The others were satisfied but I emphatically was not. For one thing I could not understand why Jane had gone into the alcove. My bedroom was equipped with a double light switch, and the more convenient switch was located beside the door into the hall. For another thing I doubted that the portable typewriter was heavy enough to inflict a serious injury; and, unless Jane had been stooping, I didn’t see how in falling the machine could have struck her on the head. Simon glanced at me and must have borrowed something of my own bewilderment, for he said, “Why did you come here, Jane?”
“I was going for the extinguisher in the rear hall,” said Jane. “Running. As I passed this room I thought I heard a noise.”
“A noise!” Simon exclaimed, and immediately his tone was sharp, alert. “What kind of noise?”
Jane seemed to hesitate. Then, “Just a noise,” said she vaguely. She added very quickly, “I thought Philomena" was turning down Aunt Margaret’s bed. I knew we’d need her, so I came on in. I must have been mistaken—for there was no one in the room. I looked.”
Harold now broke in. “What you mean, Jane,” he said in some excitement but with the lawyer’s instinct for exactitude, “is that you saw no one. How long did you spend looking? Five minutes? Three minutes? Did you look in the closet, behind that tapestry screen? Did you. look behind the curtains in the alcove? You didn’t? Well then, you can’t know that there was no one in the room.” He turned to me. “If I were you, Margaret, I’d examine my jewel case.”
There was a general lightening of tension in the room.
A thief, a marauder in the house, might be the answer to that dreadful problem which had confronted us in the strawstacks.
I went swiftly to my dressing table. My jewel case was in its usual place, its contents undisturbed and quite intact. My pocketbook, which contained a considerable sum of money, was also there. I laid down the pocketbook, keenly disappointed to discover that I had not been robbed. An equal disappointment was reflected on the faces of the others.
Fred said anxiously, “Are you sure, Margaret, that nothing has been disturbed?”
“Nothing except my typewriter.”
“What is this anyway?” demanded Jane. No one spoke. She sat up in bed. “I can explain the typewriter being on the highboy, Aunt Margaret, if that’s what’s bothering you. Dorothy must have left it there. I remember now she was typing in her own room after dinner—I heard her.”
It was not unusual for Dorothy Fithian to borrow other people’s property but that she should use my machine without permission and then fail to return it to its proper place, seemed unlikely. I was about to mention this when another question occurred to me.
“You said, Jane, you saw the typewriter when you first came in the room. You mean after you turned on the lights?”
“No, the lights were on.” Jane gave a ghostly little chuckle. “I suppose Dorothy forgot to turn them off when she brought back your typewriter. I know you didn’t.”
Our electric bills are ruinous, and, although Marian laughs at me, my early training won’t permit me to leave lights burning in an empty room. In my opinion no one is rich enough to waste electricity. Into the pause broke my sister’s clear, emphatic voice. She said, “Dorothy may have used the typewriter. Indeed, I’m quite sure she did—I also heard her typing. I’m positive, however, she didn’t leave on the lights. She went downstairs before I finished dressing. On my way down I stopped here to ask you to hook my gown, Margaret. I opened the door. The room was dark.”
I could think of no explanation of the fact that my bedroom was lighted. I felt confident the servants were too well trained in my particular prejudices to be responsible. Ames rose abruptly and walked to an open window which gave on a trellis work where English ivy, thick and tenacious, climbed. It grew so stubbornly that Thomas frequently had to cut it back. Ames glanced down.
“Do you keep this window locked, Aunt Margaret?”
“Never.” I felt a thrill of fear. “Are you suggesting that someone climbed up the trellis work and into the room?”
“It’s hard to tell,” he said slowly. He struck a match and leaned outside with it. “It would be an easy climb, but I should think the ivy would be disturbed. What do you think, Harold?”
The lawyer had joined him at the window. I went there, too. A few inches below the sill were several bruised and broken leaves, but that was all.
“I should hardly think,” said Harold doubtfully, “that trellis work would support an average-size adult. Certainly not without considerable tearing of the vines.”
