by Rufus King
“It’s about Ludwig,” Estelle said. “I see no reason for not saying this. He deserves no consideration such as the rules of hospitality, and certainly no sympathy. You must understand that, Ann?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I thought about Alice’s death a good deal during the years while I lived in Paris and finally came to the conclusion that it was Ludwig who had killed her. Time and distance had given me a fresh perspective. During that dreadful period of the trial we were all too intense, too close to the tragedy to see things clearly. I told Justin it was Ludwig when I returned, and I feel I convinced him.”
“But why, Estelle?”
“Because Ludwig was always so terribly careful of his health. The slightest scratch, and on went iodine. A touch of a cold or a sore throat, and he reeked of gargles. So many athletes and men with perfect physiques are that way. Don’t you agree with me, Sergeant Hurlstone?”
“I do. Skip the perfect physique part and I’m that way myself.”
“Well, one perfectly grim winter’s day in Paris I suddenly thought how odd it was that Ludwig should have stayed out for so long a time that afternoon in the storm.”
“I’ve also thought about that wet-clothes alibi,” Ann said.
“My dear, when I remembered Ludwig’s dread of colds, and the fact that he was supposed to have been out in that torrential downpour for over two hours, the entire thing became obvious. He hadn’t been out at all. He simply said he was going out, but he never did go out until after he had killed Alice. Then he just ran out of doors for a minute or two and got soaking wet.”
“Why would Ludwig have said a thing like that?”
“That he was going to go out into the storm? Sheer bravado. Ludwig started the word exhibitionism, I think. Everyone else was to be indoors all coddled and cozy while he was outside being rugged.”
“Did he do that sort of thing to impress Alice?”
“Mostly so, yes. Also, it pleased him to show the other men up as weaklings. Especially when he had been drinking. Ludwig is pretty drastic, dear, when he drinks too much. I was rather worried this evening that he might have been starting in on one of his tears. Of course the other men always took it most good-naturedly, and that only spurred him on.”
“How did Alice take it?”
“I thought about that in Paris too. I wondered whether Alice might have laughed.”
“That’s too farfetched, Estelle.”
“It does seem so, doesn’t it? But then you didn’t know Ludwig.”
“There is nothing farfetched about any motive,” Sergeant Hurlstone said. “A woman on a farm south of here killed a neighbor over a mail-order teapot.”
“But seriously, Estelle,” Ann said, “you can’t think that Ludwig killed Alice just because she laughed at him?”
“No, not directly, but a small spark can set off a vast explosion of dynamite. I do claim that a laugh from Alice could easily have been such a spark, and Ludwig had drunk so much both before and during luncheon that no one could tell how he would take things. You must remember that Ludwig was passionately in love with Alice, and I honestly believe that this love was a torture to him. You haven’t seen the music room, have you?”
“No.”
“Alice went there shortly after Ludwig had announced to all of us his intention of climbing South Knoll. As it came to me in Paris, I saw Ludwig coming into the music room wearing the same clothes he had worn at luncheon and their being bone dry. Even a raincoat couldn’t have checked that torrent from sopping them. I saw many variations of the scene between Ludwig and Alice, torture and frustration and hopelessness on Ludwig’s part, and Alice’s helpless laughter. I saw her laughter change into outraged repudiation and scorn and all of Ludwig’s hot emotions churning into an idiot rage. And at the end I always saw Ludwig seize the dagger from the case and kill Alice.”
Estelle stood up. She said that this time she would disturb them no further. She said good night and left them quickly. She closed the door.
“What do you think of it?” Ann asked.
Sergeant Hurlstone remained standing. He placed the cat on the seat of the chair.
“I think it’s good,” he said, “so far as it goes. She forgot the key to the whole thing: the chow dog, Chin.”
Sergeant Hurlstone left her. He toured the bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, and then came back.
“Drink tap water when you’re thirsty,” he said. “Go to bed now.”
Ann took a parting look from the bedroom doorway. He had made a beeline for the Adam desk.
CHAPTER XXVI
It was a comfort to think of Sergeant Hurlstone so near by in the living room, sitting at Alice’s desk, as she was now seated before Alice’s dressing table. Ann felt she would sleep. A sound, healthy yawn overtook her.
Usually she read for a while after getting into bed, but tonight she did not do so. She turned out the bed lamp, and the room was momentarily sable until a luster from the clearing night sky sifted through it.
She lay with her eyes open in this shadowy darkness, too obsessed, after all, to sleep. What had it got her, this sudden transition from average unimportance into notoriety and vast wealth? She had always had enough money. She had had more than her share of happiness, and her worries had been very few.
Possibly this present wretched setup of violent, emotional wrenches and death, and the shadow of death, would be but a plunge through smashing surf into a quieter and less forceful sea. The swells would become smoother, and she could readjust herself. But to what?
What did she want? To become a career woman like Fanny? Ann thought not. No, women like Fanny had everything and nothing. They worked themselves pitilessly for some chimera which ever eluded them. They were in the center of life without ever being able to catch up with it. They had clothes and luxury and an endless celebrity, and some of them even had love. But they had no time to enjoy it.
