Danger in the Dark (17 page)

“She said, then,” said Dennis thoughtfully, “that she knew we had planned to leave that night. That she knew we were to meet at the springhouse, and that Ben knew it.”

“And that he intended to stop us.”

“That means, then, that whoever saw us in the library told Ben.”

“Or that Ben himself opened the door and listened.”

“If it was Ben, he wasn’t likely to tell Gertrude. And he—I was about to say he would have taken steps about it—I mean, when you talked to him, Daphne, did you think that he knew anything of our—our plan? Anything definite, that is?”

Daphne thought back to Ben’s cool acquiescence when she told him she hadn’t loved him—he’d known it all along, he’d said. But it didn’t matter.

“No. No, I’m sure of it, Dennis. He didn’t know it then.”

“I think he knew it later,” said Dennis, frowning into the fire. “It explains his presence there in the springhouse. But someone else knew it, too. Suppose the murderer knew we were to meet there, told Ben in order to get him out of the house where the shot would not be heard, and followed him there. If that’s the way of it, the murderer is likely to be the person who opened the library door and saw us and heard our plan. And certainly Gertrude knew—”

“Gertrude!”

“Well,” said Dennis thoughtfully, “you know what she’s like when she gets in a nervous state. She always hated Ben. No matter how fully she seemed to approve your wedding to Ben, she still hated him. And with him out of the way, it leaves the coast clear for Rowley. The coast clear for Rowley and us actually playing into her hands. For if she once tells the police what she knows, it provides the—”

“The only thing they need. I know. A motive for you. It fits so—so horribly. Our meeting at the springhouse; Ben finding us there. Stopping us—and—” Her voice shook a little, and Dennis took her hands.

“And my revolver,” he finished. “It
was
my revolver, Daphne. But I don’t know how it happened. You see, I had the revolver all right when I came home Monday night. I’d taken it out of my bags when we went through customs and put it in my pocket. I’d never used the thing; don’t know why I ever bought it. I’ve had it for—oh, three or four years. Got it here in Chicago, and it’s registered—”

“Oh!”

“So there was no use in my not admitting ownership. But—but I didn’t shoot Ben!”

“Where was it?”

He told her briefly. In the springhouse. He’d taken it absently from his pocket; had put it down to light a cigarette. Had quite simply forgotten it.

“Bright, wasn’t it? But how was I to know what was going to happen in the place that night?”

And it had been used to kill Ben Brewer. He had seen it at once; recognized it.

“I picked it up when I bent over Ben to see if he was still alive. Put it in my coat pocket. Then—that moment when I turned off the flashlight—”

“I remember. And your voice seemed to come from the doorway instead of from where I thought you were standing.”

“Did it? Funny Rowley didn’t notice. I did go to the door. Went to the door and buried the thing in snow outside the door. I expected to have a chance to get hold of it again before the police did. But I—had no chance. They found it. Somehow—they—they do things so much more thoroughly than you think they will. With all that snow—none of it melting—Oh well, the point is they found it.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“Told them the truth,” said Dennis, staring into the flames. “There was nothing else to do. Besides, I might have made up some more plausible explanation, but even if one has little if any regard for the truth there’s always the matter of perjury.”

“Perjury! But that’s when there’s a trial.”

“Exactly,” said Dennis. He turned and added quickly, “Don’t look like that, Daphne! They haven’t arrested me yet. And if they had a good tight case against me they’d make a murder charge pretty tout suite. There must be evidence we know nothing about which tends to clear me.”

There was an alternative which he did not tell her; conflicting evidence, or the detective wanted such conclusive evidence against him, Dennis Haviland, that the murder charge would hold before the grand jury; that it would be tantamount to a conviction later on. The newspapers had hinted at it. But there was no use talking of it to Daphne.

“So far,” he went on, “they know only about the revolver. They’ve not proved any motive, and they won’t if Gertrude keeps still.”

“And,” said Daphne. “If Archie Shore—”

He nodded swiftly. “Of course, there’s Archie. I was talking to your father about him. He said Archie was gone from the company before Ben ever came. He said Archie and Ben didn’t really know each other; oh, they may have met, we can’t be sure. Archie has no feeling about the company as Gertrude and Amelia have. He wouldn’t be actuated by what’s almost an obsession on the part of the aunts to get rid of Ben. The only possible motive Archie could have would be Rowley.”

“Rowley?”

