Danger in the Dark (12 page)

Amelia interrupted, so kindly it was not interruption.

“It might be better,” she said, “to talk of Daphne’s marriage later. Just at present—well, it’s not in the best taste, is it, Gertrude?” Amelia smiled a little and took Daphne’s hand again. “Just now we are in a rather difficult position. For I’m quite sure the police do not think there was a burglary. They are asking,” said Amelia, “too many questions. Come, my dear, let’s join the others upstairs.”

Too many questions.

It was an observation that became increasingly apt as the day went on. As strange men came and went, as cars whirled up the long drive to the door, paused and whirled back down it to the highway again. As in a businesslike way that was remarkably thorough the police took over the house and grounds and all that was there.

The telephone was in constant use, but none of them knew what were the results of the low-voiced conversations that took place from the small telephone closet under the stairway in the lower hall. Gertrude complained of it. “I tried to hear what they said,” she told them, unblushing, “but all I could hear was somebody talking about—well, it sounded like airplanes.”

“Airplanes!” cried Johnny, jingling the keys in his pockets.

“The eleven-o’clock plane, somebody said.”

“Is that all you heard?”

“Yes,” admitted Gertrude. “A man in a brown suit with a hat over his eyes came and took the telephone extension right out of my hands. Isn’t there anything we can do to stop them, Johnny? They are all over the house, looking at everything.”

Johnny looked out the window.

“I’m afraid not, Gertrude.”

About one-thirty Laing and Maggie served a rather scattered lunch in the old playroom on the second floor to which the family had drifted, seeking refuge from the strangeness and the seething activity on the first floor. It was also, as Rowley observed, coolly attacking the chicken salad which had been intended for the wedding—it was also a vantage point.

“An observation post,” he said. “We can see everything that goes on from these front windows. Did anybody remember to stop the caterers or are these wedding-baked meats?”

“Laing telephoned them at once,” said Gertrude. “I wonder why they are questioning Dennis for so long a time. He’s been down there for an hour or so.”

“They’ll probably take us in turn,” observed Rowley. “If you have any secrets, prepare to shed them now.”

Amelia put down her teacup gently and said, “Rowley!” and waited till he looked at her. “It isn’t exactly a joking matter, my dear,” she said then kindly.

A slow little flush crept up over Rowley’s sallow face. And Gertrude said suddenly, wheezing, “If you don’t stop jingling those things in your pockets, Johnny, I’ll scream.”

She hadn’t seen Dennis since she had left the library, thought Daphne. Why were they keeping him there so long?

She wondered, glancing at Rowley, if he knew of his mother’s incredible plan. Incredible, and yet thought out and determined upon in the coolest possible way, as if Gertrude felt—as certainly she did—that it was altogether right and just. Rowley to take his rightful place at last. Gertrude to be the power behind the throne—at last. And Ben Brewer, at last, ousted.

Well, she had had every reason to think Daphne could do nothing but agree to her plan. There wasn’t, thought Daphne, staring at the plate Johnny had put in her lap, anything else to do. If Gertrude told the police what she knew, it would be horribly convincing evidence against Dennis. Dennis … stealing another man’s bride at the very moment, almost, of the wedding. Persuading her to go away with him. And Ben knowing it—going to the springhouse to stop them. And being found there murdered.

That was, almost certainly, why he had come to the springhouse. But what had happened before she and Dennis came, too? What had taken place, who had followed Ben there and met him, in that black, mysterious interval before she herself had gone through the snow and darkness and had entered the springhouse?

“Please, Miss Amelia,” said Maggie from the doorway.

“Yes, Maggie.”

“Those—those men. Policemen,” said Maggie, looking shaken. “They are looking in your desk, all through it. Drawers out and papers—”

“I can’t help it, Maggie,” said Amelia kindly. “It’s their duty.”

Maggie gave her a horrified look, said “Yes’m” dubiously and vanished.

“Had Ben no relatives at all?” said Johnny suddenly, helping himself to more salad. “He never spoke of anyone—”

“Only those Hartford cousins,” said Amelia. “I wired them some time ago.”

Quite suddenly Daphne looked up and met Gertrude’s eyes. They were light and shining and secret. Altogether assured in their knowledge. Altogether certain of power.

