by Helen Reilly
It was after ten when Catherine got back to Brookfield accompanied by Nicky. “Not so fast, young woman.” He held her firmly, an arm around her. The cab drove off as they moved toward the steps down which Catherine had run in panic earlier that day. The pillars rose tall and straight. The walls were silvered with moonlight and punctured with lighted windows. Shades and curtains were drawn. Other lights, moving lights, danced and shifted like fireflies off to the right, against the cloudy darkness of the woods.
“What’s that over there?” Catherine waved toward the moving lights.
Nicky said, “The police. They’ve been at it for hours, looking around for traces of Dutch Pete and the guy who killed him. If you ask me, they’re off on the wrong foot. Dutch Pete was followed up here from New York and killed by one of his buddies. He was an ex-convict, you know.”
If only she could believe that, Catherine thought.
Nicky felt the deep shudder that went through her. “There, you see?” he said chidingly. “You should have stayed in the hospital in Danbury.”
“I’m all right, Nicky.”
“That’s not what the doctors say.”
“Doctors are always alarmists. They have to drum up trade for themselves.”
She had had to come back, had to know what was happening, whether Stephen Darrell was under arrest. He wasn’t. He was in the house. Nicky said so. He said, “We’re all going to be given the old third degree.”
Nicky was nervous under his levity. The sensation of weight, of pressure in Catherine gathered momentum. They crossed the terrace. Before they reached the door, it was opened by a state policeman. Nightmare was waiting inside these walls, a dark and endless dream that had become reality, while the real world, the world they had once known as real, had faded to a memory.
“The inspector’s in there.” The trooper pointed, and Nicky led Catherine across the floor and on into the long drawing-room on the left.
The men and women in a loose grouping around the fire looked small in the vastness of the room. It had never been intended for such a scene. Here was airy elegance slightly formalized for the reception of guests. Polished woods gleamed, the vast rug shimmered, the soft colors of the painting hanging on the walls, richly vivid in lamp and firelight, pulsed faintly in and out.
There was one sharp note of difference in the room. The long table opposite the fireplace, perhaps twenty feet from it, had been swept bare of its usual ornaments. Papers occupied it and on the rug beneath, on a large piece of brown paper, boots, four pairs of them, a pair of rubbers, and the big black galoshes Catherine had seen in the hall closet that afternoon, were ranged in a row.
As she approached on Nicky’s arm, Catherine took a quick look at faces. Angela was there, and Hat, Tom and Francine, and Stephen Darrell. Their expressions told her nothing. Gravity, endurance, controlled irritation, impatience—that was all.
“Darling—”
“Catherine, my dear—” Francine and Angela and Tom greeted her with sympathy, with questions. Catherine sat down in a corner of a sofa with Nicky beside her. Her aunt was in black. Some subtle alteration in her struck at Catherine. Was her hair tighter to her head than usual? Was it the unrelieved black of the dress she had on, an old one that must have been up here? She wore no jewels. It was odd to see her without them. And her skin had a stretched look to it, so that the bones of her face were very clearly defined. Well, wasn’t it only natural that Angela should show signs of strain? Of course it was. The others weren’t in any too good fettle either. She accepted a light from Tom, said her head ached, but not too much, and made herself settle back.
The inspector was conferring in low tones with the state police lieutenant. The conference ended. The lieutenant went out briskly, a man on an errand. The inspector remained on his feet. He seemed tired, discouraged. His air of gloom was unmistakable.
Leaning against the table, fingering first one object and then another, he told them what had been discovered about Dutch Pete. The ex-handy man had arrived in Brookfield on the day after Mike was killed. He had bought groceries in the town, had carried them out to Catherine’s cottage. He knew of the place from his former association with the Wardwells, had once, according to Mrs. Bettinger, been sent up here on an errand. He was an ex-convict engaged in the devious business of blackmail. The cottage was an excellent base of operations. It took him out from under the eyes of the New York police, and there was a telephone there.
