Escape the Night (7 page)

“It was Modeste.” Dave came back again to stand before the fire. His face looked tired and somber. He pushed the thin lock of black hair back from his forehead, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “She says she’ll tell them as soon as they get in. She didn’t know where either of them is.”

“You’d better have a drink too, Dave.” There was a touch of compunction in Jem’s voice. “You look done in.”

Dave turned around suddenly, leaning his arms on the mantle and staring down apparently at the flames. “I’m all right.”

“Okay, but you …”

“Do you mind,” cut in Dave sharply and explosively, “not talking about it?”

There was a little pause. Not talking about what, thought Serena wearily. And then she was caught again by the shuddering picture of horror in her mind. Luisa de la Vega Condit; one moment alive and strong and full of energy, the next moment nothing but a green scarf, freighted heavily with something that by then must have had no feeling or sentience or being. It was queer that Luisa hadn’t screamed as she fell. Still, the sound of the waves would have muffled it, even so near. Or it happened too quickly, too suddenly. She put her hands over her eyes. Jem said,
“Stop that, Sissy,”
peremptorily and got up, went to a side table, mixed a drink for Dave and one for himself and, returning, put one of the glasses beside Dave’s arm on the mantle. “Drink that,” he said,

Dave’s shoulders moved as if he sighed. Then he straightened up, took the glass and turned toward Serena.

“Somebody got into my laboratory last night,” he told her, in a voice that seemed to wrench out the words. “Smashed everything up. That’s all.” He took a long drink, while Serena sat upright and stared at him.

“Laboratory! But who—why … ?”

Jem explained. “It’s pretty horrible, Sissy. You see, all Dave’s records were there. All his present experiments. Everything he’s accomplished …”

“Everything I was about to accomplish.” Dave swirled the liquid in his glass and added in a low voice: “Everything I might have done.”

Jem said: “It’s the damnedest thing, Sissy. The police were here this morning; we called them right away. They haven’t found out who did it. The horror of it is, it was probably done by a tramp, or even prowling kids. There’s no reason for it; just senseless destruction. There were unlocked windows. Dave never thought of locking them. He did latch the door, but that’s all.…”

“Nobody ever came around. It was perfectly safe. I didn’t have anything anybody would want to steal.” Dave’s face, bent downward, showed sharp, weary lines of pain.

“Anyway, it happened some time during the night; neither of us heard it. We sleep here in the house, Dave in the bedroom over there, and I’m at the other end. The laboratory is away from the house.…”

Dave, looking into his glass, broke in again, his voice dull: “Used to be the garage; I made a laboratory out of it. But there was nothing for anybody to steal.”

“Nobody stole anything; not even microscopes,” went on Jem. “It was sheer vandalism.”

“Everything smashed, torn out, destroyed,” said Dave. “As if a crazy man had got in there with a—with a whip. Or a hammer.”

“Dave, that’s horrible!” cried Serena.

Dave put his drink down. “I’ll go out and meet the police at the road,” he said. “No need to drag Sissy back there to the rocks. I’ll tell them how it happened.” He went quickly across the room, his shoulders drooping. The door closed.

“Jem, what a dreadful thing!”

“He said this morning it meant practically a complete waste of everything he’d tried to do. Neither of us heard it. You can hear the sea from here at night, it muffles other sounds; still it seems as if we ought to have heard something.” Jem stared down at the fire for a moment. “He found it this morning; he’d got himself breakfast and I was in here writing. I didn’t notice when he went out to the laboratory. First thing I knew he was just standing there in the doorway. I thought he was sick. I jumped up and ran to help him; he looked as if he was about to die then and there. Then he told me; I ran out and looked. The wanton destruction of it seems so fiendish.”

“Who could have done it?”

Jem shrugged. “I called the police. It was just a gesture, of course. Oh, I’d like to see whoever did it boiled in oil, but I don’t have much hope of their being found. Weren’t any clues that I could see. He’d kept all his notes out there too, in a box. Not even a steel box, just a corrugated pasteboard thing. I’ve seen it plenty of times. Well—the records were burned. Out back of the garage—that is, the laboratory. Out of sight of the house. All burned.…We found the heap of ashes this morning.”

“Are you sure it happened last night? It’s queer you didn’t see the fire.”

