Dead as a Dinosaur (26 page)

In the Great Hall, nothing moved among the shadows. The Tyrannosaurus grinned, but its back was to her; the light picked up the great curved tusks of a mammoth centuries dead, and it seemed that the mammoth, also, laughed out of the past. Join us in the past, the laughter said; there are no gradations in the past. In a moment, you will be as old as we.

I'll be damned if I will, Pam North thought. I won't have it!

She listened, moving back from the glass, putting an ear close to the door which led to the passage behind the exhibit alcoves. At first she heard nothing; then she heard a door close, apparently some distance up the passage. Almost at once, she heard another door open.

Her pursuer had discovered that she could not have left the passage except to go into one of the exhibit alcoves. Perhaps he had locked the door at the passage's end so that she could not go out that way—he had come from that direction when she heard him first. Now, methodically, unhurriedly, he was searching the little glass-fronted rooms—searching them one by one. He had, he must think, plenty of time. So far as Pam North could tell, her ear to the door, only determination between her and extinction as final as that which had overtaken the dinosaurs, he had.

She could not get out through the doors. She would run into the hands of her pursuer. She could not get out through the heavy plate of glass unless—

If only there were a club in this one, Pam thought, and began to search in the substance which was so like grass. With a club, I could break the glass. Then somebody would come. Then Jerry would come. Then—But there was no club. There wasn't anything. It was only then that Pamela North realized she had, one in each hand, each convulsively clutched, a shoe with a long, hard heel. Then, as she heard another door close, another open—but this time much closer—Pam North stumbled through the tangle which dragged at her legs and reached the wall of glass.

But then she hesitated. The sound would bring him running. It would bring him long before, with only flimsy shoes as tools, she had broken through the glass.

Perhaps something would happen to stop him before he found her. Perhaps Jerry, who was surely searching, had found now where she had fled; perhaps he, with Mullins, with Bill Weigand, was already in the passage, reaching out for the man who had murdered twice and sought to kill again. Perhaps—

There was no use in that, Pam thought. She began to beat on the glass with the little shoes. She beat with desperate violence, and with the first blows the glass cracked. But it only cracked. And the sound of the beating was hideously loud in the little room; must spread out from it through the building. When the door behind her opened, she would not be able to hear it now. If the voice spoke, she would not hear it; if a hand—with what weapon this time?—was raised behind her back, she would not see it. She would not turn. She beat on the glass, and it began to shatter.

She was beating on the glass still, and it was falling onto the marble floor outside, she had cut a hand and blood was on her skirt, when light swept through the Great Hall. She continued to beat on the glass, oblivious of everything else—but still she saw him running in the Great Hall—until Jerry stood in front of her and shouted at her. “Pam!” Jerry shouted. “Stop that. Stop
it
. You'll hurt yourself.” For a moment longer she beat the breaking glass. She stopped, then. She looked at the cut on her hand.

“Why,” Pam North said, “look. I've cut myself.”

Jerry wrenched a great shard of glass out, and then another. Pam, her arms at her sides, a shoe in each hand, could only wait.

Then she knew that Jerry was looking at something, at someone, behind her. It was as if his face were a mirror, reflecting danger which was behind her. But she could not turn—could not look. The door would be opening. Death would be coming through the door, through the tangle of the grass. She—

Jerry North wrenched out another jagged shard. Now he could reach through to her. Now—Now he had his hands on her, was lifting her down from the raised floor of the alcove. Now she was against him, hiding her face against him.

“Somebody almost—” Pam North said, her words muffled.

“It's all right,” Jerry said. “The door started to open. Yes. But Bill's—”

Then the Great Hall seemed suddenly full of people. Dr. Steck was coming down from the front of the hall, and he seemed to be supporting two people. At least, he had his left arm around Emily Preson's shoulders and was half carrying a strangely limp director of the Broadly Institute under his right arm. Pam lifted her head from Jerry's chest.

“He's certainly a big man,” Pam North said. “He wasn't the one at all because—”

“Got him,” Steck said, as he approached. “Just as he was about to—”

“Father!” Emily said, at almost the same moment. “Aunt Laura! You
were
here. You did—”

Homer Preson and his sister were emerging from behind a mammoth. Both were blinking in the sudden light.

