“I’ll have to drive to the village,” cried Fred and immediately left us. A moment later we heard the back door bang, as he ran outside and toward the rear garages. Winters Run was a good six miles from Broad Acres and over an atrocious road. My brother-in-law is a poor driver under the best of circumstances; I had serious doubts he would ever reach the police station. “You’d better go along,” I said to Harold.
Harold had hardly risen before Fred was back inside. He stood in the drawing room entrance, breathing hard, his face very pale. As we stared at him, he said sharply:
“Harold, may I have the keys to your car?”
The lawyer looked surprised. “They’re in the car. But why…”
Fred made no reply. At once he darted through the front door and to the circular driveway where callers to the house park their cars. Harold followed him. Completely bewildered, I went to the window which overlooked the drive. The powerful lights of Harold’s roadster suddenly stabbed the darkness, and I could see clearly. Harold was standing on the concrete curb, Fred was at the wheel of the car. He was having difficulty getting started. The starter whirred, was silent, whirred again.
I ran outside. “What’s the trouble?”
Fred said hysterically, “None of the cars will start, Margaret. That’s the trouble.” He pressed on the starter again. Again the futile whir. “It’s no use,” he cried in a frenzy of nervous frustration. “The car’s out of gas.”
“That’s impossible,” said Harold. “I just had it filled.” But the roadster was out of gasoline. It was Harold who discovered the explanation, and pointed out the dark oily stain on the pavement. Someone had drained the gasoline tank. The same person had drained the tanks of the three cars in my garage. We were six miles out in the country, and for many agonized minutes cut off from communication with the world.
I cannot tabulate nor can I remember the absurd suggestions which were made during the next half hour. I do recall that Fred wanted to set out on foot for the village and was restrained only with difficulty. And I know that eventually it was my colored cook, arriving breathless from the stables, who proved herself more capable in emergency than any of us. Rosa went to the laundry stove, emptied the drum and came into the drawing room with a tea kettle which contained something over a gallon of gasoline. After which she collected Thomas and together they went for the police.
Curiously enough, at the time I didn’t take in the significance of this incident, nor did I wonder who might have drained the gasoline tanks or why. I accepted the circumstance as a part of the general nightmare, and was struck only by the appalling inconvenience of being without transportation, and by my own helplessness. But after the departure of the servants I had time to think. The disabling of every motor car on the place was not an accident; it was the result of a deliberate plan on someone’s part, and the purpose of the plan seemed plain enough. We were to be prevented, for a long interval, from reaching the police. Thus, my thoughts led me to an unwelcome conclusion. While we were in the strawstacks, perhaps at the very moment we were uncovering Dorothy Fithian’s body, the killer himself had been in my garage. He had been there, and he had carefully drained the gasoline tanks before he fled.
I am certain that the thoughts of the others ran in similar channels, but no one spoke of the automobiles. We were gathered in the drawing room, a demoralized and silent group. Fred looked old and ill and I know that Marian was weeping quietly. She sat huddled on a corner of the divan, shivering and daubing at her eyes. Harold was attempting to be helpful without notable success. He was a lawyer, after all, and I believe he was already beginning to wonder and to worry. To piece together the situation as the authorities were to see it. He walked restlessly about the room, lighting and discarding cigarettes. At length he paused at the liquor cart, looked us over and said uneasily:
“Marian, if I were you, I’d take a drink and try to brace up. The police will be here soon. They’ll want to talk to you.”
Marian limply accepted a glass of brandy and started to drink it. Then she looked around the room, and set down her glass. “Where’s Jane? She should be here with us.”
“I’ll get her,” Fred said. “She must be down at the strawstacks with Ames and Simon.”
“No, I’ll go.” Harold stood up. He paused, and a puzzled expression crossed his face. “Are you sure Jane’s there? I don’t remember seeing her.” He paused again. I was aware of a certain tension in his manner. “Wasn’t Jane with you and Margaret in the stables, Marian?”
“No,” said Marian slowly. “No, she wasn’t with us.”
