Escape the Night

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  Probably there had been a certain amount of talk about it. It was why Oliver, on the train, who knew them all, had been embarrassed when Serena inquired about Bill. She sighed. “Amanda, you are really childish. You don’t think. You don’t—oh, well, I suppose you didn’t mean to.”

  “Of course I didn’t mean to! Can I help it if men fall in love with me? Can I help it if …”

  “You’d better go now.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I’m glad I told you about Bill, though. He did a lot of talking, but I don’t suppose he meant any of it.”

  “Talking?”

  “Oh—threats. You know. Or I don’t suppose you do know, really. Sissy, isn’t there a man in New York? Somebody you’re in love with?”

  “No. Do go to bed now, Amanda.”

  “It’s odd. You’re really rather attractive, Sissy. Not a femme fatale exactly, but still …”

  “Amanda, what about Luisa? Can you think of any real reason at all for her to have told the police she was in danger? I didn’t know her. Was she the kind of woman to try to get attention in that way?”

  Amanda’s face in the mirror became completely blank. She said instantly: “I don’t know anything about it. If she thought anything of the kind, she didn’t tell me. I cannot imagine why she phoned to the police. If they’d question Bill Lanier, they might get somewhere!”

  Serena turned, startled. “Did he have anything against Luisa?”

  Amanda shrugged. “No. That is, I don’t know of anything in particular. Anybody could have had a reason to want Luisa out of the way, frankly. She meddled and she was stubborn. But of course murder’s—different.” She frowned and went off apparently on a tangent. “It seems queer for things to begin to happen just as soon as Bill returns. That business of Dave’s laboratory last night, for instance …”

  “Oh! You know about that?”

  “Yes. Dave told us. He didn’t want to talk about it, but the police—that man Anderson, really—kept talking about it. That was horrible, too. It’s as if there were somebody—oh, hitting at us all. That is, if Luisa really …” She stopped, but it was clear what she’d meant to say: If Luisa really was murdered.

  Serena put down her brush, picked up a gay bottle of cologne, put it down again. “But why should Bill Lanier want to injure Dave?”

  Amanda’s face had a dark, brooding look; now in the mirror it seemed also to close itself secretively. She put out her cigarette, jamming it hard down into the ash tray. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that Bill …” She shivered, and tried not to. She shot a quick glance at Serena as if to be sure Serena hadn’t seen that involuntary little quiver, and the way she glanced at Serena’s back had a surreptitious slyness about it that was disconcerting. She got up, not observing Serena’s eyes reflected in the mirror. “Forget it. See you in the morning.”

  “Amanda,” Serena turned again to face her sister directly. “Were you in the patio last night? In the middle of the night, I mean. Talking to somebody?”

  “Was I …?” Amanda’s eyes narrowed again. She looked very hard at Serena and said on a quickly drawn breath: “No. Did you see somebody? Who was it?”

  Serena swiftly decided she wouldn’t mention Jem or their meeting. “I heard somebody whispering. I went out on the veranda. Presently the sound stopped and someone seemed to go up the steps, those on the other side of the patio.”

  “But was it Sutton? Was it Luisa?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you’d know.”

  “You mean you thought I was there. Well, I wasn’t. What were they saying?”

  “I don’t know. I’d better tell you, too, Amanda, that I heard you and Leda tonight. Talking. In the patio.”

  “You?” A slow flush crept up into Amanda’s face and her eyelashes lowered again so they looked straight and stiff and ugly. “What a help you’re going to be around the house! I suppose this is revenge because I told you the truth about Jem. What exactly did you hear?”

  “Don’t talk secrets in the patio if you don’t want to be heard,” began Serena and then checked herself wearily. “Oh, let’s not bicker, Amanda. It’s too serious. I heard Leda say that, now—on account of Luisa—she had the upper hand. And the rest of it.”