Maybe there were no answers, Ann thought. Not only for Marlow heiresses but for anybody. Maybe only age was an answer. A full life and an exciting one, but get it out of your system early. Maybe then you could be at peace and happy.
If you had a family.
If you had Bill.
Quite suddenly in this tremulous darkness she made up her mind what to do about Bill. She felt inspiration in it, and a deep sense of gratitude. Clarence Harlan could help her. It was not too late to ask him now. He, too, would just have retired.
She reached for the phone on the bed table and took it from its cradle. She asked to be connected with Harlan.
“This is Ann,” she said to him, “and I’m sorry about the hour.”
“It’s a splendid hour. What can I do?”
“It’s about Bill.”
“Planning your campaign?”
“Yes. You said that you had looked up his family?”
“Practically back to the Pharaohs. Not a pirate in it. No horse thieves. Nobody hanged. The dullest bunch of sterling characters I ever heard of in my life.”
“I don’t want a horse thief. I want military men. Surely they went to the wars?”
“If my splendid memory serves me, and it better had, they did. Which war do you want?”
“All of them, please.”
Harlan gave them not alone with detail but with added details, especially on the distaff side, which Ann occasionally requested. Then she thanked him with a warmth which all but reached Harlan across the wire and said good night.
She closed her eyes.
She slept.
The room had a pallid tinge when she woke up. Around four or five o’clock it would be, or thereabouts. Ann was tremendously refreshed. How quiet things were. She put on a wrapper and opened the living-room door.
Sergeant Hurlstone was not there. Nor was the cat. What was that cat act anyhow? It had seemed out of character, completely so, and had been so pointedly prolonged. Surely a pat and a “nice pussy” would have been enough without that tender lugging of the beast all over the house.
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The sergeant had left a light burning by the Adam desk, focused on a sheet of note paper propped against an inkwell. His handwriting was strong and precisely legible:
I have certain immediate things to do [the note read] and am hampered by a lack of assistants or having anyone whom I can trust to stay with you. I will not wake you, as you will need plenty of strength to get through the day. I will lock the door from the outside and shove the key back under the sill. I shall not be long. Stay here until I return.
James Hurlstone, Sgt.
5:27 A.M.
It was later than Ann had thought. She looked at her watch: twenty minutes to six. Sergeant Hurlstone had been gone, then, for a quarter of an hour. She picked up the key from the base of the door and put it back in the lock.
The fire in the grate had died. The daylight was a dismal gray, and Ann went to a window and looked out into a veil of mist which blurred the nearest trees. An intense gloom came over her and the recurrence of an irritating sense of dread. She felt the need of the armament of clothes, swiftly to dress and be prepared against this nervous imminence of something to come.
She was finishing her hair when the house phone rang. Surely, Ann thought, it would be Sergeant Hurlstone, calm with some fresh-hewn horror. But Washburn’s voice said when she answered it: “I regret troubling you at this early hour, Miss Marlow.”
“What is it, Washburn?”
“The airfield reports that a plane has just made a crash landing. Neither the pilot nor Mr. William Forrest were hurt, and Mr. Forrest insists upon being driven to the house and upon seeing you immediately. The situation is a little unusual, as Mr. Forrest is in the service of the United States Marine Corps and has made several startling statements as to results if his wishes are not complied with. It is all so confusing and irregular that I have taken the liberty of disturbing you.”
Ann instantly felt like champagne: swiftly glittering and aglow.
“What wagons are there, Washburn?”
“I beg pardon?”
“What kinds?”
“Oh, I see. There are the victoria that met you, a landaulet, a surrey, and a barouche.”
“Is the barouche lined with plush?”
“Why—yes, I believe it is.”
“Then send it for Mr. Forrest, please.”
“I will give instructions immediately.”
“Thank you, and I’ll be in the lounge.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Everything was driven from Ann’s head but the thought of seeing Bill. Certainly her wits were. She concentrated exclusively on just how much he meant to her and how meaningless any existence would be without him.
Furthermore, she had him cold.
She was glad that her hair was done, as she wanted to hurry down and take possession of the arena before the lamb stepped into it. After a moment’s intensive indecision she chose and put on a dress of white organdy. It was one she had gone overboard about at a recent sale: a time-bomb trinket which exploded in your face just as you were lulled by its sweet simplicity, a simplicity which artfully revived the dated ravishments of the twenties.
Ann unlocked the living-room door and went out into the hall, which was pallid with a light misting softly in through its mullioned windows. Her head was still witless of everything but Bill, and she forgot the lift and started walking down broad marble stairs carpeted in taupe.
The flight went no farther than the floor below, and in front of her stretched a companion to the hallway above. She saw at its farther end the ornate head of another stairway.
This hallway was also pierced with mullioned windows, the misted light from which gave an almost ethereal effect to its occasional pieces of furniture and to dark canvases of the Flemish school which were on its walls.
Ann had already taken several steps before a wit revived and advised her abruptly that this was the second floor.
The music room was on this floor.
This was the floor on which Alice had been killed.
A swift urge pressed Ann to run, to run swiftly through the hall’s unearthly twilight to the safety of the stairhead at its distant end. She controlled this impulse and walked on, stepping softly, conscious of her stepping.