In the confusion and excitement none of us had thought of Jane, or missed her. With a sudden sinking of the heart I realized that I hadn’t seen my niece since, on first discovery of the fire, she had dashed upstairs to get the fire extinguishers. That was easily an hour before. I assumed that one of the others must have been with the child. I waited for reassurance. None came. For at least a minute, and a long minute, the four of us looked at one another, first interrogatively and then with a kind of slowly dawning fear.
Fred rose suddenly. He said in a voice which was rather loud, “I know Jane. The kid is probably still swinging a broom and trying to save the stables. Ames should have brought her in.” He started toward the door.
“I don’t believe,” Harold said all at once, and very positively, “she ever left the house. I’m certain she didn’t go to the strawstacks.”
Just then Ames and Simon walked into the drawing room. They were smudged, exhausted, querulous over the non-arrival of the police. Jane was not with them. They had not seen her.
“I thought,” said Ames, pale as chalk, “she was with you, Aunt Marian.”
Marian’s glass overturned as she sprang to her feet. She called, “Jane, Jane!”
There was no answer.
Panic is a curious thing, and strikes with lightning swiftness. Marian’s voice, the note of terror in it, roused unreasoning panic in us all. We started calling Jane in chorus. Simon rushed outside and toward the strawstacks, despite Harold’s insistence that my niece had not been there. Fred followed him. My cousin Verity was also missing, and I ran to her room hoping to find Jane with her. Verity was alone in the first floor bedroom, in bed and evidently asleep. She was an old woman and the previous uproar apparently had not disturbed her. At my entrance she roused, sat up and muttered some complaint about the noise.
I shook her. “Have you seen Jane?”
“Not since dinner.”
Verity then attempted to question me, but I summarily left her. Her querulous voice pursued me down the hall. On the upper floors I could hear Marian, Ames, and Harold shouting Jane’s name. Marian and Ames were on the second floor, Harold was on the third. They would rush into an empty room and then out of it, and their futile progress could be followed by the sound of banging doors. Two bewildered maids were searching the first floor. I joined them. In the end it was Harold who found Jane.
She was lying in an alcove off my bedroom, unconscious and bleeding from a savage blow on the head. For one dreadful moment, Harold told me later, he thought the girl was dead, and then he felt the stir of her breath on his hand. With Jane in his arms, he ran to the third floor landing and shouted down:
“Margaret! Marian! Get Simon here at once. Jane’s been hurt.”
It didn’t occur to me to question him or to wonder at Jane’s injuries. I had heard an order and automatically I obeyed it. I ran into the dining room, seized the gong we used for meals and struck it with all my force. Then, still moving automatically, I opened the windows and sounded the gong a second time. And a third. When I saw Fred and Simon coming toward the house, as I remember it, I began to cry, dropped, the gong and rushed upstairs.
Ames and Harold had laid Jane on my bed. They had propped her head high with pillows and Harold was chafing her wrists while Marian, weeping hysterically, rubbed the child’s forehead with a handkerchief which was entirely dry. I took the handkerchief from my sister’s nerveless fin
gers and wet it with cologne just as Fred and Simon burst into the room.
Simon took immediate charge. He snatched the pillows from beneath Jane’s head, thrust them beneath her feet. He demanded that I produce brandy and smelling salts; he ordered the others to leave.
“You too, Marian. Especially you! I can’t help it if she is your child—she needs air to breathe. Margaret, you and Ames can stay to open the windows. Fred, you and Harold take care of Marian. And get her out of here.”
Simon’s procedure was brutal but effective. The room was silenced. The windows were opened. Ames held the smelling salts, and tried to keep his hands from trembling while Simon gently, and thoroughly examined Jane’s dark, blood-smeared head. “She’s got a nasty bump,” he said. “There’s probably a concussion but I don’t think it’s serious. An ice-bag tonight should fix her up but we’ll have an X-ray tomorrow to be sure. Give me that brandy, will you?”
I handed him the brandy.
Within a few moments Jane’s eyelids fluttered and her eyes opened. She saw Ames, and smiled.