“I mean, he might feel, as Gertrude makes no bones of feeling, that with Ben out of the way Rowley would have more chance. It occurred to your father and to me, but it doesn’t seem very reasonable. Archie Shore doesn’t impress me with having any particular affection for Rowley; at least, certainly not a crazy devotion that would lead him to commit—murder. Gertrude, of course—”

He stopped, and Daphne said, without being quite aware of what she said, “Gertrude—does such queer things.”

Dennis glanced at her quickly.

“Yes. Yes, she’s always been like that. Doesn’t seem to weigh things properly. Her bargaining with you—trying to force you to marry Rowley—is exactly like Gertrude. Get her in a rage, and God knows what she might do. And certainly she knew of our meeting in the springhouse; and she knew that Ben knew. I always come back to Gertrude, somehow. It’s so—so like her.” He rose and stirred up the fire again and absently went to the door and made sure it was closed before he came back to stand there at the mantel, tall and brown, with his peaked eyebrows thoughtful. “It’s impulsive—as if somehow she—well, suppose she met Ben there—sent him there really by telling him we were planning to go away together—suppose she saw the revolver, picked it up, shot him. I mean, it’s an impulsive sort of murder; as if it hadn’t been planned at all. We know it hadn’t been planned, because no one could have known my revolver would be there—so readily at hand. And that’s like Gertrude, somehow; oh, everything about it—she’s horribly impulsive, scarcely knows what she’s doing when she’s in a rage, and she has no sense at all. Never has had. Of course—” He paused thoughtfully. “Of course, if somebody sent Ben to the springhouse with the intention of following him and murdering him, the murderer must have known my revolver was there. That would argue he had gone to the springhouse earlier for some reason—had seen my revolver—had planned. Or that he saw my revolver before Ben saw it, snatched it up and fired.”

“Or,” said Daphne, “whoever murdered Ben might have planned to shoot him and arranged to get him to the springhouse and followed him out there with his own gun—”

“Whereupon he saw my gun and thought, What a lucky break! I’ll use that gun and they can’t trace me,” finished Dennis. “Lucky for him. Everything handed to him on a platter. We provide an excuse to get Ben to go to the springhouse, and then, just to do it up right, I leave a gun for him. Yes, it might have happened that way, too.”

“Gertrude knew about us,” said Daphne again.

They always came back to that.

“She’s hated him from the beginning,” said Dennis. “She’s been certain he was mismanaging the company. Perhaps he was. Dividends have been almost nonexistent. But it isn’t entirely Ben’s fault. It’s the times. At least, so Johnny thinks. And even Rowley admits his mother’s feeling about Ben was mostly sheer jealousy. Her sun rises and sets in the company and in Rowley.”

It was a long talk, and they were conscious of the house, of the sounds of movement now and then in the corridors, and kept their voices low instinctively, as if someone passing through that narrow corridor might pause at the door and listen. It was not nice, that feeling of surreptitiousness.

It was not nice, either, to realize that at the end they had arrived at no conclusion—no conclusion, that is, other than to continue the course they had been obliged to undertake.

“However,” said Dennis, “if worst comes to worst, I do have an out.” And showed her the thumbprint and told her all he knew of it. The gruesome little lines in reddish brown, fine and small, affected Daphne, as they had Dennis, with a frightening sense of their sinister potentiality. So small, so fine and faint to mean, perhaps, so much.

And she did not like the memory of the moment on the stairway when she had turned and whispered into the cavernous darkness below and then fled from whatever stood there on the third step.

“I’ve tried twice,” said Dennis, “to take it into a crime-detection laboratory in town. A private one where I can get a print of it without the knowledge of the police. Once I got as far as the gate before they stopped me.”

“Is it the murderer’s thumbprint? How can you be sure?”

He couldn’t be sure, of course. But neither he nor Rowley could remember getting blood on their hands during that grisly transaction. They’d been very careful about that. He hadn’t told Rowley about the thumbprint. But he had asked him about blood on his hands. He took the sliver of wood bearing its horrible little burden from her fingers.

“I’m pretty damn sure,” he said confidently, “the police and the crime-detection laboratories can do things—have secured convictions on less evidence than this. So you see, Daph, if they do arrest us—I mean me—here’s this.”

“Why don’t you give it to the police now?” she said, watching him put it carefully into an inside coat pocket.

