Bring the Bride a Shroud Page 2

  She leaned back against the cushion suddenly with an air of exhaustion. “Do you think I carried it off well? I chatted with the soldiers, you know. I tried to see if anyone watched me. I … Tick always said I had nerve enough for anything.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather regarded her with real admiration. “I wouldn’t have dreamed there was anything wrong until I saw how pale you’d grown. Please—shouldn’t you ask the driver for some sort of emergency treatment? He must have a kit. I’ll go up—”

  “No.” Her lips, and the mustache above them, drew into a firm line. “I must see Tick. Then I’ll know what to do.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather felt inadequate, almost young, in the face of such cool determination. He thought hard while he went through the routine of stowing his hat in the rack, of adjusting the seat at the proper angle back of him. The girl in the bandages had taken a compact from a pocket and was doing her lips from a tiny cake of red paint. She worked in a manner that reminded Mr. Pennyfeather of an expert and energetic mechanic. She shot a single look at him; there was appraisal in that look, even a touch of familiarity. He wondered again why there was that teasing sense of having met somewhere before.

  The nurse seemed genuinely asleep. At least, her mouth had sagged open to show some remarkable teeth. Mr. Pennyfeather wondered absently if she had ever bitten her recalcitrant patients. She had such perfect equipment for doing it.

  He glanced again at Mrs. Andler. She seemed composed, still a trifle pale, and the lips under the trace of mustache had a thoughtful twist to them.

  He leaned back gingerly. He wondered what Tick Burrell might be doing now. Getting ready to meet the bus, perhaps. Mr. Pennyfeather had gathered that Camp Frey was a little distance from the town.

  Superstition. He tried to surmise what the place was like.

  The sudden thought came into his mind that since Tick’s aunt Martha was on this bus and had shown some interest in the pair ahead of them, Tick’s trouble might involve a woman.

  Mr. Pennyfeather groaned.

  As far as women were concerned, Tick was a sheep in Don Juan’s clothing. He even carried his own shears. His naïve leer was an open invitation for clipping. He invariably ended up writing checks under the hawk noses of mamas exactly like the one in front of Mr. Pennyfeather.

  Now that I know what it’s all about, Mr. Pennyfeather thought, I may as well relax. He took a deep breath and tried the trick of beginning with his toes and working up, letting everything go slack as he went. It didn’t work, largely because of his annoyance over Mrs. Andler.

  Mr. Pennyfeather was sure at last that no one could have run out of the passageway to the women’s room without his noticing. Mrs. Andler might be Tick’s aunt and a remarkable woman. She was also a liar.

  The bus depot had the dusty and forgotten odor of all depots late at night. Mr. Pennyfeather stood between his two suitcases and tried to make out any sign of Tick. He saw soldiers passing in the street outside, their khaki uniforms lighted briefly by the unshaded globes near the windows. None of them so much as looked in at him.

  The bus had gone. Now there were, in addition to Mr. Pennyfeather, just the girl with the bandages and the nurse. The girl was on a bench, smoking a cigarette in an energetic and nervous manner. The nurse was in a phone booth. She had been there some time.

  Hawk Nose and Taffy—Mr. Pennyfeather had chosen these names for the two women ahead—had made a direct line for the hotel across the street. Mrs. Andler had followed them.

  “If you see Tick tonight, tell him I’m here,” she had said to Mr. Pennyfeather. “You might just mention what happened at that café in Little Creek.”

  He had decided to annoy her. “Just what did happen, Mrs. Andler?”

  She had frowned. “Why, you know. That attempt to—well, to murder me. You saw what I showed you, the gash in my wrist. Someone rushed in at me in the darkness. I’ve a good idea who.” She had glared at the vanishing back of Taffy.

  “Clumsy, wasn’t she?” Mr. Pennyfeather had assumed a drawl. “D’you suppose, by the way, she carries a straightedge razor?”

  “I don’t know what she carries,” Mrs. Andler had snapped. “I know she’s a dangerous character. And you tell Tick.” Her finger pinned Mr. Pennyfeather’s front lapels together. “Don’t forget. I’ll see that young man myself in the morning. Good night.”

