Hunt with the Hounds

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  It was an unfortunate phrase to use even in her thoughts.

  But why should anyone attack her? It must be, it had to be, simply a stray shot, someone hunting in the woods, afraid to come forward in view of the state of something very like hysteria in the county, following Dr. Luddington’s murder. The elaborate precautions they had taken began to seem rather silly and unnecessary.

  The night deepened. It was a quiet night, dark with no moon and a curtain of clouds over the stars.

  No one could possibly enter the house. Probably no one did. There was, however, someone about the place that night.

  It happened in the quiet, dark hour just before dawn. Woody heard it and described it later; old Jeremy, he said, had what amounted to a fit. Woody went to investigate. He and Jed found nothing amiss until they returned to the house and a pantry window was open. The lock had been forced and Woody himself remembered having locked it the night before.

  17

  THEY DID not rouse Sue or Caroline.

  “Why not?” demanded Caroline the next morning.

  “Because there wasn’t any point to it,” Woody said rather sullenly as if he felt he had failed in his duty. “Whoever it was had got away. We looked all over the house, Jed and I, and all we found was the pantry window open.”

  “That was enough,” said Caroline, who grew snappish when she was frightened. “What about Jeremy? Was he all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Woody. Jed said, “Honestly, Miss Caroline, there simply wasn’t anything to do. We searched the whole place, except your room and Sue’s and we knew you were both all right; Woody tiptoed in and listened. There wasn’t a sound and Sister Britches barely opened an eye and looked at us so we knew nobody was around. We discussed it and the only thing that was really—well, evidence, was the pantry window. Whoever was here had got away. There was no use in frightening you and Sue at that hour of the night; there was nothing we could do and nothing the police could do just then. I think they ought to know about it.”

  “They’ll not believe it,” Woody said morosely.

  Caroline got up. “I’m going out to take a look at Jeremy.”

  “Well, but Aunt Caroline, really he’s all right. Something frightened him; that’s all. And it really could have been a rat; you know how he is. He’d calmed down some by the time we got there, but he was still trembling and he looked scared.”

  Sue said, crumbling toast, “What exactly happened, Woody?”

  He told it, still rather sullenly. “Well, it was—I don’t know when, just before dawn. I hadn’t gone to sleep; I’m sure of that, but maybe I sort of drowsed. I was sitting in the hall; the window beside me was open, the screen was fastened. All at once it sounded like thunder and I jumped up and Jeremy was kicking hell out of his loose box. I had my gun right there; I ran out along the hall and unlocked the side door and ran out; it was dark as pitch and all at once I thought how silly it was for me to start on a manhunt, if that’s what it was, alone. I wasn’t afraid but it just wasn’t smart. Jeremy was quieting down but still—I turned around and ran back and by that time Jed had heard it …”

  “I’d been asleep on the couch in the library,” Jed said.

  “… and he’d got to the side door, so we hurried then to the stables and turned on the lights and there wasn’t anybody there. Jed started at the tack room and I went to Jeremy first; he was nervous and fussing around but there wasn’t anything really the matter with him and just nobody around at all. We gave the whole place a quick look but then Jed said we’d better get back to the house; we’d left the side door open. A fool thing to do of course; neither of us thought that maybe it was a diversion, I mean a trick to get us out of the house. So then when we did think of it we got back to the house in a hell of a hurry and searched there every place. We didn’t miss anywhere. And there was only the pantry window open.”

  That was in the end all there was to it; if it was evidence it was a negative kind of evidence which led nowhere except to a question. Why should anyone make an attempt to enter the house? Was it an attempted repetition of the attack on Sue?

  Caroline said thoughtfully, “I’ve always thought that Sam Bronson had a heavy hand with a horse. A poor stableman I’d have called him. And horses do remember things—it’s astonishing—let a horse do a thing once and he’ll always do it. And if he’s once been really terrified …” she stopped and thought and pushed up her hair. “But I can’t remember that Sam Bronson ever had anything to do with Jeremy.”

