The Cases of Susan Dare

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  “But you did care, Jessica. You wanted the money. You—you love money.” There was a strangely incredulous wail in her thin voice. “Money—money! Not the things it will buy. Not the freedom it might give you. But money—bonds, mortgages, gold. You love money first, Jessica, and you—”

  “Caroline,” said Jessica in a terrible voice. Caroline babbled and sobbed into silence. “Caroline, you are not responsible. You forget that there are strangers here. That Marie has been murdered. Try to collect yourself. At once. You are making a disgusting exhibition.”

  All three looked at Susan.

  And as suddenly as they had been diverted from each other they were, for a moment, united in their feeling against Susan. She was the intruder, the instrument of the police, placed there by the law for the purpose of discovering evidence.

  Their eyes were not pleasant.

  Susan smoothed back her hair, and she was acutely aware of the small telegram of warning that ran along her nerves. One of them had murdered. She turned to Caroline.

  “Then were you afraid that Marie would discover what you had been doing with your money?” she asked gently.

  Caroline blinked and was immediately ready to reply, her momentary feeling against Susan disseminated by the small touch of kindness in Susan’s manner.

  “No,” she said in a confidential way. “That wasn’t what I was afraid of.”

  “Then was there something unusual about the house? Something that troubled you?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said Caroline.

  “What was it?” asked Susan, scarcely daring to breathe. If only Jessica would remain silent for another moment.

  But Caroline was fluttering again.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. You see, it was all so queer, Marie holding out against us all, and we all—except Jessica sometimes—obeyed Marie. We’ve always obeyed Marie. Everything in the house has done that. Even Spider—the—the monkey, you know.”

  Susan permitted her eyes to flicker toward Jessica. She stood immovable, watching David. Susan could not interpret that dark look, and she did not try. Instead she leaned over to Caroline, took her fluttering, ineffectual hands, and said, still gently: “Tell me exactly why you telephoned to Jim Byrne. What was it that happened in the morning—or maybe the night before—that made you afraid?”

  “How did you know?” said Caroline. “It happened that night.”

  “What was it?” said Susan so softly that it was scarcely more than a whisper.

  But Caroline quite suddenly swerved.

  “I wasn’t afraid of Marie,” she said. “But everyone obeyed Marie. Even the house always seemed more Marie’s house than—than Jessica’s. But I didn’t kill Marie.”

  “Tell me,” repeated Susan. “What happened last night that was—queer?”

  “Caroline,” said Jessica harshly, dragging herself back from some deep brooding gulf, “you’ve said enough.”

  Susan ignored her and held Caroline’s feverishly bright eyes with her own. “Tell me—”

  “It was—Marie—” gasped Caroline.

  “Marie—what did she do?” said Susan.

  “She didn’t do anything,” said Caroline. “It was what she said. No, it wasn’t that exactly. It was—”

  “If you insist upon talking, Caroline, you might at least try to be intelligible,” said Jessica coldly.

  Could she get Jessica out of the room? thought Susan; probably not. And it was all too obvious that she was standing by, permitting Caroline to talk only so long as Caroline said nothing that she, Jessica, did not want her to say. Susan said quietly: “Did you hear Marie speak?”

  “Yes, that was just it,” cried Caroline eagerly. “And it was so very queer. That is, of course we—that is, I—have often thought that Marie must be about the house much more than she pretended to be, in order to know all the things she knew. That is, she always knew everything that happened in the house. It—sometimes it was queer, you know, because it was like—like magic or something. It was quite,” said Caroline with an unexpected burst of imagery, “as if she had one of those astral body things, and it walked all around the house while Marie just sat there in her room.”

  “Astral—body—things,” said Jessica deliberately. Caroline crimsoned and Jessica’s hands gestured outward as much as to say: “You see for yourself what a state she’s in.”

  The old room was silent again. Susan’s heart was pounding, and again those small tocsins of warning were sounding in some subconscious realm. All those forces were silently, invisibly combating—struggling against each other. And somewhere amid them was the truth—quite tangible—altogether real.