“Hello, pal,” she said. “Isn’t this silly of me?”
“Very damn silly,” Ames replied. “Who’d expect you to go Victorian on us?”
His words were unsympathetic and matter-of-fact in the way of modern youngsters but his tone was soft. Simon smiled at me.
“Shake your head, Jane,” he said, briskly, and then asked, “Does that hurt?”
“Enormously,” Jane replied, and weakly tried to laugh. She was at once nauseated and her humiliation was so natural and so heartening that I felt a second foolish rush of tears to my eyes. I said, “I think we’d better call Marian,” and went immediately downstairs.
In the interval Marian had achieved a measure of composure for which I was duly grateful. She listened quietly to Simon’s report and was just starting upstairs when Verity appeared in our midst. I had quite forgotten my cousin and I saw her with no particular pleasure. Verity was indignant and agitated—so much so that she had forgotten to put on either her cap or her slippers. An old flannel bathrobe covered her nightgown but her feet were still encased in bed socks and her gray hair was in wispy confusion with a bald spot there for all the world to see.
“What’s going on here anyway?” she demanded, shrill and belligerent. No one spoke. Verity looked at me suspiciously. “It’s something about Jane.”
It was unfair of me, perhaps, but I felt that the situation was complicated enough without adding to it the extra burden of Verity’s presence. Her reactions were always unpredictable, and I hadn’t the moral strength to cope with them. I said calmly, “Go back to bed, Verity. Everything’s all right. It’s true that Jane’s been hurt, but it isn’t serious and you can see her in the morning.”
Verity was only partially appeased but I believe I could have persuaded her to leave. At this point Harold upset my calculations and infuriated me by saying, “Since she’s up, Margaret, I think she’d better stay up. The police will…”
“Police,” echoed Verity alertly. “What about the police?”
“Dorothy Fithian has been murdered,” Harold said.
I took a step forward. I don’t know what I expected—not that Verity would collapse, certainly, for she had plenty of fortitude and she had ardently disliked Dorothy. But I was prepared for some show of shock, of revulsion. There was nothing of the kind. Without surprise, indeed with a horrifying calm, the old woman stared at Harold. She said, “So it’s come at last.”
The words were wholly inexplicable to me. For a minute I thought that my cousin had lost her mind. Then Marian said sharply, “What’s come? Talk sense, Verity. What do you mean, ‘it’s come at last’?”
“Death has come,” said Verity in a somber, awful voice. “The wages of sin, Marian, is death.”
Marian shrank back. Harold looked at me in blank dismay, and Fred got slowly out of his chair. “Verity,” he said, as one speaks to a child, “you must not say such things. The poor girl is dead. Do you understand? She’s dead.”
“And well dead,” said Verity implacably. “The harlot’s feet take hold on hell, her ways go down to death. Her time in the sun is short and then the Reaper cometh…”
Fred went white as cloth, and Marian gave a muffled protesting cry. I hadn’t an idea what to do or say. Fortunately Harold was there. Harold was a highly realistic man and his sole concern I am sure was with the ultimate impression which Verity would make upon the police.
He said bluntly, “Miss Blair, this is no time for quoting Scripture. Or making slanderous, unfounded remarks. Do you know anything to Miss Fithian’s discredit? If not, I suggest you guard your tongue.”
“Don’t advise me, young man,” said Verity. “Dorothy Fithian was a wicked woman and I’m glad…”
“What do you know about her?”
“Enough,” snapped Verity, “to have a right to my own opinion. You may be an important man to some, but you’re not to me. I don’t need to talk to you and I won’t.” Nor would she. She had been angered by Harold’s manner and she was shrewd enough to sense her general unpopularity. She shook off my restraining hand and stalked upstairs. Personally, after the initial shock wore off, I was inclined to believe that Verity had nothing to say and that the whole appalling scene was based upon nothing more important than the fact that Dorothy had been in the habit of taking an occasional drink of brandy, and borrowing Jane’s stockings without returning them. Or perhaps that is what I wanted to think.
I know that Harold was worried, for he seized his chance to address me on the stairs.