“And anyhow,” I said, “there’d have to be some object in such a climb. Surely no one risked his neck just to put my typewriter on the highboy. I can’t believe that Dorothy left it there.”
During this passage we had quite forgotten Jane. Suddenly, and with shocking unexpectedness, she projected herself back into the scene. She swung herself around in bed. Her small fists were clenched, her face was washed with color.
“How about listening to me a minute?” she said in a voice that shook. “Everyone seems bent on proving I have a secret enemy. That something happened here. Well, nothing happened except that the typewriter fell! I say that no one was in the room. I should know—I was here. You people weren’t, or do you think I’m lying?” With a twist of bewilderment, with a sense of almost deathly fear, I realized that I thought just that. I thought that Jane was lying, Jane whose little subterfuges were usually as open as herself. I don’t know what the others thought. Ames went quickly to the bed.
“Why, darling…”
She regarded even him with alienated eyes. “Something’s wrong. What is it, Ames? Tell me. I have a right to know.”
He hesitated, glanced indecisively toward Simon. Slowly, reluctantly, Simon nodded. My nephew closed his hands about Jane’s small, slim hand. “Something has happened, dear. You’ll have to brace yourself.”
“I’m braced,” she said quietly.
“Dorothy’s dead,” he said.
“Oh.” Jane drew a fluttering breath. “So she had a smash-up after all? Somehow I—I didn’t think so. I felt sure she was coming back.” She looked steadily at Ames. “Where? In Washington?”
“This wasn’t an accident, dear. Dorothy was murdered. Strangled in the strawstacks.”
As if to punctuate Jane’s cry of clear unvarnished horror came the roar of a car in the driveway below. We heard the tramp of footsteps on the veranda and the opening of a door.
The police had arrived.
I got stiffly to my feet. Marian and Fred were rushing toward the bed. They thought that Jane had fainted. She was still conscious, as was attested by a high-pitched hysterical voice, which, a moment later, stopped me at the door.
“Aunt Margaret, is that the police? Are you going to talk to them now? What do you mean to say?”
My niece was as colorless as the sheets which framed her face. Even her lips were pallid. She pushed Marian away.
“Promise me, Aunt Margaret... you’ve got to promise me you won’t tell the police about my accident. It’s nothing to do with Dorothy. They’d only be confused… they’d…”
She burst into tears. The sound of that helpless weeping followed me from the room.
5
With Jane’s sobs ringing in my ears I walked slowly down the stairs toward my first official encounter with the law. I went alone. At the last moment Harold had wanted to accompany me. I badly wanted his support but my conscience would not permit me to take advantage of the fact that an experienced lawyer happened to be on the place. Also, since this is a candid account, I must confess I feared the impression I would make if I appeared for questioning with a lawyer at my side.
My knees were shaking, and I clung tightly to the balustrade. I am not a young woman and the events of the evening would have tried a stronger constitution than mine. No sooner had we recovered from the first shock of Dorothy’s hideous death than we had the affair of the motor cars, followed swiftly by the incident of Jane. It was Jane’s “accident,�
� her request—almost her command—that I refrain from mentioning the matter to the authorities, which filled my mind. I saw no possible way of concealing my niece’s condition, yet I had never failed the child in all her life.
With flagging footsteps I turned into the drawing room. There, almost dizzy from reaction, I discovered I was to have a breathing spell. The police chief, the coroner and the two deputies, who comprised the law-enforcing body of Winters Run, had departed for the strawstacks. Thomas, who gave me this information, said the police would soon be back and then mournfully examined the empty brandy decanter.
“Do you want I should bring in cooking brandy?” he asked. “Them deputies won’t know the difference.”
“You bring the best,” I said, “and we’ll need a fresh supply of wood. It looks as though we might be up the rest of the night.”
“It do, Miss Tilbury. Policemen don’t respect the rights of gentlefolk. You should have heard the questions they asked me and Cook.” Thomas added venomously, “Cook talks too much. If I was you I’d tell that woman to shut her mouth.”
I said severely, “You and Cook, too, are to answer any questions the police see fit to ask, which all of us are bound to do.”
