Talmage Powell

Scales and Blindfold

The tall, erect man moved very easily in the darkness. He hadn’t been in this room in three years, but he knew every inch of it. It was his room, the room his mother kept readied for him whenever he should return.

He paused a moment in the moonlight that filtered through the window. The pale light touched a broad, heavy, yet young face. An open face. His gray eyes were glowing; a smile played eagerly about his broad, warm mouth.

Up here the house was silent save for the whispering of the wind through the great oaks outside and the expectant thud of the man’s pulse in his ears. In the next room he knew his son was sleeping, and in the room beyond that his mother would be alone. Silent and dark up here in this great house, yet downstairs the laughter and bubbling noise of an informal party drifted to him faintly.

The tall man stood quite still in the patch of moonlight. His whole being exuded expectant pleasure, yet there was something lonely in the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the cast of his lips. He was thinking of a lovely, wealthy young Spanish-English girl. The girl he’d married and who had died over three years ago, taking part of him with her. He was thinking that he had been away from this huge, somehow grim house a long time. He’d missed his son. He’d seen too much tired death as a war correspondent. There is a limit to the amount of death a man can see and still not be lonely.

But he was hack now. Back like a little child with a surprise gift. The gift was himself, his presence, and it struck him that he should be embarrassed, pulling a childish trick like this. He’d crept into the house quietly. It had been very easy with the party downstairs and the silence up here. No one knew he was home; no one would know until tomorrow morning. They would sit down to breakfast, and he would walk down the sweeping stairway into the dining room. He’d pause in the doorway of the dining room, and it would be a silent moment. Then Haywood and Terry and Ida would get their dropped jaws back in place and spring from the table to envelope him with greetings. His son would fly into his arms and perhaps cry a little. His mother would touch his arm gently, unbelievingly. It would be a warm scene tomorrow morning in the dining room.

He stood in the darkness, that planned scene so vivid in his mind, widening his expectant smile. Then abruptly his eyes darkened and his smile left his face. All the expectancy he had built within himself during the long voyage home, was suddenly flat, sour. The surprise he’d planned was ruined. Or had he only imagined that someone was breathing here in the darkness of the room with him?

Perhaps it was the whisper of the wind outside. This was a house of almost silent whispers, he knew. A large, stone house, set apart from others on a broad estate, Terry Bliss’ sole inheritance from his father. Terry’s research lab adjoined the house, and Frederick had left his son and mother here because Terry, his wife Ida, and Terry’s brother Haywood were the only relatives Frederick had, his cousins.

Frederick Sole stood rigid, listening. Moonbeams danced at his feet. Faintly, he heard the gay sounds of the party downstairs, the breathing of the wind, a beam creaking distantly like the timber of a great, rugged ship. And there was something else…

He murmured, “Who’s there?”

The wind whispered a reply; the house was alive about him. Battlefield reporting had given him strange ears, tuned to death. Dryness spread in his mouth. The room was silent, starkly silent, and vet…

Then he seemed to imagine the ruffling whisper of rug nap beneath a shoe. He knew that strange quality of his ears wasn’t playing him tricks. He was quite alone — save for the presence of Death…

Elsie Sole’s knitting needles clicked with a steady rhythm. From downstairs, the gay, brittle laughter of suave people drinking and talking informally beat its way into the darkness of her everlasting night. She sat by her bed, rocking slowly, one part of her mind intent on the party downstairs, the warm, bright lights and gaiety. She was an old woman, a square peg in a round hole, a bothersome fool to Terry’s and Ida’s and Haywood’s modern, horribly efficient way of thinking. But she would stay here, she promised herself. She would stay because of Peter. A seven-year-old boy needed the warmth and understanding of his granny.

Her needles clicked again, swift, sure. She sat alone in the darkness and knitted without dropping a single stitch. After all, one learned to knit quite well after three years of utter blindness.

She had learned other things, too. The sometimes halting footsteps of Terry entering a room when his blonde, young wife. Ida, was present would tell Elsie Sole that all was not right between them. The sudden cutting tone in his voice was like a banner declaring his rebellion against her domination. But those occasions were rare. He was a meek, tubby little husband, a strange sort of person to do the things he had done in research chemistry. His one mental quirk was a rather amusing allergy to double-breasted suits. It was the one thing in which he would override Ida’s suggestions. He always insisted on single-breasted models in pin stripe material in hopes that he would appear slimmer. In her world of darkness, Elsie Sole had recognized in this Terry’s almost pathetic rebellion against his wife. Or perhaps it was simply a pathetic attempt to find an ego on Terry’s part and express it through what he hoped was an emphatic characteristic.