“What’s this about Verity?”
“Nothing, probably,” I said uneasily. “She simply didn’t like Dorothy.”
“That was evident.” Harold gave a short laugh. “Come, Margaret. Out with it. Had that girl been carrying on? You know the kind of carrying on that would burn your righteous cousin. Late hours. Scotch whiskey. Men. Particularly men.”
“Certainly not,” I replied with dignity. “Dorothy seldom left the house. Most of her free time she spent with Marian, or walking about the place.”
“What,” he asked shrewdly, “made Jane think Miss Fithian was planning an elopement? In my language that predicates a man. Yet you’re saying she sat out here of nights and twiddled her thumbs.”
“Oh, that!” My mind went back to what seemed like another age. “I’m afraid there’s nothing in it, Harold. A week ago Jane and Ames did happen to run into Dorothy and a tall blond man at the Paradise Roof. The only odd thing is that Dorothy told us—Marian and me—she was attending a nurses’ dinner.”
His eyes narrowed. “Who was the man?”
“Dorothy didn’t introduce him. I believe she and her companion left almost immediately. Or so Jane said.”
I could almost see his quick brain work. Drawing inferences, reaching conclusions, making out a case against a man he had’ never seen. Yet he spoke quite calmly “This may be important, Margaret. I have a hunch it is. And my hunches are my bread and butter.”
We joined the others on the third floor hallway.
Jane’s appearance was to prove the one bright spot in the whole of that dreadful evening. She had youth and resilience on her side, and there was already faint color in her face and returning brightness in her eyes. Ames sat beside the massive canopied bed. Simon looked distinctly out of place, backed by my frivolous dressing table. I’ve known him for so many years that I believe I was aware of something a little subdued about his attitude, but I overlooked it in my pleasure over Jane.
“Hello, family,” she called. “Did you put the fire out? What happened anyhow?”
Behind her, Simon placed a finger to his lips and shook his head. Verity would have spoken but I clamped my hand upon her arm. Marian, who had gone at once to the bed, said hurriedly, “The fire is out, darling. But what happened to you? That’s what we’d like to know. You gave us such a fright.”
“That’s what these two have been asking me,” Jane said a little blankly. “It sounds
silly but I don’t really know.”
“You don’t know!”
Simon and Ames were looking anxious. Simon said, “I think we’d better question Jane tomorrow, Marian. She isn’t feeling herself by any means, and she doesn’t seem to remember…”
Marian wasn’t to be intercepted so easily. “You examined the child,” she said sharply. “She’s been badly hurt, I’m her mother and I’m entitled to hear…”
“There’s nothing to hear, Mummie,” Jane broke in impatiently and yet with an odd little air of constraint. “It’s only that Simon and I can’t seem to agree. He’s got the crazy notion someone hit me on the head. I—I think something fell on me.”
“Something fell on you!”
“In the alcove,” said Jane. “I was just turning out the lights when something fell off the highboy. I heard it coming but I wasn’t quick enough to duck.”
Harold stepped into the alcove which opened off my bedroom into Dorothy’s bedroom. A part of the space was curtained off and infrequently used items of my wardrobe—shawls, a raincoat, a heavy and unfashionable mackintosh—hung there. Harold looked around. “Your typewriter fell, Margaret,” he said, surprised. “It’s still here lying on the floor. Funny I didn’t notice it before.” The portable typewriter on which I laboriously pick out my business correspondence was indeed lying on the floor, near the light switch where Jane had been found. The highboy, a tall graceful piece which had been my mother’s, stood in a niche immediately behind the switch. But I was nevertheless incredulous. The typewriter was never kept on the highboy; when in use it sat on my desk; otherwise it was closed and covered and pushed into a drawer.
I said, “Jane, my typewriter could not have been on the highboy.”
“It was, Aunt Margaret,” said Jane, firm now and confident. “I noticed it when I first came in and wondered what it was doing there. What’s more,” she added cheerfully, “it wasn’t balanced well. I suppose I jarred it as I went into the alcove.”
The Strawstack Murders Page 5
