by Lester Dent
Sarah’s head came up. How long had she been standing here waiting? “Captain,” she called. And when the darkness did not respond, she said, “Captain Most!” more uneasily.
She approached a spot near the window. “Captain!” But Captain Most was not there. He was not where he had assured her he would wait.
Disappointment took a bite out of her good opinions of Most. He had said he would wait. She resented his breach of word. And she was needled a good deal by merely cast unexpectedly alone in the darkness.
Sarah hurried to the station wagon. Most was not there.
A thin high string of fear began singing. She could feel the cool, dank night air inside her clothing, fingering her body…. Most surely would not leave without some word. A note, at least. Perhaps there was one in the station wagon. Sarah jerked open the station-wagon door and leaned inside, but found it too dark to see clearly. She explored the spot between the doors for the dome-light switch, pressed it, and flooded the interior of the station wagon with light.
Sarah, eyes narrowed against the brightness, quickly saw there was no note. No note on the wheel, under the windshield wipers, nor anywhere in the front seat. Now really apprehensive, she looked into the back seat, searching for a possible written message. On the floor in the back, between the seats, there was a considerable object covered by sailcloth, and without quite thinking—anxiety had its claws hard in her—she jerked the sailcloth partially away from the object.
Sarah looked down at what she had uncovered while her mouth slowly formed into such a distorted shape that it hurt her, and in all of her, in each muscle and nerve, there was shock… until finally her lips began changing their position, slowly, then faster, changing a number of times before the first scream came. The second scream ached the roots of her teeth; it must have been more effective in the street, the neighborhood.
And now Sarah threw herself backward and wheeled and ran wildly and near blindly away from the station wagon and the body of Attorney Brill that she had just found. The act of running and the way of it were not wholly rational, but probably as rational as finding Brill dead there.
Chapter Fourteen
CHANCE AND TERROR CHOSE the direction Sarah took. The route carried her north in the side street where the station wagon was parked. But she was not aware of a small thing like directions. Coming on top of a night of tension, to pick up a piece of canvas and confront a corpse was a bit overmuch. One of the basic primitive instincts—safety by flight—had been aroused. Oh, Attorney Calvin Brandeis Brill of the disappearing office was a corpse. A pocketknife—the handle only—Sarah had seen far too clearly as protruding from Brill’s left ear. Logic readily indicated that the pocketknife blade, which happened to be not a short one, was buried in the brain back of the ear. Oh, Brill was dead, all right. Sarah knew whose pocketknife it was. Brill’s. She had seen the foxy attorney paring over-kept fingernails with it a couple of times. It had mother-of-pearl handle inlays and was a distinctive knife, and it had never seemed more distinctive than a moment ago sticking out of Brill’s left ear. One could logically imagine that it never would again.
So Sarah ran. She was not screaming now, because she needed the air for her lungs. There was no abatement of terror; there was no diminishing of shock. Her heels beat a hard wild rattle on the sidewalk.
Soon she heard, in the night to her left, a human grunt. Then a brief whuff! of disturbed leaves…. Someone running hard had hit a tree or a stout bush in the darkness.
The sound gave Sarah fresh alarm, and she stopped, faced in that direction, and listened.
In the south far away a car horn was briefly noisy, and then from an easterly direction, toward the bay, she heard a ship clock striking on some yacht. The clock dinged out three bells, or half-past five o’clock; then the car horn began again, and she heard a foot knock against a rock quite near by.
Now certain that she was being stalked, Sarah stepped off the sidewalk, in order to move with more silence, and began walking swiftly. Her ears were attentive and her eyes searched warily. It was horrifying in her mind that this could be Brill’s assassin, for who else would pursue her furtively?
