The music was thin, ethereal, like a soft veil that barely covered the silence. There should have been cymbals after Lisa’s words, but the music was thin.
Nydia Cornish’s voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Are you accusing me—?”
“No,” Lisa answered, “I don’t have to accuse. I planned this night very carefully, once it became inevitable—and I didn’t want it to be inevitable. I tried to avoid—” Lisa’s voice broke. For a moment there was only the music and then, “I tried to avoid the truth. I tried in every way. I think that I tried the hardest with Tod Graham. I wanted him to be behind this horrible scheme. I clung to the thought that it was he who promoted the Cornish Memorial in the first place, he who sold the idea first to you and then to Alistair Hubbard. After Hubbard’s death, Tod managed the estate. He knew how low the fund was running, and he knew, too, that if the festival had to be abandoned it would mean the end of Bellville and all of his hopes, not to mention his investments. Oh yes, I tried hard to fit the crime on Tod, and then on Dr. Hazlitt, who has a bank account in another town and too many memories for his own peace of mind. I even tried to fit it on Stanley Watts. But there was always something left over. Always something left out.”
Lisa’s voice had been low and deliberate, but not too low for Nydia to catch that one damaging word.
“Crime!” she gasped.
“Yes, crime,” Lisa repeated. “Cruel, ruthless, diabolical crime. Think of it, Mrs. Cornish. Reflect for a moment on the nature of this crime. There’s nothing honest about it, nothing risky. There’s no act of violence involved. An old man dies for the lack of his medicine. Was it withheld from him or not? Who knows? Who needs to know? A story is there for the gossips. Make the most of it. And Pierre Duval. You had several years to work on him, several years in which to make him believe in the possibility of love so much that he’d sign away his life on an insurance policy. And that’s exactly what he did, didn’t he? An accident. There would have to be an accident, sooner or later. If Duval, with his dangerous handicap, didn’t succeed in destroying himself soon enough, something could be arranged. Perhaps it was arranged; perhaps not. There was no risk to you in any event. The gossips would talk about Marta, and ten thousand dollars was enough to keep the fund alive for two more years.
“But you must have been desperate for money when Howard Gleason came into the picture. What did you tell him? How did you manage? Oh, I can imagine. ‘Stay on in Bellville, young man. You love my daughter and she loves you. She just needs a little time to realize that. Stay on in Bellville, Howard, and in the meantime perhaps I could borrow that award money. Just a loan, of course. Just until Marta accepts you.’ But it couldn’t go on, could it, Mrs. Cornish? There couldn’t always be an obliging Howard Gleason ready to blow out his brains over a lost love and a lost opportunity? One day Marta would really fall in love, and one day, very soon, she would inherit the money you must have in order to preserve the borrowed glory of Nydia Bell.”
The music was growing louder. Lisa’s voice, strong and clear now, rose above it.
“The Nydia Bell Cornish Memorial—that’s what it really is! You care no more for art than you care for humanity. It’s the glory that you love, Nydia, that annual obeisance to the widow of greatness.”
“That’s a lie!” Nydia cried. “Everything you’ve said is a lie! You can’t prove anything!”
“Prove what, Mrs. Cornish?”
Only the music answered Lisa. Only the music and then, finally, her own voice again.
“No, I can’t prove anything. No one can. There’s no law on the statute books to cover mental assassination, and no evidence of any overt act. You’re much too clever for that. I’ve watched you in action; I know. That day we met in Stanley Watts’s office, for instance. You didn’t have to mention Marta’s attack on Carrie in front of a witness, and you didn’t have to apologize so humbly and uncharacteristically. But it was good timing, wasn’t it? You knew that Stanley would bear the tale, and it made such fine grist for the mill. I’ve watched you at other times, too—clinging to Joel’s arm, winning, winnowing, being the gracious mother-in-law-to-be for the third time. You play too many parts, Nydia, and you play them too well. You play the tyrant much too well. But do you know what a tyrant really is? A coward, that’s all. Someone who is just much more afraid of life than any one else. But why, Nydia Cornish? Surely there has to be some reason for so great a fear. There must be roots. Is it possible, I wonder, can it be that the great fear of the Queen of Bell Mansion runs as deep and is as old as the roots of Claude Humphrey’s fear of fire?”
