Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

She loved that brook. He heard the brook again.

She was probably lying on her bed with her eyes open, or sitting on a chair or walking up and down her room, thinking of her dead sister.

He went on through the woods and crossed the lawn to the house, and found that she was doing none of those things. She was sitting on the side terrace, in a chair not ten feet away from the diagram marking the location where her sister’s body had lain. The white chalk-lines were plainly visible in the starlight.

Ross swerved from the path to the door and went over to her. She turned her head to him as he approached, turned it away again, and said nothing.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

She made no answer.

He moved a chair so that it was at right angles to hers, and sat on it. In the dim light of the stars her face, in profile, could have been any face to most eyes, but he was seeing it.

“Are any of those fellows around?” he asked.

“I think not.” She stirred and was quiet again. “Not in the house. Their cars are all gone.”

“I suppose they’re all out looking for him. I don’t know how to feel about that, because I don’t know how you feel. I want to feel the way you do about it. Of course, if he did that — to your sister—”

“He didn’t.”

Ross stared in astonishment. “But he must have!” he exclaimed. He added, at once, hastily, “I’m sorry. Only I didn’t think there was any doubt about it. There was no one else — who else was here?”

“You were here. And your father and Mrs. Powell.”

He continued to stare. “For God’s sake. That’s the first stupid thing I ever heard you say. Me? My father?”

“I’m often stupid.” She moved in her chair. “You asked who else was here and I told you. You were upstairs when Mrs. Powell went shopping to the village, and she was gone over an hour. Anyone could have walked in from the road.”

“But good heavens...” Ross sounded dazed.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Heather said. “I can’t think about it. My head just whirls around.”

“I’m sorry I said you were stupid. I have a bad habit—”

“That’s all right. I am stupid. As you remarked once before.”

“I didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. But you did.”

“I did not. That isn’t fair. It was a general observation regarding laymen who discuss scientific technique.”

“It doesn’t matter. I forgot it long ago.”

Ross opened his mouth, and abruptly closed it again. That inconsequential action, the opening and closing of his mouth, marked the end of an era for him and the beginning of a new one. It was a crucial victory of matter over mind, the matter consisting of a particle of flesh and bone weighing a hundred and nineteen pounds and distinguished from other particles not by its chemical formula but by the wholly unscientific appellation “Heather Gladd.” The young male mind sells logic dearly, and he had sold. The point his mouth had opened to make was unimpeachable: she mentioned something he had once said, distorting it, and then immediately declared that she had forgotten it long ago. But his mouth had closed again.

Not that he was sitting there analyzing it and saying farewell to an epoch; he was not thinking in terms of epochs.

“I always do get off on the wrong foot with you,” he began after a silence. “I did the very first day — not the first day I saw you — but you know — that day. When I asked you to go to the movies.”

“You commanded me to go to the movies.”

“Good lord! Command! Me command you! I know exactly what I said, the exact words. I said, ‘Get the car out while I change my clothes and we’ll go to the movies.’ Isn’t that right?”

“Something like that. It doesn’t matter. That’s approximately it.”

“And you said you didn’t care to go, and I went with Brager and Mrs. Powell, and three minutes after we left you took the station wagon and went by yourself, merely because you resented the way—”

“I didn’t resent it. I merely preferred to go alone.”

“Well, you didn’t like it. Did you?”

“Certainly not.” Heather was looking at him. “But I’m not as touchy as all that. It was just that it was obvious that being Mr. Dundee, Junior, you regarded me as being at your disposal as the fancy struck you, and it didn’t strike me that way.”

“What! You don’t mean that!”

“Of course I do. It was obvious. For heaven’s sake don’t think I’m complaining, it hasn’t bothered me any, and I’m quite aware that a conceited kid like you often doesn’t know what he’s doing anyway.”

“Conceited! My God!”

“You don’t even know you’re conceited? You’re the type. Perfect. The boss’s son. All the best firms have them. Sometimes I’ve thought there must be a book of rules for it and you were following them.”

“Of all the—” Ross was stunned.

The crickets and katydids were tapering off.

“Listen,” Ross said earnestly. “This is ridiculous. You must be kidding me. I may be a little conceited about my work — but no, I’m not even conceited about that, I just know I’m pretty good at it. If you think I’m conceited about girls — why listen, I’ve hardly ever looked at a girl. The fellows at school used to ride me because they thought I was girl-shy, but I wasn’t. Once about four years ago I gave a lot of consideration to it, why girls didn’t seem to impress me any one way or the other, and I decided that it was only because I was more interested in other things. Oh, I danced once in a while, and so on, but you know, all that kissing around and stuff, I tried it a few times, but I never really got into it. I decided I probably had a mother-fixation, but a fellow, the only one I ever discussed it with, said he didn’t think so because if I had I would be more emotional about it. He used some other word, but he meant emotional. Anyway, I never had the feeling that I had to kiss a girl, the way some fellows seem to feel that they’ve got to kiss a girl or bust — I never felt like that until that day in the office I leaned over and kissed you on the cheek. Then I knew it wasn’t—”

He stopped abruptly.

“Good lord,” he said in a tone of stupefaction, “you thought I was being conceited!”

Heather didn’t say anything.

“I certainly can stick my thumb in my eye,” Ross declared. “The way you acted that day I kissed you, at first, I admit it made me sore, because a kiss on the cheek is not anything involving moral turpitude, but if you thought I did it because I was conceited and expected you to like it — it wasn’t that at all, I did it because it came on me and I couldn’t help it. Anyway, I never did it again, and I could never get started talking to you. You wouldn’t let me. You never gave me a chance. So I got what I thought was a pretty clever idea. But I see now, you probably thought I was only being conceited, it was just a conceited idea.”

He stopped.

Heather asked, “What idea?”

“Those records.”

“What records?”

“Don’t do that,” he implored. “Please don’t. I don’t blame you, I have no right to ask you, I know I haven’t, but that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Otherwise I wouldn’t—”

“Oh! That’s what you’ve been talking about.”

“I didn’t say I have been, I said I wanted to. Another one got in by mistake, a record I’ve simply got to have.”

“Have you looked in the filing cases?”

“It’s not there. It’s unmarked. It would be with the ones you’ve got. If you played it—”

“You seem,” Heather interrupted, “to be under the delusion that I have a precious hidden treasure of unmarked sonograph plates. I don’t know how—”