to match the normal crust of things, as around them the work of the house went on, all the housekeeping sounds. Elsie was busy. Ione, in the hall, spoke on the telephone to tradesmen, in gracious command.

  Mandy went to sit on the window seat and stare out over the gardens that plunged so swiftly down into the misty gulch. She saw Burt, far below, digging in slow rhythm near the garage.

  Thone put his eyes on a book. Ione glanced in.

  In a little while Amanda saw her picking her way along the terraces below. No hat, but decent in a gray suit, with her purse under her arm. Was she going out?

  Mandy turned. Was it safe? The vacuum hummed on the floor below. She pointed and grimaced.

  “Give me the telephone,” said Thone instantly.

  She snatched it from its shelf in the hall. The long cord reached around the arch. “You keep on watching,” he told her.

  So she went back to the window seat. Ione was far below now, surely too far to hear the whir of the dial or the low rumble of Thone’s voice. She was talking to Burt, who had stopped digging and listened respectfully.

  She heard Thone ask for Lieutenant Kelly. Automatically, she filled in words from the other end of the wire. Lieutenant Kelly was not there. Thone was trying to leave a message. His low voice was staccato.

  Below, Ione drew away from the gardener. He began to climb upward, dragging a tool. She opened the workshop door and went inside. The bottom of the canyon was not visible from the house, except at some distance, off toward the mouth of it, where a brief bare stretch of pavement could be seen. This morning the mist blurred i
t over. Mist, which was slowly dissolving in pale sunlight, but which lingered in the hollows below. If the car should pass that point on its way out, would it make a darker moving object? Amanda’s eyes blinked with strain.

  Thone hung up. He said, not very loud, but projecting the sound, “Kelly’s not there. Where is she now?”

  Amanda thought she saw something pass. “Gone out. Took the car, I think. I’m not sure.”

  He was getting up, reaching for the crutch. “Mandy, is there anybody you can ask? I’ll be damned,” he said, standing so close behind her that she could feel his voice vibrating in his chest, “if I’ll trust your safety to a piece of paper on a cop’s desk. Can’t have him call back here. God knows if we’ll get another chance. Messages don’t always get delivered. He might not take it seriously. Can’t let it go at that. Mandy, think of someone.”

  “There’s Gene,” she said. “He’s—the chemist.”

  “Would he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then for God’s sake, call him, now!” Thone hobbled a pace or two. “I’m going down there.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, I’ve got to see.”

  “I’ll come too.”

  “No, no, you mustn’t. You call. Get him. Get him! You know what to say. Make him swear to be there. He’ll do that for you, won’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Mandy.

  “Then I’ll go down. If she hasn’t gone out, I can give you time. Hold her up. Make up a reason why I’m down there. But Mandy, if I can I want to see that place. Those door hooks.”

  “Can you walk enough?”

  “Easily.” He swung away. Turned his head. “Be careful. Remember Dad.”

  “I’ll speak low,” she said.

  How did one telephone to Gene and explain that one expected to be murdered this evening and wouldn’t he please come and watch! To a point … to any point at all!

  Mandy called the Callahan number. She wouldn’t ask for Kate. She couldn’t risk her voice to Kate. Kate would catch it in one “hello,” her fear, her excitement. Gene was different. He knew a little more. He knew about the poison. She saw her strategy.