The Balcony

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “What—what did you say?”

  “I said,” Dan reported grimly, “ ‘Thank you, Mrs. Silver,’ and like the dope I was, dropped it there. I was too flabbergasted to ask any questions.”

  “But, Dan, how did she sound?”

  “I’ve told you—casual and friendly.” He made a hopeless gesture. “I’ve gone over in my mind a thousand times every word of our conversation. And none of it makes sense. Amanda Silver hated me and my mother as much or more than Patience did; she had hated us for years. Those things don’t change, Anne.”

  “But she did change,” I said. “Something changed her. Something happened before she telephoned.”

  “Maybe.” Again Dan grinned without amusement. “But the background does make it seem unlikely, unless I can ferret out, and produce, the explanation. I went in the bank six months ago. For six solid months Amanda did her damnedest to get my job by raking up those old lies about my father. Glick knows all that. You can imagine his reaction if I announced that the feud was off so far as Amanda Silver was concerned, that she had obligingly had a change of heart just before she was mysteriously shot to death!”

  He leaned forward and said, “What’s your advice, Anne? Shall I tell that story to the Sheriff? My own idea is that I hold it back until I can produce some supporting evidence . . .”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he admitted restlessly. And then he started toward the door. “There’s one thing I can do now—and will. I can notify the Sheriff that I had a lapse of memory—that Skipper wasn’t with me yesterday.”

  I went after him.

  “That won’t help either of us, Dan. Not me certainly. I’ve got no alibi, anyway.” I forced a smile myself. “The alibis at Hieronomo House are few and far between. Only Uncle Richard and his wife are even halfway in the clear. They didn’t arrive from New York until five o’clock and they took a taxi from the station.”

  “So the Sheriff told me,” said Dan.

  It struck me that his tone was a little odd, but he dropped the matter there. In the dusk I couldn’t quite make out the expression on his face. By now the storeroom was almost entirely dark, and outside the twilight had thickened visibly. Dan glanced toward the uncurtained window, a gray outline against a darkening sky.

  “You’ve got to go now, Anne,” he said abruptly. “It’s getting late and I can’t play the gentleman and accompany you to your door. But I do want to ask: Do you really want to find out who killed Amanda Silver?”

  I think I nodded.

  “Maybe,” Dan said swiftly, “you and I can work it out together. I’ve got some ideas. Not too well formulated yet. We can talk them over tomorrow. I drive to Baltimore every Friday on business for the bank. How can we manage so you come along?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t.”

  “Then I’ll work out something else and phone. But you must go now, Anne. And I must insist that you take the gun.”

  He thrust the weapon into my hand. I was determined not to be burdened with any gun, and as he pushed me gently toward the door I managed to drop it on the ping-pong table. I was nearly home before I realized that I hadn’t learned from Dan where he had spent the preceding afternoon, or where he was at the time Aunt Amanda had met her death.

  I re-entered Hieronomo House as I had left it— through the side door and without discovery. The telephone was ringing as I slipped into the foyer. I stepped into the telephone closet, a cramped airless little booth set into the space beneath the stairs, and pulled the glass door behind me. As I half expected, Dan was on the wire. “You left without the gun,” he said accusingly.

  I admitted meekly that I had.

  There was a hesitation. Then, “I’ve got to tell you something,” he said quickly. “I meant to wait until I checked up further, got more facts, but you’re such a stubborn, hard-headed wench ...” Again he hesitated. “Is there a lock on your bedroom door?”

  “I suppose there is.”

  “Then use it. For God’s sake, lock your door tonight. And listen carefully, Anne. You’re to watch out for your Uncle Richard. Do you understand?”

  “But, Dan . . .”

  “Watch out for him, I say. He lied, Anne—the stupidest kind of lie. He didn’t come down from New York yesterday afternoon, although apparently Lucy did. Your Uncle Richard arrived in Mount Hope yesterday at six o’clock in the morning.”

  “At six o’clock in the morning! How . . .”

