Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “We never touched that ice box,” Standish said.

  He spoke like a man in a dream. He took a slow step, grasped the handle of the heavy metal door before him, and then said in a voice that changed swiftly, hideously:

  “Don’t look, Mrs. Storm!”

  But I had looked. As the catch of the door was unloosed, pressure from behind forced it forward and Franklyn Elliott’s body sagged outward and to the floor.

  The lawyer had been shot four days earlier. He had been shot through the back and had died instantly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Triple Murderer

  The car in which Standish and Hardisty had driven to the Coatesnash estate was parked beneath the porte-cochere of Hilltop House. Battling the storm, Standish carried me there. Hardisty, terrified at his precipitation into tragedy, remained in charge of Franklyn Elliott’s body. I can still recall his frightened protestations, the last glimpse of his pale face peering after us. Of the wild ride down the hill I recall nothing whatever.

  Jack met us at the door of the cottage, took one look at me and without a word or question lifted me into his arms and bundled me off to bed. Standish saw me safely settled, and then left at once.

  I remember and cherish his parting pat on my arm, his admonition that I wasn’t in any way to blame myself. There was no reference to my account of having seen Franklyn Elliott flee from the Lodge, no suggestion that a wiser, less prejudiced witness might have realized that a glimpse of a man’s car is not a glimpse of the man himself. The truth—the truth I hadn’t grasped four days before—at least in part was clear. Franklyn Elliott, his motives still obscured in mystery, had gone to the Lodge and had there surprised, red-handed, the murderer of Silas Elkins.

  No other conclusion was possible. Elliott’s movements on that sunlit afternoon were at last apparent. As was customary with all of us, the lawyer had left his car in the driveway up the hill and walked down to the Lodge on foot. He had telephoned Silas. He was expected; he doubtless knocked at the door and then pushed in. He must have seen—in that first, appalled moment of entrance—far too much. He must have seen a murderer stooping over a blood-filmed pail of water, swabbing with a wet towel at crimson stains. Probably he cried out, probably he turned to run. At any rate he paid for his arrival there with his life.

  Whatever disposition the killer had intended to make of Elliott’s body—we believe now that he planned that the lawyer’s body would be found in his abandoned car—was upset by my advent on the scene. There was no time for anything then. No time to finish washing the walls and floors of the incarnadined living room, no time to sweep up the broken crockery, barely time in which to lift Elliott’s body and start with it through the kitchen toward the back path which led to safety and the yellow car.

  The murderer’s situation was desperate. To the original murder of Hiram Darnley there had been added two others—the murder of Silas, who was on the point of disclosing the whole murky dark conspiracy, and then, swiftly following, the murder of the New York lawyer who had opened a door, and in so doing had signed his own death warrant.

  When the killer set foot on the back porch I must have been very close to the Lodge. My approach on the front path could be clearly seen from that porch. And Franklyn Elliott was a heavy man. The whole murderous structure was about to collapse. Burdened with Elliott’s body, the killer could never reach the car or make good an escape. The ice box, swept free of its trays, offered a solution. Here again chance entered into the case, and played into the killer’s hands. Elliott’s absence, coupled with the accident that no one had happened to investigate that open back porch, had deceived us utterly. We had believed, all of us except Annabelle Bayne, that Franklyn Elliott himself was our murderer.

  There were blank spots in the picture—questions which even the finding of Elliott’s body did not answer for us. Elliott’s own behavior remained inexplicable. We did not know why he had broken into the cottage, what he had discovered which had sent him to his death at the Lodge, or why he had failed to share his information with the police. Least of all did we understand Annabelle Bayne. She had been terrified for her lover’s safety; during those four days of his disappearance she must have envisioned just such an end as he had met, yet she, too, had refused to talk with the police.

  I lay on my bed as I thought of these things. I drank the hot milk which Jack brought me, obediently swallowing the sedative he produced from the medicine chest.

  “Try not to think, dear,” he said to me once. “Try to sleep.”

