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  I thought Colonel Primrose looked at her with some surprise. And I couldn’t keep from telling him what I’d thought of any longer.

  “Have you thought that it might have been some one outside the house?” I asked. “Corinne got a telephone call this evening. It couldn’t have been from any one inside . . .”

  Colonel Primrose smiled at me, with patient courtesy.

  “It was from me,” he said urbanely. “I told her her father was dead and her legal status—if any—was . . . changed. I advised her to leave at once. She said she would. I take it something changed her mind.”

  It might have been the fact of knowing that Swede and Mary were out there in the garden together, I thought. And of course she probably had no real intention of going . . . knowing then that Kumumato had a semi-official status and depending on it to protect her. I didn’t say that, however, not wanting to call any more attention to Swede and Mary than there already was. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  The officers Colonel Primrose had sent out to find the knife Corinne had been killed with appeared in the doorway.

  “—The knife is not in the house, sir,” one of them said. “—Unless it is in this room.”

  I can’t describe the silence then. It was intensely alive . . . electric and vibrant, and as unlike the silence that descended in Corinne’s room after Harry Cather had closed the door behind him as midnight is unlike high noon. And for all of my life I could not help looking at Aunt Norah’s knitting bag. And I simply tore my eyes away, and looked steadily at Colonel Primrose. That, at least, I knew was safe.

  Colonel Primrose nodded very calmly.

  “You see, Mrs. Bronson,” he said, “while you are not the murderer yourself, you do happen to be the key to this whole affair. From the beginning you have been protecting some one. I don’t know whether you have thought you were protecting one person, or two persons . . . but you have been trying, desperately, to shield the person or persons who killed Roy Cather and his daughter. And I should have thought there was only one person in this room that you’d go as far as you have gone to protect.

  “The person we’re talking about is the one who got the shelter keys away from Mrs. Latham, unlocked the shelter, killed Roy Cather, returned the keys to their proper places where Mr. Kumumato found them . . . after you, Mrs. Bronson, had thrown, his body into the ravine and cleaned the place up.—I assume, by the way, that Mrs. Cather helped you clean it up?”

  Aunt Norah nodded, grim-faced and silent.

  “And so,” Colonel Primrose went on, “the keys were returned, Mr. Kumumato found the shelter empty and in order, and so notified me.”

  I stared at him, trying not to think at all. It couldn’t have been Alice herself . . . it couldn’t have been.

  “And it was this same person who drove the knife into Corinne Farrell’s throat, Mrs. Bronson—who was in her room, just leaving it, when you opened the door . . . and at whom you shot, not knowing who it was. And then you tried to save that person, when you found out what had happened . . . by attracting attention, deliberately, for as long a time as you could, to give the murderer of Corinne Farrell time for concealment. For you are not a screaming woman, Mrs. Bronson.—And I should have thought the only person in the world you’d lift a finger to save is . . . Mary Cather.”

  His eyes rested steadily on her for an instant before he added, “But of course it was not Miss Cather you shot.”

  I can’t describe what new quality the silence in the room had then, as I became gradually aware—and I suppose all of us did except one person—of something that was happening there, right under our very eyes, as we held our breath. No one spoke or moved. I don’t know when it had begun. It was advanced and all too horribly clear when I first became aware of it, and it was as audible as if it were loud, or shrieking. Yet it was silent, as silent as the liquid blood flowing noiselessly, noiselessly, from the severed carotid in Corinne Farrell’s throat. It was there in the room with us. It was creeping along the web and the woof of the material covering it, creeping silently out . . . and shouting . . . shouting murder.

  “For you didn’t shoot at a shadow, Mrs. Bronson,” Colonel Primrose said. There was no change in his voice at all. “And you are not a bad shot. You are well known to be a good one. You fired a single shot, and it went home.”

  It was still creeping, spreading, dark against shining white.

  “You each had a motive, of a sort, for murder,” Colonel Primrose said. “The motive that some of you had was urgent and driving. But . . . there are different motives. There are three motives, great and constantly compelling: gain . . . fear . . . revenge.