He gave her a very queer look. “It’s better,” he said shortly, “to wait. After all, Daphne, it was on the stairway—someone going upstairs—”

“Oh. Oh, you mean someone in the house,” she said and swallowed with a tight throat.

He nodded. But they’d known that. Known it from the beginning. He meant, then, to give it to the police only if he had to. To save himself—to save her. Besides, to give it to the police would be to tell them the whole story of the murder as only she and Dennis knew it. And suddenly she understood: saw through all his excuses. He had found her alone in the springhouse, alone except for Ben—murdered at her feet. And his whole object was to keep that knowledge from the police.

Her eyes blurred suddenly so she couldn’t see him distinctly, and he turned, saw it, and told her briskly to cheer up.

“At worst there’s the thumbprint,” he reminded her. “And at the very least it will give its owner something to explain. So don’t worry too much, Daphne—I mean if we—I—you—finally are charged with murder, there’s always this.” He patted his pocket and gave her a kind of smile, meant to reassure. “It may save both of us yet,” he said. “And look here, my girl, don’t get any notion that I’m intent on sacrificing my young life for—for anything,” he said. “Suppose the police do find out we were in the springhouse—”

“I was there first. You found me with him. I could have murdered him before you came.”

“But you didn’t. And as to that, I could have murdered him, left the springhouse and returned later to meet you,” said Dennis cheerfully. “I didn’t, but I could have. So there’s no question of sacrifice, and don’t be a little idiot.” He went on quickly to other things: Could they, he asked her, depend upon Rowley? Rowley had never been exactly trustworthy. But here his own interests—safety, even—were involved.

“He may turn state’s evidence if—” Dennis checked himself and said, “Eventually.”

They talked, too—fruitlessly—of Archie. Of Amelia’s offer to pay him off. Of the progress the police had made or had not made.

“They found the revolver near the springhouse,” said Dennis. “Seems odd that they happened to look just there. But if they know the murder occurred in the springhouse they’ve not yet said so. To me, at any rate.”

But he hadn’t known about the wedding ring. And he stopped poking up the fire again and turned abruptly to face Daphne when she told him of it.

“Wedding ring!”

“Yes—oh, of course, I knew you had only taken it—without thinking what you were doing while you and Rowley were—were—”

“I didn’t take it. It didn’t roll out of Ben’s pocket, if that’s what you were going to say.” He frowned. “I know nothing about this, Daphne. In my pocket, you say?”

“Yes. I—I was so sure that was how it happened. I didn’t attach much importance—”

“Do the police? I mean do they seem to—to emphasize it?”

“Yes,” said Daphne miserably and told him.

He stared somberly into the fire for a moment and then poked it vigorously and took the heavy, bronze-handled fire tongs in order to adjust the lumps of coal so they would burn.

“And you are sure it was the wedding ring?”

“Yes. Ben showed it to me before dinner that night. He put it back in his pocket. I’m sure it is the ring.”

“That means, then, that whoever took the ring from his pocket knows we were in the springhouse—knows at least something of what we did that night—and is trying to—well, to frame me.” He gave a short, dry laugh. “Pleasant, isn’t it? And God knows there are enough clues involving me if the murderer knows of them and can bring them to Wait. Well, it’s to be war, then. And with an unseen enemy. Working in the dark. How about this will of Ben’s, Daphne? Your father told me of it, and you say Gertrude knew it. What are you going to do about it?”

“I can’t take the stock. I won’t—”

“You’ll have to,” he said. “You see, your father says Ben told him of it, and said he had given your name as Daphne Haviland when the will was drawn up and it was to be changed to Daphne Haviland Brewer immediately after the wedding. It was his lawyer’s doing; merely a matter of accuracy at the moment of making the will. But the result is, his whole property comes to you.”

“I won’t take it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Dennis, “whether you do or not so far as—”

“Motive?”

“Well, yes.” He said it reluctantly, hating to add to the dark care already in her eyes. She was pale that morning, with small, dark shadows under her eyes, and she looked very young in her red sweater and tweed skirt. He thought of how he loved her and wondered why he had ever gone away. First Ben stood between them, and now Gertrude and Rowley and the ugliness of the thing they threatened to do. Well, he wouldn’t let them. He wouldn’t let her marry Rowley. It was a monstrous suggestion on Gertrude’s part; a queer, half-hysterical undertaking. But it was, he thought, in the future. They couldn’t press the thing until all this had died down. Until the murderer was found—or until the quest for him was given up. Until people had stopped talking.