Haywood Bliss, Terry’s younger brother, would have been more of the man to subdue Ida, Elsie Sole thought. She remembered Haywood as a tall, powerful man with a steady gaze and firm, thin-lipped mouth. Now, since her blindness, she’d learned other things about Haywood, the latent strength when he touched an old woman to help her down the stairs, the barging, straight course with which he walked across a room.

And Ida. With her petulant way of running up stairs, the almost hidden explosiveness in every word she said. Last night young Pete had woke, afraid of the darkness in his large, almost barren, room. Elsie Sole had soothed him with gay bedtime stories. She’d broken off in the middle of a sentence as the door to Pete’s room had opened. She recognized the outraged tapping of a spike-heeled shoe. “Elsie!” Ida’s voice had been tight with impatience. “How many times must I tell you that you’re ruining the child? Utterly ruining him! Such nonsense — his being afraid of the dark!” That was Ida. So sure, so filled with answers. She didn’t know the dark, not real darkness, but Elsie Sole did. Elsie Sole knew how a child waking in darkness might feel. Yet it was Ida who had the answers.

Elsie Sole’s needles clicked, never dropping a stitch. Then with a suddenness that was jarring they stopped. She half rose, her knitting spilling to the floor, her hands, lean and old and strained, on the arms of her chair. “Frederick…!” Like that the thought of her son had come to her, like a dark cloud over the face of the sun, like a sudden roll of bursting thunder in a world of silence.

She stood, half risen, her body trembling, while dark, strange shadows played against the black curtain behind her eyes. It was unexplainable, this sudden plunging into a wild world of crazed thoughts and clammy feeling. Yet it wasn’t; for like footsteps and voices, she’d learned to tabulate everything in her world of darkness, every whisper of the house, every nuance of life about her. A quickly drawn breath, too sudden laughter, rain against the windowpanes in April bringing a travelogue of vivid green springtime to life in her mind. Now, distinctly, she had heard a groan that would have escaped other ears, a tremulous ghost of a sound finding its way down the hallway from Frederick’s room.

Then the house was the same again, with the rustle of the rising, (hill wind outside, the murmur of laughter from downstairs, the creak of a beam in the depths of the house somewhere.

She sat in her chair again. “I’m acting the old fool,” she told herself. She reached for her knitting; and, for the first time since those terrible days after the accident three years ago that had taken her sight, her hands fumbled, uncertain.

The clamminess gathered in the valleys of her face and would not leave; the house whispered to her darkly. She rose and went into the hallway. She turned toward Frederick’s room. She moved without the aid of a cane. Every room in this house, even to Terry’s laboratory downstairs, was indelibly mapped in her mind. It had been something to occupy her time.

She moved with the silence of one accustomed to searching out for guidance the tiny, ethereal sounds that are a part of silence. Eight paces. The low table with the dragon’s heads carved on it would be here. She stepped aside to skirt the dragon head table, edged toward the wall once more. Then she was standing quite still.

She was achingly attuned to the house, to the night outside. She sensed the presence near her, perhaps the rustle of cloth or the quick stopping of shallow breathing. She froze against the wall, pulses thudding. She whispered, “Pete? What are you doing out of bed, Pete?”

There was nothing, no sound, no awareness except deep inside her, a thousand wings pounding up to her throat. “Terry? Haywood? Ida?” Distantly she heard her voice rising. No one answered; nothing moved save the rustic of the earth beneath the wind and the mocking gaiety of the laughter in brightness downstairs. “Who’s there?”

In her own private world she was swathed in total darkness. Yet she knew dial someone was here in the hallway with her. Someone who would not answer to her question; someone who had stopped breathing until she should pass. And moments before she had heard her son groan…

She moved a still step; then she whirled, almost dropping to her knees, her hand upflung, as she heard the crack of a knee joint in that other world beyond her own.

