“Better close it,” said Gilbert.
Kay pushed past the card table. The screen was on a hinge. She tugged it inward and stretched up to grip the sash. The rain was less opaque now and she could see down the drive to the bicycle shed some thirty yards away.
The water was spattering against her face and hair. She pulled at the sash but it would not come down. She pulled again, using all her strength. And, as she did so, she saw dimly a scarlet figure emerging backward from the shed, wheeling a bicycle.
“Alice is starting from the shed,” she exclaimed. And then, tugging: “I can’t get the window down, Gilbert. I better get someone to help.”
Pushing the damp hair from her eyes, she ran out of the library, back to the living room. As she entered it, the French windows broke inward and a man’s figure, drenched with rain, hurried in. He had turned and pressed the window shut again before she recognized Dr. Tim Thorne.
He looked at her, smiling, dripping on the carpet. “Got caught all right,” he said. “So did Constable Masters. I saw him scurrying to shelter in the slave cottage as if all the fiends in hell were after him.”
Kay’s thoughts were concentrated on the small chore of getting the window shut and in those first seconds she did not really wonder about why Dr. Thorne was there. She just said: “Come and help me close the window in the library.”
They hurried to the library. The rain, falling in bucket loads from the eaves, was splashing in all over the card table. They squeezed past the open screen and both of them, tugging together, got the window down. Kay swung the screen back in place. Through the rain on her lashes, she looked at Dr. Thorne’s dark face with its amused eyes and its mobile, ironic mouth. She felt absurdly elated.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Lucky I came or you’d have been drowned out.” Dr. Thorne turned to Gilbert. “Good evening, Mr. Chiltern. I was cycling by and thought I could shelter here in time. As you see, I was wrong.”
Now that the window had been shut, Kay’s thoughts and anxiety returned once again to the sinister image of Alice Lumsden in her red slicker pedaling through the rain, minute by minute drawing closer to Major Clifford—and the end of the chase. The thought of her was like a sodden rag damping the feeling of warmth which Dr. Thorne had brought.
Gravely professional, the young doctor was talking to Gilbert now, advising him not to exert himself too much and to go to bed and rest.
“You mustn’t forget in all this that you are a sick man, Mr. Chiltern.”
Gilbert smiled palely. But to Kay he did look very frail and spent. During the last hours the greater tragedy of Ivor’s death had pushed Gilbert’s smaller tragedy into the background.
He said: “I do feel a little tired. Perhaps Kay would be kind enough to help me to bed.”
Dr. Thorne’s eyes were suddenly sharp. “Where’s Alice?”
Kay began: “Haven’t you heard? Alice…”
“Alice has gone out,” broke in Gilbert firmly, and she could tell from his tone that he was signaling her to say nothing. “While you’re here, Doctor, you must borrow some dry clothes and stay indoors until the storm is over.”
The young doctor was glancing at Gilbert rather nervously. “Thank you, Mr. Chiltern, but I must be getting on. Rain doesn’t bother me.” He turned to look straight at Kay. “I’m not like Constable Masters who runs to cover at the first drop of moisture. Good-by.”
He gave a solemn little bow and left the room.
That was the second time he had mentioned Constable Masters. And it was only then that, with a twinge of excitement, Kay caught a glimmering of why he had visited them.
Gilbert was saying quietly: “What do you suppose he wanted?”
“I think I understand, Gilbert. He told me twice that Constable Masters had run to cover in the slave cottage. Don’t you see? He was letting me know that the policeman had left the dock, that there was a chance of getting to the island without being discovered by anyone.”
Gilbert stared at her, astonished. “But he’s Clifford’s assistant, the coroner’s physician. He wouldn’t…”
“Oh, yes, he would. I can’t explain now, Gilbert. But he knew I went over to the island this morning and he guessed I hadn’t been able to get what I wanted. That’s why he came—to give me a chance to get over there again while the going was good.” Kay’s excitement increased. “I’ll go right away. I’ll be able to destroy the evidence against Terry before the Major comes. And then, if…”
“But the storm, Kay. It’s torrential. The bay will be kicking up. And the lightning…”
“That doesn’t make any difference. If it wasn’t for the storm there’d be no chance at all.” Kay’s eyes were shining. “Gilbert, this is our one hope. If it’s Terry Alice is going to accuse she won’t be able to get anywhere without a motive.”