  In my condition sleep was an impossibility. Outside, the storm had taken on renewed life, as if further to banish sleep. A whirlwind was loose in the world that night. Everything that could blow or rattle or shriek was in motion. The noise of the thunder was deafening and each clap was followed by a flash of lightning which turned the bedroom a fierce and vivid blue. Jack stayed close beside me.

  At exactly nine o’clock every light in the house went out. A bad storm almost always resulted in an abrupt and prolonged cessation of our electric power. I knew by previous experiences that there would be no more electricity until morning, and I began to weep. Jack tried to comfort me, then handed me the flashlight and went off to search for candles. The bedroom floor slanted as floors slant in most old houses, and I can recall now the moment when the highboy rolled majestically from one corner to the other. That was just as Jack returned with the candles, and I responded with a fit of violent hysterics.

  Eventually Jack quieted me, and for a long time sat beside the bed, saying an occasional soothing word, holding my hand in his. After a while the sedative commenced to work. I was drowsy when the telephone rang, and Jack gently disengaged his hand to step into the other room. When he came back a few minutes later, I was already half asleep, my brain almost wholly stupefied. I didn’t at once take in the information that Annabelle Bayne was missing.

  “She must be home,” I said stupidly. “She started there hours ago-

  “She didn’t go home. That was Standish calling.” Jack stepped closer to the bed. “I hate like hell to bother you, Lola, but she’s got to be found. Immediately. She—she may be in deadly danger. You went after her when the storm broke. Did you notice which direction her car was headed?”

  “I didn’t see the car at all.” I roused to a vague, drug-laden surprise. “And I remember looking toward the road. She made a fast getaway.”

  Jack was regarding me oddly. “I believe,” he said slowly, “that Annabelle came here on foot. I let her in this afternoon, and I’m almost sure her car wasn’t in the drive then. She couldn’t have walked from far; she must have left her car parked somewhere close. If we know where she left the car, and why she left it.

  I was beyond the point of mental activity, beyond the point of anxiety or wonder. I was indeed only fretfully conscious that Jack had again quit the room to telephone to Standish. Of the long worried conversation which took place between them I had no knowledge. I slept the heavy, unrefreshing sleep of the drugged…

  I woke suddenly. The bedside candle was flickering, and the room was filled with a kind of noiseless bustle. Everything seemed strangely still. The tumult outside had lessened, although the rain poured steadily, softly down and dripped through a window Jack had been unable to force entirely shut. Reuben was curled beside me, his nose cold on my shoulder. I was sleepily pushing him away when I became aware of the sound which had aroused me.

  A low, monotonous buzzing which ceased even as I identified it. The burglar alarm!

  “Jack,” I whispered I reached for his hand, sat up. I knew then that he had gone. He had taken with him the revolver he kept beneath the pillow.

  The night stands forth in my memory as a phantasmagoria of confusion and ascending horror. I remember chiefly the small, agonizing details. I recall that I seized the candle, dropped it and in anguish saw the light plunge out. I groped for matches, found none, stumbled over Reuben on my way toward the door.

  In the living room I discov
ered a box of matches, but before I had lighted the candle an uproar commenced in the cellar. Something went over with a terrific crash. I heard three shots fired in rapid succession, heard the shatter of glass, the thud of a heavier object. It sounded exactly as though a man had run amuck; but I knew there were at least two persons in the cellar and that one of them was Jack.

  How I got down the stairs I can’t explain, any more than I can explain why I didn’t fall headlong in my haste. Somewhere en route I lighted the candle, and its yellow, unsteady rays illumined the devastated cellar. The window over the coal had been jimmied, and lumps of coal were strewn wildly about. A dresser lay on its side; the ash can was overturned, and beside it lay a man’s dark felt hat. The signs of furious combat were present, but there was no one in the place. Where Jack had gone was plain enough. The cellar door stood open and rain dashed in.

  I rushed outside. Instantly my candle was doused and with it my sense of direction vanished. I was lost utterly in my own back yard. The wind whipped my night clothes and drowned out the sound of my voice. I rushed blindly toward what I thought was the road. I stumbled; someone seized me, and I screamed like a maniac.

  Jack’s voice said, “Lola! That you?”