She waited without knowing what she was waiting for. Then she knew that she was alone. There’d been only the cracking of a knee joint as someone had turned in slow, awkward, silent motion, then long seconds later the crack of a stair down the hall.

She straightened, trembling. She stumbled down the hallway, found the door to Frederick’s room.

The door whispered a creak as she opened and closed it. She stood inside the doorway, her hands clutched before her. If her son had returned, he might have slipped in. she knew. He’d done (hat sort of thing before, lie took a robust pleasure in sending warm little gifts home as total surprises. It was rather late, and if he had returned, he might have planned to surprise them at the breakfast table tomorrow.

“Frederick?”

She moved through the morass of silence. She felt his bed, the rovers untouched. She moved along the bed and her mind was forming new words: “Perhaps it was all in your nerves. Are you growing old and imagining things? It seems…”

She tripped, went to her knees. She shouldn’t have tripped. She should have been passing in front of the chair near the bookcase. There should have been nothing there to trip her…

Enhanced, the clamminess poured back over her like frigid, thick molasses. She touched the shoe that had tripped her, the worsted material of a trousers’ cuff.

He was sprawled in the chair, unmoving. Her exploring fingers increased their tempo, felt for a heartbeat. found none. Found only a wetness that left her fingertips sticky, the heavy, solid shaft of a knife…

She shuddered, closing her eyes tightly as if the darkness cloaking her wasn’t enough. She fell his hand, the signet ring she knew so well. His hand was clenched, and she uncurled the cooling fingers slowly. A button dropped in her palm. A button from a coat.

She sank very quietly in a shrunken, sitting heap on the carpet. She endured a convulsion of silent, dry, hard sobbing deep down inside: her lips whispered, “Frederick… My son…”

Then she rose unsteadily and left the room. She’d never moved about the house without caution before, but in the hallway she moved quickly. In her palm she felt the pressure of the button she’d taken from his hand. It was important, that button, for hint to have torn it loose and clutched it in death. She wondered what sort of grim, short struggle had taken place in the darkness of her son’s room. From downstairs, the brittle laughter of the party beat at her.

The scroll-legged table with the vase was at the end of the hall, below the window. She dropped the coat button into the vase, turned, started toward the stairway, measuring and counting each pace.

She knew when she reached the mouth of the stairway. Without pause she turned, and driving pains clashed across her shins. She tattered swayed, and then she and the ridiculous, low, dragon head table that had been in its customary place down the hallway only moments ago were tangled together, twisting and failing.

In her black maw of night, she knew that whoever had passed her in the hall as she’d gone to Frederick’s room had moved that table, knowing she would start down the stairs and that she never used a cane. It would be so very simple to murder her; move a single piece of furniture from its customary place and she was agonizingly helpless. Then the flashing thought broke off as she clutched at the rail, missed. Somewhere below her she heard the dragon head table in a crashing fall. Then she was plunging down, her world topsy-turvy, pain stinging her shoulder, her head, firing the dark mantel over her sight with flaming stars. Then the stars all fell and went out.

Ida’s voice bit into her consciousness: “Well, can’t you do something for her, Terry?”

And Terry’s voice, quivering with low patience, “Darling, you’ll have to give her a moment.” Elsie Sole felt a hand under her head, cool liquid on her lips. She stirred.

“Well!” Ida’s voice brought a picture of Ida with arms akimbo. “What in the world were you doing. Elsie, trying to carry that table down the stairs?”

She passed her hand over her wrinkled brow, trying to remember. Pictures grew in the black walls of her eyes as consciousness returned. “I wasn’t trying to carry the table down,” she whisperer. “It was placed at the head of the stairs to trip me.”

“Really!” Ida said.

“For God’s sake, shut up!” Terry snapped. “I told you that she’d broken no bones, only stunned herself, when we brought her in here. Hut can’t you have a little mercy on Elsie?”

The click of teeth: Ida was throbbing, eyes blazing. Hut she said nothing else to her weary, tubby husband.

“Peter?” Elsie said. “Where is Peter?”

Haywood helped her to a sitting position. “Asleep,” he said. “Your fall woke him, but I sent him back to bed. Elsie, as the boy’s guardian. I feel that you… well, the way you handle him occasionally has made the boy a very nervous…”

Only then was she aware of the dead silence in the house. “The people,” she said, “the party?”