  “But the astral body,” said Caroline suddenly into the silence, “couldn’t have talked. And I heard Marie speak. She was in Jessica’s room, and the door was closed, and I heard her talking to Jessica. And then—that’s what’s queer—I went straight on past the door and into Marie’s room, and there was Marie sitting there. Isn’t it queer?”

  “Why were you frightened?”

  “Because—because—” Caroline’s hands twisted together. “I don’t know why. Except that I had a—a feeling.”

  “Nonsense.” Jessica laughed. There was again the luminous flash in her shadowed eyes, and she spoke more rapidly than usual. “You see, Susan Dare, how nonsensical all this is. How utterly fantastic!”

  “There was Marie,” said Caroline. “She was talking to you.”

  Jessica’s silks rustled, and she walked rigidly and quickly to Caroline and leaned over so that she could grip Caroline’s shoulder and force Caroline to meet her eyes. David tried to intervene, and she brushed him away and said hoarsely:

  “Caroline, you poor little fool. You thought you’d get this young woman here and try to establish your innocence of the crime. All this talk is sheer nonsense. You are cunning after the way of fools such as you. Tell me this, Caroline—” She paused long enough to take a great gasp of breath. She was more powerful, more invincible than Susan had seen her. “Tell me. Where was David when the revolver was fired?”

  Caroline was shrinking backward. David said quickly: “She’ll say anything to protect me. She’ll say anything, and you—”

  “Be quiet, David. Caroline, answer me.”

  “He was at the door of his room,” said Caroline.

  For a long moment Jessica waited. Then with terrible deliberation she relaxed her grip and straightened and looked slowly from one to the other.

  “You’ve as good as confessed, Carrie,” she said. “There was no one else. You admit that it was not David. Why did you kill her, Carrie?”

  “She didn’t kill her!” David was between the two women, his face white and his eyes blazing, “It was you, Jessica. You—”

  “David! Stop!” The two sharp exclamations were like lashes. “I was here in this room when the shot was fired. I didn’t kill Marie. I couldn’t have killed her. You know that. Come, Caroline.”

  She put her gray hand upon Caroline’s shoulder. Caroline, as if mesmerized by that touch, arose, and Jessica turned to the doorway. No one moved as the two women crossed the room. Jim Byrne glanced at Susan unrevealingly and then, at Jessica’s imperious gesture, opened the door. Susan was vaguely aware that there were men in the hall outside, but she was held as if enchanted by the extraordinary scene she was witnessing.

  No one moved, and there was no sound save the rustle of Jessica’s silks while she led Caroline to the stairway. At the bottom step Jessica turned, and there was suddenly something less harsh in her face; it was for an instant almost kind, and there was a queer sort of tenderness in the pressure of her hand upon Caroline’s shrinking shoulder.

  But that hand was nevertheless compelling.

  “Go upstairs,” she said to Caroline, in a voice loud enough so that they all heard. “Go upstairs and do what is necessary. There’s enough veronal on my dresser. We’ll give you time.”

  She turned as if to barricade the stairway with her own rigid body and. looked s
lowly and defiantly around her. “I’ll make them give you time, Carrie. Go on.”

  There was the complete and utter silence of sheer horror. And in that silence something small and gray and quick flashed down from the curtain and up the stairs.

  “Holy Mother,” cried someone. “What was that?”

  And David sprang forward.

  “You can’t do that—you can’t do that! Caroline, don’t move—” Susan knew that he was thrusting himself between Jessica and Caroline, that there was sudden confusion. But she was mainly aware of something that had clicked in her own mind.

  Somehow she got through the confusion in the hall to Lieutenant Mohrn, and Jim Byrne was at her side. Both of them listened to the brief words she said; Lieutenant Mohrn ran rapidly upstairs, and Jim disappeared toward the dining room.

  Jim was back first. He pulled Susan to one side.

  “You are right,” he said. “The cook and the houseman both say that Marie was very strict about the monkey and that the monkey always obeyed her. But what do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure, Jim. But I’ve just told Lieutenant Mohrn that I think there should be a bullet hole somewhere upstairs. It was made by the second bullet. It is in the ceiling, perhaps—or wall. I think it’s in Jessica’s room.”

