The Dead Can Tell

by Helen Reilly

  “All I thought of was little horses galloping, and there certainly weren’t any horses up there in the penthouse.”

  She watched the Scotsman file the intruder for reference. The nocturnal visitor in Margot’s living room seemed important to him. He left her presently and she saw him in the gardens below. They were bare now and stripped, the borders raked clean, the leaves gone, except for an occasional oak or copper beach. The Inspector was talking to a group of men she recognized as detectives.

  They were everywhere. Across the lake just visible through the autumn haze she saw the clustered boats, boats that met and collided and separated. She knew what they were doing, what was going on. She had told McKee that she hadn’t heard the scream the night before, but she had heard it. The scream lay in her memory as something sharp and bright and terrible that she would never forget. They were dragging the coves over there around the point for whoever it was who had screamed. The grim fishing was so far without luck.

  Johnny knocked at the door. Cristie didn’t open it. She said through its thickness that she didn’t want any luncheon and she couldn’t go golfing because her head ached. Johnny said: “You poor kid. I don’t wonder. Take some aspirin and lie down, I’ll have them send up something.” The tray was brought and removed, its contents barely touched.

  The afternoon wore on. At half past three Margot and Euen and Johnny went out for a walk in the grounds. A cold wind whipped through the shrubbery, sent dead leaves scurrying. Cristie followed the slow backward and forward progress of the three of them and her feeling of stress deepened. Margot and Johnny and Euen had all been out the night before. What had they seen or heard, what were they concealing? They hadn’t told the Inspector all they knew any more than she had.

  Sara and Sara’s death began to assume monstrous and uncontrollable proportions. It spread like a gigantic and poisonous miasma choking out all thought, all hope, everything that made life worth living.

  It was the sound from across the water that touched off that snaking train of terror coiled inside of her, that was the result of long weeks, months of strain. There was a dull boom and water geysered in a huge spout, pale against the distant trees as the depth charge of dynamite exploded in an effort to bring to the surface whatever was hidden in the depths of the lake.

  Cristie stared blindly at the mud and debris and falling spray as the resolve which had been slowly crystallizing in her since last night, took definite shape. She had tried to help Steven. She had failed. Steven didn’t want her help. The tall suave Inspector with the piercing eyes was back of that explosion on the other side of the lake. He would never rest until he got at the truth, all of it. Sooner or later he would make her talk. If she stayed. She musn’t stay. She must get away from him, get away from everyone, now, at once, while they were up here in the country.

  She started to plan. She had managed to elude watching detectives before, she could do it again. The main line of the railroad was ten miles over the hills to the east. They wouldn’t look for her there, would be watching the station at Kokino. She could walk that distance with ease once she managed to shake off pursuit. It oughtn’t to be difficult, if she were careful and used her wits. She was accustomed to long distances in Texas and wasn’t afraid of cutting across country or of getting lost.

  No one came to her room to disturb her. Dinner wasn’t until seven. She hadn’t a great deal of money but she wouldn’t need much and she had her check book. It was dusk when she slipped out of the hotel by a side door. There was nobody around. Three quarters of an hour later she was on the far side of the lake climbing a steep slope studded with silver birches, slender, leaning ghosts in the fading light. An open field was ahead, crowned by a grove of chestnuts and a fence. Beyond the fence lay the next valley and freedom.

  She paused on a mound to look back. Below and to the right the lights of the Hazard farmhouse twinkled through the gloom, further away across the lake the sprawled hotel was a vague dark blur. Cristie turned her face to the east, gave herself a little shake and stepped out boldly on the bare stony sheep field running upward to the top of the hill.

  Just as she did so a hand seized her shoulder. The hand whirled her around. It was Steven. He had come on her unheard from behind a clump of hemlocks. He put his other hand on her other shoulder, looked down at her and said in a low voice rough with the sharpness of command, “You little fool! Trying to make a run for it, weren’t you? Don’t you realize that that’s the worst possible thing you could do, that it would give the whole show away?”

  He was savage, white, shaking as he continued, “You thought you made it. Well, you’re wrong. Look down there. No, to the right.”

