The Cases of Susan Dare

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  This time the word, falling into the long room, was weighted with its own significance. Tryon Welles’ gray shoulders moved.

  “She’s perfectly right,” he said. “I’d forgotten—if I ever knew. But that’s the way of it. We’ll have to send for people—doctor, sheriff, coroner, I suppose.”

  Afterward, Susan realized that but for Tryon Welles the confusion would have become mad. He took a quiet command of the situation, sending Randy, white and sick-looking, to dress, telephoning into town, seeing that the body was decently covered, and even telling Mars to bring them hot coffee. He was here, there, everywhere: upstairs, downstairs, seeing to them all, and finally outside to meet the sheriff … brisk, alert, efficient. In the interval Susan sat numbly beside Christabel on the love seat in the hall, with Michela restlessly prowling up and down the hall before their eyes, listening to the telephone calls, drinking hot coffee, watching everything with her sullen, flat black eyes. Her red-and-white sports suit, with its scarlet bracelets and earrings, looked garish and out of place in that house of violent death.

  And Christabel. Still a frozen image of a woman who drank coffee automatically, she sat erect and still and did not speak. The glowing amethyst on her finger caught the light and was the only living thing about her.

  Gradually the sense of numb shock and confusion was leaving Susan. Fright was still there and horror and a queer aching pity, but she saw Randy come running down the wide stairway again, his red hair smooth now above a sweater, and she realized clearly that he was no longer white and sick and frightened; he was instead alert and defiantly ready for what might come. And it would be, thought Susan, in all probability, plenty.

  And it was.

  Questions—questions. The doctor, who was kind, the coroner, who was not; the sheriff, who was merely observant—all of them questioning without end. No time to think. No time to comprehend. Time only to reply as best one might.

  But gradually out of it all certain salient facts began to emerge. They were few, however, and brief.

  The revolver was Randy’s, and it had been taken from the top buffet drawer—when, no one knew or, at least, would tell. “Everybody knew it was there,” said Randy sulkily. The fingerprints on it would probably prove to be Randy’s and Mars’s, since they picked it up.

  No one knew anything of the murder, and no one had an alibi, except Liz (the Negro second girl) and Minnie (the cook), who were together in the kitchen.

  Christabel had been writing letters in her own room: she’d heard the shot, but thought it was only Randy shooting a bullfrog in the pool. But then she’d heard Randy and Mars running down the front stairway, so she’d come down too. Just to be sure that that was what it was.

  “What else did you think it could be?” asked the sheriff. But Christabel said stiffly that she didn’t know.

  Randy had been asleep when Mars had awakened him. He had not heard the sound of the shot at all. He and Mars had hurried down to the library. (Mars, it developed, had gone upstairs by means of the small back stairway off the kitchen.)

  Tryon Welles had walked down the hill in front of the house to the mail box and was returning when he heard the shot. But it was muffled, and he did not know what had happened until he reached the library. He created a mild sensation at that point by taking off a ring, holding it so they could all see it, and demanding of Mars if that was the ring he had seen on the murderer’s hand. However, the sensation was only momentary, for the large clear stone was as green as his neat green tie.

  “No, suh, Mista Tryon,” said Mars. “The ring on the han’ I saw was red. I could see it plain, an’ it was red.”

  “This,” said Tryon Welles, “is a flawed emerald. I asked because I seem to be about the only person here wearing a ring. But I suppose that, in justice to us, all our belongings should be searched.”

  Upon which the sheriff’s gaze slid to the purple pool on Christabel’s white hand. He said, however, gently, that that was being done, and would Mrs. Michela Bromfel tell what she knew of the murder.

  But Mrs. Michela Bromfel somewhat spiritedly knew nothing of it. She’d been walking in the pine woods, she said defiantly, glancing obliquely at Randy, who suddenly flushed all over his thin face. She’d heard the shot but hadn’t realized it was a gunshot. However, she was curious and came back to the house.

  “The window behind the body opens toward the pine woods,” said the sheriff. “Did you see anyone, Mrs. Bromfel?”

