The Cases of Susan Dare (9 page)

Susan wondered what was wrong with the room and said she understood.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Denisty, rising. “That is all.”

But that was not all. For there was a whirlwind of steps, and a voice sobbing broken phrases swept through the door, and a woman ran into the room clutching in both hands something bright and crimson. A queer little chill that she could never account for crept over Susan as she realized that the woman clutched, actually, broken pieces of glass.

“Did you see, Mother Denisty?” sobbed the woman. “It’s all over the floor. How much more—how much more—”

“Felicia!” cried Mrs. Denisty sternly. “Hush—yes, I know. It was an accident.”

“An accident! But you know—you know—”

“The nurse is here—Miss Dare.”

The young woman whirled. She was—or had been—of extraordinary beauty. Slender and tall, with fine, fair hair and great, brilliant gray eyes. But the eyes were hollow and the lids swollen and pink, and her mouth pale and uncertain.

“But I don’t need a nurse.”

“Just for a few days,” said Mrs. Denisty firmly. “The doctor advised it.”

The great gray eyes met Susan’s fixedly—too fixedly, indeed, for the look was actually an unwavering stare. Was there something, then, beyond Susan—near Susan—that she did not wish to see?

“
Oh
,” said Felicia Denisty with a thin sharp gasp and looked at her hand, and Susan ran forward. On the slender white hand was a brighter, thicker crimson than the Venetian glass which was just then and quite slowly relinquished.

“You’ve cut your hand,” said Susan inadequately. Felicia had turned to the older woman, who was unmoved.

“See,” she said, extending her bleeding hand. “Just to be in the room with it—”

Mrs. Denisty moved forward then.

“Will you go upstairs with Mrs. Gladstone, Miss Dare,” she said firmly, “and dress her hand.”

Upstairs Susan blessed a brief course of Red Cross lectures which during school days she had loathed, and made a fairly workmanlike job of bandaging the wound.

But it was not so easy to spend the long hours of the slow gray day with Felicia Denisty, for she had fallen into a brooding silence, sat and stared either at her bandaged hand or out the window upon a dreary balcony, and said practically nothing.

The afternoon passed much as the morning, except that with the approach of dusk the wind rose a bit and rattled shutters, and Felicia grew restless and turned on every available light in her room.

“Dinner,” she said to Susan, “is at seven-thirty.” She looked fully at Susan, as if for the first time. “You’ve been inside all day, Miss Dare. I didn’t think—would you like to take a walk before dinner?”

Susan said she would, and hoped she wasn’t too eager.

But at the end of half an hour’s walk through rapidly increasing gray dusk she was still no wiser than she had been, except that she had a clearer notion of the general plan of the house—built like a wide-flung T with tall white pillars running up to the second-story roof of the wide double porch, which extended across the front of the house—and of the grounds.

On two sides of the house was a placid brown lawn, stretching downward to roadway and to rolling meadows. But on the south lay the ravine, an abrupt, irregular gash, masked now and made mysterious by dripping shrubbery. Beyond it appeared the roof of a house, and at the deepest point of the ravine it was crossed by a small wooden bridge which lost itself in the trees at the farther end. It must lead, thought Susan, to the house, but she did not explore it, although she looked long at the spot where (as revealed by a discreet inquiry of the pretty housemaid) the butler had been murdered.

It was perhaps ten feet from the entrance to the small wooden bridge and just behind a large clump of sumach. It was not in view from the windows of the Denisty house.

Susan, made oddly uneasy by the fog-enshrouded shadows of the trees, made her way back.

Once inside she turned at once to the drawing room. It was dark, and she fumbled for the light and found it. The room was exactly as she remembered it from the morning; a large room of spaces and many windows and massive furniture. Not somehow a pleasant room. It was too still, perhaps, too chilly, too—she turned suddenly as if someone had spoken her name and saw the Easter image.

And she realized what was wrong with the room.

It stood there beside the fireplace—a black, narrow image of a man—a terribly emaciated man, with protruding ribs and a queer, painted face, roughly carved. It was perhaps two feet tall and there were white marks on it that looked like, but were not chalk. Its emaciation and its protruding ribs suggested that it was a remnant of that strangely vanished race from mysterious, somber Easter Island. When you looked at it analytically, that was all there was to see.