He gave me a glance surprising in its cynicism, picked up the decanter and left the room. For a moment I wondered at the meaning of that glance, wondered, too, what Cook, a notoriously imaginative woman, had said to outrage my butler’s proper soul. But I couldn’t imagine that Maryland police would be overly impressed by servants’ talk and I had worries more immediate.
I wandered to the fireplace and stared into the dying coals. I was standing there when Ames came in. He looked so wretched, so really ill, that I suggested he go into the library and lie down until I called him.
“Not now, Aunt Margaret. Simon wants a bromide from the village for Jane. Did Thomas leave the car in the drive?”
“You aren’t fit to go,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t. Let me call Thomas.”
“I’d like to do something.”
I knew he meant he wanted to do something for Jane. It isn’t my habit to proffer unsolicited advice but I felt obliged to say, “I wouldn’t worry over Jane, dear. It’s natural she wouldn’t be herself tonight. Everything will straighten out tomorrow.”
“That’s what I tell myself, Aunt Margaret.” Then he burst out, “But why is Jane behaving in such a funny way?” In a voice so low I had to strain to catch his words he added, “I know she wasn’t ever fond of Dorothy, but still I should think she’d feel obliged to…”
“Obliged to do what, Ames?”
“Tell the simple truth,” my nephew said.
I looked at him without a word.
“Don’t pretend, Aunt Margaret!” he cried, savage in his own pain and hurt. “Let’s have some honesty for a change. A little, anyhow! Do you believe Jane told the truth about what happened in your bedroom?”
“I don’t know,” I said very slowly.
“Well, I know! I know she wasn’t hit on the head by that typewriter. She doesn’t think so either. A lot of things have happened tonight that have an accidental look, but, believe me, they weren’t accidents.”
“Do you think someone deliberately struck Jane?”
“I do.”
“But, Ames,” I said, arguing against my own convictions, “why should Jane conceal the fact? For that matter, why should anyone have been in the alcove?”
“That,” Ames said grimly, “is what I intend to learn.” The grimness faded and only his misery remained. “I don’t give a damn, really, who killed Dorothy Fithian except in an academic kind of way. That may sound cold but anyway it’s honest. All I want to do is look out for Jane. How am I to help if she won’t trust me? She doesn’t, Aunt Margaret, she doesn’t trust any of us. Not even me.” He bowed his head in his hands.
“I think,” I said, with an assurance which went no deeper than my tone, “that you’re over-tired and overstrained. You must remember—we must both remember—that Jane has had a blow on the head followed by a serious shock. Maybe her attitude does seem strange. Maybe her story does seem unlikely. But think, Ames, think of Jane. Isn’t the alternative even more unlikely? Have you ever known your cousin to tell a lie?”
“No,” said Ames, “I haven’t.”
Presently I was able to talk him into a calmer frame of mind. In an effort to divert his thoughts I talked of anything and everything except my niece. I attempted in¬deed to arouse his lively masculine pride by speaking of my own dependence upon him. I was overjoyed, I said, that he had accompanied the theater party to the house.
“It was a life-saver and nothing less, my dear. I wasn’t expecting you until morning.”
Instantly, to my astonishment, his face darkened. “I didn’t expect to come until tomorrow,” he said curtly. “I had an early morning class.”
“Then Marian suggested your coming?”
“Ask her,” said Ames. “She’ll tell you all about it.” He rose at once. “I'd better be shoving off.”
It wasn’t like him to be discourteous. I called him back. “What is it, Ames? Did I speak out of turn?”
“Of course not. You never do. Or almost never.” Ames managed a smile. “I’d just rather you asked Aunt Marian why she phoned and asked me to join them at the theater. Now are you satisfied?” He stooped and patted my hand.
Marian had distinctly said they stopped by the fraternity house and picked up Ames. She had led me to believe that the stopping off was a casual impulsive gesture. After a look at Ames’ face, however, I let the matter drop and said lightly, “Before rushing off to the village, why don’t you try the telephone again? It may be working now.”