  Cristie moved her eyes. She saw the brown fedora slide behind a clump of thorn bushes. She wrenched herself free, dodged sideways and began to run back down the slope. Wind streamed past her, brambles caught at her ankles, her stockings, her skirt. She had lost all sense of direction, didn’t know where she was going. The only thing she did know was that she had to put distance, a lot of it, between herself and that dreadful stranger who was Steven.

  XIX

  “Todhunter, I have a feeling that there’s something here.”

  The Inspector and the mousy little detective were standing in the Hazard farmyard. They were alone. Seven days had passed since that incompleted scene on the wooded point of land thrusting out into the waters of Kokino, the scene that had terminated in a scream and a splash.

  It had been a time of unremitting effort on the part of more than fifty workers. Men had combed the floor of the lake in and about the point assiduously and with a complete lack of success. Eels, fish, tree stumps, rocks, debris of all sorts, had been dragged to the surface, but no body, no human throat from which that cry could have issued had uncovered itself.

  The currents in the vicinity of the cove were strong and the water was deep. It was possible that the body, if there was a body, still lay far down in some bottomless hole. In any case there was nothing further to be done.

  The Scotsman was dissatisfied. He repeated his statement, added, “We don’t know yet what happened on that Halloween night. The secret is here someplace.”

  Todhunter was his ace in the hole. If there was anything here in this isolated spot in the middle of the wooded hills, Todhunter would get at it finally.

  His eyes rested moodily on the big black Cadillac beyond the rickety white gate posts waiting to take him back to New York. Poison ivy wreathed a flaming mantle of scarlet in and out of the fence pickets and spread itself over the tawny grass below. Wind whipped the leaves. The weather had turned cold. McKee looked down at the small man beside him.

  He said, the backward thrust of his head taking in the silent and tenantless farmhouse, the leaden expanse of the steel-gray lake encircled by dark leafless trees, “You’ll be alone here.”

  “Except,” Todhunter murmured fondly, “for Jumbo,” and gave the rope a tug. The obese animal at the end of it grunted. McKee smiled. His smile wiped itself away.

  “I want you to keep your eyes open, but I also want you to watch your step. Unless I’m very much mistaken we’re up against an extremely quick-witted and daring brain.”

  The eyes of the two men met. They understood each other. No further words were necessary. The little detective stood where he was, watching the Inspector get into the Cadillac, watching the Cadillac round the turn and disappear from sight.

  As the car sped southward, McKee glanced at the hotel. Practically no guests there now; the St. Vrains, Euen Firth and Cristie Lansing had returned to New York the previous Monday. Cristie Lansing’s attempt at escape—he turned that over curiously in his mind. She was a clever girl. Only extreme urgency would have driven her to that ineffectual sortie. Cristie Lansing knew something, something she hadn’t so far revealed. He would go after her hard presently when he had cleared the decks of clutter. There were a lot of odds and ends to be disposed of.

  Mary Dodd, her niece, Kit Blaketon, Pat and Cliff Somers and Steve
n Hazard were also back in New York. Election day had come and gone. The good-looking, personable, intelligent young Assemblyman who had lied concerning his whereabouts close to midnight on Halloween, had been re-elected. The newspapers hadn’t unearthed the link between the Somers and the investigation into Sara Hazard’s death. McKee hadn’t said anything, there was nothing to say—yet. Crime and politics didn’t mix well and there was, so far, no conclusive proof that the smooth suave young politician had had any hand in the crash that sent the Hazard car plunging down into the East River.

  His mouth tightened. Pat Somers had been busy in the city pulling wires. The opposition to Sara Hazard’s exhumation had strengthened, if anything, during the week that had intervened since Halloween night and that scream on the point. The Dutchess County authorities still had the application under advisement. That could go on until doomsday. Unless it came through very shortly, reflected McKee as he lit a cigarette, he would put the screws on. He would have the Commissioner and the Mayor take it straight to the Governor. The body resting in the little cemetery in the hills had to be produced.

