“You said you knew all about it.”
“So I did. And so I do. I’m checking up on what I’ve heard and learned for myself.”
“Oh! Well, there isn’t so very much to tell you. I met Ormes about a month ago. He at first wanted to make love to me. I’m on the stage; they all do, of course. That’s why I divorced you.”
“I know,” I said. “Go on.”
“But I kept him guessing. You and I had parted. I threw love out of the window. I’d made up my mind that since men are willing to pay well for a pretty woman’s kisses, I’d get all I could for mine. I’d heard that Ormes had money. But it developed that, like everybody else, he was in need of cash. So I listened to a scheme he proposed for getting money out of his wife. It seems that he married her some years back under circumstances that . . . well, I don’t know the details, but she forced him to marry her to save a scandal. Then she forced him to put a hundred thousand dollars in Government bonds into her hands. He showed me letters from his aunt and sister supporting the story. Besides, Gray admits it’s true.”
“So it is,” I interrupted, “except that she didn’t actually force him to marry her. But that’s of no consequence. Go on.”
“She didn’t? I was afraid of that. But I’m not excusing myself. I needed money. Ormes needed money. We agreed to come here together, with me helping him to get back something that seemed to belong to him. That’s all. As I say, I don’t excuse myself. He told me that he simply must have fifty thousand to stave off a petition in bankruptcy. I was to come here, represent myself as having married him a year prior to her own wedding and claim seventy thousand for my silence and my promise to obtain a divorce immediately and quietly. He got me a marriage certificate, forged, of course. It’s dated at a town in England——”
“Ah!” I exclaimed, involuntarily. Then I added: “He’s got friends there, I’ve heard. It isn’t the first time he’s procured forged documents from England. But I’m sorry to have interrupted you.”
“So we came here and I was to see her and demand the money. Twenty thousand were to be mine for helping him in this . . . this blackmail. Now you say she’s dead. It changes everything.”
“But what did he do . . . here . . . that made you want him killed?”
“He called his sister in. We talked——”
“I know. Go on. What happened?”
“Gray, the sister, wouldn’t agree to the plan. It seems that she had been in favor of it, but now, for some reason, she’s changed her mind. I couldn’t learn why.”
I wondered why Gray had admitted to me at the breakfast table that she had at first joined in the scheme, and had not also told me of later rejecting it. For she must already have rejected it at that time. Was it because she wanted to take the blame upon herself, blame for the proposed blackmail, thus shielding her aunt and her brother? I considered that Gray might have been capable of such generosity. Muriel was speaking again.
“Ormes was furious. He pleaded, he stormed, he threatened. But she merely sat and looked at him. Then she left the room. As she was going out she whispered to me that I’d better come up here.”
“You didn’t . . . immediately?”
“No. Ormes told me he had something else to propose. It was . . .”
She paused. She rose from her seat on the bed and came near to me and looked me squarely in the face. Then she went on:
“I didn’t mean that you and I were actually to kill him. That was only a way of saying that he ought to be killed without mercy. What did he propose? I suppose he thought that because I’m something of an adventuress, and had already agreed to help him in a fraud and with blackmail—I suppose he thought I’d do anything, if there was a little money in it. This, he said, was an alternative scheme he’d had in mind for some little time, in case the other should fail. Well . . . he proposed that he shoot a certain man whom he said was staying here, a fool bookworm, he called him, and I didn’t know, then, that he meant you!” I started violently, but controlled myself. Muriel continued: “And that he then shoot his wife, also. He’d put both the bodies together in Agnes’s room. He’d swear that he and I had come here suspecting she had a lover, and had found you with her. The rest was to have been done, apparently, in a fit of jealous fury. I was to pose as having come here with him because I had had reason to think that the man might be my husband and— Do you see? He and I, two wronged spouses, were to join hands in punishing you and Agnes, two erring spouses. That’s the way it was to be made to appear at the trial. But did he know that the man he was proposing to kill in cold blood was actually my husband? That is, excuse me, had actually been my husband? I didn’t know it, then. I got away from him and ran up here to Gray. Why, the man must be mad! How could he get away with such a plan as that? But Gray wasn’t in. Then you came.”
As for myself, I shall not attempt to describe my feelings of that moment. Horror was dominant, naturally. But it was so mixed with other emotions that my brain danced and I felt dizzy. Through it all came gradually a thrill of having triumphed. The crazy Grayce had done that which delivered Ormes into my hands . . . and Muriel’s. The securities, for which he had been willing to murder his wife and me, might now be his for the taking, unless she had otherwise disposed of them in a will. Muriel had betrayed his schemes to me, and Gray had refused, at the last, to join him in blackmailing his wife. Barbara would stand on my side; at least, I thought she would; and I suspected that Hobbs, if he could be convinced of Ormes’s villainy and incipient madness, would not oppose me. Into my brain was slowly coming an idea for the solution of most of our problems, disposition of Agnes’s body and a logical reason for her disappearance, without any need of her husband’s suicide.
