Black Alibi (20 page)

“Come on, we’re going to have wine with these jokes!” Sally said masterfully, beckoning the waiter.

“Old P. J. should see his hard-working secretary now!” Marjorie gloated a few minutes later, tilting a ruddy glass toward her friend.

Sally turned and looked the other way, away from the crowd out into the marginal darkness, for almost the first time since they’d seated themselves. She decided to kid her companion a little. “It may be hiding out there right now, watching us through the trees,” she said mischievously. “Do you suppose they pick out whom their next meal is going to be ahead of time and then follow them around? I heard a story once—”

“Brrh! Don’t!” pleaded Marjorie. “I was just beginning to forget it. You had to remind me.”

“Nobody else here seems to take it seriously, why should we? Look at the mob here tonight. That alone shows it’s just some sort of an idle rumor.”

Under those gay-colored lanterns strung from the trees, with music playing, glasses clinking, waiters hustling around, shoals of men and women in evening dress on every side of them, Marjorie had to admit to herself it was hard really to believe that there was violent death stalking somewhere about the city at that very moment, on four velvety, relentless paws.

By the time they were ready to leave, an hour later, they had both forgotten all about it once again. They returned in high good humor to where their carriage was waiting for them, still laughing intermittently and for as little reason as ever.

“I liked that place. Aren’t you glad we took it in?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Marjorie agreed.

“Drive us around awhile, slowly,” Sally told the coachman as they got in. “It’s a shame to go back to the hotel so soon. Isn’t it beautiful out here in the moonlight?”

“Don’t let’s run up too big a bill,” Marjorie cautioned.

“Forget it, this is my night. What’s a vacation for anyway?” An empty side lane had opened out beside them. “Turn up that way,” she ordered the driver. “Take us off this main driveway, it’s too full of exhaust fumes from all the traffic.”

There wasn’t another vehicle in sight on it. It stretched barren into the night, in a ruler-straight line before them.

“There, isn’t this much better? We’ve got it all to ourselves,” said the headstrong Sally. “I like to explore new roads, don’t you?”

“I can take them or leave them alone,” Marjorie had to admit. It was just a little
too
lifeless to appeal to her, but she didn’t like to spoil her friend’s good time.

It began to curve slowly around to the left presently, and as it did so, a sheet of burnished silver, glistening like a mirror under the moon, came into view through the trees.

“Look at that lake with the swans on it!” Sally enthused. “Did you ever see anything so exquisite?”

The horse was going at a slow walk. Presently the trees between it and them had thinned to extinctiOn, and only a grassy, downward slope lay between the road and it. “Let’s get Out and walk down to the edge of it,” was Sally’s next suggestion. “Stretch our legs a little after sitting so long. I love to walk along beside water, don’t you?”

“Not at this hour of the night,” Marjorie said halfheartedly. “Let’s turn around and go back where there are more people. It’s getting late, and we’re awfully far in—”

“Don’t be that way. You’re a big girl now. Nothing can happen to us as long as we stay in sight of the coach, don’t go roaming too far off. I promise you we won’t let it out of our sight.” She already had one foot poised out of the carriage.

Marjorie gave in once more, but this time it was the coachman who began to jabber objections to them when he saw them about to descend.

“What’s he saying?” asked Marjorie.

“just about what everyone else has been, I guess. Advising us not to leave the carriage and go walking around on foot, most likely. I think it’s a conspiracy on the part of everyone. These high-strung Latins!”

“They live here, after all,” Marjorie pointed out.

But the impulsive little redhead hadn’t waited, was already picking her way down the gently inclined sward toward the lake below, flashing blindingly in the moonlight. Marjorie turned to the driver, warned him with one Spanish word and a dozen English ones, her usual ratio: “
Espera
. Don’t you dare budge from here, understand? We’ll be back in a minute.”

He nodded in disapproving acquiescence, but the horse, meanwhile, was pawing the ground uneasily and shifting about between the traces. He had to tighten his grip on the reins to steady it. She saw its ears standing stiffly erect, as though it heard or sensed something that the humans about it were still unaware of.