There was a silence after Lisa’s words. Even the music had paused, as if in preparation for the great finale. Against the silence Nydia’s question came once more: “Who are you?”
Professor Dawes stopped the machine. The instant of silence in the room was unbearable. Everyone was waiting. No one seemed to breathe.
He looked at Marta. Her face was very white, but her eyes were waiting for the rest. He looked at Joel. Joel’s arm was about Marta’s shoulder now. It tightened protectively. Then he looked at Johnny.
“I knew,” Johnny half-whispered. “Somehow, I knew all along that Lisa had been here before.”
“Shall I play the rest, Miss Johnson? Here?”
Johnny clung to the edge of the desk. For a few moments she didn’t answer.
“It’s on the recorder,” she said, at last. “She must have wanted it that way. She said that she’d planned this night—”
Professor Dawes released the stop and the little discs began to spin once more.
When Lisa answered, the music behind her, louder, stronger, climbing to the summit of its song, her voice was very clear.
“My name,” she said, “is Elizabeth Bannister. That name doesn’t mean anything to you, Mrs. Cornish. You were never one to fraternize outside your own social circle. But it does mean something to Dr. Hazlitt. It’s been worrying him, as I’ve been worrying him, ever since the day we met at the board meeting. But Dr. Hazlitt doesn’t like to remember things. He once committed an old man to an asylum because he babbled too much, and I rather suspect that he almost believed what the old man babbled. But he doesn’t have the courage to speak. It’s easier to forget. It’s easier not to question anything that happens at Bell Mansion and just forget. What could he prove anyway? What can I prove? Perhaps the fire was an accident. Perhaps Claude Humphrey was careless with the insecticide.
“But I’ve always wondered, Mrs. Cornish. I’ve always wondered just what did happen that terrible night when I sent Stella Larkin down to the studio with a message—”
“When you sent—?”
Nydia spat out the words. They were louder than the music, sharper than the brasses and the strings.
“Elizabeth Bannister,” Lisa continued quietly. “Dr. Hazlitt remembers her now, even if he did try to forget. The Mastersons had a governess for their son. A plain, drab sort of girl who kept all of her dreams so carefully hidden that no one ever suspected she had dreams—except the man she loved. A lonely man. A man who was possessed by his wife the way a rare object of art or a prize animal might be possessed. A sensitive, tortured man who never knew the meaning of love until we found it together.”
“You? You were the one!”
The words were spoken clearly, audibly. There was no taking them back. Nydia could fall silent, but she couldn’t erase what had been said.
“So you did know,” Lisa answered. “You could hear Martin working in the studio. Was it the music that told you? He never wrote such music for you, did he?”
The music answered for Nydia, so plaintively, so full of love that there was no need for words.
“No wonder you hate it so, Mrs. Cornish. Listen to it. Listen to what it is saying. Isn’t it lovely? Not music from a carousel? Music from a heart! Music even a child could remember and reach out for through the years!”
“You were the one!” Nydia cried.
“Yes, I was the one!”
Lisa’s cry almost drowned out the music.
“I was Elizabeth Bannister, and I was the woman Martin Cornish loved! We were going away together, Mrs. Cornish. Did you know that? We were leaving Bellville and all its wretchedness and going away together, but the very week, the very week we were to leave—”
Lisa’s voice fell silent. It was as if some things could not be said. When it came again, it came more quietly.