“Will somebody,” Dr. Agee said, in a weak voice, from Steck's ungentle embrace, “get this—this aborigine—to let me go? Miss Preson will tell you—”

“Shut up, Agee!” Steck said. “You tried to push her down the stairs.” He shook the smaller man briskly. “You've done enough,” he told Agee. “Save it for—”

But then Bill Weigand was in the alcove with the horned things. Wayne Preson was with him. Bill looked out over the heads of those below, and then the alcove in which he stood was absurdly like a stage, from which an announcement was about to be made.

“Let him go, Dr. Steck,” Bill Weigand said. Steck looked at Bill for a moment. Bill nodded. Quite casually, then, Dr. Steck let Agee go. Dr. Steck dropped him. Agee went down on his hands and knees.

“You—you
Cromagnon!
” Agee said. “You—”

“I tell you,” Wayne Preson said, and it was as if there were nobody present but Bill Weigand. “I tell you, I merely wanted—”

“Don't,” Bill said. “Don't tell me anything, Preson. Not now. You'll have a chance. You can tell it all, then.”

“You don't—” Wayne Preson began, but Bill shook his head.

“I understand enough,” he said. “That you killed two men and tried to kill Mrs. North.” But then Bill paused. “I'll admit,” he said, “I don't know what Mrs. North had—”

“Oh,” Pam said. “I didn't either, for a long time. You see, he just stole a box of labels. That was all. Jerry and I saw him. And who would steal a box of labels, except a murderer?”

Then Mullins emerged, behind Homer and Laura Preson, and also from behind a mammoth.

“Loot,” Mullins said, “you want I should?”

“Right,” Bill said. “I think you'd better.”

Mullins reached forth two large hands. In each, he took an arm of a Preson.

“The Loot thinks you'd both better come along too,” Mullins said. His voice was entirely mild.

Emily Preson said, “O-oh” then, and the sound was a cry. She started toward her father and her aunt, but Dr. Steck drew her back. For a moment she seemed to resist; then she did not. Then she turned so that her face was against the not very well-fitting coat of the large mammalogist, and Dr. Steck glared out over her head.

Good heavens, Pam North thought, he
is
a big man. All he needs is a stone-headed club.

They had talked, Bill Weigand agreed; they certainly had talked. Miss Laura Preson had talked with particular fluency. Bill sighed; he looked tired. He sat in a deep chair in the Norths' living room, and reached out from time to time toward a glass on a low table. The Norths listened; Dorian Weigand, curled in a chair with a blue-eyed cat curled on her lap, listened too.

“She appears to feel we should give her a medal,” Bill said. “Her and her brother.”

“Not Wayne?” Pam asked.

She did not, Bill agreed, go that far. She appeared to feel that Wayne had been a bad boy. She seemed to feel that largely, however, because Wayne had upset excellent plans—her excellent plans. Because he had rushed in, impatiently, with youthful impetuosity. It seemed to be her idea that Wayne would outgrow all this.

“He won't,” Bill said, with some grimness.

Wayne was keeping his mouth shut, which was his best plan. He would make them dig, which was to be expected. Meanwhile, he denied everything. He didn't know what his aunt was talking about. It was preposterous to suggest he had meant harm to Pam North. He had merely wanted to talk to her.

“About what?” Pam asked. “The weather?”

“He says his sister,” Bill said. “He was worried about her state of mind.”

“Please,” Dorian said, “I just came in. Remember? Are you saying all the Presons were in it together? All in a conspiracy?”

To a point, that was quite true, Bill said. Then he hesitated.

“Not Emily, apparently,” he said. “At least, she denies it. Laura says she must have known; Emily's father, who doesn't talk much—and doesn't deny much either—does deny Emily was in it. I doubt if she was, actually. She's too—too violent to conspire; too violent to be trusted. She merely suspected, was afraid of what she half knew. Toward the end she was just trying to find out. I think she hoped against hope her uncle
was
insane—that everything was the way her father and her brother and her aunt wanted to make it appear.”