But it was singularly difficult to look at it analytically. And that was because of the curiously repellent look in its face; the air of strange and secret sentience that somehow managed to surround the small figure. There was a hint of something decadent, something faintly macabre, something incredibly and hideously wise. It was intangible: it was not sensible. But, nevertheless, it was there.

Yet, Susan told herself sternly, the image itself was merely a piece of wood.

A carved piece of wood from Easter Island: a souvenir, probably, of a journey there. It had no connection with the murder of a butler, with the shattered fine fragments of Venetian glass.

Susan turned suddenly and left the drawing room. But when in the hall the door behind her opened. Susan all but screamed before she saw the man who had entered. He flung off hat and coat and reached for a stack of letters on the hall table and then finally looked at her and said: “Oh, hullo. You must be the nurse. Miss—”

“Dare,” said Susan. He was thick, white-haired, brusque, with a blunt nose and bright, hard blue eyes. He wasn’t over forty-five, and he must be a Denisty.

“Dare,” said he. “Nice name. Well, take care of my wife.” His blue eyes shot a quick glance up the stairway, and he bent and kissed at Susan; turned, humming, toward the library, and vanished.

Kissed at her; for what she felt would have been a rather expert kiss had been pretty well deflected by some quick action on her part.

Well, that was Gladstone.

And Marlowe Denisty, the brother, who turned up at dinner, was a handsome Byronic-looking youth who talked enthusiastically of practically everything.

It was Marlowe who later, in the drawing room, spoke of the Easter image.

He had brought it, he told Susan expansively, from Easter Island himself. It was a present to Gladstone.

“An akuaku,” said Susan absently.

“A
what
?” said Gladstone, turning sharply to look at her.

Susan wished she had not spoken, and Marlowe flashed her a glance of bright approval.

“An akuaku,” he said. “An evil god. You remember, Glad, I told you all about it when I brought the thing home. These wooden figures, or moai miro, were made first, so far as can be discovered, by Tuukoihu, who ruled the island following Hotu Matua. These small figures with protruding ribs were thought to be reminders of the imminence of death, threats of—”

“Thank you, I can read the encyclopedia myself,” said Gladstone Denisty sharply. “And anyway, it’s all nonsense. A piece of carved wood with white painting on it can’t possibly have any sort of significance.”

“It
can
have,” cried Felicia with sudden unexpected violence. “It
does
have!”

Mrs. Denisty, with a glance at Gladstone, interrupted. “Felicia, dear child,” she cried in a deprecating way. “How can you be so absurd!”

“Hush!” Felicia’s voice was all at once taut; her eyes were wide and dark, and she flung out her hand toward the image. “Don’t you realize that it hears you? Don’t you realize what it has brought into this house? Misfortune—suffering—murder—”

“
Felicia
!” The interruption was loud and covered anything Felicia might have continued to say, and Mrs. Denisty went on swiftly. “You are hysterical, my dear, and not quite yourself. As to misfortune, we have lost no more than other people and are still very comfortable. And your illness couldn’t possibly have been induced by a wooden image—”

“An evil god—an evil influence,” muttered Felicia, staring at the image.

Mrs. Denisty swept on, though her mouth was tight.

“And William’s death, which I suppose you are referring to, was the result of his discovering an attempt to burglarize the house. It is dreadful, of course. But it had no possible connection with this—this piece of wood.”

Felicia was trembling. Susan put a hand upon her arm but could not stay the uneven torrent of words.

“What of the things that have happened to me?—Why, even my kitten died. Flowers die if I touch them. Something happens to everything that is mine. Why—just last night—the glass—” She was sobbing. “William—he was kind to me—he—”

Gladstone intervened.

“Take her upstairs, Miss Dare,” he said quietly. “See if you can quiet her. She has some capsules the doctor gave her—try to calm yourself, Felicia.”

“Oh, I’ll go. I’ll go.”

She sobbed weakly. But she said no more, and once in her room upstairs took the sedative and afterwards lay quiet, staring at the ceiling with great tragic eyes.

“Your illness,” said Susan gently. “The doctor didn’t tell me—”

Felicia did not look at her.

