Hide in the Dark

by Frances Noyes Hart

  Tom Ross loosed the despairing clutch of Chatty’s fingers. “I shouldn’t think that you’d need to be qualified as an expert to see that the poor devil’s dead. But if it’s necessary, I was two years with the Ambulance…. Don’t look, Chatty.”

  He moved forward, a muscle quivering suddenly and strongly in his cheek, and Gavin Dart remarked quietly over his shoulder, “I’d disturb everything as little as possible, if I were you, Ross.”

  “It won’t be necessary to disturb anything.” For a moment the black of shoulders blotted out the horror on the sofa, then he straightened, wiping his hands carefully, a little line of sweat outlining the taut lips.

  “He’s stone dead, of course. A knife thrust just above the collar.”

  “From the back?”

  “No, from the side. It got the jugular.”

  “Gavin . .” The lightest of whispers, but in the silence that came flooding back over the room after each voice ceased, it was audible as a cry, “Gavin, they said you’d gone.”

  He answered, bending to catch the whisper, “Not gone; just that I hadn’t come.”

  Hanna said, turning her bright head from side to side, as though it hurt her, “I thought—I thought they said that you had gone.… Don’t go.”

  “I’ll not go.” He spoke as gently as though she were an ailing child. “Now try to stand up; put your hand on my shoulder—see, it’s quite easy. Joel, pull that chair over to this corner, will you? No, the back to the fire … thanks. Better, now, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?” The great eyes in the marble of her face stared at him blankly, drained even of wonder. “Gavin, was it—Doug?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Is he—dead?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Doug!” She moved the bright head again restlessly. “I do think that’s rather funny, don’t you? … Don’t you think that’s rather funny, Gavin?”

  “Don’t try to talk, dear. Just put your head back, and close your eyes. I’ll be here beside you; if you put out your hand you can touch me. I won’t go again where you can’t put out your hand and touch me.”

  Joel remarked bitterly from the door:

  “Now that you’ve all quite finished, I’m going after Ray. For all any of you know, or care either, she may be dead, too. If I have to have a guardian I’ll be obliged if you’ll select someone that will have enough rudimentary decency not to frighten a girl who is already half crazed with fright into nervous prostration. And in spite of any dictatorship set up here by any mortal soul under the canopy, she’s not going to put one foot in this room until you get that—until you get Doug out of it.”

  Larry said icily, “She is not one atom more immune from suspicion than the girl that you were willing to torture into insanity because of your rank disqualification to recognize innocence when you’re confronted with it. She’ll join that girl here the moment that we can put our hands on her, and you’ll be good enough to refrain from dictating the conditions under which she’ll do it.”

  Joel shouted, his voice convulsed with rage:

  “You poor damned fool, Ray never laid eyes on Doug before to-night in her life! Get out of my way and keep out of it.”

  Larry, not moving a fraction of an inch, said:

  “But you had laid eyes on Doug before to-night, hadn’t you, Joel? And Ray is your wife. Even Cæsar’s wife wasn’t above suspicion, was she?… Suppose we go and look for Ray together.”

  “Larry, you’re simply out of your head.” Trudi rose slowly to her feet, chalk-faced but level-eyed. “Not one human being has said a word to Jill. Chatty answered your question by blurting out the first thing that came into her head; her mind probably wasn’t functioning any better than yours is—or than mine is, for that matter. I’ll go with Joel and look for Ray; if she’s in any condition to come down, we’ll bring her. If she isn’t, she can wait upstairs till we decide on the next move.… Is Jill all right, Lindy?”

  Lindy asked softly, “Better, darling?” and the girl in the deep chair nodded a listless head, tried to smile reassurance, and gave it up as though it were hardly worth the effort. She lay back against the cushions like a broken doll, her eyes fixed on Hanna, immobile in her corner by the window.

  Lindy, dropping a kiss light as a moth on the ruffled hair, turned to the group still clustered in the doorway.

  “What should we do now?” she asked, and at the quiet magic of that voice, direct and clear as a child’s, the madness that had been hovering over the room with black and dreadful wings lifted them, and its shadow withdrew slowly from their eyes.