“I was in bed upstairs, the very room I use now. It faces out toward the studio. It was dark, and I could see the flames leaping up above the pines. I could see the reflection from the flames dancing on the walls. I tried to get up and go to him, but I couldn’t move. I’d been stricken that day with a dread disease. That’s why I had sent Stella with the note. I couldn’t move at all. I could only cry out, and Dr. Hazlitt was there. He must have known. He couldn’t have forgotten that!”
“You were the one he loved!”
Nydia Cornish’s voice seemed to come from the depths of hell. She was very close to the recorder. She was very close to the desk.
“And not poor Stella Larkin at all,” Lisa said. “Does that trouble you, Mrs. Cornish? Does it trouble you the way it has always troubled me? But how could it? The devil has no conscience. A woman who could deliberately try to drive her own daughter mad—”
“That’s a lie! You can’t prove that! You can’t prove anything you’ve said!”
But Lisa’s voice went on as if nothing had been said.
“Is it because she’s so much like Martin? Is that why you hate her, too? Or are you still trying to get even with a dead man?”
“You’ll never write that! You’ll never write any of these terrible lies!”
“But you’re wrong, Mrs. Cornish. I’ve already written them.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“I wrote the whole story the day I put Martin’s composition—the music he wrote for me—into the envelope Marta had so carefully posted in time for the award dead line, the envelope you had put the blank sheets in. I sent it on to Sir Anthony. That music is the story. Listen to it! Sir Anthony already knows that it’s Martin’s music; by tomorrow all the world will know, and all the world will demand the truth. And then Marta will be free—not because of the award money she’ll never claim and never need, but free because the truth will make her free.”
“You’ll never tell!” Nydia screamed.
“I shall tell,” Lisa said.
“You’ll never tell! You’ll never tell anyone anything! You can’t prove anything!”
“I don’t have to prove anything. You have already proven it. You came tonight, Mrs. Cornish. Not Tod; not Stanley Watts; not Dr. Hazlitt. You came! You are guilty, and your crime—”
Lisa’s voice was lost then. It wasn’t the music, rising toward its ultimate conquest; it wasn’t the wind grabbing at the windows again; it was the sound of an explosion that silenced her words. One shot. One loud, blasting shot that almost shattered the mechanism of the machine on the desk. Professor Dawes didn’t wait for a repeat explosion. His hand silenced the recorder as abruptly as Lisa’s voice had been silenced.
For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was Johnny’s muffled sobbing, until Sheriff Elliot cleared his throat.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Do you suppose that story was true? Do you suppose Nydia Cornish could have started that fire?”
“Does it really matter?” the professor asked.
His eyes met the sheriff’s. The sheriff looked at Marta. She was still tense and pale, but she hadn’t broken. Perhaps later. Perhaps when this night of horror was all over there might be time for tears.
“Ghosts,” the professor added, smiling sadly as he remembered who had first used the term, “are difficult to hang. I almost wish everything on this wire could be erased.”
“But it can’t be,” Joel said.
“No.” The professor looked straight at Marta now. “It can’t be,” he said, “but it can be outlived. Miss Bancroft would have wanted it that way. She had a weakness for happy endings.”
“She had a weakness for getting into trouble,” Johnny choked. “Why did you have to drag her into this, Professor? Why did you have to be so suspicious of Marta? Why did we have to come to this terrible town anyway?”
It was as useless to try to answer one of Johnny’s questions as to answer any of them, and she didn’t expect an answer. All the answers anyone would ever have were on that wire recorder. The sheriff, puzzled now more than shocked, seemed to realize that.
“We’ll have to check on all of that story, I reckon,” he said. “But I doubt if we ever prove much. Maybe the insurance money—”
“It’s probably all gone,” Joel said. “Tod’s been crying all week about the fund running low. I don’t imagine there’s any evidence left by this time.”
“Then Mrs. Cornish was right. There really wasn’t any proof until this—”
The sheriff’s eyes completed what his voice left unsaid. There was a body on the floor that couldn’t be written off as an accident even by an old doctor whose caution outweighed his misgivings; and there was a wire recorder on the desk with a story that had gone far beyond the ending it had been set up to receive.