He had remained at the cottage since the day following Michael Nye’s death, except for a single brief excursion. That excursion was a run over to the boardinghouse in Clearwater on Sunday night. He had evidently seen the Wardwell car in town and followed it. There was no other explanation, could be no other.
Tom showed signs of restlessness. So did Francine. Francine said crisply, “Very interesting, Inspector, but what’s it got to do with us?”
McKee let them have it then, in a slow broadside. He said that Dutch Pete knew who had killed John Ward-well and Michael Nye. He hadn’t been able to cash in on this knowledge while he was in jail. He proceeded to try to do so as soon as he was out from behind bars. He had contacted the murderer, had tried to cash in on his knowledge—and had been killed himself.
“You’ve all denied having been in touch with him. You’ve all denied going over to Miss Lister’s cottage this afternoon at between half-past three and four o’clock. You’ve all denied putting twelve hundred and fifty dollars into the wood box. It was simply an installment, a sweetener, an option on Dutch Pete’s silence, the promise of more to come.”
The Scotsman glanced down at the boots on the sheet of brown paper. “Miss Lister was the only one who approached the cottage by road this afternoon. Dutch Pete’s murderer traveled across the fields, placed the money in the wood box in fulfillment of the arrangement made, no doubt, by telephone, then waited—and struck.” He spoke of the search of the woods and fields that was being conducted. “When the results of that are in, we’ll know.”
Dead silence. Not a break or a glimmer of a break. It wasn’t going to come. He hadn’t expected it. They were going to stand pat. It was the sensible thing to do, if they could keep it up. He began with the task of morale busting that had to be attempted, and that might or might not be a success.
He picked up the pair of galoshes Catherine had found in the depths of the closet earlier in the day. He exposed the smudge of cerulean blue, tracing it with a fingertip.
He said in an easy conversational tone, “These were used last night during the search of the room over the garage, the search of John Wardwell’s effects that were in Michael Nye’s possession two years ago—the search for the cancelled check.”
Canceled check? What was the inspector talking about? Catherine looked around Wonderingly—and her heart turned over.
Tom, Francine, and Nicky were the ones who responded, jerkily, like marionettes at the end of strings—not in speech at first, but in the impalpable language of guilt—and fear. The cigarette Nicky had taken from his case fell to the floor, Francine’s mouth opened and stayed that way, Tom’s shoulders sagged and he grew very white.
“Oh, yes,” McKee continued, still idly. “It’s a prison offense, you know.”
With that the floodgates opened. Francine was on her feet, was talking in a high shrill voice. “If there was anything wrong, Tom didn’t know about it. It wasn’t Tom’s fault—”
There was a welter of other voices, Tom’s and Nicky’s rising over hers. Hat and Stephen Darrell were both staring. There was a gleam in Hat’s eye. Angela sat as still as a stone. Suddenly she intervened. “What proof have you of this, Inspector?” Her voice was cold and clear.
She had called his bluff. McKee had no proof. He refused to concede. He shrugged. During his elucidation, Catherine kept her eyes fastened on the floor.
The inspector told them of his talk with Peterson, John’s former secretary, of John’s discovery, after his return to New York, that his bank balance was much lower than it sh
ould have been, of his scrutiny of his bank statement and the canceled checks, for which he had sent Peters. “We talked to one of the cashiers who knew Mr. Wardwell and had served him for years. Mr. Ward-well was speaking on the phone to this cashier on the morning of the day he died. The cashier remembered the incident perfectly because of John Wardwell’s death that night.
“The only large check drawn on Mr. Wardwell’s account was one for forty-five hundred dollars. The check was made out to Nicholas Bray. It was endorsed and had been cashed by Tom La Mott. I submit to you,” McKee said, “that the check was a forgery. Small sums were paid to Mr. Bray from time to time as a bonus on the work he did for one of the Wardwell firms. I submit to you that relying on Mr. Wardwell’s absence from the city, his illness and his practical severance from active business because of ill health, Mr. Bray forged, and Mr. La Mott endorsed and cashed—”
“No!” Furious denials from Tom and Nicky. They came too late. It was Angela’s quiet “No” that stopped the inspector and saved them from the actual consequences of what had been done, Catherine thought with sick dismay. The fact remained that both Tom and Nicky had plenty of reason for wanting her Uncle John out of the way. He had sent for them both on the day he died. Knowing him as she did, it was quite possible that he had threatened them both with penalties.