“Dave was in the laboratory until about six last night. Then he came in, we had a drink and went up to Amanda’s. I rode down to the Lodge with Amanda and Sutton; Dave went to the station to get you. We got back—well, you know when; about eleven, I should say. Both the bedrooms, as you see,” he motioned toward doors at either end of the room, “are on the sea side of the cottage, away from the garage. It could have happened, of course, while we were all at the Lodge. Or it could have happened later in the night; neither of us heard anything. The fire was small, and shielded from the house and from the highway by the garage, and all the shrubs and trees. I couldn’t sleep and walked up to the ranch, as you know, last night …” He paused. Serena, thinking of a moment in the darkness, on the stairs, felt color coming in a warm little wave into her face. Jem said slowly: “That’s when I talked to you.” He lighted a cigarette rather deliberately and went on: “I didn’t see anybody around the cottage, either when I went away or when I came back. Of course it was a dark night. And the sea is very near; the sound of the waves drowns out other sounds.”

But the sound of the waves had been too far from the shadowy patio of the Condit ranch to muffle the sounds of violent, angry whispering. Serena sat up. “Jem, somebody was in the patio last night. Talking. That is, whispering. Just before you came.”

He tossed the match in his hand toward the fireplace. “What do you mean? You said something last night, but I didn’t—I was thinking of something else. Who was there?”

“I don’t know. It sounded like two people. I thought it was … Well, naturally, it would be someone in the house, but it seemed to me that whoever it was brushed against my door. In passing. That’s why I got up to see what it was. Although something else, I don’t know what, awakened me. I didn’t see anyone, though. And the whispering stopped and I thought someone, or both of them, went up the steps—those on the other side of the patio. But I couldn’t hear anything very distinctly. I was—I don’t know why—waiting and listening, when you lighted a match and I saw you.”

“I didn’t see or hear anybody. I had just come in the gate when I lighted my cigarette, and you spoke. I wonder … It must have been somebody in the house. Amanda or Sutton. Or even Luisa. It’s—queer. Still, it couldn’t have been—oh, burglars, anything like that. After I left you I walked down the hill, took the short cut and came back to the cottage. Dave said he didn’t hear me come in. I went to sleep and didn’t hear anything at all. Then this morning Dave found the laboratory destroyed.”

“But …” Serena fumbled her way to an extraordinary and unbelievable conclusion. “But whoever did
that
… Why, Jem, nobody could hate Dave like that! Dave never did anything to anybody that could make anyone hate him.”

“I asked him about the records. I couldn’t understand the devilishness of that. It suddenly struck me that—oh, it sounds farfetched—but that maybe he had something in the records that somebody wanted destroyed.”

“I don’t see … Oh, you mean a disease he was working on with people, so he’d have one’s case history?”

“Something like that. I’m not sure how it would work. But suppose, say, somebody’d had an incurable disease and Dave knew it; and had worked with whoever it was, experimenting, and kept records of it. And then that person got worried and wanted the records destroyed. Before Dave went to war, you see; didn’t want to run the risk of anybody knowing about it. Something like that. Of course about the only disease I could think of in that case was leprosy! But anyway it struck me as a possible solution. Oh, I had it all doped out. But he said there wasn’t anything like that.”

“I don’t know anything about Dave’s work. What is it exactly?”

“Well, I didn’t either till this morning. I just knew vaguely that it was some kind of medical research. Well, I asked him, cautiously—after the foregoing theory came to my mind. Of course the flaw was that if anybody did want any record or note about himself destroyed all he had to do was to ask Dave to do it! But, at any rate, Dave told me what he’s trying to do. He’s working on blood infections—along the lines of the new sulfa drugs; but he thinks he’s got something else. I asked him what he did about experimenting and he said he had a working agreement with a hospital, the one where he trained as interne. He’s hand-in-glove with the fellows there. They think he’s brilliant, I gathered. Dave didn’t say so. Whenever he thinks he’s got a new slant, he goes to San Francisco and they work on it. I don’t know exactly the setup; but that’s it, approximately. I asked cautiously if anybody around here knew anything much of his work and he said no.” He glanced at the door and added: “Police ought to be here by now.”