  Lieutenant Mohrn was coming down the stairway. He reached the bottom of the stairs and looked wearily and a bit sadly at the group there. At Caroline crumpled against the wall. At David white and taut. At Jessica, a rigid figure of hatred. Then he sighed and looked at the policeman nearest him and nodded.

  “Will you go into the drawing-room, please,” he asked Susan. “And you, Jim.”

  The doors slid together and, still wearily, Lieutenant Mohrn pulled out from his pocket a revolver, a long cord, a piece of cotton, and a small alarm clock.

  “They were all there hidden in the newel post at the top of the stairway. The carved top was loose as you remembered it, Miss Dare. And there’s two shots gone from the revolver, and there’s a bullet hole in the wall of Jessica’s bedroom. How did you know it was Jessica, Miss Dare?”

  “It was the monkey,” said Susan. Her voice sounded unnatural in her own ears, terribly tired, terribly sad. “It was the monkey all the time. You see, he was sitting there, stealing candy right beside Marie’s chair. He would have been afraid to do that if he had not known she was dead. And when Jessica entered the room he fled. When I thought of that, the whole thing fell together: the hot house, obviously to keep Marie’s body warm and confuse the time of death; everyone out of the house to permit Jessica to do murder; then this thing you’ve found—”

  “It’s simple, of course,” said Lieutenant Mohrn. “The cord fastened tight between the alarm lever and the trigger—the bit of cotton to pad the alarm. The clock is set for ten minutes after five. When did she hide it in the newel post?”

  “When I went down to telephone the police, I suppose, and David and Caroline were in Marie’s room.—I want to go home,” said Susan wearily.

  “Look here,” said Jim Byrne. “This sounds all right, Susan, but, remember, Marie couldn’t have been dead then. You heard her talk.”

  “I had never heard her speak before. And I heard the flat, dead tone of a person who has been deaf a long time. It was Caroline who actually solved the thing. And Jessica knew it. She knew it and at once tried to fasten the blame upon Caroline—to compel her to commit suicide.”

  “What did Caroline say?” Lieutenant Mohrn was very patient.

  “She said that she’d heard Marie speaking with Jessica in Jessica’s room behind a closed door. And that she’d gone straight on past that door to Marie’s room and found Marie sitting there. Caroline was confused, frightened, talked of astral bodies. Naturally, we knew that Jessica was—rehearsing—her imitation of Marie’s way of speaking.”

  “Premeditated,” said Jim. “Planned to the last detail. And your coming merely gave her the opportunity. You were to provide the alibi, Susan.”

  Susan shivered.

  “That was the trouble. She was sitting directly opposite me when the shot was fired upstairs. Yet she was the only person who hated Marie sufficiently to—murder her. It wasn’t money. It was hatred. Growing for years in this horrible house, nourished by jealousy over David, brought to a climax that was inevitable.” Susan smoothed her hair. “Please may I go?”

  “Then Marie was dead when you entered the house?”

  “Yes. Propped up by pillows. I—I saw the whole thing, you know. Saw Jessica approach her and talk, heard the reply—and how was I to know it was Jessica speaking and not Marie? Then Jessica bent and did something to her cushions, pulled them away, I suppose, so the body was no longer erect. And she turned at once and was between me and Marie all the way to the door so I could not see Marie, then, at all. (I couldn’t see Marie very well at any time, because she was in the shadow.) And when David and Caroline came upstairs, Jessica warned both of them that Marie was reading. I suppose she knew that they were only too glad to be relieved of the necessity to speak to Marie.” Susan shivered again and smoothed back her hair and felt dreadfully that she might cry. “It’s a t-terrible house,” she said indecisively, and Jim Byrne said hurriedly:

  “She can go now, can’t she? I’ve got a car out here. She doesn’t have to see them again.”

  The air was cold and fresh and the sky very black before dawn, and the pavements glistened.

  They swerved onto the Drive and stopped for a red light, and Jim turned to her as they waited. Through the dusk in the car she could feel his scrutiny.

  “I didn’t expect anything like this,” he said gravely. “Will you forgive me?”

  “Next time,” said Susan in a small clear voice, “I’ll not get scared.”