Ames gazed at the telephone and then back at me. “Aunt Margaret, do you honestly believe that telephone went out of order on its own?” I stared at him. “The telephone fits too well with what happened to the automobiles to be an accident,” he said, patient as usual with senile stupidity. “Isn’t it pretty obvious the wire’s been cut?”
I looked instinctively at the wire which dropped from the instrument to the floor. I saw nothing out of order.
Ames smiled. “You can cut telephone wires outside a house as well as in.” Merely to humor me he stepped to the telephone and removed the receiver. “Still dead,’ he reported, not without triumph.
Just then Thomas returned burdened with brandy and an armload of wood, a feat in balancing which was one of his peculiar accomplishment. Over Ames’ protests I sent Thomas to the village.
“The police would probably like our party intact.”
“Of course you’re right.” From his instant unhappiness I judged that his thoughts had gone again to Jane. He strolled restlessly about the room, wheeled suddenly. “Where’s a flashlight, Aunt Margaret? Let’s go outside and see if we can find the break in the wire. Maybe we can save the police some trouble.”
What he wanted was action and I knew it.
I meekly produced a flashlight, and followed my nephew through the kitchen, through the tool-room, down a flight of steepish stairs into the open. The night was inky black and cold. The fires in the strawstacks had been extinguished, but, peering toward the stables, I could see the flicker of lanterns as small, blurred figures moved to and fro. My servants' were driving the horses into the stables, and I guessed that the police would soon be at the house. Suddenly our errand struck me as pointless and a little absurd.
“Hurry, Ames,” I said. My teeth were chattering. “This isn’t really up to us.”
Quite deliberately he flashed his light along that mys¬terious network of wires which enter every modern dwelling. I craned my neck, saw no dangling wire. Ames seemed disappointed.
“Where’s the telephone box?”
“I don’t know. Oh, yes, I guess it’s hidden by the deutzia bushes around the corner. The man was fixing it one day.”
Instantly Ames started in that direction. Protesting, I followed him. He caught my arm as we circled the house and neared the clump of na
ked, leafless shrubbery which had been so glorious in June. Tall and thick, the deutzia grew beneath the dining room windows. The upper branches tapped a faint tattoo against the glass.
“Someone’s been here,” Ames whispered, triumphant and excited. “See the broken twigs. That’s been done tonight.”
The deutzia bushes were seriously disturbed, indeed had been wrenched apart, and broken twigs were scattered all around. Someone had made a hole in the bushes. With a feeling of approaching panic, I realized that someone had crept so close to the house that by leaning from the window above I could have touched that person.
“And there,” Ames declared in the cheerful tone of a man whose intuitive conclusion is proved correct, “is the cut in the wire. Don’t get too close, Aunt Margaret. We must be careful to leave everything as is.”
I nevertheless went closer. The flashlight gleamed into the aperture in the bushes, upon the telephone box, and the wire which sprouted from it. The wire had been cut quite neatly, cut twice. I saw the severed length upon the ground. I saw something else. I gasped.
“What is it, Aunt Margaret?”
‘Those are my pruning shears!” I pointed to a pair of shears, tossed carelessly beside the severed wire. “Thomas paints the tool handles red.”
“Used to cut the wire,” Ames said in infinite satisfaction. “That might be important. There may be fingerprints.”
He turned, surprised by my tense clutch at his arm. “Why, Aunt Margaret…”
“Those shears,” I said, “were in the tool-room at dinner time. I was in the kitchen. Thomas was sharpening the shears. I saw him put them in the tool-box. He always locks the box.”
For a moment Ames was rigid as a statue. Then he gave a shaky, little laugh. “You must be wrong, Aunt Margaret. It’s odd enough to think someone would climb through those bushes and happen upon the easiest spot to cut the telephone wire. But who could possibly know how and where to find your shears?”
“Exactly,” said a voice behind us. “Who?”
I started violently. Ames dropped his flashlight, sheepishly picked it up. Harold Hargreaves stood behind us, another flashlight in his hand. He was very pale.
The Strawstack Murders Page 6