She wondered if he had told her of Dave’s laboratory partly in order to distract her from thoughts of Luisa.

And just as she thought that, quite unexpectedly something somebody had said to her recently floated out of Serena’s memory. It was as clear as if the words had been repeated. “Something’s going to happen,” somebody had told her.

Why, of course. Leda had said it. And Leda had said, too, that Jem was “eating his heart out—he’s been in love with her for years.” In love with Amanda, she’d meant; and then, after a few moments in the soft darkness there in the patio, Serena had dismissed Leda’s words. She hadn’t even done so consciously and intentionally; her sense of security and happiness had automatically shut out everything else.

Yet she had seen Jem again; he sat now so near she could have touched him. He was kind, protective, solid—and only that slight hesitation in his manner admitted, even, that he remembered holding her in his arms his mouth hard upon her own, as he had held her.

Perhaps Leda was right. About Jem and Amanda, and about “something” that was going to happen.

She couldn’t have known about Dave, though.

And nobody could have known about Luisa.

Luisa and a glimpse of a bright green scarf heavily—horribly weighted. The Pekingese on the rug stirred and put up its round blunt little nose and looked at the door, just as someone knocked.

It was a policeman. He’d not gone to the scene of the accident; another policeman had gone down there with Dr. Seabrooke and he’d like to use the telephone.

Jem showed him the telephone. “I just want to talk to the Chief of Police,” he said, and called a number. And, as Jem and Serena listened, he said that he was Anderson and it was the old lady out at the Condit Ranch, all right.

“The one that phoned to you yesterday,” he said. “Yeah, that’s right. Well, no, it looks like an accident. But since she told you somebody was trying to murder her, I thought maybe you’d better know. Sure. Okay.”

H
E PUT DOWN THE
telephone and turned around toward them. He was a big, hearty man with a deeply tanned face and sun-wrinkles around his eyes. Into the stupefied, abysmal silence in the room Jem said in a thunderstruck voice:
“What did you say?”

Serena never forgot the next five seconds. She remembered them though in a picture: the long, lived-in room, the books, and bright Mexican rugs on the floor; the flames in the fireplace and Jem standing there before them, his hands in his pockets, his expression one of frowning incredulity and disbelief. And the policeman walking quietly toward them. He stopped opposite Jem. He glanced at her and back at Jem, and said, “Why, this old lady, this Miss Condit, phoned in yesterday and said somebody was trying to kill her. Just like that. Chief asked her why she thought so and she wouldn’t say. But she said couldn’t the police do something about it. I don’t know what the chief said; he thought she was cracked. People here don’t …” he shrugged. “And then about noon she phoned again and said she guessed she was mistaken and to forget it. He thought she was having a brainstorm. People do, you know. You’d be surprised …” He appeared to ruminate on past episodes. Then his eyes fastened upon Serena again. “You the young lady that was with her? Did you see her fall?”

“N-no,” replied Serena in a voice that seemed dragged up from some unfathomable depth.

“Did she scream?”

“No,” she said again in the same distant, nightmare voice.

“Did you see anybody around?”

“W-what?” It was queer but she couldn’t seem to take anything in.

“Did you see anybody around? Anybody that could’ve pushed her,” explained Anderson.

“No!”
she cried in sharp horror.
“No!
We were alone. She rounded the curve ahead of me. I stopped to put down the dog. And when I got out on the curve she …” Serena’s throat closed so hard she had to stop.

Anderson’s eyes were very keen. He said suddenly: “What’s the matter with your hand?”

“Oh. That.” The handkerchief showed white and clear against her blue skirt. Scarcely knowing what she did, she pulled it off. “It’s stopped bleeding. I slipped and scratched my hand. It was what delayed me. I didn’t see her fall.”

Anderson looked at her hand in a remote yet observant way. “Quite a bruise. Lucky you didn’t go over yourself. How far behind were you?”

“Not far. Just around the curve.”

“Wonder if you’d mind coming along to the place and showing us?” asked Anderson matter-of-factly.

“But she—look here,” said Jem quickly. “Miss March has had a pretty bad shock. Couldn’t she show you tomorrow, or …”

“Rather you’d do it now,” said Anderson.

“But she couldn’t have been murdered!” cried Serena. “I was there. She couldn’t have been.”