  Sam Bronson. Sam Bronson who had come, hurrying to the house that foggy dusky twilight when Ernestine had been murdered; Sam Bronson whom Sue had called, to whom she’d first told of the thing that had happened; Sam Bronson who had waited, his little dark eyes alert, his tight-lipped mouth silent, until Ernestine died. Sam Bronson who had, however, apparently given straightforward and honest testimony, who had had no quarrel—as far as anyone knew—with Ernestine; who had never said anything that indicated any special knowledge of Ernestine’s murder. Who had disappeared, but whose disappearances were so customary that no one thought twice about it.

  Jed had suggested that it might have been Sam Bronson hiding in the pine woods. She said to Jed, “Could it have been Sam Bronson?”

  Jed, who had been pacing up and down, gave her a worried look. He was tired. So was Woody; neither of them had slept after their discovery. Jed said after a moment, “What would he want?”

  Nobody could any more than guess. Woody said, “The only answer would be that he had something to do with Ernestine’s murder and thinks that Sue knows it.”

  “If Sue knew it she’d tell,” Caroline said. “She’d have told long ago.”

  “Maybe we can find him,” Jed said. “Or maybe he’s back by now. He does go off on these binges once in a while. Not often.” He looked at Caroline. “He’s not the best stableman in the world, but he’s wonderful with a car; used to drive some for Ernestine.”

  Caroline’s lips set themselves rather tightly together; it wasn’t the way she’d have run her stables, if she’d had the means, that is, to employ a real stableman. Jed said defensively, “Besides I don’t know that we could have done any better. Ernestine seemed satisfied.”

  “Where does he go when he—goes on binges?” Sue asked.

  Jed shrugged. “I don’t know. He lives alone over the stable. Nobody pays much attention to what he does. Although honestly he doesn’t do this often; Camilla says he’s been around all winter, every day. He’s not such a bad guy, really. Yet …”

  Yet it could have been Sam Bronson, waiting his chance in the pine woods, shooting to kill. Woody went to the telephone. “I’m going to tell the police.”

  Jed said, “Make them believe it, Woody. They as good as said it was a cooked up thing last night—that shot. Make them believe it.”

  “How?” said Woody morosely, giving the number.

  “Well.” Jed thought and said, “Fingerprints. There might be some on the pantry window.”

  Somebody answered the telephone. Woody asked for Captain Henley. Caroline said suddenly, “Jed—we have to say these things. How much truth was there in all that nonsense Camilla said last night? Such as that Ernestine”—she hesitated and said, “liked Fitz Wilson? Or that you might have married Camilla if it hadn’t been for Ernestine?”

  Jed stared at her for an instant. “I don’t know about Fitz Wilson,” he said then. “I have to apologize for what I said, Miss Caroline, about Ernestine and Fitz. I was …” he glanced at Sue and then finally at the carpet. “I didn’t mean it … She invited him, yes. Often. But she liked parties. She invited other people too. And as for me and Camilla—Camilla’s heart wasn’t broken, I do assure you, Miss Caroline. Besides Camilla likes Fitz Wilson and he was …” he glanced at Sue again. “He has been very attentive to her. If Ernestine invited him it was for Camilla.”

  Caroline said rather tartly that Camilla seemed fully capable of getting her own beaux. Sue briefly debated her automatic decision not to tel
l Caroline of Woody’s story of Ernestine and again decided it was the right one. And Woody ended that by-path by shouting furiously into the telephone, “But you’ve got to believe me! You’ve got to send somebody out here! What are the police for?”

  He slammed down the receiver. “It was Henley and he doesn’t believe a word of it. He thinks it’s a trick to draw suspicion from Sue. He said he’d send somebody to investigate but that …” Navy oaths trembled on Woody’s lips and Caroline knew it and dammed them up sharply, “Woody! You hush!… Why don’t you go and tell Sheriff Benjamin?”

  Woody’s face cleared. “That’s a good idea. I will. Want to go along, Jed?”

  They went shortly after, in Caroline’s puffing, laboring and valiant little car.

  And after a while—after Chrisy had heard the whole story and commented on it with a sullen, black rage which thrust out her underlip dangerously and sent her, muttering, back to her work, after Caroline had gone anxiously to the stables and cossetted and consoled a now perfectly calm Jeremy, who thrust his long neck and neat, intelligent head out to accept apples with an air of taking only his due—after a while two state policemen came, not Captain Henley but a sergeant and another trooper. They listened to Sue’s story and Caroline’s; they looked over the house and stables in a rather desultory way, tested the pantry window for fingerprints and went away. It was done with an air of perfunctory routine.

  They had barely gone when Fitz came. Chrisy, like an enormous dark angel with blue chambray wings, was on guard, saw his car coming up the driveway and contrived to meet him at the door and tell him the story of the night. She brought him then with an air of triumph to Sue and Caroline.

  If the police had been coolly perfunctory and skeptical, Fitz was not. He concealed, however, the real depth of his alarm. “It may have been nothing at all. Jeremy may still be merely fussy from the cut in his leg.”

  “I think it was the same person,” Caroline said blackly. “Fitz, that’s what I think. That cut wasn’t made by wire.”

  “Perhaps he fell—perhaps …”

  Caroline was shaking her head. “It was made by something with a hard edge. It was a cruel and vicious blow and if the man that gave it to him ever approached him again—well, I know horses and I know Jeremy.”

  “Were there any new welts on him this morning?”

  “Well, no. Not that I could find. But just the presence of whoever it was that untied him and gave him that blow would be enough to frighten him.”

  Fitz seemed to agree; he turned to Sue. “Let’s take a look at the stables.”

  Anxiety leaped into Caroline’s eyes. “Is it safe? That shot …”

  “I think it’s safe.”

  Her eyes plead with him for a moment; then she nodded. Sue took her blue suede jacket from the rack in the hall. She was wearing again a sweater and skirt; again she looked young and childish in spite of the pallor of her face and the small dark lines drawn under her eyes.

  Actually, though, once in the bright sunshine with the blue sky and a few white fleecy clouds sailing briskly above them, with the red bud and dogwood very purple and very white amid the thin young greens of spring foliage, on the hills—with the distant sound of the Higginson hunt following the ridge behind the village—whatever had happened, or had not happened in the night took on a quality of unreality. She looked up at Fitz and his brown face, his crisp black hair with its thick white sprinkling. The way he strolled along quietly beside her, hands in the pockets of gray slacks, tweed jacket looking ordinary and comfortable, was, all of it, reassuring.

  But there was no unreality about the splinters of wood struck from a pillar, the crushing, rocking sound of a shot. She said suddenly, almost surprised: “Fitz, why would anybody try to—kill me?”

  That, of course, was the main, the important question. He looked at her gravely, “Is there anything, Sue—anything at all that you can think of that could—well, could identify the murderer?”

  She had asked herself that, too; she shook her head.

  “I expected that, of course; that is, if you knew anything you’d have told it unless …” he stopped and she had an impression that he quickly rearranged what he had intended to say; yet he said at once, “Unless it is something that you know without knowing what it means. I mean—something that is dangerous to the murderer, but which you do not recognize as being dangerous. Think hard, Sue.”

  Sue had done nothing else; again she shook her head.

  “Well …” he turned to resume their stroll toward the stables, so ordinary and accustomed, with their low white wings, the double doors for a row of loose boxes, the door to the tack room half open. The paddocks looked newly washed and clear in the bright sunlight. Jeremy put his head out and surveyed them reservedly; Geneva looked out too, inquisitively, her ears pricked forward. Fitz said, “I wish I could suggest something that would suggest something to you. But I don’t know what exactly. Unless—well for instance, one thing that has struck me as rather odd is a kind of invisibility about whoever it was that killed Ernestine and killed Dr. Luddington. That sounds silly; a murderer always tries to make himself invisible, but as a rule he’s not so successful. Then the question of accessibility. The driveway, the evening of Ernestine’s murder—Duval Hall—Dr. Luddington’s or your place—none of these houses is close enough to anything to make walking easy; I mean anybody going, say, to Duval Hall would be likely to use a car. Same to Dr. Luddington’s, even for a villager, because his house is on the outskirts; same here. Yet you didn’t hear or see a car at Ernestine’s that night; I mean another car besides yours and Jed’s. You didn’t hear or see a car while you were waiting at Dr. Luddington’s. You didn’t hear anything of the kind last night and apparently nobody else did. They’d have said so.”

  She remembered the silence in Dr. Luddington’s waiting room, the quiet of the foggy twilight when she’d walked from the cabaña to the stately steps and door of Duval Hall. And if Woody the night before had heard anything but old Jeremy’s hooves, he’d have said so. “No. That’s right but I don’t see …”

  “Don’t you, Sue?”

  She looked at Fitz who was smiling rather wryly, and at Jeremy and said flatly, “Oh!”

  Fitz said, “In a hunting, riding country there’s an easy way of getting around—rather quietly, too, and with a chance of being unobserved because everybody is riding. You took a back way, across meadows and over fences to get to Dr. Luddington’s. You or Caroline thought of it immediately and it worked; nobody noticed you, nobody stopped you or if they saw you thought twice about it. Maybe somebody else has had the same idea.”

  It seemed all at once glaringly obvious. Why had they not thought of it before? Then she saw a discrepancy. “But then, there were two riders. The man I saw, the one with the hunt and whoever it was who rode Jeremy. If, that is, someone rode Jeremy.”

  He did not answer for a moment; they reached the stables and he swung open the door of the tack room; sunlight glinted on satin-smooth saddles. He glanced vaguely around the room as if he were searching for something and yet did not know what he sought. “Do you remember what the rider you saw wore? I mean—coat and collar and—anything you can remember.”

  She remembered clearly; the flashing black and white staccato of collar and stock, his red coat, barely a glimpse of a hard hat. “Why, yes. He was wearing a red coat; black collar, white stock. He carried a crop; yes, I’m sure I saw that—”

  “A cap?”

  “No.” That would mean, of course, a master or one of his family, a child or one of the hunt staff. Caroline would know the correct custom. “At least I don’t think so. I think he wore a hat. There were willows; there happened to be a gap just at the level of his shoulders.”

  “But you couldn’t recognize him?”

  “No. Not possibly.”

  “Could it have been a woman?”

  “Not in pink …”

  “Dressed as a man,” said Fitz.

  A woman? But then, who? She
said slowly, trying to read Fitz’s eyes, “I never thought of a woman. I suppose it could have been,” and waited for him to explain. He said, however, musingly, “Black collar. Funny. The livery of the Beaufort hunt is beige collar.”

  Something in his tone, absent and remote though it seemed, caught her; she said, “Beige—but this was black. I …”

  He looked at her then. “The Dobberly hunt livery is black collar.”

  “But—but there are so many hunts—so many liveries—so many almost alike … The Leesburg livery is black collar, too. There must be many others …”

  “I inquired. There were no visitors out for the Beaufort meet. Whoever you saw, Sue, didn’t belong to the Beaufort and there wasn’t another meet in this neighborhood that day.”

  “But then …”

  “That’s what occurred to me, too. A convenient sort of disguise. Which—if that’s right—could mean that whoever shot Dr. Luddington had shot him some minutes before you reached the house and was in the very act of escaping when he took a spill, unfortunately, and you came along and saw him.”

  Hope shot up like a flame. “Then we can find him!”

  He was shaking his head. “That’s only my notion of it. It’s what the police think that counts. And it may mean nothing. It might be sheer accident; somebody we don’t know of but who doesn’t want to come forward and tell that he was there; somebody riding—in pink which, of course, looks intentional but could have a simple and straightforward explanation—or somebody even trying out some new boots or a new horse. There are those fences, too. If anybody did ride to Ernestine’s and come in across the fields, avoiding the driveway, he’d have to have a horse that was as good a jumper …”

  Jeremy gave a snuffle and he said, “… as good a jumper as old Jeremy. Some of those fences at Duval Hall are high. Those, at least, that are close to the house; they’re all post and rail, most of them low enough for an easy jump, but the paddock between the stables and the garden, near the house, over which any rider would have to take a jump to reach the garden and thus the room where Ernestine was killed—that fence is high. I looked.”