“They’re gone.” Ida said. “You broke the party up.” A tiny hiccough — perhaps Ida had had a long talk in a corner tonight during the party with young Mr. Carruthers from the estate down the road.

“And you,” Elsie Sole swept blank eyes from one to the other of them, “where have you been all evening?”

“Elsie,” Terry said gently.

She flung his hand away. “No! I’m not unbalanced! I know what I’m talking about!”

“Perhaps it was the accident she was in while riding with you three years ago, Terry,” Ida said nastily.

A chill grew in the room. The accident three years ago. The accident that had taken Elsie Sole’s eyes. “The accident isn’t important,” she breathed. “Not now. When something of real importance happens, the things that seemed to be so important are not very important any longer. You,” she said again, “the three of you. Which of you was out of the room this evening, away from the party?”

“We were all in and out,” Haywood said.

Terry’s voice came quietly. “What are you trying to say, Elsie?”

“I am trying to say,” she worried her hands together, “that Frederick is upstairs in his room — murdered.”

“Elsie,” Terry said again in that gentle, coaxing tone.

“A good night’s sleep…” Haywood began.

Ida hiccoughed gently. “Let’s go up. Let’s see what she’s talking about!”

The house whispered a grim promise of things to come as they went upstairs, down the hall to Frederick’s room.

Strangely reluctant, they paused, shrinking away, until Elsie Sole opened the door of the room. She fumbled, found the light switch beside the door, clicked it on.

Time swirled through the blackness of her night. After awhile she let out her breath. “You see…”

Terry took her hands in his, and Haywood’s arm slipped about her shoulder.

“We see,” Terry said gently, “an empty room. Only an empty room. Nothing has been bothered, nothing touched.”

“But the chair before the bookcase…”

She felt Terry and Haywood turn. “The chair is empty,” Haywood said. “Perhaps you were asleep, Elsie, thinking of him. A dream sometimes can seem very real…”

A dream? That dragon head table a dream? The touch of her son’s cooling flesh a dream? And the coat button in his hand?

Her voice was edged with hysteria. “But some sign… Blood on the chair… A wrinkle in the carpet…”

They moved deeper in the room, she between Terry and Haywood. The house flung their rasping breathing back at them, the four walls of this room mocking her.

“There’s nothing,” Terry said. “Please, Elsie…”

“But the…” She snapped the words off. Not the button. She wouldn’t mention the button. The button would prove this hadn’t been a dream. But one of the persons in this room would be very glad to get his hands on that button…

“I… I… Feel… I’d better go back to my room, I guess.”

At the door of her room, Terry and Haywood volunteered to sit with her for awhile. “No, I’ll be all right,” she said. “Good night.”

She eased inside her room, heard them move away. The house whispered grim threats. Young Peter next, maybe. Or Elsie Sole, herself. The wan, lonely noises of night insinuated themselves into her mind. She knew only one thing — it hadn’t been a dream.

But who would believe that? Not the police, for the police need evidence. They’d pat her on the shoulder, advise a sedative, and under cover of the darkness of her world, they’d tap their temples suggestively. An old blind woman going insane… Visioning murder.

Frederick would have walked up the road from the small train station in the village. The village boasted only one taxi, which went out of operation very early in the evening. Frederick would have left his bags checked, intending to take Haywood’s or Terry’s car and drive down for them tomorrow. Say that he had come in on the nine o’clock train. He’d walked up the two mile stretch of road from the village. No one had seen him; he’d entered the house like a shadow and like a shadow had dissolved. Rut hers was a world of shadows; so she could believe. She knew it was no dream. She knew it — and one other person knew it…

She made her way carefully to the door of her small bath. She opened her medicine cabinet and her fingers searched the left side of the second narrow shelf for a squat, square bottle. It contained capsules of headache medicine sans acetanilid because she was the age that acetanilid did not react favorably on the heart. After her fall over the dragon head table she needed a couple of those capsules. Her fingers passed a slim round bottle, a bottle with bumps raised over the glass, found the squat, square bottle. She opened it, removed two capsules.

She placed the capsules upright between her thumb and forefinger in order to lay them on her tongue. Then delilberately, stilling the sudden crawling of her flesh, she went back to her bedroom. She laid the capsules side by side on the dresser and pushed the ends of them against the base of the mirror. Then with her finger she touched the other ends of the two capsules.