  She had gone off, then, to the one hotel that Superstition boasted, a sway-backed affair which looked as though it had been added to, room by room, as customers had appeared. A sign said, Rooms. There was a cactus garden in a vacant lot at one side, lighted weirdly from the windows of the hotel into a maze of crouching shapes. Mr. Pennyfeather had gone into the depot.

  He sat down at last, wondering if Tick mightn’t have forgotten. The girl at the other end of the bench held out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Thanks,” he said, surprised. He took one, and she let him light a match for the two of them.

  “Did you miss your party?” she asked.

  “Perhaps I have. And you?”

  “The nurse is calling for me.” She smoked in silence for a little while, her head held stiffly erect by the steel frame.

  “You’re very brave,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, “to be traveling at all.”

  She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “I’d hoped you’d say that. I mean,” she corrected, at his look of surprise, “I’d hoped someone would say it. I’m a perfect baby for wanting sympathy.”

  She was, to Mr. Pennyfeather’s notion, not at all the type to seek sympathy. She looked too energetic, too sanely cool-headed, to be needing the pity of a stranger. “I think you mean,” he decided at last, “that you wish to arouse the sympathy of some particular person. The person your nurse is telephoning about, perhaps.”

  She smiled. She would have laughed, he thought, but for the restriction of the frame and bandages. “I should hate to be your witness,” she said.

  “Oh, but I’m not a lawyer.”

  “No.” She blew out some smoke meditatively. “I know.”

  The nurse came out of the telephone booth at that moment, to Mr. Pennyfeather’s annoyance. He wished very much to find out how the girl had known he wasn’t a lawyer. Everyone he had contacted on this remarkable trip seemed to know so much more than he did.

  “Could I assist you in any way, Miss—ah—?”

  She granted him this much. “Hazzard. Glee Hazzard.”

  He sat looking at her, dumbly, while the nurse came over to say that she hadn’t had any luck with the telephone.

  “Thank you,” said Glee Hazzard to Mr. Pennyfeather. “If you will, you can help us cross that gopher alley they call a street. With these crutches, I’ll very likely break a leg in the first chuckhole.” She turned to the nurse. “We won’t try any more phoning. Let’s go to bed.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather took Miss Hazzard’s right elbow, and they went out into the night. The street was quieting. The last bus for Camp Frey was pulling out at the next corner. A wind off the desert brought with it a smell of sage. There was the feeling of the dark sky being very big and of the town being very small.

  Miss Hazzard shuddered all at once. “Someone’s walking on my grave,” she said. She touched his fingers lightly with her own. “Do you believe such old superstitions? No, of course you wouldn’t.”

  “In this unfamiliar world,” he said, keeping to her mood of carelessness, “I might even start beating a tom-tom.”

  This seemed to amuse her. He could see her profile, sharp against the dark, illumined by the light from the open door of the hotel. She was still quite as pretty as the picture Tick Burrell had shown him two years ago. Only the bandages and the steel frame had kept him from recognizing the girl that Tick and Martha Andler had almost come to blows about.

  The nurse opened the screen. She gave Mr. Pennyfeather a look which implied that he was an elderly bachelor and making a fool of himself. “You’re very kind. Now I’ll get Miss Hazzard settled for the night.”

  Glee Hazzard
gave him a businesslike handshake with her good hand. “Good night, Professor.”

  “I suppose,” Mr. Pennyfeather said crossly to himself, “that Tick showed her my picture.” He picked his way through the dust and minor foxholes of Superstition’s main street. “He loves his friends. And he drags them right into whatever mess he’s currently involved in.”

  He opened the door of the depot, and Tick Burrell was grinning at him from a bench, the very bench where he had sat with Glee Hazzard. Tick never changed. He always looked like a young devil just let out by Satan to try a bit of mischief. He had black unruly hair, gray eyes, an air of innocence like a woolly lamb’s. A woolly lamb who has just eaten up your best petunias, Mr. Pennyfeather amended. He shook Tick’s hand. Tick seemed very tall in the uniform, much tanner and leaner. But still devilish.

  “I had hoped,” said Mr. Pennyfeather sternly, “that you would be able to manage your affairs with sufficient circumspection to avoid having to call on me for help. I am a busy man.”

  “But this,” said Tick, “is vacation.”