  “And it was revenge that struck this blow,” he said quietly. “I must ask you to take off your coat, Mr. Kumumato.”

  The blood was spreading slowly through the starched white fabric of the glistening mess jacket. Kumumato’s face was pale yellow. The sweat stood on it. He made one futile gesture. Sergeant Buck stood there by his side, a human Pali, rising sheer and rocky above him.

  “Take off your coat, Mr. Kumumato,” Colonel Primrose said evenly. “And give me Roy Cather’s knife.”

  Kumumato’s right hand moved slowly, unbuttoning his coat. His left hand hung at his side. Sergeant Buck reached down. His right hand grasped Kumumato’s, his left ripped the jacket open. He drew out something wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, held in the cord around Kumumato’s waist.

  “Roy Cather stole your wife, Mr. Kumumato,” Colonel Primrose said. “All these years you’ve followed him for us, you’ve followed not for us but for the time when you could do what you did the other night. It was you who took the keys from Mrs. Latham’s bag. You locked the shelter again, after you had killed Cather. You planned to take his body away, to some cave in the hills, perhaps. Mrs. Bronson was first. She interrupted you tonight. She knew she had hit you. She tried to give you time to bind up your arm.”

  The blue kimono, I thought . . . and he was shrunken, going to the door, not from horror but from pain.

  “So she screamed, and everybody was concerned with her and with Corinne while you could get out and bandage your wound without anybody seeing you—because there was no way to silence the alarm the shot at you had raised.—If you will raise your foot, Mr. Kumumato, you will find face powder on it. You were going through Corinne Farrell’s bag when Mrs. Bronson disturbed you. You took half a dozen steps, leaving a trail of powder, on the lanai before she called you back. There will be blood on the floor that we can’t see now. There’s a spot in your bathroom where you reached across the tub to get a towel off the rack. You’d better go now, Mr. Kumumato, and let them dress your arm.”

  The rest of us sat or stood as we were.

  “But why did he kill Corinne?”

  I wasn’t conscious that I was saying it aloud, and maybe I didn’t. It may have been the concentrated power of a common thought in everybody’s mind that made Colonel Primrose answer the question, spoken or unspoken. And he hesitated, for quite a while, before he went on, as if not quite sure of what he should say.

  “Corinne Farrell had a piece of paper, twenty years or so old, that her father gave her. It was to be brought to Mrs. Cather, to make her let him out of the shelter. But Roy Cather didn’t know his daughter. When she saw what he had given her she had no intention of releasing him. The paper could be used for her own devices. And Kumumato was trying to find it. He killed Roy Cather because he hated him. He killed his daughter partly because she was his daughter—and the daughter of the woman who left him—but mostly out of sheer friendship and loyalty to you, Mrs. Cather. Because you’ve suffered in all this too . . .”

  Colonel Primrose stopped and looked around at us all. Then his eyes rested on Norah Bronson, and he smiled a little.

  “Well, what you said about a jury not hanging you, Mrs. Bronson, may apply to him even better. He’s done an honorable job for us. It’s a pity he couldn’t have let the law do the rest of it.”

  When he’d gone Aunt Norah folded up her
knitting.

  “I am going to bed,” she said, very calmly. “I advise the rest of you to do the same.”

  Alice Cather rose unsteadily. She crossed the room and put her arms around Norah Bronson’s gaunt figure.

  “Don’t thank me,” Aunt Norah said. “And he’s wrong about one thing. I did not scream on account of Kumumato—I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could see him in the dark. But I’ve never been able to bear the sight of blood. Good night. I’m leaving in the morning, and I still think you pay too much for the repairs you make around here, Harry.”

  Harry Cather came over to his wife and took her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?” he asked quietly.

  Alice shook her head. “I was afraid. Afraid you might kill him. I didn’t want blood on . . . on your hands. Good night.”

  Swede Ellicott was by Mary’s side. He put his arms around her and held her tightly for a moment. Then he bent down and kissed her on the forehead. “Tomorrow, Mary,” he said. He turned and started out. “Come on, you goons,” he said.