  “The station master happens to be a friend of mine. He’s also a friend of the Sheriff’s, and that’s odd too, isn’t it? Glick’s apparent lack of interest in the point. But I mean to take a very active interest! How and where Richard Hieronomo spent his day, and where he joined his wife, and the meaning of that delayed and melodramatic arrival of his, I don’t understand yet, but I intend . . .”

  I was crouched on the little seat, listening tensely. Suddenly I ceased listening to Dan. I heard no sound behind me. I didn’t hear the glass door of the telephone closet open quietly, but I felt on my back a draught of air.

  “What is it, Anne? Something wrong?”

  I didn’t answer Dan. I turned around. Looming in the narrow door, framed by the dusky light of the foyer, stood Richard Hieronomo.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you, niece.”

  But I had hung up the telephone. I got up from the little seat. Great-uncle Richard did not step aside, and seemed not to realize that he completely barred the exit.

  “Some friend of Amanda’s calling?” he asked casually.

  “A—a friend of mine.”

  He looked surprised. “I wasn’t aware, my dear, that you were acquainted in the village.”

  No reply occurred to me, no explanation that would serve. I said nothing. His expression didn’t change—it remained interested and alert. Nevertheless, suddenly and quite desperately, I wanted to leave the telephone closet. Great-uncle Richard didn’t stir. I was standing. Why didn’t he step aside? The telephone booth, with its three confining walls the width of the door he blocked, was like a little prison. The foyer beyond was very quiet. Where was everyone? Where was Great-aunt Patience? Where was Cousin Hoy? Glenn? For an instant that seemed endless, Great-uncle Richard held his pose.

  “Please—” I said then, in a strangled voice. “It’s—it’s awfully close in here.”

  “My dear child, why didn’t you say so?” Instantly Richard Hieronomo stepped back and allowed me to pass from the booth into the blessed safety of the foyer. But there had been no danger, I told myself, amazed at the trembling of my body. Nerves, imagination, coupled with Dan’s warning, had brought on that sudden, sickening fright. There was nothing formidable about Great-uncle Richard. I was not in the least afraid of him.

  “I thought,” said Uncle Richard, with one of his flashing, practiced smiles, “that your friend might call you back. It sounds absurd, but I fancied you hadn’t really finished your conversation, that I’d interrupted you. Now”—and he held out his hand—“am I forgiven?”

  His hand was warm and firm and a little pathetic, too. The nails were a shade too highly polished, and I suspected that he carried his own manicure kit just as he carried the pomades and creams with which he daily bedaubed himself.

  “It’s a wretched situation we’re in—we Hieronomos,” he said, gazing gloomily at my captive hand. “I see your position clearly. Believe me, niece, I do. But the best way out, the only way, is for all of us to stick together.”

  “Of course,” I muttered mechanically.

  “I’m happy you agree.” His glance was sharper. “I had the curious notion you were considering—what we say —independent action.” My heart beat fast, as I shook my head. Apparently I satisfied the tall, gaunt man, for he released my hand. Then he bent forward to bring his eyes closer to the level of my own. “I can assure you, niece, that we Hieronomos won’t let you hang.”

  It was an unpleasant and disturbing little episode.

  XII

  I SUPPOSE
FEW MURDER MYSTERIES are solved by the discovery of any single fact. Usually the truth comes out bit by bit until finally the pattern is revealed in its dreadful whole. Certainly this was so in the case of our mystery. I know that I overlooked the significance of certain incidents, and failed lamentably to interpret others.

  The Friday that followed Aunt Amanda’s murder might be used as a case in point. That was a day of many eventful happenings; but I think that no one of us—Sheriff Glick included—perceived the direction in which they pointed. Even now, the day lingers in my mind as confused and contradictory.

  Three things—each unrelated but each of which was to play its own part in illuminating the dark and murky truth that lay behind Aunt Amanda’s murder—stand forth clearly in my memory. It was on Friday, toward noon, that Sheriff Glick came into possession of my great-grandfather’s gun. The clumsy, old-fashioned weapon was discovered nowhere near Hieronomo House, indeed was picked up on a road eighteen miles away, a lonely, seldom-traveled little country lane on the outskirts of Baltimore.