But forgery and collusion with forgery weren’t murder. Hat had a motive too. The inspector switched to Hat abruptly. “You had a violent quarrel with your uncle late on the afternoon of the day he died, Miss La Mott.”
Hat’s small face was the color of chalk. Her lips looked startlingly red against her blue-white skin. “I didn’t buy all those things,” she said with hysterical anger. “Some of them were Angela’s and Francine’s. It wasn’t fair to cut my allowance, to tell me I’d have to go to work. I—” McKee said coldly, “We don’t know at what time you left the house. In any event, you could have gone back.”
“So could Tom,” she flashed out venomously. “Or—”
“Hat!” Again Angela intervened. Hat swallowed and stopped. She was shaking. The inspector was speaking to Stephen.
“Mr. Darrell, do you still refuse to say what you did with the eleven hundred dollars you had less than an hour before that money was placed in the wood box for Dutch Pete to reclaim—and die?”
The check Stephen had cashed was news to the others. They were all looking at him with wonder, with frowns.
Then the inspector put an end to it, a sharp end. The conclusion was worse than anything that had gone before. Sentence of death, that was what he promised, in advance. He said that the search of the ground between the house and the cottage would be completed in a matter of hours and that they would know, before morning, who had killed Dutch Pete.
Before morning—
Angela was very tired. She said so. Tom and Hat and Francine surrounded her. She was getting up.
McKee said he would be in the house for some little time. After that, there would be a trooper on the door.
“That’s all for the present, Inspector?”
That was all, for the present. They walked, a compact group, out of the lovely long room, past the boots belonging to Stephen and Nicky, Tom and Hat, past the rubbers that were Angela’s. Stephen Darrell went home and the rest of them climbed the stairs. The surface remained unbroken to the last, but it had worn thin, very thin now, and there were huge holes under the crust. Outwardly everything was as it had been, no mention was made of Stephen’s money, and what he had done with it, of Hat’s furious quarrel with John, or of the forged check, but bitter blows had been given and received and the marks were there.
Good nights—Hat and Tom and Francine kissed Angela, and Catherine pressed her hand and Angela went into her room and the door closed.
Before morning—
Outside Angela’s dosed door, standing in the gallery that ran around the upper hall above the great well of the staircase, Tom said in a low explosive voice that had an almost apoplectic ring to it, “That fellow’s bluffing. He doesn’t know anything—anything—and he’s not going to be able to find out.”
A trooper came up the stairs and he stopped. The trooper handed a small box to Catherine. “Your pills, Miss. The doctor says the directions are on the label.”
Catherine took the box. More good nights. Nicky didn’t try to talk to her alone. Like the others, he was silent, beaten, used a minimum of words. Presently she was in her room with the door shut.
It was almost twelve o’clock. Her head pounded rhythmically. Getting undressed, getting into bed, taking one of the pills and lying flat, she concentrated on the pounding, refusing thought, pushing it away. Gradually the sedative began to take hold and she dozed off only to sit bolt upright in bed after a timeless interval, her heart pounding.
A sound had aroused her. It was a thump of some sort, distant, but sharp. She thought of the thump she had heard outside the cottage that afternoon, that was Dutch Pete, dying. Had something happened here, in the beautiful ordered house whose very air filled her with dread?
Rigid with foreboding, she got out of bed, seized the robe Francine had loaned her, opened her door and listened.
The upper part of the house, the wide gallery on the rim of whose horseshoe she stood, was black and silent. Above the huge well of the staircase more blackness ran clear up to the roof. Below and off to one side, there was a small patch of faint light. Catherine was about to reenter her room when she heard voices talking softly somewhere. They were more the suggestion of voices than actual voices themselves. A click of metal punctuated them. She advanced to the rail and looked down.