  There was a long pause. Serena wished her heart wouldn’t thump so loudly. Amanda looked queer and a little pinched somehow, and older. Serena said suddenly, without meaning to, really: “Don’t look like that, Amanda. I know Leda’s only being idiotic. You can count on me. You must know that.”

  But Amanda refused the peace offering. “How sweet of you, darling,” she said. “But I really don’t need your help. Or advice. By the way, what did you do with my bracelet?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT WAS THE LAST thing Serena expected. She leaned rather hard against the dressing table behind her and said: “What bracelet?”

  “My bracelet, of course. I left it here with you. This morning. You said you’d take care of it.”

  “But I—oh, I remember. The package. You had it in your hand.…”

  “Certainly, I’ll take it now.”

  “But you didn’t give it to me. Luisa came in just then …”

  “Yes. And I slid it into the drawer there. Just behind you. Before I went away. If you’ll stand out of the way, I’ll show you.”

  Serena moved rather dazedly aside. Amanda pulled open the small drawer. The package wasn’t there. Amanda looked; Serena looked; there was no small package such as Serena remembered in Amanda’s hand. Not in that drawer, not in any of the drawers, not in the room. Amanda in a white, gathering fury of search looked everywhere, under cushions, among Serena’s clothes, along the window ledges, everywhere. Once Serena tried to question her and Amanda didn’t reply or seem to hear it. At last, however, she turned over the cushions in the chaise longue again and said, looking at Serena: “It’s gone.”

  Serena sat down on the bed. “Amanda, you’ll have to explain. It can’t be gone; nobody would take the thing.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t …” began Amanda. An avid sharpened look came into her face, and she said: “Sissy, you haven’t got it somewhere? Just to—I mean only to tease me. Have you?”

  Serena was too weary of emotions to resent it. “No. I haven’t got it. I know nothing about it. Somebody’s put it away. Probably it’s in your own room or wherever you keep your jewelry.”

  Amanda was staring into space. “Who could have …?” she said, half aloud. “There are only the three of us and the servants; they wouldn’t touch anything. Of course Luisa may have seen me. She had eyes like a cat’s. But if she took it …”

  “The bracelet is real, then.”

  Amanda seemed to recall herself. She glanced sharply at Serena. “Nonsense. It’s only junk, but I liked it. It’s very cleverly made, of course. I’ll go now, Sissy. Oh, and about what you heard Leda say,—it’s nothing, really. Forget it, darling.” Her voice was light, her face white with anxiety. She went to the door and turned. “When Leda said it was convenient for me for Luisa to die she was talking of her money. Sutton, I suppose, inherits and we need it so much. We’re frightfully hard up, Sissy. That’s what Leda meant. Good night, darling.” She went quickly away.

  Serena reached for the light, and then remembered the curtains and had to get up to open them and the windows. And long after she’d groped her way back to the bed again she lay staring into the darkness. The bracelet wasn’t “junk”; the stones were real. It must be very valuable. It was equally obvious that Amanda’s concern was due to something more, even, than its intrinsic value. She had told Sutton it was paste. She had told everyone at dinner that first night that she’d had it for a long time. Leda had attempted to take issue with her and Amanda had stopped that adroitly and instantly. But Leda knew something of the bracelet. Sutton, too, knew that Amanda had not had it long; yet she had called it again “junk.”

  Yet the obvious explanation, that a man had given it to her and she wanted to keep it a secret, did not even deserve consideration. It
was curious but, Serena felt, true. Not with Amanda. And if the bracelet had, really, been stolen, Amanda would have to report it to the police. There were too many puzzles about her; probably most of them were not puzzles at all; Amanda had always had an instinct for dramatizing herself. It was one of the reasons for her charm and attractiveness. She saw herself as the heroine of a dramatic role and played up to it.