  Chatty, clutching at Tom’s arm as though she were drowning, burst suddenly into a flood of terrified and cleansing tears.

  “Oh, Lindy, Lindy, Larry’s so dreadfully angry with us—he talks to us as though he hated us, and didn’t know us at all. Jill, darling, I didn’t mean it—Jill, I do love you; don’t let him be so angry—”

  Jill whispered:

  “Don’t cry, Chatty. Larry, tell Chatty you’re sorry that you made her cry.”

  Larry, his face contorting in a sudden grimace of intolerable pain, said in a voice harsh with the effort he made to control it:

  “Sorry, Chatty. Sorry, Joel. Sorry, all the rest of you. You’re right; I’m half mad. You see I thought you were all out to get Jill.”

  He sat down abruptly in the nearest chair and dropped his head in his hands. After a moment he said indistinctly though his meshed fingers, “Trudi’s perfectly right about Ray, of course. But I think for her own sake that she ought to be here from now on if she’s up to it.… Not that it makes much difference what I think.”

  “Joel probably under-rates her capacity for endurance,” remarked Trudi bitterly. “It’s a habit of the stronger sex.… Let’s go, shan’t we?”

  “Trudi, don’t—don’t let that poor child be dragged down here if she’s afraid to come.” Lindy moved swiftly forward, the low voice shaken for the first time. “You know perfectly well it’s simply impossible that she had anything in the world to do with—with Doug’s—”

  Trudi replied briefly over her shoulder, “I’ll look out for her. Coming, Joel?”

  The dark eyes, disturbed and pitiful, followed them into the shadows of the hall. After a moment she murmured under her breath unhappily, “Oh, but that poor baby … afraid even of the wind! Surely, surely there must be some other way—”

  Kit stretched out a warning hand, catching back the long end of the tulle scarf that she was twisting through her fingers

  “Careful, Lindy; there’s blood on those violets of yours.”

  She echoed in a tenuous thread of horror: “Blood?” Her eyes did not go to the violets—they flew across the space that separated her from the green-frocked girl deep in the winged chair, and at what she saw there something shrank and contracted under the velvet pallor of her skin. “Oh—while I was bending over with the water, of course.… Cut them off, will you, Kit? And throw them away somewhere—somewhere that I can’t see them.” She stood rigid as a small statue under his swift fingers, only the flickering of her lashes betraying her desperate recoil. “Jill, darling, would you rather take the dress off, or just slip a smock on over it for now? That’s her smock—the green one there in the corner, Larry.…”

  Larry rose stiffly to his feet, staring about him as though he were seeing the room for the first time.

  “Just keep your eyes closed while I get it, darling. Where did you say, Lindy? Yes, I see.… That’s my brave girl.”

  Jill asked, “Is there blood on me, Larry?”

  “Only a little, darling; it’s all covered now—you can open your eyes.”

  She said in that small, formal voice more terrifying than any frenzy: “Thank you; do I have to?”

  “No, dear, no.”

  “Then I think I won’t, if you don’t mind.”

  She sketched again the dreadful little parody of a smile with lips too stiff to curve, and was silent.

  Larry Redmond stood staring down
at her, something quivering behind the rigidity of his face. After a moment he turned to the group by the door.

  “Look here, we can’t keep this up, and that’s flat. We’re none of us going to be able to get at this thing with any sanity or decency while—while Doug’s still here in the room. I don’t consider myself particularly high-strung, but it simply shoots the earth out from under me every time that I look over in that direction, and it’s not pleasant to imagine what it must be for the girls. Isn’t there any way that we can get him out before Trudi brings Ray down?”

  Sherry cried, “Oh, for God’s sake, let’s not stand here any longer talking about it—let’s get at it. Here, Tom, you lend a hand.”

  Tom said in a carefully controlled voice:

  “How about the police? They’ll have it in for any of us that mess things up around here, won’t they?”