Her first impression had been right. One of those capsules was a trifle longer than the other, as if something had been added to its contents in a minute quantity. But a minute quantity of many poisons was enough to drain the life from a human being…

The nights whispered to her, her own and that night outside. She was alone, an old blind woman. What, she asked herself, could an old blind woman do against a man with the strength to kill in his arm and the craftiness of murder in his heart? The nights were hushed, listening for her answer. Muddled in her chair, she knew she had none.

She waited, listening. Two hours must have past. She heard the familiar noises of the house in slumber. It was an old house, this place that Terry’s father had willed to him. When its occupants slept, the aged joints of the house itself relaxed with an occasional creaking pop. Terry waged a periodic war against mice with stuff from his lab; hut he’d never been quite successful, and every night the mice made faint scurryings in the depths of the walls. They were there tonight. They were her barometer of safety; when the mice were silent a human being was stirring.

She rose from her chair, opened her door. The hallway, too, was sleeping. A faint breeze, chill and heady with the promise of dew, trailed its fingers across her face; tiny drops of perspiration drank in the chill in the breeze and stabbed cold needles in her flesh.

She moved down the hallway an inch at a time, thinking of deliberately misplaced furniture. She turned the knob of Haywood’s door until the latch clicked. She eased inside the room, stood a moment. Bedsprings threatened to shrill as he shifted his weight. Then he was breathing again deeply and regularly.

The door of his closet was open. Very quickly now she worked, her hands sweeping over the front of his coats. She was positive that button had come from a man’s coat. Exactly the size and weight, too plain to have come from any of Ida’s things.

She felt no missing buttons. She counted the suits quickly, racking her memory for the number that Haywood had. They were all here.

Then she was hack out in the hall, wiling dry of energy. But there was still Terry’s room. She started down the long hallway.

Now she listened more intently. The buzzings in her head were her nerves singing. There had been no buttons missing from the front of Haywood’s coat…

She opened Terry’s door, heard his gargling snore. It took her fifteen minutes to cross the room to the closet door. Her trembling hands touched his clothes, searched. No buttons missing from the first suit, nor the second, nor any of them.

She stood a moment, not understanding. She was positive that had been a button from a man’s coat.

The party… Someone at the party! It would have been a simple matter for anyone to have seen Frederick crossing the lawn. There were few neighbors near this house, and those knew Frederick and his habits well. One of them had seen him, had gone to his room. Waited for Frederick…

But — the lah! An old coat of Terry’s was down there and one that Haywood used for gardening now and then was in a little junk room off the lab.

She’d been in the lab many times before. She knew the exact spot of the steam table, the test tube racks, the shelves that held flasks and beakers. Before the accident three years ago she’d done unimportant little tasks for Terry in the lab now and then.

She moved forward from the doorway, past a table holding delicate analytical balances. Then she stood rooted to the floor. She’d left the lab door open. She was a dozen feet away from it. Not a breath of air stirred in the lab to close the door — yet the latch had clicked.

In that frozen moment she knew. She saw her mistake, the one tiling she had overlooked; such a simple, obvious thing to cost her life. She knew who was in the lab with her. He hadn’t been asleep when she’d entered his room upstairs. He’d known every move she had made. He, too, had been wailing for the house to sink in slumber.

Her fingers groped, touched on a bottle, went on to another. It was a pathetic weapon, a hopeless weapon. He’d followed her down here, wanting her here in the depths of the house where the others upstairs and the two household servants wouldn’t hear her screams. It was so simple for him now. With a scratch of a match he could dispel the darkness in that other world, while she could never dispel that in her own. A scratch of a match and she would be cornered, at his mercy.

She knew all of it now. He’d seen Frederick returning, rutting across the lawn possibly. He had gone to Frederick’s room and killed her son. That had been simple, too, for Frederick trusted him. All he had to do was move close to Frederick and plunge the knife. He had heard her coming to Frederick’s room, known what she would find. He had been afraid to be absent from the party too long and had gone back, placing the dragon head table to trip her. He’d known that in tripping her he would cause enough excitement to allow him to slip hack to Frederick’s room and hide her son temporarily. Later tonight he’d planned to hide Frederick permanently. Earlier in the evening, with murder already shaped in his mind, he’d gotten poison from the lab, tinkered with the capsules.