I was confident that I could prove my own innocence of Agnes’s death, whatever Hobbs and the rest might say against me in testimony. Grayce was not dead, as I had feared she might be at the time of finding the result of her work in the garage. The bloody finger prints on the car and on Agnes’s dress and shoulders could be made to show that Grayce had killed her. And I did not think that Ormes, with his pressing need for money removed, would lightly allow himself to become known as the son of one murderous maniac, even though he must be published as the brother of another. Nor would he be likely, now, to seek my death in an attempt to fasten a criminal guilt upon his wife and me, since Muriel, the tool he must have for such a business, happened to be my own wife and not antagonistic to my interests. Moreover, how could he account for Agnes’s slashed throat, even if he carried out his scheme and shot her dead body through heart or brain?
Thus I reasoned, not quite logically, I fear, during the few minutes I continued standing in Gray’s room, and while Muriel turned away from me to seat herself again on the bed and bury her face in her hands. For it must be understood that I could not well leave Ormesby until this matter of the disposition of Agnes’s body had been cleared away. Could I go, leaving Ormes to remove all traces of his sister’s work, then to call in the police and charge me with that bloody deed? I was a mere adventurer, as Muriel had called herself an adventuress. And, as I have said before, or hinted, even though I might be able to establish my innocence, by aid of the further secrets I held, still it would mean disgrace among the people I had consorted with, and might again consort with if ever my financial standing improved. Moreover, after being hunted across the States, what if I were caught and brought back to face a charge of being accessory, either before or after the crime? I might not be able to prove innocence of that. In the first place, it didn’t exist. I was really guilty of it, and I continued being guilty of it with every moment I maintained silence. No, summing it all up, hastily enough, I grant, and no doubt illogically, yet with the best reasoning I had time for, it seemed to me that, like Macbeth, I had become so deeply involved in blood as to make it easier and safer to wade across the stream than to attempt a turning back.
And M
uriel’s position was not greatly different from my own.
But what was Ormes about? Already he might be in the garage, working destruction upon the evidence which Grayce had left there. For I believed him to be more than half way to madness, and his family pride and fear of disgrace might drive him to any insane hazard. Or, alone where I had left him, he might be already dead by his own hand.
“You stay here,” I commanded Muriel. “Have you had any breakfast? No? I’ll find Hobbs, or Gray, and have something brought to you here. But you musn’t be seen by any other person, if it’s possible to keep you out of sight. Stay here and lock this door behind me.”
I went to the door and opened it and looked out into the hallway. No one was in sight. Then I remembered something.
“Did you know that Gray has a twin sister?” I asked.
She had followed me, and now she was standing very close to me. She shook her head. It came to me that she was not thinking. As I rapidly sketched the situation for her, and for all the astonishing things she had so lately learned, she was not listening much to what I was telling, nor was she thinking of the inmates of Ormesby.
Muriel had tried divorce. It had, so far, brought her nothing but insult and hard work. Now, meeting me here, in a place of danger, I knew intuitively that, if I opened my arms to her, she would come into them. All the old relationship might be then picked up and renewed where it had been broken off. And for a moment I was tempted to welcome her.
Yet I refrained. After all, she had deserted me when most I needed her. And Gray’s face had come between us in the interim. Say what you will, no man easily forgives desertion. I stared into Muriel’s eyes. And she read in my gaze that I would not receive her. She turned away, then, smiling a little wryly in the way that women love. And I went out of the door, closing it gently, yet firmly, after me.
Ormes was still alive in his room. I did not trouble to knock at the door, but opened it and saw him there and entered. He sat in a chair by the window, seemingly in deep thought. If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. I stood inside the threshold of the door.
“Ormes,” I said, “I’ve heard enough of your doings and intentions to justify me in shooting you here and now, like a dog, and as you’d have shot me.”
It was a silly way of approaching the man, villain though he undoubtedly was, considering the heavy trouble which lay upon him. He roused at the sound of my voice, turning toward me a face from which all color and expression had fled away. It passed through my mind, fleetingly, that the near strain of insanity in his blood might well have proved too much for his brain in this crisis. And I now think that if ever a man was near to madness, while still retaining sufficient grip on sanity to be reasonable and accountable for his words and deeds, it was Ormond Ormes in that moment. But my speech, rude as it was, had sufficed to recall him to the world in which he lived. Slowly, as I waited there, watching him, something of color reappeared in his cheeks and a gleam of interest returned to his vacant eyes.
“There’s a dead body in your garage,” I said, since it seemed to me that he might have forgotten it. “I’m going to telephone to the authorities to come and take cognizance of it, unless you do so.”
“Eh? What’s that? No, don’t do that. Wait. Let me think. For God’s sake, don’t do that, Seaverns! I’ll—I’ll—let me think! Leave me alone, and let me think.”
“I did leave you alone. You haven’t been thinking. You’ve been brooding. Come! Snap out of it! Something’s got to be done at once.”
“I thought you agreed to help me.”
“I did. I will, if you’ll do something sensible.”
“What can I do?”
“Well, for one thing, the crazy person who did the killing must be surrendered to an asylum. It can’t be avoided any longer. You’ve got to face it, Ormes.”
“No. Wait! There’s a way. I can hide her—the body. I’ve thought of it. If you’ll help me, I’ll——”
“You mean, you’ll put her down the old cistern? Well, I won’t help you do that. It’s too risky.”