  But I had nothing to do with that discovery, although it was to affect me later. The other incidents concerned me more directly at the time they happened. It was on Friday that Glenn and I carried on our experiment outside the shattered door of Aunt Amanda’s bedroom and hit upon the origin of the sharp, small sound that only I had heard. It was on Friday toward dusk, also, that I saw once again in my great-grandfather’s barn the strange woman with the brassy hair.

  The day started unremarkably enough. Sheriff Glick had departed with his deputies, but through the morning Patience had her troubles with the press. Those metropolitan newspaper men and women who were to take such an active interest in the doings of the “mysterious Hieronomos,” attempted to storm the house and, failing entrance, set up a noisy watch on the portico. Lucy, whose heart was soft as butter, wanted to send out sandwiches and coffee to that articulate and frantically determined group who made the morning hideous with their clamor. Richard, who fulminated loudly against the “invasion of decent privacy,” suggested that a family bucket brigade could discourage them with boiling water. It was Patience, with Hoy’s help, who drew all the shades and disconnected the doorbell.

  As it happened, I kept to my room until late, but with the door ajar so that I could keep more or less in touch with what went on below. To tell the truth, I was willing to defer a meeting with the family, willing to defer that moment when Great-uncle Richard would greet me genially and ask me how I had slept and I would have to answer like any loving niece, and hide from him my thoughts. Not that those thoughts were much to boast about. Great-uncle Richard hadn’t struck me as a stupid man. But surely, only a stupid man could hope to sustain an alibi so pregnable that Dan had exploded it by the simple device of talking to the station master.

  What was the explanation for Richard Hieronomo’s presence in Mount Hope at six A.M. on Wednesday morning? Why had he concealed the hour of his arrival, and played out that fraudulent and hollow scene of rushing straight from his train to the bosom of his family?

  It is easy now to say that I should have gone to Uncle Richard and requested or demanded an explanation. I lack that special kind of courage. If Dan had learned the truth so easily, it seemed to me that Sheriff Glick must also be aware of it. Let him take the necessary steps! I didn’t for a moment doubt the Sheriff’s capability, or that he was keeping to himself certain facts and theories.

  Then, too, before I made any move, I needed to talk to Dan. Subconsciously, of course, I must have hoped that Dan would take the initiative, that, difficult though it was, he would figure out a way for us to meet. I was confident that somehow he would reach me. The telephone rang many times that morning, but there was no call for me.

  My bedroom windows—under the watchful eyes of a deputy, I had been allowed to transfer my personal belongings from John Hieronomo’s grim and cheerless chamber—overlooked the winter garden and the dividing fence. I had seen to that. Before Patience could place me elsewhere, I had selected that particular room. I had a clear and unobstructed view of the property next door, the colonial cottage and the playhouse. Most of the morning I sat posted at the windows. My watch was vain. I saw no sign of Dan.

  When luncheon was announced I felt compelled to go downstairs. My meeting with the family wasn’t the ordeal that I had anticipated. Aunt Patience had shown the wit to shift the meal from the funereal dining room to the smaller and more cheerful nook immediately off the kitchen. Quite unsentimentally, she sat in the chair that Amanda would have occupied had she been there, with Richard placed on her right and Hoy on her left. Her hand was not too steady as she poured the coffee, but otherwise she was completely self-contained.

  Great-uncle Richard didn’t greet me genially, remark my morning absence, or single me out in any way. In the harsh noon light he wasn’t his usual booming and commanding self. Aunt Lucy, who sat beside him, looked equally drained and lifeless. Nevertheless, she clung grimly to her perpetual search for a silver lining and professed to find it in the absence of the police authorities.

  “I wouldn’t count,” said Patience tartly, “on their not coming back. And for heaven’s sake, Lucy, I wish you’d ask for sugar. We all know you use it.”

  Lucy, who hadn’t cared to trouble Cousin Hoy, meekly accepted the bowl from him and dropped three lumps of sugar in her cup.