  “No one at all,” said Michela definitely.

  Well, then, had she heard the dogs barking? The sheriff seemed to know that the kennels were just back of the pine woods.

  But Michela had not heard the dogs.

  Someone stirred restively at that, and the sheriff coughed and said unnecessarily that there was no tramp about, then, and the questioning continued. Continued wearily on and on and on, and still no one knew how Joe Bromfel had met his death. And as the sheriff was at last dismissing them and talking to the coroner of an inquest, one of his men came to report on the search. No one was in the house who didn’t belong there; they could tell nothing of footprints; the French windows back of the body had been ajar, and there was no red ring anywhere in the house.

  “Not, that is, that we can find,” said the man.

  “All right,” said the sheriff. “That’ll be all now, folks. But I’d take it kindly if you was to stay around here today.”

  All her life Susan was to remember that still, long day with a kind of sharp reality. It was, after those first moments when she’d felt so ill and shocked, weirdly natural, as if, one event having occurred, another was bound to follow, and then upon that one’s heels another, and all of them quite in the logical order of things. Even the incident of the afternoon, so trivial in itself but later so significant, was as natural, as unsurprising as anything could be. And that was her meeting with Jim Byrne.

  It happened at the end of the afternoon, long and painful, which Susan spent with Christabel, knowing somehow that, under her frozen surface, Christabel was grateful for Susan’s presence. But there were nameless things in the air between them which could be neither spoken of nor ignored, and Susan was relieved when Christabel at last took a sedative and, eventually, fell into a sleep that was no more still than Christabel waking had been.

  There was no one to be seen when Susan tiptoed out of Christabel’s room and down the stairway, although she heard voices from the closed door of the library.

  Out of the wide door at last and walking along the terrace above the lily pool, Susan took a long breath of the mist-laden air.

  So this was murder. This was murder, and it happened to people one knew, and it did indescribable and horrible things to them. Frightened them first, perhaps. Fear of murder itself came first—simple, primitive fear of the unleashing of the beast. And then on its heels came more civilized fear, and that was fear of the law, and a scramble for safety.

  She turned at the hedge and glanced backward. The house lay white and stately amid its gardens as it had lain for generations. But it was no longer tranquil—it was charged now with violence. With murder. And it remained dignified and stately and would cling, as Christabel would cling and had clung all those years, to its protective ritual.

  Christabel: Had she killed him? Was that why she was so stricken and gray? Or was it because she knew that Randy had killed him? Or was it something else?

  Susan did not see the man till she was almost upon him, and then she cried out involuntarily, though she as a rule was not at all nervous. He was sitting on the small porch of the cottage, hunched up with his hat over his eyes and his coat collar turned up, furiously scribbling on a pad of paper. He jumped up as he heard her breathless little cry and whirled to face her and took off his hat all in one motion.

  “May I use your typewriter?” he said.

  His eyes were extremely clear and blue and lively. His face was agreeably irregular in feature, with a mouth that laughed a great deal, a chin that took insolence from no man,
and generous width of forehead. His hair was thinning but not yet showing gray and his hands were unexpectedly fine and beautiful. “Hard on the surface,” thought Susan. “Terribly sensitive, really. Irish. What’s he doing here?”

  Aloud she said: “Yes.”

  “Good. Can’t write fast enough and want to get this story off tonight. I’ve been waiting for you, you know. They told me you wrote things. My name’s Byrne. James Byrne. I’m a reporter. Cover special stories. I’m taking a busman’s holiday. I’m actually on a Chicago paper and down here for a vacation. I didn’t expect a murder story to break.”

  Susan opened the door upon the small living room.

  “The typewriter’s there. Do you need paper? There’s a stack beside it.”

  He fell upon the typewriter absorbedly, like a dog upon a bone. She watched him for a while, amazed at his speed and fluency and utter lack of hesitancy.

  Presently she lighted the fire already laid in the tiny fireplace and sat there quietly, letting herself be soothed by the glow of the flames and the steady rhythm of the typewriter keys. And for the first time that day its experiences, noted and stored away in whatever place observations are stored, began to arouse and assort and arrange themselves and march in some sort of order through her conscious thoughts. But it was a dark and macabre procession, and it frightened Susan. She was relieved when Jim Byrne spoke.