  “The affair of the Dean of Women’s underthings being flown from the flagpole didn’t come during vacation.”

  “But I was a student then. I was part of your job.”

  “My job is Milton and Chaucer and similar people,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Not to mention Shakespeare, who is almost exclusively the property of Professor Clampett. Now, Tick. What is it this time?”

  “I thought we might have a bite to eat,” Tick hedged. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Not so much for food as for enlightenment.” But he let Tick lead him down the street to a hole in the wall which sold hamburgers and coffee.

  Tick ordered for them. Mr. Pennyfeather noticed that his eye strayed frequently and with a hint of nervousness toward the pane that showed the street.

  “If you’re wondering about your aunt Martha, she came in on the bus. With me She’s at the hotel. She wants you in the morning.”

  The waiter put down two cups of coffee, and Tick stirred his furiously. “She does, does she? Just like that. I’m a poodle. She whistles and I come running. Damn everything.”

  “Why should she ride a bus? Isn’t she wealthy?” Mr. Pennyfeather wondered.

  “Not awfully. She gets an income from Dad’s estate so long as she carries out this farce of being a guardian. Anyway, she’d come by bus. It’s cheaper.” He tasted the coffee and made a face over it. “She’s ruined everything, barging in. I meant to wire her afterward. Then I’d have said, To hell with your permission. You can’t pitch me out just because I’m married.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. He thought of Glee Hazzard.

  “I’m sick of being wet-nursed through life,” Tick went on. “Asking permission to do everything from wiping my nose on out. Do you know I could have made it home my last furlough by flying, and Aunt Martha refused her permission? Too dangerous. I wonder what she thinks I’ll be doing one of these days with the Japs. Playing ping-pong?” He bent moodily over a hamburger.

  “You said something about getting married,” Mr. Pennyfeather reminded.

  Tick brightened somewhat. He took out his wallet and extracted a picture. “This doesn’t begin to do her justice. The light was poor that day. Cloudy. We swam home through a cloudburst afterward.”

  The snapshot showed some trees and the long reaches of a meadow. In the foreground, with a picnic basket, was a girl. Her wide eyes, the perfect chin, gave an effect of doll-like composure and beauty. She had a great cloud of fair hair. There was no faintest resemblance to Miss Hazzard.

  “Taffy!” breathed Mr. Pennyfeather.

  Remembering Hawk Nose, he wanted to shudder.

  Chapter Three

  “Oh damn,” said Tick. “Here, give me back that thing.” He took the picture of Taffy out of Mr. Pennyfeather’s fingers and put another snapshot in its place. Mr. Pennyfeather found himself looking at a calm young woman in the uniform of the WAC. She was standing on a sand dune, and the desert loomed behind her. She wasn’t startlingly pretty. She had an unassuming friendliness, a look of ease and of spruce wholesomeness.

  “I’m always doing that,” Tick was muttering in his ear. “Showing the wrong picture. Why don’t I tear this up right now?” He put the picture between thumb and forefinger threateningly.

  “No, no. Not yet,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Wait until I get a few things straight. Is this young woman in the uniform to be your wife?”

  “That’s right.” Tick took on the familiar brightness that Mr. Pennyfeather recalled, with exasperation, from other entanglements.

  “And who,” Mr. Pennyfeather asked, “is the other?”

  “You mean Taffy?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather choked. “What did you say?”

  “Taffy. That isn’t her name, it’s the color of her hair. Everyone called her that. Taffy Whittemore.”

  “She came in on the bus tonight,” Mr. Pennyfeather told him, “with her mother.”

  Tick just grinned. “You must be mistaken. Taffy didn’t have a mother. She was an orphan from ’way back.”

  “This young woman,” said Mr. Pennyfeather, tapping the picture in Tick’s hand, “came in on the bus with the most buzzard-eyed female I’ve ever met. They were together. The older one had an air of wanting to pick somebody’s bones. I presumed, in spite of the fact that Camp Frey holds some thousands of soldiers, the bones were yours.”

  Tick sucked at his lower lip. He had begun to be a little worried. “Good night! She mustn’t meet up with Caroline!”

  Mr. Pennyfeather regarded the young lady on the dune. “Caroline, then, must be your current fiancée. And ignorant of your reputation.”