  “Ah, to hell with the police!” yelled Sherry, his voice suddenly strained to frenzy. “Where do the police come in on this? We aren’t in Scotland Yard or the Morgue, as far as I know! We’re in Lady Court, and that thing on the sofa there isn’t just a corpse in a story—it’s Doug—it’s Doug King, and we’re us, not a lot of poor damned puppets in a melodrama. If we’ve got to spend the rest of the night in this infernal room, I’m going to get Doug out of here into that chapel, and if any of the rest of you think I’m going to be sent up to the electric chair for it, you can keep your mouths shut and steer clear of me from now on! Come on, let’s get started.”

  “Sherry, wait.” Lindy’s fingers were on his wrist, but it was her voice, not the light fingers, that held him. “This is Lady Court, as you say … and you are one of my guests here. Sherry, you do see, don’t you, that I simply can’t permit you to jeopardize the safety of my other guests by doing anything that we shouldn’t do, no matter how dreadfully, dreadfully we may want to do it? … Gavin, you said that you knew a good deal about police work, didn’t you?”

  “Quite a bit, yes.”

  “Then won’t you help us now, please? Would it be possible to do what Sherry suggests?”

  Gavin, in the far corner where he stood guard over the motionless Hanna, stood motionless, too, for a moment, with contracted brows. When he spoke it was with a trifle more than his customary deliberation.

  “Naturally, the police are going to object violently to the obliteration of any possible clues. But as it appears to be highly problematic as to how soon we’ll be able to get in touch with them, and as it certainly seems advisable to keep us confined to this room until certain facts are definitely established, I think that we’d be justified in taking matters more or less into our own hands.”

  “Until what facts are established?” inquired Kit Baird.

  “Well, there’s the weapon, of course; and then one of the first things that the police would try to ascertain is whether it might not possibly be a suicide.”

  “At least we’ll be able to set their minds at rest on that score,” said Tom Ross, something that was almost a smile passing over his haggard face.

  “Something makes you entirely clear as to that?”

  “Clear? Naturally I’m clear. Aside from half a dozen obvious reasons, there’s the more than obvious one that Doug King had everything in God’s world to make life worth living for the next hundred years!”

  Neil Sheridan looked up swiftly. “That shows all you know! Doug was—”

  “Larry!”

  Joel’s voice from the stairs sounded tired.

  “Yes?”

  “Just wanted to let you know that Ray went to her room right after the second gong struck, took some aspirin, and turned in. She was asleep, but she’ll be down as soon as she can get some things on.”

  “Good kid,” commented Larry briefly.

  “She’s a long sight gamer than I am,” said Joel. His receding footsteps lagged even more than his voice. They had hardly died away as Gavin Dart asked in his pleasant, unstressed voice: “You were going to tell us something about Doug King, Sheridan?”

  Something in that voice, for all its lack of emphasis, caused the loquacious Sherry to cast a startled glance in its direction. After a moment he said slowly:

  “Well, you can’t exactly say that he had everything. Just to-night while we were upstairs dressing he was telling me how sick and tired he was of all this rolling-stone stuff, and how he wanted to settle down somewhere and have a nice little home—”

  The wintry smile once more flickered behind Tom Ross’s eyes.

  “Still, Sherry, you don’t think that he cut his throat because he didn’t have it, do you? I hardly think that any of us are going to be able to persuade the police of that! They’re likely to look for a more substantial motive, and something tells me that they’re not going to look for it from Doug.”

  “Of course there’s another way of establishing that it’s not a question of suicide,” commented Gavin thoughtfully. “If there’s no knife within reach of his hand—”

  “It’s murder,” said Kit Baird. “There is no knife within reach of his hand.”

  “You sound fairly definite.”

  “I’m more than fairly definite. I’ve had an absolutely clear view from here of the sofa from the moment that the lights went on. There’s no knife there.”

  “Did you notice a weapon of any kind when you were making your examination, Ross?”

  “No.” The little line of sweat edged the fine, sensitive lips once more. “Kit’s right. There’s no knife.”