“Please,” Dorian said. “Shall I leave the room? Is it something I can't hear?”

Bill grinned at her.

Three of the Presons, he told them all, had become disturbed that a fourth, Dr. Orpheus Preson, was dissipating his money—“on those bones of his,” Laura Preson said—instead, as would have been seemly, of allowing it to accumulate for the eventual use of his younger brother and sister and deserving niece and nephew. “If that didn't prove he was crazy, I'm sure I don't know what would,” Laura had said. This course of action Homer and his sister, and Wayne, found disturbing. They found it far more disturbing when Dr. Preson informed them that he was leaving whatever he would have to leave to the Broadly Institute, and not to them. It was most disturbing for all of them to discover that he had already made a will in favor of the Institute. It was, Laura said—said and said again and still again—final proof that the little mammalogist had become mentally irresponsible.

But—and this was the problem of the other Presons—he had done nothing publicly which would establish him as mentally incompetent. They—and this, also, Laura Preson said repeatedly—had seen him do, and heard him say, a hundred things which would convince anyone that his mind had gone. Anyone in their place would have had no doubts at all. The difficulty, of course, was that no one else was in the place of the Presons.

“Did they really believe it?” Pam asked. “Or just want to? Or not believe it at all?”

Bill shrugged to that. He said he thought Laura Preson believed it; that Homer had convinced himself; that to Wayne it made no difference. But that was guesswork.

“Probably he did seem eccentric,” Bill said. “Many people do—especially people of limited and intense interests. Probably it was easy for them to convince themselves, if they needed to.”

They had, at any rate, set out to convince other people. There had not been, in the advertisements they inserted, any intention to drive Orpheus mad, although perhaps they nearly had. The plan was to make him appear mad or, as Homer insisted, to make his madness apparent. Orpheus would complain to the police. The police would start an investigation. When they were sure the investigation was well under way, Homer would impersonate his brother at the want-ad counter, leaving the police to discover that Orpheus had been persecuting himself.

There had been a momentary hitch; the police were not so assiduous as the Presons had assumed. “Can't be,” Bill said. “We get too many. The town is full of crackpots. Practically every family has one.”

“Now,” Pam said, “really, Bill.”

She would, Bill assured her, be surprised. But then he got back to the Presons, to the momentary hitch. There was no point to be gained by impersonating Orpheus unless they could make it reasonably certain the police were paying attention. So the day after Homer had impersonated his brother, Laura Preson had called the matter to their notice. She had gone to Orpheus's apartment, carrying phenobarbital with her. She had taken some, the dose carefully measured. She had put more in the milk. She had then contentedly gone to sleep and let nature take its course. Nature—and the police—had obliged.

“A subterfuge to bring out the truth,” Miss Laura Preson explained. “Now we could prove what we all knew.”

And then, according to the original plan, they could use their evidence as a club over Orpheus. They could give him an alternative—either he would quit wasting his money, and change his will, or they would have him certified. They planned, Laura said—and Homer said—and Laura said again, nothing more than that. Properly viewed, they were merely conservationists, preventing the dissipation of Orpheus's resources. They had had no plan for the immediate enrichment of themselves. Even if they had gone to the point of having Orpheus certified, they would not immediately have enriched themselves. They would have been under the observation of the courts.

“You believe that?” Jerry North asked.

Bill thought for a moment. Then he nodded his head slowly. He was, he said, inclined to. He was inclined to think they had figured without Wayne—without what Wayne's aunt considered the impatience of youth. Wayne didn't want to wait. Bill told them why. And to Wayne, the situation seemed made to hand. Orpheus Preson already was established in the minds of the police as irresponsible—as a man who had not only annoyed himself, but had gone to the point of planting phenobarbital in his own milk supply. It would seem only natural if one of Orpheus's plans overcarried; if, again trying to prove himself a victim of a mythical enemy, he actually became the victim of himself. That the will left Orpheus Preson's money to the Institute would not matter; it would be easy to prove that the will had been made while Orpheus was of unsound mind.