Seed on the Wind

Rex Stout Seed on the Wind

I

What startled her was the sight of the green coupé turning into the driveway. Through the window she watched it lurch, down and up, across the ditch at the edge of the sidewalk, then roll smoothly along the gravel, past the forsythia and peonies, to the bare rectangle splotched with oil in front of the little garage at the rear of the house. She frowned; this was Thursday, wasn’t it? Was the man crazy? Manhattan must have exploded into fragments; or — she smiled to herself — was this a wild leap in pursuit of the extension of privileges? She stepped forward to get a better view through the dining-room window, and her amber-grey eyes filled with astonishment as she saw not one man, but two, descend from the coupé. Lewis Kane precisely and efficiently issued from the door on the left, from the driver’s side, while from the other tumbled out a hatless man with a bony white face and a tangled mass of brown hair. Lora’s head shot forward and her neck stretched out for a swift incredulous glance, then instantly she turned and made for the front hall and the door at the other side into the living room.

The three children in the room looked up indifferently as she entered; two small boys, five and seven, from a mountain of apparatus in the far corner, and a girl, a little older but scarcely larger, from the book under her chin as she lay on a long yellow cushion directly before the window. Their involuntary glances were indifferent, through ease of habituation and the absence of any petty chronic filial fear; but something in their mother’s face and her pose, as she stopped in the middle of the room, held their gaze and quickened it; the elder boy got to his feet and the girl turned over and half raised herself.

Lora looked at the girl. “Where’s Roy?”

“He went upstairs to get—”

“All right. Quick! Listen.”

She spoke swiftly, three or four brief sentences, and the girl’s intelligent black eyes answered them as they were spoken. As she ended, “You understand?” Lora had already moved across to the other door, leading to the smaller room in the rear where books and toys were kept, and disappeared through it and closed it behind her before the girl’s nod was finished.

They would come in at the back, through the kitchen, she reflected; Lewis always did; doubtless it was more convenient, with the car parked in the yard, but his face would say plainly, as he entered the dining room through the swinging door, another triumph of prudence. At that rate he must average something like a dozen triumphs a day. But that could wait, time enough for that; it was not with amusement or resentment at Lewis’s psychological costume that she was quivering and standing, drawn tight, close to the door she had shut behind her. That the other man should appear at all was impossible; that after twelve years he should suddenly and unexpectedly emerge from Lewis Kane’s coupé was simply silly. He had been killed in the war; if not that, he had dissolved into some remote and alien atmosphere; at the very least, he had died lingeringly in a distant jungle. But there he was! What about Panther, who had not been trained to lie, except to people she knew? Would this gaunt ghost disconcert her? Poor child, her task would be complicated by the fact that Lewis would inevitably stop in the kitchen to ask Lillian, “Is your mistress in?” An hour earlier Lillian would have been upstairs...

She heard a low murmur of voices, then footsteps, then from the other side of the door Lewis’s unnaturally loud greeting to the children; even in her suspended expectation of another voice she permitted herself her accustomed smile at his careful loyalty to the theory that children like you in proportion to the amount of noise you make. The other voice was not heard. “How’s my boy?” came Lewis’s booming tones, with the usual unconscious emphasis on the pronoun, and then the sound of Julian’s little feet shuffling dutifully toward the paternal kiss. Then, “Where’s your mother?”

She strained her ears to catch Panther’s reply, but the door was too thick for those low quiet tones. The tone, though, was enough; she smiled at herself for having doubted.

An exclamation from Lewis; then, with a degree of concern remarkable for him, “When will she be back?”