  “Next time!” said Jim derisively. “There won’t be a next time! I was the one that was scared. I had my finger on the trigger of a revolver all the time you were talking to them. No, indeedy, there won’t be a next time. Not for you, my girl”

  “Oh, all right,” said Susan agreeably.

  EASTER DEVIL

  SUSAN DARE SIPPED HER coffee and quietly contemplated devils. Outside, rain beat down upon cold, dark streets, but inside the drawn curtains of Susan’s small library it was warm, with a fire cheerful in the grate, and the dog lazy upon the rug, and cigarettes and an old book beside the deepest armchair. An armchair which Susan just then decorated, for she had dressed for her dinner à seul in soft trailing crimson. Too bad, thought Susan regretfully, that her best moments were so often wasted: a seductive crimson gown, and no one to see it. She smashed her cigarette sadly and returned to her book.

  Devils and devil-possessed souls! Of course there were no such things, but it was curious how real the old writers made both. Susan, who was a successful young writer of thrilling mystery novels, was storing up this knowledge for future use.

  Then the doorbell rang. The dog barked and scrambled to his feet and bounced into the hall, and Susan followed.

  Two men, beaten and wet with rain, were waiting, and one of them was Jim Byrne, with a package under his arm.

  “Company?” asked Jim tersely, looking at the dress.

  “No. I was alone—”

  “You remember Lieutenant Mohrn?”

  Of course she did! It was her volunteer work with him on a recent Chicago crime that had led the police force to regard her as a valuable consultant.

  “How do you do?” said Lieutenant Mohrn. “I hope you don’t mind our coming. You see, there’s something—”

  “Something queer,” said Jim. “In point of fact, it’s—”

  “Murder,” said Lieutenant Mohrn.

  “Oh,” said Susan. Her own small warm house—and these two men with sober faces looking at her. She smoothed back her hair. “Oh,” she said again.

  Jim pushed the package toward her.

  “I got size thirty-six,” he said. ‘Is that right?—I mean, that’s what we want you to wear.”

  That was actually Susan’s introduction
to the case of the Easter Devil. Fifteen minutes later she was getting out of the glamorous crimson gown and into a brown tweed suit with a warm topcoat, and tossing a few things into a bag—the few things included the contents of the package, which proved to be several nurse’s uniforms, complete with caps, and a small kit of tools which were new and shiny.

  “Do you know anything about nursing?” Jim Byrne had asked.

  “Nothing,” said Susan. “But I’ve had appendicitis.”

  “Oh,” said Jim, relieved. “Then you can—oh, take a pulse, make a show of nursing. She’s not sick, you know. If she were, we could not do this.”

  “I can shake a thermometer without dropping it,” said Susan. “If the doctor will help—”

  “Oh, he’ll help all right,” said Lieutenant Mohrn somewhat grimly. “We have his consent and approval.”

  She pulled a small brown hat over her hair and then remembered to change gold slippers to brown oxfords.

  In the hall Jim was waiting.

  “Mohrn had to go,” he said. “I’ll take you out. Glenn Ash is about an hour’s run from town.”

  “All right,” said Susan. She scribbled a note to Huldah and spoke soberly to the dog, who liked to have things explained to him.

  “I’m going to a house in Glenn Ash,” she said gravely. “Be a good dog. And don’t chase the neighbor’s cat.”

  He pushed a cold nose against her hand. He didn’t want her to go, and he thought the matter of Petruchkin the cat might better have been ignored. Then the front door closed and he heard presently two doors bang and a car drive away. He returned to the library. But he was gradually aware that the peace and snugness were gone. He felt gloomily that it would have been very much better if the woman had stayed at home.

  And the woman, riding along a rainswept road, rather agreed with him. She peered through the rain-shot light lanes ahead and reviewed in her mind the few facts that she knew. And they were brief enough.

  At the home of one Gladstone Denisty in Glenn Ash a servant had been murdered. Had been shot in the back and found (where he’d fallen) in a ravine near the house. There was no weapon found, and anyway he couldn’t have shot himself. There were no signs of attempted burglary. There were, indeed, no clues. He was a quiet, well-behaved man and an efficient servant and had been with the Denisty family for some time; so far as could be discovered, his life held no secrets.