“I’m sure Miss Bancroft never meant it to end this way,” the professor added. “She was merely playing Mrs. Cornish’s game, playing on an individual’s weakness until the weakness destroyed the individual. But she forgot what a deadly weakness a woman’s vanity can be.”
“And Nydia forgot to be careful,” Johnny said. “She must have rushed out of here in complete panic. I’d left the station wagon out in front so Lisa could drive down to the concert, but Nydia Cornish couldn’t—at least, she hadn’t driven in years. Where did she think she was going, anyway?”
The question seemed superfluous when left alone in a reflective silence. Johnny, like the others, was just trying to understand. A throne had tottered, a queen had fled. It was as simple as that, actually. As simple as Lisa Bancroft’s body on the floor.
“Where could she go?” the professor answered. “In a sense, she committed suicide when she fired that shot. And exactly why she did it is something we’ll never know. Was it because Marta had escaped and the days of Nydia’s vainglory were over, or simply an outburst of sheer fury at finally facing the woman her husband had preferred to her? In any event, at least Miss Bancroft had the fleeting satisfaction of knowing that she had proved her point.”
As he spoke, the professor’s hand reached out and touched the starter switch on the recorder once more. The little discs began to spin, taking up the sound where it had ended a few minutes ago: the second shot, the sound of a body falling, a walking stick clattering to the floor, the fleeting footsteps racing blindly down the hall, and behind it all the music of Martin Cornish ebbing away as softly as life itself might ebb away.
To all of the others in the room, the next sound came as a startling postscript to tragedy; but to Professor Dawes it was a determined woman having the last word. The microphone had fallen from the desk along with that clattering cane. Into it, quite distinctly against the softness of the music, Lisa Bancroft gasped out a message that had been meant only for him.
“Do you see, Professor? The crime is murder.”
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Stranger in the Dark
1.
IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT BEFORE LARRY GOT BACK TO THE hotel. The pocket-sized lobby was deserted, except for a nearsighted clerk at the reception desk, and the fiddling had stopped in that quaint little terrace bar just off the dining room. Everything was quiet and deserted just the way he wanted it to be. No one to stare at him. No one to notice and remember how frightened the American looked when he came in. Above all, no stout Nemesis with a roll-brimmed hat on his head and a fat cigar in his hand to step up behind him and say, “I‘m sorry, Herre Willis, but I must ask you to accompany me to police headquarters.” He’d be nice about it, of course. Always polite, these Danes.
Larry didn’t stop at the desk. The key was still in his coat pocket, and the lift was automatic. All he had to remember was which button to hit for the third floor. That could be a little confusing because the third floor was four stories up, but after a few days a man could get used to that sort of thing. After a few days a man could get used to almost anything. The corridor was empty. The key in the lock, the quick, eyes-over-the-shoulder entrance, and he was safe for the moment inside the narrow hall that stretched like a long pocket toward the other door. Please keep both doors closed at all times. The familiar prose of the fire-prevention instructions kept him company in the silence. Two doors weren’t enough. Tonight there should be five or six doors with padlocks on each one—that’s how he felt when he was through the hall and inside the room. Only then did he remember the light switch.
It seemed strange that the room was just as he’d left it a few hours ago when everything else in the world had changed. The maid had been in to turn down the bed, but that was the only difference. The conspicuously new cowhide bag still stood on the luggage rack bearing its conspicuously new airline stickers and bright gold initials under the handle. L.O.W. That’s you, Larry. Larry Orin Willis. Look at your passport if you have any doubts. Look at your brief case on the desk with the catalogues still spilling out of it—Prairie State Farm Tool and Equipment Company, L. O. Willis, special representative. That’s you, the boy wonder himself. Take a good look and remember, but don’t go near a mirror. Don’t dare look at that stricken face, or you’ll never have the nerve to go through with what has to be done.
Crime is Murder Page 18