  But wasn’t that, thought Serena suddenly, a little dangerous? For when one saw the world and other people only as they revolved around one’s self, didn’t it induce a kind of blindness? A myopia? How much did Amanda really know about other people? People—for instance—like Bill Lanier. Serena could see his face against the soft darkness of the room as clearly as if she had seen it only lately; sullen, handsome, but in a lowering way that destroyed its handsomeness; his curious, dark immobility of expression. She wouldn’t like to think that Bill Lanier had any grudge toward her. Any deep grudge, anything that really roused the latent brutality one felt in him.

  And suddenly just then, adding to the growing score of puzzles surrounding Amanda, a small sharp memory struck Serena. It went back to the morning she had arrived in San Francisco and telephoned to Amanda. Amanda’s voice had broken suddenly, and she had apparently addressed someone in the room. “Put that down,” she’d said sharply. Serena remembered that. She’d said something else too: “It’s only Sissy. You can listen if you like.” Those were not the exact words perhaps, but she’d said something like that. And then, “Put that down.” Put what down? And why? And who had been there? Sutton? Luisa? One of the servants? Or, even, Jem?

  And had there been, as it seemed to her now, an element of fear in Amanda’s tone?

  Again she had a strong impulse to protect Amanda—and at the same time, and for the first time questioned that impulse. Was she, like the others, feeling that magnetism that Amanda only by being Amanda seemed to exert? Was it, by any chance, blinding her, so she would wish to protect Amanda in spite of herself? She wished that Sutton had the strength that Amanda needed in a husband, and that Luisa must have had.

  She must not think of Luisa either. Or a sodden green scarf dragged through swirling water. And of the things Amanda had said of Jem; she would remember only that all that was in the past. It must be in the past. “I love you,” Jem had said.

  She would hold tight to that.

  The night was quiet. There was no whispering and no motion in the dark well of the patio that night. If Pooky snuffled and whimpered a little at a closed door on the other side, no one heard it. At the ranch, among the dark hills, everywhere there was silence except along the shore, far below, where great black waves, unseen in the night, flung themselves and beat and crashed upon the rocks.

  Morning was still gray and foggy.

  It was not the kind of day to banish night thoughts. Instead, by its brooding quiet, its dark fog wraiths it seemed to substantiate any fancy the night might have held.

  It was not either, at least in the beginning, a revealing day. It was up to then as if Serena had seen small and confusing segments of a picture or a tapestry, which were too small and too confusing to give her any idea of the main design except that, here and there, a dark and macabre thread of fear and suspicion wove its way across it. That day revealed very little more of the pattern, except, of course, for one figure which it was to reveal too clearly and too pitilessly.

  Even in the morning something of the nightmarish quality of the previous day lingered upon them.

  It was so marked that Serena guarded herself against it. She must keep cool, behave as one ordinarily would, give the nightmare no credence.

  The scratches on her hand were healing but were still red and deep. She doused her hand with rubbing alcohol, found a package of Bandaids in the bathroom and applied one over the deepest scratch.

  She put on a navy-blue flannel suit and a white blouse and a red tie that matched the red on her lips. She rolled her smooth dark hair in a pompadour and a knot on top of her head and then put a small red bow there too, a little defiantly. She gave the girl in the mirror, with the level blue eyes, a nod, which was an admonition and went downstairs. The railing of the stairs was slippery and wet. The flagstones in the patio glistened. It was chilly, rather than cold, but it was pleasant to find an open fire in the long living room and Amanda and Sutton having breakfast on a small table drawn up before the fire.

  Amanda looked tired, and again somehow rather pinched, and did not mention the bracelet. Sutton, in bagging tweeds with a yellow scarf at his throat, and small hollows around his eyes as if he hadn’t slept, got the war news on the radio, and said briefly that the body hadn’t been found and there couldn’t be an inquest until it was found, so it might be days or even weeks before the inquest or funeral could be held.

  “Or never,” said Amanda shortly, looking at her husband over the rim of her coffee cup.