When, close at hand, feet hissed on wet grass, she knew she had not evaded the prowler. She was being rushed in the darkness. She plunged ahead then in driving flight. But to the left and rear the stalker materialized and grew to terrible size, a man who was faster than she by far. Closely beset, she threw herself to the right in a twisting plunge designed to put her clear and, if she was fortunate, let the other hurtle onward far enough for her to have a respite. She was not fortunate, because he laid hold of her—quite hard, then more gently—then he exploded, “Oh lord!” And then: “Sarah!”
Sarah gripped his arm until fingers probably bit into his flesh. “Oh, damn you! You scared me half to death,” she said.
She heard the vast relieved breath that he yanked in. “I had no idea it was you. Too infernally dark, in the shrubbery.”
And then he demanded, “Who screamed? You?”
“Yes.” Sarah shuddered.
“I thought it was you. I was standing in a kind of park over yonder when I—” He broke off. “What happened to you?”
Sarah managed to say, “Brill is dead in your station wagon. I found the body.”
This news settled a silence on Most, a deep stillness-wary, imaginative, stark—and he did not move a muscle.
Finally Most asked, “When you screamed—that was when you found Brill?” His voice was heavier, thicker.
“Yes.”
“Brill is dead? You are sure of that?”
Sarah, certain she would see the pocketknife handle protruding from Brill’s ear if she but closed her eyes, got out the one word “Yes.”
“In my car, too,” Most muttered. This was not a question but a statement, a posing of a bad fact for consideration. “But who did it?”
“I don’t know. I just found him.”
“Where?”
“The back seat, covered by a piece of sail.”
Most grunted briefly. “That sail has been in there two or three days. But I wonder how long Brill has been there?”
Now from the spot where the station wagon stood parked came a man’s shouted surprise. Plainly a householder from the neighborhood had found the body, and he began bellowing at someone called Danny to call the officers. “There’s a dead man here!” he yelled. “Danny! Danny, call the cops!” He sounded so vastly excited that Sarah visualized him as a peace-loving man who had gotten up to investigate a female screech and found, in a station wagon with the dome-light turned on, a cadaver.
Most took in his breath softly and murmured, “Well, the body’s been well found.” Then he told Sarah, “A woman left the Lineyack house, and I followed her. That’s why I was not waiting where I said I would be.”
“A woman?” Sarah echoed wonderingly.
“The old lady who came into the room when you were talking to Lineyack.”
“Alice Mildred!”
“Yes. If that’s who she is…. Well, she slipped out of the house. It was soon, within a minute or two after Lineyack took her out of the room where you were that I saw her leaving. She passed along a path in the moonlight, that I could see from where I stood.”
Sarah said blankly, “She… left the house! But Lineyack took Alice Mildred to her room. She was supposed to go back to bed.”
“Maybe they lied. Maybe she went for the police.”
“I don’t think so,” Sarah said, shaking her head quickly. “Alice Mildred would not—I cannot believe she would do that.”
The householder was yelling again at Danny, wanting to know if Danny was calling the police. Most cleared his throat thoughtfully. He asked, “Think we’d better go away from here?”
Sarah looked up at him. His face was indistinct in the darkness. But he must quite understand that a body had been found in his car, and that such a thing was very serious.
“Shouldn’t that be for you to decide?” she asked.
He took her arm then. “I don’t like to make up my mind that quick,” he said dryly. He chose a route deeper into the shrubbery. As they walked he told her, “This is the edge of a narrow park. I don’t know the neighborhood too well, but I seem to remember that the park runs along the bay several blocks.” A few yards farther on smaller shrubs disappeared and the park spread more openly before them. There was flat dew-jeweled grass and a scattering of palm trees.
“You had it rough back there,” Most said. Sarah was silent. Presently he added, “I didn’t help it by stalking you that way.” And Sarah shivered violently. “Please!” she gasped. “Don’t get me thinking about it!” And when he slowed, clearly concerned for her, she gathered control and added, “And don’t worry about me. I’m getting hardened to these things.”
He probably understood this was untrue, but he pretended to believe her anyway. He glanced about for bearings, then altered course several points to the southward. “She was headed this way when I heard you let go. There’s a chance we might pick her up,” he said.