“What do you want?” he demanded, dully, rising and coming close to where I stood.
“Want? Money, you mean? Nothing at all. I’m not trying to hold you up. I wouldn’t take your money, even if you had any and offered it to me. But Hobbs and his wife, if they don’t already know, will know very soon. And there are too many others. Besides, your sister Grayce can’t be depended on to hold her tongue. I know it because I know how freely she talked to me, about you and about your father. There’s nothing to be done, except report the death. You’d better come and do it with no more delay. Every minute we wait makes it look the worse, for all of us.”
He hesitated, scanning my face, from which, I suppose, he took no more than evidence of my determination to force him to do as I bade. Nevertheless, I will not deny that, for a moment, I was half tempted to take his money. I would have kept silence in any event, if for no other reason than I could not have talked without involving Muriel and Gray. But this man had plotted to kill me for his wife’s bonds. It did not seem entirely unjust that I should make him give me a part of them, provided they could be found. And the thing he proposed might well have been accomplished. Hobbs could be bought, or perhaps his loyalty would keep silence in any case. I would be bought . . . apparently. Grayce, being crazy, must be confined closely in the house, where her tongue could not reach a stranger’s ears. Or, if it did, then he must be made to see that her words were the ravings of a disordered brain. Gray and Barbara would say nothing. Muriel, reunited to me, would hold her peace. It was a wild risk; and yet such risks are taken every day, and every day they succeed, despite editorial writers and moralists, who try to make us believe that murder always outs, though even they have not the effrontery to claim that it is always punished. It is true that I had overlooked Mrs. Hobbs, and that oversight might have been fatal to everything.
But I conquered the temptation, which, as I said, was not more than half an enticement. I had seen enough of crime and of the effects of crime, of late, and of the terror that lives after the hiding away of crime and does not ever leave the hider in any peace. Moreover, Muriel had been forced near enough into the commission of the crime of fraud. I had no stomach for making her join me in another. Now that she had returned to me (do you think I needed her spoken promise to be aware that we could be united again?) I was determined to help her, despite my own poverty and despite her feminine hunger for luxuries. And I was determined, further, to wrest a living somehow from this bankrupt world. I am no philosopher, and I am no economist; but it seemed to me that a generation which had taken such a beating as mine had ought to be afraid of any determined man who had the courage and the effrontery to cry “Boo!” If it became necessary to commit crime to obtain money, well, I might not later refuse to commit it; but it would not be the criminal action suggested by Ormond Ormes.
He had, as I said, approached me and he now stood scanning my face as if for a sign of my yielding to his desire. I gave him back look for look, resolved to make him understand that I could not be bought to do his bidding. And he must have read the unspoken resolution that stared at him out of my unswerving eyes. Abruptly his self-control was gone. He flung out his hands and rushed at me, his pale face contorted and suddenly flushed with fury. I had no time to avoid his rush, nor to draw the pistol from my pocket, even if I had remembered having it there. I swung at his chin and missed, as he closed in on me. Then his long arms were around me and I could only grapple with him as he flung his insane strength upon me and bore me backwards against the wall. And I went down beneath his rush and his weight and we rolled together across the floor of the room.
I fought with all the force I could muster to grip him by the throat and choke him into senselessness. But he caught my arms under his own and hugged me with the hug of a grizzly, pinning me against him so that I could not free a hand.
Over and over we went, knocking chairs and small tables from their places and making noise enough to rouse the entire household. I expected that the clamor of the fight must bring Hobbs to my help within a very few minutes. I would shout to him that my antagonist was insane. For by this time I knew that I was going to need the aid of someone if I were to escape from that fight alive. Ormes was a bigger man than I, and he gripped me with all of his maniac’s power, crushing out my breath against his heavy chest. Nevertheless I thought, for an instant, that he could do me no great harm, and that if he was imprisoning me in his arms, also I was holding him and preventing his escape. But in a moment I saw that he was trying to reach my throat with his teeth! The lycanthropy within him, the madness of the wolf, which had been in his father and was now in his sister, was come uppermost into his own frenzied rage. The Thing which he had feared had conquered him at last! He wanted to tear my flesh and to glut his lust for blood by drinking mine!
How long we had tossed and tumbled about that room I do not know. I felt the strength going out of me, along with the air from my lungs, which I could no longer renew. His iron muscles held me in a hug that I could not possibly break. His terribly blotched and twisted face was just above my own. I butted at his teeth with my head, and the blood sprang from his crushed lips and ran down over his chin.
But help was coming. I heard the voices of women, screaming in terror within the room. I heaved my body upward with the last ounce of strength remaining in it, striving to hurl my enemy into such a position as would enable the others to drag him off me, or to hit him over the head with some implement or weapon. In the next instant I knew that his sharp and nearing teeth would close upon my throat. Then a blow descended upon him from above, a blow so great that I felt something of the impact even through his body. He started back from me. His muscles stiffened rigidly, then as suddenly relaxed. After that he fell forward upon me and I was aware of the taste of warm and salty blood upon my mouth.
Fingers of Fear Page 16