Gilbert was looking at her, his face a mixture of anxiety and hope.
“You really think you can do it?”
“Of course. And I can get the securities back too. I’ll go right away. I’ll take you to your room. You can lend me a raincoat. I can slip out easily without being seen. And if I skirt around the oleanders of the drive I can get to the dock without going near the slave cottage.”
Gilberts hand went out hesitantly. “Kay, I shall never be able to thank you…”
“Nonsense. Come on.”
Kay took the handle of the wheel chair and pushed her brother-in-law to the library door. She opened the door, peering down the deserted corridor to make sure they were unobserved. Then she trundled the wheel chair the short distance to Gilbert’s room.
The storm had accelerated the dusk and it was dark as night in the room. Kay turned on a light, illuminating Gilbert’s poignantly vigorous athletic photographs on the wall. Gilbert said: “You’ll find a slicker in the closet, Kay. It’ll be too big, I’m afraid.”
“All the better.”
Kay went to the closet and found a shiny black slicker. When she slipped it on, it came almost to the ground.
“This will keep me beautifully dry.” She smiled at Gilbert and, bending, impulsively kissed his cheek. “Keep your fingers crossed for me, Gilbert. Good-by.”
She moved to the closed French windows. Cautiously she opened one, having to press against it to keep the wind and rain from surging into the room. With a final glance at Gilbert, she squeezed out into the downpour.
For the first few seconds she had to stand still, bracing herself against the storm’s strength. It was an extraordinary sensation. In the queer rain dusk, the garden, everything around her, had no color, no definite shape. It was as if she had stepped out of reality into a blurred photograph.
The rain, lashing down with tropical fury, blinded her and stung like pins against her cheeks. A sudden lightning flash turned the world into a fantastic spangle of tinsel raindrops with a suggestion of vague objects behind. Thunder surged and, where before there had been nothing but elemental light, now everything was sound.
Sheathed in the black slicker, Kay moved away from the French windows. She had to trust to memory for her bearings. The slave cottage where Constable Masters was sheltering lay ahead and to the left. She must swerve to the right, hit the drive, follow it down to the bicycle shed and then around the shed through the cedars to the dock.
Stumbling, because she could not even see the coral rocks at her feet, Kay reached the drive. She could feel the soft sand under the soles of her espadrilles. The roar of the rain never slackened its tempo for a second. It seemed to become a permanent sound that had always been there.
But Kay’s feeling of urgency dwarfed everything else. On the island, hidden clumsily under the mattress of Ivor’s bed, was not only all that was left of the Chilterns’ financial future, but also that criminal evidence against Terry, damning enough in itself, but infinitely more damning now that Ivor was dead.
Strangely, the whole tangled drama of Hurricane House seemed to crystallize itself into a race between herself and Alice Lumsden. As
she moved on cautiously down the drive, her thoughts were full of that other woman who was struggling against the storm to a destination as important as her own.
Kay Winyard in a black slicker shamelessly hurrying through the rain to try to save a potential murderer. Alice Lumsden in a red slicker pedaling maliciously through the rain to try to have a murderer— hanged I Alice had farther to go, but Alice had had a start. Almost twenty minutes.
The rain had obliterated all sense of distance. Kay moved onward, conscious of nothing but the grayish gleam of the drive beneath her feet and the vague bulk of the house looming beyond the sheet of falling water. That lighted window—it was the library. Lucky her slicker was black. A red slicker would be easy to see even in the rain.
A red slicker… Suddenly Kay’s heart missed a beat. She took a step forward and then stopped, the rain hammering down on her head and shoulders. A red slicker… She had thought of a red slicker and then—as if she had conjured it up out of her mind— there was that red thing ahead. A vague red thing gleaming dully ahead, gleaming against the gray sand of the drive.
Her hands were numb—like ice. She took another step, her legs shaking, her eyes seeing nothing but that vague red thing that couldn’t—couldn’t be there.
And then her toe, moving forward, touched something. Something soft and yielding. Something horribly real.
A shiver electrified her whole body. Using every ounce of control, she dropped to her knees. She stretched out her hand. Her fingers reached that thing, felt its wet, shiny surface. She tried to keep them there, but she couldn’t.
She crouched on the drive, not able to think, not letting herself see. And then, a flash of lightning, like a vast spotlight snapping on and off, made it impossible to pretend any more.
In that short, ghastly moment of illumination, Kay had seen the red thing on the drive in every searing detail. The red shiny surface of the slicker. And the huddled body that was wearing it. Lying there, its legs twisted under it, its arms flung out in a senseless gesture across the drive.
Behind, a fantastic adjunct to disaster, she had caught a glimpse of the gleaming, sprawled silhouette of a bicycle, its silvered handle bars shining, its front wheel grotesquely pointing upward.
But all that was only incidental to the other thing she had seen—the white, contorted face beneath a battered brown felt hat.
The face of Alice Lumsden.
Instinctively, Kay groped forward on her knees, found the woman’s hand. Trembling she searched for the pulse in the wrist.
Nothing.
She leaned over, peering down at the face. Dimly she could trace the outline of the wound on the temple, a sharp, deep wound. Her hand, moving almost independently of her will, slipped across the slicker, unbuttoned it, and felt for the heart.
Nothing again. No flicker of a heartbeat.
The rain slashed down remorselessly. Kay realized the whole truth then, realized it with the icy impassivity of panic. And the thought came almost like words, words spoken by a thin, tiny voice inside her.
“She’s dead. Alice Lumsden’s dead. She’s been murdered, too.”
Chapter Seventeen
KAY SCRAMBLED to her feet. Thunder roared and faded. The rain, careening down in torrents, cut her off from that dreadful thing on the drive, isolated her in a tiny world of her own where there was nothing but water, water splashing off her shoulders, stinging her eyes, flattening her hair against her head.
That liquid darkness was worse than being able to see. Every fiber of her body felt the nearness of Alice Lumsden, lying there only a few feet away; Alice Lumsden in her red slicker, sprawled across the sand by the overturned bicycle; Alice Lumsden—dead.
Kay made no attempt to think: who? or why? or how? There was only one thing in her mind. Alice Lumsden had started for the police station and had been killed. And yet, ironically, it was Alice who had won the race.
Because Alice was dead, Kay’s next move was inevitable. She would have to go back to the house and call Major Clifford. Because Alice was dead, there would be even more ruthless cross-examination, a definite tightening of the police net around them. Because Alice was dead, there would be no further chance for Kay to go to the island; no chance to destroy the evidence against Terry or to retrieve the securities.
It was all over now.
While the storm raged around her, Kay turned her back to the invisible horror on the drive and made a move toward the house. Then, suddenly, she paused, for a thought had slid into her mind, a thought which at first was no more distinct than the whine of a gnat but which grew stronger and stronger.
Did she really have to call Major Clifford? Alice was dead. There was no hope of restoring life. There was nothing, absolutely nothing one could do to help her. And no one had seen Kay there by the body. Supposing she pretended, even to herself, that this terrible thing hadn’t happened; supposing she went on to the island now while there was still a chance…
At any other time in her life it would have seemed fantastic to Kay that she could think this way. But ever since Ivor’s death had plunged them into chaos, her standards had been beaten down. From the beginning she had thought of Major Clifford as the enemy. Wasn’t it only consistent that she carry her policy to this extreme, lawless conclusion?
She felt a little dizzy. It wasn’t for herself that she had to do this. It was for Terry; Terry who had turned criminal to save his father’s life; Terry who could so easily be charged with murder if the truth were known. Terry who—surely—was innocent.
While her impulse was at its crest, Kay turned back abruptly and started hurrying through the pall of rain toward the dock.
That furtive journey through the storm had a nightmare quality. Although it was practically impossible that she should be seen, she carefully avoided the slave cottage where Constable Masters was sheltering and moved along the drive in the lee of the oleanders. But it wasn’t Constable Masters of whom she was really conscious. It was Alice Lumsden.
As Kay skirted the bicycle shed and stumbled through the knotted grove of cedars down to the deserted dock, the memory of Alice, like a revengeful ghost, seemed to stalk silently after her.
She paused a moment on the wet jetty, trying to locate the island through the blinding sheet of the rain. Water had seeped through the slicker now, soaking her so that her very pores seemed water-logged. A sudden arrogant lightning flash showed the island ahead with its little white dock. It was a wild, forbidding scene. It seemed incredible that the blue lazy calm of Bermuda could have changed to this eerie spectacle.
The still-vexed Bermoothes, she thought. The Islands which for years the Portuguese had shunned as a habitation of devils. She could understand that now.
Keeping the position of the island dock in her mind after the flash had gone, she jumped down into a canoe, loosed the painter with cold, clumsy hands, and pushed off, paddling out across the bay.
The rain had flattened the surface of the water, and there was something eerie about the dead passivity with which the sea received the savage attack of the storm. The canoe was almost half full of rain water, lying low, but there was no point in baling. Kay’s progress was slow, laborious, and that eerie feeling was heightened—as if dead fingers in the dead sea were clinging to the canoe, holding her back.
Once, as silence came after thunder, Kay’s imagination heard a faint splash behind her. And, horribly vivid, the image came again, the image of a dead woman in a red slicker, close behind her in the rain, following inexorably to keep her from reaching the island.
Kay paddled more and more quickly as if there were some real pursuer. At last, miraculously, she made out the vague blur of the island dock. Almost before she realized it, the logy canoe had bumped against it. She made the boat fast and scrambled up onto the jetty.
Still haunted by that unnamed fear, she ran through the rain up the short path which led to the playhouse. She saw the little cottage only when she was right up to the blue Dutch door. Her pulses throbbing as
if she were reaching sanctuary, she tugged the door open and slipped inside.
For a moment she stood there, not feeling anything except the fact that the rain was no longer beating down on her. Then, the panic image of Alice Lumsden loomed in her mind again. Instinctively, senselessly, her fingers fumbled for the bolt on the door and shot it. She was safe now. Nothing could get in. She stayed there, leaning against the locked door, breathing quickly, relief sliding through her like a warm drink.
It was dark here—dark with a sort of submarine dusk as though the rain, streaming down the windows, were the sea and the cottage some strange building on the ocean bed.
She started forward through the vague blur of tables and chairs toward the door of the bedroom. Her footsteps on the boards squeaked. Squeak and then silence. Squeak—silence. Her nerves focused all their attention on that progression of sound and absence of sound. And suddenly her feeling of security slipped away. Again came the fantastic sensation that she was not alone. Every step she took seemed to be a step taken by someone else—someone who was there invisibly in the room with her.
Shivering, she thought of Ivor, that other ghost so much more malevolent than the first. Alice and Ivor! Alice was shut out. But this was Ivor’s house.
Ivor…
She stopped dead, making all sound stop with her. The blood in her veins was like ice, because she was sure of it then.
Someone was in the room.
It was only with a great effort of will that she kept herself from screaming. There was absolutely no sound except the rain outside. Nothing to suggest that anyone was there except that strange feeling in her bones.
And bones can lie, she told herself. My nerves are shot. I’m imagining things. I should be ashamed.
She moved to the bedroom door and tugged it open, deliberately making as much noise as possible. It was a little lighter in the bedroom. She could make out the shrouded form of the bed. She crossed to it. She pushed back the spread. Eagerly her hand thrust deep under the mattress. Her fingers touched something hard, the hard surface of the folder.
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