  “Then if that’s the case, the matter of posture isn’t so important, and I think that we might risk moving him. Hanna, I’ll not be more than a moment—”

  Hanna, turning on him those immense, strange eyes that had been feeding tirelessly on space, said:

  “I’ll come, too.”

  “My dear child, there’s nothing that you can do. If you’ll just sit here quietly—”

  She repeated, rising to her feet as though he had not spoken: “I’ll come, too.”

  Her hand was on his arm, but she walked beside him erect and superb as any Grecian goddess, gold-sandalled and gold-crowned, moving through Olympian fields.

  Lindy asked, “Gavin, mightn’t it be a good idea to move the whole sofa without touching… anything? I’m quite sure that it will go through the chapel door. Two of you could take each end, couldn’t you, while I hold the door open?”

  “Lindy, that sounds to me like a real inspiration. I’m inclined to believe that you have the levellest head of any of us!”

  She murmured with a small, forlorn smile and gesture of denial:

  “Oh, I’m like the skyrocket in an emergency—I rise to the occasion in quite a burst of glory, but I come down like the skyrocket, too.… Please don’t count on me.… Shall I hold it open now?”

  “I hardly think that it’s going to be necessary. If you’ll just stay near Hanna for a minute I’ll be more deeply in your debt than ever.”

  Hanna said: “Gavin, it isn’t necessary for anyone to stay with me. I’m sorry that I was so stupid, but that’s all over now.”

  For all the magnificent tranquillity of her tone, she did not look quite all right; under the level brows her eyes stared out strangely on a strange world, the pupils so dilated that the flawless aquamarine was almost black.

  Kit Baird, who had been standing looking down at the twisted handful of violets in his hand, straightened abruptly, tossed them carelessly into the basket at his feet, and lifted his eyes to the lovely lady by the table.

  “What happened to the famous earrings, Hanna?”

  She clapped startled hands to her ears, and then dropped them with a tremulous smile.

  “Oh, Kit, for a moment I forgot! The screw’s loose on one of them—it came off in my hand during supper, and I was afraid of its falling off somewhere in the dark while we were playing, so I dropped them both on my dressing table near the door as we went by on our way to the third floor.… Gavin, you aren’t worried about me any more, are you? You must surely see that I’m quite, quite
all right?”

  He stood eyeing her, gravely solicitous for a moment, and then turned steadily to the ugly task before him.

  “Very well. You and I at this end, Baird. Sheridan, I think you’re better out of this for a bit. Ross at the other—and how about you, Redmond? Think you can swing it?”

  “I’ve evidently managed to convey a flattering opinion of my qualifications in an emergency!” commented Larry Redmond with a grim twitch at the corner of his lips. “Not that I’m in any position to blame you! I’m not particularly given to hysterics, however. Careful, Tom, this thing’s heavy as sin.”

  “I think we can manage it perfectly if we can just negotiate this corner by the door. The point is to hold it as level as possible, of course.”

  “Look out for the steps down to the chapel,” said Kit Baird. “Tilt your end up a bit, boys, as we step down—about six inches, at a guess. That’s the idea; now, steady does it.…”

  Chatty ventured a terrified glance in the direction of the fading voices, and then unclinched her hands with a long, sobbing sigh of relief. Eight little scarlet crescents stood out sharply on the limp palms, showing the frantic urgency of that pressure. Hanna asked, without turning her head: “Have they—gone?”

  “Yes, they’ve gone.… Oh, Lindy, I can’t—I can’t stop crying. I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to stop crying again, not ever, as long as I live.”

  Lindy, laying a consoling cheek against the poor wet hand, whispered: “Chatty, don’t cry, don’t cry. It will help us all a lot if you don’t cry, truly. You see, we’ve all got to be brave, or none of us will be able to bear it.”

  A small, clear voice said from the threshold:

  “Can I come in? It’s me, Ray; they said you wanted me.”

  Lindy turned toward her swiftly. “Oh, Ray, what a good child you are! Of course we want you, and of course you can come in. See, there’s nothing to be frightened of now—nothing at all.”

  Ray said simply, “I’m not frightened—not now that the wind’s gone.… What’s happened to the sofa?”