  He was kneeling in the yard, and as I remember it he rose, shook me savagely and said, “Stop screaming! Stop it, I say. You’ve got to help me get her inside.”

  “Her? Who?”

  “Annabelle Bayne. I’m afraid she’s badly hurt.”

  I was only then aware of the crumpled figure lying in the sodden grass. Jack again stooped. “She’s coming around, I think. Let’s get going.” He lifted the unconscious woman into his arms, bade me hang on to him, and through the pouring rain guided us back into the cellar. I was moving like an automaton. I had no idea what had happened, and even after Jack had picked up from the floor a fallen flashlight and directed it on Annabelle Bayne’s pale face and the ugly stain on her shoulder, I supposed she had attempted to murder him.

  I said, “Are you all right? I heard her shooting at you.”

  “Shooting at me!” Jack swept a litter of objects from a broken couch and laid Annabelle there. “She wasn’t shooting at me, Lola. As it happens, she saved my life. Here, you chafe her hands—I’ll go upstairs for whisky.”

  Hardly breathing, Annabelle Bayne lay white and motionless, more defenseless than I had ever seen her. I removed the small black hat which still clung tightly to her head, straightened out her clothing, unloosed her soaked and blood-stained blouse. She had been shot through the shoulder, and the wound was slowly bleeding. I tried to staunch it.

  Jack returned with whisky and a pile of blankets. “How’s she doing now? Hold up the flashlight, will you? I want to see that shoulder.” He leaned over the couch. “By God, it doesn’t look serious. I believe she’s only fainted.”

  As if to verify his quick, intense relief, Annabelle stirred, shuddered, opened her eyes. She looked blankly at us—at me with the flashlight in my hand, at Jack who held out a glass of whisky to her.

  Jack said, “Get that down.”

  She accepted the glass obediently, drank, shuddered again, half rose only to sink back again. She whispered. “I remember now. I had the killer trapped when you came crashing down the stairs. What happened? Did he get away?”

  “Clean,” Jack said. “I don’t know yet who he was. Do you?”

  She said, “No.”

  Her dark, questing eyes moved involuntarily to the jimmied window and the heap of coal beneath it. I turned the flashlight. I saw then what I had not seen before. Someone had shoveled deep into the coal, tossed aside a great pile, and a spade stood upright in a hole which tunneled the dirt floor beneath.

  “I suppose,” said Annabelle, “the bag went with him.”

  “What bag?” I asked.

  No one answered. Jack had darted past the heaped up coal and seized the spade. Like a woman in a dream, I watched him begin to dig. Dirt flew helter-skelter. The hole deepened with a swiftness which announced that the hard-packed earth had been previously disturbed. Suddenly the spade met resistance, thudded, stuck. Jack dropped to his knees and commenced clawing with his hands.

  “It’s here!” he cried to Annabelle Bayne.

  From the excavation he hauled forth a leather Gladstone traveling bag, its handle moist and clamp, but its hardware bright, unrusted, almost new. The Gladstone bag was initialed, the gilt was only slightly discolored and the letters showed plainly. F. E. I repeated the letters to myself a second time before I comprehended their significance. F. E.

  I said bewilderedly, “That’s Franklyn Elliott’s bag.”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “Elliott buried it in the cellar a week ago. Don’t you understand, Lola? That’s why he broke into the cottage. To leave the bag.” Jack glanced at Annabelle. “Did he tell you? Was he instructed to bury it in our cellar?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  Those two—Jack and Annabelle Bayne—shared a comprehension in which I had no part. I stared at them and waited. Jack slowly unfastened the catches of the Gladstone bag and pulled back the lid. Money cascaded to the floor. Ten, twenty, fifty-dollar bills—$108,000 in bills—the identical amount which Hiram Darnley had carried and concealed in a similar bag. Jack kicked at the fluttering currency.

  He said in a tired way, “The only thing that’s left to do at this point is to call the police. And—” he tried to smile at Annabelle—“you’ll need Dr. Rand’s attentions.”

  “The doctor,” said Annabelle, “can wait. I’m not in pain. As for the police, what can they do now?”

  I said loudly, “You two—both of you—know something I don’t know. I think I’m going crazy. What’s the money for? Why did Elliott hide it here?”