Daphne rose. Someone spoke to her as she left the room—Amelia, she thought, but she did not stop. In the narrow hall she came upon a man who was blowing faintly ochre powder upon a doorknob and then bending to look intently at the old brass knob. He glanced at her questioningly but stood aside to let her pass.

In her own room again, she locked the door and sat there staring at nothing, thinking in weary, desperate circles.

Once she remembered the dress. She ought to do something with it. And she must tell Dennis what Gertrude knew and what she had threatened. He must know it at once, although she didn’t know what he could do.

It was cold in the little room; cold and dreary, and the sky dark gray above a gray, cold world. She pulled the green wool cover that lay folded on the foot of the chaise longue around her and out of sheer physical fatigue went suddenly to sleep.

It was dark when she woke, and somebody was pounding at the door.

Maggie, her face ghostly in the shadow of the little passage, said that the detective—“that Mr Wait,” said Maggie—wanted to see her.

She stumbled to the little bathroom adjoining her room and washed her face in cold water and ran a comb through her hair so the gold in it shone. She powdered, too, and put on crimson lipstick with hands that shook a little. On the way through the bedroom the wedding veil, a soft white wraith in the semitwilight, brushed against her hands and clung softly to them.

She pushed it away. And just then Dennis came to the door, glanced swiftly behind him and entered.

“Daphne, my dear,” he said and pulled her away from the door so they could not be seen and took her in his arms.

“Where have you been? What have they—”

“Questions. Routine stuff. Getting—oh, identification. Nothing to worry about.” But he looked worried, she thought swiftly. Worried and tired, with a queer, wary look in his eyes. “Are you all right, Daphne? Have they—”

“He sent for me just now. The detective.”

His arms held her tighter, and there was a quick kind of tautness in his face.

“Well, then,” he said, “it’ll be all right. But mind, Daphne, stick to the story. You know nothing of the murder. Nothing at all. Don’t worry about anybody else. Don’t let them trap you or frighten you into telling something. And look out for the unexpected—the thing you aren’t prepared for. Promise me you’ll do all this.”

“I—I’ll try, Dennis.”

He looked down into her eyes searchingly, as if testing and plumbing her strength. “Oh, my dear,” he said suddenly with something like a groan, “if I could have kept you altogether out of it! I love you so,” said Dennis and held her tight against him, his face against her hair. “I love you so.”

It was a long, inexpressibly sustaining moment.

She did not think of Gertrude until he put her away from him.

“You’d better go now, Daphne. And remember—”

“Oh, Dennis, Gertrude knows. She knows I promised to go away with you. She knows we were to meet at the springhouse. She says that Ben knew, too. She says he tried to stop us—and that we—that we murdered him,” finished Daphne in a jerky, incoherent whisper.

“Gertrude!”

“She says,” whispered Daphne stiffly—“she says she won’t tell. And that I’m to inherit Ben’s stock and marry Rowley and he’ll be president of the company.”

“To marry—” Dennis’ eyes suddenly blazed in his white face. “God! So that’s Gertrude’s plan! How—” He stopped, thinking furiously. “It’s like Gertrude,” he said. “She’s just stupid enough and vicious enough to do it.”

“What can we do, Dennis? How can we—”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ll try to think.” He stared at her for a moment, not seeing her, his eyes withdrawn under those peaked black eyebrows. “I’ll have to think,

Daphne. We’ve got to shut her up somehow. We—Look here, you’d better go down. They’ll be sending for you again. Don’t be afraid, my dear. And don’t think of anybody but yourself. Remember!”

“Yes, Dennis.”

He kissed her then. Swiftly, but so hard and deep a kiss that it seemed to remain, there on her lips, long after she had gone.

There was no longer the confusion of strange men and voices and cameras and smoke in the hall, although it had a disorderly look—and many and muddy feet had entered that wide door and trooped across the worn old rugs. Two men, plain-clothes men, were standing near the door, talking, and they stopped to turn and look at Daphne as she passed.

It was then about six o’clock. A cold, gray winter twilight with the feeling of impending snow. A twilight like the one twenty-four hours ago when Dennis walked up the road through the shadows of firs and falling snow and—before he came on to the house—climbed that steep little path to the springhouse.