Halfway along it she came to an open doorway on her left, flanked by two deep alcoves. The beauty of a great salon compelled her to stop on the threshold, to look in.
That would be the spinet over there. Those were the cases. What was it Harlan had said? Rare coins, some excellent folios, some weapons. One of which had been the Cellini dagger which the murderer, in his flush of red mania, had seized and plunged deep into that pitiable sheath. At one end of the vast salon was the console of a great organ. Tall windows were portiered in peach damask. Pale silk paneled the walls.
Alice: the tragic stranger who had been her mother.
A rush of sympathy for this murdered stranger swamped Ann and suddenly brought her to tears. A love welled up no less strong because it was so late. A grief that strengthened the tears and blinded her. She went to the spinet and touched the keys which her mother had touched. She knew that she was being maudlin, but she did not care.
“Alice.”
So strongly was the spirit of Alice in her that for an instant Ann felt no shock at hearing the spoken name. She turned slowly and faced Ludwig, who had walked up softly close to her. Ludwig’s bold features were flushed, and his dark, prominent eyes held a light of wild incredulity.
This is the way a man looks, it occurred to Ann, when he has seen a ghost. He thinks me Alice or her spirit because of this dress, this misted light, my resemblance to my mother. She must then have looked as I look now.
An hypnosis of clamping terror held her. Urgently she wanted to scream into Ludwig’s boldly carved face across the deep flush of which was spreading a heavy dewing of clammy sweat. Urgently she wished to run.
“Alice, my love.”
Ludwig came closer, and his breath was sodden with liquor. He still wore his dinner clothes, and the shirt was sweated and stained with spilled drink. There was an overpowering physical force about Ludwig right then. Ann felt it in his thick arms and barrel chest, in the hair-covered fingers that were curved rigid with astonishment and shock.
(Ludwig is pretty drastic, dear, when he drinks too much, Estelle had said just so recently to her and to Sergeant Hurlstone. No one could tell how he would take things.)
Ann’s own stupor lessened, and she managed to say with reasonable lucidity: “It’s this dress I have on, Ludwig. I’m Ann. Alice is dead.”
He observed her shrewdly with drunken disbelief, suspicious of some trick. The fumes increased and receded with sickening waves through his head.
“What are you doing here, then?” he said.
“I stopped on my way down to the lounge.”
“At this time in the morning?”
“A friend of mine just got here by plane. Bill Forrest.”
“You’re lying.”
“Let me by, please, Ludwig.”
“No.”
She wished to heaven that she could stop trembling, could even control her chattering teeth. A scream would be the worst thing she could go in for, although she felt desperately like loosing one. The chances were one in a thousand that anyone would hear it. Certainly no one could act on it in time. Those fingers were still tensed. Ludwig would simply be inflamed by the shriek and would choke her.
“What do you want, then, Ludwig?”
“I want to know what you are doing here.”
“I’ve told you.”
“Don’t toy with me. I’ve been up all night. I’m drunk. I’m in no mood for silly lies. You all think I’m a murderer. I’m not. I’m a truthful, unhappy, miserable man. Every time I’ve come to this house I’ve spent hours during the night in this room.”
Ludwig’s voice grew increasingly thick. It was hard to understand him. He spewed out the thoughts as randomly as they reeked through his head.
“There is something hidden in this r
oom. I’ve never been able to find it. The murderer wants it. All last night I sat in that alcove in the corridor and watched. I heard the murderer come in here just a moment before you came in here. He didn’t come out again, so he is in here now with us. But we can’t see him.”
“There is no one here, Ludwig. Just you and me.” Ludwig wrestled with this for a while. His bloodshot eyes roved heavily about the great salon. He weaved slowly on his feet, impatient for combat with this killer who was now so miraculously endowed with a power of invisibility. His fingers remained rigidly curved.
“You have let him go.”
“No, Ludwig.”
“The white back. Alice.” Ludwig’s face went to pieces. He grimaced horribly, and his color grew apoplectic. “You are Alice.”
He stifled her denial by crushing her close to his barrel chest. He forced her face up and smothered it with kisses. He muttered brokenly: “I’ve been waiting for this, darling. For years I’ve been waiting.”
Rage and nausea carried her fingers raking across his cheek. The pain bewildered Ludwig, and for a moment he stood holding her and looking at her stupidly. He reached a hand up and brushed some blood from his cheek. He looked affronted and hurt.
He said petulantly, “You’ve scarred me.”
Fumes swept through him, and he threw her roughly against the spinet. Ann struck its keyboard and fell to the floor.
Ludwig turned and walked steadily out of the room. He closed the door.
Six-ten a.m.
CHAPTER XXVIII
SIX-TEN A.M.
The pilot viewed the landing gear with disgust.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll stick around while they do a job on this.”
Bill followed the coachman’s strapping back. He took in the perfection of a whipcord uniform, the boots, the hat, the cockade. He took in the barouche. The folding top over the back seat was down. Plush purred and varnish gleamed. A mare was superb in chestnut satin.
Bill stepped in.