  He thought of a number of other things, of Mary Dodd and her devotion to her niece, Kit Blaketon, of Mary’s fondness for Steven, of Kit Blaketon’s peculiar behavior, of Margot St. Vrain’s imperturbable demeanor, a state of mind with strain and sleeplessness behind it, of Johnny St. Vrain’s smiling nonchalance that had iron in it, and of the playboy Firth whose vacuity covered a small but active and obstinate mentality.

  McKee put his hand into his pocket and took out the gold compact that had been found in the broken bushes at the top of the slope on the point. He turned it over and over in his fingers. It had belonged to Sara Hazard, had been identified by her husband. The other articles missing after her death, the wrist watch, the emerald bracelet, the fur coat and the clothing had not yet turned up.

  The Cadillac hit the main highway, gathered speed. The Scotsman looked at his watch. He was anxious to get back to the office. They were too far out yet to use the radio telephone or he would have given orders from there. He went on ratiocinating. Nothing so far on the absent Eva Prentice or her equally absent boy friend, George Loomis, oiler. But there was a vague, a very vague line that might lead them to the strangely evaporating Mrs. Thompson. Her quick flitting from the apartment on Vyse Avenue had been too instantaneous to be a coincidence. Detectives haunting steamship lines, railroad terminals and the airports, had isolated three departures from New York during the period under scrutiny.

  They had very little to go on, but they had established that three fair-haired dark-eyed women of about the age of the elusive Mrs. Thompson had left the city on the day following Margot St. Vrain’s visit to the Bronx. One woman had bought a ticket for Manila via Oakland and the China Clipper, one had flown to Mexico City and a third had embarked on a plane for Miami with passage booked from there on a southbound Clipper.

  No one of them was named Thompson—which meant nothing. Tracers had been put on all three. The Scotsman was anxious to find out whether there had been any return on any one of the women in question because he felt that back of all the surface facts, manifestations, there was movement, continued activity, that they hadn’t been able to tie to anyone so far. The quest for Mrs. Thompson might be a washout. The same went for the maid Eva and the boy friend. Both had to be pursued until they were resolved.

  That anonymous letter that had launched the entire investigation kept cropping up in his mind. Someone possessed of definite knowledge had sent it. Why hadn’t the sender come forward? It might be because he or she was in some way involved. But if so, why had the letter been sent at all? McKee felt that if he could unriddle that he would really be getting some place. His thoughts dwelt on Todhunter. If there was anything back there in that clearing in the woods the little detective would unearth it.

  Back in the leafless garden of the Hazard farmhouse the man McKee had left behind shook a finger at Jumbo and said menacingly, “Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me? Uprooting a bush—do you want to get us into trouble?”

  Jumbo wagged his tail. Todhunter firmed earth with the flat of the spade around the hydrangea that the dog had torn from its moorings in pursuit of a buried stone. He shook the bush gently to see that it was securely seated and replaced the spade in the tool house on the far side of the driveway. The old gray shed was crowded with implements. The detectives’ own paraphernalia lay in a heap in one corner, grappling irons, chains, nets.

  Todhunter went out. He snapped the padlock into place and consulted a piece of paper he took from his pocket. The paper was spotted with grease and smelled faintly of kerosene. It had contained his lunch of cheese and crackers. There was a name written on it. The name was George Benedict.

  The local storekeeper had given it to the little detective. George Benedict was Kokino’s oldest inhabitant, one of the ancients who knew everything about everything. Todhunter put the paper back in his pocket, whistled to Jumbo, got into his Ford and with the obese animal beside him, half on his lap and half on the seat, he drove up the valley to the north.

  He found George Benedict in a little frame cottage beyond an old church three miles from Kokino. Benedict answered a hail from the front yard. He was a tall, extremely thin man with very black hair, a small black beard, withered pink cheeks, the eyes and voice of a ten-year-old child. Todhunter had no difficulty in making him talk.

  “Bet your life I know that lake,” he said. “I been fishin’ in Kokino since I was old enough to spit. My daddy and my Uncle George whipped them waters before me.”

  The old man welcomed an audience, but Todhunter was anxious to get back to Kokino. He led the oldest inhabitant gently round to the particular part of the lake about which he wanted information.

  “Yes, sir,” Benedict said, “I know them pools down there round the Hazard point. Why I caught a pickerel once near them two tall pines, it was as big as” he sketched a miniature whale with waving arms—“and pickerel are hard to get, but I know where to look for ‘em. Beeman’s Cove and Hazard’s Point are the best places on the lake. Cause why? They both lay down on a lot of rock. There’s clefts in them rock walls on Hazard’s Point, deep ones, and the pickerel hang around in them. You got to wheedle ‘em out if you know how and you got the right bait. You take worms now—”

  Benedict was still taking worms when Todhunter started his engine and drove away. The old man’s surprised “Goodbye, glad you came,” floated after the little detective in the chilly dimness. The light was beginning to fade fast. Todhunter drove slowly back toward the lake. As he went he talked to the dog at his side.

  “Those pools around the point, Jumbo, and those rocks, fissures in the rocks. Deep cracks. The current’s pretty swift. If anything did fall into that water—take you, Jumbo, or me, if we got bashed up against those rocks, we might be jammed into a crevice of them so tight that no grapples and no dynamite would ever get us out.”

  Jumbo wagged his tail feebly and dozed off again. It was almost dark when Todhunter ran the Ford into a field to the north of the Hazard farmhouse. McKee had told him to keep his eyes open. Night was coming. It was always possible that something might turn up. No use advertising his presence. Arrange a shakedown in the hay in the barn for himself and Jumbo. Get a few hours sleep and early in the morning make a personal investigation of the rock formation beneath the point of land and then, if necessary, get more help.

  Todhunter climbed a stone wall meditatively and went through an orchard. On the right the Hazard farmhouse was dark, lightless, untenanted. On the left, the tool house loomed vaguely in the cold wind-swept darkness. Bushes swayed, leaves rustled and tree branches soughed up and down. There was no other noise, no indication of another human being within miles.

  Todhunter leaped a foot in the air and Jumbo growled at that sudden sharp slap somewhere in front. The next moment the little detective wiped perspiration from his face and grinned sheepishly. The wind had pulled the door of the tool shed open; it had slammed it s
hut.

  Todhunter stood still, handkerchief in hand; his eyes were suddenly bright. When he left he had locked the door of the tool shed behind him. Someone had opened it since. He walked forward. He was right. The staple that fastened the lock had been pulled out of the flimsy wood.

  Todhunter eased the door from its frame gently. He stuck his torchlight inside. No human being there. He followed the light in and stood in the middle of the floor looking around. He didn’t miss it at first and then he did and a little sharp tingle ran down his spine.

  The wind cried. The lock that had been wrenched from its moorings tapped lightly on the closed door. Jumbo whimpered. Todhunter didn’t move. He kept on looking at the empty space between the end of a grappling iron and a rake. Just before going out of the shed he had replaced the spade there. The spade wasn’t there now, it was gone.

  XX

  The last vestiges of color were gone from the west. Complete darkness had come. A few stars prickled the night sky. They shed very little light. The moon would be up later but that wouldn’t be for some time.

  Todhunter circled the Hazard farmhouse cautiously, trying windows and doors. Jumbo trotted silently at his heels. The little detective found the car on the other side of the house. It was long and low and black. He looked at it solemnly, took out a note book and ran over a list of numbers. The car was Pat Somers’.

  The house itself was tightly locked. There wasn’t a glimmer of light anywhere. Todhunter tried the front door. It didn’t budge. Yet someone had entered or left the house, else why was the black sedan drawn up near the front steps? Using his hands as a shield he played diminished light from a small torch over the steps. There were faint footprints on the flags at the bottom. They might be his own. He spoke to Jumbo in a whisper, made a wider cast.

  A footprint that definitely wasn’t his marked thick leaf mold thirty feet to the south near the entrance to a path. Todhunter struck along this path. It was not the one that he had taken in pursuit of Steven Hazard on Halloween, it was midway between the water and the dirt road and led to the inner end of the long point thrusting out into the waters of the lake.