  “If she knew,” Tick answered, “of one half of my misdeeds, she’d throw me over. She’s wonderfully honest.”

  “Perhaps a trifle narrow-minded?”

  Tick flared at him. “Not at all. Oh, I don’t mean to snap. Dammit, Aunt Martha and now Taffy! And God knows who as a chaperone.” He went back to stirring the coffee into a mud-colored whirlpool. “If I could get a seventy-two, I’d take off with Caroline and we could get married in San Diego.”

  “Providing Caroline rated a seventy-two, too.”

  Tick gazed at him absently. Mr. Pennyfeather gave him back his snapshot of Caroline and the cactus.

  “Another thing, Tick, which I may as well mention in passing. Glee Hazzard came in on that bus also.”

  Tick chewed his lip some more. “No, you’ve forgotten someone.”

  “A nurse.”

  “Nuh, uh. The Devil. If Old Nick wasn’t riding that bus, I’ll eat the tires off it. Without salt.”

  “It does seem as if all your troubles arrived in one bundle,” Mr. Pennyfeather told him. “Still, you know where you stand. You have your current fiancée—”

  “Don’t call her that!” Tick begged.

  “Your present fiancée and her two predecessors, all in a lump. With assorted attendants and guardians. Plus your own guardian. If you stir them as completely as you’ve stirred that coffee, you’ll come out with something.”

  “A madhouse.”

  “You might let them fight it out among them,” Mr. Pennyfeather meditated. “Winner take all. No, I forgot.” He was about to mention Miss Hazzard’s condition when Tick broke in.

  “If that should happen, Glee could handle twice her weight in wildcats.” He shook his head and began to fish for some change with which to pay their bill. “Let’s walk a bit, shall we?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather decided not to mention what had happened to Miss Hazzard. He rather suspected that she wanted the initial impact of those bandages and the brace for her own purpose.

  When they were on the street and walking in the dark, Tick spoke again. “I haven’t let myself think of Glee for a long time. You remember, I guess, the dustup Aunt Martha and I had when I wanted to marry her? It left a bad taste. Glee got impatient, and she’s hard to manage when she’s feeling her best, and when she’s impatient … she takes
things apart. Unexpectedly, publicly, and violently.”

  “Um-m-m.” Mr. Pennyfeather was remembering the air of energy and haste which had seemed to pervade even Miss Hazzard’s bandages.

  “Aunt Martha told me once that being married to Glee Hazzard would be the same as living with an electric eel.”

  “Vivid, for Aunt Martha.”

  “And then, the last time I saw Glee she crowned me with a pitcher of beer. I resented that.”

  “Even you?” inquired Mr. Pennyfeather. “Then that proves we have something in common. I should have resented it very much.”

  “But when you mentioned Glee as having come in on the bus,” Tick continued, a little strangely, “I felt queer. All over. I almost … well, I almost forgot Caroline. Only for a moment, of course.”

  “You must expect such occurrences, Tick. Psychologically, your past is always with you in your subconscious. You carry Glee and Taffy right around with your loyalty to Caroline.”

  “Then I can’t help feeling … the way I felt?”

  “According to what I’ve heard from Professor Tydings—Psych., Advanced—or didn’t you get Advanced?—we’re all just bundles of old neuroses. Plus a few repressions we picked up in infancy. Tick, I think we’d better look in on your aunt Martha. She wants you to wait until morning, but I think it might be to your advantage to surprise her. She might be cooking up a very remarkable dish for you. And here’s the hotel, right in front of us.”

  Tick planted his feet in the manner of a mule not wanting to drink at a convenient trough. “Damn it all, I won’t see her.”

  “How old are you?” Mr. Pennyfeather asked suddenly.

  The light from the empty lobby showed him Tick’s frown, black brows tight across a pair of steel-colored eyes. “I’m almost twenty-eight. I’ll bet I’m the oldest baby you ever saw.”

  “For how long does your aunt Martha play around at this guardian business?” He added: “For the love of Pete.”

  “Until I get married,” Tick flung out. “That’s the joker.”

  “She’s made a good thing out of you,” Mr. Pennyfeather decided. “By the way, was Aunt Martha the reason you wrote me to ask for help?”