  Mary stood there for a moment when we were alone, pale but with a radiant light shining in her eyes.

  “He says it doesn’t matter,” she said. “He says it doesn’t make any difference to us at all.”

  24

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SHE MEANT THEN. I didn’t know until morning, when I was in Alice Cather’s sitting room. Harry Cather was there and Colonel Primrose had come out.

  In his hand Colonel Primrose held a small yellowed piece of paper that he’d taken carefully from his billfold. It was black and worn through along the edges where it had been folded a long time.

  “This is what Kumumato was looking for and didn’t find,” he said. “She did have it with her. It was hidden in the roll of netting that held up her pompadour.”

  He put it in Alice Cather’s hand. She folded it back the way it had been for years, without looking at it, and handed it to Harry Cather. He struck a match, held it to a corner of the paper and dropped it into the fireplace.

  “I was very young,” Alice said evenly. “I was born in Java, Colonel Primrose. My father was an Army officer. He died of fever, and I got a job as governess in a rich native family. It was a miserable life. Roy Cather came along. I fell in love with him.”

  I suppose it was natural that I should have glanced up at where his portrait had been, over the mantel. And I started a little. It was there again. I hadn’t noticed it when I came in with Colonel Primrose. I must have been staring at it open-mouthed, because it seemed an astounding thing to do, to put it back, now of all times.

  Alice looked at me, a faint smile on her lips.

  “I told you, Grace. It’s not my husband—it’s his brother. That’s Harry’s portrait. Roy Cather was my husband.”

  She looked at Harry for an instant, and turned to Colonel Primrose.

  “I married him, as you realized. I didn’t know he had a Japanese girl, and their child, living with him. He didn’t bring them to our home until Mary was about to be born. When he did I was frantic. I didn’t know what to do. Then Harry came out . . .”

  “I brought her away with me, Colonel Primrose,” Harry Cather said. “I couldn’t let her stay. And we didn’t intend to start this fiction we’ve lived under so long. The shipping people listed us as husband and wife, the Honolulu papers had it before we got here. It was simpler to let it go.”

  “Mary was born here,” Alice said. “I hope she’ll never have to know that Roy was her father. I’d rather die. All my life it’s hung over me—he never let me forget it. Kumumato has always been our best friend. He knew, and whenever he saw him in Tokyo he’d try to get him to release me. And Roy always said come the war he might need a wife in Honolulu. There was nothing I could do that wouldn’t become public here. I wouldn’t have hesitated if he could have done any damage here. He wanted to stay here in the house. He gave me a list of the guests he wanted me to invite. I refused to do it. I think they had some idea that generals talk. I’m not sure that the life of a really important general or admiral would have been safe. And I truly thought he’d left, Colonel Primrose. Kumumato told me he had. A submarine was to pick him up.”

  “And what will you do now?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  “It’s something we’ve never considered ourselves in a position even to mention,” Harry Cather said quietly. “We’ve both felt from the first that our only justification was keeping the strict letter of the law in our personal relationship, even after we both knew we had a deeper feeling for each other.”

  He looked over at Alice and smiled. “Or am I assuming too much?”

  She smiled back at him and shook her head.

  “We’re going to marry as soon as possible,” Harry Cather said. “On the Mainland.”

  Alice looked at Colonel Primrose. “Unless——”

  Colonel Primrose shook his head with his quiet smile.

  “It’s not to the public interest to let people know Roy Cather came onto the Island. Not till after the war.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “The young sentry he killed died in the line of duty. Kumumato says Cather attacked him in the shelter. It was Cather’s life or his. Interest is academic, on that point. As for Corinne . . . well, we’ll have to let a jury decide.”

  When I went in to get my hat and bag to go down to the Pacific Club for lunch with Colonel Primrose, Mary was sitting on the foot of her bed pinning her short yellow curls up. She was in her bathing suit, her legs crossed under her.

  “Close the door, Grace,” she said.

  I closed it and came in. She sat quietly the way she was, looking at herself in the mirror behind the dressing table.

  “Swede says it doesn’t matter, really,” she said.