“Alice Mildred? You want to follow her?”
“Why not? I was following her. I thought she was going after the police. If she was not—well, it might be interesting to know where she was going.” He was swinging out on his long legs swiftly. The moon, less hindered by shrubbery and foliage here where the park was open, laid enough silver on Most’s angular face so that Sarah could see how sober his expression was.
Suddenly he said: “What do you think of this: She came outdoors wearing what she wore in the room—nightgown and housecoat.”
Sarah’s breath caught. “Poor Alice Mildred!”
Most looked at her sharply. “Do you mean something special by that tone?”
“Alice Mildred,” Sarah said gently, “is unstable mentally.”
Most swung his face toward her, brows arched skeptically. “Are you sure they—”
“Didn’t deceive me?” Sarah said. “No. I don’t believe it was a play for my sympathy.”
Most looked ahead again. “What else happened?”
“Ivan didn’t know. When I told Ivan that Jonnie had been taken from me, I’m sure it was the first he’d heard of it.” Sarah laid out in a few words the gist of what she had said to Lineyack and what he had said to her. “The man Ides—I’ll call him Dewey Cokerham now—works for Lineyack. Ivan admitted that, referring to him as Dewey Cokerham, not Ides.”
“Then you don’t feel that Ivan hired this Dewey and some others to take the boy from you?” Most inquired.
“No, no longer. I did have some such notion, without understanding at all why Ivan should do such a thing. But not now. Ivan was too genuinely upset when I told him.” Sarah hesitated and then added impulsively, “I think he was intensely surprised rather than hurt.”
“Would there be a difference?” Most asked.
“I think so—with Lineyack.” Sarah frowned, not sure how to express just what she did mean. “I thought he seemed like a man who’d had footing jerked from under him, more than a man who’d been stabbed. That is—oh, I can’t be sure. It may be imagination. At a time like that it would be hard to know, because it’s difficult enough at any time to read people rightly.”
“Acted as if something had gone wrong with a scheme, did he?”
“I—I don’t know. It could be,” Sarah said. She added quickly, “Oh, and this you should know: At the very last he said flatly that he did not believe my story about my son being taken from me. But Ivan lied. I’m sure he lied. He did believe it. He only said he didn’t.”
Most summed it up by dryly saying, “Old Ivan seems to live up to advance notice…. Incidentally, suppose he killed Brill?”
This was spoken far too casually for its importance and got to Sarah as a form of delayed explosion. “Oh no! No—” Then she went silent, shocked, but now wondering. Presently she added dubiously, “He had no opportunity.”
“No?” Most said skeptically. “What about when he took his wife upstairs?”
“He didn’t have time.”
“Time?” Most glanced sharply at Sarah. “He was gone upstairs at least five minutes.”
Sarah tried to remember. It could be that Lineyack had been upstairs longer than she had supposed. Probably her mind had not been in a state where time meant much to it. Perhaps she had stood there at the foot of the stairs, listening for quite an interval. And there was another stairway…. “He could have been gone longer than I thought,” she admitted. “And he could have left the house, I suppose.”
Most put a period to all this by saying wryly, “And we could be doing wishful thinking, too.”
I hope Ivan did not kill Brill, Sarah thought, and she walked along beset by silence. Hard, arrogant, self-grasping Ivan clearly was, yet he was also her son’s grandfather, and it would not be a good thing to have the old man a murderer. She wished she had time to weigh and consider all this. She had been hard-pressed by events throughout the night, and particularly during the last hour; there had been little leisure, certainly no calm, for clear thinking, for careful selecting of the sound and discarding of dross. Sarah felt pressed into making snap decisions, a mental hopscotch that should be distrusted.