  “Or never,” agreed Sutton. “In that case it’ll be years before her will can be probated. Unless, of course, Serena, here, can swear that she was dead.” He gave Serena a quick and rather kindly glance as if she had visibly winced. “I’m sorry, Serena,” he added. “Perhaps it won’t be necessary to drag you into it.”

  However, the police had asked him and Amanda to come to the station that morning, for questioning, he supposed. Later they wanted to get an exact record, too, of Serena’s story.

  Amanda said abruptly: “What are we going to do about the will, Sutton? I mean if the body isn’t found. Shouldn’t we ask Johnny? He’s a lawyer, he’d know. We can’t wait …”

  “We’ll have to wait,” said Sutton, avoiding Amanda’s eyes.

  They left about noon in Sutton’s big car, which by daylight Serena suddenly realized was big and polished and impressive at first glance, and actually of an ancient and worn vintage. Amanda, however, looked smart and beautiful in a sleek beige suit and a coral sweater. “Answer the phone, will you, Sissy,” she said, drawing on her brown gloves. “Everyone will be phoning as soon as the news gets around. Tell them that the police are investigating the accident because Luisa had told them she thought somebody was trying to murder her; tell them at the same time—be sure you say exactly this, Sissy—that we had no reason to think she was mentally unbalanced; and that we are doing everything we can to assist the police.”

  It was, of course, the proper attitude. And one almost certain to suggest to any friendly inquirer that Luisa had been temporarily unbalanced.

  “Did you find the bracelet?” asked Serena—feeling unpleasantly conspiratorial because she had not asked about it openly and frankly before Sutton went to get out the car.

  Amanda’s face tightened. “No. Sissy, don’t say anything about it, will you?” There was sharp anxiety in her eyes.

  “But if it’s valuable …”

  “I tell you it’s not,” snapped Amanda, and went out to the arched doorway. As she reached it she whirled around and came back, tall and strong and beautiful, but her eyes angry. “Don’t ask me so many questions, Sissy! I’ve told you my affairs don’t concern you!”

  She had asked questions; she had sounded inquisitive, and prying and preachy, Serena thought suddenly. Yet … “Amanda, something is wrong,” she said impulsively. “If you’re in trouble …”

  “Nonsense!” said Amanda. “I tell you that bracelet’s of no value.” This time she did not return.

  The big car drove carefully away as if feeling its way through the fog.

  Serena went slowly into the house, put another log on the fire, lighted the lamp on the long table with its bowls of stock and the two bronze horses, and hunted out some new magazines. It was better not to think, much better.

  She didn’t, however, really like being left alone again in the house with only Modeste, the old cook (part Portuguese, part Spanish paesano) in the kitchen, and Ramon, her husband, floating silently about with a dustcloth, his sad, wrinkled face looking rather green and uneasy. Both of them must know that the police had been there the previous night and why.<
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  Nobody came. There were several telephone calls expressing sympathy—and questions to which Serena replied as Amanda had asked her to do. Most of them were from people she knew and remembered more or less intimately. All of them asked when she had got back and why. Oh, a vacation. Well, was it true that she had actually been out on the rocks with Luisa when it happened? How horrible!

  There were, indeed, a series of telephone calls, each of which in its way was to be of some importance. And there was one from a San Francisco newspaper with which she coped successfully, she thought, by saying that the family were out. “It was Miss Serena March who was with the woman—that is, Luisa Condit—when it happened, wasn’t it?” inquired the voice at the other end. When she said, “Yes,” and the reporter, if reporter it was, at once asked to speak to Miss March, she lost her head a little and said Miss March wasn’t available either.

  “You mean won’t talk?” said the reporter. And added unexpectedly, “Are you Miss March by any chance?”

  “Sorry,” said Serena with as much dignity as she could muster. “But I’ll tell her you called,” and hung up, reflecting on the unexpected ways into which an ordinarily honest person can be trapped into trivial evasions. Obviously, if a statement was to be given the papers, it was Sutton’s place to do it, not hers. Yet she couldn’t say so, over the telephone, just like that.