  “What doesn’t?” I asked.

  “About who my father was.”

  She seemed a little surprised at my asking.

  I said, “Oh.”

  “Didn’t you hear Corinne call me ‘Sister’? That’s what she was telling Kumumato, down there, when he tried to make her stop. But I suppose I’d have found out sooner or later anyway. It’s funny, Grace. I’ve often wondered why Mother and Dad have always had rooms at different ends of the house. They haven’t acted like other people’s parents. They never quarrelled or said horrid things to each other the way married people do. And I suppose they’ll get married now, won’t they?”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  She looked at herself steadily in the mirror for an instant.

  “I don’t feel any different. Swede says it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Why should it?”

  “I was worried last night. I thought maybe I’d wake up and find myself different. But I don’t seem to be.”

  “I’d forget about it. I’d marry Swede and forget all about it.”

  She nodded. “That’s what Swede says. But there’s one thing—I don’t want Mother ever to know I know. It’s funny about these things, isn’t it? Remember when we were going up the stairs and Corinne came down?”

  I nodded.

  “And she spoke to Kumumato—the first time?”

  “Yes.”

  “She said, ‘Greeting, my father that should have been.’ That’s when I began to get frightened. I didn’t know the house servant Uncle Roy . . . my father married was Kumumato’s wife until that instant. And I thought he was going to kill her then and there. It was the way he smiled. It really frightened me. Anyway, Mother mustn’t ever know I know. You won’t tell her?”

  I shook my head. “Of course I won’t, darling.”

  “Tommy and Dave know it. Corinne told them. They don’t seem to think it’s important either.”

  “It’s not,” I said.

  She looked at me and smiled. “No, it really isn’t,” she said. “Well, Swede’s waiting for me.”

  She got up. “I guess nobody has a right to be as happy as I am.”

  I heard a shout from the
garden. She ran out onto the lanai, and I followed.

  Swede, Tommy and Dave were down there in swimming trunks.

  “Oh, dear,” Mary said. She laughed. “Can’t you get rid of them for a minute?”

  “Take one, take all,” said Lieutenant Thomas Edison Dawson cheerfully. “Are you coming, sister?”

  They looked up at her, grinning. It was Swede who caught her when she jumped. He held her tight for a moment.

  “Might as well get used to them,” he said. “We’re always going to have ’em underfoot.”

  “You can have an hour after lunch,” Tommy said. “Here you are, lady.—David!”

  Dave Boyer, grinning, produced from behind his back a large white spray of orchids from her own bank.

  “Orchids for the bride,” he said.

  Tommy kissed her on the cheek. “You’re a nice gal, Mary,” he said. “We’re proud to have you in the Organization.”

  Colonel Primrose was still in the house when I went out to the car. Had I known my friend Sergeant Phineas T. Buck would have been out there, I no doubt would have waited inside. He put his hand up in a very punctilious salute and opened the door for me. I got in.

  Sergeant Buck cleared his throat.

  “—You shouldn’t ought to have done what you done, ma’am,” he said, out of the corner of his mouth of course, and with a kind of menacing reproachfulness, and to my great surprise. “You shouldn’t of turned him down, irregardless. He’s lower than a snake’s belly. Think you could reconsider, ma’am?”

  Then he did turn that deep brassy red. It was as startling as it would be to hear a concrete mixer churning away and find milk and honey coming out.

  Colonel Primrose was at the door.

  “No offense meant, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck said hastily.

  “And none taken, Sergeant,” I said.

  We were all back where we started—except that I still didn’t like being called a half-wit.

  “O.K., sir,” Sergeant Buck said.

  “O.K.,” Colonel Primrose answered.

  He smiled at me as he sat down beside me. Sergeant Buck turned his head and spat accurately over into the grass at the side of the coral driveway. It was an odd kind of benediction, but there it was. He got in under the wheel. It was raining on the Pali road as we went out of the gate, but below us the city by the sea was brilliant and lovely, as clear and cool as crystal, a fortress of honor in a paradise where a brief moment of treachery was forever wiped out in the eternal setting of the yellow son of heaven.