And Jacob Wait, lounging against a table in the library, with his hat over his eyes, looked up when she hesitated in the doorway and pushed his hat farther back. “Come in,” he said. “Sit down. Tony!”

The policeman with the shorthand tablet sighed and got up from the divan and came again to the little table and opened his tablet. It was fat now with notes—queer, irregular little lines. He wished Wait would call it a day. After all, they’d talked to everybody in the house from the cook on up, and they had enough material to keep an ordinary man busy for days. He thought rather grimly of some of the things that had come out during the course of those long, grilling interviews.

He sharpened a pencil meditatively. Queer old place. He didn’t like it. If he had the money these people seemed to have, he’d live somewhere that was bright and cheerful. In town, where there were lights and people and traffic sounds. He didn’t like the way night fell on those snowy, fir-dotted slopes.

He tried the pencil. Adjusted his long, bony frame to the stiff little chair. It looked as if Wait was going to try to push the thing through that night. It was like Wait, smart of him, to get all the dope he could and then go after the girl with it. The weakest link. The one most likely to break. She looked scared. Looked as if she was about to faint.

Schmidt, the man in plain clothes, was looking at Wait, too. Looking at him and waiting, as Daphne was waiting, for him to begin. He turned suddenly and fumbled for the curtain and pulled it across the window. The wind was rising and whispering around the house, and chill little drafts were creeping along the floor. You could never get these old houses shut up tight, he reflected and thought of his lumbago. He was due for an attack as sure as the wind shifted to the east. He shivered a little and wished Wait would get on with the job. He knew damn well one of them had killed this Brewer; well, then, why not just take the whole lot of them to jail?

Pretty girl, he thought. But she looked scared. Well, she’d probably spill the whole thing. They were about due for a break.

“Sit down,” said Jacob Wait. “In that chair.”

The chair was directly under the light, and it glared down into her eyes. She sat down, clasping the arms of the chair so her hands would not tremble. She had a curious feeling of being hedged in. Of being the center of a steadily encroaching and advancing circle.

It was so strong a feeling that she turned and looked behind her. Three other men had come from somewhere and were standing in the shadow by the closed door, watching.

Her fingers tightened on the arms of the chair. Her heart suddenly was pounding in her throat.

“All right, Miss Haviland,” said Jacob Wait. “Who was the woman who left this house shortly after midnight last night?”

I
T HAD COME
.

All along, during those incredible, packed hours since midnight, she had been waiting, preparing, armoring herself against this hour. Answer him, then; evade; watch for traps.

She moistened her lips. Someone had seen her leaving the house and told of it. But if he had known it was she, would he have asked her in just that way? It had been dark, and there were no lights in the house. Whoever it was might have seen only her figure wrapped in the coat, veiled by flying snow, obscure in the darkness.

“My room is on the south,” she said. “It only overlooks the back door.”

“Don’t evade,” said Jacob Wait. “There’s no sense in it. It just takes time. Shortly after midnight last night a woman left the house, walked down the drive to the gate and took a taxi which was waiting for her into town. The taxi driver left her at Diversey and Central. She paid him and went into the drugstore, and he got a cup of coffee and drove back out to St Germain. Now then, who was the woman?”

“I—But I don’t know! I know nothing of—” It had given her a queer kind of shock; a surging relief that was, actually, dangerous itself because it threatened the tight guard she had placed on herself, because it was outside all the questions whose answers she had ready. “I don’t know,” she repeated.

“Come now, Miss Haviland. Think. Who was at dinner last night?”

“Just—just the family. My aunts. Myself. My cousins, Rowley Shore and Dennis Haviland. And—and Ben Brewer.”

“All right. Then where did the woman come from?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t any idea. She was not here. I’m sure of that.”

“Could she have been here without your knowledge?”

“No,” said Daphne and stopped and thought, This old house. Rooms over the garage. A dozen places where one might hide if it were necessary. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“The telephone call for the taxi came from this telephone,” said the detective. “We traced it. The call was made about eleven o’clock. A man’s voice told the taxi driver to be at the gate at twelve and wait until one or after. That he couldn’t say what time exactly he would have to wait. Do you know who made that telephone call?”