“Sal,” she called down the slope. “I think we’d better get back in again. I don’t like the way this horse is acting.” But even the attempt to overrule her friend and bring her back again, in itself, was carrying her involuntarily down toward the water’s edge herself.

Sally had already reached it, was crouched there on her heels, crumbling some after-dinner wafers she had brought along from the restaurant and holding them out enticingly toward a flotilla of magnificent black swans, who came streaking up from all directions. “Aren’t they beauts?” she called obviously over her shoulder. “C’mon down, what’re you afraid of?”

Marjorie made her way down to her, still only to persuade her to come back. “Come on, Sal,” she said reasonably. “Something’s making that horse fidget up there. Let’s get out of here.”

“Oh, it probably just wants to get back to the stable, you know how horses are.” She went on paying out crumbs. “Look at them fight one another. That’s what you call muscling in!”

Suddenly they all began to reverse, dart out into the middle of the lake again as swiftly as they had drawn shoreward just now.

“What’s the matter with them, what’re they doing that for?” Sally asked blankly.

“Something’s frightened them—and it wasn’t ourselves. They were practically snatching those crumbs out of your hand a minute before. I told you we’d better get out of here!” She began pulling the other girl insistently by the arm to get her to come away. “This is just the sort of place we were warned to stay away from.”

“Oh, all right,” Sally said weariedly. She straightened her feet and brushed the front of her dress. “Don’t be such a wet blanket.”

They turned to face the roadway up above once more, just in time to witness the horse rearing violently upward on its hind legs until it was nearly vertical within its traces. It whinnied with shrill fearfulness. The coachman, nearly overturned, gave an alarmed shout. The animal dropped back again, sparks flashing out from its shoes, and then it plunged forward, bolting off under their very eyes while they stood there rooted helplessly to the spot. In another moment the rapid clatter of its hoofbeats and the driver’s excited yells had both alike died away far down the driveway.

They came running up to the edge of it a moment later, stood there aghast, looking down its empty moon-speckled length. A little blue dust, siowly settling in places from the vehicle’s headlong flight, was the only trace left of it.

Marjorie’s hands struck her sides, rebounded again. “
Now
are you satisfied?” she said pointedly. “You would get out and leave it.”

“How did I know that was going to happen? He’ll get him under control in a minute or two and come back to get us. That’s the only way he can get his money for the whole night’s excursion.”

Marjorie, however, wasn’t taking such a calm view of it. “Well, we’re not waiting around
here
until he does!” she let her companion know sharply. “There’s something around here that there shouldn’t be, and I know what I’m saying. First the swans, and then that horse—”

They started to walk briskly along by the side of the road, following in the same direction the runaway horse had taken. Even though they had no idea where the road led, to keep on along it was their only hope of meeting the carriage again on its return trip.

They were alternately in shadow and moonlight. The macadam surface was hard on their feet after a while, in the thin-soled evening slippers they were wearing. First one, then the other, changed over to the turf on the outside of the roadway, where the walking was easier. This brought them into single file, however, for trees, tree roots3 and bushes impinged quite closely on the road strip in places. Marjorie was in the lead.

Their tread fell silently on the soft earth now. It was when they had been doing this for several minutes that they first became aware of something. A soft intermittent rustling sound, a sort of whispering slither, was coming from the foliage a little behind and off to one side of them. It seemed to be pacing them. It was very subtle, scarcely anything at all. It would stop and then go on again.

Marjorie hung back a step, so she could whisper over her shoulder to the girl behind her without raising her voice. “Do you hear that?” she breathed. “Something—or someone—is following us through there. I told you there was something around here there shouldn’t be—”

They’d both stopped short, instinctively, in order to listen the better. But now the sound itself had stopped too, as if suiting its actions to theirs. There was an interval of throbbing silence. Then a twig snapped betrayingly, as if slowly crushed in twain under something’s arrested weight.

All Sally’s former nonchalance had left her by now. “Oh, why didn’t I listen to you!” she whimpered. She gave her friend a push forward. “Don’t let’s stand here waiting for it, whatever it is! Run, quick! Let’s get out of here!”