  “The money,” Jack said, “was raised for ransom. First Hiram Darnley raised and attempted to pay it over. The conspiracy went haywire and he was murdered. Then Elliott was contacted and he too…”

  Jack broke off.

  “Go on,” said Annabelle in a hard, contained voice. Her eyes were dry, direct, steady. “I know Frank’s dead. I’ve known it all along, really, but I wouldn’t—I couldn’t believe it until—until this afternoon.” Tears welled up in the brilliant eyes, but she stubbornly restrained their fall. “I’ve been down here since afternoon. I didn’t leave your place at all. I hoped—never mind what I hoped. Anyhow I heard what went on upstairs.”

  She said nothing of the terrible vigil spent crouched in the jelly closet while the storm raged outside, nothing of the thoughts and sensations which crowded in her mind and heart when she learned that her lover had been brutally done to death. Nor did we.

  “Let’s move upstairs,” Jack said at last. “Lola and I can carry you.” He sighed. “It’s such a ghastly mess. Why, in God’s name, didn’t Elliott go to the police?”

  “Because he was afraid they’d kill her. After Darnley’s murder, he couldn’t take the risk. He was determined to get her back alive.”

  “Get who back alive?” I said.

  “Luella Coatesnash.”

  I gasped. “But Mrs. Coatesnash is dead. She killed herself in Paris.”

  “She may be dead,” said Annabelle, “but she didn’t kill herself in Paris. She never went there.”

  Jack interrupted. “Mrs. Coatesnash was kidnapped, Lola, kidnapped on the night the Burgoyne sailed. Another woman who resembled her in coloring and build sailed instead, used Mrs. Coatesnash’s passport, went to a grimy little hotel where the old lady wasn’t known…”

  “Laura Twining!”

  “Who else? Laura impersonated Mrs. Coatesnash till the going got too thick, then killed herself. Silas, who was also implicated, tried to confess his own part in the conspiracy and was murdered for his pains. Only the killer—the third person in the plot and the one real criminal—gets off scot-free.”

  Annabelle beat one clenched hand upon her knee. “It’s too late now,” she said. “We’ve muffed it. I’m tough, but I hate to think of that poor old woman, if she isn
’t dead already. Can’t you see her? Waiting, watching, hoping… That’s where the killer’s gone, of course. To finish off Luella. There’ll be no third attempt to collect a ransom.”

  A chair crashed to the cellar floor. Jack knocked it over in his wild rush toward the door. “I know where Mrs. Coatesnash is! Where she’s been held since February!”

  He ran into the yard. I reached him as he leaped into the car, managed to climb in with him. The rain was over, but the driveway was like a miniature ocean. Splashing water in torrents, we raced to the road, turned, sped around the hill and roared into the circular drive before Hilltop House.

  “She’s inside!” Jack cried. “She’s got to be! It all fits—the lights, Silas, Laura’s baggage—everything!” He jumped from the car. “You stay here. Lola.”

  I alighted at once, and so great was his nervous tension that he didn’t notice. When I said, “Have you got your gun?” he snapped at me, “Naturally.”

  A dozen steps carried us to the house. The porch was pitch black, carpeted with dead, soaked leaves, unpleasant underfoot. Jack preceded me lightly, soundlessly to the great front door. Just how he planned to force an entrance I don’t know. I remember my own hysterical suggestion that we should have brought an ax.

  “For God’s sake, be quiet!”

  Jack struck a match and in the flickering illumination, with a spurt of renewed terror, I saw that the front door was wide open. What was left of it. The set-in oval glass was cracked, and a splintered panel and shattered lock showed evidences of violent assault. A pool of rain water glistened from the foyer. I knew then that the kidnapper was in the house or had been there, and it seemed impossible that Luella Coatesnash should be alive.

  Jack was already inside, and starting up the stairs. I went after him. The vaulted hallway was inky black, and quiet as the grave. It was not until we gained the second floor that someone moved on the floor above. Simultaneously I smelled smoke.

  Jack caught my wrist in a vise-like grip. “He’s set fire to the house.”