Far beneath her, three men were visible in the tiny pool of subdued light in front of the hall fire. One was the inspector, one was a state trooper, one a man she didn’t know. To the left of the hearth, the state trooper was righting the stand that held the fire irons. The strange man, stout, middle-aged, and partially bald, was saying in an undertone, “You fool you, what do you want to do—rouse the house? All right, on your way.” The trooper muttered something and vanished from sight. It was the sound of her own name that held Catherine where she was, bare feet cold on the parquet beyond the rug, hands laid lightly on the banister rail. There was no danger of her being seen. Stygian blackness wrapped these upper regions. It was the stout baldish man who spoke her name.
Leaning toward the handful of glow under the mantel, the fire had died down, the stout man said, resuming an argument that had evidently been interrupted in tones that were just barely audible, “That’s fine, McKee, and I appreciate what you say, but take a good squint at it. Oh, I know Nye’s money hasn’t been found, but it will be. The Lister girl thought she stood to inherit. You can’t get around that. John Ward well’s all very fine. You say War dwell was bumped off. But what proof is there? You know as well as I do that we wouldn’t even get to first base with what you’ve got.”
“How do you know what I’ve got, Pioretti?” The inspector’s voice was so low that she had to lean forward and strain her ears to catch it.
Pioretti’s head advanced across gloom like a turtle swimming on water. “You mean you know who—”
“I don’t know, but I suspect.”
“Who?”
McKee named a name. It was the merest whisper on the stillness, so slight that it was scarcely sounded at all. Catherine’s aroused senses were very keen. She just managed to grasp it. She reeled as though the ground under her feet had collapsed. Below her, McKee asked three questions.
Catherine didn’t wait for any more. She was back at her door. The door was open. Had she left it that way?
It didn’t matter, she was inside the room with the door closed. Her teeth were chattering. Her heart and mind kept shouting “No” in unison. Her pills. Take another pill and shut it out. She didn’t switch on the light. The moon had risen and there was a faint glow near the windows. The lid of the box was off. She took one of the remaining two capsules, put it on her tongue, raised the glass of water, drank, and was in
bed with the covers drawn up tightly around her, trying to stop shivering.
She couldn’t shut out McKee’s questions. Was it because, in a layer below consciousness, they had already formed in her own mind? “Who practically collapsed when Dutch Pete turned up over in Clearwater? Who didn’t want to come here to Brookfield? Who carefully provided the others with errands this afternoon to keep them occupied?”
Worse than that, much worse—a picture of the hall in the house on Sixty-fourth Street on the night her uncle died had come back to Catherine. It took on a new, a hideous meaning. After they had gone in and found John lying dead at the foot of the stairs, she had been sent by Mike to get brandy for Angela. When she got back to the hall with the decanter, Angela was sitting in a tall chair, leaning back stiffly, and Mike, who had just stepped away from her, who had just taken his hands from her shoulders, was wiping his hands.
There was blood on them. Catherine had thought at the time, if she had thought at all, that it was John’s blood. It was John’s blood. It had come from the shoulders of Angela’s coat. The inspector had said earlier-years, centuries ago—that John had been carried from his desk in the study and his body laid at the foot of the stairs.
Sleep. Don’t think. Sleep, forget. Again the drug began to take effect. This time it was faster. She began to drift on a slow dark tide where the horror broke in bits that kept slapping at her. She slept, woke, slept, woke—and was furiously thirsty. If only she could get a drink of water. There was water on the table beside the bed. The table was too far away, it was too much effort to move. If she moved, she would have to think. She mustn’t do that.
She lay still. The deeply embrasured window to the left of the bed cast a pattern of light and shade over the pale-green satin comforter, over the footboard of the bed. The moon was low in the sky. There were four cross lines and four uprights, making sixteen little greenish squares of satin enclosed by black lines. She counted them. She was terribly thirsty—Her whole body cried out for water. If she had some, she wouldn’t swallow it all, she would let some of it run over her burning lips. Something was happening to the pattern of light and shadow. Blackness was eating up some of the green squares, a great black triangle.