  Said Hoy, who saw no reason for pretending that he felt cheerful, “I wonder what Sheriff Glick is doing, and why he isn’t here. I’d rather have him on the place than not know what he’s about. It’s—it’s the uncertainty that works on my nerves. And when my nerves go bad, my ulcer invariably acts up. . . .”

  Patience neatly cut her nephew short before he could make us privy to the exact condition of his digestive tract. She had her own opinion of the investigation, and she meant to air it.

  “I dare say,” she said flatly, “now the Sheriff has Father’s gun, he’s occupied with testing it to prove it really is the weapon that killed Amanda. That’s a policeman for you! Literal-minded and unimaginative. Every

  one of us—you included, Richard—is willing to admit this minute that the murderer used Father’s gun.”

  “It’s the Sheriff’s job to establish concrete evidence,” remarked her brother.

  “That’s all very well,” said Patience, “but Glick might have had the grace to telephone himself and let us know where the gun was found. I had to learn it by pumping his deputies. Why didn’t Glick call and relieve our minds? One thing’s sure. None of us had the slightest chance to go traipsing eighteen miles to throw away that gun.”

  She put it very definitely. She looked around the group for reassurance. It came eventually from Richard.

  “The family,” he said with the air of one entitled to speak the deciding word, “is certainly in the clear on the disposition of the weapon. All of us were in our beds last night.”

  “And we stayed there,” piped Lucy.

  “Precisely,” said Great-uncle Richard. “What is more . . .”

  Cousin Hoy didn’t say a word. I thought I detected an odd, an almost discomfited expression in his eyes, as he glanced toward Glenn. Nor did Glenn’s freckled face seem jubilant. It was sober, rather. But Patience had by no means finished with the conversation, and she firmly removed it from her brother’s charge.

  “I don’t deny,” she began with the exact manner she would have used in addressing her class in ancient history, “that concrete evidence—clues and all the rest— are important in a murder investigation. It merely seems to me that Glick might interest himself more in the intangibles. Intangibles can be important, too.”

  “Such as?” inquired Richard sharply.

  “Such as Amanda herself,” retorted Patience. “There are no two ways about it. In our own family group here, it is only good sense to admit that Amanda behaved in a very peculiar fashion. Not only Wednesday, but even before. Take the sale of the house. For a full week I attempted, and with no success, to discover the name of the bu
yer. I mean to get to the bottom of that today, have a definite talk with Verona Gay. She’s coming to the house at five o’clock. But putting that aside, I’d like to know why Amanda began locking her bedroom door one week ago—on the very day I arrived in the house.” Richard suddenly chuckled. Color rose in my great-aunt’s face.

  She said stubbornly, “I’ll admit, if you like, that I’m a woman with a certain amount of normal curiosity. But why should Amanda mind when she never minded before? Why should she start locking her door?”

  Hoy set down his glass of milk abruptly. “I bet that maid could tell us. Unless I’m very wrong about human nature, she knows the answer to the locked door, or at least suspects it. She’s a keyhole peeper, that girl, if I ever saw one.”

  Glenn grinned. “Now there’s an intangible, Aunt Patience, that’s still a fact.”

  “But you couldn’t see through the keyhole of Amanda’s door,” Patience began. She realized suddenly the implication of her statement, and wound up in a flustered and defiant way, “Well, you couldn’t! I don’t like the girl myself, but if she peeped, she didn’t find out anything.”

  “If there’s any sense to the whole thing,” said Glenn restively, “Aunt Amanda must have had something in her bedroom that she didn’t mean for you, or for anyone to see. There’s no other answer.”

  “But what?” demanded Patience. “What was it? And what became of it? When we broke down the door and went into Amanda’s bedroom, there was nothing out of order. Personally, I saw nothing worth a second glance. And I did take the trouble to look around.”

  She gazed at me reflectively. Surprisingly, there was nothing cold or suspicious in her glance. Overnight, apparently, she had reached several conclusions which did not point directly to guilty knowledge on my part. But I was reminded, as I had been reminded so often, of the short, sharp sound which had occurred behind the locked door and had caught my ear alone. Apparently, Glenn was thinking too. For he said: