The echo of the scream seemed to wander eerily through the jungle. It chilled my spine. And then, even more terrible because it linked up with the evil Mayan fancies in my mind, came another sound—a long, hissing splash.
In a cold panic I started to run toward the jungle path. Over my shoulder I called:
“Miss Brand. She’s down there. Alone.”
The manager came running behind me. I turned into the path and down it as fast as I could go. Vine tendrils waved around me as if shaken by a demonic life-force within. The butterflies, shining like jewels, floated in front of me. Everything was charged with a sort of alien horror. Visions came of Deborah with her high heels scrambling around the edge of the crater, scrambling, tripping….
I saw the clearing ahead. I saw the yellow dog squatting on its haunches at the brink of the chasm, its ears cocked, looking down. As I reached it, it gave me an absent glance and snapped at an insect.
“Deborah,” I called.
The manager came panting behind me. We both ran to the edge of the abyss. Far below us the evil green water oozed slowly past on its way down the underground river.
“Deborah,” I called again.
The manager clutched my arm. His grip was so powerful that his fingers seemed to dig to the bone. He was pointing. But I didn’t need direction, for I had seen it, too.
Eighty feet below us, glistening and gleaming under the water, trailing like some dreadful weed, I could see Deborah’s silver hair.
I could catch a vague glimpse of her face, too. It was pale, chill, green under the green water.
And she didn’t move. She lay there soggily still while the sluggish current tugged at her streaming hair.
V
My first reaction was anger. The darn little fool, I thought. Scrambling around the edge. Didn’t she have enough sense?… Then the full horror of it came to me. She was lying down there under the water without moving. She must have hit her head in the fall. Or perhaps the impact of striking the water from such a height had made her lose consciousness.
I dropped to my knees and started to swing myself down the sheer face of rock. The manager gripped me from behind. His arms were strong as a wrestler’s. He jerked me back.
“You can’t climb down. No one can.”
“But she’s drowning.”
“You’d only fall. It’s eighty feet. We’d have to save you, too.”
An Indian came running into the clearing. The manager barked Spanish at him. He scuttled away.
“He’s bringing a rope,” said the manager. “There’s a rope on the pyramid. To help people climb. In a moment he’ll have it.”
He was smaller than I, but he was all muscle, and he had taken me by surprise, pinioning my arms behind me in an expert nelson. We staggered together on the edge of the crater. The yellow dog howled. Maybe one of us trod on it.
As I struggled, not thinking, only reacting instinctively, I could see Deborah below us. She seemed to be sinking. The pale face was more blurred. The streaming hair was a duller silver. And, slowly, she was being dragged by the current closer and closer to the rock wall to be engulfed by the subterranean river beyond.
The manager’s voice came to me dimly: “It’s no use. I think she’s dead already. The body will be carried away down the river.”
There was the sound of running feet behind us. The Indian had returned. He held a clumsily coiled length of rope. Its tail stretched out behind him like a giant snake. There was another Indian with him. The manager started shouting in Spanish. The Indians ran with the rope to a place on the edge close above the sinking body. There was a tree. One of the men attached the rope to it and swung himself over the rim of the crater.
I stopped struggling then, and the manager released his wrestler’s hold. I knew now there was nothing I could do. There never had been. The manager was right. She was probably dead. I tried to make myself accept that unacceptable fact. Below, the body was almost invisible beneath the green, slimy water. The Indian, small and lithe as a boy, was swaying down on the rope. The other Indian crouched above, gazing down. Suddenly I didn’t want to look. I turned away.
The yellow dog, startled by the violence of my movement, shot me a reproachful glance and padded out of the clearing.
My head was clearer now. I moved round the rim of the crater, searching for Deborah’s large red pocket-book. It wasn’t there. She must have fallen with it clutched in her hand. I thought of it dropping slowly down, down through the turbid water, an elegant American pocket-book going to join the ancient Indian bracelets and golden gew-gaws.
From the jungle path I heard the thud of footsteps. In a few seconds the gangling figure of Bill Halliday appeared. The sunlight slanted down on his hair, which was either grey or taffy blond. He hurried towards me. His unaccented face was taut, worried.
“What happened? I was up at the ruins. I heard a scream.”
The manager had crossed to the Indian at the head of the rope. He was shouting instructions to the other man below. Halliday started towards them.
I said: “It’s Deborah Brand. She fell in.”
“Fell in.”
“She was going to take a photograph. She sent me for her camera…”
Halliday hurried to join the manager. I saw him peer cautiously down. He came back to me. He looked sick. He said in an awed voice:
“She’s dead, isn’t she? Stunned by the fall. Drowned.”
“I think so.”
The red headed bridegroom had entered the clearing now. And close after him, padding along at a breathless trot, came Mrs. Snood. So they had all been out there, I thought, visiting the ruins before the official tour. The newcomers joined us. Everyone fired questions. To me they were nothing more than a blur of disconnected images. Mrs. Snood’s perky face and her shrill green suit, the bridegroom’s vivid blue eyes, Halliday’s thin, lipless mouth.
The manager joined us. “All of you go back to the inn, please. There is nothing you can do.”
I thought of Deborah as my responsibility. I had brought her there. I protested, but the manager cut in:
“Please, Mr. Duluth. You will only distress yourself.”
“It’s okay,” said Halliday. “We’ll take him back with us.”
Halliday’s hand was firm on my arm. He was guiding me back towards the path. In a way I was relieved to go, and not to have to see what the Indian would bring up from that monstrous crater.
The bridegroom went ahead. I followed with Halliday. Mrs. Snood fluttered around us. We crossed the arena of the temples, moved out on to the road and up it to the inn. Waitresses in fancy native costumes were dawdling in the diningroom at the end of the terrace.
Mrs. Snood said: “We might as well eat breakfast. We’ll feel better with some food in us.”
“No,” I said.
“Please, Mr. Duluth. It’ll do you good.”
“No, thank you.”
I left them, hurrying down the path to the cottage. I let myself into my room. It hadn’t been made. The bed in which Deborah had slept was still a tumble of sheets under the mosquito netting. A quirkish impulse of conventionality overtook me. The maid shouldn’t be allowed to know Deborah had spent the night here—not now that she was dead. With painstaking neatness I made the second bed and tidied the mosquito netting into a formal balloon above it.
I dropped down on the other bed. I felt in my pocket for a cigarette, and brought out the book Deborah had given me. It was a twenty-five-cent detective story reprint, The Wrong Murder by Craig Rice. I glanced at the bright cover and threw it down on the bedside table. I found a cigarette then and lit it.
Deborah still seemed to be in the room with me, as if she had left a shadow behind her. I remembered her voice last night stubbornly repeating: “Why should I be afraid? Of course I’m not afraid.”
But she had been afraid, and now she was dead.
That was the first moment at which I began to wonder. In spite of her denials, there had been a lot of mystery surro
unding Deborah Brand when she was alive. Wasn’t there mystery in her death, too? Was it reasonable that a sensible, active girl should have fallen down an abyss in broad daylight simply trying to find a good place for a photograph? And in her fall she had hit her head and landed unconscious in the water, making death certain. Wasn’t it all too much of a coincidence?
I though of the strange impression of falseness she had given me when she had asked me to get her camera. I wondered if she could have deliberately sent me back to the hotel because she had arranged to meet someone else at the cenote. But if that had been so, why had she taken such pains to persuade me to visit it with her in the first place? And certainly, if there had been someone at the hotel whom she knew, she had been afraid of him or her. She would surely never have arranged a meeting at such a dangerous place as the cenote with someone of whom she had been afraid.
The theory collapsed, and yet a vague feeling of something sinister beyond my grasp remained. I had hardly known Deborah Brand, but she had become real to me. A real young girl with a real fear who had come to me for protection.
Had I somehow let her down?
There was a tap at the door. I got up and went to open it. Mrs. Snood was standing there with a cup of coffee in her hand. She looked anxious and maternal. She had pinned a spray of bougainvillea to her green suit. It was even less effective than the orchids.
“I brought you a cup of coffee. You’re paying for breakfast. You might as well get something out of it.”
She bustled into the room, looking around her brightly. She was probably wondering whether I had got a better bargain than she. I was grateful for the coffee. I was grateful, too, for her warm-hearted impulse.
I sat down on the sofa where Deborah had staged her high-school seduction attempt the night before. Mrs. Snood sat down next to me. She put a small hand on my knee and watched me, half inquisitively, half affectionately.
“You were fond of her, weren’t you?”
“She was a nice girl.”
“But it wasn’t more than that? I mean, you hadn’t known her before?”
“No.”
“The manager came back,” she said. “It’s no good. He doesn’t think they’re going to be able to get her out.”
I gulped the coffee. It tasted bitter. “No?”
“The current. It dragged her in under the rock.”
I put the cup down.
Her hand was still on my knee. “Don’t worry about it too much. You couldn’t have done anything. Lots of people die.”
That trite phrase jarred. I growled: “Sure. There’s plenty of other girls down there in the cenote already. What’s one more?”
She looked hurt. “I wasn’t being callous. It’s terrible. I know that. I was only trying to help.”
“I know you were,” I said apologetically. “I’m sorry.”
“The manager says there are no police out here. You’ll have to drive into Merida and make a statement at the police station. You have to make statements for accidents.”
“Yes.”
She got up. “Like another cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks. That was fine.”
“Well, I guess we’re going out with the guide, after all. It seems kind of awful to be snooping around the ruins after this. But since I’ve come so far and spent so much…”
“Of course.”
The manager, apprehensive and apologetic, as if everything might be blamed on him, came in then. He repeated what Mrs. Snood had already told me, and made arrangements for us to drive into Merida after lunch. The Yucatecan method of reporting accidents is more leisurely than our own. Apparently the Merida police would appreciate the fact that the manager’s duties to his guests made it impossible for him to leave the inn until the afternoon. Mrs. Snood loitered around us, her black eyes darting back and forth. When the manager had left, she said:
“I’ll have had enough of this place by lunch-time, and my plane for Mexico City leaves to-morrow. Mr. Halliday and the honeymoon couple are going back, and the hotel car’ll be full. If I get that character out from Merida again it’ll be another fifty pesos. Could you give me a ride?”
“Of course. I’d like your company.”
“Thanks.”
Mrs. Snood had wandered over to the bedside table and had picked up The Wrong Murder.
“Is this any good?”
“I don’t know. It was Deborah’s.”
“Reading it?”
“No.”
“Mind if I take it? I can’t sleep without reading. Haven’t run into any English books down here.”
“Of course. Take it.”
Mrs. Snood slipped the book under her arm. She looked at me anxiously.
“You’re a nice young man. I like you. I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
I smiled at her. “I’ll be okay.”
“I suppose you don’t know of any relatives? I mean—to be informed.”
“A father in Peru. An archælogist.”
“Where in Peru?”
“I don’t know.”
“No one else?”
“Not that I know of.”
“She didn’t say where she was going from here?”
“Mexico City. But I don’t know if she knew anyone there.”
Mrs. Snood shrugged. “Well, it’s not our responsibility. I expect the police will be able to trace her. Poor girl! What a dreadful thing!” Her natural exuberance got the better of her then. “I’ll run along. The tour will be starting. I don’t want to miss anything.”
She hurried out with the little brightly-coloured book tucked under her arm.
Alone again, I remembered that Deborah had given me her room key. My suspicion of something wrong was still strong enough to make me curious. I moved out on to the little terrace which fronted the cottage. No one was visible up at the hotel. I let myself into Deborah’s room.
Its untidiness touched me. There is something young and optimistic about untidiness. It implies that there will be plenty of time later to straighten things up. The white evening dress she had worn the night before was flung over a chair. The rest of her clothes—there weren’t many of them—had been tossed into one of the drawers of a bureau. The drawer was open. Her toilet things—perfume, cold cream, a brush—were crowded on a vanity. The camera was with them. The airplane-fabric suitcase stood at the foot of the unmade bed with some underclothes and stockings dangling out of it.
That was all that was left of her: a few untidy clothes and a suitcase.
I searched the place thoroughly. I found nothing unusual—nothing even that gave a hint as to where she had come from or what she had been planning to do in Mexico City. As I went through her meagre possessions I suddenly started to wonder whether Deborah herself had left the room this way, or whether it had been ransacked by someone else.
There was no way of telling, of course. But my suspicions increased rather than diminished. They stayed with me through the long morning when, for lack of anything better to do, I wandered around the ruins, carefully keeping away from the guided party. They were still with me when the time for the return trip to Merida arrived.
I drove with Mrs. Snood, following the manager and the sight-seeing car. I had expected to find her prattle hard to take, but, oddly enough, it soothed me. With a sensibility of which I hadn’t thought her capable, she made no reference to Deborah. She embarked upon an exhaustive history of her own life, telling me about the late Mr. Snood, who had been a real-estate man in Newark, and about her two daughters. One of them was married to a State official in Albany. The other was a lovely intellectual girl in her last year at Barnard, with a beau who was intellectual, too, and had sold a short story. It was all as homey as a corn muffin. It neutralized the bright, tropical glare of Yucatan.
The three cars met up again outside the Hotel Yucatan. The honeymoon couple went off into the hotel, but both Halliday and Mrs. Snood wanted to come along to the police station as subsidiary witnesses. We all packed into the ma
nager’s car and drove to a large, patio-ed colonial building which might once have been a palace but which now housed the Merida police.
We assembled before an important-looking man who sat at a large desk with ink-wells. Neither Halliday, Mrs. Snood nor I spoke Spanish. The manager, harried and obviously more concerned with the reputation of his hotel than with anything else, gave his version first. He then translated my purely factual account of what had happened between Deborah and myself at the cenote. A stenographer took down our statements and typed them up for us to sign. Halliday and Mrs. Snood made shorter statements corroborating what we had said.
The manager then informed us that the police were going to the inn immediately and that everything would be done to retrieve the body. He concluded with a formal speech telling us how sorry he was that our trip had been spoiled, and assuring us that an accident of that sort had never happened before. If the police thought it advisable, the whole cenote would be fenced in. The authorities, he said, appreciated our position as purely accidental witnesses to the tragedy, and would not expect us to stay in Merida for any of the necessary legal formalities.
Nothing must disturb the schedule of American tourists. It was all over just like that.
To me it seemed a shockingly casual way to have dismissed Deborah. An impulsive desire came to blurt out my amorphous suspicions and demand a further investigation. But the police official was disinterestedly picking his teeth. Mrs. Snood and Halliday were restless, obviously eager to be gone. I had absolutely nothing that resembled evidence to back up my hunch. Even Deborah herself had constantly denied that she was in danger. In the circumstances I had no right to detain the others in Yucatan indefinitely. Besides, I was eager to get my own affairs settled in Mexico City and return to Iris in New York.
When Halliday said: “Well, how about driving back to the hotel? I could do with a drink,” I said: “That’s okay with me.”
As we went out to the car I tried to pretend to myself that I had done all that anyone could have reasonably expected me to do. But I wasn’t completely convinced.
There was still something in me that I felt I was walking out on Deborah Brand.
Run to Death Page 4