“Nerves, he says. That’s all any of them say. But I was all right until he brought the image home. About a year ago.” The sedative was beginning to take effect, and she spoke calmly. “It is the image, you see, Miss Dare. It hates me. I feel it. I know it. And—I heard the story—of a woman in Tahiti, an Englishwoman who had one, and it hated her, and it brought evil and suffering and misfortune, and finally—death.”

She spoke the last word in a whisper.

“Did Marlowe tell you of it?”

“Yes. He told us. We thought nothing of it—then. Mother Denisty says it is wrong of me to fear it. She’s religious, you know.”

“She holds very firmly to the church?”

“Oh, yes. Except in the modern trend. That is—divorce, you know. She is very much against divorce.” Owing perhaps to the capsule, Felicia was beginning to talk in a rambling way. “She says my feeling about the image is superstition.”

“How was William kind to you?” asked Susan.

“Oh, in so many little ways. I think he liked me. It was he who told me about the flowers. Of course, I didn’t believe him. I know why they died. But he told me that, so I would feel better.” She was becoming drowsy, and her words were soft and slow.

Susan felt and stifled with rather shocking ease a scruple against further questions and said: “What did he tell you?’

“Oh—something about acid in the water. I don’t know—it couldn’t have been true. Flowers died because they were mine. And I don’t want to study French any more.”

“
French,
” said Susan. “
French
!”

Felicia’s drooping eyelids flared open. She stared hazily but intently at Susan and suddenly lifted herself on one elbow and leaned toward her and whispered hoarsely: “It’s Dorothy. She knows about the image. I can see it in her eyes. In her eyes.” She dropped back upon the pillow, repeated “In her eyes—in her eyes,” and then quite suddenly was heavily asleep.

After a long time Susan tiptoed away.

But at midnight she was still broadly awake, strongly aware, as one is at night, of the house about her and all that it held—including the thing that brooded over a downstairs room.

Only a piece of wood.

And what possible connection was there between a piece of wood, some shattered fine glass, and a murdered butler? French lessons and dead flowers and an acid? A kitten—dead, also. An image that represented the imminence of death. A hysterical woman—talking of death.

That night, if anyone brushed against her door, Susan did not know it, for she fell at length into an uneasy sleep.

Her second day in the Denisty household was in many ways a replica of the first, except that nothing at all happened.

Once during the morning she heard Mrs. Denisty telephoning to someone she called Dorothy and saying that Felicia would not be able to do French that morning, which left Susan little wiser than she had been. And once she herself was called to the telephone for what proved to be an extremely guarded conversation with Jim Byrne. She succeeded only in reassuring him as to her own personal safety, told him carefully that she did not know how long the “case” would last, and hung up.

That night, too, was quiet. But the next day things happened.

In the first place, “Dorothy” came to call. Susan, just entering Felicia’s room with the morning paper, heard her voice on the stairs.

“Is Mrs. Gladstone in her room?”

“Yes, Mrs. Laasch,” replied the housemaid’s voice.

“So I thought. No, no—I know the way. Mrs. Gladstone won’t mind.”

Susan waited. In another moment the owner of the voice came along the hall, glanced at Susan, and preceded her into Felicia’s room with the ease of very old and intimate acquaintance.

“Oh, good morning, Dorothy,” said Felicia.

So this was Dorothy. Dorothy Laasch. Susan gave Felicia the paper and at Felicia’s gesture sat down near her.

“Mother Denisty tells me there’ll be no more French until you are feeling better,” Dorothy was saying. She was a handsome woman in perhaps her middle thirties; a blonde with short hair, vivacious if rather large features, and light, swift eyes. She wore a green wool suit, no hat, and suède pumps. Felicia murmured something and Dorothy went on:

“Since Mother Denisty says so, I suppose that settles it. You ought to rouse yourself, Felicia. You let that woman rule you. Just because she controls the purse strings—”

“Dorothy,” said Felicia in a remonstrating way.

Dorothy shot a quick glance toward the door into the hall.

“She’s outdoors. I met her down by the bridge.”

“But—” said Felicia.

“Oh, you mean the nurse.” Dorothy looked at Susan and laughed. “Nurses neither hear nor care, do they, Miss—”

“Dare,” said Felicia. She turned briefly to Susan. “This is Mrs. Laasch. I thought you’d met. Let’s put off the French lessons for a couple of weeks, Dorothy.”