  “I say,” he said suddenly, over the clicking keys, “I’ve got your name Louise Dare. Is that right?”

  “Susan.”

  He looked at her. The clicking stopped.

  “Susan. Susan Dare,” he repeated thoughtfully. “I say, you can’t be the Susan Dare that writes murder stories!”

  “Yes,” said Susan guardedly, “I can be that Susan Dare.”

  There was an expression of definite incredulity in his face. “But you—”

  “If you say,” observed Susan tensely, “that I don’t look as if I wrote murder stories, you can’t use my typewriter for your story.”

  “I suppose you are all tangled up in this mess,” he said speculatively.

  “Yes,” said Susan, sober again. “And no,” she added, looking at the fire.

  “Don’t commit yourself,” said Jim Byrne dryly. “Don’t say anything reckless.”

  “But I mean just that,” said Susan. “I’m a guest here. A friend of Christabel Frame’s. I didn’t murder Joe Bromfel. And I don’t care at all about the rest of the people here except that I wish I’d never seen them.”

  “But you do,” said the reporter gently, “care a lot about Christabel Frame?”

  “Yes,” said Susan gravely.

  “I’ve got all the dope, you know,” said the reporter softly. “It wasn’t hard to get. Everybody around here knows about the Frames. The thing I can’t understand is why she shot Joe. It ought to have been Michela.”

  “What—” Susan’s fingers were digging into the wicker arms of her chair, and her eyes strove frantically to plumb the clear blue eyes above the typewriter.

  “I say, it ought to have been Michela. She’s the girl who’s making the trouble.”

  “But it wasn’t—it couldn’t—Christabel wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, yes, she could,” said the reporter rather wearily. “All sorts of people could do the strangest things. Christabel could murder. But I can’t see why she’d murder Joe and let Michela go scot-free.”

  “Michela,” said Susan in a low voice, “would have a motive.”

  “Yes, she’s got a motive. Get rid of a husband. But so had Randy Frame. Same one. And he’s what the people around here call a Red Frame—impulsive, reckless, bred to a tradition of—violence.”

  “But Randy was asleep—upstairs—”

  He interrupted her.

  “Oh, yes, I know all that. And you were approaching the house from the terrace, and Tryon Welles had gone down after the mail, and Miss Christabel was writing letters upstairs, and Michela was walking in the pine woods. Not a damn alibi among you. The way the house and grounds are laid out, neither you nor Tryon Welles nor Michela would be visible to each other. And anyone could have escaped readily from the window and turned up innocently a moment later from the hall. I know all that. Who was behind the curtains?”

  “A tramp—” attempted Susan in a small voice. “A burglar—”

  “Burglar nothing,” said Jim Byrne with scorn. “The dogs would have had hysterics. It was one of you. Who?”

  “I don’t know,” said Susan. “I don’t know!” Her voice was uneven, and she knew it and tried to steady it and clutched the chair arms tighter. Jim Byrne knew it, too, and was suddenly alarmed.

  “Oh, look here, now,” he cried. “Don’t look like that. Don’t cry. Don’t—”

  “I am not crying,” said Susan. “But it wasn’t Christabel.”

  “You mean,” said the reporter kindly, “that you don’t want it to be Christabel. Well—” He glanced at his watch, said, “Golly,” and flung his papers together and rose. “There’s something I’ll do. Not for you exactly—just for—oh, because. I’ll let part of my story wait until tomorrow if you want the chance to try to prove your Christabel didn’t murder him.”

  Susan was frowning perplexedly.

  “You don’t understand me,” said the reporter cheerfully. “It’s this. You write murder mysteries, and I’ve read one or two of them. They are not bad,” he interpolated hastily, watching Susan. “Now, here’s your chance to try a real murder mystery.”

  “But I don’t want——” began Susan.

  He checked her imperatively.

