“But,” said the Saint, “I still don’t see what all this has to do with the creep you started with, Brother Powls.”
“Because ever since he came here they’ve been under some awful strain, as if — well, it’s silly, but I can only say, as if he was haunting them. I don’t believe in that kind of hypnotism, but if it isn’t that, he must have some other hold over them, and now that you’ve met them you can see that that sounds almost as ridiculous.”
Mr Alton Powls had come upon the scene by simply walking into the office where Kathleen Holland worked. The office opened on a pseudo-Andalusian inside patio which it shared with about a dozen shops mostly dedicated to the sale of antiques, jewelry, objets d’art, paintings, books, and similar preciosa, all enterprises ideally suited to a location close to but architecturally shut off from the commercial hurly-burly of State Street, where shoppers could browse at leisure in an atmosphere of olde-worlde tranquillity which did much to blunt their apperception of the fact that they were being charged strictly new-world prices. Directly across the patio were the premises of Ye Needle Nooke, and through its large plate-glass window, from Kathleen’s window, could be plainly seen the Warshed sisters at work, Violet sewing and Ida rearranging the displays of merchandise, while Aunt Flo busied herself with correspondence or bookkeeping at a desk in the background.
“Do you happen to know those ladies across the way?” he asked.
She had not yet identified him as a Creep, but only as an elderly gentleman not especially different from any of the other idle strollers in the courtyard, and so she agreeably told him the names. The first evidence of Creepiness he gave was in his reaction to them: she was sure that they brought a gleam of recognition which was instantly veiled.
“Would they be from Milwaukee?” he queried.
“No, they came from Kansas City.”
“Was that long ago?”
“It was soon after I was born, anyway.”
He looked at her calculatingly.
“They remind me of some people I knew a long time ago,” he said. “I think I’ll go and talk to them.”
He went out and across the patio, and she could not help watching the rest from her desk. It was as graphic and at the same time as baffling as a movie on which the sound track had gone dead.
He went into Ye Needle Nooke, and Ida Warshed met him with the mechanical cordiality with which she would have greeted any stranger who walked in. She could only have asked, quite impersonally, what she could do for him. But his answer seemed to stop her cold. She stood there, transfixed, all the life fading out of her face. For the longest time, she seemed bereft of any power of movement, as well as speech. Then, in a most uncharacteristically feeble and helpless way, she made a beckoning gesture at Violet.
Violet put down her sewing and came over, wearing the same perfunctory smile in her more fragile and wispier way. Mr Powls spoke again. Violet froze as Ida had done, and then looked at Ida helplessly. Then both of them, by simultaneous consent, looked appealingly at Aunt Flo.
Aunt Flo put down her pen and came over from her desk. But on her candid competent face there was no more immediate response than had been shown by either of her nieces. Until Mr Powls repeated something that he had obviously said before.
Aunt Flo also froze, momentarily. But there was no one beyond her to appeal. And so after that moment she began to talk, quite volubly, in a tone that the frequent shakings of her head made vehemently negative. But Mr Powls seemed only to persist with whatever he was maintaining. There was another Creepy quality, Kathleen thought, in the implacable way he stood his ground, answering mostly with shrugs that somehow had an offensive insincerity.
Presently he turned and left the shop and sauntered away. But after his departure there was none of the complacency of three embattled women who had triumphantly repulsed an obnoxious male. There was the inevitable first minute when they all talked at once, but it quickly subsided into a bleak despondency in which they all seemed at a total loss for anything to say. Ida kicked moodily at a chair-leg, Violet dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, and Aunt Flo sat down at her desk again, heavily, and rested her forehead on her clenched hands.
Then Violet happened to glance straight across the patio at Kathleen, and said something to Ida, who glanced in the same direction, and Kathleen suddenly felt like an eavesdropper and buried herself in the papers she had been working on before the interruption.
Later that afternoon, as the shops on the patio were preparing to close up, Aunt Flo came over on the pretext of asking if Kathleen could recommend a part-time gardener to take over some of the heavy work on the flower beds which were the Warshed’s principal hobby and exercise as well as their most harmless pride. After that gambit had served its purpose, she said with transparent casualness, “What did you think of that man who came looking for us a little while ago?”
“I didn’t know he was looking for you,” Kathleen said. “He told me he thought he knew you from somewhere away back.”
She recited her conversation with Mr Powls almost verbatim, but without any commentary.
“Is that all he said?”
“Yes — as far as I can remember.”
Aunt Flo’s bright birdlike eyes raked through her like affectionate needles.
“I think he’s a crank,” she said. “He tried to insist that he knew us, but none of us ever saw him before. We couldn’t all three be mistaken. You’d better watch out if you see him again. It’s those kind of people who are never suspected until they turn out to be Monsters.”
Although the word Monster was no more than an earlier synonym for Creep, it was not that echo of her own thinking that brushed Kathleen with a clammy chill. It was the incontrovertible certainty, after what she had recently witnessed, that Aunt Flo was lying.
Four days passed before she saw Mr Powls again. She happened to look up, and he was back in Ye Needle Nooke, talking to the three ladies. He seemed to have been showing them something like a fairly large newspaper clipping, which he took back and folded carefully and put away in his wallet. Only a few more words were spoken after that, before he turned and came out, she could see very little of how they acted after his exit, for he blocked the view almost completely by walking straight across the patio to her office.
She tried not to appear too hurried over her conventional “Good afternoon” but couldn’t help going on, disingenuous though it had to sound, with, “I hear you didn’t know the Warsheds after all.”
“Oh, but I do,” he said. “And they remember me now. I’ve been able to convince them.”
She flicked a glance through the window, but could only see that the ladies were in some kind of huddle at the back of the shop.
“I’ve been back to Kansas City since I saw you last,” he said. “But I’ve decided that Santa Barbara has it beat. I think I’ll settle down here. Could you show me a very small furnished cottage or a nice little apartment?”
She took him to a couple of places she had listed, and he was delighted with the second, a sub-let that had been put in her hands only the previous day. Then came the routine question of references.