Their walking had carried them two long city blocks, but they were still inside the park. Close to the right there was a sidewalk with benches scattered along it. Close beyond was a stone sea wall, and small yachts lay with fenders nuzzling the sea wall, their spring lines slack. Mostly the craft were cabin cruisers, with an occasional motor-sailer. Sarah had always considered, partisan-like, motor-sailers an unforgivable hybrid—not packing enough canvas to sail a decent reach, and with too much underbody to get powerboat efficiency out of an engine.
Abruptly Most’s hand touched Sarah’s arm and stopped her; his other hand was pointing. “Between the two big palms… Alice Mildred.” Then he added, “On the path.”
Sarah looked intently. On the path there was dull platinum moonlight and some haze from radiation fog. Presently she discerned a figure. “It may be Alice Mildred. I’m not sure,” she told Most.
“I rather got the idea from the first that she had in mind somewhere to go,” Most said thoughtfully.
Lampposts stood topped by fuzzy balls of white light at intervals along the sea wall, and the figure of the woman moved past these, traveling without zest, as if the only purpose was locomotion. Sarah said, “It is Alice Mildred.”
“Well follow her.” At Sarah’s look of surprise, Most moved his shoulders wearily and added, “Why not? She had some reason for leaving the house the way she did.”
Sarah shook her head hopelessly. “The poor thing is ill.”
Most frowned. “You’ve said that before. Would you be more specific about it?”
“Ivan told me she has the illusion that my son… that Jonnie is her own child.”
Most shook his head and said, “Ivan’s saying it makes it so, you think?… Oh, it could be true. Grant, for argument, that it is. That sort of illness isn’t necessarily all-inclusive. They off-track on one subject, usually, when they’re getting haywire because they’re too inward. You’ve described Alice Mildred as that sort—inward, a person who finds some sort of ecstasy, probably, in intensification of consciousness. In other words, a woman who finds it easier to stay within herself than to stay out in the rough world. The way I understand it, such ones find a pleasant path they can follow in their own minds, and they follow it so blindly that they fall over a precipice. But all this doesn’t mean that they’re haywire on everything, or even haywire all of the time.”
It was a long speech for him, and Sarah glanced at him wonderingly. “That’s quite a lot of psychiatry from a sailor,” she said.
“I read a book now and then.” Most bent his head toward the distant figure of the woman. “She may be walking in the night to ease her nerves—or she may not. In the latter case, she might lead us to something. What have we to lose?”
“All right,” Sarah said. “But I feel like a vu
lture.” Actually she was grateful that he had come up with any kind of an idea. Her confusion needed an anchor to tie to, and Most, it went without saying, represented the sort of mooring to which she could safely swing. The analogy of Most as an anchor was a good one; she could visualize him as set firmly in good holding ground, with plenty of cable scope, able to swing safely as gales pounced from unexpected directions.
“She’s stopped.”
Alice Mildred had paused near a houseboat, her thin forlorn figure not nearly so far ahead of them as she had been. And now, as they watched, Alice Mildred turned slowly away from the houseboat and went to one of the benches and sank down there.
“It looked as if she went directly to that houseboat.” Most indicated an enormous palm tree and they stepped behind it to wait. They were fairly well concealed from Alice Mildred. “She lost her nerve, was afraid to go aboard. That’s typical of oversensitives.” He got out his pipe and frowned and put it away again. He pocketed his hands and settled down to patient waiting.
His forward-moving air, his ability to select a path when choosing one was very difficult, and to follow it patiently, was reassuring to Sarah. She liked it. And presently she noticed mud on her hands, the result of stumbling when she had supposed she was being chased by a marauder; it struck her, woman-like, that she must look a fright. Mud on her hands, half soaked, hair probably as wild as seaweed. She wanted her compact, but her hands were empty, and she looked at them blankly.
“Lose something?” Most asked.
“My purse,” she said stupidly. “I’ve lost it.”
His expression grew amiably ridiculing, and she resented the look when he stated, “You left it in your apartment, didn’t you, when Yellow-shoes marched you off?”