Now he was here because she had overlooked a perfectly obvious fact. He would strike a match — there was a dim chance that the lights might be seen if anyone else should happen to wake — and seconds later it would be all over for her.

Her hands clutched the pathetic bottle to her. She said, “Haywood?”

He didn’t speak.

“It goes back to the accident three years ago, doesn’t it?” she said. “The accident that took my sight. Only it wasn’t an accident. It was you who fixed Terry’s car to crash with us. I was Peter’s guardian while Frederick was absent hack then, and you wanted the job. The young Spanish-English girl who was Peter’s mother was wealthy, Haywood. and you knew that Frederick had never had need of that money, hut had left it for Peter. As his guardian, while Frederick was away, you’d have access to that money. It was too strong a temptation for you to turn down. So you fixed my accident. I didn’t die, but the accident served your purpose, for I was blind, and Frederick turned to you to watch after his son.

“It wasn’t blind luck that led you to know Frederick had returned tonight. He’s probably hinted it in the many letters he’s written about Pete. You took my eyes, and my son…” The old, blind woman strangled on the words and Haywood said heavily, “Yes. I’m sorry. But that doesn’t make any difference, does it? I wanted a fortune and I planned to get it through Pete. I knew no one had seen Frederick return here tonight. If only he could die and disappear, there’d never be any danger about the money of Pete’s that I’ve squandered. Yes,” he sighed, “and that I wanted to squander. With Frederick dead, Pete would be in my keeping until he was of age. It’s as simple as that, Elsie, and I’m sorry that I must hurt you more. But how did you know?”

“The button,” the old blind woman said, “I knew it was a coat button. a man’s button, yet no buttons were missing from the front of the coats of the only two possible men who could have killed Frederick, who had motive. That meant the button had come from the inside of a coat. And Terry’s one colorful characteristic is the fact that he wears only single-breasted suits. That meant that you, Haywood, had had your double-breasted coat unbuttoned at the moment you stabbed Frederick. Blindly, he had struck out, grabbed the inside button and in the shock of physical contact you hadn’t noticed…”

“I’m sorry, Elsie,” he said again, and his voice, tight, brittle, told her far more than that. She’d tabulated every nuance of their voices; she knew he was moving.

She heard the scratch of a match; he knew her approximate location from the words she’d spoken in the dark; the flare of the match would reveal her exact position.

Every remaining sense of her that she had so carefully developed in the past three years splashed vivid messages over her brain. The scratch of the match, the scuff of his foot, his hard breath. With a sweeping motion she swung the bottle, heard liquid gurgle; then she heard the bottle striking bone and knew her senses hadn’t lied when they’d told her his position.

He shouted hoarsely, and she moved along the table. Then the explosion of a gun rocked the lab. A gun. She hadn’t expected a gun. Strangulation, or a knife, but not a gun. She stumbled, fell, and far off in the distance, she heard him yelling, the crash of gunfire. He hadn’t hit her yet, but her senses swirled away, came bark. Then she fainted.

She liked the sound of this man’s voice, the strong timber of it. He was sitting beside her bed; he was a detective. He had told her that the sounds of gunfire had attracted Terry to the lab. and Terry had overpowered Haywood before Haywood had finished the task he’d set himself in cornering Elsie Sole in the lab.

“He wasted a lot of lead,” the detective said, “but he didn’t hit you. You’ll be here with young Peter a long time, Elsie Sole. You and Terry. It seems that Ida is using this — the scandal of Terry’s brother — to leave Terry. He’s broken up about Haywood, but in his way he’s courageous. He’s a very likable little man, engrossed in his work. Not at all like his brother. You and Pete will have to help him, and he’ll help you.”

“No,” she said, “not at all like his brother. Haywood, he…”

“Thanks to what you did to him. he’ll crack. He’ll talk plenty.”

“Thanks to what?”

“Naturally, you didn’t know that the letters on the bottle you picked up in the lab were H_2SO_4. And even if your fingertips told you that, you didn’t know what the letters meant. You didn’t know that you were splashing sulphuric acid in his eyes…”

Content

Talmage Powell
Scales and Blindfold