With one accord they fled swiftly down the side of the long, heartlessly empty road, again one behind the other. The moment they did, the rustling resumed again behind them, quickened in turn now. It was governed by whatever they did, that was easy to see. It was the pursuer, and they were its prey. It became a crashing at times, plainly audible above their slapping footfalls and hot, frightened breaths. A succession of lopes that cleared the ground and burst head. long through the impeding foliage at each impetus.

“Scream,” Sally panted. “Maybe someone will hear us!”

Marjorie hadn’t waited to be told. “Help!” she keened dismally, “Help!” But she was already too out of breath from their long run to be able to emit more than a thin, disjointed bleat.

The rustling and crashing were changing direction now, drawing slowly but surely in toward them, coming diagonally at them instead of merely keeping parallel. There were many places where the coverage between was so thin they might have been able to glimpse who or what it was, but that would have meant slowing to turn their heads, and they were both too frightened and too intent on getting away. Or perhaps they realized instinctively that the sight of whatever it was might so add to their terror as to rob them of all further use of their limbs altogether.

Marjorie was the better runner of the two. She was taller and longer-waisted. Twice she caught herself pulling slowly away from the other girl, without meaning to; first by a five-yard lead, then by ten, then by more. Twice she stopped, waited for the gap to close, tried to pull her along with her by the hand. Sally evaded the offered link, perhaps afraid it would hamper both of them alike. “I’m all right,” she heaved valorously. “Just keep going—!”

They were both staggering now from exhaustion, wavering, ready to fall. And the road never seemed to end, help never seemed to come, the horror behind them never seemed to tire.

She was aware of Sally beginning to drop behind again. Her shadow, which had been bobbing over Marjorie’s own shoulder until now, in the moonlit gaps, fell short somewhere behind her, she couldn’t see it any more. The sound of her harried breathing was no longer as distinct behind her either. But she couldn’t go on herself any more, Marjorie. There was a knife in her side, and she found herself finally spent. “I can’t keep up,” she coughed. “I’ve got to fall down here. You go on—”

She swung around to let her friend go by, stood there swaying and weaving dizzily about in the road, like a drunk, from the long run.

The road was empty behind her, in moonlight and shadow, back as far as the eye could reach. Sally wasn’t on it any more. There was only silence, on it and in the thickets that bordered it. Silence and moonlight and shadow.

No, not quite empty either. At the roadside, peering out between the bushes, lay a wisp of something on the ground, back twenty or thirty yards from her. The edge of a dress. A corner of the bottom of a garment, inert on the ground.

Even as she looked, it was slowly withdrawn, this overlooked flounce, slowly dragged in from sight, in a way that showed its wearer’s volition was no longer involved. A final whisk, and it had vanished.

Not a sound, not a cry, not a whisper.

She had never fainted before. Her senses were probably overcharged from the run, bringing on vertigo. She knew she wanted to get back there, to help her friend. Instead, somehow, she found herself flat on the ground, without any sensation of having fallen or of striking herself against it. Her eyes seemed to remain open, too. But all she could see was a pattern of spheres or disks of all sizes, big and medium and small, rising slowly before them in straight lines, like the bubbles in champagne.

A quarter of an hour later the coachman, returning belatedly for them with his curbed horse, found her straying dazedly along the roadside, near the place where he had left them. There were flecks of blood on her dress, it was tattered from brambles, her hair was straggling loosely down her shoulders, and she was holding a hand pressed distractedly crosswise to her forehead. She even made to pass him by, as if she didn’t recognize the meaning of the carriage when she saw it.

He had to jump down beside her and take her by the arm to stop her. “Senorita, que le paso?” he cried dismayedly.

“Take me to the police,” she whispered, in an oddly quiet manner. “My friend’s lying in there, torn to pieces.”

Robles said on the telephone: “It would be easier if we had someone down here who speaks English. There is a police interpreter somewhere, but I cannot locate him. We have been giving her restoratives in the meantime and treating her for shock—”