“Interested parties, Mr. Storm, seldom approve of police methods in a criminal investigation. Speaking candidly, I’m far from satisfied with the story you’ve told tonight. Far from satisfied.”
On that note, abruptly, Standish decided to call it a day.
Allowing for possible delays, an answer to his cable could not be expected before noon on Saturday. He warned us to anticipate further questioning, stretched and rose.
“We seem to be at a temporary stalemate. A great deal depends on the cable I receive tomorrow. Mrs. Coatesnash may be able to throw some light on the situation.”
At his apparent lack of conviction my heart sank. Jack got stiffly to his feet. The small room which I had virtually memorized during the hours we sat and talked in circles was rank with the odor of dead smoke. The fire flickered low, expired. Minnie Gray yawned, gathered her notebooks, dropped into a handbag those neat, accurate, damning reports, and slipped away. Outside a wagon clattered across the cobblestones. Milk bottles clinked and a sleepy driver shouted at his horse.
I reached for my coat. Standish intervened. “You must put up with us a little longer, Mrs. Storm.”
I paused, confused. Jack laid down his hat, turned slowly. “Then we aren’t going home? Is that what you mean? Are we under arrest?”
The police chief was falsely jovial. “We have to make sure you two will stick around. So far you are the backbone of our case!”
He made a phone call. In silent sympathy Dr. Rand offered Jack his whisky flask and took a drink himself. The three policemen declined, though I thought Harkway looked rather wistful. As the wait lengthened, he stepped out to the hotdog wagon and brought back greasy paper bags. A constrained group, we were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches when old Judge Calkins waddled in. He was a portly gentleman with a prejudice against Italians, Middle Europeans, and New Yorkers. He had been summoned from bed and was eager to return to it. He decided at once that Jack and I should be held as material witnesses, and promptly set a prohibitive bond to guarantee that we would remain in Crockford. We couldn’t have raised a quarter of the sum, and I was wondering where I was to lay my head that night when Dr. Rand unexpectedly came to our aid.
“That figure is ridiculous,” he informed the judge, “but I think these kids are unlucky and honest. I’ll go bail for them.”
“With what?”
“With my expensive, well-appointed and completely modern house. I exclude my library, of course.”
The judge and the doctor were friends. They argued amiably over the value of the house, which the judge insisted was papered with mortgages, and the upshot of this bickering was that Jack and I went free. I guessed that Standish wasn’t pleased by the physician’s kindly interference; the pompous little Blair plainly was not; and even Harkway seemed doubtful.
Frowning then, Standish added a few last instructions. We were to go straight to the cottage; we were to remain there, awaiting a call from headquarters; we were not to discuss the case with outsiders. The policemen went into a huddle, and Jack and I departed. Dr. Rand, who accompanied us to the street, wouldn’t listen to our fervent thanks.
“I was glad to help out. If your conscience is clear—and I think it is—you have nothing to worry about.”
“Then we won’t worry.”
“That house,” said the physician meditatively, “is all I own in the world. I’ve lived there a long time and it suits me perfectly.”
He was gone. Jack and I looked at each other. The village was dead as Pompeii, the stores closed and barred, the echoing sidewalks empty. The street lights, all six of them, had glimmered out at midnight. I felt light-headed from strain and exhaustion. Jack took my arm.
“Standish didn’t believe a single word I said.”
“Anyhow we’re not in jail. I wonder if both of us could have wedged into it. I could have kissed the doctor.”
“It’s preposterous,” said Jack bitterly, “we should need bail. Standish knows damn well we won’t light out. Where have we got to go?”
“New York.”
“New York, hell! We would be arrested at the first station. That’s exactly the sort of break they’re waiting for. That bag of money looked bad. Very bad. It provided a motive.”
“A motive for whom?” My voice shrilled. “For you? It’s nonsense to suppose you would murder a man you didn’t know for money you didn’t know he had!”
“Where’s proof I didn’t know him? Where’s proof I didn’t know he had the money?”
Our car detained by the police, was to be examined for fingerprints and searched for further evidence. We walked to Crockford garage to hire a taxi. The news of the murder had preceded us. Two sleepy-eyed drivers drifted out of the office to stare. Al Loomis, owner of the three taxis that served the village, personally drove us to the cottage.
It was after two o’clock when we reached home. The rain was long since over. A thin, clear breeze stirred the tree tops, and the rank meadow grass bent sibilantly before it. A high moon shone whitely upon the open field beyond the cottage, over a stone fence to the left, and etched in sharp relief the black woods that separated us from the next house on the road. Throughout the dreadful evening my mind had been pulling toward this spot. As I alighted to experience the impact of deep, country silence I regretted that we had not stayed in town. Dark and quiet, forlorn and lonely, our home had never seemed so alien, or less a place of comfort and of rest. Until the taxi disappeared, Jack and I stood in the driveway, watching. Then, “Let’s not talk tonight,” said he. “I’m dead.”
I shivered, loath to proceed. “I wish we had left the lights burning.”
Jack was tired and querulous. “We’re home, Lola. You’ve been a good girl. Try not to go to pieces now.”
He guided me across the muddy drive, past the well to the kitchen door. Like most country people, except on rare occasions, we used the back entrance. Jack produced his key, preceded me into the house. I stepped reluctantly into the inky blackness, paused and waited for him to find the light. Suddenly from the darkness came the sound of a collision followed by a cry of rage and pain.
“What was it, Jack?”
“That damned cellar door just knocked me cuckoo.” Immediately he switched on the light, glared at the door which led to the cellar, transferred the glare to me.
“You should know better than to leave it open.”
“I didn’t leave it open, Jack.”
Our nerves were on the ragged edge. In the yard I had wanted sympathy and had received none. Now I myself declined to offer solace. Promptly we found ourselves engaged in a pointless, bitter, matrimonial wrangle.
“You left the door open, Lola, as you habitually do. There’s no sense denying it. You went down to bank the furnace.”
“I closed the door when I came up. I remember closing it. You must have gone down later on.”
“I haven’t been in the cellar since morning.”
“You must have been.”
“I say I wasn’t!”
Kicking shut the disputed door, Jack stamped off, nursing his head and muttering darkly. When I entered the bedroom, he was already half undressed. Without speaking further, he climbed into bed. A few minutes later I joined him, put a timid hand on his averted shoulder.
“Jack, I’m positive I closed the door.”
“You win, dear. You closed it, and the little people opened it.”
“I’m serious, Jack. Really serious. Are you certain you didn’t go to the cellar after I did?”
“Is this another cross-examination? I’ve said repeatedly I was certain.”
“Then how did the door get open?”
“For God’s sake, Lola, let me get some sleep.”
Almost at once I heard his heavy breathing. Moonlight poured into the bedroom; the night was quiet. I desperately wanted to sleep, but I was in that condition of exhaustion when sleep becomes impossible. I turned and turned again, unable even to close my eyes. My nerves were taut, my senses preternaturally
acute. I felt a thin chill breeze although the window curtain stood motionless; I smelled the salt of the Sound and the damp, earthy odor of the fields; I heard the subdued rustle of mice in the attic.
I couldn’t rid my mind of that door. Again and again I went over my trip to the cellar. Again and again I saw myself shutting the door. My certainty became an obsession. I longed to compel Jack to admit he had been mistaken.
“Jack,” I whispered. “Jack.”
His heavy breathing continued unabated. I assumed another position, tossed and rolled. My eyes wandered, and in wakeful desperation I studied the bedroom doors. Three doors, one to the bathroom, one to the living room, one to a shallow clothes closet. I examined the closet door. Jack’s necktie hung around the knob, and the shadow of knob and necktie were weirdly printed upon the floor. Gradually my fixed gaze grew hypnotic. My lids were drooping shut when suddenly I felt a wave of cold surprise. The shadow on the floor was moving. I stared. Slowly but definitely the shadow advanced across the floor and toward the bed.
For a moment I lay rigid. My heart hammered, perspiration chilled my forehead and I seemed frozen to the bed. I looked again at the shadow, then raised my eyes to the closet door. Very quietly the door was opening out into the bedroom.
I shrieked.
The door flew open. A man with a blurred, black face rushed from the closet, across the bedroom into the living room. Jack flung back the covers, sat up.
“What was it?”
“Someone in the closet—a Negro.”
The kitchen door banged. Instantly Jack was out of bed and out of the bedroom. A second time the door banged. Clad only in a thin nightgown, I, too somehow got outside and into the yard.
Two figures were running through the moonlight. The man who had hidden in the closet was far in advance, half way across the stubble field beyond the fence. He ran like an animal, crouched low, arms swinging. Hampered by a late start and bare feet. Jack was steadily losing ground. As I gained the fence, the black-faced man plunged into the woods at the edge of the field, disappeared. Jack put on a fresh burst of speed.
“Come back,” I screamed.
Jack didn’t turn or hesitate, but darted on and out of sight. This bit of foolhardiness, typical of him, can make me angry now. As I saw him vanish across that empty moonlit field I felt a terror such as I had never known before. I clambered over the fence, reversed myself, and shot back into the cottage, thus, as Jack admitted later, exhibiting a higher degree of intelligence than he had shown. I reached the telephone. I retained sufficient wit to realize that Standish was six miles away, and when a sleepy operator finally answered, I put in a call for Silas. He answered at the second ring, but he sounded sleepy and his questions were intolerably slow and stupid. Frantic, I demanded that he come at once.
“Directly I get some clothes on, Mrs. Storm.”
The Lodge was more than half a mile distant. Reminded of my own apparel, I snatched up a bathrobe and slippers, hesitated long enough to try the police station—I got no response there or at Standish’s home—then ran outside into the stubble field, loudly calling Jack and watching for Silas. I had hoped he would take the short cut through the pasture. His bobbing lantern a few minutes later approached by the road.
Hatless, coatless, muttering to himself, he was hurrying. As he scrambled through the barbed-wire fence, and as I dragged him toward the woods, I poured forth a confused, incoherent story.
“Who was in the closet?”
“I don’t know. It was a Negro.”
“There aren’t many Negroes around Crockford.”
“I don’t care who was in the closet,” I cried, maddened by his stupidity. “I don’t care how many Negroes are in Crockford. I want to find Jack. You’ve got to help, me.”
At this point it developed that Silas was unwilling to enter the woods. He proposed returning to the Lodge to get his dog. I plunged in alone, and I suppose his conscience pricked him, for he followed, though he stuck close beside me. Together we started beating the bush, calling, calling. I had a flashlight. Silas, who had prudently armed himself with a stout stick, swung his lantern to and fro. Giant circles danced eerily through the tangled underbrush. Twigs crackled, the wind sighed overhead, a rabbit fled past like a shadow. Silas and I grabbed each other’s hands in mutual terror.
Five minutes later the hired man stumbled across a pair of outthrust feet. Bleeding and senseless, Jack had been roughly shoved into a clump of briars. We drew him into the open.
I pushed Silas aside—he was near collapse—and knelt upon the ground. Blood smeared Jack’s cheek and forehead; he lay deathly white and still. He didn’t hear me when I called his name.
CHAPTER SIX
The Hell Hole
Between us, Silas and I carried Jack into the cottage and laid him upon the bed. Although he had not stirred during the journey, his pallor was less intense. As I wrapped a comforter about his feet and adjusted a pillow beneath his head, he moved a little and groaned deeply, wearily. I sent Silas to heat a kettle of water. When he brought in the steaming kettle I began to bathe Jack’s forehead.
“Well,” said Silas almost cheerfully, “we got him back all right.”
“So we did,” I said.
He was impervious to irony. He shambled to the closet, peered curiously inside and muttered that our intruder had chosen a strange hiding place—a fact which had earlier occurred to me. Just then, however, I could not appreciate the hired man’s speculations. My tone was short.
“Go and phone for Dr. Rand.”
I continued my ministrations. The savage head wound, clotted with blood, matted with blond hair, abruptly thrust from my mind a certain tentative theory. Until then I had thought that, running as he was, headlong, into the dense blackness of the woods, Jack might have crashed into a tree and knocked himself unconscious. This wound was the result not of accident, but of a singularly brutal attack.
Silas returned to report that Dr. Rand would come at once. We were to put ice on Jack’s head and a hot-water bottle at his feet. We were to do nothing else until the physician reached the cottage.
“He said quiet was the best medicine.”
Shortly afterward Jack opened his eyes. Too sick and nauseated to discuss what had happened in the woods, he was sufficiently himself to protest against a doctor.
“I’ll be o.k. in the morning.”
Following his prediction, he was again violently nauseated. Silas promptly suggested that the patient rise from bed to walk backward across the room. This remedy was culled from Mrs. Coatesnash’s store, and according to Silas, had been effective in the case of a young relative who had tumbled from a haymow.
“You can lean on me, Mr. Storm, if you feel sickish. I promise it’s a sure cure. With my own eyes I saw it work with little Willie. Mrs. Coatesnash swears it saved his life.”
Jack decided to remain where he was.
Dr. Rand had assimilated his quota of excitement for one evening. He arrived at the cottage, disposed to make light of Jack’s injuries. Silas’s telephone report had been garbled and uninformative; furthermore, Jack was shakily sitting up.
The physician jovially approached the bed. “What’s this I hear about your chasing bandits in the woods? Don’t you know enough to carry a flashlight?”
Immediately he commenced the examination his face sobered. He asked Jack many questions. He had him shake his head. “Do you feel any pain?”
“Lord, yes.”
“Is it concussion?” I asked quietly.
“I think not.” Dr. Rand looked at Jack. “You’re a lucky young man. That’s a nasty wound. You missed a bad injury by a very narrow margin.”
“I think myself I missed death by a narrow margin.”
The statement went uncontradicted. Dr. Rand turned, gave me a few instructions and ordered Jack to report the next day for an X-ray. Just to be sure. Then snapping shut his bag, he paused hesitantly.
“Exactly what did happen? I’m curious.”
�
��I was running in the woods, running hard. I stopped to listen. Someone hit me.”
“From behind?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t see what it was?”
“No.”
Silas put in his two cent’s worth. “Mrs. Storm said it was a Negro. That don’t seem likely to me. Only three Negroes live in Crockford and they’re respectable folks.”
Dr. Rand turned sharply to Jack. “I thought you didn’t see who it was.”
“Lola thinks,” Jack replied, “it was a Negro.”
The remark was oddly framed; Jack’s glance was odd. I knew him better than the others; I realized he was holding something back. The physician addressed me.
“You saw the man?”
“When he came out of the closet. I glimpsed his black face as he rushed through the bedroom.”
Silence fell. Clear in the minds of three of us rose a scene on the streets of Crockford; a noisy, babbling crowd, a parked automobile, a rigid, upright body sitting in the rumble seat. We had, that night, played a part in one murder. Within nine hours of the murder this attack had occurred. Dr. Rand’s eyes traveled again to Jack’s wound.
“It runs through my mind that I did you a poor favor tonight. Apparently you’d have been better of if you had stayed—downtown.” He paused. “Of course, it’s possible there is no connection.”
Silas was baffled by the trend of the conversation. He interposed a quick, inquisitive question. “Connection, doctor? What are you talking about?”
“Please don’t interrupt, Silas.” To the physician Jack said, “How could there be a connection? No one wants to kill me.”
“Make no mistake! Someone tried to kill you.”
When I accompanied Dr. Rand to the door I asked him how he could be so positive. “After all, Jack has no enemies.”
“He has one deadly enemy. Whatever you may imagine, your husband was not the victim of an unpremeditated attack. His assailant didn’t strike with a stone or a branch torn from one of the near-by trees, as you may suppose. He struck with a heavy, blunt, metal weapon.”
Death in the Back Seat Page 6