  “You do want to,” he said. “In fact, you’ve got to. You see—your Christabel is in a spot. You know that ring she wears—”

  “When did you see it?”

  “Oh, does it matter?” he cried impatiently. “Reporters see everything. The point is the ring.”

  “But it’s an amethyst,” said Susan defensively.

  “Yes,” he agreed grimly. “It’s an amethyst. And Mars saw a red stone. He saw it, it has developed, on the right hand. And the hand holding the revolver. And Christabel wears her ring on her right hand.”

  “But,” repeated Susan. “It is an amethyst.”

  “M-m,” said the reporter. “It’s an amethyst. And a little while ago I said to Mars: ‘What’s the name of that flowering vine over there?’ And he said: ‘That red flower, suh? That’s wisteria.’ ”

  He paused. Susan felt exactly as if something had clutched her heart and squeezed it.

  “The flowers were purple, of course,” said the reporter softly. “The color of a dark amethyst.”

  “But he would have recognized Christabel’s ring,” said Susan after a moment.

  “Maybe,” said the reporter. “And maybe he wishes he’d never said a word about the red ring. He was scared when he first mentioned it, probably; hadn’t had a chance to think it over.”

  “But Mars—Mars would confess to murdering rather than—”

  “No,” said Jim Byrne soberly. “He wouldn’t. That theory sounds all right. But it doesn’t happen that way. People don’t murder or confess to having murdered for somebody else. When it is a deliberate, planned murder and not a crazy drunken brawl, when anything can happen, there’s a motive. And it’s a strong and urgent and deeply personal and selfish motive and don’t you forget it. I’ve got to hurry. Now then, shall I send in my story about the wisteria—”

  “Don’t,” said Susan choking. “Oh, don’t. Not yet.”

  He picked up his hat. “Thanks for the typewriter. Get your wits together and go to work. After all, you ought to know something of murders. I’ll be seeing you.”

  The door closed, and the flames crackled. After a long time Susan moved to the writing table and drew a sheet of yellow manuscript paper toward her, and a pencil, and wrote: Characters; possible motives; clues; queries.

  It was strange, she thought, not how different real life was to its written imitation, but how like. How terribly like!

  She wa
s still bent over the yellow paper when a peremptory knock at the door sent her pencil jabbing furiously on the paper and her heart into her throat. It proved to be, however, only Michela Bromfel, and she wanted help.

  “It’s my knees,” said Michela irritably. “Christabel’s asleep or something, and the help in the kitchen are scared of their shadows.” She paused to dig savagely at first one knee and then the other. “Have you got anything to put on my legs? I’m nearly going crazy. It’s not mosquito bites. I don’t know what it is. Look!”

  She sat down, pulled back her white skirt and rolled down her thin stockings, disclosing just above each knee a scarlet blotchy rim around her fat white legs.

  Susan looked and had to resist a wild desire to giggle. “It’s n-nothing,” she said, quivering. “That is, it’s only jiggers—here, I’ll get you something. Alcohol.”

  “Jiggers,” said Michela blankly. “What’s that?”

  Susan went into the bathroom. “Little bugs,” she called. Where was the alcohol? “They are thick in the pine woods. It’ll be all right by morning.” Here it was. She took the bottle in her hand and turned again through the bedroom into the tiny living room.

  At the door she stopped abruptly. Michela was standing at the writing table. She looked up, saw Susan, and her flat dark eyes flickered.

  “Oh,” said Michela. “Writing a story?”

  “No,” said Susan. “It’s not a story. Here’s the alcohol.”

  Under Susan’s straight look Michela had the grace to depart rather hastily, yanking up her stockings and twisting them hurriedly, and clutching at the bottle of alcohol. Her red bracelets clanked, and her scarlet fingernails looked as if they’d been dipped in blood. Of the few people who might have killed Joe Bromfel, Susan reflected coolly, she would prefer it to be Michela.

  It was just then that a curious vagrant memory began to tease Susan. Rather it was not so much a memory as a memory of a memory—something that sometime she had known and now could not remember. It was tantalizing. It was maddeningly elusive. It floated